This Side of Glory (20 page)

“Kester—tell me—if I should break my engagement now—would you ask me again to marry you?”

He answered, “I honestly don’t know, Isabel. So maybe you’d better not risk it.”

“You needn’t worry,” she retorted. “I shan’t.”

They did not speak again till the dance was over and the couples were breaking up, when in the hearing of half a dozen others Kester said gallantly, “Thank you for a delightful waltz, Miss Isabel. May I take this opportunity of wishing you happiness?”

“Thank you,” said Isabel.

Those were the last words they were destined to exchange until she came home from Germany at the outbreak of the war.

Chapter Eight

1

E
leanor’s opinion of Isabel was scornful and briefly expressed.

“And you asked her to marry you! You’re a very fortunate man, Kester Larne. All right, since you’ve promised to ignore her I’ll do the same.”

“Good,” said Kester. “Then it’s quits all around?”

“Quits,” said Eleanor.

Kester gave her a humorously grateful smile.

Eleanor pushed Isabel into a back pigeonhole of her mind, telling herself that now she could be calm, but she still found no peace. For without the problem of Isabel to occupy them her thoughts leaped back to the torment of cotton. The exchanges reopened on the sixteenth of November, and cotton was salable at five cents a pound.

At such a price Kester and Eleanor could not have repaid what it had cost to grow the cotton, to say nothing of financing the plantation for another crop. They held the cotton desperately. The newspapers were trying to bolster the courage of the planters by reminding them that Europe needed cotton duck for tents and cotton cloth for uniforms, and that the rising cost of living in the United States would force the people to buy more cotton clothes instead of silk and wool, so that the crop would eventually be disposed of at a reasonable price. But they urged that very little cotton be planted in the spring, and the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington publicly demanded that bankers and merchants refuse to extend credit to any planter who did not first promise a sharp reduction in his cotton acreage.

Kester and Eleanor spent the winter studying the possibilities of food crops. Before the Civil War part of Ardeith had been planted in sugarcane, and another part in oranges, but today most cane was grown west of the river and the land nearer the Gulf had been found more suitable for orange trees. “Rice?” Eleanor suggested hopefully. Kester told her they would have to build siphons to bring the water across the levee to flood the fields, and import laborers who knew how to grow rice. “Nobody up here knows rice any more,” he said. “It’s grown in southwest Louisiana. We might try corn, but the country had a bumper corn crop last year and half the cotton planters are already planning to put in corn next spring.”

One day in January Sylvia came in to ask for a subscription to the Belgian Relief Fund. Eleanor told her curtly it was all she could do this winter to feed her own child, let alone feeding the Belgians. If she wouldn’t help the Belgians, Sylvia persisted, would she at least promise that when she served gelatine desserts she would insist on getting Hooper’s gelatine? “You see, dear, they have a yellow label on one side of the box,” she explained, showing a sample package, “and if you cut off the label and send it to the Housewives’ League they’ll send it to the company and the company will redeem the labels for one cent each and give it to the Red Cross—”

“Why don’t they give the Red Cross all the postage that will take?” Eleanor inquired.

“Now, Eleanor, you don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. The gelatine company wants to play on public sympathy to sell more gelatine.”

“Eleanor,” said Sylvia, “I’m disappointed in you. Some of us are working so hard!”

When she had finally gone to call on her next prospect Eleanor went upstairs. She found Kester reading a letter from Sebastian, who said cotton was now six cents a pound, and did they want to sell ?

“The cotton is all we’ve got,” said Eleanor. “If we let it go it means utter bankruptcy.”

He agreed. She sat down and took his hands in hers. “Let’s hold it awhile longer, Kester. A lot of people are saying the war will be over this year.”

“A lot of people,” he said moodily, “are saying it won’t be.”

“If I’m wrong, if the bottom drops out of the market again, I can stand it. I’ve learned a lot recently.”

“You’re a great girl, Eleanor.”

She smiled. “I can stand anything, darling, except Sylvia cackling as if she’d laid an egg.”

“What did she want?”

Eleanor told him about Sylvia’s peddling gelatine for the Belgians. He chuckled, but he said,

“You could have told her I gave five dollars to a Belgian fund yesterday.”

“Kester! How could you? When we need it so!”

