TO LIVE IN two different worlds at the same time is both difficult and disconcerting. Actually, of course, the body cannot be in China and in Oxfordshire simultaneously. But it can, and does, travel rapidly between the one place and the other, while the mind or the heart persists obstinately in lingering where the body is not, or in leaping ahead to the place whither the body is bound. The whole man – or perhaps chiefly the whole woman – is in such circumstances never completely anywhere.
‘La nef qui disjoint nos amours,’ cried Mary Stuart to France from the deck of the ship in which she sailed to Scotland:
N’a ’cy de moy que la moictié.
Une part te reste – elle est tienne …
And the lingering spirit, summoned back by some importunate demand on the attention, brings with it a host of pictures, of scenes complete with scents and sounds, which it intrudes at the most unsought moments, so that the images of both worlds shift and change before one like drop scenes in a theatre. It is all most confusing and disabling, and so Mrs Leroy found it.
She was sitting in the garden of a large house in the Tartar City. What she saw with her bodily eyes was a small goldfish pond set in a miniature landscape of rocks and grottoes, against a background of pavilions with red pillars, painted eaves, and tent-like roofs of green tiles, over which the formal plumed tops of two immense pines in the next courtyard showed black against the light glittering sky. A band was playing in one of the pavilions, a buffet was being served from behind and depleted from in front in another; a short stout lady and a tall thin man were receiving guests at the top of a shallow flight of marble steps. Round the grottoes people in light summer clothes sat, or shifted to and fro; a high treble roar of voices hung over the whole assembly; Chinese servants with sealed pale-green faces, silent movements, and white coats with gold sashes moved about handing ices, olives, cocktails and caviarecroûtes with serene dignity. She was, in fact, at an At Home in the Scandinavian Legation. But she was not really seeing any of it. Sitting back in her chair under an oleander, for a moment alone, what she saw with great clearness was a green field bordered with youthful Scots pines, on which small white figures ran about with happy cries. She heard the sound of wood on leather and leather on wood, and treble voices crying, ‘How’s that?’ and hurrahing eagerly if thinly. And most clearly of all she saw one little flushed face, broad of brow, with blue veins in the white temples where the rough brown hair stuck damp to the skin, the grey eyes set wide above the dumpy nose, which approached her with a shy entrancing smile and said, ‘Might have been worse, Mummie, mightn’t it?’ as he settled down on the grass at her feet. Oh,so clear – she could see the little freckles on the white forehead and the big ones on the bridge of that snub nose, and the short broad hands, so absurdly strong for their size, that twiddled at the binding of the cricket bat.
‘Have one of this fellow’s cocktails, Mrs Leroy – he seems to want you to,’ said a voice overhead.
Mrs Leroy said, ‘No, I won’t’ – and then, ‘Yes, I think I will’ – before she looked up. The voice was familiar; she knew that her line of vision would have to travel upwards through a considerable angle before it reached the drooping blond distinction of General Nevile’s moustache and nose and eyelids, haloed by the green lining of a topi. She did, however, look up and smile, not insincerely – she liked the Military Attaché – as she took a cocktail from th
