This Side of Glory (23 page)

“They might be more thankful to have a home to live in,” said Eleanor. “This place is only half paid for.”

“But you’ll take care of Ardeith,” Kester exclaimed.

Suddenly she felt very calm and cold. “Yes, Kester, I’ll take care of Ardeith. But don’t tell me I won’t understand why I’m having to do it. You want drums and flags and glory and an excuse to make somebody else carry the responsibility for your life. If I were a helpless featherbrain you’d be more concerned about Ardeith than about saving the world. But you know when I’ve started a job I don’t quit in the middle of it, so you can run off to a new adventure.” She ended with a scornful shrug.

“My patience is of the durable variety,” said Kester, “but I wish to God you’d shut up.”

“All right, I’ll shut up. Go on and get your laurels.”

Kester gave her a sardonic little grin. “You have a positive genius for taking the color out of anything I want to do. It must be a gift.” He went to the door and opened it. “Have a good time being virtuous,” he said over his shoulder, “because I’m going to town to enlist.”

He went out. Eleanor sat down and rested her head on her hands, feeling as if the burden of the months ahead was already weighing on her shoulders.

But after a few minutes she began to regret what she had said. It was no use arguing with him. Kester was incapable of accepting the tiresome challenges of everyday living, and scolding him for it simply made him indignant without changing him in the slightest. With a sigh Eleanor turned over the blotted sheet of her ledger and started again on a fresh page. She might as well, she was thinking, accept the rôle destiny had assigned her, and spend her life wearily finishing what Kester had enthusiastically started. Since he was going into the army and there was no stopping him, she would be wise to hold her tongue as became the wife of a hero.

When he came in Eleanor told him she was sorry for her outburst. Kester, who was so delighted with himself that he had already forgotten it, replied that it didn’t matter in the least, every man expected his wife to make a scene when he joined the army. He thereupon sat down and began giving her innumerable instructions about operating the plantation in his absence, talking to her as if she were a dear, noble creature but not very bright.

But he was in such hilarious spirits that they really had a very good time together during those last few days, and Eleanor drove to the station to see him off to the training camp with every intention of making a proud and tender farewell as properly as possible.

And then, suddenly, as he kissed her goodbye, she felt a lump like a potato in her throat. Tears began to gush out of her eyes and she found herself clinging to him in an agony of terror. Somehow it had not actually come into her consciousness until this moment that Kester was going to a war where men were being killed; she heard the phrase “twenty thousand casualties a day” going around and around in her mind, and when at last he tore himself away from her as other men all around them were tearing themselves from other weeping women, Eleanor stood quite still, feeling lost and dizzy, and not troubling to hide the tears that were dripping off her cheeks.

As the train pulled out she stumbled back into the car and put her head down and sobbed like any other frightened wife who adored her husband and could not keep him out of the war. It was a long time before she could quiet herself sufficiently to drive the car home.

She shut herself up in her room and sat down, still trembling. Guncotton, nitrocellulose, cordite—the words began to repeat themselves as they had done on the morning when she had first read them, only then they had brought her hope and triumph, and now they howled at her till she was stiff with fear. Guncotton, nitrocellulose, cordite. Twenty-cent cotton meant twenty thousand casualties a day.

Eleanor looked blankly at the wall.

“Twenty-cent cotton,” she said aloud. “Strange—this very minute there must be twenty million women in the world who are feeling just as I do.”

Chapter Ten

1

S
he had never realized how large and empty the house could be without Kester.

During the five years of their marriage they had never been apart more than a few days at a time. There was always the knowledge that tomorrow or the next day they would be together again, so she had not missed him, but now the fact that he was not here and would not return for months or maybe years gave her a feeling of being lost in big rooms full of echoes. Kester had gone to an officers’ training camp in Tennessee—to be on the safe side he had dropped four years off his age, a patriotic fib for which sworn corroboration was easy to get—and though he wrote often, his letters were far too small to fill up the vacancy he had left. Eleanor had thought she had been working all day long, and now she was astonished to find how much time she had spent in simply talking to Kester. It was hard to remember what they could have talked about that occupied so much time. But evidently they had said a great deal to each other, for when she followed her regular schedule there were so many blank spaces in the days.

She hung out a service flag, took snapshots of the children looking up at it and enclosed them in a letter. As she addressed the envelope the click of her typewriter was loud in the strangely quiet house.

“I’ve got to stop this,” Eleanor told herself grimly. “I can’t spend the whole war behaving like a child left in a dark room.” She got up and rang the bell. “Bring me a pot of coffee,” she said when Bessie answered, “and the
Times-Picayune.”

The front page of the paper was full of battles. Remembering that she had been neglecting the market page, Eleanor turned to see what the battles were doing to cotton, and as she did so she stared and nearly spilt her coffee. Since Kester’s departure the price of cotton had risen to twenty-five cents a pound.

Eleanor felt her spine stiffen as though her body felt her resolution before her mind. At twenty-five cents a pound a thousand bales of cotton would be worth one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Even with mounting production costs, profits this year could be enormous.

