by Willa Cather
“It’s quite true, and it’s all that it should be,” she reassured me. “I’ll tell you about it later, and you’ll see that it’s a real solution. They are against me, of course,—all except Horace. He has been such a comfort.”
Horace’s support, such as it was, could always be had in exchange for his mother’s signature, I suspected. The pale May day had turned bleak and chilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air from somewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida’s face, and felt reassured of her unabated vitality; the old force of will was still there, and with it her characteristic optimism, the old hope of a “solution.”
“You have been in Columbus lately?” she was saying. “No, you needn’t tell me about it,” with a sigh. “Why is it, Caroline, that there is so little of my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I can even think of without depression. Yet I’ve really not such a bad conscience. It may mean that I still belong to the future more than to the past, do you think?”
My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went on thoughtfully: “Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period. But I’ve sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me, too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!” she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection. “Sea air always lets me down at first. That’s why it’s so good for me in the end.”
“I think Julia always lets you down, too,” I said bluntly. “But perhaps that depression works out in the same way.”
Cressida laughed. “Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn’t she? But it was Julia’s turn. I can’t come alone, and they’ve grown to expect it. They haven’t, either of them, much else to expect.”
At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. “A wireless for you, Madame Garnet.”
Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, and with every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope. “It’s from Jerome Brown,” she said with some confusion, as she folded the paper small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown, “Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; I want you to meet him. We shall probably be married there as soon as my engagements are over.” She rose. “Now I must write some letters. Keep two places at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine with you sometimes.”
I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was now reclining. He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head and entered the door of her deck suite. As she passed him, his eye went over her with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper in her corsage. He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward’s hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the world. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he did his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,—for the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere down in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies; paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace was usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace’s.
The three of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and always doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass: I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind each pair of them.
These three were sitting there in a row because they were all woven into the pattern of one large and rather splendid life. Each had a bond, and each had a grievance. If they could have their will, what would they do with the generous, credulous creature who nourished them, I wondered? How deep a humiliation would each egotism exact? They would scarcely have harmed her in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia looked forward to the day when Cressida would “break” and could be mourned over),—but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secret hope,—the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going,—that they would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet pack behind them to make extinction sure. All, except, perhaps, Miletus Poppas. He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one. But I always felt that if ever he had her thus at his mercy,—if ever he came upon the softness that was hidden under so much hardness, the warm credulity under a life so dated and scheduled and “reported” and generally exposed,—he would hold his hand and spare.
The weather grew steadily rougher. Miss Julia at last plucked Poppas by the sleeve and indicated that she wished to be released from her wrappings. When she disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hope that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had not brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some other Garnet. Cressida’s family was like that of the unpopular Prince of Wales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:
If it had been his brother,
Better him than another.
If it had been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive and intrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially to Ohio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Both sisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musical societies, and they were continually travelling up and down the Middle West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of two sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida’s face when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their letters by to read “when she was feeling up to it” and hastened to open others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant. Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days. Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her account and because she was so much a public personage.
The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters, were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy. They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York. They thought that was the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the last analysis, was to be Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark, and afterward in the light,—which, with her bad preparation, and with her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanan told me he thought Cressida ought “to make herself one of them,” he stated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities which had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. More than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.
�
�Sometimes,” I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those sloppily written letters, “sometimes I get discouraged.”
For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in Cressida’s deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the Signorina Garnet was “difficile.” After dinner I usually found Cressida unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself interesting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, the third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges, Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.
I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton, Horace’s father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus, and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosis two years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a long illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of chances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particular reason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluring promise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed to me more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained to me on former occasions.
“It’s nothing hasty,” she assured me. “It’s been coming on for several years. He has never pushed me, but he was always there—some one to count on. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still singing at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from the others; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. You can’t know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back, you’ll see it’s something I’ve never had.”
I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted to leaning on people.
“I’ve never had any one to lean on,” she said with a short laugh. Then she went on, quite seriously: “Somehow, my relations with people always become business relations in the end. I suppose it’s because,—except for a sort of professional personality, which I’ve had to get, just as I’ve had to get so many other things,—I’ve not very much that’s personal to give people. I’ve had to give too much else. I’ve had to try too hard for people who wouldn’t try at all.”
