The Sand Pebbles

by Richard McKenna

  In the afternoon he sent Bordelles ashore to see if Reynolds had come back from China Light, and what the word was. If it was bad, he would have to go to China Light himself next day, the last day of grace before the burning. Bordelles had not been long away when the mob thickened on the bund. Shots and a confused crowd clamor came from the city. It could be trouble. General Pan had said he had no reliable troops left. Lt. Collins thought about sending Franks and his section of the landing force to the mission but, given the mood the people were in, that might precipitate a lot of needless killing. He cursed missionaries under his breath and tried to look calm when Franks came up, also worried about the tumult in the city.

  “It’s probably just another rain magic ceremony,” Lt. Collins said. “Let’s go out and have a look.”

  Fortunately, it was that, and Lt. Collins felt Franks’ unspoken admiration. It was the Rain Dragon himself, greenly winding out of the city and many-legging it along the bund while a shouting, gonging troupe ran with him shooting firecrackers. He was made of green cloth that came to the waists of the twenty-odd men who were his legs. His big spherical head, with green whiskers and bulging eyes, bobbed and turned. He came curving and humping down to the sands, driven by his attendants. They were trying to make him cross the fire, and he did not want to. He tossed his head angrily and dodged and doubled and they headed him back with gongs and firecrackers. Everyone along the bund screamed when he crossed the fire. Each pair of legs jumped high and landed running with short steps and it was like a hump traveling along his back. Then he stood trembling and wrinkled and telescoped into himself with his goggle-eyed head on the sand, and all the spirit and life were gone out of him. The attendants began splashing him with buckets of water. It revived him. Slowly his head came up and he stretched out again sleekly green and dripping and he went cavorting back up to the bund while the crowd cheered.

  “Well, sir, I hope that gives him the idea about a little rain,” Franks said.

  “I hope so too, Chief. It would make things a lot simpler.”

  Bordelles did not come back until almost sunset. He had had to wait for Reynolds. The news was not good. The China Light people refused to evacuate, but Mr. Craddock would come in in the morning.

  “You’re in for a rough time, sir,” Bordelles said, trying not to grin. “Mr. Reynolds says old Craddock’s mad as a split snake because we even came here. He’s going to order us back to Hankow.”

  Lt. Collins smiled grimly. It was still a joke to the rest of them.

  He talked to Mr. Craddock alone in his cabin. The old man was angry in black, his gray-streaked beard like a club, his eyes and manner more bold and fierce than ever before. Lt. Collins had decided that a soft-spoken disdain would be the best counter.

  “I came here under orders and I will have to stay through the crisis,” he said. “I can’t leave while American lives are in danger.”

  “It is you who make our danger, sir!” Craddock launched into the anti-gunboat credo. The unequal treaties and the gunboats in Chinese inland waters made a mockery of the Christian spirit. They sparked and fueled the native anti-Christian feeling. Lt. Collins listened patiently, toying with his tea bowl. “The Chinese do not distinguish between your people and mine, sir!” Craddock rumbled across the green baize. “They think we are all Christians.”

  “Well, aren’t we?”

  “Ask yourself, sir. All the Christians in this district have been praying publicly for rain every day at noon. Have you and your men?”

  “No. We have no chaplain.”

  Craddock looked his contempt for that excuse. Lt. Collins was thinking. The praying was in part, as General Pan would say, a show to comfort the people. No doubt San Pablo was spoiling the moral effect. And there was just a chance—

  “In times of great stress the Chinese attack their authority symbols,” Craddock said. “Your ship, sir, is a very hated authority symbol and we are all perforce associated with it in the Chinese mind. The best thing you can do for us is to sail away from here at once.”

  “I will have my men pray on deck this noon,” Lt. Collins said. “Would you be willing to lead them in prayer, Mr. Craddock?”

  “I would be glad to.” His manner gentled notably.

