Passages From The Life Of A Fern

________________________________________________
Title:     Passages From The Life Of A Fern
Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles [More Titles by Charles]

My life has been one of such extraordinary vicissitudes as might have made many almost doubt their own identity. But it is only to-day that I have learned its real purpose. To-day, for the first time, I am content. A light has dawned on me which makes all the dark passages of my former life clear and luminous, and unites the whole into one harmonious picture. I will narrate a few of my adventures to you while I am full of this happy discovery.

The first thing I can remember is being in a world over-flowing with life in every form. It was a tropical forest. Gigantic palms rose above me so high that I could not see their feathery crowns. From one erect stem to another hung tangled festoons of parasites and climbing plants, broad, rich, green leaves, which fell into stately crowns with their own weight, enormous gorgeous flowers, delicate wreaths of intertwined many-coloured blossoms and many-shaped foliage; so that when I looked up I could scarcely see one point of the deep blue sky, except when a strong wind made rifts in my fretted roof. Scarcely one ray of light fell on me pure, but broken, and green, and tremulous, softly shaded, or tinted like a rainbow through the flowers. The animals which lived in our forest depths I cannot distinctly recall. I have not seen any like them for so many thousand years. But all were gigantic, and many would seem misshapen monsters to us now. Yet then it was quite natural, and an every-day thing, to hear the great tree-eaters tramping each like an army through the forest shades, cropping the tops of the highest trees, and devouring branches as our animals crop the herbage. Trees crackled under them like brambles. We dreaded much, we smaller creatures, to see these approach, for they trampled down a generation of us under the tread of their ponderous feet. There were lizards whose scales glittered like the waves of the sea in the sunshine, each scale a massive prismatic metallic plate. And from the lower reaches of the forest, where the hot mist steamed up from the marshy hollows, monstrous creatures, half fish, half forest-climbers, occasionally strayed among us.

I cannot recall if there was music in the forest; yet I think I hear across these countless years the dim echoes of strange voices, which have been silenced for ages on the earth, a confusion of wild calls and cries in the mornings and evenings,--weird bell-notes tolling through the sultry noonday silences, and a confused whir, and buzzing, and croaking, and whizzing, and rustling of countless smaller animals which have perished and left no trace of their existence behind.

But the creatures which impressed the restless character on my being, which only to-day the sun has smiled away, were some near relations of my own. For, although I was but a little fern, many of my race were among the lords of the forest. Their roots spread into magnificent curved pedestals; their stems rose, decorated, and erect as the palms, to the height of the tallest trees; and their fronds expanded into ribbed and fretted roofs, beneath which hundreds like me could find shade and shelter, yet every frond as delicately fringed and edged as any of ours.

I thought--"These are my elder sisters. One day I shall grow like them." Thus my own daily life seemed empty and shadowy to me, because of the strong yearning that possessed me to be great like them. It did not make me discontented or desponding, but filled me with a wild and feverish expectation which made the present appear nothing to me. I stretched out my little fronds, and caught every sunbeam and rain-drop I could; and when a shower came, and the life-giving waters circulated through my veins, I throbbed with vague desire, and thought, "Now I am to be something."

But with all my efforts I never could grow to be anything but a little fern! So the summer passed, and then I felt myself growing shrivelled and old. My limbs contracted, my fronds curled up and turned dry and brown, and in a few weeks I was scarcely visible. But the spring revived me and my yearnings, and I grew certainly very handsome and tall for one of my branch of our family; but still only a little fern!

The forest decayed, I know not how. The marsh extended, and instead of the world of varied exuberant life, we lay a long time a mass of steaming, mouldering decay. And then, through millenniums more, we stiffened and hardened, and grew black and shapeless, and were buried in the dark, no one can say how long, for to us, throughout those changeless ages, there were no days and no seasons to measure time.

At last a light came to us, not the sun, but a little trembling light, in the hand of a living creature, such as we had never seen. I know now it was a man. Then followed a time of stir and noise and knocking about, such as I shall never forget. We were hewn with pick-axes, and tossed into buckets, and at last lifted into the real old sunlight we had not seen for countless ages. The sun was the same as ever, as young and bright, it seemed, as he had been thousands of years before; but we did not bask long in his beams.

A period followed of darkness and cold and silence, in which all the world seemed to have forgotten my existence, although I had been dragged out of my native bed, and stored in this den with so much pains. But they remembered us at last. One evening, after passing through a great deal of commotion, I found myself in an open place, with many of my brethren. A light like that we had first seen after our ages of darkness in the heart of the earth was applied to us, and then the strangest transformation passed over me. Just as the water had streamed through my green veins in the forest of old, a new element began to course through all my black and stony heart. That light ran through and through me, until I became, not a receiver, but actually a giver of light. Instead of my green fronds, delicate pencils of red and golden flame streamed from me, until I became one glowing substance; and, in my own light, I actually saw living faces looking thankfully at me, and human hands stretched out to feel my warmth, just as of old I had spread my fronds in the rays of the sun. But I was too full of my old vague longings to enjoy or observe any of those things much; for I thought, with glowing confidence, "Now, I am to be something great at last!"

It was the last glimmer of that vague ambition in me. My light faded, I grew cold, and, which was worse, I fell to pieces, became mere dust, and was wafted about by the slightest breath, so that I had the greatest difficulty in preserving my own identity. I was even ignominiously swept away by the very hands which had spread so gratefully in my light only a few hours before, and tossed contemptuously out into a rubbish-heap behind the house. But there, happily for me, I was once more in the sunshine; and the sun and all heavenly creatures think scorn of no one. They smiled on me, a poor heap of ashes, as if I had been a tree-fern; and the gentle dews descended on me, as if I had been a flower; and the birds and winds scattered seeds amongst us, until I began to feel once more something like the stirrings of life within me. I had blended my being with a little seed, and in the spring green tufts of life burst out from my shrivelled heart. I grew, and spread, and drank in rain and sunshine, until at length I waved and expanded in the summer breeze--a little fern!

Then a bright, transforming thought flashed through me. In the tropical forest, in the black coal-beds, on the glowing hearth, I had not been an imperfect likeness and a vague promise of something else, but myself, in my little degree, pleasant and serviceable; exactly the best thing it was possible for me to be, filling up my tiny measure of service in the world, so that the world would have been the poorer for that tiny measure of pleasure and good without me. How happy I might have been always if I had known this before! How happy I am to know it now!

I begin life again, but I have learned my lesson. I am something; not something great, but something I was meant to be--a little green happy fern. At this moment I tremble with joy in the soft breezes, I thrill with life, I drink the rain-drops; and the next moment and to-morrow will bring each its store of work and joy for me; and I shall be the highest thing I could wish to be--the thing I was made to be. And now I am here near the tall trees, and among the many-coloured flowers, a little happy, lowly fern.

[The end]
Elizabeth Rundle Charles's short story: Passages From The Life Of A Fern

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN