Collected Stories

by Willa Cather

  All these possibilities of voice made his evening talk in the spring dusk very interesting; interesting for Trueman and for me. I found many pretexts for lingering near them, and they never seemed to mind my hanging about. I was very quiet. I often sat on the edge of the sidewalk with my feet hanging down and played jacks by the hour when there was moonlight. On dark nights I sometimes perched on top of one of the big goods-boxes—we called them “store boxes,”—there were usually several of these standing empty on the sidewalk against the red brick wall.

  I liked to listen to those two because theirs was the only “conversation” one could hear about the streets. The older men talked of nothing but politics and their business, and the very young men’s talk was entirely what they called “josh”; very personal, supposed to be funny, and really not funny at all. It was scarcely speech, but noises, snorts, giggles, yawns, sneezes, with a few abbreviated words and slang expressions which stood for a hundred things. The original Indians of the Kansas plains had more to do with articulate speech than had our promising young men.

  To be sure my two aristocrats sometimes discussed politics, and joked each other about the policies and pretentions of their respective parties. Mr. Dillon, of course, was a Democrat,—it was in the very frosty sparkle of his speech,—and Mr. Trueman was a Republican; his rear, as he walked about the town, looked a little like the walking elephant labelled “G. O. P.” in Puck. But each man seemed to enjoy hearing his party ridiculed, took it as a compliment.

  In the spring their talk was usually about weather and planting and pasture and cattle. Mr. Dillon went about the country in his light buckboard a great deal at that season, and he knew what every farmer was doing and what his chances were, just how much he was falling behind or getting ahead.

  “I happened to drive by Oscar Ericson’s place today, and I saw as nice a lot of calves as you could find anywhere,” he would begin, and Ericson’s history and his family would be pretty thoroughly discussed before they changed the subject.

  Or he might come out with something sharp: “By the way, J. H., I saw an amusing sight today. I turned in at Sandy Bright’s place to get water for my horse, and he had a photographer out there taking pictures of his house and barn. It would be more to the point if he had a picture taken of the mortgages he’s put on that farm.”

  Trueman would give a short, mirthless response, more like a cough than a laugh.

  Those April nights, when the darkness itself tasted dusty (or, by the special mercy of God, cool and damp), when the smell of burning grass was in the air, and a sudden breeze brought the scent of wild plum blossoms,—those evenings were only a restless preparation for the summer nights,—nights of full liberty and perfect idleness. Then there was no school, and one’s family never bothered about where one was. My parents were young and full of life, glad to have the children out of the way. All day long there had been the excitement that intense heat produces in some people,—a mild drunkenness made of sharp contrasts; thirst and cold water, the blazing stretch of Main Street and the cool of the brick stores when one dived into them. By nightfall one was ready to be quiet. My two friends were always in their best form on those moonlit summer nights, and their talk covered a wide range.

  I suppose there were moonless nights, and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, just as in the spring. But I remember them all as flooded by the rich indolence of a full moon, or a half-moon set in uncertain blue. Then Trueman and Dillon would sit with their coats off and have a supply of fresh handkerchiefs to mop their faces; they were more largely and positively themselves. One could distinguish their features, the stripes on their shirts, the flash of Mr. Dillon’s diamond; but their shadows made two dark masses on the white sidewalk. The brick wall behind them, faded almost pink by the burning of successive summers, took on a carnelian hue at night. Across the street, which was merely a dusty road, lay an open space, with a few stunted box-elder trees, where the farmers left their wagons and teams when they came to town. Beyond this space stood a row of frail wooden buildings, due to be pulled down any day; tilted, crazy, with outside stairs going up to rickety second-storey porches that sagged in the middle. They had once been white, but were now grey, with faded blue doors along the wavy upper porches. These abandoned buildings, an eyesore by day, melted together into a curious pile in the moonlight, became an immaterial structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted patch of sage-green that had once been a shutter.

  The road, just in front of the sidewalk where I sat and played jacks, would be ankle-deep in dust, and seemed to drink up the moonlight like folds of velvet. It drank up sound, too; muffled the wagon-wheels and hoof-beats; lay soft and meek like the last residuum of material things,—the soft bottom resting-place. Nothing in the world, not snow mountains or blue seas, is so beautiful in moonlight as the soft, dry summer roads in a farming country, roads where the white dust falls back from the slow wagon-wheel.

  Wonderful things do happen even in the dullest places—in the cornfields and the wheat-fields. Sitting there on the edge of the sidewalk one summer night, my feet hanging in the warm dust, I saw an occultation of Venus. Only the three of us were there. It was a hot night, and the clerks had closed the store and gone home. Mr. Dillon and Mr. Trueman waited on a little while to watch. It was a very blue night, breathless and clear, not the smallest cloud from horizon to horizon. Everything up there overhead seemed as usual, it was the familiar face of a summer-night sky. But presently we saw one bright star moving. Mr. Dillon called to me; told me to watch what was going to happen, as I might never chance to see it again in my lifetime.

