China Seas

by John Harris

  The ‘dancing girls’ were now armed with the weapons of the captain, the engineer and the dead Sikh guards. Among them also were a few of the deck passengers, clearly also part of the gang, passing up cans of kerosene from the foredeck. The junk to port was still bearing down swiftly on the stopped ship, and Willie knew they were intending to sink the Tien Quan with dynamite, by setting fire to her or by opening the seacocks. They would then vanish aboard the junk and get away quite cleanly, because there would be no trace of the ship beyond a little floating wreckage and perhaps a body or two, and it would be assumed she had been lost in one of the squalls for which the South China Sea was notorious.

  The phoney girls and the infiltrated passengers from the foredeck were gathered round Yip while the rest of the passengers, screaming women, children and shouting men, were herded into the bows. Two men headed for the captain’s cabin and Willie guessed that, sent for the silver that had been taken on board, they were seeking the compradore who had doubtless tucked himself away in some previously arranged hiding place. Yip’s contacts in Canton must have warned him of Chiang’s unexpected advance north and the movement of the silver, and the plot to attack the ship had been hatched quickly, with Yip joining at the last minute dressed as a woman. No wonder he and Zychov were so close. Zychov had been a naval officer and knew everything there was to know about ships. He’d probably even led a few raids himself, because, not very long before, one of the Pirate gangs had been found to have been led by a rogue officer from the German Imperial Navy, left rootless and futureless by the mutiny in the High Seas Fleet in 1918.

  By this time, the pirates had dragged the wounded mate and the wireless operator forward. Yip was performing what seemed to be a small dance of triumph, stepping daintily as Willie had seen him more than once in one of the Shanghai hotels, and, as he nodded, one of the ‘dancing girls’ raised his revolver. It was too much for Willie and he lifted the Sikh’s rifle. He had always been a good shot and he dropped the man with the revolver without effort.

  As the other pirates swung round to see where the shot had come from, he saw Yip halt in the middle of his little dance and his eyes widen as he recognised Willie.

  The second shot took Yip in the throat. He disappeared backwards as his stumbling feet caught in a ringbolt, and ended up flat on his back with his feet supported on a coil of rope. Incongruously, Willie noticed, as they stuck out from the voluminous robes he’d worn, that they were encased in his patent leather dancing pumps. At least he thought, he wouldn’t be using them again.

  Without their leader, the other pirates were confused and began to head for the ship’s side. As they did so, the two men who had been sent to look for the compradore reappeared, carrying the box of silver. Reaching the top of the ladder, they stared about them, wondering what was happening and Willie shot one of them with the revolver. The box dropped at the feet of the second one as his partner rolled down the ladder with flying arms and legs.

  ‘Quick!’ The mate, his face covered with blood, had dived for the shelter of one of the winches. ‘The machine gun!’

  The gun on the bridge was pointing up in the air and Willie scrambled up the ladder, expecting a bullet in the back every inch of the way. As he swung the weapon, the pirates yelled and began to jump overboard, but, when he pulled the trigger, there was nothing but a heavy ‘clunk’.

  ‘How the bloody hell do you work this thing?’ he screamed in fury.

  The mate had struggled up beside him. ‘It needs loading,’ he croaked and, elbowing Willie out of the way he shoved the end of the belt into the breech, yanked at the cocking handle and swung the weapon towards the approaching junk. The clack-clack as it fired sounded deafening.

  ‘Up!’ Willie yelled. ‘Up a bit!’

  The mate raised the muzzle and fired again, and immediately they saw men running along the junk’s deck. The slatted sail shifted and the bow swung away from the Tien Quan. His face contorted with pain and fury, the mate gave the vessel a few more bursts, then swung the gun round and began to aim at the men swimming in the water alongside.

  ‘Murdering bastards!’ he was snarling over and over again like a litany. ‘Murdering bastards! Murdering bloody bastards!’

