They That See the Sun

I

THERE is a large maple tree in front of the house. By looking straight ahead out the window I can see all the upper half of it. We have become very good friends, that tree and I, during these years that I have had to lie here on my back. In the morning the first thing I see when I open my eyes is the green curtain of its leaves, and all day long the rustle of the breeze and the song of the robins in its branches are in my ears. In the late afternoon the sunlight streams through its foliage, prying inquisitively among the dark green shadows that lurk in its depths and laying bare all its innermost secrets. And every night before I drop off to sleep I stare for a while at its great black shadow outlined against the sky and try to guess the riddle of its patient, watchful brooding.

Last night we had a severe thunderstorm. I woke up suddenly in the midst of it with a panicky feeling that something was about to happen. A moment later there was a flash of lightning, followed immediately by a deafening crash of thunder directly overhead. There was a fluttering of the air about my arm and I saw a great, spark go streaking across the room. I thought we were struck. It gave me a bad moment or two because it might not be so easy to get me out of here if the house were to catch fire.

Then the storm took hold of me and filled me with a fierce joy, and I forgot my fears. I lay awake listening to the slowly fading grumble of the thunder while the rain pelted against the windows. Eagerly I waited for each lightning flash to give me another glimpse of the tree. It seemed like some wild witch’s revel out there in that weird white glare. During the intervals of blackness I could see it still in my mind’s eye: that sudden sweep upward, over, and around, of all the branches together, like the last dizzy surge of a great wave just before it breaks, or like a symphony orchestra with all of the players uniting for the moment on a single mighty theme. Whenever I see that, mighty surge I always think of certain parts of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The tree, tossing and twisting and thrashing with the hiss of rushing water, looked pale and frightened, I thought, but I felt sure it was enjoying its wild dance in the storm, all the more, perhaps, because of the danger. And I longed to be out there with it, to sit among its branches and feel the swing of the great boughs and the cold splash of the rain on my face and the tug of the wind at my hair.

In the morning, when I woke, the sun was shining brightly. My tree was covered with glittering balls of light, iridescent like diamonds. I wished I might bury my face in its wet leaves.

My nurse came in so full of excitement that she ignored my good-morning.

‘We were struck by lightning last night. Did you hear the crash? That large maple in front of the house . . .’

She was joking, of course. Had n’t I been watching the tree all through the storm? And was n’t it standing right there in front of me now as usual? But I was glad it was n’t my tree.

‘Not the maple. You must mean some other. There it is — I can see it.’

‘Yes,’ she insisted, ‘I mean that tree. Look! Half of it is on the ground. It’s lucky for you it did n’t fall this way.’

I looked and saw that the light was shining through the leaves more brightly than usual. ‘Just a branch, perhaps,’ I said.

‘Half the tree is on the ground, I tell you. You can’t see it, perhaps, from the bed. They’ll have to chop it down.’

My first impulse was to deny it, as if that might change the fact. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they would n’t do that.’ I wondered how she could speak of chopping down a tree in such a matter-of-fact way, as if it were no more than cutting her finger nails. The raindrops on the leaves glistened in the sun; like tears they seemed now.

II

A couple of hours later I heard the sound of chopping out in the yard. So they had come already. They did n’t waste any time about it, certainly. Listening to that steady chopchop, I began to think of the many things I had found to love in that tree. It was so many different things to me. Sometimes just the leaves were fluttering, and then it was a troop of children at play, dancing and singing and laughing and clapping their hands in glee. Other days its swaying branches made me think of a roistering, rollicking sailor rolling back to his ship after a night’s carouse. Again it reminded me of a high mountain, its steep green slopes scarred by the black mouths of many mysterious caverns and deep ravines. And when the sunlight came sifting through the green leafy windows to light up the dim depths of the tree, it seemed to me like the upper vaulting of some ancient cathedral.

But most of the time it was a young girl — or rather, now, a lovely fullbreasted woman, for lately she has grown very tall and shapely with a definite personality of her own. Certainly she is as fascinatingly variable in her moods as any woman. Some days she stands very still, pensive and primly patient, like a nun communing with herself, or again with rapt face upturned to the glories of the sun. But more often she greets me with a gay smile. Then, with twinkling eyes full of coquetry she dances for me, a solemn saraband, a mad tarantella, or a sprightly Viennese waltz.

