by Ann Bridge
Amber listened to this outburst with the sharpest sensations of pity and pain. She felt certain that he was telling her about Mrs. Leicester, in all but name—to be near her he had got himself transferred to China, only to find that she preferred Bruno. She had deprived him of rest and food, filled his mind, upset his work—how incredibly he must have loved her! The pain was almost stifling as she thought: he can never love anyone else like that! But pain was conquered almost at once by an overpowering pity. She wanted quite terribly to comfort him, to make him see, as Nugent at T’ang-shan had made her see, the other side of what looked like waste and defeat; and under this impulse, in her simplicity, it never occurred to her to hesitate to speak on behalf of love to a person as shrewd as Rupert, with whom she was in love herself.
“I don’t believe it is waste,” she said.
Rupert stopped to turn and look at her. “You don’t? Didn’t you think it waste when your love-affair went wrong?—whatever did go wrong with it—you only said it was over.”
“Yes, I did at the time, but now I see that it wasn’t,” said Amber.
“Why wasn’t it?” said Rupert, with curt incredulity, walking on again—they were practically at the corner of the Wall now; immediately in front of them rose a small wooden hut, and piled about it great heaps of square-hewn timbers. As they approached, the door of the hut opened, and an ancient Chinese emerged, muffled in leggings and a sheepskin coat; he bowed and grinned at them, amiably.
“Because——” Amber was beginning, intent on her theme, when Rupert interrupted her.
“Half a moment—we must have a word with the old boy. This is where the corner-tower was, you know—he lives up here to guard the old timbers.”
Amber didn’t know. She had, however, suffered before under Rupert’s habit of breaking off the most absorbing conversations in order to show her something, and submitted with admirable patience to being introduced to the old man—who, leaning against a notice which forbade smoking, in Chinese and three European languages, accepted a cigarette himself, and looked mildly on while Rupert lit one—and to being told the story of the demolition of the tower. There were till recently towers at each of the four corners of the city walls, and nine gates in the sides; but when it was proposed to make a fourth gate in the south wall, to relieve the congestion of traffic, it became necessary, it appeared, to pull down one of the towers, since thirteen was the correct and fortunate number of towers and gates, and to add another would have brought ill-luck.
“That’s feng-shui—geomancy, you know,” said Rupert airily, in conclusion. “You must consult the feng-shui experts before you start on any building. The last Finance Minister but three told me solemnly that China would never be solvent again till they moved the new Ministry of Finance, because the feng-shui is all wrong—it stands near a cross-roads, and the money has four streets to roll away by!”
Amber laughed. “Better put it down a blind alley next time,” she said, moving over to one of the piles of timber near the parapet. Mounting the timber and looking over, she cried out in a different voice, “Oh, Rupert, look!”
He came and stood beside her. Beneath their feet the much lower wall of the Chinese city abutted against the one on which they stood, and ran out into the fields before turning south, with a little erection near the angle, the gate-tower of the Hsi-pien-mên; up to the north the grey line of the Tartar Wall stretched away, austere and dark above the white fields. There was something beautiful and sustaining about that huge line of masonry, imposed with such majestic decision on the snowy landscape. And round the white plain, in a great arc, stood the Western Hills, magnified by the snow into such an unexpected height and splendour as to lift the spirit suddenly. As they stood looking at it all, in silence— “Now tell me why you say your affair that went wrong wasn’t a waste,” Rupert said, brushing the snow off the parapet so that they could lean their elbows on the wall.
“Because—Nugent said it to me, and I’m sure he’s right,” the girl said, a little hurriedly. “Love isn’t wasted just because it doesn’t lead to marriage or anything. It’s worth while for itself. And besides, you can never really know people without loving them in some way, and knowing people is worth while, even if it’s very—very expensive.” She paused; her impulse had lost its momentum during the check and the discussion of feng-shui, and she felt that her hasty réchauffé of Nugent’s views was not very telling; she glanced nervously at Rupert. But he was listening quietly and seriously; there was no sign of the inquisitive amusement she dreaded. “Go on,” he said.
