by Ann Bridge
For a moment Amber was silent from sheer horror. Then she screwed herself up to it. “I’m afraid we were there,” she said.
“Were where?” Nugent asked.
“In the Forbidden City. We didn’t know either,” she said, feeling like a criminal. “But it was very nice, really,” she added lamely.
“Good heavens!” Joanna burst out, startled out of her usual composure. “Do you mean to say you took the child there today? You and he alone? Really, Amber, I thought you had more sense.”
Here Dickie interposed in defence of his beloved Amber. “Bom’p be silly, Mummie. Ip was quipe all ripe,” he said firmly. “And we’ve gop a hem.” He produced the little effigy triumphantly.
“But you must have known when you got there that there was a demonstration,” said Joanna to Amber. “Yes, Dickie, it’s lovely; now run to Miss Carruthers and get your tea.” She turned to Amber again. “Why didn’t you come home, as soon as you saw what was going on? How long were you there?”
“About two hours, I suppose,” said Amber wretchedly. “But I didn’t know what it was all about. There were only the crowds, and processions. I am most terribly sorry, Mrs. Grant-Howard. Of course, the posters looked anti-foreign, but the people were so—so fearfully friendly, I didn’t think it could be anything to do with us, after the first.”
“What exactly do you mean by friendly?” Nugent asked. “Do you mean they spoke to you?”
“We could hardly move for them!” the girl burst out, her lip quivering. “They kept coming up to look at Dickie, and smiling, and patting him—they left the speakers to come and see him! How could I know? If that’s their way of showing their anti-foreign feeling, it’s—it’s very misleading!” she said, on the verge of tears.
At that, suddenly, the momentary tension broke. Nugent opened his mouth and roared. He laughed till the tears came into his eyes. It was of course partly the reaction from his anxiety. And while he was still crowing with mirth over this unexpected revelation of the realities of an anti-foreign demonstration, Hawtrey walked in.
“The truants safely returned, ha-ha!” he said. “You gave us all quite a fright, Miss Harrison. We thought you’d got mixed up with the demonstration.”
“They had! They were in the middle of the whole blessed thing, and apparently had a succès fou,” said Nugent, wiping his eyes and changing his spectacles. “Come on, Joanna, give Amber some tea,” he said, shepherding them into the drawing-room—and Amber knew that by her host at least she was forgiven. “But of course that’s completely Chinese—that’s just like these celestial comics,” Hawtrey observed, when he had heard how the crowd had turned from listening to the speakers’ denunciations of foreign devils in general to pet and admire the particular small foreign devil in their midst. “Hullo, what’s this?” he asked of Dickie, who had again unobtrusively presented himself, and was holding up the tiled figure for his inspection. “By Jove, it’s a Bong! Where did you get that?” Dickie explained.
“Well, don’t let any of your boys see it, or they’ll probably clear out in a body,” said Joe. “It’s the one thing they’re absolutely terrified of. It’s hideously unlucky.”
“Why?” asked Amber and Joanna together.
“Oh, because the Bong is the most pernicious of all the Demons. He was caught once, and they secured him in this thoroughly Chinese way—tied him to a hen, and set the hen on the corner of the roof, above the eaves. They say a hen, being the most timid of all living creatures, is safe never to jump down—and she can’t get back up the roof-tree, because of the dogs and things behind. You must have seen them on the roofs.”
“Yes, I have—and I wondered what they were,” said Nugent.
“Well, that’s it.”
“But why are they afraid of the thing indoors, if they put it on the roof?” Joanna asked.
“Oh, on the roof it’s merely a sort of inoculation,” said Joe—“but if you bring him into the house he has power, I suppose.”
“He does look rather like a griffin, with the two heads,” observed Amber, holding the creature up.
“Well, don’t let the boys see it,” said Joe again.
So the Bong was locked away in a drawer among Amber’s underclothes, and only shown secretly to selected admirers. Mrs. Hugo shook her head over it, and told Joanna that nothing would induce her to have such a thing in the house, but Joanna only laughed. She took occasion to impress on Amber, later, the unwisdom of letting Dickie be in the crowd, for fear of infection, and Amber, duly penitent, made her peace. Dickie meanwhile was playing with his Chinese toys at the other end of the loggia. His mother watched him complacently.
