The Trees of Pride

The Squire, anticipating the trial of luncheon with a strange literary man, had dealt with the case tactfully from his own standpoint. County society might have made the guest feel like a fish out of water; and, except for the American critic and the local lawyer and doctor, worthy middle-class people who fitted into the picture, he had kept it as a family party. He was a widower, and when the meal had been laid out on the garden table, it was Barbara who presided as hostess. She had the new poet on her right hand and it made her very uncomfortable. She had practically offered that fallacious jongleur money, and it did not make it easier to offer him lunch.

“The whole countryside’s gone mad,” announced the Squire, by way of the latest local news. “It’s about this infernal legend of ours.”

“I collect legends,” said Paynter, smiling.

“You must remember I haven’t yet had a chance to collect yours. And this,” he added, looking round at the romantic coast, “is a fine theater for anything dramatic.”

“Oh, it’s dramatic in its way,” admitted Vane, not without a faint satisfaction. “It’s all about those things over there we call the peacock trees – I suppose, because of the queer color of the leaf, you know, though I have heard they make a shrill noise in a high wind that’s supposed to be like the shriek of a peacock; something like a bamboo in the botanical structure, perhaps. Well, those trees are supposed to have been brought over from Barbary by my ancestor Sir Walter Vane, one of the Elizabethan patriots or pirates, or whatever you call them. They say that at the end of his last voyage the villagers gathered on the beach down there and saw the boat standing in from the sea, and the new trees stood up in the boat like a mast, all gay with leaves out of season, like green bunting. And as they watched they thought at first that the boat was steering oddly, and then that it wasn’t steering at all; and when it drifted to the shore at last every man in that boat was dead, and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against the tree trunk, as stiff as the tree.”

“Now this is rather curious,” remarked Paynter thoughtfully. “I told you I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of the story of which that is the end, though it comes hundreds of miles across the sea.”

He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers, like a man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby of such fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch in telling them.

“Oh, do tell us your part of it?” cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunny sleepiness seemed in some vague degree to have fallen from her.

The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and then began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.

“If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the forest narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark Ages. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the Dark Ages. I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so to speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loud with lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond. They say that the hermit St. Securis, living there among trees, grew to love them like companions; since, though great giants with many arms like Briareus, they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures; they did not devour like the lions, but rather opened their arms to all the little birds. And he prayed that they might be loosened from time to time to walk like other things. And the trees were moved upon the prayers of Securis, as they were at the songs of Orpheus. The men of the desert were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys. For the trees were thus freed under strict conditions of discipline. They were to return at the sound of the hermit’s bell, and, above all, to copy the wild beasts in walking only to destroy and devour nothing. Well, it is said that one of the trees heard a voice that was not the saint’s; that in the warm green twilight of one summer evening it became conscious of some thing sitting and speaking in its branches in the guise of a great bird, and it was that which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a great serpent. As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves the tree was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the birds that flew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck them to pieces. Finally, the tempter filled the tree-top with his own birds of pride, the starry pageant of the peacocks. And the spirit of the brute overcame the spirit of the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not a plume was left, and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they say that when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but this put forth feathers of a strange hue and pattern. And by that monstrous assimilation the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree to the earth with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removed it again. That, Squire, is the beginning in the deserts of the tale that ended here, almost in this garden.”

“And the end is about as reliable as the beginning, I should say,” said Vane. “Yours is a nice plain tale for a small tea-party; a quiet little bit of still-life, that is.”

“What a queer, horrible story,” exclaimed Barbara. “It makes one feel like a cannibal.”

“Ex Africa,” said the lawyer, smiling. “It comes from a cannibal country. I think it’s the touch of the tar-brush, that nightmare feeling that you don’t know whether the hero is a plant or a man or a devil. Don’t you feel it sometimes in ‘Uncle Remus’?”

