WE SLEPT THAT night in the least repulsive of the Chinese hotels in Kiukiang. The rooms were bare of everything save dirt and one bedstead. From downstairs there came unceasingly the rattle of mah jong. Out on the river a sampan with a band on board observed I forget which festival of the Chinese calendar by strewing the waters with sibilant fireworks, to pacify the spirits of the drowned.
At dawn next day, under grey and gusty skies, we set out for the foot of the mountain in a hired and far from rainproof Ford. A low belt of mist hid the hills. The road ended in a little village, from one mean house in which there hung a sign proclaiming in Gothic lettering ‘Ye Tabard Inne’. The sun must find increasing difficulty in setting on the influence of the Arts and Crafts.
Most of the population were chair-coolies, who earned their living by carrying holiday-makers up the hill. Disdaining their offices, we hired two carriers of frail appearance for our inconsiderable luggage, and set forth. A path wound up into the mist, changing, as the gradient grew more abrupt, into an illimitable flight of steps such as you find on every Chinese mountain. Presently we left the mist. The air grew cooler and sweeter than I had known it for months. Pagodas standing in the wooded foothills dwindled as we climbed. The sun came out, and below us the Yangtse Valley offered a fine combination of land-and water-scape. The great river on which we had been travelling twisted away into the distance, its colour a curious alluvial red. Between it and the mountains lay a lake, filled, as it seemed, with some quite different element, for here the water was an untroubled blue. Junks crawled on the river like stiff-winged insects. The elaborate criss-cross of the dykes stretched like a net across the waterish land.
It was still early, and at first we passed few people on the path. Every half mile or so there was a rest house, a little thatched shelter where a crone behind a counter offered tea and unlikely delicacies. Sometimes our bearers halted and laid down the long bamboo poles from either end of which our luggage dangled; but they never stopped for long, partly because they were much stronger than they looked, and partly because in Kuling they hoped to get a return load for the journey down.
The view was lovely and the exercise welcome. I asked no more of the climb than it already offered. But in China comedy is always at your elbow, and when we were half way up comedy came suddenly round the corner at a brisk trot.
Comedy was represented by a lady, twin sister as it seemed to the apparition of last night. We were resting in the middle of a particularly steep ascent when she hove in sight – a great globular European woman with a face like a boot. She was clad in dark blue shorts and a sorely tried blouse. She came tripping down the steps at a formidable rate, for she was temporarily a slave to the laws of gravity and her huge bare legs twinkled rather more rapidly, I think, than she intended. Behind her, at a staider pace, came the bearers of her discarded chair, laughing. She thundered past us with heaving flanks and nostrils distended, to disappear round the next corner, still out of control.
‘Jesus-man’,1 murmured Li reflectively in Chinese. He took off his hat and scratched his head.
The lady in shorts was outrunner to an exodus. The worst of the hot weather was over, and a big batch of holiday-makers was going down to catch a boat at Kiukiang. They were a strange procession: English missionaries, German missionaries, American missionaries, and many other kinds, leavened with a few rich Chinese laymen. A patriarchal Belgian priest sat in his chair nursing a bunch of red and yellow flowers and smiling very sweetly. Behind him came an angry American, accompanied by two anaemic daughters in shorts. Then a German with a large square wife, both dressed for the late Victorian tropics. Then two pretty Chinese girls, one with a ukelele on her knees, their chairs escorted by four files of little soldiers. The foreign children were all pale and mostly querulous. One could not help feeling sorry for them, condemned by a combination of heroism and piety in their parents to exchange the untasted fields and friendships of their native land for life in a country which offers few amenities to the child.
As we came near the top of the mountain the air grew keen. Coolies were wearing their padded cotton clothes – things which would not be seen down in the valley for many weeks to come. Lushan is a sacred mountain, and on the rocks beside the stairway there should have been pious inscriptions carved; but the old beliefs no longer monopolized the summit, and now the rocks bore only crudely painted advertisements for Chinese dentists and photographers.
At last, in the saddle between two minor peaks, we found Kuling. The streets by which we entered it were ancient and Chinese, but soon the place proclaimed itself as a foreigners’ resort. There were hawkers selling picture postcards, and notice boards announcing whist-drives and church services, and shops offering tourist bric-à-brac and tennis balls. On the steep but well-kept gravel paths which served as streets missionaries paraded in the sunshine, and we bade our hearts rejoice at the sight of more than one college blazer. Nor were beach pyjamas altogether absent.
The principal hotel rejoices winsomely in the name of ‘The Fairy Glen’. Here we installed ourselves, noting with interest that the West was taking one of its rare revenges on the East by charging higher rates to Chinese guests than to foreigners. Here also, in the middle of the morning, we made off sausages and marmalade one of the best meals I remember eating; we had started at dawn on little save tea, and it had been a long climb.
Somewhere in Kuling there were a number of people whom we wanted to see, the greatest of them Chiang Kai-shek himself. But we felt that we had earned a ‘stand easy’ for the moment. Leaving Gerald incongruously absorbed by an ancient Bystander, I asked the way to the swimming pool.
