Peking Picnic

by Bridge, Ann;

  So, though they sat side by side on the rock, the Professor was not even holding Mrs Leroy’s hand when Annette Ingersoll suddenly appeared on the path below them. Even at a distance her figure suggested some serious disorder; she was bare-headed, and broke now and then into a little stumbling run.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Laura, starting to her feet, ‘how mad of her to come out with no hat, with that head! What is the matter with her?’

  ‘Go gently with her – I’m afraid she’s very ill,’ said Vinstead in a low voice, as she started down the path towards the girl. She checked at his words, and went on more slowly. As she approached she saw that Annette looked even worse than at breakfast, barely an hour ago – the circles under her eyes had deepened, and were almost purple; the pallor of her face was more marked, and she made little nervous movements with her hands as she walked. When she saw Mrs Leroy she ran up to her with, ‘Oh there you are, Mrs Leroy.’

  ‘Am I wanted? Are you all starting?’ asked Laura.

  ‘No, but I just had to find you,’ said the girl. She spoke with little short breaths. ‘We’ll be going in no time, and you haven’t told me. You promised …’ she said, catching at Laura’s hand; the heat of her touch was startling.

  ‘Told you what?’ said Laura – and then she remembered. Annette’s appearance had bumped her out of that world of serene communication so suddenly that for a moment she was at a loss.

  ‘About enlightenment – and what’s wrong with me; why I don’t know people. I have to know!’ She spoke with the same feverish haste that showed in her movements, and though her voice was not raised, her tones had almost the frantic urgency of a scream. ‘You just must tell me.’

  ‘I will,’ said Mrs Leroy. ‘Come on down, and we’ll talk as we go. Here, put this on,’ she said, taking off her hat. ‘Yes, you must, in this sun – or I can’t talk to you.’ Annette submitted, looking at her with childish relief and obedience. Her small unformed mouth, so like a doll’s mouth, smiled vaguely; Laura noticed that her lips were no longer like dewy petals, as Henri had said, but dry and cracked.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, terribly, Mrs Leroy.’

  ‘Would you go on down and tell Niu to get out some soda water?’ said Laura to Vinstead.

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Annette, why do you worry so much about enlightenment?’ Mrs Leroy said then, her eyes on his swift striding figure below them. Her thoughts were clamouring to follow her eyes – what was that he had said about love showing us both our weakness and our strength more clearly than any other experience? But she forced them on to the girl. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-three, Mrs Leroy.’

  ‘Well, don’t you think enlightenment – or knowing people, whichever it is you want – is largely a matter of age and experience?’

  ‘Why maybe it is – but I guess the kind of experience makes a whole heap of difference,’ said Annette, with unexpected penetration. ‘Just running around with people, and laughing, doesn’t teach you much. I’m just standing outside people all the time, looking at them. There must be a way to learn – you do it, I can see you do. I want – oh, mercy, how my head aches!’ she said, putting her hand up and then dropping it again with a sort of hopeless gesture. She began to talk once more, speaking very fast. ‘Why did that bonze shake his head at me, when he read my fortune? Oh yes, he did – I saw him. I guess he knew I was a dud at people! Why won’t you tell me?’ she said again.

  ‘Annette dear, I will – everything I can that will help you, or that’s helped me,’ said Laura. ‘But I really don’t think you are fit to talk or listen now, while your head is so bad.’ She spoke very composedly, hoping to quiet Annette’s feverish distress; she was exceedingly alarmed by the girl’s state. ‘Sit down here,’ she said as they reached the courtyard, and sitting beside Annette she took her hand, in such a way that she could feel the bumping pulse. Heavens! she must have a terrific temperature. ‘Now listen to me,’ she went on, ‘if I promise to tell you all I can as soon as your head is better, will you promise me not to worry about it till I do? Then we’ll take our time and have a good go at it. Shall we?’

  ‘Oh yes – how good you are, Mrs Leroy!’

