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CHAPTER I - THE TALE OF THE PEACOCK TREES
Squire Vane was an elderly schoolboy of English education and
Irish extraction. His English education, at one of the great
public schools, had preserved his intellect perfectly and
permanently at the stage of boyhood. But his Irish extraction
subconsciously upset in him the proper solemnity of an old boy,
and sometimes gave him back the brighter outlook of a naughty boy.
He had a bodily impatience which played tricks upon him
almost against his will, and had already rendered him rather
too radiant a failure in civil and diplomatic service.
Thus it is true that compromise is the key of British policy,
especially as effecting an impartiality among the religions of India;
but Vane's attempt to meet the Moslem halfway by kicking off
one boot at the gates of the mosque, was felt not so much to
indicate true impartiality as something that could only be called
an aggressive indifference. Again, it is true that an English
aristocrat can hardly enter fully into the feelings of either party
in a quarrel between a Russian Jew and an Orthodox procession
carrying relics; but Vane's idea that the procession might
carry the Jew as well, himself a venerable and historic relic,
was misunderstood on both sides. In short, he was a man who
particularly prided himself on having no nonsense about him;
with the result that he was always doing nonsensical things.
He seemed to be standing on his head merely to prove that
he was hard-headed.
He had just finished a hearty breakfast, in the society of his daughter,
at a table under a tree in his garden by the Cornish coast. For, having a
glorious circulation, he insisted on as many outdoor meals as possible,
though spring had barely touched the woods and warmed the seas round
that southern extremity of England. His daughter Barbara, a good-looking
girl with heavy red hair and a face as grave as one of the garden statues,
still sat almost motionless as a statue when her father rose.
A fine tall figure in light clothes, with his white hair and mustache
flying backwards rather fiercely from a face that was good-humored enough,
for he carried his very wide Panama hat in his hand, he strode across
the terraced garden, down some stone steps flanked with old ornamental
urns to a more woodland path fringed with little trees, and so down a
zigzag road which descended the craggy Cliff to the shore, where he was
to meet a guest arriving by boat. A yacht was already in the blue bay,
and he could see a boat pulling toward the little paved pier.
And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellow
sands he was destined to find. his hard-headedness provoked
into a not unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to call
hot-headedness. The fact was that the Cornish peasantry,
who composed his tenantry and domestic establishment,
were far from being people with no nonsense about them.
There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about them;
with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin,
they seemed to surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense.
But the magic circle had one center: there was one point in
which the curving conversation of the rustics always returned.
It was a point that always pricked the Squire to exasperation,
and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it everywhere.
He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speak
to the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the gardener
seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leathery
brown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed
a low opinion of foreign shrubs.
"We wish you'd get rid of what you've got here, sir," he observed,
digging doggedly. "Nothing'll grow right with them here."
"Shrubs!" said the Squire, laughing. "You don't call the peacock
trees shrubs, do you? Fine tall trees--you ought to be proud of them."
"Ill weeds grow apace," observed the gardener. "Weeds can
grow as houses when somebody plants them." Then he added:
"Him that sowed tares in the Bible, Squire."
"Oh, blast your--" began the Squire, and then replaced the more apt
and alliterative word "Bible" by the general word "superstition."
He was himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set
his tenants an example. Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.
A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered
a woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit,
having more of a grievance. His daughter was at that time
seriously ill with a fever recently common on that coast,
and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted gentleman, would normally
have made allowances for low spirits and loss of temper.
But he came near to losing his own again when the peasant
persisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditional
monomania about the foreign trees.
"If she were well enough I'd move her," said the woodcutter,
"as we can't move them, I suppose. I'd just like to get my
chopper into them and feel 'em come crashing down."
"One would think they were dragons," said Vane.
"And that's about what they look like," replied Martin. "Look at 'em!"
The woodman was naturally a rougher and even wilder figure
than the gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like an
antique parchment, and it was framed in an outlandish arrangement
of raven beard and whiskers, which was really a fashion fifty
years ago, but might have been five thousand years old or older.
Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shores
in the morning of the world, might have combed or curled or
braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns.
For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall
as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race,
small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older
than the Vane family, though that was old as county families go.
For in many such parts of England it is the aristocrats who are
the latest arrivals. It was the sort of racial type that is
supposed to be passing, and perhaps has already passed.
The obnoxious objects stood some hundred yards away from the speaker,
who waved toward them with his ax; and there was something suggestive
in the comparison. That coast, to begin with, stretching toward
the sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud.
It was cut out against the emerald or indigo of the sea in graven
horns and crescents that might be the cast or mold of some such
crested serpents; and, beneath, was pierced and fretted by caves
and crevices, as if by the boring of some such titanic worms.
Over and above this draconian architecture of the earth a veil
of gray woods hung thinner like a vapor; woods which the witchcraft
of the sea had, as usual, both blighted and blown out of shape.
