The Trees of Pride | Page 9

"Oh, if you come to that," remarked the poet Treherne, "you might as
well say Squire Vane doesn't exist, and that he's only an allegory for a
weathercock." Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the
lawyer's red brows tgether. He looked across the table and met the
poet's somewhat equivocal smile.
"Do I understand, Mr. Treherne," asked Ashe, "that you support the
miraculous claims of St. Securis in this case. Do you, by any chance,
believe in the walking trees?"
"I see men as trees walking," answered the poet, "like the man cured of
blindness in the Gospel. By the way, do I understand that you support
the miraculous claims of that--thaumaturgist?"
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, Dr. 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. And don't you fancy a fairy, looking in at your
window for a flash after having just jumped over the moon and played
mulberry bush with the Pleiades, would think you were a vegetable
structure, and that sitting still was the nature of the organism?"
"I don't happen to believe in fairies," said the doctor rather stiffly, for
the argumentum ad hominem was becoming too common. A
sulphurous subconscious anger seemed to radiate from the dark poet.
"Well, I should hope not, Doctor," began the Squire, in his loud and
friendly style, and then stopped, seeing the other's attention arrested.
The silent butler waiting on the guests had appeared behind the doctor's
chair, and was saying something in the low, level tones of the
welltrained servant. He was so smooth a specimen of the type that
others never noticed, at first, that he also repeated the dark portrait,
however varnished, so common in this particular family of Cornish
Celts. His face was sallow and even yellow, and his hair indigo black.
He went by the name of Miles. Some felt oppressed by the tribal type
in this tiny corner of England. They felt somehow as if all these dark
faces were the masks of a secret society.
The doctor rose with a half apology. "'I must ask pardon for disturbing
this pleasant party; I am called away on duty. Please don't let anybody
move. We have to be ready for these things, you know. Perhaps Mr.
Treherne will admit that my habits are not so very vegetable, after all."
With this Parthian shaft, at which there was some laughter, he strode
away very rapidly across the sunny lawn to where the road dipped
down toward the village.
"He is very good among the poor," said the girl with an honorable
seriousness.
"A capital fellow," agreed the Squire. "Where is Miles? You will have
a cigar, Mr. Treherne?" And he got up from the table; the rest followed,
and the group broke up on the lawn.
"Remarkable man, Treherne," said the American to the lawyer
conversationally.
"Remarkable is the word," assented Ashe rather grimly. "But I don't

think I'll make any remark about him."
The Squire, too impatient to wait for the yellow-faced Miles, had
betaken himself indoors for the cigars, and Barbara found herself once
more paired off with the poet, as she floated along the terrace garden;
but this time, symbolically enough, upon the same level of lawn. Mr.
Treherne looked less eccentric after having shed his curious cloak, and
seemed a quieter and more casual figure.
"I didn't mean to be rude to you just now," she said abruptly.
"And that's the worst of it," replied the man of letters, "for I'm horribly
afraid I did mean to be rude to you. When I looked up and saw you up
there something surged up in me that was in all the revolutions of
history. Oh, there was admiration in it too! Perhaps there was idolatry
in all the iconoclasts."
He seemed to have a power of reaching rather intimate conversation in
one silent and cat-like bound, as he had scaled the steep road, and it
made her feel him to be dangerous, and perhaps unscrupulous. She
changed the subject sharply, not without it movement toward gratifying
her own curiosity.
"What DID you mean by all that about walking trees?" she asked.
"Don't tell me you really believe in a magic tree that eats birds!"
"I should probably surprise you," said Treherne gravely, "more by what
I don't believe than by what I do."
Then, after