“Without making a speech.” And in a flash her anger turned to misery and she added: “I was going to say I was grateful. Would that have been all right, sir!”
And his anger underwent a change too, for he came close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their faces to a level, and said quite gently, “That would be fine. Although you won’t really be grateful for another ten days, when you get your ‘spontaneous remission’ reports—or maybe for six months or a year or two or five, when examinations keep on testing out negative.”
She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that she found herself reaching for the hand with which he steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not recoil but he didn’t seem to welcome her touch either.
“Why can’t I be grateful right now?”
“That would be an act of faith,” he said bitterly, “and that just doesn’t happen any more—if it ever did.” He rose and went toward the door. “Please don’t go tonight,” he said. “It’s dark and you don’t know the way. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When he came back in the morning the door was open.
The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels she had used. She wasn’t there.
He came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai.
Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp re-lief, tough brown-gray creviced in velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship.
There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing and living things change—and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change.
A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do or to do in less time than it needs.
The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a com-promise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree. It takes both and they must understand one another. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy, root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants. And if the explanation is well enough made and there is great enough understanding the tree will respond and obey—almost.
Always there will be its own self-respecting highly individual variation. Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it -my way. And for these variations the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation and, more often than not (almost smiling), it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.
It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.
So he stood for perhaps ten minutes, watching the flow of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of disreputable cotton duck. He opened the hinged glass at one side of the atrium and spread the canvas over the roots ‘and all ‘the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while—a month or two—a certain shoot in the topmost branch would take the hint and the uneven flow of moisture up through the cambium layer would nudge it away from that upward reach and persuade it to continue the horizontal passage. And perhaps not—and it would need the harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might have something to say, too, about the rightness of an upward trend and would perhaps say it persuasively enough to convince the man—altogether, a patient, meaningful, and rewarding dialogue.
“Good morning.”
“Oh, god—dam!” he barked. “You made me bite my tongue. I thought you’d gone.”
“I had.” She kneeled in the shadows, her back against the inner wall, facing the atrium. “But then I stopped to be with the tree for a while.”
“Then what?”
“I thought a lot.”
“What about?”
“You.”
“Did you now?”
“Look,” she said firmly. “I’m not going to any doctor to get this thing checked out. I didn’t want to leave until I had told you that and until I was sure you believed me.”
“Come on in and we’ll get something to eat.”
Foolishly, she giggled.
“I can’t. My feet are asleep.”
Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the atrium.
She asked, her arm around his shoulders and their faces close, “Do you believe me?”
He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes.
“I believe you. I don’t know why you decided as you did but I’m willing to believe you.”
He sat her down on the chest and stood back.
“It’s that act of faith you mentioned,” she said gravely.
“I thought you ought to have it at least once in your life so you can never say again what you said.” She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. “Ow!” She made a pained smile. “Pins and needles.”
“You must have been thinking for a long time.”
“Yes. Want more?”
“Sure.”
“You are an angry, frightened man.”
He seemed delighted.
“Tell me about all that!”
“No,” she said quietly. “You tell me. I’m very serious about this. Why are you angry?”
“I’m not.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I tell you I’m not. Although,” he added good-na-turedly, “you’re pushing me in that direction.”
“Well then, why?”
He gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long time indeed.
“You really want to know, don’t you?”
She nodded.
He waved a sudden hand, up and out.
“Where do you suppose all this came from—the house, the land, the equipment?”
She waited.
“An exhaust system,” he said, with a thickening of his voice she was coming to know. “A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glass wool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will bum, burns.
The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today’s standards at least, pretty clean. And because of the preheating it actually gets better mileage out of the engine.”
“So you’ve made a lot of money.”
“I made a lot of money,” he echoed. “But not because the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got the money because an automobile company bought it and buried it in a vault. They don’t like it because it costs something to install in new cars. Some .friends of theirs in the refining business don’t like it because it gets high performance out of crude fuels. Well, all right1 didn’t know any better and I won’t make the same mistake again. But yes I’m angry. I was angry when I was a kid on a tank ship and we were set to washing down a bulk-head with chipped brown soap and canvas. I went ashore and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better, faster and cheaper, so I took it to the bos’n, who gave me a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job better than he did. Well, he was drunk at the time but the rough part came when the old shellbacks in the crew gauged up on me for being what they called a ‘company man that’s a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn’t understand why people got in the way of something better.