by Edna Ferber
“I don’t know how other brides feel on their honeymoon,” she now said, “Mr. Benedict sir. But I’m having a lovely time.”
“Well, thanks.”
“It isn’t only you. It’s traveling. I love train-riding even if it’s hot and dusty.”
“If we’d had the private car as I wanted——”
“Private cars for two people are immoral. And anyway, they’re dull.”
“Well, thanks again.”
“I’ll bet you,” said the bride, “that this minute, sight unseen, I know more about Texas than you do.”
“Mrs. Benedict, if I may call you that, I am taking the filly known as My Mistake and the young woman formerly known as Leslie Lynnton, off the hands of Doctor and Mrs. Lynnton, respectively. The understanding was that the one can run and the other is intelligent as well as lovely. Perhaps one of you has got the wrong name.”
“Leslie Benedict,” she mused. “It isn’t as pretty as Leslie Lynnton.”
“But you’re prettier. I don’t sav that I’m taking full credit. But you are.”
“It’s the fresh air,” she said. “And the regular hours. Darling, will you let me know the minute we reach Texas?”
“Texas isn’t exactly a secret.”
“It’s different from other states, isn’t it? It looks different?”
He was seated opposite her on one of the grim settees. Now he leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees and smiled up at her, so earnest so eager so alive. “You’re a funny girl. You didn’t marry me just for the trip to Texas, did you?”
“I won’t say I didn’t.”
He laughed aloud then and held out his hand for hers and swung around so that he sat beside her on the seat that had been facing him. They looked at one another a moment, smiling, and then they became serious and silent.
The sound of the drawing-room door buzzer was like an electric shock. Bick Benedict passed a hand over his forehead and shouted, “Come in!” It was the dining-room steward, sallow and sleek and obsequious.
He purred. He bowed. “Parn me,” he said. “But I figured you’d want to get your order in early, before the rush. You can just run your eye over the menu, but I have a couple of suggestions. Our last stop we took on some——”
“Oh, let’s have dinner in the dining car,” Leslie said. “With the rest of the world. Let’s have olives—the big black ones—in a bowl of cracked ice with celery. And melons. And brook trout.”
“Brook trout!” Bick protested doubtfully. “They don’t have——”
“But we do,” interrupted the steward with injured dignity. “I was just trying to tell Mrs. Benedict. We took them on at Baxter just for our special passengers.”
It had been like that from the moment they had turned their faces toward the West. Passenger agents had come aboard at various stops for the sole purpose of inquiring about their comfort.
“They behave as if you were royalty,” Leslie had said. “Do they always do that? Or just for brides and bridegrooms?”
“The Benedicts have been around these parts a long time,” Bick explained. “And we travel a lot. And Reata beef travels a lot too. They’re the really important passengers when it comes to railroad arithmetic.”
It seemed to Leslie that the conductors, the stewards, the porters the station agents knew more about the members of the Benedict family of Texas—their names, habits, characteristics and whereabouts—than they knew about President Coolidge and his family in the White House.
The Pullman conductor, benign and spectacled, with all those stripes on his sleeve and the Elks charm and the little gold nugget dangling from his watch chain, was introduced with friendly formality.
“Leslie, I want you to know Mr. McCullough. The newest member of the family, Ed. Mrs. Benedict.”
“Well, say, Bick! I heard, last trip up. Certainly pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Benedict. This is great news. The girls are all fit to be tied, I bet. They had just about given him up, I guess. But say!” His tone was jocose, his manner almost paternal. He turned, beaming, to Bick. “Yessir, great news this is. How’s Miz Maudie Lou? She come for the wedding? She hasn’t ridden with us here lately. How’s Miz Luz? Did she get over that nasty fall she took? How’s Uncle Bawley? Bowie was riding with us last week, never let out a yip about the wedding, and prolly on his way to be best man. Awful closemouthed, Bowie is.”
Leslie thought that her mother would have loved all this kowtowing on the part of the railroad crew and officials. In those brief days before the hurried wedding Mrs. Lynnton had chanted her refrain endlessly.
