The Bird in the Tree Read online

  But with the tail of the Bastard it was not so. The Bastard’s tail was tremblingly responsive to his every mood, and his moods were many. Pooh-Bah was so proud that he never permitted himself even to feel a weakness, let alone to show it, but the Bastard, un-upheld by the arrogance of race and beauty, felt many weaknesses and showed them all. He was frightened, he was unhappy, he was penitent, he was anxious, he was passionately loving, he was shy, he was coy, and his tail, like a dirty uncurled ostrich feather that has seen better days, trembled, drooped, rose, fell, waved, rotated, or disappeared between his hind legs altogether, according as these emotions ravaged his faithful breast. For faithful the Bastard undoubtedly was. In spite of the extreme nervousness of his highly-strung temperament he would have died in defence of the Eliots because he loved them, while Pooh-Bah would have died for them only because they were his sacred property. The Bastard’s loving faithfulness was very visible in his appearance, shining in the liquid depths of the dark eyes that gazed so appealingly out of the curious mat of whitish-grey hair that was his face, and dripping in streams of saliva from the end of the long pink tongue that he lowered out of the side of his mouth in moments of emotion. He always dribbled when he loved people; he couldn’t help it, but it made him a little unpopular in the drawing-room. For the rest, he was a large dog with flapping uncontrolled ears, sprawling legs that didn’t seem to belong to him and a lanky body enveloped in tangled whitish-grey fur that had a slightly moth-eaten appearance. He had come to Damerosehay ten years ago as a puppy, having been deposited upon the back doorstep by persons unknown but thought to be of gypsy origin. Some thought he was of sheepdog ancestry. Others suggested elkhound crossed with pomeranian. Some few detected a flavour of collie with a dash of Skye terrier. The vet made no suggestions; the problem, he said, was beyond him; but the dog was a sweet-tempered dog, and faithful, and let them thank God for that.

  Which they did. The Bastard was a part of Damerosehay as no dog had ever been, or ever would be. Exiled Eliots could never think of the marshes that stretched between the oak-wood and the sea without picturing the Bastard’s busy body rabbiting through the rushes and the gorse. They could never dream of the ilex tree in the garden where the blackbird sang without seeing him sitting beneath it, pursuing insects upon his person, the sunlight striking down through the ilex leaves and patterning his white fur with a delicate diaper of light and shade. When they thought of Grandmother sitting in her black silk beside the drawing-room fire the Bastard was always lying at her feet, his chin propped upon her shoe and his lustrous eyes rolled upwards in expectation of a sugared almond. And when they thought of the rutted lane that led down from the main road to the marshes, and the cornfield at the corner that was as the first sight of home, it was the Bastard whom they saw flying to meet them, his uncontrolled ears flapping with ecstasy and his feathery tail streaming on the wind.

  — 3 —

  It was streaming now, as he led the van of the party that was racing to welcome David. They were through the oak-wood in a flash, and out of the broken gate that divided the demesne of Damerosehay from the village. That gate had not been mended for years. It stood open always, propped back with a stone, and would stay like that till it fell to pieces altogether. For why should Damerosehay shut itself off from the village and the marshes, the harbour and the sea? It didn’t want to. It loved them. It lay encircled by them as a jewel in its setting. And it was a strange feet that only those who went to Damerosehay upon their lawful occasions ever passed through the open gate into the oak-wood. Trespassers and sightseers had never been found within it. They stood at the gate and looked in, often, but their feet did not carry them from the hard surface of the village road on to the thick green moss of the drive. There was something about those oak-trees that gave them a queer feeling. They felt warned off.

