by Gwen Bristow
“I doubt if he’d do it anyway,” she said. “There are the younger ones still in school. He has no right to jeopardize their security for my sake.”
“You mean for my sake,” retorted Kester. “Of course he hasn’t. Your father is not going to risk losing everything he’s worked for just because you took it into your head to marry me.”
After a moment Eleanor asked, “How much money have you got?”
“I have—” Kester reached into his pocket, took out his cash and counted—“eleven dollars and thirty-four cents.”
“I have about six dollars in my purse,” said Eleanor, “and thirty-two dollars in my bank account.”
“And that’s all,” said Kester.
He sat with one leg swung across the other. She could see the sole of his shoe, with a hole worn through the first layer of the leather. They had held their cotton with a frantic hope. It was their last negotiable possession. But now what they faced was no longer the possibility of saving Ardeith, it was a lack of the simple necessities with which to go on living. The bills at the local shops would absorb Eleanor’s little income for months ahead. Their eyes met in despair.
“We’ve got to let the cotton go,” said Kester.
“Yes,” said Eleanor.
They sat looking at each other, bleakly.
In the morning Eleanor sat down at her typewriter and wrote Sebastian a letter telling him to sell the cotton. Kester, who could not typewrite, sat watching her. Eleanor began the letter four times. It was to be very simple, only a few lines long, but she kept making mistakes as though her hands refused to take the orders her mind was so reluctantly giving them. She tore out the fourth false beginning, wadded the sheet into a ball and flung it into the wastebasket. Without speaking, Kester came over to her and put his arms around her, and for a moment they stayed like that, saying nothing. At last Eleanor asked,
“What shall we do after December?”
“We may be able to rescue fifty or a hundred acres,” said Kester. “I can be a one-mule farmer.”
“And if we can’t have even that much?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kester.
Eleanor put her hands into his. Kester pressed them, then suddenly let them go. He walked over to the window and stood looking out at the swaying moss on the oaks and the azaleas thick with their bright, fragile blooms.
“Ardeith,” he said. “Philip Larne built a log cabin here. He raised indigo.”
“Kester, please stop.”
Without giving him a chance to go on she turned back to the typewriter and began the letter again. Its crisp phrases did not sound like a death-warrant. “This will give you authority to sell the cotton represented by the enclosed warehouse receipts… .”
“Here it is, Kester,” she said at length.
He leaned over the desk, read the letter and wrote his name at the end. “I’d better take it to town right away and mail it,” he said. “The price may drop any time.”
Bessie came in to announce dinner. They went into the dining-room and tried without much success to swallow what was in front of them—chicken and vegetables raised on the place, for they had not been able to buy groceries for weeks. “We’re living like sharecroppers already,” Eleanor thought, but she did not say it. During dinner neither of them said anything, except for Kester’s remarking that the peach orchard was beginning to bloom and looked mighty pretty.
As soon as their pretense at dinner was over Kester ordered his horse saddled and rode to town to mail the letter.
Eleanor walked around the house, feeling that she was saying goodbye to the place she had grown to love. At last she got out the rickety little car and went for a drive, hesitating at first at the waste of gasoline and then remembering that it no longer mattered. She drove along the river road, wondering how much they were going to be able to rescue from the ruins when they had to move.
The fields were full of fragrances and chirps and colors, and the peach orchard was glowing with bloom. As she drove Eleanor thought she had never known how sensitive to the countryside she had become, until now when she was about to lose it. Then she put her foot on the brake so suddenly that the car jerked and sputtered. In the peach orchard, sitting on the grass under the trees, she saw Kester and Isabel. They were engaged in such close conversation that they did not notice her as she passed.
Eleanor stepped on the gas-feed and the car jumped ahead. Around the curve she saw Kester’s horse tethered to a tree, and near it the smart little roadster Isabel had been driving since she came home, for though her income might be minute compared to what she was used to, it seemed enough to keep her supplied with all she needed.
Turning her car Eleanor drove past the orchard again. They had not moved. Isabel held her hat in her lap and the afternoon sun glinted on her hair. She sat with her ankles crossed in front of her, looking up at Kester as though his words were the most interesting she had ever listened to; it was the flatteringly seductive attitude of a woman wise in the ways of men, pleasing by letting herself be pleased. As Eleanor passed the orchard for the second time Kester said something that caused Isabel to throw back her head and laugh.
Eleanor was shaking with rage. She drove home, smothering her first impulse to interrupt them with the thought that she would not give Isabel the pleasure of seeing that Kester’s wife knew how successful she was. Leaving the car in the avenue, she went indoors and began to walk up and down the parlor. She was still pacing when Dilcy came in with Cornelia.
“Take her outdoors,” Eleanor said shortly.
“Fader?” asked Cornelia. Her eyes searched the room for him. “Fader?”
“Miss Elna,” said Dilcy reproachfully, “it’s gettin’ cold out dere.”
“Did you hear me tell you to take her out?”
