Almost immediately after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," Paula
emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the
tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he
could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and
scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for
hours of the piano from the distant music room. But Graham, patterning
after Dick, devoted his mornings to work, so that he rarely encountered
Paula before lunch.
She made announcement that her spell of insomnia was over and that she
was ripe for all gaieties and excursions Dick had to offer her.
Further, she threatened, in case Dick grudged these personal
diversions, to fill the house with guests and teach him what liveliness
was. It was at this time that her Aunt Martha--Mrs. Tully--returned for
a several days' visit, and that Paula resumed the driving of Duddy and
Fuddy in the high, one-seated Stude-baker trap. Duddy and Fuddy were
spirited trotters, but Mrs. Tully, despite her elderliness and
avoirdupois, was without timidity when Paula held the reins.
As Mrs. Tully told Graham: "And that is a concession I make to no woman
save Paula. She is the only woman I can trust myself to with horses.
She has the horse-way about her. When she was a child she was wild over
horses. It's a wonder she didn't become a circus rider."
More, much more, Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her
aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula's father, Mrs. Tully could never say
enough. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her
childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways--ways that
to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually
guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was
this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with
equal facility to lose them, in the great gold adventure of Forty-nine.
Himself of old New England stock, he had had for great grandfather a
Frenchman--a trifle of flotsam from a mid-ocean wreck and landed to
grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.
"And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops
out," Mrs. Tully assured Graham. "Philip was that Frenchman in his
generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same
inheritance in her generation. Though Lute and Ernestine are her
half-sisters, no one would imagine one drop of the common blood was
shared. That's why Paula, instead of going circus-riding, drifted
inevitably to France. It was that old original Desten that drew her
over."
And of the adventure in France, Graham learned much. Philip Desten's
luck had been to die when the wheel of his fortune had turned over and
down. Ernestine and Lute, little tots, had been easy enough for
Desten's sisters to manage. But Paula, who had fallen to Mrs. Tully,
had been the problem--"because of that Frenchman."
"Oh, she is rigid New England," Mrs. Tully insisted, "the solidest of
creatures as to honor and rectitude, dependableness and faithfulness.
As a girl she really couldn't bring herself to lie, except to save
others. In which case all her New England ancestry took flight and she
would lie as magnificently as her father before her. And he had the
same charm of manner, the same daring, the same ready laughter, the
same vivacity. But what is lightsome and blithe in her, was debonaire
in him. He won men's hearts always, or, failing that, their bitterest
enmity. No one was left cold by him in passing. Contact with him
quickened them to love or hate. Therein Paula differs, being a woman, I
suppose, and not enjoying man's prerogative of tilting at windmills. I
don't know that she has an enemy in the world. All love her, unless, it
may well be, there are cat-women who envy her her nice husband."
And as Graham listened, Paula's singing came through the open window
from somewhere down the long arcades, and there was that ever-haunting
thrill in her voice that he could not escape remembering afterward. She
burst into laughter, and Mrs. Tully beamed to him and nodded at the
sound.
"There laughs Philip Desten," she murmured, "and all the Frenchwomen
behind the original Frenchman who was brought into Penobscot, dressed
in homespun, and sent to meeting. Have you noticed how Paula's laugh
invariably makes everybody look up and smile? Philip's laugh did the
same thing."
"Paula had always been passionately fond of music, painting, drawing.
As a little girl she could be traced around the house and grounds by
the trail she left behind her of images and shapes, made in whatever
medium she chanced upon--drawn on scraps of paper, scratched on bits of
wood, modeled in mud and sand.
"She loved everything, and everything loved her," said Mrs. Tully. "She
was never timid of animals. And yet she always stood in awe of them;
but she was born sense-struck, and her awe was beauty-awe. Yes, she was
an incorrigible hero-worshiper, whether the person was merely beautiful
or did things. And she never will outgrow that beauty--awe of anything
she loves, whether it is a grand piano, a great painting, a beautiful
mare, or a bit of landscape.
