The King in the Tree

by Steven Millhauser

  One afternoon Mary entered his sitting room with four or five books that she had brought up from the library. She sat down in the armchair facing his sofa, opened a book, and removed a letter. “Georgiana has written to say that she is coming back to us on Thursday. Father is such a dear. He says he can’t keep her there for his own selfish pleasure. He feels there is really nothing for her to do in Belford, which of course is entirely untrue. She says—” Juan felt an odd rippling in his stomach. Blood beat in his temples, he had the sensation that somewhere many windows had been flung open—and he felt a surge of dark excitement, a tide of dangerous joy, so that he placed a hand on his chest as if to keep himself from bursting. And because, even now, Don Juan did not know what was happening to him, as he lay on his sofa trying to calm the rush of his blood, he said to himself, with a touch of sulkiness, “What the devil’s wrong with me? That doctor is a blockhead. I’m not well, not well at all.”

  I V

  “What I most like about this place,” Georgiana was saying, as she stopped for a moment on the path by the Ymber to lift both hands in a gesture of welcome, “is that nothing ever changes.”

  “Why, I cannot agree with you entirely,” Augustus Hood said. “For say you overlook my little improvements—the new laburnum planting beside the hermitage, which you really must make it a point to see tomorrow, the felling of pines in the grove by the northwest cascade—yet one notices small changes in Nature every day—every hour. The rye has grown measurably taller. The sun sets a little earlier, at a point farther south. The hawthorn hedge—”

  “But—good heavens!—you take my meaning too literally, Augustus. Let the corn grow as high as the house, let the sun be extinguished by a sneeze. I was speaking of all that underlies such changes. Do you not feel, that underneath Nature, and all that decays, there is another Nature, supporting and upholding all? That is what I meant, when I said—”

  “You, at least, my dear Georgiana, never change,” Hood remarked.

  The four were walking after dinner along the path of osiers, and Juan felt the calm, reassuring return of the familiar rhythm of days, under the always blue sky, in the green world of his deepest desire. But even as he took in the familiar details—the osier branches trailing in the dark water, the swan and its cygnets gliding over their clear reflections, the meadows across the river glowing in the yellow light of evening—he knew that everything had changed. Georgiana herself was so different from what she had been that he wondered whether he had ever looked at her before. The other Georgiana had been composed of three or four hasty strokes—a hat, a ribbon, a cool smile— like a woman glimpsed in a passing diligence, whereas this Georgiana was a torrent of details, which were almost impossible to seize because of a disturbing radiance that made it difficult for him to look at her. Her mouth, for example—how had he failed to notice, in the old days, the way her top lip would press tightly against her teeth when she smiled, while her nostrils, faintly reddish at the sides, seemed to quiver with energy?

  He had begun to rise earlier, filled with impatience to see Georgiana, as if to assure himself that she hadn’t disappeared again into Sussex or Flussex or wherever it was she had gone to. At the same time he experienced a wariness, almost a reluctance, for not to see her was at least to remain in a known condition, however undesirable, whereas to see her always unsettled him and made him feel unfamiliar to himself. At breakfast he would catch himself gazing at her naked hands, or at a thin strand of hair lying on her cheek, and he would turn violently away—or he would notice himself staring stupidly at his plate, while around him he became aware of an alarming silence. During the morning walk he was eager to have Georgiana’s attention, while at the same time he wished himself invisible, so that he might observe her in peace. If he rode off with Hood he was relieved to be away from the house, with its awkwardness and strangeness, yet he was fiercely impatient to return, since he suddenly could no longer remember what she looked like, exactly. At dinner he followed her conversation closely. He liked to watch her mouth and eyes, and the way the tip of her nose, tugged by her upper lip, would move very slightly when she spoke. In the evening, if he walked beside her, he had the sense of an imperfect, blurred view, or of sharply glimpsed pieces of face and lace and flounces flashing out at him before dropping away into nothingness. Then he longed to walk behind her, where he would be able to watch, slowly and thoughtfully, the complicated movements of her gown, the late light on her hair, the green shade and pale sunlight rippling across her hat and shoulders. But when he actually did find himself walking behind her, he felt cut off, cast out, abandoned, like an outsider among a group of close friends who have agreed to endure him patiently while secretly wishing he would go away. At night he lay restlessly awake for a long time before plunging into deep, dreamless sleep, from which he suddenly woke feeling heavy-headed and weary, with throbbing temples, as if sleep had been an exhausting labor.