Chapter Ten
THE Ladies Hunt is usually the last event of the Paper-hunting Season in Peking, and socially the most brilliant. Even the least horsy people come out to see how the T’ai-t’ai’s will acquit themselves, and the lottery tickets enjoy a brisk, if rather derisory, sale at the Club. It is a course without jumps. “They tried letting the ladies jump one year, but it was simply a massacre,” Hawtrey explained to Amber. “They fell off in heaps—armfuls of them. So Leroy—he was master then—said Never Again.” He had been showing her round the course in the spring sunshine, pointing out its main features, so that she might recognise them next day; in the distance they had seen M. Rothstein leading a band of competitors on the same errand. Now, as they jogged home, Joe was giving her a résumé of the rivals she had most to fear. “Mimi will be riding Ontario; of course he can really beat Bananas into fits, but Mimi is pretty sure to lose her way—simply can’t carry five miles of country in her head. And Dolly Rothstein will probably fall off, ha-ha! Countess Stefany is a superb horsewoman, but Herman will probably put her on some dud pony, so that she shan’t beat Mimi,” he went on, with thoughtless truthfulness.
“His own wife? Does he want her to be beaten?” Amber asked, her eyes very wide. Hawtrey mentally damned his own folly.
“Oh—er—well! People have these little eccentricities out here, you know, my dear Miss Harrison. Mimi’s a good sort, but—well, she’s French. Un peu de rouge, un peu de poudre, un peu d’amour! That’s our Mimi. Live and let live, you know! And Lydia,” he hurried on, flattering himself that he had got over that rather neatly, “dear Lydia will probably forget that she’s racing at all, and go for a nice ride alone! But you ought to be all right. You must keep the Legation flag flying, you know!”
But Hawtrey had not got out of it so neatly as he thought. His careless words had been like a slap in the face to the girl, suddenly revealing in all its potential ugliness the relation between Count Herman and Mimi, which hitherto had seemed to her merely puzzling and in rather poor taste. It was horrible! To want his wife not to win, and to let it be known that he wished her rival to triumph. Thinking of it alone, afterwards, her cheeks flamed with indignation. “The— indecency of it!” she murmured. And to her natural and healthy desire to do well was added a fierce and resentful determination to “pip that woman” if she possibly could.
This feeling was intensified next day during lunch before the race at Harry and Lydia’s Temple of the Excited Insects. The Insects themselves were extremely effervescent. Countess Stefany was there—Count Herman was not—and the indignant colour stole into Amber’s cheeks again when she observed his absence as final, on the company’s sitting down without him. Under the shock of this discovery, the girl watched with an involuntary, rather painful interest her hostess’s absorption in M. Bruno. Oh no, she told herself presently—that wasn’t possible! Mrs. Leicester was English—there couldn’t be anything in that! The countess was being gracious, gay, delightful; she and Benenden, who had returned from Shanghai, discussed the English language, and Rupert used the word “filthy” as an adjective of literary criticism. She turned to him. “Zere are two Ing-lish expressions which I sink quite ex-cillent,” she said, “ze best and most expressive in ze hol world—Filcee’ and ‘Gosh’!” This unusual view of Shakespeare’s tongue enchanted the table. Benenden asked all the
women in turns if they were nervous, with pertinacious mischief. “He is really id-yot, zis Benenden,” Anna murmured to Amber as they powdered their noses in a small latticed side-room of the court; “in such a moment one is criblée de nerfs, but one shall not say so.” Amber agreed—and a little prick of desire to shine under Benenden’s rather scornful eyes added itself to her other motives for doing her utmost in the race.
The start had its delays. “Keep back, keep back, ladies, please! Behind the furrow, Mrs. Shroff.” “Which furrow?” from Mrs. Shroff. “Major La Touche, do we go to the right of the flags, or leave the flags on our right?” After more bleats of anxiety or protest from the T’ai-t’ais, and further objurgations from the stewards, the dozen or so of women were got into some sort of alignment, La Touche dropped his hat, and they were off.
