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 shining glass 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 Berkshires; of the difference between the professional English week-ender and the American, who still has something of the naive 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.

As he slowly drew back her hand and the reins with it, to stop the ambling horse, the two children stared straight at each other, hungry, tremulously afraid. Their kiss—not only their lips, but their spirits met without one reserve. A straining long kiss, as though they were forcing their lips into one body of living flame. A kiss in which his eyes were blind to the enchantment of the jade light about them, his ears deaf to brook and rustling forest. All his senses were concentrated on the close warmth of her misty lips, the curve of her young shoulder, her woman sweetness and longing. Then his senses forgot even her lips, and floated off into a blurred trance of bodiless happiness—the kiss of Nirvana. No foreign thought of trains or people or the future came now to drag him to earth. It was the most devoted, most sacred moment he had known.

As he became again conscious of lips and cheek and brave shoulders and of her wide-spread fingers gripping his upper arm, she was slowly breaking the spell of the kiss. But again and again she kissed him, hastily, savage tokens of rejoicing possession.

She cried: "I do know now! I do love you!"

"Blessed——"

In silence they stared into the woods while her fingers smoothed his knuckles. Her eyes were faint with tears, in the magic jade light.

"I didn't know a kiss could be like that," she marveled, presently. "I wouldn't have believed selfish Ruth could give all of herself."

"Yes! It was the whole universe."

"Hawk dear, I wasn't experimenting, that time. I'm glad, glad! To know I can really love; not just curiosity!... I've wanted you so all day. I thought four o'clock wouldn't ever come—and oh, darling, my dear, dear Hawk, I didn't even know for sure I'd like you when you came! Sometimes I wanted terribly to have your silly, foolish, childish, pale hair on my breast—such hair! lady's hair!—but sometimes I didn't want to see you at all, and I was frightened at the thought of your coming, and I fussed around the house till Mrs. Pat laughed at me and accused me of being in love, and I denied it—and she was right!"

"Blessed, I was scared to death, all the way up here. I didn't think you could be as wonderful as I knew you were! That sounds mixed but—— Oh, blessed, blessed, you really love me? You really love me? It's hard to believe I've actually heard you say it! And I love you so completely. Everything."

"I love you!... That is such an adorable spot to kiss, just below your ear," she said. "Darling, keep me safe in the little house of arms, where there's only room for you and me—no room for offices or Aunt Emmas!... But not now. We must hurry on.... If a wagon had been coming along the road——!"

As they entered the rhododendron-lined drive of the Patton Kerr place, Carl remembered a detail, not important, but usual. "Oh yes," he said, "I've forgotten to propose."

"Need you? Proposals sound like contracts and all those other dull forms; not like—that kiss.... See! There's Pat Kerr, Jr., waving to us. You can just make him out, there on the upper balcony. He is the darlingest child, with ash-blond hair cut Dutch style. I wonder if you didn't look like him when you were a boy, with your light hair?"

"Not a chance. I was a grubby kid. Made noises.... Gee! what a bully place. And the house!... Will you marry me?"

"Yes, I will!... It is a dear place. Mrs. Pat is——"

"When?"

"——always fussing over it; she plants narcissuses and crocuses in the woods, so you find them growing wild."

"I like those awnings. Against the white walls.... May I consider that we are engaged then, Miss Winslow—engaged for the next marriage?"

"Oh no, no, not engaged, dear. Don't you know it's one of my principles——"

"But look——"

"——not to be engaged, Hawk? Everybody brings the cunnin' old jokes out of the moth-balls when you're engaged. I'll marry you, but——"

"Marry me next month—August?"

"Nope."

"September?"

"Nope."

"Please, Ruthie. Aw yes, September. Nice month, September is. Autumn. Harvest moon. And apples to swipe. Come on. September."

"Well, perhaps September. We'll see. Oh, Hawk dear, can you conceive of us actually sitting here and solemnly discussing being married? Us, the babes in the wood? And I've only known you three days or so, seems to me.... Well, as I was saying, perhaps I'll marry you in September (um! frightens me to think of it; frightens me and awes me and amuses me to death, all at once). That is, I shall marry you unless you take to wearing pearl-gray derbies or white evening ties with black edging, or kill Mason in a duel, or do something equally disgraceful. But engaged I will not be. And we'll put the money for a diamond ring into a big davenport.... Are we going to be dreadfully poor?"

"Oh, not pawn-shop poor. I made VanZile boost my salary, last week, and with my Touricar stock I'm getting a little over four thousand dollars a year."

"Is that lots or little?"

"Well, it 'll give us a decent apartment and a nearly decent maid, I guess. And if the Touricar keeps going, we can beat it off for a year, wandering, after maybe three four years."

