China to Me (31 page)

The early raids left only vague memories with me. There was a time during the full moon when the raiders came every night, as soon as the moon was out. We guests at the hostel got up and sat outdoors on the lawn, peering up at the starry heavens and waiting for something to happen. We were foolhardy in those days because we didn't know any better. The bombing, which had at first been concentrated on a distant military airfield, drew nearer and nearer, until a British officer came upstairs one night and hauled me out and insisted that I join him and a burly RAF officer who was his superior in a downstairs room at least. There came a time when they bombed so very close that I didn't need any more arguments, but ran down into the tunnel just as quickly as anybody. Nowadays, knowing what I know and have seen since then, I shudder at my idiocy, but we all went through that foolhardy phase. Until you see it happen you just don't believe in it.

Those moonlight vigils out on the lawn were actually pleasant, once I had stopped shivering and yawning. There were a lot of people living in the hostel just then whose company I liked.

An exception was an American with a loud manner of talking, who said he was in the hide-exporting business. In actuality he was a secret agent and everyone knew it. We knew his real name, and his reason for keeping the German mistress who hung around the hostel. Once when we were caught suddenly by the blackout she was noticed by Morgan sneaking into the hostel when we had all been ordered to stay out of doors. She must have crept up the steps during the raid and indulged in her nefarious trade in the room of a German soi-disant refugee. A few nights later the refugee was arrested by Chinese soldiers. It was just like a movie: the German protested he had nothing to hide, though they searched his room and found a transmitter there. He chewed up a paper and tried to swallow it. It had a code on it, exactly like the movies.

Everybody was badly shaken by the scene. Hitherto we had accepted him as a perfectly pukka refugee. He had introduced himself to me, naming several friends of mine in Shanghai as reference. My only reason for avoiding him had been that he was such a bore. I had put him down as one of those heavily Teutonic artistes from Munich, and he looked the part to perfection. But that night when he was arrested I wasn't so sure. He didn't seem surprised at the arrest, or even very indignant. He was angry and violent — he pulled a gun on the soldiers, and there was a struggle — but he wasn't surprised.

“Let me get dressed, will you?” he said. The soldiers let him dress, tied his hands with rope, and then marched him out past all of us, standing there in our pajamas in a row, our mouths hanging open. He didn't look at any of us. That was queer too. If it had been me I should have appealed to the crowd, but he didn't.

Next day several people at the hostel were all for Taking Steps. There was an uneasy feeling that we Europeans should stick together, and that no doubt it was all a fantastic oriental mistake. I didn't share the sentiments of the others in so far as they were based on race discrimination, but I did feel a little sick. Suppose it was a mistake? Allegedly he had been tortured by the Nazis before he escaped from Europe. So how could he possibly have been a spy for the Axis?

I have never heard the end of the story. When I left he was still in prison. We heard all sorts of other stories afterward, the most reasonable of which was that he hadn't been spying for the Nazis but for the Chinese Reds.

Certain newspapermen, as usual, acted as if they knew all about it but weren't talking. The American secret agent certainly did know, but he isn't talking either. I wonder if he tells his friends the things he used to tell us while playing poker. I shouldn't think so. Most of his conversation in those days was about women, and everyone in the hostel knew exactly what money he was giving the German lady, and for what specific services. He didn't talk about those visits upstairs during the blackouts, though.

A month of Chungking under fire was more than enough for Mme. Sun, and about the beginning of May she and her eldest sister went back to Hong Kong, where it was peaceful and quiet. Mme. Kung felt guilty at leaving her husband there, but he kept putting off his vacation for an indefinite period and she had promised Ching-ling not to outstay her in the capital. In our last conversation she said:

“You had better stay here, after all. I've changed my mind. You certainly work faster here than in Hong Kong where there are distractions. My sister Mme. Chiang has promised to be more co-operative on the book, now that she has time. Stay here and finish your book: I want it to be a success for your sake. And then build a new life,” said Mme. Kung.

“It is nice of you to help me,” I said sincerely.

“I feel guilty,” she admitted, “because I've been interfering again. But I'm sure it's all for the best.”

