by Gwen Bristow
Eleanor laughed grimly. It was the only speech made by either of them until Bob came in.
Bob gave Eleanor a fresh pile of flu-masks, and reminded her to keep up her daily ration of iron.
She tried to smile. “I’ve already taken enough iron to make a railroad.”
“You don’t look it,” he returned.
Eleanor walked to the door with them. Violet put her hand comfortingly on Eleanor’s shoulder. “Don’t let yourself get so distracted,” she urged. “You’ll come through this mess. You’re the sort that comes through anything.”
Eleanor did not reply. She closed the door behind them and went up to her room, where she lay down across the bed with her hands pressed to her throbbing temples. Wasn’t there anybody in the world, she wondered, who realized that the valiant people to whom nobody ever thought of giving sympathy because they always pulled through, sometimes reached a place where they would give anything they owned to be weak and babyish and have a strong loving bosom to receive their heads?
The next morning when she looked at her haggard face in the mirror she decided to get away from the house and think quietly. Ordering Bessie to stop washing the breakfast dishes and stay with the children, she got out the car and began to drive slowly toward town, for she had learned before now that the motions of driving required just enough attention to free the under part of her mind for thinking through a problem.
The streets were bright with billboards. Pictured soldiers grinned at her, while pictured mothers regarded them with noble eyes; Eleanor wondered why the mother of every eighteen-year-old doughboy should be painted as looking about eighty. But this did not tell her where she could find cotton-pickers. Lovely women in Greek robes waved flags on the posters urging the public to buy Liberty Bonds or join the Red Cross. There were portraits of President Wilson and Herbert Hoover. “Food will win the war! Don’t waste it!” “Every home in which cornmeal is used becomes thereby a bulwark of democracy!” “Save sugar! An American girl of 1918 should be as offended at the offer of a box of candy as a girl of 1776 would have been at the offer of a cup of tea.” “Food will win the war—every boy and girl who works in a vegetable patch is a Soldier of Freedom!”
Eleanor jammed on the brakes. She had an idea.
Turning the car to the curb she stayed there a moment, gazing up at the picture of an urchin in overalls striding along with a rake over his shoulder. After looking at him awhile she chuckled, wondering if she could make a speech. The papers were full of addresses by Four-Minute Men the country over and it should not be hard to find resounding phrases. Alternate feelings of boldness and guilt scrambled for precedence as she considered. She looked ahead at the road. “I didn’t start it,” she told herself. “I can’t stop it. I might as well use it.” She started the motor and drove to the high school.
The principal was in his office. Eleanor told him her plan.
“The boys and girls want to help win the war. But they feel there’s so little they can do. They buy thrift stamps, but most of them have such small allowances that they can’t buy many. Have you had a hard time filling your quota?”
Yes, the principal admitted, he had.
“I’m paying two dollars and a half a hundred pounds for picking cotton,” said Eleanor. “Here’s a battle they can fight. They’ll be the army behind the lines. If you’ll urge them to buy thrift stamps with their wages the Dalroy school will go over the top with its quota before the end of the month.”
He was listening with interest. Yes, it was a good idea. She could make a speech in the auditorium tomorrow morning.
“I’ll be glad to,” said Eleanor. “By the way, who’s the leader of the high school band?”
He told her, and as soon as school was out Eleanor went to see the band leader.
She had the band on the platform in the auditorium when she spoke the next morning. The students were assembled before her.
“It takes a bale of cotton to fire a fifteen-inch gun,” she exclaimed to them. “The winning of the war depends on the American South, the cottonfield of the world! The armies fighting for peace and freedom are counting on us. Come to Ardeith and fight there for salvation of the world’s democracy!”
They began to applaud.
“Thank you!” she cried. “You boys who are too young to go to France, you girls who are sorry you can’t be soldiers, mobilize to give the soldiers means to fight. Every bale of cotton we get this year brings nearer the day of universal peace. Be soldiers in the Harvest Army and win the war!”
