by Bridge, Ann;
‘Oh, shut up, Henri!’ she said impatiently. ‘Il faut respecter la jeunesse!’ she added, with a glance at the Kuniangs.
‘Mais, ma chère,’ protested Delache, opening his hands, ‘you know that with jeunes filles I am always perfectly correc—’
He was interrupted by Mrs Nevile, who came up to them with the Professor in tow. ‘My dear, they’ve found you at last! Let me introduce Professor Vinstead to you.’ Laura and the Professor shook hands. ‘Now we must really be off. It’s terribly late. Shang and the donkeys were to be at the ferry at two, and it’s a quarter before this minute. We shan’t be there till three as it is.’
‘Nina, let us get this ferry business exactly right,’ said La Touche, also coming up. ‘It’s not to Men-t’ou-kou we go, but to Moyu – is that it?’
‘No, not to Moyu – to the Mo-shih-k’ou Ferry,’ said Mrs Nevile. ‘But I’ll lead you and you can all follow on.’
Touchy saluted.
‘Laura,’ Mrs Nevile went on, ‘don’t you think we should divide up a little? I thought if you would take Miss Hande, I would borrow Miss Lilah from you.’
‘Yes, rather,’ Laura agreed absently. Her letters were burning a hole in her pocket, and she was thinking of when and how she could read them; she realised too late that to exchange Miss Hande for Lilah in her own car would make it more difficult to devour them en route.
‘I shall have a nice restful time as a gooseberry!’ murmured La Touche to Nina Nevile, glancing at Miss Ingersoll and Henri Delache, who even in these disjointed moments of departure were engaged in a promising and – judging by their faces – highly enjoyable tête-à-tête. The American girl showed an unusual animation which was highly becoming to her.
‘So will Laura and Big Annette, I should say,’ returned Mrs Nevile. ‘Look at Mr Fitzmaurice! I’ve never seen him so taken up with anyone respectable before.’
‘Oh dear! – two pairs of sweethearts in one party,’ groaned Touchy in dismay. ‘Nina, my dear, you’ll have a lot to answer for.’
‘Come on – we simply must start,’ said Mrs Nevile, disregarding him.
At last they did all stop saying, ‘We must start,’ and, somehow, started. They piled themselves in, and the three cars, freighted with luggage, bodies, and who knows what secret cargo of private preoccupations, hopes, fears and expectations, ground up the gravel of the road and swung off out of the square, past the dispensary, the electric light plant, the pumping station and all the other hideous accessories of the Legation – past the manège, with its battered turf and kaoliang fences for jumping, with low barrack buildings opposite, and finally past Touchy’s bungalow near the West Gate. The sentry, seeing many cars approaching, stiffened to attention, thinking one might be the Minister’s – found that none was, refrained from saluting, and then saw, too late, that the second contained his commanding officer. When they had passed he continued his march to and fro, stumping his heavy English boots in the white dust, thinly patterned with the shadows of the budding mimosa boughs. The Legation servants returned from their points of vantage to their various compounds, there to sleep on the pantry shelves and floor till tea; Jumbo left the belfry steps and lit another Lucky Strike cigarette; Old Wang, the head mafoo, slippered softly back into the stable yard, scolded a few of his minions, and then, pulling a very ancient kitchen chair out into the sun, sat down opposite his cherished pot of cactuses and lit a little black and silver pipe. In the Chancery, behind the lowered lienzas, the unhappy Mr Deering wrestled with a cipher book and the Minister’s remarks to the Foreign Office about the safety of missionaries; a typewriter, driven by one of the ladies commonly referred to as The Fairies, clattered monotonously in the heat from an adjoining room; in the T’ing-ch’ai’s office next door Mr Chun sorted the mail of the smaller Legation fry, his spectacles perched precariously on his yellow nose as he studied each address. Over at the Minister’s house Sir James had ordered coffee in the inner courtyard, and now, his short bulk disposed in a garden chair, a cigar between his lips, he settled himself for a brief rest after the labours of the morning, before the labours of polo to come. Everything was most irregular, and that felloh Leroy – excellent felloh, of course – had been worrying him about this jaunt of the MA’s missis. But the heat was soothing, and there would be polo later with some very decent fellohs. The usual gentle afternoon coma descended on the Legation, and it descended also on Sir James.