The Incident of the Unknown Tree
Dr. Lewis, smiling indulgently, and quite prepared for some monstrous
piece of theorizing, led Remnant into the room that overlooked the
terraced garden and the sea.
The doctor’s house, though it was only a ten minutes’ walk from the
center of the town, seemed remote from all other habitations. The drive
to it from the road came through a deep grove of trees and a dense
shrubbery, trees were about the house on either side, mingling with
neighboring groves, and below, the garden fell down, terrace by green
terrace, to wild growth, a twisted path amongst red rocks, and at last
to the yellow sand of a little cove. The room to which the doctor took
Remnant looked over these terraces and across the water to the dim
boundaries of the bay. It had French windows that were thrown wide
open, and the two men sat in the soft light of the lamp—this was before
the days of severe lighting regulations in the Far West—and enjoyed the
sweet odors and the sweet vision of the summer evening. Then Remnant
began:
“I suppose, Lewis, you’ve heard these extraordinary stories of bees and
dogs and things that have been going about lately?”
“Certainly I have heard them. I was called in at Plas Newydd, and
treated Thomas Trevor, who’s only just out of danger, by the way. I
certified for the poor child, Mary Trevor. She was dying when I got to
the place. There was no doubt she was stung to death by bees, and I
believe there were other very similar cases at Llantarnam and Morwen;
none fatal, I think. What about them?”
“Well: then there are the stories of good-tempered old sheepdogs
turning wicked and ‘savaging’ children?”
“Quite so. I haven’t seen any of these cases professionally; but I
believe the stories are accurate enough.”
“And the old woman assaulted by her own poultry?”
“That’s perfectly true. Her daughter put some stuff of their own
concoction on her face and neck, and then she came to me. The wounds
seemed going all right, so I told her to continue the treatment,
whatever it might be.”
“Very good,” said Mr. Remnant. He spoke now with an italic
impressiveness. “_Don’t you see the link between all this and the
horrible things that have been happening about here for the last
month?_”
Lewis stared at Remnant in amazement. He lifted his red eyebrows and
lowered them in a kind of scowl. His speech showed traces of his native
accent.
“Great burning!” he exclaimed. “What on earth are you getting at now?
It is madness. Do you mean to tell me that you think there is some
connection between a swarm or two of bees that have turned nasty, a
cross dog, and a wicked old barn-door cock and these poor people that
have been pitched over the cliffs and hammered to death on the road?
There’s no sense in it, you know.”
“I am strongly inclined to believe that there is a great deal of sense
in it,” replied Remnant, with extreme calmness. “Look here, Lewis, I
saw you grinning the other day at the club when I was telling the
fellows that in my opinion all these outrages had been committed,
certainly by the Germans, but by some method of which we have no
conception. But what I meant to say when I talked about inconceivables
was just this: that the Williams’s and the rest of them have been
killed in some way that’s not in theory at all, not in our theory, at
all events, some way we’ve not contemplated, not thought of for an
instant. Do you see my point?”
“Well, in a sort of way. You mean there’s an absolute originality in
the method? I suppose that is so. But what next?”
Remnant seemed to hesitate, partly from a sense of the portentous
nature of what he was about to say, partly from a sort of
half-unwillingness to part with so profound a secret.
“Well,” he said, “you will allow that we have two sets of phenomena of
a very extraordinary kind occurring at the same time. Don’t you think
that it’s only reasonable to connect the two sets with one another.”
“So the philosopher of Tenterden steeple and the Goodwin Sands thought,
certainly,” said Lewis. “But what is the connection? Those poor folks
on the Highway weren’t stung by bees or worried by a dog. And horses
don’t throw people over cliffs or stifle them in marshes.”
“No; I never meant to suggest anything so absurd. It is evident to me
that in all these cases of animals turning suddenly savage the cause
has been terror, panic, fear. The horses that went charging into the
camp were mad with fright, we know. And I say that in the other
instances we have been discussing the cause was the same. The creatures
were exposed to an infection of fear, and a frightened beast or bird or
insect uses its weapons, whatever they may be. If, for example, there
had been anybody with those horses when they took their panic they
would have lashed out at him with their heels.”
“Yes, I dare say that that is so. Well.”
“Well; my belief is that the Germans have made an extraordinary
discovery. I have called it the Z Ray. You know that the ether is
merely an hypothesis; we have to suppose that it’s there to account for
the passage of the Marconi current from one place to another. Now,
suppose that there is a psychic ether as well as a material ether,
suppose that it is possible to direct irresistible impulses across this
medium, suppose that these impulses are towards murder or suicide; then
I think that you have an explanation of the terrible series of events
that have been happening in Meirion for the last few weeks. And it is
quite clear to my mind that the horses and the other creatures have
been exposed to this Z Ray, and that it has produced on them the effect
of terror, with ferocity as the result of terror. Now what do you say
to that? Telepathy, you know, is well established; so is hypnotic
suggestion. You have only to look in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ to
see that, and suggestion is so strong in some cases as to be an
irresistible imperative. Now don’t you feel that putting telepathy and
suggestion together, as it were, you have more than the elements of
what I call the Z Ray? I feel myself that I have more to go on in
making my hypothesis than the inventor of the steam engine had in
making his hypothesis when he saw the lid of the kettle bobbing up and
down. What do you say?”
Dr. Lewis made no answer. He was watching the growth of a new, unknown
tree in his garden.
