“Would you like her to?” asked Hilary.
“No!” shouted Ben, and burst into a storm of angry sobs.
“But you like David, don’t you?” asked Hilary.
“I used to, but I’d hate him if he married Mother!” sobbed Ben furiously. “So would Father hate him. I want Father to come back again. I won’t have David be Father!”
He sobbed stormily on while Hilary, patting him mechanically upon the back, gazed grimly over his head at the garden. Lucilla’s previous anger against David and Nadine was as nothing to Hilary’s at this moment. The wild garden was the children’s own. What right had David and Nadine to indulge their selfish passion there, in the kingdom of the children they were injuring? Their behaviour showed an insensitivity that sickened him. He was so angry that he had hard work to control himself. He felt that he knew now what to say to David. What was more, he was longing to say it.
“You’re quite wrong, Ben,” he said at last. “David is not going to marry your mother.”
“How do you know?” demanded Ben.
“Because I know your mother and David wouldn’t do such a thing,” lied Hilary glibly. “Neither your mother nor David would ever do anything to hurt your father. I’m sure of that. What you saw was only an ordinary kiss, going on a bit longer than usual because it was such a lovely morning, and probably that missel thrush was singing in Methuselah. There’s nothing like a bird singing to make people kiss longer than they meant to.”
“You’re quite sure?” asked Ben anxiously.
“Quite sure,” asserted Hilary, but the grimness of his expression was by no means changed. He had, so to speak, burnt his boats behind him. If he failed, now, to bring David to his senses his attempt to save for Ben his love for his mother and David would have done more harm than good, he would merely have deepened their guilt in Ben’s eyes. He must bring David to his senses. Failure was inconceivable.
Yet Hilary was only slightly alarmed by this burning of boats. It was a method of establishing good that he frequently adopted, for he knew himself to be diffident and self-distrustful and he liked to put it out of his power to turn back from a job that he had at long last decided must be done. In this he was unconsciously true to his own and Lucilla’s generation; he built from without inwards; his courage began as an outward show and only gradually, as the burnt boats made it a necessity, penetrated to his feelings.
“So now that’s all right,” he reassured Ben. “Blow your nose and finish up your milk. You’ve upset yourself quite enough for one day. It doesn’t do, you know, it weakens you. You wouldn’t find Tommy losing his appetite because his relations kissed under an oak-tree. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Tommy cry.”
As if in answer there was a sudden tremendous crash in the hall, followed by such a loud and sustained roaring that it seemed the very rafters shook. Hurrying to the scene of the commotion Hilary and Ben found Tommy and a black tin tray lying at the foot of the stairs, inextricably mixed up with Hilary’s best pillow cases and his umbrella. Old Mary, Hilary’s housekeeper, wailing and lamenting, was vainly endeavouring to separate the roaring confusion into its component parts. Tommy had apparently fallen from the top to the bottom of the stairs but the noise he was making satisfied them that his bodily vigour was in no way impaired by the accident.
“I was shooting the rapids!” he yelled when finally scooped from the debris by Hilary. “In a boat with sails,” he added, and hiccuped pathetically.
“And I said you never cried,” ejaculated Hilary, regarding the streams of water that were pouring down Tommy’s scarlet peony of a face and disappearing into his wide-open roaring mouth. Yet on second thoughts he decided that this explosion of noise and moisture could hardly be called crying. It was too elemental, too impressive. Hilary was almost stunned by the force of his nephew’s powers of expression.
“Never mind,” he said to old Mary. “Go back to your cooking. I’ll see to this.”
“Me best pillow cases!” wailed Mary.
“Never mind,” said Hilary again, gathering them up. “Come on, boys.” And he led the way back to the study. Arrived there he shut Tommy’s roaring mouth with a peppermint bulls-eye from the tin that he kept for the delectation of his choir boys and suggested that they should continue the game of sailing ships with the pillow cases.
It was unheard of for Uncle Hilary to turn suddenly flippant like this in the middle of lesson time. Tommy’s wet scarlet cheeks dried immediately, as though fanned by a breeze from the land of make-believe, and hastily crunching up his bulls-eye he began roaring with delight instead of sorrow. Ben said nothing, but a few airy leaps about the room found him in Hilary’s big armchair, tying fishing rods to the four legs for masts and pillow cases to the fishing rods for sails. Hilary helped with a will and Tommy opened the French windows that the great ship might sail out.
“It’s the grain ship,” said Ben in low excited tones, his thoughts as completely turned as his uncle had hoped they would be. “It’s the grain ship that was wrecked on the marshes. I’m the captain and Tommy can be the crew if he likes. You’re the storm, Uncle Hilary, pushing behind. We’ll sail across the lawn and get wrecked in the sunflowers by the gate. See? They’re gold, like the corn.”
“What about my game leg?” asked Hilary mildly, hitching up his cassock.
“You must do the best you can,” said Ben kindly. “Tommy will get down and help if you stick. Not me. I’m lashed to the mast. Where’s the blue bird? Where’s the blue bird in its cage? Tommy, fetch Mary’s budgerigar!”
