by Linda Jaivin
As they pulled up before the grey walls of his compound, formerly the residence of a Manchu prince, Morrison looked at it as if through Mae’s eyes. He pictured her exclaiming at the sight of the stone lion sentinels with their fierce expressions and proud chests, a carved ball under the paw of the male and a cub under that of the female. He imagined telling her how the people of Peking were able to tell a man’s status from the depth of his entryway as easily as they could read the position he held in court from the embroidered panel on his robe. A wealthy commoner might adorn his shallow entrance with murals and silk-fringed lanterns, but it would not fool anyone. His own entryway, Morrison would point out to the senator’s daughter, was impressively deep.
He was smiling to himself as, trailed by Kuan, he approached the great carved wall blocking the view to the inner courtyard—a ‘spirit screen’ intended to deflect evil spirits, which the Chinese believed could only travel in straight lines. Something occurred to him. He gestured at the screen. ‘Kuan, do you believe mischief only moves in straight lines? In my experience, mischief always surprises one by coming round the corner.’
Kuan considered this for a moment. ‘It is people who do not travel in straight lines,’ he replied with a little smile. ‘They can’t help themselves. Always turning corners. Mischief just waiting for them there.’
‘Ha.’
In the immaculate courtyard behind the screen, the crab-apple tree was swollen with buds and, within the bamboo cage that hung from one of its branches, Cook’s Mongolian lark trilled. The spring festival had begun on the sixteenth of that month and everything still looked New Year’s-fresh, from the brightly painted latticework of the windows to the newly calligraphed couplets on either side of the doorways. Miniature mandarin trees in ceramic pots wafted a faint note of citrus into the air. From somewhere in the compound with its thirty-odd rooms drifted the uvular sounds of conversation in the Peking dialect. Morrison’s grey mare whinnied in her stable.
Morrison usually savoured that moment at the end of a trip when the sounds and smells of travel—the whistle and jolt of steam engines, the push and pong of crowds, the cries of coolies and the clip-clop of hooves—began to fade and the rhythms and sensations of home reasserted themselves in a bittersweet return to the familiar. This time, however, he felt as though a solemn grey curtain had fallen across a stage, and the gay and colourful world in which he’d been absorbed just over twenty-four hours earlier had evanesced, an artful illusion.
A slight and delicately featured girl stepped into the courtyard, carrying a stick broom. Although not more than sixteen, she wore her hair in the style of a married woman. At the sight of the men, she shrank back and, clutching the broom, stared at the ground.
Turning to Kuan, Morrison was surprised to see that his normally unflappable Boy had paled.
Before he could ask for an explanation, Kuan and the girl entered into low, urgent conversation, speaking too quickly for Morrison to understand. He gathered that they somehow knew each other and were shaken by the unexpected reunion.
‘Who is she, Kuan?’ Morrison asked when they had finished speaking.
‘She’s…’ Kuan seemed to be choosing his words with care. He glanced back at the girl, who had resumed sweeping with a concentration Morrison found strangely affecting, her feathery eyebrows drawn into a barely perceptible frown. ‘We were childhood friends. She’s Cook’s new wife.’
‘Truly?’ Morrison was surprised. He was fond of Cook, a taciturn old widower with a fanatical devotion to both the arts of the table and Morrison’s wellbeing. But Cook was not the most attractive of men. His narrow eyes looked as though they’d been carved out of the tough leather of his face by the thin blades that were his cheekbones. His nose was unusually flat for a northerner, his mouth wide and graceless. Cook was certainly no Kuan, whose large, intelligent eyes, brushstroke eyebrows, proud nose and well-proportioned mouth inspired appreciative comments from even some of the Western ladies of Morrison’s acquaintance. Morrison would not have expected Cook’s new wife to be such a slender young beauty as the one standing before them now. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong, but she doesn’t seem like she was brought up to be a servant,’ he observed.
Kuan straightened. ‘No one is brought up to be a servant. No one’s parents want this for their child. It is—how you say?—circumstances.’
Morrison realised his mistake. ‘Of course. What I meant was, what circumstances brought her to this place, I wonder?’
By now the pair was walking in the direction of Morrison’s library, a specially reconstructed wing on the southern side of the main courtyard.
