Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “I don’t like all this monkery, I don’t think,” he said. “It’s so unnatural that it gives one the grues to think of it.” He poked the toe of his white shoe to and fro in the crumby soil, and then turned to her, saying “What’s the actual point of it?” rather sharply.

  Does he know about Laurence? Anastasia wondered, looking at his red impatient face, and is that why he asks me? Or doesn’t he know, and is that why he asks like that?

  “Do you mean the point of this particular order, or of any enclosed order?” she asked in her turn.

  Hillier might be ignorant about some things, but his journalist’s training made him always willing to be accurate.

  “I was thinking of these Trappists,” he said. “But are there others? On the same lines?”

  There were several, she told him, and quite as strict—“except that only the Trappists are silent. I didn’t know whether it was the silence you were thinking about, or the monastic life in general?”

  He considered for a moment. “In general, really, I think. The silence and their beastly dirtiness adds to the horror here. But even without that, I find it hard to see what good it does, to anyone, for men to shut themselves up and sing and pray, when there are dozens of other things they could be doing.”

  His very irritation showed Anastasia that the whole thing was affecting him seriously, which made a serious argument worth while. She had however her own methods of promoting serious argument.

  “Making money?” she said, thoughtfully. “Writing books, or for the papers? There are so many books! Perfecting the means of speed?—or destruction? Promoting the exchange of commodities, half of which people would be better without? Manufacturing things? What would you rather they did?”

  Hillier was slightly startled by this onslaught. In his surprise the core of his secret distress came out. “That Italian was a diplomat,” he said.

  “Yes, but very few people can be diplomats—La Trappe alone could staff nearly half the British diplomatic Service. What else would you rather they did?”

  “They could be doctors,” he said. “Or if they want a quiet life, they could be students, and go in for learning.”

  “They do doctoring—you told us so at lunch. And they study for several hours every day—I know that. No, Roy; I don’t believe it’s that you really want them to be doing something else—it’s that you mind their doing what they do do. Why? Isn’t anyone to be allowed to lead an uncommercialised life of quiet and contemplation? Mayn’t there be even a few people left to make their souls, as the French call it, and to pray for the souls that don’t bother to make themselves, and to concern themselves with the nature of God?”

  He was startled afresh by this outburst. “Need they be dirty and not speak to do all that?” he asked.

  “They think so,” she said gently—almost sadly. “Who are we to tell them they are wrong?”

  “Then you really think that it’s important that there should be places like this?” he asked, less truculently, but still surprised.

  “Enormously important.”

  “Do you mind telling me why?”

  “I don’t mind trying. Look here—you haven’t said this yet, but isn’t it at the back of your mind that people can ‘be good’ just as well outside monastery walls, leading a normal life with normal experience?” He nodded. “And you feel that because these men lack that normal life and normal experience, their religious life must be somehow less valuable, because it’s unnatural, and anyhow it’s all made rather too easy for them?”

  “I hadn’t thought it out quite as clearly as that,” he said slowly; “but that does correspond generally to my feeling about the whole thing. Well, what’s the answer?”

  “You won’t agree with it,” she said. “The answer is that they aren’t trying to ‘be good’, in the ordinary lay way, at all. Obviously a certain degree of religious experience, sometimes the very highest, can be had in the ordinary world—only as a matter of fact it very often isn’t had. These men are leading the religious life, which is something quite different and is in fact a whole-time job. Like playing the violin, or anything else. If Yehudi Menuhin were a judge or a stockbroker, and only practised in his spare time, he would be a goodish violinist, but he wouldn’t be what he is. There are some things you’ve got to devote your life to.”

  “Yes, perhaps; but people can listen to Menuhin,” he objected. “What good does it do to the world at large, that these men lead the religious life, as you call it?”

  She pushed up her hair and combed her fingers through it.

