by Willa Cather
V.
Next morning the sun rose radiantly over the valley of the Solomon. The sky was blue and warm as the skies of the South, the hard, straight line of the horizon was softened by a little smokelike haze, and the yellow leaves of the cottonwoods, still wet from the drenching rain, gleamed in the sunshine, and through the scant foliage the white bark glittered like polished silver. All the land was washed fresh and clean from the dust of the desert summer. It was a day of opal lights, a day set in a heaven of gold and turquoise and bathed in sapphirine airs; one of those rare and perfect days that happen only in desert countries, where Nature seems sometimes to repent of her own pitilessness and by the glory of her skies seems trying to compensate for the desolation of the lands that stretch beneath them. But when the Colonel came out to view the ravages of the storm the exultant beauty of the morning moved him little. He knew how false it was and how fleeting. He knew how soon Nature forgets. Across the river he heard a horse whinnying in the bushes. Surprised and curious, he went over to see what it might mean. The horse stood, saddled and bridled, among the sumac bushes, and at the back of the saddle carried a long waterproof roll. He seemed uneasy and stood pawing the wet ground and chewing at the withered leaves. Looking about the Colonel could see no rider and he went up the bluff to look for him. And there he found him. About five paces from the oak tree was a newly dug hole, with the spade still sticking upright in the earth. The grass around it was cut and crushed as though it had been beaten by a strong man in his rage. Beside the hole was the body of a man. His shirt was torn open to the waist and was wet and spattered with mud; his left hand was wound in the long grass beside him; his right, swollen and black, was thrown over his head; the eyes were wide open, and the teeth were set hard upon the lower lip. The face was the handsome, dissolute face of Apollo Gump.
The Colonel lifted him up and laid him under the little tree. A glance at his arm told how he died. There was a brandy flask beside him, and the wound had been enlarged with his knife, but the snake had struck a vein and the poison had been too swift. Taking up the spade, the Colonel set to work to finish what the dead man had begun. At a depth of about four feet he found a wooden box, cased in tin. He whistled softly to himself as he loosened the earth about it. So the Gumps had not been so clever, after all; they had brought down more game than they could bag, and at the last moment they had been compelled to bury part of their spoil. For what else on earth or in heaven would Apollo Gump have risked his rascally neck in the Solomon valley?
But no, there was no money, only the picture of the handsome, theatrical looking woman he had seen in Apollo’s room, a few spangled stage dresses, a lot of woman’s clothing, dainty garments that looked like a trousseau and some tiny gowns made for a little, little baby, that had never been worn. That was all. The Colonel drew a long breath of astonishment, and stood looking at the picture. There, at the back of the saddle, was the waterproof roll which was to have carried it away. This then was Apollo Gump’s weakness, and this was the supreme irony that life had held in store for him, that when he had done evil without penalty and all his sins had left him scathless, his one poor virtue should bring him to his death! As the Colonel glanced at that poor distorted body, lying there in the sunlight amid the glistening grasses, he felt for a moment a throb of that old affection he had once known for him. Already the spiders had woven a rainbow web over that set, white face, a gossamer film of protection against man’s vengeance; and it seemed as though Nature had already begun her magnificent and complete work of pardon, as though the ground cried out for him, to take him into her forgiving breast and make him again a part of the clean and fruitful earth.
When he searched the dead man’s body he found a leather belt and pouch strapped about his waist next his skin. In this were ten thousand dollars in bank notes and a ticket to San Francisco. The Colonel quietly counted the money and put it into his own pocket.
“There, sir, I’ve waited a long time to square my account with you. You owe me six thousand still, but they say a dead man’s debts are cancelled and I’ll take your horse and call it square. If there is a recording angel that keeps the run of these things, you can tell him you are square with me and take that much off your poor soul; you’ll have enough to answer for without that, God knows.”
That afternoon the Colonel dragged up the bluff a long rough box made from weather boards torn from his store. He brought over his best suit of clothes from its odorous camphor chest and with much difficulty succeeded in forcing it on to the stiffened limbs of the dead man.
