The Chinese Garden (7 page)

Saturday was cold with the peculiar cold of Somerset that is three parts damp, exhaled from the sodden earth and spreading over the ground a layer of frigidity, a sub-atmosphere which the soft, ineffectual winds of the district never dispersed.

Margaret had suggested to Rachel going over to Stoke, a village technically out of bounds, but dear to them both. Rachel remembered her promise to Bisto and hesitated.

Margaret's temper was short these days. ‘All right, all right,' she said, ‘I can take Rena. Go and smoke cigarettes in the shrubberies and feed your silly rat. God, Rachel Curgenven, you'll never grow up.'

Wounded, Rachel retorted: ‘It's not that. Bisto's got
P.D. I promised I'd wait for her. You know how that brute treats her.'

‘Don't be so sentimental about her.
Motherly
Rachel Curgenven, you're a fool. Kindness cuts no ice, and Bisto should be more careful, then she wouldn't get P.D. I'm going to Stoke.'

Margaret stalked away. Rena? thought Rachel bitterly. Beastly, slimy little snake.

Angry with Bisto for being the cause of a wasted afternoon, and hurt with Margaret for her easy contempt, Rachel bullied three of her weaker contemporaries into including her name on their pass and went down to the stables, with a pocketful of food for Willy. But the afternoon was ruined. Willy refused to come out, and Rachel waited in the gloomy harness-room, reading
Wuthering Heights
, in the fading day-light, and feeling more like Heathcliff with every page. When she found that it was more than half an hour since P.D. was over, she turned suddenly savage. Even Bisto had failed her.

Forgetting her deception over the pass, she went back into school and looked for her. Two or three forlorn girls, victims of Miss Lucas's recent persecution, hung about the empty, unwarmed classrooms. They stared at Rachel's dark, angry face with delighted curiosity.

‘She'll murder Christian when she finds out,' whispered one, and Rachel, quick of hearing, turned on her.

‘Finds out what?' she asked. ‘Where's Bisto?'

‘She fainted at P.D.'

‘Fainted?'

‘Yes, Christian had her walking round and round the concrete for hours with her hands above her head.'

‘You little beast. Why didn't you tell me straight away?'

Rachel hit the child savagely, and sent it retreating with a whimper to its desk. Anger compelled her overgrown strength to displays of bullying, and the others watched anxiously to see what she would do next. But the habit of self-control was also strong. Ashamed of her outburst, Rachel walked away without another word and went up to Bisto's dormitory. Bisto was lying in bed, looking extremely pale.

‘I'll go to Chief about this,' said Rachel, looking sternly down into the pleading, doglike eyes of Bisto.

‘I wish you wouldn't,' said the victim miserably. ‘They might find out about the pass, and it'll be too awful if they do. Go away, please, do.'

A melodious whistle was heard coming down the passage towards the dormitory. Rachel went over to the window and turned to face Chief who ignored her and walked swiftly over to Bisto.

‘Miss Lucas tells me you fainted,' she said, and took up one of Bisto's hands.

‘I'm all right,' said the Bampfield stoic.

Chief was silent for a moment, mentally selecting the appropriate speech for the occasion. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed in an infinitely graceful attitude.

‘Punishment drill is not pleasant,' she began. ‘It is not intended to be. You will find, as you go out into the world, that you often have to suffer what seems to you injustice and hardship. This world of ours, Bisto, this weary, wicked world, is a hard, uncompromising place. Why should Gud make it easy for us? He did not make it easy for His only Son. Here at Bampfield, we are trying to train you to take your place in Gud's world, Gud's just and terrible world. Miss Lucas is just. Very just. I have known her too long not to believe that she treated you with perfect justice.'

Hypnotized, Bisto heard these words without a tremor.

‘But we are all of us, you and I, all of us, too weak at times to bear even justice. You need not feel ashamed that you fainted. Out of your moment of weakness you have gained strength. I am sure of that. I hope you understand me, Bisto.'

