The "Wild Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the
neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them
had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish
village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of
negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the
picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the
hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his proud, pale
wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The
general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that he had come--or
been sent--west to make a fresh start. There was something rather
pathetically naïve about that theory. There could never be a fresh start
for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent cellars and playing cards.
In a surprisingly short time he had re-created his earlier atmosphere
for himself--an atmosphere of charm and cheer and color ... and pride
and shame and misery, in which his wife and children lived and moved and
had their being. In the early eighties he built the big beautiful house
on South Figueroa Street, moved the last of his negro servitors and the
last of his cellar and his young family into it and died. Since that day
Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny creatures, liked and sighed
over, and the house was shabby now, cracked and peeling for the want of
paint, the walks grass-grown, the lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains
at the dim windows. There were only three bottles of the historic cellar
left now, precious, cob-webbed; there was only one of the blacks, an
ancient, crabbed crone of the second generation, with a witch's hand at
cookery and a witch's temper. And there were only James King III and
James King IV, his son, Honor's Jimsy, left of the line in the old home.
The negress fed and mended them; an infrequent Japanese came in to make
futile efforts on house and garden.
The neighbors said, "How do you do, Mr. King? Like summer, really, isn't
it?" and looked hastily away. One never could be sure of finding him
quite himself. Even if he walked quite steadily he might not be able to
talk quite steadily, but he was always a King, always sure of his
manner, be he ever so unsure of his feet or his tongue. He had been
worse since his wife died, when the boy was still a toddler. She was a
slim, sandy-haired Scotch girl with steady eyes and a prominent chin,
who had married him to reform him, and the neighbors were beginning to
think she was in a fair way to compass it when she died. No one had ever
been able to pity Jeanie King; she had been as proud as the pale lady
who came with the first "Wild King" from Virginia. There was that about
the Kings; it had to be granted that their women always stuck; they must
have had compensating traits and graces. No King wife ever gave up or
deserted save by death, and no King wife ever wept on a neighbor's
shoulder.
And now they had all wandered back to Virginia or up to Alaska or down
to Mexico, and there was not an uncle or cousin of his tribe left in Los
Angeles for Jimsy King; only his bad, beloved father, coming home at
noon in rumpled evening dress, but wearing it better and more handily,
for all that, than any other man on the block.
It was agreed that there was no chance for Jimsy to escape the heritage
of his blood. People were kind about it, but very firm. "If his mother
had lived he might have had a chance, the poor boy," Mrs. Lorimer would
sigh, "but with that father, and that home life, and that example----"
"My dear," said Stephen Lorimer, "can't you see what you are doing? By
_you_ I mean the neighborhood. You are holding his heredity up like a
hoop for him to jump through!"
Honor's stepfather held that there might be a generous share of the
firm-chinned Scotch mother in Jimsy. Certainly it was a fighting chance;
he was living in a day of less warmth and color than his father and his
forbears; there were more outlets for his interest and his energy. His
father, for instance, had not played football. Jimsy had played as soon
as he could walk alone--football, baseball, basketball, handball, water
polo; life was a hard and tingling game to him. "It's an even chance,"
said Stephen Lorimer, "and if Honor's palling with him can swing it, can
we square it with ourselves to take her away from him?" He carried his
point, as usual, and the boy and the girl started in at Los Angeles High
on the same day. Honor decided on the subjects which Jimsy could most
safely take--the things he was strongest in, the weak subjects in which
she was strong. There was an inexorable rule about being signed up by
every teacher for satisfactory work on Friday afternoon before a
Saturday football game; it was as a law of the Medes and Persians; even
the teachers who adored him most needs must abide by it. There was no
cajoling any of them; even the pretty, ridiculously young thing who
taught Spanish maintained a Gibraltar-like firmness.
"You'll simply have to study, Jimsy, that's all," said Honor.
"Study, yes, but that's not learning, Skipper!" (She had been that ever
since her first entirely seaworthy summer at Catalina.) "I can study, if
I have to, but that's not saying I'll get anything into my sconce! I'm
pretty slow in the head!"
"I know you are," said Honor, sighing. "Of course, you've been so busy
with other things. Think what you've done in athletics!"
