The Chinese Garden Page 2

When she taught, she slipped a gown over her chicken suit, and would sit at her desk, with her tired, sardonic eyes surveying us all as though she hated us, her hands exuding a strong smell of chicken food and Turkish cigarettes (which she smoked incessantly when not actually in the form-room). At the end of a lesson, she would shut her book with a sigh of relief, slip off her gown and toss it to one of us with the curt command, ‘Take it to my room.’ Then she would slope off in her long, shambling stride, and fumble in her pocket for her cigarette case before she was out of the door.

  My ability at Latin awoke in her an old devotion, and she concentrated upon me the narrow but brilliant beam of her intelligence and enthusiasm. She inspired me with a passion for the curiosities of Latin grammar and syntax, so that I was induced to compile a vast book of these eccentricities. I developed a tremendous appetite for middle voices, modal ablatives, and exclamatory infinitives, and my reading of classical authors was considerably enlarged by this pursuit of grammatical curiosities. The passion for collecting is supposed to be very strong in children. My interest in stamps was short-lived, and I never cared for birds’ eggs or butterflies, but I would search a volume for a ‘Me miserum’!

  Looking back on the women who peopled Bampfield, I see Miss Burnett as the one least amenable to the regime, and at the same time, the one most corrupted by it. Those whose spirits were more readily assimilated took their saturation well. No awkward reaction set in. They soaked up the infection and lost their natural colour quickly, like clothes in a vat of dye. It was only Miss Burnett’s stubborn spirit which, in resisting the process, set up a fermentation which soured and spoilt her natural fabric. By a vigorous assertion of her personality, Miss Burnett retained a measure of independence, but she retained it only by virtually destroying herself. Real independence would have meant leaving the place altogether and this she could not do. She was rooted in it. Lesser beings were gratified by finding in the regime a framework for their mild eccentricity. Only Miss Burnett knew it for what it was and was compelled to look for her own support. She found it in the cynicism which upheld her like a brace.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Now the day is over,

  Night is drawing nigh,

  Shadows of the evening

  Steal across the sky.

  S. BARING-GOULD

  IT was the evening of Rachel’s birthday. Prep was over, and the cocoa and slabs of bread, grey and solid, were eaten. Nothing had been said. It was by a sixth sense that the three girls knew, as they sat round the form-room fire in silence, that one of them had withheld something. Incurious, preoccupied with their private worlds, they were none the less sensitive to this unrevealed secret, as they might have been to a faint and indefinable scent. The fire of logs blazed in their adolescent, sleepy faces. The stolen chestnuts blackened on the iron bars of the grate. Occasionally one exploded, and Bisto would lean forward, lick her fingers, and hook it expertly out of the hot ashes. She always gave it to Rachel. If it was refused then she offered it to Margaret. The grate was small, and they sat round it on hard, wooden chairs, almost knee to knee. Their black stockings made a paling through which a few bars of warmth reached the younger children, who were huddled against their desks in the outer cold, reading dog-eared novels from the library – novels which told of midnight feasts, adorable games mistresses and unbelievable escapades out of school bounds. Within the fiery circle the three friends, half-stupefied with heat, waited for the mysterious news that they sensed in their midst. The huge windows of the form-room were uncurtained. Outside, the winter evening was starless. The cold pressed palpably against the sable glass. Far away in the hollow shell of the building, the eight-thirty bell sounded. It grew nearer, and bored hungry children who had hardly felt the warmth, hurried to the door, glad to go to bed in even colder dormitories. The three by the fire stayed on, ignoring the bell, slowly chewing the last remaining half-cooked chestnuts. The brown skins littered the hearth. The pressure of imminent departure induced Margaret to speak at last.

  ‘I have found something,’ she said. ‘I’ve found a strange place that I don’t think anyone else knows about. Maybe I’ll show it to you tomorrow.’

  Almost too hot and exhausted to reply, Rachel stretched her legs lazily towards the powdery ash and without much interest asked, ‘What is it?’

  But Margaret refused to say more. She glanced at Bisto. ‘If I feel like it I’ll show it to you, when we can get away from the mob.’

