The Handsome Road

by Gwen Bristow

  As they got out of the car Eleanor stood still a moment, silent before the beauty of the place where Kester lived. The house was very Greek and at the same time very American; evidently it was a remnant of the classic revival that, beginning with the stirrings of democracy that had produced the American and French Revolutions, had gradually changed from an intellectual ideal to an emotional fervor and then to a parlor fashion, producing the Bill of Rights and the guillotine, then the pseudo-Greek costumes of the early eighteen-hundreds, and at last, sweeping into architecture, had studded the newly democratic countries with such richness of pediments, porticoes, columns and acanthus leaves that one could hardly feel right about praying in a church or leaving money in a bank that did not suggest the Acropolis, and rich men felt it their duty to provide that their children should be born in houses that looked like Greek temples. The builder of this house, however, had combined fashion with good taste; its proportions were excellent and its Doric austerity unmarred by any prettifying, and unlike many houses of its period it suggested a cool patrician simplicity. Eleanor turned an appreciative look to Kester.

  “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place,” she told him. “Let’s go inside.”

  The main hall was wide and lofty, and near the entrance a spiral staircase curved up to the second floor. On the walls were portraits. At Eleanor’s left a man in a white powdered wig looked down upon her, and opposite was a young woman in a high eighteenth-century coiffure against a blue background. Beyond was a woman with black curls on her forehead, dressed in a square-necked gown belted just under her bosom in the style they wore when Napoleon was Emperor of France. Eleanor went in farther, and stood at the foot of the spiral staircase. Above her hung a pair of companion portraits, one of a young man in a gray Confederate uniform, the other of a girl in a blue hoop-skirt; she had evidently stood for her portrait where Eleanor stood now, for her hand rested on the balustrade and the turning steps showed behind her.

  Eleanor turned back to Kester. “Tell me about these people,” she exclaimed. “Who are they?”

  Good-humoredly, Kester complied. The man in the white wig was his great-great-great-grandfather, Philip Larne, who had received the land that was now Ardeith Plantation from George the Third of England as a reward for his soldiering in the French and Indian War. The woman opposite was Philip’s wife. They had both come down the river on flatboats in the days when steam was nothing but a vapor that came out of a kettle-spout. The woman in the Empire dress had married into the Larne family about the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War pair were Kester’s grandparents. The young man had been killed during the war, but the girl had lived to be an old lady; Kester could remember her from his childhood. Oh yes, there were other pictures. He’d be glad to show them to her sometime, and the rest of the house if she wanted to see it. It was very large, with many rooms that no longer served any purpose but to wear out brooms. Originally there had been thirty besides the servants’ quarters, though some of them had been cut up to make bathrooms and closets. Eleanor went through a doorway at one side of the hall. This room was a library. On the bookshelves modern novels stood alongside bound volumes of Putnam’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, old treatises on cotton-growing, and romances with astonishing names.

  “The Curse of Clifton,” she read aloud, and chuckled. “The Ladies’ Parlor Annual, 1841—I’ve heard of those annuals but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one before. And who’s this alphabetical author, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth?”

  “She wrote what they used to call sensation stories, mostly devoted to howling storms and people stabbing each other with jeweled daggers.” Kester shook his head. “My family had its good qualities, Miss Eleanor, but they did indulge in some deplorable literature.”

  Eleanor took down a volume of Godey’s and turned the leaves, smiling at the stilted phrases that caught her eye and the burdensome gowns of the fashion plates. “There’s something very attractive about those times,” she remarked. “People seem to have been so sure of themselves. I suppose life was simpler then.”

  Kester grinned. “I used to read voraciously in here,” he said to her. “I’ve skimmed through dozens of volumes a century or two centuries old, and every one of them laments the simplicity of the age just past and sighs over the complexities of the present.”

  “Then you don’t think nineteenth-century life was easier than ours?”

  “The period that included the American Civil War, the Sepoy Rebellion and the siege of Paris? No ma’am, I don’t. We think olden times were simple because we know how grandpa’s problems were solved, and any problem is simple when you can look up the answer in the back of the book.”

  They laughed together. Eleanor replaced the volume of Godey’s and looked around the library again. On the center table was an enormous Bible fastened with metal clasps. She asked him to open it for her. The Bible fell open of itself in the middle, where the pages had been left blank for family records, and here were lines in many handwritings, in inks browned with time, recording the births and marriages and deaths of the Larnes. Eleanor read here and there as she turned the pages.

  “Died, at Ardeith Plantation, September 23, 1810, Philip Larne, native of the colony of South Carolina… .

  “Married, at Dalroy, Louisiana, April 4, 1833, Sebastian Larne and Frances Durham…

  “Married, at Silverwood Plantation, Louisiana, December 6, 1859, Denis Larne and Ann Sheramy… .

  “Married, at Dalroy, Louisiana, March 21, 1884, Denis Larne II and Lysiane St. Clair.”

  “They were your parents?” she asked him.

