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

“Dick, on the other hand, can’t do anything unless he clearly knows in advance how he is going to do it. He does everything with balance and foresight. He’s a general, all-around wonder, without ever having been a particular wonder at any one thing. – Oh, I know him. He’s never been a champion or a record-breaker in any line of athletics. Nor has he been mediocre in any line. And so with everything else, mentally, intellectually. He is an evenly forged chain[348]. He has no massive links, no weak links.”

“I’m afraid I’m like you,” Graham said, “that commoner and lesser creature, a genius. For I, too, on occasion, flare and do the most unintentional things. And I am not above falling on my knees before mystery.”

“And Dick hates mystery – or it would seem he does. Not content with knowing how – he is eternally seeking the why of the how. Mystery is a challenge to him. It excites him like a red rag does a bull. At once he is for ripping the husks and the heart from mystery, so that he will know the how and the why, when it will be no longer mystery but a generalization and a scientifically demonstrable fact.”

Much of the growing situation was veiled to the three figures of it. Graham did not know of Paula’s desperate efforts to cling close to her husband, who, himself desperately busy with his thousand plans and projects, was seeing less and less of his company. He always appeared at lunch, but it was a rare afternoon when he could go out with his guests. Paula did know, from the multiplicity of long, code telegrams from Mexico, that things were in a parlous state[349] with the Harvest Group. Also, she saw the agents and emissaries of foreign investors in Mexico, always in haste and often inopportune, arriving at the ranch to confer with Dick. Beyond his complaint that they ate the heart out of his time, he gave her no clew to the matters discussed.

“My! I wish you weren’t so busy,” she sighed in his arms, on his knees, one fortunate morning, when, at eleven o’clock, she had caught him alone.

It was true, she had interrupted the dictation of a letter into the phonograph; and the sigh had been evoked by the warning cough of Bonbright, whom she saw entering with more telegrams in his hand.

“Won’t you let me drive you this afternoon, behind Duddy and Fuddy, just you and me, and cut the crowd?” she begged.

He shook his head and smiled.

“You’ll meet at lunch a weird combination,” he explained. “Nobody else needs to know, but I’ll tell you.” He lowered his voice, while Bonbright discreetly occupied himself at the filing cabinets. “They’re Tampico oil folk. Samuels himself, President of the Nacisco; and Wishaar, the big inside man of the Pearson-Brooks crowd – the chap that engineered the purchase of the East Coast railroad and the Tiuana Central when they tried to put the Nacisco out of business; and Matthewson – he’s the hi-yu-skookum big chief this side the Atlantic of the Palmerston interests – you know, the English crowd that fought the Nacisco and the Pearson-Brooks bunch so hard; and, oh, there’ll be several others. It shows you that things are rickety down Mexico way when such a bunch stops scrapping and gets together[350].

“You see, they are oil, and I’m important in my way down there, and they want me to swing the mining interests in with the oil. Truly, big things are in the air, and we’ve got to hang together and do something or get out of Mexico. And I’ll admit, after they gave me the turndown[351] in the trouble three years ago, that I’ve sulked in my tent and made them come to see me.”

He caressed her and called her his armful of dearest woman, although she detected his eye roving impatiently to the phonograph with its unfinished letter.

“And so,” he concluded, with a pressure of his arms about her that seemed to hint that her moment with him was over and she must go, “that means the afternoon. None will stop over. And they’ll be off and away before dinner.”

She slipped off his knees and out of his arms with unusual abruptness, and stood straight up before him, her eyes flashing, her cheeks white, her face set with determination, as if about to say something of grave importance. But a bell tinkled soft ly, and he reached for the desk telephone.

Paula drooped, and sighed inaudibly, and, as she went down the room and out the door, and as Bonbright stepped eagerly forward with the telegrams, she could hear the beginning of her husband’s conversation: