Chapter 4
Harris had a car waiting for him, and he and Juan drove northwards and crossed the Soochow Creek. Juan asked when he would write his description of the fighting, if there was any.
‘I’ve got most of it written already. It’s a damned shame, isn’t it?’
‘You mean the war?’
‘The bloody war. Did you ever come across a Chinese poem that says, “When I was away from home in winter and spring I used to long for letters. But now, when I’m coming back to my village, I daren’t ask anyone for news.” That’s what war means; you’re frightened to ask about people. Hell! I’ve drunk too much.’
The Chinese chauffeur stopped and said he could go no farther. Harris and Juan got out. In front of them the street was closed by a rampart of sandbags and barbed wire. In the white illumination of the headlights the dark wall, the fascines of wire, and the waiting soldiers had a theatrical look. Except for the soldiers the street was deserted. The lamps had been put out, and there was no light in the houses. The bombardment at Woosung had stopped, and the air was quiet.
‘You’d better become a newspaper correspondent,’ said Harris, and took from a bulging pocket-book a number of visiting-cards. ‘I always keep the cards that people send in,’ he said. ‘You never know when they’re going to be useful. Here’s half a dozen – Kettledrum of the Express, Dearborn of the San Francisco Examiner, Gibbon of the Times – you can take your choice.’
They passed the barricade, and turned into another deserted thoroughfare. The night was dark, and Juan looked uneasily into the obscurity of the streets, for already he felt rather lost.
‘We’re in Chapei now, are we?’ he asked.
‘On the outskirts of it,’ said Harris. ‘Listen!’
They stood for a moment, and heard, still small but coming nearer, the noise of motor-engines and their muffled reverberation against the walls of a distant street. Into that steely purring and plangent echo came the sound of a shot, another shot, and then a brisk fusillade.
‘This way,’ said Harris, and began to run, with awkward arms and whistling breath. Stumbling in the darkness they ran the length of a desolate street, turned a corner, and were halted by half a dozen Chinese soldiers who came suddenly from a pitch-black lane. Harris spoke to them, breathlessly, and after a short argument they returned to the shadows of their ambush. Juan and Harris ran on.
Presently Harris stopped, gasping for breath, in the doorway of a little shop. ‘Here they are,’ he said.
A motor-cycle and sidecar, with a machine-gun mounted in the sidecar, came slowly down the street. Behind it were two lorries, crowded with Japanese troops, and following them, marching swiftly on the pavements, were more soldiers carrying flares. The bayonets and the round helmets of the men in the foremost lorry were illumined brightly by the vehicle behind. The headlights of the lorries and the motor-cycle splashed the road and the houses with a livid radiance, and the flares of the marching men were reflected from darkened windows.
A Japanese officer spoke sharply to Harris; but learning who he was, changed his tone, became courteous, and laughed a little as he explained what his men were doing. While he was talking a shot was fired into the second lorry, and before its echoes died there was a burst of fire from either side of the street. The Japanese at once began to shoot into blind windows, and storming parties invaded the houses, smashing down doors with their rifles. Far ahead, like jerky shadows on the edge of the light, three or four crouching figures ran from one pavement to the other. The machine-gunner in the sidecar opened fire against them, the walls of the street repeated the savage stammering of his gun, and the driver, accelerating his engine, took him swiftly in pursuit of the disappearing snipers. Another motor-cycle, swinging recklessly past the lorries, followed in support.
The officer who had previously spoken to Harris came out from one of the invaded houses, and said, ‘We found a most notorious person in an upper room.’
‘Is he dead?’ asked Harris.
‘Not yet,’ said the Japanese, showing his square teeth in a smile.
The column moved on, sweeping away the darkness with headlights and flares, and leaving gross darkness behind.
‘Where shall we go now?’ said Juan.
‘This way, I think. We’ll get into Dikwell Road. I heard there was likely to be a good deal of fighting there.’
