Four-Part Setting Read online

  “They wash much more than Europeans; that may have something to do with it,” Antony said.

  “They make up for it with their foul garlic, anyhow,” said Hargreaves. “No, Daniels—you walk behind the moke, see?” he said, firmly to his donkey-boy, pushing him gently backwards by laying his stick across the ragged blue trouser-legs, as one does to a dog who fails to keep to heel—“I ride in front, all-same King George.” The donkey-boy, recognising either the words King George, or Hargreaves’ semi-jocular intention, grinned broadly and delightedly, and shuffled along behind the donkey.

  “H.H., you can’t think how I hate hearing you call them Daniels,” said Anastasia, who was riding ahead of the cavalcade—“it reminds me so of the Navy. Can’t you learn his name?”

  “Shouldn’t remember it, Asta, old thing. But I’ll call him Rudolf, if you like. Hi, you Rudolf—take my stick and give me my fly-switch,” he said, leaning round out of the saddle and signing to the man, who trotted blithely alongside again, proffering an oiled paper parasol from the miscellaneous collection of objects which he carried. “No, not the brolly, Rudolf—ah, there we are! And you take this. Now, back you go! All-same King George!” “Zoh!” he said to his beast, which broke into an uncertain sort of half-trot for a few steps, and carried him along after Rose Pelham.

  “Antony, can you throw any light on the origin of the naval use of the word Daniels, as a vocative case for all indigenes in the Far East?” asked Hillier, who had listened to Hargreaves’ prattle with mounting disgust.

  “No,” said Antony, “it’s universal and immemorial—that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Oh, sometimes they call them Chu-Chin-Chow, Antony,” Rose called back—all conversation between a number of people riding in single file is in common, and has to be carried on in slightly raised tones.

  “That’s a modern barbarism, Rose—the word is Daniels, with an occasional lapse into George,” Antony said firmly.

  “It’s odd, how life at sea seems to promote that sort of prep-school heartiness, isn’t it?” Hillier pursued. Antony grunted but made no other reply, and Hillier, finding all his attempts at starting a rational conversation to fail, relapsed into silence.

  It was at about this point that what Hargreaves referred to as the “flower trouble” started. Anastasia was a fervent if not very learned botanist, and rode along peering about her for new specimens—one of the features of trips with Anastasia was the constant stopping to gather some cherished bloom. Fortunately stopping for flowers with an ass-train is a simpler business than stopping for flowers in a car, since no pause is involved for the main body, and the collector can usually catch up by accelerating his pace to, say, three and a half miles per hour. Here in the lower valley of the Liuli-Ho, flowers were scarce; but Anastasia’s eye was now caught by some small zinnias of a dusty pinkish red, which began to appear at the edge of the river-bed among the white stones. She hopped off her ass and secured some, and stowed them in the large black tin vasculum which was included among the impedimenta carried by her particular donkey-boy. When she rode on after the others, she closed the procession instead of leading it, and was thus next to Hillier.

  “Is this the natural home of the zinnia?” he asked her, as the small feet of her donkey, tappeting along behind him over the stones, advertised her presence.

  “I didn’t know that it was, but I suppose it must be. China seems to be the natural home of nearly every shrub, and most flowers too,” replied Anastasia. Hillier proceeded to tell her about the flowers in the Caucasus, where he had climbed, and Anastasia, whose conscience had begun to prick her about Antony’s treatment of him, and who was moreover really interested, listened and responded. She even began, to hope that Hillier might not be so bad after all—and since they had agreed to take him, there was no point in being silly and brutal once they had got him along.