"And Paula had wanted to do, to make beauty herself. But she was sorely
puzzled whether she should devote herself to music or painting. In the
full swing of work under the best masters in Boston, she could not
refrain from straying back to her drawing. From her easel she was lured
to modeling.
"And so, with her love of the best, her soul and heart full of
beauty, she grew quite puzzled and worried over herself, as to which
talent was the greater and if she had genius at all. I suggested a
complete rest from work and took her abroad for a year. And of all
things, she developed a talent for dancing. But always she harked back
to her music and painting. No, she was not flighty. Her trouble was
that she was too talented--"
"Too diversely talented," Graham amplified.
"Yes, that is better," Mrs. Tully nodded. "But from talent to genius is
a far cry, and to save my life, at this late day, I don't know whether
the child ever had a trace of genius in her. She has certainly not done
anything big in any of her chosen things."
"Except to be herself," Graham added.
"Which _is_ the big thing," Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of
enthusiasm. "She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very
natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I'd give more
for one of Paula's madcap escapades--oh, I heard all about swimming the
big stallion--than for all her pictures if every one was a masterpiece.
But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick often calls her
the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can put on the grand air
when she needs to. I call her the most mature child I have ever seen.
Dick was the finest thing that ever happened to her. It was then that
she really seemed for the first time to find herself. It was this way."
And Mrs. Tully went on to sketch the year of travel in Europe, the
resumption of Paula's painting in Paris, and the conviction she finally
reached that success could be achieved only by struggle and that her
aunt's money was a handicap.
"And she had her way," Mrs. Tully sighed. "She--why, she dismissed me,
sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance,
and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two
other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You
couldn't guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret--oh, not these
modern cabarets, but a real students' cabaret of sorts. It was very
select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from some
of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he stated it,
he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about life
instead.
"Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged--the day before, and
he had called on me and all that. I had known 'Lucky' Richard Forrest,
and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula couldn't
have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had seen him
captain the University of California eleven to victory over Stanford.
And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared with the two
girls. She didn't know whether Dick was worth millions or whether he
was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared less. She
always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the uncatchable,
and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung forthright into each
other's arms, for inside the week it was all arranged, and Dick made
his call on me, as if my decision meant anything one way or the other.
"But Dick's cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers--a small
pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had
only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big round
one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood stained with
the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the philosophers,
and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An exception was
made for Paula and me.
"You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to
this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was
paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those
wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all
the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.
"But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married
than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed
pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong."
"And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and
discussionless," Graham remarked.
Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.
"He endowed it for them," she gasped, her hand to her side. "Or
partially endowed it, or something. I don't know what the arrangement
was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist
club."
After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents,
Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by
herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work
on a piece of fine embroidery.
"I love it," she explained. "All the costly needlework of the shops
means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick
used to fret at my sewing. He's all for efficiency, you know,
elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a
wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song to do what I was
doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.
"It's like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better
music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the music
oneself, with one's own fingers and brain, is an entirely different and
dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate another's
performance, or infuses the performance with one's own personality and
interpretation, it's all the same. It is soul-joy and fulfilment.
"Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this
flounce--there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all
mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There
are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is
different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say
that embroidery is not art?"
She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her
question.
"And who is to say," Graham agreed, "that the adorning of beautiful
womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the sweetest?"
"I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste," she nodded
gravely. "They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would
phrase it, in the world's economy."
* * * * *
Another time, seeking the library for Andean reference, Graham came
upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table
and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing
plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages of the madroño grove.
"It's a problem," she sighed. "Dick says that if I build it I must
build it for seven. We've got four sages now, and his heart is set on
seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what
philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves
and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things that
philosophers always quarrel."
"Wasn't it Voltaire who quarreled with a king over candle-ends?" Graham
queried, pleasuring in the sight of her graceful abandon. Thirty-eight!
It was impossible. She seemed almost a girl, petulant and flushed over
some school task. Then he remembered Mrs. Tully's remark that Paula was
the most mature child she had ever known.
