Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MRS LEROY did not sleep well, in spite of the allonal. Her right arm had been badly twisted by the bandits at some point or other, and hurt her when she lay on that side; she had had a blow with a rifle butt on her left shoulder blade which as soon as she got into bed hurt whatever she did. She lay turning about, seeking a comfortable position. And of course she thought of the Professor. She did like him so much! was the drowsy sum total of her thought at first, but there was more to it than that – that experienced kiss of his on her hand had left a small tingling thrill in her nerves. The longer she lay awake, the clearer, to her despair, her mind became. She found herself beginning to examine him, using all the indications she had gathered in the past three days, and continued in this exercise till at last she thought she had a fair idea of the sort of person he was and what had happened to him. Clearly he was not a misogynist, but framed by nature for the best, the most valuable and amusing sort of man-woman relationship. But either something had gone wrong with him in connection with some woman, or else the deadly clarity of his professional analysis of emotion had put him off the whole thing. Or both. Anyhow, he’d been put off, and now he was – reluctantly, she could see – put on again. And she had put him on. And being, for a woman, reasonably honest, ‘What about it?’ she asked herself.

  Mrs Leroy was no psychologist, but she had seen enough of things to know how badly wrong late love can go, if it does go wrong, and what dire damage it can do to the whole personality. It was all rather unlucky, but having happened, it must just be dealt with as well as possible. ‘I can’t have him all rotted up a second time,’ was how she thought of it. In a way it was a good thing that she liked him so very much; ‘a bit more, my girl, and you’d be head over ears,’ she told herself, lighting a cigarette to help thought, in despair of sleeping. She had a fairly strong sense that this might not be the best plan for her. Wedlock held one mysteriously by some subtle bond; there it was! – the most important job in life, and the best worth doing, without doubt, for her as for most people; and in the long run, quite the most interesting. Laura had never found marriage and maternity in the least dull. But she was aware too of a strong temptation to take this offered affection, this companionship which she had seen could be very good indeed. Her life in China was rather lonely and rather empty, with Henry absorbed in his own occupations, and the children away. And – no getting over it, and no good blinking the fact, she said, with stubborn honesty – the hunger for love and affection was still strong in her; the lingering effect of that kiss on her hand showed her how strong. She felt already the faint beginning of that heightening of all perception and intensifying of all mental activity which accompanies emotion. Oh, she knew that so terribly well! Heavenly in itself, until it reached the point where only the one person had any meaning or reality; when only the hours spent with them were alive, and the rest of the time, the rest of the world, was just a grey ash heap across which one passed, weighted with an intolerable languor. Was she ready for all that again?

  She put that aside, for the moment. What would work best for him? After all, that was really the point. Any fresh frustration ought to be avoided at all costs, even if it evolved a completed relation between them, with all its ‘pains and penalties’, as Aubrey called them. Goodness, how difficult this love business was! It meant tearing misery sooner or later, nearly always. But it was fatal to try to cut it out. Her own view was that the great thing about sex was to accept it, pains and penalties and all – to realise, however you got there, the relative unimportance of the physical side, inevitable as that was, compared with the essential thing – to love, and to be willing to be hurt because you loved. Once you had reached that position, however painful the process, sex and emotion became, she said to herself, a straight line that you could walk along – no fears and no muddles; any other way it was all knots and tangles, in which you struggled, helpless and disabled. But often people seemed to see all that much better after a completed relation than before! She had, with Aubrey. Vinstead was very clever – perhaps he would see it anyhow. Or not! She couldn’t tell! Her thoughts ran round in circles – now to Vinstead, now to the emotion just stirring in her for him. There was a moment – there nearly always is a moment – when one could stamp on it; this was that moment for her. But had she better? What about him, if it meant battening down the hatches again on what was visibly struggling with difficulty to life?

  The hardest decisions of all are those where the head and the heart, the duty to one’s neighbour and the pleasure for oneself, seem to lie in the same direction. Mrs Leroy failed to reach one that night. She must wait on events, she murmured to herself, beginning at last to get sleepy. If they had to see it out – well, there it was! On which at last she fell asleep. To wake, strangely enough, with a settled mind, not at war with a certain absurd dancing in the blood. That was all part of the game, and there was no need to worry over it.

