Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  Mrs Leroy moved over to the open French window and stepped through it on to the broad tiled verandah outside. Tubs of oleanders stood all along its outer edge, chairs and rugs and tables furnished it like a room; between the oleanders white stocks and wallflowers in shallow pots made it gay and formal at once. She stood looking out over her garden. Two tall thick plantations of fragrant evergreen thujas screened it on both sides – the further end was blocked by some big trees just coming into leaf, through which showed a high and forbidding grey wall, stuck with glass at the top, and over it the huge gloomy buildings of the Soviet Embassy. Most of the garden was lawn, but now only a few thin spikes of green showed above the brown earth and flattened matted leaves of last year’s grass. A low stone parapet, on which stood pots of wallflowers, separated the lower garden from the upper one. A week ago an avenue of lilacs had sprung up in the night along the path across the lawn – dug out from the underground pit where they had spent the winter and sunk, tubs and all, in the turf. Their sweetness came in waves now on her face as she walked towards the upper garden, where gnarled ancient trees and bushes of flowering cherry and plum held out on black fantastic branches their annual miracle of pink and rose-red blossom. Here there were stone seats, and groups of trees for shade, and a pergola – a little mystery and a little secrecy, such as a garden should have. The air was full of the scent of the yellow briars round the house, and mixed with it other scents – wood smoke and Chinese cooking and Chinese sanitation and donkey dung – the intimate penetrating Peking smell, which is like the smell of no other city on earth. Laura smelt it with positive pleasure – its strength, in the warm dusk, meant that spring was fully come, and the baking splendours of a Chinese summer on the way. In the snowless winter of cold sunshine and frost and tearing winds the smell of Peking suffers a strange diminution, and dwindles to a mere ghost.

  She wandered over to a group of tamarisks, whose boughs wore a faint bloom of pale green and pale rose, transparent and tenuous as chiffon, and sat down on a bench below the leaning trunks. The air was as full of sounds as of smells. Even in the quiet Legation garden the confused noise of the city reached her, but it was a different quality of sound from the roar of traffic in a European city, the muffled drumming of soft feet on unpaved earth – bare or slippered human feet, the pads of camels, the light tapping of the small unshod feet of donkeys. In this low murmur other sounds stood out sharply, like loud notes in soft music – the hoot of a distant motor horn, the ringing of tram bells, a scream of a steam whistle and sounds of shunting from the railway station just outside the city wall. She could hear, too, innumerable cries from the streets outside – but strange cries, with another note in the voices; now and then in the distance crackers were let off with a noise like revolver shots. There were small noises near at hand as well; a Peking crow barked now and then from over by the stables; she could hear the creak of the shadoof as the gardener hauled up water from the well, and a sort of crackling sound as his colleague rolled back the straw lienzas off the conservatory, now that the sun had set. The hoopees had just come back, and tripped about the lawn with their little running steps, fluting low isolated notes. Suddenly out of the sky came a faint winging of music, as from small harps overhead – she looked up and saw a flight of birds wheeling over the house. It was that loveliest of Chinese inventions, the small pipes bound to the pinion feathers of pigeons, so that the birds cannot fly without creating this ethereal music. Who would not love and honour a race which could devise a thing like that? she thought, as she watched the birds wheeling to and fro, up and down, in the air above her.

  The glare had gone, and one or two faint stars pricked the blue – a blue so pale that it was almost grey. The light could not lie more tenderly in the upper reaches of the sky above an English garden – not even above the garden at Garsover. And with the thought she was there. Her two worlds met for a moment under the sky that arched over both, and then that distant one invaded the present and blotted it out. She was in that garden, muffled so deep in trees, sheltered so by its grey stone walls, watching the wagtails tripping about the green deep turf between the flower beds outside the old yellow house. The lawn stretched up, up, up to the great horse chestnut, under which daffodils swung in the light air over the place whence the crocuses and aconites had just departed. She saw Grandpère going to and fro along the terrace walk, shuffling a little, his silver head bent in meditation, a volume of Kant sticking out of his pocket, a volume of Inge clasped in his hands behind his back. She saw Grandmamma come out on to the steps, a stiff spare figure in black, and walk along the flags with a sort of ungainly sprightliness to the door in the wall. Jasmine was wreathing in the arch over it, smothering the delicate Italian carving wrought in the pale Oxfordshire stone; Grandmamma was going up to Evensong, and the sound of the bells came down over the hill. A steady stream of rooks flowed over the garden, going home to roost at Chislehampton in the woods above the river; and from every corner of the smothering shrubberies rang the evening anthem of the blackbirds, carrying the air in a whole symphony of lesser song. How deep the peace was, there, after a long English day, empty of people and soaked in books – long solid stretches of work or reading, which she herself interrupted as she chose: to drive into Oxford to see Rachel or Richard, or to buy another book, to walk over to Stadham to see Arnold or Frances.

