Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “Is that what it is?” Rose asked, seating herself carefully on one of the upright chairs—“my legs feel as if they were full of lead.”

  “That’s undoubtedly what it is,” said Hillier. “What terrific stuff—it’s positively liquid dynamite.”

  “I may point out that I told you so,” observed Antony, looking with amusement at their discomfited faces.

  “You warned us against the red wine, out here, Ant; you said nothing about the mousseux” said Anastasia, rather contentiously.

  “Tasia’s getting quarrelsome drunk,” observed Hargreaves gleefully.

  “Well, if this is being drunk, I don’t see any fun in it,” said Rose. “I feel more sleepy than anything. I shall go to bed.” And to bed she went, followed rather shamefacedly by the rest. It was the first time for a week that they had slept within four walls, and all lay down in an unwonted sense of security and peace. Bells and the distant sound of chanting at intervals during the night only added to this sense of safety, shelter, and profound repose.

  Chapter Fourteen

  To stay, even for a short time, in a great religious community always produces an impression on ordinary people. They may be drawn to it, or react against it; but of whichever kind, the impression is not to be escaped. The austerity of surroundings; the discipline, the life lived not by individual decisions for individual ends, but for a common aim and in obedience to the stroke of a bell; the preoccupation with matters so remote from the ordinary concern of the modern world as meditation, prayer, formal services and acts of worship are not things which the modern layman can contemplate at close range without surprise, or interest, or even concern. And the party which the Lydiards led to the Trappist monastery in North China was no exception to this rule.

  They spent two nights there, both men and animals needing rest, and saw as much as they could of the place. It was founded some seventy years ago, and at the time of the Lydiards’ visit contained nearly a hundred Péres and Fréres, of whom about a third were Europeans and the rest Chinese. The Chinese are taught Latin and instructed in the Faith, but the main activities of the community, in rather striking contrast to those of the great Chinese religious houses, are agricultural. The visitors found the monastery surrounded by gardens and orchards in an exquisite state of cultivation, the fruit-trees pruned on the most elaborate French system, and watered everywhere by runnels carried off the main river. The community is almost entirely self-supporting—the monks grow corn, thrash it and mill it, and bake their own bread; they make cheese and wine, turn their own wooden furniture and make and mend their own shoes, of heavy native felt with string or leather soles. They keep bees for honey, and sell the surplus in Peking. Salt, books, medicines and—rather surprisingly—arms and ammunition are their main importations from outside. For there is no weakness or pacifism about these bearded Knights of the Church. The whole aspect of the place is a very curious mixture of peace and war, religion and defence. The buildings, in the most hideous style of French Gothic and unmistakeably monastic, are surrounded by high thick walls, loop-holed and bastioned, which make La Trappe easy to defend against anything but artillery or air-craft; in Boxer times it was so defended, during a prolonged siege, and the monks beat off their assailants with considerable slaughter. After that experience, the walls were still further improved, and more weapons acquired; and when a few months before the visit of Antony’s party, first the Kuominchün and then Tu Ju Jen’s troops passed up the valley, the Abbot was in a position to make his own terms, volunteering to treat the sick and wounded in the monastery hospital, provided that the precincts were respected. A few convalescents were still hanging about the premises, and the Father Prior, who was in charge of the medical work, gave Lydiard a vivid and gloomy account of his late patients. About fifty per cent, he said, were syphilitic, and an even larger proportion were suffering from “la galle”—i.e. scabies. He had treated his unwanted casualties faithfully, they gathered, both out of Christian duty and professional pride, but without much relish; he seemed to share the Chinese attitude towards soldiers, as the lowest order of human beings. “C’était des mauvais garçons,” he said. And they had treated the peasants abominably, looting their houses, tearing up their cherished fences of kaolian stems for firewood (the lack of wood, both for buildings and fuel, constitutes a chronic problem in China), killing their goats for food and carrying off their donkeys for transport, thus depriving the villagers, at a stroke, of their chief means of livelihood. And these depredations were committed, not by wandering t’ao-pings, but by an army under orders, officered and on the march. “Filthy brutes,” muttered Hillier as he listened.

