The Mercenaries (32 page)

‘Suppose Gendral Tsu needs his aeroplanes?’

‘He can pay pilots’ fees and hiring in the usual way. We maintain them, we pay for them. We draw no salaries, but the aeroplanes are ours.’

There was a long argument in Chinese then they saw that Tsu was glancing at the two battered and patched machines --the Fokker still grounded for lack of a propeller--that were all that was left of his air force, assessing their value and shrewdly working out his profit. He nodded at last and Lao turned to give his assent.

The quick grin that Sammy gave Ira was only half-concealed and he felt Ellie’s fingers touch his hand in congratulation, then Tsu, to hide the fact that he knew he’d been out-manoeuvred, insisted on inspecting what few pupil pilots remained.

While he shook hands with everybody within reach, his ivory face inscrutable, Madame Tsu touched Ira’s arm and drew him to one side. She looked nervous and tired.

‘If I ever need you. Major Ira,’ she said quietly, ‘promise me you’ll come.’

‘Need me, madame?’

She drew a deep breath and went on quickly. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘I had hoped I might take my son to Europe. But it will not now be this year. However, the General has promised he will retire before long and then’--her sad face brightened--’then we shall be able to go to Paris.’

She paused as Tsu finished his inspection and turned to the cars, and spoke quietly to Ira so that no one could hear.

‘If I need you,’ she repeated, ‘I will send for you.’

Ira nodded, waiting, and she gave a very Gallic shrug that was full of weariness. ‘The fighting has only finished for the winter,’ she pointed out. ‘Who knows what will happen next spring when it starts again? General Chiang grows stronger every week.’

Ira still looked puzzled, and she explained quickly.

‘Last year,’ she said, ‘we had to escape from Hwai-Yang by river. But suppose General Kwei controlled the river? There is only one way then--by air. You see’--she gestured with a tired movement of her hand--’I am not concerned for myself and I am not afraid. But I
am
concerned and I
am
afraid for the boy. It would be such a waste of talent, would it not, if anything were to happen to
him?’

When they’d gone, Sammy grabbed Ellie, kissed her and swung her round in a clumsy, capering dance.

‘We’re made. El,’ he said. ‘We’re made, girl! ‘

Ellie laughed and, escaping, flung herself into Ira’s arms. ‘I don’t know how your airline failed in Africa,’ she said. ‘For a Limey, you’re goddam quick.’

‘We’ve got money in the bank,’ Sammy crowed, ‘two tiptop aircraft and another building. What we all going to be? Ira’ll be the taipan, o’ course. Lawn can be chief engineer and Ed Kowalski can be treasurer. I’ll be chief pilot and Ellie can be secretary and sit in a bloody great office behind all the papers. It’ll be a smashing airline.’

He stopped as he saw that Ellie’s smile had faded and the warmth had gone from her face. The fooling stopped immediately, then, as they were staring after her, puzzled, they saw that Cheng was standing alone, his long Northern face miserable.

Tsu had made no provision whatsoever for him.

With the deteriorating weather the whole countryside seemed to descend into a period of silence and stillness. The last of Tsu’s regiments disappeared from Tsosiehn east, while General Kwei had set up headquarters round Kenli.

It was a remarkably happy period for them all. While Ira and Sammy worked on the De Havilland, Ellie, clad in her cheap cotton dress with her flying coat for warmth, set off down-river on the steamer to arrange for all the things they needed to be sent up.

The weather had suddenly become colder, with periods of wind when the ground dried out and the dust blew in clouds across the plain, and they had to drape the exposed engines with tarpaulins. To warm the freezing barn, they knocked a hole in one end. edged Heloise inside and got Wang to build a shelter round her. One of the younger Wangs was paid to keep her boiler filled and her furnace going, and while she heated the barn, she also kept them in hot water for bathing and, coupled to a dynamo which Sammy’s squirrel-like tendency to collect scrap had gathered to him months before, provided light and instantaneous power for lifting.