"I hope so. Here we are! That's Mrs. Pat waiting for us."

The Patton Kerr house, set near the top of the highest hill in that range of the Berkshires, stood out white against a slope of crisp green; an old manor house of long lines and solid beams, with striped awnings of red and white, and in front a brick terrace, with basket-chairs, a swinging couch, and a wicker tea-table already welcomingly spread with a service of Royal Doulton. From the terrace one saw miles of valley and hills, and villages strung on a rambling river. The valley was a golden bowl filled with the peace of afternoon; a world of sun and listening woods.

On the terrace waited a woman of thirty-five, of clever face a bit worn at the edges, carefully coiffed hair, and careless white blouse with a tweed walking-skirt. She was gracefully holding out her hand, greeting Carl, "It's terribly good of you to come clear out into our wilderness." She was interrupted by the bouncing appearance of a stocky, handsome, red-faced, full-chinned, curly-black-haired man of forty, in riding-breeches and boots and a silk shirt; with him an excited small boy in rompers—Patton Kerr, Sr. and Jr.

"Here you are!" Senior observantly remarked. "Glad to see you, Ericson. You and Ruthie been a deuce of a time coming up from town. Holding hands along the road, eh? Lord! these aviators!"

"Pat!"

"Animal!"

——protested Mrs. Kerr and Ruth, simultaneously.

"All right. I'll be good. Saw you fly at Nassau Boulevard, Ericson. Turned my horn loose and hooted till they thought I was a militant, like Ruthie here. Lord! what flying, what flying! I'd like to see you race Weymann and Vedrines.... Ruthie, will you show Mr. Ericson where his room is, or has poor old Pat got to go and drag a servant away from reading Town Topics, heh?"

"I will, Pat," said Ruth.

"I will, daddy," cried Pat, Jr.

"No, my son, I guess maybe Ruthie had better do it. There's a certain look in her eyes——"

"Basilisk!"

"Salamander!"

Ruth and Carl passed through the wide colonial hall, with mahogany tables and portraits of the Kerrs and the sword of Colonel Patton. At the far end was an open door, and a glimpse of an old-fashioned garden radiant with hollyhocks and Canterbury bells. It was a world of utter content. As they climbed the curving stairs Ruth tucked her arm in his, saying:

"Now do you see why I won't be engaged? Pat Kerr is the best chum in the world, yet he finds even a possible engagement wildly humorous—like mothers-in-law or poets or falling on your ear."

"But gee! Ruth, you are going to marry me?"

"You little child! My little boy Hawk! Of course I'm going to marry you. Do you think I would miss my chance of a cabin in the Rockies?... My famous Hawk what everybody cheered at Nassau Boulevard!" She opened the door of his room with a deferential, "Thy chamber, milord!... Come down quickly," she said. "We mustn't miss a moment of these days.... I am frank with you about how glad I am to have you here. You must be good to me; you will prize my love a little, won't you?" Before he could answer she had run away.

After half home-comings and false home-comings the adventurer had really come home.

He inspected the gracious room, its chintz hangings, four-poster bed, low wicker chair by the fireplace, fresh Cherokee roses on the mantel; a room of cheerfulness and open spaces. He stared into woods where a cool light lay on moss and fern. He did not need to remember Ruth's kisses. For each breath of hilltop air, each emerald of moss, each shining mahogany surface in the room, repeated to him that he had found the Grail, whose other name is love.

Saturday, they loafed over breakfast, the sun licking the tree-tops in the ravine outside the windows; and they motored with the Kerrs to Lenox, returning through the darkness. Till midnight they talked on the terrace. They loafed again, the next morning, and let the fresh air dissolve the office grime which had been coating his spirit. They were so startlingly original as to be simple-hearted country lovers, in the afternoon, declining Kerr's offer of a car, and rambling off on bicycles.

From a rise they saw water gleaming among the trees. The sullen green of pines set off the silvery green of barley, and an orchard climbed the next rise; the smoky shadow of another hill range promised long, cool forest roads. Crows were flying overhead, going where they would. The aviator and the girl who read psychology, modern lovers, stood hand in hand, as though the age of machinery were a myth; as though he were a piping minstrel and she a shepherdess. Before them was the open road and all around them the hum of bees.

A close, listless heat held Monday afternoon, even on the hilltop. The clay tennis-court was baking; the worn bricks of the terrace reflected a furnace glow. The Kerrs had disappeared for a nap. Carl, lounging with Ruth on the swinging couch in the shade, thought of the slaves in New York offices and tenements. Then, because he would himself be back in an office next day, he let the glare of the valley soothe him with its wholesome heat.

"Certainly would like a swim," he remarked. "Couldn't we bike down to Fisher's Pond, or maybe take the Ford?"

