A chill rain was falling. Liu Kung Island was shrouded in fog. Morrison had awoken with his throat as sore as if it had been scraped by razors. The muscles behind his eyes were throbbing hot, his neck felt as though it had been iced into position, his ears ached and his sinuses were in a worse than usual state of rebellion. Swathed in woollens, wrapped in misery and bound by duty, he dragged himself across the quay, past a medical boat unloading wounded Japanese soldiers and their civilian Chinese labourers and, with the moans of the injured in his ears, proceeded up the hill to the wireless base station. There, he found James in a right state.
James hurled a sheaf of cables onto the desk for Morrison’s consideration. ‘I am getting no support whatsoever from any quarter. The world is ruled by small and careful men.’
Morrison thumbed listlessly through the cables. ‘And what from our editor?’
‘The worst blow of all. Bell is not disposed to re-engage the Haimun. Says that unless we can get within sight of a naval battle, it’s a waste of the paper’s money and resources.’
‘We—you and I—sail to Nagasaki at daybreak. Passmore estimates that with the winds and currents it will take forty-eight hours and the Haimun’s remaining reserves of coal to get there. But we must convince the Japanese to allow us to proceed. It’s our last chance. In the meantime, you have to stall Bell.’
‘And if the Japanese still say no?’
‘Then I shall give up the Haimun and seek attachment to a Japanese column. In any case, Tonami tells me you will travel with the Japanese Second Army Corps leaving Nagasaki on the first or second of May for the Yalu River. You should be able to witness the first major land battle of the war.’
Morrison had never felt less capable in body or less prepared in heart and mind for such adventure. ‘Grand.’
At dawn the following morning, the Haimun steamed across the Yellow Sea towards the Land of the Rising Sun. Ichibans, for all the restorative properties of egg and milk, had not proven the best medicine for nasal catarrh. But Morrison’s mood had brightened. A telegram had come overnight to him care of the Haimun from that impossible creature. Dear, dear girl. She was taking passage to Nagasaki on the Doric with Mrs Goodnow. She would be able to meet him there before joining Egan in Yokohama. Perhaps she had reconsidered. He found himself full of hope, though exactly what it was he hoped for now he would have been hard pressed to say. He dosed up on Tinct Cinchona. By the time we meet, I ought to be well again. Please God. For all that she tests me, she brings me great happiness as well.
Early on the morning of the twenty-fourth of April, the Haimun steamed into the mountain-cradled port of Nagasaki. Coal barges drew alongside the vessel as it tied up, and, on the jetty, women in plain blue kimonos queued, baskets of coal harnessed to their backs. Bare-legged boatmen, the hems of their calico robes tucked into their waist sashes and ropy muscles glistening, steered their skiffs across the calm water, gliding in and out of the moorings. A pungency of shellfish and seaweed infiltrated Morrison’s consciousness; that he could smell again meant he was on the road to recovery. His senses were sparking back into life; the mix of travel and uncertainty—about Mae, about being sent to the front—gave everything an electric charge.
The Doric was expected that very evening. And she is on board! It is almost too good news. His mind raced with possibilities. She would not have told him to meet her if she hadn’t reconsidered her plan to marry Egan. She had been rash and foolish. He would forgive her. They would be married and return to Peking, or return to Peking and be married, though it was possible she would prefer the wedding to take place in Tientsin or Shanghai. They would have that child and many more after. There was so much to talk about. Perhaps—hope against hope!—Egan did not yet know of her condition.
He was an idiot. She just wanted to have him again, on her terms, before leaving him on her terms. He should know that by now.
He should not be such a cynic.
It was in his nature to be a cynic.
It would be strange getting married at his age. But comforting, too. And children. He recalled the sight of her with young Owen Lattimore.
Lovely.
James was occupied with the refuelling of the ship, and Tonami with appointments that they all hoped would help break the official impasse with regard to the Haimun. Relieved of any immediate tasks, Morrison took a room at a hotel. He idly perused the guest book, only for Martin Egan’s signature to leap out like a flare. He was relieved to see that Egan had checked out almost a week earlier.
He set out for a walk. A pair of middle-aged women in layered kimonos passed him on the street, bobbing along under oil-paper parasols and smiling from behind their hands. Paper charms fluttered from tree branches and chimes tinkled. There was a gentility here that Morrison found almost disconcerting after the robust hustle and bustle of China. He stopped at a tiny, immaculately clean eatery for an early lunch. Even the way the Japanese prepared food struck Morrison as discreet—the steaming, grilling, rolling; the delicate odours; the concealment in lacquered boxes as opposed to the hiss and crackle of the wok, the scrape of the spatula, the wallop of chilli and garlic and heaped platters.
