This Side of Glory

by Gwen Bristow

  She still did not understand. “But you seemed to know so much!”

  “I do know a lot about cotton, sweetheart. I’ve known for fifteen years what ought to be done with that plantation.” He squeezed her. “Honeybug, if some men are born with silver spoons in their mouths, I was born with a cotton boll in my hand.”

  For a moment she sat silent on his knees, while Kester still laughed at his own triumph. “You’re very tactful,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not.”

  “No, you’re not,” he agreed with her.

  Eleanor considered. “Tact is a form of fraud,” she said. “Yes it is— to get what you want you’ve got to use either tact or force. By force you take what you want, leaving your victim hating you; by tact you take it too, but leaving him happy in the belief that he wanted to give it to you all the time.”

  “Bright girl,” said Kester. He drew her head down and kissed her. “You have such soft little rings of hair on your temples. Eleanor, now that we’ve got the Southeastern Exchange Bank where we want it, let’s have a drink to celebrate.”

  He had handled the situation so much better than she could have done that Eleanor consented, and let him mix her a highball.

  But as the evening advanced, her reassurance began to change to apprehension. Kester’s work that day had been inspired, but his joy now was as though the battle had been fought and won, and in his victorious merriment he was drinking more Bourbon than she thought could possibly be good for him, all the time outlining more and more grandiose schemes for Ardeith. While he celebrated his jubilance Eleanor began taking notes on what he was saying. If she was going to help him make his visions concrete now was as good a time as any to begin understanding what they were.

  In the morning when she woke him up Kester groaned that his head was like a balloon, there were corkscrews twirling in his stomach, his mind was paralyzed, and in short he had the grandfather of all hangovers.

  Eleanor trembled with exasperation. Standing by the bedside, she told Kester exactly what she thought of him, and at the moment what she thought of him was not pleasant. Nothing stopped her but the clock pointing to a quarter of ten. She gathered up her notes, thanking heaven that last night she had had foreknowledge of her need for them, and went out.

  She told Mr. Robichaux Kester had got hold of a bad oyster at dinner last evening and was suffering with indigestion. With a sympathetic cluck-cluck Mr. Robichaux led her into the room where a group of other men were waiting for her.

  They looked businesslike and forbidding, and Eleanor’s courage sank as her irritation rose. If I had the brains of a bat, she thought angrily, I’d give up and let him lose his plantation. Why on earth am I doing this anyway?—I don’t care about Ardeith! But oh, heaven forgive me, she thought as she sat down before them, I do care about Kester.

  Though she did her best to tell these men what Kester had told Mr. Robichaux yesterday, her exposition lacked not only the charm of his but its expertness, for she had not heard cotton talked about every day of her life till she could speak its language by instinct. The directors were not as impressed by the possibilities of Ardeith as Mr. Robichaux had been. But Mr. Robichaux, still under Kester’s spell, insisted that Ardeith was capable of producing cotton enough to pay off all its mortgages. They listened to him, dubiously, and at last, when one of them asked, “Who’s going to put all these plans into execution?”— Eleanor, feeling that she stood on the rock-bottom of what she knew about Kester, answered with bitter clairvoyance, “I am.”

  The doubtful director was as impressed by her cold determination as Mr. Robichaux had been by Kester’s eagerness. He smiled, a little grimly.

  “You sound as if you might be a good business woman, Mrs. Larne,” he said to her.

  Eleanor did not smile. “I don’t know. I haven’t had much chance to find out. But I have a habit,” she said distinctly, “of finishing what I start.”

  The doubtful director nodded slowly. “Have you and I met before? You remind me of someone I know.”

  “You may know my father. He’s Fred Upjohn.”

  “Upjohn? The levee contractor? To be sure!” The doubtful director’s grim expression became cordial. He drummed his fingers on the desk. One or two of the others murmured recognition. Fred Upjohn had been doing business with the Southeastern Exchange Bank for twenty years. The doubtful director cleared his throat. It might be possible—ah—to obtain Mr. Upjohn’s guarantee on these notes.

  “No,” Eleanor said vehemently.

  There was a silence. Eleanor and the doubtful director looked straight into each other’s eyes. His eyes were small, set deeply under heavy gray eyebrows, and his face was thin and hard like a tomahawk. Eleanor had a passion for privacy; she could not for the life of her have told these men that this matter of the Ardeith mortgages was an affair of her personal pride because her father had warned her against Kester and now that his warning had been proved she would rather die than have him pay the price of her marriage. She was ready to give them as much as they required of herself, and suddenly her deeper mind opened to her immediate consciousness and she realized that it was for her own justification, and not because Kester loved Ardeith, that she was ready to throw herself down as a sacrifice to his thoughtlessness; and she wondered if it was merely her personal destiny or the fate of the whole human race to engage in battle with the people they loved. Aloud—the silence had lasted only a few seconds and might have appeared to have been caused only by her care in choosing words for her answer—she continued:

  “My father would guarantee these notes without question if I asked him. If I should die or for any other reason fail to pay you, he would assume the obligation without any thought of asking for mercy, and it would bankrupt him.” As the doubtful director did not shift his eyes from her, and the others waited as though expecting her to go on, she added, “I believe that as a parent he has given me all I have a right to ask for, a happy childhood, a good education, and—I hope—a sound character. The very fact that he is willing to give me more—he suggested this himself yesterday—makes it impossible for me to take it.” She spoke clearly to the doubtful director. “Do I get that extension?”

