Willa Sibert Cather

“ And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He couldn’t see Tom building “Outland,” or becoming a public-spirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he
lived, must have been put to other uses. ”

“ Crane was narrow, but he was straight; a man you could count on in the shifty game of college politics. He had never been out to get anything for himself. St. Peter would have said that nothing about the vulgar success of Outland’s idea could possibly matter to Crane, beyond gratifying his pride as a teacher and friend.
The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small and tight and airless. ”

“ Peter first began his work, he realized that his great drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures. By the time he had got as far as the third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and stones and water-courses tell only to adolescence. ”

“ The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the bluegrey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flamecolour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. ”

“ I left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more depressing they are than workmen coming out of a factory.
I was terribly disappointed when I got off the train at Tarpin and Roddy wasn’t at the station to meet me. It was late in the afternoon, almost dark, and I went straight to the livery stable to ask Bill Hook for news of Blake. ”

“ And it was there he and Tom Outland used to sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights.
On this September morning, however, St. Peter knew that he could not evade the unpleasant effects of change by tarrying among his autumn flowers. He must plunge in like a man, and get used to the feeling that under his work-room there was a dead, empty house. He broke off a geranium blossom, and with it still in his hand went resolutely up two flights of stairs to the third floor where, under the slope of the mansard roof, there was one room still furnished—that is, if it had ever been furnished. ”

“ The rain-storm was over in half an hour, but a heavy blow had set in for the night. The wind would be a protection, he thought. Even Augusta would hardly come plodding up the stairs to-night. It seemed strange to be dreading Augusta, but just now he did dread her. He believed he was safe, for to-night. Though it was only five o’clock, the sky was black, and the room was dusky and chilly. He lit the stove and lay down on the couch. The fire made a flickering pattern of light on the wall. ”

“ He could not live with his family again—not even with Lillian. Especially not with Lillian! Her nature was intense and positive; it was like a chiselled surface, a die, a stamp upon which he could not be beaten out any longer. If her character were reduced to an heraldic device, it would be a hand (a beautiful hand) holding flaming arrows—the shafts of her violent loves and hates, her clear-cut ambitions.
“In great misfortunes,” he told himself, “people want to be alone. ”

“ I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn't go into the bunk-room, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. ”

“ Rosamond happened to ask Tom, who sat in his white flannels, fanning himself with his straw hat, if spring in the South-west was as warm as this.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “May is usually chilly down there—bright sun, but a kind of edge in the wind, and cool nights. Last night reminded me of smothery May nights in Washington.”
Mrs. St. Peter glanced up. “You mean Washington City? I didn’t know you had ever been so far east.” ”

“ By eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that it now made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to his university lectures, and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece of creative work. A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland,—and he had foretold. ”

“ Crane was wearing a grey cotton coat, shrunk to a rag by washing, though he wasn’t working with fluids or batteries to-night, but at a roll-top desk littered with papers. The room was like any study behind a lecture room; dusty books, dusty files, but no apparatus—except a spirit-lamp and a little saucepan in which the physicist heated water for his cocoa at regular intervals. He was working by the glare of an unshaded electric bulb of high power— the man seemed to have no feeling for comfort of any kind. ”

“ In Nature there is no selection.
In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. “Of course emeralds would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale—to belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live here. You aren’t, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear them?”
“At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinnertable at Outland! ”

“ He even spent a little money to bear half the expense of the stucco wall.
The Professor had succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton. There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers. There were trees, of course; a spreading horse-chestnut, a row of slender Lombardy poplars at the back, along the white wall, and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees. Masses of green-brier grew in the corners, the prickly stems interwoven and clipped until they were like great bushes. There was a bed for salad herbs. ”

“ Because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary. Because there was marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters. His histories, he was convinced, had no more to do with his original ego than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young manhood.
The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. ”

“ I studied in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked at clearing away the mess the German had made in packing—tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for the right explorer. I can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide. Every morning, when the sun’s rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow, I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything. ”

“ Peter tried in vain to justify himself in his inevitable refusal. He liked Paris, and he liked Louie. But one couldn’t do one’s own things in another person’s way; selfish or not, that was the truth. Besides, he would not be needed. He could trust Louie to take every care of Lillian, and nobody could please her more than her son-in-law. ”

“ But when he looked up from his writing as the Angelus was ringing, two faces at once rose in the shadows outside the yellow circle of his lamp: the handsome face of his older daughter, surrounded by violet-dappled fur, with a cruel upper lip and scornful half-closed eyes, as she had approached her car that afternoon before she saw him; and Kathleen, her square little chin set so fiercely, her white cheeks actually becoming green under her swollen eyes. ”

“ It’s not her clothes, it’s a feeling she has inside her. When she comes toward me, I feel hate coming toward me, like a snake’s hate!”
St. Peter wiped his moist forehead. He was suffering with her, as if she had been in physical anguish. “We can’t, dear, we can’t, in this world, let ourselves think of things—of comparisons— like that. We are all too susceptible to ugly suggestions. If Rosamond has a grievance, it’s because you’ve been untactful about Louie.” ”

“ When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too “I cango-it-alone,” about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn’t like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.
She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at water-colour portrait sketches. ”

“ Occasionally, at the family dinner-table, the old man would try to rouse him- self, from motives of politeness, and would ask some kindly question-nearly always absurd and often the same one he had asked yesterday. The boys used to shout with laughter and wonder what profound matters could require such deep meditation, and make a man speak so foolishly about what was going on under his very eyes. St. Peter thought he was beginning to understand what the old man had been thinking about, though he himself was but fifty-two, and Napoleon had been well on in his eighties. ”

“ Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual work wouldn’t have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to their hands. ”

“ Tom Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great deal.
“Am I interrupting something important, Papa?”
“No, not at all, my dear. Sit down.”
On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his—a script she knew very well.
“Not much choice of chairs, is there?” she smiled. “Papa, I don’t like to have you working in a place like this. It’s not fitting.”
“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.” ”

“ Humour is always better if it’s spontaneous.”
“Oh, that’s the trouble with me,” Scott assured her. “Unless I keep my nose to the grindstone, I’m too damned spontaneous and tell the truth, and the public won’t stand for it. It’s not an editorial I have to finish, it’s the daily prose poem I do for the syndicate, for which I get twenty-five beans. This is the motif:
Bang, bang!”
He threw his cigar-end savagely into the fireplace. He knew that Rosamond detested his editorials and his jingles. ”

“ You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have foolish vanities-you had plenty."
St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing absently with the tassels of his bath-robe. "Why, Lillian, I have exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my class-rooms. My forbearance is overstrained, it's gone flat. That's what's the matter with me."
"Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour? But we won't argue about You'll put on your dinner coat? ”

“ Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature. ”

“ Peter developed the argument. “Yes, Louie, you and Godfrey can lunch with the scholars while Rosamond and I are shopping.”
Marsellus looked alarmed. “Not at all, Dearest! It’s to be understood that I always shop with you. I adore the shops in Paris. Besides, we shall want you with us when we lunch with celebrities. When was a savant, and a Frenchman, not eager for the company of two charming ladies at dejeuner? And you may have too much of the society of your sposi; very nice for you to have variety. ”