I found myself in the sea—I know not how. A round spar floated by, and I seized it though it was half aflame, for I could not swim well. After some hours, the spar bore me to a small island, and I felt I was saved.
Three others had drifted to the same islet. We all gave thanks to the gods for our salvation when we spied a small foreign boat rowed by Europeans. But they ignored our cries and swiftly drew away.
My companions despaired at this final sign of Heaven’s displeasure. One old man lay down to die. Before pressing his lips together and swearing he would speak no more till he stood before the Magistrates of Heaven, he told us he had voluntarily taken passage to Peru to seek out his eldest son who had been indentured twelve years earlier. The son had married a native woman, who gave him six children. The old man had only learned of his son’s fate and his grandchildren’s existence two months earlier when a Chinese trader brought him a tattered letter written by a public scribe.
We others thought the old man’s despair foolish. The islet, though small, was firm rock—and we saw the sails of fishing junks in the distance. But the incoming tide swept over the rock, washing away my companions in misfortune one by one. I clung to the last projecting pinnacle till the tide swept me into the waves.
Then a miracle occurred. A chicken-coop from the sunken ship drifted by, its feathered denizens drowned and limp, and I clambered onto the tossing platform. After several hours, a fishing junk from Hong Kong trailed its nets alongside. Since I still had the eight silver dollars tied to my waistband, the fisherman gave me passage to Hong Kong. Five other unfortunates clinging to bits of the wreck the fishermen abandoned, for they had no silver.
Sir Jonathan gave his attention to lighting a fresh panatella. Charles yawned behind his brandy snifter, his thoughts drifting to the letter he was drafting to the Rothschilds regarding railway financing. Himself totally committed to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Harry felt automatic indignation.
Mary was at once puzzled and irritated by the rambling account. The Europeans’ actions were reprehensible, but they were rapacious adventurers far removed from normal moral restraints. The behavior of the Chinese, she felt, was characteristic of a race overwhelmingly concerned with profit. His own cousin had sold Ah Choong into serfdom, while the Chinese fishermen had rescued only those castaways who could pay. But she no longer allowed herself to grieve over the cruelty Chinese practiced against other Chinese.
“A sad tale, General Cohen,” she said. “Perhaps my wits are muddled by your eloquence, but I can’t see what it proves.”
“Consider it a moral homily, my dear Madam,” the burly bodyguard replied equably. “This same Ah Choong was subsequently employed by your esteemed father-in-law and, later, given passage to Canada as a reward for faithful service. The first time I heard the name Sekloong was from Ah Choong’s lips.”
“I think I remember the fellow,” Sir Jonathan said, embarrassed.
“He remembers you, Sir, with great affection and gratitude. But the lady asks how his tale relates to our present endeavors. The Manchus, whom we have overthrown, connived in the coolie traffic—despite their public disapproval. The Europeans exploited the poor folk abominably—aided by corrupt officials who should have been their suffering compatriots’ natural protectors. And avaricious profit-seekers first imperiled Ah Choong and later succored him, while condemning his penniless fellow castaways to death.”
“Some capitalists contributed heavily to the revolution,” Charles objected. “I still don’t see how Ah Choong’s tale ties in with the revolution.”
“We shall destroy all such evils!” Cohen’s bass voiced boomed, and his fist struck his knee in violent indignation. “Dr. Sun has not striven these long years merely to change one set of Imperial rascals for another set of republican rascals. His program is comprehensive. He will drive the money-changers from the temple, while honoring the upright merchant and the far-seeing entrepreneur. He will make China a great, proud, and noble nation.”
“I’m reassured, General!” Sir Jonathan did not conceal his patrician distaste of the adventurer’s bombast. “But you haven’t told us why you’re so eager to help China?”
“Because, Sir, I detest injustice—and I love great enterprises. Because the lost tribes of Israel made their way to China millennia ago. If one ancient people is redeemed from injustice, then another ancient people, my own people, shall also find redemption!”
The young Jew’s declaration of faith rang in the silence. Charles retreated into his duties as the eldest son of the house. He refilled Cohen’s tankard, replenished his wife’s brandy-and-soda, and splashed dollops of brandy into balloon glasses for his father, his brother, and himself.
