The Little Lady of the Big House

“Never mind,” Paula soothed, in gurgling tones. “You will all be avenged. Dick just whispered to me to get the philosophers up to-morrow night. You know how they talk music. A musical critic is their awful prey.”

“Terrence said the other night that there was no closed season on musical critics,” Lute contributed.

“Terrence and Aaron will drive him to drink,” Paula laughed her joy of anticipation. “And Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art, can specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first words and the last. He doesn’t believe a thing he says about blastism, any more than was he serious when he danced the other evening. It’s his bit of fun. He’s such a deep philosopher that he has to get his fun somehow.”

“And if O’Hay ever locks horns with Terrence,” Lute prophesied, “I can see Terrence tucking arm in arm with him, leading him down to the stag room, and heating the argument with the absentest-minded variety of drinks that ever O’Hay accomplished.”

“Which means a very sick O’Hay next day,” Paula continued her gurgles of anticipation.

“I’ll tell him to do it!” exclaimed Lute.

“You mustn’t think we’re all bad,” Paula protested to Graham. “It’s just the spirit of the house. Dick likes it. He’s always playing jokes himself. He relaxes that way. I’ll wager, right now, it was Dick’s suggestion, to Lute, and for Lute to carry out, for Terrence to get O’Hay into the stag room. Now, ’fess up, Lute.”

“Well, I will say,” Lute answered with meticulous circumspection, “that the idea was not entirely original with me.”

At this point, Ernestine joined them and appropriated Graham with:

“We’re all waiting for you. We’ve cut, and you and I are partners. Besides, Paula’s making her sleep noise. So say good night, and let her go.”

Paula had left for bed at ten o’clock. Not till one did the bridge break up. Dick, his arm about Ernestine in brotherly fashion, said good night to Graham where one of the divided ways led to the watch tower, and continued on with his pretty sister-in-law toward her quarters.

“Just a tip, Ernestine,” he said at parting, his gray eyes frankly and genially on hers, but his voice sufficiently serious to warn her.

“What have I been doing now?” she pouted laughingly.

“Nothing… as yet. But don’t get started, or you’ll be laying up a sore heart for yourself. You’re only a kid yet – eighteen; and a darned nice, likable kid at that. Enough to make ’most any man sit up and take notice. But Evan Graham is not ’most any man – ”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” she blurted out in a fling of quick resentment.

“But listen to me just the same. There comes a time in the affairs of a girl when the love-bee gets a buzzing with a very loud hum in her pretty noddle. Then is the time she mustn’t make a mistake and start in loving the wrong man. You haven’t fallen in love with Evan Graham yet, and all you have to do is just not to fall in love with him. He’s not for you, nor for any young thing. He’s an oldster, an ancient, and possibly has forgotten more about love, romantic love, and young things, than you’ll ever learn in a dozen lives. If he ever marries again – ”

“Again!” Ernestine broke in.

“Why, he’s been a widower, my dear, for over fifteen years.”

“Then what of it?” she demanded defiantly.

“Just this,” Dick continued quietly. “He’s lived the young-thing romance, and lived it wonderfully; and, from the fact that in fifteen years he has not married again, means – ”

“That he’s never recovered from his loss?” Ernestine interpolated. “But that’s no proof – ”

“ – Means that he’s got over his apprenticeship to wild young romance,” Dick held on steadily. “All you have to do is look at him and realize that he has not lacked opportunities, and that, on occasion, some very fine women, real wise women, mature women, have given him foot-races that tested his wind and endurance. But so far they’ve not succeeded in catching him. And as for young things, you know how filled the world is with them for a man like him. Think it over, and just keep your heart-thoughts away from him. If you don’t let your heart start to warm toward him, it will save your heart from a grievous chill later on.”

He took one of her hands in his, and drew her against him, an arm soothingly about her shoulder. For several minutes of silence Dick idly speculated on what her thoughts might be.

“You know, we hard-bitten old fellows – ” he began half-apologetically, half-humorously.

But she made a restless movement of distaste, and cried out:

“Are the only ones worth while! The young men are all youngsters, and that’s what’s the matter with them. They’re full of life, and coltish spirits, and dance, and song. But they’re not serious. They’re not big. They’re not – oh, they don’t give a girl that sense of all-wiseness, of proven strength, of, of… well, of manhood.”

