Deep Summer (24 page)

He held up the candle close to the ramshackle cart. For the first time they noticed that it carried a big ungainly object covered with a piece of canvas. David called greetings to the Negroes who were pouring out of the house and fields to assure themselves that the young master was really back, and turned again to the cart.

“Look,” he said portentously.

Philip said, “What have you got there?” And Judith, who did not care, asked, “Dearest boy, where have you been all these months?”

“Oh—nearly everywhere,” returned David. “To Savannah, and Charleston, and up the Carolina coast—that’s where I found this. The trouble I had getting it back!”

He pulled down the canvas.

They saw an uncouth contrivance of wheels and big things like combs, set on a wooden framework. David stood back like an artist who had just unveiled a masterpiece.

“David, what on earth is that machine?” Philip demanded.

David laughed triumphantly. “They call it a cotton-gin.”

He thrust the candle into Rita’s hand and gripped both Philip’s shoulders as he went on, his words disconnected in his eagerness to say everything at once.

“This is the newest invention—just beginning to be used on a few of the biggest coast plantations. I tell you, it’s a miracle. You won’t believe it till you see it work. I nearly broke my neck getting it here for cotton time.”

“But what is it for, David?” Judith cried.

“It takes the seeds out of cotton. Ten times, twenty times faster than the fastest seed-picker ever born.” He was stammering with excitement. “It’s so fast you get dizzy with watching. Is the cotton in yet?”

“Some of it,” said Philip, laconic with astonishment.

“First thing tomorrow morning we’ll put the gin to work—” he clapped Philip on the back—“and we’ll have the crop clean in three days!”

Philip began to laugh. Judith did too, almost hysterically, tears still trickling down her cheeks. She should have foreseen some such denouement. David was so utterly his father’s son. She might have known he would not come home till he could come in kingly fashion. They started for the house after he had given orders to the Negroes about putting up the gin for the night. Judith walked with her arm linked in David’s, too confused with happiness to hear more than an occasional phrase of his zestful monologue.

“… two or three of these gins and cotton will be twice as profitable as indigo … at present prices worth putting half the plantation into cotton … simply itching to start it… . Lord, but it’s fun to be home… .”

Chapter Eighteen

I
t was David’s cotton-gin that cleared Ardeith of indigo and grasshoppers. He had worked his way to Charleston on a boat that skirted the Florida keys and touched at Havana, where he had heard a good deal about the rising importance of indigo in the countries south of Louisiana. The planters of Guatemala, David told his parents, were putting in enough indigo to dye the world blue. Their competition had already cut prices and was going to cut them further. Cotton was the obvious substitute. This new machine had removed the only drawback to cotton growing on a major scale, and in the United States a hundred pounds of good cotton brought twenty-five American dollars.

Judith did not attempt to puzzle out the value of twenty-five American dollars. The tangle of nations in Louisiana had muddled her ideas of currency to an extent that already overtaxed her arithmetic. But the miracles of the gin were obvious. Planters from end to end of the bluff came to watch the inspiring speed with which the seeds were combed out of the cotton. Judith listened to the talk with a sense of adventure. Between the sugar-mill and the cotton-gin the plantations were on the verge of a revolution. She could feel it not only at Ardeith, but everywhere in the countryside. Indigo, their fundamental product and the source of their living, was suddenly a relic.

The first year of the gins Philip put five hundred acres into cotton. The next year he put in a thousand. The year following he doubled that. Cotton flourished like a weed; ginning was less costly and far cleaner than brewing the indigo dye. And grasshoppers vanished from the parlor floor.

He increased on cane as well, and built a great sugar-house of brick for refining the juice. Nobody talked indigo any more, except a few shiftless folk too stupid or lazy to change crops. Cotton and sugarcane swept new prosperity through the river towns. Louis Valcour built two additional warehouses and then five more, for cotton was bulky and required ample storage space. The Purcells constructed new wharfs at both ends of town to accommodate the increasing river trade. Durham and Larne, flatboat builders, opened another boatyard.

When she heard this Judith turned wonderingly to Philip and confessed:

“I’m simply bewildered!”

Philip chuckled and squeezed her hand with the same expression he had worn when he first brought her to the moss manor.

“It’s progress,” he said. “No, more than that—it’s fulfilment. It’s what we dreamed of when we came down the river.”

The face of the countryside was changing so fast that its landmarks disappeared almost overnight. Instead of indigo plantations, broken here and there with tobacco fields, now for miles along the road one saw cotton, and acres of sugar-cane waving long green streamers. The indigo vats were gone, and in their place were gins surrounded by storehouses for the unseeded cotton and lines of wagons to take the bales to the wharfs. The tobacco-sheds had made way for ugly brick sugar-mills with high chimneys throwing up pillars of smoke day and night in grinding time.

