by Willa Cather
“That you must do again,” he declared when they finished this song. “You did it much better the other day. You accented it more, like a dance or a galop. How did you do it?”
Thea laughed, glancing sidewise at Mrs. Nathanmeyer. “You want it rough-house, do you? Bowers likes me to sing it more seriously, but it always makes me think about a story my grandmother used to tell.”
Fred pointed to the chair behind her. “Won’t you rest a moment and tell us about it? I thought you had some notion about it when you first sang it for me.”
Thea sat down. “In Norway my grandmother knew a girl who was awfully in love with a young fellow. She went into service on a big dairy farm to make enough money for her outfit. They were married at Christmastime, and everybody was glad, because they’d been sighing around about each other for so long. That very summer, the day before St. John’s Day, her husband caught her carrying on with another farm-hand. The next night all the farm people had a bonfire and a big dance up on the mountain, and everybody was dancing and singing. I guess they were all a little drunk, for they got to seeing how near they could make the girls dance to the edge of the cliff. Ole—he was the girl’s husband—seemed the jolliest and the drunkest of anybody. He danced his wife nearer and nearer the edge of the rock, and his wife began to scream so that the others stopped dancing and the music stopped; but Ole went right on singing, and he danced her over the edge of the cliff and they fell hundreds of feet and were all smashed to pieces.”
Ottenburg turned back to the piano. “That’s the idea! Now, come Miss Thea. Let it go!”
Thea took her place. She laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets, threw her shoulders high and let them drop again. She had never sung in a low dress before, and she found it comfortable. Ottenburg jerked his head and they began the song. The accompaniment sounded more than ever like the thumping and scraping of heavy feet.
When they stopped, they heard a sympathetic tapping at the end of the room. Old Mr. Nathanmeyer had come to the door and was sitting back in the shadow, just inside the library, applauding with his cane. Thea threw him a bright smile. He continued to sit there, his slippered foot on a low chair, his cane between his fingers, and she glanced at him from time to time. The doorway made a frame for him, and he looked like a man in a picture, with the long, shadowy room behind him.
Mrs. Nathanmeyer summoned the maid again. “Selma will pack that gown in a box for you, and you can take it home in Mr. Ottenburg’s carriage.”
Thea turned to follow the maid, but hesitated. “Shall I wear gloves?” she asked, turning again to Mrs. Nathanmeyer.
“No, I think not. Your arms are good, and you will feel freer without. You will need light slippers, pink—or white, if you have them, will do quite as well.”
Thea went upstairs with the maid and Mrs. Nathanmeyer rose, took Ottenburg’s arm, and walked toward her husband. “That’s the first real voice I have heard in Chicago,” she said decidedly. “I don’t count that stupid Priest woman. What do you say, father?”
Mr. Nathanmeyer shook his white head and smiled softly, as if he were thinking about something very agreeable. “Svensk sommar,” he murmured. “She is like a Swedish summer. I spent nearly a year there when I was a young man,” he explained to Ottenburg.
When Ottenburg got Thea and her big box into the carriage, it occurred to him that she must be hungry, after singing so much. When he asked her, she admitted that she was very hungry, indeed.
He took out his watch. “Would you mind stopping somewhere with me? It’s only eleven.”
“Mind? Of course, I wouldn’t mind. I wasn’t brought up like that. I can take care of myself.”
Ottenburg laughed. “And I can take care of myself, so we can do lots of jolly things together.” He opened the carriage door and spoke to the driver. “I’m stuck on the way you sing that Grieg song,” he declared.
When Thea got into bed that night she told herself that this was the happiest evening she had had in Chicago. She had enjoyed the Nathanmeyers and their grand house, her new dress, and Ottenburg, her first real carriage ride, and the good supper when she was so hungry. And Ottenburg was jolly! He made you want to come back at him. You weren’t always being caught up and mystified. When you started in with him, you went; you cut the breeze, as Ray used to say. He had some go in him.