The band, forewarned, struck up The Star-Spangled Banner. This brought them to their feet. They started to cheer.
“Thank you!” Eleanor shouted again above the din. “There’ll be trucks at the schoolhouse at three o’clock.”
That afternoon the trucks were there, draped with flags, and the band played patriotic music in the first one while the volunteers rode to the plantation. The fields of Ardeith were blazing with posters.
THIS COTTON IS GOING TO AMERICAN GUNS!
COTTON-PICKERS WILL WIN THE WAR
She had placarded the weighing-house:
BRING IN THE COTTON FOR AMERICA AND BUY THRIFT STAMPS WITH YOUR WAGES
By the first of the next week she had billboards on the streets all over town.
COTTON WILL WIN THE WAR!
A SCHOOLBOY ON A PLANTATION FIGHTS THE KAISER AS WELL AS A SOLDIER IN THE TRENCHES. FIGHT WITH US AT ARDEITH!
Five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday, Eleanor sent the boys and girls into the fields. Every Saturday morning they began with a ceremony. The band playing at their head, they marched to a platform outdoors where a flagpole stood, and as the flag was raised Eleanor led them in their pledge of allegiance. Then the band struck up Dixie, or The Stars and Stripes Forever, and they marched two and two into the fields to pick cotton for democracy.
To each one she gave a card marked in squares, each square meaning twenty pounds of cotton picked, so Wyatt could keep up with payments. “Pay them in single dollar bills, Wyatt,” she instructed him. “It looks like more. And be sure the bills are crisp.”
He gave her a long look and sighed. “I declare to my soul, Mrs. Larne,” he announced somberly, “I never did see a lady like you.”
Eleanor laughed. “What did I tell you?”
She even got them public notice. She told the New Orleans papers about her Harvest Army, bringing in the crop for the sake of the men overseas, and they sent photographers to Ardeith. Pictures of the boys and girls in the cottonfields appeared a few days later, and between publicity and patriotism Eleanor found herself one of the few employers of the year who had an abundance of labor. Some of the children caught flu that fall, others got tired and dropped out, and still others broke down cotton plants in their clumsiness, but the scheme worked. She got the cotton in.
The crop totaled twelve hundred and ten bales. She sold the cotton for thirty-eight cents a pound. The gross value of the 1918 crop was a little over two hundred thousand dollars.
4
There was one more morsel of a task, and then she would be done. She had to write the last checks that would clear her of owing a penny to anybody in the world.
She was sick with fatigue and at the same time thrilled with victory. It was ten o’clock at night when she realized that a few minutes of check-writing was all that was left for her to do. Her deposit slips had been returned from the bank that afternoon, and she had turned them over in her hands, too tired to grasp at once that the goal for which she had been striving so passionately was lying within reach. How much of this year’s return was clear profit she could not tell until she had balanced her books, but her thoughts wandered happily among the possible figures. She was so tired now she could hardly see to write checks, but she concluded that a night’s sleep would refresh her and she could attend to her ledgers in the morning.
But though sh
e was exquisitely happy, she did not sleep well that night. Her head ached persistently, and the ticking clock made her so jumpy that she got up at last and put it in the bathroom. When at last she fell asleep she had muddled dreams in which she was alternately working among rows of cotton the pages of figures that seemed to stretch through all eternity. She woke aching in every joint, and writing the checks loomed ahead of her as a task too onerous to be performed.
Disgusted at her weakness, Eleanor dragged herself downstairs and boiled an egg she did not want and made herself eat it, along with a pot of coffee in the hope that it would ease her throbbing head. It did no good, but she gave orders that she was not to be interrupted and went into her study.
The joints of her fingers hurt so that she found it hard to open the desk, and she fumbled with the fountain pen like a child, finding it hard to unscrew the cap. She opened her checkbook. “In ten minutes,” she reminded herself, “I’ll be done. Ten minutes.”