The town was changing too: with increased prosperity new residential streets were branching from the central settlement, and the air clanged with noise of saws and hammers. The wharfs were raucous with commerce. There were new counting-houses, new taverns, new shops for the display of merchandise that people were suddenly able to buy. Docked at the wharfs were more boats than ever, and bigger boats than anybody had ever seen, taking out cotton and bringing in cloth and wine and furniture for the great folk of the bluff.

Everywhere there was a tingle of energy. The river country had lost its serenity of the indigo days. There was nothing assured about cotton, nothing proved by years of experiment. Men who met at the crossroads argued hotly about varieties of seed and the most propitious time to plant. At impromptu gatherings on the corners in town one heard talk of how So-and-So had an improved gin that gobbled up cotton faster than any yet seen, or how Mrs. So-and-So had ordered real silver pitchers for her table. It was glorious, exciting, and sometimes, Judith thought with amusement, a little bit vulgar. But even their clumsiest ostentation had something healthy and likable about it.

Judith fancied she would be left in peace to watch the spectacle, but it was not long before the clamor of progress sounded indoors as well as without.

“We need a new house,” said David and Rita.

“But my dears,” exclaimed Judith, “what’s wrong with this one?” She looked around her pink moss walls, thinking how much she loved them. But of course the children would not understand how intensely she had lived in this house. Rita was talking, with her characteristic clipped terseness. She was fifteen, a slim young person with brown hair and golden-brown eyes like Judith’s.

“Nobody’s living in moss houses any more. They’re primitive. This place,” she added crisply, “looks like a nigger cabin.”

“With sixteen rooms?” Judith protested.

“But they’re such little rooms,” said Rita. “And pink walls and everything on one floor. We can’t do any really elegant entertaining here.”

“They’re building houses now of cypress wood,” David put in.

Rita laughed shrewdly. “You know what this place makes me think of, mother? Old pioneers who thought they had something grand.”

“Yes, darling,” Judith owned, “I’m afraid that’s what it is.”

“Don’t you see what we mean?” David insisted. “Folks notice us. Everybody knows this was the first plantation on the bluff to make sugar, and Ardeith had the first cotton-gin. This house—oh, it’s not what’s expected of people like the Larnes.”

Though she did so with reluctance, Judith had to own he was right. On nearly all the estates around them new dwellings were either being talked of or were already under way. The moss houses had gone out of date as abruptly as indigo.

But though she understood this, Judith listened wistfully to their plans. Hardly any of her dear possessions would be fit for the double-galleried edifice they were designing. Her big dining-table, worn smooth by years of banquets, her cane-bottomed chairs and the woven cane cradle where her babies had slept, even the bed in which all her children but David had been born—they were too old-fashioned for the background of a great planter’s family. When the cypress house got under way she walked about lonesomely, touching her furniture and curtains as if they were friends to whom she was saying goodby. “What are we going to do with these things?” she asked.

“Oh, throw them away,” said David.

“We may be able to use some of this stuff to furnish the quarters for the house-slaves,” said Philip.

“Very well,” acquiesced Judith. The spirit with which she and Philip had gone into the wilderness was too strong to be halted, and she was glad of it; her children did not know, and Philip was too ardent to realize, how easy it would have been to go so far and no further and relax among the evidences of what they had already attained. She did not say so to anybody. This was a country whose byword was change, and it had no respect for relics. Everybody was stirring and everything old was being thrown away.

The new manor was painted white. There were two floors, and the front door, which had a handle and knocker of polished brass, led into a straight wide hall uninterrupted by a staircase except for a steep inconspicuous flight at the back for use at night and in bad weather. The floors were joined by two staircases that started from either side of the front door and rose like the arms of a V to the gallery above. Outside staircases were the most modern idea for hot climates, where one spent so much time on the porch anyway that it was inconvenient to have to go indoors every time one wanted to go upstairs.

The upper and lower halls ran from the front door to the back for the sake of air-currents, and the rooms to either side were large, high and many-windowed. They had starched white curtains and mirrors in gilded frames and on the walls candle-sconces of glass or polished tin, with circular reflectors to throw the light. In the parlor hung the portrait of Judith made in New Orleans when she was twenty-two, and a portrait of Philip painted several years later by a French artist who had spent a winter in Dalroy. Though the slaves had made most of the furniture, in the parlors were heavy pedestal tables from France, and a cushioned French sofa or two. There was also a clavichord bought from a nobleman who had escaped the Terror with a few household goods, the sale of which was enabling him to drink himself to death among the barbarians. It was very frail and fancy, half the inlay had dropped out, and clavichords were going out of date anyway, but Rita loved it, and played tunes on it assiduously.

Philip said, “For heaven’s sake, Judith, let her enjoy herself; she’s already older than you were when you married, and we won’t keep her forever.” Judith sighed and agreed with him. Certainly Rita did look picturesque at the keyboard, and the young gentlemen of the neighborhood listened soulfully without being disturbed by the fact that the vicissitudes of transportation from Paris to Louisiana made the melodies somewhat off key.

