by Willa Cather
it. I found I was reading too fast; so I began to commit long passages
of Vergil to memory--if it hadn't been for that, I might have forgotten
how to use my voice, or gone to talking to myself. When I look into the
AEneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and
another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green pi�ons with
flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a
rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and
courage--behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.
Happiness is something one can't explain. You must take my word for it.
Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and
blue, a life in itself.
Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O'Briens again,
working on the section and studying with Father Duchene and trying to
get some word of Blake. Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I
couldn't fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I
questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible
way, had all the Santa F� operatives and the police and the Catholic
missionaries on the watch for him, offered a thousand dollars reward for
whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchene and our
friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I
understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites
faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I'm not very
sanguine about good fortune myself. I'll be called to account when I
least expect it.
In the spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here
and walked into your garden, and the rest you know.
THE PROFESSOR
Chapter 1
All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes
reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had
been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a
circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They
had been young people with good qualities, and very much in love, but
they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small
income from her father--only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had
made all the difference in the world. A few memorable interregnums
between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn't pinch and be
shabby and do housework, as the wives of some of his colleagues did.
Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter one.
Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn't possibly have
imagined; his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early
death and posthumous fame--it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that
this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had
never heard, for "an extravagant and wheeling stranger." The Professor
often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in
Brahms' Requiem, attending the words, "He heapeth up riches and cannot
tell who shall scatter them!" The vehemence of this passage had seemed
to him uncalled for until he read it by the light of the history of his
own family.
St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn't choose to
live his life over--he might not have such good luck again. He had had
two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many
years, and a second of the mind--of the imagination. Just when the
morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came
Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.
Through Outland's studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and
master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull
with use. The boy's mind had the superabundance of heat which is always
present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to
see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.
If the last four volumes of "The Spanish Adventurers" were more simple
and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of
Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great
drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not
spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the
scene of his explorers' adventures. By the time he had got as far as the
third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy
with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very
curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails
and stones and water-courses tell only to adolescence.
Two years after Tom's graduation they took the copy of Fray Garces'
manuscript that the Professor had made from the original in Spain, and
went down into the South-west together. By autumn they had been over
every mile of his trail on horseback. Tom could take a sentence from
Garces' diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed
the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could
always find the route by which the priest had reached the next.
It was on that trip that they went to Tom's Blue Mesa, climbed the
ladder of spliced pine-trees to the Cliff City, and up to the Eagle's
Nest. There they took Tom's diary from the stone cupboard where he had
sealed it up years ago, before he set out for Washington on his
fruitless errand.
The next summer Tom went with the Professor to Old Mexico. They had
planned a third summer together, in Paris, but it never came off.
Outland was delayed by the formalities of securing his patent, and then
came August, 1914. Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been
Tom's teacher, stopped in Hamilton on his way back to Belgium, hurrying
home to serve in any capacity he might. The rugged old man stayed in
Hamilton only four days, but in that time Outland made up his mind, had
a will drawn, packed, and said good-bye. He sailed with Father Duchene
on the Rochambeau.
To this day St. Peter regretted that he had never got that vacation in
Paris with Tom Outland. He had wanted to revisit certain spots with him:
to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the
yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after the rain; to stand
with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the
bronze figures--Time, bearing away the youth who was struggling to
snatch his palm--or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might
have mattered to Tom, had not chance, in one great catastrophe, swept
away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.
And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his
old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to
him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He
couldn't see Tom building "Outland," or becoming a public-spirited
citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his
fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled
things that were not the symbols of ideas?
A hand like that, had he
lived, must have been put to other uses. His fellow scientists, his
wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It
would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of
false excuses. It would have had to "manage" a great deal of money, to
be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had
escaped all that. He had made something new in the world--and the
rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others.
Chapter 2
All those summer days, while the Professor was sending cheerful accounts
of his activities to his family in France, he was really doing very
little. He had begun, in a desultory way, to annotate the diary that Tom
had kept on the mesa, in which he had noted down the details of each
day's work among the ruins, along with the weather and anything unusual
in the routine of their life. There was a minute description of each
tool they found, of every piece of cloth and pottery, frequently
accompanied by a very suggestive pencil sketch of the object and a
surmise as to its use and the kind of life in which it had played a
part. To St. Peter this plain account was almost beautiful, because of
the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say. If words had
cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives
were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to
present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's
emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination,
the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when
the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only conventional
phrases.
When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had
pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have
taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal
besides--something he had never before been able to do.
St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about "day-dreams,"
just as he laughed at people who naively confessed that they had "an
imagination." All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion.
When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He
had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with
his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth.
He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch
the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after
dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility.
he was cultivating a novel mental dissipation--and enjoying a new
friendship. Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door
(as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the
Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon
Valley--the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter.
