Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  Making an effort – but with a quick glance over his shoulder – he walked a little way, and turned, and turned again, and found himself lost in the maze. In front of him, alone between two ranks of gods, was a glaucous deity whose face was twisted in wild and diabolical laughter. Not the benign amusement of the others, but laughter that tore the very fabric of life. A god more evident than the others despite his lineaments of the devil – for only a god could see such comedy in the world and have the courage to laugh at it. His mouth, at one end, curled upwards like the horn of a young moon, and hung at the other like a hound’s ear. In his eyes there was more merriment than a man may show, as a man is more capable of mirth than a monkey. He was a god, but clothed in sackcloth and rags, heaven’s outcast, perhaps, because he had mocked the foundations of heaven in the same breath with his derision of the structure of the world. Or a god, it might be, who was God’s jester, fed with ambrosial crumbs and lees of nectar, to cock a long snook at providence, to butter the stairways of paradise, and applaud the lunacies of mankind.

  Hurriedly retreating from this dreadful apotheosis of humour, Juan explored, with growing agitation, yet another avenue of gleaming idols. Here was one whose eyebrows, like frozen water-spouts, grew to the ground, and there another with a bald head like an umbrella. One with the heavy eyelids of a camel, one who rode upon a tiger, one who flirted a fan. There was more variety among them than he had at first thought, but all except a few were united by the family likeness of remote amusement and well-fed peace; they were gods in clover, and their eupeptic superiority was more unnerving than all the torture and bloody wounds of the Christian hagiarchy.

  Then in a place of honour, gleaming like a giant buttercup and three times as big as the other statues, he saw a Chinese Gargantua, rolling in fat and creased with laughter. Not the laughter of the god with the twisted mouth, that tore the universe like lightning, nor the tolerant amusement of the majority, but the rollicking mirth of a divine toper. This was Mi-lei-fo, the likeness of God in his second coming, the Messiah. He would not come with a sword, for there had been swords enough in China. He would not judge the quick and the dead, for the Chinese were too sensible to want justice. But he would bring wine and fatness, and in his reign the cloud-patterned sky would fill like a blue pavilion in a breeze, puffing and pouting over gales of laughter, for China would be at peace and the villains who had troubled the comedy of life had been sent to their own place. Christ, with memories of the Cross and a sanctifying hand, was no saviour for the Middle Kingdom, but Gargantua was its coming god, with chitterlings instead of holiness, wine barrels, and loud jesting.

  They have, thought Juan, considering Mi-lei with amazement, no sense of sin. He was, to be sure, but lightly encumbered with any such thing himself, though in Detroit the prospect of having to commit murder had troubled him, and somewhere else – but he had forgotten where or when – he had been worried by something he had done, which at the time seemed morally indefensible, though what it was he could not now remember. He had, he thought, a fairly reasonable kind of conscience, and suddenly to perceive that China had none, was very shocking. There were four hundred million Chinese, all of them by Christian standards miserable sinners, and none of them realized it. They could not even have suspected it, or their conception of a Messiah would have been entirely different. People with a troubled conscience foresee the toils of Purgatory; the judicial questioning of Rhadamanthus; the infallible shepherd who will permit no goat among his virtuous wethers. But the Chinese, in their gross and unpardonable innocence, anticipated translation to a Utopia designed by Rabelais for the illiinitable satisfaction of all gluttonous delight!

  It was abominable, he thought, his mind filling from the twin taps of fear and Britannic righteousness. It was alarming in the extreme; for innocence is capable of the most appalling misconduct. Only the conscious delinquent can really be trusted to behave himself. – No wonder he had been frightened by the smooth-faced godlings, for they were the idols of a people whom error had not abashed, and who without fear looked forward to the commission of endless misdemeanours in the future. Here he was, powerless and alone, in a very dirty and uncomfortable monastery, surrounded by the sinister deities of a people whose language he could not understand, and who at any moment might behave like tigers because their hearts were like lambs! Kuo had no business to leave him in such a place, and he was certainly not going to stay there.

