by Willa Cather
“Yes. I used to sing it to the Mexicans. They like anything different.” Emil paused. “Father had a hard fight here, didn’t he?” he added thoughtfully.
“Yes, and he died in a dark time. Still, he had hope. He believed in the land.”
“And in you, I guess,” Emil said to himself. There was another period of silence; that warm, friendly silence, full of perfect understanding, in which Emil and Alexandra had spent many of their happiest half-hours.
At last Emil said abruptly, “Lou and Oscar would be better off if they were poor, wouldn’t they?”
Alexandra smiled. “Maybe. But their children wouldn’t. I have great hopes of Milly.”
Emil shivered. “I don’t know. Seems to me it gets worse as it goes on. The worst of the Swedes is that they’re never willing to find out how much they don’t know. It was like that at the University. Always so pleased with themselves! There’s no getting behind that conceited Swedish grin. The Bohemians and Germans were so different.”
“Come, Emil, don’t go back on your own people. Father wasn’t conceited, Uncle Otto wasn’t. Even Lou and Oscar weren’t when they were boys.”
Emil looked incredulous, but he did not dispute the point. He turned on his back and lay still for a long time, his hands locked under his head, looking up at the ceiling. Alexandra knew that he was thinking of many things. She felt no anxiety about Emil. She had always believed in him, as she had believed in the land. He had been more like himself since he got back from Mexico; seemed glad to be at home, and talked to her as he used to do. She had no doubt that his wandering fit was over, and that he would soon be settled in life.
“Alexandra,” said Emil suddenly, “do you remember the wild duck we saw down on the river that time?”
His sister looked up. “I often think of her. It always seems to me she’s there still, just like we saw her.”
“I know. It’s queer what things one remembers and what things one forgets.” Emil yawned and sat up. “Well, it’s time to turn in.” He rose, and going over to Alexandra stooped down and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Good-night, sister. I think you did pretty well by us.”
Emil took up his lamp and went upstairs. Alexandra sat finishing his new nightshirt, that must go in the top tray of his trunk.
IV
The next morning Angelique, Amedee’s wife, was in the kitchen baking pies, assisted by old Mrs. Chevalier. Between the mixing-board and the stove stood the old cradle that had been Amedee’s, and in it was his black-eyed son. As Angelique, flushed and excited, with flour on her hands, stopped to smile at the baby, Emil Bergson rode up to the kitchen door on his mare and dismounted.
“’Medee is out in the field, Emil,” Angelique called as she ran across the kitchen to the oven. “He begins to cut his wheat to-day; the first wheat ready to cut anywhere about here. He bought a new header, you know, because all the wheat’s so short this year. I hope he can rent it to the neighbors, it cost so much. He and his cousins bought a steam thresher on shares. You ought to go out and see that header work. I watched it an hour this morning, busy as I am with all the men to feed. He has a lot of hands, but he’s the only one that knows how to drive the header or how to run the engine, so he has to be everywhere at once. He’s sick, too, and ought to be in his bed.”
Emil bent over Hector Baptiste, trying to make him blink his round, bead-like black eyes. “Sick? What’s the matter with your daddy, kid? Been making him walk the floor with you?”
Angelique sniffed. “Not much! We don’t have that kind of babies. It was his father that kept Baptiste awake. All night I had to be getting up and making mustard plasters to put on his stomach. He had an awful colic. He said he felt better this morning, but I don’t think he ought to be out in the field, overheating himself.”
Angelique did not speak with much anxiety, not because she was indifferent, but because she felt so secure in their good fortune. Only good things could happen to a rich, energetic, handsome young man like Amedee, with a new baby in the cradle and a new header in the field.
Emil stroked the black fuzz on Baptiste’s head. “I say, Angelique, one of ‘Medee’s grandmothers, ‘way back, must have been a squaw. This kid looks exactly like the Indian babies.”
Angelique made a face at him, but old Mrs. Chevalier had been touched on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery patois that Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare.
Opening the pasture gate from the saddle, Emil rode across the field to the clearing where the thresher stood, driven by a stationary engine and fed from the header boxes. As Amedee was not on the engine, Emil rode on to the wheatfield, where he recognized, on the header, the slight, wiry figure of his friend, coatless, his white shirt puffed out by the wind, his straw hat stuck jauntily on the side of his head. The six big work-horses that drew, or rather pushed, the header, went abreast at a rapid walk, and as they were still green at the work they required a good deal of management on Amedee’s part; especially when they turned the corners, where they divided, three and three, and then swung round into line again with a movement that looked as complicated as a wheel of artillery. Emil felt a new thrill of admiration for his friend, and with it the old pang of envy at the way in which Amedee could do with his might what his hand found to do, and feel that, whatever it was, it was the most important thing in the world. “I’ll have to bring Alexandra up to see this thing work,” Emil thought; “it’s splendid!”
