The Fir-tree; Revised Version
(Too Long after Hans Andersen)
Once upon a time there grew a fir-tree in a great Newfoundland forest.
It had a delightful life; the rain fell on it and nourished its roots; the sun shone on it and warmed its heart; now and then came a great jolly wind to wrestle with it and try its strength. The peasant children would sit at its foot and play their games and sing their little songs, and the birds roosted or sheltered in its branches. Often the squirrels frolicked there.
But the tree, although everything was so happy in its surroundings, was not satisfied. It longed to be something else. It longed to be, as it said, important in the world.
“Well,” said the next tree to it, “you will be important; we all shall. Nothing is so important as the mast of a ship.”
But the tree would not have it. “The mast of a ship!” he said. “Pooh! I hope to be something better than that.”
Every year the surveyors came and marked a number of the taller trees, and then wood-cutters arrived and cut them down and lopped off their branches and dragged them away to the ship-builders. The tree disdainfully watched them go.
And then one day the surveyor came and made a mark on its bark.
“Ha! ha!” said a neighbour, “now you’re done for.”
But the tree laughed slyly. “I know a trick worth two of that,” he said, and he induced a squirrel to rub off the mark with its tail, so that when the wood-cutters came it was not felled after all.
“Oh,” said the swallows when they came back next year, “you here still?”
“Surely,” said the tree conceitedly. “They tried to get me, but I was too clever for them.”
“But don’t you want to be a mast,” they said, “and hold up the sails of a beautiful ship, and swim grandly all about the seas of the world, and lie in strange harbours, and hear strange voices?”
“No,” said the tree, “I don’t. I dislike the sea. It is monotonous. I want to assist in influencing the world. I want to be important.”
“Don’t be so silly,” said the swallows.
And then the tree had his wish, for one day some more wood-cutters came; but, instead of picking out the tallest and straightest trees, as they had been used to, they cut down hundreds just as they came to them.
“Look out,” said the swallows. “You’ll be cut down now whether you want it or not.”
“I want it,” said the tree. “I want to begin to influence the world.”
“Very well,” said a wood-cutter, “you shall,” and he gave the trunk a great blow with his axe, and then another and another, until down it fell.
“You won’t be a mast,” he added, “never fear. Nothing so useful! You’re going to make paper, my friend.”
“What is paper?” asked the tree of the swallows as they darted to and fro over its branches.
“We don’t know,” they said, “but we’ll ask the sparrows.”
The sparrows, who knew, told the tree. “Paper,” they said, “is the white stuff that men read from. It used to be made from rags; but it’s made from trees now because it’s cheaper.”
“Then will people read me?” asked the tree.
“Yes,” said the sparrows.
The tree nearly fainted with rapture.
“But only for a few minutes,” added the sparrows. “You’re going to be newspaper paper, not book paper.”
“All the same,” said the tree, “I might have something worth reading on me, mightn’t I? Something beautiful or grand.”
“You might,” said the sparrows, “but it isn’t very likely.”
Then the men came to haul the tree away. Poor tree, what a time it had! It was sawed into logs, and pushed, with thousands of others, into a pulping machine, and the sap oozed out of it, and it screamed with agony; and then by a dozen different processes, all extremely painful, it was made into paper.
Oh, how it wished it was still growing on the hillside with the sun and the rain, and the children at its foot, and the birds and squirrels in its branches. “I never thought the world would be like this,” it said. And the other trees in the paper all around it agreed that the world was an overrated place.
And the tree went to sleep and dreamed it was a mast, and woke up crying.
Then it was rolled into a long roll five miles long and put down into the hold of a ship, and there it lay all forlorn and sea-sick for a week. A dreadful storm raged overhead—the same wind that had once tried its strength on the hillside—and as they heard it all the trees in the paper groaned as they thought of the life of the forest and the brave days that were gone.
The worst of it was that the roll in which our tree lay was close by the foot of the mast, which came through the hold just here, and he found that they were old friends. The mast said he could think of no life so pleasant as that of a mast. “One has the sun all day,” he said, “and the stars all night; one carries men and merchandise about the world; one lies in strange harbours and sees strange and entertaining sights. One is influencing the world all the time.”
At these words the tree wept again. But he made an effort to be comforted. “You wouldn’t suggest,” he inquired timidly, “that a mast was as important, say, as a newspaper?”
The mast laughed till he shook. “Well, I like that,” he said. “Why, a newspaper—a newspaper only lasts a day, and everything in it is contradicted and corrected the day after! A mast goes on for years. And another thing,” he added, “which I forgot: sometimes the captain leans against it. The captain! Think of that.”
But the tree was too miserable.
In the harbour it was taken out of the ship and flung on the wharf, and then it was carried to the warehouse, below a newspaper office in London. What a difference from Newfoundland, where there was air and light. Here it was dark and stuffy, and the rolls talked to each other with tears in their voices.
And then one night the roll in which our poor tree found himself was carried to the printing-rooms and fixed in the press, and down came the heavy, messy type on it, all black and suffocating, and when the tree came to itself in the light again it was covered with words.
But, alas! the sparrows were right, for they were not beautiful words or grand words, but such words as, “Society Divorce Case,” and “Double Suicide at Margate,” and “Will it be fine to-morrow?” and “Breach of Promise: Comic Letters,” and “The Progress of the Strike,” and “Terrible Accident near Paris,” and “Grisly Discovery at Leeds,” and “Bankruptcy of Peer’s Cousin,” and “Burglary at Potter’s Bar,” and “More Government Lies”; and there were offers of a thousand pounds and smaller sums to cottagers for the best bunch of Sweet Williams, bringing to myriad simple homes in England, where flowers had been loved for their own sake, the alloy of avarice.
“Oh, dear,” sighed the tree as it realized what it was bearing on its surface, “how I wish I had gone to sea as I was meant to do!” And he vowed that if ever he got out of this dreadful life he would never be headstrong again. But alas!—
Then, cut and folded, it was, with others like it, carried away in the cold, grey morning to a railway station bookstall, and a man bought it for a halfpenny and read it all through, and said there was nothing in it, and threw it under the seat, and later another man found it and read it, and blew choking tobacco over it, and then wrapped up some fish in it, and took it home to his family. All that night it lay scrunched up on the floor of a squalid house, feeling very faint from the smell of fish, and longing for Newfoundland and the sun and the rain, and the children and the birds.
And the next morning an untidy woman lit the fire with it. It was an unimportant fire, and went out directly.