The Sand Pebbles (78 page)

Nations are paper. People are real
, Holman thought.
That’s what the old man’s trying to get across
.

“We are still Americans in our hearts, but not in the absolutely exclusive way the nation demands of us,” Shirley said.

“Surprisingly many Chinese are able to understand instantly what we have done,” Craddock said. “I hope you will understand, Lt. Collins. I hope you will go back to your ship and leave us here in the peace and safety our act has made for us.”

“I understand what you honestly
think
you have done,” Lt. Collins said. “However, neither I nor any of you are competent to rule on
that. Suppose you come with me to Hankow, make your renunciation legally, if that turns out to be possible, and then you can come back here. Fair enough?”

“No. We have really done it. To go away now, willingly, would be to deny that.”

“Go in flight from Chinese mob violence.”

“Such danger as we may face is of your making, by coming here,” Craddock said. “Go away again, and the danger will be gone.”

“It will not. I know about the death sentence you are under.”

“It is appealed. Chinese law protects me also.”

“What if it is confirmed?”

“I would consider it unjust. But I would submit.”

“And call it holy martyrdom, no doubt!”

Lt. Collins’ voice turned harsh. Holman was watching Shirley’s face. She stood close to Gillespie and she kept looking up at him. Gillespie was looking very angry. That was what she was afraid of, Holman thought. He kept his eyes on her.

There was no time left, Lt. Collins thought. These people were in a crazed dream. He had to shock and frighten them out of it.

“You are an old man without much life left, Craddock, but you have no right to dispose of yourself in that way,” he said coldly. “There is no time for more talk. Delay endangers us all. Now you people listen to me!”

In harsh, vivid words, leaning with clenched hands on his rifle muzzle, rocking it for emphasis, he told them about Nanking and the boom fight. It was another Boxer Rebellion, he insisted. The ugly words took his mind off the pain in his ankle. He turned his fire on the weakest link in their chain.

“You, Miss Eckert. They will strip you and rape you,” he said. He deliberately eyed all the curves of her body. “They will subject you to indecency and agony and death,” he said. “Is that God’s will?”

Her face showed shocked disgust. She shrank against Gillespie, who frowned blackly.

“We are at war. You know how American men, the real men,
avenge their women,” Lt. Collins went on. “This whole valley will have to pay in fire and blood. Is that God’s will?”

“You don’t know them. They wouldn’t hurt me,” she protested.

“I do know them. I’ve seen Chinese troops take a city. Many times.”

“You’ve seen warlord troops. The thing you know is your own nature,” Gillespie said tautly. “Miss Eckert is just a symbol of national prestige to you, isn’t she? When have you ever cared about
Chinese
women raped and butchered? Raped by the warlord troops you favor, because they obey your treaties?”

The girl was recovering from her shock. She stood close against Gillespie and loathing contorted her pretty face.

“You rape them yourselves, with your power to buy their starving flesh!” she cried at him.

“Silence!”

It was his command voice. Bronson and Crosley hurried back to kneel beside Holman. Holman stood up. He closed his eyes and he could still see her twisted face and hear her cry. Her face was the face of those women on the Changsha bund.

Other faces crowded into his memory, scores of Chinese girl-faces crying, and naked, slender girl bodies shrinking and wincing and trembling under him. From seven years and a hundred pigshacks along the China Coast they came all to him at once. Like most American sailors, he had always taken the young and tender ones, and he had paid the extra money that cost. He had always been gentle with them. Afterward he would hold them and stroke them, while they cried and trembled, until they would relax and nestle in to him and cling to him, and he could feel that they had forgiven him. But now he knew that he could never forgive himself.

“That’s telling ’em, ain’t it?” Bronson whispered admiringly.

He tugged at Holman’s trouser leg. Holman crouched. He was afraid to look at Shirley. Craddock was flapping his hands.

“Please. Please restrain yourselves,” he said. “Lt. Collins, we will withdraw to confer again.”

“No, you will not. There is no time,” Lt. Collins said. “Agree now,
repeat
right
now, or I will assume you are all deranged and take you along by force.”

“You can always shoot us,” Gillespie said, turning. “Come on, Shirley.”

“Walter! Please, Walter!” She was holding his arm.

