IT HAD BEEN a tiring day. Few things take it out of you so much as trying to pin down a set of utterly unreliable people to a course of action to which they are rootedly opposed; and when you have to do most of it through a recalcitrant interpreter the strain is substantially increased. The Catholic Mission gave us just the reception we needed to restore our morale.
This time the Fathers were Irish. They had taken over the Mission from the French. It was a gaunt, rather cheerless building, standing in a large compound which also contained a church and a vegetable garden, and which was at present packed with refugees whose homes had been devastated by the Communists. To these the Fathers gave food and shelter free.
It is certainly difficult, and I am afraid it is impossible, to translate into words the impression which that small community produced on me. The traveller passes through many countries, but the world is too much with him; or, if not too much, at any rate all the time. All the time he is haggling or hustling or scheming: coping with contingencies or anticipating them. Everyone he meets, from the mandarin to the muleteer, he meets (to some extent) on a business footing. Either he wants something of them, or they want something of him; or both. Usually both. The muleteer wants higher pay; the traveller wants a quicker pace. The mandarin wants a public pat on the back; the traveller wants a passport in a hurry. All the time he is fighting a guerilla war, a war of attrition. Truces are frequent; but they are clouded by the certainty that hostilities will soon be renewed. All the time – immediate or impending, acknowledged or unacknowledged – there is conflict, conflict, conflict.
It is the same, of course, in other walks of life. The traveller is not the only one who seems to himself to have embarked on a petty, inglorious Hundred Years War, a dateless and unprofitable struggle. But, both for the traveller and in more sedentary though not less strenuous lives, there are moments when the dust evaporates and the heat is cooled – when for a brief interval one feels oneself translated to another world: truces unclouded by the coming war. On the top of a hill, or swimming in an unsuspected bay, or as often as not in far more unlikely, less spectacular surroundings the conviction suddenly descends that the world is a better place than one had supposed.
The Mission at Nancheng provided me with such a moment. It was as if we had suddenly happened on a very good club of an unusual kind. The Fathers’ talk was lit by humour and comprehension. One of them was ill, another lately lamed; their lives were in danger from the Reds, their property in danger from the Whites. They were in daily contact with misery and suffering in their acutest forms, and their efforts to alleviate them were handicapped by a heart-breaking multiplicity of obstacles. They were worn out by the heat of the summer. They had few comforts, and we were the first strangers they had seen for months.
Yet you would have supposed from their bearing that they were the most fortunate of men, so cheerful were they, so humorously apologetic for the limitations of their hospitality, so full of an unwistful curiosity about the outside world. Theirs were incongruous circumstances in which to find content, yet with them you had the feeling that you were as near to true felicity as you would ever be. I remember them with admiration, and occasionally with envy.
They gave us an excellent dinner and a great deal of beer, and told us stories against themselves and against the Chinese. Like most Catholic missions in China, they were full of inside information, and they had much valuable news of the Communists, culled from refugees. When we told them how our plans for reaching Nanfeng were likely to be thwarted, they flung themselves into the intrigue with great zest, and immediately sent a chit round to the local general (who was a convert of theirs) asking him to receive us early the next day. We went to bed with the pleasant feeling that we still had a shot in our locker.
When it was light the next morning I went with one of the Fathers into their church, which was a large rather than a beautiful building. Mattins were being sung. The nave was full of Chinese, chanting their prayers in a devout sing-song. A few of them were respectable citizens, but most of them were refugees in rags. Children stood wondering among the kneeling forms, picking their noses with an air of abstraction. Sunlight filtering through the crude stained-glass windows made lurid and luminous the immaculate black heads of the women.
As we strolled back to breakfast the Father remarked that nothing in foreigners so powerfully attracted the curiosity of the Chinese as their habit of walking in step; the most eccentric behaviour earned you fewer stares than the carrying out of a normal activity in a way which could never occur to the Chinese, whose tripping paces are at no time synchronized.
We had breakfast, and then said good-bye with a very real regret. I tried to make the Fathers accept a donation for their mission, but they would have none of it. I have never known kinder hosts, or more unforgettable hospitality.
From then on our intrigue was triumphantly successful. The General (who of course had heard no word from the perfidious Mr. Chen) produced a military pass without demur, and by nine o’clock we were ready to take the road for Nanfeng. In our hearts we knew that we should see nothing there which we had not seen already; but the struggles of the last twenty-four hours had invested the place with a desirability, an irresistible lure, beside which Eldorado itself had no more than the casual appeal of a railway poster. It had been a point of honour that we should reach Nanfeng; and now, with luck, we were going to.
