Out of the Air Part 1

Out of the Air.

by Inez Haynes Irwin.

I

"... 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 Sat.u.r.days ago and I got my discharge papers yesterday. G.o.d 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, Was.h.i.+ngton 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 b.u.t.terfly table and the gla.s.s lamps. I actually salaam to that sampler. And these furnis.h.i.+ngs 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Square, which offered an effect as of a formal garden to the long pink-red palace on its north side--plumy treetops, geometrical gra.s.s areas, weaving paths; elegant little summer-houses--his gaze went with a seeking look to the doorway.

"Question No. 2. I haven't any plans of my own at present and I am quite eligible to the thing you suggest. You say that no one wants to read anything about the war. I don't blame them. I wish I could fall asleep for a month and wake up with no recollection of it. I suppose it's that state of mind which prevents people from writing their recollections immediately. Of course we'll all do that ultimately, I suppose--even people who, like myself, aren't professional writers.

Don't imagine that I'm going on with the writing game. I haven't the divine afflatus. I'm just letting myself drift along with these two jobs until I get that _guerre_ out of my system; can look around to find what I really want to do. I'm willing to write my experiences within a reasonable interval; but not at once. Everything is as vivid in my mind of course as it's possible to be; but I don't want to have to think of it. That's why your suggestion in regard to Lutetia Murray strikes me so favorably. I should really like to do that biography. I'm in the mood for something gentle and pastoral. And then of course I have a sense of proprietors.h.i.+p in regard to Lutetia, not alone because she was my literary find or that it was my thesis on her which got me my A in English 12. But, in addition, I developed a sort of platonic, long-distance, with-the-eye-of-the-mind-only crush on her. And yet, I don't know...."

Again Lindsay's eyes came up from his paper. For the third time he ignored Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

"You certainly have left an atmosphere in this joint, Spink. Somehow I feel always as if you were in the room. How it would be possible for such a pop-eyed, freckle-faced Piute as you to pack an astral body is more than I can understand. It's here though--that sense of your presence. The other day I caught myself saying, 'Oh, Spink!' to the empty air. But to return to Lutetia, I can't tell you how the prospect tempts. Once on a _permission_ in the spring of '16, I finds myself in Lyons. There are to be gentle acrobatic doings in the best Gallic manner in the Park on Sunday. I gallops out to see the sports. One place, I comes across several scores of _poilus_--on their _permissions_ similar--squatting on the ground and doing--what do you suppose? Picking violets. Yep--picking violets. I says to myself then, I says, 'These frogs sure are queer guys.' But now, Spink, I understand. I don't want to do anything more strenuous myself than picking violets, unless it's selling baby blankets, or holding yarn for old ladies. Perhaps by an enormous effort I might summon the energy to run a tea-room."

Lindsay stopped his typewriting again. This time he stared fixedly at Was.h.i.+ngton 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--"h.e.l.lo, 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 ma.n.u.script safe of the publis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+p, bellying to full sail, filled the s.p.a.ce above the looking-gla.s.s. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s like gla.s.s. 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 c.o.c.ktail, swearing at the price to the sympathetic French waiter, who made an excited response in French and a.s.sisted him to order an elaborate dinner. Lindsay propped his paper against his water-gla.s.s; 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!"

The girl put both her pretty hands out. "I _can_ shake hands with you, David, now that you're in civies. I don't like that green and yellow ribbon in your b.u.t.tonhole though. I'm a pacifist, you know, and I've got to tell you where I stand before we can talk."

"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 a.s.sortment 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 a.s.serted. "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.

Lindsay listened, apparently entranced. "Gratia, you're too pretty for any use!" he a.s.serted indulgently after the next pause in which she dove under the water and reappeared sleek-haired as ever. "I'm not going to argue with you. I'm going to tell you one thing that will be a shock to you, though. The French don't like war either. And the reason is--now prepare yourself--they know more about the horrors of war in _one_ minute than you will in a thousand years. What are you doing with yourself, these days, Gratia?"

"Oh, running a shop; making smocks, working on batiks, painting, writing _vers libre_," Gratia admitted.

"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-a.n.a.lysis," 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 appet.i.te. 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.

"Yes, Aussie was killed in Italy, flying. Will Arden was wounded in the Argonne. George Jennings died of the flu in Paris--see that big blonde over there, Dave? She's the Village dressmaker now--Dark Dale is in Russia--can't get out. Putty Doane was taken prisoner by the Germans at--Oh, see that gang of up-towners--aren't they snippy and patronizing and silly? But Molly Fearing is our best war sensation. You know what a tiny frightened mouse of a thing she was. She went into the 'Y.' She was in the trenches the day of the Armistice--_talked_ with Germans; not prisoners, you understand--but the retreating Germans. Her letters are wonderful. She's crazy about it over there. I wouldn't be surprised if she never came back-- Oh, Dave, don't look now; but as soon as you can, get that tall red-headed girl in the corner, Marie Maroo. She does the most marvelous drawings you ever saw. She belongs to that new Vortex School. And then Joel-- Oh, there's Ernestine Phillips and her father.

You want to meet her father. He's a riot. Octogenarian, too! He's just come from some remote hamlet in Vermont. Ernestine's showing him a properly expurgated edition of the Village. Hi, Ernestine! He's a Civil War veteran. Ernest's crazy to see you, Dave!"

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.

"Oh, Dave!" She took both Lindsay's hands. "I _am_ glad to see you! How I have worried about you! My father, Dave. Father, this is David Lindsay, the young aviator I was telling you about, who had such extraordinary experiences in France. You remember the one I mean, father. He served for two years with the French Army before we declared war."

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."

"Ernestine!" Lindsay said warmly. "I just love _you_. Contrary to the generally accepted opinion of the pacifists, France did not deliberately bring this war on herself. Nor did she keep it up four years for her private amus.e.m.e.nt. She hasn't enjoyed one minute of it. I don't expect Gratia to believe me, but perhaps you will. These four years of death, destruction, and devastation haven't entertained France a particle."

"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.