by Ann Bridge
“I like the way she swims,” said Nugent. “And of course her legs,” he added, as an afterthought.
But Nugent had been keeping an eye on Amber, in spite of his preoccupation with China. The young always moved him a little: to a wistful half-envy of their youth itself, with its ardours and possibilities; to an amused pity for their inexperience and the hoops through which they would certainly be put. It had become clear to him that Amber was traversing a hoop of some sort—her face, on her hurried return to the boat at Southampton, had told him that much. He was touched too by her lack of assurance, the timidity of her desire to do the right thing with people, which he discerned behind her pretty manners; and he wondered whether it was due wholly to her present trouble, or to some deeper cause. Anyhow, he decided, it was time he found out a bit more about her.
“Isn’t that like the West Coast of Scotland?” he said to her one morning, coming up to where she stood leaning on the rail as they steamed down the Straits of Malacca, and indicating the coast of Sumatra. It was a damp overcast day, and the soft rounded contours rose blue and misty from a still, colourless sea. “Those hills might perfectly well be somewhere in Arran or Kintyre,” he went on. “Isn’t it funny to think that instead of blue hares and sheep and grouse, they are full of snakes and leopards? They look so quiet and harmless.” Amber, a little embarrassed at finding herself the sole object of his attention, murmured a vague assent. They continued to gaze on Sumatra till—“Is the world bigger than you thought?” Grant-Howard asked her suddenly, turning to her with a quizzical expression. Somehow this reminded her of her father in the most comforting way, and forgetting her embarrassment—“Much!” she answered readily.
“Are places important to you?” Nugent pursued.
“Yes—in a way,” she answered, doubtfully again, uncertain if he was “being clever to her” as she privately called it.
“In what way?”
“Well, in two ways, really,” said Amber, hesitatingly, and encouraged by his “Which two?” she produced her small thought: “There are the places you know well—they are frightfully important in one way; they’re like a house you live in.”
“Yes, good—well?”
“Then there are the places you just see, like that,”—she waved vaguely at Sumatra. “They’re very exciting, I think. Of course I’ve not seen many before this time, but each one I see makes me feel—somehow much richer than before.”
“‘The traveller who bears home bags of gold,’” muttered Nugent.
“Oh, but just that! Is it a poem?”
“Yes it is—and by someone you’ll soon meet,” said Nugent, smiling at her sudden animation.
“Oh, who?”
“A man called Benenden—he’s First Secretary in Peking. But go on about your bags of gold. What is your biggest nugget so far?”
“Something I saw in the Red Sea”—and she went on to tell him how she had mistaken sand and shadows, for a moment, for mist and thick trees. “You see, that has in a way given me Arabia for myself. Not the desert and camels and horses part—that belongs to the people who’ve told one about them. But the barrenness. Can you see that it makes it seem drier than ever to have fancied for a moment that I saw it with moisture and trees, the things it can never have?”
“Yes, of course it does,” said Nugent. He was impressed himself by the vividness of the girl’s impression. She had eyes, anyhow. “I wish I’d seen that. Tell me,” he went on, “which do you think most important—these places one just sees, or the ones one knows fearfully well?” He had already got a good deal and wished to draw her out further.
Amber considered. “I’ve seen so few strange places, it’s hard to say. But I think probably the familiar ones are. These new ones are exciting, but the others you know well are really in a way a part of you, and”—she hesitated—“and of other people.” He noticed the quick nervous look she shot at him, to see if she was going to be thought silly, and said at once—“Yes, I know what you mean. Places and people do get mixed up.”
“Oh, don’t they?” She was getting quite excited at being so thoroughly understood. “Do you know how a place can be affected by a person?” she said, staring away at Sumatra. Getting near the bone, thought Nugent—he said aloud, “Do you mean a place getting so connected with someone in particular that it seems coloured with them, like a dye? So that really you can’t see it or think of it apart from them?”