Tommy raced to fetch it from the kitchen, quite indifferent to Mary’s wails as he carried it off from beneath her very nose, and soon the great ship was driving across the stormy green sea towards the sunflowers with the bird cage erected on the umbrella and all the pillow cases fluttering in the breeze. Old Mary, who was attached to her budgerigar, watched from the kitchen window in considerable anxiety. It was as she feared, when they reached the edge of the lawn the whole thing tipped over and the two little boys and the bird cage went flying into the bed of sunflowers.
“Me bird! Me bird!” wailed poor old Mary. “The cage’ll come open!”
It had come open. The blue budgerigar, a silent creature who when confined within the kitchen never so much as opened its beak, flew up into the heights of the hawthorn tree above the sunflowers and sang and sang and sang. . . . At least so the little boys afterwards declared.
— 3 —
Meanwhile Nadine sat in the wild garden under Methuselah reliving the events of the early morning and most bitterly reproaching herself. She had got up before breakfast that morning and gone out into the garden. She was not usually an early riser, but used as she was to the soothing sound of London traffic she found the birds in the country so dreadfully disturbing. They woke her up appallingly early, and very annoyed with them she always was. They were not now, of course, making the row that they made in the spring, when they all sang with such abandon that one would have said the very earth itself was singing, but this morning they had made quite noise enough. There had been the plover, for instance, crying out in the marshes almost before it was light, and the seagulls mewing like kittens, and then laughing their strange deep ha! ha! as though someone had told them a joke in rather doubtful taste and they were a little uncertain as to how much mirth it would be seemly to show. Then there had been a robin, repeating his sharp metallic phrase of music over and over again under her window, and somewhere that everlasting blackbird had been, as always, singing his everlasting song. . . . It had got on Nadine’s nerves to such an extent that she had had to get up.
In the garden she had found David gloomily smoking over the blight on one of Margaret’s rose-trees. Margaret herself did not smoke and always felt a little guilty about it, because all good gardeners should smoke over their blight, but she salved her conscience by driving every smoking guest out into the garden
to do it for her. David no longer needed driving. The minute he struck a match he remembered his duty.
“David,” had said Nadine, slipping her hand into his. David had gripped her hand hard but had not looked at her. He had continued to breathe out over the blight in a way that had irritated her a little, suggesting as it did that he was more concerned over the welfare of Damerosehay than over her own.
“David,” she had whispered, “I feel blighted too. Couldn’t you smoke at me for a bit?”
Then he had looked straight at her and she had been shocked by the misery in his eyes. “What is it, darling?” she had whispered.
“Everything,” David had said hopelessly. “Every damn thing. Why is life always such a mix-up?”
There being no answer to this question Nadine had made none. Besides, life never seemed a mix-up to her. She always knew what she wanted and made straight for it. She had known then. “Come into the wild garden,” she had said. “We’ll be alone there, with no windows looking at us.”
“Not the wild garden,” David had said. “That’s the children’s own.”
“But they aren’t up yet, darling. It’s very early. We can’t hurt anyone by being happy in the wild garden.”
He had given in and they had gone. It had been almost absurdly beautiful there, like some childish fairy story with the wet bright leaves like veined silver and the air heavy and sweet with the scent of the flowers. There had been so many birds that the blue air had seemed flashing with wings like a Botticelli canvas.
“I’m not at all sure that I like birds,” Nadine had said. “Uncanny things.”
David hadn’t agreed with her. “They’re the jolliest creatures alive,” he had said. “Birds and butterflies and all flying things. If there’s a war I’ll take to the air. If I must die I’d like to die in the sky, high up, near Apollo.”
“But you wouldn’t, my dear,” Nadine had said grimly. “You’d die crashing out of it.”
“Even that’s better than being gassed in a corner like a rat in a hole,” David had retorted.
“This is life: to keep
Steadfast to the light.
This is death: to leap
From the topmost height
Of ecstatic being straight into the night.
Rudolf Besier wrote that about death in battle. It’ll be the air for me, Nadine. There is still some sort of romance left about war in the air. Not much, but some.”
He had spoken with the bitterness that was always his when he mentioned war and Nadine had hastened to change the subject.
“I think I’m not fond of birds because they make me feel inferior,” she had said. “How do they fly? It annoys me that such little silly things should fly so high when I’m so earthbound.”
They had been under Methuselah by this time, with Nadine sitting in the swing and David leaning against the gnarled trunk. Looking up it had seemed to her that the tree was full of the green wings of the tits.
“It’s because of their mystery that I love them,” David had said. Their wings seem a sort of prophecy. More than other beautiful things they might be an evidence of things not seen.”
Nadine had smiled amusedly but when she spoke her voice had been tender. She was always gentle with the childish fantasies that were still not done to death in David. She enjoyed them. They were such a change. “Do you think all beauty is just the evidence of things not seen, David?” she had asked.
“If it’s anything it’s that,” he had said. “I should say that faith is the belief in something that you don’t understand yet, and beauty is the evidence that the thing is there.”
