O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (ebook reader with internet browser .TXT) 📕

her as if he could eat everybody alive. Frank’s not a bad neighbor, but to get on with him you’ve got to make a fuss over him and act as if you thought he was a very important person all the time, and different from other people. I find it hard to keep that up from one year’s end to another.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d be very successful at that kind of thing, Alexandra.” Carl seemed to find the idea amusing.

“Well,” said Alexandra firmly, “I do the best I can, on Marie’s account. She has it hard enough, anyway. She’s too young and pretty for this sort of life. We’re all ever so much older and slower. But she’s the kind that won’t be downed easily. She’ll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning. I could stay by a job, but I never had the go in me that she has, when I was going my best. I’ll have to take you over to see her tomorrow.”

Carl dropped the end of his cigar softly among the castor beans and sighed. “Yes, I suppose I must see the old place. I’m cowardly about things that remind me of myself. It took courage to come at all, Alexandra. I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t wanted to see you very, very much.”

Alexandra looked at him with her calm, deliberate eyes. “Why do you dread things like that, Carl?” she asked earnestly. “Why are you dissatisfied with yourself?”

Her visitor winced. “How direct you are, Alexandra! Just like you used to be. Do I give myself away so quickly? Well, you see, for one thing, there’s nothing to look forward to in my profession. Wood engraving is the only thing I care about, and that had gone out before I began. Everything’s cheap metal work nowadays, touching up miserable photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good ones. I’m absolutely sick of it all.” Carl frowned. “Alexandra, all the way out from New York I’ve been planning how I could deceive you and make you think me a very enviable fellow, and here I am telling you the truth the first night. I waste a lot of time pretending to people, and the joke of it is, I don’t think I ever deceive anyone. There are too many of my kind; people know us on sight.”

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worthwhile to work. No, I would rather have Emil like you than like them. I felt that as soon as you came.”

“I wonder why you feel like that?” Carl mused.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn’t see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful, and she says she’s contented to live and work in a world that’s so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

V

Alexandra did not find time to go to her neighbor’s the next day, nor the next. It was a busy season on the farm, with the corn plowing going on, and even Emil was in the field with a team and cultivator. Carl went about over the farms with Alexandra in the morning, and in the afternoon and evening they found a great deal to talk about. Emil, for all his track practice, did not stand up under farmwork very well, and by