The Sand Pebbles (53 page)

“It’s a good place. Maily’ll fix it up real nice,” he said.

He made excuses and went out. He did not dare to tell Burgoyne that Maily was never going to come.

The narrow flagstoned streets were crowded and noisy. Here and there students were making speeches to small groups. There were gearwheel soldiers in green and other soldiers in gray, with red, white and blue scarves around their necks. The gray ones were deserters from the Wu forces. They were all kids. Strike pickets in dark green marched along, with their bamboo staves. Pretty little girl activists in lighter green bounced along in tennis shoes. There were throngs of ordinary Chinese, mostly coolies.

It felt like a holiday. Holman drifted along, idly watching them. He began to have the
left-out
feeling that he had had in Changsha. They all had purpose, he thought, going somewhere, working together in a big, exciting plan. It made every day like a holiday. When they looked at each other, that jumped between them. But when they looked at Jake Holman nothing jumped. All they saw was something cluttering up their way. He was just a sailor killing time by walking because he did not want to go to a bar and get drunk again.

He walked a long way, past fine houses behind brick walls and across railroad tracks. He was lost. It was a fine, clear day to be lost in. He came into a kind of park on the shore of a small lake. It had trees and shrubs and graveled paths and lotuses floating in the lake. Only a few Chinese were strolling there. In one place beside the lake were several of the hollowed, fantastically shaped rocks they liked in China. Holman liked them too.

A white woman, the first he had seen all day, stood looking at them. He waited behind a shrub for her to move on. She wore a brown woolen sweater with the elbow out. Then he glimpsed the curve of her cheek and something bright shot through his sadness. She was Miss Eckert.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully.

She whirled. “Mr. Holman!” Then she smiled.

From the first, he felt easy with her. She said she was not going to Shanghai. She was going back to China Light as soon as it was safe.

“I think it’s safe now,” she said.

“That ain’t how I hear it,” he said doubtfully.

“There’s a lot of hysteria about danger. A few treaty people have been beaten and humiliated,” she said. “But no one’s been killed. The Germans have not been bothered at all.”

“You’re treaty people.”

“I know,” she said sadly.

“Maybe you’re right.” He wanted to cheer her. “I just been walking all over the native city. I didn’t feel in any danger. All I felt was left out.”

“You feel that too?” She smiled again. “Aren’t they full of joy and energy, though! At China Light I could be part of it.”

“If they want you there.”

“They want me!” She changed the subject. “I love these rocks,” she said. “They’re so wild and romantic, and yet Chinese.”

The rock was high as their heads and grayish-white. It was a stony froth of big and little hollows with sharp edges. Some of the holes went all the way through it. Holman stroked his fingers in one of the hollows.

“They make me think of steep waves in a strong wind,” he said, “You can never really see them. They change too fast. They make you wish you could stop time for just a second. That’s the feeling these rocks give me, that time stopped.”

“They are a kind of frozen time, aren’t they?” She put her hand on the rock.

“How do the Chinese ever chisel ’em out like this, know just
how?”

“Oh, they don’t! They have to be natural,” she said. “They’re waterworn limestone. Cho-jen calls them footprints of the river dragon.”

“That’s your student? I’d like to meet a kid like that.”

“I wish you could. Cho-jen would approve of you.” She looked at
him apologetically. “That sounds backward, but that’s how I think of Cho-jen. He’s extraordinary.”

“You told me.”

“Not by half.”

Every true teacher dreamed of finding a genius-potential mind among her students, she said. Just once in a lifetime. Her face grew radiant as she talked. He began to understand how it felt to be a teacher. Cho-jen was such a genius, she said. He was only a boy and he had the leader force of an Alexander. He would be a very great man in China someday.

“And of course I feel all his other teachers misguided him,” she said, smiling. “Only I understand him.”

She was pretending to mock herself, but she meant it.

“I used to think I could learn anything,” he said. “All I ever learned was machinery. But I know more about machinery than most men ever learn.” It sounded like brag and he changed the subject. “These rocks,” he said. “You know what happens, when I look long enough at a rock like this one?”

She smiled encouragement. “What happens?”

“I shrink. I get the feeling I’m small as an ant,” he said. “I get the feeling of high cliffs and deep caves and hollows like ranches. I start climbing with my eyes.”

“I’d be dizzy.”

“I get dizzy. But I have to keep looking and climbing until I find my home place.”

She took her hand off the rock. “Where is it on this one? Or should I ask?”

“I never looked at this one before,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find. It’s always high up and dangerous to get to.”

“I grew up in flat country,” she said.

She started them talking about their homes in the States. They were exploring each other. He told her about sagebrush and rimrock and crystal air and coyotes howling at night. About storms at sea and volcanoes and earthquakes and steam and engines. He did not mention any people. He kept his eyes on the rock.

She talked of Minnesota and her parents and her big brothers Tom and Charley and so many friends and schoolmates that the names jumbled. She made him see her warm, bright house with books and music and rugs on a polished floor. In the summers they had a log cabin beside a lake. They were always clean in good clothes in that house, and they loved each other. Her face was soft and happy, remembering.

Everything she said put the Great Wall of China between her and him. It did not seem to matter, beside the rock. She pressed him to talk about his family. He would not.

“I left all that,” he said. “I’m going to serve out my time and retire in China. Lots of China sailors do that.”

She glanced at the sky. He followed her eyes. It was a very pretty red and orange sunset. They had talked for hours.

“Oh my! I have to go!” she said. “I have an important letter to write.”

“I’m lost,” he confessed. “Can I walk with you, far as the British Concession?” He took a last look at the rock.

“Of course,” she said.