To the right the trees trailed along the sea front in a single line,
each drawn out in thin wild lines like a caricature. At the other end
of their extent they multiplied into a huddle of hunchbacked trees,
a wood spreading toward a projecting part of the high coast.
It was here that the sight appeared to which so many eyes and minds
seemed to be almost automatically turning.
Out of the middle of this low, and more or less level wood,
rose three separate stems that shot up and soared into the sky like a
lighthouse out of the waves or a church spire out of the village roofs.
They formed a clump of three columns close together, which might
well be the mere bifurcation, or rather trifurcation, of one tree,
the lower part being lost or sunken in the thick wood around.
Everything about them suggested something stranger and more southern
than anything even in that last peninsula of Britain which pushes
out farthest toward Spain and Africa and the southern stars.
Their leathery leafage had sprouted in advance of the faint mist
of yellow-green around them, and it was of another and less
natural green, tinged with blue, like the colors of a kingfisher.
But one might fancy it the scales of some three-headed dragon
towering over a herd of huddled and fleeing cattle.
"I am exceedingly sorry your girl is so unwell," said Vane shortly.
"But really--" and he strode down the steep road with plunging strides.
The boat was already secured to the little stone jetty,
and the boatman, a younger shadow of the woodcutter--
and, indeed, a nephew of that useful malcontent--saluted his
territorial lord with the sullen formality of the family.
The Squire acknowledged it casually and had soon forgotten all such
things in shaking hands with the visitor who had just come ashore.
The visitor was a long, loose man, very lean to be so young,
whose long, fine features seemed wholly fitted together of bone
and nerve, and seemed somehow to contrast with his hair,
that showed in vivid yellow patches upon his hollow temples
under the brim of his white holiday hat. He was carefully
dressed in exquisite taste, though he had come straight from
a considerable sea voyage; and he carried something in his hand
which in his long European travels, and even longer European visits,
he had almost forgotten to call a gripsack.
Mr. Cyprian Paynter was an American who lived in Italy. There was
a good deal more to be said about him, for he was a very acute and
cultivated gentleman; but those two facts would, perhaps, cover most
of the others. Storing his mind like a museum with the wonder
of the Old World, but all lit up as by a window with the wonder
of the New, he had fallen heir to some thing of the unique
critical position of Ruskin or Pater, and was further famous
as a discoverer of minor poets. He was a judicious discoverer,
and he did not turn all his minor poets into major prophets.
If his geese were swans, they were not all Swans of Avon. He had
even incurred the deadly suspicion of classicism by differing
from his young friends, the Punctuist Poets, when they produced
versification consisting exclusively of commas and colons.
He had a more humane sympathy with the modern flame kindled from
the embers of Celtic mythology, and it was in reality the recent
appearance of a Cornish poet, a sort of parallel to the new Irish poets,
which had brought him on this occasion to Cornwall. He was,
indeed, far too well-mannered to allow a host to guess that
any pleasure was being sought outside his own hospitality.
He had a long standing invitation from Vane, whom he had met
in Cyprus in the latter's days of undiplomatic diplomacy;
and Vane was not aware that relations had only been thus
renewed after the critic had read Merlin and Other Verses,
by a new writer named John Treherne. Nor did the Squire even begin
to realize the much more diplomatic diplomacy by which he had
been induced to invite the local bard to lunch on the very day
of the American critic's arrival.
Mr. Paynter was still standing with his gripsack, gazing in a trance
of true admiration at the hollowed crags, topped by the gray,
grotesque wood, and crested finally by the three fantastic trees.
"It is like being shipwrecked on the coast of fairyland," he said,
"I hope you haven't been shipwrecked much," replied his host, smiling.
"I fancy Jake here can look after you very well."
Mr. Paynter looked across at the boatman and smiled also.
"I am afraid," he said, "our friend is not quite so enthusiastic
for this landscape as I am."
"Oh, the trees, I suppose!" said the Squire wearily.
The boatman was by normal trade a fisherman; but as his house,
built of black tarred timber, stood right on the foreshore a few yards
from the pier, he was employed in such cases as a sort of ferryman.
He was a big, black-browed youth generally silent, but something
seemed now to sting him into speech.
"Well, sir," he said, "everybody knows it's not natural.
Everybody knows the sea blights trees and beats them under,
when they're only just trees. These things thrive like some
unholy great seaweed that don't belong to the land at all.
It's like the--the blessed sea serpent got on shore, Squire,
and eating everything up."
"There is some stupid legend," said Squire Vane gruffly.
"But come up into the garden; I want to introduce you
to my daughter."
When, however, they reached the little table under the tree,
the apparently immovable young lady had moved away after all,
and it was some time before they came upon the track of her.
She had risen, though languidly, and wandered slowly along
the upper path of the terraced garden looking down on the lower
path where it ran closer to the main bulk of the little wood
by the sea.
