China to Me

  For that week, however, it was embarrassingly evident that the Hilda who was then uppermost in her character was determined to get me sent to Stanley too.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Hattori would say, having sent for me by note. “Is everything all right? You have not received any communications from Mrs. Selwyn-Clarke?”

  “Oh, no indeed, Mr. Hattori, how could I?”

  “That is true.”

  “Is there any news of the doctor?” I asked.

  “No, nothing. I trust they’re not mistreating him. I saw him only a few times, but he impressed me as being thoroughly sincere.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Hattori, he’s sincere.”

  I walked home slowly. It seemed to me that everyone I met looked stunned. No one dared stop to speak to me; no one dared stop to speak to anyone. There were no little groups at the street corners. There were only isolated figures, hurrying along.

  Chapter 58

  Ah king always insisted that Sophie Odell was responsible for making me ill, but I don’t think that is the truth. Certainly Sophie had that strong desire you often find in warmhearted people for being the first to bring bad news. When she was in distress herself she couldn’t wait to plunge other people into the same bath.

  In our little army of parcel-carrying women there was a strong esprit de corps and an equally strong intelligence department. The Japanese officers would have been amazed — in the end, because of me, they were amazed — at the things we managed to find out about the prisoners. It was all done with mirrors, piecing together bits of news that leaked out I don’t know how. Some of it was no doubt due to the fact that a lot of the Japs now had Hong Kong girls as mistresses. They had employed the same means themselves, before the war, to get information; yet they too fell into the oldest trap in the history of the world’s battles. The commandant of camps, fat Colonel Tokunaga, may have been one of our sources of supply, because he was what the Cantonese call “wet salt,” which means “oversexed.” He ogled women. I never knew what ogling was until I saw the colonel. His whole fat face lit up when he saw a pretty piece, and he rolled his eyes with a simple, honest lubricity that would have been laughable if he hadn’t been commandant of the camps where our men were held prisoner. He had installed himself in a good house near Argyle, with a Chinese woman we all knew as his housekeeper.

  But the colonel was decidedly not the only one. I never knew where the news trickled out, or how; I just guessed. A lot of it was false but some of it sometimes was true, and what Sophie brought me that morning sounded genuine.

  “The men are being taken away, Mickey, this morning. All of them. In Kowloon they’re marching through the streets.”

  “From Argyle too?”

  “From Argyle too.” She was crying. “I suppose they’ll take Bowen Road next, and my Harry has just started to walk with his crutch.”

  It was not only the prospect of losing Charles, what very small portion I still had of him, that agitated me so much. Once before a large shipment of prisoners had been sent off by ship, the Lisbon Maru, to Japan or Formosa. Wherever it was aiming for, it didn’t get there; the Lisbon Maru was sunk, and a lot of our men were drowned. They must have been battened down in the hatches, from the percentage of losses; I haven’t yet interviewed the few survivors who made their way to Chungking. Hong Kong when the news came to us was a pit of horrible misery, and the Japanese rubbed it in cruelly in the paper. The Americans had sunk their ship, had they? And drowned their own Allies, hadn’t they? That would teach the Americans. That would teach the foolish women of Hong Kong, who were still hoping that the United Nations would win the war.

  In time the Japanese must have been scolded so heartily from Geneva for breaking a few major international laws that they quieted down. They discovered that they should have announced it to the world whenever they moved prisoners by sea. They found out that they had made other mistakes. But this new development hit us too soon, while the tragedy was still poignant. All I could think was, “Charles’s arm is paralyzed; he won’t be able to swim.”

  Five minutes after Sophie left I was violently ill.

  I should like to agree with Ah King in his attractive idea that I was merely suffering from a broken heart. It is a pretty notion and romantic. To the best of my scientific knowledge, however, broken hearts don’t lead directly to high fever and severe cramps. Ah King spoke his mind to Sophie in an outburst which must have been refreshing to all concerned. “Don’t tell the mistress these things. Wait. Wait until you’re sure. Wait until you don’t see the major at Argyle before you scare my mistress like that.”

