by Willa Cather
“Ah, my dear young lady, but it’s just his fanciful angle, as you so happily term it, that puts a stop to everything, and I’ve never quite dared to urge him past his scruples, though I’m not saying that I could if I would. If there is anything at all in the whole business, any element of chosenness, of a special call, any such value in individual tone as he fancies, then, the question is, dare one urge him?”
“Nonsense!” snapped Bertha, drawing up her slender shoulders with decision,—I had purposely set out to exhaust her patience—“you have all put a halo about him until he daren’t move for fear of putting it out. What he needs is simply to keep at it. How much satisfaction do you suppose he gets out of hanging back?”
“The point, it seems to me, my dear Bertha, is not that, but the remarkableness of any one’s having the conviction, the moral force, just now and under the circumstances, to hang back at all. There must be either very much or very little in a man when he refuses to make the most of his vogue and sell out on a rising market. If he would rather bring up a little water out of the well than turn the river across his lands, has one a right to coerce him?” I put my shaft home steadily, and Bertha caught fire with proper spirit.
“All I can say is, that it’s a miracle he’s as adaptable as he is. I simply can’t understand what you meant, you and Harrison, by keeping him out there in Ohio so long.”
“But we didn’t,” I expostulated. “We didn’t keep him there. We only did not succeed in getting him away. We, too, had our scruples. He had his old house there, and his garden, his friends, and the peace of God. And then, Olympia isn’t a bad sort of place. It kept his feeling fresh, at least, and in fifteen years or so you’ll begin to know the value of that. There everything centers about the college, and every one reads, just as every one goes to church. It’s a part of the decent, comely life of the place. In Olympia there is a deep-seated, old-fashioned respect for the printed page, and Kenneth naturally found himself in the place of official sanctity. The townswomen reverently attended his college lectures, along with their sons and daughters, and, had he been corruptible, he might have established a walled supremacy of personal devotion behind which he could have sheltered himself to the end of his days.”
“Be he didn’t, you see,” said Bertha, triumphantly; “which is proof that he was meant for the open waters. Oh, we shall do fine things, I promise you! I can just fancy the hushed breath of the place for wonder at him. And his rose garden! Will people never have done with his rose garden! I remember you and Harrison told me of it, with an air, before I had met Kenneth at all. I wonder that you didn’t keep him down there forever from a pure sense of the picturesque. What sort of days and nights do you imagine he passed in his garden, in his miserably uncertain state? I suppose we should all like well enough to grow roses, if we had nothing else to do.”
I felt that Bertha was considerately keeping her eyes from the clock, and I rose to go.
“Well, Bertha, I suppose the only reason we haven’t brought him to a worse pass than we have, is just the fact that he happens to have been born an anachronism, and such a stubborn one that we leave him pretty much where we found him.”
II
After Kenneth’s wedding, I left immediately for Paris, and during the next four years I knew of the Grays only what I could sense from Kenneth’s labored letters, ever more astonishing in their aridity, and from the parcels I received twice a year by book-post, containing Bertha’s latest work. I never picked up an American periodical that Bertha’s name was not the first to greet my eye on the advertising pages. She surpassed all legendary accounts of phenomenal productiveness, and I could feel no anxiety for the fortunes of the pair while Bertha’s publishers thought her worth such a display of heavy type. There was scarcely a phase of colonial life left untouched by her, and her last, “The Maid of Domremy,” showed that she had fairly crowded herself out of her own field.
The real wonder was, that, making so many, she could make them so well—should make them, indeed, rather better and better. Even were one so unreasonable as to consider her gain a loss, there was no denying it. I read her latest, one after another, as they arrived, with growing interest and amazement, wholly unable to justify my first suspicion. There was every evidence that she had absorbed from Kenneth like a water plant, but none that she had used him more violently than a clever woman may properly use her husband. Knowing him as I did, I could never accredit him with having any hand in Bertha’s intrepid, whole-hearted, unimpeachable conventionality. One could not exactly call her unscrupulous; one could observe only that no predicament embarrassed her; that she went ahead and pulled it off.
