When there are only seven guests on a yacht, only two of them males—and one of these an elderly valetudinarian self-excluded from the primrose path of dalliance—there really isn’t much food for gossip, and it is up to the ladies to make the most of what a kind Providence may afford.
23
Smoke of Their Torment
I
All the way from Baltimore to Miami to Panama, and from there westward, people had been talking to Reverdy Holdenhurst about Japan. They considered it injudicious of him to venture where there was so much danger. Why couldn’t he winter in some of the many places that were safe? When he asked them where, they would say, well, Florida, or Arizona, or New Mexico. This to a man who owned a beautiful yacht, and loved it, and was bound to get his money’s worth out of it!
Reverdy had always had his own way, ever since he could remember, and as a result he was a stubborn character; he made up his mind what he wanted to do and then he did it. He had taken this cruise year after year; he knew the places, and had friends in each and paid them duty calls. Just so in the old days fashionable ladies had ridden in two-horse carriages in state with coachman and footman, leaving “calling cards” at one house after another. Reverdy felt that he had abandoned one half of the world at the behest of the Führer and Il Duce; he didn’t feel like abandoning the other half for the Emperor of Japan.
He discussed the subject now and then during the cruise. The Japs had got themselves tied up in China, and were having no easy time of it; was it likely that they would wish to take on the might of the British Empire and the United States? Surely not until they had made their position in China secure, and had developed their sources of supply! Reverdy had visited Japan more than once, and had talked with leading statesmen; he knew them to be shrewd observers of the world scene, well able to weigh the forces they would face if they challenged the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Certainly they weren’t going to begin by interfering with a harmless private yacht, whose manifest and storerooms they were free to examine at any time. Reverdy possessed letters from Japanese personages in which these polite gentlemen expressed their high regard, and he kept these in a pigeonhole of his desk, on the off chance that some Japanese lieutenant might some day step aboard from a vessel of war.
In Manila the warnings of Reverdy’s acquaintances had become vigorous. What, going into Hongkong when you didn’t have to, and when everybody that could get out had done so? Didn’t the skipper of the Oriole know that alt American women had been ordered out, and all British women who didn’t have urgent duties? Reverdy said: yes, he knew, and he had no intention of staying in Hongkong. All he was planning to do was to put ashore a woman doctor whose father was a physician in the interior and who wished to rejoin him.
“But what an idea!” exclaimed the advisers. “Don’t you know the Japanese lines are drawn tightly all the way around the Hongkong territory? Nobody can get into the interior from there!”
Reverdy smiled a tolerant smile. “My woman doctor knows the situation well. The Japs have been there for three years or more, and there are plenty of ways of getting past them. You get a launch or a sampan and go up the coast a short distance at night and land in some cove; there are Chinese guerrillas who take you in charge and escort you wherever you want to go. Especially if you are a doctor, willing to help their people—they take care of their friends.”
The Baltimore capitalist had influence, and had been able to get the passports for this trip. It was still a free country, he said, and added, slyly: “If you know the right persons!” There was nobody in Manila charged with the duty of preventing a yacht owner from sailing the high seas. Reverdy discussed the matter with his guests and assured them that the stay would be very brief; while on shore they must keep in touch with the yacht and be ready to leave at any sign of trouble. He would replenish the fuel and attend to a couple of business matters, and then they would be off to the southwest, all the way to Bali and Java, where the Japanese would surely not venture—unless they were prepared to commit suicide.
“If I were a betting man,” said this knowledgeable host, “I would offer ten to one that if the Japs are planning to strike at any place, it will be Vladivostok and the railroad north of Manchoukuo. There is their real enemy, and believe me, they have the sense to know it.”
II
Lanny listened to these discussions, and walked the deck and pondered them. Prominent in his thoughts was the old sentence spoken to him in Munich: “You will die in Hongkong.” The P.A. had told himself that astrology was a pseudo-science which had been long since discarded; but that hadn’t kept him from remembering the warning. He was like a man who watches a thunderstorm gathering, sees the lightning on the horizon, and wonders what the chances are of being hit.
He might have gone to his host and said: “Reverdy, I don’t think it prudent to take these ladies into a danger spot. Why not approach the coast a bit farther north, behind the Jap lines, and use the launch to put Althea in the cove where she wants to be?” The host would have acceded to this suggestion, especially if the doctor herself had supported it.
But Althea had promised to introduce Lanny to Madame Sun Yat-sen, and that was something he looked forward to. Moreover, he was really curious about the prediction. An old-time psychic researcher, he took it as a challenge and would have been ashamed to run away from it. One more chance to find out if precognition is a possibility! Plain curiosity played a part in this; he wanted to know what, if anything, was supposed to happen here. This characteristic is one which humans share with many of the animals. A bear moving along a trail and hearing a strange noise ahead will not delay for a second; he will swing off the trail and get away from there both quickly and silently. But a deer, hearing the same sound, will stop, prick up its ears, and peer in the direction of the sound; if it is a man standing on his head and kicking his legs in the air, the deer will come nearer, trying to make out the meaning of the strange phenomenon. That is one reason why the death rate of deer is so much higher than that of bears.
