Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  After the luncheon halt they left the main valley of the Liuli-ho and followed the bed of a tributary; here there was no water at all, and a hot march they had of it—the radiation off the dry stream-bed and the bare rocky walls of the gorge was almost insufferable. Lydiard, who kept in front and continued to talk with everyone he met, collected a fair crop of rumours on the way—Leng-Shui, their next stop, was said to be full of t’ao-pings, and also the village at the foot of Por Hua Shan itself.

  When they reached Leng-Shui, however, this rumour proved false; the village was practically deserted, but there were no soldiers in it. It was a degraded place, rather—the courtyard was so filthy and dung-strewn that it was impossible to erect the tents in it, and their five beds were set out in a row on the t’ai. Since there had been no delays for bathing, they had got in early, and after the usual cup of tea with a dash of rum in it a considerable interval lay before them till supper-time. Lydiard gave out that no one was to go beyond whistle-blast of the t’ai, in case the t’ao-pings were lurking in the neighbourhood—he then took his log of the journey and a volume of Turgeniev out to a plane tree near the temple gate. Henry Hargreaves annexed Mrs. Pelham, declaring his intention of “beating the bounds” for t’ao-pings; their equipment for this enterprise being two whistles and one revolver. Anastasia settled down on the t’ai with her vasculum, a sketch-book, and a minute travelling paint-box, and began to make small sketches of her flowers for reference and identification—with details of altitude, aspect, and accompanying plants written in below each sketch—before putting them carefully in a press. Hillier, after grubbing in his valise, appeared with a portable typewriter, and looked round for a place to instal it; the folding table was not solid enough, and except for the camp-beds and rookhi chairs there was nothing else in the way of furniture. Eventually he carried it over to a flight of rough stones steps on the further side of the courtyard, cleaned both the bottom step and the next one above it with a wisp of straw, and trued up the little machine with some chips of wood. Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, he came back to Miss Lydiard.

  “Shall I disturb you if I use that instrument?” he asked in his most pronounced drawl, waving his hand at the steps. “I want to get some of this down.”

  “Not a bit,” she said, looking up from her painting. “Can you do it there?”

  “I hope so. Better than on my knee, anyhow. Thank you.” He went off and set to work, and the tapping rattle of the machine filled the hot dung-scented air of the courtyard. Anastasia, pausing between pressing one flower and getting out another, looked at the scene with amusement. On the further side of that dirty space of bare earth was an open-fronted building, in which the donkeys were huddled together in the shade; in the centre stood two youngish ginkgo trees, with thorn branches bound round their trunks with withies to protect them from the rubbing of animals; dense clouds of brown-and-yellow flies hummed and settled over the heaps of dung—and in the corner, on the steps, his topi tilted back on his neat fair head, a cigarette in a short briar holder between his lips, Mr. Roy Hillier, that rather eminent young journalist, sat typing an account of his experiences.

  “I hope you’re putting in the flies!” she called to him.

  “My God, yes! How do you spell Ch’ang T’sao?” he called back.

  She told him, and they continued to work. Presently the noise of the typewriter stopped; she saw him clip some sheets together and put them in a folder, and then he brought the whole apparatus back to the t’ai. As he crossed the yard she noticed that the red rubber sole of one of his white shoes was flapping loose at the toe end—the logic of facts had been too strong even for Hillier, and for the last two days he had walked, like the rest of them, in tennis shoes.

  “Your sole is coming loose,” she said to him.

  “I know. Have you got a piece of string?”

  “I expect so—why?”

  “If you have, I can tie it on.”

  “How absurd!” she said abruptly. “That won’t hold. Haven’t you another pair?”

  Hillier had not another pair. “Do you suppose Leng-Shui boasts a bootmaker?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t. Let me look at it, will you?”

  He sat down on the nearest bed and took his shoe off, obediently. She examined it, turning it about in her short strong hands.

