China Seas

by John Harris

  To Willie’s surprise it was a rickshaw that met him, not Da Braga’s automobile. The Portuguese shrugged.

  ‘No petrol,’ he said.

  ‘Why not, Luis?’

  ‘Something’s in the wind. There was plenty of it and now there’s none. Student trouble in the south, I think. It comes up in forty gallon drums, but the junks that carry them aren’t sailing.’

  There had been a few sporadic outbreaks of shouting along the bund and the matshed roof of the market place had been set on fire, but not much else. A new warlord was on the warpath, but nobody expected much in the way of trouble because all it meant, if he succeeded, was transferring the squeeze, and squeeze was always allowed for in the overheads. Otherwise there seemed to be very little military movement in the area. Occasional groups of the old warlord’s soldiers appeared on the bund, shabby, ill-clothed and bullying, and sampans were sometimes stolen to ferry them across the river, but otherwise their general was still established north of the city, with his officers, cars and women, and was nervously counting his money.

  ‘Chiang K’Ai-Shek’s declared war on him,’ Da Braga said bluntly, plonking the brandy bottle on the table. ‘He’s letting it be known that if a warlord isn’t for him and the Kuomin-tang, then he’s against them, and our boy’s growing worried because at the moment Chiang’s the only one with any real power. His agents are everywhere, dishing out propaganda and increasing his influence. But at the moment nothing’s happened beyond a minor riot over a murdered coolie and a few Chinese beheaded. Mind you that’s a bad sign. There are always riots and executions when a warlord considers he’s in danger.’

  ‘Will he bolt?’ A change of warlord always meant small adjustments in business.

  Da Braga shrugged. ‘He has a tug waiting with steam up,’ he said. ‘And that usually indicates a midnight flit. The value of his banknotes has fallen, too, because he’s already got all the ready cash in the area in his coffers. I reckon it’s about time for him to turn up as a merchant in Hong Kong.’

  ‘What do people think?’

  ‘They’re worried. His disappearance would mean an army on the loose, hungry and with no prospect of cash, no discipline and no scruples, but plenty of arms and ammunition. That means a crime wave, because, even if they don’t use the arms themselves, they can always sell them for others to use.’

  ‘Has it affected business?’

  ‘There are less people in the streets and shops put up shutters occasionally. A few of the rich Chinese have hired junks and disappeared. A few more will go, I suppose, and not come back until the troubles are over.’

  Willie stared from the window. He had been in China long enough now to develop a second sense and, with an instinctive nose for danger, he sensed an ominous feel about the situation. The generals were shrewd, brutal men, and foul play had been part of the Chinese political scene for a long time, but now the revolutionary tenets of Sun Yat-Sen, enhanced by the success of the revolution in Russia, were taking hold. The old trinity of landlord, loan shark and merchant that had been supported by the warlords was beginning to feel the pinch and there was a feeling in the air that the old confrontations could no longer be settled with the exchange of courtesies and a few suitcases full of dollars. A general could no longer govern the entire province with his captains and colonels because the slogans that emanated from the south were stronger than money, even stronger than weapons, and the jockeying for control had changed to a wave that was moving inexorably northwards from its beginnings near the coast.

  The first thing Abigail did when he appeared at the house was to inform him that the servants had left.

  He stared about him angrily, almost as if he expected to find them hiding in corners. ‘Why?’ he demanded.

  ‘They didn’t say,’ she pointed out calmly. ‘They just didn’t turn up. Polly says the same thing happened to her.’

  ‘Is it a strike?’

  ‘It doesn’t appear to be, but I gather other people have had the same trouble.’

  It worried Willie because the departed servants had been with them a long time, and that night when they saw fireworks in the Chinese City instead of the usual night-time silence, somehow it seemed ominous.

  ‘Sounds like trouble down there,’ Willie said.

  By daylight, the noise from the city seemed to be growing louder and Willie was just on the point of heading for his office when Da Braga appeared on a bicycle.

