A Most Immoral Woman

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘Oh, it was all rather silly. It happened about eight or nine years ago. The Daily Examiner reported that Fred Adams, who was in Oakland society, was to marry a divorcee who called herself Miss Potter. Can you imagine, a divorcee!’ She threw her hands up to her face, her eyes and mouth perfect circles of mock horror. ‘Well, the paper would report that he had met this unsavoury creature at a gathering I had hosted. My father was furious.’

  Morrison, his hyperactive imagination having produced far worse scenarios, was relieved and amused. ‘Scandal, as Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, is but gossip made tedious by morality.’

  ‘I must store that one away.’ She tapped her temple with her forefinger. ‘I am quite sure it will come in handy.’

  ‘So what did your father do? Were you punished?’

  ‘He was away in Washington at the time. You know he’s a senator. He wrote a letter to my mother, urging her to tighten my reins.’ Raising herself on one elbow, Mae switched into her father’s voice: ‘“It seems that this Miss Potter was a friend of one of Mae’s friends and had been passing herself off as a young girl, although she was at the time a divorced woman!!!” There were three exclamation marks, the final one of such vigorous a pen stroke that it tore the paper. He said, “As long as I let Mae do as she pleases, wear bangs”—he underlined the word—“and run around having a wild time with questionable boys and girls, I am a dear, good papa, but when I insist that she must go to school and socialise with respectable young people, why I am another kind of man!”’

  Morrison shook his head. ‘You frighten me. For a moment there, I could have sworn your father had slipped into bed between us. Have you ever thought of becoming an actress?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve loved the theatre ever since Mama took me to my first play at the Alcazar in San Francisco. Do you know the Alcazar? It’s the most elegant Moorish hall in all the world, or at least that’s what is printed on its playbills. Gas-jet chandeliers, classical busts on pedestals here, there and everywhere, and all society dressed in their finest, raising gold opera glasses to the stage. From the first encounter I wanted to be on that stage, to be the one they were all watching. And so I declared to Mama then and there that I would become an actress.’

  ‘What was her reaction?’

  Mimicking her mother’s light Anglo-Irish lilt, Mae slipped into character: ‘“Young lady, are you so determined to disgrace the family? An actress is but another name for a fancy woman! It would kill your father!”’

  ‘If your talent for mimicry is any indication, I would think you could have enjoyed a stellar career on the stage.’

  ‘So you say. But I might as well have told her I was running away to join the circus. Which, like being a sailor, is something I also dreamed about when I was little. I wanted to be the girl with the feathered headdress who rode the pony and got the tigers to leap through hoops. But speaking of ponies, let’s find some and ride out to the seabeach at the end of the Great Wall.’

  ‘Now?’ Morrison recoiled. ‘But it’s so pleasant in bed.’

  ‘I will go alone then.’

  ‘You mustn’t do that. It wouldn’t be proper. Or safe.’

  ‘So come with me.’

  ‘Can’t you linger with me a while longer?’

  ‘And if we are discovered?’

  ‘Hmm. I feel a sudden desire for exercise.’

  In Which Miss Perkins Demonstrates That She is

  Good in the Saddle and It Is Seen How the

  Meaning of a Parable Depends on Who Is Telling

  the Story

  As the hotel mafoo saddled up two little Mongolian ponies, Mae pointed to the feisty chestnut. ‘I’ll have that one.’

  The gelding’s ears lay flat against his head and his lips were tight; he regarded Mae’s approach with his head back and eyes rolling. When she tried to pat his neck, he jerked it away. Morrison signalled curtly to the mafoo to fetch a more tractable horse but Mae stopped him, insisting she liked that one. She calmed the pony with soft words and stroking until his ears rose to a happy angle and his lower lip loosened and trembled. Now, when she patted the white star on his forehead, he nuzzled her.

  ‘See? That wasn’t hard,’ she remarked and vaulted into the tall, wooden-framed saddle before either man could offer a hand, then settled her skirts over her legs.

  Morrison marvelled that not even beasts were immune to her charms. He hoisted himself up onto the pony’s companion, a stocky bay, the mafoo slapped the horses’ flanks, and they were off, Mae in the lead.

