The Tree by Walter de la Maire. Encased in his dingy and faded first
class railway carriage, the prosperous fruit merchant sat alone. From the collar of
his thick frieze greatcoat, stuck out a triangular nose on each side of it.
A small, bleak black eye gazed absently at one of the buttons on
the empty blue upholstered seat opposite him. His breath spread a fading vapor in
the air. He sat bolt upright, congealed in body, heated in mind,
his unseeing eye fixed on that cloth button, that stud There was nothing
else to look at, for the simple reason that his six narrow windows were
whitely sheeted with hoar frost. Only his thoughts were his company, while the
coach, the superannuated coach, bumped dully on over the metals, and his
thoughts were neither a satisfaction nor a pleasure. His square hard head under his
square hard hat was nothing but a pot seething with vexation, scorn, and
discontent. What had invited him out so far in weather so dismal, on
a line so feebly patronized? Anger all but sparkled in his mind as he
considered the intention of his journey and what was likely to be the end of
it. Twelve solid, yet fleeting years divided him from his last meeting with
his half brother, shipload on shipload of exotic oranges and lemons, pineapples,
boxed figs, and blushing pomegranates. At this very moment, three more or
less seaworthy ocean tramps were steaming across the watery channels of the world, laden
with cargoes of which he was the principal consignee. He stretched out his legs,
crossed his feet. He was a substantial man. There was nothing tastic
about him to put on airs when you couldn't afford them, to meet a
friendly offer, with ranking gratitude, to quarrel with the only relative on earth
who had kept you out of the workhouse. He had sworn never to set
foot in the place again. Yet here he was, and nothing but a
fool for his pains. Having washed his hands of the whole silly business,
he should have kept them washed, instead of which he thrust them deeper into
his capacious pockets, and wondered to God when his journey was to come to
an end. No, it was with no charitable, no friendly no sentimental
motive that he was being glided joltingly on a half brother, and particularly if
he owes you a hundred pounds and more, need not be even fractionally your
being one smiles to think of for the sake of old lang Syne. There
was nothing in common between the two except a father now twenty five years in
his grave and alone that would never be repaid. That was one galling feature
of the situation. There was another, in plain print in his own morning
newspaper. The fruit Merchant had chanced only a week or two ago on the
preposterous fact that a mere woodcut of a mere bird and flower initialed p P
had brought at Christie's ninety seven guineas ninety seven guineas sixty eight crates of excellent
Denia oranges at thirty shillings a crate. What the devil his small eyes seemed
to congest, and yet at the same time to protrude from their sockets p
P perfect pest, poultry, poser, plague, parasite, and yet hardly
a parasite you could dish a half brother who hadn't sent you a single word
of greeting for twelve solid fleeting, prosperous years with a term like that,
even if he did oher you one hundred pounds, even if he hadn't the
faintest wish to remind you of the fact, not the fruit merchant wanted his
hundred pounds. He was not a debt collector. It was the principle of
the thing. If half an hour's silly scratching over a little lump of wood
could bring you ninety seven guineas, about twenty nine and a half minutes would
bring in a round hundred. And there were more birds and more flowers in
that infernal tree than Noah could have found room for in his arc. The
tree, the very thought of it swept a pulsating cloud of rage over his
eyes. Cool quiet insolence he could have forgiven and almost forgotten. But the
merest reminder of that talk about the tree never failed to infuriate him. It
infuriated him now almost beyond endurance, simply because he knew, even if he
wouldn't confess it openly to himself, that this was the decoy which was dragging
him on these fifty three interminable miles on a freezing, hideous country afternoon.
The tree never in all his life had he met with such an exhibition of
sheer, stark midsummer madness. And yet with every inch of his journey the
recollection grew on him. He couldn't get it out of his head. Curiosity,
resentment, vindictiveness, a cold, creeping cunning, A score of conflicting
emotions zigzagged to and fro in his mind. He glared through them at the
walls of his cage. But worst outrage of all was the creeping realization,
and his body stiffened at the thought that he was, even now, and
perhaps a little more than ever, afraid of the tree. When you finally
deal with a relative who has been a pest to you all your life,
the one thing you do not look for is an interference of that kind.
