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By Root 2576 0

out …’ Easily affected by feminine distress though he was, the Major had been assailed by misgivings at this point … But still, one never knew. One thing was certain: you had to account for Vera Chiang somehow! Her Russian recollections were not very convincing, though. Furs, and icicles on window-panes, and snow on the rooftops, steam hanging in the ‘biting air’ from the horse’s nostrils, and jewels winking at the throat of the noblewomen who had leaned over her cot, for she had been a baby at the time of the Revolution, of course, the sleigh’s runners hissing in the snow as they glided east to escape the Bolsheviks, her own little black almond-shaped eyes completely surrounded by fur, gazing out over the interminable, frozen wastes of Russia. That sort of thing. It was not impossible, of course. Above all, it was the mother’s rings that made the Major uneasy. The reason was this. In a Shanghai nightclub the Major had found himself talking to one of the hostesses, a beautiful Russian girl, also a princess, who after one or two decorous waltzes had confessed her predicament to him: the following morning, as soon as the pawnbroker’s shop opened for business, she would have to pawn her mother’s wedding ring in order to prevent her younger sister from selling herself as a prostitute. Good gracious! What a business! What could the Major do but try to help avert this calamity? Well, you see, the Major’s dilemma was that sometimes these stories were true. Not very often, perhaps, but sometimes.

The Major had frozen into an attitude of despair, staring unseeing at the sparking-plug in his hand. Perhaps sensing that his thoughts had taken a bleak turn, The Human Condition left its perilous couch under the wheel of the Lagonda and crept over to lean its chin on his shoe, revolving its bulging eyeballs upwards to scan the Major’s gloomy features. Could it be that the Major was brooding over the best way to have a dog done away with? But no, the Major was still thinking of refugees, this time of those who had managed to escape from Harbin, moving south to where there were other cities with foreign concessions, to Tientsin and farther, to Shanghai. But even in Shanghai there were many Russians who found themselves starving side by side with the most wretched of Chinese coolies, obliged to sleep on the streets or in the parks through the bitter Chinese winter, candidates to join the grim regiment of ‘exposed corpses’. These gaunt scarecrows for a few years had haunted the foreign concessions. But time is cruel: people get shaken down into a society or shaken out. History moves on and the problem gets solved, one way or another, without regard to our finer feelings.

And Vera? Her father, she said, had had a stroke and was half paralysed. She had gone to Canton to support him as best she could (the Major had tactfully refrained from asking how). They were in destitution. Presently he had died and she had moved on to Shanghai. She had lived there for a couple of years until there had been some trouble with a Japanese officer. Then, with the help of some friends, she had come here to Singapore.

Well, was she indeed the daughter of a Russian princess and a Chinese tea-merchant? Was it likely that a Russian princess would marry a Chinese tea-merchant? No, but many strange alliances had been bonded in the bubbling retort of the Revolution in its early years. Vera, now in her early twenties, would be just about the right age, certainly, to be the product of such a desperate union. In Harbin, he recalled, it had been a common sight to see young women of noble blood sweeping out the Russian shops on Novogorodnaya Street or waiting at café tables beneath the inevitable, gradually yellowing portrait of the last Tsar. In such desperate circumstances people will do whatever is necessary to survive. Moreover, as the circumstances grew more desperate it had turned out, like it or not, that an attractive Russian girl, princess or dairy-maid, had at least something to sell … if only herself. In Harbin, he had heard, British and American visitors were