35
Old Ting filled Shirley’s can with steaming water and bowed when she gave him a copper. Ting was a wispy, cheerful old man with a few scraggly hairs on his chin. His caldron sat on a clay foundation beside the well. Under it he burnt dried grass and weed stems which he and his wife gleaned from the fields. Against the high red brick wall behind him he had a leanto piled with reserve fuel. Selling hot water to the native staff of China Light had been his living for many years.
Shirley smiled and spoke briefly with Mrs. Chao and Third Wang daughter. The well was a favorite gossip spot. Then she went along to take her bath before her water cooled.
They were all native staff now, with native salaries. She and Gillespie and the Craddocks had clubbed together to rent one of the larger native houses and employ one servant, who did not fetch bath water. But the house was beside the well—it backed flush against the mission wall and old Ting’s leanto was in the angle it made—so fetching water was no great task. She did not even have to walk around to the front with her hot water. Under Ting’s leanto the house had a small back door through which field coolies carried out slop jars. They collected them every morning from all the houses. Mrs. Chao thought that back door was one of the distinct advantages of Shirley’s house.
It was a good house with walls of whitewashed clay and roof of gray tile. The rooms were on three sides of a courtyard into which all doors and windows opened. There were two trees and some shrubs in the courtyard. Over the front wall she had a view of the long blue bulk of Precious Mountain.
Taking her bath, Shirley thought how good it was to be able to talk with Mrs. Chao and laugh at her argument with old Ting. The big foreign houses were no longer dwellings. One was union headquarters and another the militia armory. The Mills and Armstrong houses had been made annexes of the hospital. But the biggest change at China Light, she thought, was in the feeling between people.
All the old customs governing relations between American and native staff were swept away. The students’ infectious enthusiasm spilled over into everyone to mask any scars left behind. There was a different quality to the friendliness.
“It’s because they want us here,” Gillespie had said, discussing it. “Before, they could not be sure of that themselves, because they were granted no right to reject us. The shadow of the gunboat was always between us. And now it’s gone.”
“We’ve made a discovery. We’ve proven something,” Shirley said. “I wish we could tell them at the Alliance Hostel.”
Gillespie’s face shadowed. “I wish we could tell them in America.”
Mrs. Craddock managed the combined household. Shirley and Gillespie called her Tai-tai and for the first time were coming to know and love her. She had real skill in Chinese housekeeping, learned in her youth, and being needed brought her out of herself. Despite the drag of an old illness, she was cheerful and busy all day and she looked years younger.
Mr. Craddock looked years older. He seemed to be graying and stooping more each week. He was becoming oddly gentle. They all worried about Mr. Craddock.
His permission to return was provisional and temporary. He could do pastoral work among converted Christians, but he could not seek new converts. Cho-jen had been very candid about it: what they wanted from Mr. Craddock was his signature to legitimize transfer of land titles and all the other things which had already been done by revolutionary fiat. Mr. Craddock meant to sign; he had returned knowing that he would; but he was trying to negotiate conditions safeguarding the goals of China Light. He was not winning many points.
At the head of the supper table Mr. Craddock asked grace, briefly and with dignity. They all wore Chinese clothing in the evenings. Mr. Craddock looked worn from his day. Gillespie glanced at Shirley across the table. They were to talk about something cheerful.
“I never knew about skin on water before today,” she said. She told about Mrs. Chao’s quarrel with Ting because the hot water had skin on it. “I was afraid my Chinese was failing me again,” she said.
“Oh no,” Mrs. Craddock said. “Water has skin.”
“It’s surface tension. You can see it if you look,” Gillespie said. “Mrs. Chao meant the water wasn’t hot enough. She wanted it boiling.”
They laughed about Mrs. Chao’s language.
“I must tell you two young people about old Ting,” Craddock said. “I had a bowl of tea with him when we first came back. He has been on my mind ever since.”
Twenty years earlier Ting had been a used-up carrier coolie left behind to die by passing soldiers. Some farmers had brought him to China Light, where he had slowly regained his health. He had been very handy and helpful around the clinic.
