Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  Mrs Leroy laughed out loud.

  ‘Is that complimentary?’ inquired the General, fixing his eyeglass on her.

  ‘Very, I should say!’ she said, still laughing. ‘I must have him and Sir James to dine and hear them talk to one another.’

  ‘But will you come and talk to him at Chieh T’ai Ssu? That’s the point,’ said the General.

  ‘Yes, and Miss Hande – Big Annette,’ said Nina Nevile. ‘She will talk to you, Laura, and she’s such a bad mixer.’

  ‘Is Miss Hande coming too, then?’ Mrs Leroy inquired.

  ‘Why yes – I must take her. And Little Annette – didn’t I say so?’

  ‘No, you didn’t, my dear,’ said the General. ‘Now you know the worst, Mrs Leroy; will you come?’

  It was characteristic of General Nevile that in a society which dealt almost exclusively in Christian names, he should have continued to call the woman whom, except his wife, he knew best, and perhaps liked most, by her formal prefix. It belonged to his rather Edwardian character and appearance to do this, and Mrs Leroy liked it, if only for that reason. She marvelled perpetually at the tendency of Peking society, as of other small societies, to invent and use nicknames, and had formed a theory that it was because they seemed somehow to give the impression of a larger number of people. Major La Touche, for instance, who was now standing in front of her, measuring the distance between the top of his riding boots and the bottom of his drill jacket on his riding whip with great care and persistence, had two perfectly good names. You could call him Major La Touche, or you could call him James; you might even call him Jim; but no one ever called him anything but Touchy, which was not in the least appropriate to his character. Then there was this business of the Annettes. They were not related; they were not alike. Miss Anna Hande, who had been referred to as Big Annette, was a middle-aged and eminent American novelist (in her own country she was called ‘the American Hardy’) – if anything she was small of stature, and a most uncompromising subject for a nickname. But just because she happened to be visiting the Neviles in Peking at the same time as Annette Ingersoll, Nina’s niece, she had to be, it appeared, ‘Big Annette’, while the immensely tall Miss Ingersoll became, with equal incongruity, ‘Little Annette’. Mrs Leroy used the current nicknames, like everyone else, but they added to the sense of theatricality which sometimes overcame her. At that moment, for instance, she saw the figures about her, spattered with the irregular starry shadows of the oleander leaves – the General, standing, because his lame leg made it too much trouble to lower himself into any seat for a short time; his wife in a chair, her hat, which she had pulled off, on her lap, showing her childish waved yellow head, sipping her cocktail; Major La Touche, now, his foot on the tub of the oleander, measuring his riding boot with his whip – like figures on a stage; they seemed to her, in the subdued wavering light, against the background of fantastic architecture and shifting crowd, with the music from the band spraying over them, completely unreal, artificial presentations of types. She listened, as to a stage dialogue, to the chatter exchanged between Mrs Nevile and La Touche, and almost started when she heard herself again addressed.

  ‘Well, Laura, you’ll come, will you?’

  Mrs Leroy roused herself with sudden decision. ‘If I come,’ she said, ‘I must bring my Kuniangs.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN MANDARIN the word kuniang denotes an unmarried girl of rank – literally, a virgin. Mrs Leroy’s announcement that she must bring her virgins with her to Chieh T’ai Ssu produced a sort of pause.

  ‘My dear, that will make us the most terrific crowd of women,’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘Two, four – six! and only four men.’

  ‘Does that matter?’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Why not four men?’

  ‘Why men at all, eh?’ said General Nevile, twinkling unexpectedly.

  ‘No, I like there to be men,’ said Laura calmly, ‘only I don’t see why they need fit, except at dinner.’

  ‘Dear Laura – the Singing Kuniang by all means – but the other? Couldn’t she have a rest cure or a headache?’ urged Major La Touche.

  ‘Yes, Laura – do bring the singing one,’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘We’ll make her sing by moonlight; it will be lovely. But must you bring the other one?’

  ‘How disagreeable you all are about poor Lilah,’ said Mrs Leroy, with unruffled calm. ‘I won’t leave her out. What is the matter with her?’

  ‘The grave, the temple, the tomb!’ ejaculated La Touche rapidly, ‘none of them is more silent.’