They tell me she was planted there in front of the house just twenty years ago. That would make her about the same age as myself. I must have often passed close enough to touch her in those days, but I seldom even noticed she was there. I do remember wondering rather doubtfully if she would ever grow up to be a tall tree like some of the others on the block. I remember how sad and scrawny she looked at that time, with the ungainliness of adolescence. And I guess she was sad, too. She must have been pretty homesick at times for the familiar scenes and companions of her early years at the nursery. I have a vivid memory of the agony of homesickness I suffered myself when a couple of years later I was first sent away to boarding school. But then the day came when I could n’t get out of bed any more, for my legs had been growing more and more rigid until at last they were quite useless. Since then I have had to do all my living in a horizontal position. From that day my real acquaintance with her began.

I used to lie here and stare at her all day long, indifferently, or even resentfully, at first, but then, as the seasons ran their relay year after year, with an ever-growing awareness of her beauty. I remember I was surprised at first to see how much she had grown. Yet it seemed to me she used to cast many envious glances at the poplars across the street which had so rapidly outstripped her in height. And how she would rage with jealousy at the evergreens, so warmly dressed in their green coats, while she had to stand shivering all through the winter in her naked bark. But I loved to see the intricate architecture of her bare boughs, so black and sleek, like seals, in the rain. Then how she swelled with pride each year when the warm winds of spring came ‘driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air.’ And when she had finally got her new dress on, how haughtily she turned up her nose at those same evergreens, now so shabby in comparison with her. In the fall she outdid all the others in the glory of her scarlet and yellow robes. But when the shrill north wind began to strip her of her leaves again, first one by one, then in cascades, — and what, I wonder, are the thoughts of a leaf during that last dizzy drop toward oblivion, — I saw her grow sad and moody, and knew she was dreaming of warmer countries where the elements were more friendly. Then day after day she would stare down at the neverending stream of people passing by almost underneath her in their cars and bitterly lament the fate which compelled her to stand rooted to this one spot forever. You could n’t blame her for thinking it must be a very wonderful place they were all going to because everyone seemed to be in such an awful hurry to get there.

Is all this mere whimsy? I don’t think so. There are scientists nowadays who claim that plants are capable of feeling as well as animals and humans, that they have nervous systems which respond to stimuli very much as do our own. They say that when the plant is attacked they can actually see it cringe, as if in fear, and when it is injured it writhes as if in pain. We all know that trees have lungs and must have air to breathe, that they have stomachs and must have food and drink, and the light of the sun to live and grow. The sap flowing through their veins is not so very different from our own blood stream. Who can say that trees do not also possess a brain? We only know, in the end, that they are made of precisely the same stuff as ourselves: clouds of electric particles whirling about one another in a way which nobody understands, and seeming to possess two things — energy and intelligence. Those primitive peoples who saw a soul in every rock and tree were perhaps not so far from the truth after all.

And now this tree is about to be chopped down. As I sit here watching it I am expecting every minute to see it go toppling to the ground with a crash. Chop! Chop! Chop! Chop! Slowly come the blows, but with a stern persistence, breaking stridently upon the still, fresh-washed air of morning, and resounding in my ears, as mercilessly and as irrevocably as the strokes of Time itself. The thought of the cold steel biting into the tender tree flesh makes me shudder. . . .

III

At last I felt I could bear it no longer. I asked my nurse to look and see what the men were doing. She went to the window.

‘They’re cutting at the trunk now,’ she said. ‘It looks as if it would be coming down pretty soon.’

‘Can’t you stop them? Tell them it looks all right from here. It does, really.’

She laughed. ‘They would n’t pay any attention to me. What can I do? Besides, they can plant another tree, can’t they?’

I did n’t like her at all at that moment. But, though I felt it was useless, I begged her to go down anyway and ask the men if there was n’t some way of saving the tree.

I remember how just a little while ago I was thinking that some day I should n’t be here to see the sun scattering his magic dust over her leaves and to hear the crooning of the robins in her branches. Trees live a lot longer than men. The thought was a throbbing ache. Then I said to myself, ‘But I’ll come back again as summer rain, some midnight, like a lover to a tryst, to caress her gently, or as a thrush, perhaps, to build my nest among the dark green shadows near her heart.’ For the moment I had looked ahead impatiently to the time when such things might be.