“True,” said Paynter. “Perfectly true.” And he looked at the lawyer with a new interest. The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was one of those people who are more worth looking at than most people realize when they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent all his powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province, he might have looked much the same; the head with the red hair was heavy and powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was comparatively insignificant, as was Napoleon’s. He seemed more at ease in the Squire’s society than the doctor, who, though a gentleman, was a shy one, and a mere shadow of his professional brother.

“As you truly say,” remarked Paynter, “the story seems touched with quite barbarous elements, probably Negro. Originally, though, I think there was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though some of the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only an allegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for an ax.”

“Oh, if you come to that,” remarked the poet Treherne, “you might as well say Squire Vane doesn’t exist, and that he’s only an allegory for a weathercock.” Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the lawyer’s red brows together. He looked across the table and met the poet’s somewhat equivocal smile.

“Do I understand, Mr. Treherne,” asked Ashe, “that you support the miraculous claims of St. Securis in this case. Do you, by any chance, believe in the walking trees?”

“I see men as trees walking,” answered the poet, “like the man cured of blindness in the Gospel. By the way, do I understand that you support the miraculous claims of that – thaumaturgist?”

Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely. “Now that sounds a fascinating piece of psychology. You see men as trees?”

“As I can’t imagine why men should walk, I can’t imagine why trees shouldn’t,” answered Treherne.

“Obviously, it is the nature of the organism”, interposed the medical guest, Dr. Burton Brown; “it is necessary in the very type of vegetable structure.”

“In other words, a tree sticks in the mud from year’s end to year’s end,” answered Treherne. “So do you stop in your consulting room from ten to eleven every day. And don’t you fancy a fairy, looking in at your window for a flash after having just jumped over the moon and played mulberry bush with the Pleiades, would think you were a vegetable structure, and that sitting still was the nature of the organism?”

“I don’t happen to believe in fairies,” said the doctor rather stiffly, for the argumentum ad hominem was becoming too common. A sulphurous subconscious anger seemed to radiate from the dark poet.

“Well, I should hope not, Doctor,” began the Squire, in his loud and friendly style, and then stopped, seeing the other’s attention arrested. The silent butler waiting on the guests had appeared behind the doctor’s chair, and was saying something in the low, level tones of the well-trained servant. He was so smooth a specimen of the type that others never noticed, at first, that he also repeated the dark portrait, however varnished, so common in this particular family of Cornish Celts. His face was sallow and even yellow, and his hair indigo black. He went by the name of Miles. Some felt oppressed by the tribal type in this tiny corner of England. They felt somehow as if all these dark faces were the masks of a secret society.

The doctor rose with a half apology. “I must ask pardon for disturbing this pleasant party; I am called away on duty. Please don’t let anybody move. We have to be ready for these things, you know. Perhaps Mr. Treherne will admit that my habits are not so very vegetable, after all.” With this Parthian shaft, at which there was some laughter, he strode away very rapidly across the sunny lawn to where the road dipped down toward the village.

“He is very good among the poor,” said the girl with an honorable seriousness.

“A capital fellow,” agreed the Squire. “Where is Miles? You will have a cigar, Mr. Treherne?” And he got up from the table; the rest followed, and the group broke up on the lawn.

“Remarkable man, Treherne,” said the American to the lawyer conversationally.

“Remarkable is the word,” assented Ashe rather grimly. “But I don’t think I’ll make any remark about him.”

The Squire, too impatient to wait for the yellow-faced Miles, had betaken himself indoors for the cigars, and Barbara found herself once more paired off with the poet, as she floated along the terrace garden; but this time, symbolically enough, upon the same level of lawn. Mr. Treherne looked less eccentric after having shed his curious cloak, and seemed a quieter and more casual figure.

“I didn’t mean to be rude to you just now,” she said abruptly.

“And that’s the worst of it,” replied the man of letters, “for I’m horribly afraid I did mean to be rude to you. When I looked up and saw you up there something surged up in me that was in all the revolutions of history. Oh, there was admiration in it too! Perhaps there was idolatry in all the iconoclasts.”

