Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “That is really quite ugly, don’t you think?” she said, gazing at it through her lorgnette. “And so absurd! It isn’t marble, and it isn’t a boat! Do you know, I wonder at an intelligent woman like the Empress Dowager wishing to build this ridiculous place, and being so absurdly pleased with it.” She stopped, and continued to consider the monstrous wood and marble erection, sitting heavily on the water. “I suppose she was getting old,” she went on. “But I never quite see why age should make people particularly foolish; do you?” She turned from the Marble Boat and looked now at Mrs. Pelham.

  “No—I think it ought to be the other way round,” said Rose.

  “Old men are often very silly,” said Lady Harriet meditatively. “Do you think she was Jung Lu’s mistress?” she asked suddenly, as they walked back through the range of pavilions on the shore. Rose had no helpful views—she had only read two or three books about the Empress Dowager, and found them so contradictory, and the whole life of that extraordinary woman so fantastic, that she had been left quite at sea. She was amazed at the knowledge which Lady Harriet displayed; she had already been struck, when she visited her at the hotel, by the books strewn about her sitting-room—Back-house and Bland, the Abbé Hüc, Giles, and more modern ones like Rodney Gilbert, “La Chine en foli”, and a set of paperbound volumes in Italian, Vare’s Novelle di Yenching, which Lady Harriet had especially commended to her—“my dear, he’s really the Kipling of China.” But this elderly woman had sucked the heart out of them all, got the whole past perfectly pat—it was astonishing. She and Anastasia, who was extremely well up in Chinese history and architecture, carried on discussions which were quite over Rose’s head. It occurred suddenly to Anastasia, as they sat in the pavilion in which those fantastic theatrical performances had taken place, that in some ways Lady Harriet Downham, with her swift grasp of facts, her decided views and her certainty as to what she wanted, was probably herself not altogether unlike the Empress Dowager. But what differences, too. There was something so regulated, so controlled, so stable about the woman before her, in her simple, discreetly distinguished clothes, who had the whole English aristocratic tradition behind her—a tradition above all of responsibilities and loyalties, and these put foremost, before all personal wishes; how utterly different, how completely opposed to the arbitrary and irresponsible caprice which could seize the revenues of a whole nation, raised for naval defence, and squander them on this grotesque and extravagant pleasaunce.

  The two young women were, in fact, both greatly drawn to their companion. Anastasia of course met her mind on much more of an equality than Rose could hope to do, but the cousins smiled at one another once or twice in mutual entertainment at the way in which, in a few short weeks in Peking, Lady Harriet had met and taken the measure of everyone worth knowing—Miss C——, one-time friend of the Empress Dowager, old Lady B——, with her horse-carriage and her coachmen in Manchu hats, for so long the doyenne, the centre and incontestably the most brilliant figure of the social life of the city. Of Sir James Boggit Lady Harriet had seen little, since he had gone to Pei-t’ai-ho almost as soon as she arrived, but him too she had sized up with considerable accuracy. “He’s rather a worrying man, I feel,” she said. “I don’t think diplomatists ought to worry. Lord Salisbury never worried in the least, whatever happened. I remember driving over from ——to lunch one day at Hatfield, when the French had just done something or other perfectly frightful—it was the French then who did the frightful things—and Lord Salisbury talked most amusingly, and ate an excellent lunch. I remember we had a particularly good ham-mousse. Poor Sir James!” And she gave her rather deep laugh—“Ha-ha!”

  The proceedings of the European women in Peking, particularly the English ones, roused her to some very caustic criticisms. “I see you speak Chinese,” she said to Anastasia, when the latter had successfully and fluently routed a rather shabby man in a long grey gown, horn-rimmed spectacles and a tribly hat, who tried to foist himself on them as guide. “What I cannot understand are these women who come out here with their husbands, to spend the better part of their lives, and don’t learn more than five words of the language! It seems to me quite extraordinary.”

  “I don’t think they’re very much interested in the country or the people,” Anastasia said, with her usual vague gentleness.

