BOOK EIGHT
ENTERING THE CENTURY
IN THRALL
THE FIRST DAYS had the rough texture of surprise. Captivity was a mystery, and in its thrall Treadup did not have the energy even to think about the meaning of his new state of life.
THERE WAS plenty of room. Nineteen men of six nationalities were housed in the gymnasium. Two women, Dominican tertiary nuns recently arrived from Shensi with wilted starched wimples and dusty white habits, had the privacy of an office room. These were the only “enemies” rounded up, in or near Paoting. The boards of the gym floor, on which the men slept supperless the first night, reeked of tung oil. There was no heat. Treadup ached. “My bones were like rusty scrap iron.” No less than twenty military police had been assigned to guard the foreigners; the duty men coughed and nattered all night.
Captors began padding around in stockinged feet at five o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, the ninth. They carried kerosene lanterns to cut the darkness. They fed their guests a breakfast of millet mush and pickled turnips, and green tea. They dragged in palliasses—big cotton bags stuffed with straw—for their guests thenceforth to sleep on.
After dawn a superior officer entered with a blinding smile—five chromium teeth glittered in his jaws. With the help of an arrogant Formosan interpreter, Japanese to Chinese, the officer announced that the American fleet had been turned turtle at anchor at Hawaii. He spoke as if this were a matter of course. Most of the businessmen did not understand Chinese; Treadup translated into English, which two Britishers, naturally, and two Belgians, a Dutchman, and a Swede readily grasped. The Dutchman received the details with unseemly relish.
The officer had a desk carried into the gym, and seated at it he began to interrogate his guests, one by one.
A SQUAD of ten men went with Treadup to the Congregationalist compound. This was called an inspection. The commanding officer wanted to know who the few remaining Chinese in the compound were—the gateman, the gardener, three ministers, four doctors, a dozen nurses, charwomen, cooks, launderers, coolies, all according to their callings and functions. A consular secretary listed buildings and their uses. Treadup’s only written reaction to all this was: “Their attention to exact details is breathtaking.” Two men with a bucket of foul-smelling paste and a big brush affixed large paper seals, with death warnings and dire red chops on them, to all doors except those of the hospital. Round-the-clock guards were stationed at the compound gate. At this, Ting the gateman retired to his k’ang, ill, evidently felled by a massive and irreversible loss of face. Two men of the troop took Treadup back to the Y.
THE JAPANESE, Treadup noted later, seemed to have been transformed by the success at Pearl Harbor. They walked straight, looked one right in the eye, sucked in less apologetic breath before speaking. They were polite. “They had stopped being caricatures of themselves,” David wrote in “Search,” “and had turned into real people.”
ON THE TENTH all the foreign guests were summoned to the headquarters of the military police. They were carried there in a truck which backfired through the streets, alarming the populace with sounds of yet another war. Guards stood on the running boards.
The officer with metal teeth turned out to be the commander of the MPs. His name was Matsuyama. He was very friendly. He made a speech, complete with graceful gestures of the arms—he seemed to be conducting the sweet music of war. He said pleasantly that the Japanese had a duty to protect all the peoples of Asia against the perfidy of the British and Americans. A great ship named the Prince of Wales had been sunk near Singapore (one of his hands sank to the bottom of the sea). The American air force in Manila had been destroyed on the ground; Japanese had landed (a hand beached itself on the Philippines). The guests, he said—giving the impression that a new measure of indulgence would follow each such Japanese triumph—were now free to return to their homes. The homeless Catholic ladies could either remain at the Y.M.C.A. or lodge with others. All door seals would be removed.
Colonel Matsuyama handed out to each guest a lengthy and intricate declaration form, with instructions to list all property at the person’s home and place of business, giving the exact nature, size or quantity, and value of every item; and to return the filled form by the following Wednesday. Next he waved in the air a list of thirteen regulations governing foreigners in Paoting. These, he announced with agreeable flashes of chromium, were lenient. He read them. It was stipulated that every person must procure an identification card. Movement would be restricted. Special passes could be obtained in exceptional circumstances. All cash money would have to be surrendered. The diary: “Found it hard to concentrate on mundane matters.”
The foreign guests were now dismissed to go home. On foot. It was a long walk to the American Board compound—especially for the nuns, whom Treadup had invited to inhabit the quarters of Letitia Selden and Helen Demestrie. The strong nuns carried their own sparse baggage.
THEY WERE “free” but not free. Captivity, Treadup soon found, could have relative degrees. He and the nuns were no longer confined in the Y, but Japanese guards still manned the compound gates day and night; three guards took turns at the door of the Cowley house, where Treadup was living; and three kept track of the nuns. (Too close track, those ladies quite calmly confided to Treadup after the first night. Treadup gathered that the guards, who had obtained ladders from somewhere, were vigilant at the bedroom panes perhaps to see whether there were weapons concealed beneath all those yards of white drapery. “These women have tough fiber,” Treadup wrote. “No hysteria.”) The foreigners’ movement was indeed restricted. One had to obtain permits to go to the gate to obtain permits to go to town to obtain permits to do anything whatsoever.
In all dealings the Japanese were scrupulously polite—even, the sisters reported, while peeping, for beyond the glass they had encouragingly kept smiling and nodding. But they were, it seemed to Treadup, active to a fault. “Like mosquitoes. Always buzzing at your ear and endeavoring to land on skin.” He obediently tried to draw up the required inventories, but he was interrupted again and again for what were called “routine inspections.” An architect came to survey the buildings. A doctor came to look at the hospital. An army cook came to examine the kitchens. Treadup concluded that the Japanese wanted to use the compound to quarter troops.
