A Most Immoral Woman (27 page)

‘Let’s give it one more shot.’

The next four days passed in futile discussion with both British and Japanese contacts; the nights for Morrison passed either in bliss or, if it was Egan’s turn to enjoy Mae’s company, agony. On the afternoon of the fifth day, Morrison was strolling out the door of the Imperial when Martin Egan accosted him. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, greeting Morrison with his firm, American handshake and an expression of studied affability. ‘I understand from Miss Perkins that we’re dining together tomorrow night at the Grand.’

Morrison was grateful that Egan’s smile showed no teeth. ‘I look forward to it.’
What the deuce is she playing at now?
Whatever it was, he did not have a very good feeling about it. Sleeping in a comfortless bed that night, his dreams were thick with anxiety.

The following day dawned cloudless and warm, a perfect summer day. Morrison had rushed to Yokohama straight after breakfast only to learn that Mae had gone yachting with her putative chaperone Mrs Goodnow and that lady’s sea captain in the cliff-lined bay just south of Yokohama, which the Japanese called Negishi and the foreigners Mississippi.

He took a walk to a street where postcards were sold and distracted himself for an hour or two by shopping for war-themed postals and illustrated journals. He was particularly cheered by the find of an excellent woodblock print illustrating the battle between Japanese and Cossack cavalry on the banks of the Yalu the previous month and a magnificent triptych showing the destroyers
Hayatori
and
Asagiri
sinking Russian men o’ war during a snowstorm in one of the earliest battles for Port Arthur. He returned to Kaigan Dori but since there was still no sign of the yacht, he settled himself on the veranda of the Grand with a lemonade and some English-language papers to await Mae’s arrival.

Cackle-headed, that’s what she is.
Cackle-headed, controlling, presumptuous—and breathtakingly lovely when she finally
appeared back at the hotel in a splendid white dress, windswept and sun-kissed and, best of all, wreathed in smiles at the sight of him waiting there for her.

‘Honey, thank you for agreeing to come tonight. Martin’s been dreadful. Threatened to break off our relationship and everything. He said he knew that we had been together because whenever you and he run into one another, you look sheepish.’

‘Sheepish! He’s the one who just yesterday, upon seeing me in the dining room, walked the long way round just to avoid having to say hello.’

‘I know, I know,’ she soothed, weaving her arm into his as they strolled into the hotel. ‘He’s just being childish.’

‘You’re not making me look forward to this evening’s dinner, I must say.’

‘We’ll have a bully time, honey. He has promised to behave. I reminded him that he’d always liked and admired you and that the two of you were friends.’

‘It is not such a great sign of friendship when friends must be reminded that they like one another,’ Morrison countered glumly as they waited for the hotel boy to open her suite. ‘Where’s Egan now?’

‘He had some meetings or interviews or something.’ They entered the room. ‘Let me show you some of the things I’ve bought since I’ve been here. So much silk and brocade that I had to buy a beautiful carved tea chest to hold it all. That makes thirteen pieces of luggage, by the way. Yesterday I found the most beautiful hairpins, including one made from the shinbone of a crane that I shall give to my darling sister, Pansy, and matching ones of tortoiseshell for my dear mama.’ She burbled on, giving him scant opportunity to return to the topic of the evening’s
entertainment. When she ran out of things to show him, she related how she’d spent the previous evening lounging about her suite in a satin dressing gown whilst eating Japanese bonbons and reading about the life of an ancient courtesan. Then, scarcely pausing to draw breath, she launched into details of Mrs Goodnow’s affair with her sea captain. ‘He lashes her to the mast, imagine that!’

Mae pressed herself against the bedpost and held out the silk tie of her dressing gown. ‘Imagine that!’ she repeated. ‘Can you?’

Morrison could.

Her skin was seawater-salty and rosy from the sun. He took her like a sailor, urgently and hard against the bedpost. He wanted, on this day more than ever, to fill her up completely and in every way possible. She responded with a hunger equal to his passion. She would go to dinner, he was determined, with his impress upon her every cell.

By the time they untwined their bodies, slick and limp with bliss, it was getting late. Singing to herself, she went to run a bath. Morrison stretched, looking around for reading matter. Something on her dressing table caught his eye. He picked it up and his heart jolted. It was a ticket for passage on the
Mongolia,
which was sailing for San Francisco on the twenty-sixth of June, only five days away. The passenger’s name was listed as Miss Mae Ruth Perkins.

He rushed into the bathroom. ‘What’s this, Maysie?’

‘Oh, honey, I had to go home eventually. Neither of us will be here forever. You knew that.’

Morrison grabbed a towel and held it to his face. His nose was bleeding like his heart.

