China to Me (35 page)

Along the edge of the world which we approached there was the faintest possible glow of rosy light. We padded along in the blackness and the glow grew stronger. I had really forgotten what book I was reading or who I was now that it was closed. I didn't care. I watched, curious in a mild way, as we drew nearer to the glow, and then we topped a rise in the road and we were in a village. It was late. Nobody came out into the road to look at us. We swung along strong and quiet through the dimly lit street. Then all of a sudden, off to the right and behind a hill, there came loud singing. It must have been the music of a Chinese talking picture, one of the many that they make nowadays in the studios of Chungking. It was turned on high, so loud that the world was full of it. Chinese voices sang words that I didn't understand, but the music itself was familiar. They had borrowed a waltz from us. They sang it slowly, chantingly. It was amazingly loud and full of meaning there in that valley between the mountains, and at night.

It came to me with a little shock, not unpleasant, that I had opened my book again. It might have been different. Down in the blackness of the valley I might quite possibly have opened another volume and emerged as a different individual, but no. I was still Emily Hahn, going home to Chungking in a chair, after dark.

There was a monotony in getting scared every day. The Japanese had a contemptuous way of holding to their program without varying their timetable, since it made no difference, after all, when they came; there was no resistance at any time of day. We could expect the first alarm soon after ten in the morning, and all through July, except on those pleasant days when the planes were being reconditioned, we moved into the dugouts for the better part of the morning and afternoon. That is, the people on the North Bank did. We on the south side had much more freedom in our safety zone. Theoretically we stayed belowstairs, out of danger, but actually we didn't. I would lie on a bed on the veranda, reading and eating peanut brittle if I could find any, until I heard the planes, when I would run along with the others to the cellar downstairs. After they had bombed and gone, long before the All Clear signal, we acted as if it were over. The bridge game was resumed, or work continued in the APC office, and I heaved a sigh of relief and went back to my manuscript. We always got awfully hungry, waiting. Nobody had lunch for about six weeks, that summer.

In general the war was languishing. We heard news occasionally of battles here and there, and along toward August we became anxious because the Japs were reported to be moving in on the lower reaches of the Yangtze, the other side of the rapids, at Ichang. That meant that they would have large airfields within a short bombing distance of Chungking. We feared that this would mean less warning for our citizens, and so it worked out. By the time the enemy had the field in condition to be used, though, the sunny season was almost over. The Japs themselves were getting tired of the mass raids, and began using fewer planes in a more supple way, swooping low over the town and strafing the place with machine guns.

For some reason or other I had to cross the river one day, but I can't remember now why I took the risk. Perhaps Dr. Kung had some material for me that I was to call for in person, or maybe Mme. Chiang — but she, like myself, stayed as much as possible on the South Bank. I can't remember what it was all about, but I do recall my feeling of utter helplessness and panic when the alarm went off, catching me alone near the ferry.

The helplessness was due to the fact that I was alone in a strange neighborhood and had no dugout to go to, and no way of getting to a better place on that side of the river. It was a contingency I had often imagined and always avoided. The panic is harder to explain, but I'll have a stab at it. I am not a neurotic type; at least I don't think I am. But I did have one neurotic notion at that time. I hated crowds. I had a real terror of crowds. Well, now, all of a sudden in Chungking I was in the middle of a mob. After a moment, when I stood in the middle of the road, I got a grip on myself and started to run with my fellow men, under the warbling of the siren, down to the river.

We were trying to catch the ferry before it went to the other side. Always when an alarm sounded the ferries loaded up as much as they could carry and beat it for the South Bank as fast as they could fight the current. All three available boats would do this, and once they reached the other side they stayed there until the raid was over. If you missed the boats, or failed to get aboard because of the crowd, you were out of luck. Either you ran back up the hill and took refuge somehow, or you hurried a long way down the beach to some rowboat and bribed a boatman, if you could find him, to take you away. It was highly desirable not to be near the ferry station: the Japs always bombed it. It was also imperative not to be near the staircase up on top, for the same reason. And it was just as well not to be aboard the ferry in midstream when they came over, either. They loved to sink crowded boats.

I tried to get aboard the ferry. This meant speed, running along the street to the staircase and rushing down the cliffside, in company with about eight hundred racing Chinese. Halfway down I was negotiating a bad spot where there was no railing, only a narrow set of stone steps overhanging a sheer drop. I was on the outside of the crowd, and I couldn't fight against the pressure of bodies. I felt myself slipping, being shoved off the side.

Then a coolie grabbed my arm, pulled me back on the step — I can still feel the iron grip of his skinny fingers — and was away down the steps before I could thank him. Quickly, then, I arrived at the ferry. A narrow plank bridge stretched from the shore, balancing across the one or two rocks and up on the flat platform from which one got on the boat. There again I was almost off; there again a coolie saved me at the last minute. In that short time I lost for good my horror of crowds. They were a crowded mass, but they were good-natured. We were all uncomfortable and, I suppose, frightened. But we laughed and felt like good friends. Even at that moment I could feel that my heart had lightened and an old trouble melted away.

The first ferry was full to bursting and moved off clumsily, lurching as it hit the strong current toward midstream. We watched with bated breath. It happened every so often that a boat turned over, and once you were caught in the stream it didn't matter much if you could swim or not. Well, the first boat made it and the second was chugging up. Would I be able to get aboard? And if I got aboard, were we going to get to the other side before the planes arrived?

Yes to both. I pushed my way on. We started out. We made it, and the planes didn't come over until I was halfway up the South Bank hill to the APC House. Teddy was waiting anxiously with his binoculars, watching the beach across the river.

“I knew you were somewhere near the ferry,” he said. “I remembered how you hated crowds, and I was worried. I tried to see you with the glasses, but you're wearing blue and so is every coolie in China, and it just wasn't any use.”

