 Chapter 8 One sunny November morning, when the strain had reached a pitch that made repression almost unmanageable, she came to an impulsive decision and obeyed it. Her husband had again gone out with luncheon for the day. She took adventure in her hands and followed him. The power of the seeing clear was strong upon her, forcing her up to some unnatural level of understanding. To stay indoors and wait inactive for his return seemed suddenly impossible. She meant to know what he knew, feel what he felt, put herself in his place. She would dare the fascination of the forest, share it with him. It was greatly daring, but it would give her greater understanding how to help and save him, and therefore greater power. She went upstairs a moment first to pray. In a thick, warm skirt and wearing heavy boots, those walking boots she used with him upon the mountains about silence, she left the cottage by the back way and turned towards the forest. She could not actually follow him, for he had started off an hour before and she knew not exactly his direction. What was so urgent in her was the wish to be with him in the woods, to walk beneath leafless branches just as he did, to be there when he was there, even though not together, for it had come to her that she might thus share with him for once this horrible, mighty life and breathing of the trees he loved. In winter he had said they needed him particularly, and winter now was coming, her love must bring her something of what he felt himself, the huge attraction, the suction and the pull of all the trees. Thus in some vicarious fashion she might share, though unknown to himself, this very thing that was taking him away from her. She might thus even lessen its attack upon himself. The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle, and come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected. The air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue but cloudless. The entire forest stood silent at attention. It knew perfectly well that she had come. It knew the moment when she entered, watched and followed her, and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in. Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently as the oaks and beaches shifted past and rose and took up their positions at her back. It was not pleasant. This way they grew so dense behind her the instant she had passed. She realized that they gathered in an ever-growing army, massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting off escape. They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would know them differently. Thick, crowded, branches all drawn in hostile. Already their increasing numbers bewildered her. In front they looked so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell. But when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a sered army. During the sunlight they blocked the day, collected all the shadows, stood with their leafless and forbidding rampart like the night. They swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she came. For when she glanced behind her, rarely, the way she had come was shadowy and lost. Yet the morning spockled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran quivering through the entire day. It was what she always knew as children's weather, so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger. Everything ominous to threaten Oralaam. Steadfast in her purpose, looking back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittisi marched slowly and deliberately into the hide of the silent woods, deeper, ever deeper. And then abruptly in an open space where the sunshine fell unhindered, she stopped. It was one of the breathing places of the forest. Dead, withered bracken, laying patches of unsightly gray. There were bits of heather, too. All round the trees stood looking on. Oak, beech, holly, ash, pine, larch, was here and there small groups of juniper. On the lips of this breathing space of the woods she stopped to rest, disobeying her instinct for the first time. For the other instinct in her was to go on. She did not really want to rest. This was the little act that brought it to her, the wireless message from a vast emitter. I've been stopped, she thought to herself, with a horrid quam. She looked about her in this quiet, ancient place. Nothing stirred. There was no life nor sign of life. No birds sang, no rabbits scuttled off at her approach. The stillness was bewildering, and gravity hung down upon it like a heavy curtain. It hushed the hot in her. Could this be part of what her husband felt? This sense of thick entanglement, with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage. This has always been as it is now, she thought, yet not knowing why she thought it. Ever since the forest grew it has been still and secret here, it has never changed. The curtain of silence drew closer while she said it, thickening round her. For a thousand years I'm here with a thousand years, and behind this place stand all the forests of the world. So foreign to her temperament was such thoughts, and so alien to all she had been taught to look for in nature, that she strove against them. She made an effort to oppose, but they clung and haunted just the same. They refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as though its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through. And then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement somewhere. That obscure, dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stayed about her, listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration spread over them. At first so slight she scarcely would admit it. Then growing steadily, though still obscurely outwards. They tremble and are changed. Flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her direction. That was it. They saw her. In this way the change expressed itself in her groping terrified thought. Till now it had been otherwise. She had looked at them from her own point of view. Now they looked at her from theirs. They stared at her in the face and eyes. They stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way they watched her. Here the two in life she had watched them, variously, in superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now they read into her the things they actually were and not merely another's interpretations of them. They seemed in their motionless silence, their instinct with life, a life moreover that breathed about her, a species of terrible soft enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the brain. The forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the silence, for she wanted to look back at them. But it was like staring at a crowd, and her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding a none the one she saw. They saw her so easily, each and all. The rose that stood behind her also stared, but she could not return the gaze. Her husband she realized could, and their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her. She saw of them so little. Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground. And then she closed them all together. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they would go. But the sight of the trees came even into that inner darkness behind the fasten lids, for there was no escaping it. Outside in the light she still knew that the leaves of the hollies glittered smoothly, that the dead foliage of the oaks hung crisp in the air about her, that the needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread perception of the forest was focused on herself, and no mere shutting of the eyes could hide its scattered yet concentrated stare, the all-inclusive vision of great woods. There was no wind, yet here and there a single leaf hanging by its dried-up stalk shook all alone with great rapidity, rattling. It was the sentry drawing attention to her presence. And then again, as once, long weeks before, she felt their being as a tide about her. The tide had turned. That memory of her childhood sands came back. When the nurse said, The tide has turned now we must go in. And she saw the mass of piled-up waters green and heaped to the horizon and realized that it was slowly coming in. The gigantic mass of it, too vast for Hari, loaded with massive purpose, she used to feel, was moving towards herself. The fluid body of the sea was creeping along beneath the sky to the very spot upon the yellow sands where she stood and played. The sight and thought of it had always overwhelmed her with a sense of awe. As though her puny self were the object of the whole seas advance, the tide has turned. We had better now go in. This was happening now about her. The same thing was happening in the woods. Slow, sure, and steady, in its motion as little discernible as the seas, the tide had turned. The small human presence that had ventured among its green and mountainous depths, moreover, was its objective. That all was clear within her while she sat and waited with tight-shot lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization of something more. The presence that it saw was after all not hers. It was the presence of someone other than herself. And then she understood. Her eyes had opened with a click, it seemed, but the sound in reality was outside herself. Across the clearing where the sunshine lay so calm and still, she saw the figure of her husband moving among the trees, a man like a tree walking. His hands behind his back and head uplifted. He moved quite slowly, as though absorbed in his own thoughts. Hardly fifty paces separated them. But he had no inkling of her presence there so near. With mind intent and senses all turned inwards. He marched past her like a figure in a dream. And like a figure in a dream she saw him go. Love, yearning, pity, rose in a storm within her. But as a nightmare she found no words or movement possible. She sat and watched him go. Go from her. Go into the deeper reaches of the green, developing woods. Desire to save, to bid him stop and turn, ran in a passion through her being. But there was nothing she could do. She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her. She saw the branches drop but his steps and hit him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just took him. People unresisting and content to go. Upon the bosom of the green, soft sea he floated away beyond her reach of vision. Her eyes could follow him no longer. He was gone. And then for the first time she realized, even at that distance, that the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness, wrapped in cotaway and joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never showed to her. But she had known it. Years ago in the early days of their married life she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer obeyed the summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could call it forth. It answered to the trees. The forest had taken every part of him from her. He was very hot and soul. Her sight, that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory, now came back to the outer things again. She looked about her and her love, returning empty-handed and unsatisfied, left her open to the invading of the bleakest terror she had ever known. That such things could be real and happen found her helpless utterly. Terror invaded the quietest corners of her heart that had never yet known quailing. She could not, for moments at any rate, reach either her Bible or her God. Desolate in an empty world of fear, she sat with eyes too dry and hot for tears, yet with a coldness as of ice upon her very flesh. She stared, unseeing about her. That horror which stalks in the stillness of the noon day, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was aware of it, beyond the stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe. Yes, but for her they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least of them. It seems that behind and through the glare of this wintery noon day, in the hot of the woods, there brooded another universe of life and passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness hit it, but he moved with it all and understood. His love interpreted it. She rose to her feet, tottered feebly, and collapsed again upon the moss. Yet for herself she felt no terror. No little personal fear could touch her whose anguish and deep longing streamed all out to him whom she so bravely loved. In this time of utter self-forgetfulness, when she realized that the battle was hopeless, thinking she had lost even her God, she found him again quite close beside her, like a little presence in this terrible hot of the hostile forest. But at first she did not recognize that he was there. She did not know him and that strangely unacceptable guys. For he stood so very close, so very intimate, so very sweet and comforting, and yet so hard to understand, as resignation. Once more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully and slowly, made her way along the mossy glade by which she came. And at first she marveled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which she found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw the truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on her way. The forest did not want her. The tide was coming in indeed, yet not for her. And so, in another of those flashes of clear vision, that of late had lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole terrible thing complete. Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her, to merge his life in theirs, even to kill him in some mysterious way. This time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of animals or human. They wanted him because they loved him. But they did not want him dead. Full charge with his splendid life and enthusiasm they wanted him. They wanted him alive. It was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to remove. This was what brought the sense of abject helplessness. She stood upon the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her. For as all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a grain of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort, so the entire mass of what Sandra sent had called the collective consciousness of the forest, strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of its desire. Loving her husband, she had crept beneath its skin. It was her they would eject and take away. It was her they would destroy, not him. Them whom they loved needed they would keep alive. They meant to take him living. She reached the house in safety, though she never remembered how she found her way. It was made all simple for her. The branches almost urged her out. But behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though some towering angel of the woods that fall across the threshold the flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that form behind her a barrier, green shimmering and impassable. Into the forest she never walked again, and she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was a perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this world at all. She talked to her husband when he came in for tea, after dark. Resignation brings a curious large courage. When there is nothing more to lose, the soul takes risks and dares. Is it a curious shortcut sometimes to the heights? David, I went into the forest, too, this morning. Soon after you I went. I saw you there. Wasn't it wonderful? He answered simply, inclining his head a little. There was no surprise or annoyance in his look. A mild and gentle ennui, rather. He asked no real questions. She thought of some garden tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not want to bend. The mild unwillingness, with which it yields, she often saw him this way now, in terms of the trees. It was very wonderful indeed, dear yes. She replied low, her voice not faltering, though indistinct. But for me it was too, too strange and big. The passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice, all unbetrayed. Somehow she kept them back. There was a pause, and then he added, I find it more and more so every day. His voice passed through the lamplit room like a murmur of the wind and branches. The look of youth and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone, and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings, where he is slightly ill at ease. It was the house he aided. Coming back to rooms and walls and furniture, the ceilings enclosed windows confined him. Yet in it no suggestion that he found her, irksome. Her presence seemed to no account at all. Indeed he hardly noticed her. For whole long periods he lost her. Did not know that she was there. He had no need of her. He lived alone. Each lived alone. The outward signs by which she recognized that the awful battle was against her, and the terms of surrender, accepted, were pathetic. She put the medicine just away upon the shelf. She gave the orders for his pocket luncheon before he asked. She went to bed alone and early. From the front door unlocked was milk and bread and butter in the hall beside the lamp, all concessions that she felt impelled to make. For more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so softly. Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her, she lay awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The thing against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete, a fact accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the forest. Moreover, the time for evacuation, her own evacuation, seemed approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the rising tide she used to dread. At the high water mark she stood waiting, calmly, waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn, all those terrible days of early winter, the encircling forest watched it come. Guiding at silent swell and currents towards her feet, only she never once gave up her Bible or her praying, this complete resignation, moreover, had somehow brought to her a strange great understanding. And if she could not share her husband's horrible abandonment to powers outside himself, she could, and did, in some half grouping way, grasp at shadowy meanings that might make such abandonment possible. Yes, but more than merely possible, in some extraordinary sense, not evil. Here the two she had divided the beyond world into two shop halves, spirits good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool. That besides these definite classes there might be other powers as well, belonging definitely to neither one nor the other. Her thought stopped dead at that, but the big idea of found lodgement in her little mind, and owing to the lodginess of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought a certain solace with it. The failure or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it, of her god to interfere in help, that also she came in a measure to understand. For here she found it more and more possible to imagine, perhaps no positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from humankind, something alien and not commonly recognized. There was a gulf fixed between the two, and Mr. Sanderson had bridged it, by his talk, his explanations, his attitude of mind. Through these her husband had found the way into it. His temperament and natural passion for the woods had prepared the soul in him, and the moment he saw the way to go he took it. The line of least resistance. Life was, of course, open to all, and her husband had the right to choose it where he