To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  We are leaving Blubber Bay: where there are wharves belonging to the saw mill and some lime works, plus the government wharf where we were tied up. Where there is a post office, telegraph, and telephone. Where the harbour has a sand and mud bottom and is subject to northwesterly winds. Where, on the beach, there are a few of the big black rendering kettles left from the whaling.

  I had walked down an arbutus-shaded lane. I had talked to the skipper of the Cinnamon II as he stood on his porch. I had climbed aboard the mail steamer and played whist with the mate. In brief, I had resumed my human contacts. But bow line, stem line, and spring let go, and Lam Fan was back in my life.

  “No, no, Robert Lam,” she says to the unspoken question in my eyes. “I will always stay with you. How could I desert my child and not share with him the burden of sorrow he carries, a burden caused by me?”

  She starts to hum as we chug out from under the shadow of a heavily wooded hill. Three seals surface to starboard. She slides open the door of the wheelhouse, taps her foot on the caps, and sings to them.

  I sigh and watch out for rocks. My wet clothes, draped around the exhaust shroud, are steaming. The rain clouds, which had brought a shower as I walked from the store with supplies, have blown to the east. The side windows are open.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, Fan,” I shout above the noise. “What made you and India leave Hong Kong when you did? How did you have the sense?”

  “It was luck!” she calls, waving farewell to the diminishing buildings of Blubber Bay, and to the seals, which have ducked under. “We had good luck!”

  —

  There is a saving spirit, deep in the universe where galaxies collide and send out signals, like the magic twist of the wheel that saves a ship from icebergs, like patches of sky that emit radio waves, yet do not correspond to any visible object: we do not need to understand it; we know it by its presence.

  This luck or gift or intuition, which cannot be purchased, which you must be born with, it was this that saved Fan and India from the epidemic.

  On the one hand they had lost their father, their property, and all expectations, on the other the future stood open before them.

  Of the unexpected, of the contrariness of life that can lift those who have tumbled down the furthest, no one would think until later.

  But at the time, when they returned to the Queen’s Road house, after brows were wiped with handkerchiefs, after tea was made and served by the major’s daughters, and the sense of keeping an enemy at bay had faded, those who had followed the coffin regained their sense of purpose and remembered why they had come. Which was to give advice.

  “We were two young women on our own,” says Fan. “We had no husbands, we had no money.” And to be precise, they were both more than thirty, and one of them, although adopted into a European household, was a Chinese baker’s daughter worth less than forty-five dollars on the servants’ market. The other, erratically educated, would quickly have to find some means to support herself.

  “They suggested that India be a governess. They said, ‘Try the Blind Females of China Foundation and the Foundling Home. These charities always need good help.’ They did not even look at me.” So says my guide, at the same time pulling from her pocket a rock she has found on the island. It looks like a flower: black porphyry with bursts of white crystal blossoms. She sets it down next to the compass, which immediately starts to fluctuate.

  On and on the advice-giving went until India, calling a halt, said, “That’s fine for me, but what about Lam Fan? What’s my sister to do?” In the silence that followed, a little too long extended to be polite, an elderly gentleman, hard of hearing, shouted, “Anything at all, anything we can do to help. Don’t hesitate, just ask!”

  But the truth is, and it shows if not in their manners then in their eyes, that what they want, if they are given the choice, is for all this to disappear: the emptied Queen’s Road rooms, the grief-stricken faces of the major’s daughters, the unmatched sisters. For such women, brought up in such conditions, might do anything.

  As women sometimes did. Even Englishwomen. Who had marched alone throughout the interior of China taking photographs, scrambling over fields, preaching in markets, making themselves (and, by implication, all other English) ridiculous. Curiosities, as they were called, who were heralds of a precarious future in which women had no rules and no masters. A future difficult for the women as well: for without masters, without rules, they had no one to protect them. (Fan nods ruefully.)

  And so, despite, “Terribly sorry about the major,” and “We’re always here if you need us,” when the mourners had gone, when the door had shut behind the last one, India and Fan were alone.

