Part 44

I had intended, when I left home, to take the boat at Victoria and go down to San Pedro, for I was hungry for salt water and the feel of a rolling deck under my feet again. But the antics of my three little outlaws persuaded me, before we pulled into Calgary, that it would be as well to make the trip south as short a one as possible. Dinkie disgraced me in the dining-car by insisting on "drinking" his mashed potatoes, and made daily and not always ineffectual efforts to appropriate all the fruit on the table, and on the last day, when I'd sagaciously handed him over to the tender mercies of Struthers, I overheard this dialogue:

"I want shooder in my soup!"

"But little boys don't eat sugar in their soup."

"I want shooder in my soup!"

"But, darling, mommie doesn't eat sugar in her soup!"

"Shooder! Dinkie wants shooder, shooder in his soup!"

"Daddy never eats shooder in his soup, Sweetness."

"I want shooder!"

"But really nice little boys don't ask for sugar in their soup," argued the patient-eyed Struthers.

"Shooder!" insisted the implacable tyrant. And he got it.

There was an exceptional number of babies and small children on board and my unfraternal little prairie-waifs did not see why every rattle and doll and automatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sister tourists shouldn't promptly become their own private property. And traveling with twins not yet a year old is scarcely conducive to rest.

And yet, for all the worry and tumult, I found a new peace creeping into my soul. It was the first sight of the Rockies, I think, which brought the change. I'd grown tired of living on a billiard-table, without quite knowing it, tired of the trimly circumscribed monotony of material life, of the isolating flat contention against hunger and want. But the mountains took me out of myself. They were Peter's windmill, raised to the Nth power. They loomed above me, seeming to say: "We are timeless. You, puny one, can live but a day." They stood there as they had stood from the moment God first whispered: "Let there be light"--and there was light. But no, I'm wrong there, as Peter would very promptly have told me, for it was only in the Cambrian Period that the cornerstone of the Rockies was laid. The geologic clock ticked out its centuries until the swamps of the Coal Period were full of Peter's Oldest Inhabitants in the form of Dinosaurs and then came the Cretaceous Period and the Great Architect looked down and bade the Rockies arise, and tooled them into beauty with His blue-green glaciers and His singing rivers, and touched the lordliest peaks with wine-glow and filled the azure valleys with music and peace. And we threaded along those valley-sides on our little ribbons of steel, skirted the shouting rivers and plunged into tiny twisted tubes of darkness, emerging again into the light and once more hearing the timeless giants, with their snow-white heads against the sunset, repeat their whisper: "We live and are eternal. Ye, who fret about our feet, dream for a day, and are forgotten!"

But we seemed to be stepping out into a new world, by the time we got to Pasadena. It was a summery and flowery and holiday world, and it impressed me as being solely and scrupulously organized for pleasure. Yet all minor surprises were submerged in the biggest surprise of Peter's bungalow, which is really more like a château, and strikes me as being singularly like Peter himself, not amazingly impressive to look at, perhaps, but hiding from the world a startingly rich and luxurious interior. The house itself, half hidden in shrubbery, is of weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with the patina of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled over on itself.

The house, which is the shape of an "E" without the middle stroke, has a green-sodded patio between the two wings, with a small fountain and a stained marble basin at the center. There are shade-trees and date-palms and shrubs and Romanesque-looking stone seats about narrow walks, for this is the only really formalized portion of the entire property. This leads off into a grove and garden, a confusion of flowers and trees where I've already been able to spot out a number of orange trees, some of them well fruited, several lemon and fig trees, a row of banana trees, or plants, whichever they should be called, besides pepper and palm and acacia and a long-legged double-file of eucalyptus at the rear. And in between is a pergola and a mixture of mimosa and wistaria and tamarisk and poppies and trellised roses and one woody old geranium with a stalk like a crab-apple trunk and growth enough to cover half a dozen prairie hay-stacks.

But, as I've already implied, it was the inside of the house that astonished me. It is much bigger than it looks and is crowded with the most gorgeous old things in copper and brass and leather and mahogany that I ever saw under one roof. It has three open fireplaces, a huge one of stone in the huge living-room, and rough-beamed ceilings of redwood, and Spanish tiled floors, and chairs upholstered with cowhide with the ranch-brand still showing in the tanned leather, and tables of Mexican mahogany set in redwood frames, and several convenient little electric heaters which can be carried from room to room as they are needed.

Pinshaw, Peter's gardener and care-taker, had before our arrival picked several clumps of violets, with perfume like the English violets, and the house was aired and everything waiting and ready when we came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the icebox for the babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for their elders. My one disturbing thought is that it will be a hard house to live up to. But Struthers, who is not untouched with her folie de grandeur, has the slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at last come into her own. One of the first things I must do, however, is to teach my kiddies to respect Peter's belongings. In one cabinet of books, which is locked, I have noticed several which are by "Peter Ketley" himself. Yet that name meant nothing to me, when I met it out on the prairie and humiliated its owner by converting him into one of my hired hands. Ce monde est plein de fous.

Monday the Sixteenth

This is a great climate for meditation. And I have been meditating. Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, there's twenty degrees of frost and a northwest wind like a search-warrant. Here there's a pellucid blue sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds behind me, and a tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale green parasol over her head and meandering slowly along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of hot tar.

