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Chapter 3 of the Trees of Pride This Libbervox Recording is in the Public Domain.
Recording by Maria Trees.
The Trees of Pride by G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 3.
The Mystery of the Well
Sipprian painter did not know what he expected to see rise out of the well.
The corpse of the murdered man or merely the spirit of the fountain.
Anyhow, neither of them rose out of it, and he recognized after an instant that this
was, after all, perhaps the more natural course of things.
Once more he pulled himself together, walked to the edge of the well, and looked down.
He saw, as before, a dim glimmer of water, at that depth no brighter than ink.
He fancied he still heard of faint convulsion and murmur, but it gradually subsided to
another stillness.
Out of pseudocytally diving in, there was nothing to be done.
He realized that, with all his equipment, he had not even brought anything like a rope
or basket, and at length decided to return for them.
As he retraced his steps to the entrance, he recurred to, and took stock of, his more
solid discoveries.
Somebody had gone into the wood, killed the squire, and thrown him down the well.
But he did not admit for a moment that it was his friend the poet, but if the latter
had actually been seen coming out of the wood, the matter was serious.
As he walked the rapidly darkening twilight with clothing with red gleams, that made him
almost fancy for a moment that some fantastic criminal had set fire to the tiny forest as
he fled.
A second glance showed him nothing but one of those red sunsets in which such serene
days sometimes close.
As he came out of the gloomy gate of trees, into the full glow, he saw a dark figure standing
quite still in the dim bracken, on a spot where he had left the woodcutter.
He was not the woodcutter.
He was topped by a tall black hat of a funeral type, and the whole figure stood so black
against the field of crimson fire that edged the skyline, that he could not for an instant
understand or recall it.
When he did, it was with an odd change in the whole channel of his thoughts.
"'Dr. Brown,' he cried, "'why, what are you doing up here?'
"'I have been talking to poor Martin,' answered the doctor, and made a rather awkward movement
with his hand toward the road down to the village.
While I am the gesture, painter dimly saw another dark figure walking down in the blood
bread distance.
He also saw that the hand-motioning was really black and not merely in shadow, and, coming
nearer, found the doctor's dress was really funeral, down to the detail of the dark gloves.
It gave the American a small but queer shock, as if this were actually an undertaker come
up to bury the corpse that could not be found.
Poor Martin's been looking for his chopper, observed Dr. Brown, but I told him I'd picked
it up and kept it for him.
Between ourselves, I hardly think he's fit to be trusted with it.
Then seeing the glance of his black garb, he added, "'I've just been to a funeral.
Did you know there's been another loss?'
Poor Jake, the fisherman's wife, down in the cottage on the shore, you know.
This infernal fever, of course.
It was a both turn facing the red, evening light.
Painter instinctively made a closer study, not merely of the doctor's clothes, but of
the doctor.
Dr. Burton Brown was a tall, alert man, neatly dressed, who would otherwise have had an
almost military air before his spectacles, and an almost painful intellectualism in his
lean brown face involved Brown.
The contrast was clenched by the fact that, while his face was of the ascetic type, generally
conceived as clean shaven, he had a strip of dark mustache cut too short for him to bite,
and yet a mouth that often moved as if trying to bite it.
He might have been a very intelligent army surgeon, but he had more the look of an engineer
or one of those services that combined a military silence with a more than military science.
Painter had always respected something regularly reliable about the man, and after a little
hesitation he told him all the discoveries.
The doctor took the hat of the dead squire in his hand and examined it with frowning
care.
He put one finger through the hole in the crown and moved it meditatively.
The painter realized how fanciful his own fatigue must have made him.
For so silly a thing as the black finger wagging through the rint in that frayed white relic
unreasonably displeased him.
The doctor soon made the same discovery with professional cuteness and applied it much
further.
For when Painter began to tell him of the moving water in the well, he looked at him a moment
through his spectacles and then said, did you have any lunch?
Painter for the first time realized that he had, as a fact, worked and thought furiously
all day without food.
Please don't fancy I mean you had too much lunch, said the medical man with a mournful
humor.
On the contrary, I mean you had too little.