  ‘All right – that’s a bargain. Tell me, did you go out without your hat yesterday too?’ she asked.

  ‘Only just a little while, just up the hill here.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Why, we got in just before tiffin.’

  How mad of Nina, to allow such a thing, thought Laura angrily. Vinstead now appeared with Niu, bringing soda water, and Laura went in search of Mrs Nevile, leaving him with Annette. Just beyond the first court she met General Nevile, limping hastily towards the gate.

  ‘Vinstead says he thinks that child’s really ill,’ he said abruptly. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I’m afraid she may be – she has a tremendous pulse, and she’s inclined to be hysterical,’ said Laura. ‘I think perhaps she has a touch of the sun. She went out with no hat yesterday, she tells me, just before lunch.’

  The General frowned at this intelligence, but kept characteristically to the practical side.

  ‘What are we to do? Keep her here till it’s cooler, or get her down?’

  ‘Have we any ice up here?’

  ‘No – the coolies went off with all the food and stuff nearly an hour ago.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Laura. ‘I should be almost inclined to get her down if we’ve no ice.’

  ‘She ought to be all right if she rides, and has a topi and an umbrella,’ said the General, pulling worriedly at his blond moustache. ‘Hope she won’t be bad, poor little thing. She looked seedy enough at breakfast.’

  ‘If she’s going, oughtn’t she to start at once?’ said Laura, ‘and not wait for the rest?’

  ‘Certainly she ought,’ said the General. ‘We’ll get her off.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE JOURNEY down to the cars was rather a nightmare. As it turned out, there was no question of waiting for the others – they were all ready, and the caravan set off as soon as Annette had been provided with a topi, Miss Hande’s painted paper parasol, and a big handkerchief of Touchy’s soaked in water and draped over her head and neck. Henri at first volunteered to walk beside her and hold the parasol over her head, but he chattered, and his presence seemed to cause her a vague distress. She kept turning round and asking for Laura, who at last felt obliged to come and take Henri’s place – this arrangement seemed to soothe the girl, who consented to sit still on her donkey and not talk. It involved some sacrifice on Laura’s part, nevertheless. She had counted a good deal on spending at least a part of the two hours’ walk in Vinstead’s company. But the sense of security and comfort persisted, and she had plenty to think about – the whole layout of his attitude, as he had begun to make it clear to her, and his response to the point of view which she had expressed. If they could keep the generosity of understanding which they had once achieved, nothing else mattered – whether they ultimately became lovers or not, was almost irrelevant, she thought to herself.

  Alongside these meditations, she kept a watchful eye on Annette Ingersoll. At first the girl seemed to stand the ride well enough, but after they left the smallpox village and began to cross the open plain she wilted almost visibly under the increasing heat. A hot wind was blowing down out of the funnel-shaped valley of the Hun-ho, tossing and bending the round fluffy tops of the poplars, and raising nasty little choking whirlwinds and eddies of dust along the path. As they proceeded across the plain towards the river the sky behind them took on a dull menacing yellow glare. Touchy moved up and down the line, urging the donkey boys to greater speed. ‘I’m afraid we’re in for a dust storm if we don’t hurry,’ he said to Laura as he passed her. She nodded – she feared it too, late in the season as it was; she knew that yellow glare which betokened a sky full of fine particles of Gobi dust, whirled up off the bare desert flats and carried three hundred miles,
to drop when the wind dropped. They hurried on. ‘T’za! t’za!’ cried the donkey boys, hastening the small beasts; and trip-trip-trip went the little neat feet on the earthen path. As they approached the shallow branch of the Hun-ho Vinstead came and walked beside her, taking the umbrella which she found it hard to keep vertical against the increasing force of the wind, and himself holding it over Annette; when they reached the ford he simply splashed through it, this time, regardless of his trousers. Something in Laura’s heart warmed to him for this small action – it seemed to her somehow important, indicative of a new freedom and a capacity for extravagance. That after all was what he most needed – just moral extravagance – after his years of cautious self-regulation.