“Yes,” said Amber, and nothing else. It was exactly what she did mean; before the blue outline of Sumatra rose a picture of the pool among the sallows on the road between Thornhays and Riddingcote, which during those miserable months at home had not ceased to echo with a ghostly tune of Arthur, and her mistaken happiness. This thought frightened her with its intensity; she moved her hands restlessly on the rail—she mustn’t go back to all that! She began to wish to escape, only she hadn’t quite the courage. But Nugent noticed the movement of her hands, and led the conversation back to the strangeness of places—Penang and Colombo, which they had just seen. When Mrs. Grant-Howard came up a little later with some question and carried her husband off, Amber was left with a definite sense of comfort. However clever and important Mr. Grant-Howard might be, one could talk to him; and he kept on at a subject, didn’t skim off with the little light remarks. She felt almost at home with him. And to feel at home with anyone was a release from the slight strain of living for a month among people one didn’t really know.
For the rest of the voyage, too, whenever she acquired what Nugent had called a nugget, she thought of the line he had quoted—“The traveller who bears home bags of gold”—and speculated about the author, the man with the funny name which she hadn’t quite caught, Ben something. The words had captured her imagination, because they corresponded so closely to her own feeling. Amber had met plenty of poets—Lady Julia ran rather to literature—but it was a surprise to her that people in the diplomatic service should write anything but despatches, or whatever they did write. She collected one more supreme nugget too. After leaving Singapore they steamed for a couple of days up the China Sea—the weather turned rainy, rough and chilly, and they shivered after the heat of the last fortnight. And then one morning Amber woke to calm and clear skies, and her first glimpse of China. Not a landfall—no landfall could have been so lovely and astonishing. No—through her porthole, in the early light, she saw a distant fleet of junks, their square sails looking like a cloud of great brown and golden butterflies on the silky blue and primrose of the water. Oh, wonderful! She hurled on some clothes and ran up on deck, where she stood gazing at them, enchanted and stirred by her first movement of genuine curiosity about China for its own sake, and not simply as the place where Uncle Bill lived. There must be something remarkable about a race which could make of a fishing-boat a thing as lovely as a butterfly. She said something of this to Grant-Howard at breakfast, and he gave her one of his quick appreciative looks from behind his glasses. “Yes, and had you thought of them as seamen at all? Most English people don’t—their idea of the Chinese is a whole race paddling about ricefields in grass hats.”
“Mr. Grant-Howard, why do people say ‘John Chinaman’?” Miss Carruthers asked at this point.
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Nugent.
“They don’t say it in China—we call ‘em Daniels,” said Captain Heron. “You’ll see, in Hong-Kong.”
“Why Daniels?” Miss Carruthers wanted to know. But Captain Heron could not satisfy her.
“I wonder what they call us?” Amber hazarded.
“Big-noses, or foreign devils,” the Captain told her. “They think us simply hideous.”
In Hong-Kong Amber did see, or rather hear, the Royal Navy calling the Chinese “Daniels,” and it made her laugh whenever she heard it. But from Hong-Kong onwards the voyage became, she felt, more and more a succession of Consuls. Wherever Mr. Grant-Howard went, Consuls seemed to spring up before him like mushrooms, and afterwards she remembered each different port chiefly by the p
eculiarities of its Consul, as American tourists remember places chiefly by the peculiarities of the food. A huge whiskered Consul-General from Canton came down to meet Mr. Grant-Howard at Hong-Kong, where they lunched with His Excellency at Government House at the bottom of the hill, and dined with him at Mountain Lodge on the top. A thin learned Consul-General, and a whole troop of lesser ones appeared at Shanghai, where the party changed into a smaller boat to proceed to Tientsin; one of the lesser Consuls took Amber shopping in the French concession, and she learned that good blue-and-white china costs more in Shanghai than in London. The smaller boat was very small indeed, and it grew colder and colder; they made a sort of nest of rugs on deck, abaft the saloon, and camped there in the sun, watching the icicles which hung from the rails dip up and down against the bitter bright blue of the sea. At Chefoo the Consul was a long melancholy person with an umbrella; he and Grant-Howard stood on the deck talking, and staring at one another’s boots in the way that Amber began now to connect with official business. The Wei-Hai-Wei Consul, who appeared the moment they anchored, like all the rest, to talk to Nugent, was a little youthful man with bright eyes and long eyelashes—he looked, not at his boots, but at Amber, and she decided on these grounds that he wasn’t a proper Consul at all. When he had gone ashore, and they were steaming away from the wintry brown and white hills that mount guard over the harbour, she spoke of it to Nugent. “Is that little man—Mr. Green, was he?—really a proper consul?”
