by Ann Bridge
Autumn in Peking is perhaps the loveliest of all the seasons. After the great heat of summer there is something divine about those brisk October mornings, crystal-cool, with a tang in the air; the days of brilliant sunshine, hot but not oppressive. The courts of houses and temples are brilliant with chrysanthemums; out in the country the willows spin fine-leaved golden patterns against the sky, shed them, still delicate in decay, upon the quiet waters of canals, upon the earth, returning now again to its beautiful uniform brown. The fields are full of stooping blue figures, lifting the harvest of pea-nuts and sweet potatoes, and later digging out the roots and stumps of maize and kaoliang—they bind them in bundles to burn them. Though the crops are not all up yet, the area of rides spreads every day; the leaves of the ginkgos are as primrose-yellow as their tiny golden apples which fell a month before; sometimes there is mist before sunrise. The last of the convoys of solid-wheeled, blue-hooded carts come creaking into Peking along the narrow sandy tracks from the north and west, before the Gobi Road closes for the winter. And upon all these scenes and activities the sun, glorious and splendid, shines all day long, pouring out over the beautiful and busy earth a flood of light of a quality and brilliance beyond European imagining. The great continent of Asia, the greatest land-mass in the world, is cooling down after the terrific heating of the summer—but how slowly and temperately, with what a matchless serenity of atmosphere and light and colour. Here, undisturbed by the turbulence of cyclonic currents, by the intrusion of oceanic winds or moisture, the seasons pass in majesty, still, glorious and slow, with the large royalty of movement of a planet in stellar space.
Mortals use such a combination of cosmic forces for their own minute purposes. The Chinese peasant gathers his harvest—the European employs the perfect weather for expeditions. Early in October a rather miscellaneous party set out from Peking with mixed objectives. Nugent Grant-Howard, Benenden, Henry Leroy and Harry Leicester were going for a few days’ wild-goat-shooting to the Kou Wai Miao, a temple in the mountains not far from the foot of the Nan k’ou Pass; Joanna, Mrs. Leicester and Amber desired to see the Ming Tombs, which lie in the same direction; for the general convenience, and because Leroy wanted to bathe a rheumatic instep, the whole party decided to sleep at the sulphur springs of T’ang-Shan, where there is something in the nature of an hotel. A donkey-train with the men’s equipment preceded them, and on Saturday afternoon the party drove off in two cars, Leroy’s indefatigable old Dodge, a war-veteran of various Gobi Expeditions, and a hotel hireling.
The road to T’ang-Shan runs north-east from Peking, and swings round a spur of the Western Hills into the great semicircular bay of plain which lies at the foot of the Nan k’ou Pass; T’ang-Shan lies at the eastern tip of this bay, the Ming Tombs within it. Since the Nan k’ou road is one of the great gateways into the Peking plain, the plain below it is frequently the scene of battles for the control of the pass; and owing to fairly recent fighting, the travellers found the road in a very peculiar condition. For miles trenches and small earthworks, flung up just beyond the willows which shade it, bordered it on the northern side; this was merely interesting. What was of more immediate concern was that all the stone bridges had been blown up, and then hastily and incompetently patched with rough wooden structures, which were now in process of falling to bits, so that chasms four and five feet wide gaped in the planking. This necessitated a particular technique for crossing. On reaching a bridge the occupants of the car leapt out, ran cautiously on to the bridge and surveyed it; decided rapidly which was the soundest side, and proceeded to tear up planks from the less good one with which to stop the largest gaps in the other. The chauffeur was then instructed to “stand on the gas” for all he was worth, and the empty car shot at headlong speed across the crazy erection. Sometimes, however, the bridge was definitely non-carrossable, and there was nothing for it but to send the cars smoking and splashing through the fords.
The hotel at T’ang-Shan was a pleasant little place, rather reminding the party of Italy, with its low whitewashed buildings round an open courtyard, its arcaded loggias for meals, its oleanders. In the court itself two vast marble basins, at least thirty feet long, steamed under the sky as the glass-green waters of the two springs bubbled up in them; here also were smaller tanks, a couple of feet square, like manholes, for individual dippings; the moment he arrived, Henry Leroy rolled up the leg of one trouser, plunged his foot into one of these, and sat there on its marble rim, smoking a cigar and reading a newly arrived copy of The Times with great contentment. Joanna produced her embroidery; Lydia merely lay back in a chair and smoked—there was a curious still look of languor about her, as of a piece of mechanism whose mainspring is missing. Amber, whose heart was teaching her so much, guessed the reason; she felt that she knew just where the almost physical sense of weight and emptiness lay—and forgetting that it was all very wrong, she was simply sorry for Mrs. Leicester. Possibly she would not have been so observant or so sympathetic if Rupert had been talking to her, but he wasn’t; seated at a table with bottles of beer, he was engaged in one of his prodigious literary discussions with Harry Leicester. “My good Harry, there is only one prescription for style,” she heard him say. “Well, let’s have it, Keyserling,” said Harry reasonably. Not having read The Travel-Diary of a Philosopher, Amber didn’t know why Rupert should laugh so much, and even Leroy lower his Times to say “Haw! Haw! Haw!” “You’ve simply got to hold the nose of your mind to the grindstone of an idea, and go on holding it,” Rupert pronounced. “Nothing but that will produce a style worth having.” All this seemed to Amber incredibly dull; she was rather at a loose end, and was wondering how she should fill in the time till dinner, when Nugent strolled into the courtyard, came up to her and said, “Come and look at the gardens here, Amber.” Delighted, she went off with him.
