by Edna Ferber
She hurriedly blotted this out by saying, as she helped herself to coffee, “I almost always breakfast with Papa.” She looked very straight at Bick Benedict and he at her. She saw in the morning light that his eyes were crinkled at the corners from sun and wind; he looked even taller and broader of shoulder there at breakfast in the sunny room.
“You’re looking mighty pert, Miss Leslie,” he said inadequately. “You don’t look as if you’d been dancing all night.”
She drank her entire cup of coffee, black, she set the cup down carefully in the saucer and sat a moment very still as though ignoring the little compliment, so that the two men as they regarded her so admiringly and thought of her, the one with the love and affection of many years, the other with an emotion that bewildered and exhilarated him, felt momentarily puzzled.
She made her decision. “I came home at quarter to eleven,” she said quietly, “and I read about Texas until four this morning.”
“Oh, Leslie!” groaned Doctor Lynnton. “Leave the poor boy to eat his breakfast in peace.”
Bick Benedict was astonished and he did not believe her. He smiled rather patronizingly. “Well, what did you learn? It takes a lot of reading, Texas does.”
“We really stole Texas, didn’t we? I mean. Away from Mexico.”
He jumped as if he had touched a live wire. His eyes were agate. He waited a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “I don’t understand the joke,” he finally said through stiff lips. He thought how many men had been killed in Texas for saying so much less than this thing that had been said to him.
“I’m not joking, Mr. Benedict. It’s right there in the history books, isn’t it? This Mr. Austin moved down there with two or three hundred families from the East, it says, and the Mexicans were polite and said they could settle and homestead if they wanted to, under the rule of Mexico. And the next thing you know they’re claiming they want to free themselves from Mexico and they fight and take it. Really! How impolite. I don’t mean to be rude, but really! Of course the Spanish explorers, and the French, that was different. There was nobody around and there they were tramping and riding across the hot desert in all those iron clothes, with steel helmets and plumes. They must have been terribly uncomfortable. Those Conquistadores—isn’t it a lovely word!—Coronado and De Soto and Whatshis-name De Vaca, poor dears, looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola like children on a treasure hunt. Still, they didn’t actually grab the land away from anyone, the way we did. Of course there were the Indians, but perhaps they didn’t count.”
Doctor Lynnton glanced at Benedict. He was startled to see that the man was rigid with suppressed anger. The muscles of his jaw stood out hard and stiff. For a moment it was as though he would rise and leave the room. Or throw the cup in his hand. These Texans.
“Now now, Leslie,” Doctor Lynnton murmured soothingly. “You mustn’t talk like that to a Texan. They’re touchy. They feel very strongly about their state.” He smiled. “Their country, you might almost say. To some of them the United States is their second country. Isn’t that so, Benedict?”
“Oh, but I didn’t mean to be impolite!” Leslie said before Bick could voice his pent anger. “I was just talking impersonally—about history.” She picked up her cup and saucer and came over and sat beside him, cozily, her elbow on the table, she leaned toward him, she peered into his face like an eager child. It was disconcerting, it was maddening, if she had been a man he would have hit her, he told himself. “It’s all in the books, it’s news to me, I just meant it’s so fascinating. It’s another world, it sounds so big and new and different. I love it. The cactus and the cowboys and the Alamo and the sky and the horses and the Mexicans and the freedom. It’s really America, isn’t it. I’m—I’m in love with it.”
Bick Benedict’s heart gave a lurch. Watch out, he said to himself. Rattlesnakes.
Women did not talk like that. Certainly Texas women didn’t talk like that. Of course, in those two years he had spent at Harvard because the Benedict men always had a couple of years at Harvard so that no one could say they were provincial, he had met a few girls who had a lot of opinions of their own but they weren’t popular girls, they weren’t girls you saw at the football games or the prom. Well, if she wanted to talk about Texas he’d talk to her as if she were a man.
“I never saw anything as ignorant as you Easterners. All you know about American history is what’s happened east of Philadelphia. Valley Forge and Bunker Hill and Washington crossing the Delaware. The Delaware! Did you ever hear of the Rio Grande! I’ll bet they don’t even teach about the Alamo and San Jacinto in your schools.”
