The Mercenaries

by John Harris

  Getting rid of Fagan was like pulling a thorn out of an aching heel.

  He got drunk the night before he left, less with the alcohol than with the thought that he was about to be free for a while of his responsibilities and the brooding, dangerous Ellie, and he was noisy and laughing and already giving the glad eye to a young and not too plain missionary on the Fan-Ling who was on her way down the Yangtze on the first leg of her journey home to the States.

  Nobody said anything, but there was a marked sense of relief as the Fan-Ling disappeared from sight, and on the way back into town, by mutual consent they found a small scrubbed restaurant with spidery benches like Tang woodcuts and tables that had been worn and polished for centuries. It was full of chattering girls, bright as butterflies in their silk jackets and fringed trousers, all presided over by a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of corsets that stretched from bust to thigh, outside her dress. She seemed surprised to see Ellie and it dawned on them at last that they were in a brothel.

  But, although the waiter’s hands were more notable for the length of the nails than for their cleanliness, the food was good and, with Chinese courtesy, no one seemed to mind. They nodded to the girls’ customers moving in and out past their table and, as the mistake and the samshui set them laughing, someone produced an orchestra of horns, gongs and one-stringed fiddles, and Sammy, outdoing Fagan for lunacy, got them playing for dancing. They cleared the tables and pulled the girls forward, and started a noisy free-for-all in the middle of the floor, Sammy bringing the house down as he tried to teach the shrieking Madame how to dance the foxtrot. The evening became a celebration, with the room crowded and dozens of grinning heads jammed round the door to see what was going on.

  ‘Elevator Ellie, they called me on the fields back home,’ Ellie laughed. ‘I used to think they were complimenting me on my flying, but I found out later they were just being dirty-minded about my figure.’

  With no Fagan to worry over, she drank a little too much, but it seemed to knock the props away from beneath her fears and frustrations, and she was noisy and unaffected, and when she said good night at the door of her bungalow she insisted on kissing them both before she disappeared.

  Sammy stared after her, grinning as she weaved through the door. ‘She’ll probably have a hell of a head tomorrow,’ he said.

  Ira nodded. They’d found it unexpectedly easy to make her laugh and. without Fagan on her mind, she was surprisingly attractive with bright eyes and colour in her cheeks, her grave expression changed for one of lunatic willingness to make a night of it.

  ‘If she does, she’ll probably feel better when it’s gone,’ he said. There’s nothing like a good drunk for kicking a few boards loose.’

  Mei-Mei was waiting just inside the door for them. She seemed to be dressed in her best again, her face carefully made up, the flower behind her ear. She was smiling and deferential as usual.

  ‘Sammy, that girl worries me,’ Ira said.

  ‘She looks worried, too,’ Sammy agreed.

  Outside their room, they paused and glanced back. Mei-Mei had followed them and was now waiting by the doorway.

  ‘She still looks worried,’ Sammy said again uncertainly. ‘Lor’, Ira, suppose--suppose’--he chuckled suddenly--’Ira, do you suppose that she’s just here for our pleasure?’

  Ira turned. ‘Our pleasure?’

  They do that sort of thing, don’t they? Lay down their wives for their friends and so on.’

  Ira grinned. ‘She’s not married,’ he said. ‘Or is she?’

  Sammy shrugged. ‘Tsu sent her. Perhaps she’s something in his yamen.’

  ‘We’d better ask her.’

  Sammy hitched at his belt and put one hand confidently on Ira’s chest. ‘I’m better at the lingo than you are,’ he said firmly. ‘And if I’m right, I reckon three’ll be a crowd.’

  The sun was bright and the scent of blossom was filling the house when Ira went to breakfast next morning. Without being able to explain why, he felt on top of the world suddenly, and to his surprise he could hear Ellie across the garden actually singing as she washed. Fagan’s departure seemed to have left them all lighter-hearted.

  Preceded by a gale of giggles from Mei-Mei’s room, Sammy appeared a few minutes later, wearing only a towel and a smug look on his face like a cat that had been at the cream.

  ‘I was right, Ira,’ he said immediately.

  Ira grinned. ‘Were you, by God? Did you spend the night with her?’

  Sammy gestured airily. ‘A feller has to work up to that sort of thing,’ he pointed out ‘I told her so.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could speak the lingo that well.’

