Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  “But you must never forget that force, armed force, is no more than the expression of the will of the masses. A single politically conscious peasant or worker-soldier motivated by righteous hatred is worth a platoon of warlord mercenaries. A hearty welcome by the people of a liberated village is worth a regiment; a popular uprising led by the working class in a city is worth a division. You must cultivate the techniques of political warfare—agitation, propaganda, education, and loving kindness to the lao pai-hsing, the common people who are the ultimate source of all power, all strength, and all virtue. The lao pai-hsing must be guided to full political consciousness.”

  “Comrade Chou!”

  A thin youth with a beaky nose rose to put his question. James knew him as a member of the Young Socialist League, the training corps for the Communist Party, and an outstanding cadet, though he was only seventeen. Lin Piao was the son of a bankrupt cotton-mill owner from Central China who earned a meager living as a purser on the riverboats of the China Merchant Steam Navigation Company that plied the Yangtze. He was later to be a Marshal of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; the moving force of violent civil disorder that almost destroyed the Chinese People’s Republic; the heir-designate to Chairman Mao—and, finally, a charred corpse in the wreckage of a transport aircraft on the steppes of Mongolia after vainly attempting to assassinate Chairman Mao Tse-tung and seize power by a coup d’état. At least, such was the story of Lin Piao’s treachery Chou En-lai told the world. At that moment, almost four decades before the dénouement of their relationship, Chou En-lai strained to hear Lin Piao’s question. The ambitious youth’s harsh voice rose over distant, hoarse shouts.

  “Comrade Chou!” Lin Piao asked ingratiatingly. “Are we not already close to the stage of final victory? The proletariat are rising in Shanghai, in Canton, and in my native Wuhan, where they toil in textile plants and steel mills. One strong blow could sweep away the rotten structure of the old society and give power to the people, could it not?”

  “Not yet, Comrade Lin, not yet,” the Political Commissar replied. “Lenin teaches we must be patient as well as determined. These strikes, the wave of protest, will have great effects. But our organization is not complete—militarily or politically. A long struggle lies ahead.”

  The distant shouting grew louder, distracting the cadets. Even the obsequiously attentive Lin Piao glanced toward the windows. A civilian in black worker’s clothing slipped through the creaking wooden door and spoke to General Chou in an undertone.

  “Comrades!” the Political Commissar declared brusquely. “Comrade Liu Shao-chi sends to tell us that the workers are marching on the Anglo-French island of Shameen. Shall we see just how high the tide has risen? Perhaps Comrade Lin is right. Perhaps not.”

  Even more than Shanghai, Shameen, James Sekloong knew, was a foreign creation, a wholly alien speck in the midst of Chinese territory. It was a largely man-made island, expanded to its present dimensions, a half mile long and an eighth of a mile wide, in the mid-nineteenth century when British and French engineers methodically dumped fill onto the mudflats on the edge of the river. Connected to the mainland by a concrete causeway less than one hundred feet long, Shameen had been sacked by an angry Chinese mob protesting foreign domination in September 1883. The Sekloong brothers had been taught only two days earlier about Shameen’s creation, its foreign control, and the patriotic rising it had already experienced.

  Stepping over whining beggars and avoiding scabrous pi-dogs as he hastened through the fetid streets, James wondered if history would repeat itself. The cadets’ uniforms cleared a passage through the screaming crowds. Gnarled hands reached out to pat their shoulders and rough voices called out: “Ho! Ho! Good! Good!”

  The causeway, which was sheltered by a peaked roof, debouched from the tree-shaded island onto a small plaza thronged with workers, fishermen, and farmers carrying placards aloft on long poles. At the far end of the causeway, British and French soldiers in khaki lay behind sandbags, while two erect sentries stood ceremonial guard over the Chinese territory ruled by foreigners.

  Chou En-lai waved a pale hand, and his cadets halted obediently on the edge of the crowd. James saw that young men in workers’ clothing moved purposefully among the demonstrators. Despite their garb, their smooth faces and officious manner identified them as intellectuals. Those young men leading the chanting, James realized, were Comrade Liu Shao-chi’s agitators.

  “British imperialist dogs, get out! Leave China! We demand apologies and reparations. Revenge our martyred Shanghai compatriots!”