He could not deny it. The tree had impressed him the moment he thought
of his brother, of the country, even of his boyhood. There it
was. It had impressed him so much that the upholstered button had now completely
disappeared, and he seemed to be actually in the presence of the tree again.
He saw it as vividly as if its image hung there before his very
eyes. In the slightly self warmed air of his solitary compartment. The experience
filled him with so sudden a flood of aversion and resentment that the voice of
the guard, chanting the name of his destination reached him only just in time
to set him frantically pulling down on his frozen window and dejecting himself out of
the train. One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveler
to alight on the frosted tim of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness
in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The furs that
flanked the dreary passenger shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of
coming night. He was elderly, he was obese. His heart was none
too sound, at least as compared with his head. Yet, if he
intended to catch the last train home, he had scarcely two hours in which
to reach his half brother's wretched little house, to congratulate him on his guineas,
to refuse to accept repayment of his loan, to sneer at his tree,
and to return to the station A bark at a weedy young porter in
mittens, with mouth a jar over his long teeth, sent him ambling off
for a conveyance. The fruit merchant stood under the shed in his frieze coat
and square hard hat, and watched the train glide out of the station.
The screech of its engine hauling up into the windless air had exactly expressed his
own peculiar sentiments. There was not a living being in sight whereon to breathe
a curse, only himself, a self he had been vaguely cursing throughout his
tedious journey. The frozen landscape lay white in the dying day. The sun
hung like the yolk of an egg above the still horizon. Some menace in
the very look of this sullen object hinted that pp might long since have crossed
the bourne from which no belated draft on any earthly bank had ever been known
to come. Thought diverted into more rugged channels. The current of talk which
he had intended to engage with his half brother. In other words, he
would give the silly fool a bit of his mind. The fact was their
last quarrel, if anything so one side it could be called a quarrel,
had tinctured the fruit merchant's outlook on the world a deal more densely than he
would until now have confessed. No living creature, no sound stirred the air.
The fair country lay cold, as if in a swoon, like a
shallow inverted saucer. A bicarned sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the
fields, his broad, cleft chin thrust into his muffler, his hands into
his pockets. The stranger to these parts stood waiting, just stood there,
with his small black eyes, staring desolately out of his clothes. Why you
might as well be marooned in a foreign land or on a stage, sterile,
cold, vacant, with not a single soul in the audience. At
the sound of wheels and hoofs, he coughed, as if in uncontrollable indignation,
and turned smartly on his heel with a gesture of disdain. The fruit
merchant sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy poor to his immense knuckled hand,
and mounted into the ancient cap that had somehow been excavated from the countryside.
Stagnating all about them. The man on the box was like some cautious and
obscure little animal that had been dug up out of the earth. When given
his direction, his face had fallen into an indescribable expression beneath its whiskers,
an expression, it appeared, which was its nearest approach to a smile and
don't spare or horse had barked his fare, slamming the rickety door behind him.
A railway carriage, even of the most antique description, when its glasses
opaque with rhyme, is a little less like a prison cell than a four
wheeled cab. For which reason, perhaps, as the vehicle ground on beneath
the misty, leafless elms, the frigid air was allowed to beat softly in
from the open window upon its occupants slightly impurpled face, and still on and
on, memory retrieved for him now here now there every incident of his last
experience on this self same road. It had been summertime, June. He
had been twelve years younger, a good gross of years, less prosperous,
and perhaps not quite so easily found into a peculiar helpless state of rage.
Indeed, his actual meeting with his half brother at the little White garden Gate
had been almost friendly, so friendly that it would hardly have been supposed they
were in any way unpleasingly related to one another, or that the least responsibility
of each to each could have caused any kind of festering recrimination. Not that
Pp was even then the kind of person one hastens to introduce to one's friends.
