This Side of Glory (28 page)

“—at Louisiana State,” Wyatt was saying. “Doing mighty well up there. Got a scholarship for this year, pretty good, don’t you think?—competitive examination in a big university like that?”

“Who’s that you’re talking about?” Eleanor inquired.

Wyatt glanced down as though embarrassed. “Why—er, my daughter, Mrs. Larne.”

“Oh.” She recalled having seen a young girl around his house, but they had never discussed his family. “Here’s the check, Wyatt, and thank you.”

“Thank
you,
ma’am.”

She sat down on the step and began giving him instructions about having the tractors overhauled before the winter’s work. While she was talking Kester wandered off.

He gets intimate with everybody but me, she thought while she and Wyatt were discussing the tractors. Thirteen hundred bales of cotton and all he does is smile politely, he looked more interested in hearing that Wyatt’s daughter had won a scholarship. If Wyatt’s so proud of her it’s odd he never told me about it. What
have
I done to Kester? What except work till I collapsed making this the finest cotton plantation in Louisiana?

“Yes, that’s all,” she said briskly to Wyatt. “If I think of anything else that needs doing I’ll call you in the morning.”

She went into the house. Kester was in the library reading. Eleanor went across the hall to the parlor and sat down, a magazine on her knee so she could pretend to be reading if he came in. She was hurt more deeply than he had ever hurt her. For nearly six years, since she had first learned Ardeith was in danger, she had given herself to Kester’s plantation without stint, sustained by her passionate anticipation of the day when she could give him her dream of Ardeith complete. And now, apparently, he did not want it. She thought she could have borne anything more easily than this pleasant indifference.

At supper Kester was talkative and amusing, as always, and when they went up to tell the children good night he recounted a bedtime story that sent them into happy chuckles. At least with Cornelia and Philip he had no reticences.

“Have you asked anybody to come in this evening?” she inquired as they left the nursery.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Then come into my room. We can talk.”

“All right. I did want to talk to you.”

She was glad of it. A fire was burning in her room—mainly for decorative purposes, as there was little need for it yet—and Eleanor listened eagerly as she sat down by the hearth. Kester was taking a travel folder out of his pocket.

“This came in the mail today. It’s about a Central American cruise, lasting six weeks. Wouldn’t you like a holiday?”

“I’d love it!” she exclaimed fervently. If they could get away now, in the idleness of the Gulf they might talk to each other frankly and recapture what they had lost. “In fact,” she added, “I’d like it so much I can start getting ready tomorrow.”

“Good,” said Kester. “This sounds like the best cruise of the sort I’ve read about in a long time, a beautiful ship, stopping at all the interesting ports.”

“Let me see.” He handed her the folder. The pictures and descriptions were inviting. But the boat was not scheduled to leave New Orleans until the first of February, and when Eleanor saw the date she looked up dubiously. “But Kester, they’re always having Central American cruises. Couldn’t we take one this fall?”

“Why? This one sounds perfect.” He chuckled. “You always want to be in such a hurry. Most women would be glad of two or three months to buy clothes.”

“Silly. I can do all the shopping I’d need in a week. I was just thinking, if we took this trip we wouldn’t get back till sometime in March, and that’s just the wrong time to be away from the plantation.”

“Oh, Eleanor,” he objected, “what have we got an overseer for?”

“Wyatt’s a cotton man,” she reminded him. “If we’re going to try any experimental crops—don’t you remember we talked about that the other day?—we ought to be here.”

“I’d forgotten that.” He picked up the folder, which lay in her lap, and returned it to his pocket.

“I’ll write New Orleans tomorrow,” Eleanor went on, “asking about boats leaving in the next few weeks. That won’t interfere with our work here.” She smiled at the fire. “Experimental crops are costly at best, and there’s no reason to deplete our profits any more than we can help.”

Kester sat down. He looked at the fire. Suddenly he stood up again. “Eleanor,” he exclaimed, “don’t you ever think about anything but money?”

“Why, Kester!” She sat forward. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, don’t you ever stop gloating over the money you’ve made? Don’t you want to do anything besides go on making more?”

“I—don’t—understand,” she said slowly. “Aren’t you glad we’re prosperous at last?”

