It was the whang, yang, high, wailing screech of angry Chinese. Holman went over to the head of the engine, where two steps led down to the narrow passageway between the boilers, and then stopped. They wouldn’t know him. Burgoyne must hear it up there; he’d come and break it up. The noise got worse and Burgoyne did not come down. The circular sterns of the two boilers stuck through the light bulkhead into the engine room like huge pop eyes, one on either side of the engine. The feed checks and water columns were in the engine room. The glass tube on the steaming boiler was so dirty-brown inside from scale that Holman had to move his finger slantwise behind it to be sure where the water level was. It was all right. The screeching in the fireroom was becoming frantic. Sometimes scale lodged in a valve and the glass showed a false level. You might think you were riding along easy with plenty of water and all the time your crown sheets were melting and when they let go it could blow the ship apart like a busted cigar. You had to blow the glass down every hour and let the column reform, to be sure. “God damn it!” Holman said.
He opened the blowdown cock. The glass emptied with a roar and steam billowed under the floorplates. One of the ball checks stuck and it kept on blowing, so he closed the cock. A half-naked Chinese came running from the fireroom and Burgoyne clattered down the ladder behind Holman.
“What the Willy Jesus?” Burgoyne said, frowning.
“I blew the glass,” Holman said. “One of your checks leaks.”
“It don’t leak bad. We only blow down once a watch on this ship,” Burgoyne said. “I blew the glass when I came on watch.” “I blow ’em once an hour,” Holman said.
“Maskee. You blow ’em every half hour if you want, when you got the watch. Right now I got it.”
He was angry. He had a right to be. You did not interfere with another man’s watch. But if he turned it over to a coolie, and the coolie was not standing it but out fighting …
“I’m sorry,” Holman said slowly. “I been down here twenty minutes, maybe more, and your coolie ain’t been in the engine room once to check the plant. Hellfire, you must’ve heard ’em fighting out there—”
He broke off at Burgoyne’s sudden grin. The good-humor crinkles at the corners of his eyes replaced the frown between them.
“They ain’t but one coolie down here for both places,” he said. “What you heard was Po-han singing.” He looked at the coolie at Holman’s left. “You sing song, Po-han, he tinkee you, othah man, makee fight fight.” Burgoyne chuckled and milled his fists and grinned at the coolie.
“My no sabby any man stop this side,” the coolie said. He was grinning, but embarrassed.
“The laugh’s on me,” Holman said. “I sure thought two of ’em was about to take the shovels to each other.”
“Po-han’ll sure enough get into the Chinee opera yet,” Burgoyne said. “He’s all the time singing down here by himself.” He looked hard at Holman. “Po-han’s a good man. Anything ain’t right, he’ll find it and tell you. You can trust Po-han.”
“Sure. I feel like a jackass,” Holman said. “I’m sorry I blew that glass, Frenchy.”
“It’s all right, Jake. Well, I better go back up.” Burgoyne started up the ladder. “Ain’t supposed to leave the quarterdeck except for emergencies,” he said from the gratings.
A white hat on a swab handle could stand that quarterdeck watch this time of night, Holman thought. There was no day or night in the engine room. The coolie was standing by and Holman did not know what to say to him or how to treat him. He saw that the water column had reformed in the same place. It had been all right, but now he knew. The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.
“All thing plopah,” the coolie said. “You makee looksee, Mastah. Any side plopah.”
He was grinning and looking Holman right in the eye and Holman had to recognize him. The coolie had short black hair above his head rag and a smooth, squarish face with very Chinese eyes and a strong chin. Except for the eyes and low nose, it was the same-model face as Jake Holman’s, and that added to Holman’s unease. Holman had gray eyes and bushy eyebrows and short, sandy hair.
“My takee looksee, Joe,” he said, to break the encounter.
He walked around the engine, glancing at things, and sat again on the workbench. This business of coolies, he thought. He was used to them hired by the hour to muck out bilges or clean firesides. He knew the gunboats stationed permanently in China kept coolies living aboard to do all the hard and dirty work, bilges, passing coal, garbage detail, that stuff. But coolies tending machinery: he could not see that. He just could not see that, and it was going to make things unexpectedly complicated for Jake Holman aboard the U.S.S. San Pablo.
