Every Sunday afternoon during the picking season, Mrs. Tiffany served
tea on the lawn for the half-dozen familiar households on the Santa
Lucia tract. That was the busy time of all the year, affording no
leisure for those dinners and whist parties which came in the early
season, when the country families had just arrived from town, or in
the late season, when prune picking grew slack. Night finds one weary
in the country, even when his day has brought only supervision of
labor. These town-bred folk, living from the soil and still but half
welded to it, fell unconsciously into farmer habits in this working
period.
The Goodyears and the Morses, more formal than their neighbors, did
indeed give a dinner once or twice a summer to this or that visitor
from San Francisco or San Jose. Otherwise, the colony gathered only at
this Sunday afternoon tea of Mrs. Tiffany's. Her place lay about
midway of the colony, her lawn, such as it was--no lawn flourishes
greatly in that land of dry summers--was the oldest and best kept of
all; further, they had acquired the habit. Already, these Californians
were beginning a country life remotely like that of England; a country
life made gracious by all the simple refinements, from bathtubs to
books. They had settled, too, into the ways of a clique; small and
informal as their entertainments were, minor jealousies of leadership
had developed already.
By a kind of consent never yet made law by any contest, the Goodyears
were leaders and dictators. He, Raleigh Goodyear, was passably rich;
his wife was by birth of that old Southern set which dominated the
society of San Francisco from its very beginning. Until their only
daughter married into the army and, by her money and connections,
advanced her husband to a staff position in Washington, Mrs. Goodyear
had figured among the patrons to those cotillions and assemblies by
which the elect, under selection of a wine agent, set themselves off
from the aspiring. Them the colony treated with familiar deference.
Mrs. Tiffany, whose native desire to please and accommodate had grown
with her kind of matrimony, held social leadership of a different
kind. Her summer house was the boudoir of this colony, as her town
house was the centre for quiet and informal entertainment just tinged
with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting
and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to
that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town
dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more
of a business. That rather silent husband of hers--a man getting an
uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life
which had just escaped great success--told her that she had one great
fault of the head. She must always make a martyr of herself by bearing
the burdens of her world.
The Judge and Mrs. Tiffany sat now, in the early afternoon of a summer
Sunday, under the gigantic live-oak which shadowed their piazza. She
was crocheting a pink scarf, through which her tiny fingers flew like
shuttles; he was reading. Out beyond their hacienda, the American
"hands," fresh-shaved for Sunday, lolled on the ground over a lazy
game of cards. From the creek bottom further on, came a sound which,
in the distance, resembled the drumming of cicadas--a Chinese workman
was lulling his ease with a moon-fiddle. Near at hand stood the tea
things, all prepared before Molly, the maid, started for her Sunday
afternoon visit to the camp of the women cutters. Factory girls from
the city, these cutters, making a vacation of the summer work.
Mrs. Tiffany glanced up from her yarns at the leonine head of her
husband, bent above "The History of European Morals," opened her mouth
as though to speak; thought better of it, apparently. Twice she looked
up like this, her air showing that she was not quite confident of his
sympathy in that which she meant to bring forward.
"Edward!" she said at length, quite loud. He lowered the book and
removed his reading glasses, held them poised--a characteristic
gesture with him. He said no word; between them, a glance was enough.
"You remember the young man who went over with Eleanor to drive away
the Ruggles bull?"
Judge Tiffany gave assent by a slight inclination of his head.
"I went over to the camp of those University boys yesterday," she went
on, running loops with incredible speed, "and I don't quite like the
way they are living there. They associate too much with the
cutting-women. You know, Edward, that isn't good for boys of their
age--and they must be nice at bottom or they wouldn't be trying to
work their way through college--"
She stopped as though to note the effect. The ripple of a smile played
under Judge Tiffany's beard. She caught at her next words a little
nervously.
"You know we have a responsibility for the people about the place,
Edward--I couldn't bear to think we'd let any nice college boy
degenerate because we employed him--and it is so easy at their age."
