The Popular Magazine/Volume 54/Number 5/Blight

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

Blight

By H. De Vere Stacpoole

Author of “The Beach of Dreams,” Etc.

Townley, the tree doctor, has a weird tale to tell of a rubber plantation on the Amazon. Called down there to cure sick trees, he comes upon an inexplicable relationship between a man and his forest

Townley is an insignificant-looking little man till you look at his face; then you forget his size and all the things that at a first glance make for insignificance, for his face is lit by a spirit, patient and indomitable, kindly, 'genial, and full of genius.

He is a doctor and his patients live in all sorts of places. He has been called to consultations in the forests of India, in the forests of the Amazon, in the plantations of English dukes and American millionaires, always in places where trees grow, for his patients are trees. He is a tree doctor. He will attend vines and bushes and flowers, but trees are his specialty, or, rather, sick trees, and if you can get Townley to talk on the subject he will tell you that trees and plants and flowers are just like men and women and children, subject to cancer, subject to tumors, parasitic diseases and all sorts of maladies, some known, some partly known, some unknown. That they can show like and dislike, that they can fret and pine. He will tell you that flowers and plants and trees require love as well as attention, that Luther Burbank is a lover as well as a magician and that the roses of Dean Hole drew their perfection from the heart of the gardener no less than from the soil of the garden. And so he will go on till you fancy yourself talking to a mystic and a poet, and you will be right, he is both, but he is also one of the most practical men on earth. He was born and educated in England; and his genius came to him perhaps through his father who was a gardener at Kew. But England could not hold him, her ideas were too small, her trees too few. in America where tree doctoring is a profession and patients to be reckoned in hundreds of millions, he found his soil. A book on transplantation published when he was twenty-five gave him fame right off, and he never looked back.

However, I am not setting out to write a biography of William Townley, but a story he told me and which has more to do with men than trees. This is his story.

 

“I thought I knew something about rubber at that time. I had studied it, vine and tree—under glass. I thought I knew something about men, too, I had studied them, man and boy—but under glass, as you may say. I hadn't then come on to the fact that all man's experience contained in mind and books is a small thing compared to what he doesn't know of man and nature. Men run in a herd in a big groove of their own cutting, the country around is pretty much unknown. Even Shakespeare ran in it else his works wouldn't be of universal appeal.

“I had not seen the Amazon then, either, and he who has not seen the Amazon has not really seen God.

“It was a book of mine on the parasitic diseases of trees that brought me the letter, and the letter was from Colonel Alonzo Perreira, of the Esperanza plantation on the right bank of the Amazon, one thousand seven hundred and fifty miles from the mouth. It was a strange letter, typewritten in faultless English, practical in a way, yet producing on my mind the feeling that the writer was under the dominion of an agitation and an urgency not entirely accountable for in the matter.

“The trees on the Esperanza estate had come under a blight of some sort, that was the gist of the business, he wanted me to come and see them, to come at once, without a moment's delay. Money was of no object, absolutely none, and after all this and the signature was the postscript in manuscript, 'Come, I pray you, at once.'

“He gave me the name of his agents in Philadelphia, Milligan & Forsyth. I wrote them and got the reply that Perreira was the richest rubber man on the Amazon, that he had cabled me a credit on them of twenty thousand dollars—ending with the perfectly superfluous advice that I would be well advised from a monetary point of view to take up the proposition.

“I was not thinking so much of the money. I wanted to see the Amazon, I wanted to see those sick trees, and I wanted to see Perreira, this multimillionaire who lived seventeen hundred miles from Para, which lies seventeen hundred miles from everywhere. It seemed to me that Perreira was as sick as his trees. My mind is like that. I sometimes imagine things, and sometimes I am right.

“That letter was the call of a sick man, it seemed to me, not the hail of a planter only concerned about his pocket. The fancy came to me that Perreira loved his trees and then, somehow, my mind refused that idea for no special reason. I sometimes refuse ideas for no special reason, and sometimes I am right.

“But I was going. They have a cable up the Amazon, and I cabled that day, Saturday, it was, and on the Tuesday following I started.

“I had fixed my fee at ten thousand dollars and traveling expenses. I could have had twenty, but I wanted a holiday and I wanted to see the Amazon, and I am not a hog, anyway.

