But by the time he had run back to the bridge, the sampan was gone.
Actually Ao Ling was back in Hunan, a soldier in the army of General Ho Chien, at the time of his conversion.
That was in 1927. All Hunan and Kiangsi were in a turmoil. The Northern troops had come and gone: but now a new sort of warfare had begun. For no sooner was the Kuomintang safely in the ascendant than it split from top to bottom—Right from Left. Borodin and the Russians were sent packing. Communists, big and little, were slaughtered wherever they could be caught. For no one is so merciless to the Left as the old revolutionary: and chronologically it was Chiang Kai-shek’s government at Nanking, not the Nazi government of Hitler, which can claim the honour of being the second of the world’s fascist movements (Stalin of course only comes fourth).
Yet some of the leading Communists escaped the proscription; and raising their standard here and there, found no lack of adherents. Mao Tse-tung, for instance: a slatternly peasant-politician of thirty, with an educated and humorous mind. And Chu Teh: a comfortably-off, aristocratic, middle-aged, opium-smoking Brigadier-general, who had renounced everything to kiss the Hammer and Sickle: and who was a strategist, moreover, of the first class.
Mao, working from Changsha (the provincial capital) roused the peasants of Hunan to revolt; and presently marched south with them to the mountains of the Kiangsi border. The reformed Chu Teh, who had led his troops with him out of Nanchang, marched west, into these same mountains.
So this brilliant and incongruous pair joined forces, and established themselves first in Chingkangshan.
But of all this, of course, Ao Ling knew little at that time. Only that Old Sly-boots His Excellency Ho Chien was sending the force to which he belonged into the mountains, to fight the “bandits.”[1] Those mountains, that he already knew so well. Old Sly-boots was an efficient commander, whose troops went where he told them. And so, shouldering their umbrellas, their huge straw hats flapping on their backs, some carrying song-birds in cages, and a few even carrying rifles, the Government forces moved to the attack.
That was the point at which Ao Ling’s mind went blank, so far as his own experiences were concerned. How had he found himself in the ranks of that Red Army he had been sent to fight? He hardly knew. There were plenty of other deserters, like himself: they went over in small groups, all the time—as they had always been accustomed to do, in these local wars. Ling must have gone with a group like that: perhaps even guided them.
He had certainly no notion, as he trotted across to the enemy lines, that this was the beginning of a new life for him: that it was more than a change of leaders: that it would come to mean, to him, what the Road to Damascus meant to St. Paul.
Yet that is what happened. He absorbed the Marxist doctrine like a thirsty animal drinking. It refreshed every corner of his soul. For it freed him from his three great fears: fear of his father, fear of the supernatural, fear of the rich. Moreover it harnessed the three hatreds born of those fears, and told him they were proper and right—not the secret scars of a wandering outcast, but the honourable badges of a fraternity. In setting him to fight the government it made his father hydra-headed—and gave him a sword for every neck.
He remembered the old life clearly, but it meant nothing to him any more—almost it might have happened to someone else. Like those memories of an earlier life on earth which a re-incarnate might preserve, who had somehow avoided Mother Mêng’s potion of oblivion.
Ling, who had never been able to work even for himself for more than a few months at a time, now found himself prepared to work his whole life for the sake of the New China: for the dawn of the Red Star. He developed a great natural aptitude for learning, which he had never guessed he had in him: gulping books and lectures with an almost appalling voracity: and presently, delivering passable lectures himself.
But it was not so much his book-learning that first brought him into public notice as the almost uncanny skill he developed at ping-pong; a craze for which was then already sweeping the entire Red Higher Command like a fever.
II
All that winter they were beleaguered in Chingkangshan: and once again Ao Ling tasted bark soup. But in the spring of ’29 the Red Army burst its bounds: fought its way out of the ring surrounding it and went off campaigning and preaching in southern Kiangsi. But in the sortie, the patrol which Ao Ling now commanded got separated from the Army: and presently Ao Ling got separated from his patrol. He was suddenly alone.
