The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of
him which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she
had reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to
so much that she had never really doubted she would be equal to
this. She had come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her
own malleability and endurance; she had done so much with herself
that she had come to think that there was nothing which she could
not do; like swimmers, overbold, who reckon upon their strength and
their power to hoard it, forgetting the ever-changing moods of
their adversary, the sea.

And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not
deceive herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly
enough, and since she had said good-by to him she had not been
free for a moment from the sense of his formidable power. It
formed the undercurrent of her consciousness; whatever she might
be doing or thinking, it went on, involuntarily, like her
breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly she found herself
suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight, and Caroline
rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night
before, and the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and
insistent than ever it had in the quiet of the afternoons.
Caroline brushed her hair back from her damp forehead
and went over to the bow window. After raising it she sat down
upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and
loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of
the heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed
tops of the poplars.

Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities
this spell was woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His
power, she knew, lay not so much in anything that he actually
had--though he had so much--or in anything that he actually was,
but in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to
have or be and that was just anything that one chose to believe
or to desire. His appeal was all the more persuasive and alluring
in that it was to the imagination alone, in that it was as
indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which so
have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere
personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that
something without which--to women--life is no better than
sawdust, and to the desire for which most of their mistakes and
tragedies and astonishingly poor bargains are due.

D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the
Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult. When he could be
induced to cross the Atlantic, the opera season in New York was
successful; when he could not, the management lost money; so much
everyone knew. It was understood, too, that his superb art had
disproportionately little to do with his peculiar position.
Women swayed the balance this way or that; the opera, the
orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a cost, were
but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes and
even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the
mere mechanics of the beautiful illusion.

Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time
that she had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling
in other people, watched for it in her friends, studied it in the
house night after night when he sang, candidly putting herself
among a thousand others.

D'Esquerre's arrival in the early winter was the signal for
a feminine hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang
women flocked to the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from
typewriter desks, schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They
were of all conditions and complexions. Women of the world who
accepted him knowingly as they sometimes took champagne for its
agreeable effect; sisters of charity and overworked shopgirls,
who received him devoutly; withered women who had taken doctorate
degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism spectacles;
business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar
from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all
entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as
the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath
when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same
dull pain of shouldering the pack again.

There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who
were pitted by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth
stains. These, too, entered with him into enchantment. Stout
matrons became slender girls again; worn spinsters felt their
cheeks flush with the tenderness of their lost youth. Young and
old, however hideous, however fair, they yielded up their heat--
whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the mystic bread
wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.

Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to
the last row of the gallery, when the air was charged with this
ecstasy of fancy, he himself was the victim of the burning
reflection of his power. They acted upon him in turn; he felt
their fervent and despairing appeal to him; it stirred him as the
spring drives the sap up into an old tree; he, too, burst into
bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again, desired again, he
knew not what, but something.

But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had
learned to fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve,
the dullness, even, that kept him company between these outbursts
that she found that exhausting drain upon her sympathies which
was the very pith and substance of their alliance. It was the
tacit admission of disappointment under all this glamour
of success--the helplessness of the enchanter to at all enchant
himself--that awoke in her an illogical, womanish desire to in
some way compensate, to make it up to him.

She had observed drastically to herself that it was her
eighteenth year he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent
in turning gowns and placating tradesmen, and which she had never
had time to live. After all, she reflected, it was better to
allow one's self a little youth--to dance a little at the
carnival and to live these things when they are natural and
lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding arrears
when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight
all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the
light of her father's example, she had even refused to humor her
innocent taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began
to teach, after her mother's death, she had struck out one little
indulgence after another, reducing her life to a relentless
routine, unvarying as clockwork. It seemed to her that ever
since d'Esquerre first came into the house she had been haunted
by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about,
wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life.

The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within
the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited,
breathless. Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress;
the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation. The still earth,
the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the
exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt that she ought
to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the place
were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began
to pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of
awakening someone, her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously
vague and white. Still unable to shake off the obsession of the
intense stillness, she sat down at the piano and began to run
over the first act of the Walkure, the last of his roles
they had practiced together; playing listlessly and absently at
first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it was
the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she
played there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside
her, standing in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of
the first act she heard him clearly: "Thou art the Spring for
which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces." Once as he sang
it, he had put his arm about her, his one hand under her heart,
while with the other he took her right from the keyboard, holding
her as he always held Sieglinde when he drew her toward the
window. She had been wonderfully the mistress of herself at the
time; neither repellent nor acquiescent. She remembered that she
had rather exulted, then, in her self-control--which he had seemed
to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a
question from the hand under her heart. "Thou art the Spring
for which I sighed in Winter's cold embraces." Caroline lifted
her hands quickly from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in
them, sobbing.

