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+Project Gutenberg's The Man Whom the Trees Loved, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man Whom the Trees Loved
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: February 29, 2004 [EBook #11377]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Harry Jones and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN
+
+WHOM THE TREES LOVED
+
+ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+~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 beeches in the whole world were alike. 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, and, while his perception of a Tree
+Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost
+approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that
+particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush--shining, frowning,
+dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It
+emerged.
+
+There was nothing else in the wide world 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 in 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 Bittacy, C.B., 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, half to
+persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wife
+thought otherwise), and half 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. Bittacy was held to be austere,
+not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of
+nature that had been fostered by years 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 in 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. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergy-man, was a
+self-sacrificing woman, who in 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. It
+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 there buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few, and
+these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked
+to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not
+that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship--he admitted it with
+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 picture to the wall.
+
+"Almost as queer," he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, "as
+that _you_ should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame,
+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.
+Bittacy, 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 picture, "now long
+gone by. It reminds me of another tree--that Kentish lawn in the spring,
+birds singing in the lilacs, and some one in a muslin frock waiting
+patiently beneath a certain cedar--not the one in the picture, I know,
+but--"
+
+"I was not waiting," she said indignantly, "I was picking fir-cones for
+the schoolroom fire--"
+
+"Fir-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 are 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 state.
+
+"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 picture Sanderson had made of the cedar on their present
+lawn. She went all round 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 first--the 'something' trees possess
+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 gaunt 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--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--a 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
+encircling 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 impertinence 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 could
+engulf 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, that 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. And Sanderson's the only man I ever knew who felt it too.
+He's never said so, but there's the proof," and he turned again to the
+picture that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as
+he looked. "I wonder; by Jove, I wonder," his thoughts ran on, "whether
+a tree--er--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
+the power to get away...!"
+
+Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he
+dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.
+Outside the blackbirds 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 heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The
+summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New
+Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.
+
+Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of
+trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves
+of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and
+dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered, circling hour
+by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its melancholy,
+petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the solitary
+pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind,
+travelers 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 bittern from the lonely marshes. The undergrowth of watching
+hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark,
+suggestive 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 afflict it with the
+dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it 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 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 forced to grow one way....
+
+"I'd like to know that artist fellow better," was the thought upon which
+he returned at length 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. In the
+dim light, but for that silvery moustache, 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--"Except yourself and 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
+Baedeker for earth and heaven, did not mention it. Her husband, while
+humoring her, could never alter that instinctive dread 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 had brought, such fragments as he thought
+might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when,
+to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as their mood might
+be. She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions, told him his
+voice was a "lovely reading voice," and enjoyed the little discussions
+that occasions prompted because he always let her with 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 Bittacy 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 the 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, for 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' 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. Great emotion could shake it
+sometimes out of her. She clung to it because her father taught it 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 Bittacy 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. For
+David Bittacy behind his crackling paper had uttered a sharp exclamation
+of surprise. He had lowered 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 is _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 it 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 rims
+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, scenting 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 down 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 round the room. It was
+almost as if she felt some one had come in to them unnoticed.
+
+"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, Sophia, 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 remark about the Bible, and
+not to her judgment of the scientific men. And he did not correct her
+mistake.
+
+"And plants, 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 belong to the great vegetable
+kingdom."
+
+There 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 and wind and rain. Its very right to existence
+seemed in question.
+
+
+
+~II~
+
+Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit
+was a success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of
+it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to
+court a customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.
+
+Mrs. Bittacy 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. The 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 guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!" 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 blase.
+
+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 dusk 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 surely might have told him.
+
+They talked trees from morning to night. It 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 their 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
+upas 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 peremptory 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 whirred 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 Times_ for one thing, left off his speckled
+waistcoats for another. He was absent-minded sometimes; showed vagueness
+in practical details where hitherto he 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. Momentarily 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!"
+
+And 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 by the open window and enjoy the evening while you smoke_."
+
+She was very talkative for a moment; subconscious excitement was the
+cause.
+
+"It is 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. Bittacy'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.
+Bittacy, 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've seen it in the
+night. Your cedar, for instance," looking towards her husband again so
+that Mrs. Bittacy caught the gleaming of his turned eyes, "I failed with
+badly at first, because I did it in the morning. You shall see to-morrow
+what I mean--that 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 and 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 in another's house, perhaps," he
+answered courteously. "But, having chanced to wake, I saw the tree from
+my window, and made my way downstairs."
+
+"It's a wonder Boxer didn't bit you; he sleeps 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 showed in the dusk as he smiled. A smell
+of earth and flowers stole in through the window on a breath of
+wandering air.
+
+Mrs. Bittacy said nothing at the moment. "We both sleep like tops," put
+in her husband, laughing. "You're a courageous man, though, Sanderson,
+and, by Jove, the picture justifies you. Few artist would have taken so
+much trouble, though I read once that Holman Hunt, Rossetti, or some one
+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 woods, in
+forests, in great gatherings of trees everywhere, seemed so real and
+present while he talked.
