Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  ‘The French are so different to us, don’t you think?’ she went on, feeling her responsibility for Miss Hande rather acutely. ‘They like to keep their minds sharp and bright, like scissors, and to use them for snipping up ideas into patterns, instead of using them like big soft brushes to paint rather large vague pictures, as we do.’ (‘Oh, damn!’ she said to herself, ‘now I’m prosing.’)

  But the Professor gave a little sudden cough of laughter. ‘That is a very good psychological observation,’ he said.

  Laura turned to him, delighted with this opportunity of relinquishing the subject of Henri Delache, and made some civil inquiries as to his progress in his Oriental researches. Professor Vinstead expanded a little. The Chinese were going to be very baffling – perhaps the most baffling race on earth, psychologically. One would have to tackle it from the linguistic end, he thought, to do any good. ‘I hope your husband will help to put me on the right track – his books are most remarkable.’

  Laura said that Henry would be delighted, and duly booked the Professor for dinner on the night after their return from the picnic.

  ‘His knowledge of the Chinese must be very exceptional; he writes of them with so much understanding,’ pursued the Professor.

  ‘He loves them, of course – and they really do like and trust him.’

  ‘And you – what do you make of them’?

  ‘I think they’re the most lovable race on earth,’ said Laura simply. She saw Miss Hande give a stifled gasp, and laughed. ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Why, your comments on the way out didn’t lead me to feel that you loved the Chinese,’ said Miss Hande mildly.

  ‘Because I don’t idealise them? But you can’t understand anything you idealise, because then you are looking at your picture of the thing, and not the thing itself. The Chinese are frightfully well worth understanding; they have some marvellous qualities, but they have a lot of most peculiar characteristics as well, and you must recognise the whole lot to get them right. Isn’t that true?’ she appealed to the Professor.

  ‘Perfectly true,’ he said emphatically. ‘One must drop all preconceptions in approaching another race, if one is to get anywhere. Those rough generalised pictures that one nation forms of another are always caricatures or distortions, and if one makes them a basis for observations, he is put wrong from the start.’

  ‘No one has suffered from that more than the Chinese,’ remarked the General unexpectedly. ‘Europe still thinks of them as a race of lascivious intellectuals, wearing pigtails and smoking opium, with kite-flying and murdering Europeans as their chief recreations. In America,’ he turned to Miss Hande, ‘you vary it a little, I fancy, and think of them as high-minded philosophers to a man, engaged in meditating on the ideal existence when they aren’t being murdered by the brutal whites.’ He chuckled again.

  ‘And what is the truth?’ inquired Miss Hande.

  ‘Oh, I don’t pretend to know them,’ said the General. ‘But I suppose eighty per cent of them can’t afford opium, for one thing, and they’re not all intellectuals, for another. A hospital fellow here told me that a very high percentage of the coolie class are practically cretinous, only use about two hundred words all their lives. And their murders are generally due to pure hysteria, or done for money. But they’re frightfully good fellows, on the whole – amiable and merry, and thundering workers, and much more honest in their way than either Europeans or Americans,’ he concluded, with his gloomy grin.

  ‘Surely their religion is very lofty?’ said Miss Hande.

  ‘Well, you will be able to form some opinion of that for yourself over the weekend,’ he said. ‘Chieh T’ai Ssu is one of their most famous temples – in fact it’s a sort of Cuddesdon, a theological college where they make the priests for half North China.’

  ‘You don’t say so!’ Miss Hande was enchanted with the prospect, and so was the Professor. But Chinese religion was interrupted by the advent, at last, of the donkey team from Mo-shih-k’ou. The little grey beasts were ferried across the river, the luggage fastened to the pack saddles; the General hoisted himself on to one small ass, Miss Hande with her parasol took her seat on another, and the long straggling train set off.