  He seized every chance of being alone with Mary, in order to discuss Georgiana. Falling behind with Mary on the path by the river, he would say, “I think your sister is looking a little pale today. Don’t you think she is looking a little pale?” or “I admire that black silk bracelet, the color suits her perfectly.” When he accompanied Hood on his rounds, he would pursue a conversation of the night before, in order to feel, in the air around him, the presence of Georgiana. Once, when he complimented a pleached bower by saying that it was difficult to tell where Nature left off and Art began, Hood said, “Georgiana believes that”—and at the sound of her name, which startled him as if Hood had suddenly drawn aside a curtain, revealing Georgiana in her traveling cloak hurrying toward him, Juan banished all expression from his face, as his breath came short and blood beat in the veins of his neck.

  He knew that Georgiana was aware of the change in him, for by dozens of small signs she revealed an uneasiness in his presence, a new alertness, that in another woman might have been the first sign of awakened interest. In Georgiana he detected only a desire to conceal herself more completely, to evade scrutiny. Don Juan was accustomed to the ambiguous smiles, the modest withdrawals that were secret advances, of women who agreed to the rules of the game. Georgiana simply eluded him. He understood that if she eluded him, it was because she was aware of him—but her awareness went only far enough to enable her to mark out her distance. She wasn’t unfriendly. What troubled him was that she wasn’t anything in particular. She was a little playful, a little watchful, a little distrustful, a little indifferent. She hadn’t missed him; she did not need him; and as the days continued, it seemed to him that he had failed utterly to capture her innermost attention.

  One morning after an exhausting night, when he had lain awake until dawn and then fallen into a restless half sleep, Juan hurried down from his room and found Mary seated in the drawing room. She was alone. Looking around wildly at the empty room, the desolate symbol of still another departure— this time she had left secretly and cruelly, without a word to anyone—Juan strode forward as Mary drew back and cried, “What is it? What is it?” as if he had struck her in the face like a madman. Juan stopped, looking with surprise at his hand gripping his sword hilt and at the frightened face of Mary Hood.

  “Pray pardon me, but you—surprised me,” he said.

  “Good heavens! One would think you had seen—I don’t know what. Georgiana asked me to tell you that she is writing letters in her room and will be down in five minutes.”

  A feeling of tenderness seized Juan at the thought of Mary waiting for him so that she might deliver Georgiana’s message. It was a message that itself showed unusual consideration, since anyone who wished such a message to reach him must have imagined his feelings of confusion and concern, and with deep sincerity he said, “Forgive me if I frightened you.” Instantly a thought seized him and he added, “But you’re certain she asked you to tell me? She might have said, ‘I’ll be down in five minutes.’ And you changed her words into ‘She told me to tell you.’ Can you remember whether she said, ‘
Please tell him that I will be down in five minutes’? Do you recall her exact words?” And although an instinct warned him that he ought to stop talking immediately, that he was acting like a man who no longer respected himself, at the same time it seemed to him that if only he had the answer to this question, then his mind would be at peace and he could return to the calm, soothing routine of Swan Park.

  In his effort to gain Georgiana’s attention—her deepest, most inward attention—Juan found himself turning to Mary. She was always there, waiting for him to look at her, watching his face, alert to his slightest ripple of feeling. She would exchange conspiratorial glances with him when Georgiana’s head was turned, fall back with him on the path, leave an empty place beside her whenever the three of them rested on the elaborately carved seats and benches disposed along the walks, watch for the moment when he wished to say something to her in a few whispered words, such as “If we can get her to take that turn, over there,” draw him into the conversation or take up the slack when he chose to be silent. Juan was grateful to Mary, though he understood that her devotion to his cause was not disinterested: what she craved wasn’t his success with Georgiana but her own intimacy with him. Juan was used to the adoring looks of women, and if he accepted Mary gratefully, it was also without surprise.

