The stream flowed on. Two royal-blue chairs flaunting the winged Sekloong dragon discharged Sydney and Gregory Sek, who had come from Shanghai. Two years apart in age, Sir Jonathan’s sons by his first wife were pudgy twin penguins in tight tailcoats, unprepossessing by any standards, Chinese or Western. Their mother, Lillian, had been the daughter of a minor Ningpo merchant by a Cantonese peasant girl first brought into his family home as an eight-year-old mui-tsai, an indentured servant.
The Seks’ presence was faintly disquieting. Then plain Mr. Sek Howan, Jonathan had espoused their mother in a traditional Chinese ceremony in 1873. He had married Lady Lucinda in the Church in 1875, five years before Lillian died in his stead under the daggers of Secret Society assassins hired by his business rivals. Though polygamy was unexceptionable, the normally imperturbable Sir Jonathan felt uncomfortable in the brothers’ presence. They forcefully recalled the tawdry days when he was clawing his way toward affluence and respectability.
Judah Haleevie had also come from Shanghai, accompanied by his eleven-year-old daughter Sarah. Mary offered a special smile of welcome to the financier and his dark-eyed daughter. She waved when General Morris Abraham Cohen squeezed his bulk out of a public sedan chair. She felt great affection for the ill-matched pair, the Hebrew Mandarin and the Two-Gun General.
She saw with half an eye that Guinevere had thrown her arms around “Uncle George” Parker, while twelve-year-old Charlotte was flirting with Manfei, the eighteen-year-old son of Mosing Way. Thomas and James were converging on the Two-Gun General, demanding another highly colored installment of his adventures. All small boys, she knew, were fascinated by the romance of soldiering, but her two seemed incapable of thinking about anything else.
The man who had briefly been her own soldier was sweeping down upon her. She remembered the John Williams of sixteen years ago, the big, hearty athlete. Dismayed, she saw that he was no longer simply burly, but had become immense, bulging his short mess-jacket and red-striped trousers like the rubber-tire Michelin man. His powerful muscles had turned to fat, and broken blood vessels blotched his puffy cheeks. Although he was not yet forty, his corpulence made him appear twenty years older.
“Mary!” He advanced with open arms. “Mary, dearest!”
Heads turned at the salutation. She offered her cheek as his arms closed around her, but he kissed her full on the lips. His breath was heavy with gin.
She heard shocked clucking from the Chinese ladies and scandalized whispers from the Europeans. Behind his silver tray of champagne glasses, Ah Sam was impassively disapproving. His frozen smile weighed and condemned the man he had remembered fondly as Miss Mary’s friend.
“My dear John,” Mary said coolly, “how are you? I hear you’ve done great things since I last saw you. It’s been so long, I can hardly recall …”
“I see you’re wearing my necklace, Mary darling!”
He did not lower his voice, though he stood only a few inches away, breathing gin into her upturned face.
“Oh?” Mary strove for composure. “I’d forgotten.”
“Come off it. You couldn’t forget where those bloody great chunks of jade came from.”
His heavy forefinger flicked the miniature of the Victoria Cross on his lapel.
“Of course, it’s a pretty bauble,” she answered. “My husband’s a connoisseur of jade. He often admires the necklace—and wonders which Imperial princess it belonged to.”
John Williams grinned, unabashed by the snub. The cold perspiration of anger prickled on Mary’s back. She wanted to snatch off the necklace and hurl it in his face. Instead, she affected polite interest in his activities.
“Congratulations. I see you’re now a major general. What brings you to Hong Kong?”
“I’ll be about for a while. Big purchasing mission, you know. But cumshaw, too. I’m sure we can do business, much business under the right conditions—all the right conditions.”
His heavy eyelid winked, and his muscle-knotted forehead crinkled. The proposition could not have been cruder; while better men were dying in France, he was boldly proposing in public that the House of Sekloong bribe him to award it contracts.
“All the right conditions,” he repeated, parading his confidence that she would fall into his arms and his bed.
“Perhaps, John,” she answered. “My father-in-law strives to serve the war effort to the utmost. But, now, you must excuse me while I play the hostess.”
