Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  He engaged a room, and had his luggage, that was still in the hotel, sent up to it. He was told, somewhat to his surprise, that Kuo Kuo had telephoned, about half an hour before, to inquire if he had returned. But she had left no message. He asked the reception clerk to ring up Mr Min Cho-fu, but after several minutes the clerk said he could get no answer. It seemed to Juan that bathing and shaving could be postponed no longer, and when that was done it was lunch-time. He was hungry, and ate heartily, though his meal was punctuated by the sound of rifle-fire; for the war was coming nearer.

  He decided to go to the Club and see if he could find Harris, from whom he might get authentic news. But before leaving the hotel he asked, on a sudden impulse, whether Hikohoki was still there,

  ‘No, sir,’ said the clerk at the reception-desk. ‘Mr Hikohoki checked out this morning. He was paying his bill just before I took your telephone message. He also inquired for you, and wished to know if you had left a forwarding address. That was not very long before you came in.’

  If I hadn’t got lost in that confounded labyrinth, thought Juan, I might have been saved a lot of trouble. I’ll have to go and look for Kuo now, after I’ve seen Harris. There’ll be a row, I expect, but I’m hanged if I’m going back to that monastery. I’d like to have seen Hikohoki, too. I missed him two days ago, because I spent the day with Varya and Masha instead of coming back here. He might have reacted to a little conversation about tanks, though I don’t suppose he’d have given much away.

  Harris was not in the club. He had had an early lunch, and gone out immediately after it. But in a corner of the reading-room, where in deep chairs a score of members most prosperously slumbered, Juan saw a large and familiar figure. He also slept. His spectacles had fallen down his nose, and his hands were crossed on his great paunch. The air about him was rich with such a perfume as overhangs a malt-house in the sun, while from his lips, that blew softly in and out, came a sound of bees among clover, so that he appeared to sleep in some high summer of his own.

  Juan hesitated for a moment, and then took him by the shoulder and shook him awake.

  ‘Flanders,’ he said urgently. ‘Flanders! Aren’t you sailing to-day?’

  Flanders looked blearily over his spectacles. He licked his dry lips and smacked his mouth. ‘Like an old horse-cloth that the mice have been in,’ he muttered. ‘Come and have a drink.’

  ‘When does your ship sail?’

  Huge and ponderously, Flanders rose from the chair. ‘You remember Rocco?’ he growled. ‘That shape of recrement?’

  He led Juan to the bar. ‘It was bred by a hatch of thimble-riggers out of a stale hyaena.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Flanders leaned on the bar and looked through the window at the grey river. The sun had gone, and a slant rain was falling.

  ‘My ship’s ashore,’ he said, ‘on a lee shore with her back broken, and Gloucestershire’s at the other end of the world.’

  A barman brought coffee and brandy.

  ‘Pay for it,’ said Flanders. ‘I took you to dinner when I was rich, but anyone with two half-crowns can play host to me now. I’d drink with the hawker of fourpennyworth of leather laces, for he’s more stock-in-trade than I have. He can hang himself when he wants to.’

  ‘You haven’t lost the money you got from Rocco, have you?’

  ‘Lost it? No, but the dye’s run, the silver’s come off it, the prize canary’s nothing but a stultifying sparrow!’

  Flanders pulled a bundle of notes from his pocket and held them under Juan’s nose.

  ‘Look at that!’ he softly roared. ‘Paper and bad ink! The pulp of a sour crab-tree. Go and hang them in ajakes, for they’re worth nothing more.’

  Juan took the notes and examined them. They were well printed and differed little from others he had seen.

  ‘Whoever made them did a very good job,’ he said.

  ‘And there’s my pension! I could paper the wall of a shed with it, or wrap stinking fish for an errand-boy’s Saturday night, or give it to my landlady’s tabefied daughter to curl her hair. But it won’t carry me to England and buy the muniments of my last years.’

  Juan looked thoughtfully at Flanders and the counterfeit money. ‘Rocco’s in Nanking, I suppose?’

