by Ann Bridge
Mrs. Leicester came up with Madame de Bulle. “They’re going round by the Sand Temple,” she said; “we’re going to cut across to the bank to see them pass”—and walked on.
“Anyone like to go? It’s no distance,” said Benenden to the party generally.
“I should stay here, if I were you, Mrs. Nugent,” said Sir James. “It’s frightful walking in these fields.”
“I think I will,” said Joanna. “My shoes are full ot sand as it is.”
“You?” said Benenden to Amber.
“Yes, please,” said Amber. The sight of horses jumping had stung her blood, as it always did—her eyes were bright with excitement; she longed to see more. She and Benenden accordingly set off after Mrs. Leicester and Madame de Bulle. They ploughed through deep loose soil for some distance till they reached a small track, which they followed to the foot of a great bank of earth some thirty feet high—Benenden took Amber’s hand unceremoniously and tugged her up it at a run. Madame de Bulle and Mrs. Leicester were on the top, a few paces away, with Rothstein and one or two others.
From the bank they could see out over a wide stretch of country, all brown and bare—here and there some spindly willows or a dark group of pines broke the monotony, and a line of very unreal-looking pink and blue mountains presided over the horizon. The wind was piercing; it raised little eddies of dust along the bank and across the sandy stretches below them. Amber shivered—it all looked exceedingly dreary and strange to her. Strangest of all was the idea of riding a point-to-point fetlock-deep in loose dusty soil, instead of across the green slithery meadows of an English meeting. And suddenly, seeing all that in her mind, she felt a rush of home-sickness—the home-sickness of the eye, which is so much more potent than any other. Benenden stood watching her; he wondered what she was thinking of, but he said nothing. He had been rather intrigued by her prompt and decisive action over de Bulle’s horse. Amber as a matter of fact was just recalling her last point-to-point at home—Arthur had been there—when her eye was caught by something. To the left of where they stood, the bank, which was actually the remains of an ancient fortification, bent round at right angles and ran far out into the fields; at its foot, beyond the bend, she noticed two red flags, with a yellow kaoliang fence between them. “Good heavens, is that supposed to be a jump?” she asked Benenden, pointing to it.
He looked. “Yes. That’s a typical schweinerei of Herman’s.”
“But it’s a ridiculous place!” Amber was beginning, indignantly, when cries of “Les voici!” and “Here they are!” from further along the bank interrupted her. Some distance away to the left a cloud of dust appeared—as it approached they could pick out various figures in it, before they were cut off from view by the intervening fortification.
“Now we shall see some smashes,” said Benenden. Amber hardly heard him—she was again feeling that dancing thrill of the flying blood at the sight of a race, with a little extra quickening of excitement because she had a focus for her emotion. She knew Hawtrey—therefore she wanted Hawtrey to win; she had someone to feel about.
A rider on a white pony appeared now on the top of the bank just opposite them; for one moment he was silhouetted against the blue sky, then slithered and skidded down the slope. It was Count Herman. At the bottom he pulled up dead; then, neat and light as a cat, he lifted his pony over the kaoliang fence in a standing jump. Amber could not restrain her admiration for so pretty a piece of horsemanship. Others now appeared on the skyline—Hawtrey and Bruno, Leicester and Leroy. Pertinax sidled down the bank sideways like a crab, refused and ran out, was brought back, and crashed half over, half through the fence. Meanwhile Leroy, to her amused delight, rode down the slope at an easy angle, wrenched his pony round, and cantering back, took the fence in a sideways jump. “What an old soldier!” she murmured. He was first away after Count Herman. Bruno’s horse fell coming down the bank; he picked himself up, with a loud “Maldito cascado!”—remounted and popped through the gap left by Pertinax, as did a crowd of others. Last of all came de Bulle and a small tow-headed man on a black pony. The chestnut was obviously out of control; seeing the slope below him, he shied away from it; de Bulle turned him round, and incautiously used his whip; the pony plunged furiously forward down the slope and fell, knocking over the black, whose tow-headed rider had dismounted and was leading him down. Without warning, a struggling heap of men and horses lay beside the kaoliang fence.
