by Denton Welch
I tipped down the shining metal basin, pressed the hot and cold water buttons—quite new to me and so far more delightful than clumsy taps—then I tucked myself up in the bottom bunk and pretended to be asleep in mid-ocean; but the restraint was too much. I had to jump up, put the toy ladder into position, and climb into the top bunk where I watched the light from the water jigging and flashing on the ceiling.
By now we had begun to chug gently up the river. The city was left behind and I could see green banks through the porthole. I heard Boy talking in the galley; being still too restless to settle, I thought I would go and see what he was doing.
I found him preparing tea, while Cook and Coolie squatted on their haunches and played a game with little round discs. Boy was singing to himself in his high cracked voice. It was something intricate and tricksy as yodelling, and I longed to be able to copy him when he produced his piercing little trills and grace notes. They were sad and keen and sweet, like some fruit vinegar.
When he had finished the egg sandwiches, I helped him take the tea to the bows, where my father and mother were sitting, with rugs over their knees, for it was still cold.
My father watched and smoked and drank many cups of tea, while my mother and I ate the sandwiches, Cook’s crusted sponge cake and the American cookies. As we sat there, perched up in our wicker chairs, like three figureheads, I felt that we were part of some marvellous, rich procession, and an important part too—grotesque and strange perhaps, but significant. The touch of nightmare was there because the little boat, so perfectly compact and self-sufficing, was all at variance with the flat land, the little frog-green ponds and the clusters of curling grey roofs half-hidden in the bamboo groves.
Sometimes mangy dogs came out of the villages to bark, and once we passed a squeaking wheelbarrow, loaded with people sitting back to back, and looking in their quilted clothes like so many rolls of bedding. How they chattered amongst themselves, and how extravagantly the wheelbarrow-man groaned and grunted and chanted! He was half-naked, and the wind was biting; yet the sweat poured off him. Some of the people pointed at us and were clearly being witty at our expense, finding us very ridiculous and amusing.
Before it was really dark, my mother suggested that I should go to bed, hinting that I would then be able to get up very early in the morning. I hated the thought of sleep, but I knew I had to go, so I said goodnight to my father without kissing him and went down alone. My mother would come later to see me in my bunk.
The pale eyes of the portholes gleamed on each side of the saloon and there was a faint glimmer over the surface of the lockers. The sound of the engine came to me and the lapping of the water. The air seemed weighed down and given some deep dreaming meaning by the scent from lovely bulbs, which I think must have been China New Year flowers; or were they hyacinths?
I touched them, and I touched the delightful green pom-poms on the minute curtains. Leaning forward and putting out my tongue I licked the brass rim of one of the portholes, in order to realise the ship with all my senses. Then I curled up in a corner of the fitted seat and felt like a mole, or some other perfectly happy blind animal, burrowing deeper and deeper, coming at last to its true home.
My mother found me there and chased me into the bathroom and stood over me until I had cleaned my teeth and done everything else in her own approved way; then she saw me into a top bunk in one of the cabins and put beside me the curious doll which I insisted on keeping; though some grown-ups told me that I was too old to play with it—to say nothing of being quite the wrong sex.
Leaning over the side of the bunk and clutching the doll, I began to tease my mother, pretending that she was getting me to bed early, so that she could drink cocktails with my father—for whenever my mother drank a toast or took a sip from my father’s glass, just to please him, I would officiously remind her of her principles.
After we had kissed and hugged and she had left me, I began to talk to the doll, whose name was Lymph Est. I have had to invent that spelling, because the name has never been written before, and I cannot, of course, explain what the words mean. They just came to me one day, and I repeated them over and over again, until they turned into an incantation.
The doll was neither masculine nor feminine, but a sexless being, like an angel. It was broad and squat, and it wore a kind of convict’s outfit—meagre trousers, jacket and cap of bottle-green corduroy. Its white silk face was painted with black eyes, the shape of greatly enlarged fleas, and it had a scarlet mouth, like the slot of some rococo pillar box. Two red dots did for nostrils. It possessed no hair or ears.
I used to talk to it, not because I believed it was alive, but because I needed an audience for my hopes and plans—an image that would not answer.
‘Do you like this ship?’ I now asked Lymph Est. And then I began to tell over all its delights and beauties, until the cataloguing of them sent me to sleep.
I woke to find long grasses poking through the porthole. We were moored close to the bank and I could smell the earth. Leaving Lymph Est on the pillow, I ran up on deck in my dressing-gown. Everything was hidden in a soft mist, but the sun was gradually melting a way through. I longed to go on shore to explore the unknown land, but Cook was already making the breakfast, while Boy laid the table and Coolie pretended to dust with a bunch of cock’s feathers on a long bamboo; just as if we were in a palace ante-chamber, twenty feet high, instead of in a miniature saloon, where even I could touch the ceiling by standing on the lockers.
I remember smell of coffee and smell of oatmeal porridge on that morning, and then my mother making scrambled eggs with butter and cream in the chafing-dish. I watched the eggs curdle and thicken, saw my father’s portion put on a piece of anchovy toast, but mine on a plain piece. As I ate, the mouthfuls seemed to stick half-way, still leaving the void of excitement underneath.
