Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  Juan, who had been walking to and fro while he gave utterance to this very reasonable thesis, stopped to pour out another glass of champagne, and looking more closely at the Sisters Karamazov he perceived that all danger of their quarrelling had long since disappeared. They sat quietly, not so much bewildered – though bewildered they had been – as slightly stunned, like country cousins, whose only previous experience of music has been The Gondoliers, towards the end of a Bayreuth performance of Götterddämmerung.

  That was very interesting,’ whispered Varya.

  Masha, stirring slightly, asked. ‘Do you never make love until you have talked as long as that?’

  ‘We cannot always live up to our ideals,’ said Juan. ‘And how much less eventful life would be if we did,’ he added, finishing the champagne.

  The consciousness of benevolence invaded his mind. He had defeated, by eloquence, the menace of a disagreeable scene, and his little triumph, notably abetted by the benignity of wine, inspired in him that magnanimity which, now natural only to slight intoxication and the fleeting of an occasional happiness, is the vestigial heritage of an age of gold. His urgent desire, in this delectable mood, was that everyone should be as happy as himself, and advancing on the twins he kissed them with the amiability of a bachelor uncle and the heartiness of a storm-delayed sailor. ‘Now sing to me,’ he said.

  Masha sighed with pleasure and the extremity of her relief. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were tired of kissing me.’

  ‘All that I said,’ declared Juan, ‘was an expression of my passionate conservatism. I am prepared to laud for ever the oldest delight on earth.’

  ‘You are not interested in our blood-pressure?’ asked Varya suspiciously. Boganov, in his own way, had sometimes been given to excessive wordiness.

  ‘Only in its effect on your complexion,’ said Juan, and kissed her again.

  ‘I have just as big a blood-pressure as Varya,’ said Masha jealously.

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ said Juan hurriedly. ‘And now what are you going to sing? Do you know Black Eyes?

  ‘Of course we do!’

  The twins arranged themselves, more conveniently for song, on the edge of the bed; muttered a word or twro of warning to each other; expanded their chests; and burst into a fine presentation of discords:

  ‘Kak ty chornaya,

  Kak ty strashnaya…’

  They sang with fervour.and feeling, and their voices rubbed against each other like a wet finger on glass.

  Juan listened in astonishment greater than that with which the twins had heard his oration in defence of eloquence. At its best their singing was like the inadvertent double-stopping of an illiterate fiddler; at its worst it resembled the noise of a tram-car running on lines that had been laid for a train. Each had a voice that was, in itself, powerful and melodious, but in apposition they were like an isosceles triangle whose superior angle was a horrid gap that nothing would close. Uncle Georgy had told them that music was a matter of sums; and both were constitutionally incapable of such an elementary addition as seven-pence-ha’penny and elevenpence-three-farthings. Their singing was a farce that their humanity disguised as tragedy.

  ‘That was a most unusual performance,’ said Juan, and tilting the last champagne bottle over his glass, found to his dismay that it was empty.

  The twins got up, and hurrying towards him, Masha came first and sat on his knee. Varya was left standing.

  ‘Go and look for Anna Ivanovna,’ said Varya. ‘She will give you another bottle.’

  Juan lifted Masha to reluctant feet. ‘That’s a very good idea,’ he said. ‘In such a company as this, which is triangular and therefore incapable of linear solution, wine is our only consolation. It was Meredith I think – but correct me if I am wrong, for I am totally uneducated – who expounded the theory that Bacchus is morally superior to Venus, inasmuch as Bacchus in his bounty is generous and inclusive, while Venus is jealous and shuts the door against intruders. Where, by the way, is the door?’

  Varya pointed the way to it, and Juan, descending an easy flight of stairs, came to a narrow hall in which, on a hatstand, he recognized his coat. He opened the front door, and looked out at blackness slightly relieved by the reflection of an unseen light and faintly striated with rain. It seemed a long time since he had been out of doors. The war had stopped – but the truce was temporary – and the night was quiet. He breathed the mild darkness, and as though it had dispelled a prescriptive atmosphere, peculiar to the house, he suddenly remembered Kuo Kuo and her mission to Nanking. He thought of her with a little pang, as though his conscience had slightly twisted an ankle in a downhill run through the heather. It was not his dalliance with Varya and Masha that occasioned the pang, but his realization that for the better part of a day he had never thought of or recalled the existence of Kuo Kuo. Such forgetfulness was infidelity indeed, and Juan, stiffening his moral fibres with a harsh rebuke, resolved to leave at once this Lethean household.