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MISS ANNA HANDE, the novelist, had not come to Peking in search of local colour; she was much too intelligent and conscientious to do anything of the sort. She had come to see one of the greatest wonders of the world, and to pay a visit to her friend, Mrs Nevile. But like all novelists she had something of the journalistic mind; she liked to see everything, and to understand what she saw. As the party drove out now her lorgnette was kept perpetually above her long, distinguished nose, helping her short-sighted but intelligent eyes to observations and deductions. They left the city by the Shun-chi-mên, the most westerly of the three gates in the South Wall. Outside it the car passed a level crossing and a bridge, and now swung suddenly to the right through a narrow alley and proceeded to skirt the bank of the canal which lies outside the wall of the Tartar City. The road was merely a wide rutted waste of dust several inches deep, out of which the trunks of trees rose irregularly. To the right lay the canal, in whose filthy waters both men and women were hopefully washing clothes, or dipping up pointed wicker buckets of water for domestic purposes; on the left was a raw bank of earth with a few buildings perched at intervals along the top of it. A mixture of smells of more than usual fearfulness and virulence hung in the air – Miss Hande and Judith Milne put handkerchiefs to their noses involuntarily and simultaneously. As the car lurched and bounded over the ruts, bumps and hollows, Derek amused himself by an endeavour to discompose Miss Hande’s hygienic American mind. He pointed out to her two dark discoloured streams which oozed and trickled down the bank and into the canal, the effluents from a slaughterhouse and a manure factory respectively.
‘That is where your ice comes from,’ he told her, pointing to the canal. Miss Hande shuddered incredulously.
‘It’s a fact. In winter it freezes solid, and they cut the top off in blocks and bury it up there.’ He waved his hand towards an empty bit of ground above the bank. ‘No, not just there – that’s a criminals’ graveyard; it drains into the canal too – a little further on. Then in summer the ice has a joyful resurrection – unlike the criminals. Look – they’re getting some out now.’
In fact, from a straw-filled quarry-like hollow up the bank a coolie emerged, carrying a large block of ice slung from a shoulder yoke. He trotted down the bank with it, and then paused to light a cigarette. The ice was dumped in the dust, and the coolie sat on it; being Chinese he spat, and spat on his cargo. Miss Hande watched with a sort of horrified fascination. Derek laughed.
‘The boys keep the fish on that, and probably put it in the cocktails, if you aren’t careful,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’ve no ideas of sanitation or infection or anything.’
‘I wonder you aren’t all dead,’ said Miss Hande, looking distressfully at Laura.
‘It is rather a struggle to keep alive, for the housekeeper,’ Laura admitted. ‘I taught my cook never to put fish or anything directly on the ice, and then one day I found that his way of keeping the milk cool was to stand the bottles up against the block and wrap a dirty old sack over the lot, so that it dripped nicely into them.’ She laughed too.
‘But isn’t there a very great deal of illness?’ asked Miss Hande.
‘There’s a good deal of death!’ said Derek grimly. ‘You don’t get ill in Peking – you die; in about forty-eight hours, as a rule. Only last month …’ he told a ghastly story of the lovely young wife of a foreign consul, who had been well and brilliant at a dinner party one evening, rushed to hospital at 5 a.m. the next morning, and dead by lunchtime the following day.
‘Well, it’s most distressing,’ obse
rved Miss Hande. ‘And yet Peking seems to have such a marvellous climate.’
‘It has,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘It isn’t the climate that kills you as a rule – it’s dirt – dirt and indifference.’
‘That’s why the Foreign Office schedules it as a healthy post!’ observed Derek.
‘Well, I can’t help it!’ burst out Judith. ‘I like to be in a place where people do things in the way that seems good to them, and don’t care a hoot about germs, and aren’t all sanitary and tidy and hideous, but dirty and beautiful.’
‘I said you were a gipsy!’ remarked Fitzmaurice, letting his eyes rest on the girl in a way that made her blush.
The car at this point lurched up a steep slope, and swung precariously round a blind corner between high walls, and they found themselves before another gate in yet another city wall. It should be explained that on the south the Chinese City encloses the Tartar City, like a double box; they had left the Tartar City by the Shun-chi-mên, and were now about to leave the Chinese City by the Hsi-pien-mên. Being the outer gate, it was strongly guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, in soiled grey cotton uniforms, wearing pink calico armlets on the left arm. Derek (who was playing up rather well, Mrs Leroy thought) explained to Miss Hande that all Chinese armies wear the same uniform, and that the troops of the various warlords are only distinguished from one another by these armlets, of different colours. ‘It’s very convenient and economical, because when they change sides all they have to do is to change armlets,’ he told her.