She stood up slowly. Her indignation at Kester’s going, and then her fear, had made her forget the simple truth that as long as she could not stop the war she could use it. With such a price as this she could provide the machinery she had begun dreaming of three years ago, and increase production at Ardeith beyond Kester’s idea of possibility. The more cotton she fed the guns the sooner they could shoot a path clear for him to come home, and when he came back—she could not let herself consider any other possibility, because if she continued to do so she would go mad and not be able to raise any cotton at all—when he came back she would give him Ardeith of his ancestors not only clear of debt but a model of efficient abundance. What a welcome!

Eleanor looked down at the newspaper, smiling at an odd, guilty little realization that had begun to creep into the back of her head. With Kester away there would be no more dawdling. She would not expect him to do things and then discover the work was awry because he had not done them. She missed him, she would have been willing to put up with his ways forever if only he could come home, but since she had to endure the lack of his adorable presence she might as well be frank with herself and acknowledge that the work would go faster under her sole authority. By the time he came home she could have Ardeith so expertly organized that its operation would require no more than he was in the habit of giving it.

Pulling the bellcord again, she told Bessie that hereafter she wanted to be called at five o’clock every morning.

She went to work now with the feeling that she was digging in for a siege. Her first step was to engage a competent overseer who could relieve her of details. He was hard to find. She knew what she wanted, but she had already observed that there was something about growing cotton that made too many people pleasantly vague, caught—if they were the old-line aristocrats—in a confusion of moonlight and mint juleps, or if they were dirt-farmers, in a fatalistic dependence on variables from the weather to the market. Those who knew how to raise cotton profitably were likely to be busy on their own fields and not looking for the chance to tend the fields belonging to somebody else. But after writing to the state university and the state department of agriculture, inserting advertisements in rural journals and interviewing two dozen applicants, she secured a man named Wyatt, a lean, saturnine individual who evidently knew the cotton business and had both sense and energy to give it. Wyatt had been working at the cotton station maintained by the government several miles up the river, where the men experimented with fertilizers, varieties of seed and methods of combating pests. He asked for four hundred dollars a month, a house with water and electricity free, and an automobile.

Eleanor agreed. They signed a contract.

“Now I want the utmost production this place can give without hurting the land,” she said to him. “I’m not stingy and I don’t expect to run a sweatshop. I’ll pay the best wages in the parish but I won’t have any banjo-thrummings or watermelon-cuttings when there’s work to be done.”

Wyatt did not smile. It was evident that he rarely did. “I get it.”

“Look the place over and tell me what I need.”

“Tractors,” said Wyatt.

“Yes, I’m going to have those. With the right machines we ought to get twelve hundred bales this year. By the way, how old are you?”

“Forty-two,” said Wyatt.

“Get this straight before we start,” said Eleanor. “I’m twenty-seven. I’m not so dimwitted that I think I know everything. Give me any suggestions you can. You’ll have a telephone and can ring me at any time. But this is my plantation and I’m running it. You understand?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Wyatt. The corners of his somber mouth quivered slightly. “You didn’t have to tell me that, Mrs. Larne.”

“Good,” said Eleanor. They shook hands.

With joyful audacity she set about fulfilling her dream of the plantation’s renaissance. She installed tractors, cultivators, sprinklers, motortrucks; she paid good wages to the Negroes, repaired their cabins, scrupulously avoided asking or giving favors. Delighted with the new speed of the field work she turned her attention to the house, where except for a few routine additions such as plumbing and electric lights everything went along much as it had before the Civil War. Eleanor had the old bathrooms torn out and new pipes and fixtures installed. She added an electric stove, vacuum cleaners and an electric washing machine, and put in an inter-room telephone system. Never having heard of such goings-on the servants protested and several of them left, but as she no longer needed them it did not matter. There were not so many laborers in the fields either, as the machinery had enabled her to reduce human labor to a minimum, a change that was invaluable this year when factories and the army draft were making agricultural workers increasingly scarce in spite of the highest wages in history.

Around her the country blazed and shouted with the war. Aeroplanes sputtered, soldiers marched, billboards yelled “Give Till It Hurts!” Eleanor hardly heard the commotion. When she was asked to do war work she answered, “My husband is in the army. I’m taking his place. I can’t do any more.” It was obvious, even to the embattled ladies of the Red Cross, that she could not. She was plunged into a maelstrom of work that sent her to bed every night fairly drunk with weariness. The weather was very hot, and war-prices shot her costs to such heights that her bookkeeping grew more trying every week. She began to lose weight, her head and back and legs so often throbbed with fatigue that she almost forgot how it had ever felt to be really rested, at night columns of figures reeled in her dreams till she sometimes woke feeling as if she had hardly slept at all. But she felt rewarded whenever she looked at the teeming fields. From the romantic wastefulness of cotton tradition she was guiding Ardeith toward a crisp and impersonal efficiency. Wyatt received her orders with admiration, the laborers were getting used to regular hours, even Mamie and Dilcy were beginning to like the household contrivances that relieved them of so many backaches. When Eleanor watched the tractors at work she felt a surge of strength within herself like a response to their noisy power.

