This Side of Glory

by Gwen Bristow

  “Kester, I don’t see how I can possibly be jealous of anything that happened before you even knew I was alive. I’m so grateful to chance and destiny and God that I’ve got you now, I can’t quarrel about any of the paths that brought you to me.” She laughed a little. “Why Kester, if you hadn’t been quite audacious about girls in general, you’d never have come dashing up to speak to a perfectly strange one just because you liked the way she looked standing above the river.”

  “That’s right,” he exclaimed in lovable relief. “I suppose I shouldn’t have. Anyway, I feel as if I’m just beginning to live. The way all the poets say a man in love feels, and I thought they were so foolish.”

  “So did I.” She rested her head on his knee.

  For a long time they were silent. At last they realized it was midnight. Eleanor said he had to take her home. They drove in silence along the river road, through a still blue night thick with stars.

  4

  Fred had been sitting up late working on his monthly report to the state levee board. He was wondering where Eleanor could be. Eleanor was a sensible girl and could take care of herself, but Randa had said she had gone off with that Kester Larne and Fred was getting tired of her seeing him so often. Like a lot of fine intelligent girls who had never been bothered with puppy-love Eleanor was probably much more innocent about men than these little flirts who knew about men and nothing else, and while he didn’t care how many dates Eleanor had, most normal amusement in the world for a young girl, Fred decided to warn her about that no-’count parlor ornament. Maybe he’d been selfish, Fred told himself; there weren’t many men around a levee camp of a sort to entertain Eleanor. It was natural of her to be glad to see any presentable young fellow that came along. Great girl she was, and he shouldn’t take too much advantage of her willingness to help him, though the Lord knew he’d have a hard time finding another secretary as good as she was. Well, anyway, he’d speak to her about Kester Larne in the morning. Don’t want to be bossing you around, Eleanor, but he’s really not worth your time.

  For the love of Pete, it was past midnight and he had to be up and doing at five. He heard a car on the other side of the levee. So there they were. The canvas side of the tent next the levee was down, but Fred thought he’d better take a look out and be sure. He’d just glance side-wise around the edge of the canvas—he wouldn’t want Eleanor to think he was sitting up to spy on her.

  He saw Kester and Eleanor walking across the levee. As they neared the tent they started to say goodbye and dropped into each other’s arms.

  Fred smothered an exclamation. He was angry. But well, girls kissed young men a lot more casually nowadays than they did when he was young. No reason for him to be so startled. But Lord have mercy, that wasn’t just a kiss. That was as passionate an embrace as he’d ever heard of in his life.

  Fred knew Eleanor was not a girl to give herself lightly to that sort of lovemaking. He would have sworn Kester Larne was the only man who had ever held her like that. It meant Eleanor was in love: in love with that indolent hand-kissing scion of a wornout line.

  Finally they broke apart, and Eleanor ran toward the tents as though afraid to trust herself to look back. She let herself into her own room softly, evidently thinking the whole camp was asleep. Kester looked after her. In the starlight his face was worshipful.

  Fred turned around. His sense of decency forbade him to speak to Eleanor now. In the silence he could hear her sobbing, soft smothered sobs of thwarted ecstasy.

  Fred went to his own room, but he could not sleep. He sat up and smoked till nearly morning. All the time he had known that no matter who it would be Eleanor married he would never think the guy good enough for her, but he had always figured that when she made up her mind he’d say, “Well, if he suits you he’s all right with me,” and let her go. But not with this faded rose of the old Southland. Kester Larne did nothing but amuse himself and keep a paternal eye on his debt-ridden plantation; and he’d never, Fred thought grimly, do anything else. Fred cursed the difficulty of this particular levee job, which had kept him too busy to see what was going on. Why, he asked himself now, couldn’t he have taken time to pay some attention to his own daughter before she got herself bedazzled with this firefly?

  In the morning Eleanor did not appear till after seven. Fred was having his own belated breakfast.

  “I thought you’d be on the levee by now,” she remarked as she sat down at table.

