The Little Lady of the Big House

by Jack London

  «And don't be piggy,» Dick warned, as lightly as if nothing were amiss with him. «Don't dare steal the tiniest peek into Le Gallienne. You've got to share him with me later on. Hold up your hand.—Now, honest to God, Paul.»

  «Honest to God,» she obeyed.

  «And may jackasses dance on your grandmother's grave—»

  «And may jackasses dance on my grandmother's grave,» she solemnly repeated.

  The third morning of Graham's absence, Dick saw to it that he was occupied with his dairy manager when Paula made her eleven o'clock pilgrimage, peeped in upon him, and called her «Good morning, merry gentleman,» from the door. The Masons, arriving in several machines with their boisterous crowd of young people, saved Paula for lunch and the afternoon; and, on her urging, Dick noted, she made the evening safe by holding them over for bridge and dancing.

  But the fourth morning, the day of Graham's expected return, Dick was alone in his workroom at eleven. Bending over his desk, signing letters, he heard Paula tiptoe into the room. He did not look up, but while he continued writing his signature he listened with all his soul to the faint, silken swish of her kimono. He knew when she was bending over him, and all but held his breath. But when she had softly kissed his hair and called her «Good morning, merry gentleman,» she evaded the hungry sweep of his arm and laughed her way out. What affected him as strongly as the disappointment was the happiness he had seen in her face. She, who so poorly masked her moods, was bright-eyed and eager as a child. And it was on this afternoon that Graham was expected, Dick could not escape making the connection.

  He did not care to ascertain if she had replenished the lilacs in the tower room, and, at lunch, which was shared with three farm college students from Davis, he found himself forced to extemporize a busy afternoon for himself when Paula tentatively suggested that she would drive Graham up from Eldorado.

  «Drive?» Dick asked.

  «Duddy and Fuddy,» she explained. «They're all on edge, and I just feel like exercising them and myself. Of course, if you'll share the exercise, we'll drive anywhere you say, and let him come up in the machine.»

  Dick strove not to think there was anxiety in her manner while she waited for him to accept or decline her invitation.

  «Poor Duddy and Fuddy would be in the happy hunting grounds if they had to cover my ground this afternoon,» he laughed, at the same time mapping his program. «Between now and dinner I've got to do a hundred and twenty miles. I'm taking the racer, and it's going to be some dust and bump and only an occasional low place. I haven't the heart to ask you along. You go on and take it out of Duddy and Fuddy.»

  Paula sighed, but so poor an actress was she that in the sigh, intended for him as a customary reluctant yielding of his company, he could not fail to detect the relief at his decision.

  «Whither away?» she asked brightly, and again he noticed the color in her face, the happiness, and the brilliance of her eyes.

  «Oh, I'm shooting away down the river to the dredging work—Carlson insists I must advise him—and then up in to Sacramento, running over the Teal Slough land on the way, to see Wing Fo Wong.»

  «And in heaven's name who is this Wing Fo Wong?» she laughingly queried, «that you must trot and see him?»

  «A very important personage, my dear. Worth all of two millions—made in potatoes and asparagus down in the Delta country. I'm leasing three hundred acres of the Teal Slough land to him.» Dick addressed himself to the farm students. «That land lies just out of Sacramento on the west side of the river. It's a good example of the land famine that is surely coming. It was tule swamp when I bought it, and I was well laughed at by the old-timers. I even had to buy out a dozen hunting preserves. It averaged me eighteen dollars an acre, and not so many years ago either.

  «You know the tule swamps. Worthless, save for ducks and low-water pasturage. It cost over three hundred an acre to dredge and drain and to pay my quota of the river reclamation work. And on what basis of value do you think I am making a ten years' lease to old Wing Fo Wong? TWO thousand an acre. I couldn't net more than that if I truck-farmed it myself. Those Chinese are wizards with vegetables, and gluttons for work. No eight hours for them. It's eighteen hours. The last coolie is a partner with a microscopic share. That's the way Wing Fo Wong gets around the eight hour law.»

