The Handsome Road (36 page)

“Because I like automobiles,” said Kester. “And I perceive that you are a very dominating young woman.”

“I’ve been told that I am,” she returned, smiling.

“I suppose you’ve also been told that you’re very good-looking?”

“No.” Eleanor shook her head rebukingly. “I’ll accept as much flattery as most girls, Mr. Larne, but I know about my nose, and my square chin—”

“You must have been around college boys who liked them cute and curly. Didn’t anybody ever tell you the difference between—” he paused tantalizingly.

“Between—?”

“Well—strawberries and caviar?”

Eleanor glanced down at herself, taken aback, because most of her male acquaintances so far
had
been college boys, and engineers who respected her because she could solve mathematical equations faster than any of them. Kester was considerably older than a sophomore—twenty-six or seven, she thought—and he probably would not be at all interested in her talent as a lightning calculator. But she put a brake on her thoughts. He didn’t mean a word he was saying. No man could please a girl so expertly unless he had had abundant practice in doing it. Kester was giving her a teasing scrutiny.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“No,” she answered, startled.

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s take a ride.”

“A ride? Where?”

“Anywhere. Come on. Please!” He had scrambled to his feet and was eagerly holding out his hands to help her up.

Eleanor’s mind answered before her voice. Her mind said: I suspect that I am being deliberately captivated. I believe this young man is inviting me because he simply cannot endure the thought that any reasonably attractive woman could regard him with indifference. If I knew what was good for me I should say no. And I am going to say yes.

She answered: “I’d like to very much, thank you.”

“Fine!” He caught her hands and she stood up. Kester had received her answer with delight; she thought she had never seen so sparkling a personality as his. He was about to start down the levee, when with some difficulty at being practical Eleanor put out a detaining hand.

“Your coat,” she reminded him.

Chuckling at her prudence and his own forgetfulness, he picked it up and began to put it on. The coat was crumpled from her having sat on it, yet in spite of his casual appearance Kester had an air of elegance, as unconscious and as evident as the color of his eyes. She tried to define it. Probably it was his self-assurance, the way he moved and spoke as though nothing had ever assailed him. The feudal nobles whose effigies lay on their tombs, their legs crossed as the sign they had been on a Crusade, had even in stone this air of lordship.

They scrambled down the levee slope, Kester holding her hand, and got into his car. Eleanor tucked her skirt around her, for the little car was one of the type that had only an opening in the side in place of a door.

“Hold on,” advised Kester. “This road was never meant for the horseless age.”

The car began to bump noisily over the ruts. Kester drove out of the cottonfield and into the highway, jolting along at a speed that was unsafe and exciting, and evidently having the time of his life. The dust rose around them and streamed out behind the car like a plume. Eleanor clung to her seat, half frightened and half exhilarated, till at last Kester began to go more slowly. She saw that they had reached a high wrought-iron fence enclosing an estate.

“This is where I live,” said Kester. “I thought we’d go in and have some coffee to clear the dust out of our throats.”

“Do you often drive like that?” Eleanor demanded.

“Oh yes ma’am, always. You weren’t scared, were you? I’m a very good driver.”

“Wait a minute,” said Eleanor. She reminded him, “I don’t know you from Adam. Are you sure you live here?”

She could not help laughing at his look of startled innocence. “Miss Eleanor,” he assured her gravely, “I have lived here—I mean my family has lived here—since before the Revolution.” He put on the brake and began reaching into his pockets. “I ought to have something with my name on it. Here.” He showed her a little silver pocket-knife, and she saw it had “Kester Larne” engraved in tiny letters on the handle. “My mother gave it to me once for my birthday,” he continued, “and had my name put on it because I’m always losing things.”

“Is your mother at home?” she asked.

“I believe she and my father are out making calls. But the servants are here. So come on in!” he urged. “It’s the only place around where we can get any drinkable coffee.”

She consented, and Kester started to drive down the avenue.

