Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  Again a hint of colour flew over her face—for some reason that question of her cousin’s went rather near the bone; and it was odd of Antony to go on like this—he did with Tasia, of course, but not as a rule with her. But she answered—“I feel it’s meant to be.”

  He pounced on her. “Ah, there we are! And who or what means it?”

  “Oh, Antony, how can one know?” she burst out, almost in desperation. “You go on asking and asking—but how do I know these things?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But don’t you ever think about them?”

  “Yes—in a way. Not in that way, much. Of course one used to think God arranged the world, or tried to—but now that’s all muddled up with so many other things, it doesn’t seem so certain any more.”

  Lydiard looked at her, and gave a long sigh. He recognised it again, he knew it so well: the modern spirit, escaped from its safe home among definite ethical values, disorientated, straying in a sterile waste where good and bad and right and wrong all looked alike, and all alike were stones—no wheat, no bread anywhere.

  “Did you ever read Plato?” he asked.

  “No. That’s just the sort of thing I don’t read,” said Rose, with spirit.

  “He knew a lot,” said Antony thoughtfully, ignoring the dig. “He said that all earthly beauty corresponded to some ideal beauty, had its heavenly counterpart and therefore belonged in the divine scheme.” He paused. “I think” that’s true. And the people who are aware of this always give us a sense of reassurance, whether they preach sermons or write novels—it’s their tremendously lively sense of that correspondence, I believe, that makes you value Forster and Tolstoi; they speak as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

  “Yes, they do,” said Rose quickly—“that’s absolutely true. But Ant, how do they get it—that knowledge or awareness or whatever you call it?”

  “I suppose by being in touch, somehow or other, with the ideal beauty,” said Antony almost dreamily. “Lots of people get that through religion, which is supposed to be the most direct way—but I’m perfectly certain that a great many people get it, and get it just as validly, through art. Do you remember what you said at Pei-t’ai-ho about where part-singing happened—just about a foot above one’s head?” She nodded. “Well, isn’t that a sort of awareness of there being something beyond you that you do get into, sometimes? You didn’t mean the air a little below the ceiling, did you?”

  “No,” said Rose. “No,” she said again, thoughtfully. “I wonder——” and she sat looking out across the valley to the red-walled temple on the mountain-side, obviously deep in thought. As when they sat on the cliff by Lighthouse Point, Lydiard could trace the changes of her thought by the expression of her face—disquiets came and went, like the shadows of clouds passing over a sunlit hill. He waited in silence, hoping that she would be moved to utter some of them. But she didn’t—he could almost see the refusal to bring them out forming in her mind. Well, perhaps it was too soon for that. Oh, the poor little darling! Partly to cover the silence, partly because looking at her, sitting there, made him feel it, he said at length—

  “You see the earthly beauty does correspond, Rose—especially if it can be left to itself, uncorrupted.” He too glanced as he spoke across the valley at the mountain temple, with the bright white cliffs behind it. “That’s why I don’t think the things that you say make you happy are the wrong things,” he went on. “Enjoying feeling well, and delight in using your body and in the beauty you see is delight in things that have their counterpart in some aspect of the divine harmony.” Then, as she did not answer, he turned to her, saying—“Don’t you see that?”

  Rose was looking away down the path up which they had come, and fumbling in the pocket of her shorts, her slender right leg stuck straight out for the purpose. “Oh God, here comes that man!” she said, in tones at once energetic and rather choked—it was suddenly evident to Lydiard that she was in tears. But there indeed was Hillier, coming up the path towards them, not thirty yards away; nothing more could be said. It was for Antony an exasperating interruption; he would have given a great deal to know why Mrs. Pelham, at that moment, should have cried. Rose shifted her position and dabbed hurriedly at her eyes.

  “The botanists were really a bit too slow,” said Hillier, coming up and dropping onto the bank beside them. “Miss Lydiard has found twenty-three flowers, and each had to be climbed for. Ah,” he said, fanning himself with his topi, and looking across at the perched temple opposite, “what a pleasing erection. That really is very easy on the eye, isn’t it?”

  Rose and Antony looked at him with something like dismay. “Are the others far behind?” Antony asked. “We shall get behind the animals if we don’t look out.”

