The Mercenaries (34 page)

‘When are you going to marry her, Sammy?’

Sammy looked up, his eyes wavering. ‘I’m busy just now,’ he said shortly. ‘Later.’

Something in his manner told Ira that Sammy suddenly didn’t intend to marry Mei-Mei. It came as a surprise because Mei-Mei still seemed cheerful enough, cooking them meals of rice and strange-tasting fish drowned in stock, whenever they returned to the bungalow.

‘Something wrong between you two, Sammy?’ he asked. Sammy looked up, his eyes honest. ‘No, Ira,’ he said. ‘Not that way, anyway. It’s just that she’s East and I’m West. Know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘She thinks Chinese and I think European. It’s difficult.’

‘It always was, Sammy.’

‘I keep putting it off, trying to work it out.’

‘Think you ever will, Sammy?’

Sammy paused, leaning over the engine, then he shook his head.

‘Not really,’ he said after a pause. ‘She hasn’t picked up hardly a single blessed word and, while I’ve progressed a bit, I can’t really talk much with her. And going to bed with a girl isn’t marriage, is it? I’m still trying to work it out.’

Eventually, both wings were finished and ready for assembling, and Sammy set about timing the engine so that combustion took place at the very second when the piston was in the correct position.

Then, with the help of Wang, he made a horse for the engine with lengths of wood and strips of iron, and slung a five-gallon tin of petrol from the beam of the barn and led a long rubber tube down for a gravity feed. Before screwing on the propeller, they dug a pit in the floor, so that it could revolve without damage, and they all assembled to watch the engine start. It was the first warm day for weeks and Ellie and Lawn and Jimmy Cheng were at the side of the barn, all of them distinctly uneasy, while Ira and Sammy tinkered with the last few adjustments.

The barn stank of dope, rubber, petrol and oil, and stale coffee, but Wang had shown no sign of leaving and, to give more room, had even moved his family into one of the cow byres from which they watched now, a row of heads over the stall, first Mrs. Wang and her mother, then all the children right down to the smallest. There was a smell of burnt joss paper in the air and a distinct feeling that it was necessary. Ira stared at the Liberty uncertainly.

‘Think it’ll work, Sammy?’ he asked.

‘I reckon so,’ Sammy said confidently. ‘I got the throttle at a half, and the mixture at rich. Them switches dead?’

With Sammy crouching behind the engine, Ira and Jimmy Cheng heaved at the propeller. After several pulls without success, first with petrol off and then with it on, it started unexpectedly with a crackling roar that filled the barn with noise. Sammy had moved the throttle well forward and the power behind the big propeller pulled madly at the wooden horse so that it shuddered and began to edge nearer to the edge of the pit, in spite of the ropes they’d used to tie it in place.

‘Cut,’ Ira yelled, helping to hold the horse down with Jimmy Cheng and Wang. ‘Cut the bloody thing! ‘

The roar was deafening and the barn was full of flying straw and dust and scraps of paper, and their hair was almost torn out by the roots by the blast. Ira caught a glimpse of Ellie crouched with her hands over her ears, her hair whipped over her face, her expression one of agony, and of a whole row of Wangs, their eyes closed against the flying grit, chattering and yelling with delight Just as the front legs of the horse were tottering on the edge of the pit and the earth was beginning to crumble away, Sammy snatched the rubber pipe off and the engine died as the petrol splashed out of it on to the dirt floor. For a moment, as the racket died, they stared at each other, deafened and aghast, their nerve-ends frayed by the clamour.

The Wangs were chattering and dancing like a lot of little monkeys, their father standing with a wide grin that showed his empty gums, aware that something tremendous had happened. The rest of them stared round at each other as the dust settled and the scraps of straw and paper floated down. Then Sammy’s shocked face split in a grin.

‘It worked,’ he crowed. ‘We did it, Ira.’

Immediately, he began to climb up on to the rafters again with a wire sling and a block and tackle and before evening they had the engine swung into place above the fuselage. They doped the last of the serrated tape along the line of the ribs of the wings and applied the last of the coats of dope to the surface and lowered the engine into place.

‘All set for the rigging now,’ Sammy said.

It was at that moment that news arrived that the mob was out again in Tsosiehn.

4

The rioting had exploded without warning and with the violence of a bomb.

