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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'A first novel of rare quality – beautiful, grave, humorous, exciting, and wise.' -- Observer Laura Leroy, wife of a British attaché, leads a divided existence, torn between her beloved home in England and diplomatic society in Peking – an ancient city of exquisite allure, bordered by the violent conflicts of the civil war. When Laura joins a group of expats on an expedition to the great monastery at Chieh T'ai Ssu, they become intoxicated by the mysterious beauty of the Chinese landscape in spring (and by each other). Laura is drawn to Vinstead, a man who reminds her of the green fields and spires she has left behind in Oxford. But far from the comforting whirl of cocktails and picnic parties, they soon encounter a shocking clash that threatens the security of their newfound bond. Set in the vanished era of 1930s Peking, this enthralling novel evokes the uneasy balance between two worlds, between east and west, and between old China and the approach of the new. 'And unusual and beautiful first novel, which leaves one thinking long after one has put it down.' -- Spectator 'Ann Bridge's special blend of landscape and romance, in perhaps the best loved of her many books, makes us feel that we have been there too and have shared its dramas and enchantments.' -- Linda Kelly 'Almost unmixed delight . . . It is pictorial and exciting and illuminating.' -- L. P. Hartley
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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‘A first novel of rare quality – beautiful, grave, humorous, exciting, and wise.’ – Observer
‘Few people can evoke the spirit of a place more vividly than Ann Bridge.’ – Linda Kelly
‘Almost unmixed delight … It is pictorial and exciting and illuminating.’ – L. P. Hartley
‘An unusual and beautiful first novel, which leaves one thinking long after one has put it down.’ – Spectator
Peking Picnic
ANN BRIDGE
To Bridget, Jock and Constance and to The Singing Kuniang Herself
‘All among the yellow fields the city stands, the walls keep watch, the gates lift up their heads, scorning the passage of the unregarded years, indifferent to affection or reproach, dead to remorse or hope. The Western Hills change their appearance thrice a day and put on once a year their transient green; the lotus blooms, the willows turn to gold, and everywhere the splendour of the sun and frost is exercised. But all the pride and beauty of these things could not for long command or fortify a foreign heart, and so I went without regret back to the source of my beliefs and strength.’
A JOURNEYFROM PEKING
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
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 caviare croûtes 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 the tray proffered by the servant. The man bowed over the glasses and smiled brilliantly and furtively at her before he moved away.
‘He seems to know you,’ observed the General, directing his monocle at the servant.
‘Yes, it’s my Number Three,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘I suppose he’s a friend of the Knudsens’ Number One.’
‘Look here,’ said General Nevile, ‘I know my wife is looking for you; may I see if I can find her?’
‘Do,’ said Mrs Leroy, and watched his tall thin figure move away, limping a little in his white ducks. If she had hoped to remain alone, however, her hopes were frustrated – the German Counsellor came and clicked his heels before her and said that it was very hot; the Italian First Secretary kissed her hand and murmured that she looked deliciously cool; the Flemish Minister did likewise, and told her a funny story about their hostess in low, rapid and indistinct French; the Japanese Minister bowed very low and said that he regretted not to see her so distinguished husband in English which was monosyllabically correct. Mrs Leroy said that her husband was engaged on business for the Minister – and she smiled as she said it, for he was, as she knew, at that moment in the farrier’s shop at the American Legation, presiding over the shoeing of his own and Sir James Boggit’s polo ponies.
A very tall young man, exquisitely dressed, with an eyeglass in one of his extremely blue eyes, paused behind the Japanese Minister, and made an amiable grimace at Mrs Leroy over the little man’s head.
‘Well, au revoir, Excellency,’ she said, winding up the interview deftly. ‘I shall give my husband your love. Good afternoon, Derek.’
‘Good afternoon, ma chère,’ said the young man, raising his hat and showing a head as black and curly as a spaniel’s. ‘Where are your Kuniangs?’
‘I sent them to the Summer Palace,’ said Mrs Leroy, in her usual slow tones. ‘Miss Parke is going to tell them about the Empress Dowager. I thought it would amuse them more.’
‘I should think that highly probable,’ said Derek Fitzmaurice, sitting down beside her. ‘I should like to give a party for them next week,’ he went on. ‘Will they still be here?’
‘Yes, they have another month here, you know,’ she said. ‘How nice of you, Derek.’
‘Would Thursday do?’ he inquired. ‘Are you free then?’
‘You don’t mean I’m to come?’ She spoke in dismay, or something like it.
‘But of course – why not? Do come, my dear. There’s going to be a really good film at the Chen-Kuang.’
In Peking the cinema takes the place of the theatre, opera and concert hall combined. None of these exist, and on the first night of a famous film the grand circle of the Chen-Kuang might be Covent Garden, so full is it of diamonds, décolletages and diplomatists.
Mrs Leroy was not tempted, however.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m busy all next week, I’m sure. But do have the Kuniangs – they will enjoy it. Our parties are very dull for them.’
‘I should have thought you would want them chaperoned to my establishment,’ he said rather resentfully.
‘Oh no – they can chaperon one another. Your establishment!’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Don’t have too many of your Russians that night.’
