Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “A THOUSAND AGES AND NO BOUNDARIES”.

  It is perhaps as perfect a word for a mountain-top as can be found in the whole range of literature. As Lydiard turned to enter the temple and see the Abbot about accommodation, he caught sight of Hillier. The young man was standing gazing out at the view behind them, his face for once almost transfigured, and Antony heard him mutter the words to himself, over again—“A thousand ages, and no boundaries”.

  And as he went in he noticed that Anastasia, with an inscrutable expression, was watching Hillier too.

  Chapter Twelve

  The top of Por Hua Shan consists of several acres of alpine meadow, with rocks sticking out of it, and bright with small mountain flowers. After a cup of tea, which on this occasion they had perforce to take with the Abbot, and therefore without rum, they put on great-coats and set out to look about them. The view was superb. Towards the south and east they looked away over the lower intervening hills to Peking and the plain, with the white stretches of sand along the Hun-Ho clearly visible in the prevailing shadowy blueness, and the mountains towards Jehol, thirty miles or more beyond Peking, rising clear and faint in the distance—all round to the north and west rose mountains and more mountains and again mountains. With their field-glasses they raked the grey and dun-coloured ridges for the old Great Wall, which they knew to be somewhere beyond the Ch’ing Shui valley immediately to the north of them, and not very far away; but they could not pick it up, and the keen wind presently sent most of them in for shelter. Hargreaves however prevailed on Mrs. Pelham to come for a stroll on the more sheltered slopes—still driven by his recent emotion down by the little shrine on the col, he felt that he must at all costs have some time alone with her.

  Poor Henry! It was an ill-advised move. Rose had spent the day in a sort of trance of delight—all worries forgotten, she had really walked in glory and in joy; but when he made her sit under a rock, took her hands and began to tell her, urgently, of his love and his need, she was snatched back from her state of happy freedom. The thoughts that had caused her such disturbance the evening before crowded back on her again, filling her with a discomfort that was none the less acute because she was still uncertain about its precise cause. She must get all that sorted out before she really kissed Henry again. For the first time, she rebuffed him—gently at first.

  “Oh Henry dear, need we?—talk about all this now, I mean?”

  “My darling, why not now?”

  “I’m cold, for one thing.”

  “Oh, you poor sweet!—come into my coat. Oh sweetheart, yes—just two or three!” He took them.

  Rose, impatient now, worked herself free.

  “No, really, Henry—I said NO.”

  Henry was astonished, almost hurt. “But dearest, what is it? What’s biting you?”

  “I don’t know—but do let me alone. Let’s go in.” She rose as she spoke.

  Fortunately — or unfortunately — for him, Captain Hargreaves always had at command a supply of serviceable little theories as to why women should not (as sometimes, though rarely, happened) want him to kiss them. He supposed to himself now that Rose was tired, and that that made her pettish. “She’s Rosa spinosissima today,” he said cheerfully, as they walked back across the flower-starred turf towards the seven larch trees. “I like Rosa mollis better,” he said, tucking his arm wheedlingly into hers. Rose laughed unwillingly. That was one of the despairing things about Henry—he always got round you by making you laugh. But why despairing? it occurred to her suddenly to wonder. Oh, she didn’t know! She must have time to think it all out. How could one think, with all these wonders spread out before one at every step? They went in.

