One Hundred Per Cent Plus
Then she went downstairs and walked into the kitchen, prepared for what
she would see, by what she heard as she approached.
With Katy’s apron tied around his waist, Donald Whiting was occupied in
squeezing orange, lemon, and pineapple juice over a cake of ice in a
big bowl, preparatory to the compounding of Katy’s most delicious brand
of fruit punch. Without a word, Linda stepped to the bread board and
began slicing the bread and building sandwiches, while Katy hurried her
preparations for filling the lunch box. A few minutes later Katy packed
them in the car, kissed Linda good-bye, and repeatedly cautioned Donald
to make her be careful.
As the car rolled down the driveway and into the street, Donald looked
appraisingly at the girl beside him.
“Is it the prevailing custom in Lilac Valley for young ladies to kiss
the cook?” inquired Donald laughingly.
“Now, you just hush,” said Linda. “Katy is _not_ the cook, alone.
Katy’s my father, and my mother, and my family, and my best friend——”
“Stop right there,” interposed Donald. “That is quite enough for any
human to be. Katy’s a multitude. She came out to the car with the
canteen, and when I offered to help her, without any ‘polly foxin’,’
she just said: ‘Sure. Come in and make yourself useful.’ So I went, and
I am expecting amazing results from the job she gave me.”
“Come to think of it,” said Linda, “I have small experience with
anybody’s cooking except Katy’s and my own, but so far as I know, she
can’t very well be beaten.”
Carefully she headed the car into the garage adjoining the salesrooms.
There she had an ovation. The manager and several of the men remembered
her. The whole force clustered around the Bear-cat and began to examine
it, and comment on it, and Linda climbed out and asked to have the
carburetor adjusted, while the mechanician put on a pair of tires. When
everything was satisfactory, she backed to the street, and after a few
blocks of experimental driving, she headed for the Automobile Club to
arrange for her license and then turned straight toward Multiflores
Canyon, but she did not fail to call Donald Whiting’s attention to
every beauty of Lilac Valley as they passed through. When they had
reached a long level stretch of roadway leading to the canyon, Linda
glanced obliquely at the boy beside her.
“It all comes back as natural as breathing,” she said. “I couldn’t
forget it any more than I could forget how to walk, or to swim. Sit
tight. I am going to step on the gas for a bit, just for old sake’s
sake.”
“That’s all right,” said Donald, taking off his hat and giving his head
a toss so that the wind might have full play through his hair. “But
remember our tires are not safe. Better not go the limit until we get
rid of these old ones, and have a new set all around.”
Linda settled back in her seat, took a firm grip on the wheel, and
started down the broad, smooth highway, gradually increasing the speed.
The colour rushed to her cheeks. Her eyes were gleaming.
“Listen to it purr!” she cried to Donald. “If you hear it begin to
growl, tell me.”
And then for a few minutes they rode like birds on the path of the
wind. When they approached the entrance to the canyon, gradually Linda
slowed down. She turned an exultant flashing face to Donald Whiting.
“That was a whizzer,” said the boy. “I’ll tell you I don’t know what
I’d give to have a car like this for my very own. I’ll bet not another
girl in Los Angeles has a car that can go like that.”
“And I don’t believe I have any business with it,” said Linda; “but
since circumstances make it mine, I am going to keep it and I am going
to drive it.”
“Of course you are,” said Donald emphatically. “Don’t you ever let
anybody fool you out of this car, because if they wanted to, it would
be just because they are jealous to think they haven’t one that will go
as fast.”
“There’s not the slightest possibility of my giving it up so long as I
can make the engine turn over,” she said. “I told you how Father always
took me around with him, and there’s nothing in this world I am so sure
of as I am sure that I am spoiled for a house cat. I have probably
less feminine sophistication than any girl of my age in the world, and
I probably know more about camping and fishing and the scientific why
and wherefore of all outdoors than most of them. I just naturally had
such a heavenly time with Daddy that it never has hurt my feelings to
be left out of any dance or party that ever was given. The one thing
that has hurt is the isolation. Since I lost Daddy I haven’t any one
but Katy. Sometimes, when I see a couple of nice, interesting girls
visiting with their heads together, a great feeling of envy wells up in
my soul, and I wish with all my heart that I had such a friend.”
