The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.
This comes early in Cather’s novel, pages 11-12 in the edition I read, and when coming across it I immediately flagged it as a kind of key that will help unlock all that is to follow.
Lucy is Lucy Gayheart, a young woman late in her teens from a small town called Haverford, and Harry is Harry Gordon, a kind of platonic beau of hers. They are in his horse-drawn sleigh, moving towards a frozen tributary of the Platte River, where they and others of their youth and enthusiasm have skated for years, both for exercise and as an expression of their youthful joy.
But Lucy will leave Haverford in the spring, moving to Chicago to begin a kind of career, studying music under Professor Paul Auerbach and providing piano lessons to younger students in order to make her ends meet. And shortly, upon the recommendation of her music professor, Lucy will go to a recital offered by a famous singer named Clement Sebastian.
The first number was a Schubert song she had never heard or even seen. His diction was one of the remarkable things about Sebastian’s singing, and she did not miss a word of the German. A Greek sailor, returned from a voyage, stands in the temple of Castor and Pollux, the mariners’ stars, and acknowledges their protection. He has steered his little boat by their mild, protecting light, eure Milde, eure Wachen. In recognition of their aid he hangs his oar as a votive offering in the porch of their temple.
The song was sung as a religious observance in the classical spirit, a rite more than a prayer; a noble salutation to beings so exalted that in the mariner’s invocation there was no humbleness and no entreaty. In your light I stand without fear, O august stars! I salute your eternity. That was the feeling. Lucy had never heard anything sung with such elevation of style. In its calmness and serenity there was a kind of large enlightenment, like daybreak.
The experience is a revelatory one for Lucy -- and very much in keeping with Cather’s perennial theme of art transcending beyond the ordinary.
Through the rest of the recital her attention was intermittent. Sometimes she listened intently, and the next moment her mind was far away. She was struggling with something she had never felt before. A new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation of love as a tragic force, not a melting mood, of passion that drowns like black water. As she sat listening to this man the outside world seemed to her dark and terrifying, full of fears and dangers that had never come close to her until now.
Passion that drowns like black water. Mark that. We’ll come back to that. But for now, know only that this recital, this glimpse of the transcendent, awakens in Lucy a painful understanding that will separate her from the pastoral ideal that Haverford and the people that live there represent.
Some peoples’ lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
Lucy and Sebastian
Near the end of the year Lucy will be taken on as Sebastian’s new accompanist, playing the piano and working with him as he prepares for an extended tour in Europe. In this capacity, the two will come to know each other very well, with each representing something important to the other. Cather captures this in two short portraits, juxtaposed on the same Sunday afternoon.
First, Lucy:
One Sunday afternoon near the end of February Lucy was sitting in her room looking out at the back of the next building, which came close to her window, -- a blank wall of bricks painted grey. Sunday was the only day in which she had much time for reflection. She gave lessons all day on Saturday, but on Sunday she was free.
This morning she was wondering how a month, nearly two months, indeed, could have slipped by so quickly. A strange kind of life she had been leading. For two hours, five days a week, she was alone with Sebastian, shut away from the rest of the world. It was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one but [Sebastian’s valet] Giuseppe, heard no one; the city below was blotted out. Then, after eleven-thirty, the city began poking in its fingers. The telephone began to buzz, and she heard him build up the rest of his day and evening. At about twelve she got into the elevator and dropped down into Chicago again.
The weather, which everyone grumbled about, had been exactly the right weather for her. The dark, stormy mornings made the warmth and quiet toward which she hurried seem all the richer. The dirty streets, as she crossed the town through sleet and snow, were like narrow rivers, shut in by grey cliffs where the light was always changing, and she herself was a twig or a leaf swept along on the current. As soon as she reached the studio, that excitement and sense of struggle vanished; her mind was like a pair of dancing balances brought to rest. Something quieted her like a great natural force. Things took on their right relation, the trivial and disturbing shut out. Life was resolved into something simple and noble -- yes, and joyous; a joyousness which seemed safe from time or change, like that in Schubert’s Die Forelle, which Sebastian often sang.
