by Gwen Bristow
The future ahead of her was blank as a desert. They had no money for the laborers who would be needed to tend the plantation during the winter, they could buy no fertilizer till they paid for what they had bought already, and there were a hundred other needs from repairs and fodder to subscriptions to agricultural journals; and all that without considering the necessities of daily living, for which their credit was strained till Eleanor shrank from entering a shop. And suppose they somehow got through the winter, what in the name of reason were they going to plant next spring? The country had ten million bales of cotton on its hands. Planting more was folly, yet except for vegetables grown for their own table nothing but cotton had been planted at Ardeith since the Civil War. You could not revolutionize a plantation suddenly any more than a factory. Cotton, cotton, cotton— the word rattled in her head. Didn’t those lunatics in Europe need clothes? Of all the harmless commodities to be swept off the seas!
It was getting late. Eleanor turned the car and drove back to Ardeith. As she stopped in front of the house, impulsively she rested her elbows on the steering wheel and put her head down on her arms. “Please, God,” she whispered, “if you aren’t going to let cotton move, let something, anything, happen to make me stop thinking about it!”
2
Something did happen, of a nature to make Eleanor remember that she had heard ministers warn their congregations to be careful what they prayed for lest their prayers be answered.
They left the jewels at the bank as security, and the money they received for the old brandy they put aside to be used for living expenses. It was impossible to say how long it would last, for due to the lack of manufactured articles from abroad the price of many commodities was rising, and a war-tax bill, to make up for diminishing customs receipts, sent the cost of living higher still. Though they had a breathing space Eleanor felt like a patient who was barely breathing. There was still no answer to the question of what they could plant next spring to give them the twenty thousand dollars they had promised to pay the bank in the fall.
In spite of her resolution, suspense made her temper uncertain and she was not always easy to live with. Kester urged her to go out. Their friends were entertaining again, saying you couldn’t stay under a pall forever. It was true their gaiety had a hysterical quality suggesting that of the beleaguered cities overseas, but dancing was less destructive to the nerves than pacing the floor at home, so Eleanor yielded, and they had dinner with the Sheramys and went on a picnic with Violet Purcell. They also had a Sunday night supper with the three Durham girls, a rather lugubrious meal, as the old ladies habitually set a place at table for their sister Kate who had eloped forty years ago in defiance of parents and propriety, a matter that had grieved them so much they had felt it their duty ever since to ignore her departure.
Kester’s Cousin Sylvia came around to sell them a pair of tickets to a dance being given at the Hunt Club in town for the benefit of the Buy-a-Bale movement, which had been begun with the hope that if everybody with any money to spare would buy a bale of cotton at the standard price of fifty dollars the market would be eased. “Such a worthy cause,” Sylvia urged, “and nobody is going to lose anything by it, because all the brokers say that as soon as the war is over the need for cotton in Europe will send the price to twelve cents a pound. So anybody who buys a bale now will make ten dollars by holding it.”
“Really?” said Eleanor.
“Yes indeed.” Cousin Sylvia was fluttering about the parlor. “Have you bought your bale yet?”
Eleanor gasped.
“We have all the cotton we need, Cousin Sylvia,” answered Kester. He looked as if he wanted to giggle.
“But my dear boy, it’s the principle of the thing!”
“We can’t afford principles,” Eleanor said curtly.
“Now Eleanor, you mustn’t say things like that. President Wilson has bought a bale, and I’m sure he doesn’t need it. And all sorts of people are buying bales and putting them on their front porches—”
“Doing their alms before men in the most delicate fashion,” murmured Kester.
“And a great many of the leading merchants in New Orleans and everywhere are buying bales, and they put them on the sidewalks with a sign saying ‘Bought by the Soandso Company, have you bought yours?’”
“A nice way to get free advertising by shoving the taxpayers off the sidewalk,” said Eleanor. “I think it’s silly. The cotton is all being held for sale again, so I don’t see that it’s easing the market.”
“Now Eleanor, you don’t understand.” Sylvia opened her handbag and took out a rattling handful of buttons. “We are giving out these buttons to be worn on your dress, or your coat lapel, Kester. You see, they have ‘I’ve bought a bale, have you?’ printed on them.”
Quivering with suppressed merriment, Kester took a button. “I see. Excellent. I tell you, Sylvia, I’ll buy a bale from somebody if you’ll buy a bale from me.”
Sylvia gave a tolerant little laugh. “Now, Kester, you know I have barely enough to live on! My poor Conrad,” she explained to Eleanor, “was not a practical business man for all his noble qualities. That’s why I’m giving all I have, my strength and my time, to the cause. It’s all I have to give.” She proceeded to explain that of course, she had known it all along, when people put their whole confidence into one staple commodity they were heading straight for disaster. As neither of them had ever heard her say so before, Kester continued to be amused and Eleanor irritated. Cousin Sylvia asked Kester if he would please look for her handkerchief, she must have dropped it when she got out of her buggy, and when he was gone she urged Eleanor in a confidential voice to be very cheerful during these trying days. “And don’t make such pessimistic remarks, my dear girl,” she went on. “What every man wants of his wife is comfort and cheer. I know about these things.”