Eleanor exclaimed with admiration. From the gates two lines of live oaks led to a vast white house, half hidden by the festoons of gray moss hanging from the trees. As they came to the end of the avenue she saw the house, surrounded by a broad veranda with Doric columns reaching to the roof. The front door, which stood open like the gates, was high and wide, and on either side were windows reaching to the floor, with heavy curtains shadowing the rooms within.

As they got out of the car Eleanor stood still a moment, silent before the beauty of the place where Kester lived. The house was very Greek and at the same time very American; evidently it was a remnant of the classic revival that, beginning with the stirrings of democracy that had produced the American and French Revolutions, had gradually changed from an intellectual ideal to an emotional fervor and then to a parlor fashion, producing the Bill of Rights and the guillotine, then the pseudo-Greek costumes of the early eighteen-hundreds, and at last, sweeping into architecture, had studded the newly democratic countries with such richness of pediments, porticoes, columns and acanthus leaves that one could hardly feel right about praying in a church or leaving money in a bank that did not suggest the Acropolis, and rich men felt it their duty to provide that their children should be born in houses that looked like Greek temples. The builder of this house, however, had combined fashion with good taste; its proportions were excellent and its Doric austerity unmarred by any prettifying, and unlike many houses of its period it suggested a cool patrician simplicity. Eleanor turned an appreciative look to Kester.

“I’ve never seen a more beautiful place,” she told him. “Let’s go inside.”

The main hall was wide and lofty, and near the entrance a spiral staircase curved up to the second floor. On the walls were portraits. At Eleanor’s left a man in a white powdered wig looked down upon her, and opposite was a young woman in a high eighteenth-century coiffure against a blue background. Beyond was a woman with black curls on her forehead, dressed in a square-necked gown belted just under her bosom in the style they wore when Napoleon was Emperor of France. Eleanor went in farther, and stood at the foot of the spiral staircase. Above her hung a pair of companion portraits, one of a young man in a gray Confederate uniform, the other of a girl in a blue hoop-skirt; she had evidently stood for her portrait where Eleanor stood now, for her hand rested on the balustrade and the turning steps showed behind her.

Eleanor turned back to Kester. “Tell me about these people,” she exclaimed. “Who are they?”

Good-humoredly, Kester complied. The man in the white wig was his great-great-great-grandfather, Philip Larne, who had received the land that was now Ardeith Plantation from George the Third of England as a reward for his soldiering in the French and Indian War. The woman opposite was Philip’s wife. They had both come down the river on flatboats in the days when steam was nothing but a vapor that came out of a kettle-spout. The woman in the Empire dress had married into the Larne family about the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War pair were Kester’s grandparents. The young man had been killed during the war, but the girl had lived to be an old lady; Kester could remember her from his childhood. Oh yes, there were other pictures. He’d be glad to show them to her sometime, and the rest of the house if she wanted to see it. It was very large, with many rooms that no longer served any purpose but to wear out brooms. Originally there had been thirty besides the servants’ quarters, though some of them had been cut up to make bathrooms and closets. Eleanor went through a doorway at one side of the hall. This room was a library. On the bookshelves modern novels stood alongside bound volumes of
Putnam’s Magazine
and
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
old treatises on cotton-growing, and romances with astonishing names.

“The Curse of Clifton,”
she read aloud, and chuckled.
“The Ladies’ Parlor Annual, 1841
—I’ve heard of those annuals but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one before. And who’s this alphabetical author, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth?”

“She wrote what they used to call sensation stories, mostly devoted to howling storms and people stabbing each other with jeweled daggers.” Kester shook his head. “My family had its good qualities, Miss Eleanor, but they did indulge in some deplorable literature.”

Eleanor took down a volume of
Godey’s
and turned the leaves, smiling at the stilted phrases that caught her eye and the burdensome gowns of the fashion plates. “There’s something very attractive about those times,” she remarked. “People seem to have been so sure of themselves. I suppose life was simpler then.”

Kester grinned. “I used to read voraciously in here,” he said to her. “I’ve skimmed through dozens of volumes a century or two centuries old, and every one of them laments the simplicity of the age just past and sighs over the complexities of the present.”

“Then you don’t think nineteenth-century life was easier than ours?”

