Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  ‘He waved his hand about, and tapped his chest with his fingers.’

  ‘That might mean anything,’ said Derek.

  ‘It might mean that he was going to do something,’ said Judith doubtfully, ‘it was just like what he does when he says, “I fix.”’

  Laura could not help smiling. ‘I fix’ represented Niu’s principal stock of the English language, and it always amused her to hear him using it to Hubbard in those curious bilingual colloquies of theirs, which were somehow so effectual. He did, she remembered, on such occasions tap his chest importantly with the middle and first fingers of his right hand. It might well be that he intended to ‘fix’ something, somehow, now. She found it hard to believe that Niu, cowardly and tyrannical as he was, would abandon his T’ai-t’ai permanently in such an emergency. But she was too prudent to raise false hopes, and kept her ideas to herself.

  The time dragged on. Occasionally the sound of shots or screams from somewhere below broke the hot silence, otherwise only punctuated by the hawking and belching of their captors – a cheerless interruption, showing that the bandits were getting on with the good work in other parts of the temple. In this period of inaction the party had leisure for the first time to become aware of fear; and (those of them who were so minded) to observe their reactions to it. Vinstead, watching the others, decided that so far as it was possible to judge it manifested itself, in them as in him, as a sort of dull excitement. There was also of course that peculiar sensation round the diaphragm, which always accompanies suspense – he was too familiar with this to allow himself to put it down to hunger, as pride suggested. No – hungry he was, but without the presence of those dirty yellow men with the rifles his hunger would have produced different physical symptoms. He was frightened too, and below all his other sensations was the gnawing of this dull excitement, and a sense of exasperation at the futility of fate, in subjecting them to such an experience.

  About them all, of course, was that curious unspoken determination to behave very normally. Sound enough, thought Vinstead – the more normally you behave, the more normal you will feel. He noticed with approval that Fitzmaurice had begun telling Judith Milne an interminable series of Irish stories connected with hunting; and, feeling a bit of a fool, he was nevertheless constrained to support Miss Hande’s spirits by starting a conversation about Freud’s Theory of Laughter. It was, he felt, a poor choice, but he couldn’t think of anything else on the spur of the moment; and there was something about the uncompromising flatness of the novelist’s attitude which reminded him vaguely of the incredibly un-funny stories with which the great Viennese illustrates Die Komik and Der Humor.

  Mrs Leroy, meanwhile, was not making the smallest effort to talk to anyone. Sitting on a stool, her back propped against the wall, with her feet stretched out in front of her and her hat tilted over her eyes, she was smoking dreamily – as much absorbed, to Vinstead’s watchful observation, as she had been on the rocks above the ferry at Mo-shih-k’ou three days – was it really only three days? – ago. Her mind however was busily at work. From wondering what, if anything, she could possibly do next to extricate the party from their predicament, she passed – finding nothing at all – to the circumstances which had led them into it. She was responsible, of course, for the lot of them, and she was wondering whether it was just pure bad luck that they had been briganded, or whether she had somehow, in Derek’s favourite phrase, ‘bogged it’. She ran rapidly over the sequence of events, from the moment of their arrival at the temple, questioning her action at each one. They might, of course, have left when Niu first suggested it, but then there were the donkeys, and they had not lunched – she knew how strenuously opposed Henry always was to launching any party on an expedition unfed. When they met the T’ao-pings down on the terrace – well, that was not her fault; that miserable Judith had screamed, and torn it. It was a succession of small chances lost by inches, and the last was when they waited in the upper court for Vinstead to fetch his camera. No – she had been right then, at least; you could not leave anyone behind at such a moment.

