The Little Lady of the Big House. Джек Лондон
there was possibility for Lute to escape around either way of it. Forrest gained his feet and faced her across the broad, flat top of the instrument. As he threatened to vault it, Lute cried out in horror:
“But your spurs, Dick! Your spurs!”
“Give me time to take them off,” he offered.
As he stooped to unbuckle them, Lute darted to escape, but was herded back to the shelter of the piano.
“All right,” he growled. “On your head be it. If the piano’s scratched I’ll tell Paula.”
“I’ve got witnesses,” she panted, indicating with her blue joyous eyes the young things in the doorways.
“Very well, my dear.” Forrest drew back his body and spread his resting palms. “I’m coming over to you.”
Action and speech were simultaneous. His body, posited sidewise from his hands, was vaulted across, the perilous spurs a full foot above the glossy white surface. And simultaneously Lute ducked and went under the piano on hands and knees. Her mischance lay in that she bumped her head, and, before she could recover way, Forrest had circled the piano and cornered her under it.
“Come out!” he commanded. “Come out and take your medicine!”
“A truce,” she pleaded. “A truce, Sir Knight, for dear love’s sake and all damsels in distress.”
“I ain’t no knight,” Forrest announced in his deepest bass. “I’m an ogre, a filthy, debased and altogether unregenerate ogre. I was born in the tule-swamps. My father was an ogre and my mother was more so. I was lulled to slumber on the squalls of infants dead, foreordained, and predamned. I was nourished solely on the blood of maidens educated in Mills Seminary. My favorite chophouse has ever been a hardwood floor, a loaf of Mills Seminary maiden, and a roof of flat piano. My father, as well as an ogre, was a California horse-thief. I am more reprehensible than my father. I have more teeth. My mother, as well as an ogress, was a Nevada book-canvasser. Let all her shame be told. She even solicited subscriptions for ladies’ magazines. I am more terrible than my mother. I have peddled safety razors.”
“Can naught soothe and charm your savage breast?” Lute pleaded in soulful tones while she studied her chances for escape.
“One thing only, miserable female. One thing only, on the earth, over the earth, and under its ruining waters – ”
A squawk of recognized plagiarism interrupted him from Ernestine.
“See Ernest Dowson, page seventy-nine, a thin book of thin verse ladled out with porridge to young women detentioned at Mills Seminary,” Forrest went on. “As I had already enunciated before I was so rudely interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm this savage breast is the ‘Maiden’s Prayer.’ Listen, with all your ears ere I chew them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly, unbeautiful, squat, short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can you recite the ’Maiden’s Prayer’?”
Screams of delight from the young things in the doorways prevented the proper answer and Lute, from under the piano, cried out to young Wainwright, who had appeared:
“A rescue, Sir Knight! A rescue!”
“Unhand the maiden!” was Bert’s challenge.
“Who art thou?” Forrest demanded.
“King George, sirrah! – I mean, er, Saint George.”
“Then am I thy dragon,” Forrest announced with due humility. “Spare this ancient, honorable, and only neck I have.”
“Off with his head!” the young things encouraged.
“Stay thee, maidens, I pray thee,” Bert begged. “I am only a Small Potato. Yet am I unafraid. I shall beard the dragon. I shall beard him in his gullet, and, while he lingeringly chokes to death over my unpalatableness and general spinefulness, do you, fair damsels, flee to the mountains lest the valleys fall upon you. Yolo, Petaluma, and West Sacramento are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave and many big fishes.”
“Off with his head!” the young things chanted. “Slay him in his blood and barbecue him!”
“Thumbs down,” Forrest groaned. “I am undone. Trust to the unstrained quality of mercy possessed by Christian young women in the year 1914 who will vote some day if ever they grow up and do not marry foreigners. Consider my head off, Saint George. I am expired. Further deponent sayeth not.”
And Forrest, with sobs and slubberings, with realistic shudders and kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on the floor and expired.
Lute crawled out from under the piano, and was joined by Rita and Ernestine in an extemporized dance of the harpies about the slain.
In the midst of it, Forrest sat up, protesting. Also, he was guilty of a significant and privy wink to Lute.
“The hero!” he cried. “Forget him not. Crown him with flowers.”
And Bert was crowned with flowers from the vases, unchanged from the day before. When a bunch of water-logged stems of early tulips, propelled by Lute’s vigorous arm, impacted soggily on his neck under the ear, he fled. The riot of pursuit echoed along the hall and died out down the stairway toward the stag room. Forrest gathered himself together, and, grinning, went jingling on through the Big House.
He crossed two patios on brick walks roofed with Spanish tile and swamped with early foliage and blooms, and gained his wing of the house, still breathing from the fun, to find, in the office, his secretary awaiting him.
“Good morning, Mr. Blake,” he greeted. “Sorry I was delayed.” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Only four minutes, however. I just couldn’t get away sooner.”
Chapter IV
From nine till ten Forrest gave himself up to his secretary, achieving a correspondence that included learned societies and every sort of breeding and agricultural organization and that would have compelled the average petty business man, unaided, to sit up till midnight to accomplish.
For Dick Forrest was the center of a system which he himself had built and of which he was secretly very proud. Important letters and documents he signed with his ragged fist. All other letters were rubber-stamped by Mr. Blake, who, also, in shorthand, in the course of the hour, put down the indicated answers to many letters and received the formula designations of reply to many other letters. Mr. Blake’s private opinion was that he worked longer hours than his employer, although it was equally his private opinion that his employer was a wonder for discovering work for others to perform.
At ten, to the stroke of the clock, as Pittman, Forrest’s show-manager, entered the office, Blake, burdened with trays of correspondence, sheafs of documents, and phonograph cylinders, faded away to his own office.
From ten to eleven a stream of managers and foremen flowed in and out. All were well disciplined in terseness and time-saving. As Dick Forrest had taught them, the minutes spent with him were not minutes of cogitation. They must be prepared before they reported or suggested. Bonbright, the assistant secretary, always arrived at ten to replace Blake; and Bonbright, close to shoulder, with flying pencil, took down the rapid-fire interchange of question and answer, statement and proposal and plan. These shorthand notes, transcribed and typed in duplicate, were the nightmare and, on occasion, the Nemesis, of the managers and foremen. For, first, Forrest had a remarkable memory; and, second, he was prone to prove its worth by reference to those same notes of Bonbright.
A manager, at the end of a five or ten minute session, often emerged sweating, limp and frazzled. Yet for a swift hour, at high tension, Forrest met all comers, with a master’s grip handling them and all the multifarious details of their various departments. He told Thompson, the machinist, in four flashing minutes, where the fault lay in the dynamo to the Big House refrigerator, laid the fault home to Thompson, dictated a note to Bonbright, with citation by page and chapter to a volume from the library to be drawn by Thompson, told Thompson that Parkman, the dairy manager, was not satisfied with the latest wiring up of milking machines, and that the refrigerating plant at the slaughter house was balking at its accustomed load.
Each