The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
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Willa Cather. >> The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
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"That's just where it stings most"--here Flavia began pacing
the floor--"it is just because they have all shown such tolerance
and have treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration that I
can find no reasonable pretext for his rancor. How can he fail
to see the value of such friendships on the children's account,
if for nothing else! What an advantage for them to grow up among
such associations! Even though he cares nothing about these
things himself he might realize that. Is there nothing I could
say by way of explanation? To them, I mean? If someone were to
explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these
things--"
"I'm afraid I cannot advise you," said Imogen decidedly,
"but that, at least, seems to me impossible."
Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately,
nodding nervously. "Of course, dear girl, I can't ask you to be
quite frank with me. Poor child, you are trembling and your
hands are icy. Poor Arthur! But you must not judge him by this
altogether; think how much he misses in life. What a cruel shock
you've had. I'll send you some sherry, Good night, my dear."
When Flavia shut the door Imogen burst into a fit of nervous
weeping.
Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At
eight o'clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped
bathrobe.
"Up, up, and see the great doom's image!" she cried, her
eyes sparkling with excitement. "The hall is full of
trunks, they are packing. What bolt has fallen? It's you,
ma
cherie, you've brought Ulysses home again and the slaughter has
begun!" she blew a cloud of smoke triumphantly from her lips and
threw herself into a chair beside the bed.
Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the
story of the Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the
keenest interest, frequently interrupting her with exclamations
of delight. When Imogen reached the dramatic scene which
terminated in the destruction of the newspaper, Miss Broadwood
rose and took a turn about the room, violently switching the
tasselled cords of her bathrobe.
"Stop a moment," she cried, "you mean to tell me that he had
such a heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn't
use it--that he held such a weapon and threw it away?"
"Use it?" cried Imogen unsteadily. "Of course he didn't! He
bared his back to the tormentor, signed himself over to
punishment in that speech he made at dinner, which everyone
understands but Flavia. She was here for an hour last night and
disregarded every limit of taste in her maledictions."
"My dear!" cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in
inordinate delight at the situation, "do you see what he has
done? There'll be no end to it. Why he has sacrificed himself to
spare the very vanity that devours him, put rancors in the
vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel given to the common
enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings! He is
magnificent!"
"Isn't he always that?" cried Imogen hotly. "He's like a
pillar of sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen
vanities, where people stalk about with a sort of madhouse
dignity, each one fancying himself a king or a pope. If you
could have heard that woman talk of him! Why, she thinks him
stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices. She talked
about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists
had always shown him tolerance. I don't know why it should get
on my nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are
enough to drive one to the brink of collapse."
"Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are
calculated to do just that," said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely
ignoring Imogen's tears. "But what has been is nothing to what
will be. Just wait until Flavia's black swans have flown! You
ought not to try to stick it out; that would only make it harder
for everyone. Suppose you let me telephone your mother to wire
you to come home by the evening train?"
"Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It
puts me in a perfectly impossible position, and he
is so
fine!"
"Of course it does," said Miss Broadwood sympathetically,
"and there is no good to be got from facing it. I will stay
because such things interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay
because she has no money to get away, and Buisson will stay
because he feels somewhat responsible. These complications are
interesting enough to cold-blooded folk like myself who have an
eye for the dramatic element, but they are distracting and
demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in life."
Miss Broadwood's counsel was all the more generous seeing
that, for her, the most interesting element of this denouement
would be eliminated by Imogen's departure. "If she goes now,
she'll get over it," soliloquized Miss Broadwood. "If she stays,
she'll be wrung for him and the hurt may go deep enough to last.
I haven't the heart to see her spoiling things for herself." She
telephoned Mrs. Willard and helped Imogen to pack. She even took
it upon herself to break the news of Imogen's going to Arthur,
who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:
"Right enough, too. What should she do here with old cynics
like you and me, Jimmy? Seeing that she is brim full of dates and
formulae and other positivisms, and is so girt about with
illusions that she still casts a shadow in the sun. You've been
very tender of her, haven't you? I've watched you. And to think
it may all be gone when we see her next. 'The common fate of all
things rare,' you know. What a good fellow you are, anyway,
Jimmy," he added, putting his hands affectionately on her
shoulders.
