The Keys of the Kingdom

by A. J. Cronin

  He felt better an hour later as the lad went padding down the hill, his blue bundle bobbing on his back, his intelligent features screwed to a staunch tenacity. The better to view the departure of the launch, the priest hastened to the belfry tower. But here, as he perched himself against the pediment, his eye darkened. On the vast plain before him he saw two thinly moving streams of beasts and straggling humans, reduced, alike, by the distance to the size of little ants – two moving streams, the one approaching, the other departing from the city.

  He could not wait; but, descending, crossed immediately to the school. In the wooden corridor Sister Martha was on her knees scrubbing the boards. He stopped.

  ‘Where is Reverend Mother?’

  She raised a damp hand to straighten her wimple. ‘In the classroom.’ She added, in a sibilant, confederate’s whisper: ‘And lately much disarranged.’

  He went into the classroom, which, at his entry, fell immediately to silence. The rows of bright childish faces gave him suddenly, a gripping pang. Quickly, quickly, he fought back that unbearable fear.

  Maria-Veronica had turned towards him with a pale, unreadable brow. He approached and addressed her in an undertone.

  ‘There are signs of an epidemic in the city. I am afraid it may be plague. If so, it is important for us to be prepared.’ He paused, under her silence, then went on. ‘At all costs we must try to keep the sickness from the children. That means isolating the school and the Sisters’ house. I shall arrange at once for some kind of barrier to be put up. The children and all three Sisters should remain inside with one Sister always on duty at the entrance.’ He paused again, forcing himself to be calm. ‘Don’t you think that wise?’

  She faced him, cold and undismayed. ‘Profoundly wise.’

  ‘Are there any details we might discuss?’

  She answered bitterly: ‘You have already familiarized us with the principle of segregation.’

  He took no notice. ‘You know how the contagion is spread?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence. He turned towards the door, sombre from her fixed refusal to make peace. ‘If God sends this great trouble upon us, we must work hard together. Let us try to forget our personal relations.’

  ‘They are best forgotten.’ She spoke in her most frigid tone, submissive upon the surface, yet charged, beneath, with high disdainful breeding.

  He left the classroom. He could not but admire her courage. The news he had conveyed to her would have terrified most women. He reflected tensely that they might need all their spirit before the month was past.

  Convinced of the need of haste, he recrossed the compound and despatched the gardener for Mr Chia’s foreman and six of the men who had worked on the church. Immediately, when these arrived, he set them to build a thick fence of kaolin on the boundary he had marked off. The dried stalks of maize made an excellent barricade. While it rose under his anxious eyes, girding the school and convent house, he trenched a narrow ditch around the bases. This could be flooded with disinfectant if the need arose.

  The work went on all day and was not completed until late at night. Even after the men had gone he could not rest, a mounting tide of dread was in his blood. He took most of his stores into the enclosure, carrying sacks of potatoes and flour on his shoulders, butter, bacon, condensed milk, and all the tinned goods of the mission. His small stock of medicines he likewise transferred. Only then did he feel some degree of relief. He looked at his watch: three o’clock in the morning. It was not worth while to go to bed. He went into the church and spent the hours remaining until dawn in prayer.

  When it was light, before the mission was astir he set out for the yamen of the Chief Magistrate. At the Manchu Gate fugitives from the stricken provinces were still crowding unhindered into the city. Scores had taken up their lodging beneath the stars, in the lee of the Great Wall. As he passed the silent figures, huddled under sacking, half-frozen by the bitter wind, he heard the racking sound of coughing. His heart flowed out towards these poor exhausted creatures, many already stricken, enduring humbly, suffering without hope; and a burning impetuous desire to help them suffused his soul. One old man lay dead and naked, stripped of the garments he no longer needed. His wrinkled toothless face was upturned towards the sky.

  Spurred by the pity in his breast, Francis reached the yamen of justice. But here a blow awaited him. Mr Pao’s cousin was gone. All the Paos had departed, the closed shutters of their house stared back at him like sightless eyes.

