The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  I wonder if Richard does not care to see me in the morning because he has no wish to be reminded of the night before when he visited my room? I have no wish to be reminded of it either.

  Letter from Mary Mackenzie to her mother

  House of the Dragon Screen, 157 Hutung Feng-huang

  Peking, China

  April 17th, 1903

  Dearest Mama – I know it is a terrible time since I last wrote and my excuses are poor, but I think of you so often, and wonder what you are doing just at that hour, trying to imagine this, that you are settling by the fire for tea, for instance, or that on an Edinburgh April day you are visiting friends. Suddenly, as I was beginning to feel shut away behind these walls like a Chinese wife, things have started to happen. First, it is the spring. We had snow in the early part of this month, but now there is fruit blossom out in gardens – though not in ours – and we can ride in our rickshas without those smelly fur rugs tucked in around us. All the snow has melted and the city feels clean and washed, though I don’t think it will stay like this for long. I find that I am seeing a hundred things that I never noticed with winter clamped down, like how the ends of many of the curved tile roofs have little animal figures marching in a procession towards a bigger figure on the last tile, which is usually a hen with a devil on its back. These are called bongs. Even going down our lane, which can be quite squalid at ground level, if you look up you see the most beautiful roof patterns and sections of wood carving though I do get a little tired of dragons everywhere. It is as though all the Chinese had experienced the same bad dream.

  One day my friend Madame de Chamonpierre got the loan of the French Minister’s carriage and called for me in the afternoon and we drove through an eastern gate out to the Temple of Heaven where, on ceremonial occasions, the Emperor worships. What he worships, or why, I am not very sure, and Marie didn’t know either. There was no way to find out because we had no guide and the coachman only understands ‘go slower’ or ‘go faster’ in French. However, we got out and walked for quite a long way over paving, through which grew tall weeds, to what Marie thought was the Altar of Heaven, this reached through a gate that had what seemed to be stone wings sprouting from the top portion. After that were steps up three different levels to a circular platform offering a view down to what was the temple itself, this set against a circle of trees coming into bud. In that whole huge area we saw not another human being, only pigeons, which was a little eerie. You would have thought that in a place where the Emperor sometimes comes to worship there would have been priests about, or at least someone to pull up the weeds. Marie would not go down to the actual temple because she was reminded of the Boxer Troubles by what she says is the most frightening thing in China, a sudden deep silence where there should be continuous noise. It was certainly silent at the Temple of Heaven and we were quite glad to get back into the carriage again and hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves.

  I have been to the Russian Legation, though not to meet their Minister who is away in Vladivostok. Our host was the First Secretary, who is a Count, and wore enough medals to have fought in ten wars, though he does not look like a man who has ever fought in any. As Marie had told me to expect, we talked about nothing interesting and the men drank too much vodka, which is their whisky, only apparently quite tasteless. I wondered what was the point of drinking it until Richard took me away quite suddenly because, as Marie said afterwards, our Russian colleagues were becoming too relaxed suddenly.

  Then there was a dinner-party at the de Chamonpierres’, very elegantly done, with twelve guests, at which one of my table partners was another Count, this time a Japanese one. He is military attaché at their Legation here, and during the Boxer Troubles became one of the heroes of the defence, in that he led a party of Japanese marines through the streets of the Chinese city, this seething with Boxers, to the relief of a Catholic mission which he helped to defend when he got there. Of the twenty men he took with him seven were killed, and Captain Count Kurihama was wounded in the leg and has a scar on one temple where a bullet grazed his scalp. He should have been a very interesting man to talk to but I could scarcely get him to say a word. Marie explained afterwards that they are brought up never to have their meals with the women of the household and that it is impossible for them to get used to sitting at table with females. Marie says that quite often, at formal dinners in her house, she has had the feeling that Count Kurihama was about to order her back to the kitchen where she belongs while the men are at the serious business of eating and drinking. Clearly she had placed me next to him to see if a Scotch girl could get any reaction from a Japanese Count, but I failed. The peak of our conversation was reached when I asked if Kurihama was a place name, as with our aristocracy, or a family one, and after thinking for about five minutes he said one word: ‘Family.’ Not the most sparkling of dinner partners. I have a feeling he knows English quite well, but is keeping this a diplomatic secret.

