Produced by Suzanne Shell, Harry Jones and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1912
He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essentialqualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, forinstance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and whyno two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down topaint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individualityof a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed itwas something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, hisdrawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a TreePersonality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almostapproach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of thatparticular tree stood there alive beneath his brush—shining, frowning,dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. Itemerged.
There was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint; flowersand landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge; with people he washelpless and hopeless; also with animals. Skies he could sometimesmanage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these allseverely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that wasguided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a treelook almost like a being—alive. It approached the uncanny.
"Yes, Sanderson knows what he's doing when he paints a tree!" thoughtold David Bittacy, C.B., late of the Woods and Forests. "Why, you canalmost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the raindrip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move. Itgrows." For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, half topersuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wifethought otherwise), and half to explain this uncanny reality of lifethat lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study table.
Yet in the general view the mind of Mr. Bittacy was held to be austere,not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love ofnature that had been fostered by years spent in the forests and junglesof the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to thatEurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he hadkept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and wasunusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it. He, also,understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, bornperhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding,protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowypresences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew theworld he lived in. HE also kept it from his wife—to some extent. Heknew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed. Butwhat he did not know, or realize at any rate, was the extent to whichshe grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear, hejudged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at a timehis calling took him away from her into the jungle forests, while sheremained at home dreading all manner of evils that might befall him.This, of course, explained her instinctive opposition to the passion forwoods that still influenced and clung to him. It was a natural survivalof those anxious days of waiting in solitude for his safe return.
For Mrs. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergy-man, was aself-sacrificing woman, who in most things found a happy duty in sharingher husband's joys and sorrows to the