The grapevine had brought two items of news to the village. First, there was a Japanese offensive under way north from Canton, following the railroad; and second, there was a great battle being fought at the gates of Changsha, the principal city of what is called the “rice bowl of China.” It lies on the railroad that runs from Canton and Hankow through Central China. The Japs were in possession of both ends of the line, and if they came down from the north and up from the south at the same time they would cut Free China into two halves, an eastern and a western.
The significance of this to the refugees was obvious. They had a map with them but didn’t need to study it, having done so at Mr. Foo’s. Althea’s home lay close to the railroad, less than a hundred miles south of Changsha, and if the enemy won the battle, there might soon be no mission to go to. The other item of news was no less disturbing, for if the offensive from Canton succeeded, the Japs would cut across the route the Americans were proposing to take. At present they and the Japs were moving northward on parallel lines, the Japs having the advantage of a railroad and two rivers, whereas the Americans had only country roads.
They mentioned this fact to the tax collector, Mr. Feng, and his almond eyes twinkled. “You forget,” Althea translated, “Japanese have armies facing them at both ends of line. American gentleman and ladies have only friends in all China, help them along fast!” He went on to mention that Changsha had been taken once before by the Japs, but they had been forced to abandon it, and this might happen again. In the end the foe might succeed in taking the entire railroad, but it would not be very soon.
Mr. Feng said that the grapevine had brought the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and they understood that the Americans were their full allies at last. Why didn’t they come at once? Lanny had to explain that they could not come for a long time, for the Americans were a peaceable people like the Chinese, and it would take time to convert their industry to the ends of war. “Tell him that China must hold out!” To this Mr. Feng replied that China would do so, but it was very hard, because of the scarcity of everything, and their money losing its value.
The official invited them to his home, where they could be made more comfortable; but Althea replied that they had made arrangements at this inn, and if they were now to leave, it would be taken as a discourtesy, a criticism of the service they had received. The other admitted that this was true, and he was impressed by their willingness to live like the Chinese people and share their hardships. He told them the good news that from here on there was a canal. Waterways had been for hundreds of years the principal method of travel in Kwangtung and the boats were comfortable. With this assurance they slept soundly, and to their surprise forgot the hard couch.
VII
Their attentive friend had taken their passports, and next morning he came again, returning these, and with them an official-looking paper with Chinese printing and writing on it and those rubber stampings which are common to all lands. It was, he said, a military permit for the three to travel to Hengyang; it would be impossible for them to continue without it. China was at war, and was compelled to keep watch against spies of the Tokyo government, and of its puppet, the Nanking government, and sometimes, alas, of the Yenan government. How Mr. Feng had got this document he did not say, but he dropped a hint that it was not in his own department, and that he had had not a little difficulty in arranging matters. The doctor whispered to Lanny that Mr. Feng would expect some material thanks, and that one thousand depreciated dollars ought to he about right. Lanny took the gentleman aside and everybody’s face was saved. They were glad to have this document, for many times they were stopped by gendarmes and required to show it, and several times they had to stop at police stations and fill out questionnaires.
The journey continued. They were being very aristocratic and having a boat to themselves. It was about fifteen feet long, flat-bottomed; lean, active yellow men propelled it with poles, and never once lost their balance or their amiable expressions. One of them remarked to Althea with a grin: “Beat Japanese Army!”—so evidently Mr. Feng had enlisted their patriotic sentiments. The passengers, reclining luxuriously on wooden couches, surveyed the fields of Kwangtung Province, green in winter.
Rain came up, and at noon they stopped under the shelter of a bullock shed, generously shared by these patient animals. The boatmen ate the bowl of rice which they carried and drank the rain water which they gathered in their hats—a simple process of turning the hat upside down and standing under it with their mouths wide open to catch the dripping stream. Lanny asked the medical lady if the rainwater of China was apt to be infected with the bacillus of dysentery, and she said no, but the hats surely were. She explained why the coolies did not all die—that those who were subject to the disease had been dying off through the centuries.
The rain ceased, and the sun came out, and then they missed the rain on account of the heat. They adopted as their practice to start the long boat ride at the first streak of dawn, and at noon to find a teahouse or other place where they could rest and perhaps doze under the shelter of reed mats, resuming their journey when the afternoon was half over. They blessed the Chinese teahouses, which are, as the coffeehouses were in old London and the corner drugstores are in America, places of congregation and refreshment, where you can meet the people and hear talk. Those in China are larger, because there are more customers; unlike the peasants in the fields, the townsmen appeared to have plenty of leisure, or at any rate they took it. In the shops you would always find more clerks than customers—and far more clerks than articles to be sold, according to-Laurel, who hadn’t yet got adjusted to life in a world at war. Lanny assured her: “When we get back to America, we may be surprised to discover how much like China it has become!”
