Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (13 page)

She took the other’s hand and wrung it as if it were a hen’s neck.

‘But you’re so smart!’ said Deirdre concealing her pain. ‘I’d heard—’

‘That I was a she-ox from the desert,’ said Varvara. ‘And you rejoiced.’

Deirdre, like many home-bred children, particularly females, had acquired a veneer of precocious social assurance. But Varvara bludgeoned her way through it in a couple of sentences. Deirdre suddenly looked as if she might burst into tears.

‘Oh dear, have I said the wrong thing?’

Unfortunately Cedric chose that moment to reappear. The sound of his daughter’s voice touched off his managerial instincts.

‘What’s the matter, Deirdre? What have you been saying?’

‘Nothing, Father.’

‘Then how could it be the wrong thing?’

‘I was just rather silly.’

‘Were you showing off?’

‘No, Father.’

‘I’ve had to speak to you before about that.’

This sort of slow baiting was very unacceptable to Varvara’s nature.

‘Your daughter spoke charitably and socially,’ she said, ‘to cover up a rough word of mine.’

An expression of bewilderment, followed by one which closely resembled gratitude, spread over Deirdre’s face. It had obviously never occurred to her that frontal opposition was also a way of dealing with her father. I felt, alas, that the lesson might be rather dangerous as applied to anybody who had to live in financial dependence on him.

I thought we were in for a damned unpleasant scene between Varvara and her uncle. But suddenly Cedric made a retching noise in his throat and swayed visibly. He took a couple of quick steps and flopped down in the nearest chair, putting his head down between his hands.

‘What’s the matter, Father?’ said Deirdre with a more genuine-sounding concern than I should have expected. ‘Is it one of your attacks?’

There we are, I thought, if that doesn’t just round off the picture! I should have realized without the need for a demonstration that when Cedric could not sufficiently assert his will by force he would fall back on an appeal to pity. ‘Wicked child, do you want to kill your kind papa—who will not be with you for long anyhow?’

Despite his recent illness, this seemed a very reasonable diagnosis, and it was not my fault that it turned out to be a little too smart.

After a couple of minutes Cedric got up, still looking somewhat groggy. He muttered a brief apology and then left accompanied by Deirdre.

‘On the way home,’ said Varvara, ‘perhaps he will die.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘When he lay in the chair I hoped the blood would start out of his nostrils.’

‘Really,’ I said, ‘it’s time you learnt to lay off this face-bashing attitude. It sounds perfectly ridiculous in England.’

‘You have murderers here also.’

‘The only person your uncle is likely to knock off is his wretched daughter. He’ll send her crazy, if he doesn’t look out.’

The fact that on impulse Varvara had defended her cousin did not mean that she trusted her.

‘They are in league,’ she said.

‘You wouldn’t think so if you’d heard what she was saying about him.’

‘That was to put you off your guard. The cubs scratch the tiger to sharpen their claws, but they are not quarrelling.’

‘Have it your own way,’ I said.

I was preoccupied with a discovery which I had just made. Life is very unjust, but a high proportion of bad men manage to pay themselves out in this world: they do it simply by breeding in their own likeness.

8

I had almost forgotten my uncle’s cable, and it came as a surprise when I was called to the telephone and heard his voice at the other end. He had to spend that day at the India Office, but in the evening I went round and dined with him in his Kensington hotel.

After we had chatted for a while, he asked me how I was enjoying myself at Aynho Terrace.

‘Not too boring, I hope.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I was afraid you might be a bit short of company.’

‘Mrs. Ellison has her niece staying—the one from China.’

My uncle whistled. ‘That ought to liven things up.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Fair inference from heredity.’

My memory went back to the days in Brittany.

‘Didn’t you once tell me that you’d met her father?’

He nodded.

‘On my great cloak-and-dagger odyssey—the one your aunt describes so excitingly. As a matter of fact I think Ellison was the only exciting thing about it.’

‘Did you go to Doljuk?’

‘No. He travelled down to meet me in Kashgar.’

‘Why?’

‘It was arranged,’ said my uncle with deliberate vagueness.

‘Do you mean that he was some kind of . . . British Agent?’

