The Sand Pebbles (69 page)

“Arf! Arf! The Red Dog is ready!”

“Crosley’s always ready!” Crosley yelled, jumping up. “This time you get the works, God damn you!”

Only a few men went back with Crosley. Farren turned out the lights. The men came back and went to bed, except for Bronson and Crosley. They sat at the starboard mess table talking in voices too low for Holman to hear. He could not go all the way to sleep, for
thinking about Red Dog. Holman knew he dared not interfere. He listened for footsteps and did not hear any.

“Arf! Arf!” came weakly through the door. “The Red Dog is ready.”

“This
time I’ll kill the son of a bitch!” Crosley whispered fiercely.

Only he and Bronson went back. When they returned, they went to bed. Holman slept fitfully until Perna called him at midnight. He dressed and went to the washroom and splashed water on his face and then he went on through to the fantail. He saw Red Dog still lying there. Sudden, sick anger welled in Holman. Red Dog’s wrist was warm and his pulse was beating. Holman went up and tried the door to the sickbay. It was locked. He rapped on it.

“Who is it?” Jennings asked.

“Holman. Red Dog’s beat up. You got to take care of him.”

“In the morning.”

“Now, Doc. I’ll kick your door down.”

Jennings came out. Red Dog tried to fight them off. When they got him to the sickbay, into the light, his head was like a bloody pumpkin. He could not see at all. He could just balance himself on a chair.

“Oh my!” Jennings kept saying. “Oh my!”

He drew a basin of warm water and began laying out gauze and cotton.

“Okay, Doc. I got to go on watch,” Holman said.

As had become his custom on night watches, he began thinking about China Light. It took him away from the chill, nasty feeling of the ship, as the armed guard duty had taken him away from the sight and sound of it. He paced the floorplates, without seeing the rusting machinery all around him, and pondered his talk with Scharf in terms of China Light.

China Light was a collection of people. They grew stuff and made stuff and they ate it and they used it. They grew up and got married and had children and became old and died and they were buried at China Light. It was not as make-believe a thing as a ship. The rules
of the game at China Light had been American, but now they were Chinese. And the Chinese were having a revolution. In a revolution they threw out all the rules. As Scharf said, they would soon make new ones. But for a little while everything could be real.

The thought excited Holman. He stopped on the threshold of it and went out and coaled the fire. He came back and swabbed pump rods, hearing the splutter and sniffing the sharp fumes of hot grease. He dipped wicks in the oil box of the throbbing, purring, sparking dynamo. Things between people could be real the way machinery was real, he kept thinking. He was afraid of where that thought would lead him.

He followed it anyway. At China Light there were not now any rules to sort people out and make them be separate. People had their labels torn off. What they brought to a meeting with each other was just what they had inside their skins. At China Light there were no game rules to stop him and Shirley Eckert from loving each other and being married, if they wanted each other that way inside their own skins.

That was where the thought led. It shook him deeply. It threw a new light on his Hankow memories. She did want him that way, he realized. She had known, as he had not. At their last meeting, when she had hinted that he might desert and come to China Light with them, she was giving him the big, one, only chance of his whole life. He had lacked courage to take it.

Not courage, he thought. I was still trapped in the game. They kill you if you won’t play, and dying is still real. Well, maybe courage after all.

Well, it was not too late, he thought. He had been drawing his pay in Hankow bills and he had a wad of them in his locker. He could just stuff them in his pocket and get ashore and go, across the hills.

He was pacing excitedly. All right, when? Before the flood, before we sail for Hankow, he thought. A week or two yet. First chance I have to get ashore, I’ll keep going. I’ll walk fifty miles a day till I get there.

He was conscious of the sleeping ship above his head. To hell with
them and their make-believe and their smokestacking, he thought. I know what’s real. For the rest of his watch he paced the floorplates in a joyful storm of excitement, as if he were already striding down the miles between himself and China Light.

It rained heavily during the night and in the morning it was misty and warm. Only one or two men were on deck to watch the hate parade. It came into sight with gongs and bugles and massed flags from between a yellow brick building and a tin godown, the usual route.

