by Ann Bridge
“Well, now for the tower,” said Hillier, in a satisfied tone, rubbing his earth-stained hands with a tuft of rough grass. But here Lydiard demurred. They had still a long march in front of them before they reached La Trappe, the nearest place, so far as he knew, where they could safely pass the night; and he did not even know the way. The map ended where they stood. Hillier’s archaeological proceedings were rather impressive, but they seemed likely to be also prolonged, and he was anxious to get on up the valley, which appeared to flatten out about half a mile ahead, in order to reconnoitre a bit. He suggested mildly that it might be enough if Roy photographed the tower from where they stood.
“Oh God, Antony, you aren’t asking me not to take a proper look at the place, now you’ve brought me here, are you?” Hillier burst out in dismay. Rose Pelham, with her positively Athenian capacity for seeking after some new thing, added her voice in protest.
Lydiard explained why he wanted to get on—not in great detail. Anastasia looked at her watch, and intervened.
“Ant, it’s twelve now—we shall want to lunch in about half an hour anyhow. Why shouldn’t we go on with the train, and halt somewhere where you can see something, and they look at the tower and then catch us up? They’ll go much faster than the animals.”
To this Antony, a little reluctantly, agreed. “Don’t be too long,” he adjured Roy. “And when you’ve done just follow straight on up the valley—you’ll find us.”
So for the first time the party separated. Hargreaves, to Anastasia’s surprise, came with them. “I’m not all that keen on all this archaeological stuff,” he confided to her as they moved off. “Hillier’s all right, of course, but he tends to get a bit too professional at times. He hasn’t a light touch, you know—these things want a light touch, my dear Asta.” Asta laughed. This caused Henry to pat her on the shoulder and feel pleased with himself.
Hillier and Mrs. Pelham, meanwhile, fairly leapt to their exploration. The tower, which is perhaps some forty feet square, stands on an eighteen-foot ramp of dressed stone, above which rise two storeys, both the same: a central chamber, with a passage going all round it in the thickness of the walls, small cells at each corner, and arched windows and doors. It was all in a surprisingly perfect state except for the topmost battlements, which had for the most part crumbled away; Hillier found traces of loop-holes in the remaining portions. It was clear that a drawbridge had once connected the main door with the hill-side, but now the wooden part was gone, and they effected an entrance in a rather sensational manner across eight feet of loose and rotting birch poles. Hillier moved rapidly about with rather the air, Rose thought, of a paper-hanger “measuring-up”—he paced, noted down, and photographed, and drew her attention to the corbelling, almost as marked as a cornice, below the battlements, the stone spouts to carry off rain-water, and the stonework of the round-headed arches to the doors and windows. “It isn’t like Chinese work at all,” he told her. “They’re flat door-top builders, so far as I know. This might have been built by the Crusaders in Rhodes, or the Guelfs or Ghibellines in Italy. Most odd.” He was talking very much as he had talked when they first met, but now she was not irritated—his business-like enthusiasm was disarming.
“Well, I suppose we must go,” he said at last, reluctantly. They picked their way cautiously out over the birch poles once more, scrambled down the spur, and set off up the valley in pursuit of the ass-train. They were both rather pleased with themselves, and walked fast, talking easily. They expected to come up with the rest of the party in a very short time, but a quarter of an hour passed, then half an hour, and still there was no sign of them. The path had forked once, but they had taken the branch which looked the most used, and appeared to follow the main valley—this had spread out now into a wide shallow trough, almost a plain, with fewer bushes, and open stretches of grass; spurs ran down into it on all sides—it was a little hard to be certain which was the main valley.
At another fork Rose stopped. “Now which way, I wonder?” she said.
Hillier looked at his watch. “It’s most extraordinary,” he said. “I can’t think where they can have got to. Antony said they should only go about a mile, and we must have come two, at least, at the pace we’ve been walking.” He glanced at her. “You’re a fast walker,” he said parenthetically.
