Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  Rose and Antony had had an agitating walk on the wall. Since their return to Peking they had lived in an uncomfortable silence, each rather avoiding the society of the other except when third parties were present. Antony had expected, when Rose was well again, to receive, or at least observe some sign that she had given Henry his congé; but none came. The strain and discomfort was considerable, and meeting her outside the house, that afternoon, on her return from the Bétemps, he suggested a walk, feeling that the time had come to find out how matters stood. They took rickshas to the Watergate, and after climbing the ramp, where Henry had seen them, they walked along to the sentry-post above the American Legation, scrambled through the much-used gap in the barbed wire, and walking round the great gate-tower which bestrides the wall above the Ch’ien-Mên, pushed on westward along the wall beyond. The great flagged top here bears a growth of weeds and bushes, through which the goats that feed there have made little paths; it is a curious and solitary place, this pasture-ground on the summit of the wall of a great city, with a wide and lovely view over the city itself on one side, on the other out across the plain to the Western Hills. Bastions jut out from the line of the wall at intervals—in one of these, less shrubby than the rest, they paused, leaning their elbows on the battlements, and looked out at the view. They had walked mostly in silence—now that they stood, the silence became oppressive. Rose, pointing to the multi-coloured line of summits rising beyond the brown plain, said—“Isn’t that Mount Conolly?”

  “Yes,” said Antony absently. Then, without looking at her—“Have you talked to Henry?” he asked.

  “No, not yet,” she answered.

  Antony was a little shocked. He had expected to be told that she had tried and found it difficult, or that Henry had been obstructive, but not that she had made no attempt at all.

  “Why on earth not?” he asked, and his feeling was audible in his tone.

  Rose, like many people, was apt to use self-depreciation as a form of self-defence.

  “Cowardice, mostly, I think,” she said. “But actually, I felt I didn’t quite know what to say.”

  “What does that mean? Don’t you intend to break with him, after all?”

  “Yes, yes, Antony, I do—oh, please don’t get angry with me! I know I ought to have done it sooner. I only mean that I didn’t know whether to tell him about us—about you. If I don’t I shall feel as if I’m leaving off with him on false pretences; but if I do, he will be so—so man-of-the-worldly about it, probably.”

  “I daresay. But you will have to put up with that.”

  “If I could possibly have managed without, I thought it would—well, it wouldn’t have upset him with you. He’s very fond of you,” she said wistfully.

  “We shall all have to put up with that,” said Antony bleakly. He considered for a moment, still with his eyes on the distant line of the mountains. “I think you will have to tell him the full truth, even about us,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

  She was silent for a minute, and then spoke very timidly. “I don’t feel that I quite know what the truth about us is.”

  He turned on her almost roughly. “You know quite enough,” he said; “you know that we’ve fallen in love with one another. You and I really can’t settle down to discuss what we do about that while there are two men still hanging round in a perfectly specific relation to you, one a husband and the other a lover. Oh, Rose, you must be braver! You really must talk to Henry at once.”

  The weight of his disapproval, the harshness of his tone, made her burst into tears.

  “I will,” she sobbed out. “I don’t know why I’m so useless. It all has seemed so difficult.”

  “It is, damned difficult. And it won’t be any easier even when you have told Henry,” he said, still with that sort of bleak ruthlessness. “But at least it will be honest, so far. Come on, dry your eyes and see to your face; we ought to start back in a minute. I’ve got to see a man at the Club at a quarter to seven.” He watched her in silence while she did as she was bid—her docility, as usual, made him feel a certain remorse for his harshness.

  “Rose, dear, I know it is hard for you,” he said, as she put away her case, “but you know as well as I do that there is only one way to deal with these things. Keep your heart up, and go to it. Come on, now.” He took her hand and began to draw her away from the battlements. But his sudden return to gentleness was altogether too much for Rose just then. Instead of moving, she caught up his hand and held it to her face, and broke into a really violent fit of sobbing, through which came broken scraps of words. “Oh, it’s all so hopeless! I do—love you—and I shall only—muck things up—for you—like Charles—and Henry. I don’t—seem able—to be any use at loving—anyone! I don’t—think—I can have—been meant for love.”

