Rachel crossed a creaking, dilapidated bridge, and went into the tiny pagoda. Bells were still hanging under the painted eaves, their copper green with age, shrill and fragile when she touched them with her hand. It was inhabited only by spiders. The floorboards were rotten, and covered with bird droppings, and the once bright paint was blistered and faded. The quiet pools, greened over with weed, never-disturbed, the dense overgrown shrubbery which hedged it from the world without, the incongruous oriental appearance of the pagoda and its bridges, created an indescribable air of secrecy and strangeness. She entered an exotic world where she breathed pure poetry. It had the symmetry of Blake’s tiger. It was the green thought in a green shade.
She wandered slowly about, mapping it out in her mind. Its dereliction did not distress her. She was used to decay and ruin. The Chinese garden still offered, in its broken bridges and peeling cupola, the symbols of a precise pattern, a perfection greater than itself. Its complex image held within it a world of images, unfolding to the heart unending sequences of dream. Rachel realized now why Margaret, after visiting the garden again, had no wish to bring anyone else into it. To do so would be to reduce it to the status of a playground. It was not that. Entering it, one shed one’s reality and partook of its charmed atmosphere, like the hero of a fairy tale who, on reaching the enchanted palace, hears music from the air, and from cups presented by invisible hands, drinks a paradisal wine.
A few days later, term ended. Reluctantly I went home. Home with its passions, its poverty, its wall of misunderstanding between parents and children, brothers and sisters, made more impenetrable by the blood which cemented it – home was a place that I dreaded. The countryside around it furnished a certain measure of escape, but it was not an invariable comfort to me. It lacked the familiarity of Bampfield and its clearly defined limits. In the countryside around my home I was adrift. I wandered and came up against no familiar fencing. One might, I felt at times as I walked alone through the hazel copses, one might walk for ever and out of the world. There was too weak a centrifugal force to hold me to the hub of this universe. Thus my walks at home, lacking security, lacking a sense of possession, were always a faint source of fear. I was compelled to take them, yet I half hated them. They were the wrong sort of solitude, a solitude imposed rather than a solitude sought. I did not withdraw, as I did at Bampfield, into a secret world. I ran out into a desert to escape from home, and explored the unfamiliar with a kind of desperate hope that I would find in it something that would reassure me. When the end of the holidays came, I returned to Bampfield with a readiness that grieved my parents.
Travelling down in the train through the well-known landscape, now sodden with January rain, viewing the sheets of flood water over the Somersetshire meadows, I drew towards me the picture of Bampfield, its features, its touch, its smell, as if I were pulling towards me, by the hand, some loved and familiar figure. Resting serenely in my mind was the image of the Chinese garden. The disgust and tedium I had felt at the end of the previous term had been exorcised by absence. At the heart of Bampfield lay a world private to myself, and one which was so powerfully present to my thoughts that I did not need to visit it at once. It shed its enchanted light over those aspects of school for which I had recently felt so much detestation, and I found myself accepting again the life I had temporarily lost.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
O hours of childhood,
hours when behind the figures there was more
than the mere past, and when what lay before us
was not the future! We were growing, and sometimes
impatient to grow up, half for the sake
of those who’d nothing left but their grown-upness.
Yet when alone we entertained ourselves
With everlastingness.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
‘HOW you are enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ said Margaret sardonically, when she and Rachel had lingered behind in the form-room after the bell had gone. It was some weeks after the beginning of term, and the first time they had spoken to each other except in the presence of others. Rachel was silent. She did not feel en rapport with her this term. The brilliant beam of Margaret’s personality was turned in another direction, and Rachel was too glad to be back at Bampfield to be wounded by her apparent defection and too occupied to make the effort to get back once more on to intimate terms with her.
‘Go on –’ goaded Margaret – ‘you and your childish pleasures. I don’t know how you bear this place, Rachel, let alone enjoy it. All you do is fool about with Bisto, feeding rats and writing silly parodies.’
