The Bird in the Tree

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “I can’t help thinking about it at night,” said Ben, “and it makes me feel awful.”

  David felt suddenly cold. Did Ben know already? Had some gossip reached him through the servants? That would be fatal.

  “And I can’t tell Grandmother or Aunt Margaret,” said Ben, “because Obadiah said I wasn’t to. But it’s horrid to know about it all by myself. Tommy knows, of course, only Tommy doesn’t understand how bad I feel about it. Tommy never feels bad about anything.”

  “What do you feel bad about?” asked David.

  Ben did not move but his dark eyes were full of fear and horror. “David,” he said, “Jeremy is buried under the ilex tree, and buried very shallow.”

  The relief was so great that David was utterly at sea. “Jeremy?” he repeated stupidly. “Jeremy?”

  “Yes,” said Ben, “Jeremy Martyn who used to live in this house. He’s buried under the ilex tree and buried very shallow.”

  In his relief David laughed. “Good old Jeremy!” he said. “So that’s where he’s buried? What a first-rate place to choose. I think I’ll be buried there when my time comes.”

  “It’s horrible!” said Ben. “It’s horrible!”

  “Not at all,” said David. “While he’s lying waiting for the last trump he can listen to the blackbird singing. . . . Not that one would hear the last trump through that blackbird.”

  “He’s buried very shallow,” repeated Ben in a monotonous voice.

  David perceived that Ben was really in the grip of horror, and stopped laughing. “Tell us about it, old man,” he urged. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Grandmother and Aunt Margaret went away for the weekend,” said Ben, “and Alf and Obadiah were working in the kitchen garden, and there was no one to see what we were doing in the flower garden, and so Tommy thought it would be fun to make a dug-out under the ilex tree.”

  “A dug-out?”

  “Yes. To put Grandmother in if there was an air raid.”

  “Even if war should come, which God forbid, there’ll never be an air raid in this back of beyond, old boy.”

  “Tommy hopes there will be. We’ve made one dug-out already, behind the rubbish heap in the kitchen garden. It’s a bit smelly but then it’s only for the servants.”

  “Well, go on about Grandmother’s dug-out.”

  “We worked frightfully hard, and we got the grocer’s boy to come and help a bit on the Saturday. His brother is the gravedigger, you know, and so it’s in the family. We dug the whole weekend. It had rained a lot and the ground was very soft. The dogs dug too, and the deeper we got the more excited they were. The Bastard was dreadfully excited all Sunday. He got down in the hole and he just scratched and scratched.” Ben stopped, shivering.

  “But you didn’t uncover anything, did you?” asked David, catching a little of the horror.

  “No,” said Ben, “but we would have if Obadiah hadn’t found out what we were doing on Monday morning. He was dreadfully angry. He said we were just exactly over where Jeremy was, and Jeremy wasn’t in a coffin and was buried very shallow.”

  “Obadiah,” said David, “is an old liar.”

  “Oh no he isn’t,” said Ben. “He buried Jeremy there himself, and the old parson, the one who was here before Uncle Hilary and was very eccentric, read the burial service over him. Jeremy had wanted to be buried under the ilex tree. He was eccentric, too, you know. He wanted to be buried there so that he could listen to the blackbird, like you said, and he wanted to be buried shallow, and not to have a coffin, so that it would be easy to get out on the judgment day.”

  “The more I hear of this tall story,” said David, “the more unlikely it sounds. If ever there was an expert liar in this world it’s Obadiah. Hasn’t the old scoundrel told us time and again that no one in Little Village knows where Jeremy is buried?”

  “But Obadiah says they do,” said Ben. “The whole of Little Village knows about Jeremy. But they decided not to tell Grandmother and Aunt Margaret because they know Grandmother likes to sit under the ilex tree, and it’s very near to the drawing-room window, and they thought she might feel upset if she knew that—that—David, what do people look like when they’ve been buried for twenty-six years?”

  David got out of bed, put on his dressing-gown and pulled Ben out of his strained Indian yogi position to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. The little boy was trembling all over.

