“I left all that,” he said. “I’m going to serve out my time and retire in China. Lots of China sailors do that.”
She glanced at the sky. He followed her eyes. It was a very pretty red and orange sunset. They had talked for hours.
“Oh my! I have to go!” she said. “I have an important letter to write.”
“I’m lost,” he confessed. “Can I walk with you, far as the British Concession?” He took a last look at the rock.
“Of course,” she said.
It was a pleasant walk. When they came to Taiping Road he saw an American patrol coming and he stopped.
“Can’t let that patrol see me,” he explained. “The native city’s out of bounds to us. Supposed to be dangerous.”
He stood against a shop window. She stood in front of him. Some coolies loitering there were curious. She explained in Chinese why Holman was hiding. They laughed and stood closer, to help make a screen. The patrol thudded by, arms swinging, bayonets bright above them.
Once across Taiping Road, Holman told her goodnight. It would not do to walk together in the concession. When people saw a girl on the street with a sailor, they figured she also went to bed with him. Everybody knew that was the only use sailors had for girls.
Lynch was looking well. His face firmed up and he walked jauntily. He smoked cigars and he had good French brandy to put in his morning coffee. He seldom went into the engine room, but he would call Holman up for coffee royal and get the dope. He was not concerned about how sullen the coolies were getting. He would lean back with a shine in his eyes and the new, firm look about his mouth and wave all that grandly away.
“Baby ’em along, Jake. They’ll get over it.”
Through some roundabout Irish superstition he had once blamed Holman for getting him married. Now he seemed grateful.
“Liuba’s the best thing ever happened to me,” he would say, puffing blue smoke. “You ought to get yourself a good woman. I mean it, Jake!”
Downriver the rice eaters were still defeating the noodle eaters. Liuba had a plan. They would sell out in Hankow for a big killing and buy property in Shanghai. When the gearwheel moved in around Shanghai, they would make a really big killing.
“All the money in China will be in Shanghai then,” Lynch said.
Over in Wuchang they were still holding out. All the buildings outside the walls were burnt and most of them inside, most likely, from the angry red glare of fire that rose every night under the intermittent shelling. Several gearwheel airplanes showed up and dropped bombs on the city. That seemed to the Sand Pebbles to be just too much. But every morning on Dragon Hill the five-barred flag was still there.
Burgoyne did not look well. He lost weight. He turned morose and cursed the gearwheel bitterly. He made all the other Sand Pebbles uncomfortable. He would not look for sympathy, but neither would he give up hope. His hope was hideous, like a mangled snake that would not die.
The little public garden became Shirley’s refuge from the emotional jangling of the hostel. She went there every afternoon. When he had shore leave, Holman came there. It was not by verbal prearrangement. They were always pleasantly surprised at meeting.
She became very much interested in Holman. The garden freed him from constraint. No-man’s land, he sometimes called it. He was plainly happy there. He was as glad to get away from his ship as she from her hostel. She felt free also. Her shabby sweater did not matter. But when they walked back to the concessions, the constraint came between them once more.
One evening she told Gillespie about Holman. They were having hot chocolate and pastries in a small bakery-tearoom crowded with White Russians.
“It’s my teacher’s instinct, I believe,” she said. “There is a good man hidden in him, even from himself.”
“If I’m going to teach at China Light, I suppose I should cultivate my own instinct,” Gillespie said. “Is that how it works? Seeing the form in the block of stone?” He smiled. “It sounds ambitious.”
“Oh, not like that!”
Good teachers were like gardeners in a human garden, she explained. They helped human personalities find their most happy and attractive growth. Where they saw need, they had to help. As a gardener would stop for a moment to prune and straighten a wayside shrub. Gillespie looked doubtful.
“I’m afraid I’ve always dismissed gunboat sailors as a group,” he said. “They’ve made their life choice.”
She nibbled a pastry as he talked. He suggested gently that she felt guilt, because if they had not remained behind at China Light then Holman would not have had to shoot the coolie who was his friend. She nodded. She did feel guilt.