The next few minutes were for Amber a whirl of struggle, excitement and confusion. Then she got Bananas, who was pulling, sufficiently in hand to take stock of her position. Hawtrey had advised her to get ahead out of the ruck, in order to avoid jams at narrow places, but to keep behind Mme. de Bulle, “so that she can lose her way for herself.” At the end of the first mile she had more or less realised this aim: Mme. de Bulle and Mme. Rothstein alone were ahead of her, the former leading; the others some lengths to the rear. With flying dust in her mouth and ears, and the rattle of hoofs behind her maddening Bananas, she nevertheless set herself steadily to overhaul Mme. Rothstein. They approached a narrow gap between the mud walls of two farms, which yesterday had been level going; as they neared it Mme. de Bulle gave a scream, and Amber saw Ontario rise in a flying jump. Some ingenious Chinese had dug two deep furrows across the gap during the night! Warned in time, Amber gathered Bananas together, and cleared the obstacle, but the unfortunate Dolly Rothstein could not keep her seat, and realised Hawtrey’s prophecy by flopping off in a heap. “Are you hurt?” Amber screamed, swinging Bananas round in a short circle. “No—go on!” the other screamed back, and on Amber went. She had lost ground, and gave Bananas his head a bit—phew, Mimi was setting a pace!—Amber hoped she would soon lose her way. But this, like so many human hopes, proved illusory. There now appeared beside Mme. de Bulle another mounted figure. Amber peered through her sweat-dimmed goggles in astonishment; she would have sworn that no one else was ahead of her. But it was not a woman; it was, as she presently saw, Count Herman, galloping easily beside the track and showing his chère amie the way.
This roused Amber to something like fury. Setting her teeth, she settled down to ride Bananas as she had never ridden a horse before. Steadily, slowly, she gained on Ontario, using her spurs, but sparingly. There was that rise in the run-in—she would need the last ounce for that. Presently, within three-quarters of a mile of home, Count Herman realised that she was drawing up. “Now use your whip,” he called to Mimi de Bulle, before he faded out down a side-track; not even his brass was equal to appearing at the finish as an escort.
But the tip meant for Mimi was used also by Amber. Cautiously she tried her whip. Yes, Bananas responded. She gained. In the gully they were neck and neck. A distant roar greeted them as they swept up the rise. Level, level—would Bananas’ nose never pass Ontario’s? Head down, heels in, her right arm going like a flail, Amber rode her finish. And her riding won. Mimi could sit on a horse, but she could neither spare it the distressing bumps of her rather loose seat, nor “ride” it. In the last two hundred yards this told, and Amber passed the post nearly a length ahead.
The result of the race created something of a sensation. Though Amber was known and liked, Leicester and Hawtrey had kept her riding rather to themselves; and people who were accustomed to regular wins by either Countess Stefany or Mme. de Bulle were startled by the sensational success of the newcomer. “Tiens, elle monte à merveille, cette jeune fille,” observed the French Minister through his cigar— “Elle a gâché les manœuvres de l’ Hongrois!” Hawtrey’s delight knew no bounds. It was genuine and generous, if somewhat proprietary—he had, after all, taken her round the course and helped her to train the pony! “My dear Joe, you make me quite sick,” Mrs. Leicester drawled at him, “she could ride before she came, you know, and she isn’t your daughter.” Joe, wounded, blushed the ready blush of the fair-skinned, and turned away without a rejoinder, for once.
“Congratulations, my dear young lady! That was a triumph,” said Sir James, thoroughly pleased. He chuckled. “Be careful! Try to limit your successes to horsemanship, or there’ll be wigs on the green! Rivals are potential enemies, you know.”
“One is born the enemy of some things,” said Amber, unexpectedly, startling the Minister by this reply to his airy sous-entendu. She stood, hot, dust-stained, her legs still quivering with muscular effort, taking the general congratulations—she did not recoil visibly even under Mimi’s effusive kiss and “Très bien, petite.” But two she valued more than all the rest put together. One was Henry Leroy’s “Jolly good, Miss Harrison—wish your uncle could have seen you.” Amber was wishing just the same thing; she would have liked someone of her own to be there, someone who really cared; she lifted grateful eyes to Leroy’s harsh face. “He’s coming next week, you know,” she said, happily. At that moment Grant-Howard came up with her coat. “Put this on—you’ll be cold in a moment,” he said; “and drink this.” He handed her a whisky which Rupert carried. “Well done,” Nugent said then, as he buttoned her into her coat like a baby, giving her one of his rare illumined smiles, such as he generally reserved for Dickie. It might have been the coat or the whisky, but suddenly Amber felt warmed through and through.
