The Sand Pebbles (62 page)

He flung his arm and aimed his finger at the demonstrators on the
bund. All the heads turned. Hatred twisted the beard-stubbled faces.

“Look at them! We laughed at them once. We know better now. They think they are destroying our pride and our courage, our love for and devotion to America. And maybe they can do that,
if … we … let … them
. Let every man take a moment to remember himself six months ago.
They
have made the difference in us all!”

He dropped his arm and paused. All the eyes were back upon him, wide and wondering. The heads were nodding slowly. It was time to lift them.

“People are still asleep in the States, but we in
San Pablo
are awake now,” he said. “We know our ship is under siege here, as truly as Wuchang was under siege. They watch us every minute. They gloat over rust streaks down our sides and Irish pendants along our decks. They point out to each other gleefully every sign of military slackness, every slovenly, unshaven man they see aboard of us. They know it is their handiwork. They know that if they can only keep it up
San Pablo
will fall as Wuchang fell. They expect in the end to haul down Old Glory to shame, disgrace and oblivion.”

He saw their eyes lift above his head.

“We will defend that flag,” he said soberly. “With our lifeblood, when the time comes for that. And until then, with the cheerful sacrifice of ease and comfort. They expect it to destroy us. But it is only going to make us stronger!”

They were coming to attention, faces eager, ranks unconsciously dressing and covering off.

“We are the same Sand Pebbles we always were,” he told them. “We are awake now. We know that we are defending America. We know about the new weapons and what they can do to a man. We know that Wuchang fell only to treachery inside the walls. And
we
know that is not going to happen in
San Pablo!”

He shook raised fists to emphasize each pronoun. They snatched off their hats and waved them and cheered. Some of the men had tears on their stubbled cheeks. Their gay, defiant cheering surprised the demonstrators on the bund. They fell silent over there. The tables were turned on them.

“That is all I have to say,” Lt. Collins resumed, when the cheering ceased. “Take the rest of the morning for a field day in living spaces. This afternoon will be a rope-yarn Sunday.”

He turned them over to Bordelles and went forward. He knew he had just won a crucial battle.

Holman, in the engine room, heard the cheering. After a while he went aft to the head, which had been stinking filthy for days. The white tile deck was clean and dry. The water was stopped in the urinal trough, which Crosley was shining. Copper gleamed softly under his busy rag.

“Hi, Jake,” Crosley said cheerfully. “Lend a hand.”

“Got the watch,” Holman said.

Vincent was scrubbing out the showers. In the compartment they were all scrubbing and shining and talking back and forth. The newly-waxed deck had a high red luster. Harris’ stiff gray hair flopped as he stroked with the johnson bar. He wore a cheerful grin on his seamed and craggy face.

“I’m getting old, Jake,” he said, puffing. “Spell me on this bar.”

“Take the watch and I will,” Holman said.

Harris went below and Holman finished the polishing. He was glad to see the men cheerful and the place cleaned up. Lt. Collins had worked some kind of miracle with them.

In the afternoon they took their dirty clothes aft to scrub them. The engineers scrubbed theirs between their hands in a bucket of soapy water. The deckforce men laid theirs out on deck and scrubbed them with a hand brush.

“You snipes wear your clothes out faster that way,” Haythorn said.

“We get our hands clean too, this way,” Wilsey said. “It gets the grease out from around our fingernails.”

Farren broke out whiteline and Perna strung extra lengths of it above the boilers. The uptakes were filled with scrubbed clothes.

They all took showers and shaved. Welbeck had been able to get six safety razors and a limited supply of blades and shaving cream
from the
Duarte
canteen yeoman. Each blade had to last a man ten days. Restorff had not shaved himself in ten years, and he was clumsy as a boy. When he finished, his blunt face was spotted with the bits of toilet paper he had plastered over nicks. They all laughed at him and he laughed too. There was no malice in it.

In the compartment they made up their bunks with clean linen and put on clean blue uniforms. They shined shoes, with polish Welbeck had gotten from the
Duarte
. They argued happily about the best way to get a real inspection shine. Some held with damp rags and some with spitting on the toes. Restorff was a damp rag man, and he got the best shine of them all.

