by Ann Bridge
Chapter Thirteen
THE next few days passed with the strange and deadly slowness of days of acute anxiety. The diphtheria took Dickie badly. “He’s got great lumps, like eggs, on each side of his throat, Miss,” Burbidge whispered fearfully to Amber, with the peculiar gloomy satisfaction of a servant with bad news to impart. That nurse, she explained, had let her peep through the sheet and see Master Dickie in his bed. Amber left her, marvelling at this fresh instance of the capacity of maids for knowing everything. Miss Carruthers on the other hand knew nothing—she sat in unwonted and unhappy solitude in the schoolroom, writing interminable letters home. Miss Carruthers did not like Peking. “It’s most peculiar, Miss Harrison,” she confided to Amber. “The people here seem to have no social sense, if you know what I mean.” Amber could not imagine, but she soon learned. “That Mrs. Hugo’s maid gives Bridge parties!” Miss Carruthers said, in horrified undertones—everyone spoke in undertones in the Counsellor’s house then. “And she actually asked me! Of course I refused. The Countess de Gaffi’s governess goes, she said. Of course she is only a nursery governess, with no qualifications—but still!” Amber, sympathising with her solitude, took Miss Carruthers for walks on the Wall, where they conscientiously gave their acquaintance a wide berth; or played half-hearted tennis with her on the Legation courts. Everything was slowed down and stilled in their lives. The silent servants moved more silently than ever, ceased to display those charming speechless grins with which they were wont to salute the household. Most of all Chang, the Number Two with the saintly expression, seemed to be suffering from some very deep depression. Faithful and assiduous in his duties, his always wistful face now wore a look of settled sadness, and he moved like a man who was deathly tired. He had of course a lot of extra work, and Joanna, noticing his strained appearance, suggested to him in her tentative Chinese that he should take a day off to rest. With a gentle smile he refused, though gratefully. How wonderful their manners were, Joanna thought; just so might a cardinal of ancient lineage express to a benevolent pope his determination to carry on.
Visitors and enquiries were endless. Lydia Leicester and Countess Stefany sent flowers all the time: Mme. de Bulle and Mme. Rothstein called in person more than once. Sir James, now convalescent, came one day, and sat in the garden talking to Amber, the only person who happened to be available. “Most distressing—most distressing,” he observed. “This is a most distressing place, Miss Harrison. These Chinese fellohs have no sense, you know. That poor chap Wheeler—the Doctor thinks very badly of him.” (Wheeler was the archivist.) “This little chap was such a jolly little felloh. Terrible for Mrs. Nugent.”
There you were again, Amber thought—always Joanna! Hardly anyone seemed to realise what Nugent was enduring, except his wife and Rupert. (Amber, characteristically, did not count her own knowledge of Nugent’s state of mind.) Henry Leroy came every day; he had had every known illness and scouted the notion of infection. “How is he?” he would ask whoever he could catch: and then sat on in the loggia, saying little, and muffling his booming tones when he did speak. “Sarah had it badly and she got over it,” he daily told Joanna or Nugent; “but it’s a beastly thing.” Four times a day the Japanese bugles spangled the hot glittering air with their little foolish pattern of notes; three or four times a day Hertz came, his face more and more creased with distress; four times a day the household sat down to meals in almost complete silence.
Oddly enough, it was Hawtrey who was their main support, not Rupert. During times of illness the world becomes sharply divided, for the anxious, into those who add to their anxiety, and those whose mere presence mitigates it. Nothing is more curious than to notice who they are who furnish this rock-like sense of comfort and assurance. And in this instance Joanna was herself startled to find how glad she was to see “the tall, rather unclever one” when he “blew in,” as he himself described it; or even, from her balcony, to hear his high, soft voice “yarning away” on the loggia downstairs. He and Rupert were in and out all day long—of the loggia and garden, not the house: but whereas Rupert sat silent, or talked in lowered tones, and fretted and fidgeted, Joe swung in airily, enquired for Dickie with a sort of breezy confidence, asked for a drink, and chattered away—retailing scraps of local gossip, telling funny stories, exaggerating, till in spite of themselves they were diverted. It came to her presently, despite the prejudice that she entertained about him, that what he was actually doing was to keep the normal world alive for them in their isolation; though whether he realised it or not she could not say. “Oh yes, of course he’s doing it on purpose,” Amber said, when one day Joanna mentioned this doubt to her. “He goes round collecting stories to tell Mr. Grant-Howard. ‘Must shake old Nugent up, you know; he mopes, Miss Amber, that’s what he does—he mopes!’” Amber reproduced Mr. Hawtrey’s tones with great precision, but with a little uncertain glance at her hostess.