  ‘He’s out of reach,’ said Flanders. ‘These fools in uniform hold the railway, and Nanking itself may be at war to-morrow. But to tell the truth I wouldn’t care to go there even if all were at peace, for he’s got his cut-throat friends, and if it came to arguing, with them at his back, there’d be bullets in the syllogism or a cold premiss in the shape of a knife.’

  ‘But can’t you sue him for fraud and charge him with felony? He’s cheated you out of your price, which is fraud, and used counterfeit money, which is felony. There must be some law in China.’

  Flanders, with a rumbling cough, looked cautiously over his shoulder. There was no one else in the bar.

  ‘The law’s a man-trap,’ he said. ‘I want justice, which is ninety thousand dollars, but God give me hives if ever I ask for law. It’s dangerous, Motley, and narrow as a snake’s tongue. The law chooses its occasions, and has more shapes than a piece of putty. By daylight it’s a policeman in blue uniform, but if you walk under the rose it’s a man-trap in the grass. And that’s the trouble now, for in the matter of selling those tanks I was a kind of trespasser. The law would say I’d no right to sell them, so any dog may bite me that can, till justice puts a stick in my hand.’

  ‘It’s difficult to know what to do,’ said Juan. ‘What are your plans? Are you going to stay in Shanghai?’

  Flanders, in the depth of his disappointment, was half disposed to admit defeat. He said: ‘I’ve been here for fourteen years. I can suffer a few more, and the problem of old age will solve itself.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Juan, ‘can we go somewhere more comfortable than this, and fairly private? I’ve had one or two rather curious experiences during the last few days, and I heard a story about Rocco that will amuse you. There’s just a possibility, moreover, that I can get in touch with him.’

  ‘Touch him with a gaff, then. Bring him ashore and we’ll cut him open.’

  They went to a smallish room on an upper floor. ‘The war seems to be spreading,’ said Juan.

  ‘Like mange on a mongrel dog,’ said Flanders. ‘But there’s profit in it, there’s forage for those who don’t mind a little flavour of carrion.’

  He filled his chair – a large brown leather chair with padded arms – so tightly that it looked too samll for him, and this inadequacy gave to his whole body an appearance of discomfiture that matched the rueful expression on his face. His hands lay flatly on his thighs, his spectacles hung so crookedly that the upper rim of the right lens bisected his eye, and his white hair was ruffled. He broke the silence that followed his last remark with a prodigious sigh.

  He had been in Shanghai for fourteen years, and he wanted to go home. But how could he do that when he had been robbed of the money that was to make him independent? He had always been improvident as well as unlucky, and even his most flagrant dishonesties had never shown such profit as he expected. He found it hard to live cheaply, for his appetites were urgent and large, his taste extravagant. Nor could he save, for he was prodigal by nature, and though he frequently took thought of the morrow, he was generally optimistic about it. He rarely thought of it as a rainy day. At times he had lived well, and often insecurely, but never with, that cold prudence which passes for wisdom and writes its epitaph in a handsome will. Nor could lie regret the wasteful richness of his life, but only his ill-fortune. A little luck would have made all the difference in the world. But he had always been unlucky. Or nearly always.

  ‘Did you ever wake up beside a dead policeman?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Juan.

  It’s a bad start for a day.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  Flanders sighed again. ‘I’ve had my difficulties, Motley, but they’ve never spoiled my appetite.
The old tunes are as danceable as ever, and if there’s a day I remember more than all others with gratitude, it’s the day when a German shell saved my life by killing a staff officer – a military fashion-plate with a voice for tea-parties and scent on his handkerchief – who’d put me under arrest for cowardice and desertion in face of the enemy. I’d have been shot for it, and lost twenty years of my life. But though I was called it was he who was chosen, for the shell blew him to rags and tatters – there was very little blood in the man – and did me no harm at all. But what were you going to tell me? You’ve heard something of Rocco, that leech from a dirty horse-pond. What else is put down to Sergeant Blowfly, who filled my fortune with his maggots?’

  ‘It’s rather a long story, if I’m going to make everything clear,’ said Juan.

