A Most Immoral Woman (23 page)

‘I shall keep my original draft as a relic of barbarism,’ James said humbly.

‘Of course,’ Morrison conceded, ‘it is the reply that is the point.’

Morrison returned to the hotel to tend to his notes and correspondence, arriving just as the sky cracked open. Rain fell in sheets. James arrived for lunch, sodden despite his umbrella and bearing a telegram from Moberly Bell addressed to Morrison.

Made nervous by Morrison’s poorly veiled dissatisfaction at having to stand in for Bedlow and fearful that his star correspondent might again threaten to quit
The Times
, Bell had rescinded the order for him to proceed to the front. He ordered him instead to concentrate on solving the problem of the
Haimun
’s access to the Siege of Port Arthur and other battles taking place in the Yellow Sea. And whilst he was at it, he was to convince the Japanese to allow all
The Times
’s correspondents access to the land battles unfolding as well.

Morrison hid his relief beneath a fit of coughing. ‘So now I am not to go to the Yalu. I feel like a bloody bandalore. Up and down. Up and down.’

‘I could use a bandalore myself. I like the newfangled ones with weighted rims. Yoyos, they call them. Picked one up in America when I was organising for the wireless plant. Good for relieving tension, or so they say.’

‘So good,’ Morrison responded drily, ‘that it’s said France’s aristocrats played with them—the old-fashioned ones, anyway—all the way to the guillotine. Any reply from Sir Claude yet?’

‘None.’

The rain fell all night long. Outside Morrison’s window, bamboo creaked and groaned.

It is the hope deferred that maketh sick the heart.

In the club the following morning, Morrison perused the papers. Nearly every first-hand report or illustration was of troop movements or marches or such details as the weight of the Japanese soldier’s kit. Those rare correspondents who’d defied Japanese controls to try to make it to the site of battle themselves told electrifying tales, which usually concluded with the correspondent
himself being summarily apprehended somewhere in Korea and packed off back to Tokio with a reprimand.

The
Japan Mail
carried an article on the effect of stray mines on commercial shipping. He thought of Mae, pregnant, aboard a ship. Reading the notices as to who was staying at Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, he saw Martin Egan’s name. He looked up at the rain-streaked window; the world was grey and composed of tears.
Does she wish to be with me or Egan? Are we to be the two strings to her bow? And which of us really is the father?
He grimaced.
If it is indeed one of us at all.
He craved certainty.

The
Empress
arrived. There was no Miss Perkins aboard.

Morrison walked from the docks to the brothels of Mogi. He returned unconsoled.

Back on the
Haimun
, he found James chewing on his pipe stem in a state of fresh agitation. ‘I thought he was on our side!’ James exploded.

‘Who?’

‘Admiral Saito.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Saito is the one who said that as long as Tonami was able to vet our transmissions and use our wireless, we would have access to the theatre of war. Now he’s told Tonami that it would be a “tactical error” to allow us to leave Nagasaki at all! We have done nothing to deserve such treatment,’ James fulminated, knocking the ashes from his pipe with undue force. ‘Oh, by the way, a telegram has come to you from Shanghai.’ He passed an envelope to Morrison.

Morrison read it and then reread it.

‘Good news?’ James asked hopefully.

‘She says, “Do come Shanghai”.’

‘Who says?’

‘Miss Perkins.’

‘Miss Perkins?’ James’s voice ballooned with dread. ‘I have heard…of Miss Perkins. What do you intend to do?’

‘Go I will.’
Why fret my heart out here?

‘But the
Haimun…
’

‘It is detained indefinitely. You have just told me so in great detail yourself. And now that I am not going to the front, I should check in with Blunt.’

‘Tonami is going to Tokio to speak with Saito in person.’

‘Nothing will happen and I can’t do anything until he returns. He doesn’t even leave here until tomorrow.’

‘I cannot stop you,’ James said unhappily.

‘Good man.’ Morrison clapped James on the shoulder and took himself to the booking office to procure a ticket to Shanghai on the
Empress
when it returned there in two days’ time. Egan’s name on the Tokio hotel list was looking propitious all of a sudden. They were not yet reunited. There was still hope.
Two days! How shall they pass?

