Oh, to be sure, Paula vaguely recollected. Hed met you somewhere before South Africa, wasnt it? Or the Philippines?
Thats the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the Times dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.
Heavens he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka I was sailing the Wild Duck then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.
But who about him, and what about him? Paula queried. And whats the book?
Well, first of all, beginning at the end, hes broke that is, for him, hes broke. Hes got an income of several thousand a year left, but all that his father left him is gone. No; he didnt blow it. He got in deep, and the silent panic several years ago just about cleaned him. But he doesnt whimper.
Hes good stuff, old American stock, a Yale[149] man. The book he expects to make a bit on it[150] covers last years trip across South America, west coast to east coast. It was largely new ground. The Brazilian government voluntarily voted him a honorarium of ten thousand dollars for the information he brought out concerning unexplored portions of Brazil. Oh, hes a man, all man. He delivers the goods. You know the type clean, big, strong, simple; been everywhere, seen everything, knows most of a lot of things, straight, square, looks you in the eyes well, in short, a mans man[151].
Ernestine clapped her hands, flung a tantalizing, man-challenging, man-conquering glance at Bert Wainwright, and exclaimed: And he comes tomorrow!
Dick shook his head reprovingly.
Oh, nothing in that direction[152], Ernestine. Just as nice girls as you have tried to hook Evan Graham before now. And, between ourselves, I couldnt blame them. But hes had good wind and fast legs, and theyve always failed to run him down or get him into a corner, where, dazed and breathless, hes mechanically muttered Yes to certain interrogatories and come out of the trance to find himself, roped, thrown, branded, and married. Forget him, Ernestine. Stick by golden youth and let it drop its golden apples. Pick them up, and golden youth with them, making a noise like stupid failure all the time you are snaring swift-legged youth. But Grahams out of the running. Hes old like me just about the same age and, like me, hes run a lot of those queer races[153]. He knows how to make a get-away. Hes been cut by barbed wire, nose-twitched, neck-burnt, cinched to a fare-you-well, and he remains subdued but uncatchable. He doesnt care for young things. In fact, you may charge him with being wobbly, but I plead guilty, by proxy, that he is merely old, hard bitten, and very wise.
Chapter IX
Wheres my Boy in Breeches? Dick shouted, stamping with jingling spurs through the Big House in quest of its Little Lady.
He came to the door that gave entrance to her long wing. It was a door without a knob, a huge panel of wood in a wood-paneled wall. But Dick shared the secret of the hidden spring with his wife, pressed the spring, and the door swung wide.
Wheres my Boy in Breeches? he called and stamped down the length of her quarters.
A glance into the bathroom, with its sunken Roman bath and descending marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paulas wardrobe room and dressing-room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy womans things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, knobby, weanling colt caught in the act of madly whinneying for its mother.
Wheres my Boy in Breeches? he shouted before him, out to the sleeping porch; and found only a demure, brow-troubled Chinese woman of thirty, who smiled self-effacing embarrassment into his eyes.
This was Paulas maid, Oh Dear, so named by Dick, many years before, because of a certain solicitous contraction of her delicate brows that made her appear as if ever on the verge of saying, Oh dear! In fact, Dick had taken her, as a child almost, for Paulas service, from a fishing village on the Yellow Sea where her widow-mother earned as much as four dollars in a prosperous year at making nets for the fishermen. Oh Dears first service for Paula had been aboard the three-topmast schooner, All Away, at the same time that Oh Joy, cabin-boy, had begun to demonstrate the efficiency that enabled him, through the years, to rise to the majordomoship of the Big House.
Where is your mistress, Oh Dear? Dick asked.
Oh Dear shrank away in an agony of bashfulness.
Dick waited.
She maybe with m young ladies I dont know, Oh Dear stammered; and Dick, in very mercy, swung away on his heel.
Wheres my Boy in Breeches? he shouted, as he stamped out under the porte cochère[154] just as a ranch limousine swung around the curve among the lilacs.
Ill be hanged if I know, a tall, blond man in a light summer suit responded from the car; and the next moment Dick Forrest and Evan Graham were shaking hands.
Oh My and Oh Ho carried in the hand baggage, and Dick accompanied his guest to the watch tower quarters.
Youll have to get used to us, old man, Dick was explaining. We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If youd arrived two minutes later thered have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was just going for a ride, and Paula Mrs. Forrest has disappeared.
The two men were almost of a size[155], Graham topping his host by perhaps an inch, but losing that inch in the comparative breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. Graham was, if anything, a clearer blond than Forrest, although both were equally gray of eye, equally clear in the whites of the eyes, and equally and precisely similarly bronzed by sun and weather-beat. Grahams features were in a slightly larger mold; his eyes were a trifle longer, although this was lost again by a heavier droop of lids. His nose hinted that it was a shade straighter as well as larger than Dicks, and his lips were a shade thicker, a shade redder, a shade more bowed with fulsomeness.
Forrests hair was light brown to chestnut, while Grahams carried a whispering advertisement that it would have been almost golden in its silk had it not been burned almost to sandiness by the sun. The cheeks of both were high-boned, although the hollows under Forrests cheekbones were more pronounced. Both noses were large-nostriled and sensitive. And both mouths, while generously proportioned, carried the impression of girlish sweetness and chastity along with the muscles that could draw the lips to the firmness and harshness that would not give the lie to the square, uncleft chins beneath.