I think you were a bit knocked out and your nerves exaggerate things.
Anyhow, let me advise you not to do any more tonight.
There's nothing to be done without ropes or some sort of fishing tackle.
If with that.
But I think I can get you some of the sort of grappling irons the fisherman used for
dragging.
Poor Jake's got some, I know.
I'll bring them around to you tomorrow morning.
The fact is, I'm staying there for a bit as he's rather in a state, and I think it is
better for me to ask for the things and not a stranger.
I am sure you'll understand.
Painter understood sufficiently to a scent, and hardly knew why he stood vacantly watching
the doctor make his way down this deep road to the shore and the fishers cottage.
The may-through-off thoughts he had not examined, or even consciously entertained, and walked
slowly and rather heavily back to the vein arms.
The doctor, still funereal in manner, though no longer in so-and-costume, appeared punctually
under the wooden sign next morning, laden with what he had promised.
An apparatus of hooks and a hanging net for hoisting up anything sunk to a reasonable
depth.
He was about to proceed on his professional round, and said nothing further to deter the
American from proceeding on his own very unprofessional experiment as a detective.
The buoyant amateur had indeed recovered most, if not all, of yesterday's buoyancy, and
was now well-fitted to pass any medical examination, and returned with all his own energy to the
scene of yesterday's labors.
He may well have brightened and made breezier his second day's toil that he and not only
the sunlight and the bird singing in the little wood, to say nothing of a more scientific
apparatus to work with, but also human companionship, and that of the most intelligent type.
After leaving the doctor and before leaving the village, he had been thought himself
of seeking the little court for square, where stood the quiet brown house of Andrew Ash,
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 too rare that four hands are better than two.
In any case, they are united in repeated efforts, bore fruit at last, if anything so hard
and meager and forlorn can be called a fruit.
It weighed loosely in the net as it was lifted and rolled out on the grassy edge of the
well.
It was a bone.
Ash picked it up and stood with it in his hand, frowning.
We want Dr. Brown here, he said, this may be the bone of some animal.
Any dog or sheep might have fallen into a hidden well.
When he broke off, Forest Companion was already detaching a second bone from the net.
After another half-hours effort, painter had occasion to remark, he must have been
rather a large dog.
There were already a heap of such white fragments at his feet.
I have seen nothing yet, said Ash, speaking more plainly, that is certainly a human bone.
I fancy this must be a human bone, said the American, and he turned away a little as
he handed the other a skull.
There was no doubt of what sort of skull.
There was the one unique curve that holds the mystery of reason, and underneath it the
two black holes that had held human eyes.
But just above that on the left was another and smaller black hole, which was not an eye.
Then the lawyer said with something like an effort, we may admit it is a man without
admitting it is, any particular man.
There may be something, after all, in that yarn about the drunkard.
He may have tumbled into the well.
In their certain conditions, after certain natural processes, I fancy, the bones might
be stripped in this way, even without the skill of any assassin, we want the doctor again.
Then he added suddenly, in the very sound of his voice, suggested that he hardly believed
his words.
Haven't you got poor veins hat here?
He took it from the silent American's hand, and with a sort of hurried fitted on the
bony head.
Don't, said the other involuntarily.
The lawyer had put his finger, as the doctor had done, through the hole in the hat, and
it laid exactly over the hole in the skull.
I have the better right to shrink, he said steadily, but in a vibrant voice, I think
I am the older friend.
Painter nodded without speech, accepting the final identification.
The last doubt, or hope, had departed, and he turned to the dragging apparatus, and did
not speak till he had made his last find.
The singing of the birds seemed to grow louder about them, and the dance of the green summer
leaves was repeated beyond in the dance of the green summer sea.
Only the great roots of the mysterious tree could be seen, and the rest being far off
the, and all round it, was a wood of little lively and happy things.
They might have been two innocent naturalists, or even two children fishing for eels or
tidal bats on that summer holiday, when painter pulled up something that weighed in the net
more heavily than any bone.
And nearly broke the meshes, and fell against the mossy stone with a clang.
