The Sand Pebbles (18 page)

She led him on through into the Chinese section of low houses in walled courts, all whitewash and gray-tiled roofs. The streets there
were busy with cart and coolie traffic and children scrambling. She nodded and said hello to several Chinese wearing gowns.

“They’re native staff—I mean, not servants,” she explained. “I don’t know them all apart yet. They live in these houses.”

“This is a big place.”

He was looking all around. Just inside the shop and storehouse section she halted.

“I don’t know what all is in here,” she said. “It goes on outside the gate. Some of the people are staff and some rent their shops and stores from the mission and work on their own.”

“Like a little town, ain’t it?” The high chatter of voices and the tool noises of men at work came through the sour-smoky smell. He sniffed. “It even smells like a Chinese town,” he said.

“It’s not dirty,” she said defensively. “It’s the food and cooking oil they use, and incense. Lacquer and camphorwood in the workshops.”

“Hell, I like it!” he said. “I’m sorry if you thought—I mean, I know Chinese ain’t any dirtier than they’re forced to be.”

“Those long buildings, godowns,” she said. “The mission takes a share of the crops for land rent. Mr. Craddock keeps a reserve in those godowns, for bad years. No one ever starves around China Light.”

“Like in the Bible. The skinny cows,” he said. “You know, this is all right. I guess I always thought missions only saved souls.”

“They do, but that’s not in my department,” she said. “Mr. Craddock has all sorts of plans for China Light. He has some machinery set up to make sugar out of beets, but nobody can make it work right. He has an electric light plant, still in the crates, someone told me.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Somewhere in there.” She waved vaguely. “It’s too hot here. Let’s go on.”

She led him to what had already become her favorite retreat, a stone bench in a nook among trees around the little American cemetery. Climbing roses covered the rough stone wall and tinged the air with delicate scent and color. Bees and one little bird were busy
there. He sat beside her and fanned them both with his sun helmet. It had the name U.S.S.
San Pablo
in gold on a black ribbon sewed across the front brim. She looked at his face, strong, blunt and honest. He looked at her and she became abruptly conscious of her appearance.

“I’m letting my hair grow out,” she apologized. “It’s at its most wretched stage now.” She tried to tuck away stray wisps. “They don’t want me to wear most of the dresses I brought.”

“You’re so young and pretty, nothing could spoil how good you look.”

He said it honestly. She was not pretty, but if he thought she was, that made her so for him. She warmed to him.

“Thank you, Mr. Holman.”

Delicately, she tried to excuse Mr. Craddock’s bad manners. “He has strong opinions,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s right. Only I wish it didn’t have to make such a difference between people. That’s why … what I …”

“I know,” he said. “The guys felt it. They won’t blame you.”

“Not just me …”

She couldn’t discuss it. She told him how she was studying Chinese six hours a day with Mr. Lin. She would have one class, of senior students who spoke fair English, when school started. By the next year she would know enough Chinese to take a full teaching load.

“How long they got you signed up for?” he asked.

“Seven years.”

“We ship for four at a time,” he said. “I been in China a little over seven years.”

“Without going home?”

“My ship’s home. That’s how it is with us.”

“Mr. Craddock says it will be that way with me at China Light,” she said. “It isn’t now. I wonder how long it takes?”

“Depends on the person, I guess. For me it was quick.”

They talked about the riots in Paoshan. He was not pressing any claim. Still, she could not deny that the riots had sprung up in the gunboat’s absence and stopped with its arrival. She confessed to her
own fear during those two days, and her relief when the gunboat came.

He smiled. “I’m glad we came.”

One of the Craddock house servants found them and chattered in Chinese. They stood up.

“Your officer is ready to go,” she told him. “I hope he won’t be angry with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

Constraint grew between them. She wondered if he was remembering how he had taken leave of her that other time. Suddenly he had both her hands. She realized she had held them out, slightly and involuntarily.

“Good-bye, Miss Eckert,” he said. “I don’t feel any danger here. But if there ever is, we’ll be back.”

He pressed her hands and dropped them. She watched him walk away behind the servant, husky and red, erect and square-shouldered. She did not feel any danger, either. She sat down again.

