by Ann Bridge
“Poor Sir James! How ridiculous!” said Joanna compassionately. It is a curious and interesting psychological phenomenon that the most loyal and dyed-in-the-wool Foreign Office officials, on being sent abroad, rapidly develop a certain tone of superiority, even of slight acidity, towards “they” (or them), which infects even the womenkind in a Legation. “What did he say?” she asked, stitching away at her embroidery.
“Oh, he showed it to Nugent, of course, and old Nugent said ‘I should reply: “Cannot send full and accurate information till the torturing of the prisoners is completed. This will probably take about ten more days.” ‘Nugent thought that would give them something to think about—and actually it’s strictly true. But of course James wouldn’t—he’s too protocolaire.”
The final sensation was the ejection of the Bolshevik Mission and the closing down of the Embassy. And oddly enough it was only then that anyone remembered the Bong. Hawtrey and Amber were both lunching with the Grant-Howards the day that the news came out, and the talk of it was general. Dickie sat quietly eating his dinner—he and Miss Carruthers had dining-room lunch when there was only a small party—but presently he looked up from his plate and said loudly “Babby!”
“Yes, Dickie?”
“Have the Sovieps gone?”
“Yes, old boy; gone bag and baggage.”
“Then we semp them!” said Dickie triumphantly to Amber. “With the hem!”
“By jove! So you did!” said Hawtrey. “I say, Nugent, that’s really very remarkable, you know—most remarkable. ‘ C’est un coïncident!’ as François would say.”
The placing of the Bong in the Soviet Embassy garden was news to Nugent. It certainly was a rather impressive coincidence. He used it in one of his frequent endeavours to amuse his chief. “You don’t want me to tell the Foreign Office that, my dear fellow, I hope?” said Sir James, rather caustically, when he had heard the tale.
“It would be quite as rational as most of the reasons we give for anything that happens here,” observed Leroy, who was present, “and make a damned good story.”
As a damned good story, though excluded from official despatches, it went the rounds of Peking; to such an extent that Amber began to fear that some inquisitive person would steal her precious image, which she still privately called her “griffin.” “Let’s get it back,” she said at last to Dickie. Dickie agreed with enthusiasm. Again the problem arose of where to bestow it for safekeeping. They dared not have it in the house. Eventually Amber hauled it up—she wouldn’t allow Dickie to touch it—and perched it among the creepers on the flat roof of the septic tank. “There! Now it can cast spells on the sewage!” she said triumphantly, surveying the small ginger-coloured object. And there, unknown to anyone but the two conspirators, the Bong remained.
Though these stirring events offered a surface distraction, which perhaps she unconsciously welcomed, Amber remained much preoccupied with Rupert. Her sense of her need to know more, to have more fuel for the ceaseless consuming activity of her mind about him, increased steadily, and the chance and scrappy meetings in company, though delicious, were from this point of view merely tantalising. This feeling was now intensified by the prospect of being separated from him altogether for some time. The annual exodus of women and children from Peking to the sea, to Wei-hai-wei or Pei-t’ai-ho, was imminent, and the Grant-Howards had invited Amber to join them at the latter place. Aunt Bessie had accepted for her with relief; Uncle Bill, having been away for more than three months in the spring, did not care to leave his business again so soon, and nothing would have induced Aunt Bessie to leave him. A temperature of 105 in the shade meant nothing to her, dauntless woman; but for Amber it was different—she thought the dear child looked a little pale; it was a delightful plan. Amber thought it a delightful plan too, at first; but the delight was somewhat dimmed when she learned that Rupert was not going to Pei-t’ai-ho at all. He was staying in Peking to help Nugent, who would be in charge while the Minister took his holiday. Oh, if she could somehow see something of him before they went! If only Rupert rode more! She was always being asked to ride by Joe, by Mulholland, by M. Leopardi; with one or other of these she went for innumerable hot dusty tête-à-tête canters, out to the Princess’s Tomb or the Wang Hai Lou, in the late afternoon, when the westering sun turned the dust to a golden fog, against which the little everyday groups of peasants—women washing by a canal, children chattering round a sweetmeat-seller, a dung-carrier pitching his evil-smelling basket on a bank to gossip to a water-carrier—detached themselves with the sudden blurred significance of the ink-blue figures on a Japanese colour print. And always, seeing them, her instant wish was that Rupert could see them too. But Rupert’s riding was restricted almost entirely to what Hawtrey contemptuously called “healthful hacking” on the glacis.
