by Gwen Bristow
They went to New Orleans and talked to Mr. Robichaux. Mr. Robichaux was regretful, but he was firm. The banks simply could not carry the cotton planters. At first Eleanor was indignant at such heartlessness, then as the interview progressed she saw that Mr. Robichaux looked like a man straining under a burden too heavy for his shoulders, and his voice, as he talked to them, once or twice came perilously near to breaking. “How much power do you think we have?” he cried at last. “At least you can thank God you haven’t had to listen to the stories I’ve heard this month while I’ve sat here feeling like a brute because I couldn’t offer help. I’ve handed some of those people money from my own pocket, not people like you, but the little farmers with their one-mule crops, good decent men trying to get along, I’ve seen them break down and sob at having to take charity, and here you come telling me you’re desperate.”
“I am desperate,” said Kester quietly.
“Yes, Kester, I know. Poverty is relative, of course—but all I can tell you is what I’ve already said. We’re desperate too.”
Kester began to push back his chair. “Thank you, sir, and forgive me.”
They took the train back to Ardeith. On the seat by Kester, Eleanor was tense, her hands holding each other tight on her knee. It was the first time in her life she had ever sat facing defeat.
“You needn’t look like that,” Kester exclaimed at length under cover of the rattling wheels. “Even if the worst comes you won’t have to take in washing!”
“I could stand taking in washing. I can’t stand feeling beaten.”
“For God’s sake, Eleanor, it’s not our fault we can’t move the cotton!”
“It’s not my fault we haven’t any credit,” she returned.
Kester said nothing. He fixed his eyes on the gray cypress woods through which the train was passing. After awhile Eleanor reached out and put her hand over his.
“I’m sorry, Kester,” she said.
He turned her hand over, and looked at the darn on the tip of one of the glove-fingers. “I don’t suppose you can help saying that now and then, can you? You must be thinking it all the time.”
“I try not to,” she murmured. “Even if I don’t sound like it, Kester, I love you very much.”
Their hands closed on each other. Eleanor looked down, ashamed of herself, wondering why she could not hold her tongue.
As they went up the front steps of the Ardeith gallery Cornelia toddled to meet them. Kester picked her up and smiled for the first time that day.
Eleanor went upstairs and flung her hat on a table. The hat was two years old. Last summer when she was waiting for Cornelia’s birth she had not needed hats, and except for that beauty with the three white feathers, quite unsuitable to wear on the train, she had not dared to buy any this year. The hat she had just pulled off belonged to her magical honeymoon on the Gulf Coast, a thousand years ago when she was young and confident, sure that going to sleep with Kester’s arms around her meant that she would never have a problem in this world. Eleanor picked up the hat and tried to smooth the faded ribbon around the crown. She did so hate to be shabby; she had never been foolishly extravagant about her clothes, but she had always looked well-dressed. Always, she thought now, until she had married Kester, the single act of her life that had been prompted by emotion instead of reason.
There was a knock on her door. When she called, Kester came in carrying her grip, dear Kester who had such delicacy that he never entered her bedroom unless he knocked first, and he came to her without speaking, and put his arms around her and held her close. Eleanor clung to him, because when Kester held her like this she could not be conscious of anything except of how much she loved him.
After a long time Kester said, “They’ve got supper nearly ready. Change your dress and come down.”
“All right,” she answered faintly.
“It’s frightfully hot,” he said. “I’ll send you up a pitcher of ice water.”
She kissed him lingeringly.
After supper Kester ensconced himself behind a magazine while Eleanor sat drawing curlycues on the page of a ledger, searching the wall in front of them for some crack for escape. They did not need a great deal of money. If Kester had not neglected the interest on his notes since long before they went to the bank last January they would have needed still less.
