I
THE moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the
dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he
had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was
almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three
stories in height, painted the colour of ashes--the front porch just too
narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps. As he
walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September
morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences
he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the
halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantles with thick round
posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places.
Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall,
had made him wince many times a day for twenty-odd years--and they still
creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily have
fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was
not time enough to go round. He went into the kitchen, where he had
carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bath-room on the
second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so
old that no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to stop the drip,
the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and the doors
of the linen closet didn’t fit. He had sympathized with his daughters’
dissatisfaction, though he could never quite agree with them that the
bath should be the most attractive room in the house. He had spent the
happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly
was not, and he had known many charming people who had no bath at all.
However, as his wife said: “If your country has contributed one thing,
at least, to civilization, why not have it?” Many a night, after blowing
out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to
give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised
to behave like porcelain, and didn’t.
The Professor in pyjamas was not an unpleasant sight; for looks, the
fewer clothes he had on, the better. Anything that clung to his body
showed it to be built upon extremely good bones, with the slender hips
and springy shoulders of a tireless swimmer. Though he was born on Lake
Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on one side, and American
farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look like a
Spaniard. That was possibly because he had been in Spain a good deal,
and was an authority on certain phases of Spanish history. He had a long
brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close-trimmed Van
Dyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair,
he had a tawny skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and hawk-like
eyes--brown and gold and green. They were set in ample cavities, with
plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black eyebrows that
turned up sharply at the outer ends, like military moustaches. His
wicked-looking eyebrows made his students call him Mephistopheles--and
there was no evading the searching eyes underneath them; eyes that in a
flash could pick out a friend or an unusual stranger from a throng. They
had lost none of their fire, though just now the man behind them was
feeling a diminution of ardour.
His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in
water-colour, had once said:--“The thing that really makes Papa handsome
is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown;
it is quite the best thing about him.” That part of his head was high,
polished, hard as bronze, and the close-growing black hair threw off a
streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was fullest. The
mould of his head on the side was so individual and definite, so far
from casual, that it was more like a statue’s head than a man’s.
From one of the dismantled windows the Professor happened to look out
into his back garden, and at that cheerful sight he went quickly
downstairs and escaped from the dusty air and brutal light of the empty
rooms.
His walled-in garden had been the comfort of his life--and it was the
one thing his neighbours held against him. He started to make it soon
after the birth of his first daughter, when his wife began to be
unreasonable about his spending so much time at the lake and on the
tennis court. In this undertaking he got help and encouragement from his
landlord, a retired German farmer, good-natured and lenient about
everything but spending money. If the Professor happened to have a new
baby at home, or a faculty dinner, or an illness in the family, or any
unusual expense, Appelhoff cheerfully waited for the rent; but pay for
repairs he would not. When it was a question of the garden, however, the
old man sometimes stretched a point. He helped his tenant with seeds and
slips and sound advice, and with his twisted old back. 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. Salmon-pink geraniums dripped over the wall.
The French marigolds and dahlias were just now at their best--such
dahlias as no one else in Hamilton could grow. St. Peter had tended this
bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it.
In the spring, when home-sickness for other lands and the fret of things
unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here. In the long hot
summers, when he could not go abroad, he stayed at home with his garden,
sending his wife and daughters to Colorado to escape the humid prairie
heat, so nourishing to wheat and corn, so exhausting to human beings. In
those months when he was a bachelor again, he brought down his books and
papers and worked in a deck chair under the linden-trees; breakfasted
and lunched and had his tea in the garden. 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 low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted
on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and
held ajar by a hook in the sill. This was the sole opening for light and
air. Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had
once been very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality. The
matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an
old walnut table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers.
Before it was a cane-backed office chair that turned on a screw. This
dark den had for many years been the Professor’s study.
Downstairs, off the back parlour, he had a show study, with roomy
shelves where his library was housed, and a proper desk at which he
wrote letters. But it was a sham. This was the place where he worked.
And not he alone. For three weeks in the fall, and again three in the
spring, he shared his cuddy with Augusta, the sewing-woman, niece of his
old landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and
very devout.
Since Augusta finished her day’s work at five o’clock, and the
Professor, on week-days, worked here only at night, they did not elbow
each other too much. Besides, neither was devoid of consideration. Every
evening, before she left, Augusta swept up the scraps from the floor,
rolled her patterns, closed the sewing-machine, and picked ravellings
off the box-couch, so that there would be no threads to stick to the
Professor’s old smoking-jacket if he should happen to lie down for a
moment in working-hours.
