Children at school said that anyone who told a lie might be struck dead like Ananias; one child even knew someone who died that way. You might die in your sleep, too, and Susan was quite glad to awake alive.
Each morning she prepared for the worst. She left the house for school feeling she might never see her parents again; little conscience voices continually warned her. She kissed them ‘Goodbye’ with such deep affection they were quite touched by her devotion, and she cried ‘God bless you’ so fervently, like a pastor blessing his congregation, running back up the hill to say it if she forgot, that Mrs Garland felt her prayers had not been in vain.
Every evening she was thankful to see them again, to find the house not destroyed by earthquake or fire, the dog still in his kennel, the cows in the fields. Equally thankful, too, she was that she had not been spirited away in the wood on the way home.
Life was uncertain, strange and unreal, but she had so many secret friends she could not be sad. In the house the clock and dresser shared many of her joys. The high-backed chair in the corner with the carved face in the back and the blue and white check cushions, was glad when she sat on it. The four-legged stool on which generations of servant boys had perched, its seat worn by many corduroy trousers, the big oak cupboard, the Chinese jugs, and the teapot with an old woman on the top, even the hole in the floor recognized her and spoke.
But the clock was the most human of all, the clock which had never been moved except for the annual cleaning since her great-grandfather had dragged himself up on petticoated knees and peeped through the little bull’s-eye window, with the brass frame, at the shining pendulum wagging to and fro. Susan had known it to stop and listen, too, when she sat alert for the sound of a wolf snuffling at the door on a winter’s night. Sometimes it sighed so audibly that Susan’s heart ached, and it grunted and wheezed like an old man when the weather was stormy and rheumatism was about.
When Susan’s grandfather had died it stopped, and would not go again until after the funeral. It knew a lot, it had stood there when cattle plague raged on the farm and destroyed every animal, when tragedy visited the house, when fever and death took away the old and the young, whom only it remembered. It was alive, that clock, and Susan’s friend.
8
Trees
Trees had always had a strange fascination for Susan, ever since she had lain, an infant wrapped up in a shawl, in a clothes basket in the orchard, babbling to the apple trees and listening to their talk. They are queer, half-human creatures, alive yet tied to the ground. Lucky they are tied, too, for rooted they are safe.
One night Susan dreamed she looked through the big window in the kitchen, past the bright milk cans reared upon the wall, to the stretch of fields rolling up to the crest of hills in the north. She saw a company of mighty trees, beeches, oaks and elms of prodigious size walk over the sky-line, sweeping down the hills to the fields, a giant assemblage of shining ones with branches waving like a hundred arms, vast trunks moving serenely but terribly, and green hair of leaves shaking in the wind.
The cows and horses started up affrighted, her father and mother paled in horror, as they stared with her through the window, and she stood transfixed, aghast, listening to the approaching rustle like the sound of the sea, waiting for these gods to destroy the house and farm, as they walked through them to the hills of the sky in the south.
She awoke in great fear, and told her dream the next day. Margaret called it nonsense, a nightmare, but Tom looked serious, he knew the trees, and had heard a cry when the woodmen cut down the great oak where the plantation now stood, a cry of anguish.
But the ash, Susan’s friend, was none of these. It stood free-growing, graceful, with branches tossing like the arms of a dancer, when the south wind blew across the plough field and orchard bringing the scent of flowers and carrying bees from the skeps under the apple trees.
Cows sheltered under its wide-stretching boughs when the rain beat down the long leaves and the wind came bellowing like a maddened bull up the field from the deep valley and the great hills beyond, lashing its branches and tearing them, so that they lay, with black knotted fingers on the ground. It was sheltered from the east wind and the north by the hills that circled close to it, but the west wind tried to sweep it away.
In the hottest summer days, when haymaking was over, red and dappled cows, and white-faced Herefords stood by its great trunk, frisking their tails, gently shaking their heads, waiting to be called to the milking sheds.