This boy and he had meant, back in those faraway days, to live some sort
of life together and to share good and bad fortune. They had not shared
together, for the reason that they were unevenly matched. The young St.
Peter who went to France to try his luck, had a more active mind than
the twin he left behind in the Solomon Valley. After his adoption into
the Thierault household, he remembered that other boy very rarely, in
moments of home-sickness. After he met Lillian Ornsley, St. Peter forgot
that boy had ever lived.
But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back
to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as
there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the
years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His
career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of
events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do
with the person he was in the beginning.
The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow
strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always
consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"--in society
and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in
the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. When he met Lillian, it
reached its maturity. From that time to this, existence had been a
catching at handholds. One thing led to another and one development
brought on another, and the design of his life had been the work of this
secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties
and responsibilities of being and having been a lover. Because there was
Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary. Because there was
marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour
in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters. His
histories, he was convinced, had no more to do with his original ego
than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young
manhood.
The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a
scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods
and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever
life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly
so cultivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have been--and yet he was
terribly wise. He seemed to be at the root of the matter; Desire under
all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other
things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never
married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth.
When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven
pine-trees turned red in the declining sum, he felt satisfaction and
said to himself merely: "That is right." Coming upon a curly root that
thrust itself across his path, he said: "That is it." When the
maple-leaves along the street began to turn yellow and waxy, and were
soft to the touch,--like the skin on old faces,--he said: "That is true;
it is time." All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure.
When he was not dumbly, deeply recognizing, he was bringing up out of
himself long-forgotten, unimportant memories of his early childhood, of
his mother, his father, his grandfather. His grandfather, old Napoleon
Godfrey, used to go about lost in profound, continuous meditation,
sometimes chuckling to himself. Occasionally, at the family
dinner-table, the old man would try to rouse himself, from motives of
politeness, and would ask some kindly question--nearly always absurd and
often the same one he had asked yesterday. The boys used to shout with
laughter and wonder what profound matters could require such deep
meditation, and make a man speak so foolishly about what was going on
under his very eyes. St. Peter thought he was beginning to understand
what the old man had been thinking about, though he himself was but
fifty-two, and Napoleon had been well on in his eighties. There are only
a few years, at the last, in which man can consider his estate, and he
thought he might be quite as near the end of his road as his grandfather
had been in those days.
The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature
into the original one, and that the complexion of a man's life was
largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature
as modified by sex rubbed on together.
What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could
return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits ad passions and
experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual
activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among
his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world.
Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened
to him, and he suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not
regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the
life of another person.
Along with other states of mind which attended his realization of the
boy Godfrey, came a conviction (he did not see it coming, it was there
before he was aware of its approach) that he as nearing the end of his
life. This conviction took its place so quietly, seemed so
matter-of-fact, that he gave it little thought. But one day, when he
realized that all the while he was preparing for the fall term he didn't
in the least believe he would be alive during the fall term, he thought
he might better see a doctor.
Chapter 3
The family doctor knew all about St. Peter. It was summer, moreover, and
he had plenty of time. He devoted several mornings to the Professor and
made tests of the most searching kind. In the end he of course told St.
Peter there was nothing the matter with him.
"What made you come to me, any discomfort or pain?"
"None. I simply feel tired all the time."
Dr. Dudley shrugged. "So do I! Sleep well?"
"Almost too much."
"Eat well?"
"In every sense of the word, well. I am my own chef."
"Always a gourmet, and never anything wrong with your digestive tract! I
wish you'd ask me to dine with you some night. Any of that sherry left?"
"A little. I use it plentifully."
"I'll bet you do! But why did you think there was something wrong with
you? Low in your mind?"
"No, merely low in energy. Enjoy doing nothing. I came to you from a
sense of duty."
"How about travel?"
"I shrink from the thought of it. As I tell you, I enjoy doing nothing."
"Then do it! There's nothing the matter with you. Follow your
inclination."
St. Peter went home well satisfied. He did not mention to Dr. Dudley the
real reason for his asking for a medical examination. One doesn't
mention such things. The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his
life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the
dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking
across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea.
Letters came every week from France. Lillian and Louie alternated, so
that one or the other got off a letter to him on every fast boat...Louie
told him that wherever they went, when they had an especially delightful
day, they bought him a present. At Trouville, for instance, they had
laid in dozens of the brilliant rubber casquettes he liked to wear when
he went swimming. At Aix-les-Bains they found a gorgeous dressing-gown
for him in a Chinese shop. St. Peter was happy in his mind about them
all. He was glad they were there, and that he was here. Their generous
letters, written when there were so many pleasant things to do,