“Surely the economic possibilities are limited, if you have to shoot exactly through the eye?”
Not at all, said Muratov. Yakutsk hunters were such good marksmen, that when drafted into the Red Army, they were classified as snipers automatically.
Well, well. All the same, it was impossible not to warm to Muratov. He was a competent scoundrel. He would have done well anywhere.
And so on, down the Ili, towards Urumchi and China, the last important stop. But it was hard to make anything of, except that after the war, when the smoke cleared, Russia would be there, we would be there, and we would be wise to take cognizance of that situation now. What in God’s name was happening to the world? And did it matter?
Perhaps in India they knew.
Tashkent
Terminal of the old silk route across the back country and the Gobi, down which China had siphoned off the gold of the ancient world, and for that matter, down which the Romans, despite the perturbations and edicts of Augustus, had been only too eager to pour it.
Whatever happens, we must have silk.
They did not land there, but the irrigated valley around Tashkent looked rather like southern California.
On the Plane
Since the President had forbidden him India and the Himalaya, Tom found himself looking down and so up, to the Altai range instead, thick with mist and glister on top, but with the lower flanks shorn like sheep. Great Judges down there whom no one had ever seen, or heard of, or visited, or climbed; imperturbable, their faces obscured by clouds, with not so much as a village on their knees. The weather was windy. A ripple of ice particles swept across their laps. A tiny trickle ran down, occasionally, from the upper heights each spring.
What did you say? How did the Romans feel, followers of Mithra, who left inscriptions as high as they could in the Caucasus, no doubt for the same reasons the Nazis had slipped over the glacis, in unsuitable boots, to reach the top of Mount Elborus, a week or two ago, only to find them cut in the rock there?
Mountains, like icebergs, or chairs under dust covers when the star family is away, and mountains were icebergs of the earth, four-fifths of them underground, sat there like judges. And Tom, being a lawyer, looked out the plane window and would rather plead a sound cause before them, than before any jury in the world. Juries are only useful when a jury must be swayed.
Was that what he was trying to do?
Yes, it was. In a good cause, of course, but none the less, he was trying to influence the jury. Being a lawyer, he would have been happier alone with a judge and the facts of the case.
The wind blew. You could hear it through the cabin wall. It was like the wind in Dante’s hell. It was full of the voices of the passionately lost. The judges, who are above the senses, did not hear. They were not there to hear. They were not there to do anything. They were there only because they were there.
We climbed it because it was there, said Mallory, but that was not quite the truth. The truth was one climbed it because it was not there, and because only once on top of it could you see that, and therefore the Blick In die Ferne beyond, the lining of the colour blue, the stars invisible behind the visible, the shabby cloak of faith turned inside out, instead of just the collar, which is all that happened with a new religion, or with any religion, and the whole shrieking invisible vertiginous gulf of hope below you, in an air that cut your lungs before you had a chance to learn how to breathe it, just as you at last saw the invisible peak of the invisible range, which was higher than this one, but had no up or down.
It was a pity, alas, one had to come down. But why couldn’t an ordinary man, like the mystic, at least remember that, no matter how grounded his life, at least, for one moment, somewhere, somehow, at sometime, he had once been up?
That was all it came to. All anything can come to: Blick in die Ferne. Because the plane goes on. Because our life goes on. Because in the foothills they are quarreling about the water rights, even though there isn’t any water. But the immutable judges, they know that stream as snow, which, like darkness, falls from the air on Christmas morning.
“I do not regret this journey.” That was Scott, dying in Ultima Thule, on the way back from the Pole, like Byrd in his hut to the south, alone, but to a different purpose, and knowing he would die.
Oh, the judges. If they would only move their hands. If they would only show they know we are there. But they do not. They just sit there, and Siva, the highest we have got to them, is only a tick, in an ice cave, under their armpit, above Kashmir, in the Hindu-Kush.
And on Ascension, where roses grow well, surrounded by a gardened landscape as sculptured as Devon, they had only wanted to hear about the baseball scores.
Why do mountains always seem to have their feet in the sea? Why does one always hear among them, that sound of surf, endlessly pounding on the reef, as when the earth began, and as, though then with a lighter, but no less relentless sound, when the sun fades, we have long gone, and the world is over?
Will there be even a soft-shell crab then, to scuttle across that orange shore? What will the last syllable of recorded time be?
A wry chuckle of the spheres, and, very likely, OM.
Urumchi
He would always be glad, he said, that he had entered China by the back door, for those westerners who had employed the front, had done so only to burglarize, which had left the Chinese with an understandable and rather Dutch superstition about anyone who used the main one. Even Ulysses S. Grant, their last visitor of presidential calibre, had not impressed them much. Grant had done better in Japan.