“Ever try to make one?” asked Donald. “There are mighty fine girls in
the High School.”
“I have seen several that I thought I would like to be friends with,”
said Linda, “but I am so lacking in feminine graces that I haven’t
known how to make advances, in the first place, and I haven’t had the
courage, in the second.”
“I wish my sister were not so much older than you,” said Donald.
“How old is your sister?” inquired Linda.
“She will be twenty-three next birthday,” said Donald; “and of all the
nice girls you ever saw, she is the queen.”
“Yes,” she assented, “I am sure I have heard your sister mentioned. But
didn’t you tell me she had been reared for society?”
“No, I did not,” said Donald emphatically. “I told you Mother believed
in dressing her as the majority of other girls were dressed, but I
didn’t say she had been reared for society. She has been reared with an
eye single to making a well-dressed, cultured, and gracious woman.”
“I call that fine,” said Linda. “Makes me envious of you. Now forget
everything except your eyes and tell me what you see. Have you ever
been here before?”
“I have been through a few times before, but seems to me I never saw it
looking quite so pretty.”
Linda drove carefully, but presently Donald uttered an exclamation as
she swerved from the road and started down what appeared to be quite a
steep embankment and headed straight for the stream.
“Sit tight,” she said tersely. “The Bear-cat just loves its cave. It
knows where it is going.”
She broke through a group of young willows and ran the car into a tiny
plateau, walled in a circle by the sheer sides of the canyon reaching
upward almost out of sight, topped with great jagged overhanging
boulders. Crowded to one side, she stopped the car and sat quietly,
smiling at Donald Whiting.
“How about it?” she asked in a low voice.
The boy looked around him, carefully examining the canyon walls, and
then at the level, odorous floor where one could not step without
crushing tiny flowers of white, cerise, blue, and yellow. Big ferns
grew along the walls, here and there “Our Lord’s Candles” lifted high
torches not yet lighted, the ambitious mountain stream skipped and
circled and fell over its rocky bed, while many canyon wrens were
singing.
“Do you think,” she said, “that anyone driving along here at an
ordinary rate of speed would see that car?”
“No,” said Donald, getting her idea, “I don’t believe they would.”
“All right, then,” said Linda. “Toe up even and I’ll race YoU to the
third curve where you see the big white sycamore.”
Donald had a fleeting impression of a flash of khaki, a gleam of red,
and a wave of black as they started. He ran with all the speed he had
ever attained at a track meet. He ran with all his might. He ran until
his sides strained and his breath came short; but the creature beside
him was not running; she was flying; and long before they neared the
sycamore he knew he was beaten, so he laughingly cried to her to stop
it. Linda turned to him panting and laughing.
“I make that dash every time I come to the canyon, to keep my muscle
up, but this is the first time I have had anyone to race with in a long
time.”
Then together they slowly walked down the smooth black floor between
the canyon walls. As they crossed a small bridge Linda leaned over and
looked down.
“Anyone at your house care about ‘nose twister’?” she asked lightly.
“Why, isn’t that watercress?” asked Donald.
“Sure it is,” said Linda. “Anyone at your house like it?”
“Every one of us,” answered Donald. “We’re all batty about cress
salad—and, say, that reminds me of something! If you know so much about
this canyon and everything in it, is there any place in it where a
fellow could find a plant, a kind of salad lettuce, that the Indians
used to use?”
“Might be,” said Linda carelessly. “For why?”
“Haven’t you heard of the big sensation that is being made in feminine
circles by the new department in _Everybody’s Home_?” inquired Donald.
“Mother and Mary Louise were discussing it the other day at lunch, and
they said that some of the recipes for dishes to be made from stuff the
Indians used sounded delicious. One reminded them of cress, and when we
saw the cress I wondered if I could get them some of the other.”
“Might,” said Linda drily, “if you could give me a pretty good idea of
what it is that you want.”
“When you know cress, it’s queer that you wouldn’t know other things in
your own particular canyon,” said Donald.
Linda realized that she had overdone her disinterestedness a trifle.