‘I haven’t written any parodies this term. I’m trying to write a play, in fact.’
‘A play?’ Margaret’s eyes lit up. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t think you’d be interested. You seem occupied.’
‘With Rena, I suppose you mean?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I do.’
‘And you don’t like her, do you?’
‘No, I can’t stand her.’
‘She’s not everybody’s cup of tea.’
‘Perhaps Bisto isn’t either, but I happen to like her.’
‘That’s different,’ said Margaret.
‘I don’t see why.’
‘Tell me about your play. That’s more interesting than Bisto or Rena.’
‘I can’t begin now, we’ll be sent up soon.’
‘It’s only Punch on duty,’ said Margaret, and went on eagerly, ‘look here, let’s go up now, and meet later on. We haven’t done that for ages.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Rachel stubbornly.
‘Oh, don’t go on about it,’ said Margaret. ‘All right, it was mine. Now are you satisfied?’
Punch opened the door. She smiled blandly at them, as she usually did upon wrongdoers who were doing exactly the sort of things she liked doing herself.
‘I hate to interrupt you,’ she said, ‘since conversation is one of the most rewarding arts and I like to know that you practise it. But rules, alas, are rules.’
‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Margaret as they went up the staircase in semi-darkness. ‘Come, all the same, Rachel.’
‘Where?’
‘I suppose it’s too cold to go out?’
‘I should think so.’
‘It’ll have to be a music cell then. Number nine at the end. At ten o’clock. Will you bring the play?’
‘Well, we shan’t be able to have the light on.’
‘I’ll bring a torch.’
‘All right. At ten. Don’t go to sleep.’
‘I shan’t go to sleep,’ answered Margaret and paused in the gallery. All along it were engravings and reproductions of paintings, many of them of the Pre-Raphaelite school. They had stopped under one which depicted Cleopatra riding in her barge. Margaret looked at it intently.
‘Rena is like Cleopatra,’ she said slowly, ‘like Cleopatra sitting on her burnished throne.’
Never having given a thought to the picture before, Rachel looked hard at it, and saw that there was, indeed, a likeness.
‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ asked Margaret, rather feverishly.
Not knowing whether she referred to Cleopatra or Rena, Rachel answered cautiously: ‘Oh, well, I suppose so.’
‘You’re studying classics,’ said Margaret, contemptuously, ‘but you don’t seem to have acquired the Greek attitude to physical beauty.’
‘I’m not studying Greek,’ answered Rachel with maddening precision. ‘It’s Latin.’
‘Latin,’ said Margaret in anger. ‘Yes, that’s what you are. Very Roman. You love order, and routine and discipline and … and … hardships. You’re like Antony who drank the stale of horses. I don’t believe you know the meaning of pleasure, except perhaps brutal Roman pleasures.’
‘Shut up,’ said Rachel angrily.
‘I don’t care. You’re a pure Roman. I suspect you have secret vices. You probably torture Bisto when you go off
with her to your stupid secret hiding-places. Disgusting, Roman Empire tortures. I’ve read all about them.’
In the distance the long-drawn notes of Chief’s whistling, never of any known tune, reached them. Margaret walked quickly away. Rachel stood for a moment staring down over the curved banisters into the well of the hall. A soft padding of footsteps and another burst of whistling. She ran down the stairs and offered her shoulder to Chief, and they mounted the stairs together, side by side.
‘Thank you, my dear Curgenven. But it’s late. Oughtn’t you to be undressed?’
‘I’m sorry. I ought. I was thinking.’ (Certain appeal to Chief.)
‘Do you often stand in the gallery to think?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘It’s a beautiful gallery, isn’t it?’
Chief paused, and leaning heavily on Rachel’s shoulder, swept a slow gaze down the curved balustrading and into the shadows of the hall.
‘What were you thinking about? Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I’m not probing.’
