The Rosemary Tree Read online

  “I’m sorry,” said Michael. “And I was reported drunk? Have you a particular affection for drunkards?”

  “Not at all,” said John. “But I’m the vicar, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Michael. “Of Belmaray? Is it a large parish? If it is, and there are many drunks, and your sense of duty is what it appears to be, your time must be much occupied.”

  John was delighted to see the man was enjoying himself, pulling his leg. His impish humor was now entirely in the ascendant, and he looked young as he laughed. But why was he drifting along the roads of the world in this hungry, well-dressed and peculiar fashion? “I find it hard to preserve an attitude of Christian charity towards those who ask questions,” he said.

  “Not being a Christian I don’t have to,” said Michael.

  “What is your attitude towards the inquisitive?” asked John anxiously.

  “I knock them down,” said Michael.

  “You have a fine imagination,” stated John gently.

  “Why is that so obvious?” asked Michael.

  “A deduction from your tendency to exaggeration,” said John. “You will like Belmaray for it has its exaggerations also. The name comes from the French—belle marée—the river is tidal there and very lovely. Beyond the village it widens and runs down to the sea between banks of rhododendrons and azaleas that my great-uncle planted. They are flame color, rose and gold. They look wonderful from the manor above. He spent a fortune on them. He’s been dead for thirty years but the village still remembers him and calls him the ‘mad squire.’ ”

  Michael cocked an interested eye in John’s direction. “Are you lord of the manor as well as the parson?” he asked. “I know I’m asking questions but I’ve already ascertained that your only reaction to them is Christian charity.”

  “Technically,” said John. “For many reasons it is not possible for me to live there. My great-aunt lives there.”

  “Is she as mad as your great-uncle?” asked Michael.

  John considered the question seriously, striving for a truthful answer. “I think most people would consider her to be unusual,” he said at last. “I don’t. I did not consider my great-uncle mad; only a little peculiar at times. I think the fact of the matter is that we are rather an odd family but we seem quite normal to each other.”

  Michael was chuckling now and his eyes were twinkling. Talking to this Mad Hatter of a parson (upon further acquaintance he seemed to Michael a perfect blend of the Mad Hatter and Don Quixote) was the first entertaining thing that had happened to him in years. First that experience of beauty upon the bridge, then a good meal, and now this comic relief. Where exactly was this lost valley, ringed about with these high hills? It was not in any world that he knew. In what country did a river of mother-of-pearl slip to the sea between banks flaming with rhododendrons, while up above them an old woman with great rubies in her ears lived with her peacocks and spiders in the splendid dust of a ruined house, and walked the tangled paths of a mad garden full of roses that had known no pruning knife in a hundred years? In no country of concrete experience, only in some country that his soul had known. If John had the gift of recreating before his mind’s eye a face he had seen in a few quick glances, Michael out of chance phrases and flashes of beauty had always in old days been able to build for himself his country of escape. “Rest and ease, a convenient place, pleasant fields and groves, murmuring springs, and a sweet repose of mind.” Cervantes had known the same country, and had doubtless retained the power to create it even in the midst of misery, so great were his own interior riches. But Michael’s imagination had always been dependent upon exterior bounty, and cut off from that he had been cut off from his country too.

  “Flame color, rose and gold,” he said. “No white ones? Not the yunnanense?”

  “Just where the river turns there is a stream that comes down from the hills and makes a small waterfall,” said John, “and there is a white rhododendron growing beside it, but I never knew its name. Are you a gardener? Forgive me! That’s one of my opening gambits with newcomers to the parish. One must say something. It was only a rhetorical question.”

  “So it can be answered,” said Michael. “I know how to prune roses to an outward facing bud and I know wistaria grows eastward to greet the rising sun. I know potatoes are planted on Good Friday and if I’m not quite sure which way up to plant a bulb I’m not above taking advice.” He looked mockingly at John. “Could you recommend me to your great-aunt as a gardener? What fun to prune her roses for her and grow daffodils to fill the jardinières in her crimson salon. Has she jardinières and a salon? I feel that she has, even if only ghosts frequent it. Forgive me, it was only a joke. Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Daffodils,” said John miserably. “I’ve forgotten them. I was to have picked daffodils for my wife. Did a car pass you on the road when I was at the farm?”