  “In order to associate the ship more clearly with the local Christian effort, do you suppose I might give the prayer signal with the ship’s whistle?” Lt. Collins pursued his thought.

  Craddock considered. “Yes. Yes, a good idea,” he decided. “I have time still to go ashore and arrange it with Mr. Reynolds and his people.”

  “What do you think about tomorrow, the crisis? Would it help if all the Christians in Paoshan were here aboard, at the crisis scene, so to speak, to pray together?”

  “It might indeed. Yes, I think it would.” Mr. Craddock stood up. His manner was wholly changed and mollified. “I’ll arrange that too,” he said. “I’d better get ashore now, Lt. Collins.”

  Lt. Collins saw him off the quarterdeck. So far so good, he thought. When he had them all safe behind the guns, his duty would be done. The next step, and not an easy one, was to get the crew ready for prayers. They were probably more profane and irreverent than even the usual run of peacetime professionals, and they had the China sailor’s traditional dislike of missionaries as well. He had them called aft for another talk and he phrased it carefully. He had to leave them room to take the prayer as a joke, if they liked, and yet not seem facetious himself. Predictably, several of the sea lawyers objected. They knew that they could not, under navy regulations, be forced to pray. Holman, surprisingly, was not one of them. Holman had been doing very well lately.

  After dismissal, he planned it with Bordelles and Franks. Harris could be stationed in the bridge to blow the whistle. The other conscientious objectors could take the deck watches. Navy regulations prohibited men on duty under arms from taking off their hats or assuming undignified postures.

  “Old Craddock’ll raise hell,” Bordelles warned. “He’ll say kneeling is a perfectly dignified posture.”

  “We are still bound by navy regulations,” Lt. Collins said.

  The prayer went clumsily. Bordelles mustered the men and spaced them out in the pattern for physical drill. The men had dogged red faces. Harris blew the whistle in a vindictive, overlong blast that sent a cloud of steam drifting above the sands.

  “Ship’s company … uncover! Two!” Bordelles said. “Ship’s company … kneel!”

  They all knelt, hats beside them, except Craddock. An air of embarrassed constraint hung over the fantail. The men would not look at each other. Some knit their fingers and some steepled them. Craddock raised his hands and his bearded face to the sky and led off the prayer.

  He prayed very loudly, asking God to forgive them all for their swinish lusting after drink and harlots, for all their love of blood and violence, and to relent and send rain. The men were scowling and stirring. Just in time Craddock saw the danger signals and switched to Chinese. He raised his great voice to full register. God and the Chinese out there alone knew to what nameless sins he was vicariously confessing San Pablo. The sailors subsided. It was all right, in Chinese.

  He thundered in Chinese for ten minutes, until Harris cut him off with another long whistle blast. The men did not wait for dismissal. They stood up and bolted for the crew’s compartment, where they would swear and growl themselves back into their accustomed and comfortable state of grace. Craddock went up to the boat deck with the two officers. He was going to take tiffin aboard. He was strangely affable. He had had a chance to launder some very dirty souls and he had scrubbed hell out of them and he was feeling good about it. Bordelles loyally played up to him.

  “I feel a lot better about things now, Mr. Craddock,” he said. “Maybe I’m foolish, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it rains before tomorrow afternoon.”

  “It rests with God’s infinite mercy,” Craddock said.

  Just before lunch a new crowd clamor broke out. It sounded like jeering laughter and the
three men went out to see what it might be this time. Two Chinese in white dunce caps, one at each end of a bamboo ladder, were crossing the sands. Seven or eight dogs, fastened upright between the ladder rungs, were forced to skip and hop along on their hind legs. Each dog was dressed in a crude white sailor suit and they had crude flags tied to their flapping forepaws, variously Japanese, French, British and American. Craddock began laughing.

  “That’s a shame-heaven show,” he explained. “Everyone is supposed to laugh.”

