The Christmas Tree
TN other years I have helped to transplant little Douglas fir trees from their native shrubberies to green tubs inside the house, and to hang them with gold and silver tinsel and coloured balls of glass. This Christmas I shall be content with the tall and lonely pine that grows amidst crouching hollies there on the edge of Hanger Wood. I have no wish to transplant it or hang it with anything : it is just right where it stands. I have dis- covered that, looking from my window at a certain hour, I can see the moon sailing very slowly through its top- most' branches, like a silver sampan : and every frosty night it is hung with coloured stars.
The Pleiades—if I alter my position a little—swing over it in the course of the night. Examining them carefully, I observe, or imagine I observe, each of the sisters to be wearing a different colour : mauve, helio- trope, silver, rose-colour, electric-blue, and a faint shade of yellow. What the seventh wears I cannot say—I have never seen her : and maybe the others are not, after all, dressed as I imagine them to be. Stilt, as 'they flutter over the blackened branches of the. Christmas Tree —actually more -like a flock of luminous birds than anything—they do seem to hold a variety of hues : as many at least as a rook's or a starling's wing feather. Possibly- there is some scientific explanation of this. There is, at any rate, one star that is undeniably redder than its felloivs, I think Aldebaran. But -since I 'wrote of Venus rising in the evening I h'ave been suspicious of my star knowledge. The truth is that at sea, in navig- ating a ship; one becoines so familiar with the stars and planets as to imagine one knoivs all about their habits and relative positions ; but inland, where every cottage window is a lighthouse and every pathway indicates a safe course to some knOwn harbour, the heavenly bodies are pleasantly useless, and it is easy to forget. And even the moon has no message but one of idle beauty.
In the network of pine branches, where it is trapped for a while, it is almost absurdly ornamental. As everyone knows in these days of post-impressionism and whatnot, there is neither art nor truth in the old-fashioned type of Christmas card : the perky robin in the snow, the yellow moon with an Owl seated on a branch in front of it, the black and silver night landscape. It is all wrong, it means nothing and has no foundation in fact. I know that. I am all for being as modern as possible myself. Yet I wish, somehow, that one of our geniuses would just come and take a look at this night-piece for a moment. Nothing could be more ridiculous ; but there it is. The thing is an old-fashioned Christmas card to the life. 0 for an owl to come and sit on that outlying branch and add the final touch of unreality !
One should not paint, or write of, what one sees, how- ever. I was forgetting that : only of what one sees in, as it were . . . . I prefer to stare blankly at the Christmas Tree ; without vision, naturally, but I like- looking at it.
This lonely pine is a Christmas tree by day as by night. On such mornings of hard, white frost as we have been having lately, its silvery-green needles glitter in the pale sunlight and impart a festive look to the whole of the immediate landscape. The single pine towers up amongst its neighbouring beech-tops, stark and cold, in full and challenging apparel. In its dignity it seems to mock the fiercest storms, to invite the snow to weigh down its branches to tilt utmost. The west wind may wreck the beech trees—it has (ion; so already in a score of place's in this wood—the snow may bury hollies and cottages up to their respective tops and chimney-pots. The pine says, let it ; that is the sort of weather I really enjoy. We have not seen it this year yet in its snowy dress. But I know it must look magnificent.
Yet lordly as it is, this Christmas tree is friendly.; extraordinarily so. The small woodland creatures love it A red squirrel who should have been asleep is continually out and about amongst its branches. Ring-doves roost in it. The tits—especially the blue-tits ; they swarm in these parts decorate it by day as the stars do by night. Their light melodious voices, the blue-tits ringing tiny silver bells and the coal-tits continually calling for their tea (" Tea, 'Jerry, tea, jerry, tea ! ") keep 'it musical from dawn to sunset. Their songs, and the robin's plaintive whistle, constitute its proper day-tithe orchestra —its bark, no doubt, is an endless winter larder for thousands of these *small hungry birds. As to the night- time orchestra, I hope one night soon—I should like it to be on Christmas Eve-4o hear that also, the cry of 'a brown owl ; and to see the owl himself, seated on a branch in front of the yellow moon, the perfect Christmas card. The moon will be just on full about then.
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