by Ann Bridge
Mr. Hawtrey did not dance unusually well. He was in time, steady and safe, but there was a military firmness about his tread, and a tendency to emphasise the less subtle rhythms with a vertical movement of his partner’s hand which made his performance not quite the poetry of motion. Nevertheless Amber went off with him very contentedly—she loved dancing, she was very fond of Joe, and she had a slight sense of having neglected him rather severely during the day. Rupert was not here, so by all means dance with nice old Joe.
But she became aware, bit by bit, that there was something odd tonight about nice old Joe. Wrapped again in her dream, in the lulling movement, she only noticed vaguely, at first, that he was being nicer than ever; retailing flattering remarks that this one and that had made about her during the day. Well, there was nothing in that; so did her other partners; her host actually insisted on taking a turn with her, and quite touched the girl by his pleasure on hearing that she had taken his tip to the tune of fifty dollars. But when after an interval she danced with Joe again, absent and dreamy as she was, the meaning of his little enquiries, his little half-tender jokes slowly dawned on her—Joe was making love to her. Startled, she realised that this was quite unambiguous; there was no need for theorising here. But while she listened with a gentle smiling indifference which Joe interpreted as encouragement, secretly she was suddenly busy on a new occupation, trying to guess what it would have been like if this had been Rupert; what words the poet would have used instead of poor old Joe’s circumlocutions and conventional phrases. Ah, now her heart within her uttered at last—when Joe said, “You are quite lovely—and people love what’s lovely, you know,” it left her unmoved; but when Rupert said “What thinking?” her very blood had altered its beat. Now she knew—and with the knowledge came a sudden startled shyness. She had a secret to defend—and with an innocent craft that would have drawn tears from stones, she was a little more actively nice to Joe.
These tactics, however, had their disadvantage. Joe had a great belief in striking while the iron is hot, you know! On this occasion, unluckily for him, the iron was much cooler than he thought. Going home in the car, without warning, he expertly gathered Amber to him and kissed her. Surprised and disconcerted— “What are you doing?” she said rather indignantly, freeing herself. Joe, seeing that he had bogged it, was a little indignant too. “Well, you needn’t be so high hat about it, Amber darling.” Amber was instantly penitent at his hurt voice. “I’m sorry, Joe, but—don’t.”
“Why not?” Argument, Joe knew, was sometimes fruitful. But it wasn’t in this case. Amber wouldn’t argue. How indeed explain how trivial—and therefore how unendurable—were anyone’s kisses, compared to one of Rupert’s little shakes of the elbow? “Just don’t,” she said simply, “please, Joe.” And Joe, who was also learning something that night, said “Very well, Amber.”
What he was learning was not her secret. Not given to self-analysis, or analysis of any sort, he was quite unable to diagnose his own state, far less hers. He must, he innocently supposed, give her more time. But he was surprised at one thing—simply that he found he wanted her to have what she wanted, even if it was not to be kissed, more than he wanted to kiss her. This was novel and puzzling to Mr. Hawtrey. He thought about it all the way back from the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung to the Legation compound; he thought about it as he walked up to his bungalow door and fitted his latch-key into the lock. Then he forgot it, because some fool had bolted the door. Swearing, he rattled the handle, and eventually pulled it out by the roots; furious, he stormed round to the servants’ quarters, still waving the handle, and knocked up the frightened boys, who flew in a body to open the door. The lock being broken by Joe’s strength, they had to let him in by the French windows on the verandah. Next morning Mr. Hawtrey held a Court of Enquiry, which revealed that his Number Two was the culprit. So he administered justice, with his usual mixture of shrewdness and jocularity. He had lost “face” by being shut out—Number Two must lose face too. Amid the grins of the assembled staff he dressed the boy in his own sheepskin coat, stood him face to the compound wall, and taking his Chinese crossbow, he fired off two or three of the large clay balls which are the ammunition of this weapon in his direction, from a distance of fifty paces. At that range the balls could not hurt. The other servants looked on, giggling discreetly—the fantasy and ingenuity of the punishment devised by the Number Four Envoy tickled their curious but lively sense of humour, and enchanted them. Then Mr. Hawtrey, much pleased with himself, went in to breakfast, and began again to think of what Miss Harrison wanted.
Chapter Seventeen
FROM the middle of May onwards the temperature in Peking mounts sharply, first to the lesser heat of June, then to the Ta Shu, or Great Heat, of July, when the rain begins, ushered in by the spasmodic thunderstorms of the previous month. In June, looking out over the plain from some high point in the Western Hills, from above Pa-Ta-Ch’u or from the Emperor’s Hunting Park at Hsiang-shan, the watcher sees no city, but a great wreathing of smoky white, as of a vast bonfire—the sunlit dust lifted from the unpaved streets and open spaces of the town by the hot noonday wind. At sundown, when the wind has dropped, those who walk on the city wall to catch what movement of air there may be, what hint of coolness, find the sun-baked flagstones still warm beneath their feet; while to their nostrils mounts, more potent even than in the streets below, that peculiar stew of smells—of cess of men and animals, of charcoal fumes, of cooking with strange fats and strange condiments, of remembered dust, which is the summer atmosphere of Peking. This penetrating compound of odours, sweetish, sourish, indescribable and unforgettable, reaches even to the roof-garden of the Peking Hotel on those hot nights when the European population assembles there, to dance listlessly on the polished concrete, or to sit languid round tables set against the garish trellis of artificial roses, drinking something; while the band brays and the lights glare, till they are lowered for a waltz and he who cares may see the stars, brilliant above the few lights of the city. And going home to bed, even with doors and windows set wide and the irritant whirring of an electric fan matching the ceaseless rattle of the crickets outside, the reveller’s bedroom thermometer will still show him, at one in the morning, an implacable ninety-five degrees. Each open piece of ground is a furnace; wonks and coolies lie panting in every patch of shaded dust; sweat streams from hairless bodies burned copper-colour with the sun, the thick coats of donkeys are dark and smooth with sweat.
