Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  ‘Did you have a nice ride up?’ Laura asked, shaking Houbigant powder over her arms and neck.

  ‘M-m – yes. How neat you are!’ said Lilah, sitting down on a vacant space on the k’ang. This remark seemed to call for no reply, and Laura made none, but sat down on the bed to wash and powder her feet before putting on a pair of scarlet leather travelling slippers.

  ‘Where is everybody? Are they all all right?’ she next inquired.

  ‘They all sort of scattered when we got here. Our two lots of lovers are very much all right, I should say!’ said Lilah, taking one of Laura’s cigarettes and lighting it with her air of rather sleepy amusement. ‘Properly boiling up. They all seemed to need to hold hands to cross those little plank bridges as we came along, and the last I saw of Master Henri and Little Annette up here was sitting in one of those little corner pagodas, telling one another’s fortunes by palmistry!’ She laughed. ‘And Judith and Derek were drinking cocktails on the steps of one of those temple affairs and talking about religion. Have you noticed, Laura, how religion nearly always comes in at the beginning of love affairs?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t.’ But on thinking it over she at once saw that this, like most of Lilah’s observations, was accurate enough.

  ‘Oh yes, it does. It’s a serious symptom,’ said Lilah, who was in an unusually conversational mood.

  ‘I don’t think it will be much good for Little Annette to talk to Henri about religion,’ said Laura, absently uttering her thoughts aloud, while she pulled out from under her pillow a scarlet embroidered jacket and put it on.

  ‘Not it! I say, how superb you look in that jacket affair! Laura,’ the girl went on, with a sudden change of tone, ‘I suppose Mrs N. can look after that Annette child all right? Because I don’t think she can look after herself a bit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Laura.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean stop her being seduced,’ replied Lilah, with her usual flat calm. ‘I imagine she has just wits enough for that herself. I mean stop her being too much hurt. I should think the surface she presents to that young man just now is pretty tender, and I can’t imagine his understanding that in the least. You look at her face at dinner. She’s coming alive suddenly – just today, just up here, really – like an Iris stylosa opening in a warm room.’

  ‘Can one stop people being hurt? And had one better?’ Laura asked this question more of herself than of Lilah. In her experience all the richest and most valuable things were mixed up, somehow or other, with being hurt. Sooner or later everything that was nice hurt as well: love affairs hurt (like the devil); marriage hurt; children hurt – she half shut her eyes at the thought of children, as if to shut out Tim and Sarah and the intolerable pain of separation from them. And directly from being hurt, it seemed to her, sprang all the qualities she valued most, in others or in herself – courage; a measure of insight, and self-knowledge; and the secret sense of strength, of the indestructibility of the human spirit in the face of disasters, which is the most precious possession of all. All these things could only be had at a price, and cash in advance at that – the price of being hurt, again and again, and sometimes almost to the point of extinction. Happiness – she thought of Bridges – was the flaunting honeyed flower of the soul; but the root was pain, and the twin fruits knowledge and strength. She thought again of Little Annette; it was difficult to set her in any relation to this bleak doctrine. And it struck her with sudden force – how cunningly the life of man is arranged! If pain were not so indissolubly bound up with all the joys he pursues, who would seek it or reap its fruits?

  But Lilah, watching her with steady blue eyes, said, ‘Perhaps one can’t. And perhaps some grown-up people one had better not. But if you can help it you don’t let a downy chicken be hurt, Laura, or a kitten when its tail is still triangular. And she’s like that.’ And out she went, very definite somehow in spite of her beauty and the trailing shawl that she had thrown over her frock. Laura merely stopped to fill her cigarette case, and then followed her.