  Kester nodded. He seemed amused at her interest, but rather pleased by it too, as though he had taken his home for granted and enjoyed seeing a newcomer’s pleasure in it. Eleanor turned the pages again. She came to the records of the births, and near the end she read,

  “Born, at Ardeith Plantation, February 18, 1885, Kester Denis Larne, son of Denis Larne II and Lysiane St. Clair.”

  He had a younger brother and sister. The three births were the last of the records. She lifted her eyes again.

  “Isn’t it somehow awesome, to see yourself at the end of such a line?”

  “Why no. Why should it be?”

  “Oh—I mean—doesn’t it make you feel like a link in an endless chain?”

  “Aren’t we all?” asked Kester, laughing a little.

  They closed the Bible and went back into the hall. Bending down, Kester showed her the dent of a horseshoe on the bottom step of the spiral staircase. It was clearly marked, though in later years the stairs had been carefully repainted. That had been put there during the invasion of Louisiana in the eighteen-sixties, when a troop of soldiers had ransacked the house and one of them had ridden his horse into the hall.

  “It’s fascinating as you tell it,” said Eleanor. “I studied about all that sort of thing in school, of course, but here it seems so real!”

  “Anybody hearing you,” he said with amusement, “would think you came from ten thousand miles away.”

  “I was born in a levee camp in West Feliciana Parish,” she returned, “but that’s a long way from things like this. Am I tiring you, making you talk so much?”

  “Well ma’am,” said Kester, “I could do with that coffee.”

  Eleanor laughed apologetically, and they crossed the hall into the parlor opposite the library. This was the main living-room, and here were deep mahogany sofas, and a great square rosewood piano, and modernity represented by a phonograph. Like the library, this room had a white marble fireplace, but in this one a fire danced behind brass andirons. On the wall hung a bellcord of the sort ladies used to embroider to while away a journey up the river in the old steamboat days.

  “Does that still work?” Eleanor asked.

  “Why yes.” Kester gave it a pull.

  A Negro man in a funereal black coat came in answer to the summons. K
ester called him Cameo. He ordered coffee, and Cameo approached Eleanor with grave courtesy.

  “Rest yo’ wrap, miss?” he inquired.

  Eleanor gave him her coat. As Cameo went out she observed that the door had a silver knob and silver hinges, shining with the soft glow of time, and she remembered that the door of the library had them too. For a moment she stood still. It was her first glimpse of the dignity of plantation life, and she was conscious of a heightened awareness, as though all her senses had been sharpened to rare appreciation. She began to understand what people might be like when they had lived for generations in this quiet grandeur, their instincts curbed by the standards of their culture till they had no uncertainties, their characters polished by their knowledge in all circumstances of what was expected of them. The house, the staircase, the portraits, the ancient oaks, all suggested the same self-assurance she had observed in Kester. It was easy now to understand it.

  Kester had begun to play a ragtime record on the phonograph. He turned it off as Cameo came in and placed a tray with a silver coffee service on a low table in front of the fire. Kester and Eleanor curled up on the floor, facing each other, and Eleanor poured the coffee.

  “What a beautiful set this is,” she observed, watching the firelight stroke the pot. “It looks like a wedding present.”

  “I believe it was.”

  “Your mother’s?”

  “No, earlier than that. My great-grandmother’s, I think—there’s a monogram on it.”

  Eleanor turned the pot to find the initials. “F. D. L.,” she read. “Is that Frances Durham?—I saw a line in the big Bible about her wedding. But Kester!” she broke off sharply.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s none of my business,” said Eleanor, “but one of your servants has been frightfully careless. Did you know there was a big dent in the side, just over the monogram?”

  Kester gave a low chuckle. “We’ve been meaning to do something about that dent for forty years. That’s where a spade struck it when they were digging up the silver after the Civil War.”

  “Oh yes,” Eleanor said softly. She smiled as she watched the firelight flashing into the old depression. There was something touching and authentic about such a flaw, like the little irregularities that distinguish handmade lace from machinery imitations. “I can’t tell you how I’m enjoying this!” she exclaimed. “It’s so different from anything I’ve ever seen before. I live in a house in New Orleans that was built nine years ago, and we’re always complaining that it isn’t modern enough.”

  “I’ve often thought it would be mighty convenient to live in a new house,” said Kester. “One where the plumbing always works and the attic stairs aren’t in danger of dropping on your head. May I have some coffee, please ma’am?”

  She refilled his cup. “If you knew my father,” she continued, “you’d understand what I’m trying to tell you. He’s so entirely of today. It’s the typical American story—a self-made man, so proud of being able to give his children the chances he never had.”

  “I think I’d have known even if you hadn’t told me,” Kester said thoughtfully, “that you had a streak of power. You’re like your father, aren’t you?”

  “People say I am. I’ve been working for him a long time—during the summers while I was at college, and regularly since I finished.”

  “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Barnard. Where did you?”

  “Tulane. Did you like college?”

  “Not particularly,” said Eleanor. “I’m not very bookish, and the other girls seemed—well, so young. When you’ve lived on the river and seen real struggles, men fighting days and nights to keep a flood back, you get used to fundamentals—you can’t believe the most important thing on earth is the band of ribbon around your hair. I hope I don’t sound like somebody trying to be superior, but do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he returned seriously, and added, “I’ve never known a girl like you before. What else about the girls at school?”

