The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

W >> Willa Cather. >> The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's
life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow
which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than these could have
done--a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his
heart from his very boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare;
the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and
ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and
noble with traditions.

At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe
entered, announced that the watchers were arriving, and asked
them "to step into the dining room." As Steavens rose the lawyer
said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good experience for you,
doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've
had twenty years of them."

As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the
lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin
resting on his hand.

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the
express car shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the
kerosene lamp they separated and became individuals. The
minister, a pale, feeble-looking man with white hair and blond
chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small side table and placed
his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down behind the stove
and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall, fishing
his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers,
Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,
where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and
its effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an
old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The
coal-and-lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite
sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork.
Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to read. The talk
around him ranged through various topics of local interest while
the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members
of the family were in bed the Grand Army man hitched his
shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the
rounds of his chair.

"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak
falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails
with a pearl-handled pocketknife.

"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he
queried in his turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again,
getting his knees still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says
Harve's done right well lately," he chirped.

The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve
ain't asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could
go on with his education."

"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve
wasn't bein' edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his
handkerchief and blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed
his knife with a snap. "It's too bad the old man's sons didn't
turn out better," he remarked with reflective authority. "They
never hung together. He spent money enough on Harve to stock a
dozen cattle farms and he might as well have poured it into Sand
Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse what little
they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm, they
might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."

"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the
cattleman. "He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember
when he bought Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody
in town knew that Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for
a wedding present eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown
mules then."

Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees
with a spasm of childish delight.

"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he
shore was never fond of work," began the coal-and-lumber dealer.
"I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old
man was out to the barn helpin' his hand hitch up to take
Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin' up the fence, Harve,
he come out on the step and sings out, in his ladylike voice: 'Cal
Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"

"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man
gleefully. "I kin hear him howlin' yet when he was a big feller
in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in
the barn for lettin' the cows git foundered in the cornfield when
he was drivin' 'em home from pasture. He killed a cow of mine
that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an'
the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' the
sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he argued
that sunset was oncommon fine."

"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy
East to school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in
a deliberate, judicial tone. "There was where he got his head
full of traipsing to Paris and all such folly. What Harve
needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas
City business college."

The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it
possible that these men did not understand, that the palm on the
coffin meant nothing to them? The very name of their town would
have remained forever buried in the postal guide had it not been
now and again mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey
Merrick's. He remembered what his master had said to him on the
day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off
any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil
to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying
while the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said
with a feeble smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to
go back to the place we came from in the end. The townspeople
will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say
I shan't have much to fear from the judgment of God. The wings
of the Victory, in there"--with a weak gesture toward his studio--
will not shelter me."

The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a
Merrick to cash in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably
he helped it along with whisky."

"His mother's people were not long-lived, and Harvey never
had a robust constitution," said the minister mildly. He would
have liked to say more. He had been the boy's Sunday-school
teacher, and had been fond of him; but he felt that he was not in
a position to speak. His own sons had turned out badly, and it
was not a year since one of them had made his last trip home in
the express car, shot in a gambling house in the Black Hills.

"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently
looked upon the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it
shore made an oncommon fool of him," moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlor rattled loudly,
and everyone started involuntarily, looking relieved when only
Jim Laird came out. His red face was convulsed with anger, and
the Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his
blue, bloodshot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a
drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his client's needs
as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and there were
many who tried. The lawyer closed the door gently behind him,
leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a
little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the
courtroom, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a
flood of withering sarcasm.

"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry,
even tone, "when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and
raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never
any too well satisfied when you checked them up. What's the
matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable young men are as scarce
as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost seem to a stranger
that there was some way something the matter with your
progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young
lawyer you ever turned out, after he had come home from the
university as straight as a die, take to drinking and forge a
check and shoot himself? Why did Bill Merrit's son die of the
shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr. Thomas's son, here,
shot in a gambling house? Why did young Adams burn his mill to
beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched
fist quietly on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you
drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the
time they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as
you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and
Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up
George Washington and John Adams. But the boys, worse luck, were
young and raw at the business you put them to; and how could they
match coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted
them to be successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--
that's all the difference. There was only one boy ever raised in
this borderland between ruffianism and civilization who didn't
come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out
than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels.
Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying
that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind to;
but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his
bank and all his cattle farms put together; and a lack of
appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps.

"Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this
from such as Nimrod and me!"

"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's
money--fell short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can
all remember the very tone in which brother Elder swore his own
father was a liar, in the county court; and we all know that the
old man came out of that partnership with his son as bare as a
sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting personal, and I'd better be
driving ahead at what I want to say."

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and
went on: "Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back
East. We were dead in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud
of us some day. We meant to be great men. Even 1, and I haven't
lost my sense of humor, gentlemen, I meant to be a great man. I
came back here to practice, and I found you didn't in the least
want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer--
oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase of
pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county
survey that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom
farm inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per
cent a month and get it collected; old Stark here wanted to
wheedle old women up in Vermont into investing their annuities in
real estate mortgages that are not worth the paper they are
written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll go on
needing me; and that's why I'm not afraid to plug the truth home
to you this once.

"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you
wanted me to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for
me; and yet you'll stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick,
whose soul you couldn't dirty and whose hands you couldn't tie.
Oh, you're a discriminating lot of Christians! There have been
times when the sight of Harvey's name in some Eastern paper has
made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again, times when I
liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all this
hog wallow, doing his great work and climbing the big, clean
upgrade he'd set for himself.

"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and
stolen, and hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a
bitter, dead little Western town know how to do, what have we got
to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset
over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know
it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of
hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that
the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any
truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-
tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present
financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!"

