Mrs. Cowles: "Make him one by all means, my dear, and you young people sit up and enjoy yourselves just as long as you like. Good night, all.... Ray, will you please be sure and see that that window is fastened before you go to bed? I get so nervous when----Mr. Ericson, I'm very proud to think that one of our Joralemon boys should have done so well. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord ever meant men to fly--what with so many accidents, and you know aviators often do get killed and all. I was reading the other day--such a large percentage----But we have been so proud that you should lead them all, I was saying to a lady on the train that we had a friend who was a famous aviator, and she was so interested to find that we knew you.

Good night."

They had the Welsh rarebit, with beer, and Carl helped to make it.

Gertie summoned him into the scoured kitchen, saying, with a beautiful casualness, as she tied an ap.r.o.n about him:

"We can't afford a hired girl (I suppose I should say a 'maid'), because mamma has put so much of our money into Ray's business, so you mustn't expect anything so very grand. But you'd like to help, wouldn't you? You're to chop the cheese. Cut it into weenty cubes."

Carl did like to help. He boasted that he was the "champion cheese-chopper of Harlem and the Bronx, one-thirty-three ringside,"

while Gertie was toasting crackers, and Ray was out buying bottles of beer in a newspaper. It all made Carl feel more than ever at home....

It was good to be with people of such divine understanding that they knew what he meant when he said, "I suppose there _have_ been worse teachers than Prof La.r.s.en----!"

When the rabbit lay pale in death, a saddening _debacle_ of hardened cheese, and they sat with their elbows on the Modified Mission dining-table, Gertie exclaimed:

"Oh, Ray, you _must_ do that new stunt of yours for Carl. It's screamingly funny, Carl."

Ray rose, had his collar and tie off in two jocund jerks, b.u.t.toned his collar on backward, cheerily turned his waistcoat back side foremost, lengthened his face to an expression of unctuous sanctimoniousness, and turned about--transformed in one minute to a fair imitation of a stage curate. With his hands folded, Ray droned, "Naow, sistern, it behooveth us heuh in St. Timothee's Chutch," while Carl pounded the table in his delight at seeing old Ray, the broad-shouldered, the lady-killer, the capable business man, drop his eyes and yearn.

"Now you must do a stunt!" shrieked Ray and Gertie; and Carl hesitatingly sang what he remembered of Forrest Haviland's foolish song:

"I went up in a balloon so big The people on the earth they looked like a pig, Like a mice, like a katydid, like flieses and like fleasen."

Then, without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance "Gather the Golden Sheaves," which she had learned at the school of Mme. Vashkowska, late (though not very late) of the Russian ballet.

She explained her work; outlined the theory of sensuous and esthetic dancing; mentioned the backgrounds of Bakst and the glories of Nijinsky; told her ambition to teach the New Dancing to children. Carl listened with awe; and with awe did he gaze as Gertie gathered the Golden Sheaves--purely hypothetical sheaves in a field occupying most of the living-room.

After the stunts Ray delicately vanished. It was not so much that he statedly went off to bed as that, presently, he was not there. Gertie and Carl were snugly alone, and at last he talked--of Forrest Haviland and Tony Bean, of flying and falling, of excited crowds and the fog-filled air-lanes.

In turn she told of her ambition to do something modern and urban. She had hesitated between dancing and making exotic jewelry; she was glad she had chosen the former; it was so human; it put one in touch with People.... She had recently gone to dinner with real Bohemians, spirits of fire, splendidly in contrast with the dull plodders of Joralemon. The dinner had been at a marvelous place on West Tenth Street--very foreign, every one drinking wine and eating spaghetti and little red herrings, and the women fearlessly smoking cigarettes--some of them. She had gone with a girl from Mme. Vashkowska's school, a glorious creature from London, Nebraska, who lived with the most fascinating girls at the Three Arts Club. They had met an artist with black hair and languishing eyes, who had a Yankee name, but sang Italian songs divinely, upon the slightest pretext, so bubbling was he with _joie de vivre_.

Carl was alarmed. "Gosh!" he protested, "I hope you aren't going to have much to do with the long-haired bunch.... I've invented a name for them--'the Hobohemians.'"

"Oh no-o! I don't take them seriously at all. I was just glad to go once."

"Of course some of them are clever."

"Oh yes, aren't they clever!"

"But I don't think they last very well."

"Oh no, I'm sure they don't last well. Oh no, Carl, I'm too old and fat to be a Bohemian--a Hobohemian, I mean, so----"

"Nonsense! You look so--oh, thunder! I don't know just how to express it--well, so _real_! It's wonderfully comfortable to be with you-all again. I don't mean you're just the 'so good to her mother' sort, you understand. But I mean you're dependable as well as artistic."

"Oh, indeed, I won't take them too seriously. Besides, I suppose lots of the people that go to Bohemian restaurants aren't really artists at all; they just go to see the artists; they're just as bromidic as can be----Don't you hate bromides? Of course I want to see some of that part of life, but I think----Oh, don't you think those artists and all are dreadfully careless about morals?"

"Well----"

"Yes," she breathed, reflectively. "No, I keep up with my church and all--indeed I do. Oh, Carl, you must come to our church--St. Orgul's.

It's too sweet for anything. It's just two blocks from here; and it isn't so far up here, you know, not with the subway--not like commuting. It has the _loveliest_ chapel. And the most wonderful reredos. And the services are so inspiring and high-church; not like that horrid St. Timothy's at home. I do think a church service ought to be beautiful. Don't you? It isn't as though we were like a lot of poor people who have to have their souls saved in a mission.... What church do you attend? You _will_ come to St. Orgul's some time, won't you?"

