The Professor's House
by Willa Cather
Chapter VIII
The following week St. Peter went to Chicago to give his lectures. He had engaged rooms for himself and Lillian at a quiet hotel near the university. The Marselluses went down by the same train, and they all alighted at the station together, in a raging snow-storm. The St. Peters were to have tea with Louie at the Blackstone, before going to their own quarters.
Tea was served in Louie's suite on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The Professor was in a genial mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious hotel, and especially pleased to be able to sit in comfort and watch the storm over the water.
"How snug you are here, Louie! This is really very nice," he said, turning back from the window when Rosamond called him.
Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter's shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: "And do you like these rooms, sir? Well, I'm glad, for they're yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It's all arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won't have our great scholar staying off in some grimy place on the South side. We want him where we can keep an eye on him."
Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. "And our luggage?"
"It's on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too much. You dine early; you have an engagement for to-night. You and Dearest are going to the opera——Oh, not with us! We have other fish to fry. You are going off alone."
"Very well, Louie! And what are they giving to-night?"
"Mignon. It will remind you of your student days in Paris."
"It will. I always had abonnement at the Opéra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It's one of my favourites."
"I thought so!" Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten his scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife, while he unpacked his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and Rosamond. "Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn't it?"
At eight o'clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium. The overture brought a smile to his lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth,—that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses—the delicacy, too—belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned toward him and whispered: "Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth."
"So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn't know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too."
She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm. When she began her immortal song, one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. "Connais-tu-le-pays"—it stirred one like the odours of early spring, recalled the time of sweet, impersonal emotions.
When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. "A fine cast, don't you think? And the harps are very good. Except for the wood-winds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the Comique."
"How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things!" his wife murmured. It had been long since he had seen her face so relaxed and reflective and undetermined.
Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften a face. More than once he saw a starry moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was when she wasn't doing her duty!
"My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young."
"How often I've thought that!" she replied with a faint, melancholy smile.
"You? But you're so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily," he murmured in astonishment.
"One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn't the children who came between us." There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.
"You, you too?" he breathed in amazement. He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through his lingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own. Presently the melting music of the tenor's last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.
That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.
Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor's colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted—when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.
"That," her husband replied, "is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I'm not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn't afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow."
They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.
"Godfrey," said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, "surely you're not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There's no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove."
"There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years."
"It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn't safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you'd never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You'll get a fine headache one of these days."
"I've got headaches that way before, and survived them," he said stubbornly.
"How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health."
"Why so? It's not worth half so much as it was then."
His wife disregarded this. "And don't you think it's a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?"
The Professor's dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. "It's almost my only extravagance," he muttered fiercely.
"How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!" his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.