In Hazard (16 page)

For their contacts were very rare. In even the poorest, clay-built Chinese house, the women's court (where the children live) is separate from the father's room: an inner place. The only contact the children have with their father is a formal one, when there is some almost ritual act of service to perform. Much as the Chinese love their children, there is no display of affection such as might, in its naked informality, arouse a revulsion in the little one. The pangs of that primeval tie are never allowed to be felt; nor the pearly coating to wear thin.

Ling's father was invariably kind to him, in his remote way: did the right thing by him: dressed him, of course, all in red.

Yet when his father sent him at length to school, because his father sent him he tried not to learn.

However it is difficult not to learn, at a Chinese school. An English boy can stare at a book until he sees double, without reading a word: can shake up the figures of a sum like a kaleidoscope, without coming any nearer the answer. But the Chinese teaching method is subtler. There everything is learned by rote. Say it over and over again: say it in chorus, for hours and hours. Your attention may be in Tashkent: but say it over and over again like that, in your high piping voice, and it will get in behind your attention: when your attention returns it will be as a lid, not a shield—the thing you wished not to learn will be already safely ensconced within. So too Ao Ling had learned: by rod and by rote, but chiefly by rote.

Yet the impoverished student who conducted the little school could not make much of Ling. He was a polite but a glowering boy, not much liked by his fellows: and with an inner resistance, it almost seemed, to authority. That meant there was no hope for him (for a willing obedience to authority is the first of virtues, without which no others can be added).

Ling's personal hatred of his father, of course, the tutor never suspected. How should he? He was a decent man, not given to the imagination of incredible evil in his pupils. And a feeling so unnatural, so shameful, any child would take pains to hide even from himself. It was only by its fruits that you could tell it was already there.

An exaggerated fear, bordering on a nervous hatred, of the rich, however, the teacher did discern in him: but could not account for.

Only once did the teacher see Ling's face really happy. It was the season of bean-flies—big green insects, with red iridescent eyes. Ling was catching the silly, lovely things in dozens, and putting them in paper boxes: looking at his captives in a most happy and adoring way, holding them with infinite gentleness. The gentle Buddhist himself smiled with pleasure at his student's patent love of them. But then he saw Ling take the boxes, full of living flies, and thrust them, all of a sudden, in the stove.

But Ling's early memories went back far beyond those days: beyond his school, beyond the famine: growing even clearer, the earlier they were. Bright separate pictures, recorded not for anything important in them but rather, it seemed, by whim. Almost, Ling believed, he could remember the day when he lay, a new-born babe, wrapped in the traditional pair of his father's old trousers.

That of course is not possible: but some of his memories certainly went back very early indeed.

One was of his sister, of whom he had been so fond. It was in the days before he had learned to walk. He had seen
Chieh-Chieh
toddle out of the door into the sunshine, and on all fours had made haste to follow her. Once out in the yard, he had sat up on his clammy end to look about him. Suddenly he was bowled head over heels by a big, black-haired, wrinkled old boar, who was making a sally at a piece of melon-rind.

In only one of these memories did his father actually make an appearance. I have said that there was little personal contact between them: but in the other picture I propose to describe one of those rare contacts did occur.

The whole family were straddling the thatched roof of their cottage. The yellow flood-water swirled around them, and the mud walls beneath them were melting away. I suppose their peril was pretty acute. Ling was lying in his mother's arms. He must have been very young then: for presently she gave him suck.

However, hardly had the milk begun to come when suddenly his father tore him from her breast, and tossed him, howling furiously, into the rescue-boat which had just drawn near.

After the famine the Ao family moved south, into the eastern Hunan hills, near the Kiangsi border. By this time Ling's father had grown stern with him: and the boy's hatred deepened. But still he never gave it expression. This was not only a matter of self-control: it was a curious defect in the hatred itself. When alone he might be filled with the white fervour of parricide; but whenever he faced his father a look or a word would prick his rage as if it was a bladder, and leave him humiliated, utterly without its support (acting rather like the push the gate-keeper gave the crowd).

When he was twelve, without warning or any open quarrel, Ling ran away.

