The Rosemary Tree

  Yet presently she was lying in her bed as usual. She would have said that she had gone down screaming, that the room had fallen into ruins about her, but there was no one with her and the room looked as before. Her sight seemed a little misted and she could not see her clock, but she could hear the clink of Annie washing up the breakfast things and realized that she had been blotted out only a short while. . . Blotted out. . . The phrase was full of horror for her. “Blot his name out of the book of life.” She did not know where she had heard the sentence but as it came sliding into her mind she felt sheeted with cold. The iciness was creeping up from her feet and when it reached her heart she would die. “I must have a hot bottle,” she mumbled. “Quick, quick, Annie, a hot bottle or I’ll die.” But Annie was not there and when she tried to lift her right hand to the bell she could not move it. She lay there for a full ten minutes, breathing heavily, the sweat of her agony breaking out on her forehead. Not physical agony, for she felt no pain, but the agony of her realization. Then she tried again with her left hand, found she had the use of it, reached across herself and rang the bell. Presently Annie, wiping red hands and arms on her greasy apron, was beside her. “Get me a hot bottle, Annie,” she whispered thickly. “A hot bottle.” The mist had cleared from her eyes now and she could guess what she looked like by Annie’s face. How revolting Annie looked, with her mouth dropped open like that and her eyes popping out of her head.

  “Why, ma’am, you do look poorly,” ejaculated Annie. “Shall I get the doctor?”

  “No. A bottle.”

  “Best get the doctor,” pleaded Annie.

  “No,” repeated Mrs. Belling. “A bottle. Do as I say. Quickly.”

  Even now her will could compel and Annie ran. Mrs. Belling kept her eyes shut. She did not want the doctor. She did not want it put into words. It might pass. It might be nothing. It might be her imagination. If the hot bottle would only come. If she could only go to sleep. If she went to sleep she might wake up and find it had passed. But Annie must be quick with the bottle. Annie must be quick. Annie was quick, but even so she would not forget the misery of those moments until she felt the warmth of the bottle against her cold feet.

  “Just tired,” she mumbled to Annie. “A day in bed. Tell Miss—Miss—” She could not remember their names.

  “Yes,” said Annie. “Anything you’d fancy for lunch?”

  “Let me alone,” said Mrs. Belling, and reassured by the snappishness of her tone Annie tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door ajar.

  “I’ll never sleep,” thought Mrs. Belling. “Never sleep. I’ll never sleep.” But surprisingly, mercifully, as the warmth stole up her body she began to feel a little sleepy. Between sleeping and waking she heard Baba whimpering under the bed and felt a momentary stirring of something like compunction. She swung on a dark tide but not overwhelmed yet because the compunction bore her up just once more. Suspended between one world and another she remembered dimly that there had been other times when some weakening of self-love had lifted her up like this to abide the questioning, the detested probing questioning. “Whom do men say that I am? Whom do men say that I am?” She had always refused even to consider an answer, struggled to get away from the intolerable claim made upon her, fought to get back to her ownership of herself. The questioning now was childishly simple, not the question which had been like the thundering of a great wave along a beach but a gentle question put to a child. “Won’t you call the little dog out from under the bed? Won’t you call the little dog out from under the bed?” Swinging in darkness on the dark tide she saw him quite clearly, shivering on the floor, a paw that had been hurt in his fall doubled under him, blood oozing from the corner of his eye where her ring had cut him, an obese unpleasant little dog who loved her and had tried to lick her hand. But it was too much trouble to drag herself out of sleep and call to him. Why should she? She was just getting warm and comfortable. Let him stay there. “No,” she said.

  The warm comfort of her feather bed seemed to rise up and lap itself about her and she slept. When she was deeply asleep, snoring heavily with her mouth open, Baba knew there was no more hope and he crept out from under the bed and dragged himself through the open door. Out on the landing he paused, his hurt paw lifted and trembling. The door of a cupboard across the landing was open and he limped towards it. He crept into the darkest corner and lay there, still trembling. He could not sleep.

  4

  Miss Giles, in her cold neat bedroom, stretched the quilt over the bed she had just finished making and glanced at her watch. They had no school matron at present (it was hard to get any staff to stay at Oaklands) and Mary, who should have superintended the bed-making of the boarders and then gone downstairs to receive the day girls, was still with Mrs. Belling. The bed-making had superintended itself but she supposed she must take Mary’s place in the cloakroom, and then once more teach the babies with her own children until Mrs. Belling had finished with Mary. Every morning now she had to fight a desperate reluctance to take up the burden of the day. The weight of her despair was worst in the mornings. As the day went on it got a bit easier, but at first it did not seem possible to face these children again. How she hated them! Especially that little whey-faced Margary Wentworth whose defenselessness roused all the cruelty in her. She was dimly aware that she was cruel but she seemed as powerless to control the rush of sharp words to her tongue as she was powerless to control the onset of pain in her body. Both seemed to have their roots in her exhaustion, that deep soul-exhaustion of which she was aware but did not understand. But she knew it was a vicious circle. The harder she fought her pain and sin the more tired she was, and the more exhausted she was the more ill and bad-tempered she became. . . She did not believe it was possible for her to go downstairs and teach this morning. . . The hall clock struck the hour and her sense of duty and discipline asserted itself. She picked up a pile of exercise books from the table. Neat, efficient, upright, her thin sallow face set in its bitter lines, she went downstairs.