  The figure of Mi-lei was fortunately near the entrance to the maze, and Juan, to his large relief, found himself a moment later under the enormous trinity of Buddhas that half-filled the outer hall. He was still in the shadow when he heard the slippered scraping of approaching footsteps, and having been brought to a state of unusual nervousness by the alien gods and his discovery of China’s irresponsibility, he retired with haste into the shelter of the nearest statue. The heavy door was pushed open on groaning hinges, and in came the six Tibetan monks whom Juan had previously seen. Their heads nodded this way and that, their hands were hidden by their sleeves, their feet slurred softly on the stone floor. Juan, having committed himself to retreat, found no courage to do anything but hide. It was, he told himself, absurd to be afraid. But was it, he asked? It was also absurd that a poor suburb of Shanghai should be a battlefield; that after four thousand years of civilization the Chinese should have no sense of sin; that he should have been deposited in a Buddhist temple: but it was, they had not, and here he stood. ‘If nothing happened that wasn’t reasonable, very little would happen,’ he muttered; and peered round Buddha’s gilded skirt.

  The Tibetans stood for a moment in a close shoulder-touching group, that presently opened like a fan. Foot-slow and shambling, their hands in their sleeves, they approached the statues in extended formation. Juan could not hide for long behind Buddha’s skirts, for some would come on one side of him, some on the other. He made a swift decision. A sortie was his only hope. He stepped out of the shadow, and with squared shoulders and a bold demeanour marched quickly towards the door. To cover his embarrassment with the pretence of being quite at ease, he took out his handkerchief with a flourish and fiercely blew his nose. ‘Vvhimm!’ he bugled to the one side, ‘Vvhooomm!’ to the other. The Tibetans were manifestly surprised, though whether by his sudden appearance or this warlike neighing, he did not stop to consider, but pushing open the half-closed door continued his audacious retreat at a rather greater speed, and came without hindrance to his cell on the upper floor.

  In a few minutes’ time his mind grew calmer and more reasonable, but he was still very angry with the Chinese for their wicked unconsciousness of sin. He had been prepared to think well of China. He had, indeed, been captured by all those aspects of China which Kuo Kuo in her conversation had exhibited and made much of. But this was the first time he had been alone in China, and the encircling pressure of so much that was alien and incomprehensible had squeezed his opinion to a less favourable shape. A certain degree of innocence was all very well, and agreeable to the jaded eye. It was like the primitive gaiety of a modern picture on a dull wall of the National Gallery. But such enormity of innocence, as he had deduced from the undiscriminating benevolence of their Rabelaisian Messiah, was a different thing altogether.

  No one, it was clear, who had not a nature of great hardihood, could be expected to sympathize with this robustious irresponsibility; and Juan, perceiving in himself such an incompatibility, discovered its origin in the sensibility of his intelligence, a frailty that he had never before suspected. But now, having unexpectedly come upon it, he began to think with pleasure of the delicacy of his emotions and understanding, and for half an hour considered this amiable weakness with melancholy enjoyment. He was, however, interrupted by visitors. At the door of his cell stood the six Tibetans.

  But now they were too obviously friendly to cause him any alarm. Their wind-graven faces – with smoke in the lines that the wind had scored – were broken by cheerful smiles, and they came in talking and amiably nodding. Their language sou
nded like awkward hinges and the loose board in an old flight of stairs.

  ‘I can’t ask you to sit down,’ said Juan, ‘because there isn’t anything to sit on.’

  One of the monks, whose face was as wrinkled as a peach-stone, said something in a voice less tuneful than a raven’s, at which the others laughed creakily; and Juan, feeling it was only polite to reply, however incomprehensibly, answered, ‘I suppose we have no mutual friends whom we can discuss? There are few things so effective in the promotion of friendship as the exchange of scandal or innuendo.’