  Flanders rubbed his thick nose between thumb and forefinger and listened patiently while Juan briefly explained his relations with Kuo Kuo and described succinctly her political views and ambitions. He showed more interest when Hikohoki came into the story, and insisted that Juan should tell everything he had seen or heard of the Japanese. Juan had not intended to say anything about the Sisters Karamazov, but Flanders so pressed him that he was persuaded to expand his narrative with a short account of them and their connexion with Hikohoki. Nor, having once heard of them, would Flanders let them go, but made Juan describe them in detail, their appearance, then manners, and their history, after which he began so discursive a debate on the advantages and disadvantages of their curious condition that the main point of the story was in danger of being forgotten. But Juan brought him back to it, and related the impudent use to which Rocco had put their fictitious tale of Hikohoki the Secret Agent.

  Flanders listened with wrathful astonishment, and decorated his indignation with such copious invective that once again the purpose of the narrative disappeared from view.

  Juan at last remembered it. ‘Kuo Kuo heard that bit of fancy-work from Rocco himself,’ he said, ‘and as she’s met him once she may meet him again, or she may know something about his movements. That’s my idea, at any rate. I don’t know exactly what connexion she has in Nanking, or what strings she can pull; and I haven’t the smallest notion whether the work she’s doing is really important or totally irrelevant. That doesn’t worry me. But she certainly knows a lot of people, and she’s got a line on Rocco. So, if she’s willing to help us, we may get hold of him. Anvwav, that’s the only approach I can think of.’

  ‘And the very top of deduction, the master-key itself!’ exclaimed Flanders with enthusiasm, ‘Fly and minnow and prawn have their seasons, but woman’s the inerrable bait from February to hot August. Send out your lovely Sinologue. Cast her into the pool, let her dance and twinkle in the depths, allure the fish – a kelt, by God, a slimy kelt! – and prick him with her beauty, sink in his jaw the barb of her seduction, and so bring him to the bank and my long gaff. The Sinologue for Rocco, Motley. You’ve hit upon the very plan!’

  ‘That’s not my intention at all,’ said Juan coldly. ‘I certainly shan’t allow Kuo Kuo to run into any danger, and even more certainly she’s not going to let Rocco touch her, or make love to him by so much as a word or a glance.’

  ‘She can do it virtuously,’ said Flanders. ‘Let her show like a lighthouse on a dark coast or a green tree in the desert, and he’ll come the closer. Let her shoot with her eyes and turn like a Parthian where we shall be waiting. She can do all from a distance, coldly and without fear.’

  ‘What I suggested was that she should get information for us. I never meant her to do anything more than that.’

  ‘But it comes to them by nature! They draw us by their beauty as a valley draws down a stream. And if the stream turns a mill in its course, beauty has increment, and all are satisfied.’

  ‘At present Kuo’s turning her own mill, and I don’t think she can be diverted to another.’

  ‘Let me talk to her,’ said Flanders impatiently. ‘Put words in their proper order, and they’ll bend resistance as though it were a twig. Good words are like beavers to build a dam, and like dynamite to open a new channel. Let me talk to her, let me tell her the virtuous use she can make of her eyes, and Rocco’s her captive to-morrow.’

  ‘What about a drink?’ said Juan.

  ‘Two drinks, and then to the lovely Sinologue!’

  They had spent the whole afternoon in talking, and they found the bar, which had been deserted when last they saw it, populous again with evening drinkers. They were surrounded by fragments of conversation, casual notes and errant phrases, as though all present were members of an orchestra, tuning their instruments for a performance that would never take place.

  A pompous fierce little man said loudly: ‘Give me a battalion of my old regiment, sir, and I’d go through China like a hot knife through butter!’

  ‘Four spades to the Ace, and five Hearts to the Knave, Queen, King,’ said a quieter and more earnest voice.

  ‘I went down to Windy Corner this morning. They’re in the front row of the stalls there.’

  ‘Kicked the bottom out of every market in the world…’

  ‘She came to Shanghai in October…’

  ‘I wouldn’t give fifty dollars for it now…’

  ‘And boy, she was a lulu!’

  ‘A bloody great piece of iron, and knocked him arse over tip…’

  ‘I doubled, of course, and took five tricks.’

  ‘No discipline! What can they do without discipline?’

  ‘She told me she played the races, so I took her to see Hai Alai…’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say they were really efficient…’

  ‘But what can you do when all the banks are closed?’