  Laura and the Professor walked. The Mo-shih-k’ou ferry is an unimportant one, used mostly for light peasant traffic, and nothing in the nature of even a Chinese main road approaches it. They followed a number of small wandering paths which skirted the fields, or led along the banks of the irrigation channels which watered them, frequently crossing these on narrow rickety wooden bridges of one or two rough planks, without handrails. There was as yet no roadside vegetation, no grass nor flowers – only light splashes of shade from the round-topped poplars to alter the appearance of the brown path, though where an early crop was coming through the fields showed pale spears of green. Peasants in blue raked and hoed in the fields about them; those nearest the track ceased their work to hail the donkey train with a hoarse, ‘Shang na’erh?’ (Where to?) The donkey boys yelled back, ‘Shang Chieh T’ai Ssu!’ and furnished further particulars at the tops of their voices, ‘Foreigners from Peking,’ and so on, which were received with appreciative grunts and Ahs! – and then the whole business, question and answer, was repeated by their hearers to remoter groups, and by them to others further off still, till an area of some miles was filled with the details of their advent. This semaphore system amused the Professor very much when Mrs Leroy translated the exchanges for him. At one point they came to another arm of the Hun-ho, wide and shallow, without bridge or ferry; the donkey boys halted and urgently invited Mrs Leroy and Professor Vinstead to mount two of the animals. The Professor, with a glance at his neat trousers, did so, and was carried across, holding his long legs out almost horizontally to keep them clear of the water, in close imitation of the General, who was fording just in front; but on looking round he saw that Mrs Leroy, like the donkey boys, splashed unconcernedly through, jodhpurs and all, and like them emerged on the further bank wet to the knees.

  ‘It makes one cooler – I like it,’ she said in answer to his astonished protest.

  When he left his donkey and rejoined her, ‘Will you tell me a little about all these people?’ he said, as they walked on together. ‘A large party of strangers is so confusing unless one can get the hang of them to some extent.’

  ‘Which of them interest you? Who do you want to hear about?’

  He looked at her a little inquiringly, at this rather bald question, but there was a tone of reassurance in his voice as he answered, ‘Well, primarily the General, the Frenchman, and that beautiful Miss Something – but really I want a catalogue raisonné of the lot.’

  ‘Very well, you shall – but it’s clever of you to spot those three, especially Lilah.’

  ‘Is that the beauty? She interests me particularly,’ he said, ‘because her face and her character seem to be totally at variance. Her appearance is so peculiarly luscious, and yet her speech, what there is of it, is as pawky as a Lowland Scot’s. Beautiful people nearly always act up to their part; she doesn’t. Who is she, and why is she here?’

  ‘She’s my niece,’ said Laura, smiling in her turn at his bluntness, ‘and so is Judith, the other one. They’re here simply on a visit – seeing the world.’

  ‘Oh, then you can really tell me about her, if she’s your niece. Good!’

  ‘That’s just what I can’t.’ She explained that she had hardly known the Milnes before they arrived in Peking; ending up with, ‘And now I’m really beginning to get interested in them.’

  ‘Aren’t you always interested in people?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘No – far from it; only in some.’ She flipped a horsefly off her knee as she spoke.

  ‘What is it that makes you interested in the “some”? Do you know?’ he asked, watching with a sort of fascination the flies swarming round the damp legs of her jodhpurs, on which the dust was settling and drying.

  ‘Yes, I think so. It’s when they show some sign of being
really alive inside, and aware of the things that move them. So many people seem to live almost mechanically.’

  ‘Oh, it’s consciousness you value, is it?’

  ‘Yes – if that’s the word. I think it’s the quality which puts most reality into people’s relations with one another. Don’t you value it?’ She stooped and smote at yet another horsefly.

  ‘In relationships, certainly; for purposes of study the very unconscious people are more valuable.’

  ‘Oh, well, you’ll be able to make a study of Annette Ingersoll,’ said Laura gaily; ‘she’s as unconscious as anyone can be.’

  ‘The American girl? Oh yes. Is she engaged to the Frenchman?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Laura. ‘Miss Hande seems to think she may be before we get home again.’

  ‘The real intellectual type,’ murmured the Professor, to Laura’s delight. ‘Tell me about the Frenchman,’ he went on. ‘Is he really a friend of yours? And why does the General call him a rip?’