Despite the impeccable courtesy of the Japanese, Morrison sensed that Japan had a way of coolly excluding the foreigner that China, for all its violent spasms of xenophobia, had never mastered. If China’s government did not command Morrison’s respect as Japan’s did, China as a nation had won his love. For a man who craved order, who spent much of his time collecting, cataloguing and recording, Morrison had a weakness for the garrulous, the passionate, the chaotic, the unpredictable. China. Mae.
Walking out from the eatery, he found himself on a narrow street of open-fronted shops leading up to the Temple of the Bronze Horse. A doe-eyed little boy in a blue kimono played with spinning tops by the side of the road until, spying the tall foreigner with the pale hair and skin, he ran to his shopkeeper father and buried himself in the man’s long skirts. The father bowed to Morrison, who bowed back, strangled with emotion. He burned so fiercely with anticipation he felt he might set the houses of wood and paper aflame. He had no patience for sightseeing. He turned and all but sprinted back to the docks.
The Doric had arrived but had been put into quarantine. A customs official told Morrison that a passenger had displayed symptoms of the plague. No, he didn’t know the name of the passenger. No, he didn’t know if it was a man or a woman. Please ye gods, let it not be her. Thinking of the danger to Mae and the baby she was carrying, and for once in no doubt that it was his, Morrison nearly doubled over with anguish.
Over at the Haimun, he found James in the engine room in heated conversation with the ship’s engineer and gesturing sharply with his pipe.
‘It’s going to take days to fix,’ insisted the engineer, a little Scot with wild red hair. ‘You can rant and rave as much as you like, Mr James. But we have to get a new valve or we’re not going anywhere, and they don’t grow on Nagasaki’s trees.’
Morrison, secretly relieved, led James back up to the deck. ‘Think of it this way. Tonami will have more time to plead the Haimun’s case with his superiors in the navy here.’ And I will wait for the Doric to be cleared.
‘The engine is not the end of our trouble.’ James thrust a letter into Morrison’s hand. ‘From our minister in Tokio.’
‘Sir Claude? What does he say?’
‘Nothing of any use whatsoever. He implies that he does not wish to use his position to argue our case with the Japanese government. He even intimates that he admires the efficiency with which the Japanese have managed to crush the curse of correspondents. The traitorous Brinkley, meanwhile, has published a leaderette supporting the Japanese position on keeping correspondents well away from the war. Says that information disadvantageous to the Japanese army, and hence the outcome of the war, could be disseminated by too much freedom of access to the front by the men of the press. He forgets he’s one himself.’
‘Bilge. The Japs thought this war would be swift. So, in truth, did I. Now that it’s not going as well as they thought it would, they wish to hide this obvious fact from the world. Well, they can’t. Bell should pull Brinkley into line.’
‘Fat chance. His latest telegram read, “Obey the Japanese.” And so the English, the Japanese, our own colleagues and even the bloody machinery are conspiring to keep me from doing my job,’ James exclaimed. ‘I can’t speak for the engine but the others are doing this, from what I can see, not because I am not doing my job well enough but because I am doing it too well. The Russians, of course, would still welcome any excuse to hang me from the nearest yard-arm.’ James lit his pipe and puffed furiously at it.
Tonami arrived back from an appointment with the commander of a Japanese man o’ war berthed nearby, worry etched into his brow. He was clutching a telegram.
‘What is it, Tonami?’ James demanded before the man had even the chance to say hello.
‘Not good.’ He waved the telegram. ‘Military Headquarters has overruled the navy and ordered the Haimun to remain south of the line of battle. Well south.’
‘They know I am willing to play by their rules,’ James spluttered. ‘I just want to see the action with my own eyes. I am more than happy to accept censorship. Tonami, your welcome presence on the Haimun is testament to that.’
‘So,’ Tonami concurred. ‘And James-san has been more careful in his dispatches than our own admiralty.’
‘And as a reward I am threatened with capital punishment by one belligerent and warned off the high seas and neutral waters by the other. My own editor wishes to whisk my boat from under my feet. All because I have a vision for revolutionising correspondence itself!’
