The King in the Tree

by Steven Millhauser

  One afternoon after his late breakfast Juan accompanied Hood to the stable yard, where one of the grooms replaced a worn bridle and examined a shoe. Juan then rode out with Hood to Avernus, watched his friend disappear into the cave, and rode back to the house. There he sat with Mary and Georgiana in the drawing room before retiring to his apartment, where he threw himself down on the walnut armchair beside his bedroom window. It was an unusually comfortable chair, upholstered in claret-colored wool velvet. He drummed his fingers on the arm, stood up and walked into the sitting room, flung himself across the sofa, rose at once and returned to the bedroom, where he strode to the window. He opened the casement wide and stood with his hands on both sashes as he looked down at a strip of lawn, a plum orchard, a beech grove, and a distant turn of river. A moment later he climbed up onto the window ledge. Directly below was a narrow stretch of lawn, on which lay a rake and a watering can.

  Juan leaped, wondering dimly if he would break a leg. On the brilliant jewel-green grass his dark green shadow appeared; as he fell he had the odd sensation that his shadow had been stolen from him and was now being returned. He broke his fall, rolled over twice, and stood up, joined to his shadow. His whole body tingled with exhilaration. And suddenly he recalled his leap into the canal, the lights on the water, the orange peel, the eyes of the merchant’s wife widening in fear, the waiting gondola.

  He passed through the orchard and made his way through the coppice of beech trees, past a small lake with an island, and through a pine grove to a melancholy retreat, where paths wound among yew trees, weathered statues, and a dark pool rimmed with crumbling stone. At the far end of the retreat rose an immense oak. Its half-bared roots, thick as saplings, had been artfully shaped to form two seat backs. At the base of each seat was a dark red pillow bearing Hood’s crest: a swan wearing a crown. On one of the pillows lay Juan’s grammar. Juan threw himself onto the other pillow, opened his grammar, closed it immediately, and studied an iridescent insect that was walking on the back of his hand.

  Ten minutes later he was studying the same insect as it walked along a blade of grass that Juan slowly tipped from side to side. He looked up to see Mary approaching on a path beside the crumbling pool. The pink silk of her hooped gown rippled with light and shade, the lace ruffles at the ends of her elbow-length sleeves shook on her gloved forearms, and as she drew closer he saw that she was wearing around her shoulders a covering of translucent white fabric, the ends of which were tucked into her low-cut bodice and held in place by a blue silk breastknot.

  “ ’Twas impossible to come directly,” she said in a quiet, urgent tone, and the trouble in her face gave her an energy that reminded Juan of her tight, trembling ringlets. “Your note—”

  “Georgiana doesn’t”—he groped for the correct word as he rose to his feet—“suspect?” He motioned for her to sit down.

  “I told her that I had a terrible headache. I wasn’t to be disturbed—not for any reason. I dislike sneaking. You had something of importance to tell me?”

  “There is nothing to be alarmed about. Please sit.” He considered the phrase. “Down.”

  “I can stay no more than a moment,” she said, sitting on one of the pillows and resting the backs of her white-gloved hands in her lap, like shells.

  “A moment will be more than enough. There is something I must speak to you about”—and as he sat down beside her, looking into her anxious face, examining the shadowy pale skin beneath the translucent gauze handkerchief that revealed her elegant collarbone and swelled over the tops of her breasts before plunging out of sight beneath the big silk bow, he knew that Mary Hood had already succumbed, although she herself did not yet know it, and imagined only that she was having an interesting conversation with a Spanish nobleman under an ancient oak.

  “I really must go. Georgiana—”

  “Hang Georgiana. I have felt—for some time—that you have been avoiding me.”

  “But no—why do you—”

  “If I have offended you in any—”

  “You—offend me—”

  Juan was excited by her wide nervous eyes, by the flush in her neck, by the tense curves of her tight-gloved fingers and the short copper-colored hairs on her cheek near her ear. He could feel a hoop of whalebone bending against his thigh. He had taken her hand, he was leaning toward her—so close that he could see the individual hairs in her lustrous eyebrows, which were darker than her ringlets. Her clear hazel eyes had become cloudy and languorous. The day had grown very still. As he was about to seize her and throw her down on the grass, Don Juan hesitated for a moment, and noticed his hesitation. In that moment he became aware of a faint sound, as of a scratching or scraping. The sound grew louder. There was a thumping or rumbling behind his head—Mary looked over her shoulder in alarm—Juan leaped up with his sword in hand and whirled to stare defiantly at the great oak. A crack appeared in the bark—it was as if the whole tree were breaking before his eyes—and suddenly a door swung open and Augustus Hood stepped out.