would. He had chosen it away from her, away from other men, but not necessarily away from God. This was an enormous concession that she skirted. Never really faced. It was too revolutionary to face. But its possibility peeped into her bewildered mind. It might delay his progress, or it might advance it. Who could know? And why should God, who ordered all things with such magnificent detail, from the pathway of a sun to the falling of a sparrow, object to his free choice, or interfere to hinder him and stop? She came to realize resignation, that is, in another aspect. It gave her comfort, if not peace. She fought against all the belittling of her God. It was perhaps enough that he knew. You were not alone, dear, in the trees out there? She ventured one night, as he crept on tiptoe into the room, not far from midnight. God is with you? Magnificently was the immediate answer, given with enthusiasm, for he is everywhere, and I only wish that you. But she stuffed the clothes against her ears. That imitation on his lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to hurry to her own execution. She buried her face among the sheets and blankets, shaking all over, like a leaf. END OF CHAPTER VIII. And so the thought that she was the one to go, remained and grew. It was perhaps first sign of that weakening of the mind which indicated the singular manner of her going. For it was her mental opposition, the trees felt, that stood in their way. Once that was overcome, obliterated, her physical presence did not matter. She would be harmless. Having accepted defeat, because she had come to feel that his obsession was not actually evil, she accepted at the same time the conditions of an atrocious loneliness. She stood now from her husband farther than from the moon. They had no visitors. Others were few and far between, and less encouraged than before. The empty deck of winter was before them. Among the neighbors was none in home, without disloyalty to her husband, she could confide. Mr. Mortimer, had he been single, might have helped her in this desert of solitude that preyed upon her mind. But his wife was there the obstacle. For Mrs. Mortimer wore sandals, believed at knots with a complete food of man, and indulged in other idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the latter signs, which Mrs. Biddesey had seen taught to dread as dangerous. She stood most desolately alone. Solitude therefore, in which the mind unhindered feeds upon its own delusions, was the assignable cause of her gradual mental disruption and collapse. With the definite arrival of the colder weather, her husband gave up his rambles after dark. Evenings were spent together over the fire. He read the times. They even talked about their postponed visit abroad in the coming spring. No restlessness was on him at the change. He seemed content and easy in his mind, spoke little of the trees and woods, enjoyed far better health than if there had been change of scene, and to herself was tender, kind, solicitous over trifles as in the distant days of their first honeymoon. But this steep calm could not deceive her. It meant, she fully understood, that he felt sure of himself, sure of her, and sure of the trees as well. It all lay buried in the depths of him, too secure and deep, too intimately established in his central being to prevent of those surface fluctuations which betrayed disharmony within. His life was hid with trees. Even the fever, so dreaded in the damp of winter, left him free. She now knew why. The fever was due to their efforts to obtain him. His efforts to respond and go, physical results of a fierce unrest he had never understood till Sanderson came with his wicked explanations. Now it was otherwise the bridge was made, and he had gone. And she, brave, loyal, and consistent soul, found herself utterly alone, even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood at the bottom of some huge ravine that opened her mind. The walls were of, instead of rock, were trees that reached enormous to the sky, engulfing her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched, permitted, even perhaps approved. At any rate, he knew. During those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband knew continual access to the world, his alien love had furnished for him. Never for a single instance was he cut off from it. She gazed at the newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheru curl up above the edge, the little hole in his evening socks. And listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But this was all a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it he escaped. It was the Contra's trick to divert the sight to unimportant details while the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed wonderfully. She loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress, but all the while she knew that the body, lolling in that unarmed chair before her eyes, contained the nearest fragment of his actual self. It was little better than a corpse. It was an empty shell. The essential soul of him was out yonder with the forest, farther out near that ever-roaring heart of it. And with the dark, the forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys, the winds were always walking on the lawn, and gravel paths. Forests came and went and came again. Someone seemed always talking in the woods. Someone was in the building, too. She passed them on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and gentle, down the passages and landings after dusk. As the loose fragments of the day had broken off and stayed there caught among the shadows, trying to get out. They blundered silently all about the house. They waited till she passed, then made a run for it. And her husband always knew. She saw him more than once deliberately avoid them. Because she was there. More than once, too. She saw him stand and listen when he thought she was not near. Then heard herself the long, bounding stride of their approach across the silent garden. Already he had heard them in the windy distance of the night, far, far away. They sped she well knew, along that glade of mossy turf by which she last came out. It cushioned their tread exactly as it had cushioned her own. It seemed to her the trees were always in the house with them, and in their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew and trembled. One night in their bedroom it caught her unawares. She woke out of deep sleep, and it came upon her before she could gather her forces for control. The