_When the Wood-Dust floated in the Air_
Whilst the August sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue
heavens upon the world, a fine wood-powder continued to rain down
from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk, in a reddish
dust which lay deep upon the roots. The tree's substance had been so
falling away for centuries, with every now and then a larger
dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its
thickness: while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed.
Beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkness of the earth's heart
the roots, regretting their failed vivacity, were now resigned to
grow more dry and twisted and inert day by day, powerless any more to
suck life-giving nourishment from their ground. On the surface of
the earth the eternal counter-change of life and death proceeded.
Thousands of births, both plant and animal, occurred, to compensate
for the thousands of deaths, the wheel of life impartially grinding
out change or creation or destructiveness.
It was now summer. The still air was elastic and alive, and
transmitted a shining lightness to the world. All was green and gay
and content, serene as the unflecked sky and the splendid sun. Girt
about with this joyous and pellucid atmosphere stood the giant, tall
as ever, but contrasting more sharply against its pure keenness. The
huge embrace, vivid and blue and green, in which heaven held earth,
seemed almost violent in opposition to the spirit of the tree, whose
dead branches and scarred trunk and weary roots marked a heavy
despondency.
Sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or
winter. When the year dies the current of life is dying too, whereas
in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem
doubly desolate. The warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and
plants, the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief, which,
when autumn comes, is in keeping with the common tendency of nature,
and becomes moderate, soothed by the absence of joy in others.
Apposition is the greatest tonic of colours, as analogy clears the
vision: accordingly this day of fairest summer, with its luxuriant
flowers and plants about which the bees were humming in the sunshine
so that nature seemed to sing softly to itself in the jocund air and
the universal gladness made the far hills come together for joy, this
day made prominent the infinite desolation of the giant's aspect.
The gold of the sunlight was gilding the singing ripples of the
water, the birds were flinging their loudest notes upon the velvet
air, the wild beasts were supine with excess of well-being, the
plants were burgeoning and swelling with sap in the afflatus of their
perfumes: but the sequoia, alone, was bitten through and compassed
with the bitter smell of old age, and felt life draw back from its
insensitive branches, from its ruined trunk, from its hidden roots,
now lifeless and impassive among the former fertilizing benefits of
the juices underground. The trees near-by were preening themselves
in the rain of sun-starts, shuddering with the force of the new waves
of life pumped into them from the teeming earth. The wind thrilled
through their branches and all nature came together in that healthy
rush of new life, which had once been common also to the giant tree.
Once! for now the inside of its trunk was powdered thick with that
rain of fine red wood-dust, falling ever more fast towards the tree's
ruin.
Yet the outline of the tree against the clear, thin sky appeared
unchanged. At its very head, the topmost twig still bore green and
lustrous pine-needles. The remaining life of the sequoia had taken
refuge and concentrated itself there, in those few square inches of
supple wood and fluid sap. From the first days of spring the tree
had seemed to live wholly for this last branch, which was linked
directly with a very fine tap root burrowing deep underground. The
only pulse of life in the tree was here, in the circulation of these
few drops of sap between head and foot. Breath had slowly abandoned
the rest of the tree, to hover hazardous and trembling for a weak
while between the labouring root and the little green twig lost away
up there in the blue.
The tree's entire intention seemed now to lie in this last twig, to
the exclusion of any thought of the huge dead mass between. One
might say almost that it tried to ignore all the decay, after the
fashion of other failing lives. This solitary green branch on the
inert bole was like the quivering wing-case of a crushed insect, or
the childish and petty busyness of an old man near the grave.
Everybody can recall the incomprehensible eagerness of some dying
soul to recollect a strayed trifle, as if repose of mind depended on
its being put straight: or that other unfortunate on his sick bed who
seemed to lose sense of the beating wings of death in listening to
the petty ticking of a newly mended watch. Childhood, prime and age
have ambitions and goals to suit their strengths, so that the complex
and magnificent dreams of youth grow pale and few as life dims in us.
Old men have small hopes and mean activity, not because they are
weary and sick of life, but because life is abandoning them: and at
the final moment, when life leaves us altogether, its last feeblest
trace may be a trivial thought which we try to fix, a futile wish we
long to satisfy, a foolish interest. This last living branch of the
giant tree may prefigure the moment when the last inhabitants of our
globe will cling to its last habitable portion while all the rest of
it is frozen in an eternal winter, or when the like fate overtakes
the last habitable planet of our sky. Life which is made by inches
departs by inches: in those sudden cases of apparent and violent
destruction it is only that the falling curve dips downward more fast.
This we must consider not as a special act of nature, but as an
ultimate effect of life moving towards that new arrangement which is
called death. Since everything which exists, small or great, is
compounded of various elements (an interaction of multiple energies),
so it is logical that life should take hold of its matter piece-meal,
and relinquish it, when the time comes, also piecemeal.
In this fashion the internal decomposition of the pine-tree
proceeded. Slowly its substance crumbled away to dust, amidst the
close smell of age and decay. Tremors of dissolution began to pass
through the giant. Dull creakings ran up and down the trunk. Its
sorry boughs quivered with a thin resonance, while deep-buried in the
soil its roots contracted in agony. A narrow crack opened in the
wood just above ground level, and gradually spread round the trunk,
growing deeper as it went: while the red tree-dust trickled out
through every hollowed place and floated in the air as a fine cloud,
proof of dry rot and presage of coming death.