  He took a swift and painful breath and turned, chafing, into the courts. The passages were deserted, the main chamber a vault of echoing emptiness. He could see no one, except a few clerks scurrying with a furtive air. From one of these he learned that the Chief Magistrate had been called away to the obsequies of a distant relative in T chientin, eight hundred li due south. It was plain to the harrassed priest that all but the lowest court officials had been ‘summoned’ from Pai-tan. The civil administration of the city had ceased to exist.

  The furrow between Francis’ eyes was deeply cut, a haggard wound. Only one course lay open to him now. And he knew that it was futile. Nevertheless, he turned and made his way rapidly to the cantonment.

  With the bandit Wai-Chu complete overlord of the province, ferociously exacting voluntary gifts, the position of the regular military forces was academic. They dissolved or seceded as a matter of routine on the bandit’s periodic visits to the town. Now, as Francis reached the barracks, a bare dozen soldiers hung about, conspicuously without arms, in dirty grey-cotton tunics.

  They stopped him at the gate. But nothing could withstand the fire which now consumed him. He forced his way to an inner chamber, where a young lieutenant in a clean and elegant uniform lounged by the paper-latticed window, reflectively polishing his white teeth with a willow twig.

  Lieutenant Shon and the priest inspected one another, the young dandy with polite guardedness, his visitor with all the dark and hopeless ardour of his purpose.

  ‘The city is threatened by a great sickness.’ Francis fought to inject his tone with deliberate restraint. ‘ I am seeking for someone with courage and authority, to combat the grave danger.’

  Shon continued dispassionately to consider the priest. ‘ General Wai-Chu has the monopoly of authority. And he is leaving for Tou-en-lai tomorrow.’

  ‘That will make it easier for those who remain. I beg of you to help me.’

  Shon shrugged his shoulders virtuously. ‘Nothing would afford me greater satisfaction than to work with the Shang-Foo entirely without prospect of reward, for the supreme benefit of suffering mankind. But I have no more than fifty soldiers. And no supplies.’

  ‘I have sent to Sen-siang for supplies.’ Francis spoke more rapidly. ‘They will arrive soon. But meanwhile we must do all in our command to quarantine the refugees and prevent the pestilence from starting in the city.’

  ‘It has already started.’ Shon answered coolly. ‘In the Street of the Basket-makers there are more than sixty cases. Many dead. The rest dying.’

  A terrible urgency tautened the priest’s nerves, a surge of protest, a burning refusal to accept defeat. He took a quick step forward.

  ‘I am going to aid these people. If you do not come I shall go alone. But I am perfectly assured that you are coming.’

  For the first time the Lieutenant looked uncomfortable. He was a bold youngster, despite his foppish air, with ideas of his own advancement and a sense of personal integrity which had caused him to reject the price offered him by Wai-Chu, as dishonourably inadequate. Without the slightest interest in the fate of his fellow citizens, he had been, on the priest’s arrival, idly debating the advisability of joining his few remaining men in the Street of the Stolen Hours. Now, he was disagreeably embarrassed and reluctantly impressed. Like a man moving against his own will, he rose, threw away his twig and slowly buckled on his revolver.

  ‘This does not shoot well. But as a symbol it encourages the unswerving obedience of my most trusted
followers.’

  They went out together into the cold grey day.

  From the Street of the Stolen Hours they routed some thirty soldiers and marched to the teeming warrens of the basket-weavers’ quarters by the river. Here the plague had already settled, with the instinct of a dunghill fly. The river dwellings, tiers of cardboard hovels, leaning one on top of another, against the high mud bank, were festering with dirt, vermin, and the disease. Francis saw that unless immediate measures were taken the contagion would spread in this congestion like a raging conflagration.

  He said to the Lieutenant, as they emerged, bent double, from the end hovel of the row:

  ‘We must find some place to house the sick.’

  Shon reflected. He was enjoying himself more than he had expected. This foreign priest had shown much ‘face’ in stooping close to the stricken persons. He admired ‘face’ greatly.

  ‘We shall commandeer the yamen of the yu shih – the imperial recorder.’ For many months Shon had been at violent enmity with this official, who had defrauded him of his share of the salt tax. ‘I am confident that my absent friend’s abode will make a pleasing hospital.’