“That’s most of it—I can’t put it like he did. But I’m sure it’s true. So you see, Rupert dear, even if she did turn you down, and you were so miserable, it was all right; you knew her more—it wasn’t a waste,” she said, turning to him now and speaking with the utmost conviction the lesson she had learnt.
“Amber dear, it’s a fearful thing to know some people too well,” he said slowly. “Nugent is probably right about love and knowing coming to the same thing—but what if love only shows you abysses?”
His words, his tone, silenced the girl. She had been reading Nugent’s Pirandello to some purpose, and understood in that moment that this was a case where two realities, hers and Rupert’s, differed so widely that her words could not help him. Daunted by a sense of defeat, unexpectedly the tears stood in her eyes; she turned away her head and looked up the line of wall dominating the cold white fields. “I’m sorry,” she said simply, when she had steadied her voice.
Perhaps she had not steadied it as well as she thought. “Amber!” said Rupert suddenly, in a tone she didn’t know. “Amber, look at me!” And when she did not at once do so, his arm came round her and turned her forcibly towards him. Holding her, he studied her undefended face. “I thought so,” he said at length. “Amber, my dear, do you know that you are a complete angel and darling?” He continued to hold her and look at her; then, deliberately, he kissed her cold bright face. “You know I do know you—rather well,” he said. Shifting his arm from her shoulders to her waist, he turned her round to face the mountains, their snowy summits shining in the level rays of the low sun. “Look at that!” he said, and kissed her again. “And we both love the same things really, don’t we?”
She had no words to answer with. The world had turned to music—the snowy city, held by the strength of the impassive wall, the mountains of an incredible pearl-colour, shining across the blue-white of the darkening plain, all these flooded into her consciousness, to ring there in an incommunicable harmony of bliss. It was so, then; Heaven had opened; here was certainty, rapture and peace. No words and no need of words—only silence, in which that sense of music was spreading like a flood. Driving home in two private rickshas which they found waiting outside an opium-house, she was glad to be alone to listen. Oddly enough, the thought of Pei-t’ai-ho, and all her doubts and questionings there, returned to her vividly on the ride—but she felt an almost patronising pity for those poor old days. Now she knew. Lying awake, that night, too overwrought with happiness for sleep, she went over in her mind, again and again, those moments on the Wall—Rupert’s arm round her, his kiss, his words, his strange new voice as he said “Amber.” The more she thought of them, the more utterly satisfying they seemed. It was true he had not mentioned marriage; but what of that? That wasn’t the main thing. He loved her, and she loved him. They loved the same things, too. Towards morning she sank into an unconsciousness that was hardly sleep, so vivid still in it was the sense of a pure space walled in with hills of pearl, ringing with music, in which a face leaned above her and a new voice spoke the ultimate secrets of love.
Chapter Twenty-three
WHILE a theory is in the making, the maker lives, if it is an important one, in a state of tension and uncertainty, balancing probabilities and weighing hypotheses; but once it is completed it ceases to be an intellectual exercise and becomes part of the solid foundation on which we build up the rest of life.
So Amber now stood four-s
quare on a new happy certainty which released fresh energy for everything else. The training of the griffins went steadily forward. She was much at the temple, eating Chinese chow and sitting round the blazing fire at night, while Aunt Bessie played patience, Joe talked, and Uncle Bill, with great concentration, worked through piles of papers; and waking in the morning in a room so cold that she had to hide her nose in the bedclothes to thaw the tip till the boys came in at 6 A.M. to light the coke fire. Their batterings and hangings in the grate she heard with warm, sleepy pleasure; they roused her to another spell of delightful activity—not, as so often in middle-age, to a weary bracing of oneself to shoulder the drab burden of another day.