  Or almost at once. For it would be churlish to go without saying good-bye to Varya and Masha, and before he had given them some more champagne. He re-entered the house, and finding Anna Ivanovna, who was sleeping on a little iron bedstead in the kitchen, he indicated by signs that he was thirsty, and specified his desire by putting a finger in his mouth and withdrawing it with a loud plop! Anna, rising creakily from the bed, took the twenty-dollar note he offered her and used it to hide a yawn. She gave him a bottle of champagne and some inexplicable advice in Russian.

  Juan went upstairs again, and found the twins singing loudly. They ignored his entrance, but when the song came to an end, Varya explained: ‘That was a song called Stenka Razin. Our home is at Kazan, which is on the Volga, and Stenka Razin was a great hero who sailed on the Volga and fought against people. It is a very well-known song, and we shall sing it again.’

  They sang it again. It sounded like a gramophone being played with two needles, like the jarring of split trumpets:

  ‘Kak vshochíl tutgrózen

  Stenka Razin.

  Podhvatól Persódskuyu tsarevnu,

  V volny brosil krasruyu…’

  But the Sisters Karamazov were enjoying themselves. They found no fault in their own voices, but were assured by mathematical calculation that they sang correctly. They took the champagne that Juan gave them, and began a very melancholy song. They finished that, and sang Kólokol, Ya nye harm nye tartarin, and Vecherni zvon.

  Juan listened with increasing amazement and no little pleasure, for to relish the unusual, the grotesque, and the heteroclite, was one of his more notable faculties; and despite their voices the twins were enchanting to look at. But half-way through yet another one, called Ya tsiganka maladaya, he decided it was time to go. He stood up and prepared to say good-bye.

  Masha and Varya, however, were drowned in melody, drunk with delight in the loud noise they were making, drugged with nostalgic thoughts of Holy Russia. They paid no attention to him, nor looked his way when softly he opened the door.

  He decided to walk back to his hotel, and turning by chance in the proper direction he soon came to the Avenue Foch, from where he found his way without much difficulty; though now and again he detected in his progress a slight tendency to circularity, which he defeated by a resolute series of tangential movements. He was also impeded by a recurrent desire to stop and talk to anyone he met, but this ainiability, that in other circumstances might have made his noctambulation interminable, was fortunately parried by the linguistic poverty of Chinese wayfarers and Sikh policemen. Persuade d at last that further entertainment was unfeasible, he went to bed.

  Chapter 7

  While Juan, had been engaged with the Sisters Karamazov, the Japanese had occupied themselves with the bombing of Chapei. From early morning their seaplanes had flown over that dull but useful suburb, dropping bombs on plain and unpretentious streets, on squalid lanes, on a multitude of industrious small premises where human beings had scratched from circumstance a narrow livelihood w
ith the bright-eyed patience of hens in a backyard. At first the aeroplanes had flown at a great altitude, cautiously releasing their explosives from the heights of the sky. The weather was mild and clear, and wherever a bomb burst there rose a shape of reddish dust, like a vaporous dark cauliflower, that slowly spread and lost the deceptive firmness of its outline, and presently subsiding became nothing but dust with a fragment of wall or a broken gable in the middle of it. The seaplanes carried four bombs apiece, and when they had dropped their destructive cargo they returned to the river for another load.

  As the day grew they became bolder, and flew nearer to the houses. Their shadows raced along the streets, and the noise of their engines, echoing on broken masonry, was like the vibration of a fevered nerve. Sometimes a pilot would come so low that the upflung shape of dust, from an exploded bomb, obscured his machine in a rufous haze. Here and there, on the house-tops, were Chinese machine-gunners who fired hopefully at the invading planes, but the noise of their guns was little more than the stammering of impotent wrath. It is not easy to hit an aeroplane, and the Chinese, who were in any case indifferent marksmen, were using ammunition of inferior quality. Much of it had been imported from Japan.