day had been wildly boisterous. But now the wind had dropped. Only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shadow between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and rack. Deep like hurrying monsters. But below the earth was quiet, still, and dripping, stood the host of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of mold and fallen leaves, the air was sharp, heavy with odor. And she knew all this the instant that she woke, for it seemed to her that she had been elsewhere, following her husband, as though she had been out. There was no dream at all. Merely the definite haunting certainty. It dived away, lost, buried in the night. She sat upright in the bed, and she had come back. The room, shown pale in the moonlight, reflected through the windows, where the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her, motionless and deep sleep. But what caught her unawares was the horrid thing, that by this fact of sudden, unexpected waking, she had surprised these other things in the room. Beside the very bed, gathered close about him while he slept, it was their dreadful boldness. The relief of no account as it were that terrified her into screaming, before she could collect her powers to prevent. She screamed before she realized what she did, a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet made so little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood grouped all around that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension of walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, held yet thick, moving and turning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling. In their sound was something very sweet and sinning that fell into her with a spell of horrible enchantment. They were so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in their combination. Cold seized her. The sheets against her body had turned to ice. She screamed a second time, though the sound hardly issued from her throat. The spell sank deeper, reaching to the heart, but softened all the currents of her blood and took life from her in a stream towards themselves. Resistance in that moment seemed impossible. Her husband then stirred and asleep and woke. And instantly the forms drew up, erect and gathered themselves in some amazing way together. They lessened an extent, then scattered through the air like an effect of light when shadows seek to smother it. It was tremendous, yet most exquisite. A sheet of pale green shadow, the yet had form and substance filled the room. There was a rush of silent movement as the presences drew past her through the air and they were gone. But clearest of all, she saw the manner of their going, for she recognized in their tumult of escape by the window open at the top, the same wide, lubing circles, spirals as it seemed, that she had seen upon the lawn those weeks ago when Sanderson had talked. The room once more was empty. In the collapse that followed, she heard her husband's voice, as though coming from some great distance, her own reply she heard as well. Both were so strange and unlike their normal speech, the very words unnatural. What is it, dear? Why do you wake me now? And his voice whispered it with a sighing sound like wind and pine boughs. A moment sent something what passed me through the air of the room. Back to the night outside it went. Her voice, too, held the same note as of wind entangled among too many leaves. My dear, it was the wind. But it called, David. It was calling you by name. The air of the branches, dear, was what you heard. Now sleep again. I beg you, sleep. It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it, before and behind. Her voice grew louder, but his own and reply sank lower, far away and oddly hushed. The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was what you saw. But it frightened me. I've lost my God and you. I'm cold as death. My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours. The whole world sleeps. Now sleep again yourself. He whispered close to her ear. She felt his hand stroking her. His voice was soft and very soothing, but only a pot of him was there. Only a pot of him was speaking. It was a half-empty body that laid beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular choice of words. The horrible dim enchantment of the trees was close about them in the room. Gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter, whispering round the human life they loved. And let me sleep again. She heard a murmur as he settled down among the clothes. Sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from what you called me. His dreamy, happy tone and that look of youth and joy she discerned upon his features, even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as with the spell of those shining, mild, green presences. It sank down into her. She felt sleep groped for her. On the threshold of slumber, one of those strange, vagrant voices that lost consciousness, let's loose, cried faintly in her heart. There is joy in the forest over one center that, then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was vile parodying one of her most precious texts and that the irreverence was ghastly. And though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual, dreamless. It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and curious dream that kept again and again upon her that she stood upon a wee bear rock in the sea and that the tide was rising. The water first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams. A period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely covering her head. And then came explanation. The sword of explanation dreams bring. She understood, for beneath the water she had seen the world of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green, long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading through the darkened watery depths, the power of their ocean foliage. The vegetable kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air, and water helped it. Way of escape, there was none. And even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of roaring. Was it surf or wind or voices? Further out, yet coming steadily towards her. And so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs. Bitticey, preying upon itself and fed by constant dread, went lost in disproportion. Greeriness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies and a clean moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts. Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her god was drawn into distance. She counted the days to spring. She groped her way, stumbling down the long, dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France. There lay safety and escape for both of them. Could she but hold on. Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once looked back. She drooped, vitality passed from her, drawn out in a way as by some steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers draining off. The taps were all turned on, her personality as it were, dreamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this power that never wearied and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. She waned, she faded, she obeyed. At first she watched the process and recognized exactly what was going on. Her physical life and that balance of mind which depends on physical well-being were being slowly undermined. She saw that clearly. Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these and independent of them, lay safe somewhere with her distant god. That she knew, tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her husband was safe from all attack. Later, in his good time, they would merge together again because of it. But meanwhile, all of her that had kinship with the earth was slowly going. The separation was being remorselessly accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was being steadily drained from her. She was being removed. After a time, however, even this power of realization went so that she no longer watched the process or knew exactly what was going on. The only satisfaction she had known, the feeling that it was sweet to suffer for her sake, went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of the trees amid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind. She slept badly. Woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes. Her head ached dully. She grew confused and thought and lost the clues of daily life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight too of that brilliant picture at the exit of the tunnel. It faded away into a tiny semi-circle of pale light. The violet sea and the sunshine, the mirror's point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that stretched behind her, the power of the trees came close and caught her twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at night finding it difficult to breathe. This seemed wet leaves pressing against her mouth and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her feet were heavy, half-rooted as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge creepers stretched along the hole of that black tunnel, feeling about a person for points where they might fasten well, as Ivy or the giant parasites of the vegetable kingdom settled down on the trees themselves to sap their life and kill them. Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in league with it. They helped it everywhere. Why don't you sleep, dear? It was her husband now who played the role of nurse, tending her little wands with an honest care that at least ate to the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging battle he had caused. What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless? The winds, she whispered in the dock. For hours she had been watching, the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. They go walking and talking everywhere tonight, keeping me awake, and all the time they call so loudly to you. In his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment, until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent. The trees excite them in the night. The winds of the great swift carriers. Go with them, dear, and not against. You'll find sleep that way if you do. The storm is rising. She began hardly knowing what she said. All the more then, go with them. Don't resist, they'll take you to the trees, that's all. Resist, the word touched on the button of some text that once had helped her. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. She heard her whispered answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a flood of hysterical weeping. But her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it. So the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the roaring of the forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again. She slowly regained a sort of dull composure. Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and blankets. With a growing terror over her, she listened. The storm was rising. It came on the sudden and impetuous rush that made all further sleep for her impossible. Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm interpreted for her mind the climax. The forest barreled out its victory to the winds. The winds in turn proclaimed it to the night. The whole world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little human pain. This was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to. For unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These were sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails a thousand at a time, and sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else, the distant booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up. The whole beleaguering host of them stood up, and with the uproar of their million branches drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if they had all broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over the field and hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright, they raced, leaping through the sky. It was upheaval and adventure in the awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world. Through it, all her husbands slept peacefully as though he heard it not. It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead, for he was out with all that clamoring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half emptied. And when the winter's morning stole upon the scene at length, with a pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it remained. The single great vial that had been left to it lay dock upon the grass, sucked, end ways towards the forest by a great wind eddy. It lay there like a mass of driftwood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of a high spring tide upon the sands, remnant of some friendly splendid vessel that once sheltered men. And in the distance she heard the roaring of the forest further out. Her husband's voice was in it. End of chapter nine, and end of The Man Whom the Trees Loved by Elgin on Blackwood.