The revolting irony of it!  After stumbling and fumbling for years by himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and, suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for Reveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Reveillaud whom he wanted to know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.

He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his father?  He wondered if his father would ever understand that it was the hardest thing he had ever yet done or could do?

But the trees would be beautiful.  He would rather like seeing the trees.

Trees—­

He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.

Trees—­

He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell tree-sap, or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river and in the firs like a sea.

Trees—­

He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him again.

He looked on at the tree-felling.  He saw slaughtered trees, trees that tottered, trees that staggered in each other’s branches.  He heard the scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking and crashing of the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling, trailing through branches to the ground.  He smelt the raw juice of broken leaves and the sharp tree dust in the saw pits.  The trees died horrible deaths, in the forests under the axes of the woodmen, and in the schools under the tongues of the Professors, and in Michael’s soul.  The German Government was determined that he should know all about trees.  Its officials, the Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn’t like it, but they were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it with all their might.

Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg.  Instead of despising him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they admired and respected him because he was a poet.  The family he lived with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Loettchen admired and respected him because he was a poet.  When he walked with Ludwig in the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in German, till Ludwig’s soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow, so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest.  He said that if he had not done so he would have burst.  Ludwig’s emotions had nothing whatever to do with the forest or with Michael’s poems, but he thought they had.