The Lady and the Panda (29 page)

A certain blackness was taking hold inside her, one that was revealed in her dispatch when she wrote of the hotel clerk who played two love songs over and over in rotation on the phonograph. “There was something a little sinister,” Harkness said, “about the relentlessness of both, the phonograph grinding out its sobbing misery and the gray clouds pouring their steady deluge on the little hotel, the few huts, and the jungle. Even after I had closed my door and crept between damp sheets, the sound of both drummed in my ears.”

She was rescued the next day by a fancy Michelin train, with a cabinet
full of pâté and crackers and whiskey free for the taking, chugging through tunnel after tunnel (her tourist folder claimed there were 172), climbing for twelve hours to the high, cool city of Kunming.

SHE ARRIVED AT THE HOTEL DU COMMERCE
in the grip of an aching depression, mystified by her own mood. “There has been a vague unrest that I can't explain,” she wrote home, ignoring the number of valid reasons to feel that way. She was alone with no idea where exactly she was going or how she would get there, since planes were not scheduled; she might have to endure forty-two days of rugged overland travel by chair, not speaking any of the languages she would confront; everyone now in Kunming was telling her flatly she would never reach Chongqing; she was tight on money until she could reach Chengdu; and her second wedding anniversary was approaching on September 9.

Smoking and drinking, no doubt, she typed a letter to Hazel Perkins that was so morose she would apologize for it more than once later. Traveling could be “hellishly lonely,” she wrote. “Sometimes I could die of it.” She brooded in her hotel room, staring at the unfamiliar walls, wondering just why she felt compelled to wander the world. It all looked so bleak to her now that death seemed welcome. The American who believed so strongly in reincarnation wrote to her friend, “I'll be rather glad when this particular life is over.”

All her distress was channeled into a sickening anxiety over the fate of Su-Lin. She was desperate to have her morbid question answered—so desperate that she cursed the fact that she didn't have the money to send a swift cable. She wanted to know, and as quickly as possible, how Baby was. “For about a week now, I've been worried about Su Lin,” she wrote. “I've had funny dreams about her. I wake and tell myself that it isn't true.” She wanted her friend Perkie to cable her at Cavaliere's as soon as she received the letter. Just say, she wrote starkly, “Sulin well or Sulin dead.” It must have been a bitter moment for her to even type the words. Yet Harkness remained resolute: “I'm not weakening, I assure you,” she wrote. “The chin is still up.”

As it turned out, good luck was just around the corner—there would be a plane north after all.

At dawn she boarded a bus for the airport. As she would do so often through this journey, she found herself in a reflective state, with the land and all the life about it mirroring the stirrings of her soul. “Early rising gods and coolies scattered before the furiously honking horn,” she wrote.

From the plane, Harkness gazed out through the mud-streaked window, at the colors of the sunrise on the lake below, at groups of mountains that “came sliding toward us out of the future,” and at the land she loved. “China from the air is like watered silk,” she wrote dreamily. The tilled land of Chinese farms was not squared off American-style, rather it “conformed to the moods of the hills,” the shapes following, instead of fighting, the ancient decree of nature. The people here followed “their own particular pattern—the pattern of life, which is reflected in the patterns of their fields,” she wrote. She saw beneath her “a slow gentle way of life that has time to consider the plan of Eternity.” The plane ride lifted her up out of her despair. It was just what she needed.

The everyday scenes of the Chinese countryside were like poetry to Harkness.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Once she landed in Chongqing, her task was to book passage to Chengdu. The only planes flying there were nimble little Stinsons, which, with room for only four or five passengers at a time, were booked for several days. In need of someplace to stay, Harkness headed for the SOCONY office, looking for a man named Jones, who was yet another friend of Dan Reib's.

“How in God's name did you get here?” he bellowed when she appeared at his office doorway. He explained that Chongqing was so unsafe that Standard Oil was making plans to evacuate wives and children. Things were jumbled enough at this point that Western Union in the States required some customers who wanted to transmit telegrams here to include the phrase “sent at our own risk.” In fact, matters weren't very good anywhere else either. Word was that a presidential order had come through days before requiring all American citizens to abandon Peiping.

While Jones gladly pledged any help he could give her, the consular service, Harkness knew, would be “cursing me out for coming up here.” In fact, while she thought she had dodged all U.S. officials as she went, she would be shocked later to learn that no less an official than secretary of state Cordell Hull had sent the concerned McCombs family a telegram outlining Harkness's exact route to Chengdu—including her departure date from Shanghai.

After tiffin with Jones and the Chinese staff in the Standard Oil offices, Harkness was packed away in a regal and luxurious sedan chair that was done up in bamboo, white slipcovered cushions, and brass lamps, and sent to Jones's home. The trip would take half an hour. Coolies lugged her down the riverbank, across to the residential side of the city, and up the stone stairs of the sheer cliff to the Joneses' beautiful, low, rambling home, complete with wide-screened verandahs overlooking the river.

Harkness liked Jones's wife, Doris, and daughter, Peggy. If she had to be marooned somewhere for nearly a week, this peaceful house, removed from the chaos of the city, was a rather deluxe way to go. She would enjoy long nights of good sleep, mornings with breakfast in bed, and lazy days spent chatting with her hosts. It was so cozy that she rarely had any desire to go out.

Things couldn't have been better, especially because on her second day there, her mind was finally put at ease about Su-Lin. Hazel Perkins had wired the zoo about Harkness's concerns, and now Harkness received Perkie's cable along with one that was routed from zoo director Edward Bean:
SULIN NOW IN NEW HOME IS FINE WEIGHS 59 POUNDS
, it read. If there had been room in a telegram for more, he might have sent details, for by now, Su-Lin was not only gaining strength and weight, he was soaring in popularity. Each day, children would throng to his exhibit, shrieking with joy and leaving only when they were dragged away from the animal described by one Chicago paper as “the roly-poly clown who waddled about among her toys.” Any cry from him during play would beckon Mary Bean, his constant attendant. She found that he was doing quite well without bamboo, eating apples, rice, cornstalks, grass, and grapes—anything he was given.

