by Willa Cather
When they were fairly over the first half of the road, Tommy took out her watch. “Have to hurry up, Jess, I can’t wait for you.”
“O, Tommy, I can’t,” panted Miss Jessica, dismounting and sitting down in a little heap by the roadside. “You go on, Tommy, and tell him,—tell him I hope it won’t fail, and I’d do anything to save him.”
By this time the discreet Miss Jessica was reduced to tears, and Tommy nodded as she disappeared over the hill laughing to herself. “Poor Jess, anything but the one thing he needs. Well, your kind have the best of it generally, but in little affairs of this sort my kind come out rather strongly. We’re rather better at them than at dancing. It’s only fair, one side shouldn’t have all.”
Just at twelve o’clock, when Jay Ellington Harper, his collar crushed and wet about his throat, his eye glass dimmed with perspiration, his hair hanging damp over his forehead, and even the ends of his moustache dripping with moisture, was attempting to reason with a score of angry Bohemians, Tommy came quietly through the door, grip in hand. She went straight behind the grating, and standing screened by the bookkeeper’s desk, handed the bag to Harper and turned to the spokesman of the Bohemians.
“What’s all this business mean, Anton? Do you all come to bank at once nowadays?”
“We want ’a money, want ’a our money, he no got it, no give it,” bawled the big beery Bohemian.
“O, don’t chaff ’em any longer, give ’em their money and get rid of ’em, I want to see you,” said Tommy carelessly, as she went to the consulting room.
When Harper entered half an hour later, after the rush was over, all that was left of his usual immaculate appearance was his eyeglass and the white flower in his buttonhole.
“This has been terrible!” he gasped. “Miss Theodosia, I can never thank you.”
“No,” interrupted Tommy. “You never can, and I don’t want any thanks. It was rather a tight place, though, wasn’t it? You looked like a ghost when I came in. What started them?”
“How should I know? They just came down like the wolf on the fold. It sounded like the approach of a ghost dance.”
“And of course you had no reserve? O, I always told you this would come, it was inevitable with your charming methods. By the way, Jess sends her regrets and says she would do anything to save you. She started out with me, but she has fallen by the wayside. O, don’t be alarmed, she is not hurt, just winded. I left her all bunched up by the road like a little white rabbit. I think the lack of romance in the escapade did her up about as much as anything; she is essentially romantic. If we had been on fiery steeds bespattered with foam I think she would have made it, but a wheel hurt her dignity. I’ll tend bank; you’d better get your wheel and go and look her up and comfort her. And as soon as it is convenient, Jay, I wish you’d marry her and be done with it, I want to get this thing off my mind.”
Jay Ellington Harper dropped into a chair and turned a shade whiter.
“Theodosia, what do you mean? Don’t you remember what I said to you last fall, the night before you went to school? Don’t you remember what I wrote you—”
Tommy sat down on the table beside him and looked seriously and frankly into his eyes.
“Now, see here, Jay Ellington, we have been playing a nice little game, and now it’s time to quit. One must grow up sometime. You are horribly wrought up over Jess, and why deny it? She’s your kind, and clean daft about you, so there is only one thing to do. That’s all.”
Jay Ellington wiped his brow, and felt unequal to the situation. Perhaps he really came nearer to being moved down to his stolid little depths than he ever had before. His voice shook a good deal and was very low as he answered her.
“You have been very good to me, I didn’t believe any woman could be at once so kind and clever. You almost made a man of even me.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t succeed. As to being good to you, that’s rather a break, you know; I am amiable, but I am only flesh and blood after all. Since I have known you I have not been at all good, in any sense of the word, and I suspect I have been anything but clever. Now take mercy upon Jess—and me—and go. Go on, that ride is beginning to tell on me. Such things strain one’s nerve. Thank Heaven he’s gone at last and had sense enough not to say anything more. It was growing rather critical. As I told him I am not at all superhuman.”
