The Bird in the Tree Read online

  And there Obadiah’s constructive memory gave out and the story abruptly closed down. No one knew what had happened to the unconscious captain, whether he had lived or died, or what had happened to the girl and her unborn child, or the blue bird either. Obadiah’s grandfather, apparently, had never got any further in his narrative than the song the blue bird had sung to him when he carried it ashore. At that point he appeared to have lost interest, or Obadiah had lost interest, or else, as Ellen declared was the case, Obadiah had made the whole thing up and was the most shocking old liar she had ever come across in all her born days. The other villagers, when closely questioned by the children, protested their total ignorance of the whole affair. They could not remember over a hundred years back, they said, and their grandfathers had not been as communicative as Obadiah’s. . . . Nor such liars neither.

  Yet there was the cornfield, mysteriously sprung up all by itself in the marsh. Every year the queer stunted blades pushed their way up, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. It was never reaped, for it was useless stuff, a mere travesty of what corn should be; so it fell and died and from its death fresh life sprang again, year after year, curiously persistent.

  The villagers, of course, had their explanation all ready. In the angle of the rutted lane was the real cornfield, that had been there ever since they could remember. One spring some young sower must have taken it into his head to throw a few handfuls of his precious seed to the marsh. Daft young idiot! He must have known that marsh ground was no soil for good wheat. Wasting the seed that way! The sun must have got to his silly head.

  But Ben did not believe that theory for a moment; and nor did David, with whom he had frequently discussed it. For both of them had often watched, with souls caught up in delight, the lovely unwearied ceremony of the spring sowing in that field. They had watched the old-fashioned plough that was still used at Fairhaven pass up and down, John Barton guiding it, to drill a straight clean furrow for the precious seed, and the two horses, Daisy and Florence, working with him in a steady patient rhythm that nothing seemed able to disturb or break. Back and forth they would go, turning at each furrow’s end with a jingling of harness and a wheeling and rustling of the white wings of the gulls who followed after, but they never stopped until dinner time, and they never permitted any unusual act to mar the perfect order of events. Their work was as unbroken a thing as the rainbow that in those March days so often curved over the field in benediction.

  And it was the same with Jack Hobson who sowed the seed on fine mornings when the sky was wide and pale after shed rain. He too went faithfully back and forth, his arm moving ceaselessly in that constant divine gesture of generosity, the seed sweeping fanwise from his hand to glint like gold in the sunlight before it fell. It was impossible to imagine that such men as these should break the rhythm of their work by such a disorderly act as throwing seed in the marsh. It was impossible to think it of them. Their work was part of the swing of the seasons and it diverted not a hair’s-breadth from its appointed course. Why, there was even a local saying which declared that “If when corn is sown a cast is missed, the farmer is doomed, or else his man.”

  No. The story of the wrecked grain ship was true. And so was the unconscious captain lashed to the mast, and the blue bird in the brass cage who sang as it was carried over the water to safety. For the hundredth time, as he lingered now with the Bastard to look at the cornfield again, Ben reiterated his faith in these things. He believed them. They were a part of him.

  It was autumn now and the corn was ripe. In the field in the angle of the lane it was cut and standing proudly in golden stooks, waiting to be carried away to make the bread that fed the world; but across the road in the marsh the stunted stalks stood uncut and the pale grains waited only to drop to the earth unwanted. As the wind passed over them they rustled a little desolately, and Ben’s heart suddenly ached intolerably for that unwanted, ungarnered gold, and for the great ship that had gone to its death in this place. The field was its grave and the uncut whispering corn its epitaph. He wondered what it was saying. “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die. . . .” He had heard that somewhere, but he couldn’t remember the end, and suddenly he forgot that he had been unhappy and began throwing stones for the Bastard. He could throw much further now than he had done a few months ago; he could send a stone clean over the field into a patch of sea-lavender beyond. David would be pleased.

  — 5 —

  “B.F. 193,” said Tommy, sucking his pencil loudly and winding his legs tightly round the gatepost in an agony of composition. “E.H. 25. T.A. 340. Caroline, what was that bus?”

  But Caroline, squatting among the camomile daisies, with her pink skirts billowing round her, was paying no attention. She was talking to the camomile daisies, telling them how pretty they were with their golden faces and white bonnets, and how they mustn’t mind being turned into tea because in this world we are all of us forever being turned into something else and we’ve just got to put up with it. “I was a baby once,” said Caroline, “and now I’m a big girl. Soon I shall be a grandmother and after that I shall be an angel.”

  “How do you know?” asked Tommy the materialist, “I don’t believe there are any angels. A.B. 59. They’re just a make-up of Grandmother’s. C.W. 10. We’re just eaten up by the worms when we die and that’s all there is to it U.V. 590.”

