Randalls Round (15 page)

“Darling, it’s all right,” she crooned. “It’s not hurt. They haven’t touched it yet. It’s all right, Ralph.”

He turned on her bewildered eyes, dazed with dreams.

“I thought – they were cutting down the tree,” he muttered. “It’s horrible – murderous. It – it hurt me – they were striking at me too…” He paused, puzzled. Already the vividness of the dream impression was fading. “They struck and struck at it… It wouldn’t fall…” he said. Then, urgently, “It’s still there Nan, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” she answered quietly. Her heart ached for him though she couldn’t understand his anguish; his rumpled hair and bewildered eyes made him look so like a small boy.

He looked out of the window. The great branches spread and soared against the pale sky. The lines of the ropes placed by the workmen clung to it like the monstrous tentacles of some vile reptile seeking to sap its mighty strength.

“Nan – they mustn’t go on. It – I must stop it. Nan, do you understand? I – it’s – I must stop it.”

“All right, old thing,” said Nan tranquilly. “Go round now and tell them not to do it. Give them something for their trouble. I’ll have supper ready when you get back.”

And so the tree was spared; and Nan, who had always loved it with a warmth she could hardly explain even to herself, could have sung with glee.

All that spring she rejoiced, whenever she looked at it. It wasn’t till she saw Ralph’s big picture that she began to regret.

She knew the idea of the picture. It was to be called “Dawn.” It was a dim, half-light picture of a stretch of rough heathery ground, barred by a wet, rutty track gleaming in the silver light of a cold dawn. There was in the picture a physical feeling of wet, chill, pure air – you could feel it on your face. And it was spacious and vast, so that you got an impression of the unity of earth and sky, and the feeling of that pause that seems to come into the life of things just at the dawn… And when Nan looked at it, late in May, Ralph had painted into it the ash tree. It loomed up in the foreground, malignant as ash trees are malignant: and the meaning of the picture – its purity and cold truth – were lost in romantic suggestion.

“Oh, Ralph!” cried Nan. “I
don’t
like the tree.”

Ralph looked at her oddly and said nothing.

“Why
did you put it in?” she wailed. “It’s wicked – witchcrafty – and your picture was so cold and pure and quiet-”

He laughed, a hard, almost cruel little laugh.

“Good for you, Nan,” he said, almost with a sneer. “Didn’t you know that ash trees were the special property of witches?”

“I-I don’t know… But
why
have you put it in, Ralph? It – it’s spoiling it. Can’t you paint it out – get rid of it? Do.”

He looked at her, and she felt quite suddenly and unreasoningly afraid.

“I can’t get rid of it now,” he said slowly. “I missed my chance. I shall never get rid of it now.”

“I don’t mean the real tree,” cried Nan, rather pale.

“What is ’real?’ ” he asked sombrely; and she was silent.

The picture was rejected. A man who was on the selection committee, and who had known Nan in her bachelor days, told her in confidence that it was the fault of the tree.

“It’s in the wrong key,” he said. “It spoils the atmosphere.”

Those words haunted her. “It spoils the atmosphere,” she thought, moving about the green-shadowed studio. “It spoils the atmosphere,” she thought as she lay in bed and watched its royal branches stirring a little against the quiet sky. She grew to hate the tree.

That was a very trying summer; Nan herself was unusually irritable and depressed, and she thought that perhaps the difference she felt in Ralph was as much her fault as his – at least, she tried to think so. She was busy with her journalistic work, and when she saw how things were going she wisely kept out of Ralph’s way as much as she could. There was no use, she told herself, in getting on each other’s nerves more than was necessary. But she had an odd feeling of being out of it whenever she returned to the studio; she just didn’t belong…

She must, I think, have guessed a little; but it was not until July that she knew for certain. One afternoon towards the end of the month she came in to find Ralph holding a kind of review of all his work for the past weeks – ever since March, in fact. There were a good many paintings – and the ash tree was in them all.

