by Bridge, Ann;
During this oration the ex-prisoners sat quietly on the path, sipping brandy, the only form of sustenance he had thought to bring with him, from Touchy’s flask. Both parties, rescuers and rescued, were still not a little bewildered as to the course of events, and as they started homeward explanations began. Touchy’s appearance was quite unexpected, and in answer to questions he told his tale. The indomitable Lilah had actually found her way back to Chieh T’ai Ssu, and had arrived between five and half past, just when vague rumours of a large foreign party having been ‘mopped up’ at T’an Chüeh Ssu had begun to filter in through the servants and donkey boys, carried by the usual semaphore system of the Chinese countryside – news which had greatly disturbed the General and himself. On Lilah’s arrival their worst fears were confirmed; and he, Touchy, had at once (like Hubbard) decided to telephone to the Legation for help. He set off ‘full bat’, as he said, for Men-t’ou-kou, hoping either to telephone from the office at the coal depot there, and failing that to go on to the hotel at Pa-ta-Ch’u. He lost his way once or twice, and the coal depot was shut when he arrived at about a quarter to seven – pushing on along the road to Pa-ta-Ch’u, what was his astonishment to meet three carloads of his own men, with rifles and Lewis guns! ‘I had the surprise of my life!’ said Touchy, ‘and I still don’t know who sent the message. Lilah – Miss Milne – said nothing about it. It was sent in my name too, apparently.’
‘Ah, that was Hubbard,’ said Derek, ‘we’ll tell you about that later. Go on, Touchy.’
‘Hubbard!’ said Major La Touche, peering round uselessly to look for the maid in the dark. ‘Oh yes, Lilah said she met her, but how on earth—’
‘Oh, never mind that now, Touchy – do go on,’ said Laura. She realised that a faint sense of lèse-majesté might be awakening even in his unmilitary mind, and didn’t want the whole story dragged out there and then, in front of both Hubbard and La Touche’s own men.
La Touche, always quick as a weasel at a hint, proceeded with his tale. Finding the forces he was in quest of miraculously brought to the spot, he hurried on with them towards T’an Chüeh Ssu, in considerable fear lest he might find his birds flown when he got there. (‘And so you would have, but for Laura,’ from Derek.) It occurred to him almost at once that even if the bandits and their captives were still there, he might have considerable difficulty in finding them in such a rabbit warren, especially in the dark; and pondering over this problem as he marched – for the cars had to be left behind at Men-t’ou-kou – he remembered, by good luck, the little-known back gateway into the temple. ‘I knew they’d probably bolt if they were there, so I settled to put Jeudwine in at the bottom, like a ferret, so to speak, and stop the earth at the other side myself.’
‘Well, wasn’t that smart!’ exclaimed Miss Hande.
As they passed through the temple on their return journey an effort was made to secure a donkey for this poor lady, who was not accustomed, and had never expected to do more walking than the usual strolling through temple courts incidental to sight-seeing; but none was to be had. With the advent of local troops, regular or otherwise, in China, donkeys, and camels too, are wont to vanish, like shadows in a total eclipse – suddenly they simply are not. Miss Hande, with the gallantry which she had shown all day, declared that she did not mind, and could get along ‘just splendidly’ with the arm which La Touche offered her. In the temple also they met Jeudwine. Relieved and thankful to be well through with what he described as ‘the most outré expedition I ever undertook, Mrs Leroy’, he again assumed charge of the rest of his men for the return to Peking, with the exception of the Sergeant and six Tommies, whom Touchy decided to take on to Chieh T’ai Ssu in case of accident. Jeudwine was further bound over by La Touche to make no sort of report on his proceedings till his superior officer should return next day.