You not only never knew how he would look or what he would say,
you weren't even certain what he might do. A rolling stone that merely
he fails to gather moss is a harmless object in comparison with one that appears
to gather momentum. And even the most trifling suggestion not so much of vaccentricity
as of an alien and crooked gleam in the eye, is apt to make
the most respectable company a little uneasy. Not that the two half brothers had
ever discussed together their aims and intentions and ideas about life, their desires or
motives or hopes or aversions, or apprehensions or prejudices. The fruit merchant had
his fair share of most of these human incentives. But he also had principles,
and one of them was to keep his mouth shut. They had met,
had shaken hands, had exchanged remarks on the weather. Then PP in
his frayed jacket and slippers, had aimlessly led him off with an expressionless face
into the garden, had aimlessly dropped a few distant remarks out their common past,
and then, surrounded as they were by the scenery, scents, and
noises of summer, had pushed his knotted hands into his trousers pockets and fallen
silent, his gray, vacant eyes fixed on the tree. Apart from a
clump of elms in the distance, there was nothing in view even to challenge
it for beauty, growth and station. From its station, all but at
the foot of the broken, hedged, straggling garden it rose to heaven,
a prodigious, spreading, ascendant cone with its long, dark green, pointed
leaves. It stood from first springing branch to apex, a motionless, somnolent
fountain of flowers. If his half brother had taken the fruit merchant into a
dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an aving plant that, with care,
water and guano, had been raised from some far fetched seed, well,
that might have been something to boast about. He himself was in the trade.
He knew a jaffer orange from a mandarin. The stuff had to grow
of course, and he was broad minded enough to approve of rural enterprise.
Giant mangolds and prize pumpkins did no harm. He had stared broodingly about him.
The garden was a waste, the hedges untrimmed, A rank, lusty
growth of weeds flaunted their flowers at the sun. And this tree, it
must have been flourishing here for centuries past, a positive I saw to any
practical gardener. P. P couldn't even put a name to it. Yet
by the fixed, idiotic, dreamy look on his face, he might have
supposed it was a gift from heaven, that, having waved his hands about
like those colored humbugs with the mango, the thing had sprung up out of
the ground by sheer magic. Nor that the fruit merchant had denied that it
was unique. He had never seen, nor would he ever want to see
its double. The sun had beaten down upon his head, A low,
enormous drone filled the air. The reflected light dazed his eyes. A momentary
faintness had stolen over him as he had turned once more and glanced again into
his half brother's long, bony face, the absent eyes, the prominent cheek,
the graying hair dappled with sunlight. How do you know it's unique,
he had asked. It may be as common as blackberries in other parts of
the country or abroad. One of the officers on the catamaran was telling me,
I don't know, his half brother had interrupted him, but I have
been looking at trees all my life. This resembles all reminds me of none.
Besides, I'm not going abroad, at least at the present. What
had he meant by that? The fruit merchant hadn't inquired, had merely stood
there in the flowers and grasses, staring up into the spreading branches, almost
involuntarily shaking his head at the pungent sweetness that hung dense and sickly in the
air, and the old familiar symptoms began to stir in him, symptoms which
his intimates could have described in one word. Fuming. He was not denying
it, not he The tree was remarkable as trees go. For one thing,
it bore two distinct kinds and shapes of blossom, the one circular and
full and milky in a dark cuplike calyx with clusters of scarlet tipped pistols.
The other a pale yellow, oval three petaled with a central splash of orange.
He had surreptitiously squeezed a couple of the fallen flower hours into his pocketbook,
had taken them out at his office the next morning to show them to
the partner he had afterward brought out of the business, only to find them
black, slimy, and unrecognizable, and to be laughed at for his pains.
What's the use of the thing, He had next inquired of his half
brother, is it edible? At which, with the faint smile on his
face that had infuriated the fruit merchant even as a boy, the other had
merely shrugged his shoulders. Why not try it on the pigs. I don't
keep pigs, keep pigs. Indeed, there wasn't the faintest symptom that he
would ever be able to keep himself. Well, aren't there any birds in
these parts? It had been a singularly false move. It has brought its
own, had been his half brother's muttered retort. There was no denying it,
at least so far as the fruit merchants small ornithological knowledge went. At
that very moment. Birds of a peculiarly vivid green sheeniness were hovering and dipping
between the deep blue of the sky under the mountainous blossoming little birds with unusually
long and attenuated bills, playing fluttering, lisping, courting, and apparently sucking
the heady nectar from the snowy and ivory cups, while poised like animate gems
on the wing. He had once again opened his mouth, but his half
brother had laid a lean, tingling hand on his sleeve. Listen, he
said, half stifled, jetting, delirious bursts of song, twinkled, belled
rose, tied overflowed from the tented depths of the tree, like the yells
and laughter of a playground of children suddenly released from an unexpected half holiday.