She went on drawing circles. Their payment on the principal would not be due until the following fall. Eight thousand dollars would take care of the interest this year, though it would not leave a penny to pay for the fertilizer they had bought, nor the equipment, nor any of their long-standing bills. Eight thousand dollars; it was no vast sum to mean the bridge between collapse and endurance, but she was reminded of what Benjamin Franklin had said: “If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some.”
Alice’s husband and Sebastian had both taken such heavy losses in the market crash that though they might have wanted to do so they could not offer help. Kester’s father, living on his income from the sugar land, habitually spent the last penny he received. Her own father—the thought of asking his charity made her writhe. It might mean considerable hardship for Fred to dig up eight thousand dollars in cash on a week’s notice.
Her own little income went for current living expenses as fast as she received it, for keeping a house such as this one in order, even with the strictest economy, cost a good deal. She felt herself smiling at the irony of being destitute amid such splendor.
The idea brought a flash of inspiration. Eleanor jabbed her pencil into the paper so hard that the point snapped. She sprang up.
“Where are you going?” Kester asked.
“To get my keys. I’ll show you.” By the time she had said it she was at the door. She dashed upstairs to get her keys and a flashlight and down again to the vault that had been built under the house for the safeguarding of valuables. With the aid of the flashlight she looked around.
Kester had said every teaspoon in the house was carrying all it could stand, which was an exaggeration. There were some things nobody had thought to mortgage: a few bottles of priceless liquor put here by a race that had understood the refinements of good living, and numerous bits of jewelry worn by dead ladies. Some of it she had worn herself on important occasions. Eleanor took the bottles down and pushed aside the cobwebs so she could see the labels. She knew very little about ancient liquors, but anything that could not be replaced was worth money. She knelt down, the dust blackening her skirt, and began unlocking the old safe, constructed long ago to be opened with a series of keys. Groping in the half-darkness, she found a silver cup given to some Larne baby of a past generation; Cornelia was cutting her teeth on a silver cup that had belonged to her great-grandfather, so evidently this had been offered to another child, and holding her flashlight close she read “Cynthia, June 6, 1849.” Without pausing to wonder who Cynthia might have been Eleanor set the cup on the floor and went on rummaging. There were piles of documents—marriage certificates, wills, deeds to land and slaves—as these were of no monetary value she hardly looked at them. She found some earrings, long and heavy for pierced ears, several brooches, a jeweled butterfly apparently made to hold up a lady’s curls, a medallion with a lock of a baby’s hair on one side and on the other a space that looked as if it might have been meant for a picture. The space was set within a circle of diamonds.
Holding these and other treasures jumbled together in a bag she made by gathering up her skirt, Eleanor relocked the safe. She left the jewelry in her room, and without pausing to wash her blackened hands she picked up the flashlight again and went to the attic. It was full of furniture, mahogany and rosewood that were merely odds and ends at Ardeith but that would be costly antiques in the shop windows along Royal Street in New Orleans.
As she came down she saw Kester in the upper hall looking for her.
“Eleanor, what have you been doing?” he demanded
. He looked her up and down and burst out laughing. “Your hair is full of cobwebs and you’re black from head to foot.”
“Come in here.” She opened the door of her bedroom. “Kester, do you know we’ve got enough salable stuff in this house to set an antique dealer mad? I’m going to bring one up from New Orleans.”
Kester was amazed. He was, she guessed after a few minutes, shocked. It had never occurred to him that the treasures of Ardeith were separable from it any more than the columns that held up the roof. He looked at the silver and jewelry she had brought from the vault, and listened to her description of what else they could part with. Now and then he shook his head in wondering protest.
“The brandy I don’t mind,” he said after awhile. “Nor the things in the attic—I suppose the fact that they’re there proves we don’t need them. But these—” he indicated the jewels—“Eleanor, do we have to let them go? They mean something—I could tell you a story about every piece on that table—”
“Kester, we can’t afford to be sentimental!”
He had picked up the diamond medallion. “My grandmother—the girl in the blue hoopskirt downstairs—tried to sell this during Reconstruction, when one of her children was very ill. It was midsummer and she was trying to buy ice. She couldn’t sell it. The child died.”
