Willa Sibert Cather
Ardessa
By WILLA SIBERT CATHER
Author of "The Bookkeeper's Wife," etc.
Illustrations by Reginald Birch
About the print version
Ardessa
Willa Sibert Cather Illustrations Reginald Birch 24 cm.
The Century Co.
New York
May, 1918
The Century. vol. 96, no. 1, May, 1918, p. 105-116.
Note: Contractions closed within the text; e.g., "I 've" has become "I've" etc.
Spellchecked. Shakespeare spelled "Shakespere."
Published: May, 1918
THE grand-mannered old man who sat at a desk in the reception-room of "The
Outcry" offices to receive visitors and incidentally to keep the time-book of
the employees, looked up as Miss Devine entered at ten minutes past ten and
condescendingly wished him good morning. He bowed profoundly as she minced past
his desk, and with an indifferent air took her course down the corridor that led
to the editorial offices. Mechanically he opened the flat, black book at his
elbow and placed his finger on D, running his eye along the line of figures
after the name Devine. "It's banker's hours she keeps, indeed," he muttered.
What was the use of entering so capricious a record? Nevertheless, with his
usual preliminary flourish he wrote 10:10 under this, the fourth day of May.
The employee who kept banker's hours rustled on down the corridor to her
private room, hung up her lavender jacket and her trim spring hat, and
readjusted her side combs by the mirror inside her closet door. Glancing at her
desk, she rang for an office boy, and reproved him because he had not dusted
more carefully and because there were lumps in her paste. When he disappeared
with the paste-jar, she sat down to decide which of her employer's letters he
should see and which he should not.
Ardessa was not young and she was certainly not handsome. The coquettish
angle at which she carried her head was a mannerism surviving from a time when
it was more becoming. She shuddered at the cold candor of the new business
woman, and was insinuatingly feminine.
Ardessa's employer, like young Lochinvar, had come out of the West, and he
had done a great many contradictory things before he became proprietor and
editor of "The Outcry." Before he decided to go to New York and make the East
take notice of him, O'Mally had acquired a punctual, reliable silver-mine in
South Dakota. This silent friend in the background made his journalistic success
comparatively easy. He had figured out, when he was a rich nobody in Nevada,
that the quickest way to cut into the known world was through the
printing-press. He arrived in New York, bought a highly respectable publication;
and turned it into a red-hot magazine of protest, which he called "The Outcry."
He knew what the West wanted, and it proved to be what everybody secretly
wanted. In six years he had done the thing that had hitherto seemed impossible:
built up a national weekly, out on the news-stands the same day in New York and
San Francisco; a magazine the people howled for, a moving-picture film of their
real tastes and interests.
O'Mally bought "The Outcry" to make a stir, not to make a career, but he had
got built into the thing more than he ever intended. It had made him a public
man and put him into politics. He found the publicity game diverting, and it
held him longer than any other game had ever done. He had built up about him an
organization of which he was somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored.
On his staff there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At
first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could take an average reporter from the
daily press, give him a "line" to follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose, --
mdash; this was all in that good time when people were eager to read about their
own wickedness, -- mdash; and in two years the reporter would be recognized as
an authority. Other people -- mdash; Napoleon, Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt --
mdash; had discovered that advertising would go a long way; but Marcus O'Mally
discovered that in America it would go all the way -- mdash; as far as you
wished to pay its passage. Any human countenance, plastered in three-sheet
posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the American people. The strangest
thing was that the owners of these grave countenances, staring at their own
faces on newsstands and billboards, fell to venerating themselves; and even he,
O'Mally, was more or less constrained by these reputations that he had created
out of cheap paper and cheap ink.
Constraint was the last thing O'Mally liked. The most engaging and unusual
thing about the man was that he couldn't be fooled by the success of his own
methods, and no amount of "recognition" could make a stuffed shirt of him. No
matter how much he was advertised as a great medicine-man in the councils of the
nation, he knew that he was a born gambler and a soldier of fortune. He left his
dignified office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year while
he played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked being a great man
from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities where he had once been merely
an unconsidered spender.
O'Mally's long absences constituted one of the supreme advantages of Ardessa
Devine's position. When he was at his post her duties were not heavy, but when
he was giving balls in Goldfield, Nevada, she lived an ideal life. She came to
the office every day, indeed, to forward such of O'Mally's letters as she
thought best, to attend to his club notices and tradesmen's bills, and to taste
the sense of her high connections. The great men of the staff were all about her, as
contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each meditating upon the
particular trust or form of vice confided to his care. Thus surrounded, Ardessa
had a pleasant sense of being at the heart of things. It was like a mental
message, exercise without exertion. She read and she embroidered. Her room was
pleasant, and she liked to be seen at ladylike tasks and to feel herself a
graceful contrast to the crude girls in the advertising and circulation
departments across the hall. The younger stenographers, who had to get through
with the enormous office correspondence, and who rushed about from one editor to
another with wire baskets full of letters, made faces as they passed Ardessa's
door and saw her cool and cloistered, daintily plying her needle. But no matter
how hard the other stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of the five
oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to Ardessa. Like a
sultan's bride, she was inviolate in her lord's absence; she had to be kept for
him.
Naturally the other young women employed in "The Outcry" offices disliked
Miss Devine. They were all competent girls, trained in the exacting methods of
modern business, and they had to make good every day in the week, had to get
through with a great deal of work or lose their position. O'Mally's private
secretary was a mystery to them. Her exemptions and privileges, her patronizing
remarks, formed an exhaustless subject of conversation at the lunch-hour.
Ardessa had, indeed, as they knew she must have, a kind of "purchase" on her
employer.
When O'Mally first came to New York to break into publicity, he engaged Miss
Devine upon the recommendation of the editor whose ailing publication he bought
and rechristened. That editor was a conservative, scholarly gentleman of the old
school, who was retiring because he felt out of place in the world of brighter,
breezier magazines that had been flowering since the new century came in. He
believed that in this vehement world young O'Mally would make himself heard and
that Miss Devine's training in an editorial office would be of use to him.
When O'Mally first sat down at a desk to be an editor, all the cards that
were brought in looked pretty much alike to him. Ardessa was at his elbow. She
had long been steeped in literary distinctions and in the social distinctions
which used to count for much more than they do now. She knew all the great men,
all the nephews and clients of great men. She knew which must be seen, which
must be made welcome, and which could safely be sent away. She could give
O'Mally on the instant the former rating in magazine offices of nearly every
name that was brought in to him. She could ...
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