by Bridge, Ann;
Laura was struck by the last words. Judith had managed to hit on the essential thing, Derek’s dawning comprehension of a way of love different to his own, and his first stirrings of desire for it. This was the key to the situation for her, if there was a key. She was impressed, too, with the girl’s courage in facing the facts. Out of the jumble of italics and broken sentences there emerged an attitude so valiant, so sensible and so responsible as to command her respect. And Judith had made no sort of inquiry as to Derek’s attitude, she noted with admiration. Her heart warmed to her niece.
‘Do you want it to go on?’ she asked gently.
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Judith thoughtfully. ‘I believe I could take it on, really. If only I can be wise enough. What I’ve been wondering is whether it would be insincere to – well, to give him a certain amount of rope just now; I mean, not always tell him how utterly dud I think lots of his goings-on are. What do you think?’
Laura found this rather difficult to answer. ‘Could you tell me a little more what you mean?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Judith readily. ‘Well, for instance, he was telling me only yesterday about how amusing someone was – that terrible little Miller creature we see dancing at the hotel sometimes; how at one party she held her dress and let them pour champagne into her cami-knickers at the top and catch it in a wineglass when it came out at the bottom. And I said I really didn’t know whether it was more silly or more disgusting. Because really, Laura!’ She paused for a moment, ‘We can’t go on quarrelling all the time,’ she wound up.
‘Aren’t you ever at peace?’ Laura asked.
‘Oh yes – sometimes it’s quite heavenly; mostly when we just sit and don’t talk much. But you see he wants to do it all by – by touch, as it were – no, not as it were, as it is,’ said the girl, with a little nervous laugh that came out with the effect of a sob. ‘He says, if only I would stay quiet and not keep on thinking and fidgeting, we should find out all about one another that way. But I can’t learn about people only through my body; some of it I must do by talking and thinking. He says …’ She stopped, and when she spoke again Laura could hear in her voice the strain of the compulsion she was putting on herself to get it all out. ‘He says people neglect much too much letting their bodies make friends, and I expect he’s right. Only that isn’t all of it. So what do you think?’ she said again.
There were few things that Laura liked less than acting as mentor. However, in this case the position was thrust on her, and she saw that there was no escape. Judith’s extreme honesty and courage made her wish to help her if she could, and the tones of the girl’s voice warned her that no superficial counsels would do – it had got to be first principles and the real thing.
‘I am sure you are right to try to be as wise as you can,’ she said; ‘but you see already that no amount of wisdom will altogether resolve your difficulties with Derek, because they’re there and they’re genuine.’ She stopped and considered. ‘Something in him is fighting on your side – you’ve seen that too. Well, you must back that up.’
‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked.
‘Like this – don’t think so much about picking holes in his point of view, but go on putting your own as well as you can. I don’t only mean in words – just hold it in your mind.’ She paused, seeking the word that would give Judith what she needed, and then murmured, half to herself:
Love is swift of foot,
Love’s a man of war
And can shoot
And can hit from far.
‘Say that again, will you?’ said Judith as she ended. Laura did so, and there was silence from the other bed for a few minutes. Then she heard the girl say, on a deep breath, ‘Yes – that’s what will do it, if anything will.’
There was a longish pause, after that, before the girl’s voice came again. ‘Laura!’
‘Yes?’
‘Suppose I do, and then in the end it’s all a washout?’
‘It won’t matter,’ said Laura confidently.
‘But I – what do you mean?’
‘I mean your effort won’t have been wasted. Love never is wasted – it’s out of its nature to be wasted.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. You aren’t really afraid of it either. You aren’t a miser.’
‘No-o-o – only it would be a little like having put one’s shirt on an also-ran,’ said Judith a little hesitatingly.
‘Never mind …’ She sought for some way of expressing her strong conviction that the sacrifice of the shirt was at once all-important, and of no importance whatever, and fell back once more on words older and better than her own. ‘Listen: –
That I spent, I had,
That I gave, I have,
That I kept, I lost.