"Which means," broke in the Judge, "that you have asked this Mr.
Chester up here to tea."
"If--if you wish it, Edward."
"I can't very well countermand your invitation and tell him by the
foreman not to come. But I warn you that this social recognition will
serve as no excuse if I catch him picking any more green apricots."
Mrs. Tiffany, unturned by this breeze of criticism, ran along on her
own tack.
"His manners _are_ a little forward, but he has a nice way of
speaking. I'm sure he is a gentleman, at bottom. You can't expect such
a young man, who has been obliged to work his way, to have all the
graces at once. They've brought down their town clothes--I saw them
last Sunday--so you needn't be afraid of that. I've asked Mr. Heath,
too."
"Is that by way of another introduction?" asked Judge Tiffany. His
eyes looked at her severely, but his beard showed that he was smiling
gently again. Half his joy in a welded marriage lay in his
appreciation of her humors, as though one should laugh at himself.
"Oh, there's no doubt that _he's_ a gentleman. He is less loud,
somehow, than Mr. Chester, though he hasn't his charm. It seems there
is the most wonderful boy friendship between them."
"Where did you get all this insight into the social life of our
employees?" asked Judge Tiffany; and then, "Mattie, you've been
exposing yourself to the night air again."
"Over at their camp last evening," said Mrs. Tiffany. "Well, and isn't
it my business to look after--after that side of the ranch?" she
added.
The Judge had dropped the book now; his senses were alert to the game
which never grew old to him--"Mattie-baiting" he had named it.
"Mattie," he said, "with a pretty and marriageable, dowered and maiden
niece on your hands, a new era is opening in your life of passionate
self-sacrifice. It used to be orphan children and neglected wives of
farm hands. Now it is presentable but neglected bachelors. Your
darling match for Eleanor, I suppose, would be some young soul
snatched from evil courses, pruned, trimmed, and delivered at the
altar with 'Made by Mattie Tiffany' branded on his wings. Spare, O
spare your innocent niece!"
"Edward, I never thought of it in that light!" cried Mrs. Tiffany; and
she bent herself to furious crocheting. After a time, and when the
Judge had resumed his book, she looked up and added:
"It might be worse, though, than a young man who had made it all
himself."
Judge Tiffany burst into laughter. Then, seeing her bend closer over
her pink yarns, he grew grave, reached for the hand which held the
needles, and kissed it.
That was her reward of childless matrimony, as the appreciation of her
humors was his.
* * * * *
While they sat thus, in one of their comfortable hours, the guests
were come. The Morses appeared first. He was a pleasant,
hollow-chested little man; his delicacy of lung gave him his excuse
for playing gentleman farmer. She, half-Spanish, carried bulk for the
family and carried it well. The Andalusian showed in her coy yet open
air, in her small, broad hand and foot, in a languorous liquidity of
eye. Their son, a well-behaved and pretty youth of twelve, and their
daughter, two years older, rode behind them on the back seat. The
daughter bore one of those mosaic names with which the mixed race has
sprinkled California--Teresa del Vinal Morse. A pretty, delicate
tea-rose thing, she stood at an age of divided appreciations. In the
informal society of the Santa Lucia colony, she was listening half the
time to her elders, taking a shadowy interest in their sayings and
opinions; for the rest, she was turning on Theodore, that childish
brother, an illuminated understanding.
The Goodyears arrived with a little flourish. Their trap, which she
drove herself and which was perhaps a little too English to be useful
or appropriate on a Californian road, the straight, tailor lines of
her suit--all displayed that kind of quiet, refined ostentation which,
very possibly, shrieks as loud to God as the diamond rings on a soiled
finger. Mrs. Tiffany, who had met the Morses on the lawn, tripped
clear across the rose-border to meet the Goodyears; did it with entire
unconsciousness of drawing any distinction. As by right, Mrs. Goodyear
appropriated the great green arm-chair under the oak tree, from which
throne she radiated a delicate patronage upon the company.
