A Most Immoral Woman (10 page)

‘Kuan!’

His Boy hurried out of the house in response.

‘We’re going to Tientsin.’ Then his face fell, for Kuan handed him a telegram. Lionel James was on his way to Peking. Tientsin would have to wait. Whilst a visit from Granger wouldn’t have kept Morrison from his travels, James, unfortunately, was a different story.

More than two weeks had passed since he’d met Miss Mae Ruth Perkins, and one month since the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Both seemed as distant as history.

‘So there we are in Yokohama, in this room with walls made out of, what, toothpicks and paper, and I’ve got my boots off. I don’t feel happy about that at all. We’re sitting cross-legged. It’s putting my legs to sleep. Brinkley’s pushing all these damned oddly shaped little dishes at me. I hardly recognise a thing. All very pretty but it doesn’t look like food.
This
is food.’ Lionel James pointed to his plate of boiled mutton with caper sauce. ‘You know what all that sushi-shimi stuff looked like to me? It looked just like the titbits of information on the war that the Japanese government is doling out to correspondents in lieu of access to the front. Nicely packaged, wholly insubstantial. This doesn’t bother our colleague Brinkley, though. Neither the quality of the information nor the food. Our man in Japan has gone completely native. Speaks the lingo, eats raw fish with sticks, has taken a little Japanese missus. He’s telling me the Japanese have the most developed aesthetic in the world; couldn’t be more proud of his adopted country’s achievements if they were his own. He pushes a
plate towards me. On it is something that looks like wet shoelaces left behind by leprechauns. “Seaweed,” he says, as if that will really make me go for it. Then he urges on me something that looks like a block of milk. It falls apart on my camp fork and tastes like damp. He tells me it has as much protein as a plate of chops. That’s when I know he has passed the point of no return. I had a damned hard time keeping him on the subject.’

‘Did you meet his wife?’ Morrison asked.

‘No. I hear she is a pretty sort.’

‘That she is. It’s interesting to observe them together, for you can find the key to Brinkley in their interaction. She appears frail and ladylike, and makes a great show of deferring to her husband. In truth, she leads him by the nose no less surely than if she’d put a ring through it, as the farmers here do with their buffalo. Our uxorious colleague submits to her—and to her country—as wholeheartedly as a Mohammedan submits to Allah. I am guessing that your plan to report from the scene of the action makes him nervous, though he chooses an approach of Oriental indirectness by which to communicate his concerns.’

‘I don’t understand his reservations. The plan is a boon to our mutual employer and to journalism itself!’ James thumped the table. The crockery danced. Kuan poked his head in to see if anything was the matter. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ James apologised as the vibrations settled.

When Morrison had described James earlier to Dumas, he’d mentioned his determination. He’d forgotten that his colleague’s other leading quality was rampant excitability.

‘G.E.,’ James continued, ‘I’ve reported from Africa and India. I’ve had to get my reports out by pigeons, camels, horses, skin-floats, heliographs, bottles, field telegraph, boats and flags, cutthroat
Pathans and long-limbed Ethiopians. It is ludicrous in this modern age, with all the advances made in wireless telegraphy, that we must take such risks. We have steam-powered rotary presses that can print hundreds of thousands of newspapers in an hour. But what’s the point if the news is stale?’ He went to bang on the table again but stopped himself just in time. ‘The public deserves better.
We
deserve better. The future of correspondence rests with the science of Hertzian waves.’

‘Indeed. This is the twentieth century after all.’ Morrison unexpectedly found himself infected with his colleague’s enthusiasm.

A grateful smile lit James’s face for a moment as he fumbled in his pockets for tobacco pouch and pipe.

‘Here’s the problem with Brinkley,’ Morrison said, watching James prepare his smoke with practised, yellow-stained fingers. ‘It’s two problems really. One is pressure from the Japanese. They’re worried about the difficulty of censoring your reports. As you know, they’re fanatical about controlling news from the battlefield. Brinkley knows that if the Japanese have any complaints, they will go to him.’

‘I will take full responsibility for my reports.’

‘That’s not how it works in the Orient.’

‘I’m not an Oriental. What’s the second problem?’

‘It’s obvious. The Japanese have been refusing all journalists, and most military attachés, access to the front. And so any news that they had given
The Times
permission to steam straight into the Siege of Port Arthur, on its own boat no less, would incite the rest of the correspondents violently. Your reports will make their dispatches look even more belated and second-hand than they are. Never mind the Japanese navy—the other correspondents will be
watching you like a hawk. This naturally places Brinkley, as your colleague, in a deucedly awkward position.’

