by Ann Bridge
“Er-ch’in-ch’ai t’ai-t’ai lai-loh!” announced Chin, and Hawtrey went into the drawing-room to greet his guests. By Jove, she was a pretty girl, now she was all dolled up! And Mrs. G.-H. was very fresh and chic, too, in those furs. A certain amount of screaming outside heralded the entry of Madame de Bulle, a large round-about French Canadian, whose dress and make-up were carefully designed to give the maximum impression of impropriety, and succeeded. She flung herself on Hawtrey, thrusting her arm through his—“Ah, Joe, mon ami, figure-toi que Huron, mon beau Huron, a quelque-chose de grave!” Hawtrey glanced at Amber over Mimi’s head—sure enough her eyes were wide as an infant’s. He hurriedly detached Madame de Bulle sufficiently to present her to Mrs. Grant-Howard, and then the Leicesters came in—Harry small, neat, dark, with a mouth so like a jockey’s that one expected to see a straw in it; Lydia tall, slender, ashen-blonde, her face as still as a flower—except for her very vivid blue eyes there was no life or colour in her face at all. There were more introductions; the Stefanys arrived, and hard on their heels Grant-Howard and Benenden, completing the party. When everyone had nibbled an olive or two, drunk a cocktail, and flung a minute cigarette with a straw mouthpiece into the fire unfinished, they went in to lunch.
Sitting at the round black lacquer table, incredibly smothered with yellow roses in the month of February, Amber observed her fellow-guests. Mr. Leicester on her left was talking about ponies to Madame de Bulle; on her right Rupert Benenden was eating his soup with humped shoulders and a general appearance of gloom. This was really a relief to her—too humble to feel that she had much claim on the attention of others, she liked to be able to study them undisturbed before she was called upon to make the effort of conversation herself. The Stefanys attracted her attention first. The Countess was very tall and dark, and quite perfectly dressed, but Amber was absorbed by her face; she had never seen so much animation in a human visage before. It was impossible to tell if she was beautiful or plain, because her face was never still enough to be seen. This Amber found curiously fascinating. She turned her attention to the husband. Count Herman was slight and fair, with an over-sweet smile which he used all the time, but Amber thought his eyes looked a little malicious. He, too, was talking about horses to Mrs. Grant-Howard; everyone was talking about horses; she could hear her host’s high voice and frequent laugh referring to horses across the table. This ought to have made her feel at home, but for some reason the familiar jargon, in a setting so unfamiliar as this room with the scroll-paintings on the walls, the masses of yellow roses on the table, the discreet boys in white moving silently over the rush matting, merely had the effect of emphasising her sense of strangeness. Most of all perhaps, it was odd to hear a kind of talk she knew so well, in the mouths of people so unwonted to her home-bred eyes—Count Stefany with his sleek un-English fairness, his wife with her dark grace and unbelievably perfect clothes, or that Madame de Bulle! Impossible to imagine them in Gloucestershire. She found herself looking at the Grant-Howards, who so recently had also been strangers, with a sense of reassurance—now they represented the familiar; they were her safety here.
Mr. Leicester presently turned his dark jockey’s face to her and asked her if she rode? Amber said that she did.
“Good! You must come out and see our temple at P’ao-ma-ch’ang,” he said. “It’s a charming place. We do all our riding from there. We share it with Joe, you know.” Amber did not know. “Joe,” he called across to Hawtrey, “I’m telling Miss Grant-Howard that she must come out to the Temple of the Excited Insects and try some ponies there.” Hawtrey made some indistinguishable reply. Amber opened her mouth to say that she was not Miss Grant-Howard, but Mr. Leicester was too quick for her. “We might be able to put you on to something that would suit you,” he went on, turning again to Amber—the faintest flavour of the salesman crept into his manner, to her amusement. This at least was familiar.
“You’ll keep your ponies in the Legation Stable, I suppose?” Mr. Leicester pursued. “Do you know how many you’ll want, at all?”
“I expect I shall keep them at my uncle’s—I believe he has a stable,” Amber replied.
“Aren’t you staying in the Legation, then?”