‘Now you’re getting like Edna. I can almost hear the rustling behind the arras. No. Ellison’s energies were directed to the great cause of Ellison. But he was very helpful to me. And his support was worth having in those parts.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to meet the daughter,’ I suggested.

My uncle assented but without quite the enthusiasm which I had expected. He was nearing the age when reminiscence is more enjoyable than fresh experience.

In the event it was just as well that he did not set any particular store on the occasion. Varvara had accepted an invitation to Sunday lunch, and earlier that morning I accompanied her to the Orthodox Church in Moscow Rd., for I had become curious about the creed to which she responded with so much fervour. I myself was impressed. I can still smell the incense and see the agonized Byzantine faces that looked down from the niches of the eikonostasis, and hear the sung litany, now plangent, now rounded and smooth like a blood-ruby. Beside me Varvara chanted in a voice which did more credit to her heart than her ear.

Afterwards the spiritual temperature fell sharply. As we stood outside on the pavement, I said:

‘We might as well go straight along to the hotel.’

‘What hotel?’

‘Where my uncle’s staying.’

Varvara gave an affected start of recollection.

‘Holy Christ,’ she said, ‘I have forgotten the date of your damned uncle! Goodness how sad!’

‘Just as well I came along to remind you.’

‘You see, David,’ she said, grasping me by the hand as if she were about to tear an espalier off a wall, ‘unfortunately I have pledged myself to another.’

‘Before or after I spoke to you?’

‘Long, long before,’ said Varvara with a pellucid candour which carried no conviction.

‘I suppose we’re being thrown over for Andrew and the Ritz?’

‘I cannot spoil his party.’

‘What about my wretched uncle’s? It’s just as bad for him.’

‘Ah, no,’ said Varvara with gentle reason. ‘You see, you are wrong about the Ritz. This party is in Andrew’s flat.’

‘What the hell difference does that make?’

‘Andrew’s food would be wasted,’ she said. ‘But your uncle will suffer no loss for what is not served in a hotel.’

I don’t know whether this was a flash of hard Doljuk logic or of the spirit which had made her grandfather conserve his eyewash. At the time I was too annoyed to speculate.

‘You’re behaving like a slut.’

There in front of the House of the Lord, where with glistening eyes she had lately extolled the virtues of forgiveness, Varvara gave me a heavy cuff on the side of the head. It hurt and I realized again, with a tinge of humiliation, how strong she was.

I think that perhaps my uncle looked on this trip to England as a holiday from women. At any rate he waved aside my vicarious apologies.

‘She only sprang it on me after we came out of church,’ I said resentfully.

He began to laugh.

‘Church!’ he said. ‘That’s an odd idea to associate with one of Ellison’s family.’

‘She’s very religious.’ Spitefully I added: ‘In a hysterical way.’

‘I suppose it’s reaction,’ said my uncle. ‘Frankly the only thing I didn’t like about Fulk was his militant godlessness. Besides it was a bloody nuisance to me personally. The main object of my cloak-and-dagger trip was to get together the handful of our countrymen who inhabited those regions, and to pump them. Unfortunately, I was naïve enough to imagine that it would promote goodwill and confidence if I collected them all at the same time. Two of my sources were missionaries, and Ellison could hardly open his mouth to them without jeering.’

‘I should have thought that white men would need to stick together out there,’ I said sagely.

‘It would certainly have been a help to the wretched priests. But I doubt if they could have offered any
quid pro quo.
At the time when I knew him, Ellison was one of the most famous men in Sinkiang.’

‘I didn’t realize that he became more than a local figure.’

‘Oh yes. He’d shown himself to be something very rare: an original military thinker.’

My uncle sat back, twinkling his eyes. He always enjoyed small mystifications. But he could not have realized how much he had baffled me. The fact was I could not identify any event described in the letters with so grandiose a description.

Under his offhand Public School manner my uncle was profoundly romantic, and very English. He loved amateurism and improvisation and the triumph of underdogs. He needed little encouragement to tell a story which reeked of all three. Why Fulk himself did not relate it, seeing that he wrote at length of other events in which he played a far less glorious part, is not clear. Perhaps it was on account of the very celebrity of the operation. One of his un-Elizabethan characteristics was freedom from boasting.

