The Sand Pebbles

by Richard McKenna

  “That wasn’t fighting, that was just being crazy,” Farren said.

  “Well, weren’t Chao’s men fighting?” Holman said.

  “They didn’t know what else to do.”

  Lt. Collins stopped liberty for several days during the change-over. The city was all shuttered up and the bund almost clear of coolies. A warlord change-over was always a time of looting and killing. The San Pablo coolies either stayed aboard or ashore inside their homes, because their safe-conduct passes were not much good at those times. Burgoyne had to stay aboard and Po-han stayed home in the courtyard. Holman and Burgoyne worried about them, but there was nothing that they could do.

  There was very little looting. Chao’s men had to get out too fast, and the new men did not loot, which was almost unheard-of. They wore tan instead of gray uniforms and their general was named Tang. The gunboat captains and the consuls all exchanged calls with him and the city unshuttered itself and Lt. Collins granted liberty again. Everyone said it was a very peaceful change-over.

  Everything was all right in the courtyard. Po-han had pasted paper American flags above all the doors on his side of the courtyard. On the other side they still had tigers above their doors. Po-han said everybody thought the new warlord was better than the old one.

  “New sojah man, any time he takee, he pay,” Po-han said.

  Life in the courtyard was even better and happier than before. Holman made up a new game for the children one day, when Ah Pao dropped a fragment of rice cake in the pool and the goldfish began to nuzzle at it, pushing it this way and that. He laid goal threads floating on the water on either side of the pool. When the fragment bumped a thread, it was a score for that side of the courtyard. Each child knew his own goldfish and they screamed with excitement when their fish were pushing the wrong way. All the grownups came out to watch the children and the bright little fish and to laugh at the game. Po-han bet with the water coolie. Su-li’s fish scored the first goal for her side, and she was almost frantic with joy.

  “The children love you, Jake,” Maily said. “They’ll miss you when you go cruising.”

  Maily’s two black ones did not join in the game. They were aristocrats and would only eat from her fingers. They knew her by sight now, and she did not have to trill at them any more.

  Spring was all over both banks of the river in a yellow-green mist of new leaves and spotty patches of pink and white flowers on the mountain. When the wind was right, it smelled of flowers. The warming weather raised nasty smells and swarms of flies from the winter’s garbage along the foot of the embankment. Then one morning the river was suddenly rising as they watched it, rolling powerfully muddy brown with yellow foam on top, eating away the sandbars and the piles of rubbish. Now and then a junk along the bank would carry away its moorings and go careening downriver while all hands aboard it yelled and screamed and tried to get it back to the bank. Pappy Tung had to keep veering out more chain as the water rose. The anchor dragged and Holman and Po-han warmed up the main engine and steamed ahead slowly, just enough to ease the strain. The engine worked beautifully. The smell and sight of the steaming engine room excited Holman. He had almost forgotten about the engine.

  In a few days the water dropped again, almost as low as before, but the river bed was clean with fresh white sand. It had been what the Sand Pebbles called the false flood, the Siang’s personal flood, which all ran away in a few days into Tungting Lake and hardly wet the bottom. The real flood would come later, when the mighty Yangtze flooded and backed up into Tungting Lake. The false flood was a signal to get coal and stores aboard and prepare for summer cruising. The ship came alert. There were more drills, and military tension picked up noticeably.

  General Tang was much easier on the students than General Chao had been. They held more parades along the bund, with more life and spirit in them. Buglers always headed the parades, sounding reveille over and over, very off-key and squawky. The students, cued by section leaders, shouted slogans in unison, like cheering sections at a football game. They had thin, screechy voices, even for Chinese, because they were so young. They were bolder with their signs. Some read: DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM! and CANCEL UNEQUAL TREATIES! The Sand Pebbles laughed at one placard which read: GUNBOATS, GO HOME! For more than twenty years Changsha had been official home port for the U.S.S. San Pablo. The Sand Pebbles considered that they were home.

