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

“‘That’s all right,’ Dick stopped her. ‘His work and habits have nothing to do with the matter. Now you are sure you have never encouraged Mr. Smith in any way?’ And she was so sure that she talked for ten minutes, detailing the foreman’s persedition of her. She had a pleasant voice – one of those sweet, timid, woman’s voices, and undoubtedly is quite attractive. It was all I could do to resist peeping. I wanted to see what she looked like.

“‘Now this trouble, yesterday morning,’ Dick said. ‘Was it general? I mean, outside of your husband, and Mr. Smith, was the scene such that those who live around you knew of it?’

“‘Yes, sir. You see, he had no right to come into my kitchen. My husband doesn’t work under him anyway. And he had his arm around me and was trying to kiss me when my husband came in. My husband has a temper, but he ain’t overly strong. Mr. Smith would make two of him. So he pulled a knife, and Mr. Smith got him by the arms, and they fought all over the kitchen. I knew there was murder going to be done and I run out screaming for help. The folks in the other cottages’d heard the racket already. They’d smashed the window and the cook stove, and the place was filled with smoke and ashes when the neighbors dragged them away from each other. I’d done nothing to deserve all that disgrace. You know, sir, the way the women will talk – ’

“And Dick hushed her up there, and took all of five minutes more in getting rid of her. Her great fear was that her husband would lose his place. From what Dick told her, I waited. He had made no decision, and I knew the foreman was next on the carpet. In he came. I’d have given the world to see him.[459] But I could only listen.

“Dick jumped right into the thick of it[460]. He described the scene and uproar, and Smith acknowledged that it had been riotous for a while. ‘She says she gave you no encouragement,’ Dick said next.

“‘Then she lies,’ said Smith. ‘She has that way of looking with her eyes that’s an invitation. She looked at me that way from the first. But it was by word-of-mouth invitation that I was in her kitchen yesterday morning. We didn’t expect the husband. But she began to struggle when he hove in sight. When she says she gave me no encouragement – ’

“‘Never mind all that,’ Dick stopped him. ‘It’s not essential.’ ‘But it is, Mr. Forrest, if I am to clear myself,’ Smith insisted.

“‘No; it is not essential to the thing you can’t clear yourself of,’ Dick answered, and I could hear that cold, hard, judicial note come into his voice. Smith could not understand. Dick told him. ‘The thing you have been guilty of, Mr. Smith, is the scene, the disturbance, the scandal, the wagging of the women’s tongues now going on forty to the minute, the impairment of the discipline and order of the ranch, all of which is boiled down to the one grave thing, the hurt to the ranch efficiency.’

“And still Smith couldn’t see. He thought the charge was of violating social morality by pursuing a married woman, and tried to mitigate the offense by showing the woman encouraged him and by pleading: ‘And after all, Mr. Forrest, a man is only a man, and I admit she made a fool of me and I made a fool of myself.’

“‘Mr. Smith,’ Dick said. ’You’ve worked for me eight years. You’ve been a foreman six years of that time. I have no complaint against your work. You certainly do know how to handle labor. About your personal morality I don’t care a damn. You can be a Mormon or a Turk for all it matters to me. Your private acts are your private acts, and are no concern of mine as long as they do not interfere with your work or my ranch. Any one of my drivers can drink his head off Saturday night, and every Saturday night. That’s his business. But the minute he shows a holdover on Monday morning that is taken out on my horses, that excites them, or injures them, or threatens to injure them, or that decreases in the slightest the work they should perform on Monday, that moment it is my business and the driver goes down the hill[461].’

“‘You, you mean, Mr. Forrest,’ Smith stuttered, ‘that, that I’m to go down the hill?’ ‘That is just what I mean, Mr. Smith. You are to go down the hill, not because you climbed over another man’s fence[462] – that’s your business and his; but because you were guilty of causing a disturbance that is an impairment of ranch efficiency.’

“Do you know, Evan,” Paula broke in on her recital, “Dick can nose more human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the average fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk reports – the individual reports of the milkers – so many pounds of milk, morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow so-and-so. He doesn’t have to know the man. But there is a decrease in the weight of milk. ’Mr. Parkman,’ he’ll say to the head dairyman, ‘is Barchi Peratta married?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Is he having trouble with his wife?’ ‘Yes, sir.’