“I understand,” Dick murmured. “But please do not forget to glance at the other side of the shield. You glowing young creatures of women must affect the old fellows in precisely similar ways. They may look on you as toys, playthings, delightful things to whom to teach a few fine foolishnesses, but not as comrades, not as equals, not as sharers – full sharers. Life is something to be learned. They have learned it… some of it. But young things like you, Ernestine, have you learned any of it yet?”

“Tell me,” she asked abruptly, almost tragically, “about this wild young romance, about this young thing when he was young, fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen?” Dick replied promptly. “Eighteen. They were married three years before she died. In fact – figure it out for yourself – they were actually married, by a Church of England dominie, and living in wedlock, about the same moment that you were squalling your first post-birth squalls in this world.”

“Yes, yes – go on,” she urged nervously. “What was she like?”

“She was a resplendent, golden-brown, or tan-golden half-caste, a Polynesian queen whose mother had been a queen before her, whose father was an Oxford man, an English gentleman, and a real scholar. Her name was Nomare. She was Queen of Huahoa. She was barbaric. He was young enough to out-barbaric her. There was nothing sordid in their marriage. He was no penniless adventurer. She brought him her island kingdom and forty thousand subjects. He brought to that island his fortune – and it was no inconsiderable fortune. He built a palace that no South Sea island ever possessed before or will ever possess again. It was the real thing, grass-thatched, hand-hewn beams that were lashed with cocoanut sennit, and all the rest. It was rooted in the island; it sprouted out of the island; it belonged, although he fetched Hopkins out from New York to plan it.

“Heavens! they had their own royal yacht, their mountain house, their canoe house – the last a veritable palace in itself. I know. I have been at great feasts in it – though it was after their time. Nomare was dead, and no one knew where Graham was, and a king of collateral line was the ruler.

“I told you he out-barbaricked her. Their dinner service was gold. – Oh, what’s the use in telling any more. He was only a boy. She was half-English, half-Polynesian, and a really and truly queen. They were flowers of their races. They were a pair of wonderful children. They lived a fairy tale. And… well, Ernestine, the years have passed, and Evan Graham has passed from the realm of the young thing. It will be a remarkable woman that will ever infatuate him now. Besides, he’s practically broke. Though he didn’t wastrel his money. As much misfortune, and more, than anything else.”

“Paula would be more his kind,” Ernestine said meditatively.

“Yes, indeed,” Dick agreed. “Paula, or any woman as remarkable as Paula, would attract him a thousand times more than all the sweet, young, lovely things like you in the world. We oldsters have our standards, you know.”

“And I’ll have to put up with the youngsters,” Ernestine sighed.

“In the meantime, yes,” he chuckled. “Remembering, always, that you, too, in time, may grow into the remarkable, mature woman, who can outfoot a man like Evan in a foot-race of love for possession.”

“But I shall be married long before that,” she pouted.

“Which will be your good fortune, my dear. And, now, good night. And you are not angry with me?”

She smiled pathetically and shook her head, put up her lips to be kissed, then said as they parted:

“I promise not to be angry if you will only show me the way that in the end will lead me to ancient graybeards like you and Graham.”

Dick Forrest, turning off lights as he went, penetrated the library, and, while selecting half a dozen reference volumes on mechanics and physics, smiled as if pleased with himself at recollection of the interview with his sister-in-law. He was confident that he had spoken in time and not a moment too soon. But, half way up the book-concealed spiral staircase that led to his work room, a remark of Ernestine, echoing in his consciousness, made him stop from very suddenness to lean his shoulder against the wall. —"Paula would be more his kind."

“Silly ass!” he laughed aloud, continuing on his way. “And married a dozen years!”

Nor did he think again about it, until, in bed, on his sleeping porch, he took a glance at his barometers and thermometers, and prepared to settle down to the solution of the electrical speculation that had been puzzling him. Then it was, as he peered across the great court to his wife’s dark wing and dark sleeping porch to see if she were still waking, that Ernestine’s remark again echoed. He dismissed it with a “Silly ass!” of scorn, lighted a cigarette, and began running, with trained eye, the indexes of the books and marking the pages sought with matches.

