Introduction To Speak of Love
“IF ONLY IT WERE SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY AND NOT MINE”
A middle-aged woman with handsome, expressive eyes sits in an armchair across from her husband in their comfortable, middle-class living room, where they are passing the evening. A fire burns quietly, and their two young children are in bed for the night. He is doing a crossword puzzle, as is apparently his custom, and requires a missing word to complete a line from Keats, which he seeks from his wife: “ ‘When I behold upon the nights starr’d face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high—?’ Something in seven letters.” “ ‘Romance,’ I think,” she replies, after a moment. “I’m almost sure it is,” and tells him it will be in the Oxford Book of English Verse. “No, that’s right, I’m sure,” he says, as he writes it into his puzzle. “Because it fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan.’ ” A moment passes. The woman rises to put some music on the radio, and almost immediately the sound of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto fills the room. The woman sits again and takes up some needlework but is soon diverted. Not by anything external this time, such as a question from her husband, but rather (we are about to learn) by her recent painful memories of a love unexpectedly found and far too quickly lost, chronicled in an exquisitely crafted series of flashbacks. For this is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and as the film quickly makes clear to its audience, we have just entered the narrative terrain of the woman’s film—in which love and loss are often twins, in which the experience of female characters is marked and rendered as subjective, and in which feminine subjectivity itself performs a haunting game of hideand-seek within and across the landscape of narrative.
I invoke Brief Encounter because it is a woman’s film par excellence, and the sequence I have described is eloquently emblematic of concerns that this cycle of films addresses in the 1940s. As the passage so clearly demonstrates, if hermeneutics and puzzles are the traditional cinematic province of the male (think of the detective films and film noir also popular during the 1940s), then romance (albeit in the popular rather than the literary Keatsian sense) is deemed the province of women: it is, in fact, with love and romance that the woman’s film is so often intimately preoccupied. Occupying what is,
2
The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s from a patriarchal perspective, a fantastic no-man’s land lying somewhere between “delirium” (a morass of emotion verging on madness) and “Baluchistan” (at the time still a British province of India, a far away and exotic locale near which romance may reside without troubling British colonial patriarchy too particularly), romance and desire are the very stuff of which this ordinary woman’s inner landscape in these films is comprised. Although momentarily invisible to the eye, their haunting presence is already evoked in the strains of Rachmaninov’s music, associated throughout the film with this woman’s subjectivity.
“Fred. Fred. Dear Fred. There’s so much that I want to say to you. You’re the only one in the world with enough wisdom and gentleness to understand. If only it were someone else’s story and not mine. As it is, you’re the only one in the world that I can never tell. Never, never.” So begins Laura Jesson’s (Celia Johnson) one-sided inner dialogue with her husband (Cyril Raymond), spoken in a celebrated voice-off that rivals and even exceeds the beauty and nuance of the equally well-known voice-off in Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) only three years later. As in Ophüls’s film, the voice-off is a prelude to a lengthy flashback to a woman’s painful tale of love found and lost, and as voice-offs and flashbacks tend to do in any genre, they highlight the act of transmitting narrative, even of the difficulties that occasionally inhere in that task. In the woman’s film, when such narrative structures exist, they are inextricably linked to questions of desire, usually of that of the female protagonist, and of the representability of that desire narratively (in the story world of the film), culturally (in the world in which the film was created), and institutionally (in terms of the film industry that produced it). In Laura’s case, her desire is at least threefold: it encompasses a romantic and sexual desire (however thwarted) for Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) with whom she has fallen in love; a desire to know (another kind of life from the surface calm of her ordinary middleclass existence); and a desire to tell (her story), which ultimately she both does and does not do. Precisely because it is so manifestly about her own desire(s), Laura can never tell her story to the one person whom she feels would understand it best—her husband—for fear of hurting him. Thus, her tale takes the form of what I shall call in this volume a “lost narrative,” one that is structured as a story that, paradoxically, cannot be told yet must be told, a tale that can be communicated only with the greatest of difficulty.
In such lost narratives in the 1940s woman’s film, as I shall discuss in ensuing chapters, processes of transmission and elision within the tales are highlighted and are the result of multiple pressures brought to bear upon the stories—again, narrative, cultural, and institutional. My critical approach to elision both is predicated upon and departs from Freud’s view of ellipsis within the dreamwork, because for Freud an absence cannot necessarily be filled in with a corresponding “presence”; rather, such gaps or absences can suggest many others, as well as refer to, and cause a reinterpretation of, the manifest content. Thus, in the following chapters, I will be arguing in part
for a kind of feminist “guerilla” reading of woman’s films that, like older “recuperative” interpretations, read against the grain and allow for the elucidation of those lost narratives. At the same time, however, I will extend the textual reading process into historical research that will inform such readings. For example, the flashback structure that marks Brief Encounter is not present in Noël Coward’s original Still Life (1936), the brief one-act play on which the film is based. These flashbacks accentuate the process of narration and the difficulties that inhere in the task of Laura’s telling her story at all. As well, mindful of the need for the film to pass the British Board of Film Censors to secure its release, the filmmakers decided that the consummated affair between Laura and Alec in Still Life would be recast as a narrowly averted unconsummated love affair in Brief Encounter (as the Production Code Administration’s story summary for the film’s distribution in the United States in 1946 put it, using an editorializing tone, the two go to the flat of a friend of Alec’s, and “fortunately, the friend arrives before anything can happen, and [Laura] runs away in horror, oppressed by the feeling of degradation” [italics mine]). (Story Summary, Brief Encounter).Together, these two simple decisions greatly affected the shape of the film’s presentation of this tale of desire, love, and loss, recasting it as Laura’s story more than Laura and Alec’s and affecting the cinematic treatment of a woman’s desire, as I shall suggest in a subsequent chapter.
Because Brief Encounter is marked by flashbacks, it inevitably also raises issues of temporality (time in the film is alternately elongated, compressed, and even repeated). As Richard Dyer observes, “Time, its pressure, its fleetingness, is endlessly referenced in the film” (1993, 45). In turn, issues of temporality are related to issues of representing the past generally and history more specifically, as Maureen Turim has pointed out:
If flashbacks give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past. In fact, flashbacks in the film often merge the two levels of remembering the past, giving large-scale social and political history the subjective mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered experience. (1989, 2)
On the one hand, Brief Encounter, shot in 1945 before the end of World War II, is set just prior to the beginning of the war, and on the surface it would seem that the very private tale Laura tells has little to do with a public history generally or with World War II specifically. And yet some of the emotional response it generated in its original audiences derived from its indirect invocation of the unseen war nearing an end during the time of the film’s production. Indeed, Kent Puckett argues that Brief Encounter
is almost entirely about war . . . many of the film’s images, scenes, and sounds would have reminded contemporary audiences of wartime: war
monuments that mourn a war to come; trains and train stations that conjure the boredom of life between battles; cups and cups of tea that, in their very abundance, invoke the ongoing privations of rationing; and train whistles that sound like buzz bombs” (2011, 58).
In the skilled hands of David Lean, who was known for his early work in sound editing, the omnipresent train whistles also give voice to the threat of imminent departure and farewell, as well as to the inner shrieking of the human heart when it is torn from a thing or person it loves.
And so it is that Brief Encounter also points to a tension between private and public histories and women’s relationship to them, which is something that a number of 1940s woman’s films do. It is common to assert that Hollywood film specifically (to which the English Brief Encounter obviously does not belong, although it participates in the conventions of the woman’s film) represents historical events in terms of the story of its impact on individuals rather than on larger social, political, cultural, or economic groups. However, much remains to be said about the discursive relationship that the woman’s film constructs among history, temporality, narrative, gender, and subjectivity. If classical woman’s films often represent history neither accurately nor with much historiographical complexity, what exactly do they do with history? Are the love stories told by the woman’s film truly “situated outside the arena in which history endows space with meaning,” as Mary Ann Doane has suggested (1987, 96)? Or do some woman’s films combine issues of history and gender in ways that are narratively meaningful, if rarely historically accurate or ideologically progressive? Moreover, how do answers to these questions further our understanding of what is at stake in the classical woman’s film and in existing critical studies of them? These are some of the questions that this volume ultimately explores in the chapters that follow.