  The principal target of the bombers was the north station of the Shanghai-Nanking railway, on the outskirts of Chapei. Like so many stations it had been built in a poor and dismal neighbourhood, as if to say that railway passengers should enter a city only by the back door. It was surrounded by black shunting-yards, by cinder-dumps, and dirty streets, and crouching rows of little smoky houses. When bombs burst there, they filled the air with fountains of coal-dust. The Chinese had chosen this sombre neighbourhood as the core of their resistance. Troops from the 19th Route Army had already arrived there, and taken up a strong position. These were Cantonese soldiers, well-equipped and drilled, whose morale and reputation were both excellent. An armoured train had come from Nanking, which materially stiffened the defence till it was withdrawn after having been hit by a bomb.

  In the early afternoon an aeroplane registered a direct hit on the station, and the buildings were almost wholly destroyed in the subsequent fire. But in the midst of this infernal scene, among dust and falling debris, scorching flames and the shattering impact of the bombs, the men of the 19th Route Army held their position and would not yield.

  A few yards away, on the northern boundary of the International Settlement, the mobilized companies of the Shanghai Volunteers performed the arduous and complicated duties of policemen, an interested third party, and touch-judges. Their most important function was to prevent the war from overflowing into the Settlement, and their most difficult job was to deal with the hordes of panic-stricker, Chinese, who at one moment would try to force their way across the frontier with the whirring unanimity of locusts, and the next were endeavouring to hurl themselves back with the suicidal impetus of lemmings. The Volunteers, moreover, were frequently under fire from both sides, and in spite of this recurrent provocation were not allowed to retaliate. They accepted their position with that curious humour which shows itself in the belittling of danger and adversaries. They were Shanghailanders, and therefore hard-boiled. They knew their reputation and were proud of it. They were ready at any time to drink heavily with their friends and fellow-countrymen, or to kick the Oriental bottoms of the rest of the world. They were, especially in their cups, merry gentlemen; and having put off their financial and social anxieties with their civilian clothes, it took a lot to dismay them.

  Within these efficiently but somewhat contemptuously guarded frontiers, there was a great deal of worry and confusion. Chinese students were parading the streets in noisy demonstration against the iniquities of Japan and the Laodicean policy of Nanking. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Chinese Bankers’ Association declared a general strike, and innumerable engagements to play golf, football, bridge, or motor-car courtship – for it was a Saturday – were broken without apology. Chinese restaurants did some useful profiteering at the expense of refugees; and occasionally an alarm was caused by the discovery of a sniper, firing at nothing in particular, on the roof of a house far from the field of battle.

  These events all took place in bright smishine. At eight o’clock, when darkness had fallen, a truce was called; and most of the cinemas and night-clubs opened as usual.

  Juan, sleeping late into Sunday morning, was wakened by Kuo Kuo, who came into their room looking tired but excited. She had just returned from Nanking. A white-gowned room-boy followed her with a small dressing-case, which was all the luggage she had. As soon as he had gone she turned to Juan, and told him he must get up at once.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said sleepily, ‘how absurd you are. Approach the situation from another angle, and come to bed.’

  ‘There’s no time for nonsense,’ she answered, with agitation in her voice. ‘I’ve been very worried about you, all the time I was away, because you’re in great danger here.’

  ‘It’s my native air,’ said Juan, yawning. ‘J went to see the war the other night. It’s going to be a good one, I think. How did you get on in Nanking?’

  Kuo took off her coat, looked into a mirror, and between worry and displeasure smudged her fstce with powder. Then she sat on the bed beside Juan, and putting her narrow hands on his chest, leaned over him, looking into his eyes.

  ‘Juan,’ she said, ‘you must be serious.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Hikohoki is a spy!’

  Juan twisted away from her restraining hands, and shouted with laughter. ‘My pumpkin!’ he cried, ‘of course he’s a spy! And the moon’s a thief, and clouds are costermongers. My father sells skipping-ropes under the Admiralty Arch, and my sister does sums for blind accountants in a houseboat on Plinhmmon. What else could he be than a spy? He’s a pimp and a gun-runner, he sells insurance and postcards and homeless girls, he’s an entrepreneur, he’s got a finger in every pie and the ace of trumps up his tell-me-if-you’ve-heard-it-before. You bet he’s a spy. He sold the secrets of Aulus Splautius that day we overcame the Nervii. He’s the two-timer who put skids under Guy Fawkes. He did the dirty on Enver. he traded an old horse to Marco Polo for spring lamb, and Prince Eugene wouldn’t move a step till Hikohoki told him what Metternich had said to Bill Bailey. God knows when I’ve loved another man so much as that poly-dextrous buttercup!’