Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  She listened with an unexpected mixture of distress and happiness to this speech. It was the most complete statement of devotion that any woman could desire—if, as she had said, one wanted words—for all that it was set out so unemotionally, with almost legal clarity. And yet at the same time it was not carrying her away, sweeping her judgement along with her heart on a strong current to the desired end—it left her heart and her judgement to carry their own burden; the decision was still hers. And while her spirit commended his unselfish uprightness, her heart sank with a vague disappointment.

  “Oh, Antony!” she said, in a tone almost of protest.

  “Yes, what?—dear one?”

  “You’ve handed the baby back to me,” she said, half-laughing and half-crying.

  “Yes, I have,” he said. “You’ve got to hold it, I’m afraid. And listen, my darling—you must be absolutely sure of your decision; you mustn’t hurry it. You will have to take your time over it.”

  “How much time?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Six months, perhaps?”

  She gave a little groan.

  “Oh Antony—six months! What am I to do for six months?”

  “You must travel,” he said at once—“or go home to your people. You can’t stay here, my dear, dear love—for both of us, that would be quite impossible. Wouldn’t it?”

  She turned a little from his pleading face.

  “Did Asta suggest that to you?” she asked.

  “No—why?” he asked in surprise.

  “Only she did to me.”

  “Well, that wasn’t unreasonable of her, in the circumstances,” he said. “We can’t go on like this—no one could stand it. And you would never get your mind clear with me about.” Then as she did not speak, but sat with averted head, he caught both her hands and pulled her round to face him.

  “Rose, my dear love,” he said, looking into her face, “don’t make any mistakes about me, whatever else you do. And don’t make this harder for us both than it need be. It is very hard, and worst in some ways for you—I know that. But I said before, and it is true—our love, if we are faithful to it and don’t deny it, will support us through anything. Love is like that.” He paused for a moment before he murmured, almost to himself—“‘being weary is not tired, being pressed is not straitened, but like a lively flame and burning spark breaking upwards, it passeth securely through all. If anyone loveth, he knoweth what his voice crieth.’”

  “Oh,” she breathed, at the great words—and bowed her head onto their joined hands.

  He let her stay so, for a minute—then his grip on her hands tightened.

  “I want you to go away from Peking now,” he said, “because I love you too much to work well or sleep well or eat well with you about. That’s a selfish reason, but you love me, so it will weigh with you. And I want you to take an honest, brave and right decision about the future—whatever it is, I want it to be based on honesty and courage and righteousness, because those things really belong to you; they are what your spirit is at home in. And I think you love me too much for it to be at all reasonably easy for you to take that decision with me about. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking full at him now, winking away the tears that stood in her eyes.

  “That’s right. Don’t think now—never think, in bad moments later on—‘Antony drove me away; perhaps he didn’t really love me.’ It isn’t true. We haven’t had much chance to express our love—we found it out and just admitted it, when you were ill, and since then we’ve kept quiet about it till now—now, when all we have done has been to discuss past distresses and future difficulties. Our poor love—it hasn’t had much of a show!” He smiled a little sadly—then he went on, still holding her face with his eyes despite her thickly-falling tears, still gripping her hands—“But I’m going to say this to you now, this once: I love you. I find you beautiful beyond expression, in movement and at rest, well or ill, gay or sad. Something in you draws my heart out of me, even when you are being foolish or doing wrong; and something in me springs to join something in you that I know is there, something valiant and something noble. And I have come to love you like this in circumstances that were nearly impossible—while you were married to another man and the mistress of a third. I don’t think, after that, that there’s any room for doubts about my love. And what is more, I believe you love me too, and have come to love me in those same incredible circumstances—more incredible, on your side. So I see no reason to doubt your love, either. Whatever comes out of this, I believe in our love, and I believe in you. My darling, my beautiful one—oh my precious, my heart’s perfect treasure, if you knew how I love you!”

