|
The Namesake
By Willa Cather
|
|
Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwells
studio on the Boulevard St. Michel. We were all fellow-countrymen;
one from New Hampshire, one from Colorado,
another from Nevada, several from the farm lands of the
Middle West, and I myself from California. Lyon Hartwell,
though born abroad, was simply, as every one knew, from
America. He seemed, almost more than any other one living
man, to mean all of itfrom ocean to ocean. When he was in
Paris, his studio was always open to the seven of us who were
there that evening, and we intruded upon his leisure as often
as we thought permissible.
Although we were within the terms of the easiest of all
intimacies, and although the great sculptor, even when he was
more than usually silent, was at all times the most gravely
cordial of hosts, yet, on that long remembered evening, as the
sunlight died on the burnished brown of the horse-chestnuts
below the windows, a perceptible dullness yawned through
our conversation.
We were, indeed, somewhat low in spirit, for one of our
number, Charley Bentley, was leaving us indefinitely, in response
to an imperative summons from home. To-morrow his
studio, just across the hall from Hartwells, was to pass into
other hands, and Bentleys luggage was even now piled in
discouraged resignation before his door. The various bales
and boxes seemed literally to weigh upon us as we sat in his
neighbors hospitable rooms, drearily putting in the time until
he should leave us to catch the ten oclock express for
Dieppe.
The day we had got through very comfortably, for Bentley
made it the occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at
Maxims. There had been twelve of us at table, and the two
young Poles were thirsty, the Gascon so fabulously entertaining,
that it was near upon five oclock when we put down our
liqueur glasses for the last time, and the red, perspiring
waiter, having pocketed the reward of his arduous and protracted
services, bowed us affably to the door, flourishing his
napkin and brushing back the streaks of wet, black hair from
his rosy forehead. Our guests having betaken themselves belated
to their respective engagements, the rest of us returned
with Bentleyonly to be confronted by the depressing array
before his door. A glance about his denuded rooms had sufficed
to chill the glow of the afternoon, and we fled across the
hall in a body and begged Lyon Hartwell to take us in.
Bentley had said very little about it, but we all knew what it
meant to him to be called home. Each of us knew what it
would mean to himself, and each had felt something of that
quickened sense of opportunity which comes at seeing another
man in any way counted out of the race. Never had the
game seemed so enchanting, the chance to play it such a piece
of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.
It must have been, I think, about the middle of October,
for I remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the
Luxembourg Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the
queens of France were strewn with crackling brown leaves.
The fat red roses, out the summer long on the stand of the
old flower woman at the corner, had given place to dahlias
and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn toilettes flashed
from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets nodded at one
along the Champs-Elysees; and in the Quarter an occasional
feather boa, red or black or white, brushed ones coat sleeve
in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny autumn
air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come
back from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all
over Brittany and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness
of return, the taking up again of life and work and
play.
I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest
of all possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city
of youth, and to that little corner of it on the south shore
which since the Dark Ages themselvesyes, and beforehas
been so peculiarly the land of the young.
I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwells
rooms that evening, with Bentley making occasional
hurried trips to his desolated workrooms across the hallas
if haunted by a feeling of having forgotten somethingor
stopping to poke nervously at his perroquets, which he had
bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and all. Our host himself
sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like shoulders backed up
against the window, his shaggy head, beaked nose, and long
chin cut clean against the gray light.
Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be
fixed upon anything, was centered upon Hartwells new figure,
which stood on the block ready to be cast in bronze,
intended as a monument for some American battlefield. He
called it The Color Sergeant. It was the figure of a young
soldier running, clutching the folds of a flag, the staff of
which had been shot away. We had known it in all the stages
of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the thing
had come to have a kind of special significance for the half
dozen of us who often gathered at Hartwells roomsthough,
in truth, there was as much to dishearten one as to
inflame, in the case of a man who had done so much in a field
so amazingly difficult; who had thrown up in bronze all the
restless, teeming force of that adventurous wave still climbing
westward in our own land across the waters. We recalled his
Scout, his Pioneer, his Gold Seekers, and those monuments
in which he had invested one and another of the heroes
of the Civil War with such convincing dignity and power.