  A tall fisherman in tattered black tunic tossed high a vertical banner reading, ALL CHINESE PATRIOTS DEMONSTRATE!

  The sentries ostentatiously cocked their rifles. Behind the sandbags, other rifle bolts clicked. For an instant, the plaza was silent.

  “Kill the foreign devil-heads!” a bespectacled young agitator cried hoarsely. “Take back China’s soil!”

  The crowd surged forward, but halted involuntarily as the feet of the first rank touched the stones of the causeway. The agitators shouted and hurled themselves forward. Flourishing clubs, cleavers, cargo hooks, and sharp-pointed bamboo spears, the crowd rolled toward the sandbag barricade.

  A volley of rifle shots crashed across the shouting. The foreign soldiers had fired over the heads of their assailants.

  The shocked mob recoiled momentarily, then rolled forward again, a river battering against the frail sandbag levee. The smooth-faced agitators were screaming: “Forward! Forward! Defy the barbarians’ weapons.”

  As the human wave broke on the barricades, rifle fire rattled continuously. After no more than two minutes, the mob began to withdraw. Bleeding bodies lay crumpled on the causeway, and an old woman sprawled on the stones of the plaza was trampled by the retreating mob. General Chou spoke softly, as if to himself.

  “Not, perhaps, Comrade Lin Piao’s revolutionary high-tide. But a beginning—a definite beginning.”

  Chou En-lai withdrew his cadets. It was no part of his policy to sacrifice them in street battles. The expensively trained cadets were too precious to risk in demonstrations. Liu Shao-chi’s expendable agitators were, in any event, much more effective in whipping up the hysteria that would provide the revolution with the martyrs it urgently required.

  The siege of Shameen continued. The charging mob was scythed by the foreign rifles until the soldiers were sickened by the slaughter. Shortly after nightfall, the All China Federation of Trade Unions announced that fifty-two patriots had been killed and hundreds had been gravely injured. The actual numbers were unverifiable at the time and were to remain unverifiable. Nor had the mob taken Shameen. But that failure mattered no more than the true casualty toll. They had kindled another link in the chain of fires that was burning across China to inflame the masses and ignite the soldiers of the Revolutionary Army.

  William Hayward Driver nodded over his dog-eared copy of The War of the Worlds. Even the magic prose of H. G. Wells could not dispel his drowsiness in the close radioroom of Regina Pacis. The earphones around his neck offered no diversion but the crackle of static, and it was the third time he had read the novel.

  Bill Driver did not regret sailing aboard the yacht, though his employers, the Marconi Corporation, had warned him the duty might be monotonous after the lively Dollar Liners to which he was accustomed. The undemanding routine had allowed him to reread all his intellectual idols: Wells, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, G. B. Shaw, Henry George, and John Reed, the angry prophets of cataclysmic technological and social change. Besides, he had been surprised at finding Mrs. Sekloong not condescendingly “gracious,” but an intelligent, if challenging, audience for his own theories. He could not quite say the same for her husband or Regina’s scathingly anti-intellectual Australian captain.

  It had been revealing for a poor boy from Schenectady to see how the very rich lived. The contempt for those parasites instilled by his machinist father, a convinced anarchist and a founding member of the militant International
Workers of the World, had been slightly diluted by the experience. He had grudgingly recognized that Mrs. Sekloong could prove as formidable an adversary as she had been a sympathetic friend, while her husband was hardly the brainless wastrel living on inherited wealth his father’s doctrine described. Nonetheless, Bill Driver was glad the cruise was drawing to an end. It was time to move on.

  “CR3a … CR3A … CR3A.” The staccato Morse of the yacht’s call sign crackled in his earphones. “Regina Pacis, calling Regina Pacis.”

  Bill Driver deliberately inserted a slip of paper between the pages to mark his place and centered a note pad on his folding desk before touching the sending key. They would, he assumed, be transmitting more stock-market quotations or boring commercial news, as they had almost every evening of the past six months.

  “CR3A … CR3A,” he tapped out on the bronze key. “Receiving you. Who is calling?”

  “CR3A … CR3A.” The dots and dashes sounded in his ears. “Yacht Regina Pacis. I have an urgent message for you. Do you read me?”