  Eleanor brought her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “Well, the way they whispered with such curiosity about things I had taken for granted all my life. Birth and death are always going on in a levee camp, and of course I had known about them, and about the honky-tonk tent and why I mustn’t go down there. I don’t suppose I was ever very girlish.”

  “You’re not girlish,” Kester said, smiling. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor, listening with interest. “Go on. Tell me about a levee camp.”

  Though she did not often talk so much about herself, she continued. She told him about her cook, whose name was Randa and who had diamonds in her teeth, because Randa’s husband was killed in an accident on a levee job and the government paid her compensation; and Randa, afraid some fortune-hunter would try to marry her, devised that means of keeping her wealth to herself. She told him about Jelly Roll, who was the aristocrat of the camp, partly because he earned two dollars and a quarter a day and could afford shirts of flowered percale and partly because he was a genius at his work. Jelly Roll’s job was to keep the slope of the levee graded, and as the drivers came up with the scoops he told them where to dump the dirt; though he had only a grade-stake in the middle and a tow-stake on either side to guide him he gave directions so fast that he could direct the dumping of three wheelers at once, and with such accuracy that when the contractor measured the slope it was always right, three-to-one on the inside and four-to-one on the outside. “I like anybody who has a passion for doing his job well, like that,” said Eleanor. “That’s one reason I admire my father so much. Dad builds the best levees on the river. He’s incredibly careful, studying the soil formation and patterning the levee like a fine dress before he moves a spoonful of earth.”

  “Do you know,” said Kester, “I’ve lived on the river all my life, but you make me feel as if I’m just beginning to learn about it. I’ve always thought of this country in terms of cotton.”

  “But you’d have to. After all, that’s your business, and building levees isn’t. Did you always want to be a planter?”

  “Why yes, I always took it for granted that I would be. My brother Sebastian wanted to go into business, so when my father retired he made over the plantation to me, and Sebastion went to New Orleans.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a cotton broker.” Kester stood up, grinning. “Doing very well at it, I believe. A most excellent young man, the only one of us who is strong-minded enough to make cotton work for him instead of making himself work for cotton.”

  Kester stood with his elbow on the marble mantel. Her chin on her knees, Eleanor lifted her eyes to look up at him. “You needn’t try to be flippant,” she said. “I’m beginning to understand you love this place devotedly, and are a little bit ashamed to confess how much it means to you.”

  He nodded, half proud and half embarrassed. “I do love it, Miss Eleanor. I feel so much a part of it, you see—though not many people can make me own up to it so frankly.”

  There was a pause. The shadows were beginning to thicken in the corners, but Kester’s figure stood out in clear relief as though all the firelight had gathered to meet his glowing vitality. He was right, she thought: he belonged to Ardeith as essentially as the house or the oaks, and it would be impossible to think of him apart from his background. Though he was standing quietly by the fire she was acutely aware of his powerful presence. It was easy to imagine his entering a crowded room and making everybody else in it flatten into unimportance by the mere fact of his being there. Again remembering what her father had said about the Larnes, Eleanor reflected that Fred knew nothing about them and was relegating them to a category, perhaps unfairly; certainly Kester was an attractive young man, who had not only the gift of fascinating but the rarer gift of being fascinated. “I could like him very much,” Eleanor said to herself. “In fact, I do.”

&
nbsp; They both started as they heard a sound of footsteps at the front door.

  Eleanor sprang up, feeling suddenly self-conscious, as though she had been interrupted in a moment of intimacy. Kester had turned toward the door. “Is that company?” she asked.

  “No, only my mother and father. I’ll bring them in.”

  He crossed the room to meet them, and a moment later Eleanor was being presented to his parents.

  The first word that occurred to Eleanor in regard to Mr. and Mrs. Larne was exquisite. They looked rather alike: they were both tall and slender and graceful, they both spoke in soft, beautifully modulated voices, they both gave her an impression of perfectly charming uselessness. Mr. Larne insisted that she must have a glass of sherry with them before supper, and when she hesitated, thinking they might prefer to be left alone, he told her with flattering urgency that it was not every day Kester brought in a delightful young lady and he wouldn’t think of parting with her yet. Both amused and puzzled, Eleanor sat down again; it was quite impossible to tell whether these people meant what they were saying, but she decided to remain long enough for one glass of sherry and then go. Mrs. Larne gave her big plumed hat to a maid and Cameo brought in a decanter and glasses. Denis Larne II, married to Lysiane St. Clair, she remembered; yes, he did look like a gentleman whose doings would be rightly recorded in the right places. He would know vintages, and fine cigars, and clever lines from the new novels, he would like Debussy and shiver at ragtime, both he and Lysiane had distinction and a quiet air of breeding, but how in the name of heaven had this porcelain pair created Kester?

  “You are visiting in the neighborhood, Miss Upjohn?” Denis Larne was asking her as he poured the sherry.

  Eleanor recalled her thoughts. “Yes. I live in New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans, yes. I believe I must be acquainted with your family —the name Upjohn sounds familiar to me, though I’m ashamed to say I can’t place it.”