by Bridge, Ann;
‘Well?’ she said.
‘She’s passed over,’ said Miss Hande briefly.
‘Oh Lord! When?’
‘About one o’clock this morning. We heard late last night that she had relapsed into this sort of coma, and she was never conscious after that. They couldn’t get the temperature down. It ran up to a hundred and nine degrees, and she died then.’
‘Was Nina there?’ Laura asked.
‘No – they telephoned, and she and the General went round, but it was too late.’
‘Poor child!’ said Laura, sitting down sadly on the sofa. ‘Poor Little Annette.’
‘Why yes, it’s a great tragedy,’ said the novelist. ‘So much brilliance and promise just cut right off! And for nothing! Mrs Leroy, I think this is a terrible place. Do you recall what Mr Fitzmaurice said when we were driving out to the picnic?’
‘No, what?’
‘Why, when I asked if there wasn’t a great deal of illness here, he said, ‘There’s a good deal of death!’ I thought he was just exaggerating, but it seems that it’s true!’
‘Oh, Lord, yes, it’s true enough. Poor Little Annette,’ said Laura again. ‘How’s Nina? I must go and see her.’
‘Oh, she’s all to pieces over it,’ said Miss Hande. ‘The doctor has given her a sedative and put her to bed.’
‘Has Monsieur Delache been told?’
‘Why, they say at the hospital that he was telephoning at all hours and heard right away. I’ve been round there just now – he’s sent the most marvellous flowers. I just wonder,’ Miss Hande went on, peering at Laura, without her lorgnette, with a rather blind intentness, ‘if that would have come to anything if she hadn’t died?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Laura.
‘Nina seemed to think it wasn’t going quite so well on Sunday,’ pursued Miss Hande. ‘She seemed out of sorts with him somehow, she said. But then I daresay she was feeling wretchedly already, poor child. Well, I guess we shall never know, now.’
‘No, we shall never know now,’ said Laura. She felt suddenly the tremendous finality of death; the cutting off of the knowledge of other lives which is so inadequate, but is all we have. She would never know now whether the girl’s feeling for Henri had gone beyond mere sense enchantment, nor how far he was at the root of her spiritual disturbance. And there was so much that Annette would never know, now. ‘Buddha was quite right about her,’ she said suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Miss Hande.
‘Her fortune in the shrine – oh, you weren’t there. It said, “Enlightenment shall escape her, but Death enlightens all men.”’
‘Indeed! That’s vurry striking,’ said Miss Hande. She rose to go. ‘Well, Buddha may say so, but I guess that’s a pretty speculative proposition,’ she observed, in a tone whose sadness robbed the words of all insensitiveness, and took her leave.
Laura sat still among the freesias in her drawing room. There were numbers of things to be done after her absence, but she made no attempt to do them. She sat with her hands in her lap, thinking about Annette, especially as she had last seen her, lying in the darkened room at the hospital. It was curious that the last thing she had heard her say should have been, ‘I can’t bear the light.’ No – she couldn’t bear the light – a waking life was not, mysteriously, for her. At Chieh T’ai Ssu she had stirred in her sleep, and muttered uneasily; but she had never wakened, and now she would sleep for good.
Mrs Leroy was roused by the entrance of Hubbard, her arms full of clean linen, with some question about the washman. The matter liquidated, ‘Hubbard, Miss Ingersoll is dead,’ Laura said.
‘Never!’ exclaimed Hubbard, putting down her linen. ‘What a misfortune, madam. Poor young lady. Well, I always did think she was too tall, if I may say so.’
‘Too tall, Hubbard?’ said Laura, in a sort of dreary surprise.
‘Yes, madam – too tall for health. Those tall pretty ones, and dreamy-like with it, they can’t stand up to illness. There’s no fight in them. Miss Judith wouldn’t have died, madam – nor Miss Lilah. Well, I’ll tell Chang to wash these drills again, then, madam,’ said Hubbard, and picking up her linen, departed.
Laura was just thinking that she really must begin to tackle her accumulation of notes and tasks when Niu announced, ‘Wei Hsien-Sheng!’ and in walked the Professor.
They began by talking about Annette Ingersoll, of course – that was inevitable. Her death had been a good deal of a shock to Vinstead too, in spite of the serious view he had taken of her illness from the first; he was unused to the violence and suddenness of everything in Peking – life, death, love, all banging at you with the force of high explosive. ‘Well, she has found her way out,’ he said at length.
‘You said there always was a way out,’ said Laura, meditatively and rather inanely – she was so much occupied at the moment just in watching his face and his hands, and taking fresh stock of his whole person, that she paid little attention to her words.
‘Well, it would be hard to call this a good way,’ he answered, ‘and yet it might be even harder to think of a better. If she had lived she must have suffered, up to the limit of her capacity, anyhow.’
Laura said nothing. She was thinking that perhaps Annette’s real tragedy lay just in the fact that she hadn’t suffered up to the limit of her capacity – that that would be anyone’s tragedy. But Vinstead began to speak again.