Listen. Indeed, the noise of the creatures were still echoing in his ears
as he sat there bulkily swaying, his eyes fixed on the pallid, gliding
hedgerow from his fusty cab. Pepe had not positively claimed that every single chorister
in the chorus was an exdigenous visitant. He had gone further. He had
gently bent down a low lying fan of leaves and bloom, and not content
with exhibiting one by one living specimens of a spotted blue, iridescent little beetle,
a horned kind of cockchafer, and a dappled black and yellow mottled ladybird,
all of them following their lives in these surroundings. He had also chased
in vain a couple of exotic butterflies down the slope of the garden, and
had pointed out little clumps of saffron and sky blue flowers, and a rank
ungainly weed with a cluster of black helmet shaped florets at its tips, asserting
that these were as rare as unpressed entered in those parts as the tree itself.
You don't mean to say, because the thing has brought its own vermin,
that it's any better for that. We can do that in the fruit
trade it's brought me, said the other, mooning Meanwhile, in the opposite
direction, And where do you raise your potatoes and artichokes and scarlet runners?
It looks to me like a damned waste of soil. The wandering greenish gray
eyes had rested for a moment on the puffy, contemptuous face a few inches
beneath them, without the faintest symptom of intelligence. Empty eyes, yet with
a hint of danger in them, like a bright green pool of water in
an old quarry. You shall have a basket of the fruit, if you'll
risk it. It never really ripens queer looking seeds. You eat it yourself.
Then the eyes slid away, the narrow shoulders lifted a little. I
take things as they come. It was precisely how he had afterward taken the
check. Seated there on each side of the deal table in the bare,
uncarpeted, uncurtained living room of the cottage, over a luncheon of bread and
dry cheese and onions, with the reflected light of the tree on his half
brother's face, the talk between the two of them had gradually degenerated into an
altercation. At length, the fruit merchant, with some little relief, had
completely lost his temper. A half empty jam pot buzzing with bees was no
more appetizing an object because the insects were not of the usual variety. He
had literally been stung into repeating a few semi fraternal truths to submit to being
half starved, simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look
at your bits of drawings. To sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in
your back garden twenty times more useless, because there wasn't its like for miles
around. Even if there wasn't to be content to hang like a bloodsucker on
the generosity of a relative half blood and half water. Well, he had
given p P a bit of his mind. The fruit Merchant instinctively drew a
cold, fat hand down his face as a more and more precise recollection of
the subsequent scene recurred to him. Mere silence can be insulting. And there
was one thing about his half brother, worse than all the rest of his
peculiarities put together, that had never failed to reduce him to a helpless indignation.
His eyes they didn't see you, even when they were fixed on you
across two feet of deal board. They saw something else, and with no
vestige of common courtesy. And those hands, you could swear at a glance
that they had never done a single honest day's work in their owner's life.
Every site of them had made it easier for the fruit Merchant to work himself
up into a blind, refreshing rage. The cottage had fairly shaken to his
abuse. The raw onions had danced under his fist on the table and twining
in and out between his roarings and shoutings, had meandered on that other,
low, groping, dispassionate voice. His brothers. He had found his own
place, and there he intended to remain. Rather than sit on a stall
in accounting house writing invoices for crates of oranges and pineapples, he would hang
himself from the topmost branches of the tree. You had your own life to
lead, and it didn't matter if you died of it. He was not
making any claims. There was nothing the same in this world for any two
persons, and the more different everything was, the more closely you should cling
to the difference. Oh, yes, it was mere chance, or whatever
you like to call it, that had brought him here, mere chance that
the tree had not even been charged for in the rent. There it was,
and it would last him his lifetime, and when that was over he
wouldn't complain. He had wagged his skimpy beard a pencil between his fingers.
