The Professor's House by Willa Cather
He's the intolerant one."
"True for you, Louie," laughed the Professor.
"And it's that way about lots of things," said Louie a little
plaintively.
"Kitty," said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in
the drivers seat beside him, "that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was
one of Tom's trinkets, wasn't it? Do you suppose she has some feeling
for him still, under all this pompuosity?"
"I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very
much!" she cried vehemently.
He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand
over hers, inside her muff. "Sure?" he muttered.
"Yes, I do!" she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all
her might.
"Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty.
Most girls wouldn't have thought it necessary. I'm the only one who
knows, ain't I?"
"The only one who ever has known."
"And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told. Why did you,
Kit?"
"I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you
were the real one." Her head dropped on his shoulder. "You know you are
the real one, don't you?"
"I guess!"
Chapter 10
That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical
Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a
luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then
motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other
newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up
his father-in-law.
"I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of
Louie's party?"
"I had classes."
"It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty
of them," Scott tapped his breast pocket. "We had poor Tom served up
again. It was all right, of course--the scientific men were interested,
didn't know much about him. Louie called on me for personal
recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn't express myself very
well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be
talking uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes
I think he was just a--a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor."
Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights
of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house.
With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began
recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that
bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.
He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a
heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope,
came in at the green door that led from the street.
"Are you Professor St. Peter?" he inquired.
Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue
cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of
moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was
his manly, mature voice--low, calm, experienced, very different from the
thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The
next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young
man's sandy hair--the very fair forehead which had been protected by his
hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed
to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was
fine-looking, he saw--tall and presumably well built, though the
shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that
the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.
"I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask
you advice. I don't know anybody in the town."
"You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you
from?"
"I've never been to high school, sir. That's the trouble."
"Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you
from?"
"New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin
with a priest down there."
St. Peter smiled incredulously. "How much Latin?"
"I read Caesar and Virgil, the AEneid."
"How many books?"
"We went right through." He met the Professor's questions squarely, his
eyes were resolute, like his voice.
"Oh, you did." St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been
digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. "Can you repeat any of it?"
The boy began: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem and steadily
continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking
hand.
"Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good
pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a
Frenchman?"
"Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium."
"Did you learn any French from him?"
"No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish."
"You speak Spanish?"
"Not very well, Mexican Spanish."
The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew
enough to get credit for a modern language. "And what are your
deficiencies?"
"I've never had any mathematics or science, and I write very bad hand."
"That's not unusual," St. Peter told him. "But, by the way, how did you
happen to come to me instead of the registrar?"
"I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew.
I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father
Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he'd read about
our country down there."
The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular
periodicals it got him into trouble. "Well, what are your plans, young
man? And, by the way, what is your name?"
"Tom Outland."
The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.
"How old are you?"
"I'm twenty." He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a
few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn't know exactly how
old he was. "I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics
this summer."
"Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?"
Outland's face grew grave. "I'm rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to
write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you'd find I have
money in the bank there, and you'd think I had been deceiving you. But
it's money I can't touch while I'm able-bodied. It's in trust for
someone else. But I've got three hundred dollars without any string on
it, and I'm hoping to get work here. I've been bossing a section gang
all winter, and I'm in good condition. I'll do anything but wait table.
I won't do that." On this point he seemed to feel strongly.
The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he
said, were "mover people," and both died when they were crossing
southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He
was a baby and had been
informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in
her last hours,--a locomotive engineer named O'Brien, and his wife. This
engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along
with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a
job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.
"What's a call boy, a messenger boy?"
"No, sir. It's a more responsible position. Our town was an important
freight division on the Santa F?, and a lot of train men live there. The
freight schedule is always changing because it's a single track road and
the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose
you're a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A.M.; well, like as
not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go
to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your
mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before
your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in
time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He
must know when there's a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You
can't tell when there's a spotter about, and if a man's reported for
gambling, he's fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn't
where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for
that." The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon
irregular behaviour.
Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband
if he wouldn't bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and
looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the
Professor wouldn't hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to
prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in
the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St.
Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he
didn't want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came
back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front
staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the
waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat
down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a
giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter
apologized for the stairs.
"I'm not much used to stairs, living mostly in 'dobe houses," Tom
explained, as he picked himself up.
At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly
at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the
Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff
white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his
face with it, became a rag. "I didn't know it would be so warm up here,
or I'd have picked a lighter suit," he said, embarrassed by the activity
of his skin.
"We would like to hear more about your life in the Southwest," said his
host. "How long were you a call boy?"
"Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on
the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm."
Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was
reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian
housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a
neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth
on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able
to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking
about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.
"I think the very best is the old,--the cliff-dweller pottery," he said.
"Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma'am? Maybe you'd like to see some
I have brought along." As they rose from the table he went to his
telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the
straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects
wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and
displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek
sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.
"That's one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I
don't know just how old, but there's pin>on trees three hundred years
old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the
ruins where I got it."
