Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “Do you know, I believe you are right,” she said then, with every appearance of a thoughtful pronouncement, though in fact there was no thought whatever behind the words. Then her real feelings broke through, with her usual incomparable naturalness. “Isn’t she the most perfect darling?” she said, with a lovely warmth of affection in her voice. She was already thinking of the unutterable comfort and solace that Lady Harriet’s presence would be to her, if only they could travel together.

  Sir James, who lived in a world of which naturalness is not an outstanding feature, was a little surprised. But he was also at once approving, pleased.

  “My dear young lady, how charming it is to find the young—and beautiful!—so appreciative of the old. It’s not common, you know; it’s not at all common. Yes, Lady Harriet is an amazing woman. She has a mind, you know, though in her day it wasn’t the fashion for women to—er—well, to have minds. And always such spirits! Really it is quite astonishing, when you think what her life has been.”

  Mrs. Pelham had no idea what Lady Harriet Downham’s life had been; she was dying to know, and turned to Sir James in the act of framing a question, when Lady Harriet’s erect figure and white head were seen to bend slightly forward, the prelude to rising from her seat. Madame de Brie and the rest of the women obeyed the signal, and Rose, with them, was borne away from Sir James. Nor did she succeed in getting him to herself again during the evening. There was as usual dancing, and the younger elements danced; later Sir James became embedded in a bridge four. Hillier, dancing with Rose, surprised her slightly by the sudden question—“Why did you ask me if I thought your cousin Asta was an impartial woman?”

  “Oh, I thought you might think so,” she answered, carelessly.

  “Well, I do,” he said, as the music stopped.

  “Well, you’re wrong!” said Rose, as she returned to her seat.

  When she was taking leave of her hostess, Rose also asked a question, lingering a little to do it.

  “Lady Harriet, when do you say you are starting home? Next week?”

  “Yes. I go down to Shanghai on Friday, by that horrid little steamer, and start home on the Polynesia on Tuesday.”

  “If I could get a berth—I must get home too, as soon as I can—should you mind if I came by the same boat?” Rose asked, a little timidly. “It would be so much nicer for me.”

  “Mind? My dear child, I should be perfectly enchanted! It would be too delightful,” said Lady Harriet warmly. “I’d no idea there was any chance of anything so charming, or I should have begged you to come and keep me company.”

  “I’ve only just decided—I mean I’ve only just learned that I had to go so soon,” said Rose; the colour came into her face at the confused lameness of her explanation. Lady Harriet of course observed it.

  “Well, it is extraordinarily fortunate for me,” she said easily. “I’ll send you the number of my cabin tomorrow—I never can remember numbers!—and do try and get one near to me. But anyhow, get one you must. I couldn’t bear to be disappointed now, when I know there’s a chance of having your company.” She kissed her young friend. “Goodnight, my dear child. It was so good of you to come. You look so charming,” she said, almost wistfully, as Rose muffled the warm darkness of her fur cloak, brought by a boy, up against her delicate face. “Goodnight.” She kissed her again.

  Antony and Asta, with Rose and Hillier both absent, dined alone together that night. Alone, and rather silently. Anastasia studied her brother’s face at intervals, when she could do so unobserved. Her conversation with Rose in the morning had left her thoroughly disturbed; she wanted enormously to talk to Antony about the whole thing. What Hillier had said about the potency of Rose’s spell, on the night when he proposed to her, had actually frightened her—she felt that there was a real danger of her brother’s being bewitched, “demented” as she had said to Rose, into doing something which would destroy his peace of mind, bring to ruin his life as he was accustomed to live it—the life of the spirit penetrating and transfusing his outer life. With a moral disharmony at the root, there must ultimately be distress and mistakes even in the outward things, let alone within. And she felt that she could not bear this for him. But she realised that she must go warily now, even with her beloved Ant, even with all the closeness, the unity of ideas and feeling that there was between them. That thought brought its own pain—a sharp one, from which she strove to keep resentment out, without perfectly succeeding. She would have liked to use this chance, when for once they were alone; with Rose in the house, they were so seldom alone! She knew that they had ridden together that afternoon, he and Rose, and the knowledge lent an added urgency to her desire to speak at once, to throw all her influence into the scale. But, looking at his face, over and over again, she decided that tonight it was really no good to try. He looked so tired. Probably they had had a shattering conversation. It might already be too late. But, even if it was the eleventh hour, her strong reason told her that it was no good attempting an argument at the wrong moment; nothing could be more fatal, more foolish than that.

  But Antony himself opened the subject. When Wu had brought the coffee, arranged the curtains and the cigarette-boxes in the drawing-room, and withdrawn, he said, putting his lame foot up on a stool in front of him—

  “Asta, I want to talk to you.”

  Her heart, at that, actually beat more than when Roy began his proposal.

  “But do,” she said, in her soft quiet voice.

  “Rose told me this afternoon that she had told you that she and I care about one another,” he began. “I’m afraid that must have upset you very much.”

  “Yes—a good deal. Hasn’t it upset you, my dear?” she asked.

  He had to smile, at that—it was one of Tasia’s better comebacks, and yet so gently done. But his face grew grave again at once.

