G. K. Chesterton

“ She passed the wood, into the gray huddle of which a single white path vanished through a black hole. Along this part of the terrace ran something like a low rampart of balustrade, embowered with flowers at intervals, and she leaned over it, looking down at another glimpse of the glowing sea behind the clump of trees, and on another irregular path tumbling down to the pier and the boatman's cottage on the beach. ”

“ What else can he be but dead?”
“I speak as a lawyer,” returned Ashe, raising his eyebrows. “We can't presume his death or have an inquest or anything till we find the poor fellow's body, or some remains that may reasonably be presumed to be his body.”
“I see,” observed Paynter quietly. “You speak as a lawyer. But I don't think it's very hard to guess what you think as a man.”
“I own I'd rather be a man than a lawyer,” said the doctor, rather roughly. “I'd no notion the law was such an ass. What's the good of keeping the poor girl out of her property, and the estate all going to pieces? ”

“ Anyhow, he hid it, simply because—it was the one thing that would not sink in the well. Mr. Paynter, do you think I would say this of any man in mere mean dislike? Could any man say it of any man unless the case were complete?”
“It is complete,” said Paynter, very pale. “I have nothing left against it but a faint irrational feeling—a feeling that, somehow or other, if poor Vane could stand alive before us at this moment, he might tell some other and even more incredible tale.”
Ashe made a mournful gesture.
“Can these dry bones live?” he said. ”

“ The trees, I suppose,” said the squire wearily.
The boatman was by normal trade a fisherman, but as his house, built of black, tarred timber, stood right on the foreshore a few yards from the pier, he was employed in such cases as this as a sort of ferryman. He was a big, black-browed youth, generally silent, but something seemed now to sting him into speech.
“Well, sir,” he said, “everybody knows it's not natural. Everybody knows the sea blights trees and beats them under, when they're only just trees. These things thrive like some unholy great seaweed that don't belong to the land at all. ”

“ Paynter,” said Ashe, “you thought it rather morbid of me to collect murderers, but it's fortunate for your own view of the case that I do. It may surprise you to know that Mr. Treherne has now, in my eyes, entirely cleared himself of suspicion. I have been intimate with several assassins, as I remarked, but there's one thing none of them ever did. I never knew a murderer talk about the murder, and then at once deny it and defend it. No, if a man is concealing his crime, why should he go out of his way to apologize for it?” ”

“ Only the triple centerpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line; and these stood up in the tranquil sunlight as things almost classical, a triangular temple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer and more placid sense, and he felt a newer and more boyish curiosity and courage for the consulting of the oracle. In all his wandering, he had never walked so lightly. For the connoisseur of sensations had found something to do at last; he was fighting for a friend.
He was brought to a standstill once, however, and that at the very gateway of the garden of the trees of knowledge. ”

“ After leaving the doctor and before leaving the village, he had bethought himself of seeking the little square where stood the quiet brown house of Andrew Ashe, solicitor, and the operations of dragging were worked in double harness. Two heads were peering over the well in the wood, one yellow-haired, lean, and eager, the other red-haired, heavy, and pondering; and if it be true that two heads are better than one, it is truer that four hands are better than two. ”

“ But if ever you find me stealing one small farthing, when I can shut my eyes and see the city of El Dorado, then,” and he lifted his head like a falcon, “show me no mercy, for I shall deserve none.”
“Well,” remarked Ashe, after a pause, “I must go and fix things up for the inquest. Mr. Treherne, your attitude is singularly interesting. I really almost wish I could add you to my collection of murderers. They are a varied and very extraordinary set.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” asked Paynter, “that perhaps the men who have never committed murder are a varied and very extraordinary set? ”

“ There was a bewildered silence, and then Paynter said:
“For my part, I feel as if it would really be better to humor him, somehow.”
“Ashe,” said the doctor, with a new note of seriousness, “for old friendship, grant me this last little indulgence. It will make no difference. I have no arms or means of escape, You can search me, if you like. I know you think you are doing right, and I also know you will do it as fairly as you can. Well, after all, you get friends to help you. Look at our friend with the beard, or the remains of the beard. Why shouldn't I have a friend to help me? ”

