China to Me (34 page)

Actually the visit didn't take place during my term of residence in the capital, though Charles's other Chungking friends urged him to hurry up with it. He was a Japanese expert and didn't know China very well. His sympathies, non-political and sentimental, were with Japan, for he had spent years there, serving a term in their army as a special compliment, and he spoke that language fluently but knew nothing of Chinese, except in so far as he could read the written characters that are common to both nations. I would shake my head over this failing and make resolutions to bring him around to a more sensible state of mind.

Sir Archie had his way until the last possible moment. In spite of Japanese warnings the British embassy stayed nobly where it was, near the seat of the government, on the north side of the river — and incidentally in the most comfortable house in town. There was a grassy lawn there, and the department had already started to Branch Out, as they always do. Houses on either side of the embassy had been rented from their Chinese banker-owners.

On the Sunday after I arrived we scrimshankers over on the South Bank took a walk. The APC owned a lot of outlying places, and one was a bungalow far off on the Second Range, which had been used in the old days by engineers and their families. We packed our lunch, made careful arrangements, and started out, a large party, for a day in the country.

The Japs couldn't resist the weather, which was ideal for bombing — clear of fog and innocent of clouds, a cerulean sky. Just as we got to the bungalow about eighty enemy planes flew over. (The Japs really spread themselves in those days. They had hopes of crushing Chungking definitely, that year, with bombs alone. It was an interesting lesson to people who overrate the efficacy of air power.) Of course there was no resistance. It is pleasant for me now to realize that times have changed and that there is a good deal of resistance today, but my own eyes have never seen the Japanese as anything but unchecked, happily flying wherever they like and dropping bombs with a gay abandon. The occasional forlorn “pop, pop” of an anti-aircraft gun meant nothing, to us or to them.

The entire party of us, feeling fairly secure because we were a long way from any concentration of houses, stood on the hilltop and watched. Sometimes it was too much for our nerves anyway and we crouched close to the ground, instinctively, but nothing fell anywhere near. It was a remarkable scene. The bombs were dropped in a straight line and many of them fell into the water, and an occasional incendiary missile flared up harmlessly on the beach, but most of them fell on the town where they were intended to go. The main feature of this particular raid, as far as we were concerned, was that they got the British embassy. We saw it. A bomb falling on a Chungking house never finds much resistance, and the effect is gaudy — there is a fountain of black debris and smoke, spouting incredibly high in the air, and then it calms down, and then it goes on again, playing in the air like water, but now it is less opaque because it is only smoke and dust, the heavy stuff having fallen out of the spout. Little by little the smoke loses its black color, fades out, becomes white, and after a long time the whole thing is over and you see tiny figures of coolies working in the ruins. And so the embassy came over to live on the South Bank in spite of Sir Archie's resolution, and they commandeered a smaller APC house near us.

I spent less and less time on the North Bank. It wasn't necessary any more, and the air raids were coming so often that we could depend on a certain schedule. The Japanese were methodical and saw no reason why they should vary their program. It went like this: four to five days of intensive bombing, when eighty planes at least, and sometimes close to two hundred, flew over the city and bombed it everywhere. Then there would be two or three days when they didn't come. The RAF officer explained to us that they were reconditioning their planes, over in Hankow where they came from. Then it would start all over again. The weather through the short Chungking summer is monotonously clear and bright, and we didn't look for rain very often to give us surcease. Under these repeated attacks the city dwellers gave in and admitted that they had better make the best of it until autumn and foggy weather. Some hardy souls continued to cross the river every morning and trek to the countryside, then come back at night. But it was an unpleasantly difficult and long procedure, especially getting back on the crowded ferry of an evening.

If I had been living on the North Bank I could never have finished my book as I did that summer. Even where I was, most of the day it was impossible to work. Actually I must have done the bulk of it after the first signal during raids, waiting for the Urgent. Then the house was quiet, and nobody was in a mood to disturb me. I would type away like mad on the side veranda, while the Pawleys and Gidley and Teddy played bridge or did their office work, all of us keeping a nervous eye on the heavens and listening for the warbling note that meant business.