  “Yes—in fact upset was a foolish word. It has rather disrupted me. But I want to take this chance of telling you about it. Naturally”—his voice became calmer, quieter than ever—“what we should like to do is what all people who love one another want to do: get married. And as things are, we can’t. It seems, though, that she has ample grounds and evidence for divorcing Charles.”

  “She couldn’t do that!” Anastasia broke in, almost sharply.

  “As far as the law goes, I think she undoubtedly could,” he countered. “Friends lent him an empty furnished house, to which he was fool enough to take this girl at night—a gardener constantly saw them come and go, and Rose herself saw the lights on there, and the car waiting, more than once. I don’t think there could be much of a defence.”

  Anastasia’s calm deserted her.

  “I wasn’t thinking of the law,” she said, with an energy that was almost bitter; “I was thinking of common decency, and pity, and—and humanity.” He had never seen her so moved.

  “I know—I know,” he said, with sympathy. “Asta, dear, I know all that. She knows it too.”

  “Of course she does—I told her this morning.”

  “So she said. But Tasia, she has some rights too. Do consider—what a way to treat a girl of twenty-five, who married you when she was twenty-one, and who had just lost her baby!”

  Distress came into her eyes—she pushed her hand up under her hair.

  “Oh, I do know that, Ant. Charles is impossible sometimes. But there’s so much to him besides these wicked fits! And you can’t alter him—he just is like that.”

  “I know he is. But you can’t be surprised if his wife should at last feel that she won’t put up with his being like that.”

  Anastasia tried to take a grip on herself. This conversation was difficult enough anyhow—she mustn’t take a tone that would turn it into an argument, or anything approaching a quarrel. But they had got to get right down to the bottom, while they were at it.

  “Is she contemplating trying to divorce him? Is that what she wants?” she asked, as quietly as she could.

  “She’s thinking about that, or about getting
him to divorce her—contemplating is too definite. She’s going home to make up her mind.”

  “That’s wise.” She frowned in thought—no, they must have it out. “And what about you?” she asked.

  Antony shifted his foot on the stool, as if it hurt him. But it was his mind which hurt, not his body.

  “I have told her,” he said, “that I personally should be made miserable by feeling that my life, however blissful, was founded on another man’s wretchedness. But I’ve also told her that if in the end she decides to push it to a divorce, I will marry her.”

  The bald statement of what she had really refused to believe in knocked her out of her calmness.

  “Oh Antony, not that!” She checked herself. “Do you really mean that?” she asked very quietly.

  “Yes, my dear, I do.”

  Neither spoke for a time, then. The room was so silent that all sorts of little noises were audible in it: the clock ticking, a faint clang from the next court—Lin going round with the hot-water cans—a voice from the servants’ quarters, a coal falling in the grate. Presently Antony spoke again.

  “Tasia, if you could understand, even without agreeing, how I look at this, I think it would be a little easier for us both.”

  She looked up at him quickly, her face all tenderness even in her distress, her eyes swimming.

  “It seems such a betrayal,” she said unsteadily. “Oh, darling Ant, are you sure you mean to do this?”

  “I know it must seem so to you,” he said. “But you know I never have taken quite the same line as you about remarriage after divorce. We’ve had that all out before. You hold by St. Matthew; I hold by St. Mark. You know what Westcott and Hort say about the orthodox Jewish glosses and interpolations in St. Matthew’s Gospel.”

  “But you’ve remained an Anglican,” she objected.

  “I know I have. Being English”—he smiled rather wearily—“I’ve stuck to the Englishman’s claim to define the personal application of his religion as he chose, within the framework of his own Church. It may be illogical, but it’s what we do.”

  “I’ve never agreed with you about that.”

  “No—and you won’t now. I only want you to try to understand, and not blame Rose for this. I did hold these views before; that is the point.”

  She left that for the moment.

  “And if Charles were to divorce her? Would you still marry her?”

  “Why should Charles divorce her?”

  “You said she was thinking of asking him to—which means, I suppose, that she really was Henry’s mistress.”

  He winced a little at the word on her lips, though he had used it to Rose herself.

  “She could give him grounds, in any case, if for his sake she chose to do it that way,” he said, his face wretched.

  “But if it was done that way, you wouldn’t marry her? Antony, even the Eastern Church doesn’t allow that,” she said quickly.

  He pushed a hand over his eyes.

  “Yes—I think I should be more likely to marry her if it were done that way than the other,” he said at last.

  “Oh no—Antony, no!”

  “If you want me to say that I wouldn’t, I can’t say it,” he said, with a set face. Silence filled the room again.

  Asta sat in misery, still not quite recognising defeat. She felt she must go on trying, though a chill deep-seated instinct told her that it was hopeless.

  “I suppose you both realise that either way, this will completely break Charles,” she said at last, more coldly than she could have wished. “Even if he consented to divorce her, he would have to resign. You know what the Guards are.” She paused—“And what his life will be, without that—” her voice wavered away into silence. “One might just as well kill him outright, and have done with it,” she finished, recovering herself.

