The Little Lady of the Big House. Джек Лондон
was," was the answer, positive and complete.
Forrest closed the door and went on along a passage that was like a tunnel. Narrow, iron-barred openings, like the slits for archers in medieval castles, dimly lighted the way. Another door gave access to a long, low room, beam-ceilinged, with a fireplace in which an ox could have been roasted. A huge stump, resting on a bed of coals, blazed brightly. Two billiard tables, several card tables, lounging corners, and a miniature bar constituted the major furnishing. Two young men chalked their cues and returned Forrest’s greeting.
“Good morning, Mr. Naismith,” he bantered. “ – More material for the Breeders’ Gazette?"
Naismith, a youngish man of thirty, with glasses, smiled sheepishly and cocked his head at his companion.
“Wainwright challenged me,” he explained.
“Which means that Lute and Ernestine must still be beauty-sleeping,” Forrest laughed.
Young Wainwright bristled to acceptance of the challenge, but before he could utter the retort on his lips his host was moving on and addressing Naismith over his shoulder.
“Do you want to come along at eleven: thirty? Thayer and I are running out in the machine to look over the Shropshires. He wants about ten carloads of rams. You ought to find good stuff in this matter of Idaho shipments. Bring your camera along. – Seen Thayer this morning?”
“Just came in to breakfast as we were leaving,” Bert Wainwright volunteered.
“Tell him to be ready at eleven-thirty if you see him. You’re not invited, Bert… out of kindness. The girls are sure to be up then.”
“Take Rita along with you anyway,” Bert pleaded.
“No fear,” was Forrest’s reply from the door. “We’re on business. Besides, you can’t pry Rita from Ernestine with block-and-tackle.”
“That’s why I wanted to see if you could,” Bert grinned.
“Funny how fellows never appreciate their own sisters.” Forrest paused for a perceptible moment. “I always thought Rita was a real nice sister. What’s the matter with her?”
Before a reply could reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each other’s arms, were parodying a dance never learned at dancing school nor intended by the participants for male eyes to see.
The girl at the piano discovered him, winked, and played on. Not for another minute did the dancers spy him. They gave startled cries, collapsed, laughing, in each other’s arms, and the music stopped. They were gorgeous, healthy young creatures, the three of them, and Forrest’s eye kindled as he looked at them in quite the same way that it had kindled when he regarded the Fotherington Princess.
Persiflage, of the sort that obtains among young things of the human kind, flew back and forth.
“I’ve been here five minutes,” Dick Forrest asserted.
The two dancers, to cover their confusion, doubted his veracity and instanced his many well-known and notorious guilts of mendacity. The girl at the piano, Ernestine, his sister-in-law, insisted that pearls of truth fell from his lips, that she had seen him from the moment he began to look, and that as she estimated the passage of time he had been looking much longer than five minutes.
“Well, anyway,” Forrest broke in on their babel, “Bert, the sweet innocent, doesn’t think you are up yet.”
“We’re not… to him,” one of the dancers, a vivacious young Venus, retorted. “Nor are we to you either. So run along, little boy. Run along.”
“Look here, Lute,” Forrest began sternly. “Just because I am a decrepit old man, and just because you are eighteen, just eighteen, and happen to be my wife’s sister, you needn’t presume to put the high and mighty over on me. Don’t forget – and I state the fact, disagreeable as it may be, for Rita’s sake – don’t forget that in the past ten years I’ve paddled you more disgraceful times than you care to dare me to enumerate.
“It is true, I am not so young as I used to was, but – ” He felt the biceps of his right arm and made as if to roll up the sleeve. “ – But, I’m not all in yet, and for two cents…”
“What?” the young woman challenged belligerently.
“For two cents,” he muttered darkly. “For two cents… Besides, and it grieves me to inform you, your cap is not on straight. Also, it is not a very tasteful creation at best. I could make a far more becoming cap with my toes, asleep, and… yes, seasick as well.”
Lute tossed her blond head defiantly, glanced at her comrades in solicitation of support, and said:
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems humanly reasonable that the three of us can woman-handle a mere man of your elderly and insulting avoirdupois. What do you say, girls? Let’s rush him. He’s not a minute under forty, and he has an aneurism. Yes, and though loath to divulge family secrets, he’s got Meniere’s Disease.”
Ernestine, a small but robust blonde of eighteen, sprang from the piano and joined her two comrades in a raid on the cushions of the deep window seats. Side by side, a cushion in each hand, and with proper distance between them cannily established for the swinging of the cushions, they advanced upon the foe.
Forrest prepared for battle, then held up his hand for parley.
“’Fraid cat!” they taunted, in several at first, and then in chorus.
He shook his head emphatically.
“Just for that, and for all the rest of your insolences, the three of you are going to get yours. All the wrongs of a lifetime are rising now in my brain in a dazzling brightness. I shall go Berserk in a moment. But first, and I speak as an agriculturist, and I address myself to you, Lute, in all humility, in heaven’s name what is Meniere’s Disease? Do sheep catch it?”
“Meniere’s Disease is,” Lute began… “is what you’ve got. Sheep are the only known living creatures that get it.”
Ensued red war and chaos. Forrest made a football rush of the sort that obtained in California before the adoption of Rugby; and the girls broke the line to let him through, turned upon him, flanked him on either side, and pounded him with cushions.
He turned, with widespread arms, extended fingers, each finger a hook, and grappled the three. The battle became a whirlwind, a be-spurred man the center, from which radiated flying draperies of flimsy silk, disconnected slippers, boudoir caps, and hairpins. There were thuds from the cushions, grunts from the man, squeals, yelps and giggles from the girls, and from the totality of the combat inextinguishable laughter and a ripping and tearing of fragile textures.
Dick Forrest found himself sprawled on the floor, the wind half knocked out of him by shrewdly delivered cushions, his head buzzing from the buffeting, and, in one hand, a trailing, torn, and generally disrupted girdle of pale blue silk and pink roses.
In one doorway, cheeks flaming from the struggle, stood Rita, alert as a fawn and ready to flee. In the other doorway, likewise flame-checked, stood Ernestine in the commanding attitude of the Mother of the Gracchi, the wreckage of her kimono wrapped severely about her and held severely about her by her own waist-pressing arm. Lute, cornered behind the piano, attempted to run but was driven back by the menace of Forrest, who, on hands and knees, stamped loudly with the palms of his hands on the hardwood floor, rolled his head savagely, and emitted bull-like roars.
“And they still believe that old prehistoric myth,” Ernestine proclaimed from safety, “that once he, that wretched semblance of a man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory over Stanford.”
Her breasts heaved from the exertion, and he marked the pulsating of the shimmering cherry-colored silk with delight as he flung his glance around to the other two girls similarly breathing.
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