The Little Lady of the Big House
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“Good morning, Mr. Hennessy, and how soon will she be ready for Mrs. Forrest?” Dick Forrest asked.
“I’d like another week,” was Hennessy’s answer. “She’s well broke now, just the way Mrs. Forrest wanted, but she’s over-strung and sensitive and I’d like the week more to set her in her ways.”
Forrest nodded concurrence, and Hennessy, who was the veterinary, went on:
“There are two drivers in the alfalfa gang I’d like to send down the hill.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
“One, a new man, Hopkins, is an ex-soldier. He may know government mules, but he doesn’t know Shires.”
Forrest nodded.
“The other has worked for us two years, but he’s drinking now, and he takes his hang-overs out on his horses – ”
“That’s Smith, old-type American, smooth-shaven, with a cast in his left eye?” Forrest interrupted.
The veterinary nodded.
“I’ve been watching him,” Forrest concluded. “He was a good man at first, but he’s slipped a cog recently. Sure, send him down the hill. And send that other fellow – Hopkins, you said? – along with him. By the way, Mr. Hennessy.” As he spoke, Forrest drew forth his pad book, tore off the last note scribbled, and crumpled it in his hand. “You’ve a new horse-shoer in the shop. How does he strike you?”
“He’s too new to make up my mind yet.”
“Well, send him down the hill along with the other two. He can’t take your orders. I observed him just now fitting a shoe to old Alden Bessie by rasping off half an inch of the toe of her hoof.”
“He knew better.”
“Send him down the hill,” Forrest repeated, as he tickled his champing mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out along the road, sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.
Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, “A fat land, a fat land.” Divers things he saw that did not please him and that won a note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about the Big House and riding beyond the circle half a mile to an isolated group of sheds and corrals, he reached the objective of the ride: the hospital. Here he found but two young heifers being tested for tuberculosis, and a magnificent Duroc Jersey boar in magnificent condition. Weighing fully six hundred pounds, its bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of hair shouted out that there was nothing the matter with it. Nevertheless, according to the ranch practice, being a fresh importation from Iowa, it was undergoing the regular period of quarantine. Burgess Premier was its name in the herd books of the association, age two years, and it had cost Forrest five hundred dollars laid down on the ranch.
Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the spokes radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin, his hog manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the next few months of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the brood sow, Lady Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I. C.’s and blue-ribboner in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was safely farrowed of eleven. Crellin explained that he had sat up half the night with her and was then bound home for bath and breakfast.
“I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants to enter Stanford,” Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had half-signaled departure at a gallop.
Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a long-time father stamped upon him along with the marks of college and the youthfulness of a man used to the open air and straight-living, showed his appreciation of his employer’s interest as he half-flushed under his tan and nodded.
“Think it over,” Forrest advised. “Make a statistic of all the college girls – yes, and State Normal girls – you know. How many of them follow career, and how many of them marry within two years after their degrees and take to baby farming.”
“Helen is very seriously bent on the matter,” Crellin urged.
“Do you remember when I had my appendix out?” Forrest queried. “Well, I had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as ever walked on two nice legs. She was just six months a full-fledged nurse, then. And four months after that I had to send her a wedding present. She married an automobile agent. She’s lived in hotels ever since. She’s never had a chance to nurse – never a child of her own to bring through a bout with colic. But… she has hopes… and, whether or not her hopes materialize, she’s confoundedly happy. But… what good was her nursing apprenticeship?”
Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on foot, and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the road. Forrest glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the machine, a huge, symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the blue ribbons of her progeny, would have required an expert accountant to enumerate and classify.
“Look at the Fotherington Princess,” Forrest said, nodding at the mare that warmed his eye. “She is a normal female. Only incidentally, through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our own human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of woman to-day for suffrage and career.”
“But there is an economic sanction,” Crellin objected.
“True,” his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. “Our present industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to career. But, remember, industrial systems come, and industrial systems go, while biology runs on forever.”
“It’s rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these days,” the hog-manager demurred.
Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “There’s your wife for an instance. She with her sheepskin – classical scholar at that – well, what has she done with it?.. Two boys and three girls, I believe? As I remember your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole last half of her senior year.”
“True, but – ” Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of appreciation of the point, “that was fifteen years ago, as well as a love-match. We just couldn’t help it. That far, I agree. She had planned unheard-of achievements, while I saw nothing else than the deanship of the College of Agriculture. We just couldn’t help it. But that was fifteen years ago, and fifteen years have made all the difference in the world in the ambitions and ideals of our young women.”