  But this excellent disposition on her part rather broke down at lunch. After about an hour and a half’s going, a bend in the river-bed brought them in sight of a small temple perched a few feet up on the bank—that, Antony said, was the Lao-yeh Miao, or Old Man Temple, and there they would eat. The Lao-yeh Miao was an extremely simple-minded place, consisting of one small courtyard which contained two rough trestle tables, a few benches, and several logs of wood; the steps of the latticed shrines were broken, and littered with sacks of unspecified farm-produce; slabs of stone leant against the buildings here and there, a trailing vine of vegetable marrow hung down over the wall. It was, as Henry said, much more like a small builder’s yard in the outskirts of an English village than a place of worship. But the tables were shaded by a tall thuja growing in the centre, and the shade was grateful—Hsiao Wang spread out the lunch on them, while the priest, who was as dirty and humble as his own temple, looked on with smiles and bows. Rose, perched on one of the benches, threw off her hat and stretched her feet out in front of her luxuriously—from where she sat she could see the whitish shoulder of a limestone ridge looking in over the tiled roof of one of the shrines, and with impulsive contentment she exclaimed—“Goodness, how much I do like to have hills about!”

  The three men all looked at her—Henry with ardent pleasure, Antony with indulgent interest; but Hillier studied her for a moment, and then drawled out—“Are you a mountaineer, Mrs. Pelham, or is it just a purely aesthetic appreciation?”

  Rose gaped at him for a second, and then said—“No, I don’t climb,” and turned away and took a sandwich.

  “One of the most interesting features of modern life is the way the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for mountain scenery has persisted,” Hillier pursued—“when so few people actually climb, since the war, and nearly all the other nineteenth-century enthusiasms have gone down the drain. One wonders why it is. It can’t be the fascination of danger, because practically everything the man in the street does now is so much more dangerous than climbing—motoring, or travelling by air, or even crossing the street—which one must suppose the man in the street to do quite a lot. Have you any idea why it should be so?” he asked, turning hopefully to Miss Lydiard.

  Oh dear, oh dear! thought Anastasia, he’s worse than ever. But before she could reply, Henry, who felt that this tirade was a veiled attack on Rose, and anyhow the most pestilent sort of highbrow tripe, said rather truculently—“People may like the shape of them, you know, Hillier. I mean, we needn’t all go up them to admire that.”

  “No—true. Only so many mountains are actually so ugly, don’t you think?” Hillier replied. “There are a few really good shapes in the Alps, like the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn—and the Grivola, of course; quite lovely, especially when you see the North Arête in profile—but how few they are! Many of the mountains tourists travel miles to see are definitely amorphous and positively plain.” He reached out for another sandwich from the enamel tin, and went on—“Mont Blanc from the Brévent, for instance, is an absolute mess. That great shapeless lump of white, with all those tiresome spiky blackish Aiguilles, like part of a cathedral in an industrial town, down on the left, and nothing whatever to balance them on the right. Mont Blanc is a shockingly bad composition, I always think.”

  There was a short silence after this pronouncement. Anastasia, who was hot and a little tired, and liked peace with her meals, groped in her mind for some non-committal response—it would be quite awful if they were to have a Two-minute Silence every time the wretched man opened his mouth, and nothing of an armistice about it, either. But before she found anything, Henry Hargreaves weighed in again. Captain Hargreaves was not a very religious man; he seldom went to Church except in company with his regiment, or to celebrate the wedding, death or jubilee of some monarch; but he did feel that for a literary pipsqueak to take upon himself to criticise the untouched works of the Almighty was profane as well as boring. Also he had gone, during some post-war conference, from the shores of the Lake of Geneva up to Chamonix with a young woman who had told him that what he saw was beautiful; and being in love with her at the time, he
had believed her—though he was no longer in love with her, he still believed in the beauty of Mont Blanc; it was an article of faith. Who are you to say it’s a mess? was what he wanted to say to Hillier, but he had his own excellent code of military manners, and therefore merely observed—

  “Tastes differ, you know, Hillier. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Doesn’t really do to be too positive, does it? De gustibus, and all that.”

  This absolute broadside of platitudes caused Mr. Hillier to gaze at Captain Hargreaves in speechless astonishment for a moment, and while he was thus checked Antony put in, in a neutral tone—“Yes—though I daresay Shelley was a pretty poor judge of scenery. Tasia, have we got any tea?”

