This Side of Glory (27 page)

“Why—all right.” She stood up too. “Don’t you want me to help unpack your things?”

“No, I’ll do it.”

She moved away from him. He was looking out at the landscaped gardens. “Kester, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Not a thing. But I’m all cindery from the train, and famished. What have we got for dinner, by the way?”

She smiled at that. “River-shrimp and stuffed crabs, and rice—”

“Ah!” He grinned. “Wonderful. And we haven’t—just by the merest possible chance—we
haven’t
got pecan pie for dessert?”

She nodded vehemently. “Yes, we have.”

Kester looked around. “Imagine, pecan pie in the same house with that bathroom. Eleanor, you—” He broke off again and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny about pecan pie?” she exclaimed.

“Nothing, Eleanor. I’m just so glad to get it. Tell Mamie to hurry up, and I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

Eleanor went out and shut the door. She walked across to the middle of the hall and stood with her hand on the balustrade of the staircase, looking back at the door of Kester’s room. She could hear him moving around. From downstairs she could hear the voices of the children.

Within her was a feeling of emptiness. It was very strange. Kester’s homecoming was flat. He had not said or done anything to justify her having such an impression, but there it was. She slowly went downstairs.

“Nothing is as wonderful as you think it’s going to be,” she advised herself as she stood at the foot of the staircase. “He’s so full of things to say he can’t say any of them yet. That’s all. I’m just overworking my imagination.”

Kester called her, leaning over the balustrade above the turn. “Eleanor, have you invited any people over for this evening?”

“Why no,” she answered, looking up. “I haven’t.” She felt a pang of disappointment; she had thought he would want to be alone with her.

“Oh, call them up—Neal and Bob and Violet—you know, everybody. I want to see them.”

“All right,” said Eleanor.

He went back to his room, whistling. Eleanor shook her head. She could not get rid of a feeling of having been delicately, perhaps unintentionally, snubbed.

2

She did not get rid of it as the weeks passed. Kester rode with her through the fields, praising the cotton and admiring her rejuvenation of the land, but he never showed the joy she had expected. He had an abstraction she had never observed in him before. In the midst of her explanation of how the tractors worked she saw that his eyes had wandered over to the river; when she demonstrated the new fertilizing machine he answered in phrases that would have looked all right had they been written down, but in a manner that was in some indefinable way not quite as enthusiastic as it might have been. It was not like Kester to be absent-minded. One of his most enjoyable characteristics was his quality of being absorbed in the affair of the moment as if nothing else existed. Knowing how he loved every clod and corner of Ardeith, she had expected that he would want to examine everything and visit every field to see how it was growing. But he did not. He followed her deferentially, giving generous praises, but only rarely did she hear a spontaneous expression of pleasure.

Eleanor was beginning to hear about the war’s effect on some men, who had come back from France shivering neurotics unfit to resume normal life, but she was sure that was not what was wrong with Kester. He had seen very little of the war’s worst aspects. He talked about it freely, though with his usual tact he was quick to sense the increasing reaction of “Oh let’s not talk about the war, everybody’s so tired of that,” and change the subject. Their friends said, “Isn’t Kester delightful? How did we ever do without him!”—and she smiled to hide an increasing pain. Kester was delightful. But what she could confess to nobody was that Kester was just as delightful in their hours of privacy as he was in a roomful of people, and hardly less superficial.

Kester was not pleased with her; he did not say so, but she could feel it. His conversation was copious, born of a prodigal mind too long deprived of its most eager listener. But being with Kester was like attending a banquet where the food was choice, the wine exquisite, and her partner quick to anticipate and please her every desire, but where intimacy died in its trappings of gaiety. There had been a swift physical intoxication at their being together after their long separation, but that could not last forever and they seemed to have very little else. They had not recaptured their old sense of being one person with a single aim and a single desire; they were separate, with an empty space between them that kept them apart. They played with the children, and it was obvious that Kester was very fond of them both. They went to parties or gave parties at Ardeith, and he was as merry as ever. But they rarely spent an evening alone. They did not have their long hours of alternate silence and chatter, tossing back and forth between them the tiny unimportant threads that in the course of years became an unbreakable web of union. Kester was knightly and adoring, but that was not what she wanted.

