The Rosemary Tree Read online

  Malory had been his favorite author when he was a boy. His eyelids felt heavy as lead. He shut them and was in that strange borderland country between sleeping and waking. He drifted there for what seemed a long while and then, so he thought, was suddenly awake. A trumpet had sounded. He was alert, attentive, and then spellbound by what he saw. A gaunt old man on a bony white horse had come riding out from the gateway. He rode bareheaded, his hair and pointed beard and the white ruff above the gleam of his breastplate catching the light, so that he and his old horse seemed made of silver. He rode away among the trees and another horseman came after him, and another, and then a young man with the lovelocks of a cavalier, riding gallantly, a scarlet sash worn over one shoulder and across his cuirass. He too rode away and those who followed him seemed shadowy figures to Michael, though he knew they were knights bound upon the same journey as the rest. They passed quickly and as they crossed the road their horses’ feet made no sound on the metal surface. Last of all an old monk came out on foot, a twisted old man with a fine fierce face, and shut the door behind him.

  With the bang of the door Michael was instantly fully awake, amused yet a little shaken by the startling vividness of the dream. He had always been the victim of absurdly vivid dreams.

  “Smoke takes strange shapes,” he told himself. “It was the smoke started the dream, and remembering Malory. But that grand church is no illusion. And if instead of sitting dreaming here like the lunatic you are you were to get up and walk up that lane, and round that green hill with lambs stuck all over it, that heraldic hill with mutton argent on a field vert, you would find the manor house and the old lady with the rubies in her ears. Come on now, step on it. You have always had what it takes and now you can try out your charms on the old dame. You meant it as a joke? You did then but you don’t now. Unscrupulous? Well, so you are. Don’t you remember what the judge told you? My God, I will never forget it till I die.”

  It was the incentive he needed and he was on his feet in a flash, as though a snake had bitten him, and through the other orchard gate that opened on the lane. He strode up it for a minute or two without seeing it, overwhelmed by one of those visitations of misery and fear that often came to him. Beyond his encircling wall of personal experience was such an immensity of darkness, and his wall had always had many cracks. “Look at this place,” he told himself. “Look at the wall, not the cracks. Just now it’s a good wall. Look at it.”

  He was in a narrow stony lane with steep banks on either side and a stream running down one side of it beneath the coolness and shade of arching ferns. The banks were clothed with periwinkle, which country people call joy-of-the-ground. The leaves were deep green, so smooth that even on this grey day they reflected the light as though from polished mirrors. The flowers were a pure blue, as cool as the arching green ferns and the sound of the tinkling water. Michael stopped, for the impetus of his shame had spent itself. He stood still and remembered something; what he would have done had he still been a child.

  He would have made himself very small and crept under the ferns. They would have arched above him as mightily as the sky, enclosing him so securely in their green world that for a moment or two he would have known the meaning of security. He had been one of those children who can make themselves Tom Thumbs at will. “I’d forgotten that I’d ever done that sort of thing,” he thought. “Was that a linnet singing?”

  He walked on slowly, trying to recapture memories of childhood’s escapes to the smaller worlds. To the world down among the grass stems, where the forests are almost impenetrable and the dragons wear scaly armor. To the world inside a foxglove flower, where you swing at the end of a golden rope and lick at a suspended ball of honey with the tip of your tongue. And then the returns to—somewhere—to which the smaller worlds have each their door. He had forgotten those too until this moment, and now he remembered nothing but that there had been something—the immensity—only in those earliest days it had held no fear.

  He kicked angrily at a stone in the path. What was the good of fumbling back after the magical experiences of childhood? They had vanished. What was with him now was the misery of going exhausted to bed and lying awake dreading the years ahead, or waking from nightmare with the first cock-crow and feeling the darkness lying on him with appalling weight, or with the second cock-crow and knowing he could never undo what he had done. Then the fear could be sickening. “Ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight or at the cock-crowing or in the morning.” From what recesses of his memory had that quotation come? The master. What a name to give to those visitations of the darkness. Yet not unsuitable because for most men in these days fear was the master of life.

  “Come on,” he said to himself, “this isn’t these days. This may be escape from these days into a second childhood. Come on round this hill and find the peacocks and the old lady.” Yet as he rounded the hill he vaguely remembered a poem he had read somewhere about a man who tried to remove himself from these days by escape to an enchanted island, and when he had got there had found it hell. But he would not find Belmaray hell, for Don Quixote and Mr. Witteringham were not the kind of men one met in hell, and neither was this round green hill with the sheep upon it the landscape of hell.

  Far up above him a lark was filling the sky with praise.

  2

  He rounded the hill and saw the manor house in front of him at the bottom of a sloping field. He climbed upon the gate of the field and sat and stared. It was a timber framed house, small for a manor house but quite perfect, built in the shape of an E, with tall chimneys, and facing south across the river. The steep roof, irregular and stained with red-gold lichen, had dormer windows in it. The big porch which formed the central part of the E, and most of the front of the house, appeared to be covered with wistaria. Behind the house cob walls protected by penthouses of thatch enclosed the kitchen garden and orchard and in front of the house yews surrounded a garden that seemed to slope in terraces towards the river. From where he sat Michael could not see the garden behind the yew hedges, or see how its formal loveliness lost itself in the azaleas and rhododendrons down below, nor how upon the east side the garden looked down upon the church tower, and the churchyard with its drifts of daffodils. He could only guess at these things from where he sat, and he jumped off the gate and strode across the field. The lark was still singing over his head.

