The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

Edith seemed alarmed. She made me sit down and drink some sherry, which is all we have in the house. I had been wearing a wrapper over my dress for bathing Jane, and kept this loose, watching to see from her face whether Edith was inspecting me. I don’t think she was. In my own cowardice I am starting to suspect everyone. I will not be able to go on hiding here much longer.

  8

  Grand Hôtel de Pékin, Peking

  February 2nd, 1905

  I have been put out. Richard is paying for my room here until passage can be arranged for me from Tientsin to Shanghai and then back to Britain on some P&O ship. He said I did not deserve steerage but he would send me Second Class. He called me a whore. It was his right to do that. I am not to see Jane again. He said there isn’t a court in the world which would not uphold his right to protect his daughter from a depraved mother. He would not let me into Jane’s nursery for the last time to see her. I begged just to be allowed to see her from the door but he would not allow it, standing to bar the way.

  This past month has been horrible. I was expecting him every day, but he went from Port Arthur to Wei-Hai-Wei and settled into a hotel there to write his report for the War Office. Because this was highly confidential he did not even let the Legation know where he was, let alone me. He arrived about six this evening, with no warning that he was coming. Meng had just taken Jane back to the nursery from the pen by the drawing-room stove and when he came in I got up. We didn’t say a word, just stood staring at each other. I was too frightened to speak.

  He had heard nothing, so at least that was the way I wanted it. He has time to think how he will face the world. No one will blame him. An unfortunate marriage, the husband away on active duty and the wife, beneath him in social station, behaving as one really might expect such a woman would do. I wonder if they will soon be talking about how I refused to say the words needed to be married by a Bishop?

  I thought he was going to start hitting me when I would not tell him who the man was. He began to hurl names at me of men in the Legation Quarter, probably the ones who were known to go to Chinese women but he thought might have found me more convenient during his absence. I hadn’t even spoken to most of them. I saw what trouble he was going to make for himself and others, so I told him. For what seemed a very long time he just stood there staring at me, then he went to the door that leads into the passage by our bedrooms. A moment later I heard him vomiting.

  What will he do with Jane? Send her back to Mannington? Will she be raised in that house amongst the dark portraits? I’m sure he is right about the law, especially in England, and that the Collingsworths will be able to keep me from ever seeing Jane again, at least until she is of age and can choose to if she wants. But she won’t want to by then. While I begged for that look at her from the nursery door he said I would soon be able to look as much as I wanted at my half-Jap bastard.

  I went into my room then and began to pack. I brought everything I will take from that house, including my cabin trunk. What I have in the world, here in this hotel room, doesn’t look very much, that little trunk, one big suitcase and one small. He didn’t give me any money. I still have twenty-six pounds from what Mama gave me more than two years ago. I never had any money from him regularly. He would give me some every now and then, but he paid all the household bills, and the servants.

  Why am I putting all this down? I may be looking for small excuses for myself. But there aren’t any. Now, sitting here, feeling sick, I love Kentaro Kurihama whom I will never see again. And by all the judgements I am wicked because of this. So I must be.

  Three rickshas in a row took me away from the Lane of the Fabulous Bird. I was in the first, my luggage in the second, Yao in the third. While Richard is still responsible for me, which I suppose is while I remain in this city, I was not allowed to travel through the streets of Peking at night unaccompanied. At the hotel Yao helped the page with my luggage, carrying the trunk between them inside, then up to my room.

  I went into the lobby where the clock said twenty minutes past eight. There was considerable noise from the dining-room, people at dinner, and the undermanager told me I could have a meal with the others, or in my room. My voice sounded quite normal when I said I did not want anything, though it seemed to me that I was having to pull it out of a lump of ice. Yao was waiting at the door of my room. He bowed, and when his head came up the one eye focused on me had tears in it. I have never expected to see any Chinese man weeping for me. Both his hands were folded together in front of his chest. I put my hands on his and held them there for a moment, but I could not say anything. He knows how few my words in Chinese are.

  It is now nearly midnight. I will not go downstairs tomorrow. I hope I won’t have to see anyone before my train leaves for Tientsin, though that may be a few days until a ship sails for Shanghai. Jane almost never cries at night now, but if she should Meng would be too far away to hear her. Perhaps Richard will arrange for the amah to sleep in the nursery? I hope he doesn’t think he must change amahs because Meng has seen and heard too much. Jane needs someone she knows. I wish I could pray, but He would never listen.

  9

  Letter from Mary Mackenzie to Madame de Chamonpierre in Washington, DC, USA

  13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo, Japan

  April 8th, 1905

  Dear Marie – Never in my life have I been so grateful for a letter as I am for yours. It came nearly a week ago and I have re-read it every day, several times. I suppose I had guessed that you would have had the news from Peking of what happened to me, but the last thing I was expecting was that you should write as you have done, saying you worry about me continuously. I do not deserve such friends as Armand and you after what I have done, and I am so thankful to you both. No one else has written since I came here, and I haven’t been expecting anyone to, which made your letter seem like a kind of miracle, meaning that I have not been totally wiped out of mind by everyone I used to know. If parts of this letter do not seem very balanced and sensible then please forgive me and remember that ever since I came here, and except for my two little maids, I have seen no one to talk to. I can’t really talk to my maids either, who don’t know any English, though Japanese seems to be a much simpler language to speak than Chinese and I am trying to learn it. Since it would seem probable that I will live the rest of my life in this country I had better, hadn’t I?

