The Sand Pebbles (52 page)

“You figure it’ll get worse here?”

“It’ll be hell, come low water and the cruisers have to go. I’m glad I got my woman and the kids down to Shanghai while I still could.”

“They can send their women to Shanghai.”

“Not a chance!” Nobby said. “No sailor’s got the kind of money that costs now.”

Nobby had to go back and roll dice with some destroyer men. Holman had another drink. He kept wanting to think about Po-han. A civilian in a gray suit pushed in beside him and ordered a whisky sour. Holman saw only the arm and hand, cameo cuff links, long, well-kept fingers, an onyx signet ring, on the polished bar. Nobby bustled up.

“Yes, sir!” he said. “Anything I can do, sir?”

“I want you to set up drinks for the men of the
San Pablo
, as they come in,” the man said. “Can you do that?”

The hand laid bills on the bar. Nobby scooped them up.

“Yes, sir! Here’s one right beside you, sir,” he said. “What’ll it be, Jake?”

“More White Horse.”

“I’m Ed Graham.”

Holman looked up. The man had a long, elderly horse face with a kindly expression. “I’m Jake Holman.” Graham had a warm, firm handshake. “How come the drinks?” Holman asked.

“You brought some stuff up from Changsha for me, after the steamers stopped running,” Graham said. “I tried to give your captain a case of whisky and he wouldn’t take it. So I thought of this way.”

Holman remembered those Graham cases on the quarterdeck. Heat from the engine room had fried a stinking oil out of them. It had stained the planking and made Farren very angry.

“Guys’ll be obliged,” Holman said. “I remember them cases. What was in ’em?”

“Women’s hair. Compressed and baled.”

“What do you do with it? How’s it used?”

“I send it to the States,” Graham said. “They use the best grades to make hair pieces for women who don’t have enough of their own. The poor stuff is used in making newspaper mats.”

“You ought to pick up a lot of hair now, all these gearwheel gals bobbing their hair.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Graham agreed. “But it’s made the market worse. Short hair is a badge of this so-called revolution. Women are afraid to cut their hair. They’re afraid of what will happen to them when the loyalists come back.”

Holman swirled his drink. “You figure Wu’s coming back?”

“More likely Chang Tso-lin will come,” Graham said. “The Japs are backing him heavily. And our money’s on Sun Chuan-fang. Wu’s about done for.”

Kai-shek couldn’t last, Graham went on to say. No Chinese could
hold out very long against either lead or silver bullets. It would take a while. Graham had already sent his wife to Shanghai. He was closing out all his Central China business and he would go to Shanghai himself before long. It was going to be pretty rough around Hankow.

“I know how you boys feel, your neutrality orders and all,” he said. “You will just have to be patient, like the Chinese.”

“I saw some today wasn’t acting very patient,” Holman said.

Graham went out. Holman had several more drinks. Po-han kept coming into his mind. He could not summon his memory of Miss Eckert in any effective way. It was as if she could not be with him in a place like the Green Front. And now Maily was lost somewhere along the way. He would never see Maily again either. Nobby came back.

“That was Mr. Graham. He’s a
taipan,”
Nobby said. “What was it you Sand Pebbles done for him?”

“Brought some stuff up from Changsha,” Holman said. “God damn it, Nobby, it don’t seem fair.”

“Ain’t
fair!”
he cried, hours later, and slapped the red-checkered tablecloth. He spilled his drink.

“Itt somethings,” the large, blonde Russian woman across from him said. “You vill be sick.” She spoke in Chinese to the boy who came to mop at the tablecloth.

“This honey barge world vill be sick,” Holman said. “Want ‘nother whisky.”

She was feeding him with a spoon. It was rice and something. “Goot! Goot!” she kept saying. “You itt, beb-bee.”

Whenever he tried to talk, she had that spoon right in there.

“Got
’nough
, you big white bitch!” he choked at last. “You eat it! Want ’nother whisky!”

“Please, no more vis-kee. You be no goot to me, beb-bee.”

“I never been any good to any son of a bitch on earth,” he said bitterly. “Boy! More one whisky!”

