by Bridge, Ann;
Was that the Kwan-yins’ message? Laura wondered, staring at them, troubled. Depressed, weakened by their impassive faces, her impulse wavered and failed. She must have time to think – she would procrastinate, compromise.
‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow, when we get back from T’an Chüeh Ssu,’ she said, turning to Delache once more. ‘And in the meantime, don’t make love to her too much, Henri; you know you wouldn’t be allowed to with your own jeunes filles – you wouldn’t get the chance.’
‘Non, non – c’est entendu – I knoh this very well,’ he said, with the ready sincerity which was so engaging in him. ‘Enfin, ma chère, je connais un peu les usages anglais! I am most careful. Voyons, I never kiss ’er. Je le voudrais bien – avez-vous remarqué comme elle a les lèvres fraîches? Like flowers, which ’ave dew on them! – but I ’ave not done this. Je ne ferai pas de bêtises, parole d’honneur!’ he said, as they left the pavilion of the images.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LILAH WAS NOT in the pavilion when Laura went before dinner to wash and put on a clean shirt – the normal temple toilet. She had hoped to find her there, and when she was ready she strolled out, took a cocktail from Niu and wandered with it on to the inner terrace. Lilah was not there either, but the Professor’s lean pale length rose up from a chair in the little turret and greeted her. The evening light laid beauty over hill and plain, stretched out before them – Mrs Leroy leaned on the parapet and gazed, and the Professor studied her face.
‘I saw you out walking with our Undine on the hill this afternoon,’ he presently observed, ‘and you had a talk with her young man this evening too, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, uncertain whether she was grateful for the lead or not. ‘It’s all rather difficult,’ she said slowly, wondering whether failing Lilah she had better perhaps get such light as Vinstead could throw. ‘She is coming awake, or at least stirring in her sleep, poor child, and I am not sure how far the young man is the cause of it.’
‘He is certain to be partly the cause, with that type,’ said Vinstead.
‘Yes – but you see I’m not her natural guardian, and I can’t very well interfere with both of them on the spot,’ said Laura disconnectedly. ‘And it isn’t an easy thing to make people see. It is all so tenuous – like a maze of silk threads. And yet it is perfectly real.’
‘Of course it is real – those are the realities,’ he said, coming over to the balustrade beside her. He was trying to guess at the nature of her difficulties with the guardians, and the nature of the confidences which she might have received. But she made no answer. She was not telling him much – he had no right to complain of that, of course, stranger as he was; but, contrasting it with her openness about her own feelings that morning on the hill, he was slightly disappointed. She had clearly learned something more. As they stood leaning their elbows on the parapet, side by side, their common attitude suggested an intimacy that was for the moment denied him, and he was aware of a sense of frustration which surprised him by its sharpness. It was ludicrous to attach so much importance to a refusal of intimacy from a person he had only met two days before! With a curious impulse to try to account for his own feelings he twisted his head sideways to look at his companion. Her long figure leaned beside him in an attitude of easy grace; she was so near to him that he could note the precise modelling of every line of her clear profile, the fine dark brushwork of brow and eyelash on the delicate texture of the skin, so warm and golden-white at the temples and neck, where the thick hair swept away in heavy curves; so near that he could not escape the faint perfume which made her presence flower-like. As he looked at her, the mood of detached curiosity which had prompted him to turn his head vanished, swallowed up by a sudden rush of an emotion stronger and simpler than any he had experienced for years. He had a perfectly plain and almost overmastering desire to take in his arms that slight figure over which the thin shirt rose and fell with the light breathing, to touch with hands and lips the softness of that golden-white skin. He drew in his breath, sharply, and turning away, lit a cigarette. His impulse to study his own feelings and the cause of them had been a mistake. God! what a fool he was, he thought angrily to himself, finding that his hands actually trembled as he held the match. At his age, in his profession, to be a victim still to simple physical desire, of such a strength! To admire and enjoy a delightful and intelligent woman was one thing – and Mrs Leroy was delightful and intelligent, there was no doubt about it. But if he had derided his own folly in being faintly hurt by her reticence, how he now scourged himself for the sudden feeling which had surprised him. He moved a step or two away, and threw the match over the parapet. From this distance he looked at her again, covertly. Had she noticed anything? She was still staring at the view, but now turned her head to him with the air of one who has come to a decision.
