Willa Cather

by Willa Cather

  “Yes, he brought them himself, in a big box. He brought lots with him besides flowers. Oh, lots of things! The old Moonstone feeling,”—Thea moved her hand back and forth in the air, fluttering her fingers,—”the feeling of starting out, early in the morning, to take my lesson.”

  “And you’ve had everything out with him?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Haven’t?” He looked up in consternation.

  “No, I haven’t!” Thea spoke excitedly, moving about over the sunny patches on the grimy carpet. “I’ve lied to him, just as you said I had always lied to him, and that’s why I’m so happy. I’ve let him think what he likes to think. Oh, I couldn’t do anything else, Fred,”—she shook her head emphatically. “If you’d seen him when he came in, so pleased and excited! You see this is a great adventure for him. From the moment I began to talk to him, he entreated me not to say too much, not to spoil his notion of me. Not in so many words, of course. But if you’d seen his eyes, his face, his kind hands! Oh, no! I couldn’t.” She took a deep breath, as if with a renewed sense of her narrow escape.

  “Then, what did you tell him?” Fred demanded.

  Thea sat down on the edge of the sofa and began shutting and opening her hands nervously. “Well, I told him enough, and not too much. I told him all about how good you were to me last winter, getting me engagements and things, and how you had helped me with my work more than anybody. Then I told him about how you sent me down to the ranch when I had no money or anything.” She paused and wrinkled her forehead. “And I told him that I wanted to marry you and ran away to Mexico with you, and that I was awfully happy until you told me that you couldn’t marry me because—well, I told him why.” Thea dropped her eyes and moved the toe of her shoe about restlessly on the carpet.

  “And he took it from you, like that?” Fred asked, almost with awe.

  “Yes, just like that, and asked no questions. He was hurt; he had some wretched moments. I could see him squirming and squirming and trying to get past it. He kept shutting his eyes and rubbing his forehead. But when I told him that I absolutely knew you wanted to marry me, that you would whenever you could, that seemed to help him a good deal.”

  “And that satisfied him?” Fred asked wonderingly. He could not quite imagine what kind of person Dr. Archie might be.

  “He took me by the shoulders once and asked, oh, in such a frightened way, ‘Thea, was he good to you, this young man?’ When I told him you were, he looked at me again: ‘And you care for him a great deal, you believe in him?’ Then he seemed satisfied.” Thea paused. “You see, he’s just tremendously good, and tremendously afraid of things—of some things. Otherwise he would have got rid of Mrs. Archie.” She looked up suddenly: “You were right, though; one can’t tell people about things they don’t know already.”

  Fred stood in the window, his back to the sunlight, fingering the jonquils. “Yes, you can, my dear. But you must tell it in such a way that they don’t know you’re telling it, and that they don’t know they’re hearing it.”

  Thea smiled past him, out into the air. “I see. It’s a secret. Like the sound in the shell.”

  “What’s that?” Fred was watching her and thinking how moving that faraway expression, in her, happened to be. “What did you say?”

  She came back. “Oh, something old and Moonstony! I have almost forgotten it myself. But I feel better than I thought I ever could again. I can’t wait to be off. Oh, Fred,” she sprang up, “I want to get at it!”

  As she broke out with this, she threw up her head and lifted herself a little on her toes. Fred colored and looked at her fearfully, hesitatingly. Her eyes, which looked out through the window, were bright—they had no memories. No, she did not remember. That momentary elevation had no associations for her. It was unconscious.

  He looked her up and down and laughed and shook his head. “You are just all I want you to be—and that is,—not for me! Don’t worry, you’ll get at it. You are at it. My God! have you ever, for one moment, been at anything else?”

  Thea did not answer him, and clearly she had not heard him. She was watching something out in the thin light of the false spring and its treacherously soft air.

  Fred waited a moment. “Are you going to dine with your friend to-night?”

  “Yes. He has never been in New York before. He wants to go about. Where shall I tell him to go?”

