Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  ‘It may not have been a very good one,’ said Juan.

  ‘Would Lo Yu have given us something of no value? He told me that by means of this plan China could be saved and regenerated.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he was right. But what are we going to do now?’

  ‘I do not care very much.’

  Kuo sat herself on the bed in the inner room, nursing one leg and staring disconsolately at nothing. On the other bed were Peony, bemused by opium, and the old man, who was hypnotized by the imminence of death and a very good painting of a grasshopper. Juan felt as lonely as a recruiting sergeant among Quakers.

  The situation, however, was by no means desperate. Their imprisonment was only nominal, for with an hour or two’s work they could breach the rubble-filled doorway, or, if that proved unexpectedly difficult, a hole could easily be made in the flimsy and already shaken wall. But Juan felt that before starting on demolition of any kind, he should have the authority of the owner of the house; and neither the owner nor his daughter was in a mood for the discussion of practical affairs. Even the necessity for postponing a decision, however, was not: really irksome; for though they were to force their way out at once, he doubted whether he or Kuo could find their way through the warren of little streets in the darkness. He sat down beside Kuo and affectionately pressed her hand. With no more encouragement than that she burst into tears.

  It occurred to Juan, not for the first time, that patriotism was really a very great nuisance, for it either made people improperly arrogant or as touchy as a sore thumb. This was the second time within four or five days that Kuo had cried on his shoulder. A few weeks ago she had had no more thought of tears than a dolphin of drowning, but now she was as liable to grief as a child with bad teeth and a tin of toffee. What charming gaiety she had shown before they came to China! A lyric mood, clear and perfect as an old song. The mood of a summer morning, bright and cloudless, of the greenwood listening to its quire of birds… To the devil with politics, the queasiness and wrath of ambition, the vulgarity of conquest, and the bitterness of inferiority! The Chinese were right – the old Chinese – who said that man should enjoy the fruits of the earth and cultivate decent manners. They preached simplicity, which meant a glassless mind to the beauty and the benison of nature. They taught peace, which was freedom to live in the fullness of life. But how could the new Chinese obey such precepts, when they were harried on all sides by graceless arrivistes to whom the world was a kind of coalfield in which they dug for their ugly wealth, and fought and swindled each other for the right to dig, and darkened the green fields with slag-heaps and the black vomit of their chimneys?

  ‘An ounce of civet!’ cried Juan, jumping from the bed and leaving Kuo to regain her balance as she could. ‘An ounce of civet to sweeten my imagination!’

  ‘Have you got a pain?’ asked Kuo.

  ‘I had,’ said Juan. ‘For a moment I had. I entertained a serious thought, and that was a great mistake. For to think seriously is to wake anger, and to be angry is to burn for nodiing. It is for me, at least, because I haven’t the sort of nature to keep the fire going. What shall we talk about? If I were a poet I might tell you how beautiful you are, and that, if I did you justice, would be one of the most charming poems ever written.’

  ‘There was a princess of my name who lived in the reign of one of the T’ang Emperors, for whom Chang Hu made this poem: “When the Emperor sent for the Lady Kuo Kuo, she did not adorn her beauty, for that would have lessened it; riding to the palace in the morning, she just smoothed the little moth-wing of her eyebrows.”’

  ‘Now that,’ said Juan, ‘is a much prettier compliment than our tedious English habit of saying: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.”’

  ‘We do not estimate things in the same way as you. There was a Prefect called Liu who became famous, and is now remembered, because he loved wine and chrysanthemums.’

  ‘Of course, we have our famous characters too, though at the moment I can only think of a regicide called Harrison. He was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but no sooner had they disembowelled him than he got up and boxed the executioner’s ears.’

  ‘The English are very persistent,’ said Kuo.

  ‘We have a lot of even nicer characteristics, but we prefer to advertise our virtues, which is very stupid, because foreigners think they are merely the effect of our climate. We often go the wrong way about things. Teaching history, for instance. We make it such a dull affair, but really it’s full of interest. Did you know that knickers were first introduced into England in the reign of Charles II? Now there’s a significant fact.’

