Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  If anyone noticed this brief episode, they didn’t show it. And since the last of the guests did not leave until well after midnight (always the sign of a successful party), the subject of the coffee that wasn’t did not come up until the following morning, when Mother asked the Number-One-Boy for an explanation. The Number-One-Boy offered the most profuse apologies. It was all most regrettable, and there were not enough words in the language to express the shame and sorrow that he and the cook, and in fact the entire staff, had felt at bringing such shame upon the Tai-tai;2 and in front of such important guests. He and the staff were entirely responsible, and no shadow of blame rested on the Tai-tai. ‘I know that,’ agreed Mother impatiently, ‘but how did it happen?’ Well, it was this way, explained the Number-One-Boy …

  Only when the time came for sending in the coffee tray was it discovered that there wasn’t any coffee. The only coffee in the place was a cupful or so left over from breakfast, so it was decided to use that, by the simple method of filling up the unemptied coffee pot with boiling water, and hoping that it would pass muster. Sadly, it had not …

  Mother said that she understood their dilemma, but in that case it would have been better to skip the coffee. Such a thing must never happen again. The Number-One-Boy repeated his apologies, and that, one would have thought, was that. But no sooner was breakfast eaten and cleared away the next morning than the entire staff, overcoated and carrying its collective luggage, lined up in the courtyard and, having once again expressed its collective sorrow, announced that it was leaving.

  Tacklow, hastily summoned to deal with the crisis, inquired what the trouble was, and Number-One, speaking for all of them, explained that since they had caused the Tai-tai to lose so much face on the previous night in the presence of her foreign guests, their own loss of face was so great that they could no longer work for her, and since they were all to some degree related, they all bore a share of the disgrace. When Mother tried to talk them out of it, saying that the episode of the coffee, though unfortunate, was not all that bad and she didn’t mind losing face, the Number-One-Boy was plainly horrified, and replied tardy that she should mind! Nothing persuaded them, and the entire lot swept out, no doubt feeling that they were well out of working for someone so deficient in proper feeling.

  The next Loss-of-Face-Disaster arose from an even slighter cause. We were expecting a visitor who would, on his arrival in a few days’ time, be occupying the guest room in the second courtyard, and orders had been given for everything to be ready for him, the bedding aired and the room swept and garnished. This had been done, and a day or two before his arrival Tacklow, thinking that his friend would probably like a bit of light reading matter, collected a few books and a magazine or two and took them round to put on the guest-room writing desk. Unfortunately, he had chosen the wrong time of day for his mission; it was the hour of the siesta, when all who are at liberty to do so treat themselves to a nap. And there, treating himself to one – comfortably disposed and snoring gently on the guest-room bed – was the new (or newish) Number-One-Boy.

  Tacklow always swore that he had recognized the danger immediately and had done his best to retreat before the sleeper awoke. However, it was not to be, for, trying to tiptoe out backwards, he tripped on the edge of the carpet and dropped one of the books. Well, I don’t have to tell you what happened then. Within an hour our entire staff were lined up in their going-away clothes and explaining, through a second Number-One-Boy, why the squad could no longer remain in a house in which their senior member had lost practically his entire allowance of face. And that since they were all related (which this time I didn’t believe for a minute – I think it was team spirit), they must all leave. And leave they did.

  It was no good Mother being cross with her ‘China-side’ relations and muttering darkly that ‘They might have warned me!’ No amount of warnings could have prevented either of those dêbâcles. It was just China.

  Mother got no sympathy from her family, all of whom, I imagine, had stubbed their toes on this type of situation time without number. But it has to be said that apart from such quirks, the servants were to be valued above rubies, and the life of a foreigner who possessed a well-trained and industrious amah, a competent Number-One-Boy and a really good cook could truthfully be likened to a bed of roses.