She could see everything at once—her realization that the plantation was mortgaged, the collapse of the cotton market, her discovery of gun-cotton, her tractors, her years of work. Now, after ten minutes of pushing a pen, it would be over. She had her victory, and strangely, she felt so wretched that she did not care. She began to make out the first check.
It was hard for her to write. Her fingers moved slowly, and what she wrote was not clear before her eyes. The curious creeping aches would not leave her.
A paralyzing fear struck her, and she pushed it violently out of her mind. She was not sick, she never was, she had no time for it. She had to write these checks and the letters to go with them. She could not have influenza.
But there was no fighting back her sensations. Influenza crept into her hips and knees, wrenching at them till she felt as if the joints were coming apart; into her feet, till she was conscious of ten separate toes, each one with a drag of its own; into her shoulders till she could hardly raise her hand to push the hair back from her pounding head; into her fingers, till she could not support her head at all and let it fall down on her chest. There was an empty feeling behind her forehead. Her skin was blazing with fever and inside her was a chill as though a great icicle had been thrust down beside her spine.
Eleanor sat there, aware that the room was misshapen and moving around. Then for a moment her eyes cleared. She had one more check to write. Moving her hand slowly she grasped the pen; she took a deep breath, steadied the checkbook, and wrote it, moving the pen slowly and heavily, and signing her name like a child just learning how to write. The pen fell out of her hand again. It slipped down to her lap, leaving a blot on her dress, and rolled on the floor. Eleanor looked at it, blinking. The pen moved around. Everything in the room was wavering like shadows in the firelight. She did not care. Through the fever and the thousand aches a small clear spot in her mind knew that she had finished.
She felt herself slip down to the floor, and she caught at the chair she had been occupying. She was not unconscious. She knew she was on the floor, her head on the seat of the chair, and her hands holding it because it felt solid in the tottering room. A hundred ideas tumbled about in her head. Somebody had to get the children’s dinner, Bob Purcell had warned her she would go to pieces, she couldn’t help it, but it did not matter very much now because she had finished everything. Somebody would mail those checks and Ardeith was safe, and she had enough money to live on a long time even if she did not plant any cotton at all. When Cameo found her an hour later she was still on the floor, mumbling that she had finished.
Cameo called the yard-boy, and between them they carried her upstairs. By this time she was quite delirious.
5
Eleanor was aware of fever and of an acute discomfort that reached from her head to her feet, making her surprised that there should be so much of her to ache at once. It was dark, with spots of light piercing the black now and then and hurting her eyes, and she kept remembering figures and saying them out loud, seventeen cents, twenty cents, twenty-seven cents, thirty-eight cents. She said them over and over.
After a long time she realized that she was lying in bed and that it seemed dark because her eyes were closed. Somebody was drawing the covers up over her arms. She opened her eyes. She was in her own bed, under the crimson tester, and bending over her was a strange woman in white with a white mask over the lower part of her face. Eleanor said “Thirty-eight cents,” and the woman paid no attention. She moved away and Eleanor saw, sitting at the foot of the bed, a curiously familiar man whose mouth and nose were hidden by a square of gauze. She looked at the man and he looked at her. He was big and thick, and his eyes were blue and what she could see of his face was ruddy. Eleanor moved uncomfortably. He reached to pat her, awkwardly, with a big hand that had square nails, and when she saw his hand she knew him. She stopped saying figures. A strange peace came over her aching body. She lay quiet for a moment, and then said, “Dad.”
He sprang up and came to the head of the bed. It seemed quite impossible for her to say anything else. He sat down on the bedstep. Eleanor managed to draw her hand out from under the cover, and he took it in his. From behind his mask he said, “It’s all right, baby.” She held his hand and let her eyes close again. He was here, he was always around somehow when she needed him, and he would take care of her because he knew she could not do any more. She could give herself up to being just as sick as she pleased.
