Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  ‘And what will happen if, in the meantime, the Japanese have found the plan that my brother lost?’ asked Miss Min.

  ‘Now that’s pessimism again. We have just as much chance as the Japanese of finding it.’

  ‘My brother will not go back to Chapei. He says it is too dangerous.’

  ‘He’s probably right,’ Juan agreed.

  ‘He should be only too glad to sacrifice himself for China…’

  ‘That wouldn’t be any good either,’ said Juan. ‘If he sacrificed himself, the plan would still be lost. I’m all against sacrifice of any kind,’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I shall go and get it,’ said Kuo sofdy.

  ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ exclaimed Juan. ‘It’s just the kind of thing a woman would say. Sheer sentimental blackmail! Now I’ll have to go, and I don’t suppose the plan’s there in any case, and even if it is there it probably isn’t worth anything.’

  The argument changed colour. Now it became combative through excess of kindliness, and generosity strove with rival generosity for mastery. Kuo reiterated her intention of going into Chapei, and Juan said he would assuredly permit no such thing. But for his part, he said, he’d be only too glad of a little excitement. They grew warm with the contest, and their warmth generated such mutual affection that they could barely stay out of each other’s arms. Then the charming little Miss Min burst into tears and said they could remain where they were, for she was going that very instant to search for the plan. Whereupon Juan, moved extremely by admiration for her courage, embraced her with great kindness, and found her slim figure very adaptable to such congratulation.

  Alone among them, poor Min was unmoved by this new enthusiasm. He sat on the floor and watched them in melancholy bewilderment.

  Chapter 11

  Juan had breakfast in bed. It was a very good breakfast, and Kuo and Miss Min waited on him. He ate fruit and fish and bacon and eggs, and drank a great deal of coffee, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. It was delightful to be a hero, and be served by such lovely creatures. Kuo was now wearing a slim dress the colour of a smoky pearl, and Miss Min’s was the hedgerow hue of a pale celandine. Could heroism be assured of such rewards as these, it would become the most popular of all vocations.

  He dallied with his breakfast as long as he could, for the thought struck him that this grateful anticipation of his gallantry and, if he survived, the subsequent acclamation, would be its only pleasant features. But he did not let such thoughts trouble him for long.

  The upshot of their previous night’s argument had inevitably been that Juan should undertake the retrieving of Lu Yo’s plan. Min, who remembered very vividly his outward journey – though nothing of his homeward flight – was able to draw a map that showed the exact position of Peony’s house, and Juan studied this carefully. Miss Min suggested he should disguise himself as a Chinese, but Juan thought that might lead to unnecessary embarrassment. He still had, he remembered, the cards that Harris had given him – the insignia of Messrs Gibbon, Kettledrum, and Dearborn, of the Times, the Express, and the San Francisco Examiner – which were inscribed in both English and Chinese; and though they would not protect him from a bullet or a bomb, they might, in the event of less serious trouble, entitle him to the respect of his captors.

  Min was sent out to gather what news he could about the state of affairs in Chapei, and also to arrange, with a friend of his in North Honan Road, that Juan should use his house as a stepping-stone into the debatable land beyond. But when he returned, his information was meagre and most of it contradictory. It was, indeed, impossible for anyone to give an accurate description of what was happening, and no one could plot the line of battle when much of the battle was street-fighting that might break out anywhere.

  Juan, comparing a map of Shanghai with the plan that Min had drawn, and trying to collate the discrepancies of Min’s latest information with both of them, grew rather bewildered. Let us suppose that Shanghai is London, he thought. Then the Whangpoo becomes the Thames, and the North Station is Euston. The Japanese are fighting their way from the east towards the London and North Eastern Railway, which unconventionally takes a turn down Euston Road. The Japanese hold the Temple – though Chinese snipers have been worrying them there – and they’re pretty strong in Islington. Now the Soochow Creek’s a broadish stream running from somewhere about Regent’s Park to Waterloo Bridge, and the Japanese are patrolling several of the lower bridges on it. I’ve got to cross that, and get into no-man’s-land from North Honan Road, which is roughly equivalent to Southampton Row. From there I must cross the railway where it goes down Euston Road, and look for a very obscure street in the neighbourhood of King’s Cross, or where King’s Cross would be if there were such a station in Shanghai. And meanwhile King’s Cross is being raided by Japs and looted by Chinese, there’s a lot of fighting about Gray’s Inn Road, and casual bombing from the Angel to Camden Town. I’m going to have a lively time. I’d better write to my mother before I start, and tell her that if I die my wounds will be all behind.