With lies at the bottom of a well, cradded the American with lift in his voice, the woodman's
axe.
Hitlay, indeed, flat and gleaming in the grasses, by the well in the wood, just as it had
lain in the thicket, where the woodman threw it in the beginning of all these things, but
on one corner of the bright play was a dull brown stain.
I see, said Ash, the woodman's axe, and therefore the woodman.
Your deductions are rapid.
My deductions are reasonable, said painter.
Look here, Mr. Ash, I know what you're thinking.
I know you distrust tree hern, but I'm sure you will be just for all that.
To begin with, surely the first assumption is that the woodman's axe is used by the
woodman.
What have you to say to it?
I say no to it, reply the lawyer.
The last weapon a woodman would use would be the woodman's axe.
That is, if he is a sane man.
He isn't, said painter quietly.
You said you wanted the doctor's opinion just now.
The doctor's opinion on this point is the same as my own.
We both found him mandering about outside there.
It's obvious this business has gone to his head, at any rate.
If the murderer were a man of business like yourself, what you say might be sound, but
this murderer is a mystic, he was driven by some fanatical fad about the trees.
It's quite likely he thought there was something solemn and sacrificial about the axe, and
would have liked to cut off Vain's head before crowd like Charles I.
He's looking for the axe still, and probably thinks it's a holy relic.
For rich reason, said Ash smiling, he instantly chucked it down a well.
Painter laughed, you have me there, certainly, he said, but I think you have something else
in your mind.
You'll say, I suppose, that we were all watching the wood.
But were we?
Frankly, I could almost fancy the peacock trees, distracting with a sort of sickness, a sleeping
sickness.
Well, admitted Ash, you have me there.
I'm afraid I couldn't swear I was awake all the time, but I don't put it down to magic
trees, only to a private hobby of going to bed at night.
But look here, Mr. Painter, there's another and other argument against any outsider from
the village or countryside having committed the crime.
Granted he might have slipped past us somehow and gone for the squire, but why should he go
for him in the wood?
How did he know he was in the wood?
Do you remember how suddenly the poor old boy bolted into it on what a momentary impulse?
It's the last place where one would normally look for such a man in the middle of the night.
No, it's an ugly thing to say, but we, the group around that garden table were the only
people who knew, which brings me back to the one point in your remarks, which I happen
to think perfectly true.
What was that inquired the other?
But the murderer was a mystic, said Ash, but a clever mystic than poor old Martin.
He intermade a murmur of protest and then fell silent.
Let us talk plainly, resume the lawyer.
Treeherne had all those mad motives you yourself have mined against the woodcudder.
He had the knowledge of veins we're about, which nobody can possibly attribute to the
woodcudder, but he had much more.
Who taunted and goaded the squire to go into the wood at all?
Treeherne.
Who practically prophesied, like an informal quack astrologer, that something would happen
to him if he did not go into the wood?
Treeherne.
Who was, for some reason, no matter what, obviously burning with rage and restlessness
all that night, kicking his legs impatiently to and fro on the cliff, and breaking out
with wild words about it being all over soon?
Treeherne.
And on top of all this, when I walked closer to the wood, whom did I see slip out of
it swiftly and silently like a shadow, but turning his face once to the moon, on my
oath and on my honor, Treeherne.
It is awful, said painter, like a man stunned.
What you say is simply awful.
Yes, said Ash, seriously, very awful, but very simple.
Treeherne knew where the ax was originally thrown.
I saw him on that day as he launched to your first, watching it like a wolf while his
vein was talking to him.
On that dreadful night he could easily have picked it up as he went into the wood.
He knew about the well, no doubt, who was so likely to know any old tradition about
the peacock trees.
He hid the hat and trees, where perhaps he hoped, though the point is unimportant, that
nobody would dare to look.
Anyhow, he hid it simply because it was the one thing that would not sink in the well.
Mr. Painter, 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 was complete, as does his complete?
It is complete, said painter, very pale.
I have nothing left against it but a faint irrational feeling, a feeling that somehow or
other, if poor vein could stand alive before us at this moment, he might tell some other
and even more incredible tale.
