The Sand Pebbles (65 page)

Something’s wrong up there, the Sand Pebbles told each other uneasily. We ain’t getting all the dope.

All afternoon they stood to their guns. Their nerves grew more tense as time dragged on and the news from Hankow was still the same. The bund was deserted, but worker-peasants swarmed back among the buildings. A noise of bugles and shouting in the city came over the gray walls.

They ate supper at their guns. They could hardly stand the tension. In Hankow the mob was still attacking, with no casualties and no ground won or lost. It was as if time had gotten stuck, up there in Hankow. Across the gray river the sun set flaring red behind the sacred mountain. It made the river look like blood.

Just then it began, in a crackle of small-arms fire downriver by the Japanese gunboat.

“Stand
ready!
Stand
ready!” Franks roared.

His voice sounded twice as loud as ever before. The Sand Pebbles rose to top pitch. They were trembling eager. The firing moved upriver toward the
San Pablo
. It was a cloud of rapid red winks, like swarming fireflies in the dusk, and a constant scream of voices.

“Hold
fire!
Hold
fire!” Franks called out.

His voice was savage with disgust. They all saw it at the same time. It was firecrackers. The people were flooding along the bund with torches and paper lanterns and millions of firecrackers.

The news came by blinker from the
Duarte
. The British Concession had fallen to the coolie mob. The landing force had withdrawn to the ships. Not a shot had been fired and no one had been killed. Gearwheel troops had been invited into the concession to protect the white people from the coolies. The news shell-shocked the Sand Pebbles. They could only look at each other.

“Secure from general quarters!” Franks passed the word.

The men gathered in the compartment. They could not say much. They seemed not to want to look at each other now. They were thinking that something beyond human comprehension must have happened up there in Hankow. It was too uncanny even to wonder about.

Holman went back out on deck. He felt guilty about being among them and not feeling as whipped and bewildered as they were feeling. Ashore, the Chinese were going mad with joy. Waves of sound beat against the ship, as if the city screamed with one voice. It was a whole continent mocking and jeering and jubilating, out there in the flaming darkness.

Wind and a driving rain howled down off the mountain. There had been no school for several days. The fall of the British Concession in Hankow had stirred the valley deeply, and all the students were away on political work. Cho-jen had been called to Changsha. In the courtyard the bare branches of the trees threshed. The courtyard did not drain well. Water puddled out there, and an unpleasant dampness was seeping into the house.

Shu-ma was being very quiet in the kitchen. In the living room Shirley moved from warming her hands at the brazier to looking out the window and back to the brazier. In the bedroom Mrs. Craddock was at last asleep. But she would wake up soon and ask for news again. If no message came from Paoshan by nightfall, Shirley decided, she would go there herself in the morning.

A gust brought a branch thumping down on the tiled roof. Mrs. Craddock awoke and called out in a weak voice. Shirley crossed once more to the window in forlorn hope.

Her heart leaped. Gillespie had just come into the courtyard. He went to his own room on the other side. He was going to change into dry clothing, but she could not wait for that. She ran splashing across
and knocked on his door. He opened it and looked at her in alarm.

“Shirley! What is it? Is Tai-tai …?”

“No worse. Or not much,” she said. “Walter, what
news?
Why isn’t Mr. Craddock with you?”

Instead of answering her, he drew her inside and closed the door against rain splash. She had never been in his room before. It was small, bare and very neat, except for the mess of papers on his table. He lit the kerosene lamp on his table. His face was pale and drawn in the lamplight.

“The verdict was guilty,” he said quietly. “The sentence was death.”

She stared at him, afraid to ask. He smiled wearily.

“Mr. Craddock is still alive and well, in the Paoshan prison,” he said. “I think it is going to be all right. I will go back in the morning, but I wanted to bring you the news myself.”

He told her the story. It was the work of the Chung faction, Cho-jen’s chief power rivals. They had a technique of working up mob spirit, which they used for lynch trials of landlords and their agents out in the countryside. They had used it at Mr. Craddock’s trial, as a blow at Cho-jen. The delegation from the China Light peasant union, who were there to defend Craddock, had shouted and pleaded in vain. Gillespie had feared for his own life at one point.