She evaded his extended arm and turned away to murmur trivialities to a startled Mosing Way.
She had longed to slap John’s grinning face. Yet she knew she would be forced to smile at the Major General again, while evading his advances and praying his visit would be short. Business was, after all, business. The chief business of the House of Sekloong at that moment was with His Majesty’s War Office, represented by Major General John Williams V.C., who had been transformed from an engaging youth into an obese lout.
The Royal Mail Steamer Triton of the Peninsular and Oriental Line sailed for Southampton at 4 P.M. on Sunday, June 11, 1916, from her anchorage off Blake Pier. Her passenger list included Major (temporary) Charles Sekloong and six war-service second lieutenants. The directors of the big hongs had deemed it necessary to offer an additional contribution to His Majesty’s Forces, since young British manhood had been brutally scythed by the war. Pressed by those hongs, the civil servants in London still maintained that the best service they could render was maintaining the Empire’s trade. Nonetheless, a gesture was desirable, as long as it was not overdone. Each hong had contributed one subaltern, chosen by lot from dozens of volunteers. In June 1916, fifty-odd lieutenants were dying and more than one hundred and fifty were wounded each week in France. But the hongs had, after all, not started the conflict that swelled their profits.
R.M.S. Triton was a famous passage-maker, and the P & O guaranteed that she would reach Southhampton in twenty-eight days, “barring acts of God and the misfortunes of war.” She would not encounter acute danger until she passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic to dare the prowling submarines of the Imperial German Navy. The light cruiser Emden had slipped into the Indian Ocean in August 1914 to join the armored cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nürnberg, which had escaped from the German naval base at Tsingtao in North China under Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee. Emden was sunk on November 9, 1914, by the cruiser Sydney of the Royal Australian Navy. On December 8, von Spee’s squadron had been brought to bay and destroyed off the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. In Far Eastern and Indian waters, Triton faced only the remote peril of commerce raiders disguised as innocent merchantmen.
Nonetheless, it was a wartime sailing. Though the portholes of Charles Sekloong’s spacious cabin were open to catch the afternoon breeze, their glass was painted black. Awareness of possible danger to Triton and those who sailed in her heightened the mixed gaiety and sorrow both travelers and those left behind customarily felt whenever the Blue Peter fluttered aloft and the ship’s siren shrieked periodic warnings that the anchors would soon be coming up. Alone with Charles in his cabin, for a few moments free of the throngs of children, relations, and friends, Mary Sekloong clung to the husband toward whom she thought she had become comfortably indifferent years earlier.
“You will see Jonnie if you possibly can,” she reminded him for the fourth time. “Just as soon as you reach England, won’t you, Charles?”
“Of course, my dear,” he reassured her. “As soon as I can. He must be training hard in the cadet force. Bet he won’t mind showing off the old man’s uniform.”
“You will see him?” Mary repeated her plea. “You will make an effort? If this war goes on, he …”
“Don’t worry about that, my dear.” Charles was surprised by his sudden sense of deprivation at leaving her. “It’ll be over long before he …”
“And, Charles, I …” Mary’s voice faltered, finally halting.
“Yes, my dear?”
“Charles,” she blurted
. “I do love you, Charles.”
His familiar features, their impression blurred by long familiarity, assumed again the lean contours and the youthful intensity that had first attracted her. His hazel eyes, she saw, were damp.
“You know,” he replied slowly, abashed by his own emotion, “Mary, darling, I haven’t been the best husband. But I do love you too.”
He kissed her with unaccustomed tenderness, and Mary felt the ardent response she had thought his touch had lost the power to evoke. She tightened her arms around his neck and let herself float in rediscovered passion.
The moment of renewal was brief. Thomas and James erupted into the cabin, demanding that their father rejoin the party in the saloon. It was neither wholly love nor hero worship; they wanted to show off his new uniform to their unfortunate cousins and friends whose fathers wore familiar, drab lounge suits. Tugging at his hands, the boys drew Charles away. Mary followed slowly.
She had, she realized, misassessed not only Charles, but others as well. Lord Peter, whom she originally thought a callous, lighthearted rake, had before his death revealed himself as the best of the men she knew. She recalled with shame that she had rejected John Williams in part because she judged his prospects poor. He had prospered, but the clean-limbed hero she had known had been corrupted by avarice and drink. Harry? She would not think about Harry at all.