When I returned to New York, I found a curious state of feeling prevalent concerning the Grays. Bertha was la fille du régiment more than ever. Every one championed her, every one went to her teas, every one was smilingly and conspicuously present in her triumph. Even those who had formerly stood somewhat aloof, now found no courage to dissent. With Bertha herself so gracious, so eager to please, the charge of pettiness, of jealousy, even, could be too easily incurred. She quite floated the sourest and heaviest upon her rising tide.
There was, however, the undertow. I felt it even before I had actually made sure of it—in the peculiar warmth with which people spoke of Kenneth. In him they saw their own grievances magnified until he became symbolic. Publicly every one talked of Bertha; but behind closed doors it was of Kenneth they spoke—sotto voce and with a shake of the head. As he had published nothing since his marriage, this smothered feeling had resulted in a new and sumptuous edition of “Montpensier” and “The Wood of Ronsard”; one of those final, votive editions, suggestive of the bust and the catafalque.
I called upon the Grays at the first opportunity. They had moved from their downtown flat into a new apartment house on Eighty-fifth street. The servant who took my card did not return, but Kenneth himself stumbled into the reception hall, overturning a gilt chair in his haste, and gripped my hands as if he would never let them go. He held on to my arm as he took me to his study, telling me again and again that I couldn’t possibly know what pleasure it gave him to see me. When he dropped limply into his desk chair, he seemed really quite overcome with excitement. It was not until I asked him about his wife that he collected himself and began to talk coherently.
“I’m sorry I can’t speak to her now,” he explained, rapidly twirling a paper-cutter between his long fingers. “She won’t be free until four o’ clock. She will be so pleased that I’m almost tempted to call her at once. But she’s so overworked, poor girl, and she will go out so much.”
“My dear Kenneth, how does she ever manage it all? She must have nerves of iron.”
“Oh, she’s wonderful, wonderful!” he exclaimed, brushing his limp hair back from his forehead with a perplexed gesture. “As to how she does it, I really don’t know much more than you. It all gets done, somehow.” He glanced quickly toward the partition, through which we heard the steady clicking of a typewriter. “I scarcely know what she is up to until her proofs come in. I usually go at those with her.” He darted a piercing look at me, and I wondered whether he had got a hint of the malicious stories which found their way about concerning his varied usefulness to Bertha.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Philip,” he went on, “I’ll finish a letter that must go out this afternoon, and then I shall be quite free.”
He turned in his revolving-chair to a desk littered deep with papers, and began writing hurriedly. I could see that the simplest kind of composition still perplexed and disconcerted him. He stopped, hesitated, bit his nails, then scratched desperately ahead, darting an annoyed glance at the partition as if the sharp, regular click of the machine bewildered him.
He had grown older, I noticed, but it was good to see him again—his limp, straight hair, which always hung down in a triangle over his high forehead; his lean cheek, loose under lip, and long
whimsical chin; his faded, serious eyes, which were always peering inquiringly from behind his thick glasses; his long, tremulous fingers, which handled a pen as uncertainly as ever. There was a general looseness of articulation about his gaunt frame that made his every movement seem more or less haphazard.
On the desk lay a heap of letters, the envelopes marked “answered” in Kenneth’s small, irregular hand, and all of them, I noticed, addressed to Bertha. In the open drawer at his left were half a dozen manuscript envelopes, addressed to her in as many different hands.
“What on earth!” I gasped. “Does Bertha conduct a literary agency as well?”
Kenneth swung round in his chair, and made a wry face as he glanced at the contents of the drawer. “It’s almost as bad as that. Really, it’s the most abominable nuisance. But we’re the victims of success, as Bertha says. Sometimes a dozen manuscripts come into her for criticism in one week. She dislikes to hurt any one’s feelings, so one of us usually takes a look at them.”
“Bertha’s correspondence must be something of a responsibility in itself,” I ventured.