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him,
caught up his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before
the Grand Army man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane
his long neck about at his fellows.

Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the
funeral services. Steavens called twice at his office, but was
compelled to start East without seeing him. He had a
presentiment that he would hear from him again, and left his
address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it, he never
acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it
never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across
the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons, who had
got into trouble out there by cutting government timber.

"A Death in the Desert"

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat
across the aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large,
florid man, wore a conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third
finger, and Everett judged him to be a traveling salesman of some
sort. He had the air of an adaptable fellow who had been about
the world and who could keep cool and clean under almost any
circumstances.

The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called
among railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon
over the monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne.
Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car
were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the
Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost
of their first trip out of Colorado. The four uncomfortable
passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust
which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew
up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they
passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and
sandhills. The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by
occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of
station houses, where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the
bluegrass yards made little green reserves fenced off in that
confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and
stronger through the car windows, the blond gentleman asked the
ladies' permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender
striped shirt sleeves, with a black silk handkerchief tucked
carefully about his collar. He had seemed interested in Everett
since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and kept
glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of
the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But
wherever Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with
that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him.
Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation,
leaned back in his seat, half-closed his eyes, and began softly
to whistle the "Spring Song" from Proserpine, the cantata
that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on
mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs in New England
hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on
sleighbells at a variety theater in Denver. There was literally no
way of escaping his brother's precocity. Adriance could live on
the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions
were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had
never been able to outrun Proserpine, and here he found it
again in the Colorado sand hills. Not that Everett was exactly
ashamed of Proserpine; only a man of genius could have
written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius
outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle and smiled at his neighbor across
the aisle. Immediately the large man rose and, coming over,
dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to
it. Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've
been trying to place you for a long time; I think I must have met
you before."

"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is
Hilgarde. You've probably met my brother, Adriance; people often
mistake me for him."

The traveling man brought his hand down upon his knee with
such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance
Hilgarde, you're his double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken.
Seen him? Well, I guess! I never missed one of his recitals at
the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of Proserpine
through to us once at the Chicago Press Club. I used to be on
the Commercial there before I 146 began to travel
for the publishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's
brother, and here I've run into you at the jumping-off place.
Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn't it?"

The traveling man laughed and offered Everett a cigar, and
plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever
seemed to care to talk to Everett about. At length the salesman
and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Everett
went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a
matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly
concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled
at being kept in the office overtime on a summer night. When
Everett alighted from the train he walked down the platform and
stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he
should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the crossing,
and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and her
figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it
was too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her,
when the switch engine came puffing up from the opposite
direction, and the headlight threw a strong glare of light on his
face. Suddenly the woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and
dropped the reins. Everett started forward and caught the
horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its
tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still, her
head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to
her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward
the phaeton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then
lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden
recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women,
but this cry out of the night had shaken him.

While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter
leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting
to see him in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee and went in
the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly
pacing the floor. His whole manner betrayed a high degree of
agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves
lie near the surface. He was something below medium height,
square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair
was beginning to show gray about the ears, and his bronzed face was
heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and
he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities;
yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous
diffidence in his address.

"Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand;
"I found your name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord.
I'm afraid my sister startled you at the station last night, Mr.
Hilgarde, and I've come around to apologize."

"Ah! The young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know
whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it
is I who owe the apology."

The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.

"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand
that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's,
and it seems you favor him; and when the switch engine threw a
light on your face it startled her."

Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! Katharine Gaylord!
Is it possible! Now it's you who have given me a turn. Why, I
used to know her when I was a boy. What on earth--"

"Is she doing here?" said Gaylord, grimly filling out the
pause. "You've got at the heart of the matter. You knew my
sister had been in bad health for a long time?"

"No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of
her she was singing in London. My brother and I correspond
infrequently and seldom get beyond family matters. I am deeply
sorry to hear this. There are more reasons why I am concerned
than I can tell you."

The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.

"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see
you. I hate to ask you, but she's so set on it. We live several
miles out of town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out
anytime you can go."

"I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so," said
Everett, quickly. "I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door,
and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up
the reins and settled back into his own element.

"You see, I think I'd better tell you something about my
sister before you see her, and I don't know just where to begin.
She traveled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang
at a lot of his concerts; but I don't know just how much you know
about her."

"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the
most gifted of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very
young and very beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while."

Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was quite engrossed by his
grief. He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and
sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the
one vital thing in the world. "That's the whole thing," he went
on, flicking his horses with the whip.

"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a
great family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She
got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where
she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now
she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and
she can't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way--
miles and miles apart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."

"It's a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord,"
said Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning
along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue
outline of the mountains before them.

"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, man,
nobody will ever know how tragic. It's a tragedy I live with and
eat with and sleep with, until I've lost my grip on everything.
You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all
going to health resorts. It's her lungs, you know. I've got money
enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it's no use.
She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just getting through the
days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to
me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she's
here, I think she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she
won't leave. She says it's easier to let go of life here, and that
to go East would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a
brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little
thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything
on earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't
cover; and now, when I've got a little property together, I can't
buy her a night's sleep!"

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status
in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the
ladder with him, and the brakeman's frank avowal of sentiment.
Presently Gaylord went on:

"You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We're
all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away back. My father
was a conductor. He died when we were kids. Maggie, my other
sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I
was getting my grip on things. We had no education to speak of.
I have to hire a stenographer because I can't spell straight--the
Almighty couldn't teach me to spell. The things that make up
life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there's scarcely a point
where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old
times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in
a church choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that
if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the
things and people she's interested in, it will give her about the
only comfort she can have now."

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