Ash made a more and more gesture.
Can these dry bones live, he said?
Lord thou knowest, answer the other mechanically, even these dry bones?
And he stopped suddenly with his mouth open, a blinding light of wonder in his pale eyes.
See here, he said, Horsley and Hastily, you have said the words, what does it mean?
What can it mean?
Dry, why are these bones dry?
Below you are started and stared down at the heap.
Your case complete, cry painter and mounting excitement, where is the water in the well,
the water I saw leap like a flame, why did it leap?
Where is it gone to?
Complete.
We are buried under riddles.
Ash stooped, picked up a bone and looked at it.
You are right, he said in a low and shaken voice.
This bone is as dry as a bone.
Yes, I am right, replied Cyprian, and your mystic is still as mysterious as a mystic.
There was a long silence, ash laid down the bone, picked up the axe and studied it more closely.
Beyond the dull stain of the corner of the steel, there was nothing unusual about it, save
a broad white rag wrapped around the handle, perhaps to give a better grip.
The lower thought it worth noting, however, that the rag was certainly newer and cleaner
than the chopper, but both were quite dry.
As to painter, he said it last, I admit you have scored in the spirit if not in the
leather.
In strict logic, this greater puzzle is not a reply to my case.
If this axe has not been dipped in water, it has been dipped in blood, and the water jumping
out of the well is not an explanation of the poet jumping out of the wood.
But I admit that morally and practically, it does make a vital difference.
We are not faced with a colossal contradiction, and we don't know how far it extends.
The body might have been broken up or boiled down to its bends by the murderer, though it
may be hard to connect it with the conditions of the murder.
It might conceivably have been so reduced by some property in the water and soil, for decomposition
varies vastly with these things.
I should not dismiss my strong prima fashie case against the likely person because of
these difficulties, but here we have something entirely different, that the bones themselves
should remain dry in a well full of water, or 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
tree herring or against anybody.
No, there is only one thing to be done now.
Since we can't accuse tree herring, we must appeal to him.
We must put the case against him, frankly, before him, and trust he has an explanation, and
we'll give it.
I suggest we go back and do it now.
After her, beginning to follow, hesitated a moment, and then said,
forgive me for a kind of liberty, as you say, you are an older friend of the family.
I entirely agree with your suggestion, but before you act on your present suspicions,
do you know I think Miss Vane ought to be one to little.
I rather fear that all this will be a new shock to her.
Very well said Ash, after looking at him steadily for an instant, let us go across to
her first.
From the opening of the wood, Dekasee Barber Vane, riding 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 blossom between them, and the little group of the table grew larger
and clearer in the sunlight, painted her hair to the painful sense of being part of
an embassy of doom, it's sharpened when the girl looked up from the table and smiled
on seeing them.
I should like to speak to you, rather particularly if I may, so the lawyer, the touch of authority
in his respect.
And when the butler was dismissed, he laid open the whole matter before her, speaking
sympathetically, but leaving out nothing, from the strange escape of the poet from the
wood to the last detail of the dry bones out of the well.
No fault could be found with any one of his tones or phrases, and yet Cyprian tingling
in every nerve with the fine delicacy of his nation about the other sex, felt as if she
were faced with an inquisitor.
He stood about uneasily, watched the few colored clouds in the clear sky, and the bright
birds darting about the wood, and he hardily wished himself up the tree again.
Soon however, the way the girl took it began to move him to perplexity rather than pity,
it was like nothing he had expected, and yet he could not name the shade of difference.
The final identification of her father's skull, by the hole in the hat, turned her little
pale, but left her composed.
This was, perhaps, explicable, since she had from the first, taken the pessimistic view.
But during the rest of the tale, the rest did on her broad brows under her copper coils
of hair, a brooding spirit that was itself a mystery.
He could only tell himself that she was less merely receptive, either firmly or weakly,
than he would have expected.
It was if she revolved, not their problem but her own.
She was silent a long time, and said it last.
Thank you, Mr. Ash.
I am really very grateful for this.
After all, it brings things to the point where they must have come sooner or later.
She looked dreamily at the wooden sea, and went on.
