by Willa Cather
Title: The Professor's House (1925)
Author: Willa Cather
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Language: English
Date first posted: November 2006
Date most recently updated: November 2006
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Title: The Professor's House (1925)
Author: Willa Cather
DEDICATION
For Jan, because he likes narrative.
"THE FAMILY"
Chapter 1
The moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the
dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he
had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was
almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three
stories in height, painted the colour of ashes--the front porch just too
narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps. As he
walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September
morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences
he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the
halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantles with thick round
posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places.
Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall,
had made him wince many times a day for twenty-odd years--and they still
creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily have
fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was
not time enough to go round. He went into the kitchen, where he had
carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bath-room on the
second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so
old that no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to stop the drip,
the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and the doors
of the linen closet didn't fit. He had sympathized with his daughters'
dissatisfaction, though he could never quite agree with them that the
bath should be the most attractive room in the house. He had spent the
happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly
was not, and he had known many charming people who had no bath at all.
However, as his wife said: "If your country has contributed one thing,
at least, to civilization, why not have it?" Many a night, after blowing
out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to
give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised
to behave like porcelain, and didn't.
The Professor in pyjamas was not an unpleasant sight; for looks, the
fewer clothes he had on, the better. Anything that clung to his body
showed it to be built upon extremely good bones, with the slender hips
and springy shoulders of a tireless swimmer. Though he was born on Lake
Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on one side, and American
farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look like a
Spaniard. That was possibly because he had been in Spain a good deal,
and was an authority on certain phases of Spanish history. He had a long
brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close trimmed
Van-Dyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black
hair, he had a tawny skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and
hawk-like eyes--brown and gold and green. They were set in ample
cavities, with plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black
eyebrows that turned up sharply at the outer ends, like military
moustaches. His wicked-looking eyebrows made his students call him
Mephistopheles--and there was no evading the searching eyes underneath
them; eyes that in a flash could pick out a friend or an unusual
stranger from a throng. They had lost none of their fire, though just
now the man behind them was feeling a diminution of ardour.
His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in
water-colour, had once said:--"The thing that really makes Papa handsome
is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown;
it is quite the best thing about him." That part of his head was high,
polished, hard as bronze, and the close-growing black hair threw off a
streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was fullest. The
mould of his head on the side was so individual and definite, so far
from casual, that it was more like a statue's head than a man's.
From one of the dismantled windows the Professor happened to look out
into his back garden, and at that cheerful sight he went quickly
downstairs and escaped from the dusty air and brutal light of the empty
rooms.
His walled-in garden had been the comfort of his life--and it was the
one thing his neighbours held against him. He started to make it soon
after the birth of his first daughter, when his wife began to be
unreasonable about his spending so much time at the lake and on the
tennis court. In this undertaking he got help and encouragement from his
landlord, a retired German farmer, good-natured and lenient about
everything but spending money. If the Professor happened to have a new
baby at home, or a faculty dinner, or an illness in the family, or any
unusual expense, Appelhoff cheerfully waited for the rent; but pay for
repairs he would not. When it was a question of the garden, however, the
old man sometimes stretched a point. He helped his tenant with seeds and
slips and sound advice, and with his twisted old back. He even spent a
little money to bear half the expense of the stucco wall.
The Professor had succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton. There
was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel
and glistening shrubs and bright flowers. There were trees, of course; a
spreading horse-chestnut, a row of slender Lombardy poplars at the back,
along the white wall, and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped
linden-trees. Masses of green-brier grew in the corners, the prickly
stems interwoven and clipped until they were l
ike great bushes. There
was a bed for salad herbs. Salmon-pink geraniums dripped over the wall.
The French marigolds and dahlias were just now at their best--such
dahlias as no one else in Hamilton could grow. St. Peter had tended this
bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it.
In the spring, when home-sickness for other lands and the fret of things
unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here. In the long hot
summers, when he could not go abroad, he stayed at home with his garden,
sending his wife and daughters to Colorado to escape the humid prairie
heat, so nourishing to wheat and corn, so exhausting to human beings. In
those months when he was a bachelor again, he brought down his books and
papers and worked in a deck chair under the linden-trees; breakfasted
and lunched and had his tea in the garden. And it was there he and Tom
Outland used to sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights.
On this September morning, however, St. Peter knew that he could not
evade the unpleasant effects of change by tarrying among his autumn
flowers. He must plunge in like a man, and get used to the feeling that
under his work-room there was a dead, empty house. He broke off a
geranium blossom, and with it still in his hand went resolutely up two
flights of stairs to the third floor where, under the slope of the
mansard roof, there was one room still furnished--that is, if it had
ever been furnished.
The low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted
on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and
held ajar by a hook in the sill. This was the sole opening for light and
air. Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had
once been very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality. The
matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an
old walnut table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers.
Before it was a cane-backed office chair that turned on a screw. This
dark den had for many years been the Professor's study.
Downstairs, off the back parlour, he had a show study, with roomy
shelves where his library was housed, and a proper desk at which he
wrote letters. But it was a sham. This was the place where he worked.
And not he alone. For three weeks in the fall, and again three in the
spring, he shared his cuddy with Augusta, the sewing-woman, niece of his
old landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and
very devout.
Since Augusta finished her day's work at five o'clock, and the
Professor, on week-days, worked here only at night, they did not elbow
each other too much. Besides, neither was devoid of consideration. Every
evening, before she left, Augusta swept up the scraps from the floor,
rolled her patterns, closed the sewing-machine, and picked ravellings
off the box-couch, so that there would be no threads to stick to the
Professor's old smoking-jacket if he should happen to lie down for a
moment in working-hours.