  For just a moment he put an arm round her shoulders. “You’re altogether too much meant for it!” he muttered, with a wry look, half to himself—“that’s just the trouble.” His hand hovered over her soft hair in a curious longing gesture for a moment, and then rested on her shoulders.

  “My dear, listen to me,” he said. “Stop crying, and listen.” He waited while she struggled to control herself, took his other hand away, and got out his own handkerchief for her. “A lot of this is your fault,” he said then, “but not all. Don’t take more blame than is yours. We can talk about that later. What matters now is to be square with Henry. That will be best for everyone in the long run.”

  She raised her disfigured face to him. “I know—I will,” she said. Again his hand moved towards her as of itself, and again he checked it—instead, he took her two hands in his, and looked into her face.

  “And don’t think, because I’m hard and rough with you, and don’t kiss you or comfort you, that I don’t love you,” he said slowly—“because I do.” He gave her hands a funny little shake to emphasise the words. “If I loved you less I should be nicer to you. But there’s no easy way out of this for you and me, so we must take the hard one. Now come on.” He dropped her hands, and turned and led the way back along the little path between the thorns.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Rose Pelham, after her meeting with Captain Hargreaves in the courtyard, went in disorder to her room, and was no more seen till dinner. Antony, coming in about half an hour after her, found his sister sitting with her embroidery in the drawing-room. Anastasia’s resolution had lost nothing of its force during the interval, and when she had given him a cocktail she asked—

  “Have you seen Henry?”

  “No.”

  “He was here just now—I thought you might have met him at the Club. He’s going home.”

  Antony set down his glass.

  “Is he? What to do?” He spoke carefully, and Asta noticed that he did.

  “He says the War Office have got a job for him. Had you any idea of this?”

  “None whatever.” He was thinking hard as he spoke. Why had Henry decided to leave so suddenly? Was it only because he felt that Rose no longer cared for him, or did he guess something more?—and if so, how much? Knowing Henry, about such matters as this Antony put no limits to his instinctive powers of hitting on the truth. “When does he go?” he asked.

  “Next week.” She chose a fresh strand from the bundle of coloured wools beside her and said, threading it—“Ant, what is all this? Why is Henry buzzing off in such a hurry?”

  Her brother looked at her consideringly.

  “Can’t you make any guess?” he asked.

  She looked at him.

  “I can guess that it has something to do with Rose, but I don’t know, and never have known, exactly how that stands. I thought it was rather cooling off, lately.”

  “Mightn’t that be reason enough for him to feel he’d better go?”

  She took a stitch or two, very reasonable and quiet.

  “Not quite—no. Henry is very sensible and undramatic; if it was only a cooling flirtation—Good Heavens, we’ve seen him in dozens!—he wouldn’t go home
. He’d go shooting up near Urga, or make an excuse to pop over to Tokyo. There must be something bigger to make him do this.”

  Antony made no answer—he rose, and took another cocktail. She watched him for a moment, and then said—

  “Ant, I don’t want to be curious, but I am rather worried about all this. I should like to know anything that you know.”

  She spoke quietly, but he was struck by her use of the phrase “I don’t want to be curious.” In their normal completeness of intimacy she never needed to ask for his confidence, let alone to apologise for asking for it. She allowed no pain or reproach to appear in either her face or her voice, but she was hurt at his fencing with her, and he knew it. He considered for a moment or two before he answered.

  “Asta, you may be right,” he said then, slowly. “I do know a bit more than you, but I believe it would really be easier for everyone if we didn’t discuss it till Henry has gone, as he’s going so soon. It’s chiefly Rose’s funeral, in any case, and I think we ought to leave her to deal with it in her own way.” He was thinking as he spoke that Henry’s action in fact let Rose out, as far as her explanation with him was concerned.

