The Ginger Griffin

by Ann Bridge

  The outlook on this side was rather more restricted. It was a strange place to find in the heart of a city. The trees and the thick thorny underbrush that grew between them entirely hid whatever wall there might be on two sides of the enclosure, for aught that one could see the park might stretch for miles in that direction. Crows were flying in in thousands from the north and west, and settling in the tree-tops with an immense clamour; on the dry turf at the edge of the wood two or three rabbits, with a single long black stripe down their backs, were hopping about. Bimbo set off in pursuit, and was recalled with difficulty. Amber, lovely as she thought the place, rather regretted the interruption of the move; she had been learning some rather important things about Rupert, she felt; she would sooner have stayed where she was. But when Bimbo had been brought back and made to “sit” beside them—“Did you read any others?” Rupert asked, pulling the dog’s ears.

  “Yes—one called ‘In Self-Defence.’

  “Well, what did you make of that?”

  “I thought it very good,” the girl said slowly. Somehow, sitting here with Rupert, with his face quite near to look at, she felt a great security, from which she looked back with surprise at her fright over that poem when she first read it. It was an additional safety, in some odd way, to talk of it to him. “Very good,” she repeated.

  “Why? What do you know about it?” he asked, as if surprised at her commendation. She did not answer immediately, and in a moment he went on, as if he didn’t want an answer—“That’s an angry one, if you like. I’m surprised at your liking it.”

  “Oh, but it’s true. And it isn’t angry—it’s only what you call it—self-defence. People can’t help struggling for existence,” said Amber, without choosing her words.

  “By George, you do know something about it!” said the young man, staring at her in astonishment. He continued to look at her in silence for a moment; when he spoke again, she had a feeling that he was saying something different from what he had meant to say.

  “So you think it’s allowable to resist love, but not to hit back if you’re hurt—is that it?” he asked. Amber nodded. A certain breathlessness made it difficult to speak. Rupert was talking now with a seriousness that was new to her, and he was talking of love. As if fascinated, she watched his hand on the dog’s neck, moving among the silky curls in such skilled caresses. It was as though that hand had something of its own to say to her—some message different to his actual speech. But now he was speaking again. “I daresay you might manage to love and be hurt without hitting back,” he said. “You’re very generous—I can see that. You’d probably be rather a safe person to love.” He paused—and Amber sat listening to the noise her heart made, in the enormous silence that his words left behind them. Suddenly he shifted his position, leaving Bimbo; propped on an elbow, he looked up into her face. “But you’d get possessive in the end,” he said. “Even you would—you all do.”

  “Do we?” Amber said.

  “On the whole, yes,” said Rupert with finality. “I suppose love is the devil, for you as well as for us, and you can’t help it. But I think women have a sort of dishonesty in love that men don’t. I don’t know!” He got up, as if to close the argument. “Come on—let’s go and have a bite of supper, Amber; you must be starving.”

  The “bite” consisted of hot soup, a variety of cold deliciousnesses, an iced soufflé and a bottle of Lieb-fraumilch in a bucket of ice. Everyone lives well in Peking, but Rupert’s food was in a class by itself; the perfection of all the accessories to the meal was something to which Amber was quite unused, even at Legation tables. She sat in a curious state of consciousness, like that we experience in some kinds of dream—at once intense and remote; everything Rupert said seemed to come from a long way off, and yet to be charged with significance; she heard her own replies, saw her own and his gestures, as through a sort of haze. But the haze was partly one of enchantment; there was something sweet and frightening about the intimacy of the whole thing—going to wash and powder her nose in his bathroom, sitting tête-à-tête with him in his own house, eating his food; lovely and yet unreal, like the life of a dream. Rupert for his part spent much of his time merely watching her with a sort of considering gravity, very different from his usual lively inquisitiveness; when dessert and port were on the table, and the servants gone, he shot out one of his sudden questions. “Have you ever been in love, Amber?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up at him from the peach she was peeling. In this curious atmosphere, where she heard her voice like a stranger’s, it was somehow easy to speak.

  He considered this too. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked next.

