The Bird in the Tree

  “I can understand him,” said David, and his smiling eyes told her how utterly adorable the young Lucilla must have been.

  “Don’t interrupt, dear, because I cannot remember where I am, if you interrupt. . . . Well, we made our plans. We were to go to France. Michael had a little money of his own and on that we planned to live, for we knew, of course, that his professional life would be smashed by what we were doing. James was in London and I told the servants and the children that I was going to him. Michael had established a locum and was supposed to be taking his annual holiday. It seemed quite natural to everybody that we should go down together to catch the morning boat to the mainland. Even now I can recapture the happiness as though it were yesterday. We went down to the boat in Michael’s dogcart, through lanes full of honeysuckle. In spite of days and nights of anxiety and torturing indecision I was half crazy with joy. And then, just as we were getting on the boat, a frantic man came running to say that a favourite patient of Michael’s, a little boy of three, had burnt himself most dangerously. They did not trust the locum, they wanted Michael.” She paused and sighed, as though even now the memory of that moment oppressed her. “And Michael went. Before I came along he had been mad about his work; the best men always are. He just dumped down his bag and ran down the gangway, calling to me to take a cab home and we’d go by tomorrow’s boat, and was off like a flash in his dogcart before I’d even got time to protest. I was furious, of course. I thought he ought to have left the child to the locum and considered me first. He had put me in a very difficult position. He had, I thought, been very cruel. I did not go home. I was too angry. I put our luggage in the little office on the quay and walked to the nearest lonely bit of seashore and tramped up and down and raged and stormed, and cried until I was utterly exhausted. Then, I think, I must have slept a little. I was worn out and it was quiet and warm in the sunny little bay. Then I sat up and ate my sandwiches and looked across the Estuary to the mainland on the other side. I saw the cloud shadows passing over the wide flat marshes and flocks of sea birds wheeling up into the sun. I did not know, of course, that I was looking across at the Damerosehay country, but the peacefulness of that wide landscape had a very powerful effect upon me. It seemed to clear my mind and lull my torment to sleep so that I was able to think, and to think hard and straight I stayed there all day, thinking.”

  She stopped and David, to give her time to rest a bit went over to a window and pulled the curtain a little to keep the sun out of her eyes. He was touched by her story. Lucilla was such a serene old lady that he had never pictured her torn by any sorrows except those of inevitable bereavement. It astonished him that she too had known passion and conflict. Nadine, he saw, was moved too. He supposed that all human experience is very much the same. We think our own sufferings are unique and then we find that everyone else has been through much the same . . . or worse.

  “I want to try and tell you the conclusions I arrived at that day,” said Lucilla. “This is what I really want to tell you. My silly little love story isn’t really important, and at one time I had not meant to tell it, but the conclusions one comes to about living are important. They mould our lives, and sometimes other people’s lives too. . . . My thinking all started from the fact, so bitter to me, that Michael had put his work before his love for me. And he had done that instinctively. He had had no time to reason things out, if he had I expect he would have come with me, he had simply acted upon instinct. Now in those days I had great faith in instinct. It was instinct, I thought, that guided the world aright, that sent the wild birds flying across seas and continents to find their home, that taught the animals to care for their young, even to die for them if need be. Instinct, I thought, was the voice of God. . . . I still think that very often it is, though I realize now that there is such a mixture of good and evil in all we think and are that everything, every instinct and every thought, needs to be tested by the teaching of Christ. . . . And if that were true it meant that Michael, in instinctively putting his work before his love, was doing right. Yet he had said that his love for me seemed a truer, a more real thing, than his work. So great was his love that he had been quite ready to have his work ruined by it.

  “That made me think very hard, even as you have thought, David, about the nature of truth. What is it once one moves beyond the narrow conception of truth as the correctly spoken word? You must remember that I had never read very much and that I had to think it out very crudely for myself. I thought it out and I said to myself that true action is the creation of perfection while lying action is the creation of something that falls short of the ideal. ‘That is a true line,’ we say, when it is drawn as near to the straight as we can get it. ‘That is a bad portrait,’ we say of a picture that is not like the original. From there I went further and I said that truth at its greatest is something made in the likeness of God.”

  “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ ” quoted David softly, smiling at her.

  “Yes, dear, but don’t interrupt. I was very uneducated, as I said before. I don’t believe I had ever read Keats in those days. I had to struggle on by myself to the idea that if truth is the creation of perfection then it is action and has nothing to do with feeling. And the nearest we can get to creating perfection in this world is to create good for the greatest number, for the community or the family, not just for ourselves; to create for ourselves only means misery and confusion for everybody. That made me see that acting a part is not always synonymous with lying, it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”

  “In other words, Grandmother,” said David, smiling, “it is more truthful to pretend that you love your husband when you don’t, rather than run away with another man because you do. That, you think, is the best way of creatively building up the ideal of faithfulness in marriage, which to your mind is a better thing for the community, and therefore a truer thing, than adultery.”

  “You put it crudely, dear,” complained Lucilla.