  Chapter 8

  Winter crept up on us almost without warning. One day Peking was ablaze with the red and yellow and gold of autumn, and the next it was misty with the smoke of the countless bonfires of fallen leaves that flamed or smouldered throughout the walled cities, and there was ice on every patch and puddle of water in Peking, so that one had to be careful not to slip and fall when out walking.

  But though the leaves and the chrysanthemums had gone, the colours were still there in the Imperial yellow of the roof-tiles, the blood-red of the walls and the scarlet and blue and green of the P’ai Lous. And now the thin silk robes and small, button-topped caps of the old gentlemen who used to come out each evening to give their pet singing-birds an airing – each little bird tethered to its owner by a long length of the finest silk thread, which enabled it to fly around as though it were free, and be wound in again like a hooked fish on a line – were exchanged for long padded and quilted coats and (if the cold was particularly intense) fur-lined caps with ear pieces that tied under the chin. Every child became a small rotund object, wrapped in a well-worn padded coat and quilted bootees, while the beggars, many of them White Russians who could not even afford that much cover, wrapped themselves in tattered newspapers under their rags, and smothered their poor, blue-and-red chilblained feet in more of the same, kept on by bits of string.

  Then one night the real winter, the ‘Great Snow’, fell silently upon the city, and we woke to a glittering world in which every stick and stone was frilled with frost, and our Jade Canal frozen solid: a long sheet of ice bordered on both sides by the silver lace of the leafless willows that overhung it. We learned then what a winter in North China is like. The Pei-hai had turned itself overnight into an immense skating rink, and it looked as though all Peking had taken the day off to skate on the canals and lakes of the Forbidden City. ‘Make the most of it,’ said the old China-hands. ‘You won’t be able to do this for long!’

  I thought they meant that the icy spell would soon end in a thaw – we had already heard that the sea had frozen for three miles out from Chin-wang-tao. But it was not so. A day or two later the sky turned a dull yellowish-grey at midday, and the wind began to whine viciously through the delicate carvings and along the verandahs of the painted pavilions, pagodas and palaces, as one of Peking’s infamous dust-storms swept through the city.

  Rajputana had accustomed me to dust-storms. But this was not dust as I knew it. This was the sand of the great Gobi Desert, which bit and stung as it filled the air with tiny sharp-edged particles that laid a thin, gritty blanket over every surface in the city, including, of course, the ice. There were no more skaters to be seen on the Pei-hai or the canals, and although there must have been periods when the grit sank a little way into the ice so that the surface was temporarily smooth again, they never lasted long, for the wind seemed always to blow in from the Gobi, and the dust-storms were many.

  Not that it worried the foreign population much, for the members of the Peking Club had learned long ago how to deal with this, and no sooner had ‘Come Winter’ set in than the entire space taken up during the greater part of the year by tennis courts was flooded, and protected from the winds by a vast canvas enclosure so closely fitted that only the occasional draught managed to creep in. The result was an admirable rink. But oh, was it cold! It might have been a giant freezer, and about twenty minutes was the longest I ever lasted on it. By the end of that my feet were like solid blocks of ice, and the bitter temperature outside felt almost warm by contrast – though that must have been imagination, for there were days when even the canvas was not proof against the worst of the dust-storms, and the rink would be unusable for a day or two while
the surface melted just enough to let the dust sink before it froze again.

  Later during that same winter, while driving along the canal road to Pa-Ta-Ch’u to watch a point-to-point, we passed a part of the canal where gangs of coolies were cutting out the ice in large chunks, which they wrapped in coarse sacking before carrying it up to the road and stacking it into a number of carts that were waiting for them. We stopped for a moment or two to watch, and I asked our driver, a friend of Tacklow’s who was something to do with the British Embassy, what they were doing that for. He replied casually that the ice they were collecting would be stored in deep pits to be used for cooling all forms of cold food and drinks in the summer. And when I exclaimed in horror that all the drains of the city ran into the canal, he laughed and admitted that was so, adding cheerfully that what made it worse was the fact that the high ground overlooking the place where they were cutting the ice happened to be the Criminals’ Graveyard, which drained into that part of the canal. Ugh! I may say that I never touched any iced fruit or drink during the rest of the time that I was in North China.

