“If you go to Chungking,” declared the doctor, “you will surely not be permitted to travel to Yenan; the mere request would cause you to be marked as dangerous characters, and you would probably not get to travel anywhere. Nor can you travel toward Yenan from here; you would be halted at every military post.”
“Couldn’t we get up some pretext that would take us near Yenan?”
“Even if you did, you couldn’t cross the border.”
“You mean there is no intercourse whatever?”
“No trade is allowed; but sometimes there is officially-sanctioned exchange of products. They need our rice, and we need their oil and other products.”
“What would happen if we were caught trying to get smuggled across?”
“The Chinese who helped you would be promptly shot; and you yourselves would be taken to the headquarters of General Hu Tsung-nan. He is a very charming little gentleman—was one of the Gissimo’s fellow-students at the Whampoa Military Academy and commands his choicest crack troops—so precious that they have never yet been used against the Japs.”
“And what will he do to us?”
“He will no doubt have delightful chats with you, since he is interested in the outside world and misses it in the lonely barren country where he is stationed. He will consider you two greatly misguided souls, and will endeavor to persuade you of the error of your notions regarding China. But I hardly think he will put you in one of his reform schools.”
“Oh!—he has reform schools?”
“A polite name he gives to his concentration camps. He is disturbed because so many of the young people from our best families have heard about the work the Border Government is doing, especially the universities for both boys and girls. They want to go there and study—even if they have to walk all the way. General Hu’s soldiers catch them and they are put in schools and taught what wicked ideas the Reds hold, and they are not let loose until the authorities are convinced they are completely cured.”
“A curious thing,” remarked Lanny, “how the world has become the same everywhere. I know of labor schools in several parts of England and America, and some of our best families would like to do exactly that with sons and daughters who take an interest in them.”
“It would appear that the same forces are at work,” replied the other. “I don’t know much about politics myself. I don’t have time to study it.”
“Tell me this, Doctor. What will General Hu do if he should find that he cannot convert us?”
“He will doubtless send you to Chungking, and they will make another attempt.”
“And then?”
“They are polite to Americans, and especially to those who have money and might command publicity. They will let you stay, and set spies to watch your every move. Anybody who talks to you will be marked for life; so pretty soon you will ask to be helped on your way and they will help you.”
“That doesn’t sound so very bad,” commented Lanny. “What do you say, Laurel?”
“I want very much to try it,” remarked the spunky lady. “We must promise never to tell anybody that Dr. Carroll gave us encouragement.”
There was a twinkle in the doctor’s tired gray eyes.
II
They spent a couple of weeks at the mission, resting and discussing the problem of their next move. It was a great temptation to choose the easy way. There was a commercial airline to Chungking, and they could take a plane, fly out by way of Calcutta, and be at home, perhaps in a week. No more dirt, no more discomfort, no more water boiling! But Laurel wanted to see the future, and make sure whether it really worked. She wasn’t satisfied with the suggestion of the two doctors, that she visit some of the Red “islands” which were closer to them. These were great tracts where the Japs had never penetrated, and where the Communists held complete sway; one was near Hengyang, another near Canton—they had passed along its borders. But the writer said, No, to get any real material she would have to visit headquarters, the intellectual center. She was lured by the fact that no journalists had been there for a couple of years; and also by the fact that Lanny thought he could get into the Soviet Union.
Little by little the son of Budd-Erling discovered what it was going to be like, having a literary lady for a wife. She wasn’t going to give up her work; apparently that possibility hadn’t crossed her mind. She was a “born writer,” and went to her job in the same way that a humming bird goes to flowers, or to a saucer of sugar water if one is provided. A mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America in the riccbowl of China was a large platter to her, and she was on the wing all day. The students and teachers, the nurses and other workers, were glad to talk with her; the Americans were reminded of home, and the Chinese wanted to practice English; all were made happy by the idea of being written about. “A chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes”—a female chiel in this case, and in faith she would “prent it.” She shut herself up in a room with one of the mission typewriters and typed out the notes. One set she would put in an envelope and entrust to Althea to be mailed to New York—for mail was still going, by way of Chungking; the other set she would carry on her journey. She asked Lanny to help recall the details of life in Hongkong and on the way to the mission, and he typed that for her. She had more than one use for a husband, it appeared.
Lanny didn’t mind, for he had more than one use for a wife. He had been brought up as a little ladies’ man, and thought it was all right being managed when he had the right manager. He found what Laurel wrote worth while, and he was pleased to look at China through her keen eyes. In fact, this was what he had been asking for; he had seen Germany through her eyes, and the Coast of Pleasure, and London and New York; he had imagined himself looking at the whole United States, going to and coming from Hollywood. Now he would look at Red China, then at Red Russia, and it would all be according to plan. When he had recited the marriage service, for better, for worse, he had really meant it—but of course he meant it for better!