It appeared, however, that Benenden himself felt that he ought to see a little more of Miss Harrison before her departure, for one day at the Legation when the Coal Hill was mentioned, he turned to her with his usual abruptness and said, “That’s a thing you’ve never seen, Amber. You ought to see it. Let’s go. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s the bazaar, Rupert,” Joanna reminded him.
“Well, how long does the bazaar go on? Not after six, surely?”
Quite till six-thirty, Joanna thought. “Well, we’ll go then—it’ll be all the cooler,” said Rupert easily. Amber murmured something about being late for dinner. “No, that’s simple—I’ll give you a bite at my place when we come back,” he said. “I’ll call at the Wagons-Lits for you at a quarter to seven. That’ll be all right, won’t it, Joanna?”
“Yes, perfectly,” murmured Joanna abstractedly—she was counting napkin-rings on the loggia. Amber was a little startled at the suggestion of dining alone with Rupert at his house, but she chose, rather wilfully, to regard Joanna’s vague rejoinder as a sanction for the whole plan. More wilfully still, she merely told Aunt Bessie, on her return to the Hei-Lung Hu-t’ung, that she should be out to dinner next day. If Aunt Bessie had asked any questions she would have answered them truthfully, but Aunt Bessie didn’t—it was natural enough that Amber should dine with the Grant-Howards if she was late at the bazaar, as she comfortably assumed was to be the case, and she left it at that. And with her heart singing Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, in a silly little soundless tune, Amber, behind her mosquito curtains, fell asleep.
The Mei Shan, or Coal Hill, is a part of that astonishing group of pleasaunces—there is really no other word to use for them—which stretches all down the eastern side of the Imperial City. The Chinese system of building towns one within another, like a nest of boxes, is exemplified in the royal habitations. The vast enclosure of the Imperial City holds within its crimson walls, set like a jewel in a bed of greenery, the immense oblong of the Forbidden City itself, roofed with gold, girdled with its moat and isolated by that forbidding rampart of grey stone from which look down, at the four corners, the golden pleasure-domes; but it holds also temples, theatres, gardens, groves, libraries, with acres of latticed apartments for soldiers, for eunuchs, for concubines; and for the recreation of the Imperial inmates, pleasure-grounds of unbelievable extent, containing above all those two indispensable elements in the Chinese conception of terrestrial beauty, hills and water. (The very word for landscape in Chinese is Shan-shui—hill, water.) Three large lakes stretch down in a linked chain of shining surfaces from the Pei Hai, or Northern Sea, to the Nan Hai, or Southern Sea; their shores and islands bright with the tiles and marble of pavilions, and gentle with willows, their stillness reflecting the remoter images of the Coal Hill and that other eminence which is crowned with the immense whiteness of the Dagoba.
These lakes and hills are all made by man. It was the rulers of the Chin dynasty, in the twelfth century, who first conceived the idea of bringing the waters of the Jade Fountain from the foot of the Western Hills, miles away, to ornament their capital, heaping up the soil thus dug out into artificial mounds from which to behold their new creat
ions. Later monarchs extended the work; Kublai Khan laid out his gardens round the Pei Hai, sending back to the uplands of Mongolia, legend says, for the roots of a particular blue flower to adorn them, so that his children might grow up familiar with one beauty of the steppes which he, as a child, had loved. There is a certain pathos about this home-sickness of conquerors, which recurs again and again in Chinese history—the lou, or two-storey pavilion which Ch’ien Lung built among the Sea Palaces in order that his Stranger Concubine, the Zungarian Princess, might gaze upon the western horizon, reflects the same feeling; the Chinese still call it “The Home-looking Building.” Ch’ien Lung, whose very name has become the hall-mark of some of the loveliest things in Chinese art, was a Manchu: it was his predecessors, that dynasty of incomparable builders, the Mings, who for the most part gave to the Forbidden City its present form, and enlarged the small ponds and mounds of the Chins to their present proportions, including the Coal Hill. And there it now stands, with its five little summer-houses adorning its five little summits; not much visited by foreigners, since one can do so only if armed with a special permit obtained through the Legations; entirely solitary, save for the knot of soldiers who guard it, spitting and gambling in the gate-house porch, and for the innumerable crows which roost in the great trees behind it, standing lonely in the tangled and deserted park.
