by Ann Bridge
Nugent may have had his own ideas about Rupert and Amber, but at this time his thoughts became entirely concentrated on the affairs of the Legation. The day after the Ladies’ Hunt the Minister went down with a severe attack of dysentery, throwing a considerable burden suddenly on to his Counsellor’s shoulders. At the same moment a burst of political disturbances took place. It was first reported, then known, that Wang, the so-called “Methodist War-Lord,” had at last matured his designs on Peking, and was moving troops in the direction of the capital, with a view to ousting Li, the Marshal, who had been in possession for some time. Simultaneously there were sudden outbursts of Communist activity, or activity attributed to Communists; the city police, whose pay was six months in arrears, went on strike; a number of students made a demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s house, and before they were dispersed by the troops, leaving the corpses of immature girls and boys lying in the dust of the roadway, the Prime Minister himself had fled to the Legation Quarter. From thence he issued a circular telegram, deploring his own incompetence and lack of skill in the management of public affairs, which had led to these disorders, and announcing his resignation to make way for a more worthy successor. Such an announcement was of course quite in order; according to Chinese ideas it was both dignified and statesmanlike; but owing to the depletion of the public coffers and the uncertainty as to the military situation, the more worthy successor was slow in making his appearance, and in the meantime current negotiations had to be conducted with whoever could be prevailed upon to undertake them. And then one of the Chancery clerks took smallpox.
Nugent was of course one of the very few Europeans in Peking to whom the political disturbances made any difference whatever. But with the illness of Sir James and the archivist it was otherwise. Illness matters in China; and smallpox in the compound was no joke. The small society of the Legation, disturbed and alarmed, looked round for a cause for these misfortunes, and found it in the presence of Amber’s Bong. A deputation of Legation ladies, headed by Mrs. Hugo, waited on Joanna, and begged for the Bong’s removal. Joanna was incredulous, but felt obliged from diplomatic motives to do as they wished, and told Amber that it must go. “But it’s absurd,” protested Amber; “my poor yellow griffin! He’s brought me luck anyway; look at the race!” Joanna secretly agreed with her, but insisted, and Amber dutifully undertook to remove the offending image. But where was it to go? She couldn’t bear to lose sight of such a treasure altogether. She took counsel with Dickie, who felt he had a vested interest in the “hem,” and Dickie had an inspiration. If they must part with their precious creature, let it at least do a useful service in his secret war against the Soviet Embassy! So the Bong was taken down to the “forpress,” a string was tied round it, Dickie climbed up his favourite tree, straddled the glassless patch of garden wall, and attached the string to a branch which overhung it; then with infinite precaution the Bong was lowered into the other garden, where, as Dickie said triumphantly, it could “harry the Sovieps.”
“Good riddance,” said Hawtrey, who had assisted at this ceremony. “You know, my dear Miss Amber, people may say what they like, but there is something in these local beliefs. I’m much easier in my mind now that Mr. Bong’s gone to our Bolo friends, ha-ha! I’ve known cases in Uganda…” He dwelt on them. “I never care to mix myself up with things we don’t understand—don’t really understand, you know. You never know.”
“Uncle Joe, do you think he coulb reach us from there?” said Dickie unexpectedly, capering beside him as they crossed the lawn.
Joe glanced meaningly at Amber. “No, not from there, Dickie, old man,” he said airily.
“He mipe gep me,” said Dickie, with half fearful interest, “when I go to my forpress.”
Hawtrey swung the child up on to his shoulders. “He won’t ‘gep’ you,” he said. “You’re too small beer—minuscular beer! No one wants minuscular beer!”
How nice he was with the child, Amber thought, watching Dickie’s small dirty hands ruffling his sleek red head, unrebuked. And she liked him better still when next moment, with the obvious intention of turning the child’s mind off the previous conversation, he began: “Here Dickie, see if you can say this. ‘John Nott could not knit, so he invented a knitter which he called the Nott Knitter. But the Nott Knitter could not knit knots, so John Nott had to knot the knots which the Nott Knitter could not knit.’” She and Hawtrey laughed helplessly when Dickie began to recite this epic; the “Mop Mipper” displayed his funny speech to perfection. He wanted to take out his “plape,” but Hawtrey wouldn’t allow this, and there was scuffling. Yes, fearfully nice—nice with children and horses. How odd that he should be “barely human” as Rupert said, in society. Thinking of Hawtrey and the child, Amber forgot all about the Bong.
