Collected Stories

by Willa Cather

  The twins ran out in a joyful frame of mind. Their grandmother had been mistaken; their mother wasn’t indifferent about Blue Boy, she was sorry. Now everything was all right, and they could make a circus ring.

  They knew their grandmother got put out about strange things, anyhow. A few months ago it was because their mother hadn’t asked one of the visiting preachers who came to the church conference to stay with them. There was no place for the preacher to sleep except on the folding lounge in the parlour, and no place for him to wash—he would have been very uncomfortable, and so would all the household. But Mrs. Harris was terribly upset that there should be a conference in the town, and they not keeping a preacher! She was quite bitter about it.

  The twins called in the neighbour boys, and they made a ring in the back yard, around their turning-bar. Their mother came to the show and paid admission, bringing Mrs. Rosen and Grandma Harris. Mrs. Rosen thought if all the children in the neighbourhood were to be howling and running in a circle in the Templetons’ back yard, she might as well be there, too, for she would have no peace at home.

  After the dog races and the Indian fight were over, Mrs. Templeton took Mrs. Rosen into the house to revive her with cake and lemonade. The parlour was cool and dusky. Mrs. Rosen was glad to get into it after sitting on a wooden bench in the sun. Grandmother stayed in the parlour with them, which was unusual. Mrs. Rosen sat waving a palm-leaf fan,—she felt the heat very much, because she wore her stays so tight—while Victoria went to make the lemonade.

  “De circuses are not so good, widout Vickie to manage them, Grandma,” she said.

  “No’m. The boys complain right smart about losing Vickie from their plays. She’s at her books all the time now. I don’t know what’s got into the child.”

  “If she wants to go to college, she must prepare herself, Grandma. I am agreeably surprised in her. I didn’t think she’d stick to it.”

  Mrs. Templeton came in with a tray of tumblers and the glass pitcher all frosted over. Mrs. Rosen wistfully admired her neighbour’s tall figure and good carriage; she was wearing no corsets at all today under her flowered organdie afternoon dress, Mrs. Rosen had noticed, and yet she could carry herself so smooth and straight,—after having had so many children, too! Mrs. Rosen was envious, but she gave credit where credit was due.

  When Mrs. Templeton brought in the cake, Mrs. Rosen was still talking to Grandmother about Vickie’s studying. Mrs. Templeton shrugged carelessly.

  “There’s such a thing as overdoing it, Mrs. Rosen,” she observed as she poured the lemonade. “Vickie’s very apt to run to extremes.”

  “But, my dear lady, she can hardly be too extreme in dis matter. If she is to take a competitive examination with girls from much better schools than ours, she will have to do better than the others, or fail; no two ways about it. We must encourage her.”

  Mrs. Templeton bridled a little. “I’m sure I don’t interfere with her studying, Mrs. Rosen. I don’t see where she got this notion, but I let her alone.”

  Mrs. Rosen accepted a second piece of chocolate cake. “And what do you think about it, Grandma?”

  Mrs. Harris smiled politely. “None of our people, or Mr. Templeton’s either, ever went to college. I expect it is all on account of the young gentleman who was here last summer.”

  Mrs. Rosen laughed and lifted her eyebrows. “Something very personal in Vickie’s admiration for Professor Chalmers we think, Grandma? A very sudden interest in de sciences, I should say!”

  Mrs. Templeton shrugged. “You’re mistaken, Mrs. Rosen. There ain’t a particle of romance in Vickie.”

  “But there are several kinds of romance, Mrs. Templeton. She may not have your kind.”

  “Yes’m, that’s so,” said Mrs. Harris in a low, grateful voice. She thought that a hard word Victoria had said of Vickie.

  “I didn’t see a thing in that Professor Chalmers, myself,” Victoria remarked. “He was a gawky kind of fellow, and never had a thing to say in company. Did you think he amounted to much?”

  “Oh, widout doubt Doctor Chalmers is a very scholarly man. A great many brilliant scholars are widout de social graces, you know.” When Mrs. Rosen, from a much wider experience, corrected her neighbour, she did so somewhat playfully, as if insisting upon something Victoria capriciously chose to ignore.