The men shook hands with excruciating cordiality. Morrison, still wan from his nosebleed, perceived Egan to be more square-jawed and ruddy-cheeked than usual. He took some comfort from the fact that Mae had chosen to wear the bracelet he’d bought her in China.

An eager young Western man entered the dining room with a striking Japanese woman on his arm. Mae waved familiarly. The man waved back. The Japanese woman smiled and bowed.

‘He’s the nephew of the financier J.P. Morgan,’ Mae explained. ‘Our families know each other back home. I met up with him just the other day.’

Morrison and Egan looked over at the couple with interest. ‘And the woman?’

‘She was a geisha in Kyoto. A very famous one too, apparently. He was mad for her at first sight. Head over heels. She didn’t like him at first, wouldn’t even think of going with a Westerner. But he finally won her over and is marrying her later this year, here in Yokohama. But since her family won’t accept the match, the two of them are going to live in France.’

‘Does he speak Japanese?’ Egan asked.

‘No,’ Mae said. ‘Not more than two words. That’s about the extent of her English too. And I don’t think either speaks much French. The truth is that they can barely understand a word the other says.’

‘That would make it a fairly typical relationship for a man and a woman,’ Morrison quipped.

Although Mae insisted it wasn’t that funny, Egan laughed and Morrison liked him for that.

Morrison and Egan, in truth, had many topics of common interest. To Morrison’s relief the conversation proceeded more
easily from then on. In his father’s day, such a situation—had such a situation been conceivable—might have ended in a duel.
It really is a new century,
he thought.

However, when Egan proudly mentioned his acquaintance with the famous novelist and reporter R. Harding Davis, Morrison could not resist at least one thrust of the foil. ‘Of course you would have heard the anecdote about him and Stephen Crane, the author of the Civil War novel
The Red Badge of Courage
?’

Egan admitted he had not.

‘Do tell,’ encouraged Mae.

‘Well, I’m sure you’re well aware that Davis’s infinite conceit of himself is at least as well known as his books.’

‘I wouldn’t—’

‘So the two of them, Davis and Crane, had gone out to dine. The restaurant was crowded. As there were not enough tables, the pair pressed themselves on to one already occupied by two others. Davis thanked the men whose table they were joining, adding with something of a patronising air: “Perhaps you might like to know to whom you have done this favour. I am Mr Harding Davis; this is my friend Mr Stephen Crane.” With ready wit, the man replied, “You might like to know who has favoured you. I am John the Baptist and this is my friend Mr Jesus H. Christ.”’

Mae laughed heartily and Egan did his best to make it seem as though the joke was not partly at his own expense. Morrison wondered if Egan knew of her imminent departure and was stabbed again by the memory of finding her ticket just hours earlier.

Egan asked about the
Haimun
and the conversation turned to the adventures various correspondents had experienced trying to get to the front.

Mae tipped her head to one side, observing them coolly. ‘I hear both of you talk about the war all the time. You analyse the casualty figures as though discussing the score of a sporting contest and you tell amusing stories about the ways correspondents endeavour to elude the censors. But I never hear you talking about the ethics of fighting itself. Men, in my experience, seem far more tested by the morality of a woman than they do by the morality of war.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. Morrison found himself exchanging glances with Egan. Both men watched as, having spoken her piece, she tucked into her braised sweetbreads
aux petit pois
with her usual gusto.

‘You know,’ Egan remarked after a pause, ‘the great Lord Byron hated to watch a woman eat. He liked to think of the fairer sex as too ethereal to require actual nourishment. If a woman insisted on sharing his table, he could not stand to see her consume more than the tiniest portion of lobster salad, washed down with champagne.’

Mae replaced her fork and knife on the table. ‘Well, I could not stand to see Lord Byron then. Who are men to set these rules, anyway?’ She turned her attention to the
terrine de foie gras
.

Egan gave Morrison a conspiratorial look. Morrison sensed his rival was on the verge of serious misstep. He was not disappointed.

‘Men always set the rules,’ Egan said with cheery assurance. ‘It’s the way of the world.’

Mae set her toast back down on her plate. ‘Not of my world. And in my experience, when men prefer their women to eat like birds, it’s so they can keep them in gilded cages. This is 1904—it’s the twentieth century—and I, for one, will not be kept in a cage. By anyone.’ She dabbed at her lips with her napkin and smiled sweetly. ‘If you two hadn’t noticed. Oh, and before either
of you ask me again, honestly, I don’t know whose baby it was. And, yes, I’m sad. More than I can say. And it really is better that I don’t marry anyone. It’s not that I don’t love either of you. I love you both. But I don’t think I am suited to the institution of marriage. As you both know, I shall be sailing for America in a few days’ time. Now, which of you would like to claim me tomorrow and which the day after? This evening I shall rest with the correspondent John Fox Jnr, whom I met the other day whilst walking at Mississippi Bay.’

