A week of dissatisfaction and restlessness ensued for Graham. Tom between belief that his business was to leave the Big House on the first train, and desire to see, and see more of Paula, to be with her, and to be more with her—he succeeded in neither leaving nor in seeing as much of her as during the first days of his visit.
At first, and for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist monopolized1 nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody2 half-hours listening to their “work.” They were oblivious3 of his presence, either flushed and absorbed with the passion of their music, or wiping their foreheads and chatting and laughing companionably in pauses to rest. That the young musician loved her with an ardency4 that was almost painful, was patent to Graham; but what hurt him was the abandon of devotion with which she sometimes looked at Ware5 after he had done something exceptionally fine. In vain Graham tried to tell himself that all this was mental on her part—purely delighted appreciation6 of the other’s artistry. Nevertheless, being man, it hurt, and continued to hurt, until he could no longer suffer himself to remain.
Once, chancing into the room at the end of a Schumann song and just after Ware had departed, Graham found Paula still seated at the piano, an expression of rapt dreaming on her face. She regarded him almost unrecognizingly, gathered herself mechanically together, uttered an absent-minded commonplace or so, and left the room. Despite his vexation and hurt, Graham tried to think it mere7 artist-dreaming on her part, a listening to the echo of the just-played music in her soul. But women were curious creatures, he could not help moralizing, and were prone8 to lose their hearts most strangely and inconsequentially. Might it not be that by his very music this youngster of a man was charming the woman of her?
With the departure of Ware, Paula Forrest retired9 almost completely into her private wing behind the door without a knob. Nor did this seem unusual, Graham gleaned10 from the household.
“Paula is a woman who finds herself very good company,” Ernestine explained, “and she often goes in for periods of aloneness, when Dick is the only person who sees her.”
“Which is not flattering to the rest of the company,” Graham smiled.
“Which makes her such good company whenever she is in company,” Ernestine retorted.
The driftage through the Big House was decreasing. A few guests, on business or friendship, continued to come, but more departed. Under Oh Joy and his Chinese staff the Big House ran so frictionlessly and so perfectly12, that entertainment of guests seemed little part of the host’s duties. The guests largely entertained themselves and one another.
Dick rarely appeared, even for a moment, until lunch, and Paula, now carrying out her seclusion13 program, never appeared before dinner.
“Rest cure,” Dick laughed one noon, and challenged Graham to a tournament with boxing gloves, single-sticks, and foils.
“And now’s the time,” he told Graham, as they breathed between bouts14, “for you to tackle your book. I’m only one of the many who are looking forward to reading it, and I’m looking forward hard. Got a letter from Havely yesterday—he mentioned it, and wondered how far along you were.”
So Graham, in his tower room, arranged his notes and photographs, schemed out the work, and plunged15 into the opening chapters. So immersed did he become that his nascent16 interest in Paula might have languished17, had it not been for meeting her each evening at dinner. Then, too, until Ernestine and Lute18 left for Santa Barbara, there were afternoon swims and rides and motor trips to the pastures of the Miramar Hills and the upland ranges of the Anselmo Mountains. Other trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks19, or to his five-thousand-acre colony of twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on the soil.
That Paula sometimes went for long solitary20 rides, Graham knew, and, once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn21 at the hitching22 rails.
“Don’t you think you are spoiling that mare23 for riding in company?” he twitted.
Paula laughed and shook her head.
“Well, then,” he asserted stoutly24, “I’m spoiling for a ride with you.”
“There’s Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest.”
“This is new country,” he contended. “And one learns country through the people who know it. I’ve seen it through the eyes of Lute, and Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven’t seen and which I can see only through your eyes.”
“A pleasant theory,” she evaded25. “A—a sort of landscape vampirism.”
“But without the ill effects of vampirism,” he urged quickly.
Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged26.
“I don’t know about that,” was all she said finally; but his fancy leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing27 their possible connotations.
“But we have so much we might be saying to each other,” he tried again. “So much we... ought to be saying to each other.”
“So I apprehend,” she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight look accompanied her speech.
So she did apprehend—the thought of it was flame to him, but his tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking laugh as she turned into the house.
Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula’s aunt, Mrs. Tully, much to Graham’s disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several days’ stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but, just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting began.
O’Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order to live down the disastrous28 culmination29 of the musical raid made upon him by the philosophers. The idea and the trick had been Dick’s. Combat had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark of Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into the thick of O’Hay’s deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and eager ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of music and taken O’Hay in reverse. And the battle had raged until the hot-headed Irishman, beside himself with the grueling the pair of skilled logomachists were giving him, accepted with huge relief the kindly30 invitation of Terrence McFane to retire with him to the tranquillity31 and repose32 of the stag room, where, over a soothing33 highball and far from the barbarians34, the two of them could have a heart to heart talk on real music. At two in the morning, wild-eyed and befuddled35, O’Hay had been led to bed by the upright-walking and unshakably steady Terrence.
“Never mind,” Ernestine had told O’Hay later, with a twinkle in her eye that made him guess the plot. “It was only to be expected. Those rattle-brained philosophers would drive even a saint to drink.”
“I thought you were safe in Terrence’s hands,” had been Dick’s mock apology. “A pair of Irishmen, you know. I’d forgot Terrence was case-hardened. Do you know, after he said good night to you, he came up to me for a yarn36. And he was steady as a rock. He mentioned casually37 of having had several sips38, so I... I... never dreamed ... er... that he had indisposed you.”
When Lute and Ernestine departed for Santa Barbara, Bert Wainwright and his sister remembered their long-neglected home in Sacramento. A pair of painters, proteges of Paula, arrived the same day. But they were little in evidence, spending long days in the hills with a trap and driver and smoking long pipes in the stag room.
The free and easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless11 way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The sages39 from the ma............