She lay back, then, staring up at the illuminated top-most boughs of the white pine, wondering if she had found the right words after all. No sound came from Judith’s bed for some time. But at last there was a sort of light creaking and shuffling, and Judith’s figure stood over her.
‘Goodnight!’ she said quickly, gave her aunt a light kiss, and slipped back to bed. The cheek that had touched Laura’s was wet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOME HOURS LATER Mrs Leroy woke up, and looked, as the human habit is, at her watch. It was a quarter past three. The moon, lower now, had swung round behind the shoulder of the hill, and the terrace lay in darkness, yet it was not quite dark – the sky looked as if flood-lighted from below by the hidden planet, and had lost the small stars; only the big ones burned like huge steady jewels in the illuminated heavens. There was as yet no sign of the dawn. She lay in the warm freshness of the late end of the night, listening to the complete and utter stillness. Suddenly across this stillness came the distant resonance of a drum – it stopped, and after an interval was repeated.
‘Good heavens! They can’t still be going on with that business,’ she thought lazily to herself; but as the drum sounded again and yet again, curiosity overcame her. Slipping quietly out of bed, she set off to see what was happening. In the dim light from the moon-washed sky she passed along the great terrace and out through the straggling courts beyond; but long before she reached the hall of ordination itself the sea-like alternating rise and fall of chanting, beating with the monotony of waves on the silence, told her that the ceremony was still in progress. On coming to the doorway she went quietly in and sat down on one of the benches as before, aware that according to Chinese ideas she was much more modestly and decorously dressed in her long nightgown and coat (or for the matter of that in jodhpurs) than in any short-skirted European dress.
She saw the seven richly robed figures still sitting round the altar, precisely as they had done five hours previously, chanting in their curious rhythm. In his shadowed corner the old black-robed tea-maker crouched by his brazier, beating at intervals on his drum. The crowd had disappeared, and Mrs Leroy was the only onlooker. Leaning her head against the plastered wall she sat with half-closed eyes, listening. Old as time, regular as the alternation of night and day, incomprehensible as eternity, the music flowed round her, bearing her out into a strange impersonal region where ceremonies, religions, sacraments, all the ancient formalisations of human experience were seen in their true relation to little brittle human life, with its capricious individuality – at once its sum and its support. If the singers had been also in this remote world, she mused, for eight hours, they should indeed know their task, and be priests for ever after their own strange order.
A touch on her arm roused her. The old tea-maker stood at her side, and asked her the time. She showed him her watch – the hands marked five minutes to four. Indicating the hour on the tiny dial with a yellow finger, ‘Tou wan-la!’ (All finish) he said. Mrs Leroy took the hint, and left the pavilion. A change had come over the light since she went in – the stars were fewer and fainter, and a creeping greyness was mixing with the dying moonshine. A light fresh wind had sprung up, heralding the invisible dawn
– she shivered, felt cold and small, chilled within by the bleak immensities into which her mind had been borne by the music, chilled without by the unearthly light and the cold breath of daybreak. Muffling herself closely in her coat she hurried back along the terrace, and crept into bed again.
When she next woke the day was fully come. The first thing she saw as she opened her eyes was the brilliant sunlight splintering off the long needles of the white pine overhead, and glowing warm and golden on the chalky upper branches. Lying on her back, staring idly up at it, she became aware of a sensation of pleasure, like a warmth, stealing through her; a sensation which somehow reminded her of Oxford. Curious! Her half-awakened mind rested lightly on this association, and so captured without destroying it. Yes! – the sunlight in the pine needles reminded her of the way in which the low rays used to shoot level through the curtain fringes above the window in those ugly rooms in Oxford where she stayed in the early days when she went to see Aubrey, and the faint sensation of pleasure to come which clung to that memory resembled her morning feelings with a day of Aubrey in prospect. And rousing herself to search her mind further, she found the Professor in it! She was looking forward, if ever so little, to a day which held opportunities of talking to him again. Smiling with an amused impatience at her folly she decided to get up and go for a walk. The time, her watch showed her, was nearly six. In the next bed Judith was still fast asleep, her cloud of fair hair gilded by the level sunlight, her face, tucked into the pillow like a child’s, wearing that disarmed, rather innocent look, which sleep brings to maturer faces than hers. Mrs Leroy stood looking down at her for a moment, and then slipped away to her own pavilion to dress.