The young lieutenant in charge of the gate guards was especially friendly. Named Koniishi, he said he had lived twelve years in California, though his accent and grammar suggested that the stay, if there had been one, had been much shorter. He remained at Treadup’s shoulder all day. He knocked at the door in the evening, wanting to play parlor games. Treadup found a Crokinole set that had belonged to the boys; the pair made up rules as they went along. “I had a nice time,” Treadup wrote.
It was my first chance to unwind into my living self I had a companion in bewilderment. Under the layers of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere nonsense lay a homesick and scared human being.
THE NEXT MORNING Koniishi came with a summons for Treadup to appear at military police headquarters in town. In a frigid, barren office, Treadup was submitted to a fierce questioning, by metal jaws himself, about his work in the villages. Matsuyama put his questions courteously, but a Korean interpreter into Chinese, feeling the power of his necessity, snarled in the style he evidently imagined suitable for the New Order in East Asia. It seemed to be suspected that Mr. Teddy had ties to guerrillas. Many of the questions were obviously based on items Koniishi had reported from the conversation over Crokinole the previous evening. So much for soft feelings for a homesick and scared human being. At one point, Matsuyama called in a medic to take Treadup’s blood pressure, to see if he was lying.
The diary: “Was having difficulty hearing, especially on the right side. Is it that I can’t believe my ears half the time?”
AT THE COMPOUND the nuns told Treadup that they had had permits to go to Paoting to buy some dry goods they needed. In the street they had encountered the Dutchman, their fellow captive the other night at the Y, being trundled along by two Japanese at his elbows. He was in tip-top spirits. He said he had heard on the radio that New York had been bombed by two unmarked planes.
MEAGER NOTES in the diary:
On Wednesday, the seventeenth, Treadup dutifully handed in his inventory. He did not, however, dutifully hand in all his cash. The stocking containing the Mexican silver dollars of Madame Shen remained in the drawer.
On Thursday Treadup went to the hospital and asked Dr. Ch’en to look in his ears. The doctor removed from his right ear “enough wax to polish a ballroom floor.”
ON FRIDAY MORNING Koniishi brought a chit notifying “Mr Trodop” that he was expected at the military police office at one thirty in the afternoon. The sisters received the same notice, and it turned out that all foreigners had been summoned.
First sign that new changes were in store for us: Good-mannered, chromium-toothed Matsuyama has vanished. New Colonel Nomura presides. His style is exclamatory. He shouts, the message passing through the nasty Korean interpreter’s mouth just as loudly, that there are new regulations. No foreigners may stay in Paoting. The Imperial Government has impounded all “enemy” property here. Foreigners must now remove themselves, either to the Legation Quarter of Peking or to the British or French Concessions of Tientsin. Japanese military will provide necessary communications with those cities for persons wishing to make arrangements. No time to think. I grasp at idea of Mrs. Evenrude, with whom Emily stayed in Tientsin. I know that when women were evacuated from North China, she refused to leave, Tientsin being her “only home.” Send telegram.
A reply came that very afternoon. (“These Js are mechanical toys—wind ’em up and they move.”) It turned out that Mrs. Evenrude was overjoyed at the prospect of having a man in the house.
TREADUP’s departure could be prompt. All the movable family belongings were already in the eight tin-lined boxes he had packed before moving to Ma Ch’iao. He hired a cartman to carry the boxes to the railroad station. The Catholic sisters, who were going to take asylum with some Maryknoll nuns in Peking, went with him, in rickshas; so did Lieutenant Koniishi, who had been sheepish ever since the interrogation he had caused. It turned out that Koniishi was to be his guard all the way to Tientsin. Treadup was feeling a little stout: Madame Shen’s dollars were in a money belt around his waist.
The Japanese put their guests in a second-class car. For the first time in eleven days, Treadup sat still. Thought ensued. On its heels came a terrible crash.
I remember that I began by wondering what I was getting into. Barely knew Mrs. Evenrude. Recalled Em’s complaints about how Mrs. E made her generosity felt. Then—suddenly—sensation of dizziness—I was visited by the most terrible comprehension. All these days I had been too busy, or too confused, to see it. I was leaving my vineyard. Would I ever come back? I might never again see roses bloom on the arbor I built to celebrate my love for my wife and sons. Worse than that, far worse than that. The bottom had dropped out from under my useful life. My entire life for Christ had been utterly wasted. Lectures!—where had they led? The villages!—hollow shells. Everything I had done had been swallowed up into absurdity. A future? How long would the Visitors be here? How long would I be, in effect, a prisoner of war? All the news of the war fronts we had been getting was bad. I thought: I am sixty-three years old—finished before my time.
WHAT IS MAN?
BY THE TIME Treadup reached Tientsin, he had a headache which seemed to peak and throb at the very top of his skull. “It was as if my loftiest thoughts had turned out to be painful.”
At the Tientsin East railway station, military police took this bleak and worn-out Treadup into a side room and asked him for his papers. He surrendered them. Three MPs held a long discussion. They went away. Half an hour later they returned. Through an interpreter into Chinese, they told Treadup that his intercity pass was invalid. It had been tampered with.
Treadup, feeling great heat at the top of his head, demanded to see it. Koniishi stood to one side, not helping at all. The men showed Treadup his pass. Sure enough, it had first been made out with Peking as the destination, and then the characters for Peking had been crossed out and Tientsin substituted. The MPs argued that Mr. Teddy may have done this himself.
Treadup shouted at Koniishi to speak up. Koniishi shrugged; said he knew nothing.
