by Gwen Bristow
She stood feeling as though he had lashed her across the face with a whip. Trembling with her effort to keep a tight hold on her temper, she said,
“You don’t quite know what you’re talking about, Kester. Your picturesque way of running the plantation had it bankrupt.”
“It was bankrupt the year before the war, but after that we were paying the mortgage. And we weren’t doing it this way.”
“At the rate we were going,” she answered tensely, “it would have taken years and years. This way, we’ve nearly doubled our rate of profit.”
“Yes, I know, and that’s all that matters to you. This way, you’ve cleared out everything that made Ardeith warm and lovely, a place to be born in and live in and die in. You’ve swept away every track of the people who built it and loved it. You straightened the dent in my great-grandmother’s coffee-pot.”
Her chest rose and fell with a breath that had to be drawn with an effort because her lungs seemed paralyzed with anger.
“I think—you’re—a fool,” she said.
“Yes, by your standards I’m a fool. A sentimental fool. And by my standards you’re a fool. Eleanor, man does not live by bread alone!”
Her chest was full of pain. “I thought you were going to like it. I thought you’d be glad to be rich.”
“I don’t like to be nigger-rich,” Kester said deliberately.
“Nigger-rich?” She was so angry that her breath was coming with difficulty and she could hardly speak.
“Yes. You’ve seen darkies in prosperous times. Pink silk shirts and hanging-lamps and phonographs, anything bright or noisy—yes, I’m saying it now and you can stand up there and listen. Before I came home I’d seen cartoons of the war profiteers, complacent and porky, but it didn’t occur to me I was going to have to live with one.”
“Complacent. Porky.” Eleanor was too shocked to do more than echo. Her hands were holding each other so tight that the knuckles were prominent and the skin was stretched across their backs.
“Just because you haven’t gone in for diamond sunbursts on your bosom,” said Kester, “do you think there’s any difference? Your machines and your push-buttons and all your ostentatious efficiency!”
“That’s—what—you—think of me,” she said, slowly because she did not have breath enough to speak fast. “That’s what I get for the work I’ve done.”
“I know how hard you’ve worked. I’ve tried not to say it.”
“I worked every minute I could stay awake,” said Eleanor. “It didn’t matter how tired I was or that I nearly died of pneumonia. I was doing it for you.”
“For me?” He smiled wisely. “I’ll listen to a lot of nonsense from you, Eleanor, but don’t try to tell me that. You were doing it for your own self-esteem, to prove to yourself that you could do an almost superhuman job without anybody’s help. If you’d been remaking this plantation for me you’d have done it with some regard for what I wanted. You knew me well enough to have realized I wouldn’t like this shiny exhibition. I’m not saying you haven’t as much right to your ways as I have to mine, but don’t try to make me believe you were doing this for anybody’s pleasure but your own.”
“I thought,” she managed to say, “you were going to be delighted.”
“You thought I was going to be a rapturous audience. All you wanted from me was accolades. God knows I tried to give them to you.”
She looked him up and down. Kester stood just in front of the half-open door, hands in his coat pockets, talking to her with the smile of passionless cruelty she had seen on his face once or twice before, and that she dreaded more than any other expression he could assume.
“You’re having a good time telling me all this, aren’t you?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes, I think I am. I’ve held it back so long.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? When I was nearly distracted wondering what was wrong?”
“I didn’t know you were wondering. I thought I was applauding very well.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t. I suppose in the back of my mind I knew I couldn’t go on forever without saying this, but I kept putting it off. I was so sorry for you.”
“Sorry for me?”
“Why yes. You were so pleased with yourself. You thought it was all so pretty.”
“I did think so,” said Eleanor. “I still think so. I like convenience and efficiency and order. And whether you like them or not I’m going to keep them.”
“Not like this,” Kester retorted. “I want to enjoy life and I can’t enjoy this kind. I’m going to have that horrible bathroom ripped out and a plain white one put in. I’m going to take that gadget-ridden automobile down and turn it in for one that doesn’t look as if it had been made to show off a pawnbroker’s opulence. I’m going to plant a few watermelons in these exquisite fields and let a few pickaninnies eat them on the levee. And as long as we make a living I don’t care if I cut your precious profits in two. I’m going to get Ardeith back to something like what it used to be.”
She crossed the room and faced him. “Oh no you’re not.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not. It’s your turn to listen.” She stood in front of him, speaking clearly. “I’ve paid the price of your irresponsibility and now that I’ve done it I’ll be damned if I’ll take your contempt. Has it entered your head that by every shading of right and justice this plantation belongs to me?”
Kester did not answer. He simply stared at her. She went on, speaking so that every word was separate from every other.
“Certainly it does. When I came here Ardeith wasn’t yours. It belonged to the Southeastern Exchange Bank and they were letting you live here. When they threatened to make you move out I went to work. In the beginning you had to tell me what to do but even in that first summer I worked more than you did. When the market collapsed I sold the furniture and got Mr. Robichaux to take the jewelry as security for our interest. When dad sent me that clipping about guncotton I telephoned Sebastian and told him to hold our cotton because you were spending the night with Isabel Valcour. I got the loan from Mr. Tonelli that let us raise the crop that year. When you thought the war would be more exciting than paying your debts you merely said to me, ‘You’ll do it.’ And I did. If I had run around to patriotic tea-parties after you went to camp you wouldn’t have come home to Ardeith. You’re living here because I bought this place and paid for it. If you don’t like the way I operate my plantation, I’m sorry.”
