This Side of Glory (25 page)

Eleanor was not concerned, as Clara spent half her life catching something or other and apparently enjoying it, but when she got a letter from Fred telling her that her sister Florence was stricken she began to be worried, for like the rest of the Upjohns Florence was almost never ill. Eleanor wrote home that she would like to come to see her, but her mother answered with a special delivery letter telling her no. “Don’t you dare run any risk of taking flu back to your youngsters,” Molly wrote. “New Orleans is full of it, and it’s a bad thing.”

Eleanor telephoned Wyatt’s house. “I’m doing my best,” said Wyatt in answer to her queries. “But I don’t know what we’re going to use for hands if this keeps up.”

Eleanor went out and rode through the fields. The cotton plants were covered with little green bolls. In a short time they would be open, and cotton did not wait to be picked. But who in the name of reason was going to pick it? Pickers had been hard enough to get last year when the general health had been normal. She was ready to cry out in dismay. Her laborers were well fed and housed, they did the most healthful outdoor work, yet Wyatt said they were collapsing like old men, and those who were left standing whispered sepulchrally to each other, “He’s got it,” and were too scared to work.

During the next few weeks Eleanor had Bob Purcell come to Ardeith frequently. He could not get there as often as she wanted him, for he was working from daybreak till dark. His face was thin with fatigue. “What started this thing?” she demanded of him one morning.

“I don’t know,” said Bob.

“Have you heard what some people are saying, that it was German spies in this country?”

He shrugged. “That might be credible if it hadn’t appeared almost at the same time in China and Sweden and the Fiji Islands, and Germany too.”

“What can we do to keep well?”

Bob took a long tired breath. “Eleanor, I don’t know what it is nor how to prevent it nor how to cure it. Nobody knows. If you get it go to bed and stay there till you get well.”

Her hands held each other tight. “And it’s nearly time to pick cotton! What can I do?”

“Good Lord, Eleanor, this isn’t a problem of cotton. It’s life and death. In some towns the supply of coffins has already run out.”

He left her. Eleanor paced the floor of her room till late that night, too restless to sleep. She had read about plagues—the Black Death in Europe, the yellow fever horrors that used to sweep American ports before anybody knew that mosquitoes were more than a harmless nuisance—but it had never occurred to her that she would be called upon to fight one. After a lifetime of taking it for granted that she lived in a world where white-coated men and women in laboratories manipulated test tubes for the public health, she felt stunned before this onslaught. One thought things like this belonged in the times when people prayed to spirits instead of being vaccinated. One did not expect to stand up in the most civilized nation of the twentieth century and see it helpless before a pestilence. One thought that on a plantation equipped with every wheel and engine modern ingenuity could provide, the most scientific planter in the parish could get her cotton in!

The next day Dilcy collapsed with flu. The children missed her, and Eleanor found that she had not known until now how much she had counted on her. While she herself was in the fields she left them with Bessie, but Bessie did not know much about caring for children and Eleanor was frightened lest they catch the infection. When she came in a day or two later to find that Mamie also was ill, she went into the kitchen and cooked their supper herself, clumsily, for she knew very little about cooking and was already trembling with weariness. The children were cross, and she herself so nervous she had a hard time being gentle with them.

The cotton bolls opened on nearly empty fields. Eleanor put up signs facing the road and inserted advertisements in the newspapers offering work to anybody who would take it. She advertised two dollars a hundred pounds for picking, but got only scanty results. Billboards and patriotic speakers were proclaiming that America must feed Europe, clothe Europe, fill Europe’s guns, but with thousands of workers in the army, thousands at new jobs created by the war, and half the civilian population jamming the hospitals, there were simply not enough laborers to be had at any price.

Eleanor felt sick as she watched the meager lines of pickers. Cotton was now thirty-seven cents a pound, and with the labor shortage lessening the yield the price might go higher. With this crop in the warehouse she could lay Ardeith in Kester’s lap, the best equipped plantation in the state, not only free of debt but well on the road to making him rich. But unless she performed a miracle half her cotton would never reach the warehouse.

She sent for Wyatt. “You’ve got to do something!” she exclaimed, not because she thought he could do anything but because talking relieved her tension.