  It was late when she woke. The sun was making the air inside the paper lattice a dull powdery gold, and a tray of morning tea steamed beside her. She poured herself a cup, and immediately afterwards Judith came in, in her pyjamas, her hair a golden cloud, and curled herself up cross-legged on the k’ang, near the tea tray.

  ‘I heard your spoon chinking, so I knew you were awake,’ the girl remarked, taking one of Laura’s cigarettes.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Incredibly! Wow, I am stiff, though,’ she stretched her arms out and twisted her trunk first to one side and then to the other. There didn’t seem much wrong with Judith, Laura thought – the girl looked brilliantly well except for faint shadows under her eyes, and her whole being seemed to breathe a radiant contentment as she sat smoking on the k’ang in the dimmed dusty sunshine.

  ‘I say, Laura,’ Judith went on – and then stopped.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘You talked to Derek about me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, – or rather mostly he came and catechised me,’ said Laura, smiling.

  ‘I know – I mean I thought so. Laura!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I believe you’re going to be right.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About the shirt!’ said Judith unexpectedly. ‘We had a fearful doing on Saturday,’ she went on, rather disconnectedly. ‘We had it all out. Of course, I haven’t really seen you since then, have I? He told me all about – oh, them, and all that, and it seemed so horrible, just going on and on, from one to another, with no – no life in it!’ said Judith, with a curious note of indignant pain in her voice. ‘I was a fool, and cried, it was so beastly – and then he got cross, or crossish; and I told him how I loathed it, and he said people were like that, and I was a fool not to know it, practically.’ She paused.

  ‘Well, and then?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Oh, just hopeless. I felt we should never get anywhere, and the whole thing was a complete failure. I could see I hadn’t been wise, or not wise enough,’ said Judith. She meditated for a time, trying ineffectually to blow smoke rings. ‘How funny it is,’ she resumed, ‘that what matters is the way you’re feeling when you talk about a thing. Do you know? Now last night, coming home – I suppose it was because we’d both been frightened, and all that – but we were feeling kind to one another. I mean that sort of pride one has, and keeping one’s end up, and scoring points, was simply gone. And another thing – though he had his arm round me, that didn’t mean anything either – I mean not in the ordinary way. It was more like a very kind nurse is to a child – that, oh, just absolute kindness and being loving. Do you know?’ she said again.

  ‘Yes, rather. That’s the unassailable part of love. Well, go on,’ said Laura.

  ‘Unassailable!’ Judith repeated. ‘That’s a good word! That’s just what it was. Because after a time we got on to talking about ourselves again, but somehow this time it was all right. We could both understand what the other said, and I felt it was all possible – to let it go on, I mean. A
nd that however difficult it was – because, of course, it will be; no one’s idiot enough to think it won’t!’ said Judith emphatically – ‘that – that there would be a part of it that would be indestructible. And yet we were up against just the same things, really. Wasn’t it odd?’

  ‘Yes – no, not a bit. Judith dear, I am very glad. Derek is really valuable, and he wanted someone like you to make this possible for him. And I wanted it before he knew he did,’ said Laura, smiling.

  The girl looked at her oddly, with no answering smile, for a moment. Then she left the k’ang and went and stood behind the camp bed, out of Laura’s field of vision. ‘Now what’s up?’ Laura wondered – but she held her peace.

  ‘I was a bit of a hellhound,’ came presently from behind her, in rather a strangled voice.

  ‘Were you? Why?’

  ‘On Saturday. I – I hated his having talked to you about it.’

  ‘But my dear, what’s the matter with that? It’s only natural that you should,’ expostulated Laura. ‘That isn’t being a hell-hound.’ ‘I couldn’t really avoid it, you know, either,’ she added after a moment.

