Читать книгу The Vintage of Yon Yee - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 10

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“A stickler who never conforms,” Paul Trench had called Mary Saunders years ago. He had neither said nor meant it unkindly. Trench was never unkind, and he was one of the few discerning ones who liked Lady Saunders.

His comment had not been unjust. Mary Saunders invariably did as she chose. But no one else was allowed to deviate by a hair’s width from the strict rules of best behavior—if she could prevent it.

She disapproved of the new lax ways, tolerated no display of them in her house. Consequently her functions usually were a trifle stiff; their stiffness appetizingly relieved by the tang of her acid tongue. Many feared her comments, but most of her acquaintances liked to hear her quick, caustic talk, and endured the worst she could say or do, because she was such good fun.

Oddly enough the picnic at Si-wu degenerated into rather a go-as-you-please affair.

Like most eccentrics, Lady Saunders was a creature of variable moods.

She was careless to-day. Most of her guests followed her cue.

She marshaled them out to Si-wu. Arrived there, she fed them well—she never failed of that—and then told them to look after themselves and leave her in peace.

“Peace” meant a talk she wished to have with Trench and Allingham.

The others scattered willingly—in twos and threes as they chose.

Lady Saunders made herself very comfortable, at a safe distance from the Chinese who were repacking dishes and napery, and took Allingham and Trench with her.

“You may smoke, I suppose,” she told them grudgingly.

Paul Trench offered her his case.

“Nasty habit,” she snapped, selecting a cigarette. “Match!”

Allingham already had lit it for her.

“Listen!”

It had not occurred to either of the men to do anything else.

“I am going to sell my Nanking Road property.”

“That is what you must not do,” Trench told her. “You’ll never get so good an investment again. Mo Foy pays you an enormous rent—”

The woman chuckled. “Of course he does. A ridiculous rent, even for Shanghai. He knows that Ling Pi itches to rent it. Mo Foy would murder his grandmother to spite Ling Pi.”

“And he does all the repairs as well. It is iniquitous. But all the same you’d be insane to sell.”

“All the same I intend to. I am sick of wondering what is going to happen in Shanghai next.”

Allingham nodded. The other man’s face grew grave. Neither of them doubted that foreign holdings were in peril all over China; and nowhere perhaps more than in Shanghai. And they both agreed with the remark of Stephen Digby that Lady Saunders had the best business head in the Settlement.

“There will be no sound peace in China until every vestige of extraterritoriality has gone. It affronts China’s ‘face’ too abominably. You may rob a Chinese, and he may forget it. You may injure him in a dozen ways, and he will shrug and presently forgive and forget. But make him lose ‘face,’ and his resentment never will cease or grow less. It is even more true of the nation as a nation than it indisputably is true of every Chinese individual. The infamous Arrow War is over and done with. Some of its consequences remain and canker, of course. But the war itself is largely forgotten. And Gordon wiped out its shame, drew its sting, for the Chinese. One European who gives the Chinese a square deal, still more a European who treats them chivalrously, cuts deeper into Chinese sensibility and China’s memory than hundreds who misuse and trick her; such is Chinese gratitude, their unalterable quality of gratefulness,” Trench said.

“It is not the injury that extrality does China—if it does—that so exasperates the Chinese,” he went on, “and that they find unendurable, not the tangible, actual harm, but the loss of face, the hurt to self-respect. Extraterritoriality is damnable!”

“Rubbish!” But Mary Saunders said it with less conviction than she usually spoke.

“So it is,” Allingham agreed. “But when it goes, the chances are we’ll have to go with it. And when we do, it—our going—will be the greatest injury we’ve done China yet.”

“It’s a beastly tangle,” Trench agreed.

“China can’t afford to have us go. And where would her absconding politicians and generals take refuge, if the treaty ports weren’t ours, safe for them to scurry into and live like fighting-cocks?” the woman insisted.

“No,” Trench agreed, “China cannot afford to have us go. But she can afford it many times better than she can to have her self-respect bled white.”

“But we have promised to abrogate extraterritoriality, haven’t we? We and all the other Powers?”

“Yes”; Paul Trench answered her significantly, “we have promised.”

“But,” Allingham added, “the hitch is a nasty one.”

