by Gwen Bristow
After that she did not know exactly what they said. She was trying to tell him everything at once, and he was trying to tell her. They went into the parlor by the fire, and she sat on the sofa while he knelt in front of her with his head in her lap.
She was trying to make him understand that he had had her forgiveness long before he came home, and all she wanted was to know that she had his, but he wanted to talk. He had not meant to go to Isabel when he left her, at least, he did not think he had, though he had been so angry it was hard to say now what he had meant to do. But before it was very late he was very drunk, at least he thought he must have been, though he could remember everything that had happened, especially the bartender at Joe’s Place begging him not to drive and himself insisting that he could drive any car anywhere at any time; he remembered that out in the air he had felt better, and had taken the car with elaborate carefulness around the corner where the Colston Dry Goods Store projected dangerously into the street, but all that the clarifying of his head had done was recall her cruel speeches and make him angrier with her than ever, so that he had told himself he didn’t care if he never saw her again, and hoped he wouldn’t have to; then he had driven aimlessly along the river road, not going anywhere, just driving there by force of habit—at least he hadn’t consciously meant to be going anywhere, though it was hard for anybody to say just what his intentions had been when he was as drunk as that—but pretty soon he had discovered that he couldn’t keep the car at the right side of the road, or the left side, or the middle of it, and he hadn’t been so completely addled as not to know he wasn’t likely to get anywhere alive if he didn’t stop driving, and about that time he realized this, there in front of him was Isabel’s home, all dark except for a light from one upstairs window. And if Eleanor could know, if she could possibly by any wild reach of fantasy imagine, the rat and the brute and the worm he had felt like when he woke up this morning, she would understand how it was that he had spent most of the day driving through the woods, throwing sticks into the bayous and trying to make up his mind to come home and face her.
Eleanor told him she did know. She understood, because she had spent a sleepless night realizing that the puritans and clergymen who had dictated the laws hadn’t known more than half what they were talking about when they had assumed that there was only one sin that broke the marriage vows. She had broken them as well as he. They had both been disloyal, and all they could do was swear to each other that they would not be disloyal again.
There was a long silence. With his arms around her waist and his head in her lap and her hands stroking his tousled hair, Eleanor wondered why it was that this had made her more intensely than ever conscious of how closely she was bound to Kester, and no matter what he might do, of how completely she belonged to him.
At last he lifted his head. “What I need now is some self-respect,” he said.
Eleanor bent and kissed him. “What you need now, darling, is a bath and a clean shirt. Nobody can have any self-respect who looks the way you do.”
“What a woman,” said Kester, and she smiled with a poignant sense of happiness.
But in the middle of the night Eleanor woke up. She stirred restlessly, and turned over. It was foolish and she forbade herself to think about it, but all the same she could not rid herself of the feeling that her marriage was like a mended garment, which though it may be mended so dexterously that only a sharp eye can see that it was ever torn, will always have a weak place where it might tear again.
Chapter Nine
1
In the morning the papers Fred had sent her were still lying on Eleanor’s bureau, and she snatched them up and began telling Kester what was about to happen to cotton. She talked briskly, fastening her attention to cotton for relief as much as for its own importance, because she had heard last night all she cared to hear about Isabel Valcour and felt that she could not endure the sound of that woman’s name again, even coupled with Kester’s protests of penitence.
He listened with amazement. At first monosyllabic exclamations were all he could answer, then his mind grabbed the idea and tossed it about in delight. “Guncotton—cordite—why Eleanor, it’s wonderful! If the war lasts till fall the price for the new crop may be high enough for us to make that payment!”
But at length Eleanor reminded him that at present they had no money with which to raise another crop. As she spoke she realized that she must have been unconsciously thinking of this all night, for a plan began to tumble ready-made from her lips.
“I’m going down to New Orleans and talk to Mr. Tonelli, dad’s friend who owns the banana lines,” she told Kester. “We’ll offer to mortgage to him the cotton we have now in the warehouse.”
“Can you convince him the war will last two years more?”
“He’ll be taking a chance, of course, but what investor doesn’t? And Mr. Tonelli has made millions by taking chances like this.”
“Wait a minute.” Kester had sobered abruptly. “We wrote Sebastian to sell our cotton.”
Eleanor looked down, rolling up the edge of one of the clippings between her thumb and forefinger. “I telephoned him to hold it.”
“You did? When?”
“Yesterday morning early,” she said in a faint voice.
Kester did not say anything. He came over and drew her head to his shoulder. There was a silence, but when Eleanor spoke again it was with crisp alacrity, for she still did not feel equal to talking about anything but cotton.
“I’ll go to New Orleans this afternoon,” she said. “You’d better manage the planting while I attack the financial end of it—we always work better that way.”
“I’ll start today.” Kester spoke in the same fashion. He grinned down at her. “How was I ever lucky enough to marry a woman who had majored in mathematics?”
He gave her a squeeze. Eleanor laughed, and hurried to begin packing her bag. Later that day she drew the last dollar out of her bank account to pay for the trip to New Orleans.
