by John Harris
For the first time in years, she had something that had some meaning for her, and for the first time she meant something to someone who didn’t have to lean on her, and could relax and think about herself. She had celebrated her thirty-third birthday soon after she returned but the party they had thrown for her had only set her worrying about the future and searching, with a desperation that sprang from a feeling that time was growing short, for a settled life and the home she’d always craved.
She made no attempt to conceal what had happened between herself and Ira, but Sammy noticed she’d stopped the habit of bathing in public and began to go less and less to the airfield, preferring to remain at the bungalow with Mei-Mei. Neither of them had ever known a home and between them the house began to flower as they unearthed decorated prayer scrolls, scraps of jade and lacquered woodwork.
Sammy watched her warily. His own affair with Mei-Mei was proceeding uncertainly, and because he was a passionate man he sympathised with Ellie. But he was still shrewd enough to know what was going on in her mind, and his loyalties were sharply divided.
From time to time, Ira found an excuse to take up the Avro and fly it towards the east, his face deadened by the cold winter blast from the propeller, his nose protected by grease beneath his goggles. Sometimes it was Tsu asking for transport for one of his officers, but mostly it was for pleasure, and as he disappeared towards the horizon, the happiness faded from Ellie’s face, to be replaced with a bleak loneliness that only Sammy saw.
‘He’s got to fly. Ellie,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s the breath of life. You’ll never stop him.’
The woodwork of the first of the smashed wings was finished at last and they braced it with wires and painted it with waterproofing and dope-resisting paint, then they laid the light-brown fabric that had come up from Shanghai along the ribs and started to sew it, using curved surgical needles De Sa had found for them. Following the pattern of the sound wing, they laid tape over every rib and worked laboriously round the edges, using the correct number of stitches to the inch and locking stitches wherever they seemed to be indicated.
‘It’s going to take some doing getting the lugs to mate on the wing roots,’ Sammy said, straightening his back. Them wings are awkward. We’ll have to rig Heloïse to a block and lift ‘em into place like that.’
It was hard and exacting work and on occasion they had to scrap what they’d done and start all over again, but to their surprise the dope was on the fabric at last and the wings were finished earlier than they’d expected, remarkably efficient-looking and effective.
They stood back to admire them, but Sammy was already behind them, chivvying them on.
‘Now for the engine,’ he said cheerfully.
The news that made its way to Yaochow from the east and south had nothing in it to disturb them, but gradually they began to hear that Kwei had been to see Chiang in Canton and come back with a whole host of new advisers, and it was said that from now on, there were to be no ‘silver bullet’ bribes between opposing generals. The warlords were finished and they had to come to heel or be crushed. General Kwei had completely thrown in his lot with the Kuomintang and had its full backing in the shape of more machine guns and artillery, and the full support now of the students who, even in Tsosiehn, were beginning to produce posters and pamphlets that labelled Tsu a liar and a cheat.
Cheng brought one back from the city, given to him by a student who was reading it to a group of Tsu soldiers. It blamed all China’s troubles on the treaty powers and men like the Baptist General. Floods, epidemics, bandits, pirates, famines, locusts and war were all laid at their door. When they left China, it ended, the country would have a chance of becoming great.
With it. somehow, they sensed the first change in the air and Sammy was the one to put his finger on it.
‘When Tsu gets licked next time,’ he said shrewdly, ‘he’ll stay licked.’
The autumn weeks continued, with rain coming down the mountains in icy deluges to transform the land and blot out the horizon so that the hills became mere shadows, and their ears were never free from the splash and rattle of water. At the airfield at Yaochow--swathed in everything they possessed and topped with padded coolie coats--they continued to work on the De Havilland, sanding, varnishing, rigging and re-rigging, struggling with awkward angles that were difficult to acquire with the crude tools at their disposal. Then the coils and wheels and tyres, the shaped steel bracing wire and two brand-new propellers arrived at last from the Middle East and, what was better still, a set of plans from the De Havilland agent in Shanghai so that they were able to work with more exactitude.
Occasionally, one of Tsu’s officers came up from Hwai-Yang to ask them to make an observation flight south and, as the demands began to come more often, it became clear that Tsu was beginning to grow nervous of Kwei’s increasing power. The Kuomintang movement was growing stronger every day, sweeping forward after the summer victories with a surprising new speed and violence, and in Hwai-Yang, with Kwei not far away and suddenly likely to reappear, it was growing obvious that it would soon be the turn of the Warlord of the South-West. On their visits to Hwai-Yang, they heard agitators making speeches on the street corners, and the students were beginning to form the unions they’d been demanding for so long--even one for the prostitutes--and for safety, Ira painted out Tsu’s fading orange circles and daubed the aeroplanes with their name in English and Chinese. The English lettering was lopsided and not very professional alongside the clearer Chinese symbols of Peter Cheng, but he felt better when he saw it across the fuselages and wings, because even the airfield coolies were beginning to swing behind the Kuomintang now and occasionally, in the quieter reaches of the river, treaty power gunboats and river steamers were being fired on again from the shore and passed through Tsosiehn with their wheelhouses surrounded by sandbags and padded splinter mats.
