[Frontispiece: The Forest Giant]
[Illustration: Title page]
_The Forest Giant_
_by_
ADRIEN LE CORBEAU
_Translated from the French by_
J. H. ROSS
_Jonathan Cape_
ELEVEN GOWER STREET LONDON
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIV
MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD.
FROME AND
LONDON
_Contents_
CHAP.
1 THE ODYSSEY
2 THE GENUS TREMBLES INTO CONSCIOUSNESS
3 THE KINDLY DARKNESS
4 CONTRASTS WHICH ARE NOT CONTRASTS
5 CAUGHT UP INTO THE STREAM OF LIFE
6 THE LAW OF BALANCE
7 METAMORPHOSES
8 WHAT THE MOON SAW
9 WHEN THE CORSELET SNAPS
10 THE MIRROR OF CHANGELESS TIME
11 THE WHEEL OF LIFE LIVED
12 WHEN THE WOOD-DUST FLOATED IN THE AIR
13 WHAT IS CALLED DEATH
14 THE THEORY OF ETERNAL SLEEPLESSNESS
CONCLUSION: WITHIN A CELL
CHAPTER I
_The Odyssey_
For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the
deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest.
Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with
rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly. One day it
would be gilded by the sunlight--but not softened; another day
grizzled streaks of rain soaked it--without refreshment. It was
buried, to all appearances for ever, by drifts of snow--but was not
hurt. It had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow; it had
been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the
shrieking gusts of cyclones; and it had met all these things--the
sweetness of the day, the shade of night, the winters, the springs,
the summers--with the same submissive, invulnerable apathy. It had
waited its hour, ready, if need be, to wait yet much longer.
Those who boast of their travels and adventures should think over
this journey and its conditions. We have glimpses of other
countries, we climb mountains, we run through woods and fields; but
our varieties and difficulties are as nothing to the differences of
its varied blades of grass, to its dark holes in the ground, its
mounds of earth or snow, to all the obstacles which it met and
overcame or slipped past on its road. Our gallops on shore or
voyages at sea do not compare with its mad career as the sport of
storms and mountain-torrents. Time and space fought over the little
helpless rolling body. The elements loosed out their terrors round
it like an evil dream, seeming to toss it about in prize.
Everything seemed to toss it about. It was girt round by
immensities, which might be azure or glittering with gold in summer,
pallid dull or menacing in winter, silent as the abyss by night, and
terrible with a myriad of unknown noises in the day; but nothing
daunted it. Within its tiny form it held other visions, greater yet,
visions and million-old memories of the childhood of the world, when
the waves moaned in another measure, and the agony of the vision of
earth was different. So it waited the favourable event which would
give it life: or the sign of dissolution, to presage its death.
The light beating of a bird's wings, one dawn, had began its career
by flinging it out of the tiny shelter (a crevice in a low branch of
the mother-tree) from which the mightiest winds had been unable in
long years to tear it. It was falling in slow gyrations through the
green air, across the red-barred dawn-fires of the sun, when a quick
breath of wind lifted its mossy form and carried it, from near the
ground, far out into space. In its flight it grazed, time and again,
the rude bark of trees, sank to ground level, skimmed it, and rose
once more before it fell at last upon the polished surface of a
stone, where it lay till dark and through the night till the next
noon. The air above it was heavy with the humming of insects, and
around stretched the very old forest, vibrant with life.
The merest trifle might have carried this tiny seed of Californian
pine a few inches farther, where lay fat moist soil, good for
tree-growth; but such was not its lot. The vast and shining EYE
which oversees the dizzy spectacle of the universe, and comprehends
it in its dreadful whole as in its least bewildering detail, this EYE
had doubtless not lost sight of it. Suddenly all light around was
blotted out: a great mass overwhelmed it and carried it away with
heavy abrupt movements. It felt itself embedded in a soft warm
substance, among grains of sand, dead leaves and grass, which were
picked up now and then from the ground, carried awhile, and dropped
(only to be replaced by others), in a sequence of rudely rhythmical
movement. The pine-seed had been caught up in the frog of an
animal's foot, fixed in it deeply, so that it was not till after many
days at last delivered, when the beast waded across a brook and left
the seed on a dry sand-bank, near sunset, in the deep glow of the
evening rays.
