But Mimi waited. “I’m still recovering from the wild-horse race,” she told him. “Karl, you should have entered for that.”
“On which side?” Robert O’Farlan asked, with a grin.
Mrs. Peel thought how extraordinarily sympathetic Mimi had become. After steer-riding, calf-roping, saddle-bronc riding, calf-roping, ladies’ horse race, Indian relay race, bare-back-bronc riding, calf-roping, kids’ pony race, bulldogging, calf-roping, pony express race, sheep-catching contest, calf-roping, half-mile race, cow-cutting contest, the wild-horse race had her roped and blindfolded. “I know just how these wild horses felt,” she murmured. “Especially the ones that ran the wrong way when they were saddled and mounted, and the blindfold was removed.”
“Some are still running,” Robert O’Farlan said, trying to see into the far distance. “What do their riders do eventually? Make their way back on foot from the mountains?”
“Yellowstone by Christmas,” Carla said, and laughed. She had adopted Chuck’s catch-phrase, and found it constantly useful. Then, as Jim Brent came riding up at last to them (he had stopped to talk with five different sets of wranglers and their wives, Mimi noticed), Carla said, “Jim, it was wonderful!” Both Mimi and Sally let her do the talking, about Ned, about Bert (who had done well, although he had won nothing), about the Indian cowboys who had ridden Brahma bulls as if they had been buffaloes.
“Glad you enjoyed it,” Jim managed to say at last.
Mrs. Peel said, “To be frank, we are sitting here recovering. At least I am; and the others feel guilty about leaving me. But I’m feeling guilty too, because I want to go home and Sally insists she is taking me there.”
“Well,” Mimi said, suddenly quite recovered, “let’s all go into Sweetwater and have dinner. And then those who are staying for the dance, stay. What’s the dance like, Jim?”
“Just a little shindig,” he said, with a grin.
“Jim Brent, you are the most annoying man,” Mimi declared, with a warm smile.
“You’ll see for yourself. I guess you’ll have a good time. Just don’t get lost, that’s all.”
Robert O’Farlan said, “We’ll see the girls safely back to Rest and be Thankful.”
“Aren’t you going to the dance, Jim?” Mimi asked.
“No. I’ll drive Sally and Mrs. Peel back to the ranch, if they don’t mind being in a car with a horse-trailer behind it. The rest of you can borrow Mrs. Peel’s car for the ride home. It will be more comfortable than the truck you arrived in.” Then he looked at Sally. “See you at the car.”
She nodded. “Yes, Jim,” she said, trying to keep the happiness out of her voice. Her eyes smiled too. He touched his hat, shortened the reins, turned his horse round neatly, and rode off.
“He’s so—so definite,” Carla said. “And how beautifully he rides.”
Karl was watching the horseman. “Yes,” he said.
“They all do,” Mimi said, and rose abruptly to her feet. She seemed more interested in three Indian women, surrounded by their children, who were moving with slow, silent footsteps from their seats. Like all squaws, they were short, broad, massive under the bright enveloping shawls that hid their dresses. Their skirts were short, ending just below the knees. And their legs were encased, stiffly, thickly, in tight white buckskin leggings; their feet were neat and small, gloved like a dancer’s. Their straight black hair was braided. Their rich black eyes were slanting. This season’s crop of babies was carried in their arms. They grasped the babies with one arm crooked round the small waists, holding them vertical, keeping them face-out. Their other children, the girls in white buckskin tunics embroidered with beads and dyed porcupine quills, the boys in small cowboy suits, followed them like a straggling convoy, with faces that— laughing or crying—were stickied over with candy, lime-pop, and sniffles.
Then a voice from the judges’ stand halted everyone as it came over the loudspeaker, blurred at first and then clear. The same voice had announced various pieces of advice at intervals through the long afternoon, whether it was to tell them all to stand up and put their weight on their feet for a change or to encourage a rider—“That boy had bad luck. Give him a hand, folks.” Now the pleasant, deep-voiced drawl stopped the moving crowd. The heads all turned, not to the loudspeaker overhead, but to the invisible man in the distant box. “You’ll be right glad to hear that the boy who’s in hospital is doing all right. Doc Clark has just sent word to us here that Russ Murray is okay. He’ll be up and around in a few weeks. And Jep Jonson, who had a little bit of trouble with his Brahma bull, has got no worse than a couple of ribs and an arm broken. He’s right here with me now. Says he’s a refugee from an ambulance. Well, that’s all. You can go out and enjoy yourselves now. Thought you’d kind of feel better if you heard.”
