“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!”
“That’s much too broad a charge,” Prender said. “I agree about some of those lecturers we’ve had over here, but—”
“Let me give you the proof of it,” Sally said. “People anywhere don’t like a Government that leaves them with less than they had. And I am not talking about freedom or any other spiritual blessing. I am talking about money, jobs, food, clothes, and all the other material blessings that make life comfortable for us. Take them away from us, and then listen to our complaints!”
Prender stared at her.
“So,” she finished equably, “you’d have to live with as few demands as a Yogi or a Wandering Scholar if you really wanted to avoid being a materialist.” And she looked at him.
“Why, Prender,” Mrs. Peel said delightedly, “there’s a real crusade for you to have in your new magazine!”
“What?”
“A crusade against hypocrisy. That would cover so much ground—the arts, politics, religion. And it would be so international too. Down with rationalisation! Make the world fit for honest men to live in!”
Prender Atherton Jones looked down at her thoughtfully. He hadn’t taken a chair, but had remained standing with one elbow resting on the mantelpiece, and his feet astride on the stone hearth. This added yet another inch to his Olympian height.
“Now, Margaret,” he said reprovingly, “I am editing a little magazine, not an encyclopaedia.” And there was no need for her to be so damned facetious, either. He kicked the last log until it broke into two charred ends and fell in a shower of sparks. “You have changed, you know. In the old days you were quite different.”
“So were the old days,” Sally said, and rose to find some more logs. They were stacked outside in the kitchen yard, which was something Prender knew as well as she did.
But Prender went on with his own thoughts. Only ten minutes ago he had placed the manuscript on the mantelpiece and thought, now this might be the time to talk to Margaret. Instead of a pleasant discussion on the state of unmarried loneliness, the need for intelligent companionship, there had been an argument which had got completely out of hand. And there would be no more opportunity to talk to Margaret tonight. Sally would bring in some more logs soon. There was no peace, no privacy at all.
He was so obviously disturbed, even worried, that Mrs. Peel tried to cheer him up. As Sally returned with two small logs (she had to be careful about her cracked ribs, even if they were mending nicely), Mrs. Peel said, “Prender, here’s one thing that will really amuse you. About the old days. Did you ever know I was in love with you? Of course, most of the women were. I was absolutely crushed when you married two of my friends, one after the other, and never even looked at me in between.”
He pretended to join in her laughter, as he would have done a few years ago. He was looking at her coldly, even as he smiled at such amusing nonsense. For she would never have told him this, in front of Sally, if she still had the remotest feeling for him. She would certainly never have made a joke about it. Thank God, he hadn’t proposed ten minutes ago. Thank God! For his proposal would certainly have appealed to Margaret’s peculiar sense of humour. There was nothing so infuriating as proposing to a woman and seeing her try to disguise her laughter. Ah, well, he thought, Margaret is certainly not in the state of mind to finance my magazine; that’s obvious. It was fortunate that he had not been exactly rude, even if he had been firm towards Esther Park.
Sally could only stare at Margaret.
“I must say you hid it remarkably well,” Prender said. “Now if I had known!” He smiled jokingly.
“Of course I hid it,” Mrs. Peel said. “I was so scared of you. You were the oracle, and I was just a very minor acolyte. Besides, a widow with money wasn’t the kind of thing that attracted you. Remember how you used to hate money? The source of all hideous good, you called it. But I guess I never attracted you, anyway, for even when I was poor you never noticed me very much. Instead you married a poetess who wrote free verse which never earned a penny.”
And after that, Sally thought, a woman playwright who had two artistic flops and three money successes. Getting the best of both worlds, that was...a sort of half-way house. She looked bitterly at Atherton Jones. So that was why Margaret was so crushed and humiliated when he wrote scathingly about The Lady in White Gloves. That was why Margaret had insisted on remaining the anonymous Elizabeth Whiffleton, had never written another book.
“And I never even guessed,” Sally said slowly.
“Well,” Atherton Jones said, “those were the old days. Gone altogether?” He asked the question with a humorous smile which would have made Margaret Peel quite breathless even ten years ago.
“Quite gone,” she said, and laughed gaily.
He must go and talk to O’Farlan about the book, Prender said.
* * *
Mrs. Gunn brought some more logs into the living-room, shaking her head over Norah’s forgetfulness. She was getting as bad as Drene these days.
Mrs. Peel thanked her. “Now do sit down and tell us what’s happening. We depend on you for news, you know. How’s the new set of twins over at the Double Bee Emm Ranch? And will Bill Jonson’s leg be all right to let him enter for the rodeo?”
Mrs. Gunn sat down. But she came straight to her own problem. “I think Norah ought to leave, Mrs. Peel. She’s got to get back home to Three Springs, anyway, to pack her books and clothes for college. She may as well leave now as a week later.”
“But—”
“I’m not interfering,” Mrs. Gunn said stoutly, having heard Mrs. Peel’s opinion of Norah and Earl Grubbock only that morning. “I’m just preventing. She’s in a worse state this week than she was last week, and worse that week than she was the week before. Give her one more we
ek here, and she’ll be going back to school all upset. That’s the trouble with girls. They take love so seriously.”
“So do some men, I think,” Mrs. Peel said.
Sally said nothing.
“Well, I’ve no way of judging that,” Mrs. Gunn replied. “I don’t notice Earl Grubbock going off his food or forgetting to do his work.”
“I’m sorry,” Sally said. “We seem to have added to your troubles this summer.”
“You’ve had plenty yourself. Tell me, Miss Bly, when you used to have house-parties in those foreign places, did you have worries like this?” She shook her head as she looked at them, thinking that some people never learned.
“We seemed to be all more casual about things, somehow,” Sally said.
“How?”
Mrs. Peel tried to answer this time. “Well, some of our guests did fall in love; and were unhappy; and got drunk; and misbehaved with the pretty girls in town; and once”—she remembered that what she was about to say would certainly horrify Mrs. Gunn, for it even horrified herself now in retrospect—“well,” she finished lamely, “people did behave very badly at times, I suppose. But the rest of us just seemed to pretend we didn’t notice.”
“And what,” Mrs. Gunn wanted to know, “happened in the end to the girls in the town? But maybe that wasn’t important?”
Sally was no longer smiling. She looked at Mrs. Peel. “I think you’ve got something there,” Mrs. Peel said. “I suppose no action is completed until all the consequences can be counted too.”
Mrs. Gunn stared at the fire. “I don’t want to be unfair. But if he’s as much in love with her as she thinks he is, then he’ll up and follow her to Three Springs. That’s better than her following him to New York, pretending it’s a job she is after.”
“How will you get Norah to leave?” Mrs. Peel asked.
“I’m hoping you’ll tell her you are cutting down on help.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Peel said.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” Mrs. Gunn said, rising to her feet and looking more cheerful. “Now I’ve got to go back to the kitchen. Chuck and Jackson are coming down to pay me a visit tonight.”
“I wonder how the others are getting along,” Sally said, thinking of Jim Brent.
“Oh, they’re up there somewheres,” Mrs. Gunn said, with a smile, sweeping her arm in a general westward direction beyond the fireplace. “It’ll be cold. I told Mr. Grubbock and Mr. Koffing to take plenty of clothes with them.”
“So did I,” Sally said. They looked at each other and began to laugh.
“Well, if they didn’t, they’ll learn. That’s why they went along on this trip, you know.”
“Was this the plan?” Mrs. Peel asked, with sudden interest.
Mrs. Gunn looked puzzled.
“You told me that Jim and the boys would take care of Karl and Earl. Remember I got worried?”
“Jim thought the trip might be the best answer to all their arguments,” Mrs. Gunn said. “Kind of wore him down having to explain so much. But I guess,” she added cheerfully, “if I visited New York I’d be just as stupid about its ways.”
“I do hope nothing out of the ordinary will happen to them,” Mrs. Peel said, remembering the cowboys’ strong, if silent and unexpected, sense of humour.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mrs. Gunn assured her. “That’s why Jim didn’t want Mr. Koffing to be riding a difficult horse—that would have added to his troubles. He and Mr. Grubbock will just have a short trip into the mountains and see all about an eight-hour day, up there, for themselves.”
Mrs. Peel, brooding over an afterthought, went towards the kitchen to get some more reassuring information from Mrs. Gunn, but Chuck and Jackson were already there and enjoying themselves too much to be disturbed. As Mrs. Peel hesitated for a moment in the pantry Chuck’s voice halted her completely. He was talking in his slow, deliberate way.
“...and they’ll be figuring the lay of the land, just so’s they’ll make a fair count of them twenty-four acres that’s coming my way when they get it all parcelled out. I’m kind of worried about them twenty-four acres. Are they standing up, or laying down, or just kind of leaning tilt-wise?”
At that point Mrs. Peel shed all guilt over eavesdropping, and stood listening with a spreading smile on her face.