Arthur went with them to the station. Flavia was so
prostrated by the concerted action of her guests that she was
able to see Imogen only for a moment in her darkened sleeping
chamber, where she kissed her hysterically, without lifting her
head, bandaged in aromatic vinegar. On the way to the station
both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of keeping up appearances
entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose to the occasion.
When Hamilton carried Imogen's bag into the car, Miss Broadwood
detained her for a moment, whispering as she gave her a large,
warm handclasp, "I'll come to see you when I get back to town;
and, in the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them
you have left Caius Marius among the ruins of Carthage."
The Sculptor's Funeral
A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a
little Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which
was already twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick
over everything; in the pale starlight the line of bluffs across
the wide, white meadows south of the town made soft, smoke-
colored curves against the clear sky. The men on the siding
stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands thrust
deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their
shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to
time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along
the river shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about
restlessly, seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them.
There was but one of the company who looked as though he knew
exactly why he was there; and he kept conspicuously apart;
walking to the far end of the platform, returning to the station
door, then pacing up the track again, his chin sunk in the high
collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping forward, his
gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a tall,
spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning
his neck forward until his back made the angle of a jackknife
three-quarters open.
"I reckon she's agoin' to be pretty late ag'in tonight,
Jim," he remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of
annoyance, speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard
that grew fiercely and thickly in all directions.
The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to
the other side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from
the East will come with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on
reflectively.
"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I
like an order funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for
people of some reputation," the spare man continued, with an
ingratiating concession in his shrill voice, as he carefully
placed his toothpick in his vest pocket. He always carried the
flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the town.
The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up
the siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group.
"Jim's ez full ez a tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a
shuffling of feet on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all
ages appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the
crack of thunder; some came from the waiting room, where they had
been warming themselves by the red stove, or half-asleep on the
slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage trucks or
slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the driver's
seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They
straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and
a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that
cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred
them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the
man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood.
The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward
marsh lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of
shivering poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam
hanging in gray masses against the pale sky and blotting out the
Milky Way. In a moment the red glare from the headlight streamed
up the snow-covered track before the siding and glittered on the
wet, black rails. The burly man with the disheveled red beard
walked swiftly up the platform toward the approaching train,
uncovering his head as he went. The group of men behind him
hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up
to the express car just as the door was thrown open, the spare man
in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity.
The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a
young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.
"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily.
Philip Phelps, the banker, responded with dignity: "We have come
to take charge of the body. Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble
and can't be about."
"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger,
"and tell the operator to lend a hand."
The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the
snowy platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room
for it and then formed a close semicircle about it, looking
curiously at the palm leaf which lay across the black cover. No
one said anything. The baggage man stood by his truck, waiting
to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and the fireman
dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and long
oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of
the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked
about him helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of
that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of
an individual to be addressed.
"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and
joined the group. "No, they have not come yet; the family is
scattered. The body will be taken directly to the house." He
stooped and took hold of one of the handles of the coffin.
"Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on
the horses," called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the
door of the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger:
"We didn't know whether there would be anyone with him or not,"
he explained. "It's a long walk, so you'd better go up in the
hack." He pointed to a single, battered conveyance, but the young
man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I think I will go up with
the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the undertaker,
"I'll ride with you."
They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the
starlight tip the long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in
the still village were shining from under the low, snow-burdened
roofs; and beyond, on every side, the plains reached out into
emptiness, peaceful and wide as the soft sky itself, and wrapped
in a tangible, white silence.
When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group
that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate.
The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks,
extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety
footbridge. The gate hung on one hinge and was opened wide with
difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something
black was tied to the knob of the front door.
The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the
hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was
wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded
into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My
boy, my boy! And this is how you've come home to me!"
As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder
of unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and
angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and
caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come,
come, Mother; you mustn't go on like this!" Her tone changed to
one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The
parlor is ready, Mr. Phelps."
The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards,
while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They
bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and
disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp
ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a "Rogers group"
of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax. Henry
Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that
there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had somehow
arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about over
the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark
of identification, for something that might once conceivably have
belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his
friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls
hanging above the piano that he felt willing to let any of these
people approach the coffin.