  They reread the letters from Lam Fan’s uncle, Lum Kee. They darkened them with fingerprints and soaked them with tears. They considered the alternatives.

  And then they went to call on the Jardine Matheson solicitor.

  “We’ve seen lawyers before, Fan,” I mutter, thinking of the one who had thrown his briefcase onboard at the last moment, and of whether he’d foreseen the consequences; and at the same time wishing I’d kept the Rose’s stabilizers. There was a strong northwest wind and a heavy following sea as we emerged from Algerine Passage and eased north through a tedium of reefs and shoals: Grant Reef, Mystery Reef, Sentry Shoal. I would have to decide soon whether to stop at Whaletown, on Cortes Island, as originally planned, or to hurry on north to make up lost time. Cortes Island, where one of the first whaling stations on the coast was established in 1869, using a schooner named Kate, had been mentioned in my conversations with Captain Larson, whose father had been a whaler. Following seas, such as we were experiencing, “made the killing extremely difficult,” he’d said. He’d told me a number of stories about the area—as when a whale came up under the bow of the Kate and spilled the crew, drowning several of them—stories his father had told him. A lifetime of experience passed on that shaped who he was, how he thought. I, of course, had had no one to do likewise for me.

  I wiped the dome of the compass clear of condensation. There was Lam Fan, of course. She had tried her best to bring me up, and even if she’d made a mess of it, leaving me ignorant of my own parentage, at least she was trying to rectify it now. Lam Fan, my lookout, standing in the cockpit well at the stern, facing the wrong direction.

  —

  A solicitor then. Who is, as well, a man. A husband and father, with abundant natural sympathies. He understands the plight of the major’s orphaned daughters. He is even moved by it, but his closest horizon is his employer’s interest, especially where it concerns money and property. For he knows that a stroke of the pen can put others in his place. And yet he also knows, as we know, that there is more to life than money: there is respect from one’s colleagues. And there is self-respect, less vivid, perhaps, in some people than in others, but still present.

  He thinks. He imagines consequences. He strikes a balance.

  “It may be that I can do something to help,” he says thoughtfully, considering the women’s request for assistance to leave the country. “A ship to take you to the New World? That’s what you want?”

  The women nod agreement. The lawyer shuffles his papers, for the fact is that he’s relieved: for if someone were to tell the story of these two, made homeless by a company, sent away penniless by Hong Kong’s wealthiest merchants, there is a perspective from which the company (and thereby himself) may not be seen as—well, merciful. Although it isn’t his fault that the women have no prospects, and he is certainly acting within the legal limits.

  That is, in fact, he is aware that Jardine Matheson’s title to the house could be queried. And there was provision that the daughters be left to live in it. Items, hinted at in the major’s papers and confirmed years after by Sing Yuen, acting in Lam Fan’s interest, that might with time and patience have been revealed.

  But let us not blame a man who is doing his job. It is not his sole responsibility. He does what he’s asked to do;
he finds them a ship, even if he is on his own lookout, for he has a family to consider. But happily for the human spirit, with the appearance of generosity, in dispensing a favour, there is balm for the conscience.

  —

  A ship. Not such a ship as might have been hoped for, perhaps. Not a steamship, for example. Not even a passenger ship, exactly, but one with a glorious history. A clipper ship, sold out of the tea trade into rice and flour cargoing between the Orient and Canada. A famous ship in her day, although her era of fame is growing distant. But she is sailing where the women want to go, and they will not be obliged to purchase tickets. Since no one knows better than the Jardine Matheson solicitor that the major has left no money.

  There is one difficulty, however. Not insurmountable, not enough to hold the women back if they’re determined to go ahead. For these are resourceful females, used to conquering obstacles. But the former tea clipper, called Thermopylae isn’t leaving from Hong Kong harbour, but from Saigon harbour, some one thousand miles away.

