by Ann Bridge
Amber rather enjoyed all this, in what she herself described to Benenden as “a cinema sort of way.” She took everything and everyone as she found them, though she theorised about some of them, in her own fashion. And she had next to no time to think about Arthur. She hadn’t really as much time as she wanted for horses, which were still her principal preoccupation in this strange new world. Uncle Bill, though better, was by no means well enough to return as yet to Peking, and Amber soon decided that she must somehow get hold of a pony of her own, without waiting for him.
She had her ride with Hawtrey at the Temple 01 Heaven, where, after a good deal of fussing about the stirrup-leathers and scolding of the mafoos on Hawtrey’s part, they rode round a narrow track, between plantations of young trees or open wild spinney, for about four miles. Amber was rather disappointed—she had read about the Temple of Heaven and hoped to see it; but all she got was a few scattered glimpses of the great triple dome of deep blue, and a gleam of white marble among dark trees. Hawtrey had given her as much coaching and advice, at first, as if she were a child of six: but he finally returned to the Legation full of enthusiasm, taking all the credit for having discovered that Miss Harrison rode “really well—very well indeed, you know. A pretty seat and good hands; a very pretty seat.”
The Grant-Howards themselves wanted ponies, and a few days later a ride was arranged at P’ao-ma-ch’ang to try some both of Leroy’s and of Harry Leicester’s. They all met at Leroy’s temple, where the animals waited under a yellow-washed wall, outside a stable-yard with willow-trees in it. Leroy took charge of the proceedings. He would only allow Joanna to ride a pony of his own selection, to begin with—“You’ll ride the Mishu Ma, Mrs. G.-H.” The Mishu, who owned his peculiar title of the “Secret Clerk” pony to the fact that he had formerly belonged to a private secretary of the Minister’s, now departed, was regarded as a safe animal. Nugent was mounted, after some scuffling, on a black called William Randolf—a discard from Bill Harrison’s stable. “He’s a fair jumper; Bill only turned him out because he wouldn’t train fine enough for racing”—so ran Leroy’s commentary. The character, achievements and history of each pony in Peking are as well known as those of the people, if not better. Hawtrey had brought The Gazelle again for Amber; to his evident disgust she insisted on trying the Siamese cat-coloured pony which Leicester had ridden in the paper-hunt. This animal, who rejoiced in the name of Bananas, had a wise head, and more shoulders and more carriage than most China ponies—he had taken her fancy, and try him she would. “He pulls like the devil,” Hawtrey muttered in a discontented aside in her ear. “Lloyd-Jones offered him to me when he left, and / wouldn’t take him. And he’s much too hot for you just now.”
But Amber was obdurate and off they went, accompanied by half-a-dozen mafoos with spare horses—a long straggling cavalcade, winding single-file along the narrow paths of beaten earth through the villages. Here on the outskirts of the city the market-gardeners are always busy; the low wind-breaks of kaoliang straw which sheltered the seed-beds shone like pale yellow reeds in the sunshine; peasants in blue were hoeing and raking among them; barrows of produce were being wheeled along the narrow sunk roads, and when the party encountered one of these, they had to scramble up the steep earth banks to avoid them. Presently Leroy decreed a canter—the long file swept swiftly through a wood of small pines, past a horseshoe-shaped graveyard, past a mud-walled farm and into another sunk track. Amber was enjoying the whole thing; Bananas was hot, and did pull—goodness, you wouldn’t have believed one of these little beasts had the strength!—but by gentling him, and letting him have the bit to shake about as much as he liked, she managed all right. Even Hawtrey’s displeasure amused her. As they left the track and skirted another small spinney he came and rode beside her, and urged her on no account to buy any ponies from anyone till Old Bill returned. “People here will stick you with anything, my dear Miss Harrison,” he said in warning tones, “positively anything. Even Harry stung me frightfully when I first came.” But Amber only laughed, and said she thought she should buy Bananas.