Lucy stopped looking at the streaks of rain against the grey wall, went to her shabby piano, and played that song again and again. There were other songs which she associated more closely with Sebastian himself, but this one was like the studio, like the hours they spent there together. No matter where in the world she should ever hear it, it would always drop her down again into that room with the piano between two big windows, the coal fire glowing behind her, the Lake reaching out before her, and the man walking carelessly up and down as he sang.
And now, Sebastian:
On this same Sunday Sebastian himself was going through a bad time. He happened to have no out-of-town engagement, so he was in Chicago, in his studio. This day, with a brutal rain beating on brutal buildings, had been one of slowly rising misery.
In the morning paper he had read a dispatch from Geneva, announcing the death of an old friend and fellow student, at a sanatorium in Savoy. He hadn’t even known that Larry MacGowan was ill; there had been a coldness between them for the last few years. But the moment his eyes fell on that black headline the feeling of estrangement vanished as if it had never been. The reality was their ardent, generous young friendship, their student days together -- which were only yesterday, after all. He put down the newspaper softly, as if he were afraid of wakening someone. It was like reading his own death notice. Like it? It was just that. The obituary would serve for both -- for their good days.
Nothing had ever made Seabstian admit to himself that his youth was forever and irrevocably gone. He had clung to a secret belief that he would pick it up again, somewhere. This was a time of temporary lassitude and disillusion, but his old feeling about life would come back; he would turn a corner and confront it. He would waken some morning and step out of bed the man he used to be. Now, all in a moment, it came over him that when people spoke of their dead youth they were not using a figure of speech. The thing he was looking for had gone out into the wide air, like a volatile essence, and he was staring into the empty jar. Emptiness, that was the feeling: the very objects in his studio seemed to draw farther apart, and to regard each other more coldly. MacGowen had slipped out of all this; grey skies, falling rain, chilled affections. Everything in this room, in this city and this country, had suddenly become unfamiliar and unfriendly.
He goes on in a kind of reverie, remembering what MacGowen had once meant to him; more, it seems, that any other person, even his wife, with whom he quickly grew estranged, and even his son, who he had sent away to school. He sits by his fire for hours, smoking until his throat is dry, trying to find one lovely, unspoiled memory.
In the present wasn’t there somewhere a flower or a green bough that he could hold close and breathe its freshness? His glance wandered toward the piano; perhaps there was one!
Sebastian got up and opened the windows wide, wound a scarf about his throat, and walked up and down the room while the wind blew out the tobacco smoke. He was thinking about Lucy; that perhaps he wouldn’t have got so far down this morning if she had been there for an hour. It was dangerous to go for sympathy to a young girl who was in love with one, but Lucy was different. As he paced back and forth he told himself that hers was quite another kind of feeling than the one he had encountered under so many disguises, It seemed complete in itself, not putting out tentacles all the while. He had sometimes thought of her as rather boyish, because she was so square. It was more like a chivalrous loyalty than a young passion. He didn’t believe she would ever be guilty of those uncatalogued, faint treacheries which vanity makes young people commit. He didn’t believe she would ever use his name for her own advantage -- not even in a harmless way, to make herself interesting to a crowd of students, for instance. That was a good deal to say for a young thing with her living to make, struggling to get a foothold in a slippery world. He hadn’t met with just that kind of delicacy before, in man or woman. When she gave him a quick shy look and the gold sparks flashed in her eyes, he read devotion there, and the fire of imagination; but not invitation, no appeal. In her companionship there was never the shadow of a claim. On the contrary, there was a spirit which disdained advantage.
There is clearly a special bond emerging between these two, something far more special than the simple and natural affections that women and men feel, or even those felt by students and teachers. To borrow a Catherian turn of phrase, for Sebastian, Lucy is a bridge to Youth, and for Lucy, Sebastian is a bridge to the Bright Medusa.