  —

  Thermopylae! I look back at Lam Fan, still standing in the cockpit well, with new respect. This isn’t a ship we are talking about, it is a myth! Why, a painting of her hangs in the Pilot House to the left of the dispatcher. There are clubs named after her, and every sailor knows her sailing record. She was one of the most beautiful and quick of three-masted sailing ships ever built. I’d sailed on a five-masted schooner myself, for Canadian Transport, carrying lumber from Vancouver meant for the South African railway. But we never got there. All the sails blew out at Cape Horn, and we couldn’t get round. We spent six months in Valparaiso, Chile, then auctioned the cargo off. Sailing on the Alberni was one thing, but to have sailed on the Thermopylae!

  “Calm down, Robert Lam, calm down,” says Fan as she comes through the door to the wheelhouse. She takes my socks, which have scorched, from the shroud. She looks from the charts to the waters ahead of us with an appearance of authority.

  “So,” I say, thinking I’ve found her out, “you have sailed before!”

  “How did you think your mother and I got here, Robert Lam?” she says. “It was long before the aeroplane.” She touches my arm to soften the blow to my pride, for I confess I’d never thought about it. “Never mind, Robert Lam,” she adds, “you were not to know. Nobody told you.”

  The compass cap receives another wipe.

  “We did not know what to do at first,” she says, going on with the story. “We were very worried. We thought we should start for Saigon right away, since we did not know how long it would take us to get there.”

  Moreover, they knew, with an inner sense honed on experience, having watched the major wear out public patience, that they were on their own. The solicitor had done what he could, as had Jardine Matheson, as had everyone. That is, they had all lost interest.

  All the same, something had to be done. And when the circle of your world is the parlour lamplight (“Don’t be silly, Robert Lam, we were much more experienced!”), yet you must leave its safety and venture out: when you fly like a moth against the flame of the present, it is not so easy to take the first step.

  Still, it was an unlikely opportunity that presented itself. Call it Fate. Call it what you will.

  —

  Only a few days after the solicitor brought the news that Thermopylae was sailing from Saigon on April twenty-sixth, India and Fan saw an advertisement in the Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette. An extensive gambling community had grown up in Kowloon, across from Hong Kong island, on the mainland peninsula. Businessmen, combining the attractions of a day trip, something for nothing, and the pleasure of taking a risk, were offering free launches to take customers across the harbour to the gambling houses. This was the opening the women decided to take, since if they were going on the journey, they had to start somewhere, and particularly since, with no money and little time, there seemed no other choice. Moreover, Kowloon was a different community, they were not known there, and they hoped to find opportunities in anonymity that were denied them at home.

  It was a first step. A beginning. And like the major’s refuse bins in the streets, a gesture of hope.

  Down the steps, through the gate, and into the morning street they went, as the sun topped the horizon, and well-dressed men with clean faces stepped from sedan chairs, gripping the day’s papers; and the club doorman was telling the maid about last night’s dinner, and the maid was watching an older woman, with a baby tied to her back, as she rounded the corner. A policeman stood in front of a bank where all the shutters opened at once on a signal, and customers sprang forth—from shops and offices and from the strip of gutter along which the men of the stock exchange were already conducting business, clamouring their interests and waving documents as if the whole of life depended on it.

  Eastwards from this point at which Fan and India began their journey were the other institutions of the Europeans. The barracks and polo course, the parade ground, cricket pitch, the racecourse and cemetery at Happy Valley. On these Fan and India turned their backs, shouldering their bundles and proceeding westwards. Into narrow dusty streets where the crowds were forced against the walls by passing rickshas and chairs, and where hawkers appeared, informed themselves as to the prospects for business, and vanished in a blink.

  —

  “Did no one know that you were going, Fan?” I ask, curious, as I decide to miss out Whaletown and take a bearing for Cape Mudge. A flashing white light on a red buoy marks the southern edge of the foul ground southeastward of the cape, but the Cape Mudge lighthouse can’t be seen when the bearing is less than three hundred and seven degrees.

  “No,” Fan answers, peering over my shoulder at the chart. “We told no one. We were on our own.”

  “But anything could have happened to you, anything at all!”

