by Bridge, Ann;
All this passed through Laura’s mind as she watched the Minister gnawing and muttering his way up and down her high pale drawing room. She saw that he was tired, worried, and thoroughly discomposed, and she was sorry. There was an importunate strain in her character which persisted obstinately in infusing an element of humanity into the most unpromising relationships. Under its influence she rose now from her sofa, advanced upon Sir James, and took him firmly by the arm.
‘The latest orders from the Higher Command,’ she said gaily, ‘are that His Britannic Majesty’s Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary sits down in that chair and has another cocktail.’
There is still magic in formulas; who can doubt it? Those titles have a soothing sound in the ears of him who bears them, whether he knows it or not. Sir James obeyed, and smiled as he obeyed. Mrs Leroy strove further to persuade him to ‘se ficher un peu de ces bonhommes-là.’ ‘Half the time,’ she urged, ‘these rumours come to nothing.’
She persevered in her efforts till she saw the Minister gradually brighten considerably. Presently she looked at the clock.
‘Sir James, if we aren’t to be late we ought to go. I think Henry must be dead!’ She rang the bell. Niu appeared. ‘Gascart come?’ she inquired. ‘Has come!’ responded Niu. ‘The car’s there,’ Laura went on. ‘We’d better go; I’ll order the rickshaw for him.’ She spoke rapidly in Chinese to Niu and moved towards the door. As Niu opened it they heard Henry Leroy’s voice booming from the hall, ‘Well, you young women, you’re looking very glorious!’
‘Oh, he’s there!’ she said, relieved.
A cold draught from the hall caught the door as they went out; it slammed behind them. In the deepening dusk the room was left deserted. The glowing Fantin-Latour over the mantelpiece, and the one or two Riches and Arnold-Forsters on the walls looked down on the formal chintzes, the Kabiristan rugs, and the Queen Anne tallboy and escritoire which made Mrs Leroy’s drawing room so English, and so unusual in Peking. There was not a single Chinese thing in it except the earthenware bowls in which freesias stood blooming everywhere. Their scent contended now with the fading smell of the cocktails from the emptied glasses – as the night wind blew in through the open French windows it conquered, and at last had the room to itself.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE KNUDSENS’ AT HOME was on a Monday. Between one and half past on the following Friday cars began to assemble under the trees at the edge of the big grass square in the British Legation. The Leroys’ saloon stood up near their house, with suitcases strapped on the back. Further down was the Neviles’ big tourer, somewhat piled with luggage, and further on still a rather decayed Sports Buick belonging to Touchy. The Chinese chauffeurs, in khaki-and-gold uniforms, stood by their cars, spitting idly at the plum blossom in the Consul’s flower beds, or giving a final polish to the nickel work and the big green and white Legation number plates with old pieces of Wolsey underclothing, hoarded for this purpose under the driving seat. Servants in white gowns came and went, bringing various objects – Li appeared laden with rucksacks; Fitzmaurice’s boy came flapping round the square with a Tchilumchi, which he placed in Laura’s car. Little groups of servants were visible in all directions, gathered at the entrances to their several compounds, staring and laughing, all animated by the usual overwhelming Chinese curiosity. Down by the Legation Chapel, Jumbo, the old head coolie, a superb rhomboid of a man, six feet high and five feet broad, aired his notable pigtail and his glorious six-inch grin on the steps of the little bell tower among a knot of his minions; on the stable drive Wang, the old head mafoo, stood more discreetly under a bush, one eye cocked on the proceedings in the square, the other on his stable courtyard – a strong contrast to Jumbo with his spare slight figure in black velvet slippers, jodhpurs, and stable jacket, his shaven head and dreamy ascetic face. There was a feeling of tension and excitement in the air such as the Chinese, with their tendency to hysteria, contrive to infuse into the simplest occasions which show any features out of the ordinary. Presently Derek Fitzmaurice emerged from his house and strolled across the square, tall and slight in his khaki shorts and shirt of tropical drill, and up the drive to the Leroys’ house.
