In May 1909, the Crown Colony of some 450,000 had been a major commercial center, a vigorous community where Chinese and Europeans lived and worked together in proximate harmony only occasionally disturbed by the flaring of underlying tensions. By August 1909, the stream of commerce was dwindling to a meager trickle, and the two races regarded each other with suspicion that almost daily erupted into violent clashes.
After twelve soldiers died of plague and three more of injuries inflicted by rioters, the Commander, British Forces, informed the Governor that he could provide only volunteers for the house-to-house searches which aroused the Chinese to frenzy—and no more than one hundred of those volunteers a day. The number of volunteers regularly exceeded the general’s figure three-fold or four-fold, but neither soldiers nor medical officers could arrest the Black Death. Modern Western medicine, which the Chinese considered a conspiracy to mutilate their sacrosanct bodies, was even less effective than millennia-old Chinese medicine, which the Europeans considered black superstition.
The strains overthrew the precarious balance of trust between two antithetic races and cultures. A semblance of mutual confidence might have been preserved if the Government had yielded to Sir Jonathan’s pleas that the Tung Wah Hospitals care for all Chinese victims. Sir Jonathan himself esteemed Tung Wah’s treatment hardly more than the vain efforts of the small corps of Western doctors, but he feared that Chinese distrust of foreign medicine would turn into hatred of all foreigners. Yet Sir Frederick Lugard rejected his requests. All his advisers, including the young American doctor, George Chapman Parker, warned that the plague would become even more virulent if Tung Wah were allotted the primary responsibility. The intricate web of shared responsibility and minimal trust that had bound the races was rent.
Only the rats thrived. The few nocturnal pedestrians saw packs of sleek rodents, some so obese they waddled. Despite intermittent slaughters, their numbers increased. Large packs scampered from one unguarded warehouse to the next, gorging themselves on rice and wheat.
Early in August, the “war of the placards” shattered whatever tenuous mutual confidence still linked Chinese subjects and British administrators. The inflammatory posters first appeared in Canton, their fulsome language and elegant calligraphy proving that they were composed by the die-hard “literati,” aspirant officials who had been deprived of hope of preferment by the rapid alterations within the ancient Imperial System stimulated by Western incursions. The slogans inveighed against the inhuman practices of Western doctors who, according to the posters, cut up Chinese bodies to manufacture medicines and stole the precious jewels often found within Chinese skulls. Those doctors further extracted the eyes of living Chinese infants and amputated the penises of young men to brew long-life elixirs that commanded high prices in Europe. Similar placards blossomed in Hong Kong, mysteriously renewing themselves each time they were torn down.
Their effect was catastrophic. The new alarms paralyzed whatever normal life still endured in the Colony. Schools, homes, workshops, shops, and offices were emptied by a mass exodus to Canton and Shanghai. Most firms shut down, and European managers joined their families in safe retreats like Weihaiwei and Peitaiho in North China. Deprived of their Chinese staff, the hongs virtually ceased functioning.
The Colonial Government reacted with a mindless reflex to the Chinese “betrayal.” A total of more than 2,000 buildings were burned, and an additional 25,000 homeless families swelled the exodus. When large “disaster areas” were cordoned off, their inhabitants, too, sought to leave Hong Kong. But the Government would, quite inexplicably, permit no more than fifteen junk loads to depart, and the disaffected police dissipated their energies trying in vain to apprehend the “snake ships” that smuggled out those refugees who could scrape up extortionate fares. Guardships patrolled the harbor. But they could neither stem the exodus nor protect even the improvised pest houses on the waterfront from the mobs.
The Government ordered “a war of extermination” against the rats, threatening to demolish one out of every five structures in the Colony. Yet the rats multiplied, and the Black Death pursued its inexorable course. Food prices soared, as ships avoided the pestilence-stricken Colony. The essential compradors of the foreign hongs withdrew. Since their compatriots were not allowed to depart at will, they would no longer serve the foreigners. Infuriated mobs stormed food stores and warehouses, but other consumer goods could not be sold even at a loss. The pulse of the social and economic organism called Hong Kong beat so feebly it was barely perceptible.