  The recollection of that pause for Vinstead, however, led her on to a number of other considerations, which she now had leisure to examine. She recalled his curious look and tone, just before they went to lunch, when he quoted at her, ‘Come you not, a careless stranger, Him with reckless words to waken.’ There had been pain and bitterness, or something very like them, in his face and voice – and going over the context of their conversation, pain and bitterness, with the words he used to her, then, could only point to one rather surprising conclusion. Mmm – she wondered where he stood? Mrs Leroy, for all her absent-mindedness, was not such a fool as not to realise perfectly well when men were beginning to be interested in her; but till that moment before lunch she could honestly say that she had not observed any signs of a feeling for herself in the Professor – indeed, it would have been more than ridiculous to look for them, ‘Bless my soul, I only met the man two days ago!’ Now, however, she could not say that she had noticed nothing. Moreover, that lightning picture of Vinstead among the T’ao-pings which had flashed so decisively across her inner vision had given a sort of jab to her own consciousness – she was forced to realise that he had made rather a big hole for himself in her mind, even in this short time.

  Her thoughts, however, did not stay long with Vinstead. They ran on to Henry. How angry Henry would be – and how anxious! How completely all his objections to the picnic were being justified – and how he would enjoy not telling them all that he had told them so, when they got back. When they got back – the words left a horrid little creeping question in the mind, like a nasty taste. When would they get back? Impossible to say. They might merely be dévalisés, little as they had to steal; or, more probably, held to ransom. Ransoming was a lengthy process – two months, or three, or even more – if you survived. Mrs Leroy knew a good deal about the slow cautious negotiations, conducted at long range through some more or less competent consul or missionary, when a ransom was in question; she knew how often, if the business dragged on too long and the ransom finally offered were too small, the object of it quietly disappeared. The brigands said the person had died – it was more than likely! And she remembered how Henry, on more than one such occasion, sickened by the timidity and belated caution of the authorities, had suggested telegraphing through the intermediary the terse advice, ‘Commit suicide immediately’ – a suggestion which discomposed Sir James Boggit, and moved him, uncomfortable and incensed, to refer to his Commercial and Oriental Attaché as ‘a fantastical felloh’. Three months – but she was due to start home in just over two! The children would be so disappointed if she didn’t come. With the thought a sudden passion to escape and live awoke in Mrs Leroy. Tim and Sarah needed her still – not for many years more, but a few. Sarah must be steered through her teens, over those difficult awkwardnesses which her ruthless sincerity and her scorching tongue would make more marked than usual; Tim ought to be shown – but ever so lightly and casually – a vision of life which would save him alike from a timid and Wykehamical rigidity and from Derek’s Gallic and irresponsible excesses. At least she must try – and there was no one to do it but herself – no one! Who else would have the patience? Or see just where the need lay, and the delicate roundabout remedy? No, you couldn’t delegate those things. Fear had taken on for Mrs Leroy the sharpest edge of all – the fear for the beloved child. She thought of those two dear heads, the rough brown and the furry brown, bent together over some important task – the skinning of a mole, or the painting of a flower in Bentham – in the school-room at Garsover. She could see the big light shabby room with the glossy magnolia leaves framing the high windows, the enormous table and the ancient comfortable chairs; all in a complete litter now, of course – Sarah was so dreadfully untidy. With that vision of the massive security of English life, the present faded gradually out of her consciousness. The sun crept round and scorched her knees, unnoticed; the others moved their chairs, the T’ao-ping
s hawked and spat, but Laura Leroy never stirred. Those things had become unreal – her other world had swallowed her up. Judith observed her absorption and thought, rather resentfully, ‘Even when we’re all briganded, she can’t concentrate on it’; she knew that faraway look. And suddenly she glanced round her and said aloud, ‘Where’s Lilah?’

  No one knew. No one had seen Lilah since she went to hide her jewellery. They looked for her in the inner court, and then in the pavilion, where they expected confidently to find her, but there was no sign of her. She had vanished as completely as if an eagle had carried her off.

  ‘But it isn’t possible!’ said Laura, roused at last. ‘Even if they’d let her go, we should have seen her walk past us, and there’s no other way out.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have seen her,’ said Derek, ‘but we should – for certain. She must be somewhere.’