A PHANTOM GENRE?
In 1999, advocating for what he called a “process-oriented” approach to genre in which parameters are forever shifting and transforming in an interactive process among film, producers, critics, and audiences, Rick Altman traced a brief history of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film.” Noting that producers are more flexible in their conception and application of generic categories than academics and critics, Altman prefaces his remarks by observing, “We critics are the ones who have a vested interest in reusing generic terminology, which serves to anchor our analyses in universal or culturally sanctioned contexts, thus justifying our all too subjective, tendentious and self-serving positions” (1999, 71). Invoking both Russell Merrit’s and Ben Singer’s astute observations that melodrama has been a “slippery
5 and evolving category” (71), Altman then returns to the work of Steve Neale (1993), concluding that
it seems clear that a major goal of the 1993 article is to demonstrate that scholars have misused the term melodrama and its derivatives in describing what are now often called “woman’s films.” As Neale shows, in the 40s and 50s melodrama meant something else; recent critics thus make improper use of the term when they apply it to “the weepies.” Yet a generation of feminist critics has systematically used the term melodrama in reference to the female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s. Their analyses have taken for granted—and thus reinforced—the existence and nature of this genre and its corpus. (72)
There are multiple difficulties here in Altman’s assessment. Present in Altman’s quotation of Neale’s work is a curious idea that there is a definitively “proper” use of the term “melodrama” (and, by extension, “woman’s film”)—as opposed to different historical and interpretive uses of it as Neale describes them. Some critics, like Linda Williams (1998, 2001), consider melodrama a transgeneric mode of expression rather than a discrete genre, as do I, which might be applied to many genres, as evidenced by the historical record to which Altman points by way of Neale. Further, if a conflation of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film” is a topic of Altman’s writing here, he himself conflates and flattens differences between “melodramas” of the 1940s and those of the 1950s. Others, I among them, would question Altman’s phrase “female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s,” noting distinct differences (notwithstanding some similarities) between the “ ‘feminine’ excesses of 40s ‘weepies’ and 50s films directed by Douglas Sirk” (71). For me, what differentiates the woman’s film of the 1940s from the 1930s and from the family melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s is not so much the presumed address to a female audience (a key point for Doane, as I will discuss in a subsequent chapter), as its different narrative emphasis and dynamic. While woman’s films from the 1930s and 1940s occasionally share similar plots, the 1940s woman’s film speaks to the issue of desire gendered as feminine in a more direct way than does its 1930s counterpart, in part because the 1930s woman’s film, produced during the Great Depression, is often at least as preoccupied with class and economic issues as it is with questions of desire. The 1940s woman’s film, on the other hand, foregrounds the issues of subjectivity and desire usually (though not always) at the expense of an explicit consideration of class.1 The world it depicts is usually comfortably middle- or upper-middle class, and questions of economic survival generally pale before questions of sexual, emotional, or psychic well-being. Both the 1930s and the 1940s woman’s film generally differ from the melodramas of the 1950s, however, in that there is a strong tendency in the 1950s to
The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s focus on the configuration of the nuclear family, and particularly on the role of father (and son as potential father) within that family. Even when the 1950s family melodramas do center on a female protagonists and her desires (as, e.g., in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession [1954] and All That Heaven Allows [1955]), they usually do so in ways that foreground the woman’s relationship to her family rather than the woman as (relatively) autonomous being and her own experience of subjectivity.
While acknowledging Neale’s point and, by association, Altman’s, that the very real earlier and broader application of the term “melodrama” was to such films as the war, adventure, horror, and thriller categories, I find curious in Altman’s assessment of Neale an implicit assumption that there is a singular, proper way to apply the term—as if, somehow, feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s made some kind of error in asserting the existence of the woman’s film as a genre, as opposed to asserting a deliberate political and aesthetic call to critical and filmmaking action. Beginning with Molly Haskell’s work in 1973, then moving on through Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire, Altman rightly asserts that “one of the major tasks of feminist film criticism over the past twenty years has been to rehabilitate the term woman’s film and thereby restore value to women’s activities” (1999, 77)— still, however, without fully seeming to appreciate the complexity of those films and of the nuances of their importance to feminists. That is, even as Altman recognizes the existence of a political project and, indeed, makes it part of his point about the influential role that Doane and others played in defining and arguing for the existence, however blurry, of a genre of woman’s films that might earlier have been discussed according to different paradigms, he asserts,
I do not mean to claim that Doane was by herself capable of turning a motley assortment of old films into a widely recognized genre, but I would suggest that a major purpose of The Desire to Desire is to establish the woman’s film as a genre.
(75)
A “motley assortment of old films”? Even if writing facetiously or ironically, Altman here seems to reproduce the exact contempt that he himself quotes Haskell describing as far back as 1973: “As a term of critical opprobrium, ‘woman’s film’ carries the implication that women, and therefore women’s emotional problems, are of minor significance” (Haskell [1973] 1974, 154). After nearly forty years of dedicated scholarship about women and cinema, such an attitude is disquieting, as is Altman’s surprise at how long it took for critical attention to be paid to the genre:
We have already noted the extent to which the building of genres is often a critical, rather than a production-based, concern, so the only thing surprising about Haskell’s attempt to rehabilitate the woman’s film by
broadening and strengthening its definition is the delay between the production of the films in question and the moment of critical invention. (73)
Not so surprising, really, considering that second-wave feminism got its start in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that genre studies was initially dominated by male practitioners and scholars in Anglo-American film studies criticism at that time.
For the purposes of this volume, then, I regard melodrama as a mode of expression that is present in a range of genres and forms of media and art and the 1940s woman’s film as a loose cycle of films produced during that decade. Both the periodization of my project (the 1940s) and my acceptance of the term “the woman’s film” to denote a (more or less) coherent body of work and a legitimate field of inquiry acknowledge my debt to the work of extraordinary feminist scholars before me and accept the assumption that many films from the 1940s are not only “about women” in some unique sense but were also, in fact, originally targeted by the Hollywood studio system for what it presumed, rightly or wrongly, was a female audience thrown into prominence by World War II. I am less interested in defining (or defending) a specific genre or corpus, however, than I am in exploring certain issues of gender, narrative, and history that surface within some woman’s films from this decade, often though not always as a related constellation of concerns, and in engaging in conversation with those feminists and scholars who share these interests. My selection of relatively few films for this volume is an eclectic one that is intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. I occasionally point toward other titles that are equally relevant (I could point to many more or to different ones entirely); it is always my intention to suggest rather than proscribe issues for continued debate about woman’s films belonging to this decade.
