Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  ‘He wants something, and we can’t find out what it is,’ said the girl as she approached. ‘Come on, Laura.’ She gave her aunt’s arm a little tug.

  Laura spoke to the priest, and then turned to the others.

  ‘It’s the shrine where they do a sort of fortune-telling,’ she said. ‘He only wants to know if you wish to have your fortunes told.’

  ‘Oh yes, come on, do let’s!’ said Judith. Henri and Annette joined them, and the whole party entered the shrine. The bonze carefully closed the doors behind them, and they stood in the cool gloom, heavy with the smell of incense, before a small and rather unimposing Buddha, seated as usual behind a long narrow table full of incense burners and ornaments.

  Judith was first. The bonze, having extracted fifty cents from her, handed her some sticks of incense, which she lit and placed at his direction in the central burner. From the table he then took a tall bronze vase full of narrow slips of bamboo, whose ends only projected an inch above the rim, and holding it almost horizontally, waved it round in a circle till one of the slips fell out. He replaced the slip and handed it out to her.

  ‘You must do it yourself,’ Laura murmured. The girl did so. The slips were about fifteen inches long, and though the projecting ends were exactly alike, lower down they were inscribed with characters. The bonze took the one which fell out and read it out to her. ‘What does he say?’ Judith inquired.

  ‘He says, “Many children bring wealth,”’ said Laura. She took the slip from the bonze and examined the characters, in the dim light. ‘It isn’t the usual word for children,’ she said. ‘It really says, “Offspring of your creation”, as near as I can make it out.’ She handed it back to the bonze. ‘Those will be your songs, perhaps,’ she said, smiling at Judith.

  ‘Certainly ordinary children are more apt to consume wealth than to bring it,’ observed Vinstead.

  ‘Now who’s for truth at fifty cents?’ said Touchy. Henri stepped forward with his coin. ‘I ’ope ’e does not refer always to children, this Boudha,’ he murmured in an aside to Touchy, who giggled. But when Henri’s slip was read out it appeared that he did. ‘The children of the virtuous bring no anxiety.’ Derek and Touchy burst out laughing.

  ‘Now who?’ said Laura, laughing too. ‘You, Derek?’

  ‘Not I!’ said Derek firmly, amid general mirth. ‘That fellow’ – he indicated the impassive Buddha – ‘seems to have an idée fixe about the rising generation; I won’t trust him with my private life.’

  Annette, however, was eager to know her fortune. She burned her incense, and rather hesitatingly shook out her slip. ‘Go on – perhaps you’ll keep a crèche!’ Derek urged her. The priest’s face seemed to deepen in inscrutability as he read it – slowly, with a barely perceptible gesture of negation, he handed it to her, and let his eyes rest on her in a long strange stare.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Leroy?’ the girl asked.

  ‘It’s a curious one – it tells you very little,’ said Laura, examining the slip. ‘This is as near as I can get to it – “Enlightenment shall escape her” – or him, of course – “but Death enlightens all men.”’ Her eyes met Vinstead’s as she handed back the slip, and a quick gleam of intelligence passed between them; she knew that he was thinking of the same thing as she was – their conversation about Annette before breakfast.

  ‘Another glimpse of the obvious!’ was Touchy’s comment.

  ‘Oh, they’re nearly always these moralising saws and proverbs,’ said Laura lightly. She saw that Annette was a little dissatisfied with her fortune, and could not herself help being struck rather disagreeably by its appositeness. ‘Does anyone else want theirs done? It’s very stuffy in here.’

  ‘Yes. I must see whether he knows what my bad joss is to be,’ said Vinstead. ‘He ought to, as it’s all in his line of business.’ He lit the joss sticks and shook his slip out briskly.

  But his fortune was also rather uninformative. ‘The wise shall find wisdom, but the traveller will journey with a heavy heart,’ Laura read out.

  ‘Well, he’s spotted your profession, anyhow,’ remarked Derek.

  ‘Is that exactly what it says?’ Vinstead asked, peering first at the slip and then at Laura.

