 CHAPTER I. He painted trees as by some special, divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why, in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beaches in the whole world were like. People asked him down to paint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons. His drawing was often wildly inaccurate, but while his perception of a tree personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost approach the ludicrous. With the character and personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush, shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendlier hostile, good or evil. It emerged. There was nothing else in the wide worlds that he could paint. Flowers and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge. With people he was helpless and hopeless, also with animals. Skies he could sometimes manage, or effects of wind and foliage, but as a rule he left these all severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was guided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a tree look almost like a being alive. It approached the uncanny. Yes, Sanderson knows what he's doing when he paints a tree. Thought old David Vittacy, CB, late of the woods and forests. Why you can almost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the rain drip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move, it grows. For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, have to persuade himself that the twenty kinnies were well spent, since his wife thought otherwise, and have to explain this uncanny reality of life that lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study-table. Yet in the general view the mind of Mr. Vittacy was held to be austere, not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of nature that had been fostered by year spent in the forests and jungles of the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to that Eurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he had kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and was unusual for its vitality. Trees in particular nourished it. He also understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, born perhaps of those years he had lived and caring for them, guarding, protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy presences. He kept it largely to himself. Of course, because he knew the world he lived in. He also kept it from his wife, to some extent. He knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed. But what he did not know or realize at any rate was the extent to which she grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear, he judged, was simply due to those years in India. When for weeks at a time his calling took him away from her into the jungle forests, while she remained at home, dreading all manner of evils that might befall him. This of course explained her instinctive opposition to the passion for woods that still influenced and clung to him. It was a natural survival of those anxious days of waiting, in solitude for his safe return. For Mrs. Bittisi, daughter of an evangical clergyman, was a self-sacrificing woman, when most things found a happy duty in sharing her husband's joys and sorrows, to the point of self-obliteration. Only in this matter of the trees, she was less successful than in others, remained a problem difficult of compromise. He knew, for instance, that what she objected to in this portrait of the cedar on their lawn was really not the price he had given for it, but the unpleasant way in which the transaction emphasized this breach between their common interests, the only one they had, but deep. Sanderson, the artist, earned little enough money by his strange talent. Such checks were few and far between. The owners of fine or interesting trees, who cared to have them painted, singly, were rare indeed, and the studies that he made for his own delight he also kept for his own delight. Even were their buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few in these peculiarly intimate friends might even see them. For he disliked to hear the undercerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship. He admitted it would scorn, but that remarks about the personality of the tree itself could easily wound or anger him. He resented slighting observations concerning them, as though insults offered to personal friends who could not answer for themselves. He was instantly up in arms. It really is extraordinary, said a woman who understood, that you can make that cypress seem an individual, when in reality all cypresses are so exactly alike. And though the bit of calculated flattery had come so near to saying the right true thing, Sanderson flushed as though she had slighted a friend beneath his very nose, abruptly he passed in front of her and turned the pitcher to the wall. Almost as queer, he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, as that you should have imagined individuality in your husband, madam, when in reality all men are so exactly alike. Since the only thing that differentiated her husband from the mob was the money for which she had married him, Sanderson's relations with that particular family terminated on the spot, chance of prospective orders with it. His sensitiveness perhaps was morbid. At any rate the way to reach his heart lay through his trees. He might be said to love trees. He certainly drew a splendid inspiration from them, and the source of a man's inspiration, be it music, religion, or a woman, is never a safe thing to criticize. I do think perhaps it was just a little extravagant, dear, said Mrs. Bitticey, referring to the Cedar check, when we want a lawnmower so badly too. But as it gives you such pleasure, it reminds me of a certain day, Sophia, replied the old gentleman, looking first proudly at herself, then fondly at the pitcher. While long gone by, it reminds me of another tree, that kentish lawn in the spring, birds singing in the lilacs, and someone in a muslin frock, waiting patiently beneath a certain cedar. Not the one in the pitcher, I know, but— I was not waiting, she said indignantly. I was picking fur cones for the schoolroom fire. Fur cones, my dear, do not grow on cedars, and schoolroom fires were not made in June in my young days. And anyhow it isn't the same cedar. It has made me fond of all cedars for its sake, he answered, and it reminds me that you were the same young girl still. She crossed the room to his side, and together they looked out of the window, where, upon the lawn of their Hampshire cottage, a ragged Lebanon stood in a solitary stake. You're as full of dreams as ever, she said gently, and I don't regret the check a bit, really. Only it would have been more real if it had been the original tree, wouldn't it? That was blown down years ago. I passed the place last year, and there's not a sign of it left, he replied tenderly. And presently, when he released her from his side, she went up to the wall and carefully dusted the pitcher Sanderson had made of the cedar on their present lawn. She went all around the frame with her tiny handkerchief, standing on tiptoe to reach the top rim. What I like about it, said the old fellow, to himself when his wife had left the room, is the way he has made it live. All trees have it, of course, but a cedar taught it to me the most, the something, trees possessed, that make them know I'm there when I stand close and watch. I suppose I felt it then because I was in love, and love reveals life everywhere. He glanced a moment at the Lebanon, looming gone and somber through the gathering dusk. A curious, wistful expression danced a moment through his eyes. Yes, Sanderson has seen it as it is, he murmured. Solemnly dreaming there, its dim, hidden life against the forest edge, and as different from that other tree in Kent as I am from the vicar. Say, it's quite a stranger, too. I don't know anything about it, really, that other cedar I loved, this old fellow I respect. Friendly, though, yes, on the whole, quite friendly. He's painted the friendliness right enough. He saw that. I'd like to know that man better, he added. I'd like to ask him how he saw so clearly that it stands there between this cottage and the forest, yet somehow more in sympathy with us than with the mass of woods behind, the sort of go-between. That I never noticed before. I see it now through his eyes. It stands there like a sentinel, protective, rather. He turned away abruptly to look through the window. He saw the great and circling mass of gloom that was the forest, fringing their little lawn. It pressed up closer in the darkness. The prim garden with its formal beds of flowers seemed an impertence, almost. Some little colored insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster. Some gaudy fly that danced impudently down the edge of a great river that couldn't gulf it with a toss of its smallest wave. That forest, with its thousand years of growth and its deep spreading being, was some such slumbering monster, yes. Their cottage and garden stood too near its running lip. When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy skirts of black and purple, he loved this feeling of the forest personality. He had always loved it. Queer, he reflected, awfully queer. But trees should bring me such a sense of dim, vast living. I used to feel it particularly. I remember in India, in Canadian woods as well, but never in little English woods, till here, in Sanderson's The Only Man I Ever Knew Who Felt It To. He's never said so, but there's the proof. And he turned again to the picture that he loved, the thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as he looked. I wonder, by Jove, I wonder, his thoughts ran on, whether a tree, or in any lawful meaning of the term, can be alive. I remember some writing fellow telling me long ago that trees had once been moving things, animal organisms of some sort, that had stood so long feeding, sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the same place that they had lost their power to get away. Fancy's flew pell-mell about his mind, and lighting a chair-root, he dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play. Outside the black birds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn, he smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and the bits of open heathland far away in the heart of the woods. The summer winds stirred very faintly through the leaves, but the great new forest hardly raised to sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow. Mr. Bittisey, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. He knew all the purple cooms splashed with yellow waves of gauze, sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. Their hawks hovered, circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the pea-wheat's flight with melancholy, petulant cry deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the solitary pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind. Travellers, like the gypsies who pitched their bush-like tents beneath them, he knew the shaggy ponies with foals like baby centaurs, the chattering jays, the milky call of the cuckoos in the spring, and the boom of the pittern from the lonely marshes, the undergrowth of watching hollies. He knew, too, strange and mysterious, with their docks just of beauty and the yellow shimmer of their pale, dropped leaves. Here all the forest, lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life. No terror of devastating man afflicted it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme, but spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards to the sun and stars. But once its leafy portals left behind, the trees of the countryside were otherwise. The houses threatened them. They knew themselves in danger. The roads were no longer glades of silent turf, but noisy cruel ways by which men came to attack them. They were civilized, cared for, but cared for in order that some day they might be put to death. Even in the villages where the solemn and immemorial repose of giant chestnuts aped security, the tossing of a silver birch against their mass, impatient in the littlest wind brought warning. Dust clogged their leaves. The inner humming of their quiet life became inaudible beneath the scream and shriek of a clattering traffic. They longed and prayed to enter the great peace of the forest yonder. But they could not move. They knew moreover