A Most Immoral Woman (9 page)

The following morning, Morrison awoke with an aversion to sunlight and a head pounding from the previous night’s excesses of alcohol and revelation. He thought despairingly, then crossly, of Mae.
Jameson. How could she?
He told himself that that was it. He was finished with her. Lesson learned. He was a busy man. He had more important things to think about than some faithless little American tart with such poor taste as to succumb to one such as Jameson. She was uncommonly charming and as accomplished in bed as any prostitute. But none of that was worth a farthing in the face of such duplicity and betrayal—not to mention lapse of taste.
Jameson
? Morrison had only had her that one time. It wasn’t as if they were betrothed.
Thank ye gods
!

No,
he thought.
It is impossible, inconceivable that she has ever been with Jameson as she has been with me. And yet, that mole…
Perhaps she had mentioned it to Jameson. She was, after all, a most uninhibited conversationalist and, for all her mother’s strictures, something of an actress as well. She might have spoken of it just for effect, much as she’d declared her intention to marry
a native that night after dinner in Mountain-Sea Pass. As much as it pained him to think that she would make such a personal revelation to the undeserving other, he concluded that he’d been a fool to have taken Jameson at his word. Jameson was an accursed liar. Morrison had done Mae a terrible disservice to think otherwise. He leapt out of bed and splashed his face with cold water. Hair wild, thoughts feral, he raced into his study.

Snapping open his rolltop desk, he snatched up the letter he had received from her the day before, reread it and smiled with relief. He smoothed down his blotting paper and dipped the nib of his pen in his inkwell. In a melting reply, he kissed her from the palms of her hands to the inside of her elbows, stroked her hair, held her close, called her ‘my darling Maysie’ and beseeched her to be true. He added a few barbed witticisms at the expense of C.D. Jameson, asked after her health and expressed his wish to be remembered to the Ragsdales. Sealing the envelope with wax, he impressed it with his seal and bid Kuan to post it forthwith. There would be no more entrusting of such missives to unreliable messengers, that was for certain.

The day passed in a flurry of work as Morrison gathered the material for another telegram to
The Times
. There were rumours that the Japanese were bombarding Vladivostok. Morrison did the rounds of Japanese diplomats and military attachés, each one of whom claimed to know less about it than the one before. When he tested some of Granger’s information on the Japanese military attaché Colonel Aoki, Aoki’s response was a single word, as dismissive in English as it was in French: ‘
Canard!
’

That afternoon, a new cable arrived from Granger with the instructions, ‘Say it comes from a reliable source but not from me or Newchang.’

Granger’s ineptitude nettled him. The whole point was reliability. If one was to make a reasonable judgment about a situation, one needed to know the facts. He could not rely on the bungling Granger for the truth about the war. It would be like relying on the malign Jameson for news about Mae. ‘All my work comes from a reliable source, otherwise I would not send it,’ he muttered as he consigned Granger’s work to the fire.

He was just replacing the poker when Kuan entered with another telegram, this one from James. A vision of himself as Gulliver in Lilliput, assailed and tied down by small men, came to Morrison as he took James’s cable to his desk to read.
Good god
. The report, intended for publication, was replete with news and speculation as to present and future movements of the Japanese army. Morrison considered this a shocking failure of judgment coming, as it did, from a correspondent who had seen action in the Boer Wars and the Sudan. How the Russians would have relished this information! Screwed up into a ball, James’s telegram followed Granger’s into the potbelly stove.

Younger men like Granger and James—and Egan for that matter—had vigour on their side; Morrison would happily acknowledge that. But discretion, reasonableness, calm-headedness and wisdom—such was the province of age.

As night fell, Morrison agonised over whether to write Mae another letter. He was not sure why he felt such a desperate need to persist. The pride that drove him also gave him pause. Jameson’s calumnies had rattled him more than he cared to admit.

