_When the Corselet Snaps_
More pine kernels had sprouted near by, and the great tree was now
kept company by other russet trunks, tens of centuries younger, but
undergoing the same development. They grew and changed against the
same background as the older tree, extracting the nourishment which
formed their shape and colour, sap and scent, from the same area.
Again the law of perpetuity asserted itself in creation.
Near the giant a young tree was fainting and failing. It had not the
strong straight shape of the other conifers, nor their sharp, shining
needles. Its current of life was crossed, confused. Its sap did not
fill its roots and branches, its wood was unhealthy: while on its
gnarled trunk grew and increased year by year a huge boss of dead
matter, whose weight seemed to crush the whole organism. The stomata
laboured feebly in their task of collecting food from the environs,
and so reduced the tree's vitality that it felt no thrill from the
bounty of spring or summer, while hardly was there any flavour in the
weak sap which crept drop by drop through the sick veins of its
branches. It seemed tired and faint-hearted in its travail, this
sap, like an aged workman: and the tree's whole attitude and effect
was that of old age, of a failing constitution such as marks the last
stages of life in trees long past their prime.
For this young sequoia was sick. Its soggy utricles made no response
to the new winds of spring-tide, and were as insensible to sunlight
and to the rays of a cloudless sky. The fine weather which made the
giant so brave and fresh in foliage had no effect on this. Its slow,
sad invalid existence made it more and more like a tree whose cadence
was closing with its pale, fagged flagging tissue.
To an external observer its sickness was as though the coat of mail
which linked in and protected its life had parted, and let all its
fibres grow odd and wrong. The course of development had been
broken, and the shattered rhythm had thrown out even the smallest
cells. Their disordered whole was sad and sick with incurable
disease, a premature old age with its petulant inconsequence: and if
this sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a
slow sickness.
Plants and creatures have their illnesses, things their
malformations, planets no doubt their disasters: and since the fates
of puissant things are those of futile things may we presume that
there are mishaps also for the ordered whole? The analogies between
stars and the microscopic dust of chemical particles impress
themselves more and more upon our notice. Interstellar space seems
proportionately no richer in movement or in matter than atomic space,
and fancy, running beyond our physical powers of apprehension from
one to other, falls ever into the same nescience. We can guess at a
common rhythm behind the march of events and the linked procession of
acts: so that our superstitions may be only distorted glimpses of
design half-understood, scattered observations which our unequal
spirits cannot join together. Our superstitions take precise shape
more especially when we are in bodily pain and perturbed in spirit.
Our imagination then sublimates the shadows of our fate, flickering
over them like a marsh-light in the darkness of our half-knowledge;
and achieves only to make their obscurity more obscure.
The young sequoia tree because of its sickness could do no more than
just carry on its stunted life. The breath entered faintly into its
labouring lungs: its whole life was limited by its deficient sap, and
by the futile ineffective busyness of its stomata. Yet it accepted
the ill-health as a normal state. The idea of a more fortunate life
could not come to it, as it might to men. It had never known any
other condition than this painful breathing-in of the life-currents,
this poverty of exhalation, and so could not desire a better: whereas
human beings in pain feel it all the more since their spirits can
disengage themselves from the trammels of the flesh and conjure up
visions of a happier fate.
In such a way we make worse our torments each time we long to be
delivered from them.
A scented breath of evening floated beneath the starry sky. Plants
and creatures came to life at its whisper, which combined with the
far-away murmur of the river and the resonance of space to give a new
vividness to the grove of young pines. The tall and magnificent
giant with the full flush of its grown strength made this sweetness
of nature its own. Only the sick tree remained without benefit from
the life-giving evening airs. Its sluggish viscid sap stagnated in
the clogged stomata. Slowly its faint exhalations were breathed out
through its pores: it seemed as though nothing could revive this
imperfect organism: and as a matter of fact the first effect of
illness is to disorganize the senses, to shatter the harmony of the
unit attacked, so that it receives insufficiently and returns to the
universal flow an insufficient rhythm.
We have all had experience for a shorter or a longer time of this
heart-breaking state of sickness, when a livid mist seems to settle
itself thickly over our faculties, and the objective world weighs
upon us with the whole weight of our material blemishes. At such a
time our sensitiveness to influences outside ourselves is bad,
whether it is that our disease-crippled organs are no longer powerful
enough to communicate freely with the hidden forces through whose
paths we move, or whether it is that these very forces in a manner
avoid an unhealthy assemblage. Anyhow, it is only when suffering has
disordered our state that we become fully aware of the gulf which
lies between the external world and that other world within us.
But what we learn more particularly at such moments is how our senses
limit external influences. Our inner world is seething with a form
of life which feels special to itself, since all contact with the
vital currents of our environment has been cut off. Also, apart from
a slight play given to the organs our physical sensibility detaches
itself entirely from external adventures and elements. When our
being has once reached this absolute it fixes itself there, and no
piling up of circumstance, in however extravagant a degree, could
move it an inch farther. Thus a loss of consciousness through
illness involves as vivid a sense of dizzy falling into space as a
literal plunge into some darkling abyss, and the perturbation of an
inward malady may strike us as suddenly and sharply as the flash of a
real lightning-stroke jazzing across our eyes.
In all the world there is no force able to extend or prolong our
sensibility beyond its fixed term; which may be a reflection upon the
poverty of our means of apprehension. We would not hear the crash of
two colliding planets as loudly as the piercing of our ear-drums by a
pin-point, and to be burned alive in some conflagration is for the
individual as though the universe went up in flame, since for those
few seconds of his agony the intensity of the heat of his burning
house is as great upon him as the fires of an incandescent world. A
heart struck by a fragment of bursting shell would feel no more if it
was caught up and crushed between clashing faces of rock.
So by means of our senses we can measure against our being the
greatest physical catastrophes: we can know the supreme degree of our
faculty for feeling pain without calling for a clash of worlds to
prove it. The limitations of our senses are such that beyond a
quite-near point they can register no advance at all. It is all the
same sensation whether we fall three hundred or thirty thousand feet.
Its illness made the young sequoia dull to its circumstances, while
the forest giant all the while responded to each vibration of its
environment. On some days its sap seemed in easy relation with the
air and scents and light raining upon it, as if a mysterious fluid
somewhere in these many elements was making eager its stomata and
dissolving the material resistance of the fibres which cut off the
tree's vital fluid from the outer air. At other times, for no clear
reason this sympathy between sap and outer world would grow difficult.
When ill-health overtakes us, it closes off from exterior contact the
private world in which we exist: but not completely: we are not
driven to subsist only on our internal vitality. From there does
come the impulse or continuity which leads us up to action: but this
energy is reinforced by means existing independently of us, and yet
influencing us to our inmost soul.
Our passions come to birth within us, truly: but their growth and
final efflorescence may be due to a variety of vibrations sent from
without. Our loves and braveries and hates are coloured by powers
beyond our will's control. A single sentiment may express itself in
divers shapes according to the circumstances in which we move. A
passionate outburst may be one in a closed room, another in a street,
quite different in open country. The giant tree felt its feelings
change according to the state of the landscape over which it towered:
just as men are peculiarly liable to be strong or weak, safe or
fearful, forthcoming or callous according to their attitude, their
stage-setting, the occult influences which hem them in. Otherwise
our likes and dislikes, our joys and sorrows would not move us to
different expressions of temper in different places and conditions.
The radiant discharges of the sky, the perfumes of space, and humane
shades of earth abounded: but the sick tree, in the balmy evening,
laboured painfully to breathe them in. A link of its armour of
defence had slipped, and about it all the fibres of its being had
become displaced.