Rest and Be Thankful (28 page)

She went into the kitchen and began to prepare the lamb chops for lunch. Two for each person. Chops weren’t fattening, it seemed, not even at a dollar and fifteen cents a pound. But Irish stew, which used only one quarter of this number of chops, was. And Mr. Atherton Jones said that any kind of stew was an apology of a meal. He had a way of saying things, she had to admit. She’d be nervous about serving stew for a long time to come.

* * *

Sally opened the letter and read it. She reread it. It was detailed, explicit, and exact. She could hear Mr. Quick’s voice dictating it to his efficient secretary; she could see him marking each point, as he spoke, with his thin paper-knife tapping on the immaculate blotter in front of him. Sally, whose blotters got blotted and torn off at the edges for pen-wipers, was always amazed by the perfection of Mr. Quick’s desk. But Mr. Quick never made any mistakes...

She heard laughter in the hall, and then voices.

“Margaret!” she called impulsively. She wished she hadn’t when Prender Atherton Jones came in with Mrs. Peel. He looked at himself in the mirror, and whatever he saw pleased him. He was in fine spirits.

Prender was thinking how tanned skin and white hair went well together. He pulled back his shoulders and admired his chest expansion under his yellow polo shirt. He was wearing riding-breeches and English boots. He adjusted the navy and white-spotted silk scarf at his neck and smiled amiably. “How’s the invalid?”

Then he noticed the manuscript. “What’s this?” he asked sharply.

“O’Farlan’s novel,” Sally said. “He thought I needed something to read while I was stuck in a chair.”

“Oh.” He sounded mollified, and Sally relaxed. She wasn’t trying to save Prender’s pride, but she didn’t want him antagonistic to O’Farlan. Robert O’Farlan hadn’t seemed to care about that: she was to read it first, he insisted. And after that, Mrs. Peel. And then Atherton Jones could look at it if he wanted to.

“I’ve read most of it, of course,” Prender was saying. “In fact, I told him he must finish it. Then he seemed to get stuck— wrote nothing for months. But I hope he didn’t finish it
too
quickly, in these last weeks. What’s the end like?”

“Well, of course, I haven’t your experience in reading manuscripts,” Sally admitted. “If you like it you’ll advise him about a publisher?”

“Of course. Hazleton, Hazel, and Birch might be the firm to handle it. I’ll judge that once I read the last chapters.” He looked at Sally, but she didn’t praise them. This book was, after all, Prender’s discovery. He had liked the beginning. It wouldn’t do if someone else liked the end before he did.

“Would you like to read it now?” Sally asked casually.

“Not at the moment. I’m going upstairs to have a tub. I’ve found manuscripts hard to deal with in a bath. I’ll borrow a book from the library instead.” He looked again at the mirror as he left them. His fine spirits were quite restored.

“Hope he doesn’t take my pet copy of Dinesen into the bathtub with him,” Sally said.

Mrs. Peel, who had been rearranging the remaining mariposa lilies and admiring the pure outline of their cupped white petals, tapped the manuscript. “What about it?” she asked. “It
is
good?”

Sally nodded. “It’s a real novel. Plenty of scope and understanding and perspective. He may have got that by waiting so long to write about his idea. And we all thought that slightly comic, didn’t we? A novel about the First World War... We keep forgetting that Tolstoy wrote about a war fifty-two years after it was all over.”

“And ten years after he had seen any fighting himself,” Mrs. Peel reminded her. “Oh, dear! Do you think Prender will write a foreword saying this novel is another
War and Peace?”

“No doubt,” Sally said gloomily. “Ah, well... How was your morning ride?”

“Majestic. I felt like a lady-in-waiting accompanying the emperor reviewing his troops. But it is a strain, finding trails without gates.”

“Why do you ask him to go with you? Sorry for his abandoned state? Your soft heart will undo the lesson he was learning, darling. Reforms are often ruined by the too kind people in this world.”

Mrs. Peel smiled disbelievingly. “He talks a great deal. But, say what you will, he
can
talk. We had the men of taste in the eighteenth century, all the way from Branch Creek to Two Fork Gap.”

“Talking the mountains down, perhaps? Could be. Eighteenth century, age of reason, dislike of scenery as barbarous institution.”

“But, Sally, Prender
is
interesting when he gets started.”