  A few minutes later Professor Vinstead also left his room and strolled out on to the terrace. The evening light laid a deeper brilliance on everything it touched. The valley below was in shadow now, blue and clear; the terrace was in shadow too, but the green and golden roofs of some of the great shrines behind it caught the last sun like jewels, and the hills away across the river glowed with an astonishing enamelled vividness in clear tones of amethyst and rose and topaz. The near end of the terrace was closed by a high wall with tiled eaves – over it rose an immense white pine, its snowy trunk and branches shining among the great trusses of dark-green needles. The white pine is the most improbable of trees – too good to be true; it is impossible to believe at first that some ingenious Chinese has not sandpapered its smooth trunk and boughs, and then given it several coats of whitewash. The Professor pushed open a door in the wall and walked through. An inner terrace, narrower and more secluded, lay beyond. The flagstones of the nearer end were uneven from the thrust of the roots of the great tree, whose white trunk rose shining from the pavement – further on was a memorial tablet standing next to a small yellow fir; somehow the clipped and twisted tree had almost the same formality and permanence as the inscribed marble on its square carved pediment. Rising above the edge of the terrace stood a little pagoda, octagonal in shape; from each angle of its fluted stone frills hung a small bronze bell. He leant over the marble balustrade and reaching out, hit one of the bells lightly to set it in motion – it rang with a thin small note as it swung to and fro. At the extreme end of this inner terrace a little turret projected from the wall for several feet, roofed with a tiled cupola supported on small stone pillars, and approached by two or three steps. The Professor saw that its pillared openings would command a view of the terrace front, and make a wonderful frame for pictures of the valley and the further hillsides beyond, now spread out above the balustrade; with an eye to possible photographs on the morrow he moved towards it. But at the doorway he paused. The pillars framed, indeed, the picture he had foreseen – the coloured outline of the shining hills bisecting the level line of the plain, all in a glory of late light – but they framed another picture as well. In one of the openings stood Mrs Leroy, in her scarlet slippers and bizarre crimson jacket – as he watched she leant over the parapet and plucked a spray of blossom from a tree which bloomed high against the wall. She bent her head to smell the spray, and stood again, holding it, looking out at the view. So framed in the pillared opening, outlined against the sky and the hills, with flowers in her hands and an air of meditation on her grave face, she reminded him of some North Italian Madonna, set in a porticoed building on the slope of the Alps. The unexpected picture struck strangely on Vinstead’s heart, as though someone had dealt him a soft blow. Something made her turn her head and look at him. ‘Don’t move,’ he said involuntarily.

  ‘Why?’ she said, but she did not move. Nor did she smile, but her gravity was not unfriendly. Vinstead could not have answered her question for his life – he had spoken without thought or intention. For most of us certain places mean one person, and he may have had an obscure foreknowledge that for him Chieh T’ai Ssu was to mean, ultimately, Laura Leroy. He certainly wanted to see her there, as she stood, thoroughly. We all know occasionally this need to stamp a particular image on the mind, even though at the time we may not recognise its source. In a moment, a little self-consciously, he said something about a photograph tomorrow. ‘So difficult to get the right figure for architecture.’ A whistle sounded – Touchy’s signal. ‘I believe that means that dinner is ready,’ he added.

  ‘All right – I’ll come. Don’t wait.’ She turned back for a last look at the view, still pondering over Lilah’s remarks about Little Annette – troubled by them. ‘But who can stop lovers loving, here?’ she thought, smelling her spray of flowers. She turned to go, assuming that the Professor had gone, and dreading another messenger – people were always pursuing Mrs Leroy for the meals which she forgot.

