The Island Where Time Stands Still (23 page)

Unlike his Chinese companions, Gregory had felt himself free to spend most of his time in the city, and he made several shopping expeditions. Most of his purchases were books, gramophone records and toilet preparations which he had been asked to get by A-lu-te; but some were on his own account. Among them, as he had no faith whatever in Chinese medicine, was a stock of drugs which might prove useful if any of the party fell ill on the journey to Yen-an; and, as his belief that Wu-ming had planned to have him murdered was never far from his mind, a medium-sized automatic that he could carry in his hip pocket without its bulk being obvious. On the last night he again took Mr. Grace out to dinner and, after a thoroughly enjoyable evening, said good-bye to that capable and friendly ally.

In the morning of the day the yacht sailed, Tsai-Ping's embalmed body had been brought on board. It was received by the entire crew with much wailing, and letting off of fireworks to scare away evil spirits; then ceremoniously deposited in the newly prepared mortuary chapel, for which a cabin amidships, once the forward armoury of the ship, had been selected.

Gregory was somewhat surprised to find that although the Chinese believed in demons they did not, apparently, subscribe to the superstition that having a corpse on board brought ill luck. With the practical good sense characteristic of them, once the ceremony was over no one made any further pretence of grief. Within a few minutes they were chattering and laughing as usual, and by the time the ship left harbour it seemed that everyone on board, with the possible except of Wu-ming, had forgotten that such a person as Tsai-Ping had ever existed.

This lack of concern about the dead Mandarin's possibly having the effect of a Jonah was a disappointment to Gregory, for he had planned to use it as a lever in an attempt to sabotage the journey to Yen-an. His idea had been that if Kâo could be provided with a face-saving excuse for calling at the island on their way across the Pacific the Council would be given all the information so far acquired about
Josephine's disappearance and might decide against this forlorn hope of trying to get her back from Lin Wân. If the presence of the Mandarin's body had rendered the crew uneasy, to get rid of it as soon as possible by burial on the island would have served as such an excuse. As it was, after nursing this project until it had been proved baseless all Gregory could do on their first night at sea was to throw out the idea that before actually risking the ship in Chinese waters they should run down to the island and place the matter before the Council.

Kâo, presumably from a desire to erase from his companions' minds any impression that at their last conference he had shown luke-warmness about carrying out his mission, received the suggestion rather coldly, and without expressing an opinion asked that of Ah-moi.

The hefty Captain replied without hesitation. ‘I have already set a course almost dead across the Pacific. San Francisco is on latitude 38° north and a falling-off to the south even to 33° north would bring us abreast of the south most tip of Japan. As you know, our island lies approximately 8° south of the equator, so to call at it I should have to alter course in the direction of New Zealand. Such a detour, along two sides of a vast triangle, would add the best part of four thousand miles to our journey. Since the Council has declared so positively their wish to have the Princess for our future Empress, the sooner you can make your attempt either to lure her away from Lin Wân, or buy her freedom from him, the better. I do not feel we could reasonably justify a fortnight's delay in calling to secure what would almost certainly be a repetition of their instructions.'

That settled the matter without further argument, and Gregory resigned himself to the uninviting prospect that lay before them. He could easily have deserted ship while they were still in San Francisco, but A-lu-te had shown such implicit trust in his not doing so that he had banished the thought from his mind without even seriously considering it. Since his grievous loss he had been much more prone than formerly to regard himself as a plaything of Fate; and now,
his far from whole-hearted attempt to get the hazardous expedition called off having failed, he began to feel distinctly intrigued about its outcome.

On the first day out they fell back quite naturally into the routine they had followed during their voyage to San Francisco; but A-lu-te and Gregory soon realised that the substitution in their party of Wu-ming for Tsai-Ping would make it difficult for them to resume fully the long uninterrupted sessions of companionable study they had previously enjoyed. The love-lorn Wu-ming now had no duties of any kind to engage him, and for A-lu-te to have excluded him on all but special occasions from her private stern lounge might easily have been interpreted as a wish to be with Gregory alone for reasons far removed from the improvement of her mind.