As one adult to another, Rachel took a step forward out of childhood.
‘It’s about a play. I’m writing one.’
Chief turned and looked into her face. Rachel could have said nothing that would more have fired her spirit.
‘A play!’ she repeated with delight. ‘Rachel Curgenven, you renew my youth. Will you tell me about it? Not now necessarily, but some time?’
‘Yes, of course, Chief.’
‘And show it to me, I hope?’
‘To you, first of all,’ said Rachel, capitulating to the moment’s emotion.
They were in the gallery now, under the picture of Cleopatra.
‘Do you think she really looked like that?’ asked Rachel suddenly.
‘Who?’
‘Cleopatra.’
‘The painter has done his best, but Shakespeare did better.’ Chief began walking very slowly down the gallery towards her own wing, which opened off one end of it.
‘The barge she sat in,’ began Chief, ‘I wonder if I can remember it …
‘“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description …”’
Her senses held by the poetry, Rachel’s truant mind played with the tempting hope that she would be able to evade going to her dormitory at all. To stay with Chief until ten and then go down to the music cells to meet Margaret – a water-tight excuse handed to her gratis, if she should be caught walking the corridors still dressed at ten o’clock. With simple cunning, just as they came to Chief’s outer door, she said, ‘Is it very presumptuous of me to write a play in blank verse?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Chief. ‘You have the stuff of poetry in you. Shakespeare has no monopoly on blank verse. You know Clemence Dane’s plays well enough, and that’s blank verse of the first order. What is your play about?’
‘It’s a play about the horrors of marriage,’ said Rachel, impulsively.
Chief stopped and thought over the words. ‘Let’s hear what the horrors of marriage are,’ she said, and they entered the warm firelight together.
It was one of many occasions when Rachel had spent the evening in Chief’s room. In the winter there would be a roaring fire of logs lighting up the great Tudor room, with its fine moulded ceiling and plaster swags on the walls. The sybaritic comfort of it was a welcome inducement to sit there talking to her, often for hours. Then, long after the proper bed-time, when the rest of the school was asleep in the draughty dormitories, Rachel would be dismissed, and would walk slowly down the darkened corridors, savouring every moment of her solitude.
Yet now, when it came to the point, Rachel found that she could not talk easily of her play. Somehow the sentiments propounded in it in a mixture of Shakespeare and Gilbert Murray were inexpressible in common speech. And the roots of the play, her loathing of home, and disgust with her parents’ version of wedded life, together with the deeper though virtually unrecognized disgust which accompanied her dawning knowledge of sexual love, could only be buried under the cloak of a myth. She could use her own reactions but not her home itself. Loyalty prevented her from revealing the source of her disgust.
‘It’s about Clytemnestra,’ she said unemotionally.
‘Who killed Agamemnon with an axe, I seem to remember,’ said Chief. ‘Remind me of the rest of the story.’
‘Agamemnon went off to the Trojan wars. He sacrificed Iphigenia – to persuade the Gods to give him a fair wind.’
‘Yes,’ said Chief. ‘I remember, of course.
‘“Her spirit is fled,
Her fair body taken
Within the tomb.
Do her eyes awaken
Some light in the gloom
In the halls of the dead?”’
It was one of Rachel’s own poems that she quoted. Chief was susceptible to the strains of Gilbert Murray. She had praised the poem, and it had stayed in her retentive memory.
‘How wonderful of you to remember it,’ said Rachel, struck secretly with far more wonder at her own poetic powers that had given birth to such a lyric.
‘It is one of the best poems you have written. I hope the play is as good. Has it any lyrics?’
‘Yes, choruses.’
‘Euripides? Not a bad model,’ observed Chief.
