The Bird in the Tree

  “The day after tomorrow, then,” said David. “Let’s hope the weather lasts. If there’s nowhere else that you particularly want to go to I’d like to go to the Hard.”

  “Right,” said Hilary. “Pick me up at two-thirty. By the way, will you all keep your eyes open for old Mary’s blue budgerigar? By mistake we let it out this morning.”

  “Mary upset?” asked David.

  “Weeping,” said Hilary.

  “We’ll keep a look out for it,” promised David.

  But, as it happened, he forgot about Mary’s blue bird, for the rest of the day was one of extreme woe. At nursery dinner Tommy cut the top of his finger off with the bread knife, and Ellen being absent and Jill one of those who faint at the sight of blood David had to help Margaret bind it up, to the accompaniment of ear-splitting roars from Tommy, while Nadine revived Jill with Lucilla’s sal volatile. After lunch Caroline returned from the dentist in a very tearful condition, not having enjoyed her first extraction, and much depressed by the thought of the many more she would have to have before she was old enough to be an angel in heaven, where, she was assured, there were no dentists; or at least, if there were, for presumably dentists as well as other people went to heaven if they were good, only winged dentists in a state of bliss in which it was no longer necessary to extract teeth for a living. For, said Lucilla, in heaven our teeth will not decay. They will be made of chippings from the gates of pearl and no corruption shall touch them. But in spite of Lucilla’s comforting remarks they all had to play animal grab with Caroline until her bedtime to bring her round, and so exhausting was the grab that before the grown-ups’ late dinner Lucilla retired to bed with a headache, saying she thought she was getting a bit old to be a grandmother; but after dinner she had to get up again for Ben suddenly and unexpectedly had a violent attack of asthma, his first for a year, which was not subdued by the ministrations of the whole household until close on eleven o’clock, when it occurred to Ellen to give him a good hard slapping.

  “What can have happened to upset him?” Lucilla kept demanding miserably. “Whatever can have happened?” And Nadine and David, haunted by the vision of a little boy running through the trees of the wild garden, were careful not to look at each other.

  Altogether it was a depressing evening and David, climbing wearily to bed, thought that though there is a lot to be said for being the father of a family it is by no means, what with one thing and another, all jam.

  CHAPTER

  9

  — 1 —

  WE’RE only just in time,” said Hilary, climbing laboriously into David’s car. “The weather is on the change.”

  “Splendid today,” said David, as his silver-grey monster slid smoothly away from the Vicarage gate. “South-west weather. The best there is.”

  The warm still blue days, and the quiet nights bright with the harvest moon, had left them. There was a fresh south-west wind today and brilliant masses of sunlit cloud passed like a pageant before it, their shadows sweeping the earth beneath them. Far up, beyond and between their mighty shapes, stretches of sky shone like aquamarine and crystal, cold and tranquil. The distance was hard and clear, a brilliant royal blue, and the nearer landscape a flung quilt of colour with the bright emerald of the well-watered pasturelands, the pale buff squares of the shorn cornfields, the dark swaying masses of the trees and the cottage gardens blazing with their dahlias and hydrangeas. A few larks were tossing over the fields, wind-blown and delirious, and the wings of the seagulls, as they beat up into the wind, were like streaks of silver in the hurrying sky. Hilary did not speak. The hood of the car had been opened to the sun and the wind and he settled into the comfortably padded seat and prepared to enjoy one of the greatest pleasures of his life.

