Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “‘Like a lively flame and a burning spark, breaking upwards, it passeth securely through all’—is that it?” he asked.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “It’s from the ‘Imitation’.”

  “Will you say it again?”

  “How much of it?”

  “Any you can remember.”

  He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, thought a moment, and then began to repeat those astonishing words, the pure lyric of the adoring spirit, which bear the very accent of love in its last completion, uniting human and divine.

  “Love is a great thing … which alone maketh everything that is heavy, light; and beareth equally all that is unequal. For it carrieth a burden without a burden, and maketh everything that is bitter, sweet and tasteful.…

  “Love oftentimes knoweth no measure, but is fervent above all measure. Love feeleth no burden, weigheth no pains, attempteth what is beyond its strength, complaineth not of impossibility.… It is therefore able to undertake all things, and completeth many things and voucheth for their effect; where he that doth not love fainteth and lyeth down. Love is watchful, and sleeping, sleepeth not: being weary is not tired, being pressed is not straitened, but like a lively flame and a burning spark, breaking upwards, it passeth securely through all. If anyone loveth, he knoweth what this voice crieth.”

  She was silent when he had finished. The words fell into her heart like rain—hardly to be taken in, not to be accepted yet, but giving a picture of a possibility whose beauty drew her with power. She didn’t even thank him—she sat, her hands round her knees, contemplating that picture. He watched her, half-wondering what her thoughts were, half-aware of them; and as he did so, remembered how he had watched the shadows of her thoughts in her face on the cliff at Lighthouse Point. Her face was less revealing now, or her thoughts more unified—there was quietness, something approaching strength in her expression. But when at last she did speak, her words surprised him.

  “If lying on the mud at the bottom of the pit brought one out there, it would be worth it,” she said.

  “I think, with love added, that’s where it does bring one out,” he answered. They both spoke with a curious sort of detachment, almost dreamy, hovering above their bitter reality in a clearer air, for a moment or two—a descant in speech.

  “Will you write it out for me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I will”

  “Because I shan’t remember.”

  That brought them down. She sustained it for a moment longer—“‘Complaineth not of impossibility’,” she repeated, in a sort of quiet incredulous tone—and then suddenly turned to him, her face broken up.

  “Oh, Antony, how can I go?”

  “I know. But one can.”

  After a moment she asked—“Are we to write? Will you write?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” he said. “In some ways I think it might be better not to; but——”

  She broke in with what was almost a cry—“Oh, I must have a word from you sometimes!”

  “We may have to write a bit, anyhow. Asta is going to see Charles on her way home.”

  “Is she? What for?”

  “To find out how he feels about all this. She may even write to him first.”

  “I suppose that’s a good plan.” She spoke doubtfully. “I feel I’d rather you wrote, somehow.”

  “I think Asta will try to be fair. Anyhow Roy will be completely impartial—it’s really his idea.”

  “In a way I suppose I ought to be the one to do the writing, if anyone does,” she said.

  “I know. But I think that might not be wise—until you’ve made up your mind.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, if you did decide on a divorce, you ought to let a lawyer see everything you wrote. It’s dangerous otherwise.”

  She shivered a little.

  “How ugly it is,” she said.

  “Yes—it is very ugly,” he answered. “But Asta will have seen him, and will write to us both about the position, well before the six months are up.”

  The mention of that stretch of time brought a fresh realisation of what it all meant, and of why they were sitting there, in that deserted temple, among the leafless lilacs. It suddenly struck Rose that if she decided against divorce—which it really wasn’t possible she should!—she might actually never see Antony again. Driven by the thought, she turned and looked at him—trying to master and memorise every detail of his face. Even for six months, she would need it so! As she looked, he too turned towards her.

  “Yes,” he said, reading the thing in her eyes. “This is Goodbye, Rose, my dear love.”

  “Oh,” she said, and nothing else.

  He tried to ease it.

  “I’m going to do something so old-fashioned,” he said—“what our ancestors did” He put his hand into the pocket of his shabby riding-jacket and pulled out a little worn faded red leather case, long and narrow, with a domed lid. “That belonged to Grandmother,” he said, handing it to her—“and now I want you to have it.”

  She opened it. Inside was a long brooch, with the word MIZPAH, set in seed pearls. She looked up at him, puzzled.