Punctually at 6.45, Rupert called for Amber at the Wagons-Lits Hotel. He found her among a crowd of women who, the poorer greedily and the richer resentfully, were buying blotters, paper-knives, ash-trays, fancy pencils and cretonne knitting-bags for the benefit of some missionary effort in Szechwan. She looked flushed and fagged, and doubted whether she could leave her stall. Rupert, however, was firm and Joanna complaisant, and she was packed into a ricksha and carried off. The rickshas sped through the haze of suspended dust, golden where the low sunlight caught it—down the Jade Canal Road, across the Ta Ch’ang an Chieh, down the Nan Ch’ih Tzu, till a leftward swing brought them out beside the moat of the Forbidden City, now a forest of pink lotuses, standing two or three feet clear of the water, like delicate carved and tinted candelabra above their crowding leaves. Amber caught her breath and gazed; till this moment she had not seen the holy flower, whose represented shape is omnipresent in China, growing, green and free, in masses wide as the reedbeds round an English mere. The rickshas stopped, and they stepped out, Rupert dragging after him a lively cocker spaniel.
’Why, that’s Touchy’s dog! What did you bring him for?” Amber asked, stooping to pat the pretty creature.
“Because I couldn’t get a piao in the time,” said Rupert. “You have to have one here. But this chap may do the trick for us. Come on, o’ man!” So saying, without giving Amber time to ask how a spaniel could replace an official permit, he led the dog over to the gateway and banged on the wooden door.
A soldier in the usual dirty grey cotton uniform opened it. Rupert asked with assurance for the Number One man, and stepped inside, dog and all; Amber followed. Instantly two or three more soldiers sprang up and came forward, demanding the piao and protesting violently that the place was closed. “Teng-i-teng” (Wait, wait), said Rupert easily, and explained that he must speak with the Number One. Meanwhile, the soldiers looking on suspiciously, he made the cocker sit up; took off his hat, and set it on the dog’s head. Bimbo sat like a rock; the soldiers began to grin; Rupert picked up a fan which lay on the ground, furled it, and set it across the cocker’s shoulder like a gun—the soldiers chuckled. “Shih kö ping” (He’s a soldier), he said, and the group, including the Number One, now arrived, laughed with childish delight. While Rupert made Bimbo balance a lump of sugar on his nose a violent discussion broke out as to what this strange animal was. “Shih kö kou!” (Is dog); “Pu shih kou!” (Not is dog); “Shih kö yang hsiung!” This latter view, that the long-coated spaniel was really a “foreign bear,” finally gained acceptance. But by this time the official guardians of the Coal Hill were so entranced by the performance provided, that when Rupert showed the Number One his card with his rank in Chinese on the back, and expressed a wish to stroll up and look-see, his request was granted with ‘Haos’ and bows, and he and Amber, followed by Bimbo, passed out of the court and began the steep ascent.
At first, as usual, Rupert was conscientiously the showman. Even as they climbed single file up the little pathway, trodden in the rank wiry grass of the hillside, he began to tell of the flight and suicide of the Emperor Ch’ung Cheng, the last of the Mings, when the Manchu conquerors were at the gate, to this, one of his favourite haunts, where he hanged himself from a tree. “Sit down a moment,” he said, pulling her down beside him on the steps of the pavilion, as they reached the first little summit. “You’re puffed. Now look.”
