by Ann Bridge
Before dinner that same evening, Amber took a little red enamelled can from the corner of the loggia, and went up to water Dickie’s garden. Under the wall of the Soviet Embassy, agriculture and war went hand in hand; beside the fortress two or three asymmetrical plots were laid out in the dusty unpromising soil, in which some flowers and lettuces languished as only plants grown by children do. Since his illness she had watered them every day. She went round by the shadoof to fill the can, and passed on to the upper garden behind the grey thuja hedges; emerging from them, she stood still. There, beside the incompetent little childish garden, the futile fortifications, Nugent Grant-Howard stood, gazing at them. His face was shadowy in the dusk under the trees, but there was that about it which filled the girl with a sort of awe. He was embracing experience. Without a sound she slipped back between the thujas and stole away.
Chapter Fourteen
UNCLE BILL’S house was in a Hu-t’ung off Morrison Street, that curiously hybrid thoroughfare which begins so European, at the end near the Ta Ch’ang an Chieh, with its pavements, its block of flats where the dentist lives, its plate-glass windows in the two shops which purport to sell French dresses; and ends so completely Chinese. Some little distance down it the pavements gradually cease to be paved, and then to be defined at all, and become merely a sort of dusty adjunct to the street, a no-man’s-land between the shops—which here degenerate into ramshackle one-storey affairs with scaffold poles leaning against them, and swinging vertical signs—and the roadway itself—a space devoted to the practice of all sorts of minor trades, from the sale of sweets and persimmons to chiropody and knife-grinding. The street carries a heavy volume of miscellaneous traffic. Strings of laden donkeys patter along the gutters, neat-footed and unconcerned; teams of mules, ponies or coolies, or of all three, strain at long low-wheeled carts laden with sacks of flour or baulks of timber, which creak in a hideous treble as they pass over the uneven surface; the skimming rickshas dart up and down, thick as may-flies on a stream; great bundles sway from the shoulder-yokes of carriers as they move with their peculiar unsteady heel-and-toe run. And all this mass of traffic shouts as it goes; men and merchandise are moved to the accompaniment of an uproar like that of a political meeting in Dublin, and the dull rumble of wheels and hoofs becomes a mere ground-bass to a terrific orchestration of yelling in many keys.
But in Uncle Bill’s Hu-t’ung it is very quiet. Leaving Morrison Street on the west side, you turn right, and then left, and then right again, along narrow lanes between high grey walls with trees showing above them, where only a casual ricksha passes, and dogs and beggars snooze in sunny corners, till knocking at a scarlet door set with rows of golden knobs in fives, you are admitted to Uncle Bill’s dwelling.
It was a regular Chinese house, consisting of nine or ten paved courtyards scattered without apparent plan over a large space of ground, each with three or four one-storey pavilions round it. Those nearest the gate comprised the servants’ quarters—it was only after a longish walk through several strangely shaped doors, across a court or two, and along raised verandahs under the eaves of the pavilions that one at last reached the house proper. A court with a trellis of wistaria along one end and a p’eng, or straw roof, shading the other, housed the drawing-room and Aunt Bessie’s sitting-room; a passage and a verandah led to the dining-room in the next court, on which also opened the apartment which Uncle Bill called his “room,” but which Aunt Bessie persistently referred to as his “den.” From this a heart-shaped door led, across a small court with a goldfish pool in it, to that which contained Uncle Bill’s and Aunt Bessie’s bedrooms—beyond this again, or alternately by another route through a miniature landscape and a long passage, one reached a court with guest-rooms, where Amber slept and enjoyed the use of a small sitting-room.
The house had been Europeanised to the extent of putting in electric light and anthracite stoves for heating, but most of the rooms still had their curious pretty wooden lattices in the windows, with soft paper panes, and the baths were the old Soochow tubs of glazed earthenware, three feet high and as much across, sea-green inside and looking like bronze without, with their raised patterns under the dark glaze. Aunt Bessie, whose taste was so catholic as hardly to merit the name at all, combined, in the great L-shaped drawing-room and through the house generally, bright flowered cretonnes and glossy cushions from Harvey Nichols with black-wood furniture, scroll-paintings and bronze pictures—producing a quite bewildering effect of uncertainty and unrest; but the rooms themselves, with their high walls and timbered ceilings, and the stretches of cool rush matting on the floor, remained strangely Chinese, calmly indifferent to the bright unsuitable objects which jostled one another within them.