“I suspect it’s miners’ lettuce you want,” she said. “Of course I know
where there’s some, but you will want it as fresh as possible if you
take any, so we’ll finish our day first and gather it the last thing
before we leave.”
How it started neither of them noticed, but they had not gone far
before they were climbing the walls and hanging to precarious footings.
Her cheeks flushed, her eyes brilliant, her lips laughing, Linda was
showing Donald thrifty specimens of that Cotyledon known as “old hen
and chickens,” telling him of the rare Echeveria of the same family,
and her plunge down the canyon side while trying to uproot it, exulting
that she had brought down the plant without a rift in the exquisite
bloom on its leaves.
Linda told about her fall, and the two men who had passed at that
instant, and how she had met them later, and who they were, and what
they were doing. Then Donald climbed high for a bunch of larkspur, and
Linda showed him how to turn his back to the canyon wall and come down
with the least possible damage to his person and clothing. When at last
both of them were tired they went back to the car. Linda spread an
old Indian blanket over the least flower-grown spot she could select,
brought out the thermos bottles and lunch case, and served their lunch.
With a glass of fruit punch in one hand and a lettuce sandwich in the
other, Donald smiled at Linda.
“I’ll agree about Katy. She knows how,” he said appreciatively.
“Katy is more than a cook,” said Linda quietly. “She is a human being.
She has the biggest, kindest heart. When anybody’s sick or in trouble
she’s the greatest help. She is honest; she has principles; she is
intelligent. In her spare time she reads good books and magazines. She
knows what is going on in the world. She can talk intelligently on
almost any subject. It’s no disgrace to be a cook. If it were, Katy
would be unspeakable. Fact is, at the present minute there’s no one in
all the world so dear to me as Katy. I always talk Irish with her.”
“Well, I call that rough on your sister,” said Donald.
“Maybe it is,” conceded Linda. “I suspect a lady wouldn’t have said
that, but Eileen and I are so different. She never has made the
slightest effort to prove herself lovable to me, and so I have never
learned to love her. Which reminds me—how did you happen to come to the
garage?”
“The very beautiful young lady who opened the door mistook me for a
mechanician. She told me I would find you working on your car and for
goodness’ sake to see that it was in proper condition before you drove
it.”
Linda looked at him with wide, surprised eyes in which a trace of
indignation was plainly discernible.
“Now listen to me,” she said deliberately. “Eileen is a most
sophisticated young lady. If she saw you, she never in this world,
thought you were a mechanic sent from a garage presenting yourself at
our front door.”
“There might have been a spark of malice in the big blue-gray I eyes
that carefully appraised me,” said Donald.
“Your choice of words is good,” said Linda, refilling the punch glass.
“‘Appraise’ fits Eileen like her glove. She appraises every thing on a
monetary basis, and when she can’t figure that it’s going to be worth
an appreciable number of dollars and cents to her—‘to the garage wid
it,’ as Katy would say.”
When they had finished their lunch Linda began packing the box and
Donald sat watching her.
“At this point,” said Linda, “Daddy always smoked. Do you smoke?”
There was a hint of deeper colour in the boy’s cheeks.
“I did smoke an occasional cigarette,” he said lightly, “up to the day,
not a thousand years ago, when a very emphatic young lady who should
have known, insinuated that it was bad for the nerves, and going on
the presumption that she knew, I haven’t smoked a cigarette since and
I’m not going to until I find out whether I can do better work without
them.”
Linda folded napkins and packed away accessories thoughtfully. Then she
looked into the boy’s eyes.
“Now we reach the point of our being here together,” she said. “It’s
time to fight, and I am sorry we didn’t go at it gas and bomb the
minute we met. You’re so different from what I thought you were. If
anyone had told me a week ago that you would take off your coat and
mess with my automobile engine, or wear Katy’s apron and squeeze lemons
in our kitchen I would have looked him over for Daddy’s high sign of
hysteria, at least. It’s too bad to I have such a good time as I have
had this afternoon, and then end with a fight.”
“That’s nothing,” said Donald. “You couldn’t have had as good a time as
I have had. You’re like another boy. A fellow can be just a fellow with
you, and somehow you make everything you touch mean something it never
meant before. You have made me feel that I would be about twice the man
I am if I had spent the time I have wasted in plain jazzing around,
hunting Cotyledon or trap-door spiders’ nests.”