Through the engine, Holman watched the coolie tending the pumps on the port side. He took up neatly on a blowing gland, then swabbed the rod, then wiped up the spattered grease and water. He took a little make-up feed into the hot well. He moved quickly and surely and he seemed to know what he was doing. He wore old leather steaming shoes and the kind of thin black coolie pants that were tight at the ankle and so loose at the waist that the extra material had to be folded and lapped, and they were held up by a white sash that went around two or three times. The seats always sagged slaunchwise and the sailors laughed and called them “droopy drawers.”
Suddenly, Holman saw the sense of it. Air went through the thin cloth and they did not bind in the crotch or even touch, and the cloth in the sash soaked up the sweat that rolled down. It beat hell out of skintight dungarees and leather belts. But no sailor would ever wear coolie pants. They would rather go on doctoring the spick itch in their crotches and the prickly heat across their hip bones. Besides, coolie pants would be nonregulation. What about that, Holman thought.
The coolie was adjusting the boiler feed. He was shorter and lighter than Holman but built to the same plan, stocky and well padded with muscles that held their shape like a washboard down his stomach and worked together rounded and smoothly on his arms and across his chest. He did not look like a coolie. Coolies were scrawny and corded, ribs showing, and they had ugly purple calluses the size of cantaloupes on their humped shoulders. Squeeze merchants ashore were fat as Buddha. This coolie was what a Chinaman could look like when he had enough to eat and still had to work.
What the hell, Holman thought. That coolie’s all right. Machinery only cared about what a man knew and what he could do with his hands, whether he was a coolie or an admiral, and that was the secret, very good thing about machinery. The coolie was an engineer; well then, he was not a coolie, he was another engineer like Jake Holman. Po-han turned and caught Holman’s gaze and came over grinning.
“All thing plopah, Mastah?” he asked. He knew it was, and he was proud.
“Ding hao!” Holman made the double thumbs-up sign and grinned back. “You no moh speakee my name Mastah,” he said. “You speakee me Jake … Holman.” He pronounced it very distinctly.
“Jeh-ki,” Po-han said. “Ho-mang.”
“Jehk.”
“Jehk. Jehk.”
Holman slid off the workbench. There was no more strain in the encounter. “I’m going up and turn in,” he said, dropping the pidgin. “I’m glad to be shipmates with you, Po-han.” He held out his hand.
Po-han was embarrassed, because shaking hands was not old custom in China, but he shook hands. Both men had hard, square hands and a powerful grip.
“Keep her steaming, Po-han,” Holman said, and headed for the ladder. He had seen the engine room and he could go to sleep now.
He did not go right to bed. He needed time to appreciate his new bunk. It was against the port side forward, just aft of the door, and it was half again as wide and much softer than the thin horsehair mattress he was used to. The crew’s compartment was big enough for a hundred bunks, by navy standards, and there were only about twenty in it, as far as he could judge by the dim blue night lights. Holman was used to sleeping on narrow pipe-and-wire shelves stacked four high on either side of pipe stanchions
. You were practically in a double bed with the guy across from you. Somebody’s rump sagged in your face and someone else’s feet were next to your pillow. The air was always thick with bad smells and strangled snoring. Bunking like that was supposed to work you out of any private and personal notions you had about yourself. When you learned to like living that way, you were a good bluejacket and Uncle Sam loved you.
He undressed and sat on his bunk. A huge upright locker at either end made a little alcove of it. Above it a fresh breeze off the river fluttered curtains in the two square windows. Curtains! The place smelled airy and clean, of wax and soap and metal polish. Suddenly he stretched out his legs and waved them and raised his arms and waved them and no matter where he stretched and reached, he was still in his own space. It was his body catching up, starting to believe it, taking possession.
