Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  On the whole, however, she set out for the Betettis’ in a mood of brilliant happiness. She had played tennis well, and was toned and braced by her success, with Henry looking on—oh, so lovely to have someone to care whether one played well or badly!—and she put on a good frock of dark smoky blue, which emphasised the lovely golden colour of her arms and neck. It was a lovely night, hot, with a soft air off the sea; as her ricksha bowled along the sandy paths through the acacias warm scents of grass and tree, still imprisoned among the undergrowth from the heat of the day, came fleeting on her face, as light and moving as the faint tremors of anticipation that ran through her at the thought of the evening. She was carried through a world of enchantment, which held the thing she had so long been starving for—love. She looked no further ahead than this poised and perfect moment—asked no more.

  Her mood held through the evening, and Henry Hargreaves was dazzled by it. He was beginning to feel rather more sure of his ground—what she had told him, little and vague as it was, about her unhappiness with her husband, and there being someone else, had both explained what had puzzled him about her attitude before, and left the way clear, so he considered, for him to go ahead. Up to a point, he had gone ahead, on his own lines; he felt at ease with her now, and talked as well as kissed; he had made her a good many confidences about his own life, and his views of love and living. But his ideas of going ahead were much more concrete than hers, who indeed had no ideas at all but of enjoying the happy present. And Henry Hargreaves too was, as we know, ridden by theories about love—in his case, it must be admitted, largely reinforced by experience—and by one theory in particular. And so what happened that night was perhaps inevitable for these two theorists, the one experienced, the other not, but both determined, in their several ways, not to fall below the standard of their preconceptions.

  They left the Betettis about half-past ten, Henry full of admiration for the way Mrs. Pelham had slackened in animation, drooped and visibly wilted while dancing with her host, before complaining of the sun that afternoon, and admitting that she really had got rather a bad headache. She was a first-class little intrigante! He told her so, when they had dismissed the rickshas, and were sitting on a sheltered seat at the edge of the bluff, some distance from the Lydiards’ bungalow. There was no moon tonight; the great stars hung high above the sea, and made a faint greyish shine which just defined the whiteness of the path among the small trees; the little waves murmured a gentle noise on the shore.

  His praise jarred on Rose’s mood—she could do those things, and almost take an artistic pride in doing them as well as possible, but she disliked having them spoken of. She shifted her position, and said she wanted a cigarette.

  “Oh darling, must you?” But he found and lit one for her. His instinct told him that something was wrong, and he searched her face for some expression of it in the glow of the match. There was little to see but a gentle blankness that he was getting to know—if poker-players ever thought of looking gentle, what a poker-face hers would make! But he couldn’t leave it at that, and as he couldn’t kiss her either, while she was smoking, he had to fall back on words. Henry Hargreaves seldom found words as satisfactory, with women, as other methods. He took up her free hand and kissed that, and said “Darling, what’s wrong?”

  She was always honest with him—sometimes disconcertingly so.

  “Nothing serious—I didn’t like what you said about my having done all that so well.”

  “But you did do it well—you did it superbly, sweetheart.”

  “I know—I mean I daresay. But I hate being praised for what I rather hate doing.”

  Henry couldn’t see that. “But darling, what’s wrong with praising you for doing well what tons of people would do so hellishly badly? And it isn’t wrong, you know—I mean, it was only a little white lie. We’d agreed to meet, and you just were very clever, and made it all safe and easy.”

  “Yes—but——”

  “You don’t hate having come, do you?” Henry pursued, bearing down her hesitancy. “You don’t hate being here with me now, my dearest love?”

  “No, of course not. I’ve been looking forward to that all day,” she told him honestly, “It’s only the means to it I rather hate—white lies, and acting. That may be silly, but I do. Just don’t talk about it, Henry, please.”

  “My sweet! I’ll do exactly what you want. I don’t want to talk! I’ve been waiting for this too—if you knew how! And you know your lovely honesty is one of the things I love you for.” (Curiously enough, that was true.)

  “You shouldn’t,” Rose said, “because I’m not. Really, Henry, you are inconsistent.”

  “Never mind if I’m consistent or not! Look, you’ve really finished that cigarette now, haven’t you? Let me throw it away for you.” He did so, and fell back on the methods which he found so much more satisfactory than speech.

  But it was actually a minute misunderstanding which precipitated the crisis. Henry was by now violently in love, and he unconsciously wished to recover lost ground—the expert mastery of his love-making rather overwhelmed Rose at one point, and she breathed a faint protest. Henry didn’t actually hear her words, whatever they were; but the negative sense gave him his cue, as he thought, and he followed it up according to the rules of the game, as he understood them. Of course not—only when she felt quite ready, he said. But whenever she did, she had only to name the time and the place. He spoke with almost business-like matter-of-factness, relieved, as well as overjoyed, that they had come to the point at last. “It’s what I’m waiting for, you know. Will you let me know soon?”

