‘Well, well. It’s time we went in to lunch.’
A British merchant from Harbin who travelled with us gave us a champagne lunch. ‘You may think it a little extravagant of me,’ said he. ‘But on such occasions one lets oneself go a bit, don’t you know. And I have come to believe that generosity repays itself.’
‘Oh, I want the Daily Mail. Can we see the Daily Mail here?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Well, unfortunately you can.’
Then we drove back to the station.
How, after a champagne lunch on a sweet spring day, standing on the platform — the engine: puff-puff-puff — life is wonderful and miraculous with sweet expectancy.
At Mukden the last coach of our special train was unhooked, and we took on the ordinary train to Peking. In the early morning hours Sylvia and I rickshawed in the noisy languid din through the pagan gorgeousness of the Manchu capital, and having lost our way we were hard put to it to tell the rickshaw coolies to drive us back to the station. We imitated the sound of a railway engine with our lips, and the look of steam issuing forth from the funnel with our hands. The coolies grinned a ready comprehension, but after driving about for twenty minutes or so, stopped and scratched their heads dubiously, when we hastened to resume overtures, apparently all to no purpose. Till happily two Europeans hove in sight. We caught the train by a split second. Aunt Teresa was in hysterics. Early next morning we saw the Great Wall of China. And at midday the train steamed into Peking.
We saw what there was to see; climbed up the pagodas; visited the Summer Palace; a couple of Buddhist temples. Aunt Teresa lifted her feet high up to prevent horrible large ants from climbing up her legs.
‘And what is that?’ Berthe asked.
‘That is Buddha.’ I looked into her eyes with glee.
‘H’m,’ said she. ‘H’m. — Well, well!’
We visited the cemeteries of rank, and Uncle Emmanuel even signed his name in the register as well as on the wall and on the painted wooden pillars. Whereupon we got into our rickshaws and drove back to the hotel.
I drove behind and thought: ‘It would be nice to slip away from them all — to go off by myself.’
After the pony race there was a gala dinner and dance, and we danced in the crowded ball-room and then drove back to the hotel through the moist heavy spring night of Peking. It was as though I had been given, for ever given, life, as though the I was the effect of that particular gift, and that the whole world was not itself but through me. Why then was I asking questions? Why always was I asking questions? There was a meaning in it. But what meaning if black death obliterated all? Then a meaning in that, a hidden significance. And if death was silence eternal, there was a significance in that silence. It was as if all — death and all — were in life; and if I thrilled with emotion, feared, prayed, my nerves were somehow linked with the rest of the world: they were like strings of a musical instrument that reverberated to some faint, unknown music; and even now, as in the spidery vehicle, I drove past the palatial legations by the silent queer-smelling canals, the nocturnal foliage glancing in the mirror of black water, at its own sombre visage, the yellow lanterns bobbing on the water and the leaves, I was a traveller, I felt, to whom these lights and shadows were mysterious and strange, but no stranger than the shadows I had seen when, as a particle of light, I coursed my way through space, a planet, a fiery torch lighted at what altar? at what run? before I fell.
Next day there was a treat for us: the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came and played extracts from Wagner. They received a tremendous ovation, and at the very end, as an extra, played the Overture to Tannhäuser. I thought I should burst. It was so rich, so mighty, so ineffably glorious and majestic. One felt one’s soul standing on tiptoe! Music — I felt that music was life, that music understood what words and thoughts could never convey. There were echoes it wakened, heart-strings it touched. O Music, where have you learnt your secret?
Poor old Aunt Teresa, I thought. Poor old Uncle! Poor old everybody …
I ran into Uncle Emmanuel coming out, and he was red and bright-eyed with excitement. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘that was wonderful. It takes Germans to play Wagner. I got so excited and stirred up I wanted to shout or cry.’
I felt he and I were brothers, in fact all men brothers, and all born to do great things!
The date of sailing of the Rhinoceros having again been postponed, we lingered in Peking for a few days. Siberia — so we read in the newspapers — was red and growing redder. Chita was the one white isle in a sea of red, and thither (and to China) had flocked all that there remained of the refuse of reaction. And Peking was absorbing more than its fair share. White generals, bankrupt ministers, experts in coups d’état, failures, nonentities of every kind had made this spot their headquarters. We found many an old friend. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we ran into General ‘Pshe-Pshe’.
‘Your Excellency!’ I greeted him. ‘We thought you had been hanged long ago!’
‘Not till I have done a little myself,’ he replied, smiling a little warily. ‘And how are you?’—he turned to Aunt Teresa, and brushed her pale bejewelled hand against his prickly moustache. Things, it seemed, looked bad in Harbin. The red bandits had wrested the town from him — and now anything might happen to the population. Anything! He himself had deemed it wise to leave the town incognito, overnight. The anarchists and agents of destruction were hard at work all over the world. The only hope lay, he was bound to say, in Mr. Churchill. But that gallant statesman, he thought, had enemies even at home.
I looked at him as he spoke. How he had ever managed to become a General, God only knows! the most probable explanation is that he had appointed himself — in the interests of the fatherland. ‘Pshe-Pshe’, I learnt afterwards, had taken with him a few bars of solid gold from the national exchequer, deeming it to be well out of the hands of the miscreants who opposed him. He was living now with his wife and family at the best hotel in Peking. He was patronizing to the indigent. ‘Money,’ he said on more than one occasion, ‘is no object.’ Asked what were his plans for the future, he said that he was going on to Tsingtao for a cure and a rest, where he would wait till Mr. Churchill’s political star was again in the ascendant, when ‘The Day’ would return, and he would decorate the lamp-posts of the city of Harbin with the corpses of the bandits; for in civilized society law and order came first. He was loyal to the past. But Russia would not mould to his bankrupt dreams. He was sad, taciturn, bitterly disappointed in fate; but the deaths he had occasioned he somehow overlooked. In the train — he left in our company — the General told us that shortly before leaving Harbin news had come through that Dr. Murgatroyd had been captured in Omsk by his enemies the Bolsheviks. And quite apart from the human factor, it was felt by all that the situation was not without humour. But we were sure that the old man in the moujik clothes would eventually stroll down to some place of safety, with a pencil between his teeth and a few sheets of written paper in his hands, perhaps a little wiser for his experience, and perhaps no wiser than before — and eventually produce a book.