The Sand Pebbles (63 page)

“I’ve come to like him very much,” Shirley said.

“When we came back, he asked me to have tea with him,” Craddock went on. “He ushered me into his leanto and through that door in the mission wall, opened up again, and gave me the seat of honor in his parlor. After a few minutes, I was certain he was not gloating over me. He was honestly happy, for my sake, that my authority and responsibility were gone. It left me free on my side to be as completely his friend as he had always been mine. And you know, it’s true!”

“That’s pretty marvelous,” Gillespie said. “You say he has a son?”

“One of your students. The boy’s name is Tao-min.”

“Tao-min!” Shirley was surprised. “I thought he came from … oh, away, somewhere.”

“Many young people these days are ashamed of their fathers,” Craddock said. “But if you can honestly praise Tao-min to Ting, nothing will please the old man more.”

“I can,” Shirley said. “And tomorrow I will. You have made me love old Ting, Mr. Craddock.”

Shirley stood facing the front of the classroom. She, and all of the students standing behind her, bowed gravely three times to the portrait of Sun Yat-sen on the front wall. It was flanked by the new
Kuomintang party and national flags. Then they took their seats. The students had half an hour for review, before they would begin to read aloud.

Heads bent, lips moving silently, they squinted at their wretchedly printed texts. They were younger boys, a whole roomful of them, and they took their learning as a serious revolutionary responsibility. Tao-min, her helper for that day, was studying the assignment as hard as the younger boys.

The U.S. and old Chinese flags, and the portraits of Lincoln and Washington, were gone from the front wall. On Mondays everyone had to gather in the chapel for ritual reverence to the new flags and portrait and to hear the reading of Sun Yat-sen’s testament. One of the students—always Cho-jen, if he was at China Light that day—would deliver a patriotic harangue. The resemblance to compulsory attendance of Christian services in the old days was deliberate. Wherever the Kuomintang ruled in China, it was instituting a compulsory cult of patriotism, in Christian chapels and Buddhist temples alike.

“We are doing knowingly what you do without knowing,” Cho-jen had told Gillespie. “We are using the James-Lange effect in reverse.”

“I only know vaguely what he means by that,” Gillespie told Shirley. “How
does
he come up with those flashes of esoteric knowledge?”

“It’s his genius.”

Gillespie was teaching mathematics and history and enjoying it. The older boys were away from school on political activity, more often than not. Mr. Lin, the new principal, deplored it. Gillespie, at one faculty meeting, had defended it.

“They are in a different sort of school now,” he said. “They are learning how to build and govern a nation.”

Only in China, with its traditional reverence for learning, she thought, could mere boys take such a part, simply because they were students. Her Chinese was still not good enough to supplement the scanty English of the younger boys she was now teaching. Cho-jen had solved that by assigning her a senior student to help with language
crises. It worked well. Quite often, as today, her helper was Tao-min. She suspected that Tao-min did not much relish militia drill and political education work among the peasants.

The student union had torn out of the English textbooks all of the specifically American-patriotic material. For substitute material they had brought in pamphlets of Sun Yat-sen’s writings, done very poorly into English. She was teaching the boys quite a bit of grammar and spelling by making a game of finding errors in the pamphlets.

That was what Tao-min was doing, his pencil poised, pudgy face earnest, eyes squinting through his spectacles. As a senior student, he was honor-bound to find more errors than any of the younger boys. Whether he did or not, Shirley knew, she was going to make it seem so.

At the end of the period she dismissed the class and went to the faculty office. Cho-jen was just concluding an argument with Gillespie. No one else was there.

“Good morning, Miss Eckert,” Cho-jen said. “Mr. Gillespie has just been telling me that all power corrupts. I think it is lack of power that corrupts. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think power will corrupt you, Cho-jen.”

“Present company is always excepted,” Gillespie said, smiling.