And the thousand and more who had stopped to listen in silence began talking, began moving out more quickly. The sound of their voices proved they did feel kind of better. And Robert O’Farlan, watching their faces, was sure that they’d enjoy themselves better too.
He looked back at the judges’ box. “You know,” he said quietly, “I liked that. Sort of a climax to the whole show, somehow. Can’t explain it exactly, but...” He shook his head and followed the others, with a very silent Mimi close beside him.
* * *
In Main Street all the shops were open again, and the drugstore and cafeteria and the Elk Café were filled to overflowing. The Purple Rim and the Foot Rail were ablaze with lights and bursting with noise. The Teton Bar had its new neon sign—a cow with green hoofs and a long, dry tongue hanging out—in flashing display. The sidewalks were crowded with discussion groups exchanging news or analysing the rodeo. Horses were tethered to the hitching-rails, and the little coloured lights round the banners and signs had all been turned on. Hundreds of parked cars not only crowded the side-roads, but even edged out the horses on Main Street.
Jim drove carefully, watching out for children and dogs. Sally sat beside him, and Mrs. Peel was comfortably fitted into the back seat between a coil of rope, a new lampshade, chaps, half a sack of flour, half a dozen cartons of cigarettes, a new ledger, beer, three detective stories, a heap of magazines, and a set of records. Bachelor shopping, Mrs. Peel thought. She picked up one of the books and found it interesting enough to start reading.
Jim braked suddenly, and swore under his breath at a daring wrangler who didn’t believe in traffic lights. “Sorry,” he said. “Nearly had him. But this is the only way out of town for us.”
Sally, recovering herself from the jolt, looked round. Mrs. Peel had saved the lampshade, and everything else was so tightly packed that it hadn’t been damaged. Then Sally looked at the trailer behind the car. But the horse was all right too. In fact, Ginger seemed rather to be enjoying his triumphal progress through Main Street, jolts and stops and starts and all. He had even stuck his head out, at the side of the windscreen on the trailer, to get a better view.
“He likes the big city,” Jim said. “He and the children in the cars.”
Then Sally noticed that all the parked cars were filled with people, farm hands, small homesteaders from lonely cabins, all with their wives and children. They sat in silence, just looking, and the children’s eyes were round and wondering. As Jim slowed the car again to avoid a stream of jay-walkers she looked into the back of one of the parked cars. The three little fair-haired boys didn’t notice her at first. When they did she gave them a smile. They drew back tense, ready for flight. Then the oldest boy gave a small shy smile, and bent quickly down to hide his temerity. When she looked back again they had forgotten about her. All they saw was the town.
“A lot of people must have lonely lives,” she said. “Yet they look happy people.” They were healthy, neatly dressed, and their faces, quiet and watchful, were friendly faces.
“I guess they’re thinking it’s a nice place to visit, but they wouldn’t like to live here,” Jim said, with a grin.
Sally looked at him. “Do you know New York
?” she asked, in surprise. Then she wished she hadn’t asked. His face had tightened.
“Sure,” he said at last. “That was where I met my wife.”
“Was it?”
“You knew I was married?”
“Mimi told me,” Sally’s even voice said. There were so many gaps in our lives, in his and in mine, she thought, that we don’t know about. Once I didn’t think they mattered. But they do. They belong to the past, and the past is over, and yet their shadow falls coldly over the present. She pretended to look behind the car at the trailer. Now that they had climbed the hill out of Sweetwater they were starting to twist and turn up to Stoneyway Valley. Margaret, she noted, was asleep or pretending to be asleep.
“He’s all right,” Jim said, looking at the trailer too for a moment, and then concentrating on the road. “He’s travelled to California with me in that contraption. He seems to enjoy it.”
