THE SOLID GOLD NUGGET
The autumn was drawing to an end and the winter season settling into its
gait. Everybody was back in town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her
column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming
six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and
anyway there were signs of it already--a first tentative outbreak of
parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things
were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which
to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little houses
that had been open all along were trying to pretend they had been shut.
Furs were being hung on clothes lines and raincoats brought out of
closets. Violets would soon be blooming around the roots of the live oaks
and the Marin County hills be green. In short the San Francisco winter
was at hand.
The Alston house had been cleaned and set in order from the cellar to the
roof and in its dustless, shining spaciousness Lorry sat down and faced
her duties. The time had come for her to act. Chrystie must take her
place among her fellows, be set forth, garnished and launched as befitted
the daughter of George Alston. It was an undertaking before which Lorry's
spirit quailed, but it was part of the obligation she had assumed. Though
she had accepted the idea, the translation from contemplation to action
was slow. In fact she might have stayed contemplating had not a
conversation one night with Chrystie nerved her to a desperate courage.
The girls occupied two adjoining rooms on the side of the house which
overlooked the garden. Across the hall was their parents' room, exactly
the same as it had been when Minnie Alston died there. Behind it were
others, large, high-ceilinged, with vast beds and heavy curtains. These
had been tenanted at long intervals, once by an uncle from the East,
since deceased, and lately by the Barlow girls, Chrystie's friends from
San Mateo. That had been quite an occasion. Chrystie talked of it as she
did of going to the opera or on board the English man-of-war.
Lorry was sitting in front of the glass brushing her hair, when
Chrystie, supposedly retired, came in fully dressed. She dropped onto
the side of the bed, watching her sister, with her head tilted, her eye
dreamily ruminant.
"What's the matter, dear?" said Lorry. "Why aren't you in bed?"
Chrystie yawned.
"I can't possibly imagine except that I don't want to be there," came
through the yawn.
"Aren't you sleepy?"
"In a sort of way." She yawned again and stretched with a wide spread
of arms. "I seem to be sleepy on the outside but it doesn't go down
into my soul."
Lorry, drawing the comb through her long hair which fell in a shining
sweep from her forehead to the chair seat, wanted this explained. But her
sister vaguely shook her head and stared at the carpet, then, after a
pause, murmured:
"I wish something would happen."
"What kind of thing?"
"Oh, just something--any old thing would be a change."
Lorry stopped combing.
"Do you mean that you're dull?" she asked. The worried gravity of her
face did not fit the subject.
"That must be it." Chrystie raised her eyes and looked at the cornice,
her red lips parted, her glance becoming animated. "Yes, of course,
that's it--I'm dull. Why didn't I see it myself? You've put it before me
in letters of fire--I'm dreadfully dull."
"What would you like to do?"
"Have some good times, lots of them. There aren't enough of them this
way. We can't go to the theater too often or we'd get used to it, and I
can't get the Barlows to come up here every week, they have such crowds
of engagements."
She sighed at the memory of the Barlows' superior advantages and the sigh
sounded like a groan of reproach in Lorry's ears. Innocently,
unconsciously, unaccusingly, Chrystie was rubbing in the failure of her
stewardship. She combed at the ends of her hair, her eyes blind to its
burnished brightness.
"Would you like to have a party here?" she said in a solemn voice.
Chrystie's glance was diverted from the cornice, wide open and
astonished.
"A party here, in _this_ house?"
"Yes, it's big enough. There's plenty of room and we can afford it."
"But, Lorry"--the proposition was so startling that she could hardly
believe it--"a _real_ party?"
"Any kind of a party you want. We might have several. We could begin with
a dinner; Fong can cook anything."
Chrystie, the idea accepted and held in dazzled contemplation, suddenly
saw a flaw.
"But where would we get any men?"
"We know some and we could find some more."
"You talk as if you could find them scattered about on the ground the way
they found nuggets in '49. Let's count our nuggets." She held up the
spread fingers of a large white hand, bending one down with each name.
"There's Charlie Crowder if he can get off, and his friend Robinson in
the express company, and Roy Barlow, whom I know so well I could recite
him in my sleep, and Mrs. Kirkham's grandnephew who looks like a
child--and--and--good gracious, Lorry, is that _all_ our nuggets?"
"We could have some of those young men whose mothers knew ours."
"You said you didn't like them."
"I know I did, but if you're going to give parties you have to have
people you don't like to fill up."
"Um," Chrystie pondered, "I suppose you must. Oh, there's Marquis de
Lafayette."
"Yes," said Lorry, "I thought of him."
Chrystie's eyes, bright with question, rested on her sister.
"You can't exactly call him a nugget."
"Why not?"
"Because he doesn't shine, darling."