  I must soon be considering giving our first dinner-party at Dragon Screen House, and I can promise you, Mama dear, that the idea quite terrifies me. Have you any Scotch recipes that could make chicken taste different? I am quite sure that the beef we get here is not that at all, not even old oxen, but camel. Our cook serves it in a sloppy stew which has clearly simmered for hours but it is still like chewing parcel string. Peking is supposed to be a paradise for food, and may be in some of the Chinese restaurants, but only very few of the Legation people are going to these again, and Richard has never taken me. Is there any way, do you think, that I could make a Chinese cook produce a good Scotch meal from simple recipes? There is now open again quite a reasonable European grocery store where you can get most things, at a price, so if you have any ideas please send them. Your last letter, via the Trans-Siberian railway, reached me in less than a month, which means there is still time, since I will not be entertaining until Richard comes back from a mission.

  He leaves for Chinwangtao at the end of this month to make a report to the Admiral of the British China Fleet. I do not know what this is about. Richard says it is part of the routine contact between the services, but Marie looks mysterious. I would so like to impress her with that Scotch meal, for she thinks we live on porridge three times a day during the week and steamed mince on Sunday. She says she had a Scotch nanny who told her this was our life in the ‘frozen north’. Marie would amuse you, I think, she is very gay and bright.

  Loads of love, Mama dear,

  Mary

  House of the Dragon Screen

  April 23rd, 1903

  Yesterday I had Edith Harding to tea. I was absolutely ashamed that, after having shown me such hospitality for so long, as well as being matron of honour at our marriage, I had not had her to see the house. I suppose my idea was that I would try to do something to the place before she visited, but beyond pushing furniture about I have done nothing at all. Also, I am quite sure that Marie will have let Edith know that she has been here twice. It is not that there is any competition over me, or any real interest in me, either, between the ladies, it is just that I am a novelty in this place. I suppose until I die I will be that first bride after the Boxer Troubles, remembered for this distinction when my name has been forgotten.

  Edith arrived wearing one of those unfortunate brown dresses of which she is so fond. Somebody really should tell her that when you are wispy in appearance brown does nothing to flatter. Wicked Marie, after seeing Edith – who is very thin – arrive at a dinner-party in a browny-grey evening dress made like a tube said it was like watching a very big earthworm come in from the garden. I must find out what Marie says about me behind my back, and I am sure Edith will be most willing to tell me.

  She seemed slightly surprised that I was looking quite well and the reason for this came out over her second cup of tea when she said that she had found her own honeymoon very upsetting, but that perhaps going straight to one’s own home was the best idea. She and Mr Harding went to a hotel at Torquay in June when it rained for a week. I s
aid that it had snowed for the better part of the first two weeks of my married life, at which she said that adverse climatic conditions meant that you got to know your husband quite well sooner than you would have done if the weather had been favourable for outdoor activities. I thought for one moment she had made rather a doubtful joke, but she was quite serious. Edith does not make jokes of any kind.

  I have wronged her in the sense that I have thought her cold. She has always been rather formal with me, as though only a certain degree of intimacy was permissible with an engaged girl living under her roof. But I can see quite clearly that now I am under my husband’s roof she feels free to make a bid for closer friendship, even perhaps for the sort of intimacy which I do not wish. There were suggestions, very delicately put certainly, that we might discuss areas of married life that I could never discuss with anyone, except perhaps Mrs Brinkhill, who seemed to travel through life with a trunkful of worldly wisdom she was ready to open for those she liked. I didn’t have to rebuff Edith in any way, her curiosity about Richard and me was under several veils and she only lifted a corner of one of them, dropping it at once when she saw my reaction.