“Very nasty,” the other man emphasized. “The conditions we make are necessary, the merest self-preservation, God knows, but insulting. ‘Set your house in order, reform your laws, perfect your Courts and your judiciary, and we’ll see about relinquishing our exterial rights or at least modify them.’ Quite right, of course—from our angle—but what right have we to dictate to China how she governs her own country, works out her own salvation, if she can work it out? None at all—from China’s angle.”

“The right of necessity, perhaps,” Allingham ventured.

“Good enough!” the Englishwoman decided.

“What do you value your Nanking Road property at?” Allingham asked her. There didn’t seem any use in beating the troubled extraterritoriality cur any longer. “What would you take for it, if you sold?”

At her reply Paul Trench whistled, and Allingham laughed outright.

“I am not going to give it away!”

“Apparently not,” Allingham said. “You’ll not sell it for that, Lady Saunders.”

“Several want it badly; one big firm does.”

“Who would pay most for it?” Trench wondered.

“Ling Pi,” the woman said instantly.

“Wrong,” Allingham contradicted. “Mo Foy would outbid Ling by several thousands. Mo Foy is the warmer.”

“Well, one of those two,” Mary Saunders said indifferently. “And I suppose he could get one of us to buy it and hold it for him. Hold it until the law that prevents a Chinese from owning property in our Settlement is altered,” she added with a sneer—the sneer of the superior and always-to-be-triumphant race.

“It will be altered when extraterritoriality goes,” Trench said quietly.

“It must not go!” the Englishwoman said.

“We shall see.” Allingham spoke as quietly as Trench had.

“But I don’t think I want a native to have it. Too much of that in Shanghai already.”

“And yet,” Paul Trench said sadly, “Shanghai is in China.”

“We made Shanghai,” she reminded him.

“In China.”

“Oh! You weary me. You who are English! Extraterritoriality; it’s hanging over us all out here like a vulture!”

“Extraterritoriality is a vulture,” Trench said sadly—not meaning it as she had. “The vulture-menace of China and of Europe-in-China to-day. Extraterritoriality, not Russia. Extraterritoriality and the spirit of Sun Yat-sen.”

“Well then, what’s the way out?” she demanded.

Trench shook his head. “There isn’t any. Or, if there is, only Time will find it. We shall not.”

“I believe that your sympathies are with China, instead of with your own people as they should be,” the woman snapped at him.

“Of course they are—with China,” Trench said gravely. “All righteous sympathy must be. We have given China a blackguardly deal; exploited and throttled her, taught her the monkey-tricks of universal suffrage, manhood equality, liberal education, political power without the ability or experience to exercise it sanely, and quite without the strength to enforce it. Precious monkey-tricks that are disemboweling her, plunging her deeper and deeper into the internecine domestic wars that always have been her curse, and now threaten to ruin and exterminate her—Earth’s most glorious country, the great homeland of a first-class people. Yes; my sympathy is with China.”

“You are mad!” Mary Saunders sneered.

“Inconvenient justice often is called that,” Trench told her gently. “But why go over and over the old ground again? We came here against China’s wish. We exploited her international ignorance. And on the whole it has paid us magnificently. Now and then China has flicked us, even given us a taste of punishment, killed a few of us. On the whole China has taken us lying down. There are signs that she may not do it for ever.”

“I suppose you’d give them Shanghai—my property there included—Hong Kong, all the rest of it: everything here that is ours. We ought to thank her, oughtn’t we, when she massacres our women and children?”

“No; we should thank ourselves for that. It is our blame that they are here insufficiently safeguarded.”

“Some sense in that. I’d have every river in China crowded with gunboats.”

“They might get in each other’s way,” Allingham laughed.

Lady Saunders paid no attention to the flippant interruption.

“I’d have three English Tommies, armed to the teeth, here to guard every English woman and child in China. In the outlying places I’d have more. I’d make our women and children safe. The Chinese soon would behave when they knew that we were too many for them.”

“A masterly plan,” Trench admitted. “But who would pay all those thousands of soldiers? And who would provide them?”

“I’d make China pay them.”

