China to Me (53 page)

I looked at him with exasperation, but decided not to reply. It wouldn't have made sense to him if I had told him that the roads were crowded with looters who carried arms, that our hospital workers were always finding dead bodies of civilians who had encountered these people off the main highway, that the Canaval house was undoubtedly gutted already, as were all the other houses in the neighborhood, and Ah King or no Ah King, I would be picked up by the Japs. The only safe road was that between our house and the hospital, and that was because we stepped almost straightway from the Weill grounds to the hospital territory. I was sorry Helen needed clothes, but so did I. I wouldn't have gone to her house just then for anything but Carola. The body of a pretty European girl had been picked up near the Queen Mary and was now in the hospital icebox awaiting identification. I don't know why I got it into my head that this girl was my friend Maria da Roza, a Portuguese masseuse who had given me a course of massage after Carola, but I did. I was sure it was Maria. I made up my mind to go down and take a look, but that very morning Maria herself walked in, well and in uniform, on duty and detailed to massage Charles's arm.

Little by little I was learning my way around the hospital, through the bewildering mass of old friends who were patients. On the last day of the fighting Barbara Petro came in with her husband, who had been wounded in the leg. He had joined up the day before and there wasn't even time to give him a uniform. Petro held a French passport, though in the early days he was a White Russian. Now that he was wounded, we were worried about his status. If the Japs got hold of a Free Frenchman they would be ugly, perhaps, and Petro had a stormy record on behalf of De Gaulle. Barbara was working in the American consulate and she was still on duty. After the surrender she was held with the others incommunicado in the American Club, up on top of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building. When Petro heard that he got up, grabbed a mop as a crutch, left all his spare change with me and, still in gray tweed, hobbled out of hospital. He got to Barbara somehow, I heard later.

I found Dorothy Jenner too — the Australian newspaperwoman who had dined with Colin and me before Pearl Harbor. She was down with dysentery, after having served with the police during hostilities. She was profane in her criticism of the way the war had been run, and now she watched the campaign in Malaya with agonized interest. She was a jolly soul, and one afternoon when she came up to see Charles we had a brisk argument. Jenner as an Australian began to chip Charles as an Englishman for the way his country was mismanaging everything. I spoke up in her behalf, but suddenly she turned on me, the American, and said, “And what about all that help Roosevelt was going to send?”

It stopped me. You would have to have been in Hong Kong during that period to realize how irritating Mr. Roosevelt's glowing speeches can be, given certain conditions. I sat there looking rueful, and so did Charles, and so did Jenner. There we were, the three of us, quite definitely in the soup.

Charles began to chuckle. Then I did. Then Jenner did. It was the first time he had laughed since the surrender, but it was a good one when it came. We all sat there laughing, wordless and ignoble but still alive. After that, things were never quite so nightmarish again.

Conditions outside were getting so lawless and dangerous that we women at the Weill house put in a request to be allowed to sleep in the Queen Mary. The Rev. Mr. Short, a scared-looking bloke Selwyn had left in charge of the hospital, said we couldn't. He said there was no room. In vain I reminded him of Selwyn's early promise that the hospitals were to be refuges for women and children when the time came; he was paralyzed with fear that the Japanese would kick him, and of course the rest of the personnel, out into the street. He seemed to think that they would be angry if he took in any refugees, and he was definite in his refusal. The sisters backed him up heartily. They wanted to stay in their hospital as long as possible, and they wanted to eat too; they were awfully worried for fear we would encroach on the food supply.

In the meantime they weren't doing too badly, though the patients were starving. I shall never, I suppose, stop being bitter about that period. There were masses of supplies in the basement, and the staff must have thought the Japs were going to let them go on living in the hospital forever — the best hospital in town, mind you — eating their own food. And so naturally they didn't want to waste that food. They were eating pretty well in their own mess; they weren't that parsimonious. It was only in regard to the patients that they were so careful. Once when I was complaining about Charles's rations Hilda said:

“Why, I think we manage admirably. Today Mary and I had our choice of two kinds of soup, and we each had a cup of each, didn't we, Mary? Then there was a salad, and a bit of cold meat — ”

“No doubt,” I said, “in the staff room. Charles didn't have that.”