He sprawled luxuriously on the edge of sleep, believing and enjoying it. A sailor without his own ship was like a hermit crab without a shell. It was good to have a shell again. This bunk was no better than the one he had had on the commercial steamer up from Shanghai. But a paid-for bunk was like a whore. Your own bunk on your own ship was what a wife was probably like. You could really rest, in your own bunk.
His mind moved to the missionary girl on the commercial steamer. She was new in China, going to her first mission job. She did not know the score and she did not know the rules. That first morning in the lower Yangtze she had even thought he was part of the steamer crew. She had stopped where he was standing by the saloon deck rail.
“Are we really in a river?” she asked him.
“Yeah. It’s a river,” he said.
The starboard shore was a green horizon. The port shore was out of sight across choppy brown water. You couldn’t see it as a river. You could just know it was there.
“It’s so huge,” she said. She was blonde, fresh and clean-looking in a sleeveless brown dress, but not very pretty. “I’ve just come to China,” she said. “There’s so much. So different.” She looked down at the Chinese passengers crowding the main deck and back out across the water. “It’s just so enormous,” she repeated.
“I guess it gets smaller as you go up,” he said. “I guess if you went far enough, you could straddle it and scoop it all up in a bucket.”
That was a secret thought he always had about rivers. He had never told it to anyone before. She thought about it.
“I’m from Minnesota. I’ve seen where the Mississippi starts,” she said. “It just rises up out of the land all around. You couldn’t scoop it up in a bucket.”
They talked for half an hour. She found out he was a navy sailor and a passenger like herself. She did not know it hurt a missionary girl’s reputation to be friendly with a sailor. She told him her brother Charley had been a reserve lieutenant on the Delaware during the war. Holman didn’t tell her he hated battleships and had very little use for lieutenants. Her name was Miss Eckert and she called him Mr. Holman. It was a strange, pleasant little talk.
“I’ve so much to learn,” she said. “It’s so confusing, so far.”
It was indeed. Holman was confused also with the talk he heard at meals in the saloon. Things were set up in China so that sailors were never around nice people, and he had not heard such talk before. The other passengers were three businessmen and two buck missionaries and they wrangled about China. Holman knew his place and kept it and said nothing. Riots were going on in Shanghai because some students had been shot, and a naval landing force was ashore to back up the police. They wrangled about that.
“Chinese think we’re demoralized!” the bulky old Englishman, Mr. Outscout, said. “Think so myself, by George! Gone soft, rotten, since the war!”
He had stiff gray hair that he tossed for emphasis. His main target was the oldest missionary, Miss Eckert’s new boss, a tall, bearded man named Craddock. Craddock would stick out his beard for emphasis. He and Outscout were a good match.
“No, sir!” Craddock said once. “I say you shall not extend your unequal treaties yet further over this unhappy nation!”
“Our unequal treaties! Ours, I say!”
Outscout banged the table. The crystal chandelier tinkled. The businessmen ganged up on Craddock. They asked him if he owned title to his mission lands, what taxes and import duties he paid, how often he interfered in Chinese courts on behalf of converts and how often he had fled to a gunboat.
“Twice, to my shame,” he said, glaring at them. “I will not flee again.”
The saloon was paneled in dark wood and had a brown rug. White-coated Chinese stewards served neatly and silently. There were silver and white linen and wine glasses and they all had very good eating manners. Miss Eckert often asked questions. Both sides were trying to win her over. Her questions helped Holman to understand.
He learned that the missionaries wanted a lot more than just pulling the gunboats out of China. They wanted to turn customs and salt tax and postal system control back to the Chinese. They wanted all the palefaces to be under Chinese law and need Chinese permission to be in the country. It was complicated and it was all mixed up in Holman’s mind with Miss Eckert asking questions.
Sailors did not know about any treaties. They thought navy ships operated in Chinese waters the same way they did on the high seas. The sailors knew the missionaries despised them and wanted to run them out of China. They knew that, all right. But they thought it was only because sailors were so sinful. You would never hear a good word for missionaries from any China sailor. The businessmen said it would be time enough to think about giving China equal treaties when China was able to form a stable and civilized government. It was Craddock’s turn to thump the table.