“When I want a lecture on literature I’ll enrol at Columbia,” Sally said. Then her eyes fell on the bills and Mr. Quick’s letter, and she frowned suddenly.

“Did the bandage slip?” Mrs. Peel asked sympathetically.

“I’ve just been forced to remember why I called you into this room,” Sally said. She handed the letter to Mrs. Peel.

“Do I
have
to read it now? I did want a bath before Prender used all the hot water.”

“I think you’d better.”

Mrs. Peel looked at Sally’s face and read the letter.

Sally said, “I’m fairly stupid at understanding money matters. You’re the expert. Now is that letter as bad as I think it is?”

“It’s so long since I was an expert in money matters,” Mrs. Peel said unhappily. She read the letter once more.

“Translate it into English, will you?” Sally asked. “I get baffled when I deal with Mr. Quick’s vocabulary.”

Mrs. Peel smiled in spite of herself. “Well, cutting out all the notwithstandings and inasmuches, it seems to say that what he warned you about in New York is now more or less true.”

“Go on, darling. This is so cosy, isn’t it? Just you and I, sitting in our country house, finding out how poor we really are. But how? How, so suddenly? This house was a bargain— why, the furniture alone would cost almost as much as the entire price we—I mean, you—paid. And there
was
money enough, wasn’t there?”

“Yes. In a way. But I’ve been dipping into capital, and forgetting how much capital I had already spent. As Mr. Quick points out, I never got any financial return on any of my
literary
investments. So, what with everything, we’ve got about six thousand dollars left.”

“Some people would say that’s a lot of money.” Sally cheered up. It seemed quite a lot to her. Enough for Margaret. Sally’s cook-books, although scarcely goldmines, had always brought in a small steady sum each year to keep her independent in all her own expenses. “Why, that isn’t so bad!” she said.

“It is about one hundred and twenty dollars a year if I leave it as capital. If I spend it, then there will be nothing at all in a year or two.” At the present rate of expenditure, she thought, they’d use it up in four months.

There was silence for a very long moment.

“However did this sneak up on us?” Sally said. “Six thousand, I mean...after all that money you made!”

Mrs. Peel looked extremely guilty. “It should be nearer twenty-five thousand,” she said. “That’s my fault. I thought— well, seeing it was getting low—that I’d—well, that I’d help it along a little.
You
know—the stock market.”

“And you—”

“And I lost this time. Either the stock market has changed since 1926 or my luck has gone.”

“You lost?” Sally began to laugh.

Mrs. Peel was startled. Then she had to smile. Then she laughed too.

“Fat lot we have to laugh about,” Sally said, and went into peals of laughter again.

“Karl and Earl would say it served me right,” Mrs. Peel gasped, in a sane moment. But this only set them off again.

Sally pointed to her bandaged ribs. “It hurts, it hurts. Oh, stop me, Margaret! Don’t let me laugh any more.”

“We’ll live here through all the winter snows, and no more travelling ever, and no more cities,” Mrs. Peel said, trying to regain her seriousness. Her words helped her when she really thought about them.

“And we’ll rustle Jim’s cattle, and eat potatoes, nice white fluffy potatoes,” Sally said, and burst into another fit of laughter.

Then, at last, quite exhausted, they looked at each other.

“I’ll start writing more cook-books—lots of them,” Sally said. But she knew her income from them wouldn’t go very far between two people, so she spoke without much conviction.

“But you can’t write them unless you travel. You always wrote that kind of cook-book. You just can’t invent recipes, and give them foreign places and names to make them palatable. You’ll poison your public.”

“Not much future in that,” Sally agreed. “Six thousand could last you three or four years here. If you lived
very
quietly. It’s possible to live here in the winters if you like being snowed up, and learn to flop around on snowshoes. Or we could close the house and get a job somewhere. We’ll find something, don’t worry. We aren’t complete idiots.”

“Only in certain directions, and that’s all over too. No more travel, no more people. That’s one consolation: I’d feel very guilty if I had spent all that money on ourselves. But we didn’t. We could have lived in a fashionable part of Paris, or on the Riviera; we could have moved around according to the social season. But we didn’t. And we may have collected people in our day, but there never was a title or a millionaire among them.
That’s
something we did not do.”

“It was fun while it lasted,” Sally said. “Look, would you see if this bandage has slipped? That’s it. Thanks. Now, you run upstairs and have your bath, and change before lunch.”