Hilda looked over my head. “That's appalling,” she said. “I do think the staff ought to take what the patients get. …” She drifted away then, and avoided me for several days. She had taken over a cabinet in the hospital, with a lock on the door, and I entrusted my cans of Cow and Gate to her, just in time to save them. One had already disappeared, and the can I was using currently seemed to sink in level more quickly than was normal. I was frantic. I tried my best to do better on the milk question myself, but it was no good. The short rations couldn't have helped very much, of course.

Ah King came and told me he had no more money, and I gave him fifty dollars and said that he had better go away. “I have only two hundred left,” I said, “in hundred-dollar notes. I can't pay you any more.”

“That's all right,” he said cheerfully. “I can wait.”

The first thing the Japanese had done was to close the banks, and all of us were caught short, save for a few farsighted individuals who had taken the time in the early days to go into their banks and load up on currency. We were pretty sore at the government for waiting with their surrender and then popping it on us as a surprise. “But they wanted to avoid runs and riots,” Charles explained.

“But what do we do now?”

There wasn't anything to do but sit tight. It was lucky for me that I was with the Weills, the Weills with their clever, resourceful mother and their inexhaustible cellar. Everything in the world came out of that cellar just when you needed it most. Even Mother Weill didn't have powdered milk, though. Somewhere somebody must have put in a good word for me with the fates. One day the proprietor of the Grips dropped in to hospital. He was a man I scarcely knew. And what do you think he sent up to me? A twelve-pound tin of milk powder! I slept better that night.

Tony Dawson-Grove was in hospital. He was a patient, but he pretended that nothing was the matter with him. As if it were an obscene secret he concealed the fact that he had got a splinter of shrapnel in the chest, while he was on duty at Aberdeen. Tony is a Quaker and was glad that he was a Navy doctor and so noncombatant. Now, however, he was recovering from the first shock, and he was laboring under a strong sense of rage. I understood him thoroughly; I was too. I was angry with everyone those days, with a deep dangerous anger that burned for several months. Tony must have been feeling the same. He sat with Charles and me on the little veranda of the ward one afternoon, and he suddenly burst out — we had been talking it all over, the ineptitude of the authorities, the stupidity with which they had defended and then surrendered.

“What now?” he demanded. “It doesn't make sense. Look at Charles. Look at you. Mickey, what's going to happen to you?”

Charles looked shocked and didn't say anything. I wasn't shocked; I knew how Tony was feeling. I shrugged, and I didn't say anything either. There was nothing to say.

One of the results of the surrender was that there was a rush on the part of the leftists, Hilda's friends, to save their skins. I suppose I had better not use names. Except for Jim Bertram, who simply enlisted with the Volunteers and fought, and was captured, and in general behaved well, and Max Bickerton, who did his job too and made no attempt to get away, the leftists behaved in a way that made me slightly sick. One after another they came up to hospital with plans for getting into disguise, usually as nurses or doctors (still believing in that immunity of the magic Red Cross, you see), and shaking with terror. Each one seemed to feel that the Japanese had waged this war with the sole intention of getting hold of him. After one of them had been in the room and pleaded with me to do something for him that I couldn't, Charles spoke his mind. He felt let down and disappointed in the boys and girls.

“Not much gallantry in defeat there, is there?” he said. “I'm somewhat surprised, I must say. Why should they be so worried? You have as much reason to be afraid, Mickey.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm not. I don't think the Japs care about any of us. Anyway, Charles, the Chinese aren't acting like this. I saw Chi-cheng yesterday; she's living here on the grounds, and she was okay. Perfectly calm. Maybe you have to be hysterical, rather, to be a leftist on someone else's soil to begin with. I mean — oh, I don't know, but it is sort of disgusting.”

I almost forgave Margaret Watson all her rudeness when we talked it over. “So far there have been absolutely no inquiries about Hilda,” she admitted. “We made fools of ourselves. I think it must be a sort of conceit, don't you?”

