Collected Stories

Willa Cather
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.

ALSO BY WILLA CATHER

Alexander’s Bridge

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A Lost Lady

Lucy Gayheart

My Ántonia

My Mortal Enemy

O Pioneers!

The Professor’s House

One of Ours

Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Shadows on the Rock

The Song of the Lark

A Vintage Classics Original, December 1992

Publisher’s Note and Compilation copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1920, 1925, 1930, 1932 by Willa Cather
Copyright © 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright © 1956 by Edith Lewis and The City Bank Farmer’s Trust Co.
Copyright renewed 1948, 1953, 1958, 1959 by Edith Lewis and The City Bank Farmer’s Trust Co.
Copyright renewed 1976 by Charles E. Cather
Excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather copyright © 2013 by The Willa Cather Literary Trust.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cather, Willa, 1873–1947.
 [Short stories]
Collected stories / Willa Cather.
p. cm.—(Vintage classics)
eISBN: 978-0-307-83169-9
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3505.A87A6    1992
813’.52—dc20       92-50061

The stories in this work were originally published in the following collections:
The Troll Garden, Youth and the Bright Medusa, Obscure Destinies,
The Old Beauty and Others, and Five Stories.
“Tom Outland’s Story” was previously published as
Book Two of The Professor’s House.

79B8

v3.1_r1

CONTENTS
 

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Publisher’s Note

THE TROLL GARDEN (1905)

Flavia and Her Artists

The Garden Lodge

The Marriage of Phaedra

YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA (1920)

Coming, Aphrodite!

The Diamond Mine

A Gold Slipper

Scandal

Paul’s Case

A Wagner Matinée

The Sculptor’s Funeral

“A Death in the Desert”

OBSCURE DESTINIES (1932)

Neighbour Rosicky

Old Mrs. Harris

Two Friends

THE OLD BEAUTY AND OTHERS (1948)

The Old Beauty

The Best Years

Before Breakfast

FIVE STORIES (1956)

The Enchanted Bluff

Tom Outland’s Story

Willa Cather’s Unfinished Avignon Story,
an article by George N. Kates

Excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

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

Flavia and Her Artists

As 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.