Mandarin-Gold (34 page)

'You'll be safe enough,' Gunn said, grinning, enjoying the American's discomfiture. But why should he find such satisfaction in humiliating him? Could it be because Mackereth represented something, maybe some belief in God, that he had long ago lost, for now he believed only in himself?

Lin listened patiently to his emissary's report. 'And then, Your Excellency, the Barbarian Elliot and the Barbarian Gunn sent two other Barbarians, Gutzlaff and Mackereth, to plead with the captains to supply food and water.'

'With what result?'

'With this result, Your Excellency. They were ordered away speedily from each junk and advised to approach the next. When they reached the last of the line, that captain's answer was to send to the shore ordering the batteries to load their guns.'

'An excellent response,' said Lin approvingly. 'So what happened?'

'The two Barbarians spent six hours rowing in the Roads trying to persuade these captains from the course of their duty, without any success whatever. They returned to the Barbarian Elliot.'

'And?'

'And almost at that moment, Your Excellency, two .British ships, with many guns pointing at the shore batteries, arrived off Hong Kong.'

‘I see,' said Lin slowly. This put a different complexion on affairs. Despite the constant, reports of the feebleness of the Barbarians as soldiers and sailors, he knew that their guns could wreak terrible havoc on the junks. As with a spring tide under a strong moon, control of events was suddenly receding, from him, and he felt cold fingers of dismay around his heart.

Four men sat in Elliot's cabin, their faces grave.

The third man was a naval officer, Captain Henry Smith, who had been rowed over from his command, the
Volage.

'There has been no response whatever from any of these captains,' Gunn reported.

Elliot nodded.

'I expected as much. But then it is probably death for them if they help us. They owe their duty to their Emperor, just as we owe ours to the Sovereign.'

‘We have not come all this way, gentlemen, at high speed, to be made fools of by a lot of slit-eyed, pig-tailed, yellow-faced people in funny wooden boats,' Smith said gruffly. 'I suggest we take some speedy action against them.'

‘I agree,' replied Elliot, surprising himself by his vehemence. 'I think they should feel the weight of our shot. We have tried everything else we can. I've been here for months,
years
in fact, Smith, urging moderation, and a temperate approach — and what do I get?
This.
We are now on the verge of being driven out of the China seas altogether.'

'I am not a man of war,' said Mackereth carefully. 'But rowing .among the junks, I counted their guns, and they sport at least twenty times as many as we mount, not including the shore batteries.'

'To the devil with that,' said Smith. He was a big, hard, bluff man, eager for promotion. The best way to secure this speedily was to win a battle, and the greater the apparent odds, the more notable the victory. Caution and timidity were poor companions on any officer's journey to high command.

'We'll engage them before they can take aim. So I have your permission, Captain Elliot?'

'Yes,' said Elliot. 'I will deal with the junks to starboard. You take the rest and the shore batteries. And may God be with us all.'

'He is always on the winning side,' said Smith confidently.

'Amen,' said Mackereth.

Smith returned to the
Volage,
and for half an hour the ships rocked gently at anchor on the swell, and the sun moved relentlessly across the sky, and the children cried and the pigs grunted. And then the British guns began to fire.

Flocks of birds flew in terror from village temples, and in the singing silence after the broadside, the air was filled with the whacker of their frightened wings. The junks replied at once, but their cannonade sounded thin and feeble, like fireworks exploding, against the thundering broadside of nine guns from the
Hya
cinth,
and then fourteen more from the
Volage,
with the crackle of lighter weapons from Gunn's
Hesperides
and other armed vessels.

For half an hour they fired, blowing away the sails of the junks and shelling the forts. Then the junks put out oars like long spindly fingers and the crews began to row frantically for the relative shelter of the shore. Smith, his guns recharged, followed them and picked them off one by one.

The sun began to glide down the sky; soon it would be dark. A white fog of powder smoke rolled across the milky sea of evening. Elliot sent MacPherson over to Captain Smith to urge him to break off the engagement. After all, they had punished the junks, they had upheld the honour of the British flag; there was nothing more to do.

He sat down in his cabin and wrote a report to Palmerston; the
Volage
could take, it back as far as Calcutta. Elliot's anger at the stupidity of the Chinese had evaporated as the first gun fired. Now he felt subdued, for this had not been a battle; it had been a massacre. Yet when the Chinese would not listen to the voice of reason, the only argument left was one for the mouths of the guns to utter.

And how could Lord Palmerston, sitting in his office in faraway London, with a coal fire to warm him and fog shrouding the streets, comprehend the mounting frustration of being confined for days in the stifling, sweating heat of an anchored ship, with water and provisions in short supply, and the knowledge that, on your decision alone, a whole Empire's eastern trade could depend?

So Elliot wrote carefully: "The violent and vexatious measures heaped upon Her Majesty's officers and subjects will, I trust, serve to excuse those feelings of irritation which have betrayed me into a measure that I am certain, under less trying circumstances, would be difficult indeed of vindication.”

In other words, Elliot told himself bitterly, I lost my temper. Have I also lost everything for which I have been working out here?

Lin was worried.

'Are you
certain
that our war junks have been defeated?' he asked his emissary incredulously.

'Then we shall issue a proclamation saying that a great victory is ours. No, more than one.
Six
victories. That is a goodly number. Send in the secretary.'

'With speed, Your Excellency.'

The man turned and went out, and Lin sat, looking at the sun on the Pearl River, wondering how best to mould his account of events so that the Emperor would not blame him.

Still out of sight on that river, the English flotilla was slowly moving north to Macao. The Hong merchants were waiting for them, smiling. They knew who had won the engagement, whatever Chinese officials would no doubt later claim. They also knew the advantages of being on the winning side. There would no longer be any need for British crews to worry about decapitation should their ships be found to be carrying opium. After all, how could such sentences be enforced?