It was an impressive entry. They left the Altai and Tien Shan mountains and flowed smoothly over the carnelian lights of the desert, their shadow skimming below them like a swift. A deceptive place the desert, empty, but full of caravan trails and constant movement. The Nestorians, Moslems, and Manichees had entered China that way, which was also the route by which they left. There were ruins down there that had been cities before Christ was born, and long after Alexander was dead. As the plane lost altitude, they could see Russian tanks, automobiles, and trucks on the ground below, moving themselves and their matériel towards the Chinese border, while the Chinese poured goods the other way, to Russia, but more slowly, by wooden cart and oxen.
There was little attractive about Urumchi. It was a mongrel town. The street signs were in Russian, the government was Chinese, and the population Turki, but the melons were good, Sinkiang melons are famous, at least on Chinese tables, and so were the small seedless grapes, the best Tom had ever eaten.
There was a state dinner, given by the Governor, the first one of many. Chinese rice wine was beginning to edge out the vodka, the supply of caviar had ceased. However, of the world’s cuisines, whatever else you may say for them, the Chinese and French are unique in being always digestible, which is more than you can say for a good many. It is considered, perhaps for that reason, polite to belch.
Next morning, a military review and greetings from the Generalissimo. Welcome to China. This country was like the American West, but the American West as it must have been when Tom’s father had been a boy. It was just starting. It hadn’t had time to get sad yet. The people here seemed taller and more independent than they did in eastern China. They also seemed more enterprising. Then on to Lanchow, within the Great Wall. At Lanchow, a public reception, in a Chinese version of the American style, with children waving badly stamped rice paper American flags, which was both pathetic, lost, and endearing. Then on to Chengtu.
In the Plane
Who would get the world, anyway, he thought, flying over the red hills. Not us. Not Britain, which had already had its turn, and no matter what it said now, after the war would move quite gracefully into the dower house and leave the management of the estate to its descendants. And almost certainly not Russia. Russia might take it, but would never have it. At least, let’s hope not. Asia, perhaps. That would be only fitting, for that was where most of the best and therefore the spiritual things i
n the world had originally come from. Now, given a slight increment of science as an inducement, perhaps Asia could be persuaded to take them back.
It might be a blessing, at that. And certainly, looking down at that vast land which was just beginning to feel its strength again, it seemed altogether likely.
Wait for Chiang and see.
Chengtu
The home of eight universities in exile. He talked to the Presidents, and when he could, to the students, of all of them. They were open almost twenty-four hours a day. He found that stimulating. In America the only thing open twenty-four hours a day was the drugstore. In fact, he felt more at home in China than he had anywhere on the trip so far. His whole party did. Who wouldn’t? There’s a difference between having a civilization, like Russia, and actually being one, war or no war. The difference was ease.
Chungking
The landing-field was too small for their plane, so they had to transfer to a Chinese plane to get there. Another demonstration with paper flags. Chungking is not only the hilliest city in the world, it has virtually no level ground in it at all. His arrival was therefore somewhat bumpy.
The flags were all the same size. No doubt the Mayor, on orders from the Government, had been efficient. There were a good many fire-crackers. The Chinese adore fire-crackers, and if they had been told to make a good impression, they might just as well enjoy themselves in their own way while they did so. More power to them. It was obvious that many of these people, most of whom were in rags, had no idea who he was. But all the same, it was moving. It had an enthusiasm and a vitality behind it that for some time now he had missed at home.
Again there was a tussle with the embassy. The Ambassador, who had only one bedroom, had made the bed up for Tom and planned to sleep any old where. Tom wouldn’t have that. In the first place he wasn’t flying round the world to sit inside a variety of American embassies. He was flying round the world to see it. In the second place, the Chinese had already fitted up a guest-house for him across the river, so he moved in there, and let the Ambassador sleep in his own bed.
It was another ruckus. For one thing, the guest-house had the best procurable silk sheets, which impressed the embassy staff, which had to make do with coarse ones, as being offensive. For another: protocol.
That was just too bad. If they wanted to spend their life bowing and swooping at each other, that was what they were there for. He wasn’t. He was there to follow his nose, in his case not the biggest feature on his face, but it had served him well so far and would have to do until something better came along, which wasn’t likely.
To Orientals the nose is a virile member, and in Russia, Gogol, who couldn’t exactly be described as a pure Caucasian, had once written a story about a wretched clerk who had lost his and spent an anguished day without it.
Now what did that mean?
Not only was the reception fabulous, but Tom took to the Chiangs at once. They were the sort of people he was used to, people of the managerial class, who ran China as though it had been a limited holding company, which, after all, in those days it was, so who could blame them for that? He liked all the Soongs, even the in-law Kung, who knew a lot about finance, even if he had helped to produce the worst inflationary spiral Tom had ever seen, and nothing attempted to correct it.
Mme Chiang wore Chinese dresses, but Chinese dresses designed with one eye on Vogue. She was a charming and probably quite ruthless woman, and therefore undoubtedly quite sentimental about something, if only you could find out what. But you never would find out what, and that, too, Tom admired. All told, he talked to them steadily for six days, which again made the embassy furious, for at the embassy they were seldom given a chance to talk to them at all.