‘T’ai-t’ai!’ he said briefly to the servant. His Chinese was as scanty and as bad as possible; he always used very few words, and those usually incorrectly, but he prided himself a good deal on what he did know.
Li made some fluent reply which he could not follow and showed him into Laura’s sitting room. She was not there. He wandered coolly into Henry’s study – he was not there either. He tried a cast back across the hall into the drawing room – the scent of the freesias filled it as before, but no other living presence disturbed its rather bare and spacious grace. He was turning back into the hall when he met Lilah Milne.
‘Hullo!’ said she abruptly, and nothing else.
‘Well, are we really going?’ asked Fitzmaurice.
‘No one seems to know,’ said Lilah indifferently.
‘Where’s Laura?’
‘No one seems to know that either.’ She walked past him rather aimlessly and out on to the verandah, and sat down in an armchair. Derek followed her, fretted.
‘Where’s Leroy?’ he next inquired.
‘He went over to the Minister a few minutes ago,’ said Lilah. ‘There’s been another telegram, I think. General Nevile came in and they went off together.’
‘Cripes! That looks as though the show was off.’
Lilah said nothing at all. She picked up La Chine en Folie from a wicker table beside her and began to turn the leaves idly.
‘Well, I shall try to get hold of Laura,’ muttered Derek impatiently, and took himself off to the Neviles’, hoping to find her there.
But Mrs Leroy was not at the Neviles’. She was sitting in an obscure corner of the Grant-Howards’ garden, under the sullen creeper-clad wall of the septic tank, and, a writing pad on her knee, she was finishing a letter to Sarah. She had hidden herself deliberately. This place was one of her favourite funk holes, screened by a group of thujas and a mammoth rubbish heap; here she was for the moment out of the way of the discussion and fussification about the start, and if in the end she did contribute a little more to the delay, already immense, there was just a chance that the mail would be in before they left, and she would have her letters to take with her.
She had been running over in her mind the happenings of the last few days, choosing what should amuse Sarah. At dinner on Monday night they had found the American Legation seething with excitement, the alarm already given, and ‘leaf’ stopped. ‘But Hubbard says Howard did get off to Tientsin, with just fifteen minutes to spare!’ According to Dr Schuyler’s information, Wang and Tu, the two rival warlords, had formed an alliance and were marching together on the capital; as a result of this news Nina’s picnic was pronounced to be off.
On Tuesday, however, with the usual Chinese suddenness, all the rumours were declared to be false. Confidence prevailed, and Nina sent chits triumphantly to everyone to say that the picnic was on again. But late on Tuesday night, when the Leroys returned from a ball at the French Legation, Niu met them at the door with the announcement that an Englishman was waiting to see the Great Man in the drawing room, and Henry, grumbling and disgusted, had sought out this unseasonable visitor, who paid calls at 1.30 a.m. It proved to be a certain ex-missionary, now, like most ex-missionaries, employed in some highly lucrative business, and well known for the paternal officiousness with which he endeavoured to ‘keep the Legation on the right track, you know. Outsiders sometimes see most of the game.’ This cliché, seldom off his lips, had earned him the appellation of ‘the Outsider’, to which indeed he was entitled on other grounds. The Outsider, in hushed tones, and with an ‘are-we-observed?’ manner, now informed Leroy that he had learned from most reliable sources that the situation was very grave, very grave indeed – Tu was moving rapidly against Peking and would cut the Nankou railway by dawn at latest; Li was preparing to evacuate the city alrea
dy. ‘I have that from Yang Po Chih’s nephew.’ Henry, growling, had suggested that breakfast time would show soon enough how much there was in it all, and that the Legation could neither keep Li in Peking, nor Tu out, in any case; he had refused point-blank to arouse the Minister to give him this information, as the Outsider suggested. But he went to bed somewhat disquieted. Yang Po Chih was Li’s most trusted chung-jen, or middle-man, who negotiated his victories and defeats by the sale or purchase of generals and Army Corps, and the Outsider was known to have his own means of securing trustworthy information.
