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Ebook has 728 lines and 51581 words, and 15 pages

OUT OF THE AIR

INEZ HAYNES IRWIN

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS--NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

METROPOLITAN PUBLICATIONS, INC.

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

BILLY AND PHYLLIS

OUT OF THE AIR

"... so I'll answer your questions in the order you ask them. No, I don't want ever to fly again. My last pay-hop was two Saturdays ago and I got my discharge papers yesterday. God willing, I'll never again ride anything more dangerous than a velocipede. I'm now a respectable American citizen, and for the future I'm going to confine my locomotion to the well-known earth. Get that, Spink Sparrel! The earth! In fact...."

David Lindsay suddenly looked up from his typewriting. Under his window, Washington Square simmered in the premature heat of an early June day. But he did not even glance in that direction. Instead, his eyes sought the doorway leading from the front room to the back of the apartment. Apparently he was not seeking inspiration; it was as though he had been suddenly jerked out of himself. After an absent second, his eye sank to the page and the brisk clatter of his machine began again.

"... after the woman you recommended, Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is, shoveled off a few tons of dust. It's great! It's the key house of New York, isn't it? And when you look right through the Arch straight up Fifth Avenue, you feel as though you owned the whole town. And what an air all this chaste antique New England stuff gives it! Who'd ever thought you'd turn out--you big rough-neck you--to be a collector of antiques? Not that I haven't fallen myself for the sailor's chest and the butterfly table and the glass lamps. I actually salaam to that sampler. And these furnishings seem especially appropriate when I remember that Jeffrey Lewis lived here once. You don't know how much that adds to the connotation of this place."

Again--but absently--Lindsay looked up. And again, ignoring Washington Square, which offered an effect as of a formal garden to the long pink-red palace on its north side--plumy treetops, geometrical grass areas, weaving paths; elegant little summer-houses--his gaze went with a seeking look to the doorway.

Again Lindsay's eyes came up from his paper. For the third time he ignored Washington Square swarming with lumbering green busses and dusky-haired Italian babies; puppies, perambulators, and pedestrians. Again his glance went mechanically to the door leading to the back of the apartment.

Lindsay stopped his typewriting again. This time he stared fixedly at Washington Square. His eyes followed a pink-smocked, bob-haired maiden hurrying across the Park; but apparently she did not register. He turned abruptly with a--"Hello, old top, what do you want?"

The doorway, being empty, made no answer.

Having apparently forgotten his remark the instant it was dropped, Lindsay went on writing.

"I admit I'm thinking over that proposition. Among my things in storage here, I have all Lutetia's works, including those unsuccessful and very rare pomes of hers; even that blooming thesis I wrote. The thesis would, of course, read rotten now, but it might provide data that would save research. When do you propose to bring out this new edition, and how do you account for that recent demand for her? Of course it establishes me as some swell prophet. I always said she'd bob up again, you know. Then it looked as though she was as dead as the dodo. It isn't the work alone that appeals to me; it's doing it in Lutetia's own town, which is apparently the exact kind of dead little burg I'm looking for--Quinanog, isn't it? Come to think of it, Spink, my favorite occupation at this moment would be making daisy-chains or oak-wreaths. I'll think it..."

He jumped spasmodically; jerked his head about; glanced over his shoulder at the doorway--

"What I'd really like to do, is the biography of Lutetia for about one month; then--for about three months--my experiences at the war which, I understand, are to be put away in the manuscript safe of the publishing firm of Dunbar, Cabot and Elsingham to be published when the demand for war stuff begins again. That, I reckon, is what I should do if I'm going to do it at all. Write it while it's fresh--as I'm not a professional. But I can't at this moment say yes, and I can't say no. I'd like to stay a little longer in New York. I'd like to renew acquaintance with the old burg. I can afford to thrash round a bit, you know, if I like. There's ten thousand dollars that my uncle left me, in the bank waiting me. When that's spent, of course I'll have to go to work.

"You ask me for my impressions of America--as a returned sky-warrior. Of course I've only been here a week and I haven't talked with so very many people yet. But everybody is remarkably omniscient. I can't tell them anything about the late war. Sometimes they ask me a question, but they never listen to my answer. No, I listen to them. And they're very informing, believe me. Most of them think that the cavalry won the war and that we went over the top to the sound of fife and drum. For myself..."