It dominated Ralph’s work as it dominated the studio – yes, as, she now knew, it dominated Ralph himself. Great, uncanny, suggestive and beautiful, it reigned in them all. Even in the portrait of Sir Evan Penrith, that commission that had meant such a feather in Ralph’s cap, the tree reared itself above the crude, hasty portrait, threatening and insistent. It was in the work like a subtle poison.

Nan felt suddenly and terribly afraid. She said nothing; but she looked up at the great tree, dark against the blazing blue of the sky, and she felt certain that it knew… This was vengeance, she thought; and she felt terribly impotent and small and desolate.

She said not a word about the pictures; and Ralph never seemed to notice her silence. His eyes were fixed on the tree, as if he expected – something; Nan didn’t give it a name.

Nan was plucky, but she was not the stuff of which criminals are made. She was not sufficiently ruthless. It needed a great, almost an incredible, effort for her to decide on the step she took. But of one thing she was sure – that tree was becoming part of Ralph. It was obsessing him – his thoughts, his work, his very being. And she believed that only by the death of the tree could she free him from its mastery. She could not have it cut down – Ralph would prevent that. But there are other ways of killing a tree…

How she first heard of it I have no idea. I know that she had dealings with an old Sussex man she’d come up against in Limehouse in her journalist life – a man who had been a “diviner” and knew strange secrets of the earth; and I know it was from him that she got the stuff she used. But I know no more than that, and I can’t ask her. Anyhow, her courage and her love helping her, she did it. She poisoned the ash tree.

That was a very sultry August, full of storms that never broke, with an air like grey wool and a sky livid with heat. Nan is imaginative, artistic, highly-strung… I don’t know. Perhaps she is mistaken… But I don’t believe she is.

Once, in the height of her distress, she said a few words that gave a clue. She had cut the bark, she said, slipping out at night under the moon to do it; she smeared the stuff in the wound she made. She hated doing it, she said, with a little shuddering gasp,
hated
it. It was treacherous, loathsome… But it was the tree or Ralph, and that of course meant that she had no choice… And she told herself that, every time she made another little wound and rubbed the poison stealthily in.

At first she felt almost happy. Her heart was at ease because she had taken the great step. She was saving Ralph, she thought, and that upheld her when her heart smote her for the murdered tree, already drooping a little in its topmost branches and sicklied in the rich green of its leaves. The studio was gaspingly hot, and she always felt restless in there because of the doomed tree drooping at the window; and so she took to avoiding the place – slipping out by herself, telling herself that she was glad, glad because she was saving Ralph.

When Ralph first began to flag, she thought it was the heat.

“If only it would thunder,” she used to murmur wistfully, watching him as he sat idle, silent and brooding, his head drooping forward, his eyes fixed vacantly.

But the thunder hung in the air, or only growled sullenly far off; and the air lay on your lungs like a poultice, hot and clammy.

One day Ralph suddenly spoke.

“Nan,” he said, “what’s the matter with the ash tree?”

There was something like mockery in his listless voice as he spoke.

Nan glanced up, startled and guilty: but he was not looking at her. He was staring out at the tree.

It was drooping now in all its branches. Its pale leaves hung like dead things in the languid air. In every line it spoke of decay and death.

“I expect – the heat,” murmured Nan.

“Yes. The heat. And that’s what you think is wrong with me, too… Yes, you’re right. The same with us both… Of course it is – You know, Nan,” he said, suddenly facing round and looking at her with an odd, wild smile, “we’re connected, that tree and I. You knew that, of course. You’ve felt it. That’s why I couldn’t kill it. It meant killing myself…”

Nan’s heart stopped beating. She stared at him in wild alarm and horror. For she suddenly knew that it was the truth. And now it was too late. The poison had done its work…

I MUST explain first that I didn’t know Markham very well. We lived on the same stair at Comyn (I don’t think I’ll give the real name of our college), but he was one of those large, vigorous people who live for Rugger and rowing, and I am no good at games on account of my short sight. I want to lay some stress on my sight, because it may account for other things. I don’t believe it does, but it may. I hope it may.

