



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Harry Jones and PG Distributed Proofreaders




THE MAN

WHOM THE TREES LOVED

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

1912




~I~

He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential
qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for
instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why
no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down to
paint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality
of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed it
was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, his
drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a Tree
Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost
approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that
particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush--shining, frowning,
dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It
emerged.

There was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint; flowers
and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge; with people he was
helpless and hopeless; also with animals. Skies he could sometimes
manage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these all
severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was
guided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a tree
look almost like a being--alive. It approached the uncanny.

"Yes, Sanderson knows what he's doing when he paints a tree!" thought
old David Bittacy, C.B., late of the Woods and Forests. "Why, you can
almost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the rain
drip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move. It
grows." For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, half to
persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wife
thought otherwise), and half to explain this uncanny reality of life
that lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study table.

Yet in the general view the mind of Mr. Bittacy was held to be austere,
not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of
nature that had been fostered by years spent in the forests and jungles
of the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to that
Eurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he had
kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and was
unusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it. He, also,
understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, born
perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding,
protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy
presences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew the
world he lived in. HE also kept it from his wife--to some extent. He
knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed. But
what he did not know, or realize at any rate, was the extent to which
she grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear, he
judged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at a time
his calling took him away from her into the jungle forests, while she
remained at home dreading all manner of evils that might befall him.
This, of course, explained her instinctive opposition to the passion for
woods that still influenced and clung to him. It was a natural survival
of those anxious days of waiting in solitude for his safe return.

For Mrs. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergy-man, was a
self-sacrificing woman, who in most things found a happy duty in sharing
her husband's joys and sorrows to the point of self-obliteration. Only
in this matter of the trees she was less successful than in others. It
remained a problem difficult of compromise.

He knew, for instance, that what she objected to in this portrait of the
cedar on their lawn was really not the price he had given for it, but
the unpleasant way in which the transaction emphasized this breach
between their common interests--the only one they had, but deep.

Sanderson, the artist, earned little enough money by his strange talent;
such checks were few and far between. The owners of fine or interesting
trees who cared to have them painted singly were rare indeed, and the
"studies" that he made for his own delight he also kept for his own
delight. Even were there buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few, and
these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked
to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not
that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship--he admitted it with
scorn--but that remarks about the personality of the tree itself could
easily wound or anger him. He resented slighting observations concerning
them, as though insults offered to personal friends who could not answer
for themselves.