“Apollo, I liked you mighty well. It cut me to the heart when you turned rascal,—and you were a damned rascal. But I’ll give you a decent burial, because you loved somebody once. I always knew you were too good a fellow for your trade and that you’d trip up in it somewhere. This would never have happened to those precious brothers of yours. I guess I won’t say any prayers over you. The Lord knows you better than I do; there have been worse men who have lived and died Christians. If I thought any words of mine could help you out, I’d say ’em free. But the Lord has been forgiving sin from the beginning of the world, till it must have kept him pretty busy before now. He knows his business by this time. But I hope it will go a bit easy with you, Apollo, that I do.”
He sunk the box in the hole and made a pillow of the light spangled dresses and laid the dead man in upon them. Over him he laid the picture of the handsome, smiling woman, who was smiling still. And so he buried them.
Next day, having got his money out of the place, the Colonel set fire to his old store and urged his horse eastward, never once casting back a look at the last smoking ruin of El Dorado.
In the spring the sunflowers grew tall and fair over every street and house site; and they grew just as fair over the mound beside the oak tree on the bluff. For if Nature forgets, she also forgives. She at least holds no grudge, up in her high place, where she watches the poles of the heavens. The tree itself has stopped growing altogether. It has concluded that it is not worth the effort. The river creeps lazily through the mud; it knows that the sea would be only a great, dirty, salty pond if it should reach it. Year by year it buries itself deeper in the black mud, and burrows among the rotting roots of the dead willows, wondering why a river should ever have been put there at all.
THE PROFESSOR’S COMMENCEMENT
The professor sat at his library table at six o’clock in the morning. He had risen with the sun, which is up betimes in June. An uncut volume of “Huxley’s Life and Letters” lay open on the table before him, but he tapped the pages absently with his paper-knife and his eyes were fixed unseeingly on the St. Gaudens medallion of Stevenson on the opposite wall. The professor’s library testified to the superior quality of his taste in art as well as to his wide and varied scholarship. Only by a miracle of taste could so unpretentious a room have been made so attractive; it was as dainty as a boudoir and as original in color scheme as a painter’s studio. The walls were hung with photographs of the works of the best modern painters,—Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Corot, and a dozen others. Above the mantel were delicate reproductions in color of some of Fra Angelico’s most beautiful paintings. The rugs were exquisite in pattern and color, pieces of weaving that the Professor had picked up himself in his wanderings in the Orient. On close inspection, however, the contents of the book-shelves formed the most remarkable feature of the library. The shelves were almost equally apportioned to the accommodation of works on literature and science, suggesting a form of bigamy rarely encountered in society. The collection of works of pure literature was wide enough to include nearly all the major languages of modern Europe, besides the Greek and Roman classics.
To an interpretive observer nearly everything that was to be found in the Professor’s library was represented in his personality. Occasionally, when he read Hawthorne’s “Great Stone Face” with his classes, some clear sighted student wondered whether the man ever realized how compl
etely he illustrated the allegory in himself. The Professor was truly a part of all that he had met, and he had managed to meet most of the good things that the mind of man had desired. In his face there was much of the laborious precision of the scientist and not a little of Fra Angelico and of the lyric poets whose influence had prolonged his youth well into the fifties. His pupils always remembered the Professor’s face long after they had forgotten the things he had endeavored to teach them. He had the bold, prominent nose and chin of the oldest and most beloved of American actors, and the high, broad forehead which Nature loves to build about her finely adjusted minds. The grave, large outlines of his face were softened by an infinite kindness of mouth and eye. His mouth, indeed, was as sensitive and mobile as that of a young man, and, given certain passages from “Tristram and Isolde” or certain lines from Heine, his eyes would flash out at you like wet corn-flowers after a spring shower. His hair was very thick, straight, and silver white. This, with his clear skin, gave him a somewhat actor-like appearance. He was slight of build and exceedingly frail, with delicate, sensitive hands curving back at the finger ends, with dark purple veins showing prominently on the back. They were exceedingly small, white as a girl’s, and well kept as a pianist’s.
