The Bird In The Tree by Elizabeth Goudge | eBook

Read an Excerpt

The Bird in the Tree

By Elizabeth Goudge

Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

CHAPTER 1

— 1 —

Visitors to Damerosehay, had they but known it, could have told just how much the children liked them by the particular spot at which they were met upon arrival. If the visitor was definitely disliked, the children paid no attention to him until Ellen had forcibly thrust them into their best clothes and pushed them through the drawing-room door about the hour of five; when they extended limp paws in salutation, replied in polite monosyllables to inquiries as to their well-being, and then stood in a depressed row staring at the carpet, beautiful to behold but no more alive than three Delia Robbia cherubs modelled out of plaster. If, on the other hand, they tolerated the visitor, they would go so far as to meet him at the front door and ask if he had brought them anything. If they liked him they would go to the gate at the end of the wood and wave encouragingly as he came towards them. But if they loved him, if he was one of the inner circle, they would go right through the village, taking the dogs with them, and along the coast road to the corner by the cornfield, and when they saw the beloved approaching they would yell like all the fiends of hell let loose for the afternoon.

Their cousin David belonged to this inner circle, and David would be here at five o'clock. It was half-past four now. If they hurried they would reach the corner by the cornfield just as his car came jolting down the rutted lane from the main road. Madly they dashed down the back stairs from the nursery, raced into the kitchen to fetch the dogs, Pooh-Bah and the Bastard, and dashed out again into the hall and through the porch into the long drive that led down through the oak-wood to the road. Every family has its particular bright stars, and David and Grandmother were the particular stars of the Eliot family, people in whose presence life was more worth living, people who warmed you, like the sun, and lit the whole world to a richer glory. Grandmother was always with them, the centre of their life, but David only came on visits. He was like a meteor in the sky, or a rainbow, something that shone for a brief exciting moment and then was gone. They had to make the most of him, and for this reason it was important that they should not be a moment late at the cornfield.

"No time!" they yelled to Ellen, who called out something about thick shoes from the front door. "No time! No time!"

Yet even as he went leaping down the drive, going first because he was the eldest, with Tommy and Caroline coming after and the dogs flying on ahead, Ben was conscious as always of the beauty of the oak-wood, and of the garden that he could see through the iron gateway in the old high red brick wall that was skirted by the drive as it wound from the east side of the house, where the porch and the front door faced across the marshes to the silver line of the Estuary, down through the wood to the gate. But that one glimpse was enough for Ben. In his mind's eye, as he ran on, he could see the green grass paths between the lavender hedges, the purple masses of the michaelmas daisies with the butterflies sunning their wings upon them, the glowing spires of the goldenrod and the flames of the dahlias and peonies and petunias, the frail late autumn roses and the ilex tree by the house where the blackbird sang. He could see the colour of it, and smell the damp sweet scent of it, and feel how it lived and breathed within its old brick walls just to give sanctuary to those who needed it.

— 2 —

And Ben was one of these. Though he was only nine years old he had come already to feel the need for sanctuary. He had been born in Egypt, and then gone on to India, and foreign countries had most violently disagreed with him. The first seven years of his life were now just a confused and painful memory of heat and flies, bands playing, riots when people got shot, a burning fever in his body, a pain in his head, a choking feeling in his chest that they told him was asthma, and his father and mother quarrelling. The asthma, the grown-ups had told him, was an illness, but Ben had known quite well that he choked because his father and mother quarrelled. He admired them so, his father so tall and splendid and his mother so lovely, and when they had quarrelled his love and sorrow had swelled inside his chest like a balloon, and so of course he had choked. He had understood it all quite well in his own mind, but he hadn't been able to explain it; so he had had to go on choking.

And then they had come home to England, and the children had come to Damerosehay where Grandmother and Aunt Margaret lived. That had been two years ago, but Ben could remember the day they arrived as though it were yesterday. Aunt Margaret had met the children in London and brought them to Grandmother, because their mother was going up north to stay with a friend and their father was staying in London to arrange something mysterious called a divorce. The children and Aunt Margaret had driven out from the station in the village taxi one spring evening just as the sun was setting, and the moment they had turned in through the broken gate into the drive that led through the oak-wood he had felt better. And when ten minutes later he had sat on Grandmother's lap in the drawing-room, rubbing his bare legs contedly against her silk skirts, eating a sugared almond and looking into that lovely cloistered garden, he had suddenly felt well. After tea he had gone out into the garden quite by himself and had seen how the old red walls were built all round him to keep him safe. It had been cool in the garden and the daffodils had made pools of gold beside the grass paths. There had been no sound except the far-off murmur of the sea and the blackbird singing in the ilex tree. He had known for certain that no one would ever quarrel here, there would be no bands of shooting to hurt his head and he would never feel too hot.... Nor would he choke here.... He had run up and down the grass paths and he had been happy.

