by Willa Cather
Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before him. She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell them through his medicines. In a moment he ceased to feel embarrassed. His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged the flowers on the little table beside him.
“Now, do you want me to darken the room again?”
“Not yet. Sit down for a minute and talk to me. I can’t say much because my face is stiff.”
“I should think it would be! I met Leonard Dawson on the road yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you were cut. I would like to scold you hard, Claude.”
“Do. It might make me feel better.” He took her hand and kept her beside him a moment. “Are those the sweet peas you were planting that day when I came back from the West?”
“Yes. Haven’t they done well to blossom so early?”
“Less than two months. That’s strange,” he sighed.
“Strange? What?”
“Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it’s not much account.”
“That’s not the way to look at things,” she said reprovingly.
Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began to tell Claude about her father’s several attacks of erysipelas. He listened but absently. He would never have believed that Enid, with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and sit with him like this. He noticed that his mother was quite as much astonished as he. She hovered about the visitor for a few moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went downstairs to her work. Claude wished that Enid would not talk at all, but would sit there and let him look at her. The sunshine she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence, soothed him. Presently he realized that she was asking him something.
“What is it, Enid? The medicine they give me makes me stupid. I don’t catch things.”
“I was asking whether you play chess.”
“Very badly.”
“Father says I play passably well. When you are better you must let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China. They are beautifully carved. And now it’s time for me to go.”
She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish about seeing people. “I didn’t know you were so vain. Bandages are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the dark blind again for you?”
“Yes, please. There won’t be anything to look at now.”
“Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies’ man!”
Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.
His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him while he swallowed it. “Enid Royce is a real sensible girl—” she said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not conviction but bewilderment.
Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of torture,—everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the rack and the wheel.
When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer chair and play chess with her.
One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that he was beaten again.
“It must be dull for you, playing with me,” he murmured, brushing the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were the soft, languid hands of a sick man.
“You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind on it,” Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it was clear that he would never play well.
“Yes,” he sighed, dropping back into his chair, “my wits do wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn’t it lovely? And now I won’t be able to harvest it. Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever finish anything I begin.”
Enid put the chessmen back into their box. “Now that you are better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your trouble people are always depressed.”
Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the chair. “No, it’s not that. It’s having so much time to think that makes me blue. You see, Enid, I’ve never yet done anything that gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening to me or to somebody else. It doesn’t seem to have much connection with me. I haven’t made much of a start.”
“But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!” She shook her finger at him.
“I think about two things all the time. That is one of them.” Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude’s four o’clock milk; it was his first day downstairs.
When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that some day he must reckon with it again.
Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered her as she used to march up to the platform for Children’s Day exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent gravity of her face, which seemed to say, “How pleasant it is to do thus and to do Right!”
Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,—a good man who had been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife—and his eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in her the promise of “virtuous and comely Christian womanhood,” to use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys’ class across the aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he respected her seriousness.
When they played together she was fair-minded, didn’t whine if she got hurt, and never claimed a girl’s exemption from anything unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over, “Oh, Claude, Claude!” Incidents like that one now seemed to him significant and fateful.
When Claude’s strength began to return to him, it came overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong while his body was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted. When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her actual presence restored his equilibrium—almost. This fact did not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful in the girl’s nature,—a quality so lovely and s
ubtle that there is no name for it.
During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft physical pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through, it was delightful to lie upon a cloud that floated lazily down the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid would start up like a sweet, burning pain, and he would drift out into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor control. So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he was overtaken by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her, but loved her while she was still and unconscious like a statue. He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without knowing why.
Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush swept across his face and he felt guilty toward her, meek and humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he was glad when she went away and left him alone to think about her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed his father, His marriage would be the first natural, dutiful, expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of usefulness and content; as his mother’s oft-repeated Psalm said, it would restore his soul. Enid’s willingness to listen to him he could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was probably regarded by her friends as equivalent to an engagement.
V
Claude’s first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After leaving the barber-shop he presented himself, glistening with bayrum, at Jason Royce’s office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing his safe, turned and took the young man by the hand.
“Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can’t do much to a husky young farmer like you. With old fellows, it’s another story. I’m just starting off to have a look at my alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go along with me.”
They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and when they were spinning along between fields of ripening grain Claude broke the silence. “I expect you know what I want to see you about, Mr. Royce?”
The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim ever since they started.
“Well,” Claude went on modestly, “it oughtn’t to surprise you to hear that I’ve set my heart on Enid. I haven’t said anything to her yet, but if you’re not against me, I’m going to try to persuade her to marry me.”
“Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude,” said Mr. Royce. He sat slumping in his seat, watching the road ahead of him with intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual. “Enid is a vegetarian, you know,” he remarked unexpectedly.
Claude smiled. “That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr.Royce.”
The other nodded slightly. “I know. At your age you think it doesn’t. Such things do make a difference, however.” His lips closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not open them.
