Give Us This Day (30 page)
But at a deeper level than relief was another, altogether alien emotion, and it had to do with this land and these people, with their flies and their smiling perfidy, with their teeming, gimcrack cities, boundless plains, and brown, sluggish rivers, and she could only identify this as hate, an intensity of hate she had never felt for anyone or for anything in the past. She wanted to punish every last one of them for the misery and bitterness and frustration they had engendered in her and the terrible anger she felt for them, and for the place they lived in, and her hate was so compelling that it could only find release in action of the kind the British Marines, the Cossack Legation guards, and the volunteers known as “The Carving Knife Brigade” were taking at this very moment. She could not leave here without some act that would stamp the seal of her hatred on the country and its people, and this would be more than a mere reprisal for Rowley’s death. It would be the ultimate expression of all she felt about her time here and after that, purged and purified as it were, she would take passage home and put this part of her life behind her.
Slowly, a little more each day, she became interested in the plight of the beleaguered garrison, learning the geography of the various bastions of eleven nationalities fighting for their lives inside the shrinking perimeter. She knew the perilous handholds the Germans and Americans had upon the Tartar Wall, the battered Fu, where the forlorn Japanese garrison contested every inch of the area east of Customs Street, the half-ruined French Legation and its comic opera Ambassador, Monsieur Pichon, who was forever declaring that survival was a matter of hours and, above all, the central bastion formed by the crowded British Legation, with its bell tower and its hordes of sick, wounded and clamorous refugees. She identified with the rumours, too. How soon the relief column from Tientsin would arrive. How long the rations of stewed pony and champagne would hold out. How many more casualties the garrison could afford before the attackers swarmed in to exterminate every man, woman, and child assembled. She was aware of every desperate sortie there into the labyrinth of ruined buildings about here, the creeping advance of the Chinese barricades that were slowly enclosing them in a wall of rubble, the high courage of heroes like Captain Halliday, R.M., the poltroonery of absurd figures like Pichon, the French Ambassador.
But to know these things, to stand off and witness them, was not enough, and neither was the offer of officious women in sweat-soiled dresses to stitch sandbags made of silk, satin, and sackcloth, or tend the crowded hospital ward where men, women, and children died every day. This was women’s work, of course, but it wasn’t her work. She had to do something far less passive, far more definitive, and there was no prospect of a woman taking her place at the barricades, where she would be most likely to find her chance to assuage the terrible thirst for revenge and atonement. Whenever she went to one or other of the thinly manned posts, she was quickly sent out of range by the officer or N.C.O. in charge, warned off like a venturesome child approaching a tree-felling party of woodsmen in the grounds of Tryst and told, roughly but kindly, “Please to stand away, ma’am!” or “Please to go back, ma’am!” But it was through these persistent attempts to get within killing range of the Boxers that she at length acquired sufficient guile to circumvent their prohibitions. But that was towards the end of the siege, when the temperatures were well in the hundreds every day and the last of the ponies was marked for death and the stewpot.
* * *
By then, of course, she knew that the Boxers were not, in fact, within anyone’s range, for someone told her they had proved utterly useless wielding their clumsy weapons against anyone but unarmed missionaries and terrified converts. The daily attacks were now mounted by Imperial troops, armed with artillery and modern Mausers; sometimes she caught a brief glimpse of one of them, darting about behind their maze of barricades on the outer perimeter of the Fu, or slipping by under the Tartar Wall—colourful figures, in blues and scarlets, greens and golds, with their inscrutable banners—and whenever this happened the yearning to down at least one of them became so masterful that she could have dashed over the intervening barricades and flown at them single-handed. But then, towards the end of July, her moment arrived, so unexpectedly and in such mundane circumstances that it had almost gone before she was aware of it.