“ It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock trees was again discussed in the squire's circle. It fell out one evening, when his eccentric taste for meals in the garden had gathered the company round the same table, now lit with a lamp and laid out for dinner in a glowing spring twilight. It was even the same company, for, in the few weeks intervening, they had insensibly grown more and more into one another's lives, forming a little group like a club. ”

“ By the time the sun was high in heaven, Ashe, the lawyer, turning to the others, spoke abruptly and to the point.
“Shall we go into the wood now?” asked Paynter, and almost seemed to hesitate.
“I will go in,” said Treherne simply. Then, drawing up his dark head in answer to their glances, he added: “Oh, do not trouble yourselves. It is never the believer who is afraid.”
For the second time, they saw a man mount the white, curling path and disappear into the gray, tangled wood, but this time they did not have to wait long to see him again. ”

“ When they topped the slope of the garden, the detective had already erected his easel, though a strong breeze blowing toward the sea rattled and flapped his apparatus and blew about his fair—and false—beard in the wind. Little clouds, curled like feathers, were scudding seaward across the many-colored landscape which the American art critic had once surveyed on a happier morning, but it is doubtful whether the landscape painter paid much attention to it. ”

“ But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it, and its significance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.
“That is the reason,” said the doctor. “I have worked for that for fourteen years.”
They no longer looked at the bare promontory on which the feathery trees had once been so familiar a sight, for they had something else to look at. Any one seeing the squire now would have shifted his opinion about where to find the lunatic in that crowd. It was plain in a flash that the change had fallen on him like a thunderbolt ”

“ Ashe especially was listening quietly, but with an entirely new expression.
“Then there is the well itself,” proceeded the doctor, with the same air of insane calm. “I suppose some of you by this time know at least the secret of that. The secret of the well is simply that it is not a well. It is purposely shaped at the top so as to look like one, but it is really a sort of chimney, opening from the roof of one of those caves over there, a cave that runs inland just under the wood and, indeed, is connected by tunnels and secret passages with other openings miles and miles away. ”

“ Oh, believe me, it is she who is the poet! She has the higher reason, and honor and valor are at rest in her soul.”
“In short, he is uncommonly pretty,” replied Ashe, with some cynicism. “I knew a murderess rather well who was very much like her and had just that colored hair.”
“You talk as if a murderer could be caught red-haired instead of red-handed,” retorted Paynter. “Why, at this. very minute, you could be caught red-haired yourself. Are you a murderer, by any chance?” ”

“ Paynter looked. He saw the wine-dark sea and the fantastic trees that fringed it, but he did not see the poet. The cloister was already emptied of its restless monk.
“Gone somewhere else,” he said with a futility far from characteristic. “He'll be back here presently. This is an interesting vigil, but a vigil loses some of its intensity when you can't keep awake. Ah, here's Treherne. So we're all mustered, as the politician said when Mr. Coleman came late for dinner. No, the doctor's off again. How restless we all are!” ”

“ And Treherne had long since taken up his position openly at the great house as the husband of the great lady, and he and she were occupied with sweeping reforms on the estate. The lady especially, being of the sort whose very dreams “drive at practice,” was landscape gardening as with the gestures of a giantess. It was natural, therefore, that so sociable a spirit as Paynter should fall into speech with the one other stranger who happened to be staying at the inn, evidently a bird of passage like himself. ”

“ They all felt the note that had been struck, the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet; and the squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience. In him, more perhaps than the others, more certainly than he knew himself, the sea wind went to the head like wine.
“Credulity is a curious thing,” on Treherne in a low voice. “It is more negative than positive, and yet it is infinite. Hundreds of men will avoid walking under a ladder. They don't know where the door of the ladder will lead. ”

