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Title: Free Air

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Release Date: September 30, 2008 [EBook #26732]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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FREE AIR

SINCLAIR LEWIS

AUTHOR OF

THE JOB, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, Inc.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

MISS BOLTWOOD OF BROOKLYN IS LOST IN THE MUD

CLAIRE ESCAPES FROM RESPECTABILITY

III

A YOUNG MAN IN A RAINCOAT

A ROOM WITHOUT

RELEASE BRAKES—SHIFT TO THIRD

THE LAND OF BILLOWING CLOUDS

VII

THE GREAT AMERICAN FRYING PAN

VIII

THE DISCOVERY OF CANNED SHRIMPS AND HESPERIDES

THE MAN WITH AGATE EYES

101

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE HILLSIDE ROAD

112

SAGEBRUSH TOURISTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY

119

XII

THE WONDERS OF NATURE WITH ALL MODERN

IMPROVEMENTS

129

XIII

ADVENTURERS BY FIRELIGHT

138

XIV

THE BEAST OF THE CORRAL

149

THE BLACK DAY OF THE VOYAGE

154

XVI

THE SPECTACLES OF AUTHORITY

165

XVII

THE VAGABOND IN GREEN

176

XVIII THE FALLACY OF ROMANCE

188

XIX

THE NIGHT OF ENDLESS PINES

194

THE FREE WOMAN

205

XXI

THE MINE OF LOST SOULS

219

XXII

ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

228

XXIII THE GRAEL IN A BACK YARD IN YAKIMA

237

XXIV HER OWN PEOPLE

242

XXV

THE ABYSSINIAN PRINCE

254

XXVI A CLASS IN ENGINEERING AND OMELETS

270

XXVII THE VICIOUSNESS OF NICE THINGS

279

XXVIII THE MORNING COAT OF MR. HUDSON B. RIGGS

290

XXIX THE ENEMY LOVE

300

XXX

THE VIRTUOUS PLOTTERS

307

XXXI THE KITCHEN INTIMATE

310

XXXII THE CORNFIELD ARISTOCRAT

331

XXXIII TOOTH-MUG TEA

345

XXXIV THE BEGINNING OF A STORY

361

FREE AIR

[3]

FREE AIR

CHAPTER I

MISS BOLTWOOD OF BROOKLYN IS LOST IN THE MUD

When the windshield was closed it became so filmed with rain that Claire fancied she was piloting a

drowned car in dim spaces under the sea. When it was open, drops jabbed into her eyes and chilled

her cheeks. She was excited and thoroughly miserable. She realized that these Minnesota country

roads had no respect for her polite experience on Long Island parkways. She felt like a woman, not

like a driver.

But the Gomez-Dep roadster had seventy horsepower, and sang songs. Since she had left

Minneapolis nothing had passed her. Back yonder a truck had tried to crowd her, and she had

dropped into a ditch, climbed a bank, returned to the road, and after that the truck was not. Now she

was regarding a view more splendid than mountains above a garden by the sea—a stretch of good

road. To her passenger, her father, Claire chanted:

"Heavenly! There's some gravel. We can make time. We'll hustle on to the next town and get dry."

[4]"Yes. But don't mind me. You're doing very well," her father sighed.

Instantly, the dismay of it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch of gravel. The road ahead was

a wet black smear, criss-crossed with ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo—which is

mud mixed with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered caramels. When cattle

get into gumbo, the farmers send for the stump-dynamite and try blasting.

It was her first really bad stretch of road. She was frightened. Then she was too appallingly busy to

be frightened, or to be Miss Claire Boltwood, or to comfort her uneasy father. She had to drive. Her

frail graceful arms put into it a vicious vigor that was genius.

When the wheels struck the slime, they slid, they wallowed. The car skidded. It was terrifyingly out

of control. It began majestically to turn toward the ditch. She fought the steering wheel as though

she were shadow-boxing, but the car kept contemptuously staggering till it was sideways, straight

across the road. Somehow, it was back again, eating into a rut, going ahead. She didn't know how

she had done it, but she had got it back. She longed to take time to retrace her own cleverness in

steering. She didn't. She kept going.

The car backfired, slowed. She yanked the gear [5]from third into first. She sped up. The motor ran

like a terrified pounding heart, while the car crept on by inches through filthy mud that stretched

ahead of her without relief.

She was battling to hold the car in the principal rut. She snatched the windshield open, and

concentrated on that left rut. She felt that she was keeping the wheel from climbing those high sides

of the rut, those six-inch walls of mud, sparkling with tiny grits. Her mind snarled at her arms, "Let

the ruts do the steering. You're just fighting against them." It worked. Once she let the wheels alone

they comfortably followed the furrows, and for three seconds she had that delightful belief of every

motorist after every mishap, "Now that this particular disagreeableness is over, I'll never, never have

any trouble again!"

But suppose the engine overheated, ran out of water? Anxiety twanged at her nerves. And the deep

distinctive ruts were changing to a complex pattern, like the rails in a city switchyard. She picked

out the track of the one motor car that had been through here recently. It was marked with the

swastika tread of the rear tires. That track was her friend; she knew and loved the driver of a car she

had never seen in her life.

She was very tired. She wondered if she might not stop for a moment. Then she came to an upslope.

The car faltered; felt indecisive beneath her. She[6] jabbed down the accelerator. Her hands pushed

at the steering wheel as though she were pushing the car. The engine picked up, sulkily kept going.

To the eye, there was merely a rise in the rolling ground, but to her anxiety it was a mountain up

which she—not the engine, but herself—pulled this bulky mass, till she had reached the top, and

was safe again—for a second. Still there was no visible end of the mud.

In alarm she thought, "How long does it last? I can't keep this up. I—Oh!"

