The Rosemary Tree

by Elizabeth Goudge

  He toiled on until the end of matins, and then once again the bell rang out over his head. Old Baker was ringing it for the eight o’clock celebration. Eight o’clock and he must celebrate, he, this sinner, half demented with the toothache, thoughts all over the place, and dry as dust. How could he exalt the Lord in this state? “Be Thou exalted, Lord, in Thine own strength: so we will sing, and praise Thy power.”

  He stumbled up from his knees, gripping his jaw, and loped off towards the vestry to put on his surplice. As he went he was vaguely aware of the singing of the birds.

  2

  “Are you in love, Michael?” asked Miss Wentworth.

  Michael started and looked up from his plate of bacon and egg at Miss Wentworth all but obliterated behind the enormous old silver coffee pot.

  “ ‘Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

  As doth eternity,’ ”

  he murmured, half blinded by the coffee pot with the sun upon it.

  “No doubt of it,” said Miss Wentworth. “I have asked you twice to pass the toast, and only the lovesick or the mentally deficient quote poetry at breakfast.”

  “That depends upon the breakfast,” said Michael, passing the toast. “A Belmaray breakfast is a far greater inspiration to poetic expression than either love or frenzy. How do you get the bacon crisp at the edges like this? And never in all my life have I seen such spreads at this hour of the day.”

  “I don’t believe in economizing on food,” said Miss Wentworth. “You only end in a nursing home, which costs more a week than decent food. Nor do I hold with these modern breakfasts. A bit of hay in a soup plate, cereal they call it, and weak tea. No wonder they have religious doubts.”

  “Who?” asked Michael, passing his cup for more coffee.

  “Your generation. Insufficient nourishment in the early morning leads to pessimism and doubts.”

  “I doubt it,” said Michael. “I mean I doubt if we have doubts. Our trouble is that we haven’t anything to have doubts about.”

  “I’m glad you recognize the condition as being a trouble,” said Miss Wentworth drily.

  “Yes I do,” said Michael. “Without faith your mind gets fouled. Look at Cervantes. He was a man of faith and nothing fouled Cervantes, not even war and slavery. He wrote the first part of Don Quixote in prison.”

  Miss Wentworth, who had known what he was telling her before he was born, laid down her toast and listened with great courtesy.

  “And look at me,” he went on. “In the shadow of the galleys I only wrote deliberate trash and in prison I wrote nothing at all.”

  “Did you write successful trash?” asked Miss Wentworth.

  He smiled at her bleakly. “Yes. Very smart and clever. Gilded dust. I was one of the most successful writers of thrillers of this generation, and it just shows how much behind the times you are that you have never heard of me. Have you heard of existentialism, or the Folland Midge jet fighter? Or the Carter-Davis case?”

  “I have not,” said Miss Wentworth. “And don’t expound them unless you think they’d appeal to me. Good thrillers do. I like nothing better than a first-rate healthy thriller.”

  “Then don’t read mine,” said Michael.

  “You should be able to write again here,” said Miss Wentworth. “It’s quiet.”

  “It is, and I am,” said Michael.

  “A good thriller?”

  “Rotten poetry. It’s trash but at least it’s not deliberate trash. What would you like me to do today? If old Bob feels well enough he’s going to help me plant out the geraniums, but that won’t take all the morning.”

  “You might clear away those nettles that are choking the rosemary tree by the gazebo,” suggested Miss Wentworth. “Of course I know weeding the front garden is a task one cannot even attempt but I am fond of the rosemary tree. It’s considered unlucky, you know, not to have rosemary in your garden. Only you must never buy rosemary. It must be a gift from a friend.”

  “Who gave the rosemary to Belmaray?” asked Michael.

  “The legend in the family is that Queen Henrietta Maria was wearing a sprig of rosemary when she came here to take refuge towards the end of the Civil War. She gave it to Rupert Wentworth, who was in love with her, and he planted it in the garden. It sounds unlikely.”

  “Why?” asked Michael. “Only some three hundred years ago and rosemary trees can live to a great age. And he painted her with a sprig of rosemary in the bodice of her dress.”

  “That’s merely sentimental evidence,” said Miss Wentworth. “But all the same, that rosemary tree has potency. It’s odd, isn’t it, that some trees and shrubs have a power that others haven’t?”

  “Why odd?” asked Michael. “Look at those legends of nymphs and goddesses taking root and turning into plants. Who’s to know who a shrub is? For all we know that rosemary bush is inhabited by the ghost of Queen Henrietta Maria. Shall I clear away? Mrs. Prescott washes up today, doesn’t she?”

  Miss Wentworth got up, smiling a little as she watched him deftly piling china on the tray. In so short a while he had made himself utterly at home in the manor. Nevertheless he did not belong here. “Saturday again,” she said. “Time passes so quickly when you are old.”

  “You like Saturdays?” asked Michael.

  “Yes. Sometimes one or other of the children comes to see me. Today my lawyer is coming. Thomas Entwistle. That’s not so pleasing.”