  “Actually I think I can mend that,” she said. She rose as she spoke, and went and searched in the long zip-fastened bag which Rose had admired; she came back to her rookhi chair in a moment with a neat huswife, covered in linen and lined with chamois leather—unrolled, it revealed needles, cottons, pockets with buttons of various denominations, a tailor’s steel thimble and a long plait of black and natural linen thread.

  “What a neat contraption,” he said, coming and sitting in a chair beside her.

  “My expeditionary tendency makes me carry it,” said Anastasia a little maliciously, while she selected two very stout darning needles and stuck them in the top of her knee-stocking. She proceeded to thread them both, and to wax the linen thread with a stump of candle; then she tied the ends of the two threads together and passed one needle through into the inside of the shoe. Hillier, who had not replied to her thrust, watched her, fascinated.

  “Why two threads?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.” Using the two needles alternately, she began to sew, bringing the thread up through the sole, reversing the needle and pushing it out again through the same hole, and passing the inside thread, with which she sewed the buckskin top, through the loop of the lower one. Each time she did this, she pulled both threads tight with her hands, always adjusting the pull so that the junction of the threads came within the thickness of the sole.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” Hillier asked curiously, watching her hands, now pushing with the tailor’s thimble, now pulling at the thread, with firm precision.

  “The cobbler at home. It’s very slow like this—shoemakers have a needle with a gap in the eye, so that you can slip the thread out, instead of having to push it back each time. But this works all right.” She bent her head again over her task, frowning with concentration.

  “It’s stupefying!” said Hillier. She glanced up at him quickly, and realised that he had spoken in genuine admiration. She said nothing, but went on with her work, while Hillier sat looking on and continued to say—“It’s stupefying” or “It’s too brilliant” at intervals. This exasperated her, and the contrast between her own exasperation and his evident desire to be amiable suddenly made her speak.

  “Why do you use such extraordinary expressions?” she asked, still working away at the shoe.

  “Do you dislike them?” he countered.

  “They irritate me rather—yes. But I should like to understand why you do it.”

  “And I should like to know why they irritate you.”

  She stopped sewing and pushed up her hair.

  “I dislike them in themselves because I feel they’re a distortion of language,” she said thoughtfully. “But it irritates me when you use them, first because it’s out of key with us, and then because I feel it’s rather professional.”

  “Professional?” he queried, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes. That’s your literary stunt, that slight distortion of words, and I daresay it’s all right in books and articles. But we aren’t an article—we’re a party of friends, and to use the stunt on us is like”—she paused to find something not too offensive as a simile—“well, it’s rather like a Duke wearing his strawberry leaves out shooting.”

  He laughed, a little uncomfortably. “I’m sorry. It’s rather second nature to me, you know.”

  She looked hard at him, across the shoe which she still held in her left hand.

  “Are you sure?” she said. Then, as he stared at her in silence—“No no—cancel that,” she said. “I’ve answered your question and you’ve answered mine. So now we’re square.” Anastasia had a great belief in knowing when to drop a subject. She began to work on hi
s shoe again.

  “I’m not sure that I have answered yours,” Hillier said. “The fact is, I care a good deal about the use of words, and I think a great deal of modern prose is frightfully dead because people use them in a very narrow, limited way, when they could be used in a lively, fresh, original way. I try, actually, to do that when I write—to let words have their full meaning, or a fresh one, by using them in fresh connections. I may be wrong, but I personally feel that that is less dull, and better for English. A language can’t stand still.”

  “That’s a perfectly reasonable position,” she said, stitching away. “No one can quarrel with that.”

  “But you do quarrel with it if it’s done orally?” he said.

  She put down the shoe again.

  “I only quarrel with it, even orally, if it’s done with the wrong people,” she said. “In Bloomsbury, or wherever you all live now, I daresay it might be perfectly all right. But we are four completely ordinary people hiking about in China, and somehow it doesn’t fit with us.” She stopped—Hillier considered her for some time in silence. At last—“You use Hargreaves’ jargon with him,” he said, in the tone of one who raises an objection.

