Three Rings
Revenge. Out of all that crazy conversation the one word kept
pestering me like a leaking faucet. No matter what I was doing, or
thinking, that word, revenge, kept drip, drip, dripping, until my mind
was fairly drenched with it. I got all mixed up about it. Did people
revenge other people, or have revenge on them, or—what? I looked it up
in the dictionary. “Malicious injuring in return for an injury or
offense received.”
I got a piece of paper and wrote it down. “The Canneziano girls want
to injure, maliciously, some one on the Desert Moon Ranch, in return
for an injury or an offense received.” I crossed out “The Canneziano
girls,” and wrote, “Gabrielle Canneziano,” since Danny had said that
she had never considered that side of it at all. It did not help any.
It did not make sense.
Since Sam and I were the only people on the ranch they had known
before they came here this time, it seemed as if they had come to
injure, maliciously, one of us. I had never done either of them a mite
of harm in my life. Sam had never done anything but good for them. Of
course, Sam had not been very gentle with their father. But, as I took
pains to discover, neither of them had any kind feelings for their
father. Gaby said, straight out, that she hated him. Danny, who was
too gentle speaking to use such a word as hate, said that she had
never liked him, never loved him. Both of them laid their mother’s
death at Canneziano’s door. They thought that his cruelty and his
neglect had killed her. It was senseless to suppose that they were
harboring a grudge against Sam for anything that he had ever done to
Canneziano.
Of course, I see now that all that part of it was as plain as the
Roman nose on Hubert Hand’s face. How I missed seeing it, even then, I
don’t know. I was, I guess, like a little boy so busy trying to watch
all three rings at the circus at one time that he missed the elephant
parade.
The Desert Moon was like that sure enough; like a three ring circus,
during the months of May and June. There were the girls, everlastingly
searching for something: leaving the house shortly after the men left
it, each morning; returning, tired out, just in time for dinner; off
again for the afternoon, and coming home just in time to pretty up for
supper. After a while, I began to lose interest in that; and, being a
woman, I allowed my attention to become distracted by the center ring
where all the love interest was going on.
Not that Danny and John were interesting. If there is anything that
will make two people duller to all other people than being engaged to
each other, I am sure I don’t know what it is. Gaby’s unceasing
efforts to win John away from Danny were interesting enough, I
suppose, to folks who can stand to look at that sort of thing.
Personally, I shut my eyes to it as much as possible. Most of my
attention I gave to the clown in the ring—to Chad.
I can not explain it, now or ever; but Chad, from the very first, was
head over heels in love with Gaby. He had no more chance of winning
her, penniless, funny, kind little fellow that he was, than an amateur
has of riding an outlaw pony. I told him that, once, in those very
words.
“I know it, Mary,” he said. “But you are wrong about one thing. I’m
not riding for a fall. I’m not even mounted. I know I haven’t a chance
with her. I know I can’t pull one of those stars out of the sky up
there with a fishhook. I’m not trying. But I can sit here in the dark
and look at the stars, can’t I? Stars make all the difference—in the
dark. And, maybe, sometime I can serve her in someway. That’s all I
ask. . . .” So on. If it hadn’t been Chad, and therefore
heartbreaking, it would have been downright funny.
She never gave him two looks. He couldn’t even make her laugh with his
jokes and his songs, as he could the rest of us. Once she did deign to
allow him to try to teach her the trick of his ventriloquism. She
could not learn it, and she was furious with him, and said that he did
not want her to learn it. But he followed her about, and waited on
her. He brought her pony up to the house, instead of allowing one of
the outfit to do it. He brought her desert flowers, which she tossed
away to wither. If Connie hadn’t had a strong constitution he would
have worn her out, taking pictures of Gaby. Page after page in his
album filled with, “Gaby by the window;” “Gaby on the porch;” “Gaby
and Danny starting on a walk;” “Gaby in riding costume;” Gaby here,
there, and everywhere. And Martha half mad with jealousy.
Right at first, I think that some of the others thought that Martha’s
jealousy was something of a joke. I never did think so. Before long we
all began to feel that it was more than a little serious. Sam talked
to Chad, and to Gaby about it. Chad did the best he could, after that,
to be as attentive to Martha as he had been before; but, if he so much
as opened a door for Gaby, Martha would go into temper fits, and
sulking spells.
As for Gaby, Sam’s talk with her made things worse. She had never
noticed Chad at all, so she had not noticed that Martha was jealous of
him. She welcomed the news as another tool she could use to tease and
torment the poor girl. All along she had delighted in teasing and
tormenting Martha, though she had dared not do it when Sam was
present.
The very evening after Sam had talked to her in the morning, Gaby went
and sat beside Chad and curled his pretty, yellow curls around her
finger.
It was a cloudy evening, not chilly; but Sam had lighted the fire as
he always does when he has half an excuse, and Martha was sitting in
front of it, pretending to read a magazine. She had been pretending to
read that same magazine, on the same page, for the last five years.
She seemed to get pleasure out of sitting and holding it in her hands.
No other magazine would do.
Of a sudden, this evening, she thrust the magazine in the flames for
an instant, jerked it out, and rushed at Gaby with the burning torch.
No harm was done. John snatched it and tossed it back into the
fireplace. But all of us, except Gaby, had the good sense to be
thoroughly frightened.
Things weren’t ever quite the same for Martha after that. No other
magazine, or picture book, would take the place of the one she had
burned. She would wander about the house, evenings, quietly, but
restless, like a cat who had lost her kittens.
One of Gaby’s pleasant little ways was to refer to Martha as an idiot,
right before her face.
