They all woke at once, perhaps because a bird screamed as it flew over
them. Teddy sat up so swiftly that he almost toppled off the edge. He
stared wildly about him, trying to remember. The other three propped
themselves up on their arms, with tousled hair, and faces marked by the
rock. It was as if they had been carried to another place while they
slept; this was a green country with another sun shining down on it, a
second cousin to their sun; small and high and cheerful. He had a
confused feeling that he must have been drunk. No one spoke: they were
all waiting. Then, as if she could not control herself any longer, Gin
giggled.
“Gee, we look funny,” she said, and broke the spell. “What time is it?”
No one had a watch. They stood up, groaning and helping each other. One
by one, with grim sensible expressions, they disappeared behind a rocky
crag. They all used Harvey’s little black comb, and slowly worked up
enough concerted impulse to climb down the hill. It was not so easy as
it had been to climb up.
His shoes scuffed, his toes jammed into the ends of them, Teddy walked
blindly over the sand, leading the straggling procession. A luminous
exaltation possessed them all, shining from their faces, defying hunger
and sleepiness. He tried to put it into words in his mind, in a
hysterical stream of phrases.... “Companions of the night ... black wind
and the freedom of motion.... Away from the earth, here in fresh-born
sunlight, we are new again and shining. The true artist, the true man
lies down where he happens to be, like an animal, and sleeps as he
wishes....” He stumbled on a sandy hummock and felt a little dizzy.
They climbed stiffly into the car. Gin was obsessed with chatter: she
talked of her hunger, her disordered clothes, her lame shoulder, in a
gay high voice that had nothing to do with what she was saying. Harvey
watched her sombrely and silently. Her hair hung loose around her
shoulders: she tried once to twist it up but it fell again: in the wind
it streamed out sideways when they started to move, and whipped back,
catching Harvey on the cheek. She was beautiful, Teddy thought. He said,
“If you wouldn’t turn out to be such a ‘Saturday Evening Post’ girl, I’d
paint you.”
“I will anyway,” cried Blake. “I’ll paint all of us. It will be a
frontispiece to ‘Treasure Island’ and we’ll all be disgraced.”
“We are disgraced,” she cried joyfully. “Paint us, paint us.” She leaned
over the side as limply as she could, imitating a corpse. “Dead, dead,
dead,” she murmured. A roadster full of staring tourists passed in the
other direction, and swerved as the driver turned for a last look.
“Wheeee, it’s late,” said Teddy. “When do we eat? How far are we? Where
are we?”
Suddenly Gin screamed and then sat still with her fist to her open
mouth.
“What’s the matter?” they all asked.
“My job! I forgot. How could I?”
“Ooo,” said Blake. “And it’s late.”
“How could I?”
“I think it’s charming,” Madden answered. “It’s darling of you. I love
to have people forget important things. It’s good for your soul.”
She shook her head impatiently, her eyes wet. They were all subdued.
“Take me to a phone,” she said suddenly. “As soon as we get to town I’ll
call the office.”
“Don’t worry,” said Harvey, “Flo probably had a brainstorm and called
them already. Is she in town today?”
“I don’t know. Well, never mind. Breakfast!”
They came into town with a wild swoop. At the little cafe Gin rushed for
the telephone and found that Flo had committed the necessary perjury.
She returned radiant to her coffee and fried eggs.
“I’ve been trying to do a poem all night, I think,” Blake was telling
Teddy. “I dreamed the beginning of it and added a lot and it was very
good. Now I’ve forgotten most of it.” He laughed. “There are just two
lines.”
Teddy ordered, “Let’s have them.”
“They’re silly. They don’t mean anything.”
“Well, let’s see.”
“Just this.
“Your narrow eyes roaming desireless
Skim cruelly the arid desert sands.
“There was a picture that went with it of a figure on a mountain top.”
“I’ll draw it,” said Madden.
Harvey snuffled in scorn and looked side-wise at Blake.
“I don’t feel at all like going home,” said Blake. “We ought to do
something else now.”
“Let’s go to Taos,” said Teddy.
Gin cried out in alarm. “You do what you like, but take me home first.
I’m down for Lamy this afternoon. Are you trying to ruin me?”
“I’m going to work,” Harvey said decidedly. “Let’s get going.”
They put Gin down first, while she tried feebly to tuck her hair up
before she ran into her house. From the depths of the house they heard
Flo, shrill and abusive, as they turned the car in the narrow street and
headed for the Lennards’. Blake fell silent and thoughtful as they drew
near home.
“On second thought,” he told Harvey, “it might be wise for me to walk
the last few steps. Mother may be excited. I hope she went to sleep.” He
stepped lightly over the door and advanced bravely to the house: the car
turned discreetly and went toward town again.
Harvey was grumpy on the way back. He dumped Teddy at the door of their
house and drove away again silently. Already the day seemed tired.
Languid and a little depressed, Madden unlocked the door, carried in the
warm bottle of milk, and lay down on his bed.
His telephone rang late in the afternoon and woke him. Confused and
feeling guilty, he stumbled over to it and answered the call in a
cracked, sleepy voice.
