Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Princess’s Tomb lies on the banks of the big canal which runs roughly southwards from Peking. The ride to it is not particularly pretty or interesting, for it leads mostly through the densely cultivated banlieue outside the City wall, where in beds sheltered by wind-breaks of reeds the peasants grow vegetables for the Peking market. There are duck-farms, where the waddling white delicacies are herded in huge pens from which rises a deafening and contented symphony of quackings, flanked by manure factories in which the treasured duck-manure is dried and turned into cakes or bricks for sale; there are villages between the stretches of market-garden, where blue-clad women wash gaily and noisily on the banks of the canal; everywhere donkeys laden with merchandise tap sedately along the sandy tracks, undeflected by the innumerable squealing hordes of pigs which rush, spindly and long-legged, headlong here and there in the deep dust. But the Princess’s Tomb itself lies a little beyond this industrious area, where there are open pastures and tracts of wood—it is in a little wood of maples and conifers that the tomb itself stands, a small delicate dome of brick surrounded at the base by a sort of frill of masonry, with a short avenue of marble animals and sedate marble functionaries leading down from it to marble steps at the water’s edge, lying deserted and unused among the whispering reeds. Small, ancient, desolate, it has a curious and touching beauty, the appealing grace of a thing once cherished in decay.

  Here Rose Pelham and Antony Lydiard came riding on the afternoon of Henry’s departure. It was October now, and the trees in the little wood sheltering the tomb were yellow; the air was sunny and still, with a soft bloom in it that was not quite haze. They dismounted and left the mafoos and ponies in an open grassy space outside the wood; a solitary maple tree, its leaves golden in the autumn sunshine, stood there, and a variety of loud sweet notes emerged from the brilliant branches. Rose walked over to it. All the lower boughs were hung with little cages, bundles and clothing lay below; the peasants working thereabout had brought their song-birds out with them for the day to enjoy the air and sunlight, and—being Chinese—they had placed them all together to enjoy each other’s society. This they were manifestly doing to the full—burbling, warbling, fluting and twittering, they sprang about in their small wicker mansions, the very embodiments of eager delight. Rose stood watching, an indefinable expression on her face. Antony came over and stood beside her. Somehow that single yellow tree standing in the sunshine, with its happy singing burden, moved them both curiously.

  “It’s enchanting,” Rose said, with a little sigh, as they turned away.

  They examined the tomb cursorily. A sort of paling surrounds it, partly inside the wood, but like most Chinese barriers this had its weak spots, and Antony soon found a place where he could help Rose half-through, half over it. They walked past the tomb itself and through the trees beyond it, to where the afternoon sun, falling in through the wood’s edge, made a warm patch among the undergrowth. Here they were secure from interruption, should other Europeans chance to ride that way; and here, on the first fallen leaves, they sat down, Rose throwing off her hat as she did so.

  It was a difficult moment, and both were aware of it. The long pause which had been imposed on them, first by Rose’s dilatoriness in dealing with Henry, and then by his proximate departure, had taken from their recognition of their love the spontaneity, the impetus which go so far towards carrying lovers over the initial effort of speech. For speech between those whose love is newly born is a really hard thing—Rossetti was speaking accurately when he said that his soul “won strength” for the words “whose silence wastes or kills”. The soul does need strength for those words, to speak and to receive, even when all that shall follow is easy, smooth and shining—and for Rose and Antony Lydiard the future held no such ease. But Antony had the sort of courage needed for moments like that, and he had learned something that many people never learn—to combine lucidity with tenderness. It is not so easy as it sounds—precision of statement has a way of inducing a cold, even a harsh voice, as if coldness of tone made our words clearer. Antony knew this, and though he also knew that he ran other risks, he turned very deliberately to Rose, took her hand, and said—“Well, my dear, now we must get down to it.”

  She gave a little fluttering sigh, “Yes,” she said.

  He searched her face.

