The Chinese Garden (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

                
Feed apace then, greedy eyes,

                
On the wonder you behold:

                
Take it sudden as it flies,

                
Though you take it not to hold.

                
When your eyes have done their part

                
Thought must lengthen it in the heart.

A
UTHOR
U
NKNOWN

I
WAS
often restless at night. The vast house, with its silences, folded in mists, an island in a grey, gently moving sea, amid which the black heads of the elms emerged like volcanic islands: the sudden bursts of sound, the opening and shutting of doors, which came to me long after my companions were asleep and brought me back with a jolt to the realization that it was not, in fact, the middle of the night, but only the end of the day for the adults who lived so close to us yet so cut off; the incomprehensible fragments of conversation over-heard on the landings, laughter, or sudden breathing silences when footsteps had stopped near by – all these were part of my experience and a part which bore no relation to the world of day-time. I did not connect the words I heard, the footsteps, the laughter, the silences, with the gowned beings who taught me Latin or History or Games. When night fell, it was as though the building were occupied by a different set of people; I myself changed, and, by being a participant, if only on the fringe of this nocturnal life, I became a different person from the Rachel of my day-time hours. During the day, I worked and played and talked, and lived the limited
routine of the school. At night I lay in bed, or sometimes walked about the dark passages unobserved, and my mind absorbed avidly a host of strange and new impressions which were, it seemed, erased by sleep. But it was not so. Gradually I built up a knowledge which I only comprehended years later.

On the night of my birthday I was restless. I slept for a short while and woke to find the room full of moonlight, and that never-forgotten stillness of the night world which made me feel I had awoken somewhere else in space and time. I lay for some while, watching the bar of light shift a little across the beds of the sleepers, and then, fully awake, I got up and put on my dressing-gown. I was cold, as one usually was on winter nights at Bampfield, and went down to my own form-room, hoping that the log fire had retained sufficient embers for me to blow it into life again. Lights were still burning in the hall, and under one or two staff doors. It was half past eleven. The fire was quite dead, but the room was warm, and smelt of ink and wood-smoke. Above me were the rooms of my housemistress, Georgie Murrill. I could hear her walking about. I sat very still by the black grate and ate a half-raw chestnut which was lying in the ashes.

The form-room I was in was next door to the entrance hall, an oasis of Georgian splendour in the midst of inky form-rooms and stone-floored passages. It was a wide hall, with graceful Ionic pillars supporting the gallery above, and it was filled with rugs and fine furniture. It was out of bounds to the girls. Only at night had I ever ventured into it, and there I found a pleasure to my senses, utterly starved at Bampfield, in running my fingers through the thick fur of a
polar bear skin or burying my face in bowls of chrysanthemums, or other flowers which decorated the carved chests. The pillars were smooth and cool, and there were ornaments to handle, and the pictures to look at. I knew it all well, and gained from it more than the single sensuous pleasure – a delicious fear of discovery which was exhilarating, and a feeling of private ownership, as though only I knew this night world of soft lights and shadows. It was a world of eyes and hands and ears, made the more sensitive by the necessity to be on the alert to avoid being caught. Often I identified myself with some personage in one of the pictures, a knight escaped from battle, in which I saw him depicted, lance in hand, his horse with staring eyeballs, straining beneath him. In me, he travelled beyond the picture and entered some strange, silent hall, and stood alone as I was standing, sensations washing round him in the silence, sword in hand against the possible danger. Or the sea engulfed, at last, the mariner clinging to the spar, and he entered a drowned world and wandered in caverns lit only faintly by the reflected light of the sun's rays. And all this, which seems so endless to me, as though time had no part in it, all this must have happened within a few minutes, and on occasions so infrequent that had I ever thought to count them, they could not have amounted to more than a dozen in my whole six years at Bampfield.

That night of my birthday, I was interrupted and nearly caught. I had left the form-room and gone out into the hall and was lying down on the polar bear rug, revelling in its soft warmth. Suddenly the windows lit up as a car's lights travelled quickly towards the house. There was a sound of brakes. It could only be Miss Faulkner, the Headmistress, whom we knew as ‘Chief'. She alone possessed a car. Doors
opened and shut with quiet solicitude for the sleeping children in the dormitories above, and footsteps crunched over the flints towards the front door. I had no time to get up the long flight of stairs or to retreat again into the form-room. I crouched behind one of the chests and held my breath.

