Rest and Be Thankful (6 page)

“Well, that was all of twenty-three years ago,” Jim Brent said. “Why don’t you plan to write a novel this summer instead of taking up your time with a lot of other people?”

Mrs. Peel looked embarrassed.

Sarah said quietly, “You’ve been much too busy all these years. That’s the true answer.” But she knew, as Margaret knew, that being busy with people was one way of postponing the fearful day of having your pencils sharpened or your typewriter newly ribboned, of sitting down to stare at a white sheet of paper. She thought, too, of her own efforts at serious literature. Poetry. That was what she had been going to write when she arrived in Paris in 1930. She had been nineteen, the stuff that dreams are made on. And they had all gone sour. No one published her poems except Margaret. And to keep herself independent, so that later she might travel with Margaret with a free conscience, she had begun writing cook-books. They sold, and were still selling. And, even if she tried to tell Margaret that she was wrong to worry about what people like Prender Atherton Jones thought, she herself had published the cookery recipes under another name. And she had never mentioned them to Prender or any of the rest of their little group.

Jim Brent looked at the two downcast faces. That was just like women, he thought, to have imaginary troubles if they couldn’t find real ones. He said, quite frankly, “I don’t understand it. Why hide what you’ve done, Mrs. Peel? If it is these literary friends you are afraid of, then what kind of friends are they?”

His question certainly had results, for they stopped looking so gloomy, and they stared at each other for a moment. Miss Bly even laughed.

Mrs. Peel said, “We told you all this, Mr. Brent, because you ought to know what we are and who we are. Of course, you will want references. Would my publisher be sufficient? There’s our lawyer too.”

“Just a minute,” Jim Brent said, conscious that Mrs. Peel had passed mysteriously from the romantic mood to the realistic. “Just a minute, Mrs. Peel... We’re going ahead pretty fast.”

“But we have to,” Miss Bly told him earnestly, and gave him one of her warmest smiles. “We shan’t see you tomorrow morning, and when we leave—well, we’ve gone for good, haven’t we? And this idea of ours would be lost forever. Which would be a pity for it might benefit us all.”

“All of us?” he asked, his eyes smiling. “I’m thinking of you two,” he explained. “Do you know the writers personally?”

“No,” Sarah Bly admitted. “All we are interested in, frankly, is the fact that they are unknown writers. They haven’t been published yet.”

“Mr. Atherton Jones knows them,” Mrs. Peel said. “He had planned a summer group for August of very promising but quite unknown writers. He rented a delightful old farm, built in pre-Revolutionary days, in New England. We heard from him, only a week or so ago, that he is in a fearful quandary because all the group is arranged but the house has begun to fall down. It has just been condemned as unsuitable for human habitation. He doesn’t know what to do. Here’s the group of writers all ready for August, and there’s the houses—”

“Falling down,” Brent said. “Seems to me he has a better eye for historical architecture than he has for simple foundations. It also seems to me that he must have made some money out of literature, too. That kind of idea costs money. So if I were you, Mrs. Peel, I wouldn’t worry too much about that book of yours.”

“No, he hasn’t made money,” Mrs. Peel said quickly.

“He hasn’t exactly starved, either,” Sarah Bly said.

“That’s because he has been lecturing ever since he came back to America, Sarah. And you know how he hates it. Actually, Mr. Brent, he was arranging his summer group on a very business-like basis, but without any profits at all. The writers were to pay fees, and that would cover living expenses as well as the cost of the lectures that Mr. Atherton Jones’s friends were going to give about the art of writing. But
no
profits. He made that quite clear to us all.”

“Will you charge fees?” Brent asked.

“No. Fares out to Wyoming will be a big enough item.”

“We don’t want fees, and we don’t want lecturers,” Sarah Bly said. “We don’t see it that way.”

“The writers will merely be our guests, and I assure you that writers make very quiet, delightful guests. Have no fear of that, Mr. Brent.”

“If they aren’t,” Sarah Bly said, “we’ll put phenobarbital in their coffee.”

“They will,” Mrs. Peel continued, silencing Sarah with a shake of her head, “not trouble you at all, Mr. Brent. Or the ranch.”

“Mrs. Peel,” Jim Brent said, “I don’t think I’ve made up my mind just yet.”