  As he came nearer Michael became increasingly aware of dilapidation. His conjecture that the roses had not been pruned for a hundred years was going to prove correct. The yew hedges had not been cut for a long time either. They looked like green waves with tossing spray. And three of the manor house windows, that looked westward over the field he was crossing, had lost small diamond panes of glass and been stuffed not with dirty rags, in the old-time fashion of cottage poverty, but with rolled up kid gloves. Upon this west side of the house the field came right up to the wall and he could not only get a good view of the gloves but also see into a lower room. It was a small library entirely lined with books. Michael gave an exclamation of pleasure. They’d have Cervantes there. They’d have Chaucer and Malory, Trollope and Jane, and all the writers in whom he delighted because they wrote of a world in which men did not live on the edge of a volcano, counting out the last minutes before the flames; their laughter while they did it set one’s teeth on edge and drove one to do rotten things. “Don’t make excuses,” Michael said to himself. “You did rotten things because you’re a rotten chap.”

  He swung away from the window and walked on beside the yew hedge that bordered the garden on the west, and was so overgrown and impenetrable that he could see nothing either through it or over it, but he imagined there would be a gate soon. He found it under an arch of yew, a low gate half overgrown with honeysuckle as though it were never opened. Not wanting to disturb the honeysuckle he did not unlatch it but climbed over.

  He surveyed the garden with amazement and delight. There appear
ed to be no one about and he could stare as he pleased. It had once been laid out in formal parterres of grass and flower beds, and stone paved paths with steps leading terrace by terrace down the slope to the river, and with a queer flicker of imaginative retrospection he saw it as once it had been. He saw the small trim green lawns and beds of mignonette and heliotrope and sops-in-wine, the rose garden with its standard rose trees, like Tenniel’s illustrations in Alice in Wonderland, the hedges of sweetbriar bordering the paved court and the sundial. For a moment, through the song of the lark, he could hear the bees humming in the mignonette, and smell the flowers and the scent of the new mown grass drawn up by the heat of a summer sun.

  The vision passed and he saw a grey day and such ruin that his delight turned to sadness. Yet still there was the scent of flowers, for as he moved forward he found clumps of small purple violets running riot over the edges of the weed-filled flower beds and the mossgrown paths, and there were drifts and pools of daffodils and narcissus in the wild rough grass. The sweetbriar hedges and the standard roses had flung out wild sprays of branches in all directions but they were glowing with new leaves. The plants in the border were not quite buried. The green tide of the weeds and grass had not killed the lupins or peonies, and strong spires of madonna lilies had pushed up, reaching for air and light. There would still be summer sun and scent here in three months’ time and the bees would find plenty to do. A garden, once given life, struggles to maintain its life, and there were signs that someone still cared for it. A small stone gazebo looking south down to the river had been kept in repair and in front of it the paved court surrounding the sundial had been swept. The sundial itself had had the moss scraped from the inscription carved upon two sides of the pedestal. Michael bent down to make out the faint lettering, but after he had read a word or two he found they were two couplets from an Elizabethan poem he knew almost by heart.

  Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;

  Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

  ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

  Goddess, allow this aged man his right,

  To be your beadsman now that was your knight.

  This memorial of another man’s faithfulness reproached him, who had not himself been faithful in love, and he left the sundial and walked to the edge of the little court, leaning on the low wall and looking down upon the old church in its trees below. A gull was sitting on one of the battlements of the tower; seen from this distance it might have been a dove. To the right, behind the beech trees, he could see the chimneys of the ugly red brick vicarage. What was Don Quixote doing at this moment, the knight who should have been up here, lord of this garden? Who was the other knight, his ancestor perhaps, whose faithfulness was kept in remembrance on that sundial? Who were these Wentworths? It was a delightful Elizabethan name. He remembered Maistress Margary Wentworth.

  With Marjerain gentle,

  The flower of goodly head.

  Embroider’d the mantle

  Is of your maidenhead.

  A rosemary tree grew just on the other side of the old wall where he stood. It had grown to such a size that it was a small tree, not a bush, with a knotted trunk, and big enough to make a hiding place for a child. He picked a few silvery leaves and rubbed them between his fingers. “Pray you, love, remember.” Just over the wall there were lavender bushes too, and patches of lemon verbena that had maintained their hold, their roots fast in the earth. “Duty, faith, love, are roots.” He had failed in all three.

  He walked to the south edge of the little court. Here a flight of worn steps, flanked by broken marble urns, led down to a terrace of grass and from this terrace the steps lost themselves in the slope of a meadow leading down to the river. This field, and the opposite one on the other side, were planted with rhododendrons and azaleas, and so were the river banks upon either side until the river was lost to sight beyond the spur of a hill, and Michael could see only in imagination the silver loops of the Belle Marée winding away through the green hills to the sea. Upon the other side of the river the rhododendrons climbed the steep field until they reached the edge of a larch wood. In another two months the larches would wear their heavenly green above a flaming mass of rose and saffron, crimson and gold. And just there, where the river was lost to sight, would be the waterfall, and the white rhododendron.