“Bronson! Come in here!” Lt. Collins snapped.

Bronson went flying. Holman stood up. He moved slowly toward the door, which Bronson had left open. Now was the time to take their side and fight for them. To strike down Bronson and Crosley and Lt. Collins all three, if he had to. Now was the time.

But he could not look into her face and eyes. He was not clean. Nothing in the world could ever make him clean enough. He lingered. Then Crosley was beside him.

“Jake! Somebody’s coming!” Crosley whispered. “Hear it?”

Holman heard running footsteps, not fast but heavy, someone weary. The man burst through the gate and thudded across the courtyard to the open door. He was shiny and stinking with mud. He stumbled and almost fell across the threshold. Holman and Crosley closed in to see what it might mean.

The mud-caked intruder gasped for breath. He pressed his side and gaped around at them like a fish. Shirley knew him first, without his glasses.

“Tao-min!” she said. “What happened?”

He spoke then, in breathless Chinese, and she would not let herself understand the half-voiced phrases. But Gillespie understood. In hard, sharp Chinese he pressed for details and certainties and all the while that she would not understand the knowledge was soaking into her unbearably as death.

They had killed Cho-jen in the battle.

“Oh,” she said.

There were no words. She turned unseeing and might have fallen, but then Gillespie was holding her. Her head was on his shoulder. Mr. Craddock was close and both their arms seemed around her.

“Cho-jen is dead,” she told them. “He’s dead.”

“He is with God, Shirley.”

They were speaking Chinese. She was struggling to grasp the greatness of it. It could not be true. She felt Gillespie’s voice vibration through his chest but she scarcely heard his words. Tao-min was still speaking, in his shrill boy’s voice.

“The Chung militia is coming,” he panted. “They are coming to execute Mr. Craddock. You must all run away!”

“Everything’s lost, if Cho-jen is dead,” Gillespie said. “The Chungs will take over the whole valley. We have no choice but to go now, Mr. Craddock.”

“The Chungs will kill all the sea devils. I will kill the sea devils myself,” Tao-min said. “You must all run away. Let me run away with you.”

The officer and sailor were listening intently, heads thrust forward, as if in that way they might understand the Chinese. The officer limped over, thudding his rifle along like a blind man’s cane, and shook Gillespie’s arm.

“What’s this boy saying?” he demanded. “What news have you?”

Gillespie looked at him. “You have killed that boy Mr. Craddock told you about,” he said curtly in English. “A boy worth more to humanity than you and your crew twice over.”

“Ten
times over!” Shirley cried, her voice breaking.

Her tears were starting. Gillespie’s arm tightened around her, holding and protecting her. Numbers could no more express it than words. It was as if she could not give way to her grief until she could know how great it was. The officer’s lips quirked painfully.

“The boy was—”

“Chinese. Therefore worthless, to you,” Gillespie broke in. “—in arms against me.”

“Well, you have won your game,” Gillespie said. “You have destroyed everything, and we will have to go with you.”

The officer’s white grimace did not change. Only his lips moved.

“Very well. Take five minutes to collect personal papers.”

“Tao-min, how near are they?” Gillespie asked.

“They are coming like the skin on my heels.”

“Hey! Hey in the house!” a hoarse voice cried from the courtyard. “Somebody’s coming! A whole mob!”

“Douse that light, Bronson!”

It was all noise and wild motion in darkness.

“Craddock! Old man, come back here!”

Two shapes plunged through the door. Many guns roared all at once in the courtyard, and men’s wild shouts. The sailor was crouching and firing through the window. Gillespie threw her roughly to the floor.

“Stay
down
, Shirley!” he said tensely, and left her.

Guns at the spirit screen roared red-mouthed and screeching shadows came around both ends of the screen into the courtyard. Guns answered from the house and Crosley’s automatic rifle outroared them all. Holman clubbed his rifle and went for the shadows in a confused, fighting tangle under a tree. Feet stamped and men screamed and the darkness was all
whang … whang … spock!
with bullets.

Then they streamed out again, dragging wounded and leaving behind dark, blotchy shapes on the packed earth. Crosley was howling curses and firing around one corner of the spirit screen.

“Man that other corner!” Lt. Collins’ voice shouted. “Watch the top of the wall!”