To this household Amber came a couple of days after the archivist’s funeral, when the period of quarantine was well over, and Dickie’s recovery a matter of certainty. For Dickie “squeaked through” as Hawtrey said, thanks to Sister Helga. Hawtrey made a Club tale of the Sister’s action on that occasion, and indeed it was sufficiently remarkable for its courage and promptitude to be worth the telling. “She was lying by him on her camp-bed, touching his hand, you know, and foxing—she got no real sleep for a fortnight—when she felt him move, and heard him giving a sort of choke. So she switched on the light, and by Jove, if the whole great swelling on his neck wasn’t gone! It had burst inside, and he was swallowing away at all that frightful pus and stuff, poor little brute. So she ups with a medicine glass of that black disinfectant that looks like Guinness, Collargol or whatever it is, and pours it right down him, and then a glass of castor-oil on the top of that; and away the whole show goes, Collargol chasing the poison, and castor-oil chasing the Collargol, a regular paper-hunt! And in the morning he was as right as rain.”
This, if a picturesque, was on the whole a veracious account. But what Hawtrey did not relate at the Club, because he had not seen it, was what Amber saw and would never forget—Nugent’s daybreak face at breakfast, after hearing the news, and Joanna’s look, all that day, of utter weariness and deep content. “It’s like coming out of a tunnel,” the girl said to Rupert later in the day, turning back to look at the house, as they strolled together in the garden. Rupert stood still and stared at her for a moment. “You’re a good friend,” he said at length, before he went away.
So Amber settled down in the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung, and proceeded to adapt herself to the way of life prevailing there. Aunt Bessie was a kind, cheerful and exceedingly guileless person, who since her marriage had entirely ceased to exercise any capacity for independent thought and judgement that she might ever have possessed. “Bill says,” “Your Uncle says,” represented her final arbitrament on human affairs, great or small. Her warm and childless heart delighted in young people, and in seeing young people enjoy themselves—but she rated her own powers as an entertainer of youth very low, and with some reason. Her own life was governed by her two absorptions, Bill and Bridge. For Bill she entertained, at a particularly luxurious table, the Peking t’ai-p’ans (business men) and their wives, and his racing friends—the Rothsteins, the Leicesters, the Stefanys. For her own amusement she played Bridge daily. Either in her drawing-room, or in some other woman’s, she sat down immediately after lunch at a small green table, where she remained till it was time to rise and dress for dinner, comfortably absorbed in cards and post-mortems of hands. Her mornings were spent in the usual Peking pre-lunch industry of writing chits, and in attending to her household. This she did exceptionally well; all the heterogeneous furnishings of her many courtyards according to their nature shone, or glittered, or were clean and fresh, or stood in their proper places. She loved flowers, and was clever at them; the courts in the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung were full of great tree-paeonies in tubs; oleanders and myrtles bloomed at the entrance to each pavilion; dwarf rose-trees made a pattern of pinks and reds against the blue curtain of the wistaria.
