“Greatscod, no,” said Aitch; for there are limits to what a fellow of seven can betend in company. “Don’t let’s have any fairying, my good Zed. Let’s betend we’re just Aitch and Zed, and we’ll show the prisoner the Secret Tree.”
So they set off, and the Nana, who might as well have been a Nanning-machine for all the individuality she put into her work, trotted behind them.
The Secret Tree was one of those secrets that remain inviolate because it occurs to nobody to lay them bare. It was an everyday little palm tree, exquisitely bandaged by Nature in cocoanut matting; it was very fairy-like, and when you looked up at its fronds in their infinite intersections against the sky, you saw a thrill, like the thrill you see on a cornfield curtseying in the wind, or in the light moving across watered silk. In one of the folds of the palm tree’s garment a White Pawn, belonging to Aitch, had made his home. He lived there for days at a time—the gardener was told with bated breath—and the park-keeper never knew he was there. At night he saw the fireflies light their lamps, and heard the swift slither of the fearful scorpion; once he had reported an adventure with a centipede three times his own size. That pawn was the epitome of People Who Stay Up Late At Night, and Are Not Afraid of the Dark. A super-grown-up.
On their way to the garden gate, each child held a hand of the gardener, and the automatic Nana walked behind. As they came out into the main street, the gardener thought that the houses looked like skulls—so white they were, and so soulless, and their windows so black and empty.
“Greatscod,” said Aitch, “what is happening to the church steeple?”
For it was reeling in front of them, to the tune of a paralysing open roar from underground.
Behind them the automaton blossomed madly into life, Nana fled shrieking back into the garden.
Those two things happened, one by one, like sparks struck out of a flaming experience. Then everything happened at once, and yet lasted a lifetime. There seemed not a second to spare, and yet nothing to be done.
The gardener felt unspeakably terrified, his mother earth shot away from under him, truth was proved false. He discovered that he had seized Aitch and Zed, one under each arm; and later on—his memory having vaulted the blank—he found that he was lying on them in the gutter, and that Aitch was yapping like a dog. Zed was crying, “Mother, Mother.” And the gardener, with a quick vision of some one watering a cool English herbaceous border, also said, “Mother, Mother.”
After a while a green beetle ran past his eye, and he recalled the moment, and raised himself upon his hands and knees. A fire of pain burnt him suddenly, and he turned his head and saw a pyre of twisted iron posts heaped upon his legs.