So he found Caroline seated once more upon the swing, as composed as a queen waiting to give audience.
“Dinner time, Caroline,” he said. “Tommy has been ringing the nursery dinner bell out of the window for some minutes. He’s very hungry, he says. Aren’t you hungry?”
Caroline shook her head, slithered out of the swing and slipped her hand into David’s. But David seemed reluctant to leave the old oak-tree. As Jill had done, he laid his hand against the bark.
“I used to have a swing here too,” he told Caroline. “It’s a jolly place. Do you play here every morning?”
Caroline, her thumb in her mouth, nodded her head.
“All alone?”
Caroline, a truthful child, shook her head.
“I invented a dream boy to play with,” said David. “Do you invent playmates, Caroline?”
Caroline took her thumb out of her mouth and lifted puzzled eyes to his face. “Invent” was a word Lucilla had not taught her yet. She did not know what he meant. Then she hung her head and whispered something that David had to bend low to catch. “A lady and little boy,” she said. And then a tear rolled down her button nose because she had told her secret, and to a grown-up. She couldn’t think what had made her do it. And she was terrified of that word “invent.” She was afraid that David was going to explain it to her, and that its meaning would be one that she would not be able to bear. She burst into floods of tears and clutched David with both hands. “No! No!” she said. “Don’t tell! Don’t tell!”
David, much embarrassed and totally at sea, sat down in the swing and took Caroline on his knees. “Of course I won’t tell,” he assured her, though he had no idea what it was he wasn’t to tell. “Is the little boy you play with a nice little boy, Caroline?”
Caroline nodded, once more withdrew her microscopic handkerchief from her knickers and applied it pathetically to her minute face.
“And the lady? Is she a nice lady? What’s her name?”
Caroline shook her head, but David seemed to feel that the lady ought to have a name. “Aramante,” he suggested.
Caroline looked up at him and smiled through her tears, for that was a name that exactly suited her lady. She had known it wasn’t Mary, she had known it ought to be something longer, though she hadn’t known what. Vigorously and joyously she nodded her head, blew her small nose triumphantly and put away the now quite unnecessary handkerchief. David was delighted with his success. The mysterious grief was now apparently assuaged and he thought they might safely go in to dinner. Amicably, hand in hand, become in some queer way very close to each other, they threaded their way through the tangled sweetness of the wild garden to the place where the curtain of mind-your-own-business swept the path and the iron gate was hidden behind the guelder-rose bush.
Here Tommy met them, feverishly ringing the nursery dinner bell. “Come on!” he urged them. “Come on! It’s liver and bacon and I’ve a hungry raging wolf in my tummy!”
— 2 —
But Ben, when David made polite inquiries after lunch, said he hadn’t been able to fancy liver and bacon. “Liver seems more like a dead animal than other sorts of meat, don’t you think?” he said.
David said he didn’t really think he’d thought much about it.
“I have,” said Ben with a shudder. “I’ve thought a lot about it, and I wish I was a vegetarian.”
They were walking through the oak-wood, the dogs at their heels, on their way to the marshes and Obadiah’s cottage. David perceived that Ben’s haunting had gone deep, and his anger rose against Obadiah. He had had no business to show the sensitive little boy whatever it was that he had shown him. But then Obadiah was a poor man, familiar with all the worst facts of life and death from his babyhood up. He could not be expected to understand that disastrous sheltering of the rich man’s child, which carried on from generation to generation makes his spirit increasingly vulnerable in a world where year by year the horrors that lie in wait for him proportionately increase.