After Jay Ellington Harper had bowed himself out, when Tommy sat alone in the darkened office, watching the flapping blinds, with the bank books before her, she noticed a white flower on the floor. It was the one Jay Ellington Harper had worn in his coat and had dropped in his nervous agitation. She picked it up and stood holding it a moment, biting her lip. Then she dropped it into the grate and turned away, shrugging her thin shoulders.
“They are awful idiots, half of them, and never think of anything beyond their dinner. But O, how we do like ’em!”
THE COUNT OF CROW’S NEST.
Crow’s Nest was an overcrowded boarding house on West Side, overcrowded because there one could obtain shelter and sustenance of a respectable nature cheaper than anywhere else in ante-Columbian Chicago. Of course the real name of the place was not Crow’s Nest; it had, indeed, a very euphuistic name; but a boarder once called it Crow’s Nest, and the rest felt the fitness of the title, so after that the name clung to it. The cost of existing had been reduced to its minimum there, and it was for that reason that Harold Buchanan found the Count de Koch among the guests of the house. Buchanan himself was there from the same cause, a cause responsible for most of the disagreeable things in this world. For Buchanan was just out of college, an honor man of whom great things were expected, and was waiting about Chicago to find a drive wheel to which to apply his undisputed genius. He found this waiting to see what one is good for one of the most trying tasks allotted to the sons of men. He hung about studios, publishing houses and concert halls hunting a medium, an opportunity. He knew that he was gifted in more ways than one, but he knew equally well that he was painfully immature, and that between him and success of any kind lay an indefinable, intangible something which only time could dispose of. Once it had been a question of which of several professions he should concentrate his energies upon; now the problem was to find any one in which he could gain the slightest foothold. When he had begun his search it was a quest of the marvelous, of the pot of fairy gold at the rainbow’s end; but now it was a quest for gold of another sort, just the ordinary prosaic gold of the workaday world that will buy a man his dinner and a coat to his back.
In the meantime, among the tragic disillusionments of his first hazard of fortune, Buchanan had to live, and this he did at Crow’s Nest because existence was much simplified there, almost reduced to first principles, and one could dine in a sack coat and still hold up his head with assurance among his fellow men. So there he had his study, where he began pictures and tragedies that were never completed, and wrote comic operas that were never produced, and hated humanity as only a nervous sensitive man in a crowded boarding house can hate it. The rooms above his were occupied by a prima donna who practised incessantly, a thin, pale, unhappy-looking woman with dark rings under her eyes, whose strength and salary were spent in endeavoring to force her voice up to a note which forever eluded her. On his left lived a discontented man, bearded like a lion, who had intended to be a novelist and had ended by becoming a very ordinary reviewer, putting the reproach of his failure entirely upon a dull and unappreciative public.
The occupants of the house were mostly people of this sort, who had come short of their own expectations and thought that the world had treated them badly and that the time was out of joint. The atmosphere of failure and that peculiar rancor which it begets seemed to have settled down over the place. It seemed to have entered into the very walls; it was in the close reception room with its gloomy hangings, clammy wall paper, hard sofas and bad pictures. It was in the old gran
d piano, with the worn yellow keys that clicked like castanets as they gave out their wavering, tinny treble notes in an ineffectual staccato. It was in the long, dark dining room, where the gas was burning all day, in the reluctant chairs that were always dismembering themselves under one, in the inevitable wan chromo of the sad-eyed Cenci who is daily martyred anew at the bands of relentless copyists, in the very clock above the sideboard whose despairing, hopeless hands never reached the hour at the proper time, and which always struck plaintively, long after all the other clocks were through.
The prima donna sneered at the chilly style of the great Australian soprano who was singing for a thousand dollars a night down at the Auditorium, the reviewer declared that literature had stopped with Thackeray, the art student railed day and night against all pictures but his own.
Buchanan sometimes wondered if this were a dark prophecy of his own future. Perhaps he, too, would some day be old and poor and disappointed, would have touched that wall which marks the limitations of men’s lives, and would hate the name of a successful man as the dwarfs of the underworld hated the giants in the golden groves of Asgard. He felt it would be better to contrive to get capsized in the lake some night. Could there be any greater degradation than to learn to hate an art and its exponents merely because one had failed in it himself? He fervently hoped that some happy accident would carry him off before he reached that stage.