  “Don’t you know what it means?” She shook her head. “Grandfather gave it to her before he went to sea, once. Mizpah means ‘The Lord watch between me and thee, while we are separated one from another.’”

  She looked at it. Then she snapped the lid to and put it in her pocket. She did not speak.

  “Do you remember hymns on Sunday at Ildenham, when Grannie was there?” he said. “She always would have that one.” She nodded. She remembered the singers, the room, the tune, the verse she had always loved as a child for its triumphant ring:

  God be with you till we meet again:

  Keep love’s banner floating o’er you,

  Smite Death’s threatening wave before you;

  God be with you till we meet again.

  And now at last the tears stood in her eyes. Could even Death’s threatening wave be colder, darker, than this parting plunge?

  Antony stood up.

  “My darling, this is one of the times when we can’t really do anything. We can only torture ourselves whatever we do, whether it’s words, or looks, or touching one another. Nothing is the least use now but courage. But I said I would kiss you goodbye, and I will. Come to me.”

  She rose and stood in front of him, with that gentle sweet docility that had so often moved him. He put his arms round her, and looked long into her face. He sighed. “You are very beautiful,” he said, as if he hardly knew that he was speaking—it was the very breathing of the man’s body and spirit. “I love you very much,” he said, and bent and kissed her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Polynesia ploughed her steady way through grey seas and chilly air southwards towards Hong Kong. Mrs. Pelham lay in a chair on deck, muffled in rugs, watching the slight rise and fall of the rail in relation to the cold heaving grey horizon—Lady Harriet had gone to her cabin for an afternoon nap, but on all sides other passengers, similarly extended, snoozed or read. Rose had a book on her lap, but she was not reading it. It was a volume of poems by Rupert Benenden, which Hillier had given her at the train, in the course of that horrible departure from Peking when she had tried, in a singular numbed fashion, to do as well as Henry had done a few weeks earlier. She did not think very highly of Benenden’s poems, though people in Peking always thrust them at you, because he had been at the Legation; but one of them, which she had just read, had caused her to put the book down and stare out at the featureless waters.

  When and where makes no difference;

  There is no sense in choosing times for partings.

  No matter when a wound comes

  It is still a wound.

  Nor is travel a cure, as is said.

  The heart is no traveller,

  It lives obstinately in its own obscure and trivial haunts—

  A road, an island, a few rooms,

 
Firelit, or warmed partially by a gas fire.

  The heart can make its home anywhere

  But it will not change or move.

  But most of all it lives in words and tunes

  And these it is not so easy to escape.

  The wise ruling mind can avoid

  The road, the island, and the forbidden rooms—

  But it cannot always avoid the tune and the words.

  For the wireless may play these, or

  Some thoughtless hand fit a disk to the gramophone

  And the helpless heart is made aware again

  Of its home, and of the present emptiness there

  No other remaining, only itself, entirely alone.

  It was rather a bad poem, Rose thought, but there were things in it that were terribly true. Oh no, the heart is no traveller—she had found that out at Shanghai, fast enough; and when the ship’s wireless, last night at dinner, had brayed out a selection of “English Melodies” which included “Drink to me only”, she had realised (remembering Antony teaching her to sing descants, that evening at Pei-t’ai-ho) that you cannot always escape the tune and the words. Benenden evidently knew, all right—knew this cold, leaden, grey desolation: as leaden, cold and grey as the sky and sea about her.

  She lay back, thinking about it all, as she had hardly ceased to think since the train steamed out of the Ch’ien-Mên station, and she stood at the window watching Antony’s Dürer face grow smaller and less distinct, her hand laid over the Mizpah brooch that then, as now, fastened her scarf in place. One week was gone already—one week out of twenty-six. For in the despair of that parting, the terrible sense of being suspended in a meaningless void, Rose clung to that term. Antony had said she was to wait and make up her mind, but she felt that she had made it up. When the six months were over, whatever Asta reported, she was going to see a lawyer, and get busy about a divorce. It was hard luck on Charles, but it was really his own doing; she had done nothing to provoke his inflicting on her the misery that turned her adrift and sent her to China, to find her heart’s security in Antony. Not to get a divorce, not to marry Antony, would be even harder luck on her, and on him too. That afternoon in the lilac temple, his kiss when it came, had made her realise even more clearly than all he had said at the Princess’s Tomb what was involved for Antony in this. She shut her eyes, remembering that kiss. Oh, lost, drowned, submerged, subjugated, in a bliss almost beyond bearing! She was his—no possession could make her more so than she had been then. But she wanted him to have everything—herself, her love, her passionate response, her whole life.

