The Sand Pebbles (47 page)

“I bet the skipper put Franks up to telling us that,” Farren said. “He couldn’t say a thing like that himself, if it’s a military secret.”

“We got to keep it secret,” Restorff said.

The men nodded, grinning at each other. Excited talk was going on at all the tables.

“Plan Red is really short for Plan Red Dog Bite-’em-on-the-ass Shanahan,” Red Dog shouted. “Arf! Arf! Hear that, all you Sand Pebbles?”

“Arf! Arf!” many of them barked back at him.

“Say, this is damn good chow!” Wilsey said. “I’ll have to stop by and tell Big Chew how good it was.”

“I want more. Where’s Wong?” Harris said. “Wong, you slant-eyed son of a bitch, come in here!” he shouted at the closed door.

Plan Red made the whole world look different and better. Pappy Tung’s men had the windows reglazed and the bullet holes puttied and the whole topside repainted. The days continued hot and sultry, with occasional thunderstorms. The Sand Pebbles watched the student parades with indulgent amusement and stared back contemptuously at green-clad soldiers in passing junks. Word came that General Wu had lost Hankow, but he was still holding the walled city of Wuchang across the river. The concessions at Hankow were safe, of course: they were foreign soil, just like consulates. A landing force was ashore guarding them and Fleet ships were gathering at Hankow. It was all going according to Plan Red.

Things became worse ashore in Changsha. The many small unions—they even had one for whores—were lumped into one big worker-peasant union that took more and more unofficial power. They had strike pickets, who wore a dark uniform and carried six-foot bamboo staves, and they were a kind of unofficial police force. One day they arrested Po-han and took him before a kind of kangaroo court. Po-han’s neighbors and tenants all testified that he was a good landlord and had not been one for very long and he got away. Other landlords were not so lucky. They were fined and some were beaten to death. Po-han worked harder than ever aboard ship. He was quiet and worried. So was Burgoyne.

“It gets worse every day,” Burgoyne told Holman. “If we pull out of Changsha, that Plan Red stuff, I’ll just have to get Maily to Hankow.”

He was more hopeful about junks getting through, now that the main fighting had moved downriver from Hankow. He was not a man to be bitter and angry, but he often cursed the gearwheel in his quiet way.

“People want to be friendly and they’re scared to. They’ll get themselves in trouble,” he told Holman. “We’re just poison now.”

There were not many gearwheel soldiers in Changsha any more. They had all gone on downriver to the fighting. But the worker-peasants were setting up a militia. They were just ragged coolies and farmers with red armbands and not one in ten had a gun. They carried
big swords and spears and tridents and halberds, stuff left over from the old Empire, and one day a gang of them hauled a small brass muzzle-loading cannon along the bund. The militia often marched in the student parades and they were always good for an extra laugh.

Holman went several times to the Royal Navy Canteen to drink beer. It was a kind of godown shed behind the British consulate on the sand island, with several tables and some old magazines and a dart board. There was very good spirit among the sailors. The Limeys knew about Plan Red too, of course. Some of the younger businessmen would drop in and contribute a bottle of whisky. The treaty women were almost all in Hankow and there was no longer a social schedule in the Changsha Club. Some of the businessmen were the same ones who had been beaten up in the Red Candle, but that was all forgotten. They were a band of brothers against the gearwheel. As Crosley liked to say, “Times like now, all us palefaces got to stick together.”

One day Holman was drinking beer with Farren, Restorff and Banger Knox and two businessmen came in. One was the tall man named Van.

“Sure. Sit down here,” Farren said.

They had a bottle of Peter Dawson. The smaller, kewpie-faced man was named Wilbur. They were wearing tough khakis and leather boots. Farren admired their boots.

“I’m glad the women are gone so we can dress the way we please,” Van said. He stretched out one long leg. “I like boots. They’re heavy on the feet and they clamp close around the leg,” he said. “You feel you could stomp and kick and not get hurt yourself.”

