She had persuaded the children that they should not bring the three faithful donkeys that carried them to the Peak Tram Terminus on fine days. She had assured them that there would be donkeys and, even better, ponies at Peitaiho. She hoped fervently that she was right. Otherwise, the children’s pining for their own donkeys would mar the entire summer.
Lady Lucinda stood beside Mary. At fifty-eight, she was still physically vigorous, but forty years as the pampered and intimidated wife of Sir Jonathan had so subdued her that she was hardly more useful than the children. She did, at least, quiet them with dried sour plums from her capacious handbag when they bickered. Mary’s drab sister-in-law, Matilda, just turned twenty-one, tried to help control the throng. But, like her mother, she was pathetically uncertain, having been alternately coddled and cowed by her autocratic father. Still, Matilda’s help was better than none at all. The servants were already clutching their stomachs and turning pale green, though the Foosing still rocked gently at anchor in the shelter of sun-drenched Hong Kong harbor.
Only the apparently ageless Ah Sam was comfortable on the teak decks, actually invigorated by returning to the environment of his early adventures. He barked orders at the children and under-servants, who all obeyed him promptly even as they muddled Mary’s soft-spoken instructions.
Smiling at the ship’s officers’ astonishment, she calculated rapidly. Including the servants, the Sekloong party totaled forty. Among the adults were Lady Lucinda, Matilda, and Mary, while her children numbered six in all. The eldest was Jonnie, almost thirteen, just returned from preparatory school at St. Mary’s Hall, and puffed with the self-importance of a young man who would that autumn enter the Lower Grammar class of Stonyhurst College. The youngest was the toddler Charles, already so gravely articulate that the others called him “The Mandarin.” Between were the girls, Guinevere, eleven, and Charlotte, ten; and the boys, Thomas, nine, and James, seven. Three aged Kwok cousins, two ladies and a frail old gentleman, whose exact relationship and reasons for accompanying them were obscure, completed the intimate family party sailing for a modest summer holiday.
Even after fourteen years’ exposure to the grandiose Sekloong style, Mary was startled by the size of the accompanying entourage. The “division tail” her father would call it, she remembered with a rush of amused affection for the aging Bandmaster. She could almost hear his sour complaint about “jumped-up chinks giving themselves airs.”
By chance, the number of those below the salt—or the soy-sauce—matched the number of those above. Fifteen servants, headed by Ah Sam, would look after the fifteen gentry. Finally, Sir Jonathan’s inevitable surprise: ten scarred toughs in workmen’s clothing, who held the Alsatians on heavy chains. These Secret Society Braves would guard the ship against pirates and protect the family during the long summer under the loom of the Great Wall.
Sir Jonathan had taken the ship’s entire accommodation, asserting his prerogative as a director of the line. They were nevertheless fearfully crowded. The Captain had given up his own cabin to Lady Lucinda and Mary, who crammed in young Charles and his baby-amah. The others—Matilda, the children, the aged relations, the governess, and the tutors—were jammed into the passenger accommodations, overflowing into the officers’ cabins. The Chief Engineer and the First Officer were to sling hammocks on deck, while a cargo hold was cleared for the crew, whose own quarters had been taken over by the Sekloong servants and guards.
Mary wished again that the Foosing carried a physician. However, young Dr. George Chapman Parker had promised to join the ship at Shanghai and to spend most of the summer at Peitaiho.
“Oh, the deuce with it,” she said aloud, drawing a shocked glance from her jejeune sister-in-law.
Mary was determined to enjoy the eight-day voyage before encountering the perils of the North. She consciously relaxed, willing herself not to worry about the smaller children’s falling overboard, but to trust to the vigilance of the amahs.
The ship’s siren screamed, and the anchor chain clanked. From the deck of Lucinda, Sir Jonathan and Charles waved their straw hats. The pinnace bobbed beside the Foosing long after they had left the harbor through narrow Lyemun Gap. Only when Foosing passed the Ninepins and turned her bows toward the open sea, did Lucinda toot six times and swing around in a shower of spray to show her neatly rounded stern.