When he saw Emil, Amedee waved to him and called to one of his twenty cousins to take the reins. Stepping off the header without stopping it, he ran up to Emil who had dismounted. “Come along,” he called. “I have to go over to the engine for a minute. I gotta green man running it, and I gotta to keep an eye on him.”
Emil thought the lad was unnaturally flushed and more excited than even the cares of managing a big farm at a critical time warranted. As they passed behind a last year’s stack, Amedee clutched at his right side and sank down for a moment on the straw.
“Ouch! I got an awful pain in me, Emil. Something’s the matter with my insides, for sure.”
Emil felt his fiery cheek. “You ought to go straight to bed, ‘Medee, and telephone for the doctor; that’s what you ought to do.”
Amedee staggered up with a gesture of despair. “How can I? I got no time to be sick. Three thousand dollars’ worth of new machinery to manage, and the wheat so ripe it will begin to shatter next week. My wheat’s short, but it’s gotta grand full berries. What’s he slowing down for? We haven’t got header boxes enough to feed the thresher, I guess.”
Amedee started hot-foot across the stubble, leaning a little to the right as he ran, and waved to the engineer not to stop the engine.
Emil saw that this was no time to talk about his own affairs. He mounted his mare and rode on to Sainte-Agnes, to bid his friends there good-bye. He went first to see Raoul Marcel, and found him innocently practising the “Gloria” for the big confirmation service on Sunday while he polished the mirrors of his father’s saloon.
As Emil rode homewards at three o’clock in the afternoon, he saw Amedee staggering out of the wheatfield, supported by two of his cousins. Emil stopped and helped them put the boy to bed.
V
When Frank Shabata came in from work at five o’clock that evening, old Moses Marcel, Raoul’s father, telephoned him that Amedee had had a seizure in the wheatfield, and that Doctor Paradis was going to operate on him as soon as the Hanover doctor got there to help. Frank dropped a word of this at the table, bolted his supper, and rode off to Sainte-Agnes, where there would be sympathetic discussion of Amedee’s case at Marcel’s saloon.
As soon as Frank was gone, Marie telephoned Alexandra. It was a comfort to hear her friend’s voice. Yes, Alexandra knew what there was to be known about Amedee. Emil had been there when they carried him out of the field, and had stayed with him until the doctors operated for appendicitis at five o’clock. They were afraid it was too late to do much good; it should ha
ve been done three days ago. Amedee was in a very bad way. Emil had just come home, worn out and sick himself. She had given him some brandy and put him to bed.
Marie hung up the receiver. Poor Amedee’s illness had taken on a new meaning to her, now that she knew Emil had been with him. And it might so easily have been the other way—Emil who was ill and Amedee who was sad! Marie looked about the dusky sitting-room. She had seldom felt so utterly lonely. If Emil was asleep, there was not even a chance of his coming; and she could not go to Alexandra for sympathy. She meant to tell Alexandra everything, as soon as Emil went away. Then whatever was left between them would be honest.
But she could not stay in the house this evening. Where should she go? She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath. The sky was still red in the west and the evening star hung directly over the Bergsons’ wind-mill. Marie crossed the fence at the wheatfield corner, and walked slowly along the path that led to Alexandra’s. She could not help feeling hurt that Emil had not come to tell her about Amedee. It seemed to her most unnatural that he should not have come. If she were in trouble, certainly he was the one person in the world she would want to see. Perhaps he wished her to understand that for her he was as good as gone already.
Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released. Marie walked on, her face lifted toward the remote, inaccessible evening star.
When she reached the stile she sat down and waited. How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Yes, in so far as she was concerned, Emil was already gone. They couldn’t meet any more. There was nothing for them to say. They had spent the last penny of their small change; there was nothing left but gold. The day of love-tokens was past. They had now only their hearts to give each other. And Emil being gone, what was her life to be like? In some ways, it would be easier. She would not, at least, live in perpetual fear. If Emil were once away and settled at work, she would not have the feeling that she was spoiling his life. With the memory he left her, she could be as rash as she chose. Nobody could be the worse for it but herself; and that, surely, did not matter. Her own case was clear. When a girl had loved one man, and then loved another while that man was still alive, everybody knew what to think of her. What happened to her was of little consequence, so long as she did not drag other people down with her. Emil once away, she could let everything else go and live a new life of perfect love.
Marie left the stile reluctantly. She had, after all, thought he might come. And how glad she ought to be, she told herself, that he was asleep. She left the path and went across the pasture. The moon was almost full. An owl was hooting somewhere in the fields. She had scarcely thought about where she was going when the pond glittered before her, where Emil had shot the ducks. She stopped and looked at it. Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream—a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon like that; when it encircled and swelled with that image of gold.
In the morning, when Emil came down-stairs, Alexandra met him in the sitting-room and put her hands on his shoulders. “Emil, I went to your room as soon as it was light, but you were sleeping so sound I hated to wake you. There was nothing you could do, so I let you sleep. They telephoned from Sainte-Agnes that Amedee died at three o’clock this morning.”
