The Little Lady of the Big House. Джек Лондон

when Tim Hagan, with straight left for the hundredth time to bleeding nose and mangled mouth, and with ever reiterant right hook to stomach, had him dazed and reeling, the breath whistling and sobbing through his lacerated lips – was no time for succor from palaces and bank accounts. On his two legs, with his two fists, it was either he or Tim. And it was right there, in sweat and blood and iron of soul, that Young Dick learned how not to lose a losing fight. It had been uphill from the first blow, but he stuck it out until in the end it was agreed that neither could best the other, although this agreement was not reached until they had first lain on the ground in nausea and exhaustion and with streaming eyes wept their rage and defiance at each other. After that, they became chums and between them ruled the schoolyard.

      Lucky Richard died the same month Young Dick emerged from grammar school. Young Dick was thirteen years old, with twenty million dollars, and without a relative in the world to trouble him. He was the master of a palace of servants, a steam yacht, stables, and, as well, of a summer palace down the Peninsula in the nabob colony at Menlo. One thing, only, was he burdened with: guardians.

      On a summer afternoon, in the big library, he attended the first session of his board of guardians. There were three of them, all elderly, and successful, all legal, all business comrades of his father. Dick’s impression, as they explained things to him, was that, although they meant well, he had no contacts with them. In his judgment, their boyhood was too far behind them. Besides that, it was patent that him, the particular boy they were so much concerned with, they did not understand at all. Furthermore, in his own sure way he decided that he was the one person in the world fitted to know what was best for himself.

      Mr. Crockett made a long speech, to which Dick listened with alert and becoming attention, nodding his head whenever he was directly addressed or appealed to. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum also had their say and were treated with equal consideration. Among other things, Dick learned what a sterling, upright man his father had been, and the program already decided upon by the three gentlemen which would make him into a sterling and upright man.

      When they were quite done, Dick took it upon himself to say a few things.

      “I have thought it over,” he announced, “and first of all I shall go traveling.”

      “That will come afterward, my boy,” Mr. Slocum explained soothingly. “When – say – when you are ready to enter the university. At that time a year abroad would be a very good thing… a very good thing indeed.”

      “Of course,” Mr. Davidson volunteered quickly, having noted the annoyed light in the lad’s eyes and the unconscious firm-drawing and setting of the lips, “of course, in the meantime you could do some traveling, a limited amount of traveling, during your school vacations. I am sure my fellow guardians will agree – under the proper management and safeguarding, of course – that such bits of travel sandwiched between your school-terms, would be advisable and beneficial.”

      “How much did you say I am worth?” Dick asked with apparent irrelevance.

      “Twenty millions – at a most conservative estimate – that is about the sum,” Mr. Crockett answered promptly.

      “Suppose I said right now that I wanted a hundred dollars!” Dick went on.

      “Why – er – ahem.” Mr. Slocum looked about him for guidance.

      “We would be compelled to ask what you wanted it for,” answered Mr. Crockett.

      “And suppose,” Dick said very slowly, looking Mr. Crockett squarely in the eyes, “suppose I said that I was very sorry, but that I did not care to say what I wanted it for?”

      “Then you wouldn’t get it,” Mr. Crockett said so immediately that there was a hint of testiness and snap in his manner.

      Dick nodded slowly, as if letting the information sink in.

      “But, of course, my boy,” Mr. Slocum took up hastily, “you understand you are too young to handle money yet. We must decide that for you.”

      “You mean I can’t touch a penny without your permission?”

      “Not a penny,” Mr. Crockett snapped.

      Dick nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, “Oh, I see.”

      “Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you will have a small allowance for your personal spending,” Mr. Davidson said. “Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified – with advice, of course – to handle your own affairs.”

      “And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn’t buy me a hundred dollars to do as I please with?” Dick queried very subduedly.

      Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved to silence by Dick, who continued:

      “As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement between the four of us?”

      The Board of Guardians nodded.

      “That is, whatever we agree, goes?”

      Again the Board of Guardians nodded.

      “Well, I’d like to have a hundred right now,” Dick announced.

      “What for?” Mr. Crockett demanded.

      “I don’t mind telling you,” was the lad’s steady answer. “To go traveling.”

      “You’ll go to bed at eight: thirty this evening,” Mr. Crockett retorted. “And you don’t get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to serve the place of a mother to you – see that your ears are clean, your neck washed – ”

      “And that I get my Saturday night bath,” Dick amplified meekly for him.

      “Precisely.”

      “How much are you – am I – paying the lady for her services?” Dick questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to their cost.

      Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.

      “I’m paying her, ain’t I?” Dick prodded. “Out of the twenty million, you know.”

      “The spit of his father,” said Mr. Slocum in an aside.

      “Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum,” said Mr. Crockett.

      “It’s a waste of perfectly good money,” Dick sighed. “And board and lodging thrown in!”

      He stood up – not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.

      He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of him in their own composite image.

      “Thank you for your kindness,” Young Dick said generally to the three. “I guess we’ll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is mine, and of course you’ve got to take care of it for me, seeing I know nothing of business – ”

      “And we’ll increase it for you, my boy, we’ll increase it for you in safe, conservative ways,”