Once again the tide of guests ebbed from the Big House, and more than
one lunch and dinner found only the two men and Paula at the table. On
such evenings, while Graham and Dick yarned for their hour before bed,
Paula no longer played soft things to herself at the piano, but sat
with them doing fine embroidery and listening to the talk.
Both men had much in common, had lived life in somewhat similar ways,
and regarded life from the same angles. Their philosophy was harsh
rather than sentimental, and both were realists. Paula made a practice
of calling them the pair of "Brass Tacks."
"Oh, yes," she laughed to them, "I understand your attitude. You are
successes, the pair of you--physical successes, I mean. You have
health. You are resistant. You can stand things. You have survived
where men less resistant have gone down. You pull through African
fevers and bury the other fellows. This poor chap gets pneumonia in
Cripple Creek and cashes in before you can get him to sea level. Now
why didn't you get pneumonia? Because you were more deserving? Because
you had lived more virtuously? Because you were more careful of risks
and took more precautions?"
She shook her head.
"No. Because you were luckier--I mean by birth, by possession of
constitution and stamina. Why, Dick buried his three mates and two
engineers at Guayaquil. Yellow fever. Why didn't the yellow fever germ,
or whatever it is, kill Dick? And the same with you, Mr.
Broad-shouldered Deep-chested Graham. In this last trip of yours, why
didn't you die in the swamps instead of your photographer? Come.
Confess. How heavy was he? How broad were his shoulders? How deep his
chest?--wide his nostrils?--tough his resistance?"
"He weighed a hundred and thirty-five," Graham admitted ruefully. "But
he looked all right and fit at the start. I think I was more surprised
than he when he turned up his toes." Graham shook his head. "It wasn't
because he was a light weight and small. The small men are usually the
toughest, other things being equal. But you've put your finger on the
reason just the same. He didn't have the physical stamina, the
resistance,--You know what I mean, Dick?"
"In a way it's like the quality of muscle and heart that enables some
prizefighters to go the distance--twenty, thirty, forty rounds, say,"
Dick concurred. "Right now, in San Francisco, there are several hundred
youngsters dreaming of success in the ring. I've watched them trying
out. All look good, fine-bodied, healthy, fit as fiddles, and young.
And their spirits are most willing. And not one in ten of them can last
ten rounds. I don't mean they get knocked out. I mean they blow up.
Their muscles and their hearts are not made out of first-grade fiber.
They simply are not made to move at high speed and tension for ten
rounds. And some of them blow up in four or five rounds. And not one in
forty can go the twenty-round route, give and take, hammer and tongs,
one minute of rest to three of fight, for a full hour of fighting. And
the lad who can last forty rounds is one in ten thousand--lads like
Nelson, Gans, and Wolgast.
"You understand the point I am making," Paula took up. "Here are the
pair of you. Neither will see forty again. You're a pair of hard-bitten
sinners. You've gone through hardship and exposure that dropped others
all along the way. You've had your fun and folly. You've roughed and
rowdied over the world--"
"Played the wild ass," Graham laughed in.
"And drunk deep," Paula added. "Why, even alcohol hasn't burned you.
You were too tough. You put the other fellows under the table, or into
the hospital or the grave, and went your gorgeous way, a song on your
lips, with tissues uncorroded, and without even the morning-after
headache. And the point is that you are successes. Your muscles are
blond-beast muscles, your vital organs are blond-beast organs. And from
all this emanates your blond-beast philosophy. That's why you are brass
tacks, and preach realism, and practice realism, shouldering and
shoving and walking over lesser and unluckier creatures, who don't dare
talk back, who, like Dick's prizefighting boys, would blow up in the
first round if they resorted to the arbitrament of force."
Dick whistled a long note of mock dismay.
"And that's why you preach the gospel of the strong," Paula went on.
"If you had been weaklings, you'd have preached the gospel of the weak
and turned the other cheek. But you--you pair of big-muscled
giants--when you are struck, being what you are, you don't turn the
other cheek--"
"No," Dick interrupted quietly. "We immediately roar, 'Knock his block
off!' and then do it.--She's got us, Evan, hip and thigh. Philosophy,
like religion, is what the man is, and is by him made in his own image."
And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled
with the picture of the two big men, admiring, wondering, pondering,
without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and
giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seemed part of her.
Later in the evening she gave voice to her trouble.
"The strangest part of it," she said, taking up a remark Dick had just
made, "is that too much philosophizing about life gets one worse than
nowhere. A philosophic atmosphere is confusing--at least to a woman.
One hears so much about everything, and against everything, that
nothing is sure. For instance, Mendenhall's wife is a Lutheran. She
hasn't a doubt about anything. All is fixed, ordained, immovable.
Star-drifts and ice-ages she knows nothing about, and if she did they
would not alter in the least her rules of conduct for men and women in
this world and in relation to the next.
"But here, with us, you two pound your brass tacks, Terrence does a
Greek dance of epicurean anarchism, Hancock waves the glittering veils
of Bergsonian metaphysics, Leo makes solemn obeisance at the altar of
Beauty, and Dar Hyal juggles his sophistic blastism to no end save all
your applause for his cleverness. Don't you see? The effect is that
there is nothing solid in any human judgment. Nothing is right. Nothing
is wrong. One is left compassless, rudderless, chartless on a sea of
ideas. Shall I do this? Must I refrain from that? Will it be wrong? Is
there any virtue in it? Mrs. Mendenhall has her instant answer for
every such question. But do the philosophers?"
