Claire tried to wriggle out from under the thought of Milt while, with the Gilsons as the perfect audience, she improvised on the theme of wandering. With certain unintended exaggerations, and certain not quite accurate groupings of events, she described the farmers and cowpunchers, the incredible hotels and garages. Indeed they had become incredible to her own self. Obviously this silken girl couldn't possibly take seriously a Dlorus Kloh-or a young garage man who said "ain't."
Eva Gilson had been in Brooklyn within the month, and in a passion of remembrance of home, Claire cried, "Oh, do tell me about everybody."
"I had such a good time with Amy Dorrance," said Mrs. Gilson. "Of course Amy is a little dull, but she's such an awfully good sort and--We did have the jolliest party one afternoon. We went to lunch at the Ritz, and a matinée, and we saw such an interesting man-Gene is frightfully jealous when I rave about him-I'm sure he was a violinist-simply an exquisite thing he was-I wanted to kiss him. Gene will now say, 'Why didn't you?'"
And Gene said, "Well, why didn't you?" and Claire laughed, and her toes felt warm and pink and good, and she was perfectly happy, and she murmured, "It would be good to hear a decent violinist again. Oh! What had George Worlicht been doing, when you were home?"
"Don't you think Georgie is wonderful?" fluttered Mrs. Gilson. "He makes me rue my thirty-six sad years. I think I'll adopt him. You know, he almost won the tennis cup at Long Branch."
Georgie had a little mustache and an income, just enough income to support the little mustache, and he sang inoffensively, and was always winning tennis cups-almost-and he always said, at least once at every party, "The basis of savoir faire is knowing how to be rude to the right people." Fire-enamored and gliding into a perfumed haze of exquisite drowsiness, Claire saw Georgie as heroic and wise. But the firelight got into her eyes, and her lids wouldn't stay open, and in her ears was a soft humming as of a million bees in a distant meadow golden-spangled-and Gene was helping her upstairs; sleepiness submerged her like bathing in sweet waters; she fumbled at buttons and hooks and stays, let things lie where they fell-and of all that luxury nothing was more pleasant than the knowledge that she did not have to take precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene little brothers which-on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had been young and foolish-she seemed to remember having found in her own room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored foam, sinking deep, deep, deep--
And it was morning, and she perceived that the purpose of morning light was to pick out surfaces of mahogany and orange velvet and glass, and that only an idiot would ever leave this place and go about begging dirty garage men to fill her car with stinking gasoline and oil.
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-sturdy 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 pleasssssse 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 Japan. 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 shore-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 skyscrapers, its shining cornices and masses 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 Pass lies among mountains prickly 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 passing 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.