“A big two-man shotgun, kind of a blunderbuss,” Holman said.
He remembered the gun lying in the courtyard. Crosley had thrown it into the burning kerosene.
“You were lucky the whole charge didn’t hit you,” the doctor said. “Well, shall we get on with the rest of it?”
“What do you mean, the rest of it?”
“A molar has to come out. I’ll have to probe for broken roots.”
“Jesus Christ,” Holman said. He should not have begun letting down.
“Oh, come now, no profanity, please,” the doctor said. “We pulled a tooth for General Chiang last week, over at his headquarters. He only took five minutes off work.”
“You know what we call him on the ship?” Holman said. “We call him Chancre Jack.”
The nurse hid a smile. “Do you?” the doctor said. “Open up, please,” he said.
It was very, very bad. Holman stood it by hating the doctor. He would not give that son of a bitch the satisfaction. But it came over him in waves and it was the nurse’s fingers that held him in place. Her fingers, and glimpses of her soft mouth drooping in pity. She carried him through the red haze of it and then they had him resting there with his head down on his knees and their voices sounded far off.
“I’d rather not give him a bed,” the doctor was saying. “We already have the wounded coming in from the fighting around Yochow. You can take care of him in your sickbay, can’t you?”
“I’m all right,” Holman mumbled. He raised his head, hands on trembling knees. “Let’s go back to the ship, Doc,” he said to Jennings. He stood up. He was groggy, but he felt strength coming back. “Let’s go, Doc,” he said thickly, around the cotton in his jaw.
“You ought to rest an hour or two,” Jennings said.
Holman turned his back on the doctor. “Thank you very much,” he told the nurse, and tried to smile at her. She smiled very sweetly at him. “See you aboard,” Holman told Jennings.
He walked out. Jennings caught up with him and took his arm. “You have to rest a little first,” he insisted.
“Not in this God damned place,” Holman said. “I’m going around by the railroad and stop and see how Maily is. I’ll rest there.” Jennings didn’t like it. “You don’t have to go with me,” Holman said. “I don’t even want you along.”
Maily was all right. She was in Chinese rig and her room was clean and neat. She made tea, and it warmed and firmed Holman’s stomach. She was sympathetic about his jaw and she wanted to know all about the trouble at Paoshan. She was very curious about Paoshan. Holman kept waiting for the children to come laughing and scrambling in.
“How’s Su-li?” he asked, finally.
“She’s well. She’s a little darling,” Maily said.
She said it strangely. Her eyes were shiny and sad. Holman was feeling stronger.
“Let’s go out and feed the fish,” he said.
The black ones came and ate rice cake from Maily’s fingers, and it was just like before under that friendly tree, except that nobody else was in the courtyard. They all had tigers back above their doors, Holman noted. Then a woman came out of one of the rooms across the court. She came and spoke to Holman in Chinese and her voice was shrill and angry. Holman did not know what to think.
“What’s wrong? What’s she saying?” he asked Maily.
“She’s Ling’s wife, you know, the water coolie,” Maily said. She was blushing. “She says you owe Ling money for water for the fishpond, ten dollars.”
“I already paid him for all summer,” Holman said.
“I know. He raised the price.” Maily was embarrassed. “The students have been telling them they should charge more for work, for everything, if it’s for rich people.”
“I’m rich, for God’s sake?”
“Well, all treaty people …”
Maily seemed scared. Mrs. Ling—Holman recognized her now—was still jabbering. For Maily’s sake, Holman gave the woman twenty dollars. She took it and shut up, but she did not bow or smile.
“Thank you, Jake,” Maily said softly.
The door scraped behind them and Ah Pao came out. He was chubby and pouting in red. Su-li came behind him. They did not run to Holman. They stopped short and stared at him with big eyes. He thought it was his bandage, and the medicine smell. He squatted down and held out his arms.
“Su-li,” he said. “How’s my girl?”
Su-li wavered and tears came in her eyes. She was biting her hand. She shrank behind Ah Pao.
“Su-li,” Holman said. “Ding ding.”
