The Man Whom the Trees Loved | Page 3

respect. Friendly though--yes, on the whole quite friendly. He's painted
the friendliness right enough. He saw that. I'd like to know that man
better," he added. "I'd like to ask him how he saw so clearly that it
stands there between this cottage and the Forest--yet somehow more in
sympathy with us than with the mass of woods behind--a sort of
go-between. That I never noticed before. I see it now--through his eyes.
It stands there like a sentinel--protective rather."
He turned away abruptly to look through the window. He saw the great
encircling mass of gloom that was the Forest, fringing their little lawn.
It pressed up closer in the darkness. The prim garden with its formal
beds of flowers seemed an impertinence almost--some little colored
insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster--some gaudy fly that
danced impudently down the edge of a great river that could engulf it
with a toss of its smallest wave. That Forest with its thousand years of
growth and its deep spreading being was some such slumbering
monster, yes. Their cottage and garden stood too near its running lip.
When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy skirts of black and
purple.... He loved this feeling of the Forest Personality; he had always
loved it.
"Queer," he reflected, "awfully queer, that trees should bring me such a
sense of dim, vast living! I used to feel it particularly, I remember, in

India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little English woods till
here. And Sanderson's the only man I ever knew who felt it too. He's
never said so, but there's the proof," and he turned again to the picture
that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as he
looked. "I wonder; by Jove, I wonder," his thoughts ran on, "whether a
tree--er--in any lawful meaning of the term can be--alive. I remember
some writing fellow telling me long ago that trees had once been
moving things, animal organisms of some sort, that had stood so long
feeding, sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the same place, that they
had lost the power to get away...!"
Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he
dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.
Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn. He
smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and
the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The
summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New
Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.
Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness
of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow
waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear
and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered,
circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its
melancholy, petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the
solitary pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind,
travelers like the gypsies who pitched their bush-like tents beneath
them; he knew the shaggy ponies, with foals like baby centaurs; the
chattering jays, the milky call of the cuckoos in the spring, and the
boom of the bittern from the lonely marshes. The undergrowth of
watching hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark,
suggestive beauty, and the yellow shimmer of their pale dropped
leaves.
Here all the Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation.
No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life,
no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death.
It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without
concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought
messages of alarm as it bulged outwards to the sun and stars.

But, once its leafy portals left behind, the trees of the countryside were
otherwise. The houses threatened them; they knew themselves in
danger. The roads were no longer glades of silent turf, but noisy, cruel
ways by which men came to attack them. They were civilized, cared
for--but cared for in order that some day they might be put to death.
Even in the villages, where the solemn and immemorial repose of giant
chestnuts aped security, the tossing of a silver birch against their mass,
impatient in the littlest wind, brought warning. Dust clogged their
leaves. The inner humming of their quiet life became inaudible beneath
the scream and shriek of clattering traffic. They longed and prayed to
enter the great Peace of the Forest yonder, but they could not move.
They knew, moreover, that the Forest