  Their quarters for the night on Por Hua Shan were certainly the most peculiar they had so far encountered. They were housed on the upper floor of a sort of double-decker shrine, which they reached by a ladder; the huge golden Buddha, nearly twenty feet high, who sat among a drift of loose maize on the ground floor rose up, like the ladder, through a square opening in the planking, and presented its solemn gilded face to them on a level with their beds. This holy attic was lighted by a latticed door and windows giving onto a balcony from which that marvellous view over the Peking plain was visible. The chief concern of the travellers, however, was less to admire the view than to close as many of the paper shutters as possible and try to keep warm. The cold was considerable, and seemed intense. Twenty-four hours before, down in the valley by Shih Chia Ying, they had been walking in a shade temperature of 78°—here Lydiard’s little thermometer registered 48°. They all put on spare underclothes, two pairs of breeches and several coats, Anastasia and Mrs. Pelham retiring into the shadows behind the Buddha’s immense golden head for the purpose, and being summoned out by shouts when the men had finished changing. Then they crouched over an open brazier, and Lydiard raised a storm of protest by opening the door to take a reading of his aneroid, which he had set outside on the balcony. (However, the height of the mountain was satisfactorily established as being 8200 feet.) Henry Hargreaves said, as they crept, still heavily muffled, into their beds, that it reminded him of sleeping in Flanders; for there, too, one put on clothes to go to bed in, instead of taking them off. From the Abbot, who was very old, brown, and dirty, and looked like a farm hand, Antony had learned that the t’ao-pings of whom they had heard so much had in fact been at the temple till the previous day, holding two villagers to ransom for 600 dollars—when the money was at last produced they only released one man, demanding an extra 300 for the other; as this was not forthcoming when rumours of the advent of foreign devils reached the temple, they had carried him off, and the Abbot feared that he had probably been shot. Where they had gone, he could not say.

  That being so, there seemed nothing to prevent an attempt to reach the Great Wall, and next morning they set off, rather later than usual, for the descent into the Ch’ing Shui valley on the farther side of the mountain. At the little shrine on the col they took the left-hand path, and within a few minutes they were off the ridge and descending the north face. Immediately they found themselves, as regards vegetation, in a different world. There were almost no flowers; instead of asters, Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums they walked through shrubs—myrtles, azaleas, maples, and cotoneasters, the evergreens predominating. It was a curious and striking change.

  Antony walked ahead with Rose. Ever since their conversation opposite the mountain temple, on the way from Ho T’ei to Chang T’sao, and his subsequent brief talk with Anastasia beside the Liuli-Ho, he had at intervals been thinking about Rose, and her tears, and what could be done about her. But all the fuss with the t’ao-pings, his preoccupation with getting information and maintaining the morale of the donkey-boys, and the general atmosphere of tension and uncertainty had made serious conversation impossible, and thought next to impossible. Yesterday, for the first time since their talk, he had watched her with a free mind, and he as well as Hargreaves had been impressed by the brilliant quality of her happiness, which had really flashed like a jewel on the ascent of Por Hua Shan. But the fact of her stroll alone with Henry after tea had not escaped him—and he misinterpreted what he saw. It came into his mind that possibly her joy all day had had something to do with the anticipation of a joy to come. He had spent a long time that night, in the chilly loft beside the Buddha’s huge golden face, thinking of that, and thinking of Rose’s face after supper the previous evening, when she had come out of her long dreaming abstraction to look, with that curious air of questioning, at Henry Hargreaves. The two things did not match, somehow. But he had reached the conclusion that, whatever Tasia might say, he had better go into it all with her. One couldn’t just sit by and watch a person like Rose—and as young as Rose—make a complete hat of her life and herself and her character. But he determined also to go into it this time with the gloves off. He had at last recognised for what it was his timidity on the last occasion—the fear of what he might find if he plunged too far into her mind and her troubles. Well, there should b
e none of that this time.

  He thought, too, being a curiously practical person where moral matters were concerned, of how to tackle it. It all boiled down, in the long run, to what she felt about Charles—that was the main issue. Hargreaves, he was still convinced, was really only a side-line, an anodyne to her pain; she was attempting to evade her pain and her mortification, and Hargreaves was the means to that evasion. Even if she had come to find joy in the means, that was all it was.