In the weeks after that Eleanor was aware of very little except her own suffering. There came what seemed like years and years of torment when she could not breathe or speak and her only wish was that they would quit worrying her so she could die and get it over with. Without recalling that anybody had told her, she gathered that her attack of war-flu had turned into the particularly frightful type of pneumonia that sometimes followed it in a constitution too depleted to fight back.
But she came up out of it, white and weak and tired, and slowly she began to take an interest in things and ask questions. Her father was frequently there—he made quick trips between Ardeith and his levee camps—and in his absence her mother was with her, or one of her sisters. The children were in New Orleans with her family. Mamie and Dilcy were well. The horror was passing.
The nurse put her into the wheel-chair one bright morning and let her sit by the window in a shaft of pale winter sunshine.
“You have several letters from your husband,” she said. “Your father has them.”
“Please!” said Eleanor.
The nurse smiled and went to call Fred, who was downstairs having a mid-morning cup of coffee. Fred came in accompanied by Bob Purcell. Eleanor gave Bob her hand.
“Don’t say ‘I told you so,’” she begged.
Bob smiled at her. “I won’t. You’ve been punished enough.”
“You’ll be all right now,” said Fred. He sat down near her.
“Have you got those letters from Kester?” Eleanor asked.
“Sure, right here.” Fred took them out of his breast pocket. “I hope you’ll forgive me for opening and answering them. I hated to, but I thought I should since you couldn’t.”
She held out her hand and received them. “What does he say?”
Fred chuckled. “A lot of stuff I won’t embarrass you by repeating but I guess you’re sentimental enough to appreciate it. He ought to be coming home soon.”
Eleanor sprang forward in her chair with such force that Bob put restraining hands on her shoulders. “Home?” she cried, “Is he hurt?”
“Quiet,” said Bob. He asked gently, “Eleanor, haven’t any of us had the grace to tell you the war’s over?”
“The war’s over? Oh, my God.” Eleanor covered her face with her hands and turned her head on the pillow behind her to hide the tears she was too weak to stop. When she could turn around Bob and Fred were looking guiltily at each other, shaking their heads.
“That anybody could have missed the racket of Armistice
Day,” said Fred. He got up and leaned over Eleanor’s chair. “Go on and cry, sugar,” he added. “Don’t be ashamed. Everybody but you got rid of those tears a week ago.”
She managed to sob out, “Dad, the plantation is all clear. Cotton will drop now, won’t it?—but it doesn’t matter. I’ve done everything.”
“Yes, baby,” said Fred.
Chapter Eleven
1
Eleanor spent the rest of the winter waiting for Kester to come home. As by the first of the year she was quite recovered, she occupied her impatience by preparing Ardeith for his welcome. The house was polished and painted till only by its design and furniture could anybody have guessed it was nearly a hundred years old. Eleanor had the oak trees pruned and trimmed, and the gardens landscaped. Bringing electricians from New Orleans she had Kester’s bedroom equipped with a telephone connecting with the servants’ phones downstairs, a heater for chilly mornings and a concealed fan that in response to a push-button would send forth gusts of air on hot afternoons. She had his bathroom doubled in size, its walls and floor tiled in two shades of blue, and provided it with sybaritic devices—a gigantic blue bathtub, glassed-in shower, shaving mirror with indirect lights, a long dressing mirror in the door, a wilderness of faucets for sprays and steam, brushes, mats, and colored towels with his monogram. Remembering how he hated figures she installed an adding machine in his study. She bought him an automobile, long and gleaming, and had a new garage built for the protection of this and her own smart little roadster.
Looking around at what she had accomplished Eleanor was aglow with pride. Everything from the nursery to the boundary line of the plantation was a pattern of smooth mechanical order. In the house there was little to do that could not be done by the pressing of a button or the turning of a switch. Outdoors, except for cotton-picking, human hands were needed only for the guiding of machines.