Indeed, in the very next chapter, Lucy goes at the appointed time to Sebastian’s studio.
At last it was five o’clock, the grey twilight was gone, and she turned towards the Arts Building. She was frightened as she went up in the elevator, and tried not to think at all. She lifted the brass knocker, and Sebastian opened the door. Before she had time to speak, just as she was, in her hat and coat, he took her in his arms.
They stood for a long while without moving, in the dusky little hall among overcoats and walking-sticks. Lucy felt him take everything that was in her heart; there was nothing to hold back any more. His soft, deep breathing seemed to drink her up entirely, to take away all that was timid, uncertain, bewildered. Something beautiful and serene came from his heart into hers; wisdom and sadness. If he took her secret, he gave her his in return; that he had renounced life. Nobody would ever share his life again. But he had unclouded faith in the old and lovely dreams of man; that he would teach her and share with her. When they went into the music room, neither of them had spoken.
There is much here that transcends words, that transcends the need to communicate through words, but shortly Sebastian will put exactly into words what Lucy does for him and his withered old heart.
“Send you away? I’m afraid I’m not so unselfish. Perhaps I ought. But it isn’t as if you were really in love. I am quite old enough to be your father, you know. You are merely growing up, -- and finding things. It was just that freshness which charmed me, I thought. But now I believe I love everything about you, Lucy. The mornings used to be dull and heavy here. You brought something sweet into them. I began to watch for you from the window, and when I caught sight of you tripping along in the wind, my heart grew lighter. I love young ardour, young fire. I had a nice boy in my house once; but he had to go away to school. What a difference you have made in my life here! When you knocked, it was like springtime coming in at the door. I went to work with more spirit because things were new and wonderful to you.”
Lucy is growing -- growing as a young woman, but more so growing as a young artist, as a young connoisseur of the beautiful and the sublime -- and in that growth, whether as its instigator or even just as its fond observer, Sebastian remembers and revels in what he once had, what life and art had once meant to him.
Becoming More and More Herself
But, of course, this growth, this change, has an impact on Lucy as well.
Lucy used to be sorry that her birthday came in March. In Chicago it was the most disagreeable season of the year; and at home, in Haverford, it was always cheerless enough. The ice on the Platte had either disappeared or gone rotten, so there was no skating. The wind never stopped blowing, and the air was full of dust from the ploughed fields and sand from the river banks. But this year March was the happiest month she had ever known.
The ice on the Platte. Mark that as well. But for now, let’s continue with the changes Lucy is discovering, the passing of another birthday just a milestone to mark such progress.
Sebastian was getting up his programs for his April concert tour in the East, and every morning was important. It was much more as if he were really living at the studio now. He kept the place full of flowers and growing plants because he found Lucy liked them. When he opened the door for her, he met her with a kiss. That embrace, often playful but never hurried, seemed to bring them at once into complete understanding: every sound, every silence, had the beauty of intimacy and confidence. The air one breathed in that room was different from any other in the world. Lucy thought there was even a special kind of light there, which kept a soft tint of gold, though the fog was brown and the smoke hung low outside. The weather was consistently bad. The ice cakes ground upon each other in the Lake, rain and wet snow beat down upon the city, high winds strewed the streets with broken umbrellas. But when she reached the Arts Building the elevator took her up into an untroubled climate.
It was at night, when she was quiet and alone, that she got the greatest happiness out of each day -- after it had passed! Why this was, she never knew. In the darkness she went over every moment of the morning again. Nothing was lost; not a phrase of a song, not a look on his face or a motion of his hand. In these quiet hours she had time to reflect, and to realize that the few weeks since the 4th of January were longer than the twenty-one years that had gone before. Life, it seemed, could not be measured by years.
It was not that she had been discontented before. She had been happy ever since she first came to Chicago; thought herself fortunate to have escaped from a little town to a city, and to work with a kind and conscientious man like Paul Auerbach. But that time was far away. She began a new life on the night when she first heard Clement Sebastian. Until that night she had played with trifles and make-believes.
Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself -- except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself. She was no longer afraid to like or to dislike anything too much. It was as if she had found some authority for taking what was hers and rejecting what seemed unimportant.
Lucy is becoming more and more herself. That, to me, is one of the essential points of this story. That Sebastian -- the Bright Medusa -- whatever it is that he gains from the relationship, is helping Youth grow, mature, and become the well-rounded adult that she has to become and be. And, to me, that idea prompts a dark and dangerous thought. Once Youth stops being Youth, will the Bright Medusa still find her appealing? What will Sebastian do when Lucy stops being the wide-eyed discoverer of what to Sebastian is old, but which to Lucy is new, and which is therefore new again to Sebastian?
The change in Lucy is even more apparent when she re-connects with Harry Gordon, that young man with the horse-drawn sleigh from back home, who by now is moving up in the world of business and who has set his eye on marrying Lucy, both out of true affection for her and out of a sense that such a match would be proper for a man of his enterprising spirit. On his visit to Chicago, they go to the Art Museum.
It was a rather gentle, sunny morning, and as they walked over toward Michigan Avenue they stopped to do a little shopping. Lucy caught at every pretext for delay. Last year when they went through the Museum together they had disagreed violently about almost everything, and had come away in a bad humour. Marshall Field’s was a much better place for Harry, and it was fun choosing handkerchiefs and neckties for him. But he kept looking at his watch, and got her to the galleries soon after they were open. He was careful not to make any comments that would irritate her; she could actually feel caution in his step and voice. What a fury she must have been last spring! Not once did she catch that smart squint in his eyes. He did, occasionally, square his shoulders before a picture and twist his mouth awry, as if he would like to call the painter’s bluff; but he did not try to be funny. When they reached a loan exhibit of French Impressionists he broke down, and began pointing out figures that were not correctly drawn.
“Now, you’ll admit, Lucy--” he would begin persuasively.
“Certainly I admit, but I don’t think it matters. I don’t know anything about pictures, but I think some are meant to express a kind of feeling merely, and then accuracy doesn’t matter.”
Yes, Lucy. Pictures, and sometimes novels by Willa Cather, too.
“But anatomy is a fact,” he insisted, “and facts are at the bottom of everything.”
She did not answer him impatiently, as she would have done once, but bent her head a little and spoke in a quiet voice which disconcerted him. “Are they, Harry? I’m not so sure.”
He didn’t reply to this. Something in her tone had made him feel very tenderly toward her. She must be tired, he thought. He saw a door open, leading to one of the stone porticos at the back of the building, that looked on the Lake. He touched Lucy’s elbow.
“Let’s go out on that balcony and get some fresh air.”
The morning had grown warmer, but a mist had come up which hid the sky-line. The water was faintly blue, and above it everything was soft; a silvery mist with changing blue and green at the heart of it, far out. Even the grey gulls flew by on languid wings. The air felt full of spring showers. On a morning like this… Lucy felt an ache come up in her throat. When she looked off at that soft promise of spring, spring already happening in the colours of the sky before it had come on earth, such a longing awoke in her that it seemed as if it would break her heart. That happiness she had so lately found, where was it? Everything threatened it, the way of the world was against it. It had escaped her. She had lost it as one can lose a ravishing melody, remembering the mood of it, the kind of joy it gave, but unable to recall precisely the air itself. And she couldn’t breathe in this other kind of life. It stifled her, woke in her a frantic fear -- the fear of falling back into it forever. If only one could lose one’s life and one’s body and be nothing but one’s desire; if the rest could melt away, and that could float with the gulls, out yonder where the blue and green were changing!
A far-away voice was saying something about lunch. She came back with a start.
“No, Harry, please. I have a headache, and I want to get home as quickly as I can. If I am to go with you tonight, I must lie down and try to get over this.”