“I discovered a peculiar simplicity and sweetness of temper in him,” Craddock said. “I wanted very much to win him for Christ.”
He could not. When Ting was discharged from his hospital, he picked up a scanty living by carrying well water among the houses and selling it where he could, for a few cash. He became the mission’s first water coolie.
“Of course after a few weeks it became old custom. It was his rice bowl,” Craddock went on. “I had no thought of breaking it. I still hoped to win him.”
Ting had started his hot-water business with a five-gallon kerosene tin and two stones. Later he borrowed money to set up his caldron and build his leanto. Not long after, the crisis had arisen.
“Ting was prospering, by his standards. He had been boarding with a Christian family, but now he wanted a wife and a home of his own,” Craddock said. “That was a famine summer. We had a refugee feeding station set up outside West Gate. Ting went there and found a woman, one of the homeless, hopeless drifters who pass through at such times. She agreed to be his wife.”
The crisis was Ting’s request for permission to enlarge his fuel leanto into a small house. It was mission policy that only Christians might have households within the walls. Ting had a Chinese understanding of the danger of setting precedents, but he could not understand why he could not himself become a Christian.
Shirley let her food grow cold, listening. Mr. Craddock was talking of something that was, to her, the very mystery of China.
“He offered to attend church services and to do and say all that I might require of him,” Craddock went on. “I had to tell him that would not suffice. Many Chinese have little sense of guilt and sin. But Ting is the only man I ever knew who has absolutely none. He and I searched his heart to the depths, and I had to believe it.”
Gillespie had stopped eating. “I’m sure you realize what you are saying, Mr. Craddock,” he observed.
“Of course I do.” Craddock stroked his beard. “I spent hours in solitary prayer. And here is what I did. I performed a marriage ceremony for them, but I told Ting he would have to build his house outside the walls.”
Mrs. Craddock laughed. Shirley looked at her, shocked, and then back to Craddock. Craddock was smiling.
“Tai-tai knows the story,” he said. It was the first time they had ever heard him call her that.
Instead of adding his house to the cluster outside West Gate, Ting had built a hut of clay and cornstalks against the outside of the wall precisely opposite his leanto on the inside. And one day when the Craddocks had walked all the way around there to bring red eggs and congratulations on the birth of a son, they discovered that Ting had knocked a hole in the wall between his house and his leanto. That bit of the wall had become part of his premises and, by old custom, his to do with as he pleased. Very stiffly, the Craddocks had walked the long way round to go home again.
“I made him brick it up. I had a stern and narrow sense of duty in those days,” Craddock said. “Ting was wiser than I. He did not confuse my sense of duty with the man who was his friend. For years he walked the long way round between his home and his place of business and I’m sure now he never felt the slightest stir of resentment.”
“I’ve come to like him very much,” Shirley said.
“When we came back, he asked me to
have tea with him,” Craddock went on. “He ushered me into his leanto and through that door in the mission wall, opened up again, and gave me the seat of honor in his parlor. After a few minutes, I was certain he was not gloating over me. He was honestly happy, for my sake, that my authority and responsibility were gone. It left me free on my side to be as completely his friend as he had always been mine. And you know, it’s true!”
“That’s pretty marvelous,” Gillespie said. “You say he has a son?”
“One of your students. The boy’s name is Tao-min.”
“Tao-min!” Shirley was surprised. “I thought he came from … oh, away, somewhere.”
“Many young people these days are ashamed of their fathers,” Craddock said. “But if you can honestly praise Tao-min to Ting, nothing will please the old man more.”
“I can,” Shirley said. “And tomorrow I will. You have made me love old Ting, Mr. Craddock.”
Shirley stood facing the front of the classroom. She, and all of the students standing behind her, bowed gravely three times to the portrait of Sun Yat-sen on the front wall. It was flanked by the new Kuomintang party and national flags. Then they took their seats. The students had half an hour for review, before they would begin to read aloud.