Eleanor was tempted to slap her, but was saved from carrying out her impulse by Kester, who returned to say that he could not find the handkerchief, and remarkably Sylvia discovered that she still had it in her bag, how stupid of her to think she had dropped it. Now if they couldn’t buy a bale today, would they at least take tickets for the dance? Such a worthy cause. Eleanor was moved to wrath when Kester bought the tickets.
“Did you have to do that?” she demanded when Cousin Sylvia had left.
Kester sank into a chair and began to laugh. “No, but I did it because I wanted to. Isn’t she wonderful? The first time I ever got sent upstairs in disgrace it was for laughing at Sylvia out loud.”
“I think she’s odious,” Eleanor exclaimed, though she was amused in spite of herself. “She sent you out so she could give me some advice on how to be happily married.”
“I thought it must be for something of the sort. Sylvia was married twelve years to Cousin Conrad, who was a very affable fellow and endured her by a combination of Christian fortitude and good whiskey. I never saw a man so literally driven to drink.”
“So now she tells everybody else—”
Kester was vastly tickled. “Certainly. Once he had gone to his reward she mourned him devotedly, had him cremated and set the ashes right up in her bedroom so she could worship them always.”
“Revolting,” said Eleanor.
“So be careful,” Kester ended, “if you ever go to her house for supper and she takes you upstairs to primp. She keeps the ashes in a jar by the mirror and if you aren’t careful you’ll powder your face with Conrad.”
Eleanor could not help laughing, though she still thought it was foolish to pay for any kind of dance when they had so little money. But she liked dancing, and agreed with Kester that she needed entertainment, so she was glad when the evening arrived and they dressed and went to the Hunt Club. It was there that she met Isabel Valcour.
For a week everybody had been talking about Isabel Valcour, and Eleanor had looked forward to making her acquaintance. Isabel had grown up in Dalroy, b
ut she had married a German—an excessively rich German, they said—seven years ago, and since then she had lived abroad, apparently not remembering the United States at all until she had had to flee the war. The afternoon before the Buy-a-Bale dance was to be held Violet dropped by Ardeith for a cup of coffee with Eleanor and reported that she had just been to call on Isabel, who had moved into her deceased father’s old house on the river road. “Utterly incongruous, my dear,” said Violet. “Cosmopolitan, better-looking than ever, dressed in clothes that are going to be in style sometime next year—how she’s going to pass her time till the war’s over I don’t know.”
“Where’s her husband?” asked Eleanor. “In the army?”
“No, in heaven. It seems she’s been a widow three years, following the seasons from Norway to Scotland to Monte Carlo to Paris—or wherever it is they go, I never thought I’d be trying to describe the odysseys of the international millionaires—and now to Dalroy, Louisiana. Imagine!”
Eleanor thought Isabel sounded interesting, and asked if she was going to attend the Buy-a-Bale dance. Violet didn’t know; she had left Isabel’s house because Clara Sheramy had come to call, and though Clara was a sweet little thing there were limits to what one could stand of her stupidity.
Her curiosity aroused, when they were driving to the Hunt Club that evening Eleanor asked Kester if he remembered Isabel. Certainly he did, Kester said, he had known her all her life.
“Is she as pretty as they say?” Eleanor asked.
“She used to be. I can’t answer for her now.”
“Shall we see her tonight?”
Kester had not inquired, but he supposed they would. Everybody else would be there, and it was a good chance for Isabel to meet her old friends.
A chill autumn fog had swooped down, and the club house was brilliant by contrast. The rooms were full of people, and when Kester and Eleanor arrived the dancers were doing the fox-trot. Bob Purcell came to meet her, saying he had been waiting for her to dance with him; to Eleanor’s protests that she had never tried the fox-trot he insisted that it was not difficult and quite an orderly pastime after the breathless hugs and hops of the past few seasons. She waved Kester a temporary goodbye. In a few minutes she was having a very good time indeed, and she did not think of Isabel again until she saw her.
It was in the space after the first set of dances. She and Bob walked over to join the group around the punch-table, where a little lake of champagne sparkled in the hollow of a mold of pineapple ice. As they approached, Eleanor observed that in the center of the group was a slender blonde woman in sea-green satin, who stood with a glass in her hand answering questions with an air of amused detachment. Violet reached to take Eleanor’s hand and draw her in among them, and the stranger paused, turning upon her a pair of enormous hazel eyes. Evidently this was Isabel Valcour. Eleanor hoped she was not staring.
Isabel was not only the most beautiful woman in the room but probably the most beautiful woman in the state of Louisiana. A product not only of good fortune but a carefully casual art, she looked like the archetype of a voluptuous and sophisticated group that had been used to moving among the capitals without seeing anything but the inside of its own circle. Though she was not tall, her figure was of the sort that seems to have been designed by heaven for the sole earthly purpose of wearing clothes, and her green dress, close-fitting except for a swirl at the hips, made an exquisite setting for her white shoulders and the perfect line of her throat. She had hair of a rare gold, brushed into shining ripples, and a face of such classic outlines that one could not help being surprised at the worldly cynicism of its smile. Without having been told beforehand, Eleanor thought she would have known that Isabel had returned to this town on the Mississippi River from a region as remote by philosophy as by distance; she was an alien, lost in her present situation unless she had—as she appeared so far to have— sufficient sense of humor to be amused by it. Surmising that the war must be the first event of many years that had found Isabel unprepared, Eleanor was suddenly sorry for her, and at the same time grateful for herself to be reminded that other lives than her own had been interrupted by the breaking apart of the world’s order.