But why revisit the 1940s woman’s film now? Hasn’t enough been written about these films in past decades? Altman’s overview of the 1970s and 1980s does point to a very fruitful period for studies of melodrama generally and the woman’s film specifically, although I would also argue that the de facto conflation of 1950s family melodrama and the woman’s film by Altman itself indicates that further work remains to be done. More importantly, however, as cultural studies made increasingly significant contributions to the field of film studies and as the field itself entered a new phase in the early twentyfirst century, morphing to include new research and analytic paradigms of an increasingly digital age, debates having to do with issues of film narrative, cinematic spectatorship, and desire were prematurely truncated and displaced. As I shall discuss in the first chapter, the earlier brilliant studies of narrative, gender, and subjectivity were more or less abandoned at the exact point at which alternative critical models might have begun to be theorized in ways that were less pessimistic and allowed for a greater play of meaning and sensemaking in classical cinema generally and in feminist film theory in particular. In part, of course, this was due to an increasing sense of frustration with these
8 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
earlier models that sometimes seemed to ignore a range of issues pertaining especially to class, race, and sexuality and that LGBTQ and cultural studies productively sought to correct. At the same time, however, debates about the nature of classical narrative, identification, and subjectivity in classical cinema remain unresolved from this earlier period. Reexamining them now through a revised critical lens can not only further enlarge our understanding of an important historical period of cinema and theorizations about it but also, by extension, cast new light on contemporary filmmaking genres that derive directly or indirectly from the woman’s film (such as romantic dramas, or rom-drams, and to a lesser extent, romantic comedies, or rom-coms).
Thus, in the first chapter of this volume, “Film Theory, Narrative, and the 1940s Woman’s Film,” I examine the way in which much of contemporary film theory over the past forty years—feminist or otherwise—focused on the gaze and on paradigms of looking, usually with the intent of exposing ideological assumptions present in the very conventions of cinema, particularly narrative cinema produced in Hollywood. For the sake of convenience and shorthand, I retain the notion of “classical Hollywood cinema” throughout this volume to refer to a period between, roughly, 1920 and 1960, and to argue that its representational modes and strategies are not as monolithic and standardized in relation to gender as has occasionally been suggested. Narrative cinema itself has been theorized largely, though not entirely, as a relay of looks. However, as Teresa de Lauretis points out in an investigation of the “structural connection between sadism and narrative” in Alice Doesn’t (1984), issues of narrative and narrativity—that is, the dynamics of narrative and the principles of movement that underlie all narrative, whatever the medium—were usually neglected in favor of technical, economic, ideological, or aesthetic aspects of filmmaking and film viewing in the formulation of theories about the gaze within and at cinema. I discuss the ways in which feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s particularly—and most ironically—fetishized the gaze as a signifying discourse at the cost of other meaningful cinematic registers. Arguing that a study of narrativity in itself is a discrete area of investigation that simply did not develop and does not exist to any significant degree within film studies, I discuss its potential utility to and resonance for a study of the 1940s woman’s film that is long overdue.
In chapter 2, “The Fate of One Governess: Lost Narrative, History, and Gendered Desire,” I apply the ideas in the first chapter to perform a case study of All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940), a historical woman’s film adapted from a novel of the same title based on the real-life murder of the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin in France in 1847. I examine not only the film but also some of the archival historical and fictional discourses surrounding the Praslin affair, concluding that, in all iterations of the Praslin case—cinematic, novelistic, or overtly historical—a culturally structured desire gendered as feminine is figured as the motivating force of the (various) narrative(s) built around it and that its articulation is most powerfully rendered at the level of narrative movement as defined most clearly by literary
theorist Peter Brooks. Throughout this volume, I use the term “gendered desire” to indicate desire coded by a cultural product as masculine, feminine, or sometimes, in specific instances, both.
In chapter 3, “Melodrama, History, and Narrative Recovery,” I explore critical discussions of melodrama and history, and my interest in the woman’s film’s construction and articulation of gendered desire in relation to history continues. Rather than an extended case study, the chapter examines two very different woman’s films produced during World War II: That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941) and Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). While gendered desire and subjectivity are explicitly foregrounded in the experiences of both female and male characters in both films, they also construct relationships among the historical period of World War II (directly presented or indirectly evoked on the screen), the present moment and circumstances of the films’ production, and their audiences’ positioning in relation to those histories.
Chapter 4, “Temporality and the Past: Haunting Narratives and the Postwar Woman’s Film,” turns to a consideration of loose and very small subgrouping of the 1940s woman’s film—the postwar romantic ghost film, represented here by The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947) and Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948). Looking at the ways in which a melancholy desire is figured as not only narratively active but also occasionally both masculine and feminine, I then turn away from considerations of history, per se (highlighted in the preceding two chapters), to broader implications of temporality, concluding that these romantic ghost films encourage a reevaluation of the ways in which previous theorists have conceived the relationship between different temporal modes (eloquently expressed by Tania Modleski as “the time of repetition” and “the time of history” [1984]) in the 1940s woman’s film, particularly in the aftermath of World War II.
In chapter 5, “By My Tears I Tell a Story/The ‘Absent’ War,” I discuss the wartime American film Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) and England’s Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) in order to examine ways in which desire in these films is usually gendered as feminine, successfully articulated as such, and yet experienced as both masculine and feminine by men and women alike in the very forward movement of the narrative itself. In addition to sharing such moments, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter each feature a modern setting and were both produced during World War II, yet at the level of narrative, neither has anything to do with the war and both are set in a period immediately preceding its start. Unlike the films I have examined in earlier chapters, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter banish the war and history to their extratextual margins, but that lost narrative is imbricated with issues of desire in each film and with its reception in interesting and curious ways.
Finally, in chapter 6, “Telling the Story Differently: Toward an Androgynous Spectatorship and Interpretation,” I examine three very different woman’s films—Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), The Enchanted Cottage
The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s (John Cromwell, 1945), and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)—and argue for a fluid notion of gender in interpreting classical cinema that permits a way of identifying and reading a film androgynously (and perhaps quixotically) in and through narrative. Taking as my point of departure and speculation the paradigm of the 1940s Gothic romance film in which gendered points of view are explicitly thematized, I discuss the three films in terms of how they correspond and deviate from that paradigm, examining how each calls into question the conventional theoretical binaries of masculine and feminine points of view, identification, and narrative interpretation.
CONTESTED TEARS: WHOSE VOICES MATTER?
At the foundation of this volume is the still-unresolved (and perhaps definitively unresolvable) question that has haunted the woman’s film and the many who have watched and studied them for decades now: Whose stories do these films really tell? Whose voices do we hear, whose voices matter, and—in the case of woman’s films that explicitly engage with or evoke history—whose stories are told and what relationship do these films construct among history, narrative, and gender? Some of these same questions also reside at the heart of the “history” constructed about the woman’s film in and through academic discourse of the past forty years. That discourse has shaped our perceptions of generic parameters, oeuvres, and issues deemed worthy of scholarly debate, and it has also participated in wider conventions about critical and authorial legitimacy within academic film and media studies itself.