  Perhaps it was because they looked like people, and not normal people either, but gnarled, misshapen gnomes. Their trunks were covered with grey lichen, which made them look as old as time, and their branches were so twisted by winter storms that they looked like deformed arms with long clutching fingers stretched out in incantation. And the trees were blown all one way, as though they bowed towards the house of Damerosehay. Beneath them the grass grew thick and rough and tawny, jewelled in the spring with gold and purple crocuses that were the brightest that anyone had ever seen, and the moss on the drive was so thick that it hushed every footfall to silence. There was seldom any sound in the oak-wood except the talking of the trees themselves, for the birds preferred the sheltered garden to build and sing in and passers-by in the wood never talked. But the trees said a good deal. In the spring, when their old branches were jewelled with flame-like coral-tipped leaves, they whispered together of the secrets that they knew, secrets that if communicated to the passers-by in the wood would have taken all sorrow from their hearts forever. And in summer, when the warm rain pattered on the polished dark green surface of their full-grown leaves and their branches swayed rhythmically in the soft wind from the sea, they would sing beneath their breath a song about a far country that they knew of. The raindrops on their leaves were the words and the wind in the branches was the tune, and it ought to have been easy to overhear, yet not even Grandmother had succeeded in catching more than the echo of it. In winter they prayed and they meditated, or they cried out in anguish for the sorrow of the world. On windless days their grey heads were bowed and their knotted fingers, held up to the sky in supplication, were utterly still, but when the storms rushed in from the sea they wrung their hands in anguish and when night fell they screamed and moaned so loudly that sleepers in the house of Damerosehay woke up in sudden terror, conscious of the powers of evil abroad in the world and of great wings that passed in the night. . . . And then in the morning there would be a great quiet and the trees would stand exhausted, sodden with the rain, maimed and torn, with gashes showing white upon their branches and broken twigs strewn about their feet, yet at peace and triumphant because they had been for their people a bulwark against evil, and those wings that had passed in the night had done no harm. . . . Undoubtedly they had two faces, these trees. No Eliot, and no friend of an Eliot, could pass beneath them and not feel arms protectingly about them, and friendly hands leading them on to the inner sanctuary of the house and garden. But strangers were warned off and came no further than the broken open gate; for the trees could not feel certain about them, they could not know if they would bring to Damerosehay good or evil.

  Outside the gate was Little Village, containing the Shop and Coastguard Station, the Eel and Lobster, a few cottages and some houses belonging to rich folk who came in the summer for the yachting. Big Village, where abode Uncle Hilary and the Church, was some little way inland and was reached by a narrow winding lane where sloes grew and hips and haws were scarlet in the autumn sunshine. Both villages were really the same place, Fairhaven, but they were as different as chalk from cheese, and very jealous of their own particular attractions. Big Village, lying in a small valley and sheltered from the wind, had whitewashed thatched cottages ringed about with pasture-lands, haystacks and prosperous farms. It had several shops, a petrol pump and a graveyard, and thought a lot of itself in consequence. It had a parish room, too, and a hoarding with advertisements on it, and its gardens were packed full of all the flowers that grow.

  Little Village was quite different. Its houses, like the house of Damerosehay, were built of solid grey stone that knew how to withstand the onslaught of the winter gales, and roofed with grey slate patched with yellow lichen. Its gardens, unprotected by high walls like the garden of Damerosehay, had little in them except the feathered tamarisk trees with their foam of pale pink blossom, and fuschia bushes strung over with swaying lanterns of red and purple. But what did Little Village want with gardens? It looked out upon the harbour, and to right and left of it, stretching away to the far silver curve of the sea, were the rainbow-coloured marshes.

  Little Village considered that if you saw the
harbour you saw Life. There were no less than two seats upon the harbour wall and here the old salts would congregate in their off moments, smoking their pipes and blinking their old eyes at the sun; John Clutterbuck and Charles Beere the coast-guardsmen, William Urry from the Eel and Lobster and Obadiah Watson who lived right out in the marsh and who helped Aunt Margaret and his grandson Alf, the Damerosehay gardener, with the weeding and the pruning. Anyone who liked could sit with them discussing the bloody government, spitting accurately and with vigour into the bright waters of the harbour, and doing nothing else at all (beyond occasional adjournments to the Eel and Lobster for refreshment) from the time the sun got up till the time it went to bed again. . . . Nothing at all but listen to the sound of the incoming tide slapping against the harbour wall, and watch the broken fragments of light caught and cradled within each curve of the wind-rippled water. Kυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα the Greeks had called those fragments of light, so David had told the children. “The many-twinkling smile of ocean.” Precious they were, and beloved of seafaring folk since the dawn of the world.