In consequence he had to be given, more or less, the freedom of her sanctuary; and while he appeared quite content to sit there for hours in silence, just gazing at her with his widely-spaced eyes while she discussed English gardens, Roman history, the First World War, and scores of other subjects with Gregory, her unwelcome admirer's presence was a source of secret irritation to them both.

It was on the third morning after they had left San Francisco that a mild excitement occurred to provide a topic of conversation throughout the ship. The previous night a stowaway had been caught while stealing food from the pantry of the saloon. Ah-moi told them at lunch time that on being questioned the man had made the excuse usual in such cases when a ship was bound for China—he had been beset with a persistent urge to visit the graves of his ancestors and was too poor to pay for a passage.

A-lu-te asked what would be done with him, and the Captain replied, ‘He has been sent below to earn his keep as a stoker.'

‘Will you allow him to land when we reach China?' Gregory inquired.

Ah-moi shook his head. ‘No; and even if he had chosen some other ship in which to stow away he would not
be permitted to do so. He would be detained until he could be put ashore once more at the port in which he had made his illegal embarkation. As it is, he will see neither China nor America again. During several weeks on board it is inevitable that he should learn from the crew something of our island. We cannot allow even second-hand talk of its existence to get about, so we have no option but to take him back with us.'

‘This is by no means the first time such a case has occurred,' Kâo added. ‘Chinamen in foreign ports always assume that a ship manned by Chinese is about to return to China; so from time to time stowaways are discovered in our trading vessel. Our method of dealing with them is quite simple. On their arrival in the island they are given a course of the drug which you would have been given but for A-lu-te's intervention. Once it has blotted from their minds all memory of the past, they become quite content to spend the rest of their lives helping to man one of the junks in our fishing fleet.'

Gregory's first reaction to this was that to inflict on a man what amounted to a life sentence for a comparatively trivial offence seemed harsh in the extreme; but on consideration he realised that if the Council of Mandarins were to protect their people from corruption, and their miniature State from outside interference, they had no alternative other than to silence dangerous tongues in this by no means inhuman manner; so he dismissed the matter from his mind.

He had, in fact, entirely forgotten the existence of the stowaway when, three nights later, a chance encounter recalled it to him. The time was just after midnight; A-lu-te, Kâo and Wu-ming had gone to their cabins, and one of the stewards was putting out the lights in the upper deck lounge as the last of the officers who had been chatting there left it; but Gregory did not feel sleepy so he decided to stretch his legs for a while on the starboard promenade deck.

The officer of the watch, the quartermaster and the lookout were now the only people remaining above decks, and
none of them was visible to Gregory. It was very quiet and the only sound that broke the stillness was the hissing of the water along the ship's sides as she ploughed her way steadily through the sea. There was no moon and drifting clouds made the usually bright starlight fitful and uncertain.

Gregory had made only two turns up and down when an iron doorway forward of the bridge swung open, a man staggered from it, lurched to the rail, and clung there. As the watch had just been changed Gregory assumed the man to be an engine-room hand who had come up for a breath of air before turning in, and for a moment thought he might only have imagined his unsteady gait owing to the uncertain light. But, as he continued his advance under the dark arch formed by the starboard side of the bridge, the man gave a loud groan, let go the rail and collapsed upon the deck. Stepping quickly up to him, Gregory said in Chinese:

‘What's the matter? What's wrong with you?'

The man did not reply. He had fainted. Yet even as Gregory asked the question he saw the answer to it. A break in the clouds let the starlight through to reveal that the man was naked from the waist up and that his back was crisscrossed with angry weals, some of which were still bleeding. It was clear that within the past half-hour he had been most brutally beaten.

