David leaned back in the hard Windsor chair and gazed through the sun-warmed spaces of limpid air to the far-off sea. Those quiet yet proud words had somehow touched him very deeply. The artist in him leaped out to meet the artist in this unknown sea captain. It was as though at that moment they were made friends. There is always, he thought, this communion between the men who follow the great professions, doctors, priests, artists and sailors. Those are the selfless professions that demand all that a man can give, even sometimes to his very life, the professions that make him or break him according as he has it in him to give what they demand. David sagged a little in his chair, feeling suddenly overwhelmingly conscious of his own many failures, of the times when as an artist he had aimed rather for personal power than for the power of interpretation, of the times when he had shrunk from giving the last ounce of his strength to his work, holding always a little back through fear of fatigue, of those other times when the applause of a great audience had been too sweet to him. He did not think that other man would ever have shrunk from personal danger, however great the tempest, or that anything whatever would have deflected him from the course he must pursue. David had no real reason for his conviction; yet he had it. For he knew this man, knew him to be courageous, indomitable, yet sensitive and highly-strung too; his drawings showed that; a man who would feel weakness and fear but who yet would never yield to them. In the quiet and silence of the marshes one spirit mutely reverenced the other.
“Ee’d best turn on,” said Obadiah’s voice, suddenly shattering the silence with an almost brutal note.
Startled by it David pulled himself upright in his chair and turned on. There were a few blank pages and then, turning another, he had a hideous, a sickening shock. His mind seemed to reel under it, he felt physical nausea and a sense of terrible desolation. It seemed that he fell quite suddenly from the sunshine to the slime of the pit. Yet he turned on and on, page after page. In spite of his horror he could not stop himself.
What had happened? It was the same artist, possessed of the same genius, but some fearful change had taken place in him. He was seeing the world differently, seeing it with a mind distorted. His pictures now were of death, of agony and despair. They were pictures of war, of famine and pestilence, of cruelty and hatred. David had never seen anything so horrible.
Yet, as his mind grew steadier and he turned back the pages to look at them all again, he found that they were not evil. They were drawn not with a love of evil but a hatred of it. There was a strange mystical feeling in them all that reminded him a little of the drawings of William Blake. In one of them what at first sight seemed a ploughed field waiting for the corn was really a bare ridged plain where each ridge was a long line of dead bodies, slaughtered soldiers laid head to feet unendingly; yet the whole of the sky, that formed the background, was composed of clouds shaped like outspread wings. Another, that showed the corruption going on beneath the surface of a graveyard, showed also a little copse above it filled with singing birds. Undoubtedly these were the pictures of a man whose full sanity had left him but who still retained at the core of his being something changeless that his friends could know him by. David felt that he still knew him, still reverenced him, and in spite of the horror wanted to know him better.
“Obadiah,” he said, “may I take the book? It’s appalling, but I want it.”
Obadiah removed his clay pipe from his mouth and spat significantly. “That’s more’n oi do. Oi don’t want un,” he said. “Never knew ’twas in that dratted clock till after oi’d brought ’un ’ere.”
“Obadiah,” said David, “how in the world did you get hold of that clock?”
“Ah,” said Obadiah, and reinserting his pipe in his mouth closed his old lips on it very firmly.
“Come on, Obadiah,” urged David. “Tell me. It’s between friends.”
“Oi took un, look see,” said Obadiah. “Always partial to that thur clock, oi wur, an’ the old Master, old Jeremy Martyn, did say oi should ’ave un after ’e died. But ’e died sudden loike, an’ thur warn’t no will found. So oi just up wi’ un one evenin, ’afore the lawyer chap ’ad time to get ’ere, lays un on me barrer an’ wheels un out ’ere.”
“Very sensible of you,” said David with a grin. He always had vowed that clock had come originally from Damerosehay. It had a sort of Damerosehay flavour about it. “I’ll not mention it, of course.”
“Ah,” said Obadiah.
“That yarn you told the boys,” said David, “that yarn about Jeremy being buried under the ilex tree; was it just a yarn?”
“True as gospel,” said Obadiah. “Shovelled earth in on un meself, oi did. Don’t ee go fur to tell ’er Ladyship or Miss Margaret, an’ don’t ee let those young varmints, what nearly dug un up, tell ’em neither. Mid a bin all over trimble, them two ladies, look see.”
David was not at all sure that Lucilla and Margaret would be scared. With women, you never knew what would scare them and what wouldn’t. But he promised. There was a lot more he wanted to find out from Obadiah and he wanted him in a good temper.
“Obadiah,” he said, “was Jeremy Martyn any relation to Aramante du Plessis-Pascau?”
“ ’E told oi,” said Obadiah, “as ’e r ’er son. But ee couldn’t pay no attention to what ’e said. Childish, ’e wur, at the last. Put flowers on ’er grave, ’e did, summer an’ winter; grew un special.”
“You never told us that, Obadiah,” said David.
“Ah,” said Obadiah. “No better than ’er should be, from all oi’ve ’eard, look see.”
“There was no husband that you ever heard of?” queried David tactfully.
