The Project Gutenberg eBook, Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather
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Title: Youth and the Bright Medusa
Author: Willa Cather
Release Date: September 30, 2004 [eBook #13555]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA
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YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA
by
WILLA CATHER
1920
“We must not look at Goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits;
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry, thirsty roots?”
CONTENTS
COMING, APHRODITE!
THE DIAMOND MINE
A GOLD SLIPPER
SCANDAL
PAUL’S CASE
A WAGNER MATINEE
THE SCULPTOR’S FUNERAL
“A DEATH IN THE DESERT”
The author wishes to thank McClure’s Magazine, _The Century
Magazine_ and Harper’s Magazine for their courtesy in permitting
the re-publication of three stories in this collection.
The last four stories in the volume, Paul’s Case, A Wagner Matinee,
The Sculptor’s Funeral, ”A Death in the Desert,” are re-printed from
the author’s first book of stories, entitled “The Troll Garden,”
published in 1905.
Coming, Aphrodite!
I
Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on
the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.
He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north,
where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court
and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very
cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners
were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built
against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day
and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window,
was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked
his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often
a bone or two for his comfort.
The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly
disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told
on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very
exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about
University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was
invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled
coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and
he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler’s. Hedger,
as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a
shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that
had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on
gloves unless the day was biting cold.
Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the
rear apartment—two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.
His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors,
which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy
of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by
a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went
to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it
away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.
Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young
people who came to New York to “write” or to “paint”—who proposed to
live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired
artistic surroundings.
When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who
tried to write plays,—and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the
nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.
A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of
voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the
nurse—doubtless exhibiting her treasures—and another voice, also a
woman’s, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the
same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only
bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall,
and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath.
He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn’t leave bones
about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions
on his gas burner.
As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was
absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at
people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly
gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with
another,—though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual
lighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrow
hall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon,
groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that a
piano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down the
stairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument,
and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and go
down the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuck
his brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping to
wash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolted
doors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair was
standing up about his elegant collar.
Hedger encouraged him. “Come along, Caesar. You’ll soon get used to a new
smell.”
In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to the
roof, just opposite Hedger’s door. The dog flew at it with a growl of
hurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into the
brilliant May afternoon.
Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster
house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the
coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar was
always welcome,—not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. All
the carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steak
and onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension that
this dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesar
sat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail.
After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog’s health and
watched the stages pull out;—that was almost the very last summer of the
old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun
operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water
which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that
were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older,
brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the