At the back of the house were the sewing and weaving rooms, for though they now bought most of their dress-goods Judith was too careful a housewife to trust readymade sheets and blankets. Across the hall were the storerooms and wine-closets, a row of important doors whose keys clinked from her girdle. The kitchen was brick, to be safe from fire dangers, and the rain-jars at the back were of earthenware pottery painted in bright colors. The quarters for the house-slaves were separate from the main house and joined to it by a covered passage. They too had galleries where the servants could sit when they were done with their day’s work. “It sho ain’t eve’ybody what belongs in a house like this,” the servants told one another, and they bragged to those from other families that at Ardeith the house-folk lived nearly as high and mighty as the missis.

Upstairs were the bedrooms, eight of them besides the chambers of the bodyservants, for such a manor as this must be always ready for guests. Adjoining David’s chamber was another room with cushioned chairs and a needlework table and footstools with embroidered covers, for the young master might be expected to bring home a wife any time now and she would want a sitting-room of her own.

“This house is so perfectly sumptuous,” Rita said to her mother, “I almost hate to think of getting married and leaving it.”

“You won’t be getting married yet awhile,” Judith said hastily.

“Why not? I’m sixteen.” Rita rubbed her eyes. She and David had been up late the night before at a ball Gervaise had given for her daughter Emily, and Rita had only just wandered into the dining-room for breakfast.

Judith smiled regretfully as she poured Rita’s belated coffee. One of the kitchen-maids brought in a hot waffle. When she had gone out Rita asked:

“Mother, am I going to have a good dowry?”

“Certainly, if you marry a nice young man.”

“I might marry a rather poor one,” Rita said soberly. She had a way of keeping her thoughts to herself, and Judith wondered if this suggestion of candor was indicative. Rita added, “I think I ought to get married before David does. I’d feel like an old maid with another young lady in the house who had more authority in it than I had. And David—”

“What about David?”

“He’s been following Emily Purcell around at every ball we’ve been to lately. I’m sure he’s in love with her, for I’ve never seen him pay any girl such steady attention. Don’t you think it would be nice?”

“Why yes.” Judith reached for the coffee-pot and poured a cup for herself, recalling how she had dreaded such an announcement before David ran away. Today she was merely glad he was attracted to so desirable a girl as Gervaise’s daughter. What a fool I’ve been in my lifetime, she thought ironically as she added to Rita:

“Emily seems a nice girl, but very quiet. Do you know her well?”

“I don’t reckon anybody does. She doesn’t get very intimate. But she knows how to dress and she will entertain beautifully. I think she’s quite suitable.” Rita giggled across her waffle. “I’m glad,” she added, “I won’t have Martha St. Clair for a sister-in-law.”

Judith began to laugh. Roger Sheramy had married the youngest of the St. Clair girls only a few months before, and though Martha was exceptionally pretty she had many of the qualities of a spoilt baby. “Don’t say that outside the house,” Judith warned. “Roger’s your cousin.”

“Yes ma’am. But you know, Emily’s not very pretty but I don’t believe she’s ever shed as many tears in her life as Martha sheds every week. And Martha’s got nothing to cry about. Cousin Roger spoils her to death. Mother.”

“Yes?”

“May I go riding this afternoon with Mr. Carl Heriot?”

“Why yes. Take Melissa with you. And don’t stay out after sunset. You may bring Mr. Heriot to supper if you like.”

“Yes’m. And I wish you’d get Melissa a new riding-skirt. I hate to see a young lady all frocked up followed by a shabby maid. It spoils the effect.”

“Why don’t you give her the green one you had last spring?”

“That’s a good idea. I think I will.” Rita put down her knife and fork and started out. At the doorway she turned to ask, “Mother, when I get married and go to my own house, may I take my clavichord?”

“Of course, honey. Nobody plays it but you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Rita went off, and Judith smiled thoughtfully as she looked after her. If Carl Heriot was the rather poor young man Rita had in mind Judith could not see any great objection, except her reluctance to have Rita undertake marriage so young. The Heriots were a Tory family who had fled to West Florida early in the American rebellion, when a party of rebels showed their disapproval of Tories by burning the Heriot homestead in Pennsylvania. They had not managed to bring much property with them, though what they did bring had been invested in forest lands, and they now dealt in timber and firewood. Carl’s mother was fond of detailing the glories of their past, but Carl himself was a sensible young fellow who did not appear to be over-conscious of being an injured aristocrat. He might, Judith concluded, do very well as a husband. That afternoon as she watched Rita ride off toward the levee with him, followed by her black chaperone resplendent in Rita’s discarded riding-habit, Judith told Philip she thought they made an exceptionally pretty couple.