  “Aren’t they behind us?” Rose asked in surprise.

  “Only our own—the main train will have gone up the bed of the river. Where did you leave Asta, Roy?”

  “Oh, not so far back, really.” And in a few minutes Hargreaves and Miss Lydiard in their turn appeared round the bend of the path. Lydiard, calling out some instructions to Hargreaves about dropping down into the valley and carrying on till they overtook him, set off alone, to intercept the caravan and tell them where to wait for the luncheon halt.

  He walked fast, with his dissatisfied thoughts for company. Well, that attempt had been a pretty good flop. He had done it badly, of course—cross-examining her like a counsel, and then prosing and preaching. He ought to have a lighter hand for these things. But she had resisted him, too. Not overtly; she had made a pretence or an attempt at answering him straight, but she hadn’t really done it. Between them, the thing had never come alive—it had been dead and dry from beginning to end. No—at the end she had cried; something, he still didn’t know what, had moved her finally at least to the reality of tears. But then that wretched Roy had turned up, making it impossible to go on.

  Why had she fenced? he asked himself. The old Rose would either have answered him plumb straight out, whatever he asked, and gone on in her own rather childish way to develop his ideas, or she would have pealed with laughter and said “Don’t be a bore, Ant. I don’t know and I don’t care!” What had changed her? Charles? Or Hargreaves? Or some influence connected with them but actually different to either? He remembered her words about no longer feeling sure that God had “arranged things”. Striding fast and gloomily down the path—he could see the ass-train now, up the river-bed ahead of him, a long straggling procession of men and beasts, with large Union Jacks sticking out of the packs at intervals—Antony Lydiard, abandoning the immediate problem of Rose Pelham, thought with distress, almost with bitterness, about this blight of uncertainty which paralysed the spirit of man in the modern world, robbing humanity of conviction and hope, and therefore of joy. Was it bred of too much knowledge? Or of the despair and lassitude left by the war? He thought of the Middle Ages—men lived then in a physical insecurity and discomfort far greater than that of the twentieth century, and enjoyed but a fraction of modern knowledge; but their spirits were at home in the universe, as children are at home in their father’s house—almost as incuriously and unwittingly, perhaps. Nevertheless they had that reassurance, that moral peace, in which the soul can grow, and the spirit flower in every form of art. What had removed it, that reassurance? Had they eaten too much and too generally of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, or was it just the growth of material things, of speed and noise and facility of movement, and the lightning exchange—literally—of unneeded information and undigested ideas from continent to continent, by the ether?

  He was down again in the valley now, and on the right bank he passed a threshing-floor, a round space of beaten earth on which two oxen, blindfold, were moving round and round, tramping out the grain which lay thickly spread on it, watched by an old man in faded blue clothes—his face, worn into a network of fine wrinkles, was full of dignity and contentment and benevolence, as so many faces of the old are in China. Was it just that, Lydiard wo
ndered as he walked on, that made him find China so restful—the fact that they did everything precisely as they had been doing it for the past 4000 years? Clothes, methods of agriculture, all were unchanged—no modern ideas worried the inhabitants of the Liuli-Ho valley. That old man had led the good life—his face declared it. He thought of the children they had seen in the school that morning, learning the maxims of Confucius by heart—was that not really, perhaps, the best preparation for life? Not for money-making, share-pushing, and arranging combines and trusts, or forcing unneeded and useless goods onto a gullible market; or even for making war—but for life. Were the Cotton and Sugar and Oil Kings—or even the Air Aces and the Speed Aces—such conspicuously good livers? Might they not have been the better for a few maxims as to moral values, hammered into their infant minds by repetition as they sat on squares of goat-skin?