  As they cantered alongside the Wall towards the sea, Mae’s hair escaped its pins and streamed behind her. Snow flew from under the sure-footed ponies’ tough hooves.

  Morrison’s spirits rose until he felt he had never been happier. With Mae’s scent still in his nostrils and her taste on his tongue, all of his frustrations with editors, the war, idiotic colleagues, missionaries, his health, ageing—everything melted into insignificance. What jowls? He almost laughed aloud at the memory of the previous morning’s perturbation.

  Dismounting at Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall jutted into the sea, they led their steaming ponies across the snow-crusted sand.

  ‘You ride well,’ Morrison said.

  ‘Back in Oakland, I had the dearest pony. He was a chestnut like this one, but with a white blaze and socks on all four legs. I rode him everywhere when I was young.’

  ‘You still are young.’

  ‘Not at twenty-six, not according to Mama, anyway. She worries that I will remain a spinster. So what if I do? It is most unfair. Men like you may remain bachelors without fear of censure. Why can’t women do the same?’

  Morrison felt a rush of curiosity. For all the revelations of the night, he realised he knew next to nothing about her. ‘Have you ever been engaged?’

  ‘Three times.’

  ‘Three lucky men.’

  ‘One unlucky man three times.’

  Morrison had so many questions it was hard to know where to begin. ‘The fellow you mentioned last night, the one I remind you of, was he your fiancé?’

  ‘No. That was a different one…Oh, Ernest, if you could see the expression on your face. It makes me want to kiss you again.’

  A thick, tangy mist hung over the beach and the steely sea, laying a film on their hair and clothes and obscuring the ruined citadel at the Wall’s end. The sun’s first rays chiselled fine grooves in the fog and neat lines of waves licked at the beach’s edge. Gradually, the crumbling, cannonball-pocked enceintes and fortifications came into focus and, in the shallows, dark amorphous shapes solidified into volcanic boulders.

  ‘“To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, and tender curving lines of creamy spray,”’ Mae quoted dreamily.

  ‘Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters. You recite beautifully.’

  Mae smiled. ‘I wish Papa could hear that. He was always accusing me of neglecting my studies. He once wrote to Mama: “If I were the daughter of a senator, I should think much more about my education and manners than I did about dress! It is character and education that is the true standard of womanhood.” Oh, and that followed by three exclamation marks as usual.’ She peered at the surface of the Wall, probing one of a series of symmetrical hollows with her finger. ‘What happened to the Great Wall here? All these holes? I imagine some great battle between ancient warriors with shining helmets and bright silk banners of war.’

  ‘Actually it was the foreign troops who had come to relieve the Siege of Peking four years ago who did this.’

  ‘What a pity.’ She traced the rim of a bullet hole with one finger in a manner Morrison found most distracting. ‘Couldn’t they have rescued you all without damaging this beautiful old wall?’

  ‘As I said last night, sometimes there is adequate reason for military action. Had the Allied Forces not fought their way to the capital, I might well and truly have merited my obituary, at least in the sense I would have been dead. By then, we had been holding out for fifty-five days. The boom
ing of their guns, when they finally reached Peking, was as welcome as music.’

  ‘I am well pleased you are alive. On the other hand, I still don’t see why there was the need for so much destruction. I have heard there was a great deal of burning and looting by foreign troops and residents. It seems wanton.’

  Morrison did not answer immediately, abashed and uncertain as to how much she knew. His part in the looting that followed the defeat of the Boxers was minor compared to some. He knew foreign diplomats who’d had to hire entire railway carriages to transport their bounty out to the ports. But he was not entirely blameless. There was that jade citron, encrusted with gold, taken from the Imperial Palace. And other things. Yet he considered it barely adequate reparation for his near-fatal wounding and the loss of his first home in Peking.

  Something he had not thought about for a long time came back to him now as a painful memory. A fortnight after the foreign troops had swept in, Morrison had encountered a Chinese friend, a teacher. The man’s eyes were vacant. Russian soldiers had raped his moon-faced baby sister, sixteen years old, who wrote poetry and played the zither; they had battered and used her and left her for dead. Seven members of this friend’s family had swallowed lumps of raw opium and lain down side by side to die—their joint suicide a reproach to the perpetrators. It went unnoted. Morrison, appalled, had roundly slandered the Russians as an army and a race to his inconsolable friend. If British troops committed comparable crimes, he did not know about them—had not wanted to know.

