The Ginger Griffin

by Ann Bridge

  “No,” said Amber.

  “The troops got in that way when they raised the siege of the Legations in the Boxer rising in 1900,” he said. “It’s an historic site.”

  “Oh,” said Amber, and looked at the arch again. “Wasn’t it guarded?” she said. The arch was high, and so broad that a dozen men could march through it abreast—to enter it, as they were now doing, seemed too easy a matter to fit such an event.

  The young man burst out laughing. “You have the true historian’s outlook, evidently,” he said—“and observe historic sites with an accurate and sceptical eye. But—no; it wasn’t like this then. It was only a conduit with a grating and water in the bottom. They really had quite a job to get in—it was all quite proper.”

  Amber laughed. The tone of the young man’s voice as he apologised for the Water-gate, and his pursed fish’s mouth amused her. She was wondering if he could be Benenden.

  “There are quite a lot of historic sites here,” he went on. “If you have feelings about the Flag, and all that, you can go and have them at the Jade Canal gate, where there are bullet-holes in the wall. I’ll take you. Do you have feelings about the Flag?” he asked, peering at her.

  “I did on the boat,” said Amber. This seemed to amuse the young man; he laughed again, not loudly, but with a sort of intensity of amusement that was very engaging. “Service in the saloon on Sundays? The Navy singing?” he said. “Oh, I know——”

  “Benenden, put Miss Harrison in my car,” said Leroy loudly. “You two can walk.” Amber found herself in a car with Miss Carruthers and Dickie, driven by a smart Chinese chauffeur. She caught a glimpse of a high European building as she was driven off down a broad walled street, planted with an avenue of immature and leafless trees, towards the Legation. Tired, hungry, excited by the strangeness of everything, she was yet conscious of a small stir of interest—the mousy man was Benenden.

  The two young men, meanwhile, strolled back together towards the Legation, following the cars. “Mrs. Nugent looks all right,” Hawtrey observed, pausing to light a cigarette.

  “It’s most extraordinary the way all the tallest men in the Service marry these minute wives!” burst out Benenden, talking with extraordinary energy and very fast. “Roger and Dacres and Leftwich and Killin and Tommy Armstrong. Every blessed one of them over six foot, and deliberately arranges to go through life beside a little dot of a woman. And generally plain with it!”

  “Mrs. Nugent’s not too bad,” said Hawtrey. “She’s not exactly a femme fatale, but she’s quite chic. Not like poor Frosty-face, the gouvernante. What’s her name, by the way?”

  “Don’t know. Never heard it. Forgotten it. What’s it matter, anyhow?”

  Hawtrey didn’t seem to think it mattered much either. “I like the looks of the girl,” was his next remark.

  “It’s one more girl, anyhow,” said Benenden. “Not that girls of that age are particularly interesting as a rule, but it is something to dance with.”

  “My dear fellow, that’s your own fault. The place is full of nice girls, charming girls; only you are so frightfully fastidious, you won’t see anything of them.”

  “No, I damn well won’t!” Benenden burst out. “I won’t go and dance with typists and secretaries, just because I’m short of a petticoat. I’d sooner go without.” He pulled a pair of fur-lined gloves out of his pocket, drew them on, humped his shoulders and said “Filthily cold it is.”

  “They’re British, after all,” said Hawtrey, ignoring the last remark. He threw out his chest a little and said— “Out here it’s positively a duty to keep in touch with one’s nationals. Places like this are the front line trench, you know. When you’ve been out here as long as I have——”

  “Oh, stow it, Joe! Damn national solidarity!” Benenden, like most people who knew Hawtrey at all well, knew at the beginning of one of his high hurried orations precisely what clichés he was going to use before the end.

  “Oh, well, you know——” Hawtrey was quite unruffled. He returned to the subject of Miss Harrison. “She’s a pretty girl. She looks thoroughly well bred, and rangée, you know. Naturally, my dear fellow, I prefer that, just as you do, just as you do.”

  “It’s possible for girls to be too rangées” said Benenden gloomily—“though not usual, I admit.” They had entered the Legation compound by this time, and at the grass square Benenden swung off to the left.

  “Coming to ride this afternoon?” Hawtrey called after him.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Do you good, you know—make the blood run.”

  But Benenden, without replying, entered a low grey house backed against the wall of the compound, and disappeared. Hawtrey walked off to his own house and lunch.

