Alexander\'s Bridge and The Barrel Organ

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ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE

by Willa Cather




ALEXANDER'S BRIDGE by Willa Cather




CHAPTER I


Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the
head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man
of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a
student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of
Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to
take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still,
contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn
paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked
trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the
river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much
because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few
passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who
hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it
perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there,
looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs
and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down
the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow.
His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood
smoke in the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the
saltiness that came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles
Street between jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after
a moment of uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet,
deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his
sharp eye upon the house which he reasoned should be his objective
point, when he noticed a woman approaching rapidly from the opposite
direction. Always an interested observer of women, Wilson would have
slackened his pace anywhere to follow this one with his impersonal,
appreciative glance. She was a person of distinction he saw at once,
and, moreover, very handsome. She was tall, carried her beautiful head
proudly, and moved with ease and certainty. One immediately took for
granted the costly privileges and fine spaces that must lie in the
background from which such a figure could emerge with this rapid and
elegant gait. Wilson noted her dress, too,--for, in his way, he had an
eye for such things,--particularly her brown furs and her hat. He got
a blurred impression of her fine color, the violets she wore, her white
gloves, and, curiously enough, of her veil, as she turned up a flight of
steps in front of him and disappeared.

Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that passed him on the wing as
completely and deliberately as if they had been dug-up marvels, long
anticipated, and definitely fixed at the end of a railway journey. For
a few pleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he was going, and only
after the door had closed behind her did he realize that the young woman
had entered the house to which he had directed his trunk from the South
Station that morning. He hesitated a moment before mounting the steps.
"Can that," he murmured in amazement,--"can that possibly have been Mrs.
Alexander?"

When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alexander was still standing in the
hallway. She heard him give his name, and came forward holding out her
hand.

"Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson? I was afraid that you might get
here before I did. I was detained at a concert, and Bartley telephoned
that he would be late. Thomas will show you your room. Had you rather
have your tea brought to you there, or will you have it down here with
me, while we wait for Bartley?"

Wilson was pleased to find that he had been the cause of her rapid walk,
and with her he was even more vastly pleased than before. He followed
her through the drawing-room into the library, where the wide back
windows looked out upon the garden and the sunset and a fine stretch
of silver-colored river. A harp-shaped elm stood stripped against the
pale-colored evening sky, with ragged last year's birds' nests in its
forks, and through the bare branches the evening star quivered in the
misty air. The long brown room breathed the peace of a rich and amply
guarded quiet. Tea was brought in immediately and placed in front of the
wood fire. Mrs. Alexander sat down in a high-backed chair and began to
pour it, while Wilson sank into a low seat opposite her and took his cup
with a great sense of ease and harmony and comfort.

"You have had a long journey, haven't you?" Mrs. Alexander asked, after
showing gracious concern about his tea. "And I am so sorry Bartley is
late. He's often tired when he's late. He flatters himself that it is
a little on his account that you have come to this Congress of
Psychologists."

"It is," Wilson assented, selecting his muffin carefully; "and I hope he
won't be tired tonight. But, on my own account, I'm glad to have a few
moments alone with you, before Bartley comes. I was somehow afraid that
my knowing him so well would not put me in the way of getting to know
you."

"That's very nice of you." She nodded at him above her cup and smiled,
but there was a little formal tightness in her tone which had not been
there when she greeted him in the hall.

Wilson leaned forward. "Have I said something awkward? I live very far
out of the world, you know. But I didn't mean that you would exactly
fade dim, even if Bartley were here."

Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly. "Oh, I'm not so vain! How terribly
discerning you are."

She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt that this quick, frank glance
brought about an understanding between them.

He liked everything about her, he told himself, but he particularly
liked her eyes; when she looked at one directly for a moment they were
like a glimpse of fine windy sky that may bring all sorts of weather.

"Since you noticed something," Mrs. Alexander went on, "it must have
been a flash of the distrust I have come to feel whenever I meet any of
the people who knew Bartley when he was a boy. It is always as if they
were talking of someone I had never met. Really, Professor Wilson, it
would seem that he grew up among the strangest people. They usually say
that he has turned out very well, or remark that he always was a fine
fellow. I never know what reply to make."

Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair, shaking his left foot
gently. "I expect the fact is that we none of us knew him very well,
Mrs. Alexander. Though I will say for myself that I was always confident
he'd do something extraordinary."

Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight movement, suggestive of
impatience. "Oh, I should think that might have been a safe prediction.
Another cup, please?"

"Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case of boys, is not so easy as
you might imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early and lose
their courage; and some never get a fair wind. Bartley"--he dropped his
chin on the back of his long hand and looked at her admiringly--"Bartley
caught the wind early, and it has sung in his sails ever since."

Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with intent preoccupation, and
Wilson studied her half-averted face. He liked the suggestion of stormy
possibilities in the proud curve of her lip and nostril. Without that,
he reflected, she would be too cold.

"I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. I
don't believe he remembers," she said suddenly. "Won't you smoke, Mr.
Wilson?"

Wilson lit a cigarette. "No, I don't suppose he does. He was never
introspective. He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I
have ever known. We didn't know exactly what to do with him."

A servant came in and noiselessly removed the tea-tray. Mrs. Alexander
screened her face from the firelight, which was beginning to throw
wavering bright spots on her dress and hair as the dusk deepened.

"Of course," she said, "I now and again hear stories about things that
happened when he was in college."

"But that isn't what you want." Wilson wrinkled his brows and looked at
her with the smiling familiarity that had come about so quickly. "What
you want is a picture of him, standing back there at the other end of
twenty years. You want to look down through my memory."

She dropped her hands in her lap. "Yes, yes; that's exactly what I
want."

At this moment they heard the front door shut with a jar, and Wilson
laughed as Mrs. Alexander rose quickly. "There he is. Away with
perspective! No past, no future for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The
only moment that ever was or will be in the world!"

The door from the hall opened, a voice called "Winifred?" hurriedly,
and a big man came through the drawing-room with a quick, heavy tread,
bringing with him a smell of cigar smoke and chill out-of-doors air.
When Alexander reached the library door, he switched on the lights
and stood six feet and more in the archway, glowing with strength
and cordiality and rugged, blond good looks. There were other
bridge-builders in the world, certainly, but it was always Alexander's
picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a
tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head
seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked
strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten
great bridges that cut the air above as many rivers.


After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room
over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of
white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once
the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of
course; those warm consonances of color had been blending and mellowing
before he was born. But the wonder was that he was not out of place
there,--that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background for
his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in
the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled
above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar in his large, smooth
hand, a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which wind and sun and
exposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clear-skinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meeting of British engineers, and
I'm doing another bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met your
wife, wasn't it?"

"Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great-aunt there. A most remarkable
old lady. I was working with MacKeller then, an old Scotch engineer who
had picked me up in London and taken me back to Quebec with him. He had
the contract for the Allway Bridge, but before he began work on it he
found out that he was going to die, and he advised the committee to turn
the job over to me. Otherwise I'd never have got anything good so early.
MacKeller was an old friend of Mrs. Pemberton, Winifred's aunt. He had
mentioned me to her, so when I went to Allway she asked me to come to
see her. She was a wonderful old lady."

"Like her niece?" Wilson queried.

Bartley laughed. "She had been very handsome, but not in Winifred's way.
When I knew her she was little and fragile, very pink and white, with
a splendid head and a face like fine old lace, somehow,--but perhaps I
always think of that because she wore a lace scarf on her hair. She had
such a flavor of life about her. She had known Gordon and Livingstone
and Beaconsfield when she was young,--every one. She was the first woman
of that sort I'd ever known. You know how it is in the West,--old people
are poked out of the way. Aunt Eleanor fascinated me as few young women
have ever done. I used to go up from the works to have tea with her, and
sit talking to her for hours. It was very stimulating, for she couldn't
tolerate stupidity."

"It must have been then that your luck began, Bartley," said Wilson,
flicking his cigar ash with his long finger. "It's curious, watching
boys," he went on reflectively. "I'm sure I did you justice in the
matter of ability. Yet I always used to feel that there was a weak spot
where some day strain would tell. Even after you began to climb, I stood
down in the crowd and watched you with--well, not with confidence. The
more dazzling the front you presented, the higher your facade rose, the
more I expected to see a big crack zigzagging from top to bottom,"--he
indicated its course in the air with his forefinger,--"then a crash and
clouds of dust. It was curious. I had such a clear picture of it. And
another curious thing, Bartley," Wilson spoke with deliberateness and
settled deeper into his chair, "is that I don't feel it any longer. I am
sure of you."

