Читать книгу The Vintage of Yon Yee - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 5

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Their story—Allingham’s and his girl’s—begins a long way back; generations before the day that Tom Dudley first saw them in Henry Cotterel’s Han-chow garden.

All human stories begin a long way back. The more vital, more significant the story, the farther back its first chapter. To begin at the beginning of such stories is quite impossible. But intelligibility of this tale demands some brief recapitulation.

Henry Allingham had been thirty and more when he had gone to China to “shake the pagoda-tree,” if he could. He had shaken it to his own great advantage, and had continued to shake it for years. He had left his wife and their infant son Desmond in England. She never had expressed any wish to join her husband in China. To do him, and his own somewhat irregular story, justice, Mrs. Allingham never had felt any wish to journey to China. The husband went home now and then; stayed a few months when he did. Desmond grew and throve. And he was not an only child. His parents obliged him with a pair of brothers and the same number of sisters.

Henry Allingham brought rich and fascinating gifts to them all whenever he came from China, treated them handsomely in other ways—genially and indulgently. They always welcomed his arrival, but did not much object to his departures. He provided for them lavishly, more and more lavishly each year. The arrangement suited them both—the husband and wife—well enough. In a colorless way they were fairly good, if never intimate, friends. They never had a quarrel. They never had been lovers. Neither was of the stuff of which lovers are made.

Henry Allingham always was glad to come home. He did not like China—except for its “pagoda-trees”; he never wearied of them. On the whole he left his wife and their children more reluctantly than they were reluctant to have him go. The whole family affair was tepid.

No Black, with an exacting overseer’s whip near, vigilant and ready, ever worked harder than Henry Allingham worked in China. The gold-fruited pagoda-tree never was shaken more assiduously than Henry Allingham shook it for more than a quarter of a century.

In those days there was little English Society in China.

Shanghai was a poor cluster of cheap houses insecurely set in a treacherous, unwholesome mud-flat. Englishmen were not welcome in Peking or encouraged in Canton. There was no English Club for this Allingham’s relaxations. He was not a bookworm.

Often Henry Allingham went far off the beaten paths. He went—when he could—wherever pagoda-trees flourished thickly and unshaken. And he stayed in such remunerative localities as long as he deemed it most profitable.

Henry Allingham was full-blooded. He drank little, smoked less. But he did not live alone—either in Shanghai or up-country.

When they were young and amiable, sunnily obedient, he did not dislike Chinese women. After the fruitage of his pagoda-trees—a very long way after—he even approved them. Except those two things Chinese, there was nothing in China that stirred even a passing interest in Henry Allingham.

His intimacies with Chinese women were many. Most of them were brief. All of them were selfish, heartless. Sometimes they overlapped. He regarded the little, dark-eyed, soft-voiced Chinese women as his chattels. While he chose he kept them. When they ceased to please him he dismissed them. While they were in his service he kept and ruled them strictly. When he left them, or sent them away, he made no provision for them or theirs, gave it no consideration. While he kept them, he paid them or the relatives or others from whom he rented them. They never were girls of “family.” Henry Allingham met no women of the guarded courtyard class. Even so—of little social account as the Chinese girls of his intimacies were—Henry Allingham debased rather than enhanced the prestige of English manhood in China. He spoiled more than one Chinese woman’s life completely, irretrievably. Two of his young companions were addedly unfortunate enough to grow attached to their English “master.” One of them killed herself when he dismissed her.

But callous as this man was, he did feel something of the lure of Chinese femininity—almost the only thing that Henry Allingham ever did feel, the only inkling of her myriad message that China ever got through to him.

Nora, his wife, the daughter of a Bristol merchant, had inherited little from her Irish mother, and was almost as tepid as her husband.

But genius is not the only thing that runs underground in women. Desmond their son inherited a great deal from his Irish ancestors: charm for one thing, susceptibility for another.

Desmond went to China younger than his father had, China got more of her message through to Desmond Allingham than it ever had to Henry his father.

Desmond handled and pushed the Chinese end of the family business as ably as his father had—less ruthlessly, more deftly; and far more acceptably both to European competitors and to those Chinese with whom he had dealings.

There were more English in Shanghai by then: an English Club, English ladies, better buildings. The Shanghai miracle had begun.

Young, handsome, rich, a bachelor, Anglo-Shanghai welcomed Desmond Allingham cordially. There was no girl in it above his very possible matrimonial reach.