  On the following morning Nugent Grant-Howard was sitting in the room already allocated to him as a study, surrounded by his tin boxes, methodically arranging his papers in the drawers of a large heavy writing-table. The room was a tall grey box, with two French windows draped with blue curtains giving on to an arcaded verandah, which ran round two sides of the house. It bore signs of the process of “setting-in”—besides the boxes, piles of books lay on the floor, while others were already in position in the shelves on both sides of the fireplace. A small tree of white lilac stood in a corner by the window, delicately distinct against the grey wall, curiously frail and fresh among the solid blue furniture; on a long narrow table three shallow earthenware bowls held violet plants in full bloom. Nugent’s eye rested on them as he paused for a moment to light a pipe, and he leaned over and sniffed the nearest bowl with a sort of gratitude. Well!—if the house was ugly and the furniture worse, it was something to have flowers like this in February. And that chef man with the profile like a Roman Emperor and the long pigtail could cook! Inured by long habit to the rigours of moving-in in many capitals, Grant-Howard had been astonished by the ease with which it happened in Peking, and amused by some of its features. That parade of the servants, for example—conducted by the fellow with the game leg, Jamieson, the Legation Constable. The domestics, in their white or blue clothes, had all filed past, each making a curious sort of reverence, while Jamieson spoke their names. There seemed to be no end of them—a dozen or fifteen, at least—and most of them had been in the house for years. Only Liu, the Number One, a little wizened fellow with a face like a monkey, spoke any English to mention—how Joanna would manage he didn’t know, except that Joanna always did manage. And by Heaven, how those servants had worked the day before! They had lunched off borrowed stuff—Mrs. Hugo had arranged all that; but by dinnertime wine, silver, linen—every blessed thing had been stowed somehow, and they had eaten a first-rate dinner off their own plate and china, as if they had been there for weeks. That child, too, Amber, had worked like a horse, and shown she had quite a head on her shoulders. Nugent laughed suddenly, remembering the episode of Amber and the Minister, the previous afternoon. Amber, under Joanna’s instructions, had been sorting sheets in the hall, which was a sea of linen and blankets surrounded by a shore of packing-cases, when Sir James walked in to pay a call of welcome. Amber, hearing a voice asking for Mr. Grant-Howard, looked up from where she knelt, flushed and dishevelled, and said in some confusion— “I’ll find him. Are—are you a consul?”

  “Certainly not,” Sir James replied, with some asperity—and then, taken with Amber’s prettiness and obvious embarrassment, “a Pro-consul,” he chuckled. Nugent, through his study door, had been a spectator of the little scene, which passed before he had time to rescue Sir James. But it had done no harm, he thought. Boggit was on the whole a good fellow, and a fairly easy chief to ménager. And now Nugent found his mind running off on the too familiar track, of how this new post was going to work out for him. He knew so well what it involved, and here it was all to be done over again—getting on with his Minister, getting on with the Chancery; taking stock of the chers collègues, finding out which of them mattered and which of them didn’t, and then getting on with them. He leaned back in his chair,
a little wearily, and puffed at his pipe, thinking how boring the business of getting on with the chers collègues was going to be. But it was absolutely essential to doing the job properly. He had of course also to find out what, precisely, the job was—what problems awaited solution, what was the most fruitful line of advance—all that. This prospect did not bore Nugent—he liked nothing so well as getting his teeth into a situation, and working it through. And here in China, it was bound to be peculiarly interesting and absorbing, getting to grips with this strange race. That part of it was all right. But there were always two aspects to every post—the job itself, and the effect on one’s career. Nugent was pretty well acclimatised by now to that curious sense of isolation, remoteness, and of almost complete non-comprehension by the authorities at home, which assails all diplomatists on foreign service. In that remoteness and isolation, so much, so painfully much, depends on one’s minister. He can blast a whole career in one private letter. Nugent had seen this happen, and a prickling of discomfort ran over his mind, like a shiver over the skin, at the thought. China was apt to be a grave of reputations. So far his own career had gone very well, without his needing to worry much; when he had been in any way conspicuously placed abroad, hitherto—in charge, for instance—the right thing to do on the spot had not been unduly unpopular at home. But this was sheer luck; very often it was unpopular—and what then? Oh, well, one must trust to luck—and he’d treated Walter and Noel pretty well. After all, the Private Secretaries were the people who mattered most in the long run.