Sometimes you met people and something flashed across, she thought. It was over in a flash, and you only knew about it afterward. This was the second time with Holman.

The first time was on the steamer from Shanghai to Hankow. Riots were going on in Shanghai, with people killed. The passengers on the steamer were nervous and angry and they quarreled terribly. Holman took no part in it. The others talked of past wars and massacres and they were making her very fearful of China.

It had been warm and sunny also, that other day. They were just passing a wooded bluff with gray walls and towers, very Marco Poloish in the watery sunshine. From nowhere the American destroyer came like a long gray spear flying. Brown smoke rolled from its four rakish stacks, sailors in white stood by the deck guns, and a string of colored signal flags danced gaily above the bridge. It was beautiful and deadly and it brought a catch to her throat. The steamer, rocking in its wake, was instantly all alarm. Men shouted and ran and clanged shut the steel doors penning the Chinese on the lower decks. Mr.
Craddock hustled her to her cabin for safety. There would be shooting, he said.

Alone there and fearful, she peeped from her window as the steamer rounded the wooded point. Gray walls slanted across a green hill and dark tiled roofs curved above them. Brown junks lay all along shore. The anchored destroyer swam into view, guns trained ashore. Two power boats filled with armed sailors drew V’s in the brown water, heading in past some wooden ship hulls with house roofs above their decks. Buildings showed through trees along a stone embankment. Black smoke rose above the trees. She heard a distant noise of shouting.

Distressed and fearful, vaguely not wanting to be alone, she had slipped out on deck. She saw Holman there, sturdy with his rifle. The sight brought the same catch to her throat that the destroyer had. Then he had pointed his finger through the bars and her focus had widened out to include the three Chinese children.

“Bang bang, you’re dead,” the sailor said gravely.

The children hesitated and then smiled. One pointed and said, “Cah! Cah! Cah!” in an excited voice. Holman grinned at them.

The little play changed everything. Her sense of danger vanished. It all seemed a game in which no one really hated and feared anyone else. That was in the smile they exchanged when he turned, startled and guilty, to meet her understanding smile.

A short while afterward she was in the saloon with the refugee women. They came aboard off the hulks with amahs and crying children and tales of outrage. They had shrill voices and strained angry faces and the cords stood out in their necks.

“Of
course
they run away when the sailors come, the cowards!” one woman said. “Tie them to the cannon’s mouth, I say!”

“Whip them! Make their bones drop out!” another shrilled.

Shirley could not hope to tell them what she knew. Nor could she tell the men, at an ensuing dinner-table argument. Mr. Craddock, not too gently, pointed out that the missionaries in Chinkiang had not been molested. They lived out among the natives and they had stayed quietly at home in prayer. The people from the foreign concession,
businessmen and the collectors of customs, salt tax and postal revenues, had fled to the hulks and sent for the destroyer. Their homes were looted and some houses were burned. Mr. Outscout, the chronically angry Englishman, had countered with an attack on Christian education in China.

“Your schools. Put notions into Chinese heads. Democracy. Lincoln and cherry tree, that rot,” he said accusingly. “How d’ye know what’s already in the heads, eh? You’re all fools playing chemist.” He fountained with his hands. “Heads pop! Burn! Fizz over!”

It was a great embarrassment, Shirley knew, that mission-educated students were the most virulently anti-Christian. They were so despite considerable missionary support for Chinese independence. The business faction, which clung to the unequal treaties, enjoyed taunting the missionaries about it.

“Christian education!” Mr. Outscout tossed his gray hair scornfully. “Told Graves a few days past in Shanghai. Parade your very campuses, I told him, and for every placard denouncing the treaties there’s another maligning your Christ. Where’s your profit, eh? Eh? Graves couldn’t answer!”

“Our
Christ, Mr. Outscout! Will you deny Him, sir?”

The other men calmed the two. Holman, as usual, took no part. She no longer thought it was apathy. He simply did not think it was important. But it was very important to Mr. Craddock, who expected Shirley to side with him. On the trip to Hankow she had learned how deep and angry was the gulf between the two factions of foreigners in China.