The doctor made no answer to Remnant’s question. For one thing, Remnant
was profuse in his eloquence—he has been rigidly condensed in this
history—and Lewis was tired of the sound of his voice. For another
thing, he found the Z Ray theory almost too extravagant to be bearable,
wild enough to tear patience to tatters. And then as the tedious
argument continued Lewis became conscious that there was something
strange about the night.
It was a dark summer night. The moon was old and faint, above the
Dragon’s Head across the bay, and the air was very still. It was so
still that Lewis had noted that not a leaf stirred on the very tip of a
high tree that stood out against the sky; and yet he knew that he was
listening to some sound that he could not determine or define. It was
not the wind in the leaves, it was not the gentle wash of the water of
the sea against the rocks; that latter sound he could distinguish quite
easily. But there was something else. It was scarcely a sound; it was
as if the air itself trembled and fluttered, as the air trembles in a
church when they open the great pedal pipes of the organ.
The doctor listened intently. It was not an illusion, the sound was not
in his own head, as he had suspected for a moment; but for the life of
him he could not make out whence it came or what it was. He gazed down
into the night over the terraces of his garden, now sweet with the
scent of the flowers of the night; tried to peer over the tree-tops
across the sea towards the Dragon’s Head. It struck him suddenly that
this strange fluttering vibration of the air might be the noise of a
distant aeroplane or airship; there was not the usual droning hum, but
this sound might be caused by a new type of engine. A new type of
engine? Possibly it was an enemy airship; their range, it had been
said, was getting longer; and Lewis was just going to call Remnant’s
attention to the sound, to its possible cause, and to the possible
danger that might be hovering over them, when he saw something that
caught his breath and his heart with wild amazement and a touch of
terror.
He had been staring upward into the sky, and, about to speak to
Remnant, he had let his eyes drop for an instant. He looked down
towards the trees in the garden, and saw with utter astonishment that
one had changed its shape in the few hours that had passed since the
setting of the sun. There was a thick grove of ilexes bordering the
lowest terrace, and above them rose one tall pine, spreading its head
of sparse, dark branches dark against the sky.
As Lewis glanced down over the terraces he saw that the tall pine tree
was no longer there. In its place there rose above the ilexes what
might have been a greater ilex; there was the blackness of a dense
growth of foliage rising like a broad and far-spreading and rounded
cloud over the lesser trees.
Here, then was a sight wholly incredible, impossible. It is doubtful
whether the process of the human mind in such a case has ever been
analyzed and registered; it is doubtful whether it ever can be
registered. It is hardly fair to bring in the mathematician, since he
deals with absolute truth (so far as mortality can conceive absolute
truth); but how would a mathematician feel if he were suddenly
confronted with a two-sided triangle? I suppose he would instantly
become a raging madman; and Lewis, staring wide-eyed and wild-eyed at a
dark and spreading tree which his own experience informed him was not
there, felt for an instant that shock which should affront us all when
we first realize the intolerable antinomy of Achilles and the Tortoise.
Common sense tells us that Achilles will flash past the tortoise almost
with the speed of the lightning; the inflexible truth of mathematics
assures us that till the earth boils and the heavens cease to endure
the Tortoise must still be in advance; and thereupon we should, in
common decency, go mad. We do not go mad, because, by special grace, we
are certified that, in the final court of appeal, all science is a lie,
even the highest science of all; and so we simply grin at Achilles and
the Tortoise, as we grin at Darwin, deride Huxley, and laugh at Herbert
Spencer.
Dr. Lewis did not grin. He glared into the dimness of the night, at the
great spreading tree that he knew could not be there. And as he gazed
he saw that what at first appeared the dense blackness of foliage was
fretted and starred with wonderful appearances of lights and colors.
Afterwards he said to me: “I remember thinking to myself: ‘Look here, I
am not delirious; my temperature is perfectly normal. I am not drunk; I
only had a pint of Graves with my dinner, over three hours ago. I have
not eaten any poisonous fungus; I have not taken _Anhelonium Lewinii_
experimentally. So, now then! What is happening?’”
The night had gloomed over; clouds obscured the faint moon and the
misty stars. Lewis rose, with some kind of warning and inhibiting
gesture to Remnant, who, he was conscious was gaping at him in
astonishment. He walked to the open French window, and took a pace
forward on to the path outside, and looked, very intently, at the dark
shape of the tree, down below the sloping garden, above the washing of
the waves. He shaded the light of the lamp behind him by holding his
hands on each side of his eyes.
The mass of the tree—the tree that couldn’t be there—stood out against
the sky, but not so clearly, now that the clouds had rolled up. Its
edges, the limits of its leafage, were not so distinct. Lewis thought
that he could detect some sort of quivering movement in it; though the
air was at a dead calm. It was a night on which one might hold up a
lighted match and watch it burn without any wavering or inclination of
the flame.
“You know,” said Lewis, “how a bit of burnt paper will sometimes hang
over the coals before it goes up the chimney, and little worms of fire
will shoot through it. It was like that, if you should be standing some
distance away. Just threads and hairs of yellow light I saw, and specks
and sparks of fire, and then a twinkling of a ruby no bigger than a pin
point, and a green wandering in the black, as if an emerald were
crawling, and then little veins of deep blue. ‘Woe is me!’ I said to
myself in Welsh, ‘What is all this color and burning?’
“And, then, at that very moment there came a thundering rap at the door
of the room inside, and there was my man telling me that I was wanted
directly up at the Garth, as old Mr. Trevor Williams had been taken
very bad. I knew his heart was not worth much, so I had to go off
directly, and leave Remnant to make what he could of it all.”