Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  Will you tell me, you philosophers, where in those moments was Laura Leroy? In her long relaxed body, resting on the sunbaked rocks above the Hun-ho? Or in the rooms and gardens of that manor house in Oxfordshire, where her spirit followed after and watched her children? If you tell me that she was certainly in China, then you make the seat of reality the body – would you wish to say that? And yet if she was in England, who was it that the Professor saw when he presently scrambled round the promontory, in search of a picture for his camera? He saw a woman sitting under a rock with a lapful of letters, staring straight before her, the marks of tears on her face. He saw her, and he had a strong wish to speak to her, for her face was sensitive and intelligent, and he was cruelly bored. But he must have seen too that she was not really there – though her eyes looked towards him, looked at his face, he could not get into her eyes, within a few yards of her as he was; for her, he was not there. Professor Vinstead, being a psychologist, may have known the answer about reality – anyhow he scrambled back as quietly as he could by the way he had come, leaving his word, whatever it was, unspoken, and rejoined the others.

  It became hotter than ever. The heat off the sunwarmed rocks seemed to strike the air in a series of vibrations, made audible in the shrill persistent voices of the crickets. Everyone grew restless. Derek and Judith climbed down from their patch of shade, cramped and stiff, to stretch their legs on level ground. There was no sign of the donkeys. It was Lilah who made the suggestion that they might be cooler if they crossed to the other bank, away from the heated hillside. Any change was welcome, and the idea was applauded; they could, in any case, save time by getting the luggage across. The ferrymen, Derek and Touchy carted the suitcases and knapsacks along the steep little path to the boat. This was an extremely Stone-Age looking affair, with square sloping ends and a flat bottom; a stout post, standing mast-like at one end, carried the steel hawser which crossed the river from bank to bank. It was all rather dirty and smelt of donkeys; they seated themselves cautiously on the low sides and began their voyage. Halfway across, ‘Why, we’ve left Laura behind!’ exclaimed Mrs Nevile. ‘Has anyone seen her?’

  ‘She’s up there on the rocks, reading,’ Vinstead replied. ‘We need not disturb her, need we, as we aren’t going on?’

  Something in the words or tone made Mrs Nevile look at him with some attention. Why should he not want Laura disturbed? He hadn’t spoken three words to her! But he gave no further explanation; his face, lean, lined, intellectual and somehow sympathetic in spite of the dry Cambridge precision of his expression and manner, returned her glance with a sort of friendly blankness as he made some remark about the boat. As they drew further across they could see Mrs Leroy’s figure, her dark hat and pale shirt making a sharp patch of brown and white on the yellow hillside. Touchy hailed her with a yell, shattering the sunny silence – the patch never moved or stirred. ‘She’s in one of her dreams, I expect,’ said Lilah in her flat drawling tone. ‘Leave her alone.’ It was La Touche who stared this time. He was not accustomed to having young women use the categorical imperative to him with quite such casual abruptness; still less did he relish being told how to behave to Mrs Leroy. In a world which they both found rather alien and arid in many ways, Touchy had always felt that he had more in common with Laura than most people; it had been his pleasure and his secret pride to understand her rather well, to raid her capital of ideas and make her put them into currency; in an unobtrusive way he had been the Member for Mrs Leroy, so to speak. It had all been as unsentimental as it was in Touchy’s character to be with any woman. In a society where flirtations were almost de rigueur and liaisons as common as tea parties, Mrs Leroy preserved a graceful discretion in her personal conduct, in spite of a rather haughty freedom of ideas and speech. She gave the impression that she behaved as she did from fastidious personal choice rather than from principle, which possibly accounted for her attraction for admitted rakes like Derek and Henri Delache.

  Touchy, therefore, looked at Miss Milne with some disfavour. He had not liked her from the start. He liked at least a little subtlety, and she was not subtle – her beauty was aggressive, her silence was aggressive, and when she did speak it appeared that her speech was aggressive too. Even her plan for crossing the river proved not to be so good after all. The further bank, when they had disembarked on it, was low and muddy, and offered nothing at all, not even heated rocks, to sit upon; except for the damp foreshore every foot of soil was cultivated – dusty, hot and neat. Its full disagreeableness had just been established when Touchy raised a sudden cry, ‘Corn in Egypt! There are the asses!’