  “In some strange way,” she said slowly, “I think it is vital to the life of mankind as a whole that there should be people who lead the religious life. Historically of course it is easy to argue in favour of monasteries, because in the Dark Ages they were the repositories of thought and learning and culture, as well as of religious experience. Now thought and culture have gone out into the world at large; but these places are still the repositories of certain things; certain treasures of religious experience. I don’t expect you to agree, but I believe that a serious approach to religion, practical and intellectual, such as these monks make here, does do something for the whole of humanity—something that it would be poorer without.”

  “You can’t say how, I suppose?”

  “No,” she said slowly. “I can’t say how, I don’t think. I just am convinced that it is so.”

  Hillier was silent for a little while. Then he came back to his most pressing obsession.

  “I must say I can’t see it,” he said. “Look at that Italian. He had a real job outside, a useful and important one; and yet he goes into that place”—he pointed vengefully at La Trappe—“and shuts himself up to clean pig-styes in silence. Why, if he felt so strongly about religion, couldn’t he stay outside and be a religious diplomat? I don’t imagine there are too many of them about.”

  “Why isn’t Menuhin a stock-broker?” said Anastasia. “I suppose the Italian wanted to be a religious, and had a genius for it like Menuhin for the violin. People do have a genius for religion.” She was thinking of Laurence, who had also had a job outside, and yet had gone and shut himself up—she remembered her own regrets and secret rebellions then.

  “At least Menuhin is in a position to lead a normal human life,” Roy objected. “No, really, Anastasia, it’s a complete mystery to me. There are lots of people, like the Webbs, and slum doctors, and experimental scientists, who lead entirely altruistic and devoted lives, which are obviously and evidently useful to humanity, without touching religion with a bargepole. You don’t need Christianity today to love and serve your neighbour.”

  He turned and looked at her, and was surprised at the expression, on her face. There was a repressed force about it that was almost as strong as anger. But she spoke quite gently, at first.

  “It is a mystery,” she said quietly. “You’re quite right about that. And the modern world doesn’t like mysteries—and you don’t like this one. But Roy, you are wrong about the Webbs and the scientists.”

  “Why am I wrong?”

  “You forget, and I daresay they forget too, where their ideals of altruism come from. They have been brought up in a society that for centuries has been saturated with a Christian ethic, and European civilisation as we know it is still enjoying the fruits of that state of things—it can no more get away from it than we can get away from the effects of our mixture of Teutonic and Norman blood. In countries that have been really isolated from Christian influence in the past, you don’t get that nineteenth-century passion for relieving human misery and improving the human lot. Look at China, or India. Or do you think that you do get it?”

  “No,” he said. “Certainly you don’t. That’s true enough.”

  “So when you say that one doesn’t need Christianity today to love and serve’s one’s neighbour, aren’t you rather ignorantly ignoring your debt to the past, and the origins of the ideas you value?”

  “Yes,” he said rather slowly. �
�I see I must give you that. I hadn’t really bothered about it much before.” He considered. “Even so, I’m still worried by this business of immuring oneself. It seems to me that if you could lead a normal human life, with the ordinary experiences, and yet be a really religious person, somehow your religion would have far more value, because it would be built up of the whole of human life, instead of being more or less maimed. Christ didn’t shut himself up.”

  “No—nor did von Hügel,” said Anastasia. “It is just possible, I know. But it’s rather rare—rare enough to make one comprehend that the people who definitely want to lead the religious life should feel that they can only be sure of doing it in that way. I think one must accept it.” She sounded as if she were talking more to herself than to him, now.

  It occurred to Hillier, rather belatedly, that he remembered hearing somehow or other that the Lydiards were very High-Church or something. Perhaps he had floated, going for religion like this with her.

  “By the way,” he said, “I don’t know how religious you are yourself. I hope you haven’t minded my saying exactly what I thought. I suppose I ought to have asked—only one hardly ever meets religious people.”

  Anastasia smiled. “No, I haven’t minded,” she said. “I expect you’ve thought I was rather tiresome. But I do know just enough about it to feel an urge to controvert absolutely unfounded criticism—perhaps just because there’s a good deal that is such an obvious target, about the monastic life.”