Chapter XV

It was long after ten in the morning, when Graham, straying about restlessly and wondering if Paula Forrest ever appeared before the middle of the day, wandered into the music room. Despite the fact that he was a several days’ guest in the Big House, so big was it that the music room was new territory. It was an exquisite room, possibly thirty-five by sixty and rising to a lofty trussed ceiling where a warm golden light was diffused from a skylight of yellow glass. Red tones entered largely into the walls and furnishing, and the place, to him, seemed to hold the hush of music.

Graham was lazily contemplating a Keith with its inevitable triumph of sun-gloried atmosphere and twilight-shadowed sheep, when, from the tail of his eye, he saw his hostess come in from the far entrance. Again, the sight of her, that was a picture, gave him the little catch-breath of gasp. She was clad entirely in white, and looked very young and quite tall in the sweeping folds of a holoku of elaborate simplicity and apparent shapelessness. He knew the holoku in the home of its origin, where, on the lanais of Hawaii, it gave charm to a plain woman and double-folded the charm of a charming woman.

While they smiled greeting across the room, he was noting the set of her body, the poise of head and frankness of eyes – all of which seemed articulate with a friendly, comradely, “Hello, friends.” At least such was the form Graham’s fancy took as she came toward him.

“You made a mistake with this room,” he said gravely.

“No, don’t say that! But how?”

“It should have been longer, much longer, twice as long at least.”

“Why?” she demanded, with a disapproving shake of head, while he delighted in the girlish color in her cheeks that gave the lie to her thirty-eight years.

“Because, then,” he answered, “you should have had to walk twice as far this morning and my pleasure of watching you would have been correspondingly increased. I’ve always insisted that the holoku is the most charming garment ever invented for women.”

“Then it was my holoku and not I,” she retorted. “I see you are like Dick – always with a string on your compliments, and lo, when we poor sillies start to nibble, back goes the compliment dragging at the end of the string.

“Now I want to show you the room,” she hurried on, closing his disclaimer. “Dick gave me a free hand with it. It’s all mine, you see, even to its proportions.”

“And the pictures?”

“I selected them,” she nodded, “every one of them, and loved them onto the walls myself. Although Dick did quarrel with me over that Vereschagin. He agreed on the two Millets and the Corot over there, and on that Isabey; and even conceded that some Vereschagins might do in a music room, but not that particular Vereschagin. He’s jealous for our local artists, you see. He wanted more of them, wanted to show his appreciation of home talent.”

“I don’t know your Pacific Coast men’s work very well,” Graham said. “Tell me about them. Show me that – Of course, that’s a Keith, there; but whose is that next one? It’s beautiful.”

“A McComas – ” she was answering; and Graham, with a pleasant satisfaction, was settling himself to a half-hour’s talk on pictures, when Donald Ware entered with questing eyes that lighted up at sight of the Little Lady.

His violin was under his arm, and he crossed to the piano in a brisk, business-like way and proceeded to lay out music.

“We’re going to work till lunch,” Paula explained to Graham. “He swears I’m getting abominably rusty, and I think he’s half right. We’ll see you at lunch. You can stay if you care, of course; but I warn you it’s really going to be work. And we’re going swimming this afternoon. Four o’clock at the tank, Dick says. Also, he says he’s got a new song he’s going to sing then. – What time is it, Mr. Ware?”

“Ten minutes to eleven,” the musician answered briefly, with a touch of sharpness.

“You’re ahead of time – the engagement was for eleven. And till eleven you’ll have to wait, sir. I must run and see Dick, first. I haven’t said good morning to him yet.”

Well Paula knew her husband’s hours. Scribbled secretly in the back of the note-book that lay always on the reading stand by her couch were hieroglyphic notes that reminded her that he had coffee at six-thirty; might possibly be caught in bed with proof-sheets or books till eight-forty-five, if not out riding; was inaccessible between nine and ten, dictating correspondence to Blake; was inaccessible between ten and eleven, conferring with managers and foremen, while Bonbright, the assistant secretary, took down, like any court reporter, every word uttered by all parties in the rapid-fire interviews.

