“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.
6
...AND REACTIONS
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.
There were other rebels in Sweetwater too, particularly among the old-timers who liked their cow-towns straight. They didn’t care whether that new movie, which startled them ten years ago, even opened its doors in the evening. They took a very poor view of Milt Jerks (who ran the log-cabin gas-station on the outskirts of town) when he rented a front room on Main Street next his movie-house, filled it with fishing tackle and leather goods, and brought an old plug—fully saddled and bridled—to stand patiently by the hitching-rail at the edge of the board sidewalk. And when Jerks (he was a newcomer from St Louis who had settled in Sweetwater just over fifteen years ago) suggested everyone should dress Western this summer and bought himself a shiny blue tie and an embroidered shirt, feeling ran high in the Purple Rim Bar.
“Hell,” old Cheesit Bridger said, “we was here before he were, and all them damned dudes either. An’ what kind of way does he think we dress now? It sure ain’t Eastern.” His friends around the Purple Rim spat their agreement. Their fathers had fought off Indians, had killed bears and wolves and bad men, had built a little thin line of wooden houses and a schoolroom and the first church, with no help or encouragement from anyone except their wives, who could shoot and saw and nail as good as any man. Then, after the Indian troubles, there had been the war between the big ranchers and the settlers, which had spread from Johnson County into this part of the country. And there was a time when the outlaws from Jackson Hole had tried to run Sweetwater as well. But ever since 1914, when the fighting was taken over by Europe, there had been peace in these parts. The railroad had been kept a good ten miles to the east of Sweetwater, and the State Highway was only reached by a second-class road from Main Street South. As only a few rough roads branched out from Main Street North to ranches and farms hidden in the surrounding hills and valleys, Sweetwater had been spared invasion by busloads of “towrists.” The old-timers considered the building of the airport (a wooden hut on a grass field) as only the Thin End of the Wedge. For dude ranches were increasing each year since the airport had been organised. Although Cheesit and his friends had to grant Milt Jerks that dudes had money in their pockets to match the jingle of their new spurs, all they got out of it was that they’d be wrangling dudes instead of horses. Horses were easier on the nerves. And here was the news that Jim Brent had sold his house to more dudes. Not that they blamed Jim. Everyone knew he had been having a bad time. They blamed the Easterners.
“They ain’t regular dudes,” old Chuck said, suddenly overcome by loyalty to Rest and be Thankful. He had ridden over to Sweetwater to discuss the news with Cheesit Bridger at the Purple Rim. “Seems they’re kind of writer fellers.”
“Dudes with brains,” snorted Cheesit, in disgust. “Maybe long hair too.” He shook his head slowly. “That’s worst of all.”
And the Purple Rim fell into deep gloom, with only the slap of a bottle of Sheridan Export on the long, dark counter to break the silence.
Back on Flying Tail Ranch there was also gloom; but here it was tempered with stoicism. The boys did not like the idea of a lot of strangers wandering around the corral. (Jim might say that the ranch was now separate in every way from the house, but seeing was believing.) Yet they liked the idea of finding themselves without a job even less. Flying Tail was all right. So was Jim Brent.
* * *
Bert said he only hoped them writing fellows didn’t come into his saddle-barn with note-books in their hands and pencils all sharp as their noses.
Chuck, remembering Cheesit Bridger’s predictions, sustained himself with an anecdote about the Texas Invasion. (That had been repulsed eventually leaving Wyoming triumphant.)
Ned thought that Ma Gunn would be needing extra help. He knew a nice girl in Phoenix who would like to summer in Wyoming.
Robb, suddenly brightening, said there was a nice girl in Butte too.
Ma Gunn said she would also get her niece, Norah, from Three Springs. Norah thought a lot of writers. And her nephew, Joe, from Laramie was a handy man to have around with a paint-brush, hammer, lawn-mower, or axe. And if the ladies seemed in a bit of a hurry, well, that was the way Easterners were. And why not? The house was there, and the summer was
before them. She was to keep her kitchen as her own place, and the boys would always find a cup of coffee and a slice of pie to help out Chuck’s cooking. By September the Easterners would all be back in their rightful place. The summer wasn’t so long.
Bert remembered there was always next summer, and the summer after that, and after that. Besides, it worried him, when he was over to Sweetwater, to hear Mrs. Dan Givings and Milt Jerks saying this was all a trend: wouldn’t be long before Upshot County was as full of dude ranches and tourists as its neighbours were.
“Well, you get used to anything,” Ma Gunn said. “And we may as well look on the bright side: we’ll get one good laugh a day.” There would be plenty to talk about in the long winter evenings when she was visiting her son and daughter-in-law over at Three Springs.
Jim Brent said very little after announcing his decision. He only interrupted his routine for one day in which he hired a Piper Cub from the Sweetwater airfield to fly to Warrior, the county town, to see his lawyer.
Mrs. Peel talked at great length. Mrs. Gunn listened as she counted sheets and towels and cups and silverware, and observed that it was just like reading a dictionary, which was always something she had meant to do. One of her cousins, over at Greybull, had spent many a pleasant winter with a dictionary by a man called Sam Johnson, and had reached the letter T before he was knocked down by a bus travelling to Yellowstone. “Never knew what hit him,” Mrs. Gunn ended, in a shocked voice. “They were wearing these shorts and brazeers, too.”
Mrs. Peel puzzled over this for a little, so that her flow of eloquence ceased, much to Mrs. Gunn’s disappointment. But as Mrs. Peel was preparing to visit Jackson, with more poison-ivy lotion and apple-pie and a good book, she suddenly turned at the door and said, delightedly, “Tourists!” Mrs. Gunn nodded, and went on counting blankets. For someone as educated as Mrs. Peel must be she had a very peculiar way of pronouncing words. “Toorists,” Mrs. Gunn repeated to herself, and had her good laugh for that day.
Rest and Be Thankful Page 5