I have not only had myself to consider, you see, but if you really thinking that, it's
time I spoke out without asking anybody.
You say, as if it were something very dreadful, Mr. Treeherne was in the wood that night.
Well, it's not quite so dreadful to me, you see, because I know he was, in fact, we
were there together.
Together repeated the lawyer.
We were together, she said quietly, because we had a right to be together.
Do you mean, Mr. Ash, surprised out of himself, that you were engaged?
No, no, she said.
We were married.
Then, amid a sterile silent, she added as a kind of afterthought.
In fact, we are still.
Strong as well as his composure, the lawyer sat back in his chair with a sort of solid
stupefication, at which painting could not help smiling.
He will ask me, of course, when on Barbara in the same measured manner, why we should
be married secretly, so that even my poor father did not know.
Well, I guess you are quite frankly to begin with, because if he had known, he would certainly
have cut me off with the shilling.
He did not like my husband, and I rather fancy you do not like him either.
And when I tell you this, I know perfectly well what you will say.
The usual adventure or getting hold of the usual eras.
It is quite reasonable, and as it happens, it is quite wrong.
If I had to see my father for the sake of the money, or even for the sake of a man, I
should be a little ashamed to talk to you about it, and I think you can see that I am
not ashamed.
Yes, said the American, with a grave inclination, yes, I can see that.
She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, as if seeking the words for an obscure matter,
and then said,
Do you remember Mr. Painter that day you first launched here and told us about the African
trees?
Well, it was my birthday.
I mean, my first birthday.
I was born then, or woke up, or something.
I had walked in this garden like a synambulist in the sun.
I think there are many such synambulists in our set, in our society, stunned with health,
drug with good manners, fitting their surroundings too well to be alive.
Well, I came alive somehow, and you know how deep in us are the things we first realized
when we are babies, and began to take notice.
I began to take notice.
One of the first things I noticed was your own story, Mr. Painter.
I feel as if I heard of St. Securis as children here as Santa Claus, and if that big treat
were a buggy, I still believed in.
For I do still believe in such things, or rather, I believe in them more and more.
I feel certain my poor father drove on the rocks by disbelieving, and you were all racing
to ruin after him.
That is why I do honestly want the estate, and that is why I am not ashamed of
wanting it.
I am perfectly certain, Mr. Painter, that nobody can save this perishing land and this
perishing people but those who understand.
I mean, who understand a thousand little signs and guides in the very soil and the lie
of the land, and traces that are almost trampled out.
My husband understands, and I have begun to understand, my father would never have understood.
There are powers, there is the spirit of a place, there are presences that are not to
be put by.
Oh, don't fancy, I am sentimental and hanker after the good old days.
The old days were not all good.
That is just the point, and we must understand enough to know the good from evil.
We must understand enough to save the traces of a saint or a sacred tradition, or where
wicked God has been worshipped, to destroy his altar, and to cut down his grove.
His grove, said Painter automatically, and looked towards the little wood where the sun
bright birds were flying.
This is tree herding to ash with a formidable quietness.
I am not so unsympathetic with all this as you may perhaps suppose.
I will not even say it is all mean shine, for it is something better.
It is, if I may say so, honey mean shine.
I will never deny the saying that it makes the world go round, if it makes people's heads
go round too.
But there are other sentiments, madame, and other duties.
I need not tell you your father was a good man, and that what has befallen him will be
pitiful, even as the fate of the wicked.
This is a horrible thing, and it is chiefly among horrors that we must keep our common
sense.
There are reasons for everything, and when my old friend, lies butchered, do not come to
me with even the most beautiful fairy tales about a saint and his enchanted grove.
Well, and you, she cried, and rose radiantly and swiftly, with what kind of fairy tales
you come to me, and what enchanted groves are you walking?
You come and tell me that Mr. Painter found a well where the water danced, and then disappeared,
but of course miracles are all mean shine.
You tell me yourself fished bones from under the same water, and every bone was as dry
as a biscuit.
But for heaven's sake, let us say nothing that makes anybody's head go round.
Really, Mr. Ash, you must try to reserve your common sense.