Disembarking at Peitaiho was not quite the ordeal embarking at Hong Kong had been, largely because Dr. George Chapman Parker’s masculine authority subdued the unruly children and the fluttering servants. The lean, thirty-year-old Virginian had acquired even greater assurance than he displayed during the plague of 1909 as his pioneering studies in tropical medicine won wider recognition. But he badly needed a holiday from his exhausting efforts to instill elementary concern for public health measures into the Chinese and foreign inhabitants of Shanghai. Most of the Chinese struggled too desperately for economic survival to bother about hygiene, while their rich compatriots and the self-indulgent foreigners unconsciously considered their wealth the surest protection against epidemics. Despite the lines of strain around his wide mouth, George Parker’s manner was still breezy. His deep blue eyes and light blond hair made his sharp, intelligent features attractive. But the plentitude, almost embarrassment, of chaperones surrounding Mary and Matilda wholly satisfied the proprieties.
They were housed, all forty-one of them, in a Confucian Temple “on loan” from the town elders, who owed Sir Jonathan many favors. Confronted with primitive brick stoves and water hauled from wells, Mary resigned her responsibilities to the servants’ ingenuity under Ah Sam’s direction. Somehow, they were all fed—and well fed. Somehow, they all were provided with beds and essential mosquito nets. Since she could not find her way through the maze of courtyards, reception rooms, red-pillared altar chambers, bedrooms, store rooms, and out-buildings, Mary cast off all household cares, finding herself idle for the first time in years. For two weeks, she simply relaxed, reading desultorily and painting in ink. The rhythm of their days was determined by their meals and the morning and afternoon swims.
She reveled in the recuperation her contemporaries called “taking a breather to ginger up,” and a later generation was to describe with equal ambiguity as “unwinding and recharging your batteries.” Besides, social life was brisk in the seaside town where diplomats, missionaries, and foreign traders passed their summers. In Hong Kong she was received with strained tolerance because the Sekloong name commanded such respect; but her reception in Peitaiho was delightfully spontaneous and unconstrained.
At once exotic and familiar within their aura of great wealth, the Sekloongs intrigued the British diplomats who clustered on the headland called Legation Point. Through their introductions Mary soon knew the entire foreign community, which was eager for new faces and new conversation. All were frankly curious regarding the English girl who had married into the clan of the Eurasian merchant-prince. Moreover, her father-in-law’s knighthood was taken at its face value, rather than as a bauble Hong Kong’s Colonial Government had bestowed to placate the natives. She was, she realized, becoming a queen bee of Peitaiho society—and it was not unpleasant.
In the unbuttoned atmosphere, she reverted happily to her youthful disregard of artificial conventions. She romped with the children in the gentle surf, wearing a bathing costume that was daringly brief. She joined them on the biddable Shanshi donkeys which abounded in Peitaiho. For the first time she felt she was beginning to know her own children.
Jonnie was fascinated by politics, the great events of not only China and Britain but the entire troubled world. When she answered his incessant inquiries, Mary was surprised by the knowledge she had acquired unaware. But his questions on theology defeated her, and she dispatched him to the retreat house maintained by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Peking. Indulgent after their long separation, she ignored most of the high-spirited escapades that were his natural reaction to three years of strict Jesuit discipline.
He “just nicked” a box of
cigars and six bottles of wine for a party with his new friends, but Mary felt his agonizing hangover was punishment enough. He frayed a fishing net in sheer mischief, and the cords parted to lose the catch. Mary recompensed the fishermen and told Jonnie that she could not forgive him for imperiling the livelihood of the poor. She smiled to herself when he teased his pompous English tutor, and she found more amusing than disturbing his “borrowing” ten donkeys for a nocturnal expedition.
Only the incident that was celebrated in the small annals of quiet Peitaiho as the “Gun-Powder Plot” provoked her wrath—and that only fleetingly. The self-important British Minister, Sir Alistair Lermotte, was injured only in his dignity when the black-powder extracted from hundreds of firecrackers exploded outside his study window. Like herself, Jonnie went the whole hog when he did something foolish.
