“I’ll go upstairs and inspect the damage,” Sarah agreed. “These blue jeans are very rigid, you know, especially the seams. If I were you, Margaret, I’d start jumping on yours to soften them up. For once, laundries are too gentle.”
“But these Western saddles look so comfortable,” Mrs. Peel said in amazement, as another unnecessary problem faced her.
“I suppose so, once you get used to them.” Sarah mounted the stairs with difficulty. “The best thing for us is to get broken in as quickly as possible. Then we can welcome our guests without hobbling around like a couple of Civil War veterans.”
“You don’t make this new experiment look too attractive,” Mrs. Peel remarked, as she watched Sarah’s progress.
“Well, I’m sure it has taken pounds off,” Sarah called back.
Mrs. Peel went into their sitting-room, lit the log fire, and brooded about that.
When Sarah came downstairs at last, wrapped in her long wool dressing-gown, Mrs. Peel said, “I believe I’ll try Golden Boy tomorrow. He does look quiet?”
“As Chuck says, he’s broke gentle. And he is beautiful.” Jim Brent couldn’t have chosen a better horse to entice Margaret into riding. Had he known that? I bet he did, Sarah thought with a smile. “I’ve a surprise for you,” she added. “Golden Boy is all your own. Mr. Brent has given these two horses to us.”
“My dear!”
“Yes, I was just as taken aback as you are. It’s so long since anyone gave us anything, except a box of chocolates or a jar of bath salts as a thank-you-for-having-me note. I was so amazed, I almost forgot to say thank you adequately. Mr. Brent only said it would be a pity to live here and not have your own horse. Which means, when translated, that you just can’t cover enough ground on your own two feet in this country, and an automobile is useless if you really want to enjoy yourself. You know, when he says anything it is very much to the point. We sometimes use ten words when two would do.”
“Why not one? And keep it monosyllabic?” Mrs. Peel suggested. “Actually I am inquisitive enough to wonder about your conversation on horseback. Or does that make him more talkative?”
But Sarah refused to be drawn out, either by Margaret’s affectionate amusement or by the friendly, relaxing fire. She stretched out her feet in their comfortable leopard-skin slippers, and eased her bruised thigh against a soft cushion.
“Oh, you just ask questions,” she said non-committally.
“Isn’t that being too much the inquiring reporter?”
“Oh, not questions about himself! About the country—the early settlers, Indians, battles, massacres, trails, all that kind of thing. His grandfather came here as one of the first ranchers. His father was born while the Cheyennes were circling round these mountains on an impromptu war party.”
“And what did you talk about? Paris, Rapallo, Venice, Ragusa? How I wish I had been there to listen. A study in contrast.”
“I’m sure he found it just as amusing as you do,” Sarah said, flushing brightly. Had she really appeared so ridiculous?
“Sarah, my dear!” Mrs. Peel was alarmed.
“Well, I don’t know why you laugh at him just because his taste prefers Rembrandt to a modern distortionist.”
“I’m not laughing at him,” Mrs. Peel said. “I’m quite aware what is one man’s Shostakovitch is another man’s Haydn. That’s the nice thing about good art—there are plenty of differences to suit anyone who has taste at all. Besides, if I did smile a little, I am quite sure he evened that up by having a little smile over us. After all, The Three Dancers and the West are rather odd together, I suppose.”
“Some attempts at modern painting would look odd anywhere. Too many imitations, perhaps. You can imitate technique; that’s all right, for you can learn that way. But you can’t imitate feelings and emotions and experiences: that’s something an artist has got to supply out of his own life. I am getting tired of gas-works and linoleum patterns and jig-sawed anatomy.”
“Sarah, my dear—”
“Did you see the clouds tonight? Weren’t they worth painting? They were lying all on the same level of the sky, as evenly based as if the wind snipped them off in a straight line. And they rose to different heights, large round puffs of white smoke. It was as if a giant had taken handfuls of foam and laid them on a glass-topped table, and we were underneath looking up. Or did you see the ripples of hills and fields when the sun slanted sideways on them and the grass turned gold?”
Mrs. Peel looked at her friend, half puzzled, half alarmed. “Please don’t talk to Prender this way, Sarah,” she said earnestly. “Just imagine next winter, and all the gay remarks you’d have to listen to. They’d be calling you nature girl.”