And Hilda was funny too. “I've always pictured myself as being able to take it,” she said. “I've always imagined I would die gloriously, in a splendid blaze or something. I never in all my wildest imaginings thought of being a prisoner, just like anybody else.”

She had come around to normal pretty well. Selwyn, during all these days, was the busiest man in town. He was co-operating with the Japs insofar as he went on doing his job, the normal duties of the director of medical services. His mind had started immediately working on the problem of how to keep the town from the horrors of epidemics and other aftereffects of war, and the Japs seemed to respect this impulse of his. They gave him an arm band, their method of showing authority, which stated that the doctor was “adviser” to their Health Department. It was during those days that I remembered what they had called Selwyn in Africa when he worked there: “the man with the smile of the tiger.” He looked ghastly; haggard and bodiless. He worked without stopping to eat or sleep. He worked like a saint and a devil. He talked endlessly with stubborn or threatening or suspicious Japanese officers. Little by little he got someplace.

“My duty,” he told me once, “is to the population of this town — the Chinese and Indians and Eurasians as well as the whites. I shall continue to do my duty, if it is permitted, to keep them as healthy as possible. We took on that responsibility when we made Hong Kong a colony. I love Hong Kong.”

I looked at him now with awe. If ever I had learned to talk to him during the early days of the war, it was impossible now to communicate with him as human to human. Selwyn was going through the ordeal of canonization. You couldn't get to him, and you didn't want to. But we all leaned on him with all our weight, and he carried us.

It had been a week since the surrender. After all, nothing much had happened at the hospital. In the rest of town there had been tragedies and crimes and conflagrations, but we didn't know about them except by rumor. The telephones were cut off and there were no trams or buses. News went on foot, in the mouths of coolies.

Mrs. Weill decided that we should celebrate New Year's Day, more, I suppose, because she didn't want to default on her duties than because she felt at all joyful. Everyone tried to help with some contribution, and the table at eight o'clock looked lovely. We had no electricity, but there were candles. We had shuttered the windows, of course, and locked the front door, and closed everything up. Men were scarce; there were only Alec and the young Albert, Sophie's son. The rest of us were women of all ages and shapes, from young Lena, who had just discovered she was pregnant, to old Auntie.

Mother Weill had killed her last two chickens. We were going to eat them with the inevitable rice, and the cooking smelled wonderful. Alec poured out a few drops of whisky for each of us; Veronica brought her ukulele, which she played very well. It was quite festive considering everything. Like the other girls, I was wearing my pajamas, ready to go to bed as soon as we had dined. I should mention here that our Japanese guests were gone, having pulled out that morning, and we felt pretty good about that too. The upper house was still too filthy for us to think of moving back, but still, we thought, it was nice to have our houses to ourselves again. We were wrong.

Carola was asleep in the hallway upstairs, in a deep Morris chair which did duty as a cot, and which kept the draft off. The servants were all in the kitchen helping the cook. Veronica swung into “Rule, Britannia” and we sang with her:

“Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

At that moment a lot of men marched in through the kitchen, shut out the servants, and tied us up.

Chapter 43

It is always difficult to describe melodramatic happenings like that one. Anyway, it is for me. I don't like using exclamation points, and yet they do seem to be indicated when one is talking about this sort of thing. We thought, of course, that the men were Japanese soldiers; it was only reasonable to suppose so, as the first few of them were wearing Japanese uniform. The others, I noticed, were not. They were just Chinese rabble. When Mrs. Weill spoke to them in Japanese they didn't understand her. The leader, a small fellow with a very dashing way of doing things, was only able to reply to her when she spoke Cantonese. Later we agreed that they were camp followers, or perhaps Formosans, who had swiped the clothes and the weapons.

They had weapons, all right. Two of them were carrying rifles and the leader had a revolver which he pointed at all of us in turn as he declaimed. The purpose of the visit seemed to be the acquisition of a large sum of money which he was convinced Mother Weill had hidden somewhere on the premises. In vain did she deny it. He didn't believe her (and neither did I).