As the Professor sat caressing his Huxley, a lady entered.
“It is half past six, Emerson, and breakfast will be served at seven.” Anyone would have recognized her as the Professor’s older sister, for she was a sort of simplified and expurgated edition of himself, the more alert and masculine character of the two, and the scholar’s protecting angel. She wore a white lace cap on her head and a knitted shawl about her shoulders. Though she had been a widow for twenty-five years and more, she was always called Miss Agatha Graves. She scanned her brother critically and having satisfied herself that his linen was immaculate and his white tie a fresh one, she remarked, “You were up early this morning, even for you.”
“The roses never have the fragrance that they have in the first sun, they give out their best then,” said her brother nodding toward the window where the garden roses thrust their pink heads close to the screen as though they would not be kept outside. “And I have something on my mind, Agatha,” he continued, nervously fingering the sandalwood paper-cutter, “I feel distraught and weary. You know how I shrink from changes of any sort, and this—why this is the most alarming thing that has ever confronted me. It is absolutely cutting my life off at the stalk, and who knows whether it will bud again?”
Miss Agatha turned sharply about from the window where she had been standing, and gravely studied her brother’s drooping shoulders and dejected figure.
“There you go at your old tricks, Em,” she remonstrated. “I have heard many kinds of ability attributed to you, but to my mind no one has ever put his finger on the right spot. Your real gift is for getting all the possible pain out of life, and extracting needless annoyance from commonplace and trivial things. Here you have buried yourself for the best part of your life in that High School, for motives Quixotic to an absurdity. If you had chosen a University I should not complain, but in that place all your best tools have rusted. Granted that you have done your work a little better than the people about you, it’s no great place in which to excel,—a city high school where failures in every trade drift to teach the business they cannot make a living by. Now it is time that you do something to justify the faith your friends have always had in you. You owe something to them and to your own name.”
“I have builded myself a monument more lasting than brass,” quoted the Professor softly, balancing the tips of his slender fingers together.
“Nonsense, Emerson!” said Miss Agatha impatiently. “You are a sentimentalist and your vanity is that of a child. As for those slovenly persons with offensive manners whom you call your colleagues, do you fancy they appreciate you? They are as envious as green gourds and their mouths pucker when they pay you compliments. I hope you are not so unsophisticated as to believe all the sentimental twaddle of your old students. When they want recommendations to some school board, or run for a city office and want your vote, they come here and say that you have been the inspiration of their lives, and I believe in my heart that you are goose enough to accept it all.”
“As for my confrères,” said the Professor smiling, “I have no doubt that each one receives in the bosom of his family exactly the same advice that you are giving me. If there dwell an appreciated man on earth I have never met him. As for the students, I believe I have, to some at least, in a measure supplied a vital element that their environment failed to give them. Whether they realize this or not is of slight importance; it is in the very nature of youth to forget its sources, physical and mental alike. If one labors at all in the garden of youth, it must be free from the passion of seeing things grow, from an innate love of watching the strange processes of the brain under varying influences and limitations. He gets no more thanks than the novelist gets from the character he creates, nor does he deserve them. He has the whole human comedy before him in embryo, the beginning of all passions and all achievements. As I have often told you, this city is a disputed strategic point. It controls a vast manufacturing region given over to sordid and materialistic ideals. Any work that has been done here for aesthetics cannot be lost. I suppose we shall win in the end, but the reign of Mammon has been long and oppressive. You remember when I was a boy working in the fields how we used to read Bunyan’s “Holy War” at night? Well, I have always felt very much as though I were keeping the Ear Gate of the town of Mansoul, and I know not whether the Captains who succeed me be trusty or no.”
Miss Agatha was visibly moved, but she shook her head. “Well, I wish you had gone into the church, Emerson. I respect your motives, but there are more tares than wheat in your crop, I suspect.”