“Hello, Hello? Teddy Madden? Dear boy, where have you been? This is
Bob.”
“Oh, I was asleep. Just a minute——?” he lit a cigarette. “I say, am I
due up there tonight? I’ve lost track of time.”
He was, Bob assured him a little indignantly. Moreover, he was late for
tea.
“I’ll be right up,” he said. He hung up the receiver and before doing
anything else, sat quietly in the half-dark, his head in his hands.
“Gosh....” Waves of gloom had overtaken him at last; after being outrun
for a week they had caught him. Reasonless, they were; or at any rate he
had too many reasons to worry; none at all for this persistent
depression. Bills, conscience, perpetual hangover—he ran them over in
his mind, but there was no answering twinge as he called them out. It
was something else; something that followed every jag of happiness. It
was as much a part of this play town as the other, pleasant, excitement:
a gnawing whimpering nameless anxiety that was waiting for him whenever
he sat alone in the dark. It took gigantic effort to call the cab-stand.
“Harv? Madden calling. Listen, Harv, send a car round right away, will
you? Here, of course. No, home. Oh, charge it.”
Harvey expostulated in a mechanical, hopeless manner. “I got to tighten
up on you, Madden. Listen to reason. Do you know what you owe here?...
All right, but if you wait ten minutes, I’ll be home and run you up
myself. Oh, all right. I’ll send Ben: he’s turning into the yard now.”
“Thanks. Look, I’ll pay right now.”
“You and who else?” asked his room-mate wearily.
Turning into the Stuart driveway, however, he solved the problem. Bob
was standing on the porch superintending the parking of another car, and
strolled down to meet the taxi.
“Got any change, Bob?” asked Madden: and the two bits were forthcoming.
He walked into the house with a virtuous feeling, into a small crowd of
people. Mrs. Saville-Sanders was perched on a window-seat, holding forth
to Mrs. Lyons and a strange woman in a hat. Mrs. Lennard was talking to
Phil Ray and stopped to smile at Teddy as he entered. Nothing wrong in
that quarter, then: Blake was all right. There were other people just
coming in; not very good friends of Bob, to judge by his attitude. Teddy
poured himself a drink and sat down by Mrs. Lyons, who patted his arm in
greeting.
She was a nice old thing, he told himself again. She was one of the few
stands he took against public opinion. Most of the people in Santa Fé,
that is, the people he ran with, made fun of her. She was not quite
bright, they argued. It was always just a few minutes before they said
anything really serious that Teddy would protest,
“Well, I like old Ruth.”
He really did. She was kindly, credulous and restful. She was generous.
She was maternal. If she was a little smug, the only difference between
her attitude and Mrs. Saville-Sanders’, he said to himself, was that she
had less money to be smug about. The other thing was that she was a
native daughter and had a tangible husband. He was a popular artist who
took himself quite seriously and made a cottage-and-garden living by
executing big colourful murals of Indians wearing the wrong kind of
moccasins and shooting arrows at conventionalized mesas with all of the
shadows on the same side.
Teddy would say, “Of course, Tommy’s _work_—but I like old Ruth.”
Gwendolyn Saville-Sanders was busy getting people to do something about
Santa Fé. Gwendolyn, unlike old Ruth, had been coming out here for only
three years. Before the war did so many horrible things to it, she had
spent her leisure and a lot more in Fiesole: before she was told about
Fiesole it had been Switzerland. But Gwendolyn had begun to take up
America in a serious manner. She was a little behind other people in
doing it: many others had brought back treasures of Indian handicraft to
their Eastern homes before she had seen the writing on the wall and
hastened out to Art’s new headquarters. Now that she had found it,
though, she was making the most of it. Gwendolyn was slow on the uptake,
but thorough. Her three years of discovery had been swift and ferocious:
already her collection of Navajo silver was the largest in America (not
counting the museums) and her Chimayo blankets were famous. As for the
tin candle-sconces, it was no less than wonderful, the number she had
salvaged in the short time she had had.
No necessity here for Teddy to say, “Well, I don’t care, I like old
Gwen.” One liked Gwen as a matter of course. As soon as she left a room,
becomingly cheerful in farewell, one murmured, “Isn’t she marvelous?”
or, “Isn’t she perfectly grand?” The thing that counted in this matter
was that Gwendolyn should say after you yourself had left the room,
“I like that Teddy. He’s a nice boy.”
As yet she had not said it, at least Bob had not reported it. So Teddy
sat down next to Ruth Lyons and listened.
She was steamed up about Fiesta.
“I think that we need something for the last night, to raise the curtain
on the Ball,” she was saying. “I think that a bazaar might be the thing,
or a play. Why don’t you write a play, Teddy?” Her voice, terrifyingly
loud, rang out through the room and everyone turned to listen. That was
what she wanted. “Write a play,” she insisted. “You bright young people!
You can do it. Write a play and I’ll put it on in my garden.”
“Your wish is my command, old thing,” he said. Bob walked over and swung
an arm around his shoulders, saying,
“That’s the right spirit, Teddy. We’ll all help.”
