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 realised it--the alien
desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when
all her Eastern brothers call to 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 splendour 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 gipsies camped. Nothing
else would grow there, but the hollies throve 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 linger
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 to 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 characterised 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 vigour.
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 realised 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 centre was dreadfully increasing.
The sense of definite battle, too--battle between herself and the
Forest for his soul--came with it. Its presentment 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 through all creation.
The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature
shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the
window--standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across
the little lawn--this Forest understood it equally. The remorseless,
branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it
loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million
leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously
directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees
this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious
wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps
powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with
endless reinforcements, and once it realised 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;--realised 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 odour 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 for 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 he 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.