The cotton grew and flowered, dropped its flowers and opened its bolls to the sun. With Wyatt’s help Eleanor went out to comb the country for pickers. This was the only operation where her tractors could not relieve the cotton of its dependence on hand-laborers with their picturesque, wasteful sitting around. Mechanical cotton-pickers simply did not work. Eleanor offered first a dollar a hundred pounds for picking, then a dollar and a half, and finally two dollars. She took her car and toured the countryside, stopping to urge a job upon every able-bodied man or woman she saw, and sent her trucks to bring them to the plantation from miles around. Some of her cotton fell to the ground for lack of hands to pick it, but when she was finally done she had gathered a crop of eleven hundred and sixteen bales, and she was content. She sold the cotton for twenty-seven cents a pound. In spite of unprecedented costs of production, her profit for the year was slightly more than seventy thousand dollars.

2

That winter she tried to relax. She went out, and even gave a party herself, but there was so much to do!

The war was complicating the simplest routines of daily life. Eleanor enjoyed buying clothes for herself and the children, for she felt prosperous enough to afford war-prices, but much of what they needed she could not buy at all. Sugar was nearly unobtainable; meat went to the army; coal was needed to run troop trains and civilians were forced to buy it by the bucketful. As fat was used in the manufacture of explosives, butter cost eighty cents a pound. Wheat flour was scarce and expensive, so that bread was full of substitutes and had a dirty look as though somebody had wiped up the floor with it. Eleanor had the Negroes cut wood, but labor was so precious that she could not spare enough of them to cut all she needed, so though the children always had a fire in the nursery she herself often had to do without. She raised hens and winter vegetables, had her own butter made on the place, and thanked heaven for Mamie’s skill at corn muffins and spoonbread. By using all her resourcefulness she managed to keep the war from encroaching on the children’s comfort, but she got very little rest.

Kester’s letters were exuberant. Emerging from the training camp as a first lieutenant, he had been sent to Camp Jackson at Columbia, South Carolina, where he was drilling, marching, stabbing straw Germans and enjoying everything he did. Sometimes as she read his letters Eleanor could not help a half humorous, half resentful feeling that it was just like Kester to have managed to get himself into the one situation where the inconveniences of this wild winter could not touch him.

“This is the most amazing adventure of my life,” Kester wrote her. “The town looks like San Francisco of the forty-niners, it’s jammed and frantic and everybody in it seems to have a case of wandering head.

“But no wonder. Before the war Columbia was a pleasant little city of about thirty thousand population. It had two skyscrapers, the Palmetto Building (sixteen stories) and the National Loan and Exchange Building (twelve stories); a fine new high school, shady streets with white houses, and a noble state capitol on which could still be discerned some cherished smoke-smudges left from the time when General Sherman set fire to the town in 1865. Since Sherman’s time Columbia had thrived peacefully until the United States went to war with Germany.

“But now, at the edge of town the government has set up Camp Jackson. Aeroplanes are zooming overhead and down the streets come endless parades of infantry, cavalry and war machines camouflaged with stripes of pink and purple. Almost literally overnight the population was swelled by the addition of a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, and then by a swarm of wives, families, nurses, friends and the usual accompaniment of harlots. Lodgings are in such demand that any household with a spare bedroom can rent it for thirty dollars a week. Many of the officer’s wives are rich, and to supply them with the kind of goods they are used to buying merchants have flung up unpainted shacks where only half protected from the weather they display fur coats and hand-made shoes and gowns from the best designers in the country. There simply isn’t enough food to go around. In front of the grocery stores are lines of customers, waiting; when they get in they sign their names in a book for the privilege of buying a pound of sugar (only one pound apiece) for forty cents.

“Money is tumbling about. Office boys who used to make three dollars a week are getting twenty. Elevators and cabs are being operated by girls who quit high school to earn salaries higher than those their fathers used to get before the war. Coal is a dollar a bucket and Negro women are hawking bundles of wood in the street, for Nature has gleefully added to the jambalaya by giving South Carolina the coldest winter it has had in fifty years. It is snowing about once a week. The Northern soldiers in camp are making ungracious remarks about the Sunny South (I don’t blame them, for the icicles are three feet long), but we haven’t any right to complain, for in spite of the coal shortage the cantonment is kept beautifully warm. We have all the coal. Civilians simply can’t get it. They’ve closed the churches and schools to save coal for us, and so, as though the streets were not jammed already, the shivering citizenry pours out in the morning and doesn’t go home till bedtime, for in the street there’s at least excitement to keep them warm.

“Since there’s no school, children are out all day. They go to the movies. The theaters aren’t heated, but the pictures are lurid enough to make the audiences forget it. The movies have fearful names—
The Kaiser the Beast of Berlin, Auction of Souls, To Hell with the Kaiser
—and with our breath raising white clouds between ourselves and the screen we of the khaki brigade sit alongside the boys and girls deprived of algebra and watch Turks crucifying Armenian girls, babies being stabbed and German soldiers tearing lustfully through convents. The children believe all of it and cheer eagerly; I frankly don’t know how much of this stuff I believe, about half of it, I suppose. Anyway, Europe’s in a mess and I’m glad we’re going to clean it up before Cornelia and Philip are grown.