Willa Cather Page 11

  Marie clasped her hands and started up from her seat. She had grown very pale and her eyes were shining with excitement and distress. “But, Emil, if I understand, then all our good times are over, we can never do nice things together any more. We shall have to behave like Mr. Linstrum. And, anyhow, there’s nothing to understand!” She struck the ground with her little foot fiercely. “That won’t last. It will go away, and things will be just as they used to. I wish you were a Catholic. The Church helps people, indeed it does. I pray for you, but that’s not the same as if you prayed yourself.”

  She spoke rapidly and pleadingly, looked entreatingly into his face. Emil stood defiant, gazing down at her.

  “I can’t pray to have the things I want,” he said slowly, “and I won’t pray not to have them, not if I’m damned for it.”

  Marie turned away, wringing her hands. “Oh, Emil, you won’t try! Then all our good times are over.”

  “Yes; over. I never expect to have any more.”

  Emil gripped the hand-holds of his scythe and began to mow. Marie took up her cherries and went slowly toward the house, crying bitterly.

  IX

  On Sunday afternoon, a month after Carl Linstrum’s arrival, he rode with Emil up into the French country to attend a Catholic fair. He sat for most of the afternoon in the basement of the church, where the fair was held, talking to Marie Shabata, or strolled about the gravel terrace, thrown up on the hillside in front of the basement doors, where the French boys were jumping and wrestling and throwing the discus. Some of the boys were in their white baseball suits; they had just come up from a Sunday practice game down in the ballgrounds. Amedee, the newly married, Emil’s best friend, was their pitcher, renowned among the country towns for his dash and skill. Amedee was a little fellow, a year younger than Emil and much more boyish in appearance; very lithe and active and neatly made, with a clear brown and white skin, and flashing white teeth. The Sainte-Agnes boys were to play the Hastings nine in a fortnight, and Amedee’s lightning balls were the hope of his team. The little Frenchman seemed to get every ounce there was in him behind the ball as it left his hand.

  “You’d have made the battery at the University for sure, ‘Medee,” Emil said as they were walking from the ball-grounds back to the church on the hill. “You’re pitching better than you did in the spring.”

  Amedee grinned. “Sure! A married man don’t lose his head no more.” He slapped Emil on the back as he caught step with him. “Oh, Emil, you wanna get married right off quick! It’s the greatest thing ever!”

  Emil laughed. “How am I going to get married without any girl?”

  Amedee took his arm. “Pooh! There are plenty girls will have you. You wanna get some nice French girl, now. She treat you well; always be jolly. See,”—he began checking off on his fingers,—”there is Severine, and Alphosen, and Josephine, and Hectorine, and Louise, and Malvina—why, I could love any of them girls! Why don’t you get after them? Are you stuck up, Emil, or is anything the matter with you? I never did know a boy twenty-two years old before that didn’t have no girl. You wanna be a priest, maybe? Not-a for me!” Amedee swaggered. “I bring many good Catholics into this world, I hope, and that’s a way I help the Church.”

  Emil looked down and patted him on the shoulder. “Now you’re windy, ‘Medee. You Frenchies like to brag.”

  But Amedee had the zeal of the newly married, and he was not to be lightly shaken off. “Honest and true, Emil, don’t you want any girl? Maybe there’s some young lady in Lincoln, now, very grand,”—Amedee waved his hand languidly before his face to denote the fan of heartless beauty,—” and you lost your heart up there. Is that it?”

  “Maybe,” said Emil.

  But Amedee saw no appropriate glow in his friend’s face. “Bah!” he exclaimed in disgust. “I tell all the French girls to keep ‘way from you. You gotta rock in there,” thumping Emil on the ribs.

  When they reached the terrace at the side of the church, Amedee, who was excited by his success on the ball-grounds, challenged Emil to a jumping-match, though he knew he would be beaten. They belted themselves up, and Raoul Marcel, the choir tenor and Father Duchesne’s pet, and Jean Bordelau, held the string over which they vaulted. All the French boys stood round, cheering and humping themselves up when Emil or Amedee went over the wire, as if they were helping in the lift. Emil stopped at five-feet-five, declaring that he would spoil his appetite for supper if he jumped any more.

  Angelique, Amedee’s pretty bride, as blonde and fair as her name, who had come out to watch the match, tossed her head at Emil and said:—

  “’Medee could jump much higher than you if he were as tall. And anyhow, he is much more graceful. He goes over like a bird, and you have to hump yourself all up.”

  “Oh, I do, do I?” Emil caught her and kissed her saucy mouth squarely, while she laughed and struggled and called, “’Medee! ‘Medee!”

  “There, you see your ‘Medee isn’t even big enough to get you away from me. I could run away with you right now and he could only sit down and cry about it. I’ll show you whether I have to hump myself!” Laughing and panting, he picked Angelique up in his arms and began running about the rectangle with her. Not until he saw Marie Shabata’s tiger eyes flashing from the gloom of the basement doorway did he hand the disheveled bride over to her husband. “There, go to your graceful; I haven’t the heart to take you away from him.”