She was smiling, both blazing eyes, and Ash got to his feet with an involuntary laugh
of surrender.
Well, we must be going, he said.
May I say that a tribute is really due to your new transcendental training.
If I may say so, I always knew you had brains, and you've been learning to use them.
The two amateur detectives went back to the wood for a moment, that Ash might consider
the removal of unhappy squires remains.
As he pointed on, it was now legally possible to have an inquest, and even at that early
stage of investigations he was in favor of having it at once.
I shall be the coroner, he said, and I think it will be the case of some person or persons
unknown.
Don't be surprised, it is often done to give the guilty of false security.
This is not the first time the police have found it convenient to have the inquest first
in the inquiry afterward.
But painter had paid little attention to the point, first great gift of enthusiasm, long
wasted on arts and affections, will lift it to inspiration by the romance of real life,
into which he had just walked.
He was really a great critic.
He had a genius for admiration, and his admiration varied fittingly, with everything he admired.
A splendid girl and a splendid story he cried, I feel as if I were in love might get myself,
not so much with her as with Eve or Helen of Troy, or some tower of beauty in the morning
of the world.
Don't you love all her road things, that gravity and great candor, and the way she took
one step from a sort of throne to stand in a wilderness with a vagabond?
Oh, believe me, it is she who is the poet.
She is the higher reason and honor and valor or at rest in her soul.
In short, she is uncommonly pretty, replied asked with some cynicism.
I knew a murderous rather well, it was very much like her, and it just that colored hair.
You talk as if a murderer could be caught red-haired instead of red-handed, retorted painter.
Why at this very moment you could be caught red-handed yourself?
Are you a murderer by any chance?
Ash looked up quickly and then smiled.
I'm afraid I'm a connoisseur in murderous as you are in poets, he answered, and I assure
you thereof all colors and hair as well as to permit.
I suppose it's in you main, but mine is a monstrously interesting trade, even in a little
place like this.
As for that girl, of course I've known her all of her life, and, but, but that is just
the question, have I known her all of her life?
Have I known her at all?
Will she even there to be known?
You admire her for telling the truth, and so she did, when she said that some people wake
up late, who have never lived before.
Do we know what they might do?
We, who have only seen them asleep?
Great heavens cried painter, you don't dare suggest that she.
No, I don't, so the law you're with composure, but there are other reasons.
I don't suggest anything fully, so we've had our interviews with this poet of yours.
I think I know where to find him.
We found him, in fact, before they expected him, sitting on the bench outside the vein
arms, drinking a mug of cider, and waiting for the return of his American friend.
So it was not difficult to have been conversation with him.
Nor did he, in any way, avoid the subject of the tragedy, and the law you're seeding
himself also on the long bench that, from a little marketplace, was soon putting the
last development as lucidly as they had put at them to borrow breath.
Well, reced tree hern at last, leaning back and frowning at the signboard with the colored
birds and dolphins just about his head.
Supposed some I did kill the squire, he had killed a good many people with his hygiene
and his enlightened landlordism.
Painter was considerably uneasy at this alarming opening, but the poet went on quite coolly
with his hands in his pocket and his feet thrust out into the street.
When a man has the power of assaulting in Turkey and uses it with the idea of a spinster
and tooting, I often wonder that nobody puts a knife in him.
I wish there were more sympathy for murderers, somehow.
I'm very sorry the poor old fellows gone myself, but you gentlemen always seem to forget
there were any other people in the world.
He is alright, he was a good fellow, and his soul I fancy has gone to the happiest paradise
of all.
The anxious American can be nothing of the effect of this in the dark napoleonic face of
a lawyer and merely said, what do you mean?
The fullest paradise said tree hern and during his pot of cider.
The lawyer rose, he did not look at tree hern or speak to him, but looked and spoke straight
across him to the American who found the utterance not a little unexpected.
Mr. Painter said ash, 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. Tree hern has now, in my eyes, entirely occurred
in self-hosts suspicion.
I haven't intimate with several assassins as I remarked, but there's one thing none
of them ever did.
I never knew murderer to 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?