Chapter Eleven
THE Temple of Heaven lies on the south side of Peking, within the boundaries of the Chinese City, but outside the Tartar Wall. To reach it one passes through the Chien-mên, the great green-tiled gateway near the railway station, and down the long shabby street known as Chien-mên Wai—“outside the Chien Gate”; as we say “Bishopsgate Street Without” in our own City of London, once, like Peking, a walled town. The straggling one-storey shops of Chien-mên Wai give place gradually to a collection of small mat-sheds and wooden booths, cumbering a great dusty open space, strangely resembling a suburb of broken-down chicken-houses: finally these also cease, and the imperial road crosses a stretch of ground empty of all save the rubbish of a great city, haunted by yellow scavenging dogs. In the middle of this waste, roads branch east and west off the great highway—that on the west leads to the Temple of Agriculture and the place of execution, that on the east to the Temple and Altar of Heaven. Here, near the intersection of the roads, on a fine afternoon, may be seen one of the most enchanting sights in Peking—the exercising of the cage birds. Down the Chien-mên Wai, silent, grave and dignified, in black or grey gowns, passes a steady stream of middle-aged men, each carrying a cage and a little stick like a wand. On reaching the appropriate spot, the cage doors are opened, and each feathered occupant hops daintily out and perches on the wand: with a quick deft movement, the owner tosses the bird into the air, where amid a crowd of others it flies up into the sunlight: fluttering, wheeling, chirruping, the whole sky is full of wings and song and glad freed creatures: below upturned faces watch the pretty sight, pleased and benevolent smiles on the usually impassive countenances. Then, at some signal, the birds drop down out of the airy throng, each to his proper owner, perch again upon the lifted wands, and hop back, docile and content, each into his own cage. It is one of the strangest and loveliest displays of intimacy and sympathy between man and the brute creation: not an isolated instance of power over animals, but a whole city-full of burghers who know their bird companions, and are known of them as friends.
Turning east at this crossways, a road leads across the open space to a gate in a high wall, within which lies the Temple of Heaven. Not immediately within, however. The Chinese have no taste for the crudity which permits access to a private house, let alone to a holy place, directly from the public highway. A sandy road leads from the outer gate through a large park to an inner wall, roofed in sea-green tiles, and behind this inner wall lies the temple itself. Through the park runs the track where Hawtrey had brought Amber to ride, but of what lay beyond the sea-green top of the inner wall she knew nothing.
Rupert’s desire to witness the effect on Amber of the first sight of this shrine was natural enough. Among all the buildings of the city perhaps in the whole world the richest architecturally, the Temple of Heaven most stirs the eye and the mind. It contains two things in themselves supremely lovely—the snow-white Altar of Heaven, rising in three circular terraces with carved balustrades to a white platform at the summit, and the Temple of the Felicitous Year, raised also on terraces of white marble, and surmounted by that triple dome of indigo blue tiles which catches and holds the eye in every view southward over Peking, like a dark jewel. And
lovely as these things are, they gain enormously from their setting and arrangement. The round altar stands in the centre of a square paved enclosure, whose four low walls are coped, each in a different colour, with tiles which glow like precious stones. The blue-domed Temple is approached by a great causeway, raised many feet above the ground, which stretches the whole distance, nearly half a mile, from the Altar to the shrine. And round both, sheltering lesser buildings and filling most of the inner park, stand groves of huge ancient junipers—so that scarlet walls, coloured tiles and white marble alike have for their background endless masses of that peculiar silvery green, a green so dark that it is almost grey, and the air of the whole place is filled perpetually with their aromatic fragrance. Those incomparable builders, with their passion for space and their deep sense of the value of the things of nature, thought nothing of walling in a park three miles round to hold one temple, used for ceremonial only twice a year, and set about it the trees of the forest to add to the beauty of worship.
But the most striking thing about these buildings is their extreme simplicity, a simplicity reflecting the old uncomplicated monotheistic worship of Shang Ti, “The One Above the Earth,” which goes back four thousand years. The mind cannot resist a tribute of astonished admiration to the austere and pure conception which gave to Earth’s greatest altar no roof but the sky, surrounded it with the three hundred and sixty pillars of the terrestrial degrees, and approached it by the triple gates of the Four Winds of Heaven. No flimsy trappings or ritual furniture disturbed the purity of the marble circle, no priests intervened—bare under the sky, it awaited the feet of the Son of Heaven as, alone, he climbed the steps at dawn to make atonement for the sins of his people. And when, proceeding along the marble causeway, he went to worship and give thanks in the Temple of the Felicitous Year, it was again in a single circular room, under that dome whose intense colour recalls the sky which roofs the Altar.
Now it lies desolate. The great tiled brazier where the bull-calf of pure colour was consumed as a burnt-offering is cold from year’s end to year’s end: the bronze baskets for burning the rolls of tribute silk—most civilised and innocent of sacrifices—are rusty and empty. Tiles drip off like water, slowly and continually, from the perished cement of walls and roofs; foreigners picnic and boil tea-kettles everywhere: some Americans once gave a dance on the Altar itself—a vulgar outrage which did at last rouse the Chinese to close the Temple for a time. For the most part, however, beyond erecting a booth for the sale of tickets at the entrance-gate, the heirs of so much beauty do little for its preservation. It belongs to the unworthy past, which the new officialdom of the Republic would willingly forget—a benighted past, unlit by electric light: a slow past, unhastened by the telegraph and the internal combustion engine. But Nature, more tender than mankind, has come quietly in to cover the slow ruin of man’s handiwork. Big soft primulas, like auriculas, conceal the brilliant fragments of coloured glaze at the foot of the walls, and droop over the half-empty moat which surrounds the Hall of Abstinence, where the Emperor fasted through the night before the sacrifice: anemones, of a more imperial purple than those which the Berkshire villagers believe to spring only from the short turf of their downs where once the blood of Danes was spilt, grow in great tufts among the pale dead grass beyond the causeway; and in spring the groves of junipers are carpeted all through with great drifts of a wild crucifera, a foot or more high, in every tone of mauve and lilac and white, so that the fragrant shade is lightened from below with a glow or pale colour.