  “Mary, my dear,” he said, “you look as if you’ve seen a ghost. You look ferocious, Sir! Faith! Do you mean to cut off my head?”

  And laughing, trembling with excitement, his cheeks burning with glee, Squire Hood motioned Juan and Mary to look inside the hollow oak, where a stairway led down to an underground passage. It was, he explained as he walked with them back to the house, the most recent extension of a splendid system of subterranean tunnels that he had been working on for some time.

  III

  That night as he sat in the walnut armchair in the embrasure of his bedroom window, Don Juan brooded over his moment of hesitation under the oak tree. He had hesitated in part because he hadn’t wished to conquer so easily—he had longed for more resistance, more difficulty, and had been disappointed in the cloudy look of yielding in Mary Hood’s eyes. He had hesitated because Mary was pleasing to him just as she was— an earnest schoolteacher, an ally, a charming companion of his evening rambles, a shy and gentle woman trembling on the verge of destructive ecstasy—and he knew that she would become less pleasing the moment he had enjoyed her favors. He had hesitated because Augustus Hood was one of the few men he had ever liked. He had hesitated because he had hoped to find, in the mysterious North, a new life, unimagined before, a life of desire so deep that it would pierce him like a sword, and the seduction of pretty Mary Hood was a return to the old life. And he had hesitated for some other reason that he couldn’t quite grasp, as if there were something about himself that eluded him, something he was on the verge of knowing but did not know. Then he thought of himself brooding there in his window like a pale philosopher, and he gave a scornful laugh, aloud to the night sky—for nothing was more repellent to Don Juan than a man of uncertainty, a hesitating, careful-stepping man, a man without a woman.

  He returned to the routine of Swan Park, but with a feeling of restlessness. For a day Mary seemed awkward in his company and made a point of remaining at Georgiana’s side, but she soon thawed into her old easiness, as if nothing had happened under the old oak tree; perhaps nothing had. Georgiana, who now spoke English in his presence, remained a little aloof, a little mocking. It seemed to Juan that she was rather amused by him, this fantastical don with his plumed hat. As for Squire Hood, his work on Avernus was progressing nicely, though he’d hit a snag in Tartarus: the pasteboard boulder for Sisyphus didn’t have the look of stone, and he was eagerly awaiting a new rock prepared by a stonecutter—a real boulder carefully hollowed and filled with a mixture of wool and straw to prevent a telltale echo. At dinner Hood was in high form, overflowing with anecdotes of his day and arguing with Georgiana about the riddle of the universe. He insisted that the nature of Nature wasn’t at all clear, since although it was true that forests, for example, suggested to the mind ideas of wildness and irregularity, it was equally true that the individual trees in the wildest forest had leaves or cones so regular in appearance that it was difficult not to imagine the hand of an artist; at which Georgiana said
Hah!—by his own admission there was design in Nature, whereby one could argue the existence of an ultimate Designer. No no, Hood insisted, that wasn’t at all the case, since the appearance of design was by no means proof of a designer, it being with equal reason arguable that matter had inherent within it a cause of order; and Juan felt that this conversation would never come to an end, that it was arranged expressly never to come to an end, and that the tip of Georgiana’s nose irritated him, and that Mary’s little glances, to make certain he was following the discussion, were even more irritating than the tip of Georgiana’s infuriating nose, and that if he didn’t do something soon—now—this very instant—his head would break loose from his neck and go rolling across the floor—and still he sat there, while the voices spun out delicate threads that bound him, and it seemed to him that he had always sat just that way, like a man caught in a spell.