The effect on him was immediate and terrifying: he felt himself shrinking, shrivelling. All that winter he had been not a person, but a unit in a great fraternity, all members of one body. Now he was alone. He was no longer a patrol-commander, working his way, according to Hoyle, down the Western System of Defiles: he was a lonely man with a stubbed toe, hobbling down a steep, stone-flagged path: approaching through a clump of firs a little Taoist temple, on the walls of which huge anti-communist posters flamed. Before the door the abbot sat, playing on a zither.
Up in the mountains he had been wallowing for six months in the life of the spirit, in communion. But now the illusion of the Red-Dust was on him again: once more the visible world existed. He became again clearly conscious of the familiar country round him: the tree-capped crags, the little verdant valleys. The smoke rising from the grey villages. The comfortable country-houses, black and white timber-and-plaster beneath their curly eaves. The deeply-lowing, reddish cattle. A pathetic donkey with a weight tied to its tail, so that it might not lift it—and being unable to lift it, might not bray.
The Red Army was God-knows-where—certainly it had not passed that way. He could rejoin it later. The first thing for Ao Ling to do, a communist and a deserter from Ho Chien’s army, was to get out of the Province of Hunan.
As if he were aware of the stranger’s thoughts, the abbot laid down his zither and remarked placidly:
“When a tiger is expected in the path, it is foolish to remain and tickle its nostrils with a straw.”
“I wash my ears, Old Immortal, and listen with reverence,” Ao Ling replied—forgetting, for the moment, his anti-clericalism.
The sun showed him which was the south; and so at a steady trot, in spite of his stubbed toe, he set out for the borders of Kwangtung. It took him five days to reach an escarpment from which he could see, below, the Pei river running through the tufted pinnacles of rock which line its bed. On the Pei river he took passage, unknown, in a boat for Canton.
But Canton, even, was no place for a known Communist: the proscription still raged. It was impossible to rejoin the Red Army—for its whereabouts were too uncertain. So Ao Ling put himself at the disposal of the Party: and the Party provided him with a set of genuine-looking seaman’s papers. With their aid he was signed on the “Archimedes,” then lying at Hongkong.
III
It was no part of the contract, when the Party by a stroke of the pen converted Ao Ling into a Fireman of three years’ standing, that he should spread communism among the crew of the “Archimedes.” The time for action of that kind was not ripe: there was little to gain by a few abortive mutinies. They had enough on their hands already, with the forces of the Kuomintang to resist, without exasperating the Powers into giving those forces more aid than they were giving already.
Ao Ling did not even carry with him any Marxist texts, for private devotion: the risk of discovery was too great. Consequently he was able to give the whole force of his new-found powers of learning to his old passion for machinery. There would be need, he knew very well, some day in the New China of men who could tend machines with skill. The raw material of engineers is rarer than the raw material of political martyrs.
And yet, at this moment, he was tempted very sorely. He knew that though these seamen were now sitting harmlessly listening to the story-teller, it would not be difficult to turn their minds to serious things. Being by nature stubbornly slaves, they would under ordinary conditions have been hard to rouse against the Imperialists: but this was a speci
al moment, which would pass, and perhaps not return. Their heavy minds were now light with hunger and terror: easily swayed.
He felt a sudden conviction of power, surging into his finger-tips. He could stand up and speak: make these men follow him. They could over-power the officers, seize the ship. You can see that the temptation would be terrific, to a man who had never before been able to do anything effective on his own. At the thought of this God-the-Father of a Captain, reduced to an ordinary man—naked, but for his clothes—Ao Ling felt his muscles tremble, and a momentary flash of red light seemed to come out of the lantern.
Yes, he could do it.
But he had not the right. To act on his own, contrary to the express orders of the Party, was to be the worst sort of traitor. Duty utterly forbade it.
But was it only duty which made him open his fist, as it were, and let the opportunity slip through it? Or was it an older compulsion? At least, the feeling of collapse, as the erectile power in him ebbed and seemed to run out through the soles of his feet, was itself no new sensation to Ao Ling.
