The Chinese Garden (12 page)

She opened my eyes not only to the Romantics but to the Moderns and for this I am profoundly grateful to her. They did not enter into my syllabus, but one day she produced a newly published book of modern verse. She did not read a great deal with me – she was too wise for that – but in the two or three poems that she did read, she succeeded in conveying to me her own delight in the discovery of
these, as they then seemed, outlandish poets. I can hear her now, reading E. E. Cummings with enormous gusto and relish:

                                     
(the

                
Flics, tidiyum, are

                
very tidiyum reassuringly similar,

                
they all have very tidiyum

                
mustaches, and very

                
tidiyum chins, and just above

                
their very tidiyum ears their

                
very tidiyum necks begin)

And a phrase from another poet – I have forgotten who – still sticks in my mind:

                
Or a great cloud entering the room of the sky,

                
Napoleon of his century,

                
Heard come to knowing music consciously.

And, of course, there was Eliot's
The Waste Land
, which I hardly understood, but found myself returning to over and over again. It was at least ten years before I bought myself a copy of that anthology. The barren years at the University and the still more barren struggle to earn a living, destroyed temporarily my desire for poetry, but I came back to it in the end, and when I reread those poems, I could hear Miss Naylor's keen, humorous and appreciative tones, and I picked up, as an adult, my old enthusiasms and carried them forward.

The balanced life of authority, physical work and intellectual discovery was at least temporarily so satisfying that Rachel hardly felt her isolation from her fellows. But to Bisto the position was intolerable. Cut off from Rachel, her worried face assumed an air of perpetual and unassuageable
grief. Bampfield, which she had always hated, now held for her the horrors of a concentration camp. Her work, never brilliant, became almost moronic, and her behaviour so erratic and absent-minded that she was perpetually in the hands of Miss Christian Lucas. Bisto was, however, at least in Rachel's house. It was still possible to speak to her during the informal house dance every Friday night. She could see Rachel when she was on ‘lights' duty as a prefect and had to parade the dormitories. If it was no more than a few words she spoke, they were a comfort to the unhappy Bisto.

‘How's Willy?' asked Rachel one night, idly. Bisto's eyes filled.

‘I haven't seen him for ages. I expect he's dead,' she replied. ‘I don't like going down to the stables by myself.' Rachel switched off the light abruptly and closed the door. It was not possible to discuss the matter. Out in the darkened passage she paused for a moment, thinking of afternoons spent with Bisto in the stables; hours in the secret paths with Margaret, smoking and talking; long walks outside the park during the previous autumn when they raided orchards and lay against warm ricks, munching stolen fruit. It all seemed very far away. Of Margaret Rachel saw nothing now. She was in another house and their paths seldom crossed. But Rachel began to notice that the grass at the spot where Margaret entered the shrubbery was well trodden down. It looked as if she had been there a good many times this term, and she wondered a little that their visits had never coincided.

One fine morning in June, when the sun was drawing up a pale vapour from the marshy park, Rachel came away from her coaching with Miss Naylor, carrying Coleridge's poems under her arm, and ‘Xanadu' in her head.

‘Where Alph the sacred river ran …' she repeated to herself, and the words brought to her mind the stream running through the Chinese garden. The broken pagoda glittered again with gilt and colour and copper bells, and the ornamental bridges glowed between the ferns and berberis.

‘I must go there this afternoon,' she thought, and absented herself from games, ostensibly to go for a walk.

There was no one about. With a distaste for Margaret's well-worn track, she entered the shrubbery from almost the opposite side. She undid the wire, pulled out a paling and began to force her way through the cool, damp undergrowth. There was no path, of course, and amid new-growing brambles and pithy elders, she lost her way. At one moment she paused and heard in the silence the faint trickle of water. ‘Alph, the sacred river,' she murmured and turned towards it. She came out of the undergrowth on the side of the lake where the river carried its water out towards the fence again. Some confused memory of Greek tradition mingled with
Kubla Khan
in her mind, and she stooped on the bank of the stream and scooped some of the water up into her hands. She wetted her forehead, drank a sip of the water, and poured the rest out ceremoniously on the ground, as a libation to the gods of the place.

She was astonished and moved by the powerful effect of this sudden emergence upon the well-known scene. Her mind full of ‘Xanadu', she felt her armour drop from her and knew herself willingly vulnerable to the assault of this strange world where poetry was ‘felt in the blood and felt along the heart'. She lay down in the long grass at the side of the pool. A little above her, if she inclined her head, she could see the drooping eaves of the pagoda. There was the
bridge, and beyond it the green surface of the second pool, with its weeping willow and boathouse. There was no wind. Birds were busy in the trees and bushes. The scent of earth, broken by rising shoots, the warm aromatic smell of the berberis, the vivid, incongruous carving of the bridges, set down amid quiet elders and moss, all were caught up in a web of poetry. The garden seemed to hang in mid-air like Coleridge's sunny dome. In this compelling reality, Bampfield seemed no more than a dream.

She began to read, turning over the pages of the complete Coleridge she had
brought–Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
, and then …
Christabel:

                
‘And in my dream methought I went

                
To search out what might there be found;

                
And what the sweet bird's trouble meant,

                
That thus lay fluttering on the ground.