“Jordan Benedict of the famous Benedict ranch in Texas, you know. Jordan Benedict Third. Everybody knows about the Benedict ranch. It’s practically a kingdom. It’s a kind of legend Doctor Lynnton says.”
The Benedict family had not come to the wedding in great numbers. Bick’s younger brother Bowie had come as best man and of course his cousin Roady in Washington and his sister Maudie Lou Placer and her husband Clint. But his older sister Luz, the one who kept house for him at the ranch, the one who never had married, caught the grippe or something at the last minute and couldn’t come. Nor did Uncle Bawley, who practically never left his big untidy bachelor house from which he ran the five hundred thousand acres of the Holgado Division. Assorted aunts and uncles and cousins had not been urged to come. There had been no time, really.
The Virginia newspapers and the Washington society columns referred to it as a whirlwind courtship—a phrase that delighted Mrs. Lynnton. Rushed though she was with the wedding preparations, Mrs. Lynnton snipped out all the newspaper clichés and pasted them in a Bride’s Book—white leather with gold tooling—which she presented to Leslie and which, years later, Leslie’s daughter Luz came upon with whoops of mirth at the knee-length skirts and the ear-hugging coiffures.
The lovely Leslie Lynnton. The dashing Texan. Virginia belle. Cattle King. Bick Benedict had battered down everyone’s opposition to such haste.
“Wait for what!” he demanded of Leslie, of Doctor Lynnton of Mrs. Lynnton. “Now!” he insisted. “Now, while I’m here. Suppose I do go home and come back here again in a month—two months. What for!”
“Trousseau,” Mrs. Lynnton insisted. “There are a million things a bride has to have, besides clothes. Linens and——”
“There are a million things at the ranch. There’s everything anybody needs and no one there to use them—except my sister Luz. Boxes of stuff, barrels of them, closets stuffed with them. Fifty beds, and sheets for a hundred, and all the rest of it.”
“My daughter Leslie will be married as befits a Lynnton of Virginia. And her clothes will be as carefully chosen as those of her sister Lady Karfrey.”
But here Leslie took over. “Mama dear, you are talking like someone out of Jane Austen. Anyway, I’m not a Lynnton of Virginia. I just live here. I was born in Ohio, remember? And Texas isn’t England.”
“What has that to do with it?” Mrs. Lynnton demanded unreasonably.
“Nothing. Not a thing. For some reason Jordan wants us to be married next week. And he’s here. And why not!”
“It’s odd. People will talk.”
Leslie linked her arm through Jordan’s and together the two faced Nancy Lynnton. Horace Lynnton, never doubting the outcome, smoked a calming pipe and surveyed the battle with interest at once paternal and professional. Long ago he had learned, a male surrounded by females, to take on the protective coloration of the absent-minded professor.
Somehow it filtered through to Mrs. Lynnton that it was now or never. She looked at her husband, so maddeningly noncommittal; at Leslie who somehow, suddenly, had taken on a baffling mixture of soft bloom and hard resolution; at Jordan Benedict a man of thirty bewildered and in love for the first time.
It had not been much of a wedding, as society weddings go. The striped trousers and cutaway coats knew about Bick Benedict, and seemed somewhat pale beside him, not only from chagrin but because they hadn’t a century of
Texas sun and dust and wind behind them for coloration. The girls said, “Oh, Leslie, he reminds me of Tom Mix a little, only blond of course.”
Bick’s sister Maudie Lou Placer turned out to be something of a bombshell. Very chic. She and Clint Placer arrived the morning of the wedding and departed immediately afterward, leaving a somewhat stricken Mrs. Lynnton to digest the utterances of the strangely resentful Maudie Lou.
She had given Mrs. Lynnton a grisly five minutes. That doughty lady, recognizing an adversary when she saw one, had said, “It’s a pity they will have such a short honeymoon. Just ten days. It would have been nice if they could have gone to visit my daughter Lady Karfrey in England. But Jordan says he must get back to his ranch.”
“His ranch!” Maudie Lou had echoed, and with a peculiarly nasty laugh. “It isn’t his ranch.”
Nancy Lynnton had turned white and faint. “What do you mean by that!”