  Indeed, round the corner of the bluff across the river some little grey forms were seen moving towards the ferry, escorted by blue-clad drivers. Leaving the luggage on the shore the party joyfully boarded the boat once more, and ferried back across the stream to meet them. But even as they approached the bluff a chill of disillusionment came over their hopes. There were only four donkeys! And from the prolonged and almost passionate discussion which ensued between the General, the ferrymen and the donkey boys it emerged inexorably that they were all booked – booked completely and finally for some Wai-kuo-jen (foreigner) who was coming later.

  The morale of the party was still further shattered by this fresh blow. Miss Hande had not spoken for nearly an hour – nor had Lilah, except for her remark to Touchy. Judith and Little Annette and their attendant swains alone showed any trace of animation or enjoyment. It was Judith who suggested that they should at least accompany the unknown foreigner’s asses to the further bank again, because she ‘liked going in the boat’. The others, for lack of anything better to do, acceded to her suggestion – at least, as Touchy remarked when they once more swung out into the current, they were getting plenty of yachting! It was cooler on the water, too, and when the foreigner’s donkeys had been disembarked the ferrymen were easily persuaded, for about threepence, to pole them out into midstream and keep them there, swinging easily in the brown current below the hawser, pending the arrival of their transport.

  From her perch on the promontory Mrs Leroy saw them swinging there. She had come out of what Lilah called ‘her dream’, the profound and trance-like absorption in the other half of her life into which her letters had plunged her, and was once more awake to the present world. Her eyes rested with pleasure on the scene before her. Beyond the river a wide stretch of alluvial flat ran up into the hills, brown and level, curiously sprinkled with young isolated poplars whose round fluffy tops resembled puffs of green shrapnel loose in the air, so inconspicuous were their straight slender boles. On her right the hot yellow outline of the bluff, curving round, cut off this view with theatrical abruptness; downstream, on her left, wide sand flats, glittering like water in the heat, gave place gradually to the dusty distances of the Peking plain – she could just see, far away, the outline of the Red Temple on its ridge above the river. Behind the green puffs of shrapnel rose the hills, lavender, pink, creamy, grey, with sinister black smears where the coal seams ran out on to the face, sharply coloured even in the distance under the pouring glittering brilliance of the intense light, detailed beyond European belief in the desiccating clearness of the bone-dry air of Central Asia. The delicate strange beauty of the whole landscape struck powerfully on her senses, rousing her to an active delight. What was the quality in this Chinese scene which so moved her, she wondered? She remembered with curious distinctness the distress she had felt during the first months of her sojourn in Peking at the sheer unfamiliarity of the face of Nature. Her mind, accustomed to draw nourishment from the well-known scenes of England, the great elms standing round the quiet fields, the broad sweep of distant downs, the white roads winding over de Wint-like skylines, dotted with rick and barn, to the huddle of red village roofs, had ranged eagerly, vainly, over the Chinese countryside, finding no resting place. She remembered how alien at first had seemed these dusty flat fields, unmarked by hedge or tree, and the prevailing brown tone of the landscape; how unnatural the sharpn
ess of outlines in crystal-dry air, the vivid colour of far-off mountain shapes – till her very spirit had sickened for green, for the touch of dew, for the soft aqueous blue of distances in a moist climate. The stylised formal beauty of it she had seen at once – what had been lacking was beauty in familiarity, the richness of association entwined with sights and scents, going back through the quiet swing of the seasons to the enormous days and tiny pleasures of childhood; going back deeper and further still, blood of her English blood and bone of her English bone, to the very roots of life. Cut off from all that, planted down in a life as strange as the world she looked upon, she had wilted within like an uprooted plant. She could still remember her own astonishment at the depth of her distress, at finding how much the spirit depends for its strength on the changing but familiar beauty without, the face of the earth, the changeful face of the sky. But gradually the alien beauty of China had awakened its own response in her, and now this scene too, under the blazing untempered light, had power to nourish her spirit. The eastern changes of the seasons, the sudden swing and rush from brown earth to a high waving sea of green, the autumn gold of willows, the pictures of Chinese country life – spring tillage, the blindfold oxen treading out the grain on the round threshing floors, the patient gathering of the stumps of maize and kaoling for fuel as winter approached, had the comfort of familiarity, brought their own sense of stability and strength.