  The point-to-points across the open country and the racecourse at Pa-Ta-Ch’u were a popular form of amusement throughout the winter, and despite the fact that anything to do with horses bores me rigid, I would always accept an invitation to attend them, merely because ‘tout Peking’ turned out for them: the foreign contingent to participate or watch, and the indigenous to bet. Lacking the courage to admit to my unfashionable dislike, I would roll myself up like a sausage in winter woollies and spend hours out in the freezing (and totally uninteresting) countryside – clutching a muff. My nose and toes blue with cold, my teeth gritted together to prevent them from chattering, I pretended an interest in watching relays of tough little ponies from Outer Mongolia scuttling over the banks and ditches and artificial jumps with what seemed to me hulking, oversized riders on their backs. Looking back on those hours of self-inflicted purgatory, I can’t think how I can have been so wimpish. But since the winter point-to-points were as much a part of expatriate life in Peking as the dust-storms, they deserve a mention. Especially as I wrote them down, most unjustly, as another black mark against life in China.

  The plus marks were the art classes and some of the more exotic parties. There was the one given by a rich and flamboyant character who had fallen in love with Peking on a visit to China, and had bought himself a beautiful Chinese house. I remember the rooms in some detail because I thought they were simply wonderful. The walls of one of them had been papered with the large, square sheets of gold or silver paper that one could buy in Peking. The paper used here was dull gold and the thin lines formed by gold edge-to-edge squares made a lovely pattern on the walls and a wonderful background to the carvings and other Chinese objets d’art that stood against them.

  Another room had a pair of oval-topped niches in the wall, one each side of the door as far as I can remember. And in each niche stood a carved and gold-lacquered wooden vase bearing something that looked very like the stylized flower and leaves of a full-blown artichoke, such as one often sees in Chinese temples decorating the altar tables where the incense bowls and offerings stand before Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, and her celestial attendants. The vases stood on circular stands that turned out to be a pair of ordinary wooden kitchen sieves covered on the upper or mesh side with oiled paper, and each hiding an electric light bulb which, when switched on, lit the vases from below and gave them the enchanting effect of being made of Lalique glass.

  I hadn’t seen anything prettier in years, and from then on I hunted through the junk shops of Peking, hoping against hope to find another pair. But though I saw plenty of them in the temples, I came across none that were for sale; until at long last, grubbing around in a shop full of assorted rubbish in one of the villages near a temple in the Western Hills, Mother came across a rather battered specimen, and bought it for me. I still have it, though I can’t think how it managed to survive. Sadly, in its travels, it has lost at least two of its branches of leaves, and though I meant, for years, to give it a sieve to stand on, so that I could light it from below and see if it would look like Lalique glass for me, I never did.

  I can only remember attending one party in that fabulous house, and since my memory for names has always been hopelessly bad, I am only guessing when I say that I think our host was Harold Acton. But the high spot of the evening’s entertainment was definitely memorable. The guests, about twenty in all, were seated in a ring against the drawing-room walls, some on chairs and sofas and the remainder on the floor, and all the lights were turned out except for a dim one that enabled the host to turn on a gramophone record of ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’. As soon as the music started a single spotlight was switched on, to disclose, in the empty centre of the room, a young man curled up pretending to be sound asleep and (apart from a few blotches of brown paint here and there) apparently starkers.

  We had barely taken in the fact that he appeared to have no clothes on when at the bidding of the music he began to wake up and we saw that the lower third of him, that is from his buttocks downwards, was covered by a furry and extremely skimpy pair of tights, and that we were in for an imitation of Nijinsky dancing the young satyr in ‘L’Après-midi’… I don’t know what anyone who had seen Nijinsky dance the faun would have felt about that earnest young man writhing about in the almost-nude to the strains of Stravinsky played on a gramophone. But the whole performance struck me as hysterically funny, and I nearly burst a lung trying not to laugh.

