Authors: Willa Cather
Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia went on.
“Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been suppressed—an honour in Germany, I understand. ‘At Whose Door’ has been translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German.”
“I’m all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood,” said Imogen. “I’ve seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean, pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all aglow for a run before breakfast.”
“Yes, but isn’t it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?” The peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word “best,” the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made her obdurate.
“I don’t at all agree with you,” she said reservedly. “I thought every one admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss Broadwood is her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough in her profession.”
Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard it in the light of a defeat, and usually coloured unbecomingly. Now she changed the subject.
“Look, my dear,” she cried, “there is Frau Lichtenfeld now, coming to meet us. Doesn’t she look as if she had just escaped out of Walhalla? She is actually over six feet.”
Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt and a broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a long, swinging gait. The refugee from Walhalla approached, panting. Her heavy, Teutonic features were scarlet from the rigour of her exercise, and her hair, under her flapping sun hat, was tightly befrizzled about her brow. She fixed her sharp little eyes upon Imogen and extended both her hands.
“So this is the little friend?” she cried, in a rolling baritone.
Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she reflected, is comparative. After the introduction Flavia apologized.
“I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld.”
“Ah, no!” cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous caricature of a time-honoured pose of the heroines of sentimental romances. “It has never been my fate to be fitted into corners. I have never known the sweet privileges of the tiny.”
Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed cavalier.
When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with keen curiosity, for this was veritably the work of Flavia’s hands, the materialization of hopes long deferred. They passed directly into a large, square hall with a gallery on three sides, studio fashion. This opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast-room, beyond which was the large dining-room. At the other end of the hall was the music-room. There was a smoking-room, which one entered through the library behind the staircase. On the second floor there was the same
general arrangement; a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers, or, as Miss Broadwood termed them, the “cages.”
When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return from their various afternoon excursions. Boys were gliding through the halls with ice-water, covered trays, and flowers, colliding with maids and valets who carried shoes and other articles of wearing apparel. Yet, all this was done in response to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed voices, so that there was very little confusion about it.
Flavia had at last builded her house and hewn out her seven pillars; there could be no doubt, now, that the asylum for talent, the sanatorium of the arts, so long projected, was an accomplished fact. Her ambition had long ago outgrown the dimensions of her house on Prairie Avenue; besides, she had bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were against her. Her project had been delayed by Arthur’s doggedly standing out for the Michigan woods, but Flavia knew well enough that certain of the
aves rares
—“the best”—could not be lured so far away from the seaport, so she declared herself for the historic Hudson and knew no retreat. The establishing of a New York office had at length overthrown Arthur’s last valid objection to quitting the lake country for three months of the year; and Arthur could be wearied into anything, as those who knew him knew.
Flavia’s house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. In her earlier days she had swallowed experiences that would have unmanned one of less torrential enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. But, of late years, her determination had told; she saw less and less of those mysterious persons with mysterious obstacles in their path and mysterious grievances against the world, who had once frequented her house on Prairie Avenue. In the stead of this multitude of the unarrived, she had now the few, the select, “the best.” Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once fed at her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only Alcée Buisson still retained his right of entrée. He alone had remembered that ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein he puts alms to oblivion, and he alone had been considerate enough to do what Flavia had expected of him, and give his name a current value in the world. Then, as Miss Broadwood put it, “he was
her first real one,”—and Flavia, like Mahomet, could remember her first believer.
The “House of Song,” as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome of Flavia’s more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life; but Flavia’s discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had made concessions. Flavia, had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams to the effect that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its fairy tales: but the fact that her husband’s name was annually painted upon some ten thousand threshing machines, in reality contributed very little to her happiness.
Arthur Hamilton was born, and had spent his boyhood in the West Indies, and physically he had never lost the brand of the tropics. His father, after inventing the machine which bore his name, had returned to the States to patent and manufacture it. After leaving college, Arthur had spent five years ranching in the West and travelling abroad. Upon his father’s death he had returned to Chicago and, to the astonishment of all his friends, had taken up the business,—without any demonstration of enthusiasm, but with quiet perseverance, marked ability, and amazing industry. Why or how a self-sufficient, rather ascetic man of thirty, indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all other personal relations, should have doggedly wooed and finally married Flavia Malcolm, was a problem that had vexed older heads than Imogen’s.