Chief came in, her rubber-soled shoes padding lightly over the stone floor. She was alone. The car drove away again, round to the small garage beside the house. She paced up and down the hall, whistling softly. At last, after what seemed to me an interminable time of waiting, the front door opened again, letting in another blast of cold air, and someone came in. There was not a sound. The two stood in the hall in silence, but I could not see who the other was. Tense myself, it was only my own tension, perhaps, that abated as the footsteps began to walk towards the stairs, yet it seemed as if some sudden stiffness in the very texture of the air about me slowly relaxed as they moved away from the hall. As they turned the corner of the staircase, half-way up, they came into my view – Chief and Miss Burnett. Chief's arm was round the other's shoulders. A door opened along the corridor above, and Chief's arm dropped. The two stood on the stairs, full in my vision, looking up towards the gallery. Hard-heeled shoes emerging on to it were easily recognizable as Georgie Murrill's. There was a long, weighted silence. Chief turned and looked at Miss Burnett, slowly, very deliberately, replaced her arm round her shoulders and they went on up the stairs, out of sight.

I heard their footsteps go along the gallery to Chief's own suite of rooms at the far end. The double doors – mahogany outside, baize within – opened on easy hinges and shut again with a faint thud.

I was about to creep out and go up myself when I heard a movement above me. Miss Murrill was still standing in the long gallery. I heard her hard shoes tread very slowly back to her room, and when her doors were safely shut I made my way up to my dormitory on bare feet, my slippers in my hand.

CHAPTER FIVE

                
We've never, no, not for a single day,

                
pure space before us, such as that which flowers

                
endlessly open into; always world,

                
and never nowhere without no. …

                                                                  
a child

                
sometimes gets quietly lost there, to be always

                
jogged back again.

R
AINES
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

T
HE
following morning a steady rain fell. The clouds which had coursed all night through the sky had come to a standstill, and sunk down over the low hills in a thick grey quilt. The children in their ill-lit dormitories dressed to the monotonous patter of the rain against the windows. Walls sweated. The building felt like the inside of a well. During the day there was little opportunity for speaking together, for the three girls seldom foregathered as a trio except in the private places they knew of in the grounds, and then usually at the instigation of Margaret. She would never allow her friendship to be taken for granted. She did not regard herself as part of a trio at all. Both she and Rachel were independent of each other. They sought each other's company when they needed it, when they had something vital to tell each other. But when, as so often happened, the fourteen-year-old Bisto attached herself to Rachel, Margaret was more reluctant to join her. If Rachel and Bisto invited her to come to one of their known meeting-places, they would as often as not wait in vain. For Bisto this was no hardship. She far preferred to have Rachel to herself. The fascination
which Margaret exerted over both of them was in Bisto's case only a reverence for the personality which commanded Rachel's admiration. Like a dog, she would lick the hand of those who smiled on her mistress, and she was equally quick to snap at those who frowned. Rachel loved her with a half-protective, half-exasperated affection. It was as if she split her surface personality quite readily into two and gave half to each of her two friends. To Bisto went the romantic side, the side which fed upon mystery and upon association, which was firmly rooted in the physical delights of childhood, and most of all in the discovery of secret places. But with Margaret, Rachel felt a different sort of kinship. She was drawn to her because in her company the life of the world beyond school was glimpsed beneath the surface of Bampfield, like hidden streams whose windings are heard but only seldom seen. When Margaret withdrew herself, Rachel felt a sudden stillness, as though out of earshot, and was faintly troubled. It was the life of the adult and the intellectual to which Margaret, precocious and eccentric, beckoned her. Rachel was disturbed at its fascination, yet could not but respond. Thus even Margaret's secrecy, which was the secrecy of the adult, had for Rachel an essential rightness, however painful it could sometimes be.

Shut indoors by the now constant rain, tempers were frayed, friendships strained. Bisto saw with grief the great Rachel amusing her form-mates with her mimicry and indulging in savage jokes against junior staff. Detailed for most of the hated supervisory jobs, and lacking the capacity to inspire respect, these wretched art mistresses and music teachers endured in the chilly, stuffy, overcrowded form-rooms a kind of hell, while the rain beat incessantly outside, and there was no one within earshot to hear the yells, the
crash of furniture, and their own feeble cries of ‘Girls! Girls!
Please
be quiet!'

If Bisto could have hated anyone she might have hated Rachel at these times. Everything she witnessed revolted her gentle nature, yet the pull of her devotion prevented her from absenting herself or averting her eyes. She watched Rachel; felt compelled to watch and was ashamed that she found a certain delight in this cruel and debasing sport. It was as if Rachel were to acknowledge a taste for cutting up kittens alive, and yet, thought Bisto, as she watched her mincing up the music mistresses, this is not the real Rachel. She is doing it because she is unhappy, because that accursed Margaret sits over there reading and will not speak to her, and has said no more about this secret that she has found.

