The Bird in the Tree

  “I love the children so yet I believe I’m a bad mother,” Nadine reproached herself. “I’m good with men but I’m bad with children. I oughtn’t to have had them. I only had them because George wanted them so. In everything else I disappointed him. I tried to make up for the other things by giving him children.”

  Sitting in the quiet of the wild garden she found herself most unexpectedly grieving a little over the wreck of her marriage. She supposed it was because Damerosehay was George’s family home that she found herself, even in the full flood of her love for David, thinking more about George than she had done for ages. At the time she had been so glad to marry him. Before she had met him she had been in love for the first time, that is very romantically and desperately in love, with a man who turned out upon intimate acquaintance to be all that most revolted her. Nadine had no religion, she submitted her life to no stern moral law, but she was fundamentally clean and fastidious and she had been shocked and sickened by her discoveries, so much so that for a little while her world had seemed to crash about her. Then she had met George and had fallen at once for his sheer goodness. He had satisfied her desperate craving for love with cleanliness, and for a while she had been very happy.

  But if George was good he was also slow, and he had a rather sullen temper, and if there were two things in this world that Nadine could not stand they were slowness and sullenness. Nadine was, and had been from her cradle, an outrageous flirt. She could not help herself. She flirted as naturally and as charmingly as a bird sings. But she was fastidious and she was self-controlled and she never let her flirtations get beyond the bounds that she herself set for them. But George had been too stupid to understand this, he had continually reproached her, had been continually outraged and, worst of all, though he loved her he had not trusted her. His sullen temper and her quick one, his slowness and her cleverness, had clashed and clashed again. It had all become impossible and they had been glad to part. . . . At least she had, but she believed that poor old George in the depths of his heart still longed for her. He was so tenaciously faithful, so conservative, that he hated anything that had been to end. He was bound always to the past with bands that could not be broken.

  It had been grievous, heartbreaking, that crash, not only for the grief that it had been to George but for the sorrow it had caused Lucilla; Nadine had tried to make up for that sorrow by letting Lucilla have the grandchildren. Yet she told herself that she must not grieve because it had opened the way for David to come to her. At the thought of David her mouth curved into a lovely smile. He was everything that she had always longed for. He had beauty enough to satisfy her fastidious taste and though he was not clever he was intelligent and sensitive, and above all he combined tolerance with decency. Her flirtations would not upset him any more than his upset her; they had mutual trust in each other. And she had proof of his sense of honour that delighted her. She knew that he longed most desperately to be her lover, yet he had never once asked her if he might come to her before their marriage. That was not his code. It augured well, she thought, for her future happiness.

  There were, of course, things about him that irritated her a little. His absorption in his work, for instance, She could not quite understand that passionate dedication to an art, and she was jealous of it. The value of his work in her eyes was that it would provide them with a home in which to love, but she was not at all sure that he did not unconsciously twist things the other way round; he had said once that his love would be the inspiration of his work. That, Nadine thought, was all wrong. With her love came first. She did not like to think of it as being anything but an end in itself. No woman does.

  She was sitting on the grass beneath Methuselah, her head leaning against his hoary trunk, and through her half-closed eyes she saw a swirl of mauve, as though a woman’s skirt swayed over the grass. She opened her eyes wide and saw that the autumn crocuses were bending in the wind. She wondered if it was the crocuses that had made Caroline imagine for herself a woman playmate as well as a child. Poor little scrap, she must have been very lonely. Nadine felt reproached by the thought of that imagined woman. It was natural that Caroline should have created the child playmate, all lonely children did, but the woman. . . . Had Caroline wanted the right kind of mother so very badly?

  There was a rustle among the bushes, and a sigh, and Nadine sat up and looked intently in their direction. Then she laughed at herself, for it was only the wind. But she could understand Caroline. This wild garden was undoubtedly a very haunted place. She was glad to see David, his fetching and carrying over, coming back to her.

  “We’re for it,” he said with a rueful grin.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Grandmother is enthroned in the drawing-room,” he said. “She has chosen this morning to give us our Talking To.”

  Nadine got up immediately. One of the things she liked about Lucilla was that she never nagged. For five days she had said no single word of what her daughter-in-law knew must be to her a great trouble. There had been no difference in her manner to Nadine, it had been the one of sweet but rather distant courtesy that was always hers when she did not like people very much. When the Talking To was over Nadine knew that the matter would not be referred to again. She admired Lucilla’s self-control. She was controlled herself and she hated nothing so much as the lack of it. She put her hand in David’s and went with him through the garden.

  “Strange, sweet, wild place,” she said. “I’ve felt quite haunted, David, by that woman of little Caroline’s in the lavender skirts. Are you ever haunted by her?” And she laughed to show him that she was only joking.

  “Never,” said David. “But according to Grandmother there’s some sort of a spook in the drawing-room. A man this time.”

  “Ever felt him?” asked Nadine.

  David did not speak, but allowed his answering laugh to show her that he didn’t believe a word of it. They needed to joke a little, for they dreaded the ordeal that was coming. As they left the wild garden it seemed to Nadine that the air was a rush of wings. “Those birds!” she sighed.

