by Edna Ferber
“You’re from Nebraska, Mr. Beckwith?”
“Texas, ma’am. Uh—Benedict.”
“Texas, really!” As though he had said Timbuctoo.
Old harpy. “You’re from Ohio your daughter tells me.”
“Well, we did live there at one time. But I’m a Virginian, my ancestors really settled in Virginia, they were among the First Families.”
“I’ve read about them,” he said, too dryly. “A very interesting, uh, type, some of them.”
She looked at him sharply but his blue eyes seemed guileless, his smile winning. Here was someone a nobody, to whom she could unburden herself momentarily, a fresh receptacle. “My daughter Leslie makes fun of me, and so does the Doctor and even Lacey, for that matter, because I am proud of my ancestry. The Doctor calls me Mrs. Nickleby. Leslie’s the worst. Daughters are a real problem, Mr. Uh. Of course Leigh wasn’t. She’s Lady Karfrey, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“My, yes! She married Sir Alfred Karfrey, they live in England of course, he’s a member of Parliament.”
“Like our Congress,” Bick said smoothly. I’m really being bitchy as a woman, he thought. But she had not heard, she heard nothing that she did not want to hear.
“Leslie could have married—well, anybody you might say. Goodness knows she’s no beauty, skinny as a bird dog, and a slight cast in her left eye at times perhaps you’ve noticed, well, you’d think it would put men off her but they’re bees around a honeypot. I don’t know what it is, Doctor says Leslie has something that transcends beauty but I can’t see it myself——”
Why, the old girl’s jealous of her daughter, Bick said to himself.
“—and she has her nose in a book all day long and talks to the servants as if they were her equal—so does the Doctor for that matter—and she argues about what she calls democracy and human rights and stuff like that, I declare I should think the men would run the other way at mention of her name——”
“I think she’s fascinating,” Bick Benedict heard himself saying, to his own astonishment. It was a word he had never used—certainly never in connection with a woman.
Mrs. Lynnton blinked a little as though coming out of a trance, it was plain that she had been talking to relieve her feelings, this man might as well have been, so far as she considered him of importance, an old uncle or a piece of furniture. She seemed even to resent his interruption as though he had committed an impertinence. She put this horse trader in his place. “So others say. Count Rorik. He’ll be practically a king when his uncle dies. A principality they call it.”
He was cursing himself for having stayed when suddenly, like a badly directed stage scene, there were voices on the stairs, in the hall, on the veranda, there were a dozen people in the room and introductions were being performed and trays were being passed. Sherry! I’ll bet that’s the old girl’s doings. And there was Leslie, late but leisurely.
He looked at Leslie, he was startled by the rush of protective loyalty he felt toward her. She was wearing the disfiguring evening dress that was in vogue—the absurdly short skirt and loose hip-length waistline that so foreshortened the figure. Long slim legs, lovely shoulders, and now that she was rid of the white piqué stock and the rest of those stuffy riding clothes he saw how exquisitely her head was set on her throat and how, in some mysterious way, she was really a beauty in disguise. He couldn’t make up his mind whether there really was a slight cast in her eye or whether her eyes were so large that there wasn’t quite room enough for them in the socket. Another part of his mind was recalling that he had once seen an actress in New York—what was her name?—Ferguson, that was it—Elsie Ferguson. Her eyes had been like that, very large and liquid, not those stiff eyes that most women had, and there had been a little sort of quirk in one of them and he had been strongly attracted by this blemish.
Dinner. The colored man in white cotton gloves announced dinner. In later years Jordan Benedict sometimes referred to this evening as That Hell of an Evening When I First Met You.
6
Across the table from him—across all those lighted candles and the flowers—were Leslie and that Rorik fellow still in the red coat. Only it looked dressier now and his hair very black above the red. Career man he’d been called. Bick disliked him for no reason. He was irritated by the way the man ate his dinner, using his knife and fork in the European fashion, a busy gathering of food with both utensils, a finicky little clatter of metal against china. He ate quickly, almost daintily, he talked and looked into Leslie’s eyes very directly, and smiled. Since the war Washington was full of them, Bick thought, and scuffled his feet a little under the table; always hanging around the foreign embassies and legations. The food was very good. Wonderful, really. Run-down place, though. How could they afford it? Three daughters. Lady Karfrey, eh? Nuts to that!
