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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"What in G-d's name could have possessed you to do such a thing," cried Arthur, nearly raising his voice.
2
"After all I said the day before, why have you abandoned centuries of literary progress for some self-indulgent fantasy?"
2
He shook the papers at Allan, raising them like a belt above the head of a disobedient son.
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"This is nothing but a glorified Grimm's tale, a miscarried child of Stoker, a creation less fit to be published than to be told around an open fire at the hovel of some peasant!"
3
He spoke the last word with such heavy intonation that Allan shrank back before the physical wave of sound emanating from Arthur's throat.
2
Besides, the public liked a good, simple romance.
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"Do you hate the modern system of literature?
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Do you personally despise the works the Enlightenment or the progress made since Shakespeare?
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Do you personally despise the works the Enlightenment or the progress made since Shakespeare??"
3
?"
0
For a moment, Allan could hardly do more than shake his head.
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"No, of course not… I– "
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"Then why,"
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"do you disregard them all and return to this superstitious babble, this morbid, paganistic drivel?
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Why do you disregard my warnings, my careful advice given in the best of friendship and designed only to save you from sinking into this very type of corruption, this literary debauchery?"
2
Perhaps this will be more saleable, he thought and began to write.
1
He glared at Allan, eyes impaling him and demanding a response.
2
"Could you write decent tales with that willow at your window?"
0
Allan cried out at last, stepping forward and casting his arms open, confronting Arthur with this demanding, pleading interrogation.
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How could any writer accommodate the edicts of popular literature with the very forces of nature knocking upon his door?"
2
Arthur looked down his nose at the distraught author, viewing his complaint with pure disdain scantily concealed by the veneer of politeness that animated the construct that was Arthur Mason.
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A tree forced you to write this, my dear Mr. Clemm?
0
I must admit, this seems far-fetched, even by your standards – even your Nathan might have difficulty believing you."
2
They gazed at each other, lost in the rapture of love based so deeply within their hearts that they had never seen it before.
2
"You don't know what this is like,"
2
"You don't know what this is like," said Allan, shaking his head.
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"Nathan would understand completely."
1
Even as he said it, Allan prayed that his statement was true.
2
"Very well," said Arthur; "then take your story to that hedonist and let him defend you when no civilized publisher will approach you.
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"then take your story to that hedonist and let him defend you when no civilized publisher will approach you.
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If you insist on abandoning me, I shall not hold you."
2
Stunned, Allan slowly gathered up the pages and placed them in order.
2
He then turned and left through the door opposite that Arthur had taken, making his way past his host's doorman without assistance and setting off on foot towards Nathan's residence, several miles away.
2
Nathan read the package of words in silence, his only motions the steady progress of his eyes and occasional replacement of pages.
0
Allan sat nervously across from him in a chair Nathan had probably upholstered himself, a patchwork design of fabric containing easily more stuffing than any other furniture item of the period.
2
At long last, Nathan reached the end and set down his reading on the table between them.
1
Opening a side drawer, he took out a piece of paper and his inkpot.
0
Allan leaned forward unconsciously.
2
"What about Roger?"
1
Allan exhaled and leaned back into the chair, his face relaxing in imitation of his thoughts.
1
"So,"
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"So," he asked, "you don't think it's a waste of ink and paper, a futile expedition into morbidity or literary debauchery?"
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she asked, knowing that the answer no longer mattered.
0
"Heavens, no,"
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"Heavens, no," said Nathan, aghast.
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"This is one of the strongest works I've read in ages.
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It speaks to the deepest storyteller's instinct within us all, yet is entirely original.
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Oh, they may rail against you at first; they may decry you as a heathen or a literary savage; but while those in power say such things, others will read your tales and see their true worth.
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Believe me when I say that you will be read a century from now."
0
Allan, though dubious as to that possibility, felt some temptation from the compliment; mainly, it granted him the encouragement he still needed.
2
Nathan promised to show the story to a printer he knew and Allan left it with him, then walked home under the spreading maples with a smile lingering on his face.
0
This is good, he thought, pausing to raise the low light of the lantern.
0
He felt now that perhaps Nathan was right; although the man was somewhat peculiar, he had both an unimpeachable honesty and a certain propensity for insight.
3
Certainly, it was undeniable that the stories had an originality to them.
3
His mind's strangest fruit had ripened at last, and he found the taste less bitter than expected.
1
These thoughts and others like them filled his head as he walked the long road home.
3
It was evening, and the sky burned orange in the west when he neared home at last.
0
Passionate, fiery colors filled the western sky before him, though the sun itself had reached the trees and a few dark clouds circled overhead.
1
I'm almost done, and the happy ending is just falling into place.
1
As Allan drew closer, he distinguished a new cloud, a pillar rising directly ahead; a road of smoke ascended in the west, its source hidden by the very hillock that concealed his house from the traveler until one had nearly reached its door.