“Well, it’s no more his than mine or Luz’s or Bowie’s or Roady’s for that matter. Bick runs it. Manages, with Luz of course. But we all own it. Though if he keeps on with——”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Lynnton feebly. “So many millions of acres.”
“Though if he keeps on the way he is,” Maudie Lou concluded angrily, “putting all the profits back into the ranch and going on with his crazy breeding and fads and experiments there’ll be nothing left for any of us pretty soon.”
Bick’s oldest sister Luz did not come to the wedding. “She brought me up, really,” Bick had told Leslie. “She has been like a mother to me. She had to be. She’s nineteen years old than I am. She looks like Great-grandma Benedict. She even tries to look like her. Once she got the old hoop skirts out of the attic and went out into the pasture and tried roping in that crazy outfit because the story goes that that’s what Great-grandma Benedict did back in the late fifties. She does her hair like her, too. Two braids in a kind of crown on top of her head.”
“Like pictures of Mrs. Lincoln,” Leslie observed thoughtfully. “Luz. What an unusual name.”
“It’s Spanish. It means light.”
When the actual week of the wedding arrived there was a telegram. Luz was ill with the grippe, she had a fever of one hundred and two. The doctor said she absolutely must not travel….
Bick Benedict seemed perturbed by this out of all proportion to its importance, the Lynntons thought. An elderly sister is ill and can’t come to the wedding. How sad. But in another way how convenient, Mrs. Lynnton thought privately. A middle-aged woman, a bedroom alone of course, the house was crowded. It would have added to the difficulties without contributing anything to the festivities.
Bick had talked a great deal about this older sister. “She’s wonderful, really,” he had said, as though someone had said she was not. “Right out of a Western movie, you’ll think. She can do anything a cowboy can. The boys are all crazy about her, but they’re scared of her too.”
Doctor Horace Lynnton, in these past few years, had related to this favorite daughter of his some of the phenomena which had emerged in the trial practice of a rather new branch of therapeutics called psychiatry. He was using it to help some of the broken boys who sat staring into space in the corridors and rooms of the crowded veterans’ hospitals in Washington, Maryland, Virginia. He had given Leslie books to read, he introduced her to the writings of the giants in this new and inexact science. “Our thoughts, our dreams, our entire lives are influenced by the unconscious,” he explained.
Leslie had found this new instruction fascinating, she had accepted it with calm. “I suppose,” she said thoughtfully, “that I’ve been in love with you all these years, Papa, and that’s why I haven’t married.”
“Quite likely,” Doctor Lynnton agreed. Then, with a wry smile, “I wouldn’t try, if I were you, to explain this to your mother.”
Now, with the wedding only three days distant, it was with a certain amused thoughtfulness that Leslie received the news of her future sister-in-law’s sudden illness.
Bick said with excusable stiffness, “I don’t see why you find this amusing.”
“I didn’t know I was looking amused. Forgive me. I was thinking. You know it’s just possible that your sister Luz is sick to order. Sometimes those things happen when people are upset. Papa says he often encounters cases like that.”
“I suppose Luz got a hundred and two just to order. Is that what you mean?”
“Lots of mothers do.”
“Luz isn’t my mother. What’s the matter with you, Leslie!”
“Wives, I mean.”
“Look, Leslie, have you gone loco!”
“Big sisters sometimes think they’re wives. Or mothers. And mothers do too, Papa says.”
This somewhat confused utterance was a maddening climax for Bick.
“I think you must be sick yourself,” he had said with a harshness unusual in a prospective bridegroom.
But certainly Bick Benedict had no cause for complaint once the furor of the wedding was past. His bride was ardent and lovely and incredibly understanding. Three days of their honeymoon were spent in New York where the tall Texan in the big white Stetson and the starry-eyed girl in bridal grey caused a turning of heads even on Manhattan’s blasé Fifth Avenue. They had stayed at the Plaza.
He seemed, curiously enough, in no great hurry to start the journey home. Strangely, too, he seemed not to have a great deal of ready money. They went to the theatre, they ate well, they drove in the Park, they shopped a little but there was none of the lavish moneyed carelessness that one would expect from the possessor of millions of acres of land and hundreds of thousands of cattle.