St. Peter, in his turn, when he put out his lamp after midnight, was
careful to brush away ashes and tobacco crumbs--smoking was very
distasteful to Augusta--and to open the hinged window back as far as it
would go, on the second hook, so that the night wind might carry away
the smell of his pipe as much as possible. The unfinished dresses which
she left hanging on the forms, however, were often so saturated with
smoke that he knew she found it a trial to work on them next morning.
These “forms” were the subject of much banter between them. The one
which Augusta called “the bust” stood in the darkest corner of the room,
upon a high wooden chest in which blankets and winter wraps were yearly
stored. It was a headless, armless female torso, covered with strong
black cotton, and so richly developed in the part for which it was named
that the Professor once explained to Augusta how, in calling it so, she
followed a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy.
Augusta enjoyed the Professor when he was _risqué_, since she was sure
of his ultimate delicacy. Though this figure looked so ample and billowy
(as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest
safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter
how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most
unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood,
which responds to concussion with living vibration and is stimulating to
the hand, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. It
was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly
packed sawdust--very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow
always fooling you again. For no matter how often you had bumped up
against that torso, you could never believe that contact with it would
be as bad as it was.
The second form was more self-revelatory; a full-length female figure in
a smart wire skirt with a trim metal waist line. It had no legs, as one
could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its
bosom resembled a strong wire bird-cage. But St. Peter contended that it
had a nervous system. When Augusta left it clad for the night in a new
party dress for Rosamond or Kathleen, it often took on a sprightly,
tricky air, as if it were going out for the evening to make a great show
of being harum-scarum, giddy, _folle_. It seemed just on the point of
tripping downstairs, or on tiptoe, waiting for the waltz to begin. At
times the wire lady was most convincing in her pose as a woman of light
behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his blind spots, but
he had never been taken in by one of her kind!
Augusta had somehow got it into her head that these forms were
unsuitable companions for one engaged in scholarly pursuits, and she
periodically apologized for their presence when she came to install
herself and fulfil her “time” at the house.
“Not at all, Augusta,” the Professor had often said. “If they were good
enough for _Monsieur Bergeret_, they are certainly good enough for me.”
This morning, as St. Peter was sitting in his desk chair, looking
musingly at the pile of papers before him, the door opened and there
stood Augusta herself. How astonishing that he had not heard her heavy,
deliberate tread on the now uncarpeted stair!
“Why, Professor St. Peter! I never thought of finding you here, or I’d
have knocked. I guess we will have to do our moving together.”
St. Peter had risen--Augusta loved his manners--but he offered her the
sewing-machine chair and resumed his seat.
“Sit down, Augusta, and we’ll talk it over. I’m not moving just
yet--don’t want to disturb all my papers. I’m staying on until I finish
a piece of writing. I’ve seen your uncle about it. I’ll work here, and
board at the new house. But this is confidential. If it were noised
about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had--how do
they put it, parted, separated?”
Augusta dropped her eyes in an indulgent smile. “I think people in your
station would say separated.”
“Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven’t, you know. But
I’m going to write on here for a while.”
“Very well, sir. And I won’t always be getting in your way now. In the
new house you have a beautiful study downstairs, and I have a light,
airy room on the third floor.”
“Where you won’t smell smoke, eh?”
“Oh, Professor, I never really minded!” Augusta spoke with feeling. She
rose and took up the black bust in her long arms.
The Professor also rose, very quickly. “What are you doing?”
She laughed. “Oh, I’m not going to carry them through the street,
Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs with his cart, to wheel them
over.”
“Wheel them over?”
“Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I’ve come a week before my
regular time, to make curtains and hem linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I’ll
take everything over this morning except the sewing-machine--that’s too
heavy for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery
wagon. Would you just open the door for me, please?”
“No, I won’t! Not at all. You don’t need her to make curtains. I can’t
have this room changed if I’m going to work here. He can take the
sewing-machine--yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs,
please. She does very well there.” St. Peter had got to the door, and
stood with his back against it.
Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.
“But next week I’ll be working on Mrs. St. Peter’s clothes, and I’ll
need the forms. As the boy’s here, he’ll just wheel them over,” she said
soothingly.
