Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  The Ch’ing Shui Valley is a broad and fertile trough in the hills, very wide and open, noted for its walnut trees, and lovely to see; but the going was rough along the river-bed, and it was very hot. Rose sat like an image in her improvised palanquin, under a large umbrella, sucking eucalyptus lozenges, and telling Asta and Antony, whenever they enquired after her well-being, that she was perfectly all right. About noon they passed through Chai-T’ang, a great centre of the coal-mining industry; a large walled town with fine towers and gates. Antony had hoped to lunch there in a pleasant temple that he knew of, but when he went in with Henry to see the priest, while the caravan halted at the gates, Henry came out again quickly, saying—“No go.”

  “Why not?” Asta asked—she wanted to get Rose into a cool quiet place and procure hot tea for her.

  “Inquest going on.”

  Anastasia said no more, but Roy broke in at once—“Really? But can’t we watch while we eat?”

  “Go in and see,” said Hargreaves, grinning, and Roy went. He came out a few moments later with Antony, looking rather green. A Chinese inquest consists in cutting the corpse up into the smallest possible pieces and spreading them out neatly on straw matting, and this process was well under way in the courtyard. They pushed on and lunched in the outskirts of a village beyond Chai-T’ang, in the shade of a walnut tree and surrounded by the usual crowd.

  At Kung Shang another disappointment awaited them, when they arrived a little before five. Here too was a pleasant temple known to the Lydiards, and Anastasia had been supporting Rose’s spirits for the last hour or so of that hot march by the prospect of rest and sleep in the cloisters of a pretty and secluded courtyard. Not a bit—soldiers had occupied the temple the day before, leaving it in a quite uninhabitable state of stench and filth which the priest, with the advent of more troops in prospect, had very sensibly done nothing to remedy. There was nothing for it but to set up the tents on the river bank outside the village, and instal Rose there. However, Antony was satisfied with his day; Rose had stood up with fortitude to the long march, and though tired and uncomfortable, she was no worse; they were still on the main route of the troops, but they were well ahead of them, and hoped to keep ahead. One more hard day for Rose, and then they could take it easy, and even give her a day’s rest.

  But this hope too proved vain. During the night three more of Tu’s battalions entered Kung Shang from a side valley, and the whole of the next day, for some nine hours, Lydiard’s party had the very peculiar experience of plugging along in the middle of a Chinese army on the march, their train of baggage and donkey-boys inextricably mixed up with the commandeered villagers, mules and donkeys which carried its camp equipment, while they found themselves quite literally rubbing shoulders, on the narrow track, now with a couple of Generals in chairs, in silk civilian robes, now with N.C.O.s, now with wounded stumbling along in bandages, now with Kuominchün prisoners—and all the time with the Tu rank and file, in filthy grey uniforms with red armlets. It was an extraordinarily draggled, untidy, muddly, go-as-you-please procession, one battalion strung out over two or three miles of so-called road, and every village a seething mass of transport, donkeys, stacked rifles which fell down, and soldiers drinking tea, through which—most discreetly and patiently—they had to push their way. It was bandit order again that day; Antony ahead, Hargreaves at the rear, Hillier in the middle, walking by Rose, while Anastasia, in the villages, moved up and down the line, quelling the snobbish truculence of the donkey-boys, making jokes to the troops, smoothing out incidents before they blazed up into quarrels, oiling their passage. Hillier watched her with an admiration that was all the stronger for being edged with amusement. There she was, being ‘nippy’ again; just as adroit in managing these cretinous blackguards as in twisting him or Antony. Oh, you couldn’t go wrong with a woman like that! We’re all born to be managed, he thought, a little ruefully—and it was nicer to have it done with expert mastery, less crushing to the self-esteem.

  There was no question, that day, of finding a nice place for lunch, for no place could be nice; the fumes of garlic exhaled by the army hung over the road in an almost visible cloud. When Asta thought that Rose was beginning to look tired they simply pulled out off the track to the further side of an empty stream-bed, and sat among boulders and bushes below a dry-stone wall built with thin stones in a herring-bone pattern, which enclosed a field of maize, watching the endless thin grey stream of slovenly figures go trickling past along the further bank—some with caps, some without; some with undergarments or bits of loot hung on their rifles, some without rifles at all—all slouching and shuffling along with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  “No!” said Hillier at last, after contemplating this sordid spectacle for some time.