‘I’ll tell you who I want to have,’ said the young man, leaning towards her confidentially. ‘Number Twenty-three! I’ve met her at last and she’s an absolute peach. She really is too lovely.’
‘Which is Number Twenty-three? I’ve seen two or three of them about. Is it the tall one with an immense forelock and gold brocade, or the little one with a round face like a flower?’
‘That’s her!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I do want you to see her. She has the most comical mind. Isn’t she lovely, Laura?’
‘She is, most lovely – but I won’t meet her at your house,’ said Mrs Leroy slowly. ‘You really have very little sense, Derek. Concubines are going too far. Besides, you’ll embroil us all with Li-Ching-Hui if you carry on publicly with his ladies. I don’t think you ought to have her to the Legation at all – certainly not to meet the Kuniangs.’
‘Oh, very well.’ He looked rather crestfallen and cross.
‘I don’t mind meeting her casually and accidentally at tea at the Wagons-Lits,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Indeed, I should like to. You can arrange that some time. I shall drift in and you can invite me to your table.’
She said this not because she very much wanted to meet the beautiful concubine, but to smooth Fitzmaurice’s ruffled feathers. He had taken off his hat, in the shade of the oleander, and again, as she looked at him, she thought how like he was to a disgruntled spaniel. How likeable he was really – there were genuine qualities underlying his exquisite appearance and his absurd preoccupation with women. She thought his attitude to that side of life all wrong and quite fantastically silly, but she never tried to alter it. Looking at him now she quite forgot, as too often happened, that they were in the middle of a conversation, and let her mind run off by itself. She always tried to conceal from him the embarrassments in which his confidences about his various loves sometimes involved her, and she wondered now if she need have been so short with him about Number Twenty-three. Yes; someone had to tell him these things. Fitzmaurice was rather mal vu by most of the Legation ladies, and responded by treating them with a marked lack of that polite attentiveness which is supposed to be their due from young secretaries. On her, on the contrary, he conferred almost too much of his confidence; he had the run of her house, and what was more costly, of her leisure and attention. ‘Still, why should they bar him and cold-shoulder him?’ she reflected. As usual her thoughts flew to Tim at the same time, how he would one day be grown up and almost certainly extravagant and silly in some way; she revolted in advance against the way the married women in some remote place overseas would probably treat him. ‘Why do we give ourselves such airs, merely because we are older, and have scrounged some wretched man as a husband?’ she thought, frowning a little. ‘Age has no merit, unless we make it lovely and wise.’ ‘Unless age brings charity,’ she thought, ‘it brings very little; so much that is best goes with youth.’
And she went on reflecting about youth and age. But though she bracketed herself so definitely with the elderly, to look at her no one would have taken Mrs Leroy for even her age, which was thirty-seven. Very long, very thin, very dark, she leant back in her chair in the easy attitude of a strong and supple body, which no skill in corseting can counterfeit or replace. Her dark brows were still drawn a little together above her grey eyes, an expression of contempt for the behaviour of T’ai-t’ais (married women) compressed her thin unreddened lips. Fitzmaurice watched her. He was accustomed to her vague fits and did not object. He knew it was useless to try any more to make her come to his party, and that he was ‘planted with the Kuniangs’, as he would have expressed it – but his feathers were smoothed.
‘Hullo! who’s that?’ he asked suddenly. An excessively tall, very pretty girl, with an exquisite figure, had appeared from round a small pagoda, and stood, her white dress patterned with the moving zigzag shadows of bamboo leaves, at a little distance among the crowd.
‘Oh, that’s Little Annette, Nina Nevile’s niece,’ said Mrs Leroy.
‘Annette who? – or Annette what?’ asked Fitzmaurice, sticking his eyeglass in more firmly, the better to examine her.
‘I can’t remember,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Yes, Ingersoll – anyhow she’s staying with them.’ At this moment the young woman in question caught sight of Mrs Leroy, and her rather impassive face brightened into a smile as she moved towards her. ‘Why, hullo, Mrs Leroy!’ she exclaimed; ‘aren’t you cool there in the shade!’
‘Sit down and be cool too,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Let me introduce Mr Fitzmaurice, of our Legation.’
‘Why, I’d love to sit,’ the girl answered, shaking hands with Fitzmaurice with an absent-minded ‘Pleased to meet you!’ ‘but I have to ride with the La Tours. Have you seen Nina? She’s making inquiries for you.’
‘No, but I daresay I shall, if I go on sitting here,’ said Mrs Leroy.
The girl broke into a laugh.
‘Dear Mrs Leroy, isn’t that English?’ she exclaimed. All her remarks were made in the same high soft voice, pretty and colourless. ‘Why, if I heard someone was wanting me I should be all around after them.’
‘Well then, go “all around” now with Mr Fitzmaurice, and bring Nina here if you find her,’ said Mrs Leroy.