He worked here and there, now at this, now at that: being bitten by a restless spirit that made him always move on, from Hunan into Kiangsi, eastward from the wild and wooded hills into the red loam country near Nanchang.

It was on that road he saw his first motor-bus. It was not one of a regular service, but a lone one, far from its fellows, plying wherever a sufficiency of passengers wanted to go. It was packed with passengers so tight that they seemed to spread out at the top like a bunch of flowers: and you could tell by their faces that it was a proud thing to travel by motor-bus.

It was not moving very fast, however, because the proprietor, to economise petrol, had yoked a pair of bullocks to it instead of using the engine.

For a while Ling worked at a country inn, on this road. It had only a few smoke-blackened rooms: one smoky lamp: for general guest-bed a wooden platform. There the few travellers sat peacefully sucking at their little pipes, or relieved their mild boredom by writing and drawing on the walls. The shrill mosquitoes: the crowing cocks: the mid-night stamping of the cattle: and at dawn the rattling chain by which he drew water from the well.

What a contrast it was to the urban hotel (where presently he got another job) in Nanchang!—Nanchang, the first capital town he set eyes on, and therefore the world's metropolis to him. The sing-song of the peddlers in the street: the clatter, the strident singing, the everlasting shapeless noise: the smell of bean-oil: the snapping voices of men gambling, for drinks, all night with their fingers: the soldiers roused at bugle-crow, and the sewing-machines.

Sitting in the centre-castle of the “Archimedes,” Ao Ling closed his ears to the Christian buffoon: let his reverie course over the chequered field of his memories.

For a time he had worked as a navvy, repairing the dykes that hold the yellow Yangtze back from the green land behind.

For a time he had worked in a Shanghai theatre. Not as an actor, nor property-man, nor musician, nor any job you would think of with the word “theatre” in your mind. In that baking heat, his job was to toss among the audience hot towels, with which to ease their congested sweat-glands.

—Again, a time in Nanking: where they had already begun to raise a new, gaunt Whitehall in the earthen ruins.

A time when he had stood, his arms bound behind him, waiting his turn to kneel before the headsman. It was a sandy space, like a football-ground, outside a city wall: and surrounded by a football crowd. But even as he waited his turn someone galloped up with news, shouting. The headsman (one of the last of his guild), his smug and vain expression turned suddenly to terror, dropped his cleaver and ran, his yellow apron flapping against his knees. The punctilious Magistrate, presiding in his bivouac of matting, vanished without punctilio. The soldiers ran: the crowd melted: he was left alone, one living man among four decapitated bodies, the cold sweat drying on his stiffened and aching face.

His hands were still tied behind him as he wandered into the emptying town. A silent town: no voice raised in alarm, only a whispering all over it like a shower of rain—the whisper of running feet. When he had found something to cut himself free he ran too.

Not long after that he spent a merry three months as conductor on the Hangchow bus: a most light-hearted, boyish time. These were proper buses, proceeding under their own power. Back and forth to Nanking, for three months, always through the same countryside. It is a delicate, detailed, green country—all shades of green, green rice-fields, dark green corn-fields, green trees, green feathery clumps of bamboo. A country of earthen roads, and hump-backed bridges over canals thick with quiet, child-drawn traffic. Over these roads the bulging and intoxicated buses roared and raced; each with its wildly-swaying luggage-trailer like a tin can tied to a bolting terrier's tail.

In this job Ling developed a passion for machinery, and in time might even have risen to the rank of driver. But one day, as they bucketed over a bridge with all their wheels in the air, he caught a glimpse of a beautiful boat-girl, sitting in a sampan and embroidering slippers. Hers was a beauty that would have made even a wild goose alight. Without hesitation he dropped off the moving bus.

But by the time he had run back to the bridge, the sampan was gone.

Actually Ao Ling was back in Hunan, a soldier in the army of General Ho Chien, at the time of his conversion.