“Kester, my darling, it doesn’t matter now. We can’t let it matter!”
He slowly replaced the medallion on the table beside the other things. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you’re always so damn right.”
They took the jewelry to New Orleans the next day and left it there for appraisal. After consideration, Eleanor told Kester they need not actually sell it, as the bank would probably accept it as security for the interest on their notes, and the reminder cheered Kester so that he submitted to her unsavory choice of a dealer in antiques to look at their discarded furniture.
The dealer smelt like lard. His hair was greasy, his face was greasy, even his voice had a well-oiled sound. In the lapel of his coat he wore a button bearing the legend “I love my wife but oh you kid!” There were many dealers of gentler appearance on Royal Street, but Eleanor had wanted one who would regard what she had to sell as merchandise and make a bargain accordingly. Cameo, who met them at the station with the carriage, gave their visitor a glance of distaste all the more eloquent because he abated not one jot of the silent respect with which he waited upon any guest to Ardeith. The dealer whistled as the carriage drove down the avenue and gave voice to some profane admiration. When they went indoors he looked around as though estimating the cost of everything within his vision.
“Swell layout you got here,” he observed. “Now where’s the stuff you want me to look at?”
Eleanor had had the servants move it all into a back room downstairs. She saw Dilcy and Bessie now, regarding the new arrival as Cameo had done. “Will yo’ guest have some coffee, miss?” Bessie inquired with polite disdain.
“No time for coffee,” said the guest briskly. “Where—”
“In this room,” said Kester, opening a door, but the dealer had paused before the two companion portraits hung at the foot of the stairs. “Mhm,” he said, nodding with approval. “Romantic. How much you want for those?”
“They are not for sale,” said Kester. “Will you come in here, please?”
“Well, you needn’t freeze on it. What’d you bring me up here for if you didn’t want money?”
As this sort of trade was obviously not to Kester’s liking, Eleanor took charge. “It’s all in here,” she said briskly, leading them into the back room. “This tip-table, as you can see, is solid rosewood. This nest of tables is made up of six, fitting one within the other—”
“Sure, I see.” He bent down, tapping the wood and looking for wormholes. Eleanor nodded sagely. She had been right; this fellow wouldn’t waste time talking. He knew his business.
Kester looked on, speaking only when he had to answer a question. But now that she was actually doing something, Eleanor was enjoying herself. Matching her wits with someone else’s for profit gave her a feeling of gay triumph, for she was good at it; they dickered and argued, and when they agreed on a price for anything she wrote it down in a notebook. Evidently having begun with the misconception that he was calling upon a lady who could be cheated because she wouldn’t know any better, as the day advanced the dealer began giving her glances of unwilling respect. “You sure know what you’re up to, don’t you, Mrs. Larne?” he remarked at length.
“Certainly,” said Eleanor.
“You ought to be in business.”
“What do you think this is?” she retorted.
He continued to examine the seat of a chair he was holding upside down. “Funny. I don’t mind telling you. Most folks who’ve got this stuff to sell out of old houses don’t know a dollar from a biscuit,” he confided.
She laughed. “Well, I do.”
“So I observe. What you got total for this?”
“Two thousand one hundred and forty-two dollars.”
“Make it two thousand for the lot and we’ll call it quits.”
“It totals two thousand one hundred—”
“Damn!” he said, and began to laugh too. “Ain’t you a bit ladylike?”
“Not when it costs good money to be ladylike,” said Eleanor.
“All right, all right, you win. Look, Mrs. Larne, any time you want a job selling, let me know. I could use one like you.” He went back into the hall and looked around again at the portraits. “Better think twice, you two. I’d like to handle some of these.”
“I told you they were not for sale,” Kester answered crisply.
“Your kinfolks?”
“Yes.”
He surveyed the portraits wisely. “Sure, I knew it. You wouldn’t have ’em if they weren’t real. All your stuff is real. You can’t fool me.”