  ‘Yes, I know Henri very well indeed.’ She paused. ‘General Nevile calls him a rip because he makes his love affairs the main business of his life – he’s as serious about them as an Englishman might be about polo.’

  The Professor received this with charming calm. ‘It’s the French national sport, of course,’ he said, ‘and they are generally very intelligent and amusing about it.’

  ‘Henri is very intelligent and amusing about it,’ said Laura thoughtlessly; and then she blushed. Her remark might lead anyone to suppose that she had experience of Henri’s practice as well as of his theory; but why blush, even if she had? she thought angrily – it was no business of the Professor’s, in any case. The Professor, however, took it in the right spirit.

  ‘Now is he conscious or unconscious, would you say?’

  ‘I can’t quite make that apply to foreigners,’ she said; ‘at least not to the French. I think they’re the hardest people in the world for us to understand. Take Monsieur Delache, for instance. I know him really well. He’s as analytical, as aware of himself, as anyone can possibly be in some directions – but there’s a whole world, familiar to Englishmen, which he never enters.’ She stopped, trying to find words to express what this world was. It was worth while, she already felt, to put forward a tenuous or a sketchy idea to Professor Vinstead. She experienced a little pang of pleasure at the sudden ease and freedom of their intercourse, so unlike the talk she was accustomed to in Peking; it was the way one talked at home, in rooms in Oxford or Cambridge, or during walks along muddy English lanes and field paths. She felt that it was unfettered and free, an honest attempt to express honest opinions, instead of the parrying of empty gallantries, or the smooth emission of nicely measured platitudes, carefully calculated to give away nothing at all to anybody, which make up so large a part of diplomatic conversation. So she might have talked to Aubrey, in the days before their speech became burdened, like a thunder cloud, with undischarged emotion – so she had talked to him later, in the days when emotion had been laid aside. Momentarily she bathed in the freedom, swam in it, glad as a child released from the cramp and stuffiness of a desk in a schoolroom.

  The Professor had to jog her mind about the world Frenchmen do not enter – what was it? Would it be the sense of pathos? she hazarded. He reminded her of Flaubert’s old servant with the parrot.

  ‘Yes, but how rare that is. Look at the pitilessness of most of it! De Maupassant, Stendhal, Anatole France! Do you know L’Histoire comique? It’s a racial thing, of course, and I’m trying to get at it. They have panache, tragedy, most exquisite comedy – but no pity.’

  ‘What you said in the boat about their minds and ours was very true, I thought – is that what you mean?’

  ‘Partly. I think of Frenchmen,’ said Mrs Leroy, ‘as the clerks in God’s Office. They’re clever, and shrewd, and busy – they nose out everything, and assess everything, and their card-indexing system is simply perfect. But the great Englishmen – like Shakespeare and Bridges – and the great Germans, have minds more like God himself – patient, brooding, tender. And though the bulk of us are not like that, we can understand it, and it’s the sort of thing we sympathise with and like.’

  The Professor laughed. ‘It looks as if the world Frenchmen didn’t enter was the Kingdom of Heaven,’ he said drily.

  ‘I think they’re extremely good companions for us, but I don’t think they’re easy to marry,’ was Laura’s final pronouncement.

  ‘Not if they card-index their emotions, certainly.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what they do do,’ said Laura, thinking again of Henri’s confidences.

  ‘Well, the Frenchman is conscious, then, though Heaven is closed to him; and his young woman isn’t. Now tell me,’ he went on, ‘about the other couple. Did you say she was your niece too? And is she engaged to that young Irishman?’

  ‘No, no – how you harp on engagements!’ said Laura, amused. ‘They’re just “walking out”, as the villagers call it.’

  ‘What is he, by the way?’

  ‘He’s First Secretary in the Legation – Head of the Chancery, if you know what that is.’

  ‘Not in the least – but please don’t tell me, I shouldn’t understand. Diplomacy is a sealed book to me.’

