A Most Immoral Woman (14 page)

The
Hsin Yu
, piloted by the burly, red-faced Captain Richards, got away in good time. Kuan by his side, Morrison leaned on the rail of the little steamer and watched T’ang-ku recede into the distance. The noise of the engine and the ship’s vibrations under his palms and feet compounded his headache and the sickness behind his eyes; he hid behind his sunglasses from the thin, milky sunlight.

As the wave of nausea passed, Morrison relished the sensation of being on open water. Breathing in, he let the viscid spray numb his face and hands. Tientsin had begun to feel claustrophobic. His world had shrunk to the size of his hotel room or, more precisely, his hotel bed, and that had suddenly seemed absurdly overpopulated.

Mae’s attentions made him feel simultaneously cherished and diminished; despite all the virile evidence to the contrary, he had to admit he felt unmanned by her, a eunuch in her court. As much as he detested this image, he rolled it over and over in his mind like a child with a stick and hoop. He had confronted her, rather pathetically it had to be admitted, in the aftermath of his
nosebleed, declaring that if he was but one face in a crowd to her, then he would not linger. She had fervently denied that this was the case. Challenged to say what she liked about him in particular, she did not need to stop and think. ‘Your opinionated, cantankerous intelligence. The ginger in your beard. The spray of freckles across your knuckles,’ she proclaimed.

He looked at his hands, wrapped around the ship’s rail. They were broad and pale, with long, square-tipped fingers. He had not noticed the freckles before she had pointed them out, laying a trail of kisses over them. He smiled to himself.

At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering what she had told the others. The thought that she might be promiscuous with her compliments grieved him more than the knowledge that she was free with her body.

Suddenly a woman screamed. Morrison whirled around. A Western lady was pointing at something in the water, her face pale as ash. Silhouetted by the sun, a sphere bobbed on the current in a collision course with their ship. A chorus of panic arose from the deck; the air was filled with shrieks and shouts.

For the first time in the history of warfare, the combatants were using mines as offensive weapons, rather than solely as a means to defend land and maritime borders. The Japanese had started it, setting explosive devices adrift in the direction of the Russian flotillas. The Russians quickly followed suit. Currents and winds wreaked their havoc. As Morrison and Dumas had learned in Newchang, hundreds of mines were on the move in the Yellow Sea and Gulf of Bohai. They had already taken down half a dozen Chinese junks; all the prayers in the world to Matsu, Goddess of Compassion and Protectress of Fishermen, could not have saved their crews. It was only a matter of time before one found a
passenger ship such as the one on which Morrison was now travelling.

The steamer tacked away, pitching vertiginously. Kuan, one hand gripping the rail, caught Morrison before he fell. Morrison’s thoughts, had they been final, were of the war, his mother and Mae.

As the boat steadied, it became apparent that the ‘mine’ was nothing more than a shiny clump of dark seaweed. Beside him, Kuan expelled fear and nerves in a burst of laughter.

For the first time since the conflict broke out, Morrison experienced the visceral, gut, erotic thrill of war. He wiped his salt-encrusted sunglasses on his sleeve with enough vigour to disguise the fact that his hands were still shaking.

‘Well, Dr Morrison, that was quite a scare. I thought for a moment that your war was going to catch up with all of us.’

Morrison turned at the sound of the familiar voice. ‘Professor Ho! What a pleasant surprise.’

Professor Ho was a moon-faced Cantonese gentleman with an impeccable Oxbridge accent whom Morrison had met in Hong Kong some months earlier. Polished leather shoes protruded from the hem of Ho’s traditional blue gown and he sported a bowler hat, from which the mandatory queue fell at the back. Ho, Morrison had been impressed to learn, counted amongst his acquaintances British admirals, members of Parliament and even Prince Alfred. The men shook hands warmly and Professor Ho introduced Morrison to his two travelling companions: Sir T’ing, a former governor of Kweichow Province, and Mr Chia, a curios dealer.

