The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London

  The stallion, forcing itself higher out of water, missed, by a shade, from turning over backward as it sank. Glorious animal and glorious rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a second later, the stallion still pawing the air with fore-hoofs the size of dinner plates, the rider still clinging to the sleek, satin– coated muscles. Graham thought, with a gasp, what might have happened had the stallion turned over. A chance blow from any one of those four enormous floundering hoofs could have put out and quenched forever the light and sparkle of that superb, white-bodied, fire-animated woman.

  «Ride his neck!» Dick shouted. «Catch his foretop and get on his neck till he balances out!»

  The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she.

  «Not many women'd tackle that,» Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad, easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained, swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to the anxious cowboy.

  The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest, and saluted.

  «Now you will have to go away,» she called. «This is our hen party, and the stag public is not admitted.»

  Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the lilacs to the road.

  «Who … who was it?» Graham queried.

  «Paula—Mrs. Forrest—the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman.»

  «My breath is quite taken away,» Graham said. «Do your people do such stunts frequently?»

  «First time she ever did that,» Forrest replied. «That was Mountain Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way—tobogganed with him, twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him.»

  «Risked his neck and legs as well as her own,» was Graham's comment.

  «Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs,» Dick smiled. «That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he'd cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula, she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year until I went broke—only she doesn't. She never has accidents.»

  «I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over.»

  «But he didn't,» Dick answered placidly. «That's Paula's luck. She's tough to kill. Why, I've had her under shell-fire where she was actually disappointed because she didn't get hit, or killed, or near– killed. Four batteries opened on us, shrapnel, at mile-range, and we had to cover half a mile of smooth hill-brow for shelter. I really felt I was justified in charging her with holding back. She did admit a 'trifle.' We've been married ten or a dozen years now, and, d'ye know, sometimes it seems to me I don't know her at all, and that nobody knows her, and that she doesn't know herself—just the same way as you and I can look at ourselves in a mirror and wonder who the devil we are anyway. Paula and I have one magic formula: Damn the expense when fun is selling . And it doesn't matter whether the price is in dollars, hide, or life. It's our way and our luck. It works. And, d'ye know, we've never been gouged on the price yet.»

  CHAPTER X

  It was a stag lunch. As Forrest explained, the girls were «hen– partying.»

  «I doubt you'll see a soul of them till four o'clock, when Ernestine, that's one of Paula's sisters, is going to wallop me at tennis—at least so she's threatened and pledged.»

  And Graham sat through the lunch, where only men sat, took his part in the conversation on breeds and breeding, learned much, contributed a mite from his own world-experiences, and was unable to shake from his eyes the persistent image of his hostess, the vision of the rounded and delicate white of her against the dark wet background of the swimming stallion. And all the afternoon, looking over prize Merinos and Berkshire gilts, continually that vision burned up under his eyelids. Even at four, in the tennis court, himself playing against Ernestine, he missed more than one stroke because the image of the flying ball would suddenly be eclipsed by the image of a white marble figure of a woman that strove and clung on the back of a great horse.

  Graham, although an outlander, knew his California, and, while every girl of the swimming suits was gowned for dinner, was not surprised to find no man similarly accoutered. Nor had he made the mistake of so being himself, despite the Big House and the magnificent scale on which it operated.

  Between the first and second gongs, all the guests drifted into the long dining room. Sharp after the second gong, Dick Forrest arrived and precipitated cocktails. And Graham impatiently waited the appearance of the woman who had worried his eyes since noon. He was prepared for all manner of disappointment. Too many gorgeous stripped athletes had he seen slouched into conventional garmenting, to expect too much of the marvelous creature in the white silken swimming suit when it should appear garbed as civilized women garb.

  He caught his breath with an imperceptible gasp when she entered. She paused, naturally, for just the right flash of an instant in the arched doorway, limned against the darkness behind her, the soft glow of the indirect lighting full upon her. Graham's lips gasped apart, and remained apart, his eyes ravished with the beauty and surprise of her he had deemed so small, so fairy-like. Here was no delicate midget of a child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only a small woman can be grand on occasion.

  Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged her, and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit. He noted her shining gold-brown hair piled high; the healthy tinge of her skin that was clean and clear and white; the singing throat, full and round, incomparably set on a healthy chest; and the gown, dull blue, a sort of medieval thing with half-fitting, half-clinging body, with flowing sleeves and trimmings of gold-jeweled bands.

  She smiled an embracing salutation and greeting. Graham recognized it as kin to the one he had seen when she smiled from the back of the stallion. When she started forward, he could not fail to see the inimitable way she carried the cling and weight of her draperies with her knees—round knees, he knew, that he had seen press desperately into the round muscle-pads of Mountain Lad. Graham observed, also, that she neither wore nor needed corseting. Nor could he fail, as she crossed the floor, to see two women: one, the grand lady, the mistress of the Big House; one, the lovely equestrienne statue beneath the dull-blue, golden-trimmed gown, that no gowning could ever make his memory forget.

  She was upon them, among them, and Graham's hand held hers in the formal introduction as he was made welcome to the Big House and all the hacienda in a voice that he knew was a singing voice and that could proceed only from a throat that pillared, such as hers, from a chest deep as hers despite her smallness.

  At table, across the corner from her, he could not help a surreptitious studying of her. While he held his own in the general fun and foolishness, it was his hostess that mostly filled the circle of his eye and the content of his mind.

  It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with. The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the Breeders' Gazette were still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained to ride home in the moon
light. Graham could not remember their names; but he made out that they came from some valley town thirty miles away called Wickenberg, and that they were of the small-town banking, professional, and wealthy-farmer class. They were full of spirits, laughter, and the latest jokes and catches sprung in the latest slang.

  «I see right now,» Graham told Paula, «if your place continues to be the caravanserai which it has been since my arrival, that I might as well give up trying to remember names and people.»