Joanna, however, laughed. “You’ve got him perfectly, Amber—how do you do it?”
“I—I—I—as a matter of fact, Mrs. Nugent, it’s practice—nothing but practice!” Amber answered, still in Hawtrey’s manner, and Joanna laughed again. Little monkey! this gift was quite unsuspected. She asked, a little slyly, if Amber could “do” Rupert. With the utmost readiness the girl snatched up a hat and tilted it over her eyes, humped her shoulders, blew, and exclaimed “My good Joanna, if you think poor old James has anything corresponding to what we mean by a mind, you’re incredibly wide of the mark!” The representation was perfect, and Joanna, weary and overwrought, pealed with weak mirth. Wiping her eyes, “I think you’d better call me ‘My good Joanna,’ Amber,” she murmured, “it does me good.” Amber blushed. “Do you mean that? I’d love to.” “Yes, yes—and say that to Nugent.”
But these interludes of gaiety were short-lived. As the illness progressed, distress gained even on Joanna, for all her stout heart. As for Nugent, nothing seemed to distract him but Wang’s little bird. The tiny creature did in fact presently start to sing, in a loud sweet babble of small notes, and Nugent tended it assiduously, taking it out on to the loggia, and feeding and watering it himself. Liu had produced food, as promised—sorghum millet and a green weed: but Nugent was principally diverted by its flesh food. Liu handed him one day, with an air of great self-satisfaction, a small piece of bamboo about four inches long, cut below the knot, and stopped at the other end with a pith cork. “For bird—she welly like—eat meat.” He removed the pith cork and shook out into his palm a dozen gentles: “One day two,” said Liu. Nugent was charmed to learn that these tubes of bird-food were a regular article of commerce in the Peking market.
He and Amber continued to go for walks, with a good deal of spasmodic conversation. He conducted a sort of inquisition into her life at home, her family and her friends; and Amber, between a sense of flattery at his interest, and the desire to keep his mind occupied, poured out a very full and naive account of her father and her mother, her horses, Gemma—everything but Arthur. There was soon very little that Nugent did not know about life at Riddingcote: between him and the dark silvery masses of the thujas at the Temple of Heaven were interposed pictures, evoked by her eager and artless words, of the great Cotswold house, the garden and terraces; thronged with clever people, or still, empty and sweet-smelling in the falling rain; most of all, this ardent child, uncertain and unsuccessful, dimmed by the lovely sister, crushed by the overpowering mother—only safe and secure with her horses, her grooms, and the tolerant mischievous old man who must have been, Nugent thought, a very lovable person. He began to have a curiosity to meet Uncle Bill, who so resembled “Daddy”; he felt more urgently than ever a desire to liberate and encourage the spirit of his young companion. She needed a critical freedom from the opinions that had fettered her youth, and with her father gone, there was no one to give it; he tried himself to produce it, with considerable skill. “So your mother goes in for the funnies,” he commented, when Amber recited some well-known literary and artistic names as having appear
ed at a disastrous and thunder-stricken gathering. “Well, the Bloomsburys, then”—as he saw her puzzled eyebrows. Amber listened with a fearful joy; it was at once shocking and delightful to hear these awe-inspiring persons referred to casually as “funnies.” “I can’t do with them, myself,” Nugent observed. “They will be clever. Even about life. It’s no good being clever about life—one can be sensible about it, or brave, but not clever.” Under Nugent’s manipulation, through his comments, Amber too saw pictures of Riddingcote form and re-form against the background of junipers, along the dusty shade-spattered vistas of the track round the Temple of Heaven, but in a new perspective—the clever people grew smaller, less intimidating, less important, while she herself, Amber, became more solid, less foolish, less negligible. It was marvellous to have her private and hesitant views endorsed by a person like Mr. Grant-Howard—able, brilliant, important, even by her mother’s standards. And so nice! In those days of shared distress and enforced anxiety, the girl’s timid, almost latent affection for the older man made a great and sudden growth into consciousness and confidence, which increased tenfold the effect of his words and opinions. Affection is almost chemical in its action on the human mind: it acts as a solvent of differing points of view; under its influence the seemingly irreconcilable can mingle and interchange; and like a mordant, too, it fixes our acceptance of another’s opinion and makes it permanent, dyed in the skein of our thought. Nugent’s words, in these long hot afternoons, were bringing Amber out in a place she did not know—where she too had value and merit; where timidity was to be cast aside, and to accept experience and live dangerously was all-important. But even more than his words, what carried his thought so far and so deeply into her being was the pleasure of his rare smile, and the memory afterwards of his blank fatigued face as they drove back, silent, in the car, his shapely hands absently changing his spectacles—and then changing them back again.