  ‘Well, you can look at her while you listen to Judith,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘She’s worth looking at.’

  ‘Not the animated bust, anyhow,’ murmured La Touche.

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, Touchy, and let us get on with plans,’ said Nina Nevile. ‘Very well, Laura darling – we must have you, and if I bring my Kuniangs, it’s only fair you should bring yours, I suppose. Though if anyone is a worse mixer than Big Annette,’ she sighed, ‘I must say it is your Beauty. But look, Laura – can you bring an extra man or two?’

  ‘Do you mean Henry?’ asked Mrs Leroy. ‘Because if so I should say no. Vol. Two is well on its way just now.’

  Henry Leroy was Commercial and Oriental Attaché to the British Legation in Peking. His official duties were onerous in spasms: as when civil war approached the capital more nearly than usual, or when a fresh Tuchun (warlord) captured or purchased the city from a rival, and produced a change of government. But at other times they left him with a sufficiency of leisure, which he filled with polo and Oriental studies. He wrote books, and very good books too, on Chinese Linguistics and Chinese Commercial History, on one of which he was now engaged. Laura Leroy was interested in his official work, and aware of his very considerable local importance – as an inconspicuous, silent, but quite essential cog in the great diplomatic machine; she was also, secretly, very proud of his scholarship. She was intelligent enough to appreciate at their proper worth the books which, at longish intervals, appeared over his name, each one in turn creating its quiet stir of approbation among the experts. She appeared to accept quite naturally, and without the smallest resentment, the fact that these occupations left her husband with very little time or attention to spare for her or her interests; that she had to carry on their social life practically single-handed and fill in any leisure of her own as best she might. She was much too wise to attempt to share in any way in his labours; she spoke Peking colloquial Chinese fluently, and had a sufficiency of Mandarin at command for social purposes, but she was no Sinologue, and could only read a bare two or three thousand characters – accomplishments which she rated very low. She did not, indeed, set a very high value on herself or any of her activities – an attitude which leaves one peculiarly free to assess other values. It was perhaps to an obscure sense of this freedom about her, of unuttered judgments based on a secret independence – the sense almost of a hidden and incorruptible tribunal – that she owed her peculiar position in the small world of Peking. Not very prominent, not very young, not excessively beautiful, and not in the least ambitious, she was nevertheless quietly important to it in a way that other women who were all these things were not. Nobody ever troubled to formulate the reasons for this except perhaps Touchy; and he was an exception, knew it, and wisely held his peace. There can be few places in the world where Matthew Arnold’s dictum, that ‘ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves – cannot be too much lived with’ would find a more hollow echo than in the European society of Peking. Touchy read this sentence out to Laura Leroy one day, not very long after his arrival, as a sort of test. ‘Who said that?’ she asked; and when he had told her, ‘What a sensible man!’ she said, and that was all. At the time Touchy was a little disappointed; but afterwards, when he got to know Laura better, he felt that the answer was both adequate and characteristic. He realised presently that she agreed profoundly with Matthew Arnold, and he sometimes wondered what she did with her ideas. He, for his part, liked to use ideas as currency, and he experienced all
the discomfort of a sort of enforced intellectual moratorium in a place where they had so little value. But Laura, though her intellectual finances were obviously of the soundest – positively, he said to himself, on a gold basis – never seemed to court interchange particularly; if you could nobble her quietly she would give you a high rate of exchange, but she never looked for a market, so to speak. Yes, it was, Touchy had long since decided, probably these large gold reserves, this sense of things left unsaid, rather than anything she said or did in particular, which caused Laura Leroy to be admired, valued, yes, and a little feared as she was. There were those who said, not wholly without reason, that she was a prig. But there was nothing overtly peculiar about her; she conformed smoothly, if a little indifferently, to the milieu in which she found herself. Touchy also took off his hat, among other things, to her skilful and unobtrusive protection of Henry’s leisure and labours. As now. ‘Vol. Two,’ she said, ‘is well on its way,’ and that disposed of Henry as far as Chieh T’ai Ssu was concerned.

  ‘No, I’m too modest to hope for Henry,’ said Nina, ‘but can’t you bring someone else?’

