The First Willa Cather Megapack

by Willa Cather

  “You are a journalist, I believe, Mr. Buchanan?”

  “Scarcely, yet. That is one of the many things I would like to be.”

  “You are a Chicago man, at any rate?” inquired the tenor.

  “Well, one of the queer things about Chicago is that no one is really a native. I have lived here a good deal, off and on. My father used to be in business here before I went East to school. Just at present I want to get into something, and I think that lightning is about as likely to strike one here as any where.”

  “More likely! Chicago is the place for young talent. I have found so. They want new blood and new ideas. Success comes sooner and more directly here than elsewhere in your profession as in my own. I would rather sing to a Chicago audience than any other, and I think I have been before most of the best ones in this country.” When the taciturn gentleman spoke at all it was of one all-important theme. Indeed, do tenors ever talk of anything else? Art et moi; l’art, c’est moi!

  “O, Tony here takes things too seriously. ‘Life is a plaything, life is a toy!’ You have sung that often enough to believe it a little by this time. By the way, Mr. Buchanan, have you been down to hear the threadbare Robin Hood? O, no, I never go; there are no light operas worth hearing except those of the Viennese. Think of that odious waltz song, ta, ta, ta-ta-te, ta; ta-ta-te, ta, ta, ta!”

  Buchanan looked apprehensively about at the other supper parties in the room, and wished she would not sing so loud. But she went merrily on.

  “I can endure everything American except American music, and the less said of it the better. By the way, don’t you think I have taken to your language rather kindly? Of course I learned English when I was a child, but I had to learn American after arriving, and I assure you that is quite another language.”

  “I was just thinking that you were quite wonderful in that respect. I should never know you were not one of us; you have all the sermo familiaris even to our local touches.”

  “O yes, I went at your slang as conscientiously as if it were grammar. That is the characteristic part of a language, anyway.”

  When their order arrived, the drift of the talk changed.

  “You see a good deal of papa, Mr. Buchanan?”

  “Not half so much as I want to.”

  “I am glad you like him; he is very lonely and has those antiquated class notions about mixing up with people.”

  “I have always felt that and have been a little bit backward. I don’t want to seem to intrude.”

  “O, you need never be afraid of that; he likes you immensely. We’ve heard lots about you, haven’t we, Tony?”

  “Most enthusiastic and flattering accounts,” responded that gentleman, looking up a moment from his lobster.

  We have thought about suggesting something, Mr. Buchanan, that might be immensely to your advantage. You are a young literary man, waiting to make a hit like all the rest of us. Now let me tell you something; if you can work papa, your fame is ready made for you.”

  “Well, if I could find any fame of that variety, I would be willing to pay pretty dearly for it. I had about decided that the virgin article was not lying about in very extensive deposits.”

  “Well, it is, just in chunks, inside of that box you saw the other night. He has hundreds of papers there that would turn the court history of Europe for the last century upside down. I know whereof I speak. His friends have urged him to publish them for the last twenty years, and I—but, of course, men never listen to their daughters. Of course he wouldn’t care to edit them himself, his everlasting name, you know. But you are a practical literary man and know what fin de siècle taste demands, and if you could sort of combine forces, I have an idea it would be a great thing for both of you.”

  “But,” protested Buchanan, “your father assured me those documents were of a wholly private nature.”

  “Of course they are. That’s the sort of history that goes nowadays. It’s the sort of thing that sells and that people read, ‘something spicy,’ they call it. You could edit them with historical notes to give tone to the thing, you know. Of course you would have to overcome innumerable scruples on papa’s part. Go at it in the name of art and history and all that. He is unyielding in his notions about such things, but if there is any living man who can do it, you are the man!” She had quite forgotten now the calm indifference of her first method of attack; her lips were set and her eyes biting keen. Buchanan could not help noticing how she leaned forward and how tightly she held her fork. Evidently this plan was not a new one. There was a purpose in those hard eyes that could not be new. He shifted his position slightly.

  “I would rather you would leave me and my interests out of the question, Miss De Koch, though don’t think I don’t appreciate your kindness in thinking of me. If there is anything in the papers themselves to justify their publication, why does your father object to it?”

  “O, he considers people’s feelings,—much they’ve ever considered ours! Of course it would make big scandals all over Europe, and no end of a fuss. There would be answers, denials, refutations; the national museums would be ransacked for counterproofs. That one book would bring out a dozen. Just think of it, a grand wholesale exposé of all the courts of Europe, hailing from image-breaking Chicago! It’s your chance of fame, young man, and as for money, we’d all be throwing it at the birdies in six months.”

  She had dropped the pass word of the conspiracy. Buchanan began to feel less at sea.

  “Of course there would be grave considerations attending the publication of such matter.”

  “Not a bit of it. This is an age of disillusionment. William Tell was a myth, Josephine only a Creole coquette, and Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare at all. This generation wants to get at the bottom of things. Now it’s not the man who can invent a romance, but the man who can explode one who holds the winning card,” she touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “It’s a good deal as you say, undoubtedly. But I doubt the dignity, or even the decency of it.”