Then, for the first time in his memory, Treadup became wildly angry. He shouted that all Japanese were madmen. As if that were not enough, they were stupid madmen. They were idiotic victims of their own bumbling. They were so used to treating people like dogs that they had become worse than dogs themselves. Treadup’s roar was impressive, and the interpreter was too frightened to tell the Japanese what the man was saying. This was a new frustration: the anger was not reaching its goal. Treadup’s shouts grew even more abusive. He was nearly twice as big as the Japanese soldiers, and as he railed at them, he leaned over toward them with his fists clenched, and they retreated, running away out of the room on short legs like—like what? He could not think what. A picture was at the edge of his mind, but he could not quite summon it.
Ten minutes later they returned to the examination room and said Treadup could proceed to the British Concession.
In “Search”:
I trembled in the ricksha all the way to Davenport Road. I was deeply humiliated by my un-Christian behavior. My head hurt. I was puzzled and scared by my loss of control. At one turning I laughed out loud. The laughter frightened me, because it seemed so irrational. I was afraid my headache was turning my brain toward hysterics. It took much time and great distance for me to realize that I had had a wonderful moment of feeling triumphant in the midst of my thorough defeat—for it had been at that moment that the picture which had hovered just off the periphery of my imagination at the station flickered into and out of my mind. A cruel image. A covey of fat little quail chicks running along the ground. That was what they had looked like, scurrying out of the room. In other words I had begun to uncover something that had been hidden from me all my life because it seemed that Jesus would not have approved:—namely, that shouting produced results, that hot anger ripened fruit faster than sunlight could.
MRS. EVENRUDE’S welcome left much to be desired. “You have come at a bad time,” she said. “I have an ulcer on my leg. Just like a miserable Chinese beggar.”
She pulled up her long skirt and showed Treadup a bandage on her left leg with an ugly greenish stain on it. She turned and showed it to Koniishi. He sucked in air and bowed at her leg.
She said to Treadup, “This infidel is charming,” and she asked Koniishi if he wanted a cup of tea. He evidently had decided to pretend he did not understand English. She said, in Chinese, “Ch’a! Ch’a! Ch’a!” He made as if to understand and bowed. So they sat in the living room with curtains drawn and drank tea in a silence that was heaped up against the false language barrier. Treadup fumed. Mrs. Evenrude bobbed her chin up and down and smiled to Koniishi; in delicate mimicry he bobbed and grinned at her. At last they got rid of him.
An hour later two Peking carts pulled in at Mrs. Evenrude’s gate, with all of Treadup’s boxes. “What is this?” Mrs. Evenrude asked. “Have you come for life?”
There was a pounding at the top of Treadup’s head. “They would have taken my things,” he said, “if I had left them.”
“This is not a godown,” Mrs. Evenrude said. She peckishly told her Number One Boy and her coolie to put the boxes in an empty room in the servants’ quarters.
Treadup was to stay in the room Emily had used, looking out on the now leafless umbrella tree. He fell onto the bed, shoes and all. When he woke it was dark. He felt worse than ever.
OVER a frugal supper, Mrs. Evenrude grew talkative. “My husband, Simon Evenrude,” she said, “was a curious man. Of course, you have never been married to a lawyer, so you wouldn’t know. Everything had to be precise. We lived by question and answer. My life, Mr. Treadup, was one long cross-examination. He’s dead and gone now, but I’m in the habit. If you want to know anything in this house, you have to come at me with sharp questions. I won’t volunteer anything. You’ll just have to keep after me.”
To try to oblige her, though he did not have his heart in the work, Treadup asked some questions. Gloria Evenrude, he learned, had grown up in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, daughter of a schoolteacher. She had had a Methodist education at Wellesley, “but to tell the truth I could never get so much as a peep out of Jehovah in answer to a prayer—when I really needed something—I plumb gave up.”
She and her husband had gone to Tientsin Union Church because it was expected, “but to tell the truth, Mr. Treadup, you people are so long-winded. Boredom knocks the faith out of a person.”
How did she pass her time?
“Oh, I do the usual committee work. I putter. Fuss.”
How had she met her husband?
He had hung out a shingle in Pittsfield. “He was around. You know.”
Why China, then?
“Simon had a classmate who went into B.A.T.”—British-American Tobacco Company—“and he just wrote Simon and said, ‘Why don’t you come out here? It’s a good life. Tientsin Club. The Racecourse. Summers at the beach.’ So we came.”
Treadup’s head hurt. He was running out of questions. Had it been a good life?
Well, yes and no.
Mrs. Evenrude looked expectantly at Treadup. She obviously was waiting for a follow-up question to her cryptic answer.
But Treadup said, “I have a headache.”
This announcement transformed Mrs. Evenrude. Her voice, which had been sharp and combative, grew soft and kind. She said Dr. Cunningham had promised to come in to dress her ulcer the next morning. He lived just three houses along. She could send her coolie Liu over and ask him to come right away.
No, Treadup said. He thought he would go to bed and see whether he could sleep it off.
Mrs. Evenrude came around the table to feel his forehead. Her hand was cool, with a feathery touch trembling from concern. “No temp,” she said. “Thank heavens.”
THE HEADACHE was worse.
“It keeps knocking. Right at the very crown.”
“Let’s have a look-see,” the chubby little doctor said. He had merry eyes. Treadup was not in a mood to meet them for long. A milk-white hand popped a thermometer in Treadup’s mouth. Standing beside huge Treadup’s chair, Dr. Cunningham could barely lean over to see the top of his head. “Look here, old chap,” he said. “You’ve a great ruddy boil there.”