that the forest, with its August deep splendor, despised and pitied them. They were a thing of artificial gardens, and belonged to beds of flowers, all fools to grow one way. I'd like to know that Otis fell better, was the thought upon which he returned at lengths to the things of practical life. I wonder if Sophia would mind him for a bit. He rose with the sound of the gong, brushing the ashes from his speckled waistcoat. He pulled the waistcoat down. He was slim and spare in figure, active in his movements, and dim light, but for that silvery mustache he might easily have passed for a man of forty. I'll suggest it to her anyhow, he decided on his way upstairs to dress. His thought really was that Sanderson could probably explain his world of things he had always felt about trees. A man who could paint the soul of a cedar in that way must know it all. Why not? She gave her verdict later over the bread-and-butter pudding, unless you think he'd find it dull without companions. He would paint all day in the forest, dear. I'd like to pick his brains a bit, too, if I could manage it. You can manage anything, David, was what she answered, for this elderly childless couple used an affectionate politeness long since deemed old-fashioned. The remark, however, displeased her, making her feel uneasy, and she did not notice his rejoinder, smiling his pleasure and content. Accept yourself in our bank account, my dear. This passion of his for trees was of old a bone of contention, though very mild contention. It frightened her. That was the truth. The Bible, her Baydecker for earth and heaven, did not mention it. Her husband, while humoring her, could never alter that instinctive dred she had. He soothed but never changed her. She liked the woods, perhaps as spots for shade and picnics. But she could not, as he did, love them. And after dinner, with a lamp beside the open window, he read aloud from the Times the evening post it brought, such fragments as he thought might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when to please his wife he dozed over, tenacin or farar, as their mood might be. She knitted while he read, as gentle questions, told him his voice was a lovely reading voice, and enjoyed the little discussions that occasions prompted, because he always let her win them, with, ah, Sophia, I had never thought of it quite in that way before. But now you mention it, I must say I think there's something in it. For David Bittisey was wise, it was long after marriage during his months of loneliness spent with trees and forests in India, his wife waiting at home in the bungalow, that his other deeper side had developed strange passion that she could not understand, and after one or two serious attempts to let her share it with him, he had given up and learned to hide it from her. He learned, that is, to speak of it only casually, but since she knew it was there, to keep silence altogether would only increase her pain, so from time to time he skimmed the surface just to let her show him where he was wrong, and think she won the day. It remained a debatable land of compromise. He listened with patience to her criticisms, her excursions and alarms, knowing that while it gave her satisfaction, it could not change himself. The thing lay in him too deep and true for change, but for peace's sake, some meeting place was desirable, and he found it thus. It was her one fault in his eyes, this religious mania carried over from her upbringing, and it did no serious harm. Every emotion could shake it sometimes out of her. She clung to it because her father taught at her, and not because she had thought it out for herself. Indeed, like many women, she never really thought at all, but merely reflected the images of others' thinking which she had learned to see. So, wise in his knowledge of human nature, old David Bittisey accepted the pain of being obliged to keep a portion of his inner life shut off from the woman he deeply loved. He regarded her little biblical phrases as oddities that still clung to a rather fine big soul, like horns, and little useless things some animals have not yet lost in the course of evolution while they have outgrown their use. My dear, what is it you frightened me? She asked it suddenly, sitting up so abruptly that her cap dropped sideways almost to her ear, but David Bittisey, behind his crackling paper, had uttered a sharp exclamation of surprise. He had loaded the sheet and was staring at her over the tops of his gold glasses. Listen to this, if you please," he said, a note of eagerness in his voice. Listen to this. My dear Sophia, it's from an address by Francis Darwin before the royal society. He is president, you know, and son of the great Darwin. Listen carefully. I beg you, it's most significant. I am listening, David," she said with some astonishment, looking up. She stopped her knitting for a second. She glanced behind her. Something had suddenly changed in the room, and made her feel wide awake, though before she had been almost dozing. Her husband's voice and manner had introduced this new thing. Her instincts rose in warning. Do read it, dear. He took a deep breath, looking first again over the rooms of his glasses, to make quite sure of her attention. He had evidently come across something of genuine interest, although herself she often found the passages from these addresses somewhat heavy. In a deep, emphatic voice he read aloud, it is impossible to know whether or not plants are conscious. But it is consistent with the doctrine of continuity, that in all living things there is something psychic. And if we accept this point of view, if," she interrupted, senting danger, he ignored the interruption as a thing of slight value he was accustomed to. If we accept this point of view," he continued, we must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves. He laid the paper-town and steadily stared at her. Their eyes met. He had italicized the last phrase. For a minute or two his wife made no reply or comment. They stared at one another in silence. He waited for the meaning of the words to reach her understanding with full import. Then he turned and read them again in part, while she, released from that curious driving look in his eyes, instinctively again glanced over her shoulder around the room. It was almost as if she felt someone had come in to them and noticed. We must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves. If," she repeated lamely, feeling before the stare of those questioning eyes, she must say something, but not yet having gathered her wits together quite, consciousness, he rejoined, and then he added gravely, that, my dear, is the statement of a scientific man of the twentieth century. Mrs. Bittacy sat forward in her chair so that her silk flounces crackled louder than the newspaper. She made a characteristic little sound between sniffling and snorting. She put her shoes closely together with her hands upon her knees. David, she said quietly, I think these scientific men are simply losing their heads. There is nothing in the Bible that I can remember about any such thing whatsoever. Nothing so fear that I can remember, either," he answered patiently. Then, after a pause, he added, half to himself, perhaps, more than to her. And now that I come to think about it, it seems that Sanderson once said something to me that was similar. Then, Mr. Sanderson is a wise and thoughtful man and a safe man, she quickly took up, if he said that. For she thought her husband referred to her amok about the Bible, and not to her judgment of the scientific men, and he did not correct her mistake. Implants, you see, dear, are not the same as trees. She drove her advantage home. Not quite, that is. I agree, said David quietly, but both belonged to the great vegetable kingdom. It was a moment's pause before she answered. Pah! The vegetable kingdom indeed. She tossed her pretty old head, and into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed, for covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires that caught the sun in wind and rain. This very right to existence seemed in question. Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit was a success. While he came it all was a mystery to those who heard of it, for he never paid visits, and was certainly not the kind of man to quote a customer, there must have been something in bitesy he liked. Mrs. bitesy was glad when he left. He brought no dress-suit for one thing, not even a dinner jacket, and he wore very low collars with big balloon ties like a Frenchman, and let his hair grow longer than was nice, she felt. Not that these things were important, but that she considered them symptoms of something a little disordered. Big ties were unnecessarily flowing. For all that he was an interesting man, and in spite of his eccentricities of dress and so forth a gentleman. Perhaps, she reflected in her genuinely charitable heart, he had other uses for the twenty kinnies, an invalid sister or an old mother to sport. She had no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blasé. Still when the visit was over she felt relieved. She said nothing about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice, had likewise made no suggestion. For truth to tell, the way the younger man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the forest, talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the damp of dust came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of course Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian fever came back, but David Shirley might have told him. They talked trees from morning to night, and stirred in her the old subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big woods, and such feelings as her early evangelical training taught her were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with danger. Her mind as she watched these two was charged with curious thoughts of dread she could not understand. Yet feared the more on that account, the way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary, unwise she felt. It was disregarding the sense of proportion which deity had set upon the world for men's safe guidance. Even after dinner they smoked the cigars upon the low branches that swept down and touched the lawn, until at length she insisted on their coming in. Cedars she had somewhere heard were not safe after sundown. It was not wholesome to be too near them. To sleep beneath them was even dangerous. Though what the precise danger was she had forgotten. The uppest was the tree she really meant. At any rate she summoned David in and Sanderson came presently after him. For a long time before deciding on this preemptory step she had watched them surreptitiously from the drawing-room window, her husband and her guest. The dusk enveloped them with its damp veil of gauze. She saw the glowing tips of their cigars and heard the drone of voices. Bats flitted overhead and big silent moths word softly over the rhododendron blossoms, and it came suddenly to her while she watched that her husband had somehow altered these last few days. Since Mr. Sanderson's arrival, in fact, a change had come over him, though what it was she could not say. She hesitated, indeed to search. That was the instinctive dread operating in her, provided it passed she would rather not know. Small things, of course, she noticed. Small outward signs. He had neglected the time for one thing, left off his spectacle waistcoats for another. He was apt to have minded some times, showed vagueness and practical details, where hitherto he had showed decision. And he had begun to talk in his sleep again. These and a dozen other small peculiarities came suddenly upon her with the rush of a combined attack. They brought with them a faint distress that made her shiver. Mentorily her mind was startled, then confused. As her eyes picked out the shadowy figures in the dusk, the cedar covering them, the forest close at their backs. And then, before she could think or seek internal guidance as her habit was, this whisper muffled and very hurried ran across her brain. It's Mr. Sanderson. Call David in at once. When she had done so, her shrill voice crossed the lawn and died away into the forest, quickly smothered. No echo followed it. The sound fell dead against the rampart of a thousand listening trees. The damp is so very penetrating, even in summer, she murmured, when they came, obediently. She