Morrison thought for a moment. ‘MacDonald—Sir Claude—is weak and vacillating. But he’s out best hope. James, draft a letter of reply to our minister. I shall have a look at it when you’re finished.’
Morrison’s air of authority clearly calmed James and brought a look of relief to Tonami’s face as well.
‘That’s settled then,’ Morrison added. ‘We’ll have dinner first at the hotel.’
The three men went ashore for dinner. Afterwards, Morrison returned to the docks only to find the Doric still in quarantine.
Gripped by foreboding and still suffering from the lingering effects of the flu, Morrison slept poorly. At dawn, he forced himself from his bed and discovered the Doric still had not been cleared. Composing a note, he sent it up to the ship. Whilst awaiting a reply, he obtained a copy of the manifest and ran his finger down the list three times. His heart sank. There was no Miss Perkins aboard. No Mrs Goodnow, either. The lady is constant only in her inconstancy, he thought and was instantly struck with remorse. What if something has happened to her? Perhaps she just missed the boat. That was a plausible explanation. Enquiring as to the next boat out from Shanghai, he learned it was the twin-screw Empress, a fast boat due in the following day. He knew he could not wait indefinitely. Bell had ordered him to the front; he would have to go to Tokio soon to get his orders. He felt ill with worry—and glad for the Haimun’s troubles, for they gave him an excuse to linger in Nagasaki a bit longer.
Sighting him, James bounded down the Haimun’s gangplank with his draft letter to Sir Claude in hand. The pair returned to Morrison’s hotel for breakfast. There, Morrison read the letter. He shook his head. ‘You have rather let drift the faculties of diplomacy. Instead of moving the diplomat to come to the aid of the Haimun, you may be inciting him to sink it.’
James made a sound like a tyre deflating. ‘It is a trifle uncompromising,’ he conceded.
Morrison nodded. ‘It’s violent.’
‘Violent,’ admitted James.
‘Worst of all, it’s unconvincing.’
James grimaced.
‘Moderation and a respectful tone might better aid the cause of a sympathetic result.’
‘You see,’ James said, ‘this is why I need you, G.E. Please, help me redraft it.’
‘My pleasure. I will get to it shortly. I’ve an urgent telegram of my own to send first.’ He could see the question forming on James’s lips. ‘Our colleague in Shanghai, Blunt.’
‘I’ll accompany you to the telegraph office,’ James offered as they walked out.
‘You worked all night,’ Morrison replied. ‘Rest for a while.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Rest,’ Morrison ordered. ‘I’ll come to you shortly.’
Morrison had not been dissembling. The telegram was indeed addressed to Blunt: IS MISS PERKINS IN SHANGHAI. FIND OUT IF SAILING EMPRESS.
He feared his disappointment could be bitter. Perhaps she has decided it would be folly for us to see each other again. She has made her decision. Egan is to be the happy one and I forever precluded.
Plagued by pessimistic thoughts and craving occupation, Morrison was thankful for the task of revising James’s draft. Several hours later, he handed James the new version. ‘You will see that I have removed various random accusations and fulminations in order to stress the loss The Times would be forced to sustain if the Haimun was kept from sailing into the zone of war, the punctiliousness with which you adhere to the rules of neutrality, for so it must appear, and your sensitivity to Japanese military concerns. It most humbly requests Sir Claude, whose prestige and influence with the Japanese, not to mention our own government, is unparalleled, to render his most invaluable assistance in the matter.’
‘I shall keep my original draft as a relic of barbarism,’ James said humbly.
‘Of course,’ Morrison conceded, ‘it is the reply that is the point.’
Morrison returned to the hotel to tend to his notes and correspondence, arriving just as the sky cracked open. Rain fell in sheets. James arrived for lunch, sodden despite his umbrella and bearing a telegram from Moberly Bell addressed to Morrison.
Made nervous by Morrison’s poorly veiled dissatisfaction at having to stand in for Bedlow and fearful that his star correspondent might again threaten to quit The Times, Bell had rescinded the order for him to proceed to the front. He ordered him instead to concentrate on solving the problem of the Haimun’s access to the Siege of Port Arthur and other battles taking place in the Yellow Sea. And whilst he was at it, he was to convince the Japanese to allow all The Times’s correspondents access to the land battles unfolding as well.
Morrison hid his relief beneath a fit of coughing. ‘So now I am not to go to the Yalu. I feel like a bloody bandalore. Up and down. Up and down.’
