The Troll Garden and Selected Stories, Willa Cather [some good books to read txt] 📗

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him, and the brakeman’s frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:

“You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We’re all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can’t spell straight—the Almighty couldn’t teach me to spell. The things that make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there’s scarcely a point where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she’s interested in, it will give her about the only comfort she can have now.”

The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. “Here we are,” he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as “my sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.

When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother’s room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, lifegiving quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual <i>salutat</i> to the world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly well-shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she stood alone.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak, she coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance—with the cough. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key—older, sadder, softer.

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. “I know I’m not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?—for I’m more than usually nervous.”

“Don’t bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I can come quite as well tomorrow.”

“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor that he remembered as a part of her. “It’s solitude that I’m tired to death of—solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me—condoning it, you know—and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent.”

Everett laughed. “Oh! I’m afraid I’m not the person to call after such a serious gentleman—I can’t sustain the situation. At my best I don’t reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?”

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed: “I’m not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn’t study that method.”

She laughed and went on nervously: “The parson’s not so bad. His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon’s <i>Decline and Fall</i>, all five volumes, and that’s something. Then, he has been to New York, and that’s a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you’re just on from there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother’s old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? You see, I’m homesick for it all, from the Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!” She was interrupted by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the <i>Rheingold</i>, when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As he did so she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!” and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made them seem quite boyish. “Yes, isn’t it absurd? It’s almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon—but, after all, there are some advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you.”

Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. “Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people and then blush and look cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night when you took me home from a rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?”

“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and worldly.

“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect with singers—‘an earthen vessel in love with a star,’ you know. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother’s pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the occasion?”

“Don’t ask a man to confess the follies of his youth,” said Everett, smiling a little sadly; “I am sensitive about some of them even now. But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother’s pupils come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of.”

“Yes”, observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have lived such different lives. It’s not merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the other man’s personality in your face like an air transposed to another key. But I’m not attempting to define it; it’s beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle—well, uncanny,” she finished, laughing.

“I remember,” Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out