  Kuo Kuo, it was clear, was also worried. She had a long conversation with Miss Min, and both of them disappeared for an hour or more. When they returned, Kuo was wearing a dark blue padded tunic, blue trousers tight at the ankle, and soft black shoes. It was the costume of the lower classes that served, with little difference, both for men and women. She was going as far as Honan Road, she said, and she had dressed to be inconspicuous and able to run if that were necessary. Juan protested, but Kuo had made up her mind, and as he could not believe there would be any danger in the preliminary stage of his journey, he submitted without much argument. Kuo gave him another pistol, and Min presented him with a handsome walking-stick which, when Juan had politely accepted it, he found to he a sword-stick. He was somewhat embarrassed by this romantic armament.

  They started about five o’clock, taking rickshaws as far as the Soo-chow Creek, which they crossed by one of the upper bridges. The streets were quiet. Somewhere beyond the North Station a Chinese battery was lazily in action but there were no seaplanes overhead, and the students, who for the last day or two had been noisily demonstrating, were apparently recuperating in private.

  They dodged a party of Japanese ronin – the plain-clothes reservists – in the neighbourhood of Honan Road, and waited for a motor-patrol to pass before they crossed the road and slipped into the shop whose owner had been warned of their coming. It was a little shop that sold ink-sticks, and its small window was broken. But the proprietor was waiting for them, and led them by a narrow passage into a dirty yard, with a statue of Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, in one corner.

  ‘Help me over the wall,’ said Kuo.

  ‘No, you’ve got to go home now.’

  ‘I must come with you to the next street,’ said Kuo impatiently, ‘and then I can see that you take the right way. Hurry, Juan, hurry!’

  Juan hoisted himself on to the wall, pulled Kuo after him, and dropped into another yard. From there, through a broken fence, they got into a dark alley and looked cautiously down a road that was apparently deserted, and empty except for a lost rickshaw and a dead coolie. Juan, in a voice more cheerful than he felt, said, ‘Well, I expect I can find my way from here.’

  Kuo did not reply, but suddenly, stepping into the road, began to run as fast as she could. Juan, after a second of startled immobility, pursued her with an angry feeling that his adventure, beginning in folly, would probably end in disaster. Kuo had a very pretty turn of speed, and she had covered a hundred yards before he caught her. Even then she would not stop, but struck at his outstretched arm.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ he gasped.

  ‘This way,’ said Kuo urgently, and pulled him into the opening of a lane. ‘Ronin!’ she gasped, and pointed to two squat figures who had come from a side-street into the road ahead.

  ‘Very probably,’ said Juan, ‘but what sort of game is this?’

  ‘You couldn’t find your way alone,�
� said Kuo, and without giving him time to reply led him swiftly down the lane, across a narrow street, clambered over a pile of shattered masonry, ran up a stinking alley, and came out on a road in which a couple of bombs had dug ragged craters.

  ‘This isn’t the way I would have come,’ said Juan.

  ‘Then the ronin would have stopped you,’ said Kuo.

  ‘I’d have told them I was a journalist. How much farther do you think you’re coming?’

  ‘All the way.’

  ‘Indeed you’re not. You can’t dictate to me like that,’

  ‘I am coming to look after you.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Juan, ‘have you ever been in Chicago? Have you ever run a cargo of liquor into Detroit? Let me tell you that your Chinese wars are simply the squabbling of children compared with what I’ve seen in America…What the devil’s that?’

  A rifle cracked, and as though it had materialized out of a conjuror’s hat, a sprawling figure lay on the road ahead of them. They drew into a broken doorway, and presently, from houses that had seemed deserted, came men and women who half-surrounded the dying man, and watched his tortured movements. He wriggled and heaved, as though what hurt him was a stake that pinned him to the ground. Unmoving and pitilessly interested, the furtive spectators watched him die.

