by Willa Cather
She was a tall woman, finely, almost powerfully built and admirably developed. She carried herself with an erect pride that ill accorded with the humble position as the village schoolmistress. Her features were regular and well cut, but her face was comely chiefly because of her vivid coloring and her deeply set gray eyes, that were serious and frank like a man’s. She was one of those women one sometimes sees, designed by nature in her more artistic moments, especially fashioned for all the fullness of life; for large experiences and the great world where a commanding personality is felt and valued, but condemned by circumstances to poverty, obscurity and all manner of pettiness. There are plenty of such women, who were made to ride in carriages and wear jewels and grace first nights at the opera, who, through some unaccountable blunder of stage management in this little comédie humaine, have the wrong parts assigned them, and cook for farm hands, or teach a country school like this one, or make gowns for ugly women and pad them into some semblance of shapeliness, while they themselves, who need no such artificial treatment, wear castoffs; women who were made to rule, but who are doomed to serve. There are plenty of living masterpieces that are as completely lost to the world as the lost nine books of Sappho, or as the Grecian marbles that were broken under the barbarians’ battle axes. The world is full of waste of this sort.
While Margie was arranging the “house plants” about the pulpit platform, and the other member of the committee was giving her the benefit of her advice, a man strode lazily into the church carrying a small traveling bag and a large pasteboard box.
“There you are, Miss Margie,” he cried, throwing the box on the platform; and sitting down in the front pew he proceeded to fan himself with his soft felt hat.
“O, Martin, they are beautiful! They are the first things that have made me feel a bit like Easter.”
“One of ’em is for you, Miss Margie, to wear to morrow,” said Martin bashfully. Then he hastened to add, “I feel more like it’s Fourth of July than Easter. I’m right afraid of this weather, Mrs. Skimmons. It’ll coax all the buds out on the fruit trees and then turn cold and nip ’em. And the buds’ll just be silly enough to come out when they are asked. You’ve done well with your decorations, Mrs. Skimmons.”
Mrs. Skimmons looked quizzically at Martin, puzzled by this unusual loquaciousness.
“Well, yes,” she admitted, in a satisfied tone, “I think we’ve done right well considerin’ this tryin’ weather. I’m about prostrated with the heat myself. How are things goin’ down in Kansas City? You must know a good deal about everything there, seein’ you go down so much lately.”
“’Bout the same,” replied Martin, in an uncommunicative tone which evidently offended Mrs. Skimmons.
“Well,” remarked that lady briskly, “I guess I can’t help you no more now, Margie. I’ve got to run home and see to them boys of mine. Mr. Dempster can probably help you finish.” With this contemptuous use of his surname as a final thrust, Mrs. Skimmons departed.
Martin leaned back in the pew and watched Margie arranging the lilies. He was a big broad-chested fellow, who wore his broad shoulders carelessly and whose full muscular throat betrayed unusual physical strength. His face was simple and honest, bronzed by the weather, and with deep lines about the mild eyes that told that his simple life had not been altogether negative, and that he had not sojourned in this world for forty years without leaving a good deal of himself by the wayside.
“I didn’t thank you for the lilies, Martin. It was very kind of you,” said Margie, breaking the silence.
“O, that’s all right. I just thought you’d like ’em,” and he again relapsed into silence, his eyes following the sunny path of the first venturesome flies of the season that buzzed in and out of the open windows. Then his gaze strayed back to where the sunlight fell on Miss Margie and her lilies.
“The fact is, Miss Margie, I’ve got something to tell you. You know for a long time I’ve thought I’d like to quit the ferry and get somewhere where I’d have a chance to get ahead. There’s no use trying to get ahead in Brownville, for there’s nothing to get ahead of. Of late years I wanted to get a job on the lower Mississippi again, on a boat, you know. I’ve been going down to Kansas City lately to see some gentlemen who own boats down the river, and I’ve got a place at last, a first rate one that will pay well, and it looks like I could hold it as long as I want it.”
Miss Margie looked up from the lilies she was holding and asked sharply, “Then you are going away, Martin?”
“Yes, and I’m going away this time so you won’t never have to be ashamed of me for it.”
“I ought to be glad on your account. You’re right, there’s nothing here for you, nor anybody else. But we’ll miss you very much, Martin. There are so few of the old crowd left. Will you sell the ferry?”
“I don’t just know about that. I’d kind of hate to sell the old ferry. You see I haven’t got things planned out very clear yet. After all it’s just the going away that matters most.”
“Yes, it’s just the going away that matters most,” repeated Miss Margie slowly, while she watched something out of the window. “But of course you’ll have to come back often to see Bobbie.”
“Well, you see I was counting on taking Bobbie with me. He’s about old enough now, and I don’t think I could bear to be apart from him.”
“You are not going to take Bobbie away from us, Martin?” cried Miss Margie in a tone of alarm.
“Why yes, Miss Margie. Of course I’ll take him, and if you say so—”
“But I don’t say so,” cried Miss Margie in a tone of tremulous excitement. “He is not old enough, it would be cruel to take a bit of a child knocking around the world like that.”