Soon after breakfast the last shreds of mist evaporated, and then we saw in the distance, on the left bank, a group of buildings shining in the sun. Boy said they might be part of a monastery, and this made my mother want to visit them at once; so the engine was started and we moved on. My mother kept looking through my father’s field-glasses and telling us what she could see.
‘There are ruinous pavilions round a courtyard,’ she said, ‘and a sort of paved way leading down to the river.’
She passed the glasses to me, but I was not good at adjusting the lenses and only produced a milling, curving blur. But in a little time we were before the monastery and I could see it all for myself.
Stone carvings of lions and horses guarded the paved way, and through a thick brown mat of ancient grass pierced this year’s acid blades, hiding the bases of the statues and the steps up to the broken pavilions. Directly in front of us bulged a granite incense burner, rather like a witches’ cauldron. The lip was broken, and I did not think it very beautiful or interesting, but for some reason my mother fell in love with it. As soon as the little gangplank had been put out she ran on shore and started to stroke the harsh surface with her hand.
For a few moments we were unnoticed; then the monks came down to us in a little group. I stood still and watched, never before having seen shaven heads or thick dusty black robes or clacking wooden rosaries. The monks were very young, with faces as smooth as mushrooms, and they were smiling shyly and secretly and had their hands hidden in their sleeves. When they were within a few feet, I caught a curious smell both animal and aromatic, and it filled me with uneasiness.
My mother smiled at them and bowed, and my father nodded more awkwardly, but neither could speak Chinese, so Boy was called hurriedly to act as interpreter.
Boy told us that the monks were pleased to see us, but we must not expect any entertainment, for they were very poor and their monastery was falling into decay. Boy waved his hand rather contemptuously in the direction of the collapsing buildings. Altogether he seemed to treat the monks with very little respect.
It was now quite clear that we were being asked for money, and my father beg
an to fiddle with coins in his pocket, wondering, I suppose, how best to make a present to the monks. At last he thrust two or three silver dollars into the hand of the spokesman, muttering as he did so: ‘And they’ll only gamble it away or spend it on opium, I expect.’
To give jokingly and ungraciously was with him a convention that meant nothing at all, but I was afraid that the monks would understand his words and resent them.
Of course they did not. They were all smiles and charm and urbanity. They asked Boy if there was anything that the lady would like, and when he translated this, my mother’s eyes went straight to the incense burner.
They gave it to her at once, smiling at her for wanting the broken thing, telling her that all this side of the monastery had been abandoned, only one wing at the back being kept in repair.
Although my parents had often condemned rich Americans for carrying off Spanish cloisters and black-and-white Cheshire manor houses to their own country, they neither of them seemed to hesitate over the incense burner. Perhaps it was not important enough to trouble them; in any case it was soon being carried to our boat by several of the strongest monks. My father walked in front to show where it should go on the deck.
When it had been lashed to the rail at the top of the companion-way, my father gave the monks cigarettes, which they smoked ceremoniously as they watched us glide into mid-stream. We waved to them and they waved back. Their faces had all gone sad and thoughtful, and I felt that they were prisoners chained to their ruin, but longing to go exploring with us. I had the idea that a monk’s life was nothing but a waste of idleness, and I decided that they would all go mad in the end.
Soon they were out of sight and I could wave to them no more; then I turned to the incense burner and started to examine it with my mother. Under the mud in the bowl we found the burnt marks of the joss-sticks. These made me think of sacrifices in the Bible, and I imagined white lambs and new-born babies being slaughtered and then roasted in the bowl by a High Priest with a knife as long and curving as a scythe. The more he slaughtered, the more holy he felt. I could almost smell the meat sizzling. What had begun as an alarming fancy ended up by merely making me hungry.
Without saying anything to my mother, I went to get the green tomato chutney and two forks. Pickles were for me the symbol of the free, grown-up life, and I pretended that I liked them better than sweets.
My mother smiled when she saw what I brought for a mid-morning titbit, but she took up a translucent green fragment on her fork, and sat with it poised before her. She was looking at the low hills far away, and I wondered what she was thinking about, she was so still and smiling. I watched her, while the tang of the chutney roughened my tongue and dried up my mouth.…
Once we passed a pagoda with fairy-like grass growing on its many roofs; and then there was a beautiful little white marble bridge over a canal. I remember too somewhere logs floating in the water. I was sure that they were dangerous to our small boat, having heard stories of icebergs and steamers; but although I waited for the tearing, crunching sound, nothing happened and we sailed on smoothly.
When we stopped again, it was at the foot of a hill which stretched back from the river in a long arm. My mother suggested having our picnic at the top of the ridge, gazing out over the land; so my father took up the picnic case and I a little basket, and we started to climb up through broken terraces and tangled bushes.
It was not long before I saw that the whole hill was a huge graveyard. Walls that had looked like curved garden terraces were really horse-shoe graves, and there were simpler ones, where the coffins had not been buried, but little windowless, doorless brick houses had been built round them.