“Those are of no value to any family but my own,” said Kester, evidently wishing his visitor would remove himself as soon as possible. “They aren’t by great artists.”
The dealer gave a low whistle of derision. “I can see you’re new to this business, mister. Lots of them porky millionaires that come to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, they haven’t got any portraits. Their folks were on the steerage when your folks were getting painted. So they buy ’em a couple of pictures and take ’em home. Don’t you get it ?—Aunt Minnie.”
Kester gave a shrug. Eleanor began to laugh.
“I bet this little lady would sell ’em.” The dealer made a gesture with his thumb toward Eleanor.
“You heard my husband say they were not for sale,” she put in quickly. “Here’s the list of prices you offered, so you can add them yourself if you like. And here’s a pen.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said with exaggerated meekness. “Now what’s the first name, please?”
“Kester,” she told him.
“Oh, I make the check to him? All right, anything you say. There’ll be a couple of boys around with a truck in the morning. And don’t you get smart and slip a couple of pieces back in the garret, either.”
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Kester.
“Well, people have been known to. Don’t get me wrong, mister, I ain’t saying you’re not honest, but we need to be careful when we got our living to make.” He grinned at Eleanor. “If you change your mind about Aunt Minnie, say so.”
When he had gone Kester shivered with relief and ordered a highball. Eleanor went jubilantly to him with the check. “Endorse this now,” she exclaimed, “and I’ll send it right to the bank. Kester, aren’t you delighted?”
“I’m delighted he’s gone,” said Kester dryly. He wrote his name.
Eleanor picked up the check. For a moment she stood still, looking down at him, then she crossed to the desk, where she put the check into an envelope to be mailed the bank for deposit. As she stamped t
he letter she turned around again and looked at him. Kester sat by the window sipping his highball.
“Aren’t you even glad I got some money for us?” she asked.
“Of course I’m glad,” he said without turning.
“Then what’s the matter with you?”
“Do I have to pretend besides I enjoyed your haggling like a pawnbroker?”
“Somebody had to haggle,” she exclaimed, “and it was evident you weren’t going to.”
“You were very good at it. That nest of tables you got eighty dollars for isn’t worth more than fifty.”
Eleanor walked across the room and stood in front of him.
“Then you might have said so. All you’ve done this afternoon is stand around with your lip curled. One would think trying to pay your debts was a matter beneath a gentleman’s dignity.”
She stopped, drew a breath and let it out audibly. She went to him and put her hand on his shoulder. As she was tingling with anger she waited a moment, then spoke slowly and carefully. “Kester, please don’t make me mad! My nerves are in the same state as European culture, and if I lose my—”
He turned impulsively, put his arm around her and drew her down to sit on the arm of his chair. “I know, darling. Mine are too.” He gave a sorry little shake of his head. “Odd, isn’t it—we’re just as bad as the Europeans. The minute people start fighting for civilization they start behaving as if they never heard of it.”
For several minutes they were silent. At last Eleanor stood up restlessly. “I think I’ll take a drive down the river road before supper. The air will be good for my disposition.”
He smiled. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said.
“So am I,” Eleanor answered, and kissed his hair.
She piloted the automobile down the avenue and past the gates. The scenery along the river road was not a happy sight this fall. The oaks grew on either side, their branches lacing overhead so that the road was spotted with sunlight, but behind them in the fields unpicked cotton was lying on the ground in dirty little curls, as numerous planters had not thought it worth while to go to the trouble of getting it in. Bales for which no warehouse space had been contracted beforehand were piled around the gins, for with none of the year’s harvest moving the warehouses had no more space to rent. Eleanor had come out because she wanted to relax and not talk about cotton, but she could not help thinking about it. With the cash she had acquired today and the jewels as security for the rest of the interest they could doubtless pacify the bank into letting them stay at Ardeith through another year. But during that year—?
