My Several Worlds (38 page)

What remains to be told? We stayed there that night and all the next day, still not knowing whether we were to be released or held for an unknown purpose, but there was nothing lonely about our imprisonment. One by one through the night and the next day the few remaining white people who had not yet been found were brought to join our number. We knew now the dead, and among them was a gentle old Catholic priest, an Italian, who had been a teacher at the Chinese university where I too had taught. There we had often talked together while we waited for our classes to gather.

But what kept us from being lonely or isolated was the steady flow of Chinese friends who continued to brave the harsh revolutionary guards to bring us food and changes of clothing and toothbrushes and money and combs and warm clothes and everything they could think of for our comfort. They came weeping and heartbroken and we had to cheer them up and thank them over and over and assure them that we bore no one ill will for what had happened. And indeed this was true, for we had all been heartened and warmed by the friendship they had shown us.

Still we did not know what was to happen, although we heard rumors that the commanders on the foreign warships were negotiating for our release. Late in the afternoon of that second day, however, we were told to gather ourselves together and come out of the building. We were to march to the Bund, there to be taken off on the warships. When we reached the gate we found that several broken-down carriages had been provided for the old people and women with little children, and so I with other mothers climbed in and drove off down the familiar streets. How strange, how strange it was, and still it seems strange to me, even after all these years, and I remember it all as though there were no years between. The streets were lined with watching silent people, but the scene, so familiar, had changed overnight. Would I ever see the city again? I did not know, and yet I could not imagine never coming back. The miles were slow, but at last we reached the river’s edge and there we were met by American sailors, who took us aboard the gunboats. And almost at once we learned that we had had a second narrow escape, this time at the hands of our own countrymen. Here is the story. The American Consul, John Davis, an old friend of mine, whose father had been a missionary and a friend of my father’s, was on board the man-of-war, whence the American Commander was directing our escape. The Communist military officers in the city had been given a time ultimatum for our arrival, and if we failed to appear by the set hour, six o’clock I think it was, the city would be bombarded in earnest, not at all like the firing of the day before which had been carefully planned for the empty spaces within the city wall, so that only two or three people were killed. At six o’clock we were still not in sight and the American Commander was about to order the bombardment to begin. But John Davis, knowing that exact hours meant nothing to Chinese, begged for a fifteen-minute delay, and when, at the end of that time, we were still not in sight, for yet another brief delay. Still we were not in sight and the American officer was ready to give orders, when a third time John Davis besought him to wait only a few minutes more. Within those minutes the first of our ragged caravan appeared at the river’s edge. Had the cannon fired, undoubtedly we would have been killed by our own fire. As it was, we went aboard the ships safely.

All my life I had seen those gunboats on the river, and I had wished that they were not there. I had felt they should not be there, foreign warships in Chinese interior waters. Now such a ship was saving me and mine and taking us to a refuge. I was glad not to die, but I wished that I had not needed to justify, against my will, what still I knew to be wrong. There was no use quibbling now, however, and I turned toward my own countrymen. They were only the sailors, young and crude, from aboard the destroyer, but I longed for a friendly word from them. Alas, they were not friendly to anyone. I suppose they were tired, I suppose they were disgusted with us because we had not left Nanking when the Consul warned us, months earlier, of the dangers from the revolutionary Chinese army. Certainly those young American sailors could not understand our being in China at all, and it was only weariness that we were there to be cared for. At any rate, they were harsh and some of them even contemptuous, and I shrank away from them and felt lonely indeed. Yet I had to accept their help for the sake of the children, and so on the ship at last we gathered about a bare table where plates and forks and spoons were heaped, and a sailor ladled out some sort of stew. Everybody ate except me and I could not eat. It was more than mere exhaustion. The exhilaration of spirit was gone. The Chinese who had been our friends were far away, and here were only these rough young men who did not smile, even when they looked at the children.

