Читать книгу The Lacquer Lady - Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse - Страница 13

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PAPA, sorry for Fanny’s disappointment in the matter of the Palace summons, took her and Agatha one evening up to the top of Mandalay Hill. The endless flights of stone steps cut into its rocky flank were tiresome to lazy Fanny, but once at the top she felt it had been worth it. For there, stretched out before her, the City of Gems lay open to her eager eyes. The four-square moat edged it about with gleaming silver, and within its rose-red battlements, among lawns and trees of fresh green, were clustered its myriad houses, its golden spires; its scarlet palaces, its gold and white pagodas, and there was the great central pyathat, the brilliant beacon that marked the Lion Throne of the Arbiter of Existence, the Lord of the Rising Sun, the Lord of the Celestial Elephant—King Mindoon. Exquisite and insolent, that great seven-storied pyathat stood gleaming as though afire in the burnished light of the evening sun. Fanny fixed her eyes upon it, hardly heeding the spectacle of the white Incomparable Pagoda, of the lovely curves of the distant river, the Sagaing hills soft and purple beyond the further banks. Agatha also drew a breath of amazement and stood gazing. But when Fanny at last turned her shining gaze upon her, something naked and avid in the younger girl’s look disturbed her.

“Fanny ...” she said, “Fanny ... it’s like when the devil took Our Lord up on to the high mountain and showed Him the kingdoms of the world.”

Fanny nodded absently, then laughed.

The next day when Mr. Moroni disappeared as usual through the great gates, Fanny watched him go with wistful eyes.

“Won’t they send for us soon?” she asked her mother, who was lying back in her dingy wrapper, rocking herself placidly.

“Wait, wait. You always want things in such a hurry, Fanny.”

How Fanny envied Mademoiselle Delange, tall, calm, business-like, who disappeared through the great gates every day, generally bearing a little present for the Queens in a basket over her arm. But then Mademoiselle was over thirty and had already been there several years. She was well known and liked at the Palace. She had plenty of character and was afraid of no one. Fanny could pretend not to be afraid, but she knew only too well how liable she was to sudden panic, that stripped her very soul and laid it bare.

At last, without any warning, the great day came. Mr. Moroni arrived home one evening and announced that his wife and daughter were to call on the Alè Nammadaw Queen, Sinbyew-mashin, the following morning.

Fanny slept little that night, and next morning, lazy as she usually was, she was dressed in her freshest white muslin, a new one with a bustle, and a polonaise with yellow ribbons, long before she could induce her mother even to take her bath. Fanny was in a nervous fret by the time the old lady was finally corseted and got, with many complaints, into a European gown. Mrs. Moroni much preferred to revert to the costume of her nation, in which she looked a pleasant old lady enough, but now to please Fanny she wore a grass-green satin, straining very much at the seams of its close-fitting bodice. The useless little bonnet of white lace was tipped coquettishly forward on her black, oily hair and was tied with green ribbons under her ample chins. The parasol lined with green, which Fanny had brought from England, was clasped in a podgy hand clad in a lavender-kid glove, over the fingers of which she wore the rings that from time to time the Queens had presented to her.

Fanny gazed despairingly when all was done and the feeling that everything was not well depressed her. Perhaps the old lady would have looked better in one of her beautiful silk tameins with the white muslin jacket and the silk neckerchief that make the Burmese look so bright and fresh. However, it was too late now; besides, Fanny was determined that they must look as European as possible, and if Mrs. Moroni looked none too well, she, Fanny, could draw all eyes to herself without misgivings.

Fanny stood and admired herself in the small, spotted mirror and longed for the day when she would be able to see herself full length in a great mirror with a gilt frame. Papa had promised that next time he went to Rangoon he would buy her one. Meanwhile, she must do as best she could in this ridiculous little postage-stamp of an affair. Fanny drew on a new pair of kid gloves with two buttons each, settled the velvet ribbon with the gold locket round her neck, tilted her coquettish little straw hat, from which bright red cherries dangled, further forward over her forehead and picked up her scarlet parasol. Yes, whoever else was wrong in Mandalay that morning, there was no doubt that she was perfection.