Where in the world does he get the heat to make an idea
like that carry? Bentley remarked morosely, scowling at the
clay figure. Hang me, Hartwell, if I dont think its just because
youre not really an American at all, that you can look at
it like that.
The big man shifted uneasily against the window. Yes, he
replied smiling, perhaps there is something in that. My citizenship
was somewhat belated and emotional in its flowering.
Ive half a mind to tell you about it, Bentley. He rose uncertainly,
and, after hesitating a moment, went back into his
workroom, where he began fumbling among the litter in the
corners.
At the prospect of any sort of personal expression from
Hartwell, we glanced questioningly at one another; for although
he made us feel that he liked to have us about, we
were always held at a distance by a certain diffidence of his.
There were rare occasionswhen he was in the heat of work
or of ideaswhen he forgot to be shy, but they were so exceptional
that no flattery was quite so seductive as being taken
for a moment into Hartwells confidence. Even in the matter
of opinionsthe commonest of currency in our circlehe
was niggardly and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his
mystery more effectually. There was a singular, intense spell,
therefore, about those few evenings when he had broken
through this excessive modesty, or shyness, or melancholy,
and had, as it were, committed himself.
When Hartwell returned from the back room, he brought
with him an unframed canvas which he put on an easel near
his clay figure. We drew close about it, for the darkness was
rapidly coming on. Despite the dullness of the light, we instantly
recognized the boy of Hartwells Color Sergeant. It
was the portrait of a very handsome lad in uniform, standing
beside a charger impossibly rearing. Not only in his radiant
countenance and flashing eyes, but in every line of his young
body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life, that arrested
and challenged one.
Yes, thats where I got the notion, Hartwell remarked,
wandering back to his seat in the window. Ive wanted to do
it for years, but Ive never felt quite sure of myself. I was
afraid of missing it. He was an uncle of mine, my fathers
half-brother, and I was named for him. He was killed in one
of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I was a child. I never
saw himnever knew him until he had been dead for twenty
years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we sometimes
do living personsintimately, in a single moment.
He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled
it, and puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his
hands on his knees. Then, settling back heavily among the
cushions and looking absently out of the window, he began
his story. As he proceeded further and further into the experience
which he was trying to convey to us, his voice sank so
low and was sometimes so charged with feeling, that I almost
thought he had forgotten our presence and was remembering
aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in astonishment
and sat breathless under the spell of the mans thus breathing
his memories out into the dusk.
It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
home, and Bentleys having to cut away like this brings it all
back to me.
I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor,
though I dare say youve not heard of him. He was one of
those first fellows who went over after Story and Powers,went
to Italy for Art, quite simply; to lift from its native
bough the willing, iridescent bird. Their story is told, informingly
enough, by some of those ingenuous marble things at
the Metropolitan. My father came over some time before the
outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as a renegade by
his family because he did not go home to enter the army. His
half-brother, the only child of my grandfathers second marriage,
enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was ten
years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother
died the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit
school, while my father, already ill himself, stayed on at
Rome, chipping away at his Indian maidens and marble goddesses,
still gloomily seeking the thing for which he had made
himself the most unhappy of exiles.
He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I had
been put to work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost
morbid desire that I should carry on his work, under, as he
often pointed out to me, conditions so much more auspicious.
He left me in the charge of his one intimate friend, an
American gentleman in the consulate at Rome, and his instructions
were that I was to be educated there and to live
there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
Paris and studied under one master after another until I was
nearly thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted
by a duty which was not my pleasure.
My grandfathers death, at an advanced age, left an invalid
maiden sister of my fathers quite alone in the world. She had
suffered for years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the
faculties which rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go
to America and, if possible, bring her back to Paris, where I
seemed on my way toward what my poor father had wished
for me.
On my arrival at my fathers birthplace, however, I found
that this was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble,
shrinking creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the
spot where she had been rooted for a lifetime, would have
been little short of brutality. To leave her to the care of
strangers seemed equally heartless. There was clearly nothing
for me to do but to remain and wait for that slow and painless
malady to run its course. I was there something over two
years.
