It was plain in a flash that the change had fallen on him like a thunderbolt; that he, at least, had never had the wildest notion that the tale of the Vanishing Squire had been but a prelude to that of the vanishing trees. The next half hour was full of his ravings and expostulations, which gradually died away into demands for explanation and incoherent questions repeated again and again.
He had practically to be overruled at last, in spite of the respect in which he was held, before anything like a space and silence were made in which the doctor could tell his own story.
It was perhaps a singular story, of which he alone had ever had the knowledge; and though its narration was not uninterrupted, it may be set forth consecutively in his own words.
"First, I wish it clearly understood that I believe in nothing.
I do not even give the nothing I believe a name; or I should be an atheist. I have never had inside my head so much as a hint of heaven and hell. I think it most likely we are worms in the mud; but I happen to be sorry for the other worms under the wheel.
And I happen myself to be a sort of worm that turns when he can.
If I care nothing for piety, I care less for poetry. I'm not like Ashe here, who is crammed with criminology, but has all sorts of other culture as well. I know nothing about culture, except bacteria culture.
I sometimes fancy Mr. Ashe is as much an art critic as Mr. Paynter; only he looks for his heroes, or villains, in real life.
But I am a very practical man; and my stepping stones have been simply scientific facts. In this village I found a fact--a fever.
I could not classify it; it seemed peculiar to this corner of the coast; it had singular reactions of delirium and mental breakdown.
I studied it exactly as I should a queer case in the hospital, and corresponded and compared notes with other men of science.
But nobody had even a working hypothesis about it, except of course the ignorant peasantry, who said the peacock trees were in some wild way poisonous.
"Well, the peacock trees were poisonous. The peacock trees did produce the fever. I verified the fact in the plain plodding way required, comparing all the degrees and details of a vast number of cases; and there were a shocking number to compare. At the end of it I had discovered the thing as Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood.
Everybody was the worse for being near the things; those who came off best were exactly the exceptions that proved the rule, abnormally healthy and energetic people like the Squire and his daughter.
In other words, the peasants were right. But if I put it that way, somebody will cry: 'But do you believe it was supernatural then?'
In fact, that's what you'll all say; and that's exactly what I complain of. I fancy hundreds of men have been left dead and diseases left undiscovered, by this suspicion of superstition, this stupid fear of fear. Unless you see daylight through the forest of facts from the first, you won't venture into the wood at all.
Unless we can promise you beforehand that there shall be what you call a natural explanation, to save your precious dignity from miracles, you won't even hear the beginning of the plain tale. Suppose there isn't a natural explanation! Suppose there is, and we never find it!
Suppose I haven't a notion whether there is or not I What the devil has that to do with you, or with me in dealing with the facts I do know?
My own instinct is to think there is; that if my researches could be followed far enough it would be found that some horrible parody of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen, would explain all the facts. I have never found the explanation. What I have found are the facts. And the fact is that those trees on the top there dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had been giants, standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.
It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have the nuisance removed. Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific world finally, when more and more processions of dead men had passed through the village to the cemetery. But I had not got to convince the scientific world, but the Lord of the Manor. The Squire will pardon my saying that it was a very different thing.
I tried it once; I lost my temper, and said things I do not defend; and I left the Squire's prejudices rooted anew, like the trees.
I was confronted with one colossal coincidence that was an obstacle to all my aims. One thing made all my science sound like nonsense.
It was the popular legend.
"Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not believe in hay fever. If there were a popular story about pollen, you would say that pollen was only a popular story.
I had something against me heavier and more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the support of the ignorant.
My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale that the educated were resolved to regard as entirely a lie.
I never tried to explain again; on the contrary, I apologized, affected a conversion to the common-sense view, and watched events.
