CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was six o’clock in the evening. Blake stopped with his arms full of all the wood he had picked up, rabbit-brush roots and twigs and a few bigger branches hacked unscientifically from half-dead trees. He wanted to stay out here a minute, on the other side of the hill from the fire. Gin was busy cutting up onions, probably, and if he got back there before Teddy did she would make him help. Anyway, there was no hurry for the wood: the car was full of bits that they had picked up all day. There was wood and a water can and a saucepan and there were two loaves of bread and an assortment of knives and forks from the Magdalena hotel. In a few minutes it would be his job to pull it all out, but not yet.
He could see smoke from the fire hovering in the air. Probably she was mixing the stew now. He thought pleasurably of that stew, potatoes and onions and corned beef, most likely. Still, he would stand here until they called him. He loved them both, but it was good to be alone. How alone he was, even with that smoke so near him! He sighed with content and looked in the opposite direction, at the place where the sun had just sunk out of sight. The land was perfectly flat. A few bushes and cholla plants stood out like giants on the plain. It was hours’ since they had passed a fence; just land and land and land, with here and there a side road.
Two days now until they reached Mexico; two days at the most. He could hardly believe it. He looked up at the sky and wondered what would happen to them. Where would they be in ten years? Still in Mexico, still together? He hoped so. The rule of the expedition was that no one should think of anything but the present. Teddy had made it; he had said, “Let’s not remember anything or plan for anything. Let’s just go along.” Now Blake broke the rule; he wondered how they were acting at that moment in Santa Fé, without him. Mary would be dining with Bob, perhaps, and talking about him. Probably she was being very offhand and modern. He could hear her saying, “He’ll be back before the week is out. I know Blake. He’ll do his sulking and then come back perfectly cheerful.” Oh, he said defiantly to himself, will I?
It occurred to him then that he had really heard her saying it. Had some part of him been back there, waiting in the air and listening to Mary? When he said “Will I?” perhaps she had jumped a little, thinking of him saying it just at the time that he did. He followed the idea. Perhaps even though he was standing here on the desert, there was a part or shell of him in that room where he had been, telegraphing.
He felt very clear about it, and willing to go on with the speculation. His mind worked better these days. Every mile he went away from school seemed to help. He was almost ready to form a theory that one learned better if one was happy; perhaps in Mexico he might even become interested in algebra.
“Yoo-hoo!” Gin was calling him. “Stew-hoo!” He picked up one last twig and went back to the fire, smiling. Teddy was measuring out coffee-grounds to put in the boiling water, and Gin told Blake to cut the bread. They started to eat as fast as they could, though the food was still almost too hot.
All of them were wind-burned and peeling, with dry lips from the dust and the sun. They looked bigger, somehow, than they had been when they started out. And yet it had been only four—no, five days, Blake said aloud, since they rode out of Albuquerque. No one answered him, and for a while there was no noise but tin spoons on tin plates.
“Ho-ho,” said Teddy, sighing, and stretching out his legs. “I ate too much.” They settled back comfortably, their heads pillowed on rolled blankets. It was getting dark enough to show up a few pale stars.
Gin said, “You’re all wrong about not mentioning Santa Fé. It’s the best part of being out here, thinking about town and how nice it is that we’re not back there. I keep wondering how Flo is getting along with the dudes, and then I look around and feel great.”
“That’s the way it is with me,” said Blake. “I want to think about it all the time. The old plaza and all that. How do you think it turned out with Phil and the Pearsons?”
“Oh, I bet nothing happened at all. Nothing ever happens there. You always think it will, but it doesn’t. Something else will turn up pretty soon that they’ll be talking about instead of Phil.”
“They’re talking about us now,” said Teddy, in a tone of deep satisfaction.
There was silence again. Then Blake hit the ground with his fist. “I feel so great,” he said.
“We all do,” said Teddy quietly. To Blake, still in that queer state where everything was crystal clear, it came suddenly that he would never forget any of this moment; the orange-glowing fire or the two pastel-shadowed figures sitting beside it. Teddy’s profile, with turned-up nose and ruffled hair, was lowered to the branch he held in his hand, poking the ashes at his feet. He would always remember that, and the smell of burning cedar.
Gin sighed. “If it starts raining again tonight I’ll go to sleep sitting right up in the car. I felt lousy last night.”
