Assessing his granddaughters with a fond, but critical eye, Sir Jonathan had discerned no promise of their mother’s vigorous talents. Girls like Guinevere and Charlotte, the autocrat had declared, need at most learn reading, writing, reckoning, and the household arts. Well dowered, they would marry well, and their husbands would look after them. The Old Gentleman did not like “clever” women, although he relied upon Mary’s judgment. Intelligent, educated women affronted his traditional Chinese conviction that respectable females should confine their activities to the kitchen, the drawing-room, the nursery, and the bedroom.
Mary could not really contest Sir Jonathan’s judgment of the girls’ potential, though she was infuriated by his arrogantly dismissing all women as inferiors—“all but the few astonishing exceptions like yourself and my wonderful mother.” But remaining in Hong Kong had put a stamp upon her daughters’ personalities. It was, Mary saw with growing dismay, almost a stigma. Despite her own efforts, they were slightly chee-chee, neither quite Chinese nor quite British in accent and attitude. Archetypically Hong Kong women, they floated uneasily between two worlds, Eurasians in manner and spirit, as well as blood.
Their eldest brother, Jonnie, was utterly self-confident. Nine years at Stonyhurst had nurtured an impregnable conviction of superiority and an accent so effortlessly posh it sometimes moved Mary to quickly suppressed laughter. He had talked like a Lancashire plowboy until the astonishing transformation worked by the final year the Jesuits idiosyncratically called Poetry. When unwary sprigs of the Hong Kong British Establishment snubbed young Jonathan Sekloong, he looked down his nose, drawled a few contemptuous syllables, and left them in speechless chagrin.
His sisters, who had known only Hong Kong, were pathetically unsure of themselves. Their grandfather’s wealth and his title attracted envious comments and required their presence at interminably boring formal functions. But they were not invited to the parties by the Colony’s younger set. Mary and Charles had outgrown their resentment at their exclusion from the Hong Kong Club, the Colony’s European holy of holies. Their daughters agonized over their exclusion from the livelier Cricket and Yacht Clubs. Guinevere withdrew into her passion for housewifery, while the irrepressible Charlotte concealed her unhappiness in hectic parties with the freer St. Paul’s girls and their brothers. The madcap spirit of the 1920s had touched even remote Hong Kong. Young Eurasians, Portuguese, and even Chinese shocked their elders by drinking nauseating American concoctions called cocktails, dancing entwined to saccharine songs like “Dardanella” and “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder”—and prattling about sex and complexes. Freed of the constricting underclothing that had confined their mothers, girls wore skirts above their knees and rolled, flesh-colored stockings. Youths were grotesque in tight-waisted jackets and flaring trousers. The Jazz Age was creeping over the Colony, but the old social barriers still stood firm against the tides of self-conscious emancipation.
The quarter of a century since her arrival in Hong Kong had moved with dizzying speed, Mary reflected when she and Charles evaded the clouds of well-wishers to leave the boat-yard in the new Rolls-Royce landau, isolated from the driver by thick glass. The motorcar’s steady upward progress from Aberdeen was itself a sign of the new age. A road had been cut through to The Peak just a few months earlier, and the inconvenient progression from Peak Tram to sedan chair to Sekloong Manor was no longer necessary. Electricity, a rare luxury in the early 1900s, was commonplace, and ceiling fans had replaced creaking punkahs. Some punkah-pullers joined the ranks of the sweating coolies who still carried up to The Peak provisions and ice shipped in sawdust from North China. But the coolies, too, were becoming redundant. Patent iceboxes and the occasional, still expensive refrigerator kept food fresh for days, while angular motor-vans with wooden-spoke wheels carried perishable goods almost as cheaply and much faster than could coolies. The new unemployed grumbled, for even the ubiquitous messenger-coolie was being replaced by the telephone. A fixture in business offices, the instrument was becoming commonplace in the homes of the well-to-do.