It was a small room just big enough for the bed. The walls kept
going round. She helped him get his uniform off. It was a rocking, pitching small room in a big rough sea. It was no good. She did all the things they knew how to do and it was not any good at all. She pulled his head between her breasts.

“You vant to cry,” she said softly in the darkness. “To cry is better than the vis-kee.”

He rolled his head dumbly.

“You cry, sailor,” she whispered. “Here is nobody to laugh at you.”

He could not cry. After a while he went to sleep.

The Alliance Hostel was not a pleasant place. It was crowded with refugee missionaries violently torn from their past and fearful of their future. Children picked up their parents’ anxiety and quarreled and cried all day. The place ached with doubt and indecision and public heart searching. They talked interminably.

Shirley sat at a table in the lounge, trying to answer Cho-jen’s letter. She felt like two persons when she wrote to Cho-jen, and one of them was a traitor. She reread his letter, boldly drawn with the pen rather than written in script. That was like Cho-jen.

The Kuomintang had the Chien Valley, he told her. He was president of the student union and he meant soon to become a power in the master worker-peasant council in Paoshan. He knew his own worth. He was full of plans for China Light.

“Please come back, Miss Eckert,” he wrote. “Mr. Gillespie can come, if he will teach instead of evangelizing. I do not want any of the others.”

Except for the Craddocks, the other families had already gone to Shanghai. Mr. Craddock had given them each a year’s salary from the China Light reserve funds in Hankow. It did not leave much, and
no more would come from China Light. Cho-jen now had effective control of the mission finances.

Querulous voices reached her from the dining room. They argued all day in there, in the smell of tea and boiled cabbage. They were telling each other they had not fled from personal fear or lack of trust in God. Many had the same story: their native staff had asked them to leave because their presence infuriated the heathen Chinese, who would take it out on the native Christians. Unspoken in each story was the ugly suspicion that the native staff only wanted to get administrative control into its own hands.

It had been so clearly at China Light. She remembered that terrible night, the naval officer curt and contemptuous, Mr. Lin and Pastor Ho speaking blandly, and Mr. Craddock obdurate as flint. But Cho-jen had told her privately and candidly of their aim, knowing that he could trust her, and she had tipped the scale. She had persuaded Gillespie to go and all of them together had overborne Mr. Craddock.

I was like a Judas goat, in reverse, she thought. Now Cho-jen wants me to come back. What will I tell him?

You could hear every shade of opinion at the Alliance Hostel. Most of them agreed that association of missions with gunboats in Chinese opinion had to be broken, or Christianity was through in China. The unequal treaties had to go. The treaty powers had most of the exploiting privileges of colonial masters but none of the responsibilities for human welfare. A few missionaries agreed with the business faction that the treaties could not be given up until China had a responsible government.

Mr. Craddock could be scathingly eloquent on that. So much of Chinese sovereignty was taken away by the treaties, he said, that the Chinese could not form an effective government. And to the contention that the United States was bound by the Nine Power Treaty not to make changes in her own treaty with China except with the consent of all the other treaty powers, Mr. Craddock would explode. That was giving nations like Belgium and Portugal veto power over the United States, and it was intolerable.

“No man who favors the unequal treaties has the right to call himself a Christian!” Mr. Craddock liked to thunder.

Yet Shirley knew from Mr. Lin that Mr. Craddock had only come to that conclusion a few years ago.

Many missionaries thought they should all go home until China was granted equal status as a nation. Then those of them whom a sovereign Chinese government would permit to do so might return. Only so, they said, could they be in China in honest good faith. Cho-jen asking me to come back is something like that, Shirley thought.

But there were Christians at the Alliance Hostel who did favor the unequal treaties, in the face of Mr. Craddock’s thunder. They talked openly of armed intervention and of something called Plan Red. There was old white-haired Mr. Eustace, who lived wholly in the past, to the despair of his daughters. At least once each meal he would pronounce sententiously: “It is time for the Society for Propagation of the Gospel to step aside. It is time for the Society for Propagation of Cannonballs to bring them to their senses.” Then he would dribble food down his shirt front.

She bent to her letter. She did not know what to say.

“Hello, Shirley. China Light mail?”