Amber did not need the injunction. She was seeing Peking as she had never seen it. Their seat on the shallow marble steps of the pavilion commanded a view of the whole great oblong of the Forbidden City, spread out below them like a child’s city of bricks on the floor, but curiously foreshortened; the yellow roofs at the further end were piled upon one another in a rich golden confusion, which made it hard to identify them. There were the pleasure-domes at the corners, and that splash of dark green was the thujas of Xanadu; there was half the great tent-topped gateway, with just a hint of the two others behind, through which Amber had come that first day; right out beyond, a dim smear of green marked the gate-tower of the Chien-Mên, another stage on the Imperial road southwards towards the Temple of Heaven, whose blue dome was faintly visible, like a dark sapphire, in the haze of the southern horizon. To the west of the Forbidden City itself lay the lakes and the Sea Palaces, gleaming through a sort of haze of willows—myriads of willows, drooping to water golden with sunset, overhanging walls of marble and crimson, brushing against strangely shaped tiled roofs of amber, of sea-green, of plum-colour. Their summer foliage, a peculiar dusty shade between fawn and silver, their extraordinarily elusive delicacy of form and outline, made them a perfect setting for the architecture, at once definite and fantastic, which they companioned with their grace. Is it because they grow so freely in North China, or because their budding wands are the symbol of rebirth in spring, and so of immortality, or for this more subtle reason, that the Chinese have showered willows all over their landscape?
But it was not only the willows that fascinated Amber. Beyond the golden central block of the Forbidden City, beyond the outer oblong of the Imperial City, whose outline was traceable at intervals, lay Peking itself, to east, to west—the whole southern half of the capital. But it didn’t look like a city at all. Seen from this height, it appeared more as a vast wooded plain—like the vale of Moreton from Stow, or the Thames valley from Long Crendon; so great is the cumulative effect of the trees which stand, scarce noticed from below, in every courtyard of house or temple. What a city, the girl thought, gazing out at it in the late light that deepened and enriched every colour with thick gold, touched every shape into solidity with dense blue shadow. She gazed and gazed, thinking—how incredibly perfect to be seeing it now, in this miraculous light, and with him! And with the thought she turned to Rupert, hoping to be able to get a look at his face, to set it for ever in relation to this vision of the wooded city, the golden palace, the dream-like lakes among the silvery willows.
But Rupert was watching her, and when she turned she met his challenging eyes, his amused affectionate smile. “How you do love it; don’t you?” he said. “It was worth bringing you here.”
“Why don’t you write a poem about all this?” the girl asked, looking away again—Rupert’s eyes were a little too challenging, too keen.
“I have—one or two. What do you know about my poems?” he asked.
“I read some the other day at Joanna’s.”
“Which did you read? Did you like them?”
“I like the one about the village frightfully,” said Amber cautiously.
“About a village? What do you mean? None of them are about villages,” said Rupert vigorously.
> “Yes—one called ‘China Hand’ was,” asserted Amber.
Rupert laughed. “Oh, that. But that wasn’t about the village, it was about a woman.”
“It was more about you than about the woman,” said Amber, with a sense of hardihood. He laughed again. “Love-poems are apt to be more about oneself than about the woman,” he said with his curious harsh abruptness, “because when one’s in love one’s so cursedly obsessed with one’s own sensations.”
“But you don’t call that a love-poem, do you?” asked Amber in genuine astonishment.
“Of course. What else? What would you call it?”
“Not that; it was so—discontented; angry, nearly.”
“My dear girl, love makes people discontented and angry,” he said, turning round to stare at her, half mockingly. “You’ll make plenty of people discontented and angry before you’ve done,” he said, smiling into her eyes.
“But why need one be angry? That’s what I don’t see. I don’t call that loving,” protested Amber, disregarding the last part of his words.
“It may not be loving, but it’s love all right,” the young man asserted. “I was angry with that woman, although I loved her like mad, because she was a shifting tease.” He frowned, pushed back his hair, as though to brush away some disturbing recollection; then he sprang up. “Come round to the back—you haven’t seen that side yet,” he said, and reaching down he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Still holding her hand, whether forgetfully or on purpose Amber didn’t know, he led her along the little crest of the hill, past the pavilions, and a few feet down the further slope to where a piece of marble, half-bedded in the soil, offered a low seat. Amber sat down, and he threw himself on the ground at her side.