  With the captain, the chief engineer and the compradore dead and the mate and the wireless operator wounded, the engine wrecked, and Willie struggling half-naked in the engine room in an attempt to get the electricity working, the Tien Quan wallowed for three days in the oily, lifting water before the destroyer which was finally called to her rescue appeared. It had taken all of twenty-four hours before the wounded wireless operator had been able to repair his damaged set and send out an SOS, and another forty-eight before help arrived, and they were taken in tow.

  They had taken several prisoners from among the deck passengers, and had captured two of the ‘dancing girls’, their hands tied behind their backs, the paint still on their faces as evidence of the plot. The bodies of the dead were lying in a row in the lazarette, Yip at the head of them, still in his women’s clothing, and there were several more, victims of the mate’s machine gun action, floating in the sea.

  When they arrived at the naval base, there were representatives of The North China Daily News and other papers and agencies to meet them. Somehow, they had got hold of Willie’s name, which was well known to them, and reporters tried to waylay him for an interview. But he wasn’t interested, and, thrusting them savagely aside, he headed for his office. As the cab roared down the bund, he saw the sign of the Balalaika and, shouting at the driver to turn off towards it, dragged at the old revolver. A message had already been radioed ashore to question Zychov, but the fury that was still in Willie drove him to make a confrontation on his own.

  He was too late. A policeman was waiting inside, but Zychov had vanished, it was said to Yip’s friends in the Chinese town, and the restaurant was closed. Scrambling back into the taxi, Willie continued to the office of the Sarth Line. Kee was waiting for him with a ticket for the Fan Ling, which was due to leave for Yangpo.

  ‘Everything’s ready, sir,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is board her. You have two hours.’

  ‘What happened, George?’

  ‘It’s hard to say at the moment, sir. The students beat up Mr Da Braga when he stopped them setting fire to our godown.’

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘I think so, sir. I’m waiting to hear from Mrs Sarth. She promised to get in touch.’

  ‘Mrs Sarth?’ Willie had snatched the ticket and was already heading for the door when he stopped and turned. ‘What does she know about it?’

  ‘She went up two days ago, sir.’

  ‘She’s in Japan.’

  ‘She returned, sir.’

  ‘How the hell did she hear? Did you tell her?’

  ‘I wired her as I did you, sir. Naturally.’

  It was obvious that Abigail had set off home at once and, with the hold-up Willie had suffered, had arrived ahead of him.

  ‘She should he there now, sir,’ Kee said.

  ‘By God, she should,’ Willie snapped. ‘And by God, so should I!’

  There was no time to go home, so he headed for the nearest shop and bought clean shirts, collars and socks before hurrying back to the bund. At the end of two hours, he was on his way north.

  His mind was in a turmoil. The irony of it, he kept thinking. The bloody irony! There was no need now to fear Abigail learning of his association with Nadya. Yip was dead. Willie’s shot had been accurate, and he wondered if he’d been so careful because Yip was the organiser of the pirates or because he could tell Abigail what Willie was up to in Hong Kong. Not that it mattered, he realised. It had all been over between himself and Nadya anyway. It was all a bit bloody odd, he thought.

  China was living up to its reputation.

  The first thing they saw as the Fan Ling turned the bend in the river was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, but behind it somewhere something was on fire and a pillar of black smoke was lifting up to th
e sky. Three gunboats were anchored in midstream, near them two of the big multidecked passenger ships, to which a constant stream of boats was moving. The air was electric, like the sultry atmosphere before a thunderstorm.

  As he tried to go ashore, Willie was stopped by a naval petty officer armed with a revolver.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Nobody allowed to land.’

  ‘I have to land. I have business here and my wife’s there somewhere.’

  The petty officer fetched an officer, who reluctantly gave Willie permission. His route carried him past his office and godown. It hadn’t been destroyed but it was charred where an attempt had been made to set it on fire. The windows were broken and he could see Da Braga’s car lying on its side, wrecked. There were no rickshaws so he half-ran, half-trotted to his house. The first person he saw was one of Da Braga’s sons, a strapping youth who was holding a pistol.