“And as for the new life,” I said, “don't let that worry you. I'm used to building new lives.”

“I hope so,” said Mme. Kung, but she sounded dubious.

Chapter 25

As the mists dried out of Chungking's atmosphere, leaving a hard bright world baking under the sun, so did my mind lose its dreaminess. This was an advantage in a way, not only for the good of the book but also for my new job which I took on just as the Soongs flew away, back to Hong Kong. I began to get worried about funds. I was taking much longer on the manuscript than the publisher and I had first intended. This wasn't a surprise to the publisher, and it was less surprising to me. You can't go on chasing people all over China these days without using up a lot of time. New York obligingly pushed the deadline forward about six months, so that was all right, but the advance which had been supposed to cover the calculated period of gestation was now running short. Perhaps you laymen don't realize what a gamble a book is for the writer, who always does his year's or two years' work before he has any idea if it is going to give him returns. There comes a time for me during every book's writing when I tell myself that I am an idiot and that I must find another job with a Saturday pay check. This time the impulse overpowered me and I actually found the job, with Havas.

So nowadays I spent a good deal of time in the Press Hostel, and could have insisted on my rights as a journalist in good standing to live there altogether. I didn't, though. I wasn't tempted in the first place by the exquisite discomfort of the Press Hostel, nor in the second place by the jolly, quite maddening lack of privacy that prevailed there, nor in the third by the worse-than-primitive plumbing. (We used to have better plumbing facilities in the Congo than obtained at the Chungking Press Hostel.) There was another reason, too, that I didn't move in under Hollington Tong's wing, and that was Ma Ping-ho, who spent all his time with Holly's crowd. Nobody was allowed to mention my name in Ma's hearing, or to let him know I was back.

No one really works very hard as a foreign correspondent, and since Marcuse and I were dividing the job we had a lot of freedom. He wasn't a perfect person to work for. He had his bad moments. We had a couple of rows, when he forgot who did what, and when, and where; but they blew over. More serious was the phase we went through when Marcuse, a newcomer to Chungking and unacquainted with air-raid procedure, bawled me out for leaving the office and going into a tunnel during raids. “You must Stand By!” he shouted. “What? Go into a dugout? I never heard of such a thing. You're yellow!”

My reply was brief and emphatic, and supported by the combined protests of whatever other gentlemen of the press overheard him. A few days later, when the whole office was bombed and came tumbling down, Jacques stopped talking that way and we had no more of his heroic nonsense. But then his mind at the time was mostly on Corin.

The rapidity with which that friendship developed was the cause of great anxiety to Holly. He couldn't very well station himself at the door of Jacques's room in the main building. He didn't want to reprimand the representative of Havas, either. But he didn't like that sort of thing going on in the respectable precincts of a respectable government building, either. And Marcuse, who dominated Corin completely, was mischievous. I often suspected him of going out of his way to shock Holly and the others. In the early days before the raids grew really intense, while he was still trying to insist that I stand by my typewriter during the bombings, he saw that Corin was in a bad state of nerves. She had a respect for bombs which Jacques refused to recognize. When the Japanese flew over he wouldn't allow her to run for shelter, or, rather, he refused to go and so she couldn't. There must have been some strange scenes aboveground. When the All Clear sounded and I went up to knock on his door and to get my cables for the day, I would find Corin with traces of tears on her cheeks, and Jacques puffing one of his clay pipes and looking masterful.

Being a sort of benevolent aunt to the lovers came natural to me. Corin would drop in during the afternoon while I was working and we would have a pleasant visit, if the Japanese didn't interfere. She was looking well and happy except when the scenes over air raids upset her. Jacques was attentive and complimentary and he gave her no cause for uneasiness. To be sure, there was a girl in Shanghai who refused to accept the congé he tried to send her by mail; Jacques made no secret of his dilemma but proudly showed her frantic telegram around the hostel, and asked advice from everyone, and talked it over with Corin. It was going to be awkward, Jacques said to Corin, and she agreed that it was going to be awkward. But of course Jacques loved her now. He loved her, and all of the other affairs were over. They would go to Shanghai as soon as his term in Chungking was finished, and they would be married.

