The Sand Pebbles (56 page)

“That’d just be the chance of things, like getting killed in a war. I could stand that,” Burgoyne said. “Don’t you see, Jake, it can’t be
me
that does it! It’s got to come from outside.”

“I guess I see,” Holman said.

He walked around behind the main condenser to look at his letter. It was only a line.

He whistled soundlessly. He did not know what it meant. But today was Tuesday. Burgoyne was still standing like a statue beside the workbench. Holman went back to him.

“Frenchy, I want to jump ship along with you this afternoon.”

“Jake, I told you—”

“This is my own private business. It’s important.”

“Well, sure, then.”

They split a beer in the canteen and then walked back past the head and into the kitchen. A bearded Sikh watchman got up off a stool and said, “Hi, Johnny.” Burgoyne gave him a dollar. He led them between bales and drums and crates in a big, dark, tar-smelling warehouse section and let them out a small door that opened on Poyang Road. They cut through alleys to Boundary Road, checking each cross-street for American patrols before darting over. They walked boldly into the native city past the British guard post, with its White Ensign flying above the sandbagged matshed. A short way beyond, Holman stopped.

“Thanks, Frenchy. I turn off here.”

“Remember, go all the way to the Jap Concession to get a sampan back,” Burgoyne cautioned him. “Our patrols don’t cover that bund.”

Holman hurried his own way. It had stopped raining, but everything was cold and damp. He did not recognize her at first, beside the stone, because she was wearing lightly padded blue Chinese jacket and trousers.

“Jake,” she said, smiling. “It’s really me.”

“Well, so it is! You look good in that rig.”

They were both tense, on guard against themselves. She and three others were leaving for China Light in the morning on a chartered junk, she told him. She insisted they were not going into any danger.

“All I hear’s the other way,” he protested. “It’s worse down there.”

“We have permission to come back,” she said. “It won’t be like before, our being there without even granting them any say about it.” She told him about Cho-jen being in effective charge of everything. “We’re trying to give up the unequal treaties in our own actions,” she said. “We’re not even informing the consulate.”

She wanted his approval. He had many doubts. He was afraid for her.

“You know what they say on the ships, about missionaries who won’t come out? Or who sneak back?”

“What do they say?”

“That they’re being hostages to the gearwheel. To keep us from fighting.”

“Nonsense! Jake, you can’t believe that!”

“Not about you, I guess. But suppose it did come to fighting? You’d be bad off.”

“Not at China Light.”

She explained carefully. As long as the unequal treaties remained in force, they meant to dissociate themselves from their government. They would not even let the consul know they were there. They were going to show their personal good faith to China as individual men and women.

“I’m even prepared to become Chinese, if I must,” she said.

“What!” Then he laughed. “Oh, you mean on paper. But that’s still serious.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that.”

“Sometimes I wish I could be Chinese. Born to it, I mean.”

“That’s why I wanted to see you.”

She told him that he could be the mission engineer, look after the sugar mill and set up a light plant. She spoke of a training program for young Chinese. Her voice was strange, flat and fast, and her expression curiously wooden. She kept her eyes on him. He could see
what she meant. It hung together. It made sense. He wondered why he had never thought of it himself.

I will!
he thought, and his hands tingled.

She paused, waiting for him to say it. He knew he was staring at her. She was rosy and pretty. She dropped her eyes. He searched for thought.

“Craddock. He hates sailors.”

“Not you. He’s prayed about it. And you wouldn’t be a sailor, then.”

“That’s right. I got almost two years to do.” He bit his lip. “I couldn’t get a special order discharge now.” She was silent, her eyes still lowered. “If I went with you now, I’d have to desert,” he said.

The sound of the word in his own mouth chilled him. A deep, vague fear displaced his glow and tingle. He felt a sudden anger, as if he had been offered something wonderful and then had it snatched away.

“I’ll have to serve out my time. I suppose that’d be too late.”

“Maybe not. Cho-jen knows about you. He approves.”

She kept her eyes down. Her mouth was drooping. Something desperate flared along his nerves.

“Shirley, do you want me to come? Really want me?”

“Not for my sake. For yours, I think.” She raised her head and looked at him steadily. Her face was pale. “It must be your own uninfluenced decision, Jake. Don’t think of me. Think only of the need you will find there of the work you know best how to do.”

