‘The rivalry of honourable men is the source of evil and discomfort. But if you do not exalt virtue, there will be no incentive to rivalry.
‘Greed is the fountainliead of evil activity. But if you are careless of that which others covet, they will soon cease to envy you.
‘If the government does nothing, the people will have no cause to defy it. But for every new law there is a new transgression of it.
‘Do not discuss their unhappiness with the people. When they become dissatisfied with their life, they are also dissatisfied with their government.
‘Whoever will govern the people well, must first learn to govern himself. But who is so foolish as to cut himself off from immoderate delight?
‘Where an army has lain, brambles and nettles spring up. If the enemy comes with a great army, and you summon a great army to resist him, there will be two armies, and therefore twice as many brambles and nettles.
‘If you are greatly concerned with the idea of good, you must be equally concerned with the idea of evil. And that will be a grief to your mind.
‘A house without windows is bound to be uncomfortable. A nation without weaknesses is intolerable.
‘If the government is neither benevolent nor righteous, the people will seek comfort in their own homes. Filial piety is much to be desired.
‘It is foolish to formulate your wishes and ideas too precisely. Exactness of knowledge breeds fluency of speech, and too great a fluency is quite as unpleasant to the ear as stammering.
‘There can be no destruction without action, and it is only the action of time that makes comely ruins. To abstain from action is therefore to abstain from the ugliness of human destruction.
‘Be pliant and tender. Rigidity is the characteristic of death. It is foolish and disagreeable to others to live in the likeness of a corpse.
‘If you admire virtue, do not seek to acquire it for yourself, for then you will lose sight of it. Be content to admire it in others.’
This was the plan on which Kuo had set all her hopes, for which she had plotted, and prayed, and sought in vain, and gone into danger, and lost her sleep. It was on such insubstantial aphorisms as these that she had depended for the salvation of China and the defeating of Japan. Some of it, thought Juan, smelt vaguely of Taoism, but much of it seemed to be a curious kind of meta-Taoism, as though a cynic wrorldliness had overlaid the other-worldliness of Lao-tzu. The old hermit, Lo Yu, must be an interesting person, a sort of transcendental boulevarther, or sophisticated mystic. But whatever he was he was certainly not the teacher of national regeneration, if regeneration were looked for within a lifetime; though in a brace of millennia his refinement of laisser-faire might bear some pretty but unfattening fruit.
Poor Kuo. Her misery was plainly reflected in her long and dreary letter, where self-reproach stood side by side with gloomy comment on the political situation, and reminiscence of their happiness in America. It was finished off with a dismal little poem:
The evening sky is as green as water.
Over the marshes a white egret is flying.
But there is darkness under the broken city wall.
And I am afraid to go back to my empty room.
Then, in a postscript, she added: ‘There is an aerodrome not very distant from here, and if I can obtain my father’s permission I think I shall study to become a pilot. In the modern world it is everyone’s duty to learn to fly.’
So her spirit, though badly bruised, was not broken, and she would probably find comfort in the excitements of aviation. She did not mean to sit like Patience on a monument, pining in thought, but to ride the impalpable sky and canvass the clouds for new opinions. The whirligig of Time brings solace as well as revenge, and Juan, philosophizing in this manner – in which indeed he claimed no monopoly – was almost as much relieved as he hoped Kuo would be; for the right of a discarded lover to alternative happiness had always been a primary clause in his doctrine.
He wished, however, that she had said something of Hikohoki. He had heard nothing about the fate of the little Japanese subsequent to his arrest for an offence of which he was certainly innocent, but for which he had probably been executed. Justice on the battlefield was often summary; and so was injustice. Hikohoki had presumably been accused of espionage, the theft of Lo Yu’s plan, and the attempted murder of Colonel Rocco; and though the plan and Rocco had alike been discredited, the gravamen of all the charges was Hikohoki’s nationality, which nothing could alter. Perhaps he had been shot before Lo Yu’s plan was examined. The fact that Kuo said nothing about him might well be interpreted as reluctance to mention this fatal consequence of her stubborn misconception of his activities. The longer Juan thought about it, the more plausibly did this possibility become a probability; and a very distressing probability.