was half surprised at her open audacity, half repentant. They came so meekly at her call. And my husband is sensitive to fever from the east. No, please do not throw away your cigars. We can sit at the open window and enjoy the evening while you smoke. She was very talkative for a moment. Subconscious excitement was the cause. It was so still, so wonderfully still, she went on, as no one spoke, so peaceful and the air so very sweet, and God is always near to those who need his aid. The words slipped out before she realized quite what she was saying, yet fortunately in time to lower her voice, for no one heard them. They were, perhaps, an instinctive expression of relief. It flustered her that she could have said the thing at all. Sanderson brought her shawl and helped to arrange the chairs. She thanked him in her old-fashioned gentle way, declining the lamps which he had offered to light. They attract the moths and insects so, I think. The three of them sat there in the gloaming, Mr. Bittisey's white moustache and his wife's yellow shawl, gleaming at either end of the little horseshoe. Sanderson, with his wild black hair and shining eyes, midway between them. The painter went on talking softly. Continuing evidently, the conversation, begun with his host beneath the cedar, Mrs. Bittisey on her guard listened uneasily. For trees, you see, rather conceal themselves in daylight. They reveal themselves fully only after sunset. I never know a tree. He bowed here slightly towards the lady, as though to apologize for something he felt she would not quite understand or like, until I have seen it in the night. Your cedar, for instance, looking towards her husband again so that Mrs. Bittisey caught the gleaming of his turned eyes. I failed with badly at first, because I did it in the morning. You shall see tomorrow what I mean. The first sketch is upstairs in my portfolio. It's quite another tree to the one you bought. That view, he leaned forward, lowering his voice. I caught one morning about two o'clock in very faint moonlight in the stars. I saw the naked being of the thing. You mean that you went out, Mr. Sanderson, at that hour? The old lady asked with astonishment and mild rebuke. She did not care particularly for his choice of adjectives, either. I fear it was rather a liberty to take it in others' house, he answered courteously, but having chance to wake, I saw the tree from my window and made my way downstairs. It's a wonder-boxer didn't bite you. He slept loose in the hall, she said. On the contrary, the dog came out with me. I hope he added, the noise didn't disturb you, though it's rather late to say so. I feel quite guilty. His white teeth shelled in the dusk as he smiled. A smell of earth and flowers stolen through the window on a breath of wandering air. Mrs. Bittisey said nothing at that moment. We both sleep like tops, put in her husband, laughing. You're a courageous man, though, Sanderson, and by Job the picture justifies you. Few artists would have taken so much trouble, though I read once that Holman Hunt, Rosetti, or someone of that lot, painted all night in his orchard to get an effect of moonlight that he wanted. He chattered on. His wife was glad to hear his voice. It made her feel more easy in her mind. But presently the other held the floor again, and her thoughts grew darkened and afraid. Instinctively she feared the influence on her husband. The mystery and wonder that lie in the woods, in forests, in great gatherings of trees everywhere seemed so real and present while he talked. The night trends figures all things in a way, he was saying, but nothing so searchingly as trees. From behind a veil that sunlight hangs before them in the day, they emerge and show themselves. Even buildings do that in a measure, but trees particularly. In the daytime they sleep, at night they wake, they manifest, turn active, live. You remember, turning politely again in the direction of his hostess, how clearly Henley understood that? That socialist person, you mean? Asked the lady. Her tone and accent made the substantive sound criminal. It almost hissed, the way she uttered it. The poet, yes, replied the artist tactfully. The friend of Stevenson, you remember, Stevenson, who wrote those charming children's verses. He quoted in a low voice the lines he meant. It was for once the time, the place, and the setting altogether. The words floated out across the lawn towards the wall of blue darkness, with the big forest swept the little garden with its league-long curve. That was like the shoreline of a sea, a wave of distant sound that was like surf accompanied to his voice, as though the wind was feigned to listen to. Not to the starting day, for all the unfortunate questionings he pursues in his big, violent voice shall those mild things of bulk and multitude, the trees, God's sentinels, yield of their huge, unutterable selves. But at the word of the ancient, sacerdotal night, night of many secrets whose effect, transfiguring, hierophantic dread, themselves alone may fully apprehend. They tremble and are changed. In each the uncouth individual soul looms forth in glooms, essential, and their bodily presences, touched with an ordinate significance, wearing the darkness like a livery of some mysterious and tremendous guild, they brood, they menace, they appall. The voice of Mrs. Bittisey presently broke the silence that followed. I like that part about God's sentinels, she murmured. There was no sharpness in her tone. It was hushed and quiet. The truth so musically uttered, muted her shrill objections, though it had not lessened her lumb. Her husband made no comment. His cigar, she noticed, had gone out. And old trees, in particular, continued the oddest, as though to himself, have very definite personalities. You can offend, wound, please them. The moment you stand within their shade you feel whether they come out to you or whether they withdraw. He turned abruptly towards his host. You know that singular essay of Prentice Mulford's, no doubt, God in the trees, extravagant perhaps, but yet with a fine true beauty in it. You've never read it, no? He asked. But it was Mrs. Bittisey who answered, her husband keeping his curious deep silence. It fell like a drip of cold water from the face muffled in the yellow shawl. Even a child could have supplied the remainder of the unspoken thought. Ah! said Sanderson gently. But there is God in the trees, God in a very subtle aspect, and sometimes. I have known the trees express it too, that which is not God, dark and terrible. Have you ever noticed, too, how clearly trees show what they want? Choose their companions, at least. Small beaches, for instance, allow no life to near them, birds or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath. The silence in the beech wood is quite terrifying often, and how pines, like bilberry bushes at their feet, and sometimes little oaks, all trees making a clear, deliberate choice and holding firmly to it. Some trees, obviously, it's very strange and marked, seem to prefer the human. The old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit. Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports. We know, she answered, that he was said to have walked in the garden in the cool of the evening. The gulp betrayed the effort that it cost her. But we are nowhere told that he hid in the trees or anything like that. Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large vegetables. True was the soft answer, but in everything that grows has life, that is, this mystery past all finding out. The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato. The observation was not meant to be amusing. It was not amusing. No one laughed. On the contrary, the words conveyed, in too literal a sense, the feeling that haunted all that conversation, each one in his own way realized, with beauty, with wonder, with alarm, that the talk had somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man. Some link had been established between the two. It was not wise, with that great forest listening, at their very doors, to speak so plainly. The forest edged up closer while they did so. And Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to erupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly, in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion. She did not like her husband's prolonged silence, stillness. He seemed so negative, so changed. David, she said, raising her voice, I think you're feeling the dampness. It's grown chilly. The fever comes so suddenly, you know, and it might be wise to take the tincture. I'll go and get it, dear. At once it's better. Before he could object, she had left the room to bring the homeopathic dose that she believed in. In that, to please her, he swallowed by the tumbler full from week to week. And the moment the door closed behind her, Sanderson began again, though now in a quite different tone. Mr. Bittacy sat up in his chair. The two men obviously resumed the conversation, the real conversation, interrupted beneath the cedar, and left aside the sham one, which was so much dust merely thrown in the old lady's eyes. These love you, that's the fact, he said earnestly. Your service to them all, these years abroad, has made them know you. Know me? Made them, yes, he paused a moment, then added, made them aware of your presence, aware of a force outside themselves that deliberately seeks their welfare. Don't you see? By Joe Sanderson. This put into plain language actual sensations he had felt, yet had never dared to phrase in words before. They get into touch with me, as it were. He ventured, laughing at his own sentence, yet laughing only with his lips. Exactly, was the quick emphatic reply. They seek to blend with something they feel instinctively to be good for them, helpful to their essential beings, encouraging to their best expression their life. Good Lord, sir, Bittacy heard himself saying, but you're putting my own thoughts into words. Do you know I've felt something like that for years, as though he looked round to make sure his wife was not there, and finished the sentence, as though the trees were after me. Amalgamate seems the best word, perhaps, said Sanderson slowly. They would draw you to themselves. Good forces, you see, always seek to merge, evil to separate. That's why good in the end must always win the day, everywhere. The accumulation in the long run becomes overwhelming. Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death. The comradeship of trees, their instinct to run together, is a vital symbol. These in amass are good. Alone you may take it generally. Are well dangerous. Look at a monkey puzzler, or bet is still a holly. Look at it. Watch it. Understand it. Did you ever see more plainly an evil thought made visible? They're wicked. Beautiful, too. Oh, yes. There's a strange, miscalculated beauty, often an evil. That cedar, then? Not evil, no. But alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests, all together. The poor things drifted. That is all. People were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke so fast it was too condensed, bitisee hardly followed that last bit. His mind floundered among his own, less definite, less sordid thoughts. So presently another sentence from the odd has stoddled him into attention again. That cedar will protect you here, though, because you both have humanized it by your thinking so lovingly of its presence, the others can't get past it as it were. Protect me, he exclaimed, protect me from their love. Sanderson lapped. We're getting rather mixed, he said. We're talking of one thing in the terms of another, really. But what I mean is, you see, that their love for you, their awareness of your personality and presence, involves the idea of winning you, across the border, into themselves, into their world of living. It means, in a way, taking you over. The ideas the odd has started in his mind ran furious, wild races to and fro. It was like a maze, sprung suddenly into movement. The whirling of the intricate lines bewildered him. They went so fast, leaving but half an explanation of their goal. He followed first one, then another. But a new one always dashed across to intercept before he could get anywhere. But India, he said presently, in a lower voice. India is so far away from this little English forest. The trees, too, are utterly different for one thing. The rustle of skirts warned of Mrs. Bittisey's approach. This was a sentence he could turn round another way in case she came up impressed for explanation. There is communion among trees all the world over. Was the strange quick reply? They always know. They always know, you think, then. The winds, you see, the great swift carriers. They have their ancient rites of way about the world. An easterly wind, for instance, carrying on stage by stage as it were, linking dropped messages and meanings from land to land like birds and easterly wind, Mrs. Bittisey swept in upon them with the tumbler. There, David, she said, that will ward off any beginnings of attack, just a spoonful, dear. Ho-oh, not all! For he had swallowed half the contents at a single gulp as usual. Another dose before you go to bed, and the balance in the morning, first thing when you wake. She turned to her guest, who put the tumbler down for her upon a table at his elbow. She had heard them speak of the east wind. She emphasized the warning she had misinterpreted. The private part of the conversation came to an abrupt end. It is the one thing that upsets him more than any other in east wind, she said, and I'm glad, Mr. Sanderson, to hear you think so, too. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 The Man Whom the Trees Loved This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Amy Graymore. The Man Whom the Trees Loved by Elgin on Blackwood. Chapter 3 A deep hush followed. In the middle of which an owl was heard calling its muffled note in the forest. A big moth whirred with a soft collision above one of the windows. Mrs. Bitticey started slightly, but no one spoke. Above the trees the stars were faintly visible. From the distance came the barking of a dog. Bitticey, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that had caught all three. It's a rather comforting thought, he said, throwing the match out of the window. That life is about us everywhere, in that there is really no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic. Of universe, yes, said Sanderson, as all one, really, we're puzzled by the gaps we cannot see across, but as a fact, I suppose, there are no gaps at all. Mrs. Bitticey rustled ominously, holding her peace, meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. The alzabub lay hid among too many syllables. In trees and plants especially, their dreams and exquisite life that no one yet has proved unconscious. Or conscious either, Mr. Sanderson, she neatly interjected. It's only man that was made after his image, not shrubberies and things. Her husband interposed without delay. It is not necessary, he explained squabbly, to say that they're alive in the sense that we are alive, at the same time, with an eye to his wife. I see no harm in holding, dear, that all created things contain some measure of his life who made them. It's only beautiful, to hold that he created nothing dead. We are not pantheists for all that, he added soothingly. Oh, no, not that, I hope! The word alarmed her. It was worse than Pope. Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing like a panther. I like to think that even in decay there's life, the painter murmured, the falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency, this force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, and the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed, and take an inert stone. It's crammed with heat and weight and potencies of all sorts. What holds its particles together, indeed? We understand it as little as gravity or why a needle always turns to the north. Both things may be a mode of life. You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson, exclaimed a lady with a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage even more plainly than her tone? The artist smiled to himself in the darkness. But it was biticy who hastened to reply. Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies, he said quietly, may be due to some kind of life we can't understand. Why should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the world spin forever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these things follow the law of their being explains nothing. Mr. Sanderson merely suggests, poetically, my dear, of course, that these may be manifestations of life, the life at a different stage to ours. The breath of life, we read, he breathed into them. These things do not breathe, she said it with triumph. Then Sanderson put in a word. But he spoke rather to himself or to his host than by way of a serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady. But plants do breathe too, you know, he said, they breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to the environment, as men and animals do. They have a nervous system, too, at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory, too. Certainly they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that is only that and not psychological. He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind the yellow shawl, bit as he cleared his throat, threw his extinguished cigar upon the lawn, crossed and recrossed his legs. And in trees continued the other, behind a great forest, for instance, pointing towards the woods, may stand a rather splendid entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organized as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions so that we could understand it by being it. For a time, at least, it might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming. The mouth of Mrs. Bittisey was heard to close with a snap. Her shawl and particularly her crackling dress exhaled the protest that burned within her like a pain. She was too distressed to be over-odd, but at the same time, too confused amid the litter of words and meanings half understood to find immediate phrases she could use, whatever the actual meaning of his language might be, however, at whatever subtle dangers lay concealed behind them, meanwhile, they certainly wove a kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three delicately enmeshed there by that open window. The odors of dewy lawn, flowers, trees, and earth warmed part of it. The moods, he continued, that people waken in us are due to their hidden life affecting our own. Deep calls to sleep. A person, for instance, joins you in an empty room. You both instantly change. The new arrival, though in silence has caused a change of mood, may not the moods of nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar prerogative? The sea, the hills, the desert, weak passion, joy, terror, as the case may be. For a few, perhaps, he glanced significantly at his host so that Mrs. Biddesey again caught the turning of his eyes. Emotions of a curious, flaming splendor that are quite nameless. Well, whence come their powers, surely from nothing that is dead, does not the influence of a forest at sway and strange ascendancy over certain minds betray a direct manifestation of life? It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big woods. Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it. The authority of a host of trees. His voice grew almost solemn as he said the words. Is something not to be denied? One feels it here, I think particularly. There was considerable tension in the air as he seized speaking. Mr. Biddesey had not intended that the talk should go so far. They had drifted. He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was aware, acutely so, that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not care about. Something in her, as he put it, was working up towards explosion. He sought to generalize the conversation, diluting this accumulated emotion by spreading it. The sea is his, and he made it, he suggested vaguely, hoping Sanderson would take the hint. And with the trees it is the same. The whole gigantic vegetable kingdom, yes. The artist took him up. All at the service of man for food, for shelter, and for a thousand purposes of his daily life. It is not striking what a lot of the globe they cover, exquisitely organized life, yet stationary. Always ready to our hand when we want them, never running away, but to taking them for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another from cutting down trees, and it is curia that most of the forest tales and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat elomant. The forest beings are really gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as terrible. Tree worship still survives today. Woodcutters, those who take the lives of tree, you see a race of haunted men. He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittissie felt something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt it more strongly, for it was in the middle of the heavy silence following upon these last remarks. But Mrs. Bittissie, rising with a violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to something moving toward them across the lawn. It came silently. In outline it was large and curiously spread. It rose high, too, for the sky above the shrubberies, still pale from the sunset, was dimmed by its passage. She declared afterwards that it was moving and looping circles. But what she perhaps meant to convey was spirals. She screamed faintly, it's come at last, and it's you that brought it. She turned excitedly, half afraid, half angry, to Sanderson. With a breathless sort of a gasp, she said it, politeness all forgotten. I knew it if you went on. I knew it. Oh! Oh! And she cried again. Your talking has brought it out. The terror that shook her voice was rather dreadful. But the confusion of her vehement words, passed unnoticed in the first surprise they caused, for a moment nothing happened. What is it you think you see, my dear, asked her husband, startled. Sanderson said nothing. All three leaned forward. The men still sitting, but Mrs. Bittisey had rushed hardly to the window. Placing herself, of a purpose as it seemed, between her husband and the lawn, she pointed her little hand, made a silhouette against the sky, the yellow shawl hanging from the arm like a cloud. Beyond the cedar, between it and the lilacs, the voice had lost its shrillness. It was thin and hushed. There! Now you see it going round upon itself again, going back, thank God, going back to the forest. It sang to a whisper, shaking. They repeated with a great dropping sigh of relief. Thank God! I thought, at first, it was coming here to us, David, to you. She stepped back from the window. Her movements confused, feeling the darkness with the support of a chair, and finding her husband's outstretched hand instead. Hold me, dear, hold me, please, tight. Do not let me go. She was in what he called afterwards a regular state. He drew her firmly down upon her chair again. Smoke, Sophie, my dear, he said quickly, trying to make his voice come in natural. I see it, yes. It's smoke blowing over from the gardener's cottage. But, David, and there was a new horror in her whisper now, it made a noise. It makes it still. I hear it swishing. Some such word she used, swishing, sishing, rushing, or something of the kind. David, I'm very frightened, it's something awful. That man has called it out. Hush, hush, whispered her husband. He stroked her trembling hand beside him. It is in the wind, said Sanderson, speaking for the first time, very quietly. The expression on his face was not visible in the gloom, but his voice was soft and unafraid. At the sound of it, Mrs. Bittisey started violently again. Bittisey drew his chair a little forward to obstruct her view of him. He felt bewildered himself a little, hardly knowing quite what to say or do. It was also very curious and sudden, but Mrs. Bittisey was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she saw came from the enveloping force just beyond their little garden. It emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as was the purpose stealthily, difficultly. Then something stopped it. It could not advance beyond the cedar. The cedar, this impression remained with her afterwards, too, prevented, kept it back. Like a rising sea, the forest had surged a moment in their direction through the covering darkness, and this visible movement was its first wave. Just her mind, it seemed, like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten and mystify her and childhood on the sands. The outward surge of some enormous power was what she felt, something to which every instinct in her being rose in opposition