As a matter of fact I later found two brief passages which must, I think, refer to the rebellion of
1917
-
18
.

‘Well, Mother, there has been another damned uproar round here. Last week we had an army of Chinks trying to break into the place, but now most of them have been persuaded to go away, and the ones who are staying will not give any more trouble. . . .’

Between
1912
and the late twenties, Sinkiang as a whole enjoyed a spell of exceptional peace. But the term was relative, as if a doctor in plague-ridden territory were to note the absence of any pandemic outbreak. During these years the Governor-in-Chief of the provinces was a Chinese official named Yang, who, at least during the earlier years of his rule, showed unusual force and integrity. He is to be distinguished from the man whom Fulk refers to as the ‘Governor’ Yee. The latter was, in effect, a Resident or Deputy with local authority, who controlled Doljuk and a clutch of the northern oases. Yee was not a happy choice, perhaps because of a certain whimsicality which Confucian culture seems to impress on some of its devotees. This led him to alternate between excessive severity and excessive lenience. In any case it was not much good being cultured or whimsical with Tungans and Turkis.

A dispute about taxation set up a steady ferment which exploded in
1917
. Only the cities of Yee’s sub-province were involved, but within a limited area the rebels made an even cleaner sweep than usual, largely because Fulk had bought up quantities of modern arms from Russian deserters. He had also been speculating in the opposite market. Through China he imported five hundred cheap shot-guns with ammunition to match. Did he think he was going to popularize game-hunting in Doljuk? If so, he was as big an optimist as the man who tried to introduce the battle-of-flowers in Wigan. More likely he had from the first some dim notion of tactical possibilities.

At the end of spring,
1918
, the expected Chinese army arrived in front of Doljuk. Two hundred miles east at Barkul, it had already inflicted a severe defeat on the rebels and had then proceeded to capture that city, executing all the notables after confiscation of their goods. Naturally there was some alarm among the upper circles in Doljuk about their future.

The Chinese sat down in front of the walls and the great wooden gates. They had no artillery except three old French guns which had been used in the Franco-Prussian war; and though these were capable of breaching the fortifications, they never continued serviceable for long enough to make an exploitable gap. Unfortunately for the defenders, however, the operations were not entirely directed by the ostensible Commander of the Chinese army, a rough-neck war-lord from Kansu. With him travelled the Governor Yee, who had skipped out at the beginning of the trouble, and spent a very pleasant year in Pekin. He was a well-educated man, and he had read the history of previous campaigns in Sinkiang. He remembered that in the rebellion of
1794
the Chinese General Huang Su had recaptured Doljuk with the loss of scarcely a man, by the simple trick of diverting its water-supply.

The wells in the city were virtually useless. Doljuk had a long history, and the sanitary habits of its population had not changed much in two thousand years. Consequently the soil and all that percolated through it were polluted to a remarkable depth. Not even the best acclimatized of the natives would venture to drink from the deep stinking holes which were to be found in the courtyards of the richer houses. Indeed it was considered reckless to wash clothes in liquid drawn from them.

In normal times all drinking water was provided by a stream which descended from a pool to the west of the oasis and flowed through the city, being conducted under the wall in two brick tunnels. In
1794
the Chinese smashed these tunnels by laying charges of gunpowder in the night. The result was doubly gratifying: not only did the men of Doljuk lose their water, but it piled up in a flood at the old point of inlet, threatening to dissolve the mud structure of the wall.

Another factor made the problem of thirst peculiarly tantalizing to the besieged. There was an alternative source of supply, which consisted of a broad pool rising in the garden of the Governor’s palace. Its position had prevented it from becoming immoderately fouled; and in any case its strong mineral content was a purifier. But the latter, alas, gave it medicinal properties; it was a laxative with a harsh action. Heat exaggerated the city’s plight. Towards the end of the first week of siege, the temperature stood at over
100
° in the shade. People could no longer control themselves, but sucked down pints of the toxic water. The results, though not without the usual element of low farce, were ultimately horrible. Many died in great agony from the excoriation of their bowels.

The inhabitants had a long tradition of defeat which sapped their will to resist when things were going badly. There was some talk of surrender, particularly among the lower orders who might expect to escape any but a perfunctory and collective vengeance. Some of the rich tried to make their way by night through the Chinese lines.