She saw, if anything, a little less of Rupert than before—she was so busy with the horses, as the cold un-spring-like March of Peking came on. Rupert knew about the stable, which had become an open secret, and actually showed a rather detached interest in it, spiced as usual with a certain animus. “Coming to skate at the Pei-Hai tomorrow, you?” he would ask at the close of some evening gathering, as he helped her into her cloak or saw her to the car—“or have you got to jockey?” “Oh, Rupert, tomorrow I must ride—it’s Gin’s day for his long gallop. Can’t we go Thursday? They’ll only be exercising with the mafoos then.”
“No, Thursday I’m playing badminton—never mind,” Rupert would say, a little sourly.
“Rupert dear, you know I’d love to—but I must ride Gin myself, now Mulholland’s laid up.” (Mulholland had influenza that spring.) “Joe’s too heavy.”
“Yes, yes—okay by me,” Rupert would answer. And Amber would drive off, still in reasonable contentment. It was frightful to miss a walk with Rupert, or to contrarier him in any way, but it didn’t matter. They were safe; nothing really mattered any more. She had become as blandly unquestioning now about Rupert’s state of mind as she had formerly been scrupulous, scrutinising and doubtful—nothing shook her serene, unreasoning security.
Nugent, watching her, did not share this security. He saw that something fresh had happened, something to give her that still look of supported happiness. But he looked in vain for signs of its equivalent in Rupert—in Joe he never even sought for them—and speculated, a little gloomily, as to what was going on. Then the Marshal’s renewed activities in connection with the customs revenue took him away to Shanghai, and for three weeks he was too busy to think much of anything else.
He returned on a Saturday, and on Sunday he and Joanna drove out to one of M. Rothstein’s paper-hunt lunches. “The niece has arrived,” Joanna said to him on the way.
“What niece?”
“The Minister’s niece.”
“Didn’t know he had a niece,” said Nugent, looking vacant.
“Nugent, you are vague! He’s been talking about her all the winter.”
“Not to me,” said Nugent. “What’s she like?”
“I haven’t seen her yet, but Rupert says she’s rather nice; he knew her in Washington.”
“Why Washington?” Nugent wanted to know.
“The mother’s an American—she married James’s brother. He’s dead—George Boggit, you know. She’s madly rich, I believe,” said Joanna, producing these rather disjointed items of information like one who consults a card-index. “Anyhow, she’ll be there today.”
“Then we can give her the once-over,” said Nugent. “Is the mother here too?”
“Oh, rather—a portentous woman; I called on Thursday, but the girl was out,” said Joanna, thus completing her compte-rendu of the female Boggits.
In the crowded rooms at the Rothsteins’ villa Nugent had an opportunity to study these new additions to Peking society. He soon saw why Joanna had described Mrs. Boggit as portentous. She was a big, tall woman with an imperial profile under iron-grey hair, superbly dressed, holding her massive figure magnificently; not palpably American in appearance, except for the excellence of her clothes and carriage, not noticeably so in her speech, save for its torrential and overpowering abundance. She talked in long sentences, like an orator at a public funeral, a thing English people never do; even to hear it makes them wriggle internally, and Nugent, sitting next to the lady at lunch, wriggled and even writhed before the meal was out.
Miss Daphne Boggit was quite different. She was small and pale and perfectly European in every way. Her light hair was smeared round her head as close and shining as treacle; her scarlet lips and nails, her clothes, her smile, her gestures, all had the hard smooth finish of a piece of highly polished cornelian. This was her first introduction to Peking in bulk, as it had been Amber’s last year, but unlike Amber, she was wholly at her ease, accepting introductions with cool poise, making little remarks, and talking to Rupert, Nugent noticed, as an old friend. He had some speech of her himself, and listened with rather sour amusement when she made to him three or four brief pronouncements on Chinese character and politics. A regular pseudo-highbrow, he said to himself, listening to statements whose origin he recognised, with all her gambits taped out. “You read——, I see,” he said rather unamiably, naming a well-known writer on China. She was unabashed. “Yes—but he’s the goods, isn’t he?”
“If you like publicists’ opinions, yes.”
She was quick, he granted, in her attempt to recover lost ground. “What do you recommend, instead?”
“Personally I prefer the views of novelists, if you must take things at second-hand.”