"Stone trail...pi?ons?" she asked.
"Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet
coming and going for generations. And these old pi?on trees have come up
in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how
long ago it was by them." He showed her a coating of black on the under
side of the jar.
"That's not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It's soot, from
when it was on the cook-fire last--and that was before Columbus landed,
I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old
pots, with the fire-black on them." As she gave it back to him, he shook
his head. "That one's for you, Ma'am, if you like it."
"Oh, I couldn't think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for
yourself, or put it in a museum." But that seemed to touch a sore spot.
"Museums," he said bitterly, "they don't care about our things. The want
something that came from Crete or Egypt. I'd break my jars sooner than
they should get them. But I'd like this one to have a good home, among
your nice things"--he looked about appreciatively. "I've no place to
keep them. They're in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at
the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don't get them
out whole like that very often."
"But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it."
"Maybe some day, Ma'am, I can tell you," he said, wiping his sooty
fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He
strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled.
Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat
where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: "These I
would like to give to the little girls." In his palm lay two lumps of
soft blue stone, the colour of robins' eggs, or of the sea on halcyon
days of summer.
The children marvelled. "Oh, what are they?"
"Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the
jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians
like them this way."
Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she
couldn't let him give his stones to the children. "They are worth a lot
of money."
"I'd never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot,
and they're no use to me, but they'll make pretty playthings for little
girls." His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to
do.
"Hold them still a moment,
" said the Professor, looking down, not at the
turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined
palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little
finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the
rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see
it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.
In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and
looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that
occasion.
"Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor
perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs
leaving princely gifts."
Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still
true. Fellows like Outland don't carry much luggage, yet one of the
things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity--and when they are
gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely
gifts.
With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three
years' mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for
him. But in mathematics, he didn't have to work, he had merely to give
his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter
held the boy at arm's length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had
been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds
water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes
commonplace by a natural law.
In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their prot?g? than her
husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had
proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as "Ma'am." He
came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He
would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with
sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande
country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to
listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.
"Mother," Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, "what do you think!
Tom hasn't any birthday."
"How is that?"
"When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot
to tell the O'Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them
how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he
was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for
that."
St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his
mother died in a wagon.
"Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her
health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom's father
went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's
mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some
people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when
they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her
into the O'Briens' yard, because that was nearest the doctor's and Mrs.
O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours."
"Does Tom know anything about his father?"
"Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother
told the O'Briens that much. But the O'Briens were just lovely to him."
St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there
were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood
as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at
being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older
than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and
"True for you, Louie," laughed the Professor.
"And it's that way about lots of things," said Louie a little
plaintively.
"Kitty," said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in
the drivers seat beside him, "that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was
one of Tom's trinkets, wasn't it? Do you suppose she has some feeling
for him still, under all this pompuosity?"
"I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very
much!" she cried vehemently.
He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand
over hers, inside her muff. "Sure?" he muttered.
"Yes, I do!" she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all
her might.
"Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty.
Most girls wouldn't have thought it necessary. I'm the only one who
knows, ain't I?"
"The only one who ever has known."
"And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told. Why did you,
Kit?"
"I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you
were the real one." Her head dropped on his shoulder. "You know you are
the real one, don't you?"
"I guess!"
Chapter 10
That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical
Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a
luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then
motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other
newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up
his father-in-law.
"I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of
Louie's party?"
"I had classes."
"It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty
of them," Scott tapped his breast pocket. "We had poor Tom served up
again. It was all right, of course--the scientific men were interested,
didn't know much about him. Louie called on me for personal
recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn't express myself very
well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be
talking uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes
I think he was just a--a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor."
Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights
of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house.
With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began
recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that
bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.
He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a
heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope,
came in at the green door that led from the street.
"Are you Professor St. Peter?" he inquired.
Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue
cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of
moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was
his manly, mature voice--low, calm, experienced, very different from the
thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The
next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young
man's sandy hair--the very fair forehead which had been protected by his
hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed
to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was
fine-looking, he saw--tall and presumably well built, though the
shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that
the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.
"I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask
you advice. I don't know anybody in the town."
"You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you
from?"
"I've never been to high school, sir. That's the trouble."
"Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you
from?"
"New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin
with a priest down there."
St. Peter smiled incredulously. "How much Latin?"
"I read Caesar and Virgil, the AEneid."
"How many books?"
"We went right through." He met the Professor's questions squarely, his
eyes were resolute, like his voice.
"Oh, you did." St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been
digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. "Can you repeat any of it?"
The boy began: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem and steadily
continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking
hand.
"Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good
pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a
Frenchman?"
"Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium."
"Did you learn any French from him?"
"No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish."
"You speak Spanish?"
"Not very well, Mexican Spanish."
The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew
enough to get credit for a modern language. "And what are your
deficiencies?"
"I've never had any mathematics or science, and I write very bad hand."
