Part 23 (1/2)

”And come and see me some time. You will never be sorry. I can teach you much. Come in the afternoon. My man is night watchman in the yards and sleeps of mornings. He's sleeping now.”

Saxon went into the house puzzling and pondering. Anything but ordinary was this lean, dark-skinned woman, with the face withered as if scorched in great heats, and the eyes, large and black, that flashed and flamed with advertis.e.m.e.nt of an unquenched inner conflagration. Old she was--Saxon caught herself debating anywhere between fifty and seventy; and her hair, which had once been blackest black, was streaked plentifully with gray. Especially noteworthy to Saxon was her speech.

Good English it was, better than that to which Saxon was accustomed. Yet the woman was not American. On the other hand, she had no perceptible accent. Rather were her words touched by a foreignness so elusive that Saxon could not a.n.a.lyze nor place it.

”Uh, huh,” Billy said, when she had told him that evening of the day's event. ”So SHE'S Mrs. Higgins? He's a watchman. He's got only one arm.

Old Higgins an' her--a funny bunch, the two of them. The people's scared of her--some of 'em. The Dagoes an' some of the old Irish dames thinks she's a witch. Won't have a thing to do with her. Bert was tellin' me about it. Why, Saxon, d'ye know, some of 'em believe if she was to get mad at 'em, or didn't like their mugs, or anything, that all she's got to do is look at 'em an' they'll curl up their toes an' croak. One of the fellows that works at the stable--you've seen 'm--Henderson--he lives around the corner on Fifth--he says she's bughouse.”

”Oh, I don't know,” Saxon defended her new acquaintance. ”She may be crazy, but she says the same thing you're always saying. She says my form is not American but French.”

”Then I take my hat off to her,” Billy responded. ”No wheels in her head if she says that. Take it from me, she's a wise gazabo.”

”And she speaks good English, Billy, like a school teacher, like what I guess my mother used to speak. She's educated.”

”She ain't no fool, or she wouldn't a-sized you up the way she did.”

”She told me to congratulate you on your good taste in marrying me,”

Saxon laughed.

”She did, eh? Then give her my love. Me for her, because she knows a good thing when she sees it, an' she ought to be congratulating you on your good taste in me.”

It was on another day that Mercedes Higgins nodded, half to Saxon, and half to the dainty women's things Saxon was hanging on the line.

”I've been worrying over your was.h.i.+ng, little new-wife,” was her greeting.

”Oh, but I've worked in the laundry for years,” Saxon said quickly.

Mercedes sneered scornfully.

”Steam laundry. That's business, and it's stupid. Only common things should go to a steam laundry. That is their punishment for being common.

But the pretties! the dainties! the flimsies!--la la, my dear, their was.h.i.+ng is an art. It requires wisdom, genius, and discretion fine as the clothes are fine. I will give you a recipe for homemade soap. It will not harden the texture. It will give whiteness, and softness, and life. You can wear them long, and fine white clothes are to be loved a long time. Oh, fine was.h.i.+ng is a refinement, an art. It is to be done as an artist paints a picture, or writes a poem, with love, holily, a true sacrament of beauty.

”I shall teach you better ways, my dear, better ways than you Yankees know. I shall teach you new pretties.” She nodded her head to Saxon's underlinen on the line. ”I see you make little laces. I know all laces--the Belgian, the Maltese, the Mechlin--oh, the many, many loves of laces! I shall teach you some of the simpler ones so that you can make them for yourself, for your brave man you are to make love you always and always.”

On her first visit to Mercedes Higgins, Saxon received the recipe for home-made soap and her head was filled with a minutiae of instruction in the art of fine was.h.i.+ng. Further, she was fascinated and excited by all the newness and strangeness of the withered old woman who blew upon her the breath of wider lands and seas beyond the horizon.

”You are Spanish?” Saxon ventured.

”No, and yes, and neither, and more. My father was Irish, my mother Peruvian-Spanish. 'Tis after her I took, in color and looks. In other ways after my father, the blue-eyed Celt with the fairy song on his tongue and the restless feet that stole the rest of him away to far-wandering. And the feet of him that he lent me have led me away on as wide far roads as ever his led him.”

Saxon remembered her school geography, and with her mind's eye she saw a certain outline map of a continent with jiggly wavering parallel lines that denoted coast.

”Oh,” she cried, ”then you are South American.”

Mercedes shrugged her shoulders.

”I had to be born somewhere. It was a great ranch, my mother's. You could put all Oakland in one of its smallest pastures.”

Mercedes Higgins sighed cheerfully and for the time was lost in retrospection. Saxon was curious to hear more about this woman who must have lived much as the Spanish-Californians had lived in the old days.

”You received a good education,” she said tentatively. ”Your English is perfect.”