“So do I feel guilt,” Gillespie said. “But I wonder if it is helping the man to open new windows for him? He’s chosen his life.”
“He hasn’t!”
“What makes you so sure?”
She could not say, instantly. It was a cumulative impression. It was in his attitude toward the Chinese, his seeing no essential difference between himself and them. It was in his dislike of military pomp and ritual. It’s stupid. It’s like you choose up sides and kill each other, he had said once.
“He seems to have no limiting sense of himself,” was the best way she could sum it up.
It intrigued Gillespie. He asked questions.
“He’s had some high school, I think,” she said. “He’s very intelligent, but the only outlet he has found for it is machinery. He has made a kind of poetry of machinery.”
She could tell Gillespie nothing of Holman’s background, except that there was something painful in it which made him reticent. She realized that she knew less of Holman than she had thought. Gillespie sipped chocolate and kept his eyes inscrutably on hers. Unlike the others at China Light, he had always treated her as adult and responsible. She hoped he was not going to become fatherly now.
“What will become of him? What’s his aim in life?”
“He doesn’t seem to have any,” she said. “He means to retire and live out his life in China. He told me he would not be a bartender. Beyond that, he has no idea.”
“Most of them do become bartenders.”
She drank off her chocolate, as Gillespie talked. A black sludge was left in the bottom. She ate bits of it with her spoon. It was faintly bitter. Retired enlisted men in China also became bouncers in cabarets and armed guards at gambling places, Gillespie said. Some became bodyguards to rich Chinese. A lucky few got on as police or as outside men in the customs service. But for the most part they became subsidized beachcombers.
“I wonder if the brutalizing effect of the life they lead may not be a kind of merciful natural anesthesia,” Gillespie finished.
“They can change their lives.”
“Not easily.” He waved his hand at the White Russians seated at small tables all around them. “These are people with changed lives,” he said.
The Russians were all drinking strong brown tea from glass tumblers. They looked beaten and sad. Two ragged, bearded old men were playing chess. They might have been noblemen once.
“I don’t think it’s the same thing,” she said. “I intend to go on seeing Mr. Holman.”
“I was not suggesting that you stop. Just be thoughtful.”
“Let’s pay and go back to the hostel,” she said. “This place is depressing.”
They walked back in silence. She thought about Holman. He would often forget himself in talking to her and the hard, square lines of his face would soften. He had eager smiles and wistful smiles and a whole gamut of natural expressions which he probably never used, except with her.
It was like bringing a statue to life. She could feel him reaching out to her for form and direction. It was her teacher’s instinct. You could trust an instinct.
Holman knew it was against all the rules. It could not last. He did not think about that in the garden. He just added each time with her to all the others in the place in his memory.
It rained one afternoon and they went to the teah
ouse in one corner of the garden. It was a noisy, sloppy, happy place, for all its red lacquer rails and pillars and screens of glazed paper set in geometric designs. She spoke in Chinese to the waiters and he felt welcome there. They had a kind of booth that looked out on the garden in the rain.
“I didn’t see any other girls in there,” he said. “You sure it’s all right?”
“It’s all right. It goes with my sweater.”
She still had the hole in her elbow. Someone had given her the sweater. Most of her clothes were still at China Light. They drank tea and ate sweetish rice cakes. The breeze brought a cool, damp, green smell to their table.
“I’ve heard the other sailors call you Jake,” she said. “Is your first name Jacob?”
He grinned. “That’s a nickname. For my initials. My real name’s Joris Kylie.”
“Joris? Is it for some relative?”
“No. Nobody ever had a name like that. It sounds like a girl’s name.”
“Not to me.” She closed her eyes. “Joris. Joris. It makes me see a laughing man on horseback, with a sword and soft leather boots and a gay white plume in his hat.”
“Jorse, Jorse, ride a horse.” He laughed. “That’s what the kids used to yell at me in grade school.”
