by Gwen Bristow
But the ease with which everything came to him made Kester a stranger to the ideas of order and self-discipline she had been taught to consider important. He forgot to wind his watch, he could never remember where he had put anything, when he changed his clothes he threw things about wildly, and Eleanor often exclaimed that she spent her whole honeymoon picking up her husband’s belongings. He bought quantities of newspapers and scattered them about till the room looked as if it might have been occupied by a political committee bent on informing itself of every phase of the Balkan War and the coming Presidential election, and if she threw away one of them he lamented that it contained a most important article he hadn’t had time to read. “I believe you like disorder,” Eleanor exclaimed to him. “You don’t care whether Wilson or Taft or Roosevelt gets elected, you just like to have things lying around.” Kester laughed at her attempts at tidiness and blithely went ahead as usual. When she protested at the way he wrote checks without making out stubs for them he answered, “Why, honeybug, the bank sends a statement. That’s what they’re for.” Eleanor laughed at him rebukingly, and said, “You seem to think the angels are going to take care of you,” to which Kester retorted, “Well, they always have. And now they’ve sent you to do it, haven’t they?”
Whereupon he went to the bar and got a Manhattan cocktail, though it was mid-afternoon and the mercury was over ninety. Eleanor wondered that liquor on such a day did not make him miserable, but nothing seemed able to quench his buoyancy.
When their holiday was over they went to Ardeith. The servants and tenants were assembled in front of the house to cheer their homecoming, and Kester’s mother, with twenty of her cousins and friends, stood on the gallery to welcome Eleanor among them. Eleanor and Kester went upstairs, to the room in which Kester and his father had been born, where tulips bloomed on the marble mantel and the great fourposter bed under its canopy of crimson silk looked like a couch placed there for the begetting of heirs to a great tradition. Opening from the bedroom was a little boudoir furnished in rosewood and damask for a lady of beloved fragility; and as she looked around it, and back at the bedroom, and at the oaks beyond the windows whispering as they had whispered to many generations, Eleanor felt the tradition enfolding her, as though she were no longer an individual but part of a unit, like one stone in a castle wall.
“It’s so lovely,” she murmured to Kester. “So—important.”
Later, while her bath water was running, she stood before the old mahogany bureau and looked at herself, and thought of the other women whose reflections had come back to them from this mirror in years long past. The bureau drawer stuck slightly as she tried to open it to put in her clothes. Eleanor remembered her room at home, where the furniture was new and shining and practical. Nobody in the Upjohn family had time for drawers that stuck, or for idleness before ancient mirrors. She felt as if she had stepped into an enchanted world where nothing was quite real but everything had the vague loveliness of pleasant dreams.
2
“I am doing nothing in the most delightful fashion,” Eleanor wrote her father. “Picture me if you can, waking up in this vast fourposter, reaching up to pull an embroidered bellcord (the bells work by a system of wires and pulleys of about 1840 construction and my bedroom cord jingles something far down in the back regions where I have as yet hardly penetrated), and then lying back to contemplate the canopy over my head until a black woman in a plaid tignon and gold earrings comes in with coffee. It is not always the same woman, for we have enough servants to run the White House, but Kester says that most of them were born on the plantation and he’d have to take care of them anyway. At length we get dressed and go downstairs to a breakfast room full of flowers and mahogany, to put away quantities of hominy grits, ham and hot waffles. Meanwhile another of these ubiquitous darkies has brought the horses around, and after breakfast Kester and I go riding to look at the cottonfields. I am learning a lot about cotton. At first Kester was startled that I should ride astride, but when I told him the nicest ladies were doing it nowadays and I couldn’t learn to manage a sidesaddle anyway, he acquiesced. After awhile, leaving him in the cotton, I come indoors. On the assumption that I must be weary after my exertions, another colored girl changes me into a diaphanous dressing-gown trimmed with ostrich feathers, and I retire into my damask boudoir to sip lemonade and write letters of thanks for my wedding presents.
“As the adjustment to matronly responsibilities is assumed to be arduous enough to make assistance welcome, Kester’s mother is here for a month to carry part of my new burden. While I am riding and writing letters she is doing the housekeeping—so far I am treated like a guest who must on no account trouble her pretty head about such matters. At two o’clock I get dressed for dinner, which we eat in a dining-room the size of a state banqueting hall. The food here is divine, it’s like eating at Antoine’s every day. Suspended from the ceiling over the table hangs the long fan (they call it a besom) that a little Negro boy used to swing during every meal to blow away flies. It has no purpose in these days of screened windows, but I am beginning to have a certain tenderness for these picturesque anachronisms.