“Yassum.” Dilcy retired in dudgeon.
Eleanor went on pacing. “He promised me!” she said to herself, over and over. “This time I won’t be quiet.”
Since last November, when Kester had promised he would not see her alone again, she had not mentioned Isabel to him. This was the first week in March. Kester had given the promise of his own accord, and it had not occurred to her to doubt that he meant to keep his word. She remembered how readily he had said it, as readily as he would have offered a child a stick of candy to keep her quiet. She had a disgusting sense of having been cheated and secretly laughed at. It set her on fire. Today they had let go the cotton, unless a miracle happened they would lose Ardeith, yet she had not said a word blaming Kester for their tragedy. And this was his gratitude. It was too much.
The sun was going down when he returned. She heard the horse’s hoofs in the avenue, and Kester running up the front steps.
“Hello,” he said as he came into the parlor. “Eleanor, don’t you think it’s chilly for Cornelia to be out? Dilcy said you told her—”
Eleanor wheeled around. “You promised me not to go to Isabel Valcour’s house again,” she exclaimed to him. “I suppose you decided that didn’t mean you weren’t to meet her in the peach orchard?”
Kester had stopped short as she spoke. He banged the door behind him. “You’re the biggest fool I ever saw in my life,” he said.
Eleanor’s chest rose and fell with a short indignant breath. “Am I a fool to want to know why you said you’d let her alone if you didn’t mean it?”
“Good Lord, Eleanor, can I help passing anybody on the public highway?”
“I didn’t notice that you passed her.”
Kester stood with his back to the door, facing her. His answer had the deadly clearness that anger always produced in his speech. “Isabel was driving along the road. She stopped and called to ask if she could have some blossoms. I went in to help her cut them.”
“You weren’t cutting blossoms when I saw you.”
“Is it a crime,” he demanded, “to engage in civi
l conversation?”
“What did you find to talk about, I wonder?”
“The lurid subject,” he returned evenly, “happened to be Sylvia. Isabel started by telling me Sylvia was asking everybody to dress dolls to be sent to the Belgian children. I had told her once how Sylvia had wanted you to buy gelatine.”
“Gelatine? Sylvia didn’t mention gelatine to me till after Christmas. Have you been meeting Isabel all winter?”
By this time Kester was furious. When he was furious he did not, like Eleanor, let his words tumble out in a flood. He answered in a low voice more cutting than any display of temper could have been. Certainly, he said, he had seen Isabel several times this winter. Isabel’s house was on the river road not far from the southern border of Ardeith and they couldn’t help running into each other now and then. When she asked his counsel it seemed the simplest friendly response to give what he could. Isabel needed a friend. Her father had died while she was in Germany, she had nobody to talk to, and besides it was his own business. He had not mentioned it to Eleanor because he preferred to avoid the kind of jealous tirade she had started now and that he had known she would start if she got the chance to do it.
Eleanor’s wrath had risen as he talked. She was so angry that her voice quivered when she spoke. “Are you going to keep on seeing her?”
“I’m going to do as I please,” said Kester. “I wasn’t bought on a slave-block.”
Eleanor felt as if her head were about to explode. Her months of labor, her worry about Ardeith, her despair at having to sell the cotton, her whole piled-up burden of fatigue and frustration crashed as though glad to find a concrete object on which to fling itself. She began to talk. Her words came out of her without any conscious arrangement behind them. Every line she spoke was prompted by another detail of the past year’s tedium but they were all thrown at Kester and Isabel. At the moment she was aware only of her anger that Kester had not kept his promise, so her words were aimed at nothing else, but they carried the weight of her anger at everything else and piled it on his shoulders.
Kester was amazed. He did not realize what she was doing, any more than she did; he knew only that she was accusing him of sins he had not committed and had not meant to commit. Once or twice he tried to stop her, but he might as well have put out his hand to stop the river rushing through a break in a long-strained levee. At last he cried,
“Will you in God’s name shut up?”
“Why should I? Are you going to let that woman alone?”
“Why should I?” he exclaimed in return. “For the joy of watching you as you look now?”
“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“You look like a witch,” said Kester. “And you sound like one.”
“I can’t work fourteen hours a day and look like a siren. If you’d wanted a woman who was helpless and adoring and sweet why didn’t you marry one?”
“I wish I had,” said Kester. He said it slowly, his hands behind him holding the doorknob.
“One who would spend her life telling you how wonderful you were, no matter what you did?”
“Yes!” said Kester. He opened the door.
“It’s too bad,” she said scornfully, “that my manners have not been polished by centuries of ladyism.”
“You’re mighty right they haven’t,” Kester replied. The parlor door banged, the front door banged, and a moment later she heard the car rattling down the avenue.
Eleanor dropped into a chair. She put up her hands to her throbbing temples. For the moment she was not thinking at all. Her rage had exhausted her mind, so that it felt pumped dry of words and ideas alike, and she sat where she was, holding her head, her elbows on her knees.