The guiding tread of the previous car was suddenly lost in a mass of heaving, bubble-scattered mud,

like a batter of black dough. She fairly picked up the car, and flung it into that welter, through it,

and back into the reappearing swastika-marked trail.

Her father spoke: "You're biting your lips. They'll bleed, if you don't look out. Better stop and rest."

"Can't! No bottom to this mud. Once stop and lose momentum—stuck for keeps!"

She had ten more minutes of it before she reached a combination of bridge and culvert, with a plank

platform above a big tile drain. With this solid plank bottom, she could stop. Silence came roaring

down as she turned the switch. The bubbling water in the radiator steamed about the cap. Claire was

conscious of tautness of the cords of her neck in front; of a pain at the base of her brain. Her father

glanced at her curiously. "I must be a wreck. I'm sure my hair[7] is frightful," she thought, but

forgot it as she looked at him. His face was unusually pale. In the tumult of activity he had been

betrayed into letting the old despondent look blur his eyes and sag his mouth. "Must get on," she

determined.

Claire was dainty of habit. She detested untwisted hair, ripped gloves, muddy shoes. Hesitant as a

cat by a puddle, she stepped down on the bridge. Even on these planks, the mud was three inches

thick. It squidged about her low, spatted shoes. "Eeh!" she squeaked.

She tiptoed to the tool-box and took out a folding canvas bucket. She edged down to the trickling

stream below. She was miserably conscious of a pastoral scene all gone to mildew—cows beneath

willows by the creek, milkweeds dripping, dried mullein weed stalks no longer dry. The bank of the

stream was so slippery that she shot down two feet, and nearly went sprawling. Her knee did touch

the bank, and the skirt of her gray sports-suit showed a smear of yellow earth.

In less than two miles the racing motor had used up so much water that she had to make four trips to

the creek before she had filled the radiator. When she had climbed back on the running-board she

glared down at spats and shoes turned into gray lumps. She was not tearful. She was angry.

"Idiot! Ought to have put on my rubbers. Well—too[8] late now," she observed, as she started the

engine.

She again followed the swastika tread. To avoid a hole in the road ahead, the unknown driver had

swung over to the side of the road, and taken to the intensely black earth of the edge of an unfenced

cornfield. Flashing at Claire came the sight of a deep, water-filled hole, scattered straw and brush,

débris of a battlefield, which made her gaspingly realize that her swastikaed leader had been stuck

and—

And instantly her own car was stuck.

She had had to put the car at that hole. It dropped, far down, and it stayed down. The engine stalled.

She started it, but the back wheels spun merrily round and round, without traction. She did not make

one inch. When she again killed the blatting motor, she let it stay dead. She peered at her father.

He was not a father, just now, but a passenger trying not to irritate the driver. He smiled in a waxy

way, and said, "Hard luck! Well, you did the best you could. The other hole, there in the road, would

have been just as bad. You're a fine driver, dolly."

Her smile was warm and real. "No. I'm a fool. You told me to put on chains. I didn't. I deserve it."

"Well, anyway, most men would be cussing. You acquire merit by not beating me. I believe that's

done, in moments like this. If you'd like, I'll get out and crawl around in the mud, and play turtle for

you."

[9]"No. I'm quite all right. I did feel frightfully strong-minded as long as there was any use of it. It

kept me going. But now I might just as well be cheerful, because we're stuck, and we're probably

going to stay stuck for the rest of this care-free summer day."

The weariness of the long strain caught her, all at once. She slipped forward, sat huddled, her knees

crossed under the edge of the steering wheel, her hands falling beside her, one of them making a

faint brushing sound as it slid down the upholstery. Her eyes closed; as her head drooped farther,

she fancied she could hear the vertebrae click in her tense neck.

Her father was silent, a misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-

curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled

musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that she

could never drive again.

[10]

CHAPTER II

CLAIRE ESCAPES FROM RESPECTABILITY

Claire Boltwood lived on the Heights, Brooklyn. Persons from New York and other parts of the

Middlewest have been known to believe that Brooklyn is somehow humorous. In newspaper jokes

and vaudeville it is so presented that people who are willing to take their philosophy from those

sources believe that the leading citizens of Brooklyn are all deacons, undertakers, and obstetricians.

The fact is that North Washington Square, at its reddest and whitest and fanlightedest, Gramercy

Park at its most ivied, are not so aristocratic as the section of Brooklyn called the Heights. Here

preached Henry Ward Beecher. Here, in mansions like mausoleums, on the ridge above docks where

the good ships came sailing in from Sourabaya and Singapore, ruled the lords of a thousand sails.

And still is it a place of wealth too solid to emulate the nimble self-advertising of Fifth Avenue.

Here dwell the fifth-generation possessors of blocks of foundries and shipyards. Here, in a big brick

house of much dignity, much ugliness, and much conservatory, lived Claire Boltwood, with her

widower father.

Henry B. Boltwood was vice-president of a firm[11] dealing in railway supplies. He was neither

wealthy nor at all poor. Every summer, despite Claire's delicate hints, they took the same cottage on

the Jersey Coast, and Mr. Boltwood came down for Sunday. Claire had gone to a good school out of

Philadelphia, on the Main Line. She was used to gracious leisure, attractive uselessness, nut-center

chocolates, and a certain wonder as to why she was alive.

She wanted to travel, but her father could not get away. He consistently spent his days in

overworking, and his evenings in wishing he hadn't overworked. He was attractive, fresh, pink-

cheeked, white-mustached, and nerve-twitching with years of detail.

Claire's ambition had once been babies and a solid husband, but as various young males of the

species appeared before her, sang their mating songs and preened their newly dry-cleaned plumage,

she found that the trouble with solid young men was that they were solid. Though she liked to

dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand the district's quota of intellectuals

very well; she was good at listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in

discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif. It is history that she

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