“No, they don’t. Do they, Papa?” Doctor Lynnton passed his hand over his face with a gesture like that of brushing off cobwebs. But she went on without waiting for his confirmation. “And anyway, we’re not Easterners, Mr. Benedict.” With earnestness she had grown formal. “Not at all. Are we, Papa?” A rhetorical question, purely. “Tell him.”
“Hell no!” said Horace Lynnton. “Ohioans are no Easterners. But now don’t you get into any fracas with a Texan, Leslie. They’re touchier than a hornet, didn’t you know that? Besides, you came near being a Texan yourself.”
“She did!” Bick exclaimed in a surprisingly pleased tone of voice.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, Leslie. I guess I haven’t mentioned it since you were a very little girl and you didn’t pay much attention.”
He reached for a hot biscuit and split it and placed a great gob of butter in the center of the upper half and on top of this he perched a large gobbet of strawberry jam. He gazed admiringly at the brilliant gold and ruby picture before he bit into it.
Leslie said, very low, with a concern more wifely than filial, “You know not so much starch and sugar and fat.”
“I know,” he agreed ruefully, as though speaking of something beyond his powers of accomplishment. “My patients mind when I tell them but I don’t.” And went on eating and talking with enjoyment. He looked at Bick, genially. “My father was a doctor too, you know. Scotch-Irish stock. He heard the talk about Texas when he was living in Ohio about 1870, before I was born. When I was a kid I used to hear him say he went to Texas to settle down there and grow with the country. He fell in love with it, like Leslie here, before he ever laid eyes on it. Well sir, he stayed about six months and worked up quite a practice, there weren’t many doctors then in Texas. He didn’t mind the climate. The heat. And the northers. And the dust. But he packed up and went back to Ohio. He said his digestion was ruined for life in those six months. Fried steak. Fried potatoes. Fried bread. Fried beans. Said that people who fried everything they ate, and fried it in grease and cared as little about good food and knew as little about cooking as the Texans, would take all of another hundred years to catch up with the rest of the civilized world. No offense I hope, Jordan.” He had a thin pink curl of Virginia ham on his fork and now he used it to chase a few buttery biscuit crumbs around his plate before dispatching it. He eyed the covered dishes on the sideboard, caught Leslie’s disapproving gaze and sat back with a sigh of renunciation. “The Lynntons all set too much store by their palates, I suppose. Leslie here would rather try a new recipe than a new dress.”
“You’re worse than any of us,” Leslie retorted. She turned to Bick. “Everyone knows there’s been a feud for years between Papa and Caroline the cook about which can make the most delicate crème brûlé.”
“What,” inquired Bick Benedict, “is crème brûlé?” At sight of their stricken faces he laughed, but not very heartily. “One thing you’ll say for us—we never bragged on our food. But I like it.” Then, to his own surprise, “Texas would be a good place for Virginia women. They’re pampered and spoiled out of all reason.”
“I’m not. Am I, Papa? But then, I’m not a Virginian.”
Horace Lynnton turned to look at his daughter with the appraising gaze of one who is freshly curious. “Oh, you, Leslie. You were born out of your time. You’d have been good in the Civil War, hiding slav
es in the Underground or, before that, pioneering, maybe, in a covered wagon crossing the prairie with an ox team.”
Leslie, stirring her second cup of coffee, considered this and rejected it. “I wouldn’t have liked it, except the freedom and no Washington society and all that nonsense. Nothing to fear except scalping by the Indians, no household worries except whether you’d find water on the way. It does sound rather lovely, doesn’t it? But awfully uncomfortable. You’ve brought me up wrong, Papa. I love old silver and Maryland crabs and plenty of hot water day and night with bath salts, and one glass of very cold very dry champagne.”
Bick Benedict waved an arm that dismissed silver, hot water, house, garden, champagne, and the entire Eastern seaboard.
“All this is decadent,” he said. “Dying. Or good and dead.”
