The Lady and the Panda (5 page)

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS
, Ruth Harkness's only glimpse of the Far East had come through her husband's correspondence—tissue-thin envelopes with their exotic stamps and datelines: the South Seas, Tawi-tawi, Zamboanga, the Dutch East Indies, British North Borneo, Shanghai. She eagerly tore into them, craving news of the man she loved, hoping always that one would contain an invitation to come join him.

Through overtures in her own letters, Ruth managed to extract an offer from him; instead of having to wait for the next expedition, there was a chance that she could actually join him in China. Together, they would reach those mysterious places on the map whose very names, she said, “stir the imagination.” As it turned out, though, the tantalizing proposition was quickly rescinded when Bill suddenly received permission to travel, allowing him to head up-country immediately.

By this point, Harkness and Smith had been joined by a latecomer. Just weeks before, an adventurer Bill had not known previously came aboard—Gerald, or Gerry, Russell. He was of Bill's ilk—a young, Cambridge-educated Englishman—though one who had not so far proved himself much of a player. The press accounts of this expedition barely mentioned Russell at all, yet he would play a role in Harkness matters for quite some time.

Although one important government permission had been granted, many others were not in place as Bill began the journey to Chengdu, where Smith was waiting with the equipment. The three had decided to gamble that the rest of the authorizations would come through while they traveled.

Despite the uncertainty, as he flew over the great yellow waterway, the Yangtze, Bill must have been relieved to finally be on his way. In July 1935
The China Journal
was reporting that the “Harkness Expedition” was in the field. But it wasn't to last. Right at the threshold to panda country, near Leshan, in Sichuan, the party was rebuffed because of unresolved permit problems. By September 30, Bill was right back where he started—in Shanghai.

There was no mention of failure, and hardly any acknowledgment of Bill Harkness for that matter, in an interview Smith gave to the
China Press
shortly afterward. Though Bill was underwriting the endeavor, his partner said only, “I always take a group of trained men, while on this next trip I have the good fortune to be accompanied by Mr. William H. Harkness, who is interested in collecting live animals from the interior.” Later Smith would even say that aside from the money, Bill had only been a handicap. At the moment, Smith professed optimism, telling the press that the two would be up-country again soon, with plans to be back in Shanghai by February or March. He hoped to have secured a panda carcass by then.

Instead, Harkness and Smith would be dry-docked for months, awaiting permissions that did not come through until January. And by then it was too late; Bill Harkness had fallen ill. The heavy smoker and drinker was being ravaged by throat cancer.

O
UT OF THE BLUE
, before winter had changed to spring, a young British aristocrat presented himself to Ruth Harkness. Fresh-faced, impeccably mannered, and idealistic-seeming, Gerald Russell was the British junior partner from Bill Harkness's last expedition. Having been traveling for some length of time, he was unaware of Bill's death. Ruth was living in a flat in a remodeled house at 333 West Eighteenth Street when Russell sat talking to her, making clear that he had been immensely impressed by her husband. He found him to be “tough and determined,” two characteristics that were vital in a field companion. In China Russell had been sure there were great things in store for Bill Harkness.

As terrible and hard to take in as the news he heard now was, a redeeming thought surfaced in his mind while they spoke: why shouldn't Ruth “continue the expedition her husband had started”? It seemed unfair, wrong even, to let Bill's legacy trail away into oblivion. “After Bill's death,” Russell said, “someone bearing his name should get the first giant panda.”
Ruth had already been thinking just that. Bill's remains were to be burned to ash, but not his hopes and dreams. She had the will to do it, having always longed to make the trek herself, and with no one else to stand in for him, she felt a moral imperative. Practically speaking, with Bill's gear and bank accounts left behind, the foundation for a new expedition was already in place.

With Russell's encouragement, Ruth Harkness's desires didn't seem so preposterous. And additionally, he provided concrete information about how she should proceed.

Right off, he urged her to join forces with Floyd Smith. Harkness had already been in touch with Smith, who was waiting for her decision about the distribution of Bill's effects, though she didn't know much about him outside of the references to him in Bill's letters.

