Looking over my letters home during this period, I am impressed by the way I seem to have stretched the silver cord almost to breaking point. It is true that I seem to have talked now and then, vaguely, of coming home for a visit. I discover an indignant outburst directed against my agent, who evidently had dared to suggest that I return for a while just to get in touch with the market again, to learn what America was like, and perhaps to furbish up my English. Obviously my feeble gestures toward America were not sincere. There is more sincerity in a plan I made to persuade my mother to come out and visit me. We almost put it over. She was to buy a ticket, round trip to Manila, on one of those cruises, which few people were taking now that the Japanese had moved in so close. The idea was that she should get off in Shanghai and pick up the boat on its way back; thus she would have a fairly long visit without being in danger of forgetting to return, as her daughter had done for the past six years. Something I said had worried Mother and I suspect that is why she was girding up her loins to make the trip.
One of your recent letters, Mother [I wrote], sounds very agitated about my idea of having a baby. Calm yourself; I hereby promise not to, until I can Give It A Name. All right? All right. I wasn’t really serious, you know. Where would I put a baby? If you could only see how serious I am, and hardworking, and wholesome, and the old ladies’ favorite, you wouldn’t worry about me.
I’m not so sure Mother swallowed that. If my daughter ever writes a letter like that to me I’ll probably pack up straightaway and come running to see what it is all about. Mother couldn’t, though; there were too many other branches of the family needing her attention. In the meantime I couldn’t have been thinking very hard about that hypothetical baby. Mr. Mills in the past year had given me a good deal of trouble, just worrying about his happiness. He slept indoors, in a movable cage, but during the day he swung around in his outside cage, and when it was cold he wore a fur coat. It was made up of bits taken out of my Chinese sable coat and the tailor never charged me for the gibbon’s garments, but the fact that my pet wore sables made rather a scandal. People seemed to resent something else about him too — his diapers. I couldn’t understand why it annoyed them so much. To me it seemed the obvious way to keep him clean and comfortable. A gibbon is almost as easily housebroken as a dog. This was fortunate, because Mr. Mills lived a strangely civilized life. Sometimes he went downtown with me for lunch, and he attended so many cocktail parties that I received one nervous little invitation from an Englishwoman with a penciled note on the back: “Sorry we cannot extend invitation to Mr. Mills.” I was unreasonably angry and didn’t go to the party at all. The diaper idea, whatever could be urged against it, made him a much more acceptable caller. I suppose they didn’t like it because to a lot of people the very appearance of an anthropoid ape is insulting. Putting such human-style clothes as diapers on the animal just points the insult.
I bought a female gibbon at an outrageous price, considering that she was old and tired and evidently ill. Once I saw the animal I couldn’t leave her in the pet shop. She was chained by the neck to her basket, with only a foot-length of chain, and she was miserable. I bought her.
As soon as she came to the house I let her go and she climbed to the highest beam or curtain pole that she could find to sit on. After that we had to keep all the windows and doors closed, unless they were screened, for Mrs. Mills out in the open would just run away from everybody until she was shot or starved. She was a disappointment; her interest in Mr. Mills was that of a bored grandmother, and he wasn’t interested in her at all, once he had discovered that she didn’t feel playful. Little by little, though, she unbent. At first while I was romping and wrestling with Mills on the floor or the bed I would feel an iron grip on my sleeve, a sort of snatch, and I would look up to see Mrs. Mills retiring to her eyrie, making a threatening face at me. When she realized I wasn’t torturing another gibbon her patriotic spirit was soothed. It began to look as if she were jealous of our games. She looked down on them wistfully. But never, never could she bring herself to join in.