“I get you,” said Linda. “It’s the difference between a girl reared in
an atmosphere of georgette and rouge, and one who has grown up in the
canyons with the oaks and sycamores. One is natural and the other is
artificial. Most boys prefer the artificial.”
“I thought I did myself,” said Donald, “but to-day has taught me that I
don’t. I think, Linda, that you would make the finest friend a fellow
ever had. I firmly and finally decline to fight with you; but for God’s
sake, Linda, tell me how I can beat that little cocoanut-headed Jap.”
Linda slammed down the lid to the lunch box. Her voice was smooth and
even but there was battle in her eyes and she answered decisively:
“Well, you can’t beat him calling him names. There is only one way on
God’s footstool that you can beat him. You can’t beat him legislating
against him. You can’t beat him boycotting him. You can’t beat him with
any tricks. He is as sly as a cat and he has got a whole bag full of
tricks of his own, and he has proved right here in Los Angeles that
he has got a brain that is hard to beat. All you can do, and be a man
commendable to your own soul, is to take his subject and put your brain
on it to such purpose that you cut pigeon wings around him. What are
you studying in your classes, anyway?”
“Trigonometry, Rhetoric, Ancient History, Astronomy,” answered Donald.
“And is your course the same as his?” inquired Linda.
“Strangely enough it is,” answered Donald. “We have been in the same
classes all through high school. I think the little monkey——”
“Man, you mean,” interposed Linda.
“‘Man,’” conceded Donald. “Has waited until I selected my course all
the way through, and then he has announced what he would take. He
probably figured that I had somebody with brains back of the course I
selected, and that whatever I studied would be suitable for him.”
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Linda. “They are quick; oh! they are
quick; and they know from their cradles what it is that they have in
the backs of their heads. We are not going to beat them driving them to
Mexico or to Canada, or letting them monopolize China. That is merely
temporizing. That is giving them fertile soil on which to take the best
of their own and the level best of ours, and by amalgamating the two,
build higher than we ever have. There is just one way in all this world
that we can beat Eastern civilization and all that it intends to do to
us eventually. The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the
history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men
of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of
living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater
numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they
have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take
it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we
don’t, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don’t take warning
while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.”
“Well, there is something to think about,” said Donald Whiting, staring
past Linda at the side of the canyon as if he had seen the same
handwriting on the wall that dismayed Belshazzar at the feast that
preceded his downfall.
“I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “I had thought that there
might be some way to circumvent him.”
“There is!” broke in Linda hastily. “There is. You can beat him, but
you have got to beat him in an honourable way and in a way that is open
to him as it is to you.”
“I’ll do anything in the world if you will only tell me how,” said
Donald. “Maybe you think it isn’t grinding me and humiliating me
properly. Maybe you think Father and Mother haven’t warned me. Maybe
you think Mary Louise isn’t secretly ashamed of me. How can I beat him,
Linda?”
Linda’s eyes were narrowed to a mere line. She was staring at the wall
back of Donald as if she hoped that Heaven would intercede in her
favour and write thereon a line that she might translate to the boy’s
benefit.
“I have been watching pretty sharply,” she said. “Take them as a race,
as a unit—of course there are exceptions, there always are—but the
great body of them are mechanical. They are imitative. They are not
developing anything great of their own in their own country. They
are spreading all over the world and carrying home sewing machines
and threshing machines and automobiles and cantilever bridges and
submarines and aeroplanes—anything from egg-beaters to telescopes.
They are not creating one single thing. They are not missing imitating
everything that the white man can do anywhere else on earth. They are
just like the Germans so far as that is concerned.”
“I get that, all right enough,” said Donald. “Now go on. What is your
deduction? How the devil am I to beat the best? He is perfect, right
straight along in everything.”
The red in Linda’s cheeks deepened. Her eyes opened their widest. She
leaned forward, and with her closed fist, pounded the blanket before
him.
“Then, by gracious,” she said sternly, “you have got to do something
new. You have got to be perfect, _plus_.”
“‘Perfect, plus?’” gasped Donald.
