The Valley of the Moon Jack London

their good-night kisses had never tingled, while this one tingled

  in her brain as wall as on her lip. What was it? What did it

  mean? With a sudden impulse she looked at herself in the glass.

  The eyes were happy and bright. The color that tinted her cheeks

  so easily was in them and glowing. It was a pretty reflection,

  and she smiled, partly in joy, partly in appreciation, and the

  smile grew at sight of the even rows of strong white teeth. Why

  shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men

  had liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls

  admitted she was a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it

  from the way he made life miserable for her.

  She glanced aside to the rim of the looking-glass where his

  photograph was wedged, shuddered, and made a moue of distaste.

  There was cruelty in those eyes, and brutishness. He was a brute.

  For a year, now, he had bullied her. Other fellows were afraid to

  go with her. He warned them off. She had been forced into almost

  slavery to his attentions. She remembered the young bookkeeper at

  the laundry--not a workingman, but a soft-handed, soft-voiced

  gentleman--whom Charley had beaten up at the corner because he

  had been bold enough to come to take her to the theater. And she

  had been helpless. For his own sake she had never dared accept

  another invitation to go out with him.

  And now, Wednesday night, she was going with Billy. Billy! Her

  heart leaped. There would be trouble, but Billy would save her

  from him. She'd like to see him try and beat Billy up.

  With a quick movement, she jerked the photograph from its niche

  and threw it face down upon the chest of drawers. It fell beside

  a small square case of dark and tarnished leather. With a feeling

  as of profanation she again seized the offending photograph and

  flung it across the room into a corner. At the same time she

  picked up the leather case. Springing it open, she gazed at the

  daguerreotype of a worn little woman with steady gray eyes and a

  hopeful, pathetic mouth. Opposite, on the velvet lining, done in

  gold lettering, was, CARLTON FROM DAISY. She read it reverently,

  for it represented the father she had never known, and the mother

  she had so little known, though she could never forget that those

  wise sad eyes were gray.

  Despite lack of conventional religion, Saxon's nature was deeply

  religious. Her thoughts of God were vague and nebulous, and there

  she was frankly puzzled. She could not vision God. Here, in the

  daguerreotype, was the concrete; much she had grasped from it,

  and always there seemed an infinite more to grasp. She did not go

  to church. This was her high altar and holy of holies. She came

  to it in trouble, in loneliness, for counsel, divination, end

  comfort. In so far as she found herself different from the girls

  of her acquaintance, she quested here to try to identify her

  characteristics in the pictured face. Her mother had been

  different from other women, too. This, forsooth, meant to her

  what God meant to others. To this she strove to be true, and not

  to hurt nor vex. And how little she really knew of her mother,

  and of how much was conjecture and surmise, she was unaware; for

  it was through many years she had erected this mother-myth.

  Yet was it all myth? She resented the doubt with quick jealousy,

  and, opening the bottom drawer of the chest, drew forth a

  battered portfolio. Out rolled manuscripts, faded and worn, and

  arose a faint far scent of sweet-kept age. The writing was

  delicate and curled, with the quaint fineness of half a century

  before. She read a stanza to herself:

  "Sweet as a wind-lute's airy strains

  Your gentle muse has learned to sing,

  And California's boundless plains

  Prolong the soft notes echoing."

  She wondered, for the thousandth time, what a windlute was; yet

  much of beauty, much of beyondness, she sensed of this dimly

  remembered beautiful mother of hers. She communed a while, then

  unrolled a second manuscript. "To C. B.," it read. To Carlton

  Brown, she knew, to her father, a love-poem from her mother.

  Saxon pondered the opening lines:

  "I have stolen away from the crowd in the groves,

  Where the nude statues stand, and the leaves point and shiver

  At ivy-crowned Bacchus, the Queen of the Loves,

  Pandora and Psyche, struck voiceless forever."

  This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it.

