My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

  I

  AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under theinfluence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric hadarrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work ashead of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of hisphysicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course wasarranged under his supervision.

  I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on enteringthe Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to NewEngland, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincolnall that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. Ishall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of thehappiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and allthat went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

  In those days there were many serious young men among the students who hadcome up to the University from the farms and the little towns scatteredover the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from thecornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on throughthe four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by reallyheroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wanderingpioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a fewenthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was anatmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about theyoung college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few yearsbefore.

  Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were nocollege dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took roomswith an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off theirchildren and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, nearthe open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, andon that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough tocontain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. Thedresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even myhats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered themnon-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they areplaying house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directlyin front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In thecorner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and paintedmyself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paperwas covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some Germanscholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books fromabroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater atPompeii, which he had given me from his collection.

  When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood atthe end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it withgreat care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out foran evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger andbecome talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if hefound a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes heliked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about smallexpenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcasticremarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which werealmost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and Englishpoetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.

  I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In acrowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had noplatitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired hislectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interestedthey were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being agreat poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginativetalk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat ofpersonal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark browstogether, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in thecarpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in hisbrain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of theshadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget hisface as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day hespent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through theroofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfullystayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watchingthe constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of oldTithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of hisdeparture for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He wasstill, indeed, doing penance for it.

  I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk ofDante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto ofthe "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweetteacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his longfingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, whospoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endureslongest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from thatdivine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of theAEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"

  Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived aboutmyself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myselffor long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send mewith a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Clericbrought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly foundmyself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of theplough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the newappeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took upin my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever myconsciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened withinit, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my newexperiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped towonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.