“ That coast, to begin with, stretching toward the sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud. It was cut out against the emerald or indigo of the sea in graven horns and crescents that might have been the cast or mold of some such crested serpents, and, beneath, was pierced and fretted by caves and crevices, as if by the boring of such titanic worms. Over and above this draconian architecture of the earth, a veil of gray woods hung thinner like a vapor—woods which the witchcraft of the sea had, as usual, both blighted and blown out of shape. ”

“ The squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade.
“Why not?” he demanded. “I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic. Why did you want me to die so much?”
Doctor Brown had lifted his head, and he now very slowly lifted his hand. He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the foreshore just above the entrance to the cave. It was was the exact part of the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees. ”

“ That the bones themselves should remain dry in a well full of water, or a well that yesterday was full of water—that brings us to the edge of something beyond which we can make no guess. There is a new factor, enormous and quite unknown. While we can't fit together such prodigious facts, we can't fit together a case against Treherne, or against anybody. ”

“ I fancy hundreds of men have been left dead, and diseases left undiscovered, by this suspicion of superstition, this stupid fear of fear. Unless you in see daylight through the forest of facts from the first, you won't venture into the wood at all. Unless we can promise you beforehand that there shall be what you call a natural explanation, to save your precious dignity from miracles, you won't even hear the beginning of the plain tale. ”

“ If your gardener told you of the trees, you called him a madman, but he did not plan and plant your garden like a madman. You would not trust your woodman about these trees, yet you trusted him with all the others. Have you ever thought what all the work of the world would be like if the poor were so senseless as you think them? ”

“ No man has less right to be lawless than a man of imagination. For he has spiritual adventures, and can take his holidays when he likes. I could picture the poor squire carried off to elfland whenever I wanted him carried off. And that wood needed no crime to make it wicked for me. That red sunset the other night was all that a murder would have been to many men.
“No, Mr. Ashe. Show, when next you sit in judgment, a little mercy to some wretched man who drinks and robs because he must drink beer to taste it and take it to drink it. ”

“ From the opening of the wood, they could see Barbara Vane writing at the garden table, which was littered with correspondence, and the butler with his yellow face waiting behind her chair. As the lengths of grass lessened between them, and the little group at the table grew larger and clearer in the sunlight Paynter had a painful sense of being part of an embassy of doom. ”

“ Perhaps every plain man's life holds the real mystery, the secret of sins avoided.”
“Possibly,” replied Ashe. “It would be a long business to stop the next man in the street and ask him what crimes he never committed, and why not. And I happen to be busy, so you'll excuse me. Good morning.”
“What,” asked the American, when he and the poet were alone, “is this guess of yours about the vanishing water?”
“Well, I'm not sure I'll tell you yet,” answered Treherne, something of the old mischief coming back into his dark eyes. ”

“ The American, if intellectually an aristocrat, was still socially and subconsciously a democrat. It had never crossed his mind that the poet should be counted lucky to know the squire and not the squire to know the poet. The honest patronage in Vane's hospitality was something which made Paynter suddenly feel that he was, after all, an exile in England. ”

“ It was Martin, the woodcutter, wading in bracken and looking about him in rather a lost fashion. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“I dropped it here,” he was saying, “but I'll never work with it again, I reckon. Doctor wouldn't let me pick it up, when I wanted to pick it up, and now they've got it, like they've got the squire. Wood and iron, wood and iron. But eating it's nothin' to them.”
“Come,” said Paynter kindly, remembering the man's domestic trouble. “Miss Vane will see you have anything you want, I know. And look here, don't brood on all those stories about the squire. ”

“ Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely.
“Now that sounds a fascinating piece of psychology. You see men as trees?”
“As I can't imagine why men should walk, I can't imagine why trees shouldn't,” answered Treherne.
“Obviously, it is the nature of the organism,” interposed the medical guest, Doctor Burton-Brown. “It is necessary in the very type of vegetable structure.”
“In other words, a tree sticks in the mud from year's end to year's end,” answered Treherne. “So do you stop in your consulting room from ten to eleven every day. ”