—perhaps a little unformed when it comes to poetry and the more sophisticated aspects of life, but she’ll learn, she’ll learn.”
Unfortunately, the same, James knew, could hardly be said of his wife. “Phyllis did bring some books,” he told Magnolia.
“For you, no doubt. That was kind of her. I’m sure she has many good qualities which will unfold one by one, as her meristems start differentiating. I hope you don’t feel I’ve been too—well, personal, Jim. I was only trying to help. If I’ve gone too far….”
“Of course not, Maggie. After all—” he laughed bitterly—“I do know you better than I know her.”
“We have been good friends, haven’t we, Jim? It was rather nice—these five months we spent alone together. For the first time in my life, I have never regretted being so far from my sisters. ‘And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’”
Her blue leaves shone violet in the scarlet rays of the setting sun; the gold of her trunk was lit with red radiance. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen… but she was a tree, not a woman.
“I’m sure she’ll fit in after a while,” Magnolia continued. “Perhaps she isn’t well. She seems to guttate an awful lot. Do you suppose she’s been overwatered?”
“That wasn’t guttation,” James said heavily. “It was tears. It means she’s unhappy.”
“Unhappy? Perhaps she won’t fit in on this planet, in which case she should by all means go back to Earth. It’s cruel and unfair to keep an intelligent—loosely speaking—life-form anywhere against her will, don’t you think?”
“She’ll be happy here,” James vowed. “I’ll make her happy.”
“Well, I certainly hope you can manage it! By the way, do you suppose you’ll have a chance to read me the books she brought, or will she be keeping you too busy?”
“I’ll never be too busy to read to you, Magnolia.”
“That’s very nitrogenous of you, Jim. Our—intellectual communions have meant a lot to me. I’d hate to have to give them up.”
“So would I,” he said. “But there won’t be any need to. Phyllis will understand.”
“I certainly hope so. I so admire your English literature. It’s so deeply cognizant of the really meaningful things in life. And if your coming to this planet has served only to add poetry to our cultural heritage, it would be reason enough to welcome you with open limbs. For it was a truly perceptive versifier who wrote the immortally simple lines: ‘Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.’
“And such a charming tune to go with it, too,” Magnolia went on. “We have always sung the music that the wind and the rain have taught us, but, until you came, we never thought of putting words and melody together to form one glorious whole. ‘A tree that may in summer wear,’” she caroled in a pleasing contralto, “’a nest of robins in her hair.’ By the way, Jim, ever since reading that poem, I’ve been meaning to ask you precisely what are robins and do you think they’d look well in my hair, by which, I suppose the bard refers, in a somewhat pedestrian flight of fancy, to leaves?”
“They’re a kind of bird,” he said drearily.
“Birds—nesting in my hair! I wouldn’t think of allowing it. But then I suppose Terrestrial birds are quite different from ours? More housebroken, shall we say?”
“Everything’s different,” James said and, for an irrational moment, he hated everything that was blue that should have been green, everything sweet that should have been vicious, everything intelligent that should have been mindless.
Since matters could not grow much worse, they improved to a degree. After a day or two had passed, Phyllis, being a conscientious girl, came to realize how wrong it had been for her as a Terrestrial immigrant to show overt hostility toward a native of the planet that had welcomed her.
“But how can she be a—a person?” Phyllis wanted to know, when they were inside the cottage, for she had learned to hold her tongue when they were near Magnolia or any of her sisters, who, though they could not speak the language as fluently as she, understood it very well and eavesdropped at every possible opportunity in order, they said, to improve their accents. “She’s a tree. A plant. And plants are just vegetables.” She stabbed her needle energetically through the tablecloth she was embroidering.
“You mustn’t project Terrestrial attitudes upon Elysian ones,” James said, patiently looking up from his book. “And don’t underestimate Magnolia’s capabilities. She has sense organs, and motor organs, too. She can’t move from where she is, because she’s rooted to the ground, but she’s capable of turgor movements, like certain Terrestrial forms of vegetation—for example, the sensitive plant or blue grass.”
“Blue grass,” Phyllis exclaimed. “I’m sick of blue grass. I want green grass.”
“However, these trees have conscious control of their pulvini, whereas the Earth’s plants don’t, and so they can do a lot of things that Earth plants can’t.”
“It sounds like a dirty word to me.”
“Pulvini merely means motor organs.”
“Oh.”
He closed his book, which was a more advanced botany text, covered with the jacket of a French novel in order to spare Phyllis’s feelings. “Darling, can’t you get it through your pretty head that they’re intelligent life-forms? If it’ll make it easier for you to think of them as human beings who happen to look like trees, then do that.”
“That’s exactly what I am doing. And I’m quite sure she thinks of you as a tree who happens to look like a human being.”
“Phyllis, sometimes I think you’re being deliberately difficult. Do you know one of the reasons why I took such pains to teach Magnolia English? It was that I hoped she would be a companion for you, that you could talk to each other when I had to be away from home.”
“Why do you call her Magnolia? She isn’t a lot like one.”
“Isn’t she? I thought she was. You see, I don’t know so much botany, after all.” Actually, he had picked that name for the tree because it expressed both the arboreal and the feminine at the same time—and also because it was one of the loveliest names he knew. But he couldn’t tell Phyllis that; there would be further misunderstanding. “Of course she has a name in her own language, but I can’t pronounce it.”
“They do have a language of their own then?”
“Naturally, though they don’t get much chance to speak it, since they’ve grown so few and far apart that verbal communication has become difficult. They communicate by a network of roots that they’ve developed.”
“I don’t think that’s so clever.”
“I merely said… oh, what’s the use of trying to explain everything to you? You just don’t want to understand.”
Phyllis put down her needlework and closed her eyes. “James,” she said, opening them again, “it’s no use pretending. I’ve been trying to be sympathetic and understanding, but I can’t do it. That tree—I’ve forced myself to be nice to her, but the more I see of her, the more convinced I am that she’s trying to steal you from me.”
Phyllis was beginning to poison his mind, he thought, because it had seemed to him also, in his last conversation with Magnolia, that he had discerned more than ordinary warmth in her attitude toward him… and perhaps a trace of spite toward his wife?
Preposterous! The tree had only been trying to cheer him up as any friend might reasonably do. After all, a tree and a man…. Nonsense! One had an anabolic metabolism, one a catabolic.
But this was a different kind of tree. She spoke, she read, she was capable of conscious turgor movements. And he, he had often thought secretly, was a different kind of man. Whereas Phyllis….
But that was disloyalty—to the type as well as the individual. The tree could be a companion to him, but she could not give him sons to work his land; she could not give him daughters to populate his planet; moreover, she did not, could not possibly know what human love meant, while Phyllis could at least learn.
“Look, dear,” he said, sitting down beside his wife on the couch and taking her hand in his. She didn’t draw away this time. “Suppose that what you say is true—not that it is, of course. Just because the tree has a crush on
