Rest and Be Thankful (33 page)

Sally and Mrs. Peel exchanged glances. Sally folded the newspaper—not one suitable job unless you could add figures, do shorthand, sew furs, or manicure nails. She left too, and went into the library to find something for Mimi to read in bed.

Peaceful evening, Mrs. Peel reminded herself with a touch of bitterness. Sally was unhappy and worried. She had been hiding it for days, and her method of hiding it was to be as kind as possible to Mimi. To make up, perhaps, for the unkind thoughts she must have about Mimi. Mrs. Peel, who hadn’t allowed herself to be worried about Mimi before, was suddenly depressed. That might be the result of repressing her worries over money matters. But it had seemed wise not to think about approaching bankruptcy until August was over and the guests had gone away. For the guests would then feel something was wrong, and that would spoil everything for them. Yet worries were never repressible; they just bobbed up in another disguise.

Mimi... If Sally were taking this Mimi-Jim Brent affair to heart, then that was really something to worry about. In all these years Sally had put up a careful guard against men: she was never going to let herself be hurt so violently, so cruelly again. And here she had relaxed that guard, let it slip just enough. But surely she couldn’t be as unhappy as she had been in Paris in 1932. She was older now. She had been barely twenty-one then. Surely that made a difference! I couldn’t bear it, Mrs. Peel thought, if I had those weeks in 1932 to go through all over again. Money worries seemed nothing at this moment: it was one thing to lose your money, but quite another to lose your happiness. No money in the world was going to put that right. Not with someone who felt as deeply as Sally did. How much did she like Jim Brent, anyway? She tried to hide her strongest emotions. That was another bitter lesson she had learned in Paris in those early days. I just couldn’t bear it if she got smashed down again, Mrs. Peel thought angrily.

Carla, followed by Esther Park, came over to the fireside. Mrs. Peel, putting aside her worries, felt there was an appeal for help in Carla’s eyes.

Esther was bubbling over with an idea. “It will be wonderful,” she said. “You know, Mrs. Peel, my sister is travelling in Europe next winter. I’m
much
too busy to go with her, and she was worried about leaving me all alone in New York. But she needn’t worry any more. Carla is coming to share my apartment in town.”

Carla said, “I don’t think—”

“It will be perfect,” Esther said. “We can talk and write. Just perfect.”

“Isn’t your apartment up-town? That may be too far away from Carla’s job,” Mrs. Peel suggested and caught a glance of thanks from Carla.

“Well,” Esther said, frowning as she considered that, “perhaps Carla will find a job in a bookstore farther up-town. I know a man who has lots of bookstores. He’ll—”

“Why not let Carla arrange her own life?”

“But I was.” Esther Park sounded hurt. “Wasn’t I, Carla?”

Carla took a deep breath, looked at Mrs. Peel, and then said, “I like my job. And I don’t want to change my apartment.” But why couldn’t I have said that before, she wondered. It was easy enough, after all.

“But you said you didn’t like your room,” Esther challenged her. “You said—”

“Perhaps Carla didn’t mean what she said exactly in the way you interpreted it.”

“I was only making conversation,” Carla said, with a new assurance. “If I don’t like my room, that doesn’t mean I want to move into an apartment I didn’t choose.”

Esther Park’s eyebrows went up. “I was only trying to help,” she said indignantly. She gave Mrs. Peel a bitter look.

She left them and went over to Atherton Jones.

Carla gave Mrs. Peel a smile of thanks. “I think this might be a good time to slip away and finish some work. It’s going well, really well.”

“I’m glad of that. And I think this might be a very good time.” Mrs. Peel looked over her shoulder to study Atherton Jones, registering alarm, as Esther Park drew up a chair beside him.

“Esther, I am reading,” he said, in a warning tone. “I am sorry. But I must finish this.” He picked up another sheet and gave it all his attention. He didn’t answer her next question.

Esther came slowly back to the fire. “Where’s Carla gone?”

“She had some work to do.”

“It’s so dull tonight,” Esther said. “Where’s Robert O’Farlan?”

“Writing a letter.”

“Perhaps he’s in the library,” Esther said hopefully, and moved towards the door.

“He’s very busy. I shouldn’t disturb him.”

Esther Park studied Mrs. Peel. “You really are very cross tonight,” she said. “What have I done?”