  The shock of these words acted like a douche of cold water on Rose. She had of course vaguely envisaged the possibility that she and Henry might some day, in the future, become lovers; but childishly content with the present, perfectly happy at having love and affection hers once more, to give and to receive, she had pushed the possibility well into the back of her mind. She was not in fact in the least ready for it even emotionally, let alone spiritually; and the shock lay precisely in the fact that Henry’s practical question brought her up sharply against her own unreadiness for any such situation. She had known, she supposed, that he would say this sometime or other; what she had not expected was that she would feel that glacial disturbance when he did, this utter lack of joy. But, thrown off her direct emotional balance by her intellectual struggle to recover from her past unhappiness, she was, in this critical moment, at the mercy of the theories to which she had surrendered her judgement—of those theories, and of Henry’s unhesitating certainty. This, she supposed, was what ought to happen at this point. Very well then, it had better happen. Her pride, too, rose up, and forbade her to show any sign of nerves, or shock, or old-fashioned prudery. Anyhow, she always hated a horse who stalled at the last fence.

  So she pulled herself together and said very quietly—“Yes—I will. Quite soon.” (Angels—or Henry Hargreaves, if he had known more about women like Rose Pelham—might have wept to hear that small steady voice, so resolutely uttering those five small syllables.) As it was, Henry kissed her hands, and thanked her tenderly—he was quite at home, her stunned mind recognised, in this situation. Well, she hadn’t given her own distress away, that was one thing. And perversely, the thought of William Bromley came into her head. She chivvied it out—this was quite different.

  But the magic of the night, the usual glad harmony of their being together, had been broken up by this concrete decision. Rose soon said that she was tired, that her head really ached, and that she was going in. She went to bed with a curious cold feeling of having been shipwrecked, and cast up upon an unknown shore.

  Chapter Five

  The part that outside circumstances play in our lives is usually smaller than we like to believe. Our lives are shaped primarily by what we are ourselves—our appearance, our degree of intelligence, and most of all our psychological type, and the style of life, as the scientists call it, which that type impels us to adopt. But given
that type and that style of life, outside influences do play a certain part in modifying our actions, and now and again a particular event tips the scale in one direction or the other, with results much larger than the event itself. In Mrs. Pelham’s life, for instance, the failure of her marriage was probably inherent in her own character and that of her husband; but the results of that failure were undoubtedly affected by the influences which surrounded her. If she had been born thirty-five years earlier, though her marriage might well have come to grief, it is by no means sure that she would have taken the step of leaving her husband, even for a time; and it is almost certain that if she had, she would not have read and thought herself into the state of mind which could even contemplate a liaison with anyone else. That much she owed mainly to the ideas current in her day and generation—and people do not always realise that they themselves may be very ill-adapted to the ideas of their day and generation—or if you prefer it, that the ideas of their day and generation may be very unsuited to them. Strong characters, and people whose minds work on their own account, can live well and even comfortably, sometimes, in a moral atmosphere more or less alien to themselves—assimilating what they can suitably use of it, and leaving the rest aside. Antony and Anastasia Lydiard did so live. But the less intelligent and independent people take their colour, like chameleons, from the moral surroundings of their day, and allow influences altogether foreign to their real natures to mould them—and of these was Rose Pelham.

  Even so, if life had gone flowing smoothly on at Pei-t’ai-ho, she might have reacted against a decision taken in a hurry, in a moment of shock, and on false premises. But one external circumstance, small in itself, intervened at precisely that point to tip the scale—the expedition to Por Hua Shan.

  Anastasia, still struggling against some curious lingering instinct that it was not a good plan, had eventually asked Rose to join them on their trip—and Rose accepted with delight. She loved seeing new places and getting away from towns and the usual run of sight-seeing, and the very name of Por Hua Shan, the Hill of a Hundred Flowers, enchanted her. Such a chance was not to be missed, and the idea of complications with Henry simply had not crossed her mind when she accepted—he had been the ideal companion all these weeks, and would be so again. But Henry looked at the matter rather differently—he was practical, he was experienced, and he was by now seriously in love, for him, with Rose. He regarded the imminent trip to Por Hua as the best of reasons for pushing the affair to an immediate conclusion, and he did so. Rose, whose experience was so much less than his, was no match for him on such a point. She had renounced her own feelings and instincts, and the moral code in which she had been brought up as guides, and had nothing to put in their place but a set of preconceptions, of other people’s ideas, reinforced by pride. These ideas had led her to the belief that if physical attraction was strongly present in a relationship, that was the main thing—and as she was strongly attracted physically by Henry, without any doubt at all, the thing must be all right. The possible inadequacy of physical attraction alone, for certain people, had never been stressed by those to whom she looked for instruction. So she followed her preconceptions, which led in the same direction as that towards which Henry urged her; she agreed to become his lover when they returned to Peking.

