Rest and Be Thankful (40 page)

“I’ve known him a considerable time,” Prender Atherton Jones admitted. “We’d keep meeting. London, Paris, Rome.”

“Oh,” Carla said, and sighed. “I’ve always wanted to travel. How wonderful to be able to say London, Paris, Rome, just like that.”

“You can have all those other places,” Mimi said. “I’ll take Paris.”

“The grass is always greener...” Sally said, with a smile. “The girls I met in Rome used to talk about New York. And I’ve rarely met a London girl whose eyes didn’t shine when she thought of a holiday in Paris or Rome.”

“What about the girls in Paris?” Earl Grubbock asked, breaking his gloomy silence. “Where do they want to go?”

Mrs. Peel smiled as she punctured Sally’s theory. “Paris,” she said.

They all laughed, and went back to discuss Dewey.

* * *

Their laughter would have sounded bitter in the ears of Esther Park. For at that moment she was imagining them round the dining-table, tortured with anxiety.

They would be talking worriedly. They couldn’t eat much. And they’d all feel guilty. Look at the fuss they had made about Drene, and Sally, and Mimi, and Karl. You’d have thought that Earl and Karl were heroes when they got back from that trip into the mountains. Well, they could start worrying now about her. Yes, they’d be talking about her, arranging to send out search-parties.

She hoped it wouldn’t take long before they found her. She was bored. She had been here for hours. She was hungry. She had eaten the doughnuts and sweet rolls which she had taken from the pantry this morning, when Mrs. Gunn had been too busy in the kitchen to notice. She had also finished the two bars of chocolate, brought with her in the pocket of her buckskin jacket. All she had to do was to wait.

It was so silent, silent and strange. Almost as if she
were
lost. But she wasn’t. She was well hidden from the ranch, though. For when she left the trail she had followed a path through a little wood; and then she had climbed round a small hill, crossed a shallow stream, and entered this high glade through another little wood. It was quite simple, she reassured herself. She had ridden miles and miles on the trail, but the distance from the trail to the glade was short, short and twisted and safe. Then she looked about her, and noticed there were several little woods to be seen from the high glade where she sat. And although she was positive she knew the hill which she had skirted, she could count three small hills all folding into each other from the direction she had travelled.

“Well,” she said aloud, “there was a canyon opposite me when I came out of the first wood. There was a canyon with yellow cliffs.” But even when she rose to her feet she could only see the topmost cliffs of that canyon; or
was
it that canyon, for the rocks were now white in the blazing sunshine? And there were other little canyons and cliffs, all hunching their rocky spines, one behind the other, until your eyes were dazzled with their sharpness and brightness. She looked away, at the green, restful forest climbing up the mountain-side on her left; then she looked back at the stretching teeth of rock rising from the hilly fields in front of her. But they were more muddled than ever, and it seemed, even in that moment, they had changed their shape. As if someone had swung the whole countryside around on an axis, like a globe, and what you saw this morning you didn’t see now, and what you hadn’t seen then you noticed now.

Suddenly she wanted to cry out. She was trembling.

“But you aren’t lost,” she said. “When you want to go back all you do is get on your horse, and then he’ll take you to the ranch. Just leave it to him.”

She looked round to reassure herself, and her long-suffering horse looked at her patiently and mournfully. She had tied the end of the reins to the branch of a fir-tree, so that he shouldn’t wander. He was standing there, trying every now and again to lower his head to the grass at his feet. But she had chosen too high a branch. As she looked round he stopped straining at the reins and resigned himself to waiting. He closed his eyes.

That was a good idea, Esther thought, and she searched for a place where she could sleep too in the heat of the day. She left the boulder against which she had rested when she had eaten her eleven o’clock picnic, and went over to another tree where she would have pleasant shade. The glade sloped down in front of her towards a little stream; behind there was a thin wood straggling along the crest of a small hill. On her left were the forest and the mountain. On her right there lay the wood through which she had entered the glade, and the path which could lead her over the stream towards the trail. It could, but it wasn’t going to. She was safe here; no one could see her. She had thought the glade was a pretty place when she had first entered it, but she was beginning to hate it. She glared round at it now before she sat under the large solitary pine-tree where the grass looked comfortable. The horse was restive again; the flies were bothering him, but she was just far enough away so that they wouldn’t bother her. She stretched out in the shade of the tree, stared up at the blue sky showing through the bristling fingers of pine, listened to the silly stream chattering away to itself as it wound in and out among the sloping fields and hills, and she hated everything.