In the courtyard the low sun, striking through a gap in the buildings, touched the group of peach trees about the well head till the blossom burned with a fiery rose, as if incandescent. She stood still to look at it, in a sort of wonder; then her eye fell on the three sleeping figures, still hunched log-like under the trees in their camp beds, and with a little laugh she went into her own room.
The pavilion, with its non-conducting paper lattices, still held the stuffy warmth of yesterday’s heat, and she was glad after a rapid toilet to escape again into the freshness outside. Cool without chill, shot with sunlight, strong and delicately heady as a fine white wine, the air bathed her body through her thin clothes as she walked along the terrace, and thrilled her nerves with a quickening intoxication. The air of North China has this peculiar quality of causing nervous stimulation, which produces quite definite results – the unfortunate social phenomenon known throughout China as ‘Peking quarrels’ is one. Newcomers are particularly affected by it. There comes a lightness, a nimbleness of mind and body, and a sort of emotional exaltation in which the most unusual behaviour seems possible, normal, and delightful. Old hands know this, and are prepared for it and for the depressing reactions which follow, but they feel it nevertheless.
Mrs Leroy was aware of it now as she left the monastery by the main gateway and followed a small path which led up towards the crest of the ridge behind it. Spring morning though it was, the hillside was wintry in aspect, once she had risen above the level of the fruit trees; the coarse tufts of last year’s grass, yellow against the black shaly soil, left no pattern of dew on her shoes (there is no dew in North China), and the sere leaves of autumn still clung to the low scrub of dwarf oaks and crataegus, making a dry metallic rustling as the light air stirred them. Reaching the ridge, she turned and looked back. Chieh T’ai Ssu lay below her now, visible only as a collection of fantastic roofs: jade-green roofs, golden ones, roofs of amber and plum colour; square, round, oblong; fluted, convoluted, tiered – but each lifting its edges to the sky in delicate curves, like skirts swung by the wind or by swift movement. And these roofs with their dancing eaves, jewel-like in colour, fantastic as a ballet in shape, stood up out of a sea of fruit blossom, out of a pink and white foam which eddied like spindrift among and between their fluted curves. She had left spring behind in the temple.
She wandered on up the bare ridge, and sat down on a rock at a high point of it. Below her the Peking plain was spread out in the morning light, an expanse of fawn colour fading into blue – the city itself lay under the sun, and invisible, its position only indicated by the curious outline of the great Dagoba, which stood up like an immense scent bottle, white as a peppermint, from the dusty dazzle of the plain. So she might sit, so she had often sat, looking down on Oxford. Oxford! – the very name, out here, was like a chime of its own bells, pealing out into the blue mist that hangs forever over the spired city in the plain, pencilled with the outline of tower and dome, as one sees it from above – from Shotover, from Horsepath Hill, from Cumnor or Headington or Stowood. Oxford was haunting her mind that morning, after her curious waking memory of it, and she began to think of all her friends there, and then of all the friendships Oxford had ever known, from the great classical ones that got into the books, like those of Colet and More and Erasmus, right down to today – eager friendships of undergraduates; sober friendships, mellow as vintages with age and wisdom, of dons and learned men. And the gay friendships, spiced with amusement, of men and women together. Her fancy, picturing the visible city of stone as she had so often seen it, saw also for a moment a second city, built of these insubstantial yet enduring relationships, these airy edifices of the affections – as varied, rich, and beautiful as the other, and as ancient. Lovely and permanent, it would stand for ever. She sighed, thinking of the ease and integrity, in that city, of the meeting of friend with friend, and contrasting with it the artificiality of so many social encounters in Peking – the farce of calling, of receiving cards left in a box at your gate; the long dull dinners, the fuss over precedence, looking up people’s correct order at table in a book, as you might look up trains in a Bradshaw. She was lucky, she lived in a little oasis of amiable affectionate people, Touchy and Derek and the Neviles; but compared with the riches and variety of intercourse at home it was so little. Something – Judith’s talk the other day, partly, perhaps, and perhaps partly the Professor’s conversation, had suddenly made her homesick for her own friends; she realised afresh how that side of her went always half starved, out here.