Alexander laughed. "Nonsense! It's not I you feel sure of; it's
Winifred. People often make that mistake."

"No, I'm serious, Alexander. You've changed. You have decided to leave
some birds in the bushes. You used to want them all."

Alexander's chair creaked. "I still want a good many," he said rather
gloomily. "After all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work like the
devil and think you're getting on, and suddenly you discover that you've
only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you dry.
Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while
you are being built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap
about. I sometimes wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I hadn't
been this sort; I want to go and live out his potentialities, too. I
haven't forgotten that there are birds in the bushes."

Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire, his shoulders thrust
forward as if he were about to spring at something. Wilson watched him,
wondering. His old pupil always stimulated him at first, and then vastly
wearied him. The machinery was always pounding away in this man, and
Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective habit of mind. He could
not help feeling that there were unreasoning and unreasonable activities
going on in Alexander all the while; that even after dinner, when most
men achieve a decent impersonality, Bartley had merely closed the door
of the engine-room and come up for an airing. The machinery itself was
still pounding on.

Bartley's abstraction and Wilson's reflections were cut short by a
rustle at the door, and almost before they could rise Mrs. Alexander was
standing by the hearth. Alexander brought a chair for her, but she shook
her head.

"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and Professor
Wilson were quite comfortable. I am going down to the music-room."

"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We are tired
of talk."

"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander," Wilson began, but he got no further.

"Why, certainly, if you won't find me too noisy. I am working on the
Schumann `Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a great many hours,
I am very methodical," Mrs. Alexander explained, as she crossed to an
upright piano that stood at the back of the room, near the windows.

Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair
behind her. She played brilliantly and with great musical feeling.
Wilson could not imagine her permitting herself to do anything badly,
but he was surprised at the cleanness of her execution. He wondered how
a woman with so many duties had managed to keep herself up to a standard
really professional. It must take a great deal of time, certainly, and
Bartley must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had
never before known a woman who had been able, for any considerable
while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting
behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes
with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in
street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she
seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there
were something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty
much what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, and he
wondered how she squared Bartley. After ten years she must know him;
and however one took him, however much one admired him, one had to admit
that he simply wouldn't square. He was a natural force, certainly, but
beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not anything very really or for very
long at a time.

Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley's profile was still
wreathed in cigar smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His
shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions and one hand hung large and
passive over the arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet
smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had chosen it. She was clearly
very proud of his good looks and his fine color. But, with the glow of
an immediate interest gone out of it, the engineer's face looked tired,
even a little haggard. The three lines in his forehead, directly above
the nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and his powerful head drooped
forward heavily. Although Alexander was only forty-three, Wilson thought
that beneath his vigorous color he detected the dulling weariness of
on-coming middle age.


The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to
redden under the declining sun, Wilson again found himself facing Mrs.
Alexander at the tea-table in the library.

"Well," he remarked, when he was bidden to give an account of himself,
"there was a long morning with the psychologists, luncheon with Bartley
at his club, more psychologists, and here I am. I've looked forward to
this hour all day."

Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the vapor from the kettle. "And do
you remember where we stopped yesterday?"

"Perfectly. I was going to show you a picture. But I doubt whether I
have color enough in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded monochrome. You
can't get at the young Bartley except by means of color." Wilson paused
and deliberated. Suddenly he broke out: "He wasn't a remarkable student,
you know, though he was always strong in higher mathematics. His work
in my own department was quite ordinary. It was as a powerfully equipped
nature that I found him interesting. That is the most interesting thing
a teacher can find. It has the fascination of a scientific discovery. We
come across other pleasing and endearing qualities so much oftener than
we find force."

"And, after all," said Mrs. Alexander, "that is the thing we all live
upon. It is the thing that takes us forward."

Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully. "Exactly," he assented
warmly. "It builds the bridges into the future, over which the feet of
every one of us will go."

"How interested I am to hear you put it in that way. The bridges into
the future--I often say that to myself. Bartley's bridges always seem to
me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada,
the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it
sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh
when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is
over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it,
and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was
a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it
meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it
here." She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. "And there, you see,
on the hill, is my aunt's house."

Wilson took up the photograph. "Bartley was telling me something about
your aunt last night. She must have been a delightful person."

