The First Willa Cather Megapack

by Willa Cather

  “I had asked not to be presented to people, but Mrs. Stein, of course, brought up a few friends. The throng began closing in upon me, glowing faces bore down from every direction, and I realized that, among people of such unscrupulous cordiality I must look out for myself. I ran through the drawing-room and fled up the stairway, which was thronged with Old Testament characters. As I passed them, they all looked at me with delighted, cherishing eyes, as if I had at last come back to my native hamlet. At the top of the stairway a young man who looked like a camel, with its hair parted on the side, stopped me, seized my hands and said he must present himself, as he was such an old friend of Siegmund’s bachelor days. I said, ‘Yes, how interesting!’ The atmosphere was somehow so thick and personal that I felt uncomfortable.

  “When I reached my dressing-room Mrs. Stein followed me to say that I would, of course, come down to supper, as a special table had been prepared for me. I replied that it was not my custom.

  “‘But here it is different. With us you must feel perfect freedom. Siegmund will never forgive me if you do not stay. After supper our car will take you home.’ She was overpowering. She had the manner of an intimate and indulgent friend of long standing. She seemed to have come to make me a visit. I could only get rid of her by telling her that I must see Peppo at once, if she would be good enough to send him to me. She did not come back, and I began to fear that I would actually be dragged down to supper. It was as if I had been kidnapped. I felt like Gulliver among the giants. These people were all too—well, too much what they were. No chill of manner could hold them off. I was defenseless. I must get away. I ran to the top of the staircase and looked down. There was that fool Peppo, beleaguered by a bevy of fair women. They were simply looting him, and he was grinning like an idiot. I gathered up my train, ran down, and made a dash at him, yanked him out of that circle of rich contours, and dragged him by a limp cuff up the stairs after me. I told him that I must escape from that house at once. If he could get to the telephone, well and good; but if he couldn’t get past so many deep-breathing ladies, then he must break out of the front door and hunt me a cab on foot. I felt as if I were about to be immured within a harem.

  “He had scarcely dashed off when the host called my name several times outside the door. Then he knocked and walked in, uninvited. I told him that I would be inflexible about supper. He must make my excuses to his charming friends; any pretext he chose. He did not insist. He took up his stand by the fireplace and began to talk; said rather intelligent things. I did not drive him out; it was his own house, and he made himself agreeable. After a time a deputation of his friends came down the hall, somewhat boisterously, to say that supper could not be served until we came down. Stein was still standing by the mantel, I remember. He scattered them, without moving or speaking to them, by a portentous look. There is something hideously forceful about him. He took a very profound leave of me, and said he would order his car at once. In a moment Peppo arrived, splashed to the ankles, and we made our escape together.

  “A week later Peppo came to me in a rage, with a paper called ‘The American Gentleman,’ and showed me a page devoted to three photographs: Mr. and Mrs. Siegmund Stein, lately married in New York City, and Connie Ayrshire, operatic soprano, who sang at their house-warming. Mrs. Stein and I were grinning our best, looked frantic with delight, and Siegmund frowned inscrutably between us. Poor Peppo wasn’t mentioned. Stein has a publicity sense.”

  Tevis rose.

  “And you have enormous publicity value and no discretion. It was just like you to fall for such a plot, Connie. You’d be sure to.”

  “What’s the use of discretion?” She murmured behind her hand. “If the Steins want to adopt you into their family circle, they’ll get you in the end. That’s why I don’t feel troubled about your Ruby. She and I are in the same boat. We are both the victims of circumstance, and in New York so many of the circumstances are Steins.”

  HER BOSS

  Paul Wanning opened the front door of his house in Orange, closed it softly behind him, and stood looking about the hall as he drew off his gloves.

  Nothing was changed there since last night, and yet he stood gazing about him with an interest which a long-married man does not often feel in his own reception hall. The rugs, the two pillars, the Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same. The Venus di Medici stood on her column as usual and there, at the end of the hall (opposite the front door), was the full-length portrait of Mrs. Wanning, maturely blooming forth in an evening gown, signed with the name of a French painter who seemed purposely to have made his signature indistinct. Though the signature was largely what one paid for, one couldn’t ask him to do it over.

  In the dining room the colored man was moving about the table set for dinner, under the electric cluster. The candles had not yet been lighted. Wanning watched him with a homesick feeling in his heart. They had had Sam a long while, twelve years, now. His warm hall, the lighted dining-room, the drawing room where only the flicker of the wood fire played upon the shining surfaces of many objects—they seemed to Wanning like a haven of refuge. It had never occurred to him that his house was too full of things. He often said, and he believed, that the women of his household had “perfect taste.” He had paid for these objects, sometimes with difficulty, but always with pride. He carried a heavy life-insurance and permitted himself to spend most of the income from a good law practise. He wished, during his lifetime, to enjoy the benefits of his wife’s discriminating extravagance.