“Don’t you believe it for a moment. I tell you, Mr. Crellin, it’s a statistic. All contrary things are transient. Ever woman remains Avoman, everlasting, eternal. Not until our girl-children cease from playing with dolls and from looking at their own enticingness in mirrors, will woman ever be otherwise than what she has always been: first, the mother, second, the mate of man. It is a statistic. I’ve been looking up the girls who graduate from the State Normal. You will notice that those who marry by the way before graduation are excluded. Nevertheless, the average length of time the graduates actually teach school is little more than two years. And when you consider that a lot of them, through ill looks and ill luck, are foredoomed old maids and are foredoomed to teach all their lives, you can see how they cut down the period of teaching of the marriageable ones.”
“A woman, even a girl-woman, will have her way where mere men are concerned,” Crellin muttered, unable to dispute his employer’s figures but resolved to look them up.
“And your girl-woman will go to Stanford,” Forrest laughed, as he prepared to lift his mare into a gallop, “and you and I and all men, to the end of time, will see to it that they do have their way.”
Crellin smiled to himself as his employer diminished down the road; for Crellin knew his Kipling, and the thought that caused the smile was: “But where’s the kid of your own, Mr. Forrest?” He decided to repeat it to Mrs. Crellin over the breakfast coffee.
Once again Dick Forrest delayed ere he gained the Big House. The man he stopped he addressed as Mendenhall, who was his horse-manager as well as pasture expert, and who was reputed to know, not only every blade of grass on the ranch, but the length of every blade of grass and its age from seed-germination as well.
At signal from Forrest, Mendenhall drew up the two colts he was driving in a double breaking-cart. What had caused Forrest to signal was a glance he had caught, across the northern edge of the valley, of great, smooth-hill ranges miles beyond, touched by the sun and deeply green where they projected into the vast flat of the Sacramento Valley.
The talk that followed was quick and abbreviated to terms of understanding between two men who knew. Grass was the subject. Mention was made of the winter rainfall and of the chance for late spring rains to come. Names occurred, such as the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, the Yolo and the Miramar hills, the Big Basin, Round Valley, and the San Anselmo and Los Banos ranges. Movements of herds and droves, past, present, and to come, were discussed, as well as the outlook for cultivated hay in far upland pastures and the estimates of such hay that still remained over the winter in remote barns in the sheltered mountain valleys where herds had wintered and been fed.
Under the oaks, at the stamping posts, Forrest was saved the trouble of tying the Man-Eater. A stableman came on the run to take the mare, and Forrest, scarce pausing for a word about a horse by the name of Duddy, was clanking his spurs into the Big House.
Chapter III
Forrest entered a section of the Big House by way of a massive, hewn-timber, iron-studded door that let in at the foot of what seemed a donjon keep. The floor was cement, and doors let off in various directions. One, opening to a Chinese in the white apron and starched cap of a chef, emitted at the same time the low hum of a dynamo. It was this that deflected Forrest from his straight path. He paused, holding the door ajar, and peered into a cool, electric-lighted cement room where stood a long, glass-fronted, glass-shelved refrigerator flanked by an ice-machine and a dynamo. On the floor, in greasy overalls, squatted a greasy little man to whom his employer nodded.
“Anything wrong, Thompson?” he asked.
“There was," was the answer, positive and complete.
Forrest closed the door and went on along a passage that was like a tunnel. Narrow, iron-barred openings, like the slits for archers in medieval castles, dimly lighted the way. Another door gave access to a long, low room, beam-ceilinged, with a fireplace in which an ox could have been roasted. A huge stump, resting on a bed of coals, blazed brightly. Two billiard tables, several card tables, lounging corners, and a miniature bar constituted the major furnishing. Two young men chalked their cues and returned Forrest’s greeting.
“Good morning, Mr. Naismith,” he bantered. “ – More material for the Breeders’ Gazette?"
Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly and cocked his head at his companion.
“Wainwright challenged me,” he explained.
“Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping,” Forrest laughed.
Young Wainwright bristled to acceptance of the challenge, but before he could utter the retort on his lips his host was moving on and addressing Naismith over his shoulder.
“Do you want to come along at eleven: thirty? Thayer and I are running out in the machine to look over the Shropshires. He wants about ten carloads of rams. You ought to find good stuff in this matter of Idaho shipments. Bring your camera along. – Seen Thayer this morning?”
“Just came in to breakfast as we were leaving,” Bert Wainwright volunteered.
“Tell him to be ready at eleven-thirty if you see him. You’re not invited, Bert… out of kindness. The girls are sure to be up then.”
“Take Rita along with you anyway,” Bert pleaded.
“No fear,” was Forrest’s reply from the door. “We’re on business. Besides, you can’t pry Rita from Ernestine with block-and-tackle.”
“That’s why I wanted to see if you could,” Bert grinned.
“Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters.” Forrest paused for a perceptible moment. “I always thought Rita was a real nice sister. What’s the matter with her?”
Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each other’s arms, were parodying a dance never learned at dancing school nor intended by the participants for male eyes to see.
The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries, collapsed, laughing, in each other’s arms, and the music stopped. They were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and Forrest’s eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.
Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human kind, flew back and forth.
“I’ve been here five minutes,” Dick Forrest asserted.
The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The girl at the piano, Ernestine, his sister-in-law, insisted that pearls of truth fell from his lips, that she had seen him from the moment he began to look, and that as she estimated the passage of time he had been looking much longer than five minutes.
“Well, anyway,” Forrest broke in on their babel, “Bert, the sweet innocent, doesn’t think you are up yet.”
“We’re not… to him,” one of the dancers, a vivacious young Venus, retorted. “Nor are we to you either. So run along, little boy. Run along.”
“Look here, Lute,” Forrest began sternly. “Just because I am a decrepit old man, and just because you are eighteen, just eighteen, and happen to be my wife’s sister, you needn’t presume to put the high and mighty over on me. Don’t forget – and I state the fact, disagreeable as it may be, for Rita’s sake – don’t forget that in the past ten years I’ve paddled you more disgraceful times than you care to dare me to enumerate.
“It is true, I am not so young as I used to was, but – ” He felt the biceps of his right arm and made as if to roll up the sleeve. “ – But, I’m not all in yet, and for two cents…”
“What?” the young woman challenged belligerently.
“For two cents,” he muttered darkly. “For two cents… Besides, and it grieves me to inform you, your cap is not on straight. Also, it is not a very tasteful creation at best. I could make a far more becoming cap with my toes, asleep, and… yes, seasick as well.”
Lute tossed her blond head defiantly, glanced at her comrades in solicitation of support, and said:
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems humanly reasonable that the three of us can woman-handle a mere man of your elderly and insulting avoirdupois. What do you say, girls? Let’s rush him. He’s not a minute under forty, and he has an aneurism. Yes, and though loath to divulge family secrets, he’s got Meniere’s Disease.”
Ernestine, a small but robust blonde of eighteen, sprang from the piano and joined her two comrades in a raid on the cushions of the deep window seats. Side by side, a cushion in each hand, and with proper distance between them cannily established for the swinging of the cushions, they advanced upon the foe.
Forrest prepared for battle, then held up his hand for parley.
“’Fraid cat!” they taunted, in several at first, and then in chorus.
He shook his head emphatically.
“Just for that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising now in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a moment. But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address myself to you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven’s name what is Meniere’s Disease? Do sheep catch it?”
“Meniere’s Disease is,” Lute began… “is what you’ve got. Sheep are the only known living creatures that get it.”
Ensued red war and chaos. Forrest made a football rush of the sort that obtained in California before the adoption of Rugby; and the girls broke the line to let him through, turned upon him, flanked him on either side, and pounded him with cushions.
He turned, with widespread arms, extended fingers, each finger a hook, and grappled the three. The battle became a whirlwind, a be-spurred man the center, from which radiated flying draperies of flimsy silk, disconnected slippers, boudoir caps, and hairpins. There were thuds from the cushions, grunts from the man, squeals, yelps and giggles from the girls, and from the totality of the combat inextinguishable laughter and a ripping and tearing of fragile textures.
Dick Forrest found himself sprawled on the floor, the wind half knocked out of him by shrewdly delivered cushions, his head buzzing from the buffeting, and, in one hand, a trailing, torn, and generally disrupted girdle of pale blue silk and pink roses.
In one doorway, cheeks flaming from the struggle, stood Rita, alert as a fawn and ready to flee. In the other doorway, likewise flame-checked, stood Ernestine in the commanding attitude of the Mother of the Gracchi, the wreckage of her kimono wrapped severely about her and held severely about her by her own waist-pressing arm. Lute, cornered behind the piano, attempted to run but was driven back by the menace of Forrest, who, on hands and knees, stamped loudly with the palms of his hands on the hardwood floor, rolled his head savagely, and emitted bull-like roars.
“And they still believe that old prehistoric myth,” Ernestine proclaimed from safety, “that once he, that wretched semblance of a man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory over Stanford.”
Her breasts heaved from the exertion, and he marked the pulsating of the shimmering cherry-colored silk with delight as he flung his glance around to the other two girls similarly breathing.
The piano was a miniature grand – a dainty thing of rich white and gold to match the morning room. It stood out from the wall, so that there was possibility for Lute to escape around either way of it. Forrest gained his feet and faced her across the broad, flat top of the instrument. As he threatened to vault it, Lute cried out in horror:
“But your spurs, Dick! Your spurs!”
“Give me time to take them off,” he offered.
As he stooped to unbuckle them, Lute darted to escape, but was herded back to the shelter of the piano.
“All right,” he growled. “On your head be it. If the piano’s scratched I’ll tell Paula.”
“I’ve got witnesses,” she panted, indicating with her blue joyous eyes the young things in the doorways.
“Very well, my dear.” Forrest drew back his body and spread his resting palms. “I’m coming over to you.”