The following day, James solved that problem when he showed Morrison another letter he had drafted to Sir Claude, though the diplomat had yet to answer the first.

‘I shall sober it down, shall I?’ Morrison asked. It wasn’t really a question.

At last the
Empress
was due to set sail. Arriving dockside with his bags, he presented his ticket only to be told that the steamer was delayed due to some problem with its engine.

At Mogi, the madam offered him a pretty little sixteen-year-old for five yen who, she claimed, had been only six months in whoredom.

He returned to find James pacing the deck of the
Haimun
, smoke signals of distress rising from the bowl of his pipe. Bell had sent another ominous telegram:
FOR ONE MONTH AT A COST OF £2000 WE HAVE SUCCEEDED IN MAKING OURSELVES LOOK SUPREMELY RIDICULOUS.

‘It is the Japanese who are making all of us look supremely ridiculous!’ James ranted, and Morrison, for all his sympathy for the Japanese cause, could not argue otherwise. ‘The latest news, from our colleague Brinkley in Tokio, by the way,’ James added, ‘is that they have now decided to allow sixteen correspondents to wire two hundred and fifty words a day from the front.’

‘If the correspondents pooled resources,’ Morrison calculated, ‘they could come up with a comprehensive dispatch of four thousand words.’

‘No, no—a total of two hundred and fifty
between
them.’

Morrison knew it was not the most felicitous time for him to be going to Shanghai.

With steam pouring out of its two funnels and all three masts rigged, the sleek
Empress
managed seventeen knots but even that wasn’t fast enough for Morrison. Why hadn’t she come or telegraphed since that one urgent summons? He felt sick with apprehension. He thought again, inevitably, of the lantern-jawed Egan and was consumed with a furious jealousy. In the next instant, he told himself that he should be thankful to the clueless bastard for taking her and whoever’s child it was off his hands and affording him some peace of mind.
This is peace of mind?

Peace. Peace and war. War and peace.
To think that I should have been cajoled by a woman into proceeding to Shanghai when I ought to have pursued my duty for
The Times—
it is inconceivable.

The
Empress
ploughed through the waves and Morrison’s thoughts pitched and rolled from Nagasaki to Shanghai to London, Port Arthur, Tientsin, Isnaia Poliana and back to Shanghai again.

‘Checked out? Are you sure?’

‘Yes, she left yesterday.’

‘Any forwarding address?’

‘Let’s see. Ah, here it is. Care of Martin Egan, Grand Hotel, Yokohama. Oh, and she’s left a letter addressed to you.’

Dearest darling Ernest,

I know how often I have disappointed you. I hope that you know I’ve never set out to hurt you. I am sorry I was not on the
Doric,
and sorrier to tell you why not. The day before I was to board, I began to bleed and then to cramp. Mrs Ragsdale called the doctor, but by the time he came it was all over. I cried an ocean. I am sure she was yours. I want you to know that, and also that I love you very much. I will think of you always, even when I am in the arms of others. I leave China today in the care of Mrs Goodnow to join Martin in Japan. I had hoped to see you before going but my boat was due to depart before yours could arrive. Anyway, Martin wants to marry me and I feel that perhaps it may be a good thing after all. At Mills College, we were given Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays to read. One line has stayed with me: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ Be good and sometimes think of your Maysie.

A foolish consistency? She has never ventured a consistency of any sort!
Morrison realised that the hotel clerk was observing him with too much curiosity for his liking. He folded the letter and
put it in his pocket. ‘Good day, sir,’ he said and strode out into the sunshine, liberated from his dreams. The promiscuous scents of Shanghai filled his nostrils, making him queasy.
The final parting.
He returned in a daze to the docks, where he had left his luggage at the office of the shipping firm. Hiring a rickshaw, he set out for Bubbling Well Road, stopping only long enough to send a telegram to Mae:
ARRIVED SHANGHAI DAY LATE. DEVASTATED BY NEWS. WISH YOU PLEASANT VOYAGE UNBOUNDED HAPPINESS PROTECTED FROM ALL HARM. NEVER FORGET YOU. ERNEST.