He started Treadup on hot compresses. “I’ll send over a book to read,” he said. “Passes the time when you’re balancing a hot bag on your bean.”
He kept his promise. Half an hour later a servant came with a leather-bound book. It was the Thomas Shelton translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha.
BEFORE supper on Christmas Eve Mrs. Evenrude decorated a Christmas tree with shiny baubles she had made herself, and she clipped to the branches little tin candleholders into which she stuck pretty three-inch candles with twisted flutings of wax of different colors. Then she set up, across from the piano in her living room, a crèche, its Mary and Joseph and manger and Christ child and wise men and shepherds and sheep all made of papier-mâché. She told Treadup she had ordered these figures from the Chinese craftsmen who made those remarkably lifelike figures and objects that the Chinese liked to burn at the graves of the newly deceased to keep the dead company on the other side. “They did not want to make sheep. They said sheep were foul—no one would want them in the spirit world. I went to some trouble to tell them the story of the Nativity, but when I said that the child’s mother was a virgin, they turned away from me. None of them ever looked at me again. They thought I had the evil eye. Foreign-devil lies! They tripled their price. Look what they did with the Virgin Mary. You’d think she was a White Russian prostitute.” Mrs. Evenrude cocked her head to one side. “I like her that way. It deepens the mystery, don’t you think?”
At midnight Mrs. Evenrude, dressed in a red flannel peignoir, got Treadup up out of bed, and the pair—she leaning on his arm and limping, he in his pajamas holding a damp facecloth on top of his head—went downstairs to light the candles. “It was breathtakingly dangerous,” Treadup wrote Emily.
We sang “0 Little Town of Bethlehem,” our every exhalation blowing the tiny flames toward the dry needles. It is a wonder that I am alive to write this letter.
Early Christmas morning Dr. Cunningham dropped in. Mrs. Evenrude’s leg was bad, and Treadup had already written in his diary: “Head more sore! More heat!” The doctor said he wanted to take the two to St. John’s Hospital to make some blood tests. Mrs. Evenrude crankily ordered her carriage, and soon the angry lady, silent Treadup, and the bubbling little doctor were riding through the Tientsin streets behind the clopping of a chestnut mare.
“Are you enjoying the book I sent you?” the doctor asked Treadup.
“You chose it because it’s about me, didn’t you?”
“My dear fellow, you must cheer up. I think you have this pestilence on your noddle because the dem thing’s so full of darkness.”
The pair reached home in late afternoon.
The noon Christmas dinner was switched to evening. Pain did not curb Treadup’s appetite. He wrote:
Delicious!—capons, roast potatoes, rutabaga, peach pickles, hot biscuits, jelly, fruit cup, salad, steamed puddings w hard sauce, nuts, coffee. The old girl outdid herself Thought about what the doc said and tried to laugh—at him—with him—he is such a madcap. But I have no gaiety in me. None.
THE DIARY: “Boxing Day. Boil alarming. Nursing it all along, and reading.” Dr. Cunningham came in three times during the day.
He is very kind, bounces around like a sprite. But I am not up to it. My spirits in a sharp decline all afternoon. The work of my mission has been a waste. I am nothing.
In the night he wrote:
Waked up in a bad sweat. O Lord God, what have I done to anger you? I remember that when Mr. Lin was in desperation, that time when I took him to Peitaiho, we read the Book of Job together. Job had far worse than I: ‘many’ sore boils from the sole of his foot unto the place where I have mine.
The next morning, these words—not exactly words of comfort—copied from that book:
“I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul…My soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway: let me alone; for my days are vanity. What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.”
YET HE WAS. In the morning Dr. Cunningham brought him two more books: volumes of essays by Montaigne and Emerson.
“You have American books?” Treadup asked.
“I have Montaigne in French if you prefer. When you have a mite more pepper in you, Treadup, you must come and see my library.”
The diary:
Nursed head most of day, read. Toward evening boil opened with copious discharge and relief! The relief was such that I thought of the day of my conversion—not that the main load is off my shoulders this time: the load of the end of everything. That misery is far sorer than a mere boil. But the physical relief is sweet. The poison—what is it? hatred of those who destroy?—is draining out of me.
Another entry:
Tonight I read, side by side, Montaigne’s and Emerson’s essays on friendship. In all my years in China I have never had an English friend. Have I had any friends? Mr. Lin—used to be a friend. (I tried to find him the other day: was told he had left for free China in November.) Johnny Wu a friend?—no—he teacher, I pupil. Em? Yes! Em, my one dear friend. I am so lonely. I think I might try having an English friend. I like this little doctor. He is different.
ON THE TWENTY-NINTH, eight inches of snow fell. This much snow was rare for Tientsin. A wind came down off the Gobi Desert and piled and sculpted dynamic banks and eddies ribbed with ripples, as if the snowdrifts themselves were dunes of desert sand. The white-trimmed pine trees in Mrs. Evenrude’s garden seemed to leap into classical painted scrolls. Treadup looked up from his book. “Why does such ravishing beauty make me so sad?”
The next day his sadness was edged with disgust—but in his passive state he was for some reason unable to push his blues over the edge into anger. A squad of Japanese soldiers bluffed their way past the coolie at the gate of Mrs. Evenrude’s compound, brazenly tramped to the back of the enclosure, and with axes lopped off branches of the pine trees and took them away, apparently to use them in some sort of festive decorations for their triumphant New Year. They befouled the beautiful drifts with their indiscriminate footprints and left the trees disheveled and undressed to their hips. Mrs. Evenrude was in a state.