The offices of J. Sekloong and Sons remained open, though the exodus reduced the staff by half and the chief business was striving to sustain the chaotic Tung Wah Hospitals. But the walled compound called Sekloong Manor remained a sheltered enclave. Only three cases of plague appeared among two-hundred-odd dependents and servants, perhaps because the Sekloongs fought a relentless battle against the rats with Dr. George Parker’s advice.
When September began and the vainglorious sunshine was still unrelieved by rain, the rodents had almost vanished from the Manor. On September 10, 1909, Ah Sam proudly told Mary that not a single rat had been killed during the preceding twenty-four hours—because none could be found. Many servants had fled during the terrible days of July and August. Supported by two aged gardeners, by Mary’s personal maid, by the scowling baby-amah Ah Lam, and by Sir Jonathan’s cook, Ah Sam was the pillar of the establishment.
By September 10, the Colony’s death toll had fallen to two or three a day. Chinese or European, the survivors allowed themselves to hope—as the crew hopes when the winds begin to subside after their ship has been battered by gales for many days.
The next day, September 11, was the culmination of the terrible summer of 1909 for the Sekloongs. Sir Jonathan ordered his sedan chair early to carry him to a meeting of the Governing Board of the Tung Wah Hospitals. After the pestilence began to recede, his chair bearers had reappeared to explain that they had departed without notice in order to attend family funerals in their ancestral villages on the West River outside the market town of Sekloong. Sir Jonathan gravely heard their involved tales out. To express doubt would have stolen the coolies’ face.
Besides, he required their services, and he had good reason to believe that the worst had passed. He was, nonetheless, appalled by a report just received from the Chief Medical Officer of Health. The cumulative toll was 15,463 known dead. But Sir Jonathan knew the plague was abating, and he had prepared a proposal he believed the Board would accept.
At eleven on the morning of September 11, 1909, Sir Jonathan returned on foot to St. George’s Building. A wound in his forehead seeped blood, and he carried his left arm awkwardly. Harry hurried out to find Dr. Moncriefe.
“Hit by stones,” Sir Jonathan told Mary. “My chair was overturned, and the coolies ran away.”
His account was halting, for the pain of a torn shoulder ligament subdued even his spirit. His report of the death toll had been greeted by the Tung Wah directors with muted moans, but without antagonism. His proposal had called up a storm of protests. Staid old gentlemen rose screaming when he suggested that Tung Wah employ two English-trained Chinese doctors. Such renegades, they shouted, would be spies for the hated British witch-doctors who had allowed thousands of Chinese to die for their own sinister reasons. The board-meeting dissolved in anger. A mob gathered outside the Tung Wah Hospitals stoned Sir Jonathan after overturning his sedan chair and forcing his bearers to flee. Abashed by its deeds, the crowd then dispersed.
As she helped her father-in-law to a sofa, Mary felt pain lance her abdomen, swollen in the seventh month of pregnancy. She collapsed on the floor. When Harry returned with Dr. Moncriefe, two patients required his care.
At the wheel of the big Daimler, Harry slowly drove Mary and Sir Jonathan up Peak Road to the first sedan-chair stage. Relays of chairs carried them to The Peak. As they passed under the dragon arch, barrages of thunder rolled and rain fell in opaque sheets. The drought had ended. Within two days
, the plague, too, vanished as swiftly and mysteriously as it had descended.
Summoned by cablegram, Charles arrived from London four weeks later by fast steamer. He had suggested returning on hearing the first reports of the epidemic, and had repeated his cabled pleas almost weekly. But Sir Jonathan withheld permission, and Charles would not in this case defy his father, who was, after all, on the scene. Although she knew she was being irrational, Mary could not forgive his absence.
Charles found a household and a community in a state of shock after the long siege. Trade was bad—and would not improve for some time. Only the opium traffic had flourished, providing solace for tens of thousands amid universal terror. The resources of the House of Sekloong had been depleted by lavish contributions to relief funds. Sir Jonathan’s prestige among the Chinese had sunk as dramatically as it had risen among the Europeans. Exhausted by his injuries and his labors, Sir Jonathan was, nonetheless, cheerful. He was confident that his reputation would rebound, since some Chinese associates were already proffering flowery apologies. Sir Jonathan faced the arduous task of rebuilding with confidence that inspired his sons.