An isolated dwarf oak tree stood just below her – its shapely dead leaves, each nearly a foot long, cut a curious brown pattern on the view, threw singular elongated patterns of blue shadow on her very feet, in their white string-soled shoes. As she stared at it with idle concentration something in the strangeness of those leaves, so impossible in England, roused her to a peculiarly sharp sense of the division in her life. The next time she looked down on Oxford from Shotover, she would remember that oak tree! And this would seem reality, this and no other, and England would be the dream; and for this she would then be homesick. She knew it well. She would be suffocated again by England’s smallness and muffling greenness, maddened by its petty irrational humps and hollows, after the masterly geometrical flatness of the China plain; oppressed by its grey dripping skies, after that high light firmament in which the sun glitters like a burnished shield from dawn till evening for nine months of the year. The very people in the streets and lanes would vex her eye by their ugly parti-coloured ungraceful clothes, after the beautiful universal blue garments of the Chinese countryside, the dignified grey and black robes of the towns. And her friends even, her best and dearest, after asking inquisitively whether she knew Wang or Tu personally, and whether China wasn’t very ‘dangerous’, having listened politely to her replies would presently go on to tell her what a good round of golf they had had at Walton last week. No – it was too difficult, it was impossible; she could never make the two halves of her life fuse and fit properly. People should live only one life, and not two – otherwise, in both one was divided, uncertain, incomplete. And in a flash of understanding she realised suddenly why Anglo-Indians congregate in places like Cheltenham, and old China hands frequent the Thatched House Club – it is in a forlorn attempt to keep their most important reality alive
and intact.
Restless, she rose and wandered on, till she reached an isolated spur that stood out into the plain, separated from the main ridge by a narrow saddle. From here she could see the line of mountains swinging round to the north-west, shading away into infinite distance. You must go three hundred miles through those mountains to find plains again, and then they are the rolling uplands fringing the Gobi Desert. Feeling in her pocket for her cigarette case, she pulled out a letter – it was from Aubrey, left there accidentally from yesterday. She read it again. Aubrey rebuked her, gloomily if kindly, for not writing enough, for writing trivially when she did write; and she remembered that other letters of yesterday’s mail, now lying in the pavilion, complained in various ways of the same thing. It was true – she had written little lately, and badly; she had felt oppressed and discouraged by the hopelessness of trying to keep in touch with people by letter, over ten thousand miles of distance. And standing there, on her hilltop, regarding the shadowy mountains, she had a sudden vision of those leagues beyond leagues dividing her from those she loved best. Her mind flew in the sky like a bird – over the Central Asian wastes, empty and silent, over mountains, over the bare Persian uplands, and the green shores of the Caspian; over Europe, murmurous with population and smoky with manufactures, to the narrow ribbon of the Channel, with little England a dark speck on the silver ocean beyond. Over England the smoke was thicker, and the murmur rose to a roar, in which single voices could be heard clearly, raised in complaint: Tim’s and Sarah’s, high and shrill, Aubrey’s deep and gloomy, Grandmère’s piping faintly, Rachel’s and Richard’s flat and definite – all rebuking her, the distant Laura; loved, but careless, inadequate, forgetful.