  They looked again. She wasn’t anywhere. There was not cover for a mouse in the pavilion, let alone for Lilah, who was no mouse. Suddenly Judith, who had been roaming about, came up to Laura, her eyebrows positively lambent with intelligence. ‘I know,’ she murmured, putting her mouth to her aunt’s ear, ‘she’s got out at the back.’

  ‘How? The back? What do you mean?’ asked Laura in the same tone.

  ‘Round here – look!’ she led Mrs Leroy to the chasm behind the pavilion. ‘Don’t you remember how she got up the wall at Chieh T’ai Ssu – she told me she’d shown you yesterday – with her back and feet? I’m sure she’s got out like that. You can see where she’s scraped the moss.’

  Sure enough, in the middle of the long narrow space a sort of broken line showed on the monastery wall, where something had recently rubbed the bricks free of moss – it ended where the roots of an oak tree hung down in loops from the hillside, some fifteen feet above where they stood. Laura looked at the height in amazement. ‘But, good heavens, she could never have got right up there!’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes she could – I bet she has!’ said Judith triumphantly.

  ‘Laura!’ Derek’s voice came sharp and urgent. ‘Where are you? Come here!’

  ‘All right,’ said Mrs Leroy, squeezing back round the end of the pavilion, ‘what is it?’ But she soon saw what it was. The outer courtyard was full of soldiers, fifty or sixty of them, all talking loudly and at once – the original guard were pointing at the foreigners and giving explanations to an individual who appeared to be the long-awaited Number One; for some reason they seemed to be angry, and one soldier was holding Vinstead by the elbow and giving him a shake now and then.

  ‘I think they thought you’d gone off,’ said Derek as she came forward. ‘For heaven’s sake come and talk to them. They look rather nasty.’

  They did look very nasty, especially the Number One. He was small and stoutly built, and short of one eye; his yellow face was deeply pitted with smallpox, and his hands between the fingers were roughened and pocked with scabies. Their mere numbers somehow made the bandits all at once more menacing than the first party had been.

  ‘Keep quite still,’ Laura said to Vinstead. ‘He’ll let go presently.’ And she asked some of the men if they had got or not got the Number One?

  ‘Got, got,’ they replied in chorus, indicating the one-eyed individual. ‘Got, got!’

  To him Mrs Leroy addressed herself, rather formally. He wanted to speak-talk? Apparently he did. ‘That man wants what?’ she said, indicating the soldier who held Vinstead. ‘He let go, can talk.’ The bandit dropped Vinstead’s arm. ‘You want what?’ Mrs Leroy then asked. She spoke with a curious slow deliberation, and that impervious friendliness was again on her face.

  What the Number One wanted first was to count his bag. The prisoners were marshalled in a row and counted over – i-kö, lian-kö, san-kö, ssu-kö, wu-kö – five-piece. Then a terrific argument began. There should have been liu-kö – six-piece. ‘Still one,’ said the guards. They searched noisily and frantically through the inner court and pavilion, as our party had themselves searched a few moments before, but the six-piece was nowhere to be found.

  And then suddenly, swift as the blowing-up of a summer storm, the bandits turned dangerous. Enraged by the loss of the sixth captive, they seized all the others by the arms and shoulders and shook them roughly to and fro, shouting and shaking their fists in their faces. ‘Keep quiet – do keep perfectly quiet,’ Laura gasped out, the breath nearly shaken out of her. ‘Smile.’

  This last piece of advice Vinstead and Derek found it impossible to follow, with yellow soldiers handling Laura and Judith with brutal roughness. Never in their lives, probably, had they experienced such violent emotions of murderous hatred and helpless impotence. Miss Hande, though her lorgnette was knocked off and broken, and her neat dark bun of hair shaken down, obediently preserved a gallant smirk all the time. In a lull Laura managed to make herself heard by the Number One. ‘What plan?’ she asked, still with that almost drawling deliberation. She tried rather ingeniously to throw the onus for Lilah’s loss on the guards. ‘We know nothing – you ask-ask these men; we all-time sit-sit; they all-time here sit – they know.’