But Mary was sunk in depression. Having lost a perfectly formed girl-child, she was overwhelmed by a sense of deprivation. She shrank from the attentions of the servants who had deserted her in peril. Even when Ah Sam, that pillar of constancy, entered her room she felt irrational antipathy. Despite his loyalty, he was Chinese—and she feared all Chinese. She had seen them abandon their own dying; she had seen them attack British soldiers who came to help them. The Chinese had savaged Sir Jonathan, who had poured out his strength and his treasure to succor them. They had driven her to exhaustion—and they had murdered her girl-child.
The family kept knowledge of a further catastrophe from her for two weeks. But her repeated inquiries finally forced Charles to tell her that Hilary Metcalfe had been trampled by a mob he was trying to persuade to vacate its houses peacefully. He had died the next day. Elizabeth Metcalfe, stricken beyond reason, had closed the house on Wyndham Street and sailed for England a week later.
Mary was desolate. The Chinese had become abhorrent to her. They were no better than vicious tigers, indeed worse, for tigers would not abandon their mates and cubs to the hunter. The Chinese were ravening hyenas, which knew no law but self-preservation. Aware that her emotions defied logic, she nonetheless felt trapped on a vile little island amid a people she detested and feared.
Part IV
MARY AND JONATHAN
December 6, 1911—June 10, 1916
December 6, 1911
“But, hark, Madam, to the Immortal Bard. The Sweet Swan of Avon said it long ago: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’”
Mary was mildly amused. But the resonant bass tones declaiming from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar raised the hair on Harry’s neck, and he shivered. The flexible actor’s voice dropped to a rumble.
“We shall not be found wanting. The Manchu Dynasty has been overthrown by revolution. We shall not procrastinate to test our barque. We shall embark upon the flood-tide and sail to splendid triumph. We know, as the Bard hymned of those who miss that tide: ‘Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’”
The small company assembled in the library of The Castle was as much bemused by the speaker himself as by his heroic sentiments. He delivered the rolling phrases with immense gusto and dramatic timing—in a cockney accent marked by the guttural sibilants and tortured diphthongs of a music-hall Jew.
“But, General Cohen,” Mary objected. “Shakespeare also wrote: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’ Don’t you fear overconfidence?”
“No, Madam, no, a thousand times no,” the extraordinary voice replied. “The poet himself further said: ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’”
The General’s appearance was as extraordinary as his manner. His broad shoulders strained the seams of his green-tweed jacket, and his heavily muscled thighs rippled beneath his blue-flannel drain-pipe trousers. A battered prizefighter’s face, its nose flattened and its ruddy cheeks thickened, rose from the red-and-white cowboy’s bandanna knotted around his columnar throat, and his domed skull was covered with black curls. When he leaned back, his jacket opened to reveal two Colt .44-caliber revolvers in tooled-leather holsters.
“I see why you’re called Two-Gun Cohen,” Sir Jonathan observed dryly. “But why do you serve Dr. Sun Yat-sen?”
“Yes, General,” Charles Sekloong added. “You’re not the most likely fighter for the Chinese revolution.”
“At your service, Madam, Sir Jonathan, Gentlemen.” The massive head bowed, inviting them to partake of his vision. “And always at the service of His Excellency Dr. Sun Yat-sen, soon the first president of the Republic of China.”
“It does seem odd,” Mary probed. “How did you, of all people, come together with Dr. Sun?”
“Morris Abraham Cohen, once sergeant major in the Royal Marines, sometime interpreter of Cantonese to the law courts of Alberta, and now brevet lieutenant general in the Army of the Republic of China. That’s my tale, ‘bounded in a nutshell,’ as it were.”