The others followed by twos and threes. Montgomery Lee, fresh-faced
English University man, raising prunes on his patrimony of a younger
son; the Roach girls, plump Californian old maids, and their pleasant
little Yankee mother; the Ruggleses, a young married couple. Careless
farmers, Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles; but they had the good nature which is
the virtue of that defect. This, and the common interest in their
three plump, mischievous babies, gave them general popularity in the
colony.
Within five minutes, the company had followed the law of such
middle-aged groups of familiars, and separated by sexes. The men
drifted over to the piazza, lit cigars, hoisted their knees, and
talked, first, of the prune picking, their trouble with help, the
rather bootless effort of a group in San Jose to form a Growers'
Association; then of that city where lay their more vital interests.
Goodyear had just been to San Francisco on a flying trip; he brought
back fresh gossip: The Bohemian Club had the "Jinks" in rehearsal; a
new-discovered poet had written the book; it was to be (so the Sire
declared) the greatest in club history.
"As usual," smiled Judge Tiffany.
They were saying about the Pacific Union Club that the Southern
Pacific had raised its rates to Southern points. One might have sensed
that shadow which hangs always over commercial California in the
sombreness which froze the group at this news. From five minutes of
pessimistic discussion, Goodyear led them by a scattered fire of
personalities. Billy Darnton was going to give a bull's head breakfast
at San Jacinto. Al Hemphill was coming to it all the way from New
York. Charlie Bates had pulled out for the new gold diggings in the
Mojave desert, rich again in anticipation, although he had to leave
San Francisco secretly to escape the process servers.
"Tea, gentlemen!" called Mrs. Tiffany, from her nasturtium bower in
the shadow of the great oak.
"Just when we are getting comfortable," her husband growled
pleasantly; and he made no move to rise. The women sat at ease about
the tea-table. Their talk, beginning with the marvelous Ruggles
babies, had run lightly past clothes and help, and fallen into the
hands of Mrs. Goodyear. She, too, was full of San Francisco. Apart,
under the grape arbor, Teresa Morse and her brother were snaring
lizards--playing like two well-behaved babies miraculously grown
tall.
"There's Eleanor," suddenly spoke Teresa. At the word, she dropped
her lizard, started forward; and stopped as she came out into full
view of the road.
Eleanor, in fresh white, bareheaded under her parasol, was approaching
between two young men. The slighter of the two men moved a little
apart; the heavier, in whom Mrs. Tiffany recognized with some
apprehension the new protegé, Mr. Bertram Chester, walked very close
up. He was peering under the parasol, which Eleanor dropped in his
direction from time to time without visibly effecting his removal. It
seemed from his wide gestures, from the smile which became apparent as
he drew nearer, that he was talking ardently.
In the other man, Mrs. Tiffany recognized that Mr. Heath who had the
boy friendship with Bertram Chester. He was putting in a word now and
then, it appeared. When he spoke, Eleanor turned polite attention upon
him; and then resumed her guarded attitude toward that dynamo buzzing
at her left. Insensible of the company on the lawn, they passed behind
the grape arbor which fringed the gate and which hid them temporarily
from view; and the one-sided conversation became audible.
"It wasn't a _patch_ on fights I've had with 'em. Down home, I used to
fight steers right along. That's nothing to a nigger who used to work
for us in Tulare. He'd jump on their backs and reach over and bite
their noses till they hollered quits. Sure thing he did!" It died out
as they turned in at the gate and faced the group about the trees.
Mrs. Goodyear made a gesture of an imaginary lorgnette toward her
high-bridged nose. Mrs. Tiffany gathered herself and ran over to the
gate. It was Mr. Heath--she noticed as she advanced--who was blushing.
Bertram Chester stood square on his two feet smiling genially. As for
Eleanor, she maintained that sweet inscrutability of face which
became, as years and trouble came on, her great and unappreciated
personal asset.
Young Chester spoke first:
"I knew Miss Gray was coming down this afternoon--so I laid for her on
the road--didn't I, Miss Gray?"