The party then continued on their long trudge homewards, talking as they went. It might be supposed that they would have been silent from hunger and fatigue, but not at all – the reaction from nervous strain produced an almost hysterical chattiness. The moon was not yet up, and in the darkness they had constantly to stop at crossways of the small rough paths for Touchy and Laura to peer about and make sure of the way, with argument – delays almost intolerable to the exhausted party. But as soon as each of these checks was over, the conversation flowed on again, unceasing. To the rear the rescuing sergeant was clearly making a good deal of running with Hubbard, as shrill giggles and high-pitched protests testified. ‘Well, Miss’ Ubbard, you see you are takin’ a walk with me this Sunday after all! Ain’t it nice? Comin’ again next?’ ‘Ow, get on!’ from Hubbard. In front, Derek walked with Judith. He had made her take his arm at first, but as they passed through a faint dusty glare of yellow light from the open doorway of a house beside the path, it was evident that his arm was ‘more fully in support,’ as Touchy murmured to Miss Hande. Neither of them appeared to mind in the least whether this arrangement were patent to the rest or not; they continued on their way with the supreme carelessness of a strong emotional exaltation. Vinstead walked with Mrs Leroy. Like him, the Tommies had hobnails in their heavy British boots, which screamed on the stones, so that the party walked to a following accompaniment as of a fife band. Thus piped on their way, weary and overwrought, but in a perfect gale of conversation, they marched off into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS CLOSE on 11.30 when the party, dirty, dishevelled and exhausted, at last stumbled into Chieh T’ai Ssu. The moon had risen, and as they walked along the great terrace a figure in white came to meet them, slipping silently in and out of the patterned pools of shadow thrown by the great trees on the pavement – it was Niu, immaculate as ever and quite unperturbed. The only sign of emotion he gave was that he kowtowed deeply to his mistress, using the formal reverence usually reserved for such occasions as China New Year, or for announcing the death of a relation. Under the leaning pine a table waited, fully spread for dinner, and another with an array of drinks; as they approached them Mrs Nevile sprang up out of the shadows, and ran to meet the weary party with a little fluttering cry, ‘Thank Heaven, it’s them at last!’ The General limped after her, but though Nina kissed everyone except Touchy and Vinstead and Hubbard, and he didn’t even shake hands with anybody, his relief and pleasure were not less evident, and expressed themselves practically in forcing whisky and sodas on everyone before they attempted to eat. Lilah drifted up out of the darkness, lovely and composed, smoking a cigarette in a long holder – she took the congratulations on her feat in climbing out very coolly. ‘Did you leave your corals in a crack?’ Judith asked her.
‘Of course not.’
Derek passed this on to Laura. ‘Laura, Lilah’d got her jewellery with her all the while, so those lads had their digging party for nothing.’
‘But I never told them her things were there,’ said Mrs Leroy, turning from her conversation with Nina Nevile, and looking at him with amusement over her whisky and soda.
‘What were they after, then?’ Derek asked in amazement.
‘My pearls.’
‘But I thought you’d got those in your hem!’ objected Miss Hande, staring at her.
‘So I had.’ She turned back to Nina.
‘Well of all things!’ murmured Miss Hande.
To Vinstead, perhaps the most fantastic part of that fantastic day was the meal which followed. His perceptions, sharpened by fatigue, want of food, and nervous exhaustion, made him peculiarly awake to the strangeness of eating a regular four-course dinner, at midnight, on a moonlit terrace in a Chinese temple; of drinking wine in a buzz of European conversation, with shapes as odd as the shapes of those fluted roofs cutting the star-filled sky behind him; himself and most of his companions fresh from the hands of bandits, his wrists still raw from over-tight bonds, his shoulders still aching from blows with rifle butts, Once, by accident, he put up a hand (which he had washed, the total of his hasty toilet) to his head, and found it gritty – his hair still held the fallen
plaster from the wall under which they had stood when the T’ao-pings fired at them. In his strung-up mood he felt these contrasts as strange to the point of madness; he could not watch Mrs Leroy, answering the General’s questions so sensibly, without also seeing her body held and shaken almost senseless by yellow hands; he could not look at Judith Milne, gradually restored by food and drink to her usual enthusiasm, without seeing her white face and piteous horrified eyes when she stood bound against the wall, and the soldier prepared to jab at her with his bayonet. Above the hum of civilised voices he kept on hearing the sound of those first rifle shots, tearing the sunny midday silence like a piece of silk; as he watched the competent noiseless movements of Niu and his underling waiting at table, he saw again the grey ape-like figures – also with yellow hands and faces – who had come stealing so silently into the courtyard down by the great shrine, and murdered the lay brother there.