“Like tight leather gloves,” Perna said, at the next table. “In Seattle the cops wear leather gloves with a patch of sheet lead under the backs. They backhand you and it’s lights out, boy!”

The Peter Dawson went around and was quickly emptied. Van and Wilbur talked about their troubles with strikes and pickets. They were very bitter about the gunboat orders, especially the part about not protecting property. They thought it was just an invitation to the gearwheel
to loot the palefaces. They were most bitter against the missionaries.

“They send lies back to the States and get their church people to write letters to Congressmen,” Wilbur said. “Nobody in Washington knows what the score really is in China.”

“The missionaries have ’em thinking this Chiang Kai-shek is another George Washington,” Van said. “They want to pull the gunboats out and just turn China over to him. If we had our way, there’d be more ships in here and we’d enforce the treaties to the hilt.”

The strange thing was that the missionaries were taking a worse beating from the gearwheel than anyone else. Van and Wilbur explained that, getting angry, interrupting each other, each one anxious to say it his way. Less than one percent of Chinese were Christians and most of them were rice Christians, Van said, but the missionaries made out back home that all China was on the verge of turning Christian. The missionaries had a soft life in China and damned few of them would even be able to make an honest living on their own, and they knew if they told the truth about China they would break their own rice bowls.

“They want to throw the rest of us to the wolves, to save their rice bowls,” Wilbur said.

They blamed the anti-Christian troubles on the treaties and the gunboats, Wilbur went on. They were trying to make points with the gearwheel. They were trying to pretend that they never had had any part in the unequal treaties. That made the two men angriest of all.

“They came in under the treaties as forcibly as opium ever did!” Van said. “They grabbed themselves a damned sight better deal under the treaties than we’ve ever had!”

“They’re not fooling the students for a minute,” Wilbur said. “The students say Buddha came to China on a white horse and Christ came on a cannonball.”

Holman had heard that before. He laughed just the same. Van and Wilbur went on talking. The people to consider were the ninety-five percent of Chinese who never thought about flags and treaties and only wanted to go on farming and working and doing business in
peace. They were the real Chinese. The civilians were more worked up about it all than the sailors were, because they didn’t know about Plan Red.

“It’s a time to close ranks and the missionaries won’t close up on us,” Banger summed it up. “Very kittle folk they are, you might say.”

“I wish Harris was here,” Van said. “I dearly love to hear him take off about the missionaries.” He was scowling and somber.

“It can’t just go on forever,” Farren said. He was growing his beard again and he was red-fuzzy all over his head and face. “Sooner or later something will happen to blow the lid off.”

“The shooting will start and the missionaries will just have to take their bloody chances,” an English sailor said.

“And I do hope it’s bloody!” Van growled.

The lid blew off at Wanhsien, in the Yangtze gorges. The news came to Changsha in late afternoon and the city boiled with excitement. So did the
San Pablo
. H.M.S.
Cockchafer
and two other British gunboats had fought the Wanhsien warlord, who was not a gearwheeler. It was a hundred and fifty sailors against fifteen thousand troops and it was a great victory. Later in the evening word came that the British had been driven off with a quarter of their force killed or wounded, but they claimed two thousand Chinese casualties. The French gunboat
Gree
had stood by through the whole fight and done nothing to help. That last seemed a bad omen to the Sand Pebbles.

“Them Frogs will all get the moral Croyx de Garry,” Harris sneered.

In the morning Burgoyne came aboard with mud splashed on his white uniform and he was bleeding from a cut above his eye. He had had to run from a street mob. “They’re crazy mad over in town,” he said. He told Holman privately that during the night someone had pitched Maily’s two black goldfish out of the pond, to die on the dirty stones.

“Just her two,” Burgoyne said. “It’s a sign, Jake. I told Po-han go ahead and fix up a junk passage for her soon as he can.”