‘I will – if you will?’ to Fitzmaurice, with the little automatic glance of coquetry which seems to be as much a part of the female American’s social equipment as a frock. Fitzmaurice expressed himself as delighted, and they moved off together, a few notes of the high voice informing Mrs Leroy from a distance that Little Annette considered her to be ‘the loveliest woman in Peking’. ‘How incredible Americans are, really,’ she murmured, but paused, remembering how fond she was of Nina, who was also an American. And Little Annette’s beauty and simplicity had a certain charm. ‘She looks full of life,’ she thought, and was wandering back to her interrupted meditation on youth when she was again interrupted. An At Home is not a good place for meditation.
This time it really was Nina. A little fairy of a woman, with a blond head, Parisian chic, and a queer irregular Hogarth face – broad mouth, runaway nose, wide-set eyes – darted upon her from behind. ‘Dearest Laura, here you are!’
‘My dear, I told you she was here as soon as I found you,’ observed General Nevile, taking off his topi and fanning himself with it. ‘Yes – I’ll have one of those,’ to a servant who paused with another tray of cocktails. ‘You, Nina?’
‘Most certainly yes! You have one too, Laura – you’ll need it.’
‘Why?’ said Mrs Leroy, taking the cocktail and lighting a cigarette in a long ivory holder.
‘Well – to dispose you favourably! Now listen – I’ve got a plan, and you must say Yes. We want you to come to Chieh T’ai Ssu with us next weekend.’
‘Oh, I don’t think I can,’ said Mrs Leroy, in her most languid voice. ‘I’m frightfully busy, you know.’ Her first impulse was always to say No to any projected engagement. ‘I don’t see how I can get away.’ She sipped her cocktail. ‘What’s the party?’ she inquired, after a moment.
‘Well, will she come, Nina? Have you persuaded her?’ inquired a crisp clear voice, which conformed regrettably to the adjective ‘melodious’. A short fair man in riding clothes, with the most completely military figure and appearance it is possible to imagine, had come up to the group under the oleander, and stood darting bright bird-like glances of inquiry from face to face.
‘Mrs Leroy hasn’t really heard what it’s all about yet,’ said the General, pulling his moustache gloomily.
‘Why, we have this Professor coming tomorrow,’ said Mrs Nevile, ‘and we must do something about him. I thought we would take him to the hills for the weekend and give him a real Peking picnic. So there would be him, and we two, and you, and Touchy here (the military man saluted), and perhaps Henri.’
‘Laura, you must come,’ said the man referred to as Touchy. ‘Chieh T’ai Ssu will be like Heaven now with all the fruit blossom out. And there’s a moon – think of moonlight on the terrace, and the white pine!’
‘Well, I don’t know – I might manage it,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Is that all? And what is your Professor?’
‘Oh, he’s just some learned man from England – the Minister has been told about him, and he’s planted us with him,’ said Mrs Nevile airily. ‘He’s inquiring into something, like they do.’
‘It’s Vinstead of Cambridge,’ said General Nevile, who, after twelve years of marriage, was still troubled by his wife’s inaccuracies. ‘He has one of those travelling Fellowships, and has come out to study Oriental psychology. It’s a semi-official thing in this case, but Sir James looked him up in Who’s Who, and when he saw the names of his books’ – a smile appeared for a moment under the General’s moustache, making his lean gloomy face suddenly charming – ‘he said he thought “the felloh had better stay with someone who could talk to him,” so he has turned him over to us.’
Mrs Leroy laughed out loud.
‘Is that complimentary?’ inquired the General, fixing his eyeglass on her.
‘Very, I should say!’ she said, still laughing. ‘I must have him and Sir James to dine and hear them talk to one another.’
‘But will you come and talk to him at Chieh T’ai Ssu? That’s the point,’ said the General.
‘Yes, and Miss Hande – Big Annette,’ said Nina Nevile. ‘She will talk to you, Laura, and she’s such a bad mixer.’
‘Is Miss Hande coming too, then?’ Mrs Leroy inquired.
‘Why yes – I must take her. And Little Annette – didn’t I say so?’
‘No, you didn’t, my dear,’ said the General. ‘Now you know the worst, Mrs Leroy; will you come?’
It was characteristic of General Nevile that in a society which dealt almost exclusively in Christian names, he should have continued to call the woman whom, except his wife, he knew best, and perhaps liked most, by her formal prefix. It belonged to his rather Edwardian character and appearance to do this, and Mrs Leroy liked it, if only for that reason. She marvelled perpetually at the tendency of Peking society, as of other small societies, to invent and use nicknames, and had formed a theory that it was because they seemed somehow to give the impression of a larger number of people. Major La Touche, for instance, who was now standing in front of her, measuring the distance between the top of his riding boots and the bottom of his drill jacket on his riding whip with great care and persistence, had two perfectly good names. You could call him Major La Touche, or you could call him James; you might even call him Jim; but no one ever called him anything but Touchy, which was not in the least appropriate to his character. Then there was this business of the Annettes. They were not related; they were not alike. Miss Anna Hande, who had been referred to as Big Annette, was a middle-aged and eminent American novelist (in her own country she was called ‘the American Hardy’) – if anything she was small of stature, and a most uncompromising subject for a nickname. But just because she happened to be visiting the Neviles in Peking at the same time as Annette Ingersoll, Nina’s niece, she had to be, it appeared, ‘Big Annette’, while the immensely tall Miss Ingersoll became, with equal incongruity, ‘Little Annette’. Mrs Leroy used the current nicknames, like everyone else, but they added to the sense of theatricality which sometimes overcame her. At that moment, for instance, she saw the figures about her, spattered with the irregular starry shadows of the oleander leaves – the General, standing, because his lame leg made it too much trouble to lower himself into any seat for a short time; his wife in a chair, her hat, which she had pulled off, on her lap, showing her childish waved yellow head, sipping her cocktail; Major La Touche, now, his foot on the tub of the oleander, measuring his riding boot with his whip – like figures on a stage; they seemed to her, in the subdued wavering light, against the background of fantastic architecture and shifting crowd, with the music from the band spraying over them, completely unreal, artificial presentations of types. She listened, as to a stage dialogue, to the chatter exchanged between Mrs Nevile and La Touche, and almost started when she heard herself again addressed.