  Sometimes in the evenings he joined Hood in the library, where he bent over the microscope on the table by the fireplace and examined the little creatures teeming in a drop of vinegar or pond water or an infusion of peppercorns. Nature was so prodigious, Hood declared, that it produced universes in both directions, the minuscule and the gigantic, a vast concord of animalcula and suns; and as Juan tried to share Hood’s awe at the plenitude of Nature, he felt only a discontent, a vague revulsion, as if the universe stretching away in both directions existed solely to reveal to him the fecundity of its indifference.

  One morning when Juan came down to breakfast he found Georgiana standing in the drawing room with a letter in her hand, while Mary sat watching her.

  “Well, Sir,” Georgiana said in English, glancing up at him, “you shall soon be well rid of me.”

  “Madam,” Juan replied, choosing his words carefully, “I would sooner be rid of my honor.”

  “Oh,” Georgiana replied, with her eyes on the letter, “that is no very great thing to be rid of.”

  Juan, biting down in anger, was uncertain whether she meant to taunt him into a witty reply, or whether she intended a more malicious meaning; and once again he was aware of the odd, physical sense of imbalance he always felt in the presence of this woman, as if he were walking across an unsteady log thrown across a rushing stream.

  “Georgiana has had a letter from Father,” Mary said. In a letter filled with news of a quarrel among servants, farm rents, land improvement, a lame horse, and a pious memory of his late wife, he let it be known that he sorely missed his dear Georgiana. She would be leaving Swan Park for Sussex the next morning. Juan looked at Georgiana standing there with her haughty head bent over her letter, her hair in back turned up in a flat plait bound tightly in place. The sheer sight of her irritated every nerve in his body. She had received a letter from her father, the sort of letter that thousands of daughters received every day, and because of it the entire world must be turned upside down. A pleasing routine had been established at Swan Park, a daily harmony, and merely because of this prattling epistle from a fretful father it must now be interrupted, broken up, destroyed forever. Georgiana had no feeling for such things; there was a thoughtlessness about her, even a selfishness, that fit in perfectly with her distant manner and her mocking tone. And whatever she might think of him, a foreign guest toward whom the rules of hospitality required at most a modicum of civility, what of Mary, who without her sister would be left alone for long stretches of the day?—to say nothing of poor Augustus, who liked nothing better than to engage Georgiana in lively discussion at dinner and to walk with her along the river. And although the sight of her standing there with her insufferable letter irritated him so deeply that the mere thought of her absence filled him with delight, it was also true that the pleasure he took in her future absence was diminished by his exasperation at the knowledge of her imminent departure.

  That evening Augustus Hood did not return to the library but joined the company in a walk along the Ymber. He and Georgiana strolled ahead of Juan and Mary. The precise reflections of branches in the dark water, the meadow across the river, the sound of cattle lowing, Hood’s riding boots squeaking softly on the path, Georgiana’s hat brim trembling slightly as she walked—all this sank into Juan as if he were seeing it for the last time. “Oh, look!” said Georgiana, pointing to the swan and its five cygnets. She stepped off the path, bending her head, pushing away osier branches for a closer look. Her hat struck a branch and fell to the grass. Juan sprang forward. “Sir,” Georgiana said, laughing, “you startled me.” Juan, wondering irritably whether he was supposed to apologize, handed her the hat in silence, and as she raised it with both hands to her hair, lifting her elbows like wings, he saw her looking away across the water with a cool smile.

  And when he came down to breakfast the next morning she was gone, just like that: a conjuror’s trick. Mary would be the next to vanish, and then Hood, and then Swan Park— and the Great Magician, with a fiendish laugh, would open his hand—nothing!—while the blue silk handkerchief fluttered to the floor. Meanwhile, it was as if nothing had changed. Mary sat with him in the breakfast room. He was still sitting at table, staring at the shortened shadow of a cup on sunlit white linen, when Hood arrived in his riding boots and spurs. In the afternoon Juan rode off with Hood to the site of Avernus and then continued alone into the countryside, where he tried to ride himself into exhaustion. At dinner the conversation turned to methods of education. Juan told stories of tutors and governesses in the house in Seville, the lessons in fencing and riding, in mathematics and Latin—oh yes, he had made his way through all twelve books of the Aeneid at the age of thirteen—and as he spoke he kept expecting Georgiana to leap into the conversation in some irritating exasperating way.

