The Professor's House

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,