What was different was that all the marchers were female. Grandmothers pegged along on bound feet. Little girls came clutching paper flags. Many of the women and girls had babies slung on their backs. Fresh young girl activists in green almost danced along. They carried the placards. Whole sized-off classes of schoolgirls came marching by. They wore neat blue skirts and jumpers and white shirtwaists and they sang shrilly as they marched. They all went eyes left as they passed the
San Pablo
, They spat and screamed and shook their fists and their placards.

TO HELL WITH
C
HRIST AND COOLIDGE
! one sign read. The girl kept twirling it above her head. The other side read:
HANG GEORGE FIVE!
Many of the signs mentioned women:
FREE ALL WOMEN! HUMAN RIGHTS FOR WIVES!

There was something uncanny about so many women streaming
by, and the clamor of female voices. It was hypnotic. To Holman they were beginning all to have the same face. It was screaming hatred at the
San Pablo
.

In a group approaching he saw with sudden shock that some were naked. His flesh surged powerfully. Twenty, thirty shapely girls in the little beehive bonnets, with red lips and bobbed black hair. Most had something about their hips, but five or six walked bare as daylight between their little bonnets and their blue cloth slippers. They came stepping gingerly in pairs, as if they were trying not to sway their hips.

Their hips swayed anyway. The ship exploded.

The Sand Pebbles boiled out on deck, shock-haired, scrag-bearded, stinking and ragged in dungarees. They manned the rail and pranced and pawed and set up a gobbling howl.

Goddlemightychrist! Look! Look!
they roared.
Them shafts! Them knockers! Them round little bellies!

The women shook their placards and screamed. The Sand Pebbles outroared them. They clutched and struck each other’s shoulders. They danced and pranced and snorted and pawed with their feet. They shouted hoarsely and all at once and so fast that it was not words at all. It was a great, collective animal howl of pain.

Holman stood fast. His flesh strained blindly toward that sway-curving grace unbearably multiple in rose and ivory and shadow. Time froze.

Right opposite two women held a ribbon placard. Red letters on white cried out:
FREE OF CHRISTIAN SHAME! STRIKE DOWN CHRISTIAN POWER!

Harris howled like a wolf. “Me for you, Sugarboxes! I ain’t no Christian!” He put one leg over the bulwark. Someone pulled him back.

Holman saw their faces. Smooth, fresh, pretty girl faces, contorted with hatred, eyes squinted almost closed. Faces terrible with pain and loathing of what they did. One face. A mask of a face. He looked directly into it.

An uprush of deep something carried away his lust. It was disgust
and anger and shame and sorrow. I
wish they didn’t have to do a thing like that
, he said aloud, unheard in the roaring all around him.

They were moving on. Holman felt deeply shaken. He felt that he had escaped some unnameable danger. The proud, angry naked bodies were dwindling with distance up the bund. The Sand Pebbles stampeded up to the bridge to fight over the long glass and binoculars.

The Sand Pebbles could not get over it. At dinner they gabbled like geese. They described what they had seen to each other, jointly recreating it in the air above the mess tables.

“They was trying to walk just from the knees down.”

“They didn’t want to bounce their knockers.”

“One there, I caught her eye. She shook it right at me.”

“It was me she shook it at!”

They could not understand it, but they hoped the women would do it again. They marveled why the women had done it.

“Spiting the missionaries, you suppose?”

“Spiting us, cause we can’t have any.”

“We get to Shanghai, we’ll have us some.”

“How about that look on their faces?” Holman asked Farren. “They could hardly stand what they were doing.”

“I could stand it all day,” Farren said. “I didn’t waste time looking at their faces.”

Holman saw the faces along the mess table. He saw whiskers and scaly necks and grimed hands and black fingernails. He saw the glitter in all the eyes. He stood up and went outside.

Scurvy of the spirit, he thought. Scharf was not joking. Scars and chancres and obscene tattoos on the spirit! Whatever the spirit might be. He walked around the ship. Wherever he went, he saw all the dirt and smelled all the stink.

His eyes fled away from the ship. The sand on the island was a tawny white. The river, brownish from the rain, was creeping up the sand. Trees and willows were budding out over there, in grayish-yellow and green. They had yellow-green misty shapes and birds dipped above them. Far beyond them, beyond the blue line of hills, a few hundred miles as a bird might fly, was China Light.