  Angelique clung to her husband and made faces at Emil over the white shoulder of Amedee’s ball-shirt. Emil was greatly amused at her air of proprietorship and at Amedee’s shameless submission to it. He was delighted with his friend’s good fortune. He liked to see and to think about Amedee’s sunny, natural, happy love.

  He and Amedee had ridden and wrestled and larked together since they were lads of twelve. On Sundays and holidays they were always arm in arm. It seemed strange that now he should have to hide the thing that Amedee was so proud of, that the feeling which gave one of them such happiness should bring the other such despair. It was like that when Alexandra tested her seed-corn in the spring, he mused. From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

  X

  While Emil and Carl were amusing themselves at the fair, Alexandra was at home, busy with her account-books, which had been neglected of late. She was almost through with her figures when she heard a cart drive up to the gate, and looking out of the window she saw her two older brothers. They had seemed to avoid her ever since Carl Linstrum’s arrival, four weeks ago that day, and she hurried to the door to welcome them. She saw at once that they had come with some very definite purpose. They followed her stiffly into the sitting-room. Oscar sat down, but Lou walked over to the window and remained standing, his hands behind him.

  “You are by yourself?” he asked, looking toward the doorway into the parlor.

  “Yes. Carl and Emil went up to the Catholic fair.”

  For a few moments neither of the men spoke.

  Then Lou came out sharply. “How soon does he intend to go away from here?”

  “I don’t know, Lou. Not for some time, I hope.” Alexandra spoke in an even, quiet tone that often exasperated her brothers. They felt that she was trying to be superior with them.

  Oscar spoke up grimly. “We thought we ought to tell you that people have begun to talk,” he said meaningly.

  Alexandra looked at him. “What about?”

  Oscar met her eyes blankly. “About you, keeping him here so long. It looks bad for him to be hanging on to a woman this way. People think you’re getting taken in.”

  Alexandra shut her account-book firmly. “Boys,” she said seriously, “don’t let’s go on with this. We won’t come out anywhere. I can’t take advice on such a matter. I know you mean well, but you must not feel responsible for me in things of this sort. If we go on with this talk it will only
make hard feeling.”

  Lou whipped about from the window. “You ought to think a little about your family. You’re making us all ridiculous.”

  “How am I?”

  “People are beginning to say you want to marry the fellow.”

  “Well, and what is ridiculous about that?”

  Lou and Oscar exchanged outraged looks. “Alexandra! Can’t you see he’s just a tramp and he’s after your money? He wants to be taken care of, he does!”

  “Well, suppose I want to take care of him? Whose business is it but my own?”

  “Don’t you know he’d get hold of your property?”

  “He’d get hold of what I wished to give him, certainly.”

  Oscar sat up suddenly and Lou clutched at his bristly hair.

  “Give him?” Lou shouted. “Our property, our homestead?”

  “I don’t know about the homestead,” said Alexandra quietly. “I know you and Oscar have always expected that it would be left to your children, and I’m not sure but what you’re right. But I’ll do exactly as I please with the rest of my land, boys.”

  “The rest of your land!” cried Lou, growing more excited every minute. “Didn’t all the land come out of the homestead? It was bought with money borrowed on the homestead, and Oscar and me worked ourselves to the bone paying interest on it.”

  “Yes, you paid the interest. But when you married we made a division of the land, and you were satisfied. I’ve made more on my farms since I’ve been alone than when we all worked together.”

  “Everything you’ve made has come out of the original land that us boys worked for, hasn’t it? The farms and all that comes out of them belongs to us as a family.”

  Alexandra waved her hand impatiently. “Come now, Lou. Stick to the facts. You are talking nonsense. Go to the county clerk and ask him who owns my land, and whether my titles are good.”

  Lou turned to his brother. “This is what comes of letting a woman meddle in business,” he said bitterly. “We ought to have taken things in our own hands years ago. But she liked to run things, and we humored her. We thought you had good sense, Alexandra. We never thought you’d do anything foolish.”

  Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles. “Listen, Lou. Don’t talk wild. You say you ought to have taken things into your own hands years ago. I suppose you mean before you left home. But how could you take hold of what wasn’t there? I’ve got most of what I have now since we divided the property; I’ve built it up myself, and it has nothing to do with you.”

  Oscar spoke up solemnly. “The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything goes wrong, it’s the men that are held responsible.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lou broke in. “Everybody knows that. Oscar and me have always been easy-going and we’ve never made any fuss. We were willing you should hold the land and have the good of it, but you got no right to part with any of it. We worked in the fields to pay for the first land you bought, and whatever’s come out of it has got to be kept in the family.”

  Oscar reinforced his brother, his mind fixed on the one point he could see. “The property of a family belongs to the men of the family, because they are held responsible, and because they do the work.”

  Alexandra looked from one to the other, her eyes full of indignation. She had been impatient before, but now she was beginning to feel angry. “And what about my work?” she asked in an unsteady voice.

  Lou looked at the carpet. “Oh, now, Alexandra, you always took it pretty easy! Of course we wanted you to. You liked to manage round, and we always humored you. We realize you were a great deal of help to us. There’s no woman anywhere around that knows as much about business as you do, and we’ve always been proud of that, and thought you were pretty smart. But, of course, the real work always fell on us. Good advice is all right, but it don’t get the weeds out of the corn.”

