The Little Lady of the Big House Read online

  «Except to be herself,» Graham added.

  «Which is the big thing,» Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of enthusiasm. «She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I'd give more for one of Paula's madcap escapades—oh, I heard all about swimming the big stallion—than for all her pictures if every one was a masterpiece. But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick often calls her the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can put on the grand air when she needs to. I call her the most mature child I have ever seen. Dick was the finest thing that ever happened to her. It was then that she really seemed for the first time to find herself. It was this way.»

  And Mrs. Tully went on to sketch the year of travel in Europe, the resumption of Paula's painting in Paris, and the conviction she finally reached that success could be achieved only by struggle and that her aunt's money was a handicap.

  «And she had her way,» Mrs. Tully sighed. «She—why, she dismissed me, sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance, and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You couldn't guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret—oh, not these modern cabarets, but a real students' cabaret of sorts. It was very select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from some of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he stated it, he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about life instead.

  «Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged—the day before, and he had called on me and all that. I had known 'Lucky' Richard Forrest, and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula couldn't have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had seen him captain the University of California eleven to victory over Stanford. And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared with the two girls. She didn't know whether Dick was worth millions or whether he was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared less. She always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the uncatchable, and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung forthright into each other's arms, for inside the week it was all arranged, and Dick made his call on me, as if my decision meant anything one way or the other.

  «But Dick's cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers—a small pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big round one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood stained with the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the philosophers, and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An exception was made for Paula and me.

  «You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.

  «But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong.»

  «And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and discussionless,» Graham remarked.

  Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.

  «He endowed it for them,» she gasped, her hand to her side. «Or partially endowed it, or something. I don't know what the arrangement was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist club.»

  After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents, Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work on a piece of fine embroidery.

  «I love it,» she explained. «All the costly needlework of the shops means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick used to fret at my sewing. He's all for efficiency, you know, elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song to do what I was doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.

  «It's like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the music oneself, with one's own fingers and brain, is an entirely different and dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate another's performance, or infuses the performance with one's own personality and interpretation, it's all the same. It is soul-joy and fulfilment.

  «Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this flounce—there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say that embroidery is not art?»

  She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her question.

  «And who is to say,» Graham agreed, «that the adorning of beautiful womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the sweetest?»

  «I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste,» she nodded gravely. «They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would phrase it, in the world's economy.»

  * * * * *

  Another time, seeking the library for Andean reference, Graham came upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages of the madroГ±o grove.

  «It's a problem,» she sighed. «Dick says that if I build it I must build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things that philosophers always quarrel.»

  «Wasn't it Voltaire who quarreled with a king over candle-ends?» Graham queried, pleasuring in the sight of her graceful abandon. Thirty-eight! It was impossible. She seemed almost a girl, petulant and flushed over some school task. Then he remembered Mrs. Tully's remark that Paula was the most mature child she had ever known.

  It made him wonder. Was she the one, who, under the oaks at the hitching rails, with two brief sentences had cut to the heart of an impending situation? «So I apprehend,» she had said. What had she apprehended? Had she used the phrase glibly, without meaning? Yet she it was who had thrilled and fluttered to him and with him when they had sung the «Gypsy Trail.» That he knew. But again, had he not seen her warm and glow to the playing of Donald Ware? But here Graham's ego had its will of him, for he told himself that with Donald Ware it was different. And he smiled to himself and at himself at the thought.

  «What amuses you?» Paula was asking.

  «Heaven knows I am no architect. And I challenge you to house seven philosophers according to all the absurd stipulations laid down by Dick.»

  Back in his tower room with his Andean books unopened before him, Graham gnawed his lip and meditated. The woman was no woman. She was the veriest child. Or—and he hesitated at the thought—was this naturalness that was overdone? Did she in truth apprehend? It must be. It had to be. She was of the world. She knew the world. She was very wise. No remembered look of her gray eyes but gave the impression of poise and power. That was it—strength! He recalled her that first night when she had seemed at times to glint an impression of steel, of thin and jewel-like steel. In his fancy, at the time, he remembered likening her strength to ivory, to carven pearl shell, to sennit twisted of maidens' hair.

  And he knew, now, ever since the brief words at the hitching rails and the singing of the «Gypsy Trail,» that whenever their eyes looked into each other's it was with a mutual knowledge of unsaid things.

