Having contacted Bert, found out that he and Cec had been shearers in their time and arranged for a reserve in case of emergencies, Phryne decided not to annoy Dot while she was packing and to sit quietly in the garden with Li Pen and discuss philosophy. The Shaolin proved amenable.
‘The Chinese have a different relationship with their gods than any of the one-god religions,’ he remarked. ‘Chinese gods do not require adoration. They would not know what to do with it. They do not forgive sins.’
‘Then what are they for?’ asked Phryne, lighting a cigarette.
‘They take care of the things which they are required to take care of,’ he replied. ‘For instance, the goddess Nu Kua is responsible for walls. She rebuilt the walls of heaven once when there was a spill from the Great River of Stars. You may ask for her attention in any matter involving walls. But not anything else. Walls are her . . . her . . .’
‘Speciality?’ suggested Phryne.
‘Area of responsibility,’ said Li Pen. ‘An especially brave soldier, like Ch’uan Chung-li, might find himself turned into a god and then his care is soldiers. But there is also a god for soldiers, Kwan Gong. The goddess Songshi Niang Niang looks after childbirth and it is only childbirth that she is allowed to care about.’
‘I see,’ said Phryne. ‘A feudal heaven to match a feudal earth.’
Li Pen bowed his shaven head.
‘The Silver Lady is very acute. Some gods are common to all who have not been enlightened by the Divine One. The Emperor of Heaven is always the August Personage of Jade. Tou Mou is always the Mother of Stars. Wen Chang cares for scholars. But there are local gods as well.’
‘Lares et penates,’ said Phryne. ‘Spirits of springs and woods.’
‘Yes,’ said Li Pen. ‘These can also be brave or wise people who have become gods. And there are also the ancestors, who take a keen interest in the doings of their grandchildren. All of them are beseeched, but not in the way followers of the one-god religions do. Chinese gods do not require adoration. They require the matter to be brought to their divine attention, and then they will act, or not, and one cannot make them.’
‘Harsh,’ said Phryne.
‘Do you think so? Is it better to think that your prayers have not been answered because you are a bad person, or because the goddess happens to be busy that day? I remember when there was a great drought in Guandong province, when I was a child. We did not beat our breasts thinking that we had been sinful, though we probably had been, it being the nature of men. We brought out the statue of the Land God, that we called Grandpa, and drenched him with water and had water fights and laughed, so that he might think that we had plenty of water and send more.’
‘Shows a nasty vindictive streak in the gods, though,’ commented Phryne.
‘But it rained,’ said Li Pen, smiling.
‘Can’t argue with that.’
‘And there are also gods for people who are outcasts,’ he said quietly. ‘There are the Taoist Eight Immortals: they protect soldiers, the sick, whores, old people, entertainers, barbers, musicians and actors. Shall I tell you a story?’
‘Tell me,’ said Phryne.
‘Once Li T’ieh Kuai the immortal was a fair young man, tall as a tree. He came down from heaven and left his body in a field while he danced with the butterflies. When the butterflies flew away, he came back and found that farmers had discovered his body, thought he was dead, and burned it. What was he to do? He had to find another body in order to re-enter heaven. He flew about weeping, but everyone who had a body wanted to keep it. Finally he found a dead beggar in a field, an old man with a crippled leg. He took that body and regained heaven, but forever after he was Li of the Iron Crutch, and he cares for the sick.’
‘Nice,’ said Phryne.
‘It serves. The Gracious Lady Kwan Yin, who is an aspect of the Lord Buddha, is also in those shrines. The Chinese will reject gods who do not give good service and collect new ones as they require them, and I suppose that they always needed a goddess of mercy.’
‘Trust me, Li Pen, everyone needs a goddess of mercy. I’d better be going. You will take care of them while I am gone?’
‘I will. And you, Silver Lady, you will take care of my master?’
‘To the best of my ability.’
They did not shake hands, as monks are not supposed to touch women. Li Pen paused, seeing her hand fall to her side.