Mrs. Peel could only shake her head.

“You don’t understand,” Esther went on, “but I’ve
got
to talk to Robert. About something very important. Do you know what he has done?”

Mrs. Peel sighed. What now? Earl Grubbock had made advances to her. Karl Koffing had to be told quite sharply that
she
wasn’t that kind of girl; Jackson had forgotten his place; Bert had to be reprimanded; Ned kept looking at her in the most peculiar way. What had poor Robert O’Farlan done?

“Of course,” Esther said nobly, “he may not have known what he was doing. But”—she glanced round at Atherton Jones to make sure of a double audience—“he has stolen one of my ideas. And put it in his novel. In the second-last chapter. I told him all about a story I was planning, and he’s used it.”

Atherton Jones, suddenly sitting very erect, looked over at Esther Park. “And
when
did you see his manuscript? It was never given to you to read.”

The anger in his voice startled both women. At last, Mrs. Peel thought thankfully, at last...

“I just saw it,” Esther Park protested.

“Then you must have read it either in his room or in mine. Who invited you in?”

“He’s used my idea.”

“Nonsense. What idea?”

“About the man who was a failure because his wife underestimated him and then—”

“He told me about that idea more than a year ago. Before you ever met him.”

“But I
did
have that idea.” She looked pleadingly at them to believe her.

“When you had a look at his manuscript?” Prender Atherton Jones asked cuttingly. Then he picked up the page he had been reading, and concentrated on that.

Mrs. Peel closed her eyes and feigned sleep. It was the weakest evasion she had ever offered, but it worked. When she opened them again Esther Park had gone. Prender Atherton Jones was standing there instead.

“You’re safe now,” he said, with a smile. Then he became thoughtful, as he placed O’Farlan’s manuscript on the mantelpiece. “Something has got to be done about that woman.”

“I’ve been waiting for three whole weeks to hear you say that. Prender, you were wonderful with her. I wish Sally had heard you.”

“That kind of thing has to be scotched at once,” he said. “It is absolutely intolerable.”

Mrs. Peel was thankful that at last he had found something intolerable.

“Something has got to be done,” he repeated firmly.

“I agree. And please do it soon, Prender. Yes, you! You know her. I think you might tell her to leave before Karl and Earl get back here.”

“It’s a most difficult, a most delicate situation.” He was less decided now. His anger was leaving him.

Mrs. Peel looked at Prender, thinking that for almost three minutes he had been the Prender she had once known. But now he was retreating into the man whose established position and future plans made him wary of any decisive issue.

He smoothed his hair several times, then looked at the manuscript on the mantelpiece. He laid his hand on it. “Well,” he said, “that’s that, at least.”

“Then you like O’Farlan’s book?”

He inclined his head. “Yes. On the whole. I have some reservations about the end, though.”

“What’s wrong with it? It seemed the natural development to me.”

“I’m always doubtful of happy endings.”

“You mean that the hero ought to have lost his life? He had lost almost everything else he valued. Why, he is like millions of people who keep on going, in spite of everything. That’s the whole point about the book, the indestructibility of man’s spirit. You’d rather have O’Farlan fake some kind of accident or illness and make his hero die?”

“Well, he’s certainly made sure of the book’s popularity.”

Mrs. Peel stared at him. “Robert wasn’t trying for any such thing. He was writing this story as he saw it. If it’s a success, well and good.”

“A success!” Prender said scornfully. Then he quietened his voice, and even smiled half sadly. “You’ve changed your ideas about literature, it seems to me. In the old days in Paris you used to search for writers who were original and difficult, who had no chance of any popular success whatsoever.”

“I still admire originality,” she said. “And as for difficulty— well, perhaps I am less of a snob than I used to be. Once I did think that anything difficult to understand was necessarily important. I got a little thrill—like all snobs—from feeling I was one of the initiated. Yes, I admit it: I paid little attention to the general reading public.”

“And now you find them the epitome of all good taste?” He tried to hide his annoyance, but his voice was sarcastic. She might seem to be criticising herself, yet he felt the quiet voice was criticising him too.

“No,” she said evenly. “I think all taste has to be encouraged and developed. But how can critics like you help it to develop if you are contemptuous of it? Or don’t you
want
it developed?”