There was a very bad day at the end of that week. For three nights Hertz had slept on a camp bed by his telephone, his instruments ready packed, awaiting a summons to come and perform a tracheotomy on Dickie. Sister Helga did not sleep at all, but lay fully dressed on a couch by the child’s bed, a finger on his pulse, watching for the slightest variation in his difficult rattling breath. She had asked for a second standard lamp, beside the one which stood all night on the floor, dimmed with a scarf, to switch on in a sudden emergency. The Counsellor’s house was ill provided with these objects; there had been none in Dickie’s room, and Miss Carruthers had surrendered hers when he was taken ill. Joanna, unwilling to rob either Nugent or Amber, and not feeling called upon, in her exhaustion and anxiety, to forego the solace of reading in bed, sent a polite note to the local agent of the Ministry of Construction asking for another. This worthy called to enquire into the need for an extra standard lamp, and refused point-blank to send one, observing that they were not officially supplied to children’s rooms.
Now Joanna was normally a very equable person, and though not given to épanchement, was quite shrewd enough to pave herself a smooth path through life by a cheerful courtesy to subordinate officials, on which she got, as a rule, the usual high yield of interest. And in the ordinary way she was far too sensible to let herself be disturbed by minor affronts. But the grossness of the inhumanity displayed on this occasion, frayed as she was by anxiety, made a most painful impression. She was very angry. She appealed to Sir James.
Sir James was distressed and kind, but explained that he was quite helpless in the matter. He had no control at all over the Ministry of Construction; it was quite independent. Who did control it? Joanna wished to know. Oh, there was a little felloh in Shanghai, a nice little felloh, but he never came to Peking. “But I am paying rent for those things—I am paying a hundred and twenty-five pounds for my furniture alone,” Joanna at last protested. “Doesn’t that entitle me to one standard lamp in each room?” “My dear lady, the Ministry of Construction takes the line that no one is entitled to anything, whatever they pay, and that they’re exceedingly lucky to get anything at all. Anyway, you’ll get nothing out of the chap here. The felloh’s paid to do this sort of thing. But Hugo likes him—I can’t think why,” observed Sir James thoughtfully. “Now look at those curtains of mine”—and he embarked on his own grievances.
Joanna fled from the Ministerial curtains. Anyhow, Sir James’s child wasn’t—wasn’t perhaps dying, she thought, forcing herself to finish her mental sentence, with an angry sob, as she walked back across the square. On the way she met Rupert. He looked keenly at her. “What’s the matter, Joanna? He’s not worse?” “No, no, I’m only silly——” and she told him the story. “My God, one of these days I shall forget myself and screw that chap’s neck for him!” Rupert exclaimed at the end. “Come in here,” he went on, leading her into his house, where he made her have a drink. “Yes—go on; you need it—I don’t care if it is before lunch.” Joanna mentioned quarantine. “Rubbish—and it’s up in a day or so, isnt’ it? You’ve been shut away from him from the start.”
Her face changed, and he saw that he had said the wrong thing. “That’s just it,” she said slowly, fingering her cocktail glass. “You see, Rupert, if anything—happens, I shan’t have been with him all this time. And he—asks for me. I hear him. I thought at the beginning that it was right, but now——” She did not finish.
Rupert was firm with her. “My dear Joanna, you’ve done absolutely right. It was essential for you to be with Nugent. Suppose you’d got it? Where would he have been then?”
“I think Amber really does him more good than anyone,” said Joanna, rather tonelessly. “Thank goodness she’s been here.”
Rupert had never seen Joanna in this state of moral semi-collapse—it had somehow never occurred to him that she, judicial and controlled, could know self-doubt or ordinary feminine feelings of any sort. With real insight, however, he met her on the ground she had taken.