The exuberant personality momentarily dimmed even Sir Jonathan’s steely glitter. The newly commissioned General quaffed a half-pint of beer from a silver tankard before resuming. As he himself acknowledged, Morris Abraham Cohen swam in the attention of his audience with “as much unassuming joy as ever Leviathan tossed his streaming bulk through the high and salty waves.”
“Gratitude, Madam, gratitude has brought me here. As the deathless Bard declared, ‘I hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness.’ His Excellency Dr. Sun Yat-sen found me in Canada while seeking funds from his compatriots to liberate their Motherland from the Manchu yoke. I was employing my slight knowledge of Cantonese to assist unfortunate Chinese caught in the toils of the law. Dr. Sun made me his bodyguard. Now he’s made me a general in the army he’ll build to defend the new Republic of China. He owns my eternal gratitude—and you will not find him ungrateful.”
The four Sekloongs heard him out. When he cared to exercise it, Sir Jonathan actually possessed the remarkable patience foreign folk wisdom attributed to his Chinese ancestors—as well as his Irish forebears’ love of a good tale and a bravura character. Mary and Charles were intrigued by the young Jew, who was like an irresistible force of nature. Harry’s spirit was exalted by the outsider’s devotion to the cause he had himself served for years.
“Gratitude, Madam and Gentlemen,” the adventurer resumed, “and a certain wholesome desire for revenge. Retribution, if you will. The Chinese people have suffered under foreigners’ oppression at home and abroad. The Hebrews, my own people, have also suffered much—and someday we too shall reclaim our homeland. Meanwhile I serve justice.”
“Justice, General Cohen?” Mary asked.
“Justice, Madam, hard justice for the evil-doers of this sorrowful world. I have seen much injustice, having had much to do with the coolies who built the great railroads that bind the American continent with bands of shining steel. Some came of their own will, but many others were grievously coerced. Their suffering was inhuman. You may recall the infamous Dutch ship Banca. She lay off Macao for a month at the height of the equatorial summer with three hundred and fifty coolies under hatches, while her owners haggled with the shipwrights over costs of repairs. The two hundred or so coolies who survived disease one day burst out of confinement. The crewmen barricaded themselves on the quarterdeck and laid down a veritable hail of lead. Fire broke out, swiftly reaching the magazine. The explosion killed all but eighty coolies.”
Sir Jonathan remained silent. He saw no reason to confide to their flamboyant visitor that he himself had been involved in the coolie trade as a young man—or that he had subsequently fought to suppress the traffic in indent
ured workmen, which differed from the old African slave trade primarily in the presumed consent of its human merchandise.
“I don’t see the connection between the coolie traffic and the revolution.” Charles was genuinely puzzled.
“Perhaps I can best explain in the words of another. I have here Ah Choong’s account to an Alberta court when he was had up for threatening his foreman with a cleaver.”
Cohen extracted a much folded slip of onion-skin paper from his wallet and smoothed it on his knee with spatulate fingers.
I was a 20-year-old native of Sunning [he read] when I came to Macao to seek employment in the year 1890. A cousin lodged me in a foreigner’s house. I never knew his name. Two days later, the foreigner took me to a coolie barracoon, where many men waited for ships all packed together as we cram market chickens into wicker-baskets. I was brought before a Portuguese officer in a green-and-gold uniform, and his interpreter told me I must go to Peru to work for four dollars a month. If I refused, I would be sent to a chain-gang for six years and then to the dungeons.
Unwilling, I put my mark to a paper covered with Chinese and European printing. I could read neither. A seal was affixed—and I was given eight silver dollars, two suits of clothes, a padded jacket, and a pair of cloth shoes. With others, I was then marched to a ship manned by foreigners. We lay on the bare boards without even a grass mat. After we sailed, I was very sick. We had neither water nor fresh air, for the hatches were sealed tight.
After two hours I smelled fire, and smoke poured into the hold. We all cried out in fear, and an old man said we would all die. When the hatches were removed, we all rushed for the ladder. Many fell to their deaths. My own feet slipped, but two young coolies pulled me to the deck. Half-suffocated by the terrible struggle, I saw that the ship was wrapped in flames. An instant later, the masts fell.
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