  ‘I know! – and I talked to you about him! It was so damnable of me,’ said Judith; and coming up from behind she suddenly thrust her head into Laura’s shoulder. ‘I had to tell you, now that it’s all right,’ she said, in a voice rather muffled from her face being hidden.

  Laura twisted her stiff arm free, so that she could put it round the girl. She pulled her niece in front of her. ‘Boodle! Give me a kiss,’ she said. Judith lifted her face then and gave the older woman, not a kiss, but a long hug. ‘I am happy,’ she murmured. And then she began her delightful gurgling chuckle. ‘Boodle!’ she repeated. ‘Such a word! as Hubbard would say. Laura, we must dress!’ And still chuckling, she went off to her own room.

  The rest of the party were all assembled when Mrs Leroy joined them on the terrace for breakfast. Everyone seemed in fair order, in spite of their various experiences, except Annette Ingersoll. She looked very unwell. There were deep rings under her eyes, and her face had a blotchy yellowish pallor; about her forehead and eyebrows was the curious indefinable tight-drawn look which tells unmistakably of severe headache. Inquiries revealed the fact that she had slept badly and had been sick in the night; she was eating next to nothing, and spoke very little, turning with a visible effort when addressed, as though to speak involved the lifting of some heavy weight. Mrs Leroy was shocked by her appearance, and when they left the table she confided her concern to Nina Nevile. ‘I think she looks ill; the sooner we get her home the better.’

  ‘Why yes, but you know what a business getting off is!’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘I don’t think there’s really a lot the matter with her. Something must have upset her stomach.’

  The business of ‘getting off’ from a temple weekend is indeed always considerable. What the servants do is done efficiently enough, but the supervision and combination of the activities of the Europeans and the donkey boys require generalship of a high order. Touchy excelled at this. Mrs Leroy, who loathed fuss of any sort, confined her activities to telling Hubbard to pack for Miss Ingersoll as well as for herself, and then took her book and strolled off along the terrace, well out of reach of consultation, and sitting down on a marble bench began to read. Touchy came by, hastening to a consultation with Shang about the donkeys. ‘Vinstead’s asking for you,’ he called to her as he passed.

  ‘Tell him I’m here, there’s an angel – now,’ said Laura.

  Touchy obediently turned back, and presently reappeared with the Professor. ‘Did you think of taking a walk?’ the latter asked, seating himself beside her. ‘I gather we don’t start for another hour. I should like to look down on these roofs again.’

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ said Mrs Leroy.

  They walked along to the main gate. In the sloping courtyard just within it the little grey shapes of the donkeys were disappearing under burdens of every sort as they stood tied to the trees. They were being loaded, unloaded, reloaded under Touchy’s supervision.

  ‘You’re not starting?’ he called to Vinstead and Laura.

  ‘No, going for a stroll.’

  ‘Are you packed?’

  ‘Yes, Hubbard’s seeing to it.’

  ‘Well, for pity’s sake be back in an hour!’ he adjured them.

  They strolled up the ridge till they could look down on the ballet of the roofs in its décor of fruit blossom, and by common consent sat down on the very rock on which Laura and Annette had sat two days before. Both were of an age which felt no necessity to make excuses for coming out – but neither was wholly without self-consciousness.

  ‘I feel that perhaps I ought to apologise for last night,’ Vinstead began at length with an abruptness which showed this feeling.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be just a little ungracious?’ said Mrs Leroy slowly. She was holding an oak leaf to her eye and looking at the roofs through a hole in it, but lowered it as she spoke.

  He turned fully to her, then, with a quick relieved smile.

  ‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘I half hoped you’d feel that. I don’t really want to apologise, but I should rather like to explain. I’m still so surprised at myself!’ he said.

  ‘At the suddenness? Because that’s the air, largely,’ said Laura. ‘We get to expect that here.’

  ‘Oh, really? Do you?’ He was professionally interested at once, to Laura’s secret amusement. ‘Well, I don’t think it’s only the air,’ he pursued after a moment, with a curious wry face. ‘And it is not only the suddenness that is startling to me in myself – the whole thing is so – well, so wholly out of my line.’