"Let's. But there's no bath-house."

"Put a bathing-suit under your dress. Sun 'll dry it in no time, after the swim."

"As you command, my liege." And she ran in to change.

They motored down to Fisher's Pond, which is a lake, and stopped in a natural woodland-opening like a dim-lighted greenroom. From it stretched the enameled lake, the farther side reflecting unbroken woods. The nearer water-edge was exquisite in its clearness. They saw perch fantastically floating over the pale sand bottom, among scattered reeds whose watery green stalks were like the thin columns of a dancing-hall for small fishes. The surface of the lake, satiny as the palm of a girl's hand, broke in the tiniest of ripples against white quartz pebbles on the hot shore. Cool, flashing, golden-sanded, the lake coaxed them out of their forest room.

"A lot like the Minnesota lakes, only smaller," said Carl. "I'm going right in. About ready for a swim? Come on."

"I'm af-fraid!" She suddenly plumped on the earth and hugged her skirts about her ankles.

"Why, blessed, what you scared of? No sharks here, and no undertow. Nice white sand——"

"Oh, Hawk, I was silly. I felt I was such an independent modern woman a-a-and I aren't! I've always said it was silly for girls to swim in a woman's bathing-suit. Skirts are so cumbersome. So I put on a boy's bathing-suit under my dress—and—I'm terribly embarrassed."

"Why, blessed——Well, I guess you'll have to decide." His voice was somewhat shaky. "Awful scared of Carl?"

"Yes! I thought I wouldn't be, with you, but I'm self-conscious as can be."

"Well, gee! I don't know. Of course——Well, I'll jump in, and you can decide."

He peeled off his white flannels and stood in his blue bathing-suit, not statue-like, not very brown now, but trim-waisted, shapely armed, wonderfully clean of neck and jaw. With a "Wheee!" he dashed into the water and swam out, overhand.

As he turned over and glanced back, his heart caught to see her standing on the creamy sand, a shy, elfin figure in a boy's bathing-suit of black wool, woman and slim boy in one, silken-throated and graceful-limbed, curiously smaller than when dressed. Her white skirt and blouse lay tumbled about her ankles. She raised rosy arms to hide her flushed face and her eyes, as she cried:

"Don't look!"

He obediently swam on, with a tenderness more poignant than longing. He heard her splashing behind him, and turned again, to see her racing through the water. Those soft yet not narrow shoulders rose and fell sturdily under the wet black wool, her eyes shone, and she was all comradely boy save for her dripping, splendid hair. Singing, "Come on, lazy!" she headed across the pond. He swam beside her, reveling in the well-being of cool water and warm air, till they reached the solemn shade beneath the trees on the other side, and floated in the dark, still water, splashing idle hands, gazing into forest hollows, spying upon the brisk business of squirrels among the acorns.

Back at their greenwood room, Ruth wrapped her sailor blouse about her, and they squatted like un-self-conscious children on the beach, while from a field a distant locust fiddled his August fandango and in flame-colored pride an oriole went by. Fresh sky, sunfish like tropic shells in the translucent water, arching reeds dipping their olive-green points in the water, wavelets rustling against a gray neglected rowboat, and beside him Ruth.

Musingly they built a castle of sand. An hour of understanding so complete that it made the heart melancholy. When he sighed, "Getting late; come on, blessed; we're dry now," it seemed that they could never again know such rapt tranquillity.

Yet they did. For that evening when they stood on the terrace, trying to forget that he must leave her and go back to the lonely city in the morning, when the mist reached chilly tentacles up from the valley, they kissed a shy good-by, and Carl knew that life's real adventure is not adventuring, but finding the playmate with whom to quest life's meaning.



CHAPTER XL

After six festival months of married life—in April or May, 1914—the happy Mrs. Carl Ericson did not have many "modern theories of marriage in general," though it was her theory that she had such theories. Like a majority of intelligent men and women, Ruth was, in her rebellion against the canonical marriage of slipper-warming and obedience, emphatic but vague. She was of precise opinion regarding certain details of marriage, but in general as inconsistent as her library. It is a human characteristic to be belligerently sure as to whether one prefers plush or rattan upholstery on car seats—but not to consider whether government ownership of railroads will improve upholstering; to know with certainty of perception that it is a bore to have one's husband laugh at one's pet economy, of matches or string or ice—but to be blandly willing to leave all theories of polygamy and polyandry, monogamy and varietism, to the clever Russian Jews.

As regards details Ruth definitely did want a bedroom of her own; a desire which her mother would have regarded as somehow immodest. She definitely did want shaving and hair-brushing kept in the background. She did not want Carl the lover to drift into Carl the husband. She did not want them to lose touch with other people. And she wanted to keep the spice of madness which from the first had seasoned their comradeship.