She had found herself an approved job by then, carrying rations to men enduring long spells of duty at the loopholes, ordeals that lengthened in relation to the daily reduction of effectives manning the defences. It was in the Fu area, where the Japanese were sometimes helped out by some of the more spirited among the horde of Catholic converts, brought into the legations’ quarter the day the siege began and within hours of the murder of the German Ambassador. By then the Fu was a scene of almost complete desolation, with buildings levelled and the open spaces where they had stood strewn with rubble concealing, and sometimes half concealing, Chinese soldiers who had died prising the Japanese from one position after another. The defenders had now retreated to a triangular position terminating in an apex pointing towards the north bridge over the canal, some fifty yards beyond the garrison’s barricade; here they had built a six-foot wall pierced with loopholes, some of which were shuttered by hand-carved wooden blocks used to preserve the ancient works among the thousands of books housed in the Hanlin Yuan Library, the oldest library in the world someone told her, but now a gutted ruin, like everything else about here. The blocks were set beside the wall, ready for insertion every time a loophole was vacated. There were strict orders to this effect, dating from an occasion early in the siege when besiegers had used one to fire directly into the defences.
Some sort of attack seemed to be in progress at this moment. From the apex of the triangle came the almost continuous stutter of small-arms fire, punctuated every now and again by the boom of Imperialist cannon engaged in a one-sided duel with Betsy, the home-made gun used by the British marines. She had just crossed an open space carrying her pail of stew and was approaching the wall to make a delivery to the sentry standing there when the man, a Catholic convert, quitted his post in response to a shouted command for stretcher-bearers from the embattled sector. He left in such a hurry that he not only forgot to shutter the loophole but also left his rifle leaning against the wall. The battle, at this juncture, was about eighty yards to the north, but crouching there, close against the barricade, Helen heard no signs of activity beyond the cloud of smoke and brickdust that masked the sector, so she set down the pail of stew and took a quick peep through the loophole as far as the burned-out ruins of Customs Street.
It was then, without the slightest warning, that she saw her opportunity. A thickset Imperialist was inching along the outside of the wall in the direction of the dust-cloud; she judged him to be an officer of some kind, for his uniform was exceptionally colourful, and instead of a rifle he carried a revolver and a scimitartype sword with a broad curving blade and two points, one set above the other. She did not hesitate a second. He was no more than five yards away when she first glimpsed him, but, seeing the unshuttered loophole, he half-turned and took two strides towards it. In that moment she grabbed the sentry’s rifle and fired at point-blank range.
She had never fired a gun of any kind before, but she had often watched her brothers potting pheasants and partridges in the coverts at Tryst, so that the act of levelling and aiming was instinctive. The gun went off with what seemed to her a disproportionate roar, and the recoil was so fierce that it struck her shoulder like the blow of a club, causing her to stagger back clear of the wall. Even so, she had a clear view of the officer, who doubled like the blade of a jack-knife, spun round, and then, with a kind of grace, toppled backwards over a block of masonry and lay still, his boots angled to the sky.
At first it did not seem possible that she could have killed him so effortlessly, and she remained where the recoil had driven her, one hand holding the heavy rifle across her breast, the other slowly massaging her bruised shoulder. She could see nothing of him but his angled boots, but his posture convinced her that he was dead. As dead as those other men half-buried under the rubble. As dead as the English officer she had seen buried by the bell tower the previous evening. As dead as Rowland Coles, whose headless corpse was lying out there on the treeless plain.
The feeling of wonderment passed, replaced by an altogether different emotion that she could only describe as a kind of omnipotence. It was as though, by that single shot, she had emerged from the flesh, bones, and spirit of the jaded woman who had stooped to glance through the loophole and reassumed the personality of the eager girl she had been when she married Rowley and went off with him to seek adventure on the far side of the world. All the bitterness, the frustrations, the disappointments of the last few years dropped away, discharged into the body of a middle-aged Chinaman now lying across a block of masonry with his boots pointing to the sky. She had a sense of repossessing herself, much as a proud woman might cross the threshold of a house where everyone waited to do her bidding.