I did tame her to some extent. Nobody else could groom her, but I could. She climbed down and leaned on my lap when she saw me. Once when Peter, the enthusiastic Russian lady, dashed in and kissed me, Mrs. Mills bit her savagely, sinking her tusks in up to the gums. I was scared to death, but Peter as a gibbon lover refused to complain. Mrs. Mills lived in the house as a strange gray wraith, drifting about and picking up her food whenever it pleased her to do so. Unlike Mills, she had black markings, an apron effect down her front that made her seem indecently naked. She would float like that supernatural man in Dr. Caligari over the table when we were eating, swiping bread or bananas. She much preferred the food she stole to anything we gave her. But soon she sickened with pneumonia. Sinmay and I put on gloves and grappled with her successfully, putting a warm coat over her naked-looking body, and once she was dressed she liked it. But the poor old lady sniffled and coughed and weakened for about eight days, and then one night, after having rallied and eaten too much, she died.
Sinmay and Zoa were surprisingly sympathetic. They had been cross with me for buying her, but when she was dead they were kind, and offered me a room in their house until her ghost should have left my room. Still, they began to look worried when a pet dealer called me up and said that Singapore was sending him two young gibbons, a male and a female, on which he would give me first refusal.
“Thank goodness you are going away,” said Sinmay.
“But you can buy them for me,” I said sweetly. “Can’t you? I’ll leave the money here, and my people can take care of them. All winter they had better stay indoors. They won’t be used to this climate. I have ordered suits of clothes from the tailor already.”
He moaned in anguish.
There was a round of parties in farewell. Sir Victor had come back. He was in time to see me off and to read the first tentative chapters of my book. I had collected enough already, in fact, to write all of the childhood history of Charlie Soong, and I was getting well into Shanghai and the birth of the girls when I handed the manuscript over to Victor. It was then that he did me an enormous favor.
I am not an introverted type of writer. On the contrary, I feel much better if I can have an audience near at hand. As soon as I have written more than five thousand words I want to rush off and show them to somebody, and talk about them, and get opinions, and defend myself. Up until then I had used my old friends from the Monday Night Club as victims, trying the book out on them chapter by chapter. They listened, appreciated, made a few gentle suggestions, asked a few questions, but kept telling me that it was too soon to judge. Victor was not so polite. He sent me my precious chapters with a blunt note: “This is dull,” he said flatly. “It bored me to death. If I hadn’t been in bed already, I would have fallen asleep in my chair, reading it.”
Startled out of my conceit, I set to work on the book all over again. The Soong Sisters is still pretty dull, in my estimation. Thanks to Sir Victor it isn’t even worse. I tore it all up and started again, in livelier vein, and before I left Shanghai he confessed that the second version kept him awake until one o’clock, anyway.
Then something happened that threw the whole pattern of my life, book and imminent trip and Mr. Mill’s love life and all, into the shadows. The war began, over in Europe.
We were startled. We were distressed. We began remembering the other war, the one we had always thought would free us from any more in our generation. Probably in the back of our heads was the thought, “The really grim things, the big bombings and battles, never come out as far as the East. We fought the war at long distance last time and we’ll fight it like that again. Our English boys will join up and sail away, and it is all very distressing, but it isn’t happening here, not out in China. We will get off with our own tiny, slightly comic oriental war; that is our contribution.”
This was in our minds in spite of what everyone told us on the radio over in America and England. I paused, sighed, looked wo
nderingly at the excited refugees, who were taking it very hard, and went on with my preparations. I was very angry with the government of Hong Kong for making a lot of silly new regulations about letting people in.
The shipping companies kept all their sailings secret, so my departure was simple and not crowded. Chin Lien saw me off.
“I’ll be back in three months at the most,” I promised everyone. “I’ll stay just long enough to gather the rest of the material, and then I’ll come back here to write it up. So long; I’ll be seeing you!”
I never saw Shanghai again.