Goaded by his son Harry, who made flying visits to the Colony, Sir Jonathan was deeply concerned about rising discontent among the working class. Since the mercantile Colony was virtually devoid of industry, it was not as troubled as China, where the miners of Anshan in Manchuria and the railway workers of Chengchow in Honan had struck for better pay and safer working conditions. The pioneering strikes were organized by the “Bolsheviks” of the three-year-old Communist Party of China. The worst the Colony itself had suffered was, however, a brief seamen’s strike in 1922. In Hong Kong, as in China, menial tasks still offered employment to those forced to work for a pittance. The Sekloongs themselves employed more than two hundred servants and gardeners.
Nonetheless, the age was moving so fast that even Sir Jonathan could not look to the future confident in his judgments. Neither he nor Charles could wholly control Thomas and James, who were just nineteen and seventeen. Aided by the Great War’s disruption, they had escaped following Jonnie at Stonyhurst, and they were indifferent students at Wah Yan, the Jesuit school on Kennedy Road. Openly scornful of both commerce and scholarship, they were at the moment fascinated by the new magic called wireless. They hunched over spider-web devices of wire and crystal, rejoicing when they “brought in” a static-splintered transmission from Manila, Singapore, or Shanghai. The heterodyne tube had already been perfected by the American Lee de Forrest, and the boys were constructing a wireless set they swore would “bring in London clear as a bell.” They were, above all, intrigued by the military potential of wireless, which equipped some ships on the Royal Navy’s China Station.
Inspired by Harry’s enthusiasm, they were also fascinated by the military capability airplanes had demonstrated during the Great War. The German Dornier Company had just begun serial production of its passenger-carrying flying-boat, the Whale, while the Italian pilot Francesco de Pinedo was preparing to fly a 35,000-mile round trip from Rome to Tokyo by way of Australia in his Gennariello. Visionaries already spoke of a regular flying-boat service that would reduce the voyage from Hong Kong to London to an unbelievable seven days. Though practical businessmen were justly skeptical of that prospect, they lived in a wholly different world from the era of gaslights, sedan chairs, coolie transport, and swaying punkahs Mary Philippa Osgood had entered on landing at Hong Kong less than twenty-five years earlier.
Family solidarity had been the cornerstone of Chinese society, and, at the least, the coping-stone of European society in 1900. But that rock was cracking in 1924, as the negligent attitudes of Thomas and James demonstrated. All the children had, however, attended the launching of Regina Pacis. The girls saw visions of gay parties on the schooner’s broad decks, while Jonnie and young Charles would not have dreamed of disappointing their father. Though discerning little military utility in the anachronistic schooner, Thomas and James delighted in its splendor. But the children had scattered to their own friends, instead of returning to Sekloong Manor for the family party that would, a few years earlier, have sealed the occasion. Harry and his wife Mayling had promised to call, but only Mary and Charles rode in the leather-cushioned comfort of the black Rolls—and Mary suddenly felt herself ancient at forty-three.
Charles interrupted her musing, his normal lilt intensified by excitement. She realized that they were still holding hands like young lovers—or like a prematurely aged Darby and Joan.
“Well, old girl,” he bubbled, “she’s a beautiful thing, isn’t she? More than a hundred feet … designed by Laurent Giles … mahogany strip-planked … and a Sulzbach diesel of 250 horsepower from Bremen. The Huns still build well, blast them. Not many wives get presents like that.”
“I’m grateful, Charles,” she laughed. “But the children call Regina ‘Daddy’s new toy.’”
“My new toy, indeed!” Mild indignation edged his lilt. “Nonsense! You know it’s your present. I can’t wait to sail for Honolulu.”
“Nor I, Charles. It�
��s a lovely present.”
“We can leave right after the wedding. Only two months now before …”
Mary stiffened in resentment, and her hand stiffened in her husband’s. But he burbled on.
“Charlotte’ll be the first to go. Makes you feel a bit old. But we’ll give her a big send-off. I’ve been thinking that …”
“Charles,” Mary interrupted. “I’d rather not discuss it now. Charlotte’s a wanton little fool, and as for Manfei …”
“But, my dear, you never said a word.”
“Not a word? If I’d shouted from the housetops, I couldn’t have made my feelings plainer. You know perfectly well I don’t want this marriage. But let’s not talk about it now. Let’s just enjoy this day.”
