China to Me (30 page)

It was enough to discourage any earnest beginner in the art of snooping for King and country. Max glared at Charles; Charles toasted Max.

Little by little we weeded ourselves out. The Americans went home. Ursula went home, but Charles didn't. Alf was suddenly possessed of a familiar conviction that often came over him when he was in his cups: he thought he could fly. He got up on the table and walked across, his arms held out stiffly, his big black eyes glassy. When he came to the edge of the table he went right on walking, straight off into space, and as he went down his boot caught me in the hand: I have the mark to this day. It was a special occasion, for two out-of-town officers were with us that evening, Kenneth Millar from Shanghai and Robert Scott of the Bureau of Information down in Singapore. A Hong Kong member of “the office” took me home at the end of it all, and some of the men accompanied Charles to his flat and went to bed on the floor.

“It was queer, the way Ursula went off,” I said inquisitively to my escort. “She just came over to Charles while he was talking to me, with his arm around me — you know how he gets; it's a little embarrassing — and said, ‘I'm going home now,' and Charles just said, ‘Yes,' and she went. Like that.”

“I know,” he said. “Quite a common occurrence. What number is your house?”

Some of us met the next day for a post-mortem drink at eleven, in the hotel lobby. Charles was pale and wan. “I haven't done much today,” he said. “I took a large sheet of paper and wrote across the top, ‘Secret,' and that's the extent of the day's labors, so far. After tiffin I might possibly go back and put ahead of it the word ‘Very.' ”

I dined at the Boxers' the night before I flew back to Chungking. Ursula was going away soon on a long trip, she said, to Australia. She hadn't been well since her marriage, she complained, and she was thin and tired. It would be a long trip. … She glanced at Charles and he studied the pattern of the hearthrug, but he didn't say anything.

“I'm afraid he'll get into mischief, too,” continued Ursula. “When he's with Alf he is apt to do anything.”

I said, “If I were going to be here I'd volunteer to keep an eye on him, but I'm off to Chungking myself.”

“You'll be back later, though, Emily Hahn,” said Charles. “Nobody stays in Chungking forever.”

“Probably.”

“You take care of him, Mickey,” said Ursula. “Do. I wouldn't trust a blonde.”

“All right,” I said amiably. “I will.”

Chapter 24

Teddy met my plane, which was a kind and thoughtful thing to do on a cold, muddy morning. In the past six weeks nothing at all had happened to improve Chungking's climate and I needed the little warm glow I felt when I saw him shivering there. The town was more crowded than ever, he told me. There was a joyful reunion with Corin and others.

“I said I'd come back, didn't I?” I demanded swaggeringly.

“Yes, but we didn't think you would really be so idiotic,” said Corin. “Still, it's nice to see you. Give us the news from the world.”

I said that the most interesting item for our group was that we were getting a new member of the journalistic crowd, the relief for Pierard, Havas correspondent. “Jacques Marcuse,” I announced, “a man I met once in Shanghai, years ago. He isn't French, by the way; he's Belgian like Pierard.”

“What's he like?” demanded Teddy.

“Tall, skinny, sloppy, attractive to some women,” I said rapidly. “In fact he's attractive to lots of women.”

Corin's thin, ugly face looked thoughtful. “Intelligent?” she demanded. “Political, or just sort of continental?”

“Political when he has time, I should think.”

“Oh, that sort.” Corin dismissed him scornfully.

The Press Hostel was a sort of an estate, surrounded by a fence which was more theoretical in those days than visible. (Since I left they have really enclosed the place and put a detective guard on the door.) There were two or three biggish buildings including the stone one which had offices in it, and a bit of broadcasting apparatus. There were two long lines of cubicles, plain, boxlike bedrooms or offices for the overflow from the original hostel building, a pretty lath-and-plaster edifice, now insufficient for the many press people who had come. Here and there over the ground — everywhere but in the huge crater left spang in the middle of the place by a bomb the summer before — were smaller buildings. One of them was a delightful little hut all by itself, near Holly's own house where his wife and children shared his existence. This hut was for lucky Betty Graham, the one unmarried lady journalist in Chungking in those days. Betty was to become a sort of hardy Chungking perennial. Sometimes she worked for Reuter's, sometimes AP, sometimes Havas: she didn't care which as long as it was a newspaper job.