“I’m damned if he will! They shan’t be wheeled. They stay right there in
their own place. You shan’t take away my ladies. I never heard of such a
thing!”
Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. “But,
Professor, I can’t work without my forms. They’ve been in your way all
these years, and you’ve always complained of them, so don’t be contrary,
sir.”
“I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they
recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply--but of them
individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for your airy atelier, as
many as you wish--I’m said to be rich now, am I not?--Go buy, but you
can’t have my women. That’s final.”
Augusta looked down her nose as she did at church when the dark sins
were mentioned. “Professor,” she said severely, “I think this time you
are carrying a joke too far. You never used to.” From the tilt of her
chin he saw that she felt the presence of some improper suggestion.
“No matter what you think, you can’t have them.” They considered, both
were in earnest now. Augusta was first to break the defiant silence.
“I suppose I am to be allowed to take my patterns?”
“Your patterns? Oh, yes, the cut-out things you keep in the couch with
my old note-books? Certainly, you can have them. Let me lift it for
you.” He raised the hinged top of the box-couch that stood against the
wall, under the slope of the ceiling. At one end of the upholstered box
were piles of notebooks and bundles of manuscript tied up in square
packages with mason’s cord. At the other end were many little rolls of
patterns, cut out of newspapers and tied with bits of ribbon, gingham,
silk, georgette; notched charts which followed the changing stature and
figures of the Misses St. Peter from early childhood to womanhood. In
the middle of the box, patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.
“I see we shall have some difficulty in separating our life work,
Augusta. We’ve kept our papers together a long while now.”
“Yes, Professor. When I first came to sew for Mrs. St. Peter, I never
thought I should grow grey in her service.”
He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected?
This disclosure amazed him.
“Well, well, we mustn’t think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn’t
turn out for any of us as we plan.” He stood and watched her large
slow hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into
his waste-basket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered
how she managed to sew with hands that folded and unfolded as rigidly
as umbrellas--no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on
a bow, it stayed there. She herself was tall, large-boned, flat and
stiff, with a plain, solid face, and brown eyes not destitute of fun.
As she knelt by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her,
his hand on the lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her
last remark had troubled him.
“What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it’s
rather nice, that grey wave on each side. Gives it character. You’ll
never need any of this false hair that’s in all the shop windows.”
“There’s altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my
customers are using it now--ladies you wouldn’t expect would. They say
most of it was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it’s got to
be such a frequent thing that the priest spoke against it only last
Sunday.”
“Did he, indeed? Why, what could he say? Seems such a personal matter.”
“Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a
priest couldn’t go to see a pious woman any more without finding
switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was
disgusting.”
“Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see
a woman in the room where she takes off these ornaments--or to see her
with out them?”
Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly
missed being a giggle. “He goes to give them the Sacrament, of course,
Professor! You’ve made up your mind to be contrary to¬ day, haven’t
you?”
“You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the
hair would be lying about where it was lightly taken off. But as you
first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You’ll never
convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you’re going to
sew in the new house and I’m going to work on here. Who is ever to
remind me when it’s All Souls’ day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday,
or anything?”
Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread
as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure!
She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were
little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very
years that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it
and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his
mind like Macbeth’s two spent swimmers--years when he had the courage
to say to himself: “I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this
utterly impossible thing!”
During the fifteen years he had been working on his _Spanish Adventurers
in North America_, this room had been his centre of operations. There
had been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years
when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the South-west on
the trail of his adventurers, another in Old Mexico, dashes to France to
see his foster-brothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas
always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and
sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history.
Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man
could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he
could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic
life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally
pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were
certainly no other advantages. The furnace heat did not reach the third
floor. There was no way to warm the sewing-room, except by a rusty,
round gas stove with no flue--a stove which consumed gas imperfectly and
contaminated the air. To remedy this, the window must be left
open--otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become
unfit to breathe. If the stove were turned down, and the window left
open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing
out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he
knew it. The Professor had found that the best method, in winter, was to
turn the gas on full and keep the window wide on the hook, even if he
had to put on a leather jacket over his working-coat. By that
arrangement he had somehow managed to get air enough to work by.
