Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  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.

  – IV –

  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. . .’

  – V –

  The fishing camp lay at the junction of two canyons, and the spot was walled in by steep wooded slopes rising four or five hundred feet above the level greensward where the cabins were placed. The riders reached there in late afternoon, the horses picking their surefooted way down the last sharp slant of rocky trail; and already in the bottom of the canyon shadows lay, so that it was as though they went down into a clear pool of faintly tinted water. The brooks sang in the high silence; and when they paused to alight, Mrs. Berent groaned and declared she would never let herself be set upon a horse again. ‘I feel as though I’d been paddled with a hammer,’ she cried, and demanded to be lifted from her horse, gasping with angry pain at every touch.

  Harland and Robie next morning fished downstream two or three miles to where the main brook plunged into a narrower canyon, with cascades a dozen feet high and deep pools alive with trout. Robie said this lower gorge extended six or eight miles till the brook came to desert lands and lost itself. ‘It’s hard walking,’ he admitted. ‘But there’s good fishing all the way. Sometimes when we’re going out to the ranch I fish down through, have a horse meet me at the lower end.’

  ‘I’d like to try that.’

  ‘Better wait till we leave,’ Robie advised. ‘It’s too long a tramp down and back in one day.’ So this adventure was postponed.

  Harland at first, though he was intensely aware of her, saw little of Ellen. She took a horse every morning and rode away alone, reappearing just in time to change for dinner. But on the fourth day, ranch business would engage Robie; and when Harland heard this, preferring not to fish alone, he asked:

  ‘What about a wild turkey?’ On the twenty-mile ride in from the ranch, they had seen three flocks of hens and chicks. ‘Danny told me to be sure and shoot one for him.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Robie assented. ‘They’re out of season, but we can spare one. Take a gun and ride around till you see a flock and then put your horse right at them. They hate to take wing, and they never try it unless they can get a level or a downhill run for a takeoff. If you can drive them uphill you can often get right among them. It’s tricky shooting, but you’ll have some fun out of it.’

  Ellen — they were at breakfast — spoke from across the table. ‘I can help you get a fine gobbler, Mr. Harland, if you wish. I watched six of them, feeding on grasshoppers, yesterday; and they’re sure to be back today.’

  Robie said at once: ‘That’s the idea! Ellen knows every turkey on the ranch by its first name, Harland. You go along with her.’

  Harland, afraid his voice would betray the sudden quickening of his pulses, hesitated; and Ellen said: ‘We needn’t start till after lunch. They only feed there in the afternoon.’

  ‘Why, fine,’ Harland agreed, and he explained: ‘You see Danny, my brother, has had infantile, and he made me promise to bring back a full report of everything the ranch had to offer.’ To conceal his eagerness he turned to Robie. ‘He spoke of wild horses, too; said Lin told him there were some here.’

  Lin cried quickly: ‘You bet there are! You come along with me tomorrow — I’m going with Dad today — and maybe we’ll see them.’

  Harland, to hide his excited anticipation, turned to his cabin and spent the forenoon writing a long letter to Danny. He began by describing the pretty girl who sat opposite him in the observation car and who read his book and went to sleep over it. He knew how amusing Danny would find that episode, and he made much of it; but when he came to speak of his arrival here, some impulse led him to avoid saying that that same girl was in the party, and that they were to hunt turkeys together this afternoon. He stayed in his cabin till Mrs. Robie called that lunch was ready. When they had eaten and their horses were at the door, Harland would have forgotten the need for a gun, but Ellen reminded him, and they went to the rack and she bade him take a pump gun and a handful of shells. He put the gun in the saddle boot, and they mounted and set out.

  Ellen led the way, turning up the north canyon, taking almost at once a side trail that climbed steeply through the pines. Riding behind her, he watched the light sway of her shoulders and her pliant waist. When now and then on a level reach they trotted briefly, she did not rise but held her seat after the western fashion. Harland, more used to an English saddle with shortened stirrups, found it hard to relax; and he tried to imitate her yielding grace. They went in silence, pausing briefly now and then where on the lofty trails a break in the forest allowed them to look down some far canyon to the desert like the sea beyond.

  They crossed two ridges and descended into a valley like a park, through which a trickling brook meandered; and since the canyon floor was wide and smoothly turfed they rode now side by side, and flower masses, fringed gentians by the thousands and many other blossoms, were a carpet everywhere. Harland silently chose words to paint the beauty of the scene, but Ellen showed no desire to talk and he did not speak till after half a mile she turned aside.

  ‘We’ll leave the horses here,’ she told him, and led the way into the forest that cloaked the canyon walls, and they tethered the beasts where from the open they could not be seen, and went back afoot. ‘We must lie and wait for them,’ she explained. ‘They feed down this canyon almost every afternoon.’

  ‘There’s not much cover,’ he commented. There was in fa
ct, except for slight irregularities of the ground, none at all. The grass was cropped short, and the flowers were only inches tall, and no underbrush grew in the open anywhere.

  ‘We’ll just lie still,’ she said. ‘As long as we don’t move, they won’t notice us.’

  She led the way to a single tree of some dwarf variety which Harland could not name, and which grew near the brookside and about equally distant from the forest on either hand. Its lowest branches were five or six feet above the ground, but at its base there was a slight saucer-shaped depression. Ellen lay at length, face down, in such a position that she could, even without raising her head, look up the canyon; and Harland hesitated, uncertain where to post himself, till she said: ‘Here, beside me. We’ll be able to see them coming for almost half a mile.’ She added: ‘I was here yesterday and they passed close by me, never noticing.’

  Harland took the place she indicated, so near her that he could have touched her if he chose, could without moving have laid his arm across her shoulders. Since the lone tree gave scant shade1, the baking sun was strong upon them, warming them through and through; the little saucer-shaped depression was as full of warm sweet-scented air as a cup is full of cream. For a while she did not speak, and this long silence seemed to enter into Harland like a fragrance in his nostrils; and he caught the scent of the sunned grass on which he lay. When his neck began to ache from long staring up the empty canyon, he looked down among the grass roots, watching the busy insect life there. A small green bug climbed one grass blade, crossed to another, and descended to the ground again. A grasshopper landed a yard from their faces and stared at them with tremendous eyes and then with a wooden clatter of wings leaped away. An ant threaded a circuitous path through the grass till it reached Harland’s sleeve. It climbed on his wrist and then went along his arm to his elbow and down out of sight; but her elbow was so near his that almost at once the ant reappeared on hers. She was lying with her chin on her crossed hands, looking up the canyon; and Harland followed the ant’s progress up her arm and across her shoulder. Her shirt was open at the neck, and it embarked upon the smooth sea of her throat before she felt it and quickly brushed it off.