The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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

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His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was
symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower,
and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading
the pack. He stood through it smiling, his pale lips parted over
his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching, and be had
a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and
irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken
down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile
did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the
nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of
his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that
held his hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing about
him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying
to detect something. This conscious expression, since it was as
far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was usually attributed
to insolence or "smartness."

As the inquisition proceeded one of his instructors repeated
an impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him
whether he thought that a courteous speech to have made a
woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows
twitched.

"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or
impolite, either. I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying
things regardless."

The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether
he didn't think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul
grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told that he could
go he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was but a
repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced
the feeling of them all when he declared there was something
about the boy which none of them understood. He added: "I don't
really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence;
there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not
strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he was born in
Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a
long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."

The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at
Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of
his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his
drawing board, and his master had noted with amazement what a
white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old
man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and
stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy;
humiliated to have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have
uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and to have set each other
on, as it were, in the gruesome game of intemperate reproach.
Some of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat set at
bay by a ring of tormentors.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the "Soldiers' Chorus"
from Faust, looking wildly behind him now and then to see
whether some of his teachers were not there to writhe under his
lightheartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon and Paul
was on duty that evening as usher at Carnegie Hall, he decided
that he would not go home to supper. When he reached the
concert hall the doors were not yet open and, as it was chilly
outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay
studies of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two
that always exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in
the gallery but the old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper
on his knee, a black patch over one eye and the other closed.
Paul possessed himself of the peace and walked confidently up and
down, whistling under his breath. After a while he sat down before
a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought him to look at his
watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a start and ran
downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from the cast
room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her on
the stairway.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing room half a dozen
boys were there already, and he began excitedly to tumble into
his uniform. It was one of the few that at all approached
fitting, and Paul thought it very becoming-though he knew that
the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about
which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably
excited while be dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the
strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music
room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased
and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they
put him down on the floor and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the
front of the house to seat the early comers. He was a model
usher; gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles;
nothing was too much trouble for him; he carried messages and
brought programs as though it were his greatest pleasure in life,
and all the people in his section thought him a charming boy,
feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house
filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the
color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though
this were a great reception and Paul were the host. just as the
musicians came out to take their places, his English teacher
arrived with checks for the seats which a prominent
manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some
embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a hauteur
which subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was
startled for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her
out; what business had she here among all these fine people and
gay colors? He looked her over and decided that she was not
appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit downstairs in
such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of
kindness, he reflected as he put down a seat for her, and she had
about as much right to sit there as he had.

When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats
with a long sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done
before the Rico. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant
anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the
instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit
within him; something that struggled there like the genie in the
bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of
life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall
blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came
on Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there
and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages
always had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by
no means in her first youth, and the mother of many children; but
she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all she had
that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her,
which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and
wretched until he got to sleep, and tonight he was even more than
usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let
down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious
excitement which was the only thing that could be called living
at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after hastily
changing his clothes in the dressing room, slipped out to the
side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began
pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder, the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and
square through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories
glowing like those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas
tree. All the actors and singers of the better class stayed there
when they were in the city, and a number of the big manufacturers
of the place lived there in the winter. Paul had often hung about
the hotel, watching the people go in and out, longing to enter and
leave schoolmasters and dull care behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who
helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial
auf wiedersehen which set Paul to wondering whether she
were not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage
over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the
entrance when the singer alighted, and disappeared behind the
swinging glass doors that were opened by a Negro in a tall hat
and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar it seemed
to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go
after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an
exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking
ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
into the dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he
had seen them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday
World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down
with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was
still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots
were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet
about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out
and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the
orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what be
wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as
the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined
always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The
end had to come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the
top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily
improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up,
his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wallpaper, the creaking
bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and over his painted
wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and
the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went
slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare.
It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were
exactly alike, and where businessmen of moderate means begot and
reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath
school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in
arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and
of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never
went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home
was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached
it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that
he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into
Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After
each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical
depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable
beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a
shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of
everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely
unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping
chamber; the cold bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked
mirror, the dripping spiggots; his father, at the top of the
stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt, his feet
thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later than usual
that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be
accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on
that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his
father that he had no carfare and it was raining so hard he had
gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back
of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it
open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to
the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the
noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there
was no creak on the stairs. He found a soapbox, and carried it
over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace
door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did
not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark,
still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and
nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses
were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose
his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come
down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father
had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to
save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how
nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should come
when his father would remember that night, and wish there had
been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition
Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was
broken by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul
had to go to church and Sabbath school, as always. On seasonable
Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out
on their front stoops and talked to their neighbors on the next
stoop, or called to those across the street in neighborly
fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions placed upon the
steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their
Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the
streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the
recreation grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the steps--all
in their shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttoned--sat with their
legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and
talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity
of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked
over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to
see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and
interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about
their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and
the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon
on the lowest step of his stoop, staring into the street, while
his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's
daughters next door about how many shirtwaists they had made in
the last week, and bow many waffles someone had eaten at the last
church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in
a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade,
which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very
fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color
of the pitcher.

Today Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young
man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened
to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and
after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would
pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a
compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted eyes, over which he
wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears.
He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation,
and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a
future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now
barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order
to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that
a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his
chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-
one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share
his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much
older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne
him four children, all nearsighted, like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in
the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of
the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as
though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two
stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his
corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway
plant in Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there.
Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings that
were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of
palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at
Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the
triumphs of these cash boys who had become famous, though he had
no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over and he had helped to dry the dishes,
Paul nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's
to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked
for carfare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his
father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money,
whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to
some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to
leave his schoolwork until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He
was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that
he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the
dishwater from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and
then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the
bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his
geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out
of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the
lethargy of two deadening days and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at
one of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals
whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every
available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing room.
He had won a place among Edwards's following not only because the
young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found
him useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to
what churchmen term "vocation."

It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really
lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was
Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a
secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor
behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt
within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid,
brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat
out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from
Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly
always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of
artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was
because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-
school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to
succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he
found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and
women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how
convincingly the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the
actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever
suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the
old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich
Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women who never
saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul
had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-
white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination
had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he
scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as
would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading
the novels that some of his friends urged upon him--well, he got
what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music,
from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only the spark, the
indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his
senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It
was equally true that he was not stagestruck-not, at any rate, in
the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to
become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He
felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was
to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be
carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes Paul found the schoolroom
more than ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the
prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their
buttonholes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and
pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative.
He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment,
that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that
he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
jest, anyway. He had autographed pictures of all the members of
the stock company which he showed his classmates, telling them
the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people,
of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall,
his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these
stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he
became desperate and would bid all the boys good-by, announcing
that he was going to travel for a while; going to Naples, to
Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he
should have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the
itch to let his instructors know how heartily he despised them
and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated
elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool
with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch
of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was
helping the people down at the stock company; they were old
friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to
Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work.
The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his
stead; the doorkeeper at the theater was warned not to admit him
to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's
father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when
some of Paul's stories reached them--especially the women. They
were hardworking women, most of them supporting indigent husbands
or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred
the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with
the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.

The eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm;
the dull dawn was beginning to show gray when the engine whistled
a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had
lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window
glass with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in
curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay
already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and
there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black
above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of
laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

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