  Then he hurried upstairs to soothe me. He had it on direct authoritative evidence, he said, that the major was not being moved. He, Ah King, knew that. Then he gave me the Chinese equivalent of a tisane and closed the door and left me to sleep.

  And after all, he was right and Sophie was wrong. It had been a shipment of prisoners, but of enlisted men, mostly Canadians. Charles was still there. Nobody had left Argyle. Moreover, the Japanese behaved in a chastened manner this time and broadcast their intentions to the world through Geneva, and arranged for safe passage, and told us via the Red Cross the minute the men arrived safely.

  It made me think, though. That week was the first and only time I ever missed a parcel day; I was laid up for six days. All the while I lay there I said to myself, “If he is sent away someday, then what have I done to Carola?”

  Hattori had sent for me. “There is going to be another repatriation,” he announced. “Two repatriations, one for British and one for Americans!”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  He fiddled with his pencils. My reply had been a bit perfunctory, because I really didn’t believe it. I had heard that story fifty times, usually from Hilda, who always believed it and was always painfully disappointed. Now, with Hilda in Stanley and Selwyn in the gendarmerie, I was free to be skeptical.

  “It will really take place, though I don’t know when,” Hattori insisted. “I called you to ask you in which boat you prefer to go.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. This time,” he said pleasantly, “you will not refuse, will you? As an American you can sail in the American ship, naturally, with your child. As a British child, your Carola can sail in the British ship and you would naturally accompany her as her mother; I think the British would accept you. I don’t know the details yet; I don’t know how many British civilians they are willing to take, but I think there would be more room, you would be more comfortable, on the American boat. What do you say?”

  “But I am still not sure if I want to go at all.”

  Mr. Hattori drew a deep breath. “Do you think,” he asked patiently, “that you should take on yourself the responsibility of — ”

  “Could you get in to see Charles?” I demanded suddenly.

  “Perhaps. Yes, as a friend of the chief of staff I — ”

  “Would you? Then you could ask Charles himself what he wants. Last time it was all so sudden, and Oda was so busy, that I didn’t think of it. But it is his affair too, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly,” said Hattori in approval. “I shall try to do that. It will not be easy. This is purely a civilian affair; the military, unfortunately, never exchange prisoners, so there is no chance that your Charles will come home before the end.”

  “I know that. Thank you, Mr. Hattori, very much.”

  I put it out of my mind. The repatriation would never take place, I was sure, and if in the meantime it kept Hattori happy, thinking it would, who was I to argue?

  Day-to-day life was incredibly monotonous. The only thing that was alive, growing and constructive, was Carola. She was, of course, the most precocious and brilliant child in the world, and both De Roux and Needa assured me of this whenever my own faith might have wavered. For regard, as De Roux would have said: on Christmas, when Carola was a year and three months old, I took her downtown to look at the feeble display in the shops, and she took a fancy to an enormous baby doll in La
ne Crawford’s, now called the Matsukaya. I ignored her pleading, because it cost eleven yen. Next day she and I set out on our usual gentle afternoon walk, down the bluff to Kennedy Road, around to another staircase leading up to MacDonnell Road past a sentry (but he liked Carola), and after we had bowed to him we usually made our way home. This afternoon, however, the baby balked as we reached the wide staircase that led down to town. She took my hand and urged me with her eyes to go along with her down the stairs instead of following Kennedy Road. I let her lead me — she was walking well by this time — to see how far she would go. Down and down went Carola to the tramway, past the Peak tram station, past the cathedral, through Battery Path and down to Queen’s Road, definitely in the middle of town. Along Queen’s Road she got lost and couldn’t remember further. She stopped, looked at the bewildering crowd on foot and in ricksha, and began to cry uneasily. I carried her as far as the outside of Lane Crawford’s, because I knew by then what it was, and she promptly led me inside and along the corridor to the toy department, back to the object of her desire, the baby doll.