We learned how to make week ends more pleasant, though. The APC had an installation a few miles downriver. It didn't do any business any more because there was no oil to sell, but the houses and grounds were still kept up, and sometimes we went there in the company boat on Saturday and stayed over until Monday morning. There was a British gunboat anchored there, prudently out of the neighborhood of the military objectives of Chungking. We took our own servants and food and liquor, and while the others played bridge I read or fooled around with those of the guests who didn't like cards. On Sunday we would lunch aboard the boat. It could have been a much less pleasant existence. I blessed the day I had been bombed out of the hostel, and I wrote my book, and flourished under the protection of the safety zone, though I still had anxious moments.

Mme. Chiang's house was a long way off, but I could get there by chair across the hills and the fields, and occasionally I did. She lived on a high hill, in a house hidden by trees, hidden even from the sky, which was after all the most important aspect of hiding. I had some enchanted afternoons with Madame in that hot bright weather.

Gidley Baird lent me his chair for the trips, because it was a special chair and the whole household felt that my mission, too, was quite special and warranted attention from the public. He had twice as many coolies as most people needed because he was a big heavy man, and I gained much face when I went riding in such style. We cut across country to get to my destination; we plodded through an emerald-colored valley and for a long, long time we were completely out of the world. There were no houses in sight, no roads. Only the bright green paddy fields, bordered with straight little clay pathways, with here and there a stunted tree. A range of pleasant little mountains enclosed us. I would jog along like a princess in the sedan chair, chatting with the coolies, observing with pleasure that they didn't sweat or suffer like the less fortunate ones who carried ordinary chairs. I looked my fill at all the mountainsides and the trees that softened their rocky outlines. I put on dark glasses to protect my eyes from the brilliant sunlight bouncing off the young rice and the clear unsullied water that stood around its roots. Then I adjusted my enormous straw hat, took off my glasses, and settled down with the Oxford Book of Light Verse which I had borrowed from Mme. Chiang. All that summer I was reading poetry. I had discovered that rhyme and rhythm are soothing when you are waiting for Japanese bombers. Later in Hong Kong I remembered my discovery, and a heavy anthology of British and American verse shared my flight throughout the hostilities and saw me through the unforgettable weeks that followed after. But if those weeks are unforgettable now, they were unbelievable then. Japanese or no Japanese, one achieved a sense of peace and beauty on summer afternoons, jogging across the fields to Madame's house, all among the stone graves and the young green shoots.

Old trees kept the building damp and cool even in the hottest of the summer days. Once I counted the stone steps that led up a steep hillside to Madame's door, but I have forgotten how many there were. She complained sometimes that she felt cut off out there in the safety of the countryside, though a telephone ran not only to her study, where she tried to compose her soul in patience by translating the classics into English, but even to the main room in the tunnel under the hill.

Of all the houses I've seen Soongs in, I liked that one best. Like the APC House where I was living it was an old building, a relief from the lath-and-plaster bungalows that now mushroomed the Chungking hills. Even the stone wall that guarded the foot of the hill, and the guards in uniform who popped out from behind it to challenge me when I arrived, and the new telephone poles that led up the stone staircase — even all of that couldn't spoil the peaceful, aged quality of the house itself with its garden. The living room had comfortable furniture in it, like all Soong living rooms: they share my horror of Chinese chairs. There was a chummy little dining room where Soong Mayling gave me new kinds of marmalade to try. She likes making marmalade in Chungking, where she can get all sorts of citrus fruit, including a thick-skinned grapefruit I've never seen elsewhere.

Madame's nervous habit of working couldn't be overcome, even out there in the dreamy, shady quiet of her summer refuge. She wasn't well. She suffered pitifully from migraine. Vicious headaches had been coming on ever since her accident with Donald on the Nanking-Shanghai motor road, back in 1937, and though a chiropractor in Hong Kong had been able to give her some relief it wasn't sufficient. As if migraine isn't enough for any one woman in one season, she also had urticaria. I am something of an expert on hives. I had them unremittingly for three years after coming home from Africa and I've often wondered why I used to think they were a joke, in the days before I started getting them myself. I was most awfully sorry for Soong Mayling. I still am. And she was thoroughly likable, out in that summer house. She lost her last mistrust of the book and of me, perhaps because she had already looked over the manuscript; as one craftsman to a fellow, she talked enthusiastically about writing and reading. It wasn't my place as a biographer to say so in the book, but I think she enjoyed those afternoons too. They were relaxing, and there was no harm in them. No politics interfered with our mutual dissertations on ethics and literature. We were not concerned with means but with ends. We talked like idealistic schoolgirls. It was nice.