‘Another, very short story, Silver Lady?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Two monks at the side of a river see a woman with a child, too frail to brave the water. The first monk says, “We are required to help the poor but we are also not allowed to touch women. What shall we do?” The second monk picks the woman up, carries her and the child across the river and the two monks continue on their way. After a few li the first monk says, “But we are not supposed to touch women!” And the second monk says, “Are you still carrying that woman?” ’
‘Shake hands,’ said Phryne, and took his firm, slim hand in farewell. Li Pen smiled at her, which he did very seldom, and went back to watching bees in the wisteria. Phryne went back to her room.
Her clothes were packed, her car loaded, and she swung away into the street with her household crying farewell and a song on her lips—which at least was not ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. That was something to be thankful for. She was thinking about sex and gods and she was singing:
‘If you don’t like my peaches, why do you shake my tree?
‘If you don’t like my peaches, why do you shake my tree?
‘Get out of my orchard and let my peach tree be!’
Phryne, against all appearances, had the St Louis Blues. It was far too long since she had been free to act as she liked, what with daughters and households and sisters. This Castlemaine trip might be just the thing for some of her wilder impulses.
She drove gently out of the city onto the Bendigo road, still singing. The Hispano-Suiza was behaving perfectly, the day was sunny but not blinding, and most of the morning traffic had got where it was going. She might even take the big car up to a very high speed—say, sixty miles an hour—if she found a straight stretch of road without lurking country cops, who always had speeding fines in mind when they saw a big red car.
Lin Chung, reluctantly but accurately attired in his cassock and collar, entered the Lin family Bentley and tried not to catch anyone’s eye. His enthusiastic uncle had gone over the main points of his story—a Canton mission, not too big, driven out by passing warlords, come to Australia to minister to the remnant communities in various towns. It made a nice story and provided he was not examined too closely on matters of doctrine, he might pass. He was not at all sure that this was a good idea, but Uncle would be hurt if he abandoned it too quickly. No one seemed to have noticed and he sat back behind the curtain, watching the city fleet past. He had a load of presents for Uncle Lin Tao of the market garden, and of them he had made several smaller bundles, full of treats for any indigent Chinese person he might meet. Thus he would at least acquire merit, and might even get some answers to his questions.
Lin Chung’s recent and dangerous sojourn in China had been educational in many ways. He had heard about the starving children of the past, but never had he seen any until the potbellied infants of Canton came, hands outstretched, to the big car and thence every night in his dreams. He had expended all that he dared in charity but knew that those children had very little chance of surviving. He had heard about famine but the smell and taste of famine was another thing altogether. And during his short captivity by pirates he had learned useful, though painful, lessons about power, about dominance, and about cruelty. He had plans for the Chinese people of Castlemaine, if they were indeed poor and uncared-for. That silk trip had netted the Lin family several fortunes in silk and antiquities. One of the three Shang incense burners which he had bought for ten copper cash, a load of rice and three sheep from some starving farmers had sold in London for three thousand guineas. Though the money did not belong to Lin himself but to his family, he felt that since it was he, Lin Chung, who had risked his life for it, he had a reasonable say in its expenditure. The Lin family would be able to send all of its children to the nth generation to Melbourne Grammar and Presbyterian Ladies College just on the interest.
The thought made him smile. He opened his
Book of
Common Prayer
and began to read.
‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’
Phryne was at Diggers Rest before she risked letting the car go. The engine roared. Massive pistons slid. The road rolled away, the trees flashed past, and she did not slow down until she was coming into Gisborne, where there was bound to be an interested member of the constabulary with a notebook and a strong sense of his duty to the local shire’s revenues. She rolled to a stop next to the Gisborne pub and decided that, since she had travelled so far, so fast, lunch and a glass of pub squash would hit the spot. After turning down several pressing offers from young men eager to further their acquaintance—with her car— she sat down in the Ladies’ Lounge and was served the usual country meal, viz, steak, eggs, and vegetables out of which all nourishment, impudence and even colour had been boiled. The decor was Travelling Salesman, the prevailing colour a nice shade of mud, and the skipping girl was the only person in the pub who seemed at all pleased to see Phryne, and she was a poster advertising vinegar.