  It was of course the three men who saw most of the place. Except for reigning Queens, no woman may set foot inside a Trappist monastery; but Hillier, Hargreaves and Lydiard were not only received by the Abbot himself, but were escorted by Pére Damien and the Father Prior all over the establishment—the flour-mill, the saw-mill, the workshops, the wine-press, as well as the refectory, the chapel, the library and the monks’ quarters; out in the fields they saw the brothers, their long woollen robes kilted up round their bare legs, digging, harvesting, watering, cleaning byres and pig-styes, all in complete silence, all sweating in their thick garments under the hot China sun. No, it was contrary to “the rule” to take the habit off while at work, Père Damien told them.

  “By Jove, they must be pretty glad of a bath when they get in,” Hargreaves observed; and turning to the Father, he repeated his remark in his halting French—“n’est-pas, mon Père?”

  Father Damien smiled a little wanly. The rule did not allow washing either.

  “Good God!” Hillier exclaimed, appalled. “Is that true, Antony?”

  “Might have guessed that, come to think of it,” Hargreaves observed in an undertone, nodding in the direction of Father Damien. “I thought it was just him.”

  “Yes, it’s true enough,” Lydiard said, answering Hillier. “It’s one of the least comprehensible provisions.”

  Up to a point the feelings of all three, confronted with this strange existence, were the same—a reluctant admiration tempered with dismay. The bare cells, the fly-infested refectory—Trappists may not take life, except for food or some useful purpose—the cheese and vegetable diet, the short nights broken three times by services in the chapel, the hard manual work in unsuitable garments—worst of all, the prohibition of washing and speech, constitute a life terribly lacking in most of what the natural man desires. But beyond that preliminary and common dismay and admiration, their feelings diverged considerably. Henry Hargreaves, in his way a perfect specimen of l’homme moyen sensuel, saw no point in it at all; the whole business seemed to him mad, and a little bit funny. He continually stressed the funny side of it—a little defensively, Antony guessed. Hillier’s reactions were more complicated. To him too the life seemed terrible, the voluntary embracing of it irrational; but his mind hovered, half fascinated and half repelled, round the thing that lay behind—the impulse and the force that could move men to choose such a way of living, and the compensations, on a plane beyond his own experience, that they could find in it. He had listened with a slight premonitory shudder, at supper in the guest-house the evening before, while Father Damien told them that twenty-four hours previously an Italian nobleman had sat where they were sitting, a free man, still able to speak, to come and go as he chose; and at High Mass on the day of their arrival, while they were tracking up in the hot sunshine to the Hsiao Lung Mên, he had been received into the Order, never to leave it again. Now, when he had seen the monastery and the actual setting of the life of the Trappists, Hillier was fairly haunted by the Italian. He could not get away from him; at every moment, whatever he was seeing or hearing, part of his mind was trying to enter into that man’s mind and heart, to guess what his feelings had been in those last hours of freedom, in the moment of irrevocable renunciation; and, at this very instant, now, during his first day of enclosure, of surrendered volition, of silence. Except for
the chanting of psalms and responses in the chapel, he would not speak again, would not utter a syllable, until New Year’s Day, when from one to five the monks were allowed to go for a walk, and to hold speech with one another. So Father Damien had said, adding that the older brethren, even on that one day in the year, did not speak much—many of them not at all.