This explanation appeared to strike its maker as a consummate witticism.
She fell back on the bed in spasms of laughter.
Lorry looked annoyed.
"He's nicer than any of the others, I think."
"Of course he is, but he's been buried too long in the soil; he needs
polishing." She rolled over on the bed in her laughter.
Lorry began to braid her hair, her face grave.
"I don't think things like that matter a bit, and I don't see at all what
you're laughing at."
"I'm laughing at Marquis de Lafayette. I can't help it--something about
his hands and his manners. They're so ponderously polite; maybe it's from
waiting on table in the students' boarding house."
"I never knew you were a snob before, Chrystie."
"I guess I am. Isn't it awful? Oh, dear, I've laughed so much I've got a
pain. It's perfectly true, I'm a snob. I like my nuggets all smooth and
shiny with no knobs or bits of earth clinging to them."
Lorry's hair was done and she rose and approached her sister.
"You've spoiled my bed. Get off it and go."
But Chrystie would not move. With her face red and the tears of her
laughter standing in her eyes she gazed at the serious one.
"Lorry, darling, you look so sweet in that wrapper with your hair
slicked back. You look like somebody I know. Who is it? Oh, of course,
the Blessed Damozel, leaning on the bar of Heaven, only it's the bar
of the bed."
"Don't be silly, Chrystie. Get up."
"Never till I have your solemn, eternal, sworn-to promise."
"What promise?"
"To give that party."
"You have it--I said I'd do it and I will."
"And get nuggets for it?"
"Yes."
"All right, I'll go."
She sat up, rosy, disheveled, her hair hanging in a tousled mop from its
loosened pins. Catching Lorry's hand, she squeezed it, looking up at her
like an affectionate, drowsy child.
"Dear little Blessed Damozel, I love you a lot even though you are
high-minded and think I'm a snob."
She had been in her room for some minutes, Lorry already in bed with a
light at her elbow and a book in her hand, when she reappeared in the
doorway. The pins were gone from her hair and it lay in a yellow tangle
on her shoulders, bare and milk-white. Looking at her sister with round,
shocked eyes, she said:
"It's just come to me how awful it is that two young, beautiful and
aristocratic ladies should have to hunt so hard for nuggets. It's tragic,
Lorry. It's _scandalous_," and she disappeared.
Lorry couldn't read after that. She put out the light and made plans
in the dark.
The next day she rose, grimly determined, and girded herself for action.
In the morning, giving Fong the orders, she told him she was going to
have a dinner, and in the afternoon went to see Mrs. Kirkham.
Mrs. Kirkham had once been a friend of Minnie Alston's and she was the
only one of that now diminishing group with whom Lorry felt at ease. Had
the others known of the visit and its cause they would have thrown up
their hands and said, "Just like that girl." Mrs. Kirkham was nobody now,
the last person to go to for help in social matters. In the old days in
Nevada her husband had been George Alston's paymaster, and she had held
her head high and worn diamonds.
But that was ages ago. Long before the date of this story the high head
had been lowered and the diamonds sold, all but those that encircled the
miniature of her only baby, dead before the Con-Virginia slump. She lived
in a little flat up toward the cemeteries, second floor, door to the
left, and please press the push button. In her small parlor the pictures
of the Bonanza Kings hung on the walls and she was wont, an old rheumatic
figure in shiny black with the miniature pinned at her withered throat,
to point to these and tell stories of the great Iliad of the Comstock.
She was very fond of Lorry and when she heard her predicament--a party to
be given and not enough men--patted her hand and nodded understandingly.
Times were changed--ah, if the girls had been in Virginia in the
seventies! And after a brisk canter through her memories (she always had
to have that) galloped back into the present and its needs. Lorry went
home reassured and soothed. You could always count on Mrs. Kirkham's
taking hold and helping you through.
The old lady was put on her mettle, flattered by the appeal, made to feel
she was still a living force. Also she would have done anything in the
world for Minnie's girls. She consulted with her niece, well married and
socially aspiring if not yet installed in the citadel. It was a happy
thought; the niece had the very thing, "a delightful gentleman," lately
arrived in the city. So it fell out that Boye Mayer, under the
chaperonage of Mrs. Kirkham, was brought to call and asked to fill a seat
at the formidable dinner.
Formidable was hardly a strong enough word. It advanced on Lorry like a
darkling doom. Once she had set its machinery in motion it seemed to rush
forward with a vengeful momentum. Everybody accepted but Charlie Crowder,
who could not get off, and Mark Burrage, who wrote her a short, stiff
note saying he "was unable to attend." For a space that made her
oblivious to the larger, surrounding distress. It was a little private
and particular sting for herself that concentrated her thoughts upon the
hurt it left. After she read it her face had flushed, and she had dropped
it into her desk snapping the lid down hard. If he didn't want to come he
could stay away. Men didn't like her anyway; she knew it and she wasn't
going to make any mistakes. Her concern in life was Chrystie and it was
being pointed out to her that she wasn't supposed to have any other.
