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Ambrose Bierce - "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge"

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The Trees of Pride

G >> G.K. Chesterton >> The Trees of Pride




"First, I wish it clearly understood that I believe in nothing.
I do not even give the nothing I believe a name; or I should be
an atheist. I have never had inside my head so much as a hint
of heaven and hell. I think it most likely we are worms in the mud;
but I happen to be sorry for the other worms under the wheel.
And I happen myself to be a sort of worm that turns when he can.
If I care nothing for piety, I care less for poetry. I'm not like
Ashe here, who is crammed with criminology, but has all sorts of other
culture as well. I know nothing about culture, except bacteria culture.
I sometimes fancy Mr. Ashe is as much an art critic as Mr. Paynter;
only he looks for his heroes, or villains, in real life.
But I am a very practical man; and my stepping stones have been
simply scientific facts. In this village I found a fact--a fever.
I could not classify it; it seemed peculiar to this corner of the coast;
it had singular reactions of delirium and mental breakdown.
I studied it exactly as I should a queer case in the hospital,
and corresponded and compared notes with other men of science.
But nobody had even a working hypothesis about it, except of course
the ignorant peasantry, who said the peacock trees were in some
wild way poisonous.

"Well, the peacock trees were poisonous. The peacock trees did produce
the fever. I verified the fact in the plain plodding way required,
comparing all the degrees and details of a vast number of cases;
and there were a shocking number to compare. At the end of it I had
discovered the thing as Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood.
Everybody was the worse for being near the things; those who came
off best were exactly the exceptions that proved the rule,
abnormally healthy and energetic people like the Squire and his daughter.
In other words, the peasants were right. But if I put it that way,
somebody will cry: 'But do you believe it was supernatural then?'
In fact, that's what you'll all say; and that's exactly what I
complain of. 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 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. Suppose there
isn't a natural explanation! Suppose there is, and we never find it!
Suppose I haven't a notion whether there is or not! What the devil has
that to do with you, or with me in dealing with the facts I do know?
My own instinct is to think there is; that if my researches could
be followed far enough it would be found that some horrible parody
of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen, would explain
all the facts. I have never found the explanation. What I have found
are the facts. And the fact is that those trees on the top there
dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had been giants,
standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.
It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have
the nuisance removed. Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific
world finally, when more and more processions of dead men had passed
through the village to the cemetery. But I had not got to convince
the scientific world, but the Lord of the Manor. The Squire
will pardon my saying that it was a very different thing.
I tried it once; I lost my temper, and said things I do not defend;
and I left the Squire's prejudices rooted anew, like the trees.
I was confronted with one colossal coincidence that was an obstacle
to all my aims. One thing made all my science sound like nonsense.
It was the popular legend.

"Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not
believe in hay fever. If there were a popular story about pollen,
you would say that pollen was only a popular story.
I had something against me heavier and more hopeless than
the hostility of the learned; I had the support of the ignorant.
My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale that
the educated were resolved to regard as entirely a lie.
I never tried to explain again; on the contrary, I apologized,
affected a conversion to the common-sense view, and watched events.
And all the time the lines of a larger, if more crooked plan,
began to get clearer in my mind. I knew that Miss Vane,
whether or no she were married to Mr. Treherne, as I afterward
found she was, was so much under his influence that the first day
of her inheritance would be the last day of the poisonous trees.
But she could not inherit, or even interfere, till the Squire died.
It became simply self-evident, to a rational mind, that the Squire
must die. But wishing to be humane as well as rational,
I desired his death to be temporary.

"Doubtless my scheme was completed by a chapter of accidents, but I was
watching for such accidents. Thus I had a foreshadowing of how the ax
would figure in the tale when it was first flung at the trees; it would
have surprised the woodman to know how near our minds were, and how I
was but laying a more elaborate siege to the towers of pestilence.
But when the Squire spontaneously rushed on what half the countryside
would call certain death, I jumped at my chance. I followed him, and told
him all that he has told you. I don't suppose he'll ever forgive me now,
but that shan't prevent me saying that I admire him hugely for being
what people would call a lunatic and what is really a sportsman.
It takes rather a grand old man to make a joke in the grand style.
He came down so quick from the tree he had climbed that he had no time
to pull his hat off the bough it had caught in.

"At first I found I had made a miscalculation. I thought his
disappearance would be taken as his death, at least after a little time;
but Ashe told me there could be no formalities without a corpse.
I fear I was a little annoyed, but I soon set myself to the duty of
manufacturing a corpse. It's not hard for a doctor to get a skeleton;
indeed, I had one, but Mr. Paynter's energy was a day too early for me,
and I only got the bones into the well when he had already found it.
His story gave me another chance, however; I noted where the hole
was in the hat, and made a precisely corresponding hole in the skull.
The reason for creating the other clews may not be so obvious. It may not
yet be altogether apparent to you that I am not a fiend in human form.
I could not substantiate a murder without at least suggesting a murderer,
and I was resolved that if the crime happened to be traced to anybody,
it should be to me. So I'm not surprised you were puzzled about
the purpose of the rag round the ax, because it had no purpose, except to
incriminate the man who put it there. The chase had to end with me,
and when it was closing in at last the joke of it was too much for me,
and I fear I took liberties with the gentleman's easel and beard.
I was the only person who could risk it, being the only person who could
at the last moment produce the Squire and prove there had been no crime
at all. That, gentlemen, is the true story of the peacock trees;
and that bare crag up there, where the wind is whistling as it would
over a wilderness, is a waste place I have labored to make, as many men
have labored to make a cathedral.

"I don't think there is any more to say, and yet something moves in my
blood and I will try to say it. Could you not have trusted a little
these peasants whom you already trust so much? These men are men,
and they meant something; even their fathers were not wholly fools.
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? But no, you stuck to your rational principle.
And your rational principle was that a thing must be false because
thousands of men had found it true; that BECAUSE many human eyes
had seen something it could not be there."

He looked across at Ashe with a sort of challenge, but though the sea wind
ruffled the old lawyer's red mane, his Napoleonic mask was unruffled;
it even had a sort of beauty from its new benignity.

"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been,"
he answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories.
And yet, in justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur
to your sweeping inference. I respect these peasants, I respect
your regard for them; but their stories are a different matter.
I think I would do anything for them but believe them.
Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them, when in the more
instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have considered
what would be involved in taking their word for anything.
Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now;
and kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn
a witch. No, doctor, I admit these people have been badly used,
I admit they are in many ways our betters, but I still could
not accept anything in their evidence."

The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then,
for the last time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.

"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."

And, turning his back on them, as if automatically, he set his face
toward the village, where for so many years he had gone his round.

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