Juan was not sure whether this was a really cogent argument for proceeding to Dikwell Road, but he did not like to interfere with Harris’s plans. During the engagement between the Japanese column and the snipers he had felt an almost overpowering temptation to join the latter and assault with all his strength the round-helmeted invaders. Patriotism has foster-children as well as its native sons, and having lived so long with Kuo Kuo, Juan had inevitably been infected by her national sentiment. Ignorant as he was about China, except for what she had told him, he had had no knowledge to protect him against enthusiasm, and now, when bullets were flying and the dark air carried the contagion of anger, he discovered, what hitherto he had but faintly suspected, that an alien passion had got into his blood and he was become a hot defender and a partisan of China. Kuo Kuo had read poetry to him, and in his mind there was the image of a land whose poets were countrymen and scholars, whose countrymen were craftsmen and poets. It was a land of laughter and grief, where the mountains and drinking-cups were of jade, and the cruelty of love found a lenitive in songs of an exquisite felicity. Wars had troubled it, but war had not darkened its lanterns, nor frightened the pheasants from the clumps of willow, nor the old roguery from the hearts of its people. True, cities had invaded it from the West, and cities obscured the realities of poetry: the mulberries and the pine-trees, the wine and the wedge of geese and the girl behind a vermilion screen. But poetry, when Kuo Kuo read it, was a light that drove back the shadow of civilization as the flares that the soldiers carried thrust off the darkness of the streets; and when Kuo Kuo spoke of her country’s enemies, they were the Little Dwarfs of the Eastern Sea.
Juan had been well coached, and his anger, though partly a natura response to the surrounding atmosphere of anger, was largely a tribute to Kuo Kuo’s eloquence and ardour. But when the Japanese soldiers had gone and the firing had stopped, he remembered that several bullets had come unpleasantly close, and he doubted the wisdom of deliberately going into still more dangerous places. It was Harris’s job, however, to watch the progress of the battle, and wherever Harris went Juan must go too; for without Harris he could not find his way home.
‘How did you feel when those bullets hit the window behind us?’ he asked.
‘Scared to death,’ said Harris. ‘Come on. They’ve started firing again.’
Once more they ran through the darkness. Juan tripped over a steel helmet that a Japanese marine had lost, and nearly fell.
‘I remember being damned frightened in Chicago,’ he panted, ‘when I got mixed up in a gangsters’ battle.’
‘You needn’t come if you don’t want to,’ gasped Harris.
‘That’s all right. Do you mind if I take a crack at a Japanese if I get the chance? I’ve a pistol in my pocket.’
‘Better not. Don’t let anyone see you if you do.’
‘I’ve just remembered it. The pistol, I mean. A friend gave it to me.’
‘Never carry one myself. Too dangerous. Might go off.’
Still running, Juan fumbled in his hip-pocket and pulled out the automatic pistol that Kuo Kuo had given him. He felt for the magazine.
‘It isn’t loaded,’ he said.
‘That’s fine. Wait a minute, I’ve got a stitch.’
Harris stopped, and bowed in agony, with Juan solicitous beside him. Suddenly, with a vicious crack, a bullet struck the wall above them and flew off with the trembling whine of a ricochet. They leapt into the shelter of a deep doorway.
‘That’s cured my stitch,’ said Harris with a gasp.
Juan looked out, and another bullet hit the lintel directly over his head.
‘He must think we’re Japanese,’ he said.
‘He must have the eyes of a cat,’ said Harris.
A voice behind them remarked, ‘That appears to be characteristic of these animositous snipers. They have made themselves highly inconvenient, and I have been compelled to wait here for more than half an hour because of their inopportune attention.’
Juan recognized the voice immediately, but Harris, badly startled, exclaimed, ‘Who the hell’s here?’ and directed a small flashlight at the smiling features of Mr Hikohoki.
‘Good evening, Mr Motley. And Mr Harris, is it not? I know you quite well by sight.’
‘Hikohoki’s an old friend of mine,’ said Juan, and thought with interest of his share in the negotiations between Flanders and Rocco.
‘I am rejoiced that you should so describe me,’ said Hikohoki.
‘This isn’t a very healthy part of the town to be in,’ said Harris.
‘I had business here. We business men are the slaves of our vocation.’
‘What sort of business?’ asked Juan.