  The student parading and street corner speeches inside the city made many people nervous. The students were harmless, but they could get a mob of coolies all worked up, and that was how riots got started. It made an uneasy feeling among all the treaty people. General Chao had known how to keep the lid on things, they said. He was an old, experienced warlord. The oldest hands among the Sand Pebbles were not perturbed.

  “This Tang bastard won’t last long,” Restorff said sagely.

  Tang lasted hardly a month. He went as quietly as he had come, early in April, just before the true flood. General Chao had gotten more troops from General Wu, who owned Hankow, and the word was that Wu was going to get a cut of the Changsha squeeze money. The Wu men were very rough. Fires glowed ashore at night and there were shots and screaming most of the night. Po-han stayed home and Burgoyne had to stay aboard again. On the second day of the looting Bordelles’ section of the landing force went ashore to stand by the U.S. Consulate on the bund. Wu’s men were not anti-foreign, but when warlord soldiers got drunk on loot and blood and helpless women they were liable to do anything. There was a lot of blood. They held head choppings every day on the bund and threw the bodies over the embankment, to lie where the garbage heaps had been.

  The worst was over by the fourth day. That morning Bordelles got a trouble call from a mission school inside the city. Warlord troops were trying to billet themselves in the school, which was full of woman refugees from the looting and raping. Bordelles led his section in to throw the soldiers out.

  It looked bad inside the walls. No one was on the streets except soldiers in baggy, dirty gray uniforms and a few coolies hauling loads under guard. The shop fronts were all shuttered with vertical planks and most of them had holes broken through. The Sand Pebbles passed a number of headless bodies, with blood and flies clotted black on the flagstones.

  “They been having themselves quite a time,” Crosley commented.

  They passed one execution team. The officer was young and neatly dressed and he carried the red-and-yellow paddle that meant he had the power of instant life and death. The executioner walked just behind him, in a red hat and red sash, with the big shiny chopping sword on his shoulder. The sword had a long red tassel on its handle. A squad of riflemen in fairly good formation brought up the rear. They came straight down the middle of the street, the young officer proud and haughty and not seeing the Sand Pebbles. Involuntarily, the sailors made way.

  “Jesus Christ, there goes death walking!” Farren said.

  About thirty soldiers were milling around in the courtyard of the mission school. The missionary was a fluttery little man with rimless glasses. He was sweating and arguing in Chinese with the soldiers. They were grumbling and beating their rifle butts on the stones but, when they saw the Sand Pebbles, they became quiet. The missionary came over.

  “Please just wait a bit, Mr. Bordelles,” he said. “I’m about to convince them that their billeting order is for the native school over in the next block.”

  “Which one is their officer?”

  “They don’t seem to have one.”

  The missionary hurried back to argue some more. Bordelles winked at Red Dog and turned his back to study some shrubbery. Red Dog held his riot gun at port and went behind the gray soldiers and began kicking them. When they turned, he shoved the gun broadside at their faces and said, “Arf! Arf! Arf!” They didn’t know what to make of it. Red Dog was herding them toward the gate. It worried Holman.

  “Stand easy,” Farren told him, laughing. “If you take ’em serious they’re liable to take themselves serious, and that’s the only time
you have trouble.”

  “Here now! Stop that!” the missionary told Red Dog, fluttering hands at him.

  “Arf! Arf! Arf!” Red Dog said cheerfully.

  He tried to sidle behind the missionary, who kept turning to protect his rear. Some of the gray soldiers began laughing. Red Dog got behind the missionary and landed a gentle kick. All the warlord soldiers began laughing and going out the gate. The missionary was very indignant. He complained to Bordelles, who was still admiring the shrubbery.

  “It was the best way to handle it, Mr. Ingram,” Bordelles soothed him. “It’s a joke to them now. They won’t bear you any resentment.”

  Outside in the street again, Holman asked Bordelles a favor. “We’re not too far from where Frenchy Burgoyne’s woman lives,” he said. “Could we just stop by there and see if she’s all right?”

