The Sand Pebbles (61 page)

The coolie coal passers had carried two full buckets at once on a short, stiff shoulder yoke. Holman did the same. He was enjoying using his strength to the utmost. After a few trips he learned the knack of maneuvering the buckets in the dark, narrow, dusty wing bunkers. He built up heaps of coal on the floorplates. The other men were recovering. Ellis had gone up for a pitcher of coffee.

“Jake, stop for a cup of joe,” Haythorn said. “You bastard, you ain’t human!”

Holman stopped and drank coffee with them in the steamy, smoky, sulfurous smell of the place. He rested and felt strength flow quickly back. Then he shouldered the yoked buckets again. “Way hay! Hai lai!” he said, pretending to be a coolie. He got a weak grin from them.

After supper, when they were anchored, he took a shower. Despite rag padding, the yoke had worn the skin off his neck and shoulder. He winced as the hot water hit the raw place. At the trough, Stawski was soaking his hands in a bucket of warm water. He had come out of the fireroom and dropped into an exhausted sleep. The serum from his blisters had dried and stuck the matted rags to his hands and he was trying to soak the rags off.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Stawski said. He was forcing himself to keep his hands in the water. “God damn!” he said. He kept lifting one foot and then the other.

Holman went to his locker to dress. The compartment had a sour, sweaty stink. Most of the men were too tired and disgusted to take a bath. They had screwed the light bulbs out above their bunks and they were flaked out, still in dungarees stiff with oil and coal dust. They had no razors and they were all sprouting beards. The whole compartment was gritty with ash and coal dust. The pillows were black.

Stawski came out and sat wearily at the mess table. He laid his hands down palm upward and looked at them. Broken blisters the size of silver dollars overlapped on the balls of his thumbs and along the bases of his fingers. Some shreds of skin were left. Coal dust was embedded in the raw. Holman knew the other men were just as badly off. He could not think of any good thing to say to Stawski.

“I got the right stuff for them hands, Ski,” Harris said. He had just come in, with a brown quart beer bottle. He set it on the table. “That’s turpentine. It hardens skin,” he said. “Put some on them hands.”

“You just want to hurt me so you can laugh,” Stawski said.

“No I don’t. It’s true! It’ll help you!”

“I don’t trust you. I never ever seen you do one decent thing, Harris,” Stawski said. “To hell with you. They hurt enough when sweat runs down on ’em.”

Harris insisted. Stawski would not trust him. Harris was standing oiler watch, and he did not have any blisters to prove it on himself. Some of the other men raised up on their elbows to listen. Harris appealed to them. They would not trust him either.

“I tell you, this is a real old trick. I learned it back when all you punks were still sucking sugartits,” Harris said. “Ski, I’ll give you a hundred dollars if it hurts you. You got the whole crew for witness I said that.”

Silently, Stawski held out his left hand. Harris poured a puddle of turpentine into it. “It don’t hurt,” Stawski said wonderingly. He spread it delicately with the fingers of his right hand. “It feels cool and good!” he said. “Give me some more!” He held out both hands.

Stiffly, they all climbed out of their bunks and came over to get turpentine for their hands. They went back to sleep with a strong smell of turpentine masking the stink of their sweaty clothing.

The passage was a five-day ordeal. The water was low and still dropping. Twice they nudged mud and spent hours getting through. Bordelles and the chiefs heaved on lines and got dirty. They dropped all pretense of drills and salutes and concentrated on getting the ship through. Whatever the emergency, Lt. Collins was there, clean and cold and calm and ready with the right thing to do. He was being captain of his ship as never before in the Sand Pebbles’ memory.

They were being the crew, and they could not endure it. They could not face up to having no coolies. When they were not too exhausted, they snarled and flared at each other. The living spaces became very foul. The men went filthy and bearded. Each meal seemed worse to them than the last, and they cursed Duckbutt Randall every day until he wept. Harris cursed all night in his sleep.

Holman did much of the work in the fireroom. By the time they started up the Siang River, the men were hardening. The new skin on their palms was slick and red and hard and sensitive only in the creases. The hills looked homely and familiar. They began to pick up their spirits with the hope of getting more coolies in Changsha. They knew the cook they would get could not possibly be as good as Big
Chew. But, as they told each other, neither could he possibly be as bad as Duckbutt Randall. By the time they sighted the sacred mountain and the gray shape of Changsha, they practically had their new cook installed in the galley.

They anchored in their usual place. Changsha looked much the same, except for the U.S.S.
Duarte
upriver at a commercial pontoon near the U.S. Consulate. But within minutes demonstrators began gathering on the bund. They waved placards and shouted in unison on signal from uniformed leaders,
POISONERS OF CHINA! LEAVE CHANGSHA
! one sign screamed.

“What a hell of a welcome home!” Farren said.

They were all weary and disgusted. They stayed on the starboard side, so they could not see it. Bordelles in full dress went off to make the courtesy calls on H.M.S.
Woodcock
and the Japanese gunboat. The
Duarte
was senior ship in port. Taking Welbeck and Red Dog with him, Lt. Collins went to the
Duarte
himself.

They came back after dark with news that flashed through the ship like a bayonet thrust. The worker-peasant council that ran Changsha knew all about the
San Pablo’s
trouble in Hankow. They did not want her in Changsha. That day they had clamped an absolute boycott on all the gunboats and they would not lift it until the
San Pablo
went away. It meant no liberty and no fresh provisions. It meant no coolie help and no stores shipments by rail from Hankow. And the
San Pablo
had brought that on all the other gunboats as well. The Sand Pebbles listened to Red Dog tell about it and they were too crushed even to curse.

“They got us by the balls. We’ll have to go back to Hankow.”

