by Jack London
their good-night kisses had never tingled, while this one tingled
in her brain as wall as on her lip. What was it? What did it
mean? With a sudden impulse she looked at herself in the glass.
The eyes were happy and bright. The color that tinted her cheeks
so easily was in them and glowing. It was a pretty reflection,
and she smiled, partly in joy, partly in appreciation, and the
smile grew at sight of the even rows of strong white teeth. Why
shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men
had liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls
admitted she was a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it
from the way he made life miserable for her.
She glanced aside to the rim of the looking-glass where his
photograph was wedged, shuddered, and made a moue of distaste.
There was cruelty in those eyes, and brutishness. He was a brute.
For a year, now, he had bullied her. Other fellows were afraid to
go with her. He warned them off. She had been forced into almost
slavery to his attentions. She remembered the young bookkeeper at
the laundry--not a workingman, but a soft-handed, soft-voiced
gentleman--whom Charley had beaten up at the corner because he
had been bold enough to come to take her to the theater. And she
had been helpless. For his own sake she had never dared accept
another invitation to go out with him.
And now, Wednesday night, she was going with Billy. Billy! Her
heart leaped. There would be trouble, but Billy would save her
from him. She'd like to see him try and beat Billy up.
With a quick movement, she jerked the photograph from its niche
and threw it face down upon the chest of drawers. It fell beside
a small square case of dark and tarnished leather. With a feeling
as of profanation she again seized the offending photograph and
flung it across the room into a corner. At the same time she
picked up the leather case. Springing it open, she gazed at the
daguerreotype of a worn little woman with steady gray eyes and a
hopeful, pathetic mouth. Opposite, on the velvet lining, done in
gold lettering, was, CARLTON FROM DAISY. She read it reverently,
for it represented the father she had never known, and the mother
she had so little known, though she could never forget that those
wise sad eyes were gray.
Despite lack of conventional religion, Saxon's nature was deeply
religious. Her thoughts of God were vague and nebulous, and there
she was frankly puzzled. She could not vision God. Here, in the
daguerreotype, was the concrete; much she had grasped from it,
and always there seemed an infinite more to grasp. She did not go
to church. This was her high altar and holy of holies. She came
to it in trouble, in loneliness, for counsel, divination, end
comfort. In so far as she found herself different from the girls
of her acquaintance, she quested here to try to identify her
characteristics in the pictured face. Her mother had been
different from other women, too. This, forsooth, meant to her
what God meant to others. To this she strove to be true, and not
to hurt nor vex. And how little she really knew of her mother,
and of how much was conjecture and surmise, she was unaware; for
it was through many years she had erected this mother-myth.
Yet was it all myth? She resented the doubt with quick jealousy,
and, opening the bottom drawer of the chest, drew forth a
battered portfolio. Out rolled manuscripts, faded and worn, and
arose a faint far scent of sweet-kept age. The writing was
delicate and curled, with the quaint fineness of half a century
before. She read a stanza to herself:
"Sweet as a wind-lute's airy strains
Your gentle muse has learned to sing,
And California's boundless plains
Prolong the soft notes echoing."
She wondered, for the thousandth time, what a windlute was; yet
much of beauty, much of beyondness, she sensed of this dimly
remembered beautiful mother of hers. She communed a while, then
unrolled a second manuscript. "To C. B.," it read. To Carlton
Brown, she knew, to her father, a love-poem from her mother.
Saxon pondered the opening lines:
"I have stolen away from the crowd in the groves,
Where the nude statues stand, and the leaves point and shiver
At ivy-crowned Bacchus, the Queen of the Loves,
Pandora and Psyche, struck voiceless forever."
This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it.
Bacchus, and Pandora and Psyche--talismans to conjure with! But
alas! the necromancy was her mother's. Strange, meaningless words
that meant so much! Her marvelous mother had known their meaning.
Saxon spelled the three words aloud, letter by letter, for she
did not dare their pronunciation; and in her consciousness
glimmered august connotations, profound and unthinkable. Her mind
stumbled and halted on the star-bright and dazzling boundaries of
a world beyond her world in which her mother had roamed at will.
Again and again, solemnly, she went over the four lines. They
were radiance and light to the world, haunted with phantoms of
pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden among
those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only
grasp it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely
confident. She would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy
brother, the cruelty of Charley Long, the justness of the
bookkeeper's beating, the day-long, month-long, year-long toil at
the ironing-board.
She skipped a stanza that she knew was hopelessly beyond her, and
tried again:
"The dusk of the greenhouse is luminous yet
With quivers of opal and tremors of gold;
For the sun is at rest, and the light from the west,
Like delicate wine that is mellow and old,
"Flushes faintly the brow of a naiad that stands
In the spray of a fountain, whose seed-amethysts
Tremble lightly a moment on bosom and hands,
Then dip in their basin from bosom and wrists."