  ‘There’s been a battle,’ he said. ‘I’ve just heard. It was chiefly with words and silver bullets, but our boy’s gone – pulled out and headed south. We’ve got a new warlord.’

  ‘So that’s what the fuss was about? What about petrol?’

  ‘There’ll be no petrol here now. Not for some time. The students have decided not.’ Da Braga gave a sad smile. ‘The Kuomintang supporters fight a different way from the old warlords. They use words as well as guns, and they’ve persuaded the students that the KMT’s the party to support and that they must do all they can to make things difficult for its enemies. Our petrol’s vanished into the gutters.’

  Telephones and radios and the warships anchored off the bund gave them the rest of the news. The warlords of the north had begun to feel that Chiang was growing too big for his boots and had decided that together they were strong enough to oppose anyone and anything, even General Chiang. Nevertheless, the situation called for an immediate meeting of all owners and managers of businesses in Yangpo, and Elliott Wissermann arrived in a rickshaw to ask Willie to make sure he would attend. ‘I reckon it’s beginning to look nasty,’ he said.

  ‘I reckon it is,’ Willie agreed. ‘You should take Polly downstream to Shanghai. Or at least let Ab take her. If there’s trouble, this will be no place for her.’

  ‘I’m not leaving Elliott,’ Polly insisted.

  ‘And I can’t leave Yangpo,’ Wissermann said.

  ‘Have you been in touch with your father?’

  ‘He says that if the Whites stick together the Chinks won’t dare do a thing. Not with the gunboats in the river. Dammit, sir, there’s a cruiser and three gunboats just off the bund. They wouldn’t try anything on with that lot on the doorstep.’

  As Willie had half-expected, the meeting degenerated into a squabble. One half was for packing up and leaving, while the other half jeered at them as cowardly. In the end, nothing was decided and it was agreed to wait and see. Saying nothing, Willie sat with Da Braga and his brandy bottle in his office making plans.

  ‘What can go, Luis?’ he asked. ‘I’m not risking your life or the lives of your family just to stay in business. I’ve got interests elsewhere and we can just shut up shop here if necessary until it’s all over.’

  It was decided that, while the trouble remained small and didn’t concern the Europeans, they would carry on as before, but that they would arrange things so that everything could be closed down at the drop of a hat or the first Kuomintang shell to fall in the city. Abigail was in total agreement and was already crating up valuables from the house to be shipped downstream. She was worried about Polly, nevertheless, especially as she’d just heard that she was pregnant.

  ‘Already?’ Willie said.

  Abigail gave him a little smile. ‘I was pregnant before we got married,’ she reminded him.

  The city was in a turmoil. The effects of the old warlord’s disappearance were everywhere. Discovering it had been abandoned, his army had sallied from its quarters in search of food, pay and loot and were now moving about the streets, disorganised, sullen and ready for trouble, and the mob, feeling the situation was the fault of the foreigners, had come out and were raging about foreign rule.

  The cobbles were littered with the useless banknotes and fluttering pamphlets of the previous incumbent as governor, and the shop windows that hadn’t been boarded up had been broken. Even now, however, the hatred was directed chiefly at the Japanese. There was a big placard, ‘GO HOME JAPANESE’ fluttering above a yelling crowd of shaven Chinese skulls that looked like pe
bbles on a beach. A Japanese merchant’s car was overturned and went up in a puff of smoke and a flower of red flame, and the Japanese owner had to run for his life, pelted with stones, brickbats and filth. A few more shop windows were whacked by carrying poles into shining splinters of glass and Chinese rent collectors began to gather on the bund waiting to be taken off, while sampans in a tight mass circled the Japanese cruiser, the students yelling abuse until the crew began to rig hoses to drive them away.

  That night fires were started and spread to the business quarter, so that the whole bund was lit up. Cries and shouts floated across the water, sparks whirled up, and dim black figures ran to and fro in terror. Some jumped into the river and escaped, but some were caught and flung into the flames.