  Bacchus, and Pandora and Psyche--talismans to conjure with! But

  alas! the necromancy was her mother's. Strange, meaningless words

  that meant so much! Her marvelous mother had known their meaning.

  Saxon spelled the three words aloud, letter by letter, for she

  did not dare their pronunciation; and in her consciousness

  glimmered august connotations, profound and unthinkable. Her mind

  stumbled and halted on the star-bright and dazzling boundaries of

  a world beyond her world in which her mother had roamed at will.

  Again and again, solemnly, she went over the four lines. They

  were radiance and light to the world, haunted with phantoms of

  pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden among

  those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only

  grasp it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely

  confident. She would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy

  brother, the cruelty of Charley Long, the justness of the

  bookkeeper's beating, the day-long, month-long, year-long toil at

  the ironing-board.

  She skipped a stanza that she knew was hopelessly beyond her, and

  tried again:

  "The dusk of the greenhouse is luminous yet

  With quivers of opal and tremors of gold;

  For the sun is at rest, and the light from the west,

  Like delicate wine that is mellow and old,

  "Flushes faintly the brow of a naiad that stands

  In the spray of a fountain, whose seed-amethysts

  Tremble lightly a moment on bosom and hands,

  Then dip in their basin from bosom and wrists."

  "It's beautiful, just beautiful," she sighed. And then, appalled

  at the length of all the poem, at the volume of the mystery, she

  rolled the manuscript and put it away. Again she dipped in the

  drawer, seeking the clue among the cherished fragments of her

  mother's hidden soul.

  This time it was a small package, wrapped in tissue paper and

  tied with ribbon. She opened it carefully, with the deep gravity

  and circumstance of a priest before an altar. Appeared a little

  red-satin Spanish girdle, whale-boned like a tiny corset,

  pointed, the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed

  the plains. It was hand-made after the California-Spanish model

  of forgotten days. The very whalebone had been home-shaped of the

  raw material from the whaleships traded for in hides and tallow.

  The black lace trimming her mother had made. The triple edging of

  black velvet strips--her mother's hands had sewn the stitches.

  Saxon dreamed over it in a maze of incoherent thought. This was

  co
ncrete. This she understood. This she worshiped as man-created

  gods have been worshiped on less tangible evidence of their

  sojourn on earth.

  Twenty-two inches it measured around. She knew it out of many

  verifications. She stood up and put it about her waist. This was

  part of the ritual. It almost met. In places it did meet. Without

  her dress it would meet everywhere as it had met on her mother.

  Closest of all, this survival of old California-Ventura days

  brought Saxon in touch. Hers was her mother's form. Physically,

  she was like her mother. Her grit, her ability to turn off work

  that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's. Just so

  had her mother been an amazement to her generation--her mother,

  the toy-like creature, the smallest and the youngest of the

  strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered the brood.

  Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the

  brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior. Daisy, it was, who

  had put her tiny foot down and commanded the removal from the

  fever flatlands of Colusa to the healthy mountains of Ventura;

  who had backed the savage old Indian-fighter of a father into a

  corner and fought the entire family that Vila might marry the man

  of her choice; who had flown in the face of the family and of

  community morality and demanded the divorce of Laura from her

  criminally weak husband; and who on the other hand, had held the

  branches of the family together when only misunderstanding and

  weak humanness threatened to drive them apart.

  The peacemaker and the warrior! All the old tales trooped before

  Saxon's eyes. They were sharp with detail, for she had visioned

  them many times, though their content was of things she had never

  seen. So far as details were concerned, they were her own

  creation, for she had never seen an ox, a wild Indian, nor a

  prairie schooner. Yet, palpitating and real, shimmering in the

  sun-flashed dust of ten thousand hoofs, she saw pass, from East

  to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry

  Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on

  its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken

  part. Clearly she saw the long wagon-train, the lean, gaunt men

  who walked before, the youths goading the lowing oxen that fell

  and were goaded to their feet to fall again. And through it all,

  a flying shuttle, weaving the golden dazzling thread of

  personality, moved the form of her little, indomitable mother,

  eight years old, and nine ere the great traverse was ended, a

  necromancer and a law-giver, willing her way, and the way and the

  willing always good and right.