‘I’ve really come to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Nanking this evening.’
Laura was aware, almost with astonishment, of the jump of pain that her mind gave at his words. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Well, the Neviles can’t possibly want me in their house now – if they ever did,’ he said, with a ghost of his grin, ‘and I’ve got to put in a month or three weeks in the Schulz-Otway Institute down there anyhow, so I thought I would go at once. They can’t very well let me go to an hotel here, you see, and it will suit me just as well to come back later. There’s another reason too,’ he said, looking directly at her, ‘which you can probably surmise.’
‘Yes, I expect I can,’ said Laura rather faintly. There was that funny familiar difficulty about breathing, which belongs to these occasions. However, perhaps those five words which she had got out were enough, for the moment.
‘I think it may be a good plan for us to take a little time to look at all this,’ said Vinstead. ‘It wouldn’t be easy for me to stay here just now and see a lot of you, without – well, without wanting to see a lot more of you! That’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Laura.
‘Well, I don’t know how much more of you you’d let me see,’ pursued Vinstead. ‘And there’s the question of fairness too. I don’t want to be fair, particularly – but you are married, after all.’
‘Yes,’ said Laura again. This was practical politics, and all much more difficult than their easy meeting of minds on the hill – she could see, and still more hear, that Vinstead was in a nervous froissé mood, as a result of attempting to work it all out.
He went on, still in the rather staccato accents that she had never heard before:
‘Then there’s another thing. Even if you’d take a lover, and I don’t know if you would, I don’t know whether I should make a very good one. You know that I’ve got a complex about the whole business, and you know why. Well, that might rot it all up, at any moment; I might fly completely off the handle and let you down frightfully. I can’t tell till I try – and yet I can’t possibly try’ – he seemed almost to shiver, and the look on his face reminded Laura of a frightened horse – ‘unless I’m in love with the person. So it would be subjecting you to an experiment, even if you agreed.’
‘I don’t think that would matter much,’ said Laura. ‘I’m not a young person.’
‘No, thank God! Only don’t you see that you’re just the one person in the world that I couldn’t bear to have it go wrong with’ – he dropped his voice, and the last two words were barely audible – ‘
my darling?’
Laura was more moved than she had expected by this. But she spoke as off-handedly as Vinstead.
‘Well, there are one or two things I can tell you,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t go off with anybody, ever, because to begin with there are the children, and there’s my husband. We are rather fond of one another, and I shouldn’t hurt him. But neither of those things would prevent me from taking a lover, if it seemed a good thing to do otherwise, and if I wanted to.’ She paused, and looked meditatively in front of her, with the expression which Vinstead remembered noticing when she sat in the boat trailing her fingers in the water, and General Nevile said that she specialised in rips. ‘Really just that one thing,’ she went on, ‘seems so small, compared to the rest of loving. I know it’s there, and it’s delightful – but it isn’t in the least enduring, so it can’t be so enormously important, after all.’
‘No, but it seems very important indeed sometimes,’ said Vinstead, speaking rather more naturally. ‘It does to me now.’
‘Yes, I daresay. And I expect you’re wise to go away and see if it still looks so important a month hence,’ said Laura. ‘As to your complex,’ she continued, ‘I don’t know about them. And I don’t know what makes a good lover, really. But I suppose it must always help the thing on a bit if both parties love one another, mustn’t it?’ ‘What are you staring at?’ she asked, for Vinstead was fixing her with a gaze of extraordinary intensity.
‘Do you mean to say you really do care about me at all?’ he said – the staccato accents had entirely gone now.
‘Yes – I believe I do, rather a lot.’
He got up, and walked up and down the room.
‘You know that makes it quite easy to go,’ he said at length, stopping in front of her. ‘But I shall come back. I forgot to ask you – you’ll be here, won’t you?’
‘Yes, I shall be here,’ Laura said. She, too, got up and moved over to the window; bent to smell one of the bowls of freesias, and then turned back to him again. ‘If you find you do want to come back, after a month, we can see how we feel about it then. But remember, if you don’t want to come back, in two months I shall have gone home for the summer, so the coast will be clear up here.’
‘You are very good to me,’ he said – something in his voice made the flat words completely adequate. ‘But I shall come back,’ he repeated. He picked up a book, turned it over absently, and put it down. ‘I am not sure that I shall write to you,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I am rather afraid of that.’
Laura had not thought of this. ‘Of course not, unless you want to,’ she said. ‘Only …’
‘Only what?’ he asked, as she hesitated.
‘Only if it were a case of more bottling yourself up – not writing, I mean – I should advise you to write. Anything to be a little extravagant!’ she said lightly.
‘I’ll remember,’ he said. ‘But whether we write or not, we shall be all right, shan’t we? I shall think gently of you – and you will think gently of me, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will,’ she said.
