Mrs. Peel, unaccustomed as she was to public welcoming, had the feeling that a few phrases would not be out of place. The silent men around her, who had been such good hosts themselves, obviously expected her to rise to the occasion. They were presenting the newcomer to her as Ned’s friend, a stranger to be made at home, an interesting piece of decoration which would bring the bright colour and humour of Madison Square Garden to the workaday world of Flying Tail Ranch. Mrs. Peel, if puzzled by the respect with which they looked at the girl (for she had arrived too late to see Drene’s exhibition of riding, which had won even Mrs. Gunn’s admiration), put it all down to Western gallantry. She had been impressed by it from the very beginning: men here believed that you were all right until you proved you weren’t. So, as she admired Drene’s long, flickering eyelashes, she made a neat little speech hoping Drene would like Rest and be Thankful. She was conscious of the smile in Sally’s eyes, and she took the last hurdle with a crash. “Mrs. Gunn will show you where to sleep,” she ended. Now what on earth had made her bring that up? She added quickly, “I was just going to tempt Golden Boy.” And she smiled gaily and waved the carrots to distract all attention. She succeeded.
Drene’s black horse stretched his neck towards them. The green satin sleeve billowed as the neat little hand came smartly up and clipped him sharply over his face with the reins. Only Mrs. Peel and Sally Bly were startled. And they flinched again as the horse was pulled sharply round and struck once more. Drene’s narrow, pointed toe seemed to spring into the stirrup as she swung herself lightly into the saddle. Her shoulders were neatly held, her hips moved in understated rhythm, and her body fell into a compact, well-timed jig as the horse broke into its dancing trot. The enormous dog rose, and loped along at the heels of the horse.
Sally had only to look at the eyes of the silent audience to know this was very good, very good indeed. Ned and Robb had mounted too, and were urging their horses into a canter. The others looked as if they were ready to follow.
“She’s very good,” Sally said, watching the horse and rider as they cantered round the west pasture.
“A well-trained horse,” Bert said, and shifted his hat more over his eyes. Jackson, shifting his hat too, nodded. Chuck agreed.
Mrs. Peel held the carrots less conspicuously. But I couldn’t hit Golden Boy, she thought despairingly, even if that is the right way and this (she looked at the carrots) is not.
Jim Brent came over to Sally. “Like to go for a ride?” he asked.
“Not tonight, thank you,” she said, keeping her voice as casual as his. Not after that, she thought: I’d feel like a sack of flour bouncing around on the saddle. She looked at the hillsides, now veined with shadows, and persuaded herself it was much too late anyway. Margaret might have the wit not to stand there looking so damned amazed either.
At that moment, fortunately, the next distraction arrived in the long black shape of a Lincoln. It prowled up the road from the bridge with a rich, satisfying hum that drew all heads around, as if they were paper clips turning towards a magnet. The car slowed down, became undecided, stopped. A man put an excellent brown suede shoe carefully on to the roadway as if testing the dusty surface. Then he stepped out. He was tall. He wore his light camel-hair coat draped round his shoulders as if it were a cape. His hair was white and carefully waved. He shielded his eyes against the sloping rays of the sun.
“It’s Prender,” Mrs. Peel said.
“Is this Rest and be Thankful?” he called, and turned for a moment to say something to his two companions in the car. A girl’s voice laughed gaily, and a man answered jokingly.
“And I think that sounds like Dewey Schmetterling with him,” Sally said, in amazement mixed with horror.
“But what is he doing here?” Mrs. Peel said, and handed the carrots quickly to Jackson.
The riders had noticed the car’s arrival too. They had also decided their evening ride was over, for they came—the green sleeves first, the men rather unwillingly after—at a gallop towards the corral in a fine flurry of flying manes and tails. Yet Miss Drene Travers, as she pulled up so spectacularly beside Jim Brent in full view of the astonished newcomers, was not looking at the car. She didn’t dismount; she sat superbly in golden silence and turned her quiet eyes to the hills. Sally could only spare one admiring look for such an exquisite still-life, before she had to hurry towards the car. Margaret Peel stopped to murmur to Mrs. Gunn, “Please take charge.” She glanced at Drene as she spoke, but the expression on her face told Mrs. Gunn that the car had brought its own set of problems too.
Jim Brent also had noted Mrs. Peel’s expression. Just as he had noted that Sally was walking with a very firm heel-to-toe stride towards the car. She walked that way only when she was angry about something and was making up her mind to take action.
