Rest and Be Thankful (15 page)

Carla Brightjoy, feeling herself being pushed out into the cold shadows again, said hastily, “Mr. O’Farlan, how long have you been working on your novel?” She meant to be sympathetic, but he tightened up once more, back into the grey-haired, white-faced, worried man who rarely smiled. She forgot her adopted grace and hunched her body in nervousness. She couldn’t think of another thing to say.

Mimi’s voice said softly, “I like newspapers four days old. It is just no use worrying about their headlines, because by the time you see them someone
must
have done something about them somewhere.”

“In the wrong way, too,” Earl Grubbock said gloomily, rolling over on his back to watch the pattern of the leaves against the sky. “Next time I’ll sit the War out. I’ll get me a good safe job and make some money for a change.”

“You wouldn’t,” Mimi said. “You aren’t
that
kind.”

Grubbock looked pleased in spite of himself. “Well,” he said, sitting up and wiping the loose strands of grass from his shoulders, “if war starts we are all for it, all of us.”

“And what did war ever decide, anyway?” Koffing said, still watching the sailing cloud.

“Plenty, if you’ve learned your history,” O’Farlan said, “or if you haven’t purposely forgotten it. If we had lost the last war, who would have been in Washington now as occupation troops? And if that doesn’t move you, who would have been in Moscow?”

“I’m against beginning a war,” Grubbock said angrily.

“Who isn’t? You haven’t a patent on that, I can assure you.”

Grubbock glanced at Koffing, but Koffing kept silent now. “Look at the preparation we are making,” he said. Why didn’t Koffing talk up? He knew all the facts and figures about that. “That’s a sure way to be led into war. A peace-time draft, for God’s sake!”

“Yes,” O’Farlan said sarcastically, “considering we are the only major Power in the world that hasn’t military training.” His voice changed to bitterness. “Did pacifism ever stop anything unless you were dealing with pacifists?”

Grubbock flushed. Koffing looked at the vanished cloud with narrowed eyes. Prender Atherton Jones stopped Esther Park’s adulation of Sartre with a half-raised hand. Carla Brightjoy murmured, “Oh!” and watched everyone anxiously.

Mimi sat up and said,
“Will
you all please stop this? If I hear any more politics I’ll
scream.”
She looked around. Dewey Schmetterling wasn’t going to appear after all. Where could he have been all afternoon? Did that little blonde cowgirl, who dusted the bedrooms so abstractedly, have
every
afternoon free? It was maddening how clever Dewey could be about such things. Of course, he was only being amused by the braids and the bows. Drene Travers...what a name! Some people, Mimi Bassinbrook thought, as she looked at her long, slender legs and wondered if they’d really tan properly here what with wearing blue jeans most of the day, some people have the most awful names.

She swung herself gracefully on to her feet, to the admiration of all the men and the envy of Carla, who sighed and took off her glasses and rubbed the itching bridge of her nose.

“Do you have to wear these things?” Robert O’Farlan asked.

Carla frowned at the glasses in her hand. “I work in a bookshop, you know.” She stared at the round lenses, glinting owl-like back at her, and then looked up at Mimi. She could see her almost as clearly—almost. In fact, quite enough. She pulled down the legs of her pink denim trousers, pressing out the wrinkles with her free hand. It was no good. She looked worse than ever. She stuck the glasses back in place defiantly.

“I think I’ll take a walk to the corral,” Mimi announced. She looked at Grubbock, smiled to Prender Atherton Jones, and started off towards the path through the cottonwood-trees.

No one moved.

Prender Atherton Jones had decided to discipline Mimi. He smiled back at her, but made no effort to join her. Mimi spurned by Dewey, for the sake of a little cowgirl in tight frontier pants, was something to see. Tomorrow, when she had learned this little lesson he was now teaching her, he would take her riding with him.

The others were silent too as they watched Mimi leave. Earl Grubbock looked as if he might be about to follow, and then he saw that Atherton Jones was watching him with a suddenly alert eye. It was too much like stealing the apple off the teacher’s desk, Grubbock decided: fun, but hardly worth it. Besides, Mrs. Gunn’s niece, Norah, was a pretty little piece. She hadn’t been spoiled like Mimi. When you shared a bar of candy with her she said thank you as if it were orchids. He contented himself now by enjoying the pleasure of watching Mimi in motion in her tight, brief shorts.