"Fast on the feet and slow in the head," he grinned. "Well, I'll die
trying. But you've got to stand by, Skipper."
"Of course. I'll do your Latin and English and part of your Spanish."
"Gee, you're a brick."
"It's nothing." She dismissed it briefly. "It's my way of doing
something, Jimsy, that's all. It's the only way I can be on the team."
She glowed pinkly at the thought. "When I sit up on the bleachers and
see you make a touchdown and hear 'em yell--why I'm _there_! I'm on the
team because I've helped a little to keep you on the team! It almost
makes up for having to be a girl. Just for the moment, I'm not sitting
up high, clean and starched and safe; I'm on the field, hot and muddy
and with my nose bleeding, _doing_ something for L. A.! I'm _there_!"
Jimsy slapped her on the shoulder like a man and brother. "You're
_there_ all the time, Skipper! You're there a million!"
He made the first team the first day he went out to practice. There was
no denying him. He captained the team the second year and every year
until he graduated, a year late for all his friend's unwearying toil. As
a matter of fact they did not make a special effort to get him through
on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It
was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its
numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not
seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King
and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically
unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its
shining perfection and held it to the end. It is still a name to conjure
with at the school on the hill, Jimsy King's. The old teachers remember;
the word comes down. "A regular old-time L. A. team--the fighting
spirit. Like the days of Jimsy King!"
Other teams might score on them; frequently they could not, but when
they did the rooting section was not dashed. It lifted up its multiple
voice, young, insolent, unafraid, in mocking song, and Honor Carmody,
just on the edge of the section, beside her stepfather, sang with them:
_You can't beat L. A. High!_
_You can't beat L. A. High!_
_Use your team to get up steam_
_But you can't beat L. A. High!_
It rolled out over the football field and echoed away in the soft
Southern California air. It was gay, inexorable; you _couldn't_ beat
L. A. High, field or bleachers.
Stephen Lorimer never missed a game. His wife went once and never again.
"I suppose I am too sensitive," she said, "but I can't help it. It's the
way I'm made. I simply cannot endure seeing anything so brutal. I can't
understand those young girls ... and the _mothers_!" Two of her own were
on the second team, now, but she never saw them play, and they came in
the back way, after games and practice, sneaking up to Honor's room with
their black eyes and their gory noses for her capable first aid. She
was not one, Mildred Lorimer, into whose blood something of the iron had
entered. Her boys bewildered her as they grew and toughened out of baby
fiber. She was a little unhappy about it, but she was more beautiful
than she had ever been in her life, and freer, with the last little
Lorimer shifting sturdily for himself and his father more in love with
her than ever. She had more or less resigned her active motherhood to
him. The things she might have done for Honor, the selection of her
frocks and hats, the color scheme of her room, her parties, the girl at
seventeen did efficiently for herself. Her childish squareness of face
and figure was rounding out rather splendidly and she had a sure and
dependable sense of what to wear. Her things were good in line and
color, smartly simple. She had thick braids of honey-colored hair wound
round her head; her brow was broad and calm, her gray eyes serene; she
had a fresh and hearty color. Stephen Lorimer believed that she had a
voice. She sang like one of the mocking birds in her garden, joyously,
radiantly, riotously, and her stepfather, who knew amazingly many great
persons, persuaded a famous artist to hear her when she gave her concert
in Los Angeles.
"Yes," she said, nodding her head, "it is a voice. It is a voice. A
little teaching, yes; this Barrett woman who was once my pupil, she will
be safe with her. Not too much; not too much singing. Finish your
school, my little one. Then you shall come over to me for a year, yes?
We shall see what we shall see!" She patted her cheek and sent her out
of the room ahead of Stephen.
"Well?" he wanted to know.
"But yes, a voice, as I have said. Send her to me when her schooling is
over."
"She has a future?"
The great contralto shrugged her thick shoulders. "I fear not. I think
not."
His face lengthened. "Why?"
"Because, my friend, she will care more for living. She will not care so
greatly to _get_, that large child. She will only _give_. She has not
the fine relentless selfishness to make the artist. Well, we shall see.