And now she is to die before me after all. It must be terrible to have to die just when you have learned how to enjoy life. For, during this last year or two, I seemed to sense a new serenity in her. I felt she did n’t care any more that she would never be as tall as the poplars across the way, or that she had to lose her leaves every fall while the evergreens kept theirs. And she no longer paid any attention to the people hurrying by all day, or grumbled because she had to stay in one place the rest of her life. On those days when I felt impatient or vaguely unhappy with a longing ache to be out in the world, to be able to travel and to see all those places I have always wanted to see — on those days I used to stare at her and marvel at her patient stillness. And she would smile back at me, and with my eyes I would see that she was very lovely, but her loveliness only made me all the sadder because I could n’t feel it, too. And now she is going to die before I have had time to discover the secret of her serenity.

IV

My nurse returned. She had a large birds’ nest in her hand. I looked at her anxiously.

‘They said they’ll save it if they possibly can. But they don’t know yet whether they can or not. See what I found on the ground near the tree.’

I took the nest from her, and all at once I remembered how I watched a robin building a nest in that tree last spring. Could this be the same one? Yes, the branch was gone. I remember how delighted I was to see her sweep down to the ground again and again, to return a minute or two later with a piece of dried grass or string or a small twig. The nest before me contained one egg, pale blue in color, and several broken pieces of shell, together with a few somehow rather pathetic-looking feathers. Why was this one egg unhatched?

It seemed very wonderful to me to think that in the midst of this collection of dried mud and grass, on this very spot I was now touching with my finger, that fat mother robin I had so often watched strutting arrogantly across the lawn had laid her eggs and reared her various broods of young. Here they saw the light of the sun for the first time, here they grew big and clamorous with great silly beaks, here, perhaps, some of them died. Where are all the young robins that were hatched in this nest? I have read somewhere that out of all those reared each year by any one robin rarely does more than a single bird survive the season. As I was examining the nest, and thinking of the wonders that had taken place there, I remembered how, while the young birds were in it last spring, I had longed to be able to take a peek inside. And now Fate has granted my wish. But at what a price !

V

Suddenly I noticed that the sound of chopping which had been in my ears steadily during the last hour or so had ceased. I asked my nurse to look and see what was happening. Was this the end?

She went to the window. ‘I guess they’re not going to chop it down after all,’ she said, after what seemed an interminable wait. ‘They’ve begun to put that black stuff on it. They’ve cut away all the part that was broken.’

If I had just received news that someone very dear to me had passed the crisis and would recover, I could hardly have felt more relieved. I laughed for joy as I looked across at the tree. But it was very plain that she herself was far from happy over her reprieve. All the other trees that I could see were dancing gayly in the bright morning sun. She alone stood still with limp dark leaves, brooding over her loss. Even the sun seemed to be shunning her. Her whole attitude breathed the deepest gloom. It seemed as though I could hear her say, ‘What’s the use of living, anyway, with several of my best limbs gone and doomed to be but half a tree the rest of my life? I’d rather be dead! ’

I felt terribly sorry for her, and wished there were some way to comfort her. I wanted to make her understand that, so far as I was concerned, she was lovely still. From all other angles she might look hopelessly crippled and scarred, but from my point of view she appeared almost the same as before. In fact, if I had not been told of her accident I might not have discovered it till autumn winds had stripped her of her leaves.

But she was not to be comforted, that was plain. It was not hard to guess her thoughts: Why did this have to happen to me rather than to any of the other trees near by? What have I done to deserve such a punishment, O God of Love and Justice? Or, if I have committed no crime, tell me, O God, something of your purpose in doing this to me. Are you planning for me some wonderful existence in the far future to compensate for my present suffering? Please, just whisper a small hint of what you have in store for me, and I’ll be content. What? The ways of God must forever remain beyond the understanding of mere trees? Excuse me, O God, for asking.

Presently I saw a robin dart up from below to perch among her branches. It was followed immediately by its mate. Suddenly I saw those great boughs lift a little, slowly, and then drop slowly back. It was like a deep sigh. A few minutes later a song sparrow flew up to the tip of her topmost branch and began to pour out his delirious liquid song. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud and kissed her once again with his golden healing rays. Her leaves began to flutter.

She smiled across at me and my heart leaped with sudden joy. All at once I knew her secret. Was it she, or was it my own heart which was whispering, ‘O God, it’s good just to be alive!’