“Margaret, sometimes I wonder if we’ve spent most of our lives making the wrong friends. Oh, I know they are intelligent and bright, and highly interested in everything that is new and remote and difficult to understand. But, darling, I am sure there must be intelligent people who are kind too. Only, why don’t we meet them? Is something wrong with us?”
Margaret Peel didn’t answer. They sat in silence, watching the last flickering log. At last, “Time for bed,” she said, suddenly brisk in voice and movement. “Tomorrow is a busy day.”
Sarah rose too, slowly and carefully. “I’ve two bruises,” she announced. “I wonder if Jackson could give me some tips on how to mount a horse without flinching. You know, he is very good. I watched him tonight, riding his horse round the west pasture. He was talking away to it, teaching it Hungarian, I think. He wears a large hat, Indian-style, with the crown quite undented. And he has wrapped a broad sash around his waist. An imposing figure.”
“Jackson too!” Mrs. Peel was now resigned to her own first appearance on horseback. “Well, I suppose this was all inevitable if we did choose to live in the West. Did he look depressed or just resigned? I’m afraid we’ll lose a good chauffeur. After this summer he’ll use his savings to buy a little repair shop near his beloved Atlantic City, and we’ll never see him again.”
“And then we can drive the car ourselves, with no one to shake a gloomy head.” Sarah set the fireguard safely in position, switched off the lights, and followed Margaret slowly upstairs.
“Really, Sarah, that does sound ungrateful. After all these years.”
“It sounds more ungrateful keeping him after all these years if he wants to leave. Besides, a lot of women do drive cars nowadays: think of all the traffic accidents.”
When they reached their bedrooms Sarah Bly halted. “Margaret, why on earth do I keep calling myself Sarah?”
Mrs. Peel, half-way to her room, for their good nights were sensibly brief, looked round in surprise. “Because it’s your name, my dear.” Oh, she thought, we’ve forgotten to lock the front door again.
“But it sounds so—well, so sedate and old somehow. Why not Sally? I used to be called that.”
“Why not? It’s your name,” Mrs. Peel said sleepily. She smiled as she added, “Good night, Sally.” She watched Sarah enter her room. Not Sarah. Sally.
8
FIRST ARRIVALS
It was Saturday, the last day in July.
“No one is going to come,” Mrs. Peel said gloomily. She had reached the stage of all hostesses who have prepared too well and now only have to wait. “Except Esther Park. And that’s almost no one.”
“Nonsense,” Sally Bly said cheerfully. “The others were just too busy to let you know how they are arriving. Writers are always so preoccupied.”
Mrs. Peel agreed. Then she looked down at the list of names in her hand. She knew it, and yet she felt she didn’t know it. It would be awful if she were to start talking to a novelist about his short stories.
“Yet, somehow,” Sally said, looking out of the sitting-room window and admiring the perfect evening, “somehow I wish they weren’t coming.”
“Sarah!” Mrs. Peel was shocked into forgetting her friend’s new name. That would be very selfish of us.”
“It might be nice to be s
elfish for one summer,” Sally said, quite unrepentant. “Whenever you discover anything you like, Margaret, you always rush to share it with others. Really, I thought Europe had cured you of that.”
“You never used to object.” Then she handed the list with a smile to Sally. “Would you mind? I just want to be sure I know them all as soon as they arrive. New faces and new names are so nerve-racking when they come together.” She looked apologetic. “I know it’s silly of me,” she said.
Sally took the list without any enthusiasm. “All right,” she said, “we’ll do our homework. And then we’ll go up to the corral. Ned is practising calf-roping tonight. There’s a rodeo in August in Sweetwater, you know. Bert has entered for bull-dogging, I hear.”
“That will be interesting for our guests.”
“And for us,” Sally said wryly. “We come into the picture too sometimes. Now let’s see this list. The women first. We’ve met Carla Brightjoy. She attended these meetings of the New Trends in Literature Group last winter in New York.”
“Brown hair, draped long. Glasses. Fantastic hats all filled with bits and pieces. She writes short stories.”
“All the women do. They mentioned it when they accepted our invitations.”