Henry Tung was telling them how he had dined once with some Taoists. As it grew dark, they had no lantern: so the eldest priest cut a moon out of white paper, and pinned it on the wall: where it hung, and flooded the whole room with light. It was certainly the real moon: for if you looked carefully you could see Hêng O herself, the Moon-Fairy, sitting there among the cinnamon-groves; her jade-white hare at her side. Presently the whole party stepped up into the moon—Henry and all, he said—to take a drink with the lady. But it was too cold, in those frozen horizons, to stop there long.
“I can cap that!” said Ao Ling suddenly: and burst forth into the most extraordinary story of a thing that had happened, he said, at the country inn at which he once worked. Two travellers had been sitting late over their supper, when they saw a girl’s head poking through the wall and laughing at them. One of the travellers jumped up: but the head withdrew, leaving the wall as before. This happened several times. So he grew angry: and drawing a knife, crept on hands and knees to the foot of the wall, and waited. Presently the head popped through again, and he slashed up at the white throat with all his might. He cut the head clean off: it rolled on the floor all bloody:
“Loud cries! The landlord rushed in. There was the knife. The bleeding head still blinked its eyes. But wonder! There was no hole in the wall! No mark upon it! No body!—The men were arrested: but no body was ever found....”
“All man listen my talkee!” said a startling, clear voice.
Every eye turned towards where the pin-point of an electric torch was aimed at them. Behind it, they could just see the Captain: and with him, Mr. Soutar and Mr. Watchett. He stepped forward into the lantern-light, an officer at each shoulder. Mr. Soutar was making signs: trying to point out Henry Tung to him.
“Sea too much bobbery? No can catchee chow-chow, heh?” he began, and took their silence for agreement. Then he went on to point the moral: “I makee my pidgin, you makee your pidgin, good Joss! Ship can reach port! All man work hard can catchee cumshaw!”
“Cumshaw” means “bonus.” Instantly before each brightening inward eye silver dollars danced on a wooden desk.
He paused for a moment, before advancing the second side of his argument, and put his hand into his pocket.
“—Suppose you makee trouble? My got irons. You no forget my got this piecee!” He brought his hand out suddenly, with a revolver in it. “My no wantchee bobbery!”
He paused again, to let the position sink in: for it had better, before he came to the third phase of the matter. Then suddenly he burst out in a trumpeting sternness:
“My plenty savvy have got this place one piecee bad man! No belong sailorman, belong pilate man! Velly bad man! Velly bad joss!”
Suddenly he spun round, pointing his revolver at Ao Ling.
“Arrest that man, Mr. Watchett,” he said.
Dick sprang forward with alacrity—with far too much, being unused to making an arrest: and almost tumbled on top of Ao Ling. All the faces of the crew were turned towards them, like surprised moons, and Mr. Soutar spluttered, “But ... but ...”
Dick seized one wrist; fumbled with the handcuffs, and dropped them. Ao Ling, terrified, put up his other hand to shield his face. Dick, surprised at the sinewy strength of the wrist he held, and thinking the other meant a blow, clenched his fist and drove hard at Ao Ling’s cheek. The sinewy wrist relaxed, limp as a girl’s: Ao Ling fell back, and Dick handcuffed him as he lay.
“I’ve known about this man for a long time, Mr. Soutar,” the Captain said in an aside: “He came on board at Hongkong with forged papers. I got a wireless from the Hongkong police, asking me to arrest him. He’s a well-known bandit, by what they say.”
“You’ve known it a long time, Sir?”
“Yes; but I had not meant to make the arrest till we got to port. But now you come and tell me trouble is brewing: seemed a good chance. You saw for yourself he was the real ring-leader, he was haranguing them nineteen to the dozen. I don’t think there will be any trouble after this—your Master Henry will pipe down.”
He turned again to the Chinese.
“That man belong plenty bad man! You have look-see what fashion my makee with bad man: my catchee him takee lock-up. You good man, you no fear. Makee your pidgin, obey order chop-chop, good joss! Bymeby can come port pay plenty cumshaw: pay all man two dollar!”
