by Bridge, Ann;
‘But why do they use it for this, instead of running it?’ asked Judith.
‘Oh, that’s just their way of doing things,’ replied Derek. ‘It was briganded down the line some time back, and all the passengers turned out in their night things; then Li got hold of it, and has stuck to it ever since.’
‘But surely the railway company could get the Government to make him hand it back?’ said Miss Hande.
‘Li is the Government up here,’ said Derek; ‘no one can make warlords do anything.’
‘Well, it seems extremely uneconomic,’ observed Miss Hande.
Some distance further on, the car left the road, such as it was, leading to Paomachang and the racecourse, and turned northwards along a track still rougher and narrower, which continued for a mile or more till it joined another road leading westward to the golf course. Near the junction of the two roads stood a building enclosed by high walls; along the wall which faced the roads was scrawled in letters five feet high – ‘GOD DAMN BRITISHERS, GET OUT THIS ROAD’. Miss Hande’s lorgnette was at once in action, but she politely refrained from any comment, being in a carful of goddamn Britishers. Judith, however, burst out with, ‘Gracious! What’s that for?’ Derek explained that some enterprising Chinese students had put it there during ‘the fuss in ’25 – when we had the strike and all that.’
‘Why how very disagreeable,’ said Miss Hande. ‘Can’t you get it removed, now?’
‘Oh, we wouldn’t have it taken away for anything,’ said Derek. ‘The Chinese lost more face over that than over anything that’s happened up here for years. I believe Henry has it secretly painted up once a year to keep it fresh, doesn’t he?’ turning to Laura. She merely smiled, and shook her head.
Miss Hande’s notebook expression reappeared in full strength.
‘Now please do explain, Mr Fitzmaurice. Why should you British wish to preserve that unpleasant inscription? I should feel horribly every time I looked at it.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Derek. ‘It’s a tremendous asset. It’s the Chinese who feel horribly every time they look at it. You see out here good manners really count, and that’s a very ill-bred notice, so they’re frightfully ashamed of it. If some Minister starts to get – fresh, don’t you call it? – all you have to do is to bring him along here for a picnic or a game of golf, where he’ll see that. He sees we don’t mind, and he simply withers. It’s most useful.’
This was obviously a very new point of view to Miss Hande, and a rather disturbing one. She turned to Laura. ‘Don’t you find it painful to live among people who don’t feel cordially to you? I should think it was most trying.’
‘They respect us,’ said Laura. ‘As much as they respect any foreigners, that is. I don’t attach very much importance to being liked.’
‘Now isn’t that strange?’ said Miss Hande. ‘Of course, our people live on such wonderful terms with the Chinese, with all our intercourse; and having no Concessions helps to keep our relations very cordial. So it’s rather difficult for us to understand your viewpoint.’
This reference to the old old controversy, the smug American complacency about having no Concessions in China, while trading freely from those of the British, who incur most of the odium, irritated Laura. She had an almost overwhelming impulse to ask Miss Hande if she knew the pidgin-English name for Americans in the Treaty Ports – ‘second-chop Englishmen’ (chop meaning quality). She restrained herself, and took up the argument in a more dignified manner.
‘The Oriental mind is very hard to understand, Miss Hande. We have been on the job longer than you, and with more responsibility, and we know that the cordiality you value so much doesn’t necessarily include either respect or affection.’ She paused. ‘In fact, it may have to be bought at a price that we are not always prepared to pay.’
She paused again. She did not say, ‘They don’t really dislike us either; no American who ever lived has been loved and respected by the Chinese as Gordon was, or Hart, or Jordan, or has done a tithe as much for them.’ She did not say either, ‘We don’t buy our popularity, we let it take care of itself.’ She refrained from all this, and watched Miss Hande’s face. There, looming up, she was sure that she saw an impending disquisition on the brilliant American effort in the Philippines, as an example to less favoured races of how to deal with Orientals. She had heard this so often; just now she felt that she could not bear it, and hastened to dispose of it in advance.