It was a pleasant walk. When they came to Taiping Road he saw an American patrol coming and he stopped.

“Can’t let that patrol see me,” he explained. “The native city’s out of bounds to us. Supposed to be dangerous.”

He stood against a shop window. She stood in front of him. Some coolies loitering there were curious. She explained in Chinese why Holman was hiding. They laughed and stood closer, to help make a screen. The patrol thudded by, arms swinging, bayonets bright above them.

Once across Taiping Road, Holman told her goodnight. It would not do to walk together in the concession. When people saw a girl on the street with a sailor, they figured she also went to bed with him. Everybody knew that was the only use sailors had for girls.

Lynch was looking well. His face firmed up and he walked jauntily. He smoked cigars and he had good French brandy to put in his
morning coffee. He seldom went into the engine room, but he would call Holman up for coffee royal and get the dope. He was not concerned about how sullen the coolies were getting. He would lean back with a shine in his eyes and the new, firm look about his mouth and wave all that grandly away.

“Baby ’em along, Jake. They’ll get over it.”

Through some roundabout Irish superstition he had once blamed Holman for getting him married. Now he seemed grateful.

“Liuba’s the best thing ever happened to me,” he would say, puffing blue smoke. “You ought to get yourself a good woman. I mean it, Jake!”

Downriver the rice eaters were still defeating the noodle eaters. Liuba had a plan. They would sell out in Hankow for a big killing and buy property in Shanghai. When the gearwheel moved in around Shanghai, they would make a really big killing.

“All the money in China will be in Shanghai then,” Lynch said.

Over in Wuchang they were still holding out. All the buildings outside the walls were burnt and most of them inside, most likely, from the angry red glare of fire that rose every night under the intermittent shelling. Several gearwheel airplanes showed up and dropped bombs on the city. That seemed to the Sand Pebbles to be just too much. But every morning on Dragon Hill the five-barred flag was still there.

Burgoyne did not look well. He lost weight. He turned morose and cursed the gearwheel bitterly. He made all the other Sand Pebbles uncomfortable. He would not look for sympathy, but neither would he give up hope. His hope was hideous, like a mangled snake that would not die.

The little public garden became Shirley’s refuge from the emotional jangling of the hostel. She went there every afternoon. When he had shore leave, Holman came there. It was not by verbal prearrangement. They were always pleasantly surprised at meeting.

She became very much interested in Holman. The garden freed him from constraint.
No-man’s land
, he sometimes called it. He was
plainly happy there. He was as glad to get away from his ship as she from her hostel. She felt free also. Her shabby sweater did not matter. But when they walked back to the concessions, the constraint came between them once more.

One evening she told Gillespie about Holman. They were having hot chocolate and pastries in a small bakery-tearoom crowded with White Russians.

“It’s my teacher’s instinct, I believe,” she said. “There is a good man hidden in him, even from himself.”

“If I’m going to teach at China Light, I suppose I should cultivate my own instinct,” Gillespie said. “Is that how it works? Seeing the form in the block of stone?” He smiled. “It sounds ambitious.”

“Oh, not like that!”

Good teachers were like gardeners in a human garden, she explained. They helped human personalities find their most happy and attractive growth. Where they saw need, they had to help. As a gardener would stop for a moment to prune and straighten a wayside shrub. Gillespie looked doubtful.

“I’m afraid I’ve always dismissed gunboat sailors as a group,” he said. “They’ve made their life choice.”

She nibbled a pastry as he talked. He suggested gently that she felt guilt, because if they had not remained behind at China Light then Holman would not have had to shoot the coolie who was his friend. She nodded. She did feel guilt.

“So do I feel guilt,” Gillespie said. “But I wonder if it is helping the man to open new windows for him? He’s chosen his life.”

“He hasn’t!”

“What makes you so sure?”

She could not say, instantly. It was a cumulative impression. It was in his attitude toward the Chinese, his seeing no essential difference between himself and them. It was in his dislike of military pomp and ritual.
It’s stupid. It’s like you choose up sides and kill each other
, he had said once.

“He seems to have no
limiting
sense of himself,” was the best way she could sum it up.

It intrigued Gillespie. He asked questions.

“He’s had some high school, I think,” she said. “He’s very intelligent, but the only outlet he has found for it is machinery. He has made a kind of poetry of machinery.”

She could tell Gillespie nothing of Holman’s background, except that there was something painful in it which made him reticent. She realized that she knew less of Holman than she had thought. Gillespie sipped chocolate and kept his eyes inscrutably on hers. Unlike the others at China Light, he had always treated her as adult and responsible. She hoped he was not going to become fatherly now.

“What will become of him? What’s his aim in life?”

“He doesn’t seem to have any,” she said. “He means to retire and live out his life in China. He told me he would not be a bartender. Beyond that, he has no idea.”

“Most of them do become bartenders.”

She drank off her chocolate, as Gillespie talked. A black sludge was left in the bottom. She ate bits of it with her spoon. It was faintly bitter. Retired enlisted men in China also became bouncers in cabarets and armed guards at gambling places, Gillespie said. Some became bodyguards to rich Chinese. A lucky few got on as police or as outside men in the customs service. But for the most part they became subsidized beachcombers.

“I wonder if the brutalizing effect of the life they lead may not be a kind of merciful natural anesthesia,” Gillespie finished.

“They can change their lives.”

“Not easily.” He waved his hand at the White Russians seated at small tables all around them. “These are people with changed lives,” he said.

The Russians were all drinking strong brown tea from glass tumblers. They looked beaten and sad. Two ragged, bearded old men were playing chess. They might have been noblemen once.