  —

  So (as Fan gives me one of her looks), they inched onward through a swirl of hanging baskets, brooms, and feather dusters. They stepped over mats set out with earthenwares, struggled past piles of firewood, ducked whirring ginger grinders. And were transfixed, for a moment, in this cacophony of movement, by a glimpse, high above the melee of dirt and noise, of the cool green courtyards and gardens of the Europeans on the slopes.

  Ferns, vines, and flowers, out of which, down the steep steps and ladder streets, flowed a river of white-faced men.

  The streets rose with their tide of humanity, sweeping the women along towards the Praya. Here the food vendors had set up shop and children sat beneath bamboo mats strung on poles, eating barley congee and drinking lemon water. The sun changed from soft gold to white, bleaching behind a fog that obscured the Peak and the oases of green, and all else but the milling, half-slipping images of moving people.

  The mist dampened their clothes. Rose apples and plums, set out on a cloth, were beaded with moisture, and fowls, sleeping in baskets, woke up and protested at the falling droplets.

  (“Look!” says Fan, as a killer-whale fin cleaves the water ahead of us. “We are on the right track!”)

  Lam Fan and India, stumbling in the wake of vegetable carriers (watercress, spinach, and celery), shifted their burdens but did not falter, for they were the major’s daughters and believed in progress; for the name of the ship to which they were journeying, Thermopylae, with its evocation of bravery—King Leonidas and his Greeks and Spartans against the Persians, outnumbered, but smarter—had aroused their courage. Moreover…

  “Moreover,” says Lam Fan, “as I’ve told you many times, there was nothing else we could do.”

  And so they arrived safely at the dock where the sampans waited to take customers of the gambling houses to the Kowloon launch.

  —

  Ribbons of white cloud, in strands across the sky. Thin bands of light on the waves. The motion of the Rose a steady lift and fall as the waves catch the stern and roll under us. Straining eyes for the cream-coloured cliff face of the cape, with its smudge of forest atop. The killer whale, alone as far as we can tell (alt
hough that would be unusual), continues ahead of us on the same bearing. Fan is fiddling with the stove-top cover. The tiny bones of her fingers straining as she pries the pan ring loose and lets it drop. Clank. Pause. Clank. It is the mindless repetitive act of a child, of a nervous old woman; of an addict.

  Lam Fan. Trying to look like a gambler, in the company of my mother, that day in Hong Kong; a woman interested in nothing but pleasure. But her face belying the attempt with its complexion the colour of flour. A baker’s daughter indeed. Who is becoming sicker by the minute.

  But it is not the ferryman’s responsibility, nor the launch driver’s, to make a judgement. The women sit quietly, ignoring the looks of curiosity directed their way; all too aware that sex, age, and dress, plus the baggage they carry, as well as Lam Fan’s pallor, argue against the roles that they play.

  Yet, uncomfortable as they were, and worried as to how long Lam Fan could last between opium pipes, since there had been no occasion to put this to the test, since neither had guessed it would be so bad, they could not help but turn to watch the city they knew fall away behind them. Piled up the steep sides of the island as it was, with all its faults of overcrowding and lack of sanitation evident; and hopeful as they were against all odds, raised on a diet of reform—still, they were leaving with regret.

  For so it is we sadly turn away from childhood (“Robert Lam, we were grown-up women!”), and so we find ourselves adrift in a world without reference, no home to return to, no refuge. Facing the unknown without map or compass….

  (“There it is,” shouts Fan, “there’s the white cliff!”)

  In any case (“I see it, Fan, of course I do”); in any case (“If you’ll let me continue”) the launch plowed its way through the harbour. Around junks and ocean steamers, tramps and men-of-war, carrying passengers and merchants and ordinary workmen, sailors and soldiers, even a pilot or two; with every flag of every country of the world, or so it appeared, being raised or lowered as the ships left or entered. So that the surface of the harbour was continually disturbed, traversed, circled, and roughened, and the launch hauled away or fell off, or hesitated like a horse at a jump. Moving through the confusion of traffic nonetheless, until at the appointed time, for no schedule is kept like the schedule of business, they landed at the dock at the base of the Lion Rock. With the Nine Dragons, the Kau Lang, red on the horizon.