These things she delightfully had, in May, 1914.

They were largely due to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen and the ridiculousness of class distinctions. Reared in the farming district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, he had not, despite imagination, devoted two seconds to such details as the question of whether there was freedom and repose—not to speak of a variety of taste as regards opening windows and sleeping diagonally across a bed—in having separate bedrooms. Much though he had been persuaded to read of modern fiction, his race still believed that marriage bells and roses were the proper portions of marriage to think about.

It was due to Ruth, too, that they had so amiable a flat. Carl had been made careless of surroundings by years of hotels and furnished rooms. There was less real significance for him in the beauty of his first home than in the fact that they two had a bath-room of their own; that he no longer had to go, clad in a drab bath-robe, laden with shaving materials and a towel and talcum powder and a broken hand-mirror and a tooth-brush, like a perambulating drug-store toilet-counter, down a boarding-house hall to that modified hall bedroom with a tin tub which his doctor-landlord had called a bath-room. Pictures, it must be admitted, give a room an air; pleasant it is to sit in large chairs by fireplaces and feel yourself a landed gentleman. But nothing filled Carl with a more delicate—and truly spiritual—satisfaction than having a porcelain tub, plenty of hot water, and the privilege of leaving his shaving-brush in the Ericson bath-room with a fair certainty of finding it there when he wanted to shave in a hurry.

But, careless of surroundings or not, Carl was stirred when on their return from honeymooning in the Adirondacks he carried Ruth over the threshold and they stood together in the living-room of their home.

It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was white-enameled; the walls covered with gray Japanese paper. There were no portieres between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-a-brac, yet the rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow chairs, and Ruth's upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good rugs. There were only two or three vases, and they genuinely intended for holding flowers, and there was a bare mantelpiece that rested the eyes, over the fuzzily clean gas-log. The pictures were chosen because they led the imagination on—etchings and color prints, largely by unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The chairs assembled naturally in groups. The whole unit of three rooms suggested people talking.... It was home, first and last, though it was one cell in one layer of a seven-story building, on a street walled in with such buildings, in a city which lined up more than three hundred of such streets from its southern tip to its northern limit along the Hudson, and threw in a couple of million people in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

They lived in the Nineties, between Broadway and Riverside Drive; a few blocks from the Winslow house in distance, but one generation away in the matter of decoration. The apartment-house itself was comparatively old-fashioned, with an intermittent elevator run by an intermittent negro youth who gave most of his time to the telephone switchboard and mysterious duties in the basement; also with a down-stairs hall that was narrow and carpeted and lined with offensively dark wood. But they could see the Hudson from their living-room on the sixth floor at the back of the house (the agent assured them that probably not till the end of time would there be anything but low, private houses between them and the river); they were not haunted by Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow; and Ruth, who had long been oppressed by late-Victorian bric-a-brac and American Louis XVth furniture, so successfully adopted Elimination as the key-note that there was not one piece of furniture bought for the purpose of indicating that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Ericson were well-to-do.

She dared to tell friends who before the wedding inquired what she wanted, that checks were welcome, and need not be monogrammed. Even Aunt Emma had been willing to send a check, provided they were properly married in St. George's Church. Consequently their six rooms showed a remarkable absence of such usual wedding presents as prints of the smugly smiling and eupeptic Mona Lisa, three muffin-stands in three degrees of marquetry, three electroliers, four punch-bowls, three sets of almond-dishes, a pair of bird-carvers that did not carve, a bust of Dante in New Art marble, or a de luxe set of De Maupassant translated by a worthy lady with a French lexicon. Instead, they bought what they wanted—rather an impertinent thing to do, but, like most impertinences, thoroughly worth while. Their living-room was their own. Carl's bedroom was white and simple, though spotty with aviation medals and silver cups and monoplanes sketchily rendered in gold, and signed photographs of aviators. Ruth's bedroom was also plain and white and dull Japanese gray, a simple room with that simplicity of hand-embroidery, real lace, and fine linen appreciated by exclamatory women friends.

She taught Carl to say "dahg" instead of "dawg" for "dog"; "wawta" instead of "wotter" for "water." Whether she was more correct in her pronunciation or not does not matter; New York said "dahg," and it amused him just then to be very Eastern. She taught him the theory of house-lighting. Carl had no fanatical objection to unshaded incandescent bulbs glaring from the ceiling. But he came to like the shaded electric lamps which Ruth installed in the living-room. When she introduced four candles as sole lighting of the dining-room table, however, he grumbled loudly at his inability to see what he was eating. She retired to her bedroom, and he huffily went out to get a cigar. At the cigar-counter he repented of all the unkind things he had ever done or could possibly do, and returned to eat humble pie—and eat it by candle-light. Inside of two weeks one of the things which Carl Ericson had always known was that the harmonious candle-light brought them close together at dinner.