  Anastasia burst out laughing.

  “Yes, we do,” she said. “What’s more, we like to. But the way he talks isn’t ‘second nature’—it’s nature in the raw! He couldn’t do anything else if he tried. You can talk in any way you choose, as you know perfectly well.”

  “Thank you,” he said, ironically. “So your complaint against me,” he went on rather coldly, “is really that I don’t adapt myself?”

  She looked him full in the face, with a clear direct gaze that combined with her beautiful eyes was rather disarming.

  “Yes, it is,” she said simply, her words as direct as her look. “You haven’t done much to adapt yourself so far, in word or deed, have you?”

  “I suppose I haven’t,” he said slowly. “I hadn’t realised that it was necessary.”

  (No, my friend, I know you hadn’t, thought Anastasia to herself. But it’s time you did.) Aloud she said—“I wish you would. It would be—so much nicer.”

  “Do you mean that it would enable you to enjoy yourselves more?” he said, at last very angry.

  “We should enjoy you more,” she said, with gentle steadiness. “Hillier—Roy—don’t be an owl. Put it that we are all as tiresome and stupid as you like, but it’s easier for one person to modify his attitude than for four, isn’t it?”

  “It all seems such nonsense,” he said impatiently.

  Anastasia took up the shoe again.

  “Then say we’re four nonsensical people, and indulge us,” she said.

  He stood looking down at her, as she sat stitching his shoe. He would have liked to stride angrily away, but he had only a stocking on one foot, and the courtyard was unspeakably filthy. He hopped over to his camp-bed, rummaged in his valise, and began to change his shoes. The absurdity of this suddenly struck him, and he burst into an angry laugh. Anastasia glanced up; across the length of the t’ai they looked at one another.

  “You are a lot of Pharisees!” he said.

  “Yes, aren’t we?” said Anastasia, and went on mending his shoe.

  Chapter Eleven

  The night at Leng Shui passed quietly, except that Hargreaves, according to Anastasia, snored, and that after supper the donkey-boys had approached Lydiard with a request that he would “guarantee” their animals for the rest of the trip for so much a head. This he firmly refused to do—he had lived in China long enough to know that any guaranteed object invariably disappears in the night. The donkey-boys—who like all Chinese had brought the double science of knowing when they were beaten and on which side their bread was buttered to a fine point—collapsed, and raised no objection the following morning to setting out for Shih Chia Ying, the village at the foot of Por Hua Shan.

  That was a lovely day’s march. The air was cool, with a touch of autumn in it. When Mrs. Pelham remarked on this to Lydiard, to her surprise he pulled out his pocket diary and consulted it. The diary was one produced in China, and therefore gave, instead of bank-holidays and the feasts of the Church, the official seasonal dates of the Chinese calendar—that particular day bore the title of “First Day of Autumn”. He showed it to her.

  “But it’s fantastic!” she said, opening her eyes very wide.

  “These dates generally come right within forty-eight hours,” he told her. “But it’s amusing that you should have said that today. It does feel like autumn.”