Mechanically, and with no real awareness of what she was doing, she laid aside the rifle, shuttered the loophole, picked up her stew pail, and moved along the wall towards the enveloping dust cloud where the defenders were grouped in the apex of the works and very confident, it seemed, of beating off the uncoordinated attack mounted from the ruins of the Hanlin.
They saw her coming and a sprucely dressed Oriental, whom she recognised as Colonel Shiba, came towards her and bowed. The gesture, in that time and in that place, made her smile. It was her first smile in months. Her manner, and perhaps her presence there, seemed to please him for he too smiled, revealing about twice as many teeth as a man should have, but he said, taking her pail, “You should not be here, madam. Not when there is firing. Please do withdraw out of range.”
She turned back and made her unhurried way along the wall, then over the open ground to the Legation, bathed in a serenity that was balm to the spirit, and was at once reabsorbed in the fretful routine of the kitchens.
Everything that happened during the remainder of the siege was an anticlimax. Hope of succour came and went, fanned by stories of searchlights in the night sky to the south, by reports of distant gunfire, by the coming and going of couriers who seemed to make their way to and from the beleaguered legations with very little trouble. The truce came and then, in mid-August, the storming relief column, headed by the jovial Colonel Gasalee and his polyglot army of British, American, Russians, Japanese, French, Austrians, and Italians. Nothing during those climactic days could ruffle her newfound serenity, not even the unconfirmed story from a fugitive that Rowley’s body had been found and given Christian burial some ten miles down the river line from the spot where she had been rescued by the Belgian engineers and the Cossacks. Rowley was dead but then, to balance accounts, so was that thickset officer, shot through the loophole. It only remained to begin all over again. Not here, of course, not anywhere where temperatures soared to no degrees in the shade and huge, lazy flies swarmed about one’s head and plate. Somewhere cool and green. A place where everybody spoke a familiar tongue and servants wore starched caps and aprons. She had no belongings to pack, nothing but a few souvenirs of the siege and the clothes bought with the grant paid out to survivors to enable them to travel down to the coast and await transport home.
They went out in convoy, the women chattering gaily and continuously of the horrors of the siege, but although she listened it was in the mood of an indulgent parent settling to the prattle of children. No one among them had killed a man in a split second of time and because she had said nothing of her exploit they thought of her, she supposed, as a brokenhearted widow, one of so many overwhelmed by deep, personal tragedy. Or perhaps not even that. Simply as a drifter who had helped out now and again in the kitchens of the embattled legations.
Six
Study in Black
W
henever her mind turned upon such things (it was not often, for Henrietta was a very sanguine person) it struck her that, over the years, the clan had enjoyed more luck than most. Not so much because they had prospered, socially and commercially, but because every one of them enjoyed splendid health and most troubles, she decided after she reached the sixty mark, stemmed from sickness and the disabilities that got between one and one’s indulgences.
Apart from that one frightful period in ‘65, when Adam had lost his leg, Tryst had never been a home of mourning. Unlike most women of her generation, she had succeeded in rearing the nine children she had borne between 1860 and 1879 without a single procession to the churchyard. Their illnesses, if you could call them that, were trivial and transient, and their luck held out in other ways. Six of them were comfortably settled now and each, in his or her own way, had found a partner that could, at a pinch, be reckoned “suitable.” Not, of course, a unique being like Adam, but someone who adapted to their several idiosyncrasies and that, she supposed, was rare when you thought in terms of half-dozens.