  Shouts outside roused him, and he looked up. Slightly distorted by the glass of the double windows, he saw the blue-clothed figures of two of the house-coolies trundling an immense wooden barrel across the garden, while Dickie, minute but solid in his reefer and beret, commanded them with gestures and shrill cries. As Nugent watched, his face changed suddenly, almost out of recognition. The weariness, the careful diplomatic calm left it, and like a light switched on suddenly in a dark room, pride and tenderness illuminated his eyes, his lips—the whole man glowed with them as he looked at his son. The little monkey, ordering them about like that! When the procession with the barrel had disappeared behind a fringe of evergreens, Grant-Howard turned back to his papers. But the current of his thoughts had changed. He was aware of a certain vexation with himself for having allowed his mind to dwell on his career at all. That his children, that Dickie, should come to a healthy maturity was really what mattered—and that they should grow up intelligently honest, aware of interior values. Changing his spectacles to examine a paper more closely, Grant-Howard thought how tremendously important was this question of integrity in the inner life; how trivial, relatively, a mere career. And what, exactly, did one do to make one’s children realise it? Oh Hades, this telegram didn’t belong in this series at all! Where the devil was the file it did belong in? He became absorbed in the routine of his job once more.

  He was still shuffling his papers about and swearing gently and pleasantly to himself when the door opened and his wife came in. Joanna sat down in a blue armchair and began to laugh.

  “What is it?” Nugent asked.

  “This place is so comic!” she said. “We’ve got a new name!”

  “Sounds very Biblical,” said Nugent—“how have we acquired it?”

  “Oh, Mr. Hugo has been in about it, with another little man, very learned. Apparently we must have a Chinese name, for the servants and so on; and if you leave it to them, they make up one which means sewers or bitches. So an official one has to be given out.”

  “And what is ours?”

  Joanna consulted a slip of paper—“Kang Ho-Wu,” she read out. “That’s the nearest the Chinese can get to Grant-Howard. They haven’t settled what it means yet, exactly.”

  “But they must know what those words mean,” protested Grant-Howard, taking the paper and scanning it. His swift and orderly mind revolted from vagueness in any form.

  “No—not necessarily,” said Joanna, with the equable firmness which Nugent found so restful in his wife. “The learned little man explained it all. The sounds may mean heaps of things—it’s the characters which matter. He’s going to find some characters with frightfully exalted meanings to fit those three sounds.”

  “How crazy!” was Nugent’s only comment, as he handed back the slip.

  “I’m going to learn Chinese,” Joanna next announced. “Leroy will get me a teacher, he says.”

  “You won’t have time,” said Nugent dampingly.

  “Oh yes, I shall,” said his wife easily. “Though not much, I admit. Sir James sent Mr. Benenden across with this just now.” She held out a small paper-covered book. Nugent examined it—“Oh yes, the diplomatic list.”

  “He’s ticked the ones I call on,” Joanna proceeded. “The new arrival calls first here, you know—but only on potatoes as large or larger than oneself. The others call on me.”

  “Well, that lets you off with chef-esses and counsellors’ wives—not too bad.”

  “And Military Attachés,” she reminded him. “And then there’s an appalling lot of outside people—heads of Banks and Hospitals and God knows what. And the Posts and the Salt.”

  “Well, you must be careful to do it properly and only go to the ones you’ve got to,” said Nugent. He made this kind of remark quite mechanically, being perfectly well aware that Joanna was the most thorough and socially efficient of wives.

  But the list had brought him back into the cautious watch-your-step frame of mind, the curiously artificial atmosphere of diplomacy; that atmosphere in which no one ever says anything or goes anywhere or does anything without keeping a watchful eye on all the possible effects and repercussions of their words or actions. Naturally this is most acute in a new post, when all one’s social surroundings are terra incognita; but to some extent it persists always, at once exciting and enervating.

  His wife, however, rated his remark exactly at its due worth. “Oh, that will be all right,” she said.

  “It’s a pity Leroy’s wife is at home—she would have put you right. Who shall you ask?” Nugent enquired.

  “The Private Secretary—that’s what he’s for,” said Joanna, getting up. She also went and smelt the lilac-tree. “Heavenly these flowers are,” she murmured. “Mr. Hawtrey has asked us to lunch tomorrow—shall we go?” she said.

  Nugent pulled out his little engagement-book and looked at it. “Yes—by all means. What do you think of George?” he asked, facing round to her. He felt a sudden urgent need for a touch of reality, for some breath of the homely simplicity of conjugal criticism, as a relief from the atmosphere of calls and telegrams.

