________________________________________________
_ Saxon and Billy were gone weeks on the trip south, but in the end
they came back to Carmel. They had stopped with Hafler, the poets
in the Marble House, which he had built with his own hands. This
queer dwelling was all in one room, built almost entirely of
white marble. Hailer cooked, as over a campfire, in the huge
marble fireplace, which he used in all ways as a kitchen. There
were divers shelves of books, and the massive furniture he had
made from redwood, as he had made the shakes for the roof. A
blanket, stretched across a corner, gave Saxon privacy. The poet
was on the verge of departing for San Francisco and New York, but
remained a day over with them to explain the country and run over
the government land with Billy. Saxon had wanted to go along that
morning, but Hafler scornfully rejected her, telling her that her
legs were too short. That night, when the men returned, Billy was
played out to exhaustion. He frankly acknowledged that Hafler had
walked him into the ground, and that his tongue had been hanging
out from the first hour. Hafler estimated that they had covered
fifty-five miles.
"But such miles!" Billy enlarged. "Half the time up or down, an'
'most all the time without trails. An' such a pace. He was dead
right about your short legs, Saxon. You wouldn't a-lasted the
first mile. An' such country! We ain't seen anything like it
yet."
Hafler left the next day to catch the train at Monterey. He gave
them the freedom of the Marble House, and told them to stay the
whole winter if they wanted. Billy elected to loaf around and
rest up that day. He was stiff and sore. Moreover, he was stunned
by the exhibition of walking prowess on the part of the poet.
"Everybody can do something top-notch down in this country," he
marveled. "Now take that Hafler. He's a bigger man than me, an' a
heavier. An' weight's against walkin', too. But not with him.
He's done eighty miles inside twenty-four hours, he told me, an'
once a hundred an' seventy in three days. Why, he made a show
outa me. I felt ashamed as a little kid."
"Remember, Billy," Saxon soothed him, "every man to his own game.
And down here you're a top-notcher at your own game. There isn't
one you're not the master of with the gloves."
"I guess that's right," he conceded. "But just the same it goes
against the grain to be walked off my legs by a poet--by a poet,
mind you."
They spent days in going over the government land, and in the end
reluctantly decided against taking it up. The redwood canyons and
great cliffs of the Santa Lucia Mountains fascinated Saxon; but
she remembered what Hafler had told her of the summer fogs which
hid the sun sometimes for a week or two at a time, and which
lingered for months. Then, too, there was no access to market.
It was many miles to where the nearest wagon road began, at
Post's, and from there on, past Point Sur to Carmel, it was a
weary and perilous way. Billy, with his teamster judgment,
admitted that for heavy hauling it was anything but a picnic.
There was the quarry of perfect marble on Hafler's quarter
section. He had said that it would be worth a fortune if near a
railroad; but, as it was, he'd make them a present of it if they
wanted it.
Billy visioned the grassy slopes pastured with his horses and
cattle, and found it hard to turn his back; but he listened with
a willing ear to Saxon's argument in favor of a farm-home like
the one they had seen in the moving pictures in Oakland. Yes, he
agreed, what they wanted was an all-around farm, and an
all-around farm they would have if they hiked forty years to find
it.
"But it must have redwoods on it," Saxon hastened to stipulate.
"I've fallen in love with them. And we can get along without fog.
And there must be good wagon-roads, and a railroad not more than
a thousand miles away."
Heavy winter rains held them prisoners for two weeks in the
Marble House. Saxon browsed among Hafler's books, though most of
them were depressingly beyond her, while Billy hunted with
Hafler's guns. But he was a poor shot and a worse hunter. His
only success was with rabbits, which he managed to kill on
occasions when they stood still. With the rifle he got nothing,
although he fired at half a dozen different deer, and, once, at a
huge cat-creature with a long tail which he was certain was a
mountain lion. Despite the way he grumbled at himself, Saxon
could see the keen joy he was taking. This belated arousal of
the hunting instinct seemed to make almost another man of him. He
was out early and late, compassing prodigious climbs and
tramps--once reaching as far as the gold mines Tom had spoken of,
and being away two days.
"Talk about pluggin' away at a job in the city, an' goin' to
movie' pictures and Sunday picnics for amusement!" he would burst
out. "I can't see what was eatin' me that I ever put up with such
truck. Here's where I oughta ben all the time, or some place
like it."