  The oldest monk looked closely at the tweed suit he was wearing, and cackled harshly. The others, examining some toilet articles – a razor, shaving-soap, tooth-paste, and so forth – that he had laid on top of a dressing-case, were also laughing. They may, thought Juan, have no need for inventive gossip, since they find the ordinary apparatus of living so very funny. The youngest monk was holding his shaving-soap under the nose of a pock-marked colleague, and both were hoarsely chuckling. Another, while examining the tooth-paste, squeezed a long stalactite from the tube; and all the Tibetans laughed very heartily indeed.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ exclaimed Juan. ‘Ho-ho-ho-ho! Ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee! Ho-ho!’

  The monks, silent now, regarded him with troubled eyes.

  ‘That will teach you how disconcerting it is,’ he said. ‘I’m getting rather tired of humour, do you see? First from the gods, and now from you, and I don’t see what you’ve got to be amused at anyway.’

  The youngest monk, by means of signs and grimaces, wanted to know if he could keep the shaving-soap.

  ‘Take it,’ said Juan; and gave the tooth-paste to another.

  Presently they left him, but for some time he could hear their unlubricated laughter echoing in the stone corridor.

  For the first time in his life he felt home-sick. He had been alone before, often enough, in Australia and America; but never had he been solitary in a land where everything was so totally alien and whose habit of mind was framed in another dimension. He wished he had never come to this confounded monastery. He wished he was in England again, where the jokes were all mild and harmless. Flanders, he remembered, would be sailing to-morrow. He would be home in a few weeks, walking under trees tipped brightly with new green, under white orchard-bloom, on roads soft with the dust of March. Why had Flanders made him think of Gloucestershire, when he must stay in China till this damned war was over? But he certainly wasn’t going to stay in this dismal monastery.

  He took his hat and the small dressing-case, and went down to the main corridor. It was now so crowded with refugees that he could hardly force a way through them, and when he came to the outer door it was locked.

  Chapter 9

  Juan spent a melancholy night, for there were bugs in his room, that bit him cruelly and left a nauseous sweet stink when he killed them. He had supped sparingly off a bowl of gruel that a monk had brought him, and a little smoky lamp had helped him against the bugs. But these were all his comforts, and when morning came he lay long, still dozing restlessly.

  When at last he woke it was with a feeling of apprehension, but rising at once and going down to the main door, he found to his relief that it was open. He was at once in a great hurry to leave, for his dislike of the monastery was reinforced by the coming of another day, He had neither tooth-paste nor shaving-soap, and in other ways the monastery was ill-equipped for the conventions of the morning. He returned for his dressing-case, and with no more than a glance into the hall, where monks were again circulating to the endless drone of their infinitely reiterated hymn, he left their sour-smelling precincts, the untranslatable laughter of their gods, and went out with a feeling of joyous deliverance into the cool sunshine of the streets.

  He was surprised, a few minutes later, to find himself in a very narrow, populous, gaily-coloured, and busy thoroughfare, where open shops, displaying for sale such various commodities as earthenware pots and jade necklaces, paper money for the dead and patterned silks for the living, confronted each other over a pavement crowded with sombre-suited Chinamen of animated appearance. Scarlet bannerets, with golden characters, hung thick on either side, and the chattering of innumerable voices made in the bright air a shrill murmuration. Here was a row of little shops whose open fronts were full of carved ivory, jade necklaces, and silver ornaments. There were cream-coloured statuettes, charming trifles, Buddhas and green bracelets. There was a display of crude and gaudy pictures, the art of China brutalized by European or Japanese example. But cheek by jowl with the oleographs – peach-blossom cheek by vulgar jowl long scrolls depended on which, in exquisite line and faint colours trees were drawn and dim mountains, finger-thin pines and brown rocks, a pale girl with narrow eyes, a butterfly ship on a flowering se?i. Beside them, talking to a lean old man, pouchy of eye – the yellow pouches and his yellow chin all curved alike – stood a bland Chinese, black-gowned, hands hidden, his buttoned cap the shape of Brunelleschi’s dome, whose large round face split suddenly to laughter, hike tadpoles in a pond, the crowd softly jostled. There were faces like Buddha’s, a coolie whose blank expression was merely the circumference of an open mouth, a girl with willow-leaf eyes and pointed chin, a man with a black silk wisp of beard, a wrinkled and clamorous beggar. A little way past the jeweller’s shop a lane appeared, where joiners worked, splitting bamboos and hammering coffins.