Neither Flanders nor Harris had been able to learn what became of him. Harris, who was in the same hospital as Juan, had naturally had no opportunity for personal investigation, but many of his newspaper friends had been to see him, and none of them could give him news of the unfortunate Hikohoki.
Juan recovered his composure by means of the morning newspaper, which, in common with most newspapers, had the comforting faculty of reducing any lonely and individual misfortune to its proper proportions by providing for it a background of various and lurid horror, which, catastrophic though it might seem to the uninitiated, would be forgotten by the following day and was in the opinion of the City Editor of rather less significance than a change in the bank-rate. The day’s news included such reports of the war as left no doubt that China’s heroic effort was nearing an end. – The success at Nanyang, of course, had been merely temporary. The village of Nanyang had not been captured, and the far-scattered Chinese had been routed by bombing-planes and a well-organized counter-attack. – But though a Japanese victory was in sight, it was unlikely to be the cause of much rejoicing in Tokyo. The Chinese had shown a wholly unexpected power of resistance, and whatever might be the terms of peace, the honours of war would go to the 19th Route Army and the other troops engaged in the defence of Shanghai.
A little later in the morning Harris, in a wheeled chair, came in to see Juan and exchange amiable gossip about the state of their injuries. Thanks to the breaking of his ankle and a couple of weeks in bed, Harris was looking several years younger, a great deal healthier, and very reasonably tidy. His accident, he protested, had given him a new lease of life. It was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him, and so far as he was concerned Flanders’s wooden tanks had served a noble purpose. ‘And I’d break the other ankle to see those coolies going over the top again,’ he said.
‘No. I think once was enough.’
‘Anyway, you won the battle, and it stayed won long enough for us to get out alive.’
‘The handsomest bit of the picture was Flanders going over. I’m still sorry about throwing away his good money, but it was a stirring sight to see him chasing it.’
‘He was lucky, too. He got some of it back.’
By the greatest good fortune Flanders had retrieved two of the £100 notes that Juan had flung to the wind, and this unexpected piece of luck had so delighted him that he had scarcely complained about the loss of the other three. He told, indeed, the tale of his hunting so proudly, with such magniloquent phrase and extravagant exploits, that it nowise suggested a mere recouping of losses, but seemed rather a piece of inspired and gallant buccaneering. Heads had been knocked together, Chinese and Japanese pellmell; parapets had vanished like sand in the storm of his progress; panic had infected the scattered remnants of both armies at the sight of his wrath; and in the end they had all made submission and brought him, as it were tribute, their garnering of wind-tossed notes, from which he had graciously accepted those that were of any value. This was the story he told; and but for the arrival of two Japanese aeroplanes, he said, which took him for a certain strategic eminence that was clearly marked upon their maps, and therefore began to bomb him, why, he had stayed till th
e other three hundred pounds were brought in. But let the Chinese keep it, he added. They deserved something for their trouble, and three hundred pounds, if fairly divided, would give them all a fine holiday and a redoubtable hangover.
But Flanders was still unhappy about what seemed, in his gloomier moments, the necessity of ending his days in Shanghai. He now had, it was true, ready money with which to pay his passage to England, and he admitted the possession of a few hundred pounds in the bank, and a bundle of depreciated mining shares. – His protestation that Rocco, by his swindling, had left him destitute, had been a mild aggravation of the literal truth. – But how could he retire on so meagre a capital? And what chance was there of his finding pleasant and decently remunerative employment in England? None, none at all, he said. In Shanghai he could find something to do, he could scrape a living, but in England he would starve in a year. They would find him gnawing turnips in a field, with a snare of tying-string set for partridges, and take him to the poor-house, where he would dwindle and die. England was a kind of paradise for the rich, but hell for the poor. No, he dare not risk it.…
‘And what’s happened to Rocco?’ asked Juan.