“You see? It’s in the name.”
“They were making fun of me. I never have liked that name.”
“I’ve never heard of another girl named Shirley. My mother found it in a Brontë novel,” she said. “I used to think it was a tag-along imitation of my big brother Charley. The boys used to tease me and call me Chirley, because I tagged after them.”
“Shirley.” He closed his eyes, just as she had. “Shirley. Shirley.” He felt his cheeks warming with the pleasure of saying it. All it made him see was her sitting beside him, her eyes soft and smiling, just as if he were still looking at her. “Shirley. Shirley,” he repeated, and opened his eyes. “All it makes me see is you.”
“Because it’s my name.”
“I’d like to call you Shirley. And you call me Jake.”
They called each other Jake and Shirley the rest of that afternoon. Holman felt a tingle to it each time, like fingers touching flesh. They did not talk about serious things. But when they walked back into the British Concession at dusk, the enchantment vanished.
“Goodnight, Miss Eckert,” he said.
She marveled at the speed of his transformation. He did not yet know himself how he had changed. But she knew. His shyness was gone. They could talk candidly, without fear of offense. When he spoke of his shipmates, what had once been irritation was now more like compassion.
“This never-fight-back stuff. It’s breaking their hearts,” he said. “You know, I never saw it that way before.”
It was not breaking his heart. But he was going to be less happy than ever aboard his ship now, she knew. He still lacked much. He had no sense of religion and no developed interest beyond machinery. She could see the rising question and search behind his puzzled eyes.
They went every afternoon to the teahouse and had a modest meal with their tea. Their private booth above the garden took on a shared intimacy. She told him all about China Light and her duplicity with Cho-jen. She spoke of the emerging Chinese nation and the part Cho-jen would play and her own part in helping Cho-jen and the other boys. She was trying to reveal to him the central theme of her life, to form that concept in him, so that he might find his own central theme.
“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “You need a reason for being alive. Machinery ain’t—isn’t enough.”
It was raining that day and they had unconsciously moved closer for warmth. She saw the question in his eyes that he could neither formulate nor she answer. She yearned to answer it for him. Somehow, their shoulders touched. His arm went round her waist. She began to melt into him. Then she stiffened.
Instantly they were several feet apart and staring strickenly at each other. He was pale.
“I didn’t—it happened—I didn’t mean—”
He was pathetically anxious that she not think he had been trying to treat her as a sailor’s girl. She had to reassure him.
“I know. It surprised us both.”
Her heart was thumping. She saw the same fearful understanding in his face.
“We mustn’t let it go on.”
“No.” He was red now.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other again.”
“I’ll stay away.” He stood up. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to spoil this garden for you.”
“It’s my fault.” She gulped and breathed in deeply, to hold back tears. “I thought I was being a teacher,” she said. “But I was only being a woman.”
“I guess people can’t really unmix themselves,” he said.
Then he was gone, quickly and quietly. She felt she had wronged him. My dedication is to Cho-jen, she reminded herself. Cho-jen, who is to be one of the great trees of China. She caught one glimpse of Holman crossing the garden in the rain. She began quietly to cry.
It was just as well, Holman thought next day. Liberty was stopped for all hands. Wuchang had fallen. The gearwheel flag flew on Dragon Hill. It was the old Chinese story of sellout. Some of the defending troops had mutinied and opened the gates. The Sand Pebbles were very gloomy that day.
Over in the native city they were going crazy with joy. People thronged and danced along the bund. Flags and paper lanterns bobbed above them, and poles with strings of popping firecrackers. Boats of all sizes plied back and forth from Wuchang. As the day passed, the mood ashore turned ugly. Thousands of people had starved to death in Wuchang. Agitators were said to be parading bony corpses, with teeth marks on them, through the native city, to inflame the people.
