Free Air Part 32

The children were at breakfast--children surely not of the same species as the smeary-cheeked brats she had seen tumbling by roadsides along the way--st.u.r.dy Mason, with his cap of curls, and Virginia, with bobbed ash-blond hair prim about her delicate face. They curtsied, and in voices that actually had intonations they besought her, "Oh, Cousin Claire, would you plea.s.ssssse tell us about drive-to-the-coast?"

After breakfast, she went out on the terrace for the View.

In Seattle, even millionaires, and the I. W. W., and men with red garters on their exposed shirt-sleeves who want to give you real estate, all talk about the View. The View is to Seattle what the car-service, the auditorium, the flivver-factory, or the price of coal is to other cities. At parties in Seattle, you discuss the question of whether the View of Lake Union or the View of the Olympics is the better, and polite office-managers say to their stenographers as they enter, "How's your View this morning?" All real-estate deeds include a patent on the View, and every native son has it as his soundest belief that no one in Tacoma gets a View of Mount Rainier.

Mrs. Gilson informed Claire that they had the finest View in Seattle.

Below Claire was the harbor, with docks thrust far out into the water, and steamers alive with smoke. Mrs. Gilson said they were Blue Funnel Liners, loading for Vladivostok and j.a.pan. The names, just the names, shot into Claire's heart a wistful unexpressed desire that was somehow vaguely connected with a Milt Daggett who, back in the Middlewestern mud and rain, had longed for purple mountains and cherry blossoms and the sea. But she cast out the wish, and lifted her eyes to mountains across the sound--not purple mountains, but sheer silver streaked with black, like frozen surf on a desolate northern sh.o.r.e--the Olympics, two-score miles away.

Up there, one could camp, with a boy in a deteriorated sweater singing as he watched the coffee----

Hastily she looked to the left, across the city, with its bright new skysc.r.a.pers, its shining cornices and ma.s.ses of ranked windows, and the exclamation-point of the "tallest building outside of New York"--far livelier than her own rusty Brooklyn. Beyond the city was a dun cloud, but as she stared, far up in the cloud something crept out of the vapor, and hung there like a dull full moon, aloof, majestic, overwhelming, and she realized that she was beholding the peak of Mount Rainier, with the city at its foot like white quartz pebbles at the base of a tower.

A landing-stage for angels, she reflected.

It did seem larger than dressing-tables and velvet hangings and scented baths.

But she dragged herself from the enticing path of that thought, and sighed wretchedly, "Oh, yes, he would appreciate Rainier, but how--how would he manage a grape-fruit? I mustn't be a fool! I mustn't!" She saw that Mrs. Gilson was peeping at her, and she made herself say adequate things about the View before she fled inside--fled from her sputtering inquiring self.

In the afternoon they drove to Capitol Hill; they dropped in at various pretty houses and met the sort of people Claire knew back home. Between people they had Views; and the sensible Miss Boltwood, making a philosophic discovery, announced to herself, "After all, I've seen just as much from this limousine as I would from a bone-breaking Teal bug.

Silly to make yourself miserable to see things. Oh yes, I will go wandering some more, but not like a hobo. But---- What can I say to him?

Good heavens, he may be here any time now, with our car. Oh, why--why--why was I insane on that station platform?"

CHAPTER XXV

THE ABYSSINIAN PRINCE

Snoqualmie Pa.s.s lies among mountains p.r.i.c.kly with rocks and burnt stumps, but the road is velvet, with broad saucer curves; and to Milt it was pure beauty, it was release from life, to soar up coaxing inclines and slip down easy grades in the powerful car. "No more Teals for me,"

he cried, in the ecstasy of handling an engine that slowed to a demure whisper, then, at a touch of the accelerator, floated up a rise, effortless, joyous, humming the booming song of the joy in speed. He suddenly hated the bucking tediousness of the Teal. The Gomez-Dep symbolized his own new life.

So he came to Lake Washington, and just across it was the city of his long dreams, the city of the Pacific--and of Claire. There was no ferry in sight, and he rounded the lake, struck a brick pavement, rolled through rough woods, suburban villas, and petty business streets, to a region of factories and mills, with the funnels of ships beyond.

And every minute he drove more slowly and became more uneasy.

The pavement--the miles of it; the ruthless lumbermills, with their thousands of workmen quite like himself; the agitation of realizing that every three minutes he was pa.s.sing a settlement larger than Schoenstrom; the strangeness of ships and all the cynical ways of the sea--the whole scene depressed him as he perceived how little of the world he knew, and how big and contemptuous of Milt Daggetts that world must be.