I fear that the interlude which followed can hardly be appreciated by those unfamiliar with China. It is said that China has an unrivalled capacity for assimilating, for merging into herself, members of other nations who come in contact with her. In Manchuria I had been told more than once that she had been exercising this capacity on the Japanese, who in certain cases, discovering that they had a thing or two to learn, were exchanging their own standards of honesty for the Chinese standards – were in fact adopting the technique of ‘squeeze’. Squeeze is, to Western eyes, a deplorably dominant feature of Chinese life; it may be described as – not exactly earning a commission – but putting yourself in a position to take a commission. Your loyalest servant, instructed to make the most trifling purchase, squeezes you without a qualm of conscience. Eminent men through whose hands pass funds humanely contributed for the urgent relief of thousands of starving flood-refugees exact squeeze as a matter of course. It is not so much a habit as an instinct; very few transactions in China are unaccompanied by squeeze.
What happened at the swimming pool would have been unremarkable if the swimming pool had been a Chinese institution. But it was run by foreigners, and predominantly pious foreigners at that; so the incident, which has a typically Chinese pattern, is worth recording as a sidelight on the theory stated above.
At the gate of the swimming pool was a guichet, with a pleasant young American behind it. He stopped me from going in and handed me a blank form. This, which entitled the bearer to use the swimming pool in return for a small charge, must be signed by two property holders in Kuling; there was also a medical certificate which must be signed by a doctor. He directed me to a neighbouring bungalow, whose tenant, Gosfoot by name, was both a doctor and a property holder and therefore in a position to supply two of the necessary signatures.
With that lamb-like subservience to red tape which is perhaps the most striking characteristic of civilized man, I set out in quest of Dr. Gosfoot. The bell was answered by his lack-lustre daughter, who said that her father was out, but that her mother might be able to help me.
In this surmise she was right, Mrs. Gosfoot, a small, fat, fierce woman, signed twice in the space reserved for property holders and offered to throw in a medical inspection as well. She was not, she explained, qualified, but that didn’t really matter.
I agreed readily and prepared, though not without embarrassment, to bare whatever portions of my anatomy were considered most suspect. To my relief, Mrs. Gosfoot said that it was the eyes and the feet which were most likely to contaminate the waters of the swimming pool; what sort of condition were my eyes in?
I said I thought they were pretty good.
Mrs. Gosfoot, after favouring them with a piercing stare, said that they looked all right to her, too. What about my feet?
I sat down and began to unlace my shoes. Mrs. Gosfoot stopped me. In the case of adults, she said, it was usual to take the would-be bather’s word about the state of his feet. Could I promise that my extremities were free of skin disease?
I said I thought I could, and Mrs. Gosfoot, for the third time, signed the form. I thanked her warmly and backed towards the door.
‘Excuse me,’ said Mrs. Gosfoot in an extremely menacing voice, ‘but that will be one dollar’.
It seemed a lot to pay for having one’s word about one’s feet taken by a woman; but it was a low price at which to buy an insight into such a demure little racket. I enjoyed my swim.
The rest of that day was spent looking for a man called Colonel Huang. He had been recommended to us by Mr. Wang Ching Wei as a useful liaison man, who might be able to arrange an interview with General Chiang Kai-shek. Colonel Huang proved elusive. Neither his name nor his rank are uncommon in China (the number of Colonels in the Chinese Army is second only to the number of Generals), and the information we collected about his whereabouts was often conflicting and always inaccurate. The settlement at Kuling clings to the side of a steep hill and is divided up into ‘Lots’, each of which bears a number and each of which may comprise several dwelling places. With Li as interpreter, we went mountaineering round the Lots, picking up clues from German military advisers and Chinese minor officials and missionaries of many races. Eventually, on a breast-high scent, we ran our man to ground in a church where the wedding of two Christian Chinese was being celebrated with considerable pomp. We picketed the graveyard and sat down to wait.
At last the ceremony was over. Crackers were discharged, photographs taken – and the guests adjourned en bloc to a reception far away up the hill. With tongues hanging out we followed them and drew a cordon round the bungalow which was their destination.
After a long time the guests began to depart. Still there were no signs of our man, and we told Li to make inquiries. He returned with that deprecating smile which so often softens the impact of disappointment in China. Colonel Huang had left Kuling the day before; we had been on a false trail all the afternoon.
Nevertheless, we had a stroke of luck (as we thought) that evening. We went to see a German adviser who was R’s colleague in his task of reconstructing the Civil Service. He was a charming though almost painfully ingenuous man, very much of the old school; after six months in China he was just beginning to suspect that Chinese officials were sometimes dilatory, inefficient, and unreliable, and the suspicion disquieted him. It was a remarkable achievement, to have staved off for so long the dawn of disillusionment.
He put us on the track of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s private secretaries, and this man, by good fortune, we ran down almost at once. We had sent Li home and the secretary spoke only German. I had once studied this language for three weeks and, pricked to an unnatural fluency by this emergency, was able to extract from the secretary a promise that he would arrange an interview with the Marshal for the next morning. So we went home contented to the Fairy Glen, which was full of amiable sailors on leave from the Yangtse gunboats, and where we slept between blankets for the first time for many weeks.
1 Missionary