“Well, he’s a vice-consul, really, but he’s acting Consul there for the time being. Why?” asked Nugent. Amber explained, and Nugent roared. Joanna, hearing him roar, glanced across to where they stood together at the rail, and registered a further note of approval of Amber. Someone to keep Nugent content was always an acquisition—“if she amuses him, we must see plenty of her in Peking,” she thought to herself. She had gathered even in London that Peking was intellectually a desert. Not that Amber seemed strikingly intellectual, but Nugent never took any interest in complete mutts, however pretty. They had to be pretty, but they had not to be fools, or too affected, in order to amuse him.
As it turned out, they were compromised into seeing plenty of Amber from the outset. When they berthed at the bund in Tientsin there came on board to greet them, not only the inevitable Consul-General, a cadaverous man with a face like a lawyer and a bitter smile, but a neat stoutish little woman, in whose round face a look of worry was superimposed on an evident natural jollity, who was greeted by Amber as Aunt Bessie. Aunt Bessie was in trouble. Old Bill Harrison had been seized with some internal complaint while duck shooting near Pei-tai-ho, and had been hurried into hospital at Tientsin, where he now lay, watched over by Aunt Bessie from an hotel close by. Amber could not go to the house in Peking alone—“So you must just stay here with me, dear. I’m afraid it will be rather dull for you, as I am with your Uncle most of the time.” The Grant-Howards, on learning how the land lay—the Consul-General confided to Nugent that “Old Bill” was pretty bad—immediately offered to take Amber on to Peking with them and look after her till the Harrisons were able to come back to their own house. Aunt Bessie, though she made some formal protests, was obviously relieved at the suggestion and finally accepted it gratefully.
“She may be a help to you,” said Nugent to Joanna. “She’s rather good with Dickie.”
“Oh yes,” said Joanna easily. “I shall like to have her.” She was thinking that Amber was even better with Dickie’s father, who was really more of a proposition than Dickie. Very small boys don’t suffer from boredom, at any rate. “It’s an excellent plan,” said Nugent’s wife. So it was still under the auspices of the Grant-Howards that Amber entered Peking.
Chapter Four
THE Grant-Howard party left Tientsin on the morning after their landing in a slight and rather exciting atmosphere of uncertainty. There was a small war on, and their train was the first to go through to Peking for some days—indeed there was a certain doubt as to whether it would run right through. They sat crammed in a small coupé adjoining a long coach full of Chinese; a soldier with a rifle stood in one doorway, while a military executioner, a curved sword with a blade seven inches across slung at his back, patrolled coach and coupé alike. The fact that he wore elastic-sided boots and grey cotton gloves added, as Nugent observed, to his charm. Nugent sat reading some telegrams which he had got at the Consulate; Joanna was writing letters on her knee; Dickie kept asking Miss Carruthers if the executioner couldn’t be persuaded “po pake off his sworb, so as I cam see if ip will cup!” Miss Carruthers was very repressive; she thought the executioner a most dangerous and objectionable travelling companion; she was feeling train-sick, and resented the fact that she had to shove past the sentry every time she wanted to get into the lavatory. It was embarrassing enough, travelling with gentlemen, anyhow, Miss Carruthers thought, with a hostile glance at the unconscious Nugent: but really, to have to push a yellow Chinaman with a fixed bayonet away from the very door! It was not at all well arranged. Burbidge stared out of the window, and at intervals sniffed. There certainly was an odd smell all through the carriage—when the executioner came past, Burbidge sniffed harder than ever. She leaned across to Amber once—“Don’t you think he smells of acetylene, Miss, that man?” she enquired confidentially, in a whisper. Amber’s one visit to Italy enabled her to correct Burbidge; the smell was not acetylene, but garlic. “Comes to much the same thing, Miss,” said Burbidge, putting Eau de Cologne on her handkerchief—“I never could abide acetylene—not even on a bike, I couldn’t. It turns me.”