  CHAPTER

  8

  — 1 —

  LUCILLA also dreaded the talking to. She sat in her armchair, the Bastard at her feet with his chin on her shoe, and wished it was over. She was so dreadfully afraid of saying the wrong thing, of forgetting all her arguments if the children interrupted, or losing her temper from sheer fatigue. That was why she had chosen indoors instead of out-of-doors, for she found it much easier to concentrate indoors. Out of doors one’s mind, if one was old, was continually being deflected by something else, a cold wind on the back of one’s neck, or midges. When one was old one felt things like cold or midges very acutely. Indoors she was protected from both and her mind was more at rest. The door opened and gripping her hands together on top of her black velvet bag she looked up almost piteously at the two who came in.

  How beautiful they were, and how strong. David had got very sunburnt these last days and his hair was more than ever like a cap of smooth gold. He might have been the young Apollo. And Nadine in her slim green dress looked like a dryad. She had a yellow autumn rose stuck in her belt and there was a little wriggly green caterpillar caught in her hair. Unconsciously Lucilla put up her lorgnette. “You’ve a caterpillar in your hair, dear,” she said.

  Standing in front of the French mirror Nadine removed it. “Don’t, Grandmother,” she laughed.

  “Don’t what, dear?”

  “Put up your lorgnette. It completely unnerves me.”

  An astonishing influx of confidence and strength came to Lucilla from this statement. She was surprised, and delighted, to find that she still had it in her to unnerve another woman, and a young one at that. She waved the two erring ones to low chairs with dignity and calm.

  “I want to tell you something that happened to me when I was young,” she began abruptly and bravely. “I had not meant ever to tell anyone
but this morning I changed my mind. Or rather Hilary changed it for me. He made me see that if I told it you would realize that I sympathize with you, and that I understand your feeling for one another. I do not think one has the right to give an opinion on any subject unless one has oneself experienced the emotion of it.”

  “May I smoke, Grandmother?” interrupted David politely but firmly. If Lucilla was going to tell them tales of her youth they would be here all the morning, for there was no holding her when once she embarked upon the past.

  “Of course, dear,” said Lucilla, but she felt a little put out. When men smoked they became so somnolent. You could never tell if they were listening to a word you were saying. The interruption, too, had upset her. “Where was I?” she asked a little plaintively.

  “. . . oneself experienced the emotion of it,” prompted Nadine gently, and gave Lucilla a little comic glance of commiseration that was very warming. Nadine, unlike most other women of her type and generation, did not smoke. She was too fastidious. She didn’t like the way her lipstick came off on her cigarette. “I was very young when I married,” said Lucilla. “I was younger than you were, Nadine, when you married George. And I was not in love with my husband; he was a widower and much older than I and, poor dear, so plain. And I did not know when I married what marriage meant, either. Young girls never had things explained to them in those days. It was all a great shock to me. And then, you know, having been married before, there was nothing romantic about marriage to James, and though he meant to be kind he treated me in such a way that there was none for me either. I had five children much too quickly, and I am afraid I did not want them at all. Later, when I was older, I loved all my children very dearly, but when they were little I am afraid I did not think them worth the bother and pain. I was so very young. Though I am a naturally happy person I was very unhappy all through those early years. I was quite dreadfully unhappy and I am afraid I almost hated my good kind James.”

  She paused and her two listeners looked at her in astonishment. Somehow they had both always imagined Lucilla’s married life as one of idyllic Victorian bliss. Now her short, difficult sentences gave quite another picture.

  “I was very ill when Stephen, my fifth child, was born,” said Lucilla, “and after that I rebelled. I told James that I would not have any more children. He was very upset, poor James. He was an ardent man, and he loved me. His mother had had thirteen children and had given him very decided ideas about the duties of a wife. He thought I was failing him very badly. . . . I think,” sighed Lucilla, “that if he hadn’t gone on about his mother so much my married life might have been happier.”

  Nadine was now definitely very interested. Her married life, too, would have been very much happier if George had not gone on so much about Lucilla. One of the odd things about men was that though they always swore that women were the very devil yet they always thought their mothers perfect. . . . Lucilla, so George had told her, had delighted in bearing six children to an adored husband, Lucilla had been utterly contented with the home circle, Lucilla had never flirted, Lucilla. . . .

  “Grandmother,” asked Nadine wickedly, “did you ever flirt at all?”

  “Just a little, dear,” confessed Lucilla modestly, “but not enough for James to notice. You see, dear,” she added with a touch of pride, “I was very pretty when I was young.”

  “Grandmother,” said Nadine, smiling, “this is getting most exciting. I feel as though your life story was going to be a Victorian melodrama. Surely, Grandmother, you don’t behave like the heroine of East Lynne? I can’t believe it of you.’

  “ ‘Dead, and never called me mother,’ ” quoted David delightedly.

  His amusement hurt Lucilla and put her out again, and she stopped dead in her story. He was instantly penitent. “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” he cried, “I’m sorry,” and threw his cigarette into the fire to please her.

