Rest and Be Thankful (49 page)

“That’s a true story,” Sally said. “And a powerful one.” But could Mimi manage it?

“Oh, I know it isn’t an original story. But if most of the big writers in the world were humble enough to borrow most of their stories, who am I to be proud?” Mimi said. Then she noticed that Bob O’Farlan was watching her, waiting for her to go on. And somehow she did. “It’s the story of a white woman who had the courage to go against tradition and marry a half-Indian. She went to live with his tribe. But courage wasn’t enough. Those for whom she gave up everything murdered her happiness. No one could help her then. She wandered near the Creek where her husband had been killed before her eyes, and would let no one come near her, not even the Indians who became sorry for her.”

“You could hardly blame her for that,” Grubbock said. “They had murdered her husband. Or perhaps executed is the better word. It was his own fault. Greed and treachery. But, say, you’ve added something to the character of the woman. I used to think that it was just the shock of seeing her husband killed that drove her crazy. What do you know? We’ve got a writer in Mimi, after all!”

“After all!” Mimi said indignantly. “Well, Mr. Grubbock, that story is copyright now. Listening?”

“It’s all yours,” Earl said. “Besides, there are plenty of stories in this part of the world for us all to pick up and use. I’m sorry I didn’t get around more. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, not a bad idea at all, to stay in the West for a few months. Get a job here somewhere. Newspaper work, perhaps. It’s got its attractions.”

“Yes,” Sally said, with a smile for her own private enthusiasm. She wondered if Earl would be most attracted in the direction of Three Springs and then Laramie.

“For instance,” he went on, “I’m interested in that story about the newspaper editor who fought on the side of the homesteaders and small ranchers around Buffalo. Back in 1892, as Chuck would say. About the time of the Texas Invasion, anyway. He took a beating at first. Lost everything, it seemed. Except he got the people behind him in the end. Sort of encouraging to see ordinary people decide what is right, by themselves, and then go out and win with all the odds against them. Nice touch that, somehow.” He pulled a handful of grass and studied it. “Say, Karl, you wanted to go north to see that place near Buffalo called Ten Sleep, where the Mexicans work in the beet fields. I’d like to see Buffalo. Why don’t we travel up there together?”

“That’s an idea,” Karl said, interested.

“You’d enjoy it,” Mrs. Peel said. “I hear Ten Sleep is as pretty as its name. And you could study conditions among the Basque sheepherders near Buffalo, too. Did you know they’ve a Jai-Alai court right in the middle of Wyoming?”

Karl looked at her. Then he said, “I’m due back in New York. I’ve got a job to worry about.”

Earl threw down the crumpled blades of grass. For someone who hated the lousy capitalist system, Karl stuck to pulling in the
do re mi.
“Sure,” Earl said evenly, “you’ve more important work to do than go studying conditions where they are pleasant to study. What’s the point in that?”

“I envy you, Earl,” Robert O’Farlan said. “That’s what I’d like to do for a bit—wander around the country.”

“You are going to have a pretty good time in New York signing contracts. You can wander around there, celebrating.”

Robert O’Farlan half smiled. It worried him slightly that they all assumed his novel was going to be accepted. All that had happened so far was that Mrs. Peel’s agent had sent an enthusiastic letter about his manuscript; and this morning she had sent an enthusiastic telegram about the reactions of a publisher’s reader. But there was at least one more publisher’s reader to please, not to mention the publishers, before the book reached a contract stage.

“How happy your wife must be,” Mrs. Peel said, trying to cheer him up. He had been so silent all day. Not the way you expected a practically accepted author to behave. Perhaps he had worked so long over the book that people’s approval had bewildered him. Didn’t he know how good the novel was? “Have you wired her about latest developments?” she asked, with a sympathetic smile.

He shook his head. “Not yet. After all, there’s nothing definite...” Would Jenny be pleased? In the way he wanted her to be pleased? If it isn’t too late, he thought. For all the letters he had written recently had been answered, but not answered in the way he had hoped. If it took two people to build a hidden, smouldering quarrel, it took two of them to put these fires out and rekindle a purer, better flame. God knows, he thought, remembering their first years together, God knows I’m willing to try. But I can’t do it alone. Well, he thought unhappily, I’ll go on trying. But how long? Until he knew definitely it was no good? But how did you ever know definitely, so that you would have no remorse later?