  The old devil was laughing from more than a Chinese sense of decorum, Lt. Collins thought. Someone in that town had a nasty turn of humor. The dogs howled and hopped along. They twisted their heads and snapped at each other and showed big white teeth. A high, sharp yapping broke out on the lower deck.

  “Get in step, you mangy sons of bitches!” Shanahan’s voice rose clearly. “You’re a disgrace to the tribe!” The sailors were all laughing on the lower deck. “Arf! Arf! Arf! Eyes … right!” Shanahan shouted.

  He was pretending that the dogs were passing in review. The dogs were ludicrous. Suddenly Lt. Collins and Bordelles were laughing too, helplessly swept away. The whole ship was laughing, to match the laughter of the Chinese on the bund. When the dogs were out of sight, the laughter subsided in red-faced, wheezing chuckles.

  “The Chinese … are a very ingenious people,” Bordelles gasped happily.

  The mood lasted through tiffin. Craddock seemed actually human. He left in a good mood, promising to return with all his juniors the next morning. The prayer had indeed been a success.

  Later in the day Lt. Collins learned from Yen-ta that the Chinese on the sands had been greatly impressed by the prayer. Twice the steam cloud from the whistle had drifted over the sands and drops of water condensed in it and fell hissing on the fire. The Chinese thought that was very potent rain magic. Lt. Collins chuckled privately at the irony. It made him feel better about Mr. Craddock.

  Jake Holman had been getting more tense every day. He could not forget what Lt. Collins had said so matter-of-factly: the people know they are all going to die. He felt that he was the only man on the ship who appreciated what was going on. It affects their minds. The people were trying to take God by the throat. They were going to have rain, if they had to wring out heaven like a swab. It was an enormous thought, and Jake Holman could not shake it off. He would like to take part in a project like that. He suspected that the other Sand Pebbles were afraid underneath also, just not wanting to admit it to each other. They were only covering with their jokes and swagger.

  On Friday the whole world felt like a loaded gun on a hair trigger. The same tantalizing spun-sugar clouds floated around up there in the dry, bright sky. No one had much to say about the decks. During drills the warlord and some of his officers and women came aboard, with bales of gear. They were like rats leaving a sinking ship, the Sand Pebbles said uneasily. Shortly afterward, the missionaries came aboard. Burgoyne spat over the side.

  “Their ship’s sinking too,” he said.

  It was old custom that the missionaries took the boat deck and the Sand Pebbles stayed on the main deck, like oil on top of water. A baby was crying up there, and it sounded very out of place. The men had to watch their language so closely that they could hardly talk at all and they could no longer come from the washroom out on the fantail with no clothes on. They drifted uneasily along the main deck, resenting the missionaries. The crowd up on the city wall and along the bund was thickening. Near the fire on the sands priests had built a small mat shed. On a shelf in front of it they had wooden drums shaped like fish and some joss sticks smoking. Soldiers dumped the animal carcasses into the river and they floated away. The priests were sticking fresh willow branches into the sand around their mat shed.

  Holman watched it all. Steam was up in both boilers and they were ready to go in the engine room; Po-han was looking after that. Most of the crew was back on the fantail watching the sands. Clip Clip had to come back there to call them for their shaves. Above them on the boat deck the missionaries were watching too. The two groups did not look at each other. The sailors knew the women up there despised them. The women probably considered, quite correctly, that the sailors had impure thoughts about them. Holman saw Miss Eckert up there, in a gray dress. She caught his eye and smiled.

  “Hi!” he said. “Hello there.”

  “Hello, Mr. Holman.” She came to the rail, looking down.

  He could not talk to her there, in the quick chill of embarrassment and resentment among the Sand Pebbles. Through the open door of the head he could see Harris sitting on the trough. Harris grinned at Holman and began to sing, in a high, mocking voice:

  I am Jesus’ lit-tull lamb,

  Yes, by Jesus Christ, I am….

