Part 53 (2/2)

”Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me that I've ruined your life.”

”Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth.”

”Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you understand---- Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and try----”

”Very nice of you,” he said, grimly.

With one cry of ”Oh!” she ran into her bedroom.

He could hear her sobbing; he could feel her agony dragging him to her. But no woman's arms should drug his anger, this time, to let it ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he come to her and make peace. ”h.e.l.l!” he crawked; jerked his top-coat from its nail, and left the flat--eleven o'clock of a chilly November evening.

CHAPTER XLII

Dizzy with all the problems of life, he did not notice where he went.

He walked blocks; took a trolley-car; got off to buy a strong cigar; took the next trolley that came along; was carried across the Fifty-ninth Street bridge to Long Island. At the eighth or tenth stop he hurried out of the car just as it was starting again. He wondered why he had been such a fool as to leave it in a dark street of flat-faced wooden houses with dooryards of trampled earth and a general air of poverty, goats, and lunch-pails. He tramped on, a sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in s.h.a.ggy, open country.

He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth, but he did not want to go back, nor even telephone to her. He had to diagram where and what and why he was; determine what he was to do.

He disregarded the war as a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra business-pressure caused by the war, there would have been some other focus for their misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over clothes and aviation, Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerill, poverty and dancing, quite the same.

Walking steadily, with long periods when he did not think, but stared at the dusty stars or the shaky, ill-lighted old houses, he alined her every fault, unhappily rehea.r.s.ed every quarrel in which she had been to blame, his lips moving as he emphasized the righteous retorts he was almost certain he had made. It was not hard to find faults in her.

Any two people who have spent more than two days together already have the material for a life-long feud, in traits which at first were amusing or admirable. Ruth's pretty manners, of which Carl had been proud, he now cited as sn.o.bbish affectation. He did not spare his reverence, his pa.s.sion, his fondness. He mutilated his soul like a hermit. He recalled her pleasure in giving him jolly surprises, in writing unexpected notes addressed to him at the office, as fussy discontent with a quiet, normal life; he regarded her excitement over dances as evidence that she was so dependent on country-club society that he would have to spend the rest of his life drudging for her.

He wanted to flee. He saw the whole world as a conspiracy of secret, sinister powers that are concealed from the child, but to the man are gradually revealed by a pitiless and never-ending succession of misfortunes. He would never be foot-loose again. His land of heart's desire would be the office.

But the ache of disappointment grew dull. He was stunned. He did not know what had happened; did not even know precisely how he came to be walking here. Now and then he remembered anew that he had sharply left Ruth--Ruth, his dear girl!--remembered that she was not at hand, ready to explain with love's lips the somber puzzles of life. He was frightened again, and beginning to be angry with himself for having been angry with Ruth.

He had walked many miles. Brown fields came up at him through the paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola, with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully to see a machine again!

At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee. Sitting on a high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored gla.s.s windows with a portrait of Was.h.i.+ngton which give to all lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly, meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ign.o.ble setting for his grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night.

The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened janitor in slippers, suspenders, and tousled hair. The pavement was wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the fly-specked cover of a magazine six months old that lay in a shop window lighted by one incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of coffee on the shelf before Was.h.i.+ngton's gla.s.sy but benign face.

But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate and luminous blue.

He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains.

The Aviation Field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of hangars were empty, now, with faded gra.s.s thick before the great doors that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five hangars.

He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters in sweaters and khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane.

Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor, saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from dawn to the glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the uninclosed framework and hovered on the silvery wing-surface. The machine circled the field at two hundred feet elevation, smoothly, peacefully. And peace beyond understanding came to Carl.

He studied the flight. ”Mm. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but very thorough. Firs' rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her if I were flying. Like to try.”

Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly; that only his lips said, ”Like to try.” He was almost as much an outsider to aviation as though he had never flown. He discovered that he was telling Ruth this fact, in an imaginary conversation; was commenting for her on dawn-sky and the plains before him and his alienation from exploits in which she could not share.

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