Six times in one day, at bus stops, the vehicle had to wait while gendarmes or officials inspected that marvelous document which Han Hua had obtained for two thousand of the dollars called “CN”—for “Chinese National”—equivalent to a hundred real dollars at the start of the journey and to less at its end. Once the three had to fill out elaborate questionnaires—the bus didn’t mind waiting. Lanny, of course, was the art expert from Connecticut, U.S.A., a refugee from Hongkong, and deeply interested in the ancient art of China. He had found a book in Hengyang, and provided himself with a list of the treasures he hoped to inspect in the districts to which he was traveling. Nobody ever failed to be polite, especially to the so obviously pregnant wife. Both husband and wife got used to the routine of inspection, and took to keeping the score; before they dived underground in the mountains of South Shensi, they had produced their passports and permits a total equal exactly to the number of weeks in that year!
VI
They were approaching the great Yangtse River, called the Son of the Sea. The river comes down from the western highlands through a great chain of gorges, and at the foot of the gorges is the city of Ichang, where in old days all freight had had to be trans-shipped into special vessels built to run the rapids. Now Ichang was in the hands of the Japs, and all efforts of the Chinese to retake it had failed. Below the city were stretches of the river across which smuggling was continually going on, but Han said he would be afraid to take his party across by that route. The Japs took no prisoners in this war, and they would especially enjoy getting some Americans to torture.
The Americans agreed that they preferred to face the perils of nature. They hired a Ford car of the “tin Lizzie” era and headed to the west, into the mountains through which the great chasm has been cut: mountains denuded of trees, and terraced wherever there was a drop of moisture to be found. Han said that the farmers caught the rain in cisterns and ladled it onto their plants at night. Rains came now, most inopportunely; they drove with care on slippery mountain trails along the edges of high cliffs. There was traffic everywhere in China, it appeared, and when there was no room for passing, Han would sternly command the other parties to back up, and they would obey. Later he revealed that he had issued the commands in the name of the United States of America!
They came in sight of the famous gorges, and here was one of the most extraordinary spectacles that had ever confronted the eyes of the much-traveled Lanny Budd. It was as if a giant machine had come and cut a huge crevasse, half a mile deep and a hundred miles long, through these mountain masses; and then a swarm of human ants had come and covered the walls with themselves and their constructions. Where the wall was too steep for them to climb from the surging river they had come down from above. They had cut pathways along the cliffs and dug caves in them. Wherever there was a lump of earth they had built a wall about it and planted food. Where there was no earth they had brought it in baskets and built or dug rock basins to hold it. The caves were their homes, and outside they toiled every hour of daylight, constructing vegetable patches where you would have expected to find the nests of eagles and fish hawks. When the travelers came into sight of this gorge they looked across to the opposite face and saw it like a city turned up on end. The trails which led up into passes through the mountains had been planted on the sides, and looked like shafts of green, even at the beginning of February.
The party descended through such a trail, and when they came to the bottom they found a town strung along the water’s edge. As soon as the high waters of summer receded, the peasants rushed to the new soil and planted it. If there came an unseasonable flood their labor would be swept away, and they, too, not infrequently. Few Chinese of the peasant class knew how to swim, and Lanny doubted if many of them had ever heard of such a possibility; if they fell into water and there was nothing to catch hold of, they drowned. Han said that in the old days of commerce through the gorges there had been special boats going up and down to pick up the corpses; they would tie a rope around the neck of each and tow it; when they had accumulated a sufficient bunch they would tow it to the burial grounds.
The Japanese command of the foot of the gorges had caused the direction of traffic to change and it was now crossways to the river. At the town strung along the water’s edge they found crowds of people waiting for barges or junks to take them across the fast stream. When Lanny saw the number who intended to pile onto such a craft he refused to trust the life of his partner to it, and insisted in plutocratic fashion upon hiring a private barge. He and Laurel sat in a dirty and depressing tea-house while Han carried on the shouted negotiations which were necessary to this deal; Lanny had told the guide to pay the price and save time, but apparently this was a violation of conscience to a Chinese. A proper bargain had to be struck.
At last they were loaded and cast forth upon the tide. Six sturdy yellow men, naked save for loincloths, sculled and rowed with long oars and desperate concentration. They were swept far downstream; when they reached the opposite bank the men produced boat hooks, caught whatever objects they could find, and toilsomely pulled the craft foot by foot against the current. That was the way the gorges of the Yangtse had been ascended ever since men had discovered them and before they had discovered the power of steam.
The travelers were put ashore at the proper spot, the agreed price was paid, and they hired another car which chugged painfully up a steep trail. They spent their first night in the province of Hupeh very uncomfortably in a stone hut, along with goats and donkeys and all the smells of China. A good part of the fleas of China were present, also, but the humans had magic against these and kept themselves well powdered. The peasant who maintained this so-called inn told them through the interpreter many fearsome tales about the wizards who dwelt in these Lan-shan—the second word meaning mountains. It had been an especially powerful wizard who made the gorge which they had just crossed; he had done it by blowing with his nostrils, and that was why it was known as the Wind-box gorge. It was these wizards who sent the floods and destroyed the works of man; they were in league with the great water dragons which had their palaces in the deep pools and under the black rocks of the river bed.
