by Willa Cather
He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This
disclosure amazed him.
"Well, well, we mustn't think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn't
turn out for any of us as we plan." He stood and watched her large slow
hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into his
waste-basket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered how
she managed to sew with hands that folded and unfolded as rigidly as
umbrellas--no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on a bow,
it stayed there. She herself was tall, large-boned, flat and stiff, with
a plain, solid face, and brown eyes not destitute of fun. As she knelt
by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her, his hand on the
lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her last remark had
troubled him.
"What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it's rather
nice, that grey wave on each side. Gives it character. You'll never need
any of this false hair that's in all the shop windows."
"There's altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my customers
are using it now--ladies you wouldn't expect would. They say most of it
was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it's got to be such a
frequent thing that the priest spoke against it only last Sunday."
"Did he, indeed? Why, what could he say? Seems such a personal matter."
"Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a
priest couldn't go to see a pious woman any more without finding
switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was
disgusting."
"Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see a
woman in the room where she takes off these ornaments--or to see her
without them?"
Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly missed
being a giggle. "He goes to give them the Sacrament, of course,
Professor! You've made up your mind to be contrary today, haven't you?"
"You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the
hair would be lying about where it was lightly taken off. But as you
first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You'll never
convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you're going to
sew in the new house and I'm going to work on here. Who is ever to
remind me when it's All Souls' day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or
anything?"
Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread
as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure!
She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were
little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years
that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the
difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like
Macbeth's two spent swimmers--years when he had the courage to say to
himself: "I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly
impossible thing!"
During the fifteen years he had been working on his Spanish Adventures
in North America, this room had been his centre of operations. There had
been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years
when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the Southwest on
the trail of his adventurers, another in Old Mexico, dashes to France to
see his foster-brothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas
always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and
sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history.
Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man
could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he
could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic
life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally
pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were
certainly no other advantages. The furnace heat did not reach the third
floor. There was no way to warm the sewing-room, except by a rusty,
round gas stove with no flue--a stove which consumed gas imperfectly and
contaminated the air. To remedy this, the window must be left
open--otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become
unfit to breathe. If the stove were turned down, and the window left
open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing
out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he
knew it. The Professor had found that the best method, in winter, was to
turn the gas on full and keep the window wide on the hook, even if he
had to put on a leather jacket over his working-coat. By that
arrangement he had somehow managed to get air enough to work by.
He wondered now why he had never looked about for a better stove, a
newer model; or why he had not at least painted this one, flaky with
rust. But he had been able to get on only by neglecting negative
comforts. He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly
selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him
delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it. By doing without many
so-called necessities he had managed to have his luxuries. He might, for
instance, have had a convenient electric drop-light attached to the
socket above his writing table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful
kerosene lamp which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found
that the oil-can in the closet was empty; then, to get more, he would
have had to go down through the house to the cellar, and on his way he
would almost surely become interested in what the children were doing or
in what his wife was doing--or he would notice that the kitchen linoleum
was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he would
stop to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the human
house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when
the lamp was empty--and that usually occurred when he was in the middle
of a most important passage--he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and
worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb, sticking out of
the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It
was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn't
dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a
fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours
of the day.
If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn't go to his study
at all. Two evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters,
and one evening he and his wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or
a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of
course, and on those two days he worked like a miner under a landslide.
Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she was paid for
that day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was
earning his living during the day; carrying full university work and
feeding him
self out to hundreds of students in lectures and
consultations. But that was another life.
St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very
intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would
willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust--many instructors
had nothing else to give them and got on very well--but his misfortune
was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was
one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a
whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its
servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years,
this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it
had nothing to do with Time.
But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose--he had got
what he wanted. By many petty economies of purse, he had managed to be
extravagant with not a cent in the world but with his professor's
salary--he didn't, of course, touch his wife's small income from her
father. By eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that it now
made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to his
university lectures, and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece
of creative work. A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St.
Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that
process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one
could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly,
just once, in his student Tom Outland,--and he had foretold.
There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so
many defeats and triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just
on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear--Lake Michigan, the inland sea
of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages
before him remained blank or were full of scratched out sentences, then
he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away,
and spent a day on the lake with his sail-boat; jumping out to swim,
floating on his back alongside, then climbing into his boat again.
When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were
certain human figures against it, of course; his practical,
strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father,
the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great
fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake.
The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door
that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never
close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you
would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning,
across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran
through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part
of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter
morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured
reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't
observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now,
forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had
made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his
eyes were merely open wide.
When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and
dragged him and his brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of
central Kansas. St. Peter nearly died of it. Never could he forget the
few moments on the train when that sudden, innocent blue across the sand
dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was like sinking for the
third time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or
seemed so final. Even in his long, happy student years with the
Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue water was the one thing
he was home-sick for. In the summer he used to go with the Thierault
boys to Brittany or to the Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as
the Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. "No," he used to tell
the boys, who were always asking him about le Michigan, "it is
altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue,
but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls,
but-I don't know, il est toujours plus na�f."
Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he
was very much in love and must marry at once, out of the several
positions offered him he took the one at Hamilton, not because it was
the best, but because it seemed to him that any place near the lake was
a place where one could live. The sight of it from his study window
these many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient
things he had done without would have been.
Just in that corner, under Augusta's archaic "forms," he had always
meant to put the filing-cabinets he had never spared the time or money
to buy. They would have held all his notes and pamphlets, and the
spasmodic rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he never got them, and
now he really didn't need them; it would be like locking the stable
after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone--that was the thing he
was feeling most just now. In spite of all he'd neglected, he had
completed his Spanish Adventurers in eight volumes--without filing
cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove--and without
encouragement, Heaven knew! For all the interest the first three volumes
awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake
Michigan. They had been timidly reviewed by other professors of history,
in technical and educational journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to
do something quite different--they merely thought he was trying to do
the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They recommended to
him the more even and genial style of John Fiske.
St. Peter hadn't, he could honestly say, cared a whoop--not in those
golden days. When the whole plan of his narrative was coming clearer and
clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier with
his material, when all the foolish conventions about that kind of
writing were falling away and his relation with his work was becoming
every day more simple, natural, and happy--, he cared as little as the
Spanish Adventurers themselves what Professor So-and-So thought about
them. With the fourth volume he began to be aware that a few young men,
scattered about the United States and England, were intensely interested
in his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to express their
interest in lectures and in print. The two last volumes brought him a
certain international reputation and what were called rewards--among
them, the Oxford prize for history, with its five thousand pounds, which
had built him the new house into which he did not want to move.
"Godfrey," his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an
ironical turn in some remark he made about the new house, "is there
something you would rather have done with that money than to have built
a house with it?"
"Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought
back the fun I had writing my history, you'd never have got your house.
But one couldn't get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great
pleasures don't come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you."
Chapter 2
That evening St. Peter was in the new house, dressing for dinner. His
two daughters and their husbands were dining with them, also an English
visitor. Mrs. St. Peter heard the shower going as she passed his door.
She entered his room and waited until he came out in his bath-robe,
rubbing his wet, ink-black hair with a towel.
"Surely you'll admit that you like having your own bath," she said,
looking past him into the glittering white cubicle, flooded with
electric light, which he had just quitted.
"Whoever said I didn't? But more than anything else, I like my closets.
I like having room for all my clothes, without hanging one coat on top
of another, and not having to get down on my marrow-bones and fumble in
dark corners to find my shoes."
"Of course you do. And it's much more dignified, at your age, to have a
room of your own."
"It's convenient, certainly, though I hope I'm not so old as to be
personally repulsive?" He glanced into the mirror and straightened his
shoulders as if he were trying on a coat.
Mrs. St. Peter laughed,--a pleasant, easy laugh with genuine amusement
in it. "No, you are very handsome, my dear, especially in your
bath-robe. You grow better-looking and more intolerant all the time."
"Intolerant?" He put down his shoe and looked up at her. The thing that
stuck in his mind constantly was that she was growing more and more
intolerant, about everything except her sons-in-law; that she would
probably continue to do so, and that he must school himself to bear it.
"I suppose it's a natural process," she went on, "but you ought to try,
try seriously, I mean, to curb it where it affects the happiness of your
daughters. You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have
foolish vanities--you had plenty."
St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing
absently with the tassels of his bath-robe. "Why, Lillian, I have
exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with
all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my
class-rooms. My forbearance is overstrained, it's gone flat. That's
what's the matter with me."
"Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour?
But we won't argue about it now. You'll put on your dinner coat? And do
try to be sympathetic and agreeable to-night."
Half an hour later Mr. and Mrs. Scott McGregor and Mr. and Mrs. Louie
Marsellus arrived, and soon after them the English scholar, Sir Edgar
Spilling, so anxious to do the usual thing in America that he wore a
morning street suit. He was a gaunt, rugged, large-boned man of fifty,
with long legs and arms, a pear-shaped face, and a drooping, pre-war
moustache. His specialty was Spanish history, and he had come all the
way to Hamilton, from his cousin's place in Saskatchewan, to enquire
about some of Doctor St. Peter's "sources."
Introductions over, it was the Professor's son-in-law, Louie Marsellus,
who took Sir Edgar in hand. He remembered having met in China a Walter
Spilling, who was, it turned out, a brother of Sir Edgar. Marsellus had
also a brother there, engaged in the silk trade. They exchanged opinions
on conditions of the Orient, while young McGregor put on his horn-rimmed
spectacles and roamed restlessly up and down the library. The two
daughters sat near their mother, listening to the talk about China.
Mrs. St. Peter was very fair, pink and gold,--a pale gold, now that she