Bert said to him, “Hey! Some of these writer fellows must make money.”
“It would seem that way,” Robb said, watching another camel-hair coat step into view.
Jim nodded. He hadn’t expected this kind of arrival. Nor had Sally Bly, he was damned sure. He unsaddled his horse, turned him loose into the west pasture, and carried the saddle with its blanket and bridle into the barn. He didn’t give a second look at the car or at the girl on the black horse. It had amused him to see the reaction she caused, but he wasn’t the kind of man to prolong a joke. If she did her work to please Ma Gunn, and didn’t cause any trouble among the boys, then he didn’t object. Besides, she was a bit of brightness for the evenings when the boys gathered around with little to do. She was probably a decent kid, just another rodeo-struck girl who worked in the summers and performed in the winters. Having decided he was only taking a thoroughly practical attitude to the whole business, he walked out of the saddle-barn, gave a general good night to all of them, and started towards his cabin. He glanced briefly at the car as he passed it. The second man was young-looking, small, thin, dark-haired. He was looking towards the corral, studying the group there with obvious delight. A girl, with smooth red hair and redder lips, was standing with considerable elegance, her slender feet posed ballet-fashion in flat-heeled slippers. She wore a very wide, very long skirt, flaring from a small, belted waistline. She looked at Jim and smiled. Well, he thought, the boys are hardly going to miss the movies at all this summer. Mrs. Peel was too busy talking to notice him go by. The men were too busy looking at Drene on horseback. But it seemed to him that Sally’s smile was too small and somehow pathetic.
“We’ll leave the car here,” Mrs. Peel was saying, “and Jackson will put it away, we’ll take the luggage, the house is just beyond the trees, however did you pass its entrance, didn’t you see my little signpost at the bridge?” She ran out of breath, but if she didn’t keep talking she was going to be rude. So she talked on, angrily aware of Dewey Schmetterling, the uninvited guest. Not only uninvited, but totally unimagined. And there he was, as coolly under control as if he had been expected. He hadn’t even bothered to explain his arrival. But, then, Dewey never explained. Surely we have entertained him quite enough, Mrs. Peel thought bitterly; in Paris, in Rapallo, in New York. Why has he come here? I’m positive our charms aren’t so marked as all that.
“And is all this included with the sunset?” Dewey Schmetterling asked, watching Miss Drene Travers dismount by swinging her leg forward, across and over the flowing black mane. “And a perfect three-point landing. Mimi, you will have some new postures to learn, thank God. If I spend another winter at parties, tripping over girls’ splayed feet and pointed toes, I’ll abandon New York.”
“Yes, darling,” Mimi Bassinbrook said, so amiably that Sally buried her very feminine thought that ballet slippers had been out of vogue by last winter, too.
Prender, who had been remarkably silent, now became business-like as his eye counted the numerous suitcases. “What about one of these men doing this job?” He looked, as he spoke, at Jim Brent’s retreating back.
“No!” Sally said sharply, and stopped Prender’s ready command ju
st in time. “This isn’t our territory,” she explained more quietly. “This is Flying Tail Ranch. We only pass through it on our way to ride.”
“The natives seem friendly,” Dewey said, and Mimi Bassinbrook laughed. She had a pleasant laugh to match her pretty face. Prender Atherton Jones seemed less amused. Perhaps, Sally thought, he had travelled two thousand miles with that laugh. Or perhaps (as she noted how he left the heavier suitcases for Dewey to carry) there were other reasons. Prender had a slightly ruffled air, as if he were in one of his deeply wounded moods.
“What a marvellous sunset!” Mimi said, and pointed with charming delight. Sally looked at the red hair gleaming brightly in the sun’s yellow rays. All this, she thought, and Drene too. What a summer we are going to have!
“A very grade A sunset in the very best Technicolor,” Dewey said.
Prender spoke rather sourly Mrs. Peel thought. “We’ll be in a much more admiring mood after dinner.”
“After dinner?” Mrs. Peel looked in alarm at Sally. “Didn’t you have dinner at Three Springs or Sweetwater?”
“No. It was much too early. It is absolutely impossible to digest anything calling itself dinner at six.” He glanced at his watch, and nodded approvingly. “It is not quite eight o’clock now. We’ll wash and have a quick cocktail first. Is this the house?” He stood for a moment, looking at it. “Delightfully rustic, my dear.” He opened the large double screen door and passed into the hall. He nodded approvingly once more and put the suitcases down where the servants might find them and carry them upstairs to unpack.