It did not seem strange to us to take our picnic to the top of this dead city and eat it there, surrounded by ten thousand hidden skeletons. In China there are graves everywhere.
My mother chose a bank where the grass was blown flat by the wind. Below us the land stretched away endlessly; and I could just pick out our little boat on the curling white river. My father said the position was too exposed, but he acquiesced with mock resignation, and made a business of taking off his coat to shield the spirit lamp.
The leather picnic case was old. Plated flasks and sandwich cases fitted round a square kettle, which appealed to me strongly because of the delicate cap and chain on the spout. Apostle teaspoons and knives with yellowed ivory handles were arranged in a fan shape on the stained green satin lining of the lid.
My mother began to open the cases and take out chicken bones, Russian salad, chocolate cake and oranges, while my father poured himself out a drink from the wrong flask and grimaced when the babyish white trickle appeared. He made coffee for my mother by throwing spoonfuls into the boiling kettle. She said that the drink was not a success, but I was delighted when she allowed me to colour my milk with it.
I gnawed my drumstick and ate little pieces of piquant stuffing. There was roasted brown skin to crunch, messy salad to be played with, and then the cake, black and rich as leaf mould. The pieces of orange at the end seemed to tingle all through my mouth, cleaning away all other tastes that had ever been.
When my father was lying on his back with a cigarette between his lips, and my mother was motionless, lost in the view, I got up and ran away from them without a word. I went to explore the graves, hoping to find some ancient coin or ornament hidden under a stone, or just lying on the ground, undiscovered, but for all to see.
I jumped down from terrace to terrace, clambered under bushes, lifted stones, but found only beetles and insects. I was wondering what to do next, when I saw at the end of the ridge one of the simpler brick graves which seemed to be broken open. I hurried towards it, feeling a little afraid, but hoping for great things.
The whole of one corner had collapsed. I could see the coffin quite plainly and when, trembling with excitement, I bent even closer, the coarse weaving of a piece of cloth jumped out at me from a crack in the rotting wood.
These things were so exactly as I had expected them to be that I saw through the coffin and the shroud to the skull, the loose teeth, the clots of hair and the white bone. No need to pry any further. My dreadful pictures had come true. The imprisoned, concealed smell of the monks had been bad, but there was a worse, more evil smell here—a smell that was forcing me to know what happened in the end. Rotting wood and cloth and human bone were changed now. They were dead.
I knew that I must never say a word, that I must just walk away as if nothing had happened, but when I turned to the place where I had left my father and mother, they were no longer there. I saw only the picnic things spread out on the grass.
I started to run; and every now and then I called out to my mother in a very even plain voice that perfectly expressed my fright. There was a hollow sound in the curved arm of the hill, but no human answer.
I came upon my mother just when I had begun to feel that I might never see her again. I turned the corner of a peeling stucco wall, and there she was, framed in one of those charming completely round Chinese doorways. She smiled at me slumberously and serenely. It was clear that she had wandered away to meditate in that forgotten tomb garden.
I ran up to her and stood, breathing hard, but not touching her or saying anything. She seemed the very opposite of all that the coffin held, but this only made my confusion worse, for I knew that she would come to it at last; and that knowledge was unbearable.
I would have liked to say, ‘Up there you can see a rotten coffin with some rotten cloth poking through a crack, and under the cloth … there’s a rotten man,’ but I knew that it was forbidden, that if I did so she would frown and gaze into me to discover what had been left at the back of my eyes. Then she would turn away and say with careful casualness, ‘Darling, you oughtn’t to have looked,’ and I would be made to feel peering and a little indecent.
So I said nothing, but took her hand and walked back with her to the picnic place, where my father, back from the bushes, was now packing up the case and scattering crum
bs for the birds.
We said very little as we climbed down again to the boat. The clouds were gathering and pressing lower, and soon after we had settled ourselves in the saloon I heard rain pattering down on the deck. The surface of the river began to hiss and boil, and such a delicious feeling of snugness was created that tremors ran through me and I pressed Lymph Est hard against the cushions of the seat under the portholes where I was lying. My father took up the book that he had been reading to me at home, and my mother started to work on her neglected piece of petit-point. She had not touched it for months, but now she sorted the wools with quiet pleasure and began to put stitches into the conventional acanthus leaf. Her hand rose and fell like a sparrow snatching crumbs from the canvas.
I listened with one part of my mind to my father. He was reading something about the ancient rivalry between Genoa and Venice. The heroine’s name was Maria. I remember, because my father would pronounce it in the English way, although my mother insisted that the ‘i’ should be ‘e’ as in Italian.
The other part of me talked to Lymph Est. I got a sort of mournful, gruesome pleasure out of saying over and over again, ‘Tomorrow we go back.’
We were amongst the ships again in the thick of the river traffic, with hooters droning and the shouts of bargemen ringing out, making me believe that something terrible was about to happen.
Boy, Cook, Coolie, my father and mother, were all packing and tidying, preparing to leave.
I lay in my top bunk with Lymph Est held above my head. I was trying to pretend that the journey had only just begun, but I knew it was over and that we were back in the hateful confusion of the city.