Wednesday morning brought partial confirmation of his report. The Leroys, going at 7 a.m. for their usual ride on the glacis, the wide open space which surrounds the Legation Quarter on three sides, had noticed, as they galloped up the cinder track beside the polo ground, an unusual amount of traffic pouring through the Hatamên gateway. Peking carts, handcarts, wheelbarrows and donkeys, all piled with household effects to capsizing point, told their own dismal and familiar tale of refugees hurrying into the city before the approach of an army. By breakfast time a siege was pronounced to be imminent, as officially as anything ever is official in China. By 11 a.m. the city gates were closed, and the stream of refugees and their effects dammed back. But all day long there continued to flow into the Legation Quarter a lesser stream of rickshaws containing the valuables of wealthy Chinese, each little group of three or four followed by one in which sat the wealthy Chinese himself, imperturbable in black brocade and little black satin cap, coming to supervise personally the deposit of his more precious possessions in the strong rooms of one of the European banks, or in the cellars of the German photographer or the Swiss coiffeur. The Kuniangs, who had planned an expedition to the Yuan-Ming-Yuan, the old ruined Summer Palace, for that particular day, were thrilled to find themselves forcibly enclosed in a walled city by massive gates guarded by armed men; Judith had insisted on driving to the P’ing Tze Mên to see if it were really shut, and returned almost incoherent with italics on finding that it was. Even Lilah had displayed a measure of interest in the constant procession of the wealthy Chinese and their belongings through the half-closed bulletproof gates of the Quarter.
And the evening had afforded the Kuniangs a further thrill. The Paraguayan Minister was holding a reception in the Wagons-Lits Hotel, the large European building just inside the Water-gate, which competes with the Hôtel de Pékin, without the Quarter, for the patronage of foreigner and Chinese alike. On occasions such as this the Wagons-Lits wins hands down, as far as the Chinese are concerned. The big gaudy brightly lit lounge was swarming with them when the Leroys’ party arrived. Elegant little ladies with the coiffure and gestures of ivory statuettes were sipping tea or crème de menthe in every corner; stouter and more matronly figures in brocade sat on sofas and called to their offspring in low voices; as for the children, they were everywhere – running in the corridors, playing on the stairs, poking their round black heads and bright mask-like faces into every corner, including the ladies’ lavatories. Henry Leroy pointed out the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Justice to the Milnes – the Cabinet had apparently taken refuge more or less en bloc in the hotel. ‘Because no Chinese troops are allowed to enter the Quarter,’ he explained in answer to Judith’s inquiries. ‘They’re perfectly safe in here.’ ‘How nice for them to have a Legation Quarter to come to!’ said Lilah cheerfully, gazing round on the sanctuary-seeking politicians and their families, who were preparing to sleep, according to Touchy, in the bathrooms and billiard room, and even along the corridors on the upper floors. And Laura had laughed low and suddenly. Perhaps the real use of the presence of Europeans in Peking was to afford shelter to embusqués Chinese. Anyhow, of one thing there could be no doubt – Nina’s picnic was, for the second time, quite disastrously off. This, for the party, was the really important feature of the military situation.
The next day, however, had produced another of those sudden changes of the political scene which in China are so common that they cease to be startling, though they remain bewildering. An entirely new alignment of forces had apparently taken place in the night, and fresh alliances and combinations sprang up like mushrooms in the dew. Tu and Li, it was now reported, had formed a telegraphic alliance; Tu was moving against Wang and not against Peking; Li, instead of evacuating the capital, was remaining there to greet his victorious brother-in-arms when the campaign should be over. The city gates were reopened, the politicians and their families emerged from the bathrooms of the Wagons-Lits Hotel, and by cocktail time, in spite of Henry Leroy’s disapproval, the picnic was once more on.
