The Chinese Garden (14 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

                
A man betrayed is a man destroyed.

J
OSEPH
C
ONRAD

T
HE
cataclysm broke about a fortnight later. The prefects were summoned by Chief. She was very pale, her eyes hard and piercing. She told us that Margaret and Rena had been discovered in some situation with which, it appeared, we were expected to be familiar, since it was not explained to us. The two girls were to be removed from the school. Pending the arrival of the parents, they were isolated in the infirmary, in separate rooms. They were, I learned afterwards, locked in. This nameless vice of which they were guilty was, apparently, infectious. We were told that as prefects we had a grave responsibility. It was up to us to keep our eyes open to see if the disease was spreading. We were adjured, like the apostles, to watch and pray.

Stunned, we prefects left the presence and retreated in conclave to our room. There I suppose we talked it over. We must have been like a group of savages holding a conference over their first sight of an aeroplane, and suffered from a similar, stultifying lack of vocabulary. How much the others subsequently found out, I never discovered. I myself applied for information to Georgie Murrill. After a little hesitation, and in a manner withdrawn and uneasy, she told me that the two girls had been found naked in bed together. This was quite sufficient for me. Though still ignorant of the exact nature of the vice, my fairly extensive reading had
taught me that more than one person to a bed generally spelt wickedness. It was not, however, till that evening that it spelt anything more for me.

After supper I went to work in my study, a small room rather isolated in a distant wing of the house. I could hear a terrible crying and lamenting coming from the windows of the infirmary over which my study looked. I have never in my life heard such another sound. It was like the cries of the damned in hell. It went on and on interminably. The air was rent with grief. I left my work, profoundly moved, and went down to the prefects' room to sit in silence with the others round a dying fire.

*
 
    
*
 
    
*

Next day Margaret and Rena were taken away, and in the late afternoon Chief sent for Rachel. She was sitting in her small dark office, her back to the window, so that the girl's face was well lighted, but Chief's was blank with shadows. Chief knew something of the technique of interrogation. Without any preliminary, she asked Rachel whether she had ever spoken to Margaret about a book called
The Well of Loneliness
. She would accept no explanations. The answer must be yes or no. Yes, Rachel replied, they had had a conversation about this book which she had not herself read. Chief asked her if she knew what the book was about. Rachel found this difficult to answer. Dimly she was beginning to understand the nature of the crime committed by these two girls, but she was far from being able to put it into words. Chief accepted her assurance that she had not read the book, and told her that it was ‘filthy'.

‘This book has been brought into the school by Margaret,'
she went on. ‘It has been found among her belongings. Even if you have not read it, and I accept your word over that, I find it difficult to understand why, as a prefect, you kept silent about it. You knew that Margaret had no right to have in her possession a book that had not been passed by her housemistress. You knew – you must have known – it had not and would never have been passed.'

Yes, Rachel knew it well enough. It was a breach of her prefectorial trust and she could do nothing but admit it.

‘You are making it difficult for me to trust you,' said Chief. ‘Other matters have now come to my knowledge that make it more difficult still. I am going to tell you exactly what they are, and I am going to ask you a question – a serious question – which I will give you time to think over before you answer.'

Chief then informed Rachel that it was
her
name to which Margaret and Rena had constantly referred. Rachel, it appeared, was the only human and decent individual at Bampfield. Margaret had stressed her unconventionality and her comfortable disregard for rules, and declared that her friendship with Rachel had alone made life in this prison tolerable. She admired Rachel for having the courage to criticize a hateful and tyrannical regime. With a legacy of parody behind her, Rachel could hardly deny that she had criticized it. Chief remembered that she had parodied a religious poem on one occasion, and that she never went to Communion. She mentioned these points, and Rachel felt that she was forejudged.

‘How do I know that I can trust you?' repeated Chief, in a level, unemotional voice.

‘I
haven't
read the book,' reiterated Rachel, clinging desperately to this one solid piece of evidence.

‘I accept that. But you have talked of it.'

‘Margaret talked to
me
about it.'

‘What did she say?'

‘I … can't remember.'

‘Perhaps she was speaking of it that night you met her in the back corridor.'

Rachel could say nothing. For a moment she was too stunned to recall the occasion.

‘Have you forgotten?' persisted Chief. ‘Some time ago … in the spring term. You asked my permission to go round the house once. That was at ten o'clock. You abused that permission. At eleven thirty you were found standing in the corridor talking to Margaret.'

Rachel said nothing. Miss Burnett, for whom she had translated Virgil, and with whom she had enjoyed some of the keenest pleasure of her Bampfield life – Miss Burnett had betrayed her, had used her knowledge in an adult game of which Rachel knew too little.

Chief pressed home her advantage. How close was this friendship with Margaret, she asked, and when Rachel still could not trust herself to answer – and, in any case, what could she know of the degrees of friendship? – Chief leaned back in her chair and said with deliberation:

‘It is difficult for me to believe that the friendship was not … very close, that this was the
only
occasion on which you met Margaret at night.'

She waited for a moment for the words to take effect, and then leaned forward again to deliver another blow.

‘You have found a garden, I understand – a Chinese garden in the far shrubbery. It is a place that I put out of bounds when we first came here. Yet it appears that you have been visiting it – by your own admission. Is it news to
you that it was there that Margaret and Rena often met to carry on their filthy practices?'

The question hardly touched Rachel's consciousness. At the door of her mind hammered a far more monstrous question. How did Chief know that she had visited the garden? Her conversation with Georgie Murrill assumed a fearful personality of its own, pushed aside the lamenting of the two girls and the petty evidence of a book and a meeting by night. It stood, Judas-like, awaiting recognition. With a desperate effort, Rachel held the door of her thoughts against its insistent knocking.