He wondered now why he had never looked about for a better stove, a
newer model; or why he had not at least painted this one, flaky with
rust. But he had been able to get on only by neglecting negative
comforts. He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly
selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him
delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it. By doing without many
so-called necessities he had managed to have his luxuries. He might, for
instance, have had a convenient electric drop-light attached to the
socket above his writing-table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful
kerosene lamp which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found
that the oil-can in the closet was empty; then, to get more, he would
have had to go down through the house to the cellar, and on his way he
would almost surely become interested in what the children were doing,
or in what his wife was doing--or he would notice that the kitchen
linoleum was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he
would stop to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the
human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So
when the lamp was empty--and that usually occurred when he was in the
middle of a most important passage--he jammed an eyeshade on his
forehead and worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb,
sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet
above his table. It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at
his desk, he didn’t dare quit it. He had found that you can train the
mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be
hungry at certain hours of the day.
If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn’t go to his study
at all. Two evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters,
and one evening he and his wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or
a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of
course, and on those two days he worked like a miner under a landslide.
Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she was paid for
that day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was
earning his living during the day; carrying full university work and
feeding himself out to hundreds of students in lectures and
consultations. But that was another life.
St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very
intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would
willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust--many instructors
had nothing else to give them and got on very well--but his misfortune
was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was
one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a
whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its
servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn’t worn out with years,
this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it
had nothing to do with Time.
But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose--he had got
what he wanted. By many petty economies of purse, he had managed to be
extravagant with not a cent in the world but his professor’s salary--he
didn’t, of course, touch his wife’s small income from her father. 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.
There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so
many defeats and triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just
on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear--Lake Michigan, the inland sea
of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages
before him remained blank or were full of scratched-out sentences, then
he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away,
and spent a day on the lake with his sail-boat; jumping out to swim,
floating on his back alongside, then climbing into his boat again.
When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were
certain human figures against it, of course; his practical,
strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father,
the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great
fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake.
The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door
that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never
close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you
would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning,
across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran
through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part
of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter
morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured
reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn’t
observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now,
forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had
made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his
eyes were merely open wide.
When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and
dragged him and his brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of
central Kansas. St. Peter nearly died of it. Never could he forget the
few moments on the train when that sudden, innocent blue across the sand
dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was like sinking for the
third time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or
seemed so final. Even in his long, happy student years with the
Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue water was the one thing
he was home-sick for. In the summer he used to go with the Thierault
boys to Brittany or to the Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as
the Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. “No,” he used to tell
the boys, who were always asking him about _le Michigan_, “it is
altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue,
but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls,
but--I don’t know, _il est toujours plus naïf_.”
Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he
was very much in love and must marry at once, out of the several
positions offered him he took the one at Hamilton, not because it was
the best, but because it seemed to him that any place near the lake was
a place where one could live. The sight of it from his study window
these many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient
things he had done without would have been.
Just in that corner, under Augusta’s archaic “forms,” he had always
meant to put the filing-cabinets he had never spared the time or money
to buy. They would have held all his notes and pamphlets, and the
spasmodic rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he had never got them,
and now he really didn’t need them; it would be like locking the stable
after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone--that was the thing he
was feeling most just now. In spite of all he’d neglected, he had
completed his _Spanish Adventurers_ in eight volumes--without
filing-cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove--and
without encouragement, Heaven knew! For all the interest the first three
volumes awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake
Michigan. They had been timidly reviewed by other professors of history,
in technical and educational journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to
do something quite different--they merely thought he was trying to do
the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They recommended to
him the more even and genial style of John Fiske.
St. Peter hadn’t, he could honestly say, cared a whoop--not in those
golden days. When the whole plan of his narrative was coming clearer and
clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier with
his material, when all the foolish conventions about that kind of
writing were falling away and his relation with his work was becoming
every day more simple, natural, and happy,--he cared as little as the
Spanish Adventurers themselves what Professor So-and-So thought about
them. With the fourth volume he began to be aware that a few young men,
scattered about the United States and England, were intensely interested
in his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to express their
interest in lectures and in print. The two last volumes brought him a
certain international reputation and what were called rewards--among
them, the Oxford prize for history, with its five thousand pounds, which
had built him the new house into which he did not want to move.
“Godfrey,” his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an
ironical turn in some remark he made about the new house, “is there
something you would rather have done with that money than to have built
a house with it?”
“Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have bought back
the fun I had writing my history, you’d never have got your house. But
one couldn’t get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures
don’t come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you.”