No, he wouldn't complain if they just dug a hole in the garden and
shoveled his body in under the grass within reach of the rootlets. What's your
body. They'll bury me all right when I'm safely dead. Try it,
it's a fair speculation. Try what the fruit. Merchant's countenance had suddenly set
like a gargoyle and cast iron. His half brother had nodded towards a dingy
portfolio that stood leaning against a half empty bookcase, and at that his guest
had laid about him with a will. So that's the kind of profit you're
hoping to make out of your old b bush. That's your profit. That's
your fine airs, your miserable scribblings and scragglings. He had once more slammed
down his huge fist on the table and delivered his ultimatum. See here,
I give you a hundred pounds here and now there's no claim on me,
not a shred. We don't even share the same mother, even if we
share the same dad. You talk this abject rubbish to me. You have
never earned a decent penny in your life. You never will. You are
a fool and a loafer. Go to the parish and go for good.
I'm sick of it. You're here, sick of it. You sit there
whiffling that I haven't eyes in my head, that I don't know black from
white, that you'd rather hang your miserable carcass in your wretched old tree and
take a respectable job. Well, hang it there, it won't break the
branches. If this is the only kind of meal you can give a visitor,
I'm done with you. I wash my hands of you. He had
inaccurately pantomime to the operation sweeping over the jam pot as he did so,
and now drew in his breath, a cold breath too, as with eyes
fixed on the ever lightning hedgerows beyond his oblong window, he remembered the renewed,
red hot stab of pain that transfixed the ball of his thumb. It
recalled him instantaneously to his surroundings. Scrambling up from his seat, he ejected
his head out of the cab into the open. Whoa there, Jahia,
I'm getting out. The horse was dragged up onto its haunches. The cab
came to a standstill, and the roaring suspirations of the animal. The fruit
merchant alighted on the tinkling ice of a frozen wayside puddle of water. He
turned himself about time, and the night had not tarried during his journey.
The east was a blaze of moonlight. The moon glared in the gray heavens
like a circular, flat, little window of glass. Wait here, the
fruit merchant bade his cabman at the desolation, you've pretty near shaken the head
off my body. The cabman ducked his own small head in reply, and
saluted his fare with a jerk of his whip. You won't be long,
he sang out between his whiskers. What did he mean by that? Was
the fruit Merchant's querulous question to himself as he mounted the few remaining yards of
by lane toward the crest of the slope. He was tired and elderly and
cold. A pathetic look, one almost of sadness, came into his face.
He pushed up his muffler and coughed. There replied the faintest echo from
the low copse that bordered the lane. Grass crystalled with hoar frost muffled his
footsteps. What had he meant by that? Repeated self to self, but
not as if expectant of an answer. When well out of sight of the
cabman and his vehicle beneath the slope of the hill, the fruit merchant paused,
lifting his eyes league beyond league, beneath him, as if to the
confines of the world. The countryside spread on frostby clad meadow, wood and
winding lane, and one sole house in sight. The small tumbled down,
lightless, huddling cottage, its ragged thatch and walls checkered black with shadow and
dazzling white with wash of moonshine. And there, lifting itself into the empty
skies, its twigs and branches sweeping the stars, stood the single, naked,
gigantic tree. The fruit merchant gazed across at it like an obese minute
belial on the ramparts of Eden. He had been fooled, then tricked.
He might have guessed the fatuity of his enterprise. He had guessed it.
The house was empty, the bird had flown. Why for a single instant
had he dreamed otherwise? Simply because all these years he had been deceived into
believing there was a kind of honesty in the fellow, just that something quixotic,
stupid, stubborn, dense, dull, demented, which nothing but lies.