  The following day everything was quiet. There were no students on the streets, no soldiers in the city, no noise, no shouting, no threats, just a solitary dead Chinese, the breeze blowing the dust on to his staring terrified eyes and playing with the flap on his tunic. The silence seemed unbelievable and the rent collectors and the old warlord dependants began to make their way back to their homes, hoping they hadn’t been too much damaged.

  ‘You can unpack your treasures,’ Willie advised his wife.

  ‘Not likely,’ Abigail said stoutly.

  ‘It’s over, Ab. As usual, it’s come to a stop.’

  ‘For the time being.’

  They continued with their task for a while, then Abigail straightened up. ‘Did you know Emmeline’s up here?’ she asked.

  ‘I heard her business is due to go up for sale,’ Willie said. ‘I even thought of making an offer, but I doubt if she’d entertain it. What’s she doing?’

  ‘Saving money. It’s cheaper here.’

  ‘She picked a hell of a time to arrive.’

  Abigail was silent for a moment. When she spoke again it was quietly and slowly. ‘I shall go and see her,’ she said.

  Willie’s head jerked round. ‘What in God’s name for?’

  ‘She’s on her own.’

  ‘What about this chap she took up with? – the latest.’

  ‘He’s on his way back to England. He said he didn’t come to China to get murdered.’

  Willie grinned. ‘She does manage to pick ’em, doesn’t she? But what’s that to do with you?’

  ‘She might need help if anything happens.’

  ‘And you’re going to offer it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  It startled Willie. Abigail had never shown any interest in his old enemy, even though he had guessed that, in her shrewd way, she had some idea of what the enmity was based on, and he found it hard to comprehend now that she was prepared to put herself out to help. But then, Abigail had always been an understanding person, always willing to help a lame dog, always compassionate, idealistic and Godfearing. He couldn’t resist tossing out a warning that was not entirely humorous.

  ‘She’ll probably throw something at you.’

  ‘At you,’ Abigail corrected him. ‘I doubt if she will at me.’

  ‘You seem sure.’

  ‘Women know these things.’

  ‘Sweet suffering J! After the things she tried to do to me, too!’

  ‘Why, Willie?’ Abigail’s face was innocent of guile. ‘Why should she hate you so much?’

  Willie realised he had almost put his foot in it. ‘Various things,’ he said. ‘Long ago. Before I met you. I worked for her father. I think she thought she might marry me.’

  ‘You could never keep out of trouble, could you?’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her, less to reassure her than to stop her asking questions. ‘Ab,’ he said, meaning every word, ‘I’m the luckiest of men.’

  But, as he released her, he felt the old inevitable twinge of guilt that he had never been frank about Nadya and was still, even now, not being honest with her.

  Two

  The unrest continued to cause gloom among the foreign investors and their managers and staff. A few sent their wives and families downstream but for the most part they did nothing. The plans he had made with Da Braga completed, Willie fell to helping Abigail in labelling and parcelling their belongings. Polly arrived occasionally, chiefly to complain that she was feeling nauseous, but she steadfastly refused to accompany them downstream.

  ‘My place is here with my husband,’ she insisted.

  ‘We’re best out of here,’ Abigail insisted. ‘I’ve heard they’ve chopped a few more heads off and that the students have all joined the Kuomintang.’

  ‘An American gunboat’s arrived,’ Polly said defiantly.

  True enough, American sailors were on the bund, excited and curious. They had an ancient machine gun and seemed to think they had nothing to worry about, but soon afterwards, a car belonging to one of the American businessmen knocked over a fruit stall so that it collapsed in a welter of baskets and rolling fruit and the proprietor began to screech abuse and hammer the car with his fists. A coolie was almost too quick to join him, bringing down his carrying pole to whack a dent in the bonnet before the unlucky American could get the vehicle into gear and bolt, his klaxon honking like a rising duck in a panic. Within minutes a mob had gathered round the overturned fruit stall, arguing and yelling at the owner, then, as the American sailors fired a few rounds over their heads, they hitched up their blue cotton pants and moved off to set fire to a wooden warehouse.

  ‘Jeeze,’ one of the Americans said. ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘Not always,’ Willie said. ‘Just from time to time.’