“I took passage up the Amazon in a big ocean-going steamer, the R. M. S. Tamar, and I was on deck most of the time I was not asleep or at meals. The Amazon is not a river, it is a moving sea, and all the trees in the world seem to have grouped themselves on the banks to watch it; palms and matamatas and sand boxes, embaubas and ferns, in leagues and millions, and the forests you drop at sunset you pick up at dawn with the blue toucans still yelping over them and the great butterflies coming out to see the ship, and the blazing parrots screeching at her, and the egrets drifting over her like puffs of snow, white as the egrets you dropped a thousand miles back, and the river just as broad and the trees just as many and as new and fresh and green as they were before the pyramids were built or Egypt thought of.

“Then one morning at breakfast the captain said to me, 'In an hour we will be at the Esperanza landing stage.'

“Then as I stood on deck with my traps beside me I saw the plantation open beyond a cape of trees and the landing stage, big as a deep-sea wharf, and in another ten minutes I was shaking hands with Perreira. He had come down to meet me and he was something of the sort of man I had expected to meet; nervy, dried up and dark as a native, a Peruvian of the best sort and with all the manners of a Spanish grandee.

“I liked him, right off, but I did not like his house, nor the dinner he put before me that day. I was unused to houses with scarcely any furniture, to farina and black beans and coffee without sugar or milk, but one gets used to most things after a little while, and after a while I got used to Perreira's way of living; I had other things to think of besides comfort and food.

“Those trees—the second day I was there he took me off into the forest past a palm belt and into the true jungle where the giants stood festooned with climbing vines and bush ropes, then close to a pachuaba palm, standing on its exposed roots as if they were stilts, he showed me a rubber tree, the first we had come on. He showed me where it had been tapped.

“'You see,' said Perreira, 'it has given scarcely any milk, look at it, touch it, it is sick.'

“It was. I could see that at a glance. The bark had a leprous look, dry beyond ordinary, and scaling off in parts, though not much.

“'Let's look at another,' said I.

“'There is no use,' said Perreira, 'they are all the same, for hundreds of miles, wherever my estate reaches, they are the same. It began last year. It does not reach beyond my estate, the blight only touches me.'

“That is strange,' said I.

“'Yes,' said he, 'it is strange.'

“He said no more but stood looking at me as I cut some of the bark off for microscopical examination, then we went back to the house and I set to work that day in the little laboratory he had rigged up for me. I worked for several days and with entirely negative results. I could discover no fungus or parasite to account for the condition of the bark. There was a thickening of the cellular tissue and the fistular cavities were reduced in size, empty, or blocked. That was all.

“On the night when I told Perreira of my results we were sitting in his office, which was the coolest and pleasantest room in the house, in cane rockers and with a table laden with rum, crushed ice, lime juice, and cigars between us.

“'You can arrive at no conclusion, then,' said he, 'except that my trees are dying from, shall we say, a general debility without appreciable cause?'

“'That is so,' I replied.

“'In your book,' said he, 'there is a chapter at the end which speaks of the likes and dislikes of trees, a strange chapter in a practical book, yet it was the mind revealed in that chapter that caused me to send for you; here, said I, is a man who sees beyond the surface and who is not afraid to say what he sees and to whom I can speak what I think. Now I am going to tell you what I think. I would not tell it to any other man but you. I think my trees are blighted by an act of mine; that they are dying because, out there in the forest, many days journey from here, my brother lies dead and unburied.'

“'Did you kill him?' said I.

“The words came from me almost without volition, our minds seemed for a moment absolutely in tune, and it was as though I had read his thoughts and repeated them like a gramophone.

“'In a way I did,' replied he, as though the question were quite an ordinary one. Then he rose up and began to mix some drinks at the little table where the tray stood. I watched him as he handled the sugar and the rum and the pounded ice, measuring everything carefully, but doing so, evidently, with his mind a thousand miles away.

“Then, when he had handed me my drink, he took his own and sat down again in the cane rocker.

“'I will tell you exactly what happened,' said he, 'and how it happened, but I must first tell you that we are an unlucky family—or were, for I am the last of them all. My grandfather was a trader of Lima and my father inheriting all his wealth began trade in rubber with Para and eventually took up this estate. He was a hard man to the natives, and he was killed one day by a blow-gun man; walking in the garden here something flecked his cheek and stuck to it; he plucked it off thinking it was a flying insect and found that it was a blow-gun dart. He knew that he must die in twenty minutes or so, and, coming into the house, he made his will leaving the estate to my eldest brother, Ramon. Juan, the second eldest, was appointed overseer under Ramon, with succession in the event of Ramon's death, while I, the youngest, was directed to study law so that I might be of assistance to my brothers in the management of the business. My father was a very clever man, and he knew the tricks of lawyers and how they prey on business men for the sake of their fees. I was to be the lawyer of the firm, with a share in the profits of the business and succession to the estate should I survive the others. Having made his will and smoked a cigarette, he died. I said we were an unlucky family, and three was our unlucky number. We were three, nine is a multiple of three, and nine years after the death of my father my eldest brother Ramon died a violent death. He was out crocodile shooting with Juan and the breech of his rifle burst, killing him.

