The Ginger Tree (13 page)

As we walked forward bare boards creaked under our feet. They are said to be laid like this to give warning of approaching assassins, and certainly the sound was loud enough, the only sound, until suddenly there was a louder noise from an orchestra of flutes, fiddles and wooden clappers half hidden back in one of the aisles. About six feet from the platform four Hong Kong wicker chairs had been set in a half circle, each with its own table on which were cakes and sweetmeats. The chairs reminded me of the palm court at Peebles Hydro where we holidayed three years ago, tables laid there for tea, too, and the same chairs waiting, with music from behind a screen of greenery. And there was that
Prussian aristocratic lady staying at the same time, the Baroness Von something or other, who behaved with such queenly arrogance, special seats reserved for her and her entourage, and everyone kowtowing as she moved down to her throne. This, rather oddly, was what I was thinking of as I approached an Empress, and I did not, as expected, find myself shivering with nerves.

Just before we reached those chairs Edith Harding must have picked up a signal from Prince Tai which I didn’t see, for she went down into a very low curtsey, followed immediately by the other two, my performance coming rather late. Up on the platform no one moved, as though those glittering figures were taking part in a tableau picture, everyone waiting for the curtain to drop so they could breathe again, only here there was no curtain. Against that rigid stillness a movement from the Empress was startling, one hand lifted from her lap.

It was not an ordinary hand, but a glittering of gold talons. I had heard about those nail shields but a first sight of them was startling. They were about a foot and a half long, perhaps more on the main fingers, and even if the gold was beaten quite thin those protectors of nails that are never cut must have weighed a great deal. Because of them the Imperial Lady can do nothing for herself, she must be fed, dressed, everything, by court ladies in constant attendance, even put to bed with those nail guards still on. For a minute or two I just stood there thinking what this meant, and staring at those hands which were back in her lap, like ribbed fans folded. Every morsel of food that went into her mouth had to be put there by others; the Empress who, next to King Edward, rules over more people on earth than anyone else, is almost as helpless as a cripple without arms. It is perhaps no wonder that she behaves sometimes like a mad woman.

The orchestra which had burst out so suddenly went silent again and Prince Tai bade us be seated. Four European ladies sat down in chairs that creaked almost as loudly as the boards had done. We had not been instructed that we were not to look directly at Tsz’e Hsi, so I did this, getting an impression of a very small body under stiff robes covered with dark embroidery. Her face was very white, almost certainly with paint, and there was something quite eerie about that pallor, even her lips
almost grey. What seemed to be rather thin black hair was drawn tight to a bun on the neck, exposing ears that were noticeably large against such a small head, and in which she wore what I think were opals. I have never seen Chinese ladies wearing diamonds, perhaps because these are not available in the country.

It was soon plain that one of the things the Imperial Court simply did not know how to do was be informal. In their lives there is a rule for everything, but this party was completely outside any of those regulations drummed into them and it was my guess that they stood rigid because they were terrified of doing anything at all. Also, a slight mistake in etiquette or procedure, which with our Royal Family would be ignored or dismissed with only a mild rebuke, in China could mean banishment from Court and total disgrace to all the lady-in-waiting’s family. With Tsz’e Hsi’s reputation, a cup of poisoned tea might come into it.

I had expected the proceedings, whatever they were to be, to be opened by some kind of a speech from Prince Tai, so you can imagine my surprise when, into silence, came a series of squeaks that might have been made by a large mouse. The Empress was talking from the dragon throne, but though I could see those grey lips moving, the sound almost seemed to come from the side aisles somewhere. It was a long message to which we all listened not comprehending one word and then, as abruptly as they had started, the squeaks stopped. Prince Tai, all this time standing to one side looking a little like a funeral director, now moved forward and began a translation. He told us that the Empress welcomed us with her whole heart, and that she was filled with only goodwill towards our countries and the people who came from them to live in the Celestial Capital. It was the Imperial wish that we and her subjects would live in total harmony and deep affection forever, with the mistaken past totally forgotten. Her Imperial Majesty had issued edicts that this was to be the feeling of all her people in all parts of the Chinese Empire.