'So you see,' said Gunn, when Elliot told him this, 'Jardine
was
right all along. A little force can teach a very big lesson.'

'That has never been in doubt,' replied Elliot dryly. ‘But who has learnt the lesson?'

15

In Which One Action Leads to Another, and Then to a Friend

Mackereth sat in his cabin in the
Hesperides,
whisky at his elbow, candles burning low in the globes. The night was oppressively hot, and sweat had pasted his shirt to his soft flesh.

On the table in front of him lay a sheaf of papers, some covered in Chinese characters he had painted carefully and neatly with a brush, others with English scriptural texts. He was finding it more difficult than usual to translate what had happened nearly two thousand years ago in Palestine and Judea and along the shores of Lake Galilee, into terms that illiterate peasants on the shore of the China seas could understand and accept.

He felt like a man making maps for a journey through a country from which no traveller had ever returned. He believed there were certain guide-posts and milestones, because others had told him they existed; but by the time he would discover whether this was so or not, it would be too late to warn those who came behind him.

Mackereth sipped his drink. It seemed an age since Jardine had first come to see him because Gutzlaff was ill, but it was only a few years. Now Matheson had returned to England, buying a great house and estate in Sussex, for something over half a million pounds sterling, it was said; and Jardine also was on his way home: Mackereth had heard he hoped to become a member of parliament. And all he was doing here was growing old.

Mackereth felt uneasy about his future. Gunn had become harder and more ruthless with each step he took towards greater wealth. Now he rented a Portuguese mansion overlooking the Praya in Macao; Mackereth's boys had told him of the grand parties that Gunn had given there, importing delicacies from Calcutta and even live turkeys from Manila. As many as sixty guests would sit down at polished tables to eat from silver plates with French wines served from crystal goblets, and. then there would be entertainments, music, dancing, flirting.

Always, Gunn seemed surrounded by beautiful women. The Chinese authorities would not permit the wives and daughters of European merchants to travel to Canton. And the heat, Mackereth knew, warmed the natures of these ladies to such an extent that any man of the slightest pretension to virility could pleasure one every night; and some, like Gunn, would pleasure several.

He contrasted Gunn's growing opulence and influence with his own declining standards. Even his boys brought him little pleasure now. There had been humiliating incidents when all he had been able to do was to press his soft flaccid, pale, pustuled body against their firm young limbs and sob out his love and longing for them. And, once or twice, they had laughed at him. Imagine, Chinese coolies' half-caste sons laughing at an American! It was degrading, mortifying. He had flung them from him and stormed into the other room, and then stood naked, panting, looking at himself in the wall mirror, and seeing a frightened old man look back.

There were other worries, too, apart from these private and personal torments of unperformance and envy. It was openly said now that war could break out any day between the English and the Chinese. Gunn, he knew, would be for any action that could open up the country to what he called legitimate trade; These were words that Mackereth had also heard from the American merchants; from the Portuguese, the French, from Russians and Austrians. Their wish for legitimate trade seemed to amount to very little more than talk about its undoubted advantages. But the trade they really, sought was illegitimate; the Coast Trade, the forbidden trade — opium. That was where the greatest and the easiest profits could be made.

Mackereth had seen what the drug did to those who smoked it; how soporific they became, how indolent, half asleep like giant, turgid sloths. He had also seen what effect opium had on those who trafficked in it. How it made them hard and greedy, eager for profit to pile on profit, although if they lived a thousand years, they could barely spend all the wealth they had already made.

It was as though the sweet poppy juice turned to iron in the veins of the men who sold it. It tainted their blood just as dangerously as it poisoned the lives
-
of those who smoked it or chewed it. This was the forbidden fruit, which ruined all who came into contact with it; now it was changing Gunn's character, with disastrous consequences for Mackereth. Gunn had already whittled down his price from a thousand to three hundred pounds, and was now threatening to drop him to two-fifty, because he disapproved of him peddling his tracts.

'I'm not paying you as a missionary,' Gunn had told him angrily one day, when Mackereth had gone to see him at his splendid house. 'I pay you as an
in
terpreter.
If you want to spend so much of your time hawking tracts about eternal life over one side of the vessel, you cannot expect me to pay you the same fee as if you were using all your energies and devoting all your time to interpreting for me on the other side.'

'Have I ever let you down, doctor?' asked Mackereth quietly. 'Whenever you have asked for me, I have been there. I have always given you a faithful translation of the most difficult dialects. Never once have you found me wanting. But no man can serve two masters. As it is written, no man can serve God and Mammon.'

'You appear to have done pretty well so far,' said Gunn sharply, 'so I feel you should accept a cut in salary. If you wish to distribute your own tracts, then make your own arrangements to do so. If I allow you time and opportunity to distribute them, then acknowledge that your time is my money.'

'There are other things in life but money, doctor. You must be rich now. More rich than you ever imagined.'

'How do
you
know what I imagined?' asked Gunn bitterly.

'You still seek so much, and yet I do not even own a roof over my head.'

'Then it is time you did, and time you thought about physical necessities, as well as spiritual possibilities,' Gunn told him.

And, of course, Mackereth had thought about them; indeed, such problems were rarely out of his mind. The Good Book had adjured him to take, no thought for tomorrow, for what he would put on or what he would -eat or how he would fare, for the Lord would provide. But nevertheless Mackereth sometimes felt that the Lord could do with a helping hand.

What would happen to him if there was a war, and all foreigners were driven out? He had no home to go to, no savings, no trade or qualification that guaranteed a living. He, more than most men, was utterly dependent on other people. This was why he had swallowed his qualms about helping the opium dealers. He had not struggled against their offers, as he should have done, for he had needed their money; and now he needed it more desperately than ever.