Mrs. Peel began to walk slowly towards the door. “I suppose we had better cancel that order with Milton Jerks for a new car?”

“The one we’ve rented from him will have to do. It may be slightly battered, but it isn’t temperamental.”

“Unlike the plumbing over at the guest-house. Jackson is completely baffled for once. And now we can’t even think of getting a new handyman to take the place of Mrs. Gunn’s cousin from Laramie.”

“No,” Sally said.

“Or anyone to take Drene’s place either. We’ll all have to make our own beds, and dust around.”

“Prender will leave,” Sally said delightedly. “Unless Carla feels she has to volunteer to do it for him. Did you know she polishes his boots when she cleans her own?”

“What?”

“We ought to have guessed he never shone those boots himself.”

“One thing I can say for Dewey—he just let his shoes crack up.” Mrs. Peel was still shaking her head when she reached the door. But there she paused again, as she had done every few steps across the room. “Sally, you don’t think Jim Brent could afford to buy this house back from us?”

“Not this year. Or next. In a few years perhaps. If he can still get two cents profit on each pound of steer he sells.” Or if a grass fire didn’t ruin him, or a year of drought.

“That’s what I thought. Besides, somehow, I don’t really want to give up this house.”

“I’m glad of that,” Sally said simply, and tried to smile to Margaret as she left the room.

The worst of laughter was that afterwards it could leave you so depressed. Sally looked out at the mountains. She wondered what sort of job she would find. In America you could take any job at all, providing it was honest. No need to apologise for it or try to disguise it. And no one would pity you.
You’ve a job, haven’t you? All right, lets see what you can make
of
it.
That was the attitude. I’ll get a job, Sally thought. But Margaret? Margaret is older. Then, if necessary, I’ll get a job that will keep two of us.

Mrs. Peel, in dressing-gown and slippers, burst into the room.

“Sally, stop worrying! I’ve decided what to do. It’s quite simple. I’ll write another novel. I must be a very weak character, don’t you think? I’ve really got to have the wolf, not only howling at the door, but scratching the panel out, before I’ll work. Don’t look so upset, Sally. Why, it might even be fun to write this book! How does an historical novel about Idaho sound to you? After all, it wasn’t just discovered by skiers and potato-growers, was it?”

“What name will you use this time? Margaret Peel or Elizabeth Whiffleton?” Sally was trying to smile, to sound encouraging, but her depression only increased.

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Peel’s excitement died away. Then she remembered the bath which was still running upstairs, and she dashed from the room. She called back, “Depends on who gets control of the novel. But
I’ll
put up a good fight this time.”

“What fight?” Prender Atherton Jones asked, as he came out of his bedroom. He had been thinking, longingly, of a well-cooked luncheon digesting in his well-exercised, pleasantly bathed, and freshly dressed body. “Margaret, I’ve discovered the most amusing book. But can you tell me what on earth this inscription means?”

But Mrs. Peel, not even stopping to look at the book in his hand, only said, “My bath! The library ceiling!” and rushed on frantically.

But, fortunately, she found there was still a couple of inches to go before the bath-water would pour down into the library. The water was half-cold, for Prender had enjoyed a very good bath indeed. She felt in such a Stoic mood, however, that she scarcely said, “I knew it,” and she stepped in for almost a minute.

Prender Atherton Jones went on his way downstairs. He would show Sally his discovery in literature. It was a kind of period piece, true to the romantic escape of the nineteen-twenties: the era when green hats and sheiks and Constantinople sleeping-cars all vied with Huxley and Mencken and e.e. cummings. Not to mention Prohibition, Mayfair parties, raccoon coats, exiled Tsarists, and Dada.

He looked at the book with a smile.
The Lady in White Gloves,
by Elizabeth Whiffleton. He must have read it before— probably had only glanced into it: it had been one of those best-sellers—for he remembered he had included it with some other popular novels in a witty review he had written at the time. But now it had the most peculiar fascination for him; it awakened a nostalgia, as if he were looking at a collection of old photographs, fantastic perhaps, horrible in some ways, and yet reminders of an age when life had been young and gay and very brave-new-world. Even if the twenties had roared more with the hysterical rush of an express train than with the majestic dignity of a lion, they had had their charms in retrospect. They had been almost peace, compared to which the thirties had been a mounting nightmare. And the nineteen-forties—a fitful slumber of exhaustion, tormented by memories of delirium?