“Isn’t this darling?” Miss Bassinbrook said, glancing from the white hall into the green living-room.
“It will be, after I’ve had a couple of drinks from a tall, frosted glass,” Dewey Schmetterling said, and let his suitcases fall. He leaned against the banisters, a slender, elegant young man, and was conscious in a most unconscious way of Mimi’s admiration. Prender frowned heavily.
Mrs. Peel stood quite silenced. She was wondering if a cheese fondu, or an omelette and a salad, and some canned soup would be enough. She was worrying about a room for Dewey Schmetterling, the totally unexpected. She was thinking that their solitary bottle of Scotch was going to be insufficient. She was remembering that Prender always insisted on Daiquiris in summer. Remarkable how she had forgotten about that.
But Sally took charge. She smiled charmingly. “Come upstairs. While you are washing I’ll make some sandwiches. I’m afraid dinner is over. We eat at half-past six, you see, so that we can go out riding in the evening. And our help is quite free, once the dishes are all washed up, so”—she lifted Miss Bassinbrook’s hatbox—“let’s move these, shall we? Housekeeping is a little different out here, you know. Delightfully rustic, as Prender would say. Margaret, will you attend to the fire in the living-room?”
Mrs. Peel, as she lit the kindling under the logs, was lost in amazement and admiration. Living-room, Sally had reminded her: she would have led them into the little sitting-room and established a bridgehead for future invasions.
Then she went into the kitchen and started slicing Mrs. Gunn’s excellent home-baked bread for sandwiches.
Sally came downstairs smiling. “Well, this isn’t Paris or New York,” she said, in reply to Margaret Peel’s raised eyebrows. “They may as well get into the picture right away. They have hot and cold, electric light, clean towels, and good beds. They have someone to prepare their meals and wash their dishes, and someone to pay for it all. If they don’t think that’s enough they can go back where they came from.” They both began to laugh then.
“I begin to understand that for the first time in my life,” Margaret Peel said, referring to Sally’s last sentence, and went into another fit of laughter.
“Coffee,” Sally said, becoming practical again, “gallons of it. That will help our Scotch situation, I hope. I wish I had the courage to offer Prender some beer! And here’s plenty of fruit for dessert. I’ll serve it on ice, Spanish-fashion, and add an exotic touch.”
Sally has become so practical, Mrs. Peel thought, as she carried dishes into the living-room, where they had set up a card-table complete with supper cloth and a candlestick for the impromptu meal. Of course, Prender might have written to say he was coming, or he could have telephoned from Three Springs: that would have saved all this trouble. She sank into an armchair wearily, for she had been on her feet practically all day. There had been so many little last touches to give each room. All involved so many journeys, up and downstairs: books, flowers, candlesticks, writing-paper, matches, soap, ashtrays, and all the rest of it. In Rapallo, now, they could have nine maids for the cost of one in America. Europeans, or almost-Europeans like Prender, kept forgetting that. In Rapallo, too, no one—not even Prender—had expected everything to be run like the Ritz: everyone had laughed when things like plumbing went wrong and said, “The Italians, they are so charming, aren’t they?” But here, two thousand miles from New York, with the nearest store some twenty-five miles away and not a lime to be seen, Prender had wanted his Daiquiris.
“Cheer up,” Sally said, carrying a large pot of coffee into the room, “August has only thirty-one days. Besides, the rest of our guests won’t be like this, I’m sure. It is only Prender being very Atherton Jones. I like Miss Bassinbrook. She was appreciative, at least. Just loved your darling flowers on her divine writing-table. And such a sweet bed-lamp which really worked. I wonder what’s keeping them?”
She placed the coffee-pot near the glowing logs. “Between you and I, as they say in polite circles, I am furious about D. Schmetterling. He isn’t invited. He isn’t an unknown author. He had a smashing success with his book of satires on his poor family. He has enough money of his own, thanks to his family, to rent a whole dude ranch for himself. So it’s damnable that he should be taking up a room here. We need the space.”
Mrs. Peel didn’t even flinch at Sally’s vehemence tonight. “I know he doesn’t like us, yet he keeps haunting us,” she said miserably.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if we are part of his studies for his next smashing success. I’m sure he sees us as a mixture of Lucia and Tish. And I rather dislike being spreadeagled on a slide under a microscope.”