  Though you don’t say where you got your news of me I think it must have been Edith, and it was clever of you to write me care of the Japanese Legation in Peking. If I have done nothing else I have at least given the Quarter something new to talk about, and they ought to be a little bit grateful to me for that. You will have heard, I suppose, that I just disappeared from my hotel room before Richard even had time to start making the arrangements to have me sent home to Scotland. The morning after I was put out of the house in the lane a young man from the Japanese Legation called to see me at the hotel. I refused to go down to the lobby, and just had him brought up to my bedroom, since I was now beyond the pale, which made it quite pointless for me to worry about what was or was not respectable. What the young man had to tell me was that Count Kurihama had not simply gone back to Korea forgetting all about me. I know you always admired him so it will not surprise you that in the circumstances he did what seems very much the honourable thing, that is, left word that I was to be watched – indeed, almost spied on – and that if anything went wrong with me I was to be helped.

  I have had plenty of time to think about this since, and it does not do me much credit that he seems to have believed that if nothing happened as a result of our affair to expose it, I would just go on living with my husband, putting away the Western Hills as something to be forgotten. His opinion of me doesn’t appear to be any higher than my own, for when I am really honest I know that this is exactly what I would have done, hiding my secret and continuing to live as Richard’s wife, using as an excuse the fact that Jane needed me.

  Marie, I don’t think you ever felt that I was truly devot
ed to Jane as a mother ought to be, and you made excuses for me by saying that the child seemed remarkably independent even as an infant, and so on. I know this sounds now as though I am inventing things to suit myself, but when the end came with Richard the thing I minded most was the thought of my daughter left with him, of being cut off from her forever. It was almost a surprise that this was the thing that had stunned me and brought me close to complete despair, not the fact of being disgraced as a wife before the world. Now Richard already seems far away, that house in the lane a place where I lived long ago, but Jane I think of as now, wondering what has happened to her, and whether Richard has taken her away from Peking, back to Britain to leave my child with his mother? If you can find out anything about this for me, please do, and you are clever at finding things out.

  You will be wondering how I left Peking. The Japanese Legation arranged everything. I was only the one night in that hotel and left it without hearing from Richard again, travelling to Tientsin with an escort who disliked the job he had to do, the young man regarding wives who are faithless to their husbands as creatures only deserving to die. Richard could not have wished me in better company for that journey! My escort put me on board a Japanese freighter at Tientsin and then left, thankfully, to return to more normal duties. On the ship it was much the same. I stayed mostly in my cabin, but when I did go out and met any of the crew they were curtly polite, no more. I felt almost as though I was a prisoner even though keys weren’t turned in locks behind me. However, some of this may have been imagination. I was in a state of disgust with myself.

  As for my first impressions of your beloved Japan, well, I had very few. In the first place we arrived at Shimonoseki quite late at night and my first walk on the soil of Nippon was along a concrete station platform that seemed endless, past the longest train I have ever seen, with red bands marking the third class carriages, blue for the second and white for first. I was put in a first class compartment by another young man who had met the ship and didn’t seem to have any kinder feelings towards erring wives than had the one from the Legation. At dawn we passed endless tea plantations, at least I think it was tea, the bushes looked like the ones I had seen in my school geography of estates in Ceylon. Then there was a city called Nagoya, where my escort appeared suddenly at my compartment door with a boxed meal he must have bought on the platform. One of the boxes held cold congealed rice and the other quite a pretty array of raw fish and highly coloured pickles which tasted horrible even though I was hungry. As you might expect, I am always hungry these days, though here I get bread and butter and milk even though the rest of my diet is basically Japanese, for my two maids don’t know how to prepare anything else and at the moment I don’t seem able to teach them, I just let things slide. In fact that is what I have been doing ever since I came to this pretty little house, making no decisions, just allowing things to happen from outside, though not much does. You must not think I am in low spirits all the time, I am not; it is just as though my life was becalmed, sails flapping, and I can only wait to see if there will be a wind tomorrow.

  I go out sometimes in the evening about dusk, accompanied by one of my maids whose name is Misao San, very sweet, not yet twenty, given to endless chirping like a sparrow. She seems to think that if she talks at me continuously in the end I will begin to understand, and there may be something in this for I am already recognising words, hoping soon to be able to fit them into sentences, something I should have done long ago but for this laziness in mind and body. Just one street over from this house is the Sumida river and there is a sort of bund within two or three minutes’ walk where quite large ships tie up, some steamers, though mostly three-masted schooners which I suppose are in the coastal trade. Tsukiji used to be the Foreign Concession, but the Japanese did not for long allow concessions on their soil and now there are only a few European-type houses left in it.