Paula shook her head.
"No. All they have is ideas. They immediately proceed to talk about it,
and talk and talk and talk, and with all their erudition reach no
conclusion whatever. And I am just as bad. I listen and listen, and
talk and talk, as I am talking now, and remain convictionless. There is
no test--"
"But there is," Dick said. "The old, eternal test of truth--_Will it
work?_"
"Ah, now you are pounding your favorite brass tack," Paula smiled. "And
Dar Hyal, with a few arm-wavings and word-whirrings, will show that all
brass tacks are illusions; and Terrence, that brass tacks are sordid,
irrelevant and non-essential things at best; and Hancock, that the
overhanging heaven of Bergson is paved with brass tacks, only that they
are a much superior article to yours; and Leo, that there is only one
brass tack in the universe, and that it is Beauty, and that it isn't
brass at all but gold."
* * * * *
"Come on, Red Cloud, go riding this afternoon," Paula asked her
husband. "Get the cobwebs out of your brain, and let lawyers and mines
and livestock go hang."
"I'd like to, Paul," he answered. "But I can't. I've got to rush in a
machine all the way to the Buckeye. Word came in just before lunch.
They're in trouble at the dam. There must have been a fault in the
under-strata, and too-heavy dynamiting has opened it. In short, what's
the good of a good dam when the bottom of the reservoir won't hold
water?"
Three hours later, returning from the Buckeye, Dick noted that for the
first time Paula and Graham had gone riding together alone.
* * * * *
The Wainwrights and the Coghlans, in two machines, out for a week's
trip to the Russian River, rested over for a day at the Big House, and
were the cause of Paula's taking out the tally-ho for a picnic into the
Los Baños Hills. Starting in the morning, it was impossible for Dick to
accompany them, although he left Blake in the thick of dictation to go
out and see them off. He assured himself that no detail was amiss in
the harnessing and hitching, and reseated the party, insisting on
Graham coming forward into the box-seat beside Paula.
"Just must have a reserve of man's strength alongside of Paula in case
of need," Dick explained. "I've known a brake-rod to carry away on a
down grade somewhat to the inconvenience of the passengers. Some of
them broke their necks. And now, to reassure you, with Paula at the
helm, I'll sing you a song:
"What can little Paula do?
Why, drive a phaeton and two.
Can little Paula do no more?
Yes, drive a tally-ho and four."
All were in laughter as Paula nodded to the grooms to release the
horses' heads, took the feel of the four mouths on her hands, and
shortened and slipped the reins to adjustment of four horses into the
collars and taut on the traces.
In the babel of parting gibes to Dick, none of the guests was aware of
aught else than a bright morning, the promise of a happy day, and a
genial host bidding them a merry going. But Paula, despite the keen
exhilaration that should have arisen with the handling of four such
horses, was oppressed by a vague sadness in which, somehow, Dick's
being left behind figured. Through Graham's mind Dick's merry face had
flashed a regret of conscience that, instead of being seated there
beside this one woman, he should be on train and steamer fleeing to the
other side of the world.
But the merriness died on Dick's face the moment he turned on his heel
to enter the house. It was a few minutes later than ten when he
finished his dictation and Mr. Blake rose to go. He hesitated, then
said a trifle apologetically:
"You told me, Mr. Forrest, to remind you of the proofs of your
Shorthorn book. They wired their second hurry-up yesterday."
"I won't be able to tackle it myself," Dick replied. "Will you please
correct the typographical, submit the proofs to Mr. Manson for
correction of fact--tell him be sure to verify that pedigree of King of
Devon--and ship them off."
Until eleven Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a
quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr.
Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual
stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with
his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they were
cleaned up.
For the first time alone since he had seen the tally-ho off, Dick
stepped out on his sleeping porch to the row of barometers and
thermometers on the wall. But he had come to consult, not them, but the
girl's face that laughed from the round wooden frame beneath them.
"Paula, Paula," he said aloud, "are you surprising yourself and me
after all these years? Are you turning madcap at sober middle age?"
He put on leggings and spurs to be ready for riding after lunch, and
what his thoughts had been while buckling on the gear he epitomized to
the girl in the frame.
"Play the game," he muttered. And then, after a pause, as he turned to
go: "A free field and no favor ... and no favor."
* * * * *
"Really, if I don't go soon, I'll have to become a pensioner and join
the philosophers of the madroño grove," Graham said laughingly to Dick.
It was the time of cocktail assembling, and Paula, in addition to
Graham, was the only one of the driving party as yet to put in an
appearance.
"If all the philosophers together would just make one book!" Dick
demurred. "Good Lord, man, you've just got to complete your book here.
I got you started and I've got to see you through with it."
Paula's encouragement to Graham to stay on--mere stereotyped,
uninterested phrases--was music to Dick. His heart leapt. After all,
might he not be entirely mistaken? For two such mature, wise,
middle-aged individuals as Paula and Graham any such foolishness was
preposterous and unthinkable. They were not young things with their
hearts on their sleeves.
"To the book!" he toasted. He turned to Paula. "A good cocktail," he
praised. "Paul, you excel yourself, and you fail to teach Oh Joy the
art. His never quite touch yours.--Yes, another, please."