"Very nice of you, I'm sure," murmured Mrs. Tiffany, though she bit
her lip before she spoke--"won't you come over to meet our friends?"
Eleanor had darted ahead, to the pats of the women and the adoring
hugs of Teresa Morse.
Mrs. Tiffany saw with relief that her disgraced protegé managed his
end of the introduction very well, although he did make a slight
advance to shake hands with the critical Mrs. Goodyear. He gave no
sign to show that he perceived the men over on the piazza. Mr. Heath,
his Fidus Achates, cast a slight glance in their direction; then,
seeing Bertram settle himself down in an arm-chair and begin at once
to address Mrs. Goodyear, he sat down likewise, suffused with an air
of young embarrassment. Mrs. Ruggles, seated next to him, began with
visible tact the effort to put him at his ease.
Mr. Chester, as he talked to Mrs. Goodyear, looked always toward
Eleanor. She, helping Mrs. Tiffany with the tea things, turning a
caressing word now and then toward Teresa Morse, might not have
noticed, for all her expression showed.
The men came over for tea, were introduced. Mrs. Tiffany, in her
foolish anxiety for the manners and appearance of her protegé, noted
that he was at home with men, at least.
Mr. Goodyear, indeed, clutched with his eye at the blue-and-gold
button in the lapel of Bertram's coat, at the figure of him, and at
the name.
"You aren't Chester who played tackle on the Berkeley Varsity last
season?" he asked. An old Harvard oar, Goodyear kept up his interest
in athletics.
"Tackle and half," said the youth. "Yes, sir."
"Well, well, I remember you in the game!" said Goodyear.
Mrs. Tiffany, now that her protegé no longer needed watching, had
returned to her tea things.
"Eleanor," she called. "Will you run into the house and get that box
of chocolate wafers that's over the ice chest?"
"Let me carry 'em for you, Miss Gray," put in Chester, breaking
through a college reminiscence of Goodyear's.
Eleanor never flicked an eyelash as she announced:
"I should be very glad."
Tiffany, glancing over the group, noted with comparative relief that
none but she, Goodyear, and the young persons involved, had heard this
passage.
As they moved toward the house, Bertram opened upon Miss Gray at
once.
"This is the second chance I've had alone at you," he said.
"We are rather conspicuous," she burst out.
"Oh, nobody'll mind. A girl always thinks everybody is looking at her.
Besides, I wouldn't care if they were. I've wanted to tell you
something, and I couldn't with Heath trailing us. You've got awfully
nice eyes."
Eleanor seemed to see neither the necessity nor the convenience of an
answer.
"But you have!" he persisted. "They're better than pretty. They're
nice."
Again Eleanor said nothing. It seemed to her that there was nothing to
say.
"I know why you've got it in for me," he burst out. "You have, you
know. When I speak to you, you never talk back, and yesterday you
wouldn't let me stay after I had corralled the bull. It's because I'm
working for your uncle. It's because I'm making a living, not eating
what someone else made for me like--" he swept his hand backward
toward the company on the lawn--"like those people out there."
Stung, for a second, to a visible emotion, Eleanor raised her grey
eyes and regarded him.
"You are assuming a little, aren't you?" said she.
"Then why can't I come to see you sometime in the evening if that
isn't so? I don't ask it of many nice girls."
She caught at the delimiting phrase, "nice girls," and glanced up
again. By this time, they had passed through the living room; and he
had awkwardly opened the door into the kitchen.
"I haven't known you very long," she said.
"There isn't a lot to know about me," he grumbled. Then his face
cleared like the sunshine breaking through. "I could teach you to
savvey the whole works in an evening."
"There are the chocolate wafers up over the ice-chest--that brown tin
box." He reached up and heaved the package down, putting into that
simple and easy operation the energy of one lifting a trunk.
Annoyed, and a little amused, Eleanor watched him. All at once, she
felt a catch in her throat, was aware of a vague, uncomprehended
fear--fear of him, of her loneliness with him, of something further
and greater which she could not understand, did not try to understand.
