by Emily Hahn
Selwyn kept his wife and child there because he felt that Hilda could “do some good” with her Chinese affiliations. Also, like Charles, he felt strongly that the British should not whisk their own families away just because it was in their power, and leave the Asiatics to face the music because it was not in theirs.
“We get these people into a mess,” Charles said once, emphatically, “we set ourselves up to govern them and we get them into a war, and then we take away our own women and leave them to deal with the situation. No! I don’t like it. If you were my wife, Mickey, you’d have to go. That happens to be Army regulations and hasn’t anything to do with the case and I’d have no choice. But as it is, we’re fortunate, and you can do as you like.”
Without Hilda I wouldn’t have dared interview Professor King. He was the best gynecologist, perhaps, on the Coast, but he had in his past been a missionary. When I first interviewed him I was thankful that Hilda had broken the ice in advance. A tall, lean man, he gave an impression of utter dryness. He was compounded, it seemed to me, of equal parts of principle and professional technique, and only an interesting angle to his work, or a chance to play the piano undisturbed, could stir him to enthusiasm. He inspired confidence, but he was not a man you could get gushy with. I told him that I wanted a child and that I doubted my ability to conceive. I gave him my reasons, and whatever medical opinions I had collected on the subject in the past.
“You are married?” he asked.
Now was the moment. I said simply, “No.” I had meant to say much more, but that was before I saw him. This word was enough.
“You intend to be?” he asked. Then, swiftly, so that I wouldn’t have to answer, he started his examination. At the conclusion he said, “I can’t see anything wrong with you at all. On preliminary examination there seems to be no reason why you shouldn’t conceive. I suggest a small operation.” He described it.
“Does it often work?”
“In twenty per cent of the cases it works.”
I came home feeling hopeful, but something happened about then that disturbed me. Charles had written his wife as soon as we decided that I was not going back to America. He told her that we were living together, and asked for a divorce. Now Ursula’s reply had arrived: she refused to divorce him.
I looked at Charles in alarm. “You think she’ll come back?” I demanded.
He looked uncertain, and I realized that he was very much afraid of her himself. “I hope not,” he admitted, “but she may work it. We’ll trust to the government. Don’t worry.”
So now, faced with such a threat, we were both glum. Charles foresaw the old regime of conversational breakfasts and a wife who refused to speak to him if he overdid it at a cocktail party. I drew unpleasant pictures in my mind of lonely evenings during the ordeal of the take-over. And the baby. What of the baby?
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Charles. “I didn’t mean to worry you. We go on as before.”
Up in Shanghai, my friend who had taken Mills was getting frantic with the gibbon problem. He had a strong disinclination to bring two gibbons (the new female had died) into his apartment in town. Just at the last possible moment he found an Australian lady, a soldier’s wife, who was being sent down to Australia for the duration. She agreed to chaperon the animals on the ship, and he joyously loaded them aboard in the required crate and hurried away to send me a wire.
I smile tenderly as I remember the sunny morning they arrived. One of the CNAC pilots, Woody, the man who let me pilot the plane from Chungking, had said that he wanted the gibbons. Because he lived in Kowloon and seemed eager to keep them, and because I didn’t quite know how to keep them with me, I agreed to give them away.
Woody was so enthusiastic that he came with me to meet the boat. It was anchored in mid-harbor, and we had to hire a motorboat to get out to it. We were late arriving, too, and the Australian lady who had kept an eye on the gibbons was fretfully pacing the deck, anxious to hand over her charges and rush to town on a shopping tour. We approached the ship, bouncing over the bright blue water, under the bright blue sky. I saw her at long distance hiking up and down. I climbed out to the prow of our launch and waved wildly. The plump figure hesitated; you could see hope stiffening her frame as she watched us coming. She pointed questioningly aft, where I saw the crate. I nodded vigorously. She slumped in enormous relief and crossed herself just as we approached the companionway.
“Oh!” was her greeting, in a burst of relieved sigh. “What a time we’ve all had! I tried to take ’em out for exercise, but I was always so afraid they would escape, you know. … Junior did, once, and got into the galley, and we had such a time catching him, you can’t think. Here you are; here’s Bybie’s clothes.” She handed me the diminutive leather trunk that held the entire gibbon wardrobe. “And God bless,” she said. “I’m off to the shops.”
It was a highly emotional moment for me when I stooped down before the cage and looked in. Gravely, my Mr. Mills looked out at me. At first I meant nothing to him, though he stuck out a tentative hand and pulled my skirt, just for the devil of it. After all, it had been more than a year since I saw him.
“Mills,” I said. “Mills, old boy.”
My voice did it. Recognition spread slowly over his face. He made no outcry, but he began to bounce up and down, and when I opened the door he walked out straight into my arms and cuddled down. It was perfect happiness. …
“The little guy,” said Woody, “has escaped.”
And so he had. A small, wiry, black beast with a white forehead, Junior was now going hand over hand toward an upper deck.