  She put her glass down impatiently. “That all may be, but when we are in Rome we must be either Romans or provincials. You must give the people what they want. Really, now, don’t you like to get a tip on those old figurehead guys yourself, just to get even with them by shaking them off their pedestals a little? They were all very common clay like the rest of us.”

  Buchanan leaned back in his chair and decided to gain time and measure, if he could, the depth of the conspiracy sprung upon him. Mademoiselle was aglow with excitement, and even her gentleman-in-waiting had forgotten his supper, and his mild eyes were flashing with the first animation he had displayed.

  “Well,” he said, amused in spite of himself, “I have often thought I should like to get behind the scenes in history and see how all the great effects were really produced. How the tragic buskin is worn to make men look taller than they are, by what wires the angels are carried up to their apotheosis, and where the unfortunates go when they disappear through the trap. It would be a satisfaction to know just how often simpletons are cast for heroic parts, and great men for trivial ones, how often Hamlet and the grave digger ought to change places. I have even thought I would like to go into the dressing room, and see just how the conventional historic puppets were made up; see the real head under the powdered wig and the real cheek under the rouge. And yet I am not anxious to be wholly disillusioned. If Caesar without his toga would not be Caesar, I would rather stay down in the orchestra chairs. I don’t care to read a history of Napoleon written by his valet.”

  “Come, you know all this is moonshine. Nobody believes those things nowadays. The more you take the halo from those fellows, the more popular you make them. A new scandal about Napoleon gives him a new lease of life. It revives the interest. Who would ever know anything about Rosseau, if it wasn’t for his ‘Confessions’? That keeps him popular; even m
y hairdresser reads it.”

  “Of course it is something to have immortality among hairdressers.”

  “It’s very much better than having none at all, and being on the shelf all around. You are a young man with your mark to make, and you’ve got to meet the world on its own ground and give it what it wants, or it’ll have none of you. If you take the people’s money, you ought to cater to their tastes, that’s fair enough. You cannot afford to be an old fogy, you have too much future. You see where it has put papa. Do you want to be stranded in Crow’s Nest all your life, say fifty years of it? Chances to take the world by the horns do not occur every day; if you let them go by, you have a good long time for reflection, a lifetime, generally. One chance for one man, you know.”

  “I know that only too well, but I can’t see that this is in any sense my chance. It’s wholly your father’s affair.”

  “Make it yours. Let’s get to something definite; don’t let him put you off with high sounding words; they aren’t in the modern vocabulary and don’t mean anything. Now you’ll take up this matter? There is only one man in a thousand I would speak to openly in this way, but I have every faith in your ability. When things become definite, if papa is elusive about the business features of it, you and I can arrange that together.”

  Buchanan crumpled his napkin and threw it on the table.

  “I am sorry, but I am afraid that you have misplaced your confidence; that is, you have expected too much of me. I am not an enterprising man, or a very practical one; if I were I would already have some legitimate occupation. I seem to be rather another case of the round block versus the square hole, and decidedly I can’t fit into this. I could never propose such a thing to your father. If he ever speaks to me on the subject I will be frank enough, I promise you, but further than that I cannot pledge myself. Moreover, I doubt my own ability to either gauge the popular taste or fill its demands.”

  Mademoiselle’s amiability at once disappeared, and she took no pains to conceal the fact that she considered him both ungracious and ungrateful, though she vented her displeasure principally upon her dusky minion, the tenor, who was struggling with her rubbers. From the dogged look on his face, Buchanan imagined that that silent gentleman would one day avenge the tyrannies of his apprenticeship. Feeling very much as though he had obtained a supper under false pretenses, he said good night.

  As he lit his cigar in the street, and faced the cold wet wind that blew in from the lake, he muttered to himself, “Of all mercenary creatures! it’s loathsome enough in a man, but in a woman—bah, it’s positively reptilian! I don’t believe she has a drop of the old man’s blood in her body.”

  III.

  Some way his very aversion to the daughter drew Buchanan’s sympathies more than ever to the Count. He found himself in the evening instinctively pausing at the Count’s door, and when he went out to hear music or to see a play he felt more at ease when the Count was with him. He was of that temperament which quickly learns to depend on others. During their talks and rambles about the theatres he learned a good deal of the Count’s history. Not directly, as the old gentleman seldom talked about himself, but in scrappy fragments that he mentally sorted and expanded into a biography. He learned how Paul had been born in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, where his father had superintended the education of the Czar Nicholas’ sons. He had been considered rather dull socially in his youth, and had been kept in the background in a military school at Leipsic, while his two elder brothers spent his substance and amassed colossal debts in a manner that demonstrated their social talents to the world. After a good deal of reckless living, William had been killed in a duel about some vague diplomatic matter, and Nicholas by some accident at the races. When Paul at last came in to his shorn and parceled patrimony, he did something that established all the charges of imbecility that had been made against him; he sold the Koch estates and paid the Koch debts, the first time they had been paid in three centuries. By such an unheard of proceeding he at once lost caste in the diplomatic circles of the continent. To part with his family estates, to sell the home of the Counts De Koch to pay tradespeople and laborers, it was really more than well conducted society could be expected to condone. So Paul drifted to America, not until after the death of his wife, though of his wife he never spoke except formally. When he considered the daughter, Buchanan could not wonder at his reticence.