  Joanna gave him a shrewd affectionate glance: “If I were clever, I should call him stupid,” she said. “At present I call him remarkably good-looking!” She laughed. “I’ll tell you more tomorrow.” She picked up a single fallen blossom of the lilac, stuck it in the thick hair above Nugent’s right ear, and left the room. Nugent turned back to his papers. He did not smile, but he felt he had got what he wanted.

  A little later the door opened again, and Miss Harrison entered, her arms full of books. “Mrs. Grant-Howard thought you would want these in here,” she said—“shall I put them on the shelves or on the floor?”

  Nugent rose and peered at the titles; he bent to peer, and his head, with the lilac-blossom stuck in the grizzled hair, came close under Amber’s face. Amber smiled, amused. “Oh, the floor, I think. Here, I’ll take them,” said Nugent, straightening himself up. He surprised her smile. “How do you like Peking?” he asked her, smiling too.

  “I think it’s enormous fun,” said Amber. “The servants are so fascinating. It’s like living in a cinema to watch them. Two men brought my morning tea! Oh, and Mr. Grant-Howard, have you noticed the face of that tall one called Chang?”

  Nugent had not. “What about it?”

  “It’s like a Saint’s face in a German drawing.”

  “I should doubt his having a Saint’s character, though he can undoubtedly
fold clothes,” said Nugent, in his most man-of-the-world manner. Amber felt rebuffed.

  “I must go,” she said. “I promised to help Dickie. He’s started to build a ‘forpress’ in the upper garden.” At the absurd word a gleam of that illumination of pride and tenderness came again into Nugent’s face. “Oh, that’s what the barrel was for,” was all he said. But Amber went off with a new facet to her growing theory about her host—that his man-of-the-world-iness was only skin deep. Then what was underneath?

  Chapter Five

  MR. GEORGE HAWTREY prided himself a good deal on the excellence of his housekeeping. His bungalow was comfortably, almost richly furnished, with Chinese curios superimposed on a basis of solid furniture taken over from his predecessor, and diversified with a sprinkling of trophies from Uganda. The whole effect was agreeable and slightly incoherent, like Hawtrey himself. On the morning of his lunch-party he had left the Chancery a little early, and was now congenially engaged in giving the final touches to his arrangements—tasting the cocktails, chivying the boys and arranging the name-cards. Cigarettes—where were the Virginian cigarettes? Here there were only Russian and Turkish! Chin, his Number One, said Mastah not order wu wu wu (555’s). He was told, explosively, to get them, and a coolie went flying from the back regions to the canteen.

  Hawtrey continued to plan his table. Mrs. Grant-Howard must of course go on his right—she was a counsellor’s wife; but who sat on his left was more difficult. Madame de Bulle, the wife of the French Fourth Secretary, had a technical claim as being a diplomat’s wife—but then Countess Stefany was of much higher rank socially, though her husband was merely a buyer of Chinese antiques for a big Vienna-Paris firm. In the end he plumped for the Countess; Mimi de Bulle was a sportswoman, whatever you might think of her morals, and above such petty considerations. Harry and Lydia Leicester of course were merely chemical fertilisers, and apart from her beauty and his good nature had no social claims at all—she could sit on Grant-Howard’s left and Mimi on his right, and they could all talk horses. He half regretted having asked Mimi and Count Stefany together, now that that girl was coming—one always did ask them together, but English girls—! They really were very awkward, they knew nothing about anything, and they had a way of opening their eyes as wide as a baby’s, when they were shocked, and saying nothing at all. Well, if she was going to live for a year in Peking, she must begin to learn, thought Hawtrey to himself, humming “La donna è mobile” a little out of tune, as he placed a card with “Miss Harrison” on it between Harry Leicester’s and Benenden’s; he dropped his eyeglass, and before he found it, trod on it; calling to Chin to clear up the glass chips, he went into his study and got another from a box on the mantelpiece. But she looked a nice girl, a pretty girl, Miss Harrison—after all, what was there to touch a nice well-bred English girl? He hoped Herman and Mimi would behave. If only they would stick to horses! That really was the main concern of all of them. If the G.-H.’s wanted to ride, you couldn’t do more for them than to introduce them at one go to the Leicesters, who simply lived for horses: to Mimi, who had the best racing-stable in Peking, except perhaps Old Bill’s, and to Herman Stefany, who was quite the most brilliant horseman in the place.