Once an Eagle (66 page)

Lin Tso-han was looking at him—a calm, measuring glance, not unkind. To cover his irritation he said: “How is it you know French so well, Colonel?”

Lin smiled. “And living with these untutored peasants?”

Damon grinned back, but he said: “I was a farm boy, Colonel. It just seemed to me unusual.”

Lin laughed at this. “Oh, it is unusual—oh yes, very unusual!” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “No—I was one of the privileged ones. The favored. Born to rule.” His wide, mobile lips curved faintly. “I had scores of amahs, tutors, instructors, I had the handsomest of educations. My father was a wealthy and a violent man. Yes,” he nodded; he seemed almost asleep. “A wealthy and a violent man. And I was even more of one. I was tuchün of a large district, a general at twenty-six. Through no ability of my own. I had twelve thousand men under my command, and hundreds of thousands who feared me like the plague. A heady feeling, when people come running and fling themselves on their hands and knees, their foreheads thumping against the earth, as you pass. You feel like a god on earth … ” He paused, as though deciding how to phrase his thoughts. “And the opportunities! I became a lover of pleasure. There are so many pleasures in this world, and I saw no reason why I shouldn't have all of them. I took from the treasury of the province whatever I needed—and I needed a great deal, Ts'an Tsan. Why not? When it is all there for the taking you would be surprised at how very much you need.

“First of all I loved pomp and show. I had more than the average man's love of vanity. I had twenty-four uniforms of different hues, blue and plum-colored and white and forest green—with elaborate shoulder-boards and belts and buckles, and banks of decorations that flashed like celestial bodies. I was really decked out, you understand. I had my own personal bodyguards and
they
all had a change of uniforms, too. Very snappy—incorporating the best features of the Prussian and British lines. I could utter one word and that élite detachment snapped like clockwork.

“From there I went on to women. I had a splendid harem. You know, I suspect, the intoxication of commanding men, Ts'an Tsan, but have you ever felt that far keener, far more inebriating excitement of possessing a courtesan, an immensely skilled and sophisticated woman who is yours alone, who exists on this earth purely and simply to minister to your every whim, to anticipate each desire almost before it has arisen? or when the senses tire of that, the still more entrancing delight of taking a young girl, a fresh young virgin who lies terrified and quivering beneath your hand? It is a kind of fearful drunkenness, compounded of greed and shame and brutality—one can bathe in it, as in a vast muddy pool. I could not stop wanting them. I had—oh, let's call them emissaries, whose duty it was to scour the province for me and select the fairest, the youngest, the most timid of girls; purchase them if possible, or simply carry them off if that should be necessary … And my hunger became greater and greater, I would rise from despoiling one weeping, desperate little creature with a choking, infuriated desire for another, and another, and still another. Lust became a lust for lust, feeding on itself like the Cambodian serpent devouring its own tail.”

Lin sighed, and stroked the side of his face. “Of course I tried now and then to busy myself with other things. For example, I became interested in statecraft. Statecraft. That's the word we love to use to describe the conniving for political power. I had power: I wanted more. Who does not, in such a situation? I was rich and young and proud and ambitious. What more could anyone ask? I began to intrigue—everyone was doing it, those were the days when the big warlords were running affairs with a high hand. Even the European powers and your own government, Ts'an Tsan, were not above dabbling in this most fascinating of games; and I knew I would be better at it than most. For instance, I made an alliance with Tsao Fant'ing against Chen Hsi-teh, and then at just the right moment I deserted Tsao and joined forces with another petty potentate, K'ang Shi-mao, a kindred spirit who liked wine and young girls; and together we intrigued and raped and plundered to our hearts' content. It was like being licensed to commit any crime you chose, in any order and to any end …

“Well: I made mistakes. What impetuous, headstrong young man would not, given no wisdom and a fine, lordly indifference to suffering and death—particularly the suffering and death of the soldiers I commanded? I had no real knowledge of strategy and tactics. I only thought I did. I was brave, yes, I rode at the head of my spanking Prussian garde du corps, I took risks: but it was the bravery of a man who does not really value life—either his own or anyone else's … Have you thought much about yourself, Ts'an Tsan? as a military man, I mean?”