“Oh, it is, I assure you. People are most inconsiderate. I’m rather glad, though, when it piles up like this and I can take a hand at it. It gives me an excuse for putting off my own work, and you know how I welcome any pretext,” he added, with a flushed, embarrassed smile.
“What are you doing, anyhow? I don’t know where you’ll ever learn industry if Bertha can’t teach you.”
“I’m working, I’m working,” he insisted, hurriedly crossing out the last sentence of his letter and blotting it carefully. “You know how reprehensibly slow I am. It seems to grow on me. I’m finishing up some studies in the French Renaissance. They’ll be ready by next fall, I think.” As he spoke, he again glanced hurriedly over the closely written page before him; then, stopping abruptly, he tore the sheet across the middle. “Really, you’ve quite upset me. Tell me about yourself, Philip. Are you going out to Olympia?”
“That depends upon whether I remain here or decamp immediately for China, which prospect is in the cards. Olympia is greatly changed, Harrison tells me.”
Kenneth sighed and sank deeper into his chair, reaching again for the paper-cutter. “Ruined completely. Capital and enterprise have broken in even there. They’ve all sorts of new industries, and the place is black with smoke and thick with noise from sunrise to sunset. I still own my house there, but I seldom go back. I don’t know where we’re bound for, I’m sure. There must be places, somewhere in the world, where a man can take a book or two and drop behind the procession for an hour; but they seem impossibly far from here.”
I could not help smiling at the deeply despondent gaze which he fixed upon the paper-cutter. “But the procession itself is the thing we’ve got to enjoy,” I suggested, “the mere sense of speed.”
“I suppose so, I suppose so,” he reiterated, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. “The six-day bicycle race seems to be what we’ve all come to, and doubtless one form of it’s as much worth while as another. We don’t get anywhere, but we go. We certainly go; and that’s what we’re after. You’ ll be lucky if you are sent to China. There must be calm there as yet, I imagine.”
Our conversation went on fitfully, with interruptions, irrelevant remarks, and much laughter, as talk goes between two persons who have once been frank with each other, and who find that frankness has become impossible. My coming had clearly upset him, and his agitation of manner visibly increased when he spoke of his wife. He wiped his forehead and hands repeatedly, and finally opened a window. He fairly wrested the conversation out of my hands and was continually interrupting and forestalling me, as if he were apprehensive that I might say something he did not wish to hear. He started and leaned forward in his chair whenever I approached a question.
At last we were aware of a sudden slack in the tension; the typewriter had stopped. Kenneth looked at his watch, and disappeared through a door into his wife’s study. When he returned, Bertha was beside him, her hand on his shoulder, taller, straighter, younger than I had left her—positively childlike in her freshness and candor.
“Didn’t I tell you,” she cried, “that we should do fine things?”
III
A few weeks later I was sent to Hong-Kong, where I remained for two years. Before my return to America, I was ordered into the interior for eight months, during which time my mail was to be held for me at the consul’s office in Canton, the port where I was to take ship for home. Once in the Sze Chuen province, floods and bad roads delayed me to such an extent that I barely reached Canton on the day my vessel sailed. I hurried on board with all my letters unread, having had barely time to examine the instructions from my paper.
We were well out at sea when I opened a letter from Harrison in which he gave an account of Kenneth Gray’s disappearance. He had, Harrison stated, gone out to Olympia to dispose of his property there which, since the development of the town, had greatly increased in value. He completed his business after a week’s stay, and left for New York by the night train, several of his friends accompanying him to the station. Since that night he had not been seen or heard of. Detectives had been at work; hospitals and morgues had been searched without result.
The date of this communication put me beside myself. It had awaited me in Canton for nearly seven months, and Gray had last been seen on the tenth of November, four months before the date of Harrison’s letter, which was written as soon as the matter was made public. It was eleven months, then, since Kenneth Gray had been seen in America. During my long voyage I went through an accumulated bulk of American newspapers, but found nothing more reassuring than occasional items to the effect that the mystery surrounding Gray’s disappearance remained unsolved. In a “literary supplement” of comparatively recent date, I came upon a notice to the effect that the new novel by Bertha Torrence Gray, announced for spring publication, would, owing to the excruciating experience through which the young authoress had lately passed, be delayed until the autumn.