  “Actually I’ve been rather upset by it,” said Hillier a little awkwardly, poking his toe in the soil again.

  “How do you mean, you know?” he asked, glancing up at her rather sharply.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Because religion is so upsetting,” said Anastasia.

  Chapter Fifteen

  While Anastasia was discussing the monastic life with Hillier up the valley, Rose Pelham was lying on her creaking straw palliasse in the guest-house at the monastery, staring without attention at what was before her eyes—the cold bright light from the square of northern window on the whitewashed walls, the ewer standing in the pink-striped basin, her hat hanging on the single chair, her suit-case on the floor in the corner, with a shirt poking out from under the lid. She, hardly noticed these inanimate things, and yet in their own fashion they spoke to her, and spoke of what was in her mind. The monastic life, the surrender of all human ties; to rise in the night for prayer, to leave the fields for prayer by day; to abandon all comfort, all personal beauty, the delight of speech, above all to abandon all human love—men were doing that, within a hundred yards of her. And the fact of their doing it was hitting her even harder than it was hitting Roy Hillier. Now she thought of the astonishingly happy face of the Chinese lay-brother, as, in silence, he spread out the sleeve of a shirt, to help the stranger—smiling, full of something that you could only call love; now she thought of Henry Hargreaves’ face, and the smile that came under his little fair moustache when he was about to make love to her. He called that “love”, too—he said: “God, sweetheart, how I love you!” But they were quite different, his smile and the lay-brother’s. And they fought in her mind, those two smiles—one seemed to oppose the other.

  She lay in a curious misery. Her mind ran round this difference, this antinomy of the human heart—she could not argue it out as Hillier and Anastasia did, she did not know enough, and her mind was not of that sort. She just lay looking at the ewer and the bare room, in pain, as the hot quarters of an hour of that interminable afternoon passed by, each marked, at its passing, by the chime of the monastery clock. “One, two, three, four—one, two, three, four—one, two, three, four—” it lingered on the last stroke.

  But out of this pain one thing gradually emerged—she and Henry had got to stop. So far at least she saw. It was not very far, and the decision was not supported by any of the glib arguments which had led her into her affair with him—it was a rather blind conviction, born of her talk with Antony on the slopes of Por Hua Shan, and on the top of that, the immediate and actual fact of La Trappe. Her vigorous demonstration of energy that morning had been partly at least an attempt to escape from this influence, and it had only been temporarily successful. The energy had all evaporated now. She lay, limp and distressed, on the hot narrow bed. Her head ached. And, damn! she had got a cold coming on—there was that ominous pricking behind her nose, and her throat hurt. Oh, what a curse! Like so many very healthy people, Rose was absolutely prostrated by a cold—it made her feel really ill, and it sapped all her courage and her wits. To have one now, on the trip, and with this decision to be acted on, was too wretched. She sprang up, and delved in her suit-case for the little linen bag in which she carried a few ordinary remedies—surely she must have some Bromo-Quinine? But she had not. Damn again! If one took it at once, it sometimes headed a cold off; but you had to take it immediately, as soon as you felt that infernal pricking. What could she do? Oh, Antony might have some, in his tin box—she could go and look; and forgetting that he had said he should lie down, she darted out of her room and down the little courtyard to the door which she knew was his. Henry Hargreaves—waiting, sure enough, for her exit—hailed her from the sitting-room—“Hi! Where are you off to?”

  “Half a mo’,” she called back, and without even knocking ran into Antony’s room. There she came to a dead stop. Antony was sitting under the window at what was normally the wash-stand, with his back to her; the ewer and basin stood on the floor, and the little deal table was covered with sheets of paper, but with writing on them, not music—there was about his head and shoulders, his whole attitude, a curious, desolation which struck painfully on her sense. She could not say what caused it—he was just sitting there; but she had the impression of having walked in on a profound distress.

