Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  Mei-ling forced a smile as she murmured her thanks to her father, but she found herself unable to hold his gaze for long and she feigned shyness to avoid looking at the eldest son of the Chang family at her side. An excited buzz of conversation arose at the news that the two families were to be united, but as Lu sat down a small frown nagged at his brow. Before seeing his son and daughter he had asked his manservant how they seemed, and the old eunuch had replied that both were “more mature and self-confident.” But in the brief meeting of welcome to which he had invited them in his study and now at the banquet in their honor, neither seemed willing to look him in the eye. He glanced toward his wife, who headed an adjoining table, but she seemed relaxed and at ease, unaware of any tension. At his side Chiao was bent over his chopsticks, seemingly preoccupied with eating, and he did not turn until his father addressed him directly.

  “Soon, Chiao, we should decide when you will begin the task of learning how to take over the business from your aging parent.” Lu spoke quietly so that nobody else overheard. “There’s much for you to discover and there’s no point in wasting more time.”

  Setting down his chopsticks, Chiao raised his head to find his father’s eyes fixed on him but this time he did not flinch from returning his gaze. The striking stillness of body and mind that was so evident in his father’s bearing had been achieved, Chiao knew, by strict adherence to a lifelong regime of self-discipline practiced rigorously in accordance with ancient Chinese teachings, and in an instant he was able to discern that the older man’s dedication to his code had not diminished with age. The daily ritual over many years had never changed; although he had not observed him, Chiao knew that his father had arrived home from Shanghai’s biggest textile factory at precisely the same time as on every other day and gone directly to his secluded garden studio without speaking to any member of the household. Assisted by his manservant he had dressed himself in a long-gown of high-quality gauze and seated himself cross- legged on the earthen bed in the center of the austere room. There for forty minutes he had practiced a combination of breath control and deep meditation exercises designed to still the mind. Focusing his consciousness in the imagined center of spiritual force in the lower abdomen, he had chafed and stroked his cheeks, his temples, his forehead, and the bare soles of his feet with the warmed palms of his hands until he felt waves of cosmic energy, which Taoist sages called ch’i, rising and coursing strongly through his whole body, expanding from the abdomen, flowing outward, growing and returning to build an inner reservoir of strength and energy at the core of his being. Then when he felt refreshed he had no doubt risen and taken up his brush to let the same vital energy guide his hand in the natural rhythms of calligraphy for the writing of the poem. Chiao knew all these things with such exactitude because his father had taught him to follow the same Taoist codes of self-discipline from an early age; Chiao had continued to meditate and perform the gentle T’ai Chi Ch’uan martial art exercises daily in France, and in the same moment that he recognized his father’s continuing dedication, he knew that he himself ‘would be coming under similar scrutiny.

  “I’ve long looked forward to two things during my absence, Father,” said Chiao at last, speaking calmly. “One is refreshing my eyes before the art treasures displayed in your private Chamber of Antiquities — and the other is discussing toy future with you. May we combine those two things when the banquet is over?”

  The quiet, direct demeanor of his son, with which he was more familiar, reassured Lu and he assented willingly to the request. A small group of Chinese musicians had entered and begun to play stringed instruments on a raised platform at the end of the room, a juggler was performing elaborate tricks beyond the tables, and father and son turned their attention to the entertainment along with their guests. When the festivities ended, Lu led the way through the house to a red lacquered door standing behind a security gate of iron bars. The old eunuch appeared silently from the shadows, holding a ring of keys, and he unlocked the gate and the door, closing them carefully behind the two men once they were safely inside. The large chamber, laid out as a private museum, contained many exquisite figures carved in jade and amber, bronzes from the Han and Chou dynasties, and bowls, vases, and wine jars of glazed porcelain wrought by Tang and Sung craftsmen. Occasionally father or son stopped to caress a piece of jade or inspect the colors and markings of a piece of porcelain, but for some minutes neither of them spoke: then at last Chiao broke the silence.