Aunt Bessie was delighted to have Amber, and extremely anxious that she should enjoy herself. Secretly the g
ood lady rather disliked Lady Julia, while at the same time she thought her wonderful and important, and courted her good opinion—a state of mind which in spite of its inconsistency is very common. She had seen very little of Amber, and had been mildly dreading to find something of her sister-in-law’s chilling superiority in her niece. But Amber’s simplicity and good temper soon dispelled this dread, and the pair got on very happily together. Amber for her part was charmed with the house. She loved the privacy of a whole courtyard to herself, loved the running through two or three others to meals, or to fetch a pocket-handkerchief; loved the courtyards themselves, with their unexpected profusion of flowers in a setting of architectural formality; she even enjoyed the quaintness of her lofty china bath, and of a bathroom with a paper door. One night the electric light fused, and they had to fall back on candles; she had the ill-luck to set her bathroom door alight as she passed, and in two minutes the frail thing had burnt to the ground. Amber was much distressed—but by eleven o’clock next morning a new door of bamboo and paper was erected in its place! There was a spaciousness, a leisureliness about life in the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung which reminded her of her feeling on that day when she first drove through the by-ways of the Tartar City, going to lunch with the Leicesters. There was a special pleasure about breakfasting under the p’eng in the cool mornings, and later sitting down to sew under an oleander, and laying her scissors on shallow marble steps; it seemed easier to learn Chinese when each time she raised her eyes from her book she looked across a goldfish pond, which reflected the stiff artificial shapes of the paeonies, to a green-tiled roof with Bongs on its corners and painted eaves below.
Besides all this, on coming to the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung she immediately plunged with Uncle Bill into the world of horses. The Spring Race Meeting was imminent, and the hopes of Uncle Bill’s stable were set high on two ponies in particular—on Northcliffe for the Mandarin Stakes, the biggest race of the year, and on a black griffin, called Berry, for the Maidens Plate. Griffins, it should perhaps be explained, are ponies newly come down from Mongolia, which have never raced; to show their status their manes and tails are often left long, the latter looped up with bright braid, though their small bodies are clipped and groomed to a high gloss. Berry had come down in the autumn draft, and in his early training had shown an unusual turn of speed, but Old Bill’s illness had seriously interfered with his progress. And there were rivals. Mme. de Bulle’s Huron had carried off the Mandarin Stakes the previous year, when M. Rothstein’s Cointreau was third. Cointreau was running again, and Rothstein was also alleged to have a marvellous griffin called Crème de Cacao—all his stable were called after drinks—whose form was being kept very secret. Henry Leroy, whose stable rejoiced in diplomatic names, had entered a horse called Ambassador for the Mandarin Stakes, and was training a couple of griffins for the Maidens, Envoy and Extraordinary, but no one yet knew which he would run. Mme. de Bulle’s jockey, Tom Shaw, was already up from Shanghai, and installed in her villa among the willows at P’ao-ma-Ch’ang; Dickie Roberts was as usual riding for the Rothsteins. Leroy always rode his ponies himself, and such had hitherto been Old Bill’s habit; but this year it was deemed imprudent that he should, and to a long lean boy called Mulholland, from the Central Asiatic Bank, the Press stable fortunes were entrusted. Mulholland had a little racing experience, but not much, and had to be trained as well as the horses.
Old Bill’s equine activities were all carried on from his temple at P’ao-ma-Ch’ang. Here he and Aunt Bessie spent their week-ends, and in such times of emergency as the present, several nights in the week as well. It was a real temple, dedicated to some obscure divinity with a long and unpronounceable Chinese name, whose image, lofty and gilded, half filled one large pavilion in the main court. On certain days in the year the monks from whom Uncle Bill rented the place came to this pavilion and performed rites with incense, the big drum and the round bronze gong on its silken pedestal; otherwise it was used as a dining-room. The pavilion opposite contained a large living-room and a couple of bedrooms; in a smaller court behind were the bathrooms and a guest-room or two. Both courts were paved with flagstones, which Aunt Bessie had removed in places to make room for flower-beds; out to the north her single form of genius had created quite an English-looking garden, with walls, borders and flowering trees. Here Aunt Bessie was generally to be found, in leather gloves and a shady hat, labouring herself, and directing the operations of a very old man whom Hawtrey called the King of Spain, because of his spindly moustache, which hung down in two threadlike strands of black hair far below his chin, like a thin double beard, and looked rusty at the ends, as if it had been singed. “Listen to Auntie B. singeing the King of Spain’s beard!” Hawtrey would call, when sounds of objurgation in Aunt Bessie’s rather shrill Chinese floated over the garden wall—and Amber, in spite of his folly, laughed at him.