“How can I help but think of you?”

“You must try. Pray, if you can.” She was very serious. “Mr. Craddock says that’s how it must be. He wouldn’t let me tell you until today.”

“I don’t know how to pray. Let me think.”

The more he thought, the more hopeless it was. He could not believe that they would not catch him, any place on earth that he might go. If he were in Shanghai, he might buy a Cuban passport to protect him. But you could not do that in Hankow. He wished that she had never given him the thought. He knew it was going to haunt him with its allure and its hopelessness.

“It’s no use, Shirley,” he said at last, miserably.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I’m glad you did. In them few minutes—I know now I won’t ever ship over in the navy.”

They tried to talk. It did not go very well. He had a strong, sad feeling that he would never see her again. It was almost dark before she finally said it.

“I suppose we’d better say good-bye. Shall I go first?”

“No. I will,” he said. “I want to remember you standing here beside the rock. Like the first time.”

He walked a few paces and turned around. She was just standing there smiling in her soft blue Chinese rig. He took her into his eyes and swallowed and raised his hand.

“Good-bye, Jake,” she said.

“Good-bye, Shirley.”

He said it so low in his throat that she probably did not hear. Then he turned and walked away. He felt like a wooden man.

He got hold of himself somewhere along Ho Kai. The shops were lighted and people were all around. He stopped to get his bearings. He was almost under the hanging bicycle wheel he remembered as marking Tung Li’s place. He verified it by the little blind alley just beyond. Then he went inside and up the stairs and knocked on Burgoyne’s door.

No answer. No slightest stir inside.

He knocked again, sharply. A woman’s voice spoke in high, breathless Chinese.

“Frenchy!” Holman said. “It’s me. Jake.”

“Jake!” two voices exclaimed.

A chain rattled. Burgoyne opened the door. Maily, behind him, said, “Jake! Oh, Jake!”

“Hello, Maily.” He took her hands. They were cold.

“Come aboard, boy!”

Burgoyne pulled him inside and closed the door. The room was dark, cold and lamp-smelly. Maily turned up the wick in the tiny kerosene lamp and the shadows pulled back into the corners. Burgoyne
had on a ragged Chinese coat and trousers. His bony wrists and ankles stuck out of them.

“I wear ’em here around home,” he said. He rattled the one chair. “Sit down, Jake. We call this the emperor’s throne.” Holman didn’t want to. “Come on. You’re company,” Burgoyne said. “First we ever had here.”

Holman sat down. The room was dismal. Patches of the brown wallpaper hung loose. Maily had hung up a few bright scraps of cloth. She knelt by the clay stove lighting a fire to make tea.

“I’m sure glad to see you again, Maily,” he said lamely.

“I’m glad too, Jake.”

She was thin in the face and her hair was growing out. She wore a padded blue cotton jacket that flared at the hips, above padded blue trousers. She was trying not to let him see her from the side.

“Maily’s purely busting to talk to somebody besides me,” Burgoyne said. He paced back and forth. “We got to celebrate this,” he said, and slapped his leg. “Maily, we got to whomp us up a company chow!”

He knelt beside her. They opened the chest and whispered. What they had, what they could afford, Holman thought. He knew the shops overcharged them. They were probably almost broke.

“I meant to bring a basket of chow with me, only I was afraid I might not find you,” he said. “I’ll go get it now.”

“No. You’re company.” Burgoyne stood up, holding a basket. “And I know right where to go.”

Holman stood up. “Let me, Frenchy. I want to.”

“I’m dressed for it. They don’t like the uniform around here,” Burgoyne said. “Besides, you’re company. So damn it,
be
company! Talk to Maily.”

“At least let me pay for it.”

“I got enough.”

“If I’m company, you got to humor me,” Holman said. He stuffed some Mex bills into Burgoyne’s jacket. “All right, damn it,
humor
me!”

They all laughed. Burgoyne went out.

Holman knelt beside her. “How are you, Maily? How is it, really?”

She waved. “As you see. Only worse.”

