The Bird in the Tree Page 4

  It was, however, only Lucilla who drank the delicate China tea out of a white and gold fluted teacup of Worcester china, and ate two pieces of wafer bread and butter and one sponge finger: Ellen merely stood looking on at the rite, her bony hands crossed on her black silk apron and her face folded into stern lines of determination. She was very firm with Lucilla over her tea. Lucilla might drink two cups of tea, but no more, and she might not eat less than two pieces of bread and butter and one sponge finger, and she might not feed the cat Tucker, who had her tea in the kitchen before she came to the drawing-room. Lucilla was a very strong-minded old lady, but in the hands of Ellen she was as wax.

  It was because she loved Ellen more than anyone else, except perhaps David, that she permitted herself to be domineered over in this way; for even the strongest succumb sometimes to this luxury of yielding love; it is good to have one person upon earth to whom one gives oneself in submission as a child to its mother. There were other people to whom Lucilla appeared outwardly to yield; to her daughter Margaret, for instance, who was unmarried and poured out upon her mother all the devoted fuss which she would have given to her children had she had them. To this devotion Lucilla yielded. It was, she thought, her duty as a mother. . . . It was also her cross. . . . But her yielding was only skin-deep, given for Margaret’s sake and not for her own, while her yielding to Ellen went right down to the depths of her spirit and was one of the sources of her strength. Without Ellen she would have made a poor thing of her life. Unseen, mysteriously, Ellen’s spirit had always supported hers. The different quality of this yielding was seen in the fact that if Ellen put a shawl over her knees it remained there until Ellen took it off again, but if Margaret put it there she whisked it off the moment her daughter’s back was turned.

  Lucilla was a truthful woman and so she did not mind admitting to herself that she loved Ellen more than any of her children, more than the memory of her dead husband, more than any of her grandchildren; with the possible exception of her grandson David. Ellen knew all her secrets. She knew things about her that Lucilla’s children and grandchildren had never even guessed at, would hardly have believed had they been told of them, things that were a shame to Lucilla, and things that were a glory. Ellen knew all the heights and all the depths. In such knowledge there was peace.

  But that did not prevent her getting very irritated with Ellen at times, especially when, as now, Ellen insisted obstinately upon keeping between them that barrier of mistress and maid.

  “Sit down, Ellen, for goodness sake!” she exclaimed. “Why stand on those varicose veins of yours when the room is full of chairs?”

  Ellen chose an extremely uncomfortable chair against the wall and sat gingerly upon the extreme edge. Her eyes were mutely reproachful.

  Perhaps she was right, thought Lucilla, pouring out her second cup of tea. Perhaps Ellen’s insistence upon the outward forms of respect added to the richness of their relationship. On second thought, she was sure that it did. On Ellen’s side that outward respect had as the years went by become a habit of mind, so that even though she knew all her weaknesses she did indeed respect Lucilla. And on Lucilla’s side that dignity which as a young mistress she had always tried to practise before her young maid, encouraged and trained in it by that same respect of Ellen’s, had become automatic. Not even when they clung together in grief or pain need they fear now to lose those two attributes of their mutual relationship. And that, Lucilla saw, was good. “You’re quite right, Ellen,” she said with seeming irrelevance. “One should build, as we have done, from the outside inwards.”

  Ellen sniffed with a slight suggestion of sarcasm. All their life together she had been astonished by Lucilla’s perpetual questioning of facts that seemed to her to be obvious. But then Lucilla had been so beautiful always. Facts had come to her softened by the loving determination of others that they should hurt her as little as possible. This had perhaps a little blunted her understanding of them. But upon Ellen they had descended with that uncompromising hardness of impact that the plain woman learns to expect in all her dealings with life. She never questioned them, as did Lucilla, she merely accepted them. It was that acceptance that had made her the rock against which Lucilla leaned.

  And now Lucilla found herself, as often before, thinking about this fact of service. . . . Mistress and maid. . . . She shut her eyes for a moment against the westering sun and pictures of their life together flashed quickly through her mind, little cameos that were bright and living among dark tracts of forgotten time. Very vividly, for a few moments, she lived in them.