  But Caroline was not disturbed, because she was not attending. Just as she seldom conversed with her fellow humans, talking only to flowers and herself because flowers and herself never contradicted her, so she never now paid the slightest attention to what they said to her. In her earlier days she had done so, but at the age of four she had realized that to those as desirous of peace and quiet as herself it was better not. The remarks of others, she had found, were invariably disturbing. Either they told you to do what you didn’t want to do, or they told you not to do what you did want to do, or, like Tommy at this moment, they endeavoured to undermine your nice ideas about angels with unpleasant ones about worms. So it was much better not to listen.

  She tied a piece of grass round her bunch of daisies and sat down beside Pooh-Bah, with her arm round his neck and his woolly cheek held tightly against hers, while she tried to recollect something that she had thought she wanted to say to him. She did occasionally talk to Pooh-Bah, as well as to flowers and herself, because he and she were of exactly the same age, five and three-quarter years old, and this gave them a certain sympathy with each other. No one year is ever quite the same as any other year, and the souls whom it cradles through their first months on earth are of a particular vintage and know each other when they meet. Caroline and Pooh-Bah, being so young, could both of them still just remember a place where they had lived before they were born upon this earth, and sometimes they talked about it together in whispers, generally towards evening when the blackbird was singing in the ilex tree.

  For Pooh-Bah and Caroline knew quite well that it is at times and in places of transition, at that moment of the sunset or the dawn when it is neither night nor day but both, or out in the marshes where there is neither sea nor land but a mingling of the two, that the veil slips a little between one world and another and for one brief moment one belongs nowhere, neither to day nor night, to land or sea, in this world or the other. At these moments it made little difference to Pooh-Bah or Caroline that the soul of the one was encased in golden brown fur and the soul of the other in pink freckled skin. They forgot these slight physical differences and cheek to cheek they communed together of the things about which the blackbird was singing.

  The gulls told about these things too, as they wheeled over the marshes, and the plover in the reeds by the front door when he cried out like a shrill trumpet in the dawn, but they were not as explicit as the blackbird. In the gulls’ cry there was a note of warning and in the shrillness of the plover there was something of a challenge; but the blackbird at evening seemed to have no fur
ther need of courage or of struggle; he forgot about them for the moment and sang only of that which they win.

  It was of something the blackbird had said yesterday, something about a blue bird, that Caroline wanted to talk to Pooh-Bah. Suddenly she remembered what it was, lifted her cheek from his and put her lips to his ear. He pricked it and rolled a sympathetic amber eye in her direction.

  “M.V. 590,” shouted Tommy above their heads. “Gosh! Look! There’s David!”

  The bonnet of a silver-grey car had nosed its way round the corner of the lane, like an animal smelling its way home, and a humming contented throbbing sound rose in the quiet of the lane. The engine of the car was purring as though it was happy, and the silver racing greyhound on the bonnet, flashing in the sun, seemed to take a leap forward as though it saw the end of the journey. Forgotten was the blue bird, forgotten were those passing cars upon the high road with the important numbers plastered on their tails, forgotten was the well-bred dignity of a long and royal line of Chinese ancestors. With one wild bark Pooh-Bah was on his feet and rocketing down the lane like any vulgar mongrel. With a surprising shrill sound like a train whistle, instantly stoppered by the insertion of her thumb, Caroline was after him, easily outdistanced by Tommy who leaped from the top of the gatepost clean over her head and reached the bonnet of the car neck and neck with Ben, whose long strides had brought him flying up from the cornfield at the first shout. But it was the Bastard who was the first to leap through the opened door of the car and land heavily upon David’s chest, the Bastard mad with excitement, ears flapping, legs flying and tail half out of its socket with its agitation. David dropped his arms to his sides, closed his eyes and lay back in the driving seat, suffering with passivity the Bastard’s muddy paws upon his chest and the Bastard’s long pink tongue swirling over his face with a circular motion which though of an extreme rapidity left no particle of the countenance of the beloved unmoistened. It was always better to suffer the Bastard thus, so the Eliots had discovered. If one endeavoured to dodge the expression of his affection, or stem the torrent of his love, it but prolonged the agony. Expressed the Bastard’s feelings must be, lest he burst, and it was best to get it all over as soon as possible.

  Meanwhile the other four surged over David and the Bastard and fell heavily into the back seat. “What have you brought us?” shouted the children, picking themselves up.

  “Sausages,” said David weakly, and felt for his handkerchief.

  He always brought them something amusing. Once it had been a large tin moneybox to encourage thrift in them; but when the lid was lifted there were two white mice inside. And the next time, just in case they were tired of the mice and were at a loss as to how to get rid of them, it was an old boot with a kitten inside, a kitten called Tucker with a white patch under its chin that was subsequently given to Caroline. And the next time it was an exceedingly shrill cuckoo clock. And the next time it was a chameleon and a box full of live spiders to feed it on. And after that Grandmother turned a little difficult and said no living gift could be received in future unless it was a vegetarian, and no mechanical gift unless it could refrain from calling attention to the passing of time by shrill noises in the night. Life fed on life, one knew, and time passed, but Grandmother did not wish her attention called to either distressing fact . . . So now David had brought a string of five sausages with a large pink bow tied in each join. “Pork,” he said. “Quite silent and very nourishing. One for each of you and one each for the dogs. Now, for the love of mike, sit down, and let’s get a move on.”