  What is it, she pondered, shifting her seat on the yellow rock, and sending the lizards shooting away with her movement – what is this sustenance that we draw from scenery? Why does the spirit live so much through the eye? Two lines of Robert Bridges came into her mind:

  Man’s happiness, his flaunting honeyed flower of soul

  Is his loving response to the wealth of Nature.

  Yes, it is the ‘loving response,’ she thought – that there must be, to nourish the flower of the soul; and until one learned to make that response to an alien nature, the spirit withered. But now—! She stretched out her arms, exulting in her solitude; in the fierce heat of the sun, striking through the skin deep into muscle and sinew, in her sense of companionship with that heated landscape, so fiercely illuminated. She could see the peasants in the fields across the river, sharp notes of blue on the brown earth, and her mind followed them. ‘It is different here, all the same,’ she thought. ‘At home we have our own roots in the life of the soil; when I see men ploughing in Oxfordshire I know that I am part of their life, as they are of mine. None of us can say that out here. We have no roots in the life of this soil – we’re like cactuses, feeding on air.’ Her thoughts drifted on, following this theme and that – to people at home, to Aubrey, whose letter lay in her pocket. Presently she saw the ferryboat pull in towards the nearer shore; it disappeared under the yellow foreground of rock, and she forgot about it. She went on thinking of Aubrey, recently gone to take up a Fellowship at Clare. A moment later, over the yellow rocks, the Professor’s head appeared suddenly within a few feet of her. He sat down, took off his topi, wiped his forehead, and looked at her with friendliness on his face. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Cambridge,’ said Mrs Leroy.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PROFESSOR VINSTEAD had not climbed the rocks to offer Mrs Leroy a penny for her thoughts. He had volunteered to summon her down to a consultation. The temporary lessee of the four donkeys had turned up, and proved to be the Iberian Minister, also bound for Chieh T’ai Ssu – a tall heavy man, with ingratiating manners and tight yellow kid boots. He immediately placed one donkey at the disposal of the ladies; the quantity of luggage which accompanied him made Judith doubt if he ought to spare even one, and his boots quite clearly precluded the possibility of his walking eight miles. Mrs Nevile was becoming anxious to get on to Chieh T’ai Ssu somehow, to see whether the beds and food, sent out in advance with the servants, had shared the unknown fate of Shang and the donkeys. She and General Nevile had also observed the portent of the double armlets worn by the soldiers at the roadside temple, and this indication of military unrest made them slightly uneasy. On the other hand, it was essential that someone should wait to escort the luggage when the Mo-shih-k’ou donkeys should arrive. It was decided that one party should push on – the young people and Touchy walking, Lilah Milne and Mrs Nevile taking turns on the Iberian’s ass; while the General, whose lameness made the distance impossible for him, and Miss Hande, who was no walker, should wait for the ass team. Laura agreed to remain to keep Miss Hande company, and the Professor, rather to their surprise, decided to wait too.

  The luggage party, seated in the boat, watched the advance guard receding into the distance across the flat open country – Judith and Derek striding ahead, Lilah looking more like a Hindu goddess than ever, perched under her sunshade on the minute ass; Henri Delache, his Trilby at a jaunty angle, squiring Miss Ingersoll assiduously. The General fixed his monocle on them with a certain glum amusement.

  ‘That fellow Delache!’ he at length ejaculated.

  ‘What of him?’ inquired Miss Hande, surprised.

