Part 41 (1/2)
”Good night, Gertie. G.o.d bless you.”
He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left Gertie. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed mind working again. But it dwelt with Ruth, not with Gertie. Now that he had given words to his longing for Ruth, to his pride in her, he understood that he had pa.s.sed the hidden border of that misty land called ”being in love,” which cartographers have variously described as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvests, as a labyrinth with walls of rose and silver, and as a tenebrous realm of unhappy ghosts.
He stopped at a street corner where, above a saloon with a large beer-sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of All the World--before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had wors.h.i.+ped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young priest saying ma.s.s, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars.
”G.o.d--help--me--to--be--worthy--of--her!”
Nothing more did he say, in words, yet he was changed for ever.
Changed. True that when he got home, half an hour later, and in the dark ran his nose against an opened door, he said, ”d.a.m.n it!” very naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office that awaits its victims equally after Sundays golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two VanZile automobile salesmen he ate _Wiener Schnitzel_ and shot dice for cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It is even true that, dining at the Brevoort with Charley Forbes, he though of Istra Nash, and for a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change was there.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
From t.i.therington, the aviator, in his Devons.h.i.+re home, from a millionaire amateur flier among the orange-groves at Pasadena, from his carpenter father in Joralemon, and from Gertie in New York, Carl had invitations for Christmas, but none that he could accept. VanZile had said, pleasantly, ”Going out to the country for Christmas?”
”Yes,” Cal had lied.
Again he saw himself as the Dethroned Prince, and remembered that one year ago, sailing for South America to fly with Tony Bean, he had been the lion at a Christmas party on s.h.i.+pboard, while Martin Dockerill, his mechanic, had been a friendly slave.
He spent most of Christmas Eve alone in his room, turning over old letters, and aviation magazines with pictures of Hawk Ericson, wondering whether he might not go back to that lost world. Josiah Bagby, Jr., son of the eccentric doctor at whose school Carl had learned to fly, was experimenting with hydroaeroplanes and with bomb-dropping devices at Palm Beach, and imploring Carl, as the steadiest pilot in America, to join him. The dully noiseless room echoed the music of a steady motor carrying him out over a blue bay.
Carl's own answer to the tempter vision was: ”Rats! I can't very well leave the Touricar now, and I don't know as I've got my flying nerve back yet. Besides, Ruth----”
Always he thought of Ruth, uneasy with the desire to be out dancing, laughing, playing with her. He was tormented by a question he had been thres.h.i.+ng out for days: Might he permissibly have sent her a Christmas present?
He went to bed at ten o'clock--on Christmas Eve, when the streets were surging with voices and gay steps, when rollicking piano-tunes from across the street penetrated even closed windows, and a German voice as rich as milk chocolate was caressing, ”_Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, wie grun sind deine Blatter._”... Then slept for nine hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to the office, and sang ”The Banks of the Saskatchewan” in his bath. When he returned to the house, after breakfast, he found a letter from Ruth:
The Day before Xmas & all thru the Mansion The Maids with Turkey are Stirring--Please Pardon the Scansion.
DEAR PLAYMATE,--You said on our tramp that I would make a good playmate, but I'm sure that I should be a very poor one if I did not wish you a gloriously merry Xmas & a New Year that will bring you all the dear things you want. I shall be glad if you do not get this letter on Xmas day itself if that means that you are off at some charming country house having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled, probably not) time. But if by any chance you _are_ in town, won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm little slippers from
RUTH g.a.y.l.o.r.d WINSLOW.
P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature j.a.p garden, with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa goldfish in a pool!
MISS R. WINSLOW.
”'----all the dear things I want'!” Carl repeated, standing tranced in the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. ”Ruth blessed, do you know the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got it.” He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway.
”I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of baby pots of preserves and tea-b.a.l.l.s and stuff.... Wonder what Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to Palm Beach to fly? Not a chance!”
He had Christmas dinner in state, with the California Exiles Club. He was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the left side of dress-clothes.
Twice Carl called at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs.
Florence Barclay--needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat with an instinctive sense of delicacy. She sat bolt-upright on the front of the most impersonal French-gilt chair in the drawing-room and a.s.serted that Phil Dunleavy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth, silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise of a vicarage, remarking, ”I have been subject to very careless influences lately.” She called him neither ”Carl” nor ”Mr.