Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “A thousand ages and no boundaries.”

  Then they dropped down from the col and followed the Hun river.

  The return to Peking presented one immediate problem for Rose—where to stay. Until she and Antony had come to some conclusion, her instinct was not to remain under his roof; on the other hand if she went back to the Wagons-Lits Hotel, where she had stayed before they went to Pei-t’ai-ho, she was afraid that Henry would put his own construction on her doing so; and moreover it would be much more difficult to avoid tête-à-têtes with him, as she wished to do till such time as she had pulled up her socks and got their explanation over. In her indecision she tried it on with Asta. Driving back in the car from Men-t’o-k’ou—the three men were waiting to pay off the donkey-boys, and following in Henry’s Essex—she said as casually as she could—“I think perhaps I’ll buzz off back to the Wagons-Lits tomorrow, Tasia.”

  “Oh, Rose! Why? How absurd!”

  “Don’t you think it’s a good plan?”

  “I think it’s a ludicrous plan anyhow; till you’re perfectly fit I just shan’t let you go,” said Asta warmly. So Rose stayed with her cousins.

  Asta had thought quickly, while she spoke—her answer had not been given only on impulse, though her impulse would undoubtedly have been to keep Rose till she was completely set up again in any case. She was more puzzled than ever about Rose. She had noticed—hardly a tendency to avoid Henry, but certainly a lack of the exuberance that her cousin had earlier shown in his society, during the last few days; she, like him, thought that something was up. But she was not sure what. In normal circumstances she would almost inevitably have become aware that some new emotional disturbance was affecting both Rose and Antony—she knew them so well that she could hardly have failed to see some trace of such a violent upheaval. But the circumstances were just sufficiently out of the normal to put her off the scent. Rose was ill, which seemed to Asta to account for any amount of languor and listlessness; and their hard days of forced marches, in any case, had left little leisure for observation. The latter consideration applied also to Antony, and probably prevented her from noticing any symptoms of more than what she had for some time suspected and feared, that he might lose some portion of his heart to Rose. What she did think was that Rose, as any sane person would have expected her to do, might be beginning to realise that any form of flirtation, intrigue or whatever with poor Henry was—for her—a bad egg. And, instantly alive to all the implications of the Wagons-Lits proposal, as far as he was concerned, she had a double reason for urging her cousin strongly to remain at the Lung An Hut’ung.

  Captain Hargreaves was less easily satisfied. Finding Mrs. Pelham alone and in tears at the Temple of the Jade Emperor had shaken him thoroughly. The more and the longer he thought about it, the more it disturbed him. Quite quietly he too began to observe her, instead of cheerfully weighing in and making love whenever opportunity offered; there was no vulgar spying on her movements, he merely watched her, watched her face. And he also noticed things. Her manner with him was nervous, almost timid—a complete contrast to the charming assured sauciness which had so enslaved him at first. She was absent, very often; and often depressed. And though, by the time they had been back a week, she was really quite recovered, she twice made excuses about not going to dine with him. Something was seriously wrong. His sixth sense, his extraordinary instinct where men and women were concerned, began to work to discover what.

  It was at this stage that Lady Harriet Downham took her first cue, so to speak, in the decisive part which she was to play in connection with Mrs. Pelham’s fortunes. Lady Harriet was still in Peking on their return, and the three cousins saw her again at once. Hargreaves saw her too, and began to feel more at home with her; her crisp downrightness amused and pleased him. So when, some days after their return, he noticed her white hair and erect figure among the crowd attending the polo tea outside the small stand-cum-clubhouse at the edge of the dusty ground, it was natural that he should stroll over, cup in hand, and accost her with an enquiry as to whether he could get her anything?

  Lady Harriet would like another cup of tea. “A thirsty business, watching polo, I always find,” she said, when he had brought it and been thanked. “One’s heart is in one’s mouth so much of the time, it quite dries it.”

  Hargreaves gave his immense military laugh.

  “Your cousin doesn’t play, does he?” she asked. “Oh no”—as he looked blank for a moment—“they aren’t your cousins.” She laughed. “It’s that pretty creature who’s their cousin. How very charming she is, isn’t she? So natural and fresh. And she has quite a mind, too—native woodnotes of intelligence.” She laughed the deep laugh with which, as well as saluting anything amusing, she caressed an idea.

  This was a form of conversation which Captain Hargreaves found it a little difficult to sustain. He said, however, with sincerity, that Mrs. Pelham was a very good walker—“She’s fast, you know, when she chooses, and she never gets tired. On our trip she and old Antony distanced the lot of us, more than once.”

  Lady Harriet gave him a characteristic glance—a glance that swept over him and what he was saying and any possible implications as the shadow of a hawk’s wing sweeps over a field.

  “Mr. Lydiard is a fast walker too? In spite of the lameness?”

  “Oh yes. Doesn’t hinder him at all. It’s only in the foot, you know. And he’s a dogged sort of fellow—you might not think it, with all that music and so forth, but Lydiard is; he doesn’t let circumstances overcome him.”