In spite of the grey days, Sammy remained excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing, quite undeterred by the knowledge that they had to work to hundredths of an inch. He never seemed to be tired or without a smile on his face, and was never downhearted when things weren’t going according to plan. He was always ready with new ideas, efficient with any kind of tool they put in his hand, whether for metalwork or woodwork, and always chivvying Wang and the coolies to extra efforts with good-natured bullying in a strange mixture of English, Chinese and pidgin.

Tsu appeared to have abandoned the pupil pilots and they heard that Kee, their liaison officer, had gone east. Since Cheng had been as much caught by the flying bug as Sammy, he made no attempt to follow when the other three pupils set off for Hwai-Yang, determined to find glory as infantry officers once more. None of them had ever shown any real aptitude for flying. Only Peter Cheng, out of the lot of them, had produced any real ability, and he was now joined by his younger brother Jimmy, a sloe-eyed round-cheeked civilian of seventeen, who came up from Hwai-Yang and flung himself wholeheartedly into the business of sweeping shavings, coiling hoses, fetching petrol drums and washing off dirty oil with paraffin.

Ira was delighted with the turn of events. They had had a remarkable stroke of good fortune and he went into the repair of the De Havilland wings with a feeling of tremendous confidence. Apart from the smaller strengtheners of the leading and trailing edges, every rib in all four wings was made up of many pieces of spruce, some of them no thicker than cardboard, and each had to be glued and tacked and screwed into the right place between the main spars. But despite the size of the task, he felt sure they could do it and Sammy went off with Wang to find wood, searching the countryside and the stores and the timber rafts along the river bank halfway down to Yung-an-Chou.

The countryside was still quiet as the armies recuperated from the summer campaigning. In spite of the uncertainty reflected in the South China newspapers about Chiang’s growing strength, there was still no sign of activity along the Yangtze and the crews of the patrolling gunboats were directing their energies to shooting at snipe again instead of Chinese insurgents. After the excitement of the summer, when half the European families along the banks had packed up their belongings and sailed for Shanghai, everything seemed to be safe again, and the white women began to reappear with their families to rejoin their husbands who did business round Tsosiehn, and the missionaries began to push out into the country regions once more, heading back to their distant stations, tiny groups of Bible-carrying preachers living on the edge of poverty but driven on by their stubborn faith and a self-immolating belief in themselves. The province seemed on the surface to be settling down again after the summer and Tsosiehn began once more to look like Tsu’s city.

In spite of the calmness, however, it wasn’t difficult for anyone living as close to the Chinese as Sammy and Ira did to see that behind the scenes the agents the Nationalist leaders had planted in every town and village were still at work, and that agitators were whispering in the teashops, converting the area into a quicksand for Tsu. The tenuousness of his grasp on Hwai-Yang began to show again as Kuomintang flags cautiously reappeared and flapped wetly against the walls, then the students, encouraged by the apparent indifference of the Tsu officers to this initial cautious sign of their allegiance, held their first parade along the bund for weeks.

It started with paper lanterns and strings of popping fireworks and ended with a riot. In spite of the derisive comments of the Europeans in the treaty ports, a vast revolutionary feeling was tearing China apart from inside, and the insurgents of the Kuomintang were helping their cause by blaming the white people as much as the warlords. Smouldering feelings were fanned into flames and in a sudden spontaneous combustion of emotion, stalls were upset in the market among the rush-mat booths, and ducks, pigs, chickens and even fish were released because the stallholders had started selling to the returning Europeans again.

Before the day was out, chivvied into action by an indignant deputation of European businessmen, a regiment of Tsu troops marched in from one of the outlying villages and the riot turned into an orgy of murder, and even as far west as Tsosiehn there was a clear nervousness in the air among the shopkeepers and merchants. It was like a farcical game in which, every time Tsu turned his back, the students came out en masse and tried to destroy his influence, and every time they were moved to demonstrate, his officers lashed out in retaliation--blindly, because they never knew who were the ringleaders--so that all became quiet again until they turned their backs once more. Although he still kept his grip on Hwai-Yang, it was clear that what the Nationalists promised held out far more appeal than Tsu’s cruelty, avarice and debauchery, and suddenly no one seemed to have much faith in his ability to consolidate his summer victory or hold back the growing tide of Chiang’s new armies. The whole of south China seemed to be passing into the hands of the Kuomintang.