  Weak cold tea was produced in a couple of wicker-covered flasks, which Hsiao Wang carried slung round his person. That is to say it should have been cold, but Hsiao Wang’s person was warm, and the sun, which had been beating down on him, of great power, so the tea was luke-warm. Anastasia commented on this, and said that in future they had better arrange to have the lunch tea in a knapsack, where it would keep cooler.

  “Oh nonsense, Tasia,” said Antony, without emotion. “We can’t start setting up those sort of standards. If it’s hot, it’s hot—and in any case all drinks are better for you with the chill off when you’re in a muck sweat. Let it alone.”

  “Right,” Anastasia agreed equably.

  The donkey train with the baggage, led by Wu, caught them up during the luncheon halt, which Antony prolonged rather beyond the usual hour in order to let the animals get well ahead—the next bit, he said, was pretty dusty. He proved to be perfectly right—for the first couple of hours after they set off again, their track led through a succession of mining villages, which are as dirty and degraded in China as anywhere else in the world: they were swarming with pigs, dogs, and dirty naked children; dusty, smelly and hot. The party rode in silence for the most part: Antony insisted that they should all keep to their saddles through the villages at least, where the dust was obviously what the French so neatly call infecte—a protest from Hillier that he preferred walking, because the saddle chafed his legs, brought a curt response—“I would rather you rode, please.” Hillier, surprised and disconcerted, did as he was asked. “What a menace the man is,” Rose murmured to Hargreaves, who had taken advantage of the slightly broader track in the village to shuffle his donkey alongside hers.

  “God, yes! I told you so, darling! Told old Ant too, but he would have him—they’re always so infernally good-natured, those two. It doesn’t pay, you know. Sweetheart, do you feel all right? It’s fearfully hot.”

  “Right as a trivet—only I wish we could have a bathe. Couldn’t we?”

  Hargreaves thought perhaps they might, if they found a place, and shouted a suggestion to that effect down the line of donkeys to Lydiard, who nodded. “Soon as we can—I think there’s a pool a bit further on.” He was vexed with himself for being short with Hillier, vexed with Hillier for forcing him to be short with him. They didn’t want to have to turn back because he caught some filthy complaint from infected dust on his legs—God, what an ass the man was! Extraordinary that he couldn’t seem to see that if you came on an expedition with people who knew the country, you really had got to follow suit and do as the others did, without making a fuss. He began to regret having let him come—if it was going to be like this all the time, it would ruin the trip. Rose had been quite right, actually. He glanced towards the head of the line, where she and Hargreaves rode, talking and laughing—the sight brought back his previous discomfort, and He remembered his resolution to try and keep in touch with her out here in the hills. Well, he couldn’t for the moment. And how hot it was! The glare off the white stream-bed hurt his eyes, but he was too hot and cross and bored even to call up his donkey-boy and get his dark glasses out of his jacket pocket.

  About 4.30 they found their place for a bathe—a long deep pool where the river made a sharp bend under a cliff, away from villages for the moment, with a fringe of scrubby thorny bushes along the shore for undressing purposes. They swam in the swift water, rejoicing in being cool—Rose, turning over on her back and letting the current carry her downstream, while she lay and watched the bushes on the cliff wreathing against the sky three hundred feet above her head, thought that life was very good indeed. Then Hargreaves found a ledge, and called to, her to come and dive from it; Hillier joined them, and in a common activity they felt more amiable, and climbed up and shot down into the greenish water, over and over again. Antony however soon got out and dressed, and sat on the dry bank in the sun, smoking, where he was presently joined by his sister. It was pleasant there—the bushes and the hot turf gave out a sharp fragrant smell, the voices of the three divers echoed off the rocks. Presently Antony said—“They seem to be getting on better now.”

  “Yes. Do you know, Ant, I think H.H.’s way with him is really the best.”

  “What, de gustibus and all that?”

  “Yes, he doesn’t know what to make of it, and thank God it shuts him up.”

  “It won’t for long. And anyhow it’s hopeless one person having to be shut up. I’m sorry, Tasia.”

  “It was quite as much my fault as yours. I daresay he’ll get better after a day or two—or we shall all shake down together somehow,” she said, but without much conviction.