‘Well, Laura, you’ll come, will you?’
Mrs Leroy roused herself with sudden decision. ‘If I come,’ she said, ‘I must bring my Kuniangs.’
CHAPTER TWO
IN MANDARIN the word kuniang denotes an unmarried girl of rank – literally, a virgin. Mrs Leroy’s announcement that she must bring her virgins with her to Chieh T’ai Ssu produced a sort of pause.
‘My dear, that will make us the most terrific crowd of women,’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘Two, four – six! and only four men.’
‘Does that matter?’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Why not four men?’
‘Why men at all, eh?’ said General Nevile, twinkling unexpectedly.
‘No, I like there to be men,’ said Laura calmly, ‘only I don’t see why they need fit, except at dinner.’
‘Dear Laura – the Singing Kuniang by all means – but the other? Couldn’t she have a rest cure or a headache?’ urged Major La Touche.
‘Yes, Laura – do bring the singing one,’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘We’ll make her sing by moonlight; it will be lovely. But must you bring the other one?’
‘How disagreeable you all are about poor Lilah,’ said Mrs Leroy, with unruffled calm. ‘I won’t leave her out. What is the matter with her?’
‘The grave, the temple, the tomb!’ ejaculated La Touche rapidly, ‘none of them is more silent.’
‘Well, you can look at her while you listen to Judith,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘She’s worth looking at.’
‘Not the animated bust, anyhow,’ murmured La Touche.
‘Oh, do be quiet, Touchy, and let us get on with plans,’ said Nina Nevile. ‘Very well, Laura darling – we must have you, and if I bring my Kuniangs, it’s only fair you should bring yours, I suppose. Though if anyone is a worse mixer than Big Annette,’ she sighed, ‘I must say it is your Beauty. But look, Laura – can you bring an extra man or two?’
‘Do you mean Henry?’ asked Mrs Leroy. ‘Because if so I should say no. Vol. Two is well on its way just now.’
Henry Leroy was Commercial and Oriental Attaché to the British Legation in Peking. His official duties were onerous in spasms: as when civil war approached the capital more nearly than usual, or when a fresh Tuchun (warlord) captured or purchased the city from a rival, and produced a change of government. But at other times they left him with a sufficiency of leisure, which he filled with polo and Oriental studies. He wrote books, and very good books too, on Chinese Linguistics and Chinese Commercial History, on one of which he was now engaged. Laura Leroy was interested in his official work, and aware of his very considerable local importance – as an inconspicuous, silent, but quite essential cog in the great diplomatic machine; she was also, secretly, very proud of his scholarship. She was intelligent enough to appreciate at their proper worth the books which, at longish intervals, appeared over his name, each one in turn creating its quiet stir of approbation among the experts. She appeared to accept quite naturally, and without the smallest resentment, the fact that these occupations left her husband with very little time or attention to spare for her or her interests; that she had to carry on their social life practically single-handed and fill in any leisure of her own as best she might. She was much too wise to attempt to share in any way in his labours; she spoke Peking colloquial Chinese fluently, and had a sufficiency of Mandarin at command for social purposes, but she was no Sinologue, and could only read a bare two or three thousand characters – accomplishments which she rated very low. She did not, indeed, set a very high value on herself or any of her activities – an attitude which leaves one peculiarly free to assess other values. It was perhaps to an obscure sense of this freedom about her, of unuttered judgments based on a secret independence – the sense almost of a hidden and incorruptible tribunal – that she owed her peculiar position in the small world of Peking. Not very prominent, not very young, not excessively beautiful, and not in the least ambitious, she was nevertheless quietly important to it in a way that other women who were all these things were not. Nobody ever troubled to formulate the reasons for this except perhaps Touchy; and he was an exception, knew it, and wisely held his peace. There can be few places in the world where Matthew Arnold’s dictum, that ‘ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves – cannot be too much lived with’ would find a more hollow echo than in the European society of Peking. Touchy read this sentence out to Laura Leroy one day, not very long after his arrival, as a sort of test. ‘Who said that?’ she asked; and when he had told her, ‘What a sensible man!’ she said, and that was all. At the time Touchy was a little disappointed; but afterwards, when he got to know Laura better, he felt that the answer was both adequate and characteristic. He realised presently that she agreed profoundly with Matthew Arnold, and he sometimes wondered what she did with her ideas. He, for his part, liked to use ideas as currency, and he experienced all the discomfort of a sort of enforced intellectual moratorium in a place where they had so little value. But Laura, though her intellectual finances were obviously of the soundest – positively, he said to himself, on a gold basis – never seemed to court interchange particularly; if you could nobble her quietly she would give you a high rate of exchange, but she never looked for a market, so to speak. Yes, it was, Touchy had long since decided, probably these large gold reserves, this sense of things left unsaid, rather than anything she said or did in particular, which caused Laura Leroy to be admired, valued, yes, and a little feared as she was. There were those who said, not wholly without reason, that she was a prig. But there was nothing overtly peculiar about her; she conformed smoothly, if a little indifferently, to the milieu in which she found herself. Touchy also took off his hat, among other things, to her skilful and unobtrusive protection of Henry’s leisure and labours. As now. ‘Vol. Two,’ she said, ‘is well on its way,’ and that disposed of Henry as far as Chieh T’ai Ssu was concerned.