  The thought of that quiet English day brought her back to her day now ending. There was peace in Peking too, among the sounds of the Tartar City, but what of her day? Looking back she saw it as a protracted little bustle about little things – clothes and notes and comings and goings and people and interruptions and more clothes and more notes. Clothes and notes – that was really the bulk of her life. Yes, and cocktails – clothes and notes and cocktails! Probably Judith was right about its being a silly system. Still, she thought a little wearily, she could not alter it, and she switched off on to thinking about Judith. The girl had shown something like passion about wasting time on people to whom one was indifferent – ‘One never gets to know anyone well enough!’ she had said. Judith had opened a corner of her mind to her, and Mrs Leroy was interested in what she found inside. She felt that she had probably been a little lazy herself, or she might have found her way into Judith’s mind sooner. She had been providing her two nieces with adequate and suitable entertainment, but with half her mind elsewhere, as usual. That was how one dealt with everybody and everything in this divided life of hers! Incompetent! she thought, and rather more conscious of weariness, resolved to do better.

  A movement close by made her focus her eyes on something more immediate than the pale plume of one tamarisk bough against the sky at which, unconsciously, she had been staring with great concentration. Glancing towards the sound, she saw Derek Fitzmaurice’s figure emerge from the thicket of plum blossom, now becoming ghostly in the dusk – he came and sat down beside her.

  ‘La Belle Laure all alone!’ he observed.

  ‘Has the Minister come?’ asked Laura, glancing at her watch.

  ‘I don’t know – I came round by the garden,’ replied Fitzmaurice. ‘I saw your dress shining up here, so I came along.’ He had an incurable habit of using any means of ingress to the house rather than the front door. ‘I’ve been for a walk on the Wall with the Beauty,’ he went on.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Who told you?’ he asked, rather quickly.

  ‘Niu, of course.’

  ‘Old brute!’ grunted Derek. ‘He brought me the wrong girl. I asked him for Judith. I wish you’d have a boy who speaks English, Laura.’

  ‘Well, did you have a nice walk?’ asked Laura pacifically.

  ‘As a matter of fact, we did,’ said Fitzmaurice. ‘She’s rather a character, you know, when you get her going.’

  ‘Do you mean to say you did get her going?’

  ‘Oh, yes, in a way. She makes rather supreme remarks about people – not many, but rather supreme.’ He paused. ‘She said you were like a wise lily,’ he added, and tur
ned on her to watch the effect.

  ‘Goodness!’ said Laura. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’

  ‘Yes, wasn’t it? But she was much more extraordinary afterwards,’ pursued Derek. ‘I said wise, yes, but that you weren’t like a lily, they were white and cold and – er, so forth – and she said, “Their sweetness draws all the world to them, and they have golden hearts.”’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ exclaimed Laura, and stopped, too startled to say more.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Derek. ‘It’s a golden sentence. And true, ma chère. I wish I’d thought of it myself. Then she was quite supreme,’ he went on, ‘about poor old James.’ (This disrespectful allusion was to the Minister.) ‘She said, “He reminds me of a parson’s cob out hunting. I shouldn’t think he ever got over any obstacle without at least three people urging him from behind.” That’s very good, you know.’

  ‘It’s masterly!’ said Laura. ‘What a marvel you are, though, Derek, to have opened these floodgates! Poor Sir James! The parson’s cob! It’s perfect.’

  ‘So is the wise lily!’ he said, smiling at her.