Then that bee in his bonnet, that snake in his grass, nothing
but lies. There was no principle by which you could judge a man like
that, And yet well, after all he was like anybody else. Give
him a taste of the sweets of success, and his boasted solitude, his
contempt for the mere decencies of life, his pretended disgust at men more capable
and square headed than himself, had vanished into thin air. There were fools
in the world, he had discovered, who would pay ninety seven guineas for
a second or third hand scrabble of a drawing. Right, you are hand
over the DIBs, and I am off. A scornful yet lugubrious smile stole
over the fruit merchant's purplish features. He would be honest about it. He
positively enjoyed acknowledging when a rival had bested him over a bargain. He would
even agree that he had always nursed his own little superstitions. And now all
that fine silly talk, sheer fudge. He had been childish, fool enough
to be pressed by it, Yes, and have been even a little frightened
by a tree. He eyed it there, that gaunt, prodigious weed,
And then, with one furtive glance over his round shoulder towards the crest of
the slope behind which lay his way of escape from this wintry landscape, and
from every memory of the buffoon who had cheated him. He slowly descended the
hill, pushed open the broken gate, and entered the icy, untended garden
once more. He came to a standstill in his frieze coat, and from
under the brim of his hard hat, stared up into the huge, frigid
branches. There are a subtle lift and ease in the twigs of a tree
asleep in winter. Green living buds are everywhere, huddling close in their drowsy
defenses. Even the fruit merchant could distinguish between the dreaming and the dead,
or at any rate, between the unripe and the rotten. And as he
looked, two thoughts scurried like rats out of the wainscot of his mind,
those lean, shrunken twigs, those massive vegetable bones. The tree was dead,
and up there he shifted rapidly to and fro in order to secure an
unintructed view of a kind of huddling shape. Up aloft there an object that
appeared to be stooping crazily forward, as if on a similar quest in respect
to himself. But no, he took a deep breath, the sudden knocking
against the wall of his head ceased. He need not have alarmed himself an
optical illusion. Nothing. The tree was dead, that was clear, a
gaunt, black, sapless nightmare. But the ungainly clump and shape hoisted midway
among its boughs was not a huddling human body. It was only another kind
of derelict parasite, withered mistletoe. And that gentle skeleton like rattling high overhead
was only the fingering of a faint breeze in the moonlight, clacking twig against
twig. Maybe it would have simplified matters if but no need as well on
that one corpse at a time was enough for any man on a night like
this, and in a country as cheerless as the plains of Gomorrah, A
phrase or two out of his familiar bills of lading recurred to the fruit merchant's
mind, the act of God. There was something so horrific in the contorted
set of the branches outthrust in ungainly menace above his head, that he was
reminded of no lesser depravity than the devil himself. Thank the Lord, his
half brother had not remembered to send him a parcel of the fruit. If
ever poison showed in a plant, it haunted every knot a knuckle of this
derelict judgment had overtaken it the act of God. That's what came of boasting.
That's what came of idling a useless life away in a day dream at
other people's expense. And now the cunning bird was flown. The insult of
his half brother's triumph stabbed the fruit merchant like a sword. A sudden giddiness,
the roar as of water, caused in part no doubt by the posture
of his head, swept over him. Reverberated in his ears, he thrust
a cautious hand into the breast of his coat and lowered his eyes. They
came to a stay on the rugged moonlit bowl, and there, with hardly
less intensity of gaze, they once more fixed themselves. The natural living bark
of the tree had been of a russet gray, resembling that of the beach,
apart from a peculiar shimmer ess due to the frost that crystalled over it,
and as the skin of a dead thing, that bark now suggested the
silveriness of leprosy. So far, so good. But midway up the unbranched
bowl, at the height of from five to six feet from the ground,
appeared a wide, peculiar cicatris. The iridescent grayness here abruptly ended. Above
it stretched a clear, blank ring of darker color, knobbed over in and
out with tiny, gaudy clusters of fungi. The fruit merchant stole in a
pace or two no feet of the inhuman This cleanly and precisely the thick rind
of the tree must sometimes since have been cut and pared away in a wide
equal ring, a ring too far from the ground to have been the work
of pigs or goats, too smooth and sharp edged to have been caused by
the gnawings of cattle. It was perfectly plane. The sap protecting skin of
the thing had been deliberately cut and hacked away. The tree had been murdered.
High in the moonlit heavens. It gloated there a victim. Not until
then did the fruit merchant stealthily turn and once more survey his half brother's house.
The slow and almost furtive movement of his head and shoulders suggested that the
action was involuntary. From this garden side. The aspect of the hovel was
even more abject and disconsolate. Its one ivy clustered chimney stack was smokeless.
The moonbeams rained softly and mercilessly on the flint walls, the boarded windows,
the rattened bird ravaged thatch. Only a specter could be content with such a
dwelling, and a gilt stricken wretch at that. Yet, without any doubt
in the world, the house was still inhabited, For a slender amber beam
of light leaned out at an obtuse angle from some crevice in the shuttering wood
into the vast bath of moonshine. For a moment, the fruit merchant hesitated.