The following night, New Year’s Eve, as Mrs. Evenrude and Treadup sat silently reading before a coal fire in the grate in her living room, there was a sudden roar of motorcycles, a pounding at the gate. Mrs. Evenrude sent a servant to investigate. Soon five Japanese in uniform burst into the living room. One announced in bad English that he was the consul general of Tientsin City. They were all drunk. “We pay social call,” the consul cheerily said. “We go along Davenpole Road, every home we pay social call. How do you do? Are you Happy New Yeel, Mrs. Evellude?” He was not too drunk to know exactly where he was.
Mrs. Evenrude’s rage of the previous day, which she had nurtured and treasured ever since, now suddenly vanished into thin air. Her strong will had turned gracious. She rose and gave her hand to the consul to be kissed. Then she rang for Number One Boy and sent for some port wine and seven glasses. “We had a little party,” Treadup wrote Emily, in a letter that somehow reached Thornhill six months later (China! China!).
The most awful New Year celebration I ever witnessed. Mrs. E kept looking to me to entertain her friends, but I was Mr. Wet Blanket. I never heard so much giggling in my life as from those five. Mrs. Evenrude invited them for breakfast the next morning. They came! She served them waffles.
TREADUP’S boil dried up; Mrs. Evenrude’s ulcer got worse. Dr. Cunningham was in the house every day. David learned how to change Mrs. Evenrude’s dressings. Each time the doctor came, he sat down to chat awhile.
He has beehives in his compound. Today he got down on his hands and knees and did a dance of the kind worker bees do in summertime to alert their colleagues where to go for pollen. So earnest in his gyrations and waggings of his head and shoulders, his little hands pitter-patting on the carpet—I think I would have known exactly where to look: over in the Russian park. He knows something about everything. He has lectured me on Persian rites of Zarathustra, animal prows of Viking ships, Italian landscape in the poems of Horace—on shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. He makes me talk. He draws science out of me, as if drawing blood out of me with a pipette. “My God, Treadup,” he said. “Stir your stumps. You’re a dead thing, the way you are. Stand up, man!”
In another note, Treadup wrote that it was strange to be living in “a lay atmosphere.” Boredom with sermons had driven the faith out of Mrs. Evenrude, and Phinneas Cunningham was an agnostic. “I pray alone,” Treadup wrote.
One day Dr. Cunningham told Treadup how he had happened to come to China as a non-missionary doctor. His father, he said, was a friend of Disraeli; he had helped persuade Disraeli to give the vote to workingmen in the Reform Act of 1867. This elder Cunningham had nine children, the last born when he was very old. He started out a zealous Christian and raised his first five children in the Anglican church. But after he read The Origin of Species he became just as zealously apostate, and refused to baptize his younger children. One of the first batch of the faithful, Phinneas’s older sister Elizabeth, went to China as a missionary, with the China Inland Mission. Fifteen years later Phinneas, youngest of the faithless second batch, having studied medicine, grew restless and, “with nothing better to do,” traveled to China, where his older sister got him a job with a government university; and he eventually took up practice of his own in Tientsin. He said he never wasted his time in church. “Hocus-pocus, pray for a crocus! Bah!”
A Sunday finally came when Dr. Cunningham invited Treadup for tea at his home. The house was “about to tumble down from the weight of the books in it.” On all the walls, piled on desks and tables, scattered on the floor. Treadup remembered complimenting Yen Han-lin on “the fragrance of learning” in his calligraphy room; here, “I breathed the rank smell of this man’s intelligence—such a small head, to contain so many tomes!”
After they had talked awhile, Treadup volunteered to help out at St. John’s Hospital. He said he did not know what he could do, but he had come to the conclusion that he had better do something.
“Good man!” the little doctor said. “We’ll start you out on bedpans. That’ll shake you out. That’ll cure you of the dims.”
A FILLED ROUTINE
A NEW LIFE began. On the day he was to start his volunteer work, Treadup took Mrs. Evenrude to the hospital in her carriage. Her leg was still suppurating, and Dr. Cunningham wanted to keep her under his eye. The doctor had a tailor waiting to measure Treadup for whites to wear at work. Miraculously a suit was ready in an hour. “Thou behemoth,” the doctor said, “thy force is in the navel of thy belly, thy tail moveth like a cedar, the sinews of thy stones are wrapped together, and thy bones are as strong as brass, and furthermore, thou great beast, it took three bolts of our best cotton cloth to cover thy belly and thy bum.”
It turned out that this mischievous medical gnome had meant it about the bedpans. “I think I never knew before,” Treadup wrote at the end of the day,
what it means to be a missionary. I humbled my flesh today for the relief and easing of sufferers. The small Chinese nurses need my strength to lift women, as well as men, up for the pan. One of the heathens I serviced was Madame Evenrude. She was decently covered with a sheet the whole time, but she swore at me like a sailor. We know each other now.
And so life became a filled routine: work at the hospital in the morning, reading in the afternoon, a brisk walk three times around the Recreation Ground (he had a pass) late in the day, and reading again in the evening. The doctor loaned Treadup David Copperfield. Then Tristram Shandy, Dead Souls, Moby Dick. Then one day he said, “It’s time for you to stop being an adolescent and become a man. I mean, it’s time for you to read some poetry.” He put into his hands the poems of John Donne and The Tempest. “The advantage for you of Donne,” Dr. Cunningham said, “is that he was a preacher who knew that a soul is connected to a body.” Then of course The Tempest would disconnect things again.
