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The Man Whom The Trees Loved
Posted Mon, November 30, 2009 - 12:10 AM
books
Over the past few months, I've been reading up on a few of Algernon Blackwood's short stories, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This one in particular struck me, so much that I decided to add some formatting and repost it. Only three people are introduced in the story, and either two or three primary characters, depending on your point of view (although I tend towards the former analysis, the author probably intended otherwise.) A few excerpts:
...He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike.
..."Pah! the vegetable kingdom, indeed!" She tossed her pretty old head. And into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed for covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires that caught the sun and wind and rain. Its very right to existence seemed in question.
...She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her; she saw the branches drop about his steps and hid him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just took him, all unresisting and content to go.
...The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.
It's a very quiet and primarily psychological story, almost boring until halfway through, but gains a tremendous amount of power towards the end.