Leave Her to Heaven (4 page)

Harland, since the day Enid told him of her engagement to another, had felt no particular interest in any girl; but he was now unable easily to forget the young woman who had gone to sleep while she was reading his book. The fact that because he looked like her father she had burst into tears suggested that she was recently bereaved and her appearance indicated that she was of the nervous and emotional type. Her translucent skin through which deeper flesh tones showed, her large eyes and lofty brow and her low, vibrant voice persistently suggested the mysterious East, the indolent seductions of hot desert days and starlit nights.

He smiled at his own fancies and set himself to forget her, staying all afternoon in his compartment, reading or idly watching the passing scene. The world hereabouts seemed to be made
of vast plane surfaces which met at angles almost imperceptible. The horizon was sometimes fifteen or twenty miles away, sometimes close at hand; yet these near horizons were hardly above the level of the eye, and a straw stack or a group of farm buildings miles beyond might lift above them like the top-hamper of a passing ship at sea. Once he saw a shower approaching from the northwest, the emptying clouds casting across the wheat a shadow as blue as the ocean. Rain lashed the windows of the train and then was gone, leaving the rich lands teeming in the sun; and Harland knew these wide fruitful levels could feed a hungry world.

But the girl continually intruded in his thoughts, and he wondered idly why it was that an ocean voyage, or a long train journey, so often awoke romantic imaginings. Perhaps it was the feeling of irresponsibility which arose from the certainty that you would never see your fellow travellers again.

In the morning he had time to breakfast before they reached the junction point where he alighted. On the platform, while he was feeing the porter, young Lin Robie came running toward him with a shout of welcome. The boy wore dungarees and a silk shirt, high-heeled boots and a wide hat; and he was lean and brown and strong, and — remembering Danny who would never run again — Harland felt a shaking twist of pain. Then Lin was grasping his hand and saying many things all at once. ‘Gosh, we're sorry Danny couldn't come, Mr. Harland; but I'm glad you did! How is he? Is he going to be all right?'

‘Some day, perhaps,' Harland said. ‘But it will be a long fight.'

‘He wrote to me,' Lin explained. Harland had not known this. ‘He told me to give you a good time. There's a washout on the branch line between here and the ranch, so Dad and I came down with the car and the truck to meet you. He's looking for the others. Did you meet them on the train? There, he's found them! Come along. Charlie will look after your things.' Harland saw in the background a young man with a broad, friendly face under his wide hat, and fine shoulders in a checked shirt, and
the narrow hips of those who spend their days in the saddle; and Lin introduced him. ‘This is Charlie Yates, the ranch boss. This is Mr. Harland, Charlie.'

Harland shook Charlie's hand, finding the other's grip, as was so often the case with outdoors men, as gentle as a woman's. Conscious of their strength, they were careful to hold it in restraint. Then Lin cried eagerly: ‘Now come on!' Harland followed him, and a moment later he saw Glen Robie, in business clothes but wearing the wide hat of the region, standing with three women. One of them was old, white hair drawn smoothly back to a knot on her nape, with deep-set dark eyes; one was young and wore a pleasant friendliness; and the third was the girl whom Harland had decided to forget!

Robie when they approached turned to grasp Harland's hand in warm welcome. ‘And now meet Mrs. Berent, and Miss Ellen, and Miss Ruth!' he said. So her name was Ellen! Harland saw her meaningly clutch her mother's arm, saw them exchange glances. ‘I've told them about you,' Robie said. ‘I thought you might get acquainted on the train.'

‘Ellen had her eye on him,' the older woman declared. ‘She insisted he looked like Professor Berent, but I told her that was nonsense! It is, too! He's only a boy!'

‘I don't see it, myself,' Robie assented, looking at Harland appraisingly, so that Harland felt like a child whose resemblance to its father or its mother is under discussion.