Althea’s mother, keeping the dark secret, cut open those “unchastity belts” with her own scissors and took out the gold coins. She had to admit that the idea was a clever one, so she made a clean specimen for Laurel to wear on the new journey—deducting only a few coins which the newlyweds insisted upon paying for their bed and board at the mission. Lanny got more money by the simple device of giving Dr. Carroll, senior, a check on a New York bank; in view of the war situation the physician said that he would rather have his savings in his home country. Lanny agreed that if he reached New York before the check came through, he would put the money to the doctor’s account and stop payment on the check.
III
They announced that they wished to try the venture, and so the elder doctor undertook to find the right sort of Chinese-speaking guide. Presently he produced a wiry black-haired little fellow of thirty or so, by the name of Han Hua. He spoke English of a mixed-up sort, and was obviously intelligent; the doctor said he was honest and would do whatever he agreed to.
Lanny and Laurel proceeded to interview him to find out if he was the proper person for them, and presently they realized that Han was interviewing them, in order to judge whether they were proper persons to be received by the Border Government. Lanny, experienced in intrigue, decided that he was some kind of agent; he never did tell what he was doing, but they guessed it had something to do with propaganda. The Gissimo’s friends resented the fact that the Reds carried on propaganda within Central Government territory, and they called it a violation of the truce. But Han said that the Chungking crowd was carrying on only a halfway war against the Japs; their troops didn’t know what it was all about, and had to be kidnaped and forced to fight. The Border Government educated its people, and anybody who absorbed its ideas became a volunteer, ready to give his life for the cause of true and complete freedom. Wasn’t that helpful, even among the Gissimo’s own men?
Lanny guessed that a dossier was being prepared upon himself and wife, and he went back to the manners and la
nguage of his old Pink days. He told how he had helped to finance a labor school on the French Riviera, and another in Berlin; how he had been put out of Italy more than seventeen years ago for trying to send out of the country the facts about the murder of the Socialist Matteotti. He said that he was a personal friend of President Roosevelt and was going to make a report to him on present conditions in both Red republics. He guessed that Han wouldn’t believe this, but he would know that it was a good story, calculated to grease the wheels. By a happy thought Lanny mentioned that he had read Daughter of Earth some years ago, and they had just been reading aloud Comrade Smedley’s newest book about China. By the time he finished this discourse, the Chinese Red was completely warmed up, and said he thought it would be “good good thing” if this American couple would learn to know the new world of the north, and report it correctly to the American people.
“But how can we get a permit to travel to the border?” demanded Lanny.
Han wasn’t so discouraging as the elderly doctor. He said that the underground had various ways of arranging such matters; their representatives had to travel, and they did. Of course it wouldn’t be so easy with white people, who couldn’t be disguised. It might be a question of buying a permit from some local official of the Chungking government. Han explained that the Communists had abolished corruption, by applying the death penalty; but Chungking was riddled with it, and, naturally, the Reds took advantage of the fact, in defending themselves against the cruel blockade which kept out even American medical goods. Han said at a guess that for two thousand Chinese dollars he could get them a valid permit to travel to South Shensi, where the Reds could take charge of them and smuggle them across the border by night.
Lanny was agreeable to this proposal, and added that he would be glad to pay this class-conscious agent another two thousand to act as guide and interpreter on the trip. That wasn’t any bribe, for Lanny assumed that Han would be acting with the approval of his superiors, or of his group, which, no doubt, was working in Hengyang at risk of life.
Han returned after a couple of days and reported that his “friends” had approved the proposal and that the travel permit could be obtained. So then came a busy period of preparation. They bought long sheepskin coats with wool inside, and woolen underclothing and socks. They filled their duffelbags with all the comforts needed for a long and uncertain journey. In the great city of Hengyang you could buy anything, it appeared, if you knew where to go and let a Chinese do the bargaining. Generally the price would be cut by two-thirds, but don’t imagine that you could do that offhand, and without a lot of arguing back and forth.
Their kind host provided them with a letter to the head of a mission in Hupeh Province, more than half way to their goal; this would serve as “cover,” in the event that their purposes were closely questioned. The doctor said that the Hupeh mission might be able to provide them with some pretext for continuing on in the territory controlled by the polite and cultured General Hu Tsung-nan. “Do whatever Han tells you,” said the elder Dr. Carroll, with one of those eye twinkles they had learned to recognize. “He has very useful connections.”
IV
Bright and early one morning toward the end of January the expedition set forth. Althea and Laurel dropped tears, for they had become warm friends; they promised to write to each other as soon as it was possible, and Laurel promised to take over the water-boiling ritual. All supplies had been provided, all debts paid, and a new life was beginning, a new world opening up. Laurel looked picturesque in sheepskin trousers, seated in her palanquin; the whole mission turned out to see her off and shout and sing good-by. She had made people love her, and they were certain that by the power of her pen she was going to bring American aid to China immediately upon her arrival.