‘Then whose are the pink armlets?’ inquired Miss Hande.
‘Li-Ch’ing-hui, the Marshal’s, who’s got Peking now.’
They had paused before the gateway to let through a convoy of long solid-wheeled carts, laden with sacks of grain and flour, which were creaking up the steep cobbled slope and through the vaulted archway, their teams of mules and oxen straining painfully at the loads. Many of the beasts were sickeningly galled under their clumsy harness, and Judith exclaimed with pity and horror at the sight, ‘How can they treat animals so cruelly?’
‘It isn’t cruelty,’ said Fitzmaurice, ‘they treat animals just as they treat themselves. Look at that chap!’
Another cart came into view at the moment, drawn by a mixed team of two oxen, a donkey, and a huge coolie who, glistening with sweat, the muscles standing out under his bronzed skin, strained at the rope across his breast and shoulder. Where it passed he, too, was galled to the collarbone.
‘He doesn’t care, and he doesn’t expect the mule to mind,’ pursued Derek. ‘They’re quite accustomed to it. You must remember that the principal draught animal in Peking is still man.’
‘You don’t say so!’ exclaimed Miss Hande, startled. The intensity of her expression when she heard something striking almost gave one the impression that she was scribbling rapidly in a notebook, though in fact her hands were still occupied, one with her lorgnette and the other with a handkerchief. Though the odours of the canal were left behind, the fumes of garlic from the soldiers filled the enclosed space by the gateway with an almost visible cloud.
‘Of course he is. What carries practically the entire human traffic? Rickshaws. And quite half the goods traffic is borne on shoulder yokes and wheeled in hand-barrows, inside the city. Dirt and beauty have their seamy side!’ he said, grinning at Judith.
‘Well, what you tell me is very interesting,’ observed Miss Hande. ‘It raises a very curious prahblem.’
‘What?’ Laura felt bound to ask.
‘Why, isn’t it strange that a people of such ancient civilisation, of so much culture and such exalted ideas as the Chinese, should tahlerate the use of human beings for the work of beasts? Doesn’t it strike you as shocking?’ she said, turning to Laura.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Laura flatly. ‘I don’t think hauling a cart or pulling a rickshaw is nearly as unhealthy as being a stoker on a liner, nor as dangerous as coal-mining, and it’s certainly far less demoralising than leaning against a wall all day and drawing the dole. It isn’t really strange, either,’ she went on, getting wound up, as she sometimes did; ‘the Chinese are a perfectly rational people – the most rational on earth, probably – so of course they aren’t sentimentalists.’
‘How do you mean, Laura?’ asked Judith.
‘I mean that they don’t talk about the dignity of labour, and then constantly go on strike; they are the dignity of labour. There is greater poverty here than anywhere else in the world, but somehow no squalor. Look at your human beast of burden!’ she said to Miss Hande. The cart had passed through the gateway and halted for a rest inside it. As the car moved forward they saw the coolie stretch his superb limbs, freed for a moment from the rope, and turn with a cheerful grin to exchange a joke with the soldiers. His hairless polished torso was modelled with the perfection of a god’s; his movements were full of grace and natural dignity; his broad face, no longer contorted with the terrific strain of hauling, shone with contentment and easy humour. ‘Have you ever seen a stoker?’ Laura asked, turning to Miss Hande, as the car passed through the gate.
The gates of walled cities have caught man’s imagination from the time when King Solomon compared the nose of his beloved to the tower which looked towards Damascus, or King David bade the gates of Jerusalem lift up their heads that the King of Glory might come in. There is a splendid formality about the sharp line of masonry where the city ends at stroke, and the open country spreads up to its very foot; the gates are the breaches in this line, sluices through which the life of the fields pours in to nourish the life of the town. A glamour of past events hangs about them – the lifted heads of the gates have looked on the entrances of kings and the exits of armies; they are grey with the dust of departures on great journeys, their outlines have been caressed from afar by the glad eyes of return. This interior thrill, this sense of the past, is intensified in a city such as Peking, where past and present meet; where the city’s daily food still pours in, on donkeys’ backs, on ancient carts and on shoulder yokes, through the grey gateways beneath their mighty towers; where the motors of golfers and racegoers mingle their dust with that stirred up by the feet of long files of camels, coming in as they have come for centuries laden with coal from the hills, or with who knows what strange burden of silks or carpets or furs, from Tibet and from beyond the Gobi Desert.