Well, said Painter, with his ready appreciation, I only said you were a remarkable man and
that's certainly a remarkable idea.
Do I understand, as the poet kicking his heels on the cobbles, that both you gentlemen
have been kindly directing me towards the gallows?
No, said Painter thought holy, I never thought you guilty, and even supposing I had, if you
understand me, I should never have thought it quite so guilty to be guilty.
It would not have been for money or any mean thing, but for something a little wilder
and worrier of a man of genius.
After all, I suppose, the poet has passion, like great unearthly appetites, and the world
has always judged more gently of his sins, but now that Mr. Ash admits your innocence,
I can only say I have always affirmed it.
The poet rose also, well I am innocent, oddly enough, he said.
I think I can make a guess about your vanishing well, but of the death and dry boons, I know
no more than the dead, if so much, and by the way, my dear Painter, and he turned to bright
eyes on the art critic, I will excuse you from excusing me for all the things I haven't
done, and you, I hope, will excuse me if I differ from you altogether about the morality
of poets.
As you suggest, it is a fashion will you, but I think it is a fallacy.
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 wouldn't need no crime to make it wicked for me.
That rather sunset the other night was all that a murder would have been to a menu in.
No, Mr. Ash, 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.
Have compassion on the next batch of poor thieves, you have to hold things in order to have
them.
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 Ash, after a pause, I must go and fix things up for the inquest.
As to tree her and your attitude is singularly interesting.
I really almost swish I could add you to my collection of murderers.
They are a varied and extra-ordinary set.
Has it ever occurred to you, as painter, that perhaps the men who have never committed
murder or are varied and very extraordinary set?
Perhaps every plain man's life holds the real mystery, the secret of sins avoided.
Possibly reply to Ash, it would be a long business to stop the next man in the street
and ask him, what crimes he had never committed and why not.
And I have them to be busy, so you'll excuse me.
What asked the American when he and the poet were loon?
Is this guess of yours about the vanishing water?
Well, I'm not sure, I'll tell you yet, and so tree her in something of the old mischief
coming back into his dark eyes, but I'll tell you something else, which may be connected
with it.
Something I couldn't tell until my wife had told you about our meeting in the wood.
His face had grown grave again and he resumed after a pause.
When my wife started to follow her father, I advised her to go back first to the house,
to leave it by another door and to meet me in the wood in half an hour.
We often made these assassinations, of course, and generally thought them great fun, but
this time the question was serious, and I didn't want the wrong thing done in a hurry.
It was a question whether anything could be done to undo an experiment, we both vaguely
felt to be dangerous, and she especially thought, after reflection, the interference would
make things worse.
She thought the old sportsman, having been dared to do something, was certainly not be
dissuaded by the very man who had dared him, or by a woman who may regard it as a child.
She left me at last in a sort of despair, but I lingered with the last tip with doing something,
and drew doubtfully near to the heart of the wood, and there, instead of the silence
I expected, I heard a voice.
It seemed that if the squire must be talking to himself, and I had the unpleasant fancy
that he had already lost his reason in that wood of witchcraft.
But I soon found that if he was talking, he was talking with two voices.
Other fancies attacked me, as that the other was the voice of the tree, or the voices
of the three trees talking together, and with no man near.
But it was not the voice of the tree.
The next moment I knew the voice, for I had heard it twenty times across the table.
It was the voice of that doctor of yours.
I heard it as certainly as you hear my voice now.
After a moment's silence he resumed.
I left the wood, I hardly knew why, and with wild and bewildered feelings.
And as I came out into the faint moonshine, I saw the old lawyer standing quietly, but
staring at me like an owl.
At least, the light touched his red hair with fire, but his square old face was in shadow.
But I knew, if I could have read it, that it was the face of a hanging judge.
He threw himself on the bench again, smiled a little, and added, only, like a good
many hanging judges, I fancy, he was waiting patiently to hang the wrong man.
And the right man, subpointer mechanically, tree hern shrugged to shoulders, sprawled
on the ale bench, and play with his empty pot.
End of chapter three.
Recording by Maria Trees.