T’ing and Chia greeted Morrison in the Chinese manner, clasping their hands together and raising them to their chests.
Morrison reciprocated, though a blend of native Australian egalitarianism and British superiority ensured that he never bowed quite low enough to be genuinely polite. He produced his Chinese calling cards. Printed in red as was the custom, they bore a line of Chinese characters that read, also following tradition: ‘In fear and trembling, this humble late-born bows respectfully.’ When the others handed him their cards in return, Morrison pretended to read them, eliciting undeserved compliments on his language skills.

Chia, loquacious and cheerful and speaking in English that was almost as fluent, if not as polished, as that of Professor Ho, said that he had heard much about the famous Morrison.

Kuan, whom Morrison always encouraged to act as an extra pair of eyes and ears, remained by Morrison’s side. The conversation progressed at first in the predictable way, with the men asking Morrison how many boy children he had. He had learned that telling the truth, that he was not even married, appalled the Chinese to the extent that they didn’t quite know what else to say to him. It was a Confucian axiom that of all ways in which one might commit the sin of being unfilial, the worst was to produce no sons. So Morrison obliged his interlocutors with a fabricated family of wife, three sons and two daughters, all healthy, and the expectation that he would have grandchildren before too long. In turn, he heard all about their little ‘bugs’—the Chinese always speaking dismissively of the children they loved lest the gods grew jealous and stole them away.

The conversation, one Morrison had had a thousand times with small variations since he’d first stepped foot in China ten years earlier, left him feeling more than usually discomposed, for he would not have minded had his answer been true. He adored
children, and though he spoiled those of his servants as though they were his very own little nieces and nephews, he craved a family of his own.

As the gulf slipped past, slate blue under a cloud-streaked sky, a muddy current came into view, a vast stream of silt flowing out from the eastern shore where the Yellow River disgorged into the sea.

‘They don’t call it the Yellow River for nothing, do they, Dr Morrison?’ Professor Ho remarked. A coffee-coloured tendril broke off from the stream and curled around a patch of blue. T’ing, gesturing with his fan, made a comment in Mandarin.

Chia explained. ‘Sir T’ing says it is like the
t’ai-chi
symbol,
yin
and
yang
. The learned Dr Morrison has been long in China and knows
yin
and
yang
.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Morrison responded with the air of an actor who’d just been asked if he knew who Shakespeare was. ‘Feminine and masculine, dark and light.’

‘That and much more,’ Professor Ho said. ‘The concept is as old as the ancient book of divination, the
I Ching
, as I am sure Dr Morrison is also aware. In the hexagrams of the
I Ching, yin
is represented by a broken line and
yang
a continuous one. They are passive and active. Downward flowing and upward climbing. Water and fire, earth and wind, moon and sun, cold and heat. A closed door and an open window.’

‘All the opposites,’ Morrison stated.

‘Ah,’ demurred Professor Ho, ‘yes and no. In fact,
yin
and
yang
do and do not exist in opposition. One flows into the other as night becomes day and day becomes night. Neither is inferior or superior—
yin
is to
yang
as bamboo is to an oak, the plains to the hills, a sheep to a horse. And they are prone to shifting. If
metal is hammered into the shape of a wok, it is
yin
; if it is forged into a weapon, it will be
yang
. Fire is
yin
when held within a lamp,
yang
when released by the sun.
Yin
and
yang
complement and contain one another;
yin
cannot exist without
yang
, and
yang
without
yin. Yang
limns
yin
, and
yin
limns
yang
. Thus, the
t’ai-chi
symbol, with its teardrops of
yin
and
yang
chasing one another round and round in perpetuity, each containing a dot of the other. I fear that Western notions of masculine and feminine do not contain such subtlety or nuance.’

Listening to Ho, Morrison had a sudden insight into why the character of the faithful Gerald in
Anna Lombard
continued to rile him—whilst assuredly masculine, he was as compliant and yielding before the assertive Anna as any woman.
Altogether too big a dollop of
yin
in his
yang
! Only a female novelist could invent such a personality
.