  Bordelles said yes. He wanted to look around anyway, to make a report on the state of the city. They went out the north gate. Po-han’s district was a poor one and it was not very torn up. There were no bodies in the streets, but soldiers roamed there and many gates were broken open. Po-han’s gate was broken open. Only Po-han and Maily came out to talk to them. Maily was pale and thin in ragged, stinking Chinese clothes. Soldiers had come in three times, Po-han said, but he had scared them off with his and Maily’s safe-conduct passes. He was quite cheerful. He thought this visit of armed sailors in uniform would make him plenty of face and he would not have any more trouble with the soldiers.

  Holman talked privately with Maily. She insisted that she was all right and not afraid any more. Soldiers had done bad things in the courtyards on either side of them, and they had had to listen to it, but she thought the worst was over now. She asked them to wait while she wrote a short note for Burgoyne.

  “I’ll take that and deliver it,” Red Dog said. He was the San Pablo mail clerk. “I don’t remember old Frenchy ever getting a letter before.”

  Very few of the Sand Pebbles ever got letters.

  Changsha settled down quite rapidly. General Chao had just been teaching them a lesson. When he called the soldiers off, they did not want to stop, and the last several days all the heads lopped off on the bund were soldiers’ heads. A few shops opened and farmers began bringing in stuff to the markets. For a few days Duckbutt Randall went ashore with Big Chew to buy chow and then it was safe for Big Chew to go alone. Lt. Collins started liberty. Holman went ashore with Burgoyne and very shortly it seemed just the same as ever in Po-han’s courtyard. Po-han had gained much face in the neighborhood and his tenants across the courtyard had pasted paper flags over the tigers above their doors.

  The true flood came quietly in the night. It was a slow, steady rise of water with lazy back eddies and an actual slackening of current, but it covered and carried away the stinking corpses along the foot of the embankment. It was Yangtze floodwater from melting snow on the great mountains of Tibet, backing up the Siang and filling Tungting Lake for the summer. Silently, hour after hour, day and night, the broadening brown river swallowed sandbars and crept up the stone embankment fronting the city until the chanting water coolies had only a few steps to climb with their slopping pairs of tins.

  The gunboats did not start their summer show-the-flag cruising until it was certain that Changsha had settled down. They were very busy getting ready aboard the San Pablo. Pappy Tung and his coolies were painting the blocky topside a fresh, gleaming white. Ping-wen and his coolies were up in bosun’s chairs tarring the stack guys and painting the tall black stack. They shined the brass siren and the great, hoarse whistle to sun-winking radiance. Everything was ready in the engine room. Then Holman was shocked to learn that Po-han did not want to make the cruise. He told Holman, with considerable embarrassment, that he could live on his rents from the courtyard and he wanted to stay home and take it easy.

  “Well, damn it! Well, hell, Po-han!” Holman said.

  He felt betrayed and disappointed and more nearly angry at Po-han than he had ever been. Po-han was ashamed. Holman talked earnestly to him, recalling their work on the engine and how the summer cruise was going to be the payoff, and Po-han changed his mind. As soon as he did, he was very cheerful and happy about it.

  The weather warmed suddenly and the uniform changed to whites. A few students tried to parade and General Chao arrested all of them. The soldiers whipped the boys with bamboos. They stripped the girls and led them naked around a barracks square, to shame them, but they did not kill or rape. The Chinese were strongly against killing students. That was the mistake the British had made in Shanghai the year before.

  Everyone said that, with a really big warlord like Wu behind him, Chao was safely settled in Changsha. H.M.S. Woodcock and the Japanese gunboat sailed. The San Pablo was to sail on Monday. Holman spent Sunday afternoon and evening in the courtyard. That morning Po-han and Burgoyne had gone to a temple to burn joss sticks for luck on the cruise. Maily had been shocked.

  “I figure Chinese good luck is as good as any other kind,” Burgoyne said. He leaned forward and tousled Maily’s hair. She smiled at him.

  “It’s the best kind, in China,” Holman said.

  “I wish I’d gone.”