  Mrs. Pelham, following the same path, more slowly, with the others, was for her part also thinking, with dissatisfaction, about her conversation with Antony Lydiard. She was puzzled and a little alarmed by this sudden onslaught of her cousin’s. Could he have guessed something? Was that why he had talked like that? Or was she just nervous, because she had a secret to guard? She could not be sure, but the doubt was disturbing. She disliked too not having been able to say exactly what she thought; it was a talk that she could have enjoyed if she had been free to speak—freely, she called it in her mind, rejecting the word “honestly” with distaste—without thinking all the time of the possible construction that Antony might put on her words. Oh, it had all been rather horrid! And Rose, less clearly, was troubled too by her sense of embarrassment when Lydiard had talked about Plato and the ideal beauty. All the time he spoke, the thought of her liaison with Henry Hargreaves had kept forcing itself into her mind, as something in opposition to his words. This almost angered her. Reason, she told herself, must approve her relation with Henry, in all the circumstances. But the weight of tradition was too strong for her, stronger than reason or argument; when her cousin confronted her with something approximating to the religious view of life, she became uncomfortable and ashamed. Whatever her mind might say, she felt debased and guilty. And at the end this conflict, and the sudden reminder that his last words had brought of her old hopes and aspirations, when she was engaged to Charles, had brought her to tears. Oh dear, it had been a wretched talk.

  It had, indeed. Talks always are wretched when the talkers stick to words alone, afraid of the thought behind the words—words then became a sort of smoke-screen between them and the truth. And when they sat opposite the red fairy-tale temple, even Antony, as he was later to realise, had been afraid to push the conversation to the point where truth must emerge, because he was afraid of what he might meet there.

  They came on Lydiard and the caravan at a place where the valley opens out a little, just beyond the end of the rope railway which carries coal from the upper villages down to Toli. Hsiao Wang had preceded them, and the lunch, such as it was, was already spread out in the shade of another walnut tree on the river-bank, opposite a large pool—Antony, a damp towel and a bathing-suit on the white stones beside him, was putting on his shoes; clearly he had bathed. The rest of the party, seeing this, insisted on bathing too, in spite of his protests that they ought to eat and get on—all but Anastasia, who sat down beside her brother in the shade.

  “How did you get on with Rose?” she asked presently.

  He turned and looked at her, surprised for half a second that she should know; recognised then that Asta of course would know, and said, as directly as she—

  “Not well.”

  “Wouldn’t she talk?” Anastasia asked, re-lacing one of her white shoes, her short body bent forward rather awkwardly over her knees to do it.

  “No. I didn’t do it well, either.”

  Something in his voice made her look up at him, leaving her shoe. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask “Why not?”, but at the expression on his face she checked the question. Suddenly she knew why not—he minded too much. He was looking extraordinarily weary and discouraged—so much so that a pang of fear took her that what had happened to Charles might happen to him too. (It did, with women like Rose.) Anastasia began to think hard—and to cover her thought made one of her gentle anodyne remarks—“I expect you did, really.” It was the sort of thing a female fool would say, but such remarks have their uses, as women like Anastasia Lydiard know; they fill a space, their very stupidity lulls; and behind them the mind can work, as Anastasia’s mind was working, with the rapidity and precision of a machine. Not her mind only—all her sensibility, all her moral force were brought to bear on this situation. The best thing would be for him to leave it alone. If Rose had foundered, he couldn’t rescue her—or not without too grave a risk to himself; others could do it better—or at least more safely. If she was only playing with fire with Henry, the risk wasn’t worth taking anyhow. She herself could tackle it—she had rammed Rose into honesty before, and could do it again. So should she tell him to leave it alone? No, not yet. She must have it clearer; they were being vague and washy, as no doubt he and Rose had been vague and washy—and no good ever came of that. But when she cast about for the words that would cut out vagueness and washiness, she found herself checked again. A week ago, even twenty-four hours ago she would have said quite casually—“I’m not absolutely sure yet that she is his mistress—are you?”—with the direct freedom that was usual between them. She thought of saying that now—but before she spoke she looked again at his face, and was silent. No—no; that wouldn’t go. He looked too exhausted. He and she had got to be washy and vague, too, it seemed, for the moment—and she must loose off any advice she had to give in uncertainty. She frowned, her hands locked round her knees—to be cut off from her directness and honesty of intercourse with Antony hurt her extraordinarily, and angered her too. But she did not yield to her anger; she said presently, in her soft, meditative voice—

  “I think I should leave it alone, now, if I were you, all the same. Another man mixed up in it will only muddle her more—and she’s quite muddled enough as it is. After a knock like she’s had with Charles—I’m sure you were right about that, and how it made her start in with Henry—all men are somehow in the wrong focus for her; they’re all bound to be primarily props for her self-esteem, if they start showing interest. It isn’t her fault a bit—it’s the drowning man and the straws But it makes it impossible for her to get rational help from you. I can talk to her—I shall get lots of chances at night. What do you think?”

