“It’s really my fault. I staked it.” She was still mourning over her calamity. “I forgot to barrel it. Stakes won’t do here. The keg’s the thing.”
“That’s what they think in Mexicali.” Hardin turned to leave.
“The joke’s as stale as their beer,” retorted Innes. She did not want him to go so soon. She pointed out a new vine to him. She had brought it from Tucson; “Kudzu,” they called it; a Japanese vine. And there was another broken rose, quite beyond the help of stripped handkerchiefs and mesquit splints.
He followed her around the tent, her prattle falling from his grim mood. He was not thinking of her flowers except as a mocking parallel. The desert storm had made a havoc of his garden—a sorry botch of his life. He and Innes had been trying to make a garden out of a desert; the desert had flouted them. It was not his fault. Something had happened; something quite beyond his power. Luck was turning against him.
Innes, why, she was playing as with a toy. It was the natural instinct of a woman to make things pretty around her. But he had sacrificed his youth, his chances. His domestic life, too—he should never have carried a dainty little woman like Gerty into the desert. He had never reproached her for leaving him, even last time when he thought it was for good. The word burned his wound. Whose good? His or Gerty’s? Somehow, though they wrangled, he always knew it would turn out all right; life would run smoothly when they left the desert. But things were getting worse; his mouth puckered over some recollections. Yet he loved Gerty; he couldn’t picture life without her. He decided that it was because there had never been any one else. Most fellows had had sweethearts before they married; he had not, nor a mistress when she left him, though God knows, it would have been easy enough. His mouth fell into sardonic lines. Those half-breed women! No one, even when a divorce had hung over him. Oh, he knew what their friends made of each of Gerty’s lengthened flights; he knew! But that had been spared him, that vulgar grisly spectacle of modern life when two people who have been lovers drag the carcass of their love over the grimy floor of a curious gaping court. He shuddered. Gerty loved him. Else, why had she come back to him? Why had she not kept her threat when he refused to abandon his desert project and turn his abilities into a more profitable dedication? He could see her face as she stared flushing up into his that nipping cold day when he had run into her on Broadway. He remembered her coquetry when she suggested that there was plenty of room in her apartment! His wife! She spoke of seeing his pictures in the papers. “He had grown to be a great man!”
That piquant meeting, the week following had been the brightest of his life. He was sure then that Gerty loved him. The wrangles were only their different ways of looking at things. Of course, they loved each other. But Gerty couldn’t stand pioneer life. She had loved him, or she would not so easily have been persuaded to try it over again. She yearned to make him comfortable, she said. So she had gone back, and pulled down his ramada, and put his clothes in the lowest bureau drawer!
“It wasn’t either of our faults,” he ruminated. “It was the fault of the institution. Marriage itself is a failure. Look at the papers, the divorce courts. A man’s interests are no longer his wife’s. Curious that it should be so. But it’s a fact. It is the modern discontent. Women want different careers from their husbands.”
Yet, how could he help throwing his life into his work? He had committed himself; it was an obligation. Besides, he was a Hardin; they take things that way. And, too, a man can not live in the desert the best years, the vivid years of his life without absorbing its grim indomitable spirit; without learning to love, to require the great silent mornings, the vast star-brilliance of the nights; without falling under the spell of the land, the spell of elusiveness and mystery, of false distances, illusions; of content.
If it were not for that indefinable something, his allegiance to the cause which mocked at reasons and definitions; oh, he knew!—he had tilted with Gerty and been worsted!—he would have resigned from the company, his company which had dishonored him. Why should he stay to get more stabs, more wounds? MacLean, what in God’s name had MacLean ever done for the valley? And Rickard? It was he, Tom Hardin, who had pulled the valley, and therefore the company, from ruin, and it was that very act which had ruined him. Yet for his life, were he to go over it again, he knew he could not do differently. A curious twist of the ropes which had pulled the company back from the edge of the precipice and mangled him. Where was the loyalty of his associates? Loyalty, there was no such thing! They were cowards, all of them. Afraid of the power of the O. P. Truckling to it! Kotowing to Marshall, shivering every time he opened those profane lips of his. Bah! It made his stomach turn. Oh, he saw through their reason for kicking him out. He hadn’t been born yesterday. This was a big thing, too big not to rouse cupidity, cupidity of men and corporations. He had been fooled by Marshall’s indifference; play, every bit of it; theatric. Faraday’s reluctance? Sickening. It was a plot. Some one had put him up to it, given him the first suggestion, made him think it was his own. Hot chestnuts, all right! He was burned all right, all right! And the last scorch, this pet of Marshall’s! Hardin gave a scantling in his path a vicious kick.
The girl’s prattle had died. She walked with him silently.