  “Twenty years have passed since Old Wang served the last Son of Heaven in Peking,” he said reflectively with his back to his father. “But China has known nothing but strife during that time.” lie picked up a slender-necked Tang ewer and traced the delicate curve of its spout which was fashioned in the form of a phoenix head. “It’s wonderful to be home, Father, and see all these beautiful objects again. But I must admit I’m impatient to see a new China rise like this phoenix from the ashes of the past.” He swung around to face his father, holding the ewer before him. “Surely, Father, you want to see China restored to greatness too, don’t you?”

  “China’s greatness can still be seen clearly in every object in this room,” said Lu crisply.

  “But it isn’t visible in the terrible sights of Shanghai and Canton and the other so-called treaty ports, where Europeans rule us. It isn’t clear in Manchuria, where the Japanese are threatening to seize more of our territory.”

  Lu looked searchingly at his son. “Why do you talk this way, Chiao? Europe seems to have changed you. We came here to discuss how you might take over responsibility for the textile factories.”

  “Europe hasn’t changed me, Father — it’s helped me see things I’ve always felt much more clearly.” Chiao paused, realizing he had meant to try to break the news of his intentions more gently, but now he found he could contain his pent-up feelings no longer. “I’m sorry, Father, but I can’t spend the rest of my life looking after your factories. I have physical strength and a strong mind — you’ve given me those. And I want to use them for my country. If I stay in Shanghai and run your factories, I might make the Lu family and a few British traders more prosperous — but that’s all.”

  Lu’s face betrayed his feeling of shock for only a moment before he mastered it. “In enhancing the wealth of your own family, you would also be contributing to the well-being of your countrymen.”

  “But not enough of them, Father!”

  As he registered the implications of his son’s statement, Lu’s eyes narrowed. “This must mean you’ve become a member of the Kung Ch’an Tang while you’ve been in Europe. The words of your poem were hollow — you’ve joined the ranks of the Marxists.”

  “Yes, Father, I am a member of the Kung Ch’an Tang,” said Chiao quietly. “I believe only the Communist Party can make China great again. I intend to go to the soviet areas now and so does Mei-ling. She is too intelligent and creative to endure the torture of an arranged marriage with Chang or anybody else.” Chiao paused again, his face growing tense as he searched desperately for the right words. “But my poem was not hollow. Mei-ling and I hoped you would understand, Father. . . The Kung Ch’an Tang needs the support of men of good standing. You could provide funds even if you did nothing else — nobody need know.”

  Lu stood straighter suddenly. His face had turned pale but the stillness of his expression betrayed that he was battling for inner control of his feelings. For a long time he neither moved nor spoke; then, without warning, he walked over to Chiao and removed the Tang ewer from his grasp. Replacing it carefully on its shelf, he gestured for his son to leave the chamber ahead of him. “Your decision will cut you off immediately from your family and everything dear to you,” he said in an icy voice. “You and your sister have made a very grave choice.”

  Fully aware of the symbolic finality of the act, Lu ushered his son from the Chamber of Antiquities. Outside Chiao hesitated and turned back, half intending to make one last appeal for understanding. But he saw that his father’s face was col
d and stiff, and without any sign of emotion Lu closed the door firmly on the magnificent array of antique bronze, jade, and porcelain which he knew his son loved. Taking the key from the waiting manservant, Lu locked the door with slow deliberation. Then, turning his back on Chiao as though he no longer existed, he walked quietly away along the corridor toward his garden studio.

  8

  A strong gust of wind swept into the mission church as the notes of the last hymn died away. To Jakob’s horror, the congregation of Chinese coolies and beggars began to writhe sensually in their pews as though stirred by the wind. Turning, he saw Mei-ling rising from her seat before the organ, the skirts of her dress billowing out from her body as they had done on the deck of the Tomeko Maru. But this time she made no effort to hold down the dress: her ankles, her calves, and then her slender amber thighs became visible in turn, her long, glossy hair swirled across her face, and she too began to sway languorously as she moved toward him.

