A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

by Willa Sibert Cather

  A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

  Willa Sibert Cather

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  Willa Cather

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  Title: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

  Author: Willa Cather

  Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #25586]

  Last updated: January 31, 2009

  Language: English

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  START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***

  Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online

  Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

  A Collection of

  Stories, Reviews and Essays

  by

  Willa Cather

  CONTENTS

  PART

  I:

  STORIES

  Peter On the Divide Eric Hermannson’s Soul The Sentimentality of William Tavener The Namesake The Enchanted Bluff The Joy of Nelly Deane The Bohemian Girl Consequences The Bookkeeper’s Wife Ardessa Her Boss

  PART

  II:

  REVIEWS

  AND

  ESSAYS

  Mark Twain William Dean Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On the Art of Fiction

  PART I

  STORIES

  Peter

  “No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it

  until I am gone.”

  “But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very

  crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles

  so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue

  to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early.”

  “What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very

  cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow.”

  “Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the

  Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it

  too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet.” Antone

  pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.

  The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his

  violin with trembling fingers and muttering, “Not while I live, not

  while I live.”

  Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and

  oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the

  dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a

  homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and

  people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was

  mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little

  difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and

  his wheat always yielded more than other men’s.

  Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for

  him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone’s sight long

  enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but

  two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a

  lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to

  plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that

  matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,

  from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who

  did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,

  and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a

  much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care

  what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least

  of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long

  ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight

  centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great

  theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had

  been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which

  made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told

  him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty

  to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were

  always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that

  he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play

  first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who

  led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could

  plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the

  lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great

  players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard

  Liszt play when the Countess d’Agoult sat in the stage box and threw

  the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for

  weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her

  face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the

  same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the

  sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her

  voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she

  said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of

  Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other

  world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her

  arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets

  down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up

  at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her

  arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very

  drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who

  cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.

  It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,

  and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had

  forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well

  enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he

  feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.

  The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire

  remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would

  be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,

  and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held

  his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and

  he began to play “Ave Maria.” His hand shook more than ever before,

  and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a

  while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into

  the old sod stable. He took Antone’s shot-gun down
from its peg, and

  loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He

  sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.

  He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind

  screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular

  breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his

  heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever

  known, ”Pater noster, qui in caelum est.“ Then he raised his head

  and sighed, “Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my

  soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he

  does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard

  sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work

  so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,

  but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we

  will forget it together, the French woman and all.” He held his

  fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put

  it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off

  his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against

  his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.

  In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of

  blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so

  they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to

  town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was

  very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.

  The Mahogany Tree

  , May 21, 1892

  On the Divide

  Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute’s

  shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of

  long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the

  west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber

  wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely

  ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been

  for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,

  Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a

  timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few

  plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.

  As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any

  kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake

  Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built

  of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.

  The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic

  beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible

  that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to

  say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into

  the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one

  room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound

  together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook

  stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks

  and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of

  dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal

  proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few

  cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin

  wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,

  some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost

  incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some

  ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,

  apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk

  handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and

  a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty

  snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it

  opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide

  window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been

  ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer

  inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and

  shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a

  rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as

  though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward

  instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting

  on their shoulders and on their horses’ heads. There were men

  praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons

  behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with

  big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these

  pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this

  world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always

  the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a

  serpent’s head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had

  felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of

  them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude

  and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had

  trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men

  from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave

  and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always

  smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for

  kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work

  highly.

  It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into

  his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,

  sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,

  staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by

  heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red

  shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all

  the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter

  barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues

  of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,

  beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he

  had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have

  left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and

  miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

  He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily

  as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into

  the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw

  before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill

  themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white

  leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the

  sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his

  ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he

  knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child

  fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of

  the polar twilight.
<
br />   His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and

  looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the

  barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid

  his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither

  passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man

  who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching

  into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.

  Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the

  tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he

  stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on

  the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried

  to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was

  pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his

  rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,

  splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw

  it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,

  striking off across the level.

  It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once

  in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and

  sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the

  frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things

  on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.

  Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas

  seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the

  corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender

  inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active

  duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take

  long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation

  there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and

  most of the Poles after they have become too careless and

  discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their

  throats with.

  It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,

  but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men

  that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years

  to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the