Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  ‘Not actually, but I know all about them.’

  ‘And what’s going to be your target? Bandits, Communists, opium-eaters, or Japanese?’

  ‘The Japanese, of course. They are much the worst. We have always had plenty of bandits and criminals in China, and we do not really mind them. But the Japanese are trying to destroy China, and make us a subject people.’

  ‘You’re really serious about fighting?’

  ‘Of course I am!’

  A man’s impulse to succour beauty in distress is neither pure nor revoltingly hypocritical. It is altruism sweetened by self-interest; but it is also a noble and hazardous enlargement of self-interest. Juan’s sentiments had hitherto been simple and vivid. Kuo Kuo delighted and excited him, and he wanted to extend and enlarge the pleasure of being with her. Her attractions were magnified by her nationality. She was Chinese and unfamiliar; in the unknown there may be bliss unknown. Her beauty was strange and new, her character unexplored; and all men are sailors. But now altruism – a young man’s altruism-began to plait itself into his simple motive, and in a very short time he felt astonishingly confident about several things, all of which, half an hour earlier, had been total strangers to him. He felt sure he could help Kuo Kuo in her trouble about China; indeed in any of her troubles. He felt sure it would be the pleasantest thing in the world to help her. He was sure she was right in judging China’s condition to be desperate, and in arraigning the Japanese as her worst enemies. He began to feel strongly about China himself. He thought again of Li Po, and of Confucius, and of cherry-blossom – no, that was Japanese – and of Willow Pattern plates, and several hundred million patient farmers. Why the devil should Japan go in to ruin their peace? Japan, he was sure, had never produced anything as lovely as Kuo Kuo, with her ivory skin, her narrow green dress, and the gold buttons on its collar. He was more than half-ready to fight for China himself.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘if you come to San Francisco with me, I’ll go to China with you. And I’ll bring my own machine-gun.’

  ‘Do you think that would be a good bargain for you?’

  ‘I am neither a huckster nor a lightning calculator,’ said Juan. ‘Neither am I afraid of yielding to impulse. Nor have I ever found any difficulty in knowing what I want. At present I have twin desires. The other is to see China. I am a simple person easily pleased with the best of everything, and I have been told that Chinese scenery is superb. As for the rest, I have two eyes, but single vision. I refuse to be contradicted.’

  JUAN IN CHINA

  Chapter 1

  With portentous joint-stock banks for its battlements, and granite-walled huge offices for its watchtowers, Shanghai stood like a robber-keep at the entrance to China. Behind its tremendous walls were the incessantly toiling, tirelessly spawning provinces from which it took toll to build and maintain its magnificence. Out of rice-fields and poppy-fields and the little labour of many millions of men had risen those great buildings; and from the sweat of innumerable simple peasants that luxury had been distilled. Merchants had founded it, and merchants ruled it. As daring and fanatical for wealth as ever soldiers for honour and priests for their God, they had crossed the world, and sat themselves down in a hostile land, and stayed there despite hostility, and in a few generations raised to a wondering sky this imperial city, where before had been only some wattled huts and a stinking swamp.

  It was achievement of the largest kind. Running-board to running-board, hundreds of motor-cars stood on the Bund, and other hundreds in the bannered streets were as restless as the weaver’s shuttle. They had been bought with money made in a land where a wheelbarrow was wealth, and where the commonest kind of highway was still a footpath through the fields.

  In the Whangpoo, the river that washed the city’s wharves like a defensive moat, were ocean-going liners from France and Britain, America and Germany and Japan. Their cargoes had been brought to them in junks that naked coolies hauled through the fierce waters of the Yangtze, or in sampans laboriously poled through interminable muddy creeks. They were pirate ships, and Shanghai was a pirates’ roost.

