He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it all start, anyway?"

He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.

When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.

Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the grippe."

At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."

Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?

Certainly the maid would.

But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.

He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance, on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily, oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.

That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless, bored, driftwood in the city.

So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance, but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.

For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.

"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.

"Yes," she said. That was all.

When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed that she had wanted to telephone to him.

Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:

"I was grouchy----"

"I was beastly----"

"I'm honestly sorry----"

"'ll you forgive----"

"What was it all about?"

"Really, I do--not--know!"

"I agree with lots of the things you----"

"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."

Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.

Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.

She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.

It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.

"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.

"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"

CHAPTER x.x.xV

On an April Sat.u.r.day morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp gra.s.s, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown earth, without a single blade of gra.s.s, could smell so stirringly of coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:

"Mandy, in de spring De mocking-birds do sing, An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou----"

Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all steel cha.s.sis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull the darky's voice came again, chanting pa.s.sionately, "In de spring, spring, _spring_!" and Carl clamored: "I've _got_ to get out to-day.

Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to Ruth?"

At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to laugh with her.

Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then--last September.

I can't understand it."

"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again, and that distinctly implied Ruth."

"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring.

Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of vitriol, but now----I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book and take me down to the Maison epinay for tea, and read me poetry while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette.

Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like this--cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."

At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty debutantes in pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.

"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless but made of the very best materials," said Carl.

"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern costumes! They're charming!"

"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun, and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze tasted of spring.

Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his b.u.t.tonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills of the Metropolitan Tower.

"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir, of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl, be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of Arcadia. Go ask him."

"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."

"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play games with them."