“Good! Budgen’s taken a toss!” said Benenden in a satisfied tone. “Don’t go!” he added, catching Amber’s arm as she started forward—“they’re probably quite all right.” Indeed it appeared in a moment that they were—Rothstein and Madame de Bulle hurried down the bank, but by the time they reached the group both de Bulle and the man referred to as Budgen were on their feet, and the chestnut, riderless, was streaking off after the rest of the paper-hunt as fast as he could go. The black pony was lame, and the tow-headed individual, looking very crestfallen, started to lead him home. Amber and Benenden could hear Madame de Bulle scolding her husband vigorously.
“Wretched François! Listen to Mimi taking it out of him!” said Benenden, grinning. “Come on, let’s go back and see the finish.” Amber wanted to do this too, and they set off at a round pace. She felt rather out of conceit with Benenden, all the same—she didn’t like the malicious pleasure he appeared to take in other people’s discomfiture. This, like his bitterness over Rotherham, didn’t fit in at all with her theory of the poet. “Why were you so pleased at that man’s getting a fall?” she asked him at length, a little out of breath with walking in a fur coat through the heavy going.
“Budgen? Oh, because he’s a swine,” said Benenden easily. “I’ll tell you about him another time. But he is a swine, and if he’d broken his neck just now I’d have thrown up my hat.” “Come over here,” he went on, as they approached the crowd at the post—“if we go a little way down this side we shall see the end of the run-in.”
Accordingly they clambered up on to a little mound. “That’s where they’ll come, down that gully and through those trees in the dip,”—he pointed with his stick. “The run-in’s always the same. Here they are!”
Down the gully indeed a speck appeared, and then another, and another, dust flying behind them. Triumphant yells from a crowd of Chinese in blue near a jump in the dip arose as two riders crossed it, only a length apart. Amber strained her eyes to identify them and saw that it was Harry Leicester and Hawtrey, Leicester leading: they swept through the trees, Hawtrey gaining a little, and approached the last jump at the foot of the long gentle rise which led up to the post. As they approached this jump, a mud wall, Amber saw Hawtrey suddenly swing to the right, and thought that Pertinax was going to run out. No, he was over, right at the wing—but Leicester’s pony appeared to skid sideways, just when he should have risen to the jump, and cannoned into the wall, shooting his rider over it. Hawtrey had not seen this, and rode on; but the third figure now crossed the mud wall, well to the right, like Hawtrey, and revealed itself as Bruno, coming up fast. A length behind, half-a-length, almost alongside—up the rise they came, riding a terrific finish; shouts rose from the crowd of Europeans: “Bruno! Bruno!” and “Come on, Joe!” But though Bruno’s black hung on Pertinax’s quarters, he could not overhaul the spotted pony, and in a little roar of cheering Hawtrey passed the post first.
“Good old Joe!” said Benenden. Then he looked at Amber. Her lips were parted with excitement; she was glowing, she was eager—she was very pretty! “You were excited,” he said. “Why? Did you want Joe to win?”
“I always am excited at a race,” said Amber—she thought Benenden’s question rather forward. “I can’t help it. But let’s find the others, shall we?”
They found Nugent. “Joanna’s gone home,” he said. “The Minister had to get back, and she was cold, so she went with him. He’s sending the car back for us.” Benenden and Hawtrey both accepted the offer of a lift, and after a hurried prize-giving by Mrs. Rothstein, the whole assembly p
acked into the waiting cars and started back to Peking.
“By George, old Stephanotis just about excelled himself today,” Hawtrey said, as they bumped along in the Minister’s roomy saloon. “He must have had that last jump watered; the take-off was a sheet of ice. Leicester says he’s going to report it to the Stewards.”
“Oh, that was why you swung out,” exclaimed Amber.
He turned to her, pleased—“Ah, you noticed that, Miss Harrison. Yes—saw it just in time.” He continued to regale them during the whole drive home with an account of the humours and perils of the paper-hunt. At one jump he was next to de Bulle, and heard him muttering “Courage! Voici l’obstacle!” to himself. “Old Henry went up to Herman at the first check and asked him where the paper hoops were for us to jump through, and whether he hadn’t better start the next lap standing on the saddle, so as to be ready for the other circus events. Herman wasn’t at all pleased.” Everyone, it seemed, was indignant with Count Herman’s line and his arrangement of the jumps; de Bulle as well as Leicester was meditating a protest, and so was Schroff of the American Guard. Amber could not help remembering the Minister’s remarks to Joanna about le sport holding people together; she felt that the day’s events furnished a rather curious instance of the promoting of international solidarity, but was too shy to say so. Benenden, however, with his usual keenness of eye, noticed her expression and said: “What is amusing you?” She told him, and the three men were delighted. “How the Diplomatic Body survives le sport is always the miracle to me,” said Benenden.