“I couldn’t stand it. Those children. I kept thinking of Cornelia.”

“If you’d thought of Cornelia you might have remembered that five dollars would buy her two pairs of shoes, and she certainly needs them.”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Kester, and she bit her lip remorsefully. But he was evidently glad to accept when Neal Sheramy called him up a few minutes later inviting him to the movies.

Eleanor was doing her best to be cheerful. She went out, and now and then she had their friends in for supper. When she saw Isabel, she said “Hello” politely and then paid her as little attention as possible. Like their acquaintances, she and Kester sang
Tipperary
and tried to pronounce Ypres and Prysansyz; they laughed ironically at the news that Gavrilo Prinzip had received a sentence of twenty years for starting the holocaust; they argued about the newly announced difference between Kultur and Culture; they learned the new war-game, played on a map of Europe; with armies and navies of Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Russia carrying on strategic warfare. And meanwhile their creditors were becoming so insistent that they dreaded driving through town. They could buy nothing else at the druggist’s or the grocer’s or the dry goods store. They could not buy nails to mend a loose board on the front gallery. The car was in such need of repair that it was unsafe to drive it. For two months they had been brushing their teeth with salt instead of toothpaste.

In February cotton was eight cents a pound. On the first of March Sebastian wrote urging them to sell. Cotton was being shipped overseas in small quantities now, he said, but the German submarines were getting continually more successful in their attempts to halt Allied commerce and nobody could tell what day the risks of international shipping would send the price down again.

For several successive evenings they sat up late talking it over. At eight cents a pound the crop would cover their immediate bills, but it would not leave a penny over toward the twenty thousand dollars they would be required to pay the bank if they were to keep Ardeith longer than the first of December. There was no chance that the plantation in its first year as an experimental truck-farm could be made to show a profit of twenty thousand dollars. In their extremity they at last confessed to each other that they might have been willing to turn to Fred for aid, but Eleanor knew her father’s business well enough to know that twenty thousand dollars in cash represented an impossible demand. In the present plight of the cotton-stricken banks Fred could have raised such a sum only by mortgaging the machinery that built his levees and the home in which his family lived, a step that would reduce him to a state comparable to the one in which she and Kester found themselves today. After Fred’s long struggle, which nobody understood better than she did, Eleanor felt that she would rather accept any defeat for herself than ask for that.

“I doubt if he’d do it anyway,” she said. “There are the younger ones still in school. He has no right to jeopardize their security for my sake.”

“You mean for my sake,” retorted Kester. “Of course he hasn’t. Your father is not going to risk losing everything he’s worked for just because you took it into your head to marry me.”

After a moment Eleanor asked, “How much money have you got?”

“I have—” Kester reached into his pocket, took out his cash and counted—“eleven dollars and thirty-four cents.”

“I have about six dollars in my purse,” said Eleanor, “and thirty-two dollars in my bank account.”

“And that’s all,” said Kester.

He sat with one leg swung across the other. She could see the sole of his shoe, with a hole worn through the first layer of the leather. They had held their cotton with a frantic hope. It was their last negotiable possession. But now what they faced was no longer the possibility of saving Ardeith, it was a lack of the simple necessities with which to go on living. The bills at the local shops would absorb Eleanor’s little income for months ahead. Their eyes met in despair.

“We’ve got to let the cotton go,” said Kester.

“Yes,” said Eleanor.

They sat looking at each other, bleakly.

In the morning Eleanor sat down at her typewriter and wrote Sebastian a letter telling him to sell the cotton. Kester, who could not typewrite, sat watching her. Eleanor began the letter four times. It was to be very simple, only a few lines long, but she kept making mistakes as though her hands refused to take the orders her mind was so reluctantly giving them. She tore out the fourth false beginning, wadded the sheet into a ball and flung it into the wastebasket. Without speaking, Kester came over to her and put his arms around her, and for a moment they stayed like that, saying nothing. At last Eleanor asked,

“What shall we do after December?”

“We may be able to rescue fifty or a hundred acres,” said Kester. “I can be a one-mule farmer.”

“And if we can’t have even that much?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kester.

Eleanor put her hands into his. Kester pressed them, then suddenly let them go. He walked over to the window and stood looking out at the swaying moss on the oaks and the azaleas thick with their bright, fragile blooms.

