But the ceremonies of the Tet were conducted with pomp. This is the celebration of the Chinese New Year when the Emperor, in imitation again of the Son of Heaven, receives the homage of his mandarins. I had received an invitation and at seven in the morning, feeling embarrassed in a dinner jacket and a stiff shirt, I found at the Palace gate a group of French civilians similarly dressed and a number of officers in uniform. The Résident Supérieur drove up and we followed him into the courtyard. In the large open space soldiers in bright and fantastic uniforms were lined up and in front of them two lines of mandarins according to their rank, the civil on the right and the military on the left. A little below were the eunuchs and the imperial orchestras and on each side was a royal elephant in state caparison with a man holding a state umbrella over the howdah. The mandarins were dressed in the Manchu fashion in high boots with thick white soles, silk robes splendidly embroidered, with voluminous sleeves, and black hats decorated with gold. Bugles blew and we, the Europeans, crowded into the throne room. It was rather dark. The Emperor sat on the dais. In his gold robes he sank into the gold of the throne and the gold backcloth of the canopy over it so that at first you were hardly conscious that a living person was there. He stood up. At each comer of the dais stood a man in blue holding a state fan and behind the throne a row of servants in darker blue bore the royal utensils, the betel nut tray, the spittoon and I know not what. A little in front two soldiers magnificently dressed in orange held before them upright golden swords; they stood like images and looked neither to the right nor to the left. The Emperor too looked like an image as he stood motionless with no expression on his sallow long thin face.
The Résident Supérieur read an address and the Emperor read his reply. He read in a high-pitched voice in a sort of sing-song that made it sound like a litany. The Europeans retired to the side of the hall and the Emperor sat down. In front of the throne was a low altar and on this the Emperor’s uncle, a little old man with a sparse grey beard, now placed what looked like two books wrapped in red silk. Then the two brothers of the Emperor took up their positions in front of the altar, not facing the Emperor but each other, and at the same moment the mandarins in the courtyard, who had been standing quite still during the reading of the speeches, came forward on to bamboo mats that had been set for them, but in order according to their rank and class. They also faced not the Emperor but each other. A band began to play and singers burst into song. This was the signal for the two princes of the blood and for the mandarins in the courtyard to turn and face the Emperor. The chorus was silent and the princes and the mandarins knelt down and touched the ground with their foreheads. They moved as one. A huge gong sounded from the tower over the palace gateway and the chorus again began to sing. Then with one impressive movement like well-drilled soldiers the mandarins prostrated themselves. This was repeated five times. The emperor sat impassive and made no acknowledgement of the obeisances. He might have been a golden idol. The throne-room, which had looked so tawdry the day before, now, set off by the gorgeous clothes and smart uniforms, had if not magnificence at least a barbaric splendour. Then all the mandarins bowed three times and unceremoniously shuffled out of their ranks, the princes of the blood smiled, shook hands with their French friends and complained of the heat of their robes, the Emperor, without much dignity, stepped off his throne. He walked quickly into a sort of ante-chamber and the officials of the court and the foreigners followed him. Here in two rows stood soldiers holding the royal umbrellas and various staffs, and a band of page boys in green played drums and fifes and with vigour struck gongs. Sweet champagne was handed round with biscuits and sweetmeats and cigars. In a little while the Emperor was borne away on his palanquin, a low round gilt chair, by twelve men in red. The ceremony was over.
In the evening I went to a party at the palace. The Emperor and the Résident Supérieur sat on large gilt armchairs in the central doorway of the throne-room and the guests were gathered round about. The courtyard was lit with unnumerable little oil lamps and a native orchestra played lustily. Three fantastic figures, like those of the Chinese drama, in splendid Chinese dresses came upon the scene and trod a grotesque measure. Then the Imperial ballet, a large number of boys and youths in beautiful old-fashioned costumes that reminded one of the eighteenth century pictures of the Far East, danced and sang. They had lanterns on their shoulders, with lighted candles in them, and they moved about in complicated patterns that formed Chinese characters wishing the Emperor good luck and prosperity. It was more like a drill than dance, but the effect was strange and pretty. They gave place to other dancers, men dressed up as huge cocks, emitting fire from their beaks, or as buffaloes and fearful dragons and they cut fantastic capers; then came fireworks and the courtyard was filled with smoke and the noisiness of crackers.
