The First Willa Cather Megapack

by Willa Cather

  “I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things from me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?”

  “I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Windermere, thoughtfully. “I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it’s difficult to prescribe for those creative fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”

  Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with feverish earnestness of her speech. “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth what it costs him?” Certainly there is a sacred and dignified selfishness which properly belongs to art and religion. You know how he wastes his time and strength in those idiotic social obligations which he takes so seriously—in chivalrous attentions to vapid old women who knew his mother, and in writing wedding-marches for every pink-and-white thing who asks him.”

  “Come, come,” expostulated Windermere, alarmed at her excitement. “Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself.”

  He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement of the sonota, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his lofty and proper speech. The sonata was dedicated to Brahms, and was the most classic work Hilgarde had done up to that time. It marked, indeed, the transition from his purely lyric vein to that deeper and nobler style by which he will live. Windermere played intelligently, without the least affectation of virtuosity, but with that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

  “How he has grown! Heavens, how he has grown!” she cried. “This thing is entirely great. There is not a trace of that persistent saccharine quality that was always creeping into his earlier work. The theme, the whle conception is big and serene. How firm the texture is! And surely he never wrote such harmonies before. What the last three years have done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the white race course, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me—ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!”

  She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands. Windermere crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she had never before given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat beyond an occasional ironical jest. Her courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going sickened him.

  “Don’t do it,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t, I feel it too much. We mustn’t speak of that; it’s too tragic and too vast.”

  When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. “No, I won’t be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not if I should ever sing Brunhilda, but quite simply when I should sing Brunhilda, I was always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might not. But broken music-boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that shepherd-boy theme at the beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at the dinnertable. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been ill, I was in Nice filling a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library—a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!—as he always does when he is ill, you know. Ah, it is so good that you do know! Even his red smoking-jacket lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his ‘Souvenirs d’Automne,’ and he was, as I most like to remember him, so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of that desolated old palace. There was a concert piano in the room, and he played that prelude of Chopin’s with the ceaseless pelting of raindrops in the bass. He wrote it, you know, when George Sand carried him off to Majorca and shut him up in a damp grotto in the hillside, and it rained forever and ever, and he had only goat’s milk to drink. Adriance had been to Majorca, you know, and had slept in their grotto. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard features of the bronze Dante like the reflection of purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. How heavy and impenetrable were those shadows! quite like the darkness of the under world, where it will be resting-time indeed, and the last strokes will have been put to the last score, and we shall all be together, resting in the common darkness, after it is all over. Suddenly Adriance stopped playing and sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us at once—that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope—and we were like two clinging together on a spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had returned from Paris, ‘and in the book we read no more that night.’” She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Sometimes while looking at the mask she wore, Windermere had thought of Richard’s lines, “the shadow of my sorrow hath destroyed the shadow of my face.” He dropped his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. “How much you have cared!” he said.

  “Ah, yes, I cared,” she said, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: “You can’t imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to someone. I used to want to shriek it out to the world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the agony of it is.”

  Windermere continued to look helplessly at the floor. “I was not sure how much you wanted me to know,” he said.

  “Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have been able to conceal it when I chose, though I s
uppose women always think that. The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole, I am not ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight.”

  “And has he never known at all?” asked Windermere, in a thick voice.

  “Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course he is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn’t find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly. Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some tact, and Adriance will always be glad to see you coming around the corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at standing punishment.”

  “Don’t; you’ll make me hate him,” groaned Windermere.

  Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. “It wasn’t in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. His early music was the first that ever really took hold of me. When I was a child out in Iowa, and Charley was braking on the road, I used to lie out under the apple-trees and dream about him. I had seen his picture in some magazine or other, and I always fancied him in Paris leading the gilded existence of a Ouida hero. I had a tough pull to get started; it was a long jump from Bird City to Chicago, and a longer one from Chicago to New York. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough.”

  Windermere rose and stood hesitating. “I think I must go. You ought to be quiet and I don’t think I can hear any more just now.”

  She put out her hand and took his playfully. “You’ve put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven’t you? Well, it may never be to your glory in this world, perhaps, but it will stand to your credit in the land to which I travel. I wax quotational. It’s been the mercy of heaven to me, and it ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be. ‘Unto one of the least of these,’ you remember.”

  Windermere knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: “I stayed because I wanted to be with you, that’s all. I have never cared about other women since I met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would.”

  She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don’t tell me that. I have seen enough of the tragedy of life, God knows: don’t show me any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy’s fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it, and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows, will you not?” She took his hand with a smile that lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and sadness, hope and despair, and full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, she said softly: For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;If not, why then, this parting was well made.

  The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he went out.

  On the night of Adriance Hilgarde’s opening concert in Paris, Windermere sat by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When she aroused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about the roughness of the road, and to declare that she would never travel by that line again. At midnight Windermere and the nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the door. Windermere sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the bed and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance’s concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.

  The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened the lamp with her hand. Windermere saw that Katharine was awake and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. “Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear,” she whispered.

  Windermere went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of art was over for Katharine.

  Two days later Windermere was pacing the station siding, waiting for the Westbound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had nothing to say to each other. Windermere’s bags were piled on the truck, and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord’s impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the wrench of farewell.

  As the train pulled in, Windermere wrung Gaylord’s hand among the crowd of alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast during the stop. Windermere heard an exclamation in a broad South German dialect, and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in the most improbable places and whose florid face was marked by good living and champagne as by fine tide lines, rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat-sleeve with her tightly gloved hands.

  “Herr Gott, Adriance, lieber Freund,” she cried, emotionally.

  Windermere quickly withdrew his arm, and lifted his hat, blushing. “Pardon me, madame, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother,” he said, quietly, and turning from the crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.

  A WAGNER MATINÉE

  I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink, on glassy, blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat-pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it had become necessary for her to come to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station, and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.

  The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollections so wide and d
eep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, thumbing the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she beside me made canvas mittens for the huskers.

  The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred, smoked bodies that firemen lift from the débris of a burned building. She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning.

  Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt’s appearance she considerately concealed. Myself, I saw my aunt’s misshapened figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in a plain, angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her; and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they measured off their eighty acres by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates usually reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.