  “I had a lot of work last night,” said Fred. “That report to the levee board.”

  “I suppose you want it typed? Show me where it is and I’ll start after breakfast.”

  Eleanor had evidently not slept much herself. She was heavy-lidded, and sat playing with her bacon abstractedly and drinking a great deal of coffee. Fred was wondering how to speak to her. Whatever he said would be wrong. When a man had spent his life in levee camps he hadn’t had time to learn diplomatic phrases. He was still wondering when Randa came in and gave Eleanor a box of red camellias.

  She sprang up to receive it. As she read the card that lay among the flowers, a dreamy glow flickered over her face. She looked up. “Is the boy waiting, Randa?”

  “Yassum.” Randa grinned knowingly.

  “Give him coffee in the kitchen while I write a note.”

  As Randa departed Eleanor went to the desk. Fred got up from his chair.

  “Who’re the flowers from?” he asked, though he knew already.

  “Kester.” She was writing.

  “Wait a minute before you answer,” said Fred.

  Eleanor halted her scribbling pen. As though seeing his face for the first time that day, she started. “What’s the matter, dad?”

  He crossed the tent and stood before her. “Eleanor, you’re in love with that man, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, smiling to herself. “How did you know?”

  “I was still up when you came in last night,” he said abruptly. “I saw you kiss him.”

  He had expected her to make an indignant retort. But at once he realized that he had underestimated her. Eleanor had never kept any secrets from him, nor did she now. She only said, her eyes on the camellias, “I’d have told you very soon. I’m going to marry him.”

  “No you’re not,” said Fred.

  Eleanor stared at him. Her blue eyes stretched wide. In a thin, amazed voice she gasped, “Why—dad!”

  Fred stood with his hands in his pants pockets. He did so hate to hurt her. Feeling very awkward, he fumbled with his matter-of-fact vocabulary.

  “I don’t reckon I’m very smart about some things, Nellie,” he said gently. “If I was I could tell you better. But that fellow’s not good enough for a girl like you.”

  “Yes he is.” Smiling tolerantly, Eleanor stood up and put her hands on his shoulders. “Between you and me, dad, I think the same thing you do about his family. But they aren’t Kester.”

  Fred sighed and started over. “Nellie, listen to me.”

  She was still smiling, as though he were trying to deny that the world was round. “Stop calling me Nellie. I’m not going to listen.” She sat down again and was about to take up her pen.

  “Yes you are,” said Fred. He spoke with a tender vehemence. “Eleanor, I reckon this is about the hardest thing I ever tried to say. I guess you really are in love with him, and you’re mighty happy about it right now, but if you marry Kester Larne you’re not going to be happy long.”

  “Why not?” she asked as if hardly hearing him.

  “He’s just no good,” said Fred.

  Eleanor picked up a match and began breaking it into small pieces. “He told me he hadn’t been an angel, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Honey child,” said Fred earnestly, “I’m not talking about anything he’s done. I’m talking about the kind of person he is.”

  Eleanor was beginning to be angry. “So you think
I’ll have to wander around wearing a brave smile above a broken heart! But I won’t.”

  “I want you to get more out of life,” said Fred, “than just not having your heart broken.” He repeated, “That fellow is just no good.”

  Eleanor’s eyes had narrowed dangerously as he spoke. They looked like lines of blue fire. “You’d better be careful, dad,” she said in a low voice.

  “Why should I be careful? I’m saying what I know is true. And you’re going to sit there and hear me.” Fred caught his voice and went on as gently as he could. “Eleanor, honey, Kester don’t know what it means to be a man grown up. He’s a child in a man’s body, and you deserve better than that.”

  As he paused, Eleanor stood up. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Fred saw them swell the cloth as they doubled into fists. It was his own movement of determination.

  “All right, dad,” she said evenly. “I’ve listened. Now I’ll tell you. I love Kester. That’s all.”