For a moment, as they turned out of the oak-wood and the loveliness of the marshes and the sea lay before them, David felt himself gripped by his own particular nightmare beast. . . . War. . . . He had glibly lectured to Ben on courage that morning but he was no more successful than anyone else at applying his advice to himself. He was no more afraid of death and wounds than most men, but the fear of having his life’s work taken from him and destroyed by war was like an insidious poison in his system, perpetually weakening his effectiveness. It was so difficult to concentrate upon creative work, so difficult to carry on one’s particular battle for truth and beauty, when all the time those great forces of man’s hate and greed were lying like a dark sea on the horizon, ready to sweep over the world, as in great storms the sea submerged the marshes, and carry away all individual creations of joy and loveliness as though they had never been. There was only one way to go on without weakening, and that was to hold on to the conviction that what has been has been and in some mysterious way is immortal; to believe that every work of art has its spiritual as well as its physical life and is indestructible by material fate. But he found it increasingly hard to do that. The faith that Lucilla had taught him he had largely lost; nothing was left of it but an exceedingly vague hope that the soul lives on beyond death; when he had spoken of immortality to Ben with such certainty he had only been saying what he knew Lucilla would wish him to say; so how believe in the immortality of the little he had created? No, it was no use. He felt that without length of days in which to bring his life’s work to fulfilment a man is of no more value than a leaf that flutters by on the wind and is lost. And length of days was a thing of which, in this generation, they could have no reasonable expectation. . . . It behoved them to seize every chance of joy, of work and of love as it came, even as he and Nadine were doing, for the time was not long.
“Are you unhappy, David?” asked Ben, tugging at his coat.
Confound the little beggar! He was far too perspicacious. Without a word spoken one’s moods were clear to him. David pulled himself together and began to be very heartily cheerful. It was very important, he knew, to make children think that life was a splendid thing. How persistently grown-ups struggled to do it, what lies they told, what fears they battened down that the very shadow of them should not be seen. They worked so hard to create this illusion, obeying an overwhelming instinct, that one was tempted to wonder if it was an illusion, if it was not, after all, a dimly perceived truth. Well, anyway, while with Ben he would pretend it was. For Ben, this afternoon, life must be splendid.
And he was not an actor for nothing. Never had Ben been so gloriously entertained. He forgot his fears. His laughter rang out and his eyes were bright with delight in his thin brown face.
The effort that he made reacted upon David and he too began to cheer up. There was, at any rate, this afternoon with the sun bright in the sky and the beauty of the marshes all around them. They were walking east along a rough road that led to Obadiah’s cottage. This was a drier part of the marshes, where the sea never came now, for big dykes had been erected to keep it out. Cattle were put to graze here and one day the mayor and corporation of Radford hoped to put up bungalows for holiday makers. . . . Though only over their dead bodies, said the Eliots. . . . In spring it was a sheet of flaming gorse here but now it was mostly rough grass, fragrant with wild thyme and bright with pink swift and golden lady’s slipper, with occasional patches of sea-lavender and golden rice grass.
“Isn’t there a break in one of those dykes?” asked David, and he pointed it out to Ben.
“Yes,” said Ben, “they’ll have to mend it before the winter. They don’t think the dykes are going to be the use they thought they’d be. They tell Obadiah he’ll have to turn out of his cottage one of these days, or he’ll be drowned dead.”
David laughed. “Not much fear yet,” he said. “But Obadiah is rather an ancient old party to live in
so lonely a place.”
“Not at all,” said Ben defensively. “He’s only just over eighty, and his great-grandfather lived till a hundred and three.”
David hastily agreed that it was more than probable that Obadiah would outlive them all.
His cottage was ideally placed to promote long life. At the back of it a half-moon of woodland protected it from the north and east winds, while from the south, across the marsh, the life-giving wind from the sea and the full flood of the sunshine swept unchecked. And all around it was such beauty of sight and sound; birdsong and windsong in the wood, with the flowers in their seasons and the changing tapestry of budding, unfolding and then falling leaves, and then the gorse on the marsh, the white wings of the gulls and the far line of the gleaming sea. And to crown everything else a stream ran through the wood. It came from the high Forest land to the north and flowed through the wood fast and strong, passed by Obadiah’s cottage and then sang its way across the marsh to the sea in an ever-widening, deepening channel. Its water was sweet to drink, said Obadiah, pure and untainted; he never bothered to boil it.
But when they came to it David noticed that the stream was unusually full and rapid for the time of year. He hardly ever remembered, even in winter, seeing it so full. “It’s been such a wet summer,” explained Ben. “Lots of the Forest is under water just as though it were January.”