  * * *

  As someone coming from India, where holy places and different religious beliefs yearly give rise to riots, bloodshed and general uproar in one part or another of that priest-ridden country, the Chinese attitude towards the gods struck me as astonishing – and admirable. Temples abounded; it would have been hard to throw a brick in any direction without hitting one. And they all seemed to be well attended by devout believers. There were as many gods and as many festivals here as there were in India – and as many priests: but those one came across seemed a remarkably gentle and tolerant lot, and I was fascinated by the fact that any foreigner who had the means to do so could rent one of the temples as a week-end cottage. Or a full-time one if he wished. The larger and more important temples in the Hsi Shan – the Western Hills that fringe the amphitheatre of mountains which encircle Peking to the north and west – are really monasteries, and temples such as T’an-chê-ssu and Chieh-t’ai-ssu (whose kindly and much respected Abbot was well known to the foreign contingent in Peking) kept rooms that were at the disposal of any visitors wishing to stay overnight, but could not be reserved for a season as the smaller and less important ones were.

  The first time I ever spent a night in one of the latter was when we were invited to spend the weekend with Colonel and Mrs Hull and their two daughters. The Hulls had rented a small temple out on the plain, and nearer to the city than to the hills. And since the temple was only a small one and accommodation was strictly limited, Bets and I were asked if we would mind sharing the girls’ bedroom. This, I was fascinated to discover, turned out to be the ‘Goddery’ itself. And here once again the goddess was dear Kwan-yin, the Mother-figure that all religions seem to have revered since the beginning of Time, the Goddess of Mercy, of whom it is said that ‘there is no sweeter story told’ than that having reached the gates of Paradise, she turned back – because she heard a baby crying.

  Carved from wood and lacquered in gold, she sat enthroned, flanked by her attendants and backed by a panelled and lacquered screen that ran the length of the room, as did the altar in front of her, a long narrow table bearing the incense bowls and vases of temple flowers, also carved from wood and lacquered in gold.

  The windows were criss-crossed with thin red lacquer in geometrical designs, as in all Chinese buildings, and in place of glass there was the usual oiled paper. Our four beds were set up in a row facing the row of Heavenly Ones, and there was a moon that night: a full moon that shone from a frosty, cloudless a
nd, in those days, unpolluted sky so brightly that, as on the lakes of Kashmir, one could have read a newspaper by its light.

  I’m not sure what woke me, the moonlight or a sound. Or both. I woke up suddenly, and there, moving noiselessly in front of the gods, was a white-robed figure. Talk about your heart jumping into your throat –! Mine almost jumped out of my mouth, and for a crazy moment I was sure that this time I really was seeing a ghost instead of just hearing one.1 The ghost, perhaps, of some devout Chinese who had taken exception to the Goddery being used as a spare bedroom by foreign devils. Well, it wasn’t of course. It was one of the Hull girls who had woken with a bad toothache and, slipping out of bed in her nightie, had tiptoed out in search of her mother who would know what to do about it. She had put about ten years on my life in the process.

  * * *

  Some time during the early weeks of the winter I had acquired what my grandparents would have termed a ‘beau’ and the twentieth century had taken to calling a ‘boyfriend’. John was a language student attached to the British Legation, and in his company and that of his fellow students, among whom we made many friends, Bets and I attended a seemingly endless round of Peking parties, went shopping, explored the Forbidden City and were taken on numerous expeditions to the Summer Palace, the Jade Fountain Pagoda and the Black Dragon Pool. We spent hours wandering around the Temple and the Altar of Heaven, and the little, blue-tiled temple that was then known as the Temple of Rain, but in the modern tourist guidebooks is called the Temple of Agriculture, which may sound more brisk and forward-looking, but is not nearly so romantic.