The First Willa Cather Megapack

by Willa Cather

  We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of better days which this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, the red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to comfort in their prime. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an ill-smelling gas stove burned in the sooty recess under the cracked marble. The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, now pinned together and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames.

  I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka. Her carriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from a protective impulse or because there was no place else to put it. As I approached, after she had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down and drew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasure and stroking the velvet with his long fingers. “Couleur de gloire, couleur des reines!” I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve of the coat under his chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration.

  The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat there quietly, Cressida with her eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls. Occasionally we heard a call for “d’eau chaude!” and the heavy trot of a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody was struggling with Schubert’s Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright piano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot screaming, “Voila, voila, tonnerre!” The house was built before 1870, as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.

  When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka was still lying with her cloak under his cheek, and Cressida left it there. “It seems to please him,” she murmured as we went down the stairs. “I can go home without a wrap. It’s not far.” I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing Donna Anna tomorrow evening.

  After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happened to find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida’s music-room unannounced, or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in the alcove and came down the room to greet me.

  Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost any night when Cressida sang one could see his narrow black head—high above the temples and rather constrained behind the ears—peering from from some part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida as an artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice, a handsome woman, a great prestige; these, added together, made a “great artist “—the common euphemism for success. Her success, and the material evidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anything adequate about Straka, Cressida’s Slavic rival, and this perhaps meant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressida was singing reliably and satisfying the management, Straka was singing uncertainly and making history, though her voice was primarily defective, and her immediate vocal method was bad.

  Bouchalka was not a receptive person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her he carried somewhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite beyond herself. Then if ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer.

  One April day when we were driving in the Park, Cressida, superb in a green-and-primrose costume, hurried over from Paris, turned to me, smiling, and said: “Do you know, this is the first spring I haven’t dreaded. It’s the first one I’ve ever really had. Perhaps people never have more than one, whether it comes early or late.” She told me that she was overwhelmingly in love.

  Our visit to Bouchalka when he was ill had of course, been reported, and the men about the Opera House had made of it the only story they have the wit to invent. They could no more change the pattern of that story than the spider could change the design of its web. But being, as she said, “in love” suggested to Cressida only one plan of action; to have the Tenth Street house done over, to put more money into her brothers’ business, send Horace to school, raise Poppas’s percentage, and then with a clear conscience be married in Grace Church. She went through this program with her usual thoroughness. She was married in June and sailed immediately with her husband. Poppas was to join them in Vienna in August, when she would begin to work again.

  When they returned in October, both Cressida and Blasius seemed changed for the better. She was perceptibly freshened and renewed. She attacked her work at once with more vigor and more ease; did not drive herself so relentlessly. A little carelessness became her wonderfully. Bouchalka was less gaunt, and much less flighty and perverse. His frank pleasure in the comfort and order of his wife’s establishment was ingratiating, even if it was a little amusing. Cressida had the sewing-room at the top of the house made over into a study for him. When I went up there to see him, I usually found him sitting before the fire or walking about with his hands in his coat pockets, admiring his new possessions.

  With Cressida’s friends and guests, Bouchalka assumed nothing for himself. His deportment amounted to a quiet, unobtrusive appreciation of her and of his good fortune. He was proud to owe his wife so much. Cressida’s Sunday afternoons were more popular than ever, since she herself had so much more heart for them. Bouchalka’s picturesque presence stimulated her graciousness and charm. One still found them conversing together as eagerly as in the days when they saw each other but seldom. Consequently their guests were never bored. We felt as if the Tenth Street house had a pleasant climate quite its own. In the spring, when the Metropolitan company went on tour, Cressida’s husband accompanied her, and afterwards they again sailed for Genoa.

  * * * *

  During the second winter people began to say that Bouchalka was becoming too thoroughly domesticated, and that since he was growing heavier in body he was less attractive. I noticed his increasing reluctance to stir abroad. Nobody could say that he was “wild” now. He seemed to dread leaving the house, even for an evening. He published very little. One was given to understand that he was writing an opera. He lived in the Tenth Street house like a tropical plant under glass. Nowhere in New York could he get such cookery as Ruzenka’s. Ruzenka (“little rose”) had, like her mistress, bloomed afresh, now that she had a man and a compatriot to cook for. Her invention was tireless, and she took things with a high hand in the kitchen, confident of a perfect appreciation. Ruzenka was a plump, fair, blue-eyed girl, giggly and easily flattered, with teeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full of homely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow worked into her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literature of traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full of the wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines went with the dinner.

  That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of the house enslaved Bouchalka.

  “Imagine it,” he once said to me when I dropped in during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. “To be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once, like the cats in the street. The nights were misery. Here I waken up in the night so warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my light. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there.”

  I began to think that Bouchalka’s wildness had been the desperation which the tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized. Those first beautif
ul compositions, full of the folk music of his own country, had been wrung out of him by homesickness and heartache. I now wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his despair.

  Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though his gratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting taskmaster. She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one who had accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany her upon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because traveling interfered with composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius, or Blazej, as his wife had learned to call him, was not showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, no matter how luxurious. Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and the humor of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire.

  During the third season after her marriage Cressida had only twenty-five performances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a great deal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but he attended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business at home. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carried out her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concert tours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans for the future.

  The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident—one of those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered effort—and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy. Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five-o’clock train and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central station.

  On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see Blasius. She decided, against her custom and one might say against her principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon train the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph Blasius, because she wished—the old fallacy of affection—to “surprise” him. She could take it for granted that, at half-past eleven on a cold winter night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New York. She sent Poppas—paler than usual with accusing scorn—and her trunks on to Chicago, and with only her traveling-bag and a sense of being very audacious in her behavior and still very much in love, she took a cab for Tenth Street.

  Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key and went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, she found him where he should not have been at all.

  Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. By eight o’clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobody had any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her engagement with Theodore Thomas—and to think over the situation. Blasius was left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man’s wife to look after him. His explanation of his conduct was that he had been drinking too much. His digression, he swore, was accidental. It had never occurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife’s magnanimity. But it was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding, and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment.

  When she returned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalka alone again. Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities were conducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced in the morning papers before her friends knew that there was the least likelihood of her even wanting one.

  While the lawyers were arranging matters, Bouchalka came to see me. He was remorseful and miserable enough, and I think his perplexity was quite sincere. If there had been an intrigue with a woman of her own class, an infatuation, an “affair,” he said, he could understand. But anything so venial and accidental—he shook his head slowly back and forth. He assured me that he was not at all himself on that fateful evening, and that when he recovered himself he would have sent Ruzenka away,—making proper provision for her, of course. It was an ugly thing, but ugly things sometimes happened in one’s life, and one had to put them away and forget them. He could have overlooked any accident that might have occurred when his wife was on the road with Poppas. I cut him short, and he bent his head to my reproof.

  “I know,” he said, “such things are different with her. But when have I said that I am noble as she is? Never. But I have appreciated and I have adored. About me, say what you like. But if you say that in this there was any mépris to my wife, that is not true. I have lost all my place here. I came in from the streets, a mongrel man, but I understand her, and all the fine things in her, better than any of you here. If that accident had not been, she would have lived happy with me for many years. As for me, I have never believed in this happiness. I was not born under a good star. How did it come? By accident. It goes by accident. She tried to give good fortune to an unfortunate man, un miserable; that was her mistake. It cannot be done in this world. The lucky should marry the lucky.”

  Bouchalka stopped and lit a cigarette. He sat sunk in my chair as if he never meant to get up again. When he had consumed his cigarette he turned to me again.

  “I, too, have tried. Have I so much as written one note to a lady since she first put out her hand to help me? Some of the artists who sing my compositions have been quite willing to plague my wife a little if I make the least sign. With the Española, for instance, it is necessary to be very stern, farouche; she is so very playful. I have never given my wife the slightest annoyance of this kind. Since I married her I have not kissed the cheek of one lady! Then one night I am bored and drink too much champagne, and I become a fool. What does it matter! Did my wife marry the fool of me? No, she married me, with my mind and my feelings all here, as I am today. But she is getting a divorce from the fool of me, which she would never see anyhow!”

  His view of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic. He was meant to have so much misery every day of his life. For three years it had been withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead. Now the accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me, he said, to declare his undying gratitude to Madame Garnet, and to bid me farewell. He took up his hat and cane and kissed my hand. I have never seen him since. Cressida made a settlement upon him, but even Poppas, tortured by envy and curiosity, never discovered how much. It was very little, she told me. “Pour des gateaux,” she added with a smile that was not unforgiving. She could not bear to think of his being in want when so little could make him comfortable.

  He went back to his own village in Bohemia. He wrote her that the old monk, his teacher, was still alive, and that from the windows of his room in the town he could see the pigeons flying back and forth from the monastery bell-tower all day long. Once he sent her a song, his own words and music, about those pigeons—quite a lovely thing. He was the bell-tower and les colombes were his memories of her.

  * * * *

  Jerome Brown proved, on the whole, the worst of Cressida’s husbands, and, with the possible exception of her eldest brother, Buchanan Garnet, he was the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. It was one thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, but quite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financier or nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. For the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live—to get Jerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged activities. Brown, however, was not a man who could be amused and kept out of mischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a “mark,” in Wall Street. Nothing e
lse would gratify his peculiar vanity. The deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now all her cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of his optimism and cordiality was like trying to find articulated framework in a feather bed. All Cressida knew was that she was perpetually “investing” to save investments. When she told me she had to put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyes filled with tears. “Why is it? I have never cared about money, except to make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It has spoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately,” she added irrelevantly, drying her eyes, “Jerome and Poppas get along well.” Jerome could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter’s business. His warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny story—Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like that.

  Though Brown’s ventures never came home, there was nothing openly disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardized his interests there. Then Cressida went to England—where she could always raise money from a faithful public—for a winter concert tour. When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband’s affairs were in a bad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida’s death.