  ‘Mister Sarth. I’m glad you’ve come.’

  ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘The crowd’s come out for Chiang.’

  Inside, Willie bumped at once into Polly.

  ‘Poll,’ he snapped. ‘You ought to be in Shanghai.’

  ‘I was,’ she said. ‘But when this started, I felt I ought to be with Elliott. He’s sitting in his office with a loaded revolver in case they come again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘They tried to break in but were driven out. He’s still there.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘Upstairs with Luis.’

  He ran up the stairs, almost bumping into Abigail as she appeared from the spare bedroom.

  ‘Ab!’

  ‘Willie!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you ought not to be here!’

  ‘When I got back from Japan I found Polly had come up to be with Elliott, so I came to take her home. I found Luis half-dead.’

  Da Braga was recovering a little now, but he had a broken shoulder blade where he had been whacked with a heavy carrying pole, bruises on his head and body where he had been beaten and kicked before he could be rescued, and his left leg, struck several times with a crowbar, had been shattered.

  ‘The doctor says it’s bad,’ Abigail whispered.

  ‘Oh, Christ! Poor old Luis.’

  His face twisted with pain, Da Braga was able to explain what had happened. For the most part, the bitterness of the Chinese was being expended on those of their own nationality who traded with or worked for the Europeans, but muddy sandals were trampling over cherished patterns of life and strikes had closed down foreign-owned shipping lines and factories. Communist agents had worked on the crowd’s anti-European feeling and it had started with the rickshaw coolies asking twice as much for their fares, while the students had held a parade with a forest of flags and placards that demanded the end of foreign interference in Chinese affairs.

  Da Braga gave the news in neat sentences, as he always had. There had been executions on the bund and heads attached to poles. Criminals, making the most of the situation, had demanded more squeeze from businessmen and shopkeepers, at first only against the Japanese, whom the Chinese had always loathed, but finally against all nonChinese.

  The warlords had been beaten, Da Braga said, and their soldiers, ragged, jaded, often bootless, had tramped through the city. Their horses had been nothing but skin and bone and their guns battered and dusty. No one had moved as they had passed through, but the minute they had disappeared the students had come on to the streets again to take advantage of the situation with their shouts of ‘Go home, foreign devils!’

  The city was brooding and silent again now, with a few aimless groups of students still about, but no one was kidding himself that it was over. The long-awaited Kuomintang advance northwards was well under way now. Changsha had fallen and the Kuomintang troops had reached the border of Hupeh. The warlords had failed entirely to co-operate and the Chiang flags, red with the blue quarter containing the white sun insignia, were appearing everywhere.

  Four

  For years the warlords had trailed disease and terror across China and at last, whether you approved of Chiang or not, there was a chance of them vanishing for ever. The three Chiang columns were going from strength to strength, their numbers increasing every day instead of decreasing, as they should, as they left garrisons behind. The Communist agents had destroyed loyalties and beliefs ahead of them, and one warlord after another was toppling.

  It was quite clear the Kuomintang was emerging as the most powerful party in China and, as its troops advanced, the people were rising solidly behind them. A vast revolutionary fervour was tearing China apart. There was no longer any disguising the fact that she was going through the first throes of a full-scale rising in which there was little mercy or discrimination, as the peasants, striking out with ferocious brutality, saw a chance to end the era of murder, looting and rape, and at the same time rid themselves of the hated foreign devils.

  A naval surgeon, fetched by Da Braga’s son, appeared to examine Da Braga’s leg. Watched by Da Braga’s weeping wife, he studied the pulped limb from which fragments of bloodied bone protruded, then straightened up and turned to Willie.

  ‘It’ll have to come off,’ he said. ‘It’s a mess and we can’t put it together again. And in that case, he can’t stay here. There’s talk of evacuating everybody and he ought to go before it gets too difficult. Will his family agree?’

