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 n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle 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. "h.e.l.l!" 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 sn.o.bbish affectation. He did not spare his reverence, his pa.s.sion, 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 gla.s.s 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 ign.o.ble 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 gla.s.sy 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 gra.s.s 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.