“Damned if I will!” Charles’s temper flared beneath his new equanimity. “We’ll talk it out right now. Charlotte’s in love with young Manfei Way, and he’s suitable, most suitable. The old man agrees it’ll be a great alliance. Bring the Way interests and the Sekloong interests even closer together. You like Mosing, and his son’s a fine boy.”
“Yes, Charles, I know,” she replied. “Eminently suitable, even if he’s not a Catholic—though that doesn’t bother me, only you. Wealthy, intelligent, well-mannered, and well-educated. Dunross College isn’t in the same class as Stonyhurst. More like a training school for the Wheatleys’ bright young recruits, but it’s all right. I rather like Manfei too. Yes, eminently suitable.”
“Then, why do you object? Charl’s certainly old enough. You were. What’s bothering you, Mary?”
“Old enough at twenty? I’m not so sure. But that’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
“If you must know,” she exploded, “it’s very simple: he’s Chinese!”
“Chinese?” Charles was stunned. “How can you feel that way? I’m mostly Chinese. Why, your own children …”
“Don’t be dense, Charles. You know exactly what I mean. He’s Chinese, with all the old Chinese arrogance under the veneer of British education. I dread my daughter’s suffering what I endured in the early years of marriage.”
“Suffering what?” Charles was on edge. “Just what, Mary?”
“His philandering. And he will philander because it’s his God-given right as a Chinese man. She’ll be treated like a pampered pet, not a person. And she’ll be trapped in pompous, stuffy Hong Kong. She won’t take it for long. I know my own daughter!”
“I never knew it.” Charles spoke with bitter anger. “I never knew you were anti-Chinese.”
“That’s rubbish. I’m not anti-Chinese. But I don’t want Charlotte to suffer the same humiliations, the same slights, the same sneers I’ve put up with. If they lived in London, then perhaps … but Hong Kong, this Hong Kong! No.”
“Manfei’s a good boy. Don’t forget Hong Kong’s been good to you. China, too. Now that …”
“Now that you’ve settled down, you mean,” she smiled wryly. “Charles, it doesn’t have anything to do with us, with our marriage. But I’ve lost too much to China.”
“Too much?” Unfeigned bewilderment contended with his rising anger. “What do you mean?”
“Our life’s been racked by China. The girl-child stillborn after the plague. I wanted another girl. Now, Thomas and James want to go to that frightful military academy at Whampoa Harry’s so keen on.”
“And Harry?” Jealous anger overcame Charles’s discretion. “You’ve lost Harry to China, too?”
“Harry never belonged to me, you know.” She lied equably, confident that he did not know the truth or wish to know. “Though you, of course … your adventures. The Swatow girl—and the others.”
He lowered his eyes beneath her level stare.
“No,” she continued, “it’s China itself. I want my children to live civilized lives. Not provincial Hong Kong, not the gory, clawing horror of China.”
“It’s their heritage. You insisted that they learn Chinese. I simply don’t understand.”
“China, Charles, China! There’s no hope for China. Misery will spread. The killing will be worse. There’ll never be peace. The children are giving themselves to a chimera, decades of turmoil. And they’ll always be wogs … chee-chee Eurasians … to the British in Asia. They do have another heritage elsewhere, as do you … and I.”
“I’m not so keen on China,” he conceded without rancor. “Maybe you’ve got a point. But, Mary, you puzzle me, always have, though God knows I try to understand you. But, I tell you, this marriage will take place.”
“Perhaps, Charles, perhaps.” She smiled, unable to rise to anger. “So many perhapses in our lives, aren’t there? But I tell you … I promise you with no perhapses I’ll fight this marriage tooth and claw.”
The day that had begun with the triumphant launching of Regina Pacis tried Charles Sekloong’s patience to the utmost—and beyond. Harry and Mayling were waiting in the drawing-room of the Small House, and he knew the women detested each other. Mayling was a lacquered Shanghai doll, the archetype of the frivolous, parasitical Chinese woman Mary despised. Her features were glossily immobile, since she feared that displaying emotion would mar their smooth perfection with lines. She looked as if she devoted four hours each day to her excessive make-up, her glassily coiffed hair, her pointed fingernails shiny with vermilion varnish, and her clinging cheongsams with discreet side-slits—as indeed she did. Mary was convinced that Harry had deliberately chosen a woman who was her own antithesis when he impulsively decided he must marry to cut himself off from her and end the danger their liaison posed to the clan.
