Rest and Be Thankful (26 page)

Robb untied the calf and let it run away. He brought back the tie-rope to Ned. “Better,” he said. “Twenty-point-two seconds that time.”

The audience, perched along the fence, hadn’t liked seeing Ragtime being disciplined (“Ned’s upset about Drene,” Mrs. Peel explained). But with his next calf Ned made it in eighteen seconds flat. This time his pony worked. No one in the damp audience, however, drew any inference from method to result. They just thought it was wonderful.

They stayed through the drizzling rain for almost half an hour. And then, the gusts of wind increased enough to make umbrellas useless, and the skies darkened still more, and the first roll of distant thunder came over the mountains. There was a general retreat towards shelter and a warm fire and something hot to drink.

* * *

Sally hadn’t returned. There was no sign of Jim and Earl. And somehow, as the guests waited, they gathered in Mrs. Gunn’s kitchen. Prender Atherton Jones did most of the talking. The others listened partly to his words, partly to the rising storm, partly for the hum of the returning cars.

It was almost nine o’clock before they heard a car. One car, not two. They looked at each other. Then they were on their feet, the women crowding round the door, the men out in the rain-driven yard. The bright straight shafts of lightning turned them into black shadows with white faces.

Jim Brent’s car came slowly into the yard. Then he and Earl helped Sally out, and carried her towards the bright kitchen. Sally was saying, “I’m all right. I am, I tell you.” But she closed her eyes and lay quite still.

“She took the cut-off to save time,” Earl explained hurriedly to Mrs. Peel. “That’s why we were so long in finding her. The car went over the bank. She got out before it burned.”

Sally opened her eyes and tried to smile. “All that shopping,” she said, “I didn’t save a thing.”

By the time Mrs. Peel came downstairs to report that Sally was almost asleep and that Mrs. Gunn was going to stay with her the others had lit an enormous fire in the living-room and were gathered there. Earl Grubbock and Jim Brent were drying off in front of the blazing logs. Earl was answering the questions which Carla kept asking—not that he could give her much information about the accident itself. But he did describe the narrow dirt road, and the twisting mass of the burned car, and Sally some fifty yards away from it. She had travelled that distance before she found she didn’t feel like travelling at all. She was unconscious when they found her, but at first they hadn’t seen her—only the blackened, burned-out car. That was a bad couple of minutes for both men. Then Jim’s quick eyes saw the cardigan and hat on the road, and the search was started. They found her lying at the side of the road, near a blasted pine-tree. Afterwards, in the car, she said that she kept hoping lightning didn’t strike twice in the same place, and that the chipmunks were very sympathetic.

Jim Brent said nothing. But he noted that Mrs. Peel’s face was less worried, so Sally wasn’t in danger. He relaxed, and he even smiled when Mrs. Peel admitted that Mrs. Gunn was a much better nurse than she was. Now all they had to do was to wait for the doctor to arrive from Sweetwater. “The road may delay him,” Mrs. Peel said. “It is extraordinary how quickly a deluge of rain can turn a country road into a river of mud.”

Earl Grubbock nodded his agreement and looked down at his boots. “Fine quality of liquid earth you keep here,” he teased Norah, who was helping Mimi to pour out coffee and pass round the sandwiches. “You’d have thought a full armoured division had been over that dirt road before we reached it.”

Norah laughed. “There’s more of the storm to come. You’ll see plenty of fireworks in the next half hour from these windows.” She offered Jim a sandwich. “Lucky you weren’t up in the mountains tonight, Jim. When are you going? Next week?”

Jim nodded. “I’d rather have this than snow. It’s kind of depressing to wake up and find six inches covering you and the stores, and the horses broken loose as likely as not.”

“Snow in August?” Mimi said, looking up from the coffee-table.

“You can expect it any time after the middle of August once you get into the mountains.”

Earl said, “I don’t think I’d enjoy my breakfast if I had to dig for it first. Why are you going into the mountains, anyway?”

“There’s a herd of steers in a pasture up there. We’ll be moving them down to a lower one,” Jim answered.

“All the boys going?”

“Except Chuck. He can’t take the altitude so well now.” Jim looked at Grubbock. “Like to come along?”

“Sure.” Grubbock was pleased. He looked across the room at Koffing, now deep in a bitter argument with O’Farlan about the November elections.