‘Your problem in the Philippines,’ she went on, ‘isn’t really comparable. They’re a flimsy race compared to the Chinese, or to the peoples of India, and there isn’t the massiveness of a great traditional civilisation behind them.’
‘And anyhow they’re such a flea bite, aren’t they?’ said Derek amiably, coming unexpectedly to her aid.
Miss Hande looked from one to the other, disconcerted and silenced. The Philippines, the one big American gun in Oriental affairs, which she had duly intended to fire – Laura was quite right – had been let off at half-cock, dismissed with a friendliness more wounding than hostility as a flea bite, and a flimsy flea bite at that. And this cool tall Englishwoman, leaning back beside her in the car with her quite unconscious air of rather arrogant distinction, nearly beautiful in spite of her shabby riding clothes, nearly lovable in spite of her avowed indifference to being liked, was a puzzling subject to Miss Hande. She wished to like her; she already respected her intelligence, in spite of what seemed to the American her perverse and reactionary point of view about the Chinese. Her patronage about the Philippines was irritating, but to give Miss Hande her due, intellectual detachment generally triumphed in her over the emotions, and she was as much interested as irritated. She would gladly have continued the discussion, but Mr Fitzmaurice was now rattling away to the Milne girl, and Mrs Leroy sitting with half-closed eyes. Miss Hande had recourse to her lorgnette. The car passed through the gateway of a small town straddled across the road – its high brick walls, of the prevailing brown, stretched out on either side, broken and ruinous, into the fields, with crumbling towers at the corners. The unpaved street was swarming with people in the bright blue cotton clothes which are such a feature of the Chinese countryside; there was an air of disturbance and excitement about the crowd. Mrs Leroy roused herself and looked out. On the right they approached a temple, with dark trees and golden roofs showing over a high white and scarlet wall. Little stumpy China ponies, not more than twelve hands high, with long shaggy coats like teddy bears, were tethered in scores along the wall, and the courtyard within was teeming with the grey uniforms of soldiers.
‘Look at that, Derek!’ said Mrs Leroy suddenly – they all started a little at the tone of her voice. Derek’s eyes followed hers to the soldiers.
‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘that looks like business, doesn’t it?’
Miss Hande’s and Judith’s ‘What?’ came as one word.
‘Look at their armlets.’
They looked. Whereas the soldiers at the City gate had worn a pink armlet on the left arm, these men wore two armlets, an orange one on the right arm as well as the pink on the left.
‘The orange is Tu, isn’t it? I can’t remember.’
‘Yes, it’s Tu’s. I wonder how soon they expect him?’
‘Prepared for all emergencies, you see!’ said Derek gaily to the two newcomers. ‘Whichever side they find themselves on, they’re ready.’
As the car bounced on its way in clouds of suffocating dust the perpetual scene of the North China plain unrolled itself before them. On their left rose Pa-Pao Shan, a golden hill on a landscape the colour of brown paper; in the distance spindly trees shaped themselves as patterns in blue lace on the skyline. Once, on a parallel track, they saw a file of camels half a mile long, stencilled brown on the brown horizon, like a moving colonnade – high, slow, unceasing. The hills rose nearer and clearer ahead of them, till they could see the dark smears of green where the woods of thuja and juniper ran up into the hollows. Now that they had left the golf course behind at Pa-Pao S
han the road degenerated out of all resemblance to anything of its name; large stones the size of footballs were scattered over its surface, and several times they had to skid down off it and make detours through the fields below to avoid ditches a couple of feet deep, dug across it from side to side. These ditches aroused Judith’s curiosity, and Derek explained that they were dug by the peasants to block traffic. ‘They may be for the foreign devils, or they may be for Mr Tu’s guns.’
‘These are pretty new,’ observed Laura, inspecting one carefully. ‘I expect they’re for Tu.’