  Mae’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘What are you thinking?’

  He shook his head. ‘Just that they were…interesting times. But to return to your original point—if men destroy monuments from time to time, don’t forget it’s men who build them, as well.’

  ‘And the tears of one woman can bring them all down,’ Mae declared. ‘Yesterday, Mrs Ragsdale and I visited the Temple of the Virtuous Woman on Phoenix Mountain. Our native guide told us how Lady Meng-Chiang’s husband was abducted on their wedding night and dragged off to work on the Great Wall. When winter came and he still hadn’t returned, she took a bundle of warm clothing and went searching for him. By the time she found him, he was dead and his bones interred in the Wall itself. She wept until the skies darkened and the earth grew black and an eight-hundred-mile stretch of the Great Wall collapsed into rubble. Hearing of this, the Emperor ordered her killed. But when he laid eyes on her and saw how beautiful she was, he wanted her for a wife. She demanded that he give her first husband a proper burial first. As soon as he did, she jumped into the sea and drowned herself. Two stones rose from the waters, which you can still see today—her tombstone and her grave. Why are you smiling?’

  ‘They also say that Lady Meng-Chiang was born from a gourd, from which she sprung fully formed as a little girl. It’s just a native legend. Besides, in the end, although the Emperor did not get to have Lady Meng-Chiang for a wife, he did unify the country, standardise its system of writing and currency, and in many ways made it what it is today. And he rebuilt that section of the Wall’

  ‘That may be so. But all I could think was that Lady Meng-Chiang was young and beautiful and scarcely knew her husband when he was taken away. I certainly wouldn’t have thrown myself in the sea. Not for a man I hadn’t even slept with yet.’

  ‘And for one you had?’

  ‘Oh, honey. What a question.’

  He went to embrace her but she seemed distracted. ‘I fear Mrs Ragsdale will soon be rising and calling me for breakfast. I probably should have left a note.’

  ‘And Dumas and I hold tickets for the morning train to Peking.’

  ‘I shall pine for you,’ Mae sighed. ‘Promise you will come to see me in Tientsin as soon as possible. Sooner, if you can. And promise that you will write. And that you will think of me often.’

  ‘I will, I will and I will,’ Morrison pledged.

  In Which Morrison Contemplates the

  Nature of Promises and Romance and

  Receives Further Confirmation of

  Granger’s Incompetence

  ‘And what did she promise you in return?’ Dumas asked as the train pulled away from Mountain-Sea Pass.

  ‘Nothing,’ Morrison replied. ‘It was implicit. A woman always has more cause to worry and thus to extract promises than a man does, in the beginning at least. Our attention is easily and quickly turned. Women, on the other hand, normally require a certain amount of time and structure to grow faithless. That is why the institution of marriage plays such a useful role in encouraging infidelity in the female.’

  ‘Ever the cynic.’

  ‘A romantic, actually. But I would classify my view of human nature as realistic rather than cynical.’ Morrison looked out the window for a moment. ‘I must admit, I am immensely taken with her. She is a gem, full of life and happiness.’

  ‘And with ten million gold dollars behind her.’

  ‘Now who is the cynic?’

  ‘Not me. Like you, I am merely a realist.’

  Morrison rolled his eyes, more impressed with the notion of her wealth than he cared to let on. ‘Ah, good. Here is Kuan with our tea.’

  The train, steaming away from the mountains, cut through a flat mosaic of fields. Snow was thinner on the ground here. Garlic shoots poked their jade heads up through the dusty soil. Wisps of smoke curled from farmhouse chimneys, ears of corn lay stacked in flat woven baskets on the roofs, and pale bundles of native cabbage peeped out from under the eaves. Despite the cold, the peasants were deep in industry. A man flicked a straw switch at the straining flanks of a donkey that was pulling a cart stacked three times its own height with cornstalks. Swinging heavy mallets, other men pounded stones quarried from the distant mountains into gravel. At the back of one house, a young girl hobbled on bound feet, scattering seeds amongst a clutch of hens.

