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The Readjustment. Will Irwin
Читать онлайн.Название The Readjustment
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isbn 4064066160739
Автор произведения Will Irwin
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
“Say, we didn’t do a thing to that tree,” said Bertram Chester, with the air of one who deprecates himself that he may leave the road wide open for praise.
“It doesn’t matter. It—it was very brave of you. Thank you very much—are you hurt?”
“Only mussed up a little.” He blinked perceptibly at the coolness in her tone. Then he leaned back against a fence-post with the settled air of one who expects to continue the conversation. She swayed slightly away from him.
“Kind of nice place,” he said, sweeping his eye over the shingled cottage whose rose-bushes were making a brave fight against the dry summer dust, over the tiny lawn, over the Lombardy poplars.
“It’s nice of you to say so.”
Bertram turned his eye upon her again.
“Say,” said he, “I don’t believe the Judge expects me back right away! Anything more I can do around the place?”
Eleanor smiled through her slight resentment.
“I don’t think I care to take the responsibility.” 15 In that moment, the butcher-wagon, making the rounds from farm-house to farm-house, appeared quite suddenly at the bend of the road. Maria, wife of Antonio and cook for Eleanor’s haciendetta, ran out to meet it.
“Oh, Maria—tell Mr. Bowles I want to see him!” cried Eleanor, and hurried toward the house. Bertram Chester stood deserted for a moment, and then;
“Good bye!” he called after her.
“Good bye and thank you so much!” she answered over her shoulder.
Two minutes later, Mr. Bowles, driver of the meat wagon, was saying to Eleanor:
“Which was it—rib or loin for Saturday, Miss Gray?”
“Was it?” said Eleanor, absently; and she fell to silence. Maria and Mr. Bowles, waiting respectfully for her decision, followed her eyes. She was looking at a dust cloud which trailed down the lane. When she came out of her revery and beheld them both watching, silent and open-mouthed, she flushed violently.
Bertram Chester, swinging between the green rows, was whistling blithely: 16
| “Say coons have you ebber ebber seen ma Angeline? She am de swetes’ swetes’ coon you ebber seen.” |
17
CHAPTER II
Every Sunday afternoon during the picking season, Mrs. Tiffany served tea on the lawn for the half-dozen familiar households on the Santa Lucia tract. That was the busy time of all the year, affording no leisure for those dinners and whist parties which came in the early season, when the country families had just arrived from town, or in the late season, when prune picking grew slack. Night finds one weary in the country, even when his day has brought only supervision of labor. These town-bred folk, living from the soil and still but half welded to it, fell unconsciously into farmer habits in this working period.
The Goodyears and the Morses, more formal than their neighbors, did indeed give a dinner once or twice a summer to this or that visitor from San Francisco or San Jose. Otherwise, the colony gathered only at this Sunday afternoon tea of Mrs. Tiffany’s. Her 18 place lay about midway of the colony, her lawn, such as it was—no lawn flourishes greatly in that land of dry summers—was the oldest and best kept of all; further, they had acquired the habit. Already, these Californians were beginning a country life remotely like that of England; a country life made gracious by all the simple refinements, from bathtubs to books. They had settled, too, into the ways of a clique; small and informal as their entertainments were, minor jealousies of leadership had developed already.
By a kind of consent never yet made law by any contest, the Goodyears were leaders and dictators. He, Raleigh Goodyear, was passably rich; his wife was by birth of that old Southern set which dominated the society of San Francisco from its very beginning. Until their only daughter married into the army and, by her money and connections, advanced her husband to a staff position in Washington, Mrs. Goodyear had figured among the patrons to those cotillions and assemblies by which the elect, under selection of a wine agent, set themselves off from the aspiring. Them the colony treated with familiar deference. 19
Mrs. Tiffany, whose native desire to please and accommodate had grown with her kind of matrimony, held social leadership of a different kind. Her summer house was the boudoir of this colony, as her town house was the centre for quiet and informal entertainment just tinged with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more of a business. That rather silent husband of hers—a man getting an uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life which had just escaped great success—told her that she had one great fault of the head. She must always make a martyr of herself by bearing the burdens of her world.
The Judge and Mrs. Tiffany sat now, in the early afternoon of a summer Sunday, under the gigantic live-oak which shadowed their piazza. She was crocheting a pink scarf, through which her tiny fingers flew like shuttles; he was reading. Out beyond their hacienda, the American “hands,” fresh-shaved 20 for Sunday, lolled on the ground over a lazy game of cards. From the creek bottom further on, came a sound which, in the distance, resembled the drumming of cicadas—a Chinese workman was lulling his ease with a moon-fiddle. Near at hand stood the tea things, all prepared before Molly, the maid, started for her Sunday afternoon visit to the camp of the women cutters. Factory girls from the city, these cutters, making a vacation of the summer work.
Mrs. Tiffany glanced up from her yarns at the leonine head of her husband, bent above “The History of European Morals,” opened her mouth as though to speak; thought better of it, apparently. Twice she looked up like this, her air showing that she was not quite confident of his sympathy in that which she meant to bring forward.
“Edward!” she said at length, quite loud. He lowered the book and removed his reading glasses, held them poised—a characteristic gesture with him. He said no word; between them, a glance was enough.
“You remember the young man who went over with Eleanor to drive away the Ruggles bull?” 21
Judge Tiffany gave assent by a slight inclination of his head.
“I went over to the camp of those University boys yesterday,” she went on, running loops with incredible speed, “and I don’t quite like the way they are living there. They associate too much with the cutting-women. You know, Edward, that isn’t good for boys of their age—and they must be nice at bottom or they wouldn’t be trying to work their way through college—”
She stopped as though to note the effect. The ripple of a smile played under Judge Tiffany’s beard. She caught at her next words a little nervously.
“You know we have a responsibility for the people about the place, Edward—I couldn’t bear to think we’d let any nice college boy degenerate because we employed him—and it is so easy at their age.”
“Which means,” broke in the Judge, “that you have asked this Mr. Chester up here to tea.”
“If—if you wish it, Edward.”
“I can’t very well countermand your invitation and tell him by the foreman not to come. But I warn you that this social recognition 22 will serve as no excuse if I catch him picking any more green apricots.”
Mrs. Tiffany, unturned by this breeze of criticism, ran along