“Yes, sir!” said Linda emphatically. “You have got to be perfect, plus.
If he can take his little mechanical brain and work a thing out till he
has got it absolutely right, you have got to go further than that and
discover something pertaining to it not hitherto thought of and start
something _new_. I tell you you must use your brains. You should be
more than an imitator. You must be a creator!”
Donald started up and drew a deep breath.
“Well, some job I call that,” he said. “Who do you think I am, the
Almighty?”
“No,” said Linda quietly, “you are not. You are merely His son, created
in His own image, like Him, according to the Book, and you have got
to your advantage the benefit of all that has been learned down the
ages. We have got to take up each subject in your course, and to find
some different books treating this same subject. We have got to get
at it from a new angle. We must dig into higher authorities. We have
got to coach you till, when you reach the highest note possible for
the parrot, you can go ahead and embellish it with a few mocking-bird
flourishes. All Oka Sayye knows how to do is to learn the lesson in
his book perfectly, and he is 100 per cent. I have told you what you
must do to add the plus, and you can do it if you are the boy I take
you for. People have talked about the ‘yellow peril’ till it’s got to
be a meaningless phrase. Somebody must wake up to the realization that
it’s the deadliest peril that ever has menaced white civilization. Why
shouldn’t you have your hand in such wonderful work?”
“Linda,” said the boy breathlessly, “do you realize that you have been
saying ‘we’? Can you help me? Will you help me?”
“No,” said Linda, “I didn’t realize that I had said ‘we.’ I didn’t mean
two people, just you and me. I meant all the white boys and girls of
the High School and the city and the state and the whole world. If we
are going to combat the ‘yellow peril’ we must combine against it. We
have got to curb our appetites and train our brains and enlarge our
hearts till we are something bigger and finer and numerically greater
than this yellow peril. We can’t take it and pick it up and push it
into the sea. We are not Germans and we are not Turks. I never wanted
anything in all this world worse than I want to see you graduate ahead
of Oka Sayye. And then I want to see the white boys and girls of Canada
and of England and of Norway and Sweden and Australia, and of the whole
world doing exactly what I am recommending that you do in your class
and what I am doing personally in my own. I have had Japs in my classes
ever since I have been in school, but Father always told me to study
them, to play the game fairly, but to _beat_ them in some way, in some
fair way, to beat them at the game they are undertaking.”
“Well, there is one thing you don’t take into consideration,” said
Donald. “All of us did not happen to be fathered by Alexander Strong.
Maybe we haven’t all got your brains.”
“Oh, pother!” said Linda. “I know of a case where a little Indian was
picked up from a tribal battlefield in South America and brought to
this country and put into our schools, and there was nothing that any
white pupil in the school could do that he couldn’t, so long as it was
imitative work. You have got to be constructive. You have got to work
out some way to get ahead of them; and if you will take the history
of the white races and go over their great achievements in mechanics,
science, art, literature—anything you choose—when a white man is
constructive, when he does create, he can simply cut circles around
the coloured races. The thing is to get the boys and girls of to-day
to understand what is going on in the world, what they must do as
their share in making the world safe for their grandchildren. Life is
a struggle. It always has been. It always will be. There is no better
study than to go into the canyons or the deserts and efface yourself
and watch life. It’s an all-day process of the stronger annihilating
the weaker. The one inexorable thing in the world is Nature. The eagle
dominates the hawk; the hawk, the falcon; the falcon, the raven; and so
on down to the place where the humming bird drives the moth from his
particular trumpet flower. The big snake swallows the little one. The
big bear appropriates the desirable cave.”
“And is that what you are recommending people to do?”
“No,” said Linda, “it is not. That is wild. We go a step ahead of the
wild, or we ourselves become wild. We have brains, and with our brains
we must do in a scientific way what Nature does with tooth and claw.
In other words, and to be concrete, put these things in the car while
I fold the blanket. We’ll gather our miners’ lettuce and then we’ll go
home and search Daddy’s library and see if there is anything bearing in
a higher way on any subject you are taking, so that you can get from
it some new ideas, some different angle, some higher light, something
that will end in speedily prefacing Oka Sayye’s perfect with your
pluperfect!”