  ‘We had better not go that way,’ said Kuo.

  The broken doorway in which they stood opened into a confusion of shattered walls and ruined houses. They scrambled over precipitous grey heaps of debris, and came into what had once been a little garden, full of the grotesquely weathered rocks that are the ornaments of a Chinese garden. They forced their way into a deserted house and emerged in a street parallel to that which they had left. There had been a miniature battle there, and the bodies of a dozen soldiers lay where they had fallen.

  ‘I apologize,’ said Juan. ‘Perhaps I think too highly of American achievement. – Have you ever eaten shad roe and bacon? – But travel is broadening my mind.’

  Cautiously they advanced, and presently came in sight of an elaborate barricade. There was a complicated entanglement of barbed wire. There was a rampart of sandbags with a coping of more barbed wire. There were the round black muzzles of two machine-guns.

  ‘And now what can we do?’ said Juan. ‘Do you think they would allow Mr Dearborn of the San Francisco Examiner to cross their Hindenburg Line?’

  ‘They will let us pass,’ said Kuo, and calmly stepped into the middle of the road. Heads appeared above the barricade and they heard an excited chattering. I wish I had written to my mother, thought Juan, and with a desperate affectation of composure changed his step to keep in time with Kuo. The machine-guns were swung inwards till their muzzles stared straight at them, They heard a shrill challenge, to which Kuo in a loud high voice replied.

  A young Chinese officer leapt over the barricade, with whom Kuo began a long conversation. She showed him several papers, which he examined with interest. After more conversation, now noticeably polite, he helped them over the sandbags and they found themselves in a company of grey-uniformed soldiers of the 19th Route Army. Kuo showed her papers to another officer, and there was more debate. Then they were offered tea, which Kuo politely refused, and a soldier was detailed to escort them over the railway line, some two or three hundred yards away.

  ‘I take everything back,’ said Juan. ‘You must have some very useful friends.’

  ‘I have a pass from General Wu Tu-fu, who commands the Tank Corps in Nanking,’ said Kuo, ‘and another from General Sun Sat-lo, who is one of the generals in Shanghai.’

  They crossed the line, being impeded by nothing more than a dead camel. Its egregious brown shape, in the adjacent cinders of a railway, was to Juan a great surprise; but Kuo said it was probably a medicinal camel, one perambulated, that is, for the purgative quality of its milk. By the arousing of pity and fear, thought Juan, and by their consequent purgation, is tragedy made acceptable to the mind of man. But the camel had gone the wrong way about it, for purgation had preceded the fear and the pity, and the result was a stupid feeling of desolation.

  On the far side of the railway was an amateurish block-house made of sandbags and sleepers, and their soldier escort, hailing its commander, called out a bespectacled young man who advanced towards them, perilously swinging a long Mauser pistol from his trigger-finger. He, a subaltern in General Sun Sat-lo’s Shanghai army, was also impressed by Kuo Kuo’s passports, but said he could give them no protection beyond the range of his guns. In the labyrinth of little streets ahead of them, he declared, there were perils more desperate than any they had yet encountered. The Japanese, what were they? Stupid little dwarfs from the Eastern Sea. But now, among these ruined streets, were striped tigers from the mountains of Szechuen; Chinese looters, freebooters, murderous thieves. He would rather encounter a company of Japanese Marines, new-landed from Yokohama, than a handful of his fellow-countrymen whose hearts had become wolves for plunder.

  A theatrical young man, thought Juan, when Kuo had translated for him the subaltern’s observations. But now both of them went forward with pistols ready, and as they turned each beggared corner they were conscious of a little disappointment when they saw nothing to shoot at.

  Kuo, for the first time, made a mistake. They halted where a fallen house had blocked the road. Juan, looking at Min’s plan, discovered they had taken the wrong turning. In consequence of this he felt a little surge of protective love for Kuo, and putting his arm round her drew her to him in the ruined street. She accepted his embrace without remark or opposition. Then they heard the crescendo roaring of a seaplane’s engine.