The women did a great deal of talking, they were leading the conversation, especially that Leslie girl, it wasn’t the formal sort of dinner-table talk that he had sometimes encountered in Washington on his infrequent business trips there. He rarely took active part in the Washington end of Texas affairs, that was his cousin Roady Benedict’s business, that was why he had been sent to Washington. They were talking about everything from that crazy Scopes trial in Tennessee, with its monkey glands and its Bryan and its Darrow, to a book called An American Tragedy (which Bick hadn’t read) to a play called Desire Under the Elms (which Bick hadn’t seen). Bick Benedict ate his flavorsome duck and talked politely when necessary to the young woman on his right (whose name he hadn’t caught) and the middle-aged woman on his left (whose name he hadn’t caught).
Someone at the other end of the table must have asked Nicholas Rorik a question for now he paused in the sprightly business of the knife and fork, he raised his voice to carry down the line of dinner guests, and smiled deprecatingly and shrugged his shoulders as he replied in his very good Oxford English. “It isn’t a large country as you know, it is a principality, my country. Our little kingdom, as you call it, is only—” he cast up his eyes ceilingward to juggle the figures into American terms—“it would be in your miles less than eight hundred square miles. Very small, as you consider size in this country.”
“My goodness,” said his questioner at the other end of the table, laughing a little and then turning to look at Jordan Benedict, “Texas is bigger than that, isn’t it, Mr. Benedict!”
“Texas!” said Doctor Lynnton. “Why, Mr. Benedict’s ranch is bigger than that. Sorry, Nicky. No offense.”
“I’ve always heard these tall tales from Texas,” said one of the men across the table—he, too, was wearing one of those red coats with a red face above it, “and now I’d like to have it right from the hor—right from headquarters, Mr. Benedict. Just how many acres have you got, or miles or whatever it is you folks reckon in? It’s the biggest ranch in Texas, isn’t it?”
Jordan Benedict never could accustom himself to the habit these Yankees had of asking a man how much land he had. Why, damit, it was the same as coming right out and asking a man how much money he had! How would that redcoat like it if he, Bick Benedict, were to shout across the table to ask him how much money he had in the bank?
“No,” he said quietly, “it isn’t the largest. It is one of the large ranches but there are others as large. One or two larger, up in the Panhandle and down in the brush country.”
He felt that Leslie Lynnton was looking at him and he sensed that she understood his resentment though he didn’t know how or why. That girl isn’t only smart, he thought. She understands everything, that’s why her eyes are so warm and lovely that’s what her father meant when he said she’s got something that transcends beauty.
“Yes,” the fellow was saying persistently. “Yes, but how many acres, actually? I’d like to hear those figures really rolling out and know that it’s authentic. I never could bring myself to believe them. A million? Is that right? A million acres?”
Jordan Benedict felt his face reddening. Still
, a straight question like that, aimed at a man’s head. You had to answer it or insult a man at your host’s table. He had seen men killed for much less. There was a lull in the table talk. He looked squarely into Leslie’s eyes, she smiled at him ever so faintly as a mother smiles at a shy child, in encouragement. He heard himself saying, “Something over two million acres. Two million and a half, to be exact.”
Doctor Lynnton nodded interestedly. “Yes, I remember my father saying something about it when I was a young fellow. It used to be four or five million acres, wasn’t it? Years ago.”
“Yes.” God damn the man and his family and his friends.
“There you are, Nicky!” yelped the man who originally had asked the questions. “I guess that makes you look like a sharecropper.” Nicky shrugged his shoulders again and spread his hands in deprecation and smiled at Leslie Lynnton beseechingly.