“My dear girl,” said the Professor, his eye brightening, “that is the very reason for the sowing. There is a picture by Vedder of the Enemy Sowing Tares at the foot of the cross, and his seeds are golden coins. That is the call to arms; the other side never sleeps; in the theatres, in the newspapers, in the mills and offices and coal fields, by day and by night the enemy sows tares.”
As the Professor slowly climbed the hill to the High School that morning, he indulged in his favorite fancy, that the old grey stone building was a fortress set upon the dominant acclivity of that great manufacturing city, a stronghold of knowledge in the heart of Mammon’s kingdom, a Pharos to all those drifting, storm-driven lives in the valley below, where mills and factories thronged, blackening the winding shores of the river, which was dotted with coal barges and frantic, puffing little tugs. The High School commanded the heart of the city, which was like that of any other manufacturing town—a scene of bleakness and naked ugliness and of that remorseless desolation which follows upon the fiercest lust of man. The beautiful valley, where long ago two limpid rivers met at the foot of wooded heights, had become a scorched and blackened waste. The river banks were lined with bellowing mills which broke the silence of the night with periodic crashes of sound, filled the valley with heavy carboniferous smoke, and sent the chilled products of their red forges to all parts of the known world,—to fashion railways in Siberia, bridges in Australia, and to tear the virgin soil of Africa. To the west, across the river, rose the steep bluffs, faintly etched through the brown smoke, rising five hundred feet, almost as sheer as a precipice, traversed by cranes and inclines and checkered by winding yellow paths like sheep trails which lead to the wretched habitations clinging to the face of the cliff, the lairs of the vicious and the poor, miserable rodents of civilization. In the middle of the stream, among the tugs and barges, were the dredging boats, hoisting muck and filth from the clogged channel. It was difficult to believe that this was the shining river which tumbles down the steep hills of the lumbering district, odorous of wet spruce logs and echoing the ring of axes and the song of the raftsmen, come to this black ugliness at last, with not one throb of it
s woodland passion and bright vehemence left.
For thirty years the Professor’s class-room had overlooked this scene which caused him unceasing admiration and regret. For thirty years he had cried out against the image set up there as the Hebrew prophets cried out against the pride and blind prosperity of Tyre. Nominally he was a professor of English Literature, but his real work had been to try to secure for youth the rights of youth; the right to be generous, to dream, to enjoy; to feel a little the seduction of the old Romance, and to yield a little. His students were boys and girls from the factories and offices, destined to return thither, and hypnotized by the glitter of yellow metal. They were practical, provident, unimaginative, and mercenary at sixteen. Often, when some lad was reading aloud in the class-room, the puffing of the engines in the switch yard at the foot of the hill would drown the verse and the young voice entirely, and the Professor would murmur sadly to himself: “Not even this respite is left to us; even here the voice of youth is drowned by the voice of the taskmaster that waits for them all impatiently enough.”
Never had his duty seemed to call him so urgently as on this morning when he was to lay down his arms. As he entered the building he met the boys carrying palms up into the chapel for class-day exercises, and it occurred to him for the first time that this was his last commencement, a commencement without congratulations and without flowers. When he went into the chapel to drill the seniors on their commencement orations, he was unable to fix his mind upon his work. For thirty years he had heard youth say exactly the same thing in the same place; had heard young men swear fealty to the truth, pay honor to the pursuit of noble pleasures, and pledge themselves “to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” How many, he asked himself, had kept their vows? He could remember the occasion of his own commencement in that same chapel; the story that every senior class still told the juniors, of the Professor’s humiliation and disgrace when, in attempting to recite “Horatius at the Bridge,” he had been unable to recall one word of the poem following “Then out spake bold Horatius The Captain of the gate;” and after some moments of agonizing silence he had shame-facedly left the platform. Even the least receptive of the Professor’s students realized that he had risen to a much higher plane of scholarship than any of his colleagues, and they delighted to tell this story of the frail, exquisite, little man whom generations of students had called “the bold Horatius.”