‘I rather want to talk to you about it all,’ she said, ‘but I think I must talk to Mrs Nevile first, as she is her aunt. I am sure it will help me to clear my mind to talk to you. May I, later on?’
Oh, but of course, Vinstead told her. He was entirely at her service. The explanation, trivial as it was, helped to soothe him and to restore his self-control. As they walked back along the inner terrace they met Mrs Nevile. Vinstead took Laura’s glass and carried it back, leaving the ladies to stroll together.
Nothing escapes notice in temple picnics. ‘Well, did you have a nice talk with Little Annette?’ was Nina’s opening.
Laura used it to plunge at once into the subject. She urged Mrs Nevile to keep an eye on her niece for a few days, to give her a chance to find out where she stood.
‘Her feelings for Henri, do you mean?’
‘More than that. She’s going through a phase that is partly independent of him, I think, and she needs time for it.’
‘What sort of phase?’ Nina wanted to know.
‘Growing up – waking up. She’s always lived in a sort of dream about people, and she’s beginning to wonder if it’s enough.’
‘My dear, she’s perfectly practical. I don’t see what you mean. Did she tell you this?’
‘As well as she could. She doesn’t understand it herself.’
‘Did she speak to you of her feelings for Henri? That’s probably at the root of it.’
‘Not directly – of course that must come into it. But it’s more fundamental than a love affair, I feel sure,’ said Laura seriously.
Nina was inclined to doubt whether anything could be more fundamental than a love affair. ‘Once she gets engaged to him comfortably she’ll be all right,’ she said complacently. ‘I don’t really see what there is to be in a fuss about. Of course she’s all wrought up just now.’
‘Yes, of course she is – but she shouldn’t be wrought up more, that’s the point,’ said Laura, feeling nevertheless that she was making no headway. ‘An engagement is no cure for a psychological crisis.’ ‘Even if it comes to an engagement,’ she thought, but did not say so; the conseil de famille came into her mind, and she felt that she could not give Henri away. Nina’s practical mind would pounce with terrible certainty on any indication of the state of his feelings.
What it pounced on now, however, was the word psychological.
‘My dear, what in all the earth is a psychological crisis?’ She took her friend’s arm, and looked up at her, her gay face sparkling with arch rebuke. ‘You’ve been letting that old Professor of ours stuff your head with all sorts of maggots,’ she said, shaking her head at her. ‘All these tête-à-têtes you and he have had! I’m not sure he’s so wise after all! I wouldn’t wonder if he was heading for a “psychological crisis”, if that’s the latest word for it!’ she said, with her pealing laugh, and a significant glance which drove the point of her remark home.
‘What utter nonsense, Nina,’ said Mrs Leroy coldly – but the ready blush which she always felt to be so humiliating and ridiculous, and which Mrs Nevile found most engaging and loved to provoke, leapt into her face. ‘I can’t think how you can
bear to be so banal,’ she said, turning to her friend with a burst of impatience. ‘That’s the joke again – you’re always making it, and it is so boring.’
‘Oh well, it’s the oldest joke in the world, and I guess it’s a rather good one,’ said Nina Nevile impenitently. ‘Come on,’ she pursued coaxingly, turning her companion round with an affectionate pressure of the arm she held, ‘don’t be vexed with me, but stop worrying about Annette, and come and have some dinner.’
