This Side of Glory

by Gwen Bristow

  She wanted nothing less than to see any of them, but she did not know how to refuse. So she nodded. “And dad,” she added, “nothing to the folks about why I’m in town.”

  “Oh, to be sure not,” he said genially. “You’re old enough to have business of your own. Like to come out now for a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks, I have to get back to the baby, then I’m seeing Mr. Robichaux.”

  “All right. See you tonight, then.”

  Eleanor left him. She went back to the hotel and waited impatiently till it was time for her appointment at the bank.

  In the afternoon she went to see Mr. Robichaux.

  Mr. Robichaux had iron-gray hair and a pleasant face that became grim when she asked about the Ardeith mortgages. She told him she wanted the dates and the totals.

  Mr. Robichaux cleared his throat. He said he had been compelled to write Kester a rather sharp letter. Kester’s father had often borrowed money on the cotton crop, but he had been more careful about keeping up with it, though of course—he cleared his throat again and came to the present. Yes, there had been of late, ah, some slight neglect about the interest. Kester was becoming absent-minded. Besides, the plantation had become—well, slightly rundown. It was not as valuable security as it had been. Unless something was done shortly, he was afraid—

  “I understand,” said Eleanor. “Now, how much do we owe the bank and when do the notes fall due?”

  Mr. Robichaux called in a clerk and got a pile of papers.

  Inside of an hour Eleanor discovered that she and Kester were living at Ardeith only by a lenient interpretation of banking rules. Kester had apparently been willing to sign anything that would relieve him of thinking about money as a fact of life. She asked Mr. Robichaux for a sheet of stationery and began to write down the figures. Mentally she began to add these to the bills she had found in Kester’s desk. Kester’s notes at the bank and his personal debts together totaled, as closely as she could figure now, nearly one hundred thousand dollars.

  And the plain truth was, Mr. Robichaux reminded her, that Kester had let half the plantation go to sharecroppers. The land was being ruined with one-mule crops.

  “Thank you,” said Eleanor, “for giving me so much of your time.”

  She left him and went out into the street. A January sun, glittering without warmth, lit the pavements. Eleanor took her watch from under her belt, wondering as she did so how long it had taken Kester to pay for the watch and what it would bring if she tried to sell it. She still had some leisure, and was thankful.

  She walked down through the wholesale district, and among the factories, where the air was rich with the familiar odors of coffee and molasses that she would always associate with downtown New Orleans. When she reached the riverfront she stood on the wharf watching the creeping golden river that had fathered Ardeith and the land on which the city stood. Boats from Central America were unloading coffee, and great refrigerator cars were lined up on railroads leading to the wharf, ready to receive their cargo of bananas in the morning. Far out in the river a dredge was working, keeping the channel open. She could hear its puffing above the voices of the men busy on the wharf around her. She saw a big sign, “Tonelli Fruit Lines.” Lena Tonelli’s grandfather had come from Italy in the steerage, and picked up the overripe bananas thrown away on the wharf of New Orleans and peddled them in a pushcart at two cents a dozen. But at least he had had no debts when he started.

  Turning her back on the fruit-ships Eleanor walked down to Canal Street. She could see the west bank, a line of trees and house made dim by distance, and the ferryboats going back and forth. The wind here was fresh; Eleanor thought of crossing the river on a ferry, but recollected that she could not afford to drop a nickel unnecessarily into a turnstile. So she stood still and looked at the river, remembering how she and Vance used to tease visitors to the levee camps by asking them if they knew which way the river flowed past New Orleans. Sometimes the strangers guessed east or west, but they almost never said north, which was right, and you had to draw a map and show them the bend whereby the Mississippi appeared to want to go back where it came from, before it turned around again and poured through seven golden mouths into the purple Gulf.

  Eleanor caught herself. She was not often given to the yearning nostalgia that reaches for anything except the present. She turned around and walked swiftly back to the hotel, where she changed her dress and told Dilcy to stay with Cornelia while she went uptown to visit her mother.

