The Bird in the Tree

  He lifted the Bastard’s chin gently off his foot and moved quietly about the room, tidying it as Lucilla liked it to be tidied. But he did not feel quiet, for the conflict that had been for so long hidden in his subconscious mind was now in the open. He was fighting it consciously and with desperation.

  He put out the light, took the Bastard to his bed and went slowly upstairs. Late though it was there was a line of light showing under Nadine’s door. Was she too awake and fighting? As he shut himself into his room there was the first moan in the chimney, the first rush of wind over the roof. The promised gale was on its way. But he hardly noticed it, for the storm in his mind had dragged every sensation down into its own whirlpool.

  CHAPTER

  10

  — 1 —

  BY the next morning the wind was high, and still rising, only slackening occasionally when storms of drenching rain swept in from the sea. “White rain,” Obadiah called it; a rain so solid that one could hardly see through it. It promised to be the worst gale they had had for years, he said. It was the season of the high tides, too. He paused in his boot-cleaning to rub his stubbly chin and shake his head darkly at Cook, who had only arrived a few days ago and meant to give notice at once now that she had seen the kind of weather they had in these parts. It was her afternoon out and how was she to get along the coast road in all this muck to catch the bus to the cinema, could anyone tell her that? No one could and she went to Margaret to give notice. Jill, too, was depressed, for tomorrow was her afternoon out and Alf had gone away for two days to attend (so he said) his other grandfather’s funeral. And Rose the heavy-handed was very low in her mind because her friend the baker’s boy had taken up with the red-headed chit at the Eel and Lobster. Altogether the gloom in the kitchen was appalling and throughout the day seeped slowly through the whole house, spreading that awful depression which is characteristic of kitchen gloom only.

  David and Nadine, tormented as they both were by a conflict that they could not yet speak of to each other, felt the oppression of the storm. The tumult of it, the rush of wind and water, the rattling of the windows and the screaming in the chimneys, seemed beating upon their nerves. They could not settle to anything. After he had driven the little boys to their lessons, the wind so high even inland that he could hardly hold the car straight upon the road, David tried to go for a walk. It was useless. The wind was too wild and exhausting and he had to go home again.

  In the drawing-room he found Lucilla serenely teaching Caroline. She was so used to the Damerosehay storms that she alone seemed unaffected by the wind; though she did own that she never remembered one quite as bad as this. Nadine sat near them stitching a little desperately at her embroidery. Her face was paler than usual and her dark eyes violet-shadowed. As David came in she looked up at him and smiled, then dropped her eyes to her work again. David sat down in a far corner with a book and over the top of it he quietly watched her.

  That had been a strange look that she had given him. It had been full of love but full of a desperate pleading. For what was she pleading? That he should not desert her, or that he should not let it break him if she were to desert him? He could not know which it was for he could not talk to her until his own mind was made up. As the battle in him swayed this way and that he did not forget her, and the suffering which he might cause her if he were to take the part of tradition and leave her for Damerosehay, but it was characteristic of that strain of ruthlessness in him that as he had been willing to sacrifice Lucilla’s happiness to one set of principles so he was equally prepared to sacrifice Nadine’s to another. One could not help it. It seemed to him that while we are such imperfect creatures there is seldom a clear choice between right and wrong, only between two wrongs. Whatever one does someone must be hurt. The only thing is to choose the wrong that does least hurt to the greatest number. For during the night he had come right round to Lucilla’s and Hilary’s point of view. It is the community that matters. What he was not sure of yet was whether he was as ready to suffer for his new convictions as he had been for the old. For they asked far more of him. They asked too much. His love for Nadine was like hunger and thirst. Without her it seemed to him that he would have no life at all. Did God, if there was a God, did those fiery spirits whose kinship he wanted, expect one to give up one’s very life?

  He got up abruptly and went out into the garden to Margaret. Within the high walls there was a certain amount of shelter and Margaret, in mackintosh and boots, was staking her precious plants against the storm and cutting the loveliest of the flowers before they could be dashed to pieces by the rain. She looked very grim. The glory of her garden was doomed. After this storm it could not be the same again. The summer was over. She had nothing to look forward to now but the chrysanthemums, and then the patient nursing of single blooms in sheltered places. It would be another five months before she could begin to plan again for beds glowing with colour and branches heavy with warmth and perfume. . . . Yet what there still was should be saved.

  She straightened herself when she saw David and pushed wisps of untidy hair back from her forehead with the back of a wet hand. “Get some bast from the toolhouse and come and help me,” she commanded.