  The odd thing is that, though I wouldn’t have believed it possible only a few weeks ago that I should feel this, there are certain things that perhaps I would like to talk about to someone I really trusted. Surely all that is written in prose and poetry of love and romance cannot lead only to the experience that has been mine? And I am beginning to have a curiosity that seems to me unhealthy, a way now of looking at other women and their husbands, wondering if there is some kind of secret happiness between them? If there is, they do not show any signs of it that I can see.

  I must make arrangements to keep my notebooks secure, it would be dreadful if Richard found one. I do not know enough of him yet to be sure whether or not he would be the gentleman and decline to read what was not intended for his eyes, but I have a feeling he might not be so gallant. I will have to get a box with a lock. It is like a schoolgirl silliness. I should stop this vice of putting down what has happened to me, yet I believe it would be like trying to give up opium. When I am thirty, will I want to read about the follies of being twenty? If I have children, would I one day want them to open that box and see the records of what their mother was, perhaps to their shame?

  Edith either senses that we are not too well off or thinks the financial arrangements in our married state have yet to be clearly settled, for she began to suggest very economical ways in which I could set about doing things to our drawing-room and when I told her about Madame’s extravagant ideas for the same project she said that Madame had been a spoiled child turned into a spoiled woman and that sometimes the way she tried to queen it at her own dinners made Edith feel quite ill. When I thought about Marie queening it, what I remembered was a look that Monsieur de Chamonpierre sent down to his wife past all his guests, a look which seemed to say that the other women around the table tired his eyes which could only be refreshed by Marie. The message seemed to me so plain that I turned my head to catch Marie’s response. There was none. She was being charming to the First Secretary of the German Legation, tapping his wrist lightly. She has told me she detests the man. Perhaps it is better to have no inclination to despatch such eye messages than to despatch them for no response.

  Before she left Edith promised to lend me her sewing woman who is quite skilled at upholstery work, an unusual thing in China where the natives all sit on hard wooden chairs. Edith really is being very good, I must try to like her more. I wonder if I could persuade her not to consider brown when buying dress materials? She had come in furs, in spite of the sun shining, not the sables, Mongolian fox that could easily be some kind of long-haired rabbit, probably one of the bargains of which she is so proud. I am pretty sure that if you are the kind of person who would spend money cheerfully if you had any means that you will never have much. It is the rich who gloat over bargains. Edith’s coat is a great mistake, almost piebald in colouring and quite wrong for her, which meant that from a short distance away it was difficult to see where the coat ended and she began.

  House of the Dragon Screen, Peking

  May 3rd, 1903

  Last night, when he visited me, I asked him to stay, and instead of going back to his room at once, he did, for perhaps half an hour. There was kindness between us. Then, when he had gone, I began to cry very quietly. I don’t know what is the matter with me.

  He has gone now to Chinwangtao. He went in ordinary clothes to see an admiral, which seemed strange to me, but he says the visit is informal. The suit was very like the one in which I had first seen him coming in from the Scottish moors, it may have been the same one. Suddenly I wanted to go to the station with him, saying that Yao could fetch another ricksha in a minute and I could pick up a coat in the hall. He told me not to be foolish.

  I stood in front of our red gate watching the back of his ricksha bouncing towards the place where our lane bends, not expecting that he would turn to look back, but he did, and waved his hand. My heart gave a bump. Then I became conscious of the Chinese passing in the lane looking at me curiously, which was strange because I have become so accustomed to not being stared at in this city. Perhaps, because we live in this lane, we are now accepted by the people round about and when I went through the hatch in the gate and saw the dragon screen the carving no longer looked foreign and weird, almost as though it was now at work keeping those devils out for me, too. Then I remembered that it had not kept the devils out for the court official who had lost his head.

