and slangtime song. Terrence McFane and Aaron Hancock fell into a heated argument over the music of futurism. And Graham was saved from the Japanese situation with Mr. Wombold by Dar Hyal, who proceeded to proclaim Asia for the Asiatics and California for the Californians.
Paula, catching up her skirts for speed, fled down the room in some romp, pursued by Dick, who captured her as she strove to dodge around the Wombold group.
«Wicked woman,» Dick reproved her in mock wrath; and, the next moment, joined her in persuading Dar Hyal to dance.
And Dar Hyal succumbed, flinging Asia and the Asiatics to the winds, along with his arms and legs, as he weirdly parodied the tango in what he declared to be the «blastic» culmination of modern dancing.
«And now, Red Cloud, sing Mr. Graham your Acorn Song,» Paula commanded
Dick.
Forrest, his arm still about her, detaining her for the threatened punishment not yet inflicted, shook his head somberly.
«The Acorn Song!» Ernestine called from the piano; and the cry was taken up by Eddie Mason and the girls.
«Oh, do, Dick,» Paula pleaded. «Mr. Graham is the only one who hasn't heard it.»
Dick shook his head.
«Then sing him your Goldfish Song.»
«I'll sing him Mountain Lad's song,» Dick bullied, a whimsical sparkle in his eyes. He stamped his feet, pranced, nickered a not bad imitation of Mountain Lad, tossed an imaginary mane, and cried:
«Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!»
«The Acorn Song,» Paula interrupted quickly and quietly, with just the hint of steel in her voice.
Dick obediently ceased his chant of Mountain Lad, but shook his head like a stubborn colt.
«I have a new song,» he said solemnly. «It is about you and me, Paula.
I got it from the Nishinam.»
«The Nishinam are the extinct aborigines of this part of California,»
Paula shot in a swift aside of explanation to Graham.
Dick danced half a dozen steps, stiff-legged, as Indians dance, slapped his thighs with his palms, and began a new chant, still retaining his hold on his wife.
«Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man of the Nishinam. Ai-kut is the short for Adam, and my father and my mother were the coyote and the moon. And this is Yo-to-to-wi, my wife. She is the first woman of the Nishinam. Her father and her mother were the grasshopper and the ring– tailed cat. They were the best father and mother left after my father and mother. The coyote is very wise, the moon is very old; but who ever heard much of anything of credit to the grasshopper and the ring– tailed cat? The Nishinam are always right. The mother of all women had to be a cat, a little, wizened, sad-faced, shrewd ring-tailed cat.»
Whereupon the song of the first man and woman was interrupted by protests from the women and acclamations from the men.
«This is Yo-to-to-wi, which is the short for Eve,» Dick chanted on, drawing Paula bruskly closer to his side with a semblance of savage roughness. «Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at. But be not hard upon her. The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat. Me, I am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste. I was the first man, and this, I saw, was the first woman. Where there is but one choice, there is not much to choose. Adam was so circumstanced. He chose Eve. Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I chose Yo-to-to- wi.»
And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling arm of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and arose unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, «Dick Forrest is lucky—too lucky.»
«Me, I am Ai-kut,» Dick chanted on. «This is my dew of woman. She is my honey-dew of woman. I have lied to you. Her father and her mother were neither hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the honey-dew.
«Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut. Yo-to-to-wi is my quail woman, my deer- woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn– light before the sun . . .
«And,» Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,—'and if you think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition of
CHAPTER XI
It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted the rag-time group from the piano and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.
«'Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I'm askin' you to play
'Reflections on the Water,'» Graham heard Terrence say to her.
«And 'The Girl with Flaxen Hair,' after, please,» begged Hancock, the indicted pagan. «It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt has a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man—and he has the unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern.»
«Oh, Debussy!» Paula laughed. «Still wrangling over him, eh? I'll try and get around to him. But I don't know with what I'll begin.»
Dar Hyal joined the three sages in seating Paula at the concert grand which, Graham decided, was none too great for the great room. But no sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were evidently their chosen listening places. The young poet stretched himself prone on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands buried in his hair. Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently near to each other to nudge the points of their respective contentions as Paula might expound them. The girls were huddled in colored groups on wide couches or garlanded in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.
Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula's music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely prepared for disappointment.
Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:
«She can do anything she wants to do. And she doesn't work . . . much. She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she abides by their methods. She doesn't play like a woman, either. Listen to that!»
Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands, even as she rippled them over the keys in little chords and runs with which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before from technically brilliant but musically mediocre performers. But whatever he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared for Rachmaninoff's sheerly masculine Prelude, which he had heard only men play when decently played.
She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars, masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—he could scarcely say which—to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness of the
She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little, almost girlish woman he glimpsed through