The girls were less troublesome and less diverting, though Guinevere and Charlotte were already quite different persons. Guinevere was the perfect little housewife-to-be, sometimes, Mary felt, too docile. She would sit for hours over her embroidery or at the baby grand that was itself already famous in Peitaiho as a concrete symbol of Sekloong lavishness. Guinevere did join her hoydenish younger sister Charlotte in swimming to the diving-raft anchored two hundred yards off shore. Mary fretted about their recklessness, but was reassured by both Ah Sam and young Dr. Parker. The children, they pointed out, were never out of sight of her own or someone else’s servants, while a boat manned by local fishermen lay halfway between the raft and the shore. Charlotte, Mary feared, would later be a problem; she was already too eager for masculine attention. But, for the moment, Charlotte was a manageable handful.
The little boys lost themselves in the simple recreations of the holiday resort. Normally isolated from the Chinese masses of Hong Kong by their lonely eminence on The Peak, they discovered with delight that the Mandarin their grandfather had insisted they learn was, after their quick ears had adjusted to the local dialect, intelligible to fishermen, shopkeepers, and artisans. They drifted happy and undiscriminating among the street urchins and the foreign children from Tientsin and Peking.
Thomas and James were alike in neither temperament nor appearance. The elder was a throwback to his Kwok ancestors, small, dark, and, Mary feared, both secretive and envious. The younger each day grew more like the strapping, forthright man he called “Uncle Harry”. They quarreled noisily, but stood side by side against the street urchins and schemed with one mind to evade their tutors. The pair were at an awkward age. They had outgrown their stiflingly overattentive amahs, but were not quite old enough for personal manservants.
Both Thomas and James were fascinated by the platoon of the East Yorkshire Regiment that was Sir Alistair’s ceremonial guard and by the leather-faced U.S. Horse Marines on leave from their posts at the American Legation. When all other coveys drew blank, the two boys could be found squatting on the sand with the hard-bitten Marine gunnery sergeant or the ferocious sergeant major of the East Yorks. Mary was more amused than shocked when they sang bawdy versions of the “Marine Hymn” or “Soldiers of the Queen,” using words she pretended not to understand. After two weeks, Thomas and James declared their firm intention of becoming soldiers when they grew up. She did not pass on that resolution in her chatty letters to their father and grandfather, who would have been truly shocked. Both believed implicitly in the wisdom of the Chinese maxim: From good iron, one does not make nails! Of good men, one does not make soldiers.
Even little Charles asserted his independence at twenty months by demanding that he not be called Charlie, but Young Charles or Master Charles. The grinning servants gleefully complied with his treble instructions. They also called him Shao Yen, “Little Lord,” or Hsiao Kuan, “Small Mandarin.” Precociously peremptory, Charles was always loving, more loving than her other children. Mary was alternately enchanted and bewildered by the self-confident infant who taught himself the alphabet by sitting quietly in the corner when the tutors instructed the elder children. She was astonished one day to find him tracing Chinese characters in the sand with a twig.
In remote Peitaiho she had only one cause for worry. Her husband and her father-in-law wrote regularly, but the mails were slow; and their letters did not allude to their countercampaign against the Wheatleys. Mary fretted, though she knew that discretion was essential. She felt she had been deliberately removed from the center of events, despite Sir Jonathan’s argument that he needed her near Tientsin, where the exchange of gold for the Imperial Treasures was scheduled to take place. In reality, Peitaiho was almost as isolated from Tientsin, 110 miles away, as it was from Hong Kong, 1,500 miles away.
Her chief source of information was the eccentric Peking and Tientsin Times, edited by the equally eccentric Putnam Weale. In early July, he published alarming reports of unrest in Central Europe. But she had to look hard to find those snippets among fulsome social notes and labored analyses of byzantinely complex Chinese politics—as rival generals the newspaper called warlords fought each other, and President Yüan Shih-kai maneuvered to make himself Emperor.
Almost every issue carried a dispatch headlined: ANOTHER BANDIT OUTRAGE. The fabric of Chinese civilization had not been restored, but had been more deeply rent by removing the corrupt Manchus. The new political structure was so rickety it appeared that China either had no government at all or a dozen contending governments. Smug in its insular security, the foreign community interpreted such reports as confirmation of the inability of the Chinese either to rule themselves or to maintain minimal civil order. Reading those dispatches with strained attention, Mary was dismayed by the rise of provincial despots who alternately strove for foreign support and denounced the West’s extra-legal privileges in China.