VII
There are many mountains in the province of Hupeh, and the farther north the explorers went the more they needed their sheepskin coats. Their backs became toughened, and they grew used to being swayed back and forth by the bumping of an aged car. They learned to eat what they could get, mostly rice, eggs, and stored vegetables, washed down by tea made from their boiled water and no sugar. Presently they came to another great east and west river which had to be crossed; it was called the Han, and they asked playfully if it had been named for one of their guide’s ancestors. He grinned and informed them that “Han” was an alternative word for “Chinese.”
Just north of here was the mission to which they had a letter. It proved to be a small place, but it made them welcome and afforded them an opportunity to get clean. They took their hosts into their confidence; these people had no sympathy with the Border Government, but accepted the statement that their fellow-countrymen were getting material for a report to Washington. They thought it a strange mission for a pregnant woman—and Laurel did not share her secret with them. They gave the party a letter to another mission farther north, and warned them that after that stage they would be approaching the territory of General Hu, and it would be imperative for them to travel only at night.
From the next town there was a bus line, going north; and so they rolled on through the dirt and misery of war-torn China. “Beyond the Eight Horizons,” was the native phrase. This country had been fought over, back and forth, ever since the overthrow of the Manchu Empire a generation ago. This was the China that Lanny had read about: bare deforested mountains and dustblown slopes of yellow loess long since deprived of fertility. Peasants still toiled for an existence in the hills, but the wealth was confined to the river valleys, and these were exposed to incessant floods.
They came to
the next mission, which proved to belong to the unorthodox Seventh Day Adventists. The party had the bad luck to arrive on Friday evening, when men and women had become gloomy and were walking humbly before their God. But that did not prevent them from receiving the travelers, feeding them, and giving what advice they could. All shades of political opinion were the same in the Lord’s eyes, they reported, but this was not so in the eyes of General Hu, therefore they requested anyone who was bound for Yenan to leave the mission before morning.
Han set forth to find some friends of his, meaning, of course, his Party’s underground committee; he came back to report that he had a safe hiding place. They set out before dawn, and were led into a mountain gorge, and in its recesses they found caves with peasant families. The Americans had been assured that caves, if they were dry, could be warm and comfortable; this one had the customary k’ang along one wall, an earthen shelf on which they could sleep and wait for the next night. A Chinese family continued its life as if there were no visitors present.
From that time on the party belonged to the Red underground. They traveled only by night, over all sorts of country, including steep mountain trails where they trusted their lives to the instincts of tough little ponies. Many travelers were on these trails, most of them with heavy loads. Mysterious figures appeared and disappeared in darkness. Perhaps they were smugglers, perhaps soldiers; nobody asked any questions. Han would produce some local guide, and that guide would deliver them at a place where they and others would spend a day sleeping and eating, but doing very little talking. Han would report to his boss that he had paid so many paper dollars for various services—a cup of tea cost two dollars now—and Lanny would hand him another bundle. Han would report that they were so many li—about a third of a mile—nearer to Yenan, and Lanny would take the liberty of not being certain about that.
VIII
At last they were in North Shensi, which was Red territory, and outside the reach of the cultivated General Hu—whom they were never to see. They became creatures of the daylight again, and surveyed this neglected land which the new occupants were in process of restoring. Han explained to them how each unit of the Eighth Route Army had been obliged to go to farming and become self-sustaining—since the scattered half-starved peasants had nothing to give them. The visitors were received at an army post, and were fed in a mud hut with a thatched roof—this was a “club house.” They sat outside on a still night, amid a throng of gray-clad soldiers, and were entertained by Chinese boxing, patriotic speeches, and the singing of the Guerrilla Marching Song.
Hitchhiking on a rice truck, they followed the valley of the Yen River, and so came, weary and sore, to their long-sought goal, the city of Yenan, three thousand years ancient, according to their guide. The syllable “an” means “peace,” but it had been a futile hope through all those thirty centuries. On one of the hills stood a tremendously tall pagoda, supposed to exert a spell against invaders; but that hadn’t worked against the Mongols and wasn’t working now against the Japanese. They had been bombing the city unhindered for a matter of four years and a half, and there were few buildings with walls standing; when you entered these you generally discovered that they had no roofs.
The city lies in a flat plain, not too wide, and the hills rise abruptly; so the citizens had retired to the suburbs and dug themselves caves. The soil is of loess, good and hard, and when you have dug far enough you are safe from bombs of any size; you are cool in summer and warm in winter and dry at all seasons. You and your co-operative friends can cut a street, ascending slowly along a cliff side, and so you can have a whole row of dwellings; or it may be a hospital, a factory, a university for young men, or one for young women. There were thousands of caves—apparently nobody had ever taken a census of them.
Such was Yenan, and the American visitors fell in love with it at the first contact. Most important of all, it was the cleanest community they had come upon. Perhaps that was because it was new, and perhaps because its citizens were young; the soldiers were young and their commanders not much older; the students were young and their teachers not much older. Everybody was hard at work, everybody was doing something novel and exciting; the place gave you a sense of exhilaration, the like of which Lanny had not encountered since he had gone visiting among the “radicals” in his early days. Those hadn’t been able to do anything but dream and talk, whereas these people were constructing, they were making their dreams come true.