  ‘The aeroplane,’ said Juan, ‘our most triumphant invention, is the only vehicle that has no facilities for making love.’ And he kissed her again.

  But as he raised his head he saw, staring from a cracked window, a yellow face set in the lines of the laughing God in the monastery from which, but thirty-two hours before, he had so thankfully escaped. These battered houses were not yet wholly deserted, and such evidence of the outrageous fortitude of the human spirit, which could survive the desolation of war and play Peeping Tom on a battlefield, was curiously alarming. Juan with a compelling arm drew Kuo to the ruined pavement, and round the nearest corner.

  ‘This is the way,’ he said firmly.

  They made one more mistake, turned and explored again, and found the shuttered pawnshop. There was a high-walled four-foot lane beside it. They went down the lane, and came to a wooden door ajar. They pushed it open. A tiny littered yard was the fore-court of two-roomed house, whose door was also open.

  In the outer room, sitting on a wooden bed, was an old emaciated man whose bemused and gentle eyes were contemplating the pale picture of a grasshopper on a bending leaf. The room was bare, and faintly lighted from a paper window. Three scrolls, displaying fine penmanship, hung on the walls, and in a little red earthenware pot on a rough table grew a miniature pine tree. The old man paid no attention to them.

  Kuo went into the adjoining room, and called to Juan. He followed her and saw, lying on a low bed, a girl with heavy eyelids, a pale oval face, and narrow chin. She slept without visible movement, and beside her, on the floor, were a pipe and the apparatus for preparing opium.

  ‘Look for the piece of bamboo,’ said Kuo. ‘A length of bamboo about twenty inches. The plan is in that.’

  But the little house was so naked it was easy to discover that Lo Yu’s plan was not there.

  ‘If Min lost it while he was running away, then we shall never find it,’ said Kuo bitterly.

  ‘I can’t blame him for falling in love with Peony,’ said Juan, looking thoughtfully at the girl who lay so placidly and dreamt of luxury and fantastic bliss. ‘She must have been uncommonly pretty a few years ago.’

  ‘She has ruined us all,’ said Kuo harshly, and going into the other room, stared gloomily at the old man whose mind was in thrall to the picture of a grasshopper on a green leaf.

  ‘There’s another aeroplane,’ sai
d Juan, as the insect hum of a distant engine grew to a metallic roar above. ‘They’re firing at it,’ he added, when, thrice repeated, they heard an explosive metallic cough.

  Crrumph! said the anti-aircraft shells, and did no harm except to what was hurt already.

  ‘God Almighty!’ he concluded, and held Kuo tightly as the little house shook before a deafening roar. The indignant aeroplane had dropped its remaining bomb, which, exploding in the narrow yard, had so blown upon the outer wall of Peony’s room that it overhung her like an inquisitive friend; and displacing a great fountain of earth and bricks it had blocked the only doorway of the house with a pile of invading rubble.

  ‘Now we’re here for the duration of the war,’ said Juan, looking at the broken door and the avalanche that filled its space.

  Peony woke and rose lazily from the bed. ‘What was that noise?’ she asked Kuo.

  Kuo replied by questioning her about Min’s visit, but Peony could remember nothing till she had smoked another pipe. Then she said, ‘Yes. he came here. He used to be my lover when I was young.’

  ‘Did he leave a section of bamboo containing a written scroll?’ asked Kuo.

  ‘He was my lover,’ said Peony. ‘Does the river ask the full moon to leave anything but the memory of its silver feet?’

  She rose and walked slowly to the other room, where she sat on the bed beside her father. He, still intent upon his exquisitely drawn grasshopper, paid no attention to her; but Peony, who knew that he was dying, gazed at him with tender melancholy.

  Already it was nearly dark in the little house, and Kuo, finding a couple of small lamps, lighted them and set one in each room.

  ‘The only way to get out,’ said Juan, ‘will be to scrape that pile of rubble into the house. I can’t push it away, because there’s too much behind it. But Peony and her father may be annoyed if we fill their outer room with broken bricks and cobble-stones.’

  ‘The plan is lost,’ said Kuo drearily.