  “No,” said Amber, without hesitation. She could not tell him of the present, and what was there to say about the past? Moved by a curious need to establish this conversation in the past tense—“It’s over,” she added.

  “All right,” said Rupert oddly; she realised that he was referring to her refusal to speak. A sudden idea struck her.

  “Is that what you meant to ask me up on the hill, just now?” she asked.

  He gave a little yelp of laughter. “Yes, it was. You’re very sharp today!”

  “Why didn’t you?” she pursued—she felt this had an importance for her, though she was not sure quite what it was.

  But Rupert wouldn’t be drawn.

  “I don’t really remember now,” he said—and somehow the temperature of the haze was lowered a degree or two at the words. Then he leant over and filled up her glass.

  “I’m glad you’ve been in love,” he said; “I thought you were too young.”

  “Why are you glad?” Amber asked. The haze warmed again.

  “Because being in love makes people more interesting,” Rupert pronounced, “and more reasonable.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  DURING the next two months Amber gave way, in an unprecedented manner, to the evil habit of day-dreaming. At Pei-t’ai-ho, by the sea, she rode, walked, played tennis, swam four times a day; was taught to dive without her hands by Sir James Boggit, and to open her eyes under water and catch falling coins and cups by George Hawtrey; ate enormous meals, relished the rain when it rained, revelled in the sun when it came out again. She learned the correct seat on a donkey, well over the tail, and so mounted hooshed along the narrow field paths between the tall maize and kaoliang, or down the sandy donkey-track that runs throughout its length beside the one long road which links together the three miles of villas of the pleasant straggling wooded resort. She also learned never to put on anything but a bathing-suit or a wrapper till 5 P.M. and became quite accustomed, on that same road, to ride about in a ricksha with a bathing dress and a painted paper parasol as her only costume on her way to bathing-parties at other people’s p’engs. Like everyone else, she consumed quantities of ginger biscuits and cherry brandy on the beach at these parties, before riding back, damp but warm, the way she had come. Her creamy skin turned a deeper cream, her bronze-red hair grew bleached on top; freckles assembled not only on the bump on her nose, but all down her arms and even, as Hawtrey pointed out, on her insteps and shins; colour came back into her cheeks. She was strong and fresh and amused and occupied. But she was not fully satisfied or content; a hidden hunger gnawed her; and for false contentment and illusory satisfaction she turned to dreams of Rupert. Drowsing on her hot bed during the siesta in the darkened room, sitting out in a chaise-longue on the terrace after supper, by sunset and moonrise, while Hawtrey dabbed the ankles of the ladies with Muscatol against the mosquitoes, lying on the short turf above the rocks at Lighthouse Point, she deliberately surrendered herself to dreaming of Rupert.

  Day-dreams are peculiar things. Essentially of course they are merely an expression of one’s hidden wishes; but that curious engine, the human mind, imposes on them certain limitations. To satisfy it, even in their own insubstantial fashion, they must be in character, wearing the aspect of known reality; in their fragile and unreal sort, true. The mind, then, seizes on the known
reality as the raw material of the fabric which the heart has bidden it to rear; broods on it, works on it, speculates on it; living as it were in closest contact with the object of its desire, it makes the utmost use of every fragment of knowledge, every word, look, tone, change of expression or shade of temper. Out of these the dreamer creates his beloved illusion, remoulding nearer to the heart’s desire his actual experience. But he may never falsify this experience, or the dream withers; he can only amplify it, project the known further, so to speak, along the lines of possibility into the wished-for unknown. And this imperative need to keep the dream as real as possible, this patient and concentrated brooding on the secret possibilities of known aspects, does often bring about in the dreamer a quickness of perception, an interior knowledge, which may stand him in good stead in actual contacts. But the dangers outweigh the advantages—too often the reality, less pliable, cannot be moulded to the dream; and he falls back from it disheartened, in exhaustion, nervous and mental, into lassitude and listless-ness.