  “I should certainly think it. I call him a very forcible person.” Lady Harriet laughed again, secretly delighted with the perfect individual rightness of her companion’s conception of music as incompatible with force of character. But this was not a pleasure which she could share with him—instead, like a hawk, she pounced. “Do you know the husband?”

  Hargreaves had never met the fellow in his life. “I believe he’s very brilliant—he’s in the Brigade.”

  “Ah. I’ve been hoping I should at last come across someone who did know him. I should like to meet him.” Then she dropped Captain Pelham and returned to the Lydiards, so swiftly as to short-circuit Henry’s projected remark to the effect that the cousins knew him well. “How charmingly they all three get on together, don’t they? It’s so delightful to meet really intellectual people who enjoy one another. So often the very intellectual seem to spend so much time being clever at each other that there isn’t much enjoyment about, don’t you think?”

  “Ha-ha! Too true, Lady Harriet—you’re absolutely right. But should you call Mrs. Pelham very intellectual?”

  Again her glance swept over him: “No—but not stupid at all. Just purely delightful. She is really absolutely charming. And he is so immensely attractive. First cousins of course don’t marry nowadays, otherwise one would really have expected her to marry him,” said Lady Harriet, with her smooth air of reflection carried on at lightning speed. “That would have been so obviously the perfect match, wouldn’t it? And then there would have been no mysterious Pelham”—her voice deepened to that emphasis touched with absurdity—“lurking in Egypt or the Sudan or wherever it is. Ah, my dear Sir James! So you’re back at last?” she said, as the Minister approached.

  Lady Harriet’s chance remark was sufficient to put Henry Hargreaves on the right track. It gave a focal point to his hitherto general and uncertain watching. Old Ant—one wouldn’t have thought, with a married woman—but you never knew! One of the lessons which life had most firmly implanted in Captain Hargreaves was that really you never knew! He watched again, and now he saw—saw, guessed, imagined as best he could, and without fully comprehending, was sure. His sixth sense, now that he had a line on the thing, was as unerring as usual. Yes, that was it. The old bird had been quite right—as anyone who knew her would expect. In their own way—so different from his way—Ant had fallen for his lovely Rose, and Rose for Antony. It was all clear now. He remembered a lot of things, to whose si
gnificance he had been blinded at the time by his belief in his own power to hold any woman as long as he chose, and his conviction of old Antony’s general monkishness: the time they had walked together; that afternoon at La Trappe, when her cold began; the way he, Henry, had been excluded from the sickroom. And for a short time, a flame of anger sprang up in him against them both.

  Not for long. Inclined as Henry Hargreaves was towards a rather cynical view of the relations of men and women, he was also a realist about them, and he knew both Rose and Antony too well to think that his crudest theories fitted their case. He remembered the look of Rose’s figure, flung down in tears in the courtyard at the Temple of the Jade Emperor—he watched their faces now. This was no successful love, heartlessly deceiving friend and lover alike. There was pain about, and distress, and uncertainty. But there was also, undoubtedly, love. And even when his anger had passed, the knowledge made him suffer in a way that surprised him.

  A modern French writer, Ignace Legrand, uses a telling phrase—la beauté intime d’une femme—to express a thing which he describes very wisely and beautifully: the profound and delicate revealing of character and personality which, with women fundamentally natural and good, accompanies the physical revelation of intimacy. Among all his varied loves, this particular thing had never come Henry’s way until he fell in love with Mrs. Pelham; and brief as their relation had been, it had sufficed to turn his careless passion into genuine love—something very like love as it is understood by people like the Lydiards. But because of his previous life, of his character, and of his habits of thought, there was nothing very much—it was his private tragedy—that he could do about it. There is an old and unflattering English proverb about the impossibility of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; it is often used, even today, but the very roughness of the expression has perhaps caused the full truth of this piece of homely country wisdom to be lost sight of by those who use it. You could make a mediaeval bag purse, and a very good and serviceable one too, out of that flexible, capacious, leathery object, a sow’s ear; what you could not do was to make from it the slender purse of netted silk, run through two rings, which was the last refinement of elegant money-carrying. But the essentials of a purse were there.

  So with men of the type of Henry Hargreaves—though they can love, and suffer, their love can never be expressed outwardly in the terms that would naturally clothe the love of men like Lydiard, terms largely spiritual and intellectual. Henry’s was a good honest leathern love—or Rose had made it so; it could never be silken. (Silk is strong too.) He could think and speak in one way, his own; and he could act. This he had done all along, and this he now did, in a manner most completely his own. Once he had decided that Rose and Antony loved one another, he also recognised, almost immediately, that he himself was, to use his own phrase, “out of it”. His admiration for Lydiard was boundless; under all his laughing semi-patronage of his friend, in his heart he rather touchingly acknowledged what seemed to him an immense superiority. If Rose loved Antony and he her, that was the thing for Rose. (Religious scruples about divorce and re-marriage did not affect Captain Hargreaves in the slightest degree—they simply did not occur to him.) And there was no point in talking about it either. Ant did tend to talk things out, rather, and so did Asta—but it wasn’t much in Rose’s line, and it would be crackingly embarrassing for her, the poor sweet. Much better just get on with it. He had a talk with his chief; he did some extensive cabling; he saw Sir James Boggit; subsequently he paid a visit to the American Express Company’s office in the Wagons-Lits Hotel. Then, less than three weeks after their return to Peking, he went round at cocktail-time to the Lung An Hut’ung and announced casually to the startled Anastasia, the only person who was in, that he was sailing for home in ten days’ time to see the old brass-hats in the Boîte de Guerre, who seemed to think that they had a champion job for him.