  In vain he turned the pages of the books for the information he sought. He tried to continue his chapter without th
e information, but no words flowed from his pen. A maddening restlessness was upon him. He seized a time table and pondered the departure of trains, changed his mind, switched the room telephone to the house barn, and asked to have Altadena saddled.

  It was a perfect morning of California early summer. No breath of wind stirred over the drowsing fields, from which arose the calls of quail and the notes of meadowlarks. The air was heavy with lilac fragrance, and from the distance, as he rode between the lilac hedges, Graham heard the throaty nicker of Mountain Lad and the silvery answering whinney of the Fotherington Princess.

  Why was he here astride Dick Forrest's horse? Graham asked himself. Why was he not even then on the way to the station to catch that first train he had noted on the time table? This unaccustomed weakness of decision and action was a new rГґle for him, he considered bitterly. But—and he was on fire with the thought of it—this was his one life, and this was the one woman in the world.

  He reined aside to let a herd of Angora goats go by. Each was a doe, and there were several hundred of them; and they were moved slowly by the Basque herdsmen, with frequent pauses, for each doe was accompanied by a young kid. In the paddock were many mares with new– born colts; and once, receiving warning in time, Graham raced into a crossroad to escape a drove of thirty yearling stallions being moved somewhere across the ranch. Their excitement was communicated to that entire portion of the ranch, so that the air was filled with shrill nickerings and squealings and answering whinneys, while Mountain Lad, beside himself at sight and sound of so many rivals, raged up and down his paddock, and again and again trumpeted his challenging conviction that he was the most amazing and mightiest thing that had ever occurred on earth in the way of horse flesh.

  Dick Forrest pranced and sidled into the cross road on the Outlaw, his face beaming with delight at the little tempest among his many creatures.

  «Fecundity! Fecundity!"—he chanted in greeting, as he reined in to a halt, if halt it might be called, with his tan-golden sorrel mare a-fret and a-froth, wickedly reaching with her teeth now for his leg and next for Graham's, one moment pawing the roadway, the next moment, in sheer impotence of resentfulness, kicking the empty air with one hind leg and kicking the air repeatedly, a dozen times.

  «Those youngsters certainly put Mountain Lad on his mettle,» Dick laughed. «Listen to his song:

  «'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetime through their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'»

  CHAPTER XIX

  After Mrs. Tully's departure, Paula, true to her threat, filled the house with guests. She seemed to have remembered all who had been waiting an invitation, and the limousine that met the trains eight miles away was rarely empty coming or going. There were more singers and musicians and artist folk, and bevies of young girls with their inevitable followings of young men, while mammas and aunts and chaperons seemed to clutter all the ways of the Big House and to fill a couple of motor cars when picnics took place.

  And Graham wondered if this surrounding of herself by many people was not deliberate on Paula's part. As for himself, he definitely abandoned work on his book, and joined in the before-breakfast swims of the hardier younger folk, in the morning rides over the ranch, and in whatever fun was afoot indoors and out.

  Late hours and early were kept; and one night, Dick, who adhered to his routine and never appeared to his guests before midday, made a night of it at poker in the stag-room. Graham had sat in, and felt well repaid when, at dawn, the players received an unexpected visit from Paula—herself past one of her white nights, she said, although no sign of it showed on her fresh skin and color. Graham had to struggle to keep his eyes from straying too frequently to her as she mixed golden fizzes to rejuvenate the wan-eyed, jaded players. Then she made them start the round of «jacks» that closed the game, and sent them off for a cold swim before breakfast and the day's work or frolic.

  Never was Paula alone. Graham could only join in the groups that were always about her. Although the young people ragged and tangoed incessantly, she rarely danced, and then it was with the young men. Once, however, she favored him with an old-fashioned waltz. «Your ancestors in an antediluvian dance,» she mocked the young people, as she stepped out; for she and Graham had the floor to themselves.

  Once down the length of the room, the two were in full accord. Paula, with the sympathy Graham recognized that made her the exceptional accompanist or rider, subdued herself to the masterful art of the man, until the two were as parts of a sentient machine that operated without jar or friction. After several minutes, finding their perfect mutual step and pace, and Graham feeling the absolute giving of Paula to the dance, they essayed rhythmical pauses and dips, their feet never leaving the floor, yet affecting the onlookers in the way Dick voiced it when he cried out: «They float! They float!» The music was the «Waltz of SalomГ©,» and with its slow-fading end they postured slower and slower to a perfect close.