  Sammy laughed. ‘I’m picking it up fast.’

  ‘You ought to pick it up a lot faster now. There’s nothing like taking your dictionary to bed with you.’

  Sammy blushed. ‘I’m going to teach her English,’ he said primly. ‘She’s only a kid really.’

  ‘They grow up fast out here. I’m told. Is this a permanent arrangement?’

  Sammy looked sheepish. ‘She was sold to a dance-hall dame when she was thirteen,’ he explained. ‘She’s never had a home. If we send her away, she’ll lose face.’

  Ira chuckled. ‘If she stays,’ he said, ‘she’ll probably lose something else.’

  Fagan’s disappearance seemed to start a run of unexpected luck. Where, until his departure, everything had seemed gloomy and unpropitious, now things suddenly started to go right, and the following afternoon, to their surprise, their missing crates turned up--complete and undamaged, unearthed by Sammy in one of the godowns near where the Fan-Ling had moored--first the generator, then the lathe, then the spares and their personal luggage--and they were able to set the pupil pilots to dismantling Tsu’s ancient machines and removing the engine complete from his useless Fokker, by this time known to everyone as the Wingless Wonder.

  Taking out engine parts and unbolting guns, Sammy laid them on tables with dishes of oil and petrol and paraffin, and laboriously began to soak every working part and scratch off every scrap of rust with fine emery paper, carborundum powder and oil, moving the dulled metal inch by inch until it was free again.

  ‘Against all the tenets of engineering,’ Ira grinned. ‘Let’s hope the Chinks don’t think it’s what we do all the time.’ With Ira working on the Maurice Farman’s Renault engine, Ellie kept watch on the Chinese, threatening them all the time with Tsu’s wrath if they lost so much as a washer, while Sammy instructed as they went along.

  ‘This here’s a turnbuckle,’ he said, standing importantly by the tables, with Kee to translate, his big beaky nose in the air like a lecturer. ‘If I turn it this way, it tightens the wire. If I turn it the other way, it slackens it, see. We use ‘em to rig the wings for flying.’

  Labour was cheap and plentiful and they hoped to reap not only a harvest of minor spares from the old machines but probably also even a working engine and one or two working guns. Wang Li-Jen, the carpenter, a young-old man with empty gums, a beard and a bag full of ancient tools that resembled nothing they’d ever seen before, was a tower of strength, though it worried him that Ira and Sammy should lose face by working on the engines and covering themselves with oil.

  ‘Not good joss. Peng Ah-Lun dirty,’ he observed gravely, sounding curiously like Fagan in his disapproval. ‘Peng Ah-Lun, Sha Pi-Lo stay clean. Coolie use sclewdlivah, spannah.’ Ira gave him a cigarette and tried to explain the importance of expert knowledge of aeroplane engines, feeling surprisingly warm towards the Chinese with his already stooped back and aged face and the smell of charcoal and sweat that preceded him everywhere he went like an aura.

  Spring came in a sudden heady riot of cherry and almond blossom and a rise in temperature that caused the coolies to shed their heavy winter clothing.

  ‘Spring’ll be the time when the lice start moving,’ Sammy commented, watching them picking at each other’s heads.

  They were just beginning to make visible progress when Law
n turned up, shabby and stinking of booze, his eyes sunken and his suit looking as though it had been slept in. He was broke and trembling on the brink of D.T.s.

  ‘That bastard Geary,’ he said bitterly. ‘He done a bunk with me wallet and the tickets.’

  ‘But obviously not the money for booze,’ Ira said.

  ‘It wasn’t the booze,’ Lawn insisted. ‘It was the bleedin’ students in Kenli.’

  Ira stared. ‘What in God’s name were you doing in Kenli?’ he demanded. Kenli was a hundred miles to the south, down one of the tributaries of the Yangtze, a god-forsaken place without even a proper white community.

  ‘We got off the steamer by mistake.’

  ‘Drunk, I suppose.’

