“Help me to wake up now!” he replied with a smile.
XI
The overloaded train delivered them after dark at the overloaded city of Hengyang, formerly Hengchow. A heavy rain had come up, but they disregarded it because they were so near their destination. They had a roll of money, and “money will make the mare to go,” and likewise all her Chinese substitutes. Six “chairmen” were found, marvelous beings who took them along at what was almost a dog-trot, shouting to those who blocked the narrow way and sometimes elbowing them. The language was Mandarin now, and Althea said they were commanding: “Make way for the American lord!”
They had bought themselves Chinese gowns made of quilted cotton, as protection against the chill of night—for this was the month of January, and cold winds sometimes came from far-off Siberia. When the robes got wet they became very heavy and sagged out of shape, but the travelers refused to seek shelter. Althea had not seen her parents for several years, and was greatly excited. The coolies raced, because they knew the neighborhood and could be sure that a hot meal awaited them at the mission. “Me Christian man,” said one of them, proudly; Althea told her friends sadly that he was probably a “rice Christian,” one who professed religion in order to be fed.
They trotted up the slope on which the mission was situated. They arrived long after dark, so Lanny saw only the vague outlines of several buildings. In front of the cottage which had been Althea’s home since childhood she raised a shout, and the door was opened and light streamed forth, and there came running a thin, gray-haired lady and clasped a soggy bundle of daughter in her arms, crying with relief and happiness—they had given her up for lost in Hongkong.
A tall elderly gentleman followed, carrying a flashlight, and they all came under the shelter of the porch for introductions. While the father put on his raincoat and led the coolies to another building where they would be fed and sheltered, Althea and Laurel were led upstairs to divest themselves of their raiment. A sorry sight they were, with clothing out of shape and wet hair straggling into their eyes. A funny scene, too, when they divested themselves of their “unchastity belts” and explained the phenomenon to the startled mother.
There was a bathtub in this house, and they took turns. Lanny had a shave—he had grown a beard, and looked comical to himself, and alarming to his bride. Then, clean and warm in comfortable dressing gowns, they had a hot meal of American foods—no rice, please! While eating they took turns telling their adventures. The parents had received a letter from Althea in Baltimore, saying that she was coming on the Oriole; they had heard nothing since. They had heard the name of Laurel Creston, but never that of Mr. Lanny Budd, who now turned up as a bridegroom of one lady and rescuer of both. Being old-fashioned people, they gave full credit to the man.
There could hardly have been a happier party in all China than in the home of Dr. John Taney Carroll that night. He was a Carroll of Carrollton, it appeared, and the name was on the Declaration of Independence. He was a sternly conscientious man—one didn’t come to a part of the world like this without deep convictions; he worked a ten-hour day at a clinic here and at another down in the city, and whatever reward he received would have to be in Heaven, surely not in Hengyang. The mother was a devoted soul who shared her husband’s every thought, and had brought up three children to follow in his footsteps. In short, it was a Christian home in the good sense of a much-abused phrase. Lanny wished there might be more of them in various parts of the earth that he had visited. He told himself that he would be willing to accept the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, if men couldn’t find any other basis for practicing brotherhood.
XII
The bride and groom having been married by Episcopalian authority, it was proper that their union should be consummated under the same auspices. For two weeks they had never been alone; now they found themselves in a guest-room with lace curtains in the windows, covers on the tables, a “splasher” on the wall behind the washstand—in short, all the little elegancies of a middle-class home of thirty years ago, including freshly ironed sheets and pillowcases on the bed. To that place of almost unimaginable luxury Lanny led his newly-won treasure; he sat by her side, took her hands in his, and looked into bright brown eyes which revealed the intelligence behind them—and also now a little fear.
“I will be gentle and kind,” he said. “I will find out what makes you happy, and I will do that and nothing else. That goes for tonight and all other nights and days as well.” This was a sort of supplement to the marriage service, what the churchmen call a work of supererogation.
On that long journey Lanny might have sought occasion to claim what the world called his “marital rights”; but it would have distressed his bride greatly, amid the dirt and discomfort of a primitive world. He had known this, and his consideration had touched her deeply. Now she answered: “My heart is yours, Lanny. I trust you as I have never trusted anyone since I was a child—when I trusted everybody.”
“Tell me this,” he continued. “Do you want to have a child?”
“I always thought that I never would; but I should love to have your child.”
“It will interfere very much with writing,” he warned.
“I can arrange it. I have thought about it a lot.”
“You will find that America is at war—all-out war, be certain. Help will be hard to get.”
“I’ll find somebody, don’t worry.”
“Darling, I must be honest with you. When I get back home, some job will be assigned me. I have tried to figure out what it will be, but I can’t. It may take me away from you for long periods; and it may be dangerous.”
“That is all the more reason for having your child, and not delaying about it. Let us be happy while we can.”
