Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  Harris hurried after them, but Juan, having followed him for some forty yards, stopped when he came to the bus. Its interior was brightly lighted, and to his surprise he saw two girls in it. He went to the door, which was at the back, and got in. The girls were arguing with some heat.

  The bus was of that old-fashioned kind which has, in the middle of the gangway between the seats, two brass uprights to support the roof. The girls, standing shoulder to shoulder, were on either side of one of these uprights, and though their language was incomprehensible, their animated gestures appeared to indicate that they were debating the subject of precedence. Each of them demanded the right to go out first, and each, apparently, was restraining the other from exercising that asserted right. They were very pretty girls, and in appearance remarkably alike.

  ‘I apologize for interrupting you,’ said Juan, ‘but do you realize that you’re in a rather dangerous position here?’

  ‘That is what I have been saying to my sister for the last five minutes,’ said the girl on the right. ‘Now, Masha, will you not be reasonable when you hear this gentleman declaring the same thing that I have been telling you so often?’

  ‘But it is my turn to get out first,’ said Masha. ‘It is you who are being unreasonable, Varya.’

  ‘This is no time to split hairs,’ said Varya impatiently. ‘We are in danger, and I ask you to yield to me.’

  ‘My danger is equal to yours,’ replied Masha, ‘and if you will yield we shall get out as quickly as if I were to yield.’

  ‘It was I who got up first, and you who impeded me.’

  ‘Because it was certainly my turn to go first, and that you cannot deny.’

  ‘You have a petty mind, Masha. You are egotistic, a bitch in the manger, and you cannot see farther than your nose.’

  ‘And you are overbearing, and stubborn as a donkey, and I hate you!’

  Varya replied in Russian, and Masha, speaking the same language, discovered a remarkable volubility. Their gestures became wider and more threatening, but still they retained their original positions on either side of the brass upright, against which, in moments of exalted temper, they appeared to lean their united weight, as if trying to thrust it out of their way.

  A spent bullet interrupted their argument. It broke a window and struck with an unpleasant sound the steel framework of a seat.

  ‘Now will you let me go, or do you wish to murder us both with your stupid pride?’ cried Varya.

  ‘But why should I give in to you? It is always I who must give in. I wish you would learn about fair play, Varya.’

  Juan had listened with interest and some perplexity to this acrimonious debate, but circumstances now persuaded him that it had lasted long enough. Two or three of the houses struck by shells had caught fire, and were blazing fiercely. The heat was considerable, and both he and the girls were profusely sweating. In addition to this discomfort, he thought he could see, at the far end of the street, some new signs of military activity.

  ‘I suggest,’ he said, speaking with great calmness in order to pacify the young women, ‘that you solve your difficulties by coming out together. Simultaneously, I mean. Concurrently, or pari passu and hand in hand.’

  ‘But this brass pole is in our way,’ said Varya sullenly.

  ‘Surely you can come on either side of it?’

  They stared at him in honest bewilderment. Then Masha began to giggle self-consciously; but Varya said coldly, ‘I thought, of course, that you had recognized us.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Juan.

  ‘Give him our card, Masha.’

  ‘It was I who gave a card to the last man we met. It is now your turn. Varya.’

  ‘Do not be silly, Masha. You are wasting time.’ ‘I do not have any cards left,’ said Masha.

  Varya, frowning, fumbled in a handbag, and having found a card gave it to Juan. He took it and read:

  THE SISTERS KARAMAZOV

  THE ONLY GENUINE RUSSO-SIAMESE TWINS

  ‘I should never have guessed it,’ said Juan, looking at them with the greatest admiration.

  ‘In other ways we are naturally quite normal,’ said Varya.

  One of the burning houses suddenly collapsed, and with a wide-throated roar the flames shot upwards. The heat in the bus grew unbearable. At the same time there was the sound of brisk shooting at the farther end of the street.

  Juan made a sensible decision, and sidling past the Sisters Karamazov, he got into the driver’s seat. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said. ‘Where would you like to be taken?’