Many missionaries believed that the unequal treaties impairing Chinese sovereignty should be canceled. The most visible symbols of the treaties were the gunboats. Gunboats infuriated Mr. Craddock. They made it seem to him that he was preaching Christianity figuratively at gunpoint. He had not liked her talking to Holman.

“The saintliest spirit, if unguarded, may take a coloring from a troubled spirit which comes too near,” he had warned her once, in attempted delicacy. He did not speak to Holman himself.

Since her arrival at China Light, she had wondered more than once whether Mr. Craddock’s spirit was not troubled. He loved fiercely. He trusted God rather than gunboats with emotional speech and gestures which made God seem very like an invisible gunboat in the sky. Shirley did not want to take a coloring from Mr. Craddock.

Gillespie was altogether different. He did not get excited.

“The Chinese are the most civilized people on earth,” he had told her. “Too many of us approach them as if they were tribal Africans. I hope you will not.” He also wanted to get rid of the treaties and gunboats. “The Chinese have a fundamental sense of decency and justice,” he said. “The gunboats only outrage it. We’d be safer without them.”

Shirley found that reasonable. She liked Gillespie. She thought Holman might have been a man much like Gillespie, if chance had not cast him as a sailor. Each man in his own way gave her comfort.

She stood up, abruptly lighthearted. She began picking roses for her desk in the faculty office, where she must go now for her Chinese lesson with Mr. Lin. He was an elderly, dignified man and very patient with her. No one could help but trust and respect China in the presence of Mr. Lin. He gave comfort, too.

Bordelles spoke sharply to Holman about abandoning arms on duty. Craddock had left him in a bad temper. Once back in the boat, however, he softened. Red Dog urged him to tell about his fight with Craddock. Bordelles made a good story of it. Craddock, being independent, was hard to deal with. By the same token, he could not exert anything like the political influence back in the States that the mission board people could. All the Americans who put pennies in the plate to save the heathen could also put votes in the box to sink a Congressman. It was dangerous for a naval officer to cross a mission board. It was not very dangerous to insult Craddock.

“You think they’ll really run the gunboats out of China, sir?” Tullio asked.

“Not a chance. They don’t want to,” Bordelles said. “They only want to be on record with the Chinese pretending that they do.”

“What you think we’re building that new flotilla for, Tullio?” Farren asked. “Right now, down in Shanghai.”

Lynch was waiting for Holman on the quarterdeck. “Jake, come below,” he said. “We got troubles, boy.”

Holman followed him. “What happened?”

“The engine’s haunted.”

“Haunted!”

“The coolies think it is. Chien’s dead and his ghost is in the L.P. crankpit. The coolies are scared to come down here.”

The engineers were all in dungarees, sitting on the workbench with a fresh pot of coffee. Lynch and Holman poured themselves cups and Lynch explained what Lop Eye Shing had told him about Chinese ghosts. It was very complicated. Dead Chinese left three ghosts. One of Chien’s was in the sickbay and one had gone ashore with his body, but the most dangerous of the three was the one in the crankpit.

“Lop Eye says a Chinee ghost after while splits into little ghosts, and they split again, and after a month or two they ain’t no more trouble than mosquitoes,” Lynch said.

“We can’t wait that long. We can’t get underway without the coolies,” Holman said.

“Lop Eye’s ashore now lining up some holy man to come aboard tomorrow and run the ghost off the ship,” Lynch said. “We’ll have to stand the auxiliary watches tonight, though.”

Haythorn, the coxswain, came in on the gratings. “Hey, you bilge rats,” he called down. “How about some water in the washroom?”

Stawski slid off the workbench. “God damn it, I been filling that gravity tank every half hour,” he said. “What you deck apes doing with all that water?”

He went over and opened the steam inlet and started the fresh water pump clacking. Holman walked over beside him.

“Keeping the water end lined up, eh, Ski?”

“Hell yes, every half hour, why not?”

“The water chest valves leak. Your water’s draining back through the pump on you,” Holman said. “Close the discharge valve and it won’t be every half hour.”

Perna bounced out of the fireroom. Coal dust and sweat smudged his face and he was angry. He choked in the feed check.

“You stupid Polack, watch how you take on feed!” he told Stawski. “You’re killing my steam!”