The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  Wang was so playful and creative with words that Harkness invariably adopted his freshly coined phrases. If something was lost inside the castle, he would murmur as he hunted, “What city that thing?” Fartheroff locations were “bungalows.” Any meat was ham or “porky.” The old mandarin at the castle was, to Wang, the “manderman.” Wang, who was married to two women, once asked Harkness for one piece of paper for his two piece wives.

  Her funniest exchange with Wang, though, had come on her very first night at the castle, when she realized that with her raging cold, she was running low on clean handkerchiefs. She asked Wang if he would be willing to launder them. Yes, he could, he said. But then he began to speak to her in his idiosyncratic slang, referring quite insistently to something he called “sheeties.” Harkness was perplexed. There were no bed linens on this pared-down trek, so she was “quite befogged.” Wang kept trying to get through to her, then finally, exasperated by her dullness, he took her across the castle to the opposite wall, pointing to a small flying balcony. At its center was a square hole with a long drop to the court below. While pantomiming “intestinal evacuation,” Harkness said, he triumphantly announced, “Sheety house.” Harkness wrote home, “Thus was I shown the ‘Ladies Room.’”

  If pidgin English had a tendency to make Chinese speakers appear simpleminded in the eyes of westerners, it had to have cut both ways, for Wang never seemed confident in Harkness's abilities. As he would go off to the village, wearing all his coats and carrying his black cotton umbrella, he would leave Harkness with stern instructions, as though she didn't know enough to come in from the cold. “Master, sun go down; you go inside; catchee cough.”

  For most daily needs, Wang and Harkness were able to communicate. The kindness and loyalty of this man who was, as Harkness put it, “true to his salt,” meant the world to her. Pidgin English, though, just didn't allow for deep, complex conversations. There would be no one here in these cold mountains for her to pour her heart out to. Inexorably, Harkness found herself being pulled into a dark vortex of loneliness. There were outside signs of it from the beginning, as the American, once the toast of Manhattan, lost any interest in dress or hygiene. It was the first step in her slide downward, even though she made light of it. “My appearance at the moment should be a guide to all lady ‘explorers’ in the matter of the smart thing to wear when hunting pandas,” she wrote home. “I have on a pair of violent green wool socks; a pair of very soiled flanellate pajamas that my sister made me some years ago, a pair of Chinese cloth shoes that are many sizes too large, and my best Tibetan woolly coat lined with a different but equally violent shade of green; this garment is designed to make one look like a grizzly bear—or a panda— in all directions is girded about my loins with a really beautiful handwoven blue-green Jarung belt with much fringe that trails a few odds and ends of cornstocks. In the absence of hairdressers I brush my hair as well as possible; it is getting to look quite Chinese; I have a small cold so my nose is red. But otherwise I am quite as lovely looking as ever.” She also didn't bathe very often, and her clothes got dirtier by the day. She would bundle up in a grimy outfit and do nothing.

  Her typewriter was her liberation—her tenuous tie to the outside world—and she wondered with mock horror what would become of her if the ribbon ever gave out. Even though mail was spotty at best, she could talk and talk by typing, sending batches of mail off by runner to Wenchuan to be posted. Her first words to Hazel Perkins on October 24 were, “It is a most discouraging fact that I have had only one letter from you since I left America; I do hope that you have written and someday I can sit down and spend hours reading about things; I want to know what you are doing and why.” Though the days were uneventful, she wrote like mad anyway, sometimes typing up prank letters. In one packet, she presented a business proposal, in playful legalese, to Perkins and her friend Anne Pierce, for opening a health spa at the castle. She said the renovated complex would be good for the soul, with a bungalow available on the “yang,” or sunny side, of the mountain, and one on the “yin,” or shady side. “The one great point concerning this project which should have great publicity appeal in America is the fact that from the standpoint of health, the trip alone here, will kill or cure.”