"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face,"
wailed the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens
looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and
swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He
flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked
again. There was a kind of power about her face--a kind of
brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and furrowed by
violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions that
grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long
nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep
lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met
across her forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far
apart--teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were
obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water,
and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.
The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a
mourning comb in her hair which curiously lengthened her long
face sat stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their
large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down,
solemnly awaiting the opening of the coffin. Near the door stood
a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid
bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle.
She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob.
Steavens walked over and stood beside her.
Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall
and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair
and a dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered
uncertainly. He went slowly up to the coffin and stood, rolling
a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained
and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that he had no
consciousness of anything else.
"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered
timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her
elbow. She turned with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with
such violence that he tottered a little. He did not even glance
toward the coffin, but continued to look at her with a dull,
frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip.
His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable
shame. When his wife rushed from the room her daughter strode
after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin,
bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,
leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves. The
old man stood trembling and looking down at his dead son's face.
The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid
stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the
wide forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there
was not that beautiful and chaste repose which we expect to find
in the faces of the dead. The brows were so drawn that there
were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin was
thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life
had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly
relax the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--
as though he were still guarding something precious and holy,
which might even yet be wrested from him.
The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He
turned to the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are
comin' back to set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank
'ee, Jim, thank 'ee." He brushed the hair back gently from his
son's forehead. "He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy. He
was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of 'em all--only we didn't
none of us ever onderstand him." The tears trickled slowly down
his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
"Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed
from the top of the stairs. The old man started timorously:
"Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He turned away, hesitated stood for a
moment in miserable indecision; then he reached back and patted
the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the room.
"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems
as if his eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing
cuts very deep," remarked the lawyer.
Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the
mother had been in the room the young man had scarcely seen
anyone else; but now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim
Laird's florid face and bloodshot eyes, he knew that he had found
what he had been heartsick at not finding before--the feeling,
the understanding, that must exist in someone, even here.
The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and
blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face
was strained--that of a man who is controlling himself with
difficulty--and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of
fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the window, watched him
turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling pendants with an
angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked behind him,
staring down into the master's face. He could not help wondering
what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel and
so sooty a lump of potter's clay.
From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-
room door opened the import of it was clear. The mother was
abusing the maid for having forgotten to make the dressing for
the chicken salad which had been prepared for the watchers.
Steavens had never heard anything in the least like it; it was
injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and masterly
in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of
disgust the lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door
into the kitchen.
"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back.
"The Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her
loyalty would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell
tales that would curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who
was standing in here a while ago, with her apron to her eyes.
The old woman is a fury; there never was anybody like her for
demonstrative piety and ingenious cruelty. She made Harvey's
life a hell for him when he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed
of it. I never could see how he kept himself so sweet."
"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but
until tonight I have never known how wonderful."
"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it
can come even from such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried,
with a sweeping gesture which seemed to indicate much more than
the four walls within which they stood.
"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room
is so close I am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured
Steavens, struggling with one of the windows. The sash was
stuck, however, and would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly
and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came over, loosened
the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the window up a
few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left
him with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get
away from this place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh,
he comprehended well enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile
that he had seen so often on his master's lips!
He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit
home, he brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive
bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing
something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded
little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her
attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by
the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had
asked him if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush
that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin,
his head thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him
earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a
man should conceal a feature of such distinction under that
disfiguring shock of beard. Suddenly, as though he felt the
young sculptor's keen glance, he opened his eyes.
"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly.
"He was terribly shy as a boy."
"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined
Steavens. "Although he could be very fond of people, he always
gave one the impression of being detached. He disliked violent
emotion; he was reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--
except, of course, as regarded his work. He was surefooted
enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even
more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was
determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed afraid to
investigate."
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and
closed his eyes.
Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable
boyhood. All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of
the man whose tastes were refined beyond the limits of the
reasonable--whose mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful
impressions, and so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar
leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held
there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his
fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its
holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to
its pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the
enchantress spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in
contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a
sort of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound, a color that was
his own.
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