It made him wonder. Was she the one, who, under the oaks at the
hitching rails, with two brief sentences had cut to the heart of an
impending situation? "So I apprehend," she had said. What had she
apprehended? Had she used the phrase glibly, without meaning? Yet she
it was who had thrilled and fluttered to him and with him when they had
sung the "Gypsy Trail." _That_ he knew. But again, had he not seen her
warm and glow to the playing of Donald Ware? But here Graham's ego had
its will of him, for he told himself that with Donald Ware it was
different. And he smiled to himself and at himself at the thought.
"What amuses you?" Paula was asking.
"Heaven knows I am no architect. And I challenge you to house seven
philosophers according to all the absurd stipulations laid down by
Dick."
Back in his tower room with his Andean books unopened before him,
Graham gnawed his lip and meditated. The woman was no woman. She was
the veriest child. Or--and he hesitated at the thought--was this
naturalness that was overdone? Did she in truth apprehend? It must be.
It had to be. She was of the world. She knew the world. She was very
wise. No remembered look of her gray eyes but gave the impression of
poise and power. That was it--strength! He recalled her that first
night when she had seemed at times to glint an impression of steel, of
thin and jewel-like steel. In his fancy, at the time, he remembered
likening her strength to ivory, to carven pearl shell, to sennit
twisted of maidens' hair.
And he knew, now, ever since the brief words at the hitching rails and
the singing of the "Gypsy Trail," that whenever their eyes looked into
each other's it was with a mutual knowledge of unsaid things.
In vain he turned the pages of the books for the information he sought.
He tried to continue his chapter without the information, but no words
flowed from his pen. A maddening restlessness was upon him. He seized a
time table and pondered the departure of trains, changed his mind,
switched the room telephone to the house barn, and asked to have
Altadena saddled.
It was a perfect morning of California early summer. No breath of wind
stirred over the drowsing fields, from which arose the calls of quail
and the notes of meadowlarks. The air was heavy with lilac fragrance,
and from the distance, as he rode between the lilac hedges, Graham
heard the throaty nicker of Mountain Lad and the silvery answering
whinney of the Fotherington Princess.
Why was he here astride Dick Forrest's horse? Graham asked himself. Why
was he not even then on the way to the station to catch that first
train he had noted on the time table? This unaccustomed weakness of
decision and action was a new rôle for him, he considered bitterly.
But--and he was on fire with the thought of it--this was his one life,
and this was the one woman in the world.
He reined aside to let a herd of Angora goats go by. Each was a doe,
and there were several hundred of them; and they were moved slowly by
the Basque herdsmen, with frequent pauses, for each doe was accompanied
by a young kid. In the paddock were many mares with new-born colts; and
once, receiving warning in time, Graham raced into a crossroad to
escape a drove of thirty yearling stallions being moved somewhere
across the ranch. Their excitement was communicated to that entire
portion of the ranch, so that the air was filled with shrill nickerings
and squealings and answering whinneys, while Mountain Lad, beside
himself at sight and sound of so many rivals, raged up and down his
paddock, and again and again trumpeted his challenging conviction that
he was the most amazing and mightiest thing that had ever occurred on
earth in the way of horse flesh.
Dick Forrest pranced and sidled into the cross road on the Outlaw, his
face beaming with delight at the little tempest among his many
creatures.
"Fecundity! Fecundity!"--he chanted in greeting, as he reined in to a
halt, if halt it might be called, with his tan-golden sorrel mare
a-fret and a-froth, wickedly reaching with her teeth now for his leg
and next for Graham's, one moment pawing the roadway, the next moment,
in sheer impotence of resentfulness, kicking the empty air with one
hind leg and kicking the air repeatedly, a dozen times.
"Those youngsters certainly put Mountain Lad on his mettle," Dick
laughed. "Listen to his song:
"'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys.
The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me.
The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the
spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring.
The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetime through their
mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and
the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"