Rupert had held off rather during all this. But later that evening he made his own comments. The whole assembly had been bidden in advance to a “petit cocktail” at Mme. de Bulle’s Peking house. They gathered there about seven o’clock, some still in riding-clothes, some dressed as for a thé dansant. Mimi’s rooms, though large, were crowded, stifling, and noisy; smoke and the reek of cocktails filled them. The hostess, stout and uncouth, still in her rather dirty riding-dress, made much of Amber with a generosity that did her credit; Amber, incurably humble and bred in a tradition where it was normal for women to ride well, was astonished to find herself treated on all hands with a new deference. Presently Rupert came up and dragged her away. “I’ve got something to show you,” was all he would say; he was arbitrary and mysterious. Rickshas carried them through the windy dusk, starred with lights, to the Southern gateway of the Forbidden City, whose huge bulk stood up, black, solemn, immense, against the last pale light in the Western sky. And now Amber saw what it was that Rupert had brought her out to see. The crows of the City were taking their evening flight, wheeling in vast clouds round and round, to and fro; swinging up in a vertical movement, like flung spray, when they approached the gate-tower, to sink like blown leaves on the night wind. Their numbers, their silence, the strange unanimity of their flight made their motion more like that of some restless element than of living creatures—an element whose restlessness was forever denied by the immobility of the pillared outline of the gate-tower.
In silence they stood and watched. At last, “Well?” Rupert said.
“It’s marvellous,” the girl breathed; her face in the dusk was pale as a flower—the swift coming and going of her breath told him that she was moved by some considerable feeling. Suddenly he took hold of her arm. “You rode damned well today,” he said, “and, damn it, I like you the better for it! But don’t you see,” he gave her arm a little friendly shake, “that this is worth more than twenty races, even if you did ride well?”
Amber did not answer at once. She was conscious of a certain disturbance in herself, partly due, of course, to a young man holding her elbow in the dark; but she was also aware of two distinct elements in Rupert’s attitude—his interest in her, and his hostility to one side of her life, horses—which made it hard to answer. And she had a dim instinct that it was rather important to answer rightly. He shook her arm once more. “Well?” he said again.
“Of cours
e,” she said. “This is the other thing.”
“But Amber, this is the thing that matters,” he urged, pressing her arm more firmly.
A confused impulse of resistance stirred in the girl. Her liberty—liberty of thought, liberty of emotion, was somehow being threatened; and she could not go into it blind, she must know where she was first. She must break the spell of the moment, somehow. Crows! They were only crows! Why were they more important than horses? she thought restlessly, her mind in its simplicity seizing on the concrete to help her in the struggle that she felt rather than understood. But as she looked again at the silent mass of the gateway, impassively resistant to the airy tumult that swept about it, she felt a sudden significance in the sight, and her heart, stirred afresh, cried out within her that somehow these were the things that mattered most. Oh, if only she could think of some clever phrase about proportion or something to help her out! Through Rupert’s pressure on her arm she could feel his affectionate amusement, his curiosity as to what she would say. He was always so amused and so curious! “Out with it!” he said now, jogging her arm again.
“Everything matters in a way! / matter, too,” she burst out desperately. “To myself, I mean,” she added. Futile remarks! But somehow they seemed to satisfy Rupert.
“Bless my soul, of course you matter—you matter very much,” he said. And took her home. But in her subsequent reflections on her day Amber found that their drift had insensibly altered a little. Lying next morning in the large, comfortable and wholly unbeautiful spare-room of the Counsellor’s house, looking out through the arches of the loggia at the trees in the garden, just beginning to show a determined tracery of green, sipping the morning tea brought by Chang, the Number Two with the saintly face, she found that it was no longer possible to speculate merely on Benenden the poet, the embittered charming creature, as a person by himself. Curiously, almost against her will, she found that the subject of speculation had become a dual one, Benenden and Amber; Benenden somehow attempting a domination—yes, that was the word—of her ideas, her way of life. This was a new experience; it was stimulating, while it roused the same sense of resistance as before. Why did he? Why should he? Why not enjoy with her the things they did enjoy together, like the Forbidden City, and leave her in peace about riding? No one else had ever been like that to her—Arthur had never tried to dominate, she thought. But the thought of Arthur plunged her again into a confusion of ideas. To think of him now caused a less sharp, less jagged pain, than it used to. Was she forgetting? Her mind cried No!—but the realisation that she had compared Benenden’s attitude with his sent the colour flying into her face. That was really absurd! She was interested in the poet as a poet, an exciting person. Anyhow this time, she told herself, she was going to be fearfully careful with all young men—she would make no more idiotic mistakes. She would be very detached. And she wouldn’t take things lying down—she would be curious and amused, and pry into his ideas, and be critical! Yes, she would. And again, suddenly, she wished she knew what Mr. Grant-Howard would say about it all.