Cotyledon of Multiflores Canyon
“‘_Ave, atque vale!_’ Cotyledon!”
Linda slid down the side of the canyon with the deftness of the expert.
At the first available crevice she thrust in her Alpine stick, and
bracing herself, gained a footing. Then she turned and by use of her
fingers and toes worked her way back to the plant, she had passed. She
was familiar with many members of the family, but such a fine specimen
she seldom had found and she could not recall having seen it in all
of her botanies. Opposite the plant she worked out a footing, drove
her stick deep at the base of a rock to brace herself, and from the
knapsack on her back took a sketch-book and pencil and began rapidly
copying the thick fleshy leaves of the flattened rosette, sitting
securely at the edge of a rock. She worked swiftly and with breathless
interest. When she had finished the flower she began sketching in the
moss-covered face of the boulder against which it grew, and other bits
of vegetation near.
“I think, Coty,” she said, “it is very probable that I can corner a few
simoleons with you. You are becoming better looking every minute.”
For a touch of colour she margined one side of her drawing with a
little spray of Pentstemon whose bright tubular flowers the canyon knew
as “humming-bird’s dinner horn.” That gave her the idea of introducing
a touch of living interest, so bearing down upon the flowers from
the upper right-hand corner of her drawing she deftly sketched in a
ruby-throated humming bird, and across the bottom of the sheet the lace
of a few leaves of fern. Then she returned the drawing and pencil to
her knapsack, and making sure of her footing, worked her way forward.
With her long slender fingers she began teasing the plant loose from
the rock and the surrounding soil. The roots penetrated deeper than she
had supposed and in her interest she forgot her precarious footing and
pulled hard. The plant gave way unexpectedly, and losing her balance,
Linda plunged down the side of the canyon catching wildly at shrubs and
bushes and bruising herself severely on stones, finally landing in a
sitting posture on the road that traversed the canyon.
She was not seriously hurt, but she did not present a picturesque
figure as she sprawled in the road, her booted feet thrust straight
before her, one of her long black braids caught on a bush at her back,
her blouse pulled above her breeches, the contents of her knapsack
decorating the canyon side and the road around her; but high in one
hand, without break or blemish, she triumphantly held aloft the rare
Cotyledon. She shrugged her shoulders, wiggled her toes, and moved her
arms to assure herself that no bones were broken; then she glanced at
her drawings and the fruits of her day’s collecting scattered on the
roadside around her. She was in the act of rising when a motor car
containing two young men shot around a curve of the canyon, swerved to
avoid running over her, and stopped as abruptly as possible.
“It’s a girl!” cried the driver, and both men sprang to the road
and hurried to Linda’s assistance. Her dark cheeks were red with
mortification, but she managed to recover her feet and tuck in her
blouse before they reached her.
“We heard you coming down,” said the elder of the young men, “and we
thought you might be a bear. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
Linda stood before them, a lithe slender figure, vivid with youth and
vitality.
“I am able to stand,” she said, “so of course I haven’t broken any
bones. I think I am fairly well battered, but you will please to
observe that there isn’t a scratch on Cotyledon, and I brought her
down—at least I think it’s she—from the edge of that boulder away up
there. Isn’t she a beauty? Only notice the delicate frosty ‘bloom’ on
her leaves!”
“I should prefer,” said the younger of the men, “to know whether you
have any broken bones.”
“I’m sure I am all right,” answered Linda. “I have falling down
mountains reduced to an exact science. I’ll bet you couldn’t slide that
far and bring down Coty without a scratch.”
“Well, which is the more precious,” said the young man. “Yourself or
the specimen?”
“Why, the specimen!” answered Linda, in impatience. “California is full
of girls; but this is the finest Cotyledon of this family I have ever
seen. Don’t mistake this for any common stonecrop. It looks to me like
an Echeveria. I know what I mean to do with the picture I have made of
her, and I know exactly where she is going to grow from this day on.”
“Is there any way we can help you?” inquired the elder of the two men.
For the first time Linda glanced at him, and her impression was that he
was decidedly attractive.
“No, thank you!” she answered briskly. “I am going to climb back up to
the boulder and collect the belongings I spilled on the way down. Then
I am going to carry Coty to the car line in a kind of triumphal march,
because she is the rarest find that I have ever made. I hope you have
no dark designs on Coty, because this is ‘what the owner had to do to
redeem her.’”
Linda indicated her trail down the canyon side, brushed soil and twigs
from her trousers, turned her straight young back, carefully set down
her specimen, and by the aid of her recovered stick began expertly
making her way up the canyon side. “Here, let me do that,” offered the
younger man. “You rest until I collect your belongings.” Linda glanced
back over her shoulder. “Thanks,” she said. “I have a mental inventory
of all the pencils and knives and trowels I must find. You might
overlook the most important part of my paraphernalia; and really I am
not damaged. I’m merely hurt. Good-bye!”
