The Chinese Garden (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

                
Timidi dammae cervique fugaces

                
nunc interque canes et circum tecta vagantur.

V
IRGIL

(The hinds and the nervous, swift-footed stags wander now among the dogs and around the homesteads.)

T
HAT
night, as I lay in bed, I watched the clouds piling up over the trees in the park. The moon appeared to be racing across the sky and only with difficulty did I succeed in mooring her above one of the elms in the playing-fields. The air lay heavy over the house. A few drops of rain fell on the sill at my shoulder. In the unnatural light, trees and bushes appeared purple and the grass a vivid yellow. Suddenly a brilliant flash split the sky, lighting up the scared faces of the girls around me, and stabbing me so fiercely in the eyes that I was momentarily blinded. I held my breath, waiting for what I knew would come, and with a sudden hissing, as though the lightning were a white-hot bar of iron thrust into water, the rain came down and peal after peal of thunder rumbled above the black clouds.

I never remember the details of the park being invisible to me at night. It was as if I lived perpetually in the land of the midnight sun. There was not a human sound to be heard, except the breathing of my five or six companions; but there were innumerable animal sounds: the sudden scream of a rabbit, for snares were common all over the park and I must have pulled up and destroyed dozens in my six years at Bampfield; the varied hooting and screeching of the owls
which I so often saw gliding across the moonlit park between the clustered, top-heavy elms. But the most characteristic sound was one which I imagine few people hear. It was the pistol crack of antler meeting antler. Then would come the rustle and thud of hoofs, as the stags manoeuvred on the muddy ground for position, and
crack!
it would come again, as they locked their heads in combat. Every night the deer would approach the house. In winter they came right up to the walls, and their hoofs made a light rustling over the loose gravel when they left the grass and crossed the sweep of the drive to find shelter under our windows. We heard them coughing and shuffling and blowing through their nostrils, and then, again the sudden sharp crack of antler on antler. In the morning I would lean out and see the soft brown forms lying under the windows, shining with rime, for all the world like glistening seals upon a beach.

The park, in the fresh light of morning, never ceased to delight me: the abstracted air of tree and bush, the long delicate shadows, the rain-dark rushes. At night, too, I knew it. More than once I climbed out of a lower form-room window and stalked out over the grass, to stand under the elms and look about me. The lights of the staff rooms in the house gave me courage, and allowed me to watch in delicious trepidation the dark forms of the moving deer, to listen to the sound of the stream, always much louder at night, and the creak of branches above my head. A nightjar would whirr in the shrubbery, or an owl brush past me like a moth, and I would climb in and make my perilous way back through the dark corridors, and get into bed with my heart beating fast and my mind full of sensations which I have never forgotten.

I came to love my surroundings so deeply that I became a
slave to them. For a few years after I had left school I felt compelled at intervals to return there, not to see anyone, but to renew my relationship with the place, with the shrubberies deep in the leaves of many seasons, the statuesque elms, the derelict park. It possessed me, though I had the illusion of possessing it. I can remember having this strong feeling of possession quite consciously; of saying to myself, as I stood alone on the grass: I belong here. This is my place. This is where my roots are.

While I was at school I never confided this feeling to anyone. I confided it only to Bampfield itself, to the long lime avenues, with their carpet of moss and primroses, to the dark, arcanian shrubberies, and the network of acrid-smelling paths that interlaced them. But when I was with my fellows, Bampfield was to me as it was to them, school. The park was the domain where we strolled on the innumerable occasions when we evaded games; the lime avenues, like the groves of Academe, were fruitful of talk, of endless critical talk. Like lords we walked these tall avenues. I never remember playing in them any of our usual games. They did not lend themselves to frivolity. But there among my confederates I tore the regime to pieces; ridiculed Chief's latest sermon; poured scorn on the prefects who were too scared of us to curb our irredeemably bad behaviour. In the cold, deserted shrubberies, talk became more philosophical. Here we smoked, walking slowly among the laurels and rhododendrons, our feet making no noise on the brown leafy paths, where the leaves of a dozen seasons lay unswept.