+
+"The Night transfigures 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 all together. The words floated out across
+the lawn towards the wall of blue darkness where the big Forest swept
+the little garden with its league-long curve that was like the
+shore-line of a sea. A wave of distant sound that was like surf
+accompanied his voice, as though the wind was fain to listen too:
+
+  Not to the staring Day,
+  For all the importunate 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 and glooms
+  Essential, and, their bodily presences
+  Touched with inordinate significance,
+  Wearing the darkness like a livery
+  Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,
+  They brood--they menace--they appall.
+
+The voice of Mrs. Bittacy 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
+alarm. Her husband made no comment; his cigar, she noticed, had gone
+out.
+
+"And old trees in particular," continued the artist, 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. Bittacy who answered; her husband keeping his curious
+deep silence.
+
+"I never did!" 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? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too 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, there's 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 interrupt 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 wide to take the tincture. I'll go and get it, dear, at
+once. It's better." And before he could object she had left the room to
+bring the homeopathic dose that she believed in, and 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 quite a 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.
+
+"Trees 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 Jove, 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. D'you know, I've felt something like that for
+years. As though--" he looked round to make sure his wife was not there,
+then 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. Trees in a mass are
+good; alone, you may take it generally, are--well, dangerous. Look at a
+monkey-puzzler, or better 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 in evil--"
+
+"That cedar, then--?"
+
+"Not evil, no; but alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests all together.
+The poor thing has drifted, that is all."
+
+They were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke so
+fast. It was too condensed. Bittacy hardly followed that last bit. His
+mind floundered among his own less definite, less sorted thoughts, till
+presently another sentence from the artist startled 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 laughed. "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 artist 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. Bittacy's approach. This was a
+sentence he could turn round another way in case she came up and pressed
+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
+rights 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 the birds--an easterly wind--"
+
+Mrs. Bittacy swept in upon them with the tumbler--
+
+"There, David," she said, "that will ward off any beginnings of attack.
+Just a spoonful, dear. Oh, 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--an east wind,"
+she said, "and I am glad, Mr. Sanderson, to hear you think so too."
+
+
+
+~III~
+
+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
+against one of the windows. Mrs. Bittacy started slightly, but no one
+spoke. Above the trees the stars were faintly visible. From the distance
+came the barking of a dog.
+
+Bittacy, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that
+had caught all three.
+
+"It's rather a comforting thought," he said, throwing the match out of
+the window, "that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really
+no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic."
+
+"The universe, yes," said Sanderson, "is 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. Bittacy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared
+long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many
+syllables.
+
+"In trees and plants especially, there dreams an 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 suavely, "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, there's force and
+motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in 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 the 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 Bittacy who hastened to reply.
+
+"Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies," he said
+quietly, "may be due to some kind of life we cannot 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 worlds
+spin for ever 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, though 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 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 their
+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 it is only that, and not--psychological."
+
+He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind
+the yellow shawl. Bittacy 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. Bittacy 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 overawed, but at the same
+time too confused 'mid 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, and 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 formed 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, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case
+may be; for a few, perhaps," he glanced significantly at his host so
+that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, "emotions of a
+curious, flaming splendor that are quite nameless. Well ... whence come
+these powers? Surely from nothing that is ... dead! Does not the
+influence of a forest, its 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 ceased speaking. Mr.
+Bittacy 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. Is it not striking what a lot of the globe
+they cover ... exquisitely organized life, yet stationary, always ready
+to our had when we want them, never running away? But the taking them,
+for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another
+from cutting down trees. And, it's curious that most of the forest tales
+and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened. The
+forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as
+terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Wood-cutters... those who
+take the life of trees... you see a race of haunted men...."
+
+He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt
+something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt
+it still more strongly. For it was in the middle of the heavy silence
+following upon these last remarks, that Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a
+violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to
+something moving towards 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 gold from the sunset, was dimmed
+by its passage. She declared afterwards that it move in "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 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. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly 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 sank to a whisper, shaking. She 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 in the
+darkness for 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 calm
+and 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. Bittacy
+started violently again. Bittacy 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 all so very curious and sudden.
+
+But Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she
+saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It
+emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a 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. Thus to her mind it
+seemed... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten
+and mystify her in 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 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 cedar stops 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...."
+
+Then 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, in answer to the bell, and with her
+came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.
+
+"The lamps," said 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 heaps 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
+overwrought 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, whence it came.
+
+She peered 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 to-night." She made no further reference to her
+husband's visitor.
+
+A 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."
+
+Thompson 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. Bittacy did not
+observe it, "the wind, too, has begun to roar... in the Forest...
+further out."
+
+But Mrs. Bittacy 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. Another
+impression she got too--still more unwelcome--was that her husband
+understood his hidden meaning.