“That makes up for the face the gunner lost shaving,” Red Dog said.

Restorff touched his patches ruefully and grinned.

The clothes dried quickly above the boilers. The men brought them back in great, crinkled armloads. They laid them on their bunks and smoothed and folded them and stowed them neatly in their lockers. Bronson held a folded towel to his fat cheek and sniffed.

“I forgot how good clean clothes smell, when you scrub ’em yourself,” he said.

They wandered out on deck in twos and threes. A silent knot of coolies on the bund still watched the ship.

“Them dirty, raggedy-ass, slant-eyed bastards,” someone behind Holman said comfortably.

They were all feeling good. They walked around wriggling their toes inside clean socks and flexing their arms and smelling the clean smell of themselves. The compartment was filled with the clean smell of wax and brightwork polish and the cheery smell of the pot of coffee Tullio brought in, setting up for supper.

“I bet this is the first time anybody ever had a rope-yarn Sunday on this old tub,” Restorff said. “By God, I
like
it!”

Supper was beans, Vienna sausage and a sticky, lumpy rice pudding. The beans were hard as bullets. It was fodder to keep a man alive, Holman thought, but not much more. For the first time since Hankow, no one griped about it.

“That pudding ain’t bad,” Harris said. “Hey, Tullio! Can you get seconds on pudding?”

“Sure.” Tullio picked up the bowl.

“Tell Duckbutt from me it’s a good chow,” Harris said.

“Tell him that from all of us,” Farren said.

Old Ting filled Shirley’s can with steaming water and bowed when she gave him a copper. Ting was a wispy, cheerful old man with a few scraggly hairs on his chin. His caldron sat on a clay foundation beside the well. Under it he burnt dried grass and weed stems which he and his wife gleaned from the fields. Against the high red brick wall behind him he had a leanto piled with reserve fuel. Selling hot water to the native staff of China Light had been his living for many years.

Shirley smiled and spoke briefly with Mrs. Chao and Third Wang daughter. The well was a favorite gossip spot. Then she went along to take her bath before her water cooled.

They were all native staff now, with native salaries. She and Gillespie and the Craddocks had clubbed together to rent one of the larger native houses and employ one servant, who did not fetch bath water. But the house was beside the well—it backed flush against the mission wall and old Ting’s leanto was in the angle it made—so fetching water was no great task. She did not even have to walk around to the front with her hot water. Under Ting’s leanto the house had a small back door through which field coolies carried out slop jars.
They collected them every morning from all the houses. Mrs. Chao thought that back door was one of the distinct advantages of Shirley’s house.

It was a good house with walls of whitewashed clay and roof of gray tile. The rooms were on three sides of a courtyard into which all doors and windows opened. There were two trees and some shrubs in the courtyard. Over the front wall she had a view of the long blue bulk of Precious Mountain.

Taking her bath, Shirley thought how good it was to be able to talk with Mrs. Chao and laugh at her argument with old Ting. The big foreign houses were no longer dwellings. One was union headquarters and another the militia armory. The Mills and Armstrong houses had been made annexes of the hospital. But the biggest change at China Light, she thought, was in the feeling between people.

All the old customs governing relations between American and native staff were swept away. The students’ infectious enthusiasm spilled over into everyone to mask any scars left behind. There was a different quality to the friendliness.

“It’s because they want us here,” Gillespie had said, discussing it. “Before, they could not be sure of that themselves, because they were granted no right to reject us. The shadow of the gunboat was always between us. And now it’s gone.”

“We’ve made a discovery. We’ve proven something,” Shirley said. “I wish we could tell them at the Alliance Hostel.”

Gillespie’s face shadowed. “I wish we could tell them in America.”

Mrs. Craddock managed the combined household. Shirley and Gillespie called her Tai-tai and for the first time were coming to know and love her. She had real skill in Chinese housekeeping, learned in her youth, and being needed brought her out of herself. Despite the drag of an old illness, she was cheerful and busy all day and she looked years younger.

Mr. Craddock looked years older. He seemed to be graying and stooping more each week. He was becoming oddly gentle. They all worried about Mr. Craddock.