  “Do you love me? Are you sure?” he asked. “It would be easier, you know, if you found that you didn’t.”

  She looked steadily in his eyes. Somehow to do that seemed to call for an effort that left her almost breathless.

  “Yes—I love you,” she said; her voice too was steady, though it had no tone.

  Still he looked at her—looked and looked into her face; and still she managed to return his gaze.

  “I love you, too,” he said at length; “quite—disproportionately.” He dropped her hand. “Oh, my darling!” he said, and turned away his head.

  “Well, that settles that,” he said after a moment. “We know where we are so far. Now we have got to make up our minds what we are going to do about it.” He leaned his head back against a tree, looking up through the coloured branches at the bright sky.

  “It looks pretty insoluble,” said Rose, trying to take his tone of detachment.

  “Complicated, at least—nothing is insoluble,” he said. Then he turned and looked at her again, and once more he took her hand.

  “Rose darling,” he said, “now you and I are talking for the first time about our love, and what is to come out of it. I would like it to have been different to what it is—there are things I could say, and you could look, and things we could both feel, till the whole world turned to a singing wonder. And instead it has all got to be hard and practical and grim, all stones and no flowers. I mustn’t make you the wreaths of lovely words I would like to make; I mustn’t let even myself listen to the songs and symphonies that are running in me because of you, let alone wake your feelings to music too. This thing has come on us at the wrong time, and so we can’t take its splendour and loveliness. But we do love one another, and that can give us a little comfort—no, a great strength, my darling—while we try to be honest and sensible, and decide on the right thing to do. Although our love can’t wear any regalia, but has to disguise itself in hodden grey, it is still a real honest love. I want you to believe that.”

  The tears stood in her eyes.

  “Oh darling Antony, what I mind so much is spoiling this for you,” she said, very low. “Hodden grey is probably all my wretched love deserves to wear—it’s a beggar-maid anyhow. But yours!”

  “I think yours lost its way,” he said slowly, half-smiling—“and by living in strange places the princess mislaid her robes and crown. But anyhow, here the two beggars sit, hand in hand, and what they have to settle is where to go and what to live on.”

  “What do you want us to do?” she asked, looking earnestly at him.

  He turned his head away.

  “I don’t think we’d better begin from that end,” he said, in a curious voice. “We’d better think of what we can do, or ought to do, hadn’t we? Henry is out of the picture now, but my dearest, you’ve still got to make up your mind what you’re going to do about Charles, and make it up honestly and fairly, although these are the hardest possible circumstances for you to do that in.”

  She drew her hand from his, clasped it with the other round her knees, and looked straight in front of her.

  “If Charles divorced me, or I him, would you want to marry me?” she asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

  He rubbed his hands up and down over his face, with a curious desperate movement.

  “Oh my darling, what an impossible question! Are you going to make your decision depend on mine? How can I answer?” he said, without looking at her.

  She said thoughtfully—“I believe you have answered it, really, while we’ve been sitting here—only one wants words. If Charles divorced me because of Henry, I think you would marry me. Only Asta
said you wouldn’t.”

  “Why did she say I wouldn’t?”

  “Because the Church doesn’t allow it.”

  He rubbed his hands up and down again over his cheeks and eyes.