The bare details were that he was in his fifties, “an old China hand,” as they used to say, a man who had spent the bulk of his time in the East. Russell, who thought Smith “the cream of the earth; a great gentleman, esteemed and loved by all,” endorsed him now.

At the same moment that Russell was singing his praises, however, Smith was in a fix in Chengdu, where he had been stationed waiting for Bill's arrival. Bill's death had knocked the legs out from under him. It might not have affected him emotionally, but it did, as Smith put it, “upset all calculations.” Forever racing to stay one step ahead of financial ruin, Smith now found himself stranded in western China, flat broke, and reduced to eating cheap “coolie food.” He needed to extricate himself from this predicament as quickly as possible, as he set about his new dealings with Bill's widow. He had made an agreement with Bill from the start that Ruth Harkness would receive Bill's half of any proceeds the endeavor produced. Whether he liked it or not, she now represented Bill's interests.

From her perspective in New York, no matter what Smith's character or worth, Harkness would need to make some momentous decisions. Bill had bank accounts and a tremendous amount of accumulated gear in Shanghai. It was up to her to determine what should be done about them.

Russell could be of enormous help. He vowed his allegiance to the cause, offering to sign on to the expedition himself, and take up with Mrs. Harkness where he had left off with her husband. It seemed like a windfall to Harkness, and it must have to Russell too. For when he next revealed that he was financially embarrassed, she agreed to underwrite him.

The two set a plan. They would meet in Europe to solidify arrangements, then get an expedition together in Shanghai. Once Ruth picked up Bill's ashes, she could head toward the frontier. It all seemed so perfect.

But, of course, it was madness. Without one factor in her favor, Ruth Harkness had decided she was the one to capture the giant panda. And she was totally out of her league.

ON FRIDAY, APRIL
17, 1936, Harkness boarded the Dollar liner
American Trader,
along with a raucous mob of her dearest friends, who had all come to see her off. In the close confines of her little cabin, the air was blue, she said, with the haze of cigarette smoke. Cocktail glasses clinked, bodies spilled out into the passageway, and waves of laughter erupted.

To many of those present, this was one jolly good joke. Harkness didn't mind the ribbing—in fact, she laughed right along with them, only too happy to list her inadequacies as an explorer. She knew nothing of expeditions, hunting, or working with native trappers. She had no idea what to expect of the rough terrain or reports of murderous bandits deep in the interior of China. She wouldn't even walk a city block if there was a taxi nearby to be hailed.

“She's as mad as a hatter,” her brother, Jim, had announced from his uncomfortable position wedged on the lower berth. His sister's sinking her tiny inheritance into an effort to capture a live giant panda was preposterous. None of the he-men who had gone off to do it had come close. And besides, what the heck was a panda, anyway?

Harkness's best friend and staunchest ally tried to defend her. Hazel Perkins responded that had she no children herself, she too would take
up such an adventure. “I'd probably do wilder and more impractical things than hunting pandas,” she said loyally to the gathered crowd, but then added, “if there is anything more so.”

Perkins may have been the only believer. The rest of the friends around Harkness that day would certainly not be the last to underestimate her in this venture. They and so many others could not see past the gaiety and good humor to the resolve that was as much a trait of Harkness as her trademark glossy black hair.

Under cloudy skies, Ruth Harkness set off for adventure that late Friday afternoon aboard an oceangoing liner. She was among a throng of giddy passengers, many of whom stood huddled against the biting sea wind, watching the Statue of Liberty grow dim in the distance.

The crossings to Europe and then China, the stays in London and Paris, would be a blur of late-night cocktail parties, masquerade competitions, and shipboard pranks. Harkness would keep the bars open till nearly dawn. She would throw recorked bottles containing funny notes overboard. And once, she and a group of revelers would even trap the ship's captain inside his sleeping cabin, staking a threatening pirate's note complete with skull and crossbones on his door with a big knife.

Russell met her in London and then the two left for France, to join his family. At a magnificent château in the Rhône Valley, she discovered that the same Gerry Russell who needed her money to cover his trip to China was from a clan of titled parents and stepparents, whose friends were all a mess of “princes—counts—viscounts—marquises, etc, etc.” The country life of swimming, riding, and tennis reminded her of days with Bill's family, but then, anything and everything reminded her of him. “More than ever am I missing Bill,” she wrote.