He was filled with this new mode of life, and was continually
recalling old hunting tales of his father and telling them to
Saxon.
"Say, I don't get stiffened any more after an all-day tramp," he
exulted. "I'm broke in. An' some day, if I meet up with that
Hafler, I'll challenge'm to a tramp that'll break his heart."
"Foolish boy, always wanting to play everybody's game and beat
them at it," Saxon laughed delightedly.
"Aw, I guess you're right," he growled. "Hafler can always
out-walk me. He's made that way. But some day, just the same, if
I ever see 'm again, I'll invite 'm to put on the gloves....
though I won't be mean enough to make 'm as sore as he made me."
After they left Post's on the way back to Carmel, the condition
of the road proved the wisdom of their rejection of the
government land. They passed a rancher's wagon overturned, a
second wagon with a broken axle, and the stage a hundred yards
down the mountainside, where it had fallen, passengers, horses,
road, and all.
"I guess they just about quit tryin' to use this road in the
winter," Billy said. "It's horse-killin' an' man-killin', an' I
can just see 'm freightin' that marble out over it I don't
think."
Settling down at Carmel was an easy matter. The Iron Man had
already departed to his Catholic college, and the "shack" turned
out to be a three-roomed house comfortably furnished for
housekeeping. Hall put Billy to work on the potato patch--a
matter of three acres which the poet farmed erratically to the
huge delight of his crowd. He planted at all seasons, and it was
accepted by the community that what did not rot in the ground was
evenly divided between the gophers and trespassing cows. A plow
was borrowed, a team of horses hired, and Billy took hold. Also
he built a fence around the patch, and after that was set to
staining the shingled roof of the bungalow. Hall climbed to the
ridge-pole to repeat his warning that Billy must keep away from
his wood-pile. One morning Hall came over and watched Billy
chopping wood for Saxon. The poet looked on covetously as long as
he could restrain himself.
"It's plain you don't know how to use an axe," he sneered. "Here,
let me show you."
He worked away for an hour, all the while delivering an
exposition on the art of chopping wood.
"Here," Billy expostulated at last, taking hold of the axe. "I'll
have to chop a cord of yours now in order to make this up to
you."
Hall surrendered the axe reluctantly.
"Don't let me catch you around my wood-pile, that's all, " he
threatened. "My wood-pile is my castle, and you've got to
understand that."
From a financial standpoint, Saxon and Billy were putting aside
much money. They paid no rent, their simple living was cheap, and
Billy had all the work he cared to accept. The various members of
the crowd seemed in a conspiracy to keep him busy. It was all odd
jobs, but he preferred it so, for it enabled him to suit his time
to Jim Hazard's. Each day they boxed and took a long swim through
the surf. When Hazard finished his morning's writing, he would
whoop through the pines to Billy, who dropped whatever work he
was doing. After the swim, they would take a fresh shower at
Hazard's house, rub each other down in training camp style, and
be ready for the noon meal. In the afternoon Hazard returned to
his desk, and Billy to his outdoor work, although, still later,
they often met for a few miles' run over the hills. Training was
a matter of habit to both men. Hazard, when he had finished with
seven years of football, knowing the dire death that awaits the
big-muscled athlete who ceases training abruptly, had been
compelled to keep it up. Not only was it a necessity, but he had
grown to like it. Billy also liked it, for he took great delight
in the silk of his body.
Often, in the early morning, gun in hand, he was off with Mark
Hall, who taught him to shoot and hunt. Hall had dragged a
shotgun around from the days when he wore knee pants, and his
keen observing eyes and knowledge of the habits of wild life were
a revelation to Billy. This part of the country was too settled
for large game, but Billy kept Saxon supplied with squirrels and
quail, cottontails and jackrabbits, snipe and wild ducks. And
they learned to eat roasted mallard and canvasback in the
California style of sixteen minutes in a hot oven. As he became
expert with shotgun and rifle, he began to regret the deer and
the mountain lion he had missed down below the Sur; and to
the requirements of the farm he and Saxon sought he added plenty
of game.