Eventually, bored with her afternoon's activities, and perhaps a little disgusted with herself, Rachel summoned the faithful Bisto. Together they left the noisy classroom and went down the corridor to the music cells. Damp, ill-smelling little cubby holes, unheated and barely furnished except for a moth-eaten piano and stool, they at least afforded privacy. They found an empty one. The keys of the piano were moist and sticky. Rachel shut the lid down and sat on the stool. She laid her Virgil and notebook on the lid and started to work. She was translating Book VIII of the
Aeneid
into Miltonic blank verse, and Bisto, who was not very much interested in Latin, found the poetic frenzy when it came upon Rachel rather hard to bear. Yet it was of course gratifying to think that one knew a future Milton or Dryden. Usually Bisto sat and knitted or worked slowly and painfully on a teacosy for her mother, on which she was embroidering a peacock. But the swift and secret egress from the form-room had prevented her from getting permission to fetch
this. And nothing was to be done at Bampfield without permission. In any case, the cold of the music cell would have numbed her fingers. She sat huddled on the bare boards of the dirty floor and dreamed of what Margaret could possibly have to show them.

Bisto was a romantic. Her imagination led her always into the paths of adventure and action. The secret places were for her, doors to a world where she and those she loved and admired became figures of romantic splendour and stature. Margaret's find – was it a hollow tree? A tree in which they could hide from the others and watch them running past at their inane games of tag and prisoner's base? Or was it something more mysterious and evocative like the stone obelisk they had discovered that unforgettable day last summer?

They had left the open paths in the pleasure gardens, to creep furtively under twisted laurel boughs. In these now overgrown shrubberies, there were to be found little ponds, ornamental, neglected clearings once cultivated, and other sad relics of the garden's splendour from the Georgian days. On this occasion, deep in the midst of a shrubbery, they came across a stone obelisk, lying on its side. Carved on it were the words:

IN MEMORIAM

J. W. B.

SEVASTOPOL

1855

They stood reverently in the presence of this stone. Who was commemorated upon it, only to be forgotten? Some member of the family on whose grounds they stood? There was something exquisitely sad about the fallen stone, set up
less than a hundred years before to be a permanent record of the family's loss in the service of their country, and now dragged away and buried deep in the memorial laurels.

Bisto, her mind far away from Virgil, closed her eyes to recall the mystery and wonder of that discovery – for she, of the three, secretly rejoiced in it still, though she pretended that it bored her. Round it she had woven a story of heroism. Brave J. W. B. had not died from a cannonball or grapeshot, but by the knife of an assassin who had crept into the wards of Florence Nightingale's hospital where he lay wounded. J. W. B., tossing in a fever, had heard the stealthy footsteps, seen the white-robed figure (a Moslem fanatic) lurking by the door, his eyes shining in the moonlight, his hand clasping a dagger, waiting for the Lady of the Lamp on her rounds, to plunge his assassin's knife into her heart. Gritting his teeth against the pain, the gallant J. W. B. had crawled from his straw pallet across the mud floor of the ward, leaving behind him a trail of blood from his still open wounds. And just as the faint glow of the lamp could be seen approaching through the open door, he had raised his body with a tremendous effort upon his shattered legs and flung himself upon the assassin, to receive a fatal wound and immortality.

This summer they would act it, thought Bisto, she and Rachel and Margaret, in a clearing in the laurels near the fallen obelisk. Margaret would be the assassin and Rachel of course would be Florence Nightingale, and she herself … no, perhaps Rachel had better be the gallant J. W. B., and she would be Florence Nightingale. It was the least interesting part even if in name it was the most famous.

‘I've thought out a wonderful play we can do at that obelisk we found last summer,' she said suddenly. It was
Bisto's failing that she always clung tenaciously to things and pursued them, squeezed out of them the last drop they could give, and went on squeezing when there was really nothing more to extract. Rachel was annoyed.

‘You've interrupted a wonderful line,' she said severely.

‘I'm sorry,' said Bisto, and relapsed humbly into silence and the Crimea. A few minutes later, Rachel put down her pen. Always uncertain at heart of the value of her creative work, Rachel could not bear to keep it to herself. She must read it or show it to others, seek their support for what she had done, seek even their criticism, for adverse comment had a stimulating effect upon her, stiffening up the sinews of her pride and impelling her to revise, cut and even destroy, in the interests of the perfection that she craved. ‘Shall I read you what I've done today?' Rachel asked.

Bisto buried her Nightingale drama and, dumb with cold, settled back against the flaking wall to listen to fifty lines of frigid Miltonic blank verse on the subject of Aeneas' shield. Line after line dropped into the cold air of the cell, and Bisto heard them as an isolated series of sounds which held no meaning for her. Misery invaded her heart. Rachel was too clever for her. Was life always to be this way? A cold empty room, and clever unintelligible words? Was there no warmth anywhere, no friendly hand, no friendship without words?