  So then, of course, I bought it, eleven yen or no eleven yen. Needa said I was quite right, and gave me the eleven yen back again as his Christmas present to Carola.

  We had a regular beat of an afternoon. Ah Yuk and Carola and I. First we went to the French Bank and saw Uncle Paul, and Carola would demand in Chinese to see the lesson books, Paul’s Mandarin primers with their highly colored pictures of babies and balls and slates and things. We had a glass of grenadine there. Then we traveled on to Needa’s office, now humming with big business, and there Carola asked for candy and got sweet vitamin pills by the handful. Then we strolled through the streets, and then we made our way home. Ah Yuk and I taking turns carrying the baby when she was tired.

  Even in the Foreign Affairs office she was spoiled. Hattori gave her all the pencils on his desk.

  The chief of staff in town had been changed, and the new man was rumored to be a civilized sort, speaking good English. One evening Hattori took the Ho girls and me up to meet General Suginami. It was all very hush-hush. The Hos seemed to know him of old, but they had refrained from saying so. Suginami was a short, slight, tired man, and his English was so pure that it was Oxonian down to the slight lisp that used to be the fashion there. He told me immediately that he was an old friend of Charles, had known him in England, and had seen him in Argyle Camp.

  “How does he look?” I demanded.

  “As well as can be expected under those sad circumstances. They are good to him and will continue to be good to him. He gets treatment for the arm in our own hospital.”

  My visits to the general were limited to the occasions when Yvonne could be persuaded to spend a little time with him. The general was much more keen on those visits than was the lovely Yvonne, who, though she protested she liked him, was still somewhat shy and canny of so much grandeur. I am sure that he could have dispensed with my company too; he adored Yvonne’s dramatic beauty, and no doubt he would have adored it more without my chaperonage. But Yvonne would not go to see him without her beloved Mickey, and there you were. He was always a gentleman, as the shopgirls say, just the same. He was most reassuring to us after the American 1943 air raids started, as they did that summer. We were up there to dinner the night before the first raid took place, and the general promised us on his word of honor that there would be no raids for a long time.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” breathed Yvonne. “Thank you. General. I do get so frightened.”

  “You need not be, little girl,” he said. “I have told them myself, ‘Do not bomb Hong Kong, because Yvonne gets frightened.’ Seriously, they haven’t enough petrol as yet. The Americans have brought in many planes to Chungking; we know that. But they have not brought enough petrol.”

  Next day we had the first raid and it was a honey. Yvonne came up to see me that afternoon when the All Clear sounded, and her terror was pretty well under control, all things considered. The bombers had improved in their aim so much that you couldn’t think of those first raids in the same class. This time they concentrated on the gendarmeries, and they knew exactly where to look and where to let go. They couldn’t have done anything better calculated to cheer us up. Only in one place, at the Central Police Station, did they miss: that miss cost three hundred civilian Chinese lives. And later on, when they pounded the dockyards, they killed many of the workers, so that the government had to make a new law prohibiting their employees from quitting their jobs. Also they locked the coolies into the dockyards, so that the wretched people had no choice; they had to be bombed.

  “There’s no help for it,” said Ah Yuk. “We must die by thousands, we must. China has too many people anyway.”

  I stared at her in appalled silence. The air raids had gone to her head; she jumped and clapped and laughed for joy at every alarm, not caring who may have been watching, and equally careless of the possible effect on herself.

  “You mustn’t cry when the planes come,” I heard her telling Carola. “There is nothing now to cry about. They won’t hurt us. Those are our planes.”

  “I saw Boxer,” said Hattori, who had come to see me one evening.

  “Oh, really? What did he say?”

  Hattori stared at me, his lips compressed. He was laboring under strong emotion. He often was, so I didn’t worry about it; he was what the British would call rather unstable emotionally. “He wants you to go, if there is a repatriation,” he said.

