Alexander’s Bridge(亚力山大的桥)

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Alexander's Bridge

by Willa Cather

Alexander's Bridge

CHAPTER I

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at

the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a

man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as

a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of

Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to

take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still,

contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn

paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on

which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot

of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as

because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him

unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their school-

bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown

gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the

gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs

and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down

the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His

nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood smoke in

the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that

came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles Street between

jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of

uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet, deserted,

and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his sharp eye

upon the house which he reasoned should be his objective point, when he

noticed a woman approaching rapidly from the opposite direction. Always

an interested observer of women, Wilson would have slackened his pace

anywhere to follow this one with his impersonal, appreciative glance.

She was a person of distinction he saw at once, and, moreover, very

handsome. She was tall, carried her beautiful head proudly, and moved

with ease and certainty. One immediately took for granted the costly

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privileges and fine spaces that must lie in the background from which such

a figure could emerge with this rapid and elegant gait. Wilson noted her

dress, too,--for, in his way, he had an eye for such things,--particularly her

brown furs and her hat. He got a blurred impression of her fine color, the

violets she wore, her white gloves, and, curiously enough, of her veil, as

she turned up a flight of steps in front of him and disappeared.

Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that passed him on the wing as

completely and deliberately as if they had been dug-up marvels, long

anticipated, and definitely fixed at the end of a railway journey. For a

few pleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he was going, and only

after the door had closed behind her did he realize that the young woman

had entered the house to which he had directed his trunk from the South

Station that morning. He hesitated a moment before mounting the steps.

"Can that," he murmured in amazement,--"can that possibly have been

Mrs. Alexander?"

When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alexander was still standing in

the hallway. She heard him give his name, and came forward holding out

her hand.

"Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson? I was afraid that you might get

here before I did. I was detained at a concert, and Bartley telephoned

that he would be late. Thomas will show you your room. Had you

rather have your tea brought to you there, or will you have it down here

with me, while we wait for Bartley?"

Wilson was pleased to find that he had been the cause of her rapid

walk, and with her he was even more vastly pleased than before. He

followed her through the drawing-room into the library, where the wide

back windows looked out upon the garden and the sunset and a fine stretch

of silver-colored river. A harp-shaped elm stood stripped against the pale-

colored evening sky, with ragged last year's birds' nests in its forks, and

through the bare branches the evening star quivered in the misty air. The

long brown room breathed the peace of a rich and amply guarded quiet.

Tea was brought in immediately and placed in front of the wood fire. Mrs.

Alexander sat down in a high-backed chair and began to pour it, while

Wilson sank into a low seat opposite her and took his cup with a great

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sense of ease and harmony and comfort.

"You have had a long journey, haven't you?" Mrs. Alexander asked,

after showing gracious concern about his tea. "And I am so sorry Bartley

is late. He's often tired when he's late. He flatters himself that it is a little

on his account that you have come to this Congress of Psychologists."

"It is," Wilson assented, selecting his muffin carefully; "and I hope he

won't be tired tonight. But, on my own account, I'm glad to have a few

moments alone with you, before Bartley comes. I was somehow afraid

that my knowing him so well would not put me in the way of getting to

know you."

"That's very nice of you." She nodded at him above her cup and

smiled, but there was a little formal tightness in her tone which had not

been there when she greeted him in the hall.

Wilson leaned forward. "Have I said something awkward? I live very

far out of the world, you know. But I didn't mean that you would exactly

fade dim, even if Bartley were here."

Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly. "Oh, I'm not so vain! How

terribly discerning you are."

She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt that this quick, frank glance

brought about an understanding between them.

He liked everything about her, he told himself, but he particularly liked

her eyes; when she looked at one directly for a moment they were like a

glimpse of fine windy sky that may bring all sorts of weather.

"Since you noticed something," Mrs. Alexander went on, "it must have

been a flash of the distrust I have come to feel whenever I meet any of the

people who knew Bartley when he was a boy. It is always as if they were

talking of someone I had never met. Really, Professor Wilson, it would

seem that he grew up among the strangest people. They usually say that he

has turned out very well, or remark that he always was a fine fellow. I

never know what reply to make."

Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair, shaking his left foot

gently. "I expect the fact is that we none of us knew him very well, Mrs.

Alexander. Though I will say for myself that I was always confident he'd

do something extraordinary."

Alexander's Bridge

Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight movement, suggestive of

impatience. "Oh, I should think that might have been a safe prediction.

Another cup, please?"

"Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case of boys, is not so easy as

you might imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early and lose

their courage; and some never get a fair wind. Bartley"--he dropped his

chin on the back of his long hand and looked at her admiringly--"Bartley

caught the wind early, and it has sung in his sails ever since."

Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with intent preoccupation, and

Wilson studied her half-averted face. He liked the suggestion of stormy

possibilities in the proud curve of her lip and nostril. Without that, he

reflected, she would be too cold.

"I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. I

don't believe he remembers," she said suddenly. "Won't you smoke, Mr.

Wilson?"

Wilson lit a cigarette. "No, I don't suppose he does. He was never

introspective. He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I

have ever known. We didn't know exactly what to do with him."

A servant came in and noiselessly removed the tea-tray. Mrs.

Alexander screened her face from the firelight, which was beginning to

throw wavering bright spots on her dress and hair as the dusk deepened.

"Of course," she said, "I now and again hear stories about things that

happened when he was in college."

"But that isn't what you want." Wilson wrinkled his brows and

looked at her with the smiling familiarity that had come about so quickly.

"What you want is a picture of him, standing back there at the other end of

twenty years. You want to look down through my memory."

She dropped her hands in her lap. "Yes, yes; that's exactly what I

want."

At this moment they heard the front door shut with a jar, and Wilson

laughed as Mrs. Alexander rose quickly. "There he is. Away with

perspective! No past, no future for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The

only moment that ever was or will be in the world!"

The door from the hall opened, a voice called "Winifred?" hurriedly,

Alexander's Bridge

and a big man came through the drawing-room with a quick, heavy tread,

bringing with him a smell of cigar smoke and chill out-of-doors air. When

Alexander reached the library door, he switched on the lights and stood six

feet and more in the archway, glowing with strength and cordiality and

rugged, blond good looks. There were other bridge-builders in the world,

certainly, but it was always Alexander's picture that the Sunday

Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to

look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard and

powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in

themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges that cut

the air above as many rivers.

After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large

room over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of

white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all

what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once the

harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without

obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of

course; those warm consonances of color had been blending and

mellowing before he was born. But the wonder was that he was not out

of place there,-- that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background

for his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in

the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled

above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar in his large, smooth

hand, a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which wind and sun and

exposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clearskinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells

me."

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meeting of British engineers,

and I'm doing another bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met

your wife, wasn't it?"

Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great-aunt there. A most

remarkable old lady. I was working with MacKeller then, an old Scotch

engineer who had picked me up in London and taken me back to Quebec

Alexander's Bridge

with him. He had the contract for the Allway Bridge, but before he began

work on it he found out that he was going to die, and he advised the

committee to turn the job over to me. Otherwise I'd never have got

anything good so early. MacKeller was an old friend of Mrs. Pemberton,

Winifred's aunt. He had mentioned me to her, so when I went to Allway

she asked me to come to see her. She was a wonderful old lady."

"Like her niece?" Wilson queried.

Bartley laughed. "She had been very handsome, but not in Winifred's

way. When I knew her she was little and fragile, very pink and white, with

a splendid head and a face like fine old lace, somehow,--but perhaps I

always think of that because she wore a lace scarf on her hair. She had

such a flavor of life about her. She had known Gordon and Livingstone

and Beaconsfield when she was young,--every one. She was the first

woman of that sort I'd ever known. You know how it is in the West,--old

people are poked out of the way. Aunt Eleanor fascinated me as few

young women have ever done. I used to go up from the works to have

tea with her, and sit talking to her for hours. It was very stimulating, for

she couldn't tolerate stupidity."

"It must have been then that your luck began, Bartley," said Wilson,

flicking his cigar ash with his long finger. "It's curious, watching boys,"

he went on reflectively. "I'm sure I did you justice in the matter of ability.

Yet I always used to feel that there was a weak spot where some day strain

would tell. Even after you began to climb, I stood down in the crowd and

watched you with--well, not with confidence. The more dazzling the

front you presented, the higher your facade rose, the more I expected to

see a big crack zigzagging from top to bottom,"--he indicated its course in

the air with his forefinger,-- "then a crash and clouds of dust. It was

curious. I had such a clear picture of it. And another curious thing,

Bartley," Wilson spoke with deliberateness and settled deeper into his

chair, "is that I don't feel it any longer. I am sure of you."

Alexander laughed. "Nonsense! It's not I you feel sure of; it's

Winifred. People often make that mistake."

"No, I'm serious, Alexander. You've changed. You have decided to

leave some birds in the bushes. You used to want them all."

Alexander's Bridge

Alexander's chair creaked. "I still want a good many," he said rather

gloomily. "After all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work like the

devil and think you're getting on, and suddenly you discover that you've

only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you dry.

Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while you are

being built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap about. I

sometimes wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I hadn't been this sort;

I want to go and live out his potentialities, too. I haven't forgotten that

there are birds in the bushes."

Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire, his shoulders thrust

forward as if he were about to spring at something. Wilson watched him,

wondering. His old pupil always stimulated him at first, and then vastly

wearied him. The machinery was always pounding away in this man, and

Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective habit of mind. He

could not help feeling that there were unreasoning and unreasonable

activities going on in Alexander all the while; that even after dinner, when

most men achieve a decent impersonality, Bartley had merely closed the

door of the engine-room and come up for an airing. The machinery itself

was still pounding on. Bartley's abstraction and Wilson's reflections

were cut short by a rustle at the door, and almost before they could rise

Mrs. Alexander was standing by the hearth. Alexander brought a chair for

her, but she shook her head.

"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and

Professor Wilson were quite comfortable. I am going down to the music-

room."

"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We

are tired of talk."

"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander," Wilson began, but he got no further.

"Why, certainly, if you won't find me too noisy. I am working on the

Schumann `Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a great many hours, I

am very methodical," Mrs. Alexander explained, as she crossed to an

upright piano that stood at the back of the room, near the windows.

Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair

behind her. She played brilliantly and with great musical feeling. Wilson

Alexander's Bridge

could not imagine her permitting herself to do anything badly, but he was

surprised at the cleanness of her execution. He wondered how a woman

with so many duties had managed to keep herself up to a standard really

professional. It must take a great deal of time, certainly, and Bartley

must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had never before

known a woman who had been able, for any considerable while, to support

both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting behind her, he

watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes with his hand.

In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in street clothes, and, for

all her composure and self-sufficiency, she seemed to him strangely alert

and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were something never altogether at

rest. He felt that he knew pretty much what she demanded in people and

what she demanded from life, and he wondered how she squared Bartley.

After ten years she must know him; and however one took him, however

much one admired him, one had to admit that he simply wouldn't square.

He was a natural force, certainly, but beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not

anything very really or for very long at a time.

Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley's profile was still

wreathed in cigar smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His

shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions and one hand hung large and

passive over the arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet

smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had chosen it. She was

clearly very proud of his good looks and his fine color. But, with the glow

of an immediate interest gone out of it, the engineer's face looked tired,

even a little haggard. The three lines in his forehead, directly above the

nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and his powerful head drooped forward

heavily. Although Alexander was only forty-three, Wilson thought that

beneath his vigorous color he detected the dulling weariness of on-coming

middle age.

The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to

redden under the declining sun, Wilson again found himself facing Mrs.

Alexander at the tea-table in the library.

"Well," he remarked, when he was bidden to give an account of

himself, "there was a long morning with the psychologists, luncheon with

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Bartley at his club, more psychologists, and here I am. I've looked forward

to this hour all day."

Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the vapor from the kettle. "And

do you remember where we stopped yesterday?"

"Perfectly. I was going to show you a picture. But I doubt whether

I have color enough in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded monochrome.

You can't get at the young Bartley except by means of color." Wilson

paused and deliberated. Suddenly he broke out: "He wasn't a remarkable

student, you know, though he was always strong in higher mathematics.

His work in my own department was quite ordinary. It was as a

powerfully equipped nature that I found him interesting. That is the most

interesting thing a teacher can find. It has the fascination of a scientific

discovery. We come across other pleasing and endearing qualities so

much oftener than we find force."

"And, after all," said Mrs. Alexander, "that is the thing we all live upon.

It is the thing that takes us forward."

Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully. "Exactly," he assented

warmly. "It builds the bridges into the future, over which the feet of

every one of us will go."

"How interested I am to hear you put it in that way. The bridges into

the future-- I often say that to myself. Bartley's bridges always seem to

me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada,

the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it

sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will

laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is

over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and

it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge

into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the

beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here." She

drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. "And there, you see, on the hill,

is my aunt's house."

Wilson took up the photograph. "Bartley was telling me something

about your aunt last night. She must have been a delightful person."

Winifred laughed. "The bridge, you see, was just at the foot of the

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Alexander'sBridge1Alexander'sBridgebyWillaCatherAlexander'sBridge2CHAPTERILateonebrilliantAprilafternoonProfessorLuciusWilsonstoodattheheadofChestnutStreet,lookingabouthimwiththepleasedairofamanoftastewhodoesnotveryoftengettoBoston.Hehadlivedthereasastudent,butfortwentyyearsandmore,sincehehadbeenPro...

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