“I wish we knew which of these paths was right,” said Rose. “Do you suppose we ought to have taken the other one, at that last fork?”
Hillier had no idea, but the doubt was disconcerting. “There’s no one to ask,” he said gloomily. There was not, indeed; there was no sign of a dwelling of any sort, not a trace of cultivation, even—empty, sunny and silent, the valley stretched away as deserted and untouched as when it left the hand of God.
“I couldn’t ask if there was anyone,” said Rose.
“Nor could I, come to that. I don’t know what they want all these paths for, when there’s no one to use them,” said Hillier discontentedly.
“Let’s shout,” Rose suggested. They shouted, There was no answer.
“Damn!” said Hillier. “How silly this is. We’re lost.”
Rose laughed.
“Have you got your revolver?” he asked her suddenly.
“No—I thought you had it. I’ve never had it back.”
“Nor you have. I left it in my valise. Blast!”
“What do you want it for?”
“I thought we might fire it—it would carry further than shouting.”
“Idiot I am!” Rose exclaimed—she fumbled in the front of her shirt, and pulled out a whistle on a piece of string.
“Complete Girl Guide!” said Hillier. “Good. Blow away.”
Rose blew a piercing blast, and they stood listening in the sunny silence. A jay flew out of a clump of bushes with a great chattering, but that was all. Rose peered after it.
“Never mind the bird—blow again,” Hillier adjured her.
She did so, several times, and at last a faint answering note came down the valley towards them.
“Cheers! This way,” said Hillier, and they strode out once more. “Do you always carry a whistle?” he asked.
“Mostly. Be prepared! is my motto,” said Rose rather maliciously.
“It came in very usefully just now,” said Hillier. “Were you frightened?” he asked her then.
“I never can make up my mind when to be frightened and when not,” said Rose, swinging along beside him. Hillier burst out laughing.
“No, but you know it is difficult,” she said. “It’s so stupid to be frightened when there’s no reason to be, and yet it’s even stupider not to be frightened when there is. And I never seem to know in time.”
“It’s a blessed state, if you can argue it out with yourself,” he said. “You must have good nerves. Most people just are frightened, without weighing up the pros and cons.”
“Are you like that?” she asked simply.
“I am rather, as a matter of fact.”
“Is that why you don’t carry whistles and revolvers—to frighten yourself out of it, sort of?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Smart work!” he said; “Yes—I think that does come into it.”
“How funny,” said Rose. “Oh, there they are!” she exclaimed, as they topped a small rise. Ahead of them, in the shade of a group of poplars, the advance party sat by the stream, calmly eating their lunch. They were however extremely apologetic when the stragglers came up, admitting, while they plied them with food, that they had gone much further than they had said or intended. “We sort of dribbled vaguely on and on,” Anastasia said. “We kept thinking we should see more a little further—you know how one does.”
Rose, gobbling down her lunch, asked if they had in fact seen their way.
“No—and that utter owl Wu can’t remember it in the least,” said Anastasia. “Nor can the donkey-boy.”
“We’re lost in the wilderness, in fact,” said Hargreaves cheerfully.
“Then we’d better start on, h
adn’t we?” said Rose, tossing off a small horn mug of weak tepid whisky-and-water, and brushing the crumbs off her shorts.
“Don’t you want to sit for a few minutes? You’ve had no rest at all,” Hargreaves said to her.
“Goodness, no—I’m not tired.”
So they went on. At the further end of the long strath in which they had lunched a choice of upland valleys, with cols at their heads and each with a small path in it, presented themselves—Anastasia was for taking one towards the West, but Antony plumped for another further East; wrongly as it turned out. They struggled along a dwindling path in ever increasing doubt until, at a deserted hut of thatch and branches, the path ended beyond a peradventure—Hillier quoted the late President Wilson—and Antony had to admit that they really were completely lost. The donkey-boys, who for some time had been telling one another audibly that it was a yeh ti-feng (wild spot) now began to mutter gloomily that they would all have to ta yeh—literally, pitch in the wild. After a short consultation it was settled that Anastasia, with Hargreaves to support her, should remain in charge of the caravan while the others went ahead to prospect. Wu, at his own rather timorous suggestion, was despatched in the opposite direction to see if he could not find someone from whom to ask his way.
