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_ Despite the fastidiousness of her housekeeping, Saxon, once she
had systematized it, found time and to spare on her hands.
Especially during the periods in which her husband carried his
lunch and there was no midday meal to prepare, she had a number
of hours each day to herself. Trained for years to the routine of
factory and laundry work, she could not abide this unaccustomed
idleness. She could not bear to sit and do nothing, while she
could not pay calls on her girlhood friends, for they still
worked in factory and laundry. Nor was she acquainted with the
wives of the neighborhood, save for one strange old woman who
lived in the house next door and with whom Saxon had exchanged
snatches of conversation over the backyard division fence.
One time-consuming diversion of which Saxon took advantage was
free and unlimited baths. In the orphan asylum and in Sarah's
house she had been used to but one bath a week. As she grew to
womanhood she had attempted more frequent baths. But the effort
proved disastrous, arousing, first, Sarah's derision, and next,
her wrath. Sarah had crystallized in the era of the weekly
Saturday night bath, and any increase in this cleansing function
was regarded by her as putting on airs and as an insinuation
against her own cleanliness. Also, it was an extravagant misuse
of fuel, and occasioned extra towels in the family wash. But now,
in Billy's house, with her own stove, her own tub and towels and
soap, and no one to say her nay, Saxon was guilty of a daily
orgy. True, it was only a common washtub that she placed on the
kitchen floor and filled by hand; but it was a luxury that had
taken her twenty-four years to achieve. It was from the strange
woman next door that Saxon received a hint, dropped in casual
conversation, of what proved the culminating joy of bathing. A
simple thing--a few drops of druggist's ammonia in the water; but
Saxon had never heard of it before.
She was destined to learn much from the strange woman. The
acquaintance had begun one day when Saxon, in the back yard, was
hanging out a couple of corset covers and several pieces of her
finest undergarments. The woman leaning on the rail of her back
porch, had caught her eye, and nodded, as it seemed to Saxon,
half to her and half to the underlinen on the line.
"You're newly married, aren't you?" the woman asked. "I'm Mrs.
Higgins. I prefer my first name, which is Mercedes."
"And I'm Mrs. Roberts," Saxon replied, thrilling to the newness
of the designation on her tongue. "My first name is Saxon."
"Strange name for a Yankee woman," the other commented.
"Oh, but I'm not Yankee," Saxon exclaimed. "I'm Californian."
"La la," laughed Mercedes Higgins. "I forgot I was in America. In
other lands all Americans are called Yankees. It is true that you
are newly married?"
Saxon nodded with a happy sigh. Mercedes sighed, too.
"Oh, you happy, soft, beautiful young thing. I could envy you to
hatred--you with all the man-world ripe to be twisted about your
pretty little fingers. And you don't realize your fortune. No one
does until it's too late."
Saxon was puzzled and disturbed, though she answered readily:
"Oh, but I do know how lucky I am. I have the finest man in the
world."
Mercedes Higgins sighed again and changed the subject. She nodded
her head at the garments.
"I see you like pretty things. It is good judgment for a young
woman. They're the bait for men--half the weapons in the battle.
They win men, and they hold men--" She broke off to demand almost
fiercely: "And you, you would keep your husband?--always,
always--if you can?"
"I intend to. I will make him love me always and always."
Saxon ceased, troubled and surprised that she should be so
intimate with a stranger.
"'Tis a queer thing, this love of men," Mercedes said. "And a
failing of all women is it to believe they know men like books.
And with breaking hearts, die they do, most women, out of their
ignorance of men and still foolishly believing they know all
about them. Oh, la la, the little fools. And so you say, little
new-married woman, that you will make your man love you always
and always? And so they all say it, knowing men and the queerness
of men's love the way they think they do. Easier it is to win the
capital prize in the Little Louisiana, but the little new-married
women never know it until too late. But you--you have begun well.