  He answered crisply, “You get it, Mrs. Larne.”

  They gave her a series of papers for her signature and explained to her that under the community property laws of Louisiana Kester’s signature must in every instance be coupled with hers. It was January, 1914; the interest was to be paid in full in November, 1914, and twenty thousand dollars of the principal in December, 1915. Eleanor put the papers into a big manila envelope and took them back to the hotel with her. As she walked she thought of the indentured servants of colonial days who had signed away the labor of half their lives for the chance to come to America, and she wondered if they had felt bound as she did.

  Chapter Five

  1

  When they were back at Ardeith Kester and Eleanor had the longest and frankest talk they had ever had.

  He was ashamed of himself, Kester told her quietly. He had done more thinking than she knew since the morning when he had made her face the directors alone. He was ready to quit drinking and quit partying, and go to work. To keep their promises to the bank meant that he would have to work harder than he had ever dreamed of working, but it could be done.

  “I’m going to do it too,” said Eleanor. “There’s no reason why I can’t learn to be a cotton planter. You’ll have to provide lots of capital in the way of information, but I can give you lots of labor.”

  Standing in his favorite attitude by the mantel, Kester turned to her a face puckered with an odd smile. “Willing,” he said, “and grateful, if—” he paused impressively—“you keep your temper.”

  “I promise, dear. I won’t scream at you again.”

  “I’m not calling attention to your faults in order to minimize my own,” he went on, “but frankly, I’ve never heard a self-respect
ing woman sound the way you do when you get angry. What you say is bad enough, but your voice gets up into your nose in a snarl that sounds—”

  “Yes?” she prompted when he seemed to hesitate.

  “Common,” said Kester bluntly. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I love you so much, Eleanor, but when you yell like that I want to choke you.”

  There was a pause. Resting her chin on her hand, Eleanor looked into the fire. “I’ve been so busy throwing your deficiencies at you,” she said, “I suppose it’s about time I gave some attention to mine. I think—” she looked up at him, and smiled—“yours are the things you do, mine are the way I do things.”

  He smiled down at her. “Does that still mean you’re American and I’m Southern?”

  “I think so. Anyway, my virtues are so disagreeable and your faults are so attractive!” She took the hand that still lay on her shoulder, and held it in hers. “Kester, I’d like to talk about that now, to make it clear for both of us.”

  “Yes, dear, I’d like it too.” He went back to his place by the mantel and stood waiting for her to go on.

  Eleanor looked at him thoughtfully, noticing as she had on their first meeting Kester’s casual, unconscious elegance, and contrasting it with the cast-iron vigor of Fred ordering the foremen about. “Tell me something, honestly,” she said after a moment. “Kester, when you used to come to see me before we were married, didn’t you find my parents crude?”

  He smiled reluctantly. “Have I got to answer?”

  “You have answered,” she said.

  “But my dear girl,” he exclaimed, “it doesn’t matter! It never did.”

  “Now I’ll tell you,” said Eleanor. “When I used to come here I thought your parents were revoltingly useless. I felt superior to them because I had in me the hard streak that made my father climb out of the wretchedness where he was born.”

  Kester’s forehead had crinkled ever so slightly between and above his eyebrows, giving him a look of surprise, like that of a schoolboy coming across some glint of philosophy that pleased his reason though it damaged his prejudice.

  “But your people must have had a hardness in them once,” Eleanor went on. “When they got here Louisiana was a trackless jungle. The American pioneers didn’t hack their way across this continent by using romance and beautiful deportment. They did it because they were the most uncompromising realists the world has ever seen.” She saw he was listening, and she continued. “But now you want to live only by the gracious trivialities they developed after they’d ceased having to fight for existence. And you can’t,” she said incisively. “It’s nearly cost you Ardeith. If you want to get Ardeith back you’ve got to get it the way Philip Larne cut it out of the wilderness.”

  As she paused Kester answered slowly, as though the glint of philosophy was brightening, but its glow still so faint that he had to walk very carefully by the little light it gave him. “You’re trying to tell me, aren’t you, that I’ve got to learn hardness again, from your sort of people?”

  “Yes. Because we’re just now cutting our way out of the wilderness.”

  There was a pause, broken only by the snapping of the fire. “But what were the Upjohns doing all that time?” he asked at length.

  “I don’t know, except fighting to keep alive. Maybe we didn’t have much strength to start with. Maybe only those of us who could fight survived at all.”

  Again there was a silence. Kester picked up the tongs and adjusted a log on the fire. He got a cigarette from the box on the table, lit it, and examined its tip with the concentrated look of a man who finds it easier to fix a thought in his mind while his outer attention is fixed on a meaningless object. “But don’t you think,” he asked finally, “that what you call the gracious trivialities are important?”