His permission to return was provisional and temporary. He could
do pastoral work among converted Christians, but he could not seek new converts. Cho-jen had been very candid about it: what they wanted from Mr. Craddock was his signature to legitimize transfer of land titles and all the other things which had already been done by revolutionary fiat. Mr. Craddock meant to sign; he had returned knowing that he would; but he was trying to negotiate conditions safeguarding the goals of China Light. He was not winning many points.

At the head of the supper table Mr. Craddock asked grace, briefly and with dignity. They all wore Chinese clothing in the evenings. Mr. Craddock looked worn from his day. Gillespie glanced at Shirley across the table. They were to talk about something cheerful.

“I never knew about skin on water before today,” she said. She told about Mrs. Chao’s quarrel with Ting because the hot water had skin on it. “I was afraid my Chinese was failing me again,” she said.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Craddock said. “Water has skin.”

“It’s surface tension. You can see it if you look,” Gillespie said. “Mrs. Chao meant the water wasn’t hot enough. She wanted it boiling.”

They laughed about Mrs. Chao’s language.

“I must tell you two young people about old Ting,” Craddock said. “I had a bowl of tea with him when we first came back. He has been on my mind ever since.”

Twenty years earlier Ting had been a used-up carrier coolie left behind to die by passing soldiers. Some farmers had brought him to China Light, where he had slowly regained his health. He had been very handy and helpful around the clinic.

“I discovered a peculiar simplicity and sweetness of temper in him,” Craddock said. “I wanted very much to win him for Christ.”

He could not. When Ting was discharged from his hospital, he picked up a scanty living by carrying well water among the houses and selling it where he could, for a few cash. He became the mission’s first water coolie.

“Of course after a few weeks it became old custom. It was his rice
bowl,” Craddock went on. “I had no thought of breaking it. I still hoped to win him.”

Ting had started his hot-water business with a five-gallon kerosene tin and two stones. Later he borrowed money to set up his caldron and build his leanto. Not long after, the crisis had arisen.

“Ting was prospering, by his standards. He had been boarding with a Christian family, but now he wanted a wife and a home of his own,” Craddock said. “That was a famine summer. We had a refugee feeding station set up outside West Gate. Ting went there and found a woman, one of the homeless, hopeless drifters who pass through at such times. She agreed to be his wife.”

The crisis was Ting’s request for permission to enlarge his fuel leanto into a small house. It was mission policy that only Christians might have households within the walls. Ting had a Chinese understanding of the danger of setting precedents, but he could not understand why he could not himself become a Christian.

Shirley let her food grow cold, listening. Mr. Craddock was talking of something that was, to her, the very mystery of China.

“He offered to attend church services and to do and say all that I might require of him,” Craddock went on. “I had to tell him that would not suffice. Many Chinese have little sense of guilt and sin. But Ting is the only man I ever knew who has absolutely none. He and I searched his heart to the depths, and I had to believe it.”

Gillespie had stopped eating. “I’m sure you realize what you are saying, Mr. Craddock,” he observed.

“Of course I do.” Craddock stroked his beard. “I spent hours in solitary prayer. And here is what I did. I performed a marriage ceremony for them, but I told Ting he would have to build his house outside the walls.”

Mrs. Craddock laughed. Shirley looked at her, shocked, and then back to Craddock. Craddock was smiling.

“Tai-tai knows the story,” he said. It was the first time they had ever heard him call her that.

Instead of adding his house to the cluster outside West Gate, Ting had built a hut of clay and cornstalks against the outside of the
wall precisely opposite his leanto on the inside. And one day when the Craddocks had walked all the way around there to bring red eggs and congratulations on the birth of a son, they discovered that Ting had knocked a hole in the wall between his house and his leanto. That bit of the wall had become part of his premises and, by old custom, his to do with as he pleased. Very stiffly, the Craddocks had walked the long way round to go home again.

“I made him brick it up. I had a stern and narrow sense of duty in those days,” Craddock said. “Ting was wiser than I. He did not confuse my sense of duty with the man who was his friend. For years he walked the long way round between his home and his place of business and I’m sure now he never felt the slightest stir of resentment.”