  The coolie men and women and the beggars had begun pulling off their clothing, moving in unison. Among them Jakob saw the legless cripple seated on his wheeled tray. Through the press of yellow-brown bodies moved the white-haired senior missionary who had come to Jakob’s aid in the alley; still smiling benignly, he appeared to be encouraging and advising individuals in turn.

  Mei-ling’s dress was suddenly open from throat to hem as she came smiling toward him: she was near enough for him to see the play of muscles under her ribs, the curve of her belly, the gentle swell of her small breasts and their dark-nippled peaks. She began to stretch out her arms to him but he turned away to call frantically to the congregation, who now were grappling together in a naked, seething mass among the pews. He strained his throat and lungs — but no sound emerged. He felt cool hands touch his own shoulders and realized for the first time that he too was naked.

  Standing apart, he saw, was the American girl with the brown bobbed curls. Dressed demurely in the same pale cotton frock that she had been wearing that afternoon when she bandaged his forehead, she had an expression of seraphic detachment on her face as though she was unable to see what was going on around her. Jakob tried to attract her attention — but she continued gazing distantly over his head, an unsullied and remote figure. Feeling delicate arms tighten around his naked chest, Jakob began to struggle and shout again. An animal warmth that was both pleasurable and frightening began to suffuse his body, making him struggle more wildly, and as he thrashed from side to side he woke himself from the nightmare.

  Immediately the alien noises of Shanghai’s alleyways reached into the darkened mission house bedroom where he lay breathing raggedly: the harsh cries of peddlers, the creak of their laden bamboo poles, the tinkling bells rung by the blind. Above all else he could hear the fast, staccato beat of Chinese voices raised in complaint and argument. When his breathing quieted Jakob raised a hand to his head and gingerly fingered the bandage bound around his brow. He remembered then the soothing voice of the American girl and the confident, capable way she had treated his injury. As she leaned close over him he had smelled the fragrance of the perfumed soap with which she must have washed herself, and he became tangibly aware of the aura of goodness and wholesomeness which she radiated.

  He remembered too the calm, tactful presence of the older Englishman in the alleyway. His intervention had saved what might have been an ugly situation; in the midst of the angry crowd of Chinese he had unobtrusively handed out a few coins of compensation to the coolies whose loads had been spilled, and tempers had quickly cooled. It was he who had then suggested that Jakob get some rest immediately, although the graze on his forehead was not serious, and he had conducted Jakob to the bedroom himself.

  The memory of that kindness, contrasting so brutally with the recollection of the senior missionary’s imagined role in the nightmare, brought with it a feeling of shame and self-disgust. Stricken anew with the full horror of what he had dreamed, Jakob rose from the bed hurriedly and fell to his knees to pray. He had several times resorted to prayer in similar circumstances a few years earlier in resisting the teasing of earthy mill girls. Once they discovered the intended vocation of the apprentice engineer working among them, they had come to delight in taunting him and calling up his youthful blushes as he struggled to tend their machinery. Subduing the little- understood physical instincts of his healthy young body, therefore, had not been easy but the nightmare of sensualism he had just suffered had been unprecedented. Its shaming sacrilegious nature had obviously been inspired by the scurrilous anti-Christian propaganda read to him by Jacques Devraux on the Tomeko Maru, and for this reason he redoubled the intensity of his prayers, begging that all carnal thoughts in future be banished from his mind. He was still kneeling in this absorbed attitude when the bedroom door was opened quietly by the white-haired missionary. He waited patiently on the threshold until Jakob had finished praying and climbed back into bed, then advanced into the room, carrying a smoking oil lamp.

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day — and China can’t be converted to Christianity overnight.” The older man set the flickering lamp down on the bedside table, tapping the file of papers he carried tucked inside a big-character Chinese Bible. “I’m Matthew Barlow, and that’s today’s lesson for a novice missionary ‘with boundless energy and enthusiasm for his calling.’ I’ve been reading the report sent ahead from your training college; your arrival outside our gates certainly bears out that perceptive assessment.”