  I have not seen Count Kurihama since I came here. He is still in Korea, I believe, and probably at the front though I have had no actual news of him at all. At the moment I am very big with this child, much bigger than I was with Jane, and quite hideous. There are no mirrors of the kind you like in this house, but I have a small one which tells me too much. Even my face seems swollen.

  I can hear you asking why I did this, why I came to Japan to be the courtesan of a man who is married with four children? In fact I don’t even know whether this is what he intends for me, it could well be that I am only in this house he has provided until I have my baby. St Luke’s Hospital is just around the corner and I am to go there. Maybe you will laugh when you hear that it is run by Presbyterians, though they are American Presbyterians who are perhaps kinder to fallen women than Scotch ones. A Japanese doctor from the hospital has been to see me three times, very gentle, and speaking some English, though I am not sure whether he will deliver my baby himself. I could easily find out, but I haven’t asked, no questions to anyone is part of this drifting from which I must recover as soon as I have had the baby.

  The only one I have written to besides you is my mother. I had to tell her that I was here under the protection of a Japanese gentleman. She will call me what Richard did, only in her mind, the word itself has never passed her lips. You told me that Bordeaux is very proper bourgeois, but I am sure Edinburgh is ten times more so. My Mama will never make contact with me again, I feel that. I pray that what has happened will not make her really ill so that I would have that on my conscience, too.

  I did not mean to wail at you, and I have not yet told you why I did what I have done. The alternatives were impossible. Richard was to send me to Edinburgh, returning me to Mama. I had twenty-six pounds of my own money and that was all. I thought about getting on a ship for home, then leaving it at Hong Kong or Singapore and trying to get work. But what work? I have no training in anything. I can’t even cook properly, so couldn’t go as a servant. And who wants European servants in the Far East? Even if there had been something I might do in one of these places, who would take on a woman in my condition? Marie, there is nothing more helpless in a world made for men than a woman heavy with the child she should not be carrying. The Count provided me with an escape and I took it, that’s all. I know that I must make a future for myself but at the moment I can’t even see a hint of what this is to be.

  You must not think that what happened at the temple had anything to do with you. You could not possibly protect me from something you did not even know about until it was too late, so do not have such thoughts. But write to me. I promise that when I answer next time I will be back in something like my old character, not this dreadful drifter. Last night, thinking about Armand and you in that temple in the hills, I remembered our jokes and laughter and, remembering, wept.

  I am so glad that you are enjoying Washington and that Armand has his Pierce-Arrow motorcar, which sounds very grand. I was surprised, though, that you ride in it, and not behind a pair of horses. Do you really think carriages are doomed, to be replaced by these machines? It is hard to believe, and twenty-five miles an hour indeed sounds a dreadful speed when you are not on rails. I had never heard of the electric brougham you say Armand wishes to buy for you, but if they are slower they are probably safer. Do ladies steer these themselves, or must there always be a driver? I believe there are some motorcars in Tokyo, though I have never seen one in Tsukiji, it is all rickshas and handcarts here, with oxen to pull the heavy loads. In Japan everything seems to move faster than in China, the people in a hurry to get somewhere. You will be happy to know that I am reading more than I used to. There is an English library at the hospital which the doctor told me about and I send a chitty with Misao San saying what would interest me and the maid returns laden down with a good selection. I am in the middle of a novel by Mrs Humphry Ward who, according to her publishers, is the most famous woman writer in the world though, ignorant me, I had never heard of her.

  Forgive me, Marie, and please write. I promise I will never use your name with other people to bring you any embarras
sment from having known me once. My very sincere regards to dear, kind Armand. Thank you so much.

  Your grateful friend,

  Mary

  13 Tsukiji San Chome, Tokyo

  April 17th, 1905

  My baby will be born in less than two months and though my body is aware of this, my mind does not seem to be. It is difficult for anyone from the West to be serious about life while living in a Japanese house. My first impression of 13 Tsukiji is the one I still have, that it really is not a house at all, but a flimsy box around a game played to quite simple rules. The game is entertaining most of the time, but can become very boring. Sometimes it is much more than just boring. I have lived in a completely Japanese manner since coming here, sleeping between quilts at night, sitting on cushions on the matting by day, eating off a table only raised six inches from the floor and, in the colder weather, freezing, my feet icy as I huddled over a charcoal brazier from which rose suffocating fumes.

  Every evening at dusk my two maids, Misao and Fukuda, make another move in their charming little pretence that they are running a house, closing it all up for the night with wooden shutters along the verandahs, these our security against the greatly feared dorubos. At first I thought, from the serious way this word was thrust through laughter, that it meant some form of dreaded devil, but my phrase-book says ‘robbers’. I can’t really see what a burglar breaking into one of the countless thousands of shut boxes in this city could hope to steal, beyond money that is, for there is practically nothing in them. I arrived here with little enough and yet the contents of one small cabin trunk and two suitcases presented almost unsurmountable storage difficulties, this in a house with six rooms including the kitchen, but not a single drawer in any of them. There are cupboards behind sliding doors but these are almost filled during the day by the quilts that will be your bed at night.