English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Algeron Blackwood’s The Man whom the trees loved .

For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These were
sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, and
sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the distant
booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up–the whole beleaguering
host of them stood up–and with the uproar of their million branches
drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if
they had all broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over field and
hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a
wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright they
raced leaping through the sky. There was upheaval and adventure in the
awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has
broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world….

Through it all her husband slept peacefully as though he heard it not.
It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead. For he was out
with all that clamoring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was
there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half
emptied.

And when the winter’s morning stole upon the scene at length, with a
pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first
thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined
cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it
remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon
the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It
lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of
a high spring-tide upon the sands–remnant of some friendly, splendid
vessel that once sheltered men.

And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her
husband’s voice was in it.

I love the unsettling ‘beckoning’ horror of this tale. For Blackwood’s story is a tale of obsession and possession and this ending leaves us in no doubt that something has claimed the husband for itself. I am not sure I have ever looked at a tree in quite the same why since reading the story! It makes you check your garden and undercuts our complacency regarding supposedly passive nature or NATURE! It builds slowly, weaving the evangelistic religious beliefs of the wife with the near fatal fascination the husband harbours for trees. What makes this story so powerful is the way the writer animates the trees so that we can never doubt their power , influence  and love for the husband.

One of the most original and haunting stories I have ever read. Blackwood bestows a  language upon trees and in the case of the protective cedar,  gives the tree a heroic vulnerability which endures for a long time afterwards in the imagination. 

Utterly superb.