by Willa Cather
“How can I tell?”
“Well, if I should paint you, I could make you understand what I see.” For the second time that day Hedger crimsoned unexpectedly, and his eyes fell and steadily contemplated a dish of little radishes. “That particular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he said he found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, written by some Spanish missionary. He got his stories from the Aztecs. This one he called ‘The Forty Lovers of the Queen,’ and it was more or less about rainmaking.”
“Aren’t you going to tell it to me?” Eden asked.
Hedger fumbled among the radishes. “I don’t know if it’s the proper kind of story.”
Eden smiled; “Oh, forget about that! I’ve been balloon riding today. I like to hear you talk.”
Her low voice was flattering. She had seemed like clay in his hands ever since they got on the boat to come home. He leaned back in his chair, forgot his food and, looking at her intently, began to tell his story, the theme of which he somehow felt was dangerous to night.
The tale began, he said, somewhere in Ancient Mexico, and concerned the daughter of a king. The birth of this Princess was preceded by unusual portents. Three times her mother dreamed that she was delivered of serpents, which betokened that the child she was to bear would have power with the rain gods. The serpent was the symbol of water. The Princess grew up dedicated to the gods, and wise men taught her the rainmaking mysteries. She was guarded from men at all times, for it was the law of Thunder that she be so until her marriage. In the years of her adolescence, rain was abundant with her people. The oldest man could not remember such fertility.
When the Princess had counted eighteen summers, her father went to drive out a war party that harried his borders on the north and troubled his prosperity. The King destroyed the invaders and brought home many prisoners. Among the prisoners was a young chief, taller than any of his captors, of such strength and ferocity that the King’s people came a day’s journey to look at him. When the Princess beheld his great stature, and saw that his arms and breast were covered with the figures of wild animals, bitten into the skin and coloured, she begged his life from her father. She desired that he should practise his art upon her, and prick upon her skin the signs of Rain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb-juices, as they were upon his own body. For many days, upon the roof of the King’s house, the Princess submitted herself to the bone needle, and the women with her marvelled at her fortitude.
But the Princess was without shame before the Captive, and it came about that he threw from him his needles and his stains, and embraced the Princess; and her women ran down from the roof screaming, to call the guard which stood at the gateway of the King’s house, and none stayed to protect their mistress. When the guard came, the Captive was thrown into bonds, and he was maimed, and his tongue was torn out and he was given for a slave to the Rain Princess.
The country of the Aztecs to the east was tormented by thirst, and their king, hearing much of the rainmaking arts of the Princess, sent an embassy to her father, with presents and an offer of marriage. So the Princess went from her father to be the Queen of the Aztecs, and she took with her the Captive, who served her in everything with entire fidelity and slept upon a mat before her door.
The King gave his bride a fortress on the outskirts of the city, whither she retired to entreat the rain gods. This fortress was called the Queen’s House, and on the night of the new moon the Queen came to it from the palace. But when the moon waxed and grew toward the round, then the Queen returned to the King. The drought abated in the country and rain fell abundantly by reason of the Queen’s power with the stars.
When the Queen went to her own house she took with her no servant but the Captive, and he slept outside her door and brought her food after she had fasted. The Queen had a jewel of great value, a turquoise that had fallen from the sun, and had the image of the sun upon it. And when she admired a young man whom she had seen in the army or among the slaves, she sent the Captive to him with the jewel, for a sign that he should come to her at the Queen’s House upon business concerning the welfare of all. And some, after she had talked with them, she sent away with rewards; and some she took in and kept them by her for one day or two.
Afterward she called the Captive and bade him conduct the youth by the secret way he had come, underneath the chambers of the fortress. But for the going away of the Queen’s visitors the Captive took out the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage and put in its stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell through into a cavern that was the bed of an underground river, and whatever was thrown into it was not seen again. In this service and in all others the Captive did not fail the Queen.
But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained him four days, and on the fourth day she went to the Captive outside her door and said: tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, by which the King comes, and let him live.