  They went immediately to the recorder’s yamen. It was large and richly furnished, situated in the best part of the city. Shon effected entry by the simple expedient of breaking down the door. While Francis remained with half a dozen men to make some preparations for receiving the sick, he departed with the remainder. Presently the first cases arrived in litters and were arranged in rows on quilted mats upon the floor.

  That night, as Francis went up the hill towards the mission, tired from his long day’s work, he heard above the faint incessant death music, the shouts of wild carousing and sporadic rifle shots. Behind him, Wai-Chu’s irregulars were looting the shuttered shops. But presently the city fell again to silence. In the still moonlight he could see the bandits, streaming from the Eastern Gate, spurring their stolen ponies across the plains. He was glad to see them go.

  At the summit of the hill the moon suddenly was dimmed. It began at last to snow. When he drew near the gateway in the kaolin fence the air was alive and fluttering. Soft dry blinding flakes came whirling out of the darkness, settling on eyes and brow, entering his lips like tiny hosts, whirling so dense and thick that in a minute the ground was carpeted in white. He stood outside, in the white coldness, rent by anxiety, and called in a low voice. Immediately Mother Maria-Veronica came to the gate, holding up a lantern which cast a beam of spectral brightness on the snow.

  He scarcely dared to put the question. ‘Are you all well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His heart stopped pounding in sheer relief. He waited, suddenly conscious of his fatigue and the fact that he had not eaten all that day. Then he said: ‘We have established a hospital in the town … not much … but the best we could do.’ Again he waited, as if for her to speak, deeply sensible of the difficulty of his position, and the greatness of the favour he must ask. ‘If one of the Sisters could be spared … would volunteer to come … to help us with the nursing … I should be most grateful.’

  There was a pause. He could almost see her lips shape themselves to answer coldly: ‘You ordered us to remain in here. You forbade us to enter the town.’ Perhaps the sight of his face, worn, drawn and heavy-eyed, through the maze of snowflakes, restrained her. She said: ‘I will come.’

  His heart lifted. Despite her fixed antagonism towards him she was incomparably more efficient than Martha or Clotilde. ‘It means moving your quarters to the yamen. Wrap up warmly. And take all you need.’

  Ten minutes later he took her bag: they went down to the yamen together in silence. The dark lines of their footprints in the fresh snow were far apart.

  Next morning sixteen of those admitted to the yamen were dead. But three times that number were coming in. It was pneumonic plaque and its virulence surpassed the fiercest venom. People dropped with it as if bludgeoned and were dead before the next dawn. It seemed to congeal the blood, to rot the lungs, which threw up a thin white speckled sputum, swarming with lethal germs. Often one hour spaced the interval between a man’s heedless laugh and the grin that was his death-mask.

  The three physicians of Pai-tan had failed to arrest the epidemic by the method of acupuncture. On the second day they ceased pricking the limbs of their patients with needles, and discreetly withdrew to a more salubrious practice.

  By the end of that week the city was riddled from end to end. A wave of panic struck through the apathy of the people. The southern exits of the city were choked with carts, chairs, overburdened mules and a struggling, hysterical populace.

  The cold intensified. A great blight seemed to lie on the afflicted land, here and beyond. Dazed with overwork and lack of sleep, Francis nevertheless dimly sensed the calamity at Pai-tan to be but a portion of the major tragedy. He had no news. He did not grasp the immensity of the disaster: a hundred thousand miles of territory stricken, and half a million dead beneath the snow. Nor could he know that the eyes of the civilized world were bent in sympathy on China, that expeditions quickly organized in America and Britain had arrived to combat the disease.

  The torturing suspense deepened daily. There was still no sign of Joseph’s return. Would help never reach them from Sen-siang? A dozen times each day he plodded to the wharfside for the sight of the upcoming boat.

  Then, at the beginning of the second week, Joseph suddenly appeared, weary and spent, but with a pale smile of achievement. He had encountered every obstacle. The countryside was in a ferment, Sen-siang a place of torment, the mission there ravaged by the disease. But he had persisted. He had sent his telegrams and bravely waited, hiding in his launch in a creek of the river. Now he had a letter. He produced it with a grimed and shaking hand. More: a doctor who knew the Father, an old and respected friend of the Father, would arrive on the supply boat!

