‘Shall we go down to lunch?’ said Juan.
‘Unhappily I cannot accompany you,’ said Hikohoki. ‘I am only second-class.’
In the afternoon Juan had another conversation with him. Neither of them referred to the Sisters Karamazov. Hikohoki said he had wound up all his affairs in Shanghai, and was leaving it for good. Conditions there were too unsettled for a business man, so he was going to Hong Kong, where, in the peace and stability of a British Colony, he hoped that by unremitting industry, and the assiduous employment of such talents as he possessed, he would be able to make a respectable livelihood.
‘Tell me,’ said Juan, ‘about your dealings with Rocco. The trouble started – your part of the trouble – when you went to Rocco and told him he was paying too much for Flanders’s tanks. Now why did you do that? Were you going to get your cut of anything he saved?’
Hikohoki was very much shocked at this suggestion, and with a great deal of anxious hissing protested his entire innocence of any such intention.
‘That would be entirely unethical and contrary to the best commercial practice,’ he said. ‘My connexion with Colonel Rocco was wholly confined to legitimate business. It was my ambition at one time to take an interest in the game called hai alai. You have seen it, perhaps? It is nice to watch, and there is at least a fortune to be made out of it. So then I thought that Colonel Rocco would be an ideal individual to manage my hai alai establishment, and I suggested he should leave the employment of General Wu for this purpose. But he demanded such a fat initial premium that I was quite taken aback, for to pay such a sum would have crippled me. But fortunately I remembered his agreement to purchase four tanks from Major Flanders, so I gave him certain information about them that would, by enabling him to reduce his price, be as much value to him as the inordinate premium he had demanded. That was a good business transaction, Mr Motley, and you cannot complain that a business man should act in a businesslike fashion. It is with business that we grease the wheels of civilization, and purvey its manifold benefits to struggling humanity.’
‘I see,’ said Juan. ‘And you weren’t a spy, of course?’
Hikohoki smiled. ‘That was only your friend Miss Kuo’s imagination. I have had many irons in the fire, but spying was not one of them. I am a loyal servant of my Government, but not in any official capacity. As a young man, indeed, I was in the Consular Service, but I left it because it did not offer much scope to my redundant activities.’
Hikohoki got off at Hong Kong, and Juan went ashore there to marvel at such solemn respectability established in a landscape so undisciplined and lovely. There were parts of the city that looked like an extension of Leadenhall Street. Its pillars and grey pilasters spoke of high finance. It advertised the gravity of imperial commerce. The long harbour was crowded with shipping, and from, shore to shore innumerable sampans sped, that sturdy well-fleshed Chinese women sailed or rowed. Less muscular than this maritime gynaeocracy, but not less vocal, were the wives of well-paid civilians and of less-well-paid naval officers, who went shopping in splendid shops or conferred upon affairs of moment in the lounge of a fine hotel. And in the Hong Kong Club, among the prosperously large and dignified citizens of Empire, in furniture of imperial magnitude and in semi-ecclesiastical gloom, Juan and Flanders drank a notable drink – one of the many that the servants of Britain. Overseas have invented for the comfort of their unceasing labour – called a gin-mash.
‘And now,’ said Flanders, ‘we’re in British waters. From here to Aden’s like an English stream, and when we set foot ashore we’re on English ground.’
They sailed south, over rougher seas but into warmer weather. They passed the great island of Hainan, like a stone in the throat of the Gulf of Tongking, and in shoal water the many and perilous Paracel Islands. Then, past other islands, they came to Singapore, where the shipping of half the world lay tidily in a great harbour, as green and lovely as Killarney. And in Singapore, in the spacious forecourt of Raffles’ Hotel, Juan and Flanders drank a notable drink – one of the many that the builders of Empire have devised for the mitigation of their unfailing toil – called a gin-sling.
‘We’re round the corner,’ said Flanders. ‘The sea runs home, and we run with it, like spring salmon to the Severn.’
Sumatra was no more than darker clouds and hills in the sky, but over smiling seas, seas eyebright and deep lupin-hue they sailed in the sun; and Flanders, stretched on a long chair that the carpenter had reinforced for him, his great legs and arms asprawl, a pretty sheen of sweat on his face, would talk of the sultanate to which he was returning. There was no one so good, he said, at the laundering of shirts as a plump Magdalene of some thirty-two or four, while the prettiest of his frail captives would wait at a table, and from the rest he would choose a choir and have them taught Elizabethan songs. They would sing, ‘O love, they wrong thee much,’ and ‘Among the leaves so green O’. He would have them make ale and cider, and their uniform would be white and green. Once a day he would discourse to them on the moral life, and after supper there would be games and dancing. ‘I’ll show them,’ he said, ‘that true pleasure lies not in promiscuous entertainment on the streets, but in a spacious and well-ordered house.’
