I was so upset by this visit that for days afterwards I could not work. When I tried to concentrate I would see only the pale round little face with the swimming eyes behind the layers of wire mesh. So after a week I decided to get away for a bit and I packed a sketchbook and a few old clothes in a valise and took the boat over to the island of Lantao, and climbed up to the monastery in the hills. Here the Buddhist monks provided accommodation and simple fare at small cost, and it was very peaceful after the town and cool because of the height. The monastery stood in a little vale with rice paddies in the bottom and a pagoda up on the hill at the end. The monastery courtyard smelt of incense from the temple where joss sticks burned on the altar among the dusty wooden images and offerings of fruit. In a room over the temple a monk squatted on a dais intoning prayers from an old manuscript. At the end of each prayer his voice rose to a climax and he pulled a rope and a beam of wood swung against the temple bell, and the deep voice of the bell went booming out across the paddies. I went up to the room and sat sketching him, but he never lifted his eyes from the manuscript or showed that he knew I was there. I also sketched the monks stooping in the paddies and squatting in the courtyard with rice bowls and chopsticks, and in the temple at their prayers.
At the weekend there was an influx of walkers—three English girls in government service, some Chinese students all anxious to air their English, and a silent middle-aged Englishman in old tropical battle dress and bush hat, with lost eyes, who looked as if he had mislaid his battalion in the last war and had been searching for it ever since. After supper he went off again for a lone walk, searching even in the dark, and the rest of us played Consequences by the light of hurricane lamps, calling each other by our Christian names and being very jolly together in the best youth-hostel way. We were still playing at midnight when the Englishman came back, but he would not join us and went to bed and in the morning was gone before dawn. The others shouldered their rucksacks after lunch and trailed off down the hill to catch the boat back to Hong Kong, and I was once more left alone with the praying monks and the scent of joss sticks and my memory of Suzie behind the wire mesh.
I stayed two weeks on Lantao. I would have stayed longer but I had not brought my paints and now I wanted to try and work again. So I returned on a Friday before the next weekend invasion.
When I got back to the Nam Kok there was a note from Haynes saying that he had been trying to get in touch with me. It was evening so I rang him at his home, and he said, “Well, I’ve good news for you. At least, it’s bad in one way, but I think you’ll be glad to hear it. They’ve put our friend at Laichikok in the prison hospital, where I believe they look after them pretty decently—so she’ll be having a much better time of it than she would otherwise.”
He had inquired about her when visiting another client at Laichikok. She had been given a routine chest X-ray on entering the prison and been found to have a touch of T.B. She had been in the hospital ever since.
“But it’s nothing serious?” I said.
“No, I gather they’ve caught it early. Well, in one sense it all seems to be turning out for the best, because she’d never have got into a hospital outside. They’re all so full up, I believe they’re harder to break into than a bank. They say the only way to get into a hospital in Hong Kong is to collapse in the street and get taken in as a casualty.”
Tuberculosis was rife in Hong Kong because of the overcrowding and I was not greatly surprised by Haynes’s news. I had even wondered at one time if Suzie was infected because of a suspiciously persistent cough, and although she had protested that it was only the lingering effect of the chill that she had caught the night her baby had been killed, I had urged her to go to the government clinic for a free X-ray. Finally we had arranged to go together. But just then the cable had arrived from New York and the intention had been forgotten in the excitement of my departure for Japan. And after my return her cough seemed to have gone.
Now, reassured that it was nothing serious, I was more pleased by the news than otherwise. I preferred to think of Suzie in a hospital ward than in a cell or at work in some grim compound. (For although rationally I had discounted Big Alice’s story of beatings-up, I had never rid myself of the ghastly vision it had conjured, in which I saw Suzie being kicked and beaten to the point of mutilation by huge tough black-uniformed wardresses, sisters-in-sadism of the human-skin lampshade-makers of Belsen.) I felt greatly relieved, and thought that probably by the time Suzie left prison she would be altogether cured of her T.B.
However, later that evening I received a nasty shock. For when I passed on the news to Gwenny she showed no surprise, and said, “Yes, I thought they would probably put her in hospital. But I did not like to say anything to you before because Suzie had made me promise.”
“Promise? Promise what?”
“Promise not to tell you she had T.B.”
“You mean she knew before she went into Laichikok? But how? She didn’t have an X-ray?”
“No, she was told by the doctor.”
“But what doctor? You mean she’d been to see a doctor?”
“No, the doctor came to see her. She was so ill. It was while you were in Japan—after the business with Betty. We had gone to the cinema together, and when we came out the trams were very crowded, and Suzie said, ‘I can’t bear to go in a tram. There is no air, and I shall choke.’ There were no rickshaws so we walked back and she was very tired. I said, ‘Suzie, you need a cool drink,’ and we went into the bar, and then she began to cough and I suddenly saw her hands were all red, and her dress down the front, and her lap. It was terrible. She was very weak. Wednesday Lulu and I helped her upstairs. I telephoned to a Chinese doctor and when he came he said, ‘You have bad trouble in your lungs. You have got tuberculosis. You should be in hospital. But that is impossible, so you must rest in bed and I shall tell you what medicines to get from the druggists.’ Then Suzie told him that you were coming back soon, and that she was frightened you would catch the disease from her, and he said, ‘I will also prescribe a medicine to prevent the germs passing out of your mouth into your boy friend’s. You must take it in water three times a day.’ And after you came back it was often difficult for her to take the medicine without you knowing, so she would tell me, ‘Gwenny, you keep him talking on the verandah, while I take my medicine inside.’”