  But the keep, the pirates’ roost, was not without benevolence. The robber merchants, for their own purpose, had established law in their settlement, and contrived for those who lived there a very reasonable degree of security. It therefore presented yet another contrast to the unspoilt hinterland, whose charms included banditry, extortion, armed assault, and such reverence for the Confucian principles as to leave invested capital without any adequate protection. The result was that worldly and wealthy Chinese, in ever-increasing numbers, had discovered the amenities of the roost, and come to the conclusion that the pirates’ law was better than their own lack of it. Many who had been thrifty enough to save a little money or so clever as to swindle their fellow-villagers, and others who merely had ambitions about saving or swindling, made their homes in the foreign settlement, whose population presently numbered more than a million, the vast majority being Chinese. Two million more came to live on the periphery of the settlement, where they enjoyed the overflow of its beneficence, such as decent roads, tramcars, cinemas, the service of a fire brigade, an opportunity to make money, and a chance to spend it before it had been stolen from them.

  The robbers’ keep was therefore regarded as a Centre of Civilization; the conquering merchants built more temples to Progress and Industry, which, though scarcely as beautiful as Lincoln Cathedral or the Taj Mahal or a Greek Artemis, were more immediately useful; and all the patriotic Chinese politicians, who called the foreigners running dogs and said they must be driven into the sea, and the Chinese generals who fought or evaded each other for their country’s good, put their money into foreign banks and acquired town residences under the foreigners’ protection. Shanghai might have developed peacefully on these lines – collecting the wealth of China, returning some small change to the natives, and providing an asylum for retired Chinese statesmen – had it not been for the unruly ambition of the Japanese.

  The Little Dwarfs of the East Ocean, as the Chinese called them, were a pleasing example of a psychologist’s hypothesis. For centuries they had been bullied, swindled, and humiliated by the Chinese, the Russians, and anybody else who had the opportunity. Then they had become civilized, and discovering in civilization the very weapons they needed, had adopted along with it a modern code of ethics, imperialism, and revengeful efficiency. In their rapid progress, however, they had scarcely had time to reconcile some contradictions in their national character.

  They were, on the one side, as clean and tidy and orderly, as fond of flowers and bright colours, as the Dutch; the other side they were apt to be hysterical, fanatical, and curiously addicted to suicide. They boasted of their reverence for their ancestors, and often behaved like arrivistes who had never owned a grandfather. They were in many ways as clever and energetic as the devil; and they were so foolish as to want, not merely China’s trade, but much of its unwieldy land and undisciplined people. Because of their militant avarice the streets of Shanghai – that most benevolent of pirate polities – became a bloody and untidy battlefield.

  It was raining when the yellow-funnelled Empress of Hawaii came into the Whangpoo River. Over the wide clumsy perspective of grey buildings, and the staccato chimneys on the other bank, the sky hung dismally low, and the air was cold. Juan and Kuo Kuo stood on the boat deck and silently regarded the cheerless view.

  Four months had passed since their going from Arroyo Beach, and for twelve weeks they had been living together so contentedly that their relations had become almost domestic. Kuo Kuo, for instance, no longer troubled to conceal the blemishes in her character. She was unpunctual, illogical, and opinionative. She spat orange-pips on the floor, kept toilet requisites, peanuts, and sweetmeats under her pillow, and often, when Juan was talking well and judicially about some matter that had newly drawn his attention, she would interrupt him with a cool ‘I’m reading, dear’. But in spite of these and other flaws in her behaviour he loved her
inordinately. He loved her so completely that often he felt – with the injustice and forgetfulness of love – that he had never loved before. Three months of happy fidelity had convinced him that man was properly monogamous, and he an exemplar of blissful virtue.

  That Kuo Kuo should be so blindly and totally enamoured as this was clearly impossible; for she kept thinking about the part she was to play in the affairs of China. But she was in love, sometimes passionately, sometimes tolerantly, often with gaiety, and occasionally with petulance; for Juan, as was natural after they had dressed together for several weeks, had lost something of his spontaneous admiration for her frocks and complexion, and paid her fewer compliments about them. But they were mutually in love, and now, as they stood looking at Shanghai and Shanghai came nearer, her hand was in Juan’s coat-pocket, held closely by his, and they had no thought of parting.

  The river was busy with the passing of ships and lighters and high-sterned country-craft. Tugboats sped swiftly under plumes of furious smoke, ferries crossed, and narrow destroyers were anchored in midstream. It was, though hardly a peaceful scene, a scene that made no suggestion of war. But suddenly a procession of boats – a tug and two lighters – enormously erupted. A funnel of grey and yellow fumes shot upwards from them, expanded, and spread into cumulus. In the very moment of expansion it was split by a lurid flame, and the city shook to the roar of the explosion. Out of the smoke descended a shower of dismembered arms and legs and other human fragments.

