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

“Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged – the day before, and he had called on me and all that. I had known ‘Lucky’ Richard Forrest, and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula couldn’t have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had seen him captain the University of California eleven to victory over Stanford. And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared with the two girls. She didn’t know whether Dick was worth millions or whether he was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared less[330]. She always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the uncatchable, and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung forthright into each other’s arms, for inside the week it was all arranged, and Dick made his call on me, as if my decision meant anything one way or the other.

“But Dick’s cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers – a small pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big round one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood stained with the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the philosophers, and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An exception was made for Paula and me.

“You’ve met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant[331] for philosophers.

“But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong.”

“And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and discussionless,” Graham remarked.

Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.

“He endowed it for them,” she gasped, her hand to her side. “Or partially endowed it, or something. I don’t know what the arrangement was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist club.”

After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents, Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work on a piece of fine embroidery.

“I love it,” she explained. “All the costly needlework of the shops means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick used to fret at my sewing. He’s all for efficiency, you know, elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song[332] to do what I was doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.

“It’s like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the music oneself, with one’s own fingers and brain, is an entirely different and dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate another’s performance, or infuses the performance with one’s own personality and interpretation, it’s all the same. It is soul-joy and fulfilment.

“Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this flounce – there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say that embroidery is not art?”

She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her question.

“And who is to say,” Graham agreed, “that the adorning of beautiful womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the sweetest?”

“I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste,” she nodded gravely. “They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would phrase it, in the world’s economy.”

Another time, seeking the library for Andean reference[333], Graham came upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages of the madroño grove.

“It’s a problem,” she sighed. “Dick says that if I build it I must build it for seven. We’ve got four sages now, and his heart is set on seven. He says never mind showers and such things, because what philosopher ever bathes? And he has suggested seriously seven stoves and seven kitchens, because it is just over such mundane things that philosophers always quarrel.”