Kuan gave Morrison a searching look. ‘I will tell you, but you cannot tell anyone else. Not even Cook.’
Morrison’s curiosity was piqued. ‘Go on.’
Kuan’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Her father was a follower of T’an Ssu-tung. You know?’
T’an had been one of the ‘Six Gentlemen’ whose ideas for reforming the Chinese system of government in order to strengthen China and bring it into the modern world had found a sympathetic hearing with the young Kuang Hsu Emperor six years earlier. The reformers argued that China needed to modernise everything, from the way farmers planted their fields to the manner in which the government managed its railways and trained its army. They spoke of women’s rights and of universal education. For one hundred heady days, the Emperor promulgated the reforms but his aunt, the Empress Dowager, and her conservative cronies in the court grew alarmed. The Empress Dowager arrested her nephew and had him locked up in a pavilion in the palace. Then she rounded up and executed the leading reformers, including T’an. A number of their supporters formed an underground anti-Ch’ing movement that blamed the Manchus for China’s woes and believed it was time for China to move, like Japan, to a constitutional monarchy or even a republic.
Morrison had been enthusiastic about the reform movement. He had once even offered to help one of the reformers, an offer that had been turned down, most unfortunately as it turned out, as two years later the man was put to death.
Morrison looked back with renewed interest at the girl sweeping his courtyard. He noticed then that her feet, whilst small, had only been loosely bound. ‘I do indeed know who T’an was,’ he told Kuan, drawing a forefinger across his throat.
Kuan nodded, glancing nervously at the girl.
‘Her father—was he executed, too?’
‘He ran away. Then my parents died and I was taken to the orphanage. I never saw her again. She was young then.’ He looked pained. ‘Just a girl.’
‘She still looks young to me. What’s her name?’
‘Yu-ti.’
Morrison narrowed his eyes in thought. ‘Jade something?’
‘No. Not that yu. Means “waiting for little brother”. She was the second child, both girls. You know Chinese families must have boy.’
‘So they weren’t that progressive after all.’
‘This is China.’
‘It certainly is.’ They both watched as Yu-ti, having finished her sweeping, scampered back into the house. ‘What do you think of the reformers, Kuan?’
‘They are China’s hope,’ he replied fervently. ‘Unless we make our country strong, we will always be victims of foreign powers.’ As though catching himself saying something he should not, he bit his lip.
‘Do go on,’ Morrison urged. For all his complaints about Granger reporting the gossip of Chinese cart drivers, Morrison had always been professionally interested in the opinions of his Head Boy. But Kuan seemed reluctant to continue the conversation. That was fine, for Morrison had correspondence and other tasks waiting for him. He gave Kuan a few instructions, then stood alone in his courtyard, collecting his thoughts.
Two white kittens belonging to his servants came mewing and tumbling in together on the neat brick paving, the bells around their necks jingling. From his cage, Cook’s songbird observed their antics warily, cocking his head first in this direction, then that. Morrison felt for the handk
erchief in his pocket and stroked it with his fingers. He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. Where was she now? he wondered. Was she thinking of him, too? His chest filled with longing.
Morrison’s library was narrow and high-ceilinged, a place of repose, order and scholarship. On the shelves, in addition to twenty thousand books in more than twenty languages, lay at least four hundred early manuscript dictionaries and grammars, four thousand pamphlets and two thousand maps and engravings, each one meticulously catalogued. Of all his collections, which included bibelots, silks and jade, Morrison cherished none as much as his books. He loved the written word for the way it secured thoughts and experiences, lending them structure, preventing them from passing out of sight and memory.
Morrison’s greatest regret was that for all his accomplishments, he was not, he knew, a great writer. He had published a book and a good many reports and telegrams. But when he thought of poets and writers he admired, he felt humble—and not many things humbled Morrison—for great authors, like Kipling, his favourite, gave moral sense to the world. It was not just facility with language or even a rich imagination, he knew, that made an author great, but the way the writer reached for and honoured the truth. Morrison freely confessed to the limitations of his own craft; deep inside he knew that a worse problem was that in his public writing, at least, he was incapable of an unwavering allegiance to the truth. He could not deny to himself that how he understood the world did not always accord with the way he presented it to others. There was the odd doubt about an ally, which he thought unwise to voice, for example; information that for whatever reason he did not wish to share; strategic considerations; even, on occasion, necessary flattery.