‘Now indeed you are claiming the privilege of old friendship,’ said Hikohoki with a smile. ‘But that is O.K. with me. I had a client in this neighbourhood who was backward in the payment of an instalment on his insurance policy, so I came to collect it before civic discipline should be wholly disorganized. He was a Chinaman, and a most undesirable client. It is very difficult to make the Chinese pay money. They are bitten by the fangs of materialism.’
‘You took a risk in coming here,’ said Harris.
Hikohoki shrugged his shoulders. ‘And you, Mr Motley, you have come to seek evidence of the deplorable misunderstanding between China and my country? I ask you, as impartial observer, are the Chinese, as they were requested, doing their utmost to eradicate hatred?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Juan. ‘I was talking to your friend Rocco this afternoon.’
‘Is he also your friend?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
‘I am rejoiced. The Colonel is prone to avarice of the English or American type. He endeavoured to sell me information about the Chinese military dispositions. But I told him that was not necessary, for Heaven will ultimately disclose what man tries to hide.’
‘What’s all this about Rocco?’ asked Harris.
‘He’s a common acquaintance,’ said Juan. ‘Do you know him too?’
‘I know everybody.’
The street filled with mechanic noise and an advance guard of light, in which a drizzling rain shone like quivering needles of silver. More Japanese troops were advancing. This time, preceding the soldiers in their lorries, there came an armoured car, its turret painted with a red sun on a white field; but in the artificial light the red sun looked black.
‘Thank heaven, we are preserved,’ cried Hikohoki dramatically; and waving his umbrella to attract attention, he called to his passing countrymen. An officer came to investigate, with whom Hikohoki had a short and apparently satisfactory talk. Harris explained his own and Juan’s presence, and the officer, using Hikohoki as an interpreter, suggested they should fall in at the rear of the column.
The solitary sniper had fled, and the column encountered no opposition. Harris and Juan marched in silence, but Hikohoki, who had put up his umbrella, was in high spirits and exchanged facetious remarks with the soldiers in the rearward lorry.
Juan was greatly puzzled by Hikohoki’s presence in Chapei, and by his readiness to admit, though he claimed a virtuous part in them, the nefarious trend of his dealings with Rocco. It was possible, of course, that Hikohoki had told the truth and really come to collect an overdue instalment on some insurance policy; and it was also possible that he had seen Juan in conversation with Flanders and Rocco, and had decided to defend his own character by attacking the Colonel’s. But Kuo had been positive that he was a spy, and though Juan had no great faith in feminine intuition, he now began to wonder whether Hikohoki’s strange activities and curious knowledge might not be explained by some such hypothesis.
As though he suspected the nature of Juan’s thoughts Hikohoki turned and with great affability inquired, ‘When are you coming to further discuss with me the matter of your life insurance, Mr Motley? For that, I think, was the subject of our last felicitous conversation.’
‘We might have a talk to-morrow morning. I’m still at the New Celestial.’
‘That is most agreeable to me. About eleven, perhaps?’
Before Juan could reply, the column was halted by several shots fired from an upper window. In the darkness above the headlights they could see the thin orange flash of the sniper’s rifle. His shots were apparently a signal, for they were followed by machine-gun fire from a side-street, and also from straight ahead. In a moment the lorries were deserted, and the Japanese were lying flat on the road or pressing themselves into thin shapes against the walls of the houses. Then the crew of the armoured car opened fire. There was a villainous bang, and the scream of a shell. Half-a-dozen rounds were fired, and the machine-gun in front was silenced. Slowly the armoured car advanced.
Ahead of it rose a red glare and smoky tongues of flame, small at first and low to the ground, but quickly spreading and growing in brightness. Two or three houses had been set on fire.
Japanese riflemen engaged the machine-gun in the side-street, and the noise of their firing, doubled and redoubled by the echoing houses, was presently increased by the clamour of advancing motorcycles and the thunder of reinforcing lorries. Encircled by this iron hullaballoo, Harris put his mouth to Juan’s ear – they were lying on the pavement with their heads raised like inquiring seals – and shouted, ‘I think we’ve seen enough here. Let’s try and get round to the other side.’