  ‘Elegant!’ He threw an ironic contempt into the word.

  ‘He struck me as rather an interesting type,’ observed Miss Hande.

  ‘He’s a regular Frenchman – carries that boulevardier air with him wherever he goes; but I’m not sure that I think it particularly interesting.’

  ‘Why, not in itself – but it’s surely only a superficial aspect,’ pursued Miss Hande, her lorgnette also fixed on the now distant figures. ‘He seems to be very much attracted by Miss Ingersoll,’ she went on. ‘I hope he’s a desirable personality. She’s such a wonderful character.

  ‘I know nothing of his personality,’ said General Nevile briefly. ‘You must ask Mrs Leroy here about that. She makes friends with all the rips.’

  The Professor, at this last statement, turned and looked at Mrs Leroy with some attention. She had taken off her hat, in spite of the sun; her long thin face, with the minimum of makeup and framed in her dark hair, wore a look of almost sibylline meditation as she sat trailing her fingers in the water. She had not in the least the air of a person who specialised in rips. If she heard what the General said, which seemed doubtful, she paid no attention whatever.

  ‘Mrs Leroy, Miss Hande wants a character sketch of Master Delache,’ said the General, hoping for some distraction.

  Laura looked up. ‘Henri?’ she said. ‘He’s very French.’

  ‘Yes, we see that; but Miss Hande wants to know if he’s worthy of Little Annette,’ said the General, with his usual Edwardian chuckle.

  The words, ‘Do you mean as a lover or as a husband?’ sprang to Laura’s lips, but she did not say them, reflecting that the Professor looked as if he might be a little prim, and that she had already treated Miss Hande rather roughly in the car. She had herself speculated a good deal about Henri and Little Annette in the last few days, uncertain whether this were merely one of his usual flirtations or something more important. Henri Delache was a thorough and serious-minded devotee of the vie amoureuse, but interspersed his major activities with a number of minor flirtations on what he was pleased to call the English Model – they were, so to speak, the intellectual side of the thing, and he said that they kept his hand in for Englishwomen. ‘C’est un fait singulier, et d’ailleurs assez rigolo, but you must think always that we admire your mind as well as your body, you Englishwomen, or you are not satisfied,’ he said once to Laura. ‘Mais ça n’a rien à faire!’ It was the more rigolo, according to Henri, because Englishwomen were physically superb – ‘c’est inouï, leurs torses! – ces muscles! – on dirait des déesses grecques’ – and intellectually on the whole rather dull, without subtlety and therefore without mental attraction. ‘Et l’idée qu’elles se font de l’amour, ma chère! C’est d’une banalité qui frise l’imbécillité!’ All the same, he valued his experiences with Americans and Englishwomen for a particular thrill afforded him by their physical self-control. ‘Quand vous avez possédé une femme la
veille, et elle fait semblant de ne pas vous reconnaître ou à peine – c’est excitant, cela!’ This was a unique feature, Henri declared, not elsewhere observable, ‘même parmi les Russes.’ However, among the multitude of his affairs Laura had never yet seen Henri Delache make love or anything like it to a marriageable girl, and she wondered a good deal what he was up to.

  None of these reflections, however, would be very suitable or helpful to Miss Hande.

  ‘Henri is affectionate,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘and considerate, and very sensible. And rather rich,’ she added.

  ‘Does he care about intellectual things?’ Miss Hande pursued. ‘Annette Ingersoll is a real intellectual type.’

  ‘Most Frenchmen are intellectual, aren’t they?’ said Laura a little impatiently. She was secretly convinced that Henri would probably consider Miss Ingersoll’s rather jejune intellectuality to be ‘d’une banalité qui frise l’imbécillité’ – as indeed she did herself. Whatever else he admired in her, it wasn’t that! He might conceivably be caught by the glow of her youth, by her bright enthusiasm, her warm affectionate happiness – much more probably by her lovely elastic figure; but he would have the minimum of respect for the History of the Novel in all Ages, unless she was much mistaken.