The Sand Pebbles (41 page)

After dismissal, he planned it with Bordelles and Franks. Harris could be stationed in the bridge to blow the whistle. The other conscientious objectors could take the deck watches. Navy regulations prohibited men on duty under arms from taking off their hats or assuming undignified postures.

“Old Craddock’ll raise hell,” Bordelles warned. “He’ll say kneeling is a perfectly dignified posture.”

“We are still bound by navy regulations,” Lt. Collins said.

The prayer went clumsily. Bordelles mustered the men and spaced them out in the pattern for physical drill. The men had dogged red
faces. Harris blew the whistle in a vindictive, overlong blast that sent a cloud of steam drifting above the sands.

“Ship’s company …
uncover! Two!”
Bordelles said. “Ship’s company …
kneel!”

They all knelt, hats beside them, except Craddock. An air of embarrassed constraint hung over the fantail. The men would not look at each other. Some knit their fingers and some steepled them. Craddock raised his hands and his bearded face to the sky and led off the prayer.

He prayed very loudly, asking God to forgive them all for their swinish lusting after drink and harlots, for all their love of blood and violence, and to relent and send rain. The men were scowling and stirring. Just in time Craddock saw the danger signals and switched to Chinese. He raised his great voice to full register. God and the Chinese out there alone knew to what nameless sins he was vicariously confessing
San Pablo
. The sailors subsided. It was all right, in Chinese.

He thundered in Chinese for ten minutes, until Harris cut him off with another long whistle blast. The men did not wait for dismissal. They stood up and bolted for the crew’s compartment, where they would swear and growl themselves back into their accustomed and comfortable state of grace. Craddock went up to the boat deck with the two officers. He was going to take tiffin aboard. He was strangely affable. He had had a chance to launder some very dirty souls and he had scrubbed hell out of them and he was feeling good about it. Bordelles loyally played up to him.

“I feel a lot better about things now, Mr. Craddock,” he said. “Maybe I’m foolish, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it rains before tomorrow afternoon.”

“It rests with God’s infinite mercy,” Craddock said.

Just before lunch a new crowd clamor broke out. It sounded like jeering laughter and the three men went out to see what it might be this time. Two Chinese in white dunce caps, one at each end of a bamboo ladder, were crossing the sands. Seven or eight dogs, fastened upright between the ladder rungs, were forced to skip and hop along on their hind legs. Each dog was dressed in a crude white sailor suit
and they had crude flags tied to their flapping forepaws, variously Japanese, French, British and American. Craddock began laughing.

“That’s a shame-heaven show,” he explained. “Everyone is supposed to laugh.”

The old devil was laughing from more than a Chinese sense of decorum, Lt. Collins thought. Someone in that town had a nasty turn of humor. The dogs howled and hopped along. They twisted their heads and snapped at each other and showed big white teeth. A high, sharp yapping broke out on the lower deck.

“Get in step, you mangy sons of bitches!” Shanahan’s voice rose clearly. “You’re a disgrace to the tribe!” The sailors were all laughing on the lower deck. “Arf! Arf! Arf! Eyes …
right!”
Shanahan shouted.

He was pretending that the dogs were passing in review. The dogs
were
ludicrous. Suddenly Lt. Collins and Bordelles were laughing too, helplessly swept away. The whole ship was laughing, to match the laughter of the Chinese on the bund. When the dogs were out of sight, the laughter subsided in red-faced, wheezing chuckles.

“The Chinese … are a very ingenious people,” Bordelles gasped happily.

The mood lasted through tiffin. Craddock seemed actually human. He left in a good mood, promising to return with all his juniors the next morning. The prayer had indeed been a success.

Later in the day Lt. Collins learned from Yen-ta that the Chinese on the sands had been greatly impressed by the prayer. Twice the steam cloud from the whistle had drifted over the sands and drops of water condensed in it and fell hissing on the fire. The Chinese thought that was very potent rain magic. Lt. Collins chuckled privately at the irony. It made him feel better about Mr. Craddock.