  Rose strode out vigorously ahead of him as they walked down the steep path, swinging round the corners on a pivotal heel and a loose knee; he could not help delighting in her strong grace and her speed—apart from the fact that it was good to see, her speed was of practical use, for if she had been a slow walker there would have been no chance of a talk. Poor Antony was still hemmed in by his responsibilities to his expedition; by the time the ass-train reached Hong-An, the village in the upper Ch’ing-Shui valley at the foot of Por Hua Shan, he had got to be there at the head of it, to deal with any eventuality that might arise. But the asses, he knew, would move as slowly downhill as up, on a path as steep as this, and after over an hour of rapid descent he judged it safe to halt. They were far ahead—looking back, nothing was to be seen but the shrub-clad slopes rising behind them; when they stood still, not a sound came to them but the busy autumnal chirpings of small birds in the bushes, and the faint mewing of a yellow kite high in the blue overhead. Rose gladly agreed to a breather, and they scrambled up onto a small shoulder on one of the many ridges which intersected the mountain face, and sat down. There, among the myrtles and the azaleas, whose leaves, already beginning to show tones of pink and yellow, still gave off a faint spicy fragrance, Antony summoned his force to speak. Rose sat, lovely and serene, beside him; she got her field-glasses out of their leather case, slung them round her neck, and reattached the case to her belt. Then she raised them to her eyes and began to fiddle with the adjustment. This would never do.

  “Rose, put those things down, will you? I want to talk to you.”

  She put them down at once, and turned to him, looking surprised but docile, like a good child. Somehow that simple action moved him sharply. Driven on as much by this sudden feeling as by the need for haste, he plunged.

  “Rose, are you going back to Charles?”

  She looked startled, and he saw the serene eager happiness die out of her face.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “I haven’t really thought yet what I’m going to do.”

  “I thought not,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s about time you did?”

  She coloured, and looked at him a little uncertainly.

  “Are you and Tasia getting tired of having me about?” she asked.

  “No!” he said sharply. “You know that’s not true, Rose, and wouldn’t ever be true.” He checked himself—his instinctive protest had carried him further than he meant. “I think you’re being disingenuous,” he said, more quietly. “It seems to me that you ought to settle what you are going to do about Charles, if only in fairness to Henry.”

  There—it was out. Again the colour swept over her face, but she sat very still, looking out over the valley.

  “Don’t you think Henry can look after himself?” she said at last, still not looking at him.

  It was Antony’s turn to pause before replying this time.

  “I’m not sure that he can, where you are concerned,” he said at last, very deliberately. “But even if he could, it doesn’t seem very chic just to use him for your own ends, quite cold-bloodedly. Aren’t you at all fond of him?”

  She turned quickly to him, then, her eyes bright with anger.

  “Yes, I am very fond of him,” she said coldly, “and I don’t quite know what you mean by using him for my own ends.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said remorselessly. “Exactly what I mean. You are still married to Charles, and you say you haven’t yet decided whether you are going back to him or not. Meanwhile you’ve let Henry lose his heart to you pretty completely—and from what I’ve seen of you both I should certainly have concluded, if I were in his shoes, that you were fond of me too. In fact I should have what the books call ‘had hopes’.”

  “And even supposing all that were true, how is it using him for my own ends?” she asked.

  “Because unless you mean to get a divorce and marry him, he’s wasting his time, and you’re encouraging him to waste it. That’s indisputable. What your own ends in doing it may be I don’t know, but I can guess.” He was holding deliberately to this detached, rather brutal attitude, and her anger and attempts at self-defence were almost welcome, because they helped him to hold it. “I think—in fact I’m sure—that you minded horribly about Charles—whatever happened; and I’ve never heard what actually did happen. You may have been perfectly right to come away; but in any case you didn’t stay and face the situation and the pain sur place, did you? And when you got away, I think you found that you’d brought your pain along, didn’t you?”

  She nodded, without speaking.

  “Well, it looks very much to me,” he went on, a little less harshly, “as if, when Henry began to admire you and make up to you, as he undoubtedly did, that that made you feel a lot better—it was a comfort and a distraction. And instead of facing your pain and doing something about it, you’ve gone on taking bigger and bigger dollops of comfort and distraction, regardless of the effect on him. That’s what I mean by using him for your own ends—you’ve taken his love as a plaster for your pain and your self-esteem.”