  — 2 —

  She was once again dressing for dinner for the first time in her married home. She was tired after the long journey back from Italy where she and James, her husband, had spent their honeymoon, tired and very frightened of her new, austere maid. She had not had a lady’s maid before her marriage, she had shared her mother’s, but now they said that as the wife of such a brilliant young barrister she must certainly have one. She owed it to her husband’s position, they said. There were a good many things, she was beginning to see, that she would owe to her husband’s position that she would not like at all. This London house, for instance, so dark and gloomy after the home in the country where she had been brought up, and the many servants she would have to manage, and the strenuous social life that James was expecting her to lead. Married life was not going to be altogether the earthly paradise that her mother had led her to expect, she thought. She had not liked her honeymoon very much. She had been horribly scared. Her mother had not explained what was going to happen to her, and James had been married before and was so much older than she was that though he meant to be kind he made her feel more like his captive than his mate. She had had to keep telling herself all the time, as her mother had kept telling her during her engagement, how wonderful it was that a man like James, thirty-five years old, a widower, and with a great future before him, should have fallen in love with a little chit of eighteen like herself. She had been very fortunate, for what, her mother had frequently demanded of her during that terrifying engagement, would have happened to her if he had not? One of four daughters, the offspring of an impecunious country squire undistinguished by anything except a gallant death in the hunting field, she would have had to become a governess, she, Lucilla Marshall, the daughter of a long line of aristocratic forbears who had never stooped to do a hand’s turn at anything except losing their money. . . . That would have been her fate but for James. . . . And so, bewildered by her father’s death, by her mother’s arguments and James’ impassioned pleadings, she had got married, and sat in front of her mirror on this first evening in her home with her head held high, her cold hands locked in her lap and her voice very carefully controlled so that her new maid should not see how frightened she was. “It is a cold evening, I think,” she said, and wished that Ellen did not look so like a horse.

  “Yes, Milady,” Ellen answered, though as a matter of fact it was rather warm and sultry. “Will your ladyship wear your white satin tonight, and the diamonds?” And her bony hands, that had been busy arranging Lucilla’s golden curls in the elaborate puffs and coils of the late eighteen-seventies, pressed the girl’s head with a light, tender pressure, so light and so instantly withdrawn that Lucilla would not have known it had happened had it not been for the quick sense of warmth that suddenly ran through her cold body.

  “Yes, Ellen,” she said. “Whatever you think right.”

  And Ellen, looking at her in the glass, had smiled a comical smile that showed all her yellow teeth, and made her look more like a horse than ever; but that yet was full of reassurance. “White satin for a bride,” she said, “and diamonds for joy.”

  And then Lucilla realized that to Ellen this was a great occasion. Vicariously and unselfishly she too was decking herself in honour of a bridegroom. Behind that grim and horse-like exterior were beating all the emotions that should have been Lucilla’s, and Lucilla felt suddenly sha
med and humbled, shamed that Ellen should have been quicker than her to see the inherent beauty of a given moment, humbled by the selflessness of this older, plainer girl who could live the drama of womanhood only through another. She was quick to respond, quick to give Ellen what she wanted. She stood joyously to be decked in her white satin, lingered over the choice of earrings and bracelets, and gave Ellen a shy eager kiss before she went tapping across the polished floor in her high-heeled shoes and laughing down the long stairs to the great drawing-room where her husband waited for her. . . . Ellen, she knew, was leaning over the banisters watching her, listening to hear the greeting that she gave to James, listening for the triumphant rolling of the gong and watching for the processional entry into the dining-room. All through that evening she was aware of Ellen, and all through that evening she made her husband happier than she had done since the day she married him.