  Once again, her first lesson that morning was arithmetic. Of the various subjects she taught arithmetic was the most agonizing to her and her pupils. Yet in her own schooldays math had been, after music, her favorite subject. Standing in the cloakroom she remembered she had even been rather brilliant at it. The precision of it, the infinite variety within the framework of eternal and lovely law, had roused her awe and delight in much the same way as music had done, and the sight of the stars on a clear night. There too, in the glory of the bright sky, the law was inviolable. . . The music of the spheres. The dancing measure of words in great verse. The song of the birds, obedient to the swing of the seasons and the dawning or waning of light. . . In her youth she had never thought of the divine marriage of order with infinite variety without longing to feel the pulse of the dancing measure in her blood, aching to hear the unheard music. “Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d. . .”

  Crossing the hall to her classroom she was astonished to find that she still remembered how she had once felt about these things. She stopped in the hall and noticed how the mist of the rain was thinning and the light breaking through. Outside the hall window sprays of a rose tree hung low, heavy with the rain, and each spray was strung with silver drops. What was happening to her, that her eyes should be opened like this? What was happening to the house, that its atmosphere should be freshening about her? It was as though far off across a waste of mud flats the bright tide had turned.

  She opened the door of her classroom and went in. The rows of detestable little girls were demurely yet rebelliously seated behind their ugly inkstained desks. She felt, as always, their hatred rising against her, forgot the bright tide and hated them in return. She was aware again of that dull muffled feeling in her head, the precursor of more headache, and of griping pain below her breasts. Desolation seized her, and the sharp words that she would use presently thrust through it like steel needles in her mind. She walked erect to her desk a
nd heard in anticipation, shrinking from it, the dull thud that the pile of exercise books would make when she dropped them on the hard wood.

  But she did not drop them. She stood holding them, gazing at the bunch of flowers laid on her desk; stubby little snowdrops with the earth still on them, wet primroses, wild white violets, roots and all, some sprays of moss and a few beautiful great purple violets, the whole bound about with a spray of ivy with tiny deep-red leaves. It had been painstakingly arranged, yet with a sweet wild grace that delighted her. She put the exercise books down very gently and picked it up. She had forgotten how lovely the scent of wet violets can be. The coolness of the rain was on her hands. . . The cold, sweet spring. . . She lifted the bunch to her face, and was carried back forty-five years to the Cotswold village where she had gone to stay with her grandparents, a thin-faced town child whom no one had cared about. But she, in those days, had cared about the wild white violets and the moss.

  She looked up and saw all the little girls watching, wondering how she would react to this unprecedented occasion; all but one staring at her with mockery, curiosity or dislike, but nothing else. The one was Margary Wentworth at the end of the row, who was gazing at her with an expression which at first she did not recognize, so long was it since anyone had looked at her in pure pleasure. It was thirty-five years since she had stood before a village audience and sung them the songs they loved in her untrained contralto voice that was lovelier than either she or they realized. They had looked up at her then as Margary was looking now, delighting in the music that was a bridge of light between them, yet greeting her across it. That was pure pleasure; two delighting together in the beauty that united them. She and Margary looked at each other and between them was the spring.

  “Thank you, Margary,” said Miss Giles. “Now who will fetch me a vase of water to keep them fresh?”

  Every child in the room put up her hand. This was a grand arithmetic lesson. Five minutes of it gone already and another ten before the flowers were arranged.

  “Henrietta,” said Miss Giles. “You fetch it.”

  “Let me, Miss Giles,” said Pat. “She’ll spill the water.”

  “No, she won’t,” said Miss Giles. “Henrietta, ask Annie for a vase of water and carry it carefully.”

  She chose Winkle because a few moments ago the curiosity on the child’s face had borne no likeness to the curiosity on the faces of the others. The rest had been wondering which of several possible reactions of her own they would have the pleasure of tearing to tatters during break, but Winkle had been merely wondering what expressions of pleasure would fall from Miss Giles’s lips when she saw the big violets from the frame. Miss Giles, still standing holding the little bunch, could visualize its gathering; the wild flowers gathered in the misty rain from garden and hedgerow, the big violets begged from the child’s father as a final glory of decoration. She could see Margary bending over, her rubber boots squelching in the wet, her too-large mackintosh flapping round her like the tatters of a small scarecrow, wisps of straight hair struggling out from under her sou’wester. What a plain child she was. “And I was just such another,” thought Miss Giles. She glanced at Margary with a shy smile, and wondered, “Did I have that expressive face?” For Margary’s answering smile, equally shy, had illumined a face where all that she was feeling was most clearly written. . . Thankfulness that it had “come off,” humble delight in the fact that she had given pleasure, an almost painful relief that there were to be no sarcasms at her expense. “And it’s been my pleasure to torment this child,” thought Miss Giles. “What have I become?” A new sort of pang wrung her, the first of its kind. It was as though a hand suddenly squeezed her heart, so that she was breathless. And she was supposed to be giving an arithmetic lesson.