“What if they tell me that’s my share, and it turns out to be a canyon wall? Could be. We’ve canyons to spare. Some fellow is going to be caught with one. What’d my one and a fifth steer do then? Perhaps they’ve got that taken care of, though, along with all them other improvements. Always did need a new breed of steer in Wyoming that could hang on with its horns. Guess I can manage to round up one cow without too much trouble, but that fifth of a steer—that’s another thing that is bothering me. Haven’t slept a night ever since I hear of it, trying to figure out a way. Could be me and four other fellows just leave it intact, let it graze in turn on our parcels of land. Could be we’d be saving us a heap of trouble if we just killed it and stopped counting, and had it for meat in the winter. Sure hope I don’t get the neck end. Now there’s another problem. If five fellows divide up a steer the one whose luck with the dice is running low is going to be left hanging on to a tail. And...”
But Mrs. Peel had left. The sound of laughter from the kitchen had been too infectious. Even Norah was laughing. And Jackson had the most amazing basso profundo.”
She went into the library to get herself a book.
She walked slowly along the bookshelves. Dickens. That’s how she felt tonight, she thought. Perhaps Our Mutual Friend, with Mr. Boffin being mesmerised by the decline and fall of the Rooshan Empire.
Then she stood very still, staring at the shelf. “What on earth...” she said aloud. She picked out the tattered, torn, and all forlorn copy of Elizabeth Whiffleton’s The Lady in White Gloves.
* * *
In the living-room Esther Park had returned to talk about her family’s place on Shenquetucket Island to Sally. Rescue me, Sally seemed to be saying, as she turned to look at Mrs. Peel.
“Sally, I’d like to see you. Will you come into the sitting-room?”
Sally rose at once and followed her. She closed the sitting-room door and locked it. “Thank you, Margaret. I’ll do the same for you some day. She began by saying she had a cold just as bad as Mimi’s. But when I offered to take her temperature she switched to a long account of her family. My trouble is that I never look at the Social Register, so I wasn’t impressed. Poor Esther, what will she try next?”
“Sally, look at this!” She held out a book. “Dewey knows.”
“Dewey Schmetterling knows what?” Sally took the book. Her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said, and then read the inscription. “Dewey’s last word. We might have guessed.”
Mrs. Peel didn’t seem so upset. She said, “I’m glad. I’ve begun to feel guilty about Elizabeth Whiffleton. I’ve treated her shabbily. In fact, I nearly told Prender about her this evening when I was admitting I had once been a bit of an intellectual snob. You didn’t hear that? I wish you had. I’ve been wanting to say something like that to Prender ever since I went to some of his dreary parties in New York last winter. Heavens, they were dreary... Not one decent, heart-warming laugh all evening. Just people taking themselves much too seriously, or taking others too seriously. I begin to think that we’d all be saner if we’d argue the way Chuck does. Theories have got to be good to win over that kind of hard-riding logic.”
“Darling...” Sally said, wondering if Margaret were slightly hysterical.
“You know, Sally, this is all really very funny. I’ve been thinking for some weeks about identifying poor Elizabeth Whiffleton. I’ve been making up my mind to write my agent, and to tell her to go ahead and release the truth. Meanwhile Dewey is enjoying himself, imagining how upset I’ll be when I know that he has found out. He thinks I’ll be crushed, that he can always hold Elizabeth Whiffleton over me as a kind of threat. And he feels very superior because he knows the trut
h, and no one else does.”
“Yes, Dewey would enjoy all that. He could have a lot of fun out of it in his own little way.” Sally imagined how he’d steer the conversation when he’d meet Margaret at parties; the clever innuendoes, the knowing smile, the constant threat of revelation. He would take care to meet Margaret again, of course. Or else, to avoid him, she would find herself living in the middle of the Arizona desert.
“But if there is one thing that gives me real pleasure it is to disappoint Mr. Dewey Schmetterling. So here’s my decision in the form of a telegram. I was coming to it, anyway. Dewey just hastened it, that’s all.”
Then she looked down at the sheet of paper which lay on her writing-table. “How’s this?” she asked. “‘Elizabeth Whiffleton no longer anonymous. Dewey Schmetterling made an honest woman out of her. Writing. Love, Kisses, and Remorse, Margaret.’ Sally, would you be an angel and cope with the telephone exchange in Sweetwater for me? Get Miss Snodgrass to send this telegram to my agent.”
“I’m so glad, Margaret,” Sally said. “You do mean this?”
“When I make up my mind I make up my mind. As you ought to know by this time, darling.”
Sally picked up the telegram.
“It will be a relief to poor Elizabeth,” Mrs. Peel said. “She may even find she enjoys writing now.”
“How’s the historical novel about Idaho coming along?”
“Not very well. Elizabeth seems rather against it, somehow.”
Sally laughed and kissed her friend suddenly.
“Demonstrative tonight, aren’t we?” But Mrs. Peel smiled happily.
“I’m just so glad,” Sally said, and she hurried into the hall towards the telephone.
By the time she returned to the sitting-room she found Mrs. Peel almost at the end of the first chapter of The Lady in White Gloves.