Stay by your pretties and your looks. 'Twas so you won your man,
'tis so you'll hold him. But that is not all. Some time I will
talk with you and tell what few women trouble to know, what few
women ever come to know.--Saxon!--'tis a strong, handsome name
for a woman. But you don't look it. Oh, I've watched you. French
you are, with a Frenchiness beyond dispute. Tell Mr. Roberts I
congratulate him on his good taste."
She paused, her hand on the knob of her kitchen door.
"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 advertisement 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 analyze 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 washing, 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 washing 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
washing 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 washing. 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 ventnred.
"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."
"Ah, the English came afterward, and not in school. But, as it
goes, yes, a good education in all things but the most
important--men. That, too, came afterward. And little my mother
dreamed--she was a grand lady, what you call a
cattle-queen--little she dreamed my fine education was to fit me
in the end for a night watchman's wife." She laughed genuinely at
the grotesqueness of the idea. "Night watchman, laborers, why, we
had hundreds, yes, thousands that toiled for us. The peons--they
are like what you call slaves, almost, and the cowboys, who could
ride two hundred miles between side and side of the ranch. And in
the big house servants beyond remembering or counting. La la, in
my mother's house were many servants."
Mercedes Higgins was voluble as a Greek, and wandered on in
reminiscence.
"But our servants were lazy and dirty. The Chinese are the
servants par excellence. So are the Japanese, when you find a
good one, but not so good as the Chinese. The Japanese
maidservants are pretty and merry, but you never know the moment
they'll leave you. The Hindoos are not strong, but very obedient.
They look upon sahibs and memsahibs as gods! I was a
memsahib--which means woman. I once had a Russian cook who always
spat in the soup for luck. It was very funny. But we put up with
it. It was the custom."
"How you must have traveled to have such strange servants!" Saxon
encouraged.
The old woman laughed corroboration.
"And the strangest of all, down in the South Seas, black slaves,
little kinky-haired cannibals with bones through their noses.
When they did not mind, or when they stole, they were tied up to
a cocoanut palm behind the compound and lashed with whips of
rhinoceros hide. They were from an island of cannibals and
head-hunters, and they never cried out. It was their pride. There
was little Vibi, only twelve years old--he waited on me--and when
his back was cut in shreds and I wept over him, he would only
laugh and say, 'Short time little bit I take 'm head belong big
fella white marster.' That was Bruce Anstey, the Englishman who
whipped him. But little Vibi never got the head. He ran away and
the bushmen cut off his own head and ate every bit of him."
Saxon chilled, and her face was grave; but Mercedes Higgins
rattled on.
"Ah, those were wild, gay, savage days. Would you believe it, my
dear, in three years those Englishmen of the plantation drank up
oceans of champagne and Scotch whisky and dropped thirty thousand
pounds on the adventure. Not dollars--pounds, which means one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They were princes while it
lasted. It was splendid, glorious. It was mad, mad. I sold half
my beautiful jewels in New Zealand before I got started again.
Bruce Anstey blew out his brains at the end. Roger went mate on a
trader with a black crew, for eight pounds a month. And Jack
Gilbraith--he was the rarest of them all. His people were wealthy
and titled, and he went home to England and sold cat's meat, sat
around their big house till they gave him more money to start a
rubber plantation in the East Indies somewhere, on Sumatra, I
think--or was it New Guinea?"
And Saxon, back in her own kitchen and preparing supper for
Billy, wondered what lusts and rapacities had led the old,
burnt-faced woman from the big Peruvian ranch, through all the
world, to West Oakland and Barry Higgins Old Barry was not the
sort who would fling away his share of one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, much less ever attain to such opulence.
Besides, she had mentioned the names of other men, but not his.
Much more Mercedes had talked, in snatches and fragments. There
seemed no great country nor city of the old world or the new in
which she had not been. She had even been in Klondike, ten years
before, in a half-dozen flashing sentences picturing the
fur-clad, be-moccasined miners sowing the barroom floors with
thousands of dollars' worth of gold dust. Always, so it seemed to
Saxon, Mrs. Higgins had been with men to whom money was as water. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER III
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