‘No, I’m too modest to hope for Henry,’ said Nina, ‘but can’t you bring someone else?’
‘I’ll see – though I can’t think why we want all these men,’ said Laura. ‘Yes – I can bring Derek, of course.’
On her way home Mrs Leroy reviewed the situation. The car was at the Summer Palace with the Kuniangs, so she took a rickshaw from the crowd which thronged the narrow hut’ung among the waiting motors, the coolies squatting in the deep slate-coloured dust, gossiping and smoking American cigarettes, till the appearance of a possible fare galvanised them into activity. Then they arose and hurried forward between their brass-topped shafts, jostling one another vigorously and shouting, ‘Want-not-want?’ in a deafening chorus.
A rickshaw is the most delightfully civilised form of locomotion. Seated in a well-sprung bath-chair, the passenger bowls along on pneumatic tyres at a surprising speed; he is alone, for it only holds one; his view is unimpeded by anything but the lowered head and shoulders of the trotting coolie; the air fans his face gently, and there is nothing to prevent his holding up a sunshade in comfort. The only drawback is that in order to reach any objective unfamiliar to the coolie he must know not only the way thither, but the points of the compass en route as well, for the Chinese do not use left and right as directions, but north, south, and so on. ‘Wang tung!’ (turn east!) you cry at a corner, or ‘Wang’pei!’ (turn north!) (Which is also, if you come to think of it, both a more civilised and a more intellectual way of giving directions than our own.) However, the British Legation is known to all rickshaw coolies, so Mrs Leroy merely said, ‘Ying-Kuo Fu!’ and sat back in peace to consider.
On the whole she was inclined not to regret having agreed to join Nina’s picnic. It was true that the party would be large to the point of unwieldiness – at the last moment Mrs Nevile had invited Henri Delache, a young Frenchman, who had a camp bed of his own, and could therefore be included without disturbing what Touchy called ‘the flea-bag ratio’ of the party – and sufficiently ill-assorted to call for a certain amount of social effort and perseverance on somebody’s part; but Mrs Leroy hoped and intended that the somebody should be for the most part either Touchy, who was indefatigable and good-natured, or Nina. In any case they would all have to rub along somehow, and it would be a nice outing for the Kuniangs. Mrs Leroy had a certain amount of conscience about entertaining her two nieces. The children of an elder step-sister, they were near enough to her own age not to require elaborate taking care of, but she did want them to have a good time in Peking. She knew them really very little. For the last eight years now she had been in China, most of the time, and when she did go home she was usually too much absorbed in Tim and Sarah, their holidays and their clothes and their amusements and arrangements, to have much leisure for anything else. It was terrible how fast time flew then. She seized the moments, grasped them, held on to them with an almost physical intensity – but they slipped by like water, flowed past, sank away, and were gone; and she was left staring after two trains which had swallowed up those two small funny faces. She never seemed to have time, even, to see how the faces had altered from last year, let alone the funny minds behind the funny faces – though she used to look and look till her eyes ached. Oh, she knew all about not seizing the wingèd joy, she used to tell herself almost angrily – but what would Blake have said if his joy had lived in England and he in Peking, and he’d had it for two months, two short, short months once a year, or not even that? Once a year, an operation without an anaesthetic – and then staring after two trains! Tim, thank Heaven, was too small to mind much – he still, right up to the last, wanted to study the makes of engines from the platform, and would fidget about like a fish on the end of a line, his hand in her foolish idiotic hand which so liked to feel the small strength of his, when he caught sight of his little companions. But Sarah – Sarah with her untidiness, her inky fingers and furry hair, her bleak sincerity, savage contempts and loyal burning affection – Sarah, whose jokes became more acid, and her goodnight hugs more strained and long, the last two days – there were no engines for her. How was one to bear her short staccato remarks, indifferent or snappish, the last morning? – and at the station, the ferocious frowns with which she winked away moisture, the last helpless, sudden trembling of her lips before her brusque dive into the carriage? It was hard to make ‘eternity’s sunrise’ out of them.