The gardens of T’ang-Shan have a good deal of Shan-shui, as is only proper. Paths wander among little groves, round tiny mounds crowned with small fanciful buildings, and past miniature lakes. There are no flowers. Such gardens suffer less from the onset of autumn than ours, but there was nevertheless an indefinable melancholy about the place as Amber and Nugent strolled through it. Dead leaves floated on the surface of the pools, and lay scattered through the empty pavilions; the low light threw long shadows behind the trees; on the evening air hung an autumnal smell of decay.
“It smells almost like England,” Amber said, as they strolled along the sedgy border of one of the pools.
“Yes, it does. Do you think a lot about England out here?” Nugent asked.
“Not so much as I did at first,” Amber replied.
“Which did you think most about, the place or the people?” Nugent wanted to know. He paused to light a pipe, and the leisurely action produced a comfortable confidential atmosphere which Amber liked; she always felt tremendously at home now with Mr. Grant-Howard. She considered her answer, leisurely too. “The people,” she then pronounced.
“Several people, or one person, really?” Nugent next enquired. Coming just then to a seat—“Let’s sit,” he said. The casual way in which he asked his questions and then said something else, leaving them in the air, was very reassuring.
“Why do you ask that?” Amber said—but not, as he realised, in the least defensively.
“Because one so often does think mainly of one person,” he answered. “And ever since I first saw you, I got the impression that you were doing it.”
“Oh! Why?”
Nugent put another match to his pipe. “Do you remember nearly missing the boat at Southampton?” She nodded. “You said you wanted to buy a book, but when you came on board you hadn’t got a book. So I assumed you’d either been seeing him or telephoning to him.”
Though she was startled into a blush, Amber laughed. “I’d been trying to telephone to him, but he wasn’t in,” she said. It was strange to look back now on that misery, strange, too, how comfortable it was to be speaking of it to Mr. Grant-Howard.
“What happen
ed to him?” Nugent asked.
“It was all over—dead—even then,” she said. “I was a maniac to try to telephone to him, only at the time I felt I had to.” This time Nugent nodded. “One does,” he said. “But why was it dead? Or would you rather not tell me?”
Amber did not answer at once. She sat looking in front of her—at the leaves on the pool, at one or two which came floating down, gentle and silent, from the willows which overhung the bench on which they sat. Did she want to tell Mr. Grant-Howard about Arthur? In one way she would rather have talked to him about Rupert and her present problem, but in another way that was impossible. And then, what had happened with Arthur was rather like—no, that wasn’t it; the thing was that she was the same; she hadn’t known about Arthur, and so she had made a mistake; she didn’t know with Rupert, and so she was afraid—though less so just lately—of making a mistake with him. If she told Mr. Grant-Howard about Arthur, he would say things that might help her with Rupert. Yes, and there was more to it than that; she had never really told anyone about it, and somehow she would be glad to—and who was there in the world that she would rather tell than Mr. Grant-Howard? Another leaf came floating down and settled on her dress. She picked it up, and folding it round her finger she said, “No, I think I will tell you.”
The story when it came was very much what Nugent had expected, only with a sharper, more tragic twist. He did not remember—men don’t remember these things—that when her name was first mentioned between them his wife had surmised that Amber might be running away from a young man, and that he had suggested that she was even more probably running away from herself. But he learned now the truth of both these crude statements, and he saw too, as he had long guessed, that of the two the second represented the more permanent and essential condition. With a courage and a clear-headedness which he could not respect too warmly, the girl made absolutely clear where the cause of her disaster lay—she had made a mistake, and leaned on it, built too high on too frail a foundation; her misery and humiliation had sprung from a situation of her own creating; it was no one’s fault but hers. And Nugent guessed, too, that far as she had run from herself, her problem remained the same; he, like Joanna, had watched her with the two young men—he more than suspected that she was in love with Rupert, and well as he knew Rupert, he had not been able to decide how much he cared for Amber. That there was no understanding yet between them he was certain. So when, at the end, she said—“You see, I was such a complete fool,” he realised how much at the mercy of her own folly, as she chose to call it, she probably still felt herself; throughout, her emphasis had lain, rather strangely, on her incompetence rather than on her unhappiness, great as he saw this to have been.
“No, you weren’t a fool,” he said. “You made a mistake which it’s very easy for anyone to make. For some mysterious reason, it’s a form of mistake which is considered to be highly respectable in young men, and rather disreputable in young women.” The judge-like way in which he made this pronouncement made Amber laugh. “None of that is the point,” he went on. “You say you didn’t know him enough. I doubt that. You didn’t know all the facts about him; he was carefully concealing them, so you couldn’t. But don’t you think you probably got to know him, as a person, much better than you would have done if you hadn’t fallen in love with him—more in love with him, perhaps, than he was with you?”