  Backing and turning, he headed away from the fire and the advancing soldiers, and drove the lumbering bus into the coolness and comparative peace of a street as yet immune from all the ills of battle except its noise.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he repeated.

  Varya and Masha, though in agreement as to their most suitable refuge, gave him contrary instructions as to reaching it, and Juan continued to drive, so far as he could judge, in the direction of peace and security. Then Varya took command, and directed him by way of several obscure streets and narrow comers into a broader thoroughfare that Juan recognized as North Szechuen Road.

  ‘It is rather a long way to go,’ said Varya.

  ‘It is not far if you go by the nearest roads,’ said Masha.

  ‘But even the nearest roads are not very short.’

  ‘They are much shorter than the way we are going.’

  ‘It was you who told the driver where to go when we were in Manila, and every time we used to get lost. Please admit that, Masha.’

  ‘That happened once, and only once; and this, in any case, is not Manila.’

  ‘It is a much larger town, and so more easy to mislay yourself in it. You will please turn right at the next corner,’ she added to Juan.

  ‘That is not the way to Avenue Joffre,’ said Masha.

  ‘No, it is the way to Avenue Foch.’

  ‘But good Heavens, Varya, how can you get to Rue des Andouilles from Avenue Foch?’

  ‘It is the only way you can get to it, Masha.’

  Juan drove through the spacious streets of the Settlement with all the speed of which the ancient bus was capable. It was a noisy progress. Every window was loose in its frame, the seats were loose, the bonnet clattered as though a score of little boys were rattling sticks along park railings, and the engine so roared and complained that all its pistons and cylinders appeared to be as much at variance as the Sisters Kara-mazov. But the sum and total of these noises, the dissonant addition of stridor and roar, of snorting, thumping, and horrisonous rattle, was a friendly and reassuring total. It was the sound of machinery grown old and decrepit in the employment of man. It was a flattering and respectable sound, as of an aged servant whom neither asthma nor crutches nor chalky joints could tear from his demi-century of service. And though it was almost as deafening as the din of battle in Chapei, it nowise resembled that murderous tintamarre. Juan held the shuddering wheel with an approving hand, and turned a corner with inadvertent acceleration.

  How delightful, he thought, to have been in a battle and escaped from it! And not merely to have escaped without increment, with nothing to show for it except a whole skin, but to have eluded death with a motor-bus and Siamese twins for a prize! Fortune had indeed been open-handed. She was a Lady Bountiful who might have graced Trimal-chio’s table, a prodigal who spilled the munificence of her cornucopia with a princely hand. Was there another, in all his generation, who in one short night had seen war’s anger and driven the dark streets of Shanghai with geminate and lovely Russians? Had they been separate they would have been exciting enough, and each in her own person sufficiently charming; but being joined, and as it were one person – though speaking with a divided tongue – their charm was doubled and became unique. It was true that they wrangled a great deal, but they bore the brunt of that themselves, and to a third person they might be as equable as the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle.

  In obedience to
Varya’s direction – Masha without success opposed it – Juan turned left out of the Avenue Foch, and presently came into a street whose most noticeable features were quietness and discretion. He stopped beside a modest house with green jalousies, and briskly opened the driver’s door.

  But jumping out with some precipitancy, in order to assist the descent of Varya and Masha from the rear of the bus, he caught his foot in a loose floor-board, and pitched head-first on to the road. He felt a moment’s indignation with his own carelessness, a shattering blow, and lost consciousness.

  Chapter 5

  Juan returned to life in mingled circumstances of luxury and discomfort. He was lying, partly undressed, on a broad bed in a room whose ornate furnishing included a horizontal wall-mirror on a level with the accommodating couch. His head lay on a damp pillow, that grew steadily moister from the large wet bandage which covered his brow; and his bare feet were in painful apposition with an immoderately hot water-bottle.

  He opened his eyes and perceived that the Sisters Karamazov, seated by the bedside on a small Empire sofa, were eagerly watching for signs of his recovery.

  ‘It was I,’ said Varya proudly, ‘who put the cold-water compress on your forehead.’

  ‘And I,’ said Masha, ‘laid the hot water-bottle at your feet.’

