Part 5 (2/2)
I tried to explain it for him. ”Because writers are like Indians. The only good ones are the dead ones. And it's the same with those siren affinities of history. Annie Laurie lived to be eighty, though the ballad doesn't say so. And Lady Hamilton died poor and ugly and went around with red herrings in her pocket. And Cleopatra was really a redheaded old political schemer, and Paris got tired of Helen of Troy.
Which means that history, like literature, is only _Le mensonge convenu_!”
This made d.i.n.ky-Dunk sit up and stare at me. ”Look here, Gee-Gee, I don't mind a bit of book-learning, but I hate to see you tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and knock me down with it! And it was _salons_ we were talking about, and not the wicked ladies of the past!”
”Well, the only _salon_ I ever saw in America had the commercial air of a millinery opening where tea happened to be served,” I promptly declared. ”And the only American woman I ever knew who wanted to have a _salon_ was a girl we used to call Asafetida Anne. And if I explained why you'd make a much worse face than that, my Diddums. But she had a weakness for black furs and never used to wash her neck. So the Plimpton Mark was always there!”
”Don't get bitter, Gee-Gee,” announced d.i.n.ky-Dunk as he proceeded to light his pipe. And I could afford to laugh at his solemnity.
”I'm not bitter, Honey Chile; I'm only glad I got away from all that Bohemian rubbish. You may call me a rattle-box, and accuse me of being temperamental now and then--which I'm not--but the one thing in life which I love is _sanity_. And that, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, is why I love you, even though you are only a big sunburnt farmer fighting and planning and grinding away for a home for an empty-headed wife who's going to fail at everything but making you love her!”
Then followed a few moments when I wasn't able to talk,
... The sequel's scarce essential-- Nay, more than this, I hold it still Profoundly confidential!
Then as we sat there side by side I got thinking of the past and of the Bohemians before whom I had once burned incense. And remembering a certain visit to Box Hill with Lady Agatha's mother, years and years ago, I had to revise my verdict on authors, for one of the warmest memories in all my life is that of dear old Meredith in his wheelchair, with his bearded face still flooded with its kindly inner light and his spirit still mellow with its unquenchable love of life. And once as a child, I went on to tell d.i.n.ky-Dunk, I had met Stevenson. It was at Mentone, and I can still remember him leaning over and taking my hand.
His own hand was cold and lean, like a claw, and with the quick instinct of childhood I realized, too, that he was _condescending_ as he spoke to me, for all the laugh that showed the white teeth under his drooping black mustache. Wrong as it seemed, I didn't like him any more than I afterward liked the Sargent portrait of him, which was really an echo of my own first impression, though often and often I've tried to blot out that first unfair estimate of a real man of genius. There's so much in the _Child's Garden of Verse_ that I love; there's so much in the man's life that demands admiration, that it seems wrong not to capitulate to his charm. But when one's own family are one's biographers it's hard to be kept human. ”Yet there's one thing, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, that I do respect him for,” I went on. ”He had seen the loveliest parts of this world, and, when he had to, he could light-heartedly give it all up and rough it in this American West of ours, even as you and I!” Whereupon d.i.n.ky-Dunk argued that we ought to forgive an invalid his stridulous preaching about bravery and manliness and his over-emphasis of fort.i.tude, since it was plainly based on an effort to react against a const.i.tutional weakness for which he himself couldn't be blamed.
And I confessed that I could forgive him more easily than I could Sanguinary John with his literary Diabolism and that ostentatious stone-age blugginess with which he loved to give the ladies goose-flesh, pretending he was a bull in a china-shop when he's really only a white mouse in an ink-pot! And after d.i.n.ky-Dunk had knocked out his pipe and wound up his watch he looked over at me with his slow Scotch-Canadian smile. ”For a couple of hay-seeds who have been harpooning the _salon_ idea,” he solemnly announced, ”I call this quite a literary evening!”
But what's the use of having an idea or two in your head if you can't air 'em now and then?