‘He’s blown. He’s gone up north,’ said Harris. ‘Some of the boys were in last night, and they told me he’d been hitting it up pretty freely for a few days, and then gone off to Tientsin. He’s teaming up with some new general in Hopei or Chahar. He’ll look after himself all right.’
‘I’ve never told you what happened at Egret Island, have I?’
Juan began to describe the disastrous termination of his visit to Red-eye Rod Gehenna’s secret island on the Atlantic coast of America, when Red-eye and Rocco and Wonny the Weeper had returned to it so unexpectedly. But he had scarcely begun the story before there came a battering at the door, and Flanders appeared, red as a harvest moon and jovial as harvest home, followed by a servant from the Club, who carried a basket laden with straw-clad bottles.
‘Nunc est bibendum!’ cried Flanders, with a ripple of fat laughter in his voice and his eyes shining like sapphires in his red face. ‘Nunc pede libero – but I’d go through the floor if I danced. I’d be down like a sheep-stealer off the tail of a cart. And absit omen, for the charity of God has given me lambs to deal with. Lost lambs, and I’m their shepherd. Pull the trigger, boy, out with the corks! I’m going home, Motley! Harris, I’m going home! Nunc est bibendum. Trine! if you’ve no Latinity – scholarship’s dead and all good girth of being’s rare enough – but I’ll do it in German or any tongue but Kaffir, which is hiccups before the deed. Fill the glasses, boy, and here’s to Gloucestershire and my going down where I should, with the setting, of the sun on Severn!’
The glasses were filled – Flanders had brought champagne glasses as well as wine, and the bubbles rose joyously in their hollow stems and Harris and Juan, with the proper congratulations and some evidence of surprise, drank very willingly indeed.
‘So you’re taking a chance?’ said Harris. ‘You’ve decided to go?’
‘Neither chance nor decision,’ said Flanders, ‘but the large white hand of Providence. God’s clapped me on the shoulder, and my declining years are made glorious. – Fill the glasses, boy. Wine in the morning’s like youth at a fair. Drink hearty, there’s more in the basket. This’ll mend your bones with the sun’s own strength. – I’ve been given a new trade. Othello’s occupation’s come at last, the black ram that he was. A position of trust, of responsibility, a teacher of morality. That’s my function now. A power in the demi-world, and money to keep it up, and to live in Gloucestershire.’
‘Somebody’s given you a job?’ asked Harris incredulously.
‘A job?’ roared Flanders. ‘Mechanics find jobs, and befoul themselves with muddy fingers. I’ve been entrusted with a mission, I’ve been given a career.’
‘But what is it?’
‘Did you ever hear of the Honourable Adeline Pippin?’
‘No,’ said Harris.
‘I think so,’ said Juan.
‘A notable woman with a face like a sheep and exalted morality. She married my uncle, Tredwell Flanders, of Chuffe Manor in Gloucestershire.…’
‘I know it,’ said Juan.
‘He’s ninety-four and a monument to the tonic properties of salmon-fishing and literature. From February to September he’s on the river, and from October to January he reads The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and this has been his habit for seventy years by the testimony of all who’ve known him. But my Aunt Adeline was given to good works and died at forty-eight of a patent remedy for stone, leaving three hundred thousand pounds, which was her private fortune, to the founding of the Adeline Pippin-Flanders Memorial Home for Fallen Women, and gave the bestowal of its governorship to my Uncle Tredwell.’
‘But you don’t mean to say
‘You the governor of a Home for Fallen Women!’
‘The previous incumbent,’ said Flanders, ‘was a weakling. I am his successor. Boy! Fill the glasses. Nunc est bibendum; nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus. If the floor were stout enough, I’d dance like King David in his pride.’
Chapter 26
All day the ship had over-lurched the hollows and hills of a greenish-grey sea that was ribbed with stormy white. Now the sky was dark and the wind blew colder. For a little while a moon, chill widow-white, had mitigated the overwhelming gloom, but when the moon vanished the night was black and without form.