  With beating excitement, and a strange wild premonition, Father Chisholm took the letter from Joseph, opened it and read:

  Lord Leighton Relief Expedition Chek-kow

  DEAR FRANCIS,

  I have been in China five weeks now with the Leighton expedition. This should not surprise you if you remember my youthful longings for the decks of ocean-going freighters and the exotic jungles that lay beyond. Quite truly, I thought I had forgotten all that nonsense myself. But at home, when they began asking for volunteers for the relief party, I suddenly surprised myself by joining up. It certainly was not the desire to become a National Hero which prompted the absurd impulse. Probably a reaction, long deferred, against my humdrum life in Tynecastle. And perhaps, if I may say it, a very real hope of seeing you.

  Anyhow, ever since we arrived, I’ve been working my way up-country, trying to push myself into your sacred presence. Your telegram to Nankin was turned over to our headquarters there and word of it reached me at Hai-chang next day. I immediately asked Leighton, who is a very decent fellow, despite his title, if I might push off to give you a hand. He agreed and even let me have one of our few remaining power boats. I’ve just reached Sen-siang and am collecting supplies. I will be along full steam ahead, probably arriving twenty-four hours behind your servant. Take care of yourself till then. All my news later.

  In haste, Yours, WILLIE TULLOCH

  The priest smiled, slowly, for the first time in many days, and with a deep and secret warmth. He felt no great amazement; it was so typical of Tulloch to sponsor such a cause. He was braced, fortified by the unexpected fortune of his friend’s arrival.

  It was difficult to hold his eagerness in check. Next day when the relief boat was sighted he hastened to the wharf. Even before the launch drew alongside, Tulloch had stepped ashore, older, stouter, yet unchangeably the same dour quiet Scot, careless as ever in his dress, shy, strong and prejudiced as a Highland steer, as plain and honest as homespun tweed.

  The priest’s vision was absurdly blurred.

  ‘Man, Francis, it’s you!’ Willie could say no more. He kept on shaking hands, confused by his emot
ion, debarred by his Northern blood from more overt demonstration. At last he muttered, as if conscious of the need of speech: ‘ When we walked down Darrow High Street we never dreamed we’d foregather in a place like this.’ He tried a half-laugh, but with little success. ‘ Where’s your coat and gumboots? You can’t stroll through the pest in these shoes. It’s high time I kept an eye on you.’

  ‘And on our hospital.’ Francis smiled.

  ‘What!’ The doctor’s sandy eyebrows lifted. ‘You have a hospital of sorts? Let’s see it.’

  ‘As soon as you are ready.’

  Instructing the crew of the launch to follow him with the supplies, Tulloch set off, at the priest’s side, agile despite his increased girth, his eyes intent in his red hard-wearing face, his thinned hair showing a mass of freckles on his ruddy scalp as he punctuated his friend’s brief report with comprehending nods.

  At the end of it, as they reached the yamen, he remarked with a dry twinkle: ‘ You might have done worse. Is this your centre?’ Across his shoulder he told his bearers to bring in the cases.

  Inside the hospital he made a quick inspection, his eyes darting right, left, and with an odd curiosity towards Mother Maria-Veronica, who now accompanied them. He took a swift glance at Shon, when the young dandy came in, then firmly shook hands with him. Finally as they stood, all four, at the entrance to the long suite of rooms which formed the main ward, he addressed them quietly.

  ‘I think you have done wonders. And I hope you don’t expect melodramatic miracles from me. Forget all your preconceived ideas and face the truth – I’m not the dark handsome doctor with the portable laboratory. I’m here to work with you, like one of yourselves, which means … flatly … like a navvy. I haven’t a drop of vaccine in my bag – in the first place because it isn’t one damn bit of good outside the story-books. And in the second because every flask we brought to China was used up in a week. Ye’ll note,’ he inserted mildly, ‘it didn’t check the epidemic. Remember! This is practically a fatal disease once it gets you. In such circumstances, as my old dad used to say,’ he smiled faintly, ‘an ounce of prevention is better than a ton of cure. That’s why, if you don’t mind, we’ll turn our attention – not to the living – but to the dead.’