  That picture faded and others slipped through the mind of the old Lucilla. Once again she was lying in the big gloomy bed in her big gloomy bedroom in Eaton Square, waiting through hours of undrugged agony for the birth of her first child. She made no sound, for she had been trained to courage, but her mind was a fevered whirl of anguished questioning. Why? Why? Why? Why must she bear this child to a man she did not love, why must she bear it in this pain? And then she became aware of Ellen standing beside her, questioning nothing. With her lips tightly folded and her forehead beaded with sweat, because when Lucilla suffered she suffered too, she was knotting a towel to the bedpost for Lucilla to cling to. But her face was quite serene. There was no “why” about this for her. It just happened to a woman. One accepted it. She gave Lucilla a glance that was almost stern before she was whisked out of the way by the midwife, the proper mistress of these terrible ceremonies. But her glance remained with Lucilla, steadying her through the nightmare that came after.

  It was Ellen, Lucilla thought, as she opened her eyes and the little pictures slipped away from her, who had taught her how to love her children. Upon each babe as it arrived, and there were six of them before Lucilla’s childbearing was over, Ellen poured out such a passion of maternal love that Lucilla herself had at last caught the infection. At first the children had been to her little nuisances who periodically robbed her of her youth, her health and her beauty, but later her mind changed towards them; they became to her what they were to Ellen, the crown and glory of her life. To the last child of all, Maurice, the father of her grandson David, Lucilla had given a love that was considered even by Ellen to be out of all proportion to what a mother should feel for her child; a love that had been, and still was, though Maurice had been dead for twenty years, the great emotion of her life, the emotion through which she had reached out to some measure of comprehension of the glory and the agony that are human existence. . . . And it had been Ellen who at long last had taught her to admire her husband. It had been Ellen’s respectful devotion to him, her appreciation of “the master’s” justice and generosity that had opened Lucilla’s eyes to them. The knowledge came almost too late, of course; James died very soon after she had learnt to appreciate him; but when she came to mourn for him she needed no teaching from Ellen. She had worn her widow’s weeds with an outward correctitude which was for the first time in her life matched by her inward emotions. Ellen had, at last, made of her a woman cut to the proper pattern.

  But was it fair, she wondered now, that she should have had all the substance while Ellen had had only the shadow? And Ellen had been so ready for the substance, so well equipped with the right reactions to all the circumstances of a woman’s life, while she, Lucilla, had been always questioning, always straining away from the things that she must meet and face. No, it was not fair, but yet, in this contradictory world, it seemed the normal thing. More often than not a human creature seemed cast for the role that suited him least. There was a purpose here, perhaps. To swim with the stream was too easy; it was swimming against it that increased one’s strength. But it had surely been hard on Ellen. Sighing, Lucilla reached for the teapot to pour herself out a third cup of tea.

  — 3 —

  “You’ve had two cups,” said Ellen.

  “So I have, Ellen,” said Lucilla, and set back the teapot on the tray.

  “If you’ve finished I’ll clear,” said Ellen, and raising herself stiffly from her uncomfortable chair she lumbered on her flat feet to Lucilla’s side, adjusted her spectacles and bent over to take a firm grip of the tray with her bony hands. Ellen was eighty, two years older than Lucilla, and lifting trays was now for her something of an achievement. It required her whole attention and concentration, and Lucilla hated to see her do it.

  “Why can’t you let Rose clear?” she asked with that irritation which was always hers when in anxiety for those she loved.

  “Rose!” snorted Ellen. “That girl shall not touch our Worcester china while I’m above ground; and when I’m in the churchyard I’ll not lie easy, thinking of her way with a teacup. Believe it or not, Milady, but her notion of washing up is to fill the sink with water and then shoot the whole tray-load into it like rubbish into a dump. I’ve told her and told her, but every word I say to these girls goes in at one ear and out at the other.”

  “It’s very trying, Ellen,” agreed Lucilla. “But we must remember that we are very lucky to have kept Rose so long. The servant problem is so very acute in the country, and so very trying for Miss Margaret.”

  It was indeed; the more so that Ellen did not get on with the modern servant. Her standard was too high. They could not, like Lucilla, learn to adjust themselves to it. . . . And so they usually left at the month, and Margaret did their work until others were found.

