by Willa Cather
She was too much of an American not to believe in publicity
“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 her unabated vitality.
“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? Yet I’ve really not 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. But 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.”
The deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. “A wireless for you, Madame Garnet.”
Cressida put out her hand with impatience. “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.
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 inexpressiveness. 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 gray eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass: I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind 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 it 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, and 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 a while. As Cressida said, if she had not brought Julia she would have had to bring Georgia, or some other Garnet.
Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgia was aggressive and more intrusive. She was out to prove to all 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 traveling up and down the Middle West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of two somber, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of motion, 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.” Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days.
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. 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 rewards, spiritual as well as material, of her struggle. They coveted the qualities which had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it.
“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 difficult. After dinner I usually found Cressida unencumbered, as Horace was always in the card-room and Mr. Poppas either nursed his facial 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. 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 urged me, but he was always there—someone 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. I’ve never had anyone to lean on,” she said with a short laugh. Then she went on, quite seriously: “Somehow, my relations with people always b
ecome business relations in the end. 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 learned in a lifetime! That year when Horace was a baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams band, it was my feelings about my own people that made me go on at all. Why I didn’t drop myself in one of those dirty rivers, or turn on the gas in one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don’t know to this day. 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. Well,” Cressida gathered herself up. “Once I got out from under it all. 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. 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 episode, 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 silver 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. 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 card-room.
He looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration
“But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?” he expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard.
“Oh, Horace,” she murmured, “how can you be so? If I were your age, and a boy, with someone to back me—”
Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his topcoat. “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.
* * * *
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. 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.” The Garnet children were all in school then, scattered along from the first grade to the ninth. 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 to them—all but Cressida who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning, and who was only proud because she was so much ashamed.
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. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unless Charley Wilton 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. She 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.
Her sisters were fond of saying—at club luncheons—that Cressida had remained “untouched by the breath of scandal,” which was not strictly true. There were captious people who objected to her long and close association with Miletus Poppas. Her husband, Ransome McChord, the foreign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom she married in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she was eventually forced to choose between them.
While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified by experience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been, professionally, two Cressida Garnets: the big handsome girl, already a “popular favorite” of the concert stage, who took to Germany the raw material of a great voice; and the accomplished artist who came back. The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas. Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, and held fast to it. After experimenting with a score of teachers and accompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas. Other coaches came and went—she was always trying new ones—but Poppas survived them all.
Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed a great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions, discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida.
Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she had written down m
ore about herself than she could possibly remember. He was the one person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief. An artist’s saddest secrets are the flaws in his artistry. Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for her, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself. He knew where she was sound and where she was mended.
But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By the time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich man. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her salary,—and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida, and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves their rapacity. Whatever they didn’t get, they told themselves, Poppas would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida’s conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. But he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with the husband, if there happened to be one. As he was the only one among them who understood the sources of her fortune—and they knew it—he was able, when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goose that laid the golden eggs.
That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was another stick her sisters held over her. They pretended to understand perfectly, and were always explaining what they solemnly termed her “separation;” but they let Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a good deal of living down.
A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and a certain “squareness” of character as well as of mind, gave Cressida Garnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewarded profession. Managers chose her over the heads of singers much more gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because she was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors as Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so impressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everything else, and her sterling character was a net from which she could never escape. Once, as she said, she very nearly did escape. With Blasius Bouchalka she became almost another woman, but not quite. Her “principles,” or his lack of them, drove the two apart in the end.