  * * * * *

  Twice warned and once arrested, was Dick through the long afternoon. He drove alone, and though he drove with speed he drove with safety. Accidents, for which he personally might be responsible, were things he did not tolerate. And they never occurred. That same sureness and definiteness of adjustment with which, without fumbling or approximating, he picked up a pencil or reached for a door-knob, was his in the more complicated adjustments, with which, as instance, he drove a high-powered machine at high speed over busy country roads.

  But drive as he would, transact business as he would, at high pressure with Carlson and Wing Fo Wong, continually, in the middle ground of his consciousness, persisted the thought that Paula had gone out of her way and done the most unusual in driving Graham the long eight miles from Eldorado to the ranch.

  «Phew!» he started to mutter a thought aloud, then suspended utterance and thought as he jumped the racer from forty-five to seventy miles an hour, swept past to the left of a horse and buggy going in the same direction, and slanted back to the right side of the road with margin to spare but seemingly under the nose of a run-about coming from the opposite direction. He reduced his speed to fifty and took up his thought:

  «Phew! Imagine little Paul's thoughts if I dared that drive with some charming girl!»

  He laughed at the fancy as he pictured it, for, most early in their marriage, he had gauged Paula's capacity for quiet jealousy. Never had she made a scene, or dropped a direct remark, or raised a question; but from the first, quietly but unmistakably, she had conveyed the impression of hurt that was hers if he at all unduly attended upon any woman.

  He grinned with remembrance of Mrs. Dehameny, the pretty little brunette widow—Paula's friend, not his—who had visited in the long ago in the Big House. Paula had announced that she was not riding that afternoon and, at lunch, had heard him and Mrs. Dehameny arrange to ride into the redwood canyons beyond the grove of the philosophers. And who but Paula, not long after their start, should overtake them and make the party three! He had smiled to himself at the time, and felt immensely tickled with Paula, for neither Mrs. Dehameny nor the ride with her had meant anything to him.

  So it was, from the beginning, that he had restricted his attentions to other women. Ever since he had been far more circumspect than Paula. He had even encouraged her, given her a free hand always, had been proud that his wife did attract fine fellows, had been glad that she was glad to be amused or entertained by them. And with reason, he mused. He had been so safe, so sure of her—more so, he acknowledged, than had she any right to be of him. And the dozen years had vindicated his attitude, so that he was as sure of her as he was of the diurnal rotation of the earth. And now, was the form his fancy took, the rotation of the earth was a shaky proposition and old Oom Paul's flat world might be worth considering.

  He lifted the gauntlet from his left wrist to snatch a glimpse at his watch, In five minutes Graham would be getting off the train at Eldorado. Dick, himself homeward bound west from Sacramento, was eating up the miles. In a quarter of an hour the train that he identified as having brought Graham, went by. Not until he was well past Eldorado did he overtake Duddy and Fuddy and the trap. Graham sat beside Paula, who was driving. Dick slowed down as he passed, waved a hello to Graham, and, as he jumped into speed again, called cheerily:

  «Sorry I've got to give you my dust. I'll beat you a game of billiards before dinner, Evan, if you ever get in.»

  CHAPTER XXVI

  «This can't go on. We must do something—at once.»

  They were in the music room, Paula at the piano, her face turned up to

  Graham who stood close to her, almost over her.
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br />   «You must decide,» Graham continued.

  Neither face showed happiness in the great thing that had come upon them, now that they considered what they must do.

  «But I don't want you to go,» Paula urged. «I don't know what I want. You must bear with me. I am not considering myself. I am past considering myself. But I must consider Dick. I must consider you. I… I am so unused to such a situation,» she concluded with a wan smile.

  «But it must be settled, dear love. Dick is not blind.»

  «What has there been for him to see?» she demanded. «Nothing, except that one kiss in the canyon, and he couldn't have seen that. Do you think of anything else—I challenge you, sir.»

  «Would that there were,» he met the lighter touch in her mood, then immediately relapsed. «I am mad over you, mad for you. And there I stop. I do not know if you are equally mad. I do not know if you are mad at all.»

  As he spoke, he dropped his hand to hers on the keys, and she gently withdrew it.