  Fred thought he should have known that if Eleanor ever loved a man it would be like this. She was so intense. Feeling that he would have given anything he owned to pierce the armor of infatuation around her, he tried again.

  “I know you think that’s enough, Eleanor. But believe me, it’s not.”

  Eleanor looked past him as though he were not there. “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” she said slowly. “Maybe it never happened to you like this. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about love. But nobody seems to mean what I mean.”

  “No, Eleanor,” he said wearily. “Everybody means what you mean.”

  But it was no use. Fred told her everything he believed was true, that Kester had never accepted the responsibility for his own life and was unfit to accept the responsibility for hers. As he persisted Eleanor grew furious. She flashed at him as she had never done, then she became penitent and pled for his comprehension, and at last she cried out despairingly, “It’s no use, dad. I love him. Why can’t you understand me? You always have before!”

  She crumpled up by the desk and began to sob. It was the first time he had seen her shed tears since she was a little girl. He understood, with a pain that went very deep, that she was crying because all her life he had been her best friend. Eleanor was his first child and nearer to him than any of the others. She had run to him for comfort about her broken dolls and had accepted his rebukes for her childish sins, she had gone to him for counsel and he had talked over his own problems with her, and there had never been any anger between them. Fred stroked her shoulder clumsily. He was sure she was facing fierce disillusion, and the more he tried to tell her so the more he would succeed in making her hate him. But because he loved her he had not the faintest intention of being lenient. He wished they were back in the days when a man could lock up his daughter till she was willing to obey him.

  5

  Eleanor said nothing to Kester about her father’s opposition. She went through her work as usual and continued to see Kester every afternoon. They generally went out in his car, for his parents still lingered at Ardeith and he seemed to think they would be in the way when he and Eleanor had so much to say to each other. Eleanor supposed he had told them about their engagement, but she did not ask. It was enough to get away from her father’s hurt indignation into the wonder and peace that came to her when she and Kester were together.

  But in less than two weeks the levee was finished and she was back in New Orleans, and now that she could not see Kester every day she found her battle with her father becoming a strain that increased as she grew tired of it.

  Her mother was more tolerant. Mrs. Upjohn was a woman who took life as it came. Born Molly Thompson, she had lost her parents during her babyhood, grown up in a Methodist orphan asylum and gone from there to stand behind a counter in a department store, where she had met Fred Upjohn, who was then a sub-foreman on a levee job. When they were married she went up to camp and cooked for Fred and five other men, not accepting the help of a Negro woman until a month before Eleanor was born and then only because Fred insisted on it, Molly’s opinion being that it was a shame to pay out wages when Fred needed the money to buy his engineering books. Molly had had six children in eleven years, and with prosperity she had grown fat, comfortable and more than ever easy to live with. Having observed that the world did not always adjust itself to meet her convenience, she assumed that the Lord knew more than she did and good-naturedly let Him have His way. When Fred and Eleanor first came home Molly said of Kester only that she had not met the gentleman and therefore had no opinion, and her husband and daughter spoke of him with such contradictory violence that she could not form one. After he had been down to see Eleanor several times Molly said he was a mighty pleasant young man, but she’d hesitate before she’d marry a planter who left his cotton so often right in the middle of planting time just to see a girl who wrote him every day anyway. Noticing that Eleanor had her mind made up, Molly was thereafter silent on the subject.

  Eleanor blessed her mother’s calmness, but she was so eager to escape Fred’s troubled eyes that she would have been willing to be married in the courthouse at once. Kester, however, had assumed that their engagement would be properly announced in the New Orleans Picayune and that they would be married in her father’s house by a minister. Eleanor finally had to tell him, one day when they were lunching at Antoine’s, that Fred was so opposed to their marriage she did not believe he would consent to having it performed in his home. Kester was at first amazed, then he burst out laughing uncontrollably, and finally, when she insisted upon knowing what was so ridiculous about a situation that was racking her nerves beyond endurance, he told her his parents were also convinced the marriage would be disastrous, but for different reasons.