At Colombo Juan threw away his crutch, and more passengers came aboard. They turned northwards and ran parallel with the coast of India. Pricked on the chart, their noon position showed every day a hundred-league stride past the sun-gold, palm-green towns of Trivandrum and Cochin, of Calicut and Mangalore and New Goa. Then, in the islet-studded harbour of Bombay, the ship slid slowly past the Gateway of India, and from under it – or from the Taj Hotel behind it – came the leave-taking, homeward-bound Sahibs and their families; bankers and box-wallahs, planters, civilians, and men from the Forests, builders of roads and bridges, teachers, judges, and lean brown soldiers from Pindi and Quetta and the Afghan border. Now the ship was full, and the westering sun glided her path before her.
How brave a tiling is a ship in deep waters! Marshals and scarlet Caesars have won their victories on the land, but all are petty skirmishes when set beside the sailors’ conquest of the sea. Read in the Greek Anthology the epitaphs to fishermen whom coastwise storms had drowned; read of Leif Ericsson, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and think of their anonymous crews; read of Frobisher and Hawkins and Drake, and remember their ships that did not come home; read of East Indiamen, clipper ships, the schooners of Nova Scotia, and be glad of the indomitable men whose partners in their business were the trade winds, and who drove their ships – masts groaning and the frozen sails rebellious – through the enormous seas about Cape Horn. These were the greatest conquerors the world has known, and the fruits of their victory are beauty and ease in the midst of the sea they have tamed. Sleep softly, eat richly, and watch the dark blue fields of ocean spring into fountains of crystal that scatter the bright waves with foam. See, when islands appear, to the one side, under parallel lines of flocculent small clouds, a tall profile the colour of heliotrope; to the other a confusion of wilder heights and cold shadow, but with yellowish light on the mountain-tops and a cloud like an Indian canoe sunk on three blunted peaks. And then, when the sky grows dark and the moon is small and luminous, when the solid clouds are become soft and spacious, lean from the rail and watch the silver ripples that shine like a society of silver jelly-fish in the dense white overthrow of the ploughed sea. This beauty is the fadeless laurels of the sailors’ victory.
Thinking such thoughts as these – for he was daily growing more excited, and his mind was so full of many things that some of them could hardly fail to be splendid – Juan walked the long decks, and recovered his strength, and filled his lungs with the bright salt air. Then he talked with the soldiers coming home from India, and drank pink gin with them, and the days passed swiftly.
And one day, when he had been thinking idly about the nature of England and the character of the English people – because the voyage had shown him so much of their greatness and so many of their triumphs, yet h
e could not conceive them as deliberate conquerors like the Romans of Imperial Rome – on this day he went into the smoking-room, alone, and asked a steward to bring him a little gin and tonic water.
It was the hour before lunch, and the smoking-room was full. He sat at one side of the room, on the edge of the crowd. Occupied as he was with an unwieldy and perplexing thought, he found the noise and chattering of the other drinkers – of pink or yellow gin, of lager, of gin and tonic, or John Collinses, or even lemon squash a trifle irksome and disconcerting. He fidgeted in mild annoyance at the clamour of so many lips and teeth and tongues. And then he began to wonder what the innumerable sound was like.
The longer he listened to it the more compellingly it suggested something definite, but something so unlikely that he could not bring the similitude into his head.…
He found it at last, however. It was the noise of many birds. There was the underlying sound of starlings in a shrubbery but that was varied by sharper and by sweeter notes. There was the swift and cheerful scolding of blackbirds on a lawn. That was very clear. A thin but definitely recurrent harshness suggested a jay. He heard a cuckoo, and saw one too. Some lightly singing overtones were reminiscent of a hedgerow full of little warbling birds. There were no melancholy notes, either of the curlew or the gull. The whole effect was lively and glad. It was far more vivacious than one would have expected in an English ship, and more lyrical.
Yet these were the people who had built with such ponderous solemnity on the hillside of Hong Kong, who had charted the desperate seas, and conquered India. Perhaps, thought Juan, their sterner and more heroic qualities were developed only in a foreign climate. At home, perhaps, their characteristics were humorous and amiable. Once upon a time, before there was any suggestion that Britannia ruled the waves, England had been known as Merry England; and this leafy hedgerow chattering, which was English voices, was like a memory that would not be subdued of that ancient merriment. He drank his gin and tonic-water. Whatever the truth might be, he was delighted to be going home.
A Note on the Author
Eric Linklater was born in 1899 in Penarth, Wales. He was educated in Aberdeen, and was initially interested in studying medicine; he later switched his focus to journalism, and became a full-time writer in the 1930’s. During his career, Linklater served as a journalist in India, a commander of a wartime fortress in the Orkney Islands, and rector of Aberdeen University. He authored more than twenty novels for adults and children, in addition to writing short stories, travel pieces, and military histories, among other works.
Discover books by Eric Linklater published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/EricLinklater
A Man over Forty
A Spell for Old Bones
A Terrible Freedom
Juan in China
Ripeness Is All
The Crusader’s Key
The Dark of Summer
The Goose Girl and Other Stories
The Impregnable Women
The Merry Muse
The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1937 by Jonathon Cape Ltd
Copyright © 1937 Eric Linklater
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eISBN: 9781448210831
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Juan in China Page 30