  He obeyed her and soon they were working companionably together. The garden was the one place where David got on well with Margaret and where he could recapture his boyhood’s affection for her. For in the garden Margaret shed all her shyness and her gaucherie. Her thick tweeds and her boots, her background of trees and earth and sky, suited her and she knew it. She fitted into them as comfortably as Lucilla into the setting of her lovely drawing-room. When she sniffed the scent of the cool wet earth, and felt the worn handle of her trowel fitting into the hollow of her hand, she was as happy as David was when he smelt powder and paint and felt the boards of the theatre once more under his feet. As he held a stake steady for Margaret a sudden nostalgia for London and the stage swept over him.

  “After all,” he said to Margaret, “there’s nothing in the world like work.”

  “Work and one’s own home,” said Margaret. “It’s hard to say which is best. They help each other and I don’t think that one can accomplish much without the other. Be careful what you’re doing, David, you’re stepping on my violas.”

  “Are you so devoted to Damerosehay, Aunt Margaret?” asked David, stepping off the violas and trampling instead upon the mignonette.

  “Oh, no,” said Margaret. “I’m fond of it, of course, but it’s not my own home. Mind my mignonette.”

  What was her own home to a woman? David wondered. To a man it was the place where his forefathers had lived, fathers either of blood or spirit, the place where he had grown up, as he had grown up at Damerosehay. It had gone to the making of him and so to the making of his work. Or else it was the place that he had made out of the proceeds of his work. The two were, as Margaret had said, inseparably connected. But to a woman? Why did Margaret not feel that Damerosehay was home?

  “Why, Aunt Margaret?” he asked.

  “Because I’m fond of my mignonette. I see no reason why it should be trampled into the earth by your great feet just because its day is over.”

  “No. I mean I wonder why Damerosehay does not seem home to you?”

  Margaret straightened herself and wondered too. “It has not sheltered my children,” she said at last. Then she blushed bright red. What a thing to say to a young man like David! It was dreadful the way the garden loosened her tongue.

  “But the garden?” insisted David gently. “Isn’t the garden home?”

  “To a gardener, my dear,” said Margaret, “any garden is home. It’s home and work together. It’s not any one garden, you see, it’s the earth and things growing in it that one loves. There are times when I get tired of this particular garden. It’s difficult to think of new things to do in it. I’d rather like a fresh one to re-make from the beginning.”

  “Then if you ever had to leave Dame
rosehay you wouldn’t break your heart?” asked David.

  “Of course not. If in the course of time you ever live here with your children I shall be just as happy, or happier, living with Hilary. He has asked me to.”

  “Would Hilary’s house seem more like home to you?”

  “I think it would,” said Margaret. “I could do what I liked in it. Hilary would not mind what I did. He is in so many ways such an utter child that I could do what I liked with him too.”

  She laughed, thinking of Hilary tenderly and maternally, and David felt a sense of relief, knowing that she would not mind if one day he turned her out of Damerosehay. He looked back at the old house and tried unsuccessfully to picture himself living there with his children. . . . If they were his own children they would be the children of another wife, not Nadine. . . . Just now, loving Nadine so much, it was beyond the power of even his vivid imagination to think of himself as able to love another woman. Yet these things happened. There seemed no wound that in the end time could not heal. He knew that with his mind though his senses, gripped by pain, could not let him feel it. The senses, capable of dealing only with the moment, make pain seem eternal. The mind, building the future, knows better.

  “The bast, dear,” said Margaret, patiently, for the third time.

  David returned to a sense of his duties and they worked on happily together for another hour. The wind swept over them and now and again the rain drenched them, but neither of them cared. David supposed that he was not a true gardener because he could not agree with Margaret that it was the earth itself that mattered, not a particular walled-in space of it. It was the walled-in space that mattered to him, this particular walled-in space of Damerosehay. In no other garden would he have been content to stand for an hour in puddles of water handing out bast to his aunt.

  Margaret, heroically enduring the trampling of her plants, agreed with him that he was no gardener. He seemed never to have the slightest idea of what was beneath his feet.

  — 2 —

  By lunch time the rain as well as the wind had so increased that there could be no going out for anybody for the rest of the day; in the afternoon it was therefore all hands to the wheel to keep the children happy and good. It was no easy task, for Ben, who hated noise and turmoil, was jumpy and nervy, Caroline was tearful with fright and Tommy was apparently possessed of a demon of wickedness. By two-thirty he had tied the cats’ tails together and dressed up Pooh-Bah in Nadine’s best night gown. By two forty-five he had given the Bastard Queenie to play with and let out the white mice in the kitchen. By three o’clock there was such a row going on in the dining-room, such singing and shouting and beating of drums, that the whole household hastened to the scene of the disturbance to find him, very flushed and bright-eyed and exhilarated, walking round and round the table beating on a silver salver with a poker. A strong smell of alcohol, and a pronounced lurch in his walk, led to the terrible discovery that he had mixed himself a cocktail from the secret store that Ellen kept for the grown-up grandsons and was very drunk indeed. There might have been a very painful revelation of Ellen’s and the grandsons’ duplicity but for the fine generalship of Nadine, who got her back to the cupboard door and vowed to Lucilla, who entered last upon the distressing scene, that it was only the cooking sherry from the kitchen. As it was it was all most painful, and by three-fifteen Tommy had been very sick. By three-thirty, however, he had recovered, and by three forty-five David had organized a circus in the drawing-room to turn their thoughts.