‘Yes, Chief.'

‘I have asked Miss Lucas to keep an eye on you.'

‘Thank you, Chief.'

‘As for you, Rachel, I believe you should not be in someone else's dormitory. You may stay with Bisto for another five minutes.'

Chief departed, her whistle retreating down the corridor, a melodious anthem after the sermon.

‘God almighty!' said Rachel under her breath, swearing one of Margaret's oaths in her disgust.

CHAPTER TEN

                
Meanwhile the mind, for pleasure less

                
Withdraws into its happiness;

                
The mind, that recess where each kind

                
Doth straight its own resemblance find.

                
Yet it creates, transcending these

                
Far other worlds and other seas.

A
NDREW
M
ARVELL

T
HE
fragile coat of rime stiffened over the long grass. Ice appeared in the sluggish meanderings of the stream. The whole envelope of atmosphere in which Bampfield lay embalmed suddenly clarified, and contours of the hills sharpened at the edges. It could now be seen that Moses was several trees, not one. The smoke from the home farm chimneys drifted up against the sallow green of the hill, and sounds became crystalline, stones dropped into a well: the high-pitched creak of a cart, a dog barking in distant cottages, and the birdlike notes of the church clock were carried through the resonant, frosty air into the windows of the school.

Rachel's perceptions became sharper, tauter, more distinct. The elements of the life she was living separated into recognizable patterns, like pictures of frost on glass. All that was distasteful to her at Bampfield assumed palpable outlines. She could no longer accept their once-soft, once-blurred contours. All that she loved and felt particular to herself, receded, diminished, behind a wall of glass, and she felt it beyond her reach. Bampfield, the real Bampfield, forced
itself upon her senses – a place of dank, ill-smelling corridors, of fetid little corners where girls whispered, a place where cruelty dwelt under the guise of discipline, and corruption beneath a mask of beauty and moral tone. She felt herself trapped like a bird in its icy reality, involved inevitably in the decay, the corruption, the loathesomeness beneath the fine, glassy surface. It was no longer possible to extract from it the different essences, the pleasures, stupidities, horrors, humours, and turn upon each a separate personality. All were, with herself, embalmed in a frigid, transparent pattern.

No more parodies came from her pen. Life did not seem laughable any more and she was too immature for satire. She spent most of her time in the library, where the imposition of silence made it unnecessary to speak to others. Her creative urge was over, spent in the translation of Virgil. That inner world of pleasure was sealed off for her. Fortunately, work for University entrance gave Rachel a special time-table which often involved working at different hours from her fellows, and she was relieved to get away from the form-room, from the distraction of twenty other living minds, and to walk alone through the building, past closed doors, behind which tired and reddened faces pored over exercise books. She was even able on occasions to miss games for coaching and get out for solitary walks in the park or gardens when others were still in class.

It was on one of these occasions, during bright and frosty weather, that she decided to discover for herself what it was that Margaret had found and never communicated. She might have done this before but for an enlarged sense of honour, which prevented her from intruding upon another's secret world. And always she had hoped that Margaret
herself would tell her but she had never done so. She purloined the pliers from one of the gardeners' sheds and walked down the lime avenue towards the deserted stables till she was out of sight of the house. Then she turned across the stream by its lowest bridge and back to the shrubbery on the far side. There was no one about. The frosty rushes creaked under her shoes. She found the place where Margaret entered, and, to salve her conscience, selected another part of the palings, several yards away. It took her some time to get the wire cut and the palings out. She was not so practical as Margaret. At last it was done and she climbed through into dense undergrowth. She was in a thicket of overgrown shrubs, azalea and rhododendron mostly, their tough twisted trunks meshed in bramble and nettle. Through this she pushed her way with some difficulty, drawn towards the centre of the plantation only by her sense of direction. Shiny boughs of laurel brushed a green wound over her sleeve. For a moment she hesitated, pulled up by the world of school, in which stained or torn clothes must be explained, absences justified. Then an obstinate desire to force her way into the heart of the place gave her impetus, and thrusting aside the brown stringy creepers, she pushed on through the undergrowth.