  At this point old Mrs. Harris put her hands on the arms of the chair in preparation to rise. “If you ladies will excuse me, I think I will go and lie down a little before supper.” She rose and went heavily out on her felt soles. She never really lay down in the afternoon, but she dozed in her own black rocker. Mrs. Rosen and Victoria sat chatting about Professor Chalmers and his boys.

  Last summer the young professor had come to Skyline with four of his students from the University of Michigan, and had stayed three months, digging for fossils out in the sandhills. Vickie had spent a great many mornings at their camp. They lived at the town hotel, and drove out to their camp every day in a light spring-wagon. Vickie used to wait for them at the edge of the town, in front of the Roadmaster’s house, and when the spring-wagon came rattling along, the boys would call: “There’s our girl!” slow the horses, and give her a hand up. They said she was their mascot, and were very jolly with her. They had a splendid summer,—found a great bed of fossil elephant bones, where a whole herd must once have perished. Later on they came upon the bones of a new kind of elephant, scarcely larger than a pig. They were greatly excited about their finds, and so was Vickie. That was why they liked her. It was they who told her about a memorial scholarship at Ann Arbor, which was open to any girl from Colorado.

  VIII

  In August Vickie went down to Denver to take her examinations. Mr. Holliday, the Roadmaster, got her a pass, and arranged that she should stay with the family of one of his passenger conductors.

  For three days she wrote examination papers along with other contestants, in one of the Denver high schools, proctored by a teacher. Her father had given her five dollars for incidental expenses, and she came home with a box of mineral specimens for the twins, a singing top for Ronald, and a toy burro for Hughie.

  Then began days of suspense that stretched into weeks. Vickie went to the post-office every morning, opened her father’s combination box, and looked over the letters, long before he got down town,—always hoping there might be a letter from Ann Arbor. The night mail came in at six, and after supper she hurried to the post-office and waited about until the shutter at the general-delivery window was drawn back, a signal that the mail had all been “distributed.” While the tedious process of distribution was going on, she usually withdrew from the office, full of joking men and cigar smoke, and walked up and down under the big cottonwood trees that overhung the side street. When the crowd of men began to come out, then she knew the mail-bags were empty, and she went in to get whatever letters were in the Templeton box and take them home.

  After two weeks went by, she grew down-hearted. Her young professor, she knew, was in England for his vacation. There would be no one at the University of Michigan who was interested in her fate. Perhaps the fortunate contestant had already been notified of her success. She never asked herself, as she walked up and down under the cottonwoods on those summer nights, what she would do if she didn’t get the scholarship. There was no alternative. If she didn’t get it, then everything was over.

  During the weeks when she lived only to go to the post-office, she managed to cut her finger and get ink into the cut. As a result, she had a badly infected hand and had to carry it in a sling. When she walked her nightly beat under the cottonwoods, it was a kind of comfort to feel that finger throb; it was companionship, made her case more complete.

  The strange thing was that one morning a letter came, addressed to Miss Victoria Templeton; in a long envelope such as her father called “legal size,” with “University of Michigan” in the upper left-hand corner. When Vickie took it from the box, such a wave of fright and weakness went through her that she could scarc
ely get out of the post-office. She hid the letter under her striped blazer and went a weak, uncertain trail down the sidewalk under the big trees. Without seeing anything or knowing what road she took, she got to the Roadmaster’s green yard and her hammock, where she always felt not on the earth, yet of it.

  Three hours later, when Mrs. Rosen was just tasting one of those clear soups upon which the Templetons thought she wasted so much pains and good meat, Vickie walked in at the kitchen door and said in a low but somewhat unnatural voice:

  “Mrs. Rosen, I got the scholarship.”

  Mrs. Rosen looked up at her sharply, then pushed the soup back to a cooler part of the stove.

  “What is dis you say, Vickie? You have heard from de University?”

  “Yes’m. I got the letter this morning.” She produced it from under her blazer.