There was a brief silence. Rachel did not feel able to say anything more about it. For Chief it must be the finished product. Work in progress could be discussed with Margaret alone. Her momentary flash of self-assurance after hearing the Iphigenia lyric was swallowed up in the darkness of inner doubt. Was it, after all, so very good, that poem? It was slight, it was shallow, a verbal skimming over the surface. Even Chief’s voice could not give it wings. But for her play, Clytemnestra, she felt she had plumbed the depths herself. Accumulated bitterness and loathing had been drawn up from them and the Greek legend was no more than a vessel for this bitter well-water.
Chief’s sensitivity was acute. She would not press Rachel to tell her anything more. She set out to restore Rachel’s confidence by bringing out from the bookshelves the hardcovered notebook in which Rachel had written out her translation of Virgil’s Book Eight for Miss Burnett, the previous term.
‘This has given me great pleasure,’ she began. ‘I’d like to read you a piece of it. It reads well aloud.’ Her beautiful well-kept hands turned over the pages slowly. ‘Yes, this passage about the journey down the river.
‘“Throughout the day and night they strain the oars,
Winding along still reaches, while the trees
Cast dappled shade below; the quiet stream
Bears them along between the leafy woods.”’
Rachel settled herself more easily into the deep hearth rug and felt the heat from the piled logs flare up against her cheeks. The firelight winked against Chief’s empty wine glass and in the amber eyes of her giant Alsatian. Fascinated, Rachel listened to her voice, lending an enchantment to the rough blank verse of her translation and restoring her to the days of confidence, during the last term, when she had written it. It was an intoxicating experience.
‘There,’ said Chief. ‘There. It’s good, Rachel Curgenven. You will write more, and write better. I’m certain of it. But you must keep to the lyrical vein. This translation is, perhaps, a kind of exercise. But it’s your own imagination you must explore, not Virgil’s.’
She was not always so perceptive for she was too dominated by her own emotional needs. Perhaps at that moment the isolated poles of being which were Chief and Rachel, touched and struck off, in the electric atmosphere, a single illuminating flash. It was more than the warmth of enco
uragement. It was the rare self-illuminating light that flickers occasionally at one touch of an alien hand.
Rachel said good-night with the usual formal handshake. It was twenty minutes to ten. She lingered for a moment.
‘Would you give me permission to do something irregular?’ she asked.
‘What, my dear Rachel? By irregular, I suppose you mean against the rules?’
‘Well, not exactly. Beyond – outside the rules,’ said Rachel.
‘What is it then?’
‘May I walk once round the house, outside?’
‘It’s very cold, and I imagine very dark.’ Chief walked over to the window and pulled back the heavy curtain. The February night was illuminated by a brilliant full moon.
‘It’s like daylight,’ said Rachel, ‘and I can put a coat on. I don’t mind the cold, anyway.’
Rarely did Chief fail to respond to a suggestion such as this.
‘You may go with my blessing,’ she said, giving with her hand an exquisite gesture of dismissal.
Rachel went quickly down the turret stairs. She found her coat and let herself out of the back door into the night. Above her, a pale grey sky stretched over the hills, raddled with cloud. The walls of the house wore a sheeted, ghostly look. The light wind that was pargeting the cloud above her, stirred the leaves of the great magnolia near the house.
Fearful but enthralled, Rachel walked slowly through the lower path of the pleasure garden, out on to the back drive which led down to the stables. She could see clearly the black mass of shrubbery which held the Chinese garden. She felt a wild desire to see it by moonlight, to evoke from it an even greater mystery and enchantment; its weed-haunted pool a mirror for stars, its pagodas and bridges harbouring unfathomable shadows, drained of colour. Normal childhood fears overcame her. Should she persuade Margaret to go with her, who knew the garden as well as she did, or better? She hurried round the house, over the loose gravel, and in at the still-open front door. There was no one about. It was nearly ten. Quietly, she crossed the hall and let herself into the back corridors. The music cell was still empty, and she stood there in the darkness, her heart beating, her eyes filled with the pattern of the garden, silver and shadow.
The Chinese Garden Page 7