“Enid is a good girl,” he said at last. “Strictly speaking, she has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce had another daughter at home, I’d take Enid into my office. She has good judgment. I don’t know but she’d run a business better than a house.” Having got this out, Mr. Royce relaxed his frown, took his cigar from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back between his teeth without relighting it.
Claude was watching him with surprise. “There’s no question about Enid, Mr. Royce. I didn’t come to ask you about her,” he exclaimed. “I came to ask if you’d be willing to have me for a son-in-law. I know, and you know, that Enid could do a great deal better than to marry me. I surely haven’t made much of a showing, so far.”
“Here we are,” announced Mr. Royce. “I’ll leave the car under this elm, and we’ll go up to the north end of the field and have a look.”
They crawled under the wire fence and started across the rough ground through a field of purple blossoms. Clouds of yellow butterflies darted up before them. They walked jerkily, breaking through the sun-baked crust into the soft soil beneath. Mr. Royce lit a fresh cigar, and as he threw away the match let his hand drop on the young man’s shoulder. “I always envied your father. You took my fancy when you were a little shaver, and I used to let you in to see the water-wheel. When I gave up water power and put in an engine, I said to myself: ‘There’s just one fellow in the country will be sorry to see the old wheel go, and that’s Claude Wheeler.’”
“I hope you don’t think I’m too young to marry,” Claude said as they tramped on.
“No, it’s right and proper a young man should marry. I don’t say anything against marriage,” Mr. Royce protested doggedly. “You may find some opposition in Enid’s missionary motives. I don’t know how she feels about that now. I don’t enquire. I’d be pleased to see her get rid of such notions. They don’t do a woman any good.”
“I want to help her get rid of them. If it’s all right with you,I hope I can persuade Enid to marry me this fall.”
Jason Royce turned his head quickly toward his companion, studied his artless, hopeful countenance for a moment, and then looked away with a frown.
The alfalfa field sloped upward at one corner, lay like a bright green-and-purple handkerchief thrown down on the hillside. At the uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his brown neck. He sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his secret, was to live. His strong yellow teeth closed tighter and tighter on the cigar, which had gone out like the first. He did not look at Claude, but while he watched the wind plough soft, flowery roads in the field, the boy’s face was clearly before him, with its expression of reticent pride melting into the desire to please, and the slight stiffness of his shoulders, set in a kind of stubborn loyalty. Claude lay on the sod beside him, rather tired after his walk in the sun, a little melancholy, though he did not know why.
After a long while Mr. Royce unclasped his broad, thick-fingered miller’s hands, and for a moment took out the macerated cigar. “Well, Claude,” he said with determined cheerfulness, “we’ll always be better friends than is common between father and son-in-law. You’ll find out that pretty nearly everything you believe about life—about marriage, especially—is lies. I don’t know why people prefer to live in that sort of a world, but they do.”
VI
After his interview with Mr. Royce, Claude drove directly to the mill house. As he came up the shady road, he saw with disappointment the flash of two white dresses instead of one, moving about in the sunny flower garden. The visitor was Gladys Farmer. This was her vacation time. She had walked out to the mill in the cool of the morning to spend the day with Enid. Now they were starting off to
gather water-cresses, and had stopped in the garden to smell the heliotrope. On this scorching afternoon the purple sprays gave out a fragrance that hung over the flower-bed and brushed their cheeks like a warm breath. The girls looked up at the same moment and recognized Claude. They waved to him and hurried down to the gate to congratulate him on his recovery. He took their little tin pails and followed them around the old dam-head and up a sandy gorge, along a clear thread of water that trickled into Lovely Creek just above the mill. They came to the gravelly hill where the stream took its source from a spring hollowed out under the exposed roots of two elm trees. All about the spring, and in the sandy bed of the shallow creek, the cresses grew cool and green.
Gladys had strong feelings about places. She looked around her with satisfaction. “Of all the places where we used to play, Enid, this was my favourite,” she declared.
“You girls sit up there on the elm roots,” Claude suggested. “Wherever you put your foot in this soft gravel, water gathers. You’ll spoil your white shoes. I’ll get the cress for you.”
“Stuff my pail as full as you can, then,” Gladys called as they sat down. “I wonder why the Spanish dagger grows so thick on this hill, Enid? These plants were old and tough when we were little. I love it here.”
She leaned back upon the hot, glistening hill-side. The sun came down in red rays through the elm-tops, and all the pebbles and bits of quartz glittered dazzlingly. Down in the stream bed the water, where it caught the light, twinkled like tarnished gold. Claude’s sandy head and stooping shoulders were mottled with sunshine as they moved about over the green patches, and his duck trousers looked much whiter than they were. Gladys was too poor to travel, but she had the good fortune to be able to see a great deal within a few miles of Frankfort, and a warm imagination helped her to find life interesting. She did, as she confided to Enid, want to go to Colorado; she was ashamed of never having seen a mountain.
