In Hazard (15 page)

The chief haranguer was Henry Tung, a Christian. He looked as if he was making an ardent speech: but in fact he was being funny about his emptiness. There was plenty of wind outside, he said: but he had more inside. He was hungry enough to swallow the whole ship. But if he did, she would not just get her funnel blown out. There was enough wind inside him to blow her plate from plate.

“Ah, wind!” said young P'ing Tiao: “Can't you talk of anything but wind?”

For answer, the Christian brought out a great artificial belch, that seemed to roll on for ever. Then, with a swift change of mood:

“Oh you young lads!” he went on, “what do you know about wind? You think this a big storm? I tell you I've been through worse than this in a little junk! Run before it, with all sail set. Presently we saw a cow, swimming in the sea. Just then a real bad gust blew: and while I was watching, believe me or not, it blew the horns right out of that cow's head! So I called to my nephew Ah-Fêng, who was my mate: ‘Ah-Fêng,' I said, ‘did you see that cow? Shall we shorten sail too?' ‘You know best, Elder Uncle,' said Ah-Fêng. ‘Then hold on!' I said. ‘I don't shorten sail for any wind that blows!'—So we held on. Then suddenly Ah-Fêng shouts out he could see an island, right ahead. ‘Helm hard up!' he shouts. ‘Hard up it is!' I answered: ‘—Come aft, you turtle, and let her bows rise!' So he ran aft, and sure enough her bows rose: for he is fat as a tax-collector. That gave the wind a chance to lift her. Up she went, cleared the island like a swallow. Not a tree so much as brushed her keel. ‘Now go forward,' I said, as soon as we were over: ‘we don't want to go to Heaven yet!' So Ah-Fêng walks forward, gentle and cautious; and down she comes on the water without even a splash.”

Mr. Soutar, hidden in the gloom, listened and watched.

No one who has been (as Mr. Soutar had) through a Chinese mutiny, wishes to do so again. Such mutinies take a little time to work up: but when they do burst, the change which comes over the men is extraordinary—and horrible. It is a crowd-effect; impersonal, like the change in water when it boils. Kind, happy-go-lucky, decent chaps, with a sense of humour, go insanely cruel: with the faces of devils. And their horrible screaming all the time. If they have knives in their hands they simply cannot refrain from cutting at you, even while you are talking to them. They will cut at any little unimportant bit of you they can get at, if your vital parts are out of reach.

The
only
thing is to try and arrest the trouble in time.

Mr. Soutar could not understand a word of Chinese: but he believed that you can sometimes divine more surely what men are talking about if you do not understand a single word, than if you have a small smattering of their tongue. You rely on your eyes alone, to note the expression of their faces: and the tones of their voices help you.

He had never trusted that fat Hong-Kong Christian greaser, Henry Tung. He disliked all Mission-boys on principle: it never does to trust them. Now look at that chap: it was plain as a pike-staff what he was up to. A born demagogue and agitator. No need to be a sinologue to tell he was working the men up to some devilment: machine-wrecking, mutiny, murder—you could
see
the sort of thing he was urging!

—For Henry, his face very solemn indeed, his eyes pleading for belief, was telling one whopper after another: and the group of men listened to him fascinated, eyes wide and shining.

“Did I ever tell you,” said Henry, “how I once had a drinking-match with a tiger?”

“My God!” thought Soutar: “If I was captain I'd shoot that man where he stands: nip the whole thing in the bud!”

“My God!” thought Soutar, “If only I knew Chinese I should have him! But if I tackle him now, he'll only deny he was preaching mutiny at all!”

Then, quietly as he had come, Mr. Soutar crept away again, to look for the Captain.

The powerful innate forces in us, the few prime movers common to us all, are essentially plastic and chameleonlike. The shape and colour which they come to present at the mind's surface bear little seeming relation to the root: appear characteristic rather of the medium through which they have struggled to the light.

Where men's environment, their education, differ fundamentally, flowers from the same hidden root will
seem
to bear no kinship: will differ “fundamentally” too.