“I can’t go without Bobbie. But, Miss Margie—”
“Martin,” cried Miss Margie,—she had risen to her feet now and stood facing him, her eyes full of gathering anger and her breast rising and falling perceptibly with her quick-drawn breathing—“Martin, you shall not take Bobbie away from me. He’s more my child than yours, anyway. I’ve been through everything for him. When he was sick I walked the floor with him all night many a time and went with a headache to my work next morning. I’ve lived and worked and hoped just for him. And I’ve done it in the face of everything. Not a day passes but some old woman throws it in my face that I’m staying here drivelling my life out to take care of the child of the man who jilted me. I’ve borne all this because I loved him, because he is all my niggardly life has given me to love. My God! A woman must have something. Every woman’s got to have. And I’ve given him everything, all that I’d starved and beat down and crucified in me. You brought him to me when he was a little wee baby, the only thing of your life you’ve ever given to mine. From the first time I felt his little cheek on mine I knew that a new life had come into me, and through another woman’s weakness and selfishness I had at least one of the things which was mine by right. He was a helpless little baby, dependent on me for everything, and I loved him for just that. He needed my youth and strength and blood, and the very warmth of my body, and he was the only creature on earth who did. In spite of yourself you’ve given me half my womanhood and you shall not take it from me now. You shall not take it from me now!”
Martin heard her going, he heard the sob that broke as she reached the door but he did not stir from his seat or lift his bowed head. He sat staring at the sunlit spot in front of the pulpit where she had stood with the lilies in her hand, looking to him, somehow, despite her anger, like the pictures of the Holy woman who is always painted with lilies.
When the twilight began to fall and the shadows in the church grew dim he got up and went slowly down to the river toward the ferry boat. Back over the horseshoe shaped gulch in which the town is built the sky was glorious with red splotches of sunset cloud just above the horizon. The big trees on the bluffs were tossing their arms restlessly in
the breeze that blew up the river, and across on the level plains of the Missouri side the lights of the farm houses began to glow through the soft humid atmosphere of the April night. The smell of burning grass was everywhere, and the very air tasted of spring.
The boat hands had all gone to supper, and Martin sat down on the empty deck and lit his pipe. When he was perplexed or troubled he always went to the river. For the river means everything to Brownville folk; it has been at once their making and their undoing.
Brownville was not always the sleepy, deserted town that it is today, full of empty buildings and idle men and of boys growing up without aim or purpose. No, the town has had a history, a brief, sad little history which recalls the scathing epigram that Herr Heine once applied to M. Alfred de Musset; it is a young town with a brilliant past. It was the first town built on the Nebraska side of the river, and there, sheltered by the rugged bluffs and washed by the restless Missouri, a new state struggled into existence and proclaimed its right to be. Martin Dempster was the first child born on the Nebraska side, and he had seen the earth broken for the first grave. There, in Senator Tipton’s big house on the hillside, when he was a very little boy, he had heard the first telegraph wire ever stretched across the Missouri click its first message that made the blood leap in all his boyish veins, “Westward the course of Empire takes its way.”
In the days of his boyhood Brownville was the head of river navigation and the old steamboat trade. He had seen the time when a dozen river steamers used to tie up at the wharves at one time, and unload supplies for the wagon trains that went overland to Pike’s Peak and Cherry Creek, that is Denver now. He had sat on the upper veranda of the old Marsh House and listened to the strange talk of the foreign potentates that the “Montana” and “Silver Heels” used to bring up the river and who stopped there on their way into the big game country. He had listened with them to the distant throbbing of the engines that once stirred the lonely sand-split waters of the old river, and watched the steamers swing around the bend at night, glittering with lights, with bands of music playing on their decks and the sparks from the smokestacks blowing back into the darkness. He had sat under the gigantic oak before the Lone Tree saloon and heard the teamsters of the wagon trains and the boat hands exchange stories of the mountains and alkali deserts for stories of the busy world and its doings, filling up the pauses in conversation with old frontier songs and the strumming of banjos. And he could remember only too well when the old “Hannibal” brought up the steel rails for the Union Pacific Railroad, the road that was to kill Brownville.
Brownville had happened because of the steamboat trade, and when the channel of the river had become so uncertain and capricious that navigation was impossible, Brownville became impossible too, and all the prosperity that the river had given it took back in its muddy arms again and swept away. And ever since, overcome by shame and remorse, it had been trying to commit suicide by burying itself in the sand. Every year the channel grows narrower and more treacherous and its waters more turbid. Perhaps it does not even remember any more how it used to hurry along into the great aorta of the continent, or the throb of the wheels of commerce that used to beat up the white foam on its dark waters, or how a certain old Indian chief desired to be buried sitting bolt upright upon the bluff that he might always watch the steamers go up and down the river.
So it was that the tide went out at Brownville, and the village became a little Pompeii buried in bonded indebtedness. The sturdy pioneers moved away and the “river rats” drifted in, a nondescript people who came up the river from nowhere, and bought up the big houses for a song, cut the tall oaks and cedars in the yards for firewood, and plowed up the terraces for potato patches, and were content after the manner of their kind. The river gypsies are a peculiar people; like the Egyptians of old their lives are for and of the river. They each have their skiff and burn driftwood and subsist on catfish and play their banjos, and forget that the world moves—if they ever knew it. The river is the school and religion of these people.