Kester had not moved as he listened to her. Now as she paused he stirred slightly, moved his head and shoulders, and slowly took one hand from his pocket to reach for the doorknob behind him.
“You are perfectly right,” he said in a low voice. “Forgive me for being a very ungracious guest.”
He went out.
As he started across the hall Eleanor leaned against the side of the doorway, watching him in bitter triumph. Kester opened the door of his own bedroom, went inside and closed it.
Eleanor could hear him moving around, opening doors and pulling out drawers. Suddenly her heart gave several quick little jumps and she caught her hands over it. She had not meant to be quite so cruel. Her words came back to her with their simple and unmistakable implication, which no man of Kester’s nature could have failed to hear. The walls began to totter as she realized that he was acting upon it.
She ran across the hall and flung open the door of his room.
Two suitcases were on the floor, half full of a jumble of shirts and shoes and pajamas. The drawers of his bureau stood open, and he was going back and forth between the bureau and the suitcases, bringing garments and dumping them on the piles. As she came in he glanced up, but he did not pause or speak to her.
“Kester,” she gasped, “where are you going?”
“I really don’t know,
” said Kester. He was on his knees putting his toothbrushes into a case.
“I didn’t mean that!” she exclaimed. “I never thought of it!”
“I should have thought of it myself,” Kester returned quietly. “Stupid of me not to have realized that six months is a long time to ask for free lodging.”
Eleanor laced her hands together, moving them till she could hear the little swishing sound of her palms against each other.
“Won’t you forgive me, Kester?” she pled. “I was so angry—I hardly knew what I was talking about. I didn’t mean to say what you thought I did.”
“Would you mind moving so I can get that coat?” asked Kester.
She took a step to one side, mechanically observing that it was just like Kester to have slung his coat over a projecting light-bracket on the wall. He took it down and began folding it.
Eleanor stood where she was, silenced by her utter helplessness against what was happening. Kester went on packing his bags, muddling clothes and shaving-brushes in the most disorderly fashion and putting in shoes where the polish would be sure to smudge his handkerchiefs. She had an impulse to say, “Let me do that, you’ll never find anything when you open those bags,” but she did not say that or anything else; she simply stood there, watching him throw his things together and then close the suitcases. He had stuffed them so hastily that the lids and bottoms would not meet until he had put his knee on the top of each one in turn and strained at the straps. Then he stood up, carrying a suitcase in each hand, and went past her, through the doorway and into the hall.
She came after him. He was about to start down the staircase.
“Kester,” she said, “Kester, I told you I was sorry. My darling—why are you going away?”
He set down the bags. Turning around, he looked at her. He looked her up and down, his face expressionless but for a flicker at the corner of his mouth.
“If you weren’t poor white trash,” he answered slowly and distinctly, “you wouldn’t have to ask.”
He picked up the bags and went down the stairs. Standing with her hands on her throat, which was closing and choking her so that she could not move or speak and could hardly breathe, Eleanor heard the front door closing and then the sound of the gadget-ridden car in the avenue.
Later that night a Negro man brought the car back. Cameo, who answered the doorbell, brought Eleanor a note.
“Sorry I had to borrow your car, but I had the tank filled. Kester.”
Chapter Twelve
1
For a week Eleanor heard nothing more from Kester, then she received a note four lines long telling her he was working at the government cotton station up the river. He did not write her again. She could not tell if his silence was a weapon he was deliberately using to hurt her or if he merely had nothing to say.
Eleanor had never been more uncertain or more wretched, for never had she had such a blow to her self-respect. Whether Kester’s hand or her own had been heaviest in dealing it she could not decide. All she knew was that Kester had walked out of Ardeith and she had no way to tell if he had any intention of returning.
At first she could not think. It was like the winter before when she had been so ill that physical discomfort had been like a shell separating everything else from her consciousness, only what enclosed her now was pain of the spirit. She walked around the house, or drove into the country for such distances that she was half hypnotized with the motions of driving. Usually so clear and sure of its purposes, her mind now was muddy with confusion. Kester despised her. He had called her poor white trash. She lay awake at night remembering it, trembling with rage and shame. Long ago Kester had given her his own definition of that term: “No fineness, no delicacy, no knowledge that some things are Caesar’s and some things are God’s.”
She recalled their last dialogue. Her concluding speech to Kester had been intolerable. She had driven a hateful truth into him like a knife, with a power to hurt him that she would not have had if he had not, by loving her, given it to her. But he had plagued her past endurance, she told herself savagely; nobody could remain patient before his habit of substituting charm for a sense of moral obligation.
Over and over she retraced her analysis this far, and stopped. She could go no further because she loved Kester, she loved him for the very levity and glitter that had driven her to exasperation, and she wanted nothing in the world but to have him back.
