by Willa Cather
friends, "is that she doesn't think herself a bit unusual. Nowdays the
girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to
think themselves remarkable."
Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she
sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning,
deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after
Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry
Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a
journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live
upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the
impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to
do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from
the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The
Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he
liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of
mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father
thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no
holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after
the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague
suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond's account more than on
Kathleen's; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the
time he couldn't see how Kathleen's marriage would benefit Rosie. "Rosie
is like your second self," he once declared to his wife, "but you never
pampered yourself at her age as you do her."
Chapter 5
It was an intense September noon--warm, windy, golden, with the smell of
ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on
the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the
university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him,
walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.
"Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to
go swimming with me--I'm cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end
of his lecture, or sit down here on the bench in the sun?"
"We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it's not interesting, we
can come back and sit down for a chat."
"Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he's with his
seniors, isn't it?"
They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the
door was afar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When
he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him. "No, Miller, I don't
myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has
given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the
real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I
suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the
human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting
by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them.
Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial
kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn't
given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new
sins--not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory,
not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You'll
agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better
off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the
magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by making their
conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. As long as every man and
woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal
in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the
shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing.
The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great
temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men happy, believing
in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. It makes us
happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much
pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same
thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has
ever had.
"Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he
wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the
shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a
feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The
cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian
theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting
splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and
mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic
value--only seven, you remember, and of those only three that
are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the
cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glass-workers and painters. They
might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy
will be done in art, as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere
else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might tell me
next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides
making us very comfortable."
As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went
in.
"I came over to get you to go to the electrician's with me, Godfrey, but
I won't make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it's such
a fine day, you really should go."
"Car's outside. We'll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you
can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the
way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me."
"I wish he would get into trouble, Scott," said Lillian as they left the
building. "I wish he wouldn't talk to those fat-faced boys as if they
were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a
little ashamed."
"I was rather rambling on to-day. I'm sorry you happened along. There's
a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn't slow, and he excites me to
controversy."
"All the same," murmured his wife, "it's hardly dignified to think aloud
in such company. It's in rather bad taste."
"Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won't do it again."
It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at
the bit of beach of St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a
little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house
and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and
the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.
When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance
out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out
of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always
brought home from France in great numbers. This one was verm
ilion, and
was like a continuation of his flesh--his arms and back were burned a
deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful
reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the
water. The visor was picturesque--his head looked sheathed and small and
intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze
in their tight, archaic helmets.
By five o'clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the
sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began
to chuckle.
"Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The
day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the Herald
to get some facts you'd been too modest to give him. When he was leaving
he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk,
DON'T KNOCK, and said: 'May I ask why you don't have that notice on the
outside of your door? I didn't observe any other way of getting in.'
They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus'
place--seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them call that
place after Tom?"
"My dear boy, how can I prevent it?"
"Well, you surely don't like the idea, do you?"
The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When
he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor.
"Scott, you must see that I can't make suggestions to Louie. He's
perfectly consistent. He's a great deal more generous and
public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to
him. I can't, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his
affairs."
"I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan't occur next
time, but it does." Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time,
looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the
gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He
was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth,
attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing
outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There
was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a
great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had
been delighted when his daily poem and his "uplift" editorials first
proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell
as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and
he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do
something very fine, and he felt that the was wasting his life and his
talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was
discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St.
Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His
disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy's wolf,
and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the
corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.
Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to
commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes,
they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one
which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the
subject. He posed his two sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a
conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls
of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated
at a table with a chart, his hands extended in reasonable, patient
argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet is his hand,
his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely
frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The
tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said
dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor
liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.
Chapter 6
The Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright
October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending
to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to
admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers,
dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in
bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the
stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the
window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented
October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples
and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him
that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as
they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand,
fastidious and bold, which selected and placed--it was that which made
the difference. In Nature there is no selection.
In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and
Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a
casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold
necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. "Of course emeralds
would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale--to
belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live
here. You aren't, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear
them?"
"At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner-table at Outland! I like
the idea of their being out of scale. I've never given her any jewels.
I've waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells
emeralds."
Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. "You'll never be able to keep
them. You'll show them to her."
"Oh, no, I won't! They are to stay at the jeweller's, in Chicago, until
we all go down for the birthday party. That's another secret we have to
keep. We have such lots of them!" He bent over her hand and kissed it
with warmth.
St. Peter swung in over the window rail. "That is always the cue for the
husband to enter, isn't it? What's this about Chicago, Louie?"
He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his
chair. "It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the
date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is
coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go
down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your
lectures."
The Professor's eyebrows rose. "Bus-man's holiday for the ladies, I
should say."
"But not for me. Remember, I wasn't in your classes, like Scott and
Outland. I'd give a good deal if I'd had the chance!" Louie said
somewhat plaintively, "so you must make it up to me."
"Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie."
"Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I'll go on to Boston with you
next winter, when yo
u give the Lowell lectures."
"Would you, really? Next year's a long way off. Now I must get clean.
I've been working in my other-house garden, and I'm scarcely fit to have
tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to
do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the
mercy of the next tenants?"
As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked
back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was
wearing the white silk cr�pe that had been the most successful of her
summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She
wouldn't have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn't been
coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn't have noticed it if
Louie hadn't been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in
general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude,
unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of
another man.
Lillian's coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn't foreseen
it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about
having married daughters. It had begun with Scott--the younger sister
was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor
was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a
few weeks after Kathleen's marriage, arch and confidential relations
began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in
the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very
tactful and patient with him.
With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and
Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He
would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would
have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual
and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign
into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an
unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never
forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a
cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad
with ease. At the dinner-table, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk,
sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his
plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian's face would
become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put
her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss
her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to
like it.
Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all
over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their
interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past--the new
house made a plausible pretext--and to use her influence and charm in
the little anxious social world of Hamilton. She was intensely
interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in
their careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter
told himself. She wasn't going to have to face a stretch of boredom
between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less
intelligent and more sensible than he had thought her.
When Godfrey came down stairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He
walked up to the chair where his wife was reading, and took her hand.
"My dear," he said quite delicately, "I wish you could keep Louie from
letting his name go up for the Arts and Letters. It's not safe yet. He's
not been here long enough. They're a fussy little bunch, and he ought to
wait until they know him better."
"You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the