  Again he spoke with that great weariness.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  It would be interesting to know what precise percentage of people use some announcement about their own activities as their opening to a conversation. Somewhere between sixty-five and seventy per cent, one would say at a rough guess. But there is a small minority which does not proclaim, and Anastasia Lydiard belonged to it. Captain Hargreaves however did not, and when the party, damp and refreshed, gathered in the shade on the bank of the Liuli-Ho to eat the “snack” forecast by Antony, he announced—“We’ve found a hell of a lot of flowers, Ant, old man.”

  Antony asked what they had found, and the vasculum was produced. Actually there was nothing very striking—some vetches and a small wild pea, a white clematis with a stout stalk, which in North China grows in the fields like a buttercup, a spiranthes with a four-inch spike of bloom and pink tips to the flowers, and a small pale wild rose. Antony, propped on an elbow, leant over to examine them, sandwich in hand—so did Mrs. Pelham.

  “That’s just an ordinary wild rose, isn’t it?” she said, picking up the small spray.

  “Aha! That’s just where you’re wrong!” said Hargreaves. “That’s Rosa—Rosa something; Rosa what, Asta?”

  “Rosa mollis, I’m practically certain.”

  “But Rosa mollis grows in England—or at least Scotland—and France,” Hillier objected.

  “I know—but it spreads
right across into Western Asia; I don’t know exactly how far, but there seems no reason why it shouldn’t be here,” said Anastasia. “Rosa spinosissima goes right into Manchuria, you know.”

  “Ah, I hadn’t realised that.”

  “Look at it,” said Anastasia—botany was one of the few subjects on which she became pertinacious. “See how silky the leaves are, both sides—and the narrow straight thorns; and you see the stipules end in those curious half-moons. It’s got all the superficial characters.”

  “They’re like earwigs’ tails,” said Hargreaves, examining with interest a stipule which Anastasia had pulled off. “So this is stipule!” he went on—“never saw one before. Meet my friend Stipule,” he said, holding it out to Rose.

  “You are a goat, Henry,” said Anastasia tranquilly, laughing all the same. She went on going through the flowers with Hillier, identifying some which she had found on previous expeditions, definitely; of others tripping out the order and having a shot at the species—“yes; that’s an Inula—britannica, I expect; it comes all through China and Siberia. Salicina grows in Asia too, but the leaves are much broader, and the whole thing bunchier.” Hillier was rather impressed—lots of women collected flowers and talked vaguely about them, but she really knew her stuff, evidently. He looked with greater interest than before at her face, now bent over the flowers, now raised to his—with that air, for once, of vivid attention, instead of her usual smiling vagueness, she was really quite good-looking. And almost for the first time since they started someone was talking rationally about something. He was rather bored when Lydiard, looking at his watch, said—“Time’s up,” and rose to his feet.

  The next two hours’ march was pleasant. The coal and its dirty accompanying villages had been left behind with the rope railway, and they walked through a clean valley with cliffs, wooded slopes, and patches of agriculture. Rose here came into her own, as Henry said, in the naturalist line—she saw a tit, a bluish-reddish jay, and a large thrush with a very loudly mottled breast, all of which were new to her, and all of which she paused to study through her field-glasses. The party straggled along anyhow, at their ease, strung out over a quarter of a mile of track—far behind them, out of sight, the ass-train followed leisurely in their wake. It was of course very hot, and when about 3.30 they came to another promising-looking pool, Rose and Henry raised a clamour for a second bathe, to which Lydiard agreed. So the bathing-suits were pulled off the saddles of the donkeys, where they had been fastened to dry in the sun en route, and they took to the water. This pool, as Hargreaves observed, had “features”; a steep cliff rose above it, and from the rock about eight feet up a ledge projected like a pulpit. If only they could reach it, Henry said, what a superb diving platform it would make. He tried, on each side, but in vain—the rock was nearly vertical, and it is surprisingly hard to hoist one’s weight upwards out of water.