  ‘How can you have found anything today?’ asked Rachel suddenly. ‘You can’t have gone out – it wasn’t a games afternoon. It was art. If it’s the cellars, Bisto and I found them ages ago.’

  ‘Oh, them!’ answered Margaret scornfully. ‘Yes, I know them. They smell and are altogether beastly. It’s not the cellars. As a matter of fact, I did go out.’

  Bisto and Rachel looked at her with admiration. It was no small feat to elude the vigilance of the mistress on duty in the afternoon – or the evening, either, for at this point, the door opened and they were told peremptorily to go to bed. Early to bed and early to rise was the rule of Bampfield. But they would not obey with too great a show of readiness. It was not their policy. Leaving Bisto still raking the ashes for chestnuts, Margaret and Rachel wandered away from the fire to one of the windows. Angrily a hand switched off the light. Looking through the reflections of the fire in the glass, they could see beyond, darker than the darkened sky, the forms of trees, the outline of the distant hill, and the dense mass of a shrubbery.

  ‘Over there,’ said Margaret softly, nodding her cropped head. ‘Over there.’ She looked back over her shoulder for a moment at Bisto. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow … perhaps. Depends what I feel like.’

  It was part of Margaret’s attraction that one never knew where one was with her. In a world of iron routine, in a climate almost invariable, Margaret provided an exotic eccentricity. To begin with, she did not look like a schoolgirl. She was tall and thin, with a lean, brown, saturnine face, hair cut as short as a boy’s, and heavy, often furrowing brows over dark eyes. A passionate reader and an inspired talker, she lived a life balanced between bouts of taciturn isolation, buried in books, and extreme gregariousness, when she attracted to herself those, like Rachel, who found her talk fascinating, and others who found it dangerous or amusing. Together, the previous term, she and Rachel had edited (and largely written) a magazine, in which poetry and parody, virulent comment on the Bampfield regime, and philosophizing on life in general, were welded into a whole by the brilliant editorial hand of Margaret. She was the only spirit among the girls to whom Rachel, blatantly anti-games and fervently intellectual, deferred, for Margaret, totally uninterested in all forms of sport, had forfeited the right to appear on the games field through stubbornly refusing to hit the ball if it reached her. She did this, not because she could not have played games well if she had given her mind to them, but from principle, and this increased the admiration the intellectual set felt for her. Rachel’s own case was different. She hated games because she could not play them, and for Rachel it was essential to do a thing well, otherwise it was a torment to her. She did not feel equal to emulating Margaret’s ruthless tactics and even – with the ambivalence that characterized her attitude towards Bampfield – made sporadic efforts to achieve something on the games field. But she was never at home with the athletic set, and rendered herself an object of distrust to them by ridiculing them whenever she felt her own inadequacy in their sphere. But in Margaret she recognized one whose chief delight, like her own, lay in intellectual pleasures, and she recognized also, with a certain envy, the consistency of character which she did not herself possess and had begun even then to desire. Rachel mocked incessantly at Bampfield, but secretly she loved it. She would have preferred to loathe it whole-heartedly as did Margaret, who frankly regarded it as a passage through purgatory. Rachel observed towards it a Catullan love-hatred of which she was sometimes ashamed. Once she had found Margaret brooding over a translation of Dante’s Inferno which she
had discovered in the library, with illustrations by Doré. ‘Doré might have known Bampfield,’ Margaret had remarked bitterly, with that Byronic gloom which Rachel so much admired and to which she was by temperament as well as physiognomy quite insulted. She held the book open at one of the gruesome delineations of souls in torment. Rachel was merely amused. Her mind ran swiftly to parody. The book was a spur to her restless mind, perpetually seeking new material on which to exercise its growing muscles.

  ‘Let’s write a new Inferno,’ she suggested. ‘The Bampfield Inferno.’

  But Margaret at once shut the book secretively and refused to co-operate. Rachel saw her several times that winter, poring over the book in a corner of the library, dwelling with fascinated horror on the pictures of torment, and scanning the text for lines which confirmed her view of Bampfield, while Rachel, at a near-by table, would be translating the Aeneid with classical ardour, in the manner of Milton, or scribbling comic verses in the manner of C. S. Calverley. By this time the magazine was dead. Rachel would have continued it, but Margaret sucked the heart out of any enterprise quickly, and refused to embark on a second edition.

