by Willa Cather
When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and reasonable mood.
“What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to farm all your life?”
“Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I’d be at it before now. What makes you ask that?”
“Oh, I don’t know! I suppose people must think about the future sometime. And you’re so practical.”
“The future, eh?” Ernest shut one eye and smiled. “That’s a big word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I’m going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I’ll marry a nice girl and bring her back.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough, if it turns out right, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. It wouldn’t be for me. I don’t believe I can ever settle down to anything. Don’t you feel that at this rate there isn’t much in it?”
“In what?”
“In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to bed—nothing has happened.”
“But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to see my friends like this, it’s enough for me.”
“Is it? Well, if we’ve only got once to live, it seems like there ought to be something—well, something splendid about life, sometimes.”
Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. “You Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not very much can happen to us, we know that,—and we learn to make the most of little things.”
“The martyrs must have found something outside themselves. Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little things.”
“Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of vanity to help them along, too.”
Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, “The fact is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board and clothes and Sundays off, don’t you?”
Ernest laughed rather mournfully. “It doesn’t matter much what I think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess.”
Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was on the wrong side.
IX
After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls, Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,—different from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what might be called a “carriage,” and she had altogether more manner and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and curly,—the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent, and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her “the Georgia peach.” She was considered very pretty, and the University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since then her vogue had somewhat declined.
Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling him that he had “a magnificent physique,” a compliment which covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she should explain her absences to him,—tell him how often she washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
“Yes, I’m going out,” Claude replied. “I’ve promised to teach Miss Millmore to skate. Won’t you come along and help me?”
Julius laughed indulgently. “Oh, no! Some other time. I don’t want to break in on that.”
“Nonsense! You could teach her better than I.”
“Oh, I haven’t the courage!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?”
Julius made a little grimace. “She wrote some awfully slushy letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house one night.”
“Didn’t you slap him?” Claude demanded, turning red.
“Well, I would have thought I would,” said Julius smiling, “but I didn’t. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I’ve been wary of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Claude haughtily. “She’s only kind-hearted.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But I’m terribly afraid of girls who are too kindhearted,” Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude a word of warning for some time.
Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,—though when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost Hippolytean pride in candour.
X
The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That spring Mrs. Erlich’s first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement approached, her relatives began planning to enterta
in her. The Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour. There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the society of her own sex.
One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. “For me,” she said with decision, “you may put down Claude Wheeler.”
This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
“You don’t mean it, Mother,” the oldest son protested. “Poor old Claude wouldn’t know what it was all about,—and one stick can spoil a dinner party.”
Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. “You will see; your cousin Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy than in any of the others!”
Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might still yield her point. “For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn’t any dinner clothes,” he murmured. She nodded to him. “That has been attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded him, he told me he could easily afford it.”
The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down “Claude Wheeler” with a flourish.
If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing to Claude’s. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame Schroeder-Schatz’s recital, and on the evening of the concert, when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see what figure her escort cut.
Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, and presented himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich’s eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She laughed and clapped her hands.
“Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and wonder where I got him!”
Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets; opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and smelling salts,—there was even a little silver box of peppermint drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons, they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour, Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as food and drink. At dinner she sat on the right of the oldest son. Claude, beside Mrs. Erlich at the other end of the table, watched attentively the lady attired in green velvet and blazing rhinestones.
After dinner, as Madame Schroeder-Schatz swept out of the dining room, she dropped her cousin’s arm and stopped before Claude, who stood at attention behind his chair.
“If Cousin Augusta can spare you, we must have a little talk together. We have been very far separated,” she said.
She led Claude to one of the window seats in the living-room, at once complained of a draft, and sent him to hunt for her green scarf. He brought it and carefully put it about her shoulders; but after a few moments, she threw it off with a slightly annoyed air, as if she had never wanted it. Claude with solicitude reminded her about the draft.
“Draft?” she said lifting her chin, “there is no draft here.”
She asked Claude where he lived, how much land his father owned, what crops they raised, and about their poultry and dairy. When she was a child she had lived on a farm in Bavaria, and she seemed to know a good deal about farming and live-stock. She was disapproving when Claude told her they rented half their land to other farmers. “If I were a young man, I would begin to acquire land, and I would not stop until I had a whole county,” she declared. She said that when she met new people, she liked to find out the way they made their living; her own way was a hard one.