“Water’s already too low.”

“Yeah. We’re stuck for the winter.”

“No coolies. God damn it, no
cook!”

“Ain’t fair. They hit us enough. What the hell they
want?”

“Skipper’s going to talk to us tomorrow.”

“He’ll tell us to have moral courage,” Harris said.

They cursed without spirit. They went dirty to bed with aching bones and without any hope left at all.

There was no physical reason, Lt. Collins thought, why
San Pablo
could not winter through. The problem was moral. And morale was a prime command responsibility. And he had, right now, a crisis in morale. He had to act at once.

He sat at his table with lights out so that no one would disturb him. He had to think it out alone.

The new weapon did not yet have a name.
Moral isolation
was as close as one could come to it. In Hankow they had marked
San Pablo
down for the kill. In Changsha they meant to strike the death blow.
San Pablo
was at bay. Wrigley yesterday, in
Duarte
, had scarcely concealed his dismayed resentment that
San Pablo
had come to Changsha. He had warned that his men would probably pick fights with the Sand Pebbles unless the two crews were kept apart. Bordelles had brought back the same impression from
Woodcock
and
Hiro
. No one understood the new weapon yet.
San Pablo
would have to make her fight alone.

Americans had faced hardships, none better. Blizzards and wolves and malaria, searing summers and starvation winters, the raw, wild continent. They had faced men. Treacherous Indians, sneaky Mexicans, proud Rebels, insolent Spaniards, the hateful Hun. All dared, all beaten. But this in China was an assault on the spirit, in an area where simple, forthright people did not have any developed defenses. They did not yet know that in Washington. There was that story one heard in all the clubs. “Oh yes, Shanghai,” President Harding had told the man from Shanghai. “I have an aunt who is a missionary out there. Her post office is some little place called Calcutta. Did you ever run into her?”

Lt. Collins chuckled, without mirth. President Coolidge probably thought the Far East was about the size of Vermont. Very likely he had a missionary aunt. No doubt she wrote him long letters about the greedy businessmen and the wicked gunboats.

He checked himself. Presidents had human failings, but one must not think such thoughts about the Office. The American people were the power and the glory and the absolute authority that drew to a blinding focus in that Office, from which it fed down through the
ranks to power the last, least man in uniform. To question that Office was to welcome chaos into the world.

He felt chastened. He was himself a small and distant reflection of that blinding focus. That was his solution, grace-given in the night. It was for him simply to be
San Pablo
. To affirm his paramount value in all the symbolic ways open to him. The Sand Pebbles were good men, professionals, all lesser ties long ago severed.
San Pablo
was their collective life. And he looked out the eyes of
San Pablo. San Pablo
, despised, rejected, ringed round with enemies, would endure and keep the faith.

He stood up, filled with calm resolution. He would be able to sleep now.

He ate breakfast alone in his day cabin, as he would eat all meals henceforward. He was going to intensify his ritual isolation as commanding officer. After breakfast he sent for Bordelles and told him the plan.

“Tell the chiefs to turn out in their best uniforms,” he said. “When I judge the time right, I will have all hands called aft.”

“Yes, sir,” Bordelles said stiffly.

He was responding to his captain’s manner. There was to be no more idle talk. Relations were to be rigidly formal.

Near ten o’clock a student-led hate demonstration began to shape on the bund opposite the ship. Lt. Collins had all hands mustered aft. He gave them time to assemble and then went aft himself, after a last-minute check of his blue uniform. He faced them, as so often before, with the great wheel at his back and the colors above his head. Bordelles and the chiefs were clean and sprucely uniformed. The men were unshaven in dirty dungarees, slouching in two straggling ranks across the fantail. They were acting out a dumb and anguished protest.

“Some of us later in life are going to win medals for less heroic action than the passage we have just made from Hankow,” he began dryly. He spoke of the labor and hardship. “I want to say
Well done!
to every man aboard.”

It did not touch their sullen faces.

“Now about this boycott,” he said. “It cannot defeat us physically.” They had enough dry stores aboard to live on, he told them. There was coal ashore already in American hands. “Changsha is our home port,” he said. “We have the right by treaty to be here and to buy what we need of food, materials and labor. For reasons I will not go into, we cannot for the present enforce our rights by armed action. But we are not in the slightest degree going to give up our claim to our rights, as they are trying to force us to do.”

It deepened their sullen anger. He continued with careful words reviewing what they all knew. He wanted to build their sense of grievance to an intolerable ache.

“Right here months ago I spoke to you of a new kind of war,” he said. “We are blooded now, in that war. We know that they can hurt us, if we let them.
If … we … let … them.”
He had all their eyes now. “If we let
them
control how
we
feel and act,
they
will destroy us,” he told the men grimly. “Because
they
hate our guts.
They
hate the very linings of our hearts!”

He said it harshly. He wanted to rasp them raw. He emphasized each pronoun with voice and gesture. He made with both hands a fending gesture for
they
and an in-gathering for
we
.

“Who are they? I’ll tell you who they are. They are more than the simple, ignorant Chinese whom they are using. They are the clever, seeing ones anywhere in the world who fear and envy America. They make the new kind of war. They have singled out
San Pablo
for destruction, to test and perfect their new weapons.
They
bribed our boatmen to smuggle opium aboard of us.
They
stole away our boatmen.
They
drove us from Hankow.”

He was drumming the pronoun into them with voice and gesture. Their whiskered lips were beginning to twitch at each repetition. He had them in hand.

“They
are the people who hate America in their hearts,” he said harshly.
“They
can even be Americans themselves, and those are most devilish of all. We cannot know them by their faces. But we can know them by their words and actions. And
there they are!”