“And birds’ wings the bit of the evidence that vouches for eventual freedom,” Nadine had suggested. Then she had sat up straight, listening. “What on earth is that?”
What she had heard had been a harsh exciting sound. David, hearing it too, had smiled. “Apollo’s swans,” he had said. “Look.”
She had got up to look, strangely stirred, and had seen them flying one behind the other, slow and strong, their white plumage turned to gold by the sun-god whose servants they were.
“And they,” David had said smilingly, “are the evidence of immortality. They sing for joy when they die because they know they will live forever.”
“Duffer!” had said Nadine. “They sing, if they do sing, and I don’t believe it, for sorrow because their life is over.”
David had laughed at her and softly begun to quote the Phaedo. With his trained actor’s memory he was capable of quoting anything forever. There were times when Nadine found this most annoying, and this had been one of the times.
“ ‘But men,’ ” had quoted David, “ ‘through their own fear of death, belie the swans too, and say that they, lamenting their death, sing their last song through grief, and they do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold, or is afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale, or swallow. But neither do these birds appear to me to sing through sorrow, nor yet do swans; but in my opinion, belonging to Apollo, they are prophetic, and foreseeing the blessings of Hades, they sing and rejoice on that day more excellently than at any preceding time. But I too consider myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans, and sacred to the same god, and that I have received the power of divination from our common master no less than they, and that I do not depart from this life with less spirits than they.’ ”
“Really, David,” she had protested. “Before breakfast!”
Then he had taken her in his arms and given her the kisses she was longing for; very gentle kisses on her closed eyelids and the tip of her lifted chin. “What nonsense you talk!” she had whispered, leaning against him. “Or do you believe it?”
“I wish I did!” he had whispered back. “Oh God, I wish I did!”
She had pressed closer to him to comfort him. It was a bad moment in history, this, in which to live and love. The Rider on the Red Horse seemed advancing ever more and more quickly, his shadow creeping before him over the light of the sun.
“At least we have this to believe in,” she had said, “this love of ours. It is real, David. Not a dream or a hope or a prophecy but a fact. The loveliest fact in all my life.”
After that she hadn’t been able to blame David that he let go completely. And she had not checked him, this time. Breathless with her joy she had let herself go slack in his arms, abandoned to him. So great was her love for him that at that moment, had it been possible, she would have been willing to let her whole personality be lost in his. She would have forgone conscious knowledge of her own existence if by that sacrifice his could have been enriched. . . . Just for the moment.
It had passed quickly, for self-abnegation was not really Nadine’s strong point, yet as she slipped back into herself again she had known that she had just passed through the best moment of her life. And David had given it to her. She could never part from David now. Never.
It had been a slight sound, the sharp snapping of a twig, that had brought her back to herself. And David too. They had both looked round and Nadine had seen a little figure slipping away through the trees, running quickly as though afraid.
“Ben!” she had cried, and there had been a sharp pain at her heart.
“I don’t think so,” David had said. “I heard a bird or something but I didn’t see anyone.”
“It was! It was!” Nadine had exclaimed.
They had followed quickly, but there was no one in the wild garden, and when they looked through the iron gate there was no one in the other garden either.
“You’re seeing spooks, Nadine,” David had laughed. “You’re seeing Caroline’s little boy.” And then, as they wandered about the moss-grown paths, he had told her about Caroline’s little boy and the lady in the lilac frock.
— 4 —
And now it was after breakfast and she was alone in the wild garden. David was
taking the boys to the Vicarage and fetching Lucilla, and Ellen had taken Caroline to the dentist, one of her little pearly teeth having most unaccountably decayed, so Damerosehay was denuded of its children and Nadine could not harm them by sitting alone in their kingdom.
“We should not have come here this morning,” she reproached herself. “David was right, this is the children’s own place. I believe it was Ben. Yet it couldn’t have been, or David would have seen him too. But I believe it was. If only it had been Tommy. But Ben.”
Nadine was in a most unusual state of maternal worry and fuss. Usually she carried her responsibilities as a mother lightly, but this visit to Damerosehay was making them nag at her mind with alarming insistence. She had not realized until now what complications there would be with the children when she married David. Or rather with Ben, for she did not think that Tommy or Caroline would be much disturbed by a change of father. But Ben would. He was old enough to remember his father and he was a very faithful little boy. And if that had been Ben in the garden this morning the gentle preparation for change that she had planned for him would be completely upset by what he had seen. . . . But perhaps it hadn’t been Ben. . . . She thrust the thought away from her and began to worry instead about Caroline’s tooth.
The poor scrap was no beauty and if she was going to have bad teeth she would indeed be a plain Jane. Nadine had no wish for a plain daughter; it would increase the difficulty of marrying her off. Nadine was very anxious to marry off Caroline, otherwise she would be landed with her forever, as Lucilla was landed with Margaret, and she was very much afraid that she and Caroline would never get on together as Lucilla and Margaret did; and if a mother and daughter did not get on their relationship was the most difficult on earth.