The Chinese Garden (8 page)

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.

R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

‘H
OW
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.