  The storm hit them as they reached the river bank by the ferry. For the last few minutes the wind had been thrashing the poplar heads till they looked like green balls tossed loose in the air, their slim boles lost in a luminous haze of dust. Now, with a shriek, it fell on them. ‘Down! Down! Cover your heads!’ Touchy yelled above the screaming wind. ‘Your coat off!’ he shouted at Vinstead. Laura had pulled Annette off the donkey and cowered down with her where they were on the path, wrapping the damp handkerchief over the girl’s face, and tying her coloured neck scarf round her own – she knew that in a dust storm it is madness to attempt to move into shelter – literally madness, for the blind confusion of flying particles, the torture of dust in eyes, ears, mouth and lungs, drive one demented in a few seconds. ‘There! Over all of you!’ she heard Touchy’s voice, and found Vinstead beside her and Annette, his coat and a donkey blanket flung over all their heads. They crouched there in the semi-darkness, listening to the shrieking wind, to the patter of sand on the cloth over their heads, to shouts and cries in the distance, and – in the lulls – to one another’s breathing. Annette’s was short and irregular – her shoulder, which touched Laura’s, seemed almost to burn through the two thin sleeves. Oh, maddening delay! Just when it was so urgent to get her home quickly. For what seemed ages they crouched there, breathing uncomfortably through the wrappings on their faces, feeling their teeth nevertheless gritty and their lips dry, as the fine eddying dust searched into every fold and cranny. Actually it was barely half an hour before the worst of it was over, and Touchy came round, uncovering the huddled groups, whose corpse-like appearance moved him to laughter, and telling them that the ferry-boat was at the shore.

  They rose then and went on board, everyone beating and shaking the sand out of their clothes, and wiping their necks, their ears and the hollows of their faces with handkerchiefs to get rid of the fine film of yellowish dust which covered them. They could see the tail of the storm moving off across the sandy flats by the river towards Peking, black at the heart, with flying luminous yellow fringes. Again they landed on the sloping shore, and followed the narrow and discoloured track round the foot of the bluff to where the cars waited on the riverbank. Deadly familiar those features had become during their long wait four days ago – identical they now greeted their return, even to the single patch of shade under the stunted thuja, up on the rocks. But not all of those who returned brought back with them an equal identity. Human lives develop at unequal speeds at different times. Those four days had been a period of accelerated growth, of swift subtle modification, for several of the weekenders who set out so light-heartedly on their picnic. Derek, Judith, Annette, Laura, Vinstead – even Miss Hande perhaps, as to her theories about the Chinese – had been confronted, not fruitlessly, up at Chieh T’ai Ssu, with the ancient wisdom and the blossoming tree. Vinstead in particular looked about him as he stepped ashore, almost aghast at the strangeness, the swift movement of reality. Here on this path, four days ago, Laura had stood near him; an interesting face and a name – Mrs Leroy! – she who had now mixed herself so integrally with his thoughts, his emotions, his very life; up on those slabs he had looked her straight in the face, and failed to make an entrance for himself into her absorbed eyes – he who this morning on the hill had seen his own miserable past realities come back to life in her pitying gaze, in her sudden tears.