Leroy at this moment pulled up, and indicating two gaunt and stag-headed trees standing leafless and solitary about three-quarters of a mile away, said that the company might now “let them out” as far as the Ginkgos, as there were no sunk roads. Let them out they accordingly did—Amber was determined to see what Bananas was good for, and his flying start and turn of speed satisfied her completely. She reached the Ginkgos well ahead of the rest, and finding a handy mud wall, occupied herself in popping him over it, backwards and forwards, with an economy of effort and an easy skill which filled the four men with admiration as they rode up. “By Jove, she rides like a proper horse-coper!” Harry Leicester muttered. He had not intended to sell Bananas at all—the pony was oldish, but he was a good paper-hunter; if he did sell him, he had intended to “stick” the purchaser properly. But Amber’s prettiness and Amber’s horsemanship got past his guard; she rode back beside him talking horses with a knowledgeableness that matched her skill, and making herself uncommonly agreeable—Amber had bought horses before. On their return to P’ao-ma-ch’ang Bananas changed hands for 130 dollars, or roughly £13. Leroy chuckled as he heard the bargain concluded. “That’s the first horse Harry ever sold cheap!” he observed in a booming whisper to Joanna. “The little puss!” was her only reply. Even Hawtrey had grudgingly to agree that the pony was not dear. “I’m not surprised Harry sold him cheap to you” he said to Amber, with a certain emphasis, as they drove home, rather squashed together on the front seat of Leroy’s old tourer. “We don’t often see riding here like yours—most of the women ride like sacks of potatoes, le genou roulant, you know, and all that. It will be a tremendous pleasure to have someone here who really can ride.” Amber found nothing to say in reply to this. “But I hope you will sometimes let me help you, you know, if I can—advice, or any little thing.” His voice was different, suddenly; there was a note of sincerity in it Amber had never heard before, and she responded at once.
“Yes, indeed—thank you tremendously,” she said.
“You didn’t mind my suggesting that you shouldn’t buy in too much of a hurry today?” he went on, bending towards her—his handsome head, eye-glass and all, had a curious expression of submissiveness, suddenly. “I—you never quite know, here—” he had lost his glibness, for the moment.
“But of course not. You were very kind. Only I happened to know what I wanted!” said Amber gaily. “And I’ve got it,” she concluded.
She thought, while she bathed and changed on her return, how odd it would be if Mr. Hawtrey were to stop being a joke—because that was really what he amounted to, so far. A nice joke, but a joke, and she liked him best as a joke, she decided. But Mr. Leicester, for his part, confided to his wife that evening at dressing-time that he shouldn’t wonder if Joe’s goose wasn’t cooked at last. “How excellent!” said Mrs. Leicester slowly, “it will do Joe all the good in the world to fall in love. He’s sauntered about with that conquering air long enough.” She leaned forward to her mirror, examined the line of her jaw critically, and signed to the amah for the face-cream. Smoothing and powdering— “I hope she won’t marry him—” she said, and looked again into her mirror.
“Why not?” asked Harry.
“—Too soon,” Lydia continued. “It will need a good long spell of adversity to make Joe really marriageable.”
Harry pursed his mouth. “There’s something to be said for getting the adversity over first,” he said drily, as he left the room.
Two days after this conversation Amber lunched with the Leicesters. They lived in a Chinese house in the Tartar City, out near the Pei-t’ang. The Boy had told the ricksha coolie where to go, and Amber, who had no idea where the Pei-t’ang was, sat a little anxiously, cowering in her fur coat, while the blue-coated ragged figure between the shafts ran, ran, ran, just in front of her, his slippered feet patting gently on the cold dust. They passed the great golden-roofed gate-towers of the Forbidden
City, and skirted its scarlet wall for some time; then dived into a maze of small streets, all unpaved, with trees standing casually about the roadway, and blank walls on either side. The half-deserted, wholly casual air of this part of the city struck forcibly on Amber’s imagination; she would like, she thought, in warmer weather, to sit and meditate like that old man on the canal bank; to do her sewing on those steps where the knife-grinder was at work; or to mug up her Chinese grammar in that sunny corner where the itinerant barber, the stand with the tools of his trade set up before him, was shaving a man’s head, and cleaning out his ears with a small ivory spoon. She liked—almost with passion—the serene, leisurely way in which, in these quiet by-ways, any occupation was carried on by the roadside, without comment or haste; there was a freedom and a simplicity about it which drew at something in her with unexpected force. Peking was, in fact, beginning to take hold of her. When the coolie dumped her down at a scarlet door in a high grey wall, sheltered by a group of trees, she had a sense of interruption. And the luncheon which followed, cheerful as it was, gay to the point of noisiness, somehow made little impression on her; the jokes, the compliments, slipped off the surface of her mind like water off a pane of glass. She was glad when it was over—when Mme. de Bulle and Count Herman had taken their leave (neither François de Bulle nor the Countess were present, she noticed with surprise) and the rest were free to depart. She got into a ricksha, proudly said “Ying-kuo-fu” to the coolie, and prepared to enjoy the ride home.