because it threatened her and hers. In that moment she realized the personality of the forest, menacing. In the stumbling movement that she had made away from the window and towards the bell, she barely caught the sentence Sanderson, or was it her husband, murmured to himself. It came because we talked of it. Our thinking made it aware of us and brought it out, but the sea just stopped it. It cannot cross the lawn you see. All three were standing now, and her husband's voice broke in with authority, while his wife's fingers touched the bell. My dear, I should not say anything to Thompson. The anxiety he felt was manifest in his voice, but his outward composure had returned. The gardener can go, and Sanderson cut him short. Allow me, he said quickly. I'll see if anything's wrong, and before either of them could answer or object, he was gone, leaping out by the open window. They saw his figure vanish with a run across the lawn into the darkness. A moment later the maid entered, an answer to the bell, and with her came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall. The lamp set her master shortly, and as she softly closed the door behind her they heard the wind pass, with a mournful sound of singing round the outer walls. A rustle of foliage from the distance passed within it. You see, the wind is rising. It was the wind. He put a comforting arm about her, distressed to feel that she was trembling, but he knew that he was trembling too, though with a kind of odd elation rather than alarm. And it was smoke that you saw coming from Stride's cottage, or from the rubbish heap he's been burning in the kitchen garden. The noise we heard was the branches rustling in the wind. Why should you be so nervous? A thin whispering voice answered him. I was afraid for you, dear. Something frightened me for you. That man makes me feel so uneasy and uncomfortable for his influence upon you. It's very foolish, I know. I think. I'm tired. I feel so overawed and restless. The words poured out in a hurried jumble, and she kept turning to the window while she spoke. The strain of having a visitor, he said soothingly, has taxed you. We're so unused to having people in the house. He goes to-morrow. He warmed her cold hands between his own, stroking them tenderly. More for the life of him he could not say or do. The joy of a strange, internal excitement made his heart beat faster. He knew not what it was. He knew only, perhaps, once it came. She appeared close into his face through the gloom and said a curious thing. I thought, David, for a moment, you seemed different. My nerves are all on edge tonight. She made no further reference to her husband's visitor. The sound of footsteps from the lawn warned of Sanderson's return. As he answered quickly in a lowered tone, there's no need to be afraid on my account, dear girl. There's nothing wrong with me, I assure you. I never felt so well and happy in my life. Tomson came in with the lamps and brightness and scarcely had she gone again when Sanderson, in turn, was seen climbing through the window. There's nothing, he said lightly as he closed it behind him. Somebody's been burning leaves, and the smoke is drifting a little through the trees. The wind, he added, glancing at his host a moment significantly, but in so discreet a way that Mrs. Bittisey did not observe it. The wind, too, has begun to roar in the forest further out. But Mrs. Bittisey noticed about him two things which increased her uneasiness. She noticed the shining of his eyes, because a similar light had suddenly come into her husband's. And she noticed, too, the apparent depth of meaning he put into those simple words that the wind had begun to roar in the forest further out. Her mind retained the disagreeable impression that he meant more than he said. In his tone lay quite another implication. It was not actually wind, he spoke of. And it would not remain further out. Rather, it was coming in. Her impression she got, too, still more unwelcome, was that her husband understood his hidden meaning. CHAPTER IV David, dear, she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs. I have a horrible, uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of it. The tremor in her voice got all his tenderness. He turned to look at her. Of what kind, my dear? You're so imaginative sometimes, aren't you? I think, she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still frightened. I mean, isn't he a hypnotist or full of those theosophical ideas or something of that sort? You know what I mean. He was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them away seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies. But tonight he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her as best he could. But there's no harm in that, even if he is, he answered quietly. Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear. There was no trace of impatience in his voice. That's what I mean, she replied. The texts she dreaded, rising in an unuttered crowd behind the words. He's one of those things that we are warned would come, one of those latter-day things, for her mind still bristled with the bogies of the Antichrist in prophecy, and she had only escaped the number of the beast, as it were, by the skin of her teeth. The pope drew most of her fire, usually, because she could understand him. The target was plain and she could shoot. But this tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible it terrified her. He makes me think, she went on, of principalities and powers in high places, and of things that walk in the darkness. I did not like the way he spoke of trees getting alive in the night, and all that. It made me think of wolves in sheep's clothing. And when I saw that awful thing in the sky above the lawn. But he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided it was best to leave unmentioned. Certainly it was better not discussed. He only meant, I think, Sophie, he put in gravely, yet with a little smile, that trees may have a measure of conscious life. Rather a nice idea on the whole, surely. Something like that bit we read in The Times the other night, you remember, in that a big forest may possess a sort of collective personality. Here he's an artist and poetical. It's dangerous, she said emphatically. I feel it's playing with fire, unwise, unsafe. Yet alt the glory of God, here it's gently. We must not shut our eyes and ears to knowledge, of any kind, must we? With you, David, the wish is always fathered than the thought, she rejoined. For like the child who thought that suffered under Pontius Pilate was suffered under a bunch of violets, she heard her proverbs phonetically and reproduced them thus. She hoped to convey her warning in the quotation, and we must always try the spirits, whether they be of God, she added tentatively. Certainly, dear, we can always do that, he assented, getting into bed. But after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David bitlessly settling down asleep with an excitement in his blood that was new and bewilderingly delightful, realized that perhaps he had not said quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still frightened. He put his head up in the darkness. Sophie, he said softly, you must remember, too, that in any case between us and all that sort of thing there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed, while we are still in the body. And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep and happy. But Mrs. Bitticey was not asleep. She heard the sentence, only she said nothing, because she felt her thought was better unexpressed. She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness. The forest outside was listening and might hear them, too, the forest that was roaring further out. And the thought was this. That gulf, of course, existed, but Sanderson had somehow bridged it. It was much later that night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It passed immediately with full waking. For listen as she might, there was nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was in her dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But the sound was recognizable. For it was that rushing noise that had come across the lawn, only this time closer, just above her face while she slept, had passed this murmur as of rustling branches in the very room, a sound of foliage whispering, a going in the tops of the mulberry trees ran through her mind. She had dreamed that she lay beneath the spreading tree somewhere, a tree that whispered with 10,000 soft lips of green, and the dream continued for a moment, even after waking. She sat up in bed and stared about her. The window was open at the top. She saw the stars. The door, she remembered, was locked as usual. The room, of course, was empty. The deep hush of the summer night lay over all, broken only by another sound that now issued from the shadows close beside the bed, a human sound, yet unnatural, a sound that seized the fear with which she had waked and instantly increased it. And although it was one she recognized as familiar, at first she could not name it. Some seconds certainly passed, and they were very long ones, before she understood that it was her husband talking in his sleep. The direction of the voice confused and puzzled her. Moreover, for it was not, as she first opposed, beside her. There was a distance in it. The next minute, by the light of the sinking candle flame, she saw his white figure standing out in the middle of the room, halfway towards the window. The candlelight slowly grew. She saw him move then nearer to the window, with arms outstretched. His speech was low and mumbled. The words running together too much to be distinguishable. And she shivered. To her sleep talking was uncanny to the point of horror. It was like the talking of the dead, mere parody of a living voice, unnatural. David, she whispered, dreading the sound of her own voice, and half afraid to interrupt him and see his face. She could not bear the sight of the wide, open eyes. David, you're walking in your sleep. Do come back to bed, dear, please. Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud and still darkness. At the sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His widely open eyes stared into her without recognition. They looked through her into something beyond. It was as though he knew the direction of the sound, yet could not see her. They were shining, she noticed, as the eyes of Sanison had shown several hours ago, and his face was flushed, distraught. He was written upon every feature, and instantly, recognizing that the fever was upon him, she forgot her terror temporarily in practical considerations. He came back to bed without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed. Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not reach him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little, but all through her under being ran the warnings of a curious alarm. And it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible. The eyes had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood, stock still, and listened. Her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come out towards her. As at first she feared. The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too. Beyond all she had ever known. They are roaring in the forest further out. An eye must go and see. He stared beyond her as he said it to the woods. They are needing me. They sent for me. Then his eyes wandering back again to things within the room. He lay down. His purpose suddenly changed. And that change was horrible as well. More horrible, perhaps. As of its revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her. The singular phrase chilled her blood. For a moment she was utterly terrified. That tone of the somnambulus, differing so slightly yet so distressingly from the normal, waking speech, seemed to her somewhat wicked, evil and dangerly waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the window-cell shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a moment that something was coming in to fetch him. Not yet, then, she heard in a much lower voice from the bed. But later. It will be better so. I shall go later. The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think about. They gave it form. They brought it closer. They sent her thoughts to her deity in a wild deep prayer for help and guidance. For here was a direct unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims her husband recognized while he kept them almost wholly to himself. By the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the eyes had closed again. This time of their own accord and the head lay calmly back upon the pillows. She gently straightened the bed-clothes. She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with one hand. There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face. Then blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting back into bed. But no sleep came to her. She lay awake all night thinking, wondering, praying. Until at length, with the chorus of the birds and the glimmer of the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a slumber of complete exhaustion. But while she slept, the wind continued roaring in the forest further out. The sound came closer. It was very close indeed. With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious incidents waned. As the moods that had produced them passed away, Mrs. Biddesee soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind. It did not strike her that this change was sudden, for it came about quite naturally. For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter, and for another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been quite commonplace. Most of it certainly she put down to the presence of the artist into his wild, suggestive talk. With his welcome removal the world turned ordinary again and safe. The fever, though it lasted as usual a short time only, had not allowed of her husbands getting up to say goodbye, and she had conveyed his regrets in a dew. In the morning Mr. Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town-hatten gloves, as she saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming. After all she thought as she watched the pony bear him off, he's only an artist. What she had thought he might be otherwise her slim imagination did not venture to disclose. Her change of feeling was wholesome and refreshing. She felt a little ashamed of her behaviour. She gave him a smile, genuine because the relief she felt was genuine, as she bent over her hand and kissed it, but she did not suggest a second visit, and her husband, she noted with satisfaction and relief, had said nothing either. The little household fell again into the normal and sleepy routine to which it was accustomed. The name of Arthur Sanderson was rarely if ever mentioned. Nor for her part did she mention to her husband the incident of his walking in his sleep and the wild words he used. But to forget it was equally impossible. Thus it lay buried deep within her like a centre of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious symptom, waiting to spread the first favourable opportunity. She prayed against it every night and morning. Prayed that she might forget it, that God would keep her husband safe from harm, for in spite of much surface foolishness, that many might have read as weakness, Mrs. Bittisey had balanced sanity and a fine deep faith. She was greater than she knew. Her love for her husband and her God were somehow one, an achievement only possible to a single-hearted nobility of soul. There followed a summer of great violence and beauty, of beauty because the refreshing rains at night prolonged the glory of the spring and spread it all across July, keeping the foliage young and sweet. Of violence because the winds that tore about the south of England brushed the whole country into dancing movement. They swept the woods magnificently and kept them roaring with a perpetual grand voice. Their deepest notes seemed never to leave the sky. They sang and shouted and torn leaves raced and flooded through the air long before their usually appointed time. Many a tree, after days of roaring and dancing, fell exhausted to the ground. The cedar on the lawn gave up two limbs that fell upon successive days at the same hour, too, just before dusk. The wind often makes its most boisterous effort at that time. Before it drops with the sun and these two huge branches lay in dark ruin covering half the lawn, they spread across it and towards the house. They left an ugly gaping space upon the tree, so that the Lebanon looked unfinished, half destroyed, a monster shown of its old-time comeliness and splendor. More and more of the forest was now visible than before. It peered through the breach of the broken defenses. They could see from the windows of the house now, especially from the drawing-room and bedroom windows, straight out into the glades and depths beyond. Mrs. Bittesie's niece and nephew, who were staying on a visit at the time, enjoyed themselves immensely, helping the gardeners carry off the fragments. It took two days to do this, for Mr. Bittesie insisted on the branches being moved and tired. He would not allow them to be chopped. Also he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his superintendents the unwieldy masses were dragged to the edge of the garden and arranged upon the frontier line between the forest and the lawn. The children were delighted with the scheme. They entered into it with enthusiasm. At all costs this defense against the inroads of the forest must be made secure. They caught their uncle's earnestness, felt even something of a hidden motive that he had, and the visit, usually rather dreaded, became the visit of their lives instead. It was not Sophia this time who seemed discouraging and dull. She's got so old and funny, opined Stephen. But Alice, who felt in the silent displeasure of her aunt, some secret thing that alarmed her, said, I think she's afraid of the woods. She never comes into them with us. You see? All the more reason, then, for making this wall impregnable, all fat and thick and solid, he concluded, unable to manage the longer word. Then nothing, simply nothing, can get through, can't it, Uncle David? And Mr. Biddesey, jacket discarded and working in his speckled waistcoat, went puffing to their aid, arranging the massive limb of the cedar like a hedge. Come on, he said, whatever happens, you know we must finish before it's dark. Already the wind is roaring in the forest further out. And Alice caught the phrase and instantly echoed it. Stevie, she cried below her breath, look sharp, you lazy lump. Uncle David said, it'll come in and catch us before we're done. They worked like trojans and sitting beneath the wisteria tree that climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Biddesey, with her knitting, watched them, calling from time to time, in significant message of counsel and advice. The messages passed, of course, unheeded. Mostly indeed they were unheard, for the workers were too absorbed. She warned her husband not to get too hot, Alice not to tear her dress, Stephen not to strain his back with pulling. Her mind hovered between the homeopathic medicine, chest upstairs, and her anxiety to see the business finished. For this breaking up of the cedar had stirred again her slumbering alarms. It revived memories of the visit of Mr. Sanderson, that had been sinking into oblivion. She recalled his queer and odious way of talking, and many things she hoped forgotten drew their heads up from that subconscious region to which all forgetting is impossible. They looked at her and nodded. They were full of life. They had no intention of being pushed aside and buried permanently. Now look, they whispered. Didn't we tell you so? They had been merely waiting the right moment to assert their presence. In all her form of vague distress crept over her, anxiety, uneasiness returned, that dreadful sinking of the heart came too. This incident of the cedars breaking up was actually so unimportant, and yet her husband's attitude towards it made it so significant. There was nothing that he said in particular, or did, or left undone that frightened her. But his general air of earnestness seemed so unwarranted. She felt that he deemed the thing important. He was so exercised about it. This evidence of sudden concern and interest buried all the summer from her sight and knowledge. She realized now had been buried purposely. He had kept it intentionally concealed. Deeply submerged in him there ran this tide of other thoughts, desires, hopes. What were they? Whither did they lead? The accident to the tree betrayed it most unpleasantly, and doubtless more than he was aware. She watched his grave in serious face as he worked there with the children, and as she watched she felt afraid. It vexed her that the children worked so eagerly. They unconsciously supported him. The things she feared she would not even name. But it was waiting. Moreover, as far as her puzzled mind could deal with, a dread so vague and incoherent, the collapse of the cedars somehow brought it nearer. The fact that, all so ill-explained and formless, the thing yet lay in her consciousness, out of reach but moving and alive, filter with a kind of puzzled, dreadful wonder. Its presence was so very real, its power so gripping, its partial concealment so abominable. Then out of the dim confusion she grasped one thought and saw it stand quite clear before her eyes. She found difficulty in clothing it in words, but its meaning perhaps was this. That cedar stood in their life for something friendly. Its downfall meant disaster. A sense of some protective influence about the cottage, and about her husband in particular, was thereby weakened. Why do you fear the big win so, he had asked her several days before, after a particularly boisterous day, and the answer she gave surprised her while she gave it. One of those heads poked up unconsciously and let slip the truth. Because, David, I feel they bring the forest with them, she faltered. They blow something from the trees into the mind into the house. He looked at her keenly for a moment. That must be why I love them, then, he answered. They blow the soles of the trees about the sky like clouds. The conversation dropped. She had never heard him talk in quite that way before. And another time, when he had coaxed her to go with him down one of the nearer glades, she asked why he took the small handaxe with him, and what he wanted it for. To cut the ivy that clings to their trunks and takes their life away, he said. But can't the vergerers do that? She asked. That's what they're paid for, isn't it? Whereupon he explained that ivy was a parasite, the trees knew not how to fight alone, and that the vergerers were careless and did not do it thoroughly. They gave a chop here and there, leaving the tree to do the rest for itself, if it could. Besides, I like to do it for them. I love to help them and protect, he added. The foliage rustling all about as quiet words as they went. In these stray remarks, as his attitude towards the broken cedar betrayed this curious, subtle change that was going forward to his personality, slowly and surely all the summer it had increased. It was growing, the thought startled her horribly, just as a tree grows. The outer evidence from day to day so slight as to be unnoticeable, yet the rising tide so deep in irresistible. The alterations spread all through and over him, was in both mind and actions, sometimes almost in his face as well. Occasionally thus it stood up straight outside himself and frightened her. His life was somehow becoming linked so immediately with the trees, and with all that the tree signified. His interests became more and more their interests, his activity combined with theirs, his thoughts and feelings theirs, his purpose, hope, desire, his fate, the darkness of some vague enormous terror dropped its shadow on her when she thought of it. Some instinct in her heart she dreaded infinitely more than death. For death meant sweet translation for his soul, came gradually to associate the thought of him with the thought of trees, in particular with these forest trees. Sometimes before she could face the thing, argued away or prayed into silence, she found the thought of him running swiftly through her mind like a thought of the forest itself, the two most intimately linked and joined together, each a part and complement of the other, one being. The idea was too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere possibility dissolved the instant she focused it to get the truth behind it. It was too utterly evulsive, made protean. Under the attack of even a minute's concentration, the very meaning of it vanished, melted