Amber, like Burbidge, sat staring out of the window. This was China! She saw a flat landscape, mud-coloured and absolutely bare except for innumerable small round mounds, anything from three to ten feet high, scattered through the fields, as though a whole army of giant moles had been at work. These, she learned from Nugent, when Dickie routed his father out of the telegrams with an enquiry, were graves. The soil was dry, with a dusty bonelike dryness such as she had never seen. At intervals they passed villages, groups of one-storey houses built of and plastered with mud, with thatched roofs—they were as brown as the soil they stood on. Groups of little spindly orchard trees made a pattern on the skyline from time to time, like blue and biscuit-coloured lace; and the shadows between the houses were blue. It had a certain beauty in spite of its dreariness, this immense expanse of landscape in two colours only, pale brown and pale blue, with its extreme simplicity of design; Amber remembered that Pater had said something very knowing about economy of detail in a landscape being so valuable and tried to remember what it was, but her attention was deflected by a trainful of wounded soldiers which they passed just then. Dickie screeched with excitement—“There’s a man with bloob om his bambage!” Slowly the train trailed on across the brown country, past ramshackle brown stations plastered with flaring yellow advertisements of American cigarettes, till at last it crept through an archway, rumbled along between a frozen canal and a high grey wall, and drew up beside a platform in a bare draughty station. They had arrived.
The considerable group which awaited them on this platform Amber sorted out gradually during the introductions. Henry Leroy, the Commercial and Oriental attaché, was the big heavy black-haired Irishman with a booming voice. The small pincé man with a thin, nervous, kind-faced wife was Mr. Hugo, the Consul. Consuls again! Then there was a very tall handsome red-haired young man with an eyeglass, a clipped moustache and a horsey walk, whom everyone called Joe, but who was introduced to Amber as Mr. George Hawtrey; and a rather smaller man, mouse-brown and rather untidy as to hair, with his coat-collar half turned up and a brilliant smile, whom everyone called Rupert and who was not introduced at all. In the background stood a gaunt lame individual in gaiters, presiding over a group of Chinese in neat quilted black cotton jackets and trousers bound in round the ankles with white garters—waving his hand at this group—“Jamieson will see about your stuff,” said Leroy to Grant-Howard—“We’ll go on. The cars are outside the Water-gate.” And i
gnoring their luggage as if it did not exist, he led the party off down the platform, which was a yelling mass of Chinese—soldiers and coolies mixed up with bundles of merchandise and crates of fish, professorial figures in long grey gowns with horn spectacles and umbrellas; mail-bags, railway employees—all struggling and shouting as if in the throes of a first-class riot. It seemed to Amber very unwise to abandon their possessions in such a mob; she wished she had managed to snatch her dressing-case, as Miss Carruthers had done. But no one else seemed to mind. Grant-Howard was walking between Leroy and Mr. Hugo, already talking business, she gathered from the scraps that floated back—“Wang’s attitude is the crucial factor,” “Likin is always the trouble.” Hawtrey was escorting Joanna, and talking hard already. “Of course you’re going to ride, Mrs. Grant-Howard? Splendid! We must get you fitted out with some ponies at once. They’re not really fully broken, you know, but you’ll manage them all right once you get the trick of it. Leroy and I will put you on to some.” Joanna made some appropriate response. “Oh, no trouble at all, Mrs. Nugent. You must come out to our temple and try some there. My friend Harry Leicester has one or two that would just do you, I think. He’s a very good fellow, Leicester. We share a temple, you know. And Nugent must come up to Huai Lai and shoot a goose soon. The shooting’s pretty good. Of course it’s nothing to what we used to get in Uganda—but it’s not too bad, not too bad.” His voice, rather high and curiously soft, ran on and on, as they trailed down a cinder-path under an immense forbidding smoke-stained wall—Amber began to feel hungry. The rather untidy young man was now walking beside her—as they approached an archway which pierced the wall he pointed to it and said, “That’s the Water-gate!”
“Oh, really,” Amber replied, looking at it.
The young man looked at her sideways. “You don’t know what the Water-gate is in the least, do you?” he said, twinkling at her with a pair of light blue eyes; eyes so very light as to be startling in his tanned face. He had a mouth rather like a fish, and he pursed it up at her now, quizzically.