“Oh, it won’t rain tonight,” Blake promised easily. “The sky is clear.” It was his trip and he felt responsible for nature. The fire burned down to a useful small smouldering size while the night crept up around them.
“It’s queer how easy it is not to worry out here,” Gin said. “I used to worry all the time about everything, and now nothing seems to be very important.”
“I know,” said Teddy.
“You? You never bothered your head about anything,” she said resentfully. “Money or anything. I used to be so jealous that I could have choked you sometimes.”
“What do you know about it? I did too worry. I didn’t say anything about it, that’s all.”
Blake listened carefully to this strange talk, and now he felt impelled to break in.
“I don’t understand either of you. Why should you have worried about anything? You’re grown up. If I ever get to be twenty-one, there won’t be another thing in my life that I can’t manage. Just to think that no one will be able to tell me what to do, after that! You don’t know when you’re well off.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gin pushed a charred log farther into the fire. “Well, wait until you get there and you’ll see how easy it is.”
“People waste too much time. Always talking about little things that don’t make any difference anyway, and fussing around with people they don’t like very much. They ought to stop doing what they don’t want to do, if it doesn’t make any difference to anyone. They ought to go and do what they really want.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Gin. “What things really do matter? You act as if there were something else to do.”
“I don’t know. It depends on who you are. Teddy really wants to paint; it really matters to him. What do you really want to do?”
“I don’t know. I want to have a good time in Mexico, that’s all, and it looks as if I’ll get it.” She patted Blake’s hand and smiled at him.
“Well, if you’re satisfied now it’s just because there isn’t anyone else around to give you ideas,” said Teddy suddenly. “We’re in an artificial state just now, the way people always are when they travel. When we get some place in Mexico and start getting acquainted with people, things will be complicated again for all of us.”
“I can’t understand you,” Blake repeated sincerely. “I used to think that everyone knew all about things, everyone but me. I always felt like saying to older people, ‘Here, what about life? What is it like?’ I honestly thought they’d be able to tell me. Now I’m getting there myself, and I know that I have as much sense as anybody, but it isn’t much.”
He put his hands behind his head and looked at the sky and was happy, in spite of the ignorance of humanity.
“We ought really to have some ready-made answer to questions about life and all that,” said Teddy. “We all fool around and fool around trying to figure out an answer, and at the end we just take what we have.”
“We take what we have and then we quit,” Gin said gloomily.
“Whatever we have. It isn’t any better than what other people have, that’s the tragedy of it. It’s no nearer the real truth.”
“What truth?” asked Blake. “Is there one?”
“Oh, yes.” Gin sounded shocked. “There’s got to be truth. Why, here we are, all alive. What’s it all about, if there’s not some truth?”
“It’s just an accident that we’re here. Look at us and then look at all this space. Why should we have been picked out, especially?”
“I don’t say that we are, especially. I don’t mean just us, just the three of us or even the whole race. I mean the world and the universe and so forth. Why does it keep on going?”
“It doesn’t have to have a personal manager,” Blake insisted. “It all runs by system. Science.”
“Sure. All right. But what’s the system? Truth, of course.”
“Call it God while you’re at it,” drawled Teddy, who was almost asleep. “That’s what you’re working around to, anyway. ‘Some call it Evolution’....”
“I don’t mean Evolution,” said Gin scornfully. “Now you’ve got me all mixed up. I’m talking about the truth, that’s all. Things are true. If I didn’t think so, I’d commit suicide. I wouldn’t even take the trouble to commit suicide, I’d just stop living.”
“Well then, by all means go on believing in truth,” said Teddy placidly.
“It isn’t believing,” she insisted. “It is so.”
“I never feel like committing suicide,” said Blake thoughtfully. “It might hurt.”
“Well, that proves it,” Gin said triumphantly. “You have a standard.”
“No, I haven’t. That doesn’t follow.” He stood up and stretched,
Teddy said, “Of course you have. You believe in painting, don’t you? Some of it is better than the rest, isn’t it? Well then, you have standards.”
“Oh, no. Those are personal preferences. What I am, not what I think. My likes and dislikes aren’t my thoughts.”
“How can you decide which is you, and which is what you think?”
Blake was silent. It was too much like that old thing that used to puzzle him so at breakfast; the picture of the girl on the box of cornflakes. She held another box of cornflakes on her lap, with a picture on it of a girl holding a box of cornflakes, with a picture of a girl.... Once upon a time he had studied that picture until he was nearly crazy, trying to imagine what happened after the boxes had become so small that he couldn’t see them. He grunted and rolled over with his nose burrowed into the blanket.
