A Dirge for Elms
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
64LLUM hateth mankind and waiteth." The old saying had 4 come to haunt my mind and trouble my conscience. Of
the ancient elms that grow about my home some leaned over a highway and others over a public footpath, while a group of them towered over a neighbour's workshop. Too many dead branches had fallen across the 400tpath for my peace of mind. Some of the old trees, I knew, should be condemned ; but I was no fit judge to pronounce the death sentence. For all that it was late in the season, I called in an expert woodman. His verdict was that a dozen of them must go.
I hated the verdict, though I could not question its justice. I hated it because I admired and respected my elms. Here was a proud tree, which in the course of unnumbered centuries had raised itself to majesty, out-distancing among its remote and forgotten relations the common stinging-nettle Here, too, like the Romans and Saxons, whose works abide in our Kentish valley, was one of the conquerors of Britain. Winning its way, inch upon inch, by the patient thrust of its suckers—or, as one authority has suggested, advancing by seed in an age when, in a warmer climate than ours, its seed enjoyed a since resigned fertility—before the Romans, before the Saxons, the field-elm had conquered the length and breadth of Southern England.
I hated the verdict, also, because I loved my elms. These trees, the comrades of many men living in the old house before me, had in turn become comrades of mine--7-comrades, too, which were not to be replaced ; for better foresters than I, in fear of the Dutch elm disease, had counselled against their replanting. Between these trees about to die and me an intimacy had grown. Watching each year for the moment of their shy and fugitive flowering, I had come to feel that, in my recognition of their claret-coloured bloom, they and-I shared a secret. , Bui I could not, for the sake of any such liking, hazard the lives of men. The sentence passed, I could sign no reprieve. The woodman came with axe and saw, winch and cable and wedges, to carry out the decree. Thirty years ago he had been apprenticed to his father. Now he was passing the gathered know- ledge of two generations.to his own sons. There was no mistaking his experience, his craftsmanship or, for all that he was their executioner, his genuine love of trees and their timbers. He spoke of the, fine qualities and the uses of the wood of yew and apple. Away by the river my golden weeping willows, then in the miraculous beauty of their first green buds, caught his eye and moved him to a sudden expression of delight. Then he turned to the work.
I watched his felling of one of the most hazardous of our elms. It was to die in the moment of its flowering. Standing at the winch, to tighten from time to time the steel cable that was to hold the falling tree to its course, my companion spoke of the care, the studied avoidance of risk, that he brought to the felling of every dangerous tree. I saw for myself how the butt of the old giant, that had evidently once been a hedgerow sucker, was shot with the nails and staples of bygone fencings, that dread of every sawyer and sawmiller for the damage that even a single nail will inflict on the teeth of a saw. His two sons, with axe and crosscut saw, had made the " pocket "—the wide opening on the side towards which the tree was .to_fall ; the " seat," or cut, on the opposite side, which would finally release the giant tree to its falling. The seat, 1 knew, must always be above the pocket, to ensure that the severed trunk should not jump backward nor nip the crosscut blade. The last cutting of the eat, he pointed out, was delicately regulated so as to leave a slightly thicker hinge on one side of the trunk, that would steer the falling tree precisely between a small lime and a young Persian walnut. As the saw came slowly forward, the branches of the tree began to tremble and sway. Then with a crash, delicately avoiding its young neighbours, the great tree was down, its hate forestalled and its waiting frustrated.
As I walked among its branches, I reflected that in the hour of its falling it might prove to have won a nobler victory than the maiming of a Man. Its branches—I rescued a twig or two for the decoration of my table—were hung already with the red bloom. Twigs and chips would be gathered for kindling. The stouter branches, before they went to the stack, would be sawn to the breadth, or tWice the breadth, of the hearth that would welcome them in coming winters. (How contemptuously, as one for whose fire through twenty years elm had provided a favourite background, I had listened a year or two before to a broadcast decrying elm- wood as fuel.) The sound parts of the trunk, handsome brown heart with white sapwood covering, would be lifted and drawn to a neigh- bouring sawmill.
Elm was,..known as a cantankerous wood, but for a variety of purposes men had mastered its humours. I had read that the old Romans used elm or beech for the axles of millstones that crushed their olives. I myself had seen shaped and hollowed elm-trunks that had served as the water-mains of London streets. I recalled some of the many homely uses to which English countrymen through the centuries,Uad put the wood—from the floors of their barns and their carts to the hubs and felloes of their wheels. Years ago I had watched Mr. Lailey, of Bucklebury Common, turning his bowls of elm, and had -been lured by his example to whittle myself a small elm-bowl which every night now for twenty years had held my loose cash of an evening. I had read of Mr. Shelley's fine craftsman- ship in elm, and admired the comely panelling and furniture with which Sir Herbert Baker had adorned his Westminster office. Only this year I had been hearing of furniture made of elm in Scotland.
I liked to think that the tall trees, now to be hoisted up on to the timber-wagon, might come to equal honour. The elm in its day had conquered England. These trees in life had towered over the heads of men and women. Might not their long wait, now seemingly frustrated, yield them by a late alliance with man a final victory ? No mortal craftsmanship could save the flesh of man from return- ing, strengthtess and unlovely, to the dust. By the skill of man turned to usefulness, turned to beauty, the substance of these trees might endure.
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