The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London

  «Which means that each farmer with go in him will work nights to make good—I see,» said the Gazette man. «And why not? Hundred– dollar jobs aren't picked up for the asking. The average farmer in the United States doesn't net fifty a month on his own land, especially when his wages of superintendence and of direct personal labor are subtracted. Of course able men will work their heads off to hold to such a proposition, and they'll see to it that every member of the family does the same.»

  «'Tis the one objection I have to this place,» Terrence McFane, who had just joined the group, announced. «Ever one hears but the one thing—work. 'Tis repulsive, the thought of the work, each on his twenty acres, toilin' and moilin', daylight till dark, and after dark— an' for what? A bit of meat, a bit of bread, and, maybe, a bit of jam on the bread. An' to what end? Is meat an' bread an' jam the end of it all, the meaning of life, the goal of existence? Surely the man will die, like a work horse dies, after a life of toil. And what end has been accomplished? Bread an' meat an' jam? Is that it? A full belly and shelter from the cold till one's body drops apart in the dark moldiness of the grave?»

  «But, Terrence, you, too, will die,» Dick Forrest retorted.

  «But, oh, my glorious life of loafing,» came the instant answer. «The hours with the stars and the flowers, under the green trees with the whisperings of breezes in the grass. My books, my thinkers and their thoughts. Beauty, music, all the solaces of all the arts. What? When I fade into the dark I shall have well lived and received my wage for living. But these twenty-acre work-animals of two-legged men of yours! Daylight till dark, toil and moil, sweat on the shirts on the backs of them that dries only to crust, meat and bread in their bellies, roofs that don't leak, a brood of youngsters to live after them, to live the same beast-lives of toil, to fill their bellies with the same meat and bread, to scratch their backs with the same sweaty shirts, and to go into the dark knowing only meat and bread, and, mayhap, a bit of jam.»

  «But somebody must do the work that enables you to loaf,» Mr. Wombold spoke up indignantly.

  «'Tis true, 'tis sad 'tis true,» Terrence replied lugubriously. Then his face beamed. «And I thank the good Lord for it, for the work– beasties that drag and drive the plows up and down the fields, for the bat-eyed miner-beasties that dig the coal and gold, for all the stupid peasant-beasties that keep my hands soft, and give power to fine fellows like Dick there, who smiles on me and shares the loot with me, and buys the latest books for me, and gives me a place at his board that is plenished by the two-legged work-beasties, and a place at his fire that is builded by the same beasties, and a shack and a bed in the jungle under the madroГ±o trees where never work intrudes its monstrous head.»

  Evan Graham was slow in getting ready for bed that night. He was unwontedly stirred both by the Big House and by the Little Lady who was its mistress. As he sat on the edge of the bed, half-undressed, and smoked out a pipe, he kept seeing her in memory, as he had seen her in the flesh the past twelve hours, in her varied moods and guises—the woman who had talked music with him, and who had expounded music to him to his delight; who had enticed the sages into the discussion and abandoned him to arrange the bridge tables for her guests; who had nestled in the big chair as girlish as the two girls with her; who had, with a hint of steel, quelled her husband's obstreperousness when he had threatened to sing Mountain Lad's song; who, unafraid, had bestridden the half-drowning stallion in the swimming tank; and who, a few hours later, had dreamed into the dining room, distinctive in dress and person, to meet her many guests.

  The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties, competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of his imagination. Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two– legged work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest's board and under Dick Forrest's madroГ±o trees.

  Graham knocked out his pipe, took a final sweeping survey of the strange room which was the last word in comfort, pressed off the lights, and found himself between cool sheets in the wakeful dark. Again he heard Paula Forrest laugh; again he sensed her in terms of silver and steel and strength; again, against the dark, he saw that inimitable knee-lift of her gown. The bright vision of it was almost an irk to him, so impossible was it for him to shake it from his eyes. Ever it returned and burned before him, a moving image of light and color that he knew to be subjective but that continually asserted the illusion of reality.

  He saw stallion and rider sink beneath the water, and rise again, a flurry of foam and floundering of hoofs, and a woman's face that laughed while she drowned her hair in the drowning mane of the beast. And the first ringing bars of the Prelude sounded in his ears as again he saw the same hands that had guided the stallion lift the piano to all Rachmaninoff's pure splendor of sound.

  And when Graham finally fell asleep, it was in the thick of marveling over the processes of evolution that could produce from primeval mire and dust the glowing, glorious flesh and spirit of woman.

  CHAPTER XII

  The next morning Graham learned further the ways of the Big House. Oh My had partly initiated him in particular things the preceding day and had learned that, after the waking cup of coffee, he preferred to breakfast at table, rather than in bed. Also, Oh My had warned him that breakfast at table was an irregular affair, anywhere between seven and nine, and that the breakfasters merely drifted in at their convenience. If he wanted a horse, or if he wanted a swim or a motor car, or any ranch medium or utility he desired, Oh My informed him, all he had to do was to call for it.

  Arriving in the breakfast room at half past seven, Graham found himself just in time to say good-by to the Gazette man and the Idaho buyer, who, finishing, were just ready to catch the ranch machine that connected at Eldorado with the morning train for San Francisco. He sat alone, being perfectly invited by a perfect Chinese servant to order as he pleased, and found himself served with his first desire—an ice-cold, sherried grapefruit, which, the table-boy proudly informed him, was «grown on the ranch.» Declining variously suggested breakfast foods, mushes, and porridges, Graham had just ordered his soft-boiled eggs and bacon, when Bert Wainwright drifted in with a casualness that Graham recognized as histrionic, when, five minutes later, in boudoir cap and delectable negligee, Ernestine Desten drifted in and expressed surprise at finding such a multitude of early risers.