  Her face, all tears, leaned towards his. “Antony, my darling—I do love you too. Only I’m so utterly unworthy,” she said. “Oh, what am I? I can’t think how you can love me so.” She paused, and then said, in a very small voice—

  “Will you kiss me, please, to help me to go away? Not a big kiss—just a little one?”

  He dropped her hands, and looked at her in a sort of distraction.

  “Do you know what you are asking?” he said.

  She still looked at him. “I think so—no, I won’t ask it.” She took his hand, and raised it towards her face—above it her eyes, immense, darkened and stained with tears, looked into his. “I love you; I’m grateful to you; oh, I think I worship you!” she said slowly, and bent her head and kissed his hand.

  With a quick light movement, then, she sprang up, stood, and looked at her watch. “We must go back,” she said, rather uncertainly—“I’m dining with Lady Harriet, and she always will dine at eight.”

  More slowly, Antony rose to his feet too; he stood there looking exhausted, almost bewildered. “Come here,” he said.

  She moved a step towards him. He put his hands on her shoulders, lightly—she shivered a very little under his touch.

  “I thought so,” he said, taking them off again. He took her hand.

  “I told you just now that I would do anything for you,” he said, almost harshly—“and the first thing that you ask of me, I don’t do. But I’m not going to kiss you now—it would be bad for you as well as for me. Only don’t make any mistake about this, either—I feel as if my soul will leave my body if I don’t kiss you. And before you go, I will.” He dropped her hand, and turned and limped away from her through the trees towards the Princess’s Tomb.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “My dear, how charming you look!” said Lady Harriet, kissing Mrs. Pelham in the hall at the Hotel de Pékin—“tired, but charming! What a lovely dress—such delightful heavy stuff.” She touched it lightly. “You always have such nice clothes.”

  “So do you, Lady Harriet,” said Rose—“an admirer of yours was saying only yesterday that you were the best-dressed woman in Peking; and Anastasia Lydiard and I entirely agreed with him!”

  “Oh, my dear!” Lady Harriet’s voice deepened. “How absurd! I have no clothes. I’ve only got three evening dresses,” she murmured confidentially—“I never have more—they cost such a fortune! In London it always seems enough, but here!—one never stops going out, it seems to me. But now tell me, my child—why are you tired, and who is my admirer?”

  “Your admirer is Antony Lydiard,” said Rose, shaping the name firmly, with a little pang of pleasure and pain.

  “Oh, my dear—praise from him is worth having, about clothes or anything else! The most fastidious man alive, I should say. You have puffed me up.” She called “Come here!” firmly to a Chinese boy who was passing, and ordered cocktails, when he responded obediently to the authoritative if unfamiliar syllables. “I never know what to say to get them,” she went on, “but they seem to answer all right. Now look, my dear child, I had to put dinner to eight-thirty, because the Minister is coming—so tiresome!—but I didn’t put you off, because I thought we could have a little chat. One never sees people by themselves, here, does one?”

  Rose, touched, agreed that one never did.


  “And I wanted to say—oh, but before I forget, I must warn you—I do apologise, but I couldn’t help it—that I believe I’ve had to put you next to an enemy of yours tonight! Wait a minute”—she pulled a piece of paper out of a jewelled bag, adjusted her lorgnette, and studied it. “Yes, you’re next to Mr. Hillier. But you’ve got Sir James on your other side—he’s an ardent admirer of yours.”

  “Mr. Hillier isn’t quite so much of an enemy of mine since our trip,” Rose said gaily.

  “Ah! I’ve always wondered how that went off, but somehow I’ve never had the chance to ask. Nobody seemed to want him very much, according to that nice Captain Hargreaves. How nice he was, by the way, wasn’t he? I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the society of a totally unintellectual man so much before.”

  “Henry wasn’t stupid about some things,” Rose said, in a sort of spasm of loyalty.

  Lady Harriet glanced at her.