I bore my suspense as best I could across ocean and continent. When I arrived in New York, I went from the ferry to the “Messenger” office, and, once there, directly to Harrison’s room.
“What’s all this,” I cried, “about Kenneth Gray? I tell you I saw Gray in Canton ten months ago.”
Harrison sprang to his feet and put his finger to his lip.
“Hush! Don’t say another word! There are leaky walls about here. Go and attend to your business, and then come back and go to lunch with me. In the meantime, be careful not to discuss Gray with any one.”
Four hours later, when we were sitting in a quiet corner of a café, Harrison dismissed the waiter and turned to me. “Now,” he said, leaning across the table, “if you can be sufficiently guarded, you may tell me what you know about our friend.”
“Well,” I replied, “it would have been, under ordinary circumstances, a commonplace thing enough. On the day before I started for the interior, I was in Canton, making some last purchases to complete my outfit. I stepped out of a shop on one of the crooked streets in the old part of the city, and I saw him as plainly as I see you, being trundled by in a jinrikisha, got up in a helmet and white duck, a fat white umbrella across his knees, peering hopefully out through his glasses. He was so like himself, his look and attitude, his curious chin poked forward, that I simply stood and stared until he had passed me and turned a corner, vanishing like a stereopticon picture traveling across the screen. I hurried to the banks, the big hotels, to the consul’s, getting no word of him, but leaving letters for him everywhere. My party started the next day, and I was compelled to leave for an eight-months’ nightmare in the interior. I got back to Canton barely in time to catch my steamer, and did not open your letter until we were down the river and losing sight of land. Either I saw Kenneth, or I am a subject for the Society for Psychical Research.”
&nbs
p; “Just so,” said Harrison, peering mysteriously above his coffee cup. “And now forget it. Simply disabuse yourself of any notion that you’ve seen him since we crossed the ferry with you three years ago. It’s your last service to him, probably.”
“Speak up,” I cried, exasperated. “I’ve had about all of this I can stand. I came near wiring the story in from San Francisco. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Well, here’s to whatever withheld you! When a man comes to the pass where he wants to wipe himself off the face of the earth, when it’s the last play he can make for his self-respect, the only decent thing is to let him do it. You know the yielding stuff he’s made of well enough to appreciate the amount of pressure it must have taken to harden him to such an exit. I’m sure I never supposed he had it in him.”
“But what, short of insanity—”
“Insanity? Nonsense! I wonder that people don’t do it oftener. The pressure simply got past the bearing-point. His life was going, and going for nothing—worse than nothing. His future was chalked out for him, and whichever way he turned he was confronted by his unescapable destiny. In the light of Bertha’s splendid success, he couldn’t be churlish or ungracious; he had to play his little part along with the rest of us. And Bertha, you know, has passed all the limits of nature, not to speak of decorum. They come as certainly as the seasons, her new ones, each cleverer and more damnable than the last. And yet there is nothing that one can actually put one’s finger on—not, at least, without saying the word that would lay us open to a charge which as her friends we are none of us willing to incur, and which no one would listen to if it were said.
“I tell you,” Harrison continued, “the whole thing sickened him. He had dried up like a stockfish. His brain was beaten into torpidity by the mere hammer of her machine, as by so many tiny mallets. He had lived to help lessen the value of all that he held precious, to disprove all that he wanted to believe. Having ridden to victory under the banners of what he most despised, there was nothing for him but to live in the blaze of her conquest, and that was the very measure of his fall. His usefulness to the world was over when he had done what he did for Bertha. I don’t believe he even knew where he stood; the thing had gone so, seemed to answer the purpose so wonderfully well, and there was never anything that one could really put one’s finger on—except all of it. It was a trial of faith, and Bertha had won out so beautifully. He had proved the fallacy of his own position. There was nothing left for him to say. I’m sure I don’t know whether he had anything left to think.”