There was a lot more in this manner and then the Prince announced that tea would be served, after which would come informal conversation. The tea turned out to be us sipping from too big, handleless cups, while the court watched. With those nail guards the Empress could never take
any kind of refreshment in public, so presumably none of her attendants were allowed to either. I felt terribly sorry for those ladies who were still playing living statues in that carefully arranged grouping around an old lady in a chair. Prince Tai didn’t get any tea either, or a seat.

Informal conversation did not get off to a very good start, one reason for this being that the German wife speaks very little English and the Italian wife none at all, and when Prince Tai tried them with French, they both bowed from the sitting position as though they understood all right, but neither uttered one word. Edith Harding, usually so much in control of things, wasn’t very fluent either and could not seem to get beyond some not particularly interesting talk about the weather. This left me with my mind as blank as Edith’s seemed to be but suddenly my good fairy, if I have one, came to my rescue with a topic that ought to interest someone who had spent so much money on it, the Summer Palace. Since I had been so impressed I must have sounded quite convincing, and as Prince Tai’s translation travelled up to the dragon throne I was very conscious of Tsz’e Hsi’s eyes on me, though her head never moved.

When I had finished about the beauties of her residence, and the Prince had completed his translation, the mouse voice sounded out again, but this time the words had a crackle in them, of command. I was to come up on the platform and approach Her Imperial Majesty, which I did, suddenly very uneasy, by a flight of three steps at the side, the Prince my escort. Without being told to, I went into that low curtsey which really needs a special training I haven’t had, but for some reason I did not want to bow, especially the kind of bow that would have been called for here, amounting to almost total abasement. When I had straightened up again I stayed where I was, about five feet or so from the throne, and in a position which forced the Empress to turn her head to look at me, which she did. What I looked at were her hands. One of the finger guards moved, as though the owner of that fan had been about to open it, then decided not to.

Prince Tai said Her Majesty had a present for me, and a servant brought it, a box about six inches long covered in padded black silk. The Prince told me to open the box, presumably because Tsz’e Hsi wanted to
see my reaction to her gift, so I lifted the lid. On more padded silk, this time white, was a pair of earrings, jade and gold. The jade is obviously of the finest quality, long pendant pears of it, in shape very like those awful dangles Aunt Elsie always wears to go with her boned high-necked collars, and which on me would look even worse. I tried my best to look pleased and said that the earrings would be treasures in my family forever, and, while I got all that out, the Empress stared at me.

I think it must be enamel on her face that stretches away wrinkles and leaves no expression, and in that mask her eyes seemed terribly alive, not old eyes at all, but full of a kind of dreadful energy and purpose. This may sound ridiculous, but I felt that she was looking at me greedily because I am young, thinking what she could still do if she had my youth, and angry because there was no way even an Empress could steal from me, for her own use, the years I have ahead. I think I understand now why she keeps the Emperor a prisoner and a puppet. He is young, too. She cannot bear to think of a world in which she is dead and gone.

Richard has just come, I can hear him talking to the houseboy in the front court. This letter has been far too long as it is, so I will just close it quickly as:

Your ever loving daughter,

Mary

157 Hutung Feng-huang, Peking
July 12th, 1903

After I had written to Mama about my visit to the Imperial Court, and posted it, I knew that I had said things in the letter that I should not have done. Today this was confirmed by Mama’s reply, reaching us by the swift Trans-Siberian service in which she says she is both angered and
distressed
by what seems to have happened to me. I appear to her to have suddenly grown hard and worldly, given to making would-be clever remarks about people which do nothing but show up the deficiencies in my own character. At my age I should be showing respect to those who are older, and therefore wiser, than me.

I am a fool to have written to Mama as though she was a friend, not Mama. It is as if I had forgotten, in half a year, what she is really like and how she has always lived. Fortunately, as usual the post came after Richard had gone to the Legation. He reads all letters that come to me, as a husband’s right. But he will not read this one. I set a match to it and watched it burn in the empty drawing-room stove. In future I will always be the dutiful daughter and write to Mama about the weather and what a lovely evening we had at the Italian Legation. Perhaps it is as well that I have been checked in this way, because if I had not Mama might soon have been reading between the lines that I do not find being married to Richard what I hoped for in coming to China. I was a fool there, too. Why do we have to make such terrible decisions for our whole lives when we are too young to know what we are doing? The big mistakes are hung around your neck and you have to wear them forever.