The teaching, in this Period of Adjustments, was not all on Ruth's part. It was due to Carl's insistence that she tried to discover what her theological beliefs really were. She admitted that only at twilight vespers, with a gale of violins in an arched roof, did she really worship in church. She did not believe that priests and ministers, who seemed to be ordinary men as regards earthly things, had any extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of heaven. Yet she took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic.

Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn't pure egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the best? My country, my religion, my wife, my business—we think that whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are gods—and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian is equally ready to prove to you—and mind you, he may be a wise old man with a beard—that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper or a Hard-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself, then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like to experiment with life."

His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss God as to discuss sex, his defiances seemed terrifyingly new.... She was not the first who had complacently gone to church after reading Bernard Shaw.... But she did try to follow Carl's loose reasoning; to find out what she thought and what the spiritual fashions of her neighborhood made her think she thought.

The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a personal God, whose yearning had spoken to her in the Gregorian chant. She could never get herself to read more than two chapters of any book on the subject, nor did she get much light from conversation. One set of people supposed that Christianity had so entirely disappeared from intelligent circles that it was not worth discussion; another set supposed that no one but cranks ever thought of doubting the essentials of Christianity, and that, therefore, it was not worth discussion; and to a few superb women whom she knew, their religion was too sweet a reality to be subjected to the noisy chatter of discussion. Gradually Ruth forgot to think often of the matter, but it was always back in her mind.

* * * * *

They were happy, Carl and Ruth. To their flat came such of Ruth's friends as she kept because she liked them for themselves, with a fantastic assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The Ericsons made an institution of "bruncheon"—breakfast-luncheon—at which coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a davenport of talk and a wing-chair of Sunday papers, were to be had on Sunday morning from ten to one. At bruncheon Walter MacMonnies told to Florence Crewden his experiences in exploring Southern Greenland by aeroplane with the Schliess-Banning expedition. At bruncheon Bobby Winslow, now an interne, talked baseball with Carl. At bruncheon Phil Dunleavy regarded cynically all the people he did not know and played piquet in a corner with Ruth's father.

Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring of 1914 went there nearly every Saturday afternoon for tennis and a dance. Carl refused golf, however; he always repeated a shabby joke about the shame of taking advantage of such a tiny ball.

He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 A.M. Saturday, and begun at two that afternoon. They explored the tangled rocks and woods of Lloyd's Neck, on Long Island, sleeping in an abandoned shack, curled together like kittens. They swooped on a Dutch village in New Jersey, spent the night with an old farmer, and attended the Dutch Reformed church. They tramped from New Haven to Hartford, over Easter. Carl was always ready for their gipsy journeys; he responded to Ruth's visions of foaming South Sea isles; but he rarely sketched such pictures himself. He had given all of himself to joy in Ruth. Like many men called "adventurers," he was ready for anything but content with anything.

It was Ruth who was finding new voyages. She kept up her settlement work and progressed to an active interest in the Women's Trade Union League and took part in picketing during a Panama Hat-Workers' strike. She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method, cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary, thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side society.

In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither "the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.

When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm sure!" in reply Ruth pleasantly observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"

Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the spring of 1914, to want no others.



CHAPTER XLI

The apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter. Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he dreamed of lists of "prospects."

Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude, nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted, however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off somewhere and lie down and die gently.

Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.

For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun. That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed, she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and noisy with her.

During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours, while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to rekindle the spirit of daring.

One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson, the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the rest: "Tough in winter——" "Might be good trip——" Carl's hand was always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse, wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.

He took to watching her like a solemn baby, when she moved about the room; thus she found the little boy Carl again; laughed full-throated and secretly cried over him, as his sternness passed into a wistful obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness she had loved. But the good child who came in his place did trust her so, depend upon her so....

When Carl was strong enough they went for three weeks to Point Pleasant, on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the open sea healed his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even swam, once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely called the "fox trot" and the "lu lu fado." Their hotel was a vast barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth, and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented wall-flower.

They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their throats and sea-sparkle in their eyes—and Carl promptly tied himself to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him a vision of play.

Ruth had not taken the Point Pleasant dances seriously, but as day on day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer, she sometimes sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of lights on the ball-room floor, the wavelike swish of music-mad feet.

The flat was hot, dead. The summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes drawn over the head and lashed down. Flies in sneering circles mocked the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes, yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted by a window, while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator, venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining, and presently imagined it all over again.

Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women, not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes the passing of something—ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo' men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for something to appear. Two blocks away they were—yet to Ruth they seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every respect—she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the efficient maid, and there was no nursery.

She sat apprehensively on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the windows, hating the dull, persistent flies, hating the wetness of her forehead and the dampness of her palm; repenting of her hate and hating again—and taking another cold bath to be fresh for the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom, of all the world, she did not hate.

Even on the many cool days when the streets and the flat became tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or some one came to see her. Every one she knew, except for the Dunleavys and a few others, was out of town, and she was tired of Olive Dunleavy's mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger giggling about strange people. Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about, stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and playing squash.

Her settlement-house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded over the settlement work and accused herself of caring less for people than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a hypocrite.... Then she would take another cold bath to be fresh for the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother, and toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not hypocritical.

This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Ericson. Yet Ruth's stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, overlooking motor-hooting, gasoline-reeking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away, but she refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a week more of holiday for them both; he could not; he came to understand that he was now completely a prisoner of business.

He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with "back work that had piled up on him." He had no desire, no ambition, no interest, except in Ruth and in making the Touricar pay.

The Touricar Company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer would old VanZile be satisfied with millions to come in the future—perhaps?

Carl even took work home with him, though for Ruth's sake he wanted to go out and play. It really was for her sake; he himself liked to play, but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold of him. He was glad to have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy. She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.

"I can't stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a roof-garden.

He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"

"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.

Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him, the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry—to find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that they were both prepared to quarrel.

Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend——

Then the whole world exploded.

Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading "news," but history, with himself in the history book.

Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.

Every noon he bought half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to the bulletin-boards on the Times and Herald buildings. He pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about a world-war when he saw such items as "Russians invading Prussia," "Japs will enter war," "Aeroplane and submarine attack English cruiser."

"Rats!" he said, "I'm dreaming. There couldn't be a war like that. We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing 's impossible."

In the world-puzzle nothing confused Carl more than the question of socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French and German socialist workmen made war between the two nations absolutely impossible—and his knowledge was proven ignorance, his faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two, to find some explanation, and found only greater confusion on the part of the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand how it had all happened; they stood amid the ruins of international socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so was Carl's vague untutored optimism about world-brotherhood.

He had two courses—to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin, they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements, nor the church.

* * * * *

With a whole world at war, Carl thought chiefly of his own business. He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business seemed dead, save for a grim activity in war-trucks. VanZile called in Carl and shook his head over the future of the Touricar, now that all luxuries were threatened.

But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East followed; then, slowly, the South, despite the closed outlet for its cotton crop. Within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade than ever, so rapidly were all the cars of the warring nations being destroyed.

But, once VanZile had considered the possibility of letting go his Touricar interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be considering it. Carl read fate in VanZile's abstracted manner. And if VanZile withdrew, Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck at his work, with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In an aeroplane he had never been greatly frightened; he could himself, by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world-war or a world-industry?

He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She said, one evening: "Sometimes I think we two are unusual, because we really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger, and I realize we're not free at all; that we're just like all the rest, prisoners, dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh, sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just a bit mad, no matter how serious things become." Standing very close to him, she put her head on his shoulder.

"Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world takes a run and jumps on us."

"Indeed we will!"

* * * * *

Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called "courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old business bust, if she's going to."

Only, it refused to bust.

It kept on trembling, while Carl became nervous again, then gaily defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a freebooter. As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he retorted; the suspense kept them both raw....

To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the ego-mad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by the reappearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively but vulgar person of Martin Dockerill, Carl's former aviation mechanic.

Martin Dockerill was lanky and awkward as ever, he still wrote post-cards to his aunt in Fall River, and admired burlesque-show choruses, but he no longer played the mouth-organ (publicly), for he had become so well-to-do as to be respectable. As foreign agent for the Des Moines Auto-Truck Company he had toured Europe, selling war-trucks, or lorries, as the English called them, first to the Balkan States, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time detailed to the New York office.

It did not occur either to him nor to Carl that he was not "welcome to drop in any time; often as possible," to slap Carl on the back, loudly recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with a policeman in San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was as interested as Carl in his theories about aeroplane-scouting in war.

Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.

So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that "this ended everything." They quarreled always about the one thing which had intimidated them before—the need of quarreling; though apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was making him indecisive.

And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for dissension.

Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred—a noble faith which is an important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the living-room, waiting for a fight—and he got it.

Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked), Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's farmer relatives.

And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.

He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.

In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation—scouting ten thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer—and as one who was not merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might go.

Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"

When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently. Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was Aeroplanes and Air-Scouting in the European Armies.

She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?"

"Why shouldn't I read it?"

"You don't mean to—— You——"

"Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now. You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet."