  There was no need to speak. In silence, without a glance at each other, they returned to the company where Dick was proclaiming:

  «Well, younglings, codlings, and other fry, that's the way we old folks used to dance. I'm not saying anything against the new dances, mind you. They're all right and dandy fine. But just the same it wouldn't injure you much to learn to waltz properly. The way you waltz, when you do attempt it, is a scream. We old folks do know a thing or two that is worth while.»

  «For instance?» queried one of the girls.

  «I'll tell you. I don't mind the young generation smelling of gasoline the way it does—»

  Cries and protests drowned Dick out for a moment.

  «I know I smell of it myself,» he went on. «But you've all failed to learn the good old modes of locomotion. There isn't a girl of you that Paula can't walk into the ground. There isn't a fellow of you that Graham and I can't walk into a receiving hospital.—Oh, I know you can all crank engines and shift gears to the queen's taste. But there isn't one of you that can properly ride a horse—a real horse, in the only way, I mean. As for driving a smart pair of roadsters, it's a screech. And how many of you husky lads, hell-scooting on the bay in your speed-boats, can take the wheel of an old-time sloop or schooner, without an auxiliary, and get out of your own way in her?»

  «But we get there just the same,» the same girl retorted.

  «And I don't deny it,» Dick answered. «But you are not always pretty.

  I'll tell you a pretty sight that no one of you can ever present—

  Paula, there, with the reins of four slashing horses in her hands, her

  foot on the brake, swinging tally-ho along a mountain road.»

  On a warm morning, in the cool arcade of the great patio, a chance group of four or five, among whom was Paula, formed about Graham, who had been reading alone. After a time he returned to his magazine with such absorption that he forgot those about him until an awareness of silence penetrated to his consciousness. He looked up. All the others save Paula had strayed off. He could hear their distant laughter from across the patio. But Paula! He surprised the look on her face, in her eyes. It was a look bent on him, concerning him. Doubt, speculation, almost fear, were in her eyes; and yet, in that swift instant, he had time to note that it was a look deep and searching—almost, his quick fancy prompted, the look of one peering into the just-opened book of fate. Her eyes fluttered and fell, and the color increased in her cheeks in an unmistakable blush. Twice her lips moved to the verge of speech; yet, caught so arrantly in the act, she was unable to phrase any passing thought. Graham saved the painful situation by saying casually:

  «Do you know, I've just been reading De Vries' eulogy of Luther Burb
ank's work, and it seems to me that Dick is to the domestic animal world what Burbank is to the domestic vegetable world. You are life– makers here—thumbing the stuff into new forms of utility and beauty.»

  Paula, by this time herself again, laughed and accepted the compliment.

  «I fear me,» Graham continued with easy seriousness, «as I watch your achievements, that I can only look back on a misspent life. Why didn't I get in and make things? I'm horribly envious of both of you.»

  «We are responsible for a dreadful lot of creatures being born,» she said. «It makes one breathless to think of the responsibility.»

  «The ranch certainly spells fecundity,» Graham smiled. «I never before was so impressed with the flowering and fruiting of life. Everything here prospers and multiplies—»

  «Oh!» Paula cried, breaking in with a sudden thought. «Some day I'll show you my goldfish. I breed them, too—yea, and commercially. I supply the San Francisco dealers with their rarest strains, and I even ship to New York. And, best of all, I actually make money—profits, I mean. Dick's books show it, and he is the most rigid of bookkeepers. There isn't a tack-hammer on the place that isn't inventoried; nor a horse-shoe nail unaccounted for. That's why he has such a staff of bookkeepers. Why, do you know, calculating every last least item of expense, including average loss of time for colic and lameness, out of fearfully endless columns of figures he has worked the cost of an hour's labor for a draught horse to the third decimal place.»

  «But your goldfish,» Graham suggested, irritated by her constant dwelling on her husband.

  «Well, Dick makes his bookkeepers keep track of my goldfish in the same way. I'm charged every hour of any of the ranch or house labor I use on the fish—postage stamps and stationery, too, if you please. I have to pay interest on the plant. He even charges me for the water, just as if he were a city water company and I a householder. And still I net ten per cent., and have netted as high as thirty. But Dick laughs and says when I've deducted the wages of superintendence—my superintendence, he means—that I'll find I am poorly paid or else am operating at a loss; that with my net I couldn't hire so capable a superintendent.