_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_
To-day I stumbled on the surprise of my life! It was A Man! I took Paddy and cantered over to the old t.i.tchborne Ranch and was prowling around the corral, hoping I might find a few belated mushrooms. But nary a one was there. So I whistled on my four fingers for Paddy (I've been teaching him to come at that call) and happened to glance in the direction of the abandoned shack. Then I saw the door open, and _out walked a man_.
He was a young man, in puttees and knickers and Norfolk jacket, and he was smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as though I were the Missing Link. Then he said ”h.e.l.lo!” rather inadequately, it seemed to me.
I answered back ”h.e.l.lo,” and wondered whether to take to my heels or not. But my courage got its second wind, and I stayed. Then we shook hands, very formally, and explained who we were. And I discovered that his name was Percival Benson Woodhouse (and the Lord forgive me if they ever call him Percy for short!) and that his aunt is the Countess of D---- and that he knows a number of people you and Lady Agatha have often spoken of. He's got a j.a.panese servant called Kino, or perhaps it's spelt Keeno, I don't know which, who's housekeeper, laundress, _valet_, gardener, groom and _chef_, all in one,--so, at least Percival Benson confessed to me. He also confessed that he'd bought the t.i.tchborne Ranch, from photographs, from ”one of those land chaps” in London. He wanted to rough it a bit, and they told him there would be jolly good game shooting. So he even brought along an elephant-gun, which his cousin had used in India. The photographs which the ”land chap” had showed him turned out to be pictures of the Selkirks. And, taking it all in all, he fancied that he'd been jolly well bunked. But Percival seemed to accept it with the stoicism of the well-born Britisher. He'd have a try at the place, although there was no game.
”But there _is_ game,” I told him, ”slathers of it, oodles of it!”
He mildly inquired where and what? I told him: Wild duck, prairie-chicken, wild geese, jack-rabbits, now and then a fox, and loads of coyotes. He explained, then, that he meant big game--and how grandly those two words, ”big game,” do roll off the English tongue! He has a sister in the Bahamas, who may join him next summer if he should decide to stick it out. He considered that it would be a bit rough for a girl, during the winter season up here.
Yet before I go any further I must describe Percival Benson Woodhouse to you, for he's not only ”our sort,” but a type as well.
In the first place, he's a Magdalen College man, the sort we've seen going up and down the High many and many a time. He's rather gaunt and rather tall, and he stoops a little. ”At home” they call it the ”Oxford stoop,” if I'm not greatly mistaken. His hands are thin and long and bony. His eyes are nice, and he looks very good form. I mean he's the sort of man you'd never take for the ”outsider” or ”rotter.” He's the sort who seem to have the royal privilege of doing even doubtfully polite things and yet doing them in such a way as to make them seem quite proper. I don't know whether I make that clear or not, but one thing is clear, and this is that our Percival Benson is an aristocrat.
You see it in his over-sensitive, over-refined, almost womanishly delicate face, with those idealizing and quite unpractical eyes of his.
You see it in the thin, high-arched, bony nose (almost as fine a beak as the one belonging to His Grace, the Duke of M----!) and you see it in the sad and somewhat elongated face, as though he had pored over big books too much, a sort of air of pathos and aloofness from things. His mouth strikes you as being rather meager, until he smiles, which is quite often, for, glory be, he has a good sense of humor. But besides that he has a neatness, a coolness, an impersonal sort of ease, which would make you think that he might have stepped out of one of Henry James's earlier novels of about the time of the _Portrait of a Lady_.
And I like him. I knew that at once. He's _effete_ and old-worldish and probably useless, out here, but he stands for something I've been missing, and I'll be greatly mistaken if Percival Benson and Chaddie McKail are not pretty good friends before the winter's over! He's asked if he might be permitted to call, and he's coming for dinner to-morrow night, and I do hope d.i.n.ky-Dunk is nice to him--if we're to be neighbors. But d.i.n.ky-Dunk says Westerners don't ask to be permitted to call. They just stick their cayuse into the corral and walk in, the same as an Indian does. And d.i.n.ky-Dunk says that if he comes in evening dress he'll shoot him, sure pop!
_Thursday the Twenty-ninth_
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