“It isn’t!” Leslie contested. “It’s been sick, but now it’s just coming back to life. If Lincoln had lived another two years. He had plans. The South would have been better after the Civil War instead of broken because a lot of ignorant greedy——”
“Well,” Doctor Lynnton interrupted, very leisurely, and brushing the crumbs off his vest. “I won’t have time for this, if the Civil War’s going to be fought again.”
Leslie looked directly into Bick’s eyes. He thought, What’s coming now? “Do you read Carlyle?”
“My God no!” Bick said.
Horace Lynnton stood up. “Look here, Leslie. It’s all right to attack a Texan about Texas in the early morning but you can’t batter a guest at breakfast with Carlyle.”
“I don’t know much about Carlyle,” Bick said, and he, too, stood up as Leslie rose, so that the three made a curiously electric group without actually being conscious that they were standing. The two young people faced each other. Their talk became disjointed like the dialogue in a bad English translation of a Chekhov play. “My Mistake. The filly, I mean. I’ve bought her. If you ever come to Texas, Miss Leslie.”
Sadly, “I never will.” Her eyes turned to the open door and the apple orchard beyond where the blossoming trees in their bouffant white skirts stood like ballet dancers a-tiptoe, row on row.
His eyes followed hers. “Those apple blossoms. You can smell them way in here.”
“I read about those yellow blossoms on your trees—or are they shrubs? Are they sweet-smelling?”
“Retama?”
“Huisache. If that’s the way it’s pronounced.”
“After the spring rains there are desert flowers. Miles of them, like a carpet.”
“Then it is a desert, Texas?”
“No. You can grow anything. From grapefruit to wheat. Pretty soon there won’t be anything you can’t grow better in Texas.” Then, to his own horror, he heard himself saying, “If it’s freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it. No calling cards there and young squirts in red coats. Cattle and prairie and horses and sun and sky and plenty of good plain——”
“Plenty of good plain cactus and ticks and drought,” Doctor Lynnton interrupted good-naturedly. “And northers and snakes. You Texans!” He shook his head in wonderment. “Don’t you think you ought to look at My Mistake again before we go? I don’t think you ought to buy her unless you’re dead sure. You’ll have to watch out for that trick she has of doing fancy dance steps just when she’s supposed to be getting near the post. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“I’ve paid double that for a good bull,” Bick said, but not boastfully. Absently, as though this were something unimportant, to be dismissed for more pressing things. “Do you like it living here in Virginia?” he asked Leslie.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Everything looks so little.”
“Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets.”
“How far west have you been?”
“Kansas City once, with Papa.”
“Kansas City! That’s east! And little. In Texas there’s everything. There’s no end to it.”
“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little. I suppose I’m used to everything being sort of cozy. I don’t mean little and cramped. But sort of near me. Family and books and friends and the kitchen if I want to go out and try something new and Caroline doesn’t mind.”
Doctor Lynnton cleared his throat to remind them of his presence. They were weaving a pattern, warily, of which he was no part. “We’ll have to be getting along, Bick,” he said. “Unless you would like to stay on, we’d be happy to have you but I’m due at the hospital——”
“Good morning!” cried Mrs. Lynnton from the dining-room doorway in clear ringing tones. “Good morning, everybody.” She looked straight at Bick. “Good morning, Lochinvar!”
Bick Benedict, rather red, stammered, “Uh—good—uh——”
“Don’t mind Mama,” Leslie said, not at all embarrassed. “She’s been trying to marry me off for years. And anyway, Mama, if you’re going to be geographical, Lochinvar came out of the West, not the Southwest. It wouldn’t have scanned.”
“Leslie reads too much,” Mrs. Lynnton explained blandly. “Horace dear, fetch me a sliver of that ham, will you? For a young girl, I mean. But it’s her only fault and you wouldn’t really call it a fault. Leslie dear, if Mr. Benedict has finished breakfast don’t you want to show him the stables?”