She waited impatiently while two servants heaved and pushed Mrs. Moroni’s bulk into the brightly-painted bullock-cart, and then with a lithe movement of her apparently boneless little figure, she too disposed herself upon the mattress on the floor of the cart, the servant with the tray of presents followed, and the bullocks started off at a brisk trot over the rough road. A very few minutes of this and Fanny wished with all her heart that she had walked, even in the high-heeled French slippers that hurt her feet, but it was too late for lamentations now, the springless cart bounced and crashed over the holes and hummocks in the road, and Fanny held her hat with one hand and clasped the side of the bullock-wagon with the other, praying that by the time they reached the Palace her hair might not have come down. But soon the red battlements came into view, and everything except eager anticipation left Fanny’s mind. At last, at last—she was driving over the curved bridge, dazzling white as snow, and the next moment the bullock-cart had arrived at the great gateway and was being challenged by the barefoot sentries. Then the cart passed through, and Fanny found herself within the Shway Myodaw, the Royal Golden City.

Ridiculously there ran through her head a line of the hymn she had sung so often at Miss Patterson’s—“Once in Royal David’s City ...” She peered out eagerly from the arch of the bullock-cart. A group of soldiers in tin hats that glittered in the sun, and long, red cloth coats embroidered with white, over ballooning white breeches, stood and stared at the bullock-cart and its occupants. Fanny saw that beneath the tin hats they wore red velvet caps with wing-shaped ear-pieces edged with gold and silver tinsel.

The next moment an officer came up and spoke to her mother in Burmese. His tin hat was trimmed with a great roll of twisted gold tinsel, and his long flowing coat of crimson velvet, that fell to his heels was bordered with gold, while on his shoulders epaulettes, like the fantastic wings of a great bird, made a sort of little cape edged with gold. He was a pleasant, impudent-looking young fellow with the high cheek-bones of the Shans, and a bright roving eye which settled admiringly on Fanny. As ever, at the hint of approbation her spirits rose again.

This City of many thousand souls was a very different place from the dusty town-without-the-walls! True, there were masses of wooden houses here as there, but the grass was green about them and everywhere there was movement. Her mother, falling naturally into Burmese, explained to her that here lived shopkeepers, merchants, courtiers, officials and Ministers, and that through the next barrier, in an inner enclosure, lived the greatest and most important, the Prime Minister, the War Lord and such god-like beings.

“See,” said Mrs. Moroni, “look quickly, Fanny, here comes a Minister in his carrying chair.”

“Where, where?” cried Fanny, and followed the direction in which her mother’s finger pointed. Towards them there advanced at a swinging trot a huge red lacquer chair with panels of carved gold, it hung on two scarlet poles and was borne by sixteen panting men. Sitting in it under an orange umbrella was an old man with a pale Mongolian face and drooping black moustaches. He was dressed in apricot velvet trimmed with gold braid that glittered in the sun, his high hat glittered with thin beaten gold, his fine, pale yellow hands lay upon his knees. His eyes, serene, inscrutable, gazed calmly in front of him.

“It’s the Kinwoon Mingyi,” whispered Mrs. Moroni reverentially as the bullock-cart drew aside to let King Mindoon’s Prime Minister be borne past, with a thudding of bare feet and the sound of heavy breathing from the bearers. The huge scarlet lacquer conveyance passed them and went on down the straight white road.

At the next gate Mrs. Moroni and Fanny dismounted, not without much groaning on the part of the old lady, who was stiff from the cramped position in which she had had to sit and from the fierce jolting, but Fanny leapt out lightly as a bird and stood arranging her muslin flounces. Then they were conducted through the gate into the next enclosure. In this enclosure also the straight streets cut across each other at right angles. Before them on their left was the Tooth Relic Tower, the carvings on its white walls making faint blue shadows in the strong sunlight, and on their right was the great Clock Tower, white also, from which the drum was sounded at every third hour night and day. Fanny stood still, gazing about her, so entranced she might easily have been run down by one of the many horsemen who seemed to gallop perpetually up and down the road with a whirl of flying draperies, but Mrs. Moroni, who was accustomed to these things, drew her to the side of the road, saying:

“My goodness, Fanny, do you want to be run over? You silly girl, come now.”

They passed the Hloot-daw, the Supreme Court of Mandalay. Like the Palace, it had great teak pillars, lacquered red below and gold above, and the tent-like curves of its roof were massed with carvings of strange figures and beasts and flowers, all very different from the buildings in the town-without-the-walls. In front of them was the famous Tagani or Red Gate, through whose massive wooden portals only the King and Queen, the Princes and Princesses of the blood royal, chief Ministers and the Ambassadors of foreign powers were allowed to pass on state occasions. Mrs. Moroni headed for a little postern at the side of the Tagani, a postern so low that even she, who was not a tall woman, had to bend her head to get through it. Thus did everyone who entered the precincts of the Palace have to pay reverence by bowing his head, whether he would or no, towards the great golden throne of the Monarch of the Universe. But little Fanny was so small she passed through head erect.