The Cap Sheaf
Toward the last of the week Linda began to clear the mental decks of
her ship of life in order that she might have Saturday free for her
promised day with Donald. She had decided that they would devote that
day to wave-beaten Laguna. It was a long drive but delightful. It ran
over the old King’s Highway between miles of orange and lemon orchards
in full flower, bordered by other miles of roses in their prime.
Every minute when her mind was not actively occupied with her lessons
or her recipes Linda was dreaming of the King’s Highway. Almost
unconsciously she began to chant:
“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
You and I together on the King’s Highway,
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.”
You must have ridden this road with an understanding heart and the
arm of God around you to know the exact degree of disappointment that
swelled in Linda’s heart when she answered the telephone early Saturday
morning and heard Donald Whiting’s strained voice speaking into it. He
was talking breathlessly in eager, boyish fashion.
“Linda, I am in a garage halfway downtown,” he was saying, “and it
looks to me as if to save my soul I couldn’t reach you before noon. I
have had the darnedest luck. Our Jap got sick last week and he sent a
new man to take his place. There wasn’t a thing the matter with our car
when I drove it in Friday night. This morning Father wanted to use it
on important business, and it wouldn’t run. He ordered me to tinker it
up enough to get it to the shop. I went at it and when it would go, I
started. You can imagine the clip I was going, and the thing went to
pieces. I don’t know yet how it comes that I saved my skin. I’m pretty
badly knocked out, but I’ll get there by noon if it’s a possible thing.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Linda, fervently hoping that the ache in
her throat would not tincture her voice.
It was half-past eleven when Donald came. Linda could not bring herself
to give up the sea that day. She found it impossible to drive the
King’s Highway. It seemed equally impossible not to look on the face of
the ocean, so she compromised by skirting Santa Monica Bay, and taking
the foothill road she ran it to the north end of the beach drive. When
they had spread their blankets on the sand, finished their lunch and
were resting, Linda began to question Donald about what had happened.
She wanted to know how long Whitings’ gardener had been in their
employ; if they knew where he lived and about his family; if they knew
who his friends were, or anything concerning him. She inquired about
the man who had taken his place, and wanted most particularly to know
what the garage men had found the trouble with a car that ran perfectly
on Friday night, and broke down in half a dozen different places on
Saturday morning. Finally Donald looked at her, laughingly quizzical.
“Linda,” he said, “you’re no nerve specialist and no naturalist. You’re
the cross examiner for the plaintiff. What are you trying to get at?
Make out a case against Yogo Sani?”
“Of course it’s all right,” said Linda, watching a distant pelican turn
head down and catapult into the sea. “It has to be all right, but you
must admit that it looks peculiar. How have you been getting along this
week?”
Donald waved his hand in the direction of a formation of stone the size
of a small house.
“Been rolling that to the top of the mountain,” he said lightly.
Linda’s eyes narrowed, her face grew speculative. She looked at Donald
intently.
“Is it as difficult as that?” she asked in a lowered voice as if the
surf and the sea chickens might hear.
“It is just as difficult as that,” said Donald. “While you’re talking
about peculiar things, I’ll tell you one. In class I came right up
against Oka Sayye on the solution of a theorem in trigonometry. We
both had the answer, the correct answer, but we had arrived at it by
widely different routes, and it was up to me to prove that my line of
reasoning was more lucid, more natural, the inevitable one by which the
solution should be reached. We got so in earnest that I am afraid both
of us were rather tense. I stepped over to his demonstration to point
out where I thought his reasoning was wrong. I got closer to the Jap
than I had ever been before; and by gracious, Linda! scattered, but
nevertheless still there, and visible, I saw a sprinkling of gray hairs
just in front of and over his ears. It caught me unawares, and before I
knew what I was doing, before the professor and the assembled classroom
I blurted it out: ‘Say, Oka Sayye, how old are you?’ If the Jap had had
any way of killing me, I believe he would have done it. There was a
look in his eyes that was what I would call deadly. It was only a flash
and then, very courteously, putting me in the wrong, of course, he
remarked that he was ‘almost ninekleen’; and it struck me from his look
and the way he said it that it was a lie. If he truly was the average
age of the rest of the class there was nothing for him to be angry
about. Then I did take a deliberate survey. From the settled solidity
of his frame and the shape of his hands and the skin of his face and
the set of his eyes in his head, I couldn’t see that much youth. I’ll
bet he’s thirty if he’s a day, and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he
has graduated at the most worth-while university in Japan, before he
ever came to this country to get his English for nothing.”
Linda was watching a sea swallow now, and slowly her lean fingers were
gathering handfuls of sand and sifting them into a little pyramid she
was heaping beside her. Again almost under her breath she spoke.
“Donald, do you really believe that?” she asked. “Is it possible that
mature Jap men are coming here and entering our schools and availing
themselves of the benefits that the taxpayers of California provide for
their children?”
“Didn’t you know it?” asked Donald. “I hadn’t thought of it in
connection with Oka Sayye, but I do know cases where mature Japs have
been in grade schools with children under ten.”
“Oh, Donald!” exclaimed Linda. “If California is permitting that or
ever has permitted it, we’re too easy. We deserve to become their prey
if we are so careless.”
“Why, I know it’s true,” said Donald. “I have been in the same classes
with men more than old enough to be my father.”
