The Bird in the Tree

  CHAPTER

  4

  — 1 —

  DAVID’S room looked east across a level stretch of feathery rushes to the Estuary and the Island. He loved the view, and the room too, and now, without lighting the candles, he sat in the chair by the window for a little while looking at it as it lay quietly waiting for him patterned by the moonlight. He had used this room ever since he had been too old for Lucilla’s dressing-room. It was very small, built out over the porch in the eighteenth-century style, and in cold weather it could be very cold indeed. But David did not mind that. There was a streak of austerity in him that welcomed hardship, and even, he imagined, was ready to welcome pain. It bred courage, it sifted the true from the false, and courage and truth were companions who could outpace all the others; when dreams had withered and happiness was forgotten they were still there. For their sakes he was prepared to suffer much himself and to see others suffer. Lucilla had been right to recognize in his face that night a hint of ruthlessness.

  Yet perhaps ruthlessness was the wrong word, for there was no cruelty in David, perhaps resolution was a better one. He would inflict pain, if he had to, as a good surgeon does, outwardly unmoved by the patient’s outcry, steadily pursuing the ideal of health that is greater than individual distress.

  He remembered suddenly, at this moment, as he looked at the squares of moonlight lying on the floor, the time when he had first realized that pain is a thing that we must face and come to terms with if life is to be lived with dignity and not merely muddled through like an evil dream.

  It had been when his father was dying. His mother had not troubled over much to keep him out of sight and sound of his father’s pain; she had thought he was too little to understand. But he had understood. He had been old for his age and already sensitized by more than his normal share of those terrors of childhood of which no child will ever speak; the horror of a creeping shadow on a wall, the sudden awakening at night to the terrifying dark, the conviction that a nightmare beast is stabled beneath the bed and the strange panting fear awakened by lightning and big bangs; these he had known to the full, and they had seemed to him all summed up in this terrible thing that he had seen, this pain that had gripped his father. Terrified by it he had fled one evening to the dark attic, slammed the door and flung himself down sobbing upon the floor. He had sobbed for an hour, sobbed himself sick and exhausted until at last, childlike, he had forgotten what it was he was crying about and had become instead absorbed in the moonlight on the floor. It had been like a pool of silver, enclosed and divided up into neat squares by the bars of the window. He had counted the squares and the lines, dark and light, and had been delighted with them. He had touched each with his finger, this way and that, and had been utterly comforted.

  “What ever are you doing?” his Nanny had demanded, coming in to fetch him to his bath, irritable and anxious because he had been lost.

  “Making a pattern, Nanny,” he had said joyously.

  “Strange little boy,” had said Nanny, who though not a bad Nanny had not been very understanding. “All this trouble in the house and you make patterns!” And then, overwrought as she had been, she had shaken him for lying on the floor and making his jersey dusty. Then he had cried again, of course; but later, in bed, he had been comforted once more by the thought of that pattern. In some vague way he had understood that dark things are necessary; without them the silver moonlight would just stream away into nothingness, but with them it can be held and arranged into beautiful squares.

  And here was that same moonlight pattern lying on the floor of this beloved little room at Damerosehay. He would not see this room very often in the future; perhaps not at all. He was going to cut himself adrift from Damerosehay. He loved Nadine Eliot and was going to marry her. That, in the eyes of Damerosehay and Lucilla, would be treachery to the place and to the family and they would not again receive him with intimate gladness. The thought of that separation was misery to him, yet he had no doubt at all as to what he must do. His love for Nadine was the most shatteringly real thing that had ever happened to him. It was the truth, and it must be served. Damerosehay must be cut out of his life, Lucilla must be dealt a blow that would hurt her intolerably, and yet he must do it. He had not shirked the pain of what he had to do. He had come himself to tell Lucilla; he had not taken refuge in the easy way of a letter. Courage and truth must be served.