My grandfathers home, his fathers homestead before
him, lay on the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania.
The little town twelve miles down the stream, whither my
great-grandfather used to drive his ox-wagon on market days,
had become, in two generations, one of the largest manufacturing
cities in the world. For hundreds of miles about us the
gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas wells and coal
shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and meadow; the
brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude petroleum,
and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The great
glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded
over us, and their crashing was always in our ears. I was
plunged into the very incandescence of human energy. But,
though my nerves tingled with the feverish, passionate endeavor
which snapped in the very air about me, none of these
great arteries seemed to feed me; this tumultuous life did not
warm me. On every side were the great muddy rivers, the
ragged mountains from which the timber was being ruthlessly
torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the gulches
that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight
and seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide
myself in the tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or
the whistle of a bird was the only incident.
The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by
little, until all that remained of it was garden and orchard.
The house, a square brick structure, stood in the midst of a
great garden which sloped toward the river, ending in a
grassy bank which fell some forty feet to the waters edge.
The garden was now little more than a tangle of neglected
shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green peculiar
to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late
in the morning.
I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there
in the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick
and soft and falling in billows, was always wet until midday.
The gravel walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes,
mock-orange, and bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected
rose garden, surrounded by a low stone wall over
which the long suckers trailed and matted. They had wound
their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon layer, about the lock
and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even the porches of the
house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy with
growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine.
The garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it
which lay above the river. The bark of the old locusts was
blackened by the smoke that crept continually up the valley,
and their feathery foliage, so merry in its movement and so
yellow and joyous in its color, seemed peculiarly precious
under that somber sky. There were sycamores and copper
beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear; and fall pear-trees,
hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all with a
leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid in
color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century
before, and this garden was almost the only spot for miles
along the river where any of the original forest growth still
survived. The smoke from the mills was fatal to trees of the
larger sort, and even these had the look of doomed thingsbent
a little toward the town and seemed to wait with head
inclined before that on-coming, shrieking force.
About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
submissionit was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it
flowed so soundlessly forever past our door.
I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking
it, watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other
shore, the flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a
boat-house, and listening to the call of the boatmen through
the mist. The mist came as certainly as night, whitened by
moonshine or starshine. The tin water-pipes went splash,
splash, with it all evening, and the wind, when it rose at all,
was little more than a sighing of the old boughs and a troubled
breath in the heavy grasses.
At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old
life that I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to
watch the days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed
to carry them away.
Within the house I was never at home. Month followed
month, and yet I could feel no sense of kinship with anything
there. Under the roof where my father and grandfather were
born, I remained utterly detached. The somber rooms never
spoke to me, the old furniture never seemed tinctured with
race. This portrait of my boy uncle was the only thing to
which I could draw near, the only link with anything I had
ever known before.
There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my
father transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent
drowned in a kind of triumph. From my first day in that
house, I continually turned to this handsome kinsman of
mine, wondering in what terms he had lived and had his
hope; what he had found there to look like that, to bound at
one, after all those years, so joyously out of the canvas.
From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had
come to watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old
rose garden, there was a locust-tree which my uncle had
planted. After his death, while it was still a slender sapling, his
mother had a seat built round it, and she used to sit there on
summer evenings. His grave was under the apple-trees in the
old orchard.
My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were
days when she seemed not to remember him at all.
It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned
the boys story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen
when the first enlistment occurred, but was even then
eager to go. He was in the court-house square every evening
to watch the recruits at their drill, and when the home company
was ordered off he rode into the city on his pony to
see the men board the train and to wave them good-by. The
next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he was
fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a
charge upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his
enlistment.
The veteran showed me an account of this charge which
had been written for the village paper by one of my uncles
comrades who had seen his part in the engagement. It seems
that as his company were running at full speed across the bottom
lands toward the fortified hill, a shell burst over them.
This comrade, running beside my uncle, saw the colors waver
and sink as if falling, and looked to see that the boys hand
and forearm had been torn away by the exploding shrapnel.