  It was not his business to ask her why, but he was sorry for the shadow on her face. She left the room quietly, a figure of immense dignity in her old tweed clothes and heavy boots. He cleared away the breakfast things and went down the flagged passage, pausing to look at Rupert and Henrietta Maria as he passed them. “You couldn’t marry her, poor devil,” he said to Rupert. “Commoners don’t marry queens, and ex-convicts don’t marry respectable young schoolteachers with red hair. There are gulfs which cannot be crossed. I must not see that girl again; not fair to her. I hope she’s forgotten what I said about showing her the manor. Rupert, I won’t just weed round the bush, I’ll clear the whole flower garden for your sake, so that your ghost can walk there with the little queen.”

  He went out into the sunshine and found old Bob, somewhat recovered now from his recent attack of the screws, glowering at the pots of geraniums. Walsingham was there too, lying on his side on the sun-warmed stones of the terrace with his back against the warm wall of the house, the sun pouring down on his exposed flank. He thumped his tail on the stones when Michael approached but did not move. Warmth was what he liked most at his time of life; oven-like warmth that warmed the whole body to a temperature of extreme heat. Michael bent to pat him before he turned to gloat over his geraniums. He had now made contact with his bank manager and the geraniums were his gift to Belmaray. He had bought every kind of geranium and already the terrace was a blaze of color in his mind’s eye.

  “Nothing ain’t never come to naught in them urns,” growled Bob.

  “I filled them with fresh earth,” said Michael. “Pass the spade, Bob. I’ll dig and you can hand me the plants and tell me what a ruddy fool I am.”

  Bob growled. He liked Michael. The young chap was a hard worker, and teachable, which somewhat mitigated the exasperation of his ignorance. Nor had he put himself forward at all, except in this one matter of geraniums in the urns and the moon-shaped beds, and in that Bob had decided to let him have his own way. The fact was that Bob himself had always had a hankering for geraniums in the terrace, but his hints had made no impression on Miss Wentworth. “Geraniums and calceolaria, now, with lobelias for a border,” he suggested. “They make a pretty bit of color.”

  “Very pretty,” agreed Michael. “No, Bob, I’m sorry, but I can’t have blue and yellow together. Too like Crete.”

  “Never been in foreign parts,” said Bob. “Never been out of Devon.”

  “Don’t go out of Devon,”
said Michael. “Once in Devon only a fool would leave it.”

  “What’s Crete like?” asked Bob conversationally.

  “In spring, full of brilliant yellow marigolds against a deep blue sky. Enough to blind you. Later, heat and flies.” He dug furiously in silence for a few minutes. “Ghastly place to fight in. No cover.”

  “What’s the good of cover in wars like we has now?” asked Bob. “You and your cover, blasted to bits together, so they tell me.”

  Michael stopped digging and looked at Bob. It was curious to hear a man say “so they tell me” about the horrors of modern war. What would Bob have made of the sickening wreckage that he had looked at so often? What would Bob have done when the devilish fear came upon him? What he had done? No. He exonerated Bob. The old man would have weathered it with the dogged courage of his type. John Wentworth? He would have stuck it out though it cost him his reason. He turned back to his digging, with that familiar sickening shame wrenching his vitals again. Shame could wrench just as fear did. Thinking how other men would have behaved in his place was the most searching form of humiliation that he knew; and he knew a good many. “You’re right, Bob,” he said. “But cowards like to fool themselves with a bit of cover. I was no credit to the army, Bob.”

  “Nasty bit of fighting in Crete,” said Bob. He spoke gently, for the look on Michael’s face had not been wasted on him. “But it’s a long time ago and best to forget it now.”

  Michael stopped and looked down over the tangled garden to the river lying in pools and curves of silver below the glory of the woods. In the stillness the birds’ song rose to them with incredible beauty. There were things one could never entirely forget however hard one tried. No matter how fair the blossoming hedges on either side of you the hooded figures ran along on the other side of the trees. What had induced him to speak of Crete to old Bob? If he could not manage to forget what was below the surface need he dig for the worms in the way he was doing? It was none of his doing that he had found Daphne here, but he had deliberately told Mary the nature of his offense against the law, he had tried to jog Miss Wentworth’s memory about the Carter-Davis case, and now he must needs tell old Bob that he had not acquitted himself well in Crete. What was the place doing to him that he must spill the beans like this? Perhaps solitary places encouraged worm-digging. There were men, he remembered, who had withdrawn to hermitages in the desert, to caves in the mountains, in order that they might know themselves. That meant a deliberate confronting of one’s past. If unknowingly he had walked into his own heritage when he had walked into Belmaray, then he must become a beadsman. But how could he, who had never been a knight?

  Where does one go from a world of insanity?

  Somewhere on the other side of despair.

  To the worship in the desert, the thirst and deprivation,

  A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar,

  The heat of the sun and the icy vigil.

  T. S. ELIOT

  That was the man’s equivalent to the child’s country of escape. There was always the hidden life. For the child the journeys to the little land, the land of the memory and foretaste of paradise, for the man who was truly a man, the secret discipline. There were those like himself whose hidden life was merely a ceaseless exhausting attempt to evade that discipline, but they were not men.