  That big star certainly got nearer and nearer the moon,—very rapidly, too, until there was not the width of your hand between them—now the width of two fingers—then it passed directly into the moon at about the middle of its girth; absolutely disappeared. The star we had been watching was gone. We waited, I do not know how long, but it seemed to me about fifteen minutes. Then we saw a bright wart on the other edge of the moon, but for a second only,—the machinery up there worked fast. While the two men were exclaiming and telling me to look, the planet swung clear of the golden disk, a rift of blue came between them and widened very fast. The planet did not seem to move, but that inky blue space between it and the moon seemed to spread. The thing was over.

  My friends stayed on long past their usual time and talked about eclipses and such matters.

  “Let me see,” Mr. Trueman remarked slowly, “they reckon the moon’s about two hundred and fifty thousand miles away from us. I wonder how far that star is.”

  “I don’t know, J. H., and I really don’t much care. When we can get the tramps off the railroad, and manage to run this town with one fancy house instead of two, and have a Federal Government that is as honest as a good banking business, then it will be plenty of time to turn our attention to the star.”

  Mr. Trueman chuckled and took his cigar from between his teeth. “Maybe the stars will throw some light on all that, if we get the run of them,” he said humorously. Then he added: “Mustn’t be a reformer, R. E. Nothing in it. That’s the only time you ever get off on the wrong foot. Life is what it always has been, always will be. No use to make a fuss.” He got up, said: “Good-night, R. E.,” said goodnight to me, too, because this had been an unusual occasion, and went down the sidewalk with his wide, sailor-like tread, as if he were walking the deck of his own ship.

  When Dillon and Trueman went to St. Joseph, or, as we called it, St. Joe, they stopped at the same hotel, but their diversions were very dissimilar. Mr. Dillon was a family man and a good Catholic; he behaved in St. Joe very much as if he were at home. His sister was Mother Superior of a convent there, and he went to see her often. The nuns made much of him, and he enjoyed their admiration and all the ceremony with which they entertained him. When his two daughters were going to the convent school, he used to give theatre parties for them, inviting their frie
nds.

  Mr. Trueman’s way of amusing himself must have tried his friend’s patience—Dillon liked to regulate other people’s affairs if they needed it. Mr. Trueman had a lot of poker-playing friends among the commission men in St. Joe, and he sometimes dropped a good deal of money. He was supposed to have rather questionable women friends there, too. The grasshopper men of our town used to say that Trueman was financial adviser to a woman who ran a celebrated sporting house. Mary Trent, her name was. She must have been a very unusual woman; she had credit with all the banks, and never got into any sort of trouble. She had formerly been head mistress of a girls’ finishing school and knew how to manage young women. It was probably a fact that Trueman knew her and found her interesting, as did many another sound business man of that time. Mr. Dillon must have shut his ears to these rumors,—a measure of the great value he put on Trueman’s companionship.

  Though they did not see much of each other on these trips, they immensely enjoyed taking them together. They often dined together at the end of the day, and afterwards went to the theatre. They both loved the theatre; not this play or that actor, but the theatre,—whether they saw Hamlet or Pinafore. It was an age of good acting, and the drama held a more dignified position in the world than it holds today.

  After Dillon and Trueman had come home from the city, they used sometimes to talk over the plays they had seen, recalling the great scenes and fine effects. Occasionally an item in the Kansas City Star would turn their talk to the stage.

  “J. H., I see by the paper that Edwin Booth is very sick,” Mr. Dillon announced one evening as Trueman came up to take the empty chair.

  “Yes, I noticed.” Trueman sat down and lit his dead cigar. “He’s not a young man any more.” A long pause. Dillon always seemed to know when the pause would be followed by a remark, and waited for it. “The first time I saw Edwin Booth was in Buffalo. It was in Richard the Second, and it made a great impression on me at the time.” Another pause. “I don’t know that I’d care to see him in that play again. I like tragedy, but that play’s a little too tragic. Something very black about it. I think I prefer Hamlet.”

  They had seen Mary Anderson in St. Louis once, and talked of it for years afterwards. Mr. Dillon was very proud of her because she was a Catholic girl, and called her “our Mary.” It was curious that a third person, who had never seen these actors or read the plays, could get so much of the essence of both from the comments of two business men who used none of the language in which such things are usually discussed, who merely reminded each other of moments here and there in the action. But they saw the play over again as they talked of it, and perhaps whatever is seen by the narrator as he speaks is sensed by the listener, quite irrespective of words. This transference of experience went further: in some way the lives of those two men came across to me as they talked, the strong, bracing reality of successful, large-minded men who had made their way in the world when business was still a personal adventure.

  II

  Mr. Dillon went to Chicago once a year to buy goods for his store. Trueman would usually accompany him as far as St. Joe, but no farther. He dismissed Chicago as “too big.” He didn’t like to be one of the crowd, didn’t feel at home in a city where he wasn’t recognized as J. H. Trueman.

  It was one of these trips to Chicago that brought about the end—for me and for them; a stupid, senseless, commonplace end.

  Being a Democrat, already somewhat “tainted” by the free-silver agitation, one spring Dillon delayed his visit to Chicago in order to be there for the Democratic Convention—it was the Convention that first nominated Bryan.