  “Oh no, not at all. He was very shrewd about foreigners,” she said. “I daresay he was about people altogether—a sort of instinct. They say mongooses are like that—know the good from the bad.”

  Rose burst out laughing.

  “Dear Lady Harriet, you can’t say Henry was like a mongoose!”

  Lady Harriet laughed too.

  “My dear child, of course not. But now tell me about your trip—how did you manage about poor Mr. Hillier?”

  Rose began her burbling reminiscent laugh. She enjoyed being with Lady Harriet so much that her instinct was to pitch herself headlong into the pleasure of her company, and so escape for a little from the muddle of pain and strain and rapture which her mind was that evening.

  “At first,” she said, “it was frightful. He would keep starting long intellectual conversations about everything, and nobody took them up. In fact we were awful to him.”

  How were they awful, Lady Harriet wanted to know, sipping her cocktail—it always filled Rose with incredulous delight to see Lady Harriet drinking cocktails—and manifestly prepared to enjoy every phase of the story.

  “Well, you know his line—to be frightfully un-obvious, and never use ordinary expressions or admit to normal feelings; and we—well, we were all rather ultra-obvious. You know how Henry Hargreaves talks—we all talked like him, only more so. Saying things like ‘Up with the lark’ if we were going to start early, and all that.”

  Lady Harriet laughed her deep staccato laugh.

  “My dear child, how delicious! I do wish I could have heard you. But you don’t tell me your cousin went through this performance?”

  “Yes, he did. Only Asta was merciful. At one point I think she tackled Roy, because he became very chastened all of a sudden. And anyhow there were so many bandits and things about all the time that no one had much chance to play a lone hand, or sulk; and bit by bit he got much nicer. We can all do with him quite well now.”

  “Ah. Your cousin Anastasia would be just the person to tame a young man like that, because they all worship intellect, and she is really too clever,” said Lady Harriet decidedly. “Has she completely subjugated him?”

  This was a new idea to Rose. She had accepted as a natural result of Asta’s efforts that Hillier should rather attach himself to her skirts—now, in the light of Lady Harriet’s question, she reviewed their relationship with more attention.

  “Do you know, I’m not sure but what she isn’t,” she said, ungrammatically but lucidly.

  “I thought so,” Lady Harriet said calmly. Then she laughed. She had a way of chewing over something she heard, rather rapidly, and darting back to deposit a comment on it, even when the conversation had moved on.

  “It’s too amusing,” she now said, “to think of you all conspiring to torment poor Mr. Hillier—even Mr. Lydiard! That couldn’t happen anywhere but here. Somehow people become so natural in Peking!—and the longer they stay, the more natural they get. It’s one of the many things that make me so sorry to leave.”

  “But you aren’t leaving?” Rose said startled.

  “Yes, my dear child—next week. I must get home. For one thing I’ve spent all my money, on jade and Lan-Shinings!” She laughed her deep laugh again. “Ah,” she said, seeing a little stir round the doorway—“those will be our arrivals, I expect.” She rose, and went forward two steps to greet M. and Mme. de Brie.

