Читать книгу Hare and Tortoise - Pierre Coalfleet - Страница 4

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From a recalcitrant little garden in front of the log house, Louise could follow the figure of her husband on a buckskin colored pony which matched his blond hair. He was skirting the edge of the lake toward the trail that led up through pines and aspens to the ridge where their “Castle” would ultimately be built. Keble had still three months of his novitiate as rancher to fulfil before his father’s conservative doubts would be appeased and the money forthcoming from London for the project of transforming the mountain lake and plains into something worthy the name of “estate”: a comfortable house, a farm, a stock range, and a game preserve. He was boyishly in earnest about it all.

When Keble had disappeared into the trail, Louise’s eyes came back along the pebbly strip of shore, past the green slope that led through thinning groups of tall cottonwood trees to the superintendent’s cabin and the barns, resting finally upon the legend over her front door: Sans Souci. She remembered how gaily she had painted the board and tacked it up. Had the blows of her hammer been challenges to Fate?

She sighed and bent over the young flower beds. At an altitude of five thousand feet everything grew so unwillingly; yet everything that survived seemed so nervously vital! She dreaded Keble’s grandiose projects; or rather, the nonchalance with which he could conceive them intimidated her. There was something jolly about things as they had been: the cottage and the horses and dogs, the two servants, the rattling car, and the canoe. She thought, indulgently, of the awe in which she had originally held even this degree of luxury.

Her ditch was now fairly free of pebbles, and she placed the dahlia bulbs in line. As she worked, the thin mountain sunshine crept up on her, warming, fusing, gilding her thoughts. Spring could do so much to set one’s little world aright. In the winter when the mountains were white and purple and the emerald water had frozen black, when supplies from the Valley were held up for days at a time, one was not so susceptible to the notion of a universal benevolence as one could be on a morning like this, with its turquoise sky, its fluffy clouds that seemed to grow on the tops of the fir trees like cotton, and its rich silence, only intensified by the scream of a conceited crane flying from the distant river to the rock in the lake where he made a daily “grub-call” at the expense of Keble’s trout.

There was one other alien sound: the noise of a motor, a battered car from the Valley that brought mail on Tuesdays and Fridays. But this was Monday. The driver was talking to one of the hands; and a young stranger, quite obviously a “dude” and English, was looking about the place with a sort of eager, friendly curiosity. Then Mr. Brown appeared, and after a short consultation took the stranger in the direction of a road that led around by another route to the ridge.

An hour later, from her bedroom window she saw Keble approaching the cottage, his arm about the shoulders of the visitor. They might have been two boys dawdling home from school: boys with a dozen trifles which they had saved up for each other, to exchange with intimate lunges and gesticulations. She had never seen Keble thus demonstrative. Indeed, she had never seen him before in the company of a friend. She ran downstairs two steps at a time.

“Oh, Louise, here’s Windrom out of a blue sky,—you know: Walter Windrom who was at Marlborough with me.”

Keble had become suddenly casual again and shut off some current within him in the manner that always baffled her. She knew Walter Windrom from Keble’s tales of school life in England, and she had a quite special corner in her heart for the shy young man who had been his friend. She envied him for having been so close to Keble at a time when she was ignorant of his very existence. Walter could remember how Keble had looked and talked and worn his caps at that age, whereas she could only imagine. She remembered that Keble had marched off to war instead of going up to Oxford with his chum, as they had planned, and that Windrom had recently been given a diplomatic post in Washington. The image of Keble in a Lieutenant’s uniform awakened another memory: Keble had once told her that he and Windrom had played at warfare with their history master, and with her usual impetuosity she got part of this picture into her first remark to the new man: “You used to play tin soldiers together!”

“And Keble always won the battles, even if he had to violate the Hague conventions to do it!” Walter’s tone was indulgent.

“Oh!” exclaimed Louise. “But he would break them so morally! Even the Hague would be fooled.”

“The history of England in a nutshell,” agreed Walter. “We played battles like Waterloo, and I had to be Napoleon to his Wellington.”

“But you didn’t mind really, old man, you know you didn’t.”

“Not a bit! The foundation on which true friendship rests is that one of the parties enjoys to beat, and the other rather enjoys being beaten.”

“Walter has turned philosopher and poet and says clever things that you needn’t believe at all.”

“Oh, but I do believe him,” said Louise quickly, alarmed at the extent to which she did. To cover it she held out her hands with an exuberant cordiality and drew them into the house.

The luncheon table was drawn near windows framed by yellow curtains which Louise had herself hemmed. Through them, beyond the young green plants in the window-boxes, beyond the broken trees that Keble called the Castor and Pollux group, from their resemblance to the pillars in the Roman Forum, the two mountains that bounded the end of the lake could be seen coming together in an enormous jagged V, one overlapping the other in a thickly wooded canyon.

“And to think that all this marvel belongs to you, to do with as you see fit!” exclaimed Windrom. “It’s as though God had let you put the finishing touches on a monument He left in the rough.”

“We’re full of godlike projects,” said Keble. “This afternoon I’ll find a mount for you and take you over the place.”

“Let it be a gentle one,” Windrom pleaded. “Horses scare me,—to say nothing of making me sore.”

“Sundown won’t,” Louise quickly reassured him, then turned to her husband. “Let him ride Sundown, Keble ... He’s mine,” she explained. “The only thing left in the rough by God that I’ve had the honor of improving, apart from myself! Like lightning if you’re in a hurry, but wonderfully sympathetic. I’ll give you some lumps of sugar. For sugar he’ll do anything. He’s the only horse in Alberta that knows the taste of it. But don’t let Keble see you pamper him, for he’s getting to be very Canadian and very Western and calls it dudish and demoralizing and scolds you for it.”

She paused, a little abashed by the length to which her harmless desire to help along the talk had taken her, and smiled half apologetically, half trustfully as her husband resumed inquiries about the incredible number of unheard-of people they knew in common: people who thought nothing of wandering from London to Cairo, from New York to Peking: rich, charming, clever, initiated people,—people who would always know what to do and say, she was sure of it.