On the following morning, Morrison slapped on his trilby, slung his cape over his shoulders and loped through the dusty streets towards and then through Ch’ien-men Gate. Once south of the gate, he plunged into the familiar, roiling public excitement
that the Chinese called ‘the hot and the noisy’, which characterised that part of Peking just south of the Tartar Wall known as the Chinese City. Here was enterprise, from the streetside barbers, scribes and fortune tellers to the bustling shops. Overhead dangled painted shop signs in the shapes of the goods on offer—wooden combs, decorative glass grapes, gourds for wine, the soles of men’s boots. From a pharmacy, with its infinite small drawers of herbs, wafted the mysterious, close smells of Chinese medicine into the street. From a teahouse came the staccato of a storyteller’s clappers, and already a crowd was forming outside the Heavenly Happy Tea Garden in Polishing Street, where one could watch moving pictures—‘electric shadows’—on equipment brought all the way from Germany. Further south were the wilder diversions of the Heavenly Bridge district, famous for its sing-song girls, flower houses and efficient gangs of tatterdemalions who could strip a man of his watch and purse before he sensed them coming.

Other foreigners of Morrison’s acquaintance were wont to declaim at length about the quotidian delights of the ancient capital. His friend Lady Susan Townshend was even writing a book about them—
My Chinese Notebook,
she was going to call it. She had shown him the draft. It was full of vivid descriptions of such adventures as riding in rough Peking carts (once was enough for Lady Susan) and visiting opium dens. Morrison was not immune to the exotic, the strange, the constant sensory assault that was China. Yet he could not help but feel that such literary effusions were the proper domain of women, dilettantes and professional travellers—not the professional journalist. Since the publication of
An Australian in China
almost ten years earlier, he’d barely confessed them to his journal.

Coming now upon a crowd gathered around some entertainment, he happily joined the throng. At its centre stood a man holding a stick on which three songbirds perched. A flick of the showman’s wrist sent the birds wheeling through the air. When he whistled, they landed back on the stick in turn, taking their bows by bobbing up and down. The onlookers laughed and applauded, rewarding him with a rain of copper coins.

Finally, Morrison arrived at his destination, Liu Li Chang, originally the site of the imperial kilns that produced the thousands of golden roof tiles for the palaces within the Forbidden City. Liu Li Chang was a thriving street of curio merchants and booksellers and one of Morrison’s favourite haunts in the capital. Past the ornate shopfronts lay treasure troves of rare books, fine calligraphy, old paintings and stone rubbings, as well as bibelots such as jade archery rings, snuff bottles and belt ornaments. The clicking of abacuses, the chink of lidded teacups on saucers and the rolling hum of negotiations were sounds that gladdened Morrison’s heart today more than usual.

Half an hour later, a small paper-wrapped parcel under his arm, Morrison passed whistling back through Ch’ien-men Gate. In a generous mood, he felt in his pocket for a few coins to throw the hollow-eyed beggars who were huddled against the wall like sacks of rags. These were the survivors; every morning a cart came to collect the bodies of those who had not made it through the night.

Back in the Tartar City, Morrison quickened his footsteps in the direction of Rue Marco Polo in the eastern part of the Legation Quarter, not far from the Ch’ien-man Gate, and the home of Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs Service. Hart was the most influential foreigner in the
entire Celestial Empire—‘Our Hart’, the Empress Dowager called him.

‘Ah, Dr Morrison.’ Hart emerged from his cluttered study with Morrison’s calling card in his hand. He was immaculate in grey-striped trousers and black vest and coat, his white beard neatly combed. The only discordant note in the ensemble was a tie of blue ribbon. Once, on a holiday in Peking’s Western Hills, Hart had famously reached for what he thought was his black tie, recoiling just in time, for the ‘tie’ was in fact a small, venomous snake. Since then, the Inspector-General had only worn ties of blue.

Though he was greeted cordially, Morrison never could escape the sensation that Hart viewed him with a similar wariness to that with which he beheld narrow black ties. He knew that Hart disapproved both of his harsh views on the Empress Dowager and his warmongering on behalf of Japan. For his part, Morrison suspected the Irishman, who had only returned to Europe twice in forty years and who had scandalously taken a native concubine, of viewing the world through Chinese lenses. Hart had outrageously described the Boxers as patriotic, their movement ‘justifiable’ in theory. It made Morrison’s blood boil. Yet for all his acquaintances in the Mandarinate, he trusted only Hart to provide him with an accurate sense of the court’s thinking on the war.