“Hold on,” I said to Woody, “he’ll come back. Look.” Gripping Mills, I climbed down the companionway to the launch, and Junior followed, and grabbed Woody and clung to him. Somebody handed down the evil-smelling crate after us. Mills looked around the little walla-walla and didn’t like it. He let go of me suddenly and crawled back into the crate. If he had been able to close the door after him he would have done so. Junior followed, and so we got them home.
But I see that the Freudian censor has intervened. I haven’t mentioned the fact that both of them, in the excitement of the moment, had dirtied us pretty thoroughly first. It was this fact, which seemed trivial to me at the time, that decided Woody definitely against adopting any gibbons, and without argument he helped me take the crate and the animals straight to something known as the Dogs’ Home, over in Kowloon at the town’s edge. I walked into the place blind, myself. I didn’t know, then, that I had made an important choice. The society vet was a Mrs. Hogg, on the Hong Kong side. It was Mrs. Hogg who usually clipped wire-hairs in the spring, and de-ticked the toes of spaniels and so forth for the Peakites. Mrs. Loseby ran the Dogs’ Home in Kowloon, but free. Mrs. Loseby did it for the Blue Cross (SPCA) and for love of animals. Mrs. Loseby was much aware of the fact that she wasn’t an accredited vet. I didn’t know that, nor did I care, but if I had known a few things about the situation in general I would never, never have called her Mrs. Hogg — which I did, alas.
Mrs. Loseby was a very fat, very pink woman, and very English. She bristled first when she heard my American accent, and she bristled second when I called her “Mrs. Hogg,” and she bristled most of all when she realized that even Woody was a Yank. It looked like a thin time for the gibbons, until she saw them. Then, being English, she fell in love with them.
“Oh, the beautiful!” she cried. I beamed, and Woody rubbed at the spots on his coat and muttered under his breath. Mrs. Loseby now thawed. She explained that she was used to much more difficult propositions; she often put up giant pandas en route for the U.S.A. She hastily cleaned out a large cage and we put the gibbons in, and they went sailing happily around, and it was all highly satisfactory. Especially to Woody, who would not now have to take them home and lock them in his garage, as had been his misled intention. I shook hands with him and thanked him warmly, and said good-by, practically forever, and went home to take a bath.
Next day when I took C
harles to see the gibbons we found a large sign on the gate of the Dogs’ Home: Bell Out Of Order: Please Knock. Mrs. Loseby hurried to open to us.
“They fused all the wiring in the place, the pets,” she said fondly.
On his first introduction to them, I watched Charles anxiously. How was he going to react? Would he crab the whole show? Quietly, with the corners of his mouth soberly downturned, Charles sauntered into the cage and let Mills swing over and sit on his head. In a moment he was scratching Junior’s stomach, still very soberly, but I knew it was going to be all right.
“I dare say,” he remarked on the way home, “they’re as good an imitation as you could find.”
Although I was never told what he did, Charles went on being busier and busier, along with the rest of his office. They now embarked on a series of dinners that were something new, I think, in Hong Kong government circles: they were given in honor of various Chinese dignitaries, but they weren’t dignified. One, for example, was for Admiral Chan Chak, known as the hero of Bocca Tigris. Chan Chak was working for the British, I found out later, with the approval of Chungking, and he was the most important Chinese in town, so far as Charles was concerned. But he didn’t speak much English and Charles had no Chinese, and so I was a welcome addition to the party. It was given at one of the big restaurants, the Golden Dragon. We all drank a lot and had a good time, and I found myself talking raptly with young Cooper about Irish poetry.
Cooper the poet. He looked just like one; he was young enough not to mind that. He was about twenty-five; he had a long, sorrowful face and a deep Irish voice, and he really didn’t give much of a damn about anything but words. He was fluent in Icelandic and Swedish, “and so,” as Charles would say blithely, “he was sent to Singapore.” Now he was in Hong Kong, as a sort of exchange for Alf Bennett, who was going south soon. Cooper was also getting pretty good in Cantonese and Japanese. Already he knew more Chinese characters than I did. He wrote poetry and jingles, pottered about with his languages, did a lot of mysterious work for Charles’s office, and looked exceedingly pained, not to say dignified, when Charles accused him of being a genius. He had a house way out in Shatin near the bishop’s house where Agnes Smedley was staying, and he ran a fantastically old Rolls-Royce which used too much gasoline.
In October of that year came the Chinese Moon Festival. On one night the moon was biggest of all the year round, and Cooper gave a moon-gazing party and invited some of the Chinese intelligentsia, Charles and me. The house in Shatin was glaringly new, white stucco, a Chinese country villa built on foreign lines. Cooper had rented it from a Chinese, without noticing that the plaster was still damp, and though he had been in it for some weeks it still looked unoccupied. We had a Chinese dinner that was rankly bad, and Charles criticized Cooper loudly all through the meal for having had the cheek to do such a thing when he was inviting Chinese guests. Cooper didn’t seem to care, even when he committed the gaffe of serving the rice wine unheated. We all howled lustily at that, and made the servant take it out and warm it up. I remember — I remember a Siamese kitten on the table, wandering about and eating what it wanted. I remember how we sat in the garden afterward and looked obediently, according to tradition, at the great orange moon that hung like a stage prop or a ripe fig in the sky. I talked about poetry with Chuan Tsen-kuo; for many happy years in China, by that time, I had talked about poetry with Chuan Tsen-kuo. I remember that I was feeling warm and quiet because I had written a poem to hand to Charles after dinner, where he read it in the light of the moon.
