TWO DAYS IN Nanking yielded the inevitable crop of interviews. Of these interviews the one which it gives me most pleasure to remember was with Dr. Lo Wen Kan.
I had a letter of introduction to him from Mr. Quo Tai Chi, the Chinese Ambassador in London. It was addressed to ‘Dr. Lo Wen Kan, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nanking’. I had carried this letter half way round the world, and it was just my luck that on the day before I was able to deliver it Dr. Lo Wen Kan was obliged to resign the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At first I found this, an embarrassing circumstance, for the superscription on my letter of introduction now seemed to me little better than a taunt. Friends of the late Minister, however, assured me that I was being hypersensitive, and I presented my letter.
I should say from my limited experience of Chinese politicians that Dr. Lo Wen Kan is a rare type. He is in the first place not a rich man, and that in itself gives him a marked singularity. In the second place, he has a reputation for honesty. In the third place he appears to take little interest in the party politics of the Kuomintang, on success in which high position at Nanking ultimately depends. He was educated at Oxford, and I seemed to detect in him a certain unserious detachment, a touch of the lackadaisical, which might have been derived from that seat of learning, once the Home of Lost Causes, and now the resort of those who deplore the fact that there are no more causes worth losing.
Dr. Lo Wen Kan is a slight man, with a small moustache and hair en brosse. He is renowned for his taste in wine. He received me, with great courtesy and the inevitable tea, in a little summer-house built out over the pond on the shores of which his villa stood. I knew that his resignation had been tendered under compulsion, though not with reluctance, and I knew also that, for reasons too complex to be entered into here, he was being sent, into what was virtually exile, on a ‘pacification mission’ to Chinese Turkestan, which for the best part of a year had been torn by a three-cornered civil war. We began to discuss his journey, and he expounded his scheme for reopening the old Imperial highway to the North-West by means of convict labour. (He still retained his post as Minister of Justice, which gave him jurisdiction over the prisons. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a position for which I am peculiarly well qualified by experience, for I have served several terms of imprisonment myself.’)
He was going to fly to Urumchi, and as we talked of it I said, politely, though with complete sincerity, that I wished I was going with him. Dr. Lo Wen Kan immediately offered me a seat in his aeroplane.
It was the most tempting offer I have ever had. But to accept it would have meant scrapping my plans – now well advanced – for Canton and the Communists. Moreover, I was under contract to be back in England by November 1st, and that would be impossible if I went to Chinese Turkestan. After a fierce internal struggle I had to decline the offer.
‘On how few things’, said Dr. Johnson, ‘can we look back with satisfaction.’ To recall the things that I have done (admittedly they are few and unremarkable) gives me the minimum of pleasure. But the things that I very nearly did – ah, they are a different cup of tea! The lustre of illusion lies thick upon them. That journey to Urga with the Mongolian impresario, that cooking pot which I so nearly stole in Brazil, the puma-hunt which only just failed to come off in Guatemala, and last of all this narrowly thwarted descent on Urumchi – these splendid possibilities are still as bright as on the day I first discerned them, outshining the stale, trite, tarnished memories of the things that really happened. In the matter of the words ‘it might have been’ I belong to a school of thought sharply opposed to that of Bret Harte.
On the same day that I interviewed Dr. Lo Wen Kan I also interviewed his successor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was Mr. Wang Ching Wei, who, after a career unusually adventurous even for a Chinese politician, has risen to be the third most powerful man in the Nanking Government. Handsome, astute, a fluent speaker and a forceful writer, Mr. Wang Ching Wei impressed me rather by his political ability than by his personality. He told me, among other things, that he had good reason to believe that the Communists were receiving clandestine support from the Japanese. His belief, as I then suspected and now know, was baseless. I remembered that it had been reflected in an article in the Manchester Guardian by the late M. William Martin, who had recently been in Nanking; even for the ablest and most determined seekers, the truth is very hard to come by in China. Mr. Wang Ching Wei very kindly promised to wire to General Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Nanking Government and at present in Kuling, asking him to facilitate my journey to the anti-Communist front.
My next objective was therefore Kuling. On the eve of my departure Gerald unexpectedly turned up, a large young man of saturnine appearance, equipped with a knobkerry and a Chinese servant called Li. Without more ado he signed on for at any rate the first part of the journey. He was to prove in many ways an ideal travelling companion. His cheerfulness was as infinite as his curiosity, and he was more completely impervious to the effects of discomfort, boredom, and delay than anyone I have ever met.
Li was a remarkable person. He was twenty-two years old, and his home was in Shantung, which produces probably the best type of peasant in China. Like many another young man from that province, he emigrated to Manchuria, where he helped to run a store in Manchuli and worked in a bank in Harbin. Gerald had come across him during the fighting at the Great Wall. Li had attached himself to one of the many generals and/or bandits who raised a so-called Volunteer Corps to resist the Japanese invasion of Jehol, and who was no more successful than most of his kind in avoiding either defeat or insolvency. Gerald fell in with Li during the evacuation of a village and signed him on as his servant.
If any credit is due to anyone for the journey which we three made together, it is due to Li; he did all the dirty work, and he did it extraordinarily well. Even the best Chinese servants are seldom wholly honest; Li was. We never had the slightest hesitation in entrusting him with money, and this saved endless complications, for on our travels the currency changed with astonishing rapidity between one place and the next, and even where it remained constant that supremely mysterious thing, the copper exchange, would alter. Li was a tireless bargainer; to pay more than you need for anything was in his view the grossest solecism.