  Mrs. Rosen had been cutting noodles. She took Vickie’s face in two hot, plump hands that were still floury, and looked at her intently. “Is dat true, Vickie? No mistake? I am delighted—and surprised! Yes, surprised. Den you will be something, you won’t just sit on de front porch.” She squeezed the girl’s round, good-natured cheeks, as if she could mould them into something definite then and there. “Now you must stay for lunch and tell us all about it. Go in and announce yourself to Mr. Rosen.”

  Mr. Rosen had come home for lunch and was sitting, a book in his hand, in a corner of the darkened front parlour where a flood of yellow sun streamed in under the dark green blind. He smiled his friendly smile at Vickie and waved her to a seat, making her understand that he wanted to finish his paragraph. The dark engraving of the pointed cypresses and the Roman tomb was on the wall just behind him.

  Mrs. Rosen came into the back parlour, which was the dining-room, and began taking things out of the silver-drawer to lay a place for their visitor. She spoke to her husband rapidly in German.

  He put down his book, came over, and took Vickie’s hand.

  “Is it true, Vickie? Did you really win the scholarship?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stood looking down at her through his kind, remote smile,—a smile in the eyes, that seemed to come up through layers and layers of something—gentle doubts, kindly reservations.

  “Why do you want to go to college, Vickie?” he asked playfully.

  “To learn,” she said with surprise.

  “But why do you want to learn? What do you want to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

  “Then what do you want it for?”

  “I don’t know. I just want it.”

  For some reason Vickie’s voice broke there. She had been terribly strung up all morning, lying in the hammock with her eyes tight shut. She had not been home at all, she had wanted to take her letter to the Rosens first. And now one of the gentlest men she knew made her choke by something strange and presageful in his voice.

  “Then if you want it without any purpose at all, you will not be disappointed.” Mr. Rosen wished to distract her and help her to keep back the tears. “Listen: a great man once said: ‘Le but n’est rien; le chemin, c’est tout.’ That means: The end is nothing, the road is all. Let me write it down for you and give you your first French lesson.”

  He went to the desk with its big silver ink-well, where he and his wife wrote so many letters in several languages, and inscribed the sentence on a sheet of purple paper, in his delicately shaded foreign script, signing under it a name: J. Michelet. He brought it back and shook it before Vickie’s eyes. “There, keep it to remember me by. Slip it into the envelope with your college credentials,—that is a good place for it.” From his delicate smile and the twitch of one eyebrow, Vickie knew he meant her to take it along as an antidote, a corrective for whatever colleges might do to her. But she had always known that Mr. Rosen was wiser than professors.

  Mrs. Rosen was frowning, she thought that sentence a bad precept to give any Templeton. Moreover, she always promptly called her husband back to earth when he soared a little; though it was exactly for this transcendental quality of mind that she reverenced him in her heart, and thought him so much finer than any of his successful brothers.

  “Luncheon is served,” she said in the crisp tone that put people in their places. “And Miss Vickie, you are to eat your tomatoes with an oil dressing, as we do. If you are going off into the world, it is quite time you learn to like things that are everywhere accepted.”

  Vickie said: “Yes’m,” and slipped into the chair Mr. Rosen had placed for her. Today she didn’t care what she ate, though ordinarily she thought a French dressing tasted a good deal like castor oil.

  IX

  Vickie was to discover that nothing comes easily in this world. Next day she got a letter from one of the jolly students of Professor Chalmers’s party, who was watching over her case in his chief’s absence. He told her the scholarship meant admission to the freshman class without further examinations, and two hundred dollars toward her expenses; she would have to bring along about three hundred more to put her through the year.

  She took this letter to her father’s office. Seated in his revolving desk-chair, Mr. Templeton read it over several times and looked embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry, daughter,” he said at last, “but really, just now, I couldn’t spare that much. Not this year. I expect next year will be better for us.”

  “But the scholarship is for this year, Father. It wouldn’t count next year. I just have to go in September.”