“I shall give them—ha-ha!—a diplomatic hunt next Sunday,” said Hawtrey complacently, as the car passed in at the West Gate of the compound. “And tomorrow you’re coming to try the Gazelle at the Temple of Heaven, aren’t you, Miss Harrison?”
“Rather!” said Amber.
Chapter Seven
THE Grant-Howards now settled down into the usual Peking social routine of lunches, dinners and cocktail-parties—diversified for Nugent by his work in the Chancery, and for Joanna by the task of housekeeping, and bearing the brunt of the family correspondence. House-keeping in Peking has certain peculiarities, foremost among which is the question of “squeeze.” Joanna was nothing if not practical; she knew how largely successful diplomacy depends on a good table and a well-run house; to ensure success she wisely began by consulting the authorities, like Mrs. Hugo and Henry Leroy. From them she learned a great deal about “squeeze.” It was, apparently, ruled by the strictest conventions. The cost of any given article bore an exact relation to the official rank of the household consuming it. Whereas a chicken in the market cost some thirty cents, the moment it entered the Legation Gate it cost thirty-five—the five cents being the legitimate “squeeze” or rake-off of the Kai-mên-ti, or gate-porter. But the further possibilities of the chicken in the matter of price were endless. If it went to the students’ mess, it would figure on the bill at a paltry thirty-eight cents; if to Mrs. Hugo, who was only a consul’s wife, at about forty-one; and so up through every grade of diplomatic rank, till it reached the Leroy’s kitchen at fifty-four, while the Ministerial chickens cost Sir James Boggit sixty-three or thereabouts. “And you can’t alter that, Mrs. Grant-Howard—you must just make up your mind to it,” Leroy told her, nodding his head. “You pay fifty-eight cents for your chickens and no more, but you won’t get ‘em for less. And the same with everything else. But look here, you do this. Make your boy write out the cook’s bill every day, and check it up in the kitchen, under the ch’u-tzŭ’s eyes, with your meal-book. Then he’ll know you’re watching him. And put down your weekly totals. He won’t squeeze you too much for the first fortnight, and when your totals begin to grow—and they will grow—then you can go for him.”
Joanna, characteristically, did not ask how one went for one’s ch’u-tzŭ—there would be time enough for that when her totals showed vernal symptoms of growth; she just noted down in her mind these extraordinarily illogical facts which Leroy had given her. Following his and Mrs. Hugo’s precepts, every morning, escorted like royalty by the No. I, she proceeded to her kitchen, received the bows of the white-robed cook and his assistants, and stood by while every saucepan and utensil was lifted down for her inspection; examined the ice-chest, and saw that the vegetables were correctly soaking in a pink solution of permanganate. Once a week she said that something was not clean. “Never mind whether it is or not,” Leroy had said. “Just tell your Number One to tell the cook it’s dirty; never tell him yourself. That keeps them up to it.” So each Wednesday Joanna complained of the dirt on some different and highly burnished article of her batterie de cuisine. And every Monday she said that the permanganate was not strong enough.
The Number One then produced the meal-book, and Joanna studied his projected menus for that day and the next, and compared the cook’s book with yesterday’s meals. Once a week, still acting on instructions, she queried some item; even if they had had an omelette and a soufflé, the cook had certainly not used 130 eggs! The reactions of the Number One and the cook to these reproaches amused her enormously. The cook would stand by, his eyes searching now her face, now Liu’s, with eager and puzzled intensity, trying to guess what was wrong. Liu then turned and spoke to him in Chinese, whereupon the cook would jabber some passionate explanation, waving his slender hands in gesticulations as fervid as those of an Italian prima-donna in Tosca. The Number One would then present the case for the cook in English, with a fine show of detachment and an almost legal impartiality. “Cook she say, t’ai-t’ai want welly good cake—use plenty eggs; she say, use not plenty eggs, cake not good!” Or “Mastah she like welly big om- lett; small Mastah she like welly big omlett—use lot eggs.”