                
I went and peered, and could descry

                
No cause for her distressful cry;

                
But yet for her dear lady's sake

                
I stooped methought the dove to take…'

She heard the sound of branches being pushed aside and looked up to see Margaret emerging from the undergrowth near her. No thought of their school relationship entered her mind. Margaret was caught up as easily as
Christabel
, and with hardly a greeting to her she went on reading, as though both had a right to the garden. It was Margaret who was disconcerted. She stared at Rachel, and after a moment came up to her and looked over her shoulder.

                
‘“When lo! I saw a bright green snake

                
Coiled around its wings and neck.

                
Green as the herbs on which it couched,

                
Close by the dove's its head it crouched;

                
And with the dove it heaves and stirs,

                
Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!

                
I woke; it was the midnight hour,

                
The clock was echoing in the tower;

                
But though my slumber was gone by,

                
This dream it would not pass away –

                
It seems to live upon my eye!”'

Margaret was reading the words aloud, and she added, ‘I didn't know you came here. I suppose Chief's given you the key?' She sounded annoyed.

‘No, I get in like you do. Through the fence.'

Margaret's eyes brightened. ‘But – you're a prefect!'

‘It doesn't count here. Forget it.'

‘I won't say anything.' There was an urgency in Margaret's voice.

‘It never occurred to me that you would.'

‘Rachel, do read me some more of that poem.'

‘Don't you know it?' asked Rachel.

‘I don't think so,' said Margaret, sitting down beside her on the moss. ‘At any rate, I don't recognize that bit. Read it to me.'

‘It's rather long,' answered Rachel. ‘I don't mind reading a part of it, though.'

She began near the end, reading the verses which describe Bracy's dream.

                
‘“A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy;

                
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,

                
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,

                
And with somewhat of malice, but more of dread,

                
At Christabel she looked askance! –

                
One moment – and the sight was fled!

                
But Christabel in dizzy trance

                
Stumbling on the unsteady ground

                
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound;

                
And Geraldine again turned round,

                
And like a thing that sought relief,

                
Full of wonder and full of grief,

                
She rolled her large bright eyes divine

                
Wildly on Sir Leoline.”'

Absorbed, Rachel read on, unaware of Margaret's face, so close beside her own. She shut the book, and looked up. ‘There, that's all. He never finished it.'

‘It could have happened here, couldn't it?' said Margaret. ‘If the pagoda were a castle? One can imagine it. I found a grass snake here in the autumn, just like the one in the poem. Why do they look so evil? They're beautiful, yet they're evil.'

Margaret was pulling up the moss in tufts as she spoke, and filling one palm with the green feathers. Clenched in her hand, they looked like the tousled body of a dead green bird.

‘Rachel, tell me why the most beautiful things are often evil?'

‘I don't know that they are.'

‘I do.'

‘This garden isn't. It's perfect, in a ruined, desolate way. I can't see that it's evil.'

‘Yet I found a snake in it,' said Margaret.

‘A snake isn't really evil.'

‘It's a symbol of evil. And it's an omen. You'll see. They'll find us out and then they'll tear back the fence and admit evil – they'll turn it all into something foul.'

Rachel did not know what to reply to this. She had never thought very seriously about the problem of evil. Indeed, her rebellious atheism, propped up by classical reading, inclined her to regard evil as a creation of the Church.

‘Where did you find the snake?' she asked, her curiosity aroused. ‘He ought to be awake now. I'd love to see him.'

‘He was near the pagoda,' answered Margaret. ‘He probably went to sleep under the floorboards for warmth.'

‘Let's go and look,' said Rachel, and they climbed the rotting wooden steps up to the little building.

‘Perhaps if he hears our footsteps he'll come out.'

Rachel made a noise with her feet, and the two girls walked slowly round the pagoda, tapping the wooden sides and knocking the floor softly. But no snake appeared.

‘Perhaps,' said Margaret, ‘it's a she-snake and once was a kind of Christabel. She lived at Bampfield and used to come here to meet her lover and then as they swooned in each other's arms in ecstasy, she dropped down to the floor, a snake, and glided away into the undergrowth.'

‘Why should she?' asked Rachel, in whom the stream of poetry set flowing by Christabel was now only trickling slowly. ‘Why on earth should she?'

‘Because,' said Margaret slowly, ‘her love was evil in the eyes of the world.'

Rachel looked at her watch. ‘Oh, lord, it's time I was getting back.'

‘Rachel, will you come again?'

‘I expect so,' said Rachel warily. She did. not wish to commit herself to clandestine meetings with Margaret.

‘Can I meet you here?'

Yes, she might have known Margaret would extract that. Rachel moved awkwardly away from her, aware suddenly of the intrusion of school into this enchanted place.

‘I'd rather not.'

‘Oh, God, you are stuffy!' cried Margaret angrily, and Rachel felt ashamed and hurt. ‘As if I'd tell anyone we met. I never see you. You are the only person in this lousy hole that I can talk to, that can talk intelligently.'

‘Well, if you go on coming here,' said Rachel, ‘I suppose we're bound to meet.'