Holman knelt at the corner opposite Crosley. He began firing his rifle blindly out the gate. They were yelling and shooting outside, but the bullets went high because of the wall. The bullets that came through the gate
thugged
and
splatted
on the spirit screen.

“Jake! Hold it!” Crosley shouted. “Don’t waste ammunition!”

Holman stopped firing. He put his rifle butt-down and leaned on it.

“Just loose off a round now and then to let ’em know we’re still alive and kicking in here,” Crosley said.

Holman’s thoughts went back to how her head had gone so naturally to Gillespie’s shoulder and the natural way Gillespie’s arm came round and held her. The feeling reminded him of an earlier feeling, and he groped in his memory for it.

“Watch it, Jake!”

Holman turned. One of the bodies near them was twitching and trying to crawl. Crosley rose and smashed his heavy rifle butt down
on the middle of its back. Both legs flexed and kicked out wildly, and then it lay still.

“The only good ones are dead ones,” Crosley grunted.

At the deep bottom of the seabag of his memory, Holman found it. On winter days after school let out in Wellco, Nevada, he would linger on his way home to look in the bakery window. People would go in and out the door and warm, cinnamon-smelling air would come out. He was just a little boy then. The grown-up feeling was harder to take, he thought. Yes, a hell of a lot harder to take.

“You hurt, Jake? You hit anywhere?” Crosley asked.

“No,” Holman said.

“Me neither,” Crosley said. “Farren’s right. The skipper brings us luck.” He felt along his left side with the backs of his fingers. “I started bleeding again, though,” he said. “I’m all soggy.”

Craddock was dead. Bronson had reported no one else hurt. Lt. Collins sat on the low threshold and tried to follow what Gillespie was saying. He had twisted his ankle yet once again in his lunge after Craddock, and it was hopeless now. He fought his mind clear of the frosting pain and nodded decisively.

“Stand by back there with the girl,” he told Gillespie. “The party will leave in two minutes.” Gillespie went away. “Bronson!” Lt. Collins snapped.

“Right here, sir.” Bronson was kneeling at his elbow.

“Help me out to the spirit screen.”

They went sagging and lurching across the courtyard, his arm feeling squeamish over Bronson’s fat shoulders. At the screen, Lt. Collins knelt on his right knee. He told the men about the back door through the compound wall into the fields. The attackers were from Paoshan and did not know about it.

“They think they have us trapped,” he said. “Bronson, I want you to take charge and get all hands down to the boat as fast as you can. I will stay here and shoot and yell things in English, to make them think we are all still in here.”

They crouched in shocked silence, except for the shouting outside and scattered bullets whining over.

“How about you, sir?” Crosley asked.

“Never mind about me. That’s none of your business.”

“Sir, it is our business,” Bronson said. “The primary mission still needs you. It ain’t accomplished yet.”

“I can’t walk. I would only slow you and imperil the primary mission.”

“One of us can get on each side of you and hop you along as fast as a man can run,” Bronson said. “Somebody else can stay here, to give the party a start, and then catch up.”

Crosley swung around and fired a short burst.
“How wow wow!”
he bellowed. “Come and get it, you bastards! It’s hot and waiting for you!” He swung around again. “Sounds like it’s only one guy yelling out there now,” he said. “Maybe he’s lining them out for an attack. We better hurry.”

“You have your orders, Bronson,” Lt. Collins said. “Obey them!”

“Sir, I can’t!” Bronson protested. “I couldn’t face Mr. Bordelles. He wouldn’t dare face Comyang. Maybe the pain is affecting how you think, sir.”

The pain was doing that, but not the pain and not in the way that Bronson meant. Yet Bronson, God damn him for it, did have the right of it. It would look very strange in the report. Bronson was right about the primary mission.

“Bronson, damn you, carry out your orders!” he said.

“Sir, I
can’t!”
Bronson’s voice was agonized.
“Please
don’t make us just take you anyway, Captain!”

“I’ll stay here,” Holman said. “I know what to do.”

Bitterly, with the other pain masking the throb from his ankle, Lt. Collins bowed to it.

“Very well,” he said. “You will have to fire and shout from different positions, to keep fooling them. Before they attack, they will set up a lot of shouting and firing to mask it. Be sure you escape when that starts, if not before.”