He could leave the garden and regain his cab without nearing the house.
He could yet once more wash his hands. Certainly, after sight of the
maniac's treacherous work on this unique, god given tree, he had not the
faintest vestige of a desire to confront his half brother. Quite the reverse,
He would far rather fling a second hundred pounds after the first than be once
more contaminated by the creature. There was something vile in his surroundings. In
shadows as black as pitch like these, any inconceivable evil creature might lie in
covert. If the tree alive could decoy an alien fauna to its succulent nectar,
the tree dead might well invite even less pleasing ministrations come. What would
he was prepared. It might startle him, but he was dead cold already.
And when your whole mind is filled with disgust and disquiet, there is
no room for physical fear. You merely want to shake yourself free, edge
out and be off. Nevertheless, the human intruder in this inhuman wilderness was
already and with great caution, making his way toward the house on a pitch
black night. He might have hesitated, hadn't venomous serpents the habit of stealing
for their winter slumber into the crannies and hollows of fallen wood. Might not
even the lightest northern Zepha bring down upon his head another vast bulk of timber
from the withered labyrinth above. But so bright was the earth's lantern, so
still the starry sky, that he could hear and even see the seeds from
the humbler winter weeds scattering out from their yawning pods. As with exquisite care,
he brushed on through the tangling growths around him, and, having at
length closely approached the walls, standing actually within a jutting shadow, he paused
yet again and took a deep breath into his body. Before gently lifting himself,
he set his eye to the crevice, from which poured out that slender
shaft of light. So artificially brilliant was the room within by comparison with the
full moonlight of the fruit merchant's natural world. Without that, for an instant
or two he saw nothing, But he persevered, and after a while his
round, protruding eye found itself master of at least half the space on the
other side of the shutters. Stilled through and through, his fingers clutching the
frosted sill, he stood there, half suspended on his toes, and,
as if hypnotized, for scarcely more than a yard distant from his own,
there stooped a face, his half brothers, a face to haunt you to
your dying day. It was surmounted by a kind of nightcap, and was
almost unrecognizable. The unfolding of the hours of twelve solitary years had played havoc
with the once familiar features. The projecting brows above the angular cheek bones resembled
polished stone. The ear stood out like the vans of a bat on each
side above the corded neck. The thin, unkempt beard on the narrow jaw
brushed the long gnarled hand that was moving with a great and tedious care on
the bare table beneath it motionlessly. The hanging paraffin lamp poured its radiance upon
this engrossed, cadaverous visage, revealing every lion and bone, hollow and wrinkle.
Nevertheless its possessor, this old man, shrunken and hideous in his frame
of abject poverty, His arms drawn close up to his fallen body, worked
sedulously on and on and behind and around him showed the fruit of his labors.
Pinned to the scaling walls propped on the ramshackle shelf above his fireless hearthstone,
and even against the stale remnant of a loaf of bread on the cracked
blue dish Beside him, was a litter of pictures, and everywhere, lovely
and marvelous in all its guises. The tree, the tree in spring's delight,
in summer's quiet wonder, in autumn's garish decline, in naked, slumbering
wintry grace. The colors glowed from the old, fine, rough paper,
like lamps and gems. There were drawings of birds, too, birds of
dazzling plumage of flowers and butterflies, their crimson and emerald, rose and saffron,
seemingly shimmering and astir their every mealy and feathery and pollend, boss and
petal and plume, on fire with hoarded life and beauty. And there a
viper with its sinuous, molten scales, And there a face and shape looking
out of its nothingness, such as would awaken even a dreamer in a dream.
Only three sounds in that night quiet, and these scarcely discernible, stirred
in the watcher's ear. The faint shrill sing song of the flame in the
lamp, the harsh wheezing breath of the artist, and the noise of rats
or mice. This austere and dying creature must have come in at last from
the world of nature and mankind a long time ago. The arm that had
given the tree its quietus had now not the strength to lift an axe.
Yet the ungainly fingers toiled assiduously on the fruit merchant, spying in on the
old half staffed creature that sat there, burning swiftly away among his insane huegaurs.
