Free Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye Page B

by some curious quirk of fate, this could be the same house?
    Yet even if our scroll had not returned to the same house from which it had been snatched well over a quarter of a century earlier, it had certainly returned to a place where it was appreciated, for a few weeks after we had settled in, when we were beginning to feel at home, Tacklow, awakening early one morning and remembering that he had left something he needed in the reading room, went in search of it; to discover our entire Chinese staff down on their knees, knocking their foreheads on the floor in the deepest of kowtows before the scroll.
    Becoming aware of ‘the Master’s’ presence, they shuffled backwards a pace or two, still kneeling, before rising unhurriedly to murmur a polite greeting and back out of the room, leaving the Number-One-Boy, who had ushered them out, apologizing for having disturbed the Master. The Master assured him that he had not been in the least disturbed, and had only come into that room by chance, but he would be interested to know what the servants had been doing. At which the Number-One-Boy looked faintly surprised and replied that they had only been paying their respects to the Old Buddha. Did the Master not know that the scroll was a portrait of her, posing in the dress and character of a Goddess?
    No: Tacklow had not known; though he later admitted that he ought to have done, for just as the Dragon is the sign of the Emperor, so is the Phoenix that of the Empress. And the lady depicted on the scroll is not only attended by a young acolyte, but also by an admiring phoenix.
    The scroll was one of possibly dozens of contemporary Kossu portraits of Tzu Hsi, Dowager Empress of China, who in her old age had become known to her admiring subjects by the honorary title of Lao Fo Yeh, ‘the Old Buddha’, and whose extraordinary life story I have already touched on in the first volume of my autobiography. She was the last of the Old Guard, in that she represented a tradition and an Imperial Empire in the same way that Queen Victoria had done. However, I doubt if you could have found a handful of the latter’s subjects genuflecting before a picture of her, a quarter of a century after her death.

Chapter 6
    More than half a century has scurried past since the morning on which Bets and I set out on foot for our first conducted tour of the streets and hutungs 1 of Peking. So I hope I can be forgiven for having only the sketchiest recollections of the two men who did the conducting. All I can remember is that both our escorts were connected with the British Legation, one of them middle-aged and the other young, and both were tall and thin and wore spectacles. But I still have a clear picture of what we saw. And an even clearer one of what we smelt that morning. Perhaps Mao and his Little Red Books managed later to clean up the Tartar City, but in those days the smells were truly horrific and like nothing I had ever come across before. India could come up with some startling odours, as could parts of the Middle East and some of the slums in Naples. But they fade into insignificance in comparison with the stink here. We learned early the exact location of the really fierce ones, and kept a large folded handkerchief, soaked in eau-de-Cologne, handy (or in winter, a fur muff) so that we could bury our noses in them as we approached or passed. The gesture became automatic.
    Chinese houses were, in general, spectacularly clean. But their ideas of sanitation remained archaic, and there appeared to be no such thing as main drainage. One merely dug a large pit outside the walls of one’s domain and threw everything into that, presumably scooping it out from time to time when the garden – if any – needed a dressing of manure. The network of narrow hutungs was the worst, for here the inhabitants merely cut a long communal open drain down the centre of the lane, and let it go at that. The main roads were a good deal