  He loved speed. Tied as he was to a lame leg, his only form of locomotion a monotonous chug-chugging round the parish in the secondhand battered Trojan that was all he could afford in the way of a car, these expeditions with David often fell little short of ecstasy. Journeying in his Trojan was a painful business that he undertook for duty only but David’s glorious car went like a bird, so painlessly that he almost forgot he had a crippled body. For a moment his eyes went to the distant hills over which other men could tramp at will, and the woods in which they could lose themselves in the springtime, as he had once done, and his forehead contracted, for no one, no matter how resigned, ever quite gets used to the restrictions of an injured body. . . . Freedom. . . . He watched the strong beating wings of the gulls and the tossing of the larks, and rebellion surged bitterly through him. Why have wars and diseases to rack and weaken men’s bodies and make their lives mere things of endurance instead of things of joy? So pointless and useless. He pulled himself up sharply. He knew himself to be a happy man. He had come to terms with life. He was certain he was enjoying this drive far more than David who, if he wished, could have stopped the car and tramped to the horizon and back again without a twinge. He glanced at his nephew. He looked confident and carelessly happy, abandoned to the delight of the day, yet there was that in the rather hard set of his mouth and the challenging glance of his eyes that gave him away. The young, thought Hilary, are not happy in this generation. They are greedy for joy but their joy is too precariously held. . . . There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle-age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One’s values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one’s daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.

  The car, racing at full speed, had carried them from the low-lying coast country to the Forest land above. Then the trees dropped away behind them and they were up on the high bleak moor, still purple with the fading heather. The sky seemed immeasurably high and the wind here was keen and shrill. It was cold, for the sun was momentarily hidden by the clouds. It was like being on a ship at sea. Here space seemed a great and terrible power and one was tossed through it like a dying leaf or a shred of sea foam.

  “It’s always very grim up here when bad weather is on the way,” said Hilary.

  But David was enjoying it. He was on his way to inquire into the fate of a sea captain and the cold wind and the racing clouds were in tune with his mood. At the limit of the moor was the lake where the monks from the Abbey below used to catch their fresh-water fish. Its waters were steel grey, whipped by the wind. Hilary turned his coat collar down with a sigh of relief as they turned away from the moor and slid downhill again towards green fields and human habitation.

  At a crossroads he asked hopefully. “Are we going to the Abbey first?” Hilary liked the Abbey ruins down below them in the valley as much as he liked any spot on earth. They held a mystical stillness deeper than any he knew. Magnolias and myrtles bloomed against the grey walls and when the sun was hot rosemary scented the air. Great yew trees were black against the sky and among them, at the entrance to the Abbey, a carved calvary stood facing the river where the Fairhaven swans rested when stormy weather drove them inland. Hilary, unemotional though he was, almost loved the place.

  David was not quite so obliging as usual today. “The Hard first,” he said, “we may not have time for the Abbey,” and turned to his right along quiet lanes and through woods where in spring the primroses grew so thickly that the air was scented with them.

  But at his first sight of the Hard Hilary forgot his disappointment over the Abbey, for there were few places lovelier when, as today, the holiday season was over and the trippers mercifully absent. The Hard, too, had its stillness; not the living stillness of a place where many prayers have been said that cry on still in the silence, but the stillness of a place where once there has been great physical activity and now there is only the memory of it; the kind of stillness that comes at sunset after a storm has passed. For the Hard had once been one of the most important shipbuilding centres in
England and now it was only a short little street of eighteenth-century cottages leading down to the quiet reaches of the river.

  They parked the car at the top of the hill and walked slowly down, amiably accompanied by a kindly grey donkey. The sun was out again and the old brick of the cottages glowed rosily as it touched them. Their windows were latticed and grown around with creepers and above them the roofs were wavy as a ribbed sandy seashore. They were still quietly inhabited and smoke curled up lazily from some of the tall chimneys. Beyond the wide river the marshes were green and tawny, threaded with channels of blue water, and the horizon was shut in with thick sombre woods. The gulls, as usual, were everywhere, and a few yachts rode at anchor on the river. The peace was indescribable.

