‘P. P.’! – perfect pest; paltry poser; plaguey parasite. And yet – hardly a parasite. You couldn’t with a term like that dish a half-brother who hadn’t sent you a single word of greeting for twelve solid fleeting prosperous years. Even if he did owe you a hundred pounds. Even if he hadn’t the faintest wish to remind you of the fact. Not that the Fruit Merchant wanted his hundred pounds. He wasn’t a debt collector. He wasn’t even vindictive. It was the principle of the thing.
For if half-an-hour’s silly scratching over a little lump of wood could fetch you £101 17s., about twenty-nine and a half minutes would bring in a round hundred. And there were more birds and more flowers in that infernal tree than Noah could have found room for in his Ark. The tree! – the very thought of it swept a pulsating cloud of rage over the Fruit Merchant’s eyes. Cool, quiet insolence – he could have forgiven that, and could almost have forgotten it. But the faintest recollection of the tree, and of the talk under it, never failed to infuriate him. It infuriated him now almost beyond endurance, simply because he knew, in the secrecy of his thoughts, that this was the decoy which was dragging him on these fifty-three interminable miles on a freezing hideous country afternoon.
The tree: never in all his life had he met with such an exhibition of sheer, stark, midsummer madness. And yet with every inch of his journey the recollection grew on him. He couldn’t get it out of his head. Curiosity, resentment, vindictiveness, a cold creeping cunning – a score of conflicting emotions zigzagged to and fro in his mind. He glared through them at the walls of his cage. But worst outrage of all was the creeping realization – and his body stiffened at the thought – that he was even now, and perhaps even a little more than ever, afraid of the tree. When you finally deal with a relative and a bloodsucker who has been a pest to you all your life, the one thing you do not look for is an interference of that kind.
He could not deny it, the tree had impressed him. Ever since that first swimming stare at it, the moment he thought of his brother, of the country, even of his boyhood – there it was. It had impressed him so much that the upholstered button had now completely disappeared, and he seemed to be actually in the presence of it again. He saw it as vividly as if its image hung there before his very eyes in the slightly self-warmed air of his solitary compartment. The experience filled him with so sudden a flood of aversion and resentment that the voice of the guard chaunting the name of his destination reached him only just in time to set him frantically pulling down his frozen window and ejecting himself out of the train.
One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night.
He was elderly, he was obese, his heart was none too sound, at least as compared with his head. Yet if he intended to catch the last train home, he had scarcely a couple of hours in which to reach his half-brother’s wretched little house, to congratulate him on his guineas, to refuse to accept repayment of his loan, to sneer at his tree, and to return to the station.
A bark at a weedy young porter in mittens, with mouth ajar over his long teeth, sent him ambling off for a conveyance. The Fruit Merchant stood under the shed in his frieze coat and square hard hat and watched the train glide out of the station. The screech of its engine, horning up into the windless air, had exactly expressed his own peculiar sentiments.
There was not a living being in sight whereon to breathe a curse. Only himself, a self he had been vaguely cursing throughout his tedious journey. The frozen landscape lay white in the dying day. The sun hung like the yolk of an egg above the still horizon. Some menace in the very look of this sullen object hinted that P.P. might long since have crossed the bourne from which no belated draft on any earthly bank had ever been known to transpire.
The thought diverted into ruggeder channels the current of the talk which he had intended to engage in with his half-brother. In other words, he would give the silly fool a bit of his mind. The fact was, their last quarrel – if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel – had tinctured the Fruit Merchant’s outlook on the world a good deal more densely than he would until now have confessed. A frown settled above the sullen eyes.