  She was listened to, but her words did not produce quite the effect she intended. Vinstead could only think afterwards of what followed as a sort of typhoon which burst over them. A frightful quarrel broke out between the newcomers and the men on guard; bayonets and rifle butts were freely used; one man was shot, and lay under the courtyard wall, jerking his legs up and down. No one paid any attention to him, except that while he still moved another T’ao-ping quietly helped himself to his bandolier. Released for the moment, Vinstead moved quickly over to Laura. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.

  ‘No, not a bit; but you really must keep steady. You were making awful faces just now.’

  ‘Faces! My God!’ said Vinstead. ‘If you knew …’

  He had no chance to tell her what she didn’t know. The T’ao-pings had a fresh plan, possibly inspired by the guards out of revenge. The hands of the five prisoners were tied roughly behind their backs, and they were stood up in a row against the courtyard wall. A file of soldiers loaded their rifles and stood opposite, with weapons pointed at them.

  ‘Oh, Christ, the swine!’ ejaculated Derek.

  ‘It’s all right – they won’t hit us. You can see they’re aiming high,’ said Vinstead. The words came out in a voice whose careful normality made it sound quite unreal. For a fraction of a second he stood, hoping to God that those crazy yellow fiends wouldn’t change their minds, or shoot crooked. Then the volley came. He was right – it splintered the plaster above their heads, and the dust drifted down into their eyes, but they were not hurt. Blinking through the dust, he peered anxiously along the row to see how the women had stood it – his own knees were unsteady, and the blood kept racing in waves over his body and then draining sickeningly back to the heart. Judith and Laura were both very white. Miss Hande, however, with superb composure, blew a speck of plaster off her nose and observed that, ‘She guessed she didn’t think Oriental humour so vurry subtle after all.’ The T’ao-pings, grinning and chattering, swarmed round them, again with the question, ‘Six-piece what place?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Laura told them, with the same weary deliberation. ‘Gone, wai-t’ou (outside).’ She felt suddenly immensely tired, and quite unable to think of anything to say or do to mend matters. Then a burst of laughter drew her attention. The bandits had started a new game. One of them advanced towards Vinstead with a fixed bayonet. Her heart turned over horribly in her body as he came close to him, paused, drew back, and lunged forward. The steel struck the wall just between them, within a couple of inches of his arm – if Vinstead had moved he must have been hit. Amid roars of applause the soldier moved on towards Judith. Suddenly Laura had an inspiration.

  ‘Chê-li Lai!’ (come here!) she called loudly to the man with the bayonet. Startled, the soldier paused, and with the ingrained Chinese habit of obedience came towards her; the others, astonished, were silent. ‘More near,’ she told him, and then in
the sudden quiet, loud, slow, and clear, she made an oration. If that man, she told the bandits, holds his fire-stick there till I count ten, I jump on it. Then I die. I from the Ying-kuo-fu – that man Ying-kuo-fu Third Envoy; this man – nodding at Vinstead – Ying-kuo Ta Shuai. (Why she chose the title of Commander-in-Chief for Vinstead she couldn’t think, but it was heard with silent respect.) This, she proceeded, was a hu-tu-ti fah-tzu – an idiot-plan. ‘I die – English Emperor very angry; afterwards you all extreme regret this plan. Now!’ – she paused dramatically – ‘one, two, three, four …’

  In China such speechifying is quite in order. The commonest affairs of daily life are there conducted with an amount of oratory inconceivable to us. The difficulty is to catch the attention of the audience. On this occasion Laura’s speech and manoeuvre succeeded beyond hope. Abashed, discomfited, before she reached ‘five’, the small soldier stepped back – Mrs Leroy, tall, menacing, and still slowly counting, walked after him, till he lowered his weapon and shrank away into the crowd, whose laughter broke out tumultuously. Pursuing her advantage, she strode up to the Number One, and standing sideways before him, indicated her bound hands. ‘What plan? Not-good plan,’ she said loftily, and expatiated further and with considerable detail on the exact means that would be used to avenge any injury to English Commanders-in-Chief and people from the British Legation.