“After dinner I get dressed again—this time very carefully, for I am about to be put on exhibit—and go down to the parlor with Mrs. Larne and sit nicely receiving calls. She occupies her hands embroidering an altar-cloth for St. Margaret’s Protestant Episcopal Church. I occupy my hands with nothing, because if I sat holding stitchery everyone would think I was making tiny garments, and, though I am doing no such thing, any suggestion that such an event is possible would be indelicate. And the callers come. Apparently every lady in the parish thinks it necessary to interrupt her affairs during these first weeks so that my life can be enriched by her acquaintance. Most of the calls last exactly half an hour. Mrs. Larne acts as my duenna. A bride being supposedly too young and innocent to choose her friends without guidance, Lysiane drops hints into my ears—Mrs. Thingumbob comes of one of the finest families in Louisiana and is to be cultivated; Mrs. Soandso was talked about before her marriage, no doubt unjustly but it’s always wise to be careful. New people are generally those who have moved into the neighborhood since the Civil War. They all say ‘since the war’ as though it happened last Tuesday.
“Some of the ladies are charming, some irritating and some dull. Yesterday our butler, Cameo, announced the Durham girls. Three ancient ladies filed in, all in black, and sat weirdly in a row, surveying me so solemnly that I thanked heaven for Lysiane, who talked to them about their Sunday School classes. That evening I asked Kester why the three ladies were called girls, and with a wicked glint in his eye he answered, ‘Their house caught fire one night when they were mites of fifty or so, and recounting the accident the next day their father said, “My wife and I were perfectly calm but the children got a little excited.”’
“We have supper by lamplight. In the evening Kester’s mother tactfully removes herself—either she goes to her room to read The Winning of Barbara Worth or to somebody’s house to play flinch—and Kester and I can giggle over the people I’ve seen.
“I can imagine you wrinkling your nose and saying, ‘My daughter Eleanor, who can carry logarithms in her head!’ Don’t, dad. This marriage of mine is so ecstatic that there’s nothing I can tell you about it except that it’s right. I’m going to be one of the happy people who have no history.”
Eleanor was surprised at the number of ladies who came to call. Obviously, if Lysiane’s friends had whispered questions about Kester’s unknown bride before his marriage, the fact of the marriage was an answer. She found the formalities droll, but since she expected to live at Ardeith the rest of her life she tried to sort out her callers, though it was not always easy. The ladies seemed much alike as they sat with bright smiles in the parlor. She did manage to distinguish a few of them—young Mrs. Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation, who was pretty and frail, and coughed delicately, suggesting consumption; Kester’s cousin Sylvia
St. Clair, fortyish, with a scrawny neck and a face that looked like a whine, who hinted at her own unhappy marriage, gossiped about other people’s, and asked Eleanor veiled but intimate questions about hers, which Eleanor parried with a wild desire to giggle, but so adroitly that she won Lysiane’s commendation—“I must say you dealt with Sylvia better than most people do, my dear; even if she is my own second cousin I can’t deny she is a fool;” and gathering that Sylvia was one of the people who would rather go to the gallows at once and have it over with than be condemned to a lifelong agony of minding their own business, Eleanor chuckled at Lysiane and received an amused smile in return; and she remembered Violet Purcell, a dark, vivid girl who wore a lavender dress and a black feather boa, and whose conversation, spiced with epigrams, had a bitter pleasantness like an olive. Eleanor did not mind the callers as long as she and Kester could laugh about them in the evenings, for Kester’s sense of humor and his sense of people were alike so keen that he made comments far more penetrating than Lysiane’s.
After Lysiane had gone home to New Orleans, their life settled down to the leisurely plantation routine. Kester and Eleanor gave parties and went to them, or spent long evenings alone, never done with what they had to say to each other. When cotton-picking was over Kester gave the Negroes a barbecue, at which he and Eleanor, with several of their friends, acted as hosts and guests of honor, enthroned in state on cotton-bales while the darkies brought them beer and pig-sandwiches; after which they were driven in a wagon to the big house to dance through the evening. The day they got news of Woodrow Wilson’s election Kester appeared unexpectedly with a troop of guests to celebrate, and when Eleanor, not yet used to such impromptu parties, got him aside and asked how she was expected to feed so many people without notice Kester retorted merrily, “Vermont, Utah and Eleanor, all for Taft!”—and disappeared into the kitchen. Eleanor followed him, protesting that she was not for Taft, she was glad about Wilson, but supper for ten people was something else; but Kester was chattering with Mamie, the cook who had been at Ardeith ever since he could remember and who understood these things, and he shooed Eleanor back into the parlor with orders not to worry.
The guests were already around the piano, singing while Violet Purcell played for them. Entering with a tray of drinks, Kester flung Eleanor a teasing glance. She whispered under cover of the music.
“Is it going to be all right?”
“Of course,” Kester assured her, and shouted, “Anybody want a drink?”
Nearly everybody did, and Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation called, “Kester, may I dance with your beautiful wife?”
As they hopped off together in a bunny-hug Neal said to her, “It’s such fun coming to Ardeith, Eleanor!” She gathered that they must have been used to dropping in this way, and remembered what Lysiane had said about Kester’s keeping the house always full of people. Violet had started playing The Mississippi Dippy-Dip and Eleanor danced with Neal until they were both out of breath, when they went over to sit by Neal’s wispy little wife, who appeared too frail to indulge in these insane dances. Eleanor thanked heaven for her own rugged health and felt grateful that she could give parties. When the supper bell rang they went into the dining-room. The table held an omelet, a cheese soufflé, a dish of ham and various plates of hot biscuits and preserves; and seeing how easy it all was when everybody was used to it, Eleanor had a gay evening and later told Kester to have a party whenever he felt like it. Rather surprised, Kester answered, “Why sugarplum, I do.”
