The Riddle and Other Stories/The Tree
THE TREE
ENCASED in his dingy first-class railway carriage, the prosperous Fruit Merchant sat alone. From the collar of his thick frieze greatcoat stuck out a triangular nose. On either side of it a small, bleak, black eye gazed absently at one of the buttons on the empty blue-upholstered seat opposite to him. His breath spread a fading vapour 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 his six narrow glass 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 patronised? Anger all but sparkled in his mind as he considered the intention of his journey, and what was likely to be the end and outcome of it. Twelve solid yet fleeting years divided him from his last encounter with his half-brother—twelve cent. per cent. years—shipload on shipload of exotic oranges and lemons, pineapples, 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 fantastic about him.
To put on airs when you couldn't afford them; to meet a friendly offer with rank ingratitude; 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 heaven 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 jokingly 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 auld lang syne. There was nothing in common between the two of them, except a father now twenty-five years in his grave and a loan that would never be repaid.
That was one galling feature of the situation. There was another. In plain print and in his own respectable morning newspaper the Fruit Merchant had chanced but a week or two ago on the preposterous fact that a mere woodcut of a mere “Bird and Flower,” initialled P. P., had fetched 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; paltry poser; plaguey parasite. And yet—hardly a parasite. You couldn't with a term like that dish a half-brother who hadn't sent you a single word of greeting for twelve solid fleeting prosperous years. 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 wasn't a debt collector. He wasn't even vindictive. It was the principle of the thing.
For if half-an-hour's silly scratching over a little lump of wood could fetch you £101 17s., 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 the Fruit Merchant's eyes. Cool, quiet insolence—he could have forgiven that, and could almost have forgotten it. But the faintest recollection of the tree, and of the talk under it, never failed to infuriate him. It infuriated him now almost beyond endurance, simply because he knew, in the secrecy of his thoughts, 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 realisation—and his body stiffened at the thought—that he was even now, and perhaps even a little more than ever, afraid of the tree. When you finally deal with a relative and a bloodsucker 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. Ever since that first swimming stare at it, 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 it 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 chaunting the name of his destination reached him only just in time to set him frantically pulling down his frozen window and ejecting himself out of the train.
One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs 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 a couple of 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 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, horning 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 P. P. might long since have crossed the bourne from which no belated draft on any earthly bank had ever been known to transpire.
The thought diverted into ruggeder channels the current of the talk which he had intended to engage in 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-sided could be called a quarrel—had tinctured the Fruit Merchant's outlook on the world a good deal more densely than he would until now have confessed. A frown settled above the sullen eyes.
No living creature, no sound stirred the air. The fair country lay cold as if in a swoon. Like a shallow inverted saucer a becalmed sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the fields. His broad cleft chin thrust into his muffler, his hands into his capacious 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 just as well be marooned in a foreign land, or on a stage—sinister, cold, vacant, and 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 heels. …
With a gesture of disdain the Fruit Merchant sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy porter's immense knuckled hand and mounted into the cab. At his onset the whole square fusty interior leaned towards him like an extinguisher over the stub of a candle. The vehicle disgraced the universe. Even the man on the box resembled some little cautious and obscure 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 glass is 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 impurpled face.
And still on and on, now here, now there, memory retrieved for the sombre shape within it 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 not perhaps quite so easily fanned 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 P. P. 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 by 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 P. P., in his frayed jacket and slippers, with his meagre expressionless face, had aimlessly led off his visitor into the garden, had aimlessly dropped a few distant remarks about 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 grey, vacant eyes fixed on the tree. The Fruit Merchant had tried in vain to break the silence, to shrug his way out of it. He also could only stand and stare up and up—at the tree.
Solitary, unchallenged, exotic in 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 and somnolent fountain of flowers.
If his half-brother had taken the Fruit Merchant into a dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an ailing 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 Jaffa orange from a mandarin. The stuff has to grow, of course; and he was broad-minded enough to approve of rural enterprise. Giant Mangolds and Prize Pumpkins—they did no harm. They encouraged the human vegetable. But the. …
At last he had come to his senses and had peered fretfully 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 eyesore to any practical gardener. P. P. couldn't even put a name to it. Yet by the fixed idiotic dreamy look on his face you might have supposed it was a gift from heaven; that, having waved his hands about like those coloured humbugs with the mango, the thing had sprung up by sheer magic out of the ground.
Not 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 greying 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 for the present.”
What had he meant by that? The Fruit Merchant hadn't inquired; had merely stood there in the flowers and grasses, blinking up once more 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, as he now sat jolting on in his cab—symptoms which his intimates would have described in one word: fuming.
He was not denying it, not he—the tree had been 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 pistils; the other a pale yellow oval, three-petalled, 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 in the Borough the next morning to show them to the partner he had afterwards advantageously bought out of the business, only to find them black, slimy, and unrecognisable, and to be laughed at for his pains.
“What's the use of the thing?” he had next inquired of his half-brother in a gross voice. “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 Merchant's 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 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 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, eddied, 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 was still echoing in his ears as he sat there bulkily swaying, his eyes fixed on the pallid, gliding hedgerow from his fusty cab.
P. P. had not positively claimed that every single chorister in the chorus was an exotic 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 little spotted blue iridescent 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 waved a lean hand in the direction of a couple of gaudy butterflies intertwining in flight down the slope of the garden, 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 they were as rare—as unprecedented—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 the better for that? Lord, 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 pertatoes and artichokes and scarlet runners? It looks to me like a dam waste of soil.”