  ‘He was a good king, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was a very good king,’ said Juan. ‘Don’t you think you ought to take that heavy tunic off? You’ll be much more comfortable without it. – You’re quite different from an English girl, you know. They’re far more undulant. When Bacon said something about: “coming home to our business and bosoms,” he was dealing, in England, with a very large reality. But though Chinese girls are pretty flat in front, most of the men are hollow-chested, so you maintain the essential difference.’

  ‘They are hollow-chested because for centuries our ideal has not been physical strength but scholarship. But now it seems as though we would be better off if we had learnt to play games and be strong.’

  Juan, smelling a return to politics, swiftly steered the conversation back to poetry, and having found that he could be very comfortable on the narrow bed, if Kuo lay there too, he listened contentedly while she cleverly paraphrased some agreeable verses. A good many of them described the plight of lovers who waited in vain for their distant or dilatory sweethearts. China, thought Juan, with its inability for keeping appointments, was probably very rich in poetry of this kind. But all the graces were at the mercy of efficiency.

  ‘Though procrastination is the thief of time,’ he said, ‘punctuality is the abortionist of fancy.’

  The smell of opium, which permeated the little house, grew stronger. Peony, a long slim pipe in her hand, had come to talk to them.

  She was looking much better now, though her complexion still had a faintly greenish hue. But she was wide awake, and apparently inclined to friendly conversation. Kuo, with rather a bad grace, answered the conventional questions, and was formally polite in her turn. Juan was very sorry that Peony spoke no English, but Kuo translated most of what she said.

  After a little one-sided gossip about Min Cho-fu – Peony was grateful for his escort – she asked what it was he had lost, and they had come to look for. ‘You told me before, I think, but I do not remember what you said.’

  Kuo described the precious piece of bamboo, and Peony shook her head. She had not seen it. ‘But if it was valuable,’ she said, ‘perhaps the Japanese took it away.’

  ‘The Japanese soldiers have been here?’

  ‘Not soldiers, but a man I know, who came with two ronin.’

  After another question or two, Kuo became far too excited to translate. ‘Wait till we have finished,’ she said impatiently, when Juan asked her what it was all about. But he heard a familiar name, repeated and again repeated, and he grew almost as restive as Kuo Kuo while he listened to the incomprehensible and exasperating dialogue.

  At last he was allowed to speak. ‘Was it Hikohoki?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kuo.

  ‘Good for Proteus! He gets around like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.’

  ‘We are now quite defeated,’ said Kuo. ‘The plan could not have got into more dangerous hands.’

  ‘If Hikohoki has taken it, it’s safe enough, and you’ll be able to buy it back. From what I know of him he’d sell anything diat he didn’t have to amputate. But tell me the whole story.’

  It was, apparently, quite simple. Hikohoki had lent money to Peony, and when she returned to Shanghai she was still in his debt. She had come, as she told Min, to see her father, who was dying. But her father was in Chapei, and Chapei wa
s a battlefield. So she had gone to Hikohoki, and asked him for help. But he refused her money, and refused to give her opium, which she needed even more. She lost her temper, and told Hikohoki that she could do without him. Her father, she said, had plenty of money and an abundance of opium. Hikohoki smiled and said he did not believe it. ‘You can come and see,’ she had boasted, and told him where her father lived. When she met Min she was nearly demented, but still too frightened to go into Chapei by herself. But as the day lengthened her craving grew, and by the time she had persuaded him to go with her, she was so desperate that she hardly needed his escort.

  Peony thought it was early the following morning that Hikohoki arrived; but she could not be sure, she said with a charming sad smile, for she had rather lost count of time. He had two ronin with him, to guard him, and his manner had been very firm. He wanted the money she owed him, with appropriate interest, and he told her that unless she paid him immediately, she would immediately be arrested. And how could she suffer arrest, when her father was dying and she must stay with him? She knew where the bag of silver dollars was hidden, and she took what was needed. Hikohoki had not behaved badly. The interest that he asked was rather heavy, but he had not robbed her. He had, indeed, after counting and re-counting the money, been very kind. He had given her a bottle of cough-mixture for her father, and told her that if she needed a job at any time he would be only too glad to help her. Then, with polite wishes for her safety, he and his two gun-men had gone.