Mrs. Lynnton’s head had been slightly turned away from the table to speak over her shoulder to a servant. She turned now to look at Jordan Benedict. It was a stunned look, the look of one who has heard but who rejects the words as incredible. She turned her head again automatically to speak to the servant, then again she faced forward with a jerk to stare at Jordan as though the sense of the words had just now penetrated. Her mouth was open before she began to speak.
“How many acres did you say, Mr. Benedict?”
“He said two and a half million acres, Mama,” Leslie said with exquisite distinctness. “And you should see the greedy look on your face.”
But Mrs. Lynnton was not one to be diverted from her quarry, once she had the scent.
“Are there,” she persisted, “any cities on the premises?”
Choking a little, “Why, yes ma’am, there are a few.”
“Do you own those too?”
The company could no longer be contained. A roar went up. Bick Benedict’s reply, “Not rightly own, no ma’am,” was lost in the waves of laughter. Mrs. Lynnton turned her gaze upon her husband then. Her expression was one of the most bitter reproach and rage.
“Nobody owns a city,” Bick persisted virtuously. Controller of every vote in the town of Benedict, and most of the county.
From across the table Leslie said, “How about Tammany?”
“Oh, now, Leslie!” pleaded a man seated beside Mrs. Lynnton. A New Yorker, Bick decided not very astutely. And anyway, what does a woman want to go and get mixed up in political talk for?
There followed, then, in that household between the hours of ten-thirty P.M. and seven A.M. three scenes which made up in variety what they may have lacked in dramatic quality.
At ten o’clock the dinner guests departed, bound for the Hunt Ball. Jordan Benedict declined politely to go, pleading no proper clothes and a very early Washington appointment. At ten-thirty Doctor Lynnton was in his own bedroom after a half hour’s chat and a nightcap with Jordan Benedict. At ten-thirty Mrs. Lynnton opened fire.
“Well, Doctor Lynnton, I must say you seem to care very little about what becomes of your daughters!”
“What have the girls done now, Nancy?”
“It’s you!” Then, at his look of amazement, “Bringing that Benedict here and never telling me a word about him. Not a syllable.”
“Why, Nancy, he’s a nice enough young fella. Texans are different. You can’t judge a man by his hat. They’re used to big open ways, lots of everything. He’s a nice enough young fella.”
“Nice! He said he owns two million acres of land! And more!”
“You’re not going to hold that against him, are you?”
“Horace Lynnton, you know very well that there isn’t a young man in Virginia, Washington, Maryland and the whole of Ohio she hasn’t laughed at from the time she was thirteen. She’s past twenty. I can’t keep Lacey in pigtails forever waiting for Leslie to marry.” She was becoming incoherent. “Look at her! She says I’m feudal. And I said to him right out that she was skinny as a bird dog and her eyes—how did I know he had millions of acres and everybody knew about him—you bring a man into the house and you never even…”
“But Lacey’s only a kid and she isn’t skinny. She’s overplump if anything. What’s she got to do with it?”
“Lacey! Who’s talking about Lacey! Leslie! Leslie! For years she’s been going on about how silly Washington society is and how she hates dinners and teas and calling cards and why can’t things be big and real and American and here is this man with millions of land why it’s an empire and you never even mentioned to me…”
At quarter of eleven Leslie Lynnton pleaded a crashing headache together with various other racking complications and left the Hunt Ball flat, returning to her home under the somewhat dazed escort of a bewildered young man who had long been a willing but unrewarded victim. She went straight to the library but seemed disappointed in what she found—or failed to find—there. But she made three silent trips between the library and her bedroom, her arms loaded each time with books of assorted sizes. These she plumped down on her bed and it was surrounded by these tomes that her sister Lacey in the room next door came upon her in a spirit of investigation, having seen her light and heard her moving about.
Lacey poked her head in at the door. “I thought it was burglars or a lover,” she said.
Leslie glanced up from the book she was reading. “Well, it would have been nice to see you in either case. And where do you learn such talk!”
“What are you home for!”
“To read. About Texas.”