  Yet to David today it was alive with past activity. He could picture the prosperous town that once stood here, the shipyard, the slipways, the forges and the shops. He could hear the ring of hammer on anvil and the sound of the saws that fashioned the Forest oak-trees into timber for the ships. He could hear the men singing as they worked and far away in the woods he almost imagined he could hear the sound of the axe that felled the trees. Merchant ships had been built here, men-of-war, brigs and frigates. Glorious ships had slipped down the slipways at their launching and passed down the tranquil river with flags flying and cheering crowds bidding them Godspeed on journeys to India or the China seas; and as they reached the sea and lifted to the swell the sails had blossomed like flowers upon their masts. They had passed by Damerosehay on their way to great adventure and Aramante, perhaps, from David’s own little room over the porch, had watched them go. Those had been great days, thought David, days that his friend the sea captain had known well. Simpler days than these, quieter and more spacious and with more beauty and laughter in daily living; cruder and more cruel in many always but more hopeful and not cursed with such bitter weariness. In those days men had gone to work or war on sea or land possessed of a faith in the worthwhileness of what they did that made their sufferings light.

  “All things are light to bear for those who love God.” It was Hilary who had spoken and David discovered that they were sitting on a bench in a sheltered hollow on the bank watching the sun-flecked river slipping past them on its journey to the sea. A yacht was moored close to them and the water slapped softly against its sides. There is no more soothing sound in the world. What with his dreams and the sun, and the bad nights that had been his since he came back to Damerosehay, David found that he was half asleep. For how long had old Hilary been talking? What was he saying?

  “We churchmen have such an unfair advantage over you others,” said Hilary, happily unconscious that though he had been speaking for five minutes he had not been attended to for any of them. “To have certain principles laid firmly down, certain things that are done and certain things that are not done, makes life comparatively simple for us. Faith, too, real faith, precludes anxiety. I am a very happy man in my possession of it. My grief is that I seem unable to hand it on. It seems to me a dreadful thing that I should sit here so rich and yet unable to give any of my riches to you.”

  “You can make yourself envied, Uncle Hilary,” said David. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” queried Hilary doubtfully.

  “I envy you your peace. You men of faith have kept something that the rest of us have lost, something that those monks in the Abbey must have had, and the men who sailed in the ships from the Hard. Singleness of mind. Faith in the value of what you are doing. And, as you say, a rule of life that can be used as a touchstone for all your actions. I envy you your faith; I wish I had it; and maybe my envy of you is one step on the road to getting it.”

  “Though your rule of life may not be the same as mine yet you have one,” said Hilary.

  “Of course,” said David. “Who hasn’t? One could not live without some sort of tradition, convention or even superstition that guides one. But my set of principles are not such restful things as yours. I continually doubt them because I evolved them more or less myself. I have to be continually testing them. Yours, you think, were God-given, so you never doubt them. That’s why you’re so peaceful, Uncle Hilary.”

  “I did not accept my God-given principles blindly,” said Hilary. “I tested them. If I had not they would have been worthless to me.”

  “Yet you believed in them enough to think them worth the testing.”

  “Yes,” said Hilary. “And it is strange to me that any man who has seriously considered them, you, for instance, should not think so too.”

  David was silent, for it was strange to him as well. His subconscious mind knew that he did not want to test Hilary’s faith, deeply as he longed to possess it, because he was not willing to make the renunciations it would demand of him. But his conscious mind could not accept that; it was too derogatory a piece of self-knowledge to be accepted by a man who prided himself on his willingness for self-sacrifice.

  “There is one principle,” said Hilary, “that is I think common to every faith and every rule of life by which a man can guide his conduct, and which for that reason can surely be accepted without testing and without questioning.”

  “Yes?” asked David.

  “Faithfulness,” said Hilary, and suddenly he swung round on David with almost contemptuous anger. “Unless human beings keep their promises we have no sort of hope of anything but chaos for the future, and yet you propose to let Nadine be faithless to her marriage vows and George continue in his desertion of his children—and God knows faithfulness to children is the most elementary principle of conduct under the sun, even the animals understand it. The treatment of their children by many of the men and women of this generation passes my comprehension. Your cruelty to them, for the sake of your own selfish passions, is a thing I cannot understand.” He stopped abruptly. He longed to tell David what had happened at the Vicarage two days ago, but he was bound by his promise to Ben. There was so much that he wanted to say to David upon the subject of the children, but the abrupt check had put it out of his mind. He got painfully to his feet, cursing his inarticulacy.

