by Joan Aiken
“Ever since Nathaniel Bond died,” Councillor Sekville was explaining to the tree specialist from East Malling, “the tree has been failing.”
The specialist, Professor Lombard, nodded judicially and walked round the tree. It was tall, with glossy star-shaped leaves, and flowers which should have been a brilliant orange but had faded to a not disagreeable salmon pink as a result of the tree’s infirmity. Around the bole, which rose smoothly for some ten feet before branching, was built a rustic table and this made it impossible to approach the tree with any degree of familiarity. Professor Lombard leaned across the table and attempted to touch the bark.
“I shouldn’t do that, sir, if I were you,” said old Rust, the gardener, who had remained so far respectfully at the rear of the group.
“It won’t bite, will it?” asked the professor rather frostily, but withdrawing his hand.
“Ah, its bark is worse than its bite, sir, if you’ll pardon my witticism,” replied Rust. “There’s no knowing what that tree might do, now Mr Bond is no more.”
The members of the corporation tittered somewhat derisively, but Professor Lombard took the gardener’s statement seriously enough.
“There was an affinity between Mr Bond and the tree?”
“No, sir,” answered Rust. “There was an antipathy. You could put it that Mr Bond hated the tree.”
“In that case, why didn’t he cut it down?”
“We knew well that if the tree were to die, it would be as good as tolling the knell for his own funeral.”
“And conversely, if he died the tree would follow his example?”
“Who’s to say, sir? One’s dead, and one’s dying, and it would take a wiser man than either of ourselves to know which began it. A tree takes longer to live than a man, and longer to die, too.”
“Why did he hate the tree?”
“Ah, sir, now you’re asking something which, properly speaking, falls outside my province.”
The two men had fallen into step side by side and were walking up and down somewhat apart from the party of councillors, which by now had been augmented by a number of inquisitive sightseers and townspeople, attracted across the courtyard from Seagull Street.
“In my opinion that tree had a gift, or you might say a power,” the gardener continued. “If you touched it, a feeling went tingling up your arm like the shock from an electric fence. And the aftermath of that shock made the mind wonderfully clear and calm. Many’s the time, after I’ve pruned the tree or tended it in some way, that I’ve felt the inside of my head like a goldfish bowl—clean, transparent, the fish swimming round at ease with plenty of room; if I’d ever learned to write, I’ve often thought that would be the time when I’d write a piece of poetry.”
“You can’t write then?”
“No, sir, nor read either. That was why Mr Bond didn’t mind my touching the tree. But touch it himself he never did, nor allow anyone else to do so.”
“I should have expected a writer to be anxious for such an experience.”
“Not Mr Bond, sir. Of course, I’ve never read any of his books but I understand that his line of writing was very different from the feeling I’ve mentioned. He was always one to have things complicated; he’d like a dahlia, if you follow me, sir, better than a primrose. That was why he disliked the tree, I suppose; many’s the time I’ve seen him willfully teasing it, sitting beneath with one of his guests, chatting away, and the tree feeling left out and set at naught, I’ve no doubt at all; it would be enough to turn the nature sour in its veins.”
“Do you think there is any hope for it?”
The gardener shook his head.
The onlookers by this time were becoming somewhat impatient, so Professor Lombard communicated to them the fruit of his conversation with Rust.
“What a monstrous man!” exclaimed the forthright Mrs Tunn. “He made no use of the tree himself and would not allow other writers to do so.”
“He encouraged imitators, but never rivals,” severely remarked the town librarian, Councillor Bull.
“Perhaps if the tree really is a source of inspiration to writers, we should advertise the fact and allow them to touch it for a small fee—say ten guineas,” suggested Councillor Cockrich.
“There is the question as to whether it still possesses the same power,” pointed out Professor Lombard. “Rust here seems to think that with the death of Nathaniel Bond, the tree’s power may have altered in some way.”
“But how are we to discover if that is so?”
“The only way would be to touch it.”
The members of the assembly looked at each other and fell back a pace or two. No one seemed anxious to make the attempt. The professor asked Rust if he would care to, but the old gardener shook his head.
“I’m a married man, sir. If that tree’s diseased or gone astray in some way there’s still power enough there to do a plenty harm, I’m sure of that.”
“Supposing we leave the matter for a few days and refer it to committee,” suggested Mrs Tunn. “Professor Lombard has done all he can for us. We must put a policeman on duty to make sure that no unauthorised person touches the tree in the meantime.”
The other officials felt that this was a very proper solution to a problem which was inconveniently out of their scope, involving, as it did, moral and literary questions of which they neither took, nor wished to take, cognisance. They departed with dignity.
By this time, however their number had been far outweighed by the group of leisured citizens who had strolled into the courtyard and who remained, chatting among themselves and gazing speculatively at the tree.
A reserved-looking young man on the outermost fringe of this crowd appeared to have taken a particularly keen interest in the discussion, and he now made his way up to the tree as if he intended to touch it. He was, however, warned off by the policeman who had been summoned, and he retreated to his former position, much abashed. His name was Mr Smith, and he was a smallholder, very small indeed, who lived just beyond the town wall and had the presumption to try and illuminate his somewhat miserable existence by writing poetry.
