Part 49 (2/2)
Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him prize Ruth.
The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house in the Berks.h.i.+res, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fas.h.i.+oned lines of crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter under her pillow.
She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not answer--directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes; and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berks.h.i.+re night, with a black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:
It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk dressing gown & a tosh lace breakfast cap, & I will write neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same I am a lonely baby & I want you here to comfort me. Would you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on my bed & a papier mache Turkish dagger & head of Oth.e.l.lo over my bed & pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of course if they still have papier mache ornaments, I suppose they still live in Harlem & Brooklyn. We would sit _very_ quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace & listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that Pan is dead & that there won't ever again be any suns.h.i.+ne on the valley. Dear, it really _isn't_ safe to be writing like this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or _any_ suitor who would make foolish noises & hide me from the wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up & _NOT_ send it in the morning.
Your playmate Ruth
Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is just because of the wind & rain.
Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.
He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved, laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take another look at a letter and see whether she had said, ”I hope you had a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner,” or ”I hope you had a good time, dear.”
Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other, so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write to Istra Nash the artist, and when the VanZile office got a new telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine cheeks, he did not even smile at her.
But--was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters, but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately knew himself to be, retain her interest?
Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
The brief trip to the Berks.h.i.+res was longer than any he had taken these nine months. He looked forward animatedly to the journey, remembering details of travel--such trivial touches as the oval bra.s.s wash-bowls of a Pullman sleeper, and how, when the water is running out, the inside of the bowl is covered with a whitish film of water, which swiftly peels off. He recalled the cracked white paint of a steamer's ventilator; the abruptly stopping zhhhhh of a fog-horn; the vast smoky roof of a Philadelphia train-shed, clamorous with the train-bells of a strange town, giving a sense of mystery to the traveler stepping from the car for a moment to stretch his legs; an ugly junction station platform, with resin oozing from the heavy planks in the spring sun; the polished binnacle of the S.S. _Panama_.
He expected keen joy in new fields and hills. Yet all the way north he was trying to hold the train back. In a few minutes, now, he would see Ruth. And at this hour he did not even know definitely that he liked her.
He could not visualize her. He could see the sleeve of her blue corduroy jacket; her eyes he could not see. She was a stranger. Had he idealized her? He was apologetic for his unflattering doubt, but of what sort _was_ she?
The train was stopping at her station with rattling windows and a despairing grind of the wheels. Carl seized his overnight bag and suit-case with fict.i.tious enthusiasm. He was in a panic. Emerging from the safe, impersonal train upon the platform, he saw her.
She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet him--and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought jubilantly as he strode along the platform: ”She's wonderful. Love her? Should say I do!”
While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety, Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean, fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences regarding the people they pa.s.sed; chatter which showed the world transformed as through ruby gla.s.s--a Ruth radiant, understanding, his comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand under her arm: ”Love her? I--should--say--I--do!”
The carriage rolled out of town with the rhythmic creak of a country buggy, climbed a hill range by means of the black, oily state road, and turned upon a sandy side-road. A brook ran beside them. Sunny fields alternated with woods leaf-floored, quiet, holy--miraculous after the weary city. Below was a vista of downward-sloping fields, divided by creeper-covered stone walls; then a sun-meshed valley set with ponds like s.h.i.+ning gla.s.s dishes on a green table-cloth; beyond all, a long reach of hillsides covered with unbroken fleecy forest, like green down....
”So much unspoiled country, and yet there's people herded in subways!”
complained Carl.
They drove along a level road, lined with wild raspberry-bushes and full of a thin jade light from the shading maples. They gossiped of the Patton Kerrs and the Berks.h.i.+res; of the difference between the professional English week-ender and the American, who still has something of the nave provincial delight of ”going visiting”; of New York and the Dunleavys. But their talk lulled to a nervous hush. It seemed to him that a great voice cried from the clouds: ”It is beside _Ruth_ that you are sitting; Ruth whose arm you feel!” In silence he caught her left hand.
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