A Most Immoral Woman

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘You see, you are proving my point. Your affection for me makes you blind, though I’d be a daisy if I didn’t appreciate that. There’s another thing about the opera that reminds me of us.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Let me get this right.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. ‘You see, laughter in the Chinese opera is so stylised that it is far more than just a laugh. It is all laughter, laughter everywhere, laughter of every type and for every joke on Earth. Weeping is the same, it’s like a Platonic ideal of crying. When an actor weeps on stage in the Peking Opera, he’s weeping every tear ever shed by anyone. Also, every movement is subtly circular. To look up, the actor looks down and around first; to point, the fingers circle back before they move forward. And so we enact scenes of love that, when played so well, take on meanings greater than the actual gesture, and contain within them the notion of returning to the same point, again and again.’

  Morrison was unsure how to respond. ‘Interesting thesis. Quite a metaphor.’

  ‘I ought to own that it’s not original. Chester told me that.’

  ‘Chester?’

  ‘Holdsworth. It was he who took me to the opera. He understands much of Chinese ways.’

  ‘Holdsworth,’ Morrison repeated. An acetic taste in his mouth recalled him to the fact that the Chinese phrase for jealousy was to ‘eat vinegar’.

  ‘You are surely not denying it, honey. That book of his, The Real Chinaman, is full of insight.’

  He was on the brink of ridiculing Holdsworth’s book, which had refuted An Australian in China on several subjects. Certainly Morrison had been a trifle hasty in concluding in his own book that the Chinese were affected by pain less than other races. But such had been the evidence before his eyes when he saw the seeming equanimity with which men tolerated such punishments as being placed in stocks or how they harnessed their naked bodies to tow-ropes and pulled heavy boats against the currents of the Yangtze. Still, Holdsworth had not needed to get on his high horse about it. But not wishing to spoil the mood, Morrison kept his thoughts to himself. The hoary Holdsworth had as little chance as the liar Jameson with Mae. Morrison, as her lover, could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, it was very difficult for one to maintain an ill temper when Miss Mae Ruth Perkins was caressing one’s backside.

  ‘That’s quite a collection of scars for one pair of buttocks,’ she observed.

  Making it seem like such things were all in a day’s work for an adventurer like himself, he launched into his stories of being shot whilst defending the Legations in the siege and speared whilst attempting to walk across New Guinea years earlier. Top that, Holdsworth!

  ‘I should have known about the bullet—that’s when your newspaper thought you had died.’

  ‘Yes, and the bullet nearly did kill me. But what happened in New Guinea was worse. There were a few moments there when death seemed the better option, especially as I took another spear below my eye. Some years later I was operated on in Edinburgh by Professor Chiene, who removed a number of fragments from my sinuses, though he couldn’t get them all. It remains a source of some misery. Chiene also extracted an entire three-inch wooden spearhead from my iliacus muscle.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Here.’ He pointed to a scar on his stomach. ‘There’s a funny story about this.’

  ‘Oh?’ She stroked it curiously.

  If I were twenty, he thought wryly, I should not be able to continue speaking right now. Age has its advantages. ‘Professor Chiene later held a dinner in honour of my recovery. He said that he was going to send my mother and father a replica of the spearhead in gold. I wrote to my parents straight away to tell them about the gift that would soon reach them. But it was never sent. In 1895, I was again in Edinburgh and met the professor to whom I owed so much. He said, “I have long intended to send your father a model of that spearhead in silver.”’

  Mae chortled. ‘I thought he’d promised gold.’

  ‘Precisely. I again wrote to my parents, informing them of the imminent dispatch of this slightly less valuable souvenir. But it never arrived. Years later, I met the good professor a third time. I only regretted that he did not announce his intention to send my parents a model in bronze.’

  Bathed in Mae’s bright laughter and sweet gaze, Morrison felt a surge of euphoric energy. He remembered belatedly the gift he had bought for her that day he went to Liu Li Chang in Peking’s Chinese City: a pair of tiny embroidered slippers, made for bound feet. Her exclamations and the shower of kisses that followed gratified him immensely. He had been absurd to allow her mention of Holdsworth to disturb him as it did. ‘I wish I hadn’t promised to meet Dumas for dinner,’ he said ruefully, stretching to reach the switch for the electric light.