In mirrors, lakes, and in a lover’s eyes
We seek our lonely being, and this is love;
This and this only. Poetry and flowers,
Music and moons, the sweet swift face of hows
At night, all frame self-portraits, all are lies,
The tissue of that famous velvet glove.
Narcissus died of self-desire, not knowing
The secret of our love, the vital breath.
We needs must live upon each other, growing
On that rejection, self-reflection glowing
In lovers’ eyes, or love must come to death.
Then must I die? In fright my blood is flowing.
Within your eyes law fails, the word’s untrue.
I cannot see myself, but only you.
Then, walking back along the Shatin road in the white dust, in the white light, the green night, we strode swiftly down the hill ahead of the others, crunch, crunch, crunch in the silence, saying nothing.
Chapter 33
Christmas was riotous that year. Charles and I always invited everybody to our parties, and accepted practically all the invitations that came along. Later Charles usually grew more sober about the outside parties, but he never regretted or reneged on his own — or on mine. One time he stampeded my flat with the entire personnel of a large drunken stag cocktail party, at eleven in the evening. For Christmas Eve we blithely made three dates, which we didn’t discover until it was time to sort things out and compare notes.
Never mind. We decided to do them all, pausing only to settle on one house for dinner, so that we could notify the other hostesses in time.
“If you don’t mind,” I said hesitantly, “I thought we might eat dinner at Vi Chan’s. I’ll tell you why. I know Vi is sort of fantastic, but I’m fond of her sister Anne. Now Anne has gone and divorced her husband and married Hubert Chen, which shocks all the old-fashioned people in her set, and she feels her position. If you and I went there to dinner —”
“I can’t keep track of all these Asiatic scandals,” said Charles amiably. “It’s okay by me, baby. I don’t see just why we should make her feel any more acceptable socially, but —”
“Just so she won’t feel everybody is letting her down,” I said sentimentally.
We started out on Christmas Eve with the best of intentions, as you can see. I was still doing my face, the amah dithering around behind my chair, when Charles came stamping in with Cooper in close attendance.
“I brought old Snooper in for a drink,” he announced, and he called Ah King and ordered old-fashioneds. “We have time for one or two.” Everyone, as usual, was in the bedroom while I finished my toilette. Everyone always is. Sometimes I wonder, a little fretfully, why. I think I inherit the tendency from Sinmay’s household. After one old-fashioned Billie Lee dropped in to leave her Christmas gift, and Charles wouldn’t let her go again. We had another one all around. Charles wouldn’t let anybody go by that time. He wouldn’t even let me go to Vi’s house. By nine or ten o’clock he had decided that we could take Cooper and Billie with us to Vi’s.
“Of course there’ll be room,” he scoffed. “You can always add another bowl of rice to a Chinese dinner, can’t you? Old Vi’ll be glad to have Snooper and Billie.”
“Of course,” I said cheerfully. It all seemed perfectly logical. So there we were; me in long black lace, Charles in his mess jacket, Cooper in filthy tweeds, and Billie still dressed for the office, trooping into an absolutely frigid Chinese drawing room, hours after dinner should have been served.
Vi Chan has always taken her position merrily, but seriously au fond. Somebody else will have to write her story because I haven’t the room here, but it must be done. I dare not say how old she is, but she doesn’t look it. With an entire family (and in Cantonese circles that is saying something) she had managed, for years, to live on the forbidden Peak territory in a huge house which looked surprised at itself, and with reason. There was a swimming pool, a tennis court, a Victorian-British exterior, and then you stepped indoors, into a mass of teakwood and Chinese screens and this and that, with Vi waiting to greet you all dressed up, usually in Western evening dress, and always with a large bright flower in her hair. Usually there were Westerners at her parties, with a large preponderance of American Navy men. Tonight, though, she had evidently planned just the one thing I would never expect of Vi, a small intime affair. And, boy, was she mad!
Chinese dinners take place at seve
n at the latest. They are planned with an eye to the size of the table, too. You have tables for eight, tables for six, tables for four, but you can’t very well have tables for more than twelve, because then the circle is so large that the guests on the diameter can’t reach to the dishes with their chopsticks. If you want more than twelve you just set another table and dish your food out twice. Vi had planned a table of six. And there we were, with two extra strangers, and a couple of hours late in the bargain.
If it had been me I wouldn’t have noticed, because I am an American barbarian; Vi was near enough to being a similar character to be all right on her own, but there was that complication of Anne and Hubert, who were sensitive anyway. The family elected to feel insulted. And so, save for Charles’s happy and oblivious chatter, the meal progressed in stately silence. Billie was quiet as always, sitting there showing her dimples and unaware anything was wrong, and Cooper had sunk, as usual, into a philological coma. It wasn’t the jolliest Christmas dinner I have ever eaten. We got out before midnight and traveled on to the next place, where we thawed out.