Speaker 1: 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 fantastastic 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 a 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
Pep 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 pep, perfect pest, poultry posa plaguy parasite,
and yet hardly a parasite You couldn't 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 owe you a hundred pounds, even
if he hadn't the faintest wish to remind you of
the fact, not that 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 ark. 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. But 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 God, chanting the name of his destination
reached him only just in time to set him frantically
pulling down on his frozen window and ejecting 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 Mitten's with mouth
ajar 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 selfie,
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 peep 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 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 peclmed 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
por immense knuckled hand, and mounted into the ancient cab
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 your 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 rime,
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 occupant's slightly immpurpled 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 summer time, 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 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 eccentricity 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 of 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 wast 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 eyesaw 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 it's 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 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 flowers
into his pocket book, 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 heard 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 and a
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, died overflowed from the tented depths of the tree,
like the yells and laughter of a playground of children
suddenly released for 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. Peep 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's 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 damn 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 sight 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 stool in a counting 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 in 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 are hoping to make
out of your old bee 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, jahar 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 carcasse in your wretched old tree. 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 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, jahar, I'm getting out. The horse was dragged
up onto its haunches. The cab came to a standstill,
and to 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 the 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 cristled 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 frost
beclad meadow, wood and winding lane, and one sole house
in sight, a 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 futurity 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 and 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 grasp, 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 squareheaded 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 to 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 uninterrupted 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 Gomorah,
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 due to
the frost that crystaled 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 cicatrice. 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 perfect 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 rat and bird
ravaged thatch. Only a specter could be content with such
a dwelling, and a gilt stricken ratch 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 zephyr
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 labours. 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 colours
glowed from the old, fine, rough paper, like lamps and gems.
There were drawings of birds, too, birds of dazzling plue,
humage of flowers and butterflies, their crimson and emerald, rose
and saffron, seemingly shimmering and astir that every mellion, 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
starved creature that sat there, burning swiftly away among his
insane ghewgaws, 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 w f m c A 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. All wist 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 stuff
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 at no lady, goodriver,
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 them, who would
never know that they're lying. Preposterous. Pea 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
wind stirred in the bedraggled thatch feebly whined 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 corpselike 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 empious walls as softly as an immense sack
of hay. These were not eyes in that abominable countenance,
speck pupiled greenish gray, unfocussed 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
bronchitic figure, muffled up in a pathetic shawl, would sometimes
be seen seated in a place of honour, its hard
square hat upon its thick bald skull, within positive reach
of the jovial auctioneer's ivory hammer. To purchase every pp
that came into the market was a dream beyond even
a multimillionaire'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 salamanders, 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,