The forces ashore manned the perimeter defenses. The Americans stood by under arms aboard their ships, ready to land instantly. There was bitter talk on the San Pablo quarterdeck. To the Sand Pebbles, how they could blame the starvation in Wuchang on the palefaces was beyond all sane conjecture.
That was how things stood about suppertime, when a runner came off to the ship with a note for Frenchy Burgoyne. Maily was waiting for him at the Green Front.
29
“There is no legitimate reason for which I can grant you special liberty, Burgoyne,” Lt. Collins said.
The man, standing beside Bordelles and twisting his white hat, looked dumbly, whitely desperate. He was getting ready to plead. That would be sticky.
“However …” Lt. Collins wrote a few lines asking about an ammunition order, folded the paper and sealed it in an envelope. He wrote: “Guard Mail: Navy Godown” on the envelope and handed it to Burgoyne. “Put on a guard belt and take this to Navy Godown,” he said. “How long it takes you and the route you go are your own responsibility. You must take all the consequences if a patrol catches you misusing it.”
“I do thank you, sir!”
Burgoyne went out, trembling with relief. The two officers looked at each other.
“A mistake, Tom.”
“I’m glad you did it, sir.”
“But a mistake. A small evasion of duty.” Lt. Collins swung his chair around. “Sit down. This is an ugly thing already. Tell me all you know about it.”
All hands had been assuming the woman was lost on the way from Changsha, Bordelles said. They thought Burgoyne should have unshacked in Changsha, as the other men had. Anti-foreign feeling was building to a crisis in Hankow; Burgoyne was in for more trouble with her. But the crew thought Burgoyne was soft in the head. It was not a general morale threat; it was Burgoyne’s private trouble.
“The trouble simply is, he seems to love her,” Bordelles said.
Lt. Collins frowned. Love was not as common a hazard in China as syphilis, but it could destroy a good man much more surely. With sixteen years of four-oh service, Burgoyne should have been immune.
“He’ll be tempted to jump ship. He needs protection.” Lt. Collins drummed with his fingers. “I could have him transferred to Shanghai with the
next convoy.”
“You saw how he was, sir. It would break his heart.”
“He’d get over it. But I don’t want to lose an experienced engineer, the way things are shaping with our Chinese. That’s why I’ve kept Holman.”
“He might send the woman to Shanghai,” Bordelles suggested
“Hmmm.”
No junks could get through the war zone. Chinese passage on treaty steamers was impossibly expensive, because of the squeeze the native staffs were taking from rich refugees. But he had heard that a few Chinese passages were kept available at regular prices for servants of saloon passengers. He suggested to Bordelles that someone might take the woman down that way.
“Let’s both ask around about it ashore,” he told Bordelles. “It’s a bother. But it might help save a good man.”
Things became worse ashore. Up north Feng, the Christian warlord, came out for the gearwheel. He stabbed Wu in the back. Wu was out of the game. It made the Chinese very cocky in Hankow. They began tearing down the ancient wall around Wuchang. The cruisers had to drop downriver. The U.S.S. Duarte, a large gunboat, went to take winter duty at Changsha. The San Pablo would winter in Hankow. Liberty started again, but only for chiefs and officers. Petty officers could go to the Royal Naval Canteen.
Burgoyne found a way to jump ship from the canteen and get to the native city without being caught by patrols. He would come aboard in early-morning darkness. The quarterdeck watch had to cover up for him, checking him in on the log and the nameboard. If he were caught, it would go to Comyang, and a lot of men would be in trouble. The Sand Pebbles grew resentful of the accumulating risk. They could not reason with Burgoyne. He rebuffed fiercely every suggestion that he unshack. He was getting a dark, wild look.
“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. I ain’t asking you to cover up for me,” he said. “Log me absent. But I got to keep going over, long as I ain’t stopped cold.”
He wanted no sympathy from them. He would talk about Maily only to Holman. She had been held under arrest by gearwheel agents in Ta-li, he said. They had not hurt her, only asked questions every day.
The Sand Pebbles Page 42