Finally the evening came and everything was ready. Fong's talents,
after years of disuse, rose in the passion of the artist and produced a
feast worthy of the past. A florist decorated the table and the lower
floor. Mother's jewels were taken out of the safety deposit box, and
Lorry and Chrystie, in French costumes with their hair dressed so that
they looked like strangers, gazed upon each other in the embowered
drawing-room realizing that they had brought it upon themselves and
must see it through.
The start was far from promising; none of them seemed able to live up to
it. Aunt Ellen kept following the strange waiters with suspicious eyes,
then looking down the glittering table at Lorry like a worried dog. And
Chrystie, who had been all blithe expectation up to the time she dressed,
was suddenly shattered by nervousness, making detached, breathless
remarks about the weather and then drinking copious draughts of water. As
for Lorry, she felt herself so small and shriveled that her new dress
hung on her in folds and her mouth was so dry she could hardly
articulate.
It was awful. The guests seemed to feel the blight and wither under it,
eating carefully as if fearing sounds of mastication might intrude on the
long, recurring silences. There was a time when Lorry thought she
couldn't bear it, had a distracted temptation to leap to her feet, say
she was faint and rush from the place. Then came the turn in the
tide--Mr. Mayer, the strange man Mrs. Kirkham had produced, did it. She
had noticed that he alone seemed free from the prevailing discomfort,
looked undisturbed and calm, glancing at the table, the guests, herself
and Chrystie. But it was not until the fish that he started to talk. It
was about the fish, but it branched away from the fish, radiated out from
it to other fish, to the waters where the other fish swam, to the
countries that gave on the waters, to the people who lived in the
countries.
He woke them all up, held them entranced. Lorry couldn't be sure
whether he really was so clever or seemed so by contrast with them, but
she thought it was the latter. It didn't matter; nothing mattered
except that he was making it go. And at first she had been loath to ask
him! She hadn't liked him, thought he was too suavely elaborate, a sort
of overdone imitation. Well, thank goodness she had, for he simply took
the dinner which was settling down to a slow, sure death and made it
come to life.
Presently they were all talking, to their partners, across the table,
even to Aunt Ellen. The exhilarating sound of voices rose to a hum, then
a concerted babble broken by laughter. It grew animated, it grew
sparkling, it grew brilliant. Chrystie, with parted lips and glistening
eyes, became as artlessly amusing as she was in the bosom of her family.
She was delightful, her frank enjoyment a charming spectacle. Lorry, in
that seat which so short a time before had seemed but one remove from the
electric chair, now reigned as from a throne, proudly surveying the
splendors of her table and the gladness of her guests.
When it was over, the last carriage wheels rumbling down the street, the
girls stood in the hall and looked at one another. Aunt Ellen, creaking
in her new silks, toiled up the stairs, an old, shaky hand on the
balustrade.
"Come up, girls," she quavered; "you must be dead tired."
"Well," breathed Lorry with questioning eyes on her sister, "how was it?"
Chrystie jumped at her and folded her in a rapturous embrace.
"Oh, it was maddening, blissful, rip-roarious! Oh, Lorry, it was the
grandest thing since the water came up to Montgomery street!"
"You _did_ enjoy it, didn't you?"
"Enjoy it! Why, I never had such a galumptious time in my life. They
all did. The Barlow girls are on their heads about it--they said so and
I saw it."
"I think everybody had a good time."
"Of course they did. But, oh, didn't you nearly die at the beginning? I
was sick. Honestly, Lorry, I felt something sinking in me down here,
and my mouth getting all sideways. If it hadn't been for that man I'd
have just slipped out of my seat under the table and died there at
their feet."
"He saved it," said Lorry solemnly, as one might mention a doctor who had
brought back from death a beloved relative.
The gas was out and they were mounting the stairs, arms entwined, warm
young flesh on warm young flesh.
"Isn't he a thoroughbred, isn't he a gem!" Chrystie chanted. "I'd like to
go to Mrs. Kirkham's tomorrow, climb up her front stairs on my knees and
knock my forehead on the sill of her parlor door."
"Did you really like him? I think he's clever and entertaining but I
wouldn't want him for a friend."
"I didn't think about him that way. I just sort of stood off and
admired. He's the most _magnetic_ thing!"
"Yes, I suppose he is, but--"
"There are no buts about it." Then in the voice of knowledge, "I'll tell
you what he is, I'll put it in terms you can understand--he's the perfect
specimen of the real, genuine, solid gold nugget."