“You’re our great success,” Carla said. “Will you come to our parties so that Mimi and I can show you off? And we’d like to meet your wife, wouldn’t we, Mimi?”

“Yes.” Mimi met Bob’s eyes. (She was the only one who called him Bob. He never seemed to object.) Two unhappy people, she thought. Two much-envied people, by those who didn’t know. Two very unhappy people, you and I. I am unhappy out of my own weakness: you are unhappy because of your strength. For you are strong, Bob. You’re like Jim Brent in that: you’ve argued out right and wrong. She said, “You’re our very own literary lion, Bob. But we’ll have to teach you how to roar. You are much too modest, you know. You don’t know your own value. Why, when you arrived here, how many of us could ever have guessed you had a major work practically finished?” She smiled wholeheartedly.

“The only time he roars is when Karl waves a red flag,” Carla said, and went into a fit of giggling.

“Carla, scallions to you!” Mimi said, in mock horror.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Carla said airily. “Just you wait until next year. I’m going back to New York to write a play. About people like us, falling over one another emotionally. And for its title I might borrow Dewey Schmetterling’s phrase.
Six Authors in Search of a Character.
Or is that too close to Pirandello? Still, it would be appropriate...” She looked at Mrs. Peel. “You are the sixth, although you’ve graduated ahead of us. And to tell the truth, you’ll be my favourite author.” Then she rose, looking at her watch, and ran quickly to the house.

“And that,” Mimi said, rising from her chair, “leaves the rest of us with no exit lines worth saying. Coming, Bob? You’ve got to help Carla get these blasted elk horns into her suitcase. I absolutely refuse to travel with them naked. Can you imagine the apartment in New York, all in French Provincial and Grand Rapids Modern, with antlers around the wall? Carla says they’ll be wonderful for drying stockings on. I begin to wonder what I’ve let myself in for!” As she walked away with Robert O’Farlan she was talking enough nonsense to keep him smiling.

I hope, Mrs. Peel thought, as she looked after them, that Jenny O’Farlan is a wise woman. For her own sake. So far, judging from Robert’s face each time he read one of her letters, she wasn’t very wise. Whatever she wrote was not what he wanted to read, what he had hoped to read. It was almost too painful to see him lift the letters so eagerly from the hall table, go upstairs to read it, and then come down later with his eyes cold and his voice too controlled. Why did she do it? Or did she think it was enough to be a clever housewife and a devoted mother? Didn’t she ever wonder why a man had married her?

“Look,” Earl Grubbock said suddenly, “I’m not going back to New York. Not yet. While I’m out here I may as well explore a bit. New York will still be there when I decide to see it again.” He rose to his feet. He gave Sally a grin. “You don’t look too surprised,” he said.

“Perhaps I felt a surprise coming,” Sally said. “You are an independent kind of man, and with that kind anything can happen.”

Karl looked at him. Independent, he thought, and he could have laughed. “I suppose you are travelling as far as Three Springs in the car with the rest of us?” Karl asked. “Or are you too independent for that?”

“No. I guess Three Springs is a good place to decide where next,” Earl said, and looked at Karl as if he dared him to say it.

Karl didn’t. He was the last of the guests to leave the garden. He had meant to be the first. And then he had waited. For Grubbock? That forlorn hope, he thought bitterly. A Fascist. A potential traitor.

Mrs. Peel watched him leave.

Something of her thoughts must have appeared on her face, for Sally said, “He will be happy once he is back to his own group again. This place baffled him. But first he is going to have a depressing journey back to New York. Two thousand miles of farmland and villages and small towns, where people live as happily as they live in Sweetwater. And the more prosperity he sees the more depressed he will be. He will comfort himself with the hope that it won’t last.”

They were both silent for a long minute.

“There is something evil,” Sally said, “in a mind that wishes ill-fortune on others who have done him no harm. I think it is all the more evil for disguising itself as idealism.”

“He was talking about the election yesterday. He predicted there would be a Fascist upswing in America. Everyone in Wyoming proves it, seemingly.”

“Remind me to tell Chuck about upswing. That’s another for his repertoire.”