When they set out, Mrs. Berent sat in the front seat of the big touring car with Robie. Harland found himself between Ellen and Ruth in the tonneau, while Lin perched on a drop seat, turning around to face them. After three or four blocks they emerged from the town into the open desert. Robie drove fast, and he talked over his shoulder as he drove, and Harland, saying, ‘Yes,' and ‘Yes, I see,' as Robie called his attention to this and that, wished the other would keep his eyes upon the road. Mrs. Berent finally said irascibly: ‘For Heaven's sake, man, look where you're going!' Robie laughed and mended his ways; and after a moment Ellen, turning to Harland, asked curiously:

‘Are you really the Richard Harland who wrote
Time Without Wings?'

‘I suppose I am,' he admitted, wishing that he did not always feel, when such a question was asked, an inane desire to simper.

She laughed softly. ‘And I went to sleep, reading it, before your very eyes! No wonder you scowled at me! But I sat up half the night to finish it afterward, honestly.'

Harland could find nothing to say. The rapid motion of the car, causing them all to lean one way and then the other as they rounded occasional curves, pressed her against him, pressed him against her. Lin chattered steadily, and Harland answered him; but the sisters sat now in an equal silence. Harland forgot Ruth, but he did not for a moment cease to be conscious of Ellen, close on his other side.

Robie's home, planned by an artist who worked under no financial restrictions, was perfection, completely suited to its surroundings, never emptily luxurious yet never unnecessarily lavish. When they arrived, Mrs. Robie, surprisingly young and with an appealing beauty, welcomed them; and Harland saw the firm devotion between her and her husband, and their mutual pride. She was not quite as tall as her daughter Tess, whom Harland judged to be about eighteen — although Mrs. Robie might have been no more than thirty — and who met them with an unspoiled friendliness.

Harland's room — to which Lin escorted him — was at the end of the wing just above the pool which, tiled in blue, seemed to catch and reflect the pure beauty of the cloudless sky; and beyond, Harland could look out across the desert where every changing light produced a shifting panorama of colors to enchant the eye with swimming beauty. After an easy lunch, he went with Robie and Lin to see the stables, immaculate as a laboratory, which housed the polo ponies, and the wide pastures where fine cattle grazed; and they drove a few miles up the canyon to Robie's
hunting lodge, so Harland did not meet the other guests again till they all came together for cocktails under the pergola beside the pool. During dinner, Robie explained for Harland's benefit — since the others of course already knew this — that Professor Berent had been his chief adviser during the years when he himself was active in the development of new oil fields.

‘And after I sold out and bought the ranch here,' he said, ‘he — and Ellen — came out, last year and the year before, to collect specimens, birds. That was his hobby. He had a collector's license, used to skin them and then send the skins — and sometimes he made the mounts too — to museums. Ellen helped him.' He said to Mrs. Berent: ‘I'm sorry you could never come with them.'

‘Ellen wouldn't let me!' she retorted, with that harsh asperity which seemed to be habitual to her, and she went on: ‘Long before that, she had claimed her father as her private property, monopolized him so completely that I was surprised she didn't sleep with him!'

Ellen said quietly: ‘Father needed someone to help him with the birds, Mr. Harland; and neither Mother nor Ruth cared to do the things he wanted done.'

‘I should think not!' Mrs. Berent exclaimed, with an indignant jerk of her head. ‘Snipping away at a dead partridge's eyelids is not my idea of a way to spend an afternoon! I'd rather do needlepoint!'

Ellen, as though the older woman had not spoken, added: ‘And Mother was afraid of the arsenic, and Ruth was apt to be careless with it, and that sometimes worried Father.' Harland, who like most authors knew a little about a great many things, remembered that powdered arsenic was used to preserve raw skins.

‘I was afraid of it, I admit!' Mrs. Berent said crisply. ‘I don't like poison!' There was frank malice in her tones as she added: ‘But Ellen seemed to enjoy handling it. She treated it as casually as so much face powder. I'm not at all sure she didn't sometimes dab it on her nose!'

Everyone — even Ellen — laughed. After dinner, they had
coffee beside the pool, sitting in quiet talk under stars that seemed to stoop close to peer at them, till Robie said presently: ‘We'll start early in the morning, breakfast at seven. It's a long day's ride, so some of you may want to turn in.'

Mrs. Berent asked in quick protest: ‘Ride? Horses?'