  ‘I’ll see – though I can’t think why we want all these men,’ said Laura. ‘Yes – I can bring Derek, of course.’

  On her way home Mrs Leroy reviewed the situation. The car was at the Summer Palace with the Kuniangs, so she took a rickshaw from the crowd which thronged the narrow hut’ung among the waiting motors, the coolies squatting in the deep slate-coloured dust, gossiping and smoking American cigarettes, till the appearance of a possible fare galvanised them into activity. Then they arose and hurried forward between their brass-topped shafts, jostling one another vigorously and shouting, ‘Want-not-want?’ in a deafening chorus.

  A rickshaw is the most delightfully civilised form of locomotion. Seated in a well-sprung bath-chair, the passenger bowls along on pneumatic tyres at a surprising speed; he is alone, for it only holds one; his view is unimpeded by anything but the lowered head and shoulders of the trotting coolie; the air fans his face gently, and there is nothing to prevent his holding up a sunshade in comfort. The only drawback is that in order to reach any objective unfamiliar to the coolie he must know not only the way thither, but the points of the compass en route as well, for the Chinese do not use left and right as directions, but north, south, and so on. ‘Wang tung!’ (turn east!) you cry at a corner, or ‘Wang’pei!’ (turn north!) (Which is also, if you come to think of it, both a more civilised and a more intellectual way of giving directions than our own.) However, the British Legation is known to all rickshaw coolies, so Mrs Leroy merely said, ‘Ying-Kuo Fu!’ and sat back in peace to consider.

  On the whole she was inclined not to regret having agreed to join Nina’s picnic. It was true that the party would be large to the point of unwieldiness – at the last moment Mrs Nevile had invited Henri Delache, a young Frenchman, who had a camp bed of his own, and could therefore be included without disturbing what Touchy called ‘the flea-bag ratio’ of the party – and sufficiently ill-assorted to call for a certain amount of social effort and perseverance on somebody’s part; but Mrs Leroy hoped and intended that the somebody should be for the most part either Touchy, who was indefatigable and good-natured, or Nina. In any case they would all have to rub along somehow, and it would be a nice outing for the Kuniangs. Mrs Leroy had a certain amount of conscience about entertaining her two nieces. The children of an elder step-sister, they were near enough to her own age not to require elaborate taking care of, but she did want them to have a good time in Peking. She knew them really very little. For the last eight years now she had been in China, most of the time, and when she did go home she was usually too much absorbed in Tim and Sarah, their holidays and their clothes and their amusements and arrangements, to have much leisure for anything else. It was terrible how fast time flew then. She seized the moments, grasped them, held on to them with an almost physical intensity – but they slipped by like water, flowed past, sank away, and were gone; and she was left staring after two trains which had swallowed up those two small funny faces. She never seemed to have time, even, to see how the faces had altered from last year, let alone the funny minds behind the funny faces – though she used to look and look till her eyes ached. Oh, she knew all about not seizing the wingèd joy, she used to tell herself almost angrily – but what would Blake have said if his joy had lived in England and he in Peking, and he’d had it for two months, two short, short months once a year, or not even that? Once a year, an operation without an anaesthetic – and then staring after two trains! Tim, thank Heaven, was too small to mind much – he still, right up to the last, wanted to study the makes of engines from the platform, and would fidget about like a fish on the end of a line, his hand in her foolish idiotic hand which so liked to feel the small strength of his, when he caught sight of his little companions. But Sarah – Sarah with her untidiness, her inky fingers and furry hair, her bleak sincerity, savage contempts and loyal burning affection – Sarah, whose jokes became more acid, and her goodnight hugs more strained and long, the last two days – there were no engines for her. How was one to bear her short staccato remarks, indifferent or snappish, the last morning? – and at the station, the ferocious frowns with which she winked away moisture, the last helpless, sudden trembling of her lips before her brusque dive into the carriage? It was hard to make ‘eternity’s sunrise’ out of them.

