When a man comes to the door book in hand and you have the testimony of the versatility and breadth of his reading in half a bushel of mail for him, you expect to find his surroundings in keeping. But in Jasper Ewold"s living-room Jack found nothing of the kind.
Heavy, natural beams supported the ceiling. On the gray cement walls were four German photographs of famous marbles. The Venus de Milo looked across to the David of Michael Angelo; the Flying Victory across to Rodin"s Thinker. In the centre was a ma.s.sive Florentine table, its broad top bare except for a big ivory tusk paper-knife free from any mounting of silver. On the shelf underneath were portfolios of the reproductions of paintings.
An effect which at first was one of quiet s.p.a.ciousness became impressive and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the sole object of contemplation.
"This is my room. Here, Mary lets me have my way," said Jasper Ewold.
"And it is not expensive."
"The j.a.panese idea of concentration," said Jack.
Jasper Ewold, who had been watching the effect of the room on Jack, as he watched it on every new-comer, showed his surprise and pleasure that this young man in cowboy regalia understood some things besides camps and trails; and this very fact made him answer in the vigorous and enjoyed combatancy of the born controversialist.
"j.a.panese? No!" he declared. "The little men with their storks and vases have merely discovered to us in decoration a principle which was Greek in a more majestic world than theirs. It was the true instinct of the cla.s.sic motherhood of our art before collectors mistook their residences for warehouses."
"And the books?" Jack asked, boyishly. "Where are they? Yes, what do you do with all the second-cla.s.s matter?"
The question was bait to Jasper Ewold. It gave him an opportunity for discourse.
"When I read I want nothing but a paper-cutter close at hand--a good, big paper-cutter, whose own weight carries it through the leaves. And I want to be alone with that book. If I am too lazy to go to the library for another, then it is not worth reading. When I get head-achy with print and look up, I don"t want to stare at the backs of more books. I want something to rest and fill the eye. I--"
"Father," Mary admonished him, "I fear this is going to be long. Why not continue after Mr. Wingfield has washed off the dust of travel and we are at table?"
"Mary is merely jealous. She wants to hurry you to the dining-room, which was designed to her taste," answered her father, with an affectation of grand indignation. "The dust of travel here is clean desert dust--but I admit that it is gritty. Come with me, Sir Chaps!"
He bade Jack precede him through a door diagonally opposite the one by which he had entered from the veranda. On the other side Jack found himself surrounded by walls of books, which formed a parallelogram around a great deal table littered with magazines and papers. Here, indeed, the printed word might riot as it pleased in the joyous variety and chaos of that truly omnivorous reader of herbivorous capacity. Out of the library Jack pa.s.sed into Jasper Ewold"s bedroom. It was small, with a soldier"s cot of exaggerated size that must have been built for his amplitude of person, and it was bare of ornament except for an old ivory crucifix.
"There"s a pitcher and basin, if you incline to a limited operation for outward convention," said Jasper Ewold; "and through that door you will find a shower, if you are for frank, unlimited submersion of the altogether."
"Have I time for the altogether?" Jack asked.
"When youth has not in this house, it marks a retrocession toward barbarism for Little Rivers which I refuse to contemplate. Take your shower, Sir Chaps, and"--a smile went weaving over the hills and valleys of Jasper Ewold"s face--"and, mind, you take off those grand boots or they will get full of water! You will find me in the library when you are through;" and, shaking with subterranean enjoyment of his own joke, he closed the door.
Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender as that of the great Michael"s David pictured in the living-room; a figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara.
While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in which to dine. Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting. On the corner of the page within was a palm-tree--a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the desert might be ent.i.tled; and Jack read:
"DEAR MR. WINGFIELD:
"Please don"t tell father about that horrible business on the pa.s.s. It will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides, which are everything to me. There is not the slightest danger in the future. After this I shall always go armed.
"Sincerely yours,
"MARY EWOLD."
The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria.
"First, I must ask if you know how to shoot," he scribbled beneath her signature.
The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back with a reply:
"I do, or I would not go armed," it said.
She had capped his satire with satire whose p.r.i.c.k was, somehow, delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back with still another postscript:
"Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a thing to think of in that way."
This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack"s last communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!"
in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.
"Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor; "yes, biting into very rich meat."
He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.
"Professor Giuccamini"s researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But come! You are hungry!"
Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles, he pa.s.sed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under a pavilion.
"In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect--cheaper, even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was desert six years ago."
The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a broad path between rows of young palms.
Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the slender bronze vase on the table.
"Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room against the rules," she warned him; "against all your preachments about reading at meals!"
"That"s so, Mary," said Jasper Ewold, absently, regarding the book as if some wicked genius had placed it in his hand quite unbeknown to him.
"But, Mary, it is Professor Giuccamini at last! Giuccamini that I have waited for so long! I beg your pardon, Sir Chaps! When I have somebody to talk to I stand doubly accused. Books at dinner! I descend into dotage!"
In disgust he started toward the house with the book. But in the very doorway he paused and, reopening the book, turned three or four pages with ravenous interest.
"Giuccamini and I agree!" he shouted. "He says there is no doubt that Burlamacchi and Pico were correct. Cosmo de" Medici did call Savonarola to his death-bed, and I am glad of it. I like good stories to turn out true! But here I have a listener--a live listener, and I ramble on about dead tyrants and martyrs. I apologize--I apologize!" and he disappeared in the library.
"Father does not let me leave books in the living-room, which is his.
Why should he bring them to the dining-room, which is mine?" Mary explained.
"There must be law in every household," Jack agreed.
"Yes, somebody fresh to talk to, at, around, and through!" called Jasper Ewold, as he reappeared. "Yes, and over your head; otherwise I shall not be flattered by my own conversation."
"He glories in being an intellectual sn.o.b," Mary said. "Please pretend at times not to understand him."
"Thank you, Mary. You are the corrective that keeps my paternal superiority in balance," answered her father, with a comprehending wave of his hand indicating his sense of humor at the same time as playful insistence on his role as forensic master of the universe.
How he did talk! He was a mill to which all intellectual grist was welcome. Over its wheel the water ran now singing, again with the roar of a cataract. He changed theme with the relish of one who rambles at will, and the emotion of every opinion was written on the big expanse of his features and enforced with gestures. He talked of George Washington, of Andrea del Sarto, of melon-growing, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g pepper-trees, the Divina Commedia, fighting rose-bugs, of Schopenhauer and of Florence--a great deal about Florence, a city that seemed to hang in his mind as a sort of Renaissance background for everything else, even for melon-growing.
"You are getting over my head!" Jack warned him at times, politely.
"That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient, stupefying. Why, I can"t even convince Jim Galway that I know more about dry farming than he!"