The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her
nightdress until she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped
upon the couch and began fighting over again the battles of other
days, while the ghosts of the slain rose as from a sowing of
dragon's teeth, The shadows of things, always so scorned and
flouted, bore down upon her merciless and triumphant. It was not
enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life was not enough. It
did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other things, the
shadows-they were the realities. Her father, poor Heinrich, even
her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and
keep her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were
nearer happiness than she. Her sure foundation was but made
ground, after all, and the people in Klingsor's garden were more
fortunate, however barren the sands from which they conjured
their paradise.

The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over,
Caroline made no sound, and within the room, as without in the
garden, was the blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of
lightning showed a woman's slender figure rigid on the couch, her
face buried in her hands.

Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was
heard no more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard
leaves was steadier, she fell asleep and did not waken
until the first red streaks of dawn shone through the twisted
boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment between world and
world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her dream grow
thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart
growing cold. Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold
of her arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips,
following it a little way with fluttering hands. Then her eyes
opened wide and she sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the
cushions of the couch, staring down at her bare, cold feet, at
her laboring breast, rising and falling under her open nightdress.

The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still
pervaded her and she held it as the vibrating string holds a
tone. In the last hour the shadows had had their way with
Caroline. They had shown her the nothingness of time and space,
of system and discipline, of closed doors and broad waters.
Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in which the
genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince of
Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at
dawn. Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly
upon her knees, her shoulders sinking together. The horror was
that it had not come from without, but from within. The dream
was no blind chance; it was the expression of something she had
kept so close a prisoner that she had never seen it herself, it
was the wail from the donjon deeps when the watch slept. Only as
the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the thing have been
loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with her; so
heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was
crushed down into darkness. The fact that d'Esquerre happened to
be on the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been
here, beside her, it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect
so much. As it was, she was without even the extenuation of an
outer impulse, and she could scarcely have despised herself more
had she come to him here in the night three weeks ago and thrown
herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.

Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge
and along the path under the arbor, terrified lest the
servants should be stirring, trembling with the chill air, while
the wet shrubbery, brushing against her, drenched her nightdress
until it clung about her limbs.

At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with
concern. "It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged,
Caroline. It was a beastly night to sleep. Why don't you go up
to the mountains until this hot weather is over? By the way, were
you in earnest about letting the lodge stand?"

Caroline laughed quietly. "No, I find I was not very serious. I
haven't sentiment enough to forego a summer house. Will you tell
Baker to come tomorrow to talk it over with me? If we are to have
a house party, I should like to put him to work on it at once."

Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. "Do you
know I am rather disappointed?" he said. "I had almost hoped
that, just for once, you know, you would be a little bit foolish."

"Not now that I've slept over it," replied Caroline, and
they both rose from the table, laughing.

The Marriage of Phaedra

The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his
pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that
painter's death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of
the Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers
in Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters
between. He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of
his return trips in the late autumn, but he had always deferred
leaving Paris until the prick of necessity drove him home by the
quickest and shortest route.

Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his
death, and there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was
of no avail. Then, possibly, though there had been some
correspondence between them, MacMaster felt certain qualms about
meeting in the flesh a man who in the flesh was so diversely
reported. His intercourse with Treffinger's work had been so
deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations, that he
rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort. He had always
felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this
case he had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared
or hoped for. There still remained, however, Treffinger's great
unfinished picture, the Marriage of Phaedra, which had never
left his studio, and of which MacMaster's friends had now and again
brought report that it was the painter's most characteristic
production.

The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next
morning went out to Kensington to find Treffinger's studio. It
lay in one of the perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the
number he found on a door set in a high garden wall, the top of
which was covered with broken green glass and over which
a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger's plate was still there,
and a card requesting visitors to ring for the attendant. In
response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a cleanly
built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had
been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes
of that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven
except for the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks. He
bore himself in a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort
of trimness and alertness about him, despite the too-generous
shoulders of his coat. In one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and
in the other a copy of Sporting Life. While MacMaster was
explaining the purpose of his call he noticed that the man surveyed
him critically, though not impertinently. He was admitted into a
little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the back door
and windows opening upon a garden. A visitor's book and a pile
of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink
and some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with photographs
and colored prints of racing favorites.

"The studio is h'only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,"
explained the man--he referred to himself as "Jymes"--"but of
course we make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling
Treffinger 'erself is on the Continent, but Sir 'Ugh's orders was
that pynters was to 'ave the run of the place." He selected a key
from his pocket and threw open the door into the studio which, like
the lodge, was built against the wall of the garden.

MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed
planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine
May morning. The room was utterly bare of furniture--unless a
stepladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather
portfolios could be accounted such--and was windowless, without
other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung
the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many
of Treffinger's paintings together. He knew the painter had
married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his
pictures as he wished. These, with all of 182 his
replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to
the younger men of the school he had originated.

As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge
of the model throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed
was what he had come for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for
the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.

At one o'clock he was standing before the collection of studies
done for Boccaccio's Garden when he heard a voice at his
elbow.

"Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to
lunch. Are you lookin' for the figure study of Boccaccio
'imself?" James queried respectfully. "Lydy Elling Treffinger
give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures
he's been agiving there."

"Did he never paint out his studies, then?" asked MacMaster
with perplexity. "Here are two completed ones for this picture.
Why did he keep them?"

"I don't know as I could say as to that, sir," replied James,
smiling indulgently, "but that was 'is way. That is to say, 'e
pynted out very frequent, but 'e always made two studies to stand;
one in watercolors and one in oils, before 'e went at the final
picture--to say nothink of all the pose studies 'e made in pencil
before he begun on the composition proper at all. He was that
particular. You see, 'e wasn't so keen for the final effect as for
the proper pyntin' of 'is pictures. 'E used to say they ought to
be well made, the same as any other h'article of trade. I can lay
my 'and on the pose studies for you, sir." He rummaged in one of
the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings, "These three,"
he continued, "was discarded; these two was the pose he finally
accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.

"That's in Paris, as I remember," James continued reflectively.
"It went with the Saint Cecilia into the Baron H---'s
collection. Could you tell me, sir, 'as 'e it still? I
don't like to lose account of them, but some 'as changed 'ands
since Sir 'Ugh's death."

"H---'s collection is still intact, I believe," replied MacMaster.
"You were with Treffinger long?"

"From my boyhood, sir," replied James with gravity. "I was
a stable boy when 'e took me."

"You were his man, then?"

"That's it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio.
I always mixed 'is colors and 'e taught me to do a share of the
varnishin'; 'e said as 'ow there wasn't a 'ouse in England as could
do it proper. You ayn't looked at the Marriage yet, sir?"
he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating
with his thumb the picture under the north light.

"Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler;
that's rather appalling, at first glance," replied MacMaster.

"Well may you say that, sir," said James warmly. "That one regular
killed Sir 'Ugh; it regular broke 'im up, and nothink will ever
convince me as 'ow it didn't bring on 'is second stroke."

When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus
his mind was divided between two exultant convictions. He felt
that he had not only found Treffinger's greatest picture, but
that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the
painter's personality--a clue which, if tactfully followed, might
lead to much.

Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster
wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London
for some time and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an
only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter's widow, and
MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice. He
had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was
astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been
no less so upon the matter of her sister's unfortunate marriage.

In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when
she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when
MacMaster arrived he found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary
entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman,
thin and stiffly jointed, and her body stood out under the folds
of her gown with the rigor of cast iron. This rather metallic
suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands,
her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face,
which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

"Really," said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and
giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose
glasses, "really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you
altogether. It's four years since I saw you at Nice, isn't it? I
was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you."

"I was in New York then."

"It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?"

"Can you ask?" replied MacMaster gallantly.

Lady Mary smiled ironically. "But for what else, incidentally?"

"Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger's studio and
his unfinished picture. Since I've been here, I've decided to
stay the summer. I'm even thinking of attempting to do a
biography of him."

"So that is what brought you to London?"

"Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious
when I came. It's his last picture, I fancy, that has rather
thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing
destined."

"You'll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a
destiny," remarked Lady Mary dryly. "Isn't there rather a
surplus of books on that subject already?"

"Such as they are. Oh, I've read them all"--here MacMaster
faced Lady Mary triumphantly. "He has quite escaped your amiable
critics," he added, smiling.

"I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not
much on art," said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. "We leave
that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for
a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained
appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go
back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was
regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was
rather an unsuccessful one. If you've come to us in a missionary
spirit, we'll tolerate you politely, but we'll laugh in our
sleeve, I warn you."

"That really doesn't daunt me, Lady Mary," declared
MacMaster blandly. "As I told you, I'm a man with a mission."

Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. "Bravo! And
you've come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?"

MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. "Not altogether
for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about
the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the
matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her
to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the
whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon
your discretion."

"I think she would prefer to be consulted," replied Lady
Mary judicially. "I can't understand how she endures to have the
wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to
feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been
singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light
goes,--which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a
magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she
believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you
can see her when she returns from Italy."

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