Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “You won’t care about him when you do meet him,” said Antony.

  “If he’s got a very superior sort of mind, he can’t help letting it appear, you know, H.H.,” said Asta, with a perfectly grave face.

  “Ah, my dear Asta, you must have your little joke! Ha-ha,” said Hargreaves, grinning defensively.

  “But what do you mind about his books?” Rose persisted.

  “Oh, I hate all these writer chaps who must call every decent thing down,” Hargreaves said vigorously. “If a man does something brave, why not call it brave? Why pretend that it was a mistake, or that he was drunk at the time, or did it to amuse his typist?” Rose laughed—a rather nice bubbling laugh. “No, but really, Mrs. P., they do make me a bit tired, all these fellows. If they must be clever, let them be clever about their own clever things, books and pictures and all that; they needn’t go debunking, as they call it, all the things ordinary people admire.”

  “The trouble with Hillier, from your point of view, is surely that he does the brave things himself, isn’t it, Henry?” Asta asked, beginning to nibble a buttered cob of sweet corn. “Some of his new climbs in the Caucasus and the Elburz have been extraordinarily good shows.”

  “Yes—well then, why must he pretend that it was all as easy as riding on a bus down Piccadilly?” Hargreaves asked explosively. “It’s pure affectation, Asta. And it’s pretty silly, really.”

  “He couldn’t very well say—‘We were all very brave,’ ” said Asta, nibbling like lightning along another row of her cob.

  “No, but he could say—‘We were damned frightened, and we had good reason to be,’” replied Hargreaves. “He doesn’t—he implies that a bank clerk with no mountaineering training would have enjoyed it all.”

  “Are you making a last stand in the interests of the true romance, H.H.?” Lydiard asked, putting down his finished cob, and wiping his thin lips.

  This was the sort of question which rather nonplussed Hargreaves. He took a drink of beer, wiped his little fair moustache, and pulled himself together.

  “Ah, my dear Antony, you’re clever too, and enjoy that sort of thing. But you know, really, old fellow, that it’s as silly to pretend that things that do exist, don’t exist, as to pretend that things that don’t exist, do exist, like the romantics,” he said. “What do you say, Mrs. P.?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Rose.

  “A novel definition of romance, and quite a good one, Henry,” said Antony.

  It amused Rose Pelham to listen to Hargreaves and the Lydiards together—so much so, that she had deliberately refrained from answering Henry properly, so as not to deflect the conversation. She had known her two cousins so well, in the past, that the working of their mind and their normal speech had become one of the firm backgrounds of her life. She had always valued them very much, and particularly for one thing—she felt that they both saw a little deeper, made life a little richer than other people; they had a way of looking at things which seemed to throw a light on them. They took nothing at second-hand—they made their own judgements, and these judgements were expressed freely, and with great clarity and precision. And remembering all this, and the sort of friends who surrounded them at home, she had been astonished to find a man like Captain Hargreaves on terms of such evident intimacy, of affection, with them, out here. There must be more in him, she had supposed, than appeared. But as the weeks passed she failed to discover more than did appear: his simplicity, his abounding vitality, a funny streak of horse sense combined with immense self-complacency, a rather rough-and-ready humour. And his affectionateness. He was a most affectionate creature, obviously. And she had watched, with great entertainment, how the Lydiards made the thing work. They were fond of him, and so, with him, they lived on his lines, and above all talked on his lines, using those forms of speech which were the best worn, and the most economical of intellectual content. It had become a sort of game, and they played it with great skill—played it even in his absence, very often. Neither Antony nor Asta, in any case, believed in conversation for conversation’s sake, or as a form of entertainment; to them it was simply a means of human communication. But because they realised that human communication is a very subtle and difficult thing, they used words not only with considerable skill, but with a sort of austere faithfulness. Only, since on Henry Hargreaves skill and austerity would have been thrown away, they spoke to him in his own tongue, and used it with mastery. Compared to their ordinary speech, talking to Henry was really hardly more than a sort of conversational rubbing noses, and it amused her to watch her very intelligent cousins doing this.