+
+
+
+~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 per voice caught 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 the 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 to-night
+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 he 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 bogeys of the Antichrist and 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--and that a big forest may possess a sort
+of Collective Personality. Remember, he's an artist, and poetical."
+
+"It's dangerous," she said emphatically. "I feel it's playing with fire,
+unwise, unsafe--"
+
+"Yet all to the glory of God," he urged gently. "We must not shut our
+ears and eyes to knowledge--of any kind, must we?"
+
+"With you, David, the wish is always farther 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
+Bittacy settling down to sleep 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--and all that sort of thing--there is a great gulf fixed,
+a gulf that cannot be crossed--er--while we are still in the body."
+
+And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep
+and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy 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 than 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 a spreading tree
+somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand 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 supposed, beside her. There was 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, half-way towards
+the window. The candle-light 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-opened eyes. "David, you're walking in your sleep. Do--come
+back to bed, dear, _please!_"
+
+Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the
+sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His
+widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they looked
+through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the
+direction of the sound, yet cold not see her. They were shining, she
+noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his
+face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety 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... and I... 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, because 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 somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so
+distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.
+Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the
+window-sill, 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--sometimes very close indeed.
+
+
+
+~V~
+
+With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious
+incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away.
+Mrs. Bittacy 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 and to
+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 husband's getting up to say good-bye,
+and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux. In the morning Mr.
+Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town hat and gloves, as she
+saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.
+
+"After all," she thought as she watched the pony-cart 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 behavior. She
+gave him a smile--genuine because the relief she felt was genuine--as he
+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 center of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious
+symptom, waiting to spread at the first favorable 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. Bittacy had balance, 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 fluttered 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 shorn of its old-time comeliness
+and splendor. Far 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. Bittacy'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. Bittacy insisted on the
+branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be chopped;
+also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his
+superintendence 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 Aunt
+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 impreg--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. Bittacy, 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. Didn't you hear what Uncle
+David said? It'll come in and catch us before we've done!"
+
+They worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wisteria tree that
+climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her knitting
+watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages 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. And all her former vague distress crept over
+her. Anxiety, uneasiness returned. That dreadful sinking of the heart
+came too.
+
+This incident of the cedar's 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 and 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 thing
+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 cedar 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, filled her 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 winds 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 souls
+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 hand-axe with him, and
+what he wanted it for.
+
+"To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away," he
+said.
+
+"But can't the verdurers 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 verdurers 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 his quiet words as they went.
+
+And 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 and irresistible. The alteration 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
+intimately with trees, and with all that trees 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--
+
+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, argue it away, or pray it 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 elusive, made, protæan. 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.
+
+Reduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought
+instinctively, it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he
+loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts 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 cam 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 the little village of
+Seillans above St. Raphael--a change so regular for the past ten years
+that it was not even discussed between them--David Bittacy 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 unlit. The fire-light shone on the
+chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon
+the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures
+themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy 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 misunderstood.
+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 its second horrible
+leap.
+
+"David! You mean abroad?" she gasped.
+
+"I mean abroad, dear, yes."
+
+It reminded her of the tone he used when saying good-bye 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 slop-basin, trying with all her might not to
+let him see the trembling of her hand. The firelight and the dimness of
+the room both helped her. But in any case he would hardly have noticed
+it. His thoughts were far away....
+
+
+
+~VI~
+
+Mrs. Bittacy 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 and 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 due, as has
+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, it had a way of creeping back in other 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 escape. 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 in
+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. And 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. But 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 moods. Trees influenced the sources of his
+life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in 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
+Bittacy of the Department knew them.
+
+In 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 marked growth of passionate
+interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow, at first
+had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity
+permitted, 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; but for 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.
+
+After the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as
+her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret--and made up her mind.
+Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would
+certainly be severe--she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but
+this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it,
+too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed
+was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In 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 tea
+things 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, you
+see," his grave 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, and 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 up 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. You've 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 sat 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 eve while scorning 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 betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed
+the border between presentiment 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?" Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.
+
+"Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for you 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.
+Bittacy, 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 bear to know. And she dared not take
+the risk of that.
+
+
+
+~VII~
+
+This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The
+conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and
+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 wholly 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 in 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 south wind left upon their thinning
+boughs. 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 their 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:
+
+  O art thou sighing for Lebanon
+  In the 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 "un-evangelical," 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 prayers she offered thanks for the guidance
+that had 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 vicar, 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. And
+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
+this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most
+problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to
+know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was
+most unusual, in abominable 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 beech 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 thrive upon the stony soil.
+
+"David, the beech is all right and safe." She had learned his
+phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.
+"There's no wind to-night."
+
+"But it's rising," he answered, "rising in the east. I heard it in the
+bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out
+when the wind's upon them from the east."
+
+She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as 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, and 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?
+
+As 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 she 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 flamed in
+her little person--flamed grandly, and invincible. While knowing herself
+insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at 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, in the still
+silence of the night, or when left alone those 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.