  ‘And I the Ragsdales.’

  Morrison watched like a lovestruck boy as, seated at the dressing table in her chemise, she brushed her hair. He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards, she explained, in order to catch good fortune. She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well. ‘Luck and love,’ he observed.

  ‘The essentials.’

  He kissed the back of her neck.

  Outside, the clatter of shod hooves and the rattle of cart wheels could be heard. Down the corridor of the hotel, a longcase clock struck the hour. Beyond the curtained window, twilight lay its veil over the city.

  ‘It’s a fine hotel, isn’t it?’ she remarked.

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured into downy skin.

  ‘I was here not long ago with Zeppelin, the Dutch consul.’

  His lips froze on her nape. His heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t possibly mean…Surely not. Optimistically, he envisioned the lobby, high tea, cucumber sandwiches. An avuncular diplomat, his stout wife, the garrulous Mrs Ragsdale. ‘Not like this, I presume,’ he said, expelling a short, harsh laugh.

  ‘Oh yes, Ernest honey, just like this.’

  He stared at her reflection in the mirror.

  She smiled back, her expression free of malice. She stood up and walked over to the bed, extracting her stockings from the pile of clothing on the floor and rolling one and then the other up her legs. ‘Now where has that garter gone?’

  Morrison had endured lone treks across deserts and through jungles. He had raised his head above the parapets to fire at Boxer legions. He had cheated death a dozen ways in as many countries. He was not easily daunted. Yet he could be thrown. He lowered himself down on the bed next to her and chewed his lip for a moment before speaking. ‘A few years back, a Chinese man ran at a foreign consul in Peking with a knife.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Mae gasped, looking up. ‘Did he kill him?’

  ‘No, the consul ran faster. The police apprehended the man and declared him insane. But a witness objected. “Insane? For trying to kill a consul? There could be no clearer evidence of his sanity!”’

  Her gaze was steady, cool and nowise encouraging.

  ‘You know the old ditty,’ Morrison ploughed on, bursting into song: ‘The English, the English, they don’t amount to much; but anything is better than the goddamn Dutch.’

  Mae pursed her lips. ‘Don’t be jealous, honey. I don’t like it. If you are to be my beau, then there are things you ought to know about me.’

  ‘And what is it, precisely, that I need to know?’

  ‘Now, honey, have you ever attended the Fancy Dress Spring Ball here in Tientsin?’

  ‘Once or twice, yes.’ The ball, held at Gordon Hall in a grand room hung with tapestries and lit by magnificent chandeliers, celebrated the spring thaw that heralded the re-opening of the port and capped the winter social season in Tientsin.

  ‘But you didn’t attend the most recent one.’

  ‘No.’

  She shrugged. ‘If you had, perhaps things would have turned out differently. I had finally recovered from the grippe and was very excited about the ball. Weeks earlier I had
decided to go as Marie Antoinette. It took the seamstresses and woodturners of Tientsin that long to make my robe à la française. I wanted every detail perfect, down to the V-shaped stomacher and panniers. The night before the ball, I had Mrs Ragsdale’s maid, Ah Lan, wash my hair in beaten egg-whites and rinse it with rum and rosewater. I think she was quite scandalised by that—I’m quite sure she saved the yolks for the servants’ kitchen. Oh, Ernest, you would have laughed at me that morning. I had flung open every last one of my steamer trunks, hatboxes, shoeboxes and jewellery boxes. Things were everywhere.’

  She piled detail upon detail, of pearls pooling on the bedspread and jewelled necklaces cascading from the bedposts, of eggshell-blue crepe de Chine, of accordion flounces and chiffon ruffles, parades of satin roses, of beauty spots, cream-coloured slippers and elbow-length gloves, Morrison was simultaneously appalled and enthralled by the extravagance and luxury her words conjured. For the son of a frugal Scottish schoolmaster from Geelong, it was a titillating vision.

  ‘I’m sure you were the belle of the ball,’ he said at last.

  ‘That’s what he called me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Zeppelin, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Morrison repeated, recalling the point of the story with a sinking heart. ‘Did you meet this…consul there for the first time?’