One day was different. Sometimes by a fluke we people on the South Bank heard the world news first in town, in spite of the monopoly on telegraph lines into Holly's compound, because of the American gunboat Tutuila, which sat at anchor all year round on our side of the river. The Tutuila had a receiving set, and one day the young commander, Bob Germany, climbed the hill swiftly to bring us an item he had just heard from the air. The United States were applying an embargo at last on the sale of high-octane gasoline to foreign powers, i.e., to Japan.

In the living room we of the house assembled to talk it over. It might be very important, important enough to cause an accidental bomb to drop on us there in the safety zone. Then again, it might mean nothing. The fact that we were still selling heavy crude oil was ominous and disappointing. However, I was glad to carry the news that day to Mme. Chiang.

She hadn't heard it, and the news cheered her a lot. It was one of her bad days and she was lying on the chaise longue, wrapped in blankets. I hadn't been there long when the Generalissimo came home unusually early, and Mayling called to him before he entered the room.

“Is it true that there's an embargo on gasoline in America?” she demanded excitedly. Chiang Kai-shek, having seen that there was company, turned away at the door after bowing, and started up the steps. Over his shoulder he made the noise that signifies cheerful assent in China — it is like the last sound in “yeah.” I can only spell it “—eah.”

“No, but really?” insisted his wife. She spoke Chinese with him all the time.

“—eah,” repeated Chiang amiably, halfway up the steps.

“But isn't that marvelous? Isn't it?” she demanded.

Chiang wasn't thrilled as she was, I felt. He was thinking about that crude oil. “—eah,” came floating down the stairs, and then somewhere a door closed.

There was one evening when I stayed chez Chiang a long time, long after the hour I always set for going home. (Mme. Chiang was strict about her routine, but that evening her husband wasn't expected home until late, and she didn't like being alone. Bodyguards, evidently, are not the best company in the world.) The chair coolies knew where they were going, though, and we weren't worried. We borrowed a lantern from the Chiang kitchen, said good-by, crept carefully down the stone staircase to the foot of the mountain, and set off along the road.

Crossing by way of the rice paddies was out of the question on such a dark night. The coolies explained this to me and then set off at a good brisk trot along the newly built road. I don't really know why I bother to tell this incident. It has no value as an anecdote. I only want to evoke, if I can, for my own sake, the sensations of that night. I have known China so thoroughly, all her scents and noises and colors, that it is easy for me to bring back the feeling of a familiar moment there. The streets of Yangtzepoo in Shanghai, for instance, or the dust-choked air of Peking in summer. The wet pathways of Hangchow along the lakeside, and the drifting silence of one of those flat boats with canopies. The hard sharp rocks and the soft gliding clouds of the Yellow Mountain. It is easy to think of these. I could draw pictures of any of them. I would know at midnight where I was if I should wake up in any of these places; I would recognize the smell of it and the sound of it. But that night in my chair, gliding along the dark road from Madame's house, was a special moment. It had no familiarity. It was not China, and it was not me. Somehow we, the coolies and I, had become new people in a different universe. We trotted along at the bottom of a deep, dark canyon of blackness and all the exciting pleasures of the afternoon, my talk with Mme. Chiang, the poem we had read, the sunlight on my neck as I crossed the field, the flowers I was carrying even now, in the back of the chair — they were not there. I had it all in my mind, like something I had read in a book, but it was no more real than that. My whole life was just that: a book I was reading. That moment, then, that was the proof. Once and only once, for the first time, I closed the book and laid it aside. I sat back in the chair as it jounced and joggled along to the soft pats of the coolies' feet on the road, and wondered: Now what?