Stella had made that unfortunate first marriage, but luck (plus her mother’s despatch and sagacity) had put that right in no time. Alex had survived any number of bloody fields without so much as a grazed knee, whereas the younger ones, although getting into innumerable scrapes, all seemed to possess a degree of resilience that equipped them to evade the full consequences of wrong-headed decisions and the occasional folly. Even Joanna, who had played fast and loose with young Jack-o’Lantern Coles, and got herself with child, had succeeded in disguising a crass piece of idiocy as a romantic adventure. Alone among them Henrietta was privy to the fact that Joanna’s eldest child, now eleven, had “come across the fields” as they used to say. Helen’s future worried her a little. It couldn’t be good for health or child-bearing to go traipsing round the world in the wake of a medical missionary, but it was her life and she had chosen it and if, by now, she wished to change it, then she could use her native wit to persuade that solemn stick Rowland to abandon such unrewarding work, come home, and buy a lucrative practice in Kent, for the Coleses were known to have made a fortune peddling pills, and Rowland, eldest of the family, was likely to be rich when his father died.
As for Giles, he seemed contented enough these days, despite his eccentric approach to a war that had engulfed two of his brothers, and that flighty wife of his had at last succeeded in presenting him with a son, something Henrietta had thought unlikely after thirteen years of childless marriage. George and Edward were both as obsessed with the business as Adam had been until recently, and Margaret, the family postscript, seemed happy enough mooning about the fields and coppices with her clutter of paints and canvases.
There remained Hugo, the family clown, but he too had had an astonishing run of luck so far, first being granted licence to pursue athletics as a career (only a father as tolerant as Adam would have countenanced that!), then falling into the lap of that extraordinary woman who made a positive fetish of a boy whom Adam had often dismissed as “fifteen stone of musclebound bacon.”
All in all an unbroken run of luck, stretching over a period of more than thirty years, and she saw no reason to suppose it would not continue, at least for as long as she retained her faculties and could keep a sharp lookout for squalls. For in a way Henrietta took upon herself most of the credit for this galaxy of achievement. After all, it was she who had borne the brunt of their upbringing, for Adam had always been immersed in that other family of his—the Swann network of depots and establishments that sometimes seemed to her to haul half the merchandise of the Empire from one point to another. If the children had turned out well, then they had her rather than him to thank for it. And after her, she supposed, that dear, dogged Phoebe Fraser, who had served them so selflessly since Stella and Alex were toddlers.
As the seasons passed, Henrietta came to assume that the Swanns were immune from the disasters and tragedies of less fortunate families and more and more, as she grew older and more prescient, she half-identified with that other matriarch at Windsor, whose even larger brood enjoyed the same ascendancy. It was therefore with a sense of appalling shock that she read the express letter from Alex, postmarked Durban, telling that Hugo, God help the boy, had been shot through the head in a Boer ambush, and although well on the road to recovery, was temporarily blinded. Alex stressed the word “temporarily,” pointing out that Hugo was scheduled for a long and complicated course of treatment on his return home but he added, as a kind of buffer against despair, that he was likely to lose the sight of one eye and have limited vision in the other.
For days after she had received this frightful news, Henrietta was stunned. Nothing Adam could say helped her adjust to it, for Hugo, admittedly the slowest witted of the family, had been its prime physical product. Just as she took pride in Alex’s invulnerability, George’s cleverness, Giles’s erudition, and the girls’ undeniable charms, so she basked in Hugo’s rare beauty, seeing him as a reincarnation of a Greek demigod, described in Mr. Kingsley’s book, The Heroes. She simply could not picture Hugo as a big, helpless baby, led about by others and sitting mute while somebody cut up his meat or found his trousers. He had always possessed such an abundance of effortless grace, and of all the boys he seemed the one less equipped to adapt to a terrible handicap of that kind. But as the shock wave receded somewhat her anger mounted against that bustling, rather overpowering woman who had landed him into such a mess. Adam had to take a stern line with her, pointing out that Hugo was a grown man and could have made his own decision about volunteering for active service. He was also harsh enough to rap her knuckles about her own contribution, saying sharply for him, “Listen here, Hetty. I won’t have that! It’s not the slightest use taking that line and throwing your dignity to the winds, I seem to recall you were among a majority here who clamoured for war with Kruger and his burghers. I daresay a good many of them have been shot through the head and lost their farms into the bargain. It’s a terrible thing for a boy to face a handicap of that kind, and I’m in a better position to appreciate that than most, having stumped through half a lifetime with a tin leg on account of a fool who couldn’t read a railway time-table. But upbraiding Sybil Uskdale and the Boers won’t help any of us, least of all you. If people go to war some of them come out of it in worse shape than they went in and at least the boy’s alive. Do you know how many men have died from enteric fever out there on that veldt?”