  ‘I’d danced with him at one of Tientsin’s weekly Kettledrums not long after arriving here. But I hadn’t known him well.’

  Mae told Morrison how over dinner at the ball she grew rather crazy for the Dutchman with the bright blue eyes and cheeky smile. She admired the stylish cut of his dress uniform and the flash of red silk socks at his ankles. He turned out to be an excellent dancer. Morrison, he of the pale blue eyes, mercurial smile, poetically casual dress sense and tolerable competence on the dance floor, found no cheer in these particulars. ‘And so, after a generous little bottle of champagne,’ she told him, ‘we slipped away from the ball.’

  By the end of the remarkable recitation, which spared no detail, Morrison’s head spun with visions of Mae as Marie Antoinette, legs akimbo upon some anonymous clerk’s desk deep inside Gordon Hall, the damnedly handsome blond head of the Dutch consul navigating complex channels of petticoats towards the split in her bloomers, murmuring just before docking, ‘The gates of Heaven are always open.’

  ‘What a sparkling wit he must be to have come up with that old chestnut.’

  She smiled, oblivious to Morrison’s sarcasm. ‘He kissed me for the longest while.’

  Kissed! Such is the euphemism. ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I really did need to get out of that costume. That’s when we came across the street and took a room here at the Astor. Are you sulking?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he lied, then, with the air of a convicted man enquiring after his sentence, he asked, ‘Are you in love with Zeppelin, then?’

  ‘Oh no. He is not all that amusing, for all his obvious talents. I prefer a man of wit and intelligence.’ She drew a finger down Morrison’s chest. He had begun to pull his shirt on, but had not buttoned it. She circled his nipples. ‘And one who is tall and handsome, and strong and manly as well.’

  Morrison’s chest inflated, along with his pride.

  ‘I am in love with—’

  How sweet she is!

  ‘Martin Egan.’

  ‘Egan?’ Egan!

  ‘Yes. Oh darling, why the long face? It doesn’t make me happy to see that. I told you I don’t like jealousy. Anyway, Martin hasn’t had me for many days.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘A week, probably. Oh dear, look at how the time has flown. You will call for me again at three o’clock tomorrow, won’t you, honey? I shall pine for you until then.’ She turned her attention back to her stockings.

  Anna Lombard, who at least married her Pathan, seemed almost chaste by comparison. Zeppelin was one thing. Too much champagne, a heady evening at the ball. As much as it pained him, Morrison could almost understand that. But Egan, that cheerful bastard—in love? When did that happen? Damn him! His mind flew back to the day they had met on Peking’s Tartar Wall. Egan had said something about the attractions of Tientsin having increased in recent months. Something else, too, which had niggled at the back of his mind. Something about wanting to keep her for himself. In hindsight it was obvious that the American had been hinting at something. He had failed to pick up on it. He was a deuced fool.

  Morrison tried to think rationally about where all this left him, and what it said about the woman beside him, happily absorbed in tying a pink ribbon around her stockinged thigh. A violent rush of emotion, shame and desire overcame him. I will not come second to a Dutch consul or an American whippersnapper!

  He reached over, pushed her hand away and firmly tugged at the bow until it fell open.

  ‘Now look at what you’ve done!’ Mae watched her stocking slither down to crumple around her ankle. She pouted but did not bend to pull it up again. Nor did she push his hand away when it travelled up the inside of her thigh, trailing the ribbon. ‘This is very naughty of you,’ she said, opening her legs wider. ‘We will both be awfully late.’

  ‘We are already awfully late. And you do not seem to be resisting.’

  ‘I could resist,’ she murmured. ‘Would you prefer that?’

  When they finally parted, each doomed to arrive at their respective dinners too late even for the fruit macédoine and cream mousse, he was confident that her goodbye kiss did not say, ‘I love Martin Egan.’