  Over the first few weeks she learned with some effort how to pass the days. And by night she could lie on her cot under wool blankets reading by the dim glow of candlelight. She had with her Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Comic and crowded with characters, it was a perfect escape. She also pored over and scribbled in the margins of an odd volume, dense and pessimistic, called Man, the Unknown, by scientist Alexis Carroll. The work suggested that society should keep an open mind where mysticism and the paranormal were concerned—a perspective that, of course, interested Harkness—but Carroll also advocated eugenics, something Harkness didn't have much patience for. If she was lucky, she would nod off after reading and sleep until dawn.

  Mornings were dreary, with little sunlight, just thick cloud and gauzy veils of mist and fog. Standing out on the balcony, she could see the passage of the seasons simply by looking across the valley during clear moments, to monitor the fall colors—reds and oranges and yellows— creeping down the mountains, descending lower and lower, being chased right on their heels by snow and the icy grip of winter.

  Each day passed with no news of pandas. Wang remained optimistic: “Oh yes, Master, can catch,” he told Harkness, predicting that a panda would be in hand by November 10. Periodically, the hunters checked in with her. Combing the ridges and valleys, they were capturing all kinds of game, bringing her flying squirrels, gray squirrels, foxes, grouse, pheasants, and even a takin—none of which she wanted. Occasionally, though, the catches were so cute, she couldn't help keeping them for a while. Once, she suffered a nasty laceration from a squirrel, who gave her a bad bite on what she said was one of her most important typewriting fingers.

  Along with the live animals, the hunters would also bring welcome meat—wild boar, venison, goral, partridge, and pheasant. Years later, Harkness would write for Gourmet magazine about how she unwittingly ate ten thousand dollars' worth of rare pheasants presented by the men—orange and gold tragopans, impeyans, Lady Amhersts. The hunters carried them in bamboo baskets, or, if alive, tied in cornmeal sacks, though eventually Harkness would ask that the birds not be brought in breathing, for she couldn't bear to see them proud and beautiful one day, then lying dead the next. However they arrived, Wang would cook them in rice wine, soy sauce, and a red pepper seasoning, till the skin was a delicate lacquered crisp.

  The men came and left many times, never staying long. After the dropoff, they would set right back out again, stoic and spartan. “In the preparations for the long trips which they made for me high into the snows of the mountains, sometimes to be gone for a week or ten days,” Harkness wrote, “they took with them as their only rations a homespun bag containing perhaps eight or nine pounds of corn meal, a lump of grey rock salt, perhaps a few bunches of bei-tsai, which is a Chinese green like a cross between romaine and cabbage, a lobo or two—reminiscent of both radish and turnip—and, if they could get it, a piece of fat salt pork.” They traveled lightly, Harkness said, carrying no blankets, “sleeping close to the fire on snowy nights. Not one had a pair of socks, only straw sandals and thin blue cotton trousers and jackets.”

  Aside from the visits of the men from the field, the only other break in her monotonous agenda came when there was a rare mail drop. One evening, Dzo, a hired hand from the first expedition, arrived from Wenchuan carrying a bundle. Harkness was overjoyed. “Letters in that remote place were thrilling things,” she said. “With no companionship of any sort, mail is the breath of life.” She tore into the cache, smoking cigarettes and drinking corn wine as she discovered what her friends and family were doing, reading, thinking. The letters were dated—many had been written at the height of summer—“but gosh it was good to have them,” she said. There was a clipping from Chicago of Su-Lin sitting atop a pyramid of logs, which Harknes
s propped up by her typewriter. With the rush of remote companionship, she had gotten carried away with the wine, and by the time she finished reading and rereading, she was drunk.

  It was late at night, but with her spirits reeling, she couldn't bear the thought of going to bed. She wanted more. In New York or Shanghai, the night would be young. Here, far out in the country, skies went black early and the long, cold, silent nights would begin. This evening, she wanted to stave off the gloom for a change. There weren't many options. Finally, descending the crooked, darkened hallways and stairs with the light of a candle or kerosene lamp, she went looking for company. She clambered through the maze of rooms and passageways, searching out the dignified old mandarin. Her dancing light found him in his rustic chambers, where the air was filled with the sweet, acrid scent of opium. In the silence he sat like a wise god, serenely puffing on a filthy old pipe. They couldn't talk to each other, but when he offered for her to join him in a smoke, she sat down gamely, taking a good pull on the pipe. At the farthest reaches of civilization, in the middle of the night, she had found a little vice, after all, and she lingered long enough to finish off a couple of bowls. She reported feeling nothing from the narcotic, but when she left the old man to head back upstairs, she was still drunk. Collapsing into bed, she broke a canvas strap on the cot, nearly sinking to the floor. In the morning, as light poured into the big room and she sobered up, she thought about how she had spent the night, wondering what she “might have collected in the way of germs from the ancient pipe.”