  ‘Most extraordinary!’ went on Laura, not paying the smallest attention to him. ‘Who would have believed it?’ She was really startled at this sudden manifestation of mental activity on Lilah’s part. Within the last hour light had been thrown on both her nieces: Judith with her passion to know people, and now Lilah’s apparent capacity for learning a great deal about them merely by observation. And she was touched, inevitably, by the ‘wise lily’.

  ‘Come indoors!’ she said to Derek. ‘Sir James must be there by this time.’ Derek jibbed. ‘No, you must come. There’s a telegram, and Henry may not be down yet.’

  Fitzmaurice followed her faintly glimmering gold figure obediently across the lawn.

  They found Sir James in the drawing room. All that thought, care, and the personal attention of himself and an excellent valet could do for Sir James’s appearance was done; but in spite of immaculate suits and shirts and shoes he remained a rather undistinguished presence, rubicund of face, short and stocky of figure – a cob, in fact, elderly and well-groomed. Henry was not there. Laura apologised for him – ‘But here is Mr Fitzmaurice, Sir James, and Henry will be down in a moment. Now have a cocktail. Perhaps you and Mr Fitzmaurice would like to have a look at the telegram together?’

  Sir James displayed his usual mixture of the affable and the irritable. ‘Oh, don’t go, Mrs Henry,’ he said, taking his cocktail. ‘That’s a new dress, isn’t it? I congratulate you!’ He raised his glass and drank to her. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been for the last four hours, my boy,’ he went on, turning to Fitzmaurice, ‘but not in your Chancery. Not a soul there but the cipher clerks the whole blessed afternoon! Bad, you know. This telegram arrived – no one to deal with it.’

  ‘I’m extremely sorry, sir,’ said Fitzmaurice. ‘I went to the Knudsens’ At Home. I heard none of the Legation staff were going, and as it was for the Crown Prince I thought one of us at least had better show up. Of course I was wrong.’

  Sir James grunted. He himself had clean forgotten the Crown Prince and had gone off to play golf. Fitzmaurice was a past-master of the accusatory apology, as he had often found to his cost in the past. The afternoon was best left alone.

  ‘Well, you had better look at this now,’ he said, extracting a folded paper with some trouble from the breast pocket of his tightly fitting dress suit. He smoothed it out, on a small table beside him. ‘Read it out – Mrs Henry will forgive us.’

  Fitzmaurice, with the expression of bored loathing which the mere sight of a telegram engenders in Heads of Chanceries, took up the paper and read aloud in a slightly sick tone:

  ‘It is rumoured here that Tu Yu-Jen is concentrating troops secretly in hills west of (four words undecipherable) stop. Objective said to be Peking stop. Strength estimated at 200,000 stop. Stodart.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said, handing it back to his chief. ‘Another Kuominchün push, I suppose. They said Tu was going to write poems in Moscow, but he seems to have thought better of it.’

  ‘Stodart is that temporary felloh at Taiyuan, isn’t he?’ observed Sir James. ‘Rather an alarmist felloh, I consider.’

  ‘He only says it’s a rumour,’ said Fitzmaurice. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, sir, I think I had better slip across to the Chancery and have a go at this telegram. Our Mr Deering has left the yolk out of the egg. What we want to know is where – if at all – Mr Tu is concentrating. And that is just what we don’t know – on this.’

  ‘Yes, do, my boy,’ said Sir James.

  ‘I think you’ll find Tu is somewhere near Huai Lai,’ observed Mrs Leroy, from the corner of the sofa where she was sitting back and smoking quietly, her eyes on the darkening garden. The two men turned and stared at her.

  ‘Dear lady, how do you know that?’ inquired Sir James.

  ‘Huai Lai! Cripes! that’s pretty close to home!’ exclaimed Fitzmaurice. ‘Two hundred thousand men is a goodish crowd too. I wonder if Li will clear out, or try to hold this place. He hasn’t got sixty thousand, according to the MA.’

  ‘I think Tu’s numbers must have grown on the way to Taiyuan,’ said Laura. ‘It’s a long way from Huai Lai. The local version gives him a hundred thousand, and I expect you can halve that.’