He shook his head, gloomily watching her as she paced the floor. “I’m doing my best, Mrs. Larne.”

“Your best? Suppose it should rain and soak those open bolls? We’ve got to get that cotton in!”

Wyatt sighed. “Honest, Mrs. Larne, I’m no slacker. But I can’t make people sprout out of the ground.”

Eleanor sat down, twisting her hands together on her knees, and stood up again. “Wyatt, go back and change those signs to read two-fifty a hundred.”

“Two-fifty a hundred? My Lord, those pickers will go nigger-rich with pink silk shirts and yellow shoes and all like that.”

“If they get the cotton in I don’t care how nigger-rich they get. Go on and do what I told you.”

He sighed and retreated. Eleanor walked out into the hall, racking her head for some other means of getting cotton-pickers. On the gallery the children were quarreling. She wearily pacified them and went into the kitchen to make broth for their supper. The household was in a state as muddled as her own nerves. Dilcy and Mamie were still unable to work and two of the other maids had been sent home with influenza. The servants who were left simply could not do all the work. Dust was thick, papers and toys lay scrambled on the floor because nobody had time to pick them up. Always irritated by disorder, now with dust and fretful children added to her plantation worries Eleanor felt driven to the limit of her endurance.

She gave the children supper—used to Mamie’s delectable concoctions they grumbled till she felt like giving way to hysterics—and when at last she got them to bed Eleanor went back to the kitchen to find something for herself. She was standing by the table eating a bowl of cornflakes when Bob came to see how the servants were. He was accompanied by Violet, who was driving his car so he could rest on the road.

While Bob was upstairs Eleanor and Violet sat looking at each other in the disordered parlor, both of them too tired to talk much. Violet had been driving Bob from house to house since early morning.

“My idea of heaven,” she remarked, “is a place where one can eat white bread and buy a whole ton of coal at once and read every morning in the paper ‘The War Is Over.’”

Eleanor laughed grimly. It was the only speech made by either of them until Bob came in.

Bob gave Eleanor a fresh pile of flu-masks, and reminded her to keep up her daily ration of iron.

She tried to smile. “I’ve already taken enough iron to make a railroad.”

“You don’t look it,” he returned.

Eleanor walked to the door with them. Violet put her hand comfortingly on Eleanor’s shoulder. “Don’t let yourself get so distracted,” she urged. “You’ll come through this mess. You’re the sort that comes through anything.”

Eleanor did not reply. She closed the door behind them and went up to her room, where she lay down across the bed with her hands pressed to her throbbing temples. Wasn’t there anybody in the world, she wondered, who realized that the valiant people to whom nobody ever thought of giving sympathy because they always pulled through, sometimes reached a place where they would give anything they owned to be weak and babyish and have a strong loving bosom to receive their heads?

The next morning when she looked at her haggard face in the mirror she decided to get away from the house and think quietly. Ordering Bessie to stop washing the breakfast dishes and stay with the children, she got out the car and began to drive slowly toward town, for she had learned before now that the motions of driving required just enough attention to free the under part of her mind for thinking through a problem.

The streets were bright with billboards. Pictured soldiers grinned at her, while pictured mothers regarded them with noble eyes; Eleanor wondered why the mother of every eighteen-year-old doughboy should be painted as looking about eighty. But this did not tell her where she could find cotton-pickers. Lovely women in Greek robes waved flags on the posters urging the public to buy Liberty Bonds or join the Red Cross. There were portraits of President Wilson and Herbert Hoover. “Food will win the war! Don’t waste it!” “Every home in which cornmeal is used becomes thereby a bulwark of democracy!” “Save sugar! An American girl of 1918 should be as offended at the offer of a box of candy as a girl of 1776 would have been at the offer of a cup of tea.” “Food will win the war—every boy and girl who works in a vegetable patch is a Soldier of Freedom!”

Eleanor jammed on the brakes. She had an idea.