  Anyhow, these things had prevented her from cultivating her nieces, and now she found herself with two grown-up young women whom she hardly knew on her hands for a couple of months. On the whole she was inclined to like them. Judith was the easiest; Mrs Leroy suspected Judith of being rather a warrior. She was not very pretty – pretty in some moods and some frocks, but that was all – so she had had, presumably, to do something about it. What she had done about it was to train for a singer, in a thorough-paced and professional way, and with considerable success, judging by her voice. She was also intelligent and pleasantly enthusiastic – she had jumped at the chance of going to the Summer Palace with old Miss Parke; she would probably jump at going to Chieh T’ai Ssu. Lilah, on the other hand, never jumped at anything. She was a massive glorious blonde, beautiful with a well-regulated beauty of snowy neck and shoulders, apple-blossom skin, and golden hair which she had not shingled. But her beauty had apparently prevented her from feeling the necessity of doing – or, indeed, saying – much about anything. She dressed very well in a slightly grandiose way – much better than Judith, who was inclined to be gipsyfied about clothes and treated her rather moderate complexion with scornful neglect. But her expression was neutral almost to the point of sulkiness, and her capacity for silence almost illimitable. Never had Laura seen anyone make less contribution to the general social give-and-take, or less response to the efforts of others. She had watched, even in the short time they had been with her, person after person, lured by Lilah’s loveliness, moving cheerfully up to the attack, and after a little while falling back baffled and disgruntled. She had a mental picture of Lilah passing leisurely through the East on her way out, like some Indian goddess (influenced by Greek art, of course) with monumental impassivity, receiving the garlands and the obeisances, but giving no sign to her worshippers. She rather thought Judith must have got some fun out of watching this – she already credited Judith with getting quite a lot of fun out of watching things; but just what Lilah got out of it she did not know. And yet she was clearly not stupid. It was a puzzle.

  Wrapped in these thoughts, she was borne rapidly homewards. She was too familiar with the dirty sordid streets to be struck any more by the peculiarity of a whole city of one-storey houses; by the teeming yellow faces, the dust and squalor, the innumerable donkeys; but as her rickshaw crossed the Ta Ch’ang An Chieh, the great street running along the north side of the Legation Quarter, she turned her head to look at the Forbidden City. That was a sight on which, after all these years, she could never look unmoved. One behind the other, the great red gateways stood up in the evening light like
immense double-decker Noah’s Arks, roofed in golden tiles, above the high crimson walls. Close at hand, on the right, showed the silvery green of the secular thujas round the Temple of the Ancestors – the ‘sunny spots of greenery’, of Xanadu, planted, legend says, by Kublai Khan. The egrets had come back after their winter absence, and their white shapes showed among the ancient trees, their harsh cries filled the air above the clang of trams and the blasts of motor horns. Changeless matchless beauty, holding the eyes and the mind, as beauty does! She remembered her first sight of it, on the evening of their arrival in Peking. Henry had taken her arm and led her, tired and stiff and discouraged with unpacking, with the allocation of rooms, the dispersal of blankets and linen and silver to various household destinations, out into the icy dusk. They went through the West Gate of the Legation, across the glacis outside the Quarter, and found themselves presently in a red-walled avenue a hundred yards wide, stretching down on their left to the immense green-tiled gate-tower of the Ch’ien-mên, stretching up on their right to the red and golden Noah’s Arks, with gleams of white marble at their base. ‘There!’ said Henry. They looked. ‘It’s the eighth Wonder of the World,’ he said. And she had gone back to the house with him, partly reconciled to a place of exile which held such breathtaking beauty.

  ‘Ying-Kuo-fu!’ said the coolie suddenly, and dumped down the shafts. Mrs Leroy, accustomed to this manoeuvre, was not pitched out. ‘Go in, go in!’ she said, waving her hand towards the squat ugly grey gateway of the Legation. The coolie resumed his shafts and trotted obediently through it, past the sentry on the left, past the Constable’s lodge with the grey parrot on the right, past the painted scarlet-pillared T’ing’rhs of the Minister’s house. The Legation compound was dotted with good-sized bungalows and a few larger houses; there were open spaces which would later be grass, there were trees and flowering shrubs and officey-looking buildings in a network of well-kept roads. ‘Turn south!’ said Mrs Leroy at a crossroad. ‘Turn west!’ a few yards further on. The rickshaw bowled up a curved gravel sweep between thickets of sweet-scented yellow briars, and stopped before a large well-built house. She was at home.