Uncle Bill, however, was seldom seen in the garden. From a chaise longue on the narrow verandah in front of the sitting-room he would occasionally point the butt end of his cheroot in the direction of a bed of wallflowers or stocks in the courtyard and observe, “Bessie! those flowers are a most appalling colour.” But such destructive criticism was his only contribution to horticulture. His domain was the stables, a range of mud-built loose-boxes in a large walled yard, shaded by willow trees. There he might always be seen on a Sunday morning, in very shabby breeches, an aged Terai on the back of his head, a cheroot in his mouth, examining the various ponies which stood tied to rings in the yellow-washed walls, with Kuo, his head mafoo. Kuo had a deep brown and inconceivably wrinkled face, made further remarkable by one of those beaky noses which are occasionally, and surprisingly, to be seen in North China. He was a rather unusually good mafoo, a fair horseman and an artist in feeding. His mao-ping, or defect, was opium—as a head groom, with seven or eight men under him and considerable opportunities for squeeze, he was rich enough to indulge in a bout every five or six weeks. On such occasions he vanished entirely for a couple of days, to reappear in a dazed condition, with a complexion almost literally pea-green; till the effect wore off he was quite useless. But his master weighed his devotion and the aforementioned good qualities in the balance, and found it on the whole worth his while to keep Kuo. When the groom recovered from an opium bout, Bill rated him vigorously and at length; Kuo was abject to the point of tears, and promised never to fall again; both men knew perfectly well that the promise was worthless, but both it and the previous scolding were essential to the preservation of mutual self-respect. Uncle Bill had lived for twenty years in China, and not in vain. Indeed he definitely preferred the Chinese way of life in many respects to the European. It was because of this preference that he retained so many purely Chinese features in his house in the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung, such as the Soochow bathtubs, which up-to-date Chinese themselves would spurn today. At the temple at P’ao-ma-Ch’ang Chinese food was often served at the evening meal; Uncle Bill was as deft with his chop-sticks as any coolie, holding his bowl of broth-flavoured rice well up under his chin, and shovelling the contents into his mouth in a steady stream which reminded Amber of the jet of earth which pours out behind a terrier at a rabbit-hole.
The temple stood on a small eminence near the road; behind it the ground dropped away in a long gentle slope towards the racecourse road and the big swampy pond, so good for snipe in early autumn, which lay close to the racecourse itself. There, outside the stable wall, were several jumps, mud walls and kaoliang fences, over which he trained his paper-hunters. The mafoos, exercising in a circle, as their custom is, had worn in the loose dusty soil a hard-beaten track in an irregular ellipse round the jumps.
On this manege, one morning about ten days before the race-meeting, a string of ponies, muffled in blankets against the early chill, was moving slowly round with a mafoo at the head of each animal, awaiting Kuo. Presently he appeared, coughing and trembling, and the procession moved off down the slope towards the racecourse. Kuo had only just emerged from one of his bouts, and had had
a worse dressing-down than usual, since the moment for such indulgence was peculiarly ill-chosen; he looked weak and ill. But he had strength and spirit enough to yell directions to his underlings with his wonted ferocity. A moment later the notes of a hunting-horn, rather hoarse and flat, resounded through the temple. They woke Amber, and she groped sleepily for her watch. Needlessly—for the next moment Hawtrey’s voice was uplifted outside her door. “Amber! Half-past six! Don’t be late!” and then she heard him in the next court, “Auntie! Six-thirty! Jump to it!”
Amber rose and hurried into some clothes. Hawtrey and Mulholland had come out to the temple the night before, and they were going down to the course to watch the trial gallops of Northcliffe and Berry. Bill himself was riding, and Kuo, as well as Mulholland; Hawtrey was to function with the stop-watch. For some weeks before the meeting the racecourse, in the morning, is always the scene of great activity, the various stables training and trying out their own horses, and trying to get slants on the form of the horses of others. Most people are satisfied to begin about eight; but Uncle Bill, largely in order to avoid undesirable publicity, began much earlier than anyone else—it was currently reported in Peking that during the last fortnight he galloped his ponies in the dark.