In the winter it stood stark and bare like a naked witch. Then its long arms beckoned and waved, beseeching, imploring, menacing. Susan came to it and talked, she tried to pacify it, laying her cheek against its wet trunk, and her hands on its bark.
But when snow fell it was a white lady, a queen, mysterious, silent, desiring nothing, possessing all.
One summer day Susan lay under its branches, listening to the multitude of sounds around her. At the edge of the field, in the wood, the fir trees moaned like waves on the seashore, as if they had a little wind of their own chained to their boughs, but under the ash the wind sang softly. The sycamores quivered their silver-lined leaves, nodding to those who could understand. Flies droned and bees hummed, and little green frog-hoppers bobbed on her hands with the tiniest thuds of their geometrical bodies. The pulse of the wind dropped so low every few seconds that she heard the faint flutter of flower petals dropping near her on the grass. By the side of the bridle path the gorse pods popped like fairy cannons shooting the grasshoppers.
Against the background of the wind’s sound was the music of birdsong, chirps and twitters, quavers and ripples. One little bird ran down the scale, and another sang a tiny monotonous dirge of two notes, ting-tong, like water dropping from a well.
Another sound, very faint but familiar, began to penetrate her consciousness. She put her ear to the ground to listen, and the tinkle was more distinct. Near by was a flat stone which she had seen before, half hidden in the long grass, sunken in the earth so that the mowers’ scythes were unharmed when they went over it. She raised one corner with great difficulty, using all her young strength, and the sound rose like imprisoned music escaping from a hidden orchestra. She tugged again and dragged the stone aside. Underneath was a hole, wet, sweet-smelling of earth. Deep down a tiny jet of water played like a fountain, whispering, purling, rising and falling, curved and flowing like a mare’s tail of glass, down in the dark ground. She covered it again with the stone, the secret the ash tree had always known.
In the same field close to the path was an oak, a rough giant, with boughs as thick as any ordinary tree trunk. Its great girth was surrounded by a seat on which generations had sat to love, to plan, to weep. Smock-frocks and crinolines, old bonneted women, tired old men, babies and careless children had leaned back against the bole, with its medley of knots and humps. It was full of ghosts.
Three times it had been struck by lightning, but the tree remained a splendid creature, dignified by the name ‘The Oak’, as if it were the only one, instead of one in hundreds. It was Susan’s nursery. In cavities in its sides she kept her toys, and from the shoots springing from the round bosses she hung her pipe of elder, and her triangle. In the hollows between its roots she made a kitchen with acorn food and a bed of leaves.
A swing hung from one great horizontal bough, and here she spent many hours. In the dusk she came, when the snow was thick on the ground, and the air cut like knives, and in midsummer she lolled there with a book. The tree was on the edge of a sudden dip, a steep fall into a valley. Susan felt like a bird swooping across the fields, only to be pulled back to the tree again.
But twice the tree had tried to kill her. The long iron chains jerked treacherously one day and threw her off. She fell with her head on a piece of rock jutting through the thin bare soil. She was carried home, bathed in blood, by her troubled father and stitched up by the village doctor.
For a time she kept away from the tree, and then she played again beneath it. Weeks later she
sat swinging slowly, looking across the valley to the little white roads which climbed the hills and disappeared over the top. She had never been over them, they led to wild country, where there were no trees, and no rivers, only moorland and waste places.
It was quiet, for the wind had dropped even in that high place, and Susan swayed backwards and forwards, drinking in the peace of the countryside. The birds stopped singing above her head and flew to the lovely ash tree. Only the green moths which lived in the oak fluttered softly round.
Then Susan heard a tiny sound, so small that only ears tuned to the minute ripple of grass and leaf could hear it. It was like the tearing of a piece of the most delicate fairy calico, far away, hidden, deep, as if an elf were making new sheets.