In fact, Mme Chiang impressed him so much, that he suggested she come back with him, as a goodwill emissary to the United States. Her presence, he said, would do a great deal of good. And so it did, when eventually she went, for her, once she had addressed Congress, like an undefeated Zenobia before the Roman Senate, and after she had told the President rather sharply that God helps those who help themselves, a protestant lesson the Chiangs had learned at their missionaries’ knees, and did not propose to forget.
But to what? To what?
Unsolicited Letter From a Chinese Schoolboy
The sort of letter, said Tom, written in English of the kind that only a student can use who has enormous confidence both in his dictionary and in himself. A photograph had been enclosed. It was a determined face.
“… and we firmly believe that a bright future is waiting us ahead, and that God will give us the victory that we ache to get at.”
Now was that faulty English, or just being precise? That’s what all the colonies, all the allies ached to get at. All the subject peoples. Victory and autonomy. And didn’t these people realize just how awful and anarchic a world that so-called freedom they ached to get at would produce? Never mind, at least the horror would be autonomous. The thing that ennobles the autocrat, is that he prefers to do his own suffering, rather than have it done for him.
The boy included his draft of a plan to establish peace after the war. He advocated a scheme “to increase affection among human beings”.
Well, why not? Affection may not survive first sight, but without first sight, it wouldn’t exist at all. Why not set up a One World fund, to send somebody round the world every year or two, as he was going, to see for himself and report accordingly?
It was a grand idea.
So it was. It was even set up, that fund. But the only person able to take advantage of it was a writer of radio plays of the Sideboard simple folk poetry sort, and by the time those had been produced, the borders were closed again, and there was no longer one world left to fly around. So much for foresight.
Chungking
It was after his fourth talk with Chiang Kai-shek that he publicly announced that the war must mean the end of empire of nations over other nations. “No foot of Chinese soil should be or can be ruled from now on, except by the people who live on it.”
This infuriated the British, and made Chiang feel no better, for it was a reference to Hong Kong.
“Possibly no other country on our side in this war is so dominated by the personality of one man as is China,” said Tom. That man was Chiang, although he was universally referred to in China as “The Generalissimo,” sometimes affectionately shortened to “’Gissimo”.
And sometimes not.
There was no point in rocking the boat. Hong Kong, like Switzerland and Uruguay, was an excellent place to deposit money in case of emergencies, take political asylum when necessary, and circumvent laws which, though necessary, of necessity have, from time to time, to be circumvented, simply because they are so. Leave Hong Kong alone. Also Macao across the river mouth, which was useful for the smuggling of gold. Tom’s views were too controversial. He would have to be shut up.
“There is nothing controversial about them,” said the President. “I will sing it if you like.”
Allied unity at home, they said, was threatened by what he said abroad. He didn’t believe it. You cannot very well threaten what isn’t there.
The fall of Singapore, and the attack on Pearl Harbour, had proved to the East, said Chiang, that its manumission was not far off.
The National Military Council
Dinner with the Generalissimo (and everybody else) at the Council. Chinese music and old-fashioned vanilla ice-cream, which was wonderful. Why hadn’t they seen it before?
It had been forbidden because of the cholera epidemic. Cholera was spread in milk. Therefore, a municipal ordinance had been promulgated, making the manufacture of ice-cream a criminal offence.
“But yesterday”, said the Mayor of Chungking, “I decided that ice-cream is such a delicacy, and we were so honoured by your visit, that I repealed the ordinance for one day, so we might enjoy ice-cream tonight.”
It was possible to go on eating and to express delight at the pleasant surprise. But it was also
possible to sit up half the night, meditating upon the exactitude of the term “Mysterious East”. However, several days went by, and it proved nothing worse than a comical story, which was a relief.
Chungking
It had been necessary to allow General Chou-en-Lai, a representative Communist, to appear at a reception for Tom, in order to prove China’s essential unity. Worse than that, Tom, who had a certain respect for competence, wherever he found it, had talked to Chou-en-Lai entirely too long. It was quite late before everybody got to bed.
Somewhere in the depths of the night could be heard the sudden, insistent sound of smashed crockery.
It was, to Joe Stilwell, who couldn’t stand Chiang, but was forced to be near him, as an American adviser, one of the nicest and most heart-warming sounds to be heard in Chungking these days, and sometimes, when he thought it was coming, he stayed up late just to listen.
That was what Chiang Kai-shek always did: whenever he was frustrated, he smashed crockery, sometimes in large amounts. To give him credit, he was a civilized man, and never touched Yüan or Sung, and tried to avoid Ch’ien Lung as much as possible. His favourite period was Ming. Not only did he dislike Ming intensely, but pots of that period smashed with the best and most soul-satisfying scream.
It seemed to Vinegar Joe that this was one of the Ming nights, followed, if he was not mistaken, by a series of swift, repetitious little crashes which sounded remarkably like Haviland China.
Tom Fool Page 19