As she re-passed the southern gateway of the Forbidden City, a sudden impulse took her to stop and look at it. “Man-man!” she said to the coolie, and experienced a little thrill of triumph when he really stopped. She strolled across to one of the five little marble bridges spanning the moat which crossed the paved area in front of the gate from side to side, their balustrades carved so richly and closely as to look more like ivory than stone. Before her rose the gateway, its double roof of amber-coloured tiles supported on rows of scarlet pillars, with heavy eaves painted in fresh clear colours; it was pierced by three deep tunnels, each with a scarlet door ornamented with rows of golden bosses as large as footballs, and nine in a row—nine being the Imperial number, only Amber didn’t know it. The central door was ajar, guarded by a knot of police with rifles, in black and white uniforms; every now and then a Chinese approached them, presented a pass of some sort, and was admitted. Amber was seized with a violent curiosity to see what was inside. She wondered if she could get in. It was worth trying; and taking out a visiting-card she walked firmly up to the police, held it out to them, and tapping her chest importantly, waved her hand towards the door, indicating that she wished to enter. The police took her card, held it endways, passed it from hand to hand, and finally, jabbering in a satisfied manner, allowed her to pass. Amused, excited, triumphant, Amber walked through the red door.
She found herself on a great paved roadway, at least a hundred yards wide, walled in on each side with narrow cloisters, and closed at the further end by another gateway precisely similar to that through which she had come. On her right the greyish green of thujas showed over the yellow tiles of the cloister, and among them the long golden roof of some hidden building, shining in the brilliant light. There was no one about; pale dead grasses stood up in the cracks between the paving-stones; a mouse ran nimbly through the sunshine to some hidden destination. Vast, deserted, desolate—and incredibly beautiful. In pictures seen at home in England, Amber had always rather disliked those curved Chinese roofs, thought them merely comic and in rather poor taste. But here, seen across immense stretches ot stone paving, they were splendid with a sort of inevitable splendour. On their great crimson ramps they rose against the sky, the yellow roofs softened by age and dust, and by the dead grass which covered them, to a gold only a little deeper than the thatch on new hayricks.
The supreme wonder of Chinese architecure lies in its use of space. It is not only in the curved pillared roofs, built to imitate the pole-propped tents of their ancestors, that the architects of the Forbidden City betray their nomadic origin. By a strange skill in proportions, by isolating great pavilions in immense stretches of flagged paving, they have succeeded in bringing into their palace courts the endless spaces of the Gobi desert. The eye travels over the lower walls surrounding each mighty enclosure to distant roof-trees, and beyond these to others more distant still, with a sense of beholding mountain ranges hull-down on vast horizons; the gold of the roofs suggests the wonder of dawn and sunset on far-off snows. The world holds nothing to match this, knows nothing on such a scale. Not even Ang-Kor can approach those areas of granite pavement, those miles of scarlet wall.
Amber of course knew nothing about Chinese architecture. She did not even know that by her judicious use of a visiting-card she had entered the Forbidden City through the dynastic gateway which the Emperor himself, in earlier days, only used on such ceremonial occasions as his visits to the Altar of Heaven—which is so seldom opened to foreigners that Sir James Boggit himself had never been through it. She was merely full of delighted wonder at what she saw, and anxious to explore further. She went on to the second gate. Here were more police, but she was ready for them, pulled out a card and passed through as before. She entered another stretch of paved avenue, as large as the first, but the gateway beyond it was even more splendid than the others. From the central portion two mighty wings projected, crowned with blunt tent-topped towers, each capped with a great gilded knob; in the enclosure so formed the groups of police, the one or two Chinese, looked like ants moving about. When she walked over into it the red ramps rose above her head like cliffs. But here the police were for some reason obdurate; she could not get through, and had to turn back. She had caught a glimpse of green through a half-open door in the cloister on her right as she approached the third gateway, and now, unhindered, she went over to it. The cloister was full of timber, broken lumps of marble and decaying rubbish; tiles were falling off it in places, the small door hung crooked on its hinges. Giving it a push, she passed through.