Take that curious opposition, and tension (or at least tie), which exist in all men, and indeed in all beasts, between parent and child. The form in which it emerges into behaviour is (speaking broadly) a matter of cultural environment. Amongst Anglo-Saxons, it flowers today for the most part in revolt: in an exaggerated contempt of the adolescent child for the parent: a contempt far greater than he would feel for any other human being of the same calibre as his father. Amongst the Chinese, it is precisely this same root which flowers in obedience, in worship of the parent. In both cases the root is the same: a tie felt to be immensely strong, and potentially very painful: so,
we
tug against that tie, desperately, trying to snap it, while
they
walk towards the source of the pull faster than the pull itself, so leaving the cord quite slack!

The Englishman, because he does not have to obey his parents (once he is an adult), often hates them: while the Chinaman, because he has to obey them implicitly, seldom hates them.

Sometimes the Englishman tries to find a remedy in equality, tries to make of his father a friend. But the friendship is not free: and within it the tie will still chafe him. The Chinaman, instead, makes of his father a god; and that relation, lubricated by the very formality it entails itself, will probably not chafe either of them in the least.

Worship is the smooth, nacreous coating with which the pearl-oyster covers the irritant grain of sand. When any human relationship—parent and child, governor and governed, male and female—seems intolerably fraught with irritation, there is a lot to be said for converting it like this into a
super
human one.

No generalisation however is universal. It is not impossible for a Chinaman to hate his father: only very rare, very rare indeed. When it does happen, because it is so rare it is rendered more arcane, a more potent shaper of the course of his life, than among us. It is something that cannot be breathed aloud: a sacred crime, like incest. Seeing no answering reflection in society around it, the motive is driven down, and inwards: becomes compressed.

Some of the flowers of this hidden root will then be highly curious: and some, even beautiful.

That fireman, Ao Ling, was a young chap—the same age as Dick Watchett: but his had been a more varied career. Not typically Chinese, you might say: there was too much movement in it, too much restless shifting from place to place over big distances. And lately, too much purpose: too little of the happy-go-lucky: a sternness, even an impatience.

A sort of self-oblivion, too, seems to settle on a man, once he has identified himself with a Cause. He will be able to tell you minute details about the Cause itself, from A to Z: but he can hardly tell you whether he himself wears two legs or three.

Ao Ling was in that state now. He had a minute memory of everything which had happened to him up to the time of his conversion, but of very little afterwards. From the time of his conversion, at least down to the time when they fought their way out of Chingkangshan, his mind was a blank, so far as personal things were concerned—it was filled solely with the progress of the Cause. In this ecstasy of religion, small wonder that neither the storm, nor his hunger, nor even the fire from the furnace which had seemed powerless to destroy him, could move him very greatly! Small wonder he had been so bitterly angry at the footling little beliefs of P'ing Tiao.

He sat there in a posture the design of which seemed framed on the bones of his body and the set of his ears, rather than (like most European postures) on the shape of the body's surface. A straight line ran up his spine, up the nape of his neck, up the back of his head. His very short, coarse, thick black hair radiated impartially from a high crown: it was dead-looking, and contrasted surprisingly with his small face, which could be extremely lively and mobile (though it was like a wall, now).

Hunger? For some days now he had been without food. But what are a few days without food to a man who has been through the long faminous siege of Chingkangshan almost without noticing he was hungry?

Hunger had been nothing new to him, even then, in point of fact. For as a child he had once lived through a famine year: and had not forgotten it. He was seven years old at that time. As his limbs got smaller, his paunch got bigger, so that (like an old man) he could no longer see his knees. From drinking immense quantities of water to fill it, his paunch went hard, and pushed out his little navel till it protruded like a young baby's. He had put nothing solid into that paunch, for five months, but bark and earth—except one day, when the family found a hoard of nine dried beans.