He kissed her, and put his newly-shaven cheek against hers and whispered: “Gather ye rosebuds while, ye may, old time is still a-flying.” The rhyme was “dying,” so he didn’t complete the stanza; instead, he told her: “I have found the right woman, and I am going to make her happy.”
“You must be happy, too, dear,” she countered. “I don’t want to be a selfish wife.”
“Don’t have any worry about that,” he answered. “I have been lonely for a long time, and now I have exactly what I want.” He smiled, close to her lips, “All you have to do is to guide me, and I will be the perfect lover!”
XIII
In the morning they inspected the mission plant. There was a school, a dispensary and small hospital, a dining-hall and kitchen, a laundry, and cottages for those in charge and dormitories for the men and the women workers: a little unit of American civilization picked up and deposited in the middle of this ancient neglected land. Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui was its name. Lanny had heard the missioners sneered at because they lived according to American standards; but having tried the other course, he was certain that no American could live as the Chinese masses lived and at the same time carry on intellectual or professional work. He soon observed that all these people were thin; with the rise in prices, their small salaries were losing value and nobody was getting enough to eat.
Lanny talked with some of the Chinese, and wondered how many of them were “rice Christians.” He couldn’t enter into their hearts, of course, but he could see that they had learned English more or less well, and many could read it. They had learned to keep clean, and to use modern machinery. They didn’t have to be taught to work hard, for everybody in the Far East did that, excepting the very rich and the depraved, the opium addicts, the gamblers, and other parasites. The mission converts learned that there was such a thing as an ideal of altruism, and they at least paid the tribute which vice pays to virtue.
The visitor’s greatest surprise came from the political atmosphere which he discovered prevailing in this mission. He was used to thinking of the Episcopal Church as a refuge, perhaps the last refuge, of a gentle and refined conservatism. It had been that in Newcastle, and still more on the French Riviera; all the “best people”
attended, together with their doctors and lawyers and trades people—often for business reasons—and their carefully selected governesses and secretaries and maids. Hardly anybody else attended, and if you had taken these away there wouldn’t have been any church. But here Lanny discovered that the prevailing tone of the mission was Pink and there were spots of bright Red. He wondered, had the ancient Chinese succeeded in teaching their teachers? Or could it be that daily contact with the poverty of the East had brought the Church of Jesus hack to the state of mind of its Founder, who had Himself lived under much the same conditions?
Whatever the reason, the bishop of this diocese, with headquarters in Hankow, had become during forty-two years of service an out-and-out sympathizer with the masses in their revolt against landlords and moneylenders. He had become convinced that the so-called “Christian generals” who had been chopping off the heads of thousands of Communists were not ideal representatives of the lowly Nazarene. Bishop Roots had retired three or four years ago, but his portrait, showing a rotund, bald, and very determined cleric, still hung in the main hall of the mission and his spirit still dominated the institution. He had anaounced himself a “Christian revolutionary,” and had invited so many of the hated Reds to take shelter in his home that his enemies had dubbed the place “the Moscow-Heaven Axis.”
XIV
The priest of this mission was an elderly Chinese, Dr. Yi Yuan-tsai; a kindly, wise, and devout maker of Christian converts. To him Lanny explained the circumstances of his marriage in Hongkong, and his desire that it should have that legal validity which had not been obtainable under the guns of the Japanese. Dr. Yi assured him that under Chinese law he possessed full authority to perform the ceremony, and that its validity would be recognized by the allied government of the United States of America. So the couple stood up in the home of the Carrolls, and in the presence of that family renewed their pledges. Lanny sent another wireless message to his father, explaining the circumstances—for Robbie was the one who must have this matter clear, in the event that the fates which had missed Lanny in Hongkong were to get him anywhere on the way home.
They had a short-wave radio set at their service now and could get the news of the world and be sure of it. Always when he turned a dial, Lanny’s first thought was of the atomic bomb. Would it be Berlin, or London, or New York? But no, it was just the old routine, the operation of the military meatgrinder. The Germans had had to give up efforts to take Moscow that winter, but they had taken Rostov, at the eastern end of the Black Sea, and that was serious because it was so close to the oil of the Caucasus. The Japanese were coming down on Singapore, amazing the world by the speed with which they moved in what were supposed to be impenetrable jungles. They had taken the Solomons, those cannibal islands through which the Oriole had passed; the cannibals wouldn’t be of any use to them, but they had that fine harbor of Tulagi, and were on their way to Australia, or Pearl Harbor, or both.
Their armies in China had been definitely checked at Changsha in the north and on the Canton front in the south, which meant a respite for the missioners. But it could be only temporary, for manifestly the Japanese had to have that railroad, the only north and south line through the country. They would continue to send reinforcements, and to attack. The missioners confronted the dreadful prospect of having to leave this place and emigrate to the west. How were they to do it, with such poor means of transport? Some fifty million Chinese had already done it, leaving everything except what they could carry in wheelbarrows or on their backs. There had been no such mass migration in history—and it was still going on, impelled by the continuing atrocities of the Japanese.