No living creature, no sound stirred the air. The fair country lay cold as if in a swoon. Like a shallow inverted saucer a becalmed sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the fields. His broad cleft chin thrust into his muffler, his hands into his capacious pockets, the stranger to these parts stood waiting, just stood there, with his small black eyes staring desolately out of his clothes. Why, you might just as well be marooned in a foreign land, or on a stage – sinister, cold, vacant, and not a single soul in the audience. At the sound of wheels and hoofs he coughed as if in uncontrollable indignation; and turned smartly on his heels …
With a gesture of disdain the Fruit Merchant sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy porter’s immense knuckled hand and mounted into the cab. At his onset the whole square fusty interior leaned towards him like an extinguisher over the stub of a candle. The vehicle disgraced the universe. Even the man on the box resembled some little cautious and obscure animal that had been dug up out of the earth. When given his direction his face had fallen into an indescribable expression beneath its whiskers: an expression, it appeared, which was its nearest approach to a smile.
‘And don’t spare your – horse,’ had barked his fare, slamming the rickety door behind him.
A railway carriage even of the most antique description, when its glass is opaque with rime, is a little less like a prison cell than a four-wheeled cab. For which reason, perhaps, as the vehicle ground on beneath the misty leafless elms, the frigid air was allowed to beat softly in from the open window upon its occupant’s slightly impurpled face.
And still on and on, now here, now there, memory retrieved for the sombre shape within it every incident of his last experience on this self-same road. It had been summertime – June. He had been twelve years younger, a good gross of years less prosperous, and not perhaps quite so easily fanned into a peculiar helpless state of rage.
Indeed, his actual meeting with his half-brother at the little white garden gate had been almost friendly. So friendly that it would hardly have been supposed they were in any way unpleasingly related to one another, or that the least responsibility of each to each could have caused any kind of festering recrimination. Not that P.P. was even then the kind of person one hastens to introduce to one’s friends. You not only never knew how he would look or what he would say. You weren’t even certain what he might do. A rolling stone that merely fails to gather moss is a harmless object by comparison with one that appears to gather momentum. And even the most trifling suggestion, not so much of eccentricity as of an alien and crooked gleam in the eye, is apt to make the most respectable company a little uneasy.
Not that the two half-brothers had ever discussed together their aims and intentions and ideas about life; their desires or motives or hopes, or aversions or apprehensions or prejudices. The Fruit Merchant had his fair share of most of these human incentives, but he also had principles, and one of them was to keep his mouth shut.
They had met, had shaken hands, had exchanged remarks on the weather. Then P.P., in his frayed jacket and slippers, with his meagre expressionless face, had aimlessly led off his visitor into the garden, had aimlessly dropped a few distant remarks about their common past; and then, surrounded as they were by the scenery, scents, and noises of summer, had pushed his knotted hands into his trousers pockets, and fallen silent; his grey, vacant eyes fixed on the tree. The Fruit Merchant had tried in vain to break the silence, to shrug his way out of it. He also could only stand and stare up and up – at the tree.
Solitary, unchallenged, exotic in its station all but at the foot of the broken-hedged, straggling garden, it rose to heaven, a prodigious spread
ing ascendant cone, with its long, dark, green, pointed leaves. It stood, from first springing branch to apex, a motionless and somnolent fountain of flowers.
If his half-brother had taken the Fruit Merchant into a dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an ailing plant that with care, water, and guano had been raised from some far-fetched seed – well, that might have been something to boast about. He himself was in the trade. He knew a Jaffa orange from a mandarin. The stuff has to grow, of course; and he was broad-minded enough to approve of rural enterprise. Giant Mangolds and Prize Pumpkins – they did no harm. They encouraged the human vegetable. But the …
At last he had come to his senses and had peered fretfully about him. The garden was a waste, the hedges untrimmed, a rank lusty growth of weeds flaunted their flowers at the sun. And this tree – it must have been flourishing here for centuries past, a positive eyesore to any practical gardener. P.P. couldn’t even put a name to it. Yet by the fixed idiotic dreamy look on his face you might have supposed it was a gift from heaven; that, having waved his hands about like those coloured humbugs with the mango, the thing had sprung up by sheer magic out of the ground.
