“Well,” he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and slapping them together, “here we are at last.”
The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.
“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn’t poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you’ve really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you’ll know that there’s no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr. Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.”
Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the wind died in the dreary trees.
“You’ll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth, and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He’s really a very good fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said originally.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort of sanity. “What is his greatest virtue?”
“His greatest virtue,” replied Basil, “is that he always tells the literal truth.”
“Well, really,” cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, “he doesn’t seem to have been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?”
“He was too truthful, I confess,” said Basil, leaning against the tree; “too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it’s time we went in. We shall be late for dinner.”
Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
“Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a house?”
“I suppose so,” I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange as the wind:
“Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?”
“Why, up here,” cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
“Come up, all of you,” he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a schoolboy. “Come up. You’ll be late for dinner.”
The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them. Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly mystical in Basil’s supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant’s staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after him.
Halfway up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how, halfway up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer and all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all probability, laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly let go of the tree and fell.
“Swinburne,” said Rupert suddenly, from above, “what are we doing? Let’s get down again,” and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too felt the shock of wakening to reality.
“We can’t leave poor Basil,” I said. “Can’t you call to him or get hold of him by the leg?”
“He’s too far ahead,” answered Rupert; “he’s nearly at the top of the beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks’ nests, I suppose.”
We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind. Then I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost in space, like a falling star.
“Can nothing be done to stop Basil?” I called out.
“No,” answered my fellow climber. “He’s too far up. He must get to the top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again. Hark at him above there; you can just hear him
