by Gwen Bristow
She walked and walked, finally dulling even such slight thought as she had with the rhythm of movement. The wind was increasing; Eleanor paused a moment to place several hairpins more firmly, and went on. Veils of mist began to blow in from the river.
She became conscious that she was getting tired. Looking around, she thought she must have walked four or five miles, though she did not seem to have come very far. Her idea of distance on the river road had been fashioned by automobiles; in pre-machine days the plantations must have been remote. Eleanor remembered having heard that it used to be a four days’ journey from Ardeith to New Orleans. River steamboats had reduced that to less than a day, and now trains did it in less than two hours. Aeroplanes—
Suddenly she realized that it was quite dark.
She had known it was late, but had paid little attention to the day’s declining. Eleanor stopped where she was, unsure how long it had taken her to walk this far and calling herself stupid for not considering before that she was going to have to walk home along this lonesome country road. A wisp of hair blew across her face as she turned around and started back the way she had come.
The wind was screaming in the trees. Eleanor shivered and turned up her coat collar. Though the coat was not a heavy one, walking had kept her warm, but now the wind had begun to cut down the back of her neck and come through the fabric across her shoulders. As she fastened the collar around her throat a splash of rain struck her eyes.
The rain came violently. There was nothing invigorating about it; it tumbled down in a drowning torrent, lashing her like whips. In a few minutes she was soaked to the skin. Rain was pouring across her eyes and down her back, and the road had turned to a strip of mud. The wind blew her from side to side like a stalk. She could not see at all. More than once she stumbled into a tree, and as she put her feet blindly into puddles the mud caught and held her shoes till it was hard to take another step.
She was less frightened than irritated at her own lack of foresight. Any idiot could have noticed the weather, especially an idiot who had been born in Louisiana and experienced scores of these winter rains. It was going to rain for hours, drenching the earth and not pausing to give any peace to those who might be struggling through the downpour. Above her the oaks were creaking as the wind lashed through them. Her hair full of water and her shoes heavy with mud, her skirt flapping wetly against her legs, Eleanor fought her way along. Several times she nearly fell down, for her feet were so cold as to be almost without sensation. Through her battle with the rain came recollections of her last year’s pneumonia.
The headlights of a car cut a blurry shaft through the rain. Eleanor stopped short, ready to cry out with thankfulness. The car was going slowly and carefully, and she stepped in front of the lights, too miserable to think beyond the bliss of dryness. The car drew up alongside her and a Negro chauffeur leaned out.
“Evenin’, miss. Can we give you a lift?”
“You certainly can,” Eleanor exclaimed above the beat of the rain. The rear door of the car opened and a woman’s voice called,
“Get in.”
Eleanor scrambled inside. “Thank you! You’re very good.” As the door closed she sank back on the seat, still shivering so that it was hard to say anything else. The chauffeur turned to ask,
“I’ll take you on home, Miss Isabel?”
Eleanor turned her head. Beside her was only the shadowy outline of Isabel’s figure, though she supposed she herself must have been clearly visible in the glare of the headlights.
Isabel said, “Why yes,” and addressing Eleanor she added, “You won’t mind? We’re almost at the gate.”
Her voice was cool, courteous. Eleanor was startled, though she remembered that either by chance or by some unrecognized impulsion she had been walking directly toward the old Valcour house. “Not at all,” she returned with as much dignity as she could muster in her sodden state.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer to send you home,” Isabel continued, “but the chauffeur has a cold already and I don’t like to keep him out on a night like this.”
“I’ll telephone for a car,” said Eleanor, feeling that she was receiving the same consideration that would have been given a wet puppy. She felt so much like a wet puppy that she added, “I hope my dripping clothes won’t ruin the upholstery.”
“I’m sure not. The seat is leather,” Isabel assured her politely, and asked, “How did you happen to be caught in such a downpour?”
“I was taking a walk.” Eleanor spoke through chattering teeth. “The rain overtook me.”
“A walk? Four miles? No wonder you have such a fine figure. I never was much of a hiker.”
Eleanor fancied that Isabel was carrying off their meeting better than she was. But she was so cold, so wet and so wretched that she could not summon such urbanity. In the dark of the car her nostrils caught a warm whiff of perfume and her wrist brushed the end of a fur. She sneezed.
“Good heavens, you’re catching a chill,” said Isabel. The car stopped by her front steps, and she exclaimed, “Come in and get dry.”
Eleanor helplessly obeyed her. They ran up the front steps, and the driver touched his cap and drove off toward the garage. Isabel opened the front door. While she spoke to a servant, Eleanor stood just inside the doorway, her skirt dripping little puddles to the floor and water running into her eyes from the soaked braids of her hair. She sneezed again, and felt in her pocket for her handkerchief, though it was nothing but a useless ball of wet cloth. With impersonal grace Isabel turned to her. “We’ll go upstairs. There’s a fire in my room.”
She looked suave and smart in a dark green suit edged with squirrel fur. Eleanor was conscious that she must look not only forlorn but hideous, and more ridiculous than either. Her hair was plastered across her cheeks, her skirt spattered with mud, and her shoes so crusted one could hardly tell what their color had been. She had left muddy footprints on the floor. “I can wait here,” she returned. “I’ll ruin your furniture if I try to sit down.”