He treats me, she thought despairingly, like a mistress, a mistress he has to woo and please and charm because he doesn’t dare admit her behind the barriers of his personal pride—what have I done?

Again and again she tried to bridge the gap by pretending it did not exist. She gossiped about what their friends had been doing in his absence, and he was pleasantly attentive. She talked about the plantation, and he was interested, but when she asked his advice she rarely received more than a polite, “But Eleanor, I hardly know. Everything is so different here, I’m afraid my ideas are antiquated.”

“You know more about cotton than I ever will!” she protested.

“Don’t pretend to flatter me, sugar. You’ve done it all so magnificently, you don’t need anything I can tell you.”

Eleanor fought the emptiness with a passionate yearning. She could not get through.

“Do you love me, Kester?”

“Sweetheart, how can you ask me? When your picture wasn’t out of my pocket five minutes during the whole war except when I was showing it around?”

“Do you still love me as much as that?”

“I’ve always loved you, I love you now, I always will. Don’t you know it?”

“Yes, but I like to hear you say it.” That was all she could think of to answer.

He did love her, she could not doubt it. When Kester invited an army friend of his to spend a week at Ardeith, the guest walked directly to her with an eager smile, exclaiming, “And you are Eleanor? Forgive me if I can’t think of you except by your first name, but it’s all I heard from Kester for six months at Camp Jackson.” Eleanor laughed, more grateful than she would have liked for him to guess, and told him to go on calling her that. He told her about Kester’s popularity at camp —“Everybody liked him, but I suppose you’re used to hearing that?”—and later, when Kester had gone to select a special Bourbon for a nightcap, he added, “I never saw a man so proud of his wife. His voice positively lowered with reverence when he spoke of you.”

They gave a party the next evening, Kester playing his rôle of superb host and evidently enjoying it. Eleanor watched him, baffled. With other people he seemed not to have changed. It was only toward herself that he seemed to feel a curious shyness. His attitude was, she was sure, unintentional on his part and he did not know she sensed it, but she felt he wanted something of her that she was not giving him and that he thought it useless to ask for.

When their guest had gone Eleanor tried again. She asked Kester what he thought of the postwar conferences. They exchanged opinions. How did he regard Mr. Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations? Not very highly, Kester said, he admired Mr. Wilson but he thought the United States had had enough of Europe and should mind its own business for a change. It was no use. He was as affectionately polite as he would have been to one of her sisters.

By the end of the summer Eleanor was nearly desperate with pleasant pretenses. She had thought the ripe fields, heavy with such a harvest as he had never seen before at Ardeith, would rouse him, but Kester’s admiration, though she could find no fault with a word of it, seemed to be merely admiration; he did not, as she used to see him, take an open boll in his hand and stroke the cotton as tenderly as if it had been the hair of a beloved woman. He was not enthusiastic about anything that she could see, except parties—and he was drinking too much, though she so dreaded widening the breach between them that she never said so—and the only event that seemed to rouse his unalloyed interest was Cornelia’s beginning to go to school. He got a great deal of pleasure from his children. Eleanor wearily returned her attention to the work of getting the cotton in.

She had no trouble finding pickers this year, for the influx of returning soldiers was beginning to cause a labor surplus and Wyatt had more applicants than he could use. The price of cotton was still high, as most of the product of recent years had been nitrated and shot away, and the world was in dire need of clothes; and Eleanor felt a resurgence of hope as she calculated what the profits would be. Unable to believe that Kester would remain indifferent to the plantation, Eleanor welcomed the realization that there was a problem now on which she needed his advice. With the war over, less cotton would be wanted and it would be wise to substitute other crops on part of the Ardeith acres. She asked Kester about it one afternoon after dinner.

“Do you mean you want to try truck-farming?” he asked.

“I thought we might. What vegetables grow best here?”

“Strawberries?” he suggested.

“We can try them. Do you think it would be a good idea to try a number of crops in different places, and see what we can do? Of course that would mean taking a good-sized loss at first, but we can afford it.”

He smiled a little. “Can’t we afford to stay with cotton?”

