Read Online My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Willa Cather
Ads: Link
with my uncle. It was money I needed. We’ve thrown our lives away.”
“Come, Myra, don’t talk so before Nellie. You don’t mean it. Remember the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this.”
“We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in theworld. Now I’m old and ill and a fright, but among my own kind I’d still have my circle; I’d have courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!” She turned her face to the wall and covered her head.
We stepped into the hall, and the moment we closed the door we heard the bolt slip behind us. She must have sprung up very quickly. Oswald walked with me to my room. “It’s apt to be like this, when she has enjoyed something and gone beyond her strength. There are times when she can’t have anyone near her. It was worse before you came.”
I persuaded him to come into my room and sit down and drink a glass of cordial.
“Sometimes she has locked me out for days together,” he said. “It seems strange—a woman of such generous friendships. It’s as if she had used up that part of herself. It’s a great strain on me when she shuts herself up like that. I’m afraid she’ll harm herself in some way.”
“But people don’t do things like that,” I said hopelessly.
He smiled and straightened his shoulders. “Ah, but she isn’t people! She’s Myra Driscoll, and there was never anybody else like her. She can’t endure, but she has enough desperate courage for a regiment.”
THREE
T he next morning I saw Henshawe breakfasting in the restaurant, against his custom, so I judged that his wife was still in retreat. I was glad to see that he was not alone, but was talking, with evident pleasure, to a young girl who lived with her mother at this hotel. I had noticed her respectful admiration for Henshawe on other occasions. She worked on a newspaper, was intelligent and, Oswald thought, promising. We enjoyed talking with her at lunch or dinner. She was perhaps eighteen, overgrown and awkward, with short hair and a rather heavy face; but there was something unusual about her clear, honest eyes that made one wonder. She was always on the watch to catch a moment with Oswald, to get him to talk to her about music, or German poetry, or about the actors and writers he had known. He called her his little chum, and her admiration was undoubtedly a help to him. It was very pretty and naïve. Perhaps that was one of the things that kept him up to the mark in his dress and manner. Among people he never looked apologetic or crushed. He still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons.
On Monday, as I came home from school, I saw that the door of Mrs. Henshawe’s room was slightly ajar.She knew my step and called to me: “Can you come in, Nellie?”
She was staying in bed that afternoon, but she had on her best dressing-gown, and she was manicuring her neat little hands—a good sign, I thought.
“Could you stop and have tea with me, and talk? I’ll be good to-day, I promise you. I wakened up in the night crying, and it did me good. You see, I was crying about things I never feel now; I’d been dreaming I was young, and the sorrows of youth had set me crying!” She took my hand as I sat down beside her. “Do you know that poem of Heine’s, about how he found in his eye a tear that was not of the present, an old one, left over from the kind he used to weep? A tear that belonged to a long dead time of his life and was an anachronism. He couldn’t account for it, yet there it was, and he addresses it so prettily: ‘Thou old, lonesome tear!’ Would you read it for me? There’s my little Heine, on the shelf over the sofa. You can easily find the verse,
Du alte, einsame Thräne!
”
I ran through the volume, reading a poem here and there where a leaf had been turned down, or where I saw a line I knew well. It was a
“Come, Myra, don’t talk so before Nellie. You don’t mean it. Remember the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this.”
“We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in theworld. Now I’m old and ill and a fright, but among my own kind I’d still have my circle; I’d have courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!” She turned her face to the wall and covered her head.
We stepped into the hall, and the moment we closed the door we heard the bolt slip behind us. She must have sprung up very quickly. Oswald walked with me to my room. “It’s apt to be like this, when she has enjoyed something and gone beyond her strength. There are times when she can’t have anyone near her. It was worse before you came.”
I persuaded him to come into my room and sit down and drink a glass of cordial.
“Sometimes she has locked me out for days together,” he said. “It seems strange—a woman of such generous friendships. It’s as if she had used up that part of herself. It’s a great strain on me when she shuts herself up like that. I’m afraid she’ll harm herself in some way.”
“But people don’t do things like that,” I said hopelessly.
He smiled and straightened his shoulders. “Ah, but she isn’t people! She’s Myra Driscoll, and there was never anybody else like her. She can’t endure, but she has enough desperate courage for a regiment.”
THREE
T he next morning I saw Henshawe breakfasting in the restaurant, against his custom, so I judged that his wife was still in retreat. I was glad to see that he was not alone, but was talking, with evident pleasure, to a young girl who lived with her mother at this hotel. I had noticed her respectful admiration for Henshawe on other occasions. She worked on a newspaper, was intelligent and, Oswald thought, promising. We enjoyed talking with her at lunch or dinner. She was perhaps eighteen, overgrown and awkward, with short hair and a rather heavy face; but there was something unusual about her clear, honest eyes that made one wonder. She was always on the watch to catch a moment with Oswald, to get him to talk to her about music, or German poetry, or about the actors and writers he had known. He called her his little chum, and her admiration was undoubtedly a help to him. It was very pretty and naïve. Perhaps that was one of the things that kept him up to the mark in his dress and manner. Among people he never looked apologetic or crushed. He still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons.
On Monday, as I came home from school, I saw that the door of Mrs. Henshawe’s room was slightly ajar.She knew my step and called to me: “Can you come in, Nellie?”
She was staying in bed that afternoon, but she had on her best dressing-gown, and she was manicuring her neat little hands—a good sign, I thought.
“Could you stop and have tea with me, and talk? I’ll be good to-day, I promise you. I wakened up in the night crying, and it did me good. You see, I was crying about things I never feel now; I’d been dreaming I was young, and the sorrows of youth had set me crying!” She took my hand as I sat down beside her. “Do you know that poem of Heine’s, about how he found in his eye a tear that was not of the present, an old one, left over from the kind he used to weep? A tear that belonged to a long dead time of his life and was an anachronism. He couldn’t account for it, yet there it was, and he addresses it so prettily: ‘Thou old, lonesome tear!’ Would you read it for me? There’s my little Heine, on the shelf over the sofa. You can easily find the verse,
Du alte, einsame Thräne!
”
I ran through the volume, reading a poem here and there where a leaf had been turned down, or where I saw a line I knew well. It was a
Similar Books