  In the lamplight, Jakob became fully aware for the first time of who Barlow was. In ten years the sunburned face that had seemed so heroic to a small boy in a back-street church hall had aged considerably — but it was still recognizably the face of the man who had inspired his boyhood fantasies of China. The name “Matthew Barlow” he recognized as belonging to the Director-general in China of the entire Anglo-Chinese Mission, and this surprising realization left him momentarily at a loss for words.

  “I’m very sorry about the accident, Mr. Barlow,” he said hurriedly when at last he recovered himself. “I’m afraid I got carried away. Being pulled in the rickshaw seemed so humiliating — to the coolie and me.”

  “The Chinese, Jakob, have carried burdens as heavy as themselves for thousands of years. They think nothing of it. That’s one of the many things you’ll just have to accept.”

  Barlow smiled briefly but his manner was faintly resigned, and the expression was a pale shadow of the gleaming smile that had captivated Jakob in the Moss Side church hail. He could see that lines of fatigue were now etched deep around Barlow’s eyes, his white hair was thinning and receding at the temples, and in his movements there was a hint of growing weariness. Jakob felt a vague stirring of disquiet at these changes — then he dismissed them as natural consequences of the passage of time.

  “You’ve taught me an important lesson today, Mr. Barlow,” said Jakob, smiling ruefully and rubbing his bandaged head lightly with one hand. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”

  “Don’t thank me, young man. You ought to thank Miss Felicity Pearson.”

  “Who is Miss Pearson?”

  “Her parents were missionaries in Tientsin when she was small. They went home when she was eight years cld. But as she grew up in America she found she couldn’t forget China. She’s just spent two years studying at a Bible institute in Connecticut and has come out with the Sino-American Missionary Society.”

  “Why was she here?”

  “She’d been visiting me to discuss her application for language training. She saw you crash your chariot and came running to drag me into the fray.”

  “I must write a letter thanking her.”

  “You’ll have an opportunity to thank her personally — both of you will be attending the same course in Peking at the new Joint Missionary Language School.”

  “When do I go to Peking?” asked Jakob in surprise.

  “The day after tomorrow.” Barlow glanced absently at his file. “We don’t keep young men long in Shanghai doing nothing. You’ll have
time to get your land legs and buy a few essentials for traveling rough in China — a fiber mat, an oil sheet, some bedding. Then you’ll be on your way.

  Despite the excitement he felt on learning he was to go to Peking, Jakob experienced a new sense of dismay. Barlow’s manner seemed almost perfunctory, as though he felt little genuine interest in his task, and a silence fell between them, broken only by the distant gabble of Chinese voices and the discordant clanging of gongs and cymbals coming from the street outside. Perhaps a hint of Jakob’s perplexity showed on his face, because the director-general sat down on the end of the bed, looking at him more closely. “When I came in, Jakob,” he said quietly, “you were praying. Are you worried? Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “No, thank you, not really . . .“ Jakob avoided his gaze. “I had a bad dream, that’s all.”

  “China always overwhelms new arrivals one way or another,” said Barlow slowly. “This country teems with more people than any of us have ever seen before. Newcomers often fee! as if they’re drowning in an ocean of human bodies. It takes time for European nerves to adjust.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “And I may as well warn you, Jakob, in China you have to be prepared to be crucified at least once a day. Here in Shanghai, for instance, the refuse carts pick up ten thousand corpses from the gutters every year

  Barlow’s voice trailed off with a shrug and a thin smile, and in the attitude of his sagging shoulders as he sat on the end of the bed, Jakob detected an unmistakable air of defeatism.

  “But Shanghai isn’t the whole of China, Mr. Barlow, is it?” he asked, injecting his question with a note of determination. “The Anglo-Chinese Mission is still making good progress in China generally, isn’t it?”