To illustrate my point, let me briefly invoke the mid-1990s work and reception of American philosopher Stanley Cavell in Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). Constructing his argument in both implicit and explicit dialogue with his earlier work on Hollywood romantic comedies (1976), Cavell maintained that four films—Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)—constitute a genre he called the unknown woman film and that these films “recount interacting versions of a story, a story of myth, that seems to present itself as a woman’s search for a story, or of the right to tell her story” (3). An unsurprising assertion to those familiar with the notable and extensive work in film studies on melodrama and the woman’s film that was done prior to Cavell’s book, the volume considers the woman’s film not in relation to issues of gender, feminism, or its related critical discourses but rather to Cavell’s own earlier study of what he has termed “comedies of remarriage.” Thus, Cavell positioned himself outside the notable and highly visible work that sought variously to identify melodrama as a transgeneric mode of representation up to that point (e.g., Peter Brooks [1976]), deconstruct a gendered alignment of
subjectivity within the woman’s film within a specific decade (e.g., Doane [1987]), or locate issues of mode, genre, gender, and representation within a particular social and historical moment—to cite merely a few instances of such work (Gledhill [1987], Byars [1991]). As a result, in responses to earlier drafts and presentations of his own study, as well as to the final book itself, Cavell found himself criticized for ignoring the work of feminists and film scholars (see, in particular, responses and reviews by Modleski [1990] and Kaplan [1998]). Asserting “I have no standing, and no motive, from which to attempt to place these different emphases nor to seek out others,” Cavell argued for the legitimacy of his own interest in various relationships among cinema, philosophical skepticism, tragedy, melodrama, gender, and psychoanalysis, choosing to stay largely within the terms of philosophical debate most familiar to him. Sketching a timeline for the evolution of his interests (to demonstrate their autonomy and integrity), he simultaneously acknowledged that the work of feminist film scholars existed, declared his independence from that work, and curiously remarked upon his “sense for a long time of intellectual isolation” (1996,199) as his interests developed. Feminists might (and did) argue that Cavell’s was a self-imposed isolation, but E. Ann Kaplan’s assessment of his book in Film Quarterly is interesting to me today for two reasons. First, Kaplan engaged in a conscientious effort to assess Cavell’s work on the woman’s film and acknowledged her own investment in the controversy surrounding it. Second, and perhaps of more interest now, she also identified what she called “anxieties of time and gender” (as well as discipline) at work in Cavell’s book (Kaplan 1998, 78). Though she did not discuss them as such in her review, time and gender are precisely the well-known twin anxieties that haunt melodrama and the woman’s film specifically, with the melodramatic “too late” generally tied to an experience of women’s waiting (for love, for recognition) that may never come or come past the point to make any difference (Doane 1987; Modleski 1988; Williams 1998, 2001). Read today, Kaplan’s observation functions almost as a gloss not only on the woman’s film but also on a curious element of the debate between Cavell and his feminist critics: it played out as a kind of discursive melodrama in academic circles, with Cavell himself taking up the traditional position of the woman as the one who waits (for love, for recognition from his academic peers). Cavell’s anxiety of time, Kaplan said, emerged partly as his “need to lay claim to the authority that comes from doing research for so long. Perhaps there is anxiety about running out of time to complete his projects” (78; emphasis mine). As for the anxiety of gender, Kaplan pointed to its expression in Cavell’s choice not to engage with long-standing feminist debates about the woman’s film that both preceded and were occurring simultaneously with the development of his work:
. . . his excuse for not paying attention to the feminist melodrama work because not “specifically invited to” still strikes me as disingenuous.
Cavell evidently only engages with research that is in line with his own thoughts: he sees no need to take other points of view into account.
(1998, 78; emphasis in original)
Dramas of invitation and rejection, acknowledgment and dismissal, play out in Cavell’s own words as he levels a somewhat inverted claim at his critics, recasting it in somewhat labored but wounded prose:
Even I, for all my overlaps yet asynchronies with the interests of my culture, have had to recognize that the expression of intellectual indebtedness or helpfulness is no longer dischargeable on exactly intellectual grounds. No doubt it never was. But it is as if a current preoccupation with an [anti] metaphysics of citationality and of authorship have come to mask a politics of who is citable by whom and who not.
(1996, 199)
If Kaplan’s review unselfconsciously evokes tropes of the trajectory of a woman’s film, Cavell’s own words might be said to correspond to scenarios more similar to the 1950s family melodrama of authority and privilege about which Thomas Elsaesser wrote so compellingly in “Tales of Sound and Fury” (1972). A palpable sense of resentment and disappointment seems to permeate Cavell’s comments here: they are a grudging, backhanded admission that, although he may not have been influenced by others outside his discipline working on related material, such materials existed. They are an expression of irritation that his work should “have to” allude to or be assessed in any kind of relation to that material. They also give voice to his disappointment that, just as he may not have considered the work of feminist and other film scholars directly relevant to his project, those same people, in turn, have chosen not to engage as fully with his work as he might have wished.
I refer to the debate around Cavell’s work on the woman’s film not to centralize it or the debate unduly but rather to observe that, taken together, they dramatize issues that subtend critical discussion within any academic field: Whose voices “count” and are acknowledged as relevant or authoritative and why? Perhaps not coincidentally, issues of authority, voice, and interpretation are also matters that many woman’s films emphasize through plot and assorted enunciative strategies, both visual and aural. As the final chapter of this volume will indicate, I like to think that my reading of woman’s films of the 1940s is an act of listening to the voice of desire itself, and that it is admittedly and unabashedly as much a work of fiction as it is of theoretical and critical inquiry (if, indeed, the two impulses are distinct). Influenced by a range of theoretical practitioners and critics and interrogating the absences and silences within the woman’s film, I occasionally (re)write lost narratives from the point of view of the characters who have been left in the margins and tell their stories as they could never have told them. Christine Gledhill
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were on each other, not on the broad mirror over the back bar, which showed Rock their faces.
One was Buck Walters; the other was Dave Wells, the Texan boss of the Wagon Wheel on Old Man River, north of the Canada line.
Rock drew back, unseen, sought a chair in the lobby, and sat down, with some food for thought. Here were two men, each of whom knew him quite well—one as Doc Martin, a Parke cowpuncher; while the other had employed him for nine months in his real identity Fort Benton was small. He could not remain in that town over the night without meeting both, face to face. Which identity should he choose?
It did not take Rock long to decide. He rose and made for the bar. This time he put his foot on the rail and made an inclusive sign to the bartender, after the custom of the country.
There were other men in the bar now. Walters and Wells looked up to see who was buying. A shadow, very faint, flitted across Buck Walters’ face. He nodded, with a grunt. Wells grinned recognition and stuck out his hand.
“You got the best of me,” Rock drawled. “But shake, anyway.”
“I’d know your hide on a fence in hell,” Wells declared. He was jovial, and his eyes were bright. He had been hoisting quite a few, Rock decided. Walters seemed coldly sober.
“Gosh, who do you think I am?” Rock asked. “Your long-lost brother or something?”
“Why, you’re Rock Holloway, darn you!” Wells said bluntly. “I’d ought to know you. I paid you off less’n a month ago. Course, if you’re layin’ low for somethin’——” He paused significantly. Over his shoulder Rock marked the surprised attention of Buck Walters.
“If that is so, I sure must have a double,” Rock said. “I been drawin’ wages from the TL on the Marias River for goin’ on two years, without a break. Does this Holloway fellow you speak of look so much like me, stranger?”
Wells looked him up and down in silence.
“If you ain’t Rock Holloway, I’ll eat my hat,” he said deliberately.
“Let’s see a man eat a Stetson for once,” Rock said to the manager of the Maltese Cross. “Tell him who I am.”
“Eat the hat, Dave,” Walters said. “This feller never rode for you— not in this country. His name is Doc Martin. He rides for a lady rancher on my range. I know him as well as I know you.”
Wells scratched his head.
“I need my sky piece to shed the rain,” he said mildly. “Maybe the drinks are on me. If you ain’t the feller I think you are, you certainly got a twin.”
“I never had no brothers,” Rock declared lightly and reached for his glass. “Never heard of anybody that looked like me. Well, here’s luck.”
That was that. He got away from the barroom in a few minutes.
Wells kept eying him. So did Walters. He felt that they were discussing him in discreet undertones. They did not include him in their conversation after that drink. Once out of there, Rock set about his business. He had no desire to paint the town. He went seeking casual labor. Luck rode with him. Within an hour he had located and hired two men—the only two souls in Fort Benton, he discovered, who needed jobs. He went back to the Grand Union for supper. In the dining room he saw Wells and Walters still together, seated at a table by themselves. He observed them later in the lobby, deep in cushioned chairs, cigars jutting rakishly from their lips.
Early in the evening Rock went up to his room. He had left the Marias at sunrise, and had jolted forty miles in a dead-axle wagon. He would hit the trail early in the morning, with the hay diggers, before they changed their mind and hired themselves to some one else. He needed sleep.