  ‘You ought to open it, and make a study of the psychology of Ministers,’ said Laura, thinking of Sir James Boggit. ‘There’s lots of material here.’ She laughed, a rather pleasing soft gurgle.

  ‘Impossible. History shows that they conform to no known laws. Their aberrations are positively Freudian!’ he said, turning to her with an engaging grin. ‘I’m much more interested in your niece and her young man. He seems very attractive, in spite of all that manner; but rather immature, isn’t he, for her? She strikes me as unusually balanced and aware of things.’

  ‘There must be something in psychology,’ said Laura, startled by his perspicacity. ‘I believe you are right, but you’ve been very quick. Most of us are still thinking that she is at a disadvantage because of her inexperience. He – well, he isn’t inexperienced.’

  ‘Oh, he’s another of the General’s rips, is he?’ Professor Vinstead looked amused. ‘Well, I back the lady, all the same. Surely you agree that she is fully conscious?’

  ‘Judith? Oh dear, yes. She’s absolutely awake to everything.’

  ‘Awake is really better. Well, the young man isn’t properly awake, in your sense, is he, in spite of his experiences? Haven’t you noticed that people who specialise in sexual adventures are often curiously inexpert or immature about other things? We don’t always realise it, because they assume a sort of false sophistication – they give themselves all the airs of being the Realpolitikers. And they get away with it, nine times out of ten, because so many people are too timid to be Realpolitikers about sex, and so have a sort of furtive admiration for them.’

  ‘People aren’t like that out here,’ said Laura decidedly. ‘Half of them are always having liaisons, and the other half are pretending that they have them. But generally speaking I think what you say is true.’

  ‘Too close a preoccupation with sex has a curiously muffling effect on the faculties, especially in older people,’ pursued the Professor. ‘It’s very like alcohol in its action. A little stimulates the higher centres, and produces a heightened intensity of everything – perception, response, creative power. The function of sex in the domain of the intellect is really as purely creative as in the physical kingdom. But too much of it, like too much alcohol, slows everything down, blankets it. It’s a dangerous drug, and has its addicts.’

  Mrs Leroy watched her companion at intervals while he talked. Prim wasn’t exactly the word for him, certainly, but she wondered a little how much he knew about it all, except clinically. She was moved to ask if he didn’t think too little sex in a lifetime as bad as too much?

  ‘Oh, worse, much worse. Except, of course, for a few spiritual geniuses, who are probably abnormal, anyhow. The normal healthy thing is to take it in one’s stride in
youth; get it into proportion and leave it there. There may be later manifestations, of course.’

  ‘And those? What about them?’ asked Laura, almost blinded by the sudden intensity of her recollection of Aubrey.

  ‘I think they should be dealt with drastically,’ said the Professor. ‘In oneself …’

  The end of his sentence was lost. Round the corner of a wall at the entrance to a village they ran slap into the ass train, huddled into a confused mass; the narrow alley-like street beyond was completely blocked by a company of Chinese soldiers, passing down towards them. Mrs Leroy and the Professor backed against the wall to let them pass. The men marched in twos and threes, anyhow, with gay paper umbrellas slung at their backs; their rifles were lashed together in bundles and tied to the pack saddles of several donkeys who trotted in their midst. Two machine guns on mules brought up the rear. The men’s armlets were neither pink nor yellow, but scarlet. When they had passed, the General, who had dismounted, limped over to Laura.

  ‘See that?’

  ‘Yes – Wang’s men. They’re some of the three battalions, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t much like it,’ said the General. ‘I wonder how many there are about. They aren’t being paid off – see the guns? Well, let’s get on.’

  They passed through the village. The street, not more than five feet wide, was sunk to half a man’s height between broad earthen parapets, on which the houses stood; these parapets swarmed with men, women and children, standing and sitting, on a level with the passers-by and almost within touching distance. Many of the children lay listlessly in the dust, or in their mothers’ laps, their hands and faces, as well as those of some of the adults, hideously covered with a dark purple eruption, from which pus oozed in places.

  ‘Good heavens! What is the matter with them?’ exclaimed the Professor in horror.