At Yaochow. even while they were still untouched by what was happening, they slowly began to be aware of the new and different attitude that was growing among the Chinese. When they had first found themselves employed by General Tsu, they had felt they were taking part in some sort of opera bouffe between opposing warlords who looked and behaved like something out of Chu Chin Chow. Farce had been more predominant than sense, but now the comedy was rapidly disappearing as hostility to them began to be obvious, even in Yaochow where Lawn was finding it difficult to buy beer and his woman was being insulted by the villagers.
Then, when the news came through--just as they thought all campaigning had finished for the year--that General Chiang had won a big and unexpected victory over the northern warlords in Hunan, the drama drew nearer and grew more personal. At once, rumour got about that the river had been mined and the office of the steamer company, only just recovering from the strike, said that their vessels were going to stop running. The railway had been cut for some time now and when Chiang aeroplanes began to appear far to the north of Canton, the first small insignificant trickle of frightened Europeans, unnerved by the unexpected and uncertain situation, began to move down-river once more.
At Yaochow, they had preferred to isolate themselves from the events along the Yangtze, but now, for safety, they took to sending someone every day into Tsosiehn to find out what was happening, and Ira nervously began to balance the chances of finishing the De Havilland against the arrival of the Chiang troops, when the mob would inevitably take it into their heads to try to seize everything they possessed for the Kuomintang. They had spent so much money and so much time on the machine by this time, it was unthinkable that they should abandon it.
But, as they worked harder to finish the job, the pace of events also began to step up to keep level with them. Incidents along the river multiplied. White missionaries up-country began to be persecuted and Europeans in the river towns were insulted; and British, American and French soldiers were actually escorted out of Chinese cities by the smart Chiang officers who were taking them over. Nobody liked it and the Europeans along the bund wer
e loud in their disgust, but there were so many Chiang troops about nowadays and so many Chinese, all in agreement for once, that any resistance would have started a general massacre, a thing no one wanted with so many Europeans still up-country with their families.
These defeats were only small and largely affairs of morale, but they involved a great loss of face and increased the students’ confidence, and Kuomintang flags started to appear in Tsosiehn in a rash, and the Tsu troops in their baggy grey uniforms and bus conductors’ hats, grew more nervous and quicker to use their weapons. For safety, all the shops were boarded up with planks and at once, spontaneously, they were all daubed during the night with the Kuomintang sign in great splashes of red paint.
There was another flurry of executions in reply and Ira noticed that among them now were Tsu soldiers. It was an ominous sign. When the students tried again to parade in protest, the Tsu colonel in command of the city came down heavily on them in a fit of nervous choler, dragging both boys and girls round the streets, their wrists tied to the backs of ox-carts, stripped naked and whipped with bamboos as they went.
For a few days, Tsu seemed to have gained control again but the city, stirred by the unexpected new Kuomintang successes and the inability of the northern warlords to cement their alliance, was bubbling with discontent and on their visits to De Sa’s store for news, they began to see whole groups of missionaries moving downstream on junks, pale, nervous, and sick at heart that the people to whom they had given their lives were willing to turn on them and throw them out. Their intellectuals, fed on stories of the idyllic rhythms of the fields, had seen China through a patina of charm which was false and vicious under a regime of warlords that knew no established government, and they had been the first to stand aghast at the barbarities of revolt.
It was an uneasy period at Yaochow as they tried to ignore the obvious signs. The cheerless weather suddenly began to depress them and seemed to make the news worse. There was a rash of desertions among the coolies who worked on the field and Wang turned up one morning with a black eye and two teeth missing, because he had been in a fight with a student who had called him the tool of a foreign devil.
Then, in November, rumours that Chiang, still ignoring the traditional period of winter rest, had defeated yet another warlord at Hankow electrified the situation, and gunboats and European troops were rushed up-river to guard the treaty ports. At once, in Tsosiehn, strike pickets appeared outside De Sa’s store, wearing crude uniforms and carrying the heavy staves with which they had already beaten to death more than one Chinese who had worked for the Europeans. Even the coolies were setting up militia forces now, ragged groups of men wearing red armbands and carrying ancient two-handed swords and old muskets, and pulling an occasional muzzle-loading cannon.
Almost overnight, the trouble blew up into a country-wide threat. Fighting between Chinese and Europeans in the Yangtze gorges, with a mob of thousands besieging the concessions, set it going, and Lawn on a hunt round Tsosiehn in search of rum, came hurrying back with mud on his clothes after having had to run for his life.
The newspapers that came up from the coast were suddenly full of stories, most of them patently false, of Chinese soldiers killing white men and raping white women, and the news that all Europeans were being warned to move down to the river to be transported to Shanghai stopped the work at Yaochow dead as they stared at each other with worried faces. It had come unexpectedly at the end of a week of alarming incidents that seemed to have sprung up from nowhere.