+
+Hours 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 and
+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 massed and
+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 depths 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 firelight 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 presentiment 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," she 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 heels, 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 though 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.... Her 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, surely--drawing away. The estrangement was
+here and now--a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing;
+there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty
+distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his
+face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other
+side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving
+while she watched--moving away from her.
+
+They had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he
+volunteered no information of his day. The heart 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. It 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 with a
+climax of almost uncontrollable alarm--upon his face beneath the
+lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of
+moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his
+new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in
+which she had no part.
+
+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 acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of leaves
+mechanically with a smile and a murmured "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.
+
+
+
+~VIII~
+
+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
+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 Seillans--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
+beeches shifted past in rows 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 and 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 serried army,
+darkening 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 sparkled 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,
+nothing ominous to threaten or alarm. Steadfast in her purpose, looking
+back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and
+deliberately into the heart 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 lay in patches of unsightly grey. There were bits of
+heather too. All round the trees stood looking on--oak, beech, holly,
+ash, pine, larch, with 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 qualm.
+
+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 heart 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 were 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 stared 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 her in the face and eyes; they
+stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they
+watched her. Hitherto 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 there 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
+in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily, each and all. The
+rows 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 altogether. 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
+fastened 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 hurry,
+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 sea's 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, and its motion as little discernible as
+the sea's. 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-shut
+lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization
+of something more. The presence that it sought was after all not hers.
+It was the presence of some one 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.
+
+With 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 in 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 enveloping 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 about his steps and hid
+him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The
+trees covered him. The tide just took him, all 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--rapt, and caught
+away in 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--his very heart and soul.
+
+Her sight that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory now
+came back to 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
+noonday, 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 this 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 seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry noonday
+in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of life and
+passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness
+hid 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 heart of the hostile Forest. But at first she did not
+recognize that He was there; she did not know Him in that strangely
+unacceptable guise. 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 on 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 humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but they did
+_ not_ want him dead. Full charged 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 Sanderson 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. Him, whom they loved and 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 let fall across the threshold the
+flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed 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 short-cut
+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 question. 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 the terms of 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
+lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in 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 hated--coming back to rooms
+and walls and furniture. The ceilings and closed windows confined him.
+Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found _her_ irksome. Her presence
+seemed of 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-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for his
+pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early,
+leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the
+hall beside the lamp--all concessions that she felt impelled to make.
+Fore 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 its
+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-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings
+that might make such abandonment--possible, yes, but more than merely
+possible--in some extraordinary sense not evil.
+
+Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp 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 other. Her thought stopped dead
+at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing
+to the largeness 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 and help, that also she came in a measure to understand.
+For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was 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 belittling of her God. It
+was, perhaps, enough that He--knew.
+
+"You are 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 invitation 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.
+
+
+
+~IX~
+
+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. Callers were few and far between,
+and less encouraged than before. The empty dark of winter was before
+them. Among the neighbors was none in whom, 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
+that nuts were the complete food of man, and indulged in other
+idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the "latter signs"
+which Mrs. Bittacy had been 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 deep 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 permit of those
+surface fluctuations which betray 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 in her mind, the walls whereof
+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 instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at the
+newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheroot
+curl up above the edge, noticed 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 conjurer'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 armchair before her eyes
+contained the merest 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; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed always
+talking in the woods, some one 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 though 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 him, 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 shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and
+wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet.
+Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet
+and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of
+mould 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
+bed. She had come back.
+
+The room shone pale in the moonlight reflected through the windows, for
+the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her,
+motionless in 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--herself 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
+round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green,
+spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture.
+They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild 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; for it 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 in his sleep, and woke. And, instantly, the
+forms drew up, erect, and gathered themselves in some amazing way
+together. They lessened in 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 that 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 "looping 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 replies 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 in pine boughs.
+
+"A moment since something went past 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 in 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 part of him was there; only a
+part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay 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 him murmur as he settled down among
+the clothes, "sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which 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 grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one of
+those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried
+faintly in her heart--
+
+"There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that--"
+
+Then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was
+vilely 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 coming again and again upon her; that she stood
+upon a wee, bare rock I 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 sort 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.
+Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in
+disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies
+and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts.
+Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn 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 and away 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,
+streamed 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. This 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
+one satisfaction she had known--the feeling that it was sweet to suffer
+for his sake--went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of
+the trees ... mid 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 in 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 exist of the tunnel; it faded away into
+a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the
+merest 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, 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. There 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 whole of that black tunnel, feeling about
+her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant
+parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle 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 rôle
+of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least
+aped 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 dark. For hours she had been watching
+the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. "They go walking
+and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they
+call so loudly to you."