  Amber passed her late summer, then, in day-dreams. And the wish round whose fulfilment they hovered was that Rupert should be fond of her as she was of him. But she was under the compulsion already pointed out to keep the dream true, to continue the phantasy along the lines of the reality with which she was familiar. For two months she stood staring, as it were, at the Rupert she knew, seeking to see if this thing was in him; listening in her mind to forms of words in which such an admission could come living from his mouth, examining and discarding sequences of events which might bring it to pass. Love has no more pathetic manifestation than this fantastic imagining—its only sterile activity. And by the end of the summer Amber had practically decided that that could be; that what he said and did and was, showed it to be within the limits of possibility, at least.

  Both Joanna and Hawtrey, watching the girl’s occasionally absorbed and withdrawn face, wondered what it was that held her thoughts in such a spell. Joanna briskly assumed that it was “one of those two”—those two being of course Rupert and Hawtrey; and for all his cleverness and his devotion to Nugent, she hoped it wasn’t Rupert. There was something difficult and hard about him, she considered; he might be unreliable. (Joanna had by this time naturally heard of his past affair with Mrs. Leicester, which did not incline her very particularly in his favour.) Whereas Joe, in spite of his rather naïve airs of a galantuomo, was reliable, she thought; he was just the sort of man, once married, to spend the rest of his life carrying his wife’s gloves and fussing over her health and complexion; besides—her mind just brushed this in her rapid review—he was a Duke’s cousin and very rich. And cleverness and insight weren’t everything in marriage—in fact, quite definitely, you could have too much of them, as of all other good things.

  Mr. Hawtrey, for his part, though inclined to fear the worst, thanked Heaven for these good weeks without his rival, and made the most of his opportunity. But only within the limits which Amber had imposed; it was strange to himself, this new harness which bridled him—the wish to let someone else have their way. And how odd her way was! Strolling along the paths of the Legation Compound, or sitting on the little plank seats above the sea, they wasted long precious hours of fragrant dusk or divine moonlight (which had been far better spent in kisses, his arm round her delicious slimness) discussing horses! Mr. Hawtrey really deserved (and certainly gave himself) a good deal of credit for his self-restraint on these occasions.

  It would, however, have been a great mistake to imagine that these dreams and yearnings made Amber actively unhappy, or that she pined. On the contrary there were moments, especially on wet and rough days, swimming out alone into the sea, surmounting near dark and foaming horizons, when she experienced a strange sense of triumph and conquest, an almost spiritual exaltation; when she told herself that nothing mattered, while there was sky and sea and strong conscious motion; that she could face not getting Rupert, even, if these things endured. She remembered then Nugent’s words about embracing experience, and made them part of her contest with blown spray and towering crests; returning to breakfast with a conquering air that startled Joanna, and set Hawtrey’s heart hammering. Hawtrey too was, in a way, a source of pleasure to the girl; there was something both comforting and supporting about his unfailing good-temper, his real kindness, his constant readiness to further any and all of her plans; while his physical splendour, as he dived, swam, or stretched upon the shore, was a thing to make the beholder feel that Nature was somehow richer than one had supposed. She confided to him her scheme for getting a griffin, and Joe, while inclined to feel that racing was a man’s job, and better let alone by the women and children, nevertheless offered all sorts of assistance. He would see about griffins in Tientsin when the draft came down—he was sure he could arrange a stable; he would help with training.

  The one thing Joe would not do—there are limits to all devotion—was to accompany Amber on her longer walks. Quite a short residence in North China has the effect of depriving Europeans of the use of their legs, and everything but the mildest of strolls is looked at askance. Amber had not yet reached this stage, and her passion for long walks was regarded as a form of mania, and not so harmless at that.

  She had set her heart on walking along the eleven miles of shore to Ch’ing-wang-tao—not because she wanted to see it, but because it is most desirable to walk to a place, in China, in order to get a roof over your head for the three hours in the middle of the day when exposure to the sun, even in a topi, is dangerous; and because there were lovely sand-dunes on the way; she had seen them over and over again from Lighthouse Point. This project encountered almost universal opposition. Sir James thought it outré, and spoke vaguely of possible bandits—“and you’ll ruin your pretty complexion, my dear child. Take me a good ride instead.” Joe refused point-blank to go: he also worried over Amber’s complexion, and premised quicksands along the shore. Amber found her only ally, most unexpectedly, in Burbidge. Burbidge would love to go; she liked a good long walk; it would make a change. This reinforcement enabled Amber to get her way with Joanna; a donkey and donkey-boy were engaged to show the way and carry the lunch, and at six o’clock one morning they set out.