  But though she was amused at Captain Hargreaves, rather to her own surprise she had soon found that she also liked him very much. The fact was that he was fearfully nice. This was the surprise. Rose had never expected to find that anyone who used his mind so little and was so openly a-principled could be in the least nice; one of the most rigid of her small, private, rigid convictions was that to be nice people must be fairly intelligent, and up to a point, good. In the Army circles into which her marriage had carried her, and above all in Egypt, she had met plenty of men of the type to which Hargreaves appeared to belong: brave, inept, gallant—and she had never really liked any of them. She had sometimes discussed with Charles the question of whether the Army made ordinary men like that, or whether men like that gravitated naturally into the Army—since certainly they seemed to pullulate among the armed forces of the Crown. Both, Charles said—adding that you never found them on the Staff. (Charles was on the Staff.) Anyhow, all this made it very startling indeed that she should have found Captain Hargreaves so nice, even before the other evening.

  Lying on the small bed in her room, after lunch, Rose Pelham thought about the other evening—and about the evenings which had followed it. Her principal feeling was of a profound relief and contentment. The lienzas were down on the verandah outside, and the hot afternoon sun shot narrow brilliant threads of light through their cracks, which barred the lower halves of the cheap muslin curtains across her windows; she watched these golden bars idly, too happy, as well as too hot, to shut her eyes and try to go to sleep—she wanted to stay awake and taste her happiness to the full, to remember Henry’s arms round her last night, and his foolish tender words—and to remember that they were going to dance to the gramophone at the Ingoldstadts’ tonight, and would walk home together after it, be alone together again. Oh, after all the waste and misery and loss and despair, the crushing humiliation of the last two years, how wonderful this was—to be wanted, to be loved! She stretched her bare arms out, in an exultant gesture. And in seven hours, only in seven short hours, she would see him again.

  From her present triumphant happiness she could look back, and did now look back, watching those hot bars of light (which had a sort of blessing, a sort of inherent goodness in them, because for several days now they had been associated with this recollected joy) at her past wretchedness. It had been fearful, her incredulous realisation, at last, that Charles really didn’t care about her any more, that he never would again. It had taken her a long time to believe it. Because she loved him so, in spite of all his cruel difficult tiresomeness; and she could not believe that her marriage, hers and his, could suffer this ship-wreck. They had been unhappy before—oh, often enough, but they had always both wished to make it right, she especially; and sooner or later they had turned to one another, had kissed again with tears. “When we fell out, my wife and I”—oh yes, Tennyson knew! And even now a hot tear slid down onto the hot pillow at the memory. But at the last, that had stopped. Charles had turned stony, had as it were turned his face the other way; there had been no more kissing, with or without tears. And she was left, incredulous, to face the fact that it was really over—it was broken, this love, this marriage, which had meant everything in life to her; it couldn’t be mended. Hope, to which she had clung so long—there was no more place for hope; it was no use, it did no good. Her attempts at gentleness and quietness, her very face
of hope—they had merely irritated him. Horrible moment when she had first understood that! And then Esther Struthers had appeared—and again slowly, again with her foolish, helpless incredulity, she had watched that, had seen, long after everyone else in Cairo had seen it, what was happening. What she couldn’t give, what she couldn’t be, Esther was giving, being.

  And when she did understand that, she had fled. Because that was more than anyone could bear. To be in the house with him, in the very rooms, doing the very things, which had been witnesses of his love, his tenderness to her, and to watch him using that special secret voice, hear him laughing that special glad laugh, to someone else; see that closeness of confidence, that precious intimacy of words and looks shown to someone else. Oh, who suffers like a wife? If they had been lovers or engaged, she could have broken it off, done something decisive and fierce; but a wife can only sit, and keep quiet, and see. See even the pitying faces of the servants! A wife can be struck between every joint of her harness; in her love, her honour and her dignity. And that very gentle steadiness of behaviour which honour and dignity and duty enjoin on her can subtly, cruelly, be turned against her; can be made to seem attempts—oh, horror of cruelty!—to lure him back, to entice him. No, no one could stay and suffer that.