Philip Frederick Ottenburg was the third son of the great brewer. His mother was Katarina Furst, the daughter and heiress of a brewing business older and richer than Otto Ottenburg’s. As a young woman she had been a conspicuous figure in German-American society in New York, and not untouched by scandal. She was a handsome, headstrong girl, a rebellious and violent force in a provincial society. She was brutally sentimental and heavily romantic. Her free speech, her Continental ideas, and her proclivity for championing new causes, even when she did not know much about them, made her an object of suspicion. She was always going abroad to seek out intellectual affinities, and was one of the group of young women who followed Wagner about in his old age, keeping at a respectful distance, but receiving now and then a gracious acknowledgment that he appreciated their homage. When the composer died, Katarina, then a matron with a family, took to her bed and saw no one for a week.
After having been engaged to an American actor, a Welsh socialist agitator, and a German army officer, Fraulein Furst at last placed herself and her great brewery interests into the trustworthy hands of Otto Ottenburg, who had been her suitor ever since he was a clerk, learning his business in her father’s office.
Her first two sons were exactly like their father. Even as children they were industrious, earnest little tradesmen. As Frau Ottenburg said, “she had to wait for her Fred, but she got him at last,” the first man who had altogether pleased her. Frederick entered Harvard when he was eighteen. When his mother went to Boston to visit him, she not only got him everything he wished for, but she made handsome and often embarrassing presents to all his friends. She gave dinners and supper parties for the Glee Club, made the crew break training, and was a generally disturbing influence. In his third year Fred left the university because of a serious escapade which had somewhat hampered his life ever since. He went at once into his father’s business, where, in his own way, he had made himself very useful.
Fred Ottenburg was now twenty-eight, and people could only say of him that he had been less hurt by his mother’s indulgence than most boys would have been. He had never wanted anything that he could not have it, and he might have had a great many things that he had never wanted. He was extravagant, but not prodigal. He turned most of the money his mother gave him into the business, and lived on his generous salary.
Fred had never been bored for a whole day in his life. When he was in Chicago or St. Louis, he went to ballgames, prize-fights, and horse-races. When he was in Germany, he went to concerts and to the opera. He belonged to a long list of sporting-clubs and hunting-clubs, and was a good boxer. He had so many natural interests that he had no affectations. At Harvard he kept away from the aesthetic circle that had already discovered Francis Thompson. He liked no poetry but German poetry. Physical energy was the thing he was full to the brim of, and music was one of its natural forms of expression. He had a healthy love of sport and art, of eating and drinking. When he was in Germany, he scarcely knew where the soup ended and the symphony began.
V
March began badly for Thea. She had a cold during the first week, and after she got through her church duties on Sunday she had to go to bed with tonsilitis. She was still in the boarding-house at which young Ottenburg had called when he took her to see Mrs. Nathanmeyer. She had stayed on there because her room, although it was inconvenient and very small, was at the corner of the house and got the sunlight.
Since she left Mrs. Lorch, this was the first place where she had got away from a north light. Her rooms had all been as damp and mouldy as they were dark, with deep foundations of dirt under the carpets, and dirty walls. In her present room there was no running
water and no clothes closet, and she had to have the dresser moved out to make room for her piano. But there were two windows, one on the south and one on the west, a light wall-paper with morning-glory vines, and on the floor a clean matting. The landlady had tried to make the room look cheerful, because it was hard to let. It was so small that Thea could keep it clean herself, after the Hun had done her worst. She hung her dresses on the door under a sheet, used the washstand for a dresser, slept on a cot, and opened both the windows when she practiced. She felt less walled in than she had in the other houses.