  Captain Hargreaves was going back a few days before the rest. He was assistant Military Attaché, and he had to put his office in order before his departure; also he had been charged by Antony with the task of procuring—do not ask how—two or three Chinese army tents for the use of the expedition; of getting an option of a sufficiency of donkeys and donkey-boys, and of obtaining up-to-date information about the military situation on their route. If circumstances were favourable—circumstances in China being usually civil war, bandits and so on—Antony hoped that they might get as far as the Trappist Monastery, beyond the old inner Great Wall, which he wanted to see. An expedition of this sort may seem smooth and easy to passengers taking part in it, but this smoothness and ease depends upon a lot of very careful staff-work beforehand on somebody’s part. Lydiard judged Henry to be quite capable by this time of doing the staff-work—he had been with him and Asta now on several such jaunts, and knew how to set about the preliminary arrangements. So Henry went off “to cope”, as he himself said, and Antony, Anastasia and Rose remained at Pei-t’ai-ho, bathing, working, walking, singing, and taking siestas behind lowered lienzas as before.

  But not quite as before. It struck Antony, after two or three days, that they were seeing quite a lot of Rose—a thought which made his dark face twist sideways in sudden amusement when it first occurred to him. He went for several walks with her himself, generally along the shore and over the low neck of land, set now with fields of yellowing kaoliang, to the further side of Lighthouse Point, where one can sit on ledges of the sandy wiry turf and watch the swell surging in and out of the rocks beneath one’s feet, or look off along the line of the shore stretching away towards Ch’ing-wang-t’ao, the white of the surf and the white of the sand making a pale band between the soft blue of the sea, the dull soft green of the land. They sat there, one afternoon, in silence—Rose was often rather silent now; Lydiard watched her pretty blunt profile outlined against the invisible line where sea meets sky, the soft hair ruffled back off her forehead by the breeze, her hands round her knees, and wondered idly why everyone looks so romantic sitting on the top of a cliff. Was it that cliffs are in themselves romantic, and convey some of their romance to figures on them?—or did sitting on cliffs make people feel romantic, and their inner feeling show in their attitude? Or both? Then Henry’s dictum about romance, at lunch on the day when they discussed Roy Hillier, came into his mind—and with it a sudden spring of surprise, of impatience, at this whole business of Rose and Henry. Really, as she sat there now, delicate, poised, beautiful, withdrawn into her own thoughts, but with as it were winds of sensation, of vibration, passing over her face from her inner emotions, it was too fantastic to think of her as devoting much serious attention to a man like Henry. And moved by an impulse of almost irritated curiosity, he said suddenly—

  “A penny for them.”

  She turned to him, slowly, as if with an effort, as if she were dragging herself back from a great distance and looked at him without speaking.

  “I said ‘A penny for them,’” he repeated, smiling.

  To his surprise and embarrassment the swift colour rushed over her face.

  “I—oh, really I was rather vacant,” she said. She pushed her hand up over her forehead, as if to sweep away that unwanted blush, and went on—“I think I was wondering how Henry was getting on with getting the tents.”

  “Oh, I don’t expect he will have any difficulty about that,” said Antony. “M.A.s have their own ways and means with the army.” And he went on talking about tents, and Chinese military matters, to cover their joint embarrassment. But thinking it over afterwards, as was his wont—Antony was a great one for thinking over things—he was rather worried by this small episode. So she had really been mooning about Henry, had she, while she sat there, looking like a Lorelei, above the green rocking waters?—thinking about him so intensely that to recall her to the present gave that dragging slowness to the very movement of her head, that to enquire into her thoughts sent the colour flying over her golden skin? Then it must mean that it was fairly serious. He dallied with the thought of talking to Anastasia about it, but some feeling held him back, and before he had done so something else happened which disturbed him still more.

  A major functionary in the Chinese postal service was coming to Pei-t’ai-ho. Now the said service was then international, and the Japanese were members of it; this functionary was a Japanese, so that the anyhow exaggerated civility and ceremonial of oriental officialdom became more than ever necessary in his—almost certainly touchy—case. And Antony, yawning largely after his bathe, a day or so after he sat with Rose on the cliff, said that he supposed he should have to go and show up at the station to greet him. Rose, rath
er to his surprise, for she usually preferred country walks, said that she would walk down with him. After the siesta, accordingly, down to the station they went; the train, after the manner of Chinese trains, was late, and they sat on a seat on the open platform in the evening sun, while Antony told her the sort of thing she might expect to see, do and experience on the forth-coming expedition. She was so eager, so sensibly interested, that he was vaguely reassured, and began to think that on the trip he and Asta between them, by taking a little trouble, might conceivably wean her from this futile association with Henry. And right on top of that reassurance it happened. Rose, hearing a bell ring in the station, and anticipating the train, opened her bag to pull out her powder and attend to her face; the bag was stuffed rather full, and a number of objects fell out of it to the ground, including a letter in a closed envelope. Lydiard stopped to pick them up for her, with some remark about female luggage—as he picked up the letter, he saw that it was already stamped, and addressed to Henry Hargreaves in Peking. He handed it back to Rose without looking at her—in the circumstances, he did not want to see her blush again. Letters for the post lay on the table in the hall of the bungalow, and were dealt with by the boy; there was nothing to be gained by posting one at the station, as Rose had obviously meant to do, except that she could by that means conceal the fact that she was writing to Hargreaves. And there was no earthly reason, if it was simply a virtuous attachment or a mild flirtation, why she should not be writing to Hargreaves, and be willing to be known to be doing so.