  “I read you clearly, five by five. Ready to copy. Please proceed.”

  “CR3A, CR3A, this is Hong Kong Wireless. Message follows: Charles—Return immediately repeat immediately. Proceed with all haste repeat all haste. Do not repeat not delay. Signature J. Sekloong. Acknowledge.”

  Five minutes after Bill Driver delivered the message, the 250-horsepower Sulzbach diesel’s throbbing vibrated through Regina Pacis. The yacht heeled sharply as the crew shook out the reefs in the courses, raised the topsails, and snapped staysails aloft between her masts. A white bow-wave creamed into foam. At twelve knots, Regina Pacis would push her prow into the green waters of Hong Kong Harbor within fifty hours, instead of the leisurely week Charles and Mary had believed would conclude their long cruise.

  They agreed not to ask the Old Gentleman to expand his peremptory message. He would presumably have said more if he wished; the speed of wireless communications was paid for in part by their public nature. Charles surmised that his aging father was finally feeling—and acknowledging—the need for his eldest son’s counsel and support. He further suspected that his father was worried by widespread rioting in China’s major cities, as well as Hong Kong itself. Mary did not take issue with him, though she was skeptical of his explanation. The Old Gentleman had, after all, yielded to impulse in the past. His urgent command could have been inspired by an inauspicious reading from the aged soothsayer, Silver Seventh Brother, or by a desire that they should admire a particularly fine Ming porcelain piece newly acquired. The old autocrat was growing more imperious and capricious with age.

  Both Charles and Mary concealed their private apprehensions, reassuring each other that Sir Jonathan would certainly have been more explicit if the matter were grave. Mary thought instinctively of illness or injury to one of the children. Charles imagined a major business setback, perhaps a disastrous clash with the Wheatleys. But those fears faded amid the lingering euphoria of their island-hopping cruise. When Regina Pacis dropped her sails off Stonecutter’s Island and motored toward Blake Pier at ten on the morning of June 27, 1925, Mary and Charles were relatively relaxed. Though the green hills and terraced houses of the port surrounded them, they were still far away in spirit.

  The thrill of homecoming Mary felt despite herself was inexplicably clouded when she contemplated the familiar harbor. She involuntarily recalled her first arrival a quarter of a century earlier. The panorama was little changed, though the groves of masts had given way to steamships’ stubby funnels and pastoral Kowloon was becoming tenamented. But something, she felt instinctively, was amiss. Hong Kong’s air of lassitude was not attributable solely to the damp heat that enfolded her like a sodden blanket, though her white sportsdress was light cotton and all her clothing weighed no more than an eighth of the summer-serge dress and the voluminous undergarments that had burdened her in 1900. The difference between the Hong Kong Regina Pacis had left almost seven months earlier and the Hong Kong to which she had just returned was elusive.

  “Mary, something’s wrong!” Charles, too, was troubled. “But damned if I can see just what.”

  He gazed at The Peak, emerald green with the summer rains, and saw the boxy Peak Tram crawling up the heights. The colonnaded buildings along the Praya in downtown Victoria stood unaltered. Beyond them, he saw khaki ranks of soldiers wheeling on the Murray Parade-ground. All appeared normal, but his nagging unease persisted.

  “Somehow, Charles, it looks like the plague year,” Mary ventured. “It’s too quiet.”

  “That’s it, dear. Not something new, but something missing. Look, not a lighter’s moving in the harbor. Not a single ship’s loading or unloading.”

  “And where are the rickshaws? I can see only a few motorcars. And where are the morning crowds?”

  “Something’s damned wrong! The old man wasn’t just blowing the wind!”

  Sir Jonathan himself waited on the rough planking of Blake Pier when Regina Pacis made her deliberate approach. He lifted his walking-stick in salute and resumed his nervous pacing as the heavy warps snaked ashore. The two-inch manila cables were hauled onto the pier’s bollards by sailors in the Sekloong livery of striped blue-and-gold shirts, rather than longshoremen in rusty black. The black Rolls-Royce Phantom II, with its enormous locomotive headlights and license plate HK 7, stood foursquare and familiar on the Pier. But Mary looked in vain for the uniformed driver. A rush of joy momentarily obscured her apprehension when her eldest son, Jonnie, stepped out of the Rolls. Debonair in cream linen, he waved vigorously.