  “Isn’t it March the twenty-first?” she asked her astonished class; for whatever reaction they had expected from Miss Giles it had not been this strange immobility, this complete absence of any action whatever. They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.

  “Yes, Miss Giles,” said Pat.

  “The first day of spring?” asked Miss Giles uncertainly.

  “Yes, Miss Giles,” piped Pussy Harker.

  “It scarcely seems a suitable day for arithmetic,” said Miss Giles. “Shall I read to you instead?”

  A breath of incredulous delight exhaled from the class, and Winkle returned with both hands gripped tightly around a small blue bowl full of water. Breathing stertorously, her tongue stuck out at the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed on the bowl, she advanced at a snail’s pace. Enormous trust had been reposed in her. If she were to spill the water now she would never lift her head again. She could see the lower portion of Miss Giles’s desk, like the foothills of a mountain, in front of her, and stopped almost in tears. If she were to lift the bowl up towards the summit the water would slop over and she would be undone. But Miss Giles bent over, her hands came down over Winkle’s, grasped the bowl and lifted it up. Winkle breathed deeply, rubbed her numbed hands up and down her thighs and returned to her desk.

  “Read us a story, Miss Giles?” gasped Pat.

  “If you like,” said Miss Giles. “Margary, fetch me something you would all enjoy from the bookcase in the dining room. Pussy, go with her.”

  How had Miss Giles known she would hate to go alone, wondered Margary? But with fat little Pussy with her it was joy to be sent to choose a book. “I’d not have liked to go alone, at her age,” thought Miss Giles as the two little girls left the room. “Everyone looking at you as you cross the room; and you know you’re gangling and awkward.”

  The bookcase in the dining room held a motley collection of tattered children’s books, bought at odd times to keep the boarders quiet. Margary and Pussy squatted on their heels and surveyed them. “The Pride of the Fourth Form,” suggested Pussy. “It’s smashing.”

  “We don’t want a school story on the first day of spring,” said Margary.

  “The Princess and Curdie,” said Pussy with accommodating cheerfulness. She did not much care for that sort of soppy stuff herself but it was Margary who had won them this extraordinary deliverance and she deserved humoring.

  “Too long,” said Margary.

  “Well, buck up,” said Pussy. “What do you want?”

  Margary was not quite sure, but she thought she would know when she saw it. Her eyes ran over the titles, and she pulled out The Secret Garden.

  “But that’s just as long,” complained Pussy.

  “The part where she finds the garden is something by itself,” said Margary. Back in the classroom again she said shyly to Miss Giles, “Please, could it be from the end of chapter eight for as long as we’ve time for?”

  Miss Giles took the book. She remembered vaguely that this had been one of her childhood’s favorites but she could not remember now what it had been about. Yet the moment she began to read it all came back to her, and she remembered why the child she had been had liked this book. It had been because Mary was a plain unattractive little girl whom no one had cared about particularly; and yet she had found the secret garden. With a sudden stab of longing Miss Giles thought she remembered a memory of something or other, then found that the memory had flashed and gone. But it had left her in a nostalgic mood. She told herself she would read aloud to the two little girls, Anabel and Margary, now for always linked together in her mind, as once she had sung to the village folk who had loved her singing. She would make music for them they would not forget. She sat down, opened the book and found the place.

  Five minutes later Mary, running down the stairs in a great hurry, the ravages of a burst of angry tears in her bedroom only very clumsily repaired, stopped at the bottom in astonishment when she heard Miss Giles’s voice. She had been about to retrieve Winkle and the rest of her babies for their singing lesson, but instead she sat down on the bottom stair and listen
ed. The door was ajar and she could hear very clearly. Whatever did old Giles think she was doing, reading to the kids at this time of day? Had she gone crackers? Well, of course they all were in this place; it was the maddest, craziest school. And what in the world was she reading?

  “ ‘. . . she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly—slowly.’ ”

  A broad smile illumined Mary’s blotched and woebegone face. So that was what old Giles was reading. She moved along the stair and settled herself comfortably with her back against the wall.

  “ ‘There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains.’ ”

  What an astonishingly lovely voice Giles had when she read aloud, deep and rather thrilling, a singer’s voice.

  “ ‘Everything was strange and silent and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from everyone, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all.’ ”

  Yet presently Mary would find Dickon, her young lover and take him to the secret garden.

  Mary O’Hara lost the thread of the story and became instead lost in a mood as nostalgic as that of Miss Giles. “Shall I ever find him?” she wondered. “Five up to date, and I’ve liked them, but that’s all. I liked that dentist—what’s his name—Donald Woodcote—and he’ll be asking me to go to a flick with him as soon as he’s finished my stoppings. I saw it in his eye. Nice, but ordinary, and I’ve always wanted to marry a hero.” She was about to sigh tragically but her eye was caught by a rose branch outside the window, with its curve of diamond drops, and she changed her mind. “Oh, the joy of the world,” she thought abruptly. “Joy, even in a drop of rain on a green stem.”