"But why do you shut me out? Why do you?"

"Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't true."

"I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a typical silly wife."

"And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up aviation."

"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. "Hell!" 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 shaggy, 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 rehearsed 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 snobbish affectation. He did not spare his reverence, his passion, 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 glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly, meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble 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 Washington's glassy 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 grass 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.

The monoplane landed with a clean volplane. The aviator and his mechanicians were wheeling it toward the hangar. They glanced at him uninterestedly. Carl understood that, to them, he was a Typical Bystander, here where he had once starred.

The aviator stared again, let go the machine, walked over, exclaiming: "Say, aren't you Hawk Ericson? This is an honor. I heard you were somewhere in New York. Just missed you at the Aero Club one night. Wanted to ask you about the Bagby hydro. Won't you come in and have some coffee and sinkers with us? Proud to have you. My name 's Berry."

"Thanks. Be glad to."

While the youngsters were admiring him, hearing of the giants of earlier days, while they were drinking inspiration from this veteran of twenty-nine, they were in turn inspiring Carl by their faith in him. He had been humble. They made him trust himself, not egotistically, but with a feeling that he did matter, that it was worth while to be in tune with life.

Yet all the while he knew that he wanted to be by himself, because he could thus be with the spirit of Ruth. And he knew, subconsciously, that he was going to hurry back to Mineola and telephone to her.

As he dog-trotted down the road, he noted the old Dutch houses for her; picked out the spot where he had once had a canvas hangar, and fancied himself telling her of those days. He did not remember that at this hangar he had known Istra, Istra Nash, the artist, whose name he scarce recalled. Istra was an incident; Ruth was the meaning of his life.

And the solution of his problem came, all at once, when suddenly it was given to him to understand what that problem was.

Ruth and he had to be up and away, immediately; go any place, do anything, so long as they followed new trails, and followed them together. He knew positively, after his lonely night, that he could not be happy without her as comrade in the freedom he craved. And he also knew that they had not done the one thing for which their marriage existed. They were not just a man and a woman. They were a man and a woman who had promised to find new horizons for each other.

However much he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die is a sort of suspended energy which has no conceivable place in this over-complex and unwieldy world. He had no clear nor ringing message, but he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and he—not every one, but Ruth and he, at least—had a vocation in keeping clear of vocations, and that they must fulfil it.

Over the telephone he said: "Ruth dear, I'll be right there. Walked all night. Got straightened out now. I'm out at Mineola. It's all right with me now, blessed. I want so frightfully much to make it all right with you. I'll be there in about an hour."

She answered "Yes" so non-committally that he was smitten by the fact that he had yet to win forgiveness for his frenzy in leaving her; that he must break the shell of resentment which would incase her after a whole night's brooding between sullen walls.

On the train, unconscious of its uproar, he was bespelled by his new love. During a few moments of their lives, ordinary real people, people real as a tooth-brush, do actually transcend the coarsely physical aspects of sex and feeding, and do approximate to the unwavering glow of romantic heroes. Carl was no more a romantic hero-lover than, as a celebrated aviator, he had been a hero-adventurer. He was a human being. He was not even admirable, except as all people are admirable, from the ash-man to the king. There had been nothing exemplary in his struggle to find adjustment with his wife; he had been bad in his impatience just as he had been good in his boyish affection; in both he had been human. Even now, when without reserve he gave himself up to love, he was aware that he would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old apartment-house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices. Yet with a joy that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords, romantic towers and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and elevators and prejudices, Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of man's yearning for union with the divine; he desired happiness for her with a devotion great as the passion in Galahad's heart when all night he knelt before the high altar.

He came slowly up to their apartment-house. If it were only possible for Ruth to trust him, now——

Mingled with his painfully clear remembrance of all the sweet things Ruth was and had done was a tragic astonishment that he—this same he who was all hers now—could possibly have turned impatiently from her sobs. Yet it would have been for good, if only she would trust him.

Not till he left the elevator, on their floor, did he comprehend that Ruth might not be awaiting him; might have gone. He looked irresolutely at the grill of the elevator door, shut on the black shaft.

"She was here when I telephoned——"

He waited. Perhaps she would peep out to see if it was he who had come up in the elevator.

She did not appear.

He walked the endless distance of ten feet to their door, unlocked it, labored across the tiny hall into the living-room. She was there. She stood supporting herself by the back of the davenport, her eyes red-edged and doubtful, her face tightened, expressing enmity or dread or shy longing. He held out his hands, like a prisoner beseeching royal mercy. She in turn threw out her arms. He could not say one word. The clumsy signs called "words" could not tell his emotion. He ran to her, and she welcomed his arms. He held her, abandoned himself utterly to her kiss. His hard-driving mind relaxed; relaxed was her body in his arms. He knew, not merely with his mind, but with the vaster powers that drive mind and emotion and body, that Ruth, in her disheveled dressing-gown, was the glorious lover to whom he had been hastening this hour past. All the love which civilization had tried to turn into Normal Married Life had escaped Efficiency's pruning-hook, and had flowered.

