The Trees of Pride | Page 4

the blue bay, and he could see a boat pulling toward the little paved
pier.
And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellow sands
he was destined to find. his hard-headedness provoked into a not
unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to call hot-headedness.
The fact was that the Cornish peasantry, who composed his tenantry
and domestic establishment, were far from being people with no
nonsense about them. There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about
them; with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin, they seemed
to surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense. But the magic circle had
one center: there was one point in which the curving conversation of
the rustics always returned. It was a point that always pricked the
Squire to exasperation, and even in this short walk he seemed to strike
it everywhere. He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to
speak to the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the
gardener seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leathery
brown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed a low
opinion of foreign shrubs.
"We wish you'd get rid of what you've got here, sir," he observed,
digging doggedly. "Nothing'll grow right with them here."
"Shrubs!" said the Squire, laughing. "You don't call the peacock trees
shrubs, do you? Fine tall trees--you ought to be proud of them."
"Ill weeds grow apace," observed the gardener. "Weeds can grow as
houses when somebody plants them." Then he added: "Him that sowed
tares in the Bible, Squire."
"Oh, blast your--" began the Squire, and then replaced the more apt and
alliterative word "Bible" by the general word "superstition." He was
himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set his tenants an

example. Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.
A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered a
woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit, having more of a
grievance. His daughter was at that time seriously ill with a fever
recently common on that coast, and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted
gentleman, would normally have made allowances for low spirits and
loss of temper. But he came near to losing his own again when the
peasant persisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditional
monomania about the foreign trees.
"If she were well enough I'd move her," said the woodcutter, "as we
can't move them, I suppose. I'd just like to get my chopper into them
and feel 'em come crashing down."
"One would think they were dragons," said Vane.
"And that's about what they look like," replied Martin. "Look at 'em!"
The woodman was naturally a rougher and even wilder figure than the
gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like an antique
parchment, and it was framed in an outlandish arrangement of raven
beard and whiskers, which was really a fashion fifty years ago, but
might have been five thousand years old or older. Phoenicians, one felt,
trading on those strange shores in the morning of the world, might have
combed or curled or braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint
patterns. For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall
as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race, small and
interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older than the Vane family,
though that was old as county families go. For in many such parts of
England it is the aristocrats who are the latest arrivals. It was the sort of
racial type that is supposed to be passing, and perhaps has already
passed.
The obnoxious objects stood some hundred yards away from the
speaker, who waved toward them with his ax; and there was something
suggestive in the comparison. That coast, to begin with, stretching
toward the sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud. It
was cut out against the emerald or indigo of the sea in graven horns and
crescents that might be the cast or mold of some such crested serpents;
and, beneath, was pierced and fretted by caves and crevices, as if by the
boring of some such titanic worms. Over and above this draconian
architecture of the earth a veil of gray woods hung thinner like a vapor;

woods which the witchcraft of the sea had, as usual, both blighted and
blown out of shape. To the right the trees trailed along the sea front in a
single line, each drawn out in thin wild lines like a caricature. At the
other end of their extent they multiplied into a huddle of hunchbacked
trees, a wood spreading toward a projecting part of the high coast. It
was here