  “Life is a bit crude,” agreed David.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought,” said Lucilla. “Only I thought no less about my work for the community as a wife and mother than Michael’s as a doctor. I thought all day about his work. A doctor’s work is splendidly creative, I thought; building strong bodies and healthy minds; it is more creative even than the work of painter and sculptor for he deals in flesh and blood and thought, materials that are living. It seemed to me appalling, as I thought it over, that all this should be sacrificed to his passion for a pretty woman. It was every bit as bad as that my work for my husband and children should be sacrificed to my passion for a charming man. The love of a man and a woman, I saw, should never be allowed to be an end in itself; it should be the helpmate of their work.”

  “Do you know, Grandmother,” said Nadine gently, “if you could reason this all out so clearly I don’t think you could have been so desperately in love as you thought you were.”

  “Oh, but I was!” said Lucilla, and her tone was so piteous that they had to believe her. “I don’t know why it was that I could think so clearly then, for I’m not usually a clear thinker. Perhaps it was the shock of Michael’s action. A shock can have two effects, you know; sometimes it stuns you and sometimes it quickens you; I suppose it did the second to me. I had pencil and paper in my bag and sitting on the shore I wrote to Michael, telling him why I could not go with him after all. Then I tore up the letter I had written to James, and had meant to post on the mainland, and threw it in the sea, and I walked quietly home, posting Michael’s letter on my way. As I went in at our garden gate Hilary came running to meet me, he was a little boy of eight years old then, and he hugged me. He was so glad I had not gone away after all. ‘Don’t ever go,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t,’ and I cried and hugged him hard. Next day James came back and I
told him I was tired of the Island. So we moved and went back to the mainland.”

  “Were you very unhappy, Grandmother?” asked Nadine.

  “For the whole of the next year I was so unhappy that I did not know how to go on living. Every day when I woke up in the morning I used to hope that this day would be my last on earth—I was as unhappy as all that. The fact was that I loved Michael more than all my children put together. It’s a dreadful thing to say, but it’s true. I did not see how I could live without my best-beloved. But I did, of course, one so often has to. It was Ellen who saved me.”

  “Ellen?” asked David, astonished.

  “Ellen knew all about it, of course; I don’t know how because I didn’t tell her; perhaps I left a letter about, for I’m very careless. Ellen doesn’t think it wrong to read my letters. She thinks it her sacred duty to know all that’s going on in the family, no matter by what means. She knew and told me that she knew. She was kind, but stern. ‘What you need, Milady,’ she said, ‘is to love your poor children a bit more.’ ‘But I do love them,’ I protested. ‘I have sacrificed my happiness for them.’ ‘You don’t love ’em as much as I do,’ said Ellen. ‘What you need is to do a bit more for ’em. It’s I who do all the work, not you. Never a hand’s turn do you do for those children. . . . And if I was you, Milady, I should have another.’ ”

  “What Ellen said made me think again. I thought, love at its highest, like truth at its highest, is a creative thing. Perhaps it is action, not feeling. I was playing the part of a good wife and mother quite successfully in the outward ways but that, I saw now, was not enough. That was not love. Creative love meant building up by quantities of small actions a habit of service that might become at last a habit of mind and feeling as well as of body. I tried, and I found it did work out like that. Feeling can be compelled by action not quite as easily as action by feeling, but far more lastingly. You may not believe me, but it’s true.”

  They smiled at her, but their faces looked as though blinds had been drawn over them. She had no idea what, if any, effect she was having upon them.

  “And the last baby?” asked Nadine. “Maurice? David’s father?”

  Lucilla’s face softened and shone, as it always did at the mention of Maurice. “I took Ellen’s advice and I had him,” she said. “James had been very upset, not to say outraged, by my refusal to have more children. I told him I was sorry and I asked to have another; and Maurice, as you know, was the glory of my life. After he came living was not only possible but actually happy again. I suppose a psychologist would have said that in my love for Maurice I sublimated my love for Michael. And the odd thing was that though he was not his son Maurice was very like Michael. He had a sensitiveness and a beauty that none of my other children had. . . . And yet I suppose it was not so odd for our children are the children of our minds and souls as well as our bodies, and my mind and soul belonged to Michael.”

  “What happened to Michael?” asked Nadine.

  “Nothing dramatic, dear. He just went on with his work. But he never married, and I suppose he was unhappy on the Island after what had happened for he left it and went to the north of England, and later he came to London and before he died he was considered to be one of the greatest child specialists of his day. He must have saved the lives of a multitude of little children. He would never have done that had he married me. When we were both middle-aged I met him once at a London dinner party, and I think I was rather expecting him to tell me that I had broken his heart and ruined his life; not that I thought I had but I thought it would be nice of him to say so. But Michael was never one to say the proper thing if it wasn’t the truth. ‘Sensible young woman that you were,’ he said to me. ‘You saved us both from a great disaster.’ I asked him, a little wistfully, if he hadn’t been upset at the time. ‘Just for a twelvemonth,’ he said. ‘A year of hell, though it seems long at the time, isn’t really long compared with the span of a man’s working life.’ I said no, I supposed it wasn’t, and we said good-bye very politely and I never saw him again.”