He seemed to have a power of reaching rather intimate conversation in one silent and cat-like bound, as he had scaled the steep road, and it made her feel him to be dangerous, and perhaps unscrupulous. She changed the subject sharply, not without it movement toward gratifying her own curiosity.

“What DID you mean by all that about walking trees?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you really believe in a magic tree that eats birds!”

“I should probably surprise you,” said Treherne gravely, “more by what I don’t believe than by what I do.”

Then, after a pause, he made a general gesture toward the house and garden. “I’m afraid I don’t believe in all this; for instance, in Elizabethan houses and Elizabethan families and the way estates have been improved, and the rest of it. Look at our friend the woodcutter now.” And he pointed to the man with the quaint black beard, who was still plying his ax upon the timber below.

“That man’s family goes back for ages, and it was far richer and freer in what you call the Dark Ages than it is now. Wait till the Cornish peasant writes a history of Cornwall.”

“But what in the world,” she demanded, “has this to do with whether you believe in a tree eating birds?”

“Why should I confess what I believe in?” he said, a muffled drum of mutiny in his voice. “The gentry came here and took our land and took our labor and took our customs. And now, after exploitation, a viler thing, education! They must take our dreams!”

“Well, this dream was rather a nightmare, wasn’t it?” asked Barbara, smiling; and the next moment grew quite grave, saying almost anxiously: “But here’s Doctor Brown back again. Why, he looks quite upset.”

The doctor, a black figure on the green lawn, was, indeed, coming toward them at a very vigorous walk. His body and gait very much younger than his face, which seemed prematurely lined as with worry; his brow was bald, and projected from the straight, dark hair behind it. He was visibly paler than when he left the lunch table.

“I am sorry to say, Miss Vane,” he said, “that I am the bearer of bad news to poor Martin, the woodman here. His daughter died half an hour ago.”

“Oh,” cried Barbara warmly, “I am SO sorry!”

“So am I,” said the doctor, and passed on rather abruptly; he ran down the stone steps between the stone urns; and they saw him in talk with the woodcutter. They could not see the woodcutter’s face. He stood with his back to them, but they saw something that seemed more moving than any change of countenance. The man’s hand holding the ax rose high above his head, and for a flash it seemed as if he would have cut down the doctor. But in fact he was not looking at the doctor. His face was set toward the cliff, where, sheer out of the dwarf forest, rose, gigantic and gilded by the sun, the trees of pride.

The strong brown hand made a movement and was empty. The ax went circling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet’s memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ax of some pagan sacrifice.

A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recover his tool; but the doctor put a hand on his arm.

“Never mind that now,” they heard him say sadly and kindly. “The Squire will excuse you any more work, I know.”

Something made the girl look at Treherne. He stood gazing, his head a little bent, and one of his black elf-locks had fallen forward over his forehead. And again she had the sense of a shadow over the grass; she almost felt as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the fairies were not her friends.

II. THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANE

It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock trees was again discussed in the Squire’s circle. It fell out one evening, when his eccentric taste for meals in the garden that gathered the company round the same table, now lit with a lamp and laid out for dinner in a glowing spring twilight. It was even the same company, for in the few weeks intervening they had insensibly grown more and more into each other’s lives, forming a little group like a club. The American aesthete was of course the most active agent, his resolution to pluck out the heart of the Cornish poet’s mystery leading him again and again to influence his flighty host for such reunions. Even Mr. Ashe, the lawyer, seemed to have swallowed his half-humorous prejudices; and the doctor, though a rather sad and silent, was a companionable and considerate man. Paynter had even read Treherne’s poetry aloud, and he read admirably; he had also read other things, not aloud, grubbing up everything in the neighborhood, from guidebooks to epitaphs, that could throw a light on local antiquities. And it was that evening when the lamplight and the last daylight had kindled the colors of the wine and silver on the table under the tree, that he announced a new discovery.