  “No what?” Hargreaves asked.

  “An army in retreat—yes; an army moving up to a rail-head to go into action, no,” said Hillier.

  “My dear fellow, I’m with you absolutely,” Henry said, delighted at this sign of normality in Hillier. “Shocking state for men to be in!”

  “They are a bit nondescript,” said Rose, who was feeling better—“but it’s the smell I really mind. I wish I could smoke!”

  “Don’t you dare to try!” said Asta.

  The day had clouded over; it was grey, with an ugly featureless light over the hills. At the top of the pass it came on to rain; immediately every soldier unhitched a large oiled-paper umbrella which he carried slung on his back, slung his rifle in its place, and opening his gay brolly proceeded to march on under it, dry as a bone in that warm vertical downpour.

  “Now that,” said Hillier, as they huddled into a wayside shrine to wait till the riding-donkeys should be brought up, with their Burberrys, “that, Hargreaves, really does seem to me the very zenith of common sense. No heat, no weight, no bother at all. Couldn’t you recommend umbrellas to the Army Council, instead of those hot distressing overcoats? Or if not instead, as well? I shall certainly put it up to the Peruvian Government. Those en-tous-cas would be just the thing for the Chaco, or wherever they have their next war.”

  Some distance down on the further side of the pass they reached the mouth of their side valley, and branched up it. Here they were off the track of the marching troops, and they parted from them with great relief—Rose said the very air smelt cleaner, and Asta could at last abandon her peace-making activities and ride her donkey in comfort. Rather late, they reached the spot that Antony had in mind, a charming Taoist temple with a charming priest and a charming name—The Temple of the Jade Emperor. There was a room for Rose to sleep in, a superb pine in the courtyard; and in another room they sat down early to the most cheerful and sociable supper that the trip had so far provided. Rose, in spite of her two long days, was well enough to sit up for it; relief at her recovery, relief at having got away from—not to say through—the Chinese army without mishap raised everyone’s spirits. And it was quite a different thing now with Roy, Anastasia thought to herself, noticing more than she had done yet how pleasantly and easily he “mixed”, even with Rose and Henry. At that very moment he and Henry were discussing dance music—of all things! Henry, without a trace of annoyance, was championing some waltz which Hillier had roundly condemned. “I like it,” he said; “I like a catchy tune.”

  Rose laughed. “Father used to say that,” she said in explanation; “when I was little I used to wonder what on earth a catchy tune was.”

  “In case you’re still in any doubt, it means a tune which is habitually and very imperfectly caught by large numbers of people, and then steadily murdered by them,” said Hillier.

  Hargreaves laughed. “Perfectly right, my dear Roy, ha-ha! But I like them, all the same.”

  “‘Catchy’—it is a comic word,” said Asta. “It’s rather expressive—I don’t know why we don’t use it more. ‘A catchy book’—why not?”

  “What would you call a catchy book?” Antony asked.

  “Oh—The Green Hat,” said Asta.

  “Beau
Geste,” said Rose.

  Henry made it clear that he thought highly of both these works.

  “Roy looks as if he was going to be sick,” said Asta, delighted that it was possible to say this safely. “Never mind, H.H.—don’t you be put upon! Why shouldn’t you like what you choose?”

  “Ah, my dear Asta—you and Roy are clever!” said Henry, with that spot of gleeful malice which he occasionally exhibited. “I know the sort of books you and Roy like, especially Roy—books by the intelligentsia, for the intelligentsia, about the intelligentsia!”

  “Which of you two is going to say ‘touché’ first?” Antony enquired. “That’s done them, Henry. Game to you.”

  “I cried over The Green Hat,” said Rose, unexpectedly.

  “That shows it’s touching as well as catchy,” said Hillier.

  “It shows I’m nice and low-brow, I expect,” she said. Antony glanced at her with pleasure—he liked her for that little honest gesture of loyalty to Henry.

