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 the 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 realised 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 interpretation 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 realised, 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 above her, that the

needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread

perception of the Forest was focussed 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 realised

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 hide 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 realised, 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 realised 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 recognise 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 marvelled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which

she found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw

the truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on

her way. The Forest did not want her.

The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.

And so, in another of those flashes of clear-vision that of late had

lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole

terrible thing complete.

Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been

that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her--to

merge his life in theirs--even to kill him in some mysterious way. This

time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the

fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy

of animals or 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 recognised 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.

For more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out

after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept

until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards

his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so

softly. Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her,

she lay awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The

thing against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete,

a fact accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the

Forest.

Moreover, the time for evacuation--her own evacuation--seemed

approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the

rising tide she used to dread. At the high-water mark she stood waiting

calmly--waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn all those terrible

days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding 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 recognised. 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 realise 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.