Part 44 (1/2)

He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, ”How did it all start, anyway?”

He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.

When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a s.h.i.+ning new day, till he realized that it was not a s.h.i.+ning day; it was an ominous day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to unwish the whole affair. ”Hang it!” he groaned.

Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. ”Poor kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the grippe.”

At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. ”Miss Ruth,” he was informed, ”was asleep; she was not very well.”

Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?

Certainly the maid would.

But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.

He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance, on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily, oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.

That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not wis.h.i.+ng to go, not wis.h.i.+ng to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless, bored, driftwood in the city.

So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance, but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.

For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured the crowd that would wors.h.i.+p him. He told himself stories unhappy and long about the renewed companions.h.i.+p of Ruth and Phil. He was sure that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.

”May I come up to-night?” he said, urgently.

”Yes,” she said. That was all.

When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed that she had wanted to telephone to him.

Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:

”I was grouchy----”

”I was beastly----”

”I'm honestly sorry----”

”'ll you forgive----”

”What was it all about?”

”Really, I do--not--know!”

”I agree with lots of the things you----”

”No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know.”

Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.

Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.