  “I didn’t notice it,” said Michael. “But then I was not in a very noticing frame of mind.”

  “She may have stayed to do some shopping in Silverbridge,” said John. “Perhaps I’ve time yet.”

  They were nearly at the vicarage gate and he strode along so fast that Michael decided that the pleasure of his company, though great, was not worth the effort entailed in keeping up with him. “Good-bye,” he said firmly. John halted at once and swung round. “Good-bye. Thank you for an excellent breakfast.” He held out his hand but John did not take it. The distress upon his face struck Michael first as comic and then as profoundly moving. The man looked as Pharaoh might have looked watching the death of his son, his grief carved upon the high nobility of his acquiline face and biting inward, so that the lines of the face sharpened and the hollows deepened. And all because he must say good-bye to a strange vagabond whom he could not invite to his house for fear of his wife, and whose condition he could not discuss because the vagabond resented questions. Michael formed a swift mental picture of John’s wife; older than he was with greying hair skewered back in a bun, shrewish, houseproud, and insistent that her husband’s quixotic charity should function out of doors only. Of the mental suffering of a truly charitable man he had no conception, for he had little experience of true charity, but he perceived it to be in circumstances such as the present extremely great and all the more moving because of the human weakness that marred it. For the man had not courage enough to say, “Come in and spend the day with me,” and take the consequences with his wife. Michael was so moved that he doubled back upon the path of his escape and returned to the place where he had been when he fled from recognition. He would not deceive this man. Even though cowardice had halted Don Quixote’s hospitality he must know whom it was he had wanted to ask into his house.

  “My name is Michael Stone,” he said, pronouncing the words with almost a touch of insolence, so great was his shrinking. “Michael Stone. You don’t know it, of course,” he added with bravado, and then meeting John’s puzzled eyes he nearly choked on a sudden gust of nervous laughter, for both insolence and bravado had been quite unnecessary. Michael Stone had never been heard of in this lost valley. Or else he had been forgotten already. Or else he had never been so important in any valley as he had hitherto liked to believe. “I won’t leave Belmaray without seeing you again,” he said with sudden gentle humility, looking at his shoes. “I give you my word. And don’t worry. My luck’s going to turn.”

  He raised his hand and swung away up the lane and round the corner by the forge and the elder tree. John turned in at the vicarage gate reassured. Michael Stone would keep his word. Then he broke into a loping run and five minutes later was picking daffodils with the headlong haste of remorse.

  Powerless to stop him Harriet watched from her window, as earlier she had watched Daphne picking with the haste of anger, and had been powerless to stop her either. To Daphne she had longed to cry, “Give him time to remember,” and to John she wanted to say, “Give her time to forget.�
� But she could not get the window open. They never gave each other time. The nervous irritation of the one and the nervous anxiety of the other, meeting head on, were the source of all their clashes; and of their indigestion too. “Nerves,” thought Harriet, “we never had them when I was young. Tinned food and aeroplanes. Strawberries at Christmas and travelling faster than sound. Flying in the face of Providence don’t give the stomach a chance. Dear God, why can’t they laugh at each other? There’s a yaffingale laughing.” She folded her hands under her rug. “Dear God, why can’t they let that laughing bird teach them a bit of sense?”

  2

  Annoyance never impaired Daphne’s artistic skill. With her whole being flaming with resentment at John’s forgetfulness, the boredom of the country, too large a house, too little money, too much work in house and parish, too little strength, she could yet arrange daffodils and pussy palm in stiff vases as no other woman could arrange them; beautifully, delicately, something of her own beauty seeming to fuse with theirs, her conscious life mingling with their unconscious being, so that it seemed that they took of her willed striving towards perfection and made it their own, and gave her in exchange something of their own serene obedience to the law of their being. . . Gradually, as she worked, her resentment died away and acquiescence took its place. It was quiet in the church and she heard a yaffingale laughing.

