The Bird in the Tree

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The children were wild with excitement. Mother coming to stay! Mother coming to stay for perhaps two whole weeks! They rooted up armfuls of flowers out of the garden, Margaret enduring their onslaughts with stoical, smiling fortitude, and garlanded the staircase and the hall, the nursery and Nadine’s bedroom. With amazing unselfishness they denuded themselves of their white mice and Queenie the chameleon, and ranged these upon Nadine’s mantelpiece. Suggestions that Mother might not appreciate livestock in her bedroom were not attended to. Of course she would! They had not yet arrived at the age when they could conceive it possible that tastes differ. If they gave people what they liked themselves they were then quite sure that they had given pleasure.

  The children’s attitude to the mother whom they did not now see very often was very individual. They all adored her, greeted her comings with ecstasy and her goings with grief, she was to all three of them the sun and moon and stars, all the more adorable because she seemed nowadays to be always a little out of their reach.

  But apart from their adoration their attitude towards her varied with their characters. Ben had for her a feeling of chivalrous protection. He was old enough to recognize her beauty and to worship it, and her quite misleading look of frailty made him long to fight dragons on her behalf, protect her from gangsters and their like, even die for her if occasion should arise. Only occasion never did seem to arise, and his protectiveness was accepted by Nadine with a tolerant amusement that hurt him quite horribly.

  Tommy was never hurt by his mother; he was perhaps the only person whom she did not, at times, hurt rather badly. It is possible that he unconsciously understood her better than anyone else did, and certain that he was her favourite child. She made no secret of the fact that he was her best beloved and he traded upon her love with the utmost wickedness. Everything that he wanted to possess he got out of her when she came to stay, anything forbidden that he wanted to do he did while she was there, so that she might take his part when Ellen’s wrath fell upon him. He knew that she always would. He knew that she, like himself, could not, simply could not, live without what she wanted. To both of them what they wanted was like a shining lamp hanging in the darkness. If they could not have it then they were in darkness indeed, a terrible outer darkness that only they could understand. And to both of them, restless as they were, this lamp was rather like a will-o’-the-wisp. It was continually on the move. No sooner had they grasped one joy than they wanted another. Such restlessness should have made them miserable, yet in Tommy’s case it troubled him not at all, and Nadine only sometimes, for their will-o’-the-wisps led them on to such glorious adventures, and they loved adventures. And then again each fresh joy as they captured it was so full of satisfaction that they were apt to forget all that was past and all that was to come in the joy of the present. Denied adventures they both had it in them to be desperately, terribly unhappy.

  Caroline’s love was infinitely pathetic in its hopelessness. She still looked to Nadine for that love of a mother who loves her child more than any other being in the world, but she knew in the depths of her that she would never get it. Her unconscious knowledge was at the root of her shrinking from human contact, her low opinion of the human race; personified in Nadine it so cruelly failed her. Yet Nadine couldn’t altogether help her failure; she did try very hard to be all that she should be to her funny little daughter; but the fact was that she did not appreciate women at all, not at any age. Her mother had died in her babyhood and she had been brought up in a family of brothers, the only girl, and could not understand her own sex. She was a man’s woman through and through. . . . But she would have wept could she have known what was Caroline’s most precious memory, a memory of her father sitting by her on the nursery hearth rug, just before he left her apparently forever, stroking her shining bell of hair with his forefinger and telling her that he liked little girls better than little boys, yes, much better. Only Caroline’s remembering mind, because her father had gone away and now she could hardly visualize him at all, tried hard to substitute her mother’s figure for that of her father; tried hard but did not quite succeed.

  When David left the house at a quarter-past two, ostensibly for a walk, they were all three on the stairs tying tall sunflowers to the banisters so that it seemed that the stairs, all the way up, were lit by flaming torches. “Don’t be back late,” they called to him. “Mother will be here at four.”

  “Shall just Tommy and Caroline and me meet her at the cornfield at four?” Ben asked David. “Or will you come too?”

  His tone was sweetly courteous but his eyes were pleading and his meaning was quite plain, and David’s heart smote him.

  “At four I’ll be out somewhere,” he said. “Not at the cornfield. Your mother will want you to meet her quite by yourselves. Call the dogs, will you. I’m not taking them.”

  “Not taking the dogs? Why ever not?” gasped Ben. It was unheard of that anyone should go for a walk and not take the dogs. They were already expectantly present, barking joyously, Pooh-Bah dancing on his hind legs and the Bastard alternately crouching on the ground, tail violently in motion, eyes shining through his mat of hair, and making sudden rushing onslaughts upon David as though to push the dilatory man out of doors into the wind and sunshine and the glorious smells that live there for all God’s four-legged creatures.

  “No,” said David. “I don’t want them today. No. Not today.”

  A sudden terrible blight fell upon both dogs. A cold proud grief froze Pooh-Bah’s leaping body to an awful stillness and the Bastard’s tail, though still waving, waved ever more faintly, and his eyes, fixed upon David with a pleading that hoped on to the very last, dimmed as though with tears.

  “Oh, David!” mourned Ben, sharing to the full in this awful desolation.