"Be glad to----Oh, say, Gertie, before I forget it, what is Semina doing now? Is she married?"

Apropos of this subject, Gertie let it be known that she herself was not betrothed.

Carl had not considered that question; but when he was back in his room he was glad to know that Gertie was free.

At the Omega Chi Delta Club, Carl lunched with Ray Cowles. Two nights later, Ray and Gertie took Carl and Gertie's friend, the glorious creature from London, Nebraska, to the opera. Carl did not know much about opera. In other words, being a normal young American who had been water-proofed with college culture, he knew absolutely nothing about it. But he gratefully listened to Gertie's clear explanation of why Mme. Vashkowska preferred Wagner to Verdi.

He had, in the mean time, received a formal invitation for a party to occur at Gertie's the coming Friday evening.

Thursday evening Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot.

She also gave him a lesson in the Boston, with a new dip invented by Mme. Vashkowska, which was certain to sweep the country, because, of course, Vashkowska was the only genuinely qualified _maitresse de danse_ in America.

It was a beautiful evening. Home! Ray came in, and the three of them had coffee and thin sandwiches. At Gertie's suggestion, Ray again turned his collar round and performed his "clergyman stunt." While the impersonation did not, perhaps, seem so humorous as before, Carl was amused; and he consented to sing the "I went up in a balloon so big"

song, so that Ray might learn it and sing it at the office.

It was captivating to have Gertie say, quietly, as he left: "I hope you'll be able to come to the party a little early to-morrow, Carl.

You know we count on you to help us."

CHAPTER XXVI

The party was on at the Cowles flat.

People came. They all set to it, having a party, being lively and gay, whether they wanted to or not. They all talked at once, and had delicious shocks over the girl from London, Nebraska, who, having moved to Washington Place, just a block or two from ever so many artists, was now smoking a cigarette and, wearing a gown that was black and clinging. It was no news to her that men had a tendency to become interested in her ankles. But she still went to church and was accepted by quite the nicest of the St. Orgul's set, to whom Gertie had introduced her.

She and Gertie were the only thoroughly qualified representatives of Art, but Beauty and Gallantry and Wit were common. The conspirators in holding a party were, on the male side:

An insurance adjuster, who was a frat-brother to Carl and Ray, though he came from Melanchthon College. A young lawyer, ever so jolly, with a banjo. A bantling clergyman, who was spoken of with masculine approval because he smoked a pipe and said charmingly naughty things.

Johnson of the Homes and Long Island Real Estate Company, and his brother, of the Martinhurst Development Company. Four older men, ranging from thin-haired to very bald, who had come with their wives and secretly looked at their watches while they talked brightly with one another's wives. Five young men whom Carl could not tell apart, as they all had smooth hair and eye-gla.s.ses and smart dress-shirts and obliging smiles and complimentary references to his aviating. He gave up trying to remember which was which.

It was equally hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!"

for reasons none too clear to him. He finally fled from them and joined the group of young men, who showed an ill-bred and disapproved tendency to sneak off into Ray's room for a smoke. He did not, however, escape one young woman who stood out from the _melee_--a young woman with a personality almost as remarkable as that of the glorious creature from London, Nebraska. This was the more or less married young woman named Dorothy, and affectionately called "Tottykins" by all the St. Orgul's group. She was of the kind who look at men appraisingly, and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar, and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say indiscreet things, and three variations of reply, of which the favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness: "I'm afraid you have made a slight error, Mr. Uh---- I didn't quite catch your name?

Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attend St. Orgul's evvvv'ry Sunday, and have a husband and child, and am not at all, really, you know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the idea that I have been looking for a flirtation."

A thin, small female with bobbed hair was Tottykins, who kept her large husband and her fat, white grub of an infant somewhere in the back blocks. She fingered a long, gold, religious chain with her square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she privately termed "daring frankness."

Tottykins the fair; Tottykins the modern; Tottykins who had read _Three Weeks_ and nearly all of a wicked novel in French, and wore a large gold cross; Tottykins who worked so hard in her little flat that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning; Tottykins the advanced and liberal--yet without any of the extremes of socialists and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do not attend St. Orgul's; Tottykins the firmly domestic, whose husband grew more worried every year; Tottykins the intensely cultured and inquisitive about life, the primitively free and pervasively original, who announced in public places that she wanted always to live like the spirit of the Dancing Bacchante statue, but had the a.s.sistant rector of St. Orgul's in for coffee, every fourth Monday evening.

Tottykins beckoned Carl to a corner and said, with her manner of amused condescension, "Now you sit right down here, Hawk Ericson, and tell me _all_ about aviation."

Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men with eye-gla.s.ses. Not till now did he realize how Tottykins's shrill references to the Dancing Bacchante and the Bacchanting of her mud-colored Dutch-fashioned hair had bored him. Ennui was not, of course, an excuse; but it was the explanation of why he answered in this wise (very sweetly, looking Tottykins in the eyes and patting her hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension):

"No, no, that isn't the way, Dorothy. It's quite _pa.s.se_ to ask me to tell you all about aviation. That isn't done, not in 1912. Oh Dor-o-thy! Oh no, no! No-o! No, no. First you should ask me if I'm afraid when I'm flying. Oh, always begin that way. Then you say that there's a curious fact about you--when you're on a high building and just look down once, then you get so dizzy that you want to jump.