Without warning they found themselves again among houses, in a straggling village, where a brisk buying and selling was going on on both sides of the rough strip of dust which served for a street. At a crossways they turned to the left down a narrow alley between high walls, and emerged into the open fields. They drove on now along a mere single footpath, following the tracks of the other cars in the ploughed earth on both sides of it. A hill with ruins on the top towered steeply above them on the right; it ended in a high yellow bluff. Swinging abruptly round the foot of this they saw before them a wide river between empty sandy banks; on the nearer bank, modern and incongruous, stood the two cars, their late occupants grouped aimlessly round them. As the saloon pulled up Mrs Nevile hurried towards them with a tragic face.
‘The donkeys haven’t come!’ she announced.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS really very hard on Nina. Disaster had overtaken her picnic at the outset. Here were eleven people and their luggage planted on a river bank, with eight miles of rough walking still between them and their destination, and no transport of any kind. They gathered in groups to discuss the situation. How had she ordered the donkeys, Touchy wanted to know?
‘Mr Lin ordered them for me’ – Nina’s soft voice was almost a wail – ‘the T’ing-ch’ai at the American Legation. That nice Shang was to bring them from Pa-ta-Ch’u.’
‘Oh, yes – I know Shang. He isn’t the sort of man to fail you, I should have thought.’
‘He’s failed her this time, anyhow,’ was the General’s gloomy comment. He had perched himself rather gingerly on a steep slab of yellow rock at the foot of the bluff, and gazed with disfavour on the scene about him – the narrow strip of sandy stony bank between the hill and river, the brown and swirling waters in front.
‘Do you think he can have come and gone? We’re awfully late,’ was Touchy’s next suggestion.
‘The ferrymen would know that,’ said Laura, glancing upstream to where a large clumsy boat lay moored to the bank some two hundred yards from where they stood.
‘Oh, yes. William, do go and talk to them and find out. Go with him, Laura – you’re both so good at Chinese.’
The General raised himself stiffly from his slab, and limped off beside Mrs Leroy; except for his stiffness and her grace their two tall figures, both in khaki riding clothes, looked curiously alike, as Derek pointed out to Judith. From a distance the others watched their colloquy with the ferrymen. It was loud and extremely prolonged, as conversations with Chinese country people invariably are. You must first convince them that you, a foreign devil, are talking Chinese at all – a long and difficult process, best achieved by repeating some simple and well-known phrase over and over again, very fast and very loud, till it catches their ear as familiar. You have next to satisfy their curiosity as to who you are and what your business is. Hopeless to attempt to cut out this preliminary! Leading the most monotonous of lives, without posts, without papers and without books, their one mental interest and sustenance is that derived from the spoken word. A stranger is a blessing; a Chinese-speaking foreigner a gold mine. No peasant will contemplate for a moment so much as telling you your way until he knows where you come from and why you wish to reach your objective.
The General and Mrs Leroy, familiar with this peculiarity, furnished the three Charons who sprawled in the ferryboat with much and varied information in reply to their questions. He was Hsing Nei and she Li T’ai-t’ai (the Chinese versions of their names), both of the Ying-Kuo-fu (British Legation). No, the others were not all Ying-Kuo-jen (English) – some were Mei-Kuo-jen (Americans), and one was even a Fa-Kuo-jen (Frenchman). Certainly they had come from Peking, and they were going up to Chieh T’ai Ssu. For pleasure, and for three days. They agreed politely that at Chieh T’ai Ssu it was hen hao (very fine). Then they tackled the question of donkeys. Ten donkeys, from Pa-ta-Ch’u – had they been there? The ferrymen repeated all the questions several times, with additional questions of their own, but it was finally established beyond doubt that Shang and his team had not been at Mo-shih-k’ou Ferry that day.