But the difficulty was that now he could never go away from Damerosehay. He had to live here always and do lessons with Uncle Hilary at the Vicarage instead of going to school. When his father had gone back to India and his mother had made a home for herself in London, and was working so hard that she couldn't have her children with her except sometimes on visits, he had been sent to a preparatory school. But he had choked there so badly that they had had to write and tell Grandmother. She had come down at once, driven by David in his beautiful silver-grey car, dressed in her black silk and with a little silver box of sugared almonds in her black velvet bag, and while she had sat on his bed and hugged him he had whispered to her that it was because it was all so noisy, and the other boys quarrelled, and he wanted to go back to Damerosehay. She had listened, nodding her head, and paying not the slightest attention to the headmaster's remarks about the wholesome discipline of school life, and the matron's assertion that nervous disorders must not be treated with too much leniency; she had wrapped him up in a rug and carried him straight off downstairs to David in his waiting car.... That had been the first time he had seen David. Sitting on Grandmother's lap, leaning back against her shoulder and eating a sugared almond, he had looked at his cousin's clear-cut features against the background of sky and trees and hedgerows that streamed by as the car raced them to Damerosehay, and thought him a god among men.... Even so did the gods behave, dropping from the sky in silver chariots and carrying one away from pain and desolation to the place where one would be.

"This child is very like what you were at his age, David," Grandmother had announced over his head. "He has the Eliot colouring, of course, while you have mine, but I notice the same sensitivity."

"The same dramatic ability, you mean," David had said. "Nothing like turning on a bit of pathos to get what you want." But he had spoken quite nicely and had winked his eye at Ben, so that Ben's feelings had not been in any way hurt.... Indeed, Ben had chuckled, remembering how he had coughed a lot harder when he had overheard the headmaster saying to the matron in the passage that they had better write to Grandmother.... "I used," David had continued, "to make myself sick at school by hammering on my front and then heaving. It was a useful accomplishment I'll teach you, Ben, if you like."

"My dear!" Grandmother had exclaimed, shocked, and David had said no more but had tilted his head back and looked up at the flying clouds over his head with upon his face that expression of ethereal beauty that was his to command at will. And Ben had chuckled again, and swelled a little with pride, because he as well as David had dramatic ability.... And David's dramatic ability was such that sometimes he had his name up in electric light in Shaftesbury Avenue; the first Eliot to achieve this particular brand of fame.

And Ben, as well as David, had grace. As he went leaping down the drive his flying figure seemed less that of a boy than of the spirit of a boy. His lithe brown beauty was more of the essence of things than of their form. It was the loveliest of all types of beauty, his Grandmother thought; more enduring than perfection of shape or colour; more attractive because more elusive. In repose Ben was not a beautiful child; he was bony, with a sallow skin and straight lustreless dark hair, his only good points his shy brown fawn's eyes, and exquisitely cut lips that lifted at the corners when he smiled with a swift movement that was the very epitome of delight. But any sort of movement, whether mental or physical, transformed him. When something touched his mind or spirit into awareness or delight waves of light seemed to pass over his face, like the reflection of sun upon water, and when he moved the suppleness of the body that in stillness could be so angular had in it almost the grace of wind-blown rushes, or weeds that sway with the current beneath the water. So unselfconsciously could he abandon himself to some thought or emotion greater than his body, as the rushes to the wind and the weeds to the water, that he himself became a part of the beauty of it. So, while his mind remained unsullied and his body capable of movement, would he always be beautiful, thought his Grandmother, for the loveliness that can be mirrored in mind and body is inexhaustible as long as the world endures.

Tommy was quite different. He was eight years old, and fat. He had fat dark curls, fat red cheeks and round bright dark eyes. He looked like one of Raphael's cherubs but unfortunately his character was most distressingly at variance with his outward appearance. "What have I done," his Grandmother would cry, "that I should have such a child thrust upon me in my old age?" At which cry of despair he would chuckle his fat chuckle, bump his incredibly hard head against her shoulder in what was meant to be a contact of affection but was in effect as that of the onslaught of a young goat, and go off to think out further devilry in the bathroom. He had twice been sent to school and twice been returned with thanks; so now he stayed at Damerosehay and in company with Ben did lessons with Uncle Hilary. He was, it seemed, better behaved at Damerosehay than anywhere else. He said it was the blackbird who sang in the ilex tree who helped him to be good.

Caroline was five and three-quarters, and sucked her thumb. Nothing cured her of it; not spanking, nor bitter aloes put on the nail, nor coaxing, nor expostulation. She just sucked, removing her thumb only when she wished to eat or smile. She seldom spoke and it was impossible to say at her age whether her silence was due to the presence of great thoughts in her mind or to the absence of any thoughts at all. Time alone would show, and meanwhile she sucked, to the great distress of Ellen. "She must be cured of it, Milady," Ellen would say to Grandmother. "It's her left thumb and it's swollen something terrible already. What'll her bridegroom say when she holds out her hand for the ring and he sees the thumb she has on her?"