They wondered what was happening at home; they wondered what was happening in Britain and in Europe, in Manila and Hongkong and Singapore. But they didn’t have much chance to think about it; their time and thought went to just keeping alive, to holding themselves above the level of discomfort on which these people lived. Speaking as a physician, Althea said that very few among this human mass were healthy; she pointed out the signs of overwork and undernourishment, and of the painful infections which flourished. To see the people smiling, and grateful for the smallest kindness, was infinitely touching; the superior beings who were passing through, skimming the surface of so much human misery, felt themselves guilty, charged themselves before the bar of their own conscience.
VIII
All this time the newly married couple had no privacy whatever. Even when they got a separate room, it was only one, and there was no way to explain that a traveling lord didn’t want both his wives in the room with him. To put one of them away by herself would have been to humiliate her, to excite gossip; possibly it might have been unsafe for her. When she went to boil the water, she established herself as Number Two wife; and meantime the lord would sit on a plank beside his fair-haired and very lovely Number One, and smile upon her and say: “I love you.” The watching, audience could interpret the smile correctly.
“Darling,” Lanny would plead, “accustom yourself to public life. You are acting in a play, and the audience is completely absorbed in it.”
Hard for a lady from Baltimore, but she realized that it is no fun traveling unless you conform to the customs of the country. So, when they entered a crowded tearoom—men only—she would bow in stage-queen manner and give them a smile of royalty. Then, while the Number Two went about a servant’s duties, she would entertain her lord and master with cheerful conversation. When he asked: “Are you happy?” she would reply: “I am alive, and so is my husband.” When he asked solicitously: “Are you feeling all right?” she would say: “I am getting tough. In a little while I’ll be ready to take up my bag and walk.”
But of course that wouldn’t have done in China. Not even a bandit’s lady would have behaved so. “And especially not in your condition!” Lanny would say. He ventured to make jokes about it, for aft
er all, she was his wife, though as yet in name only.
Little by little she accustomed herself to the idea that the most public place cm be private, if you don’t recognize the difference. If Chinese men enjoyed seeing the lovelight in the eyes of a lady from the opposite side of the world, what harm could it do? Maybe it would send them home to be kinder to their own wives. The horror of footbinding was pretty much ended in China, Althea assured them, but the manifold exploitation of women went on everywhere throughout the Orient. So this pair continued their gentle wooing from one town of Kwangtung to the next, and the spectators gave every sign of finding the performance to their taste.
The land rose as they got farther from the sea, and so they parted from their genial boatmen. The weather stayed almost as hot, but there was less moisture in the air and the mosquitoes were not so numerous. The gentle slopes of the hills were carefully terraced, and the bright green spread of teaplants delighted the eye. They took to “chairs” again. They rode for a while, then walked for a while; their human beasts of burden walked all the time, and seemed to find it unprecedented that people should use their own legs when they were paying good money for other people’s legs. Doubtless the well-to-do Chinese would have told the visitors that they were setting a bad precedent, demoralizing the livery service of the land. The doctor said that missionaries heard the same complaint; they were accused of spreading ideas and stirring up the people—the same charge which had been brought against Jesus, in another land where riches and poverty had dwelt side by side for ages. The complaint against the missionaries was brought with special bitterness by the “old China hands,” the whites who had come here to make money and stayed to make more. These held the missions to blame for the revolution, the Reds, and all the turmoil of the past quarter century.
IX
In the distance they could see the blue Nan-ling mountains, which form the boundary between Kwangtung and Hunan Provinces. They were told that from the next town a bus line went through these mountains. The bus was always crowded, but in China the poor were put off, and the rich and important traveled; it had always been that way, and apparently no one thought of changing it. The three had to show their precious military permit; and after it had been inspected and stamped, and they had paid enough paper dollars, a bench was assigned to them, just wide enough for the three to squeeze into. The bus rattled, but it ran; and they were glad, because they had been told that they would have had trouble in finding coolies to take them through the mountains. Not that the burden bearers minded the climb, but they were afraid of bandits, also of demons, which swarm in the wild places.
The foothills were bare of trees and appeared to be grazing land, though there was plenty of rice wherever water was available. They came to a town which appeared as one great market for chickens, brought in from all the countryside. Processions of coolies went by them, laden with baskets and crates full of live hens and roosters: the cackling and crowing in the town added a new note to the racket which is apparently necessary to the happiness of the Chinese populace. The travelers feasted on chicken and rice at a stopping place, and again the bus set our, climbing steadily.
The mountains are not very high, but there are many of them; the trip took a full day, and they saw no bandits, only a squad of government soldiers who had been hunting deserters and were leading a string of them bound with ropes, very miserable-looking fellows. They heard more about the recruiting process; soldiers swooped down on a village and all able-bodied men ran to hide, but some were caught and carried off. The travelers were pained by this sight; a Chinese who didn’t love the Chungking government explained that the rich were allowed to buy their way out of military service, and the poor were drafted even when they were not liable by law.