To stop worrying about Annette was sooner advised than performed, as Laura found during the meal. Nina had found her own friendly means of silencing her, but the interior voice of her concern would not be silenced. It might be fancy, or some effect of the faint late night, reflected off the glowing distant surfaces of hill and plain, but she thought the girl’s face paler than usual, her light laugh a little less frequent, her pretty rather empty smile more mechanical than ever. Judith and Derek, too, were both somewhat abstracted – Derek noticeably so; he crumbled his French roll with little irritable gestures, and was moodily unresponsive to some well-meant ragging on Touchy’s part. The burden of entertainment fell mostly on Touchy and Nina that evening, as Laura had long ago foreseen that it would, though Henri, apparently in his usual spirits, seconded them well. Love affairs were love affairs, but food was food – there was no danger of Henri’s ‘confounding two things’, as he called it. Lilah sat eating and observing, her immense blue eyes moving slow and inexpressive from face to face, but as usual making an absolutely minimal contribution to the conversation; watching her, Laura could have laughed to think that the thing she wanted most at the moment was an opinion from this apparently vacant loveliness. She hoped to get it too – but the moment that the advent of coffee caused a general movement to rookhi chairs and cushions, Derek sprang up, thrust his black spaniel’s head over her shoulder, and with his mouth at her ear insisted in an urgent undertone that she should bring her coffee on to the inner terrace with him.
They sat in the turret. The dusk was deepening rapidly, making the fruit blossom below the terrace ghostly; the roofs of the temple stood up, black fanciful silhouettes, against the last yellow glow in the western sky behind the hill. The long note of the bird which had troubled Annette’s siesta was still repeated with monotonous persistency, mournful and somehow mechanical – a sinister sound to Laura’s mind.
‘Well?’ she said, lighting a cigarette.
Derek sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands plunged in his hair, in an attitude of profound and dejected meditation.
‘Well, I did as you said,’ he remarked at last gloomily, raising his head and staring at her.
‘Good,’ said Laura.
‘I’m not sure that it was so jolly good,’ he said, relapsing into his former position. Laura said nothing. ‘I love her damnably!’ he burst out suddenly, with a curious accent of surprise. ‘And Laura, she cried!’
‘She might well cry,’ said Laura.
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked, looking up again at her curiously. ‘I thought she might turn me down, and that would have been beastly enough, but I never dreamt she would cry. Oh, blast it all!’ ‘Laura, do you mind it? – my goings on?’ he asked after a pause.
‘Yes, a little.’
‘You’ve kept very quiet about it,’ he said, half resentfully. ‘You never let on that you minded.’
‘It was none of my business, and I thought enough people disapproved of you as it was,’ she said, smiling.
‘Damn them!’ he said irritably. ‘But, Laura, why do you mind? Tell me, please.’
‘Oh, the waste, really.’
‘Waste of what?’
‘Time – no, emotion. Waste of a personality. One hates to see anyone one’s fond of cherishing a fake and missing the real thing,’ said Laura rather hurriedly. ‘It must blunt the taste, too.’
‘But you’ve had lovers – or one, at any rate,’ he said, in a sort of doubtful tone.
‘Yes, but I loved them,’ she said with energy. ‘It was all blood and tears, anyhow – not a meal or a movie. I’m not taking the high moral line, Derek – I’m not in a position to. It’s the – the flippancy of promiscuity that I hate. And I imagine that’s what Judith minds too. It is ugly, say what you like,’ she said decidedly.
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me before that you minded so much?’ he asked, roused by her tone.
‘Would you have paid the smallest attention if I had?’
‘No, I don’t suppose I should, at the start,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I should probably just have lumped you in with the usual run of C of E hags. No, it’s just because you’ve never been a Pharisee, Laura darling, that I’m talking to you about it now.’
‘Not even that,’ said Laura. ‘You’re listening to me now because Judith minds, my dear.’
‘Funnily enough, in a way I mind your minding almost more,’ he said, rumpling up his hair and looking at her. ‘It’s so damned unexpected. Has she talked to you about it?’ he asked after a moment’s pause.
‘Not since you had a go at her today – she did before.’