  Holman waved his hand vaguely at her and bobbed his head and almost ran forward. He had to get out of there. On the way forward he thought of an excuse and went up the ladder to the boat deck. He began testing the stack guys. She came forward to meet him.

  “I’m slacking the stack guys,” he said loudly.

  “It’s very high.” She looked up at the smoke drifting away.

  “That’s to make a good natural draft through the furnaces.” He slapped the guy. “These cables keep it from falling over. With all the fires lit, it gets hotter and has to expand,” he said. “We got to slack the guys, or it would buckle.” He was saying it all for Crosley’s benefit, down on the quarterdeck. “This is a turnbuckle,” he went on. “It’s got right- and left-hand threads. When I turn it this way, they both screw out. You see?” She nodded, puzzled at his manner. “Now I’ll get the forward ones,” he said.

  He went forward, out of Crosley’s hearing. She followed. Her hair was well grown out, knotted back and smoothly pretty in the sunlight. She smelled clean, like Ivory soap.

  “How are things at China Light?” he asked her.

  “Oh, wonderful! I enjoyed my first school year,” she said. “I love China, now.”

  “All shook down, huh?” He smiled. “I’m glad.”

  “Some of the boys have such quick, eager minds,” she said. “One named Cho-jen is a true genius. I’m beginning to understand China, Mr. Holman. I’m never afraid any more.”

  “There may be shooting here, before today ends.”

  “I hope not.” Her face shadowed.

  “So do I.”

  He was suddenly and unaccountably very glad that she was safe aboard. She was thinner and her skin was rougher than before. American women always looked big and coarse to him, compared with Chinese girls, but he did not feel that about Miss Eckert.

  “Do you think the old monk has a chance to win?” he asked her.

  “Mr. Craddock says it is heathen spiritual arrogance,” she said. “We are to pray that it not be punished as it deserves.”

  “That means for it to rain?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it depends on how you look at it.”

  She looked concerned. “Mr. Craddock really does a lot. He has food stored at China Light for all our people. And he has his farmers plant sugar beets in some of the high fields. They send roots way, way down to reach water. They’re thriving.”

  “That machinery,” he said. “They got it working yet?”

  “Not the way it should. They can make a kind of crude molasses.”

  “If I could talk Chinese and had time and the chance, I could show these farmers along the river how to get up twice as much water with them treadmill pumps,” he said.

  “Could you really?”

  “I’d true up the flumes and polish ’em. Put low-friction packing on them wooden vanes,” he said. “Metal bearings, with oil.”

  “I wish you could have the chance.”

  “Sometimes I think about a fleet of barges, with boilers and steam pumps,” he said. “I could teach Chinese to run ’em and take care of ’em.”

  She smiled. “You have the missionary spirit, Mr. Holman.”

  It shocked him. He stared at her. S
he read his thought.

  “Not all missionaries are evangelists. There are medical and teaching missionaries,” she said. “You could be an engineering missionary.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “I never heard of one. But there could be.”

  It was an absolutely new thought to him. She moved to the rail and he followed her. A ventilator and a boat made a private little alcove for them.

  “Chinese can learn engineering,” he said. “I know.” He began telling her about Po-han and the other Chinese. He knew he was like a little boy turning handsprings to show off, and he couldn’t help it. He knew also that she would understand and not laugh at him. He told her all about the ship and what he had done. “Except for the guns, us sailors are just passengers,” he finished. “And that Po-han—if there was only a few thousand like him in China …”

  “There are many millions like him in China,” she said. “All they need is a chance.”

  “I’d like to see ’em get a chance.”

  “You’re a teacher too. You are already an engineering missionary.”

  They looked at each other. The quarterdeck bugle blared mess gear. It saved him. He was about to say something foolish.

  “I have to go eat now,” he said. “Afterward we have to stand by repel boarder stations. I won’t see you again until after … after whatever’s going to happen.”

  They both looked at the sky. It did not look any different.

  “I’m just not worried,” she said. “I feel it will rain.”