“Oh, Chuck’s got it! And he’s adopted ‘exploited,’ as well. You exploited upswung sonofabitchn old pony, you. A few other words are there too, if only I could remember them. I’m sure I heard ‘baroque’ among them. Now where did he get that? I’m sure it was baroque, and not a peculiar Anglo-Saxon word that Vassar didn’t teach me in my
Beowulf
class.”

But that problem wasn’t solved, for Sally suddenly said, “There’s Jim.” And she forgot everything else.

Mrs. Peel left them together as quickly as she could. She entered the house. It was beginning to look lonely even now. The living-room was deserted. The dining-table was shrunken into its smallest size. The library looked too neat.

I ought to go away, Mrs. Peel thought; I ought to go away until Sally and Jim aren’t too occupied being married. I ought to go away for many months. Long enough, anyway, to let them know they don’t have to invite me over to their cabin for dinner because they are sorry for me being alone. Long enough to establish the habit of only treating me as a neighbour, and not as a third member of the family. But that, Mrs. Peel decided, is up to me. I’ve got to be the one who does it.

She went into her sitting-room. Her correspondence for these last few days had been left unanswered. She picked up the letter from her agent, which had brought the good news about Robert O’Farlan. There was a long paragraph for her too. At first she had read it and laughed. Now she read it.

Hollywood... It would be interesting to see. But to work there? She glanced at the letter again.

All the publicity about Elizabeth Whiffleton has stimulated new interest in
The Lady in White Gloves.
Firmament Films have some idea about a remake, as they hold all the rights which you sold them in 1926. That means you won’t get any money, I’m afraid. But, after spending three hours on the ’phone with them today, they agree you should at least be the consultant on historical background. They offer five hundred a week for six weeks (that being their limit for historical details, seemingly), and it isn’t bad as a price now that everyone on the Coast is down to his last two swimming-pools. Much worse, I think, is the fact that you’ll be working with Dewey Schmetterling, who—for a mere $2000 a week—is going to show you just how you should have written the story in the first place. I hear he has a very beautiful but expensive wife, so there isn’t much hope he will refuse Firmament’s offer. It must have taken some of the joy out of his contract when he realised that he helped to start this new interest in
The Lady in W.G.
If he hadn’t tried to get his claws into you he might have been working on a story of his own, with all the screen credits for writing given to Schmetterling. Let me know before Tuesday if you find this idea amusing in its own way. It might be fun.

My agent has a sense of humour, Mrs. Peel decided. Historical background... Am I as old as all that? Then she laughed, thinking of Dewey working on the script of
The Lady in White Gloves.
He was going to sweat blood for his two thousand dollars a week.

But not Hollywood with Dewey, she thought suddenly: that would be too much. What else, though?

She went over to her writing-table, opened its drawer, and picked up the manuscript which she had begun. It was a play. Not an historical novel after all; a play. Really, Elizabeth Whiffleton pulled the most peculiar jokes on her. Well, she had the first act completely written, and the other two were mapped out. She had written it so easily that she was a little bit frightened. Or perhaps the explanation was that she never had found conversation difficult; in fact, all her life she had loved talk much too much. And in a play she could talk to her heart’s content. And meet such funny people, too. Yes, writing plays would certainly keep her from being lonely. But would they keep her alive too? “Elizabeth,” she said suddenly, “are you going to be good this time, or aren’t you?”

Then she laid the manuscript back in the drawer. “Well, I’m backing you, anyway, Elizabeth,” she said. And she tore up the letter. It was a strange feeling, tearing up five hundred dollars a week, even if it were only for six weeks. But grand gestures were always pleasant, for the moment at least. She went into the hall, dictated a telegram to Miss Snodgrass for her agent in New York, and then had a pleasant conversation about The Wedding. Seemingly, in Milt Jerks’s phrase, Sweetwater was buzzing.

* * *

Carla said, “I’ve tried and tried. They just won’t go in anywhere. And Mimi says I can’t possibly travel with them.” She looked at the elk horns despairingly. She had collected them so carefully, bringing in only the very best specimens from the hillsides, where she had found them lying bleached by sun and rain. There were four sets of antlers, standing over three feet high, branching and pointed with twists and flourishes.