"We can only do our best, Ellen," Grandmother would say soothingly. "Put on the aloes and trust in Providence."

Caroline had neither the dark good looks of most of the Eliots nor the golden beauty that had once been her Grandmother's and was now David's. She was thin and freckled, with straight fair hair cut in a fringe across her forehead. Yet she had an elfin attraction of her own. Her eyes were the green eyes of a fairy's child, she had the delicacy and precision of an exquisite old lady, and lovely little teeth that showed like pearls between her lips on the rare occasions when she condescended to remove her thumb from her mouth. She learnt to read and write with her Grandmother, and Ellen had taught her to make cross-stitch kettle-holders for her mother and aunts every Christmas. Ben was a child who could have lived in any age, tuned like a violin to respond with clear beauty to whatever moods and events might strike upon him, and Tommy was modern to the depths of his restless truthful little soul, but Caroline had stepped straight out of the age of Victoria the Good. She could not be dressed in shorts and jerseys, like the boys, she looked simply silly in them, she had to wear frocks of pastel shades, beautifully smocked by Ellen, worn in summer with sunbonnets that tied beneath the chin and in winter with bonnet-shaped hats and little pelissed coats trimmed with fur. Muffs became her, and coral necklaces, and little red shoes with pom-poms on them. She was inclined to be finicky over her food and already showed an old-maid tendency to like a place for everything and everything in its place. She kept a cat, and always said her prayers without being reminded, and, strangest of all traits in an Eliot, she was frightened of strange dogs.... Ellen was very much afraid that, the thumb-sucking apart, she would never get a husband.

Caroline was not frightened of their own dogs, of course, not even of Pooh-Bah, a chow possessed of the most mighty ancestry and a peculiarly crushing arrogance. Pooh-Bah's nose was permanently wrinkled, as though every smell that he smelt was beneath his notice, and he wore upon his forehead a frown that had been known to cause the most loquacious visitors to fall uneasily silent when he turned the light of his countenance disdainfully upon them. He was superbly beautiful. His ears, stiffly erect upon his noble cranium, were as delicately pointed as flower petals, his eyes were like dark amber and his tongue was a royal purple. His coat was the colour of a ripe cornfield with the sun upon it and his tail, of a slightly paler shade of tawny gold, was erected over his back in a strong lovely curve that was never untwisted and never lowered. Agitated back and forth it might be in moments of pleasure and excitement, but lowered, never. While life was in Pooh-Bah that tail would stay erect above the proud curve of his furred, protuberant stern.

But with the tail of the Bastard it was not so. The Bastard's tail was tremblingly responsive to his every mood, and his moods were many. Pooh-Bah was so proud that he never permitted himself even to feel a weakness, let alone to show it, but the Bastard, un-upheld by the arrogance of race and beauty, felt many weaknesses and showed them all. He was frightened, he was unhappy, he was penitent, he was anxious, he was passionately loving, he was shy, he was coy, and his tail, like a dirty uncurled ostrich feather that has seen better days, trembled, drooped, rose, fell, waved, rotated, or disappeared between his hind legs altogether, according as these emotions ravaged his faithful breast. For faithful the Bastard undoubtedly was. In spite of the extreme nervousness of his highly-strung temperament he would have died in defence of the Eliots because he loved them, while Pooh-Bah would have died for them only because they were his sacred property. The Bastard's loving faithfulness was very visible in his appearance, shining in the liquid depths of the dark eyes that gazed so appealingly out of the curious mat of whitish-grey hair that was his face, and dripping in streams of saliva from the end of the long pink tongue that he lowered out of the side of his mouth in moments of emotion. He always dribbled when he loved people; he couldn't help it, but it made him a little unpopular in the drawing-room. For the rest, he was a large dog with flapping uncontrolled ears, sprawling legs that didn't seem to belong to him and a lanky body enveloped in tangled whitish-grey fur that had a slightly moth-eaten appearance. He had come to Damerosehay ten years ago as a puppy, having been deposited upon the back doorstep by persons unknown but thought to be of gypsy origin. Some thought he was of sheepdog ancestry. Others suggested elkhound crossed with pomeranian. Some few detected a flavour of collie with a dash of Skye terrier. The vet made no suggestions; the problem, he said, was beyond him; but the dog was a sweet-tempered dog, and faithful, and let them thank God for that.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge. Copyright © 1967 Elizabeth Goudge. Excerpted by permission of Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

The Bird In The Tree

eBook

Customer Reviews

Read an Excerpt

The Bird in the Tree

Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Recently Viewed

The Bird In The Tree

eBook

Customer Reviews

Read an Excerpt

The Bird in the Tree

Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Recently Viewed

Related Subjects