  “But, my dear! What a criticism of them that is, in itself! And surely for some of them it’s almost a duty? That Mrs. Baines—her husband is a Consul. And it isn’t as though their other interests were so very absorbing,” Lady Harriet said, an ironic gleam suddenly lighting her fine old face. “Most of them seem to me to divide their time between Bridge, Mah Jongg, and young men! Although they are all married.”

  “There are no girls, you see—there’s no one to occupy the young men but the married women,” said Anastasia simply.

  Lady Harriet looked keenly at her—and then broke into a laugh. “Well, that is a very good reason, I suppose. But, my dear, they push it rather to lengths! Tell me, do you know a Mrs. Mussoner?”

  Anastasia’s face, at the name, lost most of its gentleness—her wide mouth set firmly in distaste.

  “Yes, I do, just,” she said.

  “She impresses me as being practically an impropriety,” Lady Harriet went on dispassionately. “In England it would hardly be possible that one should see her at all. And really, you know, there seems very little excuse for it—she has those two delightful little girls, and that perfectly charming and very sympathetic husband. Can you account for her at all? Was she like that when she came out here?”

  “I think she was probably born a bad hat,” said Anastasia, with a faint dilation of her nostrils, as though Mrs. Mussoner were a bad smell. “But most of them are frightfully deteriorated by the life out here. They have far too much time on their hands, for one thing. Three-quarters of these little women, on the incomes their husbands earn, in England would only be able to keep one servant, or one and a half at most—they would spend the better part of their time dusting the drawing-room and wheeling the baby out in the pram and going round to the greengrocer’s to buy a cauliflower.” (“Ha-ha!” from Lady Harriet.) “But out here,” Anastasia went on, “they have four or five boys and an amah, and are waited on hand and foot. Their housekeeping, such as it is”—again her nostrils dilated a little—“takes them about half-an-hour; it can’t take them more. And the rest of their day is empty. They have no obvious duties, like at home—no immediate obligations to the village and the poor and all that. They haven’t even gardens. One does miss it, you know, at first,” she said, turning her beautiful shortsighted eyes to Lady Harriet. “We don’t realise at home how easy things are made for us, living in a sort of stable frame work of duties and obligations and little tasks; we grumble at them, and don’t understand what a tremendous support they are.”

  Lady Harriet looked at her with the liveliest interest. Rose, watching them, received the impression that Anastasia’s words were giving the older woman a glimpse of an aspect of life that was new to her. But she was evidently impressed.

  “That’s very interesting,” she said. “I suppose that is so. But now tell me—don’t they read at all, to fill these empty days?”

  “Not much. There’s no proper library here, you know—only Lady Aglen’s, and we haven’t funds enough to keep that very up to date. No, books are very scarce out here—it’s one of the troubles. The shortage of them is almost as acute as of unmarried women,” said Anastasia crisply. “So they just fill up their time with amusing themselves—Bridge and gossip, and drinks at the Club; and these endless dreary, dreary parties, and the drab little flirtations.”

  Again Lady Harriet looked at her, with a sort of speculative approval. Then she made a very characteristic comment. “H’m, yes, I see. I expect it all depends a good deal on the sort of women who come out here.”