  It was very fine sitting and drinking beer under the tree in the courtyard. Petals were falling from the tree’s pink, trumpet-shaped flowers. They littered the fish pool and some of the graceful little fish nuzzled at them. The air was faintly perfumed. They were going to have a gala farewell supper brought in from a restaurant later on and all the children felt the holiday spirit. They ran and shouted and chased each other around the courtyard. Su-li tired sooner than the older children and she came and climbed into Holman’s lap. She laid her cheek against his chest and traced her tiny finger around the blue eagle and chevrons on his white jumper sleeve. He felt a surge of warm feeling.

  “You know, Frenchy, this is good,” he said. “It’s just … well. good!”

  “I wish we didn’t have to go cruising,” Burgoyne said.

  “Same me!” Po-han looked a bit defiantly at Holman.

  “Well, I’m kind of anxious to see how the engine’s going to hold up,” Holman said. “Cruising’s good, too.”

  They did not answer. Holman grinned at them.

  “You home guards!” he said. “I’m the only honest-to-God sailor in the crowd. But I know how you feel.”

  He tugged Su-li’s pigtail. The little girl looked around mischievously. She remembered how to get her laugh.

  “Ding ding,” she said. “Ding hao!”

  21

  From the start of the cruise there was no bearing trouble and all hands commented on the smoothness of the engine. To Holman’s ears, however, it was still discordant. He and Po-han worked on it during their steaming watches while Burgoyne stood by the throttle. It was good, being all three together there with the engine and the memory of the courtyard in Changsha shared among them.

  Holman had to teach Po-han about horsepower. For real smoothness, the power developed in each cylinder had to be equal. Power distribution was controlled by a screw adjustment that changed the position of the drag-link pins on the rock shaft, and you could link in or out while the engine was running. You were supposed to have indicators, which drew graphs of the changing pressures in the cylinders, as a guide to that. The San Pablo engine had never had any indicators. Holman had to make rough calculations of the correct receiver pressures and run the links in or out until he got them. When they began it, Po-han sprang a surprise. During the warlord changeovers in Changsha he had learned Arabic numerals from Maily, and all of the simple arithmetic she knew as well.

  “She thinks Po-han’s a natural-born genius,” Burgoyne said.

  He had been sharing the secret with Po-han. The pressure calculations took inverse proportion, and Po-han learned that in about fifteen minutes. But it was only monkey-see monkey-do with marks on paper, and he could not relate it to the engine. He looked beseechingly at the receiver pressure gauges, mounted three in a row on the board above the log d
esk, and shook his head in perplexity. Holman tapped the I.P. gauge. It read twenty pounds.

  “Wanchee more horses, this side,” he said. He tapped the L.P. gauge, showing seven pounds. “This side have got too many horses.”

  They went to the L.P. and he had Po-han ease out the L.P. link a fraction of an inch and they both felt the vibration smooth out a bit. Then, back at the log desk, Holman pointed to the twenty-five pounds on the I.P. and five on the L.P. and tried again to explain about the equal sharing out of horses. Po-han could not get it. It seemed to him that horses were pounds and the biggest cylinder should have the most pounds, not the fewest. He slapped his palms against his temples and his face twisted.

  “Head no good, Jehk,” he said. “Head no goddam good!”

  “Hell, Po-han, I don’t savvy it either,” Burgoyne said, grinning. “That’s only for special nuts about engines, like Jake.”

  “Steam do work, same horse,” Holman said. “Little bit steam, same one horse. Plenty steam, same plenty horse.”

  “Steam pushes, like a mule against a collar,” Burgoyne said. He pushed Po-han. “Steam pushes the ship.”

  Po-han was groping for a deeper understanding than Burgoyne had, Holman knew. Po-han could not rest on words. They went on with the fine adjustments, making them cut and try, judging with ears and fingertips, and they worked the last remnant of pulse and raggedness out of the engine vibration. Only they two knew they had done it; even to Burgoyne it seemed the same as before. All the while Po-han wrestled with horsepower.

  He had the notion of heat energy, but he thought the horses died in the main condenser. He was stopped by the thingness of steam, Holman knew. He could not mix time up with thingness and pull out the notion of pure energy.