The Garden Lodge

The Garden Lodge

When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was
to spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill
his engagement for the London opera season, they considered it
another striking instance of the perversity of things. That the
month was May, and the most mild and florescent of all the
blue-and-white Mays the middle coast had known in years, but added
to their sense of wrong. D'Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced
in the lodge in the apple orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious
garden, and report went that at almost any hour the sound of the
tenor's voice and of Caroline's crashing accompaniment could be
heard floating through the open windows, out among the snowy apple
boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with white sails, was
splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The garden to the
left and the orchard to the right had never been so riotous with
spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to accommodate
Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom the
witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most
of such a setting for the great tenor.

Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she
ought to be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly
cool-headed, slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in
that, as in everything else, she had herself so provokingly well
in hand. Of course, it would be she, always mistress of herself
in any situation, she, who would never be lifted one inch from
the ground by it, and who would go on superintending her
gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who got him.
Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why
she did get him, and it but nettled them the more.

Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success,
especially exasperated people because they felt that, for the
most part, she had made herself what she was; that she had cold-
bloodedly set about complying with the demands of life and making
her position comfortable and masterful. That was why, everyone
said, she had married Howard Noble. Women who did not get
through life so well as Caroline, who could not make such good
terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find
their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well, or
manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all
they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and
called her hard.

The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite
policy, which Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there
was this to be said for her--that there were extenuating
circumstances which her friends could not know.

If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she
was apt to regard with distrust everything which inclined toward
extravagance, it was not because she was unacquainted with other
standards than her own, or had never seen another side of life.
She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the
vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who
usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for
which the world seemed to have no especial need. His spirit was
warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration,
and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that brought him
bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him only
disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
orchestra everything under heaven except melody.

It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The
mother, who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future,
was left to a lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to
neverending conciliatory overtures to the butcher and grocer, to
the making of her own gowns and of Caroline's, and to the delicate
task of mollifying Auguste's neglected pupils.

The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had
inherited all his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his
capacity for slavish application. His little studio on the third
floor had been much frequented by young men as unsuccessful as
himself, who met there to give themselves over to contemptuous
derision of this or that artist whose industry and stupidity had
won him recognition. Heinrich, when he worked at all, did
newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He was too
indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art, too
irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too
much addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of
poetry, and to the use of chloral to be anything very positive
except painful. At twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and
the whole wretched affair had effectually shattered his mother's
health and brought on the decline of which she died. Caroline
had been fond of him, but she felt a certain relief when he no
longer wandered about the little house, commenting ironically
upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a cigarette
hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.

After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of
that bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid,
and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of
successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness
that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic
poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was
barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of
difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly. The house
had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague, distressing,
unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her mother,
thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the
house had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant,
intangible and unattainable. The family had lived in successive
ebullitions of generous enthusiasm, in talk of masters and
masterpieces, only to come down to the cold facts in the case; to
boiled mutton and to the necessity of turning the dining-room
carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had ended in petty
jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of the little
grocer on the corner.

From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and
uncertain existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its
poetic ideals and sordid realities, its indolence and poverty
tricked out in paper roses. Even as a little girl, when vague
dreams beset her, when she wanted to lie late in bed and commune
with visions, or to leap and sing because the sooty little trees
along the street were putting out their first pale leaves in the
sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to help her mother
sponge the spots from her father's waistcoat or press Heinrich's
trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question
concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from
the time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking
that many things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that
her father's pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour
while he discussed Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over
a dish of herrings and a spotted tablecloth. She knew that
Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on Heine's birthday, when the
laundress had not been paid for a month and when he frequently
had to ask his mother for carfare. Certainly Caroline had served
her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing
inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to
deny herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp
questions of life.

When she came into the control of herself and the house she
refused to proceed any further with her musical education. Her
father, who had intended to make a concert pianist of her, set
this down as another item in his long list of disappointments and
his grievances against the world. She was young and pretty, and
she had worn turned gowns and soiled gloves and improvised hats
all her life. She wanted the luxury of being like other people,
of being honest from her hat to her boots, of having nothing to
hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was willing to
work for it. She rented a little studio away from that house of
misfortune and began to give lessons. She managed well and was
the sort of girl people liked to help. The bills were
paid and Auguste went on composing, growing indignant only when
she refused to insist that her pupils should study his compositions
for the piano. She began to get engagements in New York to play
accompaniments at song recitals. She dressed well, made herself
agreeable, and gave herself a chance. She never permitted herself
to look further than a step ahead, and set herself with all the
strength of her will to see things as they are and meet them
squarely in the broad day. There were two things she feared even
more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the
part of one that bows down and worships it.

When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then
a widower of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall
Street. Then, for the first time, she had paused to take breath.
It took a substantialness as unquestionable as his; his money,
his position, his energy, the big vigor of his robust person, to
satisfy her that she was entirely safe. Then she relaxed a
little, feeling that there was a barrier to be counted upon
between her and that world of visions and quagmires and failure.

Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond
d'Esquerre came to stay with them. He came chiefly because
Caroline was what she was; because he, too, felt occasionally the
need of getting out of Klingsor's garden, of dropping down
somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong
hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge were hours of
such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom got in
anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the
seriousness of work.

One evening two weeks after d'Esquerre had sailed, Caroline
was in the library giving her husband an account of the work she
had laid out for the gardeners. She superintended the care of
the grounds herself. Her garden, indeed, had become quite a part
of her; a sort of beautiful adjunct, like gowns or jewels. It
was a famous spot, and Noble was very proud of it.

"What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down
and putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big
rustic affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?" he
asked.

"The lodge?" repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. "Why, that
seems almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerre has used it?"

Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.

"Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I'd sacrifice the
whole place to see that come to pass. But I don't believe you
could do it for an hour together."

"I don't believe so, either," said his wife, smiling.

Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the
music room to practice. She was not ready to have the lodge torn
down. She had gone there for a quiet hour every day during the
two weeks since d'Esquerre had left them. It was the sheerest
sentiment she had ever permitted herself. She was ashamed of it,
but she was childishly unwilling to let it go.

Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not
able to sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm.
The wind had fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as
the sand. She rose and thrust her feet into slippers and,
putting a dressing gown over her shoulders, opened the door of
her husband's room; he was sleeping soundly. She went into the
hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the house through a side
door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led to the garden
lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still air,
and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through
the thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed
continuously from the bank of clouds that had gathered over the
sea, but the shore was flooded with moonlight and, beyond, the
rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining. Caroline had the key of
the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened it. She stepped
into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which streamed
through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the waxed
floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the
picture frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the
half-light as did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden
against the still, expectant night sky. Caroline sat
down to think it all over. She had come here to do just that
every day of the two weeks since d'Esquerre's departure, but,
far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had succeeded
only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where
there was neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She
had, she realized, defeated a lifelong regimen; completely
confounded herself by falling unaware and incontinently into
that luxury of reverie which, even as a little girl, she had so
determinedly denied herself, she had been developing with
alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol and
that part of one which bows down and worships it.

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 END-
Willa Cather's short story: The Garden Lodge