157 Hutung Feng-huang, Peking
July 17th, 1903

I changed my mind and went after all to see Dr Zimmerman the American who is doing duty while Dr Hotchkiss is on holiday in Japan. He was quite kind, and confirmed what I suspected. I am with child. I shall tell Richard tonight. Perhaps this will end what I do not want. I could not ask the doctor whether this is necessary. Marie, who has no children, can be of no help to me now. Edith would be of too much help. Oh, this house with its high walls holding in the summer heat!

The Temple of Ultimate Peace, Western Hills, China
August 9th, 1904

In spite of its high-flown name this building has rats, huge ones from the noise they make in the ceiling. Beneath the rats we live in near luxury, as one always expects with Marie and Armand, four servants from their Peking house plus Jane’s amah from ours. The camping furniture, or at least what Armand
calls
camping furniture, is extremely comfortable, all manner of canvas chairs and some smaller wicker ones, folding tables, mattresses inflated by bicycle pumps, even rugs over the worm-eaten floors. Food supplies reach us by pack mule from Peking every second or third day and we drink what Armand says is the only thing for really hot weather, champagne. He has devised a cooling arrangement in a little stream that comes down through the rocks behind us.

I am beginning now to feel the charm of the Western Hills, though not at all attracted by them at first, wondering what all the fuss was about beyond the fact that they offer an escape from that cooped-up feeling we all get in Peking. I am used enough to bare hills in Scotland, but those are green and these, on approach, a burned-up browny yellow, seeming completely part of a landscape dedicated to dust storms from the Gobi Desert. It is only when you get in amongst them that you discover almost secret-seeming glens in which the natural growth has escaped the terrible woodcutters of China. Great clumps of bamboo flourish up to a height of twenty feet, with tree-sized rhododendrons and magnolias which must be wonderful in bloom. The temple garden here was once cultivated, though long since left to ruin, and Armand has found in it what he says
may be a ginkgo tree. He is something of a botanist and has pressed the leaves to have them identified. Apparently the ginkgo is something from another geological age, long since extinct everywhere except in China, a kind of link between conifers and ferns. Armand says fossils of its leaves have been found on the Island of Mull in Scotland. He is a man of strange areas of knowledge suddenly revealed but none of these revelations ever really noticed by Marie. Perhaps he is so kind to me because I
do
notice, but then again in fairness to Marie she clearly sees things in Richard which I do not, for he is certainly much more light-hearted in her company than he ever seems to be with me. This might be because their backgrounds are similar, both from
old
families, if in different countries, whereas the Mackenzies of South Edinburgh could not even name a great-grandfather or, indeed, have ever heard much about grandfathers. This is something that Richard will never understand about me, that I live without ancestors, whereas his life at Mannington was surrounded by innumerable generations of them, all in dark paintings watching as he went up the stairs to bed as a boy. It is probably a particularly terrible thing to live in the Far East without ancestors, where they are so highly prized, but in honesty I cannot feel that I miss them.

In a way this is a rather sad holiday, the first and probably the last I will ever have with the de Chamonpierres who leave for Washington at the end of September. Since that is an Embassy, not just a Legation, this is real promotion for Armand, and Marie already sees herself as a hostess in America, astonishing the capital with her splendid entertainments and gourmet food, at which I can see Armand wincing a little for, though they must be very well off indeed, he is a man who worries about expenditure, I think. Anyone married to Marie would!

However, Armand spends money in his own way, and has just
announced
that his first purchase in America is to be a motorcar, at which Marie declares she has never ridden in one of the horrible, smelly things and has no intention of ever doing so, which means that she will have to have her carriage and pair as well. Though Marie and I each have our reservations about the other, I am very fond of these two and for me Peking will be desolate without them. Marie says that in due course
Richard will probably be transferred to Washington also, and then we will be together again. She says that she
wishes
this to be and that when, in her life, she has seriously wished hard for something it has always happened.