‘I am stunned,’ he confided to Mrs Blunt. He’d been relieved to find her on her own at the house.

‘Did you love her?’ she asked, a fount of sympathy.

‘Love?’ Morrison repeated, as though unsure what the word meant.

‘Compared her to a summer’s day, that sort of thing,’ Mrs Blunt suggested. She poured out another cup of tea, and pushed a plate of sandwiches in his direction.

‘You tease,’ Morrison replied, oblivious to refreshment. ‘I am too old to be reciting sonnets.’ He could see that she saw straight through him. ‘Perhaps. A little.’
I loved her so dearly I can scarcely express it. Unhappy me!
He emitted a low, self-mocking laugh. ‘And now, she whom I loved so dearly and who loved me is leaving me for another. Without pretence or hypocrisy. As if it is the most natural thing in the world. It is an experience that chastens one in every way, for every reason.’

‘Love always does,’ Mrs Blunt said.

That night, hunched over the escritoire in the Blunts’ guest room, Morrison wrote for nearly two hours. He expended more than half a bottle of ink and nearly wore out a nib. The result, he confided to his journal, was
one of the most beautiful and melting love letters that I have ever written in my life. And I will send it to the care of Martin Egan, my rival who has played the game so chivalrously, and into whose arms, younger and possibly stronger than my own, she will fall in several days’ time. The thought fills me with pain as does that of my lost child. Alas, my happiness is for a long time ended.

The prospect of returning to Japan did not cheer Morrison either, for he would not arrive in time to pre-empt Mae’s reunion with Egan. He was therefore somewhat solaced to receive a telegram the next morning from Wei Hai Wei in which James reported that the Japanese had released the
Haimun
to return there. That was good news, but not the fact that en route the boat had run into a typhoon. The topmast had snapped off in the fierce winds, hurtling into the sea together with all the wireless attachments. It was one crisis after another.

Morrison left Shanghai for Wei Hai Wei on the first available steamer. It shocked him to see how, in dry-dock, the
Haimun
appeared far too small, vulnerable and broken a thing to have provoked as much passion and fury as it did.

Once he was with James, a cable came from their editor. James did not have the heart to open and so handed it to Morrison, who winced at the contents. It was a veritable philippic. Bell wanted to know how, for all the supposed advantages afforded to their paper
by newfangled wireless technology, they had been scooped by the halfpenny
Chronicle
, whose reporter had got quite a long way towards the front before his inevitable arrest and expulsion by the Japanese.

‘Let’s hope that Fraser holds up the side,’ Morrison said. In a concession to
The Times
, the Japanese army had granted Fraser permission to embed himself with General Kuroki’s forces, who were crossing the Yalu River from Korea into Manchuria. With luck, he would be able to witness the first major land battle of the war. It would be a fierce fight, no one had any doubt about that. But according to Tonami, Japanese scouts, camouflaged amongst the local population, had managed to map every one of the Russians’ trenches and trou-de-loups as well as the location of all sixty pieces of their heavy artillery. ‘It will be a great victory,’ Morrison predicted with confidence, wondering if it should have been him going and not the novice Fraser.

As it transpired, Fraser acquitted himself brilliantly. His reports from the scene of the battle, which took place on the first of May, were alive with detail. He wrote of brave Cossack battalions charging with their long spears, and the intrepid Japanese warriors who met them on the battlefield, swords raised and cries of ‘
Banzai!
’ ringing through the air. He described how the Japanese army, forty thousand strong, annihilated the enemy force, which was half its size, sowing the Manchurian fields with Russian corpses. Blood irrigated furrows littered with snapped stalks of sorghum, broken carrots and crushed turnips. There weren’t enough ambulance carts to collect all the wounded so the Japanese took only those with a chance of survival. Fraser could barely contain his admiration for the Japanese army: modern, skilful and displaying an ‘utter disregard of life’.