III
Hongkong is an island of granite hills, eleven miles long, lying in the entrance to a deep indentation that might be called an estuary or a gulf. A hundred years ago the island had been the haunt of pirates; the British had taken it, as a place where they could carry on trade and be safe from the exactions of local government. Now it was a “crown colony,” called “the Gibraltar of the Far East,” and was one of the centers of the world’s trade. Even the fact that the Japanese had seized Canton, eighty miles distant up the river, hadn’t stopped the activities of the port; for the new conquerors had to have supplies, and they were even willing for the Chinese in the interior to have supplies, provided that “squeeze” was distributed to the right Japanese officials.
The British territory included all the shores of the harbor, and the country around it for a distance of twenty or thirty miles. In this district lived some fifteen thousand white people and perhaps a hundred times as many Chinese; it was hard to say exactly, for they kept coming and going. During the four years of the Japanese invasion they had been coming, and the British had had to put them to work constructing mass shelters. Across the harbor from the island was a peninsula called Kowloon, and the refugees had filled this, and spread out into the rice fields and vegetable gardens beyond. In the harbor they lived on board sampans and junks, making a floating slum. Reverdy said you could never have any idea what poverty was until you saw China; there and in India you learned to think of human beings as of maggots in a carcass, and for the first time you realized how completely civilization depends upon the practice of birth control.
The harbor is long and narrow. The Oriole came in slowly, through a swarm of junks and other native craft of every shape and size: wonderful, picturesque, with sails of brown and yellow tints, patched to the very edges, over and over; steered usually by a woman or girl with a long pole, skillfully turning the craft out of the yacht’s course. The good humor of the sailors and their women was delightful; when
they came close to the yacht the passengers would throw coins and the natives would catch them in a little net at the end of a long pole. They were very skillful and hardly ever missed. The Oriole found a safe anchorage. Owing to governmental red tape, there would be delay in the fueling, and meantime the passengers went ashore in the launch. They found themselves in a modern city with luxury hotels, department stores, theaters, banks—everything they would have found in London or New York. The white residents were wealthy—why else would they have stayed here? The merchants had built themselves villas on a high hill called “the Peak”; they were crowded together and could not have so much in the way of gardens, but there was a sea breeze and they could be more comfortable in summer. In December it was cool and the men wore sweaters and tweeds.
The visitors were rolled around in easy-chairs on rubber-tired wheels called rickshaws; the Chinese who pulled them were called “boys,” although they were men and looked much older than they were. It was a job which wore them out quickly and when they developed varicose veins and couldn’t run any more, nobody knew what became of them and few thought to inquire. Overpopulation had its unpleasant features, but also its conveniences; there were plenty of servants, and your “Number One Boy” who ran your household ruled them with a rod of iron. The “old China hands” who had lived here since the days of the Empire took everything for granted, and laughed you down if you talked about improving anything in this part of the world. East was East, and so on. All their troubles went back to the missionaries, who had started the business of “educating these beggars” and talking to them about “reform”; as a result, all China was in chaos, and of course the Japs were taking it over—what could you expect?
IV
A person like Dr. Althea Carroll would hardly have been appreciated by the hard-boiled plutocracy of Hongkong, whether British or American. Lanny and Cousin Laurel would have been welcome, but they had chosen to give their time to the widow of China’s revolutionary saint. Reverdy was an old friend of the recently appointed governor, and when he telephoned of his arrival he received an invitation to dine at Government House. That included his daughter, and it might have included his niece and the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft if Reverdy had dropped a hint about them, but he didn’t.
Lanny was well content to have it that way, for he had dined in many official residences and knew what dull affairs they could be. Whatever Sir Mark Aitchison Young might have to report about the political and military situation, Reverdy would retail it during the trip to Bali; and meantime Althea would get busy and arrange for the call upon Madame Sun that evening. Lanny and Laurel would be free to do what they hadn’t been able to do in Berlin or Bern, in Cannes or London or New York—to wander about the streets and look at the sights to their hearts’ content.
What interested them was the Chinese quarter—or perhaps one should call it the Chinese ninety-nine-hundredths. The hills were steep, and looking down the narrow canyons you saw vistas of the bay and the hills on the far side. The streets and sidewalks were swarming with pushcarts and stands, not to mention men, women, and children, so that it was difficult for even a rickshaw to get through. Most of the shops were open to the streets, and behind them were living quarters—dens might have been a better word. Behind the tourists followed starveling children; whining a singsong. Long ago somebody must have taught it to them for a joke, but they would never know it as such, for the rest of Hongkong time they would chant: “No mammy, no pappy, no whisky-soda!”