Morrison confided only to his journal, Lett’s No. 41 Indian and Colonial ROUGH DIARY Giving an Entire Page to a Day, a serious, manly notebook, bound in leather and bearing advertisements for Remington typewriters and Whitfield’s Safes & Steel Doors on its inside covers, its pages faintly lined for convenience. Morrison had his eye on posterity, and to posterity he would be true. At the same time he would be loyal to the place that, for all his travels, he kept close to his heart: Australia. His journals would return there in the end, even if he did not. It was to his journal—and those who lived under the big, forgiving Australian sky—that he would confide his most awkward truths, the latest being that he was wildly infatuated with Miss Mae Ruth Perkins. His Maysie. Maysie, Maysie. But he would not dawdle now over sentimental matters. The unopened sack of mail on his worktable reproached him.
Morrison touched the precious handkerchief to his lips before folding it and replacing it in his pocket. Tipping the sack onto the table, he chose an envelope at random and sliced into it with his scrimshaw letter-opener. It was from J.O.P. Blunt, The Times correspondent in Shanghai. ‘What news from the City of Dreadful Dust?’ it began. Morrison could almost smell Blunt’s lavender pomade. Next was a note from some busybody in the Church, harping that Morrison had still not reported on a modern college the missionaries had established somewhere or other. Morrison wrote himself a reminder to look into it. His old neighbour Prince Su, meanwhile, had sent a note addressed ‘My dear younger brother’; Morrison knew enough of Chinese ways to perceive both the endearment and the condescension in the address. There was a letter from Bangkok: ‘I hope you are happy,’ wrote his friend Eliza R. Scidmore of the National Geographic Society. ‘At last you have your war.’
As he sorted through the post, putting some letters on his desk to answer straight away and setting others aside, he stopped to dash off a line to Moberly Bell, pointedly noting to his editor how good it had been to be able to get out and see things for himself, and remarking, by the by, that his health had improved greatly since the outbreak of war.
Much to do. He pulled on his sleeve guards and, seated at his desk, set up blotter and inkpot.
Dear Mae. Dearest Mae. Maysie. Mae, dear. Dearest. After several false starts, his pen fairly flew down the sheet of paper, and the one after, and the one after that. He was just impressing his seal on the wax that fastened the envelope when a mighty sandstorm swooped upon the city. Howling winds rattled the windows and swirled yellow and orange dust through the air. Elsewhere in the compound he could hear doors slamming, flowerpots smashing and the cries of the servants as they rushed hither and thither securing the house. Morrison felt the excitement of the weather like a tremor throughout his body. Maysie.
From behind the padded quilt that in winter helped trap his study’s meagre heat, the door banged in the wind. Snapping out of his trance, Morrison scrambled for the stitched bundle of rags he kept to stuff in the crack by the floor. He adored the thrill of a storm but not the disorder it brought with it.
When the winds abated, he emerged from his library to find Cook upset and cursing. Before Cook had been able to get to his lark, the cage had crashed to the ground and the bird had flown away. Yu-ti appeared shaken by his temper as she and the other servants busied themselves sweeping the courtyard and tidying up. Though brief, the tempest had left piles of grit on the roof tiles, piped sand along the latticework and deposited souvenirs of the Ordos Desert into the hearts of cabbages. Back inside, Morrison found it had insinuated sand into the pockets of clothes folded in wardrobes and chests, the pages of his books and the lens of his precious Brownie camera, which had been encased in leather and locked within a drawer in his study.
Morrison dismantled the lens and blew on it, then brushed it with a feather. As he watched the drift of sand on his desk, a tune popped into his head. It won’t be a stylish marriage, / I can’t afford a carriage, / But you’ll look sweet upon the seat, / Of a bicycle built for two! How ridiculous he appeared, even to himself, humming out of tune. He could scarcely credit that just months earlier he had felt so debilitated by poor health that he’d considered leaving China altogether. Maysie, Maysie, give me your answer do. His blood flowed in his veins like that of a much younger man.