To most people, once or twice in a lifetime, there comes a moment of supreme recognition, when something often heard and never fully believed flashes on eye and mind alike with absolute conviction. Such a moment came to Amber then. She was in Xanadu! Straight in front of her, beyond a small stone Pai-lou, ran a quadruple avenue of thujas, with grey trunks as stout as English oaks. To the left of the avenue lay a broad moat, sunk between huge walls of dressed stone; beyond it rose a grey battlemented wall. And over the wall appeared the pleasure dome! A summer-house, a little pavilion, with roofs in tiers and at angles, fluted up and down; delicate, fantastic, gay—enchanting by contrast with the austere immensity of the grey wall and the greater gate-towers. And oh!—“the shadow of the dome of pleasure floated mid-way on the wave”—it really did. There in the blue moat lay the golden fantasy, the delicate thing. Murmuring the familiar lines to herself in a sort of ecstasy, she walked along the thuja avenue, and now came upon the final wonder. The caves of ice were there too! Sitting down on the low parapet beside the moat, she looked over; below her, in the deep cold shadow of the dressed stone, the thick ice of winter still clung to the wall in broad projecting sheets, and the water was lapping gently in and out under it.
By this time she was quite intoxicated with wonder. Nuggets indeed! Here was Eldorado! Her main thought was to find some way of returning to this magical place, for she guessed that the card trick might not always work. It was pure marvellous luck so far. Sitting on the parapet, in the sun, she spied about her. Just below the pleasure-dome, both moat and wall made a right-angled turn; some distance further on, the moat was crossed by a bridge, on which traffic was moving to and fro. Presently she saw a Chinese come out through the door in the cloister and walk along the narrow dusty strip of ground below the wall towards the corner. At the bend some little paper hovels encumbered the strip of ground, and he disappeared behind them; watching carefully—he had an odd hat on—she saw him reappear and pass on to the
bridge, where he mingled with the traffic and vanished. So there was another way in.
Satisfied that her new paradise was not closed to her, Amber turned now to further exploration. She was to be back at five to go with Mrs. Grant-Howard to a choral practice of part-songs for the St. Dunstan’s entertainment, but she had forgotten all about that. Behind the avenue was a crimson wall, all tenderly stained with lichen, and over it showed a long golden roof. After some search she found a little door in this wall, and passed through. She wandered on and on, through one red-walled enclosure after another, all full of saecular junipers or thujas—the “ancient greenery” of Xanadu. There was not a soul about—the whole place was empty, ancient and silent, except for the harsh cries of the little grey egrets which had their home in one grove, and the Peking crows croaking and quarrelling in another. She came at last to a paved clearing among the trees; on one side of it was a three-arched gateway, with something rather Moorish-looking about its marble carving. As usual, Amber went in, and found herself in the outer court of some building whose roof was visible over an inner wall—by its shape she judged it to be the same that she had seen from the avenue. Across the outer court where she stood a little moat wound mazily, in the best Kublai Khan fashion, appearing suddenly from underground on one side and vanishing, presumably into caverns measureless to man, on the other. It was spanned by seven little marble bridges; she crossed over, and went up some marble steps to the inner gate. But the scarlet doors were shut fast; she could not get in. Sounds came from within; peering through the crack, she saw two coolies hammering on a packing-case. This aroused Amber’s curiosity without surprising her—she had already learned that there are two men and a packing-case every few yards in China, and frequently they are hammering at it in the middle of the street. Since she could not enter, she sat down on a broken piece of marble in the sun. The court was all overgrown with dead weeds, their silvery empty seed-heads springing to a man’s height against the stained red walls; over the tiled ridges appeared the green thujas, with egrets sitting in them like weather-stained statues; further off still she could see the shining roofs of the great gates, like huge golden tents. It was all so still, deserted and forgotten, in the afternoon sunshine, that but for the occasional hammering she would hardly have believed that she was in the actual world at all.