“Such a good idea of yours, Sally, to ask them to give us any details they’d pass on to their publishers. It makes them less strange to us.”
“Now what about Mimi Bassinbrook?” Sally asked, glancing out of the window. If she could hurry Margaret there would be still time for a ride this evening. Jim Brent would be waiting at the corral.
“I’ve heard about her, I seem to remember. A Southerner?”
“From South Brooklyn, I’d imagine. Don’t you remember her at Prender’s parties? She has red hair and green eyes. Young. Excellent figure. Dresses with what is called a flair. Short stories, she says, but I’m sure she’ll write an historical novel. She could project herself into it.”
“Mimi Bassinbrook...” Mrs. Peel said thoughtfully. “Now, how did I never notice her?”
“She was always surrounded by a phalanx of men, darling.”
“She must have talent. I mean, Prender said all these writers had talent.”
“Plenty of talent,” Sally agreed with a smile. “Now who’s the third woman?”
“Esther Park. She wrote us ten pages and told us nothing really. She mentioned short stories, novels, and plays. Just like that! Prolific... Frankly, I’ve never even heard of her.”
“Nor I. I only know that she kept on talking when I telephoned her in New York. She accepted right away, I remember.”
“Oh.”
“Now the men,” Sally went on quickly. “We have met two of them, thank goodness, so who is the third one?”
But Margaret Peel refused to be hurried. She counted them one by one on her fingers as she recited, “First, Karl Koffing. He said he was working on a novel about New York. Born in Red Gulch, Iowa. Age twenty-four. Thin and dark and intensely critical of everything. Unfit for military service, wasn’t he? That’s why he couldn’t go overseas. Poor Karl...”
“I’ve never heard him be critical about that,” Sally said, interrupting Mrs. Peel’s sad thoughts about young men who suffered from bad health and the tragedy of it.
“Then, next, there’s Earl Grubbock,” Mrs. Peel went on, ignoring Sally’s smile. “He’s twenty-seven. Ex-Army. Sergeant, wasn’t he? Fair-haired, but losing some of it. And he has put on a lot of weight, hasn’t he? I suppose all that muscle which sergeants have, just turned to—”
“Writes about Southern hardship,” Sally prompted her.
“Yes. Wanted to know if we were being ‘restricted,’ because if so he wasn’t coming. Whatever did you answer to that, Sally?”
“I wrote we were definitely restricted to writers who hadn’t been published yet. No reply so far. Perhaps he isn’t coming, but I hope he does. He can write, if only he wouldn’t discard every manuscript half-way. He seems to get discouraged, but he will choose discouraging subjects.”
“I’m sure that kind of attitude is all a matter of metabolism,” Mrs. Peel said. “Have you talked over the menus you’ve planned with Mrs. Gunn? Of course, she is a very plain cook.” She paused, and then added wistfully, “Do you remember Rapallo and the food we served there?”
“Don’t worry—our guests won’t starve.”
“Simple food at regular hours. Plenty of sleep,” Mrs. Peel murmured, as if persuading herself. “That’s what we all need after a winter in New York. And I am sure we were right not to worry about wines. As for other drinks—well, cocktails can be disastrous at an altitude of six thousand feet. Or do you think they’ll expect such things?”
“We can offer them beer or a mild Scotch in the evenings. And if they want real Western life they can save up for a Saturday night in Sweetwater as the cowboys do. But how did we get there? Ah, yes, Earl Grubbock...”
“Yes,” Mrs. Peel said, equally thoughtful. “Well, now, the third man is Robert O’Farlan. Working on a war novel. He’s rather old for that, isn’t he? Fifty, he said. But perhaps he was in OSS. I’ve always wanted to meet someone important in OSS. You know, I’m quite sure that the nice Sicilian who smuggled us so cleverly to North Africa must have been an American. No one else in the wide world could speak Siziliano with such a delightful Chicago inflection.”
“Important OSS men don’t talk. Any who do weren’t important. But why should Mr. O’Farlan be OSS?”
“Well, he could hardly be a parachutist—not at fifty. And he was very uncommunicative about himself. All we know is his age, his address, and that he is writing a war novel. Of course, he might have been Navy.”