As if in some secret rhythm with the earth’s relation to the sun, with the rising temperature, Amber’s need of Rupert mounted then like a slow tide. With its emergence into consciousness at the Rothstein’s party, this emotion had become as it were vocal; she could no longer ignore it for any length of time. On the hotel roof, at night, she watched his white coat among the dancers; Rupert refused the indignity of a monkey-jacket, and wore what Hawtrey derisively described as a “dentist’s coat.” When he was in another party she watched with soft torment—she could not help herself—his smiles, his queer humorous grimaces to his partners, wondering what he was saying, why laughing; when he was in her own, the waiting for him to ask her to dance brought always a slow agitation, an almost physical pressure over the heart. When they did dance, it was the poetry of motion; Rupert, on any showing, danced divinely, with an almost inspired subtlety of step and rhythm—the contrast of his jerky acid comments with this smooth movement had something drily stimulating about it, like old brandy. (Only Amber knew nothing about old brandy.) To meet him unexpectedly made her almost dizzy. Now, too, she welcomed any reason that took her to the British Legation—sought, indeed, occasions for going. Poor human heart! The portals of Paradise had now become that squat, grey gateway, guarded by the k’ai-mén-ti in his long gown, the sentry in his summer drill. She never entered that gate now without a glance across the square, green at last, towards Benenden’s house, remembering, with the heart’s passionate sense of treasure spilt, of pearls flung down unregarded, the day she took tea with him ther
e, when he scolded her for her amiability and said he should call her Amber.
A bazaar at which Amber was to sell and Mrs. Grant-Howard to preside furnished the occasion for several visits to the Counsellor’s House. One morning at the beginning of July Amber went by appointment to discuss some business in connection with it. Liu, with his monkey-fied smirk of welcome, said “T’ai-t’ai lai” and left her in the drawing-room. It was too hot to sit outside now after 10 A.M., and the windows were closed for the day’s heat, the lienzas of the loggia lowered against the glare. While she waited for Joanna, Amber wandered round the familiar room in the gloom, noting its contents. Hullo, there was a new book! Two! Amber had been long enough in China to pounce on a new book with avidity—she pounced on these. A novel—and a small thin book in a buff cover: “China Hand. Rupert Benenden.”
The girl sank down on a chair where she was, opened the book and began to read. Actually she had never seen any of Rupert’s poems before; she had been too shy to ask Rupert himself, and his works were apparently not among those indispensable treasures from which Nugent could not be separated, which she had once carted into the study next door. Like most people, she turned at once to the title poem, which was not the first, and read:
In your pale room
Are books, flowers, pictures, firelight on the wall,
Perfection—when you are there.
But half the time you are not there at all,
Although you lie extended in your chair
Blowing out smoke. Where?
Where has your mind gone grumbling off alone?
Now last night it was here
Speaking to mine in every change of tone,
In every silence; and the words you said
So carefully in general, were my own.
Well, I shall leave too!
Low in my chair, blowing out smoke, I’ll go!
Slip through your white wall—
Perfection even can pall
And books, flowers, pictures, firelight—
The uncertainty of passion most of all.
I’ll go across the world, to real things.
I know a bench below a green-tiled wall.
Beyond the cobbled path the tall maize swings
Shivering, rustling, drooping under the stars.
Out from a doorway shoot two yellow bars
Of dusty lamplight. To and fro
Threading the dark I see the fireflies go,
Living sparks, reddish.
Up the street
There is a shuffling sound of slippered feet
And voices keening—“Ai-yah! Ai-yah! Ai!”
They say that selfsame cry
Has mourned the dead here for four thousand years.
I only know it fills
The valley trough between the stony hills
And hits the sky
And falls again like rain.
It brings no sense of tears
But ageless human pain
And man’s submission.
A man was tortured to death this afternoon.
Quite close by
I hear large bodies bumping, a camel’s snarl,
The hot dark night is full of acrid smells,
Dust, wood-smoke, donkey-dung, the camels themselves.
Bong! go the temple bells.
I must turn in soon.
We did a solid thirty miles today;
I shall sleep log-like in my folding bed,
My book will go unread.
Look, there’s the moon!
Rum now, and one more gasper, and to bed.
But in the morning I shall go
Down to the river and throw
My clothes off on the stones, and soap, and scrub
Under the sun—no polished taps or tub!