When she got there she spent two days in the library reading about explosives and studying the international laws that governed neutral shipments to belligerents. Then, equipped with enough information to talk for hours if need be, she called on Marco Tonelli. Would he, she asked, lend her money on the cotton, taking the chance that the war would last long enough for her to pay it back?
Mr. Tonelli tapped his pencil on his thumb, considering. He was a fat little man with shrewd black eyes and creases in his cheeks left as the tracks of many triumphant smiles. His father had picked up overripe bananas on the wharfs of New Orleans and peddled them in a pushcart. He himself had once financed a Central American revolution for the sake of getting a government that would make more liberal terms with his banana plantations. Mr. Tonelli drove a twelve-thousand-dollar car and gave liberally to charity, but he had never knowingly wasted a quarter in his life.
“Now what’s all this you’ve found out about ammunition, Miss Eleanor?” he inquired.
She was ready. “The details of the processes are trade secrets, but the general principle is this: the raw cotton is treated with ether and alcohol to break up the fiber. As the ether and alcohol evaporate they leave a sort of jelly, and this is treated with nitrate. When the process of this treatment is fired, it forms an expanding gas—it explodes and there’s absolutely nothing left.”
He nodded and she went on.
“They have plenty of nitrate in Europe, but no cotton except what they can import. At the outbreak of the war they had reserves of ammunition, but it’s giving out and they are working madly to produce more. I knew that, but I didn’t know gunpowder was made of cotton. Evidently most of the general public doesn’t know it either. They’ll find out soon, now that it’s getting into the papers, but by that time it will be too late to plant and the 1915 cotton crop is going to be a small one, so the price will be good. Meanwhile, the American munitions factories are
going day and night making ammunition to be sold in Europe.”
“How’re they going to make sure it gets there?” Mr. Tonelli asked sharply.
“It’s already getting there. Haven’t you read those arguments in the papers about whether or not there should be a law prohibiting Americans from selling munitions to the countries at war?”
“Mhm, I believe I have. Suppose they should pass such a law?”
“Mr. Tonelli, you’re not soft-hearted or soft-headed enough to think Congress can stop the American people’s selling anything they can get paid for!”
He began to laugh. “You aren’t either, ma’am, that’s evident.”
But Eleanor was not laughing. She went on, concisely and impressively, giving him facts. “The only question is how much longer the war will go on,” she concluded. “The best estimates I can find give it three years, and so far it’s lasted only seven months.”
Chin in hand, Mr. Tonelli drummed his fingers on his little fat cheeks. “How much cotton have you got, Miss Eleanor?”
“Nine hundred and thirty-two bales.”
“Unencumbered ?”
“Yes, except that we are three hundred dollars behind on storage payments.”
“How much do you want to borrow?”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
Mr. Tonelli whistled. “You’ve got nerve, young woman, haven’t you?”
“If it isn’t worth sixty by October,” said Eleanor, “you may eat my head.”
“I don’t want to eat your head. I want that thirty thousand dollars back plus eight per cent.”
“Eight per cent! You’ve got nerve too, haven’t you?”
“Sure I have. The Germans got too close to Paris last fall for me to be counting on the duration of this war. Take it or not?”
“Take it,” said Eleanor.
He promised to have the papers ready in a few days. Eleanor left his office decorously, but once on the street she almost scampered along. This was what she enjoyed, a challenge and a fight with the chance for victory. She wired Kester to come to New Orleans and sign the papers mortgaging their cotton to Mr. Tonelli. Kester arrived the next day, won the stern heart of Mr. Tonelli by his exuberance, thanked Fred with blithe gratitude for having noticed the mention of the British dreadnaught, and characteristically signed the agreement without reading it, though as Eleanor had already examined every word it did not matter. He and Eleanor went back to Ardeith ready to work as they had worked last summer, only, if possible, harder.
2
By April cotton was quoted at ten cents a pound, and the spring exports had exceeded any previous record for the corresponding period of the year. Eleanor discovered that she was going to have another child.
She was glad of it. Though it meant that she would be carrying a double burden, she welcomed a living reminder that the event that might have broken her marriage had ended by re-establishing its unity. Kester, when she told him, was delighted, and quite unconcerned over the fact that some of the energy she had planned to give the plantation would have to be used this year for other purposes.
But Eleanor was a healthy woman and nobody had ever called her indolent. During the first months of her pregnancy she worked eagerly to make up as much as possible for the time when she would not be able to work at all. She and Kester were hopeful again, and happy. Without verbally agreeing not to, they understood that neither of them wanted to mention Isabel. She had gone away—to Washington, Clara Sheramy said, where she was attending to her citizenship status and trying to get some of her property out of Germany—and though Eleanor assured herself that she was no longer troubled about her, she could not help thinking how convenient it would be if Isabel should bewitch a diplomat and get married.
But she had little energy to waste on thinking of Isabel. Between keeping accounts and checking orders, she gave frequent parties, for Kester was not capable of working long without amusement. In midsummer, after creeping up fraction by fraction, cotton reached eleven cents a pound.