0
Allan's thoughts fled as one, scattering on the breeze that scattered the warning plume.
3
He ran the last distance, crested the hill puffing to reveal Arthur below, walking to the carriage parked before Allan's house as two laborers wrapped a great saw in oilcloths and loaded it onto the vehicle's roof.
2
Arthur paused in the door, looking up at Allan for a moment; then he turned and shut the door behind him.
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I hardly dare to think it, but – I may finish this story!
1
The driver snapped the reins and set the horses on.
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As they trotted forth, Allan's eyes remained trapped by the carriage, following it up the hillock and past himself.
0
The heavy curtains had been drawn across its windows.
0
He watched as the carriage drew still more distant, the horses' hooves still kicking up dust along the roadway.
0
When they had gone, he remained, stunned, until the scent of woodsmoke recalled him to himself.
2
He turned to regard the pillar still rising behind his house and ran to see what had been done.
2
Rounding the corner, he saw a great bonfire.
2
A mass of flaming wood stood before him, heat singeing him and sparks flying too close to his house.
2
As he thought this, a sinuous wind encircled the house, slipping through the walls to chill him.
2
It was a moment before he realized what else had changed: near the wall, beneath his window, was a stump with black and ancient bark.
0
In a thoughtless panic, Allan flew to the stream that ran by his house and began frantically throwing handfuls of water onto the pyre.
2
His thoughts were not of the act's futility, nor even of the nights spent tormented by the twisted thing; instead, all that filled his mind was the tree's constant presence in his life, growing with him and beside him, its persistent reminders that he had higher, truer things to write, the simple beauty of the great black tree for its own sake.
2
His handfuls could do nothing to quench the hewn, burning logs, but when the night sky grew dark above him and the fire dwindled to black ashes, tears threatened to spill forth and extinguish the final embers.
2
But he did not weep.
3
Instead, he bethought himself of the loss of the tree; considered also Arthur's motivation and whether some good might not come of this, after all.
2
The papers and the lantern's flame trembled as the thin fingers of a great black willow rapped gently on Allan's window and wall like a stranger knocking on his chamber door.
2
Leaving the circle of ashes, he stood and turned towards the woods, in which it was his habit to walk when in a pensive mood.
0
He stepped slowly beneath the branches, a gust of wind stirring up the ashes behind him in a great, swirling eddy, a burning brand that rose up and dispersed on the winds as though it were the willow's last breath.
3
Allan wandered beneath the trees for a time, thoughts drifting through his mind like great banks of fog, strangely beautiful but impossible to penetrate.
0
He considered Arthur's intervention; considered that it might be better to accept the fog and continue as his lifelong friend had suggested, to write stories that others would read; for after all, what purpose writing if not to be read?
1
And without that torturous willow, he might be free to write whatever he saw fit.
3
Indeed, if he still could not, he could at any time follow Arthur's advice and seek a profession more grounded in reality.
0
Perhaps that would be more healthy for his mind.
0
He found himself along the bank of a low, wide stream and allowed himself to follow its current.
0
As it turned to the deeper woods, elder giants rose above him: a beech, smooth bark a gray-green pennant hoisted on a slope and standing out between the dark, cracked trunks of the nearer trees; great pines, a few magnificent specimens still bearing the three-stroke symbol of the British King; a towering black birch, leaves impossibly high above him.
0
As the stream wound its way through the largest pines, grown so great as to eclipse that feature of the landscape they had once crowded about for sweet water as saplings, Allan continued, slowing his pace to climb across the toes of the slumbering giants.
3
This was no stranger, however; the twisted, ancient thing was older than Allan, its branches rapping on his window since his childhood.
0
There was hardly enough room for his slim frame between the trunks that overshadowed any fleeting mortal trespass.
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Emerging from between the antediluvian trunks, Allan set his feet softly down onto the carpet of needles and stopped.
3
Before him, roots imbibing the sweet water of the stream, grew a stand of black willows.
1
Fallen trunks lay rotting across the rivulet; the living elders oversaw the grove while younger trees, still small and not yet as knotted and gnarled as their forefathers, sprang up where branches reached the ground.
0
Though the elders' trunks fell and died, their children, first roots grown from the very branches that now lay dead, continued unabated, a continuous line from the most ancient of their ancestors.
2
Allan stumbled forward, jaw slightly slack, until his outstretched hands encountered the rough bark of a twisted, three-trunked willow whose waists were each larger than Allan himself.
2
After filling his pen, Allan looked at his paper in the orange glow from the lantern set back in the desk's right-hand corner.
1
Its thin, drawn fingers framed the bloated moon, whose eerie radiation now bathed the room directly.
2
Allan recalled himself and focused once more on the incomplete page before him.
3