With this news General Nevile and Mrs Leroy returned to the others. The party was already slightly disintegrated. Henri Delache and Little Annette had strolled off down the river; Derek and Judith Milne had scrambled some distance up the bluff and established themselves in a minute patch of shade beneath a small and solitary thuja which clung, stunted and scraggy, to the face of the cliff. It was very hot. The sun beat right into the hollow of the hillside, and there was not a scrap of shade anywhere except under the thuja up on the rocks. The stones and soil of the narrow track between the bluff and the river were hot to the feet, and uninviting to sit upon, stained and discoloured with the passing of beasts from the ferry. It was very still – if now and then a light puff of air struck on their faces, it was like the hot breath from a kiln. Miss Hande was sitting on her suitcase, surveying the river through her lorgnette from under her painted paper sunshade; Lilah Milne was attending to her face under hers; the Professor was leaning against the cliff with a wilted collar, unaffectedly mopping his brow; Touchy was measuring a boulder with his polo stick. There was already over the party a silence, and an isolation of its members each within his own discomfort, which boded ill for the future. After some further consultation it was decided to send for donkeys from Mo-shih-k’ou, the village they had passed, less than a mile away. ‘The chauffeurs can order them, of course,’ said Nina.
But on turning to execute this plan it was found that the cars had gone! The suitcases, the tchilumchis, the rucksacks sat like an inanimate picnic party on the bare sand among the wheel ruts, but the cars had departed. After a fresh conversation with the ferrymen the youngest Charon was persuaded to go to Mo-shih-k’ou and to bring back ten donkeys; he stood out for an exorbitant rate for men and asses in advance, with a prudent eye to his own future commission on the deal. Our travellers were, however, not in a position to haggle seriously, and having cut down his demands by a mere half, let him go. More than an hour, on the most optimistic computation, must elapse before his return, and there was nothing for it but to settle down to wait, and make themselves as comfortable as circumstances permitted.
This was Laura’s opportunity. While La Touche and the General arranged suitcases as seats for the ladies, and the Professor fiddled with the stops of a very elaborate camera, she wandered off to read her letters. Beyond the ferry the bluff shelved down steeply into the water; scrambling over the loose slabby rocks and between low thorny plants, she settled down on a little promontory with her back against a big block. Her firm body, soaked with the heat of many Chinese summers, felt no discomfort from the strong sun – tilting the broad brim of her felt hat unbecomingly over her eyes, she lit a cigarette, pulled out her packet of letters, and was immediately ten thousand miles away. A single kite wheeled, mewing at intervals, in the hot blue overhead – she did not hear it. Crickets shrilled ecstatically among the still-withered plants between the rocks; small lizards ran among the stones or paused, spread-eagled on the hot yellow surfaces for a motionless moment, moving nothing but their winking diamond eyes – she never heeded them. By Tim’s untidy and disjointed script, by Sarah’s ragged and yet somehow cultivated scrawl, she was transported into the green and chilly heart of England – to damp playing fields under grey skies, to bare and draughty classrooms and playrooms, full of a din of young voices, and, with the advent of the Easter holidays, to Garsover.
They would be there now. Sarah would hang out of her window of a morning to watch the shafts of sunlight striking through the blue hollows of the chestnut across the lawn, and to spy for hedgehogs’ tracks in the white dew; Tim would run out before breakfast to find the holes left by the hammer strokes of the green woodpecker’s beak (which he had observed when he should have been in his bath) driven into the rough turf on the slope where the daffodils grew so thickly. He would come in to breakfast, late, and be sent by Grandmamma to change his shoes – Grandpapa would scold Grandmamma, in his absence, for scolding him, and when he returned Grandmamma would load his plate with kidneys and his cup with cream to make up. There they would sit round the long table in the panelled room, the two brown heads intent on their own secret ploys and purposes, the two silver heads brooding over the brown ones, hanging on their words and looks with the touching and tender humility of old age. And when the children, fidgety with inaction, tried to slip away – ‘Grannie and Grandpère are always such an eternity over meals,’ wailed Sarah’s letter – she knew how the old man would lean out from his chair to catch one or the other by the arm as they passed, draw them to him and murmur, ‘My child, what can I do for you?’ Footfalls in the passages, voices in the garden, shouts in the paddock above the thud of horses’ hoofs – she could hear them all, loudly, clearly. No wonder that the shrill vibrant whirring of the crickets, the far mewing of that one kite, a wheeling speck in the hot blue above the yellow hill, could not reach her ears.