He was relaxed at his desk. Cho-jen moved restlessly about the room, talking in half sentences and skipping from subject to subject. He had an almost hurtful vibrancy of manner. All by himself, he made the room seem crowded. He looked out the window at a platoon of militia drilling in the street. “I am getting them ten more rifles,” he said. “From Pan’s old stock.” General Pan and his army had been made into a Kuomintang regiment and marched away. The newly-raised militia was the only armed force in the valley. “I may have to go to Changsha soon,” Cho-jen said. “I have a thousand things to do here, before I can go.” He thought he might head the Paoshan delegation to the provincial worker-peasant congress in Changsha. After a few minutes he excused himself to go and open a student union committee meeting. The room seemed suddenly empty.

Shirley sat down at her desk, in mock collapse. “How can you be so relaxed with him, Walter?” she asked. “He sets me jumping, too. I can’t help it.”

“I know it’s a cliché, but if ever a boy burnt with a gemlike flame, it’s Cho-jen these days,” Gillespie said.

He unlocked a desk drawer and took out the journal he was keeping of his talks with Cho-jen. He was if possible even more captivated by Cho-jen than was Shirley herself. No one had ever before systematically recorded the life of a teen-age Napoleon, he said quite seriously. They were both certain that Cho-jen was going to become one of the great men of Chinese history.

“He’s scarcely eighteen. He knows he’s too young,” Gillespie said. “He also knows the hour has struck for him and time will not wait.”

Gillespie enjoyed keeping Shirley informed of Cho-jen’s progress. The power in the valley lay in the worker and peasant unions and their militia. Cho-jen enjoyed the fanatical loyalty of all the senior students. He made them his lieutenants with clerical posts in all the worker-peasant groups, which he visited himself as often as he could. His gift for evoking blind personal loyalty was rapidly binding them all to him.

Legitimacy lay in the Kuomintang power structure, centered in Hankow. Cho-jen held several Kuomintang offices. To please Hankow and Changsha, he had to keep the peasants from going too far and too fast with land seizures. He avoided making enemies as much as he could. Such enemies as he could not help making, he outschemed ruthlessly. He had an instinct for power tactics.

“And as if all that were not enough,” Gillespie said, “there’s still his father.”

It was no longer a secret that Cho-jen’s father was the bandit chief on the mountain. He had fiercely refused submission when Kuomintang troops came through to sweep up General Pan. Cho-jen had saved his father then by working out a face-saving arrangement in which his father’s armed band became the cadre for the local militia. He still had to make that so in fact.

“He’s told me a good bit about his father recently,” Gillespie said. “It’s fascinating, Shirley!”

All the arts of Chinese soothsaying had predicted greatness for Cho-jen, even before his birth, Gillespie told her. Cho-jen’s father had interpreted it as the mandate of heaven for his son to found a new imperial dynasty. He had set out to become a warlord, to serve that single purpose. He had been all ready to defeat Pan and take Paoshan when the Kuomintang forestalled him. He was furious. Cho-jen could not make his father believe that greatness in China was no longer an imperial throne.

“But whatever it’s to be, Cho-jen is on his way,” Gillespie concluded. “A year from now he’ll be a power in Changsha. Before he’s twenty-one he’ll have the province behind him and be a man to reckon with in Hankow.”

“I hope he does. I’m sure he will,” Shirley said. “You sound almost as convinced as Cho-jen’s father.”

“I’ll tell you.” Gillespie cocked his head. “If someone told me Cho-jen had strangled serpents in his cradle, I think I would believe it.”

Only the ghost of a smile belied his utter seriousness.

So the days went. Shirley found them pleasant and stimulating. But often at night she could not sleep for the sound of Mr. Craddock’s slow pacing in the courtyard. He had signed all the papers. He held only a native pastorate and one vote on the mission board of control. He was deeply troubled by some of the trends at China Light. But in Hankow he had made his decision to trust in God and the fundamental decency of the Chinese and he would not waver.

Then the new trouble struck. That night when she heard him pacing she could not bear it. She rose and slipped on padded Chinese clothing and joined him in the courtyard.

“Have I been keeping you awake, Shirley?” he asked.

“No. I’m just restless. I want to walk and tire myself.”

It would not do to speak of the trouble. Nor of anything. She just
wanted to be near him and he would feel her pity and love. But he wanted to talk.

“Are you still happy with our decision?” he asked. “Have you really found it here as you expected?”