  Eleanor was angry. “That pair of eggshells!” she blazed.

  “That’s why I won’t run off to any justice of the peace,” Kester ended. “I want you worse than I ever wanted anything, but I’m going to marry you like a man who’s proud of what he’s doing.” He began to laugh again.

  “I was never so mad in my life,” Eleanor exclaimed, “and it’s not funny.”

  Kester was shaking with mirth. “But it is, my darling, it is funny. Your father thinking the Larnes were blessing heaven for the infusion of some fresh red blood into their weary veins, my father thinking the Upjohns were gloating over the prospect of getting my precious name into their chronicles—and you and I not thinking of anything but how much we love each other and how we wish they’d leave us alone.”

  At that Eleanor laughed too. As Kester said it, the opposing viewpoints of their families did sound foolish. “What is it they say,” she asked after awhile, wonderingly, “‘two shall be born the whole wide world apart’—”

  “I think everybody must have gone mad but us,” said Kester. Ignoring the uneaten half of his crêpes suzette, he asked the waiter for a check. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll attend to your father.”

  He did attend to Fred, with a gay serenity that Eleanor began to think it must have taken six generations to produce. They went into Fred’s office, where Kester stood facing Fred across the desk and calmly stated that he was going to marry Eleanor.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like me,” he went on, “but I’m going to marry her anyway. We’re both of age and don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But I happen to be a man who likes the pleasant traditions. I want to be married in her father’s house and have him say ‘I do’ when the minister asks who gives her away.”

  Fred crossed his hands on the desk and his eyes met Kester’s. “You’re mighty confident of yourself, young man, aren’t you?”

  “Why, yes sir,” said Kester. “I am.”

  “Mhm. I am too,” returned Fred. “I don’t like her marrying you, and I don’t like pretending in public that I do.”

  Kester grinned coolly. “You’re a stubborn man, Mr. Upjohn,” he remarked, “used to bossing everybody around you. B
ut this time you might as well acknowledge that you’ve lost, and it’s your own fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “Certainly,” said Kester. “I suppose it didn’t occur to you when Eleanor was born that she could be just as stubborn as you are, because when you begot her you gave her your own weapons to fight you with. You might as well give in, Mr. Upjohn. It’s the revenge of the chromosome.”

  There was a silence. Kester and Eleanor waited. At last Fred nodded slowly. “I know when I’m licked.” He glanced at Eleanor. “You’re going to marry him, whether or no?”

  “Yes, dad.”

  “All right. Kester, I guess that’s so, what you said. I’d never thought of it that way.”

  “Neither had I,” said Kester demurely, “till I walked in and saw Eleanor’s face when she looked at you. Thanks, Mr. Upjohn.”

  After that Fred made no more opposition, and gave Eleanor a check to spend for clothes. But he could not hide his disappointment, and Eleanor was eager to be gone. She did not have much time to think, however, and but for the help of her sister Florence, who came home from school for the Easter holidays, she did not know how she would have done her shopping. When the engagement was officially announced in the Picayune (with a photograph of herself pled for by the society editor with an eagerness that made Eleanor recognize the Larne hand in the background, for she knew nothing about the society section), then she found herself breathlessly busy. Lysiane called the next day, and one would have thought this marriage was the consummation of her dreams—“I cannot tell you, Mrs. Upjohn, how happy we are that your lovely daughter is to be one of us”—and Kester’s brother Sebastian called, and his married sister Alice gave her a luncheon, and Alice’s friends gave her luncheons, and wedding presents began to arrive with an abundance that made her understand that in marrying a man named Larne she was entering a tower of mighty significance. Her best friend, Lena Tonelli, whose family owned a tropical fruit company and had grown vastly rich from bananas, undertook the task of keeping the list of the letters Eleanor would have to write after she was married, and she sat competently among the gifts, collecting cards and scribbling on them with amazed exclamations. “Good heavens, Eleanor, these are all names out of the state history books! I thought they were dead. What are you getting into?”