The modern duel, won by a woman.

‘Mast, huts, gas engine, dynamo and some sixty pounds of dockyard fittings…’ Morrison looked up from the piece of paper James handed him and shook his head. ‘This is quite an inventory.’

James’s hand sliced through the air. ‘Sell it all.’

‘And the wireless station at Wei Hai Wei?’

‘To be dismantled. Dodwell’s, the chartering agents in Shanghai, should be able to organise the return passage to America for the wireless operators. Please ensure they have sufficient money to get to New York. You may take it from my Shanghai bank account. I’ll give up the charter of the
Haimun
myself. I cannot waste another moment. At least the Japanese have made good on their promise to give me permission to get to the front. Whilst Port Arthur’s citizens will all be speaking Japanese before any correspondent witnesses what is going on there, if I leave now I’ll at least be able to see the fall of Liaoyang with my own eyes.’

The men were strolling along the outer bank of the moat of Tokio’s Imperial Palace. The day was overcast, the air muggy. Morrison reached for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow. He found Mae’s, the one she’d given him secretly when they’d parted that first time at Mountain-Sea Pass. Its perfume had long faded. He mopped the perspiration off his face and stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket.

‘I still can’t believe Bell’s last telegram.’

‘It was harsh,’ Morrison agreed. Their editor had informed them that a Japanese contact in London had asked him if all
The Times
correspondents had died, as so little had been heard from them.

‘As if he doesn’t know what we’ve been trying to do! It puts me in a white-hot rage to be so insulted.’

‘It is a wicked and brutal joke,’ Morrison agreed, for he too had been stung.
Where have these months gone?

‘Will you remain here?’

‘No, I will return to China. Blunt has been covering for me and deserves a holiday. I’m sure I can be more useful in Peking, anyway. When do you leave?’

‘This evening. And you?’

‘In two days.’ The men shook hands. ‘You have made a great fight of it,’ said Morrison. ‘And you were, indeed, ahead of your time. But as far as I can see, you have had against you the Japanese general staff, the British minister, all the press correspondents including our own Brinkley, and the foreign department of
The Times
as well. I suggest you make your peace with the Almighty because if He turns against you too, you are forever damned.’

That evening was Martin Egan’s designated final night with Mae. Desperately eager for distraction, Morrison prowled the lobby of the Imperial in the hope of bumping into some correspondents he knew who were planning an expedition to the Yoshiwara, Tokio’s red-light district. He saw them arriving but before he could join them, an attractive and modishly dressed young lady greeted him. ‘Good evening, Dr Morrison.’

She looked familiar but he could not immediately place her. ‘Miss…’

‘Franklin. Eleanor.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. Last time I saw you, you were…’

She gestured down at her skirts. ‘Not trussed up.’

Morrison laughed and was about to say something when he saw Miss Franklin’s eye had been caught by something. He turned to see the spectacle of Mae passing through the lobby on Egan’s arm, attired in a splendid kimono, hair lacquered and shaped in the manner of a geisha. Her face and neck were powdered white, her lips dotted with colour like a plump cherry. She and Egan were on their way to a reception in the hotel ballroom.

‘Funny, stunning and dreadful at the same time, don’t you think?’ Miss Franklin remarked. Morrison noticed an unwonted strain in her voice, though she affected nonchalance. ‘For a woman of such respectable background, she
does
carry on.’

Morrison had to admit it was true.

‘I understand the male fascination with the geisha,’ Miss Franklin said. ‘After all, the point of her is to bolster the ego of the man.’ Here, she looked over again at the couple, who’d stopped to chat with some friends, and her gaze lingered on the figure of Egan. ‘I’d thought,’ she said ruefully, ‘oh, I don’t know
why but I had higher expectations of him. Silly, really. Anyway, it is quite astonishing that Western women, who are just beginning to carve out some form of independence for themselves, would seek to emulate such a creature, even in fun. Did you know that a Japanese woman can be divorced simply for disobedience, jealousy, ill health or talkativeness?’

‘If the same standards applied in the West,’ Morrison conceded, ‘there should not be too many marriages left. Certainly not many of my own acquaintance would survive.’

Miss Franklin laughed. ‘I like your sense of humour, Dr Morrison. I could take a whisky right now; could you?’

One of the other correspondents approached to enquire if Morrison was still interested in visiting the Yoshiwara.

‘The Yoshiwara?’ Miss Franklin exclaimed. ‘May I come too?’

‘It is a place of courtesans,’ the man said with an awkward smile.