"It's all right with me, now," she said; "so wonderfully all right."

"I want to explain. Had to be by myself; find out. Must have seemed so unspeakably r——"

"Oh, don't, don't explain! Our kiss explained."

* * * * *

While they talked on the davenport together, reaching out again and again for the hands that now really were there, Ruth agreed with Carl that they must be up and away, not wait till it should be too late. She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can flee to the halcyon isles.

But she did insist that they plan practically; and it was she who wondered: "But what would happen if everybody went skipping off like us? Who'd bear the children and keep the fields plowed to feed the ones that ran away?"

"Golly!" cried Carl, "wish that were the worst problem we had! Maybe a thousand years from now, when every one is so artistic that they want to write books, it will be hard to get enough drudges. But now—— Look at any office, with the clerks toiling day after day, even the unmarried ones. Look at all the young fathers of families, giving up everything they want to do, to support children who'll do the same thing right over again with their children. Always handing on the torch of life, but never getting any light from it. People don't run away from slavery often enough. And so they don't ever get to do real work, either!"

"But, sweetheart, what if we should have children some day? You know—— Of course, we haven't been ready for them yet, but some day they might come, anyhow, and how could we wander round——"

"Oh, probably they will come some day, and then we'll take our dose of drudgery like the rest. There's nothing that our dear civilization punishes as it does begetting children. For poisoning food by adulterating it you may get fined fifty dollars, but if you have children they call it a miracle—as it is—and then they get busy and condemn you to a lifetime of being scared by the boss."

"Well, darling, please don't blame it on me."

"I didn't mean to get so oratorical, blessed. But it does make me mad the way the state punishes one for being willing to work and have children. Perhaps if enough of us run away from nice normal grinding, we'll start people wondering just why they should go on toiling to produce a lot of booze and clothes and things that nobody needs."

"Perhaps, my Hawk.... Don't you think, though, that we might be bored in your Rocky Mountain cabin, if we were there for months and months?"

"Yes, I suppose so," Carl mused. "The rebellion against stuffy marriage has to be a whole lot wider than some little detail like changing from city to country. Probably for some people the happiest thing 'd be to live in a hobohemian flat and have parties, and for some to live in the suburbs and get the missus elected president of the Village Improvement Society. For us, I believe, it's change and keep going."

"Yes, I do think so. Hawk, my Hawk, I lay awake nearly all night last night, realizing that we are one, not because of a wedding ceremony, but because we can understand each other's make-b'lieves and seriousnesses. I knew that no matter what happened, we had to try again.... I saw last night, by myself, that it was not a question of finding out whose fault a quarrel was; that it wasn't anybody's 'fault,' but just conditions.... And we'll change them.... We won't be afraid to be free."

"We won't! Lord! life's wonderful!"

"Yes! When I think of how sweet life can be—so wonderfully sweet—I know that all the prophets must love human beings, oh, so terribly, no matter how sad they are about the petty things that lives are wasted over.... But I'm not a prophet. I'm a girl that's awfully much in love, and, darling, I want you to hold me close."

* * * * *

Three months later, in February, 1915, Ruth and Carl sailed for Buenos Ayres, America's new export-market. Carl was the Argentine Republic manager for the VanZile Motor Corporation, possessed of an unimportant salary, a possibility of large commissions, and hopes like comets. Their happiness seemed a thing enchanted. They had not quarreled again.

* * * * *

The S.S. Sangrael, for Buenos Ayres and Rio, had sailed from snow into summer. Ruth and Carl watched isles of palms turn to fantasies carved of ebony, in the rose and garnet sunset waters, and the vast sky laugh out in stars. Carl was quoting Kipling:

"The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass, And the deuce knows what we may do— But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We're down, hull down on the Old Trail—the trail that is always new."

"Anyway," he commented, "deuce only knows what we'll do after Argentine, and I don't care. Do you?"

Her clasping hand answered, as he went on:

"Oh, say, bles-sed! I forgot to look in the directory before we left New York to see if there wasn't a Society for the Spread of Madness among the Respectable. It might have sent us out as missionaries.... There's a flying-fish; and to-morrow I won't have to watch clerks punch a time-clock; and you can hear a sailor shifting the ventilators; and there's a little star perched on the fore-mast; singing; but the big thing is that you're here beside me, and we're going. How bully it is to be living, if you don't have to give up living in order to make a living."

THE END