“Your unequal treaties create a situation that compels their use! You know they are cancerously self-extending!” he said fiercely. “You know, and well you know, that China will remain helpless to put her house in order unless you first put away your enslaving treaties!”
“Our enslaving treaties! You’ll not come that on me, sir!”
Outscout looked ready to reach across and throttle Craddock. Miss Eckert slipped away, looking distressed.
“Your kind came in with the treaties, forcibly as opium!” Outscout said. “Suspend them and we all go! Chaff in a typhoon!” He flailed his arm. “Your kind, too. Chinese hate and despise you, sir! Dare you know that?”
“I dare love them in return!” The beard stuck out like a rammer bow. “I dare trust God rather than guns! Dare you, sir? Dare you?”
“I dare no less than yourself. You know well enough you’re not permitted to renounce your personal treaty rights.” Outscout’s voice turned scornful. “Cheap talk, sir, when you know you’ll not have to make it good.”
Respectable people really had control, Holman thought. Sailors could not get half that angry and nasty with each other without having to stand up and fist it out.
Near Chinkiang the river narrowed and low green hills humped along the south bank. A pagoda stood on a wooded point. The Paul Jones passed them making thirty knots, with signals fluttering, deck guns manned and boats swung out. She hailed, saying there was rioting in Chinkiang. The steamer people made a great fuss slamming and locking the steel gratings that shut the Chinese deck passengers away from topside. All male passengers were called to the pilot house. Holman went. The two missionaries were not there. Outscout seemed to have charge. He was digging in an arms chest.
“Ingram! Where d’ye keep your ammo?” he barked. The captain said someone was bringing it. Outscout thrust a rifle at Holman. “Pop down and do sentry-go on the cabin deck, lad,” he ordered. “Keep the deck passengers in hand.” Holman hefted the empty rifle doubtfully. “Just show yourself through the bars forward and aft,” Outscout said. “The sight of your uniform and rifle is all they’ll want to keep them in order.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Holman said.
The deck passengers did not look at Holman and his uniform and his empty rifle. They crowded the port rail to look at black smoke rising a
bove trees as the steamer rounded the point. Holman felt very foolish. He did not even know how to work his empty British rifle. What am I doing here? he thought. Only three Chinese children stared solemnly up at him through the bars. They knew something was wrong. The littlest one was about to cry. Holman grinned and pointed his finger down at them.
“Bang, bang. You’re dead,” he told them.
They considered that seriously. Then the two older ones smiled. The smallest one laughed and pointed his finger at Holman and said, “Cah cah cah!” Holman felt better about things. He grinned more widely. Then he felt eyes on the back of his neck. Someone behind him was watching. He stiffened and turned, cheeks burning.
It was Miss Eckert. She was smiling, understanding and sharing the little play instead of mocking it. Holman really saw her then, for the first time, and after that he could always really see her. She had a fresh, soft, sweet look to her face, and a curving build. Her straw-colored hair was bobbed and shingled. Her forehead was smooth and wide and her clear blue eyes looked right at everybody. Her rather wide mouth always showed her feelings, drooping in sympathy when someone was hurt. Now she was smiling very tenderly. He tried to smile back at her.
They could not say much. Craddock came and insisted that she take shelter. But for the rest of the trip to Hankow it was different between them. She was more than just a pleasing appearance. She was always real and there. It was clear that Craddock did not like her to be with Holman and also clear that she was ignoring Craddock’s advice. Holman knew Craddock was right, for the long run. He knew it was a good thing that he would never see Miss Eckert again, after they reached Hankow.
Holman began to think Craddock also had the right of it in the running argument at meals. At dinner on the last day he spoke up for the first time, in support of something Craddock said. It was embarrassing. There was a pause. Even Craddock did not look pleased. Then Mr. Johnson, the gaunt American with glasses, said something vague. The talk went on. Johnson began telling Miss Eckert about the gunboats.
The Sand Pebbles Page 2