come up in the world.

His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was, that he thought a boy
ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded up-stairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dish-water from his hands with the
ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from
the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously
under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he
shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown
theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-
night rehearsals whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available
moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among
Edwards's following, not only because the young actor, who could not afford to employ a
dresser, often found the boy very useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to
what Churchmen term 'vocation.'

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a
forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love.
The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed like a
prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant,
poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from "Martha", or
jerked at the serenade from "Rigoletto," all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness,
that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was
because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty
economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odors of
cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so
attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially
under the lime-light.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that
theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever
suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float
about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there; with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps, and richly appareled women who never saw the disenchanting light
of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy
toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean
shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish
fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as
would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his
friends urged upon him—well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any
sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel-organ. He needed only the spark, the
indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots
and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage-struck—not, at any
rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any

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more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what
he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue
league after blue league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever repulsive: the
bare floors and naked walls, the prosy men who never wore frock-coats, or violets in their
button-holes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about
prepositions that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a
moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that he considered it all
trivial, and was there only by way of a jest, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the
members of the stock company, which he showed his classmates, telling them the most
incredible stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with the soloists
who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these
stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he became desperate and would bid all
the boys good-night, announcing that he was going to travel for a while, going to Naples, to
Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious, and nervously smiling;
his sister was ill, and he should have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors know how
heartily he despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated
elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding,
with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them,
that he was helping the people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was, that the principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was taken out
of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his
stead, the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him to the house, and Charley
Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's stories reached
them—especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting
indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to
such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's
was a bad case.

II

The east-bound train was plowing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn was
beginning to show gray, when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from
the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window-glass
with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white
bottom-lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here
and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black above it. Lights shone
from the scattered houses, and a gang of laborers who stood beside the track waved their
lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the all-night
journey in a day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a
Pullman, and partly because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburg business
man, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke him,

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he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the
little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were
in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, Paul hurried through his breakfast, manifestly ill
at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station,
he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment that was
just opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with endless
reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in the fitting-room; the frock-coat
and dress-clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a
shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and a new scarf-pin.
He would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on
Broadway, and had his purchases packed into various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling with the
cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had
been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his
story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in
engaging his rooms, a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone over
every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrap-book at home there were pages of
description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his
sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there
was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell-
boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting
away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put
them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white
bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red
robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see
across the street but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and
jonquils on the taboret beside the couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering
himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, had stood
up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to
think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool
fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall,
when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a
mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own courage, for
he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive
dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been
pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember the
time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always
there—behind him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed corner,
the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be
watching him—and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

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But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to
the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon that he
had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposits as usual—but this time he was
instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There were above two thousand dollars in
checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank-notes which he had taken from the book and
quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip. His nerves
had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where he had finished his
work and asked for a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
pretext. The bank-book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his
father would be out of town for the next week. From the time he slipped the bank-notes into
his pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment's
hesitation. It was not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done, and this time there
would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow-flakes
whirling by his window until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start; half of one
of his precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every
stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the
kind of boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went down-stairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the Park.
The snow had somewhat abated, carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying to and fro
in the winter twilight, boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps, the avenue
stages made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on the corners were
stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the
snow-flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley, somehow vastly
more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself
was a wonderful stage winter-piece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the streets had
changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen
stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream
of carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other streams, tending
horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to
wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning that was stretched across the
sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above, about,
within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot
for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the
omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all
dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like
the snow-flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator
shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank

73
back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the
perfumes, the bewildering medley of color—he had for a moment the feeling of not being
able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went
slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms, reception-rooms, as
though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him
alone.

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers, the
white linen, the many-colored wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping
of corks, the undulating repetitions of the "Blue Danube" from the orchestra, all flooded
Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the rosy tinge of his champagne was added—
that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass—Paul wondered that
there were honest men in the world at all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he
reflected; this was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had he
ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged-looking business men got on
the early car; mere rivets in a machine, they seemed to Paul—sickening men, with combings
of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes.
Cordelia Street—Ah! that belonged to another time and country; had he not always been
thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking
pensively over just such shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any
of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the
evening, in his loge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings,
of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his
surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the
purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure
himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and sat long
watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it was with the
lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity and partly so that, if he
should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion
of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and in the
afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run
down for a "little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of
the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until
seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a
champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool. The freshman
pulled himself together to make his train and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in
the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and the Pittsburg papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to be said for
him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. Even
under the glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a
magician's wand for wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his

74
excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his
sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and
his sense of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself.
The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored
his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure, even at school, but to be noticed and admired,
to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly,
more honest even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his
actor friends used to say, "dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to
him. His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the
Pittsburg papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local news of a
sensational nature was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's
father had refunded the full amount of the theft, and that they had no intention of prosecuting.
The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the
motherless boy, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to
that end. The rumor had reached Pittsburg that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel,
and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees, and clasped
his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street
were to close over him finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched before him in
hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered
room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening vividness. He had
the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play
was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with
his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With something of the old
childish belief in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned,
Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than his
remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with
it, and finding it all-sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories
had again, and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was game,
he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia
Street, and for the first time he drank his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those
fortunate beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own place? He
drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and looked about him, telling
himself over and over that it had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his wine, that he
might have done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well
out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and
too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he had to
choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the
dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had thrown
himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and
hands were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon

75
him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was
physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed his eyes and let the
tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told himself. The memory
of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had
not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the
wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding itself up; he
had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and had even provided a way to
snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came
blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the looks of the
thing.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of
nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet
somehow, he was not afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked
into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not
so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that
he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half
an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so he went
down stairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver
to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and
had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the carriage
and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed
to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered
every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the
red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-
passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked
feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the
ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on his tongue. He
stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot.
When he reached a little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below
him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over. It
occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must have
gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of
their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass, and it was a losing game in the end, it
seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run. Paul took one of the
blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it
up. Then he dozed a while, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only
his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching
locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or
twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right
moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless

76
clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer
than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air,
on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the
picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul
dropped back into the immense design of things.

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 A Wagner Matinée

Willa Cather
(1904)

I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink, on glassy, blue-lined note-paper, and
bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed,
looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat-pocket that was none too clean,
was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a
bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it had become necessary for her to come to
Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station, and
render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that
of her arrival, I found it no later than to-morrow. He had characteristically delayed writing
until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.

The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure, at once pathetic and
grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollections so wide and deep that, as the
letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my
existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study. I became, in
short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness,
my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, thumbing the
scales with my stiff, red hands, while she beside me made canvas mittens for the huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for the station. When the
train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to
alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred,
smoked bodies that firemen lift from the débris of a burned building. She had come all the
way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray
with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to
bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning.

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she considerately

concealed. Myself, I saw my aunt's misshapened figure with that feeling of awe and respect
with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef
Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer,
which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had
dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all
the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and
extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in a
plain, angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston,
Howard followed her; and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with
him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her friends by going with him
to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red
Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they measured off their eighty acres by
driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton
handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of
those cave dwellings whose inmates usually reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery.

78