XV
In Lanny Budd’s Pink days, a dozen years ago, he had been browsing in the Rand School bookstore and had picked up Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley, of whom he had heard. He read the extraordinary life story of a child born to a large family of American poor whites, and dragged from one part of the land to another in unending wretchedness. She had managed to pick up bits of education and had become a schoolteacher, and then a rebel propagandist and friend of the oppressed of all lands. Traveling to China as a journalist, she had made the cause of the Chinese workers her own, and had traveled with the Red Army and broadcast its story to the world.
Lanny and Laurel had already heard about this army from Sun Ching-ling: how the workers and peasants had risen against the landlords and moneylenders and established a government according to the Three People’s Principles. The Kuomintang government under the control of Madame Sun’s brother-in-law, the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had set out to put this rebel government down by mass slaughter; the result had been the famous Long March; a great army had emigrated to the northwest, a distance as great as across the United States. Now they were established just south of the Great Wall, and there was a truce between them and the Chungking government while they fought the Japanese. The Reds were known as the Eighth Route Army; and in the library of the mission was another book by Agnes Smedley, China Fights Back, telling the story of her travels and adventures with this army in the early campaigns, now four years in the past.
Althea, being a consecrated soul, had gone to work without even one day’s rest; but the other two were leisure-class people who had a right to play—and besides, they were on their honeymoon. What more pleasant way to spend it than to read about other people’s heroism? Agnes Smedley, with a seriously injured back, always in pain, had walked or ridden on horseback through a region where the most elementary necessities were not to be obtained. “There are no nails, no oil or fat, no salt, no fuel for fire. I shall be writing in the dead of winter without a blaze to warm me. And (need I tell you?) without sufficient food. Our food even now in the autumn is rice, or millet as a base, with one vegetable. Today it was turnips, and yesterday it was turnips. Sometimes we have no vegetables at all.”
Such was the price which the masses of China were paying for freedom, and which an American sympathizer paid in order to report their sacrifices. A woman with an injured back carried her typewriter strapped to it because she was afraid to overload the one horse and one mule which carried the supplies of her party. “If my horse or mule should die, I am lost,” she wrote; and concluded: “I am not complaining when I write all this. These are the happiest, most purposeful days of my life. I prefer one bowl of rice a day and this life to all that ‘civilization’ has to offer me. I prefer to walk and ride with an injured back that would take six months to heal even if I should stay in bed.”
Lanny and Laurel took turns reading the book aloud; and when they finished, the bride said: “We ought to go and see those things, Lanny; it would be a crime to be so near and pass them by.”
“It sounds near, but it isn’t, darling. It’s as far as from New York to Chicago, and there are no railroads for a good part of the way.”
“I know, but we ought to get there. Somebody ought to write about what’s happening now.” They knew that Agnes Smedley’s health had broken under the strain and she was back in her native land.
“It would be a hard journey,” he warned. “Conditions can’t be any better than they were four years ago. They are probably worse.”
“Yes, but we could take supplies. I suppose there is some way you could draw on your bank at home. We could get warm clothing. Many people have taken such trips, even in winter.”
“It seems a dubious sort of way to start a baby, darling.”
“It would only be a question of the first months. We wouldn’t have to stay long—I am quick at getting impressions and making notes of what I need.”
“And what about your novel?”
“I won’t forget it. I’d just write a few articles about China. Maybe I couldn’t get anything printed, but I’d like to try.”
“I hate to take you into any more danger, Laurel—”
“I know—you bold brave man, you want to walk into danger yourself and leave your delicate charmer at home. But you call yourself a feminist, and that means that women demand
their share of the bad as well as the good.”
This was hardly to be disputed, and Lanny said: “All right. If that’s what you want, we’ll talk it over with the two doctors and see if they think it can be done.” He meant the father and daughter, with whom he had already discussed the idea of going out by way of Chungking. It might be that as far as danger was concerned there wasn’t much to choose between the two routes. They would have to fly from Chungking, and that means over the “Hump,” the most dangerous bit of air in the world. “If we go by the north,” he suggested, “we might get a plane to Russia.”
“The Moscow-Heaven Axis in reverse,” smiled Laurel.
The husband, swapping wisecracks, remarked: “I have a title for your first book. The Red Honeymoon!”
26
Hope Springs Eternal
I
The elder Dr. Carroll threw buckets of cold water over the project of a trip to Yenan. “Utterly out of the question!” he said, and explained that the difficulties were not so much of distance and weather as they were military and political. Free China was divided into two parts: the Communists, in the north, known as the “Border Government,” and those at Chungking, the “Central Government,” headed by the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. There was a truce between them while they fought the Japanese enemy, but it was like a forced marriage and nobody could guess how long it would endure. The group of money-minded men about the Generalissimo hated and feared the Reds, and could not endure to see them win a victory, even over the foreign foe. The Gissimo kept several hundred thousand of his best troops deployed along the border between the two governments, maintaining the strictest sort of blockade.
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