Chapter 17
From now on my life was to be managed on a budget. I had made up my mind to put away the little extravagances of Shanghai, and as an earnest of good intentions I traveled second-class to Hong Kong and went to a definitely second-rate hotel when I got there. The cheaper hostelries of Hong Kong can always be recognized because they are built out of cardboard, and mine was no exception. The floor telephone was just outside the door of my room, and all day and all night the floor boy answered its ring with a long-drawn-out “We-e-e-e-ei!” that sounded like a newborn kid calling its mother. The entrance was on a steeply sloping street, and our whole building was tucked in next to the Matsubara Hotel, reserved for Japanese people. I used to peer into the next-door lobby with great interest as I climbed the hill to my own place. Officially the Japanese were still friendly with Britain, and many of them lived in Hong Kong; you saw their squat, bowlegged women sauntering about the mid-level streets, May Road and Kennedy Road and MacDonnell Road, all favorite residence districts for the Sons of Heaven.
Mme. Kung promised to get me to Chungking without a lengthy wait, although there was an imposing list of people anxious to travel up to Szechuan by the only short route left to us. In the meantime I played around: I bumped into Ian Morrison again, fresh from a trip through Indo-China, and spent a lot of time with Bob Winter from Peking.
Peking, like all the other never-never lands of the world, has its little collection of traditions and good stories, and its aristocracy of old-timers. Bob Winter is one of the old-timers. You will probably not read about him in the Peking novels and travel books that fill any Far East bookstore, but he is famous in his world nonetheless. A very long time ago he taught Romance languages in Evanston, but for the past eighteen years, I think it is, he has spent most of his time in Peking, working for the Rockefeller Institute and teaching at a university there. He is a big man with freakish glands or some other accident of physiology that has prevented him from showing any signs of advancing age. Perhaps his life has had a lot to do with it. Bob in all those years has been doing exactly the sort of thing he likes doing best. Few people can claim a record like that.
Like myself, Bob is an exhibitionist and would sell his grandmother if the transaction would make a good story. Or rather, he wouldn’t bother to sell her; he would merely say he had done it and make a better story than the truth out of the old lady. Unlike me, though, be isn’t a good listener, and our relationship developed along unusual lines. Bob did all the talking, which is not unusual, but I did all the listening and that is. I have since learned how to bully him into listening to me sometimes. There is a certain grim quality about all of our conversations, due to this unending struggle.
He had much more to talk about in those Hong Kong days, anyway, than I did. Peking had been under Japanese influence for some years, and the happy, peaceful life Bob led was threatened to such a degree that he had beaten the other lotus-eaters to the inevitable decision. He was giving it up until happier days. Farewell, then, to the Winter house with its famous flower gardens and the fruit-cats and pet deer which he kept in the gardens. Bob had decided to go in for a life of espionage. I am giving away no secrets when I tell this, because Bob wasn’t like Ian Morrison and the other British Intelligence boys; he advertised himself directly instead of by implication.
Spy work is fun, of course, to anybody who hasn’t grown old beyond redemption. Bob had a grand time. All his activities were thought up by himself, carried through on his own, and rewarded with nothing but an occasional thank you from the Chinese in Chungking. Bob was no government employee; he worked against the Japs purely as a side line, and usually as a personal favor to some friend in the guerrillas or somewhere. He never laughed at himself; he was deadly serious about it all. His methods were highly colored and reminiscent of Oppenheim or Sax Rohmer. There was the story of the white jade carving, a tiny bit of a thing which Bob carried around in his pocket. You see them in quantities in curio shops. There was some intricate business about a message and a radio for the guerrillas of Shantung: Bob kept a receiving set in his house which was to be given to the wandering soldiers, and the man who called for the set must be identified, so Bob broke the carving in half, gave one piece over, taught a password to the contact man, and there you were. When the messenger came for the radio he produced the missing half and the password, and all went well. Bob loved that sort of thing.