He was also a person of resource and humour, very good at collecting information and very good at assessing its worth. Here, however, we were handicapped by the language problem. Gerald knew a few words of Chinese, I knew still fewer; Li had picked up a few words of English. We thus had a lingua franca adequate to the simpler contingencies of travel, but not sufficient, for instance, for the purpose of verbatim interpreting. But Li had a very quick mind, and could often tell us when, if not exactly how, an official interpreter had played us false. At any rate, we managed somehow, and Li did his best to improve his English with a Chinese phrase-book which contained, among other conversational openings, the following useful sentence: ‘It makes me very sad to see my concubine being sick this morning’.
He was a very likeable person, with his square face, and his broad, mischievous smile, and his instinctively faultless manners. I can see him now, padding along in his demure grey robe, all slung about with our cameras; he is scowling a little to himself, because one of us gave a five cent tip to a carrier who had already been adequately paid.
Early the next day we boarded a river steamer and started up the Yangtse. There was a large party of French sailors on board, bound for duty on a gunboat at one of the up-river ports. On the passenger list they were anonymous, appearing only, opposite the cabins allotted to them, as ‘Two French Sailors’. This element of duality was their dominant characteristic, and they were seen always in pairs. This has been my only contact with the French Navy, and as a consequence I find it impossible to visualize its personnel in the singular.
The other passengers were mostly missionaries or business men of various nationalities. There were also four rich Chinese – two men and two women – who had become so very thoroughly expatriated in America that even in conversation among themselves they used the language of that country. (Many of the smarter Chinese business men in Shanghai speak nothing but English.) These four represented a type which I find extremely unattractive, and when, as quite frequently happened, the women were insulted by the French sailors my chivalrous instincts remained, I am afraid, dormant. They spent most of the time playing bridge. The fatter and shriller of the women was once heard to remark that she was going to wait to marry again until she found a man who was her intellectual equal. ‘She’s got a long time to wait,’ observes my diary, at times a rather acid document.
Travel on the Yangtse is preferable in a number of ways to travel at sea. The horizon is not empty. Thatched huts cling to the dykes which precariously imprison the yellow waters, and the broad river is dotted with shipping ranging from the smallest sampan to a big steamer like our own. On the dykes women and children invigilate over contraptions which resemble a gigantic landing-net worked by a lever. From time to time the net is lowered slowly into the water and, after a due interval, withdrawn once more skywards. I must have seen some hundreds of these devices at work, but I have yet to witness the capture of a fish.
Sometimes your boat calls at a little town, and from the deck you watch coolies who look frail and half-famished manhandling bulky cargo on the jetty below you with equal determination and address; the brawniest British coal-heaver could not attempt their feats. Then there are the children, who scramble savagely for the coppers you throw them and yet somehow contrive that the infants in their charge emerge unscathed from the rough-house. And there is almost certainly something else – a policeman arguing with a hawker, or a quarrel between two women, who shriek and gesture and prance to and fro in taut and curiously formal attitudes which suggest the mating antics of birds. In China there is always something worth watching.
Just before dusk on the second day we passed a little red and white temple which crowns a precipitous pinnacle of rock in midstream, and round which kites circled, a disjointed halo. Then, as night was falling, we reached Kiukiang. At Kiukiang, formerly a treaty port and a place of importance in the tea trade but now much declined, we were to disembark. Kuling, our next objective, perches on the summit of a 3000 foot mountain called Lushan. It owes both its name and its popularity as a summer resort to missionary enterprise, which has found an anomalous outlet in the field of real estate. Some years ago a missionary, whose name I forget, acquired from the Chinese a large plot of land on the then sparsely inhabited mountain top, and in a short time the place became famous as a refuge from the sweltering heat of the Yangtse Valley. It was thought proper to change the Chinese name of Lushan to one which, while tastefully preserving an indigenous flavour, would convey to intending visitors some idea of the resort’s peculiar attraction; and so it became Kuling, a mariage de convenance between the synthetic and the facetious as revolting as any that blazons the gate-posts of suburbia. From Kiukiang a road runs to the base of Mount Lushan, which must be climbed on foot or in a chair. So we left the boat at Kiukiang.
As we were preparing to leave it there came suddenly bounding into the saloon a strange and terrifying monster. It was a female missionary. An unusually well-developed woman, she was clad only in a pair of very tight shorts and a dirty white blouse. Her aspect was farouche; she carried an alpenstock at the ‘ready’, her short gravel-coloured hair was in disarray, and her eyes flashed fire behind the lenses of her spectacles. Her formidable and uncovered legs were stained with travel. She bore down on the purser like a rogue hippopotamus.
‘What’s this I hear about our cabins having been given to the Van Tuylers?’ she cried.
The purser stood his ground and prevaricated for dear life. There had been some misunderstanding. The male Van Tuyler, a little dim ghost of an American, drifted into the argument; but he soon retired and sat at a table, holding his head in his hands and from time to time uttering a ghostly bleat, half protest, half apology. The place began to fill up with missionaries of every shape and sex; the faces of all of them bore those traces of nervous exhaustion which are the hall-mark of the holiday-maker on his way home. A few of them were conventionally dressed, but most wore clothes which a respectable Chinese would regard as scandalous.
Gerald and I, not without reluctance, left them and made for the gangway. Several Chinese boys had come on board, and were offering paper-backed Chinese novels for sale. We stopped to examine their wares. But the books were whisked from our outstretched hands, and we found ourselves involuntarily gazing on a large selection of obscene postcards, arranged fanwise.
‘Master likee nice picture?’ suggested the chorus, in confidential unison.
The Church Militant had attracted incongruous camp-followers.