In the Queen’s door were arrows, purple and white. When she desired the King to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow, but when she sent the purple, he came secretly and covered himself with his mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate. When the Queen thus detained the Captain of the Archers, and moreover purposed to let him live, the Captive took a purple arrow to the King, and the King came secretly and found them together. He killed the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to public trial. The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingers forty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river. The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the same day, and afterward there was scarcity of rain.
* * * *
Eden Bower sat shivering a little while she listened. Hedger was not trying to please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by his fantastic story. She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower jaw was like his bulldog’s, but tonight his face made Caesar’s most savage and determined expression seem an affectation. Now she was looking at the man he really was. Nobody’s eyes had ever defied her like this. They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed from Livingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from the newspaper men. He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more ill at ease than she wished to show.
“That’s quite a thrilling story,” she said at last, rising and winding her scarf about her throat. “It must be getting late. Almost everyone has gone.”
They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wish to get rid of each other. Hedger did not take her arm at the street crossings and they did not linger in the Square. At her door he tried none of the old devices of the Livingston boys. He stood like a post, having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threatening glance, muttered “goodnight,” and shut his own door noisily.
There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower. Her brain was working like a machine that would never stop. After she undressed she tried to calm her nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window. But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that had flamed all evening in the strange man’s eyes. The balloon had been one kind of excitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as a blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering hostility with which this violent man had looked at her when he told his savage story. Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but woman’s chief adventure is man. With a mind overactive and a sense of life overstrong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight; to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never been afraid.
Hedger must be asleep; his dog had stopped sniffing under the double doors. Eden put on her wrapper and slippers and stole softly down the hall over the old carpet; one loose board creaked just as s
he reached the ladder. The trapdoor was open, as always on hot nights. When she stepped out on the roof she drew a long breath and walked across it, looking up at the stars. Her foot touched something soft; she heard a low growl, and on the instant Caesar’s sharp little teeth caught her ankle and waited. His breath was like steam on her leg. Nobody had ever intruded upon his roof before, and he panted for the movement or the word that would let him spring his jaw. Instead, the hand that held it closed on his throat, as Hedger reached out from his blankets.
“Wait a minute. I’ll settle with him,” he said grimly.
He dragged the dog toward the manhole and disappeared. When he came back he found Eden standing over by the dark chimney, looking away in an offended attitude.
“I caned him unmercifully,” he panted. “Of course you didn’t hear anything; he never whines when I beat him. He didn’t nip you, did he?”
“I don’t know whether he broke the skin or not,” she answered aggrievedly, still looking off into the west.
“If I were one of your friends in white trousers, I’d strike a match to find whether you were hurt, though I know you are not, and then I’d see your ankle, wouldn’t I?”
“I suppose so.”
He shook his head and stood with his hands in the pockets of his old painting jacket. “I’m not up to such boy-tricks. If you want the place to yourself, I’ll clear out. But if you stay here and I stay here—” he shrugged his shoulders.
Eden did not stir, and she made no reply. Her head drooped slightly, as if she were considering. But the moment he put his arms about her they began to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera. The instant avowal of each brought out a flood of trivial admissions. Hedger confessed his crime, was reproached and forgiven, and now Eden knew what it was in his look that she had found so disturbing of late.
Standing against the black chimney, with the sky behind and blue shadows before, they looked like one of Hedger’s own paintings of that period; two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty—it was the rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the house. She came down very slowly. The excitement and bravado and uncertainty of that long day and night seemed all at once to tell upon her. When his feet were on the carpet and he reached up to lift her down, she twined her arms about his neck as after a long separation, and turned her face to him, and her lips, with their perfume of youth.
CHAPTER VI
In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction—as young people often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late one afternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch at Burton Ives’ studio, and she began telling Hedger about that beautiful place. He listened a moment and then threw down his brushes.
“I know exactly what it’s like,” he said impatiently. “A very good department store conception of a studio. It’s one of the show places.”
“Well, it’s a gorgeous place, and he said I could bring you to see him. The boys tell me he’s awfully kind about giving people a lift, and you might get something out of it.”