James sucked on his pipe, unmoved, filling the room with the scent of tobacco and a cloud of stubbornness. ‘That’s not my concern.’

Morrison liked James. He wanted him and
The Times
to succeed. He would try to make it happen—no, he
would
make it happen. It occurred to him that he was at an age and in a position in life where he ought to be able to forgo the sort of compromises forced upon youth. He did not need to sleep in short beds any longer. He had been recently unbalanced by romantic obsession and underemployment; a focus, a mission, would restore him. ‘We will get Britain’s minister in Japan, Sir Claude MacDonald, to help us.’ Morrison heard himself say the words ‘we’ and ‘us’. He was committed. It felt good.

‘Do you know Sir Claude?’ James asked hopefully. ‘Brinkley said that Sir Claude has already told him that we’re wasting our time and our employer’s money. Noel, the admiral in charge of the China Station, is apparently applying considerable pressure on the minister to go against us. Brinkley says Noel is furious at the thought that through some blunder or indiscretion we might compromise British neutrality. Or create some sort of precedent by which journalists could demand access to any future theatre of war and the right to report from it unhindered. I suspect that is the real problem,
franchement.
’ James pronounced the French word like a true Englishman, biting down on the ‘ch’ as though it were crackling.

‘You’d be right about that,’ Morrison said. ‘The thing about MacDonald is that he may have been a good military officer but he doesn’t have the marrow for diplomacy. He needs to be able to
stand up to the likes of Noel. You know, they say Lord Salisbury only appointed MacDonald minister because Salisbury believed that MacDonald was in possession of evidence proving that he, Salisbury, was Jack the Ripper.’

James’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. ‘Is there any truth—’

‘No of course not,’ Morrison replied. ‘It’s just scuttlebutt. But it’s true that MacDonald is a vacillating and selfish old dry-as-dust who, just as water always flows downhill, will always do what’s easiest for himself. Especially if he is being pressured. You know the old joke about the difference between a diplomat and a virgin?’

‘What’s that?’

‘If a diplomat says
yes
, he means
perhaps
. If a diplomat says
perhaps
, he means
no
. If a diplomat says
no
, he’s no diplomat.’

‘And the virgin?’

‘If a virgin says
no
, she means
perhaps
. If a virgin says
perhaps
, she means
yes
. If a virgin says
yes
—well, she’s no virgin.’

‘Ha. I must remember that one.’

‘Anyway, the point is—best to act discreetly for the time being. And work on the Japanese. The rest will fall into line if you can get past them.’

‘I am the soul of discretion,’ James asserted. ‘And I am working on the Japanese.’

There was something in the way James said this that made Morrison think there was something else to the story. But if he had been hinting at something, he offered no further clues.

‘All right then,’ Morrison said after a pause. ‘I shall write to Sir Claude forthwith. I shall not mention anything about the neutrality issue as that could be tricky. Instead, in my letter I shall
impress upon him how, if you are allowed to report directly from the front,
The Times
will be the paper of record on this war. It will reflect well on all of us and be to the glory of Britannia. I shall compliment him on the foresight and spine that he will have displayed in standing with us and make it clear that his hand will be one of those that has written this new page in the history of journalism.’

Morrison drank in the admiration on James’s face like a tonic.

When Dumas arrived from Tientsin on the evening train, Morrison related the gist of his conversation with Lionel James.

‘Let us hope permission is forthcoming,’ Dumas said. ‘Where is your man now?’

‘On his way back to Japan.’

‘And your plans?’

‘I am stuck here for another day doing the rounds of the ministers and attachés on his behalf. As for my own best plan of action, I am still mulling that over.’

‘With regard to Sir Claude? It sounds to me like you’ve worked it out rather well.’

‘No. I’m speaking of the whole distasteful business with Jameson. It has been eating at me.’

‘Ah. Why not call Jameson’s bluff?’ Dumas suggested. ‘If he’s telling the truth, then it’s better that you know. If he was only trying to rile you, that should become apparent soon enough. Ask him over in company and see if he sticks to his line.’

‘Good thinking.’

Morrison dashed off a note asking Jameson to luncheon the
next day. He also invited some others to whom he owed invitations, including the British military officer Colonel Bagshawe, a man so placid he appeared somnambulant, and his excitable wife; Mrs Williams, a platitudinous Englishwoman whose husband owned a Yangtze steamer; and, gritting his teeth, the Nisbets.