“What about a swim?” Grubbock said suddenly. He prodded Koffing’s ribs with his elbow.

“If our legs don’t freeze and drop off... All right. In and out?”

The idea repelled Koffing, but he was willing to show Grubbock that it took more than ice-cold water to freeze his guts. He was, although he tried to make little of it, always conscious that Grubbock had fought in the War and he had not.

But Grubbock didn’t move. He wondered, why the hell bother? He had jumped into plenty of water, waded through plenty of surf, with full equipment pulling him down. Here he didn’t need to do one damned thing unless he wanted to, when he wanted to. Here the sun was warm, the grass invited you to stretch out and look up at the sky, time was nothing. “Too lazy,” he said, and he lay back with his hands clasped behind his head. He hadn’t had so much a sense of peace in years.

“Make up your mind, for God’s sake,” Koffing said irritably. That was like Grubbock—ideas never fully worked out, plans never quite finished, plenty of energy, but it needed direction, plenty of the right emotions, but they needed to be channelled. Koffing could see himself as the missionary with his first convert, and it was a picture that both pleased and excited him. By the end of the month he would have Earl Grubbock arguing better against O’Farlan, unmasking that diversionist’s ideology and seeing it clearly for what it was. Given a few more months in New York, and Grubbock would be a sound and loyal sympathiser.

“Relax, relax,” Grubbock murmured sleepily. “This is the first real holiday I’ve had since the damned War.”

Koffing looked sharply at Grubbock.

But Grubbock had closed his eyes.

Carla Brightjoy seemed asleep too. But she was wishing she had the courage to walk up to the corral as Mimi had done. How wonderful it must be never to feel that you might be intruding, never to entertain the terrifying thought that you were superfluous.

Robert O’Farlan thought of his work, waiting for him in his room. Time to start it again. But the dappled shade around him was cool, and he was unwilling to leave it, to step out into the brilliant, blazing sunshine. He felt lazy, comfortable, and pleasantly tired. He could blame that on the altitude. Unlike the others, he hadn’t started riding—too damned busy in the mornings for that. The others could afford to waste time: they hadn’t been writing a book for—well, counting the years he had thought about it, worried about it, partly written it, scrapped it, chopped it, changed it—for almost twenty years. He had completed four drafts. He had torn them up and begun again. And the longer he waited the more varied the angles, the wider and deeper the conception, had become. Now he was almost at the end of the fifth version of his novel. This one might be all right. It excited him. Was that a good or a bad sign? Two chapters to go...two that had baffled him and benumbed him for the last few months. But here he might get enough confidence, enough energy and peace, to finish them. As Carla Brightjoy had said, this was a good place to work.
If
you were determined to work.

He thought of his four-roomed apartment in Queens: three small rooms and a kitchenette, to be more accurate. He thought of Jenny, who complained and criticised and yet still insisted on living with him. For the children’s sake? Or did she enjoy the martyrdom? Or what? As a novelist he ought to have the answers to the problem of his own wife, but he hadn’t... He admitted he had never been much of a bargain—he had spent a good deal of the ten years that followed the First World War in Veterans’ Hospitals; and, once he was fit enough, he had begun to teach school. But she knew all that when she married him. So why criticise, now, the three thousand dollars a year he could earn as a teacher? Why talk about his novel to people in just the way she did? “Robert’s writing a war novel, didn’t you know? A novel about the
First
World War!” Pause, while everyone laughed and the usual fool said that was original anyway. “And he can’t find a title for it! I suggested
For Ever All Quiet,
but Robert doesn’t seem to think that’s funny.” More laughter to prove everyone else did.

Stop it, O’Farlan warned himself. The purpose of coming to Wyoming was to get away from all that. Jenny and the children were having the usual summer with her people in New Jersey. His summers were spent in New York, with a visit at the weekends to Jenny’s people as a polite gesture. This year he was being impolite, but the novel would be finished. He looked at his watch and rose.

Carla, suddenly very wide awake, glanced up at him. “Work?” she asked, with her timid little smile.

He felt he had to make himself seem less of a machine. “I thought I’d visit Mrs. Gunn for a cup of coffee first,” he said. Why explain, why apologise? Human beings were strange creatures: even the way they all gathered here, when each could have had a private corner in this island of trees...