“Of course, you must have time to think about it,” Mrs. Peel murmured. “But if you did think about it, what kind of price would you ask?”

“About fifty thousand dollars, I guess.” They’d never meet that. It was as polite a way of refusing as any.

“For everything?” Mrs. Peel was amazed. “Furniture, guesthouse, and everything?”

“It’s worth much more,” Sarah Bly said. “I’m sure it is.”

“It’s isolated,” he replied. “And it is expensive to operate. You’ll need extra help, unless you’re willing to do a lot of work yourselves. And there’s Mrs. Gunn—she may not like this idea. She’s made her home here for years.”

“We couldn’t do without Mrs. Gunn, either,” Mrs. Peel said quickly. “I do hope she approved of us.”

A sudden thought struck him. “Did you ask her to arrange this dinner here tonight?”

“Good gracious, no!” Mrs. Peel said, with such vehemence that there was no disbelieving her.

“Then she probably approves,” he said. He began to understand why Ma Gunn hadn’t disturbed them to clear the coffee-cups away.

“You will let us have the house?” Miss Bly was asking.

“At that price? Isn’t that a lot?” He was amazed in turn. The house and grounds were well worth fifty thousand dollars. But he had expected some Eastern haggling. Whenever you had to sell anything you were always told that the market was poor and you would be lucky to get half the value. When you had to buy it was peculiar how high the market value had suddenly become.

Mrs. Peel and Miss Bly looked at each other.

“I’ll take it,” Mrs. Peel said, as if she had been born and raised in the West.

“I’ll think it over,” he said.

Sarah Bly ended the discussion by saying, “You know, during the last ten minutes I began to wonder whether
you
were buying the house and we were trying to sell it!” He smiled then.

They said good night in the hall, and he waited at the foot of the stairs until they reached the landing. Then he turned away, picked up his wide-brimmed felt hat from the hall chest, pulled it well down over his forehead, and left the house without another glance around it. But as he entered the strip of cottonwood-trees to reach the bridge and the road to his cabin he halted. He looked back at the house. It lay in darkness, except for the dim candlelight in the guest-room.

It was a house where he had been happy, but that was a long time ago. It was too large, built for a family and their friends. A man living alone there would feel he was a relic as much as the house.

He turned away, walking confidently in the dark along the twisting path and over the bridge, knowing each rut in the road, every jutting branch. He might as well be as frank as these two women had been. He needed the money. If the choice had to be between selling valuable acres and selling the house it would have to be the house. A house didn’t provide grazing land for cattle, and without cattle the ranch would close down. Then why hadn’t he agreed at once to sell the house? Perhaps because it was a problem he had postponed for many months. He resented its being solved so quickly. Then he entered his cabin, kicked aside the clothes he had thrown on the floor earlier that evening, lit the oil-lamp, and, as he threw his hat up on to the antlers above the door, he wondered irritably how the devil he had ever got into this evening’s predicament.

* * *

In the guest-room Mrs. Peel stood near the blazing fire and watched it thoughtfully. All the talk downstairs about Paris had recalled memories she wanted to forget.

“What’s wrong, Margaret?” Sarah asked. “Regretting your buying impulse?”

Mrs. Peel shook her head. “I was thinking of Paris. Of Marie and Charles.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Marie and Charles...well, aren’t they Communists?”

“That,” Mrs. Peel said angrily, “may be an explanation, but it is certainly not an excuse for their conduct. Just think what they have done with our printing-press! Ours, mark you!”

Sarah nodded. That had been very hard to take. When Margaret and she had left Paris in 1942 their printing-press had been put in charge of Marie and Charles. Once peace came they had begun publishing the little magazine which, in pre-War days, had been Margaret’s pride.

“Look how they’ve changed our magazine!” Mrs. Peel rushed on. “Everything is slanted politically. Why, they won’t even review a book on its literary merits. If the author is a Communist he gets a good review. If he isn’t he is either damned with a twisted phrase or he gets no review at all.” She stopped, partly out of indignation, partly out of breath.

“He doesn’t need to be against Communism,” Sarah reminded her. “He only needs to approve of something that Marie and Charles have been told they must play down, and he gets the treatment. Think of André Mercier... Look at the way they bludgeoned him when he wrote a book about the early days of the Resistance. Underground movements, according to Marie, just didn’t exist until the twenty-second of June 1941. And after then they were good Undergrounds only if they were run by Marie’s political friends: all the other Resistance movements were organised by people in the pay of Fascists.”