But he couldn’t sleep. The imps of unrest propped his eyelids open. An hour of wakefulness made him fretful. His mind questioned ceaselessly. Could a man like Buck Walters deliberately set out to destroy another man merely because he was a rival for a girl’s capricious affection? It didn’t seem incentive enough. A man with as much on his hands as Walters, could scarcely afford petty feuds like that. Still——
Rock dressed again, drew on his boots, and tucked his gun inside the waistband of his trousers. He would stroll around Fort Benton for an hour or so. By that time he would be able to sleep.
A battery of lighted windows faced the Missouri. Saloons with quaint names, “Last Chance,” “The Eldorado,” “Cowboy’s Retreat,” the “Bucket of Blood.” They never closed. They were the day-and-night clubs of frontier citizens. Business did not thrive in all at once. It ebbed and flowed, as the tides of convivial fancy dictated. In one or two the bartender polished glasses industriously, while house dealers sat patiently playing solitaire on their idle gambling layouts. But in others there were happy gatherings, with faro and poker and crap games in full swing. Rock visited them all and chanced a dollar or two here and there. Eventually he retraced his steps toward the hotel.
In the glow of lamplight from the last saloon on the western end of the row, just where he had to cross the street to the Grand Union, sitting in its patch of grass and flanked by a few gnarly cottonwoods, Rock met Buck Walters and Dave Wells.
He nodded and passed them. A little prickly sensation troubled the back of his neck. It startled Rock, that involuntary sensation. Nervous about showing his back to a potential enemy? Nothing less. The realization almost amused Rock. Absurd! Nobody would shoot him down on a lighted street. Yet it was a curious feeling. Expectancy, a sense of danger, a conscious irritation at these psychological absurdities. He was not surprised when a voice behind him peremptorily called:
“Hey, Martin!”
He turned to see Buck Walters stalking toward him. Wells’ long, thin figure showed plain in the glimmer of light. He stood on the edge of the plank walk, staring at the river.
“Got somethin’ to say to you,” Walters announced curtly.
“Shoot,” Rock answered in the same tone.
Walters faced him, six feet away. His face, so far as Rock could see, told nothing. It was cold and impassive, like the face of a gambler who has learned how to make his feature a serviceable
mask to hide what is in his mind. Buck’s face was unreadable, but his words were plain.
“This country ain’t healthy for you no more, Martin.”
“Why?”
“Because I tell you it ain’t.”
“You’re telling me doesn’t make it so, does it?”
“I know. Talk’s cheap. But this talk will be made good. You need a change of scenery. I’d go South if I was you—quick. You’ve been on the Marias too long.”
“Why should I go South, if I don’t happen to want to?” Rock asked.
“Because I tell you to.”
Rock laughed. For the moment he was himself, Doc Martin forgotten, and he had never stepped aside an inch for any man in his life.
“You go plumb to hell,” he said. “I’ll be on the Marias when you are going down the road talking to yourself.”
“All right,” Buck told him very slowly. “This is the second time I’ve warned you. You know what I mean. You’re huntin’ trouble. You’ll get it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rock retorted. “Say it in plain English. What’s eating you?”
“I’ve said all I aimed to say,” Walters declared. “You know what I mean, well enough.”
“If I had never laid eyes on you before,” Rock answered quietly, “you have said enough right now to justify me in going after you. Is that what you want? Do you want to lock horns with me? The light’s good. Pop your whip, you skunk!”
Rock spat the epithet at him in a cold, collected fury. He meant precisely what he said. There was such an arrogant note in that cool intimidation. It filled him with a contemptuous anger for Buck Walters and all his ways and works and his veiled threats.
“You are just a little faster with a gun than I am,” Walters replied, unruffled, the tempo of his voice unchanged. “I take no chances with you. I am not afraid of you, but I have too much at stake to risk it on gun play—by myself. If you do not leave this country, I will have you put away. You can gamble on that.”
Rock took a single step toward him. Walters held both hands away from his sides. He smiled.
“If you so much as make a motion for that gun in your pants,” he said in an undertone, “my friend Dave Wells will kill you before you get it out.”
Now Rock had made that step with the deliberate intention of slapping Walters’ face. No Texan would take a blow and not retaliate. He couldn’t live with himself if he did. But, “my friend, Dave Wells,” made him hesitate. Rock’s glance marked Wells, twenty feet away, a silent watchful figure. And it was more than a mere personal matter. Down in Fort Worth, Uncle Bill Sayre had joint responsibility with this man for the safeguarding of a fortune, and a medley of queer conclusions were leaping into Rock’s agile brain. Reason, logic, evidence—all are excellent tools. Sometimes instinct or intuition, something more subtle than conscious intellectual processes, shortcircuits and illuminates the truth with a mysterious flash of light. This man before him was afraid of Doc Martin. He was afraid of Doc, over and above any desire for possession of a woman—any passion of jealousy. There was too much at stake, he had said. Rock would have given much to know just what Buck Walters meant by the phrase. Doc Martin would have known. Rock didn’t regret the surge of his own temper—the insult and challenge he had flung in this man’s teeth. But he fell back on craft.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect you to take no chance on an even break, with anybody or about anything. You’ll play safe. You’ll pass the word that I’m to be put away. You tried it already.”
“Next time there will be no slip-up,” Walters answered with cold determination. “You have said things you shouldn’t have said. You have shot off your mouth at me. You have made a play at a fool of a girl that I aim to have for myself. I have a cinch, Martin, and I am goin’ to play it for all it is worth.”
“A cinch on me—or on the Maltese Cross?” Rock taunted.
“Both,” Walters muttered, in a whisper like a hiss, the first emotion that had crept into his cold, malevolent voice.
“That’s a damaging admission to make,” Rock sneered.
“Not to you,” Walters said flatly “You’ll never have a chance to use it. You are goin’ to be snuffed out, if you don’t pull out. I don’t like you, for one thing; you are interferin’ with my plans, for another.”
“Those are pretty strong words, Buck,” Rock told him soberly. “I’m not an easy man to get away with.” He tried a new tack. “If you are so dead anxious to get rid of me, why don’t you try making it worth my while to remove myself?”
Walters stared at him.
“I ain’t buyin’ you,” he said at last. “There’s a cheaper way.”
“All right, turn your wolf loose on me.” Rock laughed. “See what’ll happen. Now you run along, Mister Buck Walters, before I shoot an eye out of you for luck, you dirty scoundrel!”
Rock’s anger burned anew, but he did not on that account lose his head. He abused Walters in a penetrating undertone, with malice, with intent, with venom that was partly real, partly simulated. But he might as well have offered abuse and insult to a stone. He could not stir Walters to any declaration, any admission that would have been a key to what Rock sought.
“Talk is cheap. I don’t care what you say. It don’t hurt me,” the Maltese Cross boss told him stiffly. “I will shut your mouth for good, inside of forty-eight hours.”
And with that he turned his back squarely on Rock and walked to rejoin his friend, Dave Wells, who stood there, ready to shoot in the name of friendship.
Rock stood staring at their twin backs sauntering past lighted saloons. He wouldn’t have turned his back on Walters, after that. Which was a measure of his appraisal of the man’s intent. Buck would make that threat good!
Rock shrugged his shoulders and strolled across the dusty street into the Grand Union. He was little the wiser for that encounter, except that he could look for reprisal, swift and deadly. He wondered calmly what form it would take.
Certainly he had stepped into a hornet’s nest when he stepped into the dead cowpuncher’s boots. Rock lay down on his bed with his clothes still on and stared up at the dusky ceiling. He was trying to put one and one together, to make a logical sum. It made no
difference now, whether he was Doc Martin or Rock Holloway After to-night Buck Walters was an enemy. And Rock reflected contemptuously that he would rather have him as an enemy than a friend.
He recalled again Uncle Bill Sayre’s distrust of his fellow executor Uncle Bill’s instinct was sound, Rock felt sure in his own soul, now.
“I expect I am in for some exciting times,” Rock murmured to himself. “Yes, sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Ten minutes later he was sound asleep.
