Free Air Part 33

"h.e.l.lo? Oh! Miss Boltwood? This is Milt Daggett."

"Oh! Oh, how are you?"

"Why, why I'm--I've got settled. I can get into the engineering school all right."

"I'm glad."

"Uh, enjoying Seattle?"

"Oh! Oh yes. The mountains---- Do you like it?"

"Oh! Oh yes. Sea and all---- Great town."

"Uh, w-when are we going to see you? Daddy had to go East, left you his regards. W-when----?"

"Why--why I suppose you're awful--awfully busy, meeting people and all----"

"Yes, I am, rather, but----" Her hedging uncomfortable tone changed to a cry of distress. "Milt! I must see you. Come up at four this afternoon."

"Yes!"

He rushed to a small, hot tailor-shop. He panted "Press m' suit while I wait?" They gave him a pair of temporary trousers, an undesirable pair of trousers belonging to a short fat man with no taste in fabrics, and with these flapping about his lean legs, he sat behind a calico curtain, reading _The War Cry_ and looking at a "fashion-plate" depicting nine gentlemen yachtsmen each nine feet tall, while the Jugoslav in charge unfeelingly sprinkled and ironed and patted his suit.

He spent ten minutes in blacking his shoes, in his room--and twenty minutes in getting the blacking off his fingers.

He was walking through the gate in the Gilson hedge at one minute to four.

But he had reached Queen Anne Hill at three. For an hour he had walked the crest road, staring at the steamers below, alternately gripping his hands with desire of Claire, and timorously finally deciding that he wouldn't go to her house--wouldn't ever see her again.

He came into the hall tremblingly expecting some great thing, some rending scene, and she met him with a cool, "Oh, this is nice. Eva had some little white cakes made for us." He felt like a man who has asked for a drink of cold charged water and found it warm and flat.

"How---- Dandy house," he muttered, limply shaking her limp hand.

"Yes, isn't it a darling. They do themselves awfully well here. I'm afraid your bluff, plain, democratic Westerners are a fraud. I hear a lot more about 'society' here than I ever did in the East. The sets seem frightfully complicated." She was drifting into the drawing-room, to a tapestry stool, and Milt was awkwardly stalking a large wing chair, while she fidgeted:

"Everybody tells me about how one poor dear soul, a charming lady who used to take in washing or salt gold-mines or something, and she came here a little while ago with billions and billions of dollars, and tried to buy her way in by shopping for all the charities in town, and apparently she's just as out of it here as she would be in London. You and I aren't exclusive like that, are we!"

Somehow----

Her "you and I" was too kindly, as though she was trying to put him at ease, as though she knew he couldn't possibly be at ease. With a horribly elaborate politeness, with a smile that felt hot on his twitching cheeks, he murmured, "Oh no. No, we---- No, I guess----"

If he knew what it was he guessed, he couldn't get it out. While he was trying to find out what had become of all the things there were to say in the world, a maid came in with an astonishing object--a small, red, shelved table on wheels, laden with silver vessels, and cake, and sandwiches that were amazingly small and thin.

The maid was so starched that she creaked. She glanced at Milt---- Claire didn't make him so nervous that he thought of his clothes, but the maid did. He was certain that she knew that he had blacked his own shoes, knew how old were his clothes. He was urging himself, "Must get new suit tomorrow--ready-made--mustn't forget, now--be sure--get suit tomorrow." He wanted to apologize to the maid for existing.... He wouldn't dare to fall in love with the maid.... And he'd kill the man who said he could be fool enough to fall in love with Miss Boltwood.

He sipped his tea, and dropped sandwich crumbs, and ached, and panted, and peeped at the crushing quant.i.ties of pictures and sconces and tables and chairs in the room, and wondered what they did with all of them, while Claire chattered:

"Yes, we weren't exclusive out on the road. Didn't we meet funny people though! Oh, somehow that 'funny people' sounds familiar. But---- What fun that morning was at--Pellago, was it? Heavens, I'm forgetting those beastly little towns already--that place where we hazed the poor landlady who overcharged me."

"Yes." He was thinking of how much Claire would forget, now. "Yes. We certainly fixed her, all right. Uh--did you get the storage check for your car?"

"Oh yes, thank you. So nice of you to bother with it."

"Oh, nothing at all, nothing---- Nothing at all. Uh---- Do you like Seattle?"

"Oh yes. Such views--the mountains---- Do you like it?"

"Oh yes. Always wanted to see the sea."

"Yes, and---- Such a well-built town."

"Yes, and---- They must do a lot of business here."

"Yes, they---- Oh yes, I do like Seat----"

He had darted from his chair, brushed by the tea-wagon, ignoring its rattle and the perilous tipping of cups. He put his hand on her shoulder, snorted, "Look here. We're both sparring for time. Stop it.

It's--it's all right, Claire. I want you to like me, but I'm not--I'm not like that woman you were telling about that's trying to b.u.t.t in. I know, Lord I know so well what you're thinking! You're thinking I'm not up to the people you've been seeing last couple of days--not up to 'em yet, anyway. Well---- We'll be good friends."

Fearless, now, his awe gone in tenderness, he lifted her chin, looked straight into her eyes, smiled. But his courage was slipping. He wanted to run and hide.

He turned abruptly, grumbling, "Well, better get back to work now, I guess."

Her cry was hungry: "Oh, please don't go." She was beside him, shyly picking at his sleeve. "I know what you mean. I like you for being so understanding. But---- I do like you. You were the perfect companion.

Let's---- Oh, let's have a walk--and try to laugh again."

He definitely did not want to stay. At this moment he did not love her.

He regarded her as an estimable young woman who, for a person so idiotically reared, had really shown a good deal of pluck out on the road--where he wanted to be. He stood in the hall disliking his old cap while she ran up to put on a top coat.

Mute, casual, they tramped out of the house together, and down the hill to a region of shabby old brown houses like blisters on the hillside.

They had little to say, and that little was a polite reminiscence of incidents in which neither was interested.

When they came back to the Gilson hedge, he stopped at the gate, with terrific respectableness removed his cap.

"Good night," she said cheerily. "Call me up soon again."

He did not answer "Good night." He said "Good-by"; and he meant it to be his last farewell. He caught her hand, hastily dropped it, fled down the hill.

He was, he told himself, going to leave Seattle that evening.

That, doubtless, is the reason why he ran to a trolley, to get to a department-store before it closed; and why, precipitating himself upon a startled clerk, he purchased a new suit of chaste blue serge, a new pair of tan boots (curiously like some he had seen on the university campus that morning) and a new hat so gray and conservative and felty that it might have been worn by Woodrow Wilson.

He spent the evening in reading algebra and geometry, and in telling himself that he was beautifully not thinking about Claire.

In the midst of it, he caught himself at it, and laughed.

"What you're doing, my friend, is pretending you don't like Claire, so that you can hide from your fool self the fact that you're going to sneak back to see her the first chance you get--first time the watch-dog is out. Seriously now, son, Claire is impossible for you. No can do. Now that you've been chump enough to leave home---- Oh Lord, I wish I hadn't promised to take this room for all winter. Wish I hadn't matriculated at the U. But I'm here now, and I'll stick it out. I'll stay here one year anyway, and go back home. Oh! And to---- By Golly!

She liked me!"