by Willa Cather
As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies’ permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirt-sleeves, with a black silk handkerchief tucked carefully about his collar. He had seemed interested in Windermere since they had boarded the train at Holdredge, and kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever Windermere went someone was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from “Proserpine,” the cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a night. Windermere had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleighbells at a variety theatre in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother’s precocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun “Proserpine,” and here he found it again in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Windermere was exactly ashamed of “Proserpine”; only a man of genius could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can, and its popularity was the gravest charge conservative critics could make against it.
Windermere unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbor across the aisle. Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
“Dusty ride, isn’t it? I don’t mind it myself; I’m used to it. Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br’er Rabbit. I’ve been trying to place you for a long time; I think I must have met you before.”
“Thank you,” said Windermere, taking the card; “my name is Hilgarde. You’ve probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him.”
The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
“So I was right after all, and if you’re not Adriance Hilgarde you’re his double. I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of ‘Proserpine’ through to us once at the Chicago Press Club. I used to be on the Commercial there before I began to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you’re Hilgarde’s brother, and here I’ve run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn’t it?”
The travelling-man laughed and offered Windermere a cigar and plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to Windermere about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Windermere went on to Cheyenne alone.
The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o’clock, late by a matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over time on a summer night. When Windermere alighted from the train he walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaëton stood near the crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white and her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too dark to see her face. Windermere had scarcely noticed her, when the switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the headlight threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman in the phaëton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Windermere started forward and caught the horse’s head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaëton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”
Windermere hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night had shaken him.
While Windermere was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the parlor. Windermere finished his coffee, and went in the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His whole manner betrayed a high degree of nervous agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities, yet, as he turned to greet Windermere, there was an incongruous diffidence in his address.
“Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde,” he said, extending his hand; “I found your name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord; I’m afraid my sister startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I’ve come around to apologize.”
“Ah! The young lady in the phaëton? I’m sure I didn’t know whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the apology, and I make it to you most sincerely.”
The man colored a little under the dark brown on his face.
“Oh, it’s nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother’s, and it seems you favor him, and when the switch-engine threw a light on your face it startled her.”
Windermere wheeled about in his chair. “Oh! Katharine Gaylord! Is it possible! Now it’s you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on earth—”
“Is she doing here?” said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. “You’ve got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad health for a long time?”
“No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this. There are many reasons why I should be more concerned than I can tell you.”
The lines in Charley Gaylord’s brow relaxed a little.
“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I hate to ask you, but she’s so set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig’s below, and I can take you out any time you can go.”
“I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so,” said Windermere, quickly. “I’ll get my hat and be with you in a moment.”
When he came downstairs Windermere found a cart at the door, and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and settled back into his own element.
“You see, I think I’d better tell you something about my sister before you see her, and I don’t know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don’t know just how much you know about her.”
“Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while.”
Windermere saw that Gaylord’s mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world. “That’s the whole thing,” he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.
“She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn’t come of a great family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all,
and now she’s dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can’t fall back into ours. We’ve grown apart, someway—miles and miles apart—and I’m afraid she’s fearfully unhappy.”
“It’s a very tragic story that you are telling, Gaylord,” said Windermere. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.
“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, man, nobody will ever know how tragic. It’s a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep with, until I’ve lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It’s her lungs, you know. I’ve got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it’s no use. She hasn’t the ghost of a chance. It’s just getting through the days until the end now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she’s here, I think she’d be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won’t leave. She says it’s easier to let go of life here, and that to go East would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she hadn’t a wish my $80 a month didn’t cover; and now, when I’ve got a little property together, I can’t buy her a night’s sleep!” He stopped with a gulp and half closed his eyes.
Windermere saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him, and the brakeman’s frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:
“You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We’re all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can’t spell straight—the Almighty couldn’t teach me to spell. The things that make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there’s scarcely a point where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she cares for, it will give her about the only comfort she can have now.”
The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower.
“Here we are,” he said, turning to Windermere, “and I guess we understand each other.”
They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as “My sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.
When Windermere entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies. There are little skeleton-closets of the arts scattered here and there all over the West, where some Might-Have-Been hides his memories and the trophies of his student days on the Continent and the rusty tools of the craft that he once believed had called him; but this room savored of the present, and about it there was an air of immediate touch with the art of the present.
On the walls were autograph sketches by several of the younger American painters, and young Scotchmen whose names were scarcely known on this side of the water. Above one of the bookcases was a large photograph of Rodin’s Balzac; on the music-rack were the scores of Massenet’s latest opera and Chaminade’s latest song. It seemed scarcely possible that the glad tidings of these things should have reached Wyoming already. The haunting air of familiarity about the place perplexed Windermere. Was the room a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading-chair and looked keenly about him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother, framed in dark wood, above the piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother’s room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality. The black oak ceiling and floor, the dull red walls, the huge brick fireplace with a Wagnerian inscription on the tiles, the old Venetian lamp that hung under the copy of the Mona Lisa, the cast of the Parthenon frieze that ran about the room, the tall brass candlesticks with their sacerdotal candles, were all exactly as Adriance would have had them.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Windermere had known her and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost discontent. Perhaps that, too, was only the scar of the struggle of which her brother had spoken; perhaps the long warfare against adverse conditions had brought about an almost antagonistic and distrustful attitude of mind. The chief charm of the woman, as Windermere had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving quality like the sunlight; generous, fearless eyes, which glowed with sympathy and good-cheer for all living things, a sort of perpetual salutat to the world. Her head Windermere remembered as peculiarly well shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she stood alone.
Windermere was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance—with the cough. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”
Windermere was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not reckoned on the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to disguise the sharp outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was there, simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised nor evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch as water-flowers. Her chest, that full, proud singer’s chest, that had swelled like the bellows of an organ when she took her high notes, was fallen and flat. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key—older, sadder, softer.
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously arranging the pillows. “I know I’m not an inspiring object to
look upon, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?—for I’m more than usually nervous.”
“Don’t bother with me this morning if you are tired,” urged Windermere. “I can come quite as well tomorrow.”
“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor that he remembered as a part of her. “It’s solitude that I’m tired to death of, solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me—condoning it, you know—and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent.”
Windermere laughed. “Oh! I’m afraid I’m not the person to call after such a serious gentleman—I can’t sustain the situation. At my best—I don’t reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?”