‘Girls’ minds are extraordinary,’ he said. ‘I can’t follow them. In a way she was so awfully sensible, and tried to be completely slapdash about the whole thing, but she couldn’t carry it off. It simply made her miserable.’
‘Have you settled anything?’
‘Lord, no! How could we? Heaven knows what X does next!’ said Derek gloomily.
Laura made no reply, and for some time they sat in silence. The dusk had deepened rapidly – more and more stars came out and hung like lamps in the sky; the outline of the hill running down into the plain was merely a line below which lay starlessness. It was very still – the distant drumming and booming of the ordinary evening rites was over, and only the long isolated note of the bird, or whatever it was, broke the silence. Suddenly, out of the darkness, there burst a scatter of silver notes, high and clear, fresh as dew, fresh as a lark at dawn – a girl’s voice singing – Judith’s voice. Heard so through the dark and from a distance, unexpectedly, the effect was magical, transporting – Laura felt a little shiver run through her; she heard Derek catch his breath.
‘There she goes!’ he muttered; ‘the Singing Kuniang!’
‘Let’s go back,’ Laura whispered. They walked softly along the inner terrace towards the invisible voice. She was singing that lovely early song of Somervell’s, his setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Young Love lies sleeping’ – now they were near enough to hear the words clearly, and by unspoken consent stood still to listen to the second verse. Derek suddenly slipped his hand through Laura’s arm and squeezed it against his side. She stood stirred, moved, in a soft glow of emotion; thinking of him, of Tim, of Aubrey and Henry – Young Love past, present, and to come, Young Love with its ardours and ecstasies in all springtimes everywhere.
Young Love lies sleeping –
the voice rang down towards the beautiful close:
And round about him, the may bushes are white.
It ended – ended, for Laura, in a rush of visions of the blossoming tree. Not here, not here, bringing its magic into the ancient courts of temples, or painted incredibly on a brown-paper background, but of the English hawthorn, springing in free fountains of white on the slopes of green downs, topping the banks with wreaths against the blue above the dust of chalky roads, sheltering the hidden nightingale whose voice out-bubbled the bubbling spring, up in the hollow behind Garsover. She could see it, smell it; for the moment it obliterated the present, and in a sort of dream she followed Derek through the little door which he held open for her, and under cover of the applause settled down among the listening group.
She found herself seated between Vinstead and La Touche, who had both shifted a little to make room for her. Vinstead had joined in the general clamour for a further performance from the Singing Kuniang, hoping perhaps for some distraction from his thoughts, which he was not enjoying. His mind, naturally honest, and trained to the analysis of hum
an reactions, played like a searchlight over his moment of folly, trying to account for this sudden irruption of the emotional into his carefully regulated and rational life. He honestly could not think how it had happened. He had, of course, studied the faces of the group of strangers presented to him at the Legation when the expedition started, and had been struck by Mrs Leroy’s; his curiosity had been aroused by her strange concentration when she had failed to see him on the rocks by the ferry, and by the casual remarks of the others about her; a string of minute accidents had thrown him specially into her company, and her conversation had frankly delighted him. It was his habit to enjoy and appreciate delightful people, and he had hitherto done so without disquieting results. Then why – why, in heaven’s name, in this particular instance, was his peace disturbed, and his very body shaken by emotion? Professor Vinstead, of course, was new to China, and left out of account the peculiar quality of Peking air; he fell back on the strangeness of the circumstances, on the heat, on strain after a journey, to account for his trouble. He struggled with his mind, which would interpolate little pictures of her as arguments – a graceful movement, the ironic lift of the brows, the quite peculiar beauty of her voice in speech. He diagnosed the whole thing, and became very cool and rational. He would see to it that it did not happen again – and in the meantime he would, like a sensible man, enjoy the company of an agreeable woman; to shun her would be absurd. Also he might really help her with the problem of Miss Ingersoll, which intrigued him professionally. And at that moment Mrs Leroy herself, beckoned to by La Touche, came and sat down beside him in the dark, and Judith Milne began to sing Brahms’s ‘Nachtwandler’.