They crossed the rough wide plank bridge that spanned the stream and found themselves in Obadiah’s strip of flower garden bright with the hydrangeas, nasturtiums, tamarisks, marigolds and fuchsias that did not mind the wind from the sea. Behind the cottage was the vegetable garden, where the vegetable marrows were a sight to behold.
But Obadiah himself was in the flower garden, tending the giant blue hydrangea that grew beside the two snowy steps leading to the front door. The cottage was built of weather-stained grey stone, like the cottages at Little Village, but it was only one storey high and contained only three rooms, the kitchen, Obadiah’s bedroom, and the little slip of a room occupied by Alf. The village woman who “did” for them came only in the mornings and did not live there. Should there at any time come another great storm and flood, such as had wrecked the grain ship, there would, for Obadiah, be no escaping upstairs for safety. . . . But then his part of the marsh was so safe with all those dykes.
“You all right, Obadiah?” asked David as he shook hands with the old man.
“Pretty tar’blish,” said Obadiah. “Pretty tar’blish. Oi ’opes ee be well, Master David.”
He was hospitable and garrulous, was Obadiah, and was delighted to see David and Ben, much deploring the absence of Alf at Big Village for the first football match of the season. “Though ’ow they can play football in this ’eat,” said Obadiah, “beats me. But there, these things keep to date, look see, an’ if the English climate ain’t keepin’ to date along wi’ the football us can’t ’elp it. If us was to start relyin’ on the climate us’d get nowhere, look see.”
“Tides are more reliable, eh, Obadiah?” said David. “You know where you are with a tide.”
“Ah!” said Obadiah, and shaded his eyes to look at the distant line of the sea. “Yet oi’ve knowed tides what be’aved pretty contrary at times. The autumn an’ spring tides, now, oi’ve knowed ’em be up to their tricks. Like ’orses, they be. They’ll run in ’arness quiet as you please fur many a year an’ then one day, sudden loike, one on ’em will kick free an’ savage ee.”
David had a sudden lovely vision of Chaste Diana, charioteer of the moon, driving a great team of blue-green plunging horses, like the sea horse in his room at Damerosehay. He could see her, tall and serene, driving them backwards and forwards, controlling them at will; until one day one of the reins broke and one solitary horse dashed in too far, swift and terrible, galloping in over the marshes with a welter of mad white foam flying up from the spurn of his feet. Obadiah was like that; with just a few growled words he had the power to create strange, satisfying pictures in the mind. . . . Or, judging by poor Ben’s state of mind, rather horrible ones. . . . David controlled his imaginings and remembered what he was here for. The book would be indoors. He must manoeuvre the party there.
“Got that clock still, Obadiah?” he asked.
Obadiah, who had been doing the honours of his garden, smiled broadly and promptly led the way indoors. His grandfather clock was his most cherished possession and a joy not only to him but to every child who ever entered his cottage. It was a perpetual delight to Ben, Tommy and Caroline and it had been an even greater one to David in his childhood. . . . He and his dream boy, he could remember, had visited it constantly.
And even now he went to it with eagerness, sparing hardly a glance for Obadiah’s charming neat little kitchen with its snowy scrubbed stone floor, gay rag rugs and gilt-framed oleographs of ships in storms, gallant ships climbing “hills of seas Olympus high,” with behind them inky-black clouds rent by lightning.
But the grandfather clock was truly remarkable and the crown of Obadiah’s possessions. He never said how he had come to possess it, and his reticence upon the subject had led to the current belief that the old scoundrel had stolen it.
David was immediately, as ever, so enthralled by it as it stood opposite the window, bathed in light, that he failed to notice that Ben, after entering hesitantly behind him, had slipped back into the garden as though afraid, taking the dogs with him. And Ben was usually such a passionate worshipper of Obadiah’s clock.