  Dinner at home was gay, friendly and noisy. After dinner the young Tonellis came in, with Guy Rickert, Lena’s fiancé, and everybody talked at once. Lena asked Eleanor if she had learned to drive a car yet, and when Eleanor said Kester was teaching her Lena said she had already learned and it was easy, she had an Overland coupé with an electric starter that had never yet failed to work, and these new slit skirts might be immodest but they did make it easy to reach the clutch and brake. Fred told about an exciting movie he had seen, in which Ford Sterling strapped Mabel Normand to a plank and started to cut her in half with a buzz-saw; he had forgotten how she was rescued, but it kept him on the edge of his seat and quite took his mind off the trouble the Atchafalaya River was making this winter. Florence said New Orleans had more than thirty moving picture theaters now, did Eleanor know that? Molly Upjohn reminded Florence that with a baby three months old Eleanor probably didn’t have time to be up-to-date on things like moving picture theaters. Florence began to play the piano and Guy Rickert asked Eleanor to dance. It was as though she had never been away. Eleanor had a sense of warm familiarity. These were her people, solid, sincere, utterly trustworthy. They took it for granted that you should take care of yourself. Guy and Lena drove her back to the hotel. Eleanor stood a moment looking after them regretfully, feeling that they were taking away with them the sturdy self-reliance to which she had been bred and leaving her nothing to put in its place.

  When she opened the door of her room she saw Kester. He was reading an afternoon paper, and as she came in he sprang to his feet, letting the paper slip to the floor.

  “Remember me?” he asked affably.

  Eleanor went to him, and Kester put his arms around her. Eleanor dropped her head against him, wondering why it was that Kester’s arms around her should give her such a sense of security even now. When she looked up she asked, “Are you angry with me for coming?”

  “What good would it do if I were?” inquired Kester. “How does Cornelia like traveling?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “She seems to be; I played with her in the other room till she went to sleep.” He helped her off with her coat, and Eleanor rescued her hat in time to prevent his tossing it upside down on the bed, for it was a velvet hat with a tall aigrette and she did not expect to buy another hat of such quality for a long time. “Now,” said Kester as she put the hat into its box, “what have you been doing, Mrs. Manage-it-all?” He was regarding her with the reproachful amusement he might have given if she had interfered with his poker game by an excess of solicitude.

  Fresh from the gay safety of home, Eleanor was in no mood for banter. Her reply was clear and terse.

  “I’ve been adding up your bills. Altogether you owe nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A hundred th— Eleanor, don’t be fantastic!”

  “I’m not being fantastic. You told me you didn’t know how much it was, so I’ve been finding out.”

  Kester gave a long whistle. Leaning back in his chair, he regarded the chandelier thoughtfully. Eleanor told him about her talk with Mr. Robichaux.

  “You wait for me,” Kester said abruptly. “I’m going downstairs and call him.”

  “This time of night?”

  “It’s not twelve o’clock yet. I’ll ring him at home.”

  Soothed by his superb confidence that nothing could ever happen to him, Kester scampered out, and Eleanor went int
o the adjoining room to look at Cornelia. She bent over the crib. Cornelia had gone to sleep holding a rattle, which Eleanor slipped out of her fingers, lest she hurt herself with it in the night. Back in the light of her own room she noticed that the rattle was a new one, evidently brought by Kester when he came in this evening, and she flung it down with vehemence. With debts pointing accusing fingers at him from every corner, what right had he to waste even a quarter on a rattle for a child already amply supplied with unpaid-for luxuries? Kester came in, exuberant. He was going to see Mr. Robichaux at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he said, and he kissed her, assuring her that he’d take care of it and everything was going to be all right. Eleanor laid his hand against her cheek, with a wondering smile.

  “Doesn’t it distress you,” she asked, “to know you’re in debt?”

  “Darling,” said Kester, “I suppose it ought to, but I’m so used to it.” He sat down and drew her to sit on his knee.

  “Have you always been in debt?” Eleanor inquired.