In the past he had often been struck with awe by the fact that the town of which he was a citizen also contained such a notable literary figure as Nathaniel Bond. Only once had he actually met the writer, in the bookshop, and he had then timidly inquired:
“Are you not, sir, Nathaniel Bond?”
“Yes, I am,” snapped Mr Bond, turning on him waspishly, “and what is that to you?”
“Nothing, nothing,” replied the young man in terror, and he retreated at once into the street. He had been shocked at his own presumption and never again ventured to try and strike up acquaintance with the great. Gazing around the courtyard now he was surprised to see how many well-known literary and social personalities were among his fellow citizens. He led such an extremely self-contained life among his cows and poultry that for months on end he tended to forget that there were other human beings living in the town at all.
“But you see, Colin,” cried an elegant lady with a hawklike profile, clad entirely in grey except for the sparkle of diamonds at her wrist, “but you see I am his executrix, and it is my most painful duty to stay here until the council—poor blindworms that they are—have decided on the arrangements for the Nathaniel Bond museum.”
“My poor Cecilia,” said the man she addressed, who must, Mr Smith thought, be the poet Colin Warlock, “how devastating for you. Do not on any account let feminine curiosity tempt you into touching the tree. It would be just like one of dear Nat’s malicious little jokes if it at once turned you into a Salvation Lassie.”
The Honourable Cecilia Fontriver gave a little shriek of dismay.
The townspeople slowly dispersed until there was nobody left but the policeman, stolidly mounting guard by the tree, the young man wistfully staring at it, and the Hon. Cecilia, who had sunk languidly into a wicker chair and was fanning herself.
“Do you think that the tree would turn
me into a Salvation Lassie?” she startled the young man by suddenly inquiring of him.
“I—really, madam, I can hardly venture to form an opinion, but it seems unlikely that if the power of the tree derives from Mr Bond, it would evince itself in such an unkind and unjust manner.”
“Oh? And why do you think that Mr Bond would not be unjust or unkind, pray?” She eyed him coolly.
“Because he was great,” he replied.
“Really? Do you think that the two things are incompatible? You are a very odd young man,” she pursued, considering him through her lorgnette.
“I am a poet, madam.”
“You are quite unlike the poets I am acquainted with.”
“I am a very indifferent poet, I fear,” he said modestly. “I feel that if only I had an opportunity of touching the tree, there would be a great improvement in my work.”
“You are not afraid to touch it?”
“Oh no,” he exclaimed ardently.
Mrs Fontriver considered him further. He was a very personable young man, she considered; more than “taking,” positively “fetching.”
“Come back here at eleven o’clock tonight,” she commanded, laying a hand soft as velvet on his arm. “I will contrive that the policeman is elsewhere.”
With a nod, she was gone indoors, who knows whether to muse over the Bondiana there displayed or to scan, with how objective an eye, her wardrobe in quest of a costume suitable for an upcoming occasion of such importance to literary science?
At eleven o’clock Mr Smith returned. Mrs Fontriver was already flitting in the shadows of the courtyard. She took his hand and led him in the direction of the tree. Then she paused, as if a thought had suddenly struck her.
“Should you perhaps come in first and sustain yourself with something from Nathaniel’s cellar or a glance at his prints? It is surely ill-advised to undergo such an experience without some preparation?”
The glance from her dark eyes would have melted a gold candlestick, but Mr Smith had thoughts only for the tree. He leaned to touch it and fell with a little cry across the rustic table, his face against the bark and his arms encircling the massive trunk.
Touching him, Mrs Fontriver discovered that he was dead. She looked at him crossly, shrugged her shoulders, and went in to bed.
Next day the tree, too, was dead—black and shriveled. It was hurriedly cut down and removed, together with the body of Mr Smith. He had been such an obscure young man that there was none to mourn him except, indeed, his Alderneys crowding distressfully round the cowshed door. But Mrs Fontriver, returning to London in her first-class carriage, thought of him with a touch of regret. He had, after all, been a very “fetching” young man.
Honeymaroon
A wave swung high and lazily, with a curve like the white breast of a pouter pigeon, swept little Miss Roe clean off the deck of the elderly immigrant ship where she lay sleeping in the sun, and sucked her back underwater without any noise or commotion; she vanished among sea-thistles, tangled ocean-daisies, foamtips crossing this way and that, and the glitter of fins bright as mica. Nobody noticed; she was just a typist, with no relations, on her way to look for a job.
She called for help in her tiny breathless voice and tried to swim, but the waves tired her out with their salty slaps on face and arms; presently she was unconscious, floating and drifting in the teeth of a wandering current that edged her through reefs and slid her up the beach of an island, itself little more than a spit of sand in the enormous shining sea.