‘There's no road to the fishing camp,' Robie admitted. ‘The trail's rough even for a horse.'

Ellen said in quiet triumph: ‘I told you, Mother, there was no need for you to come. You can never ride so far. You'll have to stay here. You might quite as well have stayed in Bar Harbor.'

‘I came this far and I'm going the rest of the way,' Mrs. Berent retorted. ‘So you might as well make up your mind to it! You did your level best to shut me out of your father's life; but I intend to see the last of him in spite of you! Horses or no horses! I'm going through with it, even if they have to tie me on top of one of the creatures.'

Robie laughed reassuringly. ‘You'll have no trouble, no more than if you sat all day in a rocking chair,' he assured her. Harland smiled, suspecting that Robie had overstated the case for mountain riding.

When the others departed, Robie and Harland stayed to drink a highball together; and Harland, making his tone casual, led his host to speak of these other guests. Robie recalled the years when he and Professor Berent were together in Texas; but it was not of Ellen's father Harland wished to hear, and at last he asked directly: ‘How old is Ellen?'

Robie looked at him, momentarily hesitant. ‘She's twenty-two,' he said briefly. ‘Ruth's twenty. She's a fine girl.' It was as though he compared them, and to Ellen's disadvantage, and Harland wondered what it was he did not say; but then Robie returned to Professor Berent. ‘After the wells came in, I didn't see him for years,' he said. ‘Then I sold out.' He chuckled in an agreeable fashion. ‘You know, Harland, I like money. It makes it possible to do so many of the things we all want to do. I gave Professor Berent a million dollars — it was his knowledge and his advice on which I'd cashed in — and we were such good friends that he took it.'

Harland hid his astonishment, smiling. ‘Most of us, at an offer like that, would be torn between pride and avarice; but you'd better not try it on me. I'm not proud!'

Robie laughed. ‘Find me a new oil field and I'll do it,' he retorted, and he went on: ‘Then when I built this place, I asked him out for a visit; and Ellen came with him.'

He hesitated again, said: ‘You asked about Ellen.' Harland had only asked her age, but there were many questions in him. ‘She's a strange girl. They spent two months here; took a couple of the boys and some pack horses and kept on the move. Before they left I came to see behind Ellen's beauty, see the iron in her. She has an absolutely immovable will. It seemed to me her father was a mass of small bruises, beaten numb by his constant exposure to the impact of that will of hers. She never let the men do him any personal service at all. They saddled the horses, made camp, did the routine things; but she spread his bedroll, prepared his meals, almost fed him by hand. Of course, she was crazy about him; but he couldn't call his soul his own.'

‘I suspected her of a — father fixation, something of the sort.'

Robie nodded. ‘I've heard of men and women in medieval times being “pressed to death,” whatever that means. It was as though he were being pressed to death by the weight of her devotion.'

Harland smiled. ‘Looks bad for the man she marries.'

‘I notice she's wearing an engagement ring.'

‘I saw that. I suppose after her father's death her life was empty and she snatched at a straw — or at a straw man. How long has he been dead?'

‘Died this spring.'

‘Mrs. Berent said something tonight I didn't understand, something about seeing the last of her husband?'

‘Why, they've brought his ashes out here,' Robie explained.

‘There's a place up in the mountains, a high pasture with a low rim of forest all around it, nine or ten thousand feet above sea level. Professor Berent used to say it seemed to be pressed against the sky; and you have that feeling when you're up there,
that the sky is within arm's reach overhead. He loved the spot, and he hoped his ashes might be scattered there. I think he knew he wouldn't live long. That's why they're here. I judge Ellen would have preferred to come alone, but for once her mother apparently insisted.'

Harland was silent, hushed in thought. They sat in darkness save for the fair light of the stars; and he remembered that for ten thousand years men had told tales under the quiet stars, sometimes beside a flickering little fire, huddling to its warmth for a while before they sought the solitudes of sleep. It was in darkness, surrounded by the mysteries of night, that the story-teller first found his imagination stimulated into speech, and there he first found his audience too. Robie's cigarette glowed under a last drag, and he stubbed it out; and Harland said: ‘Well, if we're starting early. . .'