Later in the evening Madame Schroeder-Schatz graciously consented to sing for her cousins. When she sat down to the piano, she beckoned Claude and asked him to turn for her. He shook his head, smiling ruefully.
“I’m sorry I’m so stupid, but I don’t know one note from another.”
She tapped his sleeve. “Well, never mind. I may want the piano moved yet; you could do that for me, eh?”
When Madame Schroeder-Schatz was in Mrs. Erlich’s bedroom, powdering her nose before she put on her wraps, she remarked, “What a pity, Augusta, that you have not a daughter now, to marry to Claude Melnotte. He would make you a perfect son-in-law.”
“Ah, if I only had!” sighed Mrs. Erlich.
“Or,” continued Madame Schroeder-Schatz, energetically pulling on her large carriage shoes, “if you were but a few years younger, it might not yet be too late. Oh, don’t be a fool, Augusta! Such things have happened, and will happen again. However, better a widow than to be tied to a sick man—like a stone about my neck! What a husband to go home to! and I a woman in full vigour. Das ist ein Kreuz ich trage!” She smote her bosom, on the left side.
Having put on first a velvet coat, then a fur mantle, Madame Schroeder-Schatz moved like a galleon out into the living room and kissed all her cousins, and Claude Wheeler, good-night.
XI
One warm afternoon in May Claude sat in his upstairs room at the Chapins’, copying his thesis, which was to take the place of an examination in history. It was a criticism of the testimony of Jeanne d’Arc in her nine private examinations and the trial in ordinary. The Professor had assigned him the subject with a flash of humour. Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would not dismiss the case lightly.
Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important thing in his life. He worked from an English translation of the Proces, but he kept the French text at his elbow, and some of her replies haunted him in the language in which they were spoken. It seemed to him that they were like the speech of her saints, of whom Jeanne said, “the voice is beautiful, sweet and low, and it speaks in the French tongue.” Claude flattered himself that he had kept all personal feeling out of the paper; that it was a cold estimate of the girl’s motives and character as indicated by the consistency and inconsistency of her replies; and of the change wrought in her by imprisonment and by “the fear of the fire.”
When he had copied the last page of his manuscript and sat contemplating the pile of written sheets, he felt that after all his conscientious study he really knew very little more about the Maid of Orleans than when he first heard of her from his mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had been shut up in the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of her in armour, in an old book, and took it down to the kitchen where his mother was making apple pies. She glanced at the picture, and while she went on rolling out the dough and fitting it to the pans, she told him the story. He had forgotten what she said,—it must have been very fragmentary,—but from that time on he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc, and she was a living figure in his mind. She seemed to him then as clear as now, and now as miraculous as then.
It was a curious thing, he reflected, that a character could perpetuate itself thus; by a picture, a word, a phrase, it could renew itself in every generation and be born over and over again in the minds of childre
n. At that time he had never seen a map of France, and had a very poor opinion of any place farther away than Chicago; yet he was perfectly prepared for the legend of Joan of Arc, and often thought about her when he was bringing in his cobs in the evening, or when he was sent to the windmill for water and stood shaking in the cold while the chilled pump brought it slowly up. He pictured her then very much as he did now; about her figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust, with soldiers in it . . . the banner with lilies . . . a great church . . . cities with walls.
On this balmy spring afternoon, Claude felt softened and reconciled to the world. Like Gibbon, he was sorry to have finished his labour,—and he could not see anything else as interesting ahead. He must soon be going home now. There would be a few examinations to sit through at the Temple, a few more evenings with the Erlichs, trips to the Library to carry back the books he had been using,—and then he would suddenly find himself with nothing to do but take the train for Frankfort.
He rose with a sigh and began to fasten his history papers between covers. Glancing out of the window, he decided that he would walk into town and carry his thesis, which was due today; the weather was too fine to sit bumping in a street car. The truth was, he wished to prolong his relations with his manuscript as far as possible.