  ‘It’s the best translation I can make,’ she said. ‘Of course they have no tenses in Chinese, as you know. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve heard that one before – the real meaning is that wisdom, or too much of it, may be rather a burden, I suppose.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to hear yours?’ he asked her.

  ‘I? No!’ she said emphatically.

  ‘Why not, Laura?’ Judith asked.

  ‘When you have given hostages to Fortune you don’t want to hear her views,’ said Mrs Leroy lightly – but Vinstead saw a fleeting expression cross her face, as of one who winces from some hidden pain. As they left the pavilion, ‘The image was rather on the spot about our little friend, wasn’t he?’ he murmured in her ear.

  Outside, the party dispersed, vaguely. Mrs Leroy wished to read, and allowed Touchy to fetch her a cushion and a book; when they were brought, declining all offers of company, she climbed higher still to a tiny courtyard where one deeply coloured double cherry bloomed between two memorial tablets. She settled herself down in the shade behind one of these, her back against the cool marble, and rested. A troop of black ants was crossing and recrossing the pavement within a few inches of her, treading busily over the pitted surfaces of the paving stones, laden with mysterious burdens of eggs, grubs, and unknown substances; she watched them idly, sure that while intent on their house-moving they would not leave their high road to molest her. She was a little tired after her disturbed night and early walk – it was pleasant to be quiet, and alone, in the hot sunny stillness of the little courtyard, lulled by the soft industrious murmur of the bees in the flowering cherry, amused by the industrious activities of the sturdy ant community. The great thing about Chieh T’ai Ssu was that you could always get away from people – it was so intricate, and so big. Perfect for lovemaking, she thought with a smile, and began to wonder how Judith was getting on with the practice of wisdom.

  An hour later she was still sitting there, contented and rested – her mind half on Judith, she was singing ‘Fain would I change that note’ softly to herself. As the song ended, a shadow fell on the pavement in front of her, and looking round she saw Derek. He plumped himself down unceremoniously beside her in the narrow patch of shade.

  ‘Sing that again, will you?’ was his only salutation.

  Laura did so. When it was over he sat silent for a few minutes. She saw that he was in a restless worried state. Suddenly he whipped round on her with one of his brusque movements. ‘Laura, do you believe all that?’

  ‘I know it,’ she said.

  ‘She sang it like a prophetess last night,’ he murmured. ‘She made it sound true. “Where truest pleasure is” – hm?’ he said interrogatively, cocking his head at her.

  ‘Yes, truest pleasure is there, Derek dear.’

  ‘Have you found it, yourself? You and Henry?’ His voice was urgent.

  ‘Yes, I and Henry – and others,’ she added honestly. There are times, and she knew this to be one, when only an extremity of honesty will serve.

  ‘Oh, so you have known change then?’ he said, looking at her curiously. ‘I’ve always wondered about you – and about people like you altogether. But they never will tell one the truth, so how is one to know? There’s always this pretence about marriage and the great love of a lifetime being one and the same thing,’ he said irritably. ‘Is Henry the great love of your lifetime?’ he asked her abruptly, but not ungently.

  ‘He’s one of the three,’ said Laura. Something in the quaint moderation of the tone and statement made Derek laugh.

  ‘Oh, Laura darling, you are priceless! Tell me about the other two, and how you made it all work, will you? Were they before Henry, or after?’

  ‘One was before. We were engaged, and he was drowned yachting.’ She spoke in the same e
ven tone. ‘Then three years later I married Henry. The other one was after.’

  ‘Well, what about him? He’s the one that matters. Were you faithful to Henry, technically, when he came along?’ he said, turning to look at her. His black spaniel’s hair was rumpled up, his blue eyes inquiring, insistent. Again the thought of Tim darted unbidden into Laura’s mind. She would want anyone to tell Tim the truth, if he should ever feel obliged to ask such a question.

  ‘No, I wasn’t, for a time,’ she answered slowly, meeting his eyes steadily.

  ‘Oh, bless you!’ said Derek. ‘I knew you’d be honest. Did Henry know?’

  ‘No!’ she said emphatically. ‘That would have been the most senseless cruelty.’

  ‘And then you chucked it?’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘Then I chucked being his mistress,’ she said; her voice grew cold and hard on the ugly word. ‘I didn’t chuck him.’