After a time Miss Roe recovered consciousness. All she knew at first was the gritty shifting feel of sand that has had water over it a short time before, warm under her body. Then she raised herself on her forearms and looked about; she saw the gentle slope of the island to her left, and the smooth sea, with a curdle of reefs far out, on her right. She brushed off the damp sand and sat up.
There was a salt taste on her lips, not unlike anchovies, not unpleasant; she licked them once or twice and tried to smooth the knots out of her sticky hair before starting off to look for help. She was still wearing her faded old sunsuit, so she was decent enough.
Barefooted she paddled over the hot, yielding sand and found to her dismay that the island was small, circular, and uninhabited. It consisted of nothing but sandhills, save that in the centre there were two springs, one hot, one cold.
The hot spring bubbled and seethed in its own ferment of boiling mud, sinking away as fast as it rose. The cold spring, hardly bigger, nourished a couple of date palms whose long silky leaves, whispering above, cast a small patch of shade into which Miss Roe gratefully dropped.
Clusters of dates hung from the branches: she would not lack food. She ate a few absently, though she was not hungry. Rested, she began again her weary, useless pacing of this simplified horizon. Near the tops of the sandhills she saw small holes, but she prudently avoided them. She had been told that large spiders sometimes live in sand.
Two days passed. Miss Roe was not precisely unhappy, since she had no friends to pine for, but she was lonely, and desperately in need of occupation. Never much of a one to read, she was accustomed always to have in hand some piece of knitting or crochet, outside of office hours, and the unwonted lack of exercise for her supple fingers irked her terribly. There was no material on the island at all; only the sand and the palm trees, whose leaves were too brittle and sharp for satisfactory use.
On the afternoon of the second day, Miss Roe was lying by the cool spring, idly watching the water well up and then seep back into the damp sand. Already she was tanned by the sun; her slight body had taken the same colour as the sand she lay on, and her unimpressive mouse-coloured hair was bleaching to a silvery floss.
She saw two little brown things like bits of fluff approaching. For one heart-sickening moment she thought that they were spiders, and then, on a breath of relief, perceived that they were in fact mice; small golden-brown mice with bright needlepoint eyes and long, extra-long tails, each ending in a tidy tassel like a miniature feather duster. Normally she was afraid of mice, but these seemed unconnected with the dirty, furtive scufflings behind cheese crock or bread bin which were all her previous experience. They approached with caution, true, but with dignity, pausing at her slightest movement, putting their heads together as if they conferred, and then nimbling on again.
When they were only a couple of feet from her they stopped and went into a great pantomime, nodding their heads, flashing their almost invisible whiskers, gesturing with tiny hands and above all with their elongated mobile tails which whipped to and fro over their backs.
Miss Roe was not at all intelligent, but even she could see that they were communicating with each other, and attempting to do so with her.
It took them six months to teach her their language.
The mice lived in tiny cavelike hollows in the sand, shored and lined everywhere inside with slender sea twigs that were polished white as ivory by the passing of countless furry bodies. Their principal food was dried fish-flakes, savoury, of a soft leaflike consistency, and silver-brown in colour. While she was lying unconscious the mice had fed Miss Roe with these; they were highly nutritious and contained vitamin D in large quantities.
It was some time before the mice, whose intelligence was of a high order, realised that Miss Roe was almost totally ignorant about the workings of the civilisation from which she had come. At first they questioned her severely on ethics, civics, mathematics, and other topics, but in the end they resigned themselves to the fact that her mind contained little beyond an exhaustive knowledge of knitting patterns and the difference between right and wrong.
They did, however, become very fond of Miss Roe, and when they saw her pining for lack of occupation they started a fur collection, bringing her little heaps of moulted mousedown which her skilful fingers twirled into threads and knitted on palm-frond needles into various unnecessary articles.
When rescue appeared, in the form of a shabby schooner anchored outside the reef, the mic
e were saddened by the prospect of Miss Roe’s departure.
Tears stood in her guileless eyes also.
“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?” she begged. “You’ve been so kind to me! I could ask them to leave some cheese—or—or books so that you could learn to read—?”
Tass, the senior mouse, looked at her very kindly. His whiskers were grey, his eyes were twinkling. In appearance he was not unlike Einstein.
“The greatest service you can do us,” he said, “is to tell no one of our existence. Can you promise that?”
“Of course I can!” She scrubbed the shine from her eyes with the back of a brown hand. “Is there truly nothing else?”
“Yes,” he said dryly, “you can take those two young hotheads, Afi and Anep, with you, and rid our happy republic of a pair of troublemakers.”
Afi and Anep joyfully accepted the chance to travel. And so, when the crew of the dinghy neared the shore, there was nothing to see but a solitary figure on a bare and uninhabited island. With astonishment they saw Miss Roe, slender and brown, wearing—for this was during the cool equinoctial winds—a bikini and thick sweater of mousewool which many an Italian starlet might have envied. They did not see Afi and Anep, the two young demagogues, whose bright little beady black eyes peered glancingly out through the cable-stitch from their snug hiding place inside her big roll collar.
“Cripes,” said Ant Arson, “wait till the captain sees this.”