A
brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally
towering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me there
upon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that
frightened me before I could argue it away. Exact counterpart of its
giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my
sister's paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of these
trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were
similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly
closer to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an
upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field
of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from
view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had
slipped into its companion--almost that it had been an emanation of the
one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the garden
turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all ...!
The behavior of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely
worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their
own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to
tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving.
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