  “Wouldn’t it be a better plan, since you wish me to meet him, for you both to dine with me? It would seem only natural and friendly. You’ll have to live up a little to his notion of us.” Thea seemed to consider the suggestion favorably. “If you wish him to be easy in his mind,” Fred went on, “that would help. I think, myself, that we are rather nice together. Put on one of the new dresses you got down there, and let him see how lovely you can be. You owe him some pleasure, after all the trouble he has taken.”

  Thea laughed, and seemed to find the idea exciting and pleasant. “Oh, very well! I’ll do my best. Only don’t wear a dress coat, please. He hasn’t one, and he’s nervous about it.”

  Fred looked at his watch. “Your monument up there is fast. I’ll be here with a cab at eight. I’m anxious to meet him. You’ve given me the strangest idea of his callow innocence and aged indifference.”

  She shook her head. “No, he’s none of that. He’s very good, and he won’t admit things. I love him for it. Now, as I look back on it, I see that I’ve always, even when I was little, shielded him.”

  As she laughed, Fred caught the bright spark in her eye that he knew so well, and held it for a happy instant. Then he blew her a kiss with his finger-tips and fled.

  IV

  At nine o’clock that evening our three friends were seated in the balcony of a French restaurant, much gayer and more intimate than any that exists in New York to-day. This old restaurant was built by a lover of pleasure, who knew that to dine gayly human beings must have the reassurance of certain limitations of space and of a certain definite style; that the walls must be near enough to suggest shelter, the ceiling high enough to give the chandeliers a setting. The place was crowded with the kind of people who dine late and well, and Dr. Archie, as he watched the animated groups in the long room below the balcony, found this much the most festive scene he had ever looked out upon. He said to himself, in a jovial mood somewhat sustained by the cheer of the board, that this evening alone was worth his long journey. He followed attentively the orchestra, ensconced at the farther end of the balcony, and told Thea it made him feel “quite musical” to recognize “The Invitation to the Dance” or “The Blue Danube,” and that he could remember just what kind of day it was when he heard her practicing them at home, and lingered at the gate to listen.

  For the first few moments, when he was introduced to young Ottenburg in the parlor of the Everett House, the doctor had been awkward and unbending. But Fred, as his father had often observed, “was not a good mixer for nothing.” He had brought Dr. Archie around during the short cab ride, and in an hour they had become old friends.

  From the moment when the doctor lifted his glass and, looking consciously at Thea, said, “To your success,” Fred liked him. He felt his quality; understood his courage in some directions and what Thea called his timidity in others, his unspent and miraculously preserved youthfulness. Men could never impose upon the doctor, he guessed, but women always could. Fred liked, too, the doctor’s manner with Thea, his bashful admiration and the little hesitancy by which he betrayed his consciousness of the change in her. It was just this change that, at present, interested Fred more than anything else. That, he felt, was his “created value,” and it was his best chance for any peace of mind. If that were not real, obvious to an old friend like Archie, then he cut a very poor figure, indeed.

  Fred got a good deal, too, out of their talk about Moonstone. From her questions and the doctor’s answers he was able to form some conception of the little world that was almost the measure of Thea’s experience, the one bit of the human drama
that she had followed with sympathy and understanding. As the two ran over the list of their friends, the mere sound of a name seemed to recall volumes to each of them, to indicate mines of knowledge and observation they had in common. At some names they laughed delightedly, at some indulgently and even tenderly.

  “You two young people must come out to Moonstone when Thea gets back,” the doctor said hospitably.

  “Oh, we shall!” Fred caught it up. “I’m keen to know all these people. It is very tantalizing to hear only their names.”

  “Would they interest an outsider very much, do you think, Dr. Archie?” Thea leaned toward him. “Isn’t it only because we’ve known them since I was little?”

  The doctor glanced at her deferentially. Fred had noticed that he seemed a little afraid to look at her squarely—perhaps a trifle embarrassed by a mode of dress to which he was unaccustomed. “Well, you are practically an outsider yourself, Thea, now,” he observed smiling. “Oh, I know,” he went on quickly in response to her gesture of protest,—”I know you don’t change toward your old friends, but you can see us all from a distance now. It’s all to your advantage that you can still take your old interest, isn’t it, Mr. Ottenburg?”