“Again an excellent plan, if it were practicable. Notice, please, that I do not say a righteous plan. But you know as well as I do that it isn’t practicable. Personally I see no reason why China should pay our soldiers or provision our gunboats whose guns are trained on her junks and on her cities. If there were sufficient reason, and China could be brought to see it—(She has been made accept some pretty tall propositions already. But we gradually are opening her eyes.)—she could not pay our soldiers. She can’t pay her own. She can’t even adequately pay her own diplomats abroad. The men who accept many of those appointments have to finance them. Several princely private Chinese fortunes have vanished so. More are going the same pace, in a desperate attempt to save China’s face in the capitals of the Occident. The Manchu paid his servants. Your plans are large, but impossible.”

“What do you advise me to do—me personally?” She asked it rather bitterly.

“Sell everything you have in China, except what you own in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong. Put those in careful hands over here. Give them power to sell, or anything they thought advisable, and to do it quickly. And when you have, go back home to England soon.”

“While the going is good, I suppose you mean?”

“That is what I mean,” Trench said quietly.

“Would you take care of my things over here for me?”

“No, dear lady. It must be some one on the spot—some one in Shanghai. I am no good at all at business. And if I leave here at all, I shall go farther north, not towards Shanghai.”

“And, if it came to selling, you would not like to get the better of a Chinese!”

“Perhaps not. But it is not too easy to get the better of a rich and wide-awake Chinese. One who tried to buy your Nanking Road building, would be both.”

“Why don’t you come home too?” Mary Saunders would have given a good deal not to have asked the question. Allingham was surprised that she had. They both knew why Paul Trench probably always would shrink from returning to his birthland. They both knew he loved it well.

“This is my home now,” Trench said quietly. “I have taken root here. I have been glad to stay when, with reasonable precautions, China was safe as Hampstead. And I am not quitting now.”

She turned to Allingham.

“Do you too advise me to go home?”

“Sound idea, I believe.”

“But you keep Lois here! Why?”

“Lois has a right to be here, if she wishes. I am very careful where in China I have her. I shall not take her to Shanghai soon again, and certainly not to Hankow or Tientsin or to Shantung. And, if trouble should come, where I think it won’t, her Chinese relatives are very powerful. They are devoted to Lois and so is Chenn-yi Erh No.”

“A ridiculous old woman whom no one thirty miles beyond her own gates ever heard of! A fat lot of use she’d be, if bad trouble came!”

“Of incalculable use,” Allingham insisted. “The Lady Chenn-yi has not been well advertised in White-China, I grant you. I even agree that no great number of Chinese beyond her own estate and the estates of her kindred know her name. But she has immense power, enormous influence. She can make them felt half across China. Her friendship is more than several armies.”

Trench wondered why Allingham’s eyes had twinkled—he had spoken gravely enough.

Allingham had been tickled to hear Lady Saunders, who never had seen her, label Madam Chenn-yi “A ridiculous old woman.” For the English woman and the Chinese always reminded him of each other. He thought them oddly alike.

“Will you manage my Chinese affairs for me, if I take Mr. Trench’s advice, and cut and run? You can’t say that you are a dud at business!” Lady Saunders demanded.

“Gladly at your service”—he did not exactly sound so—“if I were going to be in Shanghai much of our time here, and not going back home before very long. Trench is perfectly right in saying that whoever you leave in charge needs to be on the spot—and to remain there. Anything may happen in the next few years—perhaps much sooner.”

Lady Saunders stood up.

“You are a helpful pair,” she told them. “I don’t believe you are much more anxious to fight the Chinese, even financially, than Mr. Trench is,” she added to Allingham.

“My wife was Chinese,” he replied with a quiet smile.

“Well,” Lady Saunders announced as she moved away, “I am staying—in China—just as long as I like to. And I am going to Shanghai before long. If I decide to sell—I think I shall; I don’t mind a bit of danger for myself, but I intend to keep the money Tom Saunders left me safe—If I decide to sell, I’ll do the selling myself. I never had any intention of letting either of you or any other man or men botch it for me; I’m no dud at business either.”

“No one better,” Allingham said cordially.

“Humph!” was the thanks Mary Saunders gave him as she stalked away.

Allingham bent down and picked up her parasol.

Trench bent down and picked up her vanity bag, her gloves and her handkerchief.

They exchanged rueful smiles, and shrugged, and walking side by side followed Lady Saunders, careful not to catch quite up with her. She would call them to her when she wanted her belongings.