The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 1
IF you can picture a little park, bright for the moment with the flush of early summer flowers and peopled with men and women in the costumes of the late nineties—If you can picture such a park set down in the midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to describe Cypress Hill on the afternoon of the garden party for the Governor. It was a large garden, indeed quite worthy of the name "park," withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitæ clipped at intervals into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, some genuine, some of them copies. The Venus of Cydnos was there (in copy to be sure), and of course the Apollo Belvedere, a favorite ornament of formal gardens, as well as the Samothrace Victory dashing forward, it seemed, to soar high above the cloud of smoke from the neighboring blast furnaces.
Here and there the hedge displayed signs of death. There were patches where the green had become withered, and other patches where there was no green at all but simply a tangled wall of hard, dead twigs. Where death had touched the barrier it was possible to see beyond the borders of the garden into regions filled with roaring furnaces, steel sheds, and a tangle of glittering railway tracks cluttered by a confusion of semaphores and signal lights which the magic of night transformed into festoons of glowing jewels—emeralds, rubies, cabuchons, opals, glowing in the thick darkness. But it was not yet dark and no one at the garden party peered through the dying gaps in the hedge because by daylight there lay beyond the borders of the garden only ugliness of the most appalling nature.
The little park sloped away on all sides from a great brick house, conceived in the most bizarre union of Georgian and Gothic styles. It was large and square and faced with white stone, but beyond this the Georgian style played no part. The roof carried a half-dozen high pitched gables; the windows were tall and pointed in the manner of a church rectory, and the chimneys, built of white stone, were carved in the most ornate Gothic fashion. Over all clambered a mass of vines,—woodbine, virginia creeper and wistaria—which somehow bound the grotesque combination of styles into one harmonious whole, characterized by a surprising look of age, considering the fact that the house stood in the midst of a community which less than a century before had been a complete and trackless wilderness.
The vines, like the hedge, had been more green and exotic at some earlier day. In places there were now no leaves at all, and elsewhere, though the season was early summer, the leaves appeared sickly and wretched, surrounded by dead bare tendrils pressing desperately against the faded bricks.
On the whole, however, the garden was at its best. Along the gravel walks leading to the arbor, irises raised crowns of mauve, royal purple and yellow. Peonies in the process of bursting from tight green buds into great pom-poms of pink and white tumbled acrdes the flagged walk. At the feet of the flying Eros (made of cast iron and painted white), who carried a ring in one hand and thus served for a hitching post, ground pinks and white violets, brought from England by Julia Shane's grandmother, peeped from among the blades of new grass. But the greatest splendor had its being in the wistaria. High up among the branches of the dead oak that towered gauntly above the horse block, its cascades of mauve and white and purple poured like water escaping from a broken dam. From the black iron portico tumbled more torrents of blossoms. They appeared even high up among the tips of the pointed cypresses which gave the house its name. To be sure these were not true cypresses at all, for true cypresses could not have survived the harsh northern winter. In reality they were cedars; but their tall, green-black spires, swaying in melancholy fashion at the least breath of air, resembled cypresses as one brother resembles another. John Shane, perhaps because the name roused memories of some secret world of his own, always called them cypresses and such, to all purposes, they had become. None knew why he called the house Cypress Hill or why he loved cypresses so much that he called cedars by that name when nature cheated him out of his heart's desire. The Town set it down simply as another of his eccentricities. One more craziness no longer disturbed the Town. And John Shane had been dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was one of no importance whatever.
Under the wistarias on the wrought iron piazza his widow, Julia Shane, leaning on her stick of ebony filigreed in silver, surveyed the bright garden and the guests who moved about among the old trees, the men clad in sober black, the ladies in sprigged muslins or bright colored linens. She was a tall thin woman with a nose slightly hooked, which gave her the fleeting look of an eagle, courageous, bold, even a little pitiless and unrelenting. An air of dignity and distinction compensated the deficiencies of beauty; she was certainly not a beautiful woman and her fine skin was already crisscrossed by a million tiny lines no more substantial than cobweb. Like the women of the generation preceding hers, she made no attempt at preserving the illusion of youth. Although she could not have been long past middle age, she dressed as an old woman. She wore a gown of black and mauve of the most expensive materials,—a sign of mourning which she kept up for a husband dead ten years, a husband whose passing could have given her no cause for regret, whose memory could not possibly bring to her ivory cheeks the faintest flush of pleasure. But the black and mauve gave her great dignity and a certain melancholy beauty. On her thin fingers she wore rings set with amethysts—and diamonds and about her neck hung a chain of amethysts caught in a setting of old Spanish silver. The chain reached twice about her thin throat and hung to the knees.
She had been standing on the piazza, a little withdrawn from her guests, all the afternoon because she knew that the mauve of her gown and the dull lavender sparkle of the amethysts blended superbly with the tumbling blossoms of the wistaria. She had not been, after all, the wife of John Shane for nothing. People said that he had taught his wife to make the best of herself because he could bear to have about him only those things which were in excellent taste. People also said that his wife was lame, not because she had fallen by accident down the long polished stairway, but because she had been thrown from the top to the bottom by her husband in an insane fit of rage.
From her point of vantage, her bright blue eyes swept the garden, identifying the guests—those whom she desired to have there, those to whose presence she was completely indifferent, and those whom political necessity had forced upon her. About most of them centered scornful, bitter, little thoughts that chased themselves round and round her tired brain.
Over against the hedge on the far side of the little pavilion stood a group which, it appeared, interested her more than any other, for she watched it with a faint smile that carried the merest trace of mockery. She discerned the black of the bombazine worn by Hattie Tolliver, her blood niece, and the sprigged muslin of Hattie's daughter, Ellen, who stood by resentfully with an air of the most profound scorn while her mother talked to Judge Weissman. The mother talked voluably, exerting all her power to charm the Judge, a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant Viennese Jew. And the efforts of Hattie Tolliver, so solid, so respectable, so downright, were completely transparent, for the woman possessed no trace of subtlety, not the faintest power of dissimulation. She sought to win favor with the Jew because he was the one power in the county politics. He ruled his party with an undisputed sway, and Hattie Tolliver's husband was a candidate for office. Perhaps from the pinnacle of her worldliness Julia Shane detected a quality naïve and almost comic in the vulgar intrigue progressing so blatantly on the opposite side of the pavilion.
There was also a quality indescribably comic in the fierce attitude of the daughter, in her aloofness from the politician and the intensity of her glowering expression. She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful, spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the piano superbly, in a truly extraordinary fashion.
Presently Julia Shane, behind the shelter of the wistaria, sniffed suddenly as though the wind had carried to her among the delicate odors of the flowers the offensive smell of the fat perspiring Jew. He was there by political necessity, because the Governor desired his presence. Clearly she looked upon him as an intruder who defiled the little park.
Farther off at the side of the empty kennels, all buried beneath a tangle of vines, another group had gathered about a table where pink ices and pink and white cakes were being served. About the great silver punch bowl hung a dozen men, drinking, drinking, drinking, as though the little park were a corner saloon and the little table the accustomed free lunch. For a moment Julia Shane's gaze fastened upon the men and her thin nostrils quivered. Her lips formed themselves to utter a word which she spoke quite loudly so that three women, perfect strangers to her who stood just beneath the piazza, overheard it and spread the story that Julia Shane had taken to talking to herself. "Pigs!" she said.