There is nothing particularly unusual about unmarried lady journalists, but Betty's presence was a sore point with Holly, whose wife told him that a girl should not live in the hostel alone with all those rough men. Holly listens to his wife. And so, just to preserve the conventions, this special detached hut was built for Betty. I avoided the whole question by taking the easy way and spending much, much more money at the Chungking Hostel.

Mme. Kung didn't keep me waiting long. It was delightfully easy to go to see her in that town of long distances and no transportation. All I had to do was trot next door.

Mme. Sun was living with her in the Kung castle: she had been given the third floor of the main house to herself. For the first time since I began writing the book I saw something of her, the mythical third sister, and heard about her activities. The young people of the town and the leftists greeted her arrival with glad, thrilled cries, and she was being treated like a combination goddess and queen by this faction. She tried to avoid their attentions, for she is shy and cautious. She granted a few special interviews to old, faithful friends, but put off most of the yearning worshipers, using as excuse a half statement, which was never quite expressed, that she was not her own master in that house.

This hint was immediately pounced upon and quoted as proof that the unfortunate Red princess was being held prisoner by her wicked capitalistic sister and her vicious banker brother-in-law. In my capacity of reporter outside the palace gates I saw and heard this legend, watching cynically as it grew, and grew, and grew. Mme. Sun, I knew, was really at liberty to see whomever she wished to see and to go wherever she wished to go. She was on excellent terms at the time with all her family, including Mme. Chiang, her natural and triumphant rival for the coveted title of First Lady. She didn't even want to live as an enemy and a rival. But however quietly she went about her business — appearing at a reception as the Kung guest of honor and being photographed with the Generalissimo in the act of toasting him — her admirers, especially the foreign ones, insisted that she was being held in durance vile. They gnashed their teeth as they thought of their beautiful Madame in such a tragic situation. It is an interesting study of public opinion, stubborn and inflexible once it is formed. And there is no doubt that it was also a useful situation for Soong Ching-ling, who was able to turn away a lot of people who bored her, whom she didn't want to see, or who had shocked her sense of morality, without hurting their feelings. “Her sister wouldn't let us in,” said the disappointed aspirants as they retraced their steps from the Kung house. “I know she'd love to see me — we were such good friends in Hankow. But that terrible sister won't let her see a soul. It's terrible.”

In the Kung castle Soong Ching-ling was saying to Mme. Kung, “That woman? Why, I understand she has lover after lover. I don't want to see her, ever again,” or, “I'm not at all satisfied with his stand on Russia in his latest articles. We'll just send him some cigarettes and say I'm not well.”

The picturesque trio was being worked to death. All the women in town — statesmen's wives and Y.W.C.A. workers and teachers, and college girls and statesmen's daughters — all wanted to do honor to the Soong sisters. The public dinners were much of a muchness and I didn't bother about them, but when the sisters went on tours of inspection of factories, hospitals, et cetera, Miss Hahn as biographer was there, along with the reporters and the photographers. It was pleasant to watch the sisters together. They really did enjoy themselves. I grew sentimental when they giggled and chaffed, thinking of their lives long ago in the school down in Georgia, before they had given a thought to marriage and rivalry. My book waxed fat and was further from making an end than ever, but I didn't mind.

Rumors multiplied and flourished. The whole town showed the effect of those three women on the local legends within a week after they arrived. One little gossipmonger came into the hostel one day with even his spectacles gleaming, so happy he was over the latest report. “Isn't it true, Mickey,” he demanded, “that Dr. Kung's summer house is just next door to a girls' school?”

“His summer home,” I said emphatically, “is all by itself on a mountain-top, out at the hot springs. There's not a school, or a girl for that matter, for miles around. It's all forest.”

“Isn't it true,” he continued, not having heard a word of my speech, “that Dr. Kung watches the girls doing their exercises every morning? And isn't it true that he presented the school with a fund of three hundred thousand dollars in appreciation of those morning exercises?”