  David had to clear his throat guiltily before he could speak again. “Not today,” he said at last. “No. Some other day. Tomorrow. Not today.”

  “You might at least say you’re sorry,” said Tommy, outraged.

  “I am sorry,” said David. “I’m awfully sorry. I can’t say how sorry I am. Tomorrow we’ll go. Tomorrow.”

  Pooh-Bah turned his back with great dignity and stalked away into the furthest recesses of the hall, where the door of a particularly dark cupboard had been left open. He entered the cupboard and lay down in the darkness upon a heap of croquet mallets. He was suffering, but he came of a great and royal race and no one should see him suffer. The Bastard did not care who saw him suffer. His tail sank to the ground and he crouched yet lower, laying his chin dejectedly upon his paws. His eyes became dark pools of sorrow and tears trickled out of the corners of them.

  The children, grouped upon the stairs in utter silence, gazed at David in reproach too deep for words. He opened the front door and fled. It had been even worse than he had expected.

  — 2 —

  But once through the oak-wood his sense of guilt gave way before a winged, exultant joy. Winged, he thought, is the only word for that joy that is like a live creature within one striving to lift one off one’s feet. It is hard to walk, one wants to run, to fly. The body seems bound about that joy like bands of iron; there is physical pain in the restriction of it, throbbing temples and panting breath, a mortal body with immortal longings in it. For joy is born of longing, thought David; longing that is running to its satisfaction.

  Once past Little Village David began to run along the coast road as excitedly as a few days before the children had run to meet him. It was absurd of him, he knew, and extremely childish, but he didn’t care. In a first onslaught of joy or grief we are all of us children; it is only as we deal with the havoc that they have created that we show what the years have taught us. He was vaguely aware, as he ran, of the beauty of the day, clear-shining after a spell of rain, of the misted sea, the golden sun and the shimmer of white wings. It looked as though a spell of fine weather was on the way, for the country people had a saying,

&nb
sp; When the mist comes from the hill

  Then bad weather it doth spill;

  When the mist comes from the sea

  Then good weather it will be.

  That was as it should be, and as it always was. Nadine had that kind of beauty which seemed to impel natural things to give her always the perfect setting.

  He was too early, of course. He had time to sit on the gate opposite the cornfield in the marsh and laugh at himself; to think how silly it was that his pulse should be racing and his head swimming. To steady himself he tried to fix his attention on the silver mist that drove in from the sea and listen to the wind in the corn and a lark dipping and soaring above it like the lark in Van Gogh’s picture. But it was no good. Nadine was in the mist, the wind, the bird song, everywhere. The thought of her seemed the pulse that kept the world alive.

  Yet when she actually did come she took him by surprise. Her battered old car had crept round the corner and was beside him before he knew it.

  “David,” she said, stretching her hand out through the window.

  He did not respond very much; not here; not in this public place.

  “Get out,” he commanded her hoarsely. “Back the car up here into the gate and get out.”

  Nadine laughed. She enjoyed the love of young men. The depth of feeling that was almost rude in its savage eagerness was delightfully stimulating to a woman whose first youth was lost. She felt deliciously young again, as young as David.

  He had opened the door and pulled her out before she had time to clutch bag or scarf. Then he took her wrist and ran with her over the hard brittle stalks of the cornfield, up over the ridge of shingle that had once wrecked the grain ship, across another stretch of marsh, over another shingle bank and so down to a strip of silver sand. The sea washed right in here. Stretches of blue water flung themselves in lovely half-moons of wind-rippled colour almost to their feet, and at their backs the piled shingle hid them from sight.

  David let go of Nadine’s wrist and put his arms round her, gently at first, then straining so tightly that she was breathless. She could feel the pulse throbbing in his cheek as she put up her hand and held his face against hers, and the beating of his heart pressed so tightly against her body. Tears pricked her eyelids. It was sweet, this love that had come to her just when she had been so saddened and so weary, it was lovelier than anything she had ever known. She yielded to David’s passion for a moment or two, returning it to the full, then withdrew herself a little. She never gave a man quite all that he wanted. That was no way to foster love.

  “David,” she said. Her voice was very gentle, but a little maternal. David let go at once.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and flushed a little. His love for Nadine was so overwhelming that it always made him go a little too far. He was ashamed then. Nadine was too fine a woman to be treated like that.

  “It’s all right, darling,” she said, and touched his hot cheek with her finger. “I love your bear hugs, only I didn’t want my ribs cracked. I still have Tommy’s affection to face.”

  David felt absurdly stabbed. So often, by classing him with her children, she made him feel a child, and it hurt him. This love of his, that was driving him to sacrifice and outrage so much, was surely no childish thing. But then Nadine did not quite understand the depth of his love for Lucilla and Damerosehay. She did not, could not, know how much she was costing him.

