A Lost Lady
Willa Cather
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Title: A LOST LADY (1923)
Author: WILLA CATHER
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: A LOST LADY (1923)
Author: WILLA CATHER
". . . . . . . . . Come, my coach!
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies,
Good night, good night."
Part One
ONE
Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the
Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were
then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its
hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. Well known,
that is to say, to the railroad aristocracy of that time; men who
had to do with the railroad itself, or with one of the "land
companies" which were its by-products. In those days it was enough
to say of a man that he was "connected with the Burlington." There
were the directors, the general managers, vice-presidents,
superintendents, whose names we all knew; and their younger
brothers or nephews were auditors, freight agents, departmental
assistants. Everyone "connected" with the Road, even the large
cattle- and grain-shippers, had annual passes; they and their
families rode about over the line a great deal. There were then
two distinct social strata in the prairie States; the homesteaders
and hand-workers who were there to make a living, and the bankers
and gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to
invest money and to "develop our great West," as they used to tell
us.
When the Burlington men were travelling back and forth on business
not very urgent, they found it agreeable to drop off the express
and spend a night in a pleasant house where their importance was
delicately recognized; and no house was pleasanter than that of
Captain Daniel Forrester, at Sweet Water. Captain Forrester was
himself a railroad man, a contractor, who had built hundreds of
miles of road for the Burlington,--over the sage brush and cattle
country, and on up into the Black Hills.
The Forrester place, as every one called it, was not at all
remarkable; the people who lived there made it seem much larger and
finer than it was. The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a
mile east of town; a white house with a wing, and sharp-sloping
roofs to shed the snow. It was encircled by porches, too narrow
for modern notions of comfort, supported by the fussy, fragile
pillars of that time, when every honest stick of timber was
tortured by the turning-lathe into something hideous. Stripped of
its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the house would probably
have been ugly enough. It stood close into a fine cottonwood grove
that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the
hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling
grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by
rail, and the last thing one saw on departing.
To approach Captain Forrester's property, you had first to get over
a wide, sandy creek which flowed along the eastern edge of the
town. Crossing this by the footbridge or the ford, you entered the
Captain's private lane bordered by Lombardy poplars, with wide
meadows lying on either side. Just at the foot of the hill on
which the house sat, one crossed a second creek by the stout wooden
road-bridge. This stream traced artless loops and curves through
the broad meadows that were half pasture land, half marsh. Any one
but Captain Forrester would have drained the bottom land and made
it into highly productive fields. But he had selected this place
long ago because it looked beautiful to him, and he happened to
like the way the creek wound through his pasture, with mint and
joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks. He was well off
for those times, and he had no children. He could afford to humour
his fancies.
When the Captain drove friends from Omaha or Denver over from the
station in his democrat wagon, it gratified him to hear these
gentlemen admire his fine stock, grazing in the meadows on either
side of his lane. And when they reached the top of the hill, it
gratified him to see men who were older than himself leap nimbly to
the ground and run up the front steps as Mrs. Forrester came out on
the porch to greet them. Even the hardest and coldest of his
friends, a certain narrow-faced Lincoln banker, became animated
when he took her hand, tried to meet the gay challenge in her eyes
and to reply cleverly to the droll word of greeting on her lips.
She was always there, just outside the front door, to welcome their
visitors, having been warned of their approach by the sound of
hoofs and the rumble of wheels on the wooden bridge. If she
happened to be in the kitchen, helping her Bohemian cook, she came
out in her apron, waving a buttery iron spoon, or shook cherry-
stained fingers at the new arrival. She never stopped to pin up a
lock; she was attractive in dishabille, and she knew it. She had
been known to rush to the door in her dressing-gown, brush in hand
and her long black hair rippling over her shoulders, to welcome
Cyrus Dalzell, president of the Colorado & Utah; and the great man
had never felt more flattered. In his eyes, and in the eyes of the
admiring middle-aged men who visited there, whatever Mrs. Forrester
chose to do was "lady-like" because she did it. They could not
imagine her in any dress or situation in which she would not be
charming. Captain Forrester him
self, a man of few words, told
Judge Pommeroy that he had never seen her look more captivating
than on the day when she was chased by the new bull in the pasture.
She had forgotten about the bull and gone into the meadow to gather
wild flowers. He heard her scream, and as he ran puffing down the
hill, she was scudding along the edge of the marshes like a hare,
beside herself with laughter, and stubbornly clinging to the
crimson parasol that had made all the trouble.