Though more tolerant than his wife of feminine vanity, Charles recognized the pursed mouth, the calculating eyes, and the false smile. All those outward signs of self-absorption he had seen among the gilded courtesans he frequented before the Great War. Had he not known that Mayling’s father was a respectable editor, he would have suspected that Harry had found her among the nightclub hostesses of Shanghai’s Bubbling Well Road. Even less than Mary could he understand why the fastidious, irreverent Harry Sekloong had married a frivolous woman who did not even pretend interest in the political struggles that were his own life work. Her doll-like fragility and self-indulgent idleness were repellent. But Mayling’s demeanor exuded complacent self-satisfaction; she had totally justified herself by giving Harry a son, Chieh-hsiang (also called Jason), now eleven years old.
Still, Mayling was essentially passive, an irritant rather than a disruption. She was proficient only in the crackling Shanghai dialect. Her Mandarin and her Cantonese were rudimentary, while her English was virtually nonexistent. Mayling’s linguistic deficiencies and her narcissism effectively prevented her interjecting herself into family discussions. Besides, she was normally preoccupied with patting her hair into place, repairing her make-up, and smoothing the wrinkles in her cheongsam. Her obsession with her own person effectively excluded all other human beings.
Mary and Mayling greeted each other with contempt revealed by tight smiles and extravagant inquiries after each other’s children. Harry himself was brimming with enthusiasm, with news, and with demands.
“Well, Charles,” he drawled, inserting a cigarette into his stubby ivory holder, “I congratulate you. You’ve beaten the old man in ostentation.”
“The boat’s for Mary, you know,” Charles replied defensively. “I promised her we’d take six months off and sail wherever she wants. Hawaii, Tahiti, Bali—who knows? Besides, we have to keep up a position.”
“Just what position? Exploiting the people?”
“Harry, that’s not fair.” Mary slipped into the familiar role of buffer between the brothers. “Building Regina has employed dozens of your precious common people. With the slump, they’d otherwise be idle. Regardless of our position, we do employ many people.”
“It’s not a defense, Mary,” her brother-in-law answered. “But I haven’t come to argue.”
“What for, then?” Charles asked with unwonted asperity.
“Why, to give the Seklo
ongs an opportunity to demonstrate their generosity toward my precious common people.”
“How?” Charles rejoined. “What is it now?”
“Now, Charles, that’s no way to talk for the man who owns the grandest yacht between Honolulu and Monaco, is it?”
“Maybe it is, speaking to the new ally of the Bolsheviks,” Charles flushed. “Your own people are hardly better than the Bolsheviks. Your living treasure Chiang Kai-shek is really a Bolshevik. Even Dr. Sun … I wonder about Dr. Sun. Nobody made him join the Soviets and turn the Kuomintang, your great Nationalist Party, into a Chinese version of the Soviet Communist Party.”
Harry sat tensely on the edge of his chair, and Charles bristled.
“Gentlemen!” Mary interrupted. “Or should I say ‘boys’? Must you fight the battle between capitalism and Bolshevism in my drawing-room?”
The brothers were momentarily abashed. The elder retreated into his duties as host, turning to the drinks cabinet. The younger accepted the rebuke with his habitual nonchalance and smiled in apology. His wife looked up suspiciously, her antennae stirred by the demonstration of Mary’s influence over the two men who loved her. Reassured by the social calm, she resumed stroking her hips to smooth her wrinkled cheongsam.
“But, Harry, what’s the point?” Charles persisted. “I can’t understand your alliance with the Communists. Can’t be good for business. So far, you’ve just made greater turmoil. While you Nationalists play with the Bolsheviks, practically every province is ruled by a warlord who squeezes the merchants and the people. It’s a bigger mess than old Viceroy Yüan Shih-kai made.”
“We’ll change that,” Harry said mollifyingly. “That’s the point, to unify China and create a new order. Order’s good for business. But politics is a messy business.”
“You know,” Mary recalled, “Napoleon said something about that. I can’t quite recall, though.”
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