On this day, Morrison managed to extract only the most general sort of information from Hart: China would
most likely
remain neutral. With ongoing threats to Chinese and particularly Manchurian lives and property, however, Hart warned that neutrality might not be enforceable. The court should not be held responsible if there was some resistance to the Japanese incursion by the population. Beyond this, Hart could not or would not say.

As Morrison was taking his leave, Hart’s niece, the charming and clever Juliet Bredon, came in from a walk, apples in her cheeks. Five years earlier, on a group excursion to the Western Hills, Morrison and Juliet, then eighteen, had ducked into a Chinese temple to hide from a tedious old missionary. The crusty old man of God had found them anyway and insisted they join him for biscuits and tea. ‘Bad biscuits, worse tea,’ Morrison had observed afterwards, and young Juliet had laughed musically.

‘Hello, Dr Morrison,’ she greeted him with a happy smile. ‘We haven’t seen you for such a long while.’

‘Hello, Juliet.’ He smiled back. ‘You’re looking lovely this fine morning.’

‘Dr Morrison was just leaving,’ her uncle said.

Useless old sleevedog
, thought Morrison as he trudged towards his next appointment. It was with a Mandarin named Hwang and was ostensibly to congratulate him on winning one of the Ch’ing Court’s highest honours. Hwang and his interpreter, Kwang, received the Australian with elaborate courtesy, a plate of sesame-flavoured sweets, and cups of fragrant leaf tea from Hunan. Yet when Morrison tried to steer the topic on to the war, Hwang brought up the invasion of Tibet by British forces several months earlier.

‘The Tibet Expedition is wholly in China’s favour,’ Morrison argued. ‘The Russian Empire, as you know, is trying to encircle British India. If they succeed, it will benefit neither of our countries. And yet, as you are aware, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama is so friendly with the Russians he has a Russian courtier. It was widely rumoured that the Ch’ing Court was thinking to allow him to invite in the Russians. England does not wish Tibet to remain a wild and barbarian country without rulers. But neither
does it want to see Tibet fall under the shadow of the Tsar’s empire. No, it must become another province of China, governed as Yunnan and Szechuan are.’

Kwang translated for Hwang and then conveyed Hwang’s response: ‘Does England itself really have no territorial designs on Tibet?’

‘We would not take one foot. It is China that must make Tibet strong.’

‘Correct me if I am mistaken,’ Kwang said after a thoughtful pause, ‘but I recall that in 1900, Mr Younghusband wrote a letter to your own honourable newspaper. I read it and memorised it, for a facility for memorisation is the benefit of my poor education in the Chinese classics. If you will permit me, I’d like to recite a line in the letter that I have never forgotten…’

Morrison nodded, setting his jaw against the inevitable. He had a fair idea of what he was about to hear.

‘He said, and I quote, “The earth is too small, the portion of it they occupy is too big and rich, and the intercourse of nations is now too intimate to permit the Chinese keeping China to themselves.”’ Kwang translated what he had said for Hwang before returning his attention to their guest. ‘What do you think of that, Dr Morrison?’

‘I do believe,’ Morrison replied in a voice that didn’t admit any doubt, ‘that the intercourse of nations has benefited China as it benefits Britain.’

Hwang, upon receiving the translation, smiled and urged more tea on his guest. Morrison understood that to be a signal to take his leave.

Damned stupid day,
Morrison thought as he trudged home. But then he noticed the glow of buds on the tendrils of the
capital’s willow trees and how the canals had begun to thaw, though a fringe of ice still clung to the edges of the man-made lakes. A swooping music filled the air. Lifting his gaze, he watched a flock of snow-flower pigeons soar past, lacquered bamboo whistles fastened to their tails with fine copper wire. The birds circled against a brilliant blue sky, looping over the sparkling golden roofs of the palace. His spirits rose. The remnants of his gloom evaporated in the spring sunshine. He picked up his pace.

Back home, Cook’s new lark was singing in its bamboo cage and the Lion’s Head goldfish, beloved of all his servants, chased the dragonflies that hovered over their blue-and-white ceramic tub. The potted orchids lovingly cultivated by Kuan had days earlier erupted in delicate white-and-pink blooms. Grass was sprouting anew between the paving stones of the courtyard and in tufts from the roof tiles. Nature’s pulse was quickening. Morrison would not wait on the mail or fret for one minute longer.