CHAPTER X—THIRTY ANGRY MEN
He had been given forty-eight hours! When twenty-four of them had elapsed, Rock lay in his bunk at the TL, staring at roof beams dim above his head. The small noises of the night, insect voices, and the river’s eternal whisper drifted through an open window. In an opposite corner the two hired men snored. Perhaps to-morrow something would happen. Perhaps not. Yet Rock could not take easy refuge behind the idea that Buck Walters’ talk had been a bluff. Fire burned under that smoke. To-morrow would tell the tale.
Sunrise came and breakfast. Rock set the men at work in a meadow. The whir of the mower blades droned in the quiet valley. There were odds and ends of work that kept him busy until ten o’clock. While he attended to these jobs, he debated with himself whether to tell Nona Parke about his encounter with Buck. He concluded to keep it to himself. He wished that he had taken advantage of Dave Wells’ presence to establish his own identity. Yet who the devil, he asked himself fretfully, would have expected Buck Walters to declare open war?
At the next opportunity, he decided, he would be himself and be done with a dead man’s troubles. It had been altogether too easy to let people go on thinking he was Doc Martin. But there was no use worrying Nona Parke with that just now. She wasn’t concerned. If anything happened to him, she could get other riders. And she was quite helpless to prevent anything happening. Rock didn’t intend that anything should happen to him. He would be wary, watchful, his weapons always handy.
Something took him to the house.
Nona sat on the porch, darning stockings for Betty. She stopped Rock to mention the need of getting in more work horses, and while they talked, her eyes, looking past Rock, began to twinkle.
“Well,” she said, “we are about to have a distinguished visitor There’s Alice Snell, and she’s certainly burning the earth.”
Rock turned. That range phrase for speed was apt. Alice came across the flat on a high gallop, her skirt flapping, bareheaded, and the gold of her hair like a halo in the sun. Her bay horse, when she jerked him to a stop, was lathered with sweat, his breast spotted with foam flecks. The girl’s face struck Rock as being stricken with a terrible fear. She swung down. To Nona Parke she gave no greeting whatever. Her eyes never left Rock, except for one furtive, backward glance. And she cried with a hysterical tremble in her voice:
“Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy, with all the boys, are coming to hang you! For God’s sake, Doc, get away from here before they come! I heard them talking it over, and I sneaked away from the ranch. They can’t be far behind me.”
So that was it. Rock’s lip curled. But a vigilance committee from two big outfits didn’t function without some excuse.
“What are they going to hang me for?” he asked.
Alice Snell put her hands on his arms, her white face turned up to his in a fever of anxiety.
“They say—they say,” she gulped, “you’re stealing cattle. They mean to hang you.”
Rock laughed.
“They won’t hang me,” he said lightly. “Thank you, just the same, for coming to tell me of their kind intentions.”
“Doc, please! There’s a lot of them. Elmer Duffy and his crew as well as the Maltese Cross riders. You can’t fight that bunch. Get a horse and ride fast.”
Rock smiled and put Alice Snell’s trembling, clutching hands off his own. But there was no mirth in that smile, for a squad of horsemen, a long line of them abreast, had swung around the point of brush, a quarter of a mile away. Nona Parke stared at the two of them in blank amazement. Alice didn’t seem to know that she was there. She had no thought for anything but this man she took for Doc Martin. But out of one corner of her eye she marked the approaching riders and began to babble incoherently
“Take her into the kitchen,” Rock commanded Nona. “Stay in there. If she’s right, there’ll be a fuss. I can’t run. And neither Buck Walters nor anybody else is going to hang me.”
He darted into the bunk room. His rifle hung above his bed, and he took it down. Out of his war bag he snatched two boxes of cartridges and stuffed them in his trousers pocket. He had on his belt gun. Both six-shooter and carbine were the same caliber. Then he went back to the door. The line of riders drew close, bobbing in unison, a long row. The sun made their silver ornaments gleam—white hats and black, red horses, blacks, bays, dun, and spotted—on they came, a brave sight. Thirty riders to confront a single miscreant. Rock wondered if Charlie Shaw rode with them, and if he would stand by, unprotesting. But he had brief time to speculate. The two girls were still on the porch. Nona had her arms about Alice, steadying her, encouraging her, and Alice was sobbing in a panic of grief and fear.
“For Heaven’s sake get her and yourself inside,” Rock snapped. “This is not going to be a Sunday-school picnic. Buck Walters warned me in Fort Benton that he’d get me inside of forty-eight hours. He’s going to make it good, if he can. This is nothing for you to be mixed up in.”
“This is as good a place as any for her and me,” Nona declared. “This is my ranch. They won’t dare!”
“Dare!” Rock grinned. “The man leading that bunch will dare anything. But I aim to fool him, if I get a chance to declare myself.”
“And if you don’t, they won’t stop to listen to anything,” she declared. Her eyes were full of questions.
“From the bunk room,” Rock said softly. “I will give them a good run for their money. The walls are thick, and I have plenty of ammunition.”
The eyeballs of horses and men were visible now, faces staring from under hat brims. Rock could see Seventy Seven riders he had worked with on trail. Charlie Shaw rode beside Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy They slowed to a trot, then to a walk and drew up before the house. Rock moved back a little in the doorway, his rifle in the crook of his arm. He stood in plain sight; but if a hand moved toward a weapon he would be under cover before it could be drawn, or fired, at least.
Walters, Duffy and Charlie Shaw dismounted. Buck Walters looked at Alice Snell, her face hidden yet against Nona’s shoulder. His own
face remained impassive, but his eyes burned. And Rock got in the first word.
“Miss Snell, not liking the idea of coldblooded murder to satisfy a personal grudge, rode up a little ahead of you-all to tell us you aimed to hang Doc Martin. If——”
“If that is true,” Nona Parke’s voice cut like a knife across his sentence, “you are a pack of dirty cowards—and you are too late.”
She thrust the weeping girl away from her and faced them, with her head up, her gray eyes wide with scorn.
“Is it true?” she demanded. “What do you want here, all of you with rifles, as if you were going to war?”
“We want him,” Buck Walters pointed at Rock. “And we will take him, dead or alive. He is a thief.”
“That,” said Nona without a moment’s hesitation, “is a lie.”
Duffy, Walters, and Charlie Shaw had stepped up on the porch. They stood within eight feet of Rock, apparently secure in the belief that under thirty pairs of watchful eyes he could neither escape nor menace them.
“You two girls better go inside,” Duffy said. “Leave us men handle this thing. They ain’t no room for argument, I guess.”
“Guess again, Elmer,” Rock said quietly. “There is lots of room for argument. In the first place, I am not Doc Martin. I can prove that by you, Duffy, and by Buck Walters himself.”
“What the hell are you givin’ us?” Walters growled.
“It is quite true,” Nona declared. “Doc Martin is dead. He was shot from ambush ten days ago. This man, no matter how much he may look like Doc, is not Doc.”
“I told you that, but you wouldn’t listen, you were so hell-bent to hang somebody,” declared Charlie Shaw, opening his mouth for the first time and addressing Buck Walters. “Now it can be proved right here, unless you got to hang somebody for your own personal satisfaction.”
“Listen, all of you!” Rock put in. “I have told you, and Miss Parke has told you, I am not Doc Martin. Do you want to listen to proof, or do you want it proved to you after a bunch of men have gone to hell
in a fog of powder smoke? Because, if you don’t want to listen to reason, there will be a lot of shooting before there is any hanging. And I will get you, Mr. Buck Walters, first crack, in spite of all your men. Just think that over.”
Charlie Shaw winked at Rock, then took two quick steps to the doorway and slid through. Walters’ right hand moved ever so little, suggestively and involuntarily, and the muzzle of Rock’s carbine pointed straight at his breast.