Damon hesitated. “Probably not as much as I should have.”

Lin smiled quickly. “That means you have, then. Yes. You are a very unusual American officer. Not like the types in Shanghai, or with the foreign legations in Peking. Which of course accounts for your being out here among the heathen. Even so, you are a professional soldier …” He brought himself up sharply. “There is a part of us—of you and me—that wants to die. Yes, it's true. Perhaps that's why we are excited by the military life. It furnishes so many excellent, so many vivid opportunities … And then there is the other part that wants to be better, that wants to love, to pardon, to grow into nobility, into tranquillity of soul. That part was almost dead in me in those days. Almost. Oh, once in a while I would be visited by a quick, stealthy nudge of uncertainty, of fear, of outright despair. But I overrode it. Why not? There was always a way out. Something to fall back on, for divertissement. If I sacrificed too many of my soldiers needlessly in a frontal assault on a fortified place, it was no great matter. What the devil—they were only farm boys, weren't they? Like yourself, Ts'an Tsan. There were always more. What did it matter if they tried to hide or escape, if many of them had to be delivered to my officers bound hand and foot?” He gave Damon a sharp, sidelong glance. “I imagine you have seen some detachments of the Kuomintang's volunteers, Ts'an Tsan.”

The observer nodded; near Hanyang a detail of young men had shuffled past him in chains, herded by armed guards, toward some barracks. What were they, he'd haltingly asked the officer in charge, criminals or deserters? “Recruits,” the officer had answered with a stiff smile. He had watched the detail move away.

“ ‘As you would not use good iron to make a nail, so you would not use a good man to make a soldier,' ” Lin Tso-han murmured. “Old Chinese proverb. We have thousands of them. The only difficulty is, those lowly nails keep the roof from falling on your own proud and inviolate head … But I never thought of that. I was enjoying myself hugely. There is a tremendous delight in this, too: You give a crisp, harsh command, from the throat, from the belly, and this mass of armed men—your property, no, more than that, the very extension of your soul—starts forward like a great, bristling animal. Bent to your will. I suppose you have felt something of that, Ts'an Tsan.”

Damon was silent a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I've felt that.”

“Well, I reveled in it. It made my blood beat faster, my breath quicken. Man en bloc, an echo of my will. What a glorious feeling! At my command the bugles would shrill and they would surge to the attack, and I would watch through my fine German field glasses as the little figures scurried and scampered. When one fell I would swing my glasses on to the others. And then at the crucial moment, after the wall was breached and the batteries silenced, I would ride in with my bodyguard and harry the poor devils of defenders running before us in panic. I averted my eyes from the groans of the wounded and dying as I rode in. What were they to me? I was victorious, wasn't I? This was what I wanted, and that was sufficient. The town would be taken, and then would come that supreme intoxication—the entering of a captured citadel. Like all those plump, terrified little virgins, but magnified a thousand thousand times.”

He picked up his weapon, a Thompson submachine gun, ejected the twenty-round box magazine with an almost contemptuous deftness, took a piece of rag out of his pocket and began to run it over the forward assembly, as though he needed to busy his hands. The gun certainly did not need cleaning.

“Gift of the American government,” he said. “Through the good offices of the Kuomintang.” He smiled wryly. “When I run out of ammunition for it I will be very sorry. I've never once had a stoppage.” For a moment he gazed out of the hut's entrance toward the valley, the flint-dark shoulder of the mountain. “But then came winter, and snows, and times of no campaigning. I fell into spells of lassitude and dissatisfaction, I picked quarrels with subalterns and servants, quarreled needlessly and disastrously. Disastrously for
them,
you understand. Not for me. I meted out punishment like the Khan. I—began exploring other vices. I had so much time on my hands, so much wealth, such a terrible hunger …”

He paused and sighed—a long, slow sigh that was a more eloquent admission than the words that followed. “I took to the poppy.” His fingers moved nervously over the gun's receiver, and his voice sank lower. “I entered that sinking, melancholy world where you are, finally and irretrievably, god—god of all gods, drifting on a rainbow cloud of light and wisdom …”