  Gradually the turmoil inside the car subsided and David, holding the Bastard down with his left elbow, was able to get at the self-starter. There were times when he wished his arrival at Damerosehay could be less like a minor earthquake and more like what it was, the return of a tired man to the place that he cared for the best on earth. . . . Yet he would have missed that riotous welcome in the lane, and by the time they reached the turn by the cornfield the children were generally sufficiently engrossed in their gifts to let him watch in comparative peace for the landmarks that he loved. . . . The car took the corner and he greeted the first, the old cornfield itself, with a leap of recognition. The window beside him was down and he could hear the wind sighing in the shivering, uncut stalks and feel it cold and clean on his skin. Beyond stretched the marsh, crimson and amethyst and gold and blue under the level rays of the sun. White high clouds were passing, sweeping upwards from the far line of the sea, and their shadows swept the marsh like the wind made visible. The old Castle was visible now, and the Island beyond. The car slid on, past the remembered creeks and gullies and the fields where the cows were browsing, past Little Village and the harbour, with the blue swans’ lake beyond. The swans were lying at rest upon their own reflections, and the gulls contemplative upon the roofs of Little Village, but a yacht was speeding out from the harbour to the sea and Clutterback and Charles Beere, Urry and Obadiah Watson, turned slowly round upon the harbour seats and removed their pipes from their mouths. More they would not have put themselves out to do had the new arrival been the king himself. David shouted a greeting to them and their mahogany faces creaked into grins of welcome, which was more than they would have done for his majesty. . . . But then David was David and the most popular of the Eliots of Damerosehay.

  “Everything all right?” he asked as the oak-wood came into sight. He asked the question casually, as he always did just at this bend of the road, but Ben sensed the undercurrent of anxiety in his tone. David could never come back to Damerosehay, Ben knew, without that shadow of a fear that something might have been changed and the old rapture of homecoming not be quite the same. Ben understood. That was the worst of going away, like David had to. If you stayed at home, as he did, you knew that everything you loved was safe; day by day you watched over it, and if something had to change a little it changed so gradually that it did not hurt.

  “Everything’s all right,” he hastened to assure David. “Tucker’s had a kitten; at least I think she had six but something seemed to happen to the other five; and Tommy has smashed his mug with the robin on it, but that’s all that’s different.”

  “I didn’t smash it,” said Tommy indignantly. “I just threw it at Ben and he ducked so that it hit the wall. It was his fault. If he hadn’t ducked it wouldn’t have hit the wall.”

  “I can bear it,” said David. “I wasn’t keen on that robin; too like Lloyd George. I suppose I’m too late for the butterflies on the michaelmas daisies?”

  And again there was anxiety in his tone and again Ben grieved for him. For David had been away all the spring and summer. He had missed the gorse on the marsh and the fruit blossom in the kitchen garden. He had missed the shut-eyed stage of Tucker’s kitten and all the victoria plums. He had missed Grandmother’s birthday and Cook’s new hat with the cherries on it that the Bastard ate, and the fête at the Vicarage when the donkey had knocked down the crockery stall. He had, in fact, missed all the beauty and excitement of five glorious months. “But you’ve not missed the butterflies,” cried Ben triumphantly. “The purple michaelmas daisy by the gate had a painted lady on it this morning, and three red admirals and a cabbage. . . . And Tucker’s kitten is called Bib because it has a white patch on its chest like Tucker.”

  And then they spoke no more for they were in the oak-wood. The moss was as velvet beneath the wheels of the car and the trees, bending a little, gathered them in.

  CHAPTER

  2

  — 1 —

  MEANWHILE Lucilla, the children’s grandmother, sat room at tea with her maid Ellen in her fire-lit drawing-room. Her daughter Margaret was at a missionary meeting at the Vicarage and the children had gone to meet David, so only Ellen was with her. She liked this, for a strange peace came over her when she and Ellen were alone. They had been together for sixty years now, ever since Lucilla had come back from her honeymoon, and what they didn’t know about each other wasn’t worth knowing. I
t was their utter knowledge that gave them their happiness together: that and the fact that they saw eye to eye in the matter of always having the window open a little bit but not too much, and always having a wood fire burning in the grate unless there was actually a heat wave on. More happy homes have been wrecked, Lucilla was apt to say, by not seeing eye to eye about how much window to have open than by any other controversy known to man. It is quite possible to live happily with a person who does not think as you do about the eternal verities, but it is not possible to live happily with someone who wants the window open when you want it shut, or shut when you want it open, or with someone who likes a fire when you don’t, or doesn’t like it when you do. Lucilla and Ellen were utterly at one about the fire. The Damerosehay drawing-room was beautiful, but it was damp, and it was no good saying it wasn’t. Lucilla and Ellen didn’t say it wasn’t. . . . They lit the fire.