  There was no alternative and, doped and unaware of what was happening, Da Braga was carried to the landing stage, where he was placed aboard a launch and taken with his wife out to the sick bay of the Fan Ling, where the naval surgeon removed the mangled limb.

  The surgeon had news from the other treaty ports. ‘There are forty-two warships off Hankow,’ he said. ‘It started when KMT supporters broke into the race club and picked flowers.’ He frowned. ‘Why? Why bother with bloody flowers?’

  It wasn’t really so silly. In any other country it might have been, but from KMT supporters it was calculated defiance, an indication that the holy of holies of the Europeans was no longer inviolable.

  ‘We landed a party of Marines,’ the surgeon went on, ‘but they couldn’t get in the city gate because of Chinese soldiers. Then the sergeant had a bright idea and sent them in three at a time in taxis and they weren’t stopped.’

  He seemed to think the whole thing rather funny, but to Willie the incongruities he was describing were really the first hostile moves of two wrestlers. Bismarck had said that China was a sleeping giant, but now she was a waking giant, touching fingertips with the giants of the West before the struggle really started. There had been agitation for higher wages for years, and waves of anti-foreign feeling, the coolies for the most part not knowing what they were rioting for, though the students who led them were always happy to have them killed or maimed to get across this idea of theirs the coolies didn’t fully understand. Many of the students were the children of rich families who had deliberately chosen to work as coolies to organise their revolution. Sometimes, when they had been caught by one of the warlords, they had been killed or tortured, and one of the girls, to Willie’s certain knowledge, had been disembowelled and her intestines wrapped round her neck while she was still alive.

  ‘There’s barbed wire everywhere,’ the naval man went on cheerfully, ‘and the taipans are all gloomy because they can’t go visiting any more. Oh, well, so long as no woman’s touched it’ll be all right. Decapitate a missionary or two or boil a merchant in oil, and no one will worry, but violate a white woman and the whole of the British Empire will rise in wrath.’

  There was a parade along the bund that afternoon, with paper lanterns and strings of popping firecrackers. It ended inevitably in an uproar when a Chinese merchant who had done business with the Europeans had the misfortune to get in the way and was left for dead in an untidy flattened heap. Feelings were fanned to flames by the agitators and, in a sudden spontaneous combustion, stalls were overturned in the market, rush-mat booths pushed over, and ducks, pigs and chick
ens released because the stallholders had been selling to foreigners.

  But the Europeans were still powerful, still had gunboats and were backed by armed forces which were more efficient even than Chiang’s troops so, as it became clear that all-out war was impossible, the agitators began using more subtle methods. As the Europeans made ready their belongings for transportation downriver they discovered it was impossible to find porters, and when Willie tried to get a rickshaw to take him to the waterfront to find others, he was informed that the rickshaw coolies were refusing to carry Europeans. Strike pickets were already about the town, some wearing crude uniforms and carrying the heavy staves with which they had already beaten to death more than one foreign-employed Chinese. Even the coolies had set up a militia force – ragged groups of men carrying ancient two-handed swords and old muskets and wearing red armbands that reminded Willie uncomfortably of the Boxers.

  That night the rioting exploded again with the violence of a bomb. For two days the wind from the mountains had been cold, but now it was hot and humid again, enough to stir ragged tempers to a fury. Some European – they never found out who – slapped a coolie. The coolie hadn’t objected to what was normal enough treatment, but the incident had been seen by one of the agitators, and before anyone knew what had happened the coolie’s attacker had been chopped to pieces and two thousand men and boys, brought to fever pitch by propaganda, were rampaging through the city, brandishing carrying poles and whacking out shop windows in showers of glass.

  The first godown to go was Wishart’s. There was very little in it, but, as the flames began to catch and they streamed past it through the streets, burning cars, beating up Chinese and wrecking European property, Emmeline appeared, terrified, to tell them all her servants had disappeared. It was Abigail who broke the news to her that her godown had gone up in flames.