  ‘Not really, Mr. Penaluna. We’d had one or two, that’s all, but it went without us. Then Geary disappeared with all me kit. They said he’d gone back to Shanghai. I was on me own and everywhere I went the bloody students followed me, chuckin’ muck at me and shouting at me to go ‘ome. They was ‘avin’ a riot and they ‘ad placards up and were caterwaulin’ all night outside the ‘otel where I stayed. One of the gunboats ‘ad to turn out its crew with a Vickers and patrol the river bank for the local warlord. They got a problem down there with them students. I’d ‘a’ gone ‘ome if I’d ‘ad the money.’

  Lawn was in a pathetic state with trembling hands, wet lips and eyeballs like yellow marbles, and was clearly in no condition to do much work. Ira extracted a promise from him to lay off the booze for a while and set him to supervising the gangs of coolies and the student pilots working over the engines, while Ellie lectured and the tireless Sammy was released for other things.

  The old Maurice Farman pusher, although little more than an aerial joke belonging to the days when they’d measured the pull of propellers with a butcher’s spring balance, proved to be in a better condition than they’d thought and while it would never be of much use to General Tsu in his campaigns, at least it was a slow safe aeroplane without vices on which to train pilots.

  They studied the ancient machine, grinning at the incongruous birdcage of spruce struts and booms that housed the propeller. When Ira had still admired the long-vanished Deperdussins and Santos-Dumonts, the Taubes, the Demoiselles and Antoinettes and the kite-like monstrosities that took off on trollies and landed on skids, the Farman had seemed neat, square and modern. After ten years of fabric-covered fuselages, high-performance engines and tractor-propellered biplanes, however, she looked as though she rightly belonged on the end of a string, with a tail of paper and rags.

  Nevertheless, she was still in working order and for days Wang and his assistant, with his eldest son as makee-learn boy, swarmed over her, replacing damaged and splintered struts and strengtheners, repairing the stabilisers fixed to the tail booms, and the elevator which stood out in front on outriggers of wood. Considering he’d probably never seen an aeroplane in his life before he showed a remarkable aptitude for fashioning the curved spars.

  ‘He makes this here carved screen stuff,’ Sammy pointed out proudly, busy at the rigging with level, plumb-bob, templates and protractors.

  Wang nodded, grinning with a mouthful of empty gums, and began to replace whole sections of splintered wood, and when a tailor appeared with his son, complete with boards and tapes and offered to make cotton summer suits for them all, Ira was just in time to catch Sammy shooing them away.

  ‘For God’s sake, grab him, don’t chuck him out,’ he yelled as the tailor scurried for the road. ‘We need a rigger.’

  And to their surprise, the tailor and his son found themselves sewing not suits but fabric on the old machine.

  By this time, the maize field had been added to the airfield and the ditch between levelled, and the tireless Sammy had got the coolies filling in all the potholes and smoothing out the ruts.

  There was another small army of them--each with his unseen helper who had another unseen helper for makee-learn--cooking, washing, mending and ironing with a big charcoal iron, and persisting despite all threats and warnings in using the bracing wires of the machines to hang out the wet clothes.

  They slept in the tattered hangars and in the sheds at the back of the barracks, celebrating their festivals with fireworks or joss sticks, invariably on the verge of starvation so that there were always a dozen of them looking for cast-off clothing or begging potato peelings, cabbage leaves or scraps of meat.

  As the days passed, they slowly began to make headway. They got the Avro repaired and tested, and Ellie’s German machines serviced properly for the first time in years, though even a simple matter like moving an aircraft was a problem that drove them to a fury of frustration and left them exhausted as they tried to drive into the minds of men who had never seen an aeroplane fly and knew nothing about its construction that they could be surprisingly fragile.

  The uninitiated coolies always had a tendency to climb on to the fabric of the wings where there was no step, and it was difficult to explain the technicalities in pidgin English. Twice they wheeled the old Farman back into the hangar that was now beginning to stink encouragingly of petrol fumes and hot oil and dope, before they finished it and were ready for flight.

  ‘Maskee,’ Sammy was bawling as they swung the ancient machine out. ‘Makee quick! Turnee fly-machine! Chop chop! Come on, you bastards, look slippy! ‘

  A fire had been lit at the end of the field, the coolies wafting it with their straw hats and headcloths, and the smoke blew steadily towards them in the breeze that billowed the canvas hangars and slapped them against the poles. The coolies round the old Farman stood importantly in a group, chattering noisily, eyed by their less favoured friends who were relegated to digging and levelling and repairing sheds and hangars.