  Derek pondered over it. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said at length. ‘Even you haven’t stuck to one person.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should say “even” me,’ said Laura rather sadly; ‘lots of people might.’

  ‘I say “even” you because you’re the most honourable person I’ve ever met, and the most unselfish,’ he said, turning to her again. And suddenly he lifted one of her hands and kissed it. The quick gesture brought the tears to Laura’s eyes.

  ‘Rubbish!’ she said, nevertheless. ‘That’s because you hardly know any nice people. But, Derek, “even” I’ – she gave a little unsteady laugh – ‘though I’ve loved three people, I’ve been – well, permanent with them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t been promiscuous.’ Again her voice hardened on the word. ‘I’ve never stopped loving any of them. I think that’s the important thing. There must be what lawyers call the animus manendi – the intention of permanence.’

  ‘Even if it’s bound to fail?’

  ‘Yes, even if it’s bound to fail. It’s an essential condition, somehow or other; you can’t get the real thing without making your surrender to that.’ Her voice grew dreamy – it was extraordinary, he thought involuntarily, how her voice changed with her thought; really a conversation with her was almost like listening to a piece of music. ‘It’s the key to the “fair house of joy and bliss”,’ she murmured, half to herself.

  They sat silent, then, for some time, but Derek’s frowning face and irritable twiddling of Laura’s cigarette case, which he had picked up off the pavement, showed that he was deep in difficult thought.

  ‘My God, I do wish I knew if it would work!’ he burst out at last. ‘I see it’s real enough to you, but would it ever be for me? You’ve got to have that animus manendi, I suppose, before you propose? I half want to marry her, and yet I’m terrified of the idea.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to her about it?’ said Laura. ‘Tell her how you’ve been accustomed to live and what you’re afraid of, and see what you make of it together. I think you’ll find she’ll understand.’

  ‘Propose, you mean?’

  ‘No, certainly not. You must learn to love before you try to marry. Tell her why you’re afraid to propose.’

  ‘Would that be fair to her?’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘Much fairer than dawdling on making love to her, as you’ve been doing, without any explanation,’ said Laura, with decision.

  ‘It seems a damnably odd thing to do,’ he observed slowly, still unconvinced. ‘And bloodily difficult. Do you really mean tell her about my life? And argue it all out? She might never look at me again.’

  ‘Try it on,’ Laura reiterated. ‘My dear, she knows most of it – she isn’t an imbecile. You needn’t be luridly detailed, but the one thing you must be is honest.’

  ‘Hm. Well, you’ve set me an example of that, wisest of lilies,’ he said, getting up. He stood looking down at her. ‘I’ll try it on, since you say so. Bless you!’ He held out his hand to pull her up. ‘Come on – there’s Touchy’s whistle. That’s lunch.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AT LUNCH Derek did not sit by Judith, according to what was becoming a custom, but by Mrs Leroy, making himself very agreeable – a piece of insight and courtesy which touched her considerably. Judith sat between Touchy and the Professor, and Laura was again struck by her curious air of strength and assurance, which seemed to deepen from hour to hour. She was talking to the Professor about psychology – catechising him, rather, as to how one set about being a psychologist. ‘But what’s the main thing? Is it spinning theories out of your own inside like a spider, or collecting little lumps of facts about people like a magpie?’ Vinstead laughed heartily at this rather unflattering comparison, but proceeded nevertheless to explain at some length what one actually did do. Laura noticed how, in spite of her rather ingenuous way of expressing herself, the girl succeeded in really making him talk, and talk well, on his own subject, by the sheer force of her spontaneous interest. It was the same thing, later on, with La Touche, who sat on her other side. From psychology the talk swung round to music, of which Touchy, for all his rather Guardee appearance, was passionately fond; and here again Judith, on her own ground this time, drew out his interest and his contribution to the subject till he talked in a way not unknown to Laura, but sufficiently unusual to make Nina raise her pretty eyebrows, and the General to fix his eyeglass on him in a long amused stare. What a sure touch on people the girl had, she thought, in spite of her youth. It was her actuality, of course, and her own quite violent interest in people and things that was the key to it. And glancing round the table she suddenly noticed Annette Ingersoll also watching Judith, with a curiously wistful expression on her pretty inexpressive face – so much prettier than the English girl’s, but so wholly without the life, the shooting play of expression from feature to feature which put Laura in mind of the flight of a swallow, sometimes, as she watched her niece.