  The man’s quiet charm, his distinctive fineness of life and thought meant a great deal to a young man like Buchanan. They helped him to keep his standards and his tastes clean at a despondent age when that is sometimes difficult to do. It was certainly a strange thing to find this instinctive autocrat, this type of an effete nobility in that city of all cities, in Chicago, where the Present and the Practical are apotheosized and paid divine honors. But, then, what can one not find in Chicago? He never stepped, without feeling the contrast, from the hurried world of barter and trade into the quiet of that little room where memories and souvenirs of other times and another world were kept hidden, as, in the days of their far captivity in the city of Baal, the Jews kept the sacred vessels of their pillaged temple.

  One night, as he was indulging in his reprehensible habit of reading in bed, Buchanan heard a hurried knock at his door. At his bidding the Count entered. He was still in street dress, hat in hand, pale and in evident excitement. His hair was disordered and his forehead shone with moisture. He would not sit down, but went straight up to the bed and grasped Buchanan’s hand. Buchanan felt that his was trembling and cold.

  “My friend,” he spoke thickly, “I need you tonight, the letters…the box…it is gone.”

  “The box? O, yes, the steel chest, but how, where, what do you mean?”

  “When I came to my rooms tonight, I opened the drawer of the chiffonier. It was a most unusual thing, it must have been instinct, those letters are the only things left to watch. They should have been in a vault, I know, but I kept delaying. When I opened the drawer they were gone.”

  “This is serious. What can you do?”

  “I must go out at once. You have retired and I would not disturb you for any trivial matter, but this—this is the honor of my family! Great God! The descendants of those people are living in Europe today, living honorably and bearing great names. You hear me? Those letters must not get abroad. They would shake men’s faith in God and make them curse their mothers.”

  Buchanan was already dressing. Suddenly he stopped short and dropped his shoe on the floor.

  Who knew where you kept them? Do you suspect any one who was interested?”

  The Count’s voice was almost inaudible as he answered, “I think, Mr. Buchanan, we must first go to my daughter’s rooms. It is with regret and shame that I drag you into this; it is terrible enough for me.” He stood with his eyes downcast, like one in bitter shame. Buchanan had never noticed that he was so old a man before.

  He felt that nothing could be said that would not be more than superfluous. When he finished dressing, the Count remarked, “Put on your ulster, it is cold.”

  They went softly downstairs and hailed a cab. During the drive the Count said nothing. Buchanan could see by the flash of the street lights as they passed them that his head was sunk on his breast. Only once he broke the silence by a sort of despairing groan. Buchanan guessed that some memory which bore immediately upon the grief of the moment had suddenly arisen before him. Perhaps it was one of those casual actions which we scatter so recklessly in our youth, and which, grown monstrous like the creature of Frankenstein, rise up to shame us in our age and spread desolation which we are powerless to check.

  When they reached the house, Buchanan saw that the windows of the third floor were lighted, while the rest of the house was in darkness. It was easy to guess on which floor Mademoiselle De Koch resided. After repeated ringing, a sleepy servant maid opened the door. The Count asked no questions, but simply gave h
is name and passed upstairs, while the maid gathered her disheveled robes about her and stumbled down the hallway. The knock at Mademoiselle De Koch’s door was greeted by a cheerful “Entrez!”

  The open door revealed Mademoiselle attired in a traveling dress with a pile of letters on the desk before her, and a pen in her hand. A half packed valise lay open on the bed, and her trunks were strapped as though for sudden departure.

  On seeing her visitors she gave a start of surprise, followed by a knowing glance, and then was quite at her ease. She would make a good defence, Buchanan suspected.

  “Ah, it is you, cher papa, and you have brought company. Well, it is not exactly a conventional hour, but you are always welcome. I am delighted, Mr. Buchanan. Papa’s chaperonage is certainly sufficient, even at three in the morning, so be seated.”

  The Count closed the door and met her. “Helena, you know why I have come and what you must do. There is no need of expletives.”

  “Not for you, perhaps, but I insist upon an explanation. What do you mean? I am at your service, as always, but I do not understand.”

  “This scene is disgraceful enough. I will allow you to spare yourself any explanations. I want the letters you took from my room. I will have them, so make no ado about it.”

  “You speak to me, sir, as though I were a chambermaid; you accuse me of taking your letters. What letters? I did not know you had correspondence so delicate now. Fie, papa! D’Albert said you were in your dotage ten years ago, but I have done you the honor to think him mistaken. Please do not altogether destroy my faith in you, I have so few illusions left at best.” The sneer in that last sentence made Buchanan shiver as with a chill.