But it was not all play in Carmel. That portion of the community
which Saxon and Billy came to know, "the crowd," was
hard-working. Some worked regularly, in the morning or late at
night. Others worked spasmodically, like the wild Irish
playwright, who would shut himself up for a week at a time, then
emerge, pale and drawn, to play like a madman against the time of
his next retirement. The pale and youthful father of a family,
with the face of Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns for a living
and blank verse tragedies and sonnet cycles for the despair of
managers and publishers, hid himself in a concrete cell with
three-foot walls, so piped, that, by turning a lever, the whole
structure spouted water upon the impending intruder. But in the
main, they respected each other's work-time. They drifted into
one another's houses as the spirit prompted, but if they found a
man at work they went their way. This obtained to all except Mark
Hall, who did not have to work for a living; and he climbed trees
to get away from popularity and compose in peace.
The crowd was unique in its democracy and solidarity. It had
little intercourse with the sober and conventional part of
Carmel. This section constituted the aristocracy of art and
letters, and was sneered at as bourgeois. In return, it looked
askance at the crowd with its rampant bohemianism. The taboo
extended to Billy and Saxon. Billy took up the attitude of the
clan and sought no work from the other camp. Nor was work offered
him.
Hall kept open house. The big living room, with its huge
fireplace, divans, shelves and tables of books and magazines, was
the center of things. Here, Billy and Saxon were expected to be,
and in truth found themselves to be, as much at home as anybody.
Here, when wordy discussions on all subjects under the sun were
not being waged, Billy played at cut-throat Pedro, horrible
fives, bridge, and pinochle. Saxon, a favorite of the young
women, sewed with them, teaching them pretties and being taught
in fair measure in return.
It was Billy, before they had been in Carmel a week, who said
shyly to Saxon:
"Say, you can't guess how I'm missin' all your nice things.
What's the matter with writin' Tom to express 'm down? When we
start trampin' again, we'll express 'm back."
Saxon wrote the letter, and all that day her heart was singing.
Her man was still her lover. And there were in his eyes all the
old lights which had been blotted out during the nightmare period
of the strike.
"Some pretty nifty skirts around here, but you've got 'em all
beat, or I'm no judge," he told her. And again: "Oh, I love you
to death anyway. But if them things ain't shipped down there'll
be a funeral."
Hall and his wife owned a pair of saddle horses which were kept
at the livery stable, and here Billy naturally gravitated. The
stable operated the stage and carried the mails between Carmel
and Monterey. Also, it rented out carriages and mountain wagons
that seated nine persons. With carriages and wagons a driver was
furnished The stable often found itself short a driver, and Billy
was quickly called upon. He became an extra man at the stable. He
received three dollars a day at such times, and drove many
parties around the Seventeen Mile Drive, up Carmel Valley, and
down the coast to the various points and beaches.
"But they're a pretty uppish sort, most of 'em," he said to
Saxon, referring to the persons he drove. "A1ways MISTER Roberts
this, an' MISTER Roberts that--all kinds of ceremony so as to
make me not forget they consider themselves better 'n me. You
see, I ain't exactly a servant, an' yet I ain't good enough for
them. I'm the driver--something half way between a hired man and
a chauffeur. Huh! When they eat they give me my lunch off to one
side, or afterward. No family party like with Hall an' HIS kind.
An' that crowd to-day, why, they just naturally didn't have no
lunch for me at all. After this, always, you make me up my own
lunch. I won't be be holdin' to 'em for nothin', the damned
geezers. An' you'd a-died to seen one of 'em try to give me a
tip. I didn't say nothin'. I just looked at 'm like I didn't see
'm, an' turned away casual-like after a moment, leavin' him as
embarrassed as hell."
Nevertheless, Billy enjoyed the driving, never more so than when
he held the reins, not of four plodding workhorses, but of four
fast driving animals, his foot on the powerful brake, and swung
around curves and along dizzy cliff-rims to a frightened chorus
of women passengers. And when it came to horse judgment and
treatment of sick and injured horses even the owner of the stable
yielded place to Billy.
"I could get a regular job there any time," he boasted quietly to
Saxon. "Why, the country's just sproutin' with jobs for any so-so
sort of a fellow. I bet anything, right now, if I said to the
boss that I'd take sixty dollars an' work regular, he'd jump for
me. He's hinted as much.--And, say! Are you onta the fact that
yours truly has learnt a new trade, Well he has. He could take a
job stage-drivin' anywheres. They drive six on some of the stages
up in Lake County. If we ever get there, I'll get thick with some
driver, just to get the reins of six in my hands. An' I'll have
you on the box beside me. Some goin' that! Some goin'!"