“'I was at Para when the news reached me, and I came here by the first steamer and found Juan quite broken down with grief. Juan was a big, domineering, violent-tempered man, yet I found him on my arrival in tears, weak as a woman and the shadow of his old self, without volition and with only one desire—to get rid of the estate. All this surprised me, for I had loved Ramon far more than Juan had appeared to love him, yet I was myself, though, indeed, sad enough, as you may imagine.

“'I did not wish to part with the estate, and without my consent a sale would have been impossible. I argued with Juan, pointing out the folly of such a course with rubber increasing in value as it then was, offering at the same time to leave Para and come up and help him in the practical working of the business. He agreed with this, and after a while he began to recover and find his old interest in life, and in six months he was himself again, domineering, violent-tempered, a hog—as you say in America—for work and the terror of the malingerers and bad hands. A man difficult to get on with, yet with whom I never had a difference, for I knew his temper to a hair and managed to lead him by humoring him.

“'So it went on for three years—for three years, mark you—till, one day, Pedro, the chief of the workers on the estate, came back from the forests with a tale.

“'Pedro had been sent with half a dozen of the hands on an exploring expedition with a view to discovering new rubber tracts. You must know that this estate is so vast that for us, the owners, or, rather, for me the owner, it is beyond the river belt in large parts, unknown.

“'Pedro at a point six days' journey away had found a rich rubber tract, but he had found something else which in his flowery language he described as a river of gold. He had done gold mining in his young days and he was not wrong. He had found a river with large deposits of auriferous sand and from the specimens he brought back with him we determined that the thing was worth exploring. That was human nature. We were rich, richer than many an American millionaire, for our riches rested on the firm foundation of the forests, they and Para were our real gold mines, yet, such is the power of the yellow metal that we could not rest and we, who had gold a thousand times beyond our needs, dreamed of gold and talked of gold as though we were beggars. We set about making preparations for a great expedition. We arranged to take twenty men including Pedro and to build a hut or tambo at the end of each day's march so that, were the river to prove workable, we might establish a regular road to it through the jungle with resting places for the gold getters and their burdens.

“'All our men were native to the spot and used to the forests, with that instinct for direction which the forest breeds in men. We started on a Tuesday and the third of the month, and just as the sun was rising above the trees.

“'Pedro led the way with the hands and we followed on the beaten track left by them. We had had luck from the first, one of the men injuring his foot against the thorny stem of a pachiuba palm. We had to lie up for a day at the first tambo we built. We built our second tambo, like fools, close to a great patch of embauba trees. These trees, you must know, are poisonous with malaria. Pedro said it did not matter, so far from the river, but he was wrong, for next morning Juan was in a fever. No one else was touched. I wished to delay the march or even return till he was better, but he would not listen to this. It was not in his nature to turn back or to lie up for a touch of fever, so we pushed on ever deeper into the forest and ever farther from help. He was worse that night, but the next morning he declared himself better, though his appearance had now begun to alarm me; his face was shrunk and his eyes were brilliant as the eyes of a woman at a fête, and his hands shook as they held the coffee cup, but his legs, under the dominion of his powerful will, seemed unaffected. He would go forward, and forward we went.

“That evening he seemed better. We had now reached the fringe of the true wilderness, the rubber trees had ceased, and we had struck a great belt of matamatas and fig which grow together finely. Mixed with them were unknown trees, and everywhere the vine and the liantasse and brush rope festooned the air; the trees seemed hung with drapery of torn lace festooned with orchids, and the air shoots of the wild pine and the tubes of the water vine rushed up through the gloom ~to be lost where the parrots shrieked and the monkeys chattered.

“'The moon was near the full, and when she rose the noises of the night began; you have heard the Mother of the Moon, that little owl which fills the night here with its melancholy cry, but you have not heard it out there in the forest, nor the roar of the howling monkeys rocking themselves on the branches, nor the hundred sounds made by unknown things that only speak at night when the moon turns all that place into a great green cave like a cave of the sea where the vines and the air shoots seem climbing up through green and waving water.