  “And Grandfather never knew a thing about it?” asked Nadine.

  “Oh no, dear,” said Lucilla, horrified at the bare idea.

  “How odd of you not to tell him, Grandmother,” said David. “Now I couldn’t have gone on living with him if I hadn’t made a clean breast of it.”

  “Your Grandfather would have been very upset if I had told him, dear,” said Lucilla. “I wanted to tell him, of course, but I saw no reason why he should be upset just to give me peace of mind. Confession is often a rather selfish luxury, I think.”

  David marvelled at her. Inward integrity meant so much to him that her ruthless sacrifice of it to the common good knocked him speechless.

  Lucilla sighed. She was dreadfully tired. “Well, I’ve finished,” she said. “You’ve both been very patient. I’ve said my say and I’ve no doubt I’ve said it very badly, and I shan’t bother you any more. Your ideals and mine are so different, but please just think about mine, for they have been tested and I think experience has proved them trustworthy.” She looked round her beautiful room. “I have tried to make life a creative art. I saved Michael’s work from disaster. I built up a happy and united family, that will be disunited if you two marry, and I made this lovely home that may pass away from us if David forsakes it. Happy homes are very important, I think, far more important than you realize, and God knows how many of them have been built up by the sacrifice of private longings. I am inclined to think that nothing so fosters creative action as the sacrifice of feeling. It’s like rain coming down upon the corn. I think it is David’s beloved Shakespeare who says somewhere, ‘Upon such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense.’ ”

  Her voice trailed away and no one said anything for some minutes. “Do you know, Grandmother,” said Nadine at last, “that through all this you have never even mentioned George and the children to me?”

  Lucilla got up and slowly crossed the room. “I saw no need to, dear,” she said at the door. “Since you have been here they have haunted you night and day. I’ve seen it.” And she went out.

  “Is that true, Nadine?” asked David. He was standing by the mantelpiece, looking unutterably weary, for his love for Nadine and his love for Lucilla, so completely opposed, seemed dragging him in pieces. Nadine sat on in her chair, her hands moving restlessly upon its arms.

  “Yes,” she said. “Grandmother has built up such an atmosphere of family feeling here that it affects one. And then there’s something else, something older and deeper than Grandmother’s atmosphere. I can’t describe it. A sort of climate. It’s in the wild garden as well as the house.”

  “Just the atmosphere of age,” said David. “All old places have it. Age and tradition.”

  Nadine got up and moved to the window. “That’s it,” she said. “Tradition. But a particular tradition. In this place there is a tradition of faithfulness.”

  “Faithfulness to what?” asked David sharply.

  Nadine did not answer. She went slowly out of the room and up the stairs to her bedroom to wash her hands for lunch.

  David turned round and held on to the mantelpiece with both hands. He had seen what Lucilla had not seen, that that old story had touched Nadine very deeply. The likeness of their experience had given her a strong link with Lucilla, and when we feel ourselves linked to someone whose experience, up to a certain point, has been our own, the tendency is not to break the link but to follow on along the full way that the other has taken. For a moment an agony of apprehension seized him. Then he shook it off. Nadine had a very strong character. Of all the women he had ever met she was the least easily influenced.

  But he was still holding on to the old carved mantelpiece when the little boys came dashing in to tell whoever they could find about the game of the ship in Hilary’s garden, and he kept one hand upon it as he swung round to listen to them.

  “Nothing was
saved,” finished Ben dramatically. “Nothing but the blue bird and some of the carving about the prow.”

  Then they ran out again, for Margaret’s voice was heard demanding that they should go and wash their hands for nursery dinner.

  “The carving about the prow.” Without realizing what he was doing David looked up at the old carved overmantel that had come from no one knew where, and in spite of his anxiety a thrill of excitement went through him. At the Hard, in the old Master-Builder’s House, he had often seen prints of the great ships that had been built and launched there more than a hundred years ago, and many of them had glorious carved poops and forecastles. Surely some of them had been decorated with arabesques like swirling water, rather like these that curled from floor to ceiling of the Damerosehay drawing-room. Why had he not noticed that before? Had this carving been taken from the wreck of the grain ship? Was the story of the grain ship true, and its captain the same man who had drawn those appalling pictures that had been found in Obadiah’s clock? Before Jeremy, before Aramante, had he lived at Damerosehay? David gladly seized upon something to turn his thoughts, and he felt as excited as his battered condition would allow. Had it not been for his preoccupation with Nadine he thought he would have connected the drawings with the captain of the grain ship long ago. He liked that man. He felt him to be his friend. How in the world could he find out about him? Could anything be discovered at the Hard?

  The telephone rang and he answered it. It was Hilary. “You haven’t taken me for a run in your car yet,” complained Hilary. “You always do when you come down. How about tomorrow?”

  “Nadine and I hope to ride in the Forest tomorrow,” said David. “Sorry.”

  “The next day then,” said Hilary with such determination that David smiled a little grimly. He had been in daily expectation of an expression of Hilary’s views upon the Nadine affair. He did not dread them. Hilary in the expression of views was always blessedly terse.