  Saxon saw Punch, the little, rough-coated Skye-terrier with the

  honest eyes (who had plodded for weary months), gone lame and

  abandoned; she saw Daisy, the chit of a child, hide Punch in the

  wagon. She saw the savage old worried father discover the added

  burden of the several pounds to the dying oxen. She saw his

  wrath, as he held Punch by the scruff of the neck. And she saw

  Daisy, between the muzzle of the long-barreled rifle and the

  little dog. And she saw Daisy thereafter, through days of alkali

  and heat, walking, stumbling, in the dust of the wagons, the

  little sick dog, like a baby, in her arms.

  But most vivid of all, Saxon saw the fight at Little Meadow--and

  Daisy, dressed as for a gala day, in white, a ribbon sash about

  her waist, ribbons and a round-comb in her hair, in her hands

  small water-pails, step forth into the sunshine on the

  flower-grown open ground from the wagon circle, wheels

  interlocked, where the wounded screamed their delirium and

  babbled of flowing fountains, and go on, through the sunshine and

  the wonder-inhibition of the bullet-dealing Indians, a hundred

  yards to the waterhole and back again.

  Saxon kissed the little, red satin Spanish girdle passionately,

  and wrapped it up in haste, with dewy eyes, abandoning the

  mystery and godhead of mother and all the strange enigma of

  living.

  In bed, she projected against her closed eyelids the few rich

  scenes of her mother that her child-memory retained. It was her

  favorite way of wooing sleep. She had done it all her life--sunk

  into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the

  last on her fading consciousness. But this mother was not the

  Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype. They had been

  before Saxon's time. This that she saw nightly was an older

  mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept,

  always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering,

  dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining

  from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and whom

  not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep.

  Crept--always she crept, about the house, from weary bed to weary

  chair and back again through long days and weeks of torment,

  never complaining, though her unfailing smile was twisted with

  pain, and the wise gray eyes, still wise and gray, were grown

  unutterably larger and profoundly deep.

  But on this night Saxon did not win to sleep quickly; the little

  creeping mother came and went; and in the intervals the face of

  Billy, with the cloud-drifted, sullen, handsome eyes, burned

  against her eyelids. And once again, as sleep welled up to

  smother her, she put to herself the question IS THIS THE MAN?

  CHAPTER VII

  Tun work in the ironing-room slipped off, but the three days

  until Wednesday night were very long. She hummed over the fancy

  starch that flew under the iron at an astounding rate.

  "I can't see how you do it," Mary admired. "You'll make thirteen

  or fourteen this week at that rate."

  Saxon laughed, and in the steam from the iron she saw dancing

  golden letters that spelled WEDNESDAY.

  "What do you think of Billy?" Mary asked.

  "I like him," was the frank answer.

  "Well, don't let it go farther than that."

  "I will if I want to," Saxon retorted gaily.

  "Better not," came the warning. "You'll only make trouble for

  yourself. He ain't marryin'. Many a girl's found that out. They

  just throw themselves at his head, too."

  "I'm not going to throw myself at him, or any other man."

  "Just thought I'd tell you," Mary concluded. "A word to the

  wise."

  Saxon had become grave.

  "He's not . . . not . . ." she began, than looked the

  significance of the question she could not complete.

  "Oh, nothin' like that--though there's nothin' to stop him. He's

  straight, all right, all right. But he just won't fall for

  anything in skirts. He dances, an' runs around, an' has a good

  time, an' beyond that--nitsky. A lot of 'em's got fooled on him.

  I bet you there's a dozen girls in love with him right now. An'

  he just goes on turnin' 'em down. There was Lily Sanderson--you

  know her. You seen her at that Slavonic picnic last summer at

  Shellmound--that tall, nice-lookin' blonde that was with Butch br />
  Willows?"