At eleven, unless there were unexpected telegrams or business, she could usually count on finding Dick alone for a space, although invariably busy. Passing the secretaries’ room, the click of a typewriter informed her that one obstacle was removed. In the library, the sight of Mr. Bonbright hunting a book for Mr. Manson, the Shorthorn manager, told her that Dick’s hour with his head men was over.

She pressed the button that swung aside a section of filled book-shelves and revealed the tiny spiral of steel steps that led up to Dick’s work room. At the top, a similar pivoting section of shelves swung obediently to her press of button and let her noiselessly into his room. A shade of vexation passed across her face as she recognized Jeremy Braxton’s voice. She paused in indecision, neither seeing nor being seen.

“If we flood we flood,” the mine superintendent was saying. “It will cost a mint – yes, half a dozen mints – to pump out again. And it’s a damned shame to drown the old Harvest that way.”

“But for this last year the books show that we’ve worked at a positive loss,” Paula heard Dick take up. “Every petty bandit from Huerta down to the last peon who’s stolen a horse has gouged us. It’s getting too stiff – taxes extraordinary – bandits, revolutionists, and federals. We could survive it, if only the end were in sight; but we have no guarantee that this disorder may not last a dozen or twenty years.”

“Just the same, the old Harvest – think of flooding her!” the superintendent protested.

“And think of Villa,” Dick replied, with a sharp laugh the bitterness of which did not escape Paula. “If he wins he says he’s going to divide all the land among the peons. The next logical step will be the mines. How much do you think we’ve coughed up to the constitutionalists in the past twelvemonth?”

“Over a hundred and twenty thousand,” Braxton answered promptly. “Not counting that fifty thousand cold bullion to Torenas before he retreated. He jumped his army at Guaymas and headed for Europe with it – I wrote you all that.”

“If we keep the workings afloat, Jeremy, they’ll go on gouging, gouge without end, Amen. I think we’d better flood. If we can make wealth more efficiently than those rapscallions, let us show them that we can destroy wealth with the same facility.”

“That’s what I tell them. And they smile and repeat that such and such a free will offering, under exigent circumstances, would be very acceptable to the revolutionary chiefs – meaning themselves. The big chiefs never finger one peso in ten of it. Good Lord! I show them what we’ve done. Steady work for five thousand peons. Wages raised from ten centavos a day to a hundred and ten. I show them peons – ten-centavo men when we took them, and five-peso men when I showed them. And the same old smile and the same old itching palm, and the same old acceptability of a free will offering from us to the sacred cause of the revolution. By God! Old Diaz was a robber, but he was a decent robber. I said to Arranzo: ’If we shut down, here’s five thousand Mexicans out of a job – what’ll you do with them?’ And Arranzo smiled and answered me pat. ‘Do with them?’ he said. ’Why, put guns in their hands and march ‘em down to take Mexico City.’”

In imagination Paula could see Dick’s disgusted shrug of shoulders as she heard him say:

“The curse of it is – that the stuff is there, and that we’re the only fellows that can get it out. The Mexicans can’t do it. They haven’t the brains. All they’ve got is the guns, and they’re making us shell out more than we make. There’s only one thing for us, Jeremy. We’ll forget profits for a year or so, lay off the men, and just keep the engineer force on and the pumping going.”

“I threw that into Arranzo,” Jeremy Braxton’s voice boomed. “And what was his comeback? That if we laid off the peons, he’d see to it that the engineers laid off, too, and the mine could flood and be damned to us. – No, he didn’t say that last. He just smiled, but the smile meant the same thing. For two cents I’d a-wrung his yellow neck, except that there’d have been another patriot in his boots and in my office next day proposing a stiffer gouge.

“So Arranzo got his ‘bit,’ and, on top of it, before he went across to join the main bunch around Juarez, he let his men run off three hundred of our mules – thirty thousand dollars’ worth of mule-flesh right there, after I’d sweetened him, too. The yellow skunk!”

“Who is revolutionary chief in our diggings right now?” Paula heard her husband ask with one of his abrupt shifts that she knew of old time tokened his drawing together the many threads of a situation and proceeding to action.

“Raoul Bena.”