  It would be her last after-dark blowout. From here on out, the nights would become increasingly difficult. On her previous expedition, she had marched and hiked and pushed herself physically every day. She had bathed in icy mountain streams. And when she had curled up just past sundown, she invariably had been pulled into a deep, contented sleep. This year, slumber escaped her. Days of laziness, in which she sat “like a hermit on his mountain top waiting for all things to come to me,” stoked nights of anxiety, restlessness, and despair.

  This would be a tougher test for Harkness than all the danger of last year's trials. But she dug in, determined to see it through. She knew she needed some sort of release, and obviously, opium wasn't the answer. So she embarked on a journey involving something infinitely more reliable than drugs—her imagination. Harkness now would dwell in a shaded and mysterious world, one full of spells and passion; a place where nature sheltered those who honored it; where animals and people could communicate. Alone in her room, she would sit at her typewriter, transforming this lonely valley into a place filled with exciting characters and intrigue. She resumed writing a story she had begun the year before, set in a beautiful forest, just like the one that rioted beyond her. It held the great themes of her life, and the dichotomies that she struggled to balance. In it, a half-breed woman was torn by her two different worlds—East and West—and by the love of two men, one a sophisticated American, the other, a handsome, brave young villager muscling his way over the edge into manhood. The forest was a primitive idyll. Modern civilization beckoned with physical comfort, medicine; but it also threatened with greed and intolerance. The story allowed Harkness to simplify some of her most complicated emotions about life and love, about home, and mysticism, and harmony with nature.

  In reality, nature was now a trial. The beginning of November felt like deep winter. The days were gray and raw, with only rare breaks of sunshine. The drizzly nights were plunged into the bone-chilling cold of high mountains. By this time, Harkness cursed her decision to remain in the castle rather than join the hunters in the field. Marking time while hired men did the legwork was a strategy Smith had advocated the previous year, one that she had rejected outright. Now she was doing just that. Not in the comfort of Shanghai, of course, but in the discomfort of the castle, and achingly within sight of the forest and the life she should have been immersed in. Why hadn't she gone? It wasn't the hardships of the field that had halted her. She craved intense sensation, which a good hard trek granted. Her only explanation was that she would have been a liability to the endeavor. She was no good at pitching tents or tying knots; she certainly couldn't shoot game.

  Other things must have weighed heavily on her. Quentin Young wasn't there, and the personal and practical considerations of entering the wild without him may have been too much. She was under tremendous pressure to succeed—ironically, much more than last time. In her first expedition, hardly anyone even knew what she was up to, and among those who did, there was little expectation. This time the world was aware of where she was and what she was doing. There were high hopes. And the Brookfield Zoo had staked money on this trip. There were also Smith's charges that she wasn't a real explorer. And her own desire to make a life for herself doing this work—the need to prove to herself before anyone else that she, in fact, could. Then too there was the debt of honor in reinforcing to the great white hunters that animal capture could be kind, and soft, and feminine. Of Smith's two pandas that died, Harkness said, “I believe the spirits of Ajax's pandas were completely broken.” She felt there was a viable alternative to all the rough work of traditional hunters. There was a lot riding on this trip, and Harkness had to stick with the tactic that had the best chance of success.

  At this point, it probably seemed too late and foolish, even too selfish, to change plans in order to go hunting herself. But she was at such loose ends, perceiving herself as so useless, she felt compelled to do whatever was in her power to hurry things along. For Harkness, that meant one thing—another ceremony to the gods of the mountains. She ordered the purchase from town of a large red cock for sacrifice.