This ended the native part of the entertainment and the foreigners gathered round the buffet. The court pages, on European instruments, began to play a one-step. The foreigners danced.
The Emperor wore a tunic of yellow silk richly embroidered and on his head a yellow turban. He was a man of thirty-five, rather taller than most of the Annamites, and very thin. His face was strangely smooth. He looked very frail but incredibly distinguished. My last impression of the party was of him leaning in a careless attitude against a table, smoking a cigarette and chatting with a young Frenchman. Every now and then his eyes rested for a moment incuriously on the conquerors clumsily dancing.
It was late now and I was setting out at dawn by car for Hanoi. It seemed hardly worth while to go to bed and as I drove in my rickshaw to the hotel I asked myself why I should not spend the rest of the night on the river. It would do if I got back in time to change, bathe myself and have a cup of coffee before starting. I explained to my rickshaw boy what I wanted and he took me down to the river. There was a landing-stage just below the bridge and here we found half-a-dozen sampans moored to the side. Their owners were sleeping in them, but at least one of them was sleeping lightly, for he awoke as he heard me walk down the stone steps and put his head out of the blanket in which he was wrapped. The rickshaw boy spoke to him and he got up. He called to a woman asleep in the boat. I stepped in. The woman untied and we slipped out into the stream. These boats have a low round awning of bamboo matting, just high enough to sit upright under, and bamboo matting on the boards. You can shut them up with shutters, but I told the man to leave the front open so that I could look at the night. In the heights of heaven the stars shone very bright as though up there too there were a party. The man brought me a pot of Chinese tea and a cup. I poured some out and lit my pipe. We went along very slowly and the sound of the paddle in the water was the only sound that broke the silence. It was delightful to think that I had all those hours before me to enjoy that sense of well-being and I thought to myself how when I was once more in Europe, imprisoned in stony cities, I would remember that perfect night and the enchanting solitude. It would be the most imperishable of my memories. It was a unique occasion and I said to myself that I must hoard the moments as they passed. I could not afford to waste one of them. I was laying up treasure for myself. And I thought of all the things I would reflect upon, and of the melancholy that I would subtly savour as you savour the first scented strawberries of the year; and I would think of love, and invent stories and meditate upon beautiful things like art and death. The paddle hit the water very gently and I could just feel the boat glide on. I made up my mind to watch and cherish every exquisite sensation that came to me.
Suddenly I felt a bump. What was it? I looked out and it was broad day. The bump was the bump of the boat against the landing-stage, and there was the bridge just above me.
‘Good God,’ I cried, ‘I’ve been asleep.’
I had slept right through the night and there was my cup of tea cold by my side. My pipe had fallen out of my mouth. I had lost all those priceless moments and had slept solidly through the hours. I was furious. I might never have the opportunity again to spend a night in a sampan on an E
astern river and now I should never have those wonderful thoughts and matchless emotions that I had promised myself. I paid for the boat and still in evening clothes ran up the steps and went to the hotel. My hired car was waiting for me at the door.
