THE NEXT MORNING was occupied by a round of farewell visits. By the middle of the next afternoon we were on the road again, going west.
Our objective was Changsha, the capital of Hunan. From Shanghai it had looked as if, in order to reach this place, one would have to retrace one’s steps from Nanchang to the Yangtse, take a boat to Hankow, and thence travel south to Changsha by the first and only completed link of the Canton-Hankow Railway. But in Nanchang we learnt that a cross-country journey by road (uncompleted) and rail (alleged) was possible. It was on the first stage of this that we were now embarking.
We crossed the river by sampan. A lot of troops were being ferried over to Nanchang in hulks from railhead on the opposite bank. They had a few mules and ponies with them, and one of the former, slipping off the narrow gangplank into the river, delayed the embarkation of the whole contingent for some time.
Of our two days’ journey from Nanchang to Pinsiang on the borders of Kiangsi and Hunan there is not much to tell. The road was very bad; large parts of it were still under construction, and rivers were negotiated by ferries with a lackadaisical technique. On the first day the country was rolling and empty, its soil a Devonshire red. On the second it was wilder and had a more obviously romantic beauty; there were big hills, thickly wooded and reputed to harbour tigers. We were drawing away from the territory of the Communists, and traces of their depredations were rarer now, though even here each village had its quota of little new forts.
I remember only one moment distinctly. On the evening of the first day we ran into a storm so violent that we had to halt the two cars in a darkened world for fear that they would be blown off the road. We took shelter in a little temple. It was inhabited by a minor official of the bus company and his numerous family. They were charming people who pressed upon us tea and cakes while a neglected telephone rang, petulant and incongruous, among old images with gilded, non-committal faces.
When the worst of the storm was over we went on. It was still raining, though in the west the evening sky was clean and yellow. Through the blurred windscreen the world lost what was outlandish in its shapes and colours; all that I could see was a drab road running on into the dusk between hills that were no longer specifically Chinese. I fell victim to a faint nostalgia. It was September, and I thought of the familiar September things that China was denying me. Rain on the windscreen. … For me that typified September: rain on the windscreen, dusk, a bad road between hills, a yellow light in the west, the smell of wet clothes. I thought of the road winding up from Alt a Chaorin over Black Rock and down at last to the Lodge; I imagined the harsh smell of a dead stag in the back of the car, and the feel of the rifle in its sodden case between my knees. I remembered other roads of the same sort and for the same reasons: the road from Sollas, which runs round the north of the island back to Sponish and which one travelled always wet to the waist from the snipe-bogs: and an earlier road on Ardnamurchan, along which the first and therefore memorable rabbits were brought in triumph home. …
On these roads the windscreen had shown something not very different from what it showed me now: dark, leaping hills distorted by the swimming glass. But inside the car there was a contrast, and for a moment, softening, I wished myself on those other roads, down which one jolted towards the certain expectation of scones, and a hot bath, and shared laughter. But nostalgia is a superfluous luxury in the traveller’s equipment, and it was not so very difficult to resign oneself to the anticipation of rice, and interminable courtesies, and a wooden bed in an inn, with perhaps some compensating dash of comedy thrown in as a relish.
Most of the comedy on this stage of our journey was provided by Mr. Tu. Mr. Tu was a dreamy, gentle old man, so fragile and so altogether negative that I never looked at him without thinking of the phrase ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather’. Feathers might have proved a very real source of danger to Mr. Tu.
Though Mr. Chen from Harvard, reluctantly faithful, was still with us, Mr. Tu was in charge of the party. He was an official in the Department of Foreign Relations in the Kiangsi Provincial Government. When I asked him what function his department fulfilled, and with which foreign powers his province might be said to have relations, he gave a little reedy laugh and said that it was difficult to explain. I dare say it was.
As far as we were concerned, Mr. Tu was an obstructionist, and his tactics as such were highly instructive. Pinsiang was the terminus of a little railway which ran thence to Changsha, and it was our aim to reach it in time to catch a train on the evening of the second day. With this aim Mr. Tu had expressed at the outset the liveliest sympathy. It could be done, he said, and he was going to see that it was done; for his part, he was only too anxious to make his own absence from Nanchang as short as possible, so the faster we travelled the better he would be pleased.
But even as he said it he hardened his heart against us. Not because he disliked us; not because he wanted to involve either us or himself in any unnecessary delay. But he had a profound, probably unconscious, and certainly instinctive disapproval of our haste. It was all wrong, this preoccupation with time, this undignified cross-country scramble, this living with an eye on the clock. It was un-Chinese. It was in bad taste. Mr. Tu proceeded to teach us a lesson.
It was a lesson for which I have an immense theoretical respect, though I find it difficult, and even impossible, to learn. I know it is foolish to be, even for the best of reasons, in a hurry, and my reasons are seldom in the last analysis the best. But a sense of proportion which is either hopelessly under- or hopelessly over-developed makes it impossible for me to take any of my own activities seriously; and I therefore make a point of carrying them out, whenever possible, in circumstances which give me no time to think. If you undertake to do a thing against time you have at least one opponent worth beating; and a victory in that field bulks, for the moment, just sufficiently large to obscure your otherwise inconvenient doubts as to whether the thing was worth doing at all. It is a modus vivendi for which I share the just and profound contempt of Mr. Tu and all China.
The tactics of Mr. Tu’s delaying action were delightfully unobtrusive. When the car was ready to start, Mr. Tu would be found to have disappeared. If a long meal looked like ending, Mr. Tu would make another speech. If a halt was objected to, Mr. Tu would agree that it was inadvisable; but the halt would take place. The process of being delayed was almost painless. It was effected by the traditional methods. No reasons were advanced, no excuses given; it simply came to pass. In this respect the gentle and old-fashioned Mr. Tu was a great contrast to the alert and modern Mr. Chen, whose Western training made him fall, dismally and without dignity, between two stools. On our former journey to Nanfeng, Mr. Chen had been actuated by the same obstructionist motives, conscious and unconscious, as Mr. Tu; but he tried to play a Chinese game by Western rules. He allowed himself to be involved in arguments, pinned down to statements, confuted out of his own mouth. Mr. Tu merely smiled, agreed, changed the subject, and had his way.
So it was not until dusk on the second day that we reached Pinsiang. The younger members of the population had not, I think, seen a foreigner before, and we were followed everywhere by a large crowd of excited children. We were both very tired, and I had a mild fever; we wanted nothing more than a long sleep. But the local Commissioner invited us to a banquet, and the laws of etiquette forbade refusal. Groaning, we burrowed in the rucksack for clean shirts.
The banquet did not begin till ten o’clock, and at first only the extreme discomfort of our stools prevented us from going to sleep where we sat. It was a very good, very formal meal. There were seventeen courses. We were toasted repeatedly in samshui of a more than ordinary potency. Gradually we began to wake up. By the birds’-nest soup we had the table laughing. Toasts became still more frequent; no heel-taps were allowed. Speeches started when the Peking duck was served. I made five, all rather delirious. By the time the meal was over it was beyond question that we had been a big social success. Two minor officials were under the table and the Commissioner had to be helped downstairs.