“I’m not the least bit concerned with them,” she snapped, “for they aren’t my sons.”
“They’re somebody’s sons, and they lost their lives in what I think a damned poor cause. Sooner or later everyone will come round to that view. Even Hugo.”
“Is that going to help him?”
“No, but neither is adding to that wretched woman’s tragedy by letting her know you lay the blame at her door. She’s all he’s got now, for he’ll never run again, and if I’m not mistaken he’ll realise that.”
“I never thought to hear you talk so cold-bloodedly about your own flesh and blood!” she wailed.
“I’m not cold-blooded!” he growled. “I’m simply trying to make the best of what can’t be altered. She’ll make sure he gets the best treatment in the world, and she’s in a better position to do it than we are!”
It provoked one of their rare, smouldering quarrels that persisted right into early July, when a wire came informing them that a shipload of wounded was arriving at Southampton and they could go along the coast and meet Hugo and Sybil on disembarkation. There was no question of bringing him home. He was scheduled to go straight into a private clinic, supervised by Sir Oscar Firbright, the famous eye specialist, there to undergo further surgery for several months.
* * *
It was on the quay, as the wounded were being carried ashore into the waiting hospital trains, that she first questioned her attitude and began to reflect upon Adam’s forthright advice. The change was not effected by the sight of so much suffering but by her first glimpse of Sybil during the brief interval before the hospital train pulled out.
The change in her was shattering. She seemed to Henrietta no more than a ghost of the brilliant creature who had bounced up the steps of Tryst seven months ago, dragging Hugo in her wake like a barge towed by a splendidly equipped steamer. Her cold, classical beauty was all but gone. Traces of its sparkle lingered in the hard blue eyes, but the cheeks were pitifully hollow, the full, sensual mouth dragged down at the corners, and the famous Uskdale bloom had been drained from her cheeks by the South African sun, the reality of war, or both. Her figure, Henrietta recalled, had been slight but very trim at that spectacular wedding at St. Margaret’s. Now it seemed angular and graceless, whereas her voice, hitherto slightly hectoring, had dwindled to a murmur little above a whisper as she said, brushing Henrietta’s cheek, “You don’t have to berate me, Mamma. I’ve been doing that for myself all these weeks. But the only thing that matters now is to get him well and in a frame of mind when he’ll put his trust in his surgeons and doctors. That’s my responsibility mainly but you can help if you will. Remind him he’s so much to live for, even if it takes him a year to adjust to not seeing.”
“Won’t he… isn’t he likely to see at all?” Henrietta had stammered. “I mean… isn’t recovery a possibility?”
“No, it isn’t,” Sybil said, staring down at her elegant boots. “There’s no point in lying to you or to myself any longer. The best we can hope for is a glimmer of sight in his right eye, and I’ll thank God to the end of my life if we can achieve even that. I have to go now. I’m travelling on with the unit. It was kind of you both to come all this way for a few minutes.”
She boarded the train then, without a backward glance, and Henrietta, eyes blurred with tears, accompanied Adam across the platform to where the civilian boat-train to London awaited them in a siding. He said, with something between a sigh and a groan, “Well, there’s the war everybody wanted,” but then, in a milder tone, “He’s in good hands, Hetty. Something about that woman I like, despite everything. Spunk, maybe.”