Chief delivered her peroration: repeatedly, in her distress, Margaret had called the name of Rachel Curgenven. She had asked to see her, over and over again. Rachel Curgenven would have understood, she insisted in the hearing of her parents and of Rena's. She put it more positively. Rachel Curgenven
did
understand. Naturally, the parents demanded an inquiry. Their daughters had been corrupted. There was talk of a legal action against the school. Rachel would be called into court.

I am afraid of many things, of the dark, of heights, of a crowd, but no fear I have ever felt quite matches the inexorable terror of that phrase ‘called into court'. This was not the splendid, purgative fear of the Chinese garden at night. This was the unholy, the unclean fear of the unknown hand in the dark, that cannot be parried.

Chief asked Rachel for a truthful answer to the accusation that she had both condoned and encouraged the activities of Margaret and Rena. She gave her three days to think it over.

Fear reigned at the centre of Bampfield, yet Rachel hardly
realized that this was so. Her own fear at those terrible words ‘called into court' temporarily anaesthetized her against other, more dreadful certainties. She was absorbed with the problem of her own innocence. She did not visualize herself as the lynch-pin on which depended the future of a whole community. Still less did she foresee the fearful likelihood that if her guilt could be proved, the whole weight of the collective guilt of Bampfield could be shifted on to her shoulders. As yet, she was not isolated. She was still a part of Bampfield, and felt her fear and her own innocence, as a thread in the whole fabric. Despite Chief's interrogation, she did not feel that Bampfield, in the person of Chief, or Georgie, or Miss Burnett, had finally betrayed and jettisoned her.

It was to Georgie Murrill that Rachel turned, deeply distressed by her own ignorance and by her fears for her innocence, and still unable to believe that the final betrayal could come from her hand.

The forbidding label
Engaged
was hanging on her door, an injunction which Rachel had never dared to disregard before. But tonight she ignored it. She knocked firmly and went in without waiting to be answered. Georgie was sitting by her fire, reading, in her dressing-gown. She got up as Rachel came in, her face angry, her eyes defensive.

‘There's an
Engaged
notice on my door,' she said.

‘I know, I know, but I had to come. I've been with Chief.'

‘I … yes, I know you have,' answered Georgie.

Rachel suddenly realized the implication of her own words. She had, in fact, believed that Georgie could
not
have known. The ‘Engaged' notice was her evidence. With the directness of which children are still capable, she said
quickly, ‘You knew I was seeing Chief tonight? Then why the “Engaged”? You must have known l should come to you afterwards.'

‘Really, Rachel, I've a right to put it on my door if I want to. Please go to bed. You'll feel better in the morning.'

‘I can't go to bed. I want to talk to you.'

‘It won't help to talk about it. There is nothing to say.'

‘There is. There is.' Rachel was speaking with extreme difficulty. But the habit of self-control which Bampfield had given her stood her in good stead now. Her muscles taut, she was able to maintain an expression almost of indifference. Only her words had difficulty forcing their way out of her rigid mouth.

‘I had to come and ask you

‘Look here,' interrupted Georgie, with a voice which shook with what Rachel thought to be anger. ‘Listen. You lied to me. You come to me now because you are frightened, because Chief has frightened you. Did you tell her, as you told me the other day, that no one else knew about the Chinese garden?'

‘I couldn't betray Margaret.'

‘In other words, you lied to me?'

‘No, no. I didn't he. Not exactly.'

Rachel sat down uninvited and put her head in her hands. Georgie stood up and moved away from her, out of range of the firelight.

‘I don't understand,' said Rachel. ‘Why don't you explain to me? They must have felt love for each other, surely?'

At the moment, it was this that hammered at her mind, far more than her own predicament. ‘They
must
have loved each other. Couldn't they have been forgiven? Why was it such a crime?'

‘It was nothing but nasty experimentalism,' said Georgie.

‘You didn't hear them – Rachel went on – ‘crying in the infirmary. It was a terrible sound. They must have loved one another to cry like that. What will they do now?'

‘I don't know,' said Georgie. ‘I am surprised you should be thinking about them. I hope you won't try to communicate with them. Your letters will be intercepted.'

‘There's nothing to say. I don't want to write to Margaret. She probably hates me now.'

‘Then you must have known,' said Georgie quickly.

‘If I tell you I didn't, will you believe me?'

‘I'd rather you thought it over before making such a statement.'

Self-control even of the Bampfield quality reaches its limit. Rachel could not go on. The gulf between their understandings was too vast. There was no means of bridging such a chasm.

‘You'd better go,' said Georgie at last. She was sympathetic now, moved by Rachel's obvious distress. ‘You'd better go. Think it over. Don't see me again until you've thought it over.'

And at the door of Rachel's mind still stood the Judas figure, whom she would not admit, whose features she could not bring herself to equate with Georgie Murrill's, who had promised to say nothing of the Chinese garden and had immediately betrayed the trust.

Next day, from her study window, Rachel looked down over the lime avenue to the stables, where she and Bisto had gone so often to feed Willy, and over the dark mass of the shrubbery in the heart of which lay the Chinese garden. She sat at her window most of that day. It was late in the
afternoon when she saw three figures approach the bridge to the shrubbery and go over it to the locked gate. The unlocking of the gate gave them some trouble, it seemed. No doubt it was rusty after so many years of disuse. The garden and Rachel waited. One figure, that of Tarrant, pushed ahead. He was carrying something that looked like a bill-hook. The other two were Chief and Georgie Murrill.