“'Next morning Juan declared himself still better, but it was the declaration of a man on the verge of bankruptcy. He did not know it, nor did I know that the fever, though suppressed, was still working in him, so we pushed on making good progress day by day, each night building a tambo, a work that only took the hands three hours, and each morning leaving it behind us. So it went on till we had built our sixth resting place by the bank of the little river that held the gold.

“'Pedro had spoken truth. The river is small, but it is there, and its mud and sand are laden with gold deposited through the ages and brought down from some source of gold far up to the west, but maybe, indeed, not so far—who can tell?

“'“We are rich,” said Juan as he sat that night when we had finished washing and weighing a specimen of the sand taken at haphazard, “we are rich enough to command fleets and armies. We will be kings.”

“'I had never heard him talk in an extravagant way before; it was the fever that he had been carrying for days like a demon in his bosom and which was now about to claim him.

“'At supper he talked like a man drunk, I thought it was the gold; it was the fever. Next morning I knew.

“'Ah, that was a bad time, six days' march from any help, with few drugs and the roughest food, without a woman for a nurse, for in sickness as in childhood what can we do without a woman's hand?

“'The tambo was given over to the sick man, and for three days he lay fighting the disease with what poor help we could give him, then on the evening of the third day he sent for me. I was asleep in a shack we had built among the trees when Pedro called me saying that Juan wished for me at once. I came, and there he was, lying on the bed of leaves we had made for him, his eyes half closed and his hands folded on his breast.

“'He opened his eyes when he heard my step and motioned me to sit down on the ground beside him. Then he closed his eyes for a moment. I thought he had fallen asleep, but he was not asleep. Suddenly in a clear, sane voice he began to speak to me.

“'“When I sent for you from Para,” said he, “I told you that Ramon had died from an accident, that his gun had burst while he was out shooting with me. Have you seen that gun?”

“'“No,” I replied, wondering what he meant. I thought for a moment that his mind was wandering, but I dismissed that idea, his manner and his tone spoke of perfect sanity.

“'“No,” he replied, “you took my word for it, you did not ask for evidence of his death, you did not imagine that I lied to you. Ramon did not die from an accident. I killed him.”

“'“You killed him!”

“'”I killed him. Would you prefer the word murder? I murdered him. I am near death, and I wish to confess.”

“'I sat with my hands folded. I knew he was speaking the truth, my tongue lay like a pebble in my mouth. Then I said:

“'You murdered Ramon!'

“'“Call it that,” he said.

“'But why—but why?' I asked, speaking as though to get out of a darkness that had suddenly surrounded me. 'Why—why?'

“'“It was done in passion, about a girl,” he replied. “She favored him; I loved her; he was the real master of Esperanza, I never cared for Ramon—you know my temper; I often held it in, often; he always managed to cross my wishes, yet I held my temper in. I hated him at times, for he was always right on business matters, and somehow I was always wrong, that touched my pride. Then I fell in love; she was the daughter of a seringuero, as low down as that, but she had eyes like the night; but Roman had been before me with her, she would not look at me, the daughter of a Seringuero.

“'“Then Ramon and I had our quarrel, and I killed him in the woods not far from that spit where the alligators sun themselves. We had our guns with us. I wrapped his head in leaves and threw his gun in the river beyond the spit, where it lies six fathoms deep. I carried him home and told the hands it was an accident; there is no questioning of statements at Esperanza.

“'“I killed him, and now that I am dying I tell you and ask your forgiveness.”

“'I sat without speaking. Ramon was my favorite brother, this thing had stricken the life in me, Juan was dying, the whole world seemed suddenly to have come to an end.

“'He asked me to forgive him. I scarcely knew what he meant. I had no anger in my heart, only grief. Had he been strong and well all would have been different, then rage would have filled me, no doubt, and I would have avenged Ramon or handed the murderer to justice, but he was dying and he had confessed. Did I forgive him? Before God, I cannot say whether I did or not. I cannot read my mind as it was just then. It seemed, indeed, just then a blank, but I know that when he asked again, “Do you forgive me?” I answered, “Yes.”

“'“Then,” said he, “I die in peace.” He closed his eyes and I left the tambo.