+
+And 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 are 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, for
+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 with a 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 bellowed 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 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. There 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 husband 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 giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon
+the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It
+lay there like a mass of drift-wood 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 Project Gutenberg's The Man Whom the Trees Loved, by Algernon Blackwood
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Man Whom the Trees Loved, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man Whom the Trees Loved
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: February 29, 2004 [EBook #11377]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Harry Jones and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN
+
+WHOM THE TREES LOVED
+
+ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+~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 beeches in the whole world were alike. 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, and, while his perception of a Tree
+Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost
+approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that
+particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush--shining, frowning,
+dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It
+emerged.
+
+There was nothing else in the wide world 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 in 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 Bittacy, C.B., 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, half to
+persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wife
+thought otherwise), and half 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. Bittacy was held to be austere,
+not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of
+nature that had been fostered by years 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 in 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. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergy-man, was a
+self-sacrificing woman, who in 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. It
+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 there buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few, and
+these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked
+to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not
+that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship--he admitted it with
+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 picture to the wall.
+
+"Almost as queer," he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, "as
+that _you_ should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame,
+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.
+Bittacy, 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 picture, "now long
+gone by. It reminds me of another tree--that Kentish lawn in the spring,
+birds singing in the lilacs, and some one in a muslin frock waiting
+patiently beneath a certain cedar--not the one in the picture, I know,
+but--"
+
+"I was not waiting," she said indignantly, "I was picking fir-cones for
+the schoolroom fire--"
+
+"Fir-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 are 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 state.
+
+"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 picture Sanderson had made of the cedar on their present
+lawn. She went all round 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 first--the 'something' trees possess
+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 gaunt 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--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--a 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
+encircling 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 impertinence 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 could
+engulf 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, that 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. And Sanderson's the only man I ever knew who felt it too.
+He's never said so, but there's the proof," and he turned again to the
+picture that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as
+he looked. "I wonder; by Jove, I wonder," his thoughts ran on, "whether
+a tree--er--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
+the power to get away...!"
+
+Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he
+dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.
+Outside the blackbirds 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 heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The
+summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New
+Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.
+
+Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of
+trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves
+of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and
+dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered, circling hour
+by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its melancholy,
+petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the solitary
+pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind,
+travelers 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 bittern from the lonely marshes. The undergrowth of watching
+hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark,
+suggestive 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 afflict it with the
+dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it 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 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 forced to grow one way....
+
+"I'd like to know that artist fellow better," was the thought upon which
+he returned at length 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. In the
+dim light, but for that silvery moustache, 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--"Except yourself and 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
+Baedeker for earth and heaven, did not mention it. Her husband, while
+humoring her, could never alter that instinctive dread 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 had brought, such fragments as he thought
+might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when,
+to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as their mood might
+be. She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions, told him his
+voice was a "lovely reading voice," and enjoyed the little discussions
+that occasions prompted because he always let her with 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 Bittacy 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 the 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, for 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' 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. Great emotion could shake it
+sometimes out of her. She clung to it because her father taught it 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 Bittacy 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. For
+David Bittacy behind his crackling paper had uttered a sharp exclamation
+of surprise. He had lowered 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 is _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 it 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 rims
+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, scenting 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 down 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 round the room. It was
+almost as if she felt some one had come in to them unnoticed.
+
+"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, Sophia, 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 remark about the Bible, and
+not to her judgment of the scientific men. And he did not correct her
+mistake.
+
+"And plants, 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 belong to the great vegetable
+kingdom."
+
+There 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 and wind and rain. Its very right to existence
+seemed in question.
+
+
+
+~II~
+
+Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit
+was a success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of
+it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to
+court a customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.
+
+Mrs. Bittacy 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. The 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 guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!" 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 blase.
+
+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 dusk 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 surely might have told him.
+
+They talked trees from morning to night. It 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 their 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
+upas 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 peremptory 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 whirred 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 Times_ for one thing, left off his speckled
+waistcoats for another. He was absent-minded sometimes; showed vagueness
+in practical details where hitherto he 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. Momentarily 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!"
+
+And 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 by the open window and enjoy the evening while you smoke_."
+
+She was very talkative for a moment; subconscious excitement was the
+cause.
+
+"It is 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. Bittacy'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.
+Bittacy, 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've seen it in the
+night. Your cedar, for instance," looking towards her husband again so
+that Mrs. Bittacy caught the gleaming of his turned eyes, "I failed with
+badly at first, because I did it in the morning. You shall see to-morrow
+what I mean--that 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 and 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 in another's house, perhaps," he
+answered courteously. "But, having chanced to wake, I saw the tree from
+my window, and made my way downstairs."
+
+"It's a wonder Boxer didn't bit you; he sleeps 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 showed in the dusk as he smiled. A smell
+of earth and flowers stole in through the window on a breath of
+wandering air.
+
+Mrs. Bittacy said nothing at the moment. "We both sleep like tops," put
+in her husband, laughing. "You're a courageous man, though, Sanderson,
+and, by Jove, the picture justifies you. Few artist would have taken so
+much trouble, though I read once that Holman Hunt, Rossetti, or some one
+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 woods, in
+forests, in great gatherings of trees everywhere, seemed so real and
+present while he talked.