  In summer the harbour was always gay with colour. The tamarisk trees grew right up to the wall and clumps of sea-asters grew between the seats. The harbour itself, and the creek that wound away through the marshes to the sea, were dotted with fishing boats and yachts rocking at anchor, their hulls painted blue and green, and their sails, tightly folded to the slender masts, looking like white lily buds folded about a flower stem. Yet it was only in repose that the sails reminded one of flowers, when they blossomed from the masts and the yachts sped down the creek to the sea they were no longer flowers but wings, their every movement a gesture of utter joy. Busy they were, and important, as they sped about their business. Man had made them and they shared a little in the self-consciousness of their creator.

  It was because it was so full of white wings that Fairhaven was such a happy place; wings of the yachts, of the seagulls, and of the swans who divided their time between the Abbey River, several miles to the eastward, and the blue lake in the marsh where the sea-lavender grew. White wings are forever happy, symbols of escape and ascent, of peace and of joy, and a spot of earth about which they beat is secure of its happiness.

  The passing and repassing of the swans was one of the events of Fairhaven, something so lovely that no one ever got used to it and no one ever failed to look up when they heard the rhythmical powerful beat of those great wings approaching from the eastward. The swans would fly one behind the other in perfect formation, their long necks stretched out as though they yearned for the place where they would be, their flight, so different from that of the yachts, as unselfconscious and as unhurried as the wheeling of the sun and moon upon their courses. When they saw their blue lake the head of the foremost swan would point downwards like the head of an arrow that turns again earthwards, and with a slow sinuous movement, that was difficult to follow even though it enchanted the watcher, the whole long lovely line of them would sink towards the water with tense necks relaxed into grace and white wings folded. Then, immobile, they would become, like the furled sails, no longer wings but flowers.

  And the gulls were quite different again. They, too, were unhurried, but when they were in flight their movement was unceasing and seemed without the direct purpose of that of the swans. All day long, sometimes, they wheeled and cried above the marshes, their wings seeming to trace some mystic pattern over the earth and sea and sky, their crying like the crying of prophecy or incantation. And then suddenly they would fall silent and unstirring, sitting hour after hour beside the lake, or perching in a solemn line upon a roof-tree, heads all pointing one way and one foot tucked up. They seemed to be dreaming then, or brooding upon the mystery of the pattern that they traced over the earth and sea and sky. Sometimes they flew inland, but they returned always at night to sleep within sound of the sea. That place where the mystery of the earth met the mystery of the sea was in their charge, perhaps. Their crying and the beating of their wings had some purpose in it. They protected the marshes as the oak-trees in the wood protected the demesne of Damerosehay.

  With Little Village upon their right and the harbour upon their left the children ran on until the coast road brought them out again into the open. Now they had the earth world upon their right, ploughed fields and wind-blown hawthorn hedges, and pasture-lands where fat black and white cows placidly chewed the cud, and upon their left the mystical half-world of the marshes that linked the earth and sea.

  These marshes were streaked with colour like a painter’s palette. There was the gold of the rice grass and the mauve of the sea-asters and sea-lavender, and the pools and channels that at high tide gave back the blue or flame or primrose of the sky above them, and at low tide flung back the light from the smooth mud-like polished surfaces of steel and silver. Gorse grew upon dry patches of the marsh, and red sorrel and golden saxifrage, and the glasswort, a spongy sea-weedy plant that could take every shade of colour from crimson to deep purple. Patches of bright green grass appeared now and again, with plovers sitting on them, and rushes bent in the wind with a soft cool sound that was indescribably peaceful.

  With the sea to the south and the Estuary to the east the marshes, Little Village and Damerosehay had water upon two sides of them. They lay between sea and sea, doubly protected, while at the junction of sea and Estuary, reached by a long causeway of shingle, was the ominous grey mass of the old Castle, lying crouched upon the water like an animal on guard. And beyond the Castle was the Island, white cliffs leaping superbly from the sea and green fields sloping to the quieter waters of the Estuary. To the west of the marshes a high shingle beach piled itself up between Fairhaven and the world beyond, adding to its height with every storm, determined that what was outside should not get in.