Sometimes he threw in items of general information— “China eggs welly small”—to reinforce the cook’s case. All this time the cook stood, watching with searching in-tentness Joanna’s expression, again struggling to discover her reactions to Liu’s special pleading. It was essential to success, Joanna found, to preserve complete facial control; she must never allow it to appear that she was amused, as she always was, or half-convinced, as she sometimes was, by Liu’s arguments. She cultivated an expression of rather stern blankness, and usually ended by saying, quite unmoved, that seventy eggs was enough, and walking away. The cook would then break out into lamentations; but if she had played her part sufficiently well, Liu’s defence would crumple up—he would silence the cook with a firm word, and protest to his mistress that all should now be well—he would fix. And a few days later sixty eggs would suffice for precisely the same items; but, mysteriously, eight pounds of butter would have been used.
It was all immense fun, Joanna thought, much more fun than keeping house in any European country. The resourcefulness, the doublings, the pertinacity of the servants were endless, and formed a daily game, your wits against theirs. Often, she was sure, they won. But they were on your side in this, that squeezing you apart, it was their pride and their glory, as much as—no, much more than yours, to make your household a thing of perfection. “And anyhow it’s all so wildly cheap,” she told Nugent. “Imagine getting a cook like this for twenty-four pounds a year!” Joanna had been alarmed at first to find five men working in her kitchen, but was relieved to learn that she only paid wages to two, the ch’u-tzŭ and the next man, whom Liu referred to as “Leeti-Cook”; the others paid the cook for the privilege of working under him in her exalted establishment. “Leeti-Cook,” it appeared, cooked when his superior was out, but she never knew when this was, as no difference was ever detectable in the uniform and quite delicious perfection of the food.
For the rest, she took up the routine of life in a new capital with her usual assured ease. There was nothing very much out of the way about this part of it, except that till her car arrived she paid the innumerable calls on quite unknown people in a ricksha. Going about in her ricksha amused her greatly. There was of course the difficulty of directing the coolie, but he had been Guy Ruthven’s before, and apart from a slight tenden
cy to take her to the Club when in doubt, he did very well. She got Rupert, or Joe, or Jamieson the Constable, to tell her the Chinese versions of the names of the people she had to see, and wrote them down on her calling list. “Ta-Ch’in-ch’ai T’ai-t’ai, Fa-kuo-fu” she read out blandly, when calling on Mme. La Salle, the French Minister’s wife; and “San ch’in-Ch’ai T’ai-t’ai, Mei-kuo-fu” when calling on Mrs. Mencken, the American First Secretary’s wife. Bowling along the draughty dusty streets of the Legation Quarter, she summed up in her mind, rapidly, the woman she had just left, or adjusted herself to what she had heard of the woman she was going to see. She arranged an At Home day. “You’ll have a jour, dear lady, I do hope,” Sir James said to her with some urgency the day after the Rothstein’s luncheon. “It’s most important out here, you know, especially for one’s own nationals. They like it, they like to feel that they can come on a Monday and be sure of a welcome.”
“Why on Monday?” Joanna asked.
“Oh, because that has always been the Legation day—ever since Lady Jordan’s time,” he told her. “You’ll find it helps to hold them together,” he added.
Amber, who was present, had choked slightly. She recalled the paper-hunt and was a little sceptical of Sir James’s ideas about holding people together.
Mrs. Grant-Howard raised her dark eyebrows at Amber over the choke, half in sympathy and half in reproof; they were beginning to get on very well together, they shared small jokes like this. Joanna had rather wondered at first how she was going to manage about the girl, in the inevitable process of being entertained to death on their arrival; she would have no time to look after her, she feared, and it would be very dull for her alone with Miss Carruthers. Her fears however were quite unfounded. The woman shortage in Peking is chronic and acute, amounting practically to a famine; the advent of an extra girl was an unmixed boon to a small society which contained mostly married women, and a vast surplus of single men. Amber had been seen at the Rothsteins and the Paper-Hunt and was immediately in tremendous demand; she was expected to lunch, to dine, to dance, to drink cocktails, from morning till night.