I was so nice to everyone, she thought. I really was. They are not worth bothering about, and the women are worse than the men. Jealous, mean. And the meanest is Margaret Peel. She’s to blame. But she’s afraid of me. Because I know. And no one else knows. Sally Bly wouldn’t even listen when I tried to tell her. No one knows but me. I saw her gathering up the empty bottles from behind the couch when she thought no one was there. And she keeps her sitting-room door locked all the time. And when she talks to me she says “Yes?” and smiles, but her eyes wander. A secret drinker, and no one knows. No one but me. That’s why she hates me. And she’s jealous too. She separated Sally from me when we could have been friends; she took Carla away from me when we were making plans for next winter; she takes the side of the men. None of them can do anything wrong; they are all angels as far as she is concerned, so that they will smile to her and talk to her. She went riding with Prender, and she’s been talking to him a lot. About me. What lies does she tell? He believed her at first, and I could feel him being turned against me. But he’s too clever for her after all. Last night he talked to me in the old way, so he knows what she is. Almost... I’ll tell him everything about Margaret Peel when we leave. To think what I’ve had to suffer this month for his sake. He must know that. He must know everything.

Elizabeth Whiffleton... I don’t believe it. She never wrote a book in her life. She hasn’t the brains. She got someone to write it for her and paid him to keep silent. And perhaps he died last week. Then she was free to speak and claim the book was hers. Would anyone keep silent for all these years about a book she had really written?

On the day the others leave I’ll pack my trunks and leave too. With dignity. I may even forgive her. I can’t help being like that. I’ll forgive her. But I’ll never forget the way she begged me to come here—telephoned and wrote—and then did everything to make me unhappy. Even this very last touch—this plan to send Norah away, leaving us with all the work to do—that was done to humiliate me. But she can’t drive me away. I’ll go when I please.

Esther Park watched a lazy white cloud float lightly over the cobalt sky. But she neither saw its delicacy nor felt its mystery. The soft air, warm with the perfume of pine forests, of sage bushes on the hills, touched her cheek lightly and passed unnoticed. She was thinking with increasing bitterness of Margaret Peel, who had tried to take away her revolver and leave her helpless. “But she didn’t!” Esther said triumphantly, putting her hand quickly to her side, where the spectacle-case was neatly held by her belt. “She didn’t,” Esther repeated, smiled happily, felt assured of everything and drowsed into sleep.

* * *

“It’s almost three o’clock,” Mrs. Peel said. “I’m going up to the corral to see if Esther has returned.”

“I’ll come with you,” Sally said.

The others watched them walk away from the group of lazy, contented people gathered on the lawn at the creek’s edge.

“Do they like her?” Karl Koffing asked, in wonder.

“What do you think?” Earl Grubbock asked. He was in a bad temper: Norah was leaving at four o’clock, and Mrs. Gunn was guarding the stairway to Norah’s room. After two attempts to see Norah he had come back to the garden.

“Well, why bother about Park? She’s well able to take care of herself.”

“She takes better care of herself than anyone I’ve ever met,” Carla said angrily. “It’s just like her to ride back slowly, so that we’ll start worrying.”

“Who’s going to start worrying?” Mimi asked. “She said some pretty nasty things about all of us behind our backs. She even tried to drop the idea into Mrs. Gunn’s mind that Sally didn’t approve of Western cooking and was sorry she hadn’t hired a cook in New York.”

“I bet Mrs. Gunn dropped that idea right back where it came from,” Earl Grubbock said.

“She did.”

“What makes Esther Park like this, anyway?” Carla asked. “Oh, no, Karl. Don’t give me that economic environment stuff: the fault lies somewhere within Esther. She’s twisted. She isn’t crazy. She’s twisted.”

“What’s the difference?” Robert O’Farlan asked.