  Ira’s mind fled back as he realised how far they’d come since the Maurice Farman had been considered an aeroplane of war, and he grinned as he gazed affectionately at the enormous box tail trembling in the breeze above his head at the end of the trellis-like fuselage. ‘Can’t tell the bow from the stern,’ he said.

  Standing in his waistcoat and huge flat cap, his sleeves rolled up, his watch-chain across his stomach, his celluloid collar stained with oil, Sammy sniggered back, at him. ‘Perhaps it can travel either way,’ he suggested.

  Ellie joined them, hugging her elbows as usual, her expression admiring and strangely excited as she stared at the ancient machine with its forest of struts and spars and its sails of floppy white fabric. Behind her, old Wang stood with his box of tools, grinning and nodding with his son.

  ‘Looks as though you ought to sail it,’ Sammy giggled. ‘And all them wires!‘

  ‘You check they’re all there by letting a linnet loose inside,’ Ira said gravely. ‘If it escapes, it isn’t rigged properly.’

  When they started up the elderly engine, it made a noise like a small lawn mower clitter-clattering across a lawn rather faster than normal and it made him swallow awkwardly with the nostalgia of the occasion as he saw again the rows of the ungainly machines standing underneath the poplars of northern France, their wings dripping with moisture, gaunt and grey in the mist.

  ‘How about it, Sammy?’ he said. ‘I flew one of these in 1915.I wonder if I can again.’

  Wang and the tailors and the coolies looked on gleefully. They had known for some time that Ira would soon make an attempt to fly the ancient contraption and there had been a great deal of washing and head-shaving and much burning of joss paper in preparation for the occasion.

  ‘Peng Ah-Lun fly?’ Wang asked with breathless anticipation and, as Ira nodded, he turned and informed the other Chinese, and the younger ones began to caper and tum cartwheels in joyous expectation, while the older men solemnly burned joss-sticks and began to set off fireworks.

  ‘Plenchee good joss,’ Wang explained earnestly. ‘Debil no catch Peng Ah-Lun.’

  Ira stepped over the wooden outriggers and picked his way through the wires to climb into the bath-like nacelle. Sammy watched as he lowered his goggles then he turned his vast
cap back to front and, jamming it down over his ears, climbed up beside him.

  “Take a good look round, Sammy,’ Ira advised. ‘It might be your last.’

  ‘I think you’re both cuckoo,’ Ellie said.

  Ira grinned and waved a hand and, under Ellie’s instructions, the coolies heaved away the chocks. Wang began to hammer on an empty petrol drum and more fireworks fizzed and sparkled to propitiate the demons, and the machine moved forward, lurching from side to side, “wires twanging like banjos as they slackened and tightened, all the struts, wires and the huge box tail conspiring to waltz it round in the breeze so that Ira had to work his feet violently on the rudder pedals to keep the tail into wind.

  Swinging the old machine round at last, he opened the throttle and, as the lawn mower behind them whirred faster, the mass of wire, fabric and wood began to jolt forward, the draught from the propeller rippling the grass and all the coolies streaming after it in a yelling excited mob. It seemed impossible that all the various parts could remain fixed together, but with his eye on the forward elevator that sat out in front of them like a detached tea tray, and judging the speed by the noise of the lawn mower behind him, Ira pulled back on the handlebar controls and the rumbling beneath them ceased and they floated into the cloudless golden sky at forty miles an hour, balancing gingerly in the open air in what was little more than a powered box kite.

  His hand clutching a strut so tightly his knuckles were white, Sammy was staring downwards like a hypnotised rabbit, then he gave a sudden yell of delight. ‘We’re up,’ he shrieked. ‘Forty miles an hour, flat out! And here I was telling Wilbur and Orville it wouldn’t fly! ‘

  Ira laughed with him at the sheer joy of flight and the excitement of heaving the ancient machine into the air.

  ‘Say your prayers, Sammy,’ he yelled. ‘We’ve got to come down again soon. And don’t fidget so bloody much. You’ll have us over.’

  All the instructions he’d been given ten years before rushed back into his head. Beware of stalling. Beware of spinning. Don’t push the nose down too fast or you’ll pull the wings off.