Day after day he sat down in that dining room that was so conducive to pessimistic reflection, with the same distasteful people: The blonde stenographer who giggled so that she often had to leave the table, the cadaverous art student who talked of originating a new school of landscape painting, and who meantime taught clay modeling in a design school to defray his modest expenses at the Nest, the reviewer, the prima donna, the languid old widow who wore lilacs in her false front and coquetted with the fat man with the ear trumpet. She had, in days gone by, made coy overtures to Buchanan and the surly reviewer, but as they were more than unresponsive and would have none of her, she now devoted herself exclusively to the deaf man, though undoubtedly ear trumpets are an impediment to coquetry. But as the deaf man could not hear her at all, he stood it very well. He might also be short sighted, Buchanan reflected.
In all that vista of faces, there were some twenty in all, there was but one which was not unpleasant; that of the courtly old gentleman who ate alone at a small table at the end of the dining room. He was only there at dinner, his breakfast and luncheon were always sent to his room. He had no acquaintances in the house and spoke to no one, yet every one knew that he was Paul, Count de Koch, and during breakfast and luncheon hours he and his possible history had furnished the pièce de résistance of conversation for some months. In that absorbing theme even the decadence of French art and English letters and the execution of the Australian soprano were forgotten. The stenographer called attention to the fact that his coat was of a prehistoric cut, though she acknowledged its fit was above criticism. The widow had learned from the landlady that he shaved himself and blacked his own boots. She was certain he had been a desperately wicked man and lost all his money at Monte Carlo, for unless Counts were very reprehensible indeed they were always rich. This scrutinizing gossip about a courteous and defenseless old gentleman was the most harrassing of all Buchanan’s table trials, and it savored altogether too much of the treatment of Père Goriot in Madame Vanquar’s “Pension Bourgeoise.”
He was always glad at dinner when the Count’s presence put a stop at least to audible queries, and his calm patrician face again made its strange contrast with the sordid unhappy ones about him. His clear gray eyes, his slight erect figure, and white, tapering hands seemed quite as anomalous there as his name. That gentlemanly figure made life at Crow’s Nest possible to Buchanan; it was like seeing a Vandyke portrait in the gallery of daubs. The Count’s whole conduct, like his person, was simple, dignified and artistic. It was a cause for much indignation among the boarders, particularly so in the case of the widow and prima donna, that he met no one. Yet his manner was never one of superiority, simply of amiable and dignified reserve. He might at all times have stood the scrutiny of a court drawing room, yet he was perfectly unostentatious and unconscious. There was something regal about his gestures. When he held back the swinging door for the hurried maid with her groaning tray of dishes, you half expected to see the Empress Eugenie and her train sweep through, or gay old Ludwig with his padded calves and painted cheeks and enormous wig, his troup of poets and dancers behind him. He drank his pale California claret as if it were Madeira of one of those priceless vintages of the last century.
In his college days Buchanan had been a good deal among well-bred people, but he had never seen any one so quietly and faultlessly correct. Sometimes he met him walking by the Lake Shore, and he thought he would have noticed his carriage and walk among a thousand. In watching him that phrase of Lang’s, “A gentleman among canaille,” constantly occurred to him.
One of the saddest defects of that ponderous machinery which we call society is the impenetrable wall which is built up between personalities; one of the saddest of our finite weaknesses is our incapacity to recognize and know and claim the people who are made for us. Every day we pass men who want us and whom we bitterly need, unknowing, unthinking, as friends pass each other at a masked ball: pursuing the tinkle of the harlequin’s bells, not knowing that under the friar’s hood is the camarâdéie they seek. Following persistently the fluttering hem of the priestly gown, never dreaming that the heart of gold is under the spangled corsage of Folly there, sitting tired out on the stairway. It seems as if there ought to be a floor manager to arrange these things for us. However, given a close proximity and continue it long enough, and the right people will find each other out as certainly as the satellites know their proper suns. It was impossible that, in such a place as Crow’s Nest, Buchanan’s relations to the Count should continue the same as those of the other boarders. It was impossible that the Count should not notice that one respectful glance that was neither curious nor vulgar, only frankly interested and appreciative.