As an infidel foreigner, Fulk Ellison had no official standing in Doljuk. Even his popularity with the Turkis which had been his chief asset was temporarily dimmed. When war turned against them, simple and faithless men found it convenient to blame the person who had provided them with the means to wage it. Nevertheless, because of his skill as an engineer, he was an informal member of the junta which had organized the defence of the city. At the meeting which, but for him, would have been the last he put forward a plan of rescue.

The key of his project was the Banner of Oirats with whom he had had previous dealings. A detachment of this tribe made an annual pilgrimage to the neighbourhood of Doljuk in order to collect salt—in which their own pastures were very poor—from the saline desert to the south of the city and they had been reported in the district several days before the beginning of the siege—of which they took not the slightest notice. Since the days of Jenghiz and Batu their nation had learnt to mind its own business.

‘Still,’ said my uncle, ‘those who know claim that the ancient spirit has survived endemic syphilis and can still be uncorked by a good cash offer.’

That was the commission with which Fulk left. He crept alone through the Chinese lines, and rode southwards until he made contact with the Mongols. After a day of feverish negotiations, he led them to the ruined Uighur watch-tower which he used as a store for big consignments of illicit arms. There the contingent was served out with a shot-gun apiece and upwards of forty cartridges filled with duck-shot.

Fulk must at some time have asked himself the question why the nomad horsemen who had once terrorized Asia and Europe had lost their impact, and found an answer in their abandonment of rapid fire-power. Accounts of the Mongol campaigns in the thirteenth century always emphasized the dismay caused by a rain of arrows accurately directed from galloping horses. But for generations the bow had been yielding place to the gun. The snobbery of modern weapons had ruined a great military power. Bullets were indeed better than arrows—but only provided that both were delivered with approximately the same efficiency. The current arms among the Mongols were old muzzle-loaders or lengths of unrifled gas-pipe fitted with triggers by cynical and ingenious Japanese. In either case the barrels were as smooth as billiard balls, and the flight of the missile unpredictable. Consequently the irresistible charge of Jenghiz’ followers had degenerated into a mere ritual letting-off of fire-crackers.

‘Ellison told me,’ said my uncle, ‘that a lot of them used to shut their eyes when they fired.’

‘Why?’

‘In order to pray more reverently for a hit.’

Since improvement in marksmanship would be a long job, Fulk’s idea was to reduce the margin of error.

Having equipped themselves, the party made a detour until they were a couple of miles above the city on its north flank. They waited until the sun was up and had begun to cast its intolerable dazzle down the mica slopes. They then charged.

‘Ellison,’ said my uncle, ‘had that habit of deprecating his own achievements which was so admired in my boyhood. You remember how Rider Haggard’s heroes usually insist that they are cowards? I suppose it’s really a degenerate offshoot of the chivalric tradition. Anyhow it suited Ellison about as well as kid gloves on a coal-heaver. . . . He pretended that he couldn’t keep up with those steppe horsemen, and that he was glad to be two hundred yards in the rear. Personally I don’t think he was too sure that the Mongols would do their stuff and he deliberately hung back to act as whipper-in. But whatever the reason was he had an ideal position for seeing the whole operation.

The Mongols came down at a controlled trot for the first mile and a half. By this time the Chinese had realized that they were being threatened from outside their lines and had faced round a part of their troops to meet the assault. But they had not realized how much the assailants were capable of stepping up their speed of approach. Over the last half-mile the Mongols broke into a furious gallop, weaving in and out of each other’s paths in a cat’s cradle of movement to confuse the enemy’s aim. The Chinese were still deploying when the attackers arrived within twenty yards of the front line. Even so their Commanders were probably not unduly disturbed, imagining they would have to face merely the usual random rifle-fire, followed up with a little sword play. But at the last moment the irregular mass wheeled broadside on, and with a fair semblance of unison both barrels of every gun were discharged. Eight hundred cartridges (excluding the minority which blew up in the faces of the firers) amount to quite a heavy concentration of shot. Comparatively few of the Chinese were killed, but the number of these who lost their eyes or were shocked into helplessness by face wounds entirely crippled the front line.