  «Don't you see?» he complained. «Yet you wanted me to come back?»

  «I wanted you to come back,» she acknowledged, with her straight look into his eyes. «I wanted you to come back,» she repeated, more softly, as if musing.

  «And I'm all at sea,» he exclaimed impatiently. «You do love me?»

  «I do love you, Evan—you know that. But…» She paused and seemed to be weighing the matter judicially.

  «But what?» he commanded. «Go on.»

  «But I love Dick, too. Isn't it ridiculous?»

  He did not respond to her smile, and her eyes delightedly warmed to the boyish sullenness that vexed his own eyes. A thought was hot on his tongue, but he restrained the utterance of it while she wondered what it was, disappointed not to have had it.

  «It will work out,» she assured him gravely. «It will have to work out somehow. Dick says all things work out. All is change. What is static is dead, and we're not dead, any of us… are we?»

  «I don't blame you for loving Dick, for… for continuing to love Dick,» he answered impatiently. «And for that matter, I don't see what you find in me compared with him. This is honest. He is a great man to me, and Great Heart is his name—» she rewarded him with a smile and nod of approval. «But if you continue to love Dick, how about me?»

  «But I love you, too.»

  «It can't be,» he cried, tearing himself from the piano to make a hasty march across the room and stand contemplating the Keith on the opposite wall as if he had never seen it before.

  She waited with a quiet smile, pleasuring in his unruly impetuousness.

  «You can't love two men at once,» he flung at her.

  «Oh, but I do, Evan. That's what I am trying to work out. Only I don't know which I love more. Dick I have known a long time. You… you are a—»

  «Recent acquaintance,» he broke in, returning to her with the same angry stride.

  «Not that, no, not that, Evan. You have made a revelation to me of myself. I love you as much as Dick. I love you more. I—I don't know.»

  She broke down and buried her face in her hands, permitting his hand to rest tenderly on her shoulder.

  «You see it is not easy for me,» she went on. «There is so much involved, so much that I cannot understand. You say you are all at sea. Then think of me all at sea and worse confounded. You—oh, why talk about it—you are a man with a man's experiences, with a man's nature. It is all very simple to you. 'She loves me, she loves me not.' But I am tangled, confused. I—and I wasn't born yesterday—have had no experience in loving variously. I have never had affairs. I loved only one man… and now you. You, and this love for you, have broken into a perfect marriage, Evan—»

  «I know—» he said.

  «—I don't know,» she went on. «I must have time, either to work it out myself or to let it work itself out. If it only weren't for Dick…» her voice trailed off pathetically.

  Unconsciously, Graham's hand went farther about her shoulder.

  «No, no—not yet,» she said softly, as softly she removed it, her own lingering caressingly on his a moment ere she released it. «When you touch me, I can't think,» she begged. «I—I can't think.»

  «Then I must go,» he threatened, without any sense of threatening. She made a gesture of protest. «The present situation is impossible, unbearable. I feel like a cur, and all the time I know I am not a cur. I hate deception—oh, I can lie with the Pathan, to the Pathan—but I can't deceive a man like Great Heart. I'd prefer going right up to him and saying: 'Dick, I love your wife. She loves me. What are you going to do about it?'»

  «Do so,» Paula said, fired for the moment.

  Graham straightened up with resolution.

  «I will. And now.»

  «No, no,» she cried in sudden panic. «You must go away.» Again her voice trailed off, as she said, «But I can't let you go.»

  * * * * *

  If Dick had had any reason to doubt his suspicion of the state of Paula's heart, that reason vanished with the return of Graham. He need look nowhere for confirmation save to Paula. She was in a flushed awakening, burgeoning like the full spring all about them, a happier tone in her happy laugh, a richer song in her throat, a warmness of excitement and a continuous energy of action animating her. She was up early and to bed late. She did not conserve herself, but seemed to live on the champagne of her spirits, until Dick wondered if it was because she did not dare allow herself time to think.

  He watched her lose flesh, and acknowledged to himself that the one result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost spiritual delicacy under her natural vividness of color and charm.