She was, by the time she boarded the
Tancred
in Marseilles and settled into a luxurious cabin, feeling unsure about Gerry Russell. “Sometimes I think I'm rather fond of Gerry in a protective way and then again I don't like him much,” she mused. He was outwardly courteous and considerate. But she began to wonder if he actually had “any depth of character.” He seemed to be missing a sense of determination.

She had plenty of time to mull everything over as the
Tancred
plowed
its way east over the next two weeks. From Suez on, she found herself in what she called a Somerset Maugham frame of mind—sipping cocktails on deck while being mesmerized by the “disturbingly beautiful” scenery that passed before her. At Port Said she watched the sun become an enormous red ball sinking lower and lower down behind the marshes. She stayed up on deck for hours, and long after darkness had fallen, she remained as the ship's powerful searchlights scanned the shore. Long after midnight, when the captain came out in his pajamas to sit beside her and speak of the solitary nature of a sailor's life, she couldn't help thinking of the loneliness of “all life.”

The fabled Orient was striking a deep chord within her, one that intensified with the passing of each nautical mile. Every port seemed to strengthen a mystical connection, especially in Hong Kong, which was nothing short of a spiritual revelation.

A WHISKEY SODA in one hand and a Chesterfield in the other, Ruth Harkness stepped from the shipowner's home out into the nighttime darkness of the tropical lawn. Her friend, the captain, had taken her swimming and shopping during the day, and then after a change of clothes to this small dinner party. The city was sweltering, but here, high on one of Hong Kong's magnificent peaks, the air was balmy. Harkness knew she was in for a beautiful view of the bay, for when they had arrived at the house earlier she had glimpsed the warm colors of the sunset in rippled reflection below. Nothing, though, could have prepared her for what she was about to see. As she made her way out to the edge of the yard, she gasped. She simply could not at first comprehend what she saw before her.

Above were moon and cloud, and the millions of stars of the night sky. Below, the sea had been transformed into its own glittering, dancing galaxy as hundreds of boats—flat-bottomed Chinese junks—crowded together to fish by torchlight.

Boundaries vanished as sea and sky appeared in mirror image. She was now in the land of yin and yang, unity and separation. In this realm,
opposites fit into each other, hold the seed of the other, become each other. It is where light and dark, male and female, heaven and earth, are reconciled.

Ruth Harkness experienced a strange sensation that would never leave her—that here, on the other side of the world, she was “in some inexplicable way—home.”

PAST OIL-SUPPLY DEPOTS, repair docks, dilapidated warehouses, and factories belching black smoke, the SS
Tancred
cut velvety furrows through the silted waters of the Huangpu River. Coming on the heels of the most sweeping vistas imaginable, the approach to Shanghai was dirty and ugly. Oppressively hot too, for this was one of the most miserable days the steamy port had to offer. Harkness couldn't help feeling let down. If Hong Kong had been celestial, Shanghai, “the Whore of the East,” was truly of the earth. Harkness would thus be surprised at how quickly she grew to love Shanghai, to embrace its very filth and to recognize the divine not just in the stars above, but in the ground below her feet.

But at that moment, even as the ship took a sharp left turn with the bend of the waterway at Soochow Creek and the scene changed to opulence, she still had her doubts. Here, amid the architectural magnificence that marked the beginning of what Europeans and Americans would consider the city proper—the steel-and-concrete dynasty of the International Settlement—was the Shanghai of movies and novels.

Harkness took in the handsome buildings that lined the shore. Possessing what had been described as a “distinctly skyward” inclination, each tried to outdo the next for stateliness and panache. There was the posh Shanghai Club, the domed Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, and the grandest structure of them all, the pyramid-capped Cathay Hotel. All the marble and granite, columns, bas-reliefs, flying buttresses, and tile mosaics made it resemble London or Paris or New York—an effect the Western businessmen were aiming for. But China wouldn't be submerged so easily, and fluttering incongruously in delicate motion before the massively built-up shore were the great poetic junks—hundreds
of them, clustered like butterflies, their sails veined by seams, many of their prows decorated with alert eyes.