One of Ours

by Willa Sibert Cather

  made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her

  roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent

  the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at

  mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,

  downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His

  top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was

  parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little

  ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up

  as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who

  liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely

  “what part of the chicken he would prefer,” in order to hear him

  murmur, “A little of the white meat, if you please,” while he

  drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a

  dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on

  a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a

  red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,

  and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the

  automobile.

  Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,

  and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always

  absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the

  visitor, did not notice Claude’s scornful silences until

  Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over

  the stove one day: “Mr. Claude, he don’t like the preacher. He

  just ain’t got no use fur him, but don’t you let on.”

  As a result of Brother Weldon’s sojourn at the farm, Claude was

  sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the

  things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to

  shape his destiny.

  When the second week of September came round, he threw a few

  clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother

  and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train

  for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,

  Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman

  car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey

  was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.

  Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he

  was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his

  lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,

  he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert

  himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough

  with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he

  continue to live with the tiresome Chapins? The Chapin household

  consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of

  twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,—and he was still going to

  school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept

  house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was

  done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd

  jobs from churches and religious societies; he “supplied” the

  pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the

  college and the Young Men’s Christian Association. Claude’s

  weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very

  necessary to their comfort.

  Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and

  it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.

  He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the

  track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His

  natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the

  ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the

  Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He

  gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and

  oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile—it had been

  thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks

  in lieu of a foundation—re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained

  voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.

  Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude’s classmates. She was not as

  dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize

  the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,

  silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too

  good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about

  Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself

  while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who

  can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding

  to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the

  house—it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to

  do—until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with

  the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.

  Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy

  pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago

  decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of

  their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle

  might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took

  care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from

  Annabelle’s attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences

  of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born

  with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a

  personal attribute.

  The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought

  up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When

  he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,

  because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His

  clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high

  and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his

  trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The

  tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn’t know what he

  wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he

  needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.

  When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul’s church on Sunday

  morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs

  down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old

  men and young, and decided there wasn’t another pair of checked

  pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and

  never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them

  wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a

  well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could

  recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into

  the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he

  was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to

  seem indifferent.

  Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal

  allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or

  pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard

 
; with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost

  in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean

  something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is

  not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap

  substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who

  flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring

  a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy

  compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.

  VI

  Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in

  the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home

  for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him

  and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the

  volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at

  his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or

  more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car

  and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of

  little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,

  and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays

  stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive

  made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the

  grey sky.

  Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an

  oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a

  frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he

  was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished

  roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could

  have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came

  in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting

  on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on

  the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking

  bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.

  “I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she

  brought his plate. “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet

  pertaters, ja.”

  “Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”

  She giggled. “Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes

  dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons

  in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain’t got no boys

  mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”

  She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching

  every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting

  it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking

  what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited

  little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether

  working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He

  didn’t believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was

  common only in what he broadly called “the West.” He bought a big

  cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh

  air until the passenger whistled in.

  After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books

  again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they

  unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the

  great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A

  starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly

  ridges between the furrows.

  Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and

  Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and

  slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and

  again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,

  when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his

  father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler

  custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it

  was understood that some member of the family would act in that

  capacity.

  Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home

  before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to

  him since he went over this road three months ago.

  As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated

  at the State University for special work in European History. The

  year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for

  some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to

  change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The

  course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as

  much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of

  historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for

  full notebooks. Claude’s were of the fullest. He worked early and

  late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and

  went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was

  studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do

  with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How

  often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see

  Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his

  independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor

  spoke without notes,—he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing

  his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which

  Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like

  a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,

  and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely

  personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.

  Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that

  the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was

  fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His

  reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to

  him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief

  difficulties had always been that he could not make himself

  believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that

  were all, then life was not worth the trouble.

  The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got

  to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after

  a football game between the Temple eleven and the State

  University team—merely a practice game for the latter. Claude

  was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the

  first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the

  right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and

  broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.

  He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men

  congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint

  that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place

  for him on the University team.

  Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was

  talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the

  grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of

  her own construction, bedecked with the Tem
ple colours and

  blowing a child’s horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.

  He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away

  to the dressing shed…. What was the use, if you were always

  with the wrong crowd?

  Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him

  aside and said affably: “Come home to supper with me tonight,

  Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the

  Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven’t you?”

  “They’re hardly clothes to go visiting in,” Claude replied

  doubtfully.

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter! We’re all boys at home. Mother wouldn’t

  mind if you came in your track things.”

  Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by

  imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the

  history class, and they had several times talked together.

  Hitherto Claude had felt that he “couldn’t make Erlich out,” but

  this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they

  became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps

  less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at

  finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he

  scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar

  with a broken edge,—wretched economies he had been trained to

  observe.

  They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when

  Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,

  terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a

  glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,

  above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,

  seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and

  they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man

  in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were

  alone.

  “Five of these are my brothers,” said his host, “and the rest are

  friends.”

  The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk

  about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his

  brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,

  agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but

  they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never

  before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one