I've been sitting here staring down that boulevard, with the strong light making me squint a little. I've been watching the two rows of date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent. The street is very quiet, but half-way down the block I can see a Jap gardener in brown denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace. Still farther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed porches, is tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I can't see is somewhere beating a rug. I can see a little rivulet of water that flows sparkling down the asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of bamboos back by Peter's bedroom window rustles crisply again and is quiet and the silence is broken by a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy motor-wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun flashing on its polished metal equipment, and the toy motor child being led reluctantly homeward by the maid cries shrilly, and in the silence that ensues I can hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of Cherokee roses from which a languid white petal falls, from time to time.

It's a dolce-far-niente day, as all the days seem to be here, and the best that I can do is sit and brood like a Plymouth Rock with a full crop. But I've been thinking things over. And I've come to several conclusions.

One is that I'm not so contented as I thought I was going to be. I am oppressed by a shadowy feeling of in some way sailing under false colors. I am also hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I'm a convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, my kiddies have all acquired a fine coat of tan, and only Struthers is slightly off her feed, having acquired a not unmerited attack of cholera morbus from over-indulgence in Casaba melon. But I keep wondering if Dinky-Dunk is getting the right sort of things to eat, if he's lonely, and what he does in his spare time.

And another conclusion I've come to is that men, much as I hate to admit it, are built of a stronger fiber than women. They seem able to stand shock better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to go down under defeat, to take the full count, as I have done. For I still have to face the fact that I was a failure. Then I turned tail and fled from the scene of my collapse. That flight, it is true, has brought me a certain brand of peace, but it is not an enduring peace, for you can't run away from what's in your own heart. And already I'm restless and ill-at-ease. It's not so much that I'm dissatisfied; it's more that I'm unsatisfied. There still seems to be something momentous left out of the plan of things. I have the teasing feeling of confronting something which is still impending, which is being withheld, which I can not reach out for, no matter how I try, until the time is ripe.... Those rustling bamboos so close to the room where I sleep have begun to bother me so much that I'm migrating to a new bedroom to-night. "There's never anything without something!"

Tuesday the Twenty-fourth

Little Dinky-Dunk has adventured into illicit knowledge of his first orange from the bough. It was one of Peter's low-hanging Valencias, and seems to have left no ill-effects, though I prefer that all inside matter be carefully edited before consumption by that small Red. So Struthers hereafter must stand the angel with the flaming sword and guard the gates that open upon that tree of forbidden fruit. Her own colic, by the way, is a thing of the past, and at present she's extremely interested in Pinshaw, who, she tells me, was once a cabinet-maker in England, and came out to California for his health. Struthers, as usual, is attempting to reach the heart of her new victim by way of the stomach, and Pinshaw, apparently, is not unappreciative, since he appears a little more punctually at his watering and raking and gardening and has his ears up like a rabbit for the first inkling of his lady-love's matutinal hand-out. And poor old Whinstane Sandy, back at Alabama Ranch, is still making sheep's eyes at the patches which Struthers once sewed on his breeks, like as not, and staring with a moonish smile at the atrabilious photograph which the one camera-artist of Buckhorn made of Struthers and my three pop-eyed kiddies....

These are, without exception, the friendliest people I have ever known. The old millionaire lumberman from Bay City, who lives next door to me, pushes through the hedge with platefuls of green figs and tid-bits from his gardens, and delightful girls whose names I don't even know come in big cars and ask to take little Dinkie off for one of their lawn fêtes. It even happened that a movie-actor--who, I later discovered, was a drug-addict--insisted on accompanying me home and informed me on the way that I had a dream of a face for camera-work. It quite set me up, for all its impertinence, until I learned to my sorrow that it had flowered out of nothing more than an extra shot in the arm.

They are a friendly and companionable folk, and they'd keep me on the go all the time if I'd let 'em. But I've only had energy enough to run over to Los Angeles twice, though there are a dozen or two people I must look up in that more frolicsome suburb. But I can't get away from the feeling, the truly rural feeling, that I'm among strangers. I can't rid myself of the extremely parochial impression that these people are not my people. And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old beaux sit about in Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet--not if I know it--not by a long shot!

But one has to be educated for idleness, I find, almost as much as for industry. I knew the trick once, but I've lost the hang of it. The one thing that impresses me, on coming straight from prairie life to a city like this, is how much women-folk can have done for them without quite knowing it. The machinery of life here is so intricate and yet so adequate that it denudes them of all the normal and primitive activities of their grandmothers, so they have to invent troubles and contrive quite unnecessary activities to keep from being bored to extinction. Everything seems to come to them ready-made and duly prepared, their bread, their light and fuel and water, their meat and milk. All that, and the daily drudgery it implies, is made ready and performed beyond their vision, and they have no balky pumps to prime and no fires to build, and they'd probably be quite disturbed to think that their roasts came from a slaughter-house with bloody floors and that their breakfast rolls, instead of coming ready-made into the world, are mixed and molded in bake-rooms where men work sweating by night, stripped to the waist, like stokers.

Wednesday the Second