In the earlier months of that winter there had been some food in the house, it is true. But that, naturally, was not given to the children. It was reserved for their grandmother: and the little starvelings used to have to carry her bowl of gruel to her, once a day, with their compliments, until their powers of walking became so uncertain that in common prudence they had to be excused. For one thing which hunger did to them was to take away the power of regular sleeping and waking. Even at night they only slept for a few minutes at a time; and by day they were liable to drop off into a catnap at any moment, whatever they were doing.

There were only two children in the family; Ling and his sister.

One day, late in the famine, they went to the district town, to sell the sister. Most families tried to sell or give away their little girls, those days: but not all were successful. For with so many to choose from the buyers were grown particular. They did not consider it economic to take children under nine years old, being not yet fit for hard work. Those over eleven or twelve, on the other hand, might have wills of their own and make trouble in their new homes: so they too were refused. But Ling's sister was lucky—she was ten, just a good age: ready for hard work, but mentally still dependent. So Ling (who had been unboyishly fond of his
chieh-chieh
) had seen her skinny skull with its sad, monkey eyes, her nobbly elbows and her cracked fingers, for the last time. He saw his father give her: and the buyer, but quite kindly, take her away.

There was a sickening smell everywhere in the town, with so many people dead: and there did not at first seem many of the living about. But as the Ao family threaded the streets on their return home, they came all at once on a large crowd. It was in a street outside the door of a rich man's house. Not the main gate, but a postern, a door of dark polished wood in a perfectly blank wall. Everyone knew the rich man had food in his house: and now the crowd had gathered, without premeditation, in twos and threes, till the street was packed. They did not say much, they just kept up a low growling; though once or twice someone cried out; cursing in falsetto, or supplicating for food. Many were nearly naked. The Aos were soon jammed in the crowd, which still grew: there must have been more than a thousand. Men whom hunger had so withered that their every movement was a gesticulation.

The low whining rose a tone or two, like a storm about to break. If you were impartial you would have feared for that rich man, among his foppish latticed courts and fishponds, with the wolves at last at his door.

The door was opened, from within; and the door-keeper stood there. He was a small, gat-toothed man: but well fed. Alone, the mob surging up to him: but he did not seem afraid of them. He did not speak: but he lifted his hand and pushed the man nearest to him in the chest.

They all went down, falling like a house of cards. In a very short while they were all lying on their backs. Many were too weak to get up again for some time, after the shock of falling: they raised their bodies a little off the ground, weeping with vexation at their own weakness.

Little Ling noticed this collapse of apparently strong men, in the magical face of the Rich, with wonder, and a very curious feeling.

Then the door-keeper closed the door again, hardly bothering to bolt it. Soldiers from the Yamen! There was no need of soldiers, to withstand these autumn leaves.

When they got home, Ao Ling went alone to the little shrine in the fields where the country-gods sat. Ordinarily they are treated with great respect: given paper clothes, and sniffs of incense, just like the household gods (who, at the New Year, when they repair to Heaven to make their annual report, have their lips smeared with honey that their report may be sweet). But now these were as tattered as their worshippers, their clay bodies as cracked and ill-cared for.

The evening was high-pitched with the shrilling of cicadas: and everywhere the croaking of frogs, like the quacking of a whole fleet of ducks.

Greatly daring, Ling laid hold of the gods: momentarily expecting them to rebuke him. But nothing happened—there was no gate-keeper here!

He dragged them out of the shrine: and with what strength he had, broke them in pieces.

There they lay: powerless to resist, as they had already shown themselves powerless to help: and he started back to the house.

There was a rustling in the dry bamboo-clump. As he passed, in the dusk, something bounded out behind him. It was the god, the fractures showing as fiery seams in his flesh, his green face terrible with anger. Little Ling stumbled screaming into the kitchen, and fell flat on the floor.

All that night he heard the god trampling round the house, or snuffling, for his blood, at the door.

After the famine they moved south, away from the River, into the hills of eastern Hunan: right away from the River.

Why had Ling, among so many filial Chinamen, been one to hate his father? That wrinkled face, with its beard of a few coarse black hairs—why, on the rare occasions he found himself near it, did he always shrink from it, as if he expected a blow?