  In Which We Learn One Difference Between

  Morrison and the Japanese Army He

  Supports, and Our Hero Goes Down

  in a Sea Captain’s Wake

  Zeppelin! Egan! As he stared at the ceiling of his hotel room, kicked from his dreams by misery, Morrison entertained the notion that perhaps Mae was simply goading him. She would no sooner fornicate with the Dutch consul on a desk in Gordon Hall than look for a Chinese husband in order to secure a cultural education—or have sexual relations with C.D. Jameson. The passion he and Mae shared was palpable, enveloping, consuming. She saw how it enlarged with provocation, so she provoked. Egan. Really! He laughed aloud, rolled over and ground his teeth, knowing he deceived only himself—and even that not well.

  Early that morning, a brisk stroll took him to Tientsin’s native city. There he caught sight of a Chinese policeman leading three miscreants by their queues, the ends of which he’d tied into a knot that he held in his fist. The unfortunate trio made for a comic sight, tripping over their own feet and each other’s, cursing and yelping. Morrison had a sudden and unpleasant vision of himself, Zeppelin and Egan being led by a no less self-satisfied Maysie. He walked with a burdened gait back towards the concessions and a luncheon with Menzies and Viceroy Yuan’s interpreter, Ts’ai Yen-kan.

  Ts’ai was a veteran of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. That war had also been sparked by conflict over Korea, then under China’s suzerainty, as well as Japanese designs on Manchuria. It ended badly for China. The Treaty of Shimonoseki granted Korea nominal independence whilst ceding the island of Formosa and the whole of the Liaotung Peninsula, including Port Arthur, to Japan in perpetuity. That had led to Germany, France, Britain and Russia demanding more ‘spheres of influence’ for themselves: ports, mines and the railways to access them. When the Russians offered to pay off Chinese debts to Japan in return for access to Port Arthur, the seeds of the present conflict were sown. Morrison was eager to hear Ts’ai’s views on the situation, for he was certain they’d reflect Yuan’s own.

  The luncheon got off to an agreeable start. Ts’ai informed Morrison that for months prior to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War he had translated every article Morrison had written on the subject of the inevitability of war for Viceroy Yuan. ‘You were most prescient,’ he said. ‘The Viceroy considers you a true prophet.’

  ‘I’m not worthy,’ Morrison replied, laughing to himself. No one ever praised Zeppelin or Egan as prophets!

  ‘
You were also right about the strength of the Japanese army. We have heard that advance forces have already crossed the Yalu River.’

  ‘Yes,’ Morrison confirmed, hoping that for once Granger was right. ‘Our correspondent says the Japanese have arrived within seventy miles of Newchang.’

  ‘It is said,’ Menzies added enthusiastically, ‘that the Japanese army carries no white flags.’

  Ts’ai exhorted both Menzies and Morrison to eat more. Had they tried the Four Treasures dish? A Tientsin specialty.

  Morrison understood that Ts’ai was not as pleased with the news of the Japanese advance as he was. ‘I have written that the Chinese will remain neutral in this conflict. Am I correct in believing this to be the firm stance of the Chinese government?’

  Ts’ai nodded. ‘We would not act rashly. But as I believe you are aware, Prince Kung wishes to mediate between the belligerents. Perhaps we could bring about a reconciliation.’

  ‘This would only benefit the Russians.’ Morrison had just begun to argue the case when Ts’ai pushed the brocaded sleeve of his robe up his arm, reversed his chopsticks and, with the blunt ends, levered a choice portion of braised fish onto Morrison’s rice. ‘Please, Dr Morrison. You must eat as well as talk,’ he urged. ‘And the fish is a local specialty.’

  Morrison, recognising that this subject was closed for the moment, brought up that of the Russo-Chinese Bank. ‘It’s the beating heart of the Russian administration in Manchuria,’ he stressed. ‘Bring down the bank and you cut off their financial supply. If you persuade enough investors to withdraw their funds, it will collapse like a house of cards. This is in China’s own interests; surely the Viceroy can see that he must decline all dealings with the bank forthwith.’

  A brief silence ensued, broken only by the sound of a peanut accidentally dropping from Menzies’s chopsticks onto the table.

  When Ts’ai spoke, his tone was measured but no less forceful than Morrison’s. ‘I do fear that the neutrality your honourable self so keenly enjoins upon my country does rather circumscribe our actions in aid of the Japanese cause. That would naturally include any actions against the Russo-Chinese Bank. Please, do try the duck.’