My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood which
make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe; which have
the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so one may lose
one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all around
us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a
truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often
shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in
this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a
single shape until the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as
“dog,” thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like
“snark” or “pobble.” It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by
repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable
as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be for
this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps
they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are
repeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps
a man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air
with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through
thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a pine
tree. However this may be, there is something singularly thrilling, even
something urgent and intolerant, about the endless forest repetitions;
there is the hint of something like madness in that musical monotony of
the pines.
I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonic
truth, “Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post.”
My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions,
especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one
of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the provincial
telegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals they made a
difference when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole we
could see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundred
straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgment
suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur lines
seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have sworn
they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and waver
everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraph
post the pines were crooked--and alive. That lonely vertical rod at once
deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet
made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly.
“Yes,” said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. “You don't know
what a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees
are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual
civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles.”
We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than we
intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out into
a yellow evening when we came out of the forest on to the hills above
a strange town or village, of which the lights had already begun to
glitter in the darkening valley. The change had already happened which
is the test and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed
still as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especially
at the edges, the hills and the pine-tops. This brought out yet more
clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods; and my friend cast a regretful
glance at them as he came out under the sky. Then he turned to the view
in front; and, as it happened, one of the telegraph posts stood up in
front of him in the last sunlight. It was no longer crossed and softened
by the more delicate lines of pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary,
and angular as any crude figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing
his stick at it, and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.
“Demon,” he said to me briefly, “behold your work. That palace of
proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men,
Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your
dreary rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest,
tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch. And the
upshot of that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty. Now lift up your
eyes and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the white
buttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if you
dare.”
“Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?” I asked. “I
fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends,
about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the
telegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to doctrine
but rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine about a
telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modern
things are ugly, because modern men are careless, not because they are
careful.”
“No,” answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid and
sprawling sunset, “there is something intrinsically deadening about
the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is
always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because
they are carrying across the world the real message of democracy.”
“At this moment,” I answered, “they are probably carrying across the
world the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt
communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His
children with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph
poles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent. But their
baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That black stick
with white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a multitude. It is
the mad creation of the souls of two millionaires.”
“At least you have to explain,” answered my friend gravely, “how it is
that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have
appeared together; you have... But bless my soul, we must be getting
home. I had no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is our
way through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph post for
entirely different reasons and get home before it is dark.”
We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another we had
underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night,
especially in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after the
first five minutes' march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes
after, had stuck nearly to the knees in mire, we began to have some
suspicion of our direction. At last my friend said, in a low, husky
voice:
“I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark.”
“I thought we went the right way,” I said, tentatively.
“Well,” he said; and then, after a long pause, “I can't see any
telegraph poles. I've been looking for them.”
“So have I,” I said. “They're so straight.”
We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of the
fringe of trees which seemed to dance round us in derision. Here and
there, however, it was possible to trace the outline of something just
too erect and rigid to be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our way
home, arriving in a cold green twilight before dawn.