Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “Right you are—will you tell Rose to slack off, or shall I? She’s getting rather good at it—she’ll be sorry,” said Antony a little regretfully.

  “She’ll just have to be sorry. I’ll tell her,” said Anastasia.

  The temple at Shih Chia Ying was the greatest possible contrast to their quarters at Leng Shui the night before. It consisted of a little courtyard surrounded by elegant latticed shrines raised on terraces sheltered by cloisters, the whole overshadowed by an immense pine growing in the centre. The priest, who was relatively clean, at once suggested that the beds of the t’ai-t’ais (ladies) should be set up in the main shrine—this was done, and he and his acolyte personally supervised Rose’s and Anastasia’s simple unpacking, setting out their folding mirrors and hair brushes on the shallow table before the image of Buddha, among the bronze incense-burners and other accessories to worship, and even hanging Rose’s white felt hat on one of the Buddha’s pointed gilt ears. The men’s beds were aligned on the narrow terrace just outside. Rose Pelham, who was new to China, found all this quite astonishing—to her it was as though a party of travellers to an English village should be invited by the parson to sleep in the chancel of his church, and to eat in the nave.

  “Oh my dear Rose, it isn’t like that at all, out here,” Hargreaves assured her. “There’s no Jehovah about it, you know—no fear of the Lord, and all that. They feel quite matey with Buddha.”

  This was at supper in the courtyard, under the great pine, whose high branches overhead made a distinct distant pattern in black against the pale evening sky.

  Lydiard looked up at Hargreaves’ remark.

  “That’s frightfully good, H.H.,” he said. “I’d never thought of the Jehovistic element in religion being the thing that brought in formal reverence.”

  “Oh yes,” said Anastasia. “Look at the Roman Church, which has freed itself almost entirely from the Hebraic side of Christianity. In Seville, in Christmas week, twelve little boys in seventeenth-century pages’ costumes, and hats, dance with castanets before the High Altar, while an orchestra plays, and the Cardinal Archbishop looks on.”

  Hillier couldn’t resist this.

  “Yes, and don’t the young men send bouquets to the Virgin Mary, with notes to say that she’s prettier than their girl-friends?” he enquired.

  “They certainly used to write sonnets to her, calling her ‘My pretty one’, in mediaeval Italy,” said Anastasia.

  Mrs. Pelham thought all this very nice. “I don’t know why English religion is so stodgy,” she sighed.

  “All of it isn’t,” said Antony.

  She glanced quickly at him, but was silent.

  “How Lady Harriet would like all this,” Anastasia said, leaving English religion. “She would love to hang up her hat on a Buddha.”

  “Yes, wouldn’t she?” said Rose eagerly. “I wish she could be here.”

  “My dear Rose, I don’t think she’d care much about the camp-beds and mixed bathing, and riding a moke for eight hours a day,” Hargreaves put in.

  “Actually, I don’t believe she would mind any of that, much,” said Mrs. Pelham. “I don’t feel that she bothers particularly about her surroundings and comforts, so long as she’s interested.”

  “She certainly is the most unexacting person I ever met,” said Anastasia, meditatively.

  “Unexacting?” Hillier queried, raising his eyebrows again.

  “Yes. She asks less of you than anyone I know. Most people are asking for something all the time—your sympathy, or your interest, or even your admiration. She asks nothing.”

  “Except questions!” said Hillier.

  “What does she give you?” Antony asked of his sister.

  “Her interest—which is extraordinarily intense. And which shows itself in the questions!” she said, turning to Hillier.

  “She sounds a very unusual character,” said Antony, lighting a cigarette.

  “She is. Didn’t you get her at all, Ant? You met her several times.”

  “No, somehow, I didn’t. I thought her a very amusing intelligent old lady, and I did notice that her mind was completely modern, in the sense of being completely fearless; but I put that down to her class.”

  “Her class?” Hillier interjected. “What on earth has class got to do with having a modern mind?”

  “In the case of Englishwomen of that generation, practically everything,” said Lydiard. But he didn’t expand his statement; this was left to Anastasia and Hillier, who developed a very promising argument on the theme, while the others listened.

