The Man Whom the Trees Loved | Page 8

Themselves alone
may fully apprehend, They tremble and are changed: In each the
uncouth, individual soul Looms forth and glooms Essential, and, their
bodily presences Touched with inordinate significance, Wearing the
darkness like a livery Of some mysterious and tremendous guild, They
brood--they menace--they appall.
The voice of Mrs. Bittacy presently broke the silence that followed.
"I like that part about God's sentinels," she murmured. There was no
sharpness in her tone; it was hushed and quiet. The truth, so musically
uttered, muted her shrill objections though it had not lessened her alarm.
Her husband made no comment; his cigar, she noticed, had gone out.
"And old trees in particular," continued the artist, as though to himself,
"have very definite personalities. You can offend, wound, please them;
the moment you stand within their shade you feel whether they come
out to you, or whether they withdraw." He turned abruptly towards his
host. "You know that singular essay of Prentice Mulford's, no doubt
'God in the Trees'--extravagant perhaps, but yet with a fine true beauty
in it? You've never read it, no?" he asked.
But it was Mrs. Bittacy who answered; her husband keeping his curious
deep silence.
"I never did!" It fell like a drip of cold water from the face muffled in
the yellow shawl; even a child could have supplied the remainder of the
unspoken thought.
"Ah," said Sanderson gently, "but there is 'God' in the trees. God in a
very subtle aspect and sometimes--I have known the trees express it
too--that which is not God--dark and terrible. Have you ever noticed,
too, how clearly trees show what they want--choose their companions,
at least? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too near them--birds
or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath? The silence in the
beech wood is quite terrifying often! And how pines like bilberry
bushes at their feet and sometimes little oaks--all trees making a clear,
deliberate choice, and holding firmly to it? Some trees obviously--it's

very strange and marked--seem to prefer the human."
The old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit.
Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports.
"We know," she answered, "that He was said to have walked in the
garden in the cool of the evening"--the gulp betrayed the effort that it
cost her--"but we are nowhere told that He hid in the trees, or anything
like that. Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large
vegetables."
"True," was the soft answer, "but in everything that grows, has life, that
is, there's mystery past all finding out. The wonder that lies hidden in
our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and
silence of a mere potato."
The observation was not meant to be amusing. It was not amusing. No
one laughed. On the contrary, the words conveyed in too literal a sense
the feeling that haunted all that conversation. Each one in his own way
realized--with beauty, with wonder, with alarm--that the talk had
somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man.
Some link had been established between the two. It was not wise, with
that great Forest listening at their very doors, to speak so plainly. The
forest edged up closer while they did so.
And Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to interrupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly
in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion. She did not like her
husband's prolonged silence, stillness. He seemed so negative--so
changed.
"David," she said, raising her voice, "I think you're feeling the
dampness. It's grown chilly. The fever comes so suddenly, you know,
and it might be wide to take the tincture. I'll go and get it, dear, at once.
It's better." And before he could object she had left the room to bring
the homeopathic dose that she believed in, and that, to please her, he
swallowed by the tumbler-full from week to week.
And the moment the door closed behind her, Sanderson began again,
though now in quite a different tone. Mr. Bittacy sat up in his chair.
The two men obviously resumed the conversation--the real
conversation interrupted beneath the cedar--and left aside the sham one
which was so much dust merely thrown in the old lady's eyes.
"Trees love you, that's the fact," he said earnestly. "Your service to
them all these years abroad has made them know you."

"Know me?"
"Made them, yes,"--he paused a moment, then added,--"made them
_aware of your presence_; aware of a force outside themselves that
deliberately seeks their welfare, don't you see?"
"By Jove, Sanderson--!" This put into plain language actual sensations
he had felt, yet had never dared to phrase in words before. "They get
into touch with me, as it were?" he ventured, laughing at his own
sentence,