Then the European blitz came along.

As Havas correspondent, I listened in on the successive stages of that incredible moment of earth's history. We would read the terse sentences and stare at each other, wondering if it wasn't just a bad joke. It couldn't happen, it couldn't! Why, in all our lifetime it had never happened. Everyone knew how good the French Army was, didn't they? And we couldn't afford to let France fall: what would happen to the world if France fell?

Chungking was seething. The Dutch Minister fell away before our eyes; he must have lost ten pounds in a few days. His two boys were in Rotterdam. And the Nazi Army smashed ahead, crossing rivers over whose unfamiliar names I toiled as I made out the day's flimsies. When the Havas sources closed down and fled, before they set up their new offices in Vichy, we got our news from a French gunboat that was stationed there in the Yangtze. When the Belgian King capitulated the Ambassador in Shanghai published a repudiation of the surrender and declared himself for the refugee government. When the smoke died down and we looked around there were the ugly facts — French resistance finished, and the retreat from Dunkirk accomplished.

I do a lot of picking at the British, but I have the usual American sentimental feeling for them, after all. It has nothing to do with principles, and not very much to do with politics. We have their literature and their language, and we have borrowed a lot of their law. You can't argue yourself out of that close a relationship without working at it. I had no desire to work at it. I suffered too.

In a way I was lucky. We were all lucky in Chungking, because we heard the news in a peculiarly exact way. We heard the German side and the Allied side, just as it came through from the offices on the spot, unmarred by editorial comment and uncolored by radio announcers. I have often sighed since for that clean, uncluttered sort of reporting, smothered as I am by extraneous voices in my newspapers and on my radio programs.

We still didn't realize how bad it was until the Germans bombed Paris, and I remember meeting a Frenchman, Leo, in the hostel corridor, early in the morning, en route from the bathroom. I was clutching soap and towel, and holding my bathrobe together in front; Leo, similarly attired, was going to try his luck at the men's bath. But we stopped to talk.

“Paris bombed!” he said. “But it is terrible, hein?” It was the only time in six years' acquaintance I had seen Leo wholly serious. “Bombs falling on Paris, I cannot believe it,” he said. “My sister is living there; I have dispatched a cable. Ah, ah, ah.” A lady in peignoir and slippers drifted past us in the dark hall and Leo looked after her appraisingly. “Who is that?” he demanded. “Not bad at all.” Then he remembered again and his plump face resettled in lines of anxiety. “Terrible, hein?” he added.

Over at the Press Hostel we gathered and shifted and gathered again in busy little groups. The American young men — Mel Jacoby, Frank Smith, Teddy White — felt uneasily that it was time to stop playing around the Far East; time to enlist somewhere, probably in England. Marcuse, the one European of our group, said that he was going immediately to join the Free French, which sent Corin into yelps of protest which did not cease until I reminded her that Jacques would have to wait, anyway, for formal release from his post.

I don't think I had any strong urge to join up in anything, but there was a sort of premonitory prickle at the roots of my scalp, and I felt guilty that the States hadn't gone into the war as yet. I don't think I realized how strong the isolationists were at home. I had fallen out of the habit of believing anything I read in the news magazines (and I didn't learn my mistake for years). I was certainly out of touch with my country, without knowing it; those stories and photographs of America First meetings which I was to see in the following months registered themselves in my brain merely as typical exaggerations, cooked up to fill the columns with something readable.

It is odd when you come to think of it that I accepted without question the necessity of our entry into the war. I had been brought up in the age of pacifism. We were taught in school that war was wicked and totally unnecessary. All the more “enlightened” educational groups took that attitude. We were filled with statistics of the munitions industry and with the conclusions our seniors drew from these figures. We were given new propaganda regularly in the popular magazines, warning us against warmongers. … It worked, evidently, on the minds of many of us, enough of us to slow down our actions by some years. I suppose it didn't work on me when the time came because I was outside the country and had a different point of view. The same goes for anyone used to traveling beyond America's limits. But I had doubts, up until the last minute and even beyond. I didn't doubt that we should be fighting, but I regretted the blind manner in which so many of the English hurled themselves into the fire.