“Cho-jen would have outgeneraled them, I think. Or just his personal sway,” Gillespie said. “Fu-liang did all he could. But he’s not Cho-jen.”

The China Light peasants and students had crowded around Mr. Craddock and saved him from summary execution, however. Some were still with him in the prison. They would not leave him until Cho-jen returned to take control. Gillespie had been up all night. They had reached Cho-jen in Changsha by telegraph. He had gotten some sort of emergency stay order from the provincial council. Fu-liang, on guard in the prison, was armed with that. Cho-jen was returning to Paoshan at once.

“So I think it will be all right,” Gillespie finished. “But it was a near thing, Shirley.” He sat down wearily on his bed.

“How is Mr. Craddock? How did he …?”

“With grace and dignity. He is becoming almost saintly under this stress,” Gillespie said. “I do not use that word carelessly.”

“I know you don’t,” she said. “We must tell Tai-tai. But not all of it.”

“All the way from Paoshan I’ve been thinking of how to tell her.” He stood up, swaying slightly. “I suppose—”

“Yes. Tell her now. And then you can rest.” Shirley became sharply aware of his fatigue and nervous strain. “You’ll have to get into dry things and go right to bed,” she told him. “I’ll have Shu-ma bring you some of the hot chicken broth he’s making.”

They crossed the courtyard hardly aware that they were hand in hand.

Shirley knew that Cho-jen was acting with his accustomed boldness, and that he would succeed. She worried all day, just the same. She was at the main gate when they came home, marching and singing across the fields from the boat landing. The song told her it was all right, and then she saw Craddock’s tall figure. The gateman lit some firecrackers.

She hummed their marching song as she hurried back to tell Mrs. Craddock. Tao-min had written it for the student militia. She thought Tao-min’s English version of it had a boyish charm.

She burst into the sickroom. “Tai-tai, he’s safe! He’s coming!” she said.

Mrs. Craddock was propped up on pillows. She had unusual color in her wasted cheeks and her eyes were alert.

“I know. I hear the firecrackers,” she said. “Would you bring me my comb, please?”

“Oh! Of course!”

Shirley helped her. She pulled the covers straight and tidied the room. When she heard them in the courtyard, she ran out to meet them. She ran to Mr. Craddock and hugged him.

“Go right in. Don’t wait to talk,” she said.

Craddock went inside. Gillespie smiled.

“We’re not needed here just now,” he said. “Anyway, Cho-jen wants to see us both right away at union headquarters.”

As they walked, he told her how masterfully Cho-jen had handled it. A new link in the Paoshan defenses had been completed, a boom of junks across the river east of the city. Cho-jen had promoted a grand militia review in Paoshan to celebrate it. He had led the China Light contingent himself. They had simply flooded into the prison and carried off Mr. Craddock before the Chung faction had time to react.

“Cho-jen is marvelous,” she agreed.

Union headquarters was the old Craddock home. Extra tables and heaps of pamphlets and posters made a sad disarray of the once neat parlor. Fu-liang and several more of Cho-jen’s principal lieutenants were there with him. The boys still wore their yellowish militia uniforms. Cho-jen waved everyone to seats and had tea brought in. He did not sit down himself. He paced the room, talking in Chinese and English indifferently.

“I have just designated your house as a prison,” he told Gillespie.

That was to make Craddock still technically a prisoner of the state, Cho-jen explained. The house would be under constant armed guard. But it was also a maneuver to make the Chungs lose face in the countryside. Cho-jen was going to swear old Ting, the hot-water seller, into the militia and make him the guard. Ting would be given a rusty old musket. Whenever he left his post by his caldron he would put his skull cap on the musket, and the musket alone would be the sentry. Within the week, all the peasants in the valley would be laughing about it.

“Cho-jen, please don’t ever become my enemy,” Gillespie said, laughing himself.

He would record that in his journal as soon as he could, Shirley knew. She laughed. The boys were all laughing. Cho-jen sobered them.

“The Chungs are still dangerous enemies!” he said sharply. “More than ever, since what happened in Hankow!”

