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

“I’m hanged if I know,” Dick answered. “Anyway, I quoted only figuratively. Call it morality, call it good, call it evolution.”

“A man doesn’t have to be intellectually correct in order to be great,” intruded a quiet, long-faced Irishman, whose sleeves were threadbare and frayed. “And by the same token many men who are most correct in sizing up the universe have been least great.”

“True for you, Terrence,” Dick applauded.

“It’s a matter of definition,” languidly spoke up an unmistakable Hindoo, crumbling his bread with exquisitely slender and small-boned fingers. “What shall we mean as great?”

“Shall we say beauty?” softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of long hair.

Ernestine rose suddenly at her place, hands on table, leaning forward with a fine simulation of intensity.

“They’re off!” she cried. “They’re off! Now we’ll have the universe settled all over again for the thousandth time. Theodore” – to the youthful poet – “it’s a poor start. Get into the running. Ride your father ion and your mother ion, and you’ll finish three lengths ahead.”

A roar of laughter was her reward, and the poet blushed and receded into his sensitive shell.

Ernestine turned on the black-bearded one:

“Now, Aaron. He’s not in form. You start it. You know how. Begin: ‘As Bergson[175] so well has said, with the utmost refinement of philosophic speech allied with the most comprehensive intellectual outlook that…’”

More laughter roared down the table, drowning Ernestine’s conclusion as well as the laughing retort of the black-bearded one.

“Our philosophers won’t have a chance to-night,” Paula stole in an aside to Graham.

“Philosophers?” he questioned back. “They didn’t come with the Wickenberg crowd. Who and what are they? I’m all at sea.[176]”

“They – ” Paula hesitated. “They live here. They call themselves the jungle-birds. They have a camp in the woods a couple of miles away, where they never do anything except read and talk. I’ll wager, right now, you’ll find fifty of Dick’s latest, uncatalogued books in their cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you’ll see them drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full of books – also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such things for him. It’s great fun for Dick, and, besides, it saves him time. He’s a dreadfully hard worker, you know.”

“I understand that they… that Dick takes care of them?” Graham asked, while he pleasured in looking straight into the blue eyes that looked so straight into his.

As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of bronze – perhaps a trick of the light – in her long, brown lashes. Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled somewhere within that pretty head of hers.

“Yes,” she was saying. “They have never to worry, as long as they live, over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral, in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them. It’s a funny place, as you’ll find out until you come to understand us. They… they are appurtenances, and – and hereditaments, and such things. They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us. Once in a while one or another of them drifts away – for a time. Like the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get them back. Terrence, there – Terrence McFane – he’s an epicurean anarchist, if you know what that means. He wouldn’t kill a flea. He has a pet cat I gave him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas, not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and communes with nature.

“Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet[177] – the alphabet. He started for Egypt – without a cent, of course – to run the alphabet down in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W.[178] riot for free speech or something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about everything to get him safe home again.