  Yesterday Wanning’s doctor had sent him to a specialist. Today the specialist, after various laboratory tests, had told him most disconcerting things about the state of very necessary, but hitherto wholly uninteresting, organs of his body.

  The information pointed to something incredible; insinuated that his residence in this house was only temporary; that he, whose time was so full, might have to leave not only his house and his office and his club, but a world with which he was extremely well satisfied—the only world he knew anything about.

  Wanning unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not take it off. He stood folding his muffler slowly and carefully. What he did not understand was, how he could go while other people stayed. Sam would be moving about the table like this, Mrs. Wanning and her daughters would be dressing upstairs, when he would not be coming home to dinner any more; when he would not, indeed, be dining anywhere.

  Sam, coming to turn on the parlor lights, saw Wanning and stepped behind him to take his coat.

  “Good evening, Mr. Wanning, sah, excuse me. You entahed so quietly, sah, I didn’t heah you.”

  The master of the house slipped out of his coat and went languidly upstairs.

  He tapped at the door of his wife’s room, which stood ajar.

  “Come in, Paul,” she called from her dressing table.

  She was seated, in a violet dressing gown, giving the last touches to her coiffure, both arms lifted. They were firm and white, like her neck and shoulders. She was a handsome woman of fifty-five,—still a woman, not an old person, Wanning told himself, as he kissed her cheek. She was heavy in figure, to be sure, but she had kept, on the whole, presentable outlines. Her complexion was good, and she wore less false hair than either of her daughters.

  Wanning himself was five years older, but his sandy hair did not show the gray in it, and since his mustache had begun to grow white he kept it clipped so short that it was unobtrusive. His fresh skin made him look younger than he was. Not long ago he had overheard the stenographers in his law office discussing the ages of their employers. They had put him down at fifty, agreeing that his two partners must be considerably older than he—which was not the case. Wanning had an especially kindly feeling for the little new girl, a copyist, who had exclaimed that “Mr. Wanning couldn’t be fifty; he seemed so boyish!”

  Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the mirror.

  “We
ll, did you tell the girls, Julia?” he asked, trying to speak casually.

  Mrs. Wanning looked up and met his eyes in the glass. “The girls?”

  She noticed a strange expression come over his face.

  “About your health, you mean? Yes, dear, but I tried not to alarm them. They feel dreadfully. I’m going to have a talk with Dr. Seares myself. These specialists are all alarmists, and I’ve often heard of his frightening people.”

  She rose and took her husband’s arm, drawing him toward the fireplace.

  “You are not going to let this upset you, Paul? If you take care of yourself, everything will come out all right. You have always been so strong. One has only to look at you.”

  “Did you,” Wanning asked, “say anything to Harold?”

  “Yes, of course. I saw him in town today, and he agrees with me that Seares draws the worst conclusions possible. He says even the young men are always being told the most terrifying things. Usually they laugh at the doctors and do as they please. You certainly don’t look like a sick man, and you don’t feel like one, do you?”

  She patted his shoulder, smiled at him encouragingly, and rang for the maid to come and hook her dress.

  When the maid appeared at the door, Wanning went out through the bathroom to his own sleeping chamber. He was too much dispirited to put on a dinner coat, though such remissness was always noticed. He sat down and waited for the sound of the gong, leaving his door open, on the chance that perhaps one of his daughters would come in.

  When Wanning went down to dinner he found his wife already at her chair, and the table laid for four.

  “Harold,” she explained, “is not coming home. He has to attend a first night in town.”

  A moment later their two daughters entered, obviously “dressed.” They both wore earrings and masses of hair. The daughters’ names were Roma and Florence,—Roma, Firenze, one of the young men who came to the house often, but not often enough, had called them. Tonight they were going to a rehearsal of “The Dances of the Nations,”—a benefit performance in which Miss Roma was to lead the Spanish dances, her sister the Grecian.

  The elder daughter had often been told that her name suited her admirably. She looked, indeed, as we are apt to think the unrestrained beauties of later Rome must have looked,—but as their portrait busts emphatically declare they did not. Her head was massive, her lips full and crimson, her eyes large and heavy-lidded, her forehead low. At costume balls and in living pictures she was always Semiramis, or Poppea, or Theodora. Barbaric accessories brought out something cruel and even rather brutal in her handsome face. The men who were attracted to her were somehow afraid of her.