  Morrison found it hard to imagine that many miles west, across the Gulf of Bohai, war was being waged on land and sea. Or that he had spent such a night—and morning—of intimacy with one so enchanting.

  ‘Your Miss Perkins is certainly quite a specimen,’ Dumas remarked. ‘Her style and manner call to mind Alice Roosevelt, whose father once said that he could either be President of the United States or control Alice, but not both. It would not have surprised me in the least if, following Miss Roosevelt’s example, Miss Perkins had jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed or shot a pistol into the air to enliven the party, had there been a pool or pistol at hand, or a party for that matter.’

  ‘You seem obsessed with Miss Perkins,’ Morrison commented. ‘Perhaps it is you who ought to be having the affair.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Buon giorno!’ Guido Pardo, correspondent for La Tribuna, materialised in front of them, and with an embarrassment of Mediterranean enthusiasm, kissed them both on the cheek. He had just travelled from St Petersburg, where the Russians claimed they had already amassed one hundred thousand soldiers in the Manchurian city of Harbin, five hundred and forty miles northeast of Port Arthur. They were sending five thousand reinforcements to the war zone each day. Inclement weather, however, was creating difficulties: an entire engine had fallen through the ice.

  ‘Well, that at least is welcome news,’ said Morrison.

  Pardo then gratified Morrison with further proof of the incompetence of his colleague-cum-nemesis Granger. In Newchang, Pardo said, he’d taken on Granger at billiards. Russian officers were playing at the next table. Granger, boasting of his fluency in Russian, eavesdropped on the Russians with droll diligence before turning to Pardo and whispering smugly, ‘Forty-five wounded.’

  ‘Which battle?’ Pardo asked, expressionless. Russian was his second language.

  ‘Not sure,’ Granger said, eyes darting about as though searching for the answer elsewhere in the room. ‘Latest one.’

  ‘I didn’t bother telling him that the Russians had been discussing the game’s score,’ Pardo told Morrison and Dumas
. ‘Buffone!’

  The three shared a hearty laugh at Granger’s expense.

  Pardo’s company helped make the time fly until, at just past three in the afternoon, the massive walls of Peking appeared in the distance.

  As the train pulled up alongside the entrance to the inner city at the ruins of the Ch’ien-men Gate, which had been chewed to rubble in the Boxer conflagrations, Morrison felt the medieval capital enclose him once more in its mighty grey-brick arms—oppressive, comforting, familiar, safe. Lonely.

  In Which a Sneeze Leads to a Discovery, Kuan

  Offers an Insight Into the Nature of Mischief, a

  Dangerous Secret is ‘Revealed and Morrison

  Thrills as a Storm Penetrates His Inner Sanctum

  Dumas would be staying the night at the British Legation before returning home to Tientsin. A carriage was waiting for him. Pardo was to rest with friends. The men parted warmly.

  As Morrison and Kuan rattled through the familiar dusty streets on a hired cart, Morrison fell disconsolate. Mae had been to Peking and he hadn’t known. How that rankled him! He would have loved to have shown her the city, the site of so much history, his own as well as China’s. C.D. Jameson was an ass. Morrison was beyond certain that Jameson had never mentioned anything about an American heiress requesting his company at lunch; it was not the sort of invitation one overlooked or easily forgot.

  Taking a deep breath, a prelude to a sigh, he inhaled dust and, feeling a sneeze coming on, dug his hands into his jacket pocket in search of his handkerchief. There he found something softer, fresher. He pulled out a lady’s lace-edged handkerchief. It was embroidered with the monogram ‘MRP’.

  What a delightful thing for her to have done. Completely forgetting he had to sneeze, Morrison pressed the delicate square of fabric to his face. Her perfume lingered on it like a last kiss. That flashing-eyed maiden! Such a picture of loveliness!

  The cart made its bone-jarring way north towards the Gate of Heavenly Peace, east past the walls of the palace, and north again up the Avenue of the Well of the Princely Mansions, a street so close to the Forbidden City that the palace walls cloaked it in shadow every sunset.