  “I don’t quite know why we mind the things he says,” said Antony, whose conscience was still pricking him. “He’s quite intelligent.”

  “He has a rather cassant way of bringing out his remarks,” said Anastasia thoughtfully. “But I think what is really tiresome is that he’s completely oblivious to other people’s feelings, and their tone together. There are four of us, who are a sort of unit—he’s been brought into it, and yet he hasn’t the wits or the grace to adapt himself. I do think that is unpardonable.”

  “Well, I hope I keep my temper better in future,” said Antony limply.

  When, about 6.30, they reached a largish village called Ho T’ei they found their servants already in occupation of the courtyard of the village school; the tents had been set up, rookhi chairs were standing round the folding canvas table, and from a small building at one side came odours of European cooking, and the voice of the ch’u-tzu uplifted in bargaining, while Wu hurried round with jugs of hot water. They also found about two hundred of the inhabitants of Ho T’ei who, consumed with the devouring curiosity of the Chinese, had swarmed into the courtyard to see the fun. By Antony’s orders these were ejected, and the high gates in the courtyard wall barred against them—undaunted, they climbed up onto the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and when the party, washed and in easy slippers, gathered round the table for supper the immediate skyline was fringed with rows of figures, perched like cormorants on a rock, who watched their every movement.

  “How comic they are,” said Rose, drinking her soup contentedly.

  “Yes, aren’t they priceless?” said Anastasia.

  Rose glanced at her cousin in surprise. Priceless was not a Lydiard word—she had never, to her knowledge, heard Tasia use it before. Hillier supposed they didn’t often see white men at Ho T’ei?

  “Oh yes—now and again. Engineers sometimes come up as far as the head of the rope railway, about half-a-day beyond us,” said Antony. “But the Chinese are funny that way.”

  Rose glanced now at him. Whoever heard Ant use such a bromide?

  Parties in camp in China have two main subjects of conversation, as a rule—their quarters for the night, and their route for the next day. One of these came in for its share of attention at Ho T’ei. The mention of the end of the rope railway caused Hargreaves to ask how far Antony expected to get tomorrow.

  “Ch’ang T’sao, I hope,” said Antony. “It’s about fifty li up the valley, and there’s a nice little temple, as far as I remember.”

  Hillier asked how far a li was. To the great satisfaction of the cousins, Hargreaves took upon himself to explain this rather complicated subject.

  “W
ell, it’s a bit difficult, you know. The li is a measure of distance, of course, but in a way it’s a measure of time too. In the plains one usually reckons three li to the mile, roughly—but if the going’s steep, these chaps in the villages may tell you a place is twelve li off, when in fact it’s only just over a couple of miles away, and on the flat they’d only call it eight, or even six.”

  “That’s very peculiar,” said Hillier. “Do you mean to say they go as far as to double the actual distance? It seems an odd way of doing it.”

  “Oh yes—double it, or halve it, if you like,” said Hargreaves cheerfully. “What’s more,” he pursued—Hargreaves loved giving information—“if you ask a chap on the road how many li it is to Peking, he’ll give you a figure quite pat, but it will probably be how many li it is from his own village; at the moment he may be five or six li this side of it, or the further side, but it’s all one to him—so unless you can find out his home town, you can never be sure to within a mile or two how far it is.”

  “That really is extraordinary,” said Hillier. “The Chinese seem so immensely intellectual and rational in their approach to most things—can you account at all for their being so vague in this matter of distance, Antony?”

  “Oh, it’s just one of their little ways,” said Lydiard, unhelpfully—he was tired, and this being interviewed all the time, as he privately called it, bored him.

  “And how far, actually, is this place we’re going to tomorrow?”

  “Round about sixteen miles.” Hillier could be seen doing the sum in his head, and while he was thus occupied, Antony addressed Hargreaves.

  “Summer time, I think, from now on, H.H., don’t you? It gives us more daylight.”

  “Yes, rather.”

  “Right. All watches on one hour,” pronounced Lydiard. “Wu!” Wu received the order, and the rest adjusted their wrist-watches accordingly.

  “Does that really make much difference?” Hillier asked.