Now and then she gave a formal dinner, and sat in splendor among the silver and linen with her hair piled on top of her head and her bosom alight with antique jewelry Kester had brought up from the vault and given her to wear, but mostly the parties at Ardeith were hilarious affairs like this one, with everybody dancing while the phonograph played or Violet pounded out ragtime on the piano. Kester’s friends were a gay, insouciant group, with beautiful voices and exquisite manners. They had been friends since childhood, and much of their badinage she could not share, but she always felt that they were doing their best to make her feel at ease among them because they were all devoted to Kester. Most of them were obviously going to be like Denis and Lysiane, decorative ladies and gentlemen of no earthly use but very pleasant to have around, and Eleanor began to understand that the reverse of her father’s good qualities could be delightful. Of the lot she preferred Violet Purcell, whose cool terseness was refreshing.
She enjoyed the life she was leading and found it easy to forget that she had ever been used to any other. When Fred wrote her a description of the President’s waterways conference in Washington she found his letter almost dull, and was astonished to remember how eager she would have been a year ago to be told about the advances in levee construction. But now Kester and Ardeith filled her thoughts so that anything else seemed a needless intrusion. Kester told her a dozen times a week that he had never been so happy. They had but one argument, when Eleanor insisted on being given a regular allowance for housekeeping. Characteristically, he said, “Buy what you need and send the bills to me,” and it took her two hours to convince him that she could not spend money with any degree of wisdom unless she knew how much she had to spend. Kester asked then, “All right, how much do you want?” Eleanor sighed; she wanted whatever it took to run the house, and was aghast when he told her Cameo and Mamie had always done the ordering and he had simply paid the bills without keeping any record of their monthly totals.
At last she got out of him that Ardeith had produced about eight hundred bales of cotton last year, and that a good average price for cotton was ten cents a pound, which gave the plantation a gross income of forty thousand dollars. How much of this was clear she did not know, and it was impossible to make Kester be definite, so in despair she halved it, and though this did not seem a large income for a place like Ardeith she considered it adequate. The house was so lavishly equipped that it could be operated with no great expenditure. She asked Kester if he would give her six hundred dollars a month for housekeeping. Kester said “Certainly,” but as she was sure he would forget to do it she drove to the bank with him the next morning to see to it that he made the first deposit. She was exasperated. But he came out of the bank as debonair as usual and gave her a book showing a deposit to her credit of eight thousand dollars. She gasped, but he said, “Now you won’t pester me for a whole year, will you?”
“Are you angry with me?” Eleanor asked repentantly.
“My darling, no,” said Kester, “but you know I’d never remember to make a deposit every month and I’m not going to waste a lot of time being called names because I am the way I am. You’ve got such—what’s that new word they’re using in factories?—efficiency.”
Eleanor kept house with the exactness she liked, balancing her account books every week and doing the best she could to prevent Mamie from feeding her husband and children out of the Ardeith kitchen. Mamie was a trial, but she was a cook in a thousand and knew her power. They had eleven servants, which Eleanor considered about five too many, but she yielded to Kester’s importunities and retained them, along with sundry black boys who kept turning up from the plantation ostensibly to ask if there wasn’t something the young miss wanted done and actually to get some cold biscuits from Mamie’s generous hands. Eleanor put these down under the heading of “Foolish but Unavoidable Expenses,” and let it go at that. As long as Kester adored her as he did she was willing to compromise with everything else.
“You’re an astonishing girl,” Violet said to her. “Don’t give me that innocent look out of your eyes, either, as if you didn’t know you were married to the most consummate heartbreaker in the United States. Remember what Washington Irving said?”
Eleanor shook her head.
“It’s about a man, but reverse the sexes and it applies to you. ‘He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown, but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette�
�’ something about his being a real hero. My dear, how do you do it?”
Eleanor laughed and said she didn’t know, but privately she was rapturous. That she should love Kester so passionately seemed to her to require no explanation; she did not know how any woman could help loving him. But that he should love her seemed a perpetually recurring miracle. She liked every evidence of it. Kester made frequent trips to New Orleans, sometimes with and sometimes without her, and brought back absurd and expensive presents—rhinestone combs for her hair, frilled camisoles, taffeta petticoats that made an enticing racket when she walked. At Christmas he gave her a watch to be worn on a long chain about her neck and tucked under her belt, with a card saying “I love you” in nine languages, the preparation of which had taken him a whole morning in the Tulane library.
After the opening of the new year Eleanor discovered that she was going to have a baby. She recognized it with some dismay, for though she had assumed that she would have children she had not intended to have any till she had been married a year or two and was tired of her carefree life, and besides, she was dubious about Kester’s reaction to the responsibilities of fatherhood. Kester had said he liked children, but she suspected that he thought of babies as being like the curly angels on Christmas cards, and as the eldest of six Eleanor had been required to play nursemaid too often to have any such cherubic misconceptions.