  “Maybe not, but it sometimes puts in the crop, and it sometimes keeps the fields for corn to grow in,” said Alexandra dryly. “Why, Lou, I can remember when you and Oscar wanted to sell this homestead and all the improvements to old preacher Ericson for two thousand dollars. If I’d consented, you’d have gone down to the river and scraped along on poor farms for the rest of your lives. When I put in our first field of alfalfa you both opposed me, just because I first heard about it from a young man who had been to the University. You said I was being taken in then, and all the neighbors said so. You know as well as I do that alfalfa has been the salvation of this country. You all laughed at me when I said our land here was about ready for wheat, and I had to raise three big wheat crops before the neighbors quit putting all their land in corn. Why, I remember you cried, Lou, when we put in the first big wheat-planting, and said everybody was laughing at us.”

  Lou turned to Oscar. “That’s the woman of it; if she tells you to put in a crop, she thinks she’s put it in. It makes women conceited to meddle in business. I shouldn’t think you’d want to remind us how hard you were on us, Alexandra, after the way you baby Emil.”

  “Hard on you? I never meant to be hard. Conditions were hard. Maybe I would never have been very soft, anyhow; but I certainly didn’t choose to be the kind of girl I was. If you take even a vine and cut it back again and again, it grows hard, like a tree.”

  Lou felt that they were wandering from the point, and that in digression Alexandra might unnerve him. He wiped his forehead with a jerk of his handkerchief. “We never doubted you, Alexandra. We never questioned anything you did. You’ve always had your own way. But you can’t expect us to sit like stumps and see you done out of the property by any loafer who happens along, and making yourself ridiculous into the bargain.”

  Oscar rose. “Yes,” he broke in, “everybody’s laughing to see you get took in; at your age, too. Everybody knows he’s nearly five years younger than you, and is after your money. Why, Alexandra, you are forty years old!”

  “All that doesn’t concern anybody but Carl and me. Go to town and ask your lawyers what you can do to restrain me from disposing of my own property. And I advise you to do what they tell you; for the authority you can exert by law is the only influence you will ever have over me again.” Alexandra rose. “I think I would rather not have lived to find out what I have to-day,” she said quietly, closing her desk.

  Lou and Oscar looked at each other questioningly. There seemed to be nothing to do but to go, and they walked out.

  “You can’t do business with women,” Oscar said heavily as he clambered into the cart. “But anyhow, we’ve had our say, at last.”

  Lou scratched his head. “Talk of that kind might come too high, you know; but she’s apt to be sensible. You hadn’t ought to said that about her age, though, Oscar. I’m afraid that hurt her feelings; and the worst thing we can do is to make her sore at us. She’d marry him out of contrariness.”

  “I only meant,” said Oscar, “that she is old enough to know better, and she is. If she was going to marry, she ought to done it long ago, and not go making a fool of herself now.”

  Lou looked anxious, nevertheless. “Of course,” he reflected hopefully and inconsistently, “Alexandra ain’t much like other women-folks. Maybe it won’t make her sore. Maybe she’d as soon be forty as not!”

  XI

  Emil came home at about half-past seven o’clock that evening. Old Ivar met him at the windmill and took his horse, and the young man went directly into the house. He called to his sister and she answered from her bedroom, behind the sitting-room, saying that she was lying down.

  Emil went to her door.

  “Can I see you for a minute?” he asked. “I want to talk to you about something before Carl comes.”

  Alexandra rose quickly and came to the door. “Where is Carl?”

  “Lou and Oscar met us and said they wanted to talk to him, so he rode over to Oscar’s with them. Are you coming out?” Emil asked impatiently.

  “Yes, sit down. I’ll be dressed in
a moment.”

  Alexandra closed her door, and Emil sank down on the old slat lounge and sat with his head in his hands. When his sister came out, he looked up, not knowing whether the interval had been short or long, and he was surprised to see that the room had grown quite dark. That was just as well; it would be easier to talk if he were not under the gaze of those clear, deliberate eyes, that saw so far in some directions and were so blind in others. Alexandra, too, was glad of the dusk. Her face was swollen from crying.

  Emil started up and then sat down again. “Alexandra,” he said slowly, in his deep young baritone, “I don’t want to go away to law school this fall. Let me put it off another year. I want to take a year off and look around. It’s awfully easy to rush into a profession you don’t really like, and awfully hard to get out of it. Linstrum and I have been talking about that.”

  “Very well, Emil. Only don’t go off looking for land.” She came up and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve been wishing you could stay with me this winter.”

  “That’s just what I don’t want to do, Alexandra. I’m restless. I want to go to a new place. I want to go down to the City of Mexico to join one of the University fellows who’s at the head of an electrical plant. He wrote me he could give me a little job, enough to pay my way, and I could look around and see what I want to do. I want to go as soon as harvest is over. I guess Lou and Oscar will be sore about it.”

  “I suppose they will.” Alexandra sat down on the lounge beside him. “They are very angry with me, Emil. We have had a quarrel. They will not come here again.”