  Even to this conversation Mrs. Pelham listened without any particular discomfort—indeed mainly with amused pleasure at Lady Harriet’s share in
it. She was for Rose rather a new experience. The range of her interest, the fearlessness of her curiosity, the splendid aristocratic independence of her outlook all had a sort of vigour about them that was unexpected in a woman who was obviously of an age when most women, like her mother-in-law, were already dear old ladies. Lady Harriet was not a dear old lady at all—she was a tremendous old lady! Or a tremendous great lady. She was very genre, as Charles would have said—it was odd how many of Charles’s phrases and ideas clung in Rose’s mind. Charles would have adored Lady Harriet. But though Rose appreciated Lady Harriet Downham, and had begun to like her warmly, the real force of her character and of what she stood for did not, so to speak, make its full impact on her, as it did on Anastasia. Her view of life was blurred by her emotions as a cold pane is blurred by a warm breath—a sort of veil of passion was interposed now between her and all outside things, so that she could listen with tranquil amusement to Lady Harriet’s strictures on women who behaved very much as she herself was behaving. Even while they were sitting, later, up by that highly-coloured monstrosity the Porcelain Pagoda, among the thick whitened grass and the bushes that crown the ridge, looking out across the plain to that other and so beautiful pagoda that rises by the Jade Fountain, and beyond it to the slopes of the Western Hills, Rose, instead of listening to Lady Harriet, who was talking quite delightfully about an encounter of hers with V. K, Ting, a former mayor of Shanghai, was thinking—if only I were here with Henry! How perfect it would have been to stroll there, to sit there, with him—shutting her eyes for a moment, she saw his eyes, his laughing mouth. All serious thought, all assessment of her actions were laid aside for the time—she was under a spell, and looked out on the world from the windows of a fairy tower which no reality, not even the astringent and delightful reality of Lady Harriet, could penetrate.

  Chapter Seven

  It was just about a week before the unhappy Mr. Losely succeeded in “bruising the serpent’s head”, as Hargreaves called it, and another two or three days before the party could set off. By that time the military situation was no longer quite so favourable to expeditions as it had been a fortnight earlier, or as Lydiard and Hargreaves could have wished. All through the summer the Kuominchün, the Nationalist army—then, like the, Nationalist movement, more or less in its infancy—had sat tight in the Nankou Pass and the adjacent mountains, watched in a cat-and-mouse sort of way by the troops of Tu Yu Jen and Li, the Marshal, along an irregular forty-mile front in the hills. But the day after the Lydiards returned to Peking the Nankou Pass fell, and the Kuominchün fell back on Kalgan and beyond. This meant that the front more or less evaporated also, so that there was less likelihood of the expedition having trouble in crossing any section of it—always a possibility, and always a vague one, since no one knew exactly where it was. On the other hand once the front had melted, there was always the extreme probability of the armies which had constituted it melting likewise, and wandering unofficered through the country; a certain menace to the inhabitants, a potential one to the European traveller.

  Lydiard and Hargreaves took all reasonable precautions. They sent out spies to examine the state of affairs on their route, they made all possible enquiries as to troop movements; but the reports were encouraging. Nothing much appeared to be happening; both Mrs. Pelham and Hillier were wild to go; and they decided that it was reasonably prudent to start. Accordingly Wu, Lydiard’s head boy and factotum, was sent to take up the long-standing option on the necessary donkeys and men, and to escort the tents, stores and other heavy baggage to the rail-head; and one morning the whole party got into a Pullman car on the Peking-Hankow express and rode blithely down to, a small junction, where they changed trains and travelled in a dirty wooden-seated train up a branch line leading to the hills, whose traffic consisted mainly of goods, and the goods principally of coal. Having once decided on the start, they were all in the highest spirits; even Lydiard did not exhibit his usual gravity and abstraction. He loved these expeditions above all things, and sat in a sort of contained glow of satisfaction which not even the sight of Henry Hargreaves, openly absorbed in Rose, could dim. He had no more idea than before how matters stood, there; but she was so normal and quiet and easy that to some extent his fears were allayed. And in the face of her own intense enjoyment and eagerness, on that morning in the train, it was difficult to do anything but enjoy her—the very sight of her was delightful, in her boyish shorts and shirt, healthy and tanned and gay. He noticed with faint amusement that Hillier was not wholly unsusceptible to her influence. Hillier’s equipment was a slight source of anxiety—the equipment of the less-known members of the party is always a source of concern to the experienced organisers of any expedition. He had only brought a sleeping-bag, refusing all offers of a camp-bed; he said he preferred to sleep on the ground. And he was wearing a rather heavy pair of leather shoes with nails. “Those will be far too hot, Roy—haven’t you any tennis shoes?” Lydiard asked him.

  “Oh, I believe I have got a pair somewhere,” Hillier drawled, “but I prefer these.” Antony was silent.