  Yet his sudden short outburst had had even more influence on David than Lucilla’s hour-long exposition of her views that had so shaken Nadine. Hilary’s curt remarks had been like a blow in the face to David. Lucilla’s theory of life as a creative art had appealed to his actor’s imagination but Hilary had dealt a blow to his man’s pride. . . . So that was what men like Hilary, single-minded men whom he admired, thought of him.

  “It’s all such a darn mess,” he said again, as he had said to Nadine in the garden. Didn’t Hilary understand on what an uncertain tenure one held one’s life these days? Did he not realize one’s eagerness to test one’s own theories, to express oneself, to work, to love and to possess before it was too late?

  But apparently Hilary did understand. “If you think this life is all there is,” he said, “then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only commonsense. It all depends on your point of view.”

  “A thing I’m not yet clear about,” said David.

  Hilary, leading the way towards the Master-Builder’s House for tea, made no answer. He had said his say for the time being and was thankful to have it off his chest. Now he could return to the full enjoyment of his day out.

  The Master-Builder’s House, now a small hotel, was the largest of the remaining houses of the Hard. The Master-Builder had been a person of great importance and his house the centre of the busy thriving little town. It had been frequented by the greatest sea captains of the time and on the day of a launching as many as a hundred and fifty people, merchant captains, captains of men-of-war and all the quality of the district, had sat down to dine in the banqueting hall. Though the glory had now departed the flavour of splendid festival still hung about the raftered room where Hilary and David sat waiting alone for their tea.

  Hilary looked round him and out of
the window at the quiet scene. “Perhaps one day Portsmouth will be as derelict as this is,” he said. “Given over to the herons and the gulls, with only an old grey donkey to walk about its streets.”

  David felt actually comforted by the thought. No matter how appalling our wars and the rumours of them they inevitably pass away.

  The room was hung round with beautiful engravings of sailing ships in titanic storms, of white-wigged sea captains and of intricate drawings of the carved poops and forecastles that had been the glory of the Hard. It had been these last that David had wanted to look at again and he jumped up and went to them.

  “Until the boys told it to me again the other morning I had forgotten that story of the wrecked grain ship,” said Hilary conversationally, lighting his pipe. “Did the boys make it up, I wonder, or was it part of the original legend that the injured captain had himself lashed to the mast so that he should not desert his job? It sounds to me rather like one of Ben’s inventions. Ben’s ideal of faithfulness to duty is such that as his dominie I find it quite difficult to live up to.” And Hilary, quite unaware that he had unwittingly returned to the former subject, drew placidly upon his pipe and admired the view.

  But David again felt that he had been dealt a blow. Faithfulness to duty. There seemed no getting away from it. Surrounded by these portraits of sea captains there wasn’t hope. Leaving the engravings of the carvings for a moment he looked along their ranks almost hoping that just one of them would look as though he had cursed his ship and left it. But they none of them looked like that. Far-seeing, vigilant, courageous men they all looked; hard-bitten, wily and ruthless, some of them, but none of them could one suspect of lack of faithfulness to duty. His eyes ran over their names. “Roger Slade, Captain of the Victorious, Man-of-War, 38 guns, launched at the Hard in 1804. John Wyatt, Captain of the Heroic, West-Indiaman, launched at the Hard in 1795. Benjamin Ellis, Captain of the Wasp, Man-of-War, 74 guns, launched at the Hard in 1810.” He moved on down the room. “Christopher Martyn, Captain of the Blue Bird, East-Indiaman, launched at the Hard in 1816.” David stopped short and his exclamation made Hilary turn round in his chair.