He had – inaccurately – pantomimed 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-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 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 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 Belial on the ramparts of Eden. He had been fooled, then; tricked. He might have guessed the fatuity of his enterprise. He had guessed it. The house was empty; the bird had flown. Why for a single instant had he dreamed otherwise? Simply because all these years he had been deceived into believing there was a kind of honesty in the fellow. Just that something quixotic, stupid, stubborn, dense, dull, demented which – nothing but lies, then.
That bee in his bonnet, that snake in his grass: nothing but lies. There was no principle by which you could judge a man like that; and yet – well, after all, he was like anybody else. Give him a taste of the sweets of success, and his 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 sharpedged 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 th
e 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 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 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 hypnotized.
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 unrecognizable. The unfolding of the hours of twelve solitary years had played havoc with the once-familiar features. The projecting brows above the angular cheekbones 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 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, unexorcizable, 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.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 19