  The eastern sun was level in their eyes as they crossed the neck of land which joins Lighthouse Point to the coast, and skirted round the seaward end of the ridge behind the village. Beyond this point all was new and unexplored, and with considerable exhilaration the pair trudged along the faintly defined track across the saltings, sand-flats and water-meadows which formed a sort of neutral territory between the sea and the land. On the right lay the blue and sun-warmed waters of the Gulf of Pechili, lapping idly against a long curve of dazzling white sand which faded away, in the distance, into a faintly pencilled dark bluff with tall wireless masts rising from it—their destination; on their left stretched a low line of dull green, the edge of the endless marshy plain which here separates the mountains from the coast—a line made soft and undecided by innumerable knots and tufts of small silvery willows, their rounded tops as light and shapeless as lumps of green cottonwool. Now and then they came to a wide stretch of water, where one of the coastal rivers ran out; these looked formidable, but, perched in turns on the donkey, Amber and Burbidge, the latter with shrill peals of amusement, forded them dry-shod, while the donkey-boy splashed alongside. Amber was very happy. The place had a curious simple loveliness, a landscape reduced to its barest essentials; the low flat planes of white and blue and dim green were restfully satisfying to the eyes, the solitude and silence, in which the light clop of the donkey’s feet on damp ground matched the gentle hesitant plash and rustle of the breaking and retreating water, most soothing to the spirit, after the rather concentrated companionship of the Legation bungalows. Burbidge was an ideal companion;

  she seldom spoke unless first addressed; if she did volunteer a remark, it was of a shrewd obviousness which was as soothing as silence, and funny as well.

  After some miles of going they reached the sand-dunes
, and Amber insisted on turning aside to explore them, indicating to the donkey-boy that he should wait on the shore. The dunes ran up, in curiously steep and mountainous shapes, to a height of over a hundred feet in places, but the wonderful thing about them was their colour. They were not yellow or fawn at all, but a sort of peach-pink, fading to purest white; all through them grew great tufts of stiff prickly grass of a bright silver-blue, like sea-holly; here and there in the hollows, most surprisingly, were little pools of water, overhung by those same silvery willows which grew in the marsh. A pink landscape with sky-filled pools, bordered with blue grass and set with silver willows is really something to exclaim about, and Amber exclaimed. “Yes, Miss,” said Burbidge temperately, when called upon to share her enthusiasm. “It does get into your shoes, though, doesn’t it, Miss?” Amber laughed, and struggled up the tallest crest in sight. From its summit she looked out over the whole expanse of the coastal plain, from north to south, as far as the eye could reach, of that cool green; behind it rose the mountains, fantastically steep, of an improbable blackish blue. But now her eye was caught by a nearer sight—the donkey and the donkey-boy, trekking placidly inland through the dunes. She yelled to them, waved and pointed towards the shore; but though the boy turned and looked at her, he continued quietly on his way. There was nothing for it but to follow, and shouting down to Burbidge directions as to the easiest way to take, Amber set off in pursuit. When she reached the tracks she sat and waited for Burbidge, then they went on together. Now a near-by rattle broke out, as of rifle-fire. “I hope we aren’t coming to a battle, Miss,” said Burbidge. Surprised and uneasy, they walked forward, till rounding a shoulder at the end of the sandhills, the reason for the boy’s manoeuvre became plain to them. In a clearing among the reeds and bushes, numerous American soldiers were carrying out musketry practice with both rifles and Lewis-guns, firing seawards; to continue along the shore would have been to cross their line of fire. Following the donkey, Amber and Burbidge skirted round the rear of these military exercises, and presently reached a green embankment stretching right and left across the plain; climbing it, they found themselves on the metalled track of a railway.