 
But the Professor had waited.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN PROFESSOR VINSTEAD was first told by the Neviles that he was to go to the Hills on a weekend picnic, his mind had immediately conjured up those rather unpleasing visions of sandwiches, sardines, and ruined coffee in thermos flasks with which the word is usually associated in English minds, prolonged over three painful days and nights. It was, therefore, with some surprise that he found himself sitting down at a table correctly spread with linen, glass, and a profusion of silver, being offered sherry by one white-robed manservant, and clear soup with a pigeon’s egg in it by another. How such things were produced in the heart of the hills, twenty miles from anywhere, was a mystery with which his mind, dulled by fatigue and hours spent in the open air, refused to grapple for the moment. It was sufficiently astonishing to be dining in such a place. The tables were set under the stone pine with the leaning trunk, and commanded the immense vista of the terrace, with the narrowing perspective of the marble balustrade along one side, and hints of great shrines on the other. A monk in black was pacing slowly to and fro in the distance, grave and dignified; another European party was dining on a raised platform a little way off, and their voices rose on the air, mingled now and then with a deep distant note of drums and gongs, booming from somewhere out of sight. As broiled crayfish with Hollandaise sauce succeeded the soup, and white wine the sherry, the Professor turned his attention from his surroundings to his companions. Mrs Nevile, sparkling and animated, was alternately inquiring after his comfort and exchanging laughing insults with La Touche, who accused her of having captured the affections of the Iberian Minister. Judith Milne was pouring out italics to the General, her sister and Miss Hande (living up to their several reputations) were eating their dinner in silence; Fitzmaurice was rather quiet, looking now at Judith, tonight definitely in one of her pretty moods, and now, almost inquiringly, at Mrs Leroy, who was telling Henri and Miss Ingersoll about Niu’s misdeeds in the matter of the pavilion. About the time of the advent of grilled chicken à l’américaine (with Russian salad) the conversation was suddenly dominated by rats.

  ‘But, my dear Laura, you will not sleep in this room if’e says there are rats? Quelle horreur!’ Henri’s high voice rose, shrill with protest, above the others.

  Laura, eating her chicken, said she didn’t believe there were any – they were an invention of Niu’s to exculpate himself.

  ‘A few rats do no harm to anyone,’ said the General calmly. ‘They have to reach three figures before they are dangerous.’

  ‘But, my dear William,’ protested Nina, horrified at this further threat to the peace and prosperity of her already much-tried party, ‘no one has ever seen rats even in one figure up here, so why theorise in that horrible manner? I assure you’ – she turned anxiously to Miss Hande and the Professor – ‘there really never are any.’

  ‘Perhaps the rats will be our bad joss,’ said Vinstead to Laura, smiling – but the small smile was like a gesture of intimacy, and it did not escape Nina. She seized thankfully, however, on the bad joss as an escape from the more menacing subject, and the bonze and his beads swamped the rats at one end of the tables, though Henri at the other was heard declaring stubbornly, ‘I shall ’ave my bed carried outside – I ’ate rats.’

  After the macédoine of fruit and cream mousse came coffee and liqueurs. The servants placed red-shaded candles on the tables, which lit up the faces round them with a shadowy glow, touching off outlines and hollows and accentuating the play of expression as in a screen photograph. Mrs Leroy leant back and studied the ones in which she was most interested at the moment. Little Annette – Lilah was quite right; there was a delicate warmth, an unfolding, an almost visible bloom of happiness on her face, for all her little conventional tricks of smiles and movements of the head – something unprotected, childish, touching. Henri’s face, on the other hand, gave away nothing but what he chose – he was being gallant and extravagant, and was obviously willing to appear so – that was all you could see. She looked at the other couple. Judith was very much ‘on her day’, that was clear; her cloudy fair hair was pushed off her forehead with an even more windswept air than usual; there was colour in her face, and some fresh emphasis about the always decisive lines of her eyebrows and nostrils – something assured, triumphant, almost warrior-like in her whole aspect. ‘Être aimée embellit beaucoup!’ Touchy whispered to Laura, following her glance. She smiled, but without answering, and looked at Derek. With his shining spaniel’s head and brilliant blue eyes he looked healthy and animated, as always, but his face in repose had a look of inquiry, almost of strain. Laura studied him covertly. So Tim perhaps would one day look, when he was in a stew over some young woman – if it was Judith he was stewing over; and she wondered with affectionate concentration just how that was bothering him. How could she teach Tim about life so that he would grow up honest, unafraid and above all responsible? Derek’s irresponsibility was his trouble. ‘Casual! Casual!’ she thought, remembering Sir James, and laughed out loud, suddenly. They all looked at her, but Derek, at whom she was looking, caught her eye and held it in a sort of appeal. As they rose from the tables he moved round to her, but Mrs Nevile was ahead of him – slipping her arm into Laura’s, she claimed her for a stroll with, ‘I simply haven’t seen you today.’