MRS. EVENRUDE’S leg cleared up. To celebrate Chinese New Year, which fell on February 14 that year, she put on a dinner for Treadup, Cunningham, and three purple-cheeked Englishmen from the business community. She served delicately glazed Peking duck—except that it was chicken. That was all her cook could buy in the black market. After dinner everyone played rummy. “I could hear my mother’s voice,” Treadup wrote. “Cards, son? Next thing we know, you’ll be making wagers.”
THE JAPANESE had imposed a guard on the hospital. The MPs—and in general all Japanese officials and military personnel—were being correct in their behavior. Dr. Cunningham had developed a code for use in front of them. Pearl Harbor was when “the sun came up.” The Japanese were all named Jonathan. The Chinese police in the puppet government were “blackies.” The guards’ demeanor at the hospital was variable, because the Japanese had a policy of changing commanding officers every ten days or so, presumably to forestall fraternizing of any kind. One Jonathan-boss asked to have the men of his guard vaccinated. Treadup assisted. The men were terrified. Treadup held their arms in his vise grip while little Cunningham scratched the skin. Each victim laughed hard when it was over.
IN MID-MARCH all the foreigners in Tientsin were summoned to a meeting. It was held in Gordon Hall, in Victoria Park. This building was named for Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon, who had laid out the original British Concession, had then gone on to fight the Taipings and later had become the martyr of Khartoum. Treadup had been in the building often during his Tientsin duty days. He had written to brother Paul in a letter in 1906: “It is a kind of castle out of Sir Walter Scott—a romantic materialization of the British imperial dream—Gothic windows, crenelated battlements, crocketed finials.” With a Japanese officer in a newly pressed uniform pacing back and forth under its proud British proscenium, as David wrote after this meeting, “the moment carried masonry and wood and human presence about as far as they could go toward the ridiculous.”
The doubly captive audience was treated to a long lecture on the reasons for the war. “We had heard that gramophone record played often,” Treadup wrote that night,
but what was dampening was the news he gave us—all bad. I had thought I was getting my morale back, but the future looks black. This Jonathan rubbed it in. Singapore had fallen. The “gleat Amelican Genelal Douglas MacAuthle” had been humbled on the Bataan Peninsula south of Manila. The liner ‘Normandie’ had been set fire to in New York harbor and had rolled over on its side. There had been big ships sunk in the Java Sea. Everywhere, to believe this officer, the might of America and Britain availed naught. As he spoke on and on, I found myself suffering a terrible and very strange attack of homesickness. Why strange? Because: The home I yearned for with all my sick heart was Ma Ch’iao. My villages! I had a deep, deep nostalgia for a sense of worth.
HE WENT on feeling worthless until April 15, when a new amazement occurred. A batch of mail arrived from the United States. “In wartime! This is China for you!” Four very old and very soiled and crumpled letters from Emily, showing obvious signs of having been steamed open. They were not cheering. Emily’s alarm at all the news of the war and her fears for David in the long period of his silence—these were oppressive. He had no way of knowing whether the letters he had written had reached her, whether her anxiety had been relieved in the two months since the last of these of hers. Half a world’s distance now seemed cosmic.
One piece of news she gave him: James B. Todd had died. The diary:
How sad I am about the difficult old warrior, after all. I thought him thick-skinned, and I resented his never liking my lecture program. Many grievances. Yet there was a grandeur about him, just the same. His vision never wavered. He was greedy for souls. I mourn him, truly. Yet as I write this I have another thought: What fun Phinneas Cunningham would have poked at old Todd! I can just hear him: “What a whale! What an everlasting whale!”
After that, no more letters came from Emily.
AS MRS. EVENRUDE recovered all her strength, she became worse and worse tempered. “She holds bedpans against me,” Treadup wrote.
Figuratively, I mean, of course. When it comes to bodily functions, I think she is a little touched. She will never forgive me, she says, for—as she puts it—having intruded with my miserable receptacle on her “most secret relationship with Father Time.” Everyone’s true clock, she says, is in his entrails. “You sneaked in there and tried to read my bowel clock!”
She punished Treadup by making him feel he was becoming a nuisance. She had a hundred complaints. He used up enough bed linen for an army; he ate like a hairy mastodon; when he cleared his throat it sounded like two ships colliding; reading at night in the still chilly evenings, he used more coal than the Kailan Mining Administration could mine.
One day she ordered him to remove his “boxes of trash” from the room in the servants’ quarters. She needed the space, she said, for “contingencies.”
Phinneas Cunningham, to whom nothing was ever a ruffle, said he would find storage for the boxes at the hospital.
It took Treadup six days to get permission from the military police to make the move. Since the goods were going to a hospital, the Jonathans insisted upon opening the boxes and inspecting the contents. A day was arranged. The MPs tore off the metal strapping and threw things everywhere. Treadup repacked. But the carters Treadup had hired for that day did not show up. The MPs said the deal was off.
Treadup then had to go through the entire process of getting permission all over again, even including the inspection. The metal strapping of the boxes had to be stripped off once more, the contents all dumped out, the boxes repacked and restrapped.
Both times Mrs. Evenrude gave tea to the Jonathans but would not let Treadup have any.
At last the boxes were gone. But that was not the end of Mrs. Evenrude’s vexations.
YET SHE COULD be tender. One day some coolies came to unload coal and wood, a supply for the next autumn. When they were finished unloading, she herded the coolies into her broad pantry and gave them a party. There must have been twenty of them. She fed them tea and cinnamon toast and scones with marmalade. They were filthy, poor, half-starved men, covered with coal dust. They wolfed this outlandish foreign-devil food in fearful yet ecstatic silence. Mrs. Evenrude hovered about, with pools of love in her eyes.
