The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
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Willa Cather. >> The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
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The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew
up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round
tower. "Here we are," he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess
we understand each other."
They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom
Gaylord introduced as "my sister, Maggie." She asked her brother
to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished
to see him alone.
When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start
of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming
sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He
wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under
the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this
room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at
the gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.
The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed
him. Was it a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it
merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and
poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading
chair and looked keenly about him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a
large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all
became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's room. If
it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that
Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of
them and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried,
it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance's
taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his
personality.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine
Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when
the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to
set his boyish heart in a tumult. Even now, he stood before the
portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. It was the face
of a woman already old in her first youth, thoroughly
sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother
had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank, confident
eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the
curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she
had more good will than confidence toward the world, and the
bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest
that was almost discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as
Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes,
which possessed a warm, lifegiving quality like the sunlight;
eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual
salutat to the
world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly well-shaped and
proudly poised. There had been always a little of the imperatrix
about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old
impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly
she stood alone.
Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him
and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall
woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to
speak, she coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich
voice, a trifle husky: "You see I make the traditional Camille
entrance--with the cough. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde."
Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she
was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his
pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect
himself. He had not reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness.
The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially
designed to conceal the sharp outlines of her emaciated body, but
the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive,
a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The
splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in
her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands
were transparently white and cold to the touch. The changes in her
face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm,
clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all
defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older,
sadder, softer.
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the
pillows. "I know I'm not an inspiring object to look upon, but you
must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at
once, for we've no time to lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you
won't mind?--for I'm more than usually nervous."
"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged
Everett. "I can come quite as well tomorrow."
"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick,
keen humor that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude
that I'm tired to death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people.
You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the
sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding
by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he
disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted
that I have a dark past. The funniest feature of his conversation
is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me--condoning it,
you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by
suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent."
Everett laughed. "Oh! I'm afraid I'm not the person to call
after such a serious gentleman--I can't sustain the situation.
At my best I don't reach higher than low comedy. Have you
decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?"
Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and
exclaimed: "I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least
noble. I didn't study that method."
She laughed and went on nervously: "The parson's not so bad.
His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's
Decline
and Fall, all five volumes, and that's something. Then, he has
been to New York, and that's a great deal. But how we are losing
time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from
there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a
whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to
me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or
she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have
they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden
Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating
changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and
what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries
about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters,
and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? You
see, I'm homesick for it all, from the Battery to Riverside. Oh,
let me die in Harlem!" She was interrupted by a violent attack
of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged
into gossip about the professional people he had met in town
during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he
found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be
used at the Metropolitan in the production of the
Rheingold,
when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and
that he was talking to the four walls.
Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him
through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He
finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back
in his pocket. As he did so she said, quietly: "How wonderfully
like Adriance you are!" and he felt as though a crisis of some
sort had been met and tided over.
He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his
eyes that made them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd?
It's almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon--but, after all,
there are some advantages. It has made some of his friends like
me, and I hope it will make you."
Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from
under her lashes. "Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty,
reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people
and then blush and look cross if they paid you back in your own
coin. Do you remember that night when you took me home from a
rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?"
"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very
crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful.
Perhaps you suspected something of the sort? I remember you saw
fit to be very grown-up and worldly.
"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys
usually affect with singers--'an earthen vessel in love with a
star,' you know. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must
have seen a good deal of your brother's pupils. Or had you an
omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the
occasion?"
"Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth," said
Everett, smiling a little sadly; "I am sensitive about some of
them even now. But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined.
I saw my brother's pupils come and go, but that was about all.
Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out
a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an
infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they never
spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you
speak of."
"Yes", observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then,
too; but it has grown as you have grown older. That is rather
strange, when you have lived such different lives. It's not
merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a
sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the
other man's personality in your face like an air transposed to
another key. But I'm not attempting to define it; it's beyond
me; something altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,"
she finished, laughing.
"I remember," Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil
between his fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown
back, out under the red window blind which was raised just a
little, and as it swung back and forth in the wind revealed the
glaring panorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow,
flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep
purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline of the
mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--"I
remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive
about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would
have had it otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a
birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of. People were
naturally always fonder of Ad than of me, and I used to feel the
chill of reflected light pretty often. It came into even my
relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was
absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken up over it.
She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of
generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt
offerings of us all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then,
and when she sat alone on the porch in the summer dusk she used
sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that
streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always
knew she was thinking of Adriance."
"Poor little chap," said Katharine, and her tone was a
trifle huskier than usual. "How fond people have always been of
Adriance! Now tell me the latest news of him. I haven't heard,
except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algeria
then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback night and day
in an Arabian costume, and in his usual enthusiastic fashion he
had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mohammedan faith
and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many countries and
faiths has be adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing Arab to
himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
in Florence once for weeks together."