Life may break her. Send her to me. In two years, yes? No, no, I will
have no thanks. It is so small a thing to do.... One grows fat and old;
it is good to have youngness near. Now, go, my friend. I shall gargle my
throat and sleep." She gave him a hot, plump hand to kiss.
Honor was not especially impressed. She rather thought, when the time
came, she should prefer to go to Stanford, but she liked her music
lessons, meanwhile. It filled up her time, the business of singing, in
that last year when she was more or less marking time and helping Jimsy
through.
Her stepfather watched her with growing amazement. So far as any one
might judge, and to Mrs. Lorimer's tearful relief, Honor's attitude
toward the last of the "Wild Kings" was at seventeen what it had been at
twelve, at six.
"I was right, wasn't I?" Stephen wanted to know.
"Well ... if you can only keep on being right about it! I'm so thankful
about her singing. That year abroad will be wonderful. She'll meet new
people ... real men."
"Young Jimsy is exhibiting every known symptom of becoming a real man."
"Yes, but he's a King."
"That appears to be the universal opinion regarding him."
"Stephen _dear_, don't be ridiculous! You've always been as bewitched
about the boy as Honor herself." Mrs. Lorimer was dressed for a luncheon
and her husband, heavy-eyed and flushed of face, had cut short his late
morning sleep to drive her. She was still for him the everlasting Helen.
"Mildred," he said, quitting the battlefield for the eternal balcony,
"do you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I
married you?"
Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good management
as well as luck, and she liked having the results appreciated. She let
him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on.
The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is,"
Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His manner
and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more heavily at
cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was
mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's mother
put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of course,
rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an electric in
which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring bell from
clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough and ready
seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be piled, and
which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who was apt to
dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them all, Jimsy,
Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the last little
Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa Monica, down
the Palisades, up the narrow, winding, wave-washed road to the Malibou
Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made coffee and baked
potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept like puppies on
the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the gracious old
house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred Lorimer would
be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his tea, cool,
lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life.
In the evenings--Sunday evenings--Honor held her joyous At Homes. Three
or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud, hilarious
meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were given their
freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had picked up here
and there over the world, pink, capable, with the assistance of Jimsy
and her biggest brothers, got supper.
It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets,
waited on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished
they pronounced their ungodly grace--a thunderous tattoo on the table
edge, begun with palms and finished with elbows--
None-but-the-righteous-shall-be-SAVED!--
followed, while the cups and plates were still leaping and shuddering,
with its secular second verse--
My-sister-Mary-walks-like-THIS!
"Well, Top Step," said Stephen one of those evenings, "eleven boys
beside the stand-by Jimsy. Fair to middling popularity, I should say!"
"Popularity?" She opened her candid eyes wide at him. "Why, Stepper, you
know it's not that! They don't come to see me! They don't mind me, of
course, but it's the eats, and meeting each other,--and mostly Jimsy, I
guess! Mercy,--the chocolate's boiling over!"
She clearly believed it, and it was more or less true. The Carmody home
of a Sunday night was a sort of glorified club house without rules or
dues or by-laws. It was the thing to do, if one were so lucky. It rather
placed a boy in the scheme of things to be one of "the Sunday-night
bunch." Jimsy was the Committee on Membership.
"Let's have that Burke boy out to supper Sunday, shan't we?" Honor would
say. "He's doing so well on the team."
"No," Jimsy would answer, definitely. "Not at the house, Skipper." Honor
accepted his judgments unquestioningly. Some way, with the deep wisdom
of boys, he knew, better than she could, that the young Burke person was
better on the field than in the drawing-room. There was nothing snobbish
in their gatherings; shabby boys came, girls who had made their own
little dimity dresses. It was the intangible, inexorable caste of the
best boyhood, and Honor knew, comfortably, that her particular King
could do no wrong.
The rooting section had a special yell for Jimsy, when he had sped down
the field to a touchdown or kicked a difficult goal. It followed the
regular High School yell, hair-lifting in its fierceness:
King! King! King!
K-I-N-G, King!
G-I-N-K, Gink!
He's the King Gink!
He's the King Gink!
He's the King Gink!
K-I-N-G, King! KING!
and Honor utterly agreed with them.