Most of his hearers smiled. They were not much concerned about Ao Ling: what they were concerned about was getting justice for themselves. Well, they were to have it: a cumshaw (bonus) was justice. Two dollars a cataclysm: that was ample justice.
Captain Edwardes’s conscience, however, was not too comfortable. His behaviour he felt, had not been as scrupulous as he liked it to be towards Chinese. And yet, if Mr. Soutar was right, surely the coup was justified. As for young Watchett’s bungling and violence, Captain Edwardes felt deeply to blame for it.
Ao Ling was handcuffed now: but he was still knocked out. They could not wait for him to revive: too much of an anti-climax. So Dick, blushing rather ashamedly at the unnecessary force he had used, bent to pick the man up.
He was astonished at the softness, now, of the limp body in his arms: the smoothness of the skin: and his shame grew. Ao Ling hanging limp like that in his arms, was almost as light as Sukie had been.
Mr. Soutar helping him, he carried Ao Ling to the Hospital (as a convenient cell for the moment): laid him more gently on the bed than a policeman should: and locked him in.
[1] The government made a practice of referring to the Communist forces as “bandits.” But the word has not quite the same connotation as in English. The Chinese bandit does not operate solely for gain: the game, for that alone, would not be worth the candle. He is often moved by a strong moral principle as well. Banditry (before the appearance of Communism in China) used to absorb what in Europe would have become revolutionary elements. But it is characteristic that where the European revolutionary is out to overthrow the social system, the Chinese bandit only repairs it: for economically, he serves the useful purpose of keeping wealth circulating. When caught he is, of course, executed.
Chapter XII
(Sunday)
It seemed Captain Edwardes was a good judge of “Joss”: or else he had looked at the barometer. Anyhow, the barometer had already risen at the time he arrested Ao Ling, and it continued to rise all the night, and with dawn the wind noticeably slackened. By nine o’clock it was certain and plain, that the sucking of the storm had relaxed its hold on them: that they were at last spewed out. I do not mean that the storm was over, it continued on its course with equal fury: but the “Archimedes” was no longer in it. She had fallen out of the back.
The wind was no more, now, than a strong breeze—a yachtsman’s gale. The ship lay with her nose generally north-east, and what wind there was varied from south-west to west—was almost directly aft.
Everybody knows that a boat under sail does not roll as badly as
a motor-boat. The wind holds on to the sail; and steadies her, whatever the waves may be up to. But should a sudden calm drop, while the sea is still rough, she will roll till your teeth rattle. Something of the same sort happened now. While the hurricane lasted the “Archimedes” had been pinned down almost as if her slab sides were working-canvas: the seas could not do with her altogether according to their whim. But now that the steadying hurricane was relaxed, there was nothing to restrain her motion: she danced like a frenzied cork, she rolled as she had never rolled since the weather began. What little on board of her had not smashed before, smashed now. The few remaining life-boats kicked out their chocks, and with broken backs somersaulted in their falls: the saloon table, bolted to the deck, snapped off its own legs. There was an unmusical clanging everywhere like abominable bells. Wire guys parted; or, with a small remnant of their object weighting the loose end, cracked like whips. Looked on as a pandemonium, the ship was worse than she had ever been.
Moreover the seas were coming up astern, pooping her. No one could have done any oiling now in the after latrines, they were spouting like geysers. The bulkheads of the after-castle were being stove in, one after another: water was pouring over the steering engine. The seas began to come clean over the after-castle, their weight levering the forward end of the ship sometimes right out of the water. When they did that, of course, much of the water went down the gap in No. 6 hatch: reducing that perilous margin very fast.
Dick Watchett could hardly believe his senses, when he found that the wind had dropped, and the risen barometer proved that this was no “centre” again, but at last the storm’s periphery. He hurried to the Bridge—to get the good news confirmed. He found the Captain and Mr. Buxton in the chartroom, both holding on to the built-in chart-roller.