"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself
barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his
clothes. I didn't hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed
that."
"He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it
must be in the publisher's hands by this time. I have been too
ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him."
Everett drew a letter from his pocket. "This came about a
month ago. It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be
brought out in London next winter. Read it at your leisure."
"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure
you will come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever
you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let
me hear it. For nine months I have heard nothing but 'The
Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My Baby's Mother.'"
He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him,
absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother and
trying to discover in just what it consisted. She told herself
that it was very much as though a sculptor's finished work had
been rudely copied in wood. He was of a larger build than
Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of
his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was of the
same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April
color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's
were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing
than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why
this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric,
youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance,
though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was
streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile
that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words.
A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal
methods and of her affections, had once said to him that the
shepherd boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have
looked like young Hilgarde; and the comparison had been
appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred to quote.
As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the InterOcean
House that night, he was a victim to random recollections. His
infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been
the most serious of his boyish love affairs, and had long
disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was painfully timid in
everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn
him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so done
and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and
loss. He bethought himself of something he had read about
"sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without
desire," and felt himself an octogenarian.
He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his
stay at his brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working
there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last
concert in New York. He had sat there in the box while his
brother and Katharine were called back again and again after the
last number, watching the roses go up over the footlights until
they were stacked half as high as the piano, brooding, in his
sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in each other's
work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering
line drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame
set about those splendid children of genius. He walked back to
his hotel alone and sat in his window staring out on Madison
Square until long after midnight, resolving to beat no more at
doors that he could never enter and realizing more keenly than
ever before how far this glorious world of beautiful creations
lay from the paths of men like himself. He told himself that he
had in common with this woman only the baser uses of life.
Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no
prospect of release except through the thing he dreaded. The
bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters
and telegrams came urging him to hasten his trip to the coast,
but he resolutely postponed his business engagements. The
mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or fishing
in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his room writing
letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his post
of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive
notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene
changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually
find that we have played the same class of business from first to
last. Everett had been a stopgap all his life. He remembered
going through a looking glass labyrinth when he was a boy and
trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose
against his own face--which, indeed, was not his own, but his
brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or
sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the
shining current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first
time that his duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of
the broken things his brother's imperious speed had cast aside
and forgotten. He made no attempt to analyze the situation or to
state it in exact terms; but he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for
him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help
this woman to die. Day by day he felt her demands on him grow
more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive;
and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her his
own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His power
to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
his brother's life. He understood all that his physical
resemblance meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always
watching for some common trick of gesture, some familiar play of
expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should
seem wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this and that
her disease fed upon it; that it sent shudders of remembrance
through her and that in the exhaustion which followed this
turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine
garden, and not of bitterness and death.
The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I
know? How much does she wish me to know?" A few days after his
first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother
to write her. He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he
could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part
of his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but
the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His phrases took the
color of the moment and the then-present condition, so that they
never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He
always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic
suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the
right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except,
when he did very cruel things--bent upon making people happy
when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his
material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the
homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer
near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made
his daily call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found
Katharine laughing like a schoolgirl. "Have you ever thought,"
she said, as he entered the music room, "how much these seances
of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,' except that I don't
give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation as Heine
did?" She held his hand longer than usual, as she greeted him,
and looked searchingly up into his face. "You are the kindest
man living; the kindest," she added, softly.
Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand
away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him and not
at a whimsical caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done
now?" he asked, lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any
stale candy or champagne since yesterday."
She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between
the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to
write it. Don't say you didn't, for it came direct, you see, and
the last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed
shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise.
But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn't know about
it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, the most
ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the
letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me."
Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in
which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He
opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw
to his satisfaction that it was a long one--wonderfully tactful
and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and
his stable boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who
prayed to the saints for him.
The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he
sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was
heavy, with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound
of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old
garden in Florence, long ago. The sky was one great turquoise,
heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish arches threw
graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline
of them on the margin of his notepaper. The subtleties of Arabic
decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal
exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten.
The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode
into Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his
work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and
comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and
appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.
As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had
divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful
way. The letter was consistently egotistical and seemed to him
even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had
wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and intensity
and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of
flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and
himself even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he
looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly.
"I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see
him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many
things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him
to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost
of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me. Do
you understand me?"
"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett,
thoughtfully. "I have often felt so about him myself. And yet
it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
so little mars."
Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face
flushed with feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of
himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and
uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate.
He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth
what it costs him?"
"Come, come," expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement.
"Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
He sat down at the piano and began playing the first
movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper
speech. The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to
that time and marked the transition from his purely lyric vein to
a deeper and nobler style. Everett played intelligently and with
that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain
lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular.
When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have
done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but
this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the
soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats
called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the
racecourse, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me.
Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!"
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