Under his feet the teak was gray and stained. At his elbow grimy white paint scaled and cracked. Above his head ripped and sooty awnings sagged. He went back inside, to his locker, and stuffed his wad of bills into his dungarees pocket. He took only about a dozen of the silver Mex dollars. They were still gesturing and gabbling at the mess tables.

On deck again, he tried to think of an excuse to get ashore. He could not just hail a sampan. They were boycotting the ship too. And Bronson, who had the quarterdeck watch, would be nosy about it.

Half an hour later, like the answer to a prayer, the
Woodcock
motor sampan came alongside. Holman went to the quarterdeck. Banger Knox, clean and pink in a faded boiler suit, came aboard. He had a round British canteen slung over his shoulder.

“Hi, Banger!” Holman said warmly.

“Hello, Jake.” Banger seemed ill at ease. “I’ve come to barter, if you’ve a three-inch valve to spare,” he said. “By some wild chance.”

“Got a three-inch gate, undrilled flanges, in the storeroom,” Holman said. “You’re welcome to it.”

They had to cross the engine room gratings to reach the storeroom. Banger did not look down through the gratings, but he could not escape the stink of foul bilges that rose up. He measured the flanges and the valve was just right.

“Well, now. This is what I brought to barter,” he said. He sloshed the canteen. “Rum. A quart of His Majesty’s finest.”

“I’ll settle for a ride in your motor pan,” Holman said. “You put me ashore over behind the island, and we’re square.”

Banger agreed, with a quizzical look. Holman told Bronson he was going to the
Woodcock
to borrow some packing. One of Banger’s stokers was running the boat. Banger told him to go around the island into the back channel.

“Anywhere over there,” Holman said, when they rounded the island. “I’ll wade ashore.”

“Jake, I’m fair curious,” Banger said. “Tell me it’s no business of mine, if you like.”

“I’m going to run away, Banger. Desert.”

“Hold up!” Banger jerked erect. “Back all engines!” The stoker
cut the motor and they were drifting. “You don’t mean that,” Banger said.

“I do mean it. I got a place to run to.”

“Jake, you’re daft! I’ll not be a party to it!” Banger’s face was turning red.

“You don’t have to give a damn about the rules in my navy.”

“I give a damn about you. Friendship cuts across rules.” “Not in my navy.”

Banger shook his head. He told the stoker to run the boat in among the willows on the island. It smelled cool and green and barky in there. They could not see Changsha or any of the gunboats. Banger sent his stoker up the bank out of earshot. He unslung the canteen.

“Best have a nip, a big one,” he said. “Then tell me about it.”

Holman tried, and he could not tell about it. Banger’s plain common sense made all of Holman’s ideas sound silly. They passed the canteen back and forth. The rum was aromatic and fiery. Holman knew Banger was defeating him. He began attacking the British sailor.

“What could your lousy gunboat do against forty million Hunanese, now or ever?” he asked. “You’re a scarecrow and they know it. Stick around long enough and they’ll make you know it.”

Banger raised an eyebrow. They were both feeling the rum.

“You’re a paper tiger to scare devils, and the devils are wise to you,” Holman pursued his attack. “It’s all paper. All make-believe. Set ways of doing things. Treaties. Regulations. Uniforms. Flags. Drills. Guards of honor. Salutes. Visits to warlords. The whole damned business of show-the-flag. All paper, and now the Chinese are tearing up the paper. Banger, you’re a paper man!”

“Now just you wait a bit! Wait a bit, there!” Banger waved a finger. “I don’t believe I’m a paper man!”

“You are! You ain’t real! The Chinese don’t believe in you any more. So how the hell can you go on believing in yourself?”

“I believe in me!”

Banger was red-faced and very upset. He slapped his knee and squeezed it.

“How can you prove it? How can you prove you’re real, even to yourself?”

“I just know it.” Banger was regaining his temper. “Is that what’s wrong on your ship, thinking and saying things like that?”

“No. Just acting ’em out, I think. But it’s why I want to run away, Banger. So I can know I’m real. You savvy now?”

“Can’t you bloody Yanks believe in yourselves, by yourselves?” Banger was as dead set as ever against helping Holman to desert. “Find some other way to prove you’re real, if you need proof,” he said.