The seed had now quitted the forest for an immense, bare, open
desert, a new prospect of the world. Here were no rustling grasses
nor fluttering leaves, no clashing together of dry branches, no birds
to sing nor beasts to howl: none of that rich, wide, strange stirring
of the mighty jungle, whose breathing and mysterious rumour was
choked (like the cries of its animals and the laboured thrumming of
the winds through its vaulted trees) by the rank smell of sap and the
exhalations of dead leaves and teeming soil. A light wind blew the
seed across the sand, for hours driving it about, backwards,
forwards, to right or left, sometimes in great circles, and sometimes
stationary against a stone till a new gust should send it forth
again, past its obstacle, on yet another abandoned desultory course.
The world was overspread with an intense blue, from which light
seemed to fall in sheets.
Later this brilliant blue turned to a bleeding red, through which the
sun's golden arrows slid into violet bands and faded gently. An
exquisite freshness fell from heaven as the purple mildness of
evening came down upon the world. Yet the pine-seed could not rest.
The wind, as it became sweeter, became stronger, and sent it again
across the sand-spaces of its former road, while about it a new life
began to stir. Insects which had been hiding all day danced over it,
or circled violently about it, or stopped to smell it, or tried in
vain to crack open its hard shell. Their grotesque shadows ran
blackly over the silver sand. At times green shining specks came
near, hovered a moment, and vanished in a soft shiver of wings.
All the while the pine-seed resigned itself with unconquerable
patience to its senseless course. Dawn came. The sun climbed high
in the heavens. Yesterday's burning blue again hemmed in the world;
and after it came night and dawn, and day and night again once more.
In the same wide desert the pine-seed rolled about, the sport of the
same winds, pitting against their caprice the constant apathetic
endurance of its little, round, hard body.
So weeks and months flowed by, times which for other things or other
beings elsewhere may have been momentous; but which for the sequoia
seed were all alike. Then one day the sky darkened, and rain began
to fall. The first slow heavy drops seemed to nail the seed to the
sand, and whole days passed; but in the end, just at twilight, water
began to trickle over the ground and to collect in plashes here and
there over the huge sandy surface.
The strange power of water to absorb light enables it to preserve the
clearness of the daylight, even when the light has fled, and makes
the shadows which it reflects in the darkness appear even darker than
their truth. The sea gives, better than any other thing, a feeling
of the mystery of never-ending distances. It strikes not merely on
living beings, through their imagination, their blood, their nerves,
but seems almost to project itself into materials. These
water-plashes at last ran together into little streams which carried
off in their current everything not strong enough to resist them.
Consequently the pine-seed found itself all at once flooded with
freshness. The liquid got right into it, penetrated unreservedly
into its outer husk, till the little seed felt itself soaked. None
the less it kept its vital force intact, and neither split nor
sprouted. The life-force handed down to it through millions of
generations was too vigorous and too well-prepared for its special
future, whether near or distant, to break up in the tiny frame. Only
this time inertia was not its sole defence against the assailing
elements: it found in itself a happy elasticity which helped to keep
out surplus liquid.
Thus for the whole rainy season the seed wandered about the
sand-desert, going with the waters down an imperceptible slope. On
all sides the waves now compassed it, with the grey sky coving above
it and them in the daytime; but at night it was drowned by water and
by darkness. The waters, as ever, darkened the shadows of these
shades circling in space. A chill, blind, impenetrable horror
overcame the pine-seed. It appeared, almost like an endowed being,
to hesitate in its career. It struck against stones, seemed to cling
to the tufts of grass which the waters carried down with them, seemed
to betray a longing to stop, while the waves, so infinitely great,
withdrew it gently but irresistibly from every obstacle. It yielded
patiently, strong perhaps in its sense of future greatness. The
outside forces, despite their violence, could not prevail over the
insignificant seed whose giant bulk would some day laugh at the
roaring of the winds and the struggles of the waves; and as it was
tossed about during the night in the immensity of shadow and water,
may not the sense of past existence have come to life in it, and a
memory of that other chaos with the very different terrors, as
experienced by its forbears in the first stages of the world? So it
journeyed, firmly and humbly, towards the unknown.