"It's beautiful, just beautiful," she sighed. And then, appalled
at the length of all the poem, at the volume of the mystery, she
rolled the manuscript and put it away. Again she dipped in the
drawer, seeking the clue among the cherished fragments of her
mother's hidden soul.
This time it was a small package, wrapped in tissue paper and
tied with ribbon. She opened it carefully, with the deep gravity
and circumstance of a priest before an altar. Appeared a little
red-satin Spanish girdle, whale-boned like a tiny corset,
pointed, the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed
the plains. It was hand-made after the California-Spanish model
of forgotten days. The very whalebone had been home-shaped of the
raw material from the whaleships traded for in hides and tallow.
The black lace trimming her mother had made. The triple edging of
black velvet strips--her mother's hands had sewn the stitches.
Saxon dreamed over it in a maze of incoherent thought. This was
co
ncrete. This she understood. This she worshiped as man-created
gods have been worshiped on less tangible evidence of their
sojourn on earth.
Twenty-two inches it measured around. She knew it out of many
verifications. She stood up and put it about her waist. This was
part of the ritual. It almost met. In places it did meet. Without
her dress it would meet everywhere as it had met on her mother.
Closest of all, this survival of old California-Ventura days
brought Saxon in touch. Hers was her mother's form. Physically,
she was like her mother. Her grit, her ability to turn off work
that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's. Just so
had her mother been an amazement to her generation--her mother,
the toy-like creature, the smallest and the youngest of the
strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered the brood.
Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the
brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior. Daisy, it was, who
had put her tiny foot down and commanded the removal from the
fever flatlands of Colusa to the healthy mountains of Ventura;
who had backed the savage old Indian-fighter of a father into a
corner and fought the entire family that Vila might marry the man
of her choice; who had flown in the face of the family and of
community morality and demanded the divorce of Laura from her
criminally weak husband; and who on the other hand, had held the
branches of the family together when only misunderstanding and
weak humanness threatened to drive them apart.
The peacemaker and the warrior! All the old tales trooped before
Saxon's eyes. They were sharp with detail, for she had visioned
them many times, though their content was of things she had never
seen. So far as details were concerned, they were her own
creation, for she had never seen an ox, a wild Indian, nor a
prairie schooner. Yet, palpitating and real, shimmering in the
sun-flashed dust of ten thousand hoofs, she saw pass, from East
to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry
Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on
its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken
part. Clearly she saw the long wagon-train, the lean, gaunt men
who walked before, the youths goading the lowing oxen that fell
and were goaded to their feet to fall again. And through it all,
a flying shuttle, weaving the golden dazzling thread of
personality, moved the form of her little, indomitable mother,
eight years old, and nine ere the great traverse was ended, a
necromancer and a law-giver, willing her way, and the way and the
willing always good and right.
Saxon saw Punch, the little, rough-coated Skye-terrier with the
honest eyes (who had plodded for weary months), gone lame and
abandoned; she saw Daisy, the chit of a child, hide Punch in the
wagon. She saw the savage old worried father discover the added
burden of the several pounds to the dying oxen. She saw his
wrath, as he held Punch by the scruff of the neck. And she saw
Daisy, between the muzzle of the long-barreled rifle and the
little dog. And she saw Daisy thereafter, through days of alkali
and heat, walking, stumbling, in the dust of the wagons, the
little sick dog, like a baby, in her arms.
But most vivid of all, Saxon saw the fight at Little Meadow--and
Daisy, dressed as for a gala day, in white, a ribbon sash about
her waist, ribbons and a round-comb in her hair, in her hands
small water-pails, step forth into the sunshine on the
flower-grown open ground from the wagon circle, wheels
interlocked, where the wounded screamed their delirium and
babbled of flowing fountains, and go on, through the sunshine and
the wonder-inhibition of the bullet-dealing Indians, a hundred
yards to the waterhole and back again.
Saxon kissed the little, red satin Spanish girdle passionately,
and wrapped it up in haste, with dewy eyes, abandoning the
mystery and godhead of mother and all the strange enigma of
living.
In bed, she projected against her closed eyelids the few rich
scenes of her mother that her child-memory retained. It was her
favorite way of wooing sleep. She had done it all her life--sunk
into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the
last on her fading consciousness. But this mother was not the
Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype. They had been
before Saxon's time. This that she saw nightly was an older
mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept,
always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering,
dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining
from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and whom
not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep.
Crept--always she crept, about the house, from weary bed to weary
chair and back again through long days and weeks of torment,
never complaining, though her unfailing smile was twisted with
pain, and the wise gray eyes, still wise and gray, were grown
unutterably larger and profoundly deep.
But on this night Saxon did not win to sleep quickly; the little
creeping mother came and went; and in the intervals the face of
Billy, with the cloud-drifted, sullen, handsome eyes, burned
against her eyelids. And once again, as sleep welled up to
smother her, she put to herself the question IS THIS THE MAN?
CHAPTER VII
Tun work in the ironing-room slipped off, but the three days
until Wednesday night were very long. She hummed over the fancy
starch that flew under the iron at an astounding rate.