Charles, Mary reflected, was outwardly becoming more British every day, for he was acutely uncomfortable with any display of emotion. Neither the wild Irish strain in the Sekloong blood nor the Chinese delight in histrionics affected his public demeanor. His father was different. Fires burned behind Sir Jonathan’s courtly façade, occasionally flaring high. Though both were passionate men who showed the world calm faces, neither Sir Jonathan nor Charles was imaginative, not as poets or revolutionaries are imaginative. Their overleaping ambitions were guided by cold-blooded calculation.
Mary feared that their cool shrewdness was frosting her own heart, though she was repelled by their quasi-religious devotion to the House of Sekloong. Professing Roman Catholics, they nonetheless paid homage to the clan like high-priests serving a jealous, demanding deity. Her revulsion had increased with the successive years. She sometimes despaired, feeling herself no longer an individual human being, nor even a wife and mother, but a reluctant high-priestess—or, perhaps, a sanctified temple prostitute—of the Sekloongs’ cult of Mammon.
Only Harry was gradually renouncing that cult and stealthily detaching himself from the clan. The Celtic and the Sinitic passions ran strong in him, though camouflaged by his habitual irreverence. At thirty-two, he had finally marked out his personal goal. His purpose had crystallized during the stormy night when he attacked the opium-smuggling steamer Taishan. The abstract, bloodless intrigues of the counting-house did not stir him as had staking his life against the waves and bullets. He was intoxicated by the cause Two-Gun Cohen so grandiloquently described: the salvation of a nation and a people—his own nation and his own people—that had been exploited and oppressed for centuries. Mary knew in sorrow that Harry was all but lost to herself as well. He was giving himself wholly to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, which had just overthrown a 267-year-old dynasty and shattered a millennia-old civilization.
Ah Sam’s knock broke both her unhappy reverie and the awkward silence that lay upon the four men. When the old pirate swung open the teak doors, she saw that he had cut off his queue, the long plait his countrymen had worn since the Manchu conquest. His act was portentous. When that staunch conservative, Ah Sam, cast off the symbol of loyalty to the Great Pure Dynasty, the republicans had all but won the hearts of the Chinese people.
Ah Sam showed an oddly matched pair into the library. A stocky Chinese with grizzled mustaches in a square peasant’s face entered first. He wore a broadcloth frock-coat, and a heavy gold chain hung across his double-breasted waistcoat. Mary recognized him as much from his commanding air as from his photographs: Sun Yat-sen, Doctor of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong, for decades the Manchus’ most dangerous enemy and, if General Cohen judged right, soon to be the first president of the Republic of China.
The revolutionary’s companion was his antithesis, a high-bred patrician. The second man’s figure was slender, and he stooped as if he spent his days hunched over old manuscripts. Dr. Sun’s tread was heavy, and his features were blunt. His companion’s step was light, and his narrow face was dominated by a high-arched nose. His waistcoat was embroidered with flamboyant yellow roses, and his deepset brown eyes shone with intelligence. When he spoke, his fine white hands gesticulated like butterflies hovering in a subtle aerial ballet.
Though Judah Haleevie l
ived in Shanghai, Mary had met him several times. A valued business associate of Sir Jonathan, like the Sekloongs he straddled two worlds. With a few other Iraqi-Jewish families like the Sassoons and the Kadoories, the Haleevies had built the modern metropolis of Shanghai from a somnolent fishing port on the muddy delta of the Yangtze River. The Haleevies could command large sums from the Rothschilds, the Salomons, and the Warburgs. The Middle Eastern Jews were bound to their German co-religionists not primarily by their faith or by common interests, but by mutual dedication to building a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Judah was known for his philanthropies, though he did not seek personal renown. The man they called the Hebrew Mandarin was an anomaly among the hard-drinking, anti-intellectual China Coast merchants—not only because of his biblical scholarship, but because of his curious family life. Blessed with seven sons and one daughter, Sarah, who was the pampered youngest of his brood at the age of six, he had adopted seven Eurasian orphans, all girls.
“They’ll make fine brides for my boys,” he would explain defensively. But Sir Jonathan observed, with a touch of envy, that Judah Haleevie was indulging the patriarchal propensity that was as pronounced among the Jews as it was among the Chinese.