  After lunch General Nevile decreed a universal ‘shut-eye’. ‘You won’t get one if you go to Tan Chüeh Ssu tomorrow, and you’ll only get sunstroke if you go walking about in this heat. Yesterday was bad enough.’ The heat had, indeed, become considerable – Touchy averred that his little travelling thermometer registered ninety in the shade before lunch, and the party were glad enough to betake themselves, some to their pavilions, some to camp beds on the shady side of the courtyard. Laura carried a heap of cushions through the little door and prepared herself a couch under the white pine.

  ‘May I come and rest here too, Mrs Leroy?’ Little Annette asked. ‘I won’t say a word!’

  Of course, Laura told her – she remembered the girl’s rather strained look as she sat outside the upper shrine, and guessed that she might wish to be away from Henri for a bit. They spread their cushions in the shadiest corner, and lay down. The resinous smell of the great tree was strong as apples in the heat; the shadows of the bell pagoda and the yellow fir lay close and foreshortened on the hot pavement, where the minute specks of mica in the stone sparkled like tiny diamonds in the sun; the bees droned sleepily in the fruit trees under the terrace wall. Only the long whistling note of some bird, repeated at regular intervals, broke the perfumed humming silence. The cushions were stuffy and hot to the body – they perspired as they lay; Annette turned from side to side. ‘Lie perfectly still, and count icicles with your eyes shut,’ Laura adjured her, ‘you’ll forget the heat then and go to sleep.’

  ‘That bird!’ Annette complained. ‘I just hate the sound of it.’

  ‘Bother the bird!’ Mrs Leroy said unsympathetically. ‘Forget him too.’ And lying relaxed on her cushions she was soon asleep. But Miss Ingersoll, untrained in the particular trick of self-control which enables anyone to sleep in discomfort, whether mental or physical, lay awake, fidgeting, staring at the black glittering pattern of pine needles against the sky, changing her position continually – till at last she gave it up, and propping herself cautiously against the wall, took a book and tried to read. From time to time she glanced enviously and h
alf curiously at her companion. Asleep, Mrs Leroy looked older than when awake; her dark thin face, unlit by the play of expression and by her brilliant eyes, was like a fine worn cameo, profiled against the cushions; Annette was moved to a vague wonder as to what tools life had used to cut it so fine. She did not express it to herself quite like that; what she thought was, ‘She looks like Anna Karenina.’

  The study of anyone’s face in sleep produces a curious effect on the beholder. It makes for the moment a new relationship, one-sided, tinged with the involuntary sense of superiority of the waking over the sleeper, and issuing always in a slight movement either of repulsion or of sympathy. In Annette’s case the result of an hour’s scrutiny of Mrs Leroy’s sleeping countenance was an increased sympathy. Anna Karenina was perhaps her favourite heroine. She was, however, delighted when her living prototype woke up; she was getting bored. Mrs Leroy woke, as she did most things, leisurely, and said, ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘No, I read – I guess I wasn’t sleepy. Mrs Leroy,’ the girl went on, ‘are you tired, or would you take a little walk?’

  ‘Where to?’ said Laura, without moving.

  ‘Why, I’d just love to see that view of the monastery from the hill at the back, that the Professor was talking about at breakfast – where you see all the roofs.’

  ‘All right – come on,’ said Laura. ‘But you must get a hat.’

  ‘Oh no, honestly, Mrs Leroy, I never wear one.’

  ‘You must wear one here,’ said Laura firmly, ‘you don’t know this sun.’

  The hat fetched, they strolled out of the main gate and up the little path on to the hill, and stood looking down at the fantastic collection of roofs, rising out of the drift of blossom which covered the hillside below.

  ‘It is very like a ballet,’ murmured Mrs Leroy.

  ‘What wonderful things you say!’ Annette exclaimed admiringly.