  For Antony, the effect of La Trappe was different again. Unlike the other two, he met no challenge to his normal outlook in the existence of the monastery. The answer given at the beginning of the Scottish Shorter Catechism—“To glorify God and enjoy Him for ever” still seemed to Antony Lydiard the best answer to the question “What is the chief end of man?” With the underlying principle, the thing that so worried Hillier, he was in agreement; what caused him a certain doubt and disquiet was the application of the principle. Noble and splendid as such self-immolation was, were God’s ends really best served by these means? Could physical dirt, for instance, have much bearing on holiness? And while he accepted the immense importance of prayer, and that there should be men who lived for that alone, while he recognised the value of a degree of withdrawal, and of times of silence, could the human mind and spirit, he asked himself, sustain their powers indefinitely in such complete isolation? Must there not be deterioration, for which even the hard work in the open air, among natural influences, could not fully compensate? Antony had often stayed in monasteries, and up till the time of Laurence’s admission he had been accustomed to feel peculiarly happy and at home in them, soothed and supported by surroundings in keeping with the promptings of his own spirit. But here at La Trappe he was very conscious of distress and disturbance. It was partly the exaggeration, as he felt it, of a thing good in itself; still more, the constant pressure of the thought of Laurence. At the very first moment of arrival, when he went up to the gate to ask for admittance for himself and his party, and had been shown into the bare waiting-room, with the chairs, the table, the crucifix and the flowers, the recollection of visits to Laurence had struck cold and unhappy on his heart. And all this morning, going round the place, his mind was busy relating what he saw to Laurence and his life, secret, mysterious, hidden. The cells—was that how Laurence’s cell looked? The chapel—in such another his voice raised the same chants; the refectory—in a room like this (though please God less black with flies!) he ate his frugal meals. But through all these externals, Antony’s heart ceaselessly sought and pursued his brother’s spirit, trying to use the similarity of outward circumstance to bring himself into a closer understanding of what Laurence felt, and knew, and was—of that inner attitude, that shaping and disposition of the soul that is the final reality of any human being. In a way, he succeeded; though it was painful, the attempt had a kind of fascination about it; to some extent, he felt nearer to Laurence. But that was only to feel, more acutely, his own loss, and as the gate clanged behind them, and they walked back up the sanded path under the loop-holed wall towards the guest-house, the irrevocability of that loss.

  Rose and Anastasia had passed their morning very differently; in an unwonted domesticity, in fact. Rose said that her shirts and stockings wanted washing, that there would be plenty of time to dry them here, and that one could perfectly well do them out at the runnel of water that ran through banks of dressed stone below the guest-house gate. Anastasia, a little startled by so much enterprise, and by the whole idea of using La Trappe as a laundry, eventually agreed. So Hsiao Wang carried the largest of the guest-house basins out to the irrigation channel, and Rose set to work, soaping and wringing her shirts in the basin, rinsing them in the bright swift-flowing current, and hanging them up on the fruit-trees to dry in the hot sun. Anastasia was moved to fetch her own belongings and try her hand, but washing was not one of her accomplishments, and Rose, loudly deploring her cousin’s incompetence, presently threw away her cigarette and took her place at the basin again, while Anastasia in her turn smoked and looked on.

  “What about the men’s things?” she asked presently. “Don’t you suppose they want doing too? Or are you tired? What do you think?”

  Rose was not tired, and she thought all the shirts of the party would undoubtedly be the better of a wash; the active manual work pleased her—it kept her mind quiet, was soothing. So they went back to the guest-house and routed in the men’s rooms. In each they found a multitude of stockings and a shirt or two, and they laughed a little, as they carried them down to the water, at the characteristic garments worn by each of their three companions. Antony had plain white cambric shirts—he never wore anything else. Henry Hargreaves affected heavy tropical twill, woven in green and beige, the sort of shirts that elephant-hunters wear to protect them from African suns; but Roy Hillier’s were of a sort of fine-meshed aertex, deep cloud-blue in colour, and bore the name of a medical man in Bond Street.

  “Roy’s will be much the easiest to wash, anyhow—Henry’s are hell,” Rose said as she set to work; she was kneeling on the bank, her own shirt-sleeves rolled up, her cheeks pink with exertion, her hair wild—she looked very energetic and extraordinarily pretty. Energy was fairly biting Rose that morning; when she had finished the men’s shirts and festooned the fruit-trees with them and their stockings, she went over and fingered her own. “They’re nearly dry,” she said, “but they’ll look foul if they’re not ironed.”

