Part 3

‘And in trees,’ continued the other, ‘behind a great forest, for instance,’ pointing towards the woods, ‘may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees--some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organised as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by _being_ it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.’

The mouth of Mrs. Bittacy was heard to close with a snap. Her shawl, and particularly her crackling dress, exhaled the protest that burned within her like a pain. She was too distressed to be overawed, but at the same time too confused ‘mid the litter of words and meanings half understood, to find immediate phrases she could use. Whatever the actual meaning of his language might be, however, and whatever subtle dangers lay concealed behind them meanwhile, they certainly wove a kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three delicately enmeshed there by that open window. The odours of dewy lawn, flowers, trees, and earth formed part of it.

‘The moods,’ he continued, ‘that people waken in us are due to their hidden life affecting our own. Deep calls to deep. A person, for instance, joins you in an empty room: you both instantly change. The new arrival, though in silence, has caused a change of mood. May not the moods of Nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar prerogative? The sea, the hills, the desert, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case may be; for a few, perhaps,’ he glanced significantly at his host so that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, ‘emotions of a curious, flaming splendour that are quite nameless. Well ... whence come these powers? Surely from nothing that is ... dead! Does not the influence of a forest, its sway and strange ascendancy over certain minds, betray a direct manifestation of life? It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big woods. Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it. The authority of a host of trees,’--his voice grew almost solemn as he said the words--‘is something not to be denied. One feels it here, I think, particularly.’

There was considerable tension in the air as he ceased speaking. Mr. Bittacy had not intended that the talk should go so far. They had drifted. He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was aware--acutely so--that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not care about. Something in her, as he put it, was ‘working up’ towards explosion.

He sought to generalise the conversation, diluting this accumulated emotion by spreading it.

‘The sea is His and He made it,’ he suggested vaguely, hoping Sanderson would take the hint, ‘and with the trees it is the same....’

‘The whole gigantic vegetable kingdom, yes,’ the artist took him up, ‘all at the service of man, for food, for shelter and for a thousand purposes of his daily life. Is it not striking what a lot of the globe they cover ... exquisitely organised life, yet stationary, always ready to our hand when we want them, never running away? But the taking them, for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another from cutting down trees. And, it’s curious that most of the forest tales and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened. The forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Woodcutters ... those who take the life of trees ... you see, a race of haunted men....’

He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt it still more strongly. For it was in the middle of the heavy silence following upon these last remarks, that Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to something moving towards them across the lawn. It came silently. In outline it was large and curiously spread. It rose high, too, for the sky above the shrubberies, still pale gold from the sunset, was dimmed by its passage. She declared afterwards that it moved in ‘looping circles,’ but what she perhaps meant to convey was ‘spirals.’

She screamed faintly. ‘It’s come at last! And it’s you that brought it!’

She turned excitedly, half afraid, half angry, to Sanderson. With a breathless sort of gasp she said it, politeness all forgotten. ‘I knew it ... if you went on. I knew it. Oh! Oh!’ And she cried again, ‘Your talking has brought it out!’ The terror that shook her voice was rather dreadful.

But the confusion of her vehement words passed unnoticed in the first surprise they caused. For a moment nothing happened.

‘What is it you think you see, my dear?’ asked her husband, startled. Sanderson said nothing. All three leaned forward, the men still sitting, but Mrs. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly to the window, placing herself of a purpose, as it seemed, between her husband and the lawn. She pointed. Her little hand made a silhouette against the sky, the yellow shawl hanging from the arm like a cloud.

‘Beyond the cedar--between it and the lilacs.’ The voice had lost its shrillness; it was thin and hushed. ‘There ... now you see it going round upon itself again--going back, thank God! ... going back to the Forest.’ It sank to a whisper, shaking. She repeated, with a great dropping sigh of relief--‘Thank God! I thought ... at first ... it was coming here ... to us!... David ... to _you_!’

She stepped back from the window, her movements confused, feeling in the darkness for the support of a chair, and finding her husband’s outstretched hand instead. ‘Hold me, dear, hold me, please ... tight. Do not let me go.’ She was in what he called afterwards ‘a regular state.’ He drew her firmly down upon her chair again.

‘Smoke, Sophie, my dear,’ he said quickly, trying to make his voice calm and natural. ‘I see it, yes. It’s smoke blowing over from the gardener’s cottage....’

‘But, David,’--and there was new horror in her whisper now--‘it made a noise. It makes it still. I hear it swishing.’ Some such word she used--swishing, sishing, rushing, or something of the kind. ‘David, I’m very frightened. It’s something awful! That man has called it out...!’

‘Hush, hush,’ whispered her husband. He stroked her trembling hand beside him.

‘It is in the wind,’ said Sanderson, speaking for the first time, very quietly. The expression on his face was not visible in the gloom, but his voice was soft and unafraid. At the sound of it, Mrs. Bittacy started violently again. Bittacy drew his chair a little forward to obstruct her view of him. He felt bewildered himself, a little, hardly knowing quite what to say or do. It was all so very curious and sudden.

But Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a purpose, stealthily, difficultly. Then something stopped it. It could not advance beyond the cedar. The cedar--this impression remained with her afterwards too--prevented, kept it back. Like a rising sea the Forest had surged a moment in their direction through the covering darkness, and this visible movement was its first wave. Thus to her mind it seemed ... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten and mystify her in childhood on the sands. The outward surge of some enormous Power was what she felt ... something to which every instinct in her being rose in opposition because it threatened her and hers. In that moment she realised the Personality of the Forest ... menacing.

In the stumbling movement that she made away from the window and towards the bell she barely caught the sentence Sanderson--or was it her husband?--murmured to himself: ‘It came because we talked of it; our thinking made it aware of us and brought it out. But the cedar stops it. It cannot cross the lawn, you see....’

All three were standing now, and her husband’s voice broke in with authority while his wife’s fingers touched the bell.

‘My dear, I should _not_ say anything to Thompson.’ The anxiety he felt was manifest in his voice, but his outward composure had returned. ‘The gardener can go....’

Then Sanderson cut him short. ‘Allow me,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll see if anything’s wrong.’ And before either of them could answer or object, he was gone, leaping out by the open window. They saw his figure vanish with a run across the lawn into the darkness.

A moment later the maid entered, in answer to the bell, and with her came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.

‘The lamps,’ said her master shortly, and as she softly closed the door behind her, they heard the wind pass with a mournful sound of singing round the outer walls. A rustle of foliage from the distance passed within it.

‘You see, the wind _is_ rising. It _was_ the wind!’ He put a comforting arm about her, distressed to feel that she was trembling. But he knew that he was trembling too, though with a kind of odd elation rather than alarm. ‘And it _was_ smoke that you saw coming from Stride’s cottage, or from the rubbish heaps he’s been burning in the kitchen garden. The noise we heard was the branches rustling in the wind. Why should you be so nervous?’

A thin whispering voice answered him:

‘I was afraid for _you_, dear. Something frightened me for _you_. That man makes me feel so uneasy and uncomfortable for his influence upon you. It’s very foolish, I know. I think ... I’m tired; I feel so overwrought and restless.’ The words poured out in a hurried jumble and she kept turning to the window while she spoke.

‘The strain of having a visitor,’ he said soothingly, ‘has taxed you. We’re so unused to having people in the house. He goes to-morrow.’ He warmed her cold hands between his own, stroking them tenderly. More, for the life of him, he could not say or do. The joy of a strange, internal excitement made his heart beat faster. He knew not what it was. He knew only, perhaps, whence it came.

She peered close into his face through the gloom, and said a curious thing. ‘I thought, David, for a moment ... you seemed ... different. My nerves are all on edge to-night.’ She made no further reference to her husband’s visitor.

A sound of footsteps from the lawn warned of Sanderson’s return, as he answered quickly in a lowered tone--‘There’s no need to be afraid on my account, dear girl. There’s nothing wrong with me, I assure you; I never felt so well and happy in my life.’

Thompson came in with the lamps and brightness, and scarcely had she gone again when Sanderson in turn was seen climbing through the window.

‘There’s nothing,’ he said lightly, as he closed it behind him. ‘Somebody’s been burning leaves, and the smoke is drifting a little through the trees. The wind,’ he added, glancing at his host a moment significantly, but in so discreet a way that Mrs. Bittacy did not observe it, ‘the wind, too, has begun to roar ... in the Forest ... further out.’

But Mrs. Bittacy noticed about him two things which increased her uneasiness. She noticed the shining of his eyes, because a similar light had suddenly come into her husband’s; and she noticed, too, the apparent depth of meaning he put into those simple words that ‘the wind had begun to roar in the Forest ... further out.’ Her mind retained the disagreeable impression that he meant more than he said. In his tone lay quite another implication. It was not actually ‘wind’ he spoke of, and it would not remain ‘further out’ ... rather, it was coming in. Another impression she got too--still more unwelcome--was that her husband understood his hidden meaning.

IV

‘David, dear,’ she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs, ‘I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of it.’ The tremor in her voice caught all his tenderness.

He turned to look at her. ‘Of what kind, my dear? You’re so imaginative sometimes, aren’t you?’

‘I think,’ she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still frightened, ‘I mean--isn’t he a hypnotist, or full of those theofosical ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean--’

He was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them away seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies, but to-night he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her as best he could.

‘But there’s no harm in that, even if he is,’ he answered quietly. ‘Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear.’ There was no trace of impatience in his voice.

‘That’s what I mean,’ she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an unuttered crowd behind the words. ‘He’s one of those things that we are warned would come--one of those Latter-Day things.’ For her mind still bristled with the bogeys of Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had only escaped the Number of the Beast, as it were, by the skin of her teeth. The Pope drew most of her fire usually, because she could understand him; the target was plain and she could shoot. But this tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible. It terrified her. ‘He makes me think,’ she went on, ‘of Principalities and Powers in high places, and of things that walk in darkness. I did _not_ like the way he spoke of trees getting alive in the night, and all that; it made me think of wolves in sheep’s clothing. And when I saw that awful thing in the sky above the lawn--’

But he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided it was best to leave unmentioned. Certainly it was better not discussed.

‘He only meant, I think, Sophie,’ he put in gravely, yet with a little smile, ‘that trees may have a measure of conscious life--rather a nice idea on the whole, surely,--something like that bit we read in the _Times_ the other night, you remember--and that a big forest may possess a sort of Collective Personality. Remember, he’s an artist, and poetical.’

‘It’s dangerous,’ she said emphatically. ‘I feel it’s playing with fire, unwise, unsafe--’

‘Yet all to the glory of God,’ he urged gently. ‘We must not shut our ears and eyes to knowledge--of any kind, must we?’

‘With you, David, the wish is always farther than the thought,’ she rejoined. For, like the child who thought that ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’ was ‘suffered under a bunch of violets,’ she heard her proverbs phonetically and reproduced them thus. She hoped to convey her warning in the quotation. ‘And we must always try the spirits whether they be of God,’ she added tentatively.

‘Certainly, dear, we can always do that,’ he assented, getting into bed.

But, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was new and bewilderingly delightful, realised that perhaps he had not said quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still frightened. He put his head up in the darkness.

‘Sophie,’ he said softly, ‘you must remember, too, that in any case between us and--and all that sort of thing--there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed--er--while we are still in the body.’

And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep. She heard the sentence, only she said nothing because she felt her thought was better unexpressed. She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness. The Forest outside was listening and might hear them too--the Forest that was ‘roaring further out.’

And the thought was this: That gulf, of course, existed, but Sanderson had somehow bridged it.

* * * * *

It was much later that night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It passed immediately with full waking, for, listen as she might, there was nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was in her dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But the sound was recognisable, for it was that rushing noise that had come across the lawn; only this time closer. Just above her face while she slept had passed this murmur as of rustling branches in the very room, a sound of foliage whispering. ‘A going in the tops of the mulberry trees,’ ran through her mind. She had dreamed that she lay beneath a spreading tree somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand soft lips of green; and the dream continued for a moment even after waking.

She sat up in bed and stared about her. The window was open at the top; she saw the stars; the door, she remembered, was locked as usual; the room, of course, was empty. The deep hush of the summer night lay over all, broken only by another sound that now issued from the shadows close beside the bed, a human sound, yet unnatural, a sound that seized the fear with which she had waked and instantly increased it. And, although it was one she recognised as familiar, at first she could not name it. Some seconds certainly passed--and, they were very long ones--before she understood that it was her husband talking in his sleep.

The direction of the voice confused and puzzled her, moreover, for it was not, as she first supposed, beside her. There was distance in it. The next minute, by the light of the sinking candle flame, she saw his white figure standing out in the middle of the room, halfway towards the window. The candle-light slowly grew. She saw him move then nearer to the window, with arms outstretched. His speech was low and mumbled, the words running together too much to be distinguishable.

And she shivered. To her, sleep-talking was uncanny to the point of horror; it was like the talking of the dead, mere parody of a living voice, unnatural.

‘David!’ she whispered, dreading the sound of her own voice, and half afraid to interrupt him and see his face. She could not bear the sight of the wide-opened eyes. ‘David, you’re walking in your sleep. Do--come back to bed, dear, _please_!’

Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they looked through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the direction of the sound, yet could not see her. They were shining, she noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety was written upon every feature. And, instantly, recognising that the fever was upon him, she forgot her terror temporarily in practical considerations. He came back to bed without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed.

Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not reach him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little, but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious alarm. And it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible. The eyes had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood stock still and listened, her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come out towards her as at first she feared.

The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had ever known.

‘They are roaring in the Forest further out ... and I ... must go and see.’ He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods. ‘They are needing me. They sent for me....’ Then his eyes wandering back again to things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed. And that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of its revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.

The singular phrase chilled her blood; for a moment she was utterly terrified. That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked. Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the window-sill, shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a moment that something was coming in to fetch him.

‘Not yet, then,’ she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, ‘but later. It will be better so.... I shall go later....’

The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think about. They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her thoughts to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance. For here was a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims her husband recognised while he kept them almost wholly to himself.

By the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the eyes had closed again, this time of their own accord, and the head lay calmly back upon the pillows. She gently straightened the bed clothes. She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with one hand. There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face.

Then, blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting back into bed. But no sleep came to her. She lay awake all night thinking, wondering, praying, until at length with the chorus of the birds and the glimmer or the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a slumber of complete exhaustion.

But while she slept the wind continued roaring in the Forest further out. The sound came closer--sometimes very close indeed.

V

With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away. Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind. It did not strike her that this change was sudden, for it came about quite naturally. For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter, and for another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been quite commonplace.