She wrote him a letter beginning, “The children ask for you a dozen times a day,” and then tore it up. It was true, the children did ask for him, but that was a bludgeon she would scorn herself for using and he would scorn her for attempting it. She pacified Cornelia and Philip by telling them their father would be back soon. To other inquiries she said Kester was at the cotton station upriver, and said it so crisply that before long she was receiving no more questions. With a fierce desire for privacy, she went about as usual, willing to discuss any subject on earth but her personal life.
Then, vaguely and tormentingly, she began to be aware that her affairs were not private. At first the rumor was like a cobweb that one brushes away on a dark street, not sure whether one has encountered a cobweb or a trick of the shadows. But though she tried to believe it was a figment of her strained imagination she began to feel like a schoolgirl suspecting that everybody but herself was sharing a secret.
She went into the drug store and saw Clara and Cousin Sylvia talking in undertones to each other over glasses of Coca-Cola. As she approached the table they stopped abruptly, and said, “Why hello, Eleanor!” with exaggerated cordiality. Clara added, “Won’t you sit down?”
Eleanor said no, she was in a hurry. While she was buying a jar of cold cream and a brush for Philip’s hair—he had goldenish curls that were shamefully wasted on a boy—she heard Sylvia make a carefully indifferent remark about the weather. Eleanor glanced around, wondering why Sylvia should wear ruffles around her scrawny neck, trying to look young when she so obviously wasn’t, and Sylvia moved her eyes away a fraction of a second too late to conceal from Eleanor that they had been on her.
When she reached home she went to the kitchen to give an order about the children’s supper. Dilcy and Bessie were talking, and through the half-open door Eleanor heard Dilcy exclaim, “Why, it ain’t so!” and Bessie retorted, “Well, dat’s what dey’s sayin’.” As Eleanor entered they both turned sharply, saying “Yes ma’am?” with an excess of deference, and looking as if they might have blushed had they been white.
Eleanor had promised to go to a tea at Silverwood the following Sunday afternoon, in honor of Clara’s sister, Mrs. Meynard, who was coming down from Baton Rouge on a visit. The tea was placidly uninteresting until during a lull in the conversation Mrs. Meynard asked innocently, “What’s Isabel Valcour doing these days? Is she still in town?” Clara answered hastily, “Oh yes, she’s still in town,” and as she said it her face pinkened and she began urging Violet to play the piano. Two or three others joined, fluttering as though to cover the embarrassment of a guest who had upset the gravy on the tablecloth. Violet complied with a coolness that was in itself a rebuke to them, while Eleanor sat nibbling wafers and feeling as conspicuous as a flagpole. But she blessed Violet’s self-possession. Violet was a practical woman who took no pleasure in minding other people’s business.
These occurrences were too frequent for her to overlook them; all she could do for the sake of her own dignity was pretend not to notice them. The chatter was all around her, in kitchen and parlor alike. She heard it and she did not hear it. Nobody told her anything, yet from everybody she learned something. Isabel was never invited anywhere Eleanor went and except for that slip at Clara’s Eleanor never heard a mention of her name. Several of Eleanor’s acquaintances began to be officiously kind. It drove her to fury. The whole business made her feel that an indecent advantage was being taken of her, as she might have felt had she seen the neighbors examining her clot
hesline in an attempt to discover how often she changed her underwear.
The fact that she was helpless drove her to bravado. She continued to go out, greeting her friends on the street and accepting invitations with offhand pleasantness. She gave a party for the children, she invited people to dinner, she went to entertainments and was very gay when she got there, and bought more clothes than ever before in a single season. When she was alone she paced the floor of her room till she thought she must have trodden miles across the rug, blaming herself, blaming Kester, hating Isabel; but her one aim in life had become that of not giving anybody a chance to guess what she was bearing. She walked through the halls and looked up at the pictured faces of her predecessors at Ardeith. Her eyes searching these women who had married men named Larne—women in Colonial powder, Napoleonic high waistline, balloon sleeves of the eighteen-thirties, Civil War hoop-skirt—she wondered what they had in common and what lay behind their painted dignity. Happiness, disappointment, secure joy or desperate grief—they could not all have experienced the same destiny, but one thing she was sure they had shared, the power of endurance. They would have turned nothing but serenity to the artists who painted them, holding their conviction that a lady wore an enigmatic smile above her personal life. They were part of a great tradition. Eleanor had never thought much about that until now, but now she thought of it and understood it. They bore pain bravely because they could bear pain more easily than pity, knowing that pity was very close to contempt.
2
Late one morning during the first week of December Cousin Sylvia made Eleanor a visit. Eleanor was surprised when Cameo summoned her to the parlor, for the day was raw and gloomy with mist, hardly a time to be chosen for a round of ceremonious calls. Her knowledge of Sylvia suggested that it was more likely to have been chosen as a day when one could be sure of finding the object of one’s efforts alone by her own fire, and as she descended the stairs Eleanor was buckling on an armor of unconcern against the pricks of Sylvia’s lance. She entered the parlor smiling brightly.