The good news made Harkness giddy. She immediately wrote home that she had read the telegram at two o'clock Friday in China, which would be one o'clock Thursday in America. “I really got it before you sent it,” she joked. She typed away, relating her immense relief, and apologizing for her “crazy depressed letter” from Kunming.

“For the first time in months I am relaxed, and contented,” she wrote. She said her roundabout route would all be terribly funny if the war that had caused it weren't so “ghastly.” Later to the Beans in Chicago she would report that “aside from having run into a war two days after I arrived with bombs through the roof of my hotel, everything is going splendidly.”

On Sunday, the day before Harkness's departure, a caravan of sedan chairs brought her and the Joneses to the customs commissioner's house for a “delicious tiffin buffet.” It was to bid farewell to the departing wives, who had received word that evacuation plans had been finalized, and to provide a poker game for the husbands. It seemed to Harkness that the whole foreign population turned out, “gossiping about the few people who were not present.” The foreigners made up a community not unlike a village in Kansas or Nebraska, Harkness said, complete with the “old dame” who snooped on everyone with her telescope.

Late in the afternoon, in a “solemn line” of three chairs, they trooped home. Harkness didn't feel much affinity with her fellow westerners at the party, but her heart was full of love for China as she looked out at the passing countryside. In what she called “the deepening dusk,” as Chinese peasants were busy with cooking, washing, basket making, and harvesting the rice, as “great gray buffalo” trudged slowly through the paddies, followed by a “plowman thigh deep in the ooze,” Harkness absorbed every element.

CHENGDU WAS YET
another homecoming. As soon as the light plane touched down, Harkness bundled her few things into a rickshaw, perched on the carriage seat, and gave instructions to head straight for the post office. Looking over the shoulder of the trotting coolie at the wide, bustling streets of the city that held so few foreigners, and anticipating her imminent reunion, she could feel happy.

The silver-haired Cavaliere was “barking orders,” in Italian-accented Chinese, as she entered. Turning to face her, he said, “Well, well, dear lady, here you are again after another panda.” Immediately, he sent her in his own rickshaw to settle in at the house.

As before, she was provided with a beautiful room off the magnificent palm-filled courtyard. It contained a massive bed that was pragmatically, yet romantically, draped in mosquito netting. Ching Yu, “the No. 1 boy,” served her lunch, and Harkness found him so dear that she was unembarrassed to use her halting and meager Chinese with him. She had been trying to learn the daunting language, in which just a slight variation in tone would completely change the meaning of what was being said.

As wonderful as it was to be back, she saw how different things were from last year. Since the big planes weren't flying into Chengdu, all the frothy fun had been drained from the great estate. Even after Cavaliere came home that evening, his house remained strangely still. Empty and quiet now, the huge tile-roofed pavilion was nearly swallowed by the night. The countless guest rooms, aside from Harkness's, remained dim
and silent. It seemed the whole place was muted by melancholy. Even Kay was morose, and it wasn't just because of the absence of parties. His lively, fun-loving White Russian mistress, Genia, a dental student, had gone, sent off by the missionaries who employed her at seventy dollars a month. If it were possible, Harkness noted, it made Cavaliere even more resentful toward them. He would have happily matched that slim salary to keep her in Chengdu, but she wouldn't stay. “Kay God dams the missionaries up and down,” Harkness wrote. And the feeling was mutual. “The situation is impossible. The dear missionaries think that Kay is a depraved soul (I'm sure they think I am too which makes less than no difference to me).” She never had any patience for anyone with an attitude of superiority, particularly the missionaries. Harkness's own earthiness was diametrically opposed to their sense of propriety. She felt that they were missing out on life—removed from what really mattered, and desiccated in their devotion.

On her first day in Chengdu the explorer arose with nothing but empty hours stretching before her. In the wake of having lost Quentin Young, as well as having had to exit Shanghai without equipment or plans, she had been unable to secure any arrangements at all. It was a miracle that she had made it this far. She would have to put together a team from here, and plot her course. There was no urgency, since Harkness, who knew that panda young were probably born toward the end of September, was after a baby again.

Besides, the idleness was rather seductive. She and Cavaliere quickly fell into an easy pattern of companionship, developing the cozy rhythms of a couple. Kay would come home midday from work for lunch and a glass of wine. Dozily, he would then sit out in the courtyard for a spell, “sun helmet in hand, blue eyes twinkling, or perhaps squinting in the pale autumn sunshine.” After a bit, he would make a big show of his departure, saying dejectedly, “Well, dear girl, I must go to work.” Harkness enjoyed the daily ritual. He would sigh deeply for good measure, then flash his engaging smile to reveal it was all an act.

In the afternoon Harkness might leaf through stale copies of
Esquire
or other American magazines that could be found lying around the
house, or she would slip back to bed for a nap. Often, she would wander about Chengdu, sometimes shopping.

She and Kay passed the evenings having long dinners, then sitting together in the living room. They might read by lamplight, or Cavaliere, who loved to fiddle with his radio, would tune in the news of the world. There was also the Victrola and the library of opera recordings that could, with the flick of a switch, turn the Chinese pavilion into a hissing and crackling Teatro Alla Scala.

“I find myself sunk in a beautiful lethargy here,” Harkness wrote home. The tranquil time was uncharacteristic for both her and Cavaliere, yet they embraced it. A contented Kay suggested that should she not find her panda this season, the American adventuress might like to ride out the winter here with him, trying again the following year. She said she thought she would.