Gilbert K. Chesterton - The Trees of Pride, Chesterton Gilbert Keith
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Etext prepared by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona.THE TREES OF PRIDEBy Gilbert K. Chesterton1922CONTENTSI. THE TALE OF THE PEACOCK TREESII. THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANEIII. THE MYSTERY OF THE WELLIV. THE CHASE AFTER THE TRUTHTHE TREES OF PRIDEI. THE TALE OF THE PEACOCK TREESSquire Vane was an elderly schoolboy of English education andIrish extraction. His English education, at one of the greatpublic schools, had preserved his intellect perfectly andpermanently at the stage of boyhood. But his Irish extractionsubconsciously upset in him the proper solemnity of an old boy,and sometimes gave him back the brighter outlook of a naughty boy.He had a bodily impatience which played tricks upon himalmost against his will, and had already rendered him rathertoo radiant a failure in civil and diplomatic service.Thus it is true that compromise is the key of British policy,especially as effecting an impartiality among the religions of India;but Vane's attempt to meet the Moslem halfway by kicking offone boot at the gates of the mosque, was felt not so much toindicate true impartiality as something that could only be calledan aggressive indifference. Again, it is true that an Englisharistocrat can hardly enter fully into the feelings of either partyin a quarrel between a Russian Jew and an Orthodox processioncarrying relics; but Vane's idea that the procession mightcarry the Jew as well, himself a venerable and historic relic,was misunderstood on both sides. In short, he was a man whoparticularly prided himself on having no nonsense about him;with the result that he was always doing nonsensical things.He seemed to be standing on his head merely to prove thathe was hard-headed.He had just finished a hearty breakfast, in the society of his daughter,at a table under a tree in his garden by the Cornish coast. For, having aglorious circulation, he insisted on as many outdoor meals as possible,though spring had barely touched the woods and warmed the seas roundthat southern extremity of England. His daughter Barbara, a good-lookinggirl with heavy red hair and a face as grave as one of the garden statues,still sat almost motionless as a statue when her father rose.A fine tall figure in light clothes, with his white hair and mustacheflying backwards rather fiercely from a face that was good-humored enough,for he carried his very wide Panama hat in his hand, he strode acrossthe terraced garden, down some stone steps flanked with old ornamentalurns to a more woodland path fringed with little trees, and so down azigzag road which descended the craggy Cliff to the shore, where he wasto meet a guest arriving by boat. A yacht was already in the blue bay,and he could see a boat pulling toward the little paved pier.And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellowsands he was destined to find. his hard-headedness provokedinto a not unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to callhot-headedness. The fact was that the Cornish peasantry,who composed his tenantry and domestic establishment,were far from being people with no nonsense about them.There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about them;with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin,they seemed to surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense.But the magic circle had one center: there was one point inwhich the curving conversation of the rustics always returned.It was a point that always pricked the Squire to exasperation,and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it everywhere.He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speakto the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the gardenerseemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leatherybrown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formeda low opinion of foreign shrubs."We wish you'd get rid of what you've got here, sir," he observed,digging doggedly. "Nothing'll grow right with them here.""Shrubs!" said the Squire, laughing. "You don't call the peacocktrees shrubs, do you? Fine tall trees--you ought to be proud of them.""Ill weeds grow apace," observed the gardener. "Weeds cangrow as houses when somebody plants them." Then he added:"Him that sowed tares in the Bible, Squire.""Oh, blast your--" began the Squire, and then replaced the more aptand alliterative word "Bible" by the general word "superstition."He was himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to sethis tenants an example. Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountereda woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit,having more of a grievance. His daughter was at that timeseriously ill with a fever recently common on that coast,and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted gentleman, would normallyhave made allowances for low spirits and loss of temper.But he came near to losing his own again when the peasantpersisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditionalmonomania about the foreign trees."If she were well enough I'd move her," said the woodcutter,"as we can't move them, I suppose. I'd just like to get mychopper into them and feel 'em come crashing down.""One would think they were dragons," said Vane."And that's about what they look like," replied Martin. "Look at 'em!"The woodman was naturally a rougher and even wilder figurethan the gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like anantique parchment, and it was framed in an outlandish arrangementof raven beard and whiskers, which was really a fashion fiftyyears ago, but might have been five thousand years old or older.Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shoresin the morning of the world, might have combed or curled orbraided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns.For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwallas Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race,small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was olderthan the Vane family, though that was old as county families go.For in many such parts of England it is the aristocrats who arethe latest arrivals. It was the sort of racial type that issupposed to be passing, and perhaps has already passed.The obnoxious objects stood some hundred yards away from the speaker,who waved toward them with his ax; and there was something suggestivein the comparison. That coast, to begin with, stretching towardthe sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud.It was cut out against the emerald or indigo of the sea in gravenhorns and crescents that might be the cast or mold of some suchcrested serpents; and, beneath, was pierced and fretted by cavesand crevices, as if by the boring of some such titanic worms.Over and above this draconian architecture of the earth a veilof gray woods hung thinner like a vapor; woods which the witchcraftof the sea had, as usual, both blighted and blown out of shape.To the right the trees trailed along the sea front in a single line,each drawn out in thin wild lines like a caricature. At the other endof their extent they multiplied into a huddle of hunchbacked trees,a wood spreading toward a projecting part of the high coast.It was here that the sight appeared to which so many eyes and mindsseemed to be almost automatically turning.Out of the middle of this low, and more or less level wood,rose three separate stems that shot up and soared into the sky like alighthouse out of the waves or a church spire out of the village roofs.They formed a clump of three columns close together, which mightwell be the mere bifurcation, or rather trifurcation, of one tree,the lower part being lost or sunken in the thick wood around.Everything about them suggested something stranger and more southernthan anything even in that last peninsula of Britain which pushesout farthest toward Spain and Africa and the southern stars.Their leathery leafage had sprouted in advance of the faint mistof yellow-green around them, and it was of another and lessnatural green, tinged with blue, like the colors of a kingfisher.But one might fancy it the scales of some three-headed dragontowering over a herd of huddled and fleeing cattle."I am exceedingly sorry your girl is so unwell," said Vane shortly."But really--" and he strode down the steep road with plunging strides.The boat was already secured to the little stone jetty,and the boatman, a younger shadow of the woodcutter--and, indeed, a nephew of that useful malcontent--saluted histerritorial lord with the sullen formality of the family.The Squire acknowledged it casually and had soon forgotten all suchthings in shaking hands with the visitor who had just come ashore.The visitor was a long, loose man, very lean to be so young,whose long, fine features seemed wholly fitted together of boneand nerve, and seemed somehow to contrast with his hair,that showed in vivid yellow patches upon his hollow templesunder the brim of his white holiday hat. He was carefullydressed in exquisite taste, though he had come straight froma considerable sea voyage; and he carried something in his handwhich in his long European travels, and even longer European visits,he had almost forgotten to call a gripsack.Mr. Cyprian Paynter was an American who lived in Italy. There wasa good deal more to be said about him, for he was a very acute andcultivated gentleman; but those two facts would, perhaps, cover mostof the others. Storing his mind like a museum with the wonderof the Old World, but all lit up as by a window with the wonderof the New, he had fallen heir to some thing of the uniquecritical position of Ruskin or Pater, and was further famousas a discoverer of minor poets. He was a judicious discoverer,and he did not turn all his minor poets into major prophets.If his geese were swans, they were not all Swans of Avon. He hadeven in...
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