She never knew how long it was that she stayed there, blankly watching the shadows as they drew in, but slowly her numb consciousness began to waken. As it did so she found that she was trembling, not with cold—for though the fire had burned down to a pile of glowing ashes its warmth was still in the room—but with an unfamiliar sensation of terror. As she moved her hands down from her temples and sat up, she knew why it was; she was afraid of a situation that she had not had to face in her marriage before, but that was there now, and she was afraid less because it was there than because she had put it there herself. No matter what she had said to Kester in those dreadful minutes when she had been half insane, she had never really believed he had been unfaithful to her. She had simply believed Isabel wanted him to be, and that since Kester had been infatuated with her once he might be tempted again if he continued to put himself in her way. But now—Eleanor stood up. She walked toward the fireplace, drawn by the little glow of the ashes, for the room was quite dark. Mechanically, she picked up a stick of wood and dropped it across the andirons, then sat down on the rug, watching the wood catch fire while she realized more and more clearly that she had pushed Kester toward Isabel with a force none the less powerful because she had not while she was talking been rational enough to know she was using it.
It came back to her with a rush, what she had said to him and how she must have looked and sounded as she said it. She could not remember the words she had used, but she was understanding now that the storm she had let fall upon him this afternoon had been gathering ever since the war had broken her hopes; she had said Isabel, but she had meant weariness, disillusion, defeat. And Kester had heard her with an understanding that was also weary, disillusioned, defeated. As she sat on the floor by her weak little fire she had her first experience of blaming herself and not something else for a disaster that had overtaken her.
Bessie called her to supper. Eleanor roused herself long enough to tell her to go away.
At last she got to her feet and went upstairs. She waited for him, watching the darkness from her bedroom window, where above the trees was a moon like a withered onion. She watched the morning break, and as the light came among the oaks she felt utterly spent, but she had learned that nothing that anyone or anything could do to her could be as terrible as what she could do to herself.
There was a knock at the door. Eleanor sprang up, shaking with hope. She ran to open it, stumbling across a chair in her haste and nearly falling, and flung the door wide open. When she saw Bessie the sight of her was like a blow in the face.
“Why miss!” Bessie marveled. “You done up and dressed already?”
Eleanor had forgotten that she had not undressed. She hoped Bessie was not looking past her to see that her bed had not been occupied.
“Yes,” she said, “what is it?”
Bessie gave her a special delivery letter from New Orleans. The address was typewritten. Eleanor sat down, twirling the letter in her fingers, and feeling too much disappointed to read it, though it was important enough to bear a special delivery stamp. At last she tore open the envelope. A sheet of paper and two printed slips fell into her lap. The letter was from her father. He thought she should be interested in these, he sent love.
Eleanor was not interested. But she picked up the smaller clipping and began to read it. Fred had penciled on the side, “New York Times, March 2.”
It was a brief report, stating without comment that the British dreadnaught Queen Elizabeth, now at the Dardanelles, used a bale of cotton every time she fired one of her fifteen-inch guns.
2
Cloudy with weariness, Eleanor’s eyes tried to focus on the other piece of print her father had sent her. This was not a clipping, but a page torn out of a chemical encyclopedia, containing part of an article headed “Explosives.” The words were long and unfamiliar: “guncotton … nitrocellulose … cordite.”
Eleanor stood up, moving her arms and shoulders to relieve their tenseness. Slowly, past the turmoil of Kester, Isabel and her own remorse, a discovery was making its way into her mind. She went into the bathroom and threw cold water over her eyes, and came back to pick up her bedside telephone.
Sebastian would not be
at his office yet, so she rang him at home. When he answered she made herself speak with terse resolution.
“Sebastian, you’ll get a letter today from Kester telling you to sell the cotton. I’ve called to tell you he’s changed his mind. He wants to hold it.”
“Why Eleanor, what’s happened?”
“Kester will tell you later. But do you understand me?—hold the cotton.”
“Eleanor, I can’t advise you too strongly to sell now. Germany and England—”
“Did you ever hear of guncotton, Sebastian? Nitrocellulose? Cordite?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t matter. Hold that cotton.”
She hung up the receiver. The spurt of determination had drained out of her all the strength she had. As the telephone clicked Eleanor let herself relax on the bed, and without taking off her shoes or loosening her belt she went to sleep.
When she awoke the sun was high. For an instant she was surprised that she had slept so late, and surprised to find herself still dressed as she had been yesterday, then she remembered and sprang up. Kester had not come home. The servants looked as if they would have liked to know why, but Eleanor paid no attention. She gave her household orders, saw Cornelia safely in her high-chair for dinner, and made herself eat strawberries and drink coffee. When she had changed her dress she sat on the gallery steps, leaning back against one of the columns, and waited for Kester.
It was nearly four o’clock when he turned the car in between the gates. Eleanor sprang up. Kester stopped the car. As he got out she ran to meet him, and they reached for each other’s hands, while they both exclaimed, “Are you ever going to forgive me?”