  “My dear, if we didn’t both realise that, there would be very little to hesitate about,” he said, almost sternly. “After what he has done—after what I have heard today—I could not blame any woman who instituted proceedings at once, in the case of a man with an ordinary career.”

  She sat looking at him, as if across a gulf. It seemed to her that she had never in her life been so unhappy. The loss of Charles had not been like this—there had been pain, a struggle; but that pain had always held the seeds of peace, if renunciation were achieved. Tears came into her eyes again; some words came into her head, as if of themselves—words she had so often used to comfort herself over Laurence:

  Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

  Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,

  Dispraise, or blame—nothing but well and fair

  And what may quiet us—

  Oh, this was not well and fair! There must be, in her, dispraise and blame, if not contempt; and was there not weakness, in him? Rose and her spell, however unconscious, had caught him in the toils—Delilah! Antony, shorn of his righteousness! And Charles—her mind flew to him, seeing him as he would be if this struck him—bitter, uncomprehending, angry, idle and ruined. Oh, how could the woman who had once been his deal him such a blow? She could see his face, his eyes, when it happened. He wasn’t like other people; she ought not to have married him, unless she could accept him as he was, and what flowed from that, for her. There must have been compensations. If she had not found them, it was her fault. He had worshipped her!

  It was no good trying to say any of this. It was no good saying anything. But this unhappy conversation had to be eased to an end somehow—things had to be ended in gentleness. She said, “I am so sorry.”

  “I am too.” Rather slowly and stiffly he got up. “I mind terribly about us—about you,” he said sadly.

  She sprang to her feet and threw her arms round him, fairly weeping now. “Oh Ant, my dear, my dear brother, don’t!”

  He held her a moment, stroking her dark head.

  “If she wants it, I must,” he said. “She has the same right to her life as he has to his. No—don’t say anything!”—as she lifted her face. “And remember—I seem to forget it myself, half the time—I love her.”

  He stooped and pressed a kiss on her hair. Then he turned away and went slowly out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Few divisions are so acute as those arising from questions of religion or morals; and such cleavages are never more painful than when unity of thought on these subjects has long been presumed. The full revelation of Antony’s attitude was a source of the utmost dismay and distress to Anastasia, Unhappy, but with her usual clear honesty, she forced herself to recognise the importance and finality of their difference of opinion. And it had one unexpected result—that of prospering Roy Hillier’s suit as no effort of his own could have done. The mind has a way of resting, unconsciously, on those of whom our thought is peaceable, easy and glad; now that Anastasia’s mind could no longer so rest on her brother—turned indeed from the pain which thinking of him involved—her thoughts moved round almost involuntarily to Roy, as to a place where they could at least find comfort.

  Roy, since their return to Peking, had got into the habit of bringing round his articles to the Lung An Hut’ung to read and discuss with her—and he clung all the more firmly to this practice since his proposal had made visits without some excuse a little embarrassing. Anastasia was not deceived—nor was he self-deceived; but even the most modern of us sometimes find our feelings surprisingly and tenaciously old-fashioned, and then the antique conventional dodges and subterfuges are found also to have their very consoling uses. Two mornings after her unhappy conversation with Antony, Roy turned up laden with typescript to seek Anastasia’s critical ear. They sat in the drawing-room; it was chilly now in the court before lunch, though the p’eng had gone and the sunlight poured in freely. Rose was out, Asta did not know where—as a matter of fact she was at the American Express Company’s Office in the Wagons-Lits, seeing about a berth on the Polynesia. Anastasia sat quietly with her embroidery, while Hillier read; but when at one po
int he paused and looked up, expecting one of her quick comments, none came—he saw that her eyes were far away.

  He stopped at once, his irritable sensibility aroused.

  “You’re not listening!” he said.

  She started.

  “Oh Roy! I’m sorry. No—I believe I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t.” He studied her face. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said, laying his papers aside.

  “No, never mind; I will listen now—I want to. My mind just ran off.”

  He leant forward.

  “I said, Tell me what’s wrong,” he said firmly. “I shan’t read another syllable till you do. Is it Ant?”

  Her face of surprise at the question told him that he was right, even before she said “Yes.”

  “How did you know?” she asked then.

  “I don’t know—I was putting two and two together. I saw them coming back from a ride two days ago, near the Hatamên; and I happened to sit next to Rose that night at dinner, and she was completely distraite the whole evening. So I assumed that some sort of combustion was taking place. Henry had just gone, too.”

  Anastasia leaned her head against her hand and considered. No, it was no good trying to conceal it from Hillier—he was too close to them, and though he lacked Henry Hargreaves’ uncanny flashes of divination, he was too observant and too sharp.

  “I don’t want it talked about,” she said in rather a weary voice—“but there is combustion going on. They have fallen in love with one another.”

  “Quick work,” Hillier commented.

  “Oh don’t, Roy—it isn’t so funny.”

  “My dear, I didn’t say it was—I said it was quick,” he expostulated. “I see it distresses you dreadfully, but I’m still a little puzzled by your minding so much. I know nothing of her affairs but what you’ve told me, but there are such things as divorces, aren’t there? If her husband—your Charles—is really in love with someone else too?”