  “Oh! I do beg your pardon,” she said. “I thought you were out.”

  “Hullo—what is it?” he asked, turning round; he in his turn was struck by something distracted about her appearance—her face was pale, her hair wild, her eyes somehow desperate.

  “Oh—I thought you were out,” she said again, stupidly. “I only wanted some Bromo-Quinine—I haven’t got any.”

  “I’m not sure if I have—I’ll see,” he said, getting tip and going over to his tin box, which stood by his valise in a corner—he kept his eyes on her as he moved. “What’s wrong? Headache?” he asked, as he knelt beside the box and lifted the lid.

  “No—at least yes; but I don’t want it for that—I’ve got a foul cold starting,” she said. “Sometimes it stops it—only you must take it at once.” She spoke hurriedly and nervously. “I am sorry I marched in like this. I thought you were out,” she said for the third time.

  He looked up at her again, his hands in the box. There was something more than a cold wrong with her. “Sit,” he said, simply. “I don’t mind your coming in.”

  She sat on the bed, and waited, while Antony rummaged. “No, I haven’t got any Bromo-Quins,” he said at length; “I’m pretty low in everything, as a matter of fact. One never brings enough stuff. But I’ve got a little ordinary ammoniated quinine. If it’s a cold you’d better have some of that, and I’ll give you a spot of bromide afterwards.” He rose as he spoke, a bottle in his hand. “Go back to your room and lie down, and I’ll bring it to you. I must get some soda for it.”

  “I’ve been lying down,” said Rose, without moving, still in that curiously stupid way.

  “Never mind—lie down again,” he said. “Warmth and quiet will help to head it off—and I’ll give you some whisky presently, too. Come on.”

  She got up then, and went out into the courtyard. Henry was standing there, in the last patch of sunlight. “Come for a walk,” he said, stretching, and smiling at her—“it’s cooler now.”

  “No”—Antony spoke for her. “She’s got a head—she’s going to lie down.”

  “You prescribing?” Henry said cheerfully, grinning at the bottle in Lydiard’s hand.

  “Yes. Lai!” Antony calle
d.

  “Is it bad, pet?” Henry murmured, following Rose towards her door, as Hsiao Wang appeared and was given an order for Ch’i-shui (soda-water—literally “breath-water”).

  “No, not bad. Ant will cope,” Rose said, and went into her room.

  When Antony came in with the mixture in a glass she was lying on her bed, the sheet and single thin blanket pulled up to her chest. “Here you are—put it back,” he said. Rose did so, and screwed up her face, as everyone does with ammoniated quinine. “It’s nastier with soda,” she said, handing back the glass.

  Antony took no notice of this observation. He drew up the one chair, with her hat hanging on the back, and sat down by the bed. “Tell me what it is you feel—just headache and cold beginning?” he asked.

  “Yes—mostly the cold. It isn’t anything, only I do so hate colds,” said Rose.

  He studied her face in silence, making no answer.

  “You look all daft-like,” he said at length, in a deliberately easy kindly tone. “Has anything upset you?”

  Her mouth began to quiver.

  “I’ve decided to—finish with Henry,” she said.

  “Oh. When?”

  “Just now—here. It’s this place. I wanted to tell you as soon as I could, but I thought you were out,” she said, still in that hurried nervous manner.

  “Rose, if you tell me you thought I was out again, I shall shake you,” he said. “That’s four times! Pull yourself together. What does it matter if I was out or in? Anyhow you’ve got your medicine now, and you’re going to keep quiet till supper. I think I’d better go, and you try and have a nap.” He rose.

  “No—no; don’t go!” she said. “I can’t sleep—and I’ve been here all the afternoon! It’s been so awful. Can’t I talk to you?”

  “Of course, if you want to,” he said, sitting down again. He made an effort, and said—“You’re sure about Henry?”

  “Yes—quite sure,” she said, more quietly. “I can’t go on—I just know that.”