“That’s a fantastic charge, Margaret.” He shrugged his shoulders. Women, he seemed to say, women...

“Well, so far you’ve been no help at all! You’ve shut people out of your literary world, kept it only for the chosen few. You are just as much to blame for any bad taste there is as—as—”

He smiled as he watched her trying to find words; he didn’t expect her to finish that sentence.

“As those cynical men who cater to twelve-year-old minds,” she said.

He was angry now. He forced himself to be tolerant, and very patient. “I suppose you would say that the critics are to save the people from the snob and the cynic?”

“Why not?” She was in earnest.

“And how many good critics are there in America?” he exploded.

She began to count them with infuriating precision.

“Newspaper, magazine hacks,” he interrupted her, “all working on a deadline.”

That aroused her enough to say, “There you go again, Prender! I suppose if those critics wrote sensitive little pieces for precious little magazines, then you’d think
that
was enough to make them good critics? Really, Prender—don’t be like poor Karl Koffing, with everything so neatly black and white.”

Sally had entered the room. She said with a smile, “I always think literary arguments are so invigorating, don’t you? Well, Mimi’s taken care of. Her tiny hands got frozen this morning, it seems. If her temperature gets any worse I suppose we ought to send for Dr. Clark. But I think she’ll be all right.” She settled in a chair near the fire, and then looked up at Prender. “Have a seat, Prender,” she said. “You terrify me, looming there like the Empire State Building above me. And what’s your new magazine going to be like?” She was trying to change the subject, and she amazed herself. For this was the first time she had ever seen Margaret stand up against Prender. He wasn’t enjoying it. He couldn’t even talk about his magazine. He didn’t even look at Sally.

“What do you mean? I am like Karl Koffing? And aren’t
you
a little given to adopting the all-black, all-white standard? I haven’t heard you praise Marie and Charles ever since they took over your printing-press in Paris.”

“I’ve never questioned their literary ability,” Mrs. Peel said indignantly. “I’ve only condemned their moral standards in politics. It is their duplicity and treachery that I’m against. Shouldn’t I be?”

Sally said, “Prender, what’s your new magazine going to be like?”

He answered her this time, although he still didn’t look at her. “Margaret will find it precious, I’m sure,” he said bitterly. “But I believe it will be important. Not in the materialistic sense, of course. And so I am quite resigned to the fact that it will get little support from the public, despite Margaret’s violent belief in their natural good taste.”

“But I never said good taste is natural. Taste is something that can be helped or discouraged.” Mrs. Peel looked at him angrily. He could argue so meanly, she thought. “I said—”

“I’m afraid you won’t approve of my first editorial,” he went on, regaining some of his good humour as he watched her. “I am going to arraign public taste. I am writing a blistering indictment of materialism in America.”

“Only in America?” Sally asked. She smiled as he gave her his attention for the first time tonight. “Why, Prender, you’ve lived long enough in Europe to know the facts of life. There’s materialism everywhere. In Europe they’ve had longer practice in disguising it, that’s all.”

“Now, Sally, I can’t at all—”

“Take lecturers, for example,” Sally said, giving Prender some of his own treatment, as she interrupted him skilfully. The word “lecturers” caught his attention. “Few European writers will come to America,” she went on smoothly, “unless they are paid a top price to lecture. How many would come, do you think, just to see a new world? And you wonder that such people always see America through gold spectacles?”

Prender Atherton Jones was silent. He was thinking, with some bitterness, of the fees which real Europeans insisted on getting before they ever set foot on a ship to cross the Atlantic. While he, who had lived so long in Europe, was treated like any other American.

“Yes,” Mrs. Peel said, “we see only as far as we can see, as far as our limitations let us see. We all have our own horizons.”

Prender Atherton Jones was thinking he would have been wiser to negotiate his lecture fees while he was still in Europe. Only, in 1939, one hadn’t had much time to think out such matters. A pity, though... Then Sally’s amused voice made him listen.

“Your practising materialist, who firmly believes he has a soul above it all, steps off the ship on his return from America, and what has he to say? Nothing about the music he has heard here, the concerts, the symphony orchestras; nothing about our artists and art collections; nothing about the warmth and generosity and friendliness he has found in people. Oh, no! He holds forth about American materialism. Those who listen to him seem only too eager to agree: it is so pleasant to feel superior to those awful Americans!”