away. The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond the touch of definite thought. Her mind was unable to grapple with it. But while it vanished, the trail of its approach and disappearance flickered a moment before her shaking vision. The horror certainly remained. Reached to the simple human statement that her temperate saw it instinctively, it stood perhaps at this. Her husband loved her, and he loved the trees as well. But the trees came first, claimed pots of him she did not know. She loved her God and him. He loved the trees and her. Thus in guise of some faint distressing compromise, the matter shaped itself for her perplexed mind in the terms of conflict. A silent hidden battle raged. But as yet raged far away. The breaking of the cedar was a visible outward fragment of a distant and mysterious encounter that was coming daily closer to them both. The wind, instead of roaring in the forest further out, now came nearer, booming in fitful gusts about its edge and frontiers. Meanwhile the summer dimmed. The autumn winds went sighing through the woods. Leaves turned to golden red, and the evenings were drawing in with cozy shadows before the first sign of anything seriously untoward made its appearance. It came then with a flat, decided kind of violence that indicated mature preparation beforehand. It was not impulsive nor ill-considered. In a fashion it seemed expected, and indeed inevitable. For within a fortnight of their annual change to little village of sealants above St. Raphael, a change so regular for the past ten years that it was not even discussed between them, David Bittisi abruptly refused to go. Thompson had laid the tea-table, prepared the spirit-lamp beneath the urn, pulled down the blinds in that swift and silent way she had, and left the room. The lamps were still on lit. The fire-light shone on the chintz-armed chairs, and boxed her lay of sleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon the walls the gilt picture-frames gleamed faintly. The pictures themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittisi had warmed the teapot and was in the act of pouring the water in to heat the cups when her husband, looking up from his chair across the hearth, made the abrupt announcement. My dear, he said, as though following a train of thought of which she only heard this final phrase, it's really quite impossible for me to go. And so abrupt, inconsequent, it sounded that she at first mis-understood. She thought he meant to go out into the garden or the woods, but her heart leaped all the same, the tone of his voice was ominous. Of course not, she answered, it would be most unwise. Why should you? She referred to the mist that always spread on autumn nights upon the lawn. But before she finished the sentence she knew that he referred to something else, and her heart then gave it second horrible leap. David, you mean abroad? She gasped. I mean abroad, dear, yes. It reminded her of the tone he used when saying goodbye years ago, before one of those jungle expeditions she dreaded. His voice then was so serious, so final. It was serious and final now. For several moments she could think of nothing to say. She busied herself with the teapot. She had filled one cup with hot water till it overflowed, and she emptied it slowly into the slot-basin, trying with all her might not to let him see the trembling of her hand. The fire-light and the dimness of the room both helped her. But in any case, he would hardly have noticed it. His thoughts were far away. CHAPTER VI Mrs. Bittisee had never liked their present home. She preferred a flat, more open country, that left approaches clear. She liked to see things coming. This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and pleasant place to settle down in. The sea coast with treeless downs behind in a clear horizon in front, as at Eastbourne, say, was her ideal of a proper home. It was curious this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in, by trees especially, a kind of claustrophobia almost. Probably do, as had been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude, the feeling had matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it. Apparently routed, and had a way of creeping back into the forms. In this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had passed. They laughed in her face. She never lost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay about their cottage like a mighty wall. A crowding, watching, listening presence that shut them in from freedom and scape. Far from morbid, naturally, she did her best to deny the thought. And so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it. Then suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of bleak reality. It was not only in her mind it existed apart from any mere mood. A separate fear that walked alone. It came and went, yet when it went, went only to watch her from another point of view. It was an abeyance, hidden round the corner. The forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and merge them in itself. Its great deep-breathing soul resented the mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. In every wind that blew its thundering message over the huge sounding board of the million shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring. All this she never framed in words. The subtleties of language lay far beyond her reach. Instinctively she felt it, and more besides. It troubled her profoundly, chiefly moreover for her husband. Merely for herself the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David's peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation. Jealousy then, in its most subtle aspect, came to strengthen this aversion and dislike, for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to. Her husband's passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and nature, managed them intuitively as other men managed dogs and horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace. It nursed and fed and soothed his deepest moons. Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beaten him, cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains. This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly to his choice of their English home. For in the little island there is nothing that suggests the woods of wilder countries, so nearly as the new forest. It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as bit of sea of the department knew them. And a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes. He consented to a cottage on the edge instead of in the heart of it, and for a dozen years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this great-spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees. Only with the last two years or so, with his own increasing age and physical decline perhaps, had come this mocked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the forest. She had watched it grow. At first had laughed at it, then had argued mildly, and finally come to realize that its treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had come to fear it with all her heart. The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently, of course. For her husband it meant a painful exile that did his health no good. He yearned for his trees, the sight and sound and smell of them. Before herself it meant release from a haunting dread, escape. To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the sunny shining coast of France was almost more than this little woman even with her unselfishness could face. Out of the first shock of the announcement she reflected as deeply as her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret, made up her mind. Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to her announcement. The discipline would certainly be severe. She did not dream at the moment house severe. But this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain. She accepted it too, without any sighing of the modder, though the courage she showed was of the modder order. Her husband should never know the cost. All but this one passion, his unselfishness was ever as great as her own. The love she had borne him all these years, like the love she bore her anthropomorphic deity, was deep and real. She loved to suffer for them both. Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular. It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection. Something higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the beginning. I feel, Sophia, it would be really more than I could manage. He said slowly, gazing into the fire over the tops of his stretched-out muddy boots, my duty and my happiness lie here with the forest and with you. My life is deeply rooted in this place. Something I can't define connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me ill. Might even kill me. My hold on life would weaken. Here is my source of supply. I cannot explain it better than that. He looked up steadily into her face, across the table, so that she saw the gravity of his expression and the shining of his steady eyes. David, you feel it as strongly as that? She said, forgetting the teethings altogether. Yes, he replied, I do, and it's not of the body only. I feel it in my soul. The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room like an actual presence and stood beside them. It came not by the windows or the door, but it filled the entire space between the walls and ceiling. It took the heat from the fire before her face. She felt suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened. She almost felt the rush of foliage in the wind. It stood between them. There are things, some things, she faltered, we are not intended to know, I think. The words expressed her general attitude to life, not alone to this particular incident. And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as though he had not heard it. I cannot explain it better than that. I do see, his gray voice answered, there is this deep, tremendous link, some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to forgive. His tone grew tender, gentle, soft. My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow. These trees, this ancient forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live. As if I go, there was a little sound of collapse in his voice. He stopped abruptly and sank back in his chair, and at that a distinct lump came into her throat, which she had great difficulty in managing, while she went over and put her arms about him. My dear, she murmured, God will direct. We will accept his guidance. He has always shown the way before. My selfishness afflicts me. He began, but she would not let him finish. David, he will direct. Nothing shall harm you. He's never once been selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things. The way will open that is best for you, for both of us. She kissed him. She would not let him speak. Her heart was in her throat, and she felt for him far more than for herself. And then he had suggested that she should go alone, perhaps, for a shorter time, and stay in her brother's villa with the children, Alice and Stephen. It was always open to her, as she well knew. You need the change, he said, when the lamps had been lit and the servant had gone out again. You need it as much as I dread it. I could manage somehow until you returned, and should feel happier that way if you went. I cannot leave this forest that I love so well. I even feel, Sophie, dear. He set up straight and faced her, as he half whispered it. That I can never leave it again. My life and happiness lie here, together. And even while squawing the idea that she could leave him alone with the influence of the forest all about him to have its unimpeded way, she felt the pangs of that subtle jealousy bite keen and close. He loved the forest better than herself, for he placed it first. Behind the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy. The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they equally could not spare him. The vividness with which he managed to conceal and yet portray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed the border between pre-sentiment and warning into positive alarm. He clearly felt that the trees would miss him. The trees he tended, guarded, watched over, loved. David, I shall stay here with you. I think you need me really, don't you? Eagly, with a touch of