“I never was,” said Linda, industriously sifting sand. “I have been
in classes with Japs ever since I have been at school, but it was
with girls and boys of our gardeners and fruit dealers and curio-shop
people, and they were always of my age and entitled to be in school,
since our system includes the education of anybody who happens to be in
California and wants to go to school.”
“Did my being late spoil any particular plan you had made, Linda?”
“Yes,” said Linda, “it did.”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” cried Donald. “I certainly shall try to see that
it doesn’t occur again. Could we do it next Saturday?”
“I am hoping so,” said Linda.
“I told Dad,” said Donald, “where I wanted to go and what I wanted to
do, and he was awfully sorry but he said it was business and it would
take only a few minutes and he thought I could do it and be on time. If
he had known I would be detained I don’t believe he would have asked it
of me. He’s a grand old pater, Linda.”
“Yes, I know,” said Linda. “There’s not much you can tell me about
paters of the grand sort, the real, true flesh-and-blood, big-hearted,
human-being fathers, who will take you to the fields and the woods
and take the time to teach you what God made and how He made it and
why He made it and what we can do with it, and of the fellowship and
brotherhood we can get from Nature by being real kin. The one thing
that I have had that was the biggest thing in all this world was one of
these real fathers.”
Donald watched as she raised the pyramid higher and higher.
“Did you tell your father whom you were to go with?” she asked.
“Sure I did,” said Donald. “Told the whole family at dinner last
night. Told ’em about all the things I was learning, from where to get
soap off the bushes to the best spot for material for wooden legs or
instantaneous relief for snake bite.”
“What did they say?” Linda inquired laughingly.
“Unanimously in favour of continuing the course,” he said. “I had
already told Father about you when I asked him for books and any help
that he could give me with Oka Sayye. Since I had mentioned you last
night he told Mother and Louise about that, and they told me to bring
you to the house some time. All of them are crazy to know you. Mother
says she is just wild to know whether a girl who wears boots and
breeches and who knows canyons and the desert and the mountains as you
do can be a feminine and lovable person.”
“If I told her how many friends I have, she could have speedily decided
whether I am lovable or not,” said Linda; “but I would make an effort
to convince her that I am strictly feminine.”
“You would convince her of that without making the slightest effort.
You’re infinitely more feminine than any other girl I have ever known.”
“How do you figure that?” asked Linda.
“Well,” said Donald, “it’s a queer thing about you, Linda. I take any
liberty I pretty nearly please with most of the girls I have been
associated with. I tie their shoes and pull their hair—down if I want
to—and hand them round ’most any way the notion takes me, and they
just laugh and take the same liberties with me, which proves that I am
pretty much a girl with them or they are pretty much boys with me. But
it wouldn’t occur to me to touch your hair or your shoe lace or the
tips of your fingers; which proves that you’re more feminine than any
other girl I know, because if you were not I would be treating you more
like another boy. I thought, the first day we were together, that you
were like a boy, and I said so, and I thought it because you did not
tease me and flirt with me, but since I have come to know you better,
you’re less like a boy than any other girl I ever have known.”
“Don’t get psychological, Donald,” said Linda. “Go on with the Jap. I
haven’t got an answer yet to what I really want to know. Have you made
the least progress this week? Can you beat him?”
Donald hesitated, studying over the answer.
“Beat him at that trig proposition the other day,” he said. “Got
an open commendation before the class. There’s not a professor in
any of my classes who isn’t ‘hep’ to what I’m after by this time,
and if I would cajole them a little they would naturally be on my
side, especially if their attention were called to that incident of
yesterday; but you said I have to beat him with my brains, by doing
better work than he does; so about the biggest thing I can honestly
tell you is that I have held my own. I have only been ahead of him once
this week, but I haven’t failed in anything that he has accomplished.
I have been able to put some additional touches to some work that he
has done for which he used to be marked A which means your One Hundred.
Double A which means your plus I made in one instance. And you needn’t
think that Oka Sayye does not realize what I am up to as well as any
of the rest of the class, and you needn’t think that he is not going
to give me a run for my brain. All I’ve got will be needed before we
finish this term.”
“I see,” said Linda, slowly nodding her head.
“I wish,” said Donald, “that we had started this thing two years ago,
or better still, four. But of course you were not in the High School
four years ago and there wasn’t a girl in my class or among my friends
who cared whether I beat the Jap or not. They greatly preferred that I
take them motoring or to a dance or a picture show or a beach party.
You’re the only one except Mother and Louise who ever inspired me to
get down to business.”
Linda laid her palm on the top of the sand heap and pressed it flat.
She looked at Donald with laughing eyes.
“Symbolical,” she announced. “That sand was the Jap.” She stretched her
hand toward him. “That was you. Did you see yourself squash him?”
Donald’s laugh was grim.
“Yes, I saw,” he said. “I wish it were as easy as that.”
“That was not easy,” said Linda; “make a mental computation of all the
seconds that it took me to erect that pyramid and all the millions of
grains of sand I had to gather.”
Donald was deeply thoughtful, yet a half smile was playing round his
lips.
“Of all the queer girls I ever knew, you’re the cap sheaf, Linda,” he
said.
Linda rose slowly, shook the sand from her breeches and stretched out
her hand.
“Let’s hotfoot it down to the African village and see what the movies
are doing that is interesting to-day,” she proposed.