  Staggered by the shock and dazed by the infernal roar, Juan and Kuo Kuo held tightly to each other. ‘The war has started,’ she said. Her voice was awed and thrilling. ‘China will win,’ she added.

  A pair of blue cotton trousers, stripped in the upper air from the lower half of a bisected coolie, sailed absurdly by and collapsed on the rain-pocked water. Boatmen and rickshaw-pullers screamed and fled; laden coolies on the wharves dropped their burdens and ran. But already the disciplined movements of rescue-work were opposing the wild activity of panic. The destroyers were lowering boats, a motor-launch raced to the storm-centre, and bearded Sikh policemen strove stubbornly to create order out of the sudden chaos on the streets. With a frenzy of klaxons and the blatant hullabaloo of bells, fire-engines hurry-scurried along the Bund.

  ‘They wouldn’t call the Fire Brigade to put out a war,’ said Juan.

  ‘Well, it sounded like a war, and a lot of people were blown to pieces.’

  But some of the passengers had already got more accurate news of the disaster, and presently Juan heard that the lighters had been loaded with gunpowder, and the explosion was probably caused by sparks from the tugboat’s funnel, or a casual cigarette-end, or an act of God. For once the Japanese were innocent. Juan was thankful that hostilities had not yet begun, for he felt strongly the desirability of becoming acquainted with the lie of the land before entering into battle. He was largely ignorant of military service, but he knew that personal reconnaissance was highly commended by professional soldiers, and he fancied that the first thing to reconnoitre was a line of retreat. If war were imminent – and apparently it was – he was pledged to fight, but by no means to die for China. ‘One must keep one’s head,’ he thought.

  Of the many friends whom Kuo Kuo had expected to meet her, only one appeared. He was a plump little man in a felt hat and a long black gown. His name was Min Cho-fu. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Juan, ‘I speak only a little English.’ He spoke less than that, however. But talking to Kuo Kuo he was extremely voluble. He explained that all the others who had intended to meet her had probably been delayed by the confusion that followed the explosion; or perhaps they would arrive later, as some of them were not very punctual. But they would all meet that evening, he said, for they were to dine at the Mei-sum restaurant in Szechuen Road, where there was the best Cantonese food to be got in Shanghai, and there they could discuss the situation.

  It was very grave. For several days past there had been serious rioting in Chapei, an industrial suburb of Shanghai, and the Japanese admiral had delivered an ultimatum in which he demanded the instant suppression of anti-Japanese sentiment and the immediate establishment of a sincere and lasting friendship; and to assist in these matters he had landed five hundred marines. Japanese residents in Shanghai were insistently demanding their government’s intervention, and Japanese reservists in plain clothes, armed and numerous, were already patrolling certain streets. The Chinese, on the other hand, were busily erecting barricades of sandbags and barbed wire, and were momentarily expecting reinforcements. Their own organization, the Conquering Youth of China, said Mr Min Cho-fu, was ready for action and waiting only for Kuo’s leadership. War was imminent, bloody and serious war.

  But Juan, for whom Kuo Kuo translated these tidings, found it difficult to regard the prospect seriously. During their civilized conveyance to an hotel, in a very good taxi-cab that avoided other cabs in the most civilized fashion, he could see nothing but the evidence of an apparently secure and civilized existence. There were handsome shops and bright electric lights, traffic-policemen and smooth office-buildings, and Englishmen in bowler hats. True, there were many thousands of blue-clad Chinamen in the streets, and a hurrying stream of rickshaws; but in spite of their foreign appearance he could discover nothing fierce or combative in their demeanour. It was ridiculous to suppose that war could invade such peacefully busy thoroughfares.

  Their hotel was almost Americanly tall. There were Chinese residents in the lounge, and Chinese servants; but the lift rose swiftly and smoothly, their room was furnished with the clean elaborate impersonality of an hotel in London or New York. ‘It’s nonsense to talk about war,’ said Juan.

  But Kuo Kuo was busily unpacking. From a pile of underclothes she took two automatic pistols, one of which she gave to Juan. ‘When wisdom rules, the world will be common to all,’ she said. ‘Till then we must protect what is rightfully ours. The youth of China will lead the whole country into action.’

