The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

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, an
d

  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, telli
ng 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.

  Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable.

  He had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he

  was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly

  because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh

  businessman, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office.

  When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast

  pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the

  little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the

  slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion,

  and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.

  Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

  When he arrived at the Jersey City station he hurried through his

  breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about

  him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he

  consulted a cabman and had himself driven to a men's-furnishings

  establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent upward

  of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great

  care. His new street suit he put on in the fitting room; the frock

  coat and dress clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen.

  Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was

  at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and a new scarf pin. He

  would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he

  stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway and had his purchases packed

  into various traveling bags.

  It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the

  Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the

  office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and