Lucy may be more and more herself, but she is not the girl she was when Harry first knew her, but tragically she is also not yet the person Sebastian is helping her become. She sees how fleeting such an idealized person is, and how difficult the transition can be. Later in the week, when Harry does ask her to marry him, Lucy is forced to turn him down, first claiming awkwardly her love for another man. But of course, it is not actually Sebastian himself that Lucy loves. And, of course, Harry can not understand.
“Now, Lucy! Every girl falls in love with her singing teacher, but I thought you, for one, had escaped!”
She felt her cheeks burn with anger. “He’s not my singing teacher! He’s a great artist,” she muttered, angrier still because this sounded so childish.
“Very well, I’ve no objection; the greater the better! But you’ll soon recover, my dear.” He refused to be annoyed. He was glowing with tolerance. She gave him a defiant look and managed to get her hand away. He considered a moment, then leaned forward and spoke softly, in a confident, teasing tone. “Now see here, Lucy, how far has this nonsense gone?”
The dining-room swam and tilted before Lucy’s eyes. “How far?” she broke out in a flash of scorn. “How far? All the way; all the way! There’s no going back. Can’t you understand anything?” She did not see his face, her eyes were blind as if she were looking into a furnace.
Her words -- truer than any Lucy had ever spoken -- do not reach Harry Gordon. They cannot. In the awkward moment that follows, he excuses himself from the table, and then, strangely, never returns.
Two Who Would Never Meet Again
But, of course, Lucy and Sebastian are also not destined for each other. Sebastian is only in the United States on an extended tour. Eventually, returns to Europe, and in his parting with Lucy they both seem to know with extreme clarity what each of them will be missing.
Sebastian felt a heaviness of heart; he scarcely knew whether on her account or his own. He was wondering whether there was not some way of escape from his life: from concerts and hotels, from Mockford, and his wife, and his place in France, from his friends in England, from everything he was and had. In what stretched out before him there was nothing he wanted very much. And this youth and devotion would not be the same when he came back, he knew; what he held against his heart was for tonight only. It was a parting between two who would never meet again.
Mark that. They, in fact, will never meet again, but that is not what Sebastian is referring to here. He can entertain the idea that he and Lucy Gayheart may indeed cross paths again -- but this Lucy Gayheart, the one whose flowering Youth has rekindled his own, this Lucy Gayheart he would never, ever see again.
And Lucy?
Lucy knew what he was thinking. She felt a kind of hopeless despair in the embrace that tightened about her. As they passed a lamppost she looked up, and in the flash of light she saw his face. Oh, then it came back to her! The night he sang When We Two Parted and she knew he had done something to her life. Presentiments like that one were not meaningless; they came out of the future. Surely that hour foretold sorrow to this. They were going to lose something. They were both clinging to it and to each other, but they must lose it.
Lucy is losing her Bright Medusa. Think back on poor Aunt Georgina at the end of her Wagner Matinee. “I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!’” Lucy will think something similar when she is back in Haverford -- sent back after Sebastian leaves for Europe, sent like an invalid by her caring landlady.
Mrs. Auerbach did all her packing for her, made explanations to the bakery people, got her railway ticket, took Lucy to the train. She had even made up a little package of “keepsakes” at Sebastian’s studio, before his lawyer came in to clean everything out; some of the handkerchiefs left in his drawer, a pair of his gloves, photographs of himself and his friends, a few of his books, scores he had marked. She selected these things without consulting Lucy and sent them by express to Haverford. They now lay in the bottom of Lucy’s trunk. They meant nothing to her; she couldn’t bear to look at them.
To have one’s heart frozen and one’s world destroyed in a moment -- that was what it had meant. She could not draw a long breath or make a free movement in the world that was left. She could breathe only in the world she brought back through memory.
She is no good. She tries to settle back into some semblance of her former life, but she cannot. She is frozen. She can’t advance in any way. It is as if Sebastian was the key to her future, and without him she can’t cross any more thresholds.