Action and speech were simultaneous. His body, posited sidewise from his hands, was vaulted across, the perilous spurs a full foot above the glossy white surface. And simultaneously Lute ducked and went under the piano on hands and knees. Her mischance lay in that she bumped her head, and, before she could recover way, Forrest had circled the piano and cornered her under it.
“Come out!” he commanded. “Come out and take your medicine!”
“A truce,” she pleaded. “A truce, Sir Knight, for dear love’s sake and all damsels in distress.”
“I ain’t no knight,” Forrest announced in his deepest bass. “I’m an ogre, a filthy, debased and altogether unregenerate ogre. I was born in the tule-swamps. My father was an ogre and my mother was more so. I was lulled to slumber on the squalls of infants dead, foreordained, and predamned. I was nourished solely on the blood of maidens educated in Mills Seminary. My favorite chophouse has ever been a hardwood floor, a loaf of Mills Seminary maiden, and a roof of flat piano. My father, as well as an ogre, was a California horse-thief. I am more reprehensible than my father. I have more teeth. My mother, as well as an ogress, was a Nevada book-canvasser. Let all her shame be told. She even solicited subscriptions for ladies’ magazines. I am more terrible than my mother. I have peddled safety razors.”
“Can naught soothe and charm your savage breast?” Lute pleaded in soulful tones while she studied her chances for escape.
“One thing only, miserable female. One thing only, on the earth, over the earth, and under its ruining waters – ”
A squawk of recognized plagiarism interrupted him from Ernestine.
“See Ernest Dowson, page seventy-nine, a thin book of thin verse ladled out with porridge to young women detentioned at Mills Seminary,” Forrest went on. “As I had already enunciated before I was so rudely interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm this savage breast is the ‘Maiden’s Prayer.’ Listen, with all your ears ere I chew them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly, unbeautiful, squat, short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can you recite the ’Maiden’s Prayer’?”
Screams of delight from the young things in the doorways prevented the proper answer and Lute, from under the piano, cried out to young Wainwright, who had appeared:
“A rescue, Sir Knight! A rescue!”
“Unhand the maiden!” was Bert’s challenge.
“Who art thou?” Forrest demanded.
“King George, sirrah! – I mean, er, Saint George.”
“Then am I thy dragon,” Forrest announced with due humility. “Spare this ancient, honorable, and only neck I have.”
“Off with his head!” the young things encouraged.
“Stay thee, maidens, I pray thee,” Bert begged. “I am only a Small Potato. Yet am I unafraid. I shall beard the dragon. I shall beard him in his gullet, and, while he lingeringly chokes to death over my unpalatableness and general spinefulness, do you, fair damsels, flee to the mountains lest the valleys fall upon you. Yolo, Petaluma, and West Sacramento are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave and many big fishes.”
“Off with his head!” the young things chanted. “Slay him in his blood and barbecue him!”
“Thumbs down,” Forrest groaned. “I am undone. Trust to the unstrained quality of mercy possessed by Christian young women in the year 1914 who will vote some day if ever they grow up and do not marry foreigners. Consider my head off, Saint George. I am expired. Further deponent sayeth not.”
And Forrest, with sobs and slubberings, with realistic shudders and kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on the floor and expired.
Lute crawled out from under the piano, and was joined by Rita and Ernestine in an extemporized dance of the harpies about the slain.
In the midst of it, Forrest sat up, protesting. Also, he was guilty of a significant and privy wink to Lute.
“The hero!” he cried. “Forget him not. Crown him with flowers.”
And Bert was crowned with flowers from the vases, unchanged from the day before. When a bunch of water-logged stems of early tulips, propelled by Lute’s vigorous arm, impacted soggily on his neck under the ear, he fled. The riot of pursuit echoed along the hall and died out down the stairway toward the stag room. Forrest gathered himself together, and, grinning, went jingling on through the Big House.
He crossed two patios on brick walks roofed with Spanish tile and swamped with early foliage and blooms, and gained his wing of the house, still breathing from the fun, to find, in the office, his secretary awaiting him.
“Good morning, Mr. Blake,” he greeted. “Sorry I was delayed.” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Only four minutes, however. I just couldn’t get away sooner.”
Chapter IV
From nine till ten Forrest gave himself up to his secretary, achieving a correspondence that included learned societies and every sort of breeding and agricultural organization and that would have compelled the average petty business man, unaided, to sit up till midnight to accomplish.
For Dick Forrest was the center of a system which he himself had built and of which he was secretly very proud. Important letters and documents he signed with his ragged fist. All other letters were rubber-stamped by Mr. Blake, who, also, in shorthand, in the course of the hour, put down the indicated answers to many letters and received the formula designations of reply to many other letters. Mr. Blake’s private opinion was that he worked longer hours than his employer, although it was equally his private opinion that his employer was a wonder for discovering work for others to perform.