The
pukow
was rolled out and rumpled. They had been in it when he knocked, for warmth. Maily was blowing at the charcoal sticks. Her thin, smudged face was blotched with red spots and her hair was stringy. Her little hands were grimy and thin as bird feet. He remembered her firm roundedness and perfect, blooming skin. Now she was a coolie woman.

“I’ll tell you how it is. It’s like a story I read once, by Edgar Allan Poe,” she said. “There was a man and they hypnotized him and he died, but they wouldn’t let him die.”

“I never read it.”

“Frenchy’s fighting God’s curse,” she said. “I brought it on him.”

“Oh
hell
, Maily!”

“It’s true!” She sat back on her heels, eying the fire. “It would comfort me if I could convince you, Jake. I’ve never told this before.”

He paced and listened. She was raised as their own child by a missionary couple who had no children of their own, she told him. The man had found her as an infant abandoned on a winter hillside, wrapped in a straw mat and being rooted at by pigs. Frost took several of her fingers and toes, but they had saved her life.

“I used to think the pigs had bitten them off,” she said. “At the same time I didn’t really believe the pig story. I thought it was a kind of stork story.”

She loved her foster parents. Somewhere along the way she learned that she had a Chinese body. She did not learn surely that she was not an American on paper until she was eighteen. The mission’s Chinese doctor was discontented and talked of going to Shanghai. They had to have the clinic in operation to keep down native hostility. Then the doctor fell in love with Maily.

“They didn’t tell me directly. They just made me know indirectly how important it was to the mission to keep Dr. Wing,” she said. “At prayer meetings they talked about pigs and God’s grace that preserved me. They kept urging me to search my heart in prayer. I pretended to, but I didn’t.”

“Well … wouldn’t a doctor be a pretty good deal?”

“I didn’t love him!” She sat up straight. “All my life I’d been hearing them condemn and try to break down the Chinese custom of arranged marriages.” She slumped again. “Besides, I didn’t want to shift from being American staff to being native staff. It makes a big difference in how you live.” She looked around. “Now look how I live. Now I know that they were right.”

She held out a long time. Then she stole money and ran away.

“You know the rest of it, Jake. I owe my life to God’s grace and I evaded His will for me. Frenchy is a good man, the best man I ever knew, and I have brought God’s curse on him.”

She was crying. She bent to blow the fire. Holman wanted to rage against her foolish belief. But it was a kind of comfort to her. And he had absolutely no other comfort to offer in exchange.

“There comes some one time in your life when God calls on you to pay the debt you owe Him. That was my time, and I failed.” She looked up, tears streaming. “Oh Jake! When your time comes, don’t fail! Don’t fail!”

She put her hand on his knee, beseechingly. He moved away.

“Maily. Oh
hell
, Maily!” he said. He felt like crying himself.

“Don’t tell Frenchy,” she pleaded. “He’s so bitter already. Something dark and burning is in him. I’m afraid, Jake.”

They heard Burgoyne’s footsteps on the stairs. She bent hastily to blow the fire again. She was wiping away the tear tracks with her grimy jacket sleeve.

The two men drank tea at the table. The little lamp shadowed the hollows of Burgoyne’s cheeks and gleamed on skin tight over bone. Maily was making chopping and mixing noises behind Holman.

“It’s a surprise, Jake. Don’t look,” she warned him.

Burgoyne was curious about Holman’s reason for jumping ship. Holman sketched out the story about Shirley and the offer to make him mission engineer. As he talked, the wild, joyful, jump-off-the-edge feeling rose again in him.

“Right this minute they’re aboard some junk along the native bund.
They won’t sail till morning.” He leaned across the table. “Frenchy, let’s go find ’em! You and me and Maily. I bet they’d take us all. What do you say?”

“You mean desert?” Burgoyne stared at him. “Jake! You crazy, boy?”

“Hell yes! Why not desert?”

“I got in my papers to go out on sixteen,” Burgoyne said. “I can’t throw that away. And besides, it’s
wrong!”
He was leaning back and staring unbelievingly at Holman. “And besides that, it’d be going over to the enemy,” he said accusingly.

“The Chinese ain’t our enemy,” Holman said. The chill was coming back over his spirit.

“The gearwheel’s our enemy!” Burgoyne said. “They’re trying to run us all out of China. God damn it, I ought to know!”