As we waited for the crestfallen and now genuinely terrified Mr. Chen, I watched reliefs for the nth division marching into Nancheng. They were poor troops – little slouching men in grey with gigantic cart-wheel straw hats lined with oiled paper, which acted as a protection against both sun and rain. These hats looked silly, but they were both practical and cheap. Most of the men carried umbrellas slung across their backs, and here and there in the column a soldier had a singing bird in a little cage. Umbrellas and larks on active service! How the superior West enjoys its laugh at the expense of the Chinese soldier! Yet nobody finds it funny when an English platoon takes a gramophone into the front line; and a song-bird, which is the only kind of potted music the nth division can afford, is a lesser burden than a gramophone. As for the umbrellas, they are not only lighter but far cheaper than waterproof capes, which are in any case nowhere procurable in Central South China. The Chinese soldier is not as funny as he sounds.
The column included a detachment of stretcher-bearers, which gave the no doubt illusory impression that it meant business. A few of the officers were mounted on Szechwan ponies, which are smaller and prettier animals than the Mongols in the North. There are very few ponies in Kiangsi; this always seemed to me curious for the grazing looked good, and the country was sufficiently open to have made a pony a more valuable asset than in most parts of South China. As I watched the troops march past I suddenly realized that I was standing outside a regimental armourer’s shop. The regimental armourer had taken a rifle to pieces and was furbishing up its component parts on an old razor strop.
At last Mr. Chen arrived, and we were off. We passed the post which we had visited the night before and got into country which grew steadily wilder. The road twisted along roughly parallel to the river, and I could not restrain myself from pointing out to Mr. Chen how admirably adapted to an ambush was almost every one of its sharp and numerous corners. Mr. Chen’s large face was disconsolate, and pale green in colour. Our bus had been commandeered by the military, so the guards were no longer with us. All along the road were recently dug trenches, relics of a successful Communist advance towards Nancheng a month ago. None of the fields was under cultivation.
Whenever we passed a military post Mr. Chen would stop the car and question the commander about conditions further down the road; he hoped to elicit an excuse for turning back. But the commanders, being, I think, familiar with conditions only as far as their eyes could see, failed to furnish an excuse, and we went on. Every time we passed a peasant on the road, Mr. Chen would turn sharply in his seat and watch the man until he was out of sight; he expected to see him go bounding up the hill-side to inform the Communist outposts of our passing.
But nothing ever seems to happen to me, and we reached Nanfeng safely, acknowledging with what dignity we could muster the salutes of an unforeseen guard of honour. Nanfeng is a small and very picturesque town, split by the river and dominated by an exceptionally tall pagoda. An ancient wall of great thickness runs round it, and its defences have been strengthened by a rash of little forts. Five months before we came there Nanfeng was hotly besieged by the full force of the main Red Armies, under the redoubtable Chu Teh. The garrison held out stoutly, but after a fortnight their ammunition was exhausted and the town was on the point of falling. It was only saved by aeroplanes which flew down from Nanchang and dropped fresh supplies of ammunition. The year before, however, it had been occupied for some time by the Reds.
The town, as we walked through it to the yamen, bore no outward traces of these stormy vicissitudes. Business As Usual: though there was of course less business. We were received with China’s unfailing courtesy by the magistrate, and, wise from experience, succeeded in forestalling lunch and arranging instead a visit to military headquarters. Before we parted, the magistrate produced one of the Communist coins, minted in Shuikin, the capital of the Red Area; these coins, with notes bearing the head of Lenin, make up a currency which is remarkable, even in these inflationary days, for the paucity of backing behind it. The coin was a twenty-cent piece, dated 1933, and bearing the hammer and sickle in addition to the star which is the emblem of the Kuomintang. The magistrate (as we afterwards discovered from Li) made us a present of it. But Mr. Chen – alas for Harvard! – pretended that it was meant for the Governor of the Province, to whom, he said, he would hand it over when we got back to Nanchang; so we never saw it again.
Afterwards, forgetting this incident, Mr. Chen confessed in an unguarded moment that he had a passion for coins, and owned a collection which included an American cent for every year since 1882.