  ‘And could she take it? She said it was in her blood.’

  ‘You might compare the Japs with our armies in the Crimea…’

  ‘Hallo, hallo!’ said a more familiar voice, and turning, Juan saw Harris with a glass of whisky and soda that shook perceptibly in his hand. His eyes were red, he was badly shaved, and looked as though he had had no sleep since the war started. ‘The last I saw of you was in Range Road on the opening night,’ he said.

  ‘A good lot has happened since then.’

  ‘Well, have a drink.’

  ‘No, it’s my turn. How’s the war getting on?’

  ‘It’s killing me, and thousands more. I haven’t been in bed for a year. What are you doing here, Flanders? I thought you were going home.’

  ‘An astrologer told me the times were out of joint, and warned me against thieves.’

  ‘He ought to copyright that. Here, when’s my drink coming? I saw two blasted children dead in the gutter an hour ago.’

  For five minutes Harris spoke disjointedly and expressively of the war. Their trio became a sestet, then an octet, and presently Juan found himself in very friendly conversation with one of the newcomers. This was a hale man of some fifty-five years with a mellow voice, a bald head, supercilious eyebrows, a clipped moustache, and a top row of artificial teeth. His name was Fannay-Brown.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, having discovered diat juan had but recently arrived in Shanghai, ‘d’you ride? Well, you must come paper-chasing with us next Sunday. We’re going to arrange an armistice with the Japanese. Their admiral’s a very decent fellow, very decent indeed. Harris, old boy, have you met the admiral?’

  ‘The baby killer?’ said Harris.

  ‘Oh, that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? I’d tea on the flagship this afternoon, and found him a very agreeable little fellow. Full of humour, in his own sort of style. Well, Motley, you’re going to come paper-chasing on Sunday. I’ve a pony that needs exercise, and you’ll find it rather good fun, I think.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you indeed,’ said Juan.

  ‘Not a bit of it. Only too glad you like the idea. And what do you think of Shanghai?’

  Juan said he had found everything very interesting so far, especially the coolness with which the English accepted the existence of war at their
gates.

  ‘That’s part of the Shanghai mind, of course. You’ve heard of our celebrated Shanghai mind? It’s really an affliction, but on the whole we’re rather proud of it. It means that we’re equally resistant to good ideas and bad luck. No, that’s not quite the proper definition. My wife has put it better. She says we’ve got high blood-pressure and low thoughts.’

  ‘That’s hard hitting.’

  ‘Oh, my wife’s a very witty woman. Sometimes a very cutting wit, and she doesn’t really like Shanghai. She finds it rather provincial after London and Paris. She lived in Vienna, too, for a while. Look here, you’d better come and have dinner some day. Come and meet her, before we go out on Sunday. She’ll be delighted to see anyone who’s just out from home, and knows what’s going on in Town.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been in England for some time. I’ve been living in America.’

  ‘Well, that’s better and better. We’ve scores of American friends, and we’re both very keen about American humour. Their magazines are so much cleverer than ours, don’t you think? The New Yorkerf and that sort of thing. My wife always says they make our periodicals look like the parish magazine. Now, what day can you come?’

  Mr Fannay-Brown was really very friendly, and Juan, who enjoyed meeting people and found entertainment everywhere, was amiable in return and said Thursday would suit him admirably. Mr Farm ay-Brown thereupon scribbled a direction on his card, accepted a short drink, smiled with a bright flash of his artificial teeth, and waved a cordial good-bye.

  ‘Has he sold you a pony yet?’ asked Harris.

  ‘Or persuaded you to go shopping with his wife?’ said Flanders.

  ‘He’s offered to mount me for some kind of a hunt next Sunday. I thought it very friendly of him.’

  ‘You’ll come back with the pony in your pocket,’

  ‘I rather liked him,’ said Juan.

  ‘A man must live,’ said Flanders, ‘and there’s no vice in him. His wife sells pictures and pottery, and he’s a horse-coper, for they’ve learnt that marriage is only made durable by the cement of kindred interests. He takes customers home to sherry-parties, and she persuades them to buy his ponies. They do very well, I believe. A happy coople, as things go.’