  “Of course I do,” said Eleanor. “I think they’re beautiful. They’re what I want to learn from you,” she added earnestly, “gentleness and tact and how to make people love me. The civilization your people created is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen or heard of—the gallantry and high breeding and ideals, the moon over the cotton and the darkies thrumming banjos along the river. It’s the South of legends and poetry, and it’s true.” She stood up and faced him. “Kester, that’s what your people brought into being. Mine didn’t do it. Yes, I know—you’re too gracious to say it, but a generation ago we’d have been called poor white trash. But my sort of people are closer to facts than yours. And if you withdraw, if you try to live on gallantry and beauty alone—here we come. We’re coming out of the tenements and the steerage. We’re hard and brash and uncouth. We hurt your sensibilities. But we’re Americans, more than you are, because we’ve got the qualities that made it possible for the American nation to be. We’re the second pioneers.”

  Kester gave her right hand a grip that hurt it. “Anything I could say after that would be an anticlimax. But you mean that with what you have from your people and what I have from mine we can do more together than either of us could do alone. I understand. Let’s see it through.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Let’s see it through.” His handclasp made her feel more closely married than she had ever felt before.

  2

  Under the double stimulus of Kester’s ideas and Eleanor’s energy, the plantation leaped into life.

  Ardeith was deep and black and rich; it gobbled the cottonseed and thrust out plants that grew fast in the brooding sun. By a last desperate loan on the pine-lands they had obtained enough money to raise the crop this year, and they worked passionately. Up at six, they spent the morning on horseback supervising the labor in the fields, and came in for dinner at three. In the afternoon Eleanor attended to the bookkeeping while Kester either returned to the cotton or wrote business letters, and that done, they relaxed by reading the newspaper—which they rarely had time to look at earlier—and playing with the baby. After supper they worked again, though not for long, as by nine o’clock they were usually too sleepy to think.

  It was backbreaking drudgery, tolerable in the velvet weather of February and March, but as the spring turned to a June of steam and fire there were days when Eleanor thought it beyond her endurance. She had never minded the summer, but she had never spent the six hottest hours of the day without shade. Yet she did not dare to wilt. Kester was working hard, the sun no lighter on his head than hers, but she knew her own driving resolution was the backbone of their labor. Though Kester could make a brilliant start he needed encouragement to persist in the doing of one thing over and over long after it had ceased to be interesting. But they were both happy in their feeling of purposeful unity. They were hard and Indian-brown, and the responding fields, promising a thousand bales in the fall, gave them a sense of splendid achievement.

  Eleanor was at first amazed at Kester’s industry. But as the spring advanced and she saw how he looked around his acres, with the same look he gave her in their tenderest moments, she began to understand. Before Kester was old enough to make his knowledge articulate he had stood on his land and had known it belonged to him. He had loved all of it, the cotton rows dwindling toward the dip of the sky like spokes of a mighty wheel, the palms waving their fans above his head, the wild irises in the woods and hyacinths crowding the bayous. Before he could bound his own state or spell the name of the river on which he lived Kester could glance at a cottonfield and tell whether or not it needed rain; and by that time there had grown up within him a love for Ardeith so intense that he felt as much a part of his plantation as the cotton and palms, and he felt, without thinking it, that he would die as easily as they if he should be torn from his soil.

  Without sharing this, she understood it, and promised both him and herself that she would give all she had to help him save Ardeith. They divided the work between them. Kester was not efficient, but he was creative, and his suggestions were so sound that Eleanor could readily put them into effect. It was Kester who had thought of holly
on the pine-lands, but it was Eleanor who collected facts and figures, discovering that most of the holly sold in New Orleans at Christmas time came from Maryland, and Louisiana holly could undersell it because of lower transportation charges. Kester knew exactly why paid laborers were economically better than sharecroppers, but Eleanor undertook to reorganize the plan under which the plantation was run; by March she had reduced by half the land tilled under the sharecropper system and the other sharecroppers had been warned that they must either move or turn into wage-workers after they had raised this year’s crop. Eleanor could make the laborers work well, but they did not like her, and she never understood how it was that by riding to the end of a row and spending ten minutes in conversation with a darky—conversation that included an exchange of gossip about Kester’s baby and the darky’s baby and the weather and the looks of the river this spring—Kester could guarantee her that the field would be plowed by sundown, and be right about it.

  Eleanor was fair: she never balked at offering good wages or required overtime work without paying for it. Kester was not fair. He thought extra pay for extra work was silly, and when additional hoeing was needed after a sudden June rain he wandered casually into the field, took hold of a hoe himself and said something about a fish-fry one Sunday before long, and the field was hoed, and nobody mentioned money or apparently thought of it. Eleanor was surprised.

  “How do you do it?” she asked that evening. “How do you make everybody like you?”

  “Like ’em back,” said Kester.

  She sighed, her elbows on her account books and her chin cupped in her hands. “I still think they should have been paid for it.”

  Kester stretched out on the sofa to read the Times-Picayune from New Orleans. “My dear, if you ran the world all the sidewalks would be scrubbed and the trains would run on time and everybody would live to be ninety and nobody would have any fun. Now do your arithmetic and let me read about this murder.”