  ‘Do you mind taking them away?’ asked Juan.

  They rose, and Masha, who was the left-hand twin, reached in front of her sister for the wet bandage; but Varya impatiently slapped down her hands and endeavoured to remove the hot bottle.

  ‘It is burning his feet,’ she said. ‘I knew it would.’

  ‘It is better to have burnt feet than to get pneumonia, and possibly rickets, through lying with your head in a puddle,’ retorted Masha.

  Summoning his returning strength, Juan rolled over on the bed to escape from the sodden compress and the burning bottle. In his head there was the unpleasant sensation of a battering-ram that struck, at regular intervals, a splintered but resisting door, and his brow was embossed with a large swelling on which, diluted by water, there was a rivulet of blood. He lowered his feet to the ground, and got up, but dizzily and without confidence. He stood for a moment or two, and returned to bed. The Sisters Karamazov gave him a dry pillow and covered him with a heavy quilt.

  ‘Do you always quarrel?’ he asked.

  ‘We?’ exclaimed Varya. ‘During the whole of our life we have never exchanged an angry word. We are devoted to one another. Aren’t we, Masha?’

  ‘We live only for each other,’ said Masha. ‘Varya is often selfish and inconsiderate, but none the less I have the most cordial feelings for her.’

  ‘How can you say that I am selfish when I am always thinking of you and trying to save you from committing follies? It is I who bear the heavy end of the stick. It was I who took the heavy end of this gentleman when we brought him upstairs.’

  ‘I’m extremely sorry to have given you so much trouble,’ said Juan drowsily; and dreaming, while still half-awake, that the pain in his head was the booming of Japanese guns, he was carried upon the rhythm of that dream and fell sound asleep.

  ‘On spatet,’ whispered Varya.

  Masha, with affectionate interest, leaned over him to see if this were really so, and murmured, also in Russian, ‘Perhaps we should stay with him, in case he needs anything.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ hissed Varya. ‘It is very late, and we must go to bed.’

  Reluctantly Masha was led away, and the Sisters Karamazov went out with the broken pace of stretcher-bearers, or of children in a three-legged race, for the ligament that joined them, hip to hip, made it almost impossible to walk in step.

  Juan slept for eight hours and woke to a feeling of drowsy comfort. His head no longer ached, and his body was full of the exquisite stirring of strength renewed, as of a meadow waking out of winter, to which his mind, released from battle and concussion, was pleasantly complementary. He could hear, from far away, the dull explosion of shells or bombs; but the sound had lost its novelty. The war, he supposed, was continuing. A column of pale sunshine divided the heavy curtains that covered the window, and was reflected as a luminous gap in the long mirror. In this diminishment of darkness he could see the outline of unfamihar furniture, and presently curiosity persuaded him to get up.

  He drew back the curtains, and the room filled with the bright glare of a fine winter noon. It was a curious apartment, deficient in much of the usual equipment of a bedroom, but in other ways very usefully appointed. The nature of the house was obvious. It would, in the ordinary way, be described as disorderly. But such a description was ungrateful and inaccurate, for everything was as orderly as it could be, and its accounts were strictly audited. Its function, indeed, was the raising of love’s status from the primitive level of a romantic obsession to the civilized plane of a marketable commodity. Juan, thoughtful but not really embarrassed, washed his face and hands, and wiped the dry blood from his forehead.

  No sooner had he made his toilet than the door opened and the Sisters Karamazov came in, the one carrying a cup, the other a glass of tea. They wished him good morning in the friendliest fashion, and then, putting down the glass and the cup of tea, marched with unusual agreement to the window and closed the curtains again. Varya switched on the electric light, and Masha said, ‘That is much nicer, isn’t it?’

  ‘It makes it even more difficult to decide which of you is the lovelier,’ said Juan courteously.

  The twins were enchanted by this politeness, but immediately, in the Karamazov manner, began to dispute it, each protesting that her sister was by far the prettier, and prettily maintaining that urbane chiasmus. Then they remembered the tea they had brought, and Masha said she had thought he would rather have it made in the English fashion, but Varya was sure he would prefer the Russian style. So Juan took the cup in one hand and the glass in the other, and having assured them that English habit and Russian custom were equally agreeable to him and immeasurably improved by conjunction, drank them both.

