The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London

  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.»

  «All you need, now, to make it absolutely perfect,» Graham praised, «is to square the circle.»

  «Yes,» Mr. Gulhuss agreed. «As it is, a circle in a square field loses some acreage.»

  Graham's face advertised a mental arithmetic trance for a minute, when he announced: «Loses, roughly, three acres out of every ten.»

  «Sure,» Dick concurred. «But the farmer has to have his front porch somewhere on his ten acres. And the front porch represents the house, the barn, the chicken yard and the various outbuildings. Very well. Let him get tradition out of his mind, and, instead of building these things in the center of his ten acres, let him build them on the three acres of fringe. And let him plant his fruit and shade trees and berry bushes on the fringe. When you come to consider it, the traditionary method of erecting the buildings in the center of a rectangular ten acres compels him to plow around the center in broken rectangles.»

  Gulhuss nodded enthusiastically. «Sure. And there's always the roadway from the center out to the county road or right of way. That breaks the efficiency of his plowing. Break ten acres into the consequent smaller rectangles, and it's expensive cultivation.»

  «Wish navigation was as automatic,» was Captain Lester's contribution.

  «Or portrait painting,» laughed Rita Wainwright with a significant glance at Mr. Deacon.

  «Or musical criticism,» Lute remarked, with no glance at all, but with a pointedness of present company that brought from O'Hay:

  «Or just being a charming young woman.»

  «What price for the outfit?» Jeremy Braxton asked.

  «Right now, we could manufacture and lay down, at a proper profit, for five hundred. If the thing came into general use, with up to date, large-scale factory methods, three hundred. But say five hundred. And write off fifteen per cent, for interest and constant, it would cost the farmer seventy dollars a year. What ten-acre farmer, on two– hundred-dollar land, who keeps books, can keep a horse for seventy dollars a year? And on top of that, it would save him, in labor, personal or hired, at the abjectest minimum, two hundred dollars a year.»

  «But what guides it?» Rita asked.

  «The drum on the post. The drum is graduated for the complete radius— which took some tall figuring, I assure you—and the cable, winding around the drum and shortening, draws the tractor in toward the center.»

  «There are lots of objections to its general introduction, even among small farmers,» Gulhuss said.

  Dick nodded affirmation.

  «Sure,» he replied. «I have over forty noted down and classified. And I've as many more for the machine itself. If the thing is a success, it will take a long time to perfect it and introduce it.»

  Graham found himself divided between watching the circling tractor and casting glances at the picture Paula Forrest was on her mount. It was her first day on The Fawn, which was the Palomina mare Hennessy had trained for her. Graham smiled with secret approval of her femininity; for Paula, whether she had designed her habit for the mare, or had selected one most peculiarly appropriate, had achieved a triumph.

  In place of a riding coat, for the afternoon was warm, she wore a tan linen blouse with white turnback collar. A short skirt, made like the lower part of a riding coat, reached the knees, and from knees to entrancing little bespurred champagne boots tight riding trousers showed. Skirt and trousers were of fawn-colored silk corduroy. Soft white gauntlets on her hands matched with the collar in the one emphasis of color. Her head was bare, the hair done tight and low around her ears and nape of neck.

  «I don't see how you can keep such a skin and expose yourself to the sun this way,» Graham ventured, in mild criticism.

  «I don't,» she smiled with a dazzle of white teeth. «That is, I don't expose my face this way more than a few times a year. I'd like to, because I love the sun-gold burn in my hair; but I don't dare a thorough tanning.»

  The mare frisked, and a breeze of air blew back a flap of skirt, showing an articulate knee where the trouser leg narrowed tightly over it. Again Graham visioned the white round of knee pressed into the round muscles of the swimming Mountain Lad, as he noted the firm knee– grip on her pigskin English saddle, quite new and fawn-colored to match costume and horse.

  When the magneto on the tractor went wrong, and the mechanics busied themselves with it in the midst of the partly plowed field, the company, under Paula's guidance, leaving Dick behind with his invention, resolved itself into a pilgrimage among the brood-centers on the way to the swimming tank. Mr. Crellin, the hog-manager, showed them Lady Isleton, who, with her prodigious, fat, recent progeny of eleven, won various naГЇve encomiums, while Mr. Crellin warmly proclaimed at least four times, «And not a runt, not a runt, in the bunch.»

  Other glorious brood-sows, of Berkshire, Duroc-Jersey, and O. I. C. blood, they saw till they were wearied, and new-born kids and lambs, and rotund does and ewes. From center to center, Paula kept the telephones warning ahead of the party's coming, so that Mr. Manson waited to exhibit the great King Polo, and his broad-backed Shorthorn harem, and the Shorthorn harems of bulls that were only little less than King Polo in magnificence and record; and Parkman, the Jersey manager, was on hand, with staffed assistants, to parade Sensational Drake, Golden Jolly, Fontaine Royal, Oxford Master, and Karnak's Fairy Boy—blue ribbon bulls, all, and founders and scions of noble houses of butter-fat renown, and Rosaire Queen, Standby's Dam, Golden Jolly's Lass, Olga's Pride, and Gertie of Maitlands—equally blue-ribbon
ed and blue-blooded Jersey matrons in the royal realm of butter-fat; and Mr. Mendenhall, who had charge of the Shires, proudly exhibited a string of mighty stallions, led by the mighty Mountain Lad, and a longer string of matrons, headed by the Fotherington Princess of the silver whinny. Even old Alden Bessie, the Princess's dam, retired to but part-day's work, he sent for that they might render due honor to so notable a dam.

  As four o'clock approached, Donald Ware, not keen on swimming, returned in one of the machines to the Big House, and Mr. Gulhuss remained to discuss Shires with Mr. Mendenhall. Dick was at the tank when the party arrived, and the girls were immediately insistent for the new song.

  «It isn't exactly a new song,» Dick explained, his gray eyes twinkling roguery, «and it's not my song. It was sung in Japan before I was born, and, I doubt not, before Columbus discovered America. Also, it is a duet—a competitive duet with forfeit penalties attached. Paula will have to sing it with me.—I'll teach you. Sit down there, that's right.—Now all the rest of you gather around and sit down.»

  Still in her riding habit, Paula sat down on the concrete, facing her husband, in the center of the sitting audience. Under his direction, timing her movements to his, she slapped her hands on her knees, slapped her palms together, and slapped her palms against his palms much in the fashion of the nursery game of «Bean Porridge Hot.» Then he sang the song, which was short and which she quickly picked up, singing it with him and clapping the accent. While the air of it was orientally catchy, it was chanted slowly, almost monotonously, but it was quickly provocative of excitement to the spectators:

  «Jong-Keena, Jong-Keena,

  Jong-Jong, Keena-Keena,

  Yo-ko-ham-a, Nag-a-sak-i,

  Kobe-mar-o—hoy!!! »

  The last syllable, hoy , was uttered suddenly, explosively, and an octave and more higher than the pitch of the melody. At the same moment that it was uttered, Paula's and Dick's hands were abruptly shot toward each other's, either clenched or open. The point of the game was that Paula's hands, open or closed, at the instant of uttering hoy, should match Dick's. Thus, the first time, she did match him, both his and her hands being closed, whereupon he took off his hat and tossed it into Lute's lap.