  Florence was slender, with a long, graceful neck, a restless head, and a flexible mouth—discontent lurked about the corners of it. Her shoulders were pretty, but her neck and arms were too thin. Roma was always struggling to keep within a certain weight—her chin and upper arms grew persistently more solid—and Florence was always striving to attain a certain weight. Wanning used sometimes to wonder why these disconcerting fluctuations could not go the other way; why Roma could not melt away as easily as did her sister, who had to be sent to Palm Beach to save the precious pounds.

  “I don’t see why you ever put Rickie Allen in charge of the English country dances,” Florence said to her sister, as they sat down. “He knows the figures, of course, but he has no real style.”

  Roma looked annoyed. Rickie Allen was one of the men who came to the house almost often enough.

  “He is absolutely to be depended upon, that’s why,” she said firmly.

  “I think he is just right for it, Florence,” put in Mrs. Wanning. “It’s remarkable he should feel that he can give up the time; such a busy man. He must be very much interested in the movement.”

  Florence’s lip curled drolly under her soup spoon. She shot an amused glance at her mother’s dignity.

  “Nothing doing,” her keen eyes seemed to say.

  Though Florence was nearly thirty and her sister a little beyond, there was, seriously, nothing doing. With so many charms and so much preparation, they never, as Florence vulgarly said, quite pulled it off. They had been rushed, time and again, and Mrs. Wanning had repeatedly steeled herself to bear the blow. But the young men went to follow a career in Mexico or the Philippines, or moved to Yonkers, and escaped without a mortal wound.

  Roma turned graciously to her father.

  “I met Mr. Lane at the Holland House today, where I was lunching with the Burtons, father. He asked about you, and when I told him you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr. Lane is a very clever man, isn’t he?”

  “Very,” assented Wanning.

  “I should think he must be!” sighed Mrs. Wanning. “How in the world did he make all that money, Paul? He didn’t seem especially promising years ago, when we used to see so much of them.”

  “Corporation business. He’s attorney for the P. L. and G.,” murmured her husband.

  “What a pile he must have!” Florence watched the old negro’s slow movements with restless eyes. “Here is Jenny, a Contessa, with a glorious palace in Genoa that her father must have bought her. Surely Aldrini had nothing. Have you seen the baby count’s pictures, Roma? They’re very cunning. I should think you’d go to Genoa and visit Jenny.”

  “We must arrange that, Roma. It’s such an opportunity.” Though Mrs. Wanning addressed her daughter, she looked at her husband. “You would get on so well among their friends. When Count Aldrini was here you spoke Italian much better than poor Jenny. I remember when we entertained him, he could scarcely say anything to her at all.

  Florence tried to call up an answering flicker of amusement upon her sister’s calm, well-bred face. She thought her mother was rather outdoing herself tonight,—since Aldrini had at least managed to say the one important thing to Jenny, somehow, somewhere. Jenny Lane had been Roma’s friend and schoolmate, and the Count was an ephemeral hope in Orange. Mrs. Wanning was one of the first matrons to declare that she had no prejudices against foreigners, and at the dinners that were given for the Count, Roma was always put next him to act as interpreter.

  Roma again turned to her father.

  “If I were you, dear, I would let Mr. Lane tell me about his doctor. New discoveries are often made by queer people.”

  Roma’s voice was low and sympathetic; she never lost her dignity.

  Florence asked if she might have her coffee in her room, while she dashed off a note, and she ran upstairs humming “Bright Lights” and wondering how she was going to stand her family until the summer scattering. Why could Roma never throw off her elegant reserve and call things by their names? She sometimes thought she might like her sister, if she would only come out in the open and howl about her disappointments.

  Roma, drinking her coffee deliberately, asked her father if they might have the car early, as they wanted to pick up Mr. Allen and Mr. Rydberg on their way to rehearsal.

  Wanning said certainly. Heaven knew he was not stingy about his car, though he could never quite forget that in his day it was the young men who used to call for the girls when they went to rehearsals.

  “You are going with us, Mother?” Roma asked as they rose.

  “I think so, dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour tea for Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite ashamed of his spoons.”

  Harold, the only son, was a playwright—as yet “unproduced”—and he had a studio in Washington Square.

  * * * *

  A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a mothe
r’s interest in her children’s pleasures? Moreover, it was his wife’s way of following things up, of never letting the grass grow under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than he,—that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent, and Julia’s childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house the attractive place he believed it to be.