‘How long are you going to be, Ira?’ Ellie begged, her face strained. ‘Land’s sakes, how long?’
Ira threw down the plug spanner he’d been working with and wiped his hands. ‘We’ve nearly finished, Ellie,’ he said calmly. ‘Once we’ve got the engine running, we can put her together and fly everybody out.’
Ellie didn’t seem very reassured. Kowalski’s doubt and the events of the past few weeks had touched her very deeply and, from being the capable, even cynical, woman she’d been when Fagan had depended on her, she seemed to have been reduced by her dependence on Ira to a bundle of nervous fears, as though she were afraid that the little happiness she’d been granted would be carried away from her on the first breath of ill wind.
Ira tried to give her a little of his own confidence, even while he remained uncertain himself. They had reached the point now when it would have been heart-breaking and even financially ruinous to throw up everything they’d done, yet they had no guarantee that they’d ever be given enough time to complete the job.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the whole of China seemed to be on the point of explosion, with the Europeans between the opposing military factions, and it was clear the treaty powers were no longer prepared to be responsible for any of their nationals who remained out of reach. The fighting in the gorges, instead of dying out, had grown worse, and British gunboats had been damaged, and a destroyer had had to steam up-river to rescue them. Overnight, the countryside about them had become a witch’s broth of hatred with the lid tied down and on the point of blowing off, and it no longer seemed sense to Europeans to remain out of reach of safety.
It was a hard fact for Ira to face when, not very long before, they had been on top of the world with a future suddenly before them.
‘Just a few more days, El,’ Sammy begged as she pleaded for them to cut their losses and leave. He had rigged up a fitter’s bench in the barn with a rack of tools and was busy grinding the valves of the Liberty. ‘We’re waiting for the shock absorbers and we’re all right till the weather changes.’
Ellie’s lips tightened and she didn’t argue, but it was suddenly obvious that, as far as aeroplanes were concerned, she had thrown in the sponge.
Putting the Liberty together was easier than they had expected and the tinfuls of nuts, bolts, washers, screws and parts that they had carefully put on one side began to dwindle.
As the work progressed, neither Sammy nor Ira got home regularly to the bungalow and, for safety, they hired a couple of labourers and armed them with strong staves to guard it. In her fatalistic Chinese way, Mei-Mei ignored the possibility of trouble, merely nodded when Sammy instructed her that she had to have everything ready and was to make her way out to the airfield if anything started, and continued to busy herself with her cage-birds and green tea and prayer scrolls. She clearly had no intention of leaving the bungalow for a tent and whenever Sammy brought up the subject she brushed it aside with a smile. Ellie, however, had long since begun to move her possessions from the bungalow, suddenly lacking the courage to go into the city yet unhappy in the cramped room at the farmhouse and desperate for comfort.
‘We can’t camp out all our lives, Ira,’ she kept saying.
Ira looked at Sammy. He had the sparking plugs from the Liberty in a pan and the rocker box cover removed, and he was sitting astride the radiator, fingering a lead wire.
‘Maybe we are neglecting things a bit, Sammy,’ he said uncertainly as Ellie disappeared.
‘We got work to do,’ Sammy said stubbornly, his mind rigidly on the job in hand.
‘How about Mei-Mei? What does she think?’
‘She doesn’t think. She takes it as it comes.’
‘When are you going to marry her, Sammy?’
Sammy looked up, his eyes wavering. ‘I’m busy just now,’ he said shortly. ‘Later.’
Something in his manner told Ira that Sammy suddenly didn’t intend to marry Mei-Mei. It came as a surprise because Mei-Mei still seemed cheerful enough, cooking them meals of rice and strange-tasting fish drowned in stock, whenever they returned to the bungalow.
‘Something wrong between you two, Sammy?’ he asked. Sammy looked up, his eyes honest. ‘No, Ira,’ he said. ‘Not that way, anyway. It’s just that she’s East and I’m West. Know what I mean?’
‘I think so.’
‘She thinks Chinese and I think European. It’s difficult.’
‘It always was, Sammy.’
‘I keep putting it off, tryin
g to work it out.’
‘Think you ever will, Sammy?’
Sammy paused, leaning over the engine, then he shook his head.
‘Not really,’ he said after a pause. ‘She hasn’t picked up hardly a single blessed word and, while I’ve progressed a bit, I can’t really talk much with her. And going to bed with a girl isn’t marriage, is it? I’m still trying to work it out.’
Eventually, both wings were finished and ready for assembling, and Sammy set about timing the engine so that combustion took place at the very second when the piston was in the correct position.
Then, with the help of Wang, he made a horse for the engine with lengths of wood and strips of iron, and slung a five-gallon tin of petrol from the beam of the barn and led a long rubber tube down for a gravity feed. Before screwing on the propeller, they dug a pit in the floor, so that it could revolve without damage, and they all assembled to watch the engine start. It was the first warm day for weeks and Ellie and Lawn and Jimmy Cheng were at the side of the barn, all of them distinctly uneasy, while Ira and Sammy tinkered with the last few adjustments.