+
+"The Night transfigures 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 all together. The words floated out across
+the lawn towards the wall of blue darkness where the big Forest swept
+the little garden with its league-long curve that was like the
+shore-line of a sea. A wave of distant sound that was like surf
+accompanied his voice, as though the wind was fain to listen too:
+
+  Not to the staring Day,
+  For all the importunate 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 and glooms
+  Essential, and, their bodily presences
+  Touched with inordinate significance,
+  Wearing the darkness like a livery
+  Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,
+  They brood--they menace--they appall.
+
+The voice of Mrs. Bittacy 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
+alarm. Her husband made no comment; his cigar, she noticed, had gone
+out.
+
+"And old trees in particular," continued the artist, 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. Bittacy who answered; her husband keeping his curious
+deep silence.
+
+"I never did!" 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? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too 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, there's 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 interrupt 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 wide to take the tincture. I'll go and get it, dear, at
+once. It's better." And before he could object she had left the room to
+bring the homeopathic dose that she believed in, and 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 quite a 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.
+
+"Trees 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 Jove, 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. D'you know, I've felt something like that for
+years. As though--" he looked round to make sure his wife was not there,
+then 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. Trees in a mass are
+good; alone, you may take it generally, are--well, dangerous. Look at a
+monkey-puzzler, or better 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 in evil--"
+
+"That cedar, then--?"
+
+"Not evil, no; but alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests all together.
+The poor thing has drifted, that is all."
+
+They were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke so
+fast. It was too condensed. Bittacy hardly followed that last bit. His
+mind floundered among his own less definite, less sorted thoughts, till
+presently another sentence from the artist startled 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 laughed. "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 artist 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. Bittacy's approach. This was a
+sentence he could turn round another way in case she came up and pressed
+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
+rights 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 the birds--an easterly wind--"
+
+Mrs. Bittacy swept in upon them with the tumbler--
+
+"There, David," she said, "that will ward off any beginnings of attack.
+Just a spoonful, dear. Oh, 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--an east wind,"
+she said, "and I am glad, Mr. Sanderson, to hear you think so too."
+
+
+
+~III~
+
+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
+against one of the windows. Mrs. Bittacy started slightly, but no one
+spoke. Above the trees the stars were faintly visible. From the distance
+came the barking of a dog.
+
+Bittacy, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that
+had caught all three.
+
+"It's rather a comforting thought," he said, throwing the match out of
+the window, "that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really
+no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic."
+
+"The universe, yes," said Sanderson, "is 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. Bittacy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared
+long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many
+syllables.
+
+"In trees and plants especially, there dreams an 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 suavely, "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, there's force and
+motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in 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 the 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 Bittacy who hastened to reply.
+
+"Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies," he said
+quietly, "may be due to some kind of life we cannot 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 worlds
+spin for ever 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, though 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 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 their
+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 it is only that, and not--psychological."
+
+He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind
+the yellow shawl. Bittacy 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. Bittacy 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 overawed, but at the same
+time too confused 'mid 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, and 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 formed 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, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case
+may be; for a few, perhaps," he glanced significantly at his host so
+that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, "emotions of a
+curious, flaming splendor that are quite nameless. Well ... whence come
+these powers? Surely from nothing that is ... dead! Does not the
+influence of a forest, its 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 ceased speaking. Mr.
+Bittacy 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. Is it not striking what a lot of the globe
+they cover ... exquisitely organized life, yet stationary, always ready
+to our had when we want them, never running away? But the taking them,
+for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another
+from cutting down trees. And, it's curious that most of the forest tales
+and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened. The
+forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as
+terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Wood-cutters... those who
+take the life of trees... you see a race of haunted men...."
+
+He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt
+something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt
+it still more strongly. For it was in the middle of the heavy silence
+following upon these last remarks, that Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a
+violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to
+something moving towards 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 gold from the sunset, was dimmed
+by its passage. She declared afterwards that it move in "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 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. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly 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 sank to a whisper, shaking. She 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 in the
+darkness for 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 calm
+and 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. Bittacy
+started violently again. Bittacy 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 all so very curious and sudden.
+
+But Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she
+saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It
+emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a 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. Thus to her mind it
+seemed... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten
+and mystify her in 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 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 cedar stops 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...."
+
+Then 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, in answer to the bell, and with her
+came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.
+
+"The lamps," said 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 heaps 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
+overwrought 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, whence it came.
+
+She peered 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 to-night." She made no further reference to her
+husband's visitor.
+
+A 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."
+
+Thompson 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. Bittacy did not
+observe it, "the wind, too, has begun to roar... in the Forest...
+further out."
+
+But Mrs. Bittacy 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. Another
+impression she got too--still more unwelcome--was that her husband
+understood his hidden meaning.