“He saw them yesterday, Mama. Besides, we’ve just quarreled in a polite way about Texas so it’s no use your trying to palm me off on him. And anyway Mr. Benedict has three million acres and five hundred thousand cows or whatever they’re called in Texas——”
“Head of cattle,” Bick suggested, “and not quite five——”
“—head of cattle then. And hundreds of vaqueros and consequently he’s engaged to marry the daughter of the owner of the adjoining ranch who, though comparatively poor, is beautiful and has only one million acres and fifteen thousand horses and two hundred thousand head of cattle and six hundred vaqueros.”
“What is a vaquero?” Mrs. Lynnton demanded, dignified in defeat.
Jordan Benedict walked round the table to stand beside Leslie as though he were talking to her rather than to her mother. “A vaquero is a Mexican cowboy,” he said crisply, with no trace of a drawl. “Did you ever hear the word buckaroo? That’s what the old Texas pioneers made of vaquero, they couldn’t get the hang of the Spanish word vaquero. You see—vaca, cow. Vaquero—fellow who tends cows.”
“Is she pretty?” demanded Mrs. Lynnton, turning the knife in her wound.
Doctor Lynnton bent over his wife’s chair and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Good-bye, dear. Mr. Benedict and I are going now. I’m late.”
Baffled, Mrs. Lynnton must still know the worst. “What, may I ask, is the name of the lucky young lady you are marrying, with all those cows?”
Then even Leslie was moved to protest. “Oh dear Mrs. Nickleby, that was just my little joke.”
Bick Benedict just touched her hand with his forefinger. “It’s more or less true—or was. My next-door neighbor does have a daughter—only a next-door neighbor in Texas is fifty miles away, usually. And he does have just about all that land and those horses and the cattle. And perhaps there was some idea of my marrying his daughter like the fellow in a book. But I’m not.”
A radiance lighted Mrs. Lynnton’s austere features. “Dear me, it all sounds so romantic. I never knew anyone from Texas before, it’s very refreshing, of course it’s quite a distance, Texas.”
“It is a far piece, ma’am,” Bick agreed, still looking at Leslie. “But when you get there you never want to live anywhere else.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Lynnton agreed happily, “with those new fast trains and all you can visit back East in no time at all. And you’re going back tomorrow. Dear me, what a pity. I don’t know when I’ve met any young man that seemed so much like one of the family.”
7
After thirty-six hours of travel the bride and bridegroom seemed to have set up miniature
housekeeping in their drawing room on the Missouri Pacific’s crack Sunshine Special. Books and papers and bundles and bags were heaped on couches and racks. A towering edifice of fruit in a basket, untouched, was turning brown under the hot blasts that poured through the screened window. A vast box of Maillard’s candy, open on the couch, was coated with the fine sift of dust that filmed the little room. A bottle of bourbon clinked against a bottle of water in the wall bracket. Railroad folders and maps of Texas splashed their brilliant pinks and blues and orange and scarlet against the drab green of the car upholstery and the grim maroon of the woodwork. The door of the compartment adjoining the drawing room was open, and this was piled with a formidable array of luggage.
They had been traveling hours, days, yet Texas was not in sight. Bick Benedict did not appear eager for a glimpse of that fabulous commonwealth from which he had been three weeks absent. He lolled on the hot plush seat, the withering southwest blasts poured over him, the dust clogged his throat, the electric fan set the cinders to spinning more merrily in the stifling little room.
He had been bred on heat and dust. This was nothing.
He looked at Leslie and he was like a man fanned by ocean breezes, laved in the perfumes of fresh-cut meadows. But now and then when he leaned against the gritty cushion and shut his eyes his face muscles tensed, his fingers clenched, and it was obvious that his inner vision presented a picture less than idyllic.
The bride was reading a railroad timetable. Bick Benedict eyed her through narrowed lids. “I’ve married a bookworm.” They both laughed as though the timeworn joke were new-minted.
It was incredible that any woman could appear as cool and fresh as she after thirty-six hours in the gritty luxury of a train drawing room. She seemed to have an unlimited supply of fresh blouses and just to watch her open a filmy handkerchief and to catch the scent that emanated from it as she shook out its white folds was a refreshment to the onlooker. She brushed her hair a great deal. She poured eau de cologne into the lavatory wash basin and bathed her wrists and her temples and the scent of this, too, pricked the grateful nostrils.