His reports, conveyed out of the field by the usual uncertain methods, took between six and twenty days each to reach the paper. The Japanese army, having crossed the Yalu, swiftly advanced through Manchuria towards the commercial hub of Liaoyang. As May wore on, the trickle of refugees from the war zone became a flood. There were reports of famine in places. Morrison’s Chinese contacts were increasingly vocal in their dismay, for there was no end in sight to the conflict. The Anti-Manchu movement gained strength; its adherents questioned what sort of government would allow foreign powers to fight over part of its territory, so hogtied by its promise of neutrality that it could not defend or rescue its own citizens.

The
Haimun
needed weeks in dry-dock. Morrison returned to Peking. One day, whilst he was in his library, a terrible keening rent the air. He jumped to his feet, every hair on his neck erect, and raced into the courtyard, almost colliding with Kuan, who stammered, ‘The war…
mafoo…
’ Morrison’s eyes darted in the direction of the stables. His groom, surrounded by the other servants, was slapping his own face; the
mafoo
’s wife, Morrison saw, was the source of the awful wailing, though by now several of the other women had joined in as well. Morrison could see Yu-ti standing by Cook’s side, pale, frightened.

The
mafoo
, Yang, like all of Morrison’s servants with the exception of Kuan, Cook and Yu-ti, was Manchu. He had just received news of a battle near the town where most of his family, including his father and mother, still lived. After the Japanese routed the Russians, the Russians had returned and burned the entire town down to the ground. Nearly everyone perished. ‘A cowardly proceeding and deliberate provocation,’ Morrison told Kuan. ‘It is proof, if ever needed, that the Russians never had
Chinese interests at heart.’ He clasped Yang’s hand in his own and felt the limitations of his spoken Chinese when he offered his condolences. It was a damned shame.
Russian perfidy
. He instructed Kuan to make appropriate arrangements, including giving Yang and his family time off to mourn.

Morrison mourned too—for his lost child, lost love, for Maysie, for himself. At times, thinking of her with Egan, he was consumed with jealousy. Thankfully, as the weeks passed, he thought of her less and less.

At the end of the month of May, Morrison received one of James’s urgent summons to meet him in Wei Hai Wei. Anticipating only a brief trip, he packed light and left Kuan at home in charge of the household.

He found James in his usual state at the mess on Liu Kung Island, a half-drunk ichiban on the table before him. ‘It is not that I am unused to censorship,’ James thundered before Morrison had even sat down. ‘During the Boer War, we had to say “successful reconnaissance” when we meant “military failure”. The censors there were cunning. But the Japanese are diabolical. Particularly with regard to the
Haimun
. It’s been five weeks since they imposed their “temporary prohibition” on the
Haimun
’s movements, and a month since the Battle of the Yalu. It’s time,’ he said, reaching over and gripping Morrison’s arm, ‘we went to Tokio.’

‘We?’

‘You and me. As you know, the Japanese are allowing more reporters to ride with the army. Others are sneaking out through
Korea and across Manchuria to reach the lines of battle with greater success than before—if only because there are too many of them for the Japanese to catch. Some have attached themselves to the Russians. It is said that the Russo-Japanese War will be the most reported war in all history. Just not by us, and in the most path-breaking way conceivable.’ He took a breath. ‘G.E., you have known Sir Claude from the time of the siege. I know the bonds such an experience can forge. If anyone can get him on side, it is you. And the Japanese too. You have been most useful to them with your telegrams in support of the war and their cause, even before the conflict broke out; they know your loyalty and your value. You have a sound and almost uncanny judgment in dealing with people, a quality I do not claim for myself. You are imperturbable in debate. Most of all, you are untainted with the personal irritation that at this moment is liable to vitiate my own considered opinions. You are the
Haimun
’s final hope.’

‘And you propose…?’

‘We sail in two days to Nagasaki and then Kobe, from where we will proceed overland to Tokio.’

Morrison nodded. ‘Jolly good.’
What Providence is this that, following each separation, apparently final, sends me back to her again? This time to find her, no doubt, in the arms of Martin Egan, where she has been ensconced for this last month.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I need to send a telegram.’