  She had taken to slipping him notes from time to time. He would open a morocco-bound copy of Warner’s Horticultural Meditations, brought to him by Mary from the library to improve his command of English, and in it he would discover a folded piece of letter paper on which she had written:

  Tomorrow morning we should take the west path, past the plum orchard, in the direction of the grotto. After the wych elm, let us bear left, through the pine grove, which will take us to the cascade—a lovely walk, with many enchanting prospects, and one about which Georgiana spoke with enthusiasm last summer.

  His slight irritation at the note, with its air of whispered melodrama, dissolved at the thought of the next day’s walk, with its new turn through the pine grove, shot through with dim green sunlight, which would ripple across her hands and throat as if she were composed of iridescent silk—and as he reread the note, which promised him an intimacy so necessary to his well-being that he tried not to desire it, in order not to suffer disappointment, suddenly he came to the words “last summer,” that time when she walked in Swan Park without him, and it seemed to Juan that she had always walked through rippling sun and shade in a green world beyond his world, maddening and ungraspable.

  Or, walking along the path of osiers, Juan would feel something brush against his hand. Glancing down he would see Mary’s hand passing him a piece of paper, which he would thrust out of sight and read later, in his sitting room: She says you are too silent.

  Once, when he was walking with Mary behind Augustus and Georgiana on the path by the Ymber, he was startled to see Georgiana’s hand, in its yellow kid glove, reach behind and lightly lift up the back of her hooped overskirt, in order to prevent the hem from catching on a small branch that had fallen onto the path. The suddenly appearing hand, the agile jerk of the wrist, the exposed ankle with its tense tendon pressing against the white silk stocking, the sense of a secret and exact body inhabiting the shaking mass of her clothes, all this created in Juan a roaring behind his eyes, as if he had accidentally stepped off the path into the thick mist of a cascade, so that he was almost relieved when, a few moments later, he caught his foot on the small branch, which he kicked violently aside. Georgiana, glancing over her shoulder from under the turned-up brim of her bergère hat, looked down at the branch, raised her eyes to Don Juan’s face, and seemed about to say something, before she turned away with a faint smile.

  From Mary he learned that Georgiana had had several suitors, whom she had discouraged swiftly. She passed her time between her father’s house and Swan Park, and seemed disinclined to pant after a husband. When Mary and Augustus traveled, Georgiana accompanied them. Augustus, Mary observed, was good to her sister, though she added without complaint that Georgiana in her own way was helpful to him, for Augustus worried about leaving Mary too much alone and the presence of Georgiana permitted him to do as he liked. Mary, Juan saw, was cleverer than he had thought. He tried to imagine her life, and the life of Georgiana, but quickly grew tired—he wasn’t in the habit of imagining the invisible lives of women. If Georgiana puzzled him, it wasn’t because of the way she conducted her life, which seemed to him no more absurd than the lives of other women—it was because she drifted before him, just out of reach, glancing over her shoulder with a little smile, like a faery creature from another world who was leading him deeper and deeper into a dark forest.

  Sometimes he rebelled against his new life—a life of continual agitation and anxious brooding modified by moments of uncertain hope. Hadn’t he always despised men of feeling?— the soft, delicate, sighing race of men who go trembling after a woman. After all, he was no dreamer. He was Don Juan Tenorio, scorner of gods, slayer of men, conqueror of women—a new Alexander, obeying no law except the law of his relentless will. What was wrong with him? He was no longer himself—he was no longer anything. He was a sick man—a dying man—a man who had been poisoned by a woman. Enough! It was time to act. She was nothing—nothing but a woman—and she would bend to his will—or break. He had known plenty of Georgianas— proud women, arrogant women, enclosed in the insufferable circle of their self-esteem. He had had one of them against an orchard wall in Algeciras, another on a drawing-room sofa in Seville, with his hand over her mouth. She had bitten him like a rat. He would have her—she would pay attention to him— he would smash his way in. Then an image would come to him, of sunlight and green shade, of a cool smile and a glance thrown across a river, and Don Juan would suddenly place a hand on his chest, as if to feel his adoration spreading in him like a disease.