"Huh!" he growled. "Quite some folks living here. Don't suppose they spend such a whale of a lot of time thinking about Milt Daggett and Bill McGolwey and Prof Jones. I guess most of these people wouldn't think Heinie Rauskukle's store was so gosh-awful big. I wasn't scared of Minneapolis--much--but there they didn't ring in mountains and an ocean on you. And I didn't have to go up on the hill and meet folks like Claire's relations, and figure out whether you shake hands catch-as-catch-can or Corinthian. Look at that sawmill chimney--isn't it nice of 'em to put the fly-screen over it so the flies won't get down into the flames. No, they haven't got much more than a million feet of lumber in that one pile. And here's a b.u.m little furniture store--it wouldn't cost more 'n about ten times all I've got to buy one of those Morris chairs. Oh Gooooooosh, won't these houses ever stop? Say, that must be a jitney. The driver snickered at me. Will the whole town be onto me? Milt, you're a kind young fellow, and you know what's the matter with Heinie's differential, but they don't need you here. Quite a few folks to carry on the business. Gosh, look at that building ahead--nine stories!"

He had planned to stop at a hotel, to wash up, and to gallop to Claire.

But--well--wouldn't it maybe be better to leave the car at a public garage, so the Boltwoods could get it when they wanted to? He'd better "just kind of look around before he tackled the watch-dog."

It was the public garage which finally crushed him. It was a garage of enameled brick and colored tiles, with a plate-gla.s.s-enclosed office in which worked young men clad as the angels. One of them wore a carnation, Milt noted.

"Huh! I'll write back and tell Ben Sittka that hereafter he's to wear his best-Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and a milkweed blossom when he comes down to work at the Red Trail Garage!"

Milt drove up the brick incline into a room thousands of miles long, with millions of new and recently polished cars standing in lines as straight as a running-board. He begged of a high-nosed colored functionary--not in khaki overalls but in maroon livery--"Where'll I put this boat?"

The Abyssinian prince gave him a check, and in a tone of extreme lack of personal interest snapped, "Take it down the aisle to the elevator."

Milt had followed the natural lines of traffic into the city; he had spoken to no one; the prince's snort was his welcome to Seattle.

Meekly he drove past the cars so ebon and silvery, so smug and strong, that they would have regarded a Teal bug as an insult. Another attendant waved him into the elevator, and Milt tried not to look surprised when the car started, not forward, but upward, as though it had turned into an aeroplane.

When these adventures were over, when he had had a shave and a shine, and washed his hands, and looked into a department-store window that contained ten billion yards of silk draped against polished satinwood, when he had felt unhappy over a movie theater large enough to contain ten times the population of Schoenstrom, and been cursed by a policeman for jaywalking, and had pa.s.sed a hotel entirely full of diplomats and marble and caviare--then he could no longer put off telephoning to Claire, and humbly, in a booth meant for an umbrella-stand, he got the Eugene Gilson house, and to a female who said "Yes?" in a tone which made it mean "No!" he ventured, "May I speak to Miss Boltwood?"

Miss Boltwood, it seemed, was out.

He was not sorry. He was relieved. He ducked out of the telephone-booth with a sensation of escape.

Milt was in love with Claire; she was to him the purpose of life; he thought of her deeply and tenderly and longingly. All the way into Seattle he had brooded about her; remembered her every word and gesture; recalled the curve of her chin, and the fresh feeling of her hands. But Claire had suddenly become too big. In her were all these stores, these office buildings for clever lawyers and surgeons, these contemptuous trolley cars, these careless people in beautiful clothes.

They were too much for him. Desperately he was pushing them back--back--fighting for breath. And she belonged with them.

He mailed the check for the stored car to her, with a note--written standing before a hacked wall-desk in a branch post-office--which said only, "Here's check for the boat. Did not know whether you would have room for it at house. Tried to get you on phone, phone again just as soon as rent room etc. Hope having happy time, M.D."

He went out to the university. On the trolley he relaxed. But he did not exultantly feel that he had won to the Pacific; he could not regard Seattle now as a magic city, the Bagdad of modern caravans, with Alaska and the Orient on one hand, the forests to the north, and eastward the s.p.a.cious Inland Empire of the wheat. He saw it as a place where you had to work hard just to live; where busy policemen despised you because you didn't know which trolley to take; where it was incredibly hard to remember even the names of the unceasing streets; where the conductors said "Step lively!" and there was no room to whistle, no time to swap stories with a Bill McGolwey at an Old Home lunch-counter.