The pair stood on the esplanade called “the Bund,” watching a Chinese funeral go by. It was a long affair, entirely pedestrian. The coffin was borne by pall-bearers, who worked in relays, and the idle four of them chewed some sort of seeds, and spat frequently and made jokes with the spectators. Many of the mourners were barefoot; they had been hired, and some of them carried large bedraggled banners, rented for the occasion. Women mourners bore a sort of stretcher loaded with paper flowers. There were many bands wearing faded uniforms, and making loud noises which had no relation to music in Western ears. The oddest feature of this long procession was people with large wads of raw cotton hanging over their heads and bumping against their cheeks; other mourners kept poking at these wads with dirty cloths, and who could guess what that was supposed to signify? When they asked Althea she explained that the wads represented tears of grief, and the extra mourners were wiping them away.
V
The doctor joined them, and they had dinner in one of the restaurants patronized by the well-to-do Chinese, of which there was a large group on the island. Here, as everywhere, there was abundance for those who had the money. Althea had arranged for them to go that evening to call upon Madame Sun, and she spent the mealtime telling them about this remarkable lady, and about the Chinese silk merchant, Mr. Foo Sung, who was coming in his car to fetch them to the lady’s home.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, had been the son of a poor farmer; he had been educated in a Christian school, and had devoted his life to teaching ideas of freedom and social justice to his people. He had spent a good part of his life in exile, a fugitive from the various warlords who ruled the Flowery Kingdom. He had traveled to America and to Britain, getting support of the Chinese there for the Kuomintang, the Republican party. He had organized the revolution which had overthrown the Manchu Empire, and had laid down a sort of political charter for the future of his countrymen.
The “Three People’s Principles” were, first, Nationalism, which meant freedom and independence for all Chinese; second, Democracy, which meant government by the will of the people; and third, Socialism, which meant the production and distribution of goods for use and not for private profit. Needless to say, Dr. Sun had not lived to see these principles put into effect among his four hundred million countrymen; but his ideals were cherished and taught by clear-visioned souls, not merely in China but elsewhere throughout a tormented world.
There were three ladies of China known as the Soong sisters, daughters of the wealthiest banking family in the country, all three of them Christians educated in American colleges. The best known of them, Mei-ling, was the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek; the second, Ai-ling, was married to Finance Minister Kung of the government; the third, Ching-ling, had become the secretary of Sun Yat-sen and had married him in his later years. She had imbibed his doctrines, and although she had been sixteen years a widow, she still made them the guiding light of her life. The Kuomintang had become a political machine, and had made its terms with the wealthy exploiters—or so, at any rate, Ching-Ling believed. She was the “radical” of the Soong family, the “parlor Pink.” Lanny, who had played that same uncomfortable role in his youth, could sympathize with her position; but since he had not yet decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life, he continued wearing his camouflage of art expert, a nonpolitical personality.
VI
Mr. Foo Sung called for them at the restaurant with his limousine. He was an elderly gentleman wearing a long white goatee, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a Chinese costume of black silk; he was very dignified, very courteous, and informed about art both Oriental and Western; he spoke English, not perfectly, but easily to be understood. After he had listened for a while to Lanny’s polished discourse, he invited the visitor to inspect his own collection and give him an opinion as to the genuineness of a Holbein for which he was thinking of making an offer. Lanny said that Holbeins were mostly in museums, and the likelihood of one turning up in Hongkong seemed slight. Mr. Foo replied: “I have, what you say, pedigree for him.” Lanny promised to see what he could do on the morrow.
Madame Sun lived in Kowloon, the city on the mainland across the bay; you went on a little green-painted ferryboat, and there was time for cultured conversation. Mr. Foo, one of those rare persons of wealth who rise above their class interests and are willing to take their chances in a democratic world, was a great admirer of the lady they were going to visit. Lanny wondered: would he have admired her so much if she had n
ot been a member of the richest family of the country? Human motives are mixed, at any rate as Lanny had observed them in the Western world, and he guessed that this might be true of the still more ancient Orient.
The widow of China’s George Washington lived in an unpretentious Western-style cottage in the suburbs. She was a small, frail person in her fifties, looking surprisingly like her more famous sister whose picture Lanny had seen in the papers. She wore a close-fitting gown of light blue, and her black hair was pulled back from her forehead and formed a knot in back; she wore no jewels. Her English was excellent, her manner smiling and serene. She was tireless in serving on committees for the aid of war refugees, orphans, and workers’ co-operatives.