  “Rose has been conducting her own funeral for weeks, now,” said Anastasia; “and so far the only visible result is that Henry feels obliged to go home. But of course we’ll leave it, if you’d rather.” She folded her work together as she spoke, bundled it onto a chair on top of the wools, and rose. “Roy’s coming to dinner,” she said as she crossed the room. At the door she paused, her hand on the latch, and then went back to where her brother sat rather wearily in his chair, the second cocktail still untouched beside him. She stood looking down at him, hesitating. “What bothers me, dear Ant,” she said then in her soft voice, “is whether Rose is just a bad undertaker, or—well, whether it really is her funeral. It’s certainly Henry’s!”

  He looked up at her, smiled, and caressed her hand. But he said nothing, and she went away to dress, disappointed and dissatisfied. Antony was within his rights, of course, in refusing to discuss Rose’s affairs with her, but the refusal was so novel that it hurt her surprisingly. To her mortification she found tears stinging behind her eyelids, as she threw off her clothes and sprang into a bath. That was merely being silly and possessive about him; she must be more civilised than that, she told herself, sponging her face vigorously. As she reached for the soap, a concrete reason for his reserve occurred to her—probably Rose had been Henry’s mistress, and those tiresome male conventions would make him feel that he must not be the one to tell her so. Ridiculous that such inhibitions should operate between her and Ant!—still, they probably would. But the comfort derived from this thought was short-lived. How did he know? Henry, from the same conventions, would never have told him—it must have been Rose herself. And on what terms were they, for her to make him such a confidence? Was it all going to turn out as fatally as she had feared at the beginning of the trip? That both should have withdrawn their confidence from her so completely looked ominous. As she dressed, full of these gloomy speculations, she realised that she was looking forward to Roy’s coming that evening as a definite piece of comfort. The idea made her smile—a few weeks ago his presence would merely have been an added vexation to them all. Now no one minded his coming, and she herself was quite definitely glad of it. Roy was getting nicer and nicer.

  In fact, Hillier won himself several further good marks during the evening. After dinner, as they drank their coffee out under the p’eng in the courtyard with the gold-fish pool in it, first Antony said he had some work to finish, and went off to his study, and then Rose excused herself on the ground of having letters to write, and disappeared in the direction of her own courtyard. Left alone, Hillier and Anastasia slipped at once into a sort of comfortable intimacy. He poured himself out another cup of coffee, took Antony’s chair next to hers, threw a cushion out of it, lit a cigarette, and lay back, looking up at the strip of sky between the edge of the p’eng and the opposite roof-tree. “You warm enough?” he asked her.

  “Yes, perfectly. The p’eng keeps the dew off.”

  “Good.” And they remained for some time, smoking in a pleasant silence. Anastasia was glad to be silent, and glad to be with only Roy; dinner had been a faintly uneasy meal to her, occupied beneath the talk in wondering whether Rose had any inkling of Henry’s departure, and where she had gone after she left the Bétemps. There had been no sign of her till dinner, and for that she appeared late, and too much made up; during it she had either chattered rather, or been silent. Presently Hillier spoke.

  “Henry’s going off very suddenly, isn’t he?”

  She was startled.

  “When did you hear he was going?” she asked.

  “Just before dinner, at the Club—he told me himself. When did you hear?”

  “Only this evening—he came in for a drink.” So Roy had known all through dinner, but hadn’t referred to it. That was very discreet—but on whose account was he so discreet?

  Hillier smoked for a time. “Big-game shooting in London!” he said then. “It’s all in the best tradition, of course. But I feel a little resentful towards the lovely Rose. He was enjoying himself extraordinarily out here.”

  “Are you putting it down to Rose from what you noticed on the trip, or from something else?” she asked.

  He considered.

  “I wonder why you ask that,” he said at length. “Never mind—I’ll tell you. On the trip alone—I’m not sure. Actually I got an extraordinarily definite impression that they were violently involved the very first time I saw them, at the cinema; in fact I put them down as being lovers. So that may have coloured my impressions of the trip. But the last part of the time I had an idea that she was more interested in Antony.”