And so it was over lunch the next day that Jameson, unprompted, regaled Mrs Bagshawe and Mrs Nisbet, between whom he was seated, with the details of what he claimed to be his ongoing affair with Miss Mae Perkins. The shock on Mrs Nisbet’s face and the delight on Mrs Bagshawe’s roused Jameson to deliver an oration as slanderous as it was detailed.

Villainous man
, Morrison seethed.
Clearly a sordid fantasy all of his own and nowise amusing! He’s read
Venus in Furs
and let his wretched imagination run away with him! She is not that way inclined.
She had suggested nothing of the sort to him anyway, not that he would have submitted to it. Jameson’s own perversions, he concluded, were clearly of the most wretched nature.

His mood grew acerbic. When Colonel Bagshawe playfully mentioned British Legation Secretary Reginald Tower’s propensity to fall asleep at formal dinners, Morrison snapped, ‘No one is ever sorry about that, much preferring Tower asleep to Tower orating.’ Mrs Williams mentioned that on their last visit to London she and Mr Williams had seen ‘that other famous Australian’, Nellie Melba, in concert. ‘Madame Melba!’ Morrison exclaimed. ‘That woman has the manners of a lime-juicer. She drinks, uses foul language and at her table permits a ribald conversation that would shock any decent lady.’
Though probably no worse than I have just tolerated at my own

His guests bent to their plates. Dumas worried his sideburns until they stood at angles from his cheeks. Jameson remained offensively cheerful.

Morrison was as relieved as everyone else when the luncheon drew to a close. Worn out by his own cantankerousness, he tidied his correspondence, went out to pace the Tartar Wall and retired early that evening to read. Two days before, Menzies had sent him a gift of a large box of books from the English bookseller in Tientsin. On top of the pile, a slim volume with an attractive dustcover caught his eye:
Anna Lombard
, the latest novel by Victoria Cross.
Anna Lombard
had sold millions of copies worldwide to become the bestselling book of its time. Morrison had heard that the author identified with the New Woman movement and that the novel had stirred considerable scandal. This had intrigued him but he had not been able to procure a copy before now.

Turning up the spirit lamp, he settled himself in his favourite reading chair, tie loosened and carpet slippers replacing his brogues. Despite the advent of spring, the northern Chinese evenings were still chilly. He pulled a woollen rug over his lap. Kuan had placed a brazier at his feet. The kettle on the potbellied stove wheezed softly. A cart mule clip-clopped along the lane with heavy footsteps, bell tinkling with every sway of its neck.

Morrison lost himself in the voluptuous Indian night of the novel, in which the purple sky was ‘throbbing, beating, palpitating with the light of stars and planets’, and in which the ‘soft, hot air itself seems to breathe of the passions’ and tropical flowers released their cloying perfume. He chuckled to himself at the male narrator Gerald’s description of the cackle-headed females at a colonial ball. He grew as interested as Gerald himself in the appearance of the cultivated and passionate beauty Anna Lombard. He nodded with
recognition as Gerald remarked that, having come to the East, he wished never to return, for the Orient ‘holds one with too many hands’. And he suffered a shock almost equal to Gerald’s when he discovered that the brilliant Anna had not only taken a native Pathan for a lover but, outrageously, a
husband
. The authoress lingered long on her staggeringly wanton descriptions of the Pathan’s masculine yet sensual beauty—as if that excused the white woman’s passion. His indignation mounting, Morrison turned the pages ever more swiftly, appalled by how Gerald passively accepted every insult to his British manliness. Loving Anna with a steadfast heart, Gerald waited for her to come back to him with almost—it had to be said—
female
devotion. Reaching the last page, Morrison snapped the book shut. He now understood why some of the critics called the book ‘disgusting’ and ‘thoroughly impure’, even as others—no doubt women hiding behind male pseudonyms—pronounced it ‘remarkable’ and ‘difficult to praise too highly’.

The illusion of subcontinental heat disappeared from the cold Peking night. He would go to bed, but not before recording in his journal in a firm, certain hand that
Anna Lombard
was
the most immoral work
he had ever read. George Ernest Morrison could be very assured in his opinions about the immorality of other people and particularly women: Nellie Melba, the Empress Dowager, Anna Lombard and…No. Jameson was a liar, a masturbatory fabulist.

Morrison’s dreams that night were dense and scented with jasmine.

The following morning, the eighteenth of March, snowflakes swirled through the air. Spring may have been retreating but Morrison was advancing. He bounded out of bed.

‘Kuan! We’re going to Tientsin. Get us tickets on the first train out.’