He showed no intention of seeking any one of them in marriage. If he had, his choice would have been narrow. Most of the English ladies already were married—the wives of men with whom he shared club and recreations. Allingham had no “affairs” in the Concession. To have had would have been inconvenient and even risky. More than that it would have been in dubious taste, smacked of disloyalty to some countryman whose hospitable bread he often broke, whose pegs he often drank. There are men who do such things—many of them. Desmond Allingham was not of their kind. “So-called men,” he would have termed them. Far from an anchorite, he never was disloyal to bread he had eaten. Desmond Allingham was of finer stuff than his father had been.

But his first recorded ancestor, Adam of Eden, was strong in Desmond Allingham.

As such lives went in Anglo-China then, he gave no fuel to scandal. He had his quiet experiences; most of the bachelors of the Concession, several of the Benedicts too, had more. He had his rooms near the Bund, and he had a bungalow not far from the Bubbling Well. There were many such bungalows, kept more or less discreetly there and thereabouts.

The Chinese girl who “kept house” in his was a permanency. She was a dear little woman, pretty—of course, deft in her housewifery, accomplished in the courtyard accomplishments of well-to-do Chinese homes. Her English “lord” invariably was kind to her; and as the years passed he grew very fond of her. He took some of his men friends to visit her—or rather had them as his guests at the bungalow, and did not screen Pun Fo away when he did.

Pun Fo entertained them charmingly, with a gentle kittenish dignity. They all liked her; and more than one of them envied Allingham. But every one of them knew that he must treat the Chinese girl with respect. Allingham selected with care the men he sometimes took “home” with him to the bungalow in the fragrant greenery of Bubbling Well.

Even then there were European men who married—legally married—Chinese wives: a few such men. Allingham considered them chumps. It never occurred to Desmond Allingham to marry Pun Fo; if it had occurred to him, he certainly would not have done it.

But he treated her well, always with courtesy, grew to care for her as much as without infatuation normal men of the West can care for yellow-skinned women, grew to care for her as nearly unselfishly as a man of his caliber could for a woman whose relation to him was what Pun Fo’s was. But he would have scorned any suggestion of marriage with her. No one made that suggestion—least of all Pun Fo herself.

He left her once for all when he left China. He made no pretense that their parting was not final. And Pun Fo bowed her head to it.

He left her provided for amply.

“Good-by” grieved them both; that it grieved him, perhaps her greatest consolation. They had no children. Pun Fo was sorry. Being Chinese, she adored children. She longed for babies of her own to cuddle—and made such pale shift as she could with babies she borrowed from their bungalow servants, when Desmond was not at home with her. He, being half Irish—his dominant half—too was fond of children. But half-caste children, amazingly pretty as most of them were, always seemed to him not a little pathetic, and harassingly problematical. Half-caste children in his own courtyard would have appalled him, he knew; and he believed that they would have revolted him even while he loved them. For he knew that it would not be in him not to love Pun Fo’s children who were his.

If they had had children, it would not have led him to marry Pun Fo. But it would have made his going from her harder for them both perhaps. He probably would have made permanent provision for such children—unwanted children—but the thought of them would have nagged him in England. He might not have been able quite to forget them. His memories of Pun Fo did not disturb him in any way; they were pleasant memories—until they faded away.

Desmond Allingham was not an old man when he left China. He did not intend to come back. He might, he knew, alter his mind. He did not intend his Chinese interests to suffer. But he left such details of his Chinese affairs as he could not, he believed, handle efficiently in England, in hands he had proved competent and was confident he could trust.

That was a risky experiment. But James MacDonald justified it.

Desmond Allingham never went back to China.

He married in England—an Irish girl who was lovely and in no way tepid. Their marriage was unusually happy. The three children were as lovely as their mother. When Desmond Allingham of Leadenhall Street and Beach Park in Norfolk thought of Pun Fo, he thought of her kindly but never with regret. And he thought of her less and less often.

He often told his wife and his children of China—of what he had seen and learned there. Mrs. Allingham always was interested. Everything interested Alys Allingham. And an uncle, who had gilded much of her childhood, had spent many years in China. And she loved the sound of her husband’s voice.

Rose and Miriam enjoyed hearing their father’s stories of China—sometimes; rather oftener they were bored.

But Edward the boy could not hear enough. He was born, his mother said, with a craze for China. And hers was less of an exaggeration than maternal pronouncements concerning only sons often are.

When Edward was eighteen the father died suddenly.

The boy was grieved—even more grieved for his mother’s grief than he was hurt by his own keen sense of loss. He begged to leave Oxford—to which he had gone only a few months before—that he might be the closer with his mother. She would not permit it.

They compromised.