Her own household was not eating too well. Prices in the city were soaring. A picul of rice cost $250 in the rocky official currency. A half catty of brown sugar cost $3.20, a catty of pork $4.50. Decent food was hard to find. All the eggs and fresh vegetables in Cathay were going down Japanese necks. All this made what happened one afternoon a week after the coolie party especially moving.
There was rapping at the compound gate. Chou, the Number One Boy, came to Mrs. Evenrude and reported in the pidgin English he insisted on using, “Three piece no-good man, Missee. I tell them go way chop-chop?” Mrs. Evenrude asked what sort of men—Japanese or Chinese? “Chinee man. No good.” Mrs. Evenrude told Chou to admit them to the back courtyard. He went away shaking his head.
Treadup went with Mrs. Evenrude to the platform by the kitchen, overlooking the back courtyard. There they found a delegation from the pack of coal coolies of the previous week. These men had brought from the country a live hen, a string of garlic, some huge radishes, and a basket of eggs. Treadup, turning to Mrs. Evenrude, saw that there were tears streaming down her cheeks. “Treadup, you brute,” she angrily shouted, “get yourself down there and accept those gifts for me.”
IN APPEASEMENT, on a Sunday morning, Treadup asked Mrs. Evenrude if she would like to go to Union Church with him. He thought she didn’t have enough to do.
She refused. “Ten years ago,” she said, “when I was trying to decide what to give up for Lent, I suddenly thought, ‘I’ll give up church.’ I did, and I’ve never been back. It was a great blessing to be free of it. It will take more than you, Treadup, to get me back in that bad habit again.”
Treadup went alone. The diary that night:
Shocked by the stupidity of the sermon. Reverend Planson—has had Union Church pulpit for decades—has lived well, I would say. English vicar type. Elegant Oxford tongue pushed around by a mule’s brain. Rotund, shining pate with natural tonsure round sides and back. Spectacular red nose. His text St. Matthew 26:39: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” It is just before Judas betrays Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane. Reverend Planson got all ensnared in the question of the nature of the wine in the cup. Spent twenty minutes of flawless grammar on it. Came to the suggestion that there was ‘sake’ in the cup. This must have been his idea of a subtle attack on our oppressors. Were the Japs going to kiss us in the garden? Was there, I wondered, a jug of wine in Reverend Planson’s nose? Shocked is not too strong a word. I find myself deeply troubled tonight by the echoes of his cant, his pomposity, his complacency, his distance from all reality. O my poor villages! Prayer sticks in my throat like phlegm.
IN MAY came Mrs. Evenrude’s seventieth birthday. She was furious all day.
ONE AFTERNOON while Treadup was out for his walk in the Recreation Ground, a Japanese in military uniform—“but without officer’s tabs, or any sign of rank, I noticed when I got home”—arrived saying, in rudimentary English, that he had been ordered to make an inspection of the house. Mrs. Evenrude must have been wearing her disguise as a charming woman—which, Treadup noted, she almost always managed to have on when Japanese showed up. She received the man with cordial acquiescence. She guided him, like a chatelaine, from room to room. She opened all the closet doors. She pointed out the views from the windows.
The man demanded quarters for the night. He designated Mrs. Evenrude’s guest room as his choice. She sent for Number One Boy to put the best linen on the bed.
The man ate a big British dinner—made delighted sucking noises over the boiled cabbage. He drank half a bottle of port. (The diary: “I got the creeps thinking of Reverend Planson’s fillings of the cup of woe.”) After dinner, it being rather warm, the man took off his tunic and his boots, undid his belt and fly, and “made himself at home in his underwear.” Mrs. Evenrude kept up a front, chatting with him—or, rather, at him—as if he were draped in admiral’s braid. The man stumbled upstairs quite drunk shortly after ten.
The next morning Treadup decided to stay home from the hospital. The man was still snoring at eleven o’clock. Treadup then went to the military police. A party of four MPs returned to the house with him. They got the man out of bed and took him away.
No explanation was forthcoming. The diary, two weeks later: “I must have been to the MPs ten times to ask about our overnighter. All they will ever say: ‘So sorry, investigation not finish.’ ”
It never was finished. The mystery was never solved. From time to time Mrs. Evenrude would sigh and say, “Wasn’t that a lovely chap who dropped in on us? So much better manners the Japanese have than the Chinese.”
THE DIARY:
I guess I love this cranky old woman, but I don’t know how long I can stand the life with her. If it were not for Phinneas, and his books, and my telling myself that the patients at the hospital suffer more than I, I don’t know what I would do. I am so worried about Em worrying about me. O Em, I am so lonely! I am such a failure!
A LESSON IN COMBAT
TIENTSIN’S heat was coming on like a panting wonk—a mangy, wild, bad-breathed, scavenging Chinese dog of a summer. “Something,” Treadup wrote,
is happening to the Jonathans. Something is happening to Mrs. E. Something is happening to me. God—if, by any chance, you have washed your ears lately and can hear my crude yawp amongst all the hideous noise up here in North China—please help us all. Are you listening?
TREADUP had long since graduated from bedpans. He was now, without bearing the title, the chief administrative officer of the hospital, in charge of personnel, laundry, cockroaches, kitchens, floor-mopping, scouring the black market for food for the patients—all the odds and ends of basic existence under occupation. The work did not make him cheerful.
On Monday, June 15, 1942, at seven thirty in the morning, this huge factotum and his tiny friend the chief medical officer arrived at the hospital together on foot. The hospital gateman, greatly exercised, told them that the third floor was swarming with “yellow jackets.” The two men ran up.