  Rose Pelham paid little attention to them. She leant back in her rookhi chair and watched the first stars beginning to prick through the black pattern formed by the pine-trusses overhead, and thought about Lady Harriet Downham. She had not hit on that peculiar undemandingness either, but when Anastasia mentioned it, she recognised the truth of her words at once. No, Lady Harriet didn’t ask anything of anyone. Was that why she seemed so strong and secure? Was that why one liked her so enormously, from the word go? And how did one get to the stage of not asking anything of anyone? A lot of her trouble came from asking things of people—or at least expecting, which came to the same thing. If she could have stopped expecting Charles to love her when he showed signs of stopping loving her, how much easier it would all have been. With a really violent effort, as much moral as mental, she did for a moment bring herself to the pitch of envisaging this impossible state of affairs—saw, for a second or two, a Rose Pelham on whom even that loss had no power. But she could not hold it—before she had time even to see the shape, as it were, of that Rose, stripped of all her covering of wants and desires, the vision faded. Still her thought went on, with a curious dreamy movement of its own, thinking about wanting and not wanting. Not only leaving Charles, but now all this business of Henry rose from wanting things—wanting comfort, wanting soulagement for her wounded love and pride; perhaps even wanting the sweetness of physical love, at last. If she hadn’t wanted those so much, she would not have been involved with Henry now. The colour flooded her face, she almost started, as she realised suddenly where her thoughts had brought her out. She had been thinking of her affair with Henry Hargreaves as a trouble, a difficulty, a hindrance—not so much something wrong as something she didn’t really want. Oh, but what had happened? Where was she getting to? Difficulty in the way of what? Hindrance to what? Why didn’t she want it, this love-affair that had made her feel so proud and strong and glad and free? In her deep perturbation, she actually looked, for enlightenment, to Henry’s face. He was sitting with his rather fine fair head tilted a little to one side, listening to Hillier and Anastasia, while his long fingers alternately scraped together and scattered a heap of crumbs on the green canvas table. Wu had set a candle-lamp on this, round which all the insects in Shih Chia Ying were gathering and perching; the light showed his expression clearly, a little amused, a little complacent—even when he was thinking about nothing much, the air of the cheerful dominant male was there. Antony sat next to him; he had been drawing flowers for Anastasia in her sketch-book, and his fine musicianly fingers still held the pencil—involuntarily Rose let her eyes travel up from his hands to his face. She found his eyes fixed on her in a long searching gaze, questioning and—yes, somehow distressed. She looked quickly away, her colour rising again, and made a remark at random to Henry. But for a long time that night she lay awake on her camp-bed, under the impassive face of the Buddha in the shrine, wondering what it was about her that had distressed Antony Lydiard.

  But speculations and difficult thoughts, for Rose Pelham, could nearly always be banished, for the time being, by fresh things to see and do, and the day that followed was a day of excitement for everyone. At last they were about to ascend Por Hua Shan, which for so many weeks had been, as Rose said, dangled before them like a carrot before a donkey, withdrawn ever further ahead now by this contretemps, now by that. The uncertainties of the last three days had brought a fresh element of determination, almost of
combativeness, into their natural desire to reach the summit. And there was still a touch of uncertainty about the venture—village information at Shih Chia Ying, collected by Antony on their arrival during his usual administration of remedies to the local sick, confirmed the story which they had first heard at Ch’ang T’sao, that a party of bandits was occupying the summit temple, holding a couple of villagers to ransom there.

  This, if true, might be awkward; and for this and other reasons Lydiard decreed an unusually early start. For the first time the caravan was about to tackle a really steep ascent, and not such a short one either; Shih Chia Ying lay, according to his aneroid, at something over 3000 feet—the summit was said to be well over 8000. Five thousand feet is a good pull for laden asses. Of course the height of the summit, since it was a Chinese mountain, was a matter of some uncertainty too; the figure of 8000-odd feet was certainly given on Antony’s map, but as that had been made in the eighties by an Austrian priest, and was known to be inaccurate in several particulars, it might well be out about the height of Por Hua Shan. But since it was the only map of any description which covered that stretch of country, it was suitably prized by Antony. He had more or less surveyed their route the evening before, from a knoll behind the village. They would be ascending the south face of the mountain, and their track led first up a sort of glen or combe in that face, with a stream running down it—at some point they would strike a col on the summit ridge, and proceed along it to the top and the temple.