“You get around,” Sally said. Shadows, she was thinking, were never so cold and terrifying once she knew what caused them; but would she ever know, or would he? We come so near to explaining them, and then we don’t; and we can’t ignore them either. What was part of our past is still part of us now.
“Used to.”
“You sound settled now,” she said, trying to keep her voice as casual as his.
“I am.” He was wondering when Mimi had told Sally about his wife. Probably only in these last few days. And that explained something that had worried him; it seemed recently as if Sally were farther away from him. Instead of getting to know her better he had got to know her less. He had thought that was perhaps the way she had wanted it. Perhaps. A wife hadn’t seemed to make much difference to Mimi. But to Sally? That proved something about Sally, and he liked what it proved.
The silence embarrassed Sally. “Robb,” she said suddenly, “Robb wasn’t at the parade or at the rodeo.”
“He stayed in charge of the ranch. Said he had some work to do. I’ll take over when we get back, and he can get into Sweetwater for the dance.”
“Oh.” So that was why Jim hadn’t waited for the dance. You hope too much, she told herself; that’s why you always get disappointed. She said, “Then come over and have dinner with us, if you’ll trust my cooking. Mrs. Gunn is staying overnight with her friends in Sweetwater. You know, I think she is beginning to approve of Earl Grubbock. At least, there were plenty of other pretty girls around today, and he didn’t bother about them at all. I’m glad, for Margaret and I were aiding and abetting him, you know.”
“Can’t he make up his own mind?”
“He is beginning to, I think. I suppose he suddenly realised he was never going to meet Norah again unless he did make up his mind. As long as she was at Rest and be Thankful—well, it was a nice luxury not to make up his mind, wasn’t it?”
Jim looked at her sharply. “I suppose so,” he said. “You sound as if you believed that Earl and Norah will never meet anyone else they’d—well, fall in love with.”
“But they are in love. Have you seen them when they are anywhere near each other? It would be a waste, wouldn’t it, to throw it all away because they didn’t realise in time how much they—” She stopped, pretending to laugh at her romanticism, but she averted her head and looked out at the hills and studied the evening sky. This conversation, this was so unlike Jim. He was waiting for her now to go on. As if he wanted to hear what she believed. But she couldn’t go on. “Is that rain over that mountain?” she asked.
He burst out laughing.
“What’s funny about that, Jim?”
“Everything.”
She smiled too. She felt her cheeks were on fire. “This is getting to be a difficult conversation,” she said, keeping a joke in her voice.
“I never was good at—” He didn’t finish the sentence except in his own mind. At making polite conversation when there’s something else to be decided. “By the way, Mimi hasn’t got all the details quite straight. I haven’t been married for a number of years.”
Then, as Sally said nothing, he went on: “We separated before we each ruined the other’s life. I met her in New York, just after I had gone there from Chicago. I was going to be an illustrator, I thought. She was on the stage. She had to be in New York. She didn’t want to leave it. I liked New York too. But after a bit I found I wasn’t any good as an illustrator. I suppose when I set out for Chicago to learn to be an artist I was having a kind of revolt against being a rancher. I had three years in Chicago, and then I went to New York with a job there. And I had nearly two years in New York before I got wise to myself. I wanted to come back here. My revolt was over. Ranching was a job I could do well. This was where I was happy, where I was needed. I wasn’t much needed in New York. I wasn’t going to stay there and be a kind of hanger-on. So I came back to Wyoming. At the end of the second year.”
“She wouldn’t come?”
“No.”
“Not even to see it?”
“She took one look at the map and screamed.” He was smiling. “Didn’t seem so funny to me at the time, though.”
“Is she famous now?”
His voice became cold and emotionless. “She had one or two parts—just enough to keep her convinced she was good. She married an agent. And she was just getting into star parts when—well, they were driving out for a week-end in Pennsylvania and they had a bad smash. She was killed.”
Sally said nothing more. She suddenly realised she knew more about Jim and his wife than anyone else did. He had really been in love, had gone on hoping that she would come out here after all. Until she married the other man. And he had killed her.