  “Oh no,” she broke out, in a tone of protest—“Not quite that. There was something else as well.”

  “What else, then?”

  “I thought I should learn—and besides people don’t think having a love-affair so important now—I mean they don’t think it’s got to be marriage or nothing. Henry certainly doesn’t.”

  “I know he doesn’t, in theory. What did you think you would learn?” he said, fixing on the point which required elucidation—he understood all the rest.

  She looked away, out over the sun-bright yellowish stretches of the valley to the grey and blue ranges of hills beyond, and he saw the ready colour come up in her face again. Then she turned and faced him, with a sort of appeal in her eyes.

  “I should find it rather hard to tell you that,” she said.

  “Do you know yourself?”

  “I think so, pretty well.”

  “Then you’d better tell me,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s no good going on being dishonest, you’ll get nowhere—and it’s so appallingly easy to be dishonest with only oneself.”

  Oddly enough, she accepted these propositions with that curious docility which she sometimes showed to him. “I believe I thought,” she began slowly, twisting a pink azalea leaf round her brown fingers, and keeping her eyes fixed on that—“I believe I thought, without knowing I was thinking it, quite, that I should learn more about—love, I suppose. And it’s been partly a muddle.” She stopped—the intervening days of happiness and passion had almost made her forget that initial misunderstanding, and the struggle by which pride and theory together had carried her through; now that she remembered, it was only to decide that she would not speak of it to Antony. She had a moment of wonder as to why she was talking to Antony at all—there was nothing to compel her to answer his questions. But she was in a muddle, and he was very clear-headed; and it had been a habit of years with Rose to regard the Lydiards as a family as a source of wisdom and help. She felt curiously safe with Antony, always—safe even when uncomfortable or awed; like being in Church.

  “What did you want to learn about love?” Antony prompted her.

  “Almost everything—and Henry seemed to know a lot about it; I mean he seemed to have done what people write about.” She hesitated, and then went on—“You see I still don’t know what really put everything wrong with Charles; but after it had gone wrong, I thought about it, and I read a lot of books, and it seemed as if that might h
ave had something to do with it.”

  She did not look at her cousin. He drew at his cigarette once or twice and then said, still very detachedly—

  “You’re being a little too vague. Do you mean that the physical side of your relation with Charles didn’t go too well?”

  She was silent—he thought she was going to evade that. But she did not.

  “I mean that I didn’t really know if it had gone well or badly,” she brought out at last. “I hardly knew anything about it, and I wasn’t thinking about that, anyhow. I loved him, and I was thinking of loving him in other ways—with my mind, and trying to be good, and all that. I was quite happy about it,” she said, with great simplicity. “At least quite happy enough for me. But I thought afterwards that he might not have been—that it mightn’t have been so good for him.”

  He sat silent for a moment or two. At last—

  “Has that been better with Henry?” he asked. His voice was quite quiet. She looked straight in front of her and said, just as quietly as he—

  “Yes.”

  They were both silent then for rather a long time. Presently Antony shifted his position, and spoke again.

  “Even that is using Henry, isn’t it, to learn something for yourself, and not for him?”

  She turned and faced him. “Why do you assume that I don’t love him?” she asked.

  He looked steadily at her. He did not tell her about her face under the pine tree, after supper at Shih Chia Ying; he said—

  “If you tell me that you do love him, I shall believe you.”

  That was something she could not do. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands. He sat in a curious torment, at her untruth being so unveiled both to herself and him. But it had to be done—she could only get free of it if it was unveiled, and it was not the right thing for her, to be untrue. He waited, his pain and his pity growing all the time. At last, as she still did not speak, he took one of her wrists and pulled her hand away from her face, saying very gently—“Rose, dear, you had better tell me.”