‘Of course,’ Chia added, his smile making crescents of his eyes, ‘woman’s place of
yin
can absorb man’s
yang
. So if man not release—you understand? He doesn’t lose
yang
. The danger,’ and here he grinned slyly, ‘is that one may encounter the sort of woman whose
yin
is so powerful that it can steal all of the man’s
yang
. There are creatures called
hu li ching
, fox spirits, who dwell in the—how do you say?—
borderlands
, where the edges of
yin
and
yang
blur, for example.’

‘I have heard of Chinese ghost stories in which the goodhearted scholar, bent over his books, fails to notice a beautiful woman, in reality a fox spirit, passing through the window of his study. Personally, I cannot imagine not noticing such a thing,’ Morrison said.

‘Perhaps Dr Morrison would not be so easily seduced. But fox spirits are powerful creatures, and clever too. They say a fox spirit
is as sophisticated, intelligent and tough as the man she haunts, as lovable, canny and dangerous as his own reflection. And thus it is that a ruffian will pull to him a rogue; a sharp-talker, a wit; and a lustful man a succubus, who steals so much
yang
from her lover that the man is left a shell and may die.’

‘Fox spirits belong to the realm of superstition,’ Morrison insisted with a vehemence that suggested the topic had provoked him more than he might admit. ‘You received a Western education, Professor Ho. Surely you don’t believe in such whimsy.’

Before Ho could answer, T’ing asked in Chinese what they were talking about.

Ho translated Morrison’s words for the Mandarin.

T’ing spoke, his words measured. Ho translated: ‘We are aware that our humble country is backwards-looking and lacking in scientific knowledge and outlook. We hope that Dr Morrison will share with us the benefits of his scientific thinking. Perhaps then, China might reach the exalted standards of modern Western nations such as Great Britain in government administration as well as agriculture and defence.’

There were moments when even the most assured of old China hands could not be sure if he was being given a polite dressing down, a genuine compliment or an invitation to explore the topic further.

A brief silence descended on the group, broken only by the steady thump of the ship’s engine. The sun, which had been quivering fat and red above a corrugated horizon, dropped out of sight. Night fell heavily upon the gulf. In the light of the lanterns that had been lit on deck, the men’s faces flickered in and out of focus as though they were spirits themselves. A shiver ran down Morrison’s spine.

‘It’s getting cold,’ Professor Ho observed. ‘Dr Morrison must watch his health.
Shui-t’u b’u fu
. It is hard for a foreigner to adapt to conditions in China. I suggest that we retire to the smoking saloon and wait for the dinner bell.’

As the little group made its way inside, T’ing in the lead, Morrison looked around for Kuan and caught sight of him in converse with Chia.
These men are exceptionally polite to my Boy
, he thought.

In the saloon, Morrison moved the talk to politics. He pressed the three gentlemen for their views on the reform movement, the Empress Dowager and, of course, the war. They in turn professed themselves most interested in his views. They asked him many questions. It was only later that he realised that they had answered very few of his own. He suspected that he had been the loser in a subtle contest of ‘push hands’, in which the master allows his opponent to unbalance himself with the force of his own blows.

Morrison woke the next morning to the squawk of gulls. That and the engine’s slackening beat told him they were approaching the shore.
In whose arms does she lie today
? His chest was ballasted with woe.
What an infatuation it is
. Dressing against the damp chill in the air and that in his thoughts, Morrison hurried up on to the deck.

The steamer had cut southwest through the gulf to arrive at Chefoo, a British treaty port where it would stop before continuing on to Shanghai. He and Kuan would disembark here and catch the mail packet to Wei Hai Wei, fifty miles east, an easy trip. He thought how improvements in steam technology,
particularly the invention of the screw propeller, had revolutionised travel in his lifetime. Ocean voyages that had taken months in his parents’ day were now but a matter of weeks. Steam made the world a smaller place. It had not even been twenty-four hours since they’d left Tientsin’s port of T’ang-ku. And yet there was already enough sea and air between the two places that, for all his fretting, Morrison felt relaxed, bigger, expanded into his normal self, a man amongst men once more.

Kuan joined him on deck in an animated mood. The rising sun was burning off the morning fog. Kuan pointed to an outcrop silhouetted in the mist. ‘It is called Horse Island—see the horse?’