  Later, as the three of them were rising from table, they greeted Lute Desten and Rita Wainwright arriving. Over the billiard table with Bert, Graham learned that Dick Forrest never appeared for breakfast, that he worked in bed from terribly wee small hours, had coffee at six, and only on unusual occasions appeared to his guests before the twelve-thirty lunch. As for Paula Forrest, Bert explained, she was a poor sleeper, a late riser, lived behind a door without a knob in a spacious wing with a rare and secret patio that even he had seen but once, and only on infrequent occasion was she known to appear before twelve-thirty, and often not then.

  «You see, she's healthy and strong and all that,» he explained, «but she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn't sleep as a little baby even. But it's never hurt her any, because she's got a will, and won't let it get on her nerves. She's just about as tense as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can't sleep, she just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her `white nights,' when she gets them. Maybe she'll fall asleep at daybreak, or at nine or ten in the morning; and then she'll sleep the rest of the clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please.»

  «It's constitutional, I fancy,» Graham suggested.

  Bert nodded.

  «It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can't sleep one time—she should worry—she just sleeps some other time and makes it
up.»

  More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.

  «I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn't get if she went after it,» he confided. «Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition of servitude—it's all one when she gets on the high and mighty. And I don't see how she does it. Maybe it's just a kind of light that comes into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don't know what—anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake about it.»

  «She has a … a way with her,» Graham volunteered.

  «That's it!» Bert's face beamed. «It's a way she has. She just puts it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night— excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded or when the ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her—the English game. She'll go some.»

  A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack, and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and way, come in upon them through the open door.

  Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

  He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his hostess did not appear.

  «A white night,» Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional inaptitude for normal sleep. «Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I've seen her go three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of exhaustion. That was when the All Away went ashore in the Carolines and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn't the danger, for there wasn't any. It was the noise. Also, it was the excitement. She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over, I actually saw her asleep for the first time in my life.»

  A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he was a violinist of note on the Pacific Coast.

  «He has conceived a grand passion for Paula,» Ernestine told Graham as they passed out from the dining room.

  Graham raised his eyebrows.

  «Oh, but she doesn't mind,» Ernestine laughed. «Every man that comes along does the same thing. She's used to it. She has just a charming way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the best out of them in consequence. It's lots of fun to Dick. You'll be doing the same before you're here a week. If you don't, we'll all be surprised mightily. And if you don't, most likely you'll hurt Dick's feelings. He's come to expect it as a matter of course. And when a fond, proud husband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to see his wife not appreciated.»

  «Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must,» Graham sighed. «But just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because everybody does it. But if it's the custom—well, it's the custom, that's all. But it's mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls around.»

  There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and flushed.

  «Little Leo—the boy poet you remember last night,» she rattled on in a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. «He's madly in love with Paula, too. I've heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some sonnet cycle, and it isn't difficult to guess the inspiration. And Terrence—the Irishman, you know—he's mildly in love with her. They can't help it, you see; and can you blame them?»

  «She surely deserves it all,» Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. «She is most deserving of all men's admiration,» he continued smoothly. «From the little I've seen of her she's quite remarkable and most charming.»

  «She's my half-sister,» Ernestine vouchsafed, «although you wouldn't dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different. She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew— though she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know—»

  «Pussy, pussy,» Graham whispered.

  The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.

  «Cat,» he censured in mock reproof.

  «Oh!» she cried. «I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula's age. She tells it herself. I'm eighteen—so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?»

  «As old as Dick,» he replied promptly.

  «And he's forty,» she laughed triumphantly. «Are you coming swimming? —the water will be dreadfully cold.»

  Graham shook his head. «I'm going riding with Dick.»

  Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.

  «Oh,» she protested, «some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing.»

  «But he said something about swimming at five.»

  Her face brightened joyously.

  «Then we'll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said swimming at five.»

  As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:

  «Oh, Mr. Graham.»

  He turned obediently.

  «You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It was just my way of putting it.»

  «I shall be very, very careful,» he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.

  Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.

  As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone. Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double– reined and single-bitted.

  «I don't know her plans,» he said. «She hasn't shown up yet, but at any rate she'll be swimming later. We'll meet her then.»

  Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he found himself glancing at his wrist-watch to ascertain how far away five o'clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man's selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky-a
spiring.

  «I've really worked to make the American Merino,» Dick was saying; «to give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much hand-reared and manicured.»

  «You're doing things, big things,» Graham assured him. «Think of shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself.»

  Dick Forrest's eyes were sparkling, as he replied:

  «Better than Idaho. Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia. Twelve years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting squatter. After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me. Australia will never be the worse for my having been. Down there they say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest's rams have tripled the wool and mutton production.»

  Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by wooded canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling Shires that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures and feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills. There were nearly two hundred of them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for their age.

  «We don't exactly crowd them,» Dick Forrest explained, «but Mr. Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the time they are foaled. Up there in the hills, where they are going, they'll balance their grass with grain. This makes them assemble every night at the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of them with a minimum of effort. I've shipped fifty stallions, two-year– olds, every year for the past five years, to Oregon alone. They're sort of standardized, you know. The people up there know what they're getting. They know my standard so well that they'll buy unsight and unseen.»