“Yes, Amber’s a darling,” he said warmly, “and she does do him good. Nugent likes studying the young, and she takes his mind off it all. But no amount of young darlings are the same thing as a partnership—you know that! No one else can do what you do for him. By the way,” he went on, remembering something suddenly, “a frightful thing has happened. That poor wretched Wheeler is dead.”
“Oh no.”
“Yes—died last night. The funeral’s this afternoon. Nugent will have to go.”
“Oh, Rupert, must he really? Now?”
“I’m afraid so. Old James isn’t fit to hang about in this sun yet. Nugent will have to deputise for him.”
“I don’t think he ought to have to do that just at this moment,” said Joanna, her firmness of mind returning at once to meet this fresh emergency. “Those things affect him very much.”
“Yes, he carries a frightfully powerful receiving apparatus. He gets ten times the vibrations that other people do, from everything. In a way it’s a disability—but it makes him what he is,” said Rupert. He rang the bell, and said something to the servant, who answered it with a promptness which suggested his having been stationed on the mat outside. He went on: “He gets a light—the real light—on quite minute things, in a way the rest of us don’t. Like this: we were discussing the nature of pathos once, and Nugent said eventually that he didn’t know what it consisted in, but how about this for the thing itself?—and he told us how he had seen in the Maryhill Road, Glasgow, a slot machine for packets of chewing gum, and a notice over it: ‘Suitable gift—one penny.’ Of course he was right; it’s the most pathetic thing imaginable: there’s the whole of poor humanity in that, striving to express its love through all the limitations that hedge the gift—what it can afford, and what will be suitable. Only who but Nugent would have seen it in a slot-machine in the Maryhill Road?”
The tears stood shining in Joanna’s eyes as he finished. The ineffectual love of poor humanity was too much for her just then. At that moment Rupert’s boy reappeared, his arms full of electric lamps. Rupert made her choose on
e, and the boy bore it after them as they walked round to the Counsellor’s house. It struck Rupert as he strolled back under the acacias, where the fallen blossoms lay like small curved pebbles of ivory on the path, how great, really, was Joanna’s isolation. Possessed of her husband and her children, and possessed by them, she gave nothing to the world in general, and received nothing from it. Nothing to live by, no bread. She was sensible, successful, reliable and kind; but she was strangely alone. One didn’t know her—one didn’t really want to know her. Bad—bad, thought Rupert, gathering up a handful of the acacia blossoms and studying them as they lay on his hand; it was wrong, it was limiting to live so; all limiting was bad; people should have friends, should let the world in, and go out to greet it. His theory about Joanna developed as he walked—it was the first time he had really applied himself to it. Poor Joanna! He blew, and the acacia blossoms were scattered. He laughed loudly then, and went in to lunch.
Nugent attended the archivist’s funeral that afternoon. Seated in a car, he followed the hearse through the teeming streets, resounding with the strong vigorous life and labour and laughter of this alien humanity. He stood beside the grave in the prim little English cemetery near the P’ing-tzu-men, whose unnatural parochial neatness, by contrast with the exuberant disorder outside, created a strangely desolating impression. It seemed lost and unhappy here, under the blazing sun, this small enclosure set apart for the sanctities of his national faith; even the great words of the Burial Service sounded faint in his ears, dulled by the jolly clamour of material existence in all its strength and pervasiveness. As he stood there, hat in hand, correct and formal, with a face as expressionless as brass, he experienced a sort of horror of this land, implacable and indifferent, which menaced not only the life of his son, but somehow by its very indifference sapped the heart of his own beliefs. Here one would have to fight and strive prodigiously to preserve the salt and strength of one’s integrity, one’s grip on real values. In a flash, in the little forlorn cemetery, with the line of the city wall cutting the sky behind him, so much more imposing and permanent than this plot of ground, he saw the inner reason for many of the features of white life in China which he had already noticed with dismay—the casual inconsequent drifting through a round of pointless pleasures; the moral slackness, the unprecedented reliance on stimulants as a source of vitality. Yes, one would have to struggle, to gird up one’s loins, to face the influences which were stronger than isolation. But not here, not now; now he must just stand with his face still, and throw earth on the coffin, and not think, not think, NOT THINK of Dickie.