The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“And that other line,” Leo said. “From the same sonnet,” he explained to Graham. “Listen to the sound of it: ‘To hear what song the star of morning sings’ – oh, listen,” the boy went on, his voice hushed low with beauty-love for the words: “‘With perished beauty in his hands as clay, Shall he restore futurity its dream – ’”

He broke off as Paula’s sisters entered, and rose shyly to greet them.

Dinner that night was as any dinner at which the madroño sages were present. Dick was as robustly controversial as usual, locking horns[497] with Aaron Hancock on Bergson, attacking the latter’s metaphysics in sharp realistic fashion.

“Your Bergson is a charlatan philosopher, Aaron,” Dick concluded. “He has the same old medicine-man’s bag of metaphysical tricks, all decked out and frilled with the latest ascertained facts of science.”

“’Tis true,” Terrence agreed. “Bergson is a charlatan thinker. ’Tis why he is so popular —”

“I deny —” Hancock broke in.

“Wait a wee, Aaron. ’Tis a thought I have glimmered. Let me catch it before it flutters away into the azure. Dick’s caught Bergson with the goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His very cocksureness is filched from Darwin’s morality of strength based on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it? Touched it up with a bit of James’[498] pragmatism, rosied it over with the eternal hope in man’s breast that he will live again, and made it all a-shine with Nietzsche’s[499] ‘nothing succeeds like excess – ’”

“Wilde’s, you mean,” corrected Ernestine.

“Heaven knows I should have filched it for myself had you not been present,” Terrence sighed, with a bow to her. “Some day the antiquarians will decide the authorship. Personally I would say it smacked of Methuselah[500] – But as I was saying, before I was delightfully interrupted…”

“Who more cocksure than Dick?” Aaron was challenging a little later; while Paula glanced significantly to Graham.

“I was looking at the herd of yearling stallions but yesterday,” Terrence replied, “and with the picture of the splendid beasties still in my eyes I’ll ask: And who more delivers the goods?”

“But Hancock’s objection is solid,” Martinez ventured. “It would be a mean and profitless world without mystery. Dick sees no mystery.”

“There you wrong him[501],” Terrence defended. “I know him well. Dick recognizes mystery, but not of the nursery-child variety. No cock-and-bull stories for him, such as you romanticists luxuriate in.”

“Terrence gets me,” Dick nodded. “The world will always be mystery. To me man’s consciousness is no greater mystery than the reaction of the gases that make a simple drop of water. Grant that mystery, and all the more complicated phenomena cease to be mysteries. That simple chemical reaction is like one of the axioms on which the edifice of geometry is reared. Matter and force are the everlasting mysteries, manifesting themselves in the twin mysteries of space and time. The manifestations are not mysteries – only the stuff of the manifestations, matter and force; and the theater of the manifestations, space and time.”

Dick ceased and idly watched the expressionless Ah Ha and Ah Me who chanced at the moment to be serving opposite him. Their faces did not talk, was his thought; although ten to one was a fair bet that they were informed with the same knowledge that had perturbed Oh Dear.

“And there you are,” Terrence was triumphing. “’Tis the perfect joy of him – never up in the air with dizzy heels[502]. Flat on the good ground he stands, four square to fact and law, set against all airy fancies and bubbly speculations…”

* * *

And as at table, so afterward that evening no one could have guessed from Dick that all was not well with him. He seemed bent on celebrating Lute’s and Ernestine’s return, refused to tolerate the heavy talk of the philosophers, and bubbled over with pranks and tricks. Paula yielded to the contagion[503], and aided and abetted him in his practical jokes which none escaped.

Choicest among these was the kiss of welcome. No man escaped it. To Graham was accorded the honor of receiving it first so that he might witness the discomfiture of the others, who, one by one, were ushered in by Dick from the patio.

Hancock, Dick’s arm guiding him, came down the room to confront Paula and her sisters standing in a row on three chairs in the middle of the floor. He scanned them suspiciously, and insisted upon walking around behind them. But there seemed nothing unusual about them save that each wore a man’s felt hat.

“Looks good to me,” Hancock announced, as he stood on the floor before them and looked up at them.

“And it is good,” Dick assured him. “As representing the ranch in its fairest aspects, they are to administer the kiss of welcome[504]. Make your choice, Aaron.”

Aaron, with a quick whirl to catch some possible lurking disaster at his back, demanded, “They are all three to kiss me?”