  Somewhere behind him upon one of the flagged paths he heard the pattering of feet, a strange pattering that sounded like a very old lady walking in pattens. There was a swishing sound too, as though long silken skirts fell from step to step. Michael, his back turned, stood still. She was coming. His heart was beating as ridiculously hard as though he were a lover waiting for his sovereign, his lovely goddess. And he knew most certainly that the coming of this old lady did matter to him as much as all that, perhaps more, for by letting him stay or sending him away she had it in her power to save or damn him. So he believed, and though his power of self-dramatization had led him into disaster time and again it had at other times given him a sure instinct for the moment when he should play the hero for his own advancement. He stood for a moment, visualizing her, the swishing silk dress the same deep ruby as her jewels, her small hand holding it up in front above the pattens, the dark waves of it caressing the stones behind, her peacocks one on each side.

  He turned slowly, gracefully, dramatically, ready to bow, and found himself confronting a large white pig. The shock was so great that he bowed to the pig. “Michael Stone, you are the most unutterable ass,” he said to himself and bowed again, this time with exaggeration. Then he bowed the third time with real admiration, for it was the most remarkable pig. To his town-bred ignorance a pig was a dirty repulsive brute, and this rosy porcine beauty was a revelation to him of what a pig can be.

  “Don’t let Josephine go down those steps,” called a husky voice.

  Recovering from his shock he was aware that the swishing sound continued, and taking his fascinated eyes from the pig he looked up and saw the most peculiar old woman swishing away at the nettles behind the rosemary tree with a stick. “The slope is steep down to the river,” she continued. “Remember the Gadarene swine?”

  “I often do,” Michael called back. “I’m full of devils. Have you a large herd?”

  “No,” said the old woman. “A small one. But they are not to receive your devils, young man. Far too valuable. I show them. That is why I am exercising Josephine. Keep your devils to yourself if you please. These nettles have got a real hold here. Who are you, by the way? Have you a message?”

  “Yes,” said Michael desperately. “I’d come and deliver it only Josephine seems anxious to go down these steps.”

  “Stay where you are,” commanded the old woman. “Keep your eye on her and I’ll come. Though really you could shout it. There’s nobody here but the sundial and it keeps its secrets.”

  She climbed over the low wall with ease, though Michael perceived her to be of a great age. She stamped her feet on the stones of the terrace, to get the earth off them, and came towards him. She wore a peat brown tweed coat and skirt, pulled out of shape and faded by work and weather, with the skirt reaching only just below her knees, thick brown worsted stockings and a pair of clumping lace-up boots of the type which Michael up to now had seen only in pictures. A battered felt hat was placed well forward over her forehead and skewered into position above the knot of grey hair at the back of her head with a large hat pin that protruded several inches each way. The figure and the headgear, though not the face, reminded him instantly of Tenniel’s Red Queen. Her small clawlike hands were grimed with dirt. Yet she herself was delightfully fresh and trim and as she came close to him he could see she wore a blouse of priceless lace, freshly laundered, and that her thick grey hair was carefully brushed and coiled. Her figure was tiny and her little face deeply wrinkled and gipsy-brown, her black eyes keen and sparkling under beautiful arched brows, the sucked in puckered mouth above the
nutcracker chin matching it in iron determination. Michael knew that once she had had great beauty; vital and compelling and very sure of itself. Even now the vitality and assurance compelled him. He had meant to practice his charms upon this old lady, but instead he found himself being hooked and landed by her own.

  “Well now, young man, what is it?” she asked, but though the husky voice was sharp she seemed in no hurry. She did not belong to a generation that had ever hurried. Her tasks might be herculean but she had all the time there was for whoever came. She took a gold cigarette case from her pocket, offered him one and took one herself. As he lit hers and then his own she watched him not narrowly but with a benevolence that was at the same time both keen and gracious. He realized that she had been in her day the mistress of many servants and the hostess of many guests. It had been her life to extract service and give pleasure with equal competence. Adversity might have made an oddity of her now, as something or other or many things had made an oddity of Don Quixote, but her air of kindly command was still that of the great lady and she wore it, as he wore his air of distinction, with unconscious and disarming grace. As from Don Quixote’s manner Michael had been aware of the man’s love of souls so in this old lady he was aware of a dedication to social duty that was selfless in its single-mindedness. To her any guest would be sacrosanct.

  “Sit down,” she said, motioning with her cigarette towards the steps. “If we sit on them Josephine can’t go down them. Also I have reached the age when I’d sooner sit than stand. And you yourself, if I may say so, have been so long standing around in my garden that I wonder you have not sat down before. But you’re young. Now where’s that pig?”

  “She’s gone into the gazebo,” said Michael.

  “She can stay there,” said the old lady. “She’s had her exercise.”

  “Do you exercise all the pigs?” asked Michael weakly.