“Of course I’m glad. But you aren’t just comfortably prosperous. You run money through your fingers like a miser. What’s happened to you?” He spoke vehemently.

Eleanor pushed her hand over her forehead. “So that’s it,” she said. “That’s why you don’t like me.” She was hurt, and she was still bewildered.

“I love you very much,” Kester said earnestly. “But I don’t like this streak that’s come out in you, this passion for making money as though a bank account were the only important thing in the world. Eleanor, I don’t care whether we take a trip now or next spring, or whether or not we take one at all, but I do care about your thinking of everything on the face of the earth in terms of what it costs! Ardeith is organized now to run with only a reasonable amount of supervision—can’t you let it alone? You’re so imbedded in the idea of profits!”

“Wait a minute,” said Eleanor. She spoke slowly, trying to be reasonable. “Kester, you don’t understand. For so long I’ve not had the chance to think of anything else. When you left, Ardeith wasn’t half paid for. I had to battle the highest prices and the worst labor shortage in history. I had to think about money every hour I was awake.”

“But you don’t have to now. We don’t owe a cent to anybody on earth. We’re making a splendid income, much more than enough for everything we need.”

“But now that we’ve got such a victory,” she pled, “we can’t let it go! We can’t slip back to being indolent dreamers!”

“Nobody’s asking you to. But you don’t have to work incessantly to get rich, as you did during the war.”

Eleanor shook her head at him. She was still hurt, but she felt a sense of relief at the clearing of the mist. “But shouldn’t we run the place carefully? Efficiently? I can’t believe we should sit back and take it easily now! I like the sense of doing a job well. I want the results of all I worked for, Kester! You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t here.”

“You’re damn right I wasn’t here,” Kester said in a low voice.

She stood up. “If you had been—”

“If I had been here the place wouldn’t be like this.”

“Aren’t you pleased with what I did?” she cried in astonishment. “Don’t you like to have Ardeith free and rich and all your own again? Think what it is now, compared to what it used to be!”

“I’ve thought of nothing else all summer,” said Kester.

“Aren’t you glad the mortgages are paid?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Then what? Please tell me! Aren’t you proud? Don’t you love it?”

“Love it? In the name of God, Eleanor, how can anybody love living in a place that looks like the Ford factory?”

He turned around and walked to the door, while she stood still, breathless with amazement. His hand on the doorknob, he went on.

“There. I’ve said it. I’ve tried not to say it every day since I’ve been at home. I hate what you’ve done to Ardeith. I hate every button and every engine. I hate that God-damned bathroom and your telephones and your adding machines. This place was beautiful when I had it. It was lazy and wasteful and nobody did very much work and everybody had a grand time. Now it’s a mill for the manufacture of cotton-bales. It’s hideous.”

He opened the door.

“Wait a minute,” said Eleanor.

She stood feeling as though he had lashed her across the face with a whip. Trembling with her effort to keep a tight hold on her temper, she said,

“You don’t quite know what you’re talking about, Kester. Your picturesque way of running the plantation had it bankrupt.”

“It was bankrupt the year before the war, but after that we were paying the mortgage. And we weren’t doing it this way.”

“At the rate we were going,” she answered tensely, “it would have taken years and years. This way, we’ve nearly doubled our rate of profit.”

“Yes, I know, and that’s all that matters to you. This way, you’ve cleared out everything that made Ardeith warm and lovely, a place to be born in and live in and die in. You’ve swept away every track of the people who built it and loved it. You straightened the dent in my great-grandmother’s coffee-pot.”

Her chest rose and fell with a breath that had to be drawn with an effort because her lungs seemed paralyzed with anger.

“I think—you’re—a fool,” she said.

“Yes, by your standards I’m a fool. A sentimental fool. And by my standards you’re a fool. Eleanor, man does
not
live by bread alone!”

Her chest was full of pain. “I thought you were going to like it. I thought you’d be glad to be rich.”

“I don’t like to be nigger-rich,” Kester said deliberately.

“Nigger-rich?” She was so angry that her breath was coming with difficulty and she could hardly speak.