Amber considered this—largely, it must be said, in the light of her more recent attempts to know Rupert. “Yes, I expect I did,” she said eventually.
“Then I don’t see why you call it a wash-out,” said Nugent. “If you believe, as I and most sensible people do, that knowing people and loving them are two of the most important forms of human knowledge and human activity, I don’t see what you’ve got to worry about.” He wanted, quite passionately, to wipe out her sense of humiliation, of waste; it was the one thing which he felt, with an urgency that surprised him, that he couldn’t bear her to endure. As she said nothing, only continued to twist the yellow and silver willow leaf, he went on— “What makes knowing people so expensive is that to do any good with it you’ve got to love them, to some extent. Oh yes, I know all that in the books about love being blind—but the fact remains that nothing but love, affection, in some shape or form, gives real interior knowledge. That’s simply a natural law, though the only person who’s really given it much publicity since St. Paul is Pirandello, and he only by implication. But Pirandello’s implications fairly bite you.”
“I’ve only seen Henry the Fourth,” said Amber.
“Well, it sticks out of that a yard,” said Nugent. “Don’t you remember when they take the psychologist to see how the madman is getting on, and there is he, and the other Doctor, and the Countess’s lover and all the rest, fussing about, being clever—but the one person who guesses that Henry has really been sane for years, and is only shamming, is the Countess. She’s quite a stupid woman, but she had loved Henry once, and even the poor ghost of that old tenderness gives her vision where the rest are blind.”
“Yes,” said Amber after a moment’s consideration. “I see that now you say it, though I hadn’t thought of it before.”
“It comes in nearly all tue plays in some shape or other,” said Nugent. “Pirandello is obsessed by the problem of reality, and especially of how different reality is for each person; but all through his work, if there ever is a solvent of differing realities, a fusion of outlook, it’s affection that brings it.” He attended to his pipe again. “That’s why I can’t think it so deplorable when I hear that someone has ‘loved in vain,’ as it’s called,” he went on. “How can you love in vain, if the activity of loving is one of the highest there is? Loving is an end in itself—why should it lead to anything? We always think it’s wasted unless it leads to marriage. Well, marriage is all right; it can be a great work of art, it’s indispensable to human life at its best, but you can’t go harnessing a spiritual activity like love to it alone. There are all sorts of love that can never be crowned with temporal rewards and successes.”
He stopped abruptly, and Amber felt that he had almost forgotten about Arthur and herself. She dragged him back to her problem. “One feels wasted, oneself, all the same, when you love a person and they don’t want it.”
“Good Heavens, yes! You feel it, of course. It deals a frightful blow to one’s whole personality when that happens,” he said. “But though you can’t be expected to see it at the time, most people are better value for having loved, whatever came of it.”
Amber compared this swiftly in her mind with some of Rupert’s statements on the same subject. “Even if love makes them discontented or angry?”
Startled, Nugent swung round to look at her. Sitting there, quietly concentrated, with her pretty honest face and clear eyes, her generous mouth, those words struck a note completely alien to her whole being—he could not have been more surprised if a mouse had run from her lips. Staring at her, as she sat absorbed, suddenly he saw that this was Rupert in her; she was giving utterance to his thought, using his words. Oh, poor child! This went deep indeed. Nugent knew that stage of the actual invasion of the personality by another, when the very mind is dyed with that other’s attitude and conceptions. So it was as bad as that!
“I don’t think loving ever makes a person angry,” he said. “That poor word is so misused. Surely only ‘Love,’ in the Continental sense, does that.”
Struck by this, forgetting that she might give her secret away, “That’s just what Rupert said!” the girl exclaimed. “How funny!”
“How funny!” echoed Nugent, a little grimly.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE expedition to the Ming Tombs ended in the muddle and confusion which so often attend European enterprise in China. The plan was admirable. The donkey-train and the men were to start early on foot, accompanied by Amber, who could not forego the chance of a walk; Mrs. Grant-Howard and Mrs. Leicester were to go later by car with Leroy, who wished to spare his instep—they were all to
meet for lunch “at the Tombs.” But alas for imprecision! The Tombs surround a large valley; it is three miles at least from the entrance P’ai-lou to the Yung-lou, the largest tomb; and neither Leicester, nor Nugent, nor Rupert, nor Amber realised this fact. It was only when they had walked for some eight miles, and entered, under the walls of a ruined fort, a flat valley studded in the most Claudelike manner with groups of trees, that they grasped the problem, on the donkey-boys enquiring, at a fork of the path, whether lunch was to be at the P’ai-lou or the Yung-lou? They had no idea. In the end Nugent decided to go with the donkey-train to the Yung-lou, which, it was established, was on the way to the Kou Wai Miao; while Amber and Rupert were to be led by Leicester, who thought he could find his way, to the P’ai-lou, there to intercept the car.