  For once the stupid man—fond as she was of Henry, Anastasia reckoned him stupid—took the clever woman by surprise.

  “Going home?” she said. “Oh, Henry—but why?” And then cursed her folly inwardly—of course he had had a breach of some sort with Rose. But—was it as bad as that? For either of them?

  “Oh well—have a change, you know.” Henry was perfectly easy—he did it superbly, whatever he was doing. “I’ve had three years here, you know. No good getting into a rut, my dear Asta.”

  “Have you told Ant?” she asked, still trying to adjust her ideas to this unexpected move. “He’ll hate your going—we all shall.”

  “Ah, my dear Asta, you’re always so amiable! Lots more fish in the sea, you know! No—it’s only just fixed. I thought Ant might be here—I didn’t know if you or he would care to have The Begum? He’s quite sound across country, if he is a polo-pony.”

  “I’ll ask him,” said Anastasia. She was still all rattled—Henry’s rapidity of action had scattered her wits; he was running her off her feet with his smooth arrangements of detail. She was doing everything wrong, and she did it again, with a sort of fated inevitability.

  “Does Rose know?” she asked.

  Henry never turned a hair.

  “I tell you, it’s only just fixed. I came straight to you. Is she out?”

  “She went to the Bétemps—I expect her back any minute.”

  Now he could leave, if he wanted to; he couldn’t intend to tell Rose in public—or could he? He didn’t leave, in any case; when the boy brought the cocktails he asked if he should get her one, took one himself, and talked cheerfully on. Rose, to her relief, did not return; nor was there any sign of Antony. But there grew up in Anastasia during the course of this visit an almost ferocious determination to get to the bottom of whatever was going on—have it out with Rose, and apply to Antony for information. It was all too confusing as it was. They had gone on long enough, drifting and sliding, all of them. Occupied a good deal with Hillier, of whose feelings she was no longer in much doubt, a little afraid of what she might precipitate or crystallise in the way of emotions in her brother, emotions which might still be fluid and unconscious, by open discussion, she had gone on for the last fortnight in an almost voluntary doubt and uncertainty, really postponing any critical judgement on the meaning of Rose’s continued depression, of Antony’s silence and air of fatigue. Well, she would postpone it no longer.

  Henry presently left, after bidding them all to a small farewell party which he intended, he said, to throw. He had known perfectly well all along that Rose would not be there—on leaving the American Express office, he had chanced to catch sight of her and Antony walking up the ramp onto the Tartar Wall, and guessed that they were going to have a talk, and that it would last some time. The sight had given him a sharp twinge, but his resourceful commonsense soon decided to use this excellent opportunity to get his announcement over in the way least embarrassing for everyone. When he next met Rose, he reflected with some complacency, as he walked out through the three or four courtyards on the way to Anastasia’s front door, she would know—and everything would be easy. And the next moment, in the last courtyard of all, he came face to face with Rose herself.

  She was hurrying, and her light graceful movements went oddly with a distraite, almost desperate air there was about her; he saw that she had been crying. When she caught sight of him she stopped, and made a pathetically obvious effort to pull her face and her manner together.

  “Hullo, Henry,” she said. “Have you been seeing Asta?”

  The sight of her, her evident distress, the gallant futility of her attempt at ease with him, with whom all had once seemed utter ease for her, caught Henry Hargreaves like a blow. For a few seconds he stood looking at her, taking her in, and pains and comprehensions more complex than any in his previous experience shook him. There were things in him then that needed the words of poets—and he had no such words. The feelings of the Henrys of this world inevitably go by default; their words are as tragically inadequate as the lips of the dumb. But in some ways he did better than she. (Leathern
purses are stout.)

  “Yes,” he said breezily. “I’ve been telling old Asta my news.”

  “What is your news?” she asked, trying to emulate his control—she fumbled nervously in her bag for her cigarette-case.

  “I’m going home next week,” he said, taking out his little gold briquet and lighting the cigarette for her.

  “Home?” She turned pale, then red—she could not speak; he thought she was going to cry again.

  “Yes—the boy-friends at the War-shop have got a nice job for Master Henry,” he said gaily, “and they want him at once. Good men are scarce, darling.”

  It is extraordinary how that word, once become a habit, clings and slips out, even when it is least intended and least appropriate. It had escaped Henry Hargreaves involuntarily, just then, but it had a curious effect on Rose. She stopped trying to act, to equal his coolness and composure, and simply stood gazing at him. Then suddenly she broke out, with a sob in her voice—“Henry, you are—oh, no one but me will ever know what you are! And there’s nothing I can do for you, nothing! Oh, bless you”—and she ran on towards the house, leaving him standing looking after her.