“Yes. You’ve seen darkies in prosperous times. Pink silk shirts and hanging-lamps and phonographs, anything bright or noisy—yes, I’m saying it now and you can stand up there and listen. Before I came home I’d seen cartoons of the war profiteers, complacent and porky, but it didn’t occur to me I was going to have to live with one.”

“Complacent. Porky.” Eleanor was too shocked to do more than echo. Her hands were holding each other so tight that the knuckles were prominent and the skin was stretched across their backs.

“Just because you haven’t gone in for diamond sunbursts on your bosom,” said Kester, “do you think there’s any difference? Your machines and your push-buttons and all your ostentatious efficiency!”

“That’s—what—you—think of me,” she said, slowly because she did not have breath enough to speak fast. “That’s what I get for the work I’ve done.”

“I know how hard you’ve worked. I’ve tried not to say it.”

“I worked every minute I could stay awake,” said Eleanor. “It didn’t matter how tired I was or that I nearly died of pneumonia. I was doing it for you.”

“For me?” He smiled wisely. “I’ll listen to a lot of nonsense from you, Eleanor, but don’t try to tell me that. You were doing it for your own self-esteem, to prove to yourself that you could do an almost superhuman job without anybody’s help. If you’d been remaking this plantation for me you’d have done it with some regard for what I wanted. You knew me well enough to have realized I wouldn’t like this shiny exhibition. I’m not saying you haven’t as much right to your ways as I have to mine, but don’t try to make me believe you were doing this for anybody’s pleasure but your own.”

“I thought,” she managed to say, “you were going to be delighted.”

“You thought I was going to be a rapturous audience. All you wanted from me was accolades. God knows I tried to give them to you.”

She looked him up and down. Kester stood just in front of the half-open door, hands in his coat pockets, talking to her with the smile of passionless cruelty she had seen on his face once or twice before, and that she dreaded more than any other expression he could assume.

“You’re having a good time telling me all this, aren’t you?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes, I think I am. I’ve held it back so long.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? When I was nearly distracted wondering what was wrong?”

“I didn’t know you were wondering. I thought I was applauding very well.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t. I suppose in the back of my mind I knew I couldn’t go on forever without saying this, but I kept putting it off. I was so sorry for you.”

“Sorry for me?”

“Why yes. You were so pleased with yourself. You thought it was all so pretty.”

“I did think so,” said Eleanor. “I still think so. I like convenience and efficiency and order. And whether you like them or not I’m going to keep them.”

“Not like this,” Kester retorted. “I want to enjoy life and I can’t enjoy this kind. I’m going to have that horrible bathroom ripped out and a plain white one put in. I’m going to take that gadget-ridden automobile down and turn it in for one that doesn’t look as if it had been made to show off a pawnbroker’s opulence. I’m going to plant a few watermelons in these exquisite fields and let a few pickaninnies eat them on the levee. And as long as we make a living I don’t care if I cut your precious profits in two. I’m going to get Ardeith back to something like what it used to be.”

She crossed the room and faced him. “Oh no you’re not.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you why not. It’s your turn to listen.” She stood in front of him, speaking clearly. “I’ve paid the price of your irresponsibility and now that I’ve done it I’ll be damned if I’ll take your contempt. Has it entered your head that by every shading of right and justice this plantation belongs to me?”

Kester did not answer. He simply stared at her. She went on, speaking so that every word was separate from every other.

“Certainly it does. When I came here Ardeith wasn’t yours. It belonged to the Southeastern Exchange Bank and they were letting you live here. When they threatened to make you move out I went to work. In the beginning you had to tell me what to do but even in that first summer I worked more than you did. When the market collapsed I sold the furniture and got Mr. Robichaux to take the jewelry as security for our interest. When dad sent me that clipping about guncotton I telephoned Sebastian and told him to hold our cotton because you were spending the night with Isabel Valcour. I got the loan from Mr. Tonelli that let us raise the crop that year. When you thought the war would be more exciting than paying your debts you merely said to me, ‘You’ll do it.’ And I did. If I had run around to patriotic tea-parties after you went to camp you wouldn’t have come home to Ardeith. You’re living here because I bought this place and paid for it. If you don’t like the way I operate my plantation, I’m sorry.”