Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online

winter.
    You could see why they did it, for at several of the station platforms where we stopped there were troop-trains standing in the sidings – open trucks packed with bewildered young soldiers who had almost certainly been farm-lads or shop-assistants until caught by the press-gangs of one or other of the war lords and forced to serve in the ranks of his private army. Some of them were only boys, wearing uniforms that had obviously been intended for grown men. At one station a squad of some twenty or thirty of them, their faces drawn with exhaustion and their ill-fitting uniforms grey with the dust of the unmade roads, had collapsed on to the platform, sitting on the ground with their backs to the fence that surrounded it, their legs stretched out before them. I saw with horror that, although the uniforms looked new, their feet were shoeless and the rags and cardboard and newspaper that they had tied on to them with string had disintegrated into bloodstained fragments, the result, presumably, of days of marching and counter-marching across country as the fortunes of their particular ‘General’ rose and fell.
    Those poor boys! I hadn’t really taken in the fact that their country was in turmoil, or what civil war and anarchy were actually like, until I saw those exhausted ranks of young soldiers whose feet had been reduced to bloodstained pulp. The sight of them stays in my memory as an illustration of the cruelty and stupidity of war, and did nothing towards reconciling me to life in China. For it is one thing to read about such happenings, but quite another actually to witness them yourself.
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    Pei-tai-ho, when we reached it, was a relief. A small town, then little more than a village on the shores of the Gulf of Pe-chih-li, it was set on a sandy plain dotted with wind-blown pines, casuarina scrub and fields of Indian corn and kao-liang (sorghum millet) and protected from the sea by a line of Victorian-style villas, white-painted, clapboard houses with wide verandahs, standing on the landward side of a long, sandy beach that curved away to left and right towards distant hills and far-off mountains. At one of these houses we unloaded the Dadski and Aunt Dor and her offspring, before moving further on down the beach to the one that had been hired for us.
    I still have the impression that there was nothing more to Pei-tai-ho than these houses, though a photograph of the place from the air shows that behind that sandy track and the casuarina scrub lay a not insignificant little Chinese town.
    Our houses all faced out on to a long, sandy shore sloping downwards to the sea’s edge, where it formed itself into several small bays, interspersed by outcrops of rock and long sweeping stretches of sand. To our left, looking seaward, the beach rose in a line of low cliffs that became higher to form a headland that was known as Lighthouse Point, on which the British Embassy had a holiday house, or rather, houses. Beyond this promontory, among a series of little bays, lay the Cathedral Rocks, and up on the East Cliffs stood the little cottage which, almost thirty years before, a Miss Winterbottom had lent to Mother and Tacklow for their honeymoon. Beyond that again the shore and the flat lands swept away in a wide bay to meet the mountains that lay along the eastern horizon, and the town of Shan-hai-kwan, where the eastward end of the Great Wall of China ends in the sea.
    To the right of our house, apart from a few small caves, the shoreline stretched away westward, flat and featureless, to the foot of the Lotus Hills, pine clad, enchanting, and full of old temples and carved stone stelae erected to the memory of men and women long dead. The most charming of these were enormous tortoises carved in elaborate detail, supporting a tall slab on which characters giving the name and deeds of the departed were cut deep into the weather-worn stone.
    The staff who went with the house consisted of