  “Always,” he assured her solemnly. “I’ll tell you about myself. When I was eight years old my father gave me a quarter and told me he was going to give me a quarter every week. I was to keep a cash book, recording what I spent for candy and such, and this was to teach me how to be a big business man.”

  “Yes, that’s the way I was taught,” she agreed.

  Kester went on talking confidentially. “But I didn’t have any cash book, you see. So I went to the store and bought one. It was a funny little store kept by an old man named Mr. Parfax. The cash book cost thirty cents, and I only had a quarter. So the first entry I made in the book was, ‘I owe Mr. Parfax five cents.’” He sighed. “And it seems I’ve never caught up.”

  Eleanor could not help laughing at him. Kester looked as ingenuous as his baby daughter. “Do you support your father?” she asked after a moment.

  “No, darling, he has the rent from that sugar land across the river.”

  “What are you going to tell Mr. Robichaux tomorrow? He can foreclose if he wants to.”

  “Oh Lord, I don’t know. I’ll tell him something. Eleanor, I bothered about this for a long time the other night before I could go to sleep and all it did was give me a headache. I’m not going to tear my head to pieces again about it. It’s late, and I’m sleepy, and if you don’t get that serious look off your face you’re going to have lines before you’re thirty.”

  3

  The next afternoon they went to the Southeastern Exchange Bank to see Mr. Robichaux.

  Mr. Robichaux greeted Kester cordially. Suspecting that this pleasantness was merely intended to soften what he would be compelled to tell Kester in about ten minutes, Eleanor was apprehensive as she sat down. Kester began to talk business.

  That is, he began to talk what purported to be business, while Eleanor listened with increasing amazement. Her way of discussing anything was to slash through to its fundamentals. Kester’s was to exchange opinions about the races, to ask Mr. Robichaux about his grandchildren (he knew all their names), to congratulate Mr. Robichaux on having won the chess tournament at his club (and how under heaven, she wondered, did Kester know he had won any chess tournament? Kester knew everything about everybody). Apparently Mr. Robichaux’s chess was important to him. He grew more and more jovial. He told Kester about a tricky opening gambit he had used. Somehow the talk veered to politics. Mr. Robichaux thought the Americans who were having trouble with the Mexican bandits ought to come home and not expect the government to send soldiers to take care of them. That sort of thing would lead to war. And who wanted war with Mexico? Who indeed, Kester inquired agreeably. The United States got all of Mexico it could use during the old war with them, the one back in the eighteen-forties. But of course, said Mr. Robichaux, with that college professor in the White House you couldn’t tell what might happen. Kester nodded. Mr. Wilson was a sort of experiment with a philosopher-king, as they said, didn’t Mr. Robichaux think so?

  But what, Eleanor thought in wonder, had all this to do with the Ardieth mortgages?

  From Mexico the talk drifted to Mr. Robichaux’s trip to California last summer. Remarkable country out there, but with all that desert between, it was almost like crossing to another continent. Was Kester by any chance thinking of going to the exposition next year in San Francisco? They did say the Panama Canal would be open and ready for traffic, and they were planning to send boats directly from New Orleans to San Francisco, through the canal.

  Kester smiled and shrugged. Mr. Robichaux must know he couldn’t afford to go to any exposition. Why, he had to get busy and attend to his plantation. That was what he had come in for, you know, to talk over the mortgages Mr. Robichaux’s bank had been so kind as to let him carry on Ardeith.

  Yes, yes indeed, said Mr. Robichaux. By this time he and Kester had grown so sociable that Mr. Robichaux was speaking of the mortgages as a matter between friends, not at all in the grim fashion in which he had discussed them with Eleanor yesterday. Kester remarked that he had been planning to make a great many changes in his management of Ardeith, but what with his getting married and having a baby, he had sort of been putting it off. He leaned nearer his listener, across the desk. Now here was the idea.