This must be a nice gift to possess. I don’t have it, and am without much hope that a British Military Attaché will be sent to America to watch what their Army is doing, this simply because it has done very little since the Spanish American War when they acquired the Philippines as their first colony. It seems to me that as a people they are most unlikely these days to become involved in wars abroad, having plenty in their own huge country to keep them occupied. Still, one never knows, and after all Marie was right about the Japanese and Russians going to war, for we are now right in the middle of one of the bloodiest struggles in human history between them.

Richard’s last letter was from a Russian headquarters at a place called Anping. Though he seems to believe that the Russians will win in the end, I think he would prefer to be watching the fighting from the Japanese side, for most of the war has been attacks by them with the Russians just defending positions. He seems to think very little of the Czar’s Viceroy in the Far East, Admiral Alexeiev, though he does have a better opinion of Kuropatkin whom he thinks is just playing for time bringing in more Russian reinforcements via the Trans-Siberian railway. The sheer might of Russia is bound to triumph in the end for, as Armand told me the other day, the Czar has a standing peacetime army of well over a million men without calling up the reserves, while it is said that the Japanese are already desperate for manpower. I don’t see how gallantry alone can give them victory.

Marie found out through the Japanese Legation that Count Kurihama has been wounded yet again in the Battle of the Yalu. I’m sorry to hear this, remembering how he said, with a serious face, that Japan was mounted on a dragon subject to uneasy dreams. Apparently the Count has now been made a full Colonel and received a high decoration from his Emperor, which I’m sure he deserved. Marie is certain he will become a general very soon.

It is strange being in China during this war which is being fought over who is to have control of Manchuria, and the Chinese, with battles raging on their territory, have no say in the matter at all. It is humiliating for them to have to stay passive while their own land is being ravaged, the more so because of their defeat of not so many years ago at the hands of Japan. The Empress Dowager and her advisers remain completely silent about the whole matter, as though it were not happening not so very far north of us. She has again moved her whole court, which is like moving a city, out to the Summer Palace which we can see from some of the higher bridle paths amongst our temples. The only thing that really affects us here is the slowness of mails from home now the Trans-Siberian railway has been requisitioned for military use only. Everything for us has to come by sea via Suez, and there seem to be delays here, too, for Mama’s last letter was dated nearly two months earlier. All this makes home seem very far away and I’m not sure I really think of it as home any more. After not quite a year and a half in China I feel sometimes that it is at least ten years since I left Scotland. From Mama’s letters nothing has changed there. The changes are all in me.

The Temple of Ultimate Peace, Western Hills, China
August 10th, 1904

I seem to have caught the writing disease again, which may be because I wake up early and Marie is such a late riser. Armand gets up early, too, but immediately goes off on a long walk on which I have wanted to accompany him sometimes, but never suggested this, pretty sure that Marie wouldn’t like the idea. Also, I have always made a point of supervising Meng’s preparation of Jane’s first morning feed, though I know I don’t really need to do this since Amah is so devoted to the infant. Actually Jane is putting on weight fast at last, the cooler air up here undoubtedly suits her, and she no longer looks what I have always thought her, a ‘peakit’ baby, as we say in Scotland. I tell Meng not to be continually screening the child from the sun, a little of which won’t harm her, but Meng goes on keeping her in the shade. Perhaps I am wrong to trust Meng as much as I
do, but Marie says it always happens with amahs in China and does the baby no harm, not that Marie knows much about raising children. I don’t think she minds one bit about not being a mother, though I have no idea how Armand feels about having no heir for the de Chamonpierre name. This is probably something that worries a man of family. I know how disappointed Richard was that Jane was a girl, and it is almost as though the infant does not recognise him as her father, she never laughs when he comes towards her as she sometimes does with me, though more often with Meng. On the rare occasions when he picks her up she quite often screams, and I’m sure he has noticed this. I had always thought that girl babies had a special feeling for their fathers even from a very early age. I can certainly remember this from my own childhood even though Papa died when I was quite young. With him I felt safe from many things, including punishments, for he never lifted a hand to me, leaving this to Mama.