“Well, Sir Jonathan, my old friend, I think we can all be happy tonight,” Dr. Sun said exuberantly in English. The American intonation overlaying his sibilant Hong Kong accent recalled his high-school education in Hawaii.
“Let us hope so, Dr. Sun,” Sir Jonathan replied ceremoniously. “May I present my son Charles and his wife Mary? My useless younger son, Harry, you know.”
“Delighted, Madam, Mr. Sekloong. Your brother’s told me a lot about you.”
Judah Haleevie’s formal manner recalled his distant Spanish ancestors. His heavy-lidded eyes lingered on Mary’s open features, appraising her red-gold hair and her figure in a yellow-silk, high-waisted dress. He nodded to Two-Gun Cohen like an old acquaintance. Actually, they had met for the first time the previous day, and the scholarly Jewish merchant-prince had little in common with the bombastic Jewish adventurer.
“As you know, Jonathan,” Haleevie observed quietly, “Dr. Sun shares your passion for railroads. We’ve been drawing long lines on the wall map.”
“Your railroads … our railroads … will unite China.” Dr. Sun Yat-sen spoke with the practiced orator’s authority. “From Manchuria to Tibet we will spin a web of steel across the nation. China will no longer be a sheet of sand, but a granite pillar bound by steel hoops. China will also be a living organism, ever changing, ever moving. The railroads will be the arteries through which the nourishing life-blood flows. Harry’s fleets of motor-lorries will be the capillaries feeding every cell, no matter how remote!”
“Your railroads, Dr. Sun,” Judah Haleevie interposed, “not our railroads.”
“Well,” the statesman laughed, “ours and yours—in the beginning at least. We’ll need much financial help, though the railroads must belong to the Chinese people.”
“Agreed,” Sir Jonathan nodded. “And a fair return for the financiers.”
“A fair return,” Sun Yat-sen answered. “Not exorbitant.”
“If you don’t feed the goose,” Sir Jonathan said tartly, “it won’t lay eggs—golden or not.”
“A remarkable coincidence,” Judah Haleevie interposed diplomatically. “Railroads loom large in your plans, but resistance to railroads brought you to power.”
“Not coincidence, my friend,” Dr. Sun replied, “but providence. The entire Yangtze Valley from Szechwan to Shanghai rose in revolt because the railroad consortium assembled by the Manchus meant unbreakable foreign domination for many years—perhaps indefinitely. Our railroads will be different. Financing from abroad, but Chinese control.”
“Were you,” Mary asked, “surprised by your quick triumph?”
“No, not in a larger sense,” Sun answered. “We knew the Manchus must fall. We were surprised by the minor incidents that toppled them. Scattered anti-railroad riots in the southwest and an explosion—a very small explosion—in Wuhan. The revolutionaries in Wuhan exercised more enthusiasm than skill in handling dynamite. When the Manchus ordered their army to suppress them, the troops revolted. So many officers were listed on our secret rolls. If the Manchus had found the lists, they would have been slaughtered.”
“And, then,” Mary persisted, “everything went as you wished?”
“I was sorry when the Manchu garrisons were slaughtered. They weren’t soldiers any longer, just fat, pampered pensioners. Then the whole structure collapsed. The Ta Ching Chao looked like an immense impregnable fortress. For years, we had hurled ourselves at the towering walls, sometimes gaining a foothold. We were always thrown back, though we knew the structure was rotten with internal decay. Then, suddenly, that small accidental explosion—and the fortress tumbled like a house of cards.”
“But, Sir,” Harry interjected, “if it weren’t for Viceroy Yüan Shih-kai, you wouldn’t be going to Nanking to preside over the National Assembly.”
“True, Harry,” Sun said. “We couldn’t be sure the Great Viceroy would betray the Dynasty to the revolution in 1911 just because he betrayed the reformers to the Dynasty in 1898. His masterly inactivity was an unexpected, decisive boon—and he’ll demand his reward. Unfortunately, we must still temporize with the self-serving vestiges of the old regime like Yüan Shih-kai. But their time will be short. We’ll build a new China from the best of East and West—after purging the corruption of two thousand years of Confucian government. Our task is great, but we will execute it as swiftly as the Ching Dynasty collapsed.”