“Bring him too,” Jim Brent suggested. “If he wants to come.”

“Fine,” Grubbock said, but a shadow of doubt crossed his face. He would have just as soon gone alone with the boys. However, Koffing had been asked in the Western way, and Earl would pass on the invitation. He changed the subject to the storm which was now breaking with full violence among the mountains. “Fireworks,” he remarked, watching the flashes through the window. “Lightning all shapes and sizes, sheet or forked. Have your choice.”

“Fireworks in here too,” Mimi said quietly, glancing over at Koffing and O’Farlan, who had been joined by Prender Atherton Jones. He was now in the middle of an eloquent peroration. It seemed to Earl Grubbock that Atherton Jones always talked in paragraphs, never in sentences. And when they dealt with politics they all could be boiled down to one thing—an intellectual embroidery of the obvious. He should stick to literature, Grubbock thought; he knows something about that at least. Then he looked round, a little guiltily, for he had felt his remark so strongly that it might have been spoken. Perhaps Atherton Jones is a lesson to all of us, Grubbock went on thinking; perhaps we should all stick to our subjects. That’s our trouble: if we are good at one thing we think we must also be keen political minds. As if politics, in theory and practice, wasn’t a science as difficult to master as any other. He looked at Atherton Jones with sudden distaste, and sipped the coffee.

“Too bitter?” Mimi asked. “Here’s the sugar to disguise my efforts at cooking.” She was smiling, and this time Earl knew she: had guessed his feelings. Perhaps she shared them. And only three months ago they had listened to Prender in New York as if he were the Oracle of Delphi.

“You need a drink, Earl,” Mrs. Peel said suddenly. “We all do tonight. Prender, will you attend to that?”

Perhaps she had asked Atherton Jones quite naturally— she had done it with her usual helpless flutter and charming smile—but it seemed to O’Farlan that it was as good a way as any to break up an argument which gave out more heat than light. And why hadn’t Grubbock joined in to help Koffing? Well, well, he thought, and moved over to the fireplace beside Grubbock and Brent.

“I hope you don’t get colds,” Mrs. Peel said.

Jim Brent exchanged a grin with Earl Grubbock.

“Haven’t felt better in months,” Grubbock said. It was true. He looked at the drink which Carla brought him. I can take it or leave it, he thought. He put it down on the mantelpiece and drank the coffee.

“I wish the doctor would come,” Carla said. She was still suffering from a sense of guilt: to think they had all worried over Drene’s running off with Dewey this evening, and had never given one thought to Sally, who had been lying on a lonely hillside.

“Mrs. Gunn says she doesn’t think it’s very much,” Mrs. Peel said. “Perhaps a rib or two, bruises, and cuts. Otherwise, apart from some scrapes and scratches, Sally seems all right.”

“Not very much!” Carla said, in horror. She looked at the others, who had now formed a wide half-circle in front of the fire. At that moment the lights went out.

The men swore and the women exclaimed—all except Mrs. Peel, who said quietly, “Well, we have plenty of candles in every room.” And as she began to light those in the living-room she went on talking about Sally. “I do think a leg broken in two places is much worse, and Sally had that in 1941, when we were in Paris. And you’d never know, would you?”

You’d never know a lot of things, Grubbock thought suddenly as he watched Mrs. Peel’s calm face. If he had wanted to know how she behaved in an emergency he was learning now; and it wasn’t as he expected. Thank God he hadn’t asked her any foolish questions this morning.

Koffing leaned forward in his chair. “Were you in Paris in 1941?”

“Yes. And
not
as collaborators, Karl.” Everyone laughed. Even Karl had to smile, for she had said it kindly, humorously.

Jim Brent said quietly, “You were running a counter-propaganda paper, weren’t you?” This time everyone else stared.

“Yes. That’s how Sally broke her leg in two places. You see, we had hidden our little printing-press in a cellar. We had the help of four very good workmen—good in every sense.” She paused, and then went on. “They helped us to get it into the cellar, piece by piece. They set it up, and helped us run it. That was in June 1940. A friend of ours also helped us—he is the novelist André Mercier.”