The past two days had been icy and the cold had provoked several parades by the students along the bund, as much as anything to enable them to keep warm, and the trouble started when one of De Sa’s foremen slapped a coolie. The coolie hadn’t objected to what was as normal as the sun rising, but the incident was seen by a group of the militia returning from one of the parades and, before anyone had realised what was happening, the foreman had been chopped to pieces by the ancient swords and hatchets, and two thousand screaming men and boys, brought to a fever pitch of hatred by propaganda, were rampaging through the city, brandishing carrying poles and whacking in the windows.

De Sa’s store was set on fire, though with the aid of his coolies the blaze was put out, then the mob streamed through the narrow streets, burning cars, beating up Chinese who worked for white men and wrecking property belonging to the foreign devils.

The Chinese merchants were only too pleased to encourage them. Throttled as they were by Tsu’s banking system, it brought nearer the day when he would fall, and the few Tsu soldiers who remained in the city found they had more on their hands than they could handle and in no time at all their bodies were lying in flattened heaps along the bund, with stark faces and blackened lips, kicked, hacked and stripped of clothes and weapons.

Even out at Yaochow, they could hear the drums and the gongs and the yelling, and sporadic shooting came to them on the wind with a thin high baying that filtered through the trees and past the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda.

Peter Cheng, who had been in the city arranging fresh supplies of petrol, arrived back on a borrowed horse. He had had to leave the Citroen van in a hurry near De Sa’s store, and the last he had seen of it, it was burning. He had eventually stolen a bicycle to get out of the city and when it had finally collapsed under him on the rough road to Yaochow, had borrowed a farm nag and flogged it into a lumbering gallop the rest of the way.

‘A gunboat has come,’ he panted as Ellie shoved a cigarette at him. ‘All Europeans go down-river.’

Sammy’s face was ashen.

‘What about Mei-Mei, Ira?’ he said.

Ira tossed down the spanner he’d been working with. ‘Come on, Sammy,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and find out.’

Ellie climbed into the Crossley with them.

‘Stay here, Ellie,’ he begged.

Ellie’s pale face came to life. In the past weeks, when everything had depended entirely on the skill of Sammy and Ira, she had drifted about the airfield, between the barn and the farmhouse, with a lost expression on her face, but now that she felt she was needed, the old brisk Ellie they hadn’t seen for a long time returned, and colour came back into her cheeks.

‘Not on your sweet life,’ she said. ‘That kid might need a woman, not a couple of men.’

The route took them along the bund where a small landing party from the gunboat, under the command of a roundcheeked midshipman who looked no more than a schoolboy, had stopped the mob in its tracks. Standing in front of his few men. wearing a fixed grin to show he wasn’t afraid, he refused to move while the filth and the brickbats bounced off him and his little party. Spat at, abused, covered with ordure, the little group of sailors waited with their rifles in front of them, not threatening, but also not budging.

Above them, dwarfing them, the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda reared its multitudinous shabby roofs. Someone had tried to set it on fire and part of the temple at the side had collapsed in a welter of charred beams.

The mob had quietened a lot by this time but every now and then they could hear the crackle of firing and from time to time they came across small groups of Tsu soldiers dodging between the houses, their faces terrified. Idols and dragon symbols were being carried through the streets, and on the bund the coolies were making messy sacrifices with chickens and goats. British, American, French and Japanese flags had been torn down or daubed with filth, and they passed a group of students burning pictures of President Coolidge and King George.

It was bitterly cold and the wet streets were full of smoke and soggy ashes. De Sa was picking among the charred portion of his store, his shoulders bowed, his face strained, and a few sheepish coolies moved about in the rubbish-littered alleys, where groups of defiant-looking militiamen hung around on the comers. Telegraph wires looped above pavements strewn with glass, broken stones, paper and blowing chaff, and here and there a burnt-out car still smoked.

The bungalow had been wrecked and everything of value smashed or stolen. Ellie’s gasp of horror was involuntary and audible, and Ira saw her eyes go cold in a way he hadn’t seen for weeks. A fire had been started on the verandah, though, apart from scorching the walls, it had done little damage. But the doors were kicked in, the screens smashed, the paper windows torn, and all the furniture and bedding slashed. Outside, the coil of red prayer paper Mei-Mei had hung over the door was looped across the verandah rail and her cage of birds had been trampled flat, its dusty dead occupants still inside.