“Oh, no! He couldn’t! He wouldn’t!”
“He could. Besides, he has no imagination. So he has to write from life: one of those specimens who’ve got to borrow because they can’t invent. Margaret, I’ll really get fighting mad if he picks our guests for copy.”
“I’m sure he isn’t staying... It just happened that he was driving across the country to California, and so Prender and Miss Bassinbrook came with him. I’m sure it was all as simple as that.”
“It just happened,” Sally said. “But how I wish Prender wasn’t always tempted to save money. A train ticket would have been much cheaper in the long run for all of us.”
“Sarah,” Mrs. Peel said sharply, “I don’t think your trip to Europe last year did you any good at all.”
“On the contrary,” Sally said equally sharply. “If it hadn’t been for that I might never have grown up at the ripe age of thirty-seven. Pippa’s passing is definitely from the kindergarten to the first grade. And it’s Sally, Margaret. Sally... I am no longer anyone’s kindly great-aunt. I’ve discovered a very good rule: from now on anyone I spend time on has got to justify his existence in my life.”
Mrs. Peel said nothing. She stared at the little dancing flames stitching the logs together.
Sally reached out a hand and touched her arm gently. “You certainly justified your existence in my life. Remember 1932? That hideous day in October when I was—well, I wasn’t very happy, was I? You didn’t know how unhappy, when you came to see me that night because you were worried about me. And you stayed to talk until dawn came. You didn’t know; but you—you saved my life.” She spoke the last words with difficulty and embarrassment. How often the truth sounded trite; and the untruth witty.
Margaret Peel’s gentle face turned towards her friend. Th
e brown eyes, which could look so young, were now old with deep wisdom.
Yes, she had known. She had talked that night to a girl clearly marked for self-destruction. She had talked against time, and waited for the first sign that the dreadful determination had weakened. Then it had been safe to stop talking, but not to leave alone. She had brought Sarah to her flat. It was then that this easy partnership had begun. But from Paris to Wyoming had been a long journey in years. It had taken all that time for Sarah to speak of that night.
She touched Sally’s hand in reply.
Then, “The coffee is going to boil,” she said, pulling out her handkerchief to move the pot farther away from the blazing logs.
Sally rose. “They are coming downstairs. Thank goodness.” She went to welcome the guests, invited and uninvited.
9
SALLY
Mimi Bassinbrook had changed her dress and her face. Mrs. Peel, taking one look at the off-shoulder blouse, gave up her chair next to the fire. After all, that was less of a sacrifice than having to nurse a guest with pneumonia.
Prender Atherton Jones was more cheerful, having tested the mattress, the plumbing, and the view from his window.
Dewey Schmetterling was imperturbable. His dark hair was smoothly controlled. His face—which once had a tendency to be full-fleshed and volubly expressive—was fixed in its carefully disciplined mask. As a boy he had become conscious of the fact that his nose was more prominent than his chin; so he carried his head high, with an almost imperceptible backward tilt. He had decided his eyes were too large, too emotional, and so his eyelids were trained to narrow them to a coldly appraising stare. His eyebrows looked best in a slightly quizzical frown, so they stayed that way. He held his lips tightly to give his mouth a firm line. All this had been so constantly remembered—just as a determined woman can improve her waistline by pulling in her diaphragm even during the most intellectual conversations—that it had become seemingly natural. His appearance, made to match the character he had adopted, was that of a handsome bird of prey, waiting for the moment to strike. Among men, he found, this more than made up for his height; he could do little, though he had tried hard enough, to extend his five feet four inches. For men were wary of him. Women, because he seemed incalculable and indifferent, found him interesting. When he did turn on the charm, at moments of his own choosing, the effect was overwhelming. For the charmed one, a little nervous, a little apprehensive, a little doubtful that she was quite up to Dewey’s standard, suddenly felt she was not only the most charming and beautiful, but certainly the wittiest woman in the room. Five minutes of that made a whole evening memorable. Other men were puzzled that Schmetterling, as in all branches of his career, could achieve so much by working so little. They explained it in terms of women’s natural instinct for wealth. Dewey, dressed with superb understatement, was surrounded by an aura of good living, clinging as unobtrusively, but tantalisingly, as the scent of the costliest French perfume round a pretty woman’s throat. No expense, provided it was in good taste, was spared: the best was not good for Dewey.