Stooping, Gregory grasped his shoulder, pulled him into a sitting position, then thrust his head down between his knees. After a moment or two he groaned again and muttered in English with a touch of American accent:

‘I can't! I can't! I'm not strong enough.'

While man-handling him Gregory had already observed that he was of slight build, not much more than five feet seven in height, and still probably in his early twenties. Having given him a minute to recover he said:

‘I've never heard any of the hands speak English, so I take it you are the stowaway. What's your name?'

Without looking up, the youngster nodded. ‘Yes, Sir. I am that unfortunate person; and my name is Foo Wang.'

‘Who has been ill-treating you like this?'

‘The chief stoker. He says that slowness in one holds up the whole gang. But I have not been used to manual labour. Towards the end of each watch my strength begins to fail, then he beats me.'

Unsteadily the boy got to his feet. Taking him by the arm, Gregory said, ‘You'd better come to my cabin, and I'll do what I can for that back of yours.' Then he led him aft.

Having told Foo to wash the grime from his face and hands at the basin, Gregory went to the galley and dissolved a little cooking salt in warm water. Returning, he gently cleansed the stowaway's back with the solution, patted it dry, and anointed the weals with ointment; then he told him to sit down and asked him:

‘Is it true that you smuggled yourself on board because you wanted to visit the graves of your ancestors?'

‘Not my ancestors, Sir, but those of my parents. They were very poor and both of them died with many others in our village from a typhus epidemic, when I was quite young. As often happens in such cases, all the poorer victims of the epidemic were put in a row into a common grave, and that has always worried me. An American missionary took pity on me and later sent me to be educated in the United States. By great economy I have managed to save a little money. Enough to give my parents a respectable burial, but not enough also to pay for a passage back to China. That was my reason for stowing away.'

Having regard to the veneration for their parents which is second nature to the Chinese, the account Foo Wang gave of himself was a highly plausible one, and the only thing which might have caused the least doubt about it was that he did not look like the child of poor parents. Now that he had cleaned himself up and could be seen under electric light, his appearance was much more pleasing than might have been expected. Although he was of modest height his limbs were well proportioned, his features delicate, his eyes intelligent and his hands well moulded. It then occurred to Gregory that it was probably these very attractions which
had caused the missionary to single him out, and give him a far better chance in life than fell to the lot of the vast majority of Chinese orphans.

After a moment, Gregory asked, ‘What led you to choose this ship?'

‘Simply a belief that she was bound for China, Sir; but oh, how I wish now that I had waited for some other.'

‘Why? You could not have hoped to make so long a voyage without being discovered. In any ship you would have been made to work your passage; and as stowaways are in no position to protest against harsh treatment, you might equally well have had the ill luck to find yourself at the mercy of a brutal taskmaster. You must have realised the risk you were running.'

‘I did, Sir; and it isn't that. There is something queer about this ship that I don't understand, and it frightens me. The crew are different from any Chinamen I have ever met, either among those who have travelled widely or others who have never before left China. They will say nothing of the part of China from which they or their families come. None of them either drinks or smokes. There is no radio in the fo'c'sle, and except for sending signals they do not appear to realise that any other use can be made of wireless. Their speech too is neither exactly dialect nor quite the sort of bastard Mandarin that most poor men use, but a mixture of both with many old-fashioned expressions thrown in. They seem quite happy, but everything about them is unusual and reminiscent of a past generation—even their clothes. At times during these last three days I have become quite terrified, from the feeling that I must be dead and am now a spirit doing penance in some strange other world. Talking to you, and your great kindness to me, has reassured me upon that. But tell me, I beg, are we really on our way to China?'

Gregory nodded, and, refraining from telling him that he was not to be allowed to land when they got there, said: ‘In due course I expect you will learn why the crew differ quite a bit from any other Chinese seamen you have come across;
but for the time being I think the fewer questions you ask them about themselves the better. Anyhow, while we are on our way to China you have no cause to be frightened of anything worse happening to you, than you have experienced up to now.'