IV

‘David, dear,’ she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs,

‘I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of

it.’ The tremor in her voice 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 theofosical

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 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 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, realised 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 that night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy

dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It

passed immediately with full waking, for, listen as she might, there

was nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was

in her dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But

the sound was recognisable, 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 recognised 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, halfway 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 could 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, recognising 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 recognised 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 or 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

behaviour. 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 centre of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious

symptom, waiting to spread at the first favourable opportunity. She

prayed against it every night and morning: prayed that she might forget

it--that God would keep her husband safe from harm.

For in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as

weakness, Mrs. 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 this

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 splendour. Far more of the Forest was

now visible than before; it peered through the breach of the broken

defences. 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 defence 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 half 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 wistaria 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 homoeopathic 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 realised 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 in 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 focussed it to get the truth

behind it. It was too utterly elusive, mad, 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 came nearer, booming in

fitful gusts about its edge and frontiers.

Meanwhile the summer dimmed. The autumn winds went sighing through the

woods; leaves turned to golden red, and the evenings were drawing in

with cosy 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 firelight 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 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....