“Just one move,” said Rock, “one more little move like that, Buck, and the Maltese Cross will be shy your services for good. I will give you leave to hang me or shoot me, if you can, but this crowd is going to hear who I am before the ball opens. I am going to keep this gun right on your middle. If I feel anything or hear anything, I pull trigger. If one of your men should pot me, I can still kill you, even if I were dead on my feet. Now, I tell you again I am not Doc Martin. I came to this ranch the day he was killed—murdered, as a matter of fact. I helped to bury him. His riding gear and all his stuff is here in the house.”
The riders edged their horses nearer and craned their necks. At best, destroying a thief was an unpleasant task even for honest men who despised stock thieves with the contempt such a thief inspired on the range. Every word uttered on that porch carried distinctly to their ears. They were not fools. They knew, and Rock banked on that knowledge, that, whether the man in the doorway was Doc Martin or not, he had the drop on Buck Walters, and the chances were a hundred to one he would kill not only Walters but several of them before they got him. Perhaps too late they realized the tactical error of letting Charlie Shaw get inside. He was a TL man. Right or wrong, if there was a fight, Shaw would fight against them. They would have been confirmed in that supposition if they could have looked behind Rock. That young man’s heart warmed at the boy’s quick wit and unhesitating loyalty. A little behind him Charlie whispered:
“Stand pat. I’ll back any play you make. I got two guns on me.”
Elmer Duffy stared at Rock. He glanced sidewise at Buck Walters, then back to the man in the door
“If you ain’t Doc Martin,” he said at last, “there’s only one other man you could be.”
“Hell and damnation!” Walters burst out. “Who else could he be? Are we goin’ to be old women and let him bluff us out with a fairy story?”
“We got plenty of time, Buck,” Elmer Duffy reminded him. “He can’t get away We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Young Shaw did tell us this before we started.”
“Rats!” Rock laughed. “You sure don’t want to be convinced, do you, Buck? You surely want to see Doc Martin dance on a rope end. Maybe you’d just as soon hang me, even if I’m not Doc. You recollect what Dave Wells named me in Fort Benton, night before last, don’t you? Well, you have Elmer Duffy say who he thinks I might be if I’m not Doc.”
“If Doc Martin is dead an’ buried,” Duffy said, “there’s only one man you can be.”
“You are right,” Rock said. “I will bet you a new hat, Walters, that Elmer Duffy names me what Dave Wells called me in Benton. I can see half a dozen riders in this crowd I worked on trail with, until we came to Clark’s Ford in Nebraska. If you want to be dead sure, Elmer, there is a sorrel horse with two white hind feet and a big star on his forehead, branded JB, and a black, branded a Bleeding Heart, grazing in the pasture back of the barn. And I could tell you more that only one man could know, Elmer. Tell Buck Walters who I am.”
“You’re Rock Holloway,” Duffy muttered.
“Bull’s-eye!” Rock said. “I have been in Montana less than three weeks. It seems a plumb exciting place. Are you satisfied, Buck? Are you still eager to hang me under the impression that I’m Doc Martin? Do you want to see his saddle, with bloodstains on it, where somebody—who also wanted to see him dead—shot him, while he rode along the river bottoms? Maybe you’d like to dig up his body, where he’s buried over by those poplars?”
“What is the use of carrying this on any longer?” Nona demanded. “I don’t believe Doc did what Alice says you claim he did. I don’t believe he was a thief. But, whether he was or was not, he is dead. This man is what he says he is. He came here the day Doc was killed. He told me his name was Rock Holloway. I hired him. That is all there is to it.”
“Isn’t that what Dave Wells called me?” Rock said to Walters. “Are you satisfied?”
“You denied it,” Walters said. “When he spoke to you, you used me to prove you were Doc Martin.”
“A man can have a joke with his friends, if he likes. It isn’t against any law that I know of. He probably told you I joined his outfit on the Yellowstone last summer and worked for him all winter.”
“I don’t recollect him mentionin’ it,” Walters replied. “Why have you passed yourself off for Doc Martin, anyway?”
“Shucks!” Rock said. “Everybody just naturally insisted on taking me for Doc. Miss Parke knew my name. I explained myself to Charlie Shaw as soon as I had a chance. I didn’t care much, one way or the other. I didn’t know anybody in this neck of the woods, barring the Seventy Seven. I fooled Elmer Duffy purposely, the first time I saw him, because I was kinda interested in trying to find out who killed Doc Martin, seeing I looked so much like him and was taking his place as a TL rider. Are you satisfied, or is there still something you’d like to know about?”
“Yes, I can see there’s been a mistake,” Walters said in a different tone. “You can’t blame us. We got it straight that Martin was standing in with some pretty bald-faced stealing. We’ve cleaned out his partners. I guess this settles it as far as you’re concerned. I’ll have to take Elmer’s word for it. He ought to know you, seein’ you killed his brother.”
It seemed to Rock that Walters raised his voice a trifle, and that he managed to impart a sneer into those words. Every man could hear. It seemed to Rock like a deliberate taunt, a barb purposely planted to rankle in Duffy’s skin. For a second there was silence. Elmer Duffy’s Adam’s apple slid nervously up and down his lean throat. His face flushed. Rock read the signs for himself. A few spiteful reminders like that, and Duffy would feel that he had to go gunning for his brother’s slayer. Buck Walters broke that strained hush. He lifted his hat to Nona.
“I’m sorry if this has been disagreeable,” he said politely “But those Burris thieves incriminated your man Martin. He has been in with them on their rustling. We’ve lost a lot of stock. Maybe they
didn’t overlook you. It’s as well Doc Martin has cashed in. We would certainly have hung him to the nearest cottonwood. We don’t reckon there’ll be any more trouble. I hope you don’t hold grudges,” he said, turning to Rock. “In our place you’d do the same. Nobody told us what happened to Martin. You passed for him. We got to protect our range. There’s only one way to deal with rustlers.”
He turned to his men with a wave of his hand.
“All right, boys,” he said. “You’ve heard the whole show, and we’re saved a nasty job. Ride on. We’ll catch up with you.”
Elmer Duffy muttered something, stepped down off the porch, and swung into his saddle, without a word or a look at Rock. Buck Walters stepped over beside Alice. She had listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Now she shrank away from Buck.
“Come on home with us, Al,” he said coaxingly.
“Go home with you!” Alice Snell shrilled. “I’ll never go on that ranch again till you’re off it for good, you blackhearted beast! If Doc Martin was murdered, I know who did it and why. I hate you—I hate you!”
“You’re all worked up,” Walters said diffidently. “You’ll be sorry for saying such a thing about me when you cool off. I didn’t kill Doc Martin, although he had it coming. A man who steals can’t flourish on any range I have charge of.”
“Doc Martin never stole anything in his life,” the girl cried. “He was a better man than you, any day. You were afraid of him,” she raved. “I know. You hated him because I loved him, and he loved me. Get away from me, you—you toad!”
Walters’ face flamed. He shot a quick sidewise look at Nona and Rock Holloway. But he was cool and patient.
“Hysterics,” he said to Nona. “I guess I’ll have to leave her to you, Miss Parke. See she gets home, will you? Sorry about all this fuss. Couldn’t be helped, the way things stood.”
Rock said nothing. He had declared himself. This was a matter between these others, interesting, dramatic, and with hints of passionate conflict. Rock knew Nona Parke’s side of it. What she had told him about Doc Martin was fresh in his mind. And there was Martin’s attitude and actions toward Elmer Duffy. She, like himself,
stood silent, while Alice leaned against the log wall and lashed at her foreman, her breast heaving, a fury blazing in her pansy-blue eyes. Walters stepped off the porch and mounted his horse. The riders were crossing the flat at a walk. Buck lifted his hat to Nona, flung “So long, boys!” over his shoulder to Rock and Charlie Shaw, and loped away after his men.
