Sinclair Lewis

“ It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty.
They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a thousand miles to grow in. ”

“ That was the only question worth solving in the world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of coming spring. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Wondering at himself for it, Carl thought of other things. He was amazed that, while their lips were hot together, he worried as to what train Ruth ought to take, [356] after dinner. Yet, with such thoughts conferring, he was in an ecstasy beyond sorrow; praying that to her, as to him, there was no pain but instead a rapture in the sting of her lips, as her teeth cut a little into them.... A kiss—thing that the polite novels sketch as a second's unbodied bliss—how human it was, with teeth and lips to consider; common as eating—and divine as martyrdom. ”

“ The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of the city:
Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a sound reason for talking. ”

“ Not such the America that lifted Carl's chin in wonder——
Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. ”

“ They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. ”

“ The town and college of Plato disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks. In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on a frozen bed-sheet—no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the prairie itself—far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch with the fields. ”

“ Their hotel was a vast barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth, and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented wall-flower. ”

“ Even now, when without reserve he gave himself up to love, he was aware that he would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old apartment-house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices. Yet with a joy that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords, romantic towers and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and elevators and prejudices, Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of man's yearning for union with the divine ”

“ Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?
But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.
Job. He had to have a job. ”

“ Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat, but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and mucking in grease—he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed MacDowell. ”

“ Talking, falling into silences touched with the mystery of sun and sea, they confessed youth's excited wonder about the world; Carl sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles, a springy figure in blue flannel and a daring tie; while Ruth, in deep-rose linen, her throat bright and bare, lay with her chin in her hands, a flush beneath the gentle brown of her cheeks, her white-clad ankles crossed under her skirt, slender against the gray sand, thoughtful of eye, lost in happiness. ”

“ There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army—Haviland the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three generations of army officers. ”

“ At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out of the Middle West. Around them was [286] the storm of highballs and brandy and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke, shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet refuge for the eternal force of life....
Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day and be off hiking through the clouds the next?" ”

“ Then Carl spoke of his religion—the memory of Forrest Haviland. He had never really talked of him to any one save Colonel Haviland and Titherington, the English aviator; but now this girl, who had never seen Forrest, seemed to have known him for life. Carl made vivid by his earnestness the golden hours of work together in California; the confidences in New York restaurants; his long passion for their Brazilian trip. Ruth's eyes looked up at him with swift comprehension, and there was a tear in them as he told in ten words of the message that Forrest was dead. ”

“ Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars. ”

“ The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population, born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure. ”

“ Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was known to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time——" And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, long time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering taps. "A long, long time before either you or I were born, Carl, and we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men that ever lived, now can we?" ”

“ Carl displayed a tweed Norfolk jacket, a great sweater, and mittens unabashed. He had a mysterious pack which, he informed the excited Ruth, contained Roland's sword and the magic rug of Bagdad. Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors.
For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" ”

“ One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the pays du tendre is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray groves of the Land of Wandering [364] Tunes, till Phil began to talk, disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor, and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend. ”