  Tonight Rachel was too tired to be provoked by Margaret’s secretiveness, desiring only to achieve in the setting of Bampfield the equilibrium which her birthday had disturbed. She was almost glad that Margaret had not told them the secret, for she could not have endured any more demands upon herself. In silence, drugged with heat, and the various and incommunicable emotions which weighed upon their hearts, the three left the darkened form-room.

  The corridors had long ago absorbed the cold of winter. Wainscot and gilded cornice and bare walls gave off a chill that enveloped them as they went up to bed. In silent files, girls were moving along to their dormitories. No warmth of speech or laughter thawed the icebound surface of the walls. To Bisto it was alarming. Her wrinkled, old-womanish face became even more shrivelled. She was acutely sensitive to the spartan discomforts of Bampfield. Her hands and feet were perpetually chilblained, for her mittens were confiscated over and over again as being too hedonistic for Bampfield’s stern regime. Her nose was raw with indigestion and her eyes perpetually anxious, on the lookout for some fresh indignity to her unhappy, protesting body.

  Margaret whistled defiantly down the silent corridor towards her dormitory. For her, the rules existed only to be broken. She was openly contemptuous of them. A born rebel, she would have been obliged to invent the regime if it had not existed, merely in order to kick against it.

  But Rachel, last of the three to go up, paused in the long gallery. She herself slept in one of the rooms opening out of it. It led right across the front of the house and was approached by a fine double flight of stairs, gracefully curving out on either side. On the walls above the staircase hung portraits of the noble family who had once owned the house. And here for a moment, Rachel would stand, if she could find a time when the gallery was empty, as it was tonight. Behind closed doors she could hear the chatter of voices. They might have been the voices of girls dressing to go to a ball. Occasionally, a deeper alto tone brought the illusion of masculine presences, tying cravats, pulling down flowered waistcoats over silk breeches, preparing for the moment when the bells would ring, music play and the stairs fill with figures on their way down to the ballroom. A door opened at the end of the gallery. Amid a cloud of steam, there emerged a ruddy, pyjama’d figure, glistening from her bath. Rachel watched her scurry into a near-by room, her dressing-gown streaming out behind her, then turned away to her own dormitory, Margaret and Bisto forgotten, her birthday shrugged off at last.

  None of the three slept in the same room. Their secrets would never be whispered in the dark or behind cover of a curtain, and each adopted, among the girls she slept with, another personality. Bisto was talking to her neighbour in the next cubicle of trivial things, and even giggling a little, tense with suppressed excitement. Unhappy in her relations with the staff, she joined with desperation in the by-play of her fellows, content to be the scapegoat for their lawlessness, if only they would admit her to their sorority. Tonight she hugged herself with secret pleasure, even as she talked. The true world was with Rachel and Margaret, and over the circle hung a mystery. When the lights bell rang, she relapsed easily into silence and let the others whisper without her. Her eyes under their heavy arched brows were wide open. She lay awake with her thoughts, watching the black, shadeless electric bulb swinging in the wind across the square of dark sky.

  Up in one of the front dormitories, with their moulded plaster cornices, their tapestry papers, and once polished floors, Rachel was giving a lifelike impersonation of the Head delivering her assembly harangue of that morning. It was a frequent performance, eagerly looked forward to by the rest of her room-mates. The surface mechanism of her mind played a brilliant light over the feeble structure of the morning address and sent underfoot the rags of consciousness that remained from the day’s emotions. The room was full of malicious laughter. A bell rang.

  ‘And now to Gud the Father, Gud the Son, and Gud the Holy Ghost,’ said Rachel solemnly, and switched out the light.

  * * *

  Down far corridors, voices were talking. Their tones reached Margaret’s ears as she lay in bed, her book in its brown paper cover now tucked beneath her pillow. They are talking of me, she said to herself, with bitter conviction. But I shall elude them. Perhaps I shan’t ever tell the others of the discovery. They might give it away, and it could have been a secret place for me. No one is to be trusted. Except perhaps Rachel. The voices came a little nearer. She could clearly distinguish them. Matron’s voice and Georgie’s. She thought contemptuously, they are standing in the passage and talking about me. Georgie is telling Matron that I went out this afternoon, for she did see me, only she didn’t dare say anything to stop me. What cowards women are. All except Chief.