On July 22, 1914, the North China Daily News abandoned its normal reserve to proclaim in a bold block type headline across three columns: GREAT BANDIT OUTRAGE: HANKOW-PEKING LIMITED DERAILED, BULLION FEARED STOLEN.
It is reported from Chengchow in dispatches lately reaching us [The article reported.] that bandits halted the crack Hankow–Peking Limited on the relatively unpopulated stretch between Hsinyang and Suiping on the nineteenth day of the present month.
The engineer espied a log barricade across the tracks and applied the emergency brakes. However, the train’s momentum carried it into the barricade. The locomotive, the tender, and the leading passenger-waggon were derailed. Fortunately, personal injuries were slight. Two Europeans suffered lacerations, and the Chinese fireman was killed when his head struck a projecting lever.
Passengers were terrified when a band of more than 100 armed men attacked the three special goods-waggons that had been attached to the last carriage just before the departure of the Limited. The out-numbered guards fired only a few shots before fleeing. The bandits broke into the goods-waggons and made off with a large number of stout wooden boxes.
Reports from knowledgeable sources, though unconfirmed, indicate that those boxes contained bullion. Our own Economic Correspondent has noted persistent rumours that the gold reserves of the Republic were to be transferred to a new place of safekeeping. However, it is not known whether the gold reserves were indeed in the looted goods-waggon. But our Economic Correspondent understands …
The report tailed off into farrago of speculation, and Mary threw the paper down in frustration. The allusion to a transfer of the Republic’s gold reserves had alerted her, since the Wheatleys planned to transport their enormous loan to President Yüan Shih-kai under that pretext. Searching subsequent editions, she found no further mention of the incident.
“Who knows,” George Parker remarked, “whether the news was suppressed—or whether it’s just the Tientsin and Peking Times’s casual approach to our times.”
After a few weeks Mary began to chafe at the simple pleasures of isolated Peitaiho. The restless enthusiasm of her youth reasserted itself after its protracted suppression by domestic and business responsibilities, and she longed for a change in the pleasant monotony. She would be deli
ghted to do something mildly foolish with her whole heart—if she could find some such diversion in the smug enclave of foreign privilege on the edge of a troubled nation.
The expedition George Parker proposed was hardly foolish. He suggested an excursion to Hsienfenghow, ninety-five miles northwest in the shadow of the Great Wall. Mary’s interest in Chinese civilization had reawakened, largely because the big-boned, slow-spoken, and courteous Northerners were more congenial than the slight, nervous, and contentious Cantonese. She longed to see the town built on the ruins of an old feudal capital.
They set out in three broad-wheeled Peking Carts, each unsprung wooden platform on wooden wheels pulled by two stocky ponies and a patient donkey harnessed abreast. Its only luxury was a canvas hood that could be raised to protect the travelers against the sun and the rain. In addition to the cartmen, four servants, and three guards, they had originally planned to take only Matilda Sekloong as a chaperone. But Jonnie insisted upon the eldest son’s right to accompany them and Guinevere surprised them by demanding the same right as the eldest daughter. Her schoolgirl crush on “Uncle George” made her uncharacteristically assertive. Mary yielded, pleased at having her two elder children virtually to herself.
For two days, the little caravan rolled along deep-rutted roads incised by millennia of turning wheels into the soft yellow soil of the flat North China plain. Unlubricated wooden axles squealed an undulating marching song, and the cartmen swore goodhumoredly at the animals. They occasionally passed sparsely inhabited villages beside golden millet fields reeking of night-soil. North China was almost deserted by comparison with the hectic, overpopulated South, and they saw more white-washed, womb-shaped tombs than packed-earth dwellings. But the travelers found new pleasure in each other’s company. Amiable and intelligent, George Parker controlled the servants without effort. Free of the bickering younger children, Jonnie and Gwinnie chatted intelligently. They were gravely aware of their new privileges and responsibilities.
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