Gwen smiled and changed her mind. “Or a vaudeville. A vaudeville would
be easier and we’d please more people. Ruth, you must tell Tommy to do
the sets—we’ll get _all_ the artists to do the sets. And the Native
Element will be able to help. They’re so histrionic. The Indians and the
Spaniards and all that. Is that settled? Good: I must go. Bob darling,
pick out a committee. I must go. Where did I put my bag? It’s all
settled then; a play. No, a vaudeville. I _must_ go. Teddy, come to
lunch tomorrow. Good-night, Ruth. Goodbye, everybody, I must simply
fly.”
They all flew except Teddy and Philip and the stranger with the hat.
They were going to dine, Bob said, and then play bridge. The stranger
was a puzzled frightened woman from Austria who had come over to paint
Indians. She was going on to Japan to paint cherry-blossoms. The Indians
were an interlude between cherry-blossoms in Japan and chestnut blossoms
in Paris. Teddy remembered seeing some of her work in the Modern Wing of
the Museum; he had thought then for a few stormy moments that they had
no business being there, and now, looking at her, he was sure of it. She
was open-mouthed and passive under an onslaught of information. Bob
loved to give information about his country.
In the dining-room they chatted thus: Bob shining with happiness. His
dour Mexican maid served the soup.
“You have mountains too, of course,” he said, and Miss Kolbenhayer
nodded. “But I always think that it is not the mere rocks and stones and
trees that make the mountains. Here we have something else to contend
with: the smouldering forces of the American Indian.”
Miss Kolbenhayer’s soup-spoon stopped at the edge of her plate. “But
here they are quite tame, is it not so?”
“Unfortunately they are, for the most part,” he admitted. “It is the
mixed breed that is prone to strange outbursts. Things go on here ...
religious frenzies ... crimes of innocence.... I suppose no one had told
you of the Red River crime?”
No one had.
“Now, there’s an instance.” Bob gave up the soup proposition for the
evening. “A girl from the East with her newly married husband and a
guide went on a hunting north of here. They met a sheep-herder, a
Mexican. A mere boy; sixteen, I think. He came up to their camp-fire one
night. It is the law of the mountains: they gave him food. The next
morning he went on with them and they gave him a gun to carry. Now, he
had noticed the girl, and he wanted her.” Bob bit ferociously into the
cracker and repeated, “Wanted her. So he shot the husband.” He stared at
Miss Kolbenhayer.
Flo twisted around and looked, “Hmmm. Shot the husband and the guide.
They died immediately.”
“Oh!”
“Immediately. The girl ran seven miles to Red River, where she sobbed
out her story and fainted.” Bob’s round little face beamed with pride.
“The strangest thing is what the sheep-herder said at the trial. When
they asked him if he had anything to offer in defence he said that the
devil had entered his soul. In a way he was right, poor chap.”
Miss Kolbenhayer shuddered. “It’s like your Chicago.”
“Oh, Chicago,” said Bob in scorn. “That is a commercial city. The crimes
are commercial and stupid. Here we are faced with a mysterious people.”
He hesitated as Revelita changed the plates, and Teddy fell into a
revery that had to do with the mysterious people. In the old foolish
days when he had first come and had been overwhelmed by the place, he
had tried to plunge headlong into the native life of the town. There had
been dances in the little halls at the edge of the city: colourful but
stiff affairs with little skinny girls wearing pink ribbons in their
hair, dancing with swarthy little boys. He had eaten by preference in
the Mexican restaurants—not that there were many; the native
townspeople liked to eat at home—where he had tried to burn out his
guts, as he expressed it, with chile in various forms. Here and there he
met and danced with Revelita.
Then came the new phase, when he began to go uptown to the big houses.
He had almost forgotten the queer triumphant feeling he had when
Revelita first appeared at his elbow at Bob’s, wearing a white apron and
offering him a cocktail from a tray, eyes downcast, and lips composed.
Then the climax, a few nights later, when he was alone in Bob’s house,
drawing upon his new pleasant intimacy by reading in the library while
Bob was out at Sanford’s. The hurried step outside, the Spanish
recriminations, and Revelita’s startled face when she found him in a
supposedly empty house; her face still twisted in anger and fear of her
father, who had beaten her after a quarrel, and driven her up to Bob’s
strap in hand. Of course, something had to be done to quiet her.
Together, amused by the piquancy of it, they raided the liquor-chest.
Revelita was reckless, drunk, excited out of her usual reserve. Followed
the usual row of asterisks, he told himself. And then the next day she
appeared once more at his elbow in the white apron, eyes downcast, lips
composed. He still remembered the thrill of power that little incident
had given him. It was a wonderful town.
“A mysterious people.” Bob repeated as Revelita’s stocky figure passed
out through the door. “Who knows what they are thinking?”
They had coffee in the living-room before beginning to play. Teddy
looked around at the calm well-fed faces, the heavy blankets that
curtained the windows, the polished floor and all the big permanent
things that Stuart lived with, among which he had his leisurely thoughts
of people and poetry and music.
Quietly, he stretched out his legs and settled back to sip the coffee.
For the first time that day, he was really happy. Safe.