  As they walked along the terrace in the dusk, ‘Well, how do you think it’s going?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Oh, rather well – don’t you?’

  ‘Why yes – I think so. How do you and the Professor get on?’

  ‘Oh, very well – he’s nice,’ said Laura emphatically.

  ‘You’re just wonderful with learned men!’ said Nina admiringly. ‘I think it really looks as if Henri and Little Annette might get engaged on this trip,’ she went on complacently.

  ‘Nina, do you think that’s all right? I’m rather bothered about her,’ said Laura.

  ‘My dear, he’s a wonderful parti if he does decide to marry, and he’s most charming.’

  ‘I daresay, but you know what Henri is. I’m afraid of his making her unhappy.’

  ‘But I really think he’s serious this time,’ Nina Nevile protested.

  ‘All the worse if he is, I should say,’ said Laura brusquely. ‘She’ll almost certainly be miserable if she marries him.’

  ‘Oh, American women are very good at international marriages,’ said Nina airily. ‘They’re adaptable, and they know how to keep their end up.’ She laughed a little consciously. ‘We’re much better at that than you are, my dear.’

  They had turned in their walk and were approaching the tables again. The servants were clearing them, and some of the party still lingered under the leaning pine, smoking on the cushions. As Mrs Leroy and Mrs Nevile came up, Touchy rose to consult Nina about plans. ‘Miss Hande is very anxious to go to T’an Chüeh Ssu – do you think tomorrow or Sunday would be the better day?’

  Derek had risen too, and while Mrs Nevile was engaged with La Touche, he took Laura gently but firmly by the elbow. ‘Come on, come and stroll, wise lily!’ he said in her ear.

  For some time they walked in silence, arm in arm. It was almost dark now – the shapes of the great trees on the terrace were just deeper darknesses with a pattern in them; colour had deserted the buildings, leaving them invisible except for a glimmer of white marble at the base, or an outline of fantastic roof blocked in against the faint grey starshine of the sky. They went up some steps into one of the courtyards above the terrace. It was just possible to make out the dark shapes of the huge bronze incense burners which rose here and there from the pavement, higher than their heads, strange formal symbols of worship; pale and insubstantial as water at dawn, groups of almond trees bloomed shadowy in the dark. Laura paused to smell their faint freshness, holding her face close to the clustering boughs – Derek did the same, and she heard him draw a deep breath.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He did not answer at once, except to press her arm gently. She waited without impatience
. Something was working in him, born of the spring, urged by the stars and the flowering trees towards expression; held back perhaps by the formality of shape, of restrained carven symmetry which surrounded them on all sides, stylised within rigid bounds. No one has yet measured the pressure exercised on our moods and impulses in moments of tension by external things, though everyone has at some time been forced to recognise its existence, if only by the way in which particular emotional states remain linked in our minds with some irrelevant object which was before the eyes at the time. Laura was always aware, at Chieh T’ai Ssu, of these dual influences pressing on her, but she had not yet seen Derek subject to them. He had been there before, but never in the company of a young woman with whom he was beginning to be in love; nor, so far as Laura knew, had he ever yet begun to be in love with anyone who was, so to speak, in earnest about life. She realised this new ferment working in him now, but when he did speak, it was in the light coaxing tones he often used.

  ‘Tell me about her, wise one,’ he said.

  ‘I expect you know more than I do, by now.’

  ‘No – women have their own ways of knowing one another, and their own things to know, that we don’t get at.’