It was a hard pull, the way back. Enc.u.mbered with pack and two pairs of skees, which they dared not use in the darkness, he could not give her a helping hand. The snow was still falling, not very thick nor savagely wind-borne, yet stinging their eyes as they crossed open moors and the wind leaped at them. Once Ruth slipped, on a rock or a chunk of ice, and came down with an infuriating jolt. Before he could drop the skees she struggled up and said, dryly:

"Yes, it did hurt, and I know you're sorry, and there's nothing you can do."

Carl grinned and kept silence, though with one hand, as soon as he could get it free from the elusive skees, he lightly patted her shoulder.

She was almost staggering, so cold was she and so tired, and so heavy was the snow caked on her boots, when they came to a sharp rise, down which shone the radiance of an incandescent light.

"Road's right up there, blessed," he cried, cheerily.

"Oh, I can't----Yes, I will----"

He dropped the skees, put one arm about her shoulders and one about her knees, and almost before she had finished crying, "Oh no, _please_ don't carry me!" he was half-way up the slope. He set her down safe by the road.

They caught the 8.09 train with two minutes to spare. Its warmth and the dingy softness of the plush seats seemed palatial.

Ruth rubbed her cold hands with a smile deprecating, intimate; and her shoulder drooped toward him. Her whole being seemed turned toward him.

He cuddled her right hand within his, murmuring: "See, my hand's a house where yours can keep warm." Her fingers curled tight and rested there contentedly. Like a drowsy kitten she looked down at their two hands. "A little brown house!" she said.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

While scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers, a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.

All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Sat.u.r.day did not make plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed, judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace of G.o.d will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile Corporation, was not ent.i.tled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested skating.

No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider joining him?

Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason, apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:

"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some hospitals and libraries."

They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peac.o.c.ks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat, and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.

At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations, she at last comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.

They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan.

Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason, to lunch at the Aero Club.

Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.

He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piraeus, stating that Carl was "visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us"; an absurd string of beads from Port Sad and a box of Syrian sweets; a Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.

He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her temper the badness.

Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes, apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:

"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office, even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the children at my beastly old settlement-house."

"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.

"Not of our cla.s.s."

"What do you mean by 'our cla.s.s'?"

And the battle was set.

Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth burst out:

"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."

"Give her and her children education for three generations----"

She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact that he wasn't a product of city life.

And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library--he had made the step naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.

She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't, and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he has gr----"

"_Nice!_"

"Really----" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.

"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."

"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.

Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."

"Have I been rude? Have----"

"Yes. Very."

He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.

He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I _must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he knew not what.

He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.

But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of "niceness." He had, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.

As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties, stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-b.u.t.tons, and a haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not know how the play would end.

But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in earnest.

Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would ask her.... Then he remembered.