Corduroy — Story, Setting & Ideas

to relatives in Los Angeles or San Francisco and asked them not to come to her. This first black Christmas (the one a year earlier had been vibrant with hope) she must be allowed to spend alone, in the luxury of uninterrupted and unconsoled grief. Even the servants--Estrada and his men, old Manuela, the housekeeper, Ling, the moon-faced Chinese cook--were banished to San Luis Obispo on the morning of the twenty-fourth, not to return until the twenty-sixth, but her gift to herself of solitude had been snatched away from her. Dos Pozos was five miles off the highway, but in good weather motorists often took the dirt road for a short cut. This year Virginia had neglected to have it kept up; the bridge, half a mile from the house, was a frail and ancient structure. Aleck had meant to replace it with a permanent one of concrete, and Estrada had begged her to carry out the young _señor’s_ plan, but she would not. Later, perhaps; for the present, she was thankful for anything which made for isolation.

And then, ironically enough, the very thing which was to have kept the world away, brought it to her. It rained in torrents, lavish, riotous California rain; the road sank down into a batter of soft mud; the bridge whined in the storm; at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve four machines and ten persons, wailing children among them, were stranded and helpless. The telephone line was down; the _vaqueros_ spending their holiday in town; and tradition was rigid; no one, gentle or simple, ever lifted the latch of Dos Pozos in vain. Grudgingly, with unadorned civility, Virginia had taken them into the old _adobe_ ranch house and prepared to give them camp fare, for there was no way in which she could summon her servants.

It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what--they wanted respectfully to know--would she have done without them?

So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.

When she went to bed at midnight Virginia had worked out something of her rebellion in weariness. She had resurrected toys for the pinched children, helped the school-teachers and the Stanford students to trim a tree for them and to decorate the big rooms with snowberries and scarlet _toyon_--spurred herself to a civil semblance of hospitality. As she fell asleep she was aware of a feeling she had sometimes had when she was a rather bad and turbulent child--that, having been good, unusually, laboriously good--something good should and must come to her.

It came at sunrise, when Estrada wakened her, calling excitedly in front of her window. She slipped her feet into Indian moccasins and threw a _serape_ about her and padded down the long corridor and out on to the veranda. She heard people stirring as she passed the guest rooms; one of the children was whimpering with eagerness to be dressed and allowed to hunt for its Christmas stocking.

Behind the _mayordomo_ stood a tall man in uniform: for one mad moment her heart stood still and her eyes dilated and blurred and the figure in khaki swam dizzily in the keen morning light.

Then the old Spaniard stepped quickly forward and she saw that his eyes were wet. “_Gracias a Dios, Señorita_--it is a friend of _Señor Alejandrino_! At last he has come, over the sea and over the land, to bring you the message!”