The Great Fire Read Online Free PDF

and there was clandestine laughter, like school. At each end of the longish table, a Driscoll kept watch. As Gardiner had said, the Driscolls were disquieting as a symptom of new power: that Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what one had hoped from peace. It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities.
    They had grasped, eagerly enough, at a future as yet unrevealed to Leith and to what they would have called his kind.
    There was beer, and sake in tiny cups. Dishes had been set out, tea was poured, and flowers floated in a bowl. Two women in kimonos, possibly mother and daughter, slipped about, providing and removing. The girl was extremely slight, in body nearly a child; her unobtrusiveness so notable that one watched to see how it was done. The older woman's face was a tissue of wrinkles, expressionless. There was also a young man in dark Japanese dress, who came and went and was seemingly in charge.
    Calder told Leith that the youth had been partly educated in England, son of an ambassador or a minister of legation. Brought here to act as interpreter, he had become a sort of maggiordomo: 'God knows what he's thinking.'
    Opposite, there had arrived a boy of indeterminate youth, a Westerner to whom the serving women gave soft attentions — he in turn addressing them in unpractised words of their language, little beak aloft; then looking around the company with bright dispassionate eyes. Beneath a rick of fair hair, the face was triangular. In sunless skin, the lips, unexpectedly full, made strokes of mobility and colour. There was special food for him, and difficulty in eating it. The boy, hunched and angular, was afflicted by some abnormality. On this theme, too, Leith recalled the words of Gardiner.
    Gardiner who, yesterday at that hour, had been alive, awaiting him. Who was proving himself indispensable.
    Down the table, a civil engineer from Bradford or Leeds was recounting an experience at Kagashima — one of those tales in which the traveller is the clever one, the indigenous inhabitant venal or infantile. He said, 'I'm just giving facts,' mistrustful of anything that might be called a story. Leith, half-turned, half-listening, was looking along the reddish flowers and red lacquer, the ceramic cups and Western cutlery. He could see a hand at rest. It was extended on the tabletop, where it lay like silence. He waited for the other hand to appear, as a watcher of birds awaits the arrival of the mate, the pairing. And soon the right hand came, shifting a disc of sauce before settling alongside its fellow, while the soldier looked with pleasure.
    'Mr Leith.'
    Across the table, the boy, smiling, might have seen it all.
    'Is it true . . .' Voice neither fully broken nor childish. Except for bright eyes, the lifted face was mask-like: apertures — of eyes and nostrils — so precise and close as to recall the little muzzle of a cat. As with a cat, too, some charm of clairvoyance.
    The boy stretched his hand. Leith had to rise, in order to clasp it.
    'Benedict Driscoll.'
    So this was the son of those.
    'Why did you walk across China?'
    'I wanted to do it, and it was proposed to me.' To answer candidly, with no indulgent smile, was to exorcise the gratuitous suspicion that stood sentinel at either end of the table. 'But I can't say that I walked across. I had to bear south, due to the civil war. I'd hoped to take the northern route of an Italian traveller of long ago, but it wasn't workable.' What had been possible for the monk Carpini in 1245, in heroic old age, was no go in 1946 for a modern man in prime of life. 'And I wasn't always on foot. In trains, often, or waggons, or carts, or on a mule. Or by river.'
    'It was the large idea, though.' The boy looked down, shy about what moved him.
    'Which is perhaps necessarily formless, except in the traveller's mind. I mean that it can't be comprehensive, like a single objective, or done conclusively.'
    Benedict said, 'There might be a danger in doing one thing