Mrs. Forrester was twenty-five years younger than her husband, and
she was his second wife. He married her in California and brought
her to Sweet Water a bride. They called the place home even then,
when they lived there but a few months out of each year. But
later, after the Captain's terrible fall with his horse in the
mountains, which broke him so that he could no longer build
railroads, he and his wife retired to the house on the hill.
He grew old there,--and even she, alas! grew older.
TWO
But we will begin this story with a summer morning long ago, when
Mrs. Forrester was still a young woman, and Sweet Water was a town
of which great things were expected. That morning she was standing
in the deep bay-window of her parlour, arranging old-fashioned
blush roses in a glass bowl. Glancing up, she saw a group of
little boys coming along the driveway, barefoot, with fishing-poles
and lunch-baskets. She knew most of them; there was Niel Herbert,
Judge Pommeroy's nephew, a handsome boy of twelve whom she liked;
and polite George Adams, son of a gentleman rancher from Lowell,
Massachusetts. The others were just little boys from the town; the
butcher's red-headed son, the leading grocer's fat brown twins, Ed
Elliott (whose flirtatious old father kept a shoe store and was the
Don Juan of the lower world of Sweet Water), and the two sons of
the German tailor,--pale, freckled lads with ragged clothes and
ragged rust-coloured hair, from whom she sometimes bought game or
catfish when they appeared silent and spook-like at her kitchen
door and thinly asked if she would "care for any fish this
morning."
As the boys came up the hill she saw them hesitate and consult
together. "You ask her, Niel."
"You'd better, George. She goes to your house all the time, and
she barely knows me to speak to."
As they paused before the three steps which led up to the front
porch, Mrs. Forrester came to the door and nodded graciously, one
of the pink roses in her hand.
"Good-morning, boys. Off for a picnic?"
George Adams stepped forward and solemnly took off his big straw
hat. "Good-morning, Mrs. Forrester. Please may we fish and wade
down in the marsh and have our lunch in the grove?"
"Certainly. You have a lovely day. How long has school been out?
Don't you miss it? I'm sure Niel does. Judge Pommeroy tells me
he's very studious."
The boys laughed, and Niel looked unhappy.
"Run along, and be sure you don't leave the gate into the pasture
open. Mr. Forrester hates to have the cattle get in on his blue
grass."
The boys went quietly round the house to the gate into the grove,
then ran shouting down the grassy slopes under the tall trees.
Mrs. Forrester watched them from the kitchen window until they
disappeared behind the roll of the hill. She turned to her
Bohemian cook.
"Mary, when you are baking this morning, put in a pan of cookies
for those boys. I'll take them down when they are having their
lunch."
The round hill on which the Forrester house stood sloped gently
down to the bridge in front, and gently down through the grove
behind. But east of the house, where the grove ended, it broke
steeply from high grassy banks, like bluffs, to the marsh below.
It was thither the boys were bound.
When lunch time came they had done none of the things they meant to
do. They had behaved like wild creatures all morning; shouting
from the breezy bluffs, dashing down into the silvery marsh through
the dewy cobwebs that glistened on the tall weeds, swishing among
the pale tan cattails, wading in the sandy creek bed, chasing a
striped water snake from the old willow stump where he was sunning
himself, cutting sling-shot crotches, throwing themselves on their
stomachs to drink at the cool spring that flowed out from under a
bank into a thatch of dark watercress. Only the two German boys,
Rheinhold and Adolph Blum, withdrew to a still pool where the creek
was dammed by a reclining tree trunk, and, in spite of all the
noise and splashing about them, managed to catch a few suckers.
The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass
was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on.
Birds and butterflies darted everywhere. All at once the breeze
died, the air grew very hot, the marsh steamed, and the birds
disappeared. The boys found they were tired; their shirts stuck to
their bodies and their hair to their foreheads. They left the
sweltering marsh-meadows for the grove, lay down on the clean grass
under the grateful shade of the tall cottonwoods, and spread out
their lunch. The Blum boys never brought anything but rye bread
and hunks of dry cheese,--their companions wouldn't have touched it
on any account. But Thaddeus Grimes, the butcher's red-headed son,
was the only one impolite enough to show his scorn. "You live on
wienies to home, why don't you never bring none?" he bawled.
"Hush," said Niel Herbert. He pointed to a white figure coming
rapidly down through the grove, under the flickering leaf shadows,--
Mrs. Forrester, bareheaded, a basket on her arm, her blue-black
hair shining in the sun. It was not until years afterward that she
began to wear veils and sun hats, though her complexion was never
one of her beauties. Her cheeks were pale and rather thin,
slightly freckled in summer.