  They spent two nights at the Temple of the Jade Emperor. Anastasia thought the rest would do Rose no harm, though she was now so much better that her chair had been unlashed and her carriers paid off and sent home as soon as they arrived; Antony considered that the caravan, animal and human, deserved a pause after their two hard days; and Hillier wished to go up Mount Conolly, which rises immediately behind the temple. This lovely mountain with a lovely Chinese name—the Ch’ing Shui Tien, or Clear Water Peak—has given a distressing immortality to a language student, otherwise unknown to fame, called Conolly, who was the first European to go up it; a shapely pyramid, far higher than its immediate neighbours, it is the most conspicuous mountain that one sees from the top of the Tartar Wall in Peking—and as the Europeans who so easily identified it wished to call it something, and could not be bothered to master the Chinese syllables, Mount Conolly, rather horribly, it remains.

  In the end everyone but Rose went up Mount Conolly. Henry before the start contrived to murmur to her, “Darling, I don’t think I’d better suggest staying behind—it would be a bit obvious.”

  “No, rather not—you couldn’t possibly,” she agreed hastily.

  “If I get a chance I’ll slip down a bit early—ankle or head or something.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t,” said Rose. “That would be fearfully obvious too.”

  “Don’t worry—I won’t be obvious. I’ll think something up,” he said cheerfully.

  “I really shouldn’t bother,” said Rose. “I shall be perfectly happy alone. I expect I shall sleep most of the time.”

  He glanced at her, a little surprised—she wasn’t very enthusiastic. Perhaps she was still tired. “A bientôt, sweet,” he said.

  Rose was glad of her day alone. She pottered about in the red-walled courts of the Temple, smiling at the priest and sitting here and there, and when the sun was hot at noon went down to the river and ventured on a bathe in a pool; after lunch she took her sleeping bag and some pillows out into a small side court, away from the amiable but pressing attentions of the priest’s female relations, who were washing clothes and household utensils and sipping tea all over the main court. She lay propped against a shallow flight of marble steps; the great pine flung its shadow over into her retreat, and she watched the bright splashes of light that slipped through and lay flat on the flag-stones, elongated athwart the red walls. How blessed it was to be alone and quiet, for once; and how deep the peace was, here in this place—a peace more profound than the flowering peace of gardens, the wild sylvan peace of woods. More profound because it was willed, meant, she thought; it had been built for peace, and people had practised peace in it. What wouldn’t she give to be able simply to surrender to its peace, to have peace like that in her heart. But she could not do that; within her everything was strife and confusion. The wonder of Antony’s love warred with this absurd entanglement with Henry, with the distant fact of her marriage; she could not surrender to the peace of loving Antony any more than to the peace of the Jade Emperor’s secret temple. They were alike, his love and this place; the same quality. Oh, why had it had to come at a time, in circumstances, when she could not give herself up to it freely, this love that was so wonderful?

  She tilted her head back, staring up through the delicate lacy tracery of the pine needles at the blue of the sky. Extraordinary that so airy a substance could throw so solid a shadow! How strange that she and Antony should have known one another all these years without ever knowing this, she thought. She had known him before she knew Charles. It was like two friends who keep on not meeting at the same party. Why had they not seen then what they could mean to one another? For a moment she felt the wild longing, in the circumstances so natural, that she might have kept all this for Antony, that it could have waited for him, that nothing and no one else should have come first. But even Rose, bad as she was at analysing things, soon saw that it was not really like that. If Antony had come before Henry, she would not have known what she now knew about what love can be, the intimacy and fearlessness and open confiding that come from fulfilled and happy physical love—and the beauty and value of it in a relation where it could find its place along with love’s other fullest expression. Charles had not taught her that; she owed that to Henry. But, again, Charles had shown her other things, or their possibility—the solid reality of married life, the strong link of wedlock, the committed feeling which again gave its own character, and a good, a happy, a supporting character to one’s love for a person. A part of her still was deeply linked to Charles. She was still very much attached to Henry. It was wrong as well as silly to wish to expunge those two, to wipe them off her slate; it was no good being disloyal to the past, because her present self was her past. She remembered with distaste how one or two women of her acquaintance who had divorced and remarried lost no opportunity of calling down, of having digs at their former husbands. She had thought then that it was undignified; she saw now that it was also false.