I sputtered furiously and denied the nonsense, but his spectacles still gleamed; his ears were closed. He was a reporter in pursuit of the Truth, and he would not be contradicted. … “Hi, Till!” he shouted. “Have you heard the latest about Kung and the girls' school?”

My social life, independent of the Soongs, proceeded according to plan. A birthday party for Corin took place around the corner from our hostel, in a house occupied by an amiable plane salesman who was willing to lend it for the occasion. It was at this party that Corin, pretty and excited in a dress left to her by the departing Butterfield-Swire wife, danced steadily throughout the evening with Jacques Marcuse, the Havas correspondent. Jacques is in many ways a remarkable man. He was remarkable that evening, for he danced indefatigably in spite of his heavy cowhide boots. His long blond hair flopped round; his agile bottom, in brown corduroys, presented itself impartially to the room as he whirled in circles across the floor and swung the fragile birthday girl in his arms until she was dizzy. But she loved it.

“He's not at all the way you described him,” she said to me.

“Oh yes, he is,” I said, “but let it pass. … Haven't you heard from your American boy friend at all, Corin?”

“No,” she said, looking stubborn. “No. He never wrote again.”

“Then write to him, for Pete's sake, and find out why.”

“I don't have to. It must be another woman. No, that's over,” said Corin, and went out to dance again with Marcuse. I felt quite cross. But anybody, perhaps, would be better than the nobody with whom she had been spending her last tortured year, and anyway, I could do nothing. I never did do anything from that time on, anything in the way of a warning. It would have been no use, would it? Would it? I wish someone would tell me flatly, “No, it wouldn't.” I would feel better.

One day while the two sisters Mmes. Kung and Sun were strolling in their garden there came the crack of a rifle. Mme. Kung insists that she heard a “swish” of a bullet, too, traveling past them, but although the entire household searched earnestly they couldn't find it. Mme. Sun didn't seem to mind that incident very much, but she was distinctly nervous when the first air raid arrived.

The Japanese had been irritated beyond control by the loud noise of rejoicing in the Chinese press after the sisters made the public gesture of unity by coming together to Chungking. It was definitely annoying to their propaganda experts, who had spread themselves on the thesis that China was coming to pieces from internal disagreements in the Soong dynasty. Probably that accounts for our early air raid, first of the season, which came along two or three days after the sisters arrived. It was really more of a warning than a raid; they did much better later. But for a demonstration it wasn't so bad, and a few bombs fell, though wide, near the residential section where the government officials, and the sisters, were living. I dropped in that evening and found Mme. Kung laughing at Mme. Sun, who was frightened and wanted to go back to Hong Kong. I was surprised, because I would have expected the elder sister to be the more nervous. She scouted the suggestion.

“It was much worse at the beginning,” she said, “last year when we didn't have the signals straight. Poor Dr. Kung!”

Now that the season had officially opened there was a flurry on the part of the municipal authorities to clear the town of its surplus population. Now, an older and wiser woman by two years in occupied territory, I know how that sort of thing can be done. It is done by the Japanese, who are not squeamish in their methods. But the Chinese would probably object to the Jap system, which is direct and unsentimental: when Japs want to get rid of people they simply go around town, rounding them up, and then cart them out and dump them at a safe distance. The Chinese authorities couldn't do that in Chungking. They couldn't even take a fair census; they didn't really know how many people were crowded into the ancient, rebuilt city. Nobody would register, for fear of being told he was inessential and ordered out again. The government sighed and did the next best thing: they went on digging air-raid tunnels. “One or two really bad raids, later in the season, will get rid of them,” said Mme. Kung wisely. “They'll start moving out into the country then.”

The trouble was that as soon as a group did take the initiative and move out into the country a busy, big community would begin to spring up. Relatives followed and built cottages near by. Wandering peddlers settled down and set up shops. Other shops sprang up and other people came along and liked the looks of the place, and before you knew where you were there was a flourishing village, big enough for the Japs to bomb. It happened over and over again.