  ‘But it’s absurd for you yourself to think about fighting! There’s a Chinese army, isn’t there? Well, why not leave it to them? I’m not going to let you run into danger for the sake of nonsensical, quixotic, sentimentally blood-and-thunderish romantic notions about patriotism…’

  ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ said Kuo Kuo, and deafened herself against his sudden anger with the noise of rushing water. But Juan continued to talk, to expostulate, and denounce her folly. He walked impatiently to and fro, talking loudly in the heated air. He sat on the edge of the bath and continued to talk. But in the middle of a sentence he stopped, and was silent.

  In spite of his disbelief in the likelihood of war his nerves had reacted to the atmosphere of danger, and in a very natural and illogical fashion he now felt responsible for Kuo’s safety. Love had never before contented him so well or troubled him so deeply. Her narrow beauty delighted his eyes and his arms; but beauty was only partly the cause. There was poetry and prose in her; the poetry of a people who had for many generations cultivated the poet’s vision and loved the poet’s tongue; the prose of an old nation that accepted the dirt and discomfort of life, and could laugh loudly and live strongly till its death. She had beauty, and strength of character, and many small faults that did not matter in the least. Because they loved so well they could be casual in their love without hurt to it. Such happy love was like a mountain stream, bubbling and shallow at one moment, then passionate and deep, but always in the same course. To think of losing her was misery and darkness.

  But Kuo lay calmly in her bath, and said, in the unexpected silence, ‘I suppose Japan has been too straitened to acquire riches and good manners. Mencius said, “To be very poor and yet law-abiding is possible only to the cultured”. And Confucius said, “Cultured people must inevitably become poor; but when the mean in spirit are poor, they are lawless”.’

  ‘I wish you’d forget about Confucius and Mencius,’ exclaimed Juan. ‘If it weren’t for them you might have had time to learn something useful in the last four thousan
d years; and China wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in to-day.’

  ‘Give me a towel,’ said Kuo. ‘And if you’re going to put on a clean shirt you’d better hurry, because in China we dine early.’

  Juan was still unpacified when they reached the Mei-sum restaurant. They climbed a narrow and rather dirty wooden stair, and came into a warm smell and a clattering noise of talk and eating and the shifting of dishes. The restaurant consisted of eight or ten small private rooms. They passed a black and narrow kitchen, and arrived at a room where Kuo Kuo was warmly greeted by seven men and a short, slim, pretty girl. When Juan was introduced they bowed in turn, shook hands with themselves, and began a lively conversation with Kuo. For some minutes Juan was forgotten. He examined the furnishing of the room, and saw bare matchboard walls, rather shabbily painted; three large spittoons that had not recently been emptied; heavy chairs and a round table; and a battered sideboard of a curiously Victorian pattern. Presently Mr Min came round and again introduced him to the slim pretty girl, who was his sister. ‘She speaks good English,’ he said.

  Unfortunately Miss Min was so shy that she could use no more of her English than a whispered yes or no. It was a relief to Juan when they sat down, and dinner was ordered. But his relief was short-lived, for looking at the table equipment he found before him an array of tiny bowls, a little plate, a small porcelain ladle, and two ivory chopsticks. Tea was served. Then a waiter put a dish of little birds in the middle of the table, at which Juan stared helplessly. Everyone else, reaching forward with strangely prehensile chopsticks, pincered a bird and eagerly began to eat. Juan was still trying to find the proper grip with which to hold his skewers, when Miss Min obligingly offered him, on her own chopsticks, a blackbird, lark, or such small fowl. He was very grateful, and hurried to empty his mouth of splinters of bone in order to tell her so. Before the little birds were finished another dish was brought in, of small hard mushrooms and a long green vegetable. The mushrooms, by some remarkable device of the cook’s, had become slippery and slightly elastic. Some of them evaded Juan’s chopsticks with a coy squirming motion, and others leapt lightly about the table. Even the soft green tendrils slid snakelike from his grasp. But Miss Min again took pity on him, and filled his plate, from which, abandoning his chopsticks, he ate with the porcelain ladle and a surreptitious finger.