  Then, to Eleanor’s astonishment, Kester coolly began to outline plans for completely revising the system under which Ardeith was conducted. He described the constitution of the soil and its possibilities for intensive cultivation. He talked about scientific improvements the Department of Agriculture had suggested for increasing the yield of cotton land, and improved sprinkling methods for fighting boll weevils. He used terms that were to Eleanor a foreign language, and possibly to Mr. Robichaux too, but it was obvious that the latter was beginning to be impressed. He asked questions. He nodded soberly. He listened.

  Kester’s deep, persuasive voice went on, laying fact after fact before Mr. Robichaux’s attention. Cabbages could be grown on the cotton land in winter. That scrub pine land, so far considered valueless, could be planted in holly. Holly always had a profitable market at Christmas. You planted ten female trees to each male tree, and for maximum production you could graft female branches to each of the male trees. But holly and cabbages and such minor crops would just be lagniappe, something extra thrown in; Ardeith was a cotton plantation. It had averaged eight hundred bales a year recently, but there was no reason why it couldn’t produce a thousand or even more. The government experts had been saying for a long time that a bale of cotton took twice as much land as it ought to, and there was no reason why it had to be grown so wastefully at Ardeith. That was what sharecroppers did for a place. As soon as he got back to Ardeith he was going to start getting the sharecroppers off his land and have the cotton grown by paid laborers under his own supervision.

  “Give me two years, Mr. Robichaux,” said Kester. “This fall I’ll pay you the interest entire on all these notes, and in the fall of 1915 I can start reducing the principal.”

  Mr. Robichaux thoughtfully adjusted the position of his inkstand.

  “You don’t want a rundown plantation,” said Kester. “What would the bank do with it? Let it be run at a loss by somebody who’s hired and consequently doesn’t care? Or cut it up into parcels and sell it for whatever you can get? Either way you’ll lose money. Let me run it the way I’ve outlined and you won’t lose a penny.”

  Mr. Robichaux was won. “I wish you had told me your plans before!” he exclaimed. “I had no idea you were counting on such improvements.”

  “Well, it takes time to work out details. I didn’t want to come to you with anything that wasn’t complete and clear.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Robichaux, “of course.” But he explained that he could not, without consultation, renew the notes so as to postpone a payment on the principal until the fall of 1915, nearly two years ahead. However, Kester could come in tomorrow morning and outline his system of plantation management to a group of
directors. Mr. Robichaux was confident they would agree to his proposal.

  Kester lowered his eyes and was humbly grateful. “After the procrastinating idiot I’ve seemed to be, Mr. Robichaux, I surely appreciate it, sir.”

  “Not at all, Kester, my boy.” Mr. Robichaux held out his hand. “Bankers aren’t ogres. We live by lending money. Only, you understand, we’ve got to have certainty. Just had to check up on your plans, you see.”

  They shook hands. Eleanor wanted to gasp and laugh at once. By this time it was Mr. Robichaux who was on the verge of apologies and Kester who was bossing the interview. Mr. Robichaux shook hands with Eleanor, and said if she was planning to come back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras she must certainly let Mrs. Robichaux know, maybe they could manage a luncheon one day.

  Kester and Eleanor got outside, into the street. “Kester!” she began.

  “Don’t say anything. Come on. Hurry.” He was nearly choking with smothered glee.

  He made her almost race the short distance back to the hotel. When he had closed the door of their room behind them Kester dropped into a chair and began to laugh. He laughed till he was weak. Eleanor was still speechless.

  “Now what was all your hurry?” he demanded at last. “I went to dinner, tried out the automobiles, had supper with the salesman, and settled everything here.” He gave her a look of twinkling triumph. “You, young woman, are going to explode one of these days.”

  “But Kester,” she exclaimed in awe, “with such marvelous ideas for rehabilitating Ardeith, why haven’t you been doing any of it? And why didn’t you tell me before I nearly lost my mind with worry?”

  Kester gave her a blank look. “My dearest girl, you didn’t assume I’d thought up all that before this afternoon?”

  “But—you must have!” she gasped.

  Kester pulled her down to sit on his knees. “My darling, my angel, the light of my eyes,” he said to her, shaking with mirth, “I made it up as I went along.”