  She had always had this gift of correspondence with natural beauty, especially with flowers. It was not the same thing as John’s gift of sympathy with the creatures and with humanity, that caused him so much pain, for in her correspondence there was only pleasure. Her pain always came from inside herself, from her resentment of the contrariness and frustration of life, while his came most often from outside himself, growing inevitably from his compassion. It was a simplification of the difference between them to say that to the selfish comfort comes from the external things, while to the selfless consolation comes interiorly, but that was the way Daphne put it to herself. She reverenced her husband even when he drove her wild.

  She finished arranging her flowers, slipped into the vicarage pew and sat down, her hands in her lap. It was always to her own seat that she gravitated when she found herself alone in the church. She had no love for the thing, for it had been especially designed to produce a maddening ache in the small of the back, and all the draughts in the church, and there were many, met about her ankles, but it was hers, the cranny in the rock that was her appointed place, and unconsciously she clung to it.

  “The cranny in the rock,” she said to herself. In her thoughts of the church where she had so unwillingly worshipped week by week for ten years imagination had hitherto played little part, for they had been irritated and practical thoughts concerned chiefly with draughts and crumpled surplices, but now as the dimness of the church weighed upon her eyelids, and her weary body relaxed against the hard wood, pictures of the church rose in her memory, and it was each time as a rock that it rose.

  She was in the manor house garden, on the day John had brought her to see Great-Aunt Maria after they had got engaged, standing in the paved court by the rosemary bush, and she looked down and saw the church below her with its square Norman tower, its buttresses and walls foreshortened by the height upon which she stood. It looked a rock down there in the valley, with the sea of leaves washing about it. In the dilapidated house behind her there might be an old woman who did not like her and with whom she would never get on, resentful as she was of what she considered Aunt Maria’s selfishness in letting John maintain her in the manor house, but what were the animosities and resentments of women compared with the permanence of the rock down below? No more than blown spume.

  She was in their boat on the river, paddling the children home from a picnic, in those days when Harriet had still been able to do much of the work of the house and there had been time for picnics, and saw the church towering up above the trees in their spring green, beyond the golden kingcups that enamelled the banks of the Belle Marée. It was not foreshortened now, a rock washed by the sea, for she was looking at it from below, but one of those “hills whose heads touch heaven.” Such cliffs are full of hiding places. “The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats: and so are the stony rocks for the conies.” She was as restless as any mountain creature, beating herself against the bars of her mistaken marriage and her lost valley. But neither could the rock go free. It must remain immovable if the wild creatures were always to find it there, as she must stay where she was for her children’s sake; her little girls whom she had not much wanted. She did not like girls, or women either for that matter. She was a man’s woman, and had longed with desperation for a son.

  She was struggling towards the church on a winter’s evening, ankle deep in one of those rare snowfalls of the sheltered valley, tired out after all the Christmas parish parties and rebellious that she must leave her warm fireside in such weather just because it was Sunday evening and she was the parson’s wife. Why should parson’s wives always be expected to be in church upon every conceivable occasion? A butcher’s wife was not expected to haunt the butcher’s shop, or an auctioneer’s wife to sit beneath her husband’s rostrum listening to his eloquence with bated breath. “And it’s not as though my religion ever brought me any joy,” she thought. “Since I married John I’ve tried to believe what he believes and that’s all there is to it.” If any of her prayers had ever been answered, if Aunt Maria could have had the decency to tell John to sell the manor house so that they need not be so wretchedly poor, or if she had had a son, it might have been different. But how could one rejoice in a God of granite who paid not the slightest attention to what one said? Granite. The church was built of granite, heavy, cold, dead stuff. Absorbed in herself she turned the corner unexpectedly and there it was, black and massive against the snow but pouring out warm glowing color from the gashes in its great walls. The snow was rosy where the glow touched it and gold seemed to spill down the stone. She had a swift impression of fire in the rock and was scared for a moment or two. Even when she quickened her steps with grateful thoughts of light and warmth the remembrance of fire did not quite leave her and at the back of her mind she remained uneasy.