  The day broke brilliantly fine and hot, and from the first the Mountain of a Hundred Flowers lived up to its name. The moment they left the village, bushes of wild mint and three sorts of harebell fringed the rocky path, while great jungles of dark blue and pale primrose yellow monkshood, three feet high, grew down by the stream. The path climbed steeply, and every hundred feet or so brought fresh flowers—the brilliant orange of the Siberian wall-flower came next, followed by very large blue, mauve and pink scabious, and a sort of meconopsis with pale yellow flowers and a maroon stain on each petal. Then the Siberian wall-flowers were joined by the vivid incredible blue of the first wild delphiniums—a combination which, met growing wild and free on the rocks of an open hill-side, really does set the blood dancing, like the merry noise of bells. But indeed it is hard to describe the flowers on a Chinese mountain in autumn in such a way as to be at all credible to anyone who has not seen them. If there were only a few specimens of each it would be astonishing to find on a mountain-side the flowers which are familiar in an English garden—but there were not a few specimens of each. After a time the sides of the ravine broadened out—here there were China asters in great drifts the size of a billiard-room, and growing two feet high; Michaelmas daisies spread in sheets between the rocks, while still the thickets of monkshood bordered the stream. As they rose higher, the view began to mount behind them, and the air to have a touch of freshness, though the sun was still hot; the glen flattened itself out, and they continued the ascent up the open south face of the hill. Still there were new flowers—grass of Parnassus, fringed gentians, masses of sweet-smelling dianthus; and everywhere the Michaelmas daisies, several sorts of them, from a huge pale mauve one four feet high, down through ranges of size and colour to a tiny white star-like flower that Antony said reminded him of cloisonné enamel. High up on this open slope a fresh beauty was added in a little wild single chrysanthemum of a delicate pale pink like apple-blossom—under a foot high, it actually carpeted the slopes, and from this pink foam the bigger sorts of Michaelmas daisies stood out bold and delicate. No millionaire, Anastasia said, ever had such a garden, did bedding-out on such a scale.

  Presently they reached a sort of col practically on the summit ridge; here the path forked, one branch slanting away to the left, up towards the highest point, the other going straight on over the ridge to drop into the Ch’ing Shui valley beyond. Up here, off the hot sheltered face, the wind was already keen; the women put on sweaters, the men coats, and they were glad to sit and wait for the ass-train in the shelter of a little open-fronted shrine close to the junction of the two paths. Modest and weather-beaten, it stood in a sort of holy shabbiness on that flowery hill; the wild chrysanthemums sprang from the very angles of its single broken step, Michaelmas daisies brushed against the crumbling painted plaster of its walls, its loosened tiles dropped off into pools of wild asters. Hsiao Wang and Mrs. Pelham’s donkey-boy (the riding animals had more or less kept up with the walking party) investigated the interior, and then gestured Mrs. Pelham inside. An image, as small and shabby as the building itself, was perched on a sort of bracket on the back wall; before it a rough plank, built across from side to side, served as an altar table, on which stood a little pot of joss-sticks, an earthenware saucer full of white ash to burn them in, and another with a few copper cash. There were one or two offerings on the table too—some withered bunches of flowers, and a rather worn-looking packet of “Lucky Strike” cigarettes. Mrs. Pelham set three joss-sticks to burn in the ash-filled saucer and lit them, putting a mao (the smallest Chinese silver coin, about the size of a threepenny bit) in the other among the cash—the donkey-boys beamed and grunted and inclined their heads and muttered “Hao!” (well); they were fully as conversant as Lydiard with the rumours of bandits in the temple, and the summit was now very close—they evidently felt that the party could do with a bit of extra good joss. The others meanwhile sat in the sun outside and watched the laden donkeys struggling up the path below, their loads barely emerging from that sea of flowers—the path was extremely steep, and it hardly seemed possible that heavily laden beasts should get up it at all, but they did. At the head of the line, springy, alert and easy, walked a figure who from the outset had been a source of delight to Hargreaves and the Lydiards—the man who carried the five large and very heavy poles which supported the tents, a burden too long and awkward for any donkey. Under this—one would have imagined—crushing load he habitually moved lightly at the head of the caravan, taking short cuts across steep hill-sides, running down slopes, bounding from rock to rock in water-courses; they were always coming on him far ahead even of the riding-party, seated in the shade by a spring, drinking from his cupped hands and singing to himself. Hargreaves had christened him the Leprechaun. He had run away from home, Wu said, in the teeth of his family’s strong objections, to enjoy the unexampled treat of carrying this mass of timber for two or three weeks, and he never seemed to regret his choice—his queer wizened face was always wreathed in smiles, and at no point did he show a sign of either fear or fatigue.