  She remembered, now, with curious clearness, those first weeks in England—the emptiness, and the emptied feeling. What is a wife without her husband, away from her husband? Everyone asked for Charles, as if he were part of her, half of her—and he wasn’t, any more. More than that, she had had strongly the feeling of being depreciated, of no value to anyone. Lying watching the bars of sunlight on the curtains, and thinking about being depreciated, she remembered one odd little episode. She had been staying, as in duty bound, with the old Pelhams in Gloucestershire, and one warm spring day, partly as a duty, partly to escape from that house, with all its memories of Charles and the days of their engagement, she had walked over to lunch with an elderly couple living about six miles away, who were old friends of her family. They were both in the sixties, she a year or two older than he; and both, in her girlhood, had shown her much indulgent kindness. The house was old and beautiful, her hosts civilised and affectionate; she had enjoyed the change, the sort of rest of escape into another atmosphere. And then, after lunch, Mrs. Bromley had gone upstairs to fetch a piece of needlework to show her—and in her absence Mr. Bromley, without any warning, had put his arms round her and kissed her. There was no time to say anything before his wife reappeared. But when later Rose made to take her leave, both had pressed her to stay for tea. Mrs. Bromley, it appeared, had a village meeting, and must go out; “but do stay—you will keep William company. He hates having tea alone.” And William, with an air of perfectly easy good faith, had added his pressure to that of his wife. In a curious sort of listlessness, Rose had agreed. She had no good excuse for not stopping; and they had both been so good to her in the past, he particularly, that she felt a certain reluctance not to do what they asked, to take a strong line of refusal for which he, at least, would perfectly understand the reason. But above all she felt that she could not bring herself to show discourtesy, a cold rebuff, to affection, any affection—even the unwelcome and rather nauseating caresses of a foolish old man. So she stayed. Mrs. Bromley went out, and a little tense and nervous, she walked with Mr. Bromley about the garden in the spring sunshine, forcing herself to talk lightly and naturally about everything—the new lily-pond, the narcissus at the edge of the spinney, the cows. When they went in for tea the tension became more acute—the servants, it appeared, had also gone to the meeting, and they boiled the silver kettle themselves on a spirit-lamp in the dining-room. This was more than Rose had bargained for, to be alone in the house with old William, in his amorous mood. She was actually a little frightened. But she forced herself to maintain a semblance of ease; and when, after tea, as she had known he would, he kissed her again, a great deal, sitting on the faded chintz sofa in the beautiful drawing-room with the high windows, she managed to show herself gently acquiescent and quiet until the very last, when she went away. And walking back along the white upland road, where the level light lay so beautifully across the long rolling slopes, she was glad that she had. It was something saved from her own wreck, not to have been unkind, not to have shown a selfish and cruel impatience with his folly. He was being what people called a nasty old man, and his kisses had been a horror to her; but she could not forget that he had once been, not a nasty old man, but a generously kind middle-aged one. What would have been gained by rebuffing even this sickly affection? And did it really matter what happened to her? Why should she be too proud to be kissed by old William? No—she was glad she had stuck it out—smiled, been gracious. And from the depths of this dreary humility had at last sprung one little thought, drearier and humbler than all—it was something to be able to give that much pleasure to anyone, even to a foolish old man.

  Well, being loved by Henry was very different to poor old William Bromley, she thought, smiling to herself—and turning on her side, under the thin sheet, at last she dropped off to sleep.