Not that Leslie expected or coveted the brilliant baubles with which the Fifth Avenue windows were bedecked. But perhaps he felt that some sort of explanation was called for.
“Cattle men don’t have a lot of ready cash,” he said not at all apologetically. “We put it back into the ranch. More beef cattle, better stock, experimenting with new breeds. A good bull can cost twenty thousand dollars.”
The bride and her practical side. “He can bring in twenty thousand too, can’t he? If you sell him. Or his—uh—sons?”
“You don’t sell a bull like that. You buy him.”
At the unreasonableness of this she laughed. But then she said seriously enough, “I hope you’re not stingy by nature, Jordan darling. Because that’s very bad for you. We’ve never had any money but we’ve always been lavish.”
“Perhaps that’s why.”
“Why what? Oh. Just for that perhaps you’d better buy me something very expensive. Not that I want it. But as a lesson to you. Not the price of a bull but a calf, say.”
Now, as they neared the end of their journey, the little luxury room on the train grew hotter, hotter, became stifling, the electric fan paddled the heat and slapped their face with it, the whole body was fevered with heat and dust. Too, another kind of fever possessed Leslie, it was the fire of deep interest and anticipation so that she quite ignored the physical discomfort of the stuffy train.
“You can see miles!” she said. “Miles and miles and miles!” She had her flushed face at the ineffectually screened window, like a child.
“It’s sort of frightening, isn’t it—like something that defies you to conquer it? So huge. Why, we’ve been riding in it for days. And ugly, too, isn’t it! I thought it would be beautiful. Oh, now, don’t be sulky. I’m not talking about your ancestors or something, dearest. I’m being interested. And clinical.”
“Like your father.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Oh, I’m so excited. Look! There at that little station we’re passing—that’s a cowboy, isn’t it, it must be, I was just feeling cheated because I hadn’t seen a single cowboy. Are they like that at the ranch, at Reata?”
He eyed her with fond amusement. “Sometimes I think you’re ten years old and not real bright.”
“I can’t help it. Geography always excites me when it’s new places, and I love trains and being married to you, and seein
g Texas. When your grandfather came here it was wilderness really, wasn’t it? Imagine! What courage!”
“They were great old boys. Tough.”
“No trees, except that little fluffy stuff, it’s rather sweet. What’s it called? Is there some at the ranch?”
His smile was grim. “That little sweet fluffy stuff is the damnedest nuisance in Texas. It’s called mesquite and if you can find a way to get rid of it you’ll be the toast of Texas, sure enough.”
As far as her eyes could see she beheld the American desert land which once had waved knee-high with lush grasses. She had never seen the great open plains and the prairies. It was endless, it was another world, bare vast menacing to her Eastern eyes. Later she was to know the brilliant blurred patter of the spring flowers, she was to look for the first yellow blossoms of the retama against the sky, the wild cherry and the heavy cream white of the Spanish dagger flower like vast camellias.
“How big is it, really? Not in figures, I can’t understand figures, but tell me in a kind of picture.”
This was home again, this was what he knew and loved. “Well, let’s see now. How can I—— Look, you know the way the map of the United States looks? Well, if you take all of New England—the whole of the New England states—and then add New York State and New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois, and put the whole thing together in one block, why, you’d have a state the size of Texas. That’s how big it is.” He was triumphant as though he himself had created this vast area in a godlike gesture.
It was late afternoon when their train arrived at Vientecito. “Here we are!” he said and peered out through the window to scan the platform and the vehicles beyond the swirling dust.
“What’s it mean? How do you pronounce it?”
“Vientecito? Means gentle breeze. We call it Viento for short. The wind blows all the time, nearly. The Spanish explorers arrived here way back in 1519 before you were born I think, honey. Alonso Alvarez de Pinedo, if you want to know in round numbers. You see I did go to school. He and his crowd swung around hereabouts and liked the layout and claimed it for king and Spain. But they didn’t know enough to hang onto it.” He pointed at some object. “There we are. But who’s that!” A huge Packard. In the driver’s seat was a stocky young Mexican with powerful shoulders. About twenty, Leslie thought; a square face a square brow, his hair like a brush growing thick thick and up from his forehead. He was very dark very quiet he did not smile.