As she approached, George Adams, who had a particular mother, rose,
and Niel followed his example.
"Here are some hot cookies for your lunch, boys." She took the
napkin off the basket. "Did you catch anything?"
"We didn't fish much. Just ran about," said George.
"I know! You were wading and things." She had a nice way of
talking to boys, light and confidential. "I wade down there myself
sometimes, when I go down to get flowers. I can't resist it. I
pull off my stockings and pick up my skirts, and in I go!" She
thrust out a white shoe and shook it.
"But you can swim, can't you, Mrs. Forrester," said George. "Most
women can't."
"Oh yes, they can! In California everybody swims. But the Sweet
Water doesn't tempt me,--mud and water snakes and blood-suckers--
Ugh!" she shivered, laughing.
"We seen a water snake this morning and chased him. A whopper!"
Thad Grimes put in.
"Why didn't you kill him? Next time I go wading he'll bite my
toes! Now, go on with your lunch. George can leave the basket
white figure drifting along the edge of the grove as she stopped
here and there to examine the raspberry vines by the fence.
"These are good cookies, all right," said one of the giggly brown
Weaver twins. The German boys munched in silence. They were all
rather pleased that Mrs. Forrester had come down to them herself,
instead of sending Mary. Even rough little Thad Grimes, with his
red thatch and catfish mouth--the characteristic feature of all the
Grimes brood--knew that Mrs. Forrester was a very special kind of
person. George and Niel were already old enough to see for
themselves that she was different from the other townswomen, and to
reflect upon what it was that made her so. The Blum brothers
regarded her humbly from under their pale, chewed-off hair, as one
of the rich and great of the world. They realized, more than their
companions, that such a fortunate and privileged class was an
axiomatic fact in the social order.
The boys had finished their lunch and were lying on the grass
talking about how Judge Pommeroy's water spaniel, Fanny, had been
poisoned, and who had certainly done it, when they had a second
visitor.
"Shut up, boys, there he comes now. That's Poison Ivy," said one
of the Weaver twins. "Shut up, we don't want old Roger poisoned."
A well-grown boy of eighteen or nineteen, dressed in a shabby
corduroy hunting suit, with a gun and gamebag, had climbed up from
the marsh and was coming down the grove between the rows of trees.
He walked with a rude, arrogant stride, kicking at the twigs, and
carried himself with unnatural erectness, as if he had a steel rod
down his back. There was something defiant and suspicious about
the way he held his head. He came up to the group and addressed
them in a superior, patronizing tone.
"Hullo, kids. What are YOU doing here?"
"Picnic," said Ed Elliott.
"I thought girls went on picnics. Did you bring teacher along?
Ain't you kids old enough to hunt yet?"
George Adams looked at him scornfully. "Of course we are. I got a
22 Remington for my last birthday. But we know better than to
bring guns over here. You better hide yours, Mr. Ivy, or Mrs.
Forrester will come down and tell you to get out."
"She can't see us from the house. And anyhow, she can't say
anything to me. I'm just as good as she is."
To this the boys made no reply. Such an assertion was absurd even
to fish-mouthed Thad; his father's business depended upon some
people being better than others, and ordering better cuts of meat
in consequence. If everybody ate round steak like Ivy Peters'
family, there would be nothing in the butcher's trade.
The visitor had put his gun and gamebag behind a tree, however, and
stood stiffly upright, surveying the group out of his narrow beady
eyes and making them all uncomfortable. George and Niel hated to
look at Ivy,--and yet his face had a kind of fascination for them.
It was red, and the flesh looked hard, as if it were swollen from
bee-stings, or from an encounter with poison ivy. This nickname,
however, was given him because it was well known that he had "made
away" with several other dogs before he had poisoned the Judge's
friendly water spaniel. The boys said he took a dislike to a dog
and couldn't rest until he made an end of him.
Ivy's red skin was flecked with tiny freckles, like rust spots, and
in each of his hard cheeks there was a curly indentation, like a
knot in a tree-bole,--two permanent dimples which did anything but
soften his countenance. His eyes were very small, and an absence
of eyelashes gave his pupils the fixed, unblinking hardness of a
snake's or a lizard's. His hands had the same swollen look as his
face, were deeply creased across the back and knuckles, as if the
skin were stretched too tight. He was an ugly fellow, Ivy Peters,