  But she sensed the hurt in him and was quick to heal it. Her momentary passion, her assurance, left her, and one of her enchanting little-girl moods was upon her like dew on a flower. This was the one of her many moods that David loved best, and she knew it. It made him feel mature, older than she was, more certain of her, when she stood still and straight like that, waiting for him to take the initiative, her mouth sweet and shy and her eyes wide with expectation like a little girl at a party. He was smiling as he took her arm protectively and led her over to the old rowing boat, half buried in the sand, where they could sit and watch the ripples creaming up to their feet and the stately passing and repassing of the gulls across the sky.

  “Isn’t it quiet, Nadine?” he said. “Isn’t it quiet?”

  Nadine nodded. Though she did not love Damerosehay as the rest of the family did yet she loved it. She sat still, folded in its peace, her hands linked lightly round her knees.

  David watched her, worshipping her. “With my body I thee worship.” He had always liked the sentences in the marriage service. Lover of words as he was he was sorry that a marriage in a registry office gave one nothing lovely to say to the woman one loved. Never mind, he would say them now. “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part. With my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. . . . And thereto give thee my troth.”

  “David!” laughed Nadine. “You’re absurd!”

  Her laughter might have hurt him again, only Nadine when she laughed was so enchanting. Her dark eyes, then, were so full of light, and her low laugh had a soft caressing quality that warmed and comforted and was a lovely contrast to the white austerity of her beauty. It was her contrasts that gave Nadine so unique a loveliness. Her great dark eyes and softly curling dark hair were almost startling against the ivory pallor of her face, and her gallant, almost boyish figure, combined with her very feminine and rather sensuous grace, made people look and look again, touched and even troubled by her beauty. “Troubling” was an adjective that very accurately described Nadine. Her joyousness, together with that hint of intensity that suggested that she might be able to suffer very deeply, were very troubling; so was her rather reckless courage, that took delight sometimes in flying in the face of all safety, law and order. . . . Even her clothes were troubling to those conservative minds who take a fancy to a particular fashion only when it is going out.

  Nadine, somehow or other, always managed to be almost ahead of fashion. If they wanted to know the latest the female Eliots only had to look at Nadine; and when they did look at her they experienced shock and incredulity not unmixed with envy. For Nadine was so clever over her outrageous clothes. She had never had much money to spend on them, but she could knot a vivid scarf round her shoulders with just the right air of devilry, pin a bunch of camellias on the shoulder of an evening dress in exactly the most enchanting position, and wear wicked hats at an angle that however outrageous did not detract one whit from her austere and lovely dignity. . . . Though how it was that she gave this impression of austerity no one had the slightest idea.

  Except David, who knew it was because she always possessed herself. Whatever mad thing she was doing he knew she had planned to do it, willed it, and was in perfect command of the situation. Even this love that had come between them never swept her off her feet as it did him. In the beginning he had fought against it and been beaten. Nadine had not done that. When she had found that she loved David she had taken her love, looked at it, known it was what she longed for and resolutely taken it to her.

  “David, dear,” she said, “have things been very detestable?”

  “It was detestable telling Grandmother,” said David slowly.

  “I told you it would be,” said Nadine. “You should have written. There’s something so decisive about a letter. What is written is written, down in black and white, not to be altered.”

  David did not answer. This question of the best way to tell Lucilla had led to the one and only quarrel that he and Nadine had ever had. He was still astonished and marvelling that he had been the victor in that quarrel. He did not know that, just at the end, Nadine had let him win. She had known instinctively that he needed, just then, to feel his power over her, and in the vital question of this marriage she was sure enough of her power over him to let him have his own way in smaller things. She was so certain that she could even afford to be sorry for Lucilla.

  “Poor old Grandmother!” she said, and t
here was real compunction in her tone. She was much fonder of Lucilla than Lucilla was of her. She was genuinely sorry that she had to hurt her.

  David felt a little shock of surprise. Somehow he never thought of Lucilla as old. Her unageing spirit in her ageing body burned so strongly that he forgot the one in the other.

  “I know it seems cruel to hurt so old a woman,” went on Nadine, “yet when it is a question of sacrificing the happiness of two young people to the happiness of one old one I don’t think there’s any question of what the choice should be. Grandmother’s life is nearly over. We have ours before us.”

  David did not answer because he was doubtful of her argument. If life went on beyond death this question of how much longer one had to live just did not apply; if one had all eternity there was neither youth nor age to be considered. Besides, the young of this generation had always hanging over them the nightmare of impending war. It was quite probable that Lucilla would live longer in this world than he would. No, the whole question was one of truth. But Nadine, he knew, did not quite see it like that. Where he sought truth she sought happiness. It was to her a divine and shining thing and she thought it her right to grasp it when she could.

  “So let’s be happy, Nadine,” he begged. “We know we are doing right, so let’s not question it for just this hour.”

  The appeal to happiness was one that never failed with Nadine. She jumped up and held out her hands to him, her eyes bright again with her party mood. Turning their faces eastward they walked quickly on the firm sand. To their left, though hidden from them by the ridge of shingle, were the marshes, the sea was on their right. The wind and the sun-shot mist blew over them and they laughed like children, swinging their clasped hands. The air and sunshine seemed to enclose them in a translucent crystal globe. Through it they could see dimly the sorrow of the world, but just for a little while they were safe inside it with their happiness.