+
+
+
+~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 per voice caught 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 the 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 to-night
+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 he 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 bogeys of the Antichrist and 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--and that a big forest may possess a sort
+of Collective Personality. Remember, he's an artist, and poetical."
+
+"It's dangerous," she said emphatically. "I feel it's playing with fire,
+unwise, unsafe--"
+
+"Yet all to the glory of God," he urged gently. "We must not shut our
+ears and eyes to knowledge--of any kind, must we?"
+
+"With you, David, the wish is always farther 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
+Bittacy settling down to sleep 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--and all that sort of thing--there is a great gulf fixed,
+a gulf that cannot be crossed--er--while we are still in the body."
+
+And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep
+and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy 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 than 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 a spreading tree
+somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand 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 supposed, beside her. There was 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, half-way towards
+the window. The candle-light 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-opened eyes. "David, you're walking in your sleep. Do--come
+back to bed, dear, _please!_"
+
+Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the
+sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His
+widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they looked
+through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the
+direction of the sound, yet cold not see her. They were shining, she
+noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his
+face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety 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... and I... 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, because 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 somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so
+distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.
+Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the
+window-sill, 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--sometimes very close indeed.
+
+
+
+~V~
+
+With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious
+incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away.
+Mrs. Bittacy 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 and to
+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 husband's getting up to say good-bye,
+and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux. In the morning Mr.
+Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town hat and gloves, as she
+saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.
+
+"After all," she thought as she watched the pony-cart 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 behavior. She
+gave him a smile--genuine because the relief she felt was genuine--as he
+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 center of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious
+symptom, waiting to spread at the first favorable 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. Bittacy had balance, 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 fluttered 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 shorn of its old-time comeliness
+and splendor. Far 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. Bittacy'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. Bittacy insisted on the
+branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be chopped;
+also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his
+superintendence 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 Aunt
+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 impreg--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. Bittacy, 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. Didn't you hear what Uncle
+David said? It'll come in and catch us before we've done!"
+
+They worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wisteria tree that
+climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her knitting
+watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages 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. And all her former vague distress crept over
+her. Anxiety, uneasiness returned. That dreadful sinking of the heart
+came too.
+
+This incident of the cedar's 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 and 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 thing
+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 cedar 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, filled her 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 winds 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 souls
+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 hand-axe with him, and
+what he wanted it for.
+
+"To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away," he
+said.
+
+"But can't the verdurers 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 verdurers 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 his quiet words as they went.
+
+And 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 and irresistible. The alteration 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
+intimately with trees, and with all that trees 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--
+
+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, argue it away, or pray it 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 elusive, made, protaean. 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.
+
+Reduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought
+instinctively, it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he
+loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts 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 cam 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 the little village of
+Seillans above St. Raphael--a change so regular for the past ten years
+that it was not even discussed between them--David Bittacy 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 unlit. The fire-light shone on the
+chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon
+the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures
+themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy 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 misunderstood.
+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 its second horrible
+leap.
+
+"David! You mean abroad?" she gasped.
+
+"I mean abroad, dear, yes."
+
+It reminded her of the tone he used when saying good-bye 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 slop-basin, trying with all her might not to
+let him see the trembling of her hand. The firelight and the dimness of
+the room both helped her. But in any case he would hardly have noticed
+it. His thoughts were far away....
+
+
+
+~VI~
+
+Mrs. Bittacy 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 and 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 due, as has
+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, it had a way of creeping back in other 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 escape. 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 in
+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. And 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. But 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 moods. Trees influenced the sources of his
+life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in 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
+Bittacy of the Department knew them.
+
+In 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 marked growth of passionate
+interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow, at first
+had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity
+permitted, 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; but for 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.
+
+After the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as
+her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret--and made up her mind.
+Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would
+certainly be severe--she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but
+this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it,
+too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed
+was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In 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 tea
+things 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, you
+see," his grave 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, and 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 up 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. You've 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 sat 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 eve while scorning 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 betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed
+the border between presentiment 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?" Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.
+
+"Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for you 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.
+Bittacy, 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 bear to know. And she dared not take
+the risk of that.
+
+
+
+~VII~
+
+This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The
+conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and
+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 wholly 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 in 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 south wind left upon their thinning
+boughs. 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 their 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:
+
+  O art thou sighing for Lebanon
+  In the 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 "un-evangelical," 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 prayers she offered thanks for the guidance
+that had 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 vicar, 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. And
+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
+this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most
+problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to
+know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was
+most unusual, in abominable 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 beech 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 thrive upon the stony soil.
+
+"David, the beech is all right and safe." She had learned his
+phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.
+"There's no wind to-night."
+
+"But it's rising," he answered, "rising in the east. I heard it in the
+bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out
+when the wind's upon them from the east."
+
+She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as 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, and 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?
+
+As 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 she 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 flamed in
+her little person--flamed grandly, and invincible. While knowing herself
+insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at 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, in the still
+silence of the night, or when left alone those 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.