3

From all the vast events that were tearing at the roots and fabric of Chinese society, the little group at Yaochow were happily insulated by the few intervening miles of paddy field. The tensions of the cities rarely spread beyond their boundaries, but they were glad nevertheless that they had broken with Tsu so that they could regard the war that was martyring China as something that didn’t concern them. As Sammy said, they merely happened to have set up in business there and the never-ending bitterness that existed between Peking and Canton and between the rival warlords didn’t touch them.

They salvaged from the broken wings what ribs and spars were undamaged and, with Wang to do the skilled work, Ira and Sammy began the hard, uninteresting jobs of screwing.

tacking and glueing. As they laboured, they learned short cuts and, gradually, they were able to work as well as Wang, plugging, measuring, shaving and shaping as if they had been doing the job half their lives.

Ellie watched them, her face sometimes amused, sometimes sad, sometimes with an unexplained frown on her brows, as though she were obsessed with private thoughts that she couldn’t hope to communicate. When she looked at Ira, her eyes were soft and her face calm, but there were moments when she still looked lost and lonely and uncertain.

With a wisdom beyond his years, Sammy guessed that the life they were obliged to live had suddenly ceased to appeal to her and that she had begun to yearn like any woman to push down roots for a settled existence somewhere where there were other white women and European homes and security. Watching her, seeing Ira’s enthusiasm not reflected in her eyes, it was clear to him she had at last become disenchanted with aeroplanes.

She had returned from Shanghai a little subdued and surprisingly affected by the uncertainty which had begun to hit the coast, and had shown remarkably little excitement at the fact that they had already managed to repair the De Havilland’s least damaged wing by the time she reappeared.

On the coast, it seemed, the officials of the International Settlement were beginning to regard the quietness in the interior not so much safe as ominous. The Kuomintang had emerged as the most powerful political and military party in China and rumour had been circulating for some time of rioting, bloodshed and butchery following its advancing armies as the peasants, aware of freedom for the first time, rose behind them against the Europeans. There was no longer any disguising the fact that China was in a state of full-scale revolution and, as in all revolutions, there was little mercy or discrimination as the peasants struck back everywhere with the ferocious brutality of primitive people seeking revenge on their oppressors. The spectacle of looting and massacre, of temples in flames and muddy sandals trampling over cherished patterns of life was an awesome one that was brought nearer home as strikes closed down foreign-owned shipping lines and factories. The news that Chiang was threatening to march on Shanghai itself the following spring and was prepared to risk a conflict with the treaty powers for it had sounded like the hammer of doom on the coast. The stock market had begun to show signs of doubt and, with only an ominous future ahead, more than one business house had closed its China office. When Eddie Kowalski himself had talked of pulling out also, the uncertainty that had gripped the International Settlement had caught hold of Ellie, too.

For the first time in years, she had something that had some meaning for her, and for the first time she meant something to someone who didn’t have to lean on her, and could relax and think about herself. She had celebrated her thirty-third birthday soon after she returned but the party they had thrown for her had only set her worrying about the future and searching, with a desperation that sprang from a feeling that time was growing short, for a settled life and the home she’d always craved.

She made no attempt to conceal what had happened between herself and Ira, but Sammy noticed she’d stopped the habit of bathing in public and began to go less and less to the airfield, preferring to remain at the bungalow with Mei-Mei. Neither of them had ever known a home and between them the house began to flower as they unearthed decorated prayer scrolls, scraps of jade and lacquered woodwork.

Sammy watched her warily. His own affair with Mei-Mei was proceeding uncertainly, and because he was a passionate man he sympathised with Ellie. But he was still shrewd enough to know what was going on in her mind, and his loyalties were sharply divided.

From time to time, Ira found an excuse to take up the Avro and fly it towards the east, his face deadened by the cold winter blast from the propeller, his nose protected by grease beneath his goggles. Sometimes it was Tsu asking for transport for one of his officers, but mostly it was for pleasure, and as he disappeared towards the horizon, the happiness faded from Ellie’s face, to be replaced with a bleak loneliness that only Sammy saw.