The Sand Pebbles (50 page)

“Nationalism is a deep, intense feeling,” she said. “Can you see how the sight of foreign flags and gunboats, so long taken for granted, can be suddenly infuriating?”

“I guess I can. It don’t help a bit about Po-han.”

“Not your grief. But you said you wanted to know in your head.”

“I don’t know. Why Po-han? Why not old Craddock?”

“Mr. Craddock is only their enemy. But Po-han, and all like him, are suddenly traitors in the new light of nationalism.” She looked out across the water. “Think of a Japanese gunboat at St. Louis, in defiance of our wishes. And an American who worked aboard it, caught ashore….”

“Yes.”

“In my home town, during the war, they killed dachshunds.”

“Yes.”

“I thy Flag am a jealous Flag, and thou shalt have no other flags before Me. Cho-jen is fond of saying that.” Her voice was very sad. “Cho-jen says treason is the modern sin against the Holy Ghost. He says the Chinese must become the Chosen People of their own tribal god, if they are to survive in the modern world.”

“I understand now,” Holman said. “It don’t help a bit.”

“Not your grief. I wish I could share that with you.”

She moved nearer. The night was warm and dark around them. The only noise was the buzzing in his ear. He wanted to touch her hands, beside his on the wooden rail. As if she knew, she put her left hand on his and he put his other hand on top of it. He felt her warm, unjudging nearness and the iron clamp around his chest eased up.

“It ain’t that I shot Po-han, my finger on the trigger,” he said at last, haltingly. “It ain’t only that.”

She said nothing.

“I knew our orders,” he said. “I’m an American. I could’ve run down there and made it legal to save us both.” His throat was tight. “I was afraid,” he whispered. “I stayed aboard.”

She was silent. Her hand lay warm and unflinching between his hands. The strident buzzing back of his ear softened. He swung his head against her shoulder.

“All the time I was being glad it wasn’t me,” he whispered.

Her free hand came up and pressed his head against softness under the rough texture. Afterward he could not remember how long it was they stood that way. The cold craziness and the red-hot hurt beneath it and all the shame and hatefulness of everything drained out of him into her and he could breathe without the ache in his throat. The buzzing behind his ear stopped. They stood that way a long while and parted at last without saying anything more.

When he woke up in the morning, it felt like coming off a drunk. He could remember all he had done and said, and he was ashamed of most of it. The only part of it that he wanted to remember was that with Miss Eckert. He was not ashamed of that.

The men avoided him in the washroom. At the mess table they spoke in low voices and did not look at him. He did not like it.

“How long till we get to Hankow?” he asked Farren.

Farren looked surprised and pleased. “Three days, if you give us the turns,” he said.

“We’ll give you the turns,” Holman said. “Won’t we, Frenchy?”

“Sure enough! We sure will, Jake!” Burgoyne said, grinning.

“Want me and Perna to take the first watch?” Wilsey asked.

“Yeah, will you? I want to flake out again,” Holman said. “I still got a headache to sleep off.”

He half slept for several hours. Then he got up and had Clip Clip shave him and he felt pretty fair. He was able to shoot the breeze casually with the men drinking coffee. He stopped by the galley and had a bowl of tea with Big Chew. Nobody mentioned Po-han.

In the afternoon he and Burgoyne took the steaming watch and
at first it went pretty hard. Chiu-pa was oiler. Holman heard a tiny steam blow start down the air pump rod. Chiu-pa was wiping over by the feed pumps and he did not move. The steam blow became louder. It rasped Holman’s nerves. He began hating Chiu-pa for a stupid idiot.

Po-han would have heard it instantly and been over there to set up on the gland and swab the rod. Many a time he had done it, grinning happily … holding his head so … reaching in so…. Suddenly a rivering sense of loss surged at Holman and just as suddenly it seemed to pass him. He had a feeling of Miss Eckert in the darkness and how friendly everyone had been all day.

“Chiu-pa!” he called. “Catchee air pump gland!”

After that he tried not to listen to the small things. Chiu-pa was a good man and he would catch anything before it became serious. At the end of the hour Crosley called down hesitantly for the readings. He did not say
up and down, up and down
.

“Sixty-two, up and down, up and down,” Holman shouted into the voice tube. “More to spare, if you want ’em!”

“Gotcha, Jake!” Crosley said.

What it took was not paying very close attention to the machinery. By the end of the watch he had the hang of it. It was going to be all right.

Each day after that it was easier. Holman stayed on the main deck. He caught glimpses of Miss Eckert on the boat deck, but he did not try to talk to her. He would not have known how to behave. That talk in the dark had changed things between them, but he did not know just how. He did not know how she felt about it.

Often she was with one of the men missionaries who Lynch said was named Gillespie. He was a well-set-up man of medium height with a strong chin and a sure, pleasant look about him. The men missionaries bunked in with the chiefs and Lynch had all the dope on them. Gillespie was the only one Lynch respected. Lynch said Gillespie came from a rich family and he was only being a missionary for the fun of it.

All hands manned the rail when the
San Pablo
steamed into Hankow. They were excited. They passed the native city first, to port, the bund six deep in junks and boiling with people. The gearwheel flag floated from every high place. It was worse than Changsha. Across the river the walled city of Wuchang was under siege. General Wu’s five-barred flag floated from a hilltop inside the walls. On Pagoda Hill back of Wuchang a gearwheel battery was firing into the city. They fired about one shell every five minutes and a smoke haze hung above the gray walls.