“She’s all her own fault. She would be perfectly all right if she’d be content with herself as she is, and do the best she could with that.”

Mimi giggled. “Isn’t that asking an awful lot of her?”

Everyone laughed except Prender Atherton Jones. He looked up from his book with some surprise. He had been listening in spite of himself, and he didn’t particularly like the conversation. He said, benevolently but reprovingly, “And since when did Carla start analysing people?”

Carla blushed. But she answered him, her voice trembling slightly at first, until she got it under control. “I may be wrong, but I think Esther is ambitious, and she has nothing to be ambitious on. She wants to be the centre of interest always. I’m sure she started being literary just to be different from all the people who live beside her. I mean, they must have money and fine houses and clothes and all that; but she wanted to become something they couldn’t be. So she came to New York to write. But she can’t write. And she has no ideas of her own: when she gives an opinion she is only quoting a review or a critical essay on some well-known author. That didn’t cut much ice with us, did it? So she started throwing her family, and money, and the house with two gardeners at us. Because none of us own such things. And we were just as bored with her as her rich acquaintances must be when she starts throwing literature at them. That’s what I mean when I say she is all her own fault. Why, we’d
all
like to be the centre of attention.”

“Not bad,” Earl Grubbock said, “not bad at all, Carla.” Then he looked at his watch, wondered if Norah had finished packing, decided to wait for another ten minutes. There was no use aggravating Mrs. Gunn.

Carla smiled with pleasure at her artistic triumph.

“That’s Esther,” Mimi agreed. “But I’d add a middle stage between the great literary mind and the wealthy landowner. She wanted to be the irresistible woman. Didn’t you notice the trouble she tried to start? I expect you all heard what I was supposed to think about you; I certainly heard all of your opinions about me.”

“What?” several voices asked, in a broken chorus. And the men (who had been thinking that if you wanted a woman analysed, then all you had to do was to let another woman take on the job and to hell with all these psychiatrists at twenty-five dollars an hour) looked at each other.

Prender Atherton Jones closed his book and laid it aside. “What do you mean? If a woman thinks she is irresistible, then why should she start making trouble between people?”

“Because,” Mimi said, “if you think you are irresistible you try very hard to prove it.” She looked a little embarrassed for a moment. Then, “That’s true enough for all women, I guess,” she said truthfully. The men, watching her, knowing what she meant, thought she had never been more charming. She gave them all a warm smile to add to their admiration.

“And one way of proving it,” Carla explained, “is to separate people. If you can’t attract, then you distract. Isn’t that what you meant, Mimi?”

“Yes,” Mimi said slowly, looking down at her slender hands.

“Not that I know much about it, not being an irresistible woman,” Carla said quickly, trying to hide Mimi’s confusion. “And I’m not the wealthy kind either. Guess I’ll just have to concentrate on writing stories and hope for the best.” She laughed as the others laughed.

“I liked the story you’ve just written,” Atherton Jones said. “Of course, it needs a little polishing, a little editing. But it promises very well, I think.”

“Thank you,” Carla said. She thought, how strange that I now feel so unmoved by his praise. Yesterday Mrs. Peel had said, “It’s good, Carla. I love it. Don’t let anyone change one comma!” And Carla had hugged her with delight. She looked at Atherton Jones to see if he had noticed her coolness. But he was thinking over some problem of his own. I know what is wrong with him, Carla thought. He keeps shutting people out. He lets them in when he pleases, and he closes the door when he pleases. I don’t believe he cares about any of us at all, certainly not as human beings. Then why does he bother with us? There was a new problem for her to solve.

O’Farlan, watching the smile on her face, asked, “And what’s pleasing you now?” Once, he thought in amazement, I called her a timid and worried little marmoset.

“People,” Carla answered, “people are so interesting.”

* * *

It was four o’clock.

Grubbock was saying goodbye to Norah. With a million other people, he thought angrily.

“What’s your address? Will Three Springs find you?” he asked at the last minute.

“Until Labour Day. After that I’m in Laramie.” Norah looked at him, and then didn’t look at him.

“Maybe I’ll be seeing you. I might hitch a ride home and drop in to see you at Three Springs.”