In the night we had one more catastrophe. Into a cabin designed for six sailors, fourteen women and all their children were crowded. Some of the women had come from the mission hospital with newborn babies, and they were given the best berths. Others slept on the floor. I was given a berth for my children, and I put them to bed in the same clothes they had worn, the only ones they had, and I sat down beside them to rest for a moment. Then I saw that my helpless child was feverish and somewhere I borrowed a thermometer and took her temperature. She was fretful and bit the glass to pieces and I had to be sure that she swallowed none of it. It was just then that I noticed a greenish look on other faces and suddenly my younger child vomited and other children began to vomit. In a few minutes women and children were in violent nausea, except me, and a missionary doctor, called to attend them, staggered into the cabin, himself violently ill, to report that everybody was ill. The stew, it seemed, had been made from old tinned meat, long held in reserve, and it had caused ptomaine poisoning.

What a night that was! I ran back and forth with various vessels, emptying and washing and holding them again to be refilled. We had only one toilet, but fortunately it was a flush toilet and so somehow we managed. Once when I went in, loaded with pots, I found a friend, a woman who had been my neighbor, earnestly searching the toilet contents. She had swallowed her wedding ring the day before when a Communist soldier had tried to take it from her and now she was trying to recover it. It was part of the absurd nightmare of that night that she did recover it, thanks to her determination.

When the worst was over and it became apparent that nobody was going to die and when my own children were asleep at last, it was near dawn and the destroyer was racing down the river toward Shanghai. Then I sat down on the edge of the berth again and wished that I had something to read, anything to take my mind away from this pit of horror and to keep me from thinking of an unknown tomorrow. There was not a book in sight. Some sixth sense made me put my hand under the berth, however, and there in an open canvas bag I felt the outlines of a book. I pulled it out and by the light of the sturdy oil lamp on the wall I read the title. It was
Moby Dick
, and I had not read it before. Never say the gods are not kind! While the others slept away their fever and their pain, I sat in good health and restored calm and read for the rest of the night.

I had a curious sense of pleasant recklessness when I stepped off the ship at Shanghai. There is something to be said for losing one’s possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been. I did not even care that the manuscript of my novel was lost. Since everything else was gone, why not that?

I cannot advise the deliberate wooing of such a mood, for what it meant was that my roots were abruptly pulled up, and never again was I to put them down so deeply. Anyone who has lost all his habitual environment by sudden violence will know what I mean, and those who have not, cannot possibly understand, and so there is no use in trying to explain. Simply the fact was that nothing was ever as valuable to me again, nothing, that is, in the way of place or beloved objects, for I knew now that anything material can be destroyed. On the other hand, people were more than ever important and human relationships more valuable. My mind was crowded with all the different people I had met in the last forty-eight hours, from the moment our tailor had come to warn us and my loved Mrs. Lu had come running across the fields to save us, down to the last surly young sailor. Surly they remained, too, for not one of those sailors showed the slightest responsibility for the poisoning nor any pity for a child.

When the destroyer docked I stared at the crowds on the Shanghai Bund who had gathered to stare at us, and felt neither shame nor concern. Plenty of Chinese were there who did not conceal their pleasure at seeing a crowd of white people as dirty and weary refugees, but others were there, too, who were kind and good and wanted to give us food and shelter. I had already learned that any crowd will contain the same contrast, wherever it gathers. Room had been found for us all, and so indifferent was I that I cannot now remember where we went or even how long we stayed, except that it was not long. We bathed and put on fresh garments collected for us, and then I felt that Shanghai was even more intolerable than usual and that I must go away.

I wanted to go somewhere into high mountains, where there were few people, and if possible no one that I knew, and where I could review all that had happened to me and see what it meant that I had been pulled up by the roots. What did one do with roots that were no good any more, and were roots necessary, after all? If not, why put them down again? These were questions that had to be answered and I said to my family:

“Let’s leave. Let’s go to Japan, into those mountains above Nagasaki and the sea. We could rent a little Japanese house.”