She took no notice, but an absurd unreasoning terror seized her. The Things from the wood were free. She sat swinging, softly swinging, but listening, holding her breath, always pretending she did not care.
Her heart’s beating was much louder than the midget rip, rip, rip, which wickedly came from nowhere. She looked up at the tree, but there was nothing, no motion, not even a bird who might have made the sound deep in his tiny throat, as he whispered to himself a tune.
A voice throbbed in her head, ‘Go away, go away, go away,’ but still she sat on the seat, afraid of being afraid.
Then aloud, to show Them she was not frightened, she sighed and said, ‘I am so tired of swinging, I think I will go,’ and she slid trembling off the seat and walked swiftly away, the blood drumming in her ears, drowning the exquisitely small sound.
Immediately the rip grew to a thunder like a giant hand tearing a sheet in the sky, and the whole enormous bough fell with a crash which sent echoes round the hills. The oaken seat of the swing was broken to fragments, the rock was split, and the great chains bent and crushed.
Susan stood frozen, bewildered, just outside the reach of the tree. The bough lay like a full-grown oak, torn off, fresh, quivering, the oak tree stood inimical, hating, and Susan never moved.
From the farm Tom Garland rushed out, followed by the men and Becky. The dog barked, and the horse and mares galloped across the fields.
‘Susan, Susan,’ shouted Tom from the gate. ‘Susan,’ he cried, trembling with fear as he came to her, ‘I thought you’d been crushed to death. What happened? How did you escape? I heard the oak drop its bough with a noise of a house falling, and I hardly durst look; I knew you were swinging.’
Susan never answered as she was led away.
‘It was God that took care of her,’ said Mrs Garland. ‘He warned her,’ and she took the child in her arms on the rocking chair and rocked to and fro.
Susan kept silent, she could not speak of Them, they might hear, but old Joshua said, ‘Trees are like that, they drop without warning when they want to kill.’
The other oaks were friendly; Susan climbed their branches and played among their boughs. The beeches, too, with their low-dipping whispering branches loved her. There were two in particular which grew by the side of a cow path, with fox-gloves round their feet. Their trunks were so large that three men could not span them, and their great roots ran along the earth in twists and knots, forming tables and seats, cupboards and caves.
They were the survivors of a wood that had been cut down when Susan was born and planted with oaks and firs, a sinister plantation where foxes and weasels lived. But the ‘beechen trees’ were of different mould, too noble to stoop to scare a child. The first cuckoo perched on the wishing-gate underneath their branches in the spring and called to the echo, ‘Cuckoo, Cuckoo’. Rabbits ran through the wandering roots and made their burrows, red squirrels danced along the high grey boughs, and flashing magpies flirted their tails. Susan sat underneath with her mug of warm milk straight from the cow, with minute gnats imprisoned in the froth, and Becky brought her knitting in the summer. Away in the far pasture was a group of limes which attracted Susan first by the music of their bee-filled branches, and then by the scent of their honey flowers. They were the only limes for miles round, and their discovery was a great event. Three trees sprang from one root, and by stepping on a pile of stones Susan could climb into the green bower and sit lost in a world of leaves.
But the spot was too lonely except for a casual visit. It was more than a mile away, in the last field, on the border of a wilderness of precipitous wood with trees scrambling among masses of rock, dwarf and misshapen trees, long leafless hags of trees, lightning-blasted and ivy-slain trees, with old mine workings under their roots, the pits covered with loose stones and carpeted with nettles and forget-me-nots. A deserted broken-down cottage lay in ruins, with broken walls leering among the bushes, and badgers, foxes and rats made their homes under the ground.
Cries of rabbits made her catch her breath, quiet rustlings of adders startled her as she looked down from her eyrie in the trees.