Turning the car to the curb she stayed there a moment, gazing up at the picture of an urchin in overalls striding along with a rake over his shoulder. After looking at him awhile she chuckled, wondering if she could make a speech. The papers were full of addresses by Four-Minute Men the country over and it should not be hard to find resounding phrases. Alternate feelings of boldness and guilt scrambled for precedence as she considered. She looked ahead at the road. “I didn’t start it,” she told herself. “I can’t stop it. I might as well use it.” She started the motor and drove to the high school.

The principal was in his office. Eleanor told him her plan.

“The boys and girls want to help win the war. But they feel there’s so little they can do. They buy thrift stamps, but most of them have such small allowances that they can’t buy many. Have you had a hard time filling your quota?”

Yes, the principal admitted, he had.

“I’m paying two dollars and a half a hundred pounds for picking cotton,” said Eleanor. “Here’s a battle they can fight. They’ll be the army behind the lines. If you’ll urge them to buy thrift stamps with their wages the Dalroy school will go over the top with its quota before the end of the month.”

He was listening with interest. Yes, it was a good idea. She could make a speech in the auditorium tomorrow morning.

“I’ll be glad to,” said Eleanor. “By the way, who’s the leader of the high school band?”

He told her, and as soon as school was out Eleanor went to see the band leader.

She had the band on the platform in the auditorium when she spoke the next morning. The students were assembled before her.

“It takes a bale of cotton to fire a fifteen-inch gun,” she exclaimed to them. “The winning of the war depends on the American South, the cottonfield of the world! The armies fighting for peace and freedom are counting on us. Come to Ardeith and fight there for salvation of the world’s democracy!”

They began to applaud.

“Thank you!” she cried. “You boys who are too young to go to France, you girls who are sorry you can’t be soldiers, mobilize to give the soldiers means to fight. Every bale of cotton we get this year brings nearer the day of universal peace. Be soldiers in the Harvest Army and win the war!”

The band, forewarned, struck up
The Star-Spangled Banner.
This brought them to their feet. They started to cheer.

“Thank you!” Eleanor shouted again above the din. “There’ll be trucks at the schoolhouse at three o’clock.”

That afternoon the trucks were there, draped with flags, and the band played patriotic music in the first one while the volunteers rode to the plantation. The fields of Ardeith were blazing with posters.

THIS COTTON IS GOING TO AMERICAN GUNS!
COTTON-PICKERS WILL WIN THE WAR

She had placarded the weighing-house:

BRING IN THE COTTON FOR AMERICA AND BUY THRIFT STAMPS WITH YOUR WAGES

By the first of the next week she had billboards on the streets all over town.

COTTON WILL WIN THE WAR!
A SCHOOLBOY ON A PLANTATION FIGHTS THE KAISER AS WELL AS A SOLDIER IN THE TRENCHES. FIGHT WITH US AT ARDEITH!

Five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday, Eleanor sent the boys and girls into the fields. Every Saturday morning they began with a ceremony. The band playing at their head, they marched to a platform outdoors where a flagpole stood, and as the flag was raised Eleanor led them in their pledge of allegiance. Then the band struck up
Dixie,
or
The Stars and Stripes Forever,
and they marched two and two into the fields to pick cotton for democracy.

To each one she gave a card marked in squares, each square meaning twenty pounds of cotton picked, so Wyatt could keep up with payments. “Pay them in single dollar bills, Wyatt,” she instructed him. “It looks like more. And be sure the bills are crisp.”

He gave her a long look and sighed. “I declare to my soul, Mrs. Larne,” he announced somberly, “I never did see a lady like you.”

Eleanor laughed. “What did I tell you?”

She even got them public notice. She told the New Orleans papers about her Harvest Army, bringing in the crop for the sake of the men overseas, and they sent photographers to Ardeith. Pictures of the boys and girls in the cottonfields appeared a few days later, and between publicity and patriotism Eleanor found herself one of the few employers of the year who had an abundance of labor. Some of the children caught flu that fall, others got tired and dropped out, and still others broke down cotton plants in their clumsiness, but the scheme worked. She got the cotton in.

The crop totaled twelve hundred and ten bales. She sold the cotton for thirty-eight cents a pound. The gross value of the 1918 crop was a little over two hundred thousand dollars.

4

There was one more morsel of a task, and then she would be done. She had to write the last checks that would clear her of owing a penny to anybody in the world.