The Professor's House
by Willa Cather
Chapter XVII
Lillian and the Marselluses sailed for France early in May. The Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to spray his rose-vines, and his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his university duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to the old house and settled down to a leisurely bachelor life. He realized that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all day, was no longer a valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was a little thing, but one of those little things at which the hand becomes self-conscious, feels itself stiff and clumsy.
It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland's diary—to edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy's life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and straightforward personality.
Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether straightforward; but that was merely because he was not altogether consistent. As an investigator he was clear-sighted and hard-headed; but in personal relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too exalted for the circumstances—"chivalry of the cinema," Lillian used to say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the logical result of Tom's strange bringing-up and his early associations. There is, he knew, this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love down among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Tom had brought it along to the university, where advancement through personal influence was considered honourable.
It was not until Outland was a senior that Lillian began to be jealous of him. He had been almost a member of the family for two years, and she had never found fault with the boy. But after the Professor began to take Tom up to the study and talk over his work with him, began to make a companion of him, then Mrs. St. Peter withdrew her favour. She could change like that; friendship was not a matter of habit with her. And when she was through with anyone, she of course found reasons for her fickleness. Tom, she reminded her husband, Was far from frank, though he had such an open manner. He had been consistently reserved about his own affairs, and she could not believe the facts he withheld were altogether creditable. They had always known he had a secret, something to do with the mysterious Rodney Blake and the bank account in New Mexico upon which he was not at liberty to draw. The young man must have felt the change in her, for he began that winter to make his work a pretext for coming to the house less often. He and St. Peter now met in the alcove behind the Professor's lecture room at the university.
One Sunday, shortly before Tom's Commencement, he came to the house to ask Rosamond to go to the senior dance with him. The family were having tea in the garden; a few days of intensely warm weather had come on and hurried the roses into bloom. 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."
There was no denying that the young man looked uncomfortable. He frowned and said in a low voice: "Yes, I've been there. I suppose I don't speak of it because I haven't very pleasant recollections of it."
"How long were you there?" his hostess asked.
"A winter and spring, more than six months. Long enough to get very home-sick." He went away almost at once, as if he were afraid of being questioned further.
The subject came up again a few weeks later, however. After Tom's graduation, two courses were open to him. He was offered an instructorship, with a small salary, in the Physics department under Dr. Crane, and a graduate scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. St. Peter strongly urged him to accept the latter. One evening when the family were discussing Tom's prospects, the Professor summed up all the reasons why he ought to go to Baltimore and work in the laboratory made famous by Dr. Rowland. He assured him, moreover, that he would find the atmosphere of an old Southern city delightful.
"Yes, I know something about the atmosphere," Tom broke out at last. "It is delightful, but it's all wrong for me. It discourages me dreadfully. I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me blue. I don't believe I could ever work there."
"But can you trust a child's impressions to guide you now, in such an important decision?" asked Mrs. St. Peter gravely.
"I wasn't a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am now—older, in some ways. It was only about a year before I came here."
"But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all up?" Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed the knuckles together, as she did when she wanted to punish him.
"Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn't matter. It was long enough to count for two ordinary years," he muttered abstractedly.
Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had definitely accepted the instructorship under Crane, and would stay on in Hamilton.
During that summer after Outland's graduation, St. Peter got to know all there was behind his reserve. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of his own, over in the Physics laboratory. He and St. Peter were often together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming. Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the cleaning-woman, and he and Tom went to the lake and spent the day in his sail-boat.
It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. He dined at eight o'clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius.
It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the dining-room, that Tom at last told the story he had always kept back. It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about—until he grows older.