heartfelt passion, the words poured out. Now more than ever, dear, God bless you for your sweet unselfishness and your sacrifice, he added, is all the greater, because you cannot understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay. Perhaps in the spring instead? She said with a tremor in the voice. In the spring, perhaps? He answered gently, almost beneath his breath, for they will not need me then. All the world can love them in the spring. It's in the winter that they're lonely and neglected. I wish to stay with them, particularly then. I even feel I ought to, and I must. And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs. Biddisi, at least, asked no more questions. Yet she could not bring herself to show more sympathy than was necessary. She felt, for one thing, that if she did, it might lead him to speak freely and to tell her things she could not possibly better know, and she did not take the risk of that. CHAPTER VI. This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons. It marked, at the same time, the line between her husband's negative and aggressive state. She almost felt she had done wrong to yield. He grew so bold, concealment all discarded. He went, that is, quite openly to the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations. He even sought to coax her to go with him. The hidden thing blazed out without disguise, and while she trembled at his energy, she admired the virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired before her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to protect. The wife turned holy mother. He said so little, but he hated to come in. From morning to night he wandered in the forest. Often he went out after dinner. His mind was charged with trees, their foliage, growth, development, their wonder, beauty, strength, their loneliness and isolation, their power in a herded mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them, the danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness and the soft, moist tenderness that a self-wind left upon their thinning vows. He spoke all day of their sensations, how they drank the fading sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars. The dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming softness in their roots. They nursed the life they carried, insects, larvae, chrysalis, and when the skies above them melted he spoke of them standing, motionless in an ecstasy of rain, or in the noon of sunshine, self-poised upon the prodigy of shade. And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice and heard him, wide awake, not talking in his sleep, but talking towards the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon. A wat thou sighing for Lebanon in a long breeze that streams to thy delicious east, sighing for Lebanon, dark cedar? And when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him by name. He merely said, my dear, I felt the loneliness suddenly realized it, the alien desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England, when all her eastern brothers call her in sleep. And the answer seemed so queer, so unavangical, that she waited in silence till he slept again. The poetry passed her by. It seemed unnecessary and out of place. It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy. The fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendor of her husband's state. Her anxiety at any rate shifted from the religious to the medical. She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind a little. How often in her prayer she offered thanks for the guidance that made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to say. It certainly was twice a day. She even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the victor, called and brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor, as to tell the professional man privately some symptoms of her husband's queerness. In his answer that there was nothing he could prescribe for, added not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James had never been consulted under such unorthodox conditions before. His sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled instrument that might help the race. No fever, you think, she asked insistently with hurry, determined to get something from him? Nothing that I can deal with, as I told you, madam," replied the offended, allopathic knight. Evidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in his surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn. Chance of a fee most problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a bumping pulse, to know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was most unusual, inabominable taste besides, of course it was, but the drowning woman seized the only straw she could. For now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the point where she found it difficult even to question him. Yet in the house he was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy as possible. David, you really are unwise to go out now. The night is damp and very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You'll catch your death of cold. His face lightened. Won't you come with me, dear, just for once? I'm only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beach that stands so lonely by itself. She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had passed that evil group of hollies where the gypsies camped. Nothing else would grow there, but the hollies thrived upon the stony soil. David, the beach is all right and safe. She had learned his phraseology a little, made clever out of dew seasoned by her love. There's no wind to-night. But it's rising, he answered. Looking in the east, I heard it in the bare and hungry lodges. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out when the winds upon them from the east. She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity, and she heard him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How could he possibly know such things? Yet in all else, in the relations of his daily life, he was sane and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that, since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did he watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he hunger especially in the dusk to catch their mood of night, as he called it? Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the wind appeared to rise? When she put it so frequently now herself, how could he possibly know such things? He went as she closed the front door after him. She heard the distant roaring in the forest. And then it suddenly struck her. How could she know them, too? It dropped upon her like a blow that felt at once all over upon body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated courage, like that which animates the leaders of splendid, forlorn hopes, blamed in her little person, blamed grandly and invincible, while knowing herself insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power out her back which moves the worlds, the faith that filled her was the weapon in her hands, and the right by which she claimed it. But the spirit of utter selfless sacrifice that characterized her life was the means by which she mastered its immediate use, for a kind of white and faultless intuition guided her to the attack. Behind her stood her Bible and her God. How so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies perhaps in the very simpleness of her nature. At any rate she saw quite clearly certain things, saw them in moments only, after prayer and the still silence of the night, or when left alone was long hours in the house, with her knitting and her thoughts, and the guidance which then flashed into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten. They came to her these things she saw, formless, wordless. She could not put them into any kind of language, but by the very fact of being uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigor. Those of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed easily afterwards, by degrees on subsequent days, a little and a little. Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken his luncheon with him. She was sitting by the tea-things, the cups in the teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his return. When she realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts, was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single trees, but something masked in mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were, the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless steps far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her, with the fire-light and hissing kettle out yonder in the forest further out. The thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing. The sense of definite battle, too, battle between herself and the forest for his soul, came with it. Its pre-sentiment was as clear as though Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage was surrounded. Please, ma'am, there are trees come up about the house, he might have suddenly announced, and equally might have heard her own answer. It's all right, Thompson, the main body is still far away. Immediately upon its hills then came another truth, with a close reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran through all creation. The vegetable kingdom knew it, too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This forest just beyond the window, standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn. This forest understood it equally. The remorseless branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself. The thing it loved and needed spread like a running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously directed. In animals it acted with frank instinctiveness. But in trees this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements. And once it realized its passion was returned, the power increased. Their husband loved the trees. They had become aware of it. They would take him from her in the end. Then while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door, she saw a third thing clearly. Realized the widening of the gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life, to stay by his side and help him, he had been slowly, drawing away. The estrangement was here and now, a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing. They're young, this broad, deep space between them. Across the empty distance she saw the change in Mercila's perspective. It revealed his face and figure. Dearly loved, once fondly worshiped. Fire on the other side in shadowy distance. Small, the back turned from her. And moving while she watched. And moving away from her. They had their tea in silence then. She has no questions. He volunteered no information of his day. The hat was big within her. And the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising icy mist. She watched him, filling all his wants. His hair was untidy and his boots were caked with blackish mud. He moved with a restless swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable shivering down her back. Reminded her of trees. His eyes were very bright. He brought in with him an odor of the earth and forest that seemed to choke her and make it difficult to breathe. And what she noticed were the climax of almost uncontrollable alarm. Upon his face, beneath the lamplight, shown traces of a mild, faint glory, that made her think of moonlight falling upon a wood through the speckled shadows. It was his newfound happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her in a which she had no pot. In his coat was a spray of faded yellow beech leaves. I brought this from the forest to you. He said, with all the air that belonged to his little axe of devotion long ago, and she took the spray of leaves mechanically with a smile and a murmur, thank you, dear, as though he had unknowingly put into her hands the weapon for her own destruction, and she had accepted it. And when the tea was over and he left the room, he did not go to his study or to change his clothes. She heard the front door softly shut behind him, as he again went out towards the forest. A moment later she was in her room upstairs, kneeling beside the bed, the side she slept on, and praying wildly through a flood of tears that God would save and keep him to her. Wind brushed the window panes behind her while she knelt. End of chapter 7.