There was a moment’s silence, and then Vinstead spoke again.
‘It’s the security that is so marvellous,’ he said. ‘That we should suddenly have that in one another. We all want it – like the French!’ He came over and stood beside her. ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got things to see to. But I take the certainty of your kindness. Goodbye.’ Rather gently, rather hesitatingly, he kissed her – and with a simple gravity that was almost like a child’s she kissed him in return.
At the door he paused suddenly, and turned back to her.
‘That Buddha was very wise,’ he said; ‘for some of us, anyhow. That poor child, and now me.’
For the moment Laura had forgotten the Professor’s fortune. It darted back into her mind, as he repeated it, ‘The wise find wisdom’ – well, if I ever was wise,’ he said, ‘I have found more wisdom.’ He took her hand, and kissed it once more. ‘But the traveller will journey with a heavy heart,’ he said, and went out.
When the door had shut after him Laura Leroy walked slowly over to a small table. She took up from it the book which Vinstead had picked up and laid down, when he said that he should not write to her. For a moment she held it in her hands, and then raised it slowly towards her face. But she did nothing else. Presently she put it down again, gently, on the table from which she had taken it, and stood looking at it with a curious expression on her face, as of a person who is lost and for the moment cannot find their way. Then she smiled, and went over and rang the bell; when Niu answered it, ‘I speak with the son of the kitchen,’ she said. Niu held open the door for her, as she passed out to the ordering of her household.
Before dinner on that same evening Laura was sitting on the seat under the group of tamarisks in the upper garden. Their boughs of filmy green were less pale and tenuous than a week before, and the blossoms on the bushes of flowering cherry and plum were almost overblown. But the scent of the lilacs and of the yellow briars round the house still filled the air, and the smells of the city – wood smoke and Chinese sanitation and Chinese cooking and donkey dung – came stronger than ever in the warm dusk. Again she sat idle, her hands in her lap, thinking of the week that had passed since she last sat there, and what it had brought – the strange unexpected ripening of her acquaintance with Little Annette, just at the girl’s moment of crisis, and the cutting short of that lovable and unawakened life; the development, which had an air of finality, in the relation between Judith and Derek; the sudden flowering of love between herself and Vinstead. She held his face in her mind – the curious sweetness of his eyes when he smiled, the mixture of humour and grimness round his mouth. The noises of the city came to her as she sat – the soft hum of unshod traffic, the hoot of motor horns, the clanging of tram bells, the hoarse strange cries. Suddenly a steam whistle screamed from the station just outside the Tartar wall, followed by the heavy puffing of an engine and the rumbling of coaches moving. She looked at her watch. Yes, it was the seven-thirty going out, rather late, as usual, and Vinstead was on it. He was sitting, lean and pale, in one of those first-class coaches, with his neat luggage – she was sure it was neat – his tired eyes, and the heavy heart that he said he should journey with. And suddenly Laura put her head down on her arms on the end of the bench. ‘It isn’t only the traveller,’ she murmured to herself.
She lifted her head, after a moment or two, as a sudden question, a doubt, came into her mind – would he come back? She had a curious instinctive wondering whether, for them, the most intimate, the securest, the most perfect moment had not been reached on the previous day, out on the hill, before Little Annette’s interruption. The passage of time, opportunities for intercourse, do not always develop a relationship, she knew – it may often happen that at an early stage a point is reached, a zenith of truth and understanding, which is never achieved again. Had it been so with herself and Vinstead, she wondered? Would it prove so? Then, indeed, he would do better not to come back.
Suddenly, out of the pale evening sky, there came again the winging of music. She looked up, and saw the flight of pigeons wheeling over the house. Watching them, catching at any distraction from the doubt and pain in her heart and mind, she noticed a solitary white bird a little behind the rest. For some reason this single white pigeon attracted her attention; he reminded her of the white fantails who cooed and preened above the heavy pale cornice, who strutted and quarrelled among the geraniums on the terrace at Garsover. And with the picture she remembered the terrible episode of Tim and the fantails, years ago now – the catapult presented to the still blue-smocked little boy by a worshipping under-gardener; the havoc wrought; Grandpère’s wrath. She could see the child’s flushed tear-stained face, the hair damp with the perspiration of emotion round the white brow, the poor angry little voice actually strangled with the sense of injustice and innocent intention. Her funny foolish Tim! Always in hot water of one sort or another. Actually the tears started to her eyes a
t the thought of him. What was he doing? He was there – the pigeons cooed about him now, the wagtails tripped and ran; in no time the flycatchers would be perching on the tennis poles and the bare stem of the tree peony.
Slowly the tumult died down in her. The pain of uncertainty, of parting, ebbed away out of her heart. She was back again at Garsover, with her children, with her parents – where in three months’ time her body would be, as well as her spirit. A look of musing peace and happiness came gradually into her face, as she sat under the tamarisks in the Legation garden in Peking. Her other world had gathered her into it once more.
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