XLIII
Here I had the intention of finishing this book for at Hanoi I found nothing much to interest me. It is the capital of Tonkin and the French tell you it is the most attractive town in the East, but when you ask them why, answer that it is exactly like a town, Montpellier or Grenoble, in France. And Haiphong to which I went in order to get a boat to Hong-Kong is a commercial town and dull. It is true that from it you can visit the Bay of Along, which is one of the sehenswürdigkeiten of Indo-China, but I was tired of sights. I contented myself with sitting in the café, for here it was none too warm and I was glad to get out of tropical clothes, and reading back numbers of I Illustration, or for the sake of exercise taking a brisk walk along straight, wide streets. Haiphong is traversed by canals and sometimes I got a glimpse of a scene which in its varied life, with all the native craft on the water, was multicoloured and charming. There was one canal, with tall Chinese houses on each side of it, that had a pleasant curve. The houses were whitewashed, but the whitewash was discoloured and stained; with their grey roofs they made an agreeable composition against the pale sky. The picture had the faded elegance of an old water-colour. There was nowhere an emphatic note. It was soft and a little weary and inspired one with a faint melancholy. I was reminded I scarcely know why, of an old maid I knew in my youth, a relic of the Victorian age, who wore black silk mittens and made crochet shawls for the poor, black for widows and white for married women. She had suffered in her youth, but whether from ill-health or unrequited love, no one exactly knew.
But there was a local paper at Haiphong, a small dingy sheet with stubby type the ink of which came off on your fingers, and it gave you a political article, the wireless news, advertisements and local intelligence. The editor doubtless hard pressed for matter, printed the names of the persons, Europeans, natives of the country and Chinese, who had arrived at Haiphong or left it, and mine was put in with the rest. On the morning of the day before that on which my boat was to sail for Hong-Kong I was sitting in the café of the hotel drinking a Dubonnet before luncheon when the boy came in and said that a gentleman wished to see me. I did not know a soul in Haiphong and asked who it was. The boy said he was an Englishman and lived there, but he could not tell me his name. The boy spoke very little French and it was hard for me to understand what he said. I was mystified, but told him to show the visitor in. A moment later he came back followed by a white man and pointed me out to him. The man gave me a look and walked towards me. He was a very tall fellow, well over six feet high, rather fat and bloated, with a red, clean-shaven face and extremely pale blue eyes. He wore very shabby khaki shorts, and a stingah-shifter unbuttoned at the neck, and a battered helmet. I concluded at once that he was a stranded beachcomber who was going to touch me for a loan and wondered how little I could hope to get off for.
He came up to me and held out a large red hand with broken, dirty nails.
‘I don’t suppose you remember me,’ he said. ‘My name’s Grosely. I was at St Thomas’s Hospital with you. I recognised your name as soon as I saw it in the paper and I thought I’d look you up.’
I had not the smallest recollection of him, but I asked him to sit down and offered him a drink. By his appearance I had first thought he would ask me for ten piastres and I might have given him five, but now it looked more likely that he would ask for a hundred and I should have to think myself lucky if I could content him with fifty. The habitual borrower always asks twice what he expects to get and it only dissatisfies him to give him what he has asked since then he is vexed with himself for not having asked for more. He feels you have cheated him.
‘Are you a doctor?’ I asked.
‘No, I was only at the bloody place a year.’
He took off his sun-helmet and showed me a mop of grey hair, which much needed a brush. His face was curiously mottled and he did not look healthy. His teeth were badly decayed and at the comers of his mouth were empty spaces. When the boy came to take the orders he asked for brandy.
‘Bring the bottle,’ he said. ‘La bouteille. Savvy?’ He turned to me. ‘I’ve been living here for the last five years, but I can’t get along with French somehow. I talk Tonkinese.’ He leaned his chair back and looked at me. ‘I remember you, you know. You used to go about with those twins. What was their name? I expect I’ve changed more than you have. I’ve spent the best part of my life in China. Rotten climate, you know. It plays hell with a man.’
I still had not the smallest recollection of him. I thought it best to say so. ‘Were you the same year as I was?’ I asked.
‘Yes. ‘92.’
‘It’s a devil of a long time ago.’
About sixty boys and young men entered the hospital every year; they were most of them shy and confused by the new life they were entering upon; many had never been in London before; and to me at least they were shadows that passed without any particular rhyme or reason across a white sheet. During the first year a certain number for one reason or another dropped out, and in the second year those that remained gained by degrees the beginnings of a personality. They were not only themselves, but the lectures one had attended with them, the scone and coffee one had eaten at the same table for luncheon, the dissection one had done at the same board in the same dissecting room, and The Belle of New York, one had seen together from the pit of the Shaftesbury Theatre.