Again he jumped; turned his head; stared into the doorway. After an instant of apparent expectancy, he sighed. He arose and, with an elaborate saunter, moved over to the mirror hanging above the mantel; looked at his reflection with the air of one longing to see something human. The mirror was old; narrow and dim; gold framed. A gay little picture of a ship, bellying to full sail, filled the space above the looking-glass. The face, which contemplated him with the same unseeing carelessness with which he contemplated it, was the face of twenty-five--handsome; dark. It was long and lean. The continuous flying of two years had dyed it a deep wine-red; had bronzed and burnished it. And apparently the experiences that went with that flying had cooled and hardened it. It was now but a smoothly handsome mask which blanked all expression of his emotions.

Even as his eye fixed itself on his own reflected eye, his head jerked sideways again; he stared expectantly at the open doorway. After an interval in which nothing appeared, he sauntered through that door; and--with almost an effect of premeditated carelessness--through the two little rooms, which so uselessly fill the central space of many New York houses, to the big sunny bedroom at the back.

The windows looked out on a paintable series of backyards: on a sketchable huddle of old, stained, leaning wooden houses. At the opposite window, a purple-haired, violet-eyed foreign girl in a faded yellow blouse was making artificial nasturtiums; flame-colored velvet petals, like a drift of burning snow, heaped the table in front of her. A black cat sunned itself on the window ledge. On a distant roof, a boy with a long pole was herding a flock of pigeons. They made glittering swirls of motion and quick V-wheelings, that flashed the gray of their wings like blades and the white of their breasts like glass. Their sudden turns filled the air with mirrors. Lindsay watched their flight with the critical air of a rival. Suddenly he turned as though someone had called him; glanced inquiringly back at the doorway....

When, a few minutes later, he sauntered into the Rochambeau, immaculate in the old gray suit he had put off when he donned the French uniform four years before, he was the pink of summer coolness and the quintessence of military calm. The little, low-ceilinged series of rooms, just below the level of the street, were crowded; filled with smoke, talk, and laughter. Lindsay at length found a table, looked about him, discovered himself to be among strangers. He ordered a cocktail, swearing at the price to the sympathetic French waiter, who made an excited response in French and assisted him to order an elaborate dinner. Lindsay propped his paper against his water-glass; concentrated on it as one prepared for lonely eating. With the little-necks, however, came diversion. From behind the waiter's crooked arm appeared the satiny dark head of a girl. Lindsay leaped to his feet, held out his hand.

"Good Lord, Gratia! Where in the world did you come from!"

"All right," Lindsay accepted cheerfully. "You're a darn pretty pacifist, Gratia. Of course you don't know what you're talking about. But as long as you talk about anything, I'll listen."

Gratia had cut her hair short, but she had introduced a style of hair-dressing new even to Greenwich Village. She combed its sleek abundance straight back to her neck and left it. There, following its own devices, it turned up in the most delightful curls. Her large dark eyes were set in a skin of pale amber and in the midst of a piquant assortment of features. She had a way, just before speaking, of lifting her sleek head high on the top of her slim neck. And then she was like a beautiful young seal emerging from the water.

"Oh, I'm perfectly serious!" the pretty pacifist asserted. "You know I never have believed in war. Dora says you've come back loving the French. How you can admire a people who--" After a while she paused to take breath and then, with the characteristic lift of her head, "Belgians--the Congo--Algeciras--Morocco-- And as for England--Ireland--India--Egypt--" The glib, conventional patter dripped readily from her soft lips.

"I mean, what do you do with your leisure?" Lindsay demanded, after prolonged meditation.

Gratia ignored this persiflage. "I'm thinking of taking up psycho-analysis," she confided. "It interests me enormously. I think I ought to do rather well with it."

"I offer myself as your first victim. Why, you'll make millions! Every man in New York will want to be psyched. What's the news, Gratia? I'm dying for gossip."

Gratia did her best to feed this appetite. Declining dinner, she sipped the tall cool green drink which Lindsay ordered for her. She poured out a flood of talk; but all the time her eyes were flitting from table to table. And often she interrupted her comments on the absent with remarks about the present.

The middle-aged, rather rough-featured woman standing in the doorway turned at Gratia's call. Her movement revealed the head and shoulders of a tall, gaunt, very old man, a little rough-featured like his daughter; white-haired and white-mustached. She hurried at once to Lindsay's table.