  “So that’s the trouble, is it?” he said gently. “After twenty-six years, Ben, and no coffin, there’ll be nothing left of Jeremy but a nice clean respectable skeleton. You’re not frightened of skeletons, are you?”

  “Yes,” whispered Ben. “I saw pictures of them once. They’re horrible. They grin. Obadiah has horrible pictures of dead bodies and skeletons in a book at his cottage. I saw them. I think about it in the night.”

  “What do you think about in the night?”

  “About what the people I love will look like when they’re dead. Father and Mother and Grandmother, and you and Aunt Margaret, and Ellen, and Tommy and Caroline. You’ll look like the people in Obadiah’s book.”

  “Now look here, Ben,” said David strong-mindedly, “it doesn’t matter a damn what people look like when they’re dead because they’re not people anymore. A body is like a suit of clothes. When it’s finished with it’s thrown away and the soul that lived in it goes off somewhere else. You don’t worry about what’s happening to your old clothes, do you?”

  “It’s not a bit the same,” said poor Ben. “Not a bit. You and Grandmother and Mother, you’re beautiful. I like to look at you. I can’t bear it that—that—” He stopped. “I think about it in the night,” he finished lamely.

  “And you the eldest son of a V.C.,” said David, applying bracing treatment. “If your father had let himself get scared of death in the night he wouldn’t be a V.C. now.”

  “No,” whispered Ben. “No. And I shouldn’t be afraid if Father was here.”

  David felt stabbed. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I never felt afraid of things when I was with Father. When he went out I used to feel afraid, and I used to hide on the verandah and watch for him to come home. Then when I saw him coming I used to run and meet him, and when I was very small he used to put me on his shoulder. One felt very safe with Father.”

  David came to a decision. “Now look here, Ben,” he said, “I’ll tell you what to do when something you have seen has frightened you. You don’t run away from it, you look at it again. Any fear, when you face it instead of running away from it, turns out not to be so bad after all. Those pictures of Obadiah’s terrified you, didn’t they? You wouldn’t have been so upset by Jeremy if you hadn’t seen them?”

  “No,” whispered Ben.

  “Well, we’ll go out to Obadiah’s cottage and look at those pictures together. I’ll explain them to you and then, you’ll see, they won’t frighten you anymore.”

  “No!” cried Ben, and he began to sob. “I can’t look at those pictures again! I can’t! Not ever!”

  “Shirker,” said David. “Coward.”

  Ben began to tremble again. He trembled for five minutes, as a thorough-bred dog trembles, but his voice was quite steady, though muffled, when he spoke. “I’ll come,” he said. “We could go this afternoon. It’s Saturday and Obadiah is always out at his cottage on Saturdays. He does his own garden then.”

  “Then we’ll go this afternoon. You’re a fine fellow, Ben. Proud of you. There’s that confounded cuckoo shouting again. What’s the time?”

  Ben counted. “Eight.”

  “Eight? Go and turn on my bath.”

  Ben slipped off the bed and vanished like a blue shadow. David searched wearily for sponge and shaving things. He seemed to have been talking for hours, and it was going to be a brute of a day. In the morning there would be Grandmother and her reactions to the Nadine a
ffair to be coped with, and in the afternoon there would be Ben and his skeletons. Yet in spite of his weariness and apprehension there was a tiny gleam of interest flickering in his mind. What was this terrifying book of Obadiah’s? And how much more, that he had never told, did Obadiah know about the former owners of Damerosehay? Like Lucilla, David had always wanted to know more about Jeremy and Aramante. He would pump Obadiah. He would pump him hard. . . . The cheerful sound of running water told him that the obliging Ben had turned on his bath and with almost a feeling of impending doom he sallied forth to confront the new day. . . . The first time in his life that he had confronted a day at Damerosehay with foreboding.

  — 3 —

  It was an understood thing that on his way down to the dining-room he should visit the children at nursery breakfast. On his way there, in the passage, he encountered Margaret on her hands and knees.

  “Have you dropped anything, Aunt Margaret?” he asked.

  “No, but I thought I saw a spider,” said Margaret.

  “Did you want a spider?” asked David politely.

  “For Queenie,” said Margaret.

  “Queenie?”