  On the night after his return from Chicago, Mr. Dillon was seated in his chair on the sidewalk, surrounded by a group of men who wanted to hear all about the nomination of a man from a neighbour State. Mr. Trueman came across the street in his leisurely way, greeted Dillon, and asked him how he had found Chicago,—whether he had had a good trip.

  Mr. Dillon must have been annoyed because Trueman didn’t mention the Convention. He threw back his head rather haughtily. “Well, J. H., since I saw you last, we’ve found a great leader in this country, and a great orator.” There was a frosty sparkle in his voice that presupposed opposition,—like the feint of a boxer getting ready.

  “Great windbag!” muttered Trueman. He sat down in his chair, but I noticed that he did not settle himself and cross his legs as usual.

  Mr. Dillon gave an artificial laugh. “It’s nothing against a man to be a fine orator. All the great leaders have been eloquent. This Convention was a memorable occasion; it gave the Democratic party a rebirth.”

  “Gave it a black eye, and a blind spot, I’d say!” commented Trueman. He didn’t raise his voice, but he spoke with more heat than I had ever heard from him. After a moment he added: “I guess Grover Cleveland must be a sick man; must feel like he’d taken a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  Mr. Dillon ignored these thrusts and went on telling the group around him about the Convention, but there was a special nimbleness and exactness in his tongue, a chill politeness in his voice that meant anger. Presently he turned again to Mr. Trueman, as if he could now trust himself:

  “It was one of the great speeches of history, J. H.; our grandchildren will have to study it in school, as we did Patrick Henry’s.”

  “Glad I haven’t got any grandchildren, if they’d be brought up on that sort of tall talk,” said Mr. Trueman. “Sounds like a schoolboy had written it. Absolutely nothing back of it but an unsound theory.”

  Mr. Dillon’s laugh made me shiver; it was like a thin glitter of danger. He arched his curly eyebrows provokingly.

  “We’ll have four years of currency reform, anyhow. By the end of that time, you old dyed-in-the-wool Republicans will be thinking differently. The under dog is going to have a chance.”

  Mr. Trueman shifted in his chair. “That’s no way for a banker to talk.” He spoke very low. “The Democrats will have a long time to be sorry they ever turned Pops. No use talking to you while your Irish is up. I’ll wait till you cool off.” He rose and walked away, less deliberately than usual, and Mr. Dillon, watching his retreating figure, laughed haughtily and disagreeably. He asked the grain-elevator man to take the vacated chair. The group about him grew, and he sat expounding the reforms proposed by the Democratic candidate until a late hour.

  For the first time in my life I listened with breathless interest to a political discussion. Whoever Mr. Dillon failed to convince, he convinced me. I grasped it at once: that gold had been responsible for most of the miseries and inequalities of the world; that it had always been the club the rich and cunning held over the poor; and that “the free and unlimited coinage of silver” would remedy all this. Dillon declared that young Mr. Bryan had looked like the patriots of old when he faced and challenged high finance with: “You shall not press this crown of thorns upon the brow of labour; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” I thought that magnificent; I thought the cornfields would show them a thing or two, back there!

  R. E. Dillon had never taken an aggressive part in politics. But from that night on, the Democratic candidate and the free-silver plank were the subject of his talks with his customers and depositors. He drove about the country convincing the farmers, went to the neighbouring towns to use his influence with the merchants, organized the Bryan Club and the Bryan Ladies’ Quartette in our county, contributed largely to the campaign fund. This was all a new line of conduct for Mr. Dillon, and it sat unsteadily on him. Even his voice became unnatural; there was a sting of come-back in it. His new character made him more like other people and took away from his special personal quality. I wonder whether it was not Trueman, more than Bryan, who put such an edge on him.

  While all these things were going on, Trueman kept to his own office. He came to Dillon’s bank on business, but he did not “come back to the sidewalk,” as I put it to myself. He waited and said nothing, but he looked grim. After a month or so, when he saw that this thing
was not going to blow over, when he heard how Dillon had been talking to representative men all over the county, and saw the figure he had put down for the campaign fund, then Trueman remarked to some of his friends that a banker had no business to commit himself to a scatter-brained financial policy which would destroy credit.

  The next morning Mr. Trueman went to the bank across the street, the rival of Dillon’s, and wrote a cheque on Dillon’s bank “for the amount of my balance.” He wasn’t the sort of man who would ever know what his balance was, he merely kept it big enough to cover emergencies. That afternoon the Merchants’ National took the check over to Dillon on its collecting rounds, and by night the word was all over town that Trueman had changed his bank. After this there would be no going back, people said. To change your bank was one of the most final things you could do. The little, unsuccessful men were pleased, as they always are at the destruction of anything strong and fine.

  All through the summer and the autumn of that campaign Mr. Dillon was away a great deal. When he was at home, he took his evening airing on the sidewalk, and there was always a group of men about him, talking of the coming election; that was the most exciting presidential campaign people could remember. I often passed this group on my way to the post-office, but there was no temptation to linger now. Mr. Dillon seemed like another man, and my zeal to free humanity from the cross of gold had cooled. Mr. Trueman I seldom saw. When he passed me on the street, he nodded kindly.