"That's not unusual," St. Peter told him. "But, by the way, how did you
happen to come to me instead of the registrar?"
"I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew.
I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father
Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he'd read about
our country down there."
The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular
periodicals it got him into trouble. "Well, what are your plans, young
man? And, by the way, what is your name?"
"Tom Outland."
The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.
"How old are you?"
"I'm twenty." He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a
few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn't know exactly how
old he was. "I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics
this summer."
"Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?"
Outland's face grew grave. "I'm rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to
write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you'd find I have
money in the bank there, and you'd think I had been deceiving you. But
it's money I can't touch while I'm able-bodied. It's in trust for
someone else. But I've got three hundred dollars without any string on
it, and I'm hoping to get work here. I've been bossing a section gang
all winter, and I'm in good condition. I'll do anything but wait table.
I won't do that." On this point he seemed to feel strongly.
The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he
said, were "mover people," and both died when they were crossing
southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He
informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in
her last hours,--a locomotive engineer named O'Brien, and his wife. This
engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along
with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a
job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.
"What's a call boy, a messenger boy?"
"No, sir. It's a more responsible position. Our town was an important
freight division on the Santa F?, and a lot of train men live there. The
freight schedule is always changing because it's a single track road and
the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose
you're a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A.M.; well, like as
not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go
to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your
mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before
your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in
time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He
must know when there's a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You
can't tell when there's a spotter about, and if a man's reported for
gambling, he's fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn't
where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for
that." The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon
irregular behaviour.
Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband
if he wouldn't bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and
looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the
Professor wouldn't hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to
prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in
the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St.
Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he
didn't want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came
back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front
staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the
waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat
down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a
giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter
apologized for the stairs.
"I'm not much used to stairs, living mostly in 'dobe houses," Tom
explained, as he picked himself up.
At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly
at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the
Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff
white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his
face with it, became a rag. "I didn't know it would be so warm up here,
or I'd have picked a lighter suit," he said, embarrassed by the activity
of his skin.
"We would like to hear more about your life in the Southwest," said his
host. "How long were you a call boy?"
"Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on
the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm."
Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was
reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian
housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a
neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth
on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able
to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking
about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.
"I think the very best is the old,--the cliff-dweller pottery," he said.
"Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma'am? Maybe you'd like to see some
I have brought along." As they rose from the table he went to his
telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the
straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects
wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and
displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek
sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.
"That's one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I
don't know just how old, but there's pin>on trees three hundred years
old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the
ruins where I got it."
"Stone trail...pi?ons?" she asked.
"Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet
coming and going for generations. And these old pi?on trees have come up
in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how
long ago it was by them." He showed her a coating of black on the under
side of the jar.
"That's not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It's soot, from
when it was on the cook-fire last--and that was before Columbus landed,
I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old
pots, with the fire-black on them." As she gave it back to him, he shook
his head. "That one's for you, Ma'am, if you like it."
"Oh, I couldn't think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for
yourself, or put it in a museum." But that seemed to touch a sore spot.
"Museums," he said bitterly, "they don't care about our things. The want
something that came from Crete or Egypt. I'd break my jars sooner than
they should get them. But I'd like this one to have a good home, among
your nice things"--he looked about appreciatively. "I've no place to
keep them. They're in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at
the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don't get them
out whole like that very often."
"But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it."
"Maybe some day, Ma'am, I can tell you," he said, wiping his sooty
fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He
strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled.
Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat
where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: "These I
would like to give to the little girls." In his palm lay two lumps of
soft blue stone, the colour of robins' eggs, or of the sea on halcyon
days of summer.
The children marvelled. "Oh, what are they?"
"Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the
jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians
like them this way."
Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she
couldn't let him give his stones to the children. "They are worth a lot
of money."
"I'd never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot,
and they're no use to me, but they'll make pretty playthings for little
girls." His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to
do.
"Hold them still a moment,
turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined
palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little
finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the
rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see
it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.
In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and
looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that
occasion.
"Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor
perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs
leaving princely gifts."
Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still
true. Fellows like Outland don't carry much luggage, yet one of the
things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity--and when they are
gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely
gifts.
With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three
years' mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for
him. But in mathematics, he didn't have to work, he had merely to give
his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter
held the boy at arm's length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had
been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds
water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes
commonplace by a natural law.
In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their prot?g? than her
husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had
proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as "Ma'am." He
came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He
would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with
sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande
country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to
listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.
"Mother," Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, "what do you think!
Tom hasn't any birthday."
"How is that?"
"When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot
to tell the O'Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them
how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he
was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for
that."
St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his
mother died in a wagon.
"Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her
health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom's father
went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's
mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some
people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when
they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her
into the O'Briens' yard, because that was nearest the doctor's and Mrs.
O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours."
"Does Tom know anything about his father?"
"Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother
told the O'Briens that much. But the O'Briens were just lovely to him."
St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there
were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood
as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at
being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older
than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and