Wednesday was her third day in bed. The medical student who lived in the house had been in to see her, had left some tablets and a foamy gargle, and told her that she could probably go back to work on Monday. The landlady stuck her head in once a day, but Thea did not encourage her visits. The Hungarian chambermaid brought her soup and toast. She made a sloppy pretense of putting the room in order, but she was such a dirty creature that Thea would not let her touch her cot; she got up every morning and turned the mattress and made the bed herself. The exertion made her feel miserably ill, but at least she could lie still contentedly for a long while afterward. She hated the poisoned feeling in her throat, and no matter how often she gargled she felt unclean and disgusting. Still, if she had to be ill, she was almost glad that she had a contagious illness. Otherwise she would have been at the mercy of the people in the house. She knew that they disliked her, yet now that she was ill, they took it upon themselves to tap at her door, send her messages, books, even a miserable flower or two. Thea knew that their sympathy was an expression of self-righteousness, and she hated them for it. The divinity student, who was always whispering soft things to her, sent her “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
The medical student had been kind to her: he knew that she did not want to pay a doctor. His gargle had helped her, and he gave her things to make her sleep at night. But he had been a cheat, too. He had exceeded his rights. She had no soreness in her chest, and had told him so clearly. All this thumping of her back, and listening to her breathing, was done to satisfy personal curiosity. She had watched him with a contemptuous smile. She was too sick to care; if it amused him—She made him wash his hands before he touched her; he was never very clean. All the same, it wounded her and made her feel that the world was a pretty disgusting place. “The Kreutzer Sonata” did not make her feel any more cheerful. She threw it aside with hatred. She could not believe it was written by the same man who wrote the novel that had thrilled her.
Her cot was beside the south window, and on Wednesday afternoon she lay thinking about the Harsanyis, about old Mr. Nathanmeyer, and about how she was missing Fred Ottenburg’s visits to the studio. That was much the worst thing about being sick. If she were going to the studio every day, she might be having pleasant encounters with Fred. He was always running away, Bowers said, and he might be planning to go away as soon as Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s evenings were over. And here she was losing all this time!
After a while she heard the Hun’s clumsy trot in the hall, and then a pound on the door. Mary came in, making her usual uncouth sounds, carrying a long box and a big basket. Thea sat up in bed and tore off the strings and paper. The basket was full of fruit, with a big Hawaiian pineapple in the middle, and in the box there were layers of pink roses with long, woody stems and dark-green leaves. They filled the room with a cool smell that made another air to breathe. Mary stood with her apron full of paper and cardboard. When she saw Thea take an envelope out from under the flowers, she uttered an exclamation, pointed to the roses, and then to the bosom of her own dress, on the left side. Thea laughed and nodded. She understood that Mary associated the color with Ottenburg’s boutonniere. She pointed to the water pitcher,—she had nothing else big enough to hold the flowers,—and made Mary put it on the window sill beside her.
After Mary was gone Thea locked the door. When the landlady knocked, she pretended that she was asleep. She lay still all afternoon and with drowsy eyes watched the roses open. They were the first hothouse flowers she had ever had. The cool fragrance they released was soothing, and as the pink petals curled back, they were the only things between her and the gray sky. She lay on her side, putting the room and the boarding-house behind her. Fred knew where all the pleasant things in the world were, she reflected, and knew the road to them. He had keys to all the nice places in his pocket, and seemed to jingle them from time to time. And then, he was young; and her friends had always been old. Her mind went back over them. They had all been teachers; wonderfully kind, but still teachers. Ray Kennedy, she knew, had wanted to marry her, but he was the most protecting and teacher-like of them all. She moved impatiently in her cot and threw her braids away from her hot neck, over her pillow. “I don’t want him for a teacher,” she thought, frowning petulantly out of the window. “I’ve had such a string of them. I want him for a sweetheart.”
VI
“Thea,” said Fred Ottenburg one drizzly afternoon in April, while they sat waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake, “what are you going to do this summer?”
“I don’t know. Work, I suppose.”
“With Bowers, you mean? Even Bowers goes fishing for a month. Chicago’s no place to work, in the summer. Haven’t you made any plans?”
Thea shrugged her shoulders. “No use having any plans when you haven’t any money. They are unbecoming.”
“Aren’t you going home?”
She shook her head. “No. It won’t be comfortable there till I’ve got something to show for myself. I’m not getting on at all, you know. This year has been mostly wasted.”
“You’re stale; that’s what’s the matter with you. And just now you’re dead tired. You’ll talk more rationally after you’ve had some tea. Rest your throat until it comes.” They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathanmeyer had said about the Swedish face “breaking early.” Thea was as gray as the weather. Her skin looked sick. Her hair, too, though on a damp day it curled charmingly about her face, looked pale.