  Several days later, at dusk, the runners returned from Guanxian with the animal and all the ceremonial provisions. Wang arranged with the hunters that they would carry the rooster, incense, candles, and wine to the same spot that had been used for Harkness's big joss service last year. She lobbied to travel with the men, if not for hunting, then at least for the rites, but Wang preferred the comforts, such as they were, of the castle. His reluctance only added to Harkness's suspicion that he was tethered by a romance in the village. Wang sometimes dressed up and disappeared for hours somewhere in the vicinity of those huts beyond the castle. One day, when he had vanished for a long time—an afternoon and into the evening—Harkness sent for him. In his embarrassment, she reported, “he came rushing back puffing and dithering up the castle stairs.” She thought he was guilty about something.

  As for a trip into the forest, Wang wouldn't budge. He told Harkness that they could time things so that the night the hunters reached the ceremonial rock, the two of them could “make joss” simultaneously, close to their own protective roof.

  With all the preparations in place, a few nights later, near a little peach tree, Harkness and Wang lighted their candles, burning sacrificial money in obeisance to the Tibetan gods. Staying put was a small concession to her dear Wang. He had been so good to her that she couldn't have pressured him about it.

  By mid-November, the seclusion was truly taking its toll on Harkness. In letters home, she didn't even try to hide it anymore. “Slowly but inevitably I am losing my mind,” she wrote. Her distractions weren't distracting enough. She was even coming to the end of her meager reading selection, having almost completed the Dickens. She said that when she turned the last page of the book, her last vestige “of sanity will have fled.” When she wrote, she still threw in a witty line or two, but invariably her predicament would become apparent. “Patience is, I am told, a great virtue. Mine I fear is wearing thin. Not for me the years on lonely mountain tops in contemplation; I have too much to do in this world.”

  Her humor blackened while inch by inch her confidence eroded. Dirty, bedraggled, and without a single in-depth conversation to steady her in reality, she began to think for the first time that she might just fail. She feared she would never see another giant panda. With every passing day, each night that closed to total blackness, it got worse. Deep inside the lonely castle, she might hea
r only the rushing wind, the sounds of her own footsteps in the echoing dim halls, the sputtering of an oil lamp, or the crackle of a precious campfire. She caught the sound of her own language only inside her own thoughts.

  If she took stock of her life, she would see no safety net below. She was a thirty-seven-year-old widow with a lust for adventure and a nebulous hold on underwriting it. When she lost her husband, she sidestepped a family fortune. If she failed on this trip, she would have trouble supporting herself. She would have to find a way to earn her keep. Furthermore, she wasn't even sure which side of the world she wanted to call home. At times it could seem that her life was at stake: “This year I'm afraid will end in failure… and what will I do if I fail?” she wrote. Too easily, she would seek solace in corn wine. It took some of the sting out of the tortured hours, which always worsened at sundown.

  Some nights she abandoned any effort to sleep, and when Wang would hear her moving about, or coughing with the cold she had trouble shaking, he would rouse himself to boil her a bowl of pale tea. He would give her tiger balm and stoke the fire in her chilled room.

  But that didn't always bring her peace. In this wild, desolate place, she began to have strange dreams of Bill. Sometimes it was comforting to sense his presence and to feel protected by his spirit, but she was also distressed by a recurring nightmare: horrible images of Bill in terrible condition, “ill and penniless.” He must have been reproaching her in some way, because over and over, in the nightmare, she would have to defend herself, laying out the whole story of Su-Lin to him, explaining why she had to leave to bring the panda back a mate. In this castle where she had first made love to Quentin Young, and with nothing to occupy her mind, she began to drown in despair.

  It opened the door even wider to the mysticism and spirituality she had always craved. She felt that she was in the presence not only of Bill's spirit but of “other forces too.” The previous year, she had ascended these mountains into the realm of the gods. Now, paradoxically, from this great height, she seemed to be descending, ever downward, into perdition, fueled by local corn wine and dark thoughts, into a netherworld where dreams would become portents, and opium and mysticism would call to her.