Rose, not without a struggle, accompanied the two men. Both Hargreaves and Lydiard thought she would have done better to stay and rest with Anastasia—she had not once mounted her ass that day, and had been walking for over eight hours already. But Rose was eager to see more, and pressed so urgently to be allowed to go on that she got her way. She was again in that state of intoxication which beauty, exercise and adventure combined invariably produced in her. Antony glanced at her with something like exasperation as they set out. Her capacity for forgetting everything in her excitement over a bird, a ruin or a view seemed to him childish and perverse to a degree. He himself had been pursued all day by the memory of their conversation the morning before, and the light it had thrown on Rose’s situation; still more he had been tormented by the implications of what had happened last night, his terror and his relief—and the sight of her insouciante eagerness was baffling and enraging. It was a false note, he told himself irritably, this inept and forgetful enthusiasm. But a clearer perception stepped in at once to deny that. No, it wasn’t a false note in Rose; it was herself, it was her own peculiar melody, her theme-tune; she could not be otherwise. It might make harmonies difficult, but there it was, the air.
Rose, for her part, walked entranced. Wild, or yeh the place might be, but it was a most lovely one. The rough grass of those high valleys was set thickly all over with dwarf delphiniums, huge silvery-white edelweiss, and the prickly round blue-and-silver thistle-heads of Echinops ritro, so that all the ground was blue and silver; in the hollows were little spinneys of a dwarf willow with silver foliage, which shivered into light as the breeze passed over them, and out of these, at their approach, flew chattering flocks of the blue magpie of North China, which has a long silver-grey tail and a powder blue back. And all these things she saw with the peculiar detailed clarity that comes from a certain degree of physical fatigue and nervous tension. She was just tired enough for every colour to have its true delicate brilliance, undimmed by the sluggish powers of the normal flesh; for every detail to make its own impact on the eye, instead of being slurred over carelessly into a general whole. So when a flock of those blue-and-silver birds rose incredibly from a thicket of silver foliage, and moved with dipping noisy flight over a blue-and-silver pasture, she saw the delicate black tickings and lacings on their long grey tails; she noticed the two shades of silver on the upper and under sides of the willow-leaves, and how they curved like little metal scales; she noticed with ecstatic amazement the almost luminous whiteness of those immense edelweiss, like velvety white suns set in the grass among blue-and-silver sea-urchins, and the pure passionate blue of the delphiniums. These things mastered her, as nothing else ever did—to this she made a complete surrender. She checked once in her rapid walk, as another flock of birds flew out before them; Antony, turning to tell her rather shortly to come on, was arrested by the expression on her hot bright face. As Hillier’s had been on Por Hua Shan, it was transfigured. He recognised the look—worship is unmistakeable. He turned away and went on without speaking. Rose’s individual melody was very loud and true just then, and he was too much of a musician to interrupt it. He found himself wishing that the capacity for worship could be turned to some more practical object than flowers and birds; but when his habitually honest mind asked to what? the answers disturbed him. Why should she rather look like that in Church? or love a man as she loved those upland pastures? He was being interfering—the point was that the feeling was there.
