THE MAN WHOM THE TREES
LOVED
[Illustration: THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED]
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 favourite 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 realise 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 clergyman, 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 emphasised 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 cheques 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 criticise.
‘I do think, perhaps, it was just a little extravagant, dear,’ said
Mrs. Bittacy, referring to the cedar cheque, ‘when we want a lawn-mower
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 solitary state.
‘You’re as full of dreams as ever,’ she said gently, ‘and I don’t
regret the cheque a bit--really. Only it would have been more real if
it had been the original tree, wouldn’t it?’
‘That was blown down long 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
sombre 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
coloured 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, travellers like the gipsies 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 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 civilised, 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
splendour 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 here 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 this 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
humouring 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 win them
with ‘Ah, Sophia, I had never thought of it quite in _that_ way before;
but now you mention it I must say I think there’s something in it....’
For David 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 up-bringing, 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 italicised 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 sniffing 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 him 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 thing 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.