One of Ours

by Willa Sibert Cather

  whether they weren’t very “worldly” people, and was apprehensive

  about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,

  and he went to bed early.

  Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he

  thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from

  fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did

  not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.

  But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him

  avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he

  did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He

  would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his

  faculties free. He didn’t want to be like the young men who said

  in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated

  their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.

  In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A

  funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black

  coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the

  dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of

  escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no

  way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of

  lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing

  but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had

  never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And

  yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;

  that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself

  from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he

  would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay…. He could

  not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What

  did it mean, that verse in the Bible, “He shall not suffer His

  holy one to see corruption”?

  If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious

  fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude

  had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as

  something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned

  about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who

  taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their

  theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by

  faith. “Faith,” as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the

  Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities

  he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were

  timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because

  they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his

  mother.

  Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,

  Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in

  God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on

  the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at “Blessed are the meek,”

  until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant

  exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!

  VIII

  On the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking

  along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.

  Wheeler’s timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,

  so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked

  elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops

  seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to

  the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than

  a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that

  wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.

  It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.

  They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had

  brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell

  Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt

  that this was more Ernest’s fault than his own; Ernest was such a

  literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they

  forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the

  red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold

  leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it

  honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the

  stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes

  took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the

  creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of

  melting ice.

  When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude

  again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and

  reasonable mood.

  “What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to

  farm all your life?”

  “Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I’d be at it before

  now. What makes you ask that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know! I suppose people must think about the future

  sometime. And you’re so practical.”

  “The future, eh?” Ernest shut one eye and smiled. “That’s a big

  word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I’m

  going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I’ll marry a

  nice girl and bring her back.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s enough, if it turns out right, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. It wouldn’t be for me. I don’t believe I can ever

  settle down to anything. Don’t you feel that at this rate there

  isn’t much in it?”

  “In what?”

  “In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?

  Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad

  to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel

  sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a

  holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to

  bed—nothing has happened.”

  “But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your

  own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to

  see my friends like this, it’s enough for me.”

  “Is it? Well, if we’ve only got once to live, it seems like there

  ought to be something—well, something splendid about life,

  sometimes.”

  Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they

  walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. “You

  Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to

  warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not

  very much can happen to us, we know that,—and we learn to make

  the most of little things.”

  “The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.

  Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little

  things.”

  “Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their

  idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the

  sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of

  vanity to help them along, too.”

  Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squi
nted at

  a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, “The fact

  is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board

  and clothes and Sundays off, don’t you?”

  Ernest laughed rather mournfully. “It doesn’t matter much what I

  think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach

  down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess.”

  Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about

  over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.

  The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler

  watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside

  a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving

  along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at

  that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so

  unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was

  on the wrong side.

  IX

  After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in

  the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove

  where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art

  students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in

  this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having

  to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked

  him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and

  greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the

  campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between

  boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,

  Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,—different

  from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and

  was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.

  Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what

  might be called a “carriage,” and she had altogether more manner

  and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and

  curly,—the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of

  a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,

  and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to

  pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if

  they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her

  “the Georgia peach.” She was considered very pretty, and the

  University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since

  then her vogue had somewhat declined.

  Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town

  with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her

  tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always

  dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked

  to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept

  slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and

  be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in

  his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling

  him that he had “a magnificent physique,” a compliment which

  covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.

  Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if

  she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she

  should explain her absences to him,—tell him how often she

  washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.

  One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the

  campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.

  “Yes, I’m going out,” Claude replied. “I’ve promised to teach

  Miss Millmore to skate. Won’t you come along and help me?”

  Julius laughed indulgently. “Oh, no! Some other time. I don’t

  want to break in on that.”

  “Nonsense! You could teach her better than I.”

  “Oh, I haven’t the courage!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?”

  Julius made a little grimace. “She wrote some awfully slushy

  letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house

  one night.”

  “Didn’t you slap him?” Claude demanded, turning red.

  “Well, I would have thought I would,” said Julius smiling, “but I

  didn’t. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I’ve been wary

  of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of

  peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand.”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Claude haughtily. “She’s only

  kind-hearted.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But I’m terribly afraid of girls who are

  too kindhearted,” Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude

  a word of warning for some time.

  Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to

  the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning

  he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last

  excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude

  avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She

  was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by

  clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a

  degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale

  cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been

  sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,—though

  when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager

  susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He

  was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of

  trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father

  kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had

  given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost

  Hippolytean pride in candour.

  X

  The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That

  spring Mrs. Erlich’s first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,

  who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as

  soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement

  approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The

  Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so

  the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family

  invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding

  which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.

  There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich

  remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the

  society of her own sex.

  One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich

  reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. “For me,”

  she said with decision, “you may put down Claude Wheeler.”

  This announcement was met with groans and laughter.

  “You don’t mean it, Mother,” the oldest son protested. “Poor old

  Claude wouldn’t know what it was all about,—and one stick can

  spoil a dinner party.”

  Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. “You will

  see; your cousi
n Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy

  than in any of the others!”

  Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might

  still yield her point. “For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn’t any

  dinner clothes,” he murmured. She nodded to him. “That has been

  attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded

  him, he told me he could easily afford it.”

  The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed

  they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down

  “Claude Wheeler” with a flourish.

  If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing

  to Claude’s. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame

  Schroeder-Schatz’s recital, and on the evening of the concert,

  when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him

  over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new

  black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see

  what figure her escort cut.

  Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, and presented

  himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich’s

  eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly

  his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She

  laughed and clapped her hands.

  “Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and

  wonder where I got him!”

  Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;

  opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into

  her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and

  smelling salts,—there was even a little silver box of peppermint

  drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long

  gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was

  ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about

  her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,

  they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air

  was a frame for the gay little picture she made.

  The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,

  Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than

  her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an

  enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great

  contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a

  really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as