A very cool hand, Rock reflected. Smooth and dangerous. He had denied that Dave Wells mentioned anything. Rock felt that to be a lie. It was simpler now that he had established his real identity But he wasn’t done with Buck Walters yet. No! Rock couldn’t quite say why he had that conviction; but he had it very clear in his mind.
CHAPTER XI—RIDERS ON A RISE
“Is the excitement all over?” Charlie Shaw asked, grinning. “Guess I’ll go put my caballo in the barn. I’ll go back an’ cut my string this afternoon.”
“Round-up over?” Nona asked. She had put one arm protectingly about Alice Snell. That disturbed young woman, her tawny hair in a tangle, her cheeks tear stained, stared at Rock. Her eyes expressed complete incredulity, surprise and a strange blend of grief and wonder.
Charlie nodded. “Glad, too,” he said. “Hope you don’t send me with that outfit this fall.”
“Some one will have to go,” Nona said dispiritedly.
“Oh, well!” Charlie shrugged his shoulders and took his horse away to the stable. Nona led Alice inside. Rock stood his rifle against the wall and sat down on the porch steps to roll a smoke. He found the fingers that sifted tobacco into the paper somewhat tremulous. Odd that a man could face a situation like that with cold determination and find himself shaky when it was all over. Rock smiled and blew smoke into the still air. He could see the teams plodding in the hayfield. The whir of the mower blades mingled with the watery murmur of the river. A foraging bee hummed in a bluster of flowers by his feet. Except for these small sounds, the hush of the plains lay like a blanket, a void in which men and the passions of men were inconsequential, little worrying organisms agitated briefly over small matters, like flies on the Great Wall of China.
He sat there a long time. Charlie came back and went into the bunk room. Rock saw him stretch out on a bed. Good kid—loyal to his friends and his outfit. What a mess there would have been if a fight had started. Like the Alamo. Two of them intrenched behind log walls, and thirty angry men in the open, spitting lead. Alice Snell must certainly have thought a lot of Doc Martin. Rock could see the look on Buck Walters’ face when she flung her scornful epithets in
his face. Funny about Doc and Nona Parke and Elmer Duffy Not so funny, either. Hearts were caught on the rebound. Alice Snell was worth a second look. Passionate, willful, beautiful. Her fingers had clutched his arms with a frenzy of possession, when she pleaded with him to get away from danger. She was certainly capable of loving.
Nona came out. She, too, sat down on the edge of the porch near him. She stared at the haymakers, off down the river, where that hanging squad had departed, up at the banks where the plains pitched sharp to the valley floor.
“Isn’t it peaceful?” she said absently.
“Yes, by comparison. Sweet Alice calm her troubled soul?”
“How can you joke about it? I made her lie down. She’s in a terrible state—all on edge. I didn’t think she was like that.”
“Like what?” Rock inquired.
“I didn’t think she had it in her to feel so much about anything. She’s heartbroken,” Nona said. “Doc, it appears, meant a lot to her. She just babbles about him.”
“Everybody seems to know that but you,” Rock told her.
“I don’t understand it,” Nona said slowly “Doc—oh, well, I guess he made love to her, same as he did to me.”
“You blame him?” Rock inquired. “She’s attractive. Offhand, I’d say she loved this rider of yours a heap. You didn’t have any use for him except in his capacity as a cowpuncher Sometimes, I’ve noticed, a man craves affection. If he can’t find it one place he’ll look elsewhere. Maybe he was in love with you both. You’re funny, anyhow. You didn’t want him, yourself. But it seems to jar you because he consoled himself with another girl.”
“It isn’t that,” she replied in a bewildered sort of fashion. “Why should he lie to me? Why should he quarrel with Elmer Duffy about me—make an issue of me—if—if—”
“I don’t know I do know that I may have a man-size quarrel with Elmer, myself, now, if Buck Walters makes a few more public cracks about my run-in with Mark. Elmer’s apt to brood over that, and I’m handy if he concludes it’s up to him to get action over a grievance. And it’s likely he will.”
“What’ll you do, if he does?” she said anxiously
“Oh, take it as it comes. There’s something fishy to me about all this upheaval. Of course I can savvy why Buck Walters wanted to get your man, Doc. Alice would be reason enough. Buck’s face gave him away But I somehow don’t believe that’s the whole answer Perhaps both Elmer and Buck are such honest, God-fearing cattlemen that the very idea of rustling would make them froth at the mouth simultaneously. But I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe for a single instant that Doc Martin had anything to do with any rustling whatever,” Nona declared. “I don’t care what these Burrises said, or anybody.”
“I’m not an awful lot interested in that, now,” Rock remarked thoughtfully. “It would appear from the way these fellows were ready to act that there has been rustling. Duffy wouldn’t back a play like that just to satisfy either his own or Buck Walters’ grudge. Between the Seventy Seven and the Maltese Cross, ranging around forty thousand cattle, a few rustled calves by the Goosebill don’t cut so much figure, except as an excuse for action. No; ‘there’s more in this than meets the eye,’ as Shakespeare or some other wise gazabo said once. You have lost calves, yourself.”
“Yes, I know I have, and I can’t afford to. I certainly hate a thief.”
“So do I,” Rock murmured. “Still, I don’t hate you.”
“Me?” she uttered in astonishment. Her head went up imperiously. “What do you mean?”
“You steal hearts.” Rock said calmly “You admitted it. You told me you did, only, of course, you said you didn’t mean to.”
The blood leaped to her cheeks. It was the first time he saw her momentarily at a loss for words, embarrassed by an imputation.
“It worries me a little,” Rock continued meditatively. “You may steal mine. Of course, you don’t intend to. You hate to do it, as the fellow said when he took the town marshal’s gun away from him. But, on the other hand, you don’t care a boot if you find you’ve got the darned thing. You’re immune. And mine is an innocent, inexperienced sort of a heart. It’s useful to me. I’d be mighty
uncomfortable without it. Maybe I’d better pull out while the going is good.”
“You want to quit now?” she asked. “There won’t be any more trouble, I think,” she said stiffly. “And I’m just getting used to you. I hate strange men around. Can’t you think of me as your boss instead of as a woman? Oh, dear, it’s always like this!”
Her distress was so comical, yet so genuine, that Rock laughed out loud.
“Good Lord, Nona—everybody calls you Nona, so it comes natural —I’m the world’s crudest josher, I guess,” he declared. “Say, you couldn’t drive me off this range now. I promised you, didn’t I, that if my admiration for you did get powerful strong I wouldn’t annoy you with it? Don’t you give me credit for fully intending to keep my word?”
Nona smiled frankly at him and with him.
“You like to tease, don’t you?” she said simply. “You aren’t half so serious as you look and act.”
“Sometimes I’m even more so,” he drawled lightly.
“You were serious enough a while ago,” she said. Her next words startled Rock, they were so closely akin to what had been running in his mind not long before. “If Elmer hadn’t known you, there would have been a grand battle here. You and Charlie in the bunk house. I would probably have bought into it from one of the kitchen windows. I have dad’s old rifle, and I can shoot with it probably as straight as most men. They wouldn’t have won much from us. Buck Walters and his cowboys, I don’t think.”
“What makes you think Charlie would have backed me up?” he asked curiously.
“He did, didn’t he?” she asked. “I know that boy.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Of course I was scared,” she admitted. “But that didn’t paralyze me. It never does. Do you think I’d stand and wring my hands, while a man was fighting for his life?”
“I see,” Rock nodded. “Sort of united we stand, eh?”
“Well, neither Buck Walters nor anybody else will ever take a man out of my house and hang him to a cottonwood tree if I can stop it,” she said hotly. “There is law in this Territory, if it is not very much in