But Hubbard at dressing time had supplied a footnote to the couleur de rose official bulletins. ‘The boys were saying at the “Y” this afternoon, madam, that this alliance business is all my-eye.’ ‘Oh, really, Hubbard. Why is that?’ ‘Why, madam, as far as I can make it out, this Lee has put it about as a bluff, like, so that he can keep the railways open, and go on getting money, and then make a quiet getaway to Tientsin. And this Doo – the boys don’t trust him. They say he means business, and will have Peking yet.’ ‘But Hubbard,’ Laura had said, pondering this gloomy view while she plied the powder-puff, ‘the Chinese themselves believe there won’t be a siege – they’ve opened the gates and are going on just as usual.’ ‘Ah, and so they may,’ replied Hubbard darkly. ‘They’ll swallow anything if there’s enough of it, as the saying goes. Saying’s believing, not seeing, with these people, seemingly. What scent shall you wear tonight, madam?’
All this uncertainty and toing and froing, as Lilah called it, had made the worst possible preparation for any expedition, in Laura’s view. Before such an undertaking, if it is to succeed, the participants should keep as much apart as possible until the actual start. But on this occasion they had all seen a quite intolerable amount of one another. At almost every party, in the interval between its inception and the day of departure, they had drawn together, as by some fatality, to discuss the pros and cons, the chances of success and the fears of failure. And when they were not meeting in public, they had been running round to one another’s houses to ask for the latest news. But one feature of interest had emerged for Mrs Leroy – the sudden and unexpected growth of her acquaintance with Little Annette.
It began, literally, by accident. On the Tuesday after the Knudsens’ At Home, when rumours were stilled and all was peace, a party had ridden out under Touchy’s auspices to the Marco Polo Bridge, about eight miles from Peking. It was getting late for cross-country riding; the spring planting was beginning, and there was no more galloping slap across the dusty cold fields from landmark to landmark – to a red-walled tomb, a temple, a dark patch of wood marking some burial plot. But Touchy, who relieved the monotony of his duties as Commandant of the Legation Guard by the more onerous and exciting ones of Joint Master of the Drag-Hunt, knew the country like the inside of his pocket, and led them by devious ways of his own – now along narrow sunk roads, from which only their heads projected as they rode along, now across an open sandy patch, still free for an inspiriting gallop, till they reached the long high-backed bridge spanning the Hun-ho. It was a hot soft April day – the brilliant light poured over the flat brown landscape, on which the coloured walls of temples and tombs, and the dark masses of graveyard trees, detached themselves with great vividness; and all the way the sharp outline of the Western Hills kept them company on the right, like a bright pink and lavender-coloured backcloth hung on the sky. They had ridden up on to the arc of the bridge between the Chippendale-looking panels of the carved stone parapets, topped at intervals with those little green effigies of beasts which amused Marco Polo so much that he counted them in 1263, when he rode across this same bridge into Ch’angtu, or Xanadu, the old Peking. The General handed out this piece of information for the benefit of Judith and Little Annette. ‘I expect the traffic then looked much as it does now,’ he added. ‘This road is still the start of the great trade route to Tibet.’ Small hooded carts with solid wheels creaked up the slopes of
the bridge, drawn by mules or shaggy ponies; strings of donkeys with laden panniers tripped over the huge steep paving slabs on their neat unshod feet, urged on by men with rough faces and wild clothes; now and then a group of Tibetans, in flapping green and yellow garments, strode past, their wrinkled faces much more typically Mongolian than the Chinese. Long files of camels were fording the river a little above the bridge, moving with the curious slow rhythm that suggests a waltz in every leg, lifting their strange supercilious heads in a timeless challenge to distances and deserts and little weariable man, treading stones or sand or water with the same aloof indifference.
As the party turned homewards and passed through the dirty tiny broken-walled town which holds the bridgehead, Mrs Leroy called out, ‘Have we time for the Red Temple, Touchy?’ La Touche, a little ahead, did not hear, but Annette Ingersoll, who happened to be riding behind with Mrs Leroy, was at once consumed with a desire to see something more. ‘What is it? Can’t we go to it?’
‘It’s just a little temple on the river bank,’ replied Laura. ‘There’s nothing to see, but it stands rather beautifully, and I like it.’
‘Oh, do let’s go, Mrs Leroy,’ the girl said urgently.
Laura looked at her watch, and then at her companion’s pony. ‘What’s that horse you’re on?’ she asked. ‘Po Chih? Oh, all right – we’ll go and look at it and catch the others up. He’s fast.’