Not that the Fruit Merchant had denied that it was unique. He had never seen, nor would he ever want to see, its double. The sun had beaten down upon his head; a low, enormous drone filled the air; the reflected light dazed his eyes. A momentary faintness had stolen over him as he had turned once more and glanced again into his half-brother’s long bony face – the absent eyes, the prominent cheek, the greying hair dappled with sunlight.
‘How do you know it’s unique?’ he had asked. ‘It may be as common as blackberries in other parts of the country – or abroad. One of the officers on the Catamaran was telling me …’
‘I don’t know,’ his half-brother had interrupted him, ‘but I have been looking at trees all my life. This resembles all, reminds me of none. Besides, I’m not going abroad – at least for the present.’
What had he meant by that? The Fruit Merchant hadn’t inquired; had merely stood there in the flowers and grasses, blinking up once more into the spreading branches, almost involuntarily shaking his head at the pungent sweetness that hung dense and sickly in the air. And the old familiar symptoms began to stir in him, as he now sat jolting on in his cab – symptoms which his intimates would have described in one word: fuming.
He was not denying it, not he – the tree had been remarkable as trees go. For one thing, it bore two distinct kinds and shapes of blossom. The one circular and full and milky in a dark cuplike calyx, with clusters of scarlet-tipped pistils; the other a pale yellow oval, three-petalled, with a central splash of orange. He had surreptitiously squeezed a couple of the fallen flowers into his pocket-book, had taken them out at his office in the Borough the next morning to show them to the partner he had afterwards advantageously bought out of the business, only to find them black, slimy, and unrecognizable, and to be laughed at for his pains.
‘What’s the use of the thing?’ he had next inquired of his half-brother in a gross voice. ‘Is it edible?’ At which, with the faint smile on his face that had infuriated the Fruit Merchant even as a boy, the other had merely shrugged his shoulders.
‘Why not try it on the pigs?’
‘I don’t keep pigs.’
Keep pigs, indeed; there wasn’t the faintest symptom that he would ever be able to keep himself!
‘Well, aren’t there any birds in these parts?’ It had been a singularly false move.
‘It has brought its own,’ had been his half-brother’s muttered retort.
There was no denying it – at least so far as the Fruit Merchant’s small ornithological knowledge went. At that very moment birds of a peculiarly vivid green sheeniness were hovering and dipping between the deep blue of the sky and the mountainous blossoming. Little birds, with unusually long attenuated bills, playing, fluttering, lisping, courting, and apparently sucking the heady nectar from the snowy and ivory cups, while poised like animate gems on the wing. He had again opened his mouth, but his half-brother had laid a lean tingling hand on his sleeve. ‘Listen!’ he said.
Half-stifled, jetting, delirious bursts of song twinkled, belled, rose, eddied, overflowed from the tented depths of the tree, like the yells and laughter of a playground of children suddenly released for an unexpected half-holiday. Listen, indeed! The noise of the creatures was still echoing in his ears as he sat there bulkily swaying, his eyes fixed on the pallid, gliding hedgerow from his fusty cab.
P.P. had not positively claimed that every single chorister in the chorus was an exotic visitant. He had gone further. He had gently bent down a low-lying fan of leaves and bloom, and not content with exhibiting one by one living specimens of a little spotted blue iridescent beetle, a horned kind of cock-chafer, and a dappled black-and-yellow-mottled ladybird – all of them following their lives in these surroundings; he had also waved a lean hand in the direction of a couple of gaudy butterflies intertwining in flight down the slope of the garden, had pointed out little clumps of saffron and sky-blue flowers, and a rank, ungainly weed with a cluster of black helmet-shaped florets at its tips, asserting that they were as rare – as unprecedented – in those parts as the tree itself.
‘You don’t mean to say because the thing’s brought its own vermin that it’s any the better for that? Lord, we can do that in the fruit trade.’
‘It’s brought me,’ said the other, mooning meanwhile in the opposite direction.
‘And where do you raise your pertatoes and artichokes and scarlet runners? It looks to me like a dam waste of soil.’