Heads bent, lips moving silently, they squinted at their wretchedly printed texts. They were younger boys, a whole roomful of them, and they took their learning as a serious revolutionary responsibility. Tao-min, her helper for that day, was studying the assignment as hard as the younger boys.
The U.S. and old Chinese flags, and the portraits of Lincoln and Washington, were gone from the front wall. On Mondays everyone had to gather in the chapel for ritual reverence to the new flags and portrait and to hear the reading of Sun Yat-sen’s testament. One of the students—always Cho-jen, if he was at China Light that day—would deliver a patriotic harangue. The resemblance to compulsory attendance of Christian services in the old days was deliberate. Wherever the Kuomintang ruled in China, it was instituting a compulsory cult of patriotism, in Christian chapels and Buddhist temples alike.
“We are doing knowingly what you do without knowing,” Cho-jen had told Gillespie. “We are using the James-Lange effect in reverse.”
“I only know vaguely what he means by that,” Gillespie told Shirley. “How does he come up with those flashes of esoteric knowledge?”
“It’s his genius.”
Gillespie was teaching mathematics and history and enjoying it. The older boys were away from school on political activity, more often than not. Mr. Lin, the new principal, deplored it. Gillespie, at one faculty meeting, had defended it.
“They are in a different sort of school now,” he said. “They are learning how to build and govern a nation.”
Only in China, with its traditional reverence for learning, she thought, could mere boys take such a part, simply because they were students. Her Chinese was still not good enough to supplement the scanty English of the younger boys she was now teaching. Cho-jen had solved that by assigning her a senior student to help with language crises. It worked well. Quite often, as today, her helper was Tao-min. She suspected that Tao-min did not much relish militia drill and political education work among the peasants.
The student union had torn out of the English textbooks all of the specifically American-patriotic material. For substitute material they had brought in pamphlets of Sun Yat-sen’s writings, done very poorly into English. She was teaching the boys quite a bit of grammar and spelling by making a game of finding errors in the pamphlets.
That was what Tao-min was doing, his pencil poised, pudgy face earnest, eyes squinting through his spectacles. As a senior student, he was honor-bound to find more errors than any of the younger boys. Whether he did or not, Shirley knew, she was going to make it seem so.
At the end of the period she dismissed the class and went to the faculty office. Cho-jen was just concluding an argument with Gillespie. No one else was there.
“Good morning, Miss Eckert,” Cho-jen said. “Mr. Gillespie has just been telling me that all power corrupts. I think it is lack of power that corrupts. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think power will corrupt you, Cho-jen.”
“Present company is always excepted,” Gillespie said, smiling.
He was relaxed at his desk. Cho-jen moved restlessly about the room, talking in half sentences and skipping from subject to subject. He had an almost hurtful vibrancy of manner. All by himself, he made the room seem crowded. He looked out the window at a platoon of militia drilling in the street. “I am getting them ten more rifles,” he said. “From Pan’s old stock.” General Pan and his army had been made into a Kuomintang regiment and marched away. The newly-raised militia was the only armed force in the valley. “I may have to go to Changsha soon,” Cho-jen said. “I have a thousand things to do here, before I can go.” He thought he might head the Paoshan delegation to the provincial worker-peasant congress in Changsha. After a few minutes he excused himself to go and open a student union committee meeting. The room seemed suddenly empty.
Shirley sat down at her desk, in mock collapse. “How can you be so relaxed with him, Walter?” she asked. “He sets me jumping, too. I can’t help it.”
“I know it’s a cliché, but if ever a boy burnt with a gemlike flame, it’s Cho-jen these days,” Gillespie said.
He unlocked a desk drawer and took out the journal he was keeping of his talks with Cho-jen. He was if possible even more captivated by Cho-jen than was Shirley herself. No one had ever before systematically recorded the life of a teen-age Napoleon, he said quite seriously. They were both certain that Cho-jen was going to become one of the great men of Chinese history.