  “Asta goes further than I do about that,” he said slowly, “I should feel I was losing something, some sort of fine flower of idealism, by marrying someone who had a living husband; but in these circumstances”—he paused, with a curious high look of concentration in his face—“I shouldn’t feel I was imperilling my immortal soul. I don’t think those rules are or were ever meant to be hard-and-fast and absolute; I believe the letter killeth and the spirit maketh alive. And I think you’ve had rather a raw deal. You married at twenty-one, when you didn’t really know very much what you were about. What Charles put you through to make you run away I don’t know, and if possible I don’t want to hear—but I know him well enough to realise what you were up against. He has immense gifts, but he is a very wilful, selfish person, with a monstrous idea of his own value and the imperative importance of his own needs; your beauty completely undid him (for which I don’t blame him in the least) and after that he had to have you, whether it was a good idea or not. But having got you, with all his experience and maturity, it was his job, primarily, to make the thing work; and he hasn’t made it work. I blame you, as you know, for making a fool of yourself with Henry; but I am quite convinced that you would never have looked at Henry—or me either, for that matter, because you wouldn’t have been here to look—if your own husband had treated you with the most modest degree of affection and tenderness, after the baby died; in fact if he had had any sense of obligation at all. But he hasn’t, and never has had. He rotted up Asta’s life for her entirely, and then turned and dropped her like a spent cartridge because he wanted you. And if on the top of that he were to divorce you, my scruples wouldn’t prevent me from marrying you. I should feel that morally you were the ‘innocent party’—and the Eastern Church has always allowed innocent parties to re-marry, with full benefit of clergy.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Do you think he’s likely to divorce you? Has he said anything about it?”

  “No—he hasn’t written.”

  “God, what a man! Have you written to him?”

  “No—but I could.”

  “I don’t think he will divorce you,” Antony said after a pause.

  “I might divorce him.”

  “Have you got evidence?”

  She shuddered a little.

  “As good as. When he was seeing so much of Esther, some friends of his had an extra bungalow that they had furnished for letting, as a spec—it happened to be empty, and they lent it to him for them to go to in the evenings.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He told me so. There was no doubt about it, either. Once or twice”—her voice became very thin—“I was in such agony—I went round there, and stood in the garden. And there were lights in the windows—I stood outside and saw. Her car was there, too. Oh, the roses smelt so——”

  “Don’t!” he said violently. “Don’t go on telling me that! How can I keep sensible if you do?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She brushed her hand up across her forehead. “Anyhow there was the gardener there, because I saw him and hid. I think he used to give them the key and put the flowers in. And of course the owners knew.”

  Antony leant forward till his chin rested on his knees, and thought.

  “Well, I don’t think he will divorce you,” he said again after a pause, “because of his job. You could write and ask him to, of course, and say you could give him evidence.” His voice now was very detached and cold. “It would be rather a poor return to Henry, though. And even then, he might refuse to take action—he’s very proud.”

  “And if I divorced him?”

  He turned to her, his face so heavy with wretchedness that she was startled by it.

  “I don’t think you can do that,” he said slowly.

  “Isn’t the evidence good enough?”

  “O Lord yes—I imagine you could hang an Archbishop on that evidence! But you can’t yourself hang Charles; that’s the point.”

  “You mean because of his job?”

  “Yes. He might feel it necessary to resign even if he divorced you; but if you divorced him there would be no question about it—he’d have to leave his regiment.”

  “Oh,” she said on a long note of dismay. “So Asta was right.”

  “Did Asta say that?”

  “Yes.” She let a long sigh escape into the sunny air. “Oh dear—poor Charles. I don’t see what he would do if he weren’t being a soldier.”

  “He couldn’t do anything. It’s his life. And he’s amazingly good at it—I suppose if anyone was ever sure of dying a Field-Marshal it’s Charles. You might as well shoot him outright as take that away from him,” he said.

  She turned to him again, and now her face was as wretched as his.

  “Does that mean, that unless I can persuade him to divorce me, you and I can’t ever get married?” she said, very slowly.

  “Yes, it means just that, I think,” he said, looking full at her—but after a moment what he saw in her face made him turn his head away.

  “Oh Rose, my darling, my dear love, surely you see it?” he asked in a stifled tone, over his shoulder. “We can’t build our happiness on the ruins of his life, of his career! We should never know a moment’s peace.”

  “And do you think that the fact that his life and his career stand on the ruins of our happiness will cause him a moment’s worry?” she asked, with extraordinary bitterness.

  He turned back to her, and took her hands, both of them this time.

  “Yes—it would distress him if he knew,” he said firmly. “Oh, don’t be harsh, my darling love! Be you—because I love you so.”