Anyhow, these things had prevented her from cultivating her nieces, and now she found herself with two grown-up young women whom she hardly knew on her hands for a couple of months. On the whole she was inclined to like them. Judith was the easiest; Mrs Leroy suspected Judith of being rather a warrior. She was not very pretty – pretty in some moods and some frocks, but that was all – so she had had, presumably, to do something about it. What she had done about it was to train for a singer, in a thorough-paced and professional way, and with considerable success, judging by her voice. She was also intelligent and pleasantly enthusiastic – she had jumped at the chance of going to the Summer Palace with old Miss Parke; she would probably jump at going to Chieh T’ai Ssu. Lilah, on the other hand, never jumped at anything. She was a massive glorious blonde, beautiful with a well-regulated beauty of snowy neck and shoulders, apple-blossom skin, and golden hair which she had not shingled. But her beauty had apparently prevented her from feeling the necessity of doing – or, indeed, saying – much about anything. She dressed very well in a slightly grandiose way – much better than Judith, who was inclined to be gipsyfied about clothes and treated her rather moderate complexion with scornful neglect. But her expression was neutral almost to the point of sulkiness, and her capacity for silence almost illimitable. Never had Laura seen anyone make less contribution to the general social give-and-take, or less response to the efforts of others. She had watched, even in the short time they had been with her, person after person, lured by Lilah’s loveliness, moving cheerfully up to the attack, and after a little while falling back baffled and disgruntled. She had a mental picture of Lilah passing leisurely through the East on her way out, like some Indian goddess (influenced by Greek art, of course) with monumental impassivity, receiving the garlands and the obeisances, but giving no sign to her worshippers. She rather thought Judith must have got some fun out of watching this – she already credited Judith with getting quite a lot of fun out of watching things; but just what Lilah got out of it she did not know. And yet she was clearly not stupid. It was a puzzle.
Wrapped in these thoughts, she was borne rapidly homewards. She was too familiar with the dirty sordid streets to be struck any more by the peculiarity of a whole city of one-storey houses; by the teeming yellow faces, the dust and squalor, the innumerable donkeys; but as her rickshaw crossed the Ta Ch’ang An Chieh, the great street running along the north side of the Legation Quarter, she turned her head to look at the Forbidden City. That was a sight on which, after all these years, she could never look unmoved. One behind the other, the great red gateways stood up in the evening light like immense double-decker Noah’s Arks, roofed in golden tiles, above the high crimson walls. Close at hand, on the right, showed the silvery green of the secular thujas round the Temple of the Ancestors – the ‘sunny spots of greenery’, of Xanadu, planted, legend says, by Kublai Khan. The egrets had come back after their winter absence, and their white shapes showed among the ancient trees, their harsh cries filled the air above the clang of trams and the blasts of motor horns. Changeless matchless beauty, holding the eyes and the mind, as beauty does! She remembered her first sight of it, on the evening of their arrival in Peking. Henry had taken her arm and led her, tired and stiff and discouraged with unpacking, with the allocation of rooms, the dispersal of blankets and linen and silver to various household destinations, out into the icy dusk. They went through the West Gate of the Legation, across the glacis outside the Quarter, and found themselves presently in a red-walled avenue a hundred yards wide, stretching down on their left to the immense green-tiled gate-tower of the Ch’ien-mên, stretching up on their right to the red and golden Noah’s Arks, with gleams of white marble at their base. ‘There!’ said Henry. They looked. ‘It’s the eighth Wonder of the World,’ he said. And she had gone back to the house with him, partly reconciled to a place of exile which held such breathtaking beauty.
‘Ying-Kuo-fu!’ said the coolie suddenly, and dumped down the shafts. Mrs Leroy, accustomed to this manoeuvre, was not pitched out. ‘Go in, go in!’ she said, waving her hand towards the squat ugly grey gateway of the Legation. The coolie resumed his shafts and trotted obediently through it, past the sentry on the left, past the Constable’s lodge with the grey parrot on the right, past the painted scarlet-pillared T’ing’rhs of the Minister’s house. The Legation compound was dotted with good-sized bungalows and a few larger houses; there were open spaces which would later be grass, there were trees and flowering shrubs and officey-looking buildings in a network of well-kept roads. ‘Turn south!’ said Mrs Leroy at a crossroad. ‘Turn west!’ a few yards further on. The rickshaw bowled up a curved gravel sweep between thickets of sweet-scented yellow briars, and stopped before a large well-built house. She was at home.
CHAPTER THREE
STANDING IN the cool polished hall of her house, Mrs Leroy called ‘Lai!’ A servant in white appeared. ‘Give money that man,’ she said in Chinese, pointing towards the door. The servant bowed and went. Mrs Leroy threw off her hat and sat down on a sofa, and began to read through a pile of notes which had accumulated during the afternoon on a silver tray near the inner door. When the servant returned, ‘Great-Man back-come-not?’ she inquired. The servant answered that the Great Man had come back, and now ride pony with No. 2 Envoy, by which communication Mrs Leroy knew that her husband was out riding with the Counsellor, Grant-Howard. She next inquired as to her nieces’ whereabouts. Niu, who like all Chinese upper servants made it his business to be minutely informed about the doings of the whole household, was prompt and clear. The Virgins had returned in the gas-cart (motor) – the one Virgin was in her room, the Enormous Virgin (the servants’ name for the massive Lilah) was walking with the Third Envoy. Laura was pleased. Derek must have nipped home from the Knudsens’ and carried Lilah off for a walk – a rather enterprising move. She refused a cocktail which Niu told her was waiting, and bade him tell Ho Kuniang (Hubbard, her maid) to get a bath ready – what she actually said was, ‘Want bath’; then gathering up her notes she went into her own sitting room to write a few answers before dinner.