  “That’s exactly one of her advantages, Dr. Archie. Nobody can ever take that away from her, and none of us who came later can ever hope to rival Moonstone in the impression we make. Her scale of values will always be the Moonstone scale. And, with an artist, that is an advantage.” Fred nodded.

  Dr. Archie looked at him seriously. “You mean it keeps them from getting affected?”

  “Yes; keeps them from getting off the track generally.”

  While the waiter filled the glasses, Fred pointed out to Thea a big black French barytone who was eating anchovies by their tails at one of the tables below, and the doctor looked about and studied his fellow diners.

  “Do you know, Mr. Ottenburg,” he said deeply, “these people all look happier to me than our Western people do. Is it simply good manners on their part, or do they get more out of life?”

  Fred laughed to Thea above the glass he had just lifted. “Some of them are getting a good deal out of it now, doctor. This is the hour when bench-joy brightens.”

  Thea chuckled and darted him a quick glance. “Benchjoy! Where did you get that slang?”

  “That happens to be very old slang, my dear. Older than Moonstone or the sovereign State of Colorado. Our old friend Mr. Nathanmeyer could tell us why it happens to hit you.” He leaned forward and touched Thea’s wrist, “See that fur coat just coming in, Thea. It’s D’Albert. He’s just back from his Western tour. Fine head, hasn’t he?”

  “To go back,” said Dr. Archie; “I insist that people do look happier here. I’ve noticed it even on the street, and especially in the hotels.”

  Fred turned to him cheerfully. “New York people live a good deal in the fourth dimension, Dr. Archie. It’s that you notice in their faces.”

  The doctor was interested. “The fourth dimension,” he repeated slowly; “and is that slang, too?”

  “No,”—Fred shook his head,—”that’s merely a figure. I mean that life is not quite so personal here as it is in your part of the world. People are more taken up by hobbies, interests that are less subject to reverses than their personal affairs. If you’re interested in Thea’s voice, for instance, or in voices in general, that interest is just the same, even if your mining stocks go down.”

  The doctor looked at him narrowly. “You think that’s about the principal difference between country people and city people, don’t you?”

  Fred was a little disconcerted at being followed up so resolutely, and he attempted to dismiss it with a pleasantry. “I’ve never thought much about it, doctor. But I should say, on the spur of the moment, that that is one of the principal differences between people anywhere. It’s the consolation of fellows like me who don’t accomplish much. The fourth dimension is not good for business, but we think we have a better time.”

  Dr. Archie leaned back in his chair. His heavy shoulders were contemplative. “And she,” he said slowly; “should you say that she is one of the kind you refer to?” He inclined his head toward the shimmer of the pale-green dress beside him. Thea was leaning, just then, over the balcony rail, her head in the light from the chandeliers below.

  “Never, never!” Fred protested. “She’s as hard-headed as the worst of you—with a difference.”

  The doctor sighed. “Yes, with a difference; something that makes a good many revolutions to the second. When she was little I used to feel her head to try to locate it.”

  Fred laughed. “Did you, though? So you were on the track of it? Oh, it’s there! We can’t get round it, miss,” as Thea looked back inquiringly. “Dr. Archie, there’s a fellow townsman of yours I feel a real kinship for.” He pressed a cigar upon Dr. Archie and struck a match for him. “Tell me about Spanish Johnny.”

  The doctor smiled benignantly through the first waves of smoke. “Well, Johnny’s an old patient of mine, and he’s an old admirer of Thea’s. She was born a cosmopolitan, and I expect she learned a good deal from Johnny when she used to run away and go to Mexican Town. We thought it a queer freak then.”

