The Tree of Man

'It is all very interesting,' said the solicitor, touching a furrow with his toe. 'The soil. It is a grand life. And productive.'
Because it was his life, Stan Parker had never thought of it as this. It had taken possession of him. But nothing had ever taken possession of Dudley Forsdyke, except perhaps his wife.
Suddenly he would have liked to be possessed by something, some passion, or vice even. The wind was blowing from a southerly quarter and twitching his mackintosh.
'Why don't we chuck everything and go on the land, dear?' he called back to his wife.
'Why?' she considered, drawing her fur collar slowly across her cheek. Because you would hate it.'
His legs were ridiculous in a wind.
Dudley Forsdyke was so used to examining reports on living that he had been made drunk suddenly by a smell of life. This came up at him out of the ploughed field and down the wet hill. The sky was overflowing with obstreperous clouds. The wind hit him in the chest. Then the vision of ridiculous man returned to him with his wife's words. He did not resent them, the possibility that they were meant to hurt, because he deserved such censure for his momentary imprudence. So he made noises in his throat, of agreement, or masochism, and continued to stray across the landscape, across all those other landscapes in which he had not yet lived, and in which he would not live wholly until he was beneath them.

'Oh God, oh God', said Stan Parker.
He was suspended.
Then his agreeable life, which had been empty for many years, began to fill. It is not natural that emptiness shall prevail, it will fill eventually, whether with water, or children, or dust, or spirit. So the old man sat gulping in. His mouth was dry and caked, that had also vomited out his life that night, he remembered, in the street. He was thinking about it intolerably.
What is intended of me and for me? He wondered. I am ignorant.
He was not answered, though.
After a while the old man called to the old dog, that had continued to sit in front of the burrow, pointing his grey muzzle, and shaking his cankered ear, and the two went away. The man walked carefully, comforted by his continued existence beneath the evening sky.

The man returned to his chair on the edge of the room, and looked at the blank book, and tried to think what he would write in it. The blank pages were in themselves simple and complete. But there must be some simple words, within his reach, with which to throw further light. He would have liked to write some poem or prayer in the empty book, and for some time did consider that idea, remembering the plays of Shakespeare that he had read lying on his stomach as a boy, but any words that came to him were the stiff words of a half-forgotten literature that had no relationship with himself.

Stan Parker, sitting at the small, cold table, had by this time achieved permanence of a kind which the song could not dissolve, ebbing and flowing though it was at the iron roots of the table. But this permanence was not worth having, he knew. All things of importance, in the liquid light of the silver song, are withheld or past. All figures that he recognized were turned to marble. So he lay with his wife upon the iron bed, which still grew from rose carpet, but their limbs were marble. They were frozen together in each other's eyes.

The man, who went about his evening work, did not try. He was tired. He was also at peace under the orange sky. Events had exhausted him. He had not learned to think far, and in what progress he had made had reached the conclusion he was prisoner in his human mind, as in the mystery of the natural world. Only sometimes the touch of hands, the lifting of a silence, the sudden shape of a tree or presence of a first star, hinted at eventuel release.
But not now. And he did not ask for it.