Mrs. Peel said nothing. But there was a flush of anger on her usually pale cheeks.

Sarah Bly said slowly, “Perhaps we ought to have stayed and fought Marie’s claim to our printing-press.”

“As Americans? Just think what she would have made of that. No, Sarah. And I wasn’t going to stay and see our magazine perverted.”

There was a short silence.

Sarah moved away from the hearth. “Let’s change this subject,” she said, “or else we’ll lie awake all night worrying. What’s done can’t be undone.” She began to cream her skin in front of the mirror. She took more trouble with it tonight than usual. “How old do you think Jim Brent is?” she asked, keeping her voice casual. She studied her face in the glass. No wrinkles yet, she thought thankfully.

“About forty, I suppose. I like his eyes. A nice warm grey. But sad and thoughtful. Of course, he has his worries. Doesn’t he ever laugh, though? And how thin all those men are! And tanned, except for the white brows... those hats, of course.” Her voice grew more cheerful as she talked, if only to please Sarah. And somehow, thinking of the house and the ranch and people like Jim Brent, she became more cheerful.

“I’m going to visit a hairdresser in New York,” Sarah announced suddenly. “You won’t recognise me when I return here!”

Mrs. Peel stared at her friend. “You’ll be too busy in New York explaining to the lawyers that we haven’t lost our minds. Mr. Quick would really like me to die and leave all my money intact to cat and dog homes. Much pleasure that would give me under six feet of earth! I’ll telegraph Prender Atherton Jones tomorrow and get him to send you a list of his stranded writers. Do you think he will be annoyed with us for not consulting him first? He does like to manage things.”

“My dear, why do you think he wrote you about his tumbling-down house? He wanted your help. And he has got it.”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Peel said, in disappointment. Really, Prender could be quite feline at times.

“I’ll get a ’plane from the airport at Sweetwater,” Sarah was saying, as she climbed into bed. “I’ll be back here in five days with everything organised. Margaret, do you think you can manage things here? There is so much to be planned. We have only six weeks until August.”

“Get to sleep!” Mrs. Peel said, much in the same voice as she had said, “I’ll take it.” She had no doubts at all about the future. It must be this air, she thought, as she obeyed her own command.

In a place where newspapers arrived late and radio reception was temperamental the news about Rest and be Thankful spread as fast as a forest fire. The town of Sweetwater (population 853, except on Saturdays, when it reached 1200 or more) felt itself to be implicated in the change. There the reaction was swift and varied.

“Better lay in a big stock of fancy shirts,” Mrs. Dan Givings warned her husband, who owned the Western General Emporium. “And some beaded moccasins and Navaho rugs and silk rodeo ties and postcards and frontier pants.” Dan thought they’d better wait a bit: women always seized on any excuse to spend money. “That’s just it,” his wife said. “They’ll be women among these visitors. And if we don’t sell the stuff this year we can sell it next year. These dudes never know what they want to buy unless they see it. Give ’em plenty to see.” So the Western General increased its stock, and Mrs. Givings changed the windows from Christmas Gifts to something real fancy.

The B Q Bar put up a new neon sign, added three new slot machines with the jackpot tantalisingly full of silver, and ordered an extra shipment of Sheridan Export beer. The Teton Bar, not to be outshone, put up two neon signs. It also added six slot machines to supplement its crap table and black jack. The Foot Rail and the Purple Rim, having their own steady Saturday trade, contented themselves with repainting their names.

Reverend Teesdale, of the Methodist United, suggested a Welcome-to-Sweetwater Social. Reverend Buell, of the Evangelical Lutheran, wondered if he should call, as Father O’Healey, over at Three Springs, certainly would.

Bill’s Drug Store rewrote its menus, and ordered films, Kleenex, and sun-tan lotion. Upstairs its Zenith Beauty Shop put up new curtains across its two booths and added oil shampoos to its repertoire. But Mrs. Bill drew the line—even for Easterners who spent money so wildly—at facials. “If they’re as crazy as that let ’em go to Yellowstone and jump in the mud volcano,” she said.