  "Yes, I remember her," Saxon sald. "What about her?"

  "Well, she'd been runnin' with Butch Willows pretty steady, an'

  just because she could dance, Billy dances a lot with her. Butch

  ain't afraid of nothin'. He wades right in for a showdown, an'

  nails Billy outside, before everybody, an' reads the riot act.

  An' Billy listens in that slow, sleepy way of his, an' Butch gets

  hotter an' hotter, an' everybody expects a scrap.

  "An' then Billy says to Butch, 'Are you done?' 'Yes,' Butch says;

  'I've said my say, an' what are you goin' to do about it?' An'

  Billy says--an' what d'ye think he said, with everybody lookin'

  on an' Butch with blood in his eye? Well, he said, 'I guess

  nothin', Butch.' Just like that. Butch was that surprised you

  could knocked him over with a feather. 'An' never dance with her

  no more?' he says. 'Not if you say I can't, Butch,' Billy says.

  Just like that.

  "Well, you know, any other man to take water the way he did from

  Butch--why, everybody'd despise him. But not Billy. You see, he

  can afford to. He's got a rep as a fighter, an' when he just

  stood back 'an' let Butch have his way, everybody knew he wasn't

  scared, or backin' down, or anything. He didn't care a rap for

  Lily Sanderson, that was all, an' anybody could see she was just

  crazy after him."

  The telling of this episode caused Saxon no little worry. Hers

  was the average woman's pride, but in the matter of

  man-conquering prowess she was not unduly conceited. Billy had

  enjoyed her dancing, and she wondered if that were all. If

  Charley Long bullied up to him would he let her go as he had let

  Lily Sanderson go? He was not a marrying man; nor could Saxon

  blind her eyes to the fact that he was eminently marriageable. No

  wonder the girls ran after him. And he was a man-subduer as well

  as a woman-subduer. Men liked him. Bert Wanhope seemed actually

  to love him. She remembered the Butchertown tough in the

  dining-room at Weasel Park who had come over to the table to

  apologize, and the Irishman at the tug-of-war who had abandoned

  all thought of fighting with him the moment he learned his

  identity.

  A very much spoiled young man was a thought that flitted

  frequently through Saxon's mind; and each time she condemned it

  as ungenerous. He was gentle in that tantalizing slow way of his.

  Despite his strength, he did not walk rough-shod over others.

  There was the affair with Lily Sanderson. Saxon analysed it again

  and again. He had not cared for the girl, and he had immediately

  stepped from between her and Butch. It was just the thing that

  Bert, out of sheer wickedness and love of trouble, would not have

  done. There would have been a fight, hard feelings, Butch turned

  into an enemy, and nothing profited to Lily. But Billy had done

  the right thing--done it slowly and imperturbably and with the

  least hurt to everybody. All of which made him more desirable to

  Saxon and less possible.

  She bought another pair of silk stockings that she had hesitated

  at for weeks, and on Tuesday night sewed and drowsed wearily over

  a new shirtwaist and earned complaint from Sarah concerning her

  extravagant use of gas.

  Wednesday night, at the Orindore dance, was not all undiluted

  pleasure. It was shameless the way the girls made up to Billy,

  and, at times, Saxon found his easy consideration for them almost

  irritating. Yet she was compelled to acknowledge to herself that

  he hurt none of the other fellows' feelings in the way the girls

  hurt hers. They all but asked him outright to dance with them,

  and little of their open pursuit of him escaped her eyes. She

  resolved that she would not be guilty of throwing herself at him,

  and withheld dance after dance, and yet was secretly and

  thrillingly aware that she was pursuing the right tactics. She

  deliberately demonstrated that she was desirable to other men, as

  he involuntarily demonstrated his own desirableness to the women.

  Her happiness came when he coolly overrode her objections and