Linda started back up the side of the canyon, leaving the young men
to enter their car and drive away. For a minute both of them stood
watching her.
“What will girls be wearing and doing next?” asked the elder of the two
as he started his car.
“What would you have a girl wear when she is occupied with coasting
down canyons?” said his friend. “And as for what she is doing, it’s
probable that every high-school girl in Los Angeles has a botanical
collection to make before she graduates.”
“I see!” said the man driving. “She is only a high-school kid, but did
you notice that she is going to make an extremely attractive young
woman?”
“Yes, I noticed just that; I noticed it very particularly,” answered
the younger man. “And I noticed also that she either doesn’t know it,
or doesn’t give a flip.”
Linda collected her belongings, straightened her hair and clothing,
and, with her knapsack in place, and leaning rather on heavily on her
walking stick, made her way down the road to the abutment of a small
rustic bridge where she stopped to rest. The stream at her feet was
noisy and icy cold. It rushed through narrow defiles in the rock,
beat itself to foam against the faces a of the big stones, fell over
jutting cliffs, spread in whispering pools, wound back and forth
across the road at its will, singing every foot of its downward way
and watering beds of crisp, cool miners’ lettuce, great ferns, and
heliotrope, climbing clematis, soil and blue-eyed grass. All along
its length grew willows, and in a few places white-bodied sycamores.
Everywhere over the walls above it that vegetation could find a footing
grew mosses, vines, flowers, and shrubs. On the shadiest side homed
most of the ferns and the Cotyledon. In the sun, larkspur, lupin, and
monkey flower; everywhere wild rose, holly, mahogany, gooseberry, and
bayoneted yucca all intermingling in a curtain of variegated greens,
brocaded with flower arabesques of vivid red, white, yellow, and blue.
Canyon wrens and vireos sang as they nested. The air was clear, cool,
and salty from the near-by sea. Myriad leaf shadows danced on the black
roadbed, level as a barn floor, and across it trailed the wavering
image of hawk and vulture, gull and white sea swallow. Linda studied
the canyon with intent eyes, but bruised flesh pleaded, so reluctantly
she arose, shouldered her belongings, and slowly followed the road
out to the car line that passed through Lilac Valley, still carefully
bearing in triumph the precious Cotyledon. An hour later she entered
the driveway of her home. She stopped to set her plant carefully in the
wild garden she and her father had worked all her life at collecting,
then followed the back porch and kitchen route.
“Whatever have ye been doing to yourself, honey?” cried Katy.
“I came a cropper down Multiflores Canyon where it is so steep
that it leans the other way. I pretty well pulverized myself for a
pulverulenta, Katy, which is a poor joke.”
“Now ain’t that just my luck!” wailed Katy, snatching a cake cutter and
beginning hurriedly to stamp out little cakes from the dough before her.
“Well, I don’t understand in exactly what way,” said Linda, absently
rubbing her elbows and her knees. “Seems to me it’s my promontories
that have been knocked off, not yours, Katy.”
“Yes, and ain’t it just like ye,” said Katy, “to be coming in late,
and all banged up when Miss Eileen has got sudden notice that there is
going to be company again and I have an especial dinner to serve, and
never in the world can I manage if ye don’t help me!”
“Why, who is coming now?” asked Linda, seating herself on the nearest
chair and beginning to unfasten her boots slowly.
“Well, first of all, there is Mr. Gilman, of course.”
“‘Of course,’” conceded Linda. “If he tried to get past our house,
Eileen is perfectly capable of setting it on fire to stop him. She’s
got him ‘vamped’ properly.”
“Oh I don’t know that ye should say just that,” said Katy “Eileen is a
mighty pretty girl, and she is _some_ manager.”
“You can stake your hilarious life she is,” said Linda, viciously
kicking a boot to the center of the kitchen. “She can manage to go down
town for lunch and be invited out to dinner thirteen times a week, and
leave us at home to eat bread and milk, bread heavily stressed. She
can manage to get every cent of the income from the property in her
fingers, and a great big girl like me has to go to high school looking
so tacky that even the boys are beginning to comment on it. Manage?
I’ll say she can manage, not to mention managing to snake John Gilman
right out of Marian’s fingers. I doubt if Marian fully realizes yet
that she’s lost her man; and I happen to know that she just plain loved
John!”
The second boot landed beside the first, then Linda picked them both up
and started toward the back hall.
“Honey, are ye too bad hurt to help me any?” asked Katy, as she passed
her.
“Of course not,” said Linda. “Give me a few minutes to take a bath and
step into my clothes and then I’ll be on the job.”