Lin cleared his throat and put down the weapon. “But then the cloud dissolves. You find yourself slipping below the sweet rainbow stream, sinking faster and faster—until finally you plummet cold and forsaken through the darkest of terrors and smash against a pavement of naked, trembling anguish. You stagger to your feet and hurry back—but now it is flight, not search. Terrified flight.” He pursed his lips. “For every vice there is a corresponding price, and opium extracts the most exorbitant remittance of them all. I lost weight, I became listless and dull—or when the terrible, frosty pangs reached out for me, savage and feverish. I went along like this for quite some time, alternating between nirvana-sloth and raging activity. At the mercy of my appetites. The wheel had swung its full circle: I was the captive now, the farmer boy delivered bound hand and foot to death. But I would not face that …

“And then a curious thing happened, a very curious thing, and to this day I do not know exactly why I reacted as I did. A moment—it is still as clear as crystal. I was at the theater one evening; and during an intermission a servant came to tell me that my mother was dying. I left immediately and hurried to her. She had been ill for some time—it was cancer—but when I went in to see her now I was shocked by her appearance. She had been a great beauty, celebrated for her wit and refinement—and here she was a haggard scarecrow, the shadow of her skull thrusting out through her wasted flesh. I tried, you know, to talk of various things, little things—in my distress I even began to speak of her recovery and a trip we would take together. She stopped me with a gesture. ‘Oh my son,' she said, ‘if I could continue this life by raising my hand, I would not raise it.' I was horrified: it was the most terrible thing I had ever heard one human being say to another—and this was my mother! I begged her not to say that, I pleaded with her, I fell into a fit of weeping; and she merely lay there and smiled at me, the saddest, weariest smile, and murmured: ‘Pu p'a, hsiao Lin, pu p'a.' Don't be afraid. The way she had when I was little …

“Just before dawn she died. I got up and went out to my car and ordered my driver to take me home. I had stopped weeping, but I was neither stunned nor sleepy. I felt unnaturally alert, my senses quickened to the pearl gray dawn streaked with rose above the mountains, the fierce green shoots of rice thrusting out of the mirror plate of the paddies. It was a little like the moment before battle—that sacred, profane vividness that burns to the very pit of your consciousness; you have felt it yourself …”

He caught himself up again, brusquely. “Well; there I was, returning to my great house in my car, a tumult of acute, almost painful sensations, aware of the ominous stirring of the opiate beast deep in my vitals, when I noticed a girl child, a baby lying naked on a dung heap. It is not an uncommon sight. You have undoubtedly seen something very similar here and there in this vast, pitiless, tortured land of ours, Ts'an Tsan—the girl baby abandoned by the poorest of the poor, tossed in the dead of night upon the manure piles to die; for there is no place for her kind, no hope in such interminable, mountainous poverty, she is merely another mouth to feed, come to rob those other already desperately hungry bellies—”

He stopped. Damon glanced at him, and saw that the guerrilla leader's face was very hard.

“There was no reason it should have affected me,” he went on after a moment. “I had seen such sights by the thousands. Only this infant was still moving, feebly, stretching her tiny hands and feet, twisting her head in a tremulous little agony—to hold on, to clutch at that spark of life. A tiny white form, immaculate and lovely, moving on that pyre of filth. It burned into my consciousness like molten iron … And then—and this is what is so singular—not twenty seconds later I had this sudden fierce pain in my heart: a stab as though someone had driven a sharpened stake right through my chest and held it there, probing and twisting. I doubled up, gasping, I struggled and struggled for air, I tried to cry out for help—and I could not make a sound audible over the smooth, liquid crooning of the motor. A heart attack, a savage and fatal seizure. I was going to die. In minutes. No more intrigues of state, no more battles, no more concubines or virgins or opium, no more riot of indolence and luxury and power over men. It was terrible. In a few moments, a few racing moments, I would be no more. I was going to die in my prime.”

There came a boom, another, flat and distant, bowling up the valley in troubled reverberation; there was a stir in the room, and several heads were raised.