“Not that oi ever ’eard on,” said Obadiah, and suddenly spat again, reinserted his pipe and shut his mouth upon it like a trap. His old face had a very closed look now, and David saw that he was going to get nothing more out of him. He did not know whether Obadiah’s sudden reticence came from loyalty to the past or a desire not to contaminate the present, or whether it was simply the wish of an old man not to be bothered with questions when he didn’t feel like it. Anyway he realized that as far as Obadiah was concerned the session was now closed, and he got up and held out his hand.
Obadiah got up too, removed his pipe and gripped David’s slim hand in his huge horny one. He was devoted to David. The loyalty he had once given to Jeremy Martyn, and then to Lucilla, he now gave to David, whom from many little signs that he had seen he did not doubt would be the heir of Damerosehay. He was of the old school. This bit of earth, comprising the marshes, his cottage, Little Village and the house of Damerosehay, with the owner of Damerosehay as the symbol of it, was his whole world and had his whole devotion. “ ’Tis good,” he told David, “to ’ave ’ad proper sensible folk in the old ’ouse this last twenty year. Not but what oi weren’t rarely fond o’ the old Master, oi was that, proper good to the poor ’e wur, but ’tis good to ’ave sensible folk. Master David oi ’ope ee’ll be at Damerosehay many a long year. All on us ’opes that i’ these parts.”
He wrung David’s hand hard, then jerked his pipe stem over his shoulder. “The lad’s in wood,” he said. “Goo’ arternoon, Master David. See ee termorrer-day,” and he turned immediately back to his labour in his garden. He could express himself well, with all a countryman’s fine simplicity of feeling, but it was not his way to prolong a sentimental moment.
David, the book under his arm, went into the wood in search of Ben with feelings suddenly grown cold and desolate. He too, like Obadiah, was old-fashioned in his feelings about place and service. It was good to have a bit of the earth that was really your own, and good to be served by men whose hearts were as bound to it as yours was. It was this mutual bond that justified the fact of service; even glorified it. It was bitter that he must lose all this. Bitter but inevitable. And it would have been harder still, impossibly harder, to lose Nadine.
But in the wood he recovered himself; it was so long s
ince he had been in a wood and he found the magic of the trees as healing as ever. The pungent autumn smell of the wood, the crackle of the twigs under his feet and the soft squelch of the wet moss, the pattern of the intertwined branches over his head and the sighing of them as the wind passed over them, these were good things and not to be exchanged for all the riches of the world.
He found Ben and the dogs where he expected to find them, in a place that all four of them knew of, a clearing in the wood where a fallen tree trunk lay like a bridge across the stream and where the swiftly-flowing water, tinted golden-brown by the iron in it that came down from the Forest land above, was so clear that you could count all the pebbles on the bottom. Bramble bushes grew all round, coloured by the autumn to the brilliance of fire, and the moss here was deeper and greener than anywhere else. Ben sat on the tree trunk, dangling his legs over the water, and the dogs splashed happily in the sun-flecked shallows of the stream.
“You ran away, Ben,” said David.
“Yes” said the little boy, and hung his head.
David swung himself out along the tree trunk to sit by Ben. It was a rather perilous position in which to examine a precious volume, but a perfect one in which to face a terrible fact of life. The book might fall into the water at any moment, but all around them was such loveliness and peace, and in front of them, through a break in the trees, they could see a perfect view of the marshes, the sea and the sky.
“The pictures are perfectly horrible, old man,” said David. “I don’t blame you for panicking. I was scared stiff myself, and even Obadiah doesn’t think them pretty.”
Ben let out a shuddering sigh of relief. It was extraordinarily comforting that other people should be frightened too. Ben had all the horror of being abnormal of a supersensitive person. So often he had found that other people didn’t feel about things as he did, and it made him feel very lonely. It was consoling to have David’s companionship in fear.
“But you see, Ben,” David went on, “they’re not quite true. They’re exaggerated. I grant you that death can be dreadful, but it’s not as bad as this. You see it was a sick man who drew these last pictures, and a healthy man who drew the first ones, and the truth about things is somewhere between the two. When we feel well and jolly we see the happy side of life, and are inclined to think that’s all there is to it, and when we’re sick we see the seamy side and are inclined to think that’s all there is to it too. You’ve got to get both sides, and not exaggerate either of them, before you get the truth. . . . And even then you only get the shadow of it.”
Ben did not quite understand, but he took the book from David and began bravely to look at the pictures again, first the happy ones and then the awful ones.
But he found, this time, that the awful ones were not quite so awful as he had thought they were. He had not noticed, for instance, until David pointed it out, that in that picture where the dead soldiers lay line upon line like the furrows of a ploughed field the clouds above were formed of spread wings. And there were other comforting things, in the other pictures, that he had not noticed either until David showed them to him.
“How odd that I shouldn’t have noticed,” he said.
“The nice things aren’t drawn in a noticeable way,” said David. “Besides, you weren’t looking properly before. The horror of the pictures stunned you and you didn’t look them steadily in the eye, so to speak.”
“Well, I have now,” said Ben, “and it’s not as bad as I thought.” He gave a great sigh of relief. “I shan’t think about it in the night anymore; or if I do I’ll remember the wings. . . . Surely it’s tea time?”