“Oh, we can, of course, but there’s no reason to. Cotton prices are going to drop. I’m certain we’ll do better with food crops on part of the land. Don’t you think it would be fun to experiment, anyway?”

“But you’ve got the whole place organized for cotton. And we can live, and live well, Eleanor, on the production we have now, even if the price goes back to ten cents a pound.”

“But there’s no sense in living on that if we don’t have to!” she exclaimed.

“I think there’s pretty good sense to it,” said Kester. “We can be mighty comfortable.”

“But there’s so much else to do, Kester! So much we
can
do. It’s so exciting, to work at a challenge like this. To organize it and feel it grow, and be rewarded when you’ve done it right.”

“But you don’t get time to do anything else,” said Kester. He stood up. “Try reorganization if you want to. Put in strawberries very early to catch the February market. And don’t risk anything on figs. They’re so hard to ship they aren’t worth it. Try—oh, lettuce, cabbage, celery, corn, shallots, turnips—they’ll all grow well.”

She shook her head at him, wondering. “When you know so much about it,” she said, “it’s strange that you aren’t interested in doing it. Why Kester, we can be rich!”

Kester smiled. “You like being rich, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Who wouldn’t?”

He came over to where she sat. Bending over her, he pushed her hair back from her temple and kissed her. “You’re an odd person. You’re not like anybody else I’ve ever known.” He added, “It’s frightfully hot. I think I’ll have Cameo make a Tom Collins.”

“I’ll order it.” Eleanor gave the order at the telephone, tempted at the same time to scold Kester for drinking and make him mad. At the moment it seemed to her that any honest expression from him, even anger, would be easier to bear than his courteous apathy. “I’m going to town,” she said abruptly. “I’ve some errands to do.”

She got out the car and drove hurriedly down the avenue. Once on the river road she went more slowly. She had no errands. She simply drove, welcoming the cool wind in her hair, asking herself over and over, What have I done? What
is
the matter with him? Why doesn’t he like me?

She had no answer.

3

When the cotton was baled Wyatt came to her triumphantly. Eleanor went out on the gallery to meet him, and found him looking almost jaunty, his hat on the back of his head.

“Here you are, Mrs. Larne,” he said. He handed her his statement and stood back, waiting for his laurels.

Eleanor glanced down, and gasped. The crop totaled thirteen hundred and twenty-six bales.

“Wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“Yes ma’am,” said Wyatt.

“Great work, Wyatt.” She shook his hand warmly.

The cheeks on either side of his lantern jaw began to crease with one of his rare proud grins. “Well ma’am, I wouldn’t say it was bad, myself.”

“I think this calls for a bonus,” said Eleanor.

“You mean it, Mrs. Larne?”

“Certainly I mean it. Shall we say a dollar a bale?”

“Well now, ma’am, that’s nice of you. You’re mighty fair.”

“Wait a minute. I want to tell my husband.” She ran to the door and called. “Kester! Come here.”

“What’s all the excitement?” Kester asked, coming out to the gallery. “Oh hello, Wyatt.”

“Good morning, Mr. Larne. Nice day.”

“Kester,” Eleanor was exclaiming, “do you know what we’ve done this year? Thirteen hundred and twenty-six bales!”

“Holy smoke,” said Kester. He gave Wyatt a smile of congratulation. “I’m beginning to think you must be as smart as my wife says you are.”

Mellowed by his bonus, Wyatt was in a mood to be generous. “Well sir, I wouldn’t take all the credit. Not more than a third of it, I’d say. I never did see a lady could get things done like this lady here.”

“Yes, she’s great, isn’t she?”

“Yes sir. You’re mighty right she is. Thirteen hundred and twenty-six bales.” Wyatt gave a glance around as though taking in all of Ardeith. “Not bad for a plantation that six years ago was barely topping eight hundred, is it?”

“Not bad at all,” said Kester dryly.

“Don’t go yet, Wyatt,” Eleanor said to him. “I’ll write that check for you.” She hurried in, and when she came out with the check in her hand she saw Kester leaning against one of the gallery columns in affable conversation with the overseer. Wyatt was evidently finding him pleasant to talk to.