“La-la!” Gaby exclaimed one evening, when Martha was wandering about.
“The idiot gets on my nerves. Can’t you make her keep still, Mrs.
Ricker?”
“She isn’t harming anyone,” I said, since Mrs. Ricker, as usual, said
nothing. “You leave her alone, and stop talking like that, Miss.”
“I’m not harming anyone, now,” Martha piped up. “But someday I might.
I’d like to. I won’t, though,” she walked over close to Gaby, “if
you’ll give me the gold monkey. I’ll be good then, for always.”
It was a bracelet charm of Gaby’s, a gold monkey, about the size of a
large almond, with jade eyes. The minute Martha had seen it she had
begun to beg for it. There weren’t any monkeys in the jewelry
catalogs, but Sam sent off and got her a bear and a turtle. She
wouldn’t have any truck with them. She wanted that one, particular
monkey. Gaby would not give it to her; would not so much as allow her
to wear it for a few hours at a time. As usual, this evening, she
refused to let Martha touch it.
“Yes, and you’ll be sorry,” Martha threatened.
She went upstairs and emptied a can of pepper in Gaby’s handkerchief
box.
She was always playing tricks of the sort on Gaby, if we did not watch
her. For my own part, I wouldn’t have bothered with watching her but
for the fact that, more than often, she got the two girls mixed up and
it was Danny whose pretty dress would be tied to the chair to tear,
instead of Gaby’s; or Danny’s hair would receive the contents of
Chad’s paste-pot; and then Martha, discovering her mistake, would make
herself ill with crying and remorse. Just as she had hated Gaby from
the start, she had loved Danny; but she could not tell them apart.
It seemed incredible that even Martha could be confused about the two
girls; because, if ever girls were opposites, those girls were. Of
course, they were the same size, about five feet and two inches tall,
I should judge, and the same weight—both of them too skinny to my way
of thinking, flat as bread-boards. Their faces, just their faces, did
look alike. They both had long brown eyes, straight noses, small
mouths—Gaby painted her lips until they looked much fuller and more
curved than Danny’s—pointed chins, and complexions the color of real
light caramel frosting. Danny’s cheeks showed a faint pink, coming and
going. Gaby painted her cheekbones, clear back to her ears, with a
deep orange-pink color. They both had wavy, dark brown hair, cut just
the same in the back, real close fitting and down to a point. But Gaby
brushed her hair straight back from her forehead, and put varnish
stuff on it till it was as sleek and shining as patent leather. She
left all of her ears showing, and she always wore big earrings,
dangling from them. Danny parted her hair on the side, and allowed it
to wave, loose and soft and pretty. She never wore earrings. Gaby’s
clothes were all loud colored, or seemed to be—black turned gaudy when
she put it on—and they were all insecure appearing, too defiant of
paper patterns to be quite moral. Danny’s clothes were as neat and
quiet as a pigeon’s.
No wonder that these frequent mistakes of Martha’s made me decide that
she was losing her eyesight. I spoke to Sam about it, suggesting that
Mrs. Ricker would better take her to San Francisco to visit an
oculist.
According to his usual custom, Sam laughed at me. He said that he had
about concluded that Martha was the only one on the place who could
use her eyes to see deeper than gee-gaws and fol-de-rols.
“If you are insinuating,” I said, “that those two girls are alike in
any respect, inside or outside, you’ve lost your senses.”
“Why shouldn’t they be alike?” Sam questioned. “They are twin sisters.
They were brought up together, they have had the same friends, the
same teaching, the same environments. Of course they are alike. One of
them is play-acting. I don’t know which one. I suspect Danielle, on
account of John.”
I may as well state, right here, that all of this remark of Sam’s,
with the exception of the girls being twin sisters, was a mistake from
beginning to end. I didn’t, at that time, know much of anything about
their past lives. I did know their present characters. I told him so.
He laughed again, and wanted to know what had become of all my
theories concerning our modern young girls. Ever since the war, I had
been standing up for them, through thick and thin.
“It takes a pretty stout theory,” I admitted, “to hear a young lady
called a ‘damn good sport,’ and see her receive it as a choice
compliment.”
“Who said that to who?” Sam wanted to know.
“Who do you suppose? Hubert Hand to Gaby, of course.”
“Hubert Hand,” Sam said, “had better behave himself.”
Since Hubert Hand was too selfish ever to love anything that his Roman
nose wasn’t attached to, his carryings on with Gaby should be classed,
I think, not in the center ring, but as the main attraction of the
third ring. And he almost old enough to be her father, with white
coming into his hair at his temples!
To this day I have never understood those two, during those months.
Gaby was in love with John. Hubert Hand was in love with Hubert Hand.
Yet they hugged and kissed, and seemed to think that calling it
“necking” made it respectable. It wasn’t a flirtation, with them. It
was more like a fight, where each of them was fighting for something
they did not want. A perfectly footless, none too wholesome
performance.
“You make him behave himself, Sam,” I urged.
“He is free, white and twenty-one. And she sure can take care of
herself, if ever a girl could. It’s none of my put-in.”
“What about the rest of us,” I said, “forced to watch such goings on?”
“Don’t watch. If you watch Belle, and Sadie and Goldie, that is
watching enough for one woman.”
Belle, Sadie and Goldie were the Indian women I had, at that time, to
help me around the place. I suppose they were pretty good girls. They
did all the actual work there was to do around the house, except the
cooking, with me directing them every step they took. But when I
remember how they all deserted me, in the time of our terrible
trouble, it makes me so fighting mad that I don’t like to give them
credit for anything, nor think about them at all, even yet.