Mary suppressed a smile and retired into her own thoughts. She was quite certain that Dr. Sun Yat-sen could not attain a tithe of his goals even in a century. His promise to remake the inert mass of China “as swiftly as the Ching Dynasty collapsed” was not merely visionary. It was abysmal nonsense. The essential character of the Chinese would prevent any sweeping transformation. Hong Kong itself demonstrated the impossibility of mitigating the ingrained selfishness of the average Chinese or altering his total disregard for all other human beings. Despite their snobbery, their cliques, and their avarice, the British were efficient and selfless by comparison with the Chinese. But they had failed to affect the fundamental nature of the Chinese.
“Hong Kong’s an ideal sociological laboratory.” Hilary Metcalfe had confided his near despair during the plague year, 1909, only months before his death under the feet of a Chinese mob. “Small and isolated, if imperfectly controlled. British behavior’s been foul, but we’re selfless angels compared to the Chinese ruling class. Our efforts to create a new society blending East and West were, at least, well meant. But the upshot? Look around you. The Chinese transformed us—it was quite a feat. The Chinese further corrupted men you’d think couldn’t be more corrupt, men born with no more moral sense than that cheechuk.”
He gestured toward the ceiling, where a two-inch-long, translucent lizard darted its tongue at a black ant.
“The only bond was avarice. A number of Europeans and a few Chinese tried to communicate across the immense barrier of divergent cultures. Even language we couldn’t teach. Hong Kong English—it’s not a language, but a damned ineffective jargon. Only thing worse is Hong Kong Chinese as spoken by British Colonial Officers. Yet some people think the Chinese can transform themselves. Rubbish!”
At the time, Mary was shocked by his vehemence. She had not yet fully comprehended the vulpine character of the race, the overwhelming rapacity that impelled one Chinese to prey upon his compatriots, or the miasmic superstition that mired progress. Her subsequent experiences had supported Hilary Metcalfe’s dire judgment. Since a well-ordered society was impossible in Hong Kong, it was inconceivable in China. The deluded idealist Dr. Sun could not see his own people clearly. He was blinded by his own enthusiasm, by his protracted absences from China, and by his foreign education.
Sir Jonathan believed in China’s future, almost in defiance of his own cool assessment of
men and events. It was his one blind spot, for his judgment of China was shaped far more by his impulsive heart than by his calculating brain. But his personal investments were dispersed in Europe and America, as well as Asia. That disposition demonstrated the skepticism regarding the future of the China he loved he would not express in words.
The autocrat had, moreover, not objected to Mary’s proposal that her eldest child, his grandson Jonathan, be educated in England. At his insistence, all the children were tutored in Mandarin and calligraphy by an elderly scholar, a distant cousin whom they affectionately called Uncle Kwok when they were not teasing him. But Sir Jonathan’s fervent Chinese patriotism had yielded to his hard practical sense when Charles and Mary consulted him regarding young Jonathan’s education.
“He’s old enough—nine, almost too old to begin the trials of an English boarding-school. But it’s necessary, and he can spruce up his Chinese later. Of course, it must be a Catholic school.”
“No question about that, Father,” Charles replied.
Mary was almost as startled by Sir Jonathan’s insistence upon a Catholic school as by his easy concession of the good Chinese education Jonnie could not, in any event, obtain in Hong Kong. Would Sir Jonathan, she wondered, have been quite so compliant if the entire Chinese educational system were not in flux and an English education were not essential to success in commerce? She herself still shrank from delivering her first-born into the hands of black-clad priests. After a decade of marriage to a Catholic, she was still haunted by the irrational fear of the Church of Rome inculcated by her Nonconformist upbringing.
“And, Father,” Charles added, “it must be the Jesuits. They did well by you and me.”
The decision that had wrung Mary’s heart for months was taken in minutes. She had agonized over parting with Jonathan, though she knew she must. However satisfactory for most Hong Kong Chinese and Eurasians St. Stephen’s College might be, the school would not do for a Sekloong of the third-generation—and certainly not for her son. If Jonathan were not to be a typical Hong Kong man, a deracinated dweller in an isolated cultural-village, he must go to England to school.
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