Examination of David’s watch proved that it was long after. David was heartily thankful, for he found the guidance and instruction of the young most exhausting. In fact he had found the whole day most exhausting. There had already begun in him a mental conflict of which he was not fully aware, and of all things in this life an unrecognized conflict is most wearing to nerves and body.
Because they were so late they had a tray of tea brought to them in the drawing-room and Lucilla sat with them while they ate it. At least David, thirsty after the walk in the sun, merely drank, but Ben ate everything there was to eat with an appetite astonishing in one who had so recently been in the grip of distress. He seemed very happy now. David hoped the load of horror had been left behind in the wood forever.
Lucilla, except for dark circles round her eyes, seemed herself again. While her grandsons ate and drank she sat by the fire, a piece of needlework in her hands, and told them tales of when their fathers had been boys. She excelled at these tales; the long past that stretched behind her, upon which she looked back as though she saw it framed in a window at sunset, was more precious to her now than it had ever been; she could take from it one incident after the other, seeing them now with their inevitable past and future as perfect rounded things, and show them to her hearers as jewels of great price. “You cannot judge anything without its context,” she said now, suddenly, after several tales. “And you cannot judge the value of what happens to you until many years afterwards. Then you see how one thing led to another and how it was all, even the little trivial things as well as the big ones, somehow necessary.”
David thought that she was trying to comfort herself in this grief that he had brought upon her, trying to feel that this tangle of family life would somehow get unravelled and the perfect pattern that she was trying to weave for them all be seen again. He got up abruptly and went to her, standing before the fire looking down at her, his hand resting on the old carved mantel. But when she looked up and smiled at him he could not bear it; he loved her so much. “I’ll go upstairs,” he said.
“You’ve letters to write?” said Lucilla evenly. “The post goes at seven, dear. When you’ve finished put yours with mine on the hall table and Rose will take them to post as usual.”
As David went through the hall he noticed that she had only written one letter, and that it was addressed in her clear beautiful handwriting to Mrs. George Eliot. She did not usually, he thought, use her son’s Christian name when addressing her daughter-in-law; it was generally just Mrs. Eliot. But now it was different; now the battle was joined; and even on an envelope Lucilla was insisting that Nadine belonged to George, divorce or no divorce, and should do to the end.
Upstairs in his room David put away the book in the drawer of his writing table and sat down to write to Nadine. He wrote persuasively. She must leave her partner in charge of the shop, take her holiday now, and come. It would be hateful, but they must go through with it. It was only fair to Lucilla. How could they expect her to try to understand their point of view if they made no effort to understand hers? And she must understand their point of view. He couldn’t bear it if she didn’t. He wanted her to realize the greatness of their love, and to understand too that what they were doing they were doing for the sake of truth.
Yet when he had written the letter he wondered a little uneasily if Nadine would obey the summons. He never felt quite sure of what she would do under given circumstances; he did not know her well enough yet; he was never sure to what extent their outlook coincided. So often, when he talked, she just smiled and said nothing. But she loved him, he believed, as deeply as he loved her. His letter finished he dropped his head in his hands and thought of her love, and instantly his body was burning and his pulses throbbing as though she were with him in the room. Against the darkness of his closed eyes he could see her adorable beauty and his longing for her was almost unbearable. Everything else was forgotten. There was only Nadine. The fact of her filled the whole of life. She was the only reality.
Half-an-hour later he went downstairs to put his letter on the hall table beside Lucilla’s. He had addressed it to Nadine by her professional name—Miss Nadine Marsh.
CHAPTER
6
— 1 —
NADINE answered by return that she would be at Damerosehay in
a couple of days. She wrote charmingly to Lucilla in a letter that Lucilla handed David to read, even though she knew that the sweetness of it would increase his infatuation tenfold. But she was determined that in this struggle she would have no secrets from David. Come what might they should respect each other throughout, for if they lost their mutual respect they would to a certainty lose their love.
David could not be so open in return, for Nadine’s letter to him could not possibly be shown to Lucilla. “Very well, David,” she wrote, “since you want it I will come. But I think you are making a mistake in giving way to Lucilla over this. It is never pleasant for a man to have two women fighting over him, especially when he loves them both. You will be horribly mangled, darling. For that is what it comes to, David; are you to belong to Lucilla or to me? It is a measure of my trust in you that I dare to come, for Lucilla will be a powerful adversary. But I do dare to come. I love you utterly, as you love me. I shall win. But one thing I do refuse to do, David, and that is to see you first in the bosom of the family and dogs. I have told Lucilla I will arrive at four o’clock. I won’t. I will be at the corner by the cornfield at half-past two.”
David wished she had not said that. It jarred upon him. Now he would have to slip away furtively, or else to prevaricate. It was odd how the finest of women seemed to love intrigue. It would be good to have that hour and a half with her alone, but not worth it at the price of honesty. They would have many other times of being alone, times when they could walk off together openly. Then he resolutely crushed his momentary disappointment in her. Nadine was perfect in thought and word and deed.
The Bird in the Tree Page 15