The ’Varsities are not niggardly of vacation. Edward spent every hour of his with his mother—her servant and lover. In term time she spent more days at Oxford than most undergraduates would relish even the best-liked and least discreditable relatives doing. Edward wished that she would spend all of all his terms there.

Men came to half expect to find Mrs. Allingham there before them when they dashed up his stairs and into Allingham’s rooms.

They always were glad to find her there. At forty Edward’s mother was as radiant and beautiful as she was gracious. She queened it delightfully over Edward’s friends; scolded and encouraged them, each according to his need. She saved more than one from raw young disaster, literally dragged one up out of it. They all adored her. They amused her vastly, and she felt sisterly kindness for them.

She loved her son every bit as deeply and tenderly, if not quite as violently, as he loved her.

And had it not been for Rose and Miriam, probably Alys Allingham during term times would have left Beach Park and the house in Brompton Square to the more-or-less mercy of servants, and have “kept” all his terms with Ed. But she did not intend to let her girls be ’Varsity hangers-on. She had a swift and sure sense of proportion, and she had good taste.

A year after Edward “came down” his mother died.

Edward thought and hoped that the blow would kill him. Possibly it would, but that mothers’ deaths do not kill boys of twenty-four. Little as he clung to it, life clung to him.

Rose, his senior, had been married a year. Miriam, two years his junior, was engaged. She accepted Rose’s invitation to make the Grants’ home hers until her marriage.

At first the sisters gave little thought to Edward. His grief was not hysterical; not once noisy. It was too great. And he was manly, and had inherited from his mother the breeding and fine taste that not even sorrow—even the sharpest and most desperate—can degrade, make peasant and clamorous. Her girls had loved their mother dearly; she one of the rare and rarely happy women who are born to be loved. In their own grief they did not at first realize that Edward’s suffering was beyond theirs, and was even dangerous. But when their own sincere grief was a little spent they did—saw how deep their brother’s hurt.

“What are we to do with Edward?” Miriam asked her brother-in-law one evening.

“Yes; he’s in a bad way,” Grant agreed. “Do with him? H’m—I wonder! Could you get him to slip off to China for a bit—see into his affairs there for himself? H’m?”

Rose Grant caught her husband’s hand. “Gerald! You’ve got it!”

“Yes,” Miriam echoed gratefully. “You’ve got it, Gerald.”

“Hope so,” the man said doubtingly. “It might help, and it might not.”

“If it doesn’t, nothing will,” Miriam said.

“It will help,” Rose insisted. “Of course, it will!”

“Hope so,” Grant repeated. “Worth trying, perhaps. But can you get him to go?”

“That’s the rub,” Miriam owned.

“He’s got to go,” the older sister said stoutly. “We’ve got to make him go; that’s our part.”

“You girls might go with him, or one of you—stay with him six months or so. Let him hang on there, if he took to it.”

“Poof!” Miriam scorned. “Not me!”

“He won’t want us, or either of us,” Rose Grant told her husband. “We’ll make him go. But he’ll go alone; he’d rather, and we’d rather, and it will be best for him too.”

“If he’ll go,” Grant reminded them.

Edward went without persuasion.

He had not thought of doing it. He had thought of nothing since his mother’s death—he had only felt.

But when Miriam suggested it, he consented at once.

“Might as well,” he replied. He said it listlessly. But it almost seemed to Miriam that, unsuspected by himself, the idea interested him.

“We’ve done the trick!” she announced to Rose and Gerald.

“Hope so,” Grant told her.

“Perhaps when he’s there his old craze over China will reassert itself, take him out of himself—actually help him. He was wild about China when we were children.”

“Oh, I hope it will,” Miriam said fervently.

“H’m,” Grant remarked dubiously.

Two weeks later Edward Allingham sailed for China; a longer, less commonplace voyage than it is now.

His sisters rejoiced, and made much of Gerald Grant.

Two years later, when they heard that Edward had married a Chinese wife, actually married her, Mrs. Grant and Lady Rawlins were aghast, and wished Edward had stayed in England, ossified or even perished there, rather than have made that fatal sailing for China.

“And he says he may never come back home. Isn’t sure his wife would like it here. We must go out and visit them!” Miriam Rawlins sobbed.

“Edward never come home!” Rose Grant said unsteadily. “Live the rest of his life in China!”

“H’m,” as often, was all that Grant said.

The sisters both were crying now.

Grant slipped from the room.

But neither then nor after did either Rose or Miriam ever remind Gerald Grant that it was at his suggestion that Edward had gone to China.

They were extraordinarily nice women.