  At the corner by the cornfield, where the coast road swerved sharply to the right and became the rutted lane that led to the main road, you could know what you were protected from, for looking beyond the protecting shingle you could see the very distressing bungalows that formed the suburbs of the sea coast town of Radford beyond, and if you listened very hard you could just hear the sound of the traffic passing on the main road at the end of the lane.

  Tommy, whose tastes were of a material type, was always fascinated by these rumours of the great world. Today, there being as yet no sign of David, he left Ben by the cornfield and ran up the lane to the place where he could sit on a gate and see the cars passing and established himself there to enter their numbers in a little notebook. It was very important, he said, that he should do so. He was going to be a policeman. Pooh-Bah went with him to watch the cars for Pooh-Bah also was of the earth, earthy. Caroline went too, not because she liked the cars but because camomile daisies grew in the lane and she always picked a bunch of them for Ellen to make into camomile tea for Grandmother’s weak inside. . . . But Ben and the Bastard stayed behind with the cornfield.

  — 4 —

  Strictly speaking there were two cornfields, one in the marsh and the other just across the road in the angle of the lane, but it was the cornfield in the marsh that was the exciting one. For no one had ever planted it. It just grew by itself. Years ago, so said Obadiah Watson, a grain ship had been wrecked in one of the terrible winter gales that now and then, perhaps once or twice in a generation, sent the sea raging in over the marshes with the incoming tide, submerging the rushes and the sea-lavender, galloping like mad horses over the blue pools and the patches of bright grass, leaping sometimes right across the road and attacking the very houses themselves, so that the inhabitants had to fly helter-skelter to their bedrooms and take refuge there until the tide turned. This particular wreck had taken place within the lifetime of Obadiah’s grandfather and Obadiah, by the exercise of a very constructive imagination was able to tell the story as though he had seen it happen with his own eyes only yesterday. It had been at sunset, after a day of storm worse than any they could remember in those parts. It had been a wi
ld sunset with a mad flaming light welling upwards as though the world rocked on the edge of a burning abyss that would presently engulf it. Outlined starkly against that terrible light the terrified inhabitants of Little Village had seen the great ship driving towards the marshes. She had been a merchantman, a splendid ship of graceful and lovely line and carven prow and poop, such a ship as Little Village had seen launched time and again at the shipbuilding yards on the Abbey River, where the greatest ships of the century were conceived in the minds of Hampshire men and wrought out of the labour of their blood and bones. Yet she was utterly lost, driven before the storm, two of her masts down and her spars and tackle, that had once lifted themselves in such beauty against tranquil skies, a tangled mass of wreckage upon her decks. They could see how the waves broke over her and how she was heeling over, her cargo perhaps shifted by the buffeting of the storm, and they could see the figure of her captain apparently lashed to the mainmast. A great groan and cry went up from Little Village, echoed by the wind and the screaming gulls; and then they all started running, for they could see where she was heading for; she was being driven straight across the marshes to the hideous bank of shingle on the west.

  They could not go by the road for the sea was right across it, but they fought their way through the drenched fields on the other side and reached the corner by the lane just in time to see the tortured ship shiver into stricken stillness, her prow wedged in the shingle and her keel held fast in the mud of the marshes. The inhabitants of Little Village had the same courage then as now. They hurled themselves into the swirling water and swam out to the ship. They saved the few passengers and the crew, including the unconscious captain, who was found to have a leg broken and his head injured by a falling spar, and they rescued from his cabin a young girl big with child, who was lying in his bunk large-eyed with terror but not crying out, and a blue bird in a brass cage who was singing away as though all that had happened was quite in order and nothing but what it had expected. It was Obadiah’s grandfather who had saved the blue bird, concerning himself with its welfare rather than that of the girl because it was the prettiest bird he had ever seen, with a very bright eye to it, and the song it sang to him as he waded ashore with it, holding it high up over his head lest it should wet itself, was the prettiest he had ever heard. But the cargo they did not save. It was dark by the time they had got the last man ashore and they thought more of getting the poor creatures to warmth and shelter than of what might be in the ship’s hold. In the morning it was too late. The ship was breaking up and the seas had raked her from prow to stern. They saved only some of the fine carving about her prow.