The First Willa Cather Megapack

by Willa Cather

  “Suppose,” his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in from Céleste or Mme. Blanche, “suppose you had homely daughters; how would you like that?”

  He wouldn’t have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so unreasonable—He felt along his back incredulously with his hand. Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends, he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy.

  The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic tinkle from the butler’s pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver, which he put away himself every night.

  Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out through the dining-room.

  “Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I’m not feeling very well tonight.”

  The old colored man dried his hands.

  “Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?”

  “No, thank you, Sam. That’s one of the things I can’t do any more. I’ve been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells me there’s something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys have sort of gone back on me.”

  It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had betrayed him, while all the rest of him was so sound.

  Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled head and looked full of wisdom.

  “Don’t seem like a gen’leman of such a temperate life ought to have anything wrong thar, sah.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?”

  * * * *

  Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam for nearly half an hour. The specialist who condemned him hadn’t seemed half so much interested. There was not a detail about the examination and the laboratory tests in which Sam did not show the deepest concern. He kept asking Wanning if he could remember “straining himself” when he was a young man.

  “I’ve knowed a strain like that to sleep in a man for yeahs and yeahs, and then come back on him, ’deed I have,” he said, mysteriously. “An’ again, it might be you got a floatin’ kidney, sah. Aftah dey once teah loose, dey sometimes don’t make no trouble for quite a while.”

  When Wanning went to his room he did not go to bed. He sat up until he heard the voices of his wife and daughters in the hall below. His own bed somehow frightened him. In all the years he had lived in this house he had never before looked about his room, at that bed, with the thought that he might one day be trapped there, and might not get out again. He had been ill, of course, but his room had seemed a particularly pleasant place for a sick man; sunlight, flowers,—agreeable, well-dressed women coming in and out.

  Now there was something sinister about the bed itself, about its position, and its relation to the rest of the furniture.

  II

  The next morning, on his way downtown, Wanning got off the subway train at Astor Place and walked over to Washington Square. He climbed three flights of stairs and knocked at his son’s studio. Harold, dressed, with his stick and gloves in his hand, opened the door. He was just going over to the Brevoort for breakfast. He greeted his father with the cordial familiarity practised by all the “boys” of his set, clapped him on the shoulder and said in his light, tonsilitis voice:

  “Come in, Governor, how delightful! I haven’t had a call from you in a long time.”

  He threw his hat and gloves on the writing table. He was a perfect gentleman, even with his father.

  Florence said the matter with Harold was that he had heard people say he looked like Byron, and stood for it.

  What Harold would stand for in such matters was, indeed, the best definition of him. When he read his play “The Street Walker” in drawing rooms and one lady told him it had the poetic symbolism of Tchekhov, and another said that it suggested the biting realism of Brieux, he never, in his most secret thoughts, questioned the acumen of either lady. Harold’s speech, even if you heard it in the next room and could not see him, told you that he had no sense of the absurd,—a throaty staccato, with never a downward inflection, trustfully striving to please.

  “Just going out?” his father asked. “I won’t keep you. Your mother told you I had a discouraging session with Seares?”

  “So awfully sorry you’ve had this bother, Governor; just as sorry as I can be. No question about its coming out all right, but it’s a downright nuisance, your having to diet and that sort of thing. And I suppose you ought to follow directions, just to make us all feel comfortable, oughtn’t you?” Harold spoke with fluent sympathy.

  Wanning sat down on the arm of a chair and shook his head. “Yes, they do recommend a diet, but they don’t promise much from it.”

  Harold laughed precipitately. “Delicious! All doctors are, aren’t they? So profound and oracular! The medicine-man; it’s quite the same idea, you see; with tom-toms.”

  Wanning knew that Harold meant something subtle,—one of the subtleties which he said were only spoiled by being explained—so he came bluntly to one of the issues he had in mind.

  “I would like to see you settled before I quit the harness, Harold.”

  Harold was absolutely tolerant.

  He took out his cigarette case and burnished it with his handkerchief.

  “I perfectly understand your point of view, dear Governor, but perhaps you don’t altogether get mine. Isn’t it so? I am settled. What you mean by being settled, would unsettle me, completely. I’m cut out for just such an existence as this; to live four floors up in an attic, get my own breakfast, and have a charwoman to do for me. I should be awfully bored with an establishment. I’m quite content with a little diggings like this.”