  By noon they had climbed out of the narrow limestone gorges and entered a wide straight valley which approaches Por Hua Shan from the east; at its end rose a great blunt-topped mountain mass, dwarfing everything else, which Lydiard hailed as Por Hua itself, and their spirits rose at the sight. The valley was much more fertile than anything they had seen since they left the North China plain at Toli, a smiling countryside of easy slopes, terraced and covered with crops, diversified by groves of birches and groups of poplars with round tufted heads—the straight lines of the terraces and the globular heads of the poplars gave a curious dot-and-dash appearance to the landscape. A scattering of various shrubs, and the river running through it, added to the general effect of richness. At the further end, right under Por Hua Shan, the valley opened out into a shallow amphitheatre surrounded by gentle grassy hills, in which lay the village of Shih Chia Ying. All that day, breezes blew; the poplars whispered, the tall maize rustled, the river sang. And all that day they found new kinds of flowers, but especially clematis. A small one, with a four-pointed white flower, wreathing the bushes by the track in the manner of traveller’s joy, made them feel like home. There was another which smothered the heaps of stones at the edges of the fields, with pale sulphur-coloured cups like a campanula, and a strong sweet scent which recalled vanilla; a third stiff and stout of stalk, grew in a bush like an elder, with clusters of powder-blue flowers in the axils of the leaves; this puzzled even Anastasia for some time, till a flower gone to seed revealed it as an undoubted clematis. (It was C. heraclaefolia.) And there was their old friend the white field one. “It was clematis, clematis, all the way,” chanted Hargreaves, when they were logging them up at tea-time—and Hillier raised his eyebrows at Anastasia; she responded with a glinting eye which had a touch of complicity about it, and gave him a certain pleasure.

  Hillier’s first reaction to Anastasia’s attack on him at Leng Shui, when he had time to think it over, was plain resentment. He even dallied with the idea of telling Lydiard that he wished to return to Peking at once, but on reflection he saw that this was a foolish notion. Clearly with the donkey-boys in their present frame of mind any attempt to split the caravan would be fatal, and he could not in reason drag the whole party back—besides, there seemed a good chance now of making Por Hua Shan, and possibly even the old Great Wall, which lay some miles beyond it, and he wanted to see all that. There was nothing to do but stick it. But his vexation, which had to find an object, focussed itself on Anastasia Lydiard, and at the same time, such are the operations of the human mind, it focussed his attention on her as well. From the outset he had found her the most congenial and sympathetic of the party—now, on that pleasant day’s march, during which he took care to be as solitary as possible, he considered her—to him so surprising—onslaught. It had been remorseless, but he recognised a little reluctantly that it had been detached and without temper; there was no element of feminine scratching in it. Such a cold-blooded rough-housing was a complete novelty, and he was the more struck by it because it had come at a moment when he was in fact feeling a good deal of admiration for certain things about her—her real knowledge of flowers, her resourceful skill with his shoe. His ingenious vanity prompted him to ask in his mind whether it was a recognition of this admiration which had moved her so to take him down? But for once the ingenuity failed, defeated by something in Anastasia herself. Her whole being excluded coquetry—and when he came to wonder why he was so sure of this, he was led on
to consider her character as a whole, and what sort of woman would do a thing like that, and what her motives could be. Remember that he was profoundly astonished still at fault being found with him, Roy Hillier, who was liked, admired, envied. But here was a person who didn’t like him or admire him—who criticised his speech and his attitude to others, who frankly declared that he needed alteration. And perhaps for the first time in his life, certainly for the first time for many years, Roy Hillier tried to see himself with the eyes of another. He did it haltingly, uncomfortably, jibbing a good deal—but at last without anger. And the result was a fresh uncertainty about himself. It didn’t go much further than that, so far—but even that administered a jolt to his self-esteem.

  Anastasia, in spite of the clematis, noticed his tendency to keep to himself during the day, and understood the possible cause of it. She took occasion to mention the matter to her brother.

  “Ant, there mustn’t be any more ‘on safari’-ing with the wretched Roy just now,” she said, as they walked together at the head of the caravan.

  “Oh, has he noticed? Or have you started being compassionate?” he asked, looking at her with his usual touch of pleased amusement.

  “I washed his head yesterday,” she replied briefly.

  “Oh, you did, did you? Why? Was he quite exasperating?”

  “No, actually he was being rather extra nice.”

  “And you thought that a good moment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he seemed a bit miffed,” said Antony. “How did he take it?”

  “Neither well nor badly. He was hurt, and now he’s cross, of course. But it may improve things. Anyhow, he must be given a chance.”