  And the Big House ran on in its frictionless, happy, and remorseless way. Dick sometimes speculated how long it would continue so to run on, and recoiled from contemplation of a future in which it might not so run on. As yet, he was confident, no one knew, no one guessed, but himself. But how long could that continue? Not long, he was certain. Paula was not sufficiently the actress. And were she a master at concealment of trivial, sordid detail, yet the new note and flush of her would be beyond the power of any woman to hide.

  He knew his Asiatic servants were marvels of discernment—and discretion, he had to add. But there were the women. Women were cats. To the best of them it would be great joy to catch the radiant, unimpeachable Paula as clay as any daughter of Eve. And any chance woman in the house, for a day, or an evening, might glimpse the situation—Paula's situation, at least, for he could not make out Graham's attitude yet. Trust a woman to catch a woman.

  But Paula, different in other ways, was different in this. He had never seen her display cattishness, never known her to be on the lookout for other women on the chance of catching them tripping— except in relation to him. And he grinned again at the deliciousness of the affair with Mrs. Dehameney which had been an affair only in Paula's apprehension.

  Among other things of wonderment, Dick speculated if Paula wondered if he knew.

  And Paula did wonder, and for a time without avail. She could detect no change in his customary ways and moods or treatment of her. He turned off his prodigious amount of work as usual, played as usual, chanted his songs, and was the happy good fellow. She tried to imagine an added sweetness toward her, but vexed herself with the fear that it was imagined.

  But it was not for long that she was in doubt. Sometimes in a crowd, at table, in the living room in the evening, or at cards, she would gaze at him through half-veiled lashes when he was unaware, until she was certain she saw the knowledge in his eyes and face. But no hint of this did she give to Graham. His knowing would not help matters. It might even send him away, which she frankly admitted to herself was the last thing she should want to happen.

  But when she came to a realization that she was almost certain Dick knew or guessed, she hardened, deliberately dared to play with the fire. If Dick knew—since he knew, she framed it to herself—why did he not speak? He was ever a straight talker. She both desired and feared that he might, unti
l the fear faded and her earnest hope was that he would. He was the one who acted, did things, no matter what they were. She had always depended upon him as the doer. Graham had called the situation a triangle. Well, Dick could solve it. He could solve anything. Then why didn't he?

  In the meantime, she persisted in her ardent recklessness, trying not to feel the conscience-pricks of her divided allegiance, refusing to think too deeply, riding the top of the wave of her life—as she assured herself, living, living, living. At times she scarcely knew what she thought, save that she was very proud in having two such men at heel. Pride had always been one of her dominant key-notes—pride of accomplishment, achievement, mastery, as with her music, her appearance, her swimming. It was all one—to dance, as she well knew, beautifully; to dress with distinction and beauty; to swan-dive, all grace and courage, as few women dared; or, all fragility, to avalanche down the spill-way on the back of Mountain Lad and by the will and steel of her swim the huge beast across the tank.

  She was proud, a woman of their own race and type, to watch these two gray-eyed blond men together. She was excited, feverish, but not nervous. Quite coldly, sometimes, she compared the two when they were together, and puzzled to know for which of them she made herself more beautiful, more enticing. Graham she held, and she had held Dick and strove still to hold him.

  There was almost a touch of cruelty in the tingles of pride that were hers at thought of these two royal men suffering for her and because of her; for she did not hide from herself the conviction that if Dick knew, or, rather, since he did know, he, too, must be suffering. She assured herself that she was a woman of imagination and purpose in sex matters, and that no part of her attraction toward Graham lay merely in his freshness, newness, difference. And she denied to herself that passion played more than the most minor part. Deep down she was conscious of her own recklessness and madness, and of an end to it all that could not but be dreadful to some one of them or all of them. But she was content willfully to flutter far above such deeps and to refuse to consider their existence. Alone, looking at herself in her mirror, she would shake her head in mock reproof and cry out, «Oh, you huntress! You huntress!» And when she did permit herself to think a little gravely, it was to admit that Shaw and the sages of the madrono grove might be right in their diatribes on the hunting proclivities of women.