It was very old, quite small as grandfather clocks go, and must have been made, its admirers thought, at the Hard, the ship building yard on the Abbey River where more than a hundred years ago the greatest of England’s ships had been built and launched. The slender length of it was built of Forest oak, beautifully fashioned and carved, but its chief glory was the clock face where at each hour, instead of the usual numeral, there was the picture of a sailing ship. The ship at one o’clock had bare masts, with just one little sail hoisted to indicate the hour, and then as the day went on the sails blossomed out upon the masts one by one until at twelve o’clock a great ship like a blossoming rose was seen sailing triumphantly into the sunset. The little pictures were faintly coloured, with blue and green for the sea, scarlet and gold for the setting sun and green dolphins and rainbow tinted sea horses disporting themselves around the ships. The clock did not go any more and the hands stood perpetually at one o’clock, that hour when something that has ended begins all over again, yet if it was no longer of practical use it was still a glorious work of art, and rejoicing in it afresh David looked round for Ben to share his delight.
“Why, he’s gone!” he exclaimed.
Obadiah, coughing sepulchrally behind his horny hand, looked exceedingly self-conscious.
“Look here, Obadiah,” said David suddenly, sitting on the table edge. “That boy’s scared stiff at something you showed him here. What was it?”
A look of relief spread over Obadiah’s mahogany features. “Oi’m right glad to tell ee of it, Master David,” he said. “It’s worritted me considerable as the boy should ’ave seen. It weren’t oi showed un. ’E found un ’isself, look see. Real put about oi was. ’E opened the clock when me back was turned. Out in the garden, oi were, an’ ’im alone inside.”
“The clock?” exclaimed David, and immediately was on his feet, opening it. Wedged behind the pendulum that now swung no longer was a battered old book with worn brown leather covers. With an exclamation David took it out.
“Bring un outside,” suggested Obadiah. “There’s sun outside. More ’olesome, look see.”
They carried out Obadiah’s two Windsor chairs and sat beside the glorious blue hydrangea. Then, at Obadiah’s suggestion, they lit their pipes. When these were well started, and they were settled as cosily as cats in the sun, Obadiah signified that David might open the book. He was being very careful of David’s nerves. To him David was still a little boy, and his experience of
Ben had taught him that the nerves of educated little boys were what he called “roight gaggly . . .” Ben and the dogs had completely disappeared.
David lifted the cover and immediately gave an exclamation of delight. He was looking at a spirited picture of dancing dolphins executed in pen and ink, with faint washes of colour. It was lovely, the work of a fine artist. He ruffled the pages of the book and saw that it was full of drawings. Then he turned back to exult in the dolphins again. The edges of the page were stained and spotted with damp and age but the picture itself was hardly hurt at all. It was almost as fresh as when it had been drawn. He turned the page and saw a ship in full sail, he turned another page and saw some exquisite studies of sea horses. Something familiar about these challenged his attention.
“Obadiah!” he exclaimed, “these are studies for the clock face! Did you realize that?”
“Aye,” said Obadiah, puffing unmoved at his clay pipe.
“But they’re lovely,” cried David. “They’re exquisite. There’s nothing here to frighten a child.”
“Ee’d need to turn on a bit further, look see,” said Obadiah ominously.
David turned on further, but he still saw only great beauty; more sailing ships and strange, richly imagined sea-creatures, the lovely shapes of sea birds in flight, minutely observed and evidently most passionately loved, a splendid little sketch of a launching at the Hard, with the ship lying ready in the slips, the cheering crowd and a group of seamen, the ship’s officers no doubt, standing tense and expectant on a raised platform. David recognized this scene quite easily; he knew the lovely curve of the Abbey River and the woods beyond, and the row of workmen’s cottages that was still to be seen at the Hard. After this picture came another of a sailing ship, the best of all. She was a grand creature with a fine carved poop and forecastle, wind-filled sails crowding up aloft and the foam curling back in delicate curves and arabesques from her splendid prow. Something was written very faintly beneath this picture, and David bent low to make it out. First came some illegible name, and then these words, “The first ship I have had the honour to command. Launched at the Hard on April 6th in the year of Our Lord 1816. May God bless her, and find me worthy of my trust.”
The Bird in the Tree Page 14