After half a mile they separated, and climbed three small summits rising about 400 feet from the main ridge. They found that the cols between these, though easy on the south slope, were cut off on the north by a wooded precipice in each case—but Hillier looked out a route down from a col behind them which would only involve a return on their tracks of about a mile and a half. By the time they met and compared notes it was after four, and they would gladly have camped where they were; but with the fear of t’ao-pings heavy on the donkey-boys, Hargreaves and Lydiard deemed it imprudent. So they went back. Hillier’s path, though very steep and rough, panned out all right; the only trouble remaining was that Wu had apparently sunk without trace. However after an hour’s descent he suddenly reappeared, accompanied by a very small child whom he had haled along as guide. He had had the greatest difficulty in getting speech of any peasants, as the few whom he saw mistook him for a t’ao-ping, and fled in terror at his approach. To Hargreaves and the Lydiards, who knew Wu’s extremely timorous nature, this part of his tale was not without charm. Accompanied by their infant leader, the party continued their descent into the valley, a curious place of small mounds and hillocks of decomposing granite, supporting only a sparse growth of tufted bushes, which gave them a curious pock-marked appearance—far below them, spread out like a child’s toy city on the floor, they caught glimpses of what looked like a small walled town, with houses, squares, spires and battlements, all in a rather ugly version of what Hillier called Fairy-tale Gothic, and Anastasia said was merely debased Scotch Baronial style—obviously the Trappist monastery. Lower down they lost sight of it, but when they reached the valley itself evidences of superior cultivation began: well-grown poplars by the river-side, large fields supported on neat stone-built terracing on the slopes, runnels of bright water in artificial channels, smooth sanded paths—and at last behind high loop-holed walls rose the roofs of La Trappe itself. Wearily they mounted a steep final path, and at seven o’clock found themselves at the monastery gate, after nearly twelve hours on the road.
Here a certain amount of parleying began, while the ass-train stood grouped on the space before the entrance, and Hillier and the two women sat down on the stone benches provided for the sick and those seeking alms; but after a delay which seemed very long to them, in their weariness and thirst, the Pére de Réception appeared and led them up a sanded path between high espalier pear trees to the guest-house, a little courtyard just outside the monastery proper. Here they were allotted small bare whitewashed rooms, each containing a bed, a basin, a chair, a crucifix and nothing more; there was also a sitting-room with upright chairs and a notable round table in walnut-wood. On this the Father promptly set out glasses and a carafe of red wine made by the monks from their own vineyards, for the refreshment of his visitors.
“I wanted that,” said Hillier, putting down his glass and wiping his mouth with deep satisfaction.
“Goodness, yes—isn’t it good?” said Rose.
“Here’s how Father!” said Hargreaves, raising his glass to the bearded Trappist in his long white robe, who stood by, smiling on his guests.
“Go easy with it,” Antony warned them—“it may be stronger than you think.”
“Surely it’s only vin du pays, Ant?” Anastasia said.
After a very short interval they were summoned to dinner in the refectory of the guest-house, on the other side of the courtyard, where Père Damien, seated at the head of the table, presided over their meal, eating nothing himself; a Chinese brother, with one of those strange faces of the born mystic, served them in silence. Père Damien, being the Father in charge of guests, was of course allowed to speak as much as he chose, and he chose to speak a great deal, in rather bad Belgian French—but the Trappist vow of silence closed the lips of the Chinese monk. It was curious after a week on the road to sit down in a European room, at a real wooden table, to a meal such as you might get at any small inn in France: stuffed braised aubergines, potato fritters with apples and bacon, stewed rabbit and tomato salad, followed by Trappist cheese, and pears and peaches for dessert. The Father showed great and justifiable pride in these good things of which he might not partake, all home-produced—the tame rabbit and pickled pork, the plump tomatoes, the splendid fruit; the monks, he explained, lived on soup, bread, cheese and vegetables, chiefly turnips, with no wine—and he added that this diet did not agree with his digestion very well. But he urged on his guests copious draughts of the monastery’s own vin mousseux, pale fizzy stuff rather like cider to the taste, but very different in its effects, as the party discovered when it was already too late. Antony’s warning proved only too well founded—after seven hours without food the newly-fermented wine, even taken with a meal, went rapidly to their heads. “By Jove, I believe I’m tight, or as near as no matter,” Hargreaves said, as they walked back across the courtyard to their sitting-room, after Père Damien had dismissed them with a Latin grace.