Winifred laughed. "The bridge, you see, was just at the foot of the
hill, and the noise of the engines annoyed her very much at first. But
after she met Bartley she pretended to like it, and said it was a good
thing to be reminded that there were things going on in the world. She
loved life, and Bartley brought a great deal of it in to her when
he came to the house. Aunt Eleanor was very worldly in a frank,
Early-Victorian manner. She liked men of action, and disliked young
men who were careful of themselves and who, as she put it, were always
trimming their wick as if they were afraid of their oil's giving out.
MacKeller, Bartley's first chief, was an old friend of my aunt, and
he told her that Bartley was a wild, ill-governed youth, which really
pleased her very much. I remember we were sitting alone in the dusk
after Bartley had been there for the first time. I knew that Aunt
Eleanor had found him much to her taste, but she hadn't said anything.
Presently she came out, with a chuckle: `MacKeller found him sowing
wild oats in London, I believe. I hope he didn't stop him too soon. Life
coquets with dashing fellows. The coming men are always like that. We
must have him to dinner, my dear.' And we did. She grew much fonder
of Bartley than she was of me. I had been studying in Vienna, and she
thought that absurd. She was interested in the army and in politics, and
she had a great contempt for music and art and philosophy. She used to
declare that the Prince Consort had brought all that stuff over out of
Germany. She always sniffed when Bartley asked me to play for him. She
considered that a newfangled way of making a match of it."

When Alexander came in a few moments later, he found Wilson and his wife
still confronting the photograph. "Oh, let us get that out of the way,"
he said, laughing. "Winifred, Thomas can bring my trunk down. I've
decided to go over to New York to-morrow night and take a fast boat. I
shall save two days."



CHAPTER II


On the night of his arrival in London, Alexander went immediately to the
hotel on the Embankment at which he always stopped, and in the lobby he
was accosted by an old acquaintance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him
with effusive cordiality and indicated a willingness to dine with him.
Bartley never dined alone if he could help it, and Mainhall was a good
gossip who always knew what had been going on in town; especially, he
knew everything that was not printed in the newspapers. The nephew of
one of the standard Victorian novelists, Mainhall bobbed about among the
various literary cliques of London and its outlying suburbs, careful to
lose touch with none of them. He had written a number of books himself;
among them a "History of Dancing," a "History of Costume," a "Key to
Shakespeare's Sonnets," a study of "The Poetry of Ernest Dowson," etc.
Although Mainhall's enthusiasm was often tiresome, and although he was
often unable to distinguish between facts and vivid figments of his
imagination, his imperturbable good nature overcame even the people whom
he bored most, so that they ended by becoming, in a reluctant manner,
his friends. In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly like the
conventional stage-Englishman of American drama: tall and thin, with
high, hitching shoulders and a small head glistening with closely
brushed yellow hair. He spoke with an extreme Oxford accent, and when he
was talking well, his face sometimes wore the rapt expression of a very
emotional man listening to music. Mainhall liked Alexander because he
was an engineer. He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his
idea about Americans was that they should be engineers or mechanics. He
hated them when they presumed to be anything else.

While they sat at dinner Mainhall acquainted Bartley with the fortunes
of his old friends in London, and as they left the table he proposed
that they should go to see Hugh MacConnell's new comedy, "Bog Lights."

"It's really quite the best thing MacConnell's done," he explained as
they got into a hansom. "It's tremendously well put on, too. Florence
Merrill and Cyril Henderson. But Hilda Burgoyne's the hit of the piece.
Hugh's written a delightful part for her, and she's quite inexpressible.
It's been on only two weeks, and I've been half a dozen times already.
I happen to have MacConnell's box for tonight or there'd be no chance of
our getting places. There's everything in seeing Hilda while she's fresh
in a part. She's apt to grow a bit stale after a time. The ones who have
any imagination do."

"Hilda Burgoyne!" Alexander exclaimed mildly. "Why, I haven't heard of
her for--years."

Mainhall laughed. "Then you can't have heard much at all, my dear
Alexander. It's only lately, since MacConnell and his set have got hold
of her, that she's come up. Myself, I always knew she had it in her. If
we had one real critic in London--but what can one expect? Do you know,
Alexander,"--Mainhall looked with perplexity up into the top of the
hansom and rubbed his pink cheek with his gloved finger,--"do you know,
I sometimes think of taking to criticism seriously myself. In a way, it
would be a sacrifice; but, dear me, we do need some one."