  Still staring up through the branches of the pine, the past led her to the future. Antony had said that they must be good and clever, and sitting in her chair, on those two long marches, her mouth full of eucalyptus pastilles, she had tried to think what goodness and cleverness would be, for them. Shy, tortuous and vague as the workings of Rose’s mind usually were, this time she had been surprisingly definite—in her heart she knew, quite simply, that she wanted to marry Antony. Here was all she worshipped, all she needed—(like Hillier, she was inclined to marry salvation)—and by a miracle he loved her. Charles, if they divorced, could marry Esther Struthers. The one tormenting doubt was whether Antony would, with his religious views, marry a divorcée. Rose had very little precise knowledge about Antony’s religious views, except that he went most regularly to Church; but she believed they were rather High Church, and High Church people had a prejudice about divorced people marrying.

  However, that was all a long way ahead—the immediate thing was Henry. She had got to tell Henry that she no longer loved him—oh, she never had! Just how false that was, how unfair to Henry, now broke fully upon her. Antony had said it, on the descent from Por Hua Shan, and her mind had agreed; now her heart cried out its truth. How was she to tell him? Just say—“I’ve stopped”? False again—a half-truth. Say—“I find I love Antony”? Better, but brutal. Say the whole truth—“It was a mistake—I never really meant it. I used you for my own comfort. Now I love Antony. But I am grateful for what you have taught me”? Could one make Henry understand that? Would he mind? How much? Oh, she didn’t know—she knew nothing about him! In her distress, her shame, her uncertainty, above all in her physical weakness, Rose burst into tears, and lay sobbing on her pile of pillows in the little red courtyard.

  There Henry Hargreaves found her. Standing in the doorway, at first he thought she was asleep, seeing the slender form lying there on its side, with the face hidden; then he saw that her shoulders were moving convulsively, and heard the little low gulping sounds. He ran to her and knelt down.

  “Oh,
darling,” he said, trying to take her hands—“oh, darling, what is it? What’s wrong, my sweet?”

  She shivered all over, and sat up hastily, dabbing at her face with a sodden little handkerchief.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m tired and silly, that’s all.” Oh, it would happen that he caught her now, like this, when she was all potty and useless, and couldn’t possibly talk to him sensibly.

  “But, what is it, sweetheart? Do tell me. What’s upset you?”

  “Nothing—really nothing. Where are the others?” She began to push up her hair, and dabbed ineffectually again at her nose.

  “Up the mountain—I skidded off. Old Asta was flowering away with Hillier, finding thissima and thatyphylla, and Ant was mooning, so I said I’d seen a bird down in the combe, and I was going after it, and would find my own way home—and I just legged it off back to you. I’m sorry you’ve been upset, pet.”

  “What was the bird?”

  “Darling, there wasn’t one. Here’s my bird!” He tried to take her in his arms.

  She wriggled away.

  “I’m too foul to kiss—I must go and wash my face,” she said, and sprang up and ran off. She was a long time, and when she came back, it was only to call through the door and say that there was tea, and wouldn’t he come and have some? He went, but she lingered over her tea, out in the main court with the servants and that old geyser’s harem (thus Henry designated the aged priest’s refugee female relatives) about, till the others came back.

  Henry was disappointed, rather hurt, and profoundly puzzled. One didn’t lie and cry all alone on a fine afternoon for nothing. There must be something up.

  Chapter Twenty

  They left the Temple of the Jade Emperor next morning, crossed a low pass to the east, and in the afternoon, again in rain, dropped down onto the great Temple of Tan Chüeh Ssu, only a day’s march from Peking. Next day they climbed up out of the wooded cup in which it lies, and stood looking down on the Hun-Ho where it debouches from the hills below Men-t’o-k’ou. Before them lay the flat plain, Peking, daily life; behind them the mountains, free wandering, bathes in blue streams, sleep in shrines or tents. They stood for a minute or two, waiting for the caravan; sensible of a moment of pause between ending and beginning, between an interlude and the resumption of normal existence in its steady flow. “Hun-Ho Chü Shan”—“the Hun River leaves the mountains”—Antony quoted the old peasant saying for what they saw. From where they stood on the col they could also see, by turning round, the blue blunt-topped summit of Por Hua Shan away to the west, and it brought into Hillier’s mind those other words written there—