Collected Stories

Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. When she was ten years old, her family moved to the prairies of Nebraska, later the setting for a number of her novels. At the age of twenty-one, she graduated from the University of Nebraska and spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. In 1903 her first book,
April Twilights,
a collection of poems, was published, and two years later
The Troll Garden,
a collection of stories, appeared in print. After the publication of her first novel,
Alexander’s Bridge,
in 1912, Cather devoted herself fulltime to writing, and, over the years, completed eleven more novels (including
O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Professor’s House,
and
Death Comes for the Archbishop
), four collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for
One of Ours
in 1923. She died in 1947.

CONTENTS
 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
 

This collection brings together all of Willa Cather’s short fiction published in book form in her lifetime, along with two volumes of stories that were compiled after her death and published with the approval of the literary executor of her estate.

The Troll Garden
(1905) was Willa Cather’s first book of prose and consisted of seven short stories. Four of these stories—“The Sculptor’s Funeral,” “A Death in the Desert,” “A Wagner Matinée,” and “Paul’s Case”—were later revised and rearranged (the revised versions appear in this volume) and were included in
Youth and the Bright Medusa
(1920) with four others that Cather had written between 1916 and 1920. The three stories of her next collection,
Obscure Destinies
(1932), were written between 1924 and the time of the book’s publication.

Willa Cather completed three additional stories, which were published for the first time in
The Old Beauty and Others
(1948) in the year following her death. A final collection,
Five Stories,
published by Vintage Books in 1956, brought together short fiction spanning Cather’s career. It consisted of three previously published stories (“Neighbour Rosicky,” “The Best Years,” and the revised “Paul’s Case”); “The Enchanted Bluff,” an early work, previously uncollected; “Tom Outland’s Story,” which forms Book II of
The Professor’s House;
and George N. Kate’s article on Willa Cather’s unfinished Avignon story.

 

“We must not look at Goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits;

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?”

—GOBLIN MARKET

A
s the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she had consented to be one of Flavia’s house party at all. She had not felt enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept Flavia’s invitation.

Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia’s husband, who had been the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to study that remarkable woman in her own setting.

Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which Flavia demanded it. Submerged in her studies, Imogen had, of late years, seen very little of Flavia; but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New York, between her excursions from studio to studio—her luncheons with this lady who had to play at a matinée, and her dinners with that singer who had an evening concert—had seen enough of her friend’s handsome daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such violence and assurance as only Flavia could afford. The fact that Imogen had shown rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly placed her in that category of “interesting people” whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and lawful prey.

When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver’s cushion beside her, gathered up the reins with an experienced hand.

“My dear girl,” she remarked, as she turned the horses up the
street, “I was afraid the train might be late. M. Roux insisted upon coming up by boat and did not arrive until after seven.”

“To think of M. Roux’s being in this part of the world at all, and subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come over?” queried Imogen with lively interest. “He is the sort of man who must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris.”

“Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people,” said Flavia, professionally. “We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He was ill in California at the close of his concert tour, you know, and he is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey from the coast. Then there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Rest zhoff, the Russian chemist; Alcée Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist; and Will Maidenwood, the editor of
Woman.
Then there is my second cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero’s comedy last winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld.
Have
you read her?”