  Truth. He would have to try to make Lucilla understand how he felt about it, how it was to him the lamp that lit all life. It would be difficult, for her generation and his felt so differently about this truth. Her generation had built from without inwards, had put the reality of law and tradition above the reality of personal feeling, but his built from within outwards, the truth of personal feeling must come first; when there was no longer reality in a union, smash the union; never mind what laws were broken or what lives were crippled; live the truth. He tried to, in art as in life. Life, to him, was the fearless facing of reality, and art was its illumination. It is the business of an artist, he thought, to show how the truth, even an apparently ugly truth, can be transformed by fearless acceptance into a thing of beauty. Living this acceptance it is hard to realize the beauty, watching it objectively we see and understand.

  But he doubted if Lucilla would look at the situation like that. His marriage to Nadine would not seem to her a blow struck for the truth but a blow struck at her son George, a death blow to all his hopes of reunion with Nadine. It would not seem to Lucilla loyalty to reality but treachery to the Eliot family. She would be unable to take a broad view. For a moment, knowing that she wouldn’t, he felt exasperation with her. Then he pulled himself up. In the awful arguments that were bound to come he must try to understand her point of view as well as try to make her see his. That was only fair.

  Then his man’s problems fell from him and he just thought, childishly, that he didn’t want to lose this room. He was so fond of all the things in it. That was womanish of him, and he was ashamed, but he couldn’t help it. There was a lot of the woman in him, he knew; a lot of Lucilla. His room was not cluttered up with school groups and fishing rods and all the paraphernalia of a departed boyhood; he loved beauty too much for that. There was just the bare minimum of furniture, old and lovely, and a bookcase full of the books that he loved best; most of them the poetry that he read always when he was at Damerosehay, and that seemed to him a part of it. There were several reminders of Lucilla in the room; the sunshine-yellow quilt that she had worked for him, the yellow curtains that she had chosen and the exquisite Chinese model of a galloping horse that she had given him when he first learnt to ride. It was of great value and Lucilla had had no right to spend the money on it that she had done. . . . Only Ellen was allowed to dust it. . . . It was made of china, blue with green lights in it, the deep blue and translucent green of a windy summer sea. It was a seahorse, perhaps, for there was a swirl of green water about its plunging hoofs and a hint of spray in the flying mane. It stood upon the chest of drawers, and would always stand there. Looking at it now, mysteriously drowned in the moonlight, David knew that he would never be able to take it away when Damerosehay was no longer his home. It was part of the sea and belonged to it.

  And he didn’t think he would be able to take away his picture, either, even though that was his own gift to himself, bought with almost the first money that he had earned. It was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s painting of a lark tossing joyously over a wind-blown cornfield. He had seen it some years ago in a shop window and had stood at once utterly spellbound, feeling the hot sun that beat down out of that clear blue sky, hearing the swish of the corn as it bent before the wind that was surely racing in from the sea, caught up in the ecstasy of the fluttering bird. The whole feeling of Damerosehay was in that picture. He had gone straight into the shop and bought it, and hadn’t had quite enough to eat for the rest of the week in consequence. It hung now over the bed, the yellow of the corn matched by the yellow of Lucill
a’s quilt. It must always hang there. He could not take it away.

  He flung the window wide and looked out. Even though it was so still a night the rushes, lost in shadow, were yet rustling softly. Beyond them he could see the lights of a ship sailing down the Estuary to the open sea, and beyond that again was the dark mass of the Island blocked against the stars. In the morning the plover would wake him and he would get up and watch the dawn. Perhaps it would be one of those quiet dawns of early autumn; the Estuary would be a silver ribbon and the Island would be folded in veils of amethyst mist, very withdrawn and far away, almost a part of the grey dreaming sky. Or it might be one of those bright clear dawns when the Island was a patchwork of coloured fields, so near that one could almost touch them, with the Estuary a sparkling gold and the sky like flame. He knew all the dawns. His window had framed them for many years.