  “I really ain’t got it, daughter.” He spoke, oh so kindly! He had lovely manners with his daughter and his wife. “It’s just all I can do to keep the store bills paid up. I’m away behind with Mr. Rosen’s bill. Couldn’t you study here this winter and get along about as fast? It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to let you have the money if I had it. And with young children, I can’t let my life insurance go.”

  Vickie didn’t say anything more. She took her letter and wandered down Main Street with it, leaving young Mr. Templeton to a very bad half-hour.

  At dinner Vickie was silent, but everyone could see she had been crying. Mr. Templeton told Uncle Remus stories to keep up the family morale and make the giggly twins laugh. Mrs. Templeton glanced covertly at her daughter from time to time. She was sometimes a little afraid of Vickie, who seemed to her to have a hard streak. If it were a love-affair that the girl was crying about, that would be so much more natural—and more hopeful!

  At two o’clock Mrs. Templeton went to the Afternoon Euchre Club, the twins were to have another ride with the Roadmaster on his velocipede, the little boys took their nap on their mother’s bed. The house was empty and quiet. Vickie felt an aversion for the hammock under the cottonwoods where she had been betrayed into such bright hopes. She lay down on her grandmother’s lounge in the cluttered play-room and turned her face to the wall.

  When Mrs. Harris came in for her rest, and began to wash her face at the tin basin, Vickie got up. She wanted to be alone. Mrs. Harris came over to her while she was still sitting on the edge of the lounge.

  “What’s the matter, Vickie child?” She put her hand on her granddaughter’s shoulder, but Vickie shrank away. Young misery is like that, sometimes.

  “Nothing. Except that I can’t go to college after all. Papa can’t let me have the money.”

  Mrs. Harris settled herself on the faded cushions of her rocker. “How much is it? Tell me about it, Vickie. Nobody’s around.”

  Vickie told her what the conditions were, briefly and dryly, as if she were talking to an enemy. Everyone was an enemy; all society was against her. She told her grandmother the facts and then went upstairs, refusing to be comforted.

  Mrs. Harris saw her disappear through the kitchen door, and then sat looking at the door, her face grave, her eyes stern and sad. A poor factory-made piece of joiner’s work seldom has to bear a look of such intense, accusing sorrow, as if that flimsy pretence of “grained” yellow pine were the door shut against all young aspiration.

  X
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br />   Mrs. Harris had decided to speak to Mr. Templeton, but opportunities for seeing him alone were not frequent. She watched out of the kitchen window, and when she next saw him go into the barn to fork down hay for his horse, she threw an apron over her head and followed him. She waylaid him as he came down from the hayloft.

  “Hillary, I want to see you about Vickie. I was wondering if you could lay hand on any of the money you got for the sale of my house back home.”

  Mr. Templeton was nervous. He began brushing his trousers with a little whisk-broom he kept there, hanging on a nail.

  “Why, no’m, Mrs. Harris. I couldn’t just conveniently call in any of it right now. You know we had to use part of it to get moved up here from the mines.”

  “I know. But I thought if there was any left you could get at, we could let Vickie have it. A body’d like to help the child.”

  “I’d like to, powerful well, Mrs. Harris. I would, indeedy. But I’m afraid I can’t manage it right now. The fellers I’ve loaned to can’t pay up this year. Maybe next year—” He was like a little boy trying to escape a scolding, though he had never had a nagging word from Mrs. Harris.

  She looked downcast, but said nothing.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Harris,” he took on his brisk business tone and hung up the brush. “The money’s perfectly safe. It’s well invested.”

  Invested; that was a word men always held over women, Mrs. Harris thought, and it always meant they could have none of their own money. She sighed deeply.

  “Well, if that’s the way it is—” She turned away and went back to the house on her flat heelless slippers, just in time; Victoria was at that moment coming out to the kitchen with Hughie.

  “Ma,” she said, “can the little boy play out here, while I go down town?”

  XI

  For the next few days Mrs. Harris was very sombre, and she was not well. Several times in the kitchen she was seized with what she called giddy spells, and Mandy had to help her to a chair and give her a little brandy.