The Birthday Tree
I
I IMAGINE that few women — unless they have recently become engaged to a millionaire, and have been generalizing about emeralds — look forward with any very keen pleasure to their fortieth birthday. It is no longer, it is true, the portal of middle age, for there is no age nowadays; but it is the beginning of Part II; and Part II, if the expectation of life is the same now as in the Psalmist’s day, will be shorter than Part I. It may be equally agreeable; it may even be more agreeable— but we do not know; all we know is that it will be different. The assets, the technique, the experiences which made Part I what it was we cannot rely on in Part II. I, anyhow, had no very lively anticipations of this festival; I should have forgotten all about it if certain furtive and gleeful whisperings between the children and Cook had not reminded me that some monstrous confection would have to be admired and eaten next day. Least of all did I imagine that it would bring me one of those crystal moments of unexpected and quintessential joy which pierce through the muddy texture of common things, fill the eyes, and by their purity and perfection lift a simple emotion on to the plane of high art.
The Three came just before I was up to kiss me and wish me Many Happy Returns of the Day, which they did with a certain rather self-conscious smugness. At breakfast there was a present — one. It was from Aubrey — a hurricane lantern of a special pattern which was, he kindly assured me, very nearly foolproof, and which I should find invaluable for visiting the incubators next spring. In late August incubators seem rather remote. Still, I was not chilled — a present is a present, Aubrey is not a millionaire, and I never talk about emeralds.
At 10.30 Sabina handed me a note, heavily sealed, with instructions to open it at 11.30. The Three then vanished. At 11.30 I opened the note. It contained a rough map of the fields about the house, with a line of arrows indicating the route to a certain small gate near the edge of what the villagers still call ‘the forest.’ ‘Go to this spot,’ red-ink lettering informed me, ‘and you will receive further instructions.’
II
Out in the fields the August sun beat down in splendor on the cracked brown turf, making great blue caves in the dusty late green of the elms. The thistle heads were opening in the heat and spilling their mischievous silvery contents in all directions. No one was in sight as I approached the little gate, but it first shivered uncertainly, and finally burst open with a jerk toward me. An ingenious arrangement of fine green string in the hedge had produced this effect of unseen hands. I passed through. There stood Patrick, stocky, rosy, and self-conscious, in fancy dress of a rather miscellaneous character — I spotted a pair of my own silk knickers and Sabina’s best gray school stockings, besides other items. In one hand he carried a sweet-scented autumn nosegay, in the other a second note. With two low bows he presented me with both. I read the note. ‘Follow the bearer to the split tree and into the wood — from there you will see your way.’
Repressing a strong desire to kiss the bearer’s downy freckled face, I said, ‘I follow.’ In solemn silence he led me across the brackeny topmost corner of the field, full of devil’s-bit scabious, to the split tree — an old ilex with a double trunk, which is our regular highway into the wood. Scrambling through, I saw a most curious sight.
From the ilex a tiny narrow path leads away and uphill into the heart of the wood. This had been swept clear of every leaf and twig and pine needle, and the sweepings had been piled up in neat little heaps at regular intervals on both sides of the path. But every heap was crowned with a branch of green bracken, and on each branch lay a posy of flowers. Here a bunch of asters, there pink or white stocks; marigolds, mignonette, gladiolus; a late rose or two, a tress of wistaria from the second blooming; cosmias, heliotrope — and, when these failed, the great starry blossoms of purple or white clematis, or single flowers from the big creamy or crimson hollyhocks. In the deep shade this flowery pathway gleamed as if picked out with little many-colored lamps. Startled, amused, touched by this pretty conceit, I followed the path, indeed ‘seeing my way,’ the bearer now behind me. For a good quarter of a mile it led me through the wood. What hours of patient toil, sweeping and piling the heaps! What a triumph of organization — for every bough and flower was firm and dewfresh !
At last the path came out at a place I know well, and dearly love. A huge beech tree stands alone in the space it has cleared for itself, a circle thirty yards across, at whose outer rim the undergrowth stops as if cut with a knife. Where the path debouched into this circle two larger heaps of leaves, each crowned with an immense bouquet, stood like gateposts. But my eyes were held by the circle itself. Here too every inch of soil had been swept bare, and a rampart of dead leaves a foot or more high surrounded it. In the centre rose the great trunk of the beech, and about it the ground for twenty feet was carpeted with fresh-strewn fern, while a narrow green ribbon of the same led out to it from the end of my path. At the foot of the tree stood a sort of altar, also all of green save the top, which was covered with posies of flowers, among which I discerned the gleam of white tissue paper. Here were the presents I had missed at breakfast — here was my fortieth birthday!
III
For a moment I stood in tears, unable to see. Then I looked again. No one was in sight — circle, altar, and tree stood deserted in the dappled silence. Suddenly with a rustling of boughs there burst through the rhododendrons first Sabina, barefooted, her shining hair combed loose from its plaits and floating to her waist over her soft Confirmation dress; then Helena, also in her best muslin and also barefoot. They danced up to me, danced round me, and curtsied deeply before me. But formalities vanished now in a tempest of hugs and kisses. In the middle Patrick touched my arm — ‘What an inopportune apparition!‘ he muttered in dismay. I looked where he pointed. The figure of Searle, the keeper, was approaching down another path.
Such a moment could suffer no blasting. I went over to him. ‘Look, Searle, what the children have made for my birthday! Is n’t it pretty?’
Searle pushed his cap over one ear, the better to scratch his head. ‘Well,’ he observed with a long breath, ‘I’m glad to know the rights o’ this at last. More’n a fortnight I seen someone been sweepin’ that little path, and then a-clearin’ this spot — but I never could catch ’em. Come dinner time, I did, and early mornin’ when I’d fed the pheasants, but I never see no one.’ Muffled giggles from behind told me that Searle had not been himself unseen. ‘This mornin’ I see the green fern on the ’eaps,’ he went on, ‘and I thought it was the school children. But those flowers — that’s right pretty, that is. You swept all this, miss?’ to Sabina. ‘Well, that’s a fair bit o’ work! Best take some o’ these leaves home for your garden, ma’am, now they are swep’ up.’
No, even Searle could not resist it. We gave him a posy for his wife — heliotrope and the silvery blue of arctotis — and he took himself off, full of good humor, to his pheasants.
We cleared the altar of flowers — thirty-seven bunches there were — and sat on it to discuss the presents: the cigarette case from Patrick, Helena’s chocolate, and the linen nightdress case that had kept Sabina busy for a twelvemonth. I heard all the details of the work — those early morning walks from six to eight were now explained — and how they had ‘beat it into the rhodos’ on the many occasions when Searle had come to find out who was sweeping in his wood. I was even shown the suitcase in which they had carried up their best frocks and Patrick’s fancy dress. ‘But you walked so fast, Mummie, we had no time to put on our stockings.’ Blessed speed — I would not have missed my woodland nymphs for the world.
Emeralds are beautiful — I love them. But not even for emeralds would I exchange that first moment at the beech tree, when sight and speech were lost in an emotion so sudden, so pure, so perfect, as to defy time and change. For what can buy bliss? Who would n’t be forty?