  He undressed and got into bed. These first nights at home were always a joy; he fell asleep so blessedly soon, lulled by that cool murmuring that sometimes seemed to come from the rushes outside the window and sometimes from the bending corn in the picture over his bed. But tonight he could not sleep. He lay quite still, tormented, listening hour after hour to the strident voice of that wretched cuckoo clock that he had given the children. Where had they hung the confounded thing? In the nursery? As time went on it seemed so near that he felt it must be in the room with him, and then it seemed in his own brain, cuckooing there with an insistence that made him feel distracted. . . . He would smash the thing in the morning.

  The striking of three o’clock was, as always, the cue for the entrance of self-pity. It submerged him. He rolled over on to his face and groaned. Why must it happen like this? It was just his luck that it had to happen like this. Love had come to him for the first time, glorious, overwhelming, passionate, the love for the one woman in the world, far greater and far more lovely than he had ever dreamed it could be, returned in full measure and with equal passion, but she had been his uncle’s wife. He could not take her without pain; pain for himself, for her, for the whole family. Why had it had to be like this? God in heaven, why had he had to fall in love with Nadine?

  But David was not given to self-pity and it did not submerge him for long. The thing had happened. It was true. His love for Nadine would be all the more precious because he had to sacrifice a good deal for it. He turned over again and lay quietly watching for the first lightening of the dawn, and listening for the trumpet call of the plover that would be followed soon after by the ecstasy of the lark. It was not the season of larks now, but at Damerosehay there were always a few who sang in snatches all the summer through.

  “I shall wake presently, he thought, at daylight. It is the season of larks. They will be flinging the bright seed of song in the furrows of grey light, till East is gold with the smooth sheaves of singing.”

  Who had said that? Humbert Wolfe? Had he been thinking of Van Gogh’s picture when he wrote it? The Uncelestial City was in the bookcase. He would read it again to help himself through the bad days to come.

  — 2 —

  Yet, as it happened, sleep unexpectedly overtook David and he missed the dawn completely. He awoke in broad daylight to find Tommy sitting on his chest.

  “David,” said Tommy, “will you teach me how to be sick, please?”

  It took David a little while to adjust his ideas.

  “Why?” he asked at last.

  “You see,” said Tommy, “I’m so bored by lessons with Uncle Hilary. You can’t think how bored I am. I want to stay home today and if I could be very sick Grandmother would let me. Ben says you taught yourself how to be sick when you were at school.”

  “It’s a difficult technique,” said David seriously. “And you have to have breakfast first.”

  “Why?”

  “Every artist must have material upon which to work. There must be something in your tummy.”

  “Oh,” said Tommy, and pondered. “But it’s those sausages you gave us for breakfast. It would be a pity to waste them, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would,” said David. “And an insult to my gift.”

  “Yes,” said Tommy. “I think I’ll try on a haddock day.”

  “Horrid little brat,” said David. “You’re as horrid a little boy as I used to be. Go and turn on my bath.” And he heaved the horrid child off on to the floor.

  Tommy in his red and white striped pyjamas, chuckling in a round fat heap on the floor, was an engaging sight. He had a way of looking always completely circular which was very reassuring. His bones and nerves were so well covered by fat that his body would bounce through life, one felt, with consummate ease. His mind too, was very compact. It had no sensitive tendrils to get broken, it gave forth no impossible delicate dreams to be shattered. Tommy’s tendrils were of the octopus type, strongly acquisitive, and his dreams of that practical sort that can come true with effort.

  “I’m going to be a policeman,” he said suddenly, and with one leap was back again on David’s chest.

  “Quite,” said David weakly. “Only I should have thought a gangster was more in your line.”

  “It’s much the same thing,” said Tommy. “I mean, whichever you are you can knock people down. I’m in training myself. I practise jumping on to people, like I have on to you, and I take all the numbers of cars.”

  The door opened and Ben, clad in a sky-blue dressing gown, stood in the patch of sunshine on the threshold like an apparition from another world.