In Which Morrison Encounters the Bumptious
Egan, Whose Excellent Teeth Remind Him of the
Sorry State of His Own, and an Assignment from
His Editor Proves Just the Ticket
The following morning, Morrison woke invigorated, organised his notes and had just begun drafting his telegram for The Times when Kuan entered with a letter from Granger.
‘My dear Morrison,’ it began, presumptuous in its familiarity. Cavilling over the course of nearly two pages that his telegrams were not being published as regularly as he had hoped, Granger then fretted over the reliability of both modern telegraphy and the post. He begged the indulgence of his esteemed colleague: would Morrison please ensure the enclosed report, obtained at the cost of much sweat and blood, reach the eyes of their editor in London? He would be eternally grateful.
Morrison extracted the report and read it carefully.
Damned badly drawn and inconsequential. Addle-headed idiot. He tore it up and tipped the scraps into the stove.
Yesterday’s storm had scoured the sky to a cerulean magnificence. Morrison worked through lunch but, as the afternoon wore on, he found it impossible to keep himself at his desk. Buoyantly, he strode out into the breezy sunshine. The winds had strewn the candy-coloured petals of early-flowering apple and cherry blossoms about the streets like fragrant confetti. Through broad avenues and narrow hutong, Morrison wove his way through a dense traffic of merchants and peddlers, carters, ricksha pullers and palanquins. He passed Manchu ladies with lacquered wings of hair, beggars and Bannermen. The vendors’ sing-song cries, the chatter from the wine shops, the clatter of cart wheels and the shouts of the children kicking shuttlecocks rang in his ears. His nose was simultaneously assaulted by the rotten-egg smell of thawing sewage and delighted by the scents of toffee and pancakes. The streets of Peking were exhilarating and claustrophobic all at once, and he quickened his steps until he reached the ramp that led to the top of the Tartar City Wall.
The wall was forty feet high and so wide in places that four carriages could be driven abreas
t. Hundreds of years old, the ramparts afforded an incomparable view of the city, including the golden-roofed halls, gardens and pavilions of the Imperial Palace itself. The Tartar City Wall was a place to contemplate history—China’s, Peking’s, one’s own, and to order one’s thoughts with the aid of the grand symmetry of the capital, with its north-south axis and clear, sacred geometry. It was a post from which one could observe the teeming, clamorous life in the streets below without having it present in every pore. Walking the Tartar Wall appealed for every reason to Morrison, himself a man of solid bulwarks, gated enceintes and complex fortifications.
Atop the wall, Morrison took a breath and gazed out over his adopted city. Box kites carved colourful grooves in a brilliant blue sky and from all directions came the music of bells: ringing on peddlers’ carts, tinkling from the necks of camels and mules, and chiming from the flying eaves of the city’s temples. It was not a day for guarded emotion. His heart sang. Oh Maysie. What a type, he thought. She excites me passionately, pleases me infinitely.
Infinitely. His thoughts jumped to Mary Joplin. Mary was the angelic Eurasian nurse who had aided his convalescence from fever in Calcutta at the end of his epic journey from Shanghai to the subcontinent ten years earlier. Sweet Mary, on whose fingers even hydrochlorate of quinine tasted like honey. He had written much of that ilk in his journal at the height of his infatuation: the animation of her beautiful features…the charming grace and noiseless celerity of her movements…
When he had recovered enough to leave India, Mary tearfully bade him marry a good girl of his own station in life. Yet he could not put her from his mind. In 1899, he persuaded The Times that he needed to visit Assam to report on advances in tea cultivation. He never came within a mile of a tea bush. Mary had fallen on hard times and pawned the jewellery he’d given her—for fourteen rupees, half its worth, he’d noted with displeasure. What was worse, this time quinine could truly compare to her. She wired into me like blazes. Shouted, cried, pummelled his chest with her small, caramel fists. Morrison had done his duty and helped her out as best he could, but his feelings had turned to stone. When he finally left, it was forever, and with relief. He had moved up in the world. Women like Mary, as achingly lovely and tender as she had been, would not perform well under society’s glare.