“Ah—because Art is more disinterested?”
God, what a girl! It was rather near to what he meant, which added to Nugent’s distaste.
“No—because their eyesight is better—and often their prose,” he said, escaping.
Waiting for the start below the Ta To-tzu, in the sand and the bitter wind, Nugent observed that Benenden was again with Miss Boggit, explaining the proceedings and showing her round. Suddenly he remembered their first paper-hunt last year, and how Rupert had then squired Amber; and a little chill of apprehension ran through him as he heard the newcomer repeatedly drawling out “But Rupert——” with that rather adenoidal inflexion, placed at the back of the nose, which so many young women seem to regard as a social asset. Amber was with Joe, who was going to ride Port in a paper-hunt for the first time; presently they came up together, Joe in his old orange waistcoat, and Nugent noticed with fresh distaste how the newcomer ran her eye over Mr. Hawtrey’s splendid presence with cool practised appraisal. Joe apparently noticed it too—during the little spate of talk following the introductions he bent to Nugent’s ear, muttering, with a nod in Miss Boggit’s direction— “Straight from Tsavo! Pure-bred man-eater.” Nugent chuckled—this vein of rather vulgar shrewdness was, to him, one of Joe’s most endearing traits. When Joe went off to mount, Amber, who was also in riding-dress, took off her fur coat and handed it to Rupert—“Hang on to that, Rupert, will you? I’m just going to have a last look at Port.” There was a confiding simplicity about the action, small as it was, which revived Nugent’s sense of apprehension—as Amber and Joe walked off together he heard Miss Boggit say to Rupert, “Is she one of his sweetie-pets?”
“No—they’re running a stable together; she’s a marvellous horsewoman,” Rupert replied, in a rather cold voice, which Nugent heard with relief.
“Oh, is she? She’s quite terribly pretty,” observed Miss Boggit. “That baby manner suits her too—rather clever.”
Rupert made no reply; the riders were beginning to line up, and he pointed out the various notable figures to his companion. Amber presently came back for her coat, and stood with them as they watched the start. Port took the first jump beautifully, and she turned to Rupert with some enthusiastic comment.
“Yes—marvellous,” Miss Boggit said. “Rupert darling, how much longer must we go on lousing around in this appalling wind and this dastardly sand? Can’t we go and sit in a car till they come back?”
“No, you must see the finish,” said Rupert firmly. “It’s quite against the rules to sit in cars. You can walk about.” And walk about they all did, t
ill the race finished. Joe was fourth, but was “on the card” and seemed very well satisfied.
As the Grant-Howards drove home: “Well, what do you think of them?” Joanna asked her husband.
“She’s got thick ankles,” said Nugent non-committally. Joanna, as they lurched over the well-known bumps in the dusty road beside the canal, stared out at the now familiar spectacle of the ice-cutters hewing at the harvest of putrid ice, which looked deceptively blue and clean, and the women at the water-holes hauling up dripping wicker buckets, which left a trail of dark round spots in the deep dust as they were borne up the bank. Presently she spoke again. “I shall dislike it very much if that little arriviste does Amber down,” she said.
Nugent was startled. Joanna had never spoken so definitely about Amber and Rupert before, and some curious half-shy delicacy about the girl’s concerns, since he had received her confidence at T’ang-shan, had prevented him from opening the subject.
“Oh, you noticed them too?” he said, really rather relieved to get Joanna’s opinion.
“Noticed them! It was like Writing on the Wall,” said Joanna. “I wish it was Joe,” she added in a moment, “he’s as stupid as an owl, but still——”
Nugent found this inconsecutive utterance perfectly clear. Remembering Joe’s remark about Miss Boggit, he repeated it to his wife, and they laughed together. “Yes, Joe’s got that kind of sense,” Joanna said. “Rupert hasn’t. He’s morally very stupid, you know, Nugent. He’s not independent—and then he’s so cross!”
Nugent, for once, did not defend Rupert from this general indictment, and they drove home in rather gloomy silence.