Esther Park’s voice cut across the peace of the garden. “Mr. O’Farlan, I think you are wonderful. How you work! You
are
wonderful. Isn’t he?” She gave an encircling smile, meant, they felt as they tried to wriggle free, for each of them alone. “You must tell me how you plan your day. We all need lessons in that. Don’t we?”

Bob O’Farlan, as the eager face turned back to him, felt as if he were watching a movie with a quick succession of close-ups, while the sound-track boomed every time the face on the screen lunged towards him.

“I—,” he began, and stopped. She was talking again.

She was an ostrich, he thought: all nose, no chin, too much neck. Eyes that protruded in her enthusiasms. Thick body, thin legs, large feet. Even her black hair, overcurled and thick, reminded him of waving plumes. She was an ostrich, gobbling everything, everyone, greedily up. But what terrified him most was her manner—the hand laid on his arm, the breathless question, the painted line of eyebrow that formed a question-mark as he answered, the beady black eyes noticing everything, the note-book which she always carried under her arm. (“My best ideas are so unexpected. Aren’t yours?”) She talked about Her Work.

She had tried this on all the others, turning on the full blast of her charm. After the first half hour there was a firm movement away from her, an equally firm determination never to be caught again. Dewey Schmetterling was the only one who had spent part of an evening with her, but that had seemingly been enough even for his peculiar tastes.

All right, all right, O’Farlan thought, as he stooped to pick up the newspaper he had almost forgotten; you’re the guy who took twenty years to get the characters in your novel straightened out, but you’ve got everyone here classified and dissected after a few days. Standing up, he looked at Esther Park. There was a limit to all honest politeness. He turned away, leaving her still talking.

Carla scrambled to her feet. “May I come to Mrs. Gunn’s? If you don’t mind, that is?”

O’Farlan, who did mind, said, “Come along.” He suddenly knew by the look on her face that she would never have had the courage to visit Mrs. Gunn’s kitchen alone, and he was glad he hadn’t refused.

Esther Park wasn’t going to let them escape so easily. “Why don’t you come to my room, instead? And have a drink?” She smiled round the group again. “Why don’t you
all
come?”

“Too early,” O’Farlan said, and he could hear Carla’s little intake of breath in her relief.

“Going out riding,” Grubbock mumbled. Koffing nodded. They both rose as if they had to catch a horse at four-thirty leaving on platform five.

“I’ve some notes to look over for tonight’s lecture,” Prender Atherton Jones said, as he glanced at his watch with a frown. His was quite the most finished performance, but he had had much longer practice in the gentle art of disentangling. They all avoided looking at each other as they got ready to take wing and fly.

Esther Park was less embarrassed than they were. “Ah, well,” she said brightly, “I’m going to see Mrs. Peel. She must have known Sartre or Camus.” And, tucking her note-book under her arm, she pranced off with her spring-heeled step.

“Don’t believe she cares a bit,” Grubbock said, surprised and relieved.

Or she’s learned to hide it through years of practice, O’Farlan thought, as he waited. Carla was gathering up her sun-tan lotion, and a book, and a bag, and a handkerchief. Now don’t go being blackmailed through pity, he warned himself, or else you’ll have Esther Park around your neck for the rest of the month. He looked at Carla, and wondered why women had to hang on...and on... But suddenly she looked up, gave her nervous smile; and he felt ashamed of himself.

Carla was saying, “And I want to see Jackson too. I need his advice about riding. I just can’t seem to get on a horse without pulling the saddle all sideways.” She stopped in embarrassment. Why admit it so openly? All the others seemed to take to riding so easily, so naturally. At least, they didn’t
look
the way she felt. Jackson was quiet and unworried; he gave lessons without making you feel you were wasting his time. She could learn from Jackson.

Koffing laughed.
“That
dumb bastard,” he said in an undertone to Grubbock. “Doesn’t know his knee from his elbow if you ask me.”

But Carla’s hearing was quick. “I wasn’t asking you,” she said, so sharply that the four men stared at her. If Jackson had been an exiled Communist, no doubt Karl would have approved of him. Then she blinked quickly, bit her lip, and looked at Robert O’Farlan for help.

“Let’s get that cup of coffee,” O’Farlan said.