“Only till they come back; then I go to the Harrisons.”
“Oh! Oh, you’re Old Bill’s niece, that he was talking about. I apologise—I got you wrong. Oh well, he’ll put you right, of course.” Mr. Leicester’s tone altered considerably at the mention of Old Bill. His air of salesmanship vanished. “He’ll get you the best of everything,” he said, almost ruefully. “Do you read, Miss Harrison?” he went on. “That is much rarer here. Everyone rides in Peking, but practically no one reads, except me and Benenden.” Amber noticed that he did not wait for her reply. “We read, don’t we, Benenden?” Mr. Leicester continued, talking across her. Benenden made no answer. Still untroubled, Mr. Leicester went on—“By the way, what did you think of that last book of Rotherham’s I lent you? Have you finished it?”
At this point Hawtrey’s voice rose across the table. “Miss Harrison, you must have some of this. This is bustard—our Peking speciality. Most unusual, you know, and delicious—really delicious. My boy gets them specially.” Amber helped herself rather gingerly from the breast of an enormous bird to a slice of dark brown meat which looked like mutton, and tasted like venison, with a reminiscence of grouse. It was delicious, as Hawtrey said. But Benenden was now replying to Leicester, across her. “Yes, I finished it—I don’t like it,” he said.
“Oh, don’t you? It’s written with tremendous punch, don’t you think?”
“It’s got a sort of vulgar violence, if you call that punch,” said Benenden. “Look here, Harry, you were in the War and so was I, but we don’t spend our time either bleating that the War has wrecked our lives, or bellowing like angry bulls at our fathers for having caused it. Aren’t you getting rather fed up with all these books that do? It simply isn’t true that the War was made by the old men in Clubs—and it’s even less true to pretend that it wrecked our lives. It ended lives enough, God knows, but it didn’t wreck all the others.”
“I think Rotherham is tremendously sincere, though,” said Leicester.
“Oh, sincere! My dear Harry, a little boy of six kicking and yelling on the floor is tremendously sincere, he’s showing terrific ‘punch,’ as you call it, but we don’t extol him for that.” Leicester laughed, and Amber laughed too—Benenden’s own violence was curiously engaging. “It’s childish temper, that’s what it is—it isn’t a mature book. One expects the young in their twenties to rage against the established order, and scream hysterically about the older generation; but if a man hasn’t outgrown all that by the time he’s thirty, he’s no damn good. This man Rotherham was all through the War; he must be nearly forty, and yet he’s still in a screaming temper over it. That’s silly, you know.”
“I agree with you up to a point,” said Leicester—“I still think the actual writing is extraordinarily competent. And he does know what he’s talking about.”
“My dear chap, we all know what he’s talking about! So why talk about it? He’s got no monopoly of the War. Why can’t he let it alone? It was nasty enough while it lasted. What is even more silly and sickening, if possible,” Benenden went on, talking faster and faster and with more and more emphasis, “is these young novelists, who were being trundled about in perambulators while the War was on, and now take it upon themselves to stand up and curse the older generation too, and say-that their silly neurotic little lives have been blasted. If your life is blasted, let it be blasted, blast it! But don’t write it up, for God’s sake! Who cares?” He drank some wine, while Leicester laughed out. Benenden suddenly turned to Amber and said, “What do you think, Miss Harrison?”
“I—I don’t write,” she faltered, taken aback.
“No, but you read, don’t you? Do you agree with me about these sort of books?”
A sudden memory of certain young novelists who had tormented her with their c
leverness at Riddingcote came into Amber’s mind, and with a little revengeful impulse she said—“I think I agree with you that it doesn’t much matter if some writers’ lives are blasted.” Benenden looked at her with surprise—his eyes said “Oho!” though he merely pursed his mouth—this was quite unexpected. Leicester roared; “One for you, Rupert!” he said. Amber blushed furiously—she had forgotten for the moment that Benenden wrote. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she said.
“But that’s a very sensible thing to mean,” said Benenden. “It doesn’t in the least matter if most people’s lives are blasted, if only they’ll keep their mouths shut about it. Besides, it’s generally their own fault if they are. Isn’t it?”