Jake Holman had been getting more tense every day. He could not forget what Lt. Collins had said so matter-of-factly:
the people know they are all going to die
. He felt that he was the only man on the ship who appreciated what was going on.
It affects their minds
. The people were trying to take God by the throat. They were going to have rain,
if they had to wring out heaven like a swab. It was an enormous thought, and Jake Holman could not shake it off. He would like to take part in a project like that. He suspected that the other Sand Pebbles were afraid underneath also, just not wanting to admit it to each other. They were only covering with their jokes and swagger.

On Friday the whole world felt like a loaded gun on a hair trigger. The same tantalizing spun-sugar clouds floated around up there in the dry, bright sky. No one had much to say about the decks. During drills the warlord and some of his officers and women came aboard, with bales of gear. They were like rats leaving a sinking ship, the Sand Pebbles said uneasily. Shortly afterward, the missionaries came aboard. Burgoyne spat over the side.

“Their ship’s sinking too,” he said.

It was old custom that the missionaries took the boat deck and the Sand Pebbles stayed on the main deck, like oil on top of water. A baby was crying up there, and it sounded very out of place. The men had to watch their language so closely that they could hardly talk at all and they could no longer come from the washroom out on the fantail with no clothes on. They drifted uneasily along the main deck, resenting the missionaries. The crowd up on the city wall and along the bund was thickening. Near the fire on the sands priests had built a small mat shed. On a shelf in front of it they had wooden drums shaped like fish and some joss sticks smoking. Soldiers dumped the animal carcasses into the river and they floated away. The priests were sticking fresh willow branches into the sand around their mat shed.

Holman watched it all. Steam was up in both boilers and they were ready to go in the engine room; Po-han was looking after that. Most of the crew was back on the fantail watching the sands. Clip Clip had to come back there to call them for their shaves. Above them on the boat deck the missionaries were watching too. The two groups did not look at each other. The sailors knew the women up there despised them. The women probably considered, quite correctly, that the sailors had impure thoughts about them. Holman saw Miss Eckert up there, in a gray dress. She caught his eye and smiled.

“Hi!” he said. “Hello there.”

“Hello, Mr. Holman.” She came to the rail, looking down.

He could not talk to her there, in the quick chill of embarrassment and resentment among the Sand Pebbles. Through the open door of the head he could see Harris sitting on the trough. Harris grinned at Holman and began to sing, in a high, mocking voice:

Holman waved his hand vaguely at her and bobbed his head and almost ran forward. He had to get out of there. On the way forward he thought of an excuse and went up the ladder to the boat deck. He began testing the stack guys. She came forward to meet him.

“I’m slacking the stack guys,” he said loudly.

“It’s very high.” She looked up at the smoke drifting away.

“That’s to make a good natural draft through the furnaces.” He slapped the guy. “These cables keep it from falling over. With all the fires lit, it gets hotter and has to expand,” he said. “We got to slack the guys, or it would buckle.” He was saying it all for Crosley’s benefit, down on the quarterdeck. “This is a turnbuckle,” he went on. “It’s got right- and left-hand threads. When I turn it this way, they both screw out. You see?” She nodded, puzzled at his manner. “Now I’ll get the forward ones,” he said.

He went forward, out of Crosley’s hearing. She followed. Her hair was well grown out, knotted back and smoothly pretty in the sunlight. She smelled clean, like Ivory soap.

“How are things at China Light?” he asked her.

“Oh, wonderful! I enjoyed my first school year,” she said. “I love China, now.”

“All shook down, huh?” He smiled. “I’m glad.”

“Some of the boys have such quick, eager minds,” she said. “One named Cho-jen is a true genius. I’m beginning to understand China, Mr. Holman. I’m never afraid any more.”

“There may be shooting here, before today ends.”

“I hope not.” Her face shadowed.

“So do I.”

He was suddenly and unaccountably very glad that she was safe aboard. She was thinner and her skin was rougher than before. American women always looked big and coarse to him, compared with Chinese girls, but he did not feel that about Miss Eckert.

“Do you think the old monk has a chance to win?” he asked her.

“Mr. Craddock says it is heathen spiritual arrogance,” she said. “We are to pray that it not be punished as it deserves.”