  It was arranged that Annette should go in Laura’s car, which was the fastest and the best sprung, and with Derek and Judith as well it set off first, bumping and crawling over the fields towards Mo-shih-k’ou. Once on the road it went faster, but still not fast enough to satisfy Laura’s desire to get Annette safely home. The girl lay back in the corner, with closed eyes most of the time – sometimes she turned her head from side to side, as if seeking a position that would lessen the pain. ‘Is your head very bad?’ Laura asked her, arranging the freshly soaked handkerchief on her forehead, and sprinkling it with Hubbard’s eau-de-Cologne. ‘Oh my, yes!’ the girl answered in a sort of moan; ‘and my legs, too – and my back. It seems just everywhere.’ There was nothing to be done but to sit and watch the familiar landmarks on the road, as they reached and passed them one by one – Pa Pao Shan, the golden hill on the brown-paper-coloured landscape; the little walled town astride the road; the empty bed of the old Imperial Canal; Goddamn Britishers, painted on the roadside wall. Every small hindrance – a file of camels crossing from a side road, a cart upset – seemed intolerable to Laura, whose anxiety was increasing all the time. If this were sunstroke, it was a severe case; and now at intervals Annette gave a curious little sharp cry, not loud, but of a painful and striking intensity. At last the grey outline of the city wall rose ahead of them, and the mighty bulk of the gate tower; they swung through, and bumped and raced along the wide sordid streets of tumbledown one-storey houses, vertical signs, and teeming commercial activity on the sidewalks. As they turned into the Jade Canal Road and approached the Legation, Laura gave an order to the chauffeur in Chinese; at the Legation gate the car stopped.

  ‘You two get out here,’ said Laura abruptly to Judith and Derek, and sprang out after them. ‘I’m going to take her to the German Hospital at once,’ she said in a low tone. ‘You, Judith, go to Nina’s house and wait, and tell her when she comes – send her on there immediately; the doctor may want to know things I can’t tell him. Derek, ring up Dr Hertz’s house and find out where he is; if he’s at the hospital, all right – if not, you must get hold of him and send him there at once. Oh, and Judith – send the amah round in a rickshaw with a nightgown of Annette’s and some handkerchiefs – she talks English.’ She stepped back into the car and was gone.

  Judith and Derek were left standing on the path under the locust trees. For a moment they remained almost benumbed, while the rickshaw coolies who hung about the gate sprang up and shuffled towards them, proffering their services with loud cries. ‘Pu yao’ (Don’t want), said Derek mechanically, and turned towards the gate.

  ‘Do you think she’s really ill?’ Judith asked incredulously, as they walked in.

  ‘Laura evidently thinks so,’ he said gravely. ‘Poor kid. Well, come on, Juno – we must do our jobs.’ And suddenly, regardless of the sentry, he gave her elbow a quick squeeze. ‘If it had been you!’ he said, ‘where should I be now?’ – and hurried off to his own house.

  In the polished concreted hall, smelling of ether and disinfectants, of the big white building off Legation Street, Mrs Leroy asked for Schwester Johanna. Small, stout, motherly, comely in her wide-folded white headdress, the sister superintended the removal of Annette from the car to a room upstairs with swift competence. Dr Hertz was operating, but would be free in a few minutes. Meanwhile, the sister took the girl’s temperature, and handed the thermometer to Laura with grave eyes. It was over 105º. An ice pack was being prepared – the Schwester knew her job – when Dr Hertz came in, still wiping disinfectant from his hands with a little towel. He made a brief examination – touched the pulse, raised the head from the pillow and let it lie back again, and removing the sheet, gently first lifted and then lowered the right leg. ‘This hurts?’ he asked.

  ‘No – oh, I can’t bear the light!’ moaned Annette. He half drew the curtain, and then stood in a characteristic attitude at the foot of the bed, watching the
patient intently, as if to draw in information from her general aspect – a trick of his that Laura knew well. So he had stood, gazing from the foot of the bed at Sarah, when she had nearly died of scarlet fever three years before. After a prolonged survey of the now flushed face, the nervous movements of the hands, the uncertain breathing, with a brusque gesture he beckoned Mrs Leroy from the room.

  ‘It is grave,’ he said when they stood in the passage, where the greenery from the great trees outside almost brushed the high windows. ‘Unless this temperature shall come down! But we pack her with ice – perhaps it comes down. She has been in the sun, yes?’

  Laura gave him, briefly, the history of the picnic; the long hot wait on Friday, in the full heat of the day, beside the ferry; the hot walk up to Chieh T’ai Ssu – the fact that Annette had gone out, hatless, before lunch on Sunday. At this last detail he gave an impatient little shrug, and almost a moan of distress. ‘So they do! So they do! And she has headache – when?’