‘Oh, I know that,’ she said. ‘I shall run up to my room and change into my masculine attire. No one shall be the wiser. I’ll be down in ten minutes.’

The correspondent looked at Morrison, who shrugged.

The group’s
jinrikisha
pullers deposited them at the magnificent Sensoji Temple, on the edge of the Nightless City. They wended their way through the close, lantern-lit streets, the air full of music and the scents of jasmine and burning orange peels, the latter which the Japanese used to ward off mosquitoes. ‘The world of flowers and willows, they call it,’ Miss Franklin said. A sing-song girl clattered by on her
geta
, trailed by her maidservant. The melancholy notes of the
shamisen
, plucked from braided silk strings with an ivory plectrum, drifted out from one of the three-storey pleasure quarters punctuated by the shouts of
men at drinking games. Their little group turned into an even narrower lane, where ladies of the night sat side by side in their barred enclosures, motionless as statues, great red lanterns throwing a pink blush on their whitened, mask-like features as the gold and silver threads in their kimonos winked at passers-by.

By 1904, though Tokio’s more fashionable demimonde had drifted elsewhere, the Yoshiwara still offered an abundance of interesting restaurants and wine shops. The other men were keen to visit one of the few pleasure houses where the women were agreeable to serving men
bataa-kusa
i—‘stinking of butter’—as they labelled Westerners. Morrison, not in the mood, was glad to have the excuse of keeping Miss Franklin company.

‘Do you find her beautiful?’

They were seated in a small restaurant drinking sake and eating dishes chosen for them by the owner. Immediately upon asking her question, Miss Franklin poked at the mysterious blond vegetable shavings that writhed upon grilled eggplant like something alive. Morrison sensed that she was avoiding his eyes.

He did not need to ask to whom Miss Franklin was referring. ‘She has an undeniable magnetism,’ he answered after a moment.

Miss Franklin nodded, solemn. She pincered a small grilled fish with her chopsticks. The two of them ate in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts.

‘They call this the “floating world”. Did you know that?’ she asked, breaking the silence.

Morrison nodded. ‘The world of pleasure-seeking and entertainment.’

‘And more generally, in Buddhist terms, the earthly existence of sorrow and suffering from which we all seek release. The Buddhists say that all suffering comes from desire. Not just the desires of the
flesh, but also the desires to own, to rule, to collect, to conquer, to possess, to have things go the way we want them to.’

‘I’ve heard this. And it makes sense to me from a rational perspective. But to be honest, I’m not sure I know what life without desire would be.’

‘Neither do I,’ she said with a wistfulness that seemed difficult to reconcile with her normally forthright nature. ‘Sometimes I wish I did.’

Morrison looked at her curiously. It was as though a shuttered window had opened a crack and then closed again. Recalling the way she had looked at Egan earlier, and remembering their first conversation on the
Haimun
, he thought that perhaps he understood.

The following day, Morrison packed, paid off his hotel bill, then took the train to Yokohoma, where Mae was waiting for him at the Grand in a subdued mood. They both knew that this parting would be the final one. He would not stay beyond the one night. There was no point.

They made love for a long time, and tenderly, after which she surprised him by laughing.

‘I’m so happy,’ she said.

‘That we’re to part?’

‘No, honey. Of course not. It’s just, well, you know me.’

‘I’m not sure I do. After all.’

‘We’re going to part, and that’s so sad. I have loved you dearly, more than you could know and probably more than I was prepared to. But life is funny. It gives us these beautiful, crazy experiences, it gave me you and it gave you me, and then it snatches it all away again and we’re flung back out again into the mystery. And that’s something to savour, too.’

‘I will miss you, Maysie.’

‘You’ll get over me. Men’s hearts are like that.’

He started to protest but she shushed him with a finger to his lips. ‘I’ve been reading about a Japanese poetess who lived maybe a thousand years ago. She was a lady-in-waiting at the court, and the most beautiful woman in all of Japan, with hair so long it touched the floor and eyebrows like as crescent moons in a clear sky. The men were crazy about her. She usually slept alone in a room with curtains of crystal beads and decorations of tortoiseshell. She wrote in a poem that a man’s love, no matter how brightly it burns, will in the end fade and fall like old petals.’

A pause, a breath. ‘And a woman’s?’ Morrison asked.

‘We keep everything here.’ She patted her chest.

‘What happened in the end? Did she find love?’

‘She grew old. She was cast out from the court and died a crazy beggar-woman, haunted by the spirits of the men who had perished for the love of her. She was punished for her freedom and her beauty. Women usually are. You can’t deny it.’

The following morning, he walked away from the hotel in a daze. Then he turned and there she was, leaning halfway out of the window of her room, waving him farewell. He fixed the picture in his mind.