The wandering greenish-grey 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 a derelict 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 had lifted a little. “I take things as they come.” It was precisely how he had afterwards taken the cheque.
Seated there, on either 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 appetising 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 feverish helplessness: his eyes. They didn't see you even when they were fixed on you across a couple of 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 lifetime. 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 brother's.
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 individuals. And the more different everything was, the more closely you should cling to the difference.
Oh, yes, he had gone on, it was mere chance, or whatever you liked to call it, that had brought him here; a 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 shovelled his body in under the grass within reach of the rootlets. What's your body?—“They'll buy 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 blighted old bee-bush? That's your profit? That's your fine airs—your miserable scribblings and scragglings.”
He had once more slammed down his fat 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, d'ye hear?—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 carcase in your wretched old tree than 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. Do you hear?”
He had—inaccurately—pantomimed the operation, sweeping over the jampot as he did so, and now drew in his breath—a cold breath, too; as, with eyes fixed on the ever-lightening hedgerows beyond his oblong window, he remembered the renewed red-hot stab of pain that had 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! Whoa, I say: I'm getting out.”
The horse was dragged up on to 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 grey heavens like a circular flat little window of glass.
“Wait here—” the Fruit Merchant bade his cabman in 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 towards 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 hoarfrost, 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 and lifted 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, tumbledown, lightless, huddling cottage, its ragged thatch and walls chequered 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, as if in wait for him, the single naked gigantic tree.
The Fruit Merchant gazed across at it, like an obese minute Behai 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 boosted 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 now 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 himself childish fool enough to be impressed 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 is a supple lift and ease in the twigs of a tree asleep in winter. Green living buds are everywhere huddling close in their drowsy defences. 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. An unprecedented foreboding descended on him. These lean shrunken twigs, these 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 muffled 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 yet another kind of derelict parasite—withered mistletoe. And that gentle spellican-like rattling high overhead was but the fingering of a faint breeze in the moonlight; clacking twig against twig.
Maybe it would have simplified matters if But no need to dwell 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 less a 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 and knuckle of this tree. 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 daydream 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, again 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 bole. And there, with a renewed intensity of gaze, they once more fixed themselves.
The natural living bark of the tree had been of a russet grey, resembling that of the beech. Apart from a peculiar shimmeringness due to the frost that crystalled it over, 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 bole, at the height of five to six feet from the ground, appeared a wide peculiar cicatrice. The iridescent greyness here abruptly ended. Above it stretched a clear blank ring of darker colour, knobbed over, in and out, with tiny sparkling clusters of fungi.
The Fruit Merchant stole in a pace or two. No feat of the inhuman this. Cleanly and precisely the thick rind of the tree must some time 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 plain; 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 spectre could be content with such a dwelling, and a guilt-stricken wretch at that. Yet without any doubt in the world the house was still inhabited. For even now 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 his unique God-given tree he hadn't 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 his company. There was something vile in his surroundings.
In shadows black as pitch, like these, any inconceivably evil creature might be 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 come 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 infinite caution, making his way towards 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 baulk of timber from the withered labyrinth above? But so bright was the earth's lanthorn, 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 hypnotised.
For scarcely more than a yard distant from his own there stooped a face—his half-brother's: a face to haunt you to your dying day. It was surmounted by a kind of nightcap, and was almost unrecognisable. 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 ears stood out like the vans of a bat on either side above the corded neck. The thin unkempt beard on the narrow jaw brushed the long gnarled hand that was moving with an infinite tedious care on the bare table beneath it.
Motionlessly the hanging paraffin lamp poured its radiance upon this engrossed cadaverous visage, revealing every line 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 marvellous in all its guises—the tree. The tree in May's showering loveliness, in summer's quiet wonder, in autumn's decline, in naked slumbering wintry grace. The colours glowed from the fine old 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 pollened 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 a shape looking out of its nothingness such as would awake 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 of the lamp, the harsh wheezy breath of the artist, and a faint scuttling as 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 being that sat there, burning swiftly away among his insane gewgaws, 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 desolate 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 ageing. His life also was coming to an end. He stared on—oh, yes. And not even a nephew to inherit his snug fat little fortune. Worldly goods, shipload on shipload—well, since he could not take them away with him, he would leave them behind. He would bequeath them to charity, to the W.F.M.P.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 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 stuff your grandmother belled under glass. He thanked the Lord he wasn't 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 Godiva. “They” would buy right enough—there was 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 even he himself could lay his practised hands on.
And there were fools in plenty—rich, dabbling, affected, silly fools—dillytanties, you called 'em—who would never know that their lying, preposterous P. P. had destroyed the very life of the tree that had given its 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 corpse-like countenance, almost within finger-touch on the other side of the table, slowly raised itself from the labour 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. Speck-pupilled, greenish-grey, unfocused, under their protuberant mat of eyebrow, they remained 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 neither for 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-mountained sward-—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 “P. P.” 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 scope of the Fruit Merchant's purse. The eye that showed not the faintest vestige of reflected glory from the orange of the orange, the gamboge of the lemon, or the russet bronze of the pomegranate—in their crated myriads—would fitfully light up awhile as one by one, and with reiterated grunts of satisfaction, he afterwards in the secrecy of his home consigned these indifferent and “early” works of art to the flames.
But since his medical man has 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, unexorcisable, 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 around him, to be seen, haunted gay and painted birds and crystal flowers and damasked butterflies; and, as it were, sylphs and salamanders, shapes of an unearthly beauty. And all of them strangely, preternaturally still, as if in a peepshow, as if stuffed.