With a black scowl on her face, Linda climbed the dingy back stairway
in her stocking-feet. At the head of the stairs she paused one minute,
glanced at the gloom of her end of the house, then she turned and
walked to the front of the hall where there were potted ferns, dainty
white curtains, and bright rugs. The door of the guest room stood open
and she could see that it was filled with fresh flowers and ready for
occupancy. The door of her sister’s room was slightly ajar and she
pushed it open and stood looking inside. In her state of disarray
she made a shocking contrast to the flower-like figure busy before a
dressing table. Linda was dark, narrow, rawboned, overgrown in height,
and forthright of disposition. Eileen was a tiny woman, delicately
moulded, exquisitely coloured, and one of the most perfectly successful
tendrils from the original clinging vine in her intercourse with men,
and with such women as would tolerate the clinging-vine idea in the
present forthright days. With a strand of softly curled hair in one
hand and a fancy pin in the other, Eileen turned a disapproving look
upon her sister.
“What’s the great idea?” demanded Linda shortly.
“Oh, it’s perfectly splendid,” answered Eileen. “John Gilman’s best
friend is motoring around here looking for a location to build a home.
He is an author and young and good looking and not married, and he
thinks he would like to settle somewhere near Los Angeles. Of course
John would love to have him in Lilac Valley because he hopes to build
a home here some day for himself. His name is Peter Morrison and John
says that his articles and stories have horse sense, logic, and humor,
and he is making a lot of money.”
“Then God help John Gilman, if he thinks now that he is in love with
_you_,” said Linda dryly.
Eileen arched her eyebrows, thinned to a hair line, and her lips drew
together in disapproval.
“What I can’t understand,” she said, “is how you can be so unspeakably
vulgar, Linda.”
Linda laughed sharply.
“And this Peter Morrison and John are our guests for dinner?”
“Yes,” said Eileen. “I am going to show them this valley inside and
out. I’m so glad it’s spring. We’re at our very best. It would be
perfectly wonderful to have an author for a neighbor, and he must be
going to build a real house, because he has his architect with him;
and John says that while he is young, he has done several awfully good
houses. He has seen a couple of them in San Francisco.”
Linda shrugged her shoulders.
“Up the flue goes Marian’s chance of drawing the plans for John
Gilman’s house,” she said. “I have heard him say a dozen times he would
not build a house unless Marian made the plans.”
Eileen deftly placed the strand of hair and set the jewelled pin with
precision.
“Just possibly things have changed slightly,” she suggested.
“Yes,” said Linda, “I observe that they have. Marian has sold the home
she adored. She is leaving friends she loved and trusted, and who were
particularly bound to her by a common grief, without realizing exactly
how it is happening. She certainly must know that you have taken her
lover, and I have not a doubt but that is the reason she has discovered
she can no longer work at home, that she must sell her property and
spend the money cooped up in a city, to study her profession further.”
“Linda,” said Eileen, her face pale with anger, “you are positively
insufferable. Will you leave my room and close the door after you?”
“Well, Katy has just informed me,” said Linda, “that this dinner party
doesn’t come off without my valued assistance, and before I agree to
assist, I’ll know _one_ thing. Are you proposing to entertain these
three men yourself, or have you asked Marian?”
Eileen indicated an open note lying on her dressing table.
“I did not know they were coming until an hour ago,” she said. “_I_
barely had time to fill the vases and dust, and then I ran up to dress
so that there would be someone presentable when they arrive.”
“All right then, we’ll agree that this is a surprise party, but if John
Gilman has told you so much about them, you must have been expecting
them, and in a measure prepared for them at any time. Haven’t you
talked it over with Marian, and told her that you would want her when
they came?”
Eileen was extremely busy with another wave of hair. She turned her
back and her voice was not quite steady as she answered. “Ever since
Marian got this ‘going to the city to study’ idea in her head I have
scarcely seen her. She had an awful job to empty the house, and pack
such things as she wants to keep, and she is working overtime on a very
special plan that she thinks maybe she’ll submit in a prize competition
offered by a big firm of San Francisco architects, so I have scarcely
seen her for six weeks.”
“And you never once went over to help her with her work, or to
encourage her or to comfort her? You can’t think Marian can leave this
valley and not be almost heartbroken,” said Linda. “You just make me
almost wonder at you. When you think of the kind of friends that Marian
Thorne’s father and mother, and our father and mother were, and how we
children were reared together, and the good times we have had in these
two houses—and then the awful day when the car went over the cliff, and
how Marian clung to us and tried to comfort us, when her own heart was
broken—and Marian’s the same Marian she has always been, only nicer
every day—how you can sit there and say you have scarcely seen her in
six of the hardest weeks of her life, certainly surprises me. I’ll tell
you this: I told Katy I would help her, but I won’t do it if you don’t
go over and make Marian come to-night.”
Eileen turned to her sister and looked at her keenly. Linda’s brow was
sullen, and her jaw set.
“A bed would look mighty good to me and I will go and get into mine
this minute if you don’t say you will go and ask her, in such a way
that she comes,” she threatened.
Eileen hesitated a second and then said: “All right, since you make
such a point of it I will ask her.”
“Very well,” said Linda. “Then I’ll help Katy the very best I can.”