  And here she was inside the rock, lodged in her own particular cranny within the permanence, the shelter, the strength and fire. Rock of Ages. The only thing she liked about that sentimental old hymn, to which John was so tiresomely attached, was the story of how it had been written. She liked to think of that man creeping into the cleft of the rock in the Somersetshire valley and taking shelter there from the storm, sitting hunched up inside (she had seen it and it was such an uncomfortable cranny, as uncomfortable as this of hers) while the rhythm of the storm beat out the verses in his mind. She thought the verses doggerel, but she could never sing them without hearing the roll of thunder and feeling a thrill of fear.

  While I draw this fleeting breath,

  When my eyelids close in death,

  When I soar through tracts unknown,

  See Thee on Thy Judgment Throne;

  Rock of ages, cleft for me—

  What was the time? Her watch had stopped. . . There was that laughing yaffingale again. . . Bother the time. For once in a way she was feeling peaceful, and happy, she who was always so depressed and restless. Seeds blow into crannies in the rock, dead-looking brown things hardly larger than grains of dust, and then unbelievably flower into snapdragon and valerian. It was miraculous how such gay things could grow in the rock. And if she stayed here much longer it would be miraculous if there was any lunch. She got up quickly and turned, seeing before her a blaze of red and gold, the flowers that grow from seeds in the rock, and just coming through the doorway was John with his arms full of daffodils.

  She looked so gay that he thought suddenly of the sparkling apple tree. Fresh from some experience that had been happy her joy shone about her still as though she was enclosed in one of those spheres of light that had hung upon the tree. The moment wa
s ripe for one of their clashes, but it did not come. She was seeing him as part of a rock that glowed with warmth and color and he was seeing her made one with the miracle of the tree. . . And he had brought the daffodils too late. . . The incident seemed to them not annoying but humorous and they burst out laughing. Behind John, out in the churchyard, there was a flash of scarlet and green as the merry yaffingale flew laughing by.

  Chapter 3

  1

  Their laughter reached their second daughter Margary and eased her wretchedness. She did not know that they laughed, but even separated from them she was never unaffected by their moods and actions. She was one of those children who cannot detach themselves from their parents and the shelter of their home. Had she been a fledgling sparrow it would have taken the united efforts of both parents to heave her over the side of the nest. Had she been a kitten she would always have been down at the bottom of the prickly pile, with the rest on top. Daphne, equally despairing over her and irritated by her, could not imagine how she would ever survive boarding school, how she would ever be launched in a career of her own. She would stay at home always, Daphne feared, perpetually underfoot, and when her parents died she would develop into one of those old maids who sit forlornly in draughty cottages, surrounded by mementos of the past, and talk incessantly about the old home. Daphne disliked old maids and felt that to be the mother of one would be the final humiliation of her life of humiliations.

  John felt differently, for Margary was his favorite child. He was not irritated by her incompetence, her lack of beauty or her present terror of all that existed beyond her home, for in her he saw again the child he had once been himself. And he did not fear eventual loneliness for her, for he knew the preciousness of the single state. . . The cell, and the sunlight moving on the bare wall. . . He had chosen it once, knowing it the life for him, and then had come the ending of Daphne’s engagement to some young rotter whom he had never met, and her despair, the despair of the girl whom he had loved all her life, and to serve her he had shut the door of the cell behind him with himself outside. He had lost his cell yet, paradoxically, it existed now somewhere within him. He believed that in dying he might leave it to Margary as other men leave their daughter a material house. When she was old she would go in and find peace. He did not fear for her old age, though he did worry over the stretch of time that lay between, for she had his temperament and he knew the burden that it was to bear. His whole being was one great apology to her.