The wandering greenish-grey eyes had rested for a moment on the puffy contemptuous face a few inches beneath them without the faintest symptom of intelligence. Empty eyes, yet with a hint of danger in them, like a bright green pool of water in a derelict quarry. ‘You shall have a basket of the fruit; if you’ll risk it. It never really ripens – queer-looking seeds.’
‘You eat it yourself, then?’
The eyes slid away, the narrow shoulders had lifted a little. ‘I take things as they come.’ It was precisely how he had afterwards taken the cheque.
Seated there, on either side of the deal table, in the bare, uncarpeted, uncurtained living-room of the cottage over a luncheon of bread and dry cheese and onions, with the reflected light of the tree on his half-brother’s face, the talk between the two of them had gradually degenerated into an altercation.
At length the Fruit Merchant, with some little relief, had completely lost his temper. A half empty jam-pot buzzing with bees was no more appetizing an object because the insects were not of the usual variety. He had literally been stung into repeating a few semi-fraternal truths.
To submit to being half-starved simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look at your bits of drawings; to sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in your back-garden, twenty times more useless because there wasn’t its like for miles around, even if there wasn’t; to be content to hang like a bloodsucker on the generosity of a relative half-blood and half-water – well, he had given P.P. a bit of his mind.
The Fruit Merchant instinctively drew a cold fat hand down his face as a more and more precise recollection of the subsequent scene recurred to him. Mere silence can be insulting, and there was one thing about his half-brother – worse than all the rest of his peculiarities put together – that had never failed to reduce him to a feverish helplessness: his eyes. They didn’t see you even when they were fixed on you across a couple of feet of deal board. They saw something else; and with no vestige of common courtesy.
And those hands – you could swear at a glance that they had never done a single honest day’s work in their owner’s lifetime. Every sight of them had made it easier for the Fruit Merchant to work himself up into a blind refreshing rage. The cottage had fairly shaken to his abuse. The raw onions had danced under his fist on the table. And twining in and out between his roarings and shoutings had meandered on that other low, groping, dispassionat
e voice – his brother’s.
He had found his own place; and there he intended to remain. Rather than sit on a stool in a counting-house writing invoices for crates of oranges and pineapples he would hang himself from the topmost branches of the tree. You had your own life to lead, and it didn’t matter if you died of it. He was not making any claims. There was nothing the same in this world for any two individuals. And the more different everything was, the more closely you should cling to the difference.
Oh, yes, he had gone on, it was mere chance, or whatever you liked to call it, that had brought him here; a mere chance that the tree had not even been charged for in the rent. There it was, and it would last him his lifetime; and, when that was over, he wouldn’t complain. He had wagged his skimpy beard, a pencil between his fingers. No, he wouldn’t complain if they just dug a hole in the garden and shovelled his body in under the grass within reach of the rootlets. What’s your body? – ‘They’ll buy me all right when I’m safely dead. Try it – it’s a fair speculation.’
‘Try what?’ The Fruit Merchant’s countenance had suddenly set like a gargoyle in cast-iron.
His half-brother had nodded towards a dingy portfolio that stood leaning against a half-empty bookcase. And at that his guest had laid about him with a will. ‘So that’s the kind of profit you are hoping to make out of your blighted old bee-bush? That’s your profit? That’s your fine airs – your miserable scribblings and scragglings.’
He had once more slammed down his fat fist on the table and delivered his ultimatum. ‘See here, I give you a hundred pounds, here and now. There’s no claim on me, not a shred. We don’t even share the same mother, even if we share the same dad. You talk this abject rubbish to me. You have never earned a decent penny in your life. You never will. You are a fool and a loafer. Go to the Parish; and go for good. I’m sick of it, d’ye hear? – sick of it. You sit there, whiffling that I haven’t eyes in my head, that I don’t know black from white, that you’d rather hang your miserable carcase in your wretched old tree than take a respectable job. Well, hang it there – it won’t break the branches if this is the only kind of meal you can give a visitor! I’m done with you. I wash my hands of you. Do you hear?’
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 18