As nearly broke out crying as laughing. He was frightened and elated,
mute and bursting with words. The act of God rather than even remotely resemble
that old scarecrow in his second childhood. Pushing that tiny bladed knife across the
surface of a flat of wood, he would an empty and resolute look stole
into the gazing eye. Not that he professed to understand. He knew nothing.
His head was completely empty. The last shred of rage and vindictiveness had
vanished away. He was glad he had come, for now he was going
back. What little of the present and future remained would soon be the past.
He too was aging. His life also was coming to an end.
He stared on. Oh yes, and not even a nephew to inherit his
snug little fortune, worldly goods shipload on shipload Well, since he could not
take it away with him, he would leave it behind. He would bequeath
it to charity, to the WFMCA perhaps, and he would make a note
of the hundred pounds, not in malice, only to leave things business like,
and in order to do your duty by a greedy and ungrateful world,
even though you were soon to be washing your hands of that too, or
waste, nothing but waste. But he thanked the Lord he had kept his
sanity, that he was respected, that he wasn't in the artificial fruit trade,
the stuffed your grandmother belled under glass. He thanked the Lord. He
was not foul to look at, foul probably to smell, and a poison
even to think about. Yet still he peeped on this old tom, though
it no lady could either. They would buy right enough. There's no doubt
of that Christie's would some day be humming with the things. He didn't deny,
the old lunatic that he knew a bird when he saw it, even
on paper. Ninety seven guineas. At that rate. There was more money
swimming about in this pestilent hovel than ever he himself could lay his practiced hands
on. And there were fools in plenty, rich dabbling affected silly fools,
dilettants, you called em, who would never know that their lying preposterous p
p. Had destroyed the very life of the tree that had given it all
for him, And why and why the fruit Merchant was almost tempted to burn
down the miserable cabin over his half brother's head. Who could tell a gust
of winds stirred in the bedraggled thatch, feebly wind in the keyhole, and
at that moment, as if an angry and helpless thought could make itself audible
even above the hungry racketing of mice and the melancholic whistling of a paraffin lamp.
At that moment, the corpse like countenance, almost within finger touch on
the other side of the table, slowly raised itself from the labor of its
regard and appeared to be searching through the shutter's cranny, as if into the
fruit Merchant's brain. The glance swept through him like an avalanche. No,
no, but one instantaneous confrontation, and he had pushed himself back from the
impious walls as softly as an immense sack of hay. These were not eyes
in that abominable countenance, spec pupiled greenish gray, unfocused under the protuberant matter
of eyebrow. They remained as still as a salt and stagnant sea, and
in their uplifted depths stretching out into endless distances, the fruit merchant had seen
regions of a country. Whence, for neither love nor money, he could
ever harvest one fruit, one pip, one cankered bud, and blossoming there
beside a glassy stream in the mid distance of far mountain sword a tree.
In after years, an old, fat, vulgar, and ronchitic figure,
muffled up in a pathetic shawl, would sometimes be seen seated in a place
of honor, its hard square hat upon its thick bald skull, within positive
reach of the jovial auctioneer's ivory hammer. To purchase every ppe that came into
the market was a dream beyond even a multi millionaire's avarice. But small beetles
or grubs, or single feathers drawn from the life were within the scope of
the fruit merchant's purse. The eye that showed not the faintest vestige of a
reflected glory from the orange of the orange, the gamboge of the lemon,
or the russet bronze of the pomegranate, in their created myriads, would fitfully
light up a while as one by one, and with reiterated grunts of satisfaction.
He afterward, in the secrecy of his home, consigned these indifferent and
early works of art to the flames. But since his medical man had warned
him that any manifestation of passion would almost unquestionably prove his ultimate manifestation of anything,
he steadily avoided thinking of the tree. Yet there it remained unexercisable,
ineradicable in his fading imagination. Indeed, he finally expired in the small hours
one black winter's morning, and as peacefully as a child, having dreamed that
he was looking through a crevice into what could not be hell, but might
be limbo or purgatory, the place of departed spirits. For there sat his
half brother, quite quite still, and all about him to be seen gay
and painted birds, and crystal flowers and damasked butterflies, and as it were,
sylphs and salamandous shapes of an unearthly beauty, but all of them strange,
preternaturally still, as if in a peep show, as if stuffed.
End of the tree,