It happened late in the Hilary term of our second year that Markham got rather badly damaged in a Rugger match. It was some injury to the back, not very serious, but it meant that he had to lie up for some weeks; and as we were of the same year and on the same stair, it also happened that I used to go in and see him a good deal; so when he asked me to come down to the Cotswolds with him for part of the vac. I rather jumped at it. I haven’t many friends of my own – I am dull and priggish – and I expect he didn’t want any of his own hefty pals about while he was so badly out of it. So, odd as we were as a pair, we fitted in rather well.

He chose the place – said his family used to come from those parts, and he had a liking for the country. It was a farmhouse, standing alone in wide, prosperous fields. We went there by car, on account of Markham’s back, and I shall never, even now, look back on that evening with anything but pleasure. It was the twentieth of March, I remember, and there was a kind of green bloom on the bare fields and a purple bloom on the bare woods that lay on the hill behind the farm. The house itself was like a dozen others in that country – long and low, built of the yellow Cotswold stone, with a beautifully pitched roof and mullioned windows. The stone barns grouped about it showed the same beauty of perfect proportion. The whole thing was as simple and direct as the country it stood in.

I said something of this to Markham, but he hardly answered. He seemed fidgetty and uneasy; I thought he was probably in pain, or overtired with the journey. Anyhow, he only growled, rather shortly, that it was all rot, one farm was like another, and he hoped they’d give us decent meals. But he threw a queer, almost suspicious glance round as he was being helped in. I dismissed it as of no importance.

In the morning he was more cheerful. It was a lovely day, soft as April, with a tender blue sky that showed up the bursting leaf- buds. It was not a day to be in, ill or well; so I consulted Mrs Stokes as to the possibility of getting Markham out.

She had a sofa long and broad enough for him, and was perfectly willing that I should take it out; but when I asked her about a suitable spot to establish him in she rather hesitated.

“Haven’t you a small garden or a patch of grass somewhere near the house?” I asked.

She looked quite troubled and confused.

“Well, of course,” she said at last, “there’s the plot in there,” and she jerked her head at a high stone wall with a wooden door in it at one end of the yard; “but I don’t think your friend would like it, sir,” she added hurriedly. “Nobody’s been there for years, and it’s likely all choked wi’ nettles and rubbish.”

I was surprised to hear this. The farm was so well-ordered and the fields so clean that it seemed odd that a piece of ground so near the dwelling-house should be neglected.

“May I look at it?” I asked: and again I couldn’t help seeing that she went for the key of the door with considerable reluctance.

While she was gone I studied the outside of this yard. It ran on to one end of the farmhouse, as if it had once been the flower- garden of some bygone farmer’s wife; but instead of coming right up to the house wall, a high wall of its own cut it off from the house. This seemed absurd and ridiculously inconvenient since, of course, it meant that the rooms on that side of the house could have no windows, whereas they might have looked out pleasantly on to a garden. The high wall ran round three sides of the little plot and at the fourth end, opposite the house, I could see the pointed end of a stone barn.

I’m sorry if I’m tedious, but I must explain this still more. This fourth wall was apparently the end of a ruined barn which had at one time, before the garden was made, run straight on to the house. You could tell this because a bit of the roof remained, projecting over the plot of grass like a penthouse roof. I had never seen traces of a large stone barn built straight on to a farmhouse before, and I was interested. I supposed that rats had made it inconvenient to have a barn on to the house, and that it had been destroyed and a garden made on its floor space; though why later farmers had abandoned the garden I could not imagine – still less why they had erected that wall between the grass plot and the house.

Mrs. Stokes returned with the key. She still looked “put about,” as country people say, and I apologised for putting her to the trouble of opening the place.

“Oh, it isn’t any trouble, sir,” she said, as she fitted the key into the big lock. “Only – well, I’ll tell you the truth, sir,” she burst out suddenly, standing upright and facing me. “They do say as this place isn’t – chancy. It’s not the farm, it’s just this one place. That’s why they’ve walled it off. I don’t know nothing myself,” she added hastily. “I come from Dorset myself, and I’ve never heard nor seen a thing. But my husband’s people, they’ve farmed this land for centuries, so they say, and there’s not one of ’em as’ll go anigh this plot.”

“Is there a story about it?” I asked. I am very keen on folk-lore and legends, and thought there might be something here.