She looked up. “Hello, Walter. Nothing new.” Gillespie looked pale, almost ill. He had gone with a truce team to try to get starving civilians out of Wuchang across the river. “Did you have any luck?” she asked.

“A few thousand. We filled six lighters,” he said. “Then they clubbed them back and closed the gate. It was very bad, Shirley.”

They were skeletons, without strength, he said. They jammed in the narrow gate, desperate to escape. Mothers held their babies above the press until their strength failed. Then both went under. He had counted more than two hundred of the weakest, trampled to death in the moment of liberation.

“Unspeakable things are going on in Wuchang,” he said.

A hundred thousand civilians were starving. The defending general in Wuchang would not let them go. He wanted to put the onus
on the Kuomintang, if it would not lift the siege. He was swearing to defend Wuchang to the last man. He was said to have refused an enormous personal bribe. Gillespie shuddered all over. He cleared his face with an effort.

“Well, we have to carry on. I’ll bathe and change,” he said. “Then how about the show at the Victoria? It’s De Mille’s
Ten Commandments
, and there’s a matinee.”

“Maybe tonight,” she said. “I want to go for a walk.”

She wanted to think it out about Cho-jen. She wanted to be alone in the little public garden she had found in the native city.

On the ships uniform changed to blues to match the crisping weather. Destroyers came and went, convoying commercial steamers filled with refugees. They were constantly fired upon. Propaganda sampans plied along the line of warships with signs and shouted slogans. Suspicion rose up nastily between the Sand Pebbles and the
San Pablo
coolies. Lop Eye Shing was dickering with Lt. Collins for more money. Everybody knew the ship could not stand any more squeeze. Clip Clip raised shaves by a nickel and haircuts by a dime. Ping-wen’s men did a very poor job of scraping the white paint off the floorplates.

“Place looks like it’s got leprosy,” Lynch said ruefully, one day after lower-deck inspection.

“They’re slacking all along the line,” Holman said. “I was waiting for the skipper to blast about it.”

“He knew he’d just lose face,” Lynch said. “There’s times you got to look the other way.”

Lynch was in good humor these days. He had paid off the mortgage on the teashop and he was talking about selling it to some rich Chinese who wanted a safe investment out of reach of the gearwheel. They were offering plenty, Lynch hinted, but Liuba was holding out for more. She’d get it, too.

Wuchang held out gallantly. Day and night the grumbling guns fired into it. A smoke haze hung above it all day. The two Wu gunboats came back upriver, but this time they flew the gearwheel flag and fired into Wuchang. Their captains had been hit by silver
bullets. The newspapers said General Liu inside Wuchang had turned down sixty thousand dollars. He was going to fight to the last man. The Sand Pebbles were getting sentimental about General Liu. They could really take it, in Wuchang. Every morning the five-barred flag still flew above Dragon Hill.

Big Chew did not change. He turned out better food than ever. He made flaky roast duck and spiced fish and ham and pork and vegetables a hundred ways. If such a thing were possible, he was outdoing himself.

Holman went into the native city with Burgoyne to see the room for Maily. There was a permanent British guardpost where they crossed Taiping Road. It was a big matshed, with sandbags and barbed wire. The British sailors did not try to stop them. In China, every nation was its own law. The room was above a kind of hardware store, with the stairs inside. It was small and shabby and the single window had no glass. Holman opened the wooden shutter and looked down into a short blind alley filled with beggars. Burgoyne closed the shutter.

“I don’t like looking down there,” he said. “It gives me the creeps, someway.”

He had a clay stove and a rickety table but no chair yet. He had some clay pots and mats and his prize was one of the thick white quilts they called
pukows
. Fischer had gone back to Ichang and Burgoyne had the room by himself. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and clasped his bony knees.

“Sit down, Jake,” he invited.

Holman paced back and forth. “What the hell, Frenchy, do you just sit here like that?” he asked.

“I think how it’ll be with Maily here,” Burgoyne said. “Once in a while I go out and buy something more that we can use.”

“Well, Jesus Christ.”

“Sometimes I sleep all night on the mat, with my head on the
pukow,”
Burgoyne said. “But I never unroll the
pukow
. That’s for when Maily comes.”

There was something unbearable about it. It was almost nasty. Holman knew he had to get out of there.