“Wonderfully happy. But not quite as I expected.”

“It is different and better than I had expected,” he said. “I learn. Now in my age, I learn. We don’t have to do bold and startling things for them to win their love.” He walked a few steps in silence. “I have stopped fretting about the electric light plant,” he said. “I am glad now that navy engineer did not come with us. I fear I wanted him only as a bribe to the people here.”

“It was for his own sake, too,” she said, too quickly. “He was desperately unhappy on his ship. He deserved a better life.”

“But he might not have been happy here. For him, the decision would have been irreversible.”

He would have been happy, she thought. But in a shamed corner of her heart, when she looked there honestly, she knew that it was of herself she had been thinking, those last days in Hankow. It was the sense of moving into unknown dangers and her wish for a strong man at her side. But there was no danger and her life was filled pleasantly with her work and she had not thought of Jake Holman for a week or longer.

“I think you’re right,” she agreed sadly. “It’s best he didn’t come. But I’m glad we came.”

“It’s like a grace, isn’t it?” he said. “Everything I see speaks of it. Even this spirit wall.”

They stopped beside it and she put her hand on the new, rough brick. It stood high as their heads, like a baffle before the gate in the front wall. It was to keep devils from entering the courtyard. Devils could travel only in straight lines and they could not turn the corners to get around a spirit screen. In the old days Mr. Craddock had sternly forbidden them as a superstition.

“You know, when the board of control discussed building these, I voted in favor of it,” Craddock said. “They have nothing to do with devils any more. They are just part of Chinese architecture.” He
chuckled gently. “When we built the big house, Tai-tai wanted green shutters,” he said. “I had them made and nailed solidly to the side of the house, without hinges, and you could not close them if you wanted to. Why could I not have understood then that a spirit screen is just like those shutters?”

She did not answer. They resumed walking. When she felt tired she said goodnight. He had understood her purpose in coming out.

“Goodnight, Shirley, and thank you,” he said.

In her bed again, she still heard his slow footsteps. She had not taken away his trouble. The trouble was a charge of “criminal landlordism.” On a remote and separated bit of mission property there really had been some rent gouging and opium forcibly grown, Gillespie said. Craddock had known nothing of it. Wen, the mission bailiff, was the real criminal. Cho-jen was perfectly frank about it.

“They know he’s innocent. It’s just orders from Changsha,” he said. “They want to take treaty people before our new Chinese courts, to establish our claim to jurisdiction over everyone in China.”

Cho-jen was leaving the way open for the Craddocks to go back to Hankow. But he was trying to persuade Craddock to submit voluntarily to Chinese judicial authority. That would be an even more solid blow at the unequal treaties.

“I have always meant to live out my days at China Light,” Craddock had said, the one time they had discussed it at supper. “If wrong was done under my delegated authority, that can be determined more surely in Paoshan than by a U.S. court a thousand miles away in Shanghai.” Then he had added, “It goes step by step. I fear where the steps may be taking us. I don’t know what to do.”

In the courtyard, the measured footsteps halted.

He’s praying now, she thought. He would stand under the largest tree with his head bowed and his hands clasped on his chest. Shirley always wanted to hold her breath when the footsteps stopped.

She did not know about prayer. Gillespie seldom spoke of religion any more, but once he had told her: “You thin a barrier, a kind of shell around your awareness. You become able to feel directly just a hint of the nearness and love of God, Who is always all around
you without your knowing.” She did not know about that. But in those silences of the night, she could believe that Mr. Craddock really talked with God.

After a long while the footsteps started again. Firmly and surely they crossed the courtyard and were lost in a door sounding. Shirley went to sleep feeling that Mr. Craddock had reached his decision and that it would be the right one.

There were simply not enough men. From the First, the engineers had to work topside to keep the ship looking clean and military. They had no time for cleaning work below decks. The machinery spaces stayed rusty and dirty. Lt. Collins stopped holding lower-deck inspections. He still inspected topside with all the old ritual. He was being very stiff and reserved, but he had a cold, fierce pride in his eye and manner. The Sand Pebbles responded to it. They knew they were holding the fort.