“You mean you came home from the Hunt Ball just to have a read! About Texas!”
“Go along to bed,” Leslie said. “There’s a good child.”
Lacey gave her a hard look. “Aha!” she said. “Likewise oho! Texas, huh?”
The Lynnton family knew what Leslie meant when she said she was going to have a read. Her bed in the old Virginia house was by no means the meager maiden couch upon which the unwed usually compose themselves to sleep. Leslie had seized upon a vast four-poster that had reposed for years in the jungleland of the attic. Originally it must have been meant for at least one pair of ancestors and a suckling infant. A vast plateau, as broad as it was long and as long as any six-foot Virginian could have wished, it stood, not with its headboard against the wall as is the custom of all well-behaved beds, but in the middle of the room for reasons that no one of the family could fathom and that Leslie never explained. The headboard soared almost to the ceiling. Above blazed a crystal chandelier, full blast, and on either side were lamps. All over the bed and in piles on the floor were books large and small, making a sort of stockade in the confines of which Leslie Lynnton had composed herself to read for hours. Books of history, encyclopedias, pamphlets, almanacs, even fiction. Leslie Lynnton read and as she read she twined and untwined a lock of hair between her fingers until tendrils curls and wisps stood up, medusa-like, all over her head.
Upon this spectacle Lacey gazed without astonishment.
“Oh, Leslie, are you in love with him!”
“Perhaps. Yes, I think so. He says Texas is different from any other state in the whole United States.”
“Pooh! Everybody says that about their own state. That’s what Papa says about Ohio and Mama about Virginia.”
“Not like that. He talks as if it were a different country altogether. A country all by itself that just happens to be in the middle of the United States.”
“It isn’t in the middle. It’s way down near Mexico or something.”
Leslie ignored this. “He calls it ‘my country’ when he means Texas. I asked him about that and he said all Texans—he says Texians—call their state their country and they even call their own ranches their country as if they were kings. I never was so interested in my life. Never. I’ve got all the books I could find in the library that might have something about Texas and Pa’s files and the Congressional Records since way back and the encyclopedia and a lot of histories and Your Southwest and How to Run a Ranch and Life of a Texas Ranch Wife and The Texas Rangers and
Texas, a Description of Its Geographical, Social and Other Conditions with Special Reference to——”
“Good night!” said Lacey, and closed the door firmly. Lacey awoke once during the night and heard the great clock in the downstairs hall strike three. Turning over drowsily she saw the thin line of light still grinning beneath Leslie’s closed door.
Breakfast at the Lynntons’ was a pleasant thing. The dining room itself was perhaps the friendliest room in that open-handed house. A noble old room, high-ceilinged, many-windowed. On a sunny day such as this it was no room for a woman who preferred to shun the early morning light. A brilliant bay at the south end led to a terrace and the haphazard garden. Inside shone mahogany and silver and crystal.
Bick Benedict, entering the room rather diffidently, noted that the napkins were neatly darned, the flower-patterned carpet threadbare. It’s the luxuries that matter, Leslie had said. Who cares about the necessities.
Breakfast here was done in the English fashion, a movable feast. Doctor Lynnton was likely to breakfast at six and Lacey Lynnton at five or at ten, while other members of the family and assorted guests might appear between seven and eleven. On the long sideboard were the hot dishes cozily covered and freshly replenished from time to time but certainly the early risers had the best of it. Eggs, kippers, sausages. Hot biscuits toast muffins. Tea coffee jam honey. You helped yourself, you sat and you talked or you sat and ate if you had awakened grumpy or you sat and read your paper, the sun streamed in, the coffee was strong and hot, there was an air of leisure mingled with a pleasant bustle of coming and going.
Leslie Lynnton came in with a rush which she checked at once.
Early as she was, Doctor Lynnton and Bick Benedict were there before her. She looked very young and pale in the little blue dress with the white collars and cuffs, her black hair tied with a ribbon. She had had three hours of sleep.
“Hello!” she said. “Good morning!”
“Why Leslie!” said Doctor Lynnton.