The big white stone Customs House marked the beginning of the foreign concessions. That bund was wide and tree-bordered, with pontoons for steamers. Treaty power flags and company house flags flew in profusion from every building, as if they were trying to match the gearwheel show in the native city. But what outmatched the gearwheel was the long gray line of warships down the middle of the river. They were sited so that their big guns could fire straight up the streets. As the
San Pablo
passed each ship, the sailors along the rail saluted in unison to bugled signals. The Sand Pebbles stood proudly and they snapped their salutes. They passed H.M.S.
Cockchafer
, shot full of holes and covered with glory, and they waved their hats and cheered.

To Holman everything looked scaled up. The destroyers looked like cruisers and the cruisers like battleships. Once Hankow had looked pokey to him, after Shanghai. Now, after Changsha, it looked like New York City.

“God, ain’t they pretty?” Duckbutt Randall kept asking, as they passed each warship. “That gearwheel. Huh! It ain’t a fart in a typhoon!” He spoke for them all.

The
San Pablo
anchored off the ex-Russian Concession. Sampans came out to take off passengers. Holman knew that refugees were being funneled down to Shanghai. He did not expect ever to see Miss Eckert again and he had to say at least good-bye. He pushed through the crowd on the quarterdeck.

“Good-bye, Miss Eckert,” he said.

She smiled and said good-bye. That was all they could say. Sailors and missionaries both stared, as if it were wrong and unheard of. Only Gillespie did not look upset about it.

All the ships had landing force ashore. There was no liberty. Lynch went ashore on special liberty. He said he was going to get his money back from that Russian woman or know the reason why. He was gone all night. He came back in the morning drunk and happy.

“That teashop’s got rooms topside and in back,” he told them in the CPO quarters. “She’s got ’em all rented to rich slopehead refugees. She’s even got the passageways rented.”

“Making money, you mean?”

“Almost three hundred Mex a day,” Lynch said happily.

Welbeck whistled. Franks stood up and walked a circle around Lynch, grinning and sniffing.

“Becky, he smells just like a rose,” Franks said.

“I got me a gold mine, boys,” Lynch agreed.

He told them about it. The gearwheelers were shooting landlords and moneylenders out in native territory. Thousands of them with their families and money were jamming into the concessions for safety. They would pay almost anything for a place to stay while they tried to bribe their way aboard a treaty-flag steamer to Shanghai. Chinese passages on those steamers already cost ten times as much as saloon passages, Lynch said, which were still reserved for white people.

“Stand by for me, Becky. I got to go back over tonight,” Lynch said. “She needs a man there. All she’s got is a pimple-faced kid cousin named Valentine.” He slapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Come visit us, when liberty starts again,” he said. “Harbin Teashop, on Rue Krassof. There’ll always be an open bottle, boys!”

“We’ll do that, Lynch-boy!” Franks said. “Say hello to Looby for us.”

“Her name’s
Liuba.”
Lynch looked annoyed.
“Lee-oo-bah
. It means
love
in Russian.”

Franks’ landing force section took the first week ashore. Red Dog went over every day for mail and he brought back newspapers and scuttlebutt. Maily had not shown up at the Green Front, he said. Coolies from the dockyard came aboard and measured to make armor flaps for the bridge and all the superstructure windows. Ping-wen brought the floorplates back to the engine room. All the white paint had to be scraped off them. The coolies worked very slowly at it.

“Pappy Tung’s coolies are dogging off, too,” Farren told Holman. “It’s all them signs and propaganda.”

Sampans with big signs went up and down the river. They tried to come close enough to harangue the ship coolies in Chinese. The ships kept fire hoses led out, to wet down and swamp the sampans if they came within range. One sampan went round and round
H.M.S. Cockchafer
all day long. Its sign read:
DAMN EYES KILL BABY
BRITISHER, GO HOME!

The line of warships made a brave show all day. Signal flags fluttered from yardarms, power boats shuttled back and forth, bosuns’ pipes and bugles shrilled and blared. Commands rang out for battle drills. For colors every morning all hands on a mile of warships stood at hand salute while the bands on the two cruisers played their way through five national anthems.

The chief pastime aboard was watching the siege of Wuchang. One day two Wu gunboats came upriver to shell Pagoda Hill. They were small, white and rusty and they steamed up and down behind the screen of treaty power warships with their deck guns barking. The ships went to battle stations. People ashore crowded rooftops along the bund to see the show. They all cheered when Wu’s popguns raised dust on Pagoda Hill.

The gearwheel guns began firing back and making splashes in the water. They were trying to pot the Wu ships as they crossed the gaps between the treaty power ships. On the
San Pablo
everyone was certain that as soon as a gearwheel shell hit one of the treaty ships it would be legal to shoot back. Then the cruisers would take the whole top off Pagoda Hill. After a while the British admiral told the Wu
ships they would have to get out in the open river. They went back downriver instead. As soon as they were clear of the concessions, small-arms fire whipped the water white around them. Crosley watched through the long glass.

“Jee-zuzz! We just think we been shot at!” he said that night at the mess table.

At the mess tables they repeated the same things that were in the newspapers. Things were hopeful. Wu had stopped fighting in the north. All the northern warlords were coming south to gang up on the gearwheel. People were calling them “The Allies.” Northern Chinese ate noodles made of wheat flour. That was supposed to make them more noble and tough than the sneaky rice eaters from south of the Yangtze. Big Chew fed the Sand Pebbles rice every day of their lives, and they could still believe a thing like that.