A little depressed but adequately nourished, she was soon back on the road to Kyneton, which she hoped (with police presence) to reach in two hours or (without police presence) one hour, when she could have sworn that the black Bentley which followed her at a decorous pace was the Lin family car. But it was carrying a clergyman. As far as she knew, there were no ecclesiastical Lins.
She shook her head, jammed her cloche down firmly over her forehead, and leaned on the accelerator. The great car leapt under her hands. It was almost as good as flying.
Apart from a brief shower of rain while passing through the forest, which necessitated stopping and wrestling with the hood, always a task which ruined the fingernails and pinched the knuckles, the journey was uneventful and most of her blues were blown away as she went at a proper twenty miles an hour through the agreeable hamlet of Chewton and into the town of Castlemaine.
‘Nice place,’ said Phryne to herself. Unlike some of the places she had passed through, Castlemaine had an almost cocky sense of self assurance. The straight, well-planned streets and the solid stone buildings, town hall, State Bank, market and post office, told the visitor that this hadn’t just once been the richest goldfield in Australia but presently had the best beer as well, and did anyone want to make anything of it? This was a well-found, well-served gem of a little place that knew exactly what it was, which was the best place in the world, and have you tried our clotted cream and our superlative jam on our very excellent scones at Penney’s tea-rooms?
Phryne liked it immediately. She parked the Hispano-Suiza near the market next to a dilapidated grocer’s van and strolled into Mostyn Street. A passing gentleman, politely removing his hat, directed her to walk along Hargraves Street to Lyttleton, where she would find the Imperial Hotel opposite the town hall. It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a cloudless day and the air was fresh and scented with baking. Divine. Phryne fell into her Parisian saunter and enjoyed the walk.
This was an old place. Everywhere the buildings were stone, and those which had crumbled over the years had been repaired and prinked-up with kalsomine. She saw several young women wheeling perambulators, which was a good sign. Once a town began to decay, the young people moved out and with them went the future. She passed a doctor’s surgery, a chemist’s shop and the Supreme Court Hotel before she turned the corner into Lyttleton Street and the Imperial Hotel burst upon her in all its slightly off-key glory.
Well, well. Someone had decided that a hotel, to be a hotel within the meaning of the act, had to have dormers and a lot of windows; so far so good. They had then added a French mansard roof, made of tin, and more wrought iron than seemed entirely decent. It was charming, commodious, and unlikely.
Phryne loved it. She hoped she was staying there.
She walked into the pub, was gestured at by a barman, and went in the second door, where a blonde girl was sucking a sweet and reading a film magazine in front of a bank of pigeonholes. ‘Hello, I’m Phryne Fisher,’ she said, and the girl almost choked on her lolly.
‘The Hon. Miss Fisher? What your butler rang up yesterday about? Yes, Miss, er, my lady, we have your room, it’s a nice one, with a balcony, and you have a private bath, just like he said. Bill! Come and get the lady’s things!’
‘I parked my car over by the market,’ said Phryne. ‘I shall go and fetch it later. Where can I park it?’
‘In the stables, my lady, Bill Gaskin will show you. Bill!’ Her voice rose to a screech.
Someone grumbled in the background, ‘All right, hold yer horses,’ and Bill Gaskin came into sight. He was a younger man than she had expected from the voice and seemed to have been doing something relating to coal. Or possibly soot. He had barely distinguishable features and those she could see looked sullen.
‘I’ll just go and get the car,’ said Phryne. ‘Then shall I come round to the side?’
‘Yes, Miss, them big green doors,’ he agreed, without enthusiasm.
‘Bert and Cec send their fraternal greetings, comrade,’ whispered Phryne to Bill as she went out. A gnarled hand detained her.
‘How’s the dock strike?’
‘Worse than ever,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what Mr Justice Beeby was thinking of, really I don’t.’
The hand released her and the blackamoor grinned, showing white teeth. Phryne had found a comrade.
‘I’ll wait by the gate,’ he promised, sounding like something out of Tennyson.
Phryne had parked the Hispano-Suiza in the stable yard of the Imperial Hotel and her bags had been carried up by the indefatigable Bill Gaskin. He had stopped for a few moments to gossip about the wharf strike and recommend her to tip his son, the waiter, before a bell had summoned him to the kitchen to clean silver.