  She opened her eyes and shifted her position in the deck chair. It was too much, all this; she must calm down, she mustn’t think of Antony. But it was so impossible not to think of him, if one thought at all. To distract her mind she threw aside her rugs and went to get a book from the ship’s library in the saloon. It was rather exiguous; there was not much choice; she saw a novel she had read, in England, just before she went out to China, which had made rather an impression on her—she took that, went back to her chair, and read steadily.

  After about an hour she put the book down again, with a puzzled little sigh. It didn’t seem so good now, so valid. It was one of the many books she had read, at the time of her flight from Charles and even before, which had elevated physical love practically into the position of a panacea for all moral ills—moral ills being of course inevitably psychological in origin. Now, that seemed so partial, so little of the truth. What she felt for Antony, with hardly a kiss between them, still more the little she felt for Henry, whose lover she had been, made her realise with a sharp clearness that this book, all these books, were really off the track. However meritorious and valuable physical love and its expression might be, in conjunction with the other aspects of love—she shivered again as she switched her mind swiftly off a momentary vision of completed physical love between herself and Antony—it was now manifest to her that it could not run alone, had not the value in itself, that was so vociferously claimed for it. Oh no—the physical was very very good, but it wasn’t by itself as good, as useful, as all that.

  A gong resounded musically all over the ship. That meant tea. Rose groaned to herself. Tea on board ship is not a very agreeable meal; it brings into inescapable prominence that regrettable feature of ocean travel, tinned or otherwise preserved milk. But what was worse than tea itself was the time after tea, the desert that stretched between it and dinner, when the light failed, and it grew chilly; or the sun, as in the tropics, dropped into the sea with a bump, leaving behind a red and green sky that scraped your emotions like violin-strings. Rose remembered those hours on the voyage out. She wanted a world without sunsets for the next six months.

  However, today it was not so bad as she expected. As she made her way to the saloon she encountered Lady Harriet, completely appropriate and distinguished in a dark pepper-and-salt cloak cut on the lines of an Inverness cape, and a neat little close-fitting black hat. They had tea together, Lady Harriet surveying the other passengers through her lorgnette, discreetly, and commenting on them with a combination of expert criticism and rather absurd speculation which Rose found very diverting. “Do look at that man’s hands”—indicating an immense individual, very richly dressed, with brown-and-white ‘co-respondent’ shoes, whose hands were indeed of an exaggerated hairy vastness. “What can he possibly be? The only man I’ve ever seen with hands like that was a person who used to eat live rats at St. Giles’s Fair when I was a child—if the nursery-maid took us in, we used to go and see him with the groom. Do you suppose this man has made a fortune out of eating live rats? Obviously he is very rich.” Rose had to laugh. After tea Lady Harriet made a brief excursion on deck, decided that it was really too cold and nasty “for words”, and settled down with Rose snugly in a corner of the saloon with her knitting, where they continued to talk. Rose had been intrigued by the story of the rat-eater, and reverted to him—“He didn’t really eat them alive?”

  “Oh yes, my dear, indeed he did. He took them out of a cage with those hands, and ate them! Too horrible. But as children it fascinated us. We were always so anxious that our summer visit to Broadover should coincide with St. Giles’s Fair, because of the rat-eater.”

  “Oh, you didn’t live at Broadover?”

  “No, no, my dear child, not at that time—it was my grandfather’s house; the old Duke, you know. We were terrified of him,” said Lady Harriet, deepening her voice on “terrified”. “He had an ebony cane with an ivory knob, and he used to reach out and strike us with it if he considered that we were naughty.”

  “Were you naughty?” Rose asked, fascinated by these glimpses of Lady Harriet’s past.

  “No one would think so nowadays,” said Lady Harriet, looking amused—“we should be considered absolute paragons today. Though I did once put worms in my Grandfather’s bed.”

  “Worms?” Rose asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, earthworms” Lady Harriet’s eyes glinted with reminiscent triumph over this exploit of sixty odd years ago. “There was a tremendous fuss. He had beaten me extra hard, and that was my revenge! He disliked me rather,” she said tranquilly, “because I was so plain.”