“That was just before the War started,” Jim said. And after that, he thought, he hadn’t had so much time to think about himself and what might have been and what hadn’t. When you got caught up in a war personal pride and admissions of defeat in your private life didn’t seem so damned important.
He brought the car carefully over the bridge and stopped it before the house.
Mrs. Peel opened her eyes. “Rest and be Thankful,” she said gratefully.
“You’ll be able to do that once your guests clear out,” Jim said, with a smile. “They’ve given you a busy month.” Too damned busy, he thought, as he looked at Sally.
“Except that Sally is talking of leaving.”
“What?” For once the tightly controlled face was completely caught off guard.
“To take a job in Chicago as a publisher’s reader,” Mrs. Peel said.
“Margaret,” Sally said quickly, “you know we agreed not to talk about—”
“Jim isn’t just one of the others. He’s our friend. He may as well know now.”
“I’m going to start dinner,” Sally said. “I’m hungry. And Robb will be waiting for you, Jim. See you later.” She walked quickly into the house.
Mrs. Peel still sat in the car.
“You’ve been a long time together, haven’t you?” Jim asked unexpectedly.
“Yes. Ever since 1932. I was alone, she was alone. It seemed a good idea to travel together. Of course, I had known Sally for two years before that—ever since she arrived in Paris. She was going to write poetry. And she was very much in love with a man, and he seemed to be in love with her.”
Jim turned to look at her. There was a question in his eyes.
“He was a writer—one of our little group. She had followed him from America to Paris. He had asked her to come. Her family and all her friends in Boston were absolutely against him. You know, I’ve often thought that was the reason why she stayed in Europe for so long. She waited, although she never admitted it, until most people who had known him had forgotten about her. When she left here, you see, they all thought he was going to marry her.”
“Where is he now?”
“In Italy, I hear. Quite a famous dramatist nowadays. He’s had two wives and a brood of children. Didn’t seem to worry him at all, seemingly.” Mrs. Peel disentangled herself from the back of the car. “I like your choice in lampshad
es, Jim. And may I borrow this novel? I began it before I feel asleep.”
And did you fall asleep, he wondered. Then he gave her a smile, and she looked less nervous. “Sure,” he said. “And what time is supper?”
“Give us an hour. Or will that be too late?”
“Fine. I’ve some things to see to.” Principally a lot of ideas to be rearranged, a lot of thinking to be done. That had always been his failing—his unwillingness to face a situation that really affected him deeply. Like the two years of his life wasted in New York, when one year, or six months, should have been enough to tell him. Yet he could act quickly enough—sometimes too damned thoughtlessly—in other matters. It was only in things that he wanted to hide, deep-down reasons, that he postponed the problems. Pride, he told himself, was always your trouble; and it’s a bad one.
He gave Mrs. Peel a wave of his hand and drove towards the ranch, sounding the horn with three short blasts so that Robb would be ready to leave.
* * *
Sally cooked dinner, borrowing from Mrs. Gunn’s well-prepared larder, while Margaret attended to making the dining-room as attractive as possible with flowers and candles and a roaring log fire. Then, with all the clutter of cooking cleared away, Sally dashed upstairs to dress. She had exactly eight minutes. As she threw off her blue linen suit, and slipped into a white wool dress with a long, sweeping skirt (“so suitable for dining at home in the winter evenings,” the New York catalogue had said—which made it just about right for six thousand feet high in Wyoming at the end of August), she wondered, along with forty million other women, just how anyone ever had the time to lie down for an hour with cream on her face, and pads over her eyes, and relax before dinner. She folded a green silk scarf into the neckline of her dress, clasped a gold bracelet on its tight, narrow cuff, and slipped her feet into her gold slippers. Why not? She hadn’t been as happy as this for a long time. She hadn’t been as happy as this since she was eighteen; perhaps she hadn’t been as happy then as she was now. The difference between feeling happy at eighteen and feeling happy at thirty-seven was that you appreciated it when you were thirty-seven. She looked in the mirror on her dressing-table and laughed. Then, to see if the hem on her dress looked right, she climbed up on a chair.