Still, at the very crest there shone out golden in the sunlight that
last living branch, fresh and shining in all its needles. The
gracious summer had fortified all life upon earth. From a hill far
away there came a waft of air, which loaded itself on its passage
with the emanations of plain and field and wood, till it reached the
district of the tree. Its warm soft breath kissed the giant gently,
just waving the little green twig up aloft, and then passed on, as
though towards an endless series of new scenes and adventures. Yet
it was early checked. A line of trees, making a wall with their
interwoven branches, repulsed it, flung it back with a new impulse.
It became a gust, sweeping along the ground-level, raising a cloud of
leaves and dust and the dried powder of decomposed wood about the
base of the sequoia, into whose fissured trunk it blew strongly. The
tree shuddered, spiral tremors running up its length and down again,
rather as the invigorating sap had once run up and down. At the foot
of the tree, where the circular crack was, these tremors were stayed.
They ran together, reinforced each other, swelled into lateral
shocks. A deep low warning sounded in the body of the wood, and
echoed outside. For a little the huge shape shivered in the liquid
air, oscillating to right and left, while the tiny plume of green at
its summit described vivid curves against the blueness of the sky.
Then simply, powerfully, inevitably, as in all natural decisions,
came a loud rending like the last cry of an agonizing spirit, and the
immense pillar bowed down and fell upon the earth, which shook under
the weight, while the sky, suddenly made vacant of such bulk, seemed
to leap up as the giant fell. Thick clouds of ruddy dust rose widely
into the air, filling it with the damp odour of decay, while the
bottom of the trunk feathered out in splinters, as the dried roots,
so long hidden from the day, were torn out from both ground and wood.
More than seven thousand years ago a heedless puff of wind had cast a
sequoia seed upon the fertile earth: and now another puff had broken
down its tree. For more than seventy centuries the forest giant had
had its part in this life which we share, and its course (like ours,
while they endure) had run curving through time and space till its
circle was completed, a perfect round, as all life's movements are,
and will be everywhere and evermore. Its very age was inscribed in
concentric circles in the thickness of its trunk. The seasons, in
their repeated going and coming, had given the impression of a slowly
turning wheel, like the terrene revolution or the sun's. The
sequoia, a cylinder in core, a cone in shape, had lived amongst
fellow-curves. The rounded stars journey in their elliptical orbits,
and the electrons likewise in their infinite degree. This unchanging
changeless time rounds all things in their span. The hours encompass
us, described upon their dial; and even contrasts at the last run
together, made to coincide by the slow bending of every line of form.
Infinity, if that be the nature of the universe, causes to meet all
movement when its arc of direction is completed, and the course of
time too seems circular, the rolling of a wheel. Can chaos, the
abyss itself, be concentric, after the likeness of everything with
which its halls are peopled?
Suppose that an eagle, piercing high beyond our sight in the blue
vault of heaven, had seen the giant fall. It would have thought the
event and the object petty, across the vast distance. One near-by
would have been moved by the greatness of the victim. The greatness
and the littleness of things thus seem to depend upon the point of
view--a trite, daily, observation, no doubt, but so is life itself to
us. Big and little--is it not possible that proportions get their
value only subjectively, and that in space they rank less important
than to our minds? This concept of relativity, producing itself in
everlasting stages across the horizon of our intelligence--may it not
be linked with that other law of comparison, the relation of one
dimension to another, which ensures something bigger than any object,
however big, and something smaller than the almost infinitely small?
Anyhow, measured by human standards, the trunk of the dying giant as
it lay there on the ground was huge. The wind was still rustling in
its branches, though the air about them was made dense with wood-dust
now. It used to be, to our mind, an immense tree ... and soon it
will be nothing. Soon? Before the sequoia has given back to space
the elements of which it was made, its carcass will have to rot for
hundreds or thousands of years. It takes so long for all the
constituents of such a tree to be resolved, for the oxygen to go back
to oxygen, for the carbon to re-become carbon, the liquid to turn
again into liquid. Yet this lapse of time, when the last trace of
the tree has ceased to be, will have been as a second. To our
fallibility it has seemed long, but eternity, which will bring the
ultimate and certain destruction of all matter, recks not of a few
thousand centuries.
When it was alive the forest giant harboured in its branches
thousands of bodies of insects. Some were crushed violently to dust
by accidents. Some perished merely by lapse of time, but all in the
end came to nothing: for eternity reduces everything to the same
value, sooner or later--reduces them all to nothing. Our thousands
of lives, magnificent or sordid, long or short, great or small, as
they happen to be on earth, leave no mark in space and time. The
glory or the shame of what has been bears value and meaning only in
our fitful solitary dreams. Should we consider them as having never
existed--all these things which have had life and have, under the
law, returned to the chaos which called them forth--now only as the
dust of forces and of time? The elements remain eternally unchanged,
however protean their assumed shapes: perhaps what we term life and
death are only their incidental phases.