She must have been facing Isabel for only an instant, for she heard Violet say,
“We’ve been hearing about the horrors of war first hand—oh, I’m sorry, of course you two don’t know each other. Mrs. Larne, Mrs.—Isabel, what is your name?”
Isabel answered with a slow smile. “Schimmelpfeng.”
“There,” said Violet to Eleanor. “You heard it.”
Eleanor laughed. “Yes. But forgive me if I can’t say it,” she added to Isabel. “How do you do.”
“Don’t apologize. It took me a month to learn to say it myself.” Isabel’s voice was as lovely as her face. “Mrs. Kester Larne?”
“Yes.”
“I remember Kester so well. Is he here tonight?”
“He’s here, yes. Don’t let me interrupt you. You were talking about the war?”
Isabel shrugged as though she would have been happy to stop talking about it, but Clara Sheramy chirped eagerly.
“She’s been telling us about her adventures getting out of Europe. It’s terribly exciting. Do go on, Isabel. It happened all of a sudden—” she paused expectantly.
Isabel yielded. “Yes, it was quite terrifying. Europe—well, galvanized, that’s the only word I can think of. You woke up one morning to find every placid village turned into a center of mobilization. There were bright pink bulletins tacked up everywhere proclaiming the war and army orders.”
Eleanor accepted a glass of punch from Bob Purcell. “Go on,” Bob said to Isabel. “Where were you? In Germany?”
“No, in Italy, by the grace of God. If I’d been in Germany I’d probably still be there. Italy was technically neutral, though it was nearly as bad there as in the other countries. The streets were full of foreigners who had been called to the armies, saying tearful goodbyes and promising to meet again as soon as it was over—”
“How lucky you were neutral!” Clara exclaimed.
Isabel gave a little astonished laugh. “But I wasn’t neutral, dear child. Legally I’m a German, hoch der Kaiser and all that.”
“Are you really?” breathed Clara.
“Of course she is,” said Violet.
Isabel held out her glass. “Will somebody fill this for me? I haven’t drunk champagne punch like this since the last time I went to a ball in Vicksburg.”
Eleanor nearly chuckled at the vision of Isabel at a ball in Vicksburg. But of course, she reminded herself, Isabel in those days had not been the Isabel she was seeing now. Three gentlemen sprang to replenish her glass, and smiling graciously at them all Isabel acceded to the requests around her that she continue.
“I went to Rome,” she told them, “and began storming the American consulate like the rest. There must have been hundreds of us there every day, Americans who had suddenly discovered we were yearning for apple pie and Mount Vernon and willing to pay anything we possessed for a berth in any ship heading west. You know how those countries adore American visitors, bowing and holding out their itching palms to us—we’d been used to that, and here we found ourselves reduced to the status of public nuisances.”
She talks well, Eleanor reflected. With that hair and figure I’ll wager she didn’t have much trouble.
Isabel’s next line might have been an answer to her thoughts. “Then luckily, just as I thought I was going to have to stay in Rome or be shipped back to Germany for the length of the war, who should turn up at the consulate but a most delightful man, Louisiana born like myself, from Baton Rouge, of all places. I’d forgotten how Louisiana looked, but did I remember then! Crayfish bisque, river-boats, cotton, sugarcane, levees, cornbread—they began to trip off my tongue as though I’d never been a mile from the river.”
Overcome by the image of Isabel’s t
ransformation into a honey child, Eleanor laughed out loud. Isabel’s eyes met hers, at first surprised, then she laughed too. “You’re quite right,” she said to Eleanor, and went on speaking to the group at large. “We became very good friends. He had a steamship ticket he couldn’t use, as he was there on business and his firm had cabled him to stay in Rome. So I got out, bringing such luggage as I had with me.”
“Where are the rest of your things?” asked Clara.
“In Berlin, darling. Want to try and get them?”
Behind Isabel a voice called, “Hello, everybody!”
They saw Kester, approaching with a general grin at the company. Eleanor watched him, wondering how it was that no matter what his circumstances Kester always looked like a fortunate youth immune from the common plagues of life, and as always she was proud of him. “Can a man get a drink here?” he was asking. “Bob, you left a treatise on leprosy at my house. Well, for heaven’s sake—Isabel Valcour!”
They had moved to make way for him. Isabel turned her glass by its stem as she glanced up. “Hello, Kester.”
“It’s good to see you.” He looked her up and down. “But that’s not Berlin. It’s Paris. Or am I wrong?”
“No, Paris.” She smiled, watching him. “Don’t tell me I haven’t changed a bit.”
“Of course you’ve changed,” said Kester.