The Professor's House

by Willa Cather

He's the intolerant one."

  "True for you, Louie," laughed the Professor.

  "And it's that way about lots of things," said Louie a little

  plaintively.

  "Kitty," said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in

  the drivers seat beside him, "that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was

  one of Tom's trinkets, wasn't it? Do you suppose she has some feeling

  for him still, under all this pompuosity?"

  "I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very

  much!" she cried vehemently.

  He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand

  over hers, inside her muff. "Sure?" he muttered.

  "Yes, I do!" she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all

  her might.

  "Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty.

  Most girls wouldn't have thought it necessary. I'm the only one who

  knows, ain't I?"

  "The only one who ever has known."

  "And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told. Why did you,

  Kit?"

  "I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you

  were the real one." Her head dropped on his shoulder. "You know you are

  the real one, don't you?"

  "I guess!"

  Chapter 10

  That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical

  Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a

  luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then

  motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other

  newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up

  his father-in-law.

  "I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of

  Louie's party?"

  "I had classes."

  "It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty

  of them," Scott tapped his breast pocket. "We had poor Tom served up

  again. It was all right, of course--the scientific men were interested,

  didn't know much about him. Louie called on me for personal

  recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn't express myself very

  well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be

  talking uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes

  I think he was just a--a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor."

  Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights

  of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house.

  With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began

  recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that

  bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.

  He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a

  heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope,

  came in at the green door that led from the street.

  "Are you Professor St. Peter?" he inquired.

  Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue

  cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of

  moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was

  his manly, mature voice--low, calm, experienced, very different from the

  thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The

  next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young

  man's sandy hair--the very fair forehead which had been protected by his

  hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed

  to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was

  fine-looking, he saw--tall and presumably well built, though the

  shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that

  the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.

  "I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask

  you advice. I don't know anybody in the town."

  "You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you

  from?"

  "I've never been to high school, sir. That's the trouble."

  "Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you

  from?"

  "New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin

  with a priest down there."

  St. Peter smiled incredulously. "How much Latin?"

  "I read Caesar and Virgil, the AEneid."

  "How many books?"

  "We went right through." He met the Professor's questions squarely, his

  eyes were resolute, like his voice.

  "Oh, you did." St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been

  digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. "Can you repeat any of it?"

  The boy began: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem and steadily

  continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking

  hand.

  "Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good

  pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a

  Frenchman?"

  "Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium."

  "Did you learn any French from him?"

  "No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish."

  "You speak Spanish?"

  "Not very well, Mexican Spanish."

  The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew

  enough to get credit for a modern language. "And what are your

  deficiencies?"

  "I've never had any mathematics or science, and I write very bad hand."

  "That's not unusual," St. Peter told him. "But, by the way, how did you

  happen to come to me instead of the registrar?"

  "I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew.

  I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father

  Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he'd read about

  our country down there."

  The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular

  periodicals it got him into trouble. "Well, what are your plans, young

  man? And, by the way, what is your name?"

  "Tom Outland."

  The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.

  "How old are you?"

  "I'm twenty." He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a

  few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn't know exactly how

  old he was. "I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics

  this summer."

  "Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?"

  Outland's face grew grave. "I'm rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to

  write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you'd find I have

  money in the bank there, and you'd think I had been deceiving you. But

  it's money I can't touch while I'm able-bodied. It's in trust for

  someone else. But I've got three hundred dollars without any string on

  it, and I'm hoping to get work here. I've been bossing a section gang

  all winter, and I'm in good condition. I'll do anything but wait table.

  I won't do that." On this point he seemed to feel strongly.

  The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he

  said, were "mover people," and both died when they were crossing

  southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He
was a baby and had been

  informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in

  her last hours,--a locomotive engineer named O'Brien, and his wife. This

  engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along

  with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a

  job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.

  "What's a call boy, a messenger boy?"

  "No, sir. It's a more responsible position. Our town was an important

  freight division on the Santa F�, and a lot of train men live there. The

  freight schedule is always changing because it's a single track road and

  the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose

  you're a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A.M.; well, like as

  not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go

  to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your

  mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before

  your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in

  time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He

  must know when there's a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You

  can't tell when there's a spotter about, and if a man's reported for

  gambling, he's fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn't

  where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for

  that." The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon

  irregular behaviour.

  Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband

  if he wouldn't bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and

  looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the

  Professor wouldn't hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to

  prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in

  the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St.

  Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he

  didn't want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came

  back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front

  staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the

  waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat

  down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a

  giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter

  apologized for the stairs.

  "I'm not much used to stairs, living mostly in 'dobe houses," Tom

  explained, as he picked himself up.

  At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly

  at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the

  Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff

  white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his

  face with it, became a rag. "I didn't know it would be so warm up here,

  or I'd have picked a lighter suit," he said, embarrassed by the activity

  of his skin.

  "We would like to hear more about your life in the Southwest," said his

  host. "How long were you a call boy?"

  "Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on

  the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm."

  Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was

  reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian

  housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a

  neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth

  on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able

  to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking

  about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.

  "I think the very best is the old,--the cliff-dweller pottery," he said.

  "Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma'am? Maybe you'd like to see some

  I have brought along." As they rose from the table he went to his

  telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the

  straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects

  wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and

  displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek

  sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.

  "That's one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I

  don't know just how old, but there's pin>on trees three hundred years

  old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the

  ruins where I got it."

  "Stone trail...pi�ons?" she asked.

  "Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet

  coming and going for generations. And these old pi�on trees have come up

  in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how

  long ago it was by them." He showed her a coating of black on the under

  side of the jar.

  "That's not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It's soot, from

  when it was on the cook-fire last--and that was before Columbus landed,

  I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old

  pots, with the fire-black on them." As she gave it back to him, he shook

  his head. "That one's for you, Ma'am, if you like it."

  "Oh, I couldn't think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for

  yourself, or put it in a museum." But that seemed to touch a sore spot.

  "Museums," he said bitterly, "they don't care about our things. The want

  something that came from Crete or Egypt. I'd break my jars sooner than

  they should get them. But I'd like this one to have a good home, among

  your nice things"--he looked about appreciatively. "I've no place to

  keep them. They're in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at

  the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don't get them

  out whole like that very often."

  "But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it."

  "Maybe some day, Ma'am, I can tell you," he said, wiping his sooty

  fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He

  strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled.

  Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat

  where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: "These I

  would like to give to the little girls." In his palm lay two lumps of

  soft blue stone, the colour of robins' eggs, or of the sea on halcyon

  days of summer.

  The children marvelled. "Oh, what are they?"

  "Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the

  jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians

  like them this way."

  Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she

  couldn't let him give his stones to the children. "They are worth a lot

  of money."

  "I'd never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot,

  and they're no use to me, but they'll make pretty playthings for little

  girls." His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to

  do.

  "Hold them still a moment,
" said the Professor, looking down, not at the

  turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined

  palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little

  finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the

  rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see

  it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.

  In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and

  looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that

  occasion.

  "Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor

  perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs

  leaving princely gifts."

  Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still

  true. Fellows like Outland don't carry much luggage, yet one of the

  things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity--and when they are

  gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely

  gifts.

  With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three

  years' mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for

  him. But in mathematics, he didn't have to work, he had merely to give

  his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter

  held the boy at arm's length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had

  been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds

  water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes

  commonplace by a natural law.

  In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their prot�g� than her

  husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had

  proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as "Ma'am." He

  came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He

  would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with

  sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande

  country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to

  listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.

  "Mother," Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, "what do you think!

  Tom hasn't any birthday."

  "How is that?"

  "When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot

  to tell the O'Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them

  how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he

  was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for

  that."

  St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his

  mother died in a wagon.

  "Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her

  health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom's father

  went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's

  mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some

  people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when

  they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her

  into the O'Briens' yard, because that was nearest the doctor's and Mrs.

  O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours."

  "Does Tom know anything about his father?"

  "Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother

  told the O'Briens that much. But the O'Briens were just lovely to him."

  St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there

  were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood

  as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at

  being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older

  than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and