Through these groves Rupert and Amber came walking on the day after the ejection of the Bong into Soviet territory. The sky was soft with spring, and the warmth, only gentle as yet, brought out the scent of everything—the dust of the track, the faint sharp smell of dry grass, the incense of the junipers, the scentless freshness of the innumerable flowers. Rupert watched the girl, walking beside him, as he led her carefully by a route where the whiteness of the Altar would burst most suddenly on her vision. She had taken off her hat, and flecks of sunlight now and then caught that hair which was just not the perfect Titian red—above the mauve flowers, below the dark branches, her colour had a perfect setting. “The pre-Raphaelites ought to have painted her like that,” he thought. But no: except for the marvellous colouring, it was not a pre-Raphaclite face; there was no die-away heavenliness about that firm chin, raised now as with lifted head she frankly snuffed the flying odours of which the air was full; nor about the decided nose with the bump in it, and the rather wide mouth. It was an honest, sensible, sensitive face, Rupert said to himself, reflecting as plainly as a mirror the clear simplicity within; a seeking face, looking for something it had yet to find. For what? Knowledge? Experience? Well, those she lacked, certainly. For love? All women were always looking for that—poor fools! A delicious fruit, love—quickly eaten, and giving you a frightful pain afterwards. But they never understood that; never realised, even, that the better the quality of the fruit, the worse the after-effects. They always imagined that if the fruit were big enough and juicy enough, it would last for ever and leave no pain behind! Ludicrous belief! And the worst of it was, this everlasting hunt of theirs for love made women quite hopeless companions, muddled up such intellect as they had and sent it twisting and doubling in all directions: you couldn’t be honest with them, or they with you, so long as love was even a possibility. Not even with women like Lydia, with all her courage and detachment; not even she had l’esprit libre. Poor Lydia! he thought, sighing gustily. And women caught and entangled you in this hopeless maze of theirs, snared you with an emotion which they knew all about, damn them!—and then held you with pity and weakness. Oh, never again, except in marriage; marriage was some security, from yourself and from them; marriage was the solution. Find the right person, carefully; and then with cleverness, with patience, it could be made to go. Look at Nugent and Joanna—sound, jolly, stable—as good as it could be. Joanna was a bit terre á terre, but that was all the better really—you couldn’t have two Nugents in one ménage. But marriage was so final—that was the devil of it! And meanwhile one was still interested, still curious, still liable to be excited. One wanted to see what was in them, each fresh person; to watch them in action, see how they worked. It was oneself really, from which one could never get free.
He realised suddenly that they were nearing the edge of the trees. “Shut your eyes,” he said to Amber. “Here, give me your hand. You’re not to open them till I say.” So blinded, he led her out to the space round the Altar; she opened her eyes on gleaming ascending circles of white marble, the sky over them and the trees behind. Carefully, thoroughly, he showed her everything, explained everything, covertly studying her face all the time. He was pleased with her for refusing to set foot on the topmost platform of the altar, though she climbed the steps to look at it. Then he led her along the causeway, towards the blue dome which glowed like a triple sapphire ahead of them all the way; took her across the moat and into the Hall of Abstinence, where lilacs in the courtyards made the air almost intolerably sweet with their piercing fragrance. But then she asked to see the Altar again, and they went out into the open space to the south of it, and sat on the steps of the underground furnace which used to heat the square of soil on which the Emperor’s pavilion stood when he robed himself for the ceremony. So far, though eager and appreciative, Amber had said but little; now, as they sat in the sunshine, looking across at the white marble against the grey trees: “I wonder if S. John the Divine could ever have seen it,” the girl said.
“Why in the world S. John the Divine?” Rupert asked, surprised.
“It’s so like his vision of the Holy City, in some ways,” she answered. “Those four walls round it—in the sun, their tiles are like jewels—the jewels in the twelve foundations of the wall: do you remember?”
Rupert didn’t—his acquaintance with the Apocalypse was of the slightest. “Tell me,” he said.
Still gazing in front of her, Amber repeated that string of glorious na
mes. “The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third a chalcedony, the fourth an emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth sardius, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth a topaz, the tenth a chrysophrasus, the eleventh a jacinth, the twelfth an amethyst.”
“By jove, they are good words!” Rupert said, when she finished. “Say them again.” Amber did so. “But it isn’t only the stones,” she said at the end. “It’s the gates too. Don’t you remember them? ‘On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, on the west three gates’—and ‘Every several gate was of one pearl.’ Those Gates of the Winds look just as if they were carved out of huge pearls, from here. It made me wonder if he could ever have seen or heard of this, and that had given him the idea.”