  Lady Harriet’s was the only company that could really avail to distract Rose Pelham’s thoughts that evening. Sitting at dinner between Sir James and Roy Hillier, though she made small remarks to one or the other, and leant her pretty head in either direction in a charming attitude of attention, her eyes on her plate (for some reason, this is much the most fetching manner of dinner-table listening—like the down-cast eyelids of the waiting typist) her mind was all the time occupied elsewhere. Sir James might make his neat and rather catty comments on his fellow-diplomats, but Mrs. Pelham, even while smiling and saying Yes and How good, was hearing all the time those amazing words that Antony had uttered to her that afternoon. Mr. Roy Hillier might point out to her the resemblances and differences between the interior decoration of the Hotel de Pékin and the Queen’s Hall, and she might raise her eyes dutifully to puffs of plaster and swirls of gilding, but all the time she was seeing a little space at the edge of a wood, canopied with yellow boughs, in which a man sat, rubbing his hands over a face like a Dürer drawing, or pushing his hand across his forehead with a helpless gesture when he said that he was and always would be more hers than his own. It was a curious mixture of rapture and agony to recall Antony as he had shown himself that afternoon; the smallest thing about him, his face, his voice, his hands, his attitude, had an astonishing power over her, filled and stilled her thoughts into a sort of awed hush of wonder—wonder at himself, the man she had seen, wonder at the miracle of his love coming to her. Now and then her thoughts left the wood by the Princess’s Tomb, and moved to another scene. As they rode home, very silent, just below the city wall where the track turns left to dive through a deeply-tunnelled gateway into the Chinese City, they had come on a curious sight. A small crowd had gathered—on-lookers in blue, small boys in dirty red and green robes which did not fit them, carrying red poles surmounted by banners and odd round things resembling lanterns, which they held casually at all sorts of angles—round a group of people in white and more men in red and green, who were busied about a set of very singular objects. There was a paper house, like an out-size dolls-house, only Chinese, carried on bamboo rods; there were paper figures of horses and people, nearly life-size and fairly life-like, also borne on slender bamboos; there was a large red-and-green palanquin. All these were assembled by the roadside, and as Antony and Rose drew up and watched, first the paper house was set on fire, and went crackling up in bright smoky flames, emitting a strong smell of varnish, then the paper figures, and last of all the horses. Rose had enquired what it was all about, and Antony told her that it was a Chinese funeral. But why were they burning the toys? she had asked, and she remembered the very words of his answer. “They aren’t toys—that is a house and servants, and wives and horses, for his use and habitation in the next life. Burning them sends them after him—gives them to him.” And though he spoke perfectly simply, without any special stress or sign of a further intention, the thought had come into her mind—Is that so for us, too? Must we make a bonfire of our happiness for it to become ours spiritually? She had repulsed the thought—it wasn’t commonsense, it wasn’t fair; but it returned to her again and again, with a strange persistence. That bonfire of pretty toys, the paper emblems of a man’s life, outside the city gate was still crackling in her head when towards the end of the meal Roy Hillier turned and addressed her with a certain determination.

  “You’re pretty broody this evening, Rose. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I think I must be tired,” she said simply, without any attempt at defence.

  “I thought you never got tired—you never were on the trip,” he said, looking at her a little curiously.

  “No, I wasn’t—wa
lking never tires me,” she said thoughtlessly.

  “And riding does?” he said, quizzically.

  Blushing, she roused herself then. Roy must have seen them going out or coming home, bother him.

  “No—no out-door things tire me,” she said, with something of her usual spirit—“only people!”

  “Oh! Is that for me or the Minister?” he asked, dropping his voice.

  “I was always renowned for my impartiality!” Rose was beginning in a clear voice, when Sir James, who was secretly enchanted with her—Lady Harriet was quite right—caught the words and broke in.

  “Were you indeed? Then let me tell you, my dear young lady, that you are unique among women! Don’t you agree, Hillier?”—he civilly glossed over this bare-faced piece of dinner-table brigandage.

  “Oh no, Sir—I know two impartial women.”

  “Is Asta one?” Rose asked—she remembered Lady Harriet’s words before dinner, and didn’t at all mind getting a little of her own back with Roy.

  But Sir James wasn’t going to have that—he had started talking to that pretty Mrs. Pelham himself, and he meant to go on. Before Hillier could reply, he pursued, in his calm diplomatic voice—

  “I believe you have one rival, Mrs. Pelham. I think our hostess is perhaps perfectly impartial. What do you think?”

  Rose was quite willing to let Hillier drop—or sink, or drown—Sir James was a more comfortable companion tonight. She put on a face of consideration, and let Sir James enjoy it for a moment or so. It had suddenly occurred to her—why hadn’t she thought of it before?—that if she had got to make that desolate journey home, Lady Harriet’s company was the one thing that would make it in the least bearable.