Billy took little interest in the many discussions waged in
Hall's big living room. "Wind-chewin'," was his term for it. To
him it was so much good time wasted that might be employed at a
game of Pedro, or going swimming, or wrestling in the sand.
Saxon, on the contrary, delighted in the logomachy, though little
enough she understood of it, following mainly by feeling, and
once in a while catching a high light.
But what she could never comprehend was the pessimism that so
often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells
of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the
concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young
magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a
painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was
petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all
when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the
gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die. At
such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art. It
was inconceivable that they, of all people, should be so forlorn.
One night Hall turned suddenly upon Billy, who had been following
dimly and who only comprehended that to them everything in life
was rotten and wrong.
"Here, you pagan, you, you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you
monstrosity of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do
you think of it?" Hall demanded.
"Oh, I've had my troubles," Billy answered, speaking in his
wonted slow way. "I've had my hard times, an' fought a losin'
strike, an' soaked my watch, an' ben unable to pay my rent or
buy grub, an' slugged scabs, an' ben slugged, and ben thrown
into jail for makin' a fool of myself. If I get you, I'd be a
whole lot better to be a swell hog fattenin' for market an'
nothin' worryin', than to be a guy sick to his stomach from not
savvyin' how the world is made or from wonderin' what's the good
of anything."
"That's good, that prize hog," the poet laughed. "Least
irritation, least effort--a compromise of Nirvana and life.
Least irritation, least effort, the ideal existence: a jellyfish
floating in a tideless, tepid, twilight sea."
"But you're missin' all the good things," Billy objected.
"Name them," came the challenge.
Billy was silent a moment. To him life seemed a large and
generous thing. He felt as if his arms ached from inability to
compass it all, and he began, haltingly at first, to put his
feeling into speech.
"If you'd ever stood up in the ring an' out-gamed an' out-fought
a man as good as yourself for twenty rounds, you'd get what I'm
drivin' at. Jim Hazard an' I get it when we swim out through the
surf an' laugh in the teeth of the biggest breakers that ever
pounded the beach, an' when we come out from the shower, rubbed
down and dressed, our skin an' muscles like silk, our bodies an'
brains all a-tinglin' like silk...."
He paused and gave up from sheer inability to express ideas that
were nebulous at best and that in reality were remembered
sensations.
"Silk of the body, can you beat it?" he concluded lamely, feeling
that he had failed to make his point, embarrassed by the circle
of listeners.
"We know all that," Hall retorted. "The lies of the flesh.
Afterward come rheumatism and diabetes. The wine of life is
heady, but all too quickly it turns to--"
"Uric acid," interpolated the wild Irish playwright.
"They's plenty more of the good things," Billy took up with a
sudden rush of words. "Good things all the way up from juicy
porterhouse and the kind of coffee Mrs. Hall makes to..." He
hesitated at what he was about to say, then took it at a plunge.
"To a woman you can love an' that loves you. Just take a look at
Saxon there with the ukulele in her lap. There's where I got the
jellyfish in the dishwater an' the prize hog skinned to death."
A shout of applause and great hand-clapping went up from the
girls, and Billy looked painfully uncomfortable.
"But suppose the silk goes out of your body till you creak like a
rusty wheelbarrow?" Hall pursued. "Suppose, just suppose, Saxon
went away with another man. What then?"
Billy considered a space.
"Then it'd be me for the dishwater an' the jellyfish, I guess."
He straightened up in his chair and threw back his shoulders
unconsciously as he ran a hand over his biceps and swelled it.
Then he took another look at Saxon. "But thank the Lord I still
got a wallop in both my arms an' a wife to fill 'em with love."
Again the girls applauded, and Mrs. Hall cried:
"Look at Saxon! She blushing! What have you to say for yourself?"
"That no woman could be happier," she stammered, "and no queen as
proud. And that--"
She completed the thought by strumming on the ukulele and
singing:
"De Lawd move in or mischievous way
His blunders to perform."
"I give you best," Hall grinned to Billy.
"Oh, I don't know," Billy disclaimed modestly. "You've read so
much I guess you know more about everything than I do."
"Oh! Oh!" "Traitor!" "Taking it all back!" the girls cried
variously.
Billy took heart of courage, reassured them with a slow smile,
and said:
"Just the same I'd sooner be myself than have book indigestion.
An' as for Saxon, why, one kiss of her lips is worth more'n all
the libraries in the world." _
Read next: BOOK III: CHAPTER X
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