Rest and Be Thankful

  * * *

  Downstairs Dr. Clark found it good to rest for half an hour by the fire, enjoying a sandwich and coffee before he started the bleak drive down to Sweetwater. Jim Brent was looking well, he was glad to see, and the rest of the writers were more normal than he had expected from that screwball on the landing. They were a nice crowd, talkative and friendly enough. There was an important-looking man with a noble head and a good pair of hands, who seemed to be the host. He was making a fancy little speech about the fine life of a country doctor on his errands of mercy.

  But as Dr. Clark stretched his sodden boots towards the fire, and remembered the child who had died of tetanus that afternoon, he was inclined to be less moved than his host was by the spiritual rewards. They must be very great, he was assured earnestly.

  Before he finished the second sandwich the telephone rang. The doctor was on his feet at once, his bag in his hand. “Tell them I’m coming straight over,” he called to Mrs. Gunn, who had hurried into the hall to answer the ’phone. “Good night, all.”

  Spiritual rewards, he thought, as he ploughed through the muddy yard with Jim towards his car. That kid with tetanus...

  “Good night, Jim. Keep well!” he said, and drove carefully down the black, slick road.

  18

  GOOD NEWS AND BAD

  After a week Sally was downstairs suffering mostly from tight bandages. By that time everyone had got accustomed to the idea that accidents do happen, and the household had stepped back into its ordinary routine again.

  “An invalid’s only interesting when he’s about to die,” Mrs. Gunn said shrewdly. She had brought Miss Bly a morning cup of broth, and found her alone in the little sun-porch off the sitting-room, reading through a pile of paper sheets, tattered and dog-eared. “But I’m glad to see you sitting still for a change. I’ve brought you the weekly bad news too.” She laid a collection of bills beside the manuscript on the table at Sally’s elbow.

  “Mr. O’Farlan’s book,” Sally explained.

  “My, and isn’t there a lot of it? And now it will be published!”

  “We hope so,” Sally said, with a smile. “It’s good; it’s very good.” She was as delighted as Mrs. Gunn, and a little surprised. Just wait, she thought, until Prender reads this. “But Mr. O’Farlan has a lot of work before him yet.”

  Mrs. Gunn looked puzzled, so Sally told her about editing and polishing, about proof-correcting twice over until you got to know every misplaced comma by sight.

  “Why, there’s more work to it than I thought,” Mrs. Gunn admitted. “It’s not all just a matter of sitting down and letting your ideas run away with you! Many’s the time I thought I’d like to write a book, but”—she glanced at the pile of manuscript doubtfully—“if I were Mr. O’Farlan, I think I’d have made it a small book. Not so much trouble, I’m thinking. Now drink up the broth before it gets cold, Miss Bly.”

  “You’re a strange one to be talking about avoiding trouble.” Sally sipped the cup of broth dutifully, looked at the bills on the table beside her, and frowned. One of the envelopes, long and business-like, was from Lawyer Quick in New York. What words of warning was he giving them this time?

  Mrs. Gunn gathered up some petals, fallen from the mariposa lilies in the vase on the table. “Now don’t let these bills go worrying you. And I do try to keep them down. But it is a multitude to feed and provide for, and they do like their food and all their etceteras.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the bills so much. I was thinking of Mr. Quick, our lawyer.” Sally laid down the cup, and picked up his letter. She looked at it with distaste. “He takes such a gloomy view of everything. If only he would write once to say the world wasn’t going to pieces and us along with it!” She looked down at the letter, then at the other envelopes: yes, all bills. She tried not to seem worried.

  “It’s the etceteras,” Mrs. Gunn said. “I was the youngest in a family of ten, and all of us alive if it hadn’t been for the War—the first one, that is. We had one dinner a day, plenty of gravy to make the meat spin out, plenty of potatoes to fill up the gaps. But it’s not that way with city folks. Gravy is fattening, potatoes is fattening. So they’ve got to be filled up on other things. And Mr. Atherton Jones leaves all the pie-crust on his plate—just eats the filling—and then thinks he’d like a bit of that Camembert to end with. Never seems to think that if he ate the pie-crust he wouldn’t have room for the Camembert. And isn’t cheese as fattening too?”

  “But he’s very fond of it, so he forgets that. I’m glad that they at least enjoy their food here.”

  “They certainly do,” Mrs. Gunn said, with some pride. Then she added quickly, “Don’t get me wrong, Miss Bly. If I’m cooking I’m cooking. It takes just as long to make a good dishful of white fluffy potatoes as it takes to cook asparagus or mushrooms. But there’s a heap of difference in the cost. That’s what worries me.”

  “We’ll manage. Guests are guests, after all. We can start economising in September.” She smiled up at Mrs. Gunn.

  “Well,” Mrs. Gunn said slowly, “a giving hand is always getting, they say.” But she shook her head as she scattered the petals into the cup’s saucer, and gathered it all up to take into the kitchen. “They don’t last long, do they? Mrs. Peel put these lilies in that vase only yesterday. That’s what I always say when I get worried: nothing lasts forever. Not even troubles.”

  She glanced over her shoulder as she closed the door. Miss Bly was looking at the letter again. She wanted to tell her, “Open it. It may be good news this time.” But she had said more than enough already. It was strange, when she spoke about city folks, that she kept forgetting Miss Bly and Mrs. Peel were Easterners too. Not that she disliked city folks. When you got to know them they were just like any other folks in most things. But they did take a lot for granted. Perhaps if they had to grow their own food, and kill their meat and dress it and keep it, they might eat anything that was nicely cooked for them.

  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 i
t. 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 sa
id.

  “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?”