Striding back and forth, he gave them a lecture on it. The major warlords were all puppets of the treaty powers, he said. Bolshevik
Russia had voluntarily given up the unequal treaties and was aiding the Kuomintang with arms and advisors. But there was reason to believe that the Russians wanted to make the Kuomintang their own puppet in a power struggle with England. Communists within the Kuomintang were behaving correctly. But others, such as the two Chung men in Paoshan, were trying to persuade the worker-peasant groups to seize local power and carry the revolution to unsanctioned extremes.

“The treaty port newspapers are all shouting that Chiang Kai-shek is a Bolshevik because he wants to cancel the treaties,” Cho-jen said. “That pleases the Chungs. That is why they want to execute Mr. Craddock. They want the foreign newspapers to shout all the louder.”

The Chungs did not want the treaties canceled, Cho-jen went on. They wanted to force war between the Kuomintang and one or more treaty powers, preferably England. If that happened, they thought they could turn the whole revolution Bolshevik. The English probably knew that, and so they refused to shoot at the mob in Hankow. That mob had been the work of other agents like the Chungs. The Kuomintang had had no choice but to take control of the British Concession, once the mob had overrun it.

“I am afraid they will soon control Changsha,” Cho-jen said. “That will make it very difficult here in Paoshan.”

“I can see how it would,” Gillespie agreed.

“Here is how you come into it,” Cho-jen said. “My position is that you have all renounced your personal treaty privileges; therefore we must grant you the same rights as ourselves. In Paoshan the Chungs are saying that you are not able to do that, as a private act, and that you are still as much of an insult to Chinese sovereignty as if you were gunboats. They think they are striking at me by saying that.”

“If we are really endangering you—” Gillespie began.

“You are not. They would just find something else,” Cho-jen assured him. “I want to fight them on that issue, because I know that Chinese hearts are with me on it.”

It was dusk and Cho-jen had lamps brought in. He went on pacing tirelessly and talking about his plans. The other boys seldom had a
chance to speak. Their awe of Cho-jen was evident. At last Gillespie excused himself and Shirley.

“Remember, do not go to Paoshan,” Cho-jen told them in parting. “But you are quite safe here at China Light.”

They walked home together in the darkness.

“Hey! You needn’t walk so fast!” Gillespie protested.

Shirley laughed. “It’s Cho-jen. He’s simply
contagious!”
She slowed down. “Hasn’t he grown, though!”

“Not noticeably. To my eyes.”

“He’s taller. He
is!”

“It’s his impression. His presence,” Gillespie said.
“That
grows, I grant you!” He whistled, thinking. “To coin a striking phrase, Cho-jen is being tempered in revolutionary fires,” he said. “He was born with the proper metal for it. He is a boy meeting his time.”

He began whistling softly again. Shirley hummed with him. It was Tao-min’s militia song.
To fight the warlords with all our might
, she sang softly. Gillespie joined her.

Shirley began laughing. “Isn’t it a wonderful song for a revolution?”

“It is for this one. It really is!” Gillespie said.

Lamplight was yellow in the windows. They crossed the courtyard singing Tao-min’s song.

“That up in Hankow,” Farren told Holman. “It was the last straw, kind of. Something’s broke in the guys, Jake.”

“It sure took the heart out of ’em,” Holman agreed

They were on the quarterdeck, where Farren had the watch. Haythorn and two seamen were washing down the portside. Most of the others sat in the compartment unshaven and morose. Half the bunks were unmade in there. It was as if they had been saving back something vital, Holman thought, and in the Hankow alarm they had laid it all on the line and they had lost it. They had nothing left.

“I feel it myself,” Farren said. “We been shot at and we ran away too many times. We been rocked and spit on and hated at, more than men can stand.” He gripped the log desk with both hands and shook it. “What the hell we doing in Hunan, anyway? There’s enough Chinamen in Hunan they could beat us to death with their chopsticks, if they took a mind!”

“We’ll get out when the flood comes.”

“I wish it was here now.” Farren lowered his voice. “It’s going bad. The guys are turning ugly inside.” He stroked his beard and looked sharply at Holman. “Know what I mean?”