And Bampfield gave me my private worlds. I knew many places that hardly anyone else knew. Girls are not adventurous nor are they explorers like boys and few of us strayed from the paths in the gardens or penetrated the overgrown
shrubberies along the stream. Nor was I any more adventurous than the rest, but a habit of solitude due to a year of lameness, and the overwhelming desire to know intimately the whole of my domain, led me to explore it inch by inch, though a natural fear of the unknown led me sometimes to take companions with me on my more daring explorations. I found that they seldom wanted to return to these secret places, often difficult of access. I returned alone.

Deep in the shrubberies was a derelict rose garden, well known to most of us as a playground, but only I knew of the little iris garden that lay beyond it, hidden in the laurels, the path to it now completely overgrown. I found it one afternoon in early summer – a small circular clearing in the bushes, carpeted with thick green moss that sank beneath my feet. In the centre were a few neglected shrubs. One was a magnificent fire-bush. Later, on an autumn afternoon I found it blazing in the shadows, untouched by sunlight. All around the long, derelict garden were clumps of iris which, though choked and half-buried in bramble and couch grass, still produced a few flags of brilliant blue and yellow. That was how I first saw it – a little theatre of green desolation, lit with tapers of blue and yellow flame. Later, when high summer came, I used to go there by myself and sit on the dry moss and read Shelley's
Adonais
and Keats's
Hyperion
. The garden was surrounded not only by rhododendron and laurel, but also by tall trees, and looking upwards one would see the sky as nothing more than a small blue plate amid the dense, surrounding green.

For what world was I searching on these occasions, when the urge came upon me to hide even from my closest friends? I did not know. I was aware only of a private delight in and need for the secret places, a delight which
was different from the child's pleasure in secrets, and a need greater than the mere desire to escape from school. Bampfield so satisfied a part of my personality that I had no desire to escape from it. But there resided within me, the schoolgirl Rachel Curgenven, another self, a restless, hungry, immaculate being, bent on piercing through the outward semblances of things to seek out another intuitively-known reality, a reality beyond the world as I saw it. Without being aware of it at the time, I brought back, perhaps, no more than the word ‘fire' or the word ‘rose'. But these images flowered for me in the deserted gardens of Bampfield, and they never withered.

Poetry was the bridge over which I walked to this world which, at sixteen, I was already in danger of losing sight of.

                
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,

                
Majesties, sovran cities, agonies,

                
Creations and destroyings.

I became intoxicated with the power of poetry to transport me into this other world and resentful of sharing the peaceful places. Only when I was alone could I experience the ‘shades and silences and the voices of inanimate things'. They acquired for me a quality of near-perfection, owing to their withdrawn, uncontaminated peace. The lines of their formal beauty remained, the paths could be traced, the urn still stood on its crumbling base, the dry fountain could be seen above the rushes. The image in the eye of whoever had created it still lay behind its dereliction, could be recaptured by my own imagination. It was at the time of my sixteenth birthday that I first became conscious of the power of such images over my being. The sunrise on the November morning remained more vividly in my own mind than in the
words in which I had tried to re-create it and share it with others. When I thought of Margaret's still untold secret, I realized that she might have regretted the impulse that made her begin to tell us of it, and I recognized that she had the right to keep it to herself, to preserve it inviolate. Some bond of sympathy between myself and Margaret reduced my curiosity to manageable proportions.

Lying in bed, the morning after the storm, watching the rain, I was almost glad that it would probably be impossible for her to reveal the secret today.

CHAPTER SEVEN

                
This was my shaping season.

H
ENRY
V
AUGHAN

D
AY
after day it rained with West Country persistence. Rachel threw herself resolutely into her Virgil translation, finished it at last and gave it to Miss Burnett. Bampfield was sodden and inert. Chief had not appeared for days. It was given out that she was ill, and the withdrawal of her presence took the salt out of the regime. At last, the rain cleared and a faint watery sun hung luminous in the sky, giving little warmth but cheering to the eye. Tempers grew easier. No longer confined to form-rooms, the girls ran about the muddy park; windows were opened, and the building began to breathe freely again. Chief recovered. Rachel saw her coming slowly down the front staircase one morning and at once went to her assistance. It was the recognized thing that you offered Chief your shoulder to lean on, coming down stairs. At the bottom, Chief did not relinquish her hold.

‘What are you supposed to be doing, Curgenven?' she asked.