  The doctor launched into a long story, in which he was often eagerly interrupted or joyously confirmed by Thea, who was drinking her coffee and forcing open the petals of the roses with an ardent and rather rude hand. Fred settled down into enjoying his comprehension of his guests. Thea, watching Dr. Archie and interested in his presentation, was unconsciously impersonating her suave, gold-tinted friend. It was delightful to see her so radiant and responsive again. She had kept her promise about looking her best; when one could so easily get together the colors of an apple branch in early spring, that was not hard to do. Even Dr. Archie felt, each time he looked at her, a fresh consciousness. He recognized the fine texture of her mother’s skin, with the difference that, when she reached across the table to give him a bunch of grapes, her arm was not only white, but somehow a little dazzling. She seemed to him taller, and freer in all her movements. She had now a way of taking a deep breath when she was interested, that made her seem very strong, somehow, and brought her at one quite overpoweringly. If he seemed shy, it was not that he was intimidated by her worldly clothes, but that her greater positiveness, her whole augmented self, made him feel that his accustomed manner toward her was inadequate.

  Fred, on his part, was reflecting that the awkward position in which he had placed her would not confine or chafe her long. She looked about at other people, at other women, curiously. She was not quite sure of herself, but she was not in the least afraid or apologetic. She seemed to sit there on the edge, emerging from one world into another, taking her bearings, getting an idea of the concerted movement about her, but with absolute self-confidence. So far from shrinking, she expanded. The mere kindly effort to please Dr. Archie was enough to bring her out.

  There was much talk of aurae at that time, and Fred mused that every beautiful, every compellingly beautiful woman, had an aura, whether other people did or no. There was, certainly, about the woman he had brought up from Mexico, such an emanation. She existed in more space than she occupied by measurement. The enveloping air about her head and shoulders was subsidized—was more moving than she herself, for in it lived the awakenings, all the first sweetness that life kills in people. One felt in her such a wealth of jugendzeit, all those flowers of the mind and the blood that bloom and perish by the myriad in the few exhaustless years when the imagination first kindles. It was in watching her as she emerged like this, in being near and not too near, that one got, for a moment, so much that one had lost; among other legendary things the legendary theme of the absolutely magical power of a beautiful woman.

  After they had left Thea at her hotel, Dr. Archie admitted to Fred, as they walked up Broadway through the rapidly chilling air, that once before he had seen their young friend flash up into a more potent self, but in a darker mood. It was in his office one night, wh
en she was at home the summer before last. “And then I got the idea,” he added simply, “that she would not live like other people: that, for better or worse, she had uncommon gifts.”

  “Oh, we’ll see that it’s for better, you and I,” Fred reassured him. “Won’t you come up to my hotel with me? I think we ought to have a long talk.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Dr. Archie gratefully; “I think we ought.”

  V

  Thea was to sail on Tuesday, at noon, and on Saturday Fred Ottenburg arranged for her passage, while she and Dr. Archie went shopping. With rugs and sea-clothes she was already provided; Fred had got everything of that sort she needed for the voyage up from Vera Cruz. On Sunday afternoon Thea went to see the Harsanyis. When she returned to her hotel, she found a note from Ottenburg, saying that he had called and would come again to-morrow.

  On Monday morning, while she was at breakfast, Fred came in. She knew by his hurried, distracted air as he entered the dining-room that something had gone wrong. He had just got a telegram from home. His mother had been thrown from her carriage and hurt; a concussion of some sort, and she was unconscious. He was leaving for St. Louis that night on the eleven o’clock train. He had a great deal to attend to during the day. He would come that evening, if he might, and stay with her until train time, while she was doing her packing. Scarcely waiting for her consent, he hurried away.

  All day Thea was somewhat cast down. She was sorry for Fred, and she missed the feeling that she was the one person in his mind. He had scarcely looked at her when they exchanged words at the breakfast-table. She felt as if she were set aside, and she did not seem so important even to herself as she had yesterday. Certainly, she reflected, it was high time that she began to take care of herself again. Dr. Archie came for dinner, but she sent him away early, telling him that she would be ready to go to the boat with him at half-past ten the next morning. When she went upstairs, she looked gloomily at the open trunk in her sitting-room, and at the trays piled on the sofa. She stood at the window and watched a quiet snowstorm spending itself over the city. More than anything else, falling snow always made her think of Moonstone; of the Kohlers’ garden, of Thor’s sled, of dressing by lamplight and starting off to school before the paths were broken.