  Would he tell her why anything so normal as falling in love had come to be out of his line? Laura asked.

  He would – and did. It was not a long story, but not even his deliberately dry and scientific presentation could make it anything but painful to a degree. He had been wildly – and seriously – in love with a beautiful and not unintelligent girl, and engaged to her; poverty had put marriage out of the question for about a year and a half. He had had scruples against living with her before marriage; scruples which, he realised too late, she did not share. They had ultimately married – only to find, in his case, that she was unfaithful to him – freely, continuously, scandalously; that she had been, as she had at last told him casually, unfaithful to him even during the period of their engagement. There was no question of turning from him to someone she loved better – she had le goût pour l’homme to a point which made normal life impossible for her. ‘It was a genuine case of nymphomania,’ he said. ‘Actually that is a comparatively rare thing in Northern Europe, in spite of the free way in which people throw the word about.’ He could not bring himself to divorce her, and the last thing she wished was to divorce him – a home, an income, the protection of a respectable name were just what she wanted. So he had gone on, in a misery which he did not mention, but which Laura shivered with pity to guess at, till at length she ran away with somebody richer and died of typhoid in Naples. The Professor told his tale without rancour and quite impersonally, but Mrs Leroy could see with hideous clearness the wretched and piteous accompaniment – every natural feeling, every tradition, every eager hope and tender or sacred association trampled in the mud, degraded and ruined, till sex had become for him an obsession, a horror, the slow murderer of all the things by which he lived.

  ‘So you see,’ he ended up, ‘why I have become rather abnormal. Only I didn’t really realise it – at least, if I did, I felt my abnormality to be the greater wisdom. Of course, my job makes me look at all emotion professionally; Love has become an exhibit, and not always an amusing one. And what you have done for me here has been to turn me into an exhibit myself,’ he said, turning again to her with a half-rueful smile.

  To his astonishment she turned her head away from him quickly, but not before he had seen the tears on her face.

  ‘You’re not crying?’ he said incredulously. ‘Not for me? My dear,’ he took her han
d and pulled her round towards him, ‘you’re not crying for me?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, nodding at him with a curious helpless gesture. ‘Oh yes.’ The pity of it had taken her by surprise, and jerked her completely off her rather careful, if sincere attitude of frankness and sympathy. He had been hurt hideously, and it made her cry; she was nearly as much surprised as he, but there it was.

  ‘Don’t cry, please,’ he said, still holding her hand. ‘There is no need to worry about it, you know – it was all so long ago. I’ve hardly thought of it for years – it is certainly years since I felt it at all. Please don’t cry for me.’ And suddenly he put his arm round her and kissed her – gently, like an older person comforting a child.

  Laura, who had begun to dab at her eyes, was completely taken aback by this. ‘Oh, wait a bit,’ she said, in a startled voice. ‘We – we haven’t got there yet!’

  Vinstead burst out laughing. ‘I have!’ he said. ‘When did you expect to get there?’

  Laura began to laugh too. Her tears, his kiss, had suddenly put the whole thing on a fresh and perfectly natural basis, where none of the usual gambits were needed or even possible. There was no ‘situation’ any more between them; they began to talk like two human beings, and not like a professor and a married woman with whom he has fallen in love. What to do about it all would have to be faced and settled sooner or later, but the immediate concern was simply to understand. In this new blessed ease they fairly got down to it, coming to grips with the question of how you look at love, which is one of the two or three things that make a life sane or otherwise, civilised or otherwise. Their points of view were not the same, but they were in a state where human communication is at its best; where words are used and used well, but where the meaning flows through them and along with them, unhampered by submerged emotions or conventional reticences. On vit plus ou moins à travers des mots, as a rule, but sometimes these moments do come when words and thought are one, and one with the receptive understanding. And in such moments the individual reality of two lives – for reality is subjective, personal to each one of us, held in by the crystal walls of our own experience – can be fully understood; the crystal walls are broken down for a space, and two realities mingle and become one. There is little better. The physical falls away, almost irrelevant, when naked spirits meet in kindness.