“Bu hao!” the little girl said.
She turned and ran back inside her open door. Ah Pao went to Mrs. Ling. He looked over his shoulder at Holman and jabbered to Mrs. Ling. The coolie woman began to laugh. Holman stood up and looked his question at Maily. She would not meet his eyes. Po-han’s wife came out, with a frightened smile and a bow at Holman, and snatched Ah Pao away. She scolded the little boy and dragged him wailing back into the room and shut the door. Holman took Maily’s arm.
“Maily! What’s it all about? What’s wrong with everybody?”
“Please come inside again, Jake,” she said.
They sat down at her table and she told him about it. The gearwheelers—she called them Kuomintang—were preaching hatred for the treaty people. They were supposed to be oppressing and exploiting the Chinese under the unequal treaties. The gearwheel was against all rich people, who were supposed to be automatically on the side of the ocean devils. You didn’t really have to be rich to be in trouble. Po-han was in trouble, because he was landlord of the courtyard and because he worked on a gunboat. That was why Mei-yu was so frightened. The gearwheelers had cut all rents in half, not that it helped the tenants any, because they had to give the other half for a tax. It all came out of Maily in a rush.
“What was Ah Pao saying?” Holman asked.
“He was asking Mrs. Ling when the green soldiers would come to put you in the fishpond.” Maily smiled sadly. “The street orators have been saying that the treaty people will all be pushed into the sea. Ah Pao has never even seen the river. It’s the only way he can understand it.”
“Jesus,” Holman said. “Even the little kids. Even babies!”
“It’s like a sudden poison.”
Maily began to cry silently. Holman reached across the table and patted her shoulder.
“Are you … are they giving you a bad time, too?”
“They overcharge me, on our street,” she said. “Mei-yu has been buying for both of us.”
“It’s more than that.” His voice roughened. “What the bastards been doing, Maily? Tell me!”
“Nothing, really. It’s just a coldness. I feel that I’m being … left out … shut out … pushed away, somehow.”
“I know. I been feeling that all day.”
“You’re an American. But if I’m pushed away, where is there for me? If I’m not Chinese, what am I?” Her voice was breaking.
“You’re Frenchy’s wife,” Holman said. “He’ll take care of you, Maily. I’ll help all I can. Don’t you worry now.”
“I can’t help it. I worry what will happen to Frenchy.” Her face was all broken up with her crying. “I’m just God’s curse to myself and everybody,” she said. “I wish I were dead!”
“Maily! Don’t say things like that!” Holman slid his chair around to where he could put an arm around her shoulders. There was nothing nasty about it. “You ain’t told me everything,” he said. “What you told me ain’t all that bad. Come on now, what’s the rest of it?”
Crying into his shoulder, she told him. She was going to have a baby. She had been very happy about it and suddenly it was … all wrong, a danger, not fair to Frenchy, he might hate her for it, she couldn’t say all the ways it was wrong.
“Everybody in the streets is so happy and hopeful and I’m … I’m …”
He smoothed her hair. “It’s all right,” he kept saying. “I’ll get back to the ship and tell Frenchy he�
��s just got to get special liberty and come over here. You just need Frenchy with you.”
She stopped crying and he prepared to go.
“I won’t tell Frenchy the news. He’ll want to hear it the first time right from you,” Holman said. “He’ll be proud, I know. He really loves you, Maily.”
That started her crying all over again.
25
Franks’ landing force section was standing by at the consulate. There had been no trouble right in Changsha, but everyone expected it. Gearwheel agitators were making speeches on street corners and they held rallies on the bund every day. They were forming everybody into unions and making fantastic promises of how good it would be when they won their rights and blaming all their troubles on the unequal treaties. It was bound to lead to riots.
The shackmasters, Burgoyne among them, were granted special liberty. They understood it would be canceled the first time any one of them got in trouble. Holman’s jaw healed rapidly and he was busy every day fastening the engine room floorplates around the bridge for makeshift armor. He had plank walkways down below in place of the floorplates, revealing everywhere the raw red lead of the bilges, and the engine room looked ripped open. Po-han worked at the job. The way things had changed ashore made him value his job aboard a great deal more than being a landlord. But he was also worried about the ship.