“I expect so,” said Amber limply. This last shot of Benenden’s brought her down from her little flight of animation like a bird with a broken wing. Of course it was one’s own fault—her misery over Arthur was her own silly, silly fault! It all rushed over her again, making her feel lost and small—involuntarily her eyes sought the Grant-Howards. To her relief, Joanna at that moment rose, with polite smiles at the Countess and Madame de Bulle, and the ladies left the room.
In the drawing-room Mrs. Grant-Howard and Countess Stefany, seated on an immense sofa, their feet on the jazz-looking skin of an okapi, at once began a brisk conversation about mutual friends in Buda-Pesth, while Madame de Bulle started a toilette of such a drastic nature that Amber was quite embarrassed. She pulled off her hat, combed her thickly-waved and very improbable orange hair, and besides the usual application of powder and lipstick, she did things to her eyebrows and lashes with a small black brush, which like the rest of her face equipment lived in a large silver case of many compartments. While she made herself up, she chattered in French to Mrs. Leicester about reducing exercises with the most extreme frankness; Amber could not understand all she said, but frequent references to “les hanches” caught her ear. She thought Madame de Bulle a dreadful person. She went over, coffee-cup in hand, to look at a leather shield, strangely decorated, which hung on the wall. She tilted it sideways, to see how it could be attached, and came on a gummed slip of paper on the back, on which was written in a very neat small hand—“Given me by my friend Ban-to-bu, Chief of the Ngamba, on my birthday, Oct. 10——, for killing a lion which bothered him.—G. H.” This inscription pleased Amber—it showed her host in a nice light, she thought; she liked the simplicity of “bothered,” she liked the description of the chief as “my friend.” She thought of Hawtrey’s face as she had just seen it—handsome, with that clean race-horse look about the regular features and the narrow red head, though the eyeglass and the little moustache gave a touch of fashion which rather repelled her. She tried to imagine him in conversation with his friend Ban-to-bu, and found it possible, but difficult. What she had so far heard of his conversation seemed to her formal and rather foolish. And yet there was something likeable about him—his smile was reliable and kind.
Her meditations were interrupted by Madame de Bulle coming up to her, putting her arm affectionately into hers, and leading her, to her great embarrassment, to a small divan. “You are the niece of my old friend Beel ‘Arrison—we shall be friends together, isn’t it?” she observed, pulling Amber down beside her and patting her hand. “You ride also? You love ponies, like eem? That is good. Then we are friends.” She threw off these professions of friendship with a sort of voluble ease which disconcerted Amber very much—she was not accustomed to being patted by strangers, and her theory about this stout improper-looking person was already cut and dried. “Beel and I, we are—’ow do you say?— concourants” Madame de Bulle went on, with a loud jolly laugh; “’e always seeks to beat my ponies in the races, and I seek to beat ‘is. ‘E ‘as some very good ones, but so ‘ave I.” She laughed again. “You will come and see my ponies—come to lunch with me at P’ao-ma-ch’ang, yes?” Amber made some polite response. “You will see Huron—’e beat your uncle’s pony, Norsecliffe, last year.” She was making some enquiries as to Bill Harrison’s state of health, when the men rejoined them; in the general reshuffle which ensued, Amber found herself talking to her host.
“Well, Miss Harrison, I hope you’ll like us,” he began, turning his eyeglass on her. “A Legation is a funny place, you know—a little world! And all sorts in it. Benenden, you know—you’ve been talking to him; he’s one of our learned ones. He and Leroy. Have you met Leroy? He’s a great man, is Henry. Odd combination, you know—knows more about China than almost anyone living, and yet he’s a terrific sportsman, the best polo-player here. I’m not learned,” Hawtrey went on, with a cheerful laugh—“but after all, that’s not the only thing in diplomacy, as you’ll see, my dear Miss Harrison. The Minister isn’t learned either—he and I are a sort of bloc du bas-front in the compound.” He laughed again. “Have you met the Minister?” he asked her.