She wanted air; wanted to get away. When he turned about, she stood
holding open the kitchen door, her eyes averted.
She felt that he was standing over her; she felt his smile as he
looked down.
"You needn't be in such a terrible hurry," he said.
"They'll be waiting for us on the lawn," she forced herself to answer.
It required all her energy to keep her voice clear and firm. Then she
hurried ahead into the open air. Once in sight of the lawn party, she
made herself walk beside him, even smile up at him.
"It's just as I said--" he had gone back to his grumbling voice and
his wholly presumptuous manner--"Either you don't like me, or you're
sore on me because I'm working for your uncle."
To the great relief of Eleanor, Mrs. Tiffany came out to meet them,
took the box from Bertram and accompanied them back to the tea table.
For the rest of the afternoon, Eleanor managed by one device or
another to save the situation. When, in the shifting of group and
group, she had no one else for protection, Teresa Morse, following her
like a dog, ready to come to her side at a glance, played the
involuntary chaperone.
Judge Tiffany had no word alone with his wife until the sun slanted
low across the orchard and the company broke up. When he met her
apart, he said:
"He ought to be a success, that protegé of yours!"
"I have been dreadfully mortified!"
"Oh, not a social success, though that may come too, if he ever
perceives the necessity for it. But a general success. Such simple and
unturned directness as his ought to win out anywhere. It is more than
enchanting. It is magnificent. I'm willing to risk discipline on the
place just to study a specimen so unusual. Mattie, this time I am
going to assist. I'm going to ask him to supper."
"Edward, are you laughing at me again?"
"For once, my dear, no; not at least on the main line. You'd better
ask that Mr. Heath, too."
"And Eleanor?"
The Judge looked across to the oak tree, where Eleanor was
ostentatiously tying up the brown braids of Teresa Morse. Bertram,
talking athletics with Goodyear, had her under fire of his eyes.
"If any young person was ever capable to make that choice, it is your
niece Eleanor," he said. "It might afford study. Yes, ask her, too."
Mr. Chester and Mr. Heath were delighted; though Mr. Chester said that
he had an engagement for the evening. ("What engagement except with
the cutting-women?" thought Mattie Tiffany.) But Eleanor declined.
Some of the chickens were sick; she was afraid that it might be the
pip; she doubted if Antonio or Maria would attend to it; she would sup
at home. Mrs. Tiffany, anticipating the intention which she saw in
Bertram's eyes, made a quick draft on her tact and asked:
"Mr. Chester, would you mind helping me in with the chairs?"
Seated at the supper table, Bertram Chester expanded. The Judge took
him in hand at once; led him on into twenty channels of introspective
talk. Presently, they were speaking direct to one another, the gulf
that separates youth from age, employer from employed, bridged by
interest on one side and supreme confidence on the other. This
grouping left Mrs. Tiffany free to study Heath. It grew upon her that
she had overlooked him and his needs through her interest in the more
obvious Chester. She noticed with approval his finished table manners.
Mr. Chester, though he understood the proper use of knife and fork and
napkin, paid slight attention to "passing things"; Heath, on the
contrary, was alert always, and especially to her needs. "He had a
careful mother," she thought. Gently, and with a concealed approach,
she led him on to his family and his worldly circumstances. He spoke
freely and simply, and with a curious frank assumption that anything
his people chose to do was right, because they did it. He had come
down to the University from Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair
shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost
everything.
"I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more
easily than through an Eastern college," he said simply.
"And then I shouldn't be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me
at least once a year."
He was going home after the apricot picking was over; he felt that in
vacation he should earn at least his fare to Washington and back.
"I'm sure she must be a very good mother to deserve that devotion,"
said Mrs. Tiffany, warming to him.
"She deserves more," he said, a kind of inner glow rising to his
white-and-pink boyish face. That same glow,--Mrs. Tiffany might have
noticed this and did not--illuminated him whenever, from across the
table, Chester's laugh or his energetic crack on a sentence called a
forced attention. Mr. Heath deferred always to this louder
personality; kept for him the anxious and eager interest of a mother
toward her young. Gradually, this interest absorbed both Mr. Heath and
Mrs. Tiffany. The table talk became a series of monologues by young
Bertram Chester, Judge Tiffany throwing in just enough replies to spur
and guide him.
