



Produced by Judith Boss





THE TROLL GARDEN

AND

SELECTED STORIES

By Willa Cather


Contents



_Selected Stories_

     On the Divide
     Eric Hermannson's Soul
     The Enchanted Bluff
     The Bohemian Girl


_The Troll Garden_

     Flavia and Her Artists
     The Sculptor's Funeral
     "A Death in the Desert"
     The Garden Lodge
     The Marriage of Phaedra
     A Wagner Matinee
     Paul's Case




SELECTED STORIES




On the Divide


Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of long
rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the west the
ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along
the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough to
crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted
cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot
himself years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they seem
irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any kind,
for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek there
was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built of logs split
in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster. The roof was covered
with earth and was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of
a round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the log
across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There were
two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition made of ash
saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw basket work. In
one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a
bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and
upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench
of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with
a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some ragged
clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth, apparently
new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk handkerchief
and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and a badger skin,
and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose
noisy tails rattled ominously every time it opened. The strangest things
in the shanty were the wide windowsills. At first glance they looked as
though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but
on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a rough
way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as though they
had been cut very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on
their horses' heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over
their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There
were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All
about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was
always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was
a serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt
its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of them
was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and
careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from their evil
geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave and were either
toiling or praying, while the devils were always smiling and dancing.
Several of these boards had been split for kindling and it was evident
that the artist did not value his work highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into his
shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove, sat
down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire, staring
drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by heart every
individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that
stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness
of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had
seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by
drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in
the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as
though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the
hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the
shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the
snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen
earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and
began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the
wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear
the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North
Seas