But Charles remained her own, and she prayed silently that he would return unharmed. She had, she finally realized, married Charles not primarily for his prospects, but for himself. The Sekloongs’ wealth had undeniably influenced her decision, as had the lure of the exotic, but she knew she had married Charles for himself first. She swore they would truly make a new beginning when he returned. After all, she was almost thirty-six, and it was time to settle down.
Mary was not allowed to brood on either her regrets or her new resolution. Her cavaliers set out to divert her. “Mary’s Four Musketeers,” Sir Jonathan called them: heavy-bodied Morris Cohen, the Two-Gun General; hotheaded Harry Sekloong, his lighthearted banter belying his patriotic dedication; patrician Judah Haleevie, the most astute financial brain in Asia; and boyish Dr. George Parker, caught up in her entourage for reasons he did not quite comprehend. Early Monday morning, the four carried her off to Shatin in the New Territories.
The old Daimler had been replaced by an open Rolls-Royce with folding windshields, front and back, four spare wheels on the running-boards, and eight places for passengers. The Rolls could barely fit in the barge that carried it across Kowloon Bay. The battered Model T Ford Harry had driven down from Canton looked like a mechanical dwarf beside the royal-blue limousine with the inevitable winged dragon rampant on its side panels.
Guinevere and Charlotte were missing school to come along. With instinctive female solidarity, they were obtrusively, lovingly, almost irritatingly protective of their mother after watching their father sail away. Their three-year-old youngest brother was bundled between them in the Rolls, since his sisters believed little Charles would take Mary’s mind off big Charles. Thomas and James behaved as if the excursion had been mounted for their sole pleasure. They cried out shrill demands, which their Uncle Harry at the wheel of the Ford cheerfully ignored. His own purposes, camouflaged by the family outing, were even more important than the rare pleasure of spending a day with Mary and their son, James.
The motorcars attracted stares as they rolled between the spreading trees that shaded broad Nathan Road. Motor-vehicles were rarely seen on the flat plain dotted with occasional buildings, and the rickshaw-pullers were as startled as the carthorses and water buffaloes. Casting out puffs of black smoke and heralded by the clattering of gears, they passed the Walled City of Kowloon. That legally anomalous enclave, preserved under nominal Chinese sovereignty by treaty, was a bolthole for criminals and Secret Society Braves. The British preferred not to send their police into its labyrinthine alleys, and no effective Chinese government existed to maintain order.
Crossing Boundary Street into the New Territories, they entered the age-old Chinese countryside. Plump ducks lifted incurious eyes at the snorting conveyances, and startled chickens scuttled clucking into tile-roofed farmhouses. Their bellies brushing the ground, sway-backed sows led squealing piglets to succulent garbage-heaps. Thick-ruffed chow dogs barked imprecations at the rattling wagons that trailed a fearful stench, unlike the familiar aroma of pungent night-soil. Hakka women were foreshortened mushrooms under the wide, crownless circles of straw hung with black-cloth strips they wore to protect their complexions from the implacable sun. The women waded through flooded fields, stooping laboriously to transplant pale-green rice shoots. Plodding behind wooden plows drawn by patient water buffaloes, their men furrowed the fields.
The dirt road wound along the east coast of the New Territories, occasionally skirting the water’s edge, more often clinging to the lip of precipices overlooking distant green islets. Though the party stopped once for a picnic lunch and three times to repair punctured tires, the motorcars made excellent time. Only three hours after crossing Hong Kong Harbor, the Rolls and the Ford triumphantly halted at Shatin, thirty-one miles away.
The boys were abashed when their arrival went unnoticed, though only two other motorcars, an Auburn and a Mercedes, stood amid the crowd that rimmed a red-earth field at the foot of the pine-covered hills. Farmers squatted on the damp ground beside peddlers who fried bright-red chunks of offal and plump brown bean-curd cakes on their portable stoves. European ladies in horse-drawn phaetons held organdy parasols over their heads, and Chinese gentlemen in cotton long-gowns directed the sodden air at their perspiring faces with painted fans. Even the ragged urchins barely glanced at the Sekloong motorcars. The throng’s attention was focused on an ungainly contrivance of wire, bamboo, and cloth perched at the far end of the field—an immense kite with double wings and an elongated wooden ship’s screw mounted on the engine at its prow.