While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and a young woman entered whom she at once recognized as Jemima Broadwood—“Jimmy” Broadwood, she was called by people in her own profession. While there was something unmistakably professional in her frank
savoir-faire,
“Jimmy’s” was one of those faces to which the rouge never seems to stick. Her eyes were keen and grey as a windy April sky, and so far from having been seared by calcium lights, you might have fancied they had never looked on anything less bucolic than growing fields and country fairs. She wore her thick, brown hair
short and parted at the side; and, rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in keeping with her fresh, boyish countenance. She extended to Imogen a large, well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to clasp.
“Ah! you are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce myself. Flavia said you were kind enough to express a wish to meet me, and I preferred to meet you alone. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Why, certainly not,” said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and looking hurriedly about for matches.
“There, be calm, I’m always prepared,” said Miss Broadwood, checking Imogen’s flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing an oddly-fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess in her dinner-gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her patent-leather Oxfords, and lit her cigarette. “This match-box,” she went on meditatively, “once belonged to a Prussian officer. He shot himself in his bath-tub, and I bought it at the sale of his effects.”
Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: “I’m awfully glad you’ve come, Miss Willard, though I’ve not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your thesis to read.”
“Why, how funny!” ejaculated Imogen.
“On the contrary,” remarked Miss Broadwood. “I thought it decidedly lacked humour.”
“I meant,” stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much like Alice in Wonderland, “I meant that I thought it rather strange Mrs. Hamilton should fancy you would be interested.”
Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. “Now, don’t let my rudeness frighten you. Really, I found it very interesting, and no end impressive. You see, most people in my profession are good for absolutely nothing else, and, therefore, they have a deep and abiding conviction that in some other line they might have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is the object of our envious and particular admiration. Anything in type impresses us greatly; that’s why so many of us marry authors or newspaper men and lead miserable lives.” Miss Broadwood saw that she had rather disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction. “You see,” she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed
cigarette, “some years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy to open the pages of your thesis—nor to be one of her house party of the chosen, for that matter. I’ve Pinero to thank for both pleasures. It all depends on the class of business I’m playing whether I’m in favour or not. Flavia is my second cousin, you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I choose with perfect good grace. I’m quite desperate for some one to laugh with, so I’m going to fasten myself upon you—for, of course, one can’t expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything funny. I don’t intend you shall lose the humour of the situation. What do you think of Flavia’s infirmary for the arts, anyway?”
“Well, it’s rather too soon for me to have any opinion at all,” said Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. “So far, you are the only one of the artists I’ve met.”
“One of them?” echoed Miss Broadwood. “One of the
artists
? My offence may be rank, my dear, but I really don’t deserve that. Come, now, whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me, just let me divest you of any notion that I take myself seriously.”
Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment, and sat down on the arm of a chair, facing her visitor. “I can’t fathom you at all, Miss Broadwood,” she said frankly. “Why shouldn’t you take yourself seriously? What’s the use of beating about the bush? Surely you know that you are one of the few players on this side of the water who have at all the spirit of natural or ingenuous comedy?”
“Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis, aren’t we? Oh! did you mean it? Well, you
are
a clever girl. But you see it doesn’t do to permit oneself to look at it in that light. If we do, we always go to pieces, and waste our substance a-starring as the unhappy daughter of the Capulets. But there, I hear Flavia coming to take you down; and just remember I’m not one of them; the artists, I mean.”
Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As they reached the lower hall they heard voices from the music-room, and dim figures were lurking in the shadows under the gallery, but their hostess led straight to the smoking-room. The June evening was chilly, and a fire had been lighted in the fireplace. Through the deepening
dusk the firelight flickered upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall, and threw an orange glow over the Turkish hangings. One side of the smoking-room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory, which was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs. There was about the darkened room some suggestion of certain chambers in the Arabian Nights, opening on a court of palms. Perhaps it was partially this memory-evoking suggestion that caused Imogen to start so violently when she saw dimly, in a blur of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking in a low, deep chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown. His long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A brown moustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and apathetic. When Imogen entered, he rose indolently and gave her his hand, his manner barely courteous.
“I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard,” he said with an indifferent drawl. “Flavia was afraid you might be late. You had a pleasant ride up, I hope?”
“Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton,” she replied, feeling that he did not particularly care whether she replied at all.
Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for dinner, as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had become faint after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and immediately excused herself. As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss Broadwood with a rather spiritless smile.
“Well, Jimmy,” he remarked, “I brought up a piano box full of fireworks for the boys. How do you suppose we’ll manage to keep them until the Fourth?”
“We can’t, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the premises,” said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by Hamilton’s chair, and leaning back against the mantel. “Have you seen Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?”