I cannot remember how it was done except that the mission head let us draw on salary for funds, nor do I remember how we got the house nor any of the other means whereby I achieved just that end. But, we found space in a crowded little Japanese ship and we crossed the sea to Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, Japan. In those days Nagasaki was a clean and charming place, familiar to me, for we had visited it often as we came and went across the Pacific. There, too, my eldest sister had been taken ill to die upon a ship at six months of age, when my parents were taking her home to China after a holiday, long before I was born.

What comfort it was to walk on quiet clean streets again, to go to the small inn and settle into peaceful rooms, to have a Japanese bath, long and soaking and hot, a delicious Japanese meal and then sleep, hours of sleep! I remember how I savored every moment of such restoration. And when we woke we walked the streets among friendly courteous people, and we watched the evening mists gather over the mountains that seemed almost to push the houses into the sea. Up in those mountains was hidden the little Japanese town where I hoped we could find a home for a while until we knew what we wanted to do.

It was all so easy, so safe, so free from strain. A Japanese cabman drove us up the winding roads into the mountains and we took rooms at an inn until we could find a house and settle into it, and that inn I remember because of the hot springs in the baths, wonderful clear warm water, medicinal and soothing. The mountainside was pierced with such springs, little curls of steam rising from the rocks, and Japanese woodcutters and tourists cooked their eggs in the steam and heated their rice and vegetables, and I packed picnic baskets and did the same for the children.

My sister and her family went on to Kobe, for she expected a child and needed to be near a doctor, and my father, enlivened by his unaccustomed freedom from work, decided to go to Korea by himself and so there were only the four of us in Unzen. I tired quickly, as usual, of living in a hotel, and within a few days we moved to a little Japanese house across the valley and on another mountain. It was made of wood as all such houses are, and it was deep in a pine forest. The house itself was one big room whose whole front could be slid back into boards at either side, and behind it were three cubbyhole bedrooms, and a tin room with a large oval wooden tub for a bath. On the narrow back porch a rough table provided my kitchen, and upon it stood a charcoal stove which was only a pottery jar under a grate, and there I cooked my meals.

In this simple space I found healing. The scent of the pines pervaded the air, and the stillness of the forest was peace itself. I did not want a servant nor any stranger in the house, and indeed there was nothing to do except to prepare the meals and sweep the floors with a bamboo broom and when this was done to wash our few garments in the brook. The nights were long and still and in the morning I was waked by the soft rustling and whispering of the crabwomen. When I had washed and dressed I went out and found five or six old souls, in worn cotton kimonos, very clean, and sitting in a row on the edge of the floor of our living room as it opened directly into the trees. They had been too kind to wake me, but once they saw me they held up their baskets of fresh crabs and fish so that I might make my choice for the day. I tried to buy from one and the other, in justice to all, and they made no complaint, but they always came together and went away together, leaving me with a grass string of frantic crabs or pulsing fish in my hand. Rice boiled dry and flaky, and a green of some sort was enough for a meal and we grew healthy and clear-eyed on the fare.

Sometimes we made sandwiches of bread I baked once a week and then we went off for the day, to climb a mountain or explore a valley and often we found ourselves part of a procession of tourists, picnicker and people on walking tours, for the Japanese love their mountains and beauty spots and are indefatigable about picnics. I must have been very happy and idle for I cannot remember anything else about our month in the mountains of Japan, except once when I was taking my daily bath in the wooden tub, my glance happened to fall upon a familiar knot hole in the wooden wall and I saw it not green, as usual, with the immediate forest, but filled with an unblinking black eye. I stared at the eye for an instant, and then put my forefinger into the knothole, where upon it withdrew. I pondered upon the sex of the eye’s owner, but could come to no conclusion. When I had finished my bath and had dressed and come out again, however, I found that the eye belonged to a young woman with six eggs which she wished to sell. She had heard the splashing of water in the tub and had merely wanted to know if I was at home.