CHAPTER VIIA GARDEN IN A DESERT
HIS dwelling leaped into sight as Hardin turned the corner of the street. There was but one street running through the twin towns, flanked by the ditches of running water. The rest were ditches of running water edged by foot-paths. Scowling, he passed under the overhanging bird-cages of the Desert Hotel without a greeting for the loungers, whose chairs were drawn up against the shade of the brick walls. His abstraction aborted the hallo of jovial Ben Petrie, who was leaving his bank for his vineyard, the more congenial half of his two-sided life. Petrie stood for a minute on the narrow board-walk watching the hunched shoulders, the angry blind progress. He shrugged. Hardin was sore. Itwaspretty tough. Such infernal luck! He got thoughtfully into his English trap.
Fred Eggers left his motley counter, and joined the group of lounging Indians outside his store. He had a morning paper in his hand. His pale blue eyes looked surprised as Hardin’s momentum swept him past. “Mr. Hardin,” he called ineffectually.
The momentum slackened as Hardin neared the place he called his home. An inner tenderness diluted the sneer that disfigured his face. He could see Innes as she moved around in the little fenced-in strip that surroundedher desert tent. She insisted on calling it a garden, in spite of his raillery.
“Gerty’s in bed, I suppose,” thought Tom. He had a sudden vivid picture of her accusing martyrdom. His mouth hardened again. Innes, stooping over a rose, passed out of his vision.
It came to Hardin suddenly that a man has made a circle of failure when he dreads going to his office and shrinks from the reproaches at home.
“A ‘has-been’ at forty!” he mused. Where were all his ships drifting?
Innes, straightening, waved a gay hand.
“She’s raising a goodly crop of barrels.” His thought mocked and caressed her. Her garden devotion was a tender joke with him. He loved the Hardin trait in her, the persistence which will not be daunted. An occupation with a Hardin was a dedication. He would not acknowledge the Innes blood in her. Like that fancy mother of hers? Innes was a Hardin through and through!
“It’s in the blood,” ran his thought. “She can’t help it. All the Hardins work that way. The Hardins always make fools of themselves!”
Innes, lifting her eyes from a crippled rose, saw that the black devils were consuming him again.
“Will you look at this wreck!” she cried.
The wind-storm the previous week had made a sickening devastation of her labors. The morning-glories alone were scatheless. A pink oleander drooped many broken branches from which miracles of perfect flowers were unfolding. The prettiest blossom to Hardin was the gardener herself. She was vivid from eager toil. Hardin looked at her approbatively. He liked her khakisuit, simple as a uniform, with its flowing black tie and leather belt. She looked more like herself to-day. She had bleached out, in Tucson. She had been letting herself get too tanned, running around without hats. Sunburn paled the value of those splendid yellow eyes of hers. He could always tease her by likening them to topazes.
“Cat’s eyes, why don’t you say it?”
She pushed a teasing lock of hair out of her eyes with one of her mud-splashed garden gloves. It left a ludicrous smudge across her cheek.
“Each time I leave this garden,” she complained, “I declare I won’t again. Not even for the Marshalls.” She bent over again to adjust a bottomless keg around a wind-whipped, moribund plant.
“Quite a keg plant!” he quizzed. “Raising anything else?”
“And the glory of the morning he does not see!” she exclaimed with theatric intent.
His eyes ran over the pink and purple lines of cord-trained vines which made floral screens for her tent. Free of the strings overhead, they rioted over the ramada, the second roof, of living boughs. He acknowledged their beauty. They gave grace to bare necessity; they denied the panting, thirsty desert just beyond.
He remembered his own ramada. Gerty had hated it, had complained of it so bitterly when she came home from New York that he had had it pulled down and replaced by a V roof of pine boards, glaring and ugly. Gerty was satisfied, for it was clean; she no longer felt that she lived in a squaw-house. Let the Indians have ramadas; there was no earthly reason she should. He had urged that the desert dwellers had valuable hints togive them. But what was a ramada to him, or anything else?
He nodded at Innes.
“They are doing so much better than the ones you planted at the office. I wonder if Sam doesn’t water them enough?” His mood was faultfinding. “Didn’t he water your roses while you were gone?”
“Oh, hewatersenough,” smiled his sister. “But Sam’s not for progress. He won’t see the difference between watering and irrigating.”
“It looks like a train wreck, or a whipped prize-fighter, next day,” observed Hardin.
“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 aroundher. 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.
At the door of her tent, she stopped, looking at him wistfully. She wished he could hide his hurt. If he had only some of the Innes’ pride!
“How are things?” She used their fond little formula.
“Oh, rotten!” growled Hardin, flinging away. The gate slammed behind him.