We were almost invariably called by our surnames at Bampfield.

‘Drill, Chief, I was just going down to change my shoes.'

‘Ah, yes, drill,' said Chief, as though hearing of the subject for the first time. ‘Never mind, I want to talk to you. Come out into the sun.'

The two walked slowly out, and across the front sweep on to the sodden grass.

‘Isn't it awfully wet for you?' asked Rachel protectively.

The habit of protection was well developed in the older girls.

Chief ignored her remark, and leaning heavily on her shoulder gazed at the distant hills.

‘That's a very good piece of work you've done for Miss Burnett,' she said slowly. ‘Very good indeed.'

For a moment Rachel did not understand her. ‘My … my last prose, do you mean, Chief?'

Chief shook her shoulder playfully. ‘No, no,' she said. ‘Your translation.'

‘Good lord, has Miss Burnett shown it to you?'

‘Certainly. I read it through last night. I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. I'm very glad you did it. It is things like that that make teaching worth while.'

Behind them on the cruel flints, the rest of Rachel's form was having drill, making teaching worth while for Miss Christian Lucas. Chief and Rachel walked slowly up and down the hockey pitch, Rachel silent, Chief meditative, speaking from time to time at random, about Virgil, about the pitch, about the prospect of the park.

On this damp November morning, the voice of Miss Christian Lucas, absorbed by the spongy atmosphere, receded as Chief and Rachel went further down the pitch. Half-hypnotized, Rachel suspended both her hatred of Miss Lucas and her morbid passion for the drill itself, and allowed herself to be wholly subject to Chief's personality. She had suddenly started a new subject.

‘You will have to be a prefect soon. How do you feel about it?'

No false modesty was expected. Chief uttered the words as a challenge. True to her Bampfield training, Rachel replied, ‘I'm ready when you choose to make me one, Chief.'

‘Really? Are you ready?' Chief looked at her shrewdly. ‘You have still some way to go, I think, but it is something that you feel yourself ready, for that means that you are prepared to train yourself further. Is that so?'

‘What do you want me to do, Chief?'

‘You must regard yourself as a squire, training to be a knight. The positive qualities I think you possess – a sense of leadership, an air of authority. But there are things you will have to do without. You must remember how an acolyte, before taking his vows, fasted. You will have to learn to fast. Must I tell you what you will have to do without?'

No, it was not necessary. Rachel felt she already knew. Her friendship with Bisto, possibly. Her friendship with Margaret, certainly. A prefect was understood to embrace a vow of non-friendship, much as a knight espoused lady chastity. It was a Bampfield rule.

The two turned and walked back in silence. The voice of Miss Lucas became more insistent.

‘Knees outward…bend!'

The flints grated beneath twenty pairs of ravined plimsolls. Chief paused. The girls were now running, marching and counter-marching, their breaths coming in uneasy gasps.

‘She trains their bodies,' said Chief with admiration, watching the precision of the ranks. ‘Only
you
can train your mind, your own personality. With of course, the help of Gud. It is a matter of the will. Train your will first, Curgenven, and all else shall be added unto you.' She leaned a little
more heavily on Rachel's shoulder. ‘Next year I shall make you a prefect.'

Chief released her, and walked back into the house alone, leaving Rachel standing on the empty hockey pitch, moved and appalled, like a neophyte who has attended some fascinating but revolting rite.

In the park among the decaying branches and ashen trunks of the dead sycamores and elms stood a few young trees, planted before the school took over the estate, and left uncared-for ever since. Each had been given protection from the deer and the rabbits by a circlet of iron paling, to which netting was fastened. The netting had long since rusted into shreds, but the palings remained, close now to the bark they had once protected, and doomed, as the trunks swelled, to throttle the trees more and more tightly, till, like the iron bands of a medieval engine of torture, they cut into the living bark. I see now a symbolism in the deeply scarred trunks. All the ambivalence of my attitude to Bampfield is summed up in that short conversation with Chief as we strolled the playing fields. I despised the regime, laughed at it, rebelled against it, yet I was subject to its fascination. I could not detach myself from it and readily rendered up my personality to its peculiar power. It could not restrain my growth, but, like the iron bands encircling the trees, it could and did mark me.