Americans were scarce in Red China, and the arrival of this unannounced pair occasioned great interest; everybody wanted to meet them, and to shake hands—they had adopted that western custom, and did it with alarming vigor. The visitors were taken up by Yenan’s best society—which meant precisely everybody in the place. Socialist equality was their bright dream, and everybody felt himself on the same plane, from the poorly dressed ex-peasant, Mao Tse-tung, Party chairman and government head, to the youngest hsiao-kuei, which means “little devil,” and is the name for the small boys who follow the army and make themselves useful to the soldiers. When civil wars have gone on for a generation, there is a plentiful supply of boys who have no homes, and if you feed them they will work and grow up to be soldiers.
The Budds were put up at the Guest House, which meant that they had a private cave. It contained two cots, a small table and two stools made of local wood, a water pitcher, a basin and a pot de chambre made of local clay, a couple of blankets and a couple of straw mats—all products of the co-operatives. That was more than most people had and all that anybody needed. The first time Laurel had met Lanny, she had called him a troglodyte, a cave-dweller; now here they were, two of them, and the jokes they made were many.
They and their guide would have their meals in a communal dining-room, and they would eat what everybody else ate—rice, millet, boiled vegetables, and once a week a little meat. The first person they met in the dining-room was a scholarly Englishman who had been teaching at Yenching University in Peiping when he had got news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had made a quick dive to the Red guerrillas who were in the near-by mountains. He was in Yenan for only a short visit, he said: he was going back to the armies to help them with radio, which was his hobby. Next to him sat an American doctor who had been several years in this new world and liked it so well that he had taken a Chinese name; you addressed him as Dr. Ma. He was the happiest American they had met in a long time, having only one serious complaint, that his hospital had no medicines.
IX
After spending a couple of days on the back of a Chinese pony scrambling up mountainsides and along the edge of precipices and over dubious suspension bridges, a delicately-reared lady would have been glad to lie down and rest for a day or two. But everybody wanted to show her things and tell her stories, and this was what she had come for. So she climbed the side of cliffs and inspected the new institutions of a new-old land. The co-operatives were not peculiar to the Red part of Free China; there were several thousand of them, in a score of provinces. They were the answer of the whole land to the move westward and to the desperate needs of war. This population—soldiers, workers, and intellectuals—had never seen western and northwestern China before, and had hardly known that it existed. They had come to a raw, almost abandoned land, and had applied to it the techniques of social effort which had been worked out by revolutionary theorists of Europe and America and which had received their first trials on a nation-wide scale in the Soviet Union.
Some of these leaders had studied in Russia, and so their movement called itself Marxist; but Lanny Budd quickly decided that they weren’t really Marxist, they were early American Utopian. They were Brook Farm and New Harmony, Ruskin, Tennessee, and Llano, California; they were Robert Owen and Bronson Alcott, Edward Bellamy and J. A. Wayland. Lanny had read about them in the library of his Great-Uncle Eli, and now it was one of the strangest experiences of his life to discover their theories and techniques bursting into flower here on the dustblown hills under the Great Wall of China.
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br /> Here was the communal life; here were the communal kitchens and dining-rooms, the communal nurseries where children were cared for; here were the co-operative production and distribution, the socialized medicine, the socialized teaching. Here was the old idea of students supporting themselves by part-time manual labor; here was a medical college where the students brought spinning wheels out into the open in good weather and spun cloth for three hours every morning. The old New England spinning wheels which had clothed Lanny’s forefathers, and which now brought fancy prices from collectors of antiques! Here, too, was the old New England practice of community help in house-raising, corn-husking, and other farm tasks—the name for it here was “labor exchange.”
Even more important than all these economic devices was the social spirit. Here we’re the vision and the dream, the ideal of brotherhood and mutual aid; hope springing eternal in the human breast; faith in the perfectibility of man, in the possibility of building new institutions and having them right this time; the casting off of old habits of greed and self-seeking, the setting up of a new code of group awareness. “Solidarity forever!” had been the slogan of the “Wobblies”; that of the Chinese co-operatives was: “Gung ho!”—meaning work together. The American Dr. Ada was as happy as a schoolboy. “For the first time,” he said, “here is a medical world without professional jealousy. Nobody is making money out of the sick; nobody is trying to be richer or more famous than his colleagues; we are all trying to find out she causes of disease and prevent them before they start.”
Lanny had visited Leningrad and Odessa, and had seen a bit of this dream in action; but Laurel had only read the books, and had only half believed in the possibility. Naturally a critical nature, prone to see human weaknesses rather than virtues, she was moved by this torrent of faith and enthusiasm. She forgot all about her stiff back and aching thighs, and went from place to place, asking questions for hours. Lanny went along, an amused spectator, and Han blossomed forth as the proud propagandist, scoring the great success of his life—for had he not been the one to discover these wealthy and important Americans and to bring them safely through many perils? Who says that the collective life will destroy all initiative?
A World to Win Page 74