  Ellen snorted again, then carefully raised the tray of Worcester china and bore it, as a priestess a holy relic, towards the door.

  “How I love you, Ellen,” cried Lucilla impulsively. “Was I irritable just now?”

  “I’m used to it,” said Ellen.

  “Better than anyone else, I think, Ellen,” said Lucilla.

  Ellen paused at the door and her face creased itself into its rare, slow smile. “Master David will be here in half-an-hour,” she said.

  “What? So soon?” cried Lucilla, and was instantly in a flutter. Her face flushed a delicate shell-pink and her hands went instinctively to her white hair to see that it was tidy. Ellen sniffed. The extravagance of Lucilla’s love for her grandson David, as for his father before him, always slightly irritated her. It was out of proportion. It was not quite the correct reaction of maternity. It was almost more the love of a girl for her lover. . . . And Lucilla was seventy-eight.

  “Tell Rose to make fresh tea as soon as Master David comes,” said Lucilla.

  “He don’t take tea,” Ellen reminded her. “Only cocktails.”

  “Not in my house,” said Lucilla with sudden heat. “The grandsons know perfectly well, Ellen, that I will not have those horrible drinks, those Sidecars and Highballs and whatnot, shaken all over the place between meals. A glass of wine with their dinner, yes, and a whisky and soda if they’ve got wet out shooting, but no more. They know that, Ellen.”

  “Ah,” said Ellen, and departed out, closing the door with a little more noise than was actually necessary.

  “She’s jealous,” thought Lucilla.

  But there she misjudged Ellen, who was never jealous of David. She slammed the door because she was in a bit of a hurry, having forgotten to see if the necessary ingredients for the kind of cocktail beloved of David were put ready in the cupboard in the dining-room where Lucilla never went. She knew all the tastes of the grandsons in regard to drinks, and never confused them. Sometimes her conscience reproached her a little at this deception of Lucilla, but these qualms were rare, and she did not let them worry her. She had been an excellent disciplinarian in her youth, and was so still with the children who lived in the house, but the others she just wanted to have what they liked. Lucilla wanted them to have what they like
d too, of course, but only if it was good for them. Ellen did not care a rap if it was good for them so long as they enjoyed it.

  Left alone Lucilla laughed again, a clear girlish laugh that was echoed by the little gold clock on the mantelpiece jubilantly chiming half-past four. Another half-hour to wait; or more probably three-quarters, for he was always later than he said he would be. Lateness was a matter of principle with him, she thought, for he knew quite well, the rascal, that he was one of those who are always waited for with a beating heart. There was no need for him, as for less fortunate ones, to woo popularity with punctuality and consideration. He could, and did, trade upon affection. That was wrong of him, of course, but she could not scold him because she had done the same when she was young. She remembered how, in London, when she was at the height of her beauty and popularity, she had always been careful to be the last arrival at a party. It had been such fun to hear the sudden thrilled little silence that fell at the announcement of her name, to walk slowly down the long drawing-room with every eye upon her, to feel the envy of the women and the admiration of the men. . . . And how it had annoyed poor James. . . . But she had grown out of that, as David would, for the acceptance of homage, she had found, gave no permanent satisfaction; it was better to give it; what is given to you you are always afraid will one day cease to be given but what you give you can give forever. Life had taught her that at long last.

  And now that she was old she found so much to call forth her homage. Now that she had to count her springs they burned for her with a glory to which she could not give less than worship. She felt that she could almost pray to the sun as it warmed her, and to human kindness when she met it she had hard work not to bend the knee. Above all did she worship youth, especially the youth that had flowed from her own life. This, she was aware, might be called a perverted form of egoism; but she did not think it was; for though they were life of her life she regarded her adored grandchildren with a certain detachment. The gulf of time was so wide between them that she could not fully share their thoughts or their outlook, their torments or their battles, which were of their generation and not of hers; she could only love them and tend them and make for them a refuge to which they could fly when those same thoughts and struggles had wearied them beyond endurance.