The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious
eyes, "and so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on
wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never getting
them. That's a girl's philanthropy for you!"

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over
the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted
upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was
at the house. Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red
smile at Margaret.

"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf
Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ,
when she isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from
Frenchtown will bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with
the Norwegians much."

"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of
our trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see
the Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.

"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in
this scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of
his pipe. "She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to
talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and
taking the carriage at four to catch the six o'clock train out of
Riverton--well, it's tommyrot, that's what it is!"

"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to
decide whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up
at three in the morning. To get up at three, think what that
means! No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a
sleeper."

"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were
tired of dancing."

"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian
dance, and I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is
that one really wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I
have really wanted to go to a party before. It will be something
to remember next month at Newport, when we have to and don't want
to. Remember your own theory that contrast is about the only thing
that makes life endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's;
your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in being nice to the
Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you were adept enough at it once.
And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such
young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie
you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them."

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his
fate, while his sister went on.

"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
his plowshoe.

"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty
hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone
over to the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in
the fire than shake 'em to a fiddle."

Margaret made a gesture of impatience. "Those Free Gospellers
have just cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?"

"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass
judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by
their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'
that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've
sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I
don't see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were
before. I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little
Dane as I want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of
him and sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his
knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle
get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it
goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the
spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now he's
got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we
can even get him to come in tomorrow night."

"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said
Margaret, quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself."

"I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd
help us out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,' " said
Lockhart, imitating the laboured English of the Norwegian.

"'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'"
chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she
laughed mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit
that I am beaten until I have asked him myself."

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in
the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
Tonight Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode
with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart
had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret regarded her escort very
much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long
rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She
was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling
with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before.

He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it
in his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His
brain worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of
things. This girl represented an entirely new species of humanity
to him, but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when
an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but
he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost
its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were
not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had
prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape
in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent
horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America.
Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in
stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's;
hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes
of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain
confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical
perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with
life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide.
But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an
arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his
case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and
more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as though some
red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in
which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them
quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of
the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable
sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never
lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first
bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly,
according to the time it takes each man's heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a
year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the
windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of
his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until
that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his
violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people
settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work.

"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," et cetera. The
pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was
one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it
embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and
where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again.
This man understood things literally: one must live without
pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it was necessary to
starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her
cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of
road that runs for some three miles through the French settlement,
where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the
fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of
slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that
Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It
will be safe to run the horses here, won't it?"

"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his
pony's flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old
saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two
to death before they get broken in to the country. They are
tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to
get to the end of something. Margaret galloped over the level
road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the
wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her
and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face.
Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in
blinding flashes, always with more or less embarrassment, but now
he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory. Men of
the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous,
finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men
of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have
conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows
forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had
curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious memory in
those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these details. To him
this beauty was something more than colour and line; it was a flash
of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour because all
colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by
a young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held
something more than the attraction of health and youth and
shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the
Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing
whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering
his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil,
to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from
her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it
maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands
should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he
admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched
her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to
take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly
in her saddle.

"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,"
she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe
hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to
work," he asked, timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied
the outline of his face, pityingly.

"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't
like you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of
atmosphere, some way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was
thinking: There he would be altogether sordid, impossible--a
machine who would carry one's trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is
every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it? "No," she
added aloud, "I shouldn't like that."

"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle
amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you
to dance with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian
dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?"

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed
as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his
violin across his knee.

"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he
delivered his soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound
through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a
beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the
ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in
front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of
wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-
traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the
farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that
was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all
the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret
called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and
was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the
range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and
striking her with their forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It
was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.

"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing
all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic
forefeet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild
mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in
wrenching the pony's head toward him and crowding her withers
against the clay bank, so that she could not roll.

"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a
snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she
should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs-- He
struck out again and again, kicking right and left with all his
might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut,
and their long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd.
As suddenly as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild
life swept up out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and
with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head
and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from
her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her
saddle. "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his
face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and
that his lips were working nervously.

"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck
you!" she cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands
clenched at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat
their brains out with my hands. I would kill them all. I
was never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that
has ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky.
You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the
snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You
are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all that
they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more
than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope
for heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my
God!" He threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the
pony's mane, leaning ]imply against the animal like a man struck
by some sickness. His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his
laboured breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion and
fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric's head and said
gently:

"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"

"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not
safe. I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky,
but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in
silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's
head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm
and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt,
thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of
me. He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the
morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to
bed now. Good night."

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank
upon the bed in her riding dress, face downward.

"Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh
of exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again,
she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at
the village post-office. It was closely written in a long,
angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and
began:

My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say how like
a winter hath thine absence been, I should incur the risk of
being tedious. Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything.
Having nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in
particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell
noted my general despondency and brought me down here to his place
on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up.
As You Like It is of course the piece selected. Miss
Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the
part. Miss Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a
maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists on reading into the part
all sorts of deeper meanings and highly coloured suggestions wholly
out of harmony with the pastoral setting. Like most of the
professionals, she exaggerates the emotional element and quite
fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and really brilliant
mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is
epris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory
is treacherous and his interest fitful.

My new pictures arrived last week on the Gascogne. The
Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in
Paris. A pale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a
stream of anemic water flows at her feet. The Constant, you
will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in
all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a glowing
sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful
as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted
with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,
gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls
memories of you very precious to me. But it is useless to
deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove the
charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him
of cheapness.

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of
this strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with
discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
them by.

She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went
to open the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated,
feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some
inordinate desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She
stood there for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the
sky.

"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured.
"When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to
be great? Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions
into a life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all
that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am
alone! Will life never give me that one great moment?"

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes
outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some
overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like
the outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the
air seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with
the words, "I love you more than Christ who died for me!" ringing
in her ears.

III

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height.
Even the old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of
revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric
took the violin from the Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the
organ, and the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half
mournful music, made up of the folksongs of the North, that the
villagers sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when
they are thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so
long away. To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer
Gynt music. She found something irresistibly infectious in
the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt
almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in
them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with
delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they
caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their
strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them.
Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and
ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a
hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons,
premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But
what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
blood in the heart; tonight they danced.

Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no
longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and
looked hopelessly into her eyes. Tonight he was a man, with a
man's rights and a man's power. Tonight he was Siegfried indeed.
His hair was yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and
his eyes flashed like the blue water between the ice packs in the
north seas. He was not afraid of Margaret tonight, and when he
danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on
his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like an all-
pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there
all these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips
to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some
lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight,
some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool,
and why, if this curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But
was it a curse, this awakening, this wealth before undiscovered,
this music set free? For the first time in her life her heart held
something stronger than herself, was not this worthwhile? Then she
ceased to wonder. She lost sight of the lights and the faces and
the music was drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw
only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the
warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood
of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man
she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding
back the memory of that face with all her strength.

"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer
was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that
masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this
man was little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn.
The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past,
no consideration of the future.

"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music
stopped; thinking, I am growing faint here, I shall be all
right in the open air. They stepped out into the cool, blue
air of the night.

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