‘Wait a minute,’ shouted Juan.
Seven or eight Japanese soldiers were coming out of a house with a pair of prisoners. The captured snipers were in dark clothes. An officer, a revolver in his hand, walked up to them and after a word or two shot one of them at point-blank range. Juan, evading Harris’s restraining hand, scrambled to his feet. The officer pointed his revolver at the second sniper, but before he could fire Juan threw his own empty pistol – a hard throw, a lightning return from cover-point – straight at his face. It took the Japanese between the eyes, and he went down like a coconut at a fair.
‘You bloody fool!’ Harris exclaimed, and seizing Juan by the arm, pulled him into the darkness. ‘This way,’ he said, and for the third time that night they took to their heels and ran.
‘They’d have killed you if they’d caught you,’ he gasped.
‘It was rather a pretty throw-in,’ panted Juan. ‘The sniper got away, didn’t he?’
‘We’re not out of the wood ourselves yet.’
‘You oughtn’t to drink so much, if this is the kind of work you have to do.’
‘I’ll never touch another drop.’
They came into a street where the air, washed by the rain, tasted sweet and clean after the acrid stench from which they had escaped.
‘Have you any idea where we are?’ Juan asked.
‘If we keep on this way, we’ll come into Range Road, I think. My God, you were a fool to throw your gun at that fellow.’
‘I lost my temper.’
‘And nearly lost your life as well. I can’t run any farther.’
‘We ought to be safe here.’
The street was empty, but the stammering din of battle continued, and it seemed as if only a single row of houses separated them from the crowding of angry soldiers. Harris, walking with drooping head and shambling steps, was breathing painfully; but his spirit was undaunted.
‘We’ll try and get round to the railway,’ he said. ‘The Chinese are properly dug in there.’
They turned a corner and came into a street that was not wholly deserted, nor entirely dark. Here and there were little groups of people, obviously nervous, patently on the point of running, but yet sufficiently enthralled by their nearness to danger to wait and see if it should come closer.<
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The characteristic of the street was a small and dreary respectability that struggled against decay. The houses were of dark red brick on a foundation of small shops. Here, behind their shutters, lived a patch-tailor and a shabby modiste. There was a sweet shop, a fruit shop, a cabinet-maker’s shop. There were two dingy little restaurants. And the houses over the shops were inhabited by elderly clerks and superior artisans, by unlicensed dentists, and widows and their lodgers.
The rattle of machine-gun fire came nearer, and there was a movement of panic among the scattered groups on the pavement. Then, with a screech and a wild explosion, a shell burst on a roof and sent a whistling flight of tiles and splinters into the street. Haifa mile away the gunner of an armoured car, with blood trickling into his eyes, tilted his gun too high and fired again and yet again. The second shell burst in a restaurant, and made ragged cantlets of all its poor furniture; the third, taking a chimney-pot on its way, crashed through the milliner’s back wall and exploded among silk blouses and smart knickers for typists. It slaughtered a high-busted corset-model, and blew another, that wore a ten-dollar blue party frock, end-over-tip through the front window. The people in the street, sobbing for their losses or crying aloud their fear, ran wildly in the wrong direction. Ten miles away, at Woosung, the naval guns began a new bombardment, and filled the air with their dull violence.
At this inopportune moment an old-fashioned bus came into the street, and stopped abruptly when another shell, screaming for plunder, burst in an upper room and uncovered a fountain of broken slates and shattered rafters. The driver leapt from his seat and bolted for cover. From the back of the bus, shrieking with fright and scrambling to escape, tumbled a dozen young women, bare-headed, with coats and wraps that flew open to show their many-coloured evening dresses. They ran to the other side of the street and crowded into a narrow doorway, beating on the door and crying for entrance.
‘They’re Russian girls from one of the night-clubs,’ Harris explained. ‘A lot of them live here. My God, where are they going now?’
Some new panic had assailed them, for suddenly they took flight, away from where Juan and Harris were standing, and like a levee of pigeons in a wood fled noisily into shadow.
Juan in China Page 6