“You’ll have a fever if you don’t get warm,” Isabel said reasonably. “Come on by the fire, and Ophelia will bring us some hot lemonade.”
Suddenly through her shivers and chatters Eleanor felt herself pushed forward by an imperative curiosity. It occurred to her that Isabel had a reason for wanting her to stay or she would not have dismissed the car. To accept hospitality from her was the last thing Eleanor would ever have thought she wanted to do, but it would be only for the few minutes required for another car to come from Ardeith, and she rationalized her impulse by remembering that Isabel was right in saying that if she didn’t get warm she would almost certainly be sick. She followed Isabel up the stairs.
Isabel opened the door of her bedroom. A fire was leaping behind the andirons, and it seemed to Eleanor that never had she felt a more delicious sensation than the warmth that came over her as she stood dripping by the hearth. Isabel took off her own hat and gloves, making an occasional remark about the joyless weather.
Downstairs Eleanor had been too uncomfortable to notice her surroundings, but now as she held out her numb hands to the fire she began to look around her. The room contained a mingling of furniture in the style of about seventy years before and the accessories of a modern woman who spent half her waking hours taking care of her person. There was a great fourposter bed, a marble-topped bureau, an armoire with mirrors in the doors, several tip-tables and rosewood chairs with seats made of horsehair. The old bureau was incongruously scattered with powder-boxes, atomizers, bottles of astringent, facial packs; a bathrobe of quilted blue satin lay across the bed and a pair of furred blue mules stood by the bedstep. As Isabel put her hat on the shelf of the armoire Eleanor sneezed again.
“Won’t you get out of those clothes?” Isabel exclaimed, so urgently that Eleanor wondered if Isabel were afraid she was going to collapse and be stranded here for a week. Without waiting for an
answer Isabel had opened the side door leading to the bathroom and started the water running. “Come in here,” she called. “The plumbing looks early American and is, but there’s plenty of hot water.”
Realizing that nerves and discomfort together were making her foolish, Eleanor gathered what was left of her self-possession and crossed to the bathroom door. “Thank you. But first, where’s your telephone?”
“I’ll tell Ophelia to call.” Isabel brought the blue robe and slippers. “Put these on, and I’ll have her iron your things dry. Here she is now.”
The Negro girl came in with a thermos bottle and two glasses on a tray, and a moment later Eleanor was handing over her own clothes to be pressed. She stepped into the tub. As the warm water crept over her, soothing her goose-pimples, Eleanor began to feel her assurance rising. She wondered what she and Isabel were going to say to each other. She was regarding the minutes ahead with simple curiosity, as though she were a tourist about to enter an unfamiliar place of interest. Isabel’s bathroom was, as she had said, inconveniently out of date; the tub stood high on four claw feet, and the pipes groaned at the effort demanded of them. Evidently she preferred to spend her inadequate income on clothes and cold creams rather than on modernizing the quarters in which unmerciful destiny required her to live.
Eleanor dried herself on Isabel’s towels, shook Isabel’s talcum powder over herself, put on Isabel’s bathrobe and slippers, and combed her wet hair with a silver-topped comb on which were the initials “I.S.” in German script. When she came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a dry towel, Isabel began to pour the hot lemonade.
“This will be good for both of us,” she said, offering a glass. “I do hope you’re going to be all right.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Eleanor. “I’m very hard to kill.”
Taking the drink she sat down by the fire. She felt quite well. Somehow her being here made Isabel seem curiously vulnerable. They had never talked to each other except on that first evening at the Buy-a-Bale dance; that was five years ago and seemed a thousand, and Eleanor was realizing that in her own mind Isabel had begun to lose the proportions of an ordinary person and become an idea frightening by its unfamiliarity. Tonight she was observing that Isabel was merely a beautiful, vain and idle woman whom she disliked exceedingly.
Now that excuses for being active were over, Isabel seemed uncertain of how to proceed. She sat down before the fire opposite Eleanor, by the little table where the maid had put the tray, and tasted her own drink tentatively. Eleanor began the conversation herself.
“It was kind of you to pick me up,” she said.
Isabel smiled slightly. “I couldn’t let you drown in that rain.”
“Did you recognize me?”
“Why yes.”
There was a pause. They looked each other over with an appraising interest that was fast dropping its mask of politeness. Observing that Isabel was extremely good to look at, Eleanor acknowledged her possession of a quality that in principle commanded her admiration, that of guarding one’s assets. Beauty, she knew, was a gift of the gods at twenty but was more than that at thirty, and not one detail of Isabel’s appearance—her face, her figure, her exquisite hands, the flawless line under her chin—had a suggestion of the slackness that would have betrayed its having been left to chance. Eleanor had never had reason to be distressed by her own lineaments; she was handsome in a cool, functional way, but between Isabel and herself the difference was that of a flower and a diamond drill. Isabel looked, as she almost certainly was, appealing and entirely useless. Eleanor despised her, not because Isabel knew what she wanted and the best means of getting it, but because what Isabel wanted was evidently the chance to be a soft and lovely parasite. She had no intention of living on her own strength if she could help it. Eleanor wondered how Kester, or any other man, could possibly be fond of such a creature.