“That means for it to rain?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it depends on how you look at it.”

She looked concerned. “Mr. Craddock really does a lot. He has food stored at China Light for all our people. And he has his farmers plant sugar beets in some of the high fields. They send roots way, way down to reach water. They’re thriving.”

“That machinery,” he said. “They got it working yet?”

“Not the way it should. They can make a kind of crude molasses.”

“If I could talk Chinese and had time and the chance, I could show these farmers along the river how to get up twice as much water with them treadmill pumps,” he said.

“Could you really?”

“I’d true up the flumes and polish ’em. Put low-friction packing on them wooden vanes,” he said. “Metal bearings, with oil.”

“I wish you could have the chance.”

“Sometimes I think about a fleet of barges, with boilers and steam pumps,” he said. “I could teach Chinese to run ’em and take care of ’em.”

She smiled. “You have the missionary spirit, Mr. Holman.”

It shocked him. He stared at her. She read his thought.

“Not all missionaries are evangelists. There are medical and teaching missionaries,” she said. “You could be an engineering missionary.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“I never heard of one. But there could be.”

It was an absolutely new thought to him. She moved to the rail and he followed her. A ventilator and a boat made a private little alcove for them.

“Chinese can learn engineering,” he said. “I know.” He began telling
her about Po-han and the other Chinese. He knew he was like a little boy turning handsprings to show off, and he couldn’t help it. He knew also that she would understand and not laugh at him. He told her all about the ship and what he had done. “Except for the guns, us sailors are just passengers,” he finished. “And that Po-han—if there was only a few thousand like him in China …”

“There are many millions like him in China,” she said. “All they need is a chance.”

“I’d like to see ’em get a chance.”

“You’re a teacher too. You are already an engineering missionary.”

They looked at each other. The quarterdeck bugle blared mess gear. It saved him. He was about to say something foolish.

“I have to go eat now,” he said. “Afterward we have to stand by repel boarder stations. I won’t see you again until after … after whatever’s going to happen.”

They both looked at the sky. It did not look any different.

“I’m just not worried,” she said. “I feel it will rain.”

“It will, if hoping helps. I sure been hoping.”

He went lightly down to the main deck. So you could be a missionary without fiddling around with souls. You could be a teacher. A teacher
too
. How about that?

The waist party stood by on the quarterdeck, beside the open arms locker. Lynch paced nervously and slapped his pistol and they talked in very low voices. The missionaries on the boat deck were going to pray straight through and they were making all the noise on the ship. The men up there took turns leading the praying and now and then they all stopped for a hymn. The high, cottony clouds were heaping and piling behind the city. The wall and bund were solid with people. Soldiers and monks were building a pyre on the sands.

“They could go hermentile any second. This could get pretty nasty,” Lynch kept saying.

Burgoyne was nervous too. He had an extra large lipful of snuff and he kept crossing the quarterdeck to lean out and spit and look aft.

“If there is a God, and He knows how to make it rain, I don’t rightly see how He can hold out,” Burgoyne said.

“Hah!” Harris said.

“Harris don’t believe in God,” Wilsey said, winking.

“I believe in admirals,” Harris said.

“Harris is going to hell.”

“I’ll worry about that when I get there.”

“Harris is a bad influence on us kids,” Wilsey said. “No wonder we’re so sinful that God won’t let it rain.”

Stawski snickered. Harris bristled.

“You got something, Wilsey, you say it to me, not just about me!” he demanded. “I’m here, too.”

Wilsey put his lips to Harris’s ear. “Prong you, Harris,” he whispered.

“Prong you and all your relations clear back to Judas!”

“Pipe down!” Lynch snapped. “Cut out that kind of talk!”

“You believe in God, Chief?” Wilsey asked.

“Times like this I do,” Lynch said. “No use guys pushing their luck, times like this.”

The missionaries started on “Rock of Ages.” The flurry of talk on the quarterdeck died down. The great crowd of Chinese ashore was hushing, also.

At three o’clock they brought the old man out of the city. They were having a hard time getting him through the crowd on the bund. Holman could see the sedan chair, high and tossing like a ship. Bordelles came.