“But why on earth didn’t she tell me about it, Gwenny?”
“She was afraid to upset you. You were already upset because she had stabbed Betty with the scissors, so that you could not work properly, and she was afraid that if she upset you any more you would not work at all. She said you were very bad-tempered when you could not work, and did not love her as much as when you worked well. Besides there was nothing you could do.”
“I could have tried to get her into some hospital for a start—or at least seen that she got proper treatment instead of taking useless Chinese drugs.”
“I don’t think they are useless. They cost so much money they must be good. The medicine for making her germs safe cost eleven dollars an ounce and she took one ounce every day.”
“Good Lord, how awful!”
“And she was ashamed of being ill. She said that sometimes when you told her she was beautiful she would feel very ashamed and think, ‘But inside I am ugly, because I am sick and cough blood.’ That is why she would not marry you.”
“Gwenny, if only I’d known!”
“Anyhow, I am sure that now she is in hospital she will soon get well.”
Two weeks later I paid a second visit to Laichikok and found that Suzie was indeed looking wonderfully well—better than I had ever seen her look before. The hospital ward was a light airy white-painted room that except for its barred windows and grille instead of a door was a good deal more cheerful than many a public hospital ward outside. Suzie was sitting propped up in bed with a picture magazine. Her hair had that pretty flu
ffiness and sheen that it always acquired after a shampoo, and she looked pink-cheeked and well-scrubbed, and extremely pleased with herself.
“Suzie, you look marvelous!” I exclaimed, laughing with relief—for until that moment I had been dreading another scene like the last, and fortifying myself against the possibility of more tears. “I wish I was allowed to kiss you.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I fixed it. I told that woman you were coming.” She airily indicated the Chinese wardress as though she was some menial. “I told her you were a big man and would want to kiss me. I told her, ‘You just look the other way.’”
I duly embraced her. The wardress looked a bit uncomfortable and pretended that something had caught her attention out of the window.
“Yes, she is very nice, that warder-woman,” Suzie said condescendingly.
“And what’s the doctor like?”
“Half-caste woman. Very nice.”
“It all sounds too good to be true. Is everybody nice?”
“No, one warder-woman is very nasty. Sometimes she works in here. She says, ‘I know all about you, Wong Mee-ling. I know you used to go with men. Yes, you were a bad girl—dirty!’ And then you know what she does?”
“What?”
“Tries to hold my hand.”
“Hold your hand? What for, if she thinks you’re dirty?”
She looked very complacent. “She’s in love with me.”
“Good Lord!” I laughed. “And what do you do about it?”
“I tell her, ‘Shoo! Go away! I came in this hospital to get better—and you just make me sick!’”
“Well, there’s nothing like putting the wardresses in their places. And what about the Governor? Do you talk to the Governor like that?”
“Oh, yes. Chinese woman governor—very nice.”
“Well, I’m sure!”
“She came in here once, so I told her, ‘Good morning! You’ve got a very nice monkey-house!’”
“Suzie, you are in a frivolous mood!”
“Yes, I told her, ‘I like your monkey-house. I will stay a few days longer if you don’t mind?’ She said, ‘Sure, Wong Mee-ling, you stay as long as you like, and if that warder-woman gives you any trouble just let me know.’ I said, ‘Thank you, I like your monkey-house very much, and you make a very nice Number One Top Monkey!’” She giggled with childish mischief.
“Suzie, it’s marvelous to see you like this again.”
“I’m happy today. My boy friend has come. I told that warder-woman, ‘He’ll come, don’t you worry. He won’t forget.’ But I was scared you might forget. Then I should lose face.”
“Well, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I’m very angry with you for not telling me you’d been ill while I was in Japan.”
“Ill? Who said I was ill?”
“It’s no good, Suzie. I know all about it.”
She was very reluctant to admit the truth and tried to shrug it all off as unimportant; however, assuming that I knew about it already, she let slip that she had actually had another hemorrhage in prison. It had occurred on her second day, immediately after my visit, and had no doubt been brought on by the emotional ordeal; and it was for this reason that she had been sent into hospital, and not because of the X-ray as Haynes had told me. But now she assured me that she was practically cured, and that by the time she left prison her full health would be restored.
However, later, as I was leaving the hospital building, I met the prison doctor herself. She had just pulled up in a little car and I guessed her identity from her Eurasian features, and the wardress accompanying me confirmed it. I went up to her and said, “May I ask you about Wong Mee-ling?”