  Varya and Masha watched him with solicitude. Masha’s expression was the more affectionate, but Varya’s the more considerate of his comfort. It was Varya who remembered to thank him for having rescued them from the perils of the previous night.

  ‘It was so noble of you,’ she said. ‘You are kind to others and fearless for yourself.’

  ‘And you drove the bus very cleverly and fast.’

  ‘That is a minor thing,’ said Varya.

  ‘If he had not been able to drive, he could not have rescued us,’ said Masha with justice.

  ‘But the nobility of his mind – why, Masha, we do not yet know what the gaspaden is called.’

  Juan, having told them, hoped they would allow him the usage of their Christian names. And how, they asked, could they refuse this small courtesy to one who had so recently saved their lives? ‘I am Masha,’ said Masha.

  Their costume was the morning’s neglige, but only in the technical sense could it be described as such. Masha, whose hair was the mild gold of an old spade-guinea, wore a blue silk peignoir as soft and pale as hyacinths in a wood; and Varya, whose hair was bright as a new penny, had a green silk robe de chambre as agreeable to the eye as young beech leaves. Their maquillage had been chosen with taste and skilfully applied, and their red leather slippers added two inches to their height.

  ‘Are there many other people in the house?’ asked Juan.

  ‘There is no one except Anna Ivanovna, the old servant,’ said Varya.

  ‘They were frightened, and they ran away,’ Masha explained.

  According to Anna Ivanovna, they said, Madame la patronne and the young ladies of the establishment had been seriously perturbed by the arrival, on the previous afternoon, of a party of Japanese, two in uniform and one in plain clothes. What they had come for, Anna Ivanovna did not know; but clearly their purpose was not that of the majority of visitors. After they had gone the young ladies ran hither and thither, in great fear and derangement, making large untidy parcels o
f their more valued possessions, and though Madame at first had endeavoured to calm their panic, she had presently been infected by it and eventually was the worst of them all, crying, ‘Make haste, make haste!’ and leaving the house with nothing but a hairbrush and a tumbler containing an infusion of senna-pods. But what the Japanese had said to intimidate them and start such a wild stampede Anna Ivanovna could not tell, though she thought it might have something to do with General Sun Sat-lo, who was in love with a girl called Nina Fyodorovna, and during the week before he had visited her on three successive nights. All that one could say for certain, however, was that the only occupants of a once populous residence were Juan, the Sisters Karamazov, and Anna Ivanovna.

  The twins told their story with great animation and little contradiction, and no sooner was it finished than Anna came in with an enormous tray on which were six glasses and a dozen small dishes of caviare, smoked salmon, gherkins, sausage, and so forth. Masha could not restrain her pleasure at this felicitous entrance, and greeted Anna with boisterous delight. Varya, with more self-control, merely glanced at the refection and hoped that Juan had a good appetite. But in making ready to eat, her alacrity was equal to Masha’s, and with remarkable agility she and her sister hop-shuffled on to the broad bed, gyrated on Varya as a centre, and squatted on their retracted legs to face the tray that Anna set upon the gold-threaded counterpane. Juan, at their invitation, assumed a semi-recumbent attitude on the opposite side of the tray, and Anna, having made another journey downstairs, brought a bottle of vodka and three bottles of champagne. She filled the smaller glasses with vodka, and Juan and the Sisters Karamazov drank each to the others’ health with willing kindness.

  ‘Anything in the nature of a picnic,’ said Juan reflectively, ‘has always, until now, filled me with displeasure. The common attempt common in England, that is – to avoid the tedium of a conventional meal by eating it cold in the company of ants, gnats, and wasps, and with the addition of sand and nettles, inevitably reminds one of the fatuity of trying to cure a cliilblain by sleeping on an iceberg, which is known as homeopathy. But though feasting al fresco has all the discomfort of farce, I am now ready to admit that skilly al letto – but this is a banquet – might have merits unknown in a stalled ox and the dining-room mahogany.’