  “Tommy,” said David, “get off my chest and go and turn on my bath.”

  “Ben,” said Tommy, “go and turn on David’s bath.”

  “Shan’t,” said Ben, who though delicate was not without spirit “You’re the youngest.”

  Tommy arose, trampling on David, and poised himself on the bed as though for flight. “Watch me,” he commanded, and in two gigantic leaps was over the foot of the bed and out of the door. It was amazing that anyone so solid could be so swift in movement. He reminded David of an American robin, six times the normal size and rotundity yet capable of airy leaps which astonish the watcher.

  “You saw that?” asked Tommy, returning for a moment. “Good, wasn’t it? If I’d had more take-off I’d have done it in one. Good-bye.” And he disappeared, leaving the door open.

  Ben carefully closed it and sat down on David’s feet. “David,” he said earnestly, “I want to tell you something. It’s very important.”

  David, tired after a bad night, could not but feel that the early morning is hardly the best time for contact with the very young. It is desirable to have breakfast first.

  “What about my bath, old boy?” he hedged. “The water will be running over the top.”

  “Oh no it won’t,” said Ben. “Tommy won’t have turned it on. He never runs errands for people. He says it’s better not.”

  David, listening, recognized the truth of Ben’s statement. There was no sound of running water, only a succession of heavy thuds that suggested that Tommy was leap-frogging along the passage. He resigned himself to the inevitable.

  “All right, old boy. But get off my feet will you? You’re not so heavy as Tommy but you’re quite heavy enough.”

  Ben settled himself at the foot of the bed, cross-legged and very upright. With his thin brown hands folded and his wide dark eyes absorbed in something very far away he looked like a young Indian mystic. David wondered where his mind had gone to, but not for the world would he have interrupted Ben’s train of thought to ask. There was something about Ben that made his silences respected.

  Instead he found himself thinking about the children in relation to their mother. He had scarcely done that before. Until now they had just been his cousins, jolly little beggars whom he was fond of. But now they were something more, they were the children of the woman he loved. He could see Nadine in them. Tommy had her driving force, her power of doing and getting what she wanted. And all
the qualities that he loved best in Nadine were in Ben also; the grace, the elusive beauty that defied definition yet led one on to try and define it, like a will-o’-the-wisp dancing on the marsh, the intensity and the almost painful capacity for feeling. About Caroline he seemed to know very little as yet. She was a small girl-child, a creature as mysterious to him as a merbaby from the ocean. But he would have to try and understand her. He would be her step-father as well as Ben’s and Tommy’s stepfather.

  That had really come home to him for the first time last night, when he went with Lucilla to say good night to the children. It had struck him like a blow, almost terrifying him. It had seemed especially alarming that he should be Ben’s stepfather. Why? He and Ben were fond of each other. They ought to be happy in their new relationship. Yet last night he had known they wouldn’t be, and this morning, looking at Ben’s upright figure and dreaming face, he thought he knew why. For there was a look of discipline in Ben’s straight back and quietly folded hands, in his thin legs folded neatly under him, not sprawling as Tommy’s would have been; a look of discipline and of pattern. They were the same thing, of course; just an orderly arrangement of the things that make up life; and arrangement that delivered one from the bewilderment of confusion so that the spirit could go free. . . . As Ben’s was doing at this moment. . . . His was a nature that needed orderliness. Maladjustment would always injure him; as his parents’ quarrels had already done. The family distresses that were bound to come when David married Nadine, the final tearing apart of the threefold pattern of father and mother and child, would injure him even more. Delicately-balanced creature that he was it might upset his equilibrium altogether.

  David thrust the thought away. As usual, he was letting his imagination run away with him. It would be quite all right if everything was very carefully explained to Ben. And, anyhow, risks must be taken for truth. Such a blazing love as his and Nadine’s could not be denied and it would be a finer thing for a child to see and live with than the perpetual quarrels that had disfigured the marriage of Nadine and George.