The Professor's House

by Willa Cather

friends, "is that she doesn't think herself a bit unusual. Nowdays the

  girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to

  think themselves remarkable."

  Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she

  sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning,

  deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after

  Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry

  Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a

  journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live

  upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the

  impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to

  do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from

  the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The

  Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he

  liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of

  mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father

  thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no

  holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after

  the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague

  suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond's account more than on

  Kathleen's; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the

  time he couldn't see how Kathleen's marriage would benefit Rosie. "Rosie

  is like your second self," he once declared to his wife, "but you never

  pampered yourself at her age as you do her."

  Chapter 5

  It was an intense September noon--warm, windy, golden, with the smell of

  ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on

  the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the

  university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him,

  walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.

  "Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to

  go swimming with me--I'm cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end

  of his lecture, or sit down here on the bench in the sun?"

  "We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it's not interesting, we

  can come back and sit down for a chat."

  "Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he's with his

  seniors, isn't it?"

  They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the

  door was afar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When

  he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him. "No, Miller, I don't

  myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has

  given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the

  real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I

  suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the

  human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting

  by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them.

  Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial

  kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn't

  given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new

  sins--not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory,

  not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You'll

  agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better

  off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the

  magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by making their

  conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. As long as every man and

  woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal

  in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the

  shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing.

  The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great

  temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men happy, believing

  in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. It makes us

  happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much

  pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same

  thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has

  ever had.

  "Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he

  wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the

  shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a

  feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The

  cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian

  theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting

  splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and

  mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic

  value--only seven, you remember, and of those only three that

  are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the

  cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glass-workers and painters. They

  might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy

  will be done in art, as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere

  else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might tell me

  next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides

  making us very comfortable."

  As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went

  in.

  "I came over to get you to go to the electrician's with me, Godfrey, but

  I won't make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it's such

  a fine day, you really should go."

  "Car's outside. We'll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you

  can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the

  way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me."

  "I wish he would get into trouble, Scott," said Lillian as they left the

  building. "I wish he wouldn't talk to those fat-faced boys as if they

  were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a

  little ashamed."

  "I was rather rambling on to-day. I'm sorry you happened along. There's

  a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn't slow, and he excites me to

  controversy."

  "All the same," murmured his wife, "it's hardly dignified to think aloud

  in such company. It's in rather bad taste."

  "Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won't do it again."

  It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at

  the bit of beach of St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a

  little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house

  and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and

  the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.

  When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance

  out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out

  of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always

  brought home from France in great numbers. This one was verm
ilion, and

  was like a continuation of his flesh--his arms and back were burned a

  deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful

  reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the

  water. The visor was picturesque--his head looked sheathed and small and

  intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze

  in their tight, archaic helmets.

  By five o'clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the

  sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began

  to chuckle.

  "Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The

  day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the Herald

  to get some facts you'd been too modest to give him. When he was leaving

  he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk,

  DON'T KNOCK, and said: 'May I ask why you don't have that notice on the

  outside of your door? I didn't observe any other way of getting in.'

  They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus'

  place--seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them call that

  place after Tom?"

  "My dear boy, how can I prevent it?"

  "Well, you surely don't like the idea, do you?"

  The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When

  he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor.

  "Scott, you must see that I can't make suggestions to Louie. He's

  perfectly consistent. He's a great deal more generous and

  public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to

  him. I can't, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his

  affairs."

  "I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan't occur next

  time, but it does." Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time,

  looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the

  gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He

  was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth,

  attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing

  outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There

  was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a

  great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had

  been delighted when his daily poem and his "uplift" editorials first

  proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell

  as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and

  he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do

  something very fine, and he felt that the was wasting his life and his

  talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was

  discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St.

  Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His

  disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy's wolf,

  and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the

  corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.

  Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to

  commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes,

  they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one

  which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the

  subject. He posed his two sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a

  conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls

  of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated

  at a table with a chart, his hands extended in reasonable, patient

  argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet is his hand,

  his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely

  frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The

  tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said

  dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor

  liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.

  Chapter 6

  The Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright

  October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending

  to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to

  admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers,

  dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in

  bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the

  stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the

  window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented

  October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples

  and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him

  that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as

  they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand,

  fastidious and bold, which selected and placed--it was that which made

  the difference. In Nature there is no selection.

  In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and

  Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a

  casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold

  necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. "Of course emeralds

  would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale--to

  belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live

  here. You aren't, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear

  them?"

  "At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner-table at Outland! I like

  the idea of their being out of scale. I've never given her any jewels.

  I've waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells

  emeralds."

  Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. "You'll never be able to keep

  them. You'll show them to her."

  "Oh, no, I won't! They are to stay at the jeweller's, in Chicago, until

  we all go down for the birthday party. That's another secret we have to

  keep. We have such lots of them!" He bent over her hand and kissed it

  with warmth.

  St. Peter swung in over the window rail. "That is always the cue for the

  husband to enter, isn't it? What's this about Chicago, Louie?"

  He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his

  chair. "It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the

  date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is

  coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go

  down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your

  lectures."

  The Professor's eyebrows rose. "Bus-man's holiday for the ladies, I

  should say."

  "But not for me. Remember, I wasn't in your classes, like Scott and

  Outland. I'd give a good deal if I'd had the chance!" Louie said

  somewhat plaintively, "so you must make it up to me."

  "Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie."

  "Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I'll go on to Boston with you

  next winter, when yo
u give the Lowell lectures."

  "Would you, really? Next year's a long way off. Now I must get clean.

  I've been working in my other-house garden, and I'm scarcely fit to have

  tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to

  do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the

  mercy of the next tenants?"

  As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked

  back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was

  wearing the white silk cr�pe that had been the most successful of her

  summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She

  wouldn't have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn't been

  coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn't have noticed it if

  Louie hadn't been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in

  general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude,

  unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of

  another man.

  Lillian's coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn't foreseen

  it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about

  having married daughters. It had begun with Scott--the younger sister

  was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor

  was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a

  few weeks after Kathleen's marriage, arch and confidential relations

  began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in

  the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very

  tactful and patient with him.

  With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and

  Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He

  would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would

  have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual

  and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign

  into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an

  unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never

  forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a

  cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad

  with ease. At the dinner-table, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk,

  sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his

  plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian's face would

  become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put

  her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss

  her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to

  like it.

  Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all

  over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their

  interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past--the new

  house made a plausible pretext--and to use her influence and charm in

  the little anxious social world of Hamilton. She was intensely

  interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in

  their careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter

  told himself. She wasn't going to have to face a stretch of boredom

  between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less

  intelligent and more sensible than he had thought her.

  When Godfrey came down stairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He

  walked up to the chair where his wife was reading, and took her hand.

  "My dear," he said quite delicately, "I wish you could keep Louie from

  letting his name go up for the Arts and Letters. It's not safe yet. He's

  not been here long enough. They're a fussy little bunch, and he ought to

  wait until they know him better."

  "You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the