Fred beckoned the waiter and increased his order for food. Thea did not hear him. She was staring out of the window, down at the roof of the Art Institute and the green lions, dripping in the rain. The lake was all rolling mist, with a soft shimmer of robin’s-egg blue in the gray. A lumber boat, with two very tall masts, was emerging gaunt and black out of the fog. When the tea came Thea ate hungrily, and Fred watched her. He thought her eyes became a little less bleak. The kettle sang cheerfully over the spirit lamp, and she seemed to concentrate her attention upon that pleasant sound. She kept looking toward it listlessly and indulgently, in a way that gave him a realization of her loneliness. Fred lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. He and Thea were alone in the quiet, dusky room full of white tables. In those days Chicago people never stopped for tea. “Come,” he said at last, “what would you do this summer, if you could do whatever you wished?”
“I’d go a long way from here! West, I think. Maybe I could get some of my spring back. All this cold, cloudy weather,”—she looked out at the lake and shivered,—“I don’t know, it does things to me,” she ended abruptly.
Fred nodded. “I know. You’ve been going down ever since you had onsillitis. I’ve seen it. What you need is to sit in the sun and bake for three months. You’ve got the right idea. I remember once when we were having dinner somewhere you kept asking me about the Cliff-Dweller ruins. Do they still interest you?”
“Of course they do. I’ve always wanted to go down there—long before I ever got in for this.”
“I don’t think I told you, but my father owns a whole canyon full of Cliff-Dweller ruins. He has a big worthless ranch down in Arizona, near a Navajo reservation, and there’s a canyon on the place they call Panther Canyon, chock full of that sort of thing. I often go down there to hunt. Henry Biltmer and his wife live there and keep a tidy place. He’s an old German who worked in the brewery until he lost his heal
th. Now he runs a few cattle. Henry likes to do me a favor. I’ve done a few for him.” Fred drowned his cigarette in his saucer and studied Thea’s expression, which was wistful and intent, envious and admiring. He continued with satisfaction: “If you went down there and stayed with them for two or three months, they wouldn’t let you pay anything. I might send Henry a new gun, but even I couldn’t offer him money for putting up a friend of mine. I’ll get you transportation. It would make a new girl of you. Let me write to Henry, and you pack your trunk. That’s all that’s necessary. No red tape about it. What do you say, Thea?”
She bit her lip, and sighed as if she were waking up.
Fred crumpled his napkin impatiently. “Well, isn’t it easy enough?”
“That’s the trouble; it’s too easy. Doesn’t sound probable. I’m not used to getting things for nothing.”
Ottenburg laughed. “Oh, if that’s all, I’ll show you how to begin. You won’t get this for nothing, quite. I’ll ask you to let me stop off and see you on my way to California. Perhaps by that time you will be glad to see me. Better let me break the news to Bowers. I can manage him. He needs a little transportation himself now and then. You must get corduroy riding-things and leather leggings. There are a few snakes about. Why do you keep frowning?”
“Well, I don’t exactly see why you take the trouble. What do you get out of it? You haven’t liked me so well the last two or three weeks.”
Fred dropped his third cigarette and looked at his watch. “If you don’t see that, it’s because you need a tonic. I’ll show you what I’ll get out of it. Now I’m going to get a cab and take you home. You are too tired to walk a step. You’d better get to bed as soon as you get there. Of course, I don’t like you so well when you’re half anaesthetized all the time. What have you been doing to yourself?”
Thea rose. “I don’t know. Being bored eats the heart out of me, I guess.” She walked meekly in front of him to the elevator. Fred noticed for the hundredth time how vehemently her body proclaimed her state of feeling. He remembered how remarkably brilliant and beautiful she had been when she sang at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s: flushed and gleaming, round and supple, something that couldn’t be dimmed or downed. And now she seemed a moving figure of discouragement. The very waiters glanced at her apprehensively. It was not that she made a fuss, but her back was most extraordinarily vocal. One never needed to see her face to know what she was full of that day. Yet she was certainly not mercurial. Her flesh seemed to take a mood and to “set,” like plaster. As he put her into the cab, Fred reflected once more that he “gave her up.” He would attack her when his lance was brighter.