The Leroys’ was one of the three or four English-built houses in the Legation – that is to say it had an upstairs as well as a downstairs, while the servants had quarters of their own in a roomy compound outside. The room in which Mrs Leroy now sat had a southern aspect, and was somewhat darkened by the shadow of the p’êng which ran along the whole south side of the house. A p’êng is an ingenious contrivance for keeping houses cool in summer, common in Peking; it consists of a sort of extension of the roof made of straw matting, thrown out at roof level and supported on poles, which keeps the sunny side of the house perpetually in shadow, but permits a free movement of air below it. P’êngs are put up at the beginning of the summer and removed in autumn; it was fully early for one, but Henry Leroy had a theory that to keep a house cool you must never let it get hot – so his p’êng was always erected a fortnight or more before other people’s. Sitting down before a large writing table of the GHF (Government Heavy Furniture) type, supplied by the Office of Works, Mrs Leroy wrote rapidly, from time to time consulting a large red notebook labelled ‘Engagements’, and scribbling a word or two in another book bound in blue, throwing the notes as she finished them on to the floor at her side. She had nearly finished when the door opened; she looked up and saw Judith Milne poised at the threshold.
‘Come in, Judith,’ she said.
‘Oh, not if you’re busy, Laura.’
‘No, I’ve just finished,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Come and tell me how you got on while I log these up.’
‘It was marvellous!’ began Judith eagerly, coming forward as she spoke and perching on the arm of a sofa close to the writing table. ‘Miss Parke is a wonder! Fancy her having lived there like that.’ She went on describing her day at the Summer Palace while Mrs Leroy collected her notes off the floor, took a third book labelled ‘Chits’ in gold lettering, and began to write in it the names of the recipients under the day’s date, looking up at Judith now and then, with a nod or a laugh, as she did so.
Judith Milne was only medium tall, but she had a strong elastic figure, like a boy’s, and extremely pretty shapely feet, legs and hands. Her hair was cendré fair, and curled by itself; she wore it shingled, rather long, so that her face was always framed in a pale fuzzy halo. The face was redeemed from ordinariness by rather fine light-blue eyes, under brows much darker than her hair, which slanted almost upwards at the corners; there was something about this slant of the brows and the winged cut-away line of her nostrils that reminded Laura of one of the Michelangelo youths at the corners of the Sistine Chapel. She talked fast and headlong, tumbling out her sentences and interrupting herself with little burbles of laughter – there was a sort of warm vibration of enthusiasm in her voice when she was excited, which made it very nice to listen to. She ended her recital as she began – it was a marvellous place, they had had a marvellous day, it was terribly good of Laura to have arranged it. ‘Miss Parke, of course, simply made it. I am sorry for people who go to the Summer Palace without her to tell them about the Empress Dowager’s picnics.’ There was always at least one word in italics in each of Judith’s sentences.
Mrs Leroy had by this time finished entering her notes in the chit book, and rang the bell. Niu appeared; she handed him the book and the notes, and said something to him in Chinese. ‘Understand, understand!’ he replied briefly, and went out.
‘I think that’s such a killing way of carrying on one’s correspondence,’ said Judith, looking after the man. ‘Do you never post letters?’
‘Not to people in Peking,’ replied Laura. ‘It’s much quicker to send the chit coolie.’
Judith was idly handling the things on the writing table. ‘Profit and loss account,’ she read out, holding up the book bound in blue, in which Laura had been making entries as she wrote her notes. ‘What on earth is this?’
Laura smiled. ‘Lunches and dinners given and received,’ she said. ‘They are all written up in that, and when I am giving a party I can turn anyone up and see at once what I owe them, and work them off. I balance it once a quarter or so and start afresh.’
Judith Milne turned the leaves thoughtfully, and then looked at Laura. ‘I think it’s rather frightful,’ she said.
‘Why?’ asked Laura, interested.
‘It seems so horrible to run one’s entertaining like a bank,’ the girl said slowly. ‘Making friendship a sort of business. Don’t you want to see any of these people?’
‘Some of them,’ said Mrs Leroy.
‘Then why do you have the ones you don’t want to see?’ persisted Judith, still looking at the book. ‘Mrs Brownlow,’ she read out. ‘That’s that awful fat woman who’s so badly made up, with the husband who was screwed the other night at the hotel, isn’t it? She looks like a barmaid. You can’t want to see her or him, ever.’
‘She was a barmaid,’ said Mrs Leroy coolly, ‘and I don’t want to see her very much, though there are plenty of people in Peking who are duller and less kind than Mother Brownlow. But he represents a big British commercial interest, and one must be civil to them.’