Sometimes she glimpsed the welcome figure of a poacher, scrambling over the rocky ground, trampling the ferns and sending the blackbirds screaming with rage past the quiet figure in the lime trees, to the sunny fields beyond. So Susan visited these outposts only when she wandered with Becky or her mother, picking mushrooms and blackberries, or when the haymakers were in the neighbouring fields, and the chatter and laughter of the Irishmen drove away all ghosts, but she waved to them, across the intervening fields, beautiful ladies in a hostile country.
In winter she felt as close to her trees as in the summer, and she struggled through snowdrifts to visit them, as they stood white under the freezing sky, waiting for the word. In summer she laid gifts of flowers at their roots, or slipped a posy in their bark, a little offering in return for their friendship, a touch of colour on the dark trunks.
From the grove of silver birch trees, on the edge of Druid Wood, the birch rod, which hung in a corner of the kitchen among the lanterns and stirrups, was cut, and bound with withies. It had a hundred stings, and Susan had tasted it too often to look at the trees with equanimity. She was brought up under the shadow of the proverbs, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’, ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’, ‘Wilful waste makes woeful want’, and they ruled her life.
‘You’ll come to want,’ warned Mrs Garland, when Susan turned up her nose and refused to eat her meat and rice pudding, two things she detested. ‘There’s many a one who is beggar now, going from door to door, through leaving her good food.’
This gave her a fright. Beggars sometimes came to the old Hall, pitiful creatures with broken shoes and ragged dresses. Mrs Garland gave them bowls of hot broth and made them sit down on the steps by the rose trees to drink it whilst she found some more shoes and an old dress or hat for them to carry away. It was so far from the village and the hill such a climb, they deserved everything they got, she said. But Susan trembled to think she might become one of these poor things, and she gulped down her food.
Then one day when she was returning home from school running down the road with some other girls, in a spirit of bravado she threw a bag-smelling crust into the muddy road.
‘I don’t want that silly old crust,’ she boasted, and they all laughed.
She left the children at the village and climbed up the fields to Dark Wood, but no sooner had she entered than the thought of the crust began to trouble her. The trees surrounded her, whispering more than usual, heavy and sinister. Her steps lagged, a pain grew in her breast, a queer miserable pain. If she left that crust she would as surely come to want as night follows day. She couldn’t bear it any longer. She turned round, tired as she was after a long day, and went back. Two miles away she found it lying in the dirt where she had thrown it. She picked it up and rubbed it in her handkerchief, and returned it to her bag. Her heart was light, the wood seemed brighter, although it was quite dark before she got home.
She gave a thankful sigh of escape from certain unhappiness as she crept slowly through the gate and threw the crust to Roger. He gobbled it up and asked for more, but she had learnt her lesson.
Each listened as Mrs Garland read the words from the Prayer Book, the prayer for fine weather or rain, the prayer for the sick, the General Thanksgiving and the Lord’s Prayer. Each one felt safe in the hands of Heaven. Hell was forgotten, God was a father, and His advice was asked over all difficulties.
The room was full of holy thoughts. A dove folded its wings across the ceiling, and peace surrounded them.
9
Lantern Light
The morning air was sweet with autumn scents, falling elm leaves, bent ferns, bruised wet grass, beech leaves and sycamore. Windfalls, from the great tree that was too old and too tall to climb, dropped with little thuds and lay under Fanny’s feet, crunching under her hoofs as she fed on the patch of grass by the gravelled drive.
Everywhere there was a sound of dropping, tiny bumps filled the air, some so soft that only the blackbird heard, the fall of the scarlet fruit from the dark yews, the beech mast littering the woods. The sweet chestnuts bounded on the paths, splitting open and exposing their one sweet kernel and two withered ones. Dan picked them up and ate them, and kicked away the husks. Susan hunted among the leaves and feasted.
Late Glory roses, tea roses with peach-coloured hearts and petals shading to the deepest cream, bloomed on the house, faded, and scattered their brown leaves on the grass beneath. A few chrysanthemums were left, tawny red flowers and little maroon buttons on the green dresses of the bushes.
The Country Child Page 8