With all this, he was increasingly aware of an overwhelming, if confused and helpless, feeling about Laura Leroy – that she might somehow soothe this whirling disturbance of his mind and imagination, if only she would. He recognised vaguely that to a great extent she was herself the cause of it. Something in him was clamouring for expression – he did not, or dare not, as yet know it very precisely for what it was. It is possible, and indeed usual for people to live through such an experience as Vinstead had just undergone with, as it were, the top layer of the mind only, passing from moment to moment, from emergency to emergency, with complete matter-of-factness, concentrated wholly on practical details. But the depths of personality are ravaged all the same, and when the immediate tension is removed the violently disturbed emotions surge up, insisting on some form of release; and then, and then only, do we begin to realise what the experience has done to us. It was so with the Professor now. His surface preoccupation was a miserable certainty that, exhausted as he was, he would nevertheless not sleep – but he longed passionately to lie awake, since lie awake he must, in some sort of assurance such as he felt Mrs Leroy might give him, if only he could talk to her. And mixed in with all this was a strange feeling of exaltation in this new emotional disturbance – a sense of rivers long frost-bound breaking into flood, of buds on boughs long bare, of birdsong in the blood.
All the time, of course, the general conversation was flowing past him. Sometimes he was addressed, and jerked himself into full attention at the sound of his own name. ‘The first thing that made me pretty sure we’d got the right lot,’ he heard Touchy saying at one point, ‘was your boots, Vinstead. I heard your nails screeching in the dark – of course I couldn’t see a thing – and I guessed there weren’t two pairs of hobnailed boots in the hills on the same day, so I told Jamieson to carry on.’
‘Jamieson’s oration was a masterpiece,’ said Laura. ‘I didn’t recognise his voice at first – he does talk exactly like a Chinese when he chooses.’
Mrs Leroy had not passed such a meditative meal as the Professor, at least not at first. It was from her and Derek that the General and La Touche expected to get a coherent story of the incident with the bandits, and she was kept busy explaining and answering questions. She gave her account as well as she could; but when the fire of questions slackened she made no further effort to talk. The hysterically conversational stage was over, for her – she sat relaxed, relieved, conscious of exhaustion and yet at peace, and in a sort of trance watched the others. Derek and Judith had the first share of her dreamy attention, and looking at them she was quite satisfied – there was a silent air of security and achieved understanding about the pair which boded well for the future. In a vague sort of way, looking at Henri, who sat twirling a glass of liqueur brandy, thoughtfully, in his fingers, she speculated about Little Annette. Annette had gone to bed with a slight headache, it was reported; but before dinner Nina Nevile had already found time to tell Mrs Leroy that she was not over-happy about that pair – she had an idea that something had ‘gone wrong’ with them during the day. ‘They sort of hung about, looking awkwardly – I don’t know what’s amiss!’ It might, of course, have been the headache.
At Vinstead Laura hardly looked. They had had a long talk on the way home, and the result was a sense of intimacy much more pronounced than anything which had gone before. She recalled his charming tired unguarded voice in the dark, which gave him away with every question about what they’d said or done or felt, at this moment or that, as they went over the events of the day. Oh well, she thought, stealing a glance at his composed face, and hearing his voice at its most Cambridge-y as he answered the General – he was overwrought and so was I. He’ll be different tomorrow. She remembered his firm tones on the first day, when he spoke of manifestations of emotion later in life – ‘They should be dealt with drastically.’ He would be more than equal to dealing with this sudden burst of emotion in himself, she felt. She had liked it, mind you – it had been soothing, warming, after the acute strain and violent unpleasantness of the day, bringing a glow and a sense of soulagement. But it wouldn’t last, of course – it was one of the delicate fragrant things that you put away in a drawer in your mind, and it smelt sweet for a while, and then faded and got lost, somehow.