  “That chameleon you gave the children. She’ll eat nothing but live spiders. It’s very difficult to keep her supplied.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” ejaculated David. “Can’t the children catch the spiders?”

  “Children are very difficult with their pets, dear,” explained Margaret “They’ll feed them with great enthusiasm for a fortnight but after that they lose interest. They like the pets, of course, but they won’t be bothered with the commissariat.”

  David fell silently to his hands and knees. He was too penitent to speak; he could only spider-hunt. He had presented the children with two white mice, a chameleon, and a cat that had taken to heart rather too literally the divine command to replenish the earth. . . . And Margaret had the bother of them.

  “I am sorry, Aunt Margaret,” he said at last, lying flat to take a particularly juicy spider by the back leg from beneath the wainscot. “What a lot of trouble I’ve given you.”

  “It’s quite all right, dear,” said Margaret patiently. “This is an old house, you see, and spidery. I don’t know what we should have done if we’d lived in one of those modern chromium-plated things. Poor Queenie would have died, I think.”

  “And a good riddance,” said David savagely. “I wish that cuckoo clock would die. It kept me awake all night. Was it always so noisy?”

  “Yes, dear,” said Margaret. “It was always very noisy. I think that will be enough. I’ve more in this tin.”

  David inserted his spider into the toffee tin with a perforated lid that was Queenie’s larder, got to his feet and sighed. It struck him that though he might be, after Lucilla, the most beloved member of the Eliot family yet he was, what with one thing and another, an inveterate troubler of its peace. And he didn’t want to be that. He wanted to be the preserver of it. With a face of gloom he followed Margaret into the nursery.

  It was a cheerful place, looking west over the kitchen garden. It had a blue oilcloth on the floor, and a blue wallpaper decorated with white ducks hurrying to some invisible enchanted pond. The windows were curtained with blue curtains patterned with white butterflies and across them were very ancient iron bars that had been there before the Eliots came, showing that this room had been a nursery before. Another child had leaned out of these windows, holding the old iron bars with fat hands, watching the unfolding of the apple blossom in the garden below and laughing to see the gold of the sunset spread behind the tall pear tree. David could dimly remember how in his own rather lonely nursery days he had created for himself a little dream boy who played here with him; he had felt along the window bars for that other boy’s hands and listened for his voice shouting in the garden.

  The Eliot nursery was in some ways more like a zoo than a nursery. In one corner of it was stabled Job, the rocking horse who had in turn carried all Lucilla’s children, then David and his dream-child, and now Ben, Tommy and Caroline. Job was worn with his patience. His tail and mane had disappeared completely, his eyes were filmed with age and his once glossy dappled body was faded and dented. Yet, round about sunset, he could go as fast as ever. He creaked abominably, it is true, but he could fling back his head as gallantly as ever he did, paw the golden air with his feet and arrive at the gate of the city of dreams in a mere twinkling of an eye. He could not go so fast at other times; it was sunset that inspired him.

  Next to Job dwelt Snowflake and Lily, the two white mice, in a little house with a knocker on the door. They were beautiful and much loved and they had not been given as food to Tucker, according to David’s original outrageous suggestion; though Tucker, dozing with the kitten of the moment before the fire, always kept one green eye half open and glinting at them in a way which made them a little nervous.

  Queenie lived in a sort of miniature sheep-pen on a table. She was incredibly ugly, though she seemed not to know it. In the table drawer was her wardrobe, a selection of coloured handkerchiefs upon which she was displayed when visitors came to the nursery. Smiling fatly she was placed upon each in turn and would turn red, blue, green or pink as the case might be. She had on the whole an amiable character and never failed to oblige.

  “Auntie!” cried Ben, as Margaret and David entered, “hurry with the spiders! Queenie’s dreadfully hungry!”

  Queenie certainly seemed much enraged. She was racing round her pen lashing her tail and looking exactly like a crocodile. When she was in a bad mood she looked like the worst kind of crocodile and when she was in a good mood she looked like the nicest kind of lizard. Like all of us she had a higher and a lower nature. The children thought that when she got to heaven she would always look like a lizard.