  He received a note describing a plan. Mary would contrive an excuse to return to the house during their morning walk; he would be with Georgiana, alone. It seemed to him unlikely, an impossible scheme doomed to failure, but the next day it happened: he found himself alone with Georgiana on a winding path not far from the first grotto. Sunlight fell on the oak and beech trees. In the warm air the rich green odors burned his nostrils like firesmoke. Nearby he heard the rush of a cascade, punctuated by the repeated cry of some animal that might have been a fox. The warm air, thick with dusky light, the heavy scents of green, the edges of Georgiana’s gown brushing against bushes, the two of them moving slowly through green shade and green sun, all this made Juan feel drowsy and heavy-headed, as if he could barely push his way through the rich, cloth-like air. He spoke very little. When he did speak, the sound of his voice struck him as grotesque. After a short time, or perhaps it was a long time, they returned in silence to the house.

  “How was your little walk?” Mary called from a window.

  “Most extraordinarily remarkable,” Georgiana replied. “And how goes your headache?”

  “Oh, much—very much better, thank you, I—”

  In his sitting room, Juan stretched out on his sofa and recalled the time in Seville when he was fifteen years old and the chambermaid had looked at him strangely. She had suddenly reached for his hand and placed it on her stiff black dress, over her breast. Juan had removed his hand, considered a moment, and then plunged it deep inside her dress. As he lay on his sofa, bitterly reviewing his wasted walk, he compared the boldness of the boy with the ludicrous confusion of the thirty-year-old man. And with a little burst of anger he thought, “Those doctors don’t know anything. There’s definitely something wrong with me.”

  It was about this time that Hood one afternoon invited Juan and Mary and Georgiana to visit Avernus. Work had been progressing splendidly; it was complete, except for a few minor details. In the early afternoon the party set out along the broad riding path, in the calash drawn by a bay. The graveled path wound through the gardens, passing a tea pavilion, a small lake with an island, and a statue of Morpheus sleeping on a shady rock. Soon they entered
the parkland, where they rolled through dense forests and sunny meadows, along the banks of rushing streams, between cliffs where hawks rose from their nests. Once a deer came bursting out of the woods and startled the horse—Mary cried out as the carriage rocked and threw her against Juan, who had been staring at Georgiana’s throat rippling with light and shade. The woods grew darker and thicker; the carriage came to a halt at the shore of a gloomy lake. Hood, walking with Georgiana, led Juan and Mary along a path to the great cave mouth, where all four paused while Mary read the inscription aloud.

  “Careful—steady—hah!—look sharp, now,” Hood said, as he led Georgiana into the cave.

  “Oh! This is terribly exciting!” Mary exclaimed as, drawing close to Juan, she followed them in. A moment later she gave a little shriek at the hissing Hydra, which abruptly withdrew, while Georgiana, drawing her shawl tightly around her shoulders, remarked that with so many heads it must be difficult to make up one’s mind. They passed the Gorgon, the flamebreathing Chimaera, hundred-armed Briareus, the tree of false dreams. On the shore of the river Acheron, Georgiana said that Charon reminded her of their old governess, Mistress Grindley. Mary whispered, “You are incorrigible!” and burst into nervous laughter that she instantly stifled.

  All four entered the flat boat and were rowed across to the far shore, where Juan pointed out three-headed Cerberus with his neck of wriggling snakes. That dark woman over there, who looked savagely at them before turning away—that was the shade of Dido. And Juan, startled by her passionate, ravaged face, glanced suddenly at Georgiana, who was adjusting her hat. Hood meanwhile had seized a lantern that hung from a hook in the wall and was leading the party along a dark path; at a fork he turned left, toward Tartarus.