They were surprised to find that there were still forests in the mountains of South China, but the process of stripping them was going on continually. Timber was being cut, and the cutters didn’t in the least mind felling a tree across the toad and obliging a bus to wait until the debris had been cleared. Cool mountain streams tempted the travelers, but the stern warden of their health forbade them to drink even this water unboiled. For an hour or two they enjoyed bracing cold, and then they were going down into Hunan Province and it was warm again. Twenty-seven million people lived in this province, according to the statistics, but Lanny doubted if anybody had counted them, ever from the beginning of time. In the highlands the peasants grew wheat, groundnuts, and a little tea; lower down it would be rice again—they were on the way to the “rice bowl.” To add savor to this number-one food, long trains of bearers carried baskets of coarse salt out of the hills. A stream flowed through the pass, and presently others joined it and there was water enough to float logs. The trees cut higher up had holes chopped through the end, and were dragged with ropes by a dozen coolies. That was the way you got a telephone or telegraph pole into your rice bowl!
X
A town of some size, and a teahouse with a wonderful rare treasure—a radio set! It was old and produced many extra noises, but you could hear broadcasts from Chungking, and Althea translated the news of the world. America was calling for an army of ten million men, and President Roosevelt had promised fifty thousand airplanes—many thousands for China. Hongkong had surrendered, and Manila was being attacked; so also the Dutch East Indies. Of more immediate concern, Chungking claimed a great victory at Changsha, the capital city of Hunan Province; the large and well-mechanized army of the Japanese had been routed and was in part surrounded. Also, the enemy offensive north of Canton had been checked. There was no longer any reason why the tourists should not head westward into the river valley which led to Althea’s home. They might even be able to get a ride on the railroad which the Japs weren’t going to get for some time!
Another crowded bus took them into the valley of the Lui-ho. This was almost civilization compared with the remote country they had crossed; but they found it no improvement, rather the opposite. They were in the backwash of war; endless trains of coolies carried supplies southward to the Canton front, while refugees and wounded men came from it; the sights were the most pitiful they had beheld. Food was scarce, prices higher, shelters more crowded. The river was low and even the smallest boats couldn’t get through. As for the railroad, their first look was terrifying, the trains were crowded with passengers, inside, outside, and on top. But Althea said: “This is China. We’ll get aboard!”
First they had to report to the military authorities and have their pass checked. Apparently it was in order, and everybody was very polite. Next they found the telegraph office. A curious thing: the operator did not know a word of English, but he was expert in sending the letters of the Morse code. China had an excellent telegraph network, and messages would go by radiogram from Chungking. Lanny filed a cablegram to his father, telling of his escape from Hongkong and his marriage, and asking him to notify Beauty, Irma, Rick, and Alston. He wasn’t sure if the message would ever arrive, but later on he learned that it had. Althea sent a message to her parents, which, oddly enough, failed to arrive.
They found a good inn, where they got plentiful buckets of hot water and took real baths. In the morning they were “chaired” to the railroad station, and Althea conferred with the official in charge. She told him about the important American emissary and paid him the proper cumshaw. It was an ancient custom, and when the jampacked train came in, the station master spoke to the conductor, who came to the American lady and got “his.” Apparently he had a compartment which he kept vacant for such emergencies. They were put into it, and the aged train staggered on its way.
With every li of the slow progress the air grew cooler, and also the crowds denser. The railroad was comparatively new, but the river had been here for ages, and the villages had been strung along it, sometimes with buildings overhanging the banks and always jammed one against the next. Paralleling the river was a highway, less than a dozen feet wide, hardly able to accommodate the human pack-animals going both ways. A town seemed
to go on forever, and perhaps it was more than one town—there was no way to be sure. Sitting by his wife’s side, looking out upon all this, Lanny exclaimed: “What a curious thing! You remember I told you about the scenes of China that I watched in a crystal ball?”
“Yes, very well.”
“Well, these are the scenes. They are so familiar, I can’t get over the feeling that I’ve been here before.”
“When did this begin, Lanny?”
“About three years ago. I stopped experimenting with the crystal ball because I couldn’t get anything but China, and I got tired of it.”
“That was after the astrologer told you about dying in Hongkong?”
“It was soon after, and of course I thought that might account for it—my subconscious mind had got a powerful impulse, and proceeded to put together everything I had read about this country. Now the correspondences keep striking me: these roads crowded with traffic, and the loads hanging from men’s shoulders; the carved gates across the road, the houses with curved double roofs, the square watch towers, the tall pagodas, like one roofed building on top of another. I even saw some of the men crippled and wounded.”
“But you knew that China was at war, Lanny!” She was so anxious that they should not fool themselves.
“I know. We can never be sure about it. But it’s so vivid, I can’t get over the feeling.”
“Yes, but it’s that way with dreams. Think how often our subconscious mind makes up elaborate fantasies, and when we wake up we have a hard time realizing that it didn’t happen. I have spent half a morning trying to convince myself that some unpleasant thing was entirely imaginary.”