“Evahbody speak, all gunship go, nevah come back this side,” he told Holman.
“No, no, Po-han,” Holman assured him. “Right now we makee plenty more gunship in Shanghai. Pretty soon we have two, three American gunship this side.”
Holman had never seen the Sand Pebbles so uneasy. They watched the troops passing downriver and repeated all the scuttlebutt. The commercial steamers were being fired upon. They came into Changsha with armor around their pilot houses and sand bags piled along their cabin decks and almost all the paleface women and children were leaving for Hankow. The consul sent out word to evacuate Western Hunan and all the Americans left the Chien Valley except the people at China Light. The China Light people did not send in their waivers. The Sand Pebbles cursed about that and seemed to take it as a bad sign. They were very touchy. Word came of a big gearwheel victory near Yochow. General Wu’s men were said to have been undermined by propaganda and their officers bought with silver bullets. The Sand Pebbles repeated that. They did not want to believe that any Chinese could really fight. Word came that the gearwheels had mined the river in the Chenglin narrows and all commercial steamers stopped running into Hunan. Gearwheel troops monopolized the railroad. Changsha was more cut off than in the wintertime. The days were hot, sultry and electric, and no one knew what to expect.
One day they were eating their noon meal when they heard a far, strange noise. Wong dropped a tureen clattering on deck and burst into the compartment, very frightened. “Topside sampan! Topside sampan!” was all he could say. They all went out on deck curious to see a wonder and it was only three airplanes flying low over Changsha. They had the gearwheel on their wings and tails.
“First time I ever seen one of them infernal machines,” Restorff grunted.
“It’s Russians flying ’em,” Crosley said, with assurance.
Bolshevik Russians were known to be with the gearwheel troops. The planes made much face for the gearwheel in Changsha. They added to the unease on the San Pablo. England and Japan and America had thousands of airplanes, but they did not have any in Hunan Province.
The students paraded along the bund nearly every day, very bold and noisy, with a forest of placards denouncing the treaties and the treaty people. According to scuttlebutt, many were the sons and daughters of big landlords and merchants who were in gearwheel prisons or who had even been shot. It was a thing unheard-of in China, where they worshiped ancestors. It was the student parades, more than anything else, that rasped the nerves of the Sand Pebbles. But they always watched them, in the way a man’s tongue will seek an aching tooth.
“What the hell are the unequal treaties, anyway?” Wilsey said once.
“They give us our treaty rights,” Ellis said. “We got to stand up for our rights.”
“What the hell are our rights?”
“I don’t know. I guess the officers know,” Ellis said. “Ask Bordelles, if you really want to know.”
Crosley aimed an imaginary gun at the line of students. “Boy oh boy, just like ducks in a row!” he said. He closed one eye and clicked his tongue rapidly. “Ducks in a rain barrel,” he said. “Bet you they’d knock off that sign crap, quick enough.”
“You can’t shoot students,” Ellis said.
“Old Chao stripped the girls and led ’em around in front of the soldiers,” Crosley said. “I bet them soldiers liked that.”
“I’d like it,” Ellis said. “I bet some of them young ones are real tender gear.”
“Hot damn!” Crosley snorted and pawed with his foot.
“You guys been aboard too long,” Wilsey said. “Too bad you ain’t shackmasters.”
The shackmasters were not having it easy. All of them except Burgoyne were arranging to send their women to stay with relatives in the country, until the storm blew over. Maily had no relatives. The others urged Burgoyne to unshack, but he would not consider it. He was looking worried and not saying much. He had not told Holman about Maily being pregnant, and Holman did not mention it.
“I guess they say things in Chinese that hurt her feelings,” Burgoyne said. “I can tell that much from faces. But nobody offers to hit her, or anything. But they overcharge her and Mei-yu both, now. They got to go clear over by South Gate to buy at a decent price.”
“How about you?” Holman asked. “They give you a hard time?”