St. Peter, in his turn, when he put out his lamp after midnight, was
careful to brush away ashes and tobacco crumbs--smoking was very
distasteful to Augusta--and to open the hinged window back as far as it
would go, on the second hook, so that the night wind might carry away
the smell of his pipe as much as possible. The unfinished dresses which
she left hanging on the forms, however, were often so saturated with
smoke that he knew she found it a trial to work on them the next
morning.
These "forms" were the subject of much banter between them. The one
which Augusta called "the bust" stood in the darkest corner of the room,
upon a high wooden chest in which blankets and winter wraps were yearly
stored. It was a headless, armless female torso, covered with strong
black cotton, and so richly developed in the part for which it was named
that the Professor once explained to Augusta how, in calling it so, she
followed a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy.
Augusta enjoyed the Professor when he was risque since she was sure of
his ultimate delicacy. Though this figure looked so ample and billowy
(as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest
safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter
how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most
unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood,
which responds to concussion with living vibration and is stimulating to
the hand, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. It
was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly
packed sawdust--very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow
always fooling you again. For no matter how often you had bumped up
against that torso, you could never believe that contact with it would
be as bad as it was.
The second form was more self-revelatory; a full-length female figure in
a smart wire skirt with a trim metal waist line. It had no legs, as one
could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its
bosom resembled a strong wire bird-cage. But St. Peter contended that it
had a nervous system. When Augusta left it clad for the night in a new
party dress for Rosamond or Kathleen, it often took on a sprightly,
tricky air, as if it were going out for the evening to make a great show
of being harum-scarum, giddy, folle. It seemed just on the point of
tripping downstairs, or on tiptoe, waiting for the waltz to begin. At
times the wire lady was most convincing in her pose as a woman of light
behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his blind spots, but
he had never been taken in by one of her kind!
Augusta had somehow got it into her head that these forms were
unsuitable companions for one engaged in scholarly pursuits, and she
periodically apologized for their presence when she came to install
herself and fulfil her "time" at the house.
"Not at all, Augusta," the Professor had often said. "If they were good
enough for Monsieur Bergeret, they are certainly good enough for me."
This morning, as St. Peter was sitting in his desk chair, looking
musingly at the pile of papers before him, the door opened and there
stood Augusta herself. How astonishing that he had not heard her heavy,
deliberate tread on the now uncarpeted stair!
"Why, Professor St. Peter! I never thought of finding you here, or I'd
have knocked. I guess we will have to do our moving together."
St. Peter had risen--Augusta loved his manners--but he offered her the
sewing-machine chair and resumed his seat.
"Sit down, Augusta, and we'll talk it over. I'm not moving just
yet--don't want to disturb all my papers. I'm staying on until I finish
a piece of writing. I've seen your uncle about it. I'll work here, and
board at the new house. But this is confidential. If it were noised
about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had--how do
they put it, parted, separated?"
Augusta dropped her eyes in a
n indulgent smile. "I think people in your
station would say separated."
"Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven't, you know. But
I'm going to write on here for a while."
"Very well, sir. And I won't always be getting in your way now. In the
new house you have a beautiful study downstairs, and I have a light,
airy room on the third floor."
"Where you won't smell smoke, eh?"
"Oh, Professor, I never really minded!" Augusta spoke with feeling. She
rose and took up the black bust in her long arms.
The Professor also rose, very quickly. "What are you doing?"
She laughed. "Oh, I'm not going to carry them through the street,
Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs with his cart, to wheel them
over."
"Wheel them over?"
"Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I've come a week before my
regular time, to make curtains and hem linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I'll
take everything over this morning except the sewing-machine--that's too
heavy for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery
wagon. Would you just open the door for me, please?"
"No, I won't! Not at all. You don't need her to make curtains. I can't
have this room changed if I'm going to work here. He can take the
sewing-machine--yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs,
please. She does very well there." St. Peter had got to the door, and
stood with his back against it.
Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.
"But next week I'll be working on Mrs. St. Peter's clothes, and I'll
need the forms. As the boy's here, he'll just wheel them over," she said
soothingly.
"I'm damned if he will! They shan't be wheeled. They stay right there in
their own place. You shan't take away my ladies. I never heard of such a
thing!"
Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. "But,
Professor, I can't work without my forms. They've been in your way all
these years, and you've always complained of them, so don't be contrary,
sir."
"I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they
recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply--but of them
individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for your airy atelier, as
many as you wish--I'm said to be rich now, am I not?--Go buy, but you
can't have my women. That's final."
Augusta looked down her nose as she did at church when the dark sins
were mentioned. "Professor," she said severely, "I think this time you
are carrying a joke too far. You never used to." From the tilt of her
chin he saw that she felt the presence of some improper suggestion.
"No matter what you think, you can't have them." They considered, both
were in earnest now. Augusta was first to break the defiant silence.
"I suppose I am to be allowed to take my patterns?"
"Your patterns? Oh, yes, the cut-out things you keep in the couch with
my old note-books? Certainly, you can have them. Let me lift it for
you." He raised the hinged top of the box-couch that stood against the
wall, under the slope of the ceiling. At one end of the upholstered box
were piles of notebooks and bundles of manuscript tied up in square
packages with mason's cord. At the other end were many little rolls of
patterns, cut out of newspapers and tied with bits of ribbon, gingham,
silk, georgette; notched charts which followed the changing stature and
figures of the Misses St. Peter from early childhood to womanhood. In
the middle of the box, patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.
"I see we shall have some difficulty in separating our life work,
Augusta. We've kept our papers together a long while now."
"Yes, Professor. When I first came to sew for Mrs. St. Peter, I never
thought I should grow grey in her service."