At intervals of three or four minutes a cat belonging to one of the stewards wailed hoarsely for an impossible lover. A few miles away lay the coast of China, lay Wen Chan-fu and Lot sin Bay and the infinitesimal island of Pe-shan. Beyond all doubt there were cats ashore, stout Toms with taut whiskers and yellow eyes, that would have comforted poor Tib. With curving back and tail in the air they stalked the odorous lanes, and turned from riper smells to snuff the sea. The salt estranging sea. She howled again, poor cat. The sea is love’s old enemy, and those who weary of their love by instinct board a ship.
Feeling melancholy also at leaving China, but for reasons less simple than the cat’s, Juan shivered on the dark windy deck, pivoted on his crutch, and went to look for warmth and company.
In the lounge Flanders was drinking whisky and soda with two bony, boisterous, high-coloured American spinsters. Flanders had no regrets. He was telling the Americans that life began at sixty, and cracking tremendous jokes to show them what he meant by life; and the American women, whose tongues were nimble as pelota players, glossed all he said with pungent observation. It was a noisy party, and when Juan joined them they called for more drinks and settled down to talk till midnight.
In the morning the sun shone mildly on a sea like pale green watered silk. The distant land was a bright shadow the colour of apricots, and like crescent moons on the water were painted junks, white and red and blue, with red and white pennants. The air was a little warmer, the sea was smooth, and Juan on his crutch walked cheerfully up and down the promenade deck. Then, leaning against the rail, he looked down at the ceaseless patterns of the cloven water, and felt on his hands and face the exhilaration of sunlight and the gentle breeze.
In this charming idleness he heard behind him a polite and propitiatory hissing, a sharp indrawing of breath, and turning he saw, to his very great surprise, Hikohoki.
‘Hikohoki!’ he exclaimed. ‘My dear fellow, I’m glad to see you. How did you get away? What are you doing here?’
‘I am rejoiced to see you, Mr Motley. But you have had an accident? That is a great mishap, and I trust you were well insured against temporary disability?’
‘Never mind about that. Tell me what you’ve been doing. What happened after you were captured and taken to Sun Sat-lo?’
Hikohoki sadly shook his head and sighed profoundly. ‘That was a most dire miscarriage, and very prejudicial to me.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I have suffered a great loss, Mr Motley.’ Hikohoki’s lips trembled, and he dabbed his eyes with a large pink-spotted silk handk
erchief. ‘I was condemned to be killed. They were going to shoot me to death because they said I was a spy, and had stolen a trumpery curio, and endeavoured to murder the American, Colonel Rocco. But all that was a tissue of lies, a holus-bolus of prevarication, and very unfair besides. I was innocent as a lamb in its mother’s uterus. But I am Japanese, and that was enough. They were resolutely determined to kill me.’
Juan was uncomfortably silent, for he could not deny that he had been partly responsible, though indirectly and unwillingly, for Hikohoki’s late predicament.
‘I was in terror for my life,’ said Hikohoki.
‘And how did you escape?’
With an expression of the utmost sadness, Hikohoki said, ‘I was compelled to effect a bargain with General Sun. As one of your poets has said, while there is life there is hope. And also it has been rather generally remarked that life is sweet. There is my excuse for what I did, so I trust you will not unduly condemn me.’
‘I’m sure I snan’t.
‘The General is a man of great literary gifts and curiosity. For a Chinese he is remarkably in the swim with cultured ideas, and like ourselves it is his hobby to spend much of his time in the society of young ladies. I informed him about the two Misses Karamazov, and he was highly interested. He said he would be very much pleased to become their protector.’
Hikohoki sighed again. ‘He is a kind man and he will be good to them. But they were such bundles of charm. They were the apples of my eyes!’
‘You gave them away?’
‘I made a bargain with the General,’ said Hikohoki. ‘He acquired the Misses Karamazov, and I retained my life.’
The many-pointed sea sparkled in the sun, and a junk like a huge brown butterfly slid smoothly over the little waves. A steward with a brass gong came out of the saloon and beat a loud summons to lunch. He walked forward and beat it again. They heard it sounding in the smoking-room, the veranda cafe, the music-room, the writing-room, and in the long corridors of the ship.
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