  “I must say I should like to come here in spring,” Hillier said, twirling a spray of aster, with deep purple single blooms three inches across round and round in his fingers, and looking at the waving masses of bloom on every side. “The flowers then must be something to see.”

  “Oh no, there wouldn’t be anything then, bar a few violets, perhaps,” Anastasia said.

  “No flowers here, in spring? How do you know?” he asked, with his usual reporter’s brusqueness about facts.

  Anastasia smiled.

  “There aren’t spring flowers in North China,” she said equably—“there’s no rain in the winter, you see, and not a lot of snow, even. The flowers come after the rain—the rain only begins end of May, or June-ish.”

  “Is that why all the flowers we get from China, like asters and chrysanths and zinnias, are autumn flowers, Tasia?” Rose asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Obviously we can’t get spring flowers from China if they don’t exist, my dear Rose,” said Hargreaves, with a sort of patronising benevolence.

  “No, I know. I was only thinking.” But she didn’t pursue the point, as he would have liked, and spar gaily with him—she went off into a happy musing dream. Rose was in a sort of ecstasy, that day. Natural beauty of every sort moved her profoundly, indeed all natural things could stir her to a spontaneous joy—wind on her face, the power of the sun on her body, the chill of water on her skin, the lifting effort of her leg muscles
as she strode up a slope. And the crowding overwhelming splendour of the flowers on Por Hua Shan, combined with the pleasure of climbing a mountain, had produced in her a state bordering on intoxication. Hargreaves watched her now as she sat on the step of the little shrine, her loose jumper and shorts showing the beautiful lines of her body, the field-glasses through which she had been watching birds dangling forgotten round her neck, a lost musing look of happiness on her lovely sunburnt face—and a wave of feeling which surprised himself swept over him. It was not only desire, though that was present, and strongly—there was also a powerful surge of spiritual tenderness, which does, so much more often than the worldly-wise suppose, accompany physical desire. Oh, she was beautiful, she was precious, she was strange and good! He lit a cigarette, and to cover his emotion made a funny remark to Anastasia.

  When the ass-train had come up with them and taken a short breather, they set off again towards the actual summit; they now marched in what Hargreaves called “bandit order”, with Lydiard and Anastasia walking ahead of the train, while Rose Pelham, Hargreaves and Hillier brought up the rear. The going was much less steep as the path passed across above the face, and in half-an-hour they saw the summit temple ahead of them. They met a peasant, and Lydiard asked about the bandits—“To t’so-loh” he said—“all gone”. This cheerful news was passed back down the line, and grins spread and Hao’s arose throughout its length. The temple, when they reached it, proved to be a ramshackle collection of courtyards, shrines and farm buildings, all in a high state of dirt and confusion: maize cobs drying among the images, and the smell of onions mingling with that of stale incense. Outside the enclosing wall stand seven larch trees, wind-beaten and strong, raising scraggy arms to heaven, and before the two horseshoe-shaped doors stretches a big brick-built devil-screen, on which is written in large characters one of those inscriptions with which the Chinese love to greet the pilgrims to their sacred places—a complete generalisation, which every man can make his own as he pleases. Lydiard translated it for them—