  Two nights later he woke and saw through his partly open bed curtains a brilliant glow of moonlight in the room. He had fallen asleep fully clothed, with his sword belt still in place. Through the open casement window he saw the deep-blue night sky. He had been restless and distracted; a walk would do him good. At the casement he sprang lightly onto the sill, then lowered himself from the window by climbing partway down along two stone projections on the wall. He dropped to the grass and, keeping away from the kennels, made his way around the guest wing and down to the river. For a while he walked on the path beside the osiers, before stepping into the trees. He sat down against a trunk. Frogs croaked along the riverbank; a bird called sharply and was still. Through the hanging branches he looked out at the dark river shining with moonlight.

  He was restless and irritable and melancholy—he could feel disappointment seeping into his skin. His northern journey had been a failure. He had hoped for something—something that was no longer clear to him—and he hadn’t found it here. It was true that he had been happy at Swan Park—happy riding out with Augustus Hood, happy half-seducing Mary and sparing her the descent into triteness, happy even in the exasperating company of irritating Georgiana. But now there was a flatness to things, a dullness in his spirit. He had never been so long without a woman. He was probably doing himself great harm by not ravishing Mary Hood, or her maid-servant, or one of the chambermaids he saw now and then about the house. But he had wanted—he had wanted—and Don Juan, who was a man of action, unused to thinking, tried to seize it, under the tree by the river—he had wanted something else, something more, an adventure so extraordinary that all of Venice by comparison would melt away. He had been a fool. It was time for him to leave Swan Park, to return to his real life—the life of Don Juan Tenorio, conquistador. And at the thought of leaving Swan Park, of never returning to the northern Eden where it was always summer, where women looked at you from under the shade of ribboned hats or stared across rivers with cool little smiles, he felt such a burst of protest, such an inner riot of grief, that he was shaken and almost frightened—he who had faced death a score of times with a mocking laugh.

  So Don Juan sat under the osier all that night and tried to seize himself, but he kept slipping away.

  When he woke in his bed the next morning, his bones ached and his eyes felt
heavy-lidded. At breakfast a terrible weariness possessed him; he could barely keep his head erect. Far, far away he saw Mary looking at him through quivering air, she seemed to be saying something, and when he tried to stand up he heard a great roar, as of a nearby cascade.

  He stayed in bed for the rest of the day, and the next morning he was examined by Dr. Centlivre, a plump man with a very small nose, large melancholy eyes, and streaks of wig powder on the shoulders of his frock, who kept reaching into a pocket in the waistband of his breeches and removing a silver-cased watch that he held up to his ear. Dr. Centlivre announced that the patient was suffering from a fever, gave him a teaspoonful of foul-tasting green liquid that Juan spat onto the floor, let out a cupful of his blood into a basin, and recommended a regimen of rest supplemented by boiled duck and small beer. Then he examined his watch once more, returned it to his fob pocket, and proceeded to tell a long story about a fox that had killed two of his bantams. Juan, weakened by the bloodletting, was led by his servant to the sofa in his sitting room before an open window. There Mary read to him, while his mind wandered down to the river.

  A weariness coursed through Don Juan. So that was it! He was not well—he who had never been ill a day in his life—and his sensation of dullness and melancholy was the sign of his illness. The news cheered him a little, for it meant that the trouble lay not in Swan Park but in his debilitating fever. It was true that the doctor had struck him as a fool, with his insufferable watch and his dead bantams. Juan had heard it said that when a physician knew nothing he always said “fever,” a vague word covering a multitude of symptoms, including those of health. In fact, far from feeling warm, he felt like a lump of damp earth; and anyway, he would sooner stick his sword into the doltish doctor’s plump belly than permit him to steal any more of his blood. Still, something was wrong with him. The word “fever” was in one sense soothing—it removed the necessity for further thought. For he was tired, there could be no doubt about that; and a languor had come over him. It was as if the act of lifting his arm were more than he could bear. Sometimes, looking up, he would see Mary staring at him anxiously with her hazel eyes. Then an irritation would seize him, for his languor was not unpleasant; and he wished he were alone, so that he might sink into himself, and drift away into a heavy-lidded half-waking drowsiness.