They made a fuss over me and I was pleased and comforted, especially when they brought out one of their rare bottles of beer and opened it. I was the brand saved from the burning, the temperamental artiste whose soul had been harried. … “Poor Mickey,” said Teddy, “when you hate crowds so much too.”

“But I don't,” I said, draining my glass. “I love 'em.”

Then the planes arrived.

The situation deteriorated rapidly toward the end of my stay. Each summer, according to the people who live there permanently, they used to think that a fortnight more tacked on to the bombing season would finish off Chinese resistance. The raids grew longer and longer; there were fewer and fewer places to live, less and less resistance in the souls of the people. You can be bombed out just so often and then it ceases to be amusing to pick up your bags and move to another place. Even that wouldn't be so bad if one could only sleep, but the Japanese began a round-the-clock campaign, and that meant sitting up all night as well as all day in the dugout. It was certainly bad. But I still don't think that another fortnight would have done the trick.

One lady whose husband was a Minister, and who had been a famous young hostess in the Shanghai period, was bombed out so completely that her house was simply a mess of bricks and broken furniture. We all turned out to help her salvage what we could, and it is quite surprising what can be recovered from ruins if you go about the job scientifically. Patricia recovered her piano, a box of chocolates, and two unbroken bottles of Rose's lime juice, while her clothes were scarcely damaged at all. I had occasion to notice that fact about clothes quite often. My own wardrobe, flung to the four points of the compass, was nevertheless all right when I gathered it together again, though a lot of it simply disappeared. I remember that Maya and I had a brisk argument over a stocking which had draped itself over a neighboring roof after the hostel received the coup de grâce: we both claimed it, but neither of us ever recovered it.

Until quite late in the season, long after the rest of us gave up our stubborn foolhardiness, Fenn Lynch refused to go down into cellars. Fortunately for him, he was in a fairly solid building on the day the Japs decided to polish off the downtown district. He was in his own Bank of China, at his desk on the ground floor. Everyone had gone down to the vaults, but not old Fenn. A bomb came down spang on the middle of the house. Concrete and steel reinforcements held out pretty well, and Fenn escaped being brained by falling plaster, but only just. He probably stood still for a little while until the noise and echo had died away, because he showed the signs for a long time afterward. He was dazed, and more respectful than he had been formerly of bombers. He did a good job that same afternoon, though, of sending panic-stricken crowds of refugees from a collapsed dugout, through flaming streets, to a safe cave. Fenn had guts and self-control when he needed them. He moved over to the South Bank too. Everyone moved over. There just weren't any houses left for them in the city. Our week-end parties became bigger and better with every week of bombing.

Chapter 28

One day I began to type faster and faster, hunched over the baby Hermes that had made my life miserable by breaking down every week. I breathed fast. I worked like a crazy woman. I always do, just as I am getting close to the end. It would be a tremendous thing, that business of writing the last sentence. It wasn't just that another book was finished. After all, that is nothing remarkable in this distressingly literate age of ours. Nowadays the remarkable people are those who don't write books. No, my excitement this time was due to surrounding circumstances. This book was not only another book, it was my life. That sounds melodramatic, but it was literally true. Because of the book I had left my home, broken up my house, deserted the gibbons and Sinmay, and lived under conditions of acute discomfort for nearly a year. The manuscript had done that, leading me around by the nose for eighteen months. The fact that I had no place I could call home — that was the manuscript. My luggage, ravaged and torn and moldy, and my belongings, lost and scattered — that was the manuscript. Myself, a neglected-looking female with worn-out shoes, with teeth that called for attention — that was the manuscript.

“What else exists of me?” I asked myself in the queer hidden cellar of the brain that goes on thinking no matter what you do on the surface. “Nothing else,” replied my brain; “nothing else. In America my name means something to my mother and something — less, but still something — to my sisters and brother. Here and there in the files of old magazines you can see it, that jumble of letters, Emily Hahn. The name means a lot to me, but that is all it is.”

A staggering fact, the aloneness that sweeps over us at times. I always have it when I am finishing a book.

I wrote the last page, my legs beginning to tremble. It was at eight in the morning and I had known for several days, actually, that it would be finished soon, but still I was surprised. I had been on that job a long, long time.

I shouted, pulling the sheet out of the roller. “Done!” I yelled through the door to the Pawleys, who were still at breakfast. “Done!” I yelled over the railing to Gidley Baird, who was getting the office ready for the day's work. “Teddy,” I called down the corridor, “did you hear me? I've finished the book!”

I don't usually make quite such a public noise about my work, but that summer we were all soaked in the community spirit. Even the close-mouthed business folk had become expansive and confidential, and discussed their business in the presence of the whole household.

My book was a group problem. Nobody had read it and nobody was particularly keen to, because they weren't a reading crowd, but the abstract fact of the book, and the presence of a writer in their midst, made a pleasant change for our household. I had already promised to hand out autographed copies all around. It stimulated Gidley to reminiscences of other writers he had known. Teddy remembered successful journalists who had stopped over and got drunk in the club in Manila when he was there. Ida wondered if she shouldn't do something with that article she once wrote. They all took a pleasantly paternal attitude toward my opus, and their pleasure and excitement when I made my announcement were genuine. It was almost sufficient to cancel out the inner misgiving that would be my constant companion until I started on another book.

There were certain matters to be accomplished now that my mind was clear. A complete copy of the whole thing to be made and sent over to the States, whither. I had been sending chapter after chapter as it was done. I was at least six months overdue with the thing already, so time was an item to be considered gravely. And there were other things to decide, chief of which was — whither now for myself, on this long pilgrimage?

A month or so before that morning I had received a mysterious cable signed “Pat.” Just Pat, nothing more.

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