  I wasn’t really surprised, but I said, “Oh, does he? Really?”

  “Yes. At the moment the repatriation excitement has died down,” Hattori admitted, “so I couldn’t tell him just when it would take place. He was delighted, however, at the possibility, and I have come now to tell you that I must add your name to the list of possible repatriates immediately, in order to send it off to Tokyo. That is what I will do this evening.”

  “But I’m still not sure — ”

  “You said you would abide by Boxer’s decision.”

  “So I did.”

  “He told me something else,” said Hattori. “He told me that he intends to marry you.”

  Then he beamed. The secret was out. That was why he looked so excited and mysterious and moved. He was not prepared for my reaction; neither, I suppose, was I.

  “Oh,” I said, “does he indeed!”

  A very peculiar half hour was the result of that exchange. I don’t suppose Hattori and I could have reached any more of an understanding in ten times the period; certainly we were nowhere near an accord when he left my house and slammed my door.

  It had been foolish of me, I told myself when I went to bed. I should not have forgotten I was talking to a Japanese, chief of the Foreign Affairs Department and a man of fixed ideas. Centuries of feminism stood between us, but I at least should have realized that and acted accordingly. And I should have realized too that Charles hadn’t said it that way. He had said it at all only because he knew they would treat me with more care if they thought of me as his wife and not as a light of love.

  Oh dear, I groaned in the weeks that followed, how right he was! He had been far too right. Hattori and I never saw each other nowadays without having a row.

  “I have heard,” he said icily, “that you were Out to Dinner last night?”

  “Yes, I was. Needa gave a dinner party.”

  “Who is this Needa, anyway?”

  I explained. I bore down heavily on the fact that Needa was in the good graces of the Army and the Navy. Also, I said sincerely, he was a good man, a very sweet man, generous and an old friend of mine. …

  Hattori’s face did not relax as I talked. He looked more and more like the dean of women at my old university. “Does Boxer know this man?” he demanded at last.

  “Why — uh — no, as a matter of fact he doesn’t. You see, Charles was never keen on racing. He just wouldn’t go to races. And I met Needa years before I knew Charles, back in ’35, in Shanghai — ”

  I could scarcely have done wo
rse. The result was that Hattori immediately invited Needa to dinner so that he could have a look at him, on behalf of Boxer. So we had dinner, and even Hattori had to admit that there was nothing inimical to the welfare of Boxer’s Family in that gentle soul.

  “Nevertheless, I do not think you should be seen so often in public,” he said grudgingly, “There will be criticism if the gendarmes see you around so much. In fact there is criticism. I am always being asked about you. It is dangerous.”

  “Honestly?” Frankly, I was skeptical. “Really, Mr. Hattori, do you think you ought to worry so much about your responsibility? Mr. Oda couldn’t have meant that you should waste so much time on me. He didn’t, you know; I scarcely ever saw him. And he trusted me, too, more than you do.”

  “It is my responsibility to Boxer that now motivates me,” he said grimly. “Since I have seen him, and have seen what a fine man he is, and how upright and honorable — ”

  “Well” — I played my trump card — “Charles doesn’t care if I go out. He never did. He encouraged me to have my own friends, Mr. Hattori. If that is what you are thinking of — ”

  “It is different now. He intends to marry you.”

  I went home cursing under my breath, in a tangle of exasperated gratitude, laughter, and desperation, I do like to be boss. Like Mélisande, I was not happy there.

  Helen Ho after her release came to see me, as was natural, and when we had drunk tea together we both started for town. When we came out of my door a young man in a long white gown, who had been loitering up on MacDonnell Road, looking at a brook that ran down by the house, strolled after us. Helen turned white.

  “Is he following us?” she demanded. “I saw him, I’m sure, on my way up. He is following me, Mickey.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  But he was. Helen was arrested again that night and questioned for two more days before she was again released. It was the first time I felt directly responsible for that kind of thing.