“Who are you?” she said. “Do you belong to the prison?” She was in her thirties with handsome clear-cut features and a down-right manner that seemed to say, “Now, tell me what you want with no nonsense. I don’t mind if you’ve committed murder or raped a girl of five, so long as you give it me without any nonsense.” She wore a white cotton dress and carried a bottle with a glass stopper filled with yellow liquid. It might have been acid or urine.
“No, I’ve just been to visit her,” I said. “I’m a friend.”
“A painter?” She saw me look surprised, and said, “Oh, don’t worry, I know more about you than you know about yourself. How that little girl can gossip! Well, she’s perfectly all right, she’s not going to die or anything. We got her just in time. But how long more’s she got here? Six weeks? That’s no good at all. She’ll need at least another couple of months in hospital after she leaves here, otherwise in a few months she’ll be back where she started.”
“Could you get her transferred to a civil hospital from here?”
“No.” She looked at me with the blunt no-nonsense Chinese-English eyes. “They throw patients out of the civil hospitals when they’re no better than that girl in there, to make room for worse cases. No strings you can pull?”
I remembered Kay Fletcher at St. Margaret’s; but I had not seen Kay since that night when she had driven me back to the Nam Kok, and I had said, “See you on Thursday,” and she had driven off in the rain, and then I had gone upstairs and Suzie had rung to say her baby was dead. And when I had rung her to cancel the meeting on Thursday she had been understandably brusque with me, saying “Well, I’m not surprised,” and ringing off. No, I could hardly ask Kay.
I said, “No, I don’t know anyone.”
“Well, you’ve plenty of time. If you don’t want her lungs to pack up on her again you’d better try and talk some hospital into taking her after she leaves here. Or soon after—a short holiday in between wouldn’t do her any harm. That’s all I can tell you. Except that she seems to me a very nice girl, and I hope you’ll manage something—because I hate to see all our good work wasted.” She turned away briskly, but turned back in the hospital entrance and said with a faintly ironical smile, “By the way, I’d tell anybody who’s had much to do with her to get a check-up themselves. That Chinese medicine’s about as effective against infection as this would be.” She shook the bottle in her hand. I still did not know whether it was acid or urine.
“Yes, I’ll do that.”
And a few days later I went along to the clinic in Wanchai, and stood in the queue of Chinese for a free X-ray. The English doctor looked surprised when he saw me and said, “Hello, what are you doing in these parts?” I told him I lived in Wanchai, and he said grimly that in that case I was very wise to come along. But when I returned the next week for the result he said, “Ah, lucky chap. No spots anywhere—you’re passed as sound as a bell.”
II
I did not know there were so many hospitals in Hong Kong until I began my search to find Suzie a bed. The biggest T.B. hospital was the Ruttonji, a Parsee foundation, but they could not hold out any hope. They would have no vacancy for months, and even then they could only take in much worse cases than Suzie’s. The other hospitals were the same. The sudden vast influx of refugees from China after the revolution had meant not only more people to be ill but a higher rate of illness per head of population, since overcrowding was synonymous with epidemics and a low standard of health. The Hong Kong government had done its best to meet the unexpected situation, and was building new hospitals and convalescent homes as fast as it could. But meanwhile the majority of consumptives received no treatment at all beyond the concoctions of Chinese druggists, but sickened and wasted away in congested rooms, breathed their germs into the fetid air, and died. And those who had been infected by the germs became sick in turn, and breathed more germs to infect others, and died likewise.
And so finally I went to Kay. I had already been once to St. Margaret’s to try my luck there on my own, and had drawn the usual blank; but now I went again and sent up a note. I explained briefly why I had come and how ashamed I felt to be asking her help, and I said that if she did not
want to see me I would understand; though I had no doubt really that, being Kay, she would come down and be very forgiving and nice. However, ten minutes later, when she appeared, she sailed across the entrance hall with a rather cold impersonal smile, and said in a hard bright voice with an edge, “Robert, you really have a lot of cheek! Ashamed my foot! And obviously you haven’t a clue about the hospital situation. There’s a queue five miles long for every bed in this place, and even if I could help you, which I can’t, it would mean somebody else losing his turn. But I suppose that never occurred to you?”
I said, “Yes, it did.”
“You mean so long as you can get your own friends fixed up you couldn’t care less what happens to other people, even if they’re dying.”
“Yes, I could. But I’m prepared to do it.”
She was taken aback for a moment. Then she smiled a bit more warmly and said, “Well, anyhow that’s honest. But I’m not.”
I said, “Kay, one can’t fight for everybody, and I’m going to fight for Suzie. I know it’s all wrong, and I ought to let her take her turn and get worse again, and probably die. But I’m not going to, because she means more to me than the people I don’t know, and because I want to see her properly cured, and because I’m going to marry her.”
Kay looked stunned. “You’re not?”
“She hasn’t agreed yet. But I think she will when she comes out of gaol.”
“I think you’re mad.”
“I probably am.”
“Stark staring mad. Well, I wish you luck.”
World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) Page 32