“The period that included the American Civil War, the Sepoy Rebellion and the siege of Paris? No ma’am, I don’t. We think olden times were simple because we know how grandpa’s problems were solved, and any problem is simple when you can look up the answer in the back of the book.”

They laughed together. Eleanor replaced the volume of
Godey’s
and looked around the library again. On the center table was an enormous Bible fastened with metal clasps. She asked him to open it for her. The Bible fell open of itself in the middle, where the pages had been left blank for family records, and here were lines in many handwritings, in inks browned with time, recording the births and marriages and deaths of the Larnes. Eleanor read here and there as she turned the pages.

“Died, at Ardeith Plantation, September 23, 1810, Philip Larne, native of the colony of South Carolina… .

“Married, at Dalroy, Louisiana, April 4, 1833, Sebastian Larne and Frances Durham…

“Married, at Silverwood Plantation, Louisiana, December 6, 1859, Denis Larne and Ann Sheramy… .

“Married, at Dalroy, Louisiana, March 21, 1884, Denis Larne II and Lysiane St. Clair.”

“They were your parents?” she asked him.

Kester nodded. He seemed amused at her interest, but rather pleased by it too, as though he had taken his home for granted and enjoyed seeing a newcomer’s pleasure in it. Eleanor turned the pages again. She came to the records of the births, and near the end she read,

“Born, at Ardeith Plantation, February 18, 1885, Kester Denis Larne, son of Denis Larne II and Lysiane St. Clair.”

He had a younger brother and sister. The three births were the last of the records. She lifted her eyes again.

“Isn’t it somehow awesome, to see yourself at the end of such a line?”

“Why no. Why should it be?”

“Oh—I mean—doesn’t it make you feel like a link in an endless chain?”

“Aren’t we all?” asked Kester, laughing a little.

They closed the Bible and went back into the hall. Bending down, Kester showed her the dent of a horseshoe on the bottom step of the spiral staircase. It was clearly marked, though in later years the stairs had been carefully repainted. That had been put there during the invasion of Louisiana in the eighteen-sixties, when a troop of soldiers had ransacked the house and one of them had ridden his horse into the hall.

“It’s fascinating as you tell it,” said Eleanor. “I studied about all that sort of thing in school, of course, but here it seems so real!”

“Anybody hearing you,” he said with amusement, “would think you came from ten thousand miles away.”

“I was born in a levee camp in West Feliciana Parish,” she returned, “but that’s a long way from things like this. Am I tiring you, making you talk so much?”

“Well ma’am,” said Kester, “I
could
do with that coffee.”

Eleanor laughed apologetically, and they crossed the hall into the parlor opposite the library. This was the main living-room, and here were deep mahogany sofas, and a great square rosewood piano, and modernity represented by a phonograph. Like the library, this room had a white marble fireplace, but in this one a fire danced behind brass andirons. On the wall hung a bellcord of the sort ladies used to embroider to while away a journey up the river in the old steamboat days.

“Does that still work?” Eleanor asked.

“Why yes.” Kester gave it a pull.

A Negro man in a funereal black coat came in answer to the summons. Kester called him Cameo. He ordered coffee, and Cameo approached Eleanor with grave courtesy.

“Rest yo’ wrap, miss?” he inquired.

Eleanor gave him her coat. As Cameo went out she observed that the door had a silver knob and silver hinges, shining with the soft glow of time, and she remembered that the door of the library had them too. For a moment she stood still. It was her first glimpse of the dignity of plantation life, and she was conscious of a heightened awareness, as though all her senses had been sharpened to rare appreciation. She began to understand what people might be like when they had lived for generations in this quiet grandeur, their instincts curbed by the standards of their culture till they had no uncertainties, their characters polished by their knowledge in all circumstances of what was expected of them. The house, the staircase, the portraits, the ancient oaks, all suggested the same self-assurance she had observed in Kester. It was easy now to understand it.

Kester had begun to play a ragtime record on the phonograph. He turned it off as Cameo came in and placed a tray with a silver coffee service on a low table in front of the fire. Kester and Eleanor curled up on the floor, facing each other, and Eleanor poured the coffee.