  ‘It is a very suspect story, isn’t it?’ said Kuo.

  ‘Suspect?’

  ‘I mean that Hikohoki was not likely to go into Chapei merely to collect two hundred dollars. That motive was the cover for his real one. He discovered that Min had come here, having the plan with him, and followed at once, hoping to find him still here.’

  ‘You’re still shooting at a target that isn’t there,’ said Juan. ‘I’ve told you a dozen times that Hikohoki isn’t a spy or a Secret Policeman, but simply a good dishonest grafter.’

  ‘Then why did he try to murder Colonel Rocco?’

  Juan sighed, and assured her that he had done no such thing. Kuo listened with patent unbelief, but before Juan could answer more than five or six of her stubborn questions, Peony, with a languid air un-suited to the importance of the news, returned to say that her father had been asking who these visitors were, and what they had come for. Having been told their errand, he at once said that he had seen one of the Japanese pick up a short bamboo staff from the floor, and conceal it in his clothing. He had noticed and remembered the incident, because the piece of bamboo was spotted, and spotted bamboo, as everyone was aware, had acquired its spots through the dropping of the tears of the two wives of the Emperor Shun as they wept over his tomb in the land of Ts’ang-wu. He had always, said Peony, entertained a vicarious affection for the wives of the Emperor Shun.

  ‘We must leave here at once,’ said Kuo decisively. ‘Hikohoki has the plan, and we must get on his track. We shall now go to any length to deal with him.’

  ‘Then I suppose you want me to clear away all this rubble,’ said Juan.

  Peony had no objection to his filling the outer room with the blockading stones, though she asked him first to carry her father to the other bed. He would die before morning, she said.

  The old man was no heavier than a child. His eyes, half covered by their yellow lids, were clouded and apparently sightless; but still in his frail fingers he held his pale green picture of the grasshopper. He lay motionless on the inner bed, a little anatomy that waited at the bourne of life for death to catch him up.

  Juan considered the business of clearing the blockaded doorway without enthusiasm. He had neither pick nor shovel with which to attack the heap of stones, and all he could do was to pull them away one by one. But while he was thoughtfully taking off his coat he heard, coming from outside, the sounds of an agitated scraping. Someone else was already at work.

  Kuo became very excited and insisted that Juan should draw his pistol and hold it ready to shoot the intruder, who, she was already sure, was a member of the Japanese Secret Police. Peony, mildly interested, also waited to see who their visitor might be. One of their neighbours, she thought. Juan, though he inclined to Peony’s view rather than to Kuo’s, judged it prudent to put out the light. They waited in darkness.

  The scraping in the stone-heap continued and grew louder. Presently, between the rubble and the top of the door, they could see a dark little ragged patch of sky. A few large stones were pulled away, and into the hole came the round shape of a head. It spoke in a thin creaky voice, and Peony replied. There was a brief conversation, and then the stranger began to dig as furiously as a terrier.

  ‘His name is Wang,’ said Peony. ‘He is acquainted with my father, and he wishes to come in here so that he may effect an entrance to the pawnshop, which is part of this building.’

  After several minutes of impatient digging, during which a great deal of rubble came down into the room, the energetic Wang had made a hole large enough to enter by, and he slid into the house like a sheep on a slope of loosened scree.

  He was a cheerful little man with a round smiling face – Juan relighted the lamp and Mr Wang blinked in the feeble glare – and while slapping the dust off his clothes he began, very volubly, to explain to Peony the purpose of his coming.