  In his lustrous light-blue-cotton long-gown, Sir Jonathan was as erect and dignified as she remembered him. But his behavior was uncharacteristic. Not waiting for his son and daughter-in-law to descend to the Pier, he hurried up the gangplank while the sailors were still setting it up. His grandson took long strides to keep up with the septuagenarian.

  Sir Jonathan kissed Mary perfunctorily and laid his arm on Charles’s shoulders for an instant. Jonnie greeted her with an exuberant bear-hug. Though his grandfather was abstracted, her normally reserved son was ebullient. He swung her into the air before greeting his father with a hard handshake and a half-embrace. Mary wondered that Jonnie, instilled with English restraint, should be so demonstrative while his grandfather was withdrawn.

  “Leave the baggage,” Sir Jonathan commanded. “Leave everything for the servants. I want to get back to the Manor.”

  The streets were oppressively quiet, the normal throngs of clerks, hawkers, messengers, rickshawmen, and coolies absent. But an effervescent Jonnie whipped the Rolls around the curves to The Peak. His grandfather grunted irritably, and he slowed momentarily. Mary caught her breath when her eldest son, turning in the driver’s seat to grin at his passengers, almost ran the motorcar over a precipice.

  “Jonnie, do be careful,” she admonished. “We haven’t survived the Cannibal Islands to be killed in Hong Kong.”

  “Right you are, Mother.” Jonnie did not slacken his speed. “No danger at all, I assure you. You’re safe with the best driver on the China Coast, maybe the entire world.”

  “What’s wrong with the boy?” Charles asked indulgently. “Touch of the sun?”

  “He’s in love.” Sir Jonathan’s gravity lightened for a moment. “Or so he tells me.”

  “Now, that is interesting,” Mary said. “Who is it, Jonnie?”

  “Well … ah … it’s a long story, Mother. Hard to say.”

  “You mean you love everyone, the entire human race?” Charles’s irony was heavy. “Isn’t your love fixed on one person, female I presume?”

  “That’s more like it, definitely female.” Jonnie turned to grin at them again, swerving at the last instant to avoid an oncoming lorry.

  “And who, may I ask …” Mary laughed.

  “Till the sands of the desert grow cold, and the infinite numbers are told,” he crooned, “God gave thee to me—to have and to hold.”

  “Let the boy be.” A smile quirked the corners of
Sir Jonathan’s mouth. “You’ll hear soon enough. God knows, I’ve heard nothing else since I called him back from Shanghai. However, there are more important matters.”

  He leaned forward to crank up the glass panel that separated the passengers from the driver. Unabashed, Jonnie sang on merrily.

  “I called you back,” Sir Jonathan resumed, “because I’m worried about what’s building up.”

  “The demonstrations?” Charles asked.

  “The demonstrations—and worse to come, much worse.”

  “We’ve had demonstrations before, Father,” Mary remarked, “and the Chinese situation’s no worse—though, naturally, no better—than it’s always been. Why worse to come?”

  “You saw the streets practically empty, didn’t you? Where are the longshoremen? For that matter, where’s my driver, Ah Wai? It’s a strike, a general strike, and it’s just beginning. They’ll close Hong Kong down before they’re through.”

  “The rioting in China’s anti-foreign, anti-British,” Charles objected. “It can’t really hurt the Sekloongs. After all, we’re Chinese.”

  “When it suits you,” Mary observed dryly. “Don’t be so obtuse, Charles. We’re not really Chinese, for one thing. And, if we are, we’re still running-dogs of the foreign imperialists to the revolutionaries.”

  “Not quite that bad,” Sir Jonathan interjected. “The name Sekloong still counts for a lot. We still have a big credit with the Nationalists, and Harry’s a power again. His man Wang Ching-wei’s certain to become President of the Provisional Government when they finally choose Sun Yat-sen’s successor in just a few days.”

  “Then what’s the worry?” Mary asked.

  “The Bolsheviks,” Sir Jonathan replied. “They’re calling a general strike throughout Kwangtung Province—and especially Hong Kong—because of what they’re calling the ‘Shameen Massacre.’ The strike will spread, and we’ll be hurt badly by the shock waves.”