  Anastasia bit her lip.

  “And did you think he was interested in her?” she asked, in a lowered tone.

  He lit a fresh cigarette before answering.

  “Yes,” he said eventually—“in his own way, I think he is.” He too spoke in a rather cautiously lowered voice.

  “H’m. I see.”

  “Why do you mind that so much?” he asked, turning round so that he could look at her.

  “Did I say I minded?”

  “No—but you do mind. Why?”

  She pushed her hand up under her hair, behind her ear, and he watched her, with the pleasure which a gesture that has come to be familiar gives us in a person we care about.

  “Because it would be silly, and hopeless, and wasteful for him to be in love with her,” she said, still in the same lowered voice. “She’s married, you know.”

  “Silly and wasteful things happen, with women like her,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Don’t I know it! She was obviously not the right person for Charles, but he insisted on marrying her; and now there’s Henry—and if Antony is to be made wretched too! Do you really wonder why I mind?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Only you know I don’t think it’s entirely or even mainly her fault. She behaves perfectly nicely. I think she just is a femme fatale, and an unconscious one. And they’re the worst of the lot, in the upshot.”

  “That doesn’t make one mind the results any less, does it?” she asked.

  “Perhaps not. I thought it might be easier for you not to feel she was wholly to blame,” he said. “I know you’re fond of her.”

  “Thank you,” she said, after a moment—“that was kind and clever of you, Roy.”

  He reached out, gave her hand a light squeeze, and dropped it again.

  “Tell me about her husband,” he said. “What sort of person was he? Did you know him well?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated, and then some complex impulse, which had as much to do with Roy himself as with anything else, pushed, her on to openness. “I was in love with him myself for three years,” she said.

  “Golly,” said Roy. He reached out for her hand again took it and held it firmly. “That is pretty bloody for you,” he said, thoughtfully.
“But—may I say something rather brazen?”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “That will make you all the more uncomfortable if you aren’t fully fair to her. And women don’t find it easy to understand the really dizzying effect that her type produces. It’s like a sort of spell.”

  “Do you feel it, with her?” she asked, rather to her own surprise.

  “No, because she patently loathed me from the word go, and in any case was equally patently Henry’s,” he said with great naturalness.

  “What is the spell?” she asked curiously.

  “I should really find it very hard to tell you,” he said. “Beauty, charm—those are just words, and anyhow people with little beauty sometimes have that quality. I think it must be some very profound biological thing, plus a psychological one—perhaps a special capacity for abandonment, masked by that silvery detachment.” He paused and frowned in his unwonted search for words. “It defeats me, really, to define it—but I recognise it fast enough. And she has beauty too, and a nice fresh mind, and a sort of gallantry—you must have noticed her walking!”

  The mention of that concrete thing stirred up a curious little spasm of jealousy in Anastasia.

  “Walking?” she said, in a tone of surprise.

  “Oh yes, Asta. Rose walking is like a ship in full sail—just that grace and strength and pride. That beauty in motion is part of the spell; it’s a much more potent thing than beauty that’s at its best reclining on a couch. It was when Helen was walking on the walls, you remember, that even the old men of Troy turned their heads to look after her.”

  This really shattering tribute to her cousin reduced Anastasia to silence; that, and perhaps partly the sense she had that he was speaking his full mind to her, if only about another person, as never before. Her own candour was reaping a rich and prompt harvest, as candour so often does. At last she said—“Yes—I begin to see. It’s a big thing,” in rather a small voice.

  Roy seemed suddenly to realise that he was still holding her hand—he took a fresh and firmer grip of it. “Yes—it is a big thing,” he said. “And it produces results out of all proportion either to the possessors’ intention, or to their mental or moral stature. Like Helen. Homer never asks us to believe that she was either an esprit fort or particularly good—he contents himself with that remark about the old men. But her face did launch a thousand ships, and bring the topless towers of Ilium down in flames.” He paused. “I don’t say Rose is another Helen,” he went on—“all I’m concerned to do is to point out that she does belong in a modest way to that order of women.”