  He also had a dying father. Or, to be more accurate, a father who, after a long illness, had appeared to be dying. In the early days of his illness, when they had not thought it very serious, they had pawned his coffin, which in readiness for his death had lain in the house for several years, in order to buy medicine. But the medicine made the old man worse, and the need for the coffin became suddenly urgent. Deciding therefore that a dying man had no use for clothes, they pawned his whole wardrobe and with the money thus obtained redeemed the coffin. Then, to their surprise, the old man showed signs of recovery. Despite having had no medicine for a week, his appetite returned, and he grew rapidly stronger. He was now quite well again, and eager to be up and about. But all his clothes were in the pawnshop, and the front of the pawnshop was heavily shuttered; the proprietor had fled. Mr Wang had found it impossible to force an entrance from the street, and would have been in despair had he not fortunately remembered that in the honourable abode of Peony and her father there was a trap that gave entrance to a loft that communicated with the upper floor of the pawnshop. Could he therefore so far presume on their kindness as to crave the use of that felicitous backdoor? He did not mean to commit robbery in the pawnshop. He would, if he could find them, take only the garments originally belonging to Ids father; or alternatively such a mere sufficiency of attire as would enable a very tetchy old gentleman to leave his bed and walk once more abroad.

  Peony had no objection to so reasonable a proposal, and Mr Wang pointed triumphantly to the trapdoor in the ceiling of the inner room. It was too high for him to reach without assistance, but Juan was willing to help, and Mr Wang, with many apologies for putting him to so much trouble, climbed nimbly on to his shoulders. The trap was secured with only a couple of nails, and Mr Wang soon forced it open, and disappeared into the loft.

  Kuo was now in a great hurry to be gone, but Juan was beginning to worry about Peony. Her father was very near to death, and how could they leave her alone with a dying man, or with a corpse? But Kuo, intent on the pursuit of Hikohoki and national salvation, would certainly refuse to be delayed by any consideration so finical as that.

  ‘It is still very dark,’ she said, ‘but perhaps we can persuade Wang to show us the way.’

  Peony put a shred of cotton wool on her father’s lips, a wisp of it in his nostrils. It lay motionless, for there was no breath to shake it. She began to wail, quietly, but with a shuddering intensity of grief. She took off the few pieces of worthless jewellery that she wore, and threw them on the floor. She loosened her hair, and bared her feet.

  Juan’s attention was distracted by a noise in the loft, and looking up he saw t
hat Mr Wang was trying to force an enormous bundle through the small trapdoor. He had found a piece of red cloth, the size of a sheet, and with this he had made a great unwieldy pack of clothes of all kinds. But push and knead and shove it as he would, he could not get it through the trapdoor without undoing it. He was loth to do this, but at last accepted the necessity and poured into the room an innumerable shower of coats, vests, trousers, tunics, gowns, hats, and robes of ceremony; on top of which he presently descended with a charming but somewhat bashful smile. But discovering, a moment later, that the house had become a house of mourning, his expression immediately altered, and to Peony’s small wailing he added his own cries of grief.

  Nor was that all his sympathy, for searching the heap of clothes he found a very handsome robe of honour in which, to Peony’s great comfort, he arrayed the body of her father. Then, with the air of a kindly man who has done his duty to others and must now think of himself, he began to bundle his loot together and wrap it in the red sheet.

  Kuo asked him if he would be their guide out of Chapei, and Wang., having considered the request and put a price on his services, said he would willingly help them, but first he must take the bundle of clothes to his own house, so that his father, who was impatient to get up, might dress himself in the respectable style to which he was accustomed. He also stipulated that Juan should wear Chinese costume, for in the streets, he said, there were marauding bands who would shoot at sight anyone in European attire.

  ‘And what’s Peony going to do?' Juan asked.

  Peony was persuaded to go with Wang. She put a pearl – an artificial one – in her father’s mouth, and a branch of faded willow in his right hand. In his left hand she placed a handkerchief and a fan. Then she made a parcel of her pipe, three little pots of opium, the lamp and the dipper, and having taken the bag of dollars from its hiding-place, said she was ready.

  Juan, in the meantime, had taken a long black gown and a little round hat from Wang’s convenient bundle. He wore the gown over his own clothes, and felt somewhat tightly circumscribed till he had ripped a seam or two under the arms. The little black hat, the shape ol Brunelleschi’s dome, he put on with diffidence; but was somewhat reassured when no one laughed.