Her thoughts ran on, dreamily – really she was half asleep as she sat! She was roused by hearing Vinstead’s voice say with energy, ‘Coffee? Good Heavens, no! I shan’t sleep as it is.’ Mechanically, as they rose from the table, she took a cup from the servant, and then heard him beside her asking, ‘Can I carry your coffee somewhere for you?’
‘Where?’ she asked, in almost stupid surprise, letting him take the cup.
‘Anywhere – through here,’ he said, holding open the door on to the inner terrace for her to pass through. ‘You must drink it somewhere, you know.’
Too dulled by fatigue to resist, she followed him passively, half her mind protesting feebly that she ought to be going to bed. However, one must drink coffee somewhere, as he said, and the buzz of voices was still loud behind them under the leaning pine as they walked along the inner terrace.
They sat in the turret. The moon was behind it, on the side without openings; and within the small circle of the parapet it was very dark. The long whistling note – they had still never found out if it was a bird or not, Laura thought idly – was repeated at intervals, mechanical, insistent. She lit a cigarette, and began to drink her coffee; but still the Professor said nothing. His silence lasted till even in the dreamy passive state of her consciousness it produced a sense of tension, of suspense, that was almost ludicrously familiar. How often one had sat like this, waiting for a man to speak! Sometimes the prisoner of courtesy, sometimes inwardly trembling with secret ardent expectation. Which are you this time? her mind asked her, suddenly. Oh, she was so deadly, deadly tired and sleepy, she really didn’t know. And then Vinstead spoke.
‘I can’t see you, now,’ he said, in a curious tone, half meditative and half surprised; ‘and yet I can – I’m afraid I always shall. Standing here, as you stood the first evening.’
Laura said nothing at all – the only words which came with maddening persistence into her head were, ‘Dealt with drastically.’ He waited a moment, and then asked, ‘Does that anger you?’
‘Of course not – why should it? Only …’ she wanted to tell him why, really, she felt it probably wasn’t any good, as her experience with Aubrey had taught her; but it was such a long story, and difficult – oh, tired out as she was, impossible! Before she could think of anything to say he was speaking again, still in that curious meditative tone which had yet a sort of appeal. ‘You seem so free – I don’t think you can be afraid of love in any form.’
What an odd way to put it, Laura thought. ‘I don’t think I am,’ she said slowly. ‘It can only be all to the good.’
‘All to the good?’ he echoed, surprise now in his voice.
‘That there should be a little more affection in the world, I mean – it’s such a divine commodity.’ Oh, that was a silly thing to say! She roused herself and went on, ‘But look h
ere – do you think we might talk in the morning? I rather fancy we may have quite a lot to say to each other, that we oughtn’t to miss, but I really am not quite up to it tonight. Do you mind?’
Again his answer surprised her. ‘I don’t mind anything, so long as you know.’
‘Then I’ll say goodnight,’ she said, getting up.
He rose too; took her hand, and kissed it with surprising efficiency. ‘Goodnight!’ he said.
She left him and walked away. But halfway along the terrace she called back, ‘By the way, would you like some allonal? I’ve got some. I’m going to have a couple.’
‘Oh, thanks very much. Yes, I think I would,’ said Vinstead, rejoining her. The prospect of getting some sleep was marvellous. It ought of course to have spoilt their little situation completely, he felt, to join forces again the moment it was over – but somehow it didn’t. Without any sense of embarrassment he walked back with her to the courtyard and got his tablets and some soda to drink them down with. And then he went to bed. He lay again under the peach trees by the well head, looking up at the moonlit blossom between him and the stars – but tonight he was not fretting. The thing was out. He had been right – to speak to Laura had brought him the assurance he craved. Just what distillation of peace had dropped on him he could not say, but the sense of it was cool as dew. He lay still, allowing himself the idiotic happiness merely of knowing her only twenty yards away, in the pavilion whose lattice glowed a dull yellow from her single candle. In peace now he closed his eyes on the blossoming tree, undisturbed by the strange flowering within him; to dream – for contrary to expectation he slept – of having plunged into cold dark waters which suddenly turned warm and buoyant, bearing him out serenely on a shining sea. He woke thinking of Virgil’s shipwrecked swimmer, who saw Italy from the top of a wave.