I still have guilt feelings about not being able to breastfeed Jane. I think it angered Richard that a daughter of the Collingsworths had to be suckled by a
Chinese
wet-nurse, as though this might be the source of some strange contagion. I know that Edith did not approve at all, she wanted me to use some special artificial infant feeds that can be obtained these days from Tientsin, but the wet-nurse was a cheerful, kind woman and I’m sure that Jane took no harm from her milk. It was when we started on the artificial feeds too soon, this by Richard’s orders, that she failed to put on weight.

The Temple of Ultimate Peace, Western Hills, China
August 18th, 1904

There is absolutely nothing to do here, and though one or two of the temples nearby are occupied by others from the Legations we have no contact with our neighbours, perhaps because we are rather isolated, for there are rumours of partying elsewhere. It is a terrible thing to say, but the news of the war, with thouands dying, reaches us as something unreal, in which it is hard to believe. Armand comes back from his
botanical excursions as though from some secret excitement and will talk, if made to by me, about China as an astonishing reservoir of sometimes unique plants, which is somehow hard to believe when one looks at hills which appear to be covered with nothing but sunscorched grass.

The other day there was a slight sandstorm from the Gobi Desert, but only touching us lightly here and apparently not nearly so bad in Peking as the ones we had last summer. However, though lucky in our escape, these temples cannot be closed up in any effective way and, though we lowered shutters and so on, we were still eating grit with our salads and everything had a layer of something much more solid than dust. I covered Jane’s cot and mosquito net with wet cloths that would hold the sand and keep it from getting through to the bedding, and the whole time we were under assault from the sand cloud, about two hours, Meng insisted on carrying Jane about with her and never staying still, as though movement was somehow a kind of protection against the attack of these devils from the desert.

I am reading a great deal, more steadily than I ever have, and as though she knew I would be driven to this here Marie brought along almost all her library of what Armand calls her dream literature about Japan, though fortunately not more Pierre Loti which I would have had to struggle through in French. Greater than Loti, Marie says, is Lafcadio Hearn, who writes in English about the land he adopted, and he certainly does make it seem almost Marie’s paradise, though there were things in one of the books,
Kokoro
, which disturbed me and continue to. One evening after dinner we discussed these matters in a general way, though Armand has only read one half of one of Mr Hearn’s books, stopping because he prefers plants to fairy stories. What we discussed was reincarnation.

It may be the result of my Scots education, but I had never heard of this before, the theory that we all have many lives and are returned to a new life in a condition that somehow reflects what we were and what we have done in a previous existence. It is a strictly un-Christian doctrine, of course, or I thought it must be until Armand said that once it was not,
part of Christian teaching by some sects, and then rejected as improper doctrine at a church council.

I must admit the idea attracts me a little, that the mistakes we make in one life, or perhaps the seeming complete waste of it, are not all, but that we can profit by these errors when we come back again and, by some instinct carried over from another living, not make the same mistakes again.

Marie also quite likes the idea but Armand says it in no way accounts for natural increase, and that with the world population becoming larger all the time there must be a factory busy manufacturing new souls to send out as well as despatching the old ones for a new turn, at which Marie said nonsense, the new souls might not be new at all, but old ones coming to earth for the first time from another planet. At this point Armand said that if we would excuse him he would go to bed, which he did after warning us to put out all the lamps, and Marie and I went on talking about reincarnation until I suddenly had the thought of Mama coming from another life into her present one, and I wondered what she was being rewarded for, or perhaps punished by being given me. Marie prodded at my thoughts until she got this one out and after I had told her a little of what Mama is like we both began to giggle, and then went on to play a game in which we tried to think of what various people in the Legation Quarter had been last time, and what they were likely to be next. We were soon laughing so loudly that Armand came back again in his dressing-gown and Jane woke and started to howl.

Marie says that what we were last time and what we will be next is the most brilliant drawing-room game ever invented and she is determined to play it next time they give a formal dinner to the German Minister, who is a Prussian with a steel spine. She also wants to try it on the Russians, saying that the game ought to be as effective as that
ice-breaking
ship they used on Lake Baikal in Siberia to get the trains over in winter.