Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/44

 from the face muffled in the yellow shawl; even a child could have supplied the remainder of the unspoken thought.

'Ah,' said Sanderson gently, 'but there is 'God' in the trees. God in a very subtle aspect and sometimes—I have known the trees express it too—that which is not God—dark and terrible. Have you ever noticed, too, how clearly trees show what they want—choose their companions, at least? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too near them—birds or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath? The silence in the beech wood is quite terrifying often! And how pines like bilberry bushes at their feet and sometimes little oaks—all trees making a clear, deliberate choice, and holding firmly to it? Some trees obviously—it's very strange and marked—seem to prefer the human.'

The old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit. Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports.

'We know,' she answered, 'that He was said to have walked in the garden in the cool of the evening'—the gulp betrayed the effort that it cost her—'but we are nowhere told that He hid in the trees, or anything like that. Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large vegetables.'

'True,' was the soft answer, 'but in everything that grows, has life, that is, there's mystery past all finding out. The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato.'

The observation was not meant to be amusing. It was not amusing. No one laughed. On the contrary, the words conveyed in too literal a sense the feeling that haunted all that conversation. Each