  “They’ll be clean, anyhow,” said Anastasia.

  “Yes, but they’ll look foul. Tasia, tell Hsiao Wang to try to get us an iron—they must have one, for surplices and things.”

  Anastasia protested a little, but Rose’s energy conquered her amused resistance. Hsiao Wang in due course reported that an iron was on its way, and Rose converted the round table in the guest-house into an ironing-board by covering it with a pair of blankets and a sheet. The iron when the lay-brother brought it was an astonishing affair, a vast metal box containing hot charcoal, normally used for pressing vestments; Hsiao Wang and the lay-brother, a dreamy gentle smile on his mystic’s face, took it in turns to blow the charcoal, and when the machine was hot enough they stood by smoothing sleeves and stretching out cuffs and collars, with the ready neat practicality of their race, while Rose steered the massive engine over the surfaces of the shirts. Anastasia sat looking on, still smoking, still amused; Rose made a very good job of the ironing, she thought. It was not very like her to be so good at practical things, except sport; it was very like her, on the other hand, to achieve without effort that eager co-operation with her wishes from men, even from a Chinese lay-brother and a Chinese groom. She watched the three faces bent over the table, the two yellow ones and the one pink—even the lay-brother, in the most innocent “and altruistic way, was enjoying these unwonted activities enormously, that was clear. Well, it must be a change from Trappist routine, certainly, to be ironing shirts with a female foreign devil.

  But the idea of the lay-brother’s normal routine turned her thoughts from Rose and her laundering to the Trappists in general, to La Trappe itself, and the life lived there. Antony was seeing all that now, at this very moment—not just being intellectually aware of it, as she was, but seeing it with his eyes, getting that peculiar unescapable sharpness of the visual impression. And it would make him think of Laurence, it would alter and sharpen his chronic pain about Laurence. It was doing that to hers, merely being here in the guest-house. She thought, almost with dread, of what his eyes would look like when he came back to lunch. Would he want to talk about it, or not? Usually it was better to talk, but just occasionally it wasn’t. She would have to see; to look at his eyes, whatever pain was in them, and then decide. There was all the afternoon, and no public donkey-boyed marching; they could go for a stroll.

  But in fact it was not with Antony that Anastasia strolled that afternoon. When the men had returned and they had eaten a rather silent lunch—even Father Damien, it seemed, had more or less talked himself out during the morning, and everyone else appeared slightly abstracted—Antony announced, in answer of a vague question of his sister’s, that he was going to lie do
wn, and then write up his journal. Rose also announced her intention of lying down. So when Hillier turned to Anastasia and asked if she felt like taking a walk up the valley, she agreed. Henry showed no disposition to come too—presumably he would sit on Rose’s doorstep and wait for her to emerge, Anastasia thought to herself as they set off.

  They walked up the hot valley track beside the river, between the yellow pock-marked little hills, in complete silence at first. The track forked, they broke silence to agree to take the left-hand branch, which slanted up hill, and then walked forward silently again, sweating. Anastasia got the impression that Hillier was in some sort of distress, or ferment; he frowned as he walked, he kicked the little crumbling pieces of black and yellow rock which lay on the path, and his pace, unconsciously, grew faster and faster. At last her short legs and shorter breath caused her to protest—“Roy, this isn’t a Marathon! I must have a breather.”

  He stopped at once.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Let’s find somewhere to sit.”

  There was nowhere much to tempt them—the hot brown hill-side, the dark flame-shaped bushes of juniper, each with its shortened patch of shadow. They sat in one of the largest of these patches, on the small crumbs of decomposed granite. Anastasia took off her topi and loosened the damp hair round her temples. Below them the yellow valley lay spread out, and in it, shivering a little in the heat, the grey Gothic outlines of La Trappe.

  “Horrible place,” said Hillier suddenly, looking at it.

  “Oh, do you find it is? Why?”