  Rose studied her companion’s face. Now magnificent, those strongly-marked features might well have been unbecoming to a little girl. Lady Harriet caught her glance.

  “Oh yes, my dear, I was very plain as a child. And as a girl, too. I hated going to dances, because my Mother used to inspect us first, like recruits”—she gave a little laugh—“and she always complained of how I looked. Most discouraging! Of course Maud and Louise—my sisters—were so beautiful, I see that it was very trying for her.”

  Rose was horrified. “How awful for you,” she said.

  Lady Harriet smiled at her companion’s lovely face, but left the smile her only comment on that.

  “It was disagreeable,” she said. “But I don’t think it did me harm in the end. I learned to depend on other things, and they have worn well.�
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  Rose, thinking over all this as she dressed for dinner, remembered Sir James’s unexplained remark—“When you think what her life has been.” Was it this youthful plainness and family dislike that he was referring to? Or something more? She wished she knew everything about Lady Harriet’s life, what influences had shaped her into the thing she now was. Well, perhaps she would learn a little during this voyage. At dinner, and afterwards, Lady Harriet again kept up an amused and appreciative flow of comment, now largely on the women’s clothes, which seemed to interest her enormously. Rose had noticed this interest in clothes before, and found it delightful, if unexpected—she felt she had the clue to it now, in those unhappy inspections before Victorian balls! But how sane, how wise, instead of turning away from a field of youthful mortification, to dress in age faultlessly herself, and still to enjoy dress, fashion, and the ephemeral beauty and success of others. When she went to bed, after an evening which had been thoroughly enjoyable, it struck Mrs. Pelham what a wonderful art this was of her companion’s—to build up, as it were, a shelter of pleasantness and entertainment, for herself and others, out of such trivial materials. Thank God, oh, thank God she had come with her.

  Rose continued, on the voyage, whenever she got a lead, to draw Lady Harriet out about her past life. It involved drawing—unlike most people of seventy or over, Lady Harriet did not live in the past; the present was her main interest and concern. But she was easily persuaded, by Rose’s questions, to reminiscence—and her reminiscences were good value. She had of course known everyone who was “worth knowing”, i.e. all the great public figures of her day—and it had been a long day; and her amused curiosity at the time had preserved aspects of them so unexpected, fresh and lively that the great Victorians, in her conversation, moved and walked for Mrs. Pelham not in an aura of virtue and dullness, as in biography they tend to do, but in an extremely human and slightly absurd guise:—of tricks with watch-chains, boots off which buttons burst, cough-lozenges mislaid before momentous speeches in the House, and startling tastes in food and contemporary fiction. But it was not only such externals which Lady Harriet’s memory had preserved. Ambitions, failures and successes, and their causes: family trouble here, ill-health in a wife there, loyalties and devotions, rivalries and dislikes—all these became fascinatingly actual for Rose as the Polynesia ploughed her way down to Singapore, turned up through the Straits and headed westward across the Indian Ocean. And in and out of these memories the Royal Family popped with disconcerting frequency and intimacy, though always escorted, as it were, by a graceful respect. They too were amusing, but a special feeling towards them leavened the amusement—a strong sense of their value and dignity, a very real affection and esteem. Rose had never before encountered this special attitude of the personal servants of the Crown, and it interested her enormously. She began to see in it how at least one side of that mysterious thing English loyalty is built up—deeply felt and strongly held by one class, that nearest the Throne it was by them purveyed and handed on to those who stood further off, and by these to others remoter still, till, as with an invisible cement, the whole fabric of English society was welded into a common unity of loyal affection. To recognise this was not to belittle the merits of the Royalties themselves, who clearly—most clearly, by Lady Harriet’s account—did their part and more; nor the much that was spontaneous and free. But it did show to her, as she had never seen before, so to speak the mechanics of the thing, and the part played by a devoted entourage in creating a great and stabilising tradition. Faithful servants proclaim good masters as nothing else can. She saw Lady Harriet, during her active years, building again—a home for loyalty and a place of security for royalty, as she was continually building for her, Rose, a shelter against desolation. What a builder she was! And yet it was all done so lightly, so easily, as if for her own pleasure and amusement.