“Ah, of course. Charming man. Good writer,” Prender Atherton Jones said. “At least, he used to be. He’s fallen off badly. That last book of his—”

“Did you read it?” Mrs. Peel asked, suddenly very alert. Atherton Jones looked annoyed. “Frankly the reviews I saw didn’t encourage me to waste any time on it.”

“What reviews did you read?” Mrs. Peel asked, almost bitterly. He stared at her. They had been in the literary magazines, published in Paris, which he had always admired so much: the French did these things so much better than we could somehow. “I rely on my own judgment for—”

“And I’m still left in that cellar,” Grubbock said to Mrs. Peel. If Prender A. Jones got started on his judgment her story would be still-born.

“Yes,” Mimi said quickly, and won a smile from Grubbock, “I want to hear about the leg broken in two places.”

“In that case we are back in the cellar,” Mrs. Peel said. “It was a small one, lying behind a much larger cellar filled with crates of aspirin. So we were fairly safe.”

Carla laughed, and then looked apologetic. “Do go on. I’m sorry.”

Mimi smiled too. “It’s so exactly like a Hitchcock movie,” she explained.

“Except,” Mrs. Peel said gently, “there was no background music, and the hero didn’t always win, and the heroine was often old and ugly. And the cast would disappear, often unexplainedly. Forever.”

No one spoke now.

“We were fairly safe,” Mrs. Peel went on, “because aspirin was one thing that didn’t attract the Germans. In fact, they were unloading it all over Europe as payment for value received. We never went near that large cellar, of course, once we got the printing-press into the smaller one. We blocked up all traces of the connecting door with crates of aspirin. To reach our cellar we had to come down a ladder from a trap-door in the floor of a small room overhead. The caretaker and his wife lived there, and they covered the trap-door with a scrap of rug and a heavy table. We worked out a very practical routine. The owner of the building was a friend of ours; he had been a dealer in antique furniture, but he hadn’t much left after two months of Occupation except some worthless marks and many crates of aspirin. Everything was going better than we had expected; and then one night Sally missed her step on the ladder. That put her out of circulation for some weeks. But the leg mended nicely; and by the time we had to escape from France she was perfectly all right. Fortunately.”

There was a short but deep silence. A look of surprise passed from one face to another. Jim Brent was watching Mrs. Peel thoughtfully.

“What then?” Earl Grubbock asked hopefully.

“Oh,
that
was just the usual story—alarms and fears and good friends and risks and much kindness. By that time the Underground movements were beginning to be well organised. We really had a very safe journey, considering how extremely unsafe everything was.” She had made her voice light, casual. And that, it told them, was the end of the story.

“Were many of your friends left in Paris, once you got back again after the War?” Robert O’Farlan asked.

“Not so many, actually.” Her voice was now cold, almost hard. “And among those who survived there are some who would willingly condemn their former comrades to death. They would, too, if they got into full power.”

“What?” cried Carla. The others too were just as startled. What, they wanted to know, did Mrs. Peel mean?

So she told them the story of André Mercier, of Marie and Charles, of the literary magazine which still pretended to be literary but was now a political machine. When she finished she noticed the faces around her: they were looking either uncomfortable or incredulous. Karl was the only one whose expression she couldn’t judge.

“It doesn’t sound possible,” Prender Atherton Jones said. “Why, I knew them all, and they were all close friends. Marie is a very charming and intelligent woman.” He looked at Mrs. Peel disbelievingly.

“What I say is true,” she said sadly. “And this is not an isolated case. Since the Liberation many magazines and papers in France have fallen into Communist control. In fact, France has the biggest Communist Press in Western Europe. So, you see, André Mercier and all the other writers like him haven’t much chance, have they? Anything that he writes from now on is secretly blacklisted. And, unless people like us realise what is happening, he is going to be abandoned to people like Marie and Charles.”

“But, really, Margaret,” Atherton Jones said, “literary magazines don’t carry much weight in the political world. Aren’t the Communists wasting their energies?” He smiled, shaking his head. “We mustn’t exaggerate their danger, you know. That only leads to witch-hunts.”

“Communists aren’t stupid. They don’t underestimate the power that they can get from controlling words and ideas and opinions. And they’ve succeeded very well with you, Prender: you didn’t even read André’s last book, and yet you were ready to damn it. Don’t tell me you’ve started to believe the lies about his private life that they are spreading?”