“Just,” said Amber. “I made rather a bad break with him, I’m afraid.” The evident amiable intention of Hawtrey’s compte-rendu of the Legation had begun to put her at her ease, and she told him how she had asked Sir James if he was a consul. Hawtrey laughed. “Poor old man! How did he take it?”
“He said, ‘No, a proconsul,’” said Amber.
“Now that’s exactly like him! He does think pro-consularly,” said Hawtrey. “That’s very characteristic.” Hawtrey nearly always said the same thing twice over, in different words, as Amber was beginning to notice. “Do you know the story of old——” he continued, “who was sent as Minister to Brussels, when the rnaitre d’hôtel in the restaurant thought he recognised him and called him Monsieur le Consul?— ‘Le service consulaire, c’est une belle carrière, je ne dis pas le contraire—mais moi, je suis Ministre!’” Hawtrey told this story with a rapidity and perfection of indignant French intonation which made Amber laugh. “That’s the attitude of all Ministers to the life, my dear Miss Harrison. Ni shên-ma?” he said to a servant who now approached him; “Excuse me, please, Miss Harrison—the proconsul is on the telephone!” He gave his high laugh and hurried from the room.
“Where has Joe gone?” Mrs. Leicester asked in a languid voice, drifting over to Amber.
“To speak to the Minister on the telephone,” Amber replied.
“It would have to be the Minister, if Joe was rung up in the middle of a party,” said Mrs. Leicester, looking very faintly amused.
“Why?” asked Amber innocently.
“Oh, because Joe is like that. Diplomacy is the breath of his nostrils. But he’s a dear.” She pulled her furs up round her thin shoulders, so that the fine soft darkness touched her pale face, and said, “Joe’s very innocent, really—that’s why we all like him.” She looked sideways at Amber and said, “I expect you are rather innocent too, aren’t you?”—and again she looked faintly amused. “You won’t like everything in Peking, or everyone, but you can be very happy here, if you choose your people and your occupations. You ride, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Amber.
“Well, if you stick to that, and to people like Joe, you’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Leicester. She looked thoughtfully at Amber, with her blue eyes in her still face, and then gave a tiny laugh. “You want to ask me why I’m saying this to you the moment we meet, don’t you? Never mind about that—remember it when you leave. Most girls who come to Peking leave it engaged, generally to the wrong man; and nearly all women leave Peking with a broken heart. But your Aunt Bessie won’t tell you so! She’s never noticed! Have I been impertinent?” she asked, with a faint, charming smile.
“Oh no!” said Amber. She did not in the least know what to make of Mrs. Leicester’s sudden démarche, but she liked her face, and her own natural impulse towards amiability in all circumstances was uppermost. Murmuring that they would meet again, Mrs. Leicester drifted away.
Walking back alone—Mrs. Grant-Howard had gone straight on in her ricksha to pay calls—Amber first drew a deep breath of relief. The stinging glittering air, the flooding cold sunshine, were delicious after the hot rooms in the bungalow. A
nd suddenly she decided to walk about and explore the compound a little. She strolled down a straight drive, bordered with small leafless trees, looking with interest to right and left—at a large handsome Lutyens-y house in a pretty garden, at various low ugly buildings whose use she could not guess, but which were in fact the dispensary, the electric-light plant, the artesian well and the sanitation system. Well, if that was a diplomatic luncheon, it was rather dull, Amber thought regretfully, as she walked along; except Benenden and that strange Mrs. Leicester, no one had been very interesting. Worse, she felt that these people were going to be rather hard to like and get on with; there was something—what was it?—almost unreal about them which made them as intimidating in their way as the clever people at home. And thinking of luncheons at home caused Amber, from sheer force of bad habit, to wonder how she had acquitted herself. Oh dear, her mother would not have been best pleased—she had really said nothing at all, done nothing but listen. There hadn’t been much chance, actually—at lunch itself Mr. Leicester and Benenden had done all the talking, and Mr. Hawtrey talked like—like a waterfall! She had liked listening to Benenden—she wondered why he was so violent; more than violent—so bitter. How awful ot her to have said that about writers’ lives being blasted, thought Amber, blushing again at the memory.