"I can't see how you do it," Mary admired. "You'll make thirteen
or fourteen this week at that rate."
Saxon laughed, and in the steam from the iron she saw dancing
golden letters that spelled WEDNESDAY.
"What do you think of Billy?" Mary asked.
"I like him," was the frank answer.
"Well, don't let it go farther than that."
"I will if I want to," Saxon retorted gaily.
"Better not," came the warning. "You'll only make trouble for
yourself. He ain't marryin'. Many a girl's found that out. They
just throw themselves at his head, too."
"I'm not going to throw myself at him, or any other man."
"Just thought I'd tell you," Mary concluded. "A word to the
wise."
Saxon had become grave.
"He's not . . . not . . ." she began, than looked the
significance of the question she could not complete.
"Oh, nothin' like that--though there's nothin' to stop him. He's
straight, all right, all right. But he just won't fall for
anything in skirts. He dances, an' runs around, an' has a good
time, an' beyond that--nitsky. A lot of 'em's got fooled on him.
I bet you there's a dozen girls in love with him right now. An'
he just goes on turnin' 'em down. There was Lily Sanderson--you
know her. You seen her at that Slavonic picnic last summer at
Shellmound--that tall, nice-lookin' blonde that was with Butch<
br />
Willows?"
"Yes, I remember her," Saxon sald. "What about her?"
"Well, she'd been runnin' with Butch Willows pretty steady, an'
just because she could dance, Billy dances a lot with her. Butch
ain't afraid of nothin'. He wades right in for a showdown, an'
nails Billy outside, before everybody, an' reads the riot act.
An' Billy listens in that slow, sleepy way of his, an' Butch gets
hotter an' hotter, an' everybody expects a scrap.
"An' then Billy says to Butch, 'Are you done?' 'Yes,' Butch says;
'I've said my say, an' what are you goin' to do about it?' An'
Billy says--an' what d'ye think he said, with everybody lookin'
on an' Butch with blood in his eye? Well, he said, 'I guess
nothin', Butch.' Just like that. Butch was that surprised you
could knocked him over with a feather. 'An' never dance with her
no more?' he says. 'Not if you say I can't, Butch,' Billy says.
Just like that.
"Well, you know, any other man to take water the way he did from
Butch--why, everybody'd despise him. But not Billy. You see, he
can afford to. He's got a rep as a fighter, an' when he just
stood back 'an' let Butch have his way, everybody knew he wasn't
scared, or backin' down, or anything. He didn't care a rap for
Lily Sanderson, that was all, an' anybody could see she was just
crazy after him."
The telling of this episode caused Saxon no little worry. Hers
was the average woman's pride, but in the matter of
man-conquering prowess she was not unduly conceited. Billy had
enjoyed her dancing, and she wondered if that were all. If
Charley Long bullied up to him would he let her go as he had let
Lily Sanderson go? He was not a marrying man; nor could Saxon
blind her eyes to the fact that he was eminently marriageable. No
wonder the girls ran after him. And he was a man-subduer as well
as a woman-subduer. Men liked him. Bert Wanhope seemed actually
to love him. She remembered the Butchertown tough in the
dining-room at Weasel Park who had come over to the table to
apologize, and the Irishman at the tug-of-war who had abandoned
all thought of fighting with him the moment he learned his
identity.
A very much spoiled young man was a thought that flitted
frequently through Saxon's mind; and each time she condemned it
as ungenerous. He was gentle in that tantalizing slow way of his.
Despite his strength, he did not walk rough-shod over others.
There was the affair with Lily Sanderson. Saxon analysed it again
and again. He had not cared for the girl, and he had immediately
stepped from between her and Butch. It was just the thing that
Bert, out of sheer wickedness and love of trouble, would not have
done. There would have been a fight, hard feelings, Butch turned
into an enemy, and nothing profited to Lily. But Billy had done
the right thing--done it slowly and imperturbably and with the
least hurt to everybody. All of which made him more desirable to
Saxon and less possible.
She bought another pair of silk stockings that she had hesitated
at for weeks, and on Tuesday night sewed and drowsed wearily over
a new shirtwaist and earned complaint from Sarah concerning her
extravagant use of gas.
Wednesday night, at the Orindore dance, was not all undiluted
pleasure. It was shameless the way the girls made up to Billy,
and, at times, Saxon found his easy consideration for them almost
irritating. Yet she was compelled to acknowledge to herself that
he hurt none of the other fellows' feelings in the way the girls
hurt hers. They all but asked him outright to dance with them,
and little of their open pursuit of him escaped her eyes. She
resolved that she would not be guilty of throwing herself at him,
and withheld dance after dance, and yet was secretly and
thrillingly aware that she was pursuing the right tactics. She
deliberately demonstrated that she was desirable to other men, as
he involuntarily demonstrated his own desirableness to the women.
Her happiness came when he coolly overrode her objections and