  Nadine was sorry too. “Forgive us,” she said. “It was because we don’t believe it of you that we teased you. Please go on, Grandmother.”

  “I am afraid, my dears,” said Lucilla slowly, “that you must believe it of me. I think a woman’s history is very often like one of those old romances that you laugh at. Mine was, and so, Nadine,” she added a little sharply, “is yours. You may laugh at them but they were truer to life than many of those psychological novels you young people read nowadays. We women don’t sit half the day and night analysing our emotions but we do perpetually fall in love out of wedlock, and over and over again we have to fight out the same old battle between love and duty. Human emotions are very monotonous,” sighed Lucilla. “Poor human nature doesn’t get much change. . . . Now where was I when you interrupted me?”

  “I believe we were just getting to a most exciting lover,” said Nadine, and her eyes were still dancing though she kept her mouth serious and grave. “Was he a brilliant young artist, Grandmother?”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, dear, but he wasn’t. He was only a doctor, a perfectly ordinary country G.P., and I met him through the children’s measles.”

  Nadine and David forbore to smile, for Lucilla spoke with such quiet intensity. She was back in the past now, recapturing deeply-felt emotion, and even the room seemed gathering round to listen as she went on with her story.

  “James and I took a house on the Island, our Island that we see from Damerosehay, for the whole summer, because the children had been so ill with measles in the spring. I was there all the time, of course, and James came down for the weekends. Michael Forbes was the doctor there. The village where we had our house was a quiet little place and he came in to see us a great deal, as a friend as well as a doctor, because he was lonely. At the beginning I only liked him, but I liked him better than anyone else I had ever met. He was young, just my age, and he cared about all the country things just as I did, but as James did not. James, you know, was always a thorough Londoner, but I was brought up in the country and I’ve always hated towns. Michael could ride well and we often went out together. Riding had been the joy of my life before my marriage but James never cared for it; his seat on a horse was a heartbreaking thing. Michael read a lot, too, and though he wasn’t actually an artist, Nadine, he had an appreciation of beauty that enriched my life forever. He could be very amusing and he made me laugh a lot. It was so long since I had really laughed. But best of all he was so sensitive in all his contacts. It was wonderful to see him with a sick child or a frightened little animal. Had he been married I know he would have been very gentle with his wife, far more gentle than James had ever been with me. There was something about him that seemed to heal the wounds of the mind as well as the body.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Nadine with eager feminine curiosity. David was a little impatient with her. What on earth, at this immense distance of time, did it matter what the fellow had looked like? Yet in a minute he found that, to him, it most surprisingly did matter.

  “He was good to look at,” said Lucilla. “I shouldn’t have loved him if he hadn’t been, for I was hungry for every sort of beauty. He was tall and graceful and he looked his best on horseback; all good-looking men do. He was fair, with very smooth gold hair.”

  She raised her head suddenly and found her grandson looking at her with most painful intensity. He was almost, she thought, a little white. After a moment’s puzzlement she understood. “No, no, my dear,” she cried, a little amused in spite of herself. “Don’t look like that, David. It never got to that. Your father was James’ child, not Michael’s. You’ve every right to the name of Eliot.”

  David relaxed, a little shamefacedly. Lucilla’s eyes, he noticed, were still twinkling. She had caught him out. He, who was all for truth rather than law in human relationships, had, caught unexpectedly, not wanted to find himself with no legal right to his own name. . . . He grinned at Lucilla.

  “After Grandfather,” pronounced Nadine, “you must have fallen for a man like tha
t very badly indeed, Grandmother.”

  “I did,” said Lucilla, “but gradually. There was nothing violent about it. I just woke up one morning to find that in him all my desperate unsatisfied longings were satisfied completely, and that his companionship was the only thing in the world I wanted. This love was, I thought, the one and only really true thing that had ever happened to me. My marriage and motherhood had always seemed like a sort of play that I acted. This was real. It was the same with his love for me. It seemed to him, he told me, the only truth there was. It dwarfed everything else. Even his beloved work seemed an unreal thing beside it. I don’t need to explain such a love to you. You know all about it, and how the power of it can numb thought and memory and drive the sanest and best of men and women to the maddest of acts. . . . Unless fate gives them a quiet breathing space in which to recollect themselves. . . . I had it, and it saved me from doing incalculable harm, and I am hoping that this time at Damerosehay will give it to you.”

  There was naturally no response to this, and Lucilla went on.

  “We arranged to go away together. That was the way one did things in those days. There were none of these arranged divorces,” and here her eyes fell upon her daughter-in-law and her voice grew a little hard, “none of this ridiculous business of making the man take the blame as though the fault were his only. In those days, if a woman wanted to leave her husband for another man, she did so openly, and the blame was hers; and very severe blame it was, too; she and the man she went to were socially ruined to an extent that can hardly be understood nowadays.” She paused, then went on again. “Looking back after all these years I can understand myself, for I was a selfish creature when I was young, I had next to no religion, I was not happy with my husband and I did not love my children as much as I should have done. But I find it hard to understand Michael, for he was so fine a creature. It is strange to me that he should have been so completely overturned by a silly young woman.”