That was in 1927. All Hunan and Kiangsi were in a turmoil. The Northern troops had come and gone: but now a new sort of warfare had begun. For no sooner was the Kuomintang safely in the ascendant than it split from top to bottom—Right from Left. Borodin and the Russians were sent packing. Communists, big and little, were slaughtered wherever they could be caught. For no one is so merciless to the Left as the old revolutionary: and chronologically it was Chiang Kai-shek's government at Nanking, not the Nazi government of Hitler, which can claim the honour of being the second of the world's fascist movements (Stalin of course only comes fourth).

Yet some of the leading Communists escaped the proscription; and raising their standard here and there, found no lack of adherents. Mao Tse-tung, for instance: a slatternly peasant-politician of thirty, with an educated and humorous mind. And Chu Teh: a comfortably-off, aristocratic, middle-aged, opium-smoking Brigadier-general, who had renounced everything to kiss the Hammer and Sickle: and who was a strategist, moreover, of the first class.

Mao, working from Changsha (the provincial capital) roused the peasants of Hunan to revolt; and presently marched south with them to the mountains of the Kiangsi border. The reformed Chu Teh, who had led his troops with him out of Nanchang, marched west, into these same mountains.

So this brilliant and incongruous pair joined forces, and established themselves first in Chingkangshan.

But of all this, of course, Ao Ling knew little at that time. Only that Old Sly-boots His Excellency Ho Chien was sending the force to which he belonged into the mountains, to fight the “bandits.”
[1]
Those mountains, that he already knew so well. Old Sly-boots was an efficient commander, whose troops went where he told them. And so, shouldering their umbrellas, their huge straw hats flapping on their backs, some carrying song-birds in cages, and a few even carrying rifles, the Government forces moved to the attack.

That was the point at which Ao Ling's mind went blank, so far as his own experiences were concerned. How had he found himself in the ranks of that Red Army he had been sent to fight? He hardly knew. There were plenty of other deserters, like himself: they went over in small groups, all the time—as they had always been accustomed to do, in these local wars. Ling must have gone with a group like that: perhaps even guided them.

He had certainly no notion, as he trotted across to the enemy lines, that this was the beginning of a new life for him: that it was more than a change of leaders: that it would come to mean, to him, what the Road to Damascus meant to St. Paul.

Yet that is what happened. He absorbed the Marxist doctrine like a thirsty animal drinking. It refreshed every corner of his soul. For it freed him from his three great fears: fear of his father, fear of the supernatural, fear of the rich. Moreover it harnessed the three hatreds born of those fears, and told him they were proper and right—not the secret scars of a wandering outcast, but the honourable badges of a fraternity. In setting him to fight the government it made his father hydra-headed—and gave him a sword for every neck.

He remembered the old life clearly, but it meant nothing to him any more—almost it might have happened to someone else. Like those memories of an earlier life on earth which a re-incarnate might preserve, who had somehow avoided Mother Mêng's potion of oblivion.

Ling, who had never been able to work even for himself for more than a few months at a time, now found himself prepared to work his whole life for the sake of the New China: for the dawn of the Red Star. He developed a great natural aptitude for learning, which he had never guessed he had in him: gulping books and lectures with an almost appalling voracity: and presently, delivering passable lectures himself.

But it was not so much his book-learning that first brought him into public notice as the almost uncanny skill he developed at ping-pong; a craze for which was then already sweeping the entire Red Higher Command like a fever.

All that winter they were beleaguered in Chingkangshan: and once again Ao Ling tasted bark soup. But in the spring of '29 the Red Army burst its bounds: fought its way out of the ring surrounding it and went off campaigning and preaching in southern Kiangsi. But in the sortie, the patrol which Ao Ling now commanded got separated from the Army: and presently Ao Ling got separated from his patrol. He was suddenly alone.

The effect on him was immediate and terrifying: he felt himself shrinking, shrivelling. All that winter he had been not a person, but a unit in a great fraternity, all members of one body. Now he was alone. He was no longer a patrol-commander, working his way, according to Hoyle, down the Western System of Defiles: he was a lonely man with a stubbed toe, hobbling down a steep, stone-flagged path: approaching through a clump of firs a little Taoist temple, on the walls of which huge anti-communist posters flamed. Before the door the abbot sat, playing on a zither.