  At that, without any warning the tears rained down her face. She made no attempt to hide them; she left her hands in his.

  “Oh, it is so hard!” she sobbed out. “With you, I really could be worth something—I shouldn’t only be perfectly, unbelievably happy, I could be good! I was nearly good with him, only it was too much for me, his—his hardness. Really I tried, Antony. I was patient even about Esther—I never made a fuss, I was nice to her. I knew how wretched Carlino dying had made him, and I didn’t want to be a dog in the manger; I was willing for him to have that comfort, if he could. I did everything! It was only when it got so public, and people began to commiserate, and he went all cold and brutal, that it got to be more than I could do with.”

  “Gently, darling one, gently,” he said quietly, but with a strained note in his voice—“don’t tell me more than you must.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, still sobbing. “I don’t want to upset you.” She freed her hands, found a handkerchief in the pocket of her riding-breeches, mopped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she shook her hair back, and lifted her head; her face took on a set expression.

  “I think it’s almost too unfair,” she said, firmly. “I did do absolutely my best to make it work, and you say yourself that he was older and cleverer, and that it was really his job. And now, after all this misery—and poor Henry—when I have really learnt something, and you and I love one another so much, and could be so happy, we’ve got to do without so that Charles may be a Field-Marshal! Antony, is it fair? Haven’t I got any rights? Haven’t you got any?”

  He looked at her musingly.

  “I’ve only got the rights I’m willing to claim,” he said at last—“and I shouldn’t be very willing to claim a happiness based on someone else’s misery. But it’s quite true that you have got certain rights—and if you choose to claim them, I suppose they are yours.” He paused—he looked worried. “You must let me think a minute. In law, your case would be absolutely watertight, but for Henry; and I don’t suppose he left much evidence going about—he’s too old a hand. Sorry,” he said with a ghost of a smile then—“Henry did have other affairs, you know. But
he loved you—that was different. Let me think,” he said again.

  She watched him while he sat looking out through the branches to the open ground beyond, where in the distance peasants in blue stooped, raking or hoeing, above the brown earth. She noticed his fine musicianly hands, with the fading freckles between the powdering of small dark hairs, one clasped round his knee, the other meditatively stroking his riding-boot; noticed the deep sculptural modelling of his temple, cheekbone and eye-socket, like that in a Dürer portrait, and the strong generous line of his mouth. It was not exactly beautiful, Antony’s face, but there was nobility and fineness in the moulding of all of it; and she loved it all—loved even the way his hair grew round his forehead and at the back of his neck. Looking at him now, she felt she was gathering in something valuable and precious, merely by seeing him. Was she to forego all this, him, for the sake of Charles, who had caused her such misery, and his career?

  At length Antony spoke.

  “This is difficult for me,” he said slowly, “to be honest about, because if you were to stand on your rights, it would bring me something I want very badly indeed—you, in fact. But it isn’t reasonable to be unjust to you because I’m afraid of my own desires—I see that. Yes, both in law and on grounds of ordinary justice, I think you have certain rights in this business. In law I think your case would be quite as good as Charles’s; morally I think it’s a good deal stronger than his, because all along you have been the younger and the less experienced. And if you feel, in the end, that you want your rights and are determined to claim them, I shall abide by your wishes. I can’t really help myself, very well,” he said, passing his hand across his forehead with a funny gesture, almost of resignation—“because in some strange way I’ve become more yours than my own; it seems inconceivable that I shouldn’t love you and serve you in any way I could, from now till I die. And if you did decide to rub Charles off”—she recognised instantly that the roughness of the expression was part of his technique for mutual self-control—“the obvious way of doing that would be to marry you, quite apart from the fact that that would mean the most complete fulfilment possible for me. So there it is—if that is your decision, eventually, I am most literally at your service.” He caught her hand.—“Oh my darling, I never thought those words could come to mean anything like this!”