  This was a part of Shanghai that Juan had never seen before, nor would have seen now had he not once again mistaken his direction. The monastery was just inside the boundary of the Chinese city, but instead of turning to the circumference of the city he was going towards its centre. He was, however, not ill-pleased by his mistake, and turning down the lane where the coffin-makers were busy he came presently to a black alley noisy with smithies and the hammering of brass. Then, past a corner where great earthenware cauldrons far excrement were piled in high pyramids, by a little street full of the smell of cooking and the display of strange foods, of messes grotesque in appearance and of unthinkable origin, he came to the bird market. In a thousand wicker cages were quails and love-birds, doves and Java sparrows and tiny birds, sprinkled with crimson as though by a showrer of blood, that sat on their perch as tightly as peas in a pod. Between the cages, that stood one on top of the other, transparent walls on either side, the crowd, sombre-hued among this chattering brightness, surged and thrust its opposing ways, or gathered like leaves in a windy corner, or flowed like a tide in a narrow channel.

  Caught by such a stream, Juan was carried into a small open square, in part of which were stalls loaded with fish of a horrible and gaudy aspect, while nearby sat plump men intent upon their eating of these and yet more improbable confections. Suddenly, to this crowded square, came the sounds of war. A couple of miles away the Japanese had re-opened their offensive against the North Station, and their seaplanes were again bombing Chapei. At once the crowd rose, with sharp cries and a huge fluttering noise, like pigeons on the piazza of St Mark, and turned northwards, raising to the sky their startled eyes and open mouths half-full of cuttle-fish, bêche-de-mer, and salted cabbage. Here and there was a little movement of panic, but they soon were quietened, and presently the square was busy again with its own affairs and bargaining, and no one paid much attention to the explosion of the bombs and the rattle of machine-gun fire, though everyone spoke more loudly to overcome the noise, and with greater animation because of the proximity of battle.

  Juan, being reminded of the war, immediately wanted to know what was happening and who was winning. He decided to return, without further delay, to the New Celestial Hotel, and grew somewhat annoyed when he discovered that this was not going to be easy. The Chinese city was a maze of intersecting alleys, and try as he might he could not walk in any one direction for more than a hundred yards. He returned to the bird market and passed a shop that he recognized, where funeral ornaments were sold. Ten minutes later he was back in the bird market, and stopped to look at a silver pheasant and find his bearings. Having chose
n his direction he arrived, after struggling through a very dense crowd, at a kind of sluggish and dark green lagoon in the centre of which was an ornamental building like the house on a Willow Pattern plate. Here it seemed to Juan that he was making real progress for he had not seen the Willow Pattern house before. But presently he returned to the bird market.

  He made another attempt, and came to the shop that sold flaring oleographs; or was it a different shop with the same sort of pictures? There were thousands of shops, all side by side, and hundreds of lanes, all crossing and re-crossing. He was sweating a little now, and very urgently intent on finding his way out of the labyrinth. But it took him a long time, and he revisited the Willow Pattern house and the bird market more than once before coming to a broader street whose character, though hardly European, was not so aggressively Chinese as the crowded lanes behind him.

  After walking some little distance he got a rickshaw, and though the coolie could not understand a word that was said to him, he ran very vigorously and came by good fortune to the Bund, from where Juan directed him with imperative waving of the arms to the New Celestial,