“That’s why we bother our heads about little things,” said Gin. “When we try to figure out big ones, we go crazy.”
“Some people do,” Teddy said. “They stop thinking about everything but that one question, What is Truth? Scientists....”
“I know,” she said impatiently. “Arrowsmith stuff. What difference does it all make?” She unrolled her blanket and started to take off her shoes.
“We’re like a legend,” Blake said after a moment. “Three brave people going out into the world. It makes me feel brave to sleep next to a fire. I don’t know why.”
“It is like that,” Gin said eagerly. “Like the Three Musketeers, but there were four Musketeers really, weren’t there? I always forget. Perhaps we’ll pick up a fourth somewhere.”
“I hope not,” said Teddy. “Four would be too many and we’d have trouble.”
“I don’t see why.”
“If we pick up another man, he’ll start making love to you; and if we pick up another girl one of us will start making love to her.”
“I don’t think so.” Blake sat up. “We don’t make love now, so why should anyone else start us off? We’re different.”
“Oh, you think so?” Teddy laughed in a nasty patronizing manner that disturbed Blake. “Wait a while. We know each other too well, this crowd. Take it from me, someone else will spoil it.”
Blake was uneasy. He hated to carry the conversation farther, but he was too worried to let it drop. “Why should we change?” he persisted. “We get along.”
“How do you know? How do you know Gin gets along, for instance? Or that I do?”
Gin interrupted, saying, “Oh, shut up, Teddy. Never mind,” she added to Blake, “he’s talking through his hat. Go to sleep.”
Wonderingly, Blake looked from one to the other of his companions. They were glaring at each other.
“Leave him alone,” said Gin.
“Why should I? What are you trying to do; mother him? This is no nursery.” Teddy lay down with his back to the others.
“Well then, try to act your age,” she retorted, but there was no answer.
In the next few minutes the quiet of the prairie was disturbed by Teddy’s soft snores. The atmosphere had cleared and everything was peaceful. Blake sighed and flopped over in his cocoon.
“Gin,” he whispered experimentally.
She lifted her head. “I can’t sleep.” They peered at Teddy, and she added, “I think I’ll take a walk. It’s awfully early. Do you want to come along?”
Softly he untangled his feet and put his shoes on again; she did the same. They tiptoed away to the road and set out at a good stride. The starlight was blue.
“I kept thinking of poetry,” he explained, “and I couldn’t get to sleep. It kept going round and round in my head.”
“What poetry?”
“Just little pieces that I’ve read. I thought this one over and over:
“While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
“I don’t think it’s right, but that’s the way I remember it.”
“There’s just one poem I remember,” she said. “You know——
“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free....
“Do you like that one too?” he asked. Incredible! They stared at each other.
The light of a ranch house was ahead of them, and they paused.
“Let’s go back,” she said. He nodded and they turned.
“Listen, Gin,” he said thoughtfully, “I know what Madden meant when you got sore at him. You don’t have to worry about me. I know what he meant.”
“Of course you do.”
“Only I don’t like to talk about it, that’s all. I just don’t like it and I won’t talk about it. You see? I don’t want you to think....”
“Of course I see. Never mind.”
“I don’t want you or Madden to think I’m dumb, or....”
“I don’t think you’re dumb at all.”
They turned up the field again towards the fire.
“Gin,” he asked, “do you think that any other three people ever had a better time?”
“That’s what I was wondering. I don’t see how they could, the way most of them live.”
He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll go on feeling like this. Sometimes I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what? Of course lots of things could happen. We might have an accident, or perhaps....”
“That isn’t what I mean. I’m not sure what I do mean. But—well, if one of us should die it would be terrible, but that isn’t the most dangerous thing.”
“What is it, then?” She was whispering now, standing near the fire. Teddy was still snoring.
“People change so. You might change, Gin. Even I....”
She shook her head and he thought that she looked very sad. “I’m grown up,” she said. “I’m more grown up than you are, and I know about myself. You’re the one who will change, or Teddy. I don’t want to go back; I don’t want to do anything but this.”
He believed her, and felt lighter. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t want anything else either. Look at the star up there, over that tree. It’s green, isn’t it?”
Teddy tossed a little, and mumbled.
“We’d better be quiet,” whispered Gin. “Go on back to sleep.”