With a scornful resolution that she would make Isabel be downright for once, Eleanor asked clearly,
“Isabel, why don’t you say whatever it is you brought me here to listen to?”
“Why do you think I brought you here for anything?” Isabel’s voice was even.
“You could very easily have told the chauffeur to take me home. It wouldn’t have delayed him long enough to matter.”
Isabel considered. After a moment she returned slowly, “Why—yes. You’re right, I did want to talk to you.” She tasted the lemonade again, watching Eleanor over the rim of the glass.
“What do you want to know about me?”
With a slight smile, Isabel answered, “Nothing more. I’ve had a good deal of time to observe you.”
“Is that what you do with your time?”
Isabel gave an ironic little laugh. “Really, Eleanor, have you imagined me like that? Solitary female in an old house, fussing over a bird and a pussy cat, crocheting centerpieces and eying the neighbors? What a picture!”
“I haven’t formed any image so silly, or even so detailed,” Eleanor retorted. “I’ve been very much occupied lately.”
“So have I. Most of my relatives and friends are in New York, you know. I’ve been there frequently. Only now and then I have to come home for the obvious unhappy reason.”
“Obvious?”
“Poverty,” Isabel replied with a cool frankness. “Oh, I know you don’t understand that. In my place you’d have tripled your income and done without a car and chauffeur till you could really afford them. But I’m no financial wizard. I can’t increase my income. It’s all I can do,” she added as though the fact were amusing, “to live on it.”
Eleanor looked down at a slice of lemon in her glass and back at Isabel, thinking again how different the two of them were. It was not her way to admit that she had any inadequacies. Isabel, on the contrary, made capital of hers. Eleanor said,
“I’ve never thought about how you manage your property, but I suspect you’re not as helpless as you sound.”
Isabel regarded her gravely. After another slight pause she said, “How straightforward you are. You’re direct in thinking and speaking and acting. You don’t like to be told things gently, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then—” Isabel set her glass on the table. She linked her hands on her knees and looked straight across at Eleanor. “Will you give Kester a divorce?” she asked.
Eleanor felt herself stiffening. Remembering what her temper had cost her in the past she vehemently ordered herself to hold it tight. She said, in a voice as level as Isabel’s, “He hasn’t asked for one.”
“That’s not an answer,” said Isabel.
“It’s as much of an answer as I feel required to give.”
“Don’t you know Kester wants one?” Isabel asked steadily.
“I know if he did,” Eleanor returned, “he wouldn’t send you to tell me so.”
Isabel shrugged. “He’d wait a long time before he told you so himself, too, because he has such respect for the forms of tradition. But what makes you think he doesn’t?”
“If Kester ever mentions this subject to me,” Eleanor said, “I’ll discuss it with him.”
Isabel was giving her a shrewd scrutiny. “You can’t take it, can you? You asked me what I wanted, but you don’t like my having answered. I knew you wouldn’t. I told you I knew all about you I needed to know. Would you like to hear what else I think of you?”
Eleanor leaned down to put her glass on the hearth. Her pulse was quickening, and her skin was getting the unpleasant hot tingle of anger. Speaking carefully to keep her voice under control, she said, “No, I wouldn’t. I’m really not interested in your opinions.”
“Then maybe you’ll be interested in this. I love Kester. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved in my life.”
“I don’t believe you,” Eleanor said shortly, “You’re not capable of loving anybody very much.”
Isabel gave her a sardonic little smile. “Then why should I want him ?—and I do want him, Eleanor.”
“I’ll tell you why you want him.” Eleanor spoke with deliberate certainty “You’ve been bored to desperation. The war made you a pitiful and rather laughable object. If you could get Kester away from all he loves best in the world—from me, from Ardeith, from his children—it would re-establish your conviction that you’re irresistible.”
Isabel sat forward, holding the arms of her chair. “Do you mean my self-respect requires that I persuade somebody to marry me? Don’t be childish, Eleanor. I can get married next week if I please.” Her eyes fixed on Eleanor she added distinctly, “And he’s worth about six million dollars. Does that answer you?”
“If it’s true it surprises me.”
“Does it indeed!”
“Not to hear that you can make a rich man fall in love with you. But that you should hesitate at taking him.”
“Do you think I’m utterly mercenary? Yes, you do—and I said that to prove I love Kester more than you think. Now do you believe me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I told you. You do love luxury, but you love your own ego more than that. Kester will do more for your precious self-esteem than anybody else. That’s what you’re proving.”
“You are stubborn, aren’t you?” Isabel took out a handkerchief and began rolling it between her fingers. “But you might as well be pliable now, Eleanor. You’ve had your chance with Kester. And look what you did with it,” she exclaimed. “What right have you to want him now?”
“Forgive my slowness,” said Eleanor, “But as I don’t know what has been said to you about me, I don’t follow you.”
“What has been said to me?” Isabel echoed with scorn. “Do you think I need to be told anything? Do you think I can’t see what happened to him? Oh, you’re a fool, Eleanor!”