The war showed no sign of drawing to a close. Experts were saying that the Russian drive in eastern Europe and the British-French offensive in France had both failed for lack of ammunition, but the armies expected to have all they needed for next winter’s campaign. As for the Germans and Austrians, they seemed to have ammunition in plenty. The Allies were doing all they could to keep cotton out of Germany, but even British diplomacy had a hard time stopping American shipments to other neutral countries, and the neutral countries of northern Europe had suddenly found they stood in need of astonishing amounts of cotton. During the past few months Sweden had imported twenty-five times as much cotton as in the similar period the year before the war, and Holland fourteen times as much; Eleanor chuckled as she read, wondering what they got for the cotton when they resold it in Germany.
She turned the pages of the newspaper, while on the steps Cornelia prattled to her dolls and Dilcy sat nearby mending rompers. Kester was indoors making mint juleps and setting them on the ice to frost, for they were having guests to supper. Ardeith would not have a thousand bales this year, not with Kester’s alternate spurts of diligence and gaiety, but the crop was going to be a good one, and next year when she was free again, she was confident that she could make the plantation produce a thousand or more. Eleanor wished that either the King of England or the Russian Czar would shave, as their pictures looked confusingly alike. She dropped her eyes to read a description of a weapon called Skoda Forty-two, the great Austrian gun that threw a shell weighing twenty-eight hundred pounds. The shell penetrated soft ground twenty feet before exploding. It killed every living thing within a hundred and fifty yards; the pressure of its gas would break roofs and partitions. As for men, the gas got into their body cavities and exploded there, blowing them into fragments so tiny that soldiers who disappeared in these explosions were reported missing, as there was no proof of their death.
Eleanor shivered and swallowed, uneasily broke off in the middle of the story and shifted her eyes to the adjoining column. A paragraph was joyfully informing the cotton planters, “It is estimated on good authority that the German and Austrian armies alone are shooting into space a thousand tons of cotton a day, besides what is being used by the Allied armies. Every machine-gun keeps by it a reserve of ammunition averaging half a bale of cotton per gun… .” She let the paper slide off her knees to the floor, and looked across Cornelia’s head to the gardenia and hibiscus bushes and the cottonfields beyond. It was hard, in this dreaming landscape, to be conscious that every stalk in the fields was putting forth a fruit of death. She did not recall that she had ever really thought about it before.
Eleanor got up and went indoors. Kester came down the hall, a julep in his hand.
“Eleanor! Oh, there you are—I was about to look for you on the gallery. Taste this. Seems to me I’ve made these first ones too sweet.”
She complied. “I think you have, only don’t be too sure of my opinion. I’m not very expert.” She set down the julep. “Kester, tell me something.”
“Yes, honey. What is it? You look mighty serious.”
Eleanor sat down on the sofa between the two front parlor windows. “I’ve just been reading a description of one of the big guns. It did something rather awful to me. Have you thought about it? I mean, thought about what we’re doing, feeding those guns?”
With an odd little smile, Kester made a mark with his finger in the mist on the side of the julep-cup. “Why yes, I’ve thought about it.”
“You haven’t said anything.”
“I’m still old-fashioned enough,” said Kester, “not to want to point out some of those horrors to a woman who’s about to have a baby.”
“What I read made me quite sick for a minute,” said Eleanor. “It’s shocking to see myself as a maker of instruments of murder.”
“We aren’t responsible for the war,” said Kester. H
e spoke quietly, and added, “What did they expect when they began it? People who don’t like spiders in their tea shouldn’t go on picnics.”
“Oh I know,” she agreed, “we can’t do anything to stop it, but wouldn’t you feel less responsible if we were growing something harmless—food crops, for instance?”
He shook his head.
“Why?”
Kester crossed the room to adjust a curtain that was letting in the glare of the sun. He turned around and stood leaning with his arms crossed on the back of a chair, searching for words that would make his rationalization articulate. She was somewhat surprised at him, for Kester had such facility of ideas that he could not often be induced to press one of them to its conclusion. Presently he spoke.
“Here’s the fact, Eleanor. We have a plantation. We’ve got to raise something in order to make a living. Anything we grow this year will be used in some fashion to further the war. Food, clothes, ammunition—there’s no difference. The armies can’t fight without all of them.”
She nodded.
“We sell to both sides,” Kester continued. “Certainly. Why not? The right side and the wrong side—there isn’t any. I’ve read their arguments till I’m sick of them. They both say they’re fighting for civilization, for culture, for home and mother and flag. They both talk about ‘the spiritual nature of the war’ but they neglect to say what they hope to get by victory except the joy of having licked the pants off their enemies.”
Eleanor laughed shortly. “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
“And as far as ammunition is concerned,” Kester went on, “there was plenty of war before gunpowder was invented. There isn’t any decent method of murder. If you’re going to kill a man it doesn’t make any difference whether you shoot him or knock him down with a club or lock him up to starve to death. We were horrified at the Germans’ dropping bombs on defenseless towns, but the British are killing as many babies with their blockade as the Germans are with their bombs.” He lifted his shoulder expressively.