  Margaret took the lid from the tin and spilt the unfortunate spiders into Queenie’s pen. Out shot her long serpentine tongue and they were licked up. It was like a conjuring trick. One did not see them go. They just went. Bulging with repletion Queenie sank to rest in the corner of her pen.

  “It’s a revolting sight,” said David. “Simply disgusting.”

  But the children, their porridge spoons suspended in mid air, were chuckling with delight. Queenie’s meal was a sight of which they never tired. It seemed to give them just the right start to their breakfast.

  Ellen always presided over nursery breakfast. She was behind the teapot now, standing no nonsense, for though she could be wickedly indulgent with the older grandchildren, who came to Damerosehay on visits, she was not so with the younger ones who lived there. She knew her duty. Bits of porridge couldn’t be hidden beneath the spoon when Ellen was there, and on haddock mornings the loathly creature had to be finished up to the last flake. The feeding of young Eliots had always been Ellen’s duty for somehow Lucilla had never been lucky with Nannies. They never seemed to stay. They didn’t seem to like being taught their duty by Ellen. They went, and Ellen once more reigned supreme in the nursery, assisted by one of those battered nursery maids, loving and devoted, who never give notice no matter how bullied they may be because they belong to the rare company of those who love little children; really love them; love them when they are dirty, greedy, noisy and rude, love them through bilious attacks, colds, measles and the whooping cough. Of these the world is not worthy and of their blessed company was Jill, the present holder of the office.

  She was seated by the window, darning Tommy’s tattered socks. She had lately staggered up from the kitchen with the loaded breakfast tray, and would presently stagger down with it again. She was thin, round-shouldered and pasty-faced, but very tough and wiry. She had far too much to do, Ellen used her as an outlet for any bad temper she might happen to be feeling and Tommy teased her unmercifully and tried out upon her all his newest inventions in practical jokes. But her life was not without its compensations. Alf walked out with her on Sundays, and was one day going to marry her, and betwee
n her and Caroline there was a quiet understanding companionship that was one of the best things that either of them had in their lives. She did not look up when Margaret and David came into the nursery; she did not even glance under her eyelashes at David’s good looks, as Rose the parlourmaid would have done; she was absorbed in her work for the ungrateful Tommy . . . who had his back to her and unseen by Ellen was ladling his porridge into the marmalade pot. Jill, he knew, would not give him away.

  The boys greeted David with torrents of conversation, quite as though they had not met this morning, but Caroline only gave him a shy smile and went on eating her porridge very slowly and daintily. She wore a white bib with a pussy on it, but she never spilt anything, out of consideration for the feelings of the pussy. Tommy, on the other hand, breast-plated with humpty-dumpty sitting on the wall, was always a horrible sight down the front. Ben wore no bib. He was too old for such things.

  “Don’t stay, dear,” said Ellen to Margaret. “I’m having trouble to get these children through their porridge. . . . Sausages excite ’em. . . . And I’ll trouble you, Master David, not to bring home sausages again. Too heavy on the stomach, as I’ve told you time and again.”

  Tommy leapt to his feet. “I’ve finished my porridge,” he yelled. “Bags I the burst sausage—the big one.”

  “Now! Now!” said Ellen. “Ask properly or you’ll get nothing. . . . There’s the gong, Miss Margaret, love.”

  Margaret and David went downstairs. Lucilla, who thought it a weakness of the flesh to have breakfast in bed, was already behind the silver coffeepot in the dining-room, worn and heavy-eyed. She had slept badly. With each striking of the cuckoo clock through the night David’s trouble had taken on more and more alarming proportions. She was convinced, by the time her early tea came, that he was suffering from some incurable disease. The only question which now remained to be decided was, which one. A great uncle upon her husband’s side of the family had died of diabetes, and her own great-grandmother had fallen a victim to an interesting decline, but otherwise both families had enjoyed an almost vulgar healthiness. What could David have? Something he had picked up on the stage, no doubt. She had always considered the stage a most unhealthy place; no fresh air, too many drinks, late hours; it had been entirely against her wishes and advice that David had had anything to do with the thing. And now look at the appalling result of disregarding her wishes. There was always disaster in the family when her wishes were disregarded. She was grieved that it should be so, but such were the facts.