‘But can’t you be civil to people without having them to dinner?’ asked Judith, still studying the blue book, horror at the number of meals the Brownlows were asked to clearly visible on her face. ‘It seems so awfully insincere!’ She paused. ‘It isn’t like you, Laura!’ she burst out.
‘It isn’t like anyone,’ Laura answered, wondering what idea the girl had been forming of her. ‘It’s just part of the job. This entertaining is simply a system.’
‘Well, I call it a rotten system,’ said Judith. ‘Such a fearful waste of time. One never sees enough of the people one really wants to see – one never gets to know anyone well enough. And to spend ages feeding people who bore you seems to me simply crazy.’
Laura was more interested than ever. ‘I agree with you that as a life it would be crazy,’ she said. ‘But as I keep telling you, it’s a job.’
‘But why is it part of the job?’ said Judith. ‘Does it help Uncle Henry, for instance, to dine with duds?’
Laura laughed out. ‘Not exactly,’ she answered. ‘Yes, indirectly it does. Look here – everyone in Peking is here to transact business of some sort with someone or other – we are, the colleagues are, the business people are. And in practice it’s been found that business is transacted more easily between people who know one another socially than between those who only meet officially. Hence the system.’ She rose and took the book from Judith and put it in a drawer. ‘And hence that book,’ she added. ‘One may as well be efficient about things. Come on – we ought to go and dress.’
‘No – wait a moment, Laura,’ said Judith. ‘Surely all this must make people very insincere?’
‘Perhaps it does,’ said Laura a little wearily. ‘I think sincerity is often very much overrated, though.’
‘Laura! What do you mean?’ Judith began. But she was interrupted by the entrance of Niu, with the information that the Big Envoy wished to strike electric talk with the Great Man. Mrs Leroy went towards the door. ‘The Minister is on the telephone,’ she said as she went. ‘I must go.’
On her way upstairs – ‘I’m so sorry, Sir James,’ Judith heard Laura’s voice, ‘Henry is out riding with Mr Grant-Howard. Shall I send him across when he comes in?’
Sir James was perturbed. His Counsellor was out, his Commercial and Oriental Attaché was out. ‘I can’t even get that felloh Fitzmaurice,’ he complained. Laura’s voice became very soothing. ‘Aren’t you dining with the Schuylers too?’ she said. ‘Well, then, won’t you come across when you’re dressed and have a cocktail and talk to Henry quietly here, and we can all go on together. Do – I’ll make you one of your special ones.’
Sir James was soothed. He thought perhaps he would. That would be delightful, Laura said – in about half an hour? She hoped it wasn’t anything tiresome? Oh, that felloh Tu – there was a telegram from that felloh at what’s-its-name, a jumpy felloh, seemed to think he was on the move again. ‘Your husband’ll know what it’s all worth,’ said Sir James. ‘Half an hour, then.’
In Laura’s room Hubbard, the maid, waited with a face registering resignation. ‘This is the second bath I’ve drawn you, madam. I hope it won’t be cold.’
‘Run in some more hot, Hubbard,’ said Laura.
‘I’ve put the gold dress out for you, madam,’ Hubbard went on, moving towards the bathroom.
‘No – I’ll wear the black lace,’ said Laura.
‘You wore the black lace the last time you was at the American Legation, madam,’ said Hubbard reprovingly.
‘Oh, did I? Very well, the gold then,’ said Laura indifferently, as the maid left the room.
A few moments later Mrs Leroy plunged into her bath, found it boiling hot, and blessed her servant. Hubbard was an undersized skinny little woman, the wrong side of forty, with a sallow complexion, beady black eyes, and tightly frizzed black hair; she was, as Henry Leroy often said, much uglier than sin. But she was also from Laura’s point of view a jewel. It was not only that she sewed like an angel, and could really copy French frocks – that usually legendary accomplishment; it was not only that she always remembered, as now, what frock her mistress had worn where, and ruled the wash man and the house coolies with a rod of iron and three words of Chinese; nor that every garment, shoe, and stocking flourished like a living entity under her skilled care. These things were much. But in all the eight years they had spent in China together Mrs Leroy had never seen her maid frightened, and never known her go sick. Her mincing gentility concealed a highly adventurous spirit, and her plain little person housed, most improbably, a raging and successful coquette. None of the young and pretty maids and nurses of the Legation had a tithe of her success – she simply walked through the hearts of the British and American Legation guards. And though she grumbled like any Tommy, baths were always hot, and cigarette cases always filled, and clothes and handkerchiefs always scented. Happy the woman who lights on such a maid; happier still the one who, like Mrs Leroy, contrives to inspire in such a paragon an unexpressed devotion.
‘So we’re likely to have another war then, madam,’ remarked Hubbard conversationally, as she put on her mistress’s shoes and fastened her suspenders, while Laura, before the mirror, dealt rather perfunctorily with her face.
‘Oh, are we?’ said Laura. ‘Who with this time, Hubbard?’
‘Well, the boys were saying at the “Y” this afternoon that one of these Doojoons, as they call them, was setting out to attack Peking,’ replied Hubbard. ‘Doo, I think they said his name was; though I can’t make much of these names after all these years, and that’s a fact.’