One evening as Buchanan sat in the reception room reading a volume of Gautier’s romances while waiting for the dinner that was always late, he glanced up and detected the Count looking over his shoulder.
“I must ask your pardon for my seeming discourtesy, but one so seldom sees those delightful romances read in this country, that for the moment I quite forgot myself. And as I caught the title ‘La Morte Amoureuse,’ an old favorite of mine, I could scarcely refrain from glancing a second time.”
Buchanan decided that since chance had thrown this opportunity in his way, he had a right to make the most of it. He closed the book and turned, smiling.
“I am only too glad to meet some one who is familiar with it. I have met the idea before, it has been imitated in English, I think.”
“Ah, yes, doubtless. Many of those things have been imitated in English, but—”
He shrugged his shoulders expressively. “Yes, I understand your hiatus. These things are quite impossible in English, especially the one we are speaking of. Some way we haven’t the feeling for absolute and specific beauty of diction. We have no sense for the aroma of words as they have. We are never content with the effect of material beauty alone, we are always looking for something else. Of course we lose by it, it is like always thinking about one’s dinner when one is invited out.”
The Count nodded. “Yes, you look for the definite, whereas the domain of pure art is always the indefinite. You want the fact under the illusion, whereas the illusion is in itself the most wonderful of facts. It is a mistake not to be content with perfection and not find its sermon sufficient. As opposed to chaos, harmony was the original good, the first created virtue. And of course a great production of art must be the perfection of harmony. Even in the grotesque the harmony of the whole must be there. To be impervious to this indicates a certain bluntnes
s toward the finer spiritual laws.”
“And yet,” said Buchanan, “we have been accustomed to look at all this as quite the opposite of spiritual. Our standpoint is certainly rather inconsistent, but I believe it is honest enough.”
The Count smiled. “Certainly. It is a question of whether you want your sermon in a flower or in a Greek word, in poetry or in prose, whether you want the formula of goodness or goodness itself. So many of your authors write formulae. There was, however, one of your littérateurs who knew the distinction, even if he was something of a charlatan in using it. Poe surpassed even Gautier in using some effects of that character,” pointing to the book in Buchanan’s hand. “Perhaps under happier circumstances he might have done so in all. You had there a true stylist, who knew the value of an effect; a master of single and graceful conceptions, who was content to leave them as such, unexplained and without apology.”
“Perhaps that is the reason we say he was crazy,” said Buchanan, sadly.
“Perhaps,” said the Count as he lighted his cigar. “I hope to have the pleasure of discussing this again with you. You have read ‘Fortunio?’ No? When you have read ‘Fortunio’ I will wish to see you.” He smiled and went out for his wintery walk on the Lake Shore.
After that Buchanan met the Count frequently, in the hallway, on the veranda, on his walks. They always had some conversation during these encounters, but their remarks were generally of a very casual nature. Buchanan felt some hesitancy about pushing the acquaintance lest he should exhaust it too soon. His tendency had always lain that way. In his intemperate youth he had plunged hotheaded and rapacious into friendship after friendship, giving more than any one cared to receive and exacting more than any one had leisure to give, only to reach that almost inevitable point where, independent of any volition of his own, the impetus slackened and stopped, the wells of sweet water were dry and the cisterns were broken. These promising oases that flourish among monotonous humanity dry up so quickly, most of them. They are verdant to us but a night. There are so few minds that are fitted to race side by side, to wrestle and rejoice together, even unto the paean. And after all that is the base of affinities, that mental brotherhood. The glamour of every other passion and enthusiasm fades like the brilliance of an afterglow, leaving shadow and chill and a nameless ennui.