The boys’ pride was restored when Harry led them across the field to the airplane. They saw a small, wiry man in a close-fitting leather helmet nervously wielding a monkey wrench. Figure-eight goggles peered blindly from his forehead like an additional pair of eyes. His beady eyes were alert, and his nose was a thin beak above a hair-line mustache. Harry introduced him as Lieutenant Eddie McCormick.
“She’s an Avro 504, boys,” he explained in an American drawl, “eighty horsepower Gnome engine, range two hundred fifty miles, and maximum speed eighty-two miles per hour.”
“You mean, Mister … Lieutenant,” Thomas demanded, “you’re going to fly that fast? Right here and now?”
“That’s right, Sonny. Just as soon as I get this danged magneto fixed.”
“And where to, Lieutenant?” James asked.
“Oh, just around and around for now, Sonny.”
“Shall we let the Lieutenant get on with his job?” Harry suggested.
The boys swaggered across the hard-packed red earth. With the hauteur of superior beings, they ignored the surrounding urchins gaping at them.
“Uncle Harry,” Thomas asked, “is he only a lieutenant? Daddy’s a major. What kind of a lieutenant is he?”
“The American Army, he says,” Harry replied shortly.
As if their arrival were a signal, Eddie McCormick tightened two bolts, tossed the wrench to his Chinese mechanic, and climbed into the cramped cockpit. Pulling his goggles down, he called out: “Contact!” The crowd stared as the mechanic spun the wooden propeller.
The airplane did not move, and the mechanic spun the propeller again. Three times the propeller described a half circle before stopping with a jerk. The fourth time, puffs of black smoke erupted from the engine’s sausage-link exhaust pipes, and the propeller whirled amid a volley of explosions.
“There he goes,” Harry cried.
The propeller’s revolutions stopped abruptly, and the engine’s noise died. The sweat-drenched mechanic again tugged at the propeller. The engine caught, and the propeller settled into a continuous, buzzing revolution flat
ulent with greasy smoke puffs. Accelerating rapidly, the Avro rolled across the field. Harry’s breath caught when the machine dipped into a rut. But the airplane righted itself and lurched into the cloud-flecked sky, the string of firecrackers tied to its tail skid popping merrily.
“He’s up!” the boys shrieked. “He’s up!”
“So he is,” Harry said. “There never was any doubt …”
Judah Haleevie glanced quizzically at his friend, but did not speak. The airplane circled the field six times before settling to earth again like a clumsy seagull alighting on the crest of a wave. It struck the same rut, and the tail dropped heavily.
“That’s the show, Gentlemen,” Harry announced. “That’s it. I’ll have a word with Eddie McCormick before we go.”
During the drive back, James and Thomas rained questions on Harry. After answering patiently for an hour, he threw up his hands when James demanded: “But why does it fly, Uncle Harry?”
“I’ll explain later, when I’ve got a piece of paper,” he answered. “We’ll need a diagram.”
When the boys subsided, Harry said softly to Two-Gun Cohen: “Cracked a tail plane and a landing-carriage strut. Another postponement.”
A week later, Eddie McCormick became “the first man to conquer a city singlehanded,” as he later boasted. A crude bomb strapped between its landing wheels, the Avro lumbered through the summer sky toward Canton ninety miles away. His target was the headquarters of General Mok Wing-sun, one of the ambitious local potentates the Chinese called tu-chün, “warlords,” who had turned against President Sun Yat-sen. McCormick released the bomb by slashing the rope with his sheath-knife. Although the explosion merely shook the ground five hundred yards from his villa, General Mok decamped and Sun Yat-sen returned in triumph to Canton. It was a great victory at the time, though the city was to be lost and regained repeatedly. A decade was to pass before the Nationalist armies streamed out of Canton to unify China in alliance with the Communist Party, which had not yet come into existence in 1916.
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