  That evening, the vanished warlord’s soldiers began to straggle out of the town, a horde of undisciplined men holding umbrellas and parasols, even wearing boaters to protect their heads against the sun. As they slogged by, their rifles slung anyhow, their equipment missing, their officers jogged past on shaggy ponies, followed by the ragtag and bobtail of the army, the wives and children and camp followers. Their artillery, a single Maxim, a .75 and two or three battered Russian guns, rattled behind them with the ox-carts containing the luggage and equipment.

  ‘That’s an army?’ the American sailor said.

  ‘Shall we say they’re soldiers,’ Willie corrected him.

  ‘They couldn’t fight their way out of Mom’s apple pie.’

  ‘That’s only because they’ve got nothing to fight for and never have had,’ Willie said. ‘Give ’em that something, and you’ll find they’re different.’

  ‘What would that something be, sir, you reckon?’

  ‘Nationality, unity and a little pride in themselves.’

  ‘They’ll never get it. The Slopeheads aren’t like that.’

  Willie shrugged. ‘I suspect it won’t be long before they are,’ he said.

  The gloom that had already appeared in Yangpo had taken a good hold on Shanghai by the time Abigail and Willie returned. The place was constantly being brought to a stop these days by demonstrations as the workers showed their loyalty to Chiang K’Ai-Shek’s growing Kuomintang party. The mood had even spread to the immediate hinterland, where Kuomintang agents were producing a frenzy of excitement.

  Chiang was promising now to clear up the mess in the north. He had decided that the agreement the warlords had made to stick together was not worth the paper it was written on – if it was written on paper – and he clearly thought that now was the time, while the European powers were preoccupied with the strikes and riots, to make his move.

  It was the long-cherished but still unfulfilled dream of Sun Yat-Sen that one day the Revolution, armed and united, would march from its base in Canton and move inexorably northwards to rid the country of the warlords and their masters, the wealthy merchants, moneylenders and rent collectors, and, above all, of the foreign devils who had battened like leeches on to China and drained her of her prosperity.

  ‘There’s one thing,’ Kee pointed out as they sat in Willie’s office discussing the possibilities that the move might provoke, ‘if he doesn’t have the support of the Chinese merchants and the me
n who control the money in Shanghai, he certainly has the support of the peasants.’

  ‘And the women, George,’ Willie said. ‘They’re flocking to join him. In any capacity, even as soldiers.’

  It wasn’t hard to see why. In the pointless and savage little civil war that had been tearing China apart for two decades, women had always been regarded as mere chattels who could be dragged off, raped or simply butchered and left in the gutter. The newspapers were always full of harrowing details whenever a town was taken over.

  But, curiously, the trouble which had started the unexpected alarm died down just as suddenly as it had come.

  ‘The only bloody fighting they’re doing is being done with words,’ Willie said, puzzled because it was something that was entirely new. The warlords had often negotiated but had always managed to retire full of wealth. Nowadays they were being defeated, and often only with words – pamphlets, posters and columns in the press.

  ‘It’s the Communists,’ Kee said. ‘They’ve learned the meaning of propaganda.’

  ‘Which means,’ Willie said, ‘that if Chiang moves he’ll be taking a big chance that Japan or one of the Western powers might be persuaded to intervene to prop up the warlords against him.’

  The possibilities were endless and always fascinating.

  ‘Allying himself to the Communists was a mistake,’ he went on. ‘The northern warlords are presenting him as a raging Bolshevik and that’s enough to put people like Gerald Honeyford off him any time.’

  ‘Do you think he’s bitten off more than he can chew?’

  Willie grinned. ‘I’ll bet Honeyford and his pals are taking heart that the alliance of the warlords will be enough to destroy him. After all, George, he’s not very old or experienced. I bet they’re hoping it’ll all go wrong and that the students will decide they’ve backed the wrong man. Then, with the unrest dying down, the Chinese will slip back into the old ways, and Honeyford and his pals will go on making money from them as they always have.’