“Ardeith,” he said. “Philip Larne built a log cabin here. He raised indigo.”

“Kester, please stop.”

Without giving him a chance to go on she turned back to the typewriter and began the letter again. Its crisp phrases did not sound like a death-warrant. “This will give you authority to sell the cotton represented by the enclosed warehouse receipts… .”

“Here it is, Kester,” she said at length.

He leaned over the desk, read the letter and wrote his name at the end. “I’d better take it to town right away and mail it,” he said. “The price may drop any time.”

Bessie came in to announce dinner. They went into the dining-room and tried without much success to swallow what was in front of them—chicken and vegetables raised on the place, for they had not been able to buy groceries for weeks. “We’re living like sharecroppers already,” Eleanor thought, but she did not say it. During dinner neither of them said anything, except for Kester’s remarking that the peach orchard was beginning to bloom and looked mighty pretty.

As soon as their pretense at dinner was over Kester ordered his horse saddled and rode to town to mail the letter.

Eleanor walked around the house, feeling that she was saying goodbye to the place she had grown to love. At last she got out the rickety little car and went for a drive, hesitating at first at the waste of gasoline and then remembering that it no longer mattered. She drove along the river road, wondering how much they were going to be able to rescue from the ruins when they had to move.

The fields were full of fragrances and chirps and colors, and the peach orchard was glowing with bloom. As she drove Eleanor thought she had never known how sensitive to the countryside she had become, until now when she was about to lose it. Then she put her foot on the brake so suddenly that the car jerked and sputtered. In the peach orchard, sitting on the grass under the trees, she saw Kester and Isabel. They were engaged in such close conversation that they did not notice her as she passed.

Eleanor stepped on the gas-feed and the car jumped ahead. Around the curve she saw Kester’s horse tethered to a tree, and near it the smart little roadster Isabel had been driving since she came home, for though her income might be minute compared to what she was used to, it seemed enough to keep her supplied with all she needed.

Turning her car Eleanor drove past the orchard again. They had not moved. Isabel held her hat in her lap and the afternoon sun glinted on her hair. She sat with her ankles crossed in front of her, looking up at Kester as though his words were the most interesting she had ever listened to; it was the flatteringly seductive attitude of a woman wise in the ways of men, pleasing by letting herself be pleased. As Eleanor passed the orchard for the second time Kester said something that caused Isabel to throw back her head and laugh.

Eleanor was shaking with rage. She drove home, smothering her first impulse to interrupt them with the thought that she would not give Isabel the pleasure of seeing that Kester’s wife knew how successful she was. Leaving the car in the avenue, she went indoors and began to walk up and down the parlor. She was still pacing when Dilcy came in with Cornelia.

“Take her outdoors,” Eleanor said shortly.

“Fader?” asked Cornelia. Her eyes searched the room for him. “Fader?”

“Miss Elna,” said Dilcy reproachfully, “it’s gettin’ cold out dere.”

“Did you hear me tell you to take her out?”

“Yassum.” Dilcy retired in dudgeon.

Eleanor went on pacing. “He promised me!” she said to herself, over and over. “This time I won’t be quiet.”

Since last November, when Kester had promised he would not see her alone again, she had not mentioned Isabel to him. This was the first week in March. Kester had given the promise of his own accord, and it had not occurred to her to doubt that he meant to keep his word. She remembered how readily he had said it, as readily as he would have offered a child a stick of candy to keep her quiet. She had a disgusting sense of having been cheated and secretly laughed at. It set her on fire. Today they had let go the cotton, unless a miracle happened they would lose Ardeith, yet she had not said a word blaming Kester for their tragedy. And this was his gratitude. It was too much.

The sun was going down when he returned. She heard the horse’s hoofs in the avenue, and Kester running up the front steps.

“Hello,” he said as he came into the parlor. “Eleanor, don’t you think it’s chilly for Cornelia to be out? Dilcy said you told her—”

Eleanor wheeled around. “You promised me not to go to Isabel Valcour’s house again,” she exclaimed to him. “I suppose you decided that didn’t mean you weren’t to meet her in the peach orchard?”

Kester had stopped short as she spoke. He banged the door behind him. “You’re the biggest fool I ever saw in my life,” he said.