Hedger started up and pushed his canvas out of the way. “What could I possibly get from Burton Ives? He’s almost the worst painter in the world; the stupidest, I mean.”
Eden was annoyed. Burton Ives had been very nice to her and had begged her to sit for him.
“You must admit that he’s a very successful one,” she said coldly.
“Of course he is! Anybody can be successful who will do that sort of thing. I wouldn’t paint his pictures for all the money in New York.”
“Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful.”
Hedger bowed stiffly.
“What’s the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?” Eden went on persuasively. “Why don’t you paint the kind of pictures people can understand, and then, after you’re successful, do whatever you like?”
“As I look at it,” said Hedger brusquely, “I am successful.”
Eden glanced about the dark hole. “Well, I don’t see any evidences of it,” she said, biting her lip. “He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar and keeps a riding horse.”
Hedger melted a little. “My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in the world, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work to please nobody but myself.”
“You mean you could make money and don’t? That you don’t try to get a public?”
“Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I’m painting for painters—who haven’t been born.”
“What would you do if I brought Mr. Ives down here to see your things?”
“Well, for God’s sake, don’t! Before he left I’d probably tell him what I thought of him.”
Eden rose. “I give you up. You know very well there’s only one kind of success that’s real.”
“Yes, but it’s not the kind you mean. So you’ve been thinking me a scrub painter, who needs a helping hand from some fashionable studio man? What the devil have you had anything to do with me for, then?”
“There’s no use talking to you,” said Eden, walking slowly toward the door. “I’ve been trying to pull wires for you all afternoon, and this is what it comes to.”
She had expected that the tidings of a prospective call from the great man would be received very differently, and had been thinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, she might gild Hedger’s future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide of prosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows on Fifth Avenue.
Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar’s collar and they ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan street off toward the river. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where the big drays bumped over stone paving blocks, and the men wore corduroy trousers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drink in one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in his life been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He had told this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summer nights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all his misty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been able to explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she had looked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them for him! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives.
Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young, beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub? Pity? Hardly; she wasn’t sentimental. There was no explaining her. But in this passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated-to-be, his own position now looked to him ridiculous. Hedger ground his teeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up.
While they were having supper at the oysterman’s, Hedger planned his escape. Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he should never have told anyone, would come back to him; ideas he had never whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. He would catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on to the north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summer studio among the sand dunes, and he would stay until things came right in his mind. And she could find a smart painter, or take her punishment.
When he went home, Eden’s room was dark; she was dining out somewhere. He threw his things into a hold-all he had carried about the world with him, strapped up some colours and canvases, and ran downstairs.
CHAPTER VII
Five days later Hedger was a restless passenger on a dirty, crowded Sunday train, coming back to town. Of course he saw now how unreasonable he had been in expecting a Huntington girl to know anything about pictures; here was a whole continent full of people who knew nothing about pictures and he didn’t hold it against them. What had such things to do with him and Eden Bower? When he lay out on the dunes, watching the moon come up out of the sea, it had seemed to him that there was no wonder in the world like the wonder of Eden Bower. He was going back to her because she was older than art, because she was the most overwhelming thing that had ever come into his life.
He had written her yesterday, begging her to be at home this evening, telling her that he was contrite, and wretched enough.
Now that he was on his way to her, his stronger feeling unaccountably changed to a mood that was playful and tender. He wanted to share everything with her, even the most trivial things. He wanted to tell her about the people on the train, coming back tired from their holiday with bunches of wilted flowers and dirty daisies; to tell her that the fish-man, to whom she had often sent him for lobsters, was among the passengers, disguised in a silk shirt and a spotted tie, and how his wife looked exactly like a fish, even to her eyes.
He could tell her, too, that he hadn’t even unstrapped his canvases—that ought to convince her.
In those days passengers from Long Island came into New York by ferry. Hedger had to be quick about getting his dog out of the express car in order to catch the first boat. The East River, and the bridges, and the city to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; there was that great homecoming reach of evening in the air.