“'The sun was setting and the open space by the river was filled with the light of sunset, great moths flew in the golden, gauzy light and the smell of the forest was altering; few men seem to have noticed this change in the scents that fill the air of the forest when day begins to turn into night. I believe I myself had not noticed it till just then. My senses had suddenly become more acute as though the shock I had received had sharpened them, also my perception of things, as though my mind, ever so slightly joggled from its base, were seeing things from a fresh viewpoint.

“'Right before me between two branches a bird-eating spider had spread its huge web in which a little colored bird had become entangled. This thing which was common seemed to me new and monstrous and strange—strange as the new world which had suddenly surrounded me.

“'I walked a little way among the trees, and, taking my seat on a fallen log, I tried to pull my mind together, to think and to remember,

“'Pictures of Ramon came up before me and of our boyhood. I had always been his favorite. I was the youngest brother, rather delicate, the spoiled child of the family. Ramon had always stood between me and the rough things of life, he had been generous to me with money. Had I forgiven his murderer?

“'Had I betrayed Roman? Looking into my heart I could find no anger against Juan. Death had intervened, destroying anger and the thoughts of vengeance, but I had not forgiven him. I had said the words, it is true, but I had spoken out of a mind rendered negative by contending forces and under dominion of the great power exercised by the dying.

“'That power was on me still.

“'I left the trees and returned toward the tambo. Pedro and the others had lit a fire some distance away. It was now dark, and the flicker of it showed against the night of the trees and strangely fierce against the still silver of the moonlight.

“'At the door of the tambo I paused. There was no sound, I entered and struck a match. Juan was still lying on his back with his hands folded, but he was not dead; he was sunk in a profound sleep, his face had changed, miraculously as though he had gained ten years of youth and his forehead was dewed by a gentle perspiration. Death had passed him by, the fever had left him, he would not die; he would recover and be well and strong again. He had been at the turning point when he had sent for me to make his confession, and that sudden ease coming to his mind had cast the die for life.

“'The match went out. I lit another and stood till it burned my fingers gazing on him.

“'Then I went out into the night and came to the fire where Pedro and the others were seated smoking, with the great white moths flitting about them and the great white moon shining above. I told them that I would look after Juan that night and then I went and lay down in my shack among the trees with all the noises of the forest around me and the great problem before me staring at me like a sphinx.

“'My forgiveness was withdrawn with the withdrawal of death. I was now the judge and also the guardian of the honor of our house and its good name.

“'Would you believe me that in that terrible position and freighted with that great trust, I slept? I slept as soundly as the man in the tambo, and with the first screaming of the parrots and yelping of the toucans I woke.

“'The dawn was strong, and, creeping toward the hut, I looked in. Juan was still asleep, lying, now, on his right side and breathing easily and lightly. I entered and, listening, I counted his respirations. They were normal. In an hour or so he would wake a new man, weak, very weak, but on the road to recovery. Yet he must never return to Esperanza. I did not say that, Justice said it, and the ghosts of my forefathers and the ghost of Ramon.

“'I left the place, and, going to where the men were still asleep, I woke Pedro.

“'“Pedro,” said I, “Senhor Juan is dead, rouse the hands, collect the stores, and give the order to march. There is no need to dig a grave, the tambo will be his tomb, so he has willed it.”

“'The men awoke yawning in the light that was now full, and without question, and like beasts of burden they shouldered their loads. Pedro gave the order to march, and they wheeled back along the road we had come, I, following, leaving the golden river and the sleeping man, who was my brother, in the tambo that was to be his tomb.

“'You are the only man who knows this and now my heart seems lighter. You can understand, and also that the judge pays for his office a far larger sum than the salary he receives. That was three years ago, and now see in the third year my trees are telling me that my payment is due. I have got to die like them, but first I have got to bury what remains of Juan. It is all a fate working out intricately. I don't know how I will die, maybe the fever will take me as it took him when I make my journey into the forest to find his bones and to bury them.'

“I made that journey with him,” finished Townley. “When he had told me that story it was as though a strong bond had been woven between us. I went with him. We found the old ruined tambos, one by one, but we did not reach the river, for in the fourth tambo from the start we found a skeleton. It was the skeleton of Juan. He had dragged himself back thus far, miraculously, despite the want of food and the weakness that must have been his. It was the knowledge of this fact that killed Perreira—with the help of a Mauser pistol.

“We buried the brothers beneath a great matamata tree.

“That is the Amazon, where the men are as strange as the trees, and the trees as the river, and where the great plantations turn rubber into gold that no man can spend in a climate that few men can live in—where the sure things are fever and fate and the shouting of the toucans by day and the roaring of the howling monkeys by night.”