"No, I don't belong to any fraternity," said the confident youth,
"don't believe in them. They plenty beat me for football captain last
year too. When I came to college, they didn't want me. After I made
the team and got prominent, they began to rush me. Then I didn't want
_them_."
"It might have been easier for Bert if he _had_ joined them," said
Heath. "They don't like to have their members working at--with their
hands; they always find them snap jobs if they are poor and
prominent."
"Oh, I don't know," said Bertram. "The barbs elected me business
manager of the _Occident_ last season--I didn't make the team until I
was a Sophomore, you know--and that more than paid my way. This year
I've got a billiard hall with Sandy McCusick.
"He used to be a trainer for the track team," explained Bertram. "I
steer him custom and he runs it. Ought to get me through next year
over and above. That's one reason I'm picking fruit and resting my
mind this summer instead of hustling for money in the city."
"And then?" asked the Judge.
"Law, I guess."
"I am an attorney myself."
"I guess I know that!"
"What school have you chosen?"
"None, I guess. I don't want to afford the time. Yes, I know you want
good preparation, but I'd rather be preparing in an office, making a
little and keeping my eye open for chances. I may find, before my
three years are up, that it isn't law I want, but business."
"I'm not a college man myself," said the Judge, "I got my education by
reading nights on the farm, and pounded out what law I knew in an
office at Virginia City. One didn't need a great deal of law to
practice in Comstock days--more nerve and mining sense. But I've
regretted always that I didn't have a more thorough preparation.
Still, every man to his own way. This may be best for you."
"That's what I think," said Bertram Chester. "When I got through High
School in Tulare, Dad said, 'Unless you want to stay on the ranch,
you'd better foot it for college.' I didn't want to ranch it, and I
saw that college must be the best place for a start. Dad put up for
the first year. I might have stretched it out to cover a little of my
Sophomore year if I'd been careful. I was a pretty fresh Freshman," he
added.
"And your mother?" asked Mrs. Tiffany. "I suppose she was crazy for
you to go."
"Yes, I suppose she would have been. She's been dead ten years. How
hard is it to get into a law office in San Francisco?" he added,
shifting.
Judge Tiffany met the direct hint with a direct parry.
"We have five thousand attorneys in San Francisco and only five
hundred of them are making a living."
"Yes, I know it is overcrowded," said Bertram Chester, not a particle
abashed.
After black coffee on the piazza, the two college boys swung off down
the lane, Bertram smoking rapidly at one of the Judge's cigars.
"He can be almost anything," said the Judge, meditatively.
"Even a gentleman?" gently inquired Mrs. Tiffany.
"Perhaps that isn't necessary in our Western way of life. Thank God,
we haven't come yet to the point where the caste of Vere de Vere is
necessary to us."
"I wish I had it," he went on, a little wistfully.
"Gentility? why Edward, if anyone--"
"Oh no, my dear. I may say that was half the trouble. So many
considerations came up; so many things I didn't want to do, so many it
didn't seem right to do. I was forever turning aside to wrestle with
my feelings on those things, and forever hesitating. Half the time,
after the opportunity was gone by, I discovered that my scruples had
been foolish; but I always discovered afterward. I don't believe that
success lies that way in a new world."
He had risen; and now his wife rose and stood beside him.
"You are forever talking as though you were a failure. I know you're
not. Everyone knows you're not."
"The parable of the ten talents, Mattie. Not how much we've got, but
how much interest we've earned on our powers. However, we had that out
long ago, my dear. Yes, I know. I promised not to talk and think this
way. But if I'd been like this boy! He'll seize the thing before him.
No side considerations in his mind!"
"It is a policy," said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone of injured
partisanship, "that will land him in jail."
"No," said the Judge, "success does not lead towards jails. He'll look
out for that."