  From a near-by bed came a whisper: ‘Margaret, are you awake?’

  She did not answer. You, she thought, I will trust least of all.

  The speaker called again, a little louder, and a child in another bed stirred in its half sleep.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Margaret in a low voice. ‘Be quiet. Not tonight.’

  Until she fell asleep, she could hear a stifled sobbing coming from the other’s bed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Feed apace then, greedy eyes,

  On the wonder you behold:

  Take it sudden as it flies,

  Though you take it not to hold.

  When your eyes have done their part

  Thought must lengthen it in the heart.

  AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  I WAS often restless at night. The vast house, with its silences, folded in mists, an island in a grey, gently moving sea, amid which the black heads of the elms emerged like volcanic islands: the sudden bursts of sound, the opening and shutting of doors, which came to me long after my companions were asleep and brought me back with a jolt to the realization that it was not, in fact, the middle of the night, but only the end of the day for the adults who lived so close to us yet so cut off; the incomprehensible fragments of conversation over-heard on the landings, laughter, or sudden breathing silences when footsteps had stopped near by – all these were part of my experience and a part which bore no relation to the world of day-time. I did not connect the words I heard, the footsteps, the laughter, the silences, with the gowned beings who taught me Latin or History or Games. When night fell, it was as though the building were occupied by a different set of people; I myself changed, and, by being a participant, if only on the fringe of this nocturnal life, I became a different person from the Rachel of my day-time hours. During the day, I worked and played and talked, and lived the limited routine of the school. At night I lay in bed, or sometimes walked about the dark passages unobserved, and my mind absorbed avidly a host of strange and new impressions which were, it seemed, erased by sleep. But it was not so. Gradually I built up a knowledge which I only comprehended years later.

  On the night of my birthd
ay I was restless. I slept for a short while and woke to find the room full of moonlight, and that never-forgotten stillness of the night world which made me feel I had awoken somewhere else in space and time. I lay for some while, watching the bar of light shift a little across the beds of the sleepers, and then, fully awake, I got up and put on my dressing-gown. I was cold, as one usually was on winter nights at Bampfield, and went down to my own form-room, hoping that the log fire had retained sufficient embers for me to blow it into life again. Lights were still burning in the hall, and under one or two staff doors. It was half past eleven. The fire was quite dead, but the room was warm, and smelt of ink and wood-smoke. Above me were the rooms of my housemistress, Georgie Murrill. I could hear her walking about. I sat very still by the black grate and ate a half-raw chestnut which was lying in the ashes.

  The form-room I was in was next door to the entrance hall, an oasis of Georgian splendour in the midst of inky form-rooms and stone-floored passages. It was a wide hall, with graceful Ionic pillars supporting the gallery above, and it was filled with rugs and fine furniture. It was out of bounds to the girls. Only at night had I ever ventured into it, and there I found a pleasure to my senses, utterly starved at Bampfield, in running my fingers through the thick fur of a polar bear skin or burying my face in bowls of chrysanthemums, or other flowers which decorated the carved chests. The pillars were smooth and cool, and there were ornaments to handle, and the pictures to look at. I knew it all well, and gained from it more than the single sensuous pleasure – a delicious fear of discovery which was exhilarating, and a feeling of private ownership, as though only I knew this night world of soft lights and shadows. It was a world of eyes and hands and ears, made the more sensitive by the necessity to be on the alert to avoid being caught. Often I identified myself with some personage in one of the pictures, a knight escaped from battle, in which I saw him depicted, lance in hand, his horse with staring eyeballs, straining beneath him. In me, he travelled beyond the picture and entered some strange, silent hall, and stood alone as I was standing, sensations washing round him in the silence, sword in hand against the possible danger. Or the sea engulfed, at last, the mariner clinging to the spar, and he entered a drowned world and wandered in caverns lit only faintly by the reflected light of the sun’s rays. And all this, which seems so endless to me, as though time had no part in it, all this must have happened within a few minutes, and on occasions so infrequent that had I ever thought to count them, they could not have amounted to more than a dozen in my whole six years at Bampfield.