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

She showed her laughing teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which Mr. Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: “Look at that filly there. We all knew Paula was wrong. But look at it! She bred a rickety old thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its filly foal with the same standard again; knocked all our prognostications into a cocked hat, and – well, look at it, a world-beater polo pony. There is one thing we have to take off our hats to her for: she doesn’t let any woman sentimentality interfere with her culling[233]. Oh, she’s coldblooded enough. She’s as remorseless as any man when it comes to throwing out the undesirables and selecting for what she wants. But she hasn’t mastered color yet. There’s where her genius falls down, eh, Paul? You’ll have to put up with Duddy and Fuddy for a while longer for your trap. By the way, how is Duddy?”

“He’s come around[234],” she answered, “thanks to Mr. Hennessy.”

“Nothing serious,” the veterinarian added. “He was just off his feed a trifle. It was more a scare of the stableman than anything else.”

Chapter XIII

From the colt pasture to the swimming tank Graham talked with his hostess and rode as nearly beside her as The Fop’s wickedness permitted, while Dick and Hennessy, on ahead, were deep in ranch business.

“Insomnia has been a handicap all my life,” she said, while she tickled The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened belligerence. “But I early learned to keep the irritation of it off my nerves and the weight of it off my mind. In fact, I early came to make a function of it and actually to derive enjoyment from it. It was the only way to master a thing I knew would persist as long as I persisted. Have you – of course you have – learned to win through an undertow[235]?”

“Yes, by never fighting it,” Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty-eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.

“Exactly,” she went on. “By not fighting the undertow. By yielding to its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again. Dick taught me that trick. So with my insomnia. If it is excitement from immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the entangling currents. I invite my soul to live over again, from the same and different angles, the things that keep me from unconsciousness.

“Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday. I lived it over last night as I had lived it in reality. Then I lived it as a spectator – as the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of all, as my husband saw it. Then I made up a picture of it, many pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of thousands of years ago.

“After that I put it to music. I played it on the piano, and guessed the playing of it on full orchestras and blaring bands. I chanted it, I sang it – epic, lyric, comic; and, after a weary long while, of course I slept in the midst of it, and knew not that I slept until I awoke at twelve today. The last time I had heard the clock strike was six. Six unbroken hours is a capital prize for me in the sleep lottery.”

As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.

“Will you sport a bet[236], Evan?” he queried.

“I’d like to hear the terms of it first,” was the answer.

“Cigars against cigars that you can’t catch Paula in the tank inside ten minutes – no, inside five, for I remember you’re some swimmer.”

“Oh, give him a chance, Dick,” Paula cried generously. “Ten minutes will worry him.”

“But you don’t know him,” Dicked argued. “And you don’t value my cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He’s drowned kanakas, and you know what that means.”

“Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he’ll slash a killing crawl-stroke at me before I’ve really started. Tell me his history and prizes.”

“I’ll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas. It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them —”

“I thought you said there was one other?” Paula interrupted.

“She was a woman,” Dick answered. “He drowned the last kanaka.”

“And the woman was then a white woman?” Paula insisted.