  “Bob,” he said suddenly out of a long silence, “ought a man to forget his own vile actions?”

  Bob’s blue eyes were puzzled as those of a child, and he made no answer. He knew nothing about vile actions. Michael thought he had never been in the presence of a man who possessed such a depth of innocence. One could almost bathe oneself in it, as one bathed oneself in the soft air of the west-country. And why not? The worth of one man was surely as much at the service of another as the warmth of the sun, if that other had a sufficient realization of his need for it. “And I have, God knows,” thought Michael, as he planted the last geranium.

  “That’s the lot, Bob,” he said. “If you don’t want me for anything I’ll tackle the weeds down below.”

  “You can’t do no harm among them weeds” encouraged Bob. “Nor yet you won’t do much good either, not under a twelve-month. But ’tis good exercise. . . Sir,” he added suddenly, and went off round the corner of the house trundling the barrow. He did occasionally let fall tokens of respect, and always when Michael was feeling most disintegrated by a sense of his worthlessness. They seemed to be bestowed to join him together again, for Bob seemed always moved by that strong creative impulse which only the best men have. In most men, Michael thought, even decent men, the destructive impulse is strongest in the presence of weakness.

  Knighted, Michael attacked the nettles and bindweed round the rosemary tree with exhilaration. Bob had touched his cap to him before, he had opened gates for him, but he had never yet said Sir. Upon this day of silver sunshine the accolade had fallen.

  3

  An hour later, exhausted but triumphant, he sat down on the wall of the paved court, sleepily relaxed in the sun, and contemplated the result of his labors. He thought it good, for like all amateur gardeners he did not worry about roots he could not see. The whole bed below the wall was (above ground) clear, the lemon verbena could breathe and the sun could reach the white violets under the wall, and the small deep purple ones that grew about the roots of the rosemary tree. The bush itself astonished him, for freed from the mass of weeds which had dwarfed its height it seemed to have grown in power and dignity. It was so old that its trunk and branches were twisted and looped like those of a wistaria. Yet the small leaves grew thickly and the shape of it was that of a silver shield. It shone against the blue sky with strength and brilliance. Nothing feminine about it; not the ghost of a dead queen but a virile and entirely masculine presence. How immensely strong must be the spirit of the man who held it that he could so invest the shield with his own power; and the great cross-handled sword which he held in his other hand. “I wish I could see him,” thought Michael, “but that blue is so bright it dazzles the eyes.” Between sleeping and waking he blinked, yawned like a cat, leaned back against the stone urn behind him and shut his eyes.

  Suddenly it seemed he was awake again, his heart beating hard, his eyes more than ever dazzled, not this time by the brilliant blue of the man’s cloak but by the nearness of the sword and shield. They were being held out to him. They were his. Had he slept on vigil? That was unpardonable. Yet he was still on his knees, his eyes fixed on the cross-handled sword and the shield, one more of the many who had kept vigil in this place. He was Michael, one of the knights of Belmaray, each in himself a weak and sinful man yet as a member of the brotherhood strong with the power of the man who held the sword and shield. Who was he? Strange images chased through Michael’s mind. He thought of the Holy Grail and of a white dove, of fire in the rock and immense wings filling the sky. Then he thought of the doors that had opened in his childhood to that immensity, and the darkness beyond the walls of his man’s experience. “Ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at midnight, at even, or at cockcrowing or in the morning.” The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.

  “Yes, I will,” said Michael, and he held out his hands and took them.

  He half woke up to see a woman’s grave blue eyes looking at him out of the rosemary bush. Queen Henrietta Maria after all. His first fancy had been the right one. The man cloaked with the sky who had offered the sword and shield had been just another of his absurdly vivid dreams, woven out of the blue day and the silvery bush, and memories of stories read in his childhood. This was reality, this queen become a bush. Or was this only another dream? Was he awake, or wasn’t he?

  “Henrietta,” he said gently.

  “She’s with Aunt Maria,” said the bush shyly and sweetly. “It’s me.”

  Michael sat up straight and saw bits of a lila
c frock showing through the rosemary tree, below the parted branches through which a child’s face was smiling at him. The fingers holding back the branches were thin and brown and he dimly saw slim bare brown legs below the dress. This child, of the three of them, was the most intimately a child of Belmaray. That was why he liked her best.

  “Come out of it Margary,” he said. “It’s enough to startle a fellow out of his wits.”

  Margary came out from behind the tree and sat down shyly beside him on the wall. It was April now and the day was so warm that she wore a cotton frock and sandals, and there was a rosy glow of sunburn in her cheeks. She was always happy in this garden but just now she was almost always happy because something very odd had happened at school. When Miss Giles snapped at her she no longer minded; the one who minded was Miss Giles.

  “Please, what is?” she asked.

  “Having the rosemary tree turn into you. Though I might have known it. Mistress Margary Wentworth was a very flowery lady. Do you know the poem about her?”

  “Yes,” said Margary. “Father called me after her.”

  Michael repeated the second verse, bending over to pick a sprig of rosemary.