“Well, not right out in a way you could understand it that way.” Burgoyne’s face twisted and he tugged his mustache. “Maybe they cuss me, but they don’t throw rocks, I mean. It’s just a feeling so strong you could nearabout cut it with a knife.”
“Well, piss on ’em!”
Burgoyne shook his head. “Po-han feels it, too. We don’t never sit out by the fishpond any more. Him and me sneak home like it was a crime for us to have a home.”
“How’s Maily taking it?”
“She makes out to be cheerful.” Burgoyne dug out his snuff. “But she cries in bed, when she thinks I’m asleep. And she’s back on that crazy stuff, that God hates her.”
“You got to get her to Hankow, Frenchy.”
“I know that. I know that, now.”
They talked about it. The only way was to go by junk. The word was that all junks were being commandeered by one side or the other, in the fighting above Hankow. It was not safe, but neither was Changsha safe. Po-han had offered several times to arrange a junk passage to Hankow for Maily.
“Makes me wonder, is it his way of hinting that Maily is bringing extra trouble on him?” Burgoyne said. “And she is, all right.”
“I don’t get it. Why in hell should she?”
“Account of me. And she’s American too, and they know that, too.” He pinched out some snuff. “I don’t know what her raisings were, for she won’t talk about that, but she’s more American than you or me.”
Holman felt an obscure warning signal. “No, Frenchy, she’s Chinese,” he said.
“Only on paper.”
“Paper’s what counts. It’s down on paper that no Chinese can ever be an American.”
“How about Chinatown, in Frisco?”
“They ain’t Americans. We had Chinese in my home town, but even when I was a little kid I knew they wasn’t Americans,” Holman said. “Not any more than the Piutes up on the Duck Valley Reservation.”
“Maily’s always been American to me.”
“You come from the wrong part of the country.”
“Well, I got to get her out of this part of this country,” Burgoyne said. “By the Lord God, I hope General Wu up there kills half of them gearwheelers and runs the other half clean out of China! Things was real good here, till the gearwheel came.”<
br />
Bordelles took his section to the consulate to relieve Franks’ group. It was easy duty. They slept on cots on a screened side veranda and stood two-hour sentry watches at the front gate. There were a deck of cards and a few old Country Gentleman magazines for the men off duty. The head was poor: a room off the kitchen with several big slop jars and a circular pottery tub four feet across and a foot deep. Coolies had to bring water in buckets. The consulate food was not half as good as Big Chew’s meals. It was easy duty, but they were standing by for trouble, and a small noise at night would bring them all awake.
Trouble was in the air. The consul was deep in walla walla with the gearwheel people over mission property upcountry. It was almost a relief when the alarm came one sunny afternoon that gearwheel troops were trying to move into a mission school right in Changsha, the same school Bordelles had cleared of Chao’s soldiers in April. They marched to the scene with the feel of springs unwinding.
Holman and Farren headed the double file behind Bordelles and they swung along in step, arms at right shoulder, washing the people aside like the bow wave of a destroyer. The school courtyard was full of green soldiers and carrier coolies with baggage. Two missionaries were talking to a little knot of gearwheelers. Bordelles barked, “Detail … halt!” and their feet went one … two! “Order … arms!” and they brought them down with a slap and a jingle. Bordelles stepped forward.
“Hello, Mr. James, Mr. Ingram,” he said cheerfully. “Little trouble, eh?”
“A small misunderstanding, I’m afraid,” the older man said. “Ensign Bordelles, may I present Major Liu of the National Chinese Army?”
Bordelles in his white and gold bulked much larger than the slender Chinese officer in neat green. No one moved for a second. Then, to avoid saluting first, Bordelles held out his hand. Treaty people did not salute warlord officers. Bordelles went up on his toes, leaning a bit, in an effort to crush Liu’s hand. Liu’s face did not show anything.
“What is your mission here, Mr. Bordelles?” he asked.
“My mission is to ask you that, Mr. Liu,” Bordelles said. “This compound is American property. You can’t just lafoo it.”
The Sand Pebbles Page 35