The hurrying cold blue of the stream
Will rinse and lave me, silvered with the gleam
Of the fresh morning of a long hot day—
We’ll sleep another thirty miles away.
What did you say?
Oh, I was thinking. Not of anyone.
No, things, real things. Not pictures, books or flowers!
Of long hot hours
And the hot China sun
And camels, and tall maize and kaoliang—
What is it? Oh, a thing you wouldn’t know,
A real thing; what they use to make a p’eng—
And of the smells of dust and donkey-dung.
Good night! I must go.
No, not tomorrow. Tuesday? I don’t know.
I might.
Wednesday?
All right.
To read the verse of a person you know is like seeing them in a new and revealing dress, like bathing-things or riding-clothes—it gives a new picture. There is something about the actual form of poetry which makes for revelation, some strange compulsion in that way of using words which, almost without our volition, forces out the half-recognised realities of the deeper ranges of thought and feeling and leaves them bare for all to see. But poetry does more than this mere laying bare—it crystallises the revealed emotion into a thing with shape and form of its own, a new entity, which is everyone’s possession; poetry makes public characters of the heart’s secrets. That bad poetry does this less than good is obvious; but that all poetry, whether good or bad, does it to some extent is one of the mysteries of the poetic form. And when we say that a prose writer writes like a poet, or that his writing has a poetic quality, we mean just this—that he, somehow, also presents us with these new entities of expressed emotion, instead of merely picturing for us emotions and actions. Those who wish to keep their secrets should not write poetry.
So when Amber, sitting where she was in the dim room, read this poem of Rupert’s through, she did so with a thirsty expectancy of learning more about him. Actually her first impression was that the poetry itself was rather bad; it was not in the least like Tennyson’s, which Amber secretly adored; it reminded her faintly, on the contrary, of the productions of her old enemies, the clever young men at Riddingcote. She read it through again—and this time, in spite of its roughness and jerkiness, she realised that it did at least say something with quite peculiar clearness—etched for her a little picture of a hot night in a Chinese village that she could see. And dimmer, but more potent, was the suggestion of the troubled relationship with some woman, who drew him and yet irritated him; from whom he turned to real things. “The uncertainty of passion most of all”—what lay behind that? Here, large as life, was the Rupert she knew, irritability and all; but here was also a life of his that she didn’t know, from which she was excluded. With a long sigh she turned the page to the next. It was called “In Self-defence.” She read it.
Keep out! Keep out!
Do not come in!
Keep out, I say!
I will not have you in my mind—
Leave the door—go away.
While you are just outside,
Just there—close, near—
I cannot see the words upon the page,
I cannot hear
The ringing pauses of the sentences,
There is no meaning in the sounds I hear.
I will not have you in my mind.
There! You are gone. Now all is clear.
Now meaning flows and words ring.
Now I can hear a bird sing.
Now I am free, and now I can be kind.
What, again? Go, go, go, go!
Why do you haunt me so?
You turn my world to slag when you come in—
Filling my mind
Till I am smitten blind
Seeing only you—and not as I would see,
But bitterly—a burning pain.
O, go away again!
Keep out, keep out! I will not have you in.
I want my world of simple things—
Food, friends, books, thought—
In which a bird sings.
Why should you make it ashes, grey?
L
eave me my world. Go—go away.
In her mood of expectancy, unusually receptive, these lines hit Amber with extraordinary violence—in the darkened quiet room they reached her mind almost with the painful force of a scream. Bad they might be—that they were authentic, expressing some tormenting reality, she could not doubt. Because she knew it so well herself! Oh, she knew so terribly well that struggle to defend the mind from the invasion of another; knew how words do lose their meaning, how the printed page swims and fades under an intruding picture. Sitting there, she realised with a startled pang of fright that it was really against this domination that she had struggled when she argued with Rupert that night, watching the crows at the gate of the Forbidden City—not merely against his point of view. And as the mind in panic flies from fear to fear, from dread to past experience, so now her old misery about Arthur stood up before her afresh, as it were visible—outside her now, rather than part of her, but still a shape of anguish.
As usual, she struggled with herself—no heroine of Jane Austen’s had a greater passion for “subduing her agitation” than poor Amber. She looked about her, as if to draw support from the homely details of the familiar, rather ugly room; gazed at the dark velvet curtains that framed the windows, at the narrow stripes of light traversing the lowered lienzas. Absurd—to be flung into such a fuss over a poem! She read it again, determinedly. But for once her small experience matched Rupert’s too closely for her to be able to minimise it as she would have wished; she sighed again, thinking with naive surprise—How odd that men should feel this too! She tried to combat that curious sense of panic which the thought of Arthur had intensified—the sense of a threat to her happiness. Why, because it had gone wrong once, it should always go wrong! Absurd again! But she had a sense of groping in the dark. She needed so to know Rupert, know him all through—and she didn’t. Think as she would, weigh and examine as she might, he always baffled her. Now he was one thing, now another. These poems threw light—but only on his power to suffer, and his intolerance of suffering. What sort of woman had done this to him? And—with a shoot of pain—who?