She tried to feel at peace and to breathe more slowly, but every nerve was quivering with a long-forgotten restlessness. How often she had run out on a spring morning, into the orchard, down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew! It was there, in the breeze, in the sun; it hid behind the blooming apple boughs, raced before her through the neighbours’ gardens, but she could never catch up with it. Clement Sebastian had made the fugitive gleam an actual possession. With him she had learned that those flashes of promise could come true, that they could be the important things in one’s life. He had never told her so; he was, in his own person, the door and the way to that knowledge.
And despite this frozenness, the suspension between what she was and what she still might become, her fate comes suddenly and -- despite my usual cynicism -- unexpectedly,
It is winter, and Lucy is walking home from someplace. It is hard going, with the wagon-ruts frozen solid in the dirt road. She is walking along the river, which, in her absence in a spring flood, had shifted its course, eliminating the shallow tributary when she and her friends had often skated. Behind her, Harry Gordon approaches in his horse-drawn sleigh, and, true to his persistent avoidance of her since her return from Chicago, he refuses to give her a ride back to town when she asks, claiming some urgent business in another direction.
In that moment, she makes two fateful decisions.
When Lucy next stopped to take breath, she found herself a long way nearer the river bend. For a moment she had leaned against the telephone post back yonder, but only for a moment. Such a storm of pain and anger boiled up in her that she felt strong enough to walk into the next county. Her blood was racing, and she was no longer conscious of the cold. She forgot to look where she put her feet; they took care of themselves.
She couldn’t have imagined such rudeness, such an insult! She was young, she was strong, she would show them they couldn’t crush her. She would get away from these people who were cruel and stupid -- stupid as the frozen mud in the road. If she let herself think, she would cry. She must not give in to it, she must hurry on.
When she reached the river bank she sat down just long enough to take off her walking-shoes, and put on the other pair with skates attached. Her hands trembled so that she could scarcely pull the leather laces taut and tie them. She was angry with herself, too. That she should have given him the chance to leave her in the road, as he had left her in the dining-room that night in Chicago! But how could anyone be armed against such boorishness and spite? Catching up a stick, she got to her feet and took a few long strokes close to the shore. She was not looking about her, she saw nothing -- she would get away from this frozen country and these frozen people, go back to light and freedom such as they could never know.
There they are, the two decisions. The first, to skate rather than walk home. The second, to get away, far away, and to never come back. It is a warm and hopeful image.
Without looking or thinking she struck toward the centre for smoother ice. A soft, splitting sound brought her to herself in a flash, and she saw dark lines running in the ice about her. She turned sharply, but the cracks ran ahead of her. A sheet of ice broke loose and tipped, and she plunged to her waist into cold water.
Lucy was more stimulated than frightened; she had got herself into a predicament, and she must keep her wits about her. The water couldn’t be very deep. She still had both elbows on the ice; as soon as she touched bottom she could manage. (It never occurred to her that this was the river itself.) She was groping cautiously with her feet when she felt herself gripped from underneath. Her skate had caught in the fork of a submerged tree, half-buried in sand by the spring flood. The ice cake slipped from under her arms and let her down.
And that’s it. Lucy is dead, drowned in a frozen river, as presaged in so many images and metaphors throughout the earlier text. But there is still a third book and thirty more pages to go in this novel. And Cather will use those pages to reinforce her basic theme.
The last section focuses almost entirely on Harry Gordon -- and begins twenty-five years after the tragic closing event of the previous section. It is retrospective, looking back over a life of decisions -- yes, the one that left Lucy to her fate on that cold winter day -- but other decisions as well, decisions having to do with business, marriage, and life. Through it all, Harry has changed dramatically. And Lucy?
He is not a man haunted by remorse; all that he went through with long ago. He enjoys his prosperity and his good health. Lucy Gayheart is no longer a despairing little creature standing in the icy wind and lifting beseeching eyes to him. She is no longer near, beside his sleigh. She has receded to the far horizon line, along with all the fine things of youth, which do not change.
Lucy has not changed in the slightest -- not in Harry’s mind, not for anyone else in the world. At the end of our dark tale, Lucy Gayheart is simply and still an eternal thing called Youth.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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