The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent of his injury,
for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade did
not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just
as my uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment,
a second shell carried away his left arm at the
arm-pit, and he fell over the wall with the flag settling about
him.
It was because this story was ever present with me, because
I was unable to shake it off, that I began to read such
books as my grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I
found that this war was fought largely by boys, that more
men enlisted at eighteen than at any other age. When I
thought of those battlefieldsand I thought of them much
in those daysthere was always that glory of youth above
them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long lines
on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the
very golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so
gaily, so incredibly.
I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine,
who seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy
allotted to his family and to have lived up its vitality in one
splendid hour, had left so little trace in the house where he
was born and where he had awaited his destiny. Look as I
would, I could find no letters from him, no clothing or books
that might have been his. He had been dead but twenty years,
and yet nothing seemed to have survived except the tree he
had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that no physical
memory of him should linger to be cherished among his
kindred,nothing but the dull image in the brain of that
aged sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening,
wondering that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his
call to his pony or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about
those shaded paths where the pale roses exhaled their dewy,
country smell. Sometimes, in the dim starlight, I have
thought that I heard on the grasses beside me the stir of a
footfall lighter than my own, and under the black arch of the
lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.
There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old
aunt waited, and which stood out from the months that were
all of a sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted
that I should bring down the big flag from the attic and run it
up upon the tall flagstaff beside Lyons tree in the garden.
Later in the morning she went with me to carry some of the
garden flowers to the grave in the orchard,a grave scarcely
larger than a childs.
I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic,
a leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was
unable to find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than
usual; she seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to
wish me to be with her. I did not have an opportunity to
return to the attic until after dinner that evening, when I carried
a lamp up-stairs and easily forced the lock of the trunk. I
found all the things that I had looked for; put away, doubtless,
by his mother, and still smelling faintly of lavender and
rose leaves; his clothes, his exercise books, his letters from the
army, his first boots, his riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I
took them out and replaced them gently. As I was about to
shut the lid, I picked up a copy of the Aneid, on the fly-leaf
of which was written in a slanting, boyish hand,
Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.
He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.
My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for
the pages were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins
mottled with pencil sketchesbugles, stacked bayonets,
and artillery carriages. In the act of putting the book down, I
happened to run over the pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf
at the back I saw his name again, and a drawingwith his
initials and a dateof the Federal flag; above it, written in a
kind of arch and in the same unformed hand:
Oh, say, can you see by the dawns early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilights last gleaming?
It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and
color seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the
lamp, and rushed down into the garden.
I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have
been with him in that careless, unconscious moment and to
have known him as he was then.
As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began
to rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my
head and bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of
the pale roses that overran the little neglected garden. Then,
as it grew stronger, it brought the sound of something sighing
and stirring over my head in the perfumed darkness.
I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the
Greeks believed, watched from birth over those marked for a
violent or untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the
shine of the morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing
eyes looking straight before him, and at his side that grave
figure, hidden in her draperies, her eyes following his, but
seeing so much fartherseeing what he never saw, that great
moment at the end, when he swayed above his comrades on
the earthen wall.
All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning
flapped fold against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the
darkagainst a sky so black with rain clouds that I could
see above me only the blur of something in soft, troubled
motion.
The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly
to a man so dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same
feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our
work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose
and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first
time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt
beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was
as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and
were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of
morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out
of me and running into the ground.
Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders,
and then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more
squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness
had made us almost invisible to each other, and, except
for the occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward
from the arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all
asleep.
And so, Hartwell added thoughtfully, I naturally feel
an interest in fellows who are going home. Its always an experience.
No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud
rap at the door,the concierge, come to take down Bentleys
luggage and to announce that the cab was below. Bentley got
his hat and coat, enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his
perroquets, gave each of us a grip of the hand, and went
briskly down the long flights of stairs. We followed him into
the street, calling our good wishes, and saw him start on his
drive across the lighted city to the Gare St. Lazare.
McClures, March 1907
355 W Olive Avenue, Suite 207, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 | 408-738-8384
| info@improveyourenglish.com
Copyright 2003-2010, Improve Your English. All rights reserved.
|