The student parade that day lasted all day and it was frenzied. They stayed on the bund opposite the gunboats screaming and shaking insuiting
signs. One was a crude cartoon of a sailor with a baby stuck on his bayonet. The signs claimed twenty thousand people killed at Wanhsien. That was how they lied, the Sand Pebbles commented. The right way was always to claim the other side got hurt worse than you did. It threw you off when they claimed that themselves and even beat your claims. Chinese had no pride at all.

More news came in. The treaty power consuls were calling all Central China missionaries in to the treaty ports. All Western China was exploding with rage. The British scaled down their claim to about two hundred enemy casualties at Wanhsien. Women and children were to be pulled back all the way to Shanghai. It seemed to be Plan Red, all right. All day the Sand Pebbles stayed on deck, ready for anything. Lt. Collins would not let Burgoyne go ashore. It would have been suicide to climb up on the bund in a navy uniform. Po-han went ashore.

During the night a few holdout missionaries sneaked into Changsha, disguised in Chinese clothes. American destroyers reached Hankow and the large gunboat U.S.S.
Duarte
was ordered from Hankow to Changsha. The crippled British gunboats with their wounded aboard were turned back by gearwheel artillery fire at Hanyang, just above Hankow. The American destroyer U.S.S.
Stewart
had steamed up there and blasted the gearwheel guns to bits and brought the little gunboats safely into port. The Sand Pebbles repeated that proudly. It was the real Plan Red spirit. Late in the day a telegram came to the consulate from Paoshan. The China Light people were afraid for their lives and they wanted a gunboat to come and take them out.

“Wouldn’t you know it!” Crosley said in disgust.

No one thought the
San Pablo
would go. Paoshan was not a treaty port. The water was very low in that end of the lake in September, perhaps already too low. The China Light people had had their warning and their chance to get out while commercial steamers still ran, and it would serve them right to be left there. Holman worried to himself about Miss Eckert. He was glad when orders came from Comyang the next morning for the
San Pablo
to get the China Light people and take them to Hankow.

It was a frantic day. They began raising steam. A number of
civilian passengers came aboard. One was Wilbur. Bales and boxes of merchandise lined the main deck on both sides. They would make good bullet shielding for the superstructure. Ping-wen had trouble getting enough coal. Big Chew was ashore trying to get extra food. Po-han was still ashore trying to get Maily aboard a junk for Hankow. When the coal was aboard and steam raised, Lynch wanted to report ready to get underway. He and Holman were in the engine room.

“Let’s hold off awhile, Chief,” Holman said. “Po-han ain’t back. Frenchy’s up on deck watching for him.”

“We can steam without Po-han. This is war, boy!” Lynch rubbed his hands. “Plan Red! I’ll report ready.” He did so.

“Stand by and rock engines for the time being,” Bordelles called back. “We have to wait for Big Chew to come aboard.”

Holman gave Wilsey the throttle and joined Burgoyne on the main deck. Burgoyne was very nervous. He was tugging his mustache and working the snuff in his lower lip.

“The hell of it is, Po-han don’t know we’re sailing,” he said. “He might just wait till morning.”

There was nothing to do but watch and hope. Big Chew and Jack Dusty came aboard, with only one basket of vegetables, and there was not much hope left. On the bridge they tested the whistle and siren with a hoarse blast and wail, the signal for getting underway. Pappy Tung and his men went forward to raise the anchor. The anchor windlass began to clank and the hoses were going. Pappy Tung was cursing in Chinese.

“There he comes!” Burgoyne shouted, and began coughing.

Po-han was on the stone steps, waving his arms and arguing with a sampan man. Burgoyne was choking and coughing. He had breathed in some of his snuff. Po-han came alongside just as the anchor broke water and the screw began to thresh. Holman and Burgoyne reached down hands to pull him scrambling aboard. He came up grinning, showing his gold teeth.

“I heah whistle,” he said. “I sabby ship go. What place go?”

“Paoshan,” Holman said.

Po-han said he had just put Maily and her gear aboard a junk that
would sail in the morning for Hankow. He pointed it out, but it was too far up the bund for them to be sure which one. Burgoyne had tears in his eyes from his coughing spell. He was getting control of his voice.