He found the university; he talked with the authorities about entering the engineering school; the Y. M. C. A. gave him a list of rooms; and, because it was cheap, he chose a cubbyhole in a flat over a candy store--a low room, which would probably keep out the rain, but had no other virtues. It had one bed, one table, one dissipated bureau, two straight bare chairs, and one venerable lithograph depicting a girl with ringlets shaking her irritating forefinger at a high-church kitten.

The landlady consented to his importing an oil-stove for cooking his meals. He bought the stove, with a box of oatmeal, a jar of bacon, and half a dozen eggs. He bought a plane and solid geometry, and an algebra.

At dinner time he laid the algebra beside his plate of anemic bacon and leaking eggs. The eggs grew cold. He did not stir. He was reviewing his high-school algebra. He went down the pages, word by word, steadily, quickly, absolutely concentrated--as concentrated as he would recently have been in a new problem of disordered transmission. Not once did he stop to consider how glorious it would be to marry Claire--or how terrifying it would be to marry Miss Boltwood.

Three hours went by before he started up, bewildered, rubbed his eyes, picked at the chill bacon and altogether disgusting eggs, and rambled out into the street.

Again he risked the scorn of conductors and jitney drivers. He found Queen Anne Hill, found the residence of Mr. Eugene Gilson. He sneaked about it, slipped into the gate, prowled toward the house. Flabby from the intensity of study, he longed for the stimulus of Claire's smile.

But as he stared up at the great squares of the clear windows, at the flare of white columns in the porch-lights, that smile seemed unreachable. He felt like a rustic at court. From the shelter of the p.r.i.c.kly holly hedge he watched the house. It was "some kind of a party?--or what would folks like these call a party?" Limousines were arriving; he had a glimpse of silken ankles, frothy underskirts; heard easy laughter; saw people moving through a big blue and silver room; caught a drifting tremor of music.

At last he saw Claire. She was dancing with a young man as decorative as "that confounded Saxton fellow" he had met at Flathead Lake, but younger than Saxton, a laughing young man, with curly black hair. For the first time in his life Milt wanted to kill. He muttered, "d.a.m.n--d.a.m.n--d.a.m.n!"

as he saw the young man carelessly embracing Claire.

His fingers tingling, his whole body yearning till every cell seemed a beating hammer, Milt longed just once to slip his hand about Claire's waist like that. He could feel the satin of her bodice and its warmth.

Then it seemed to him, as Claire again pa.s.sed the window, that he did not know her at all. He had once talked to a girl who resembled her, but that was long ago. He could understand a Gomez-Dep and appreciate a brisk sports-suit, but this girl was of a world unintelligible to him.

Her hair, in its dips and convolutions, was altogether a puzzle. "How did she ever fix it like that?" Her low evening dress--"what was it made of--some white stuff, but was it silk or muslin or what?" Her shoulders were startling in their bare powdery smoothness--"how dare that young pup dance with her?" And her face, that had seemed so jolly and friendly, floated past the window as pale and illusive as a wisp of fog.

His longing for her pa.s.sed into clumsy awe. He remembered, without resentment, that once on a hilltop in Dakota she had coldly forbidden him to follow her.

With all the pleasure of martyrdom--to make quite sure that he should realize how complete a fool he had been to intrude on Miss Boltwood--he studied the other guests. He gave them, perhaps, a glory they did not have. There were girls sleek as ivory. There was a lean stooped man, very distinguished. There was a bulky man in a dinner coat, with a semi-circle of mustache, and eyes that even at a distance seemed to give impatient orders. He would be a big banker, or a lumberman.

It was the easy friendliness of all of them that most made Milt feel like an outsider. If a servant had come out and ordered him away, he would have gone meekly ... he fancied.

He straggled off, too solidly unhappy to think how unhappy he was. In his clammy room he picked up the algebra. For a quarter-hour he could not gather enough vigor to open it. In his la.s.situde, his elbows felt feeble, his fingers were ready to drop off. He slowly scratched the book open----

At one o'clock he was reading algebra, his face still and grim. But already it seemed less heartily brick-red.

He listlessly telephoned to Claire, in the morning.