  House of the Dragon Screen, Peking

  May 5th, 1903

  This morning I did something Richard would not have approved of. I called Yao in about ten-thirty and put on a little performance as an actress, pretending that I was in a market buying things, picking up vegetables and so on, the object of all this being to tell him that when he went shopping I was going with him. For some time he watched me with a look of almost panic on his face, as though he thought I had gone mad after only two nights of being deprived of my husband and then, when the idea began to dawn, a strange thing happened, he laughed. Whatever Yao’s life history has been his face says that there has been very little in it to laugh over, and though I have no belief in my talents as an actress it is something to have produced that laughter. Soon we were laughing together, a demented servant and his demented mistress, not the kind of carry-on that would have been approved of in Edinburgh or the Legation Quarter. I don’t care. It pleased me to be able to laugh with Yao though if Mr Ching Hen happened to be sweeping up in the outer courtyard at the time there is now a scandal in the kitchen quarters. I must see that I do not make Yao laugh when Richard is here. Am I going to become one of those women who is too familiar with servants and so earns their contempt?

  Anyway, we went to market, Yao and I, down the Lane of the Fabulous Bird, a Scotchwoman and her servant both carrying baskets. There was the question of how we should walk in the lane and we started out like children playing Indians, with me the leader, which seemed very silly indeed, so I waited for him and we went along side by side with him looking very nervous probably for fear the familiarity might be reported back to Mrs Yao. Perhaps I shouldn’t have insisted we walk like that but I have always hated seeing dogs trained to heel, and the idea of servants doing this is much worse.

  One thing I haven’t quite got used to yet is the Peking smell. It is everywhere you go, almost as though contained by the city walls, not one of the spicy smells that are supposed to be a feature of the Orient, but more like rancid butter that has been slightly heated in a pan. The smell seems to come from everywhere, but is particularly pungent rising from the fur rug that is put over your knees in rickshas. It is as though the whole city had been dipped in some substance which gives off this reek, faint in some places, strong in others. I noticed it when Richard and I were up on Coal Hill on that bitterly freezing day, though there was no hint of it at the Temple of Heaven outside the walls.

  Yao and I mus
t have walked half a mile to the market, which was a simple enough arrangement on what looked like a piece of waste ground though there was a sort of gate, this made of upright wooden poles with a sign stuck across the top and banners hanging from it with Chinese writing in huge characters. Beyond were the stalls, all of a portable kind, with the carts that had brought them in the background. Here the butcher worked in the open, chopping and cutting on a fat slab of wood with clouds of flies rising at every movement he made. Flies were a solid skin over pieces of meat hanging behind him. It was the same at the fishmonger’s, flies thick on a huge cod even as it was being cleaned and filleted. The insides were not being put in a bucket for disposal, but in a container on the counter, and while I watched an old woman shoved over a coin and received some fish entrails in a jar she was carrying. I longed to know what tasty dish was going to be made from her purchase. I would have thought that the vegetable stalls would have interested the flies less, but they were there too in thousands. I certainly saw the need for that washing in potassium permanganate and am rather put off the idea of salads of any kind, particularly since I learned how these crops are fertilised, with what cannot be talked about put straight at the roots of the growing plants. Perhaps we are too fussy about many things in the West, and there are certainly no signs that the Chinese, as a result of poisoning themselves, are dying out. Marie thinks that by the end of this century they will have swamped the world, even the Russians, for she says that two Chinese are born for every one of the rest of us. I don’t know where she gets her statistics from and I am a little suspicious of them.

  All my attention was on the stalls and their vendors, so that for some time I just didn’t notice the interest in me, and this was partially, I suppose, that I had grown so used to not being looked at in Peking, at least not openly, which rather gave the feeling that you could go anywhere and be invisible. But not in the market. There wasn’t a big crowd, I expect most housewives and servants had shopped earlier, and those there were not all women, some very well-robed men, which surprised me as much as it would have done to see a gentleman shopping in an Edinburgh grocer’s. One of the men was quite openly asking Yao questions about the foreigner while he frankly stared at me, Yao not a little embarrassed by this. There was no feeling of hostility at all, but for all that, from having been relaxed, I felt myself stiffening up, self-conscious suddenly, particularly of the clothes I was wearing.