  «I don't blame you,» she laughed concurrence. «But these are neighbors. They drop in any time. Mrs. Watson, there, next to Dick, is of the old land-aristocracy. Her grandfather, Wicken, came across the Sierras in 1846. Wickenberg is named after him. And that pretty dark– eyed girl is her daughter…»

  And while Paula gave him a running sketch of the chance guests, Graham heard scarce half she said, so occupied was he in trying to sense his way to an understanding of her. Naturalness was her keynote, was his first judgment. In not many moments he had decided that her key-note was joy. But he was dissatisfied with both conclusions, and knew he had not put his finger on her. And then it came to him—pride. That was it! It was in her eye, in the poise of her head, in the curling tendrils of her hair, in her sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips, in the very pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every muscle, nerve, and quiver of her—conscious, sentient, stinging pride.

  She might be joyous and natural, boy and woman, fun and frolic; but always the pride was there, vibrant, tense, intrinsic, the basic stuff of which she was builded. She was a woman, frank, outspoken, straight– looking, plastic, democratic; but toy she was not. At times, to him, she seemed to glint an impression of steel—thin, jewel-like steel. She seemed strength in its most delicate terms and fabrics. He fondled the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather, of twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw.

  «All right, Aaron,» they heard Dick Forrest's voice rising, in a lull, from the other end of the table. «Here's something from Phillips Brooks for you to chew on. Brooks said that no man 'has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him, he gives him for mankind.'»

  «So at last you believe in God?» the man, addressed Aaron, genially sneered back. He was a slender, long-faced olive-brunette, with brilliant black eyes and the blackest of long black beards.

  «I'm hanged if I know,» Dick answered. «Anyway, I quoted only figuratively. Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution.»

  «A man doesn't have to be intellectually correct in order to be great,» intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were threadbare and frayed. «And by the same token many men who are most correct in sizing up the universe have been least great.»

  «True for you, Terrence,» Dick applauded.

  «It's a matter of definition,» languidly spoke up an unmistakable Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned fingers. «What shall we mean as great?»

  «Shall we say beauty?» softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of long hair.

  Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward with a fine simulation of intensity.

  «They're off!» she cried. «They're off! Now we'll have the universe settled all over again for the thousandth time. Theodore"—to the youthful poet—"it's a poor start. Get into the running. Ride your father ion and your mother ion, and you'll finish three lengths ahead.»

  A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded into his sensitive shell.

  Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:

  «Now, Aaron. He's not in form. You start it. You know how. Begin: 'As Bergson so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook that…'»

  More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine's conclusion as well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.

  «Our philosophers won't have a chance to-night,» Paula stole in an aside to Graham.

  «Philosophers?» he questioned back. «They didn't come with the

  Wickenberg crowd. Who and what are they? I'm all at sea.»

  «They—» Paula hesitated. «They live here. They call themselves the jungle-birds. They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away, where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full of books—also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such things for him. It's great fun for Dick, and, besides, it saves him time. He's a dreadfully hard worker, you know.»

  «I understand that they… that Dick takes care of them?» Graham asked, the while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes that looked so straight into his.

  As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of bronze—perhaps a trick of the light—in her long, brown lashes. Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled somewhere within that pretty head of hers.

  «Yes,» she was saying. «They have never to worry, as long as they live, over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral, in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them. It's a funny place, as you'll find out until you come to understand us. They… they are appurtenances, and—and hereditaments, and such things. They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us. Once in a while one or another of them drifts away—for a time. Like the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get them back. Terrence, there—Terrence McFane—he's an epicurean anarchist, if you know what that means. He wouldn't kill a flea. He has a pet cat I gave him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas, not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and communes with nature.

  «Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet—the alphabet. He started for Egypt—without a cent, of course—to run the alphabet down in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W. riot for free speech or something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about everything to get him safe home again.

  «And the one with a beard—Aaron Hancock. Like Terrence, he won't work. Aaron's a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and that there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn't be restrained from working. That's why he wears a beard. To shave, he holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from out the Australian bush. It seems he'd been making original researches in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is.»

  «And the poet?» Graham asked, g
lad that she must still talk for a while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played upon her face.

  «Oh, Theo—Theodore Malken, though we call him Leo. He won't work, either. His people are old Californian stock and dreadfully wealthy; but they disowned him and he disowned them when he was fifteen. They say he is lunatic, and he says they are merely maddening. He really writes some remarkable verse… when he does write; but he prefers to dream and live in the jungle with Terrence and Aaron. He was tutoring immigrant Jews in San Francisco, when Terrence and Aaron rescued him, or captured him, I don't know which. He's been with us two years now, and he's actually filling out, despite the facts that Dick is absurdly generous in furnishing supplies and that they'd rather talk and read and dream than cook. The only good meals they get is when they descend upon us, like to-night.»

  «And the Hindoo, there—who's he?»

  «That's Dar Hyal. He's their guest. The three of them invited him up, just as Aaron first invited Terrence, and as Aaron and Terrence invited Leo. Dick says, in time, three more are bound to appear, and then he'll have his Seven Sages of the MadroГ±o Grove. Their jungle camp is in a madroГ±o grove, you know. It's a most beautiful spot, with living springs, a canyon—but I was telling you about Dar Hyal.

  «He's a revolutionist, of sorts. He's dabbled in our universities, studied in France, Italy, Switzerland, is a political refugee from India, and he's hitched his wagon to two stars: one, a new synthetic system of philosophy; the other, rebellion against the tyranny of British rule in India. He advocates individual terrorism and direct mass action. That's why his paper, Kadar, or Badar, or something like that, was suppressed here in California, and why he narrowly escaped being deported; and that's why he's up here just now, devoting himself to formulating his philosophy.