Outside the Hsi-pien-mên a stretch of green and stagnant water lies at the Wall’s very foot. A file of camels had been halted to drink there on its way into the city, and the strange creatures were stooping their heads to the water, and raising them to swallow, with that same clumsy and compelling rhythm which they show in walking. Thick furry brown felt reached to their knees like plus-fours, and clothed most of their bodies; from it their spindly shanks, improbable swan necks and double humps emerged bare and grey. These winter coats were moulting in patches, but camel’s hair is valuable, and the loose bits were looped up and tied on with odds and ends of string, which gave to each a curiously disordered appearance, as of a badly done-up brown paper parcel. Yet their matchless dignity and timeless beauty of outline triumphed over this disability; philosophers in rags, they drank slowly, taking their time, while the drivers squatted on the muddy margin of the canal, smoking and exchanging news with the vegetable sellers who were washing their salads, cabbages and neat bundles of garlic, in the filthy water, before taking them in to the market. But when Derek hastened to point this out to Miss Hande, she seemed for once oblivious to hygiene, hypnotised by the beauty of the scene at the gateway – the drinking camels, the blue-clad drivers, the green and creamy piles of vegetables, and over all the grey and silent line of the wall, reflected in the water.
They drove on, now, along a sandy road raised three or four feet above the surrounding country, which was brown, flat and densely cultivated. Here and there a line of tall willows, showing a filmy green, was reflected in the still waters of some canal, breaking the monotony of the fawn-coloured soil. At a dangerous speed they overhauled a line of curious-looki
ng wicker carts, which creaked along in the dust ahead of them; their peculiar shape attracted Miss Hande’s attention, and she asked what they contained.
‘They’re fu-carts,’ Derek told her, with malicious pleasure.
‘What are fu-carts?’ asked Judith.
‘It’s sewage, going out from the city to be put on the land – those vegetables you saw at the gate were grown on it.’
Miss Hande’s intensity of expression returned.
‘Solemn fact,’ Derek assured her. ‘The Chinese are much too practical to waste good manure. That’s why there’s no sanitation in Peking – or any other city. A contractor not long ago paid six thousand pounds for the sole rights over the night soil from the International Concession at Shanghai for one year alone.’
‘You don’t tell me so!’ exclaimed Miss Hande. ‘Why, that’s thirty thousand dollars! Surely,’ she paused delicately, ‘it can’t be worth that sum?’
‘That was for manufacture and sale, of course,’ said Derek. ‘It would be sent up-country to agricultural districts.’
‘But I don’t see how you can export sewage,’ objected Judith, who was every bit as curious as Miss Hande, and had no nice feelings at all; ‘it’s such sloppy stuff to cart about.’
‘They dry it and turn it into bricks, neat as anything,’ said Derek. ‘I’ll take you to see a manure factory one day – there’s that one we passed by the canal. It’s most interesting.’
Laura watched Miss Hande with amusement. She longed to ask her whether she felt that the use of human manure for agriculture was also inconsistent with the ‘ancient culture and exalted ideas’ of the Chinese, and constituted another ‘prahblem’. She was prepared to like the novelist, but all the same she was aware of the faint irritation with which Americans nearly always inspired her. ‘They won’t use their eyes,’ she thought, ‘it’s always the same. They want uplift, and uplift they’ve got to have; facts must take their chance. And it must be their idea of what is uplifting too. They’re so deafened with the clamour of their own synthetic idealism that they can’t hear any of the funny little tones of reality.’ ‘She’ll waste her time here,’ she thought, ‘like all the rest of them – she’s come to look for exalted ideas, and she’ll get them all right – American ideas of Chinese ideas. But she’ll learn nothing about China.’ She listened to her companions again. The road was approaching a railway embankment at a long angle; a train, consisting of Pullmans and sleeping cars, was drawn up beside the permanent way. It was overflowing with Chinese soldiers who, in various stages of undress, were cooking, washing, eating and hanging their underwear out of the windows. The former splendours of the coaches, the blue paint and gilding, showed signs of decay – battered and dirty, festooned with filthy rags, they resembled some street of fine houses turned into a slum. Derek was explaining that this was the famous Blue Train, the Pullman express which used to run between Pukow and Tientsin, but which now served as a barracks for some of Li’s men. ‘It was bought on borrowed money and hasn’t been paid for yet – it never will be now, of course.’