by Willa Cather
The first member of Cressida’s party with whom I had speech was Mr. Poppas. When we were two hours out I came upon him in the act of dropping overboard a steamer cushion made of American flags. Cressida never sailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reach her at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left his hand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, his fingers contemptuously sprung back. “Lest we forgedt!” he said with a shrug. “Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your company for this voyage?” He spoke deliberate, grammatical English—he despised the American rendering of the language—but there was an indescribably foreign quality in his voice,—a something muted; and though he aspirated his “th’s” with such conscientious thoroughness, there was always the thud of a “d” in them. Poppas stood before me in a short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind Cressida’s shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold, supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,—very close together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something like defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it out with you, or with the world, at last.
I asked him if Cressida had engagements in London.
“Quite so; the Manchester Festival, some concerts at Queen’s Hall, and the Opera at Covent Garden; a rather special production of the operas of Mozart. That she can still do quite well,—which is not at all, of course, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that our Madame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules.” Poppas’ tone about his client was consistently patronizing, and he was always trying to draw one into a conspiracy of two, based on a mutual understanding of her shortcomings.
I approached him on the one subject I could think of which was more personal than his usefulness to Cressida, and asked him whether he still suffered from facial neuralgia2 as much as he had done in former years, and whether he was therefore dreading London, where the climate used to be so bad for him.
“And is still,” he caught me up, “And is still! For me to go to London is martyrdom, chère Madame. In New York it is bad enough, but in London it is the auto da fé,3 nothing less. My nervous system is exotic in any country washed by the Atlantic ocean, and it shivers like a little hairless dog from Mexico. It never relaxes. I think I have told you about my favourite city in the middle of Asia, la sainte Asie,4 where the rainfall is absolutely nil, and you are protected on every side by hundreds of meters of warm, dry sand. I was there when I was a child once, and it is still my intention to retire there when I have finished with all this. I would be there now, n-ow-ow,” his voice rose querulously, “if Madame Cressida did not imagine that she needs me,—and her fancies, you know,” he flourished his hands, “one gives in to them. In humouring her caprices you and I have already played some together.”
We were approaching Cressida’s deck chairs, ranged under the open windows of her stateroom. She was already recumbent, swathed in lavender scarfs and wearing purple orchids—doubtless from Jerome Brown. At her left, Horace had settled down to a French novel, and Julia Garnet, at her right, was complainingly regarding the grey horizon. On seeing me, Cressida struggled under her fur-lined robes and got to her feet,—which was more than Horace or Miss Julia managed to do. Miss Julia, as I could have foretold, was not pleased. All the Garnets had an awkward manner with me. Whether it was that I reminded them of things they wished to forget, or whether they thought I esteemed Cressida too highly and the rest of them too lightly, I do not know; but my appearance upon their scene always put them greatly on their dignity. After Horace had offered me his chair and Miss Julia had said doubtfully that she thought I was looking rather better than when she last saw me, Cressida took my arm and walked me off toward the stern.
“Do you know, Carrie, I half wondered whether I shouldn’t find you here, or in London, because you always turn up at critical moments in my life.” She pressed my arm confidentially, and I felt that she was once more wrought up to a new purpose. I told her that I had heard some rumour of her engagement.
“It’s quite true, and it’s all that it should be,” she reassured me. “I’ll tell you about it later, and you’ll see that it’s a real solution. They are against me, of course,—all except Horace. He has been such a comfort.”
Horace’s support, such as it was, could always be had in exchange for his mother’s signature, I suspected. The pale May day had turned bleak and chilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air from somewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida’s face, and felt reassured of her unabated vitality; the old force of will was still there, and with it her characteristic optimism, the old hope of a “solution.”
“You have been in Columbus lately?” she was saying. “No, you needn’t tell me about it,” with a sigh. “Why is it, Caroline, that there is so little of my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I can even think of without depression. Yet I’ve really not such a bad conscience. It may mean that I still belong to the future more than to the past, do you think?”
My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went on thoughtfully: “Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period. But I’ve sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me, too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!” she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection. “Sea air always lets me down at first. That’s why it’s so good for me in the end.”
“I think Julia always lets you down, too,” I said bluntly. “But perhaps that depression works out in the same way.”
Cressida laughed. “Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn’t she? But it was Julia’s turn. I can’t come alone, and they’ve grown to expect it. They haven’t, either of them, much else to expect.”