“He’s scarcely eighteen. He knows he’s too young,” Gillespie said. “He also knows the hour has struck for him and time will not wait.”
Gillespie enjoyed keeping Shirley informed of Cho-jen’s progress. The power in the valley lay in the worker and peasant unions and their militia. Cho-jen enjoyed the fanatical loyalty of all the senior students. He made them his lieutenants with clerical posts in all the worker-peasant groups, which he visited himself as often as he could. His gift for evoking blind personal loyalty was rapidly binding them all to him.
Legitimacy lay in the Kuomintang power structure, centered in Hankow. Cho-jen held several Kuomintang offices. To please Hankow and Changsha, he had to keep the peasants from going too far and too fast with land seizures. He avoided making enemies as much as he could. Such enemies as he could not help making, he outschemed ruthlessly. He had an instinct for power tactics.
“And as if all that were not enough,” Gillespie said, “there’s still his father.”
It was no longer a secret that Cho-jen’s father was the bandit chief on the mountain. He had fiercely refused submission when Kuomintang troops came through to sweep up General Pan. Cho-jen had saved his father then by working out a face-saving arrangement in which his father’s armed band became the cadre for the local militia. He still had to make that so in fact.
“He’s told me a good bit about his father recently,” Gillespie said. “It’s fascinating, Shirley!”
All the arts of Chinese soothsaying had predicted greatness for Cho-jen, even before his birth, Gillespie told her. Cho-jen’s father had interpreted it as the mandate of heaven for his son to found a new imperial dynasty. He had set out to become a warlord, to serve that single purpose. He had been all ready to defeat Pan and take Paoshan when the Kuomintang forestalled him. He was furious. Cho-jen could not make his father believe that greatness in China was no longer an imperial throne.
“But whatever it’s to be, Cho-jen is on his way,” Gillespie concluded. “A year from now he’ll be a power in Changsha. Before he’s twenty-one he’ll have the province behind him and be a man to reckon with in Hankow.”
“I hope he does. I’m sure he will,” Shirley said. “You sound almost as convinced as Cho-jen’s father.”
“I’ll tell you.
” Gillespie cocked his head. “If someone told me Cho-jen had strangled serpents in his cradle, I think I would believe it.”
Only the ghost of a smile belied his utter seriousness.
So the days went. Shirley found them pleasant and stimulating. But often at night she could not sleep for the sound of Mr. Craddock’s slow pacing in the courtyard. He had signed all the papers. He held only a native pastorate and one vote on the mission board of control. He was deeply troubled by some of the trends at China Light. But in Hankow he had made his decision to trust in God and the fundamental decency of the Chinese and he would not waver.
Then the new trouble struck. That night when she heard him pacing she could not bear it. She rose and slipped on padded Chinese clothing and joined him in the courtyard.
“Have I been keeping you awake, Shirley?” he asked.
“No. I’m just restless. I want to walk and tire myself.”
It would not do to speak of the trouble. Nor of anything. She just wanted to be near him and he would feel her pity and love. But he wanted to talk.
“Are you still happy with our decision?” he asked. “Have you really found it here as you expected?”
“Wonderfully happy. But not quite as I expected.”
“It is different and better than I had expected,” he said. “I learn. Now in my age, I learn. We don’t have to do bold and startling things for them to win their love.” He walked a few steps in silence. “I have stopped fretting about the electric light plant,” he said. “I am glad now that navy engineer did not come with us. I fear I wanted him only as a bribe to the people here.”
“It was for his own sake, too,” she said, too quickly. “He was desperately unhappy on his ship. He deserved a better life.”
“But he might not have been happy here. For him, the decision would have been irreversible.”
He would have been happy, she thought. But in a shamed corner of her heart, when she looked there honestly, she knew that it was of herself she had been thinking, those last days in Hankow. It was the sense of moving into unknown dangers and her wish for a strong man at her side. But there was no danger and her life was filled pleasantly with her work and she had not thought of Jake Holman for a week or longer.
The Sand Pebbles Page 49