  Rose Pelham at this time was in a peculiar state of mind. The rejection of a love once sought, given, and accepted deals a very powerful and deadly blow at the whole personality, especially if the reasons for the rejection are not understood. And they very seldom can be either explained or understood. Rose, in any event, did not really understand what had happened between herself and her husband. She was in a state of complete bewilderment as to what had gone wrong and why. From the cloud of pain and confusion there had gradually emerged the conviction that she had somehow or other failed to get love right, failed either to understand it or to live it; and because this mistake had hurt and injured her so, she felt that it must somehow be rectified. For the last few months, therefore, she had turned for instruction on this point to any quarter which seemed likely to afford it. She had read text-books, poor child, on sex and psychology; she had read up-to-date novels. And because of her own confusion and uncertainty, she was in a very dangerous state of mental subjection to any author who spoke with conviction on the subject of modern love. She studied the writings of Messrs. D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Lawrence didn’t take her very far; Charles was obviously not in a state of emotional thraldom to old Lady Pelham, whom he treated with a very affectionate derision—and as for the dark underground what-nots, and all the rest of it, they left her quite out of her depth. The cool lucid precision, the simian-scientific view of life set forth by Mr. Huxley, on the other hand, exercised a certain fascination over her, as over so many of her generation. Life and love as she knew them hadn’t felt like that, but that was probably her ignorance and her unconsciousness. If she had known herself better, no doubt it would all have worn this curiously cold and physical aspect; perhaps the idealistic and aspiring love which she believed in, and had long believed to exist between herself and Charles, was in fact a pure illusion, based either on their psychological peculiarities or on unrecognised sexual fantasies and impulses; perhaps it was really true that the only fundamental reality in the relations between men and women was some form of sexual or even sensual impulse—and that if it looked otherwise, it was merely dressed out by the deceitful and vainglorious ego to sail under false colours.

  Under the influence of such theories as these, and in the effort to understand, her direct emotional life had become all tangled up; distorted and dominated by a quite artificial intellectual attitude towards love and sex. And this had developed in her a new quality of enquiry and even of recklessness—a dare-all and try-all attitude which didn’t really belong to her character. She was determined to know about this side of life about which she had known too little, which, going wrong, had ruined her happiness. Everything had been rotted up for her on the old lines, along which she had tried so hard—lines primarily moral; well, now she was going to find out the truth along other lines, more practical and more scientific. And no scruples or timidities were going to hinder her.

 
This had been her frame of mind when she arrived in China; it will be evident therefore that she was in a state to be in mental subjection, not only to books but also to persons who spoke with authority on the subject of love. And this Henry Hargreaves, on his own lines, appeared to do. From the first he threw out little snappy semi-psychological tags, in the course of his comments on people, which implied—quite correctly—a vast experience. Rose Pelham had not paid much attention to the tags, for she thought Henry very fairly stupid, though nice; but when he began to make love to her, the mastery which his experience gave him told. And she was by now quite prepared to believe that a person who was stupid about books and things of that sort might nevertheless be wise about love and living. After all, no one could be much more intelligent than Charles, but his intelligence had not prevented their love from foundering.

  The fact was that though she had been married to Charles for nearly five years, though he had at first been passionately in love with her, and though she had welcomed and returned his love, she had been so much preoccupied with the ethical and mental side of their relation that the technique of passion had been left out, as far as she was concerned. She had never troubled herself to think about that—it had all been part of a divine confusion. (She had, when all was said and done, married at twenty-one.) No one had ever suggested to her that she should try, and in her preoccupation with the spiritual side of her marriage she had not tried to isolate passion in order to understand it intellectually, and its bearing on the rest of her married life. So now she was unable to correlate her own experience with the written theory. And whatever Henry might say, his love-making was authoritative; it carried conviction, as well as satisfying her starved young senses and soothing her bruised self-respect. In her new mood of pseudo-scientific detachment she was almost prepared to tell herself airily that if this business with Henry was almost entirely physical, it was none the worse for that.