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The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life, a novel by Sinclair Lewis |
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Part 3. The Adventure Of Love - Chapter 38 |
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_ PART III. THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE. CHAPTER XXXVIII While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is, sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves. She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her throat, as he had done at Long Beach. As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these: Join country clb take R dances there? He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont, motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her brothers. One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the _pays du tendre_ is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray groves of the Land of Wandering Tunes, till Phil began to talk, disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor, and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend. A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.) Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors, arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you want to! How is the automobile business going?" * * * * * It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were going as, in real life, most businesses go--just fairly well. A few cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our young hero vice-president of the corporation. * * * * * In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had, since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure indifference to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped, according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed--or escaped--her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as, except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see. 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 Berkshires, 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-fashioned 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 Berkshire night, with a black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound: It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am 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'. _ |
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