And Martin Dempster was one of them. When most of the better people of the town moved away Martin remained loyal to the river. The feeling of near kinship with the river had always been in him, he was born with it. When he was a little boy he had continually run away from school, and when his father hunted for him he always found him about the river. River boys never take kindly to education; they are always hankering for the water. In summer its muddy coolness is irresistibly alluring, and in winter its frozen surface is equally so. The continual danger which attends its treacherous currents only adds to its enticing charm. They know the river in all its changes and fluctuations as a stock broker knows the markets.
When Martin was a boy his father owned a great deal of Brownville real estate and was considered a wealthy man. Town property was a marketable article in those days, though now no real estate ever sells in Brownville—except cemetery lots. But Martin never cared for business. The first ambition he was ever guilty of was that vague yearning which stirs in the breasts of all river boys, to go down the river sometime, clear down, as far as the river goes. Then, a little later, when he heard an old stump speaker who used to end all his oratorical flights with a figure about “rearing here in the Missouri Valley a monument as high as the thought of man,” he had determined to be a great navigator and to bring glory and honor to the town of Brownville. And here he was, running the old ferry boat that was the last and meanest of all the flock of mighty river crafts. So it goes. When we are very little we all dream of driving a street car or wearing a policeman’s star or keeping a peanut stand; and generally, after catching at the clouds a few times, we live to accomplish our juvenile ambitions more nearly than we ever realize.
When he was sixteen Martin had run away as cabin boy on the “Silver Heels.” Gradually he had risen to the pilot house on the same boat. People wondered why Marjorie Pierson should care for a fellow of that stamp, but the fact that she did care was no secret. Perhaps it was just because he was simple and unworldly and lived for what he liked best that she cared.
Martin’s downfall dated back to the death of the steamboat trade at Brownville. His fate was curiously linked with that of his river. When the channel became so choked with sand that the steamers quit going up to Brownville, Martin went lower down the river, making his headquarters at St. Louis. And there the misfortune of his life befell him. There was a girl of French extraction, an Aimée de Mar, who lived down in the shipping district. She lived by her wits principally. She was just a wee mite of a thing, with brown hair that fluffed about her face and eyes that were large and soft like those of Guido’s penitent Magdalen, and which utterly belied her. You would wonder how so small a person could make so much harm and trouble in the world. Not that she was naturally malignant or evil at all. She simply wanted the nice things of this world and was determined to have them, no matter who paid for them, and she enjoyed life with a frank sort of hedonism, quite regardless of what her pleasure might cost others. Martin was a young man who stood high in favor with the captains and boat owners and who seemed destined to rise. So Aimée concentrated all her energies to one end, and her project was not difficult of accomplishment under the circumstances. A wiser or worse man would have met her on her own ground and managed her easily enough. But Martin was slow at life as he had been at books, heady and loyal and foolish, the kind of man who pays for his follies right here in this world and who keeps his word if he walks alive into hell for it. The upshot of it was that, after writing to Margie the hardest letter he ever wrote in his life, he married Aimée de Mar.
Then followed those three years that had left deep lines in Martin’s face and gray hairs over his temples. Once married Aimée did not sing “Toujours j’amais!” any more. She attired herself gorgeously in satins and laces and perfumed herself heavily with violettes de Parme and spent her days visiting her old friends of the milliners’ and hairdressers’ shops and impressing the
m with her elegance. The evenings she would pass in a box at some second rate theatre, ordering ices brought to her between the acts. When Martin was in town he was dragged willy-nilly through all these absurdly vulgar performances, and when he was away matters went even worse. This would continue until Martin’s salary was exhausted, after which Aimée would languish at home in bitter resentment against the way the world is run, and consoling herself with innumerable cigarettes de Caporale until pay day. Then she would blossom forth in a new outfit and the same program would be repeated. After running him heavily into debt, by some foolish attempt at a flirtation with a man on board his own boat, she drove Martin into a quarrel which resulted in a fierce hand-to-hand scrimmage on board ship and was the cause of his immediate discharge. In December, while he was hunting work, living from hand to mouth and hiding from his creditors, his baby was born. “As if,” Aimée remarked, “the weather were not disagreeable enough without that!”
In the spring, at Mardi-Gras time, Martin happened to be out of town. Aimée was thoroughly weary of domesticity and poverty and of being shut up in the house. She strained her credit for all it was worth for one last time, and on the first night of the fête, though it was bitterly cold, she donned an airy domino and ran away from her baby, and went down the river in a steam launch, hung with colored lights and manned by some gentlemen who were neither sober nor good boatmen. The launch was overturned a mile below the Point, and three of the party went to the bottom. Two days later poor little Aimée was picked up in the river, the yellow and black velvet of her butterfly dress covered with mud and slime, and her gay gauze wings frozen fast to her pretty shoulders.