The boy brought the bottle of brandy and Grosely, if that was really his name, pouring himself out a generous helping drank it down at a gulp without water or soda.
‘I couldn’t stand doctoring,’ he said, ‘I chucked it. My people got fed up with me and I went out to China. They gave me a hundred pounds and told me to shift for myself. I was damned glad to get out, I can tell you. I guess I was just about as much fed up with them as they were with me. I haven’t troubled them much since.’
Then from somewhere in the depths of my memory a faint hint crept into the rim, as it were, of consciousness, as on a rising tide the water slides up the sand and then withdraws to advance with the next wave in a fuller volume. I had first an inkling of some shabby little scandal that had got into the papers. Then I saw a boy’s face, and so gradually the facts recurred to me; I remembered him now. I didn’t believe he was called Grosely then, I think he had a one syllabled name, but that I was uncertain of. He was a very tall lad (I began to see him quite well) thin, with a slight stoop, he was only eighteen and had grown too fast for his strength, he had curly, shining brown hair, rather large features (they did not look so large now, perhaps because his face was fat and puffy) and a peculiarly fresh complexion, very pink and white, like a girl’s. I imagine people, women especially, would have thought him a very handsome boy, but to us he was only a clumsy, shuffling lout. Then I remembered that he did not often come to lectures, no, it wasn’t that I remembered, there were too many students in the theatre to recollect who was there and who wasn’t. I remembered the dissecting room. He had a leg at the next table to the one I was working at and he hardly ever touched it; I forget why the men who had other parts of the body complained of his neglecting the work, I suppose somehow it interfered with them. In those days a good deal of gossip went on over the dissection of a ‘part’ and out of the distance of thirty years some of it came back to me. Someone started the story that Grosely was a very gay dog. He drank like a fish and was an awful womaniser. Most of those boys were very simple, and they had brought to the hospital the notions they had acquired at home and at school. Some were prudish and they were shocked; others, those who worked hard, sneered at him and asked how he could hope to pass his exams; but a good many were excited and impressed, he was doing what they would have liked to do if they had had the courage. Grosely had his admirers and you could often see him surrounded by a little band listening open-mouthed
to stories of his adventures. Recollections now were crowding upon me. In a very little while he lost his shyness and assumed the airs of a man of the world. They must have looked absurd on this smooth-cheeked boy with his pink and white skin. Men (so they called themselves) used to tell one another of his escapades. He became quite a hero. He would make caustic remarks as he passed the museum and saw a pair of earnest students going over their anatomy together. He was at home in the public-houses of the neighbourhood and was on familiar terms with the barmaids. Looking back, I imagine that, newly arrived from the country and the tutelage of parents and schoolmasters, he was captivated by his freedom and the thrill of London. His dissipations were harmless enough. They were due only to the urge of youth. He lost his head.
But we were all very poor and we did not know how Grosely managed to pay for his garish amusements. We knew his father was a country doctor and I think we knew exactly how much he gave his son a month. It was not enough to pay for the harlots he picked up on the promenade at the Pavilion and for the drinks he stood his friends in the Criterion Bar. We told one another in awe-struck tones that he must be getting fearfully into debt. Of course he could pawn things, but we knew by experience that you could not get more than three pounds for a microscope and thirty shillings for a skeleton. We said he must be spending at least ten pounds a week. Our ideas were not very grand and this seemed to us the wildest pitch of extravagance. At last one of his friends disclosed the mystery: Grosely had discovered a wonderful system for making money. It amused and impressed us. None of us would have thought of anything so ingenious or have had the nerve to attempt it if he had. Grosely went to auctions, not Christie’s, of course, but auctions in the Strand and Oxford Street, and in private houses, and bought anything portable that was going cheap. Then he took his purchase to a pawnbroker’s and pawned it for ten shillings or a pound more than he had paid. He was making money, four or five pounds a week, and he said he was going to give up medicine and make a regular business of it. Not one of us had ever made a penny in his life and we regarded Grosely with admiration.