The first stage of their journey was by a small steamer down the Siang River, and their first destination was the mountain resort of Hengshan, close to the river. Lanny didn’t wish to forget entirely that he was an art expert, and he wanted to be able to produce evidence of such activity when questioned by the military. There were ancient art objects at Hengshan, which had been the favorite resort of the highly cultivated poet-emperor, Chien Lung, of the eighteenth century. A bus carried them up to the place, and they spent that night in a comfortable inn.
They were on their way into the rice bowl. Changsha lay less than a day’s journey ahead, but that city had been wrecked and was still being bombed by the frustrated Japs, so they would turn off to the northwest, by the shores of the great lake of Tung-ting. This lake and a chain of others form a sort of reservoir of the Yangtse River which cuts across China from east to west. The river and the lakes form the rice bowl; their marshy shores are like the delta of the Nile and that of the Mississippi. In rainy weather the causeways called roads are all but impassable; you would slip off them or get stuck in them. That was what had defeated the Japanese invader in the great battle of Changsha which had just been fought. Those storms which had made things so uncomfortable for the American trio had saved the rice bowl for Free China.
Now the sun smiled on them, and they took off their sheepskin coats and laid them across their laps. The bus was the best they had yet seen in China, and while it was jammed, the polite passengers showed their respect for President Roosevelt by avoiding to crowd the American tourists. They gazed on endless rice fields—nearly always small plots, cultivated with the endless personal care of a land where human labor is the cheapest of all commodities. Each step they took carried them farther from the equator and nearer to the Arctic ice cap; for that, too, they could find compensation—the big black mosquitoes would be fewer, and soon would be gone entirely.
Many rivers flow into Tung-ting, and all those on the south and west had to be crossed. At the biggest river they changed busses; the passengers crossed on small ferryboats, using sails, poles, and long four-man sculls; it took a lot of time and also of yelling. The Chinese apparently could not work together without a great deal of noise, and making it seemed to be one of their greatest pleasures in life. They all wanted to talk to the Americans, and Han was eager to assist. One of the early Christian fathers had said that when he was in Rome he did as the Romans did; and on this principle Laurel would carry on conversations with the interpreter’s help. Han would talk loudly, for the benefit of the whole bus, and Laurel did not rebuke him, because she saw what pleasure it gave to all. When she asked the man why the Chinese always shouted, he told her the custom had been started by an emperor who was suspicious of his subjects and decreed the death penalty for anybody observed to be whispering.
V
Han Hua was a part of China, and they studied him all the way. He was incessantly talkative, and delighted to tell the story of his life. He had been born a peasant in the south, a district where the wealthy landlords had named the magistrate. Little Han had heard of the concept of justice—he called it cheng yi—but he had seen very little of it in action. At the age of thirteen he had joined the Red Army, and there had begun to pick up an education. He had learned to read and write, and since then had read every scrap of printed material he could get hold of. His present employers soon realized that one of his reasons, perhaps the principal reason for taking this job, was the chance it offered to improve his English. It wasn’t long before Lanny was saying to his wife—in French—that the only fault he had to find with the Red regime of China was that it caused Han Hua to ask so many questions.
Truly embarrassing questions! Was everybody in America as rich and beautiful as in the movies they sent to the Far East? And was it true that everybody had a vote—or were there Negroes who weren’t allowed to vote? And was it true that the police ever beat up strikers, after the fashion which Han had seen in Old China? And why was it that the South, most revolutionary part of China, was the least revolutionary part of the United States? And why had the Americans sold scrap iron and oil to the Japs when it had been so obvious that the Japs were going to use the stuff against America? And how did it happen that the Ameri
cans had no language of their own? And why were there so many strange ways of spelling words? How could it be that “through” didn’t rhyme with “rough”? To say nothing of “plough” and “cough” and “hiccough”! Lanny had to admit that many things in the Englishman’s language could have been improved. Han said he was glad that matters had been arranged more sensibly in Mandarin.
This secret agent of revolution would get hold of a newspaper in towns through which they passed. (Lanny was astonished to learn that there were some sixteen hundred newspapers published in Free China at war.) He would read a paragraph and then turn round and tell his employers what it said. If it was news from home he would explain it, and if it was news from abroad he would ask them to explain it. Sitting in an inn waiting for their food, he would require Lanny to draw him a map showing the states of the United States, and he would write down populations and data such as that; he would cherish those scraps of paper to study. But why did American states have such queer names as Massachusetts and Connecticut? And why did Americans eat so much food? A Chinese worker could get more out of one grain of rice than an American could get out of a handful of wheat.
In short, here was the proletariat in process of awakening, in the rice bowl of China as in the bread basket of the Ukraine and among the sharecroppers of Arkansas and Oklahoma. “Workers of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!” Han Hua was Red China in miniature; and as he came to know his employers better and to understand that, fabulously rich though they were, they were yet willing to see the land owned by those who worked it and the tools of industry owned by those who used them, he opened his heart and provided “Mary Morrow” with so many stories and picturesque phrases that she couldn’t find time enough to jot them down.