I have noticed it before about the people who live in Peking; they all seem to go in for lurid adventure along these lines. If they haven’t fooled around with smuggling from Manchuria they have had a lot to do with the local wars. The Japanese venture, in their eyes, was just more of the same kind of excitement, but they were proved wrong in the end and the game went too far and was taken out of their hands. Not that it was ever in their hands. I have always thought it very nice of the Chinese to let Peking foreigners preen themselves on their “influence.” Since those fabulous days when almost any missionary who happened to be around could nab a cushy job as adviser to the Ch’ing court it has been the same up north; the Chinese have handed little commissions over to us, small favors involving our passports or errands for us to run, back and forth between Chinese officials. We have been very useful to the Chinese of the old school, and they have been duly grateful. I don’t think the newfangled Chinese need us quite so much, or feel quite as grateful, but I think they will let us go on working for them as long as we want to. Romance in China is not yet dead.
Bob was this romance personified. He brought a large retinue down from Peking, including a Eurasian girl in search of her papa down in Indo-China (she carried The Papers in her girdle), a little Japanese woman whose Chinese husband was teaching in a university in Free China — this girl had always been very useful, Bob assured me, and she simply hated the Japanese — and the Living Buddha of Outer Mongolia. This last item completely overshadowed all the others. The Delawah Butuktuk (the spelling is my own version of his Mongol name) was introduced to me at the hotel where they stayed, a Chinese hostel down on the water front, with mah-jongg parties going on all day and all night in practically every room but Bob’s and the Buddha’s. The Buddha was a new one on me but Bob assured me that he was a famous figure in Peking. For more than twenty years he had lived there, an exile from Outer Mongolia since the Russians had driven him out of his own country when they took that territory under their protection.
We are apt to think there is only one Living Buddha, the Dalai Lama whose picture, done up in gold paint, we saw everywhere when he was installed in office as a little boy of five. There are, however, at least seven of them. The Dalai Lama just happens to be more publicized than the others. Bob’s Buddha was a man between fifty and sixty, with charming manners and a pock-marked face. According to Bob, he had decided that it was time to get out of Peking before the Japs grabbed him and incorporated him in their plans for a free, glorious New Asia. He wanted to go to Tibet, his spiritual home, a place he knew well, although in his present incarnation he has never been there. The Buddha depended heavily on Bob for guidance in this venture. He planned to go first to Chungking, to assure the Generalissimo of his preference for Chinese rather than Japanese, and then he would make his way south, around the coast, over India into Tibet.
Bob undertook to get him out of Peking. It entailed a disguise, of course, and disguising a Buddha is not a simple matter. Bob’s first plan was to dress him like a Tibetan, and
then to hire a number of ordinary Tibetans and to send them all together through the frontier guard in a Ford. The Buddha didn’t like that notion. It seems that a Buddha must always wear a certain shade of yellow, regardless of what shape his clothes may take. Thus, though he was willing to wear Western clothes suitable for a Tibetan tourist of the middle class, these clothes had to be yellow. He appeared for the journey in yellow tweeds, with a yellow plush hat something like a Homburg. And here at last they were, safe in Hong Kong!
It would have been all right, probably, if Bob as raconteur had been satisfied with the story of the clothes and of the old man’s retort when the Japanese emigration official asked him if he had been vaccinated: “Isn’t my face enough for you?” he is alleged to have retorted. But Bob was proud of the fact that he bad meddled with his divine ward’s passport. I don’t remember what sort of passport it was, but Bob had erased the date on it and substituted another one. He probably had excellent reasons for doing so, if he ever really did it, which is always a pertinent question to put to Bob when he tells stories. But he need not have boasted about this deed so much in Hong Kong, where all the officials were nervous and jumpy and very watchful. Bob forgot he had left China behind, outside the Colony limits. He was in British territory now, among suspicious imperialists. He and the Living Buddha couldn’t get up to Chungking as quickly as they had hoped. They were detained and questioned. Rightly or wrongly, Bob put this delay down to Captain Boxer’s address: we had all lunched together one day and everyone but the Buddha got intoxicated, and Bob thought Charles had squinted at him suspiciously or something. Anyway, the questions began next day, and since Charles was chief of Intelligence in Hong Kong the whole thing, in Bob’s judgment, was obvious. Because of that man Boxer he and his poor old Buddha were being persecuted by the stupid, thickheaded, bureaucratic British.