At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. “A wireless for you, Madame Garnet.”
Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, and with every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope. “It’s from Jerome Brown,” she said with some confusion, as she folded the paper small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown, “Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; I want you to meet him. We shall probably be married there as soon as my engagements are over.” She rose. “Now I must write some letters. Keep two places at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine with you sometimes.”
I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was now reclining. He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head and entered the door of her deck suite. As she passed him, his eye went over her with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper in her corsage. He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward’s hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the world. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he did his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,—for the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere down in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies; paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace was usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace’s.
The three of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and always
doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass: I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind each pair of them.
These three were sitting there in a row because they were all woven into the pattern of one large and rather splendid life. Each had a bond, and each had a grievance. If they could have their will, what would they do with the generous, credulous creature who nourished them, I wondered? How deep a humiliation would each egotism exact? They would scarcely have harmed her in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia looked forward to the day when Cressida would “break” and could be mourned over),—but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secret hope,—the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going,—that they would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet pack behind them to make extinction sure. All, except, perhaps, Miletus Poppas. He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one.5 But I always felt that if ever he had her thus at his mercy,—if ever he came upon the softness that was hidden under so much hardness, the warm credulity under a life so dated and scheduled and “reported” and generally exposed,—he would hold his hand and spare.
The weather grew steadily rougher. Miss Julia at last plucked Poppas by the sleeve and indicated that she wished to be released from her wrappings. When she disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hope that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had not brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some other Garnet. Cressida’s family was like that of the unpopular Prince of Wales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:If it had been his brother,
Better him than another.
If it had been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive and intrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially to Ohio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Both sisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musical societies, and they were continually travelling up and down the Middle West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of two sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida’s face when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their letters by to read “when she was feeling up to it” and hastened to open others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant. Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days. Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her account and because she was so much a public personage.
The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters, were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy. They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York.6 They thought that was the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the last analysis, was to be Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark, and afterward in the light,—which, with her bad preparation, and with her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanan told me he thought Cressida ought “to make herself one of them,” he stated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities which had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. More than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.
“Sometimes,” I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those sloppily written letters, “sometimes I get discouraged.”
For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in Cressida’s deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the Signorina Garnet was “difficile.” After dinner I usually found Cressida unencumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself interesting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, the third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges, Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.
I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton, Horace’s father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus, and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosis two years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a long illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of chances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particular reason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluring promise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed to me more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained to me on former occasions.
“It’s nothing hasty,” she assured me. “It’s been coming on for several years. He has never pushed me, but he was always there—some one to count on. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still singing at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from the others; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. You can’t know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back, you’ll see it’s something I’ve never had.”
I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted to leaning on people.
“I’ve never had any one to lean on,” she said with a short laugh. Then she went on, quite seriously: “Somehow, my relations with people always become business relations in the end. I suppose it’s because,—except for a sort of professional personality, which I’ve had to get, just as I’ve had to get so many other things,—I’ve not very much that’s personal to give people. I’ve had to give too much else. I’ve had to try too hard for people who wouldn’t try at all.”
“Which,” I put in firmly, “has done them no good, and has robbed the people who really cared about you.”
“By making me grubby, you mean?”
“By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty.”
She nodded mournfully. “Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well, there’s not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that I carried off the family success, just as I might have carried off the family silver,—if there’d been any! They take the view that there were just so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there were none left for the others. At my age, that’s a dismal truth to waken up to.” Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she needed courage to face the facts in her case. “When one remembers one’s first success; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full of presents—How much one learns in a life-time! That year when Horace was a baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I didn’t drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don’t know to this day. At twenty-two you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was the same afterward
in Germany. A young woman must live for human people. Horace wasn’t enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose you will say it would have been better if I had.”
Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover than to that of a discontented and envious family.
“Well,” Cressida gathered herself up, “once I got out from under it all, didn’t I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again. You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. That time, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn’t distracted or empty. That time I was all there!”
“Yes,” I echoed her, “that time you were all there. It’s the greatest possible satisfaction to remember it.”
“But even that,” she sighed, “was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the end—and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter with me?”
The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known, she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.
We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish to take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressida rose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at the stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor, little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family units, presumably,— male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if it were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response. Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk between my friends. Cressida’s voice was deep and entreating. She was remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep away from the cardroom.