‘I could use a bandalore myself. I like the newfangled ones with weighted rims. Yoyos, they call them. Picked one up in America when I was organising for the wireless plant. Good for relieving tension, or so they say.’
‘So good,’ Morrison responded drily, ‘that it’s said France’s aristocrats played with them—the old-fashioned ones, anyway—all the way to the guillotine. Any reply from Sir Claude yet?’
‘None.’
The rain fell all night long. Outside Morrison’s window, bamboo creaked and groaned.
It is the hope deferred that maketh sick the heart.
In the club the following morning, Morrison perused the papers. Nearly every first-hand report or illustration was of troop movements or marches or such details as the weight of the Japanese soldier’s kit. Those rare correspondents who’d defied Japanese controls to try to make it to the site of battle themselves told electrifying tales, which usually concluded with the correspondent himself being summarily apprehended somewhere in Korea and packed off back to Tokio with a reprimand.
The Japan Mail carried an article on the effect of stray mines on commercial shipping. He thought of Mae, pregnant, aboard a ship. Reading the notices as to who was staying at Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, he saw Martin Egan’s name. He looked up at the rain-streaked window; the world was grey and composed of tears. Does she wish to be with me or Egan? Are we to be the two strings to her bow? And which of us really is the father? He grimaced. If it is indeed one of us at all. He craved certainty.
The Empress arrived. There was no Miss Perkins aboard.
Morrison walked from the docks to the brothels of Mogi. He returned unconsoled.
Back on the Haimun, he found James chewing on his pipe stem in a state of fresh agitation. ‘I thought he was on our side!’ James exploded.
‘Who?’
‘Admiral Saito.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Saito is the one who said that as long as Tonami was able to vet our transmissions and use our wireless, we would have access to the theatre of war. Now he’s told Tonami that it would be a “tactical error” to allow us to leave Nagasaki at all! We have done nothing to deserve such treatment,’ James fulminated, knocking the ashes from his pipe with undue force. ‘Oh, by the way, a telegram has come to you from Shanghai.’ He passed an envelope to Morrison.
Morrison read it and then reread it.
‘Good news?’ James asked hopefully.
‘She says, “Do come Shanghai”.’
‘Miss Perkins.’
‘Miss Perkins?’ James’s voice ballooned with dread. ‘I have heard…of Miss Perkins. What do you intend to do?’
‘Go I will.’ Why fret my heart out here?
‘But the Haimun…’
‘It is detained indefinitely. You have just told me so in great detail yourself. And now that I am not going to the front, I should check in with Blunt.’
‘Tonami is going to Tokio to speak with Saito in person.’
‘Nothing will happen and I can’t do anything until he returns. He doesn’t even leave here until tomorrow.’
‘I cannot stop you,’ James said unhappily.
‘Good man.’ Morrison clapped James on the shoulder and took himself to the booking office to procure a ticket to Shanghai on the Empress when it returned there in two days’ time. Egan’s name on the Tokio hotel list was looking propitious all of a sudden. They were not yet reunited. There was still hope. Two days! How shall they pass?
The following day, James solved that problem when he showed Morrison another letter he had drafted to Sir Claude, though the diplomat had yet to answer the first.
‘I shall sober it down, shall I?’ Morrison asked. It wasn’t really a question.
At last the Empress was due to set sail. Arriving dockside with his bags, he presented his ticket only to be told that the steamer was delayed due to some problem with its engine.
At Mogi, the madam offered him a pretty little sixteen-year-old for five yen who, she claimed, had been only six months in whoredom.
He returned to find James pacing the deck of the Haimun, smoke signals of distress rising from the bowl of his pipe. Bell had sent another ominous telegram: FOR ONE MONTH AT A COST OF £2000 WE HAVE SUCCEEDED IN MAKING OURSELVES LOOK SUPREMELY RIDICULOUS.
‘It is the Japanese who are making all of us look supremely ridiculous!’ James ranted, and Morrison, for all his sympathy for the Japanese cause, could not argue otherwise. ‘The latest news, from our colleague Brinkley in Tokio, by the way,’ James added, ‘is that they have now decided to allow sixteen correspondents to wire two hundred and fifty words a day from the front.’
‘If the correspondents pooled resources,’ Morrison calculated, ‘they could come up with a comprehensive dispatch of four thousand words.’
‘No, no—a total of two hundred and fifty between them.’
Morrison knew it was not the most felicitous time for him to be going to Shanghai.