“We’ll know soon enough. Well, that’s all.” Sally returned the list to the folder marked “urgent” which lay on the writing-desk. “But they sound so much more than six somehow. Come along, Margaret; we’ve worried too much about all this.”
“I may as well admit I’m nervous; this is our first house-party in America. Oh, I do hope it goes well! I suppose writers are much the same all the world over. They will work in the mornings, read in the afternoons, and talk together after dinner. It will be pleasant to hear some intelligent conversation again.”
Sally laughed. “Thank you, darling. And what about the great outdoors? Or is it just to be a background for intelligent conversation?”
“Oh, it will be there,” Mrs. Peel said vaguely, as she led the way to the kitchen to get two carrots for Golden Boy. “It always is. But you mustn’t judge others by yourself, Sally. We don’t all throw ourselves with such abandon into the Wild West.” She glanced at Sally’s tight blue jeans and then at her own tweed skirt. Three more pounds, she thought, and I can risk it.
“Golden Boy needs exercise. Why don’t you try him out tonight?”
“I’m getting to know him first.” And she also had to finish the article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Horsemanship and Riding.
They crossed the yard, passed the garage, and entered the road that would take them to the corral and the west pasture. “I’ve an idea,” Mrs. Peel announced. “I’ll let Jackson exercise Golden Boy meanwhile. That will cheer him up: he really is so gloomy these days. What can be wrong?”
“Ask him,” Sally suggested. Then she stopped short. “Good heavens! What’s this?”
This was a young girl with gleaming gold hair, narrow hips snug in tight pearl-grey trousers, green satin sleeves swinging loose from her white buckskin waistcoat, who stood near the entrance to the saddle-barn. Beside her was a black horse with an elaborate leather saddle. An enormous dog of undistinguishable breed lay at her feet, but its long coat had been as carefully brushed as the horse had been curried and polished.
The cowboys had gathered round, of course. Jackson was there too, sitting on the five-barred fence as if he had always been accustomed to perch eight feet from the ground. Ned looked as if he had found something other than calves to rope. Jim Brent was there, his horse saddled and bridled for an evening ride, but now it was teth
ered to the hitching-rail and quite forgotten. Mrs. Gunn and her pretty niece Norah (who had arrived from Three Springs only that morning) had come up for an evening stroll to see Ned’s calf-roping. They were trying to stand somewhat aside, and yet they too were caught into the group, fascinated by what they saw. The girl’s long gold hair, braided into two plaits reaching just below her shoulders, was tied with bright green ribbon bows. Her hat of fine white straw, broad-brimmed, with its edges curving like peregrine wings, sat as demurely as the Empress Eugénie’s over the centre of her brow. Her feet were small in the narrow pointed boots of fine green leather.
For a moment Mrs. Peel, remembering the carrots (which she knew were not the correct Western approach to a horse), hesitated. Then, holding them openly in her hand, she walked bravely on with Sally. Mrs. Gunn came to meet them.
“It’s the girl from Phoenix,” she explained quickly, in a hushed voice. She shot a glance at Ned, and shook her head. “She’s just arrived.” This time she shot a glance at the bright green car and the gleaming aluminium horse-trailer which had been parked at one side of the saddle-barn. “If she can clean as well as she can ride she’ll be good.”
“You mean she’s the nice girl from Phoenix Ned told us about? Our new upstairs maid?” Sally asked, keeping her voice equally hushed. Mrs. Peel was still fitting Mrs. Gunn’s glances into a pattern.
“That’s her.” Mrs. Gunn looked at Ned again. “I kind of think we’re lucky that Robb’s nice girl from Butte went and got married last week.”
By this time the three women had approached the group round the corral. Ned stopped his conversation to turn to them with a proud smile. “Mrs. Peel, Miss Bly, I want you to meet Miss Drene Travers.”
Miss Drene Travers put out a neat little hand and gave a fine grip. She had very large dark blue eyes, with black eyelashes and skilfully marked brows. Her skin, incredibly untanned, had the same smooth finish that the slender, straight-haired girls, forever hurrying along Lexington Avenue, in New York, with mysterious patent-leather hatboxes, always displayed as they turned a photogenic chin-line to their passing public. She smiled slowly, showing even white teeth between the deep red lips. “Hello, how are you?” That was all. But Sally had to admit it was devastating.
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