VI
The Church has always held that life is for the living. On Saturday, while half the village of Sainte-Agnes was mourning for Amedee and preparing the funeral black for his burial on Monday, the other half was busy with white dresses and white veils for the great confirmation service to-morrow, when the bishop was to confirm a class of one hundred boys and girls. Father Duchesne divided his time between the living and the dead. All day Saturday the church was a scene of bustling activity, a little hushed by the thought of Amedee. The choir were busy rehearsing a mass of Rossini, which they had studied and practised for this occasion. The women were trimming the altar, the boys and girls were bringing flowers.
On Sunday morning the bishop was to drive overland to Sainte-Agnes from Hanover, and Emil Bergson had been asked to take the place of one of Amedee’s cousins in the cavalcade of forty French boys who were to ride across country to meet the bishop’s carriage. At six o’clock on Sunday morning the boys met at the church. As they stood holding their horses by the bridle, they talked in low tones of their dead comrade. They kept repeating that Amedee had always been a good boy, glancing toward the red brick church which had played so large a part in Amedee’s life, had been the scene of his most serious moments and of his happiest hours. He had played and wrestled and sung and courted under its shadow. Only three weeks ago he had proudly carried his baby there to be christened. They could not doubt that that invisible arm was still about Amedee; that through the church on earth he had passed to the church triumphant, the goal of the hopes and faith of so many hundred years.
When the word was given to mount, the young men rode at a walk out of the village; but once out among the wheatfields in the morning sun, their horses and their own youth got the better of them. A wave of zeal and fiery enthusiasm swept over them. They longed for a Jerusalem to deliver. The thud of their galloping hoofs interrupted many a country breakfast and brought many a woman and child to the door of the farmhouses as they passed. Five miles east of Sainte-Agnes they met the bishop in his open carriage, attended by two priests. Like one man the boys swung off their hats in a broad salute, and bowed their heads as the handsome old man lifted his two fingers in the episcopal blessing. The horsemen closed about the carriage like a guard, and whenever a restless horse broke from control and shot down the road ahead of the body, the bishop laughed and rubbed his plump hands together. “What fine boys!” he said to his priests. “The Church still has her cavalry.”
As the troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the town,—the first frame church of the parish had stood there,—old Pierre Seguin was already out with his pick and spade, digging Amedee’s grave. He knelt and uncovered as the bishop passed. The boys with one accord looked away from old Pierre to the red church on the hill, with the gold cross flaming on its steeple.
Mass was at eleven. While the church was filling, Emil Bergson waited outside, watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill. After the bell began to ring, he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback and tie his horse to the hitch-bar. Marie, then, was not coming. Emil turned and went into the church. Amedee’s was the only empty pew, and he sat down in it. Some of Amedee’s cousins were there, dressed in black and weeping. When all the pews were full, the old men and boys packed the open space at the back of the church, kneeling on the floor. There was scarcely a family in town that was not represented in the confirmation class, by a cousin, at least. The new communicants, with their clear, reverent faces, were beautiful to look upon as they entered in a body and took the front benches reserved for them. Even before the Mass began, the air was charged with feeling. The choir had never sung so well and Raoul Marcel, in the “Gloria,” drew even the bishop’s eyes to the organ loft. For the offertory he sang Gounod’s “Ave Maria,”—always spoken of in Sainte-Agnes as “the Ave Maria.”
Emil began to torture himself with questions about Marie. Was
she ill? Had she quarreled with her husband? Was she too unhappy to find comfort even here? Had she, perhaps, thought that he would come to her? Was she waiting for him? Overtaxed by excitement and sorrow as he was, the rapture of the service took hold upon his body and mind. As he listened to Raoul, he seemed to emerge from the conflicting emotions which had been whirling him about and sucking him under. He felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin. He looked across the heads of the people at Frank Shabata with calmness. That rapture was for those who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent. He coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata’s. The spirit he had met in music was his own. Frank Shabata had never found it; would never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years; would have destroyed it if he had found it, as Herod slew the innocents, as Rome slew the martyrs.
San—cta Mari-i-i-a,
wailed Raoul from the organ loft;
O—ra pro no-o-bis!
And it did not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation.
The confirmation service followed the Mass. When it was over, the congregation thronged about the newly confirmed. The girls, and even the boys, were kissed and embraced and wept over. All the aunts and grandmothers wept with joy. The housewives had much ado to tear themselves away from the general rejoicing and hurry back to their kitchens. The country parishioners were staying in town for dinner, and nearly every house in Sainte-Agnes entertained visitors that day. Father Duchesne, the bishop, and the visiting priests dined with Fabien Sauvage, the banker. Emil and Frank Shabata were both guests of old Moise Marcel. After dinner Frank and old Moise retired to the rear room of the saloon to play California Jack and drink their cognac, and Emil went over to the banker’s with Raoul, who had been asked to sing for the bishop.