“Which,” I put in firmly, “has done them no good, and has robbed the people who really cared about you.”
“By making me grubby, you mean?”
“By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty.”
She nodded mournfully. “Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well, there’s not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that I carried off the family success, just as I might have carried off the family silver,—if there’d been any! They take the view that there were just so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there were none left for the others. At my age, that’s a dismal truth to waken up to.” Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she needed courage to face the facts in her case. “When one remembers one’s first success; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full of presents—How much one learns in a life time! That year when Horace was a baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I didn’t drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don’t know to this day. At twenty-two you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was the same afterward in Germany. A young woman must live for human people. Horace wasn’t enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose you will say it would have been better if I had.”
Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover than to that of a discontented and envious family.
“Well,” Cressida gathered herself up, “once I got out from under it all, didn’t I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again. You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. That time, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn’t distracted or empty. That time I was all there!”
“Yes,” I echoed her, “that time you were all there. It’s the greatest possible satisfaction to remember it.”
“But even that,” she sighed, “was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the end—and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter with me?”
The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known, she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.
We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish to take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressida rose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at the stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor, little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family units, presumably,—male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if it were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response. Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk between my friends. Cressida’s voice was deep and entreating. She was remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep away from the cardroom.
“But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?” he expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard. “What is there, now, to do?”
“Oh, Horace!” she murmured, “how can you be so? If I were twenty-two, and a boy, with some one to back me—”
Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat. “Oh, I’ve not your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that. I am as I am. I didn’t ask to be born into this charming world.”
To this gallant speech Cressida made no answer. She stood with her hand on the rail and her head bent forward, as if she had lost herself in thought. The ends of her scarf, lifted by the breeze, fluttered upward, almost transparent in the argent light. Presently she turned away,—as if she had been alone and were leaving only the night sea behind her,—and walked slowly forward; a strong, solitary figure on the white deck, the smoke-like scarf twisting and climbing and falling back upon itself in the light over her head. She reached the door of her stateroom and disappeared. Yes, she was a Garnet, but she was also Cressida; and she had done what she had done.
II
My first recollections of Cressida Garnet have to do with the Columbus Public Schools; a little girl with sunny brown hair and eager bright eyes, looking anxiously at the teacher and reciting the names and dates of the Presidents: “James Buchanan, 1857–1861; Abraham Lincoln, 1861–1865”; etc. Her family came from North Carolina, and they had that to feel superior about before they had Cressy. The Garnet “look,” indeed, though based upon a strong family resemblance, was nothing more than the restless, preoccupied expression of an inflamed sense of importance. The father was a Democrat, in the sense that other men were doctors or lawyers. He scratched up some sort of poor living for his family behind office windows inscribed with the words “Real Estate. Insurance. Investments.” But it was his political faith that, in a Republican community, gave him his feeling of eminence and originality. The Garnet children were all in school then, scattered along from the first grade to the ninth. In almost any room of our school building you might chance to enter, you saw the self-conscious little face of one or another of them. They
were restrained, uncomfortable children, not frankly boastful, but insinuating, and somehow forever demanding special consideration and holding grudges against teachers and classmates who did not show it them; all but Cressida, who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning.
It was no wonder that Cressy ran away with young Charley Wilton, who hadn’t a shabby thing about him except his health. He was her first music teacher, the choir-master of the church in which she sang. Charley was very handsome; the “romantic” son of an old, impoverished family. He had refused to go into a good business with his uncles and had gone abroad to study music when that was an extravagant and picturesque thing for an Ohio boy to do. His letters home were handed round among the members of his own family and of other families equally conservative. Indeed, Charley and what his mother called “his music” were the romantic expression of a considerable group of people; young cousins and old aunts and quiet-dwelling neighbours, allied by the amity of several generations. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unless Charley Wilton, and no other, played the wedding march. The old ladies of the First Church used to say that he “hovered over the keys like a spirit.” At nineteen Cressida was beautiful enough to turn a much harder head than the pale, ethereal one Charley Wilton bent above the organ.
That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch of grim, hard prose, was simply Cressida’s relentless bad luck. In her undertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, she was successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad. Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I have ever known. Cressida lived, more than most of us, “for others”; and what she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envy and discord—even dishonesty and turpitude.