“What’s his rank?”

“Colonel – he’s got about seventy ragamuffins.”

“What did he do before he quit work?”

“Sheep-herder.”

“Very well.” Dick’s utterance was quick and sharp. “You’ve got to play-act. Become a patriot. Hike back as fast as God will let you. Sweeten this Raoul Bena. He’ll see through your play, or he’s no Mexican. Sweeten him and tell him you’ll make him a general – a second Villa.”

“Lord, Lord, yes, but how?” Jeremy Braxton demanded.

“By putting him at the head of an army of five thousand. Lay off the men. Make him make them volunteer. We’re safe, because Huerta is doomed. Tell him you’re a real patriot. Give each man a rifle. We’ll stand that for a last gouge, and it will prove you a patriot. Promise every man his job back when the war is over. Let them and Raoul Bena depart with your blessing. Keep on the pumping force only. And if we cut out profits for a year or so, at the same time we are cutting down losses. And perhaps we won’t have to flood old Harvest after all.”

Paula smiled to herself at Dick’s solution as she stole back down the spiral on her way to the music room. She was depressed, but not by the Harvest Group situation. Ever since her marriage there had always been trouble in the working of the Mexican mines Dick had inherited. Her depression was due to her having missed her morning greeting to him. But this depression vanished at meeting Graham, who had lingered with Ware at the piano and who, at her coming, was evidencing signs of departure.

“Don’t run away,” she urged. “Stay and witness a spectacle of industry that should nerve you up to starting on that book Dick has been telling me about.”

Chapter XVI

On Dick’s face, at lunch, there was no sign of trouble over the Harvest Group; nor could anybody have guessed that Jeremy Braxton’s visit had boded anything less gratifying than a report of unfailing earnings. Although Adolph Weil had gone on the early morning train, which advertised that the business which had brought him had been transacted with Dick at some unheard of hour, Graham discovered a greater company than ever at the table. Besides a Mrs. Tully, who seemed a stout and elderly society matron, and whom Graham could not make out, there were three new men, of whose identity he gleaned a little: a Mr. Gulhuss, State Veterinary; a Mr. Deacon, a portrait painter of evident note on the Coast; and a Captain Lester, then captain of a Pacific Mail liner, who had sailed skipper for Dick nearly twenty years before and who had helped Dick to his navigation.

The meal was at its close, and the superintendent was glancing at his watch, when Dick said:

“Jeremy, I want to show you what I’ve been up to. We’ll go right now. You’ll have time on your way to the train.”

“Let us all go,” Paula suggested, “and make a party of it. I’m dying to see it myself, Dick’s been so obscure about it.”

Sanctioned by Dick’s nod, she was ordering machines and saddle horses the next moment.

“What is it?” Graham queried, when she had finished.

“Oh, one of Dick’s stunts. He’s always after something new. This is an invention. He swears it will revolutionize farming – that is, small farming. I have the general idea of it, but I haven’t seen it set up yet. It was ready a week ago, but there was some delay about a cable or something concerning an adjustment.”

“There’s billions in it… if it works,” Dick smiled over the table. “Billions for the farmers of the world, and perhaps a trifle of royalty for me… if it works.”

“But what is it?” O’Hay asked. “Music in the dairy barns to make the cows give down their milk more placidly?”

“Every farmer his own plowman while sitting on his front porch,” Dick baffled back. “In fact, the labor-eliminating intermediate stage between soil production and sheer laboratory production of food. But wait till you see it. Gulhuss, this is where I kill my own business, if it works, for it will do away with the one horse of every ten-acre farmer between here and Jericho.”

In ranch machines and on saddle animals, the company was taken a mile beyond the dairy center, where a level field was fenced squarely off and contained, as Dick announced, just precisely ten acres.

“Behold,” he said, “the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch.”

In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty feet in height and guyed very low.

From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.

“This is the porch,” Dick said. “Just imagine we’re all that future farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the manless, horseless plowing goes on.”

Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center winding up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by the cable, turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or, rather, an inward trending spiral about the field.

“No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way,” Dick exulted, as the uncanny mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field’s center. “Plow, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize, cultivate, harvest – all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her pie-crust.”