+
+Hours 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 and
+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 massed and
+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 depths 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 firelight 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 presentiment 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," she 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 heels, 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 though 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.... Her 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, surely--drawing away. The estrangement was
+here and now--a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing;
+there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty
+distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his
+face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other
+side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving
+while she watched--moving away from her.
+
+They had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he
+volunteered no information of his day. The heart 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. It 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 with a
+climax of almost uncontrollable alarm--upon his face beneath the
+lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of
+moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his
+new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in
+which she had no part.
+
+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 acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of leaves
+mechanically with a smile and a murmured "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.
+
+
+
+~VIII~
+
+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
+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 Seillans--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
+beeches shifted past in rows 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 and 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 serried army,
+darkening 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 sparkled 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,
+nothing ominous to threaten or alarm. Steadfast in her purpose, looking
+back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and
+deliberately into the heart 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 lay in patches of unsightly grey. There were bits of
+heather too. All round the trees stood looking on--oak, beech, holly,
+ash, pine, larch, with 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 qualm.
+
+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 heart 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 were 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 stared 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 her in the face and eyes; they
+stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they
+watched her. Hitherto 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 there 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
+in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily, each and all. The
+rows 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 altogether. 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
+fastened 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 hurry,
+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 sea's 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, and its motion as little discernible as
+the sea's. 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-shut
+lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization
+of something more. The presence that it sought was after all not hers.
+It was the presence of some one 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.
+
+With 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 in 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 enveloping 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 about his steps and hid
+him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The
+trees covered him. The tide just took him, all 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--rapt, and caught
+away in 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--his very heart and soul.
+
+Her sight that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory now
+came back to 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
+noonday, 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 this 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 seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry noonday
+in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of life and
+passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness
+hid 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 heart of the hostile Forest. But at first she did not
+recognize that He was there; she did not know Him in that strangely
+unacceptable guise. 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 on 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 humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but they did
+_ not_ want him dead. Full charged 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 Sanderson 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. Him, whom they loved and 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 let fall across the threshold the
+flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed 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 short-cut
+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 question. 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 the terms of 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
+lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in 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 hated--coming back to rooms
+and walls and furniture. The ceilings and closed windows confined him.
+Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found _her_ irksome. Her presence
+seemed of 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-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for his
+pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early,
+leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the
+hall beside the lamp--all concessions that she felt impelled to make.
+Fore 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 its
+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-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings
+that might make such abandonment--possible, yes, but more than merely
+possible--in some extraordinary sense not evil.
+
+Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp 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 other. Her thought stopped dead
+at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing
+to the largeness 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 and help, that also she came in a measure to understand.
+For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was 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 belittling of her God. It
+was, perhaps, enough that He--knew.
+
+"You are 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 invitation 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.
+
+
+
+~IX~
+
+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. Callers were few and far between,
+and less encouraged than before. The empty dark of winter was before
+them. Among the neighbors was none in whom, 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
+that nuts were the complete food of man, and indulged in other
+idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the "latter signs"
+which Mrs. Bittacy had been 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 deep 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 permit of those
+surface fluctuations which betray 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 in her mind, the walls whereof
+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 instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at the
+newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheroot
+curl up above the edge, noticed 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 conjurer'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 armchair before her eyes
+contained the merest 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; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed always
+talking in the woods, some one 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 though 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 him, 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 shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and
+wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet.
+Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet
+and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of
+mould 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
+bed. She had come back.
+
+The room shone pale in the moonlight reflected through the windows, for
+the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her,
+motionless in 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--herself 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
+round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green,
+spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture.
+They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild 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; for it 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 in his sleep, and woke. And, instantly, the
+forms drew up, erect, and gathered themselves in some amazing way
+together. They lessened in 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 that 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 "looping 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 replies 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 in pine boughs.
+
+"A moment since something went past 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 in 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 part of him was there; only a
+part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay 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 him murmur as he settled down among
+the clothes, "sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which 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 grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one of
+those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried
+faintly in her heart--
+
+"There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that--"
+
+Then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was
+vilely 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 coming again and again upon her; that she stood
+upon a wee, bare rock I 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 sort 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.
+Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in
+disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies
+and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts.
+Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn 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 and away 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,
+streamed 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. This 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
+one satisfaction she had known--the feeling that it was sweet to suffer
+for his sake--went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of
+the trees ... mid 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 in 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 exist of the tunnel; it faded away into
+a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the
+merest 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, 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. There 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 whole of that black tunnel, feeling about
+her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant
+parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle 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 wants with an honest care that at least
+aped 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 dark. For hours she had been watching
+the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. "They go walking
+and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they
+call so loudly to you."
+
+And 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 are 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, for
+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 with a 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 bellowed 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 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. There 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 husband 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 giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon
+the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It
+lay there like a mass of drift-wood 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 Project Gutenberg's The Man Whom the Trees Loved, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED ***
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