  The real start was made from Toli, their rail-head, a mining settlement at the terminus of the branch line. There they met the servants, who had preceded them, all their effects, and the troop of twenty-four donkeys and their attendant donkey-boys, who were to be their transport during their wanderings. Five of the more nimble-looking animals were selected for their personal use, and one was allotted to the lunch and to Hsiao Wang (Small Wang) its guardian, who was normally the least of Lydiard’s mafoos. The party then set off, leaving Wu to sort out the confusion of loads, servants and the remaining eighteen donkeys. To each of “the hacks” as Hargreaves called them—Antony observed with amusement Hillier’s withering glance of dismay at the phrase—was attached a donkey-boy, whose business it was to carry the rücksack, camera, fly-switch, paper umbrella, walking-stick, fan, topi and any other oddments belonging to his particular patron, according to requirements, and to steer the animal under his care safely along the route. The word steer is used advisedly, for with one exception the donkeys were all pack-animals, to whom bit and bridle were unknown, and were guided from astern, like a ship, by a judicious use of their own language: Woh! (Right), Eeeee! (left), Za! (straight on), Zoh! (hasten) and Yüey! (stop). The exception was Anastasia’s ass, a small neat animal brought (uninvited) from near Hankow by Big Wang, Small Wang’s brother, who had attached himself (also uninvited) to the expedition; this creature wore a bridle, but seemed a little vague as to its uses, as Anastasia found when she mounted it for the purpose of fording the river.

  It may be as well to state here that the great question in connection with a donkey in China is whether it is lao-shih or not. Lao-shih is a word difficult to translate: perhaps a combination of “biddable” and the German word “gemütlich” comes nearest to its meaning. Donkeys are lao-shih or the reverse; so are ponies; so are servants and chauffeurs. But the use of the word is very extended. An English traveller in these same hills once put up for the night in the village school, and was dismayed to see a number of dots on the walls, not perfectly immobile, which on closer inspection turned out to be bugs of large size; the schoolmaster, for his comfort, told him that the bugs would probably not bite, as they were “hên lao-shih” (extremely docile!). Hargreaves’ donkey was reputed to be slightly pu (not) lao-shih but he showed no particular vice, as it turned out, beyond a tendency to sink, like a crumpling pillow, under his rider’s weight if the going was at all steep.

  Toli lies at the edge of the plain, at the spot where the Liuli-Ho debouches from the hills which lie round Peking in an arc seventy miles across. The hills rise quickly from the plain, and within half-an-hour of leaving Toli the party was passing up a valley already enclosed between white and sharply serrated limestones ridges. Their route lay up the Liuli-Ho valley itself, and the road followed for the most part the broad dry bed of the river—crossing and re-crossing the stream at frequent intervals, sometimes by fords, more often on long narrow
causeways of large stones, raised only a few inches above the surface of the water, which flowed unhindred through the loose structures. For purposes of fording they mounted their donkeys, but otherwise they walked, hopping when necessary over the slippery stones of the causeways. There is nothing very pleasant or inviting about riding a donkey in China. The saddle produced for the use of travellers is a sort of triangular wooden object, like an inverted fodder-rack, set on the animal’s back, with two loose knubbly little cushions, like dolls’ mattresses, in dirty striped cotton covers, slung across it; the mattresses shift about on the saddle, and chafe the inside of the rider’s legs, the saddle itself tends to slide forward going downhill, and backwards going up—it is in any case set uncomfortably far aft on the creature’s back. Also, as Rose observed after crossing a longish ford, it smelt.

  “What smells?” Antony asked.

  “I don’t know—something does. I think it’s that saddle thing, but it may be the donkey.”

  “Mustn’t start being fussy,” Hargreaves adjured her. “Got to rough it a bit, you know, on these trips.”

  “I’m not being fussy—I’m only saying it smells” said Rose, without heat. “I didn’t even say I minded it smelling. It was just what Mme. de Brie would call ‘une constatation’.”

  “It’s most curious, how much less the Chinese smell than most European proletariats, isn’t it?” observed Hillier. “I believe their diet makes them lacking in ammonia, constitutionally.”