  ‘But where did you get this information, Mrs Henry?’ persisted the Minister.

  ‘It came in a telegram from Huai Lai this morning,’ said Laura. ‘Not to me, of course. But I rather think it’s reliable.’ She smiled at the Minister. ‘Dear Sir James, you must allow me my little private intelligence service, you know!’

  ‘Well, it’s all very irregular!’ said Sir James, only half mollified. ‘This is a most irregular country.’ He walked up and down, gnawing at his small reddish moustache; Laura began to fear an explosion, and wished Henry would come. The trouble in which Henry’s ablutions involved her! She hinted that Mr Fitzmaurice might perhaps go as he had suggested and see what he could make of the telegram – then they would have the official version. Sir James agreed, and Laura breathed more freely when Derek had taken himself off. Sir James had no great love for this particular subordinate, a state of affairs which Derek did nothing that he could help to remedy.

  ‘Casual! Casual!’ he muttered now, as he walked up and down; ‘the boy’s far too casual. It won’t do in this job.’ He went on gnawing and muttering as he walked, a sure sign of mental discomfort. The state of Sir James’s moustache was used as a sort of political barometer by the observant. If it was drooping, worn, and frayed it was a sure indicator of trouble. Touchy used to say that during a crisis which occurred soon after his arrival there was hardly a hair left in it.

  Laura understood the Minister’s discomposure. China is a trying place for all European diplomatists, and especially so for those of the type of Sir James Boggit. It is, as he said, a most irregular country. Humour, flexibility, and the very casualness he deplored in Fitzmaurice are essential qualities, if not to success, at least to a quiet life, out there. Sir James lacked them. He had a certain humour of a puckish sort, but he too seldom extended it to the affairs of his mission. What he liked was regular conditions, and a consistent policy to carry out – the sort of steady-going diplomacy which enables a Minister to say in almost every dispatch, ‘I repeated to His Excellency what I had said to him last week …’ or vice versa. He could almost never say this in China. No one in the Wai Chiao Pu (the Chinese Foreign Office) ever said the same thing to him twice running, and there was seldom the same Excellency for him to address himself to for many weeks on end. In the first six months after his arrival he had been in charge of certain negotiations connected with loans, and had had to deal, in that period, with four different Finance Ministers. One after another, for various excellent political or private reasons, they had betaken themselves, ‘with their spittoons and their concubines’ in the classic phrase, to the Wagons-Lits Hotel in the Legation Quarter, en route for private life in a foreign Concessio
n or abroad. Two different warlords had held the capital and erected transient governments since he came, and now it looked as if a third were about to unseat the present incumbent. It was all most unsettling, and made a consistent policy very hard to carry out.

  Mrs Leroy knew, but did not share Sir James’s views on a consistent policy in China. As a wise and experienced foreigner once expressed it to her: ‘The best policy in the world will be wrong in China, Madame, if it is consistent, just because it is consistent. Today you must use the bludgeon, tomorrow you offer the gift. You must not have a policy – you must send a man you trust to act à discrétion, who will choose the appropriate inconsistency for each emergency as it arises.’ But Sir James had not grasped this great truth. He lacked what the Leroys called ‘comme-ci-comme-ça-ness’. They had coined the phrase on a visit to a Treaty Port during a prolonged and rather dangerous crisis. They found the British Concession practically abandoned and under guard, the Russian a ruin, the Japanese an armed camp, bristling with barbed wire and machine guns. Business took them to the French Consulate. In the French Concession tennis parties were in full swing, nurses and babies were strolling about, while Chinese wandered in and out freely. They asked the Consul how he was getting on. He raised his shoulders – ‘Comme-ci, comme-ça!’ Did he have no trouble with the Chinese? ‘O, comme-ci, comme-ça! Sometimes, yes.’ He placed no guards, he left the place open? ‘O, comme-ci, comme-ça! at times yes, he placed a guard – and at other times, no.’ ‘Il faut se ficher un peu de ces bonhommes-là!’ he added. Henry Leroy left full of admiration for the wisdom and flexibility of the little provincial Frenchman, who had grasped the needs of the situation so completely and met them with such skilful suppleness.