They had arranged to stay at the Norfolk overnight before returning home and as the cab dropped them off at the portals her eye caught a newspaper placard reading
“
Peking: Massacre Feared.” Her heavy heart gave a great leap and then seemed to subside well below the navel, for she remembered Joanna writing to her only last week saying that Helen had written to her in May, telling her that she was based on Peking but sometimes accompanied Rowley to help out at out-lying surgeries. She caught Adam’s arm as he was paying off the cabbie and said, “Look at that! It can’t be that Helen and Rowland are involved…” and he said, gruffly, “Come inside and take tea. I can tell you more than you’re likely to learn from the
Daily Mail,
” and she went into the tea-room where he ordered tea and buttered scones with an air of gravity that warned her he must have been aware of Helen’s danger for some time but had postponed telling her, probably on account of Hugo. She said, “Tell me, Adam. I’ve a right to know.”
“Nobody knows anything for a fact. It’s all guesswork so far. That, and the kind of sensation papers thrive on. You knew there had been unrest in North China, didn’t you?”
“No, I haven’t even glanced at a paper since we heard about Hugo. Every page was full of war news, and it only made me more miserable than ever.”
“Well, there’s been an uprising of some kind. A secret society they call the Boxers has been working up a hate campaign against the foreigners, especially the missionaries. They’ve even killed one or two, but not in her province, somewhere a long way to the north and west.”
“But it actually mentioned Peking on that poster.”
“There’s an unconfirmed report from Hong Kong about the foreign community there. A German diplomat has been killed and our Government has asked their Government to protect British nationals.”
“Can’t we find out anything specific about her? I don’t think I could stand another shock of that kind.”
He took her hand and pressed it. “Leave it to me. I’ll find out somehow. I’ve got a good agent in Hong Kong and I’d believe anything he wired me, but I can’t do it tonight. I’ll get the wheels moving first thing in the morning. I know roughly where that chap Coles operates and will put some feelers out.” He paused, still holding her hand and regarding her with the vaguest suspicion of a twinkle. “Poor old Hetty, you are having a time of it! Haven’t seen you this way for long enough. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember how long.”
“I can,” she said, sombrely, “since the time of that rail crash all of thirty-five years ago.”
“Well,” he said, “we all get our turn if we hang around long enough.” And then, “See here, we’re not doing Hugo or Helen any good by moping. How would you like to go to a music hall and don’t pretend it isn’t ‘decent’. It’s the best way I know of holding trouble at bay for a couple of hours.”
She said, unexpectedly, “I’ll do anything to take my mind off Hugo. What time do they start? Is it after or before dinner?”
“Both,” he said, grinning, “but I’d best take you to the first house. The second gets a bit rowdy.”
She thought:
That’s the really comforting thing about him. He knows things. About what’s going on in Peking and what time the curtains at music-halls go up. He knows me, too, enough to give me that facesaver about the propriety of visiting a music-hall on a night like this… She finished her tea and went up to their roo
m for a rest and a wash.
He knew the entertainment world, too, it proved, for he chose the “Star” where the bill included the great illusionist Devant and a galaxy of eccentric comedians and daring acrobats, the latter all foreigners, she noted, working in family groups. For two hours she all but forgot her misery watching pyramids of men, women, and children in skin-tight costumes pile themselves almost as high as the proscenium arch, girls presumably sawn in half skip nimbly from gaudily painted closets shouting “Hoi!” as they flashed wide, toothy smiles at the audience, short fat men in baggy trousers screaming abuse at tall thin men in evening dress, soubrettes who specialised in songs that would never have been tolerated twenty years ago but seemed now to delight the patrons, and jugglers who whirled clubs so rapidly that it made one dizzy to watch. He said, as they settled into a hansom and made their way back to supper, “Well, Hetty?” and she kissed him impulsively on the cheek and then, quite irrationally, began to cry. Just a little; just enough to require a furtive dab or two between lamp-standards as they bowled down Fleet Street, past the Law Courts and into the Strand. He didn’t notice. Or pretended he didn’t.