  Wanning’s eyes fell. Somebody had to pay the rent of even such modest quarters as contented Harold, but to say so would be rude, and Harold himself was never rude. Wanning did not, this morning, feel equal to hearing a statement of his son’s uncommercial ideals.

  “I know,” he said hastily. “But now we’re up against hard facts, my boy. I did not want to alarm your mother, but I’ve had a time limit put on me, and it’s not a very long one.”

  Harold threw away the cigarette he had just lighted in a burst of indignation.

  “That’s the sort of thing I consider criminal, Father, absolutely criminal! What doctor has a right to suggest such a thing? Seares himself may be knocked out tomorrow. What have laboratory tests got to do with a man’s will to live? The force of that depends upon his entire personality, not on any organ or pair of organs.”

  Harold thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up and down, very much stirred. “Really, I have a very poor opinion of scientists. They ought to be made serve an apprenticeship in art, to get some conception of the power of human motives. Such brutality!”

  Harold’s plays dealt with the grimmest and most depressing matters, but he himself was always agreeable, and he insisted upon high cheerfulness as the correct tone of human intercourse.

  Wanning rose and turned to go. There was, in Harold, simply no reality, to which one could break through. The young man took up his hat and gloves.

  “Must you go? Let me step along with you to the sub. The walk will do me good.”

  Harold talked agreeably all the way to Astor Place. His father heard little of what he said, but he rather liked his company and his wish to be pleasant.

  Wanning went to his club for luncheon, meaning to spend the afternoon with some of his friends who had retired from business and who read the papers there in the empty hours between two and seven. He got no satisfaction, however. When he tried to tell these men of his present predicament, they began to describe ills of their own in which he could not feel interested. Each one of them had a treacherous organ of which he spoke with animation, almost with pride, as if it were a crafty business competitor whom he was constantly
outwitting. Each had a doctor, too, for whom he was ardently soliciting business. They wanted either to telephone their doctor and make an appointment for Wanning, or to take him then and there to the consulting room. When he did not accept these invitations, they lost interest in him and remembered engagements. He called a taxi and returned to the offices of McQuiston, Wade, and Wanning.

  Settled at his desk, Wanning decided that he would not go home to dinner, but would stay at the office and dictate a long letter to an old college friend who lived in Wyoming. He could tell Douglas Brown things that he had not succeeded in getting to any one else. Brown, out in the Wind River mountains, couldn’t defend himself, couldn’t slap Wanning on the back and tell him to gather up the sunbeams.

  He called up his house in Orange to say that he would not be home until late. Roma answered the telephone. He spoke mournfully, but she was not disturbed by it.

  “Very well, Father. Don’t get too tired,” she said in her well modulated voice.

  When Wanning was ready to dictate his letter, he looked out from his private office into the reception room and saw that his stenographer in her hat and gloves, and furs of the newest cut, was just leaving.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Wanning,” she said, drawing down her dotted veil.

  Had there been important business letters to be got off on the night mail, he would have felt that he could detain her, but not for anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert legal stenographer, and she knew her value. The slightest delay in dispatching office business annoyed her. Letters that were not signed until the next morning awoke her deepest contempt. She was scrupulous in professional etiquette, and Wanning felt that their relations, though pleasant, were scarcely cordial.

  As Miss Doane’s trim figure disappeared through the outer door, little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers’ room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she was scrambling into her coat as she came, holding her gloves in her teeth and her battered handbag in the fist that was already through a sleeve.

  “Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind!” she answered cheerfully, and pulling off her old coat, threw it on a chair. “I’ll get my book.”

  She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,—though she wrote with her book on her knee.

  Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to take his private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured about it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar to get her dinner, she protested, laughing, and saying that she could never eat so much as that.

  She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn’t pout when she was scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling. She was plump and undersized, always dodging under the elbows of taller people and clattering about on high heels, much run over. She had bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair in which, despite Miss Doane’s reprimands, she often stuck her pencil. She was the girl who couldn’t believe that Wanning was fifty, and he had liked her ever since he overheard that conversation.

  Tilting back his chair—he never assumed this position when he dictated to Miss Doane—Wanning began: “To Mr. D. E. Brown, South Forks, Wyoming.”

  He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up. He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting ready to live the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture the doctors couldn’t mend. What was the use of it?

  Wanning’s thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and the great silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains, when he was disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He looked out between his fingers. Little Annie, carried away by his eloquence, was fairly panting to make dots and dashes fast enough, and she was sopping her eyes with an unpresentable, end-of-the-day handkerchief.

  Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying? What did it matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning to her, who sometimes took an hour of the precious few she had left at the end of the day and then complained about her bad spelling. When the letter was finished, he handed her a new two dollar bill.

  “I haven’t got any change tonight; and anyhow, I’d like you to eat a whole lot. I’m on a diet, and I want to see everybody else eat.”

  Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking at the bill which she had not taken up from the table.

  “I don’t like to be paid for taking letters to your friends, Mr. Wanning,” she said impulsively. “I can run personal letters off between times. It ain’t as if I needed the money,” she added carelessly.

  “Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old and has a sweet tooth needs money, all they can get.”

  Annie giggled and darted out with the bill in her hand.

  Wanning strolled aimlessly after her into the reception room.

  “Let me have that letter before lunch tomorrow, please, and be sure that nobody sees it.” He stopped and frowned. “I don’t look very sick, do I?”

  “I should say you don’t!” Annie got her coat on after considerable tugging. “Why don’t you call in a specialist? My mother called a specialist for my father before he died.”

  “Oh, is your father dead?”

  “I should say he is! He was a painter by trade, and he fell off a seventy-foot stack into the East River. Mother couldn’t get anything out of the company, because he wasn’t buckled. He lingered for four months, so I know all about taking care of sick people. I was attending business college then, and sick as he was, he used to give me dictation for practise. He made us all go into professions; the girls, too. He didn’t like us to just run.”

  Wanning would have liked to keep Annie and hear more about her family, but it was nearly seven o’clock, and he knew he ought, in mercy, to let her go. She was the only person to whom he had talked about his illness who had been frank and honest with him, who had looked at him with eyes that concealed nothing. When he broke the news of his condition to his partners that morning, they shut him off as if he were uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met him with a hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable business, but he was less enterprising than either of his partners.

  III

  In the early summer Wanning’s family scattered. Roma swallowed her pride and sailed for Genoa to visit the Contessa Jenny. Harold went to Cornish to be in an artistic atmosphere. Mrs. Wanning and Florence took a cottage at York Harbor where Wanning was supposed to join them whenever he could get away from town. He did not often get away. He felt most at ease among his accustomed surroundings. He kept his car in the city and went back and forth from his office to the club where he was living. Old Sam, his butler, came in from Orange every night to put his clothes in order and make him comfortable.

  Wanning began to feel that he would not tire of his office in a hundred years. Although he did very little work, it was pleasant to go down town every morning when the streets were crowded, the sky clear, and the sunshine bright. From the windows of his private office he could see the harbor and watch the ocean liners come down the North River and go out to sea.

  While he read his mail, he often looked out and wondered why he had been so long indifferent to that extraordinary scene of human activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived race of beings the energy and courage valiantly to begin enterprises which they could follow for only a few years; to throw up towers and build sea-monsters and found great businesses,
when the frailest of the materials with which they worked, the paper upon which they wrote, the ink upon their pens, had more permanence in this world than they? All this material rubbish lasted. The linen clothing and cosmetics of the Egyptians had lasted. It was only the human flame that certainly, certainly went out. Other things had a fighting chance; they might meet with mishap and be destroyed, they might not. But the human creature who gathered and shaped and hoarded and foolishly loved these things, he had no chance—absolutely none. Wanning’s cane, his hat, his topcoat, might go from beggar to beggar and knock about in this world for another fifty years or so; but not he.

  In the late afternoon he never hurried to leave his office now. Wonderful sunsets burned over the North River, wonderful stars trembled up among the towers; more wonderful than anything he could hurry away to. One of his windows looked directly down upon the spire of Old Trinity, with the green churchyard and the pale sycamores far below. Wanning often dropped into the church when he was going out to lunch; not because he was trying to make his peace with Heaven, but because the church was old and restful and familiar, because it and its gravestones had sat in the same place for a long while. He bought flowers from the street boys and kept them on his desk, which his partners thought strange behavior, and which Miss Doane considered a sign that he was failing.

  But there were graver things than bouquets for Miss Doane and the senior partner to ponder over.

  The senior partner, McQuiston, in spite of his silvery hair and mustache and his important church connections, had rich natural taste for scandal.—After Mr. Wade went away for his vacation, in May, Wanning took Annie Wooley out of the copying room, put her at a desk in his private office, and raised her pay to eighteen dollars a week, explaining to McQuiston that for the summer months he would need a secretary. This explanation satisfied neither McQuiston nor Miss Doane.