There was no sign either of the guards or of Mei-Mei, and Sammy ran through the rooms, his eyes frantic, calling her name, but all they found that indicated that she’d ever been there was a torn silk jacket she’d worn and the medal that Tsu had given to Sammy and which he’d passed on to her.

Sammy stopped among the rubbish to pick it up, and when he rose his face had grown old.

‘They’ve got her, Ira,’ he whispered.

Ira’s throat worked as he stared at Sammy’s grief. ‘We’ll find her, Sammy,’ he said.

‘Not now.’ Sammy shook his head. ‘It’s too late. I was too bleddy busy to look after her. If I’d been here it wouldn’t have happened ‘

Ira felt unable to console him. Sammy had grown up in an hour from an enthusiastic boy to a strained bitter man.

‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘I’m staying till I find her. I don’t suppose anything would ever have come of it, between her and me, but I reckon I let her down. I was scared of marrying a Chink and having slant-eyed kids. It was my fault, whatever happened, and I’ve got to put it right.’

As he walked slowly from the bungalow, Ellie watched him, her expression bleak and empty, then she turned to the Crossley, unspeaking and dry-eyed. Ira followed her, sick at heart, at a loss what to say. As he struggled with the cross-grained old vehicle, she sat silently in the front seat, hugging the few possessions she’d managed to rescue, and staring ahead of her almost as if she were blind.

‘Please, Ira,’ she begged as he finally coaxed the old engine to start, ‘let’s quit. Let’s get the hell out. Set up somewhere else.’

Ira nodded. ‘O.K., Ellie,’ he said. That’s all right with me.’

‘Not in China,’ she went on firmly. ‘Not here. Somewhere safe. Somewhere they won’t strip and rape me just because I don’t belong--just to show they don’t care about us any more.’

Sammy returned the following night, appearing out of the darkness like a ghost. It was still bitterly cold and his breath hung in a cloud of vapour about his head. He was covered with mud and dirt, and had a two days’ growth of beard on his chin. His face was white and thin and dangerous as he threw down a battered suitcase with the last of his belongings from the bungalow.

Ira watched him go into the office, then quietly followed him inside. Sammy turned as he entered, and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand.

‘I found her, Ira,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘I found her in one of them huts by the river, near the pagoda. They’d stripped her, Ira, and blinded her with needles. Some feller had had her in there and God knows what else they’d done to her. She was dead when I found her.’

‘Oh, God, Sammy...!‘

‘He was still there and I hit him with an iron bar I was carrying. I expect I killed him. I had to do something.’

Ira said nothing. Ellie had followed them in and was standing by the door, watching silently, her face grey and sick-looking.

‘I had to do something, Ira,’ Sammy repeated harshly. ‘It was all my fault, see. It was because--because she’d been with me--a foreign devil.’ He paused, his face hard. ‘Poor little nailer,’ he went on. ‘She wasn’t clever enough to know really what a foreign devil was. She wasn’t even clever enough to learn a bit of English.’

He paused again, his face gaunt, his eyes feverish with hatred. There’s nothing left now, Ira,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Not one thing to remember her by. I got that Welsh parson feller who buried Pat Fagan to give her a decent burial. He didn’t want to because she wasn’t a Christian but I said I’d hammer his head in if he didn’t, so he did--the whole lot, every blessed word.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose it’s the right way to get anyone a Christian burial.’

He drew a deep breath as though his chest were aching. ‘I found a couple of coolies and threatened to shoot ‘em if they didn’t dig a grave. I had Pat Fagan’s Colt in me pocket. I couldn’t find nobody to make a coffin, so I got a roll of silk from De Sa--about all he’d got left--and wrapped her in that.’ He looked up. That’s how they bury sailors, ain’t it? We put her in the ground like that. That bastard preacher didn’t like it but he was too scared of me to say anything.’

He turned away and crushed out his cigarette. ‘She’ll be all right, I reckon. Don’t you, Ira?’

Ira struggled for words of consolation, anything to stop the heart-breaking grief and guilt in Sammy’s face.

‘I reckon so. Sammy,’ was all he could manage.