Her languor was not a feebleness but rather a fullness of life,
like that of a child half awake; she seemed to stretch
herself and enjoy everything without noticing anything.
She passed the wood, into the gray huddle of which a single
white path vanished through a black hole. Along this part
of the terrace ran something like a low rampart or balustrade,
embowered with flowers at intervals; and she leaned over it,
looking down At another glimpse of the glowing sea behind
the clump of trees, and on another irregular path tumbling
down to the pier and the boatman's cottage on the beach.
As she gazed, sleepily enough, she saw that a strange figure
was very actively climbing the path, apparently coming from
the fisherman's cottage; so actively that a moment afterwards it
came out between the trees and stood upon the path just below her.
It was not only a figure strange to her, but one somewhat strange
in itself. It was that of a man still young, and seeming somehow
younger than his own clothes, which were not only shabby but antiquated;
clothes common enough in texture, yet carried in an uncommon fashion.
He wore what was presumably a light waterproof, perhaps through having
come off the sea; but it was held at the throat by one button,
and hung, sleeves and all, more like a cloak than a coat.
He rested one bony hand on a black stick; under the shadow
of his broad hat his black hair hung down in a tuft or two.
His face, which was swarthy, but rather handsome in itself,
wore something that may have been a slightly embarrassed smile,
but had too much the appearance of a sneer.
Whether this apparition was a tramp or a trespasser, or a friend of some
of the fishers or woodcutters, Barbara Vane was quite unable to guess.
He removed his hat, still with his unaltered and rather sinister smile,
and said civilly: "Excuse me. The Squire asked me to call."
Here he caught sight of Martin, the woodman, who was shifting along
the path, thinning the thin trees; and the stranger made a familiar
salute with one finger.
The girl did not know what to say. "Have you--have you come
about cutting the wood?" she asked at last.
"I would I were so honest a man," replied the stranger.
"Martin is, I fancy, a distant cousin of mine; we Cornish folk just
round here are nearly all related, you know; but I do not cut wood.
I do not cut anything, except, perhaps, capers. I am,
so to speak, a jongleur."
"A what?" asked Barbara.
"A minstrel, shall we say?" answered the newcomer, and looked up
at her more steadily. During a rather odd silence their eyes
rested on each other. What she saw has been already noted,
though by her, at any rate, not in the least understood.
What he saw was a decidedly beautiful woman with a statuesque
face and hair that shone in the sun like a helmet of copper.
"Do you know," he went on, "that in this old place, hundreds of years ago,
a jongleur may really have stood where I stand, and a lady may really
have looked over that wall and thrown him money?"
"Do you want money?" she asked, all at sea.
"Well," drawled the stranger, "in the sense of lacking it, perhaps, but I
fear there is no place now for a minstrel, except nigger minstrel.
I must apologize for not blacking my face."
She laughed a little in her bewilderment, and said:
"Well, I hardly think you need do that."
"You think the natives here are dark enough already, perhaps,"
he observed calmly. "After all, we are aborigines, and are
treated as such."
She threw out some desperate remark about the weather or the scenery,
and wondered what would happen next.
"The prospect is certainly beautiful," he assented,
in the same enigmatic manner. "There is only one thing in it
I am doubtful about."
While she stood in silence he slowly lifted his black stick like a long
black finger and pointed it at the peacock trees above the wood.
And a queer feeling of disquiet fell on the girl, as if he were,
by that mere gesture, doing a destructive act and could send a blight
upon the garden.
The strained and almost painful silence was broken by the voice
of Squire Vane, loud even while it was still distant.
"We couldn'tt make out where you'd got to, Barbara," he said.
"This is my friend, Mr. Cyprian Paynter." The next moment
he saw the stranger and stopped, a little puzzled. it was only
Mr. Cyprian Paynter himself who was equal to the situation.
He had seen months ago a portrait of the new Cornish poet
in some American literary magazine, and he found himself,
to his surprise, the introducer instead of the introduced.
"Why, Squire," he said in considerable astonishment, "don't you
know Mr. Treherne? I supposed, of course, he was a neighbor."
"Delighted to see you, Mr. Treherne," said the Squire,
recovering his manners with a certain genial confusion.
"So pleased you were able to come. This is Mr. Paynter---my
daughter," and, turning with a certain boisterous embarrassment,
he led the way to the table under the tree.
Cyprian Paynter followed, inwardly revolving a puzzle which had taken
even his experience by surprise. The American, if intellectually
an aristocrat, was still socially and subconsciously a democrat.
It had never crossed his mind that the poet should be counted
lucky to know the squire and not the squire to know the poet.
The honest patronage in Vane's hospitality was something which made
Paynter feel he was, after all, an exile in England.
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 de vour 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
case 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 tgether.
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 welltrained 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, lie 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.
Content of CHAPTER I - THE TALE OF THE PEACOCK TREES [G K Chesterton's novel: The Trees of Pride]
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