Mr. Phillips extended a long arm which dangled a long hand. "Pleased to meet you, sir! You're the first flier I've had a chance to talk with. I expect folks make life a perfect misery to you--but if you don't mind answering questions--"

"Shoot!" Lindsay permitted serenely. "I'm nearly bursting with suppressed information. How are you, Ernestine?"

"Pretty frazzled like the rest of us," Ernestine answered. Ernestine had one fine feature; a pair of large dark serene eyes. Now they flamed with a troubled fire. "The war did all kinds of things to my psychology, of course. I suppose I am the most despised woman in the Village at this moment because I don't seem to be either a militarist or a pacifist. I don't believe in war, but I don't see how we could have kept out of it; or how France could have prevented it."

"Well, of course--" Ernestine was beginning, "but what's the use?" Her eyes met Lindsay's in a perplexed, comprehending stare. Lindsay shook his handsome head gayly. "No use whatever," he said. "I'm rapidly growing taciturn."

"What I would like to ask you," Mr. Phillips broke in, "does war seem such a pretty thing to you, young man, after you've seen a little of it? I remember in '65 most of us came back thinking that Sherman hadn't used strong enough language."

"Mr. Phillips," Lindsay answered, "if there's ever another war, it will take fifteen thousand dollars to send me a postcard telling me about it."

The talk drifted away from the war: turned to prohibition; came back to it again. Lindsay answered Mr. Phillips's questions with enthusiastic thoroughness. They pertained mainly to his training at Pau and Avord, but Lindsay volunteered a detailed comparison of the American military method with the French. "I'll always be glad though," he concluded, "that I had that experience with the French Army. And of course when our troops got over, I was all ready to fly."

"Then the French uniform is so charming," Gratia put in, consciously sarcastic.

Lindsay slapped her slim wrist indulgently and continued to answer Mr. Phillips's questions. Ernestine listened, the look of trouble growing in her serene eyes. Gratia listened, diving under water after her shocked exclamations and reappearing glistening.

Matty Packington approached the table with a composed flutter. The two men arose. Gratia met her halfway; performed the introductions. In a minute the conversation was out of everybody's hands and in Miss Packington's. As Gratia prophesied, Lindsay found it difficult to believe her. She started at an extraordinary speed and she maintained it without break.

Lindsay contemplated the lady who put this interesting question to him. She was fair and fairy-like; a little, light-shot golden blonde; all slim lines and opalescent colors. Her hair fluttered like whirled light from under her piquantly cocked military cap. The stress of her emotion added for the instant to the bigness and blueness of her eyes.

Miss Packington received this characteristically; that is to say, she did not receive it at all. For by the time Lindsay had begun his last sentence, she had embarked on a monologue directed this time to Gratia. The talk flew back and forth, grew general; grew concrete; grew abstract; grew personal. It bubbled up into monologues from Gratia and Matty. It thinned down to questions from Ernestine and Mr. Phillips. Drinks came; were followed by other drinks. All about them, tables emptied and filled, uniforms predominating; and all to the accompaniment of chatter; gay mirth; drifting smoke-films and refilled glasses. Latecomers stopped to shake hands with Lindsay, to join the party for a drink; to smoke a cigarette; floated away to other parties. But the nucleus of their party remained the same.

David answered with patience all questions, stopped patiently halfway through his own answer to reply to other questions. At about midnight he rose abruptly. He had just brought to the end a careful and succinct statement in which he declared that he had seen no Belgian children with their hands cut off; no crucified Canadians.

"Folks," he addressed the company genially, "I'm going to admit to you I'm tired." Inwardly he added, "I won't indicate which ones of you make me the most tired; but almost all of you give me an awful pain." He added aloud, "It's the hay for me this instant. Good-night!"

Back once more in his rooms, he did not light up. Instead he sat at the window and gazed out. Straight ahead, two lines of golden beads curving up the Avenue seemed to connect the Arch with the distant horizon. The deep azure of the sky was faintly powdered with stars. But for its occasional lights, of a purplish silver, the Square would have been a mere mystery of trees. But those lights seemed to anchor what was half vision to earth. And they threw interlaced leaf shadows on the ceiling above Lindsay's head. It was as though he sat in some ghostly bower. Looking fixedly through the Arch, his face grew somber. Suddenly he jerked about and stared through the doorway which led into the back rooms.

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