She emerged into a strange, secret world, a clear blue sky above, willows, a lake, a coloured pagoda, and a tiny bridge – the world of a willow-pattern plate.

The park stream ran right through the centre of the large plantation, and in the heart of it had been created two pools big enough to sail a boat on, and indeed the poor relic of a punt still lay rotting in the boathouse. The pools lay close together and the stream that joined them had been divided into two courses, making a tiny, almost circular island
between the lakes. Here stood a summerhouse, built like a Chinese pagoda, and reached by two bridges, one over each stream, highly ornamented in the oriental style so that the whole scene, viewed from the point where she stood, possessed the formal beauty of a Chinese plate, its rim the fringe of trees around the still, shallow pools.

Rachel crossed a creaking, dilapidated bridge, and went into the tiny pagoda. Bells were still hanging under the painted eaves, their copper green with age, shrill and fragile when she touched them with her hand. It was inhabited only by spiders. The floorboards were rotten, and covered with bird droppings, and the once bright paint was blistered and faded. The quiet pools, greened over with weed, never-disturbed, the dense overgrown shrubbery which hedged it from the world without, the incongruous oriental appearance of the pagoda and its bridges, created an indescribable air of secrecy and strangeness. She entered an exotic world where she breathed pure poetry. It had the symmetry of Blake's tiger. It was the green thought in a green shade.

She wandered slowly about, mapping it out in her mind. Its dereliction did not distress her. She was used to decay and ruin. The Chinese garden still offered, in its broken bridges and peeling cupola, the symbols of a precise pattern, a perfection greater than itself. Its complex image held within it a world of images, unfolding to the heart unending sequences of dream. Rachel realized now why Margaret, after visiting the garden again, had no wish to bring anyone else into it. To do so would be to reduce it to the status of a playground. It was not that. Entering it, one shed one's reality and partook of its charmed atmosphere, like the hero of a fairy tale who, on reaching the enchanted palace, hears
music from the air, and from cups presented by invisible hands, drinks a paradisal wine.

A few days later, term ended. Reluctantly I went home. Home with its passions, its poverty, its wall of misunderstanding between parents and children, brothers and sisters, made more impenetrable by the blood which cemented it – home was a place that I dreaded. The countryside around it furnished a certain measure of escape, but it was not an invariable comfort to me. It lacked the familiarity of Bampfield and its clearly defined limits. In the countryside around my home I was adrift. I wandered and came up against no familiar fencing. One might, I felt at times as I walked alone through the hazel copses, one might walk for ever and out of the world. There was too weak a centrifugal force to hold me to the hub of this universe. Thus my walks at home, lacking security, lacking a sense of possession, were always a faint source of fear. I was compelled to take them, yet I half hated them. They were the wrong sort of solitude, a solitude imposed rather than a solitude sought. I did not withdraw, as I did at Bampfield, into a secret world. I ran out into a desert to escape from home, and explored the unfamiliar with a kind of desperate hope that I would find in it something that would reassure me. When the end of the holidays came, I returned to Bampfield with a readiness that grieved my parents.

Travelling down in the train through the well-known landscape, now sodden with January rain, viewing the sheets of flood water over the Somersetshire meadows, I drew towards me the picture of Bampfield, its features, its touch, its smell, as if I were pulling towards me, by the hand, some loved and familiar figure. Resting serenely in my mind was the image of the Chinese garden. The disgust and tedium I
had felt at the end of the previous term had been exorcised by absence. At the heart of Bampfield lay a world private to myself, and one which was so powerfully present to my thoughts that I did not need to visit it at once. It shed its enchanted light over those aspects of school for which I had recently felt so much detestation, and I found myself accepting again the life I had temporarily lost.