  This was a great success, for David was not the only member of the Eliot family possessed of dramatic talent. Tommy in a scarlet bathing suit jumping through a hoop, Caroline in her party frock playing Red Riding Hood to Pooh-Bah’s Wolf, and Ben’s lithe figure turning somersaults, were much admired; and Queenie changing colour upon each of her coloured handkerchiefs in turn was only to be outdone by Bib and Tucker in pink bows riding upon the Bastard’s back. It was altogether what David called a commercial as well as an artistic success, for six-pence–halfpenny was taken at the box office for Lucilla’s missionary box, and this over and above the expenses of the production, which came to nothing but two eggs which fell out of Red Riding Hood’s basket and were smashed on the parquet floor, and a little cake which Pooh-Bah, not quite certain of his duties as the Wolf, ate by mistake. It was successful, but exhausting, and after a large and filling tea in the nursery they were thankful to settle down round the drawing-room fire and have Lucilla read them Two Flat Irons for a Farthing. The children loved Lucilla’s old-fashioned story books, they liked them far better than their own modern ones. There was something thrilling in the thought that when their father and Aunt Margaret had been children they too had sat on the floor at Lucilla’s feet and listened to these very same tales.

  But after a little while Mrs. Ewing’s beautiful English, Lucilla’s gentle voice, and even the lovely leaping flames of the log fire were powerless to hold them. The storm got at them. Now and then the rush of it, and the sheets of rain hurled against the windows, quite drowned Lucilla’s voice so that they could not hear what she was reading. The draughts came creeping under the door like live things and the crying in the chimney sounded as though some poor maddened creature was imprisoned there. Now and then, above the wind and rain, they could hear the roar of the angry sea and the poor oak-trees in the wood tossing and moaning. Damerosehay storms were always uncanny things but this one was more creepy than usual. The noise of the circus and the clatter of tea had kept it at bay but now it was right in the room with them. Though they none of them spoke of it yet it captured their thoughts and played upon their nerves so that they were all of them, except Tommy, filled with a strange dreary misery.

  Lucilla, while she read steadily on and her face was quiet and composed, was thinking, “There is such misery in the world, such torment of mind and body, such fear and storm and conflict. It is all abroad tonight. It is crying in the wind and weeping in the rain. And I have brought all these children and grandchildren into the world. . . . All these children. . . . And soon I shall die and leave them to I know not what. I want them to keep together and to love each other. I want them to stand foursquare to the world. Oh, David, David, please keep them together. Please. What a wind tonight. A horrible wind.”

  And Margaret thought, “Oh, my poor garden. In spite of the stakes there’ll not be a thing left standing. I wish I didn’t get such rheumatism working in the wet. I wish I wasn’t getting old. I wish Cook hadn’t given notice. I wish I had a son like David. Oh, my poor garden. I hate these gales.”

  And Nadine thought, “It was Ben, and he saw us. That was why he had asthma. Year after year living with a man you don’t love. No one knows what it means. Yes, Grandmother knows. One can’t give up a man one loves so desperately. One can’t. It’s like tearing your heart out. Yet Grandmother did it. She had the courage. I wish I could talk to her. I wish she liked me. Ben had asthma. I have brought these children into the world. It’s bad for children to be separated from their father. George is a good father. I can’t give up David. I can’t. What a vile wind. I hate the noise of it.”

  And David thought, “Was it a storm like this through which he had to guide that ship? All those lives in his charge; the passengers, the crew, Aramante and her child. It is an appalling thing that the lives of others should be so affected by what we do. Especially the lives of the children. Family life. Community life. National life. Broken promises mean chaos for them all. The more populated the earth the more hampering interdependence becomes. Only the savages have real freedom. I wish I was a savage. Curse this wind! What did he feel like when he realized he had to preserve those lives through that storm?”

  And Caroline thought, “I don’t like it. It makes noise. I wish Mother would have me on her lap.”

  And Tommy thought, “I’ll put Queenie in Cook’s bed. I wish the house would blow down. It would be fun.”

  And Ben thought, “I don’t lik
e it. It’s like hammers beating on me. I wish Father was here. I wish I was little again and could ride on his shoulder like the boy in picture.”