In the O.R. the Jonathans were systematically pulling out the surgical instruments and wrapping them in newspaper bundles and stowing them away in wooden boxes which they had brought with them. They absolutely cleaned out the instruments, even Ob and Gyn. Phinneas began to howl. The senior J claimed in atrocious English that he was an M.D., and he produced a piece of paper—orders from a very high altitude, somewhere way up around the Emperor’s forehead. I have never seen my dear Phinneas so crushed; in that instant the cricket lost his song.
The yellow jackets started in on boxed apparatus, cystoscopes and such, and packed the boxes away, even empty ones. They rifled small drawers, taking used gloves, rubber tubing, scrub brushes. They left the dressings untouched, and for some reason they did not pack the supply of surgical needles. Dr. Cunningham protested every item in little broken yelps. The Jonathans worked stolidly, ignoring him. Everything from the operating room walked out—tables, furniture, bottles. They overlooked one small instrument table, which they had heaped with other loot, and a few odds and ends were left in the autoclave, still hot from the morning sterilization.
All the Japanese trooped out with their loads. They seemed to be leaving. Treadup steered poor Dr. Cunningham to his office on the second floor.
Soon came the self-styled M.D. with a demand to be led to the drug stockroom. The Japanese cleaned out everything there except six pounds of ether, a drum of leper oil, and ten gallons of alcohol. The X-ray room was locked. “Give key,” said the M.D. In the X-ray room the M.D. asked Cunningham so many foolish questions that the Englishman finally turned to Treadup and said, “This man is not a doctor. I cannot stomach any more of this.” He left.
The non-doctor ordered Treadup to have the X-ray machine disassembled; he would come back for it with a truck later in the day.
Where were the hypodermics? Treadup led him to the closet.
They packed all the hypes, needles, thermometers; a case of laundry soap; I. V. tubes; our three precious copper sterilizers. All this time the false M. D. was trying his English out on me. He said: “I think you are very sorry.” I said, “I am much more than sorry.” But when I asked him his name, he suddenly forgot his English and couldn’t understand my question.
Next, the wards. The non-doctor ordered his men to clear off the dressing carts and medicine trays.
I called a halt to that. I said, “We have twenty-one patients here who have to be cared for until we can arrange for them to go home. We need this stuff.” He said, “How long patient stay?” I said, “If they stay only twenty-four hours, they will get the best care we can give them.” I began un-Christianly to shove the little bugger. He said, “Understand! Understand!” and ordered the things put back.
A Chinese doctor named Han came into the ward. Non-doctor demanded his stethoscope. Dr. Han took it off from around his neck and handed it over.
Treadup said (“my voice was climbing the registers”), “That does not belong to the hospital. That belongs to Dr. Han.”
“How many hospital have?”
“There are five doctors in the hospital. Each owns one.”
“You keep two. I take three.” The doctor reached Han’s stethoscope back, baring his teeth in a samurai grin. “Divide. Spirit of Meiji,” he said.
“You go back to Tokyo and get an order personally signed by Mr. Meiji. Then we give you three stethoscopes.”
Treadup moved a few steps toward the doctor.
“Understand! Understand!”
PHINNEAS CUNNINGHAM disassembled the X-ray machine himself with tender loving care. “You know, Treads,” he said at one point, “I brought this tube up from Shanghai sixteen years ago with it in my lap all the way.” Dr. Cunningham laid out the parts in meticulous order on the X-ray room floor, so he could explain how the machine should be reassembled. He had to tear out part of a wall to free the developing tank.
It was nine at night and nearly dark when the Japanese sent their truck. This time the M.D. did not even come; he sent a noncom and ten Chinese coolies. There was no one to whom to explain the complicated reassembly.
The Chinese coolies—“out of a well of wisdom which neither Phinneas nor I could plumb”—destroyed the X-ray machine. They slid and thumped the heavy parts down the hospital’s concrete stairs, severely chipping the edges of the steps and crumpling the metal of the apparatus. Whatever was sensitive in the machine they treated roughest. They dropped some parts from waist level onto the pavement beside the truck. With a coolie chant they swung the box containing the precious tube three times and hurled it up onto the truck.
That’s that. Sixteen years of merciful work have come from that machine; it has paid for itself in compassion. If a machine could have a heart, it would have had one. It will take no more pictures. Ever. No one will be able to put those damaged parts together. At first Phinneas was saddened by the destruction of such a beautiful device, but later he laughed and said, “Those poor coolie geezers gave us a lesson in combat, what? Instinct!”
IT WAS OBVIOUS that the Japanese planned to appropriate the hospital building. Without telling Mrs. Evenrude, who had grown extremely touchy, Treadup hired a cartman and moved his boxes back into the room in Mrs. Evenrude’s servant quarters. They made the move under cover of darkness, and Treadup paid the cartman and his helper extra to be very quiet as they worked. He also gave Mrs. Evenrude’s Number One Boy, Chou, a big tip, and Chou happily assured Treadup: “No talkee, no talkee.” Treadup’s gloomy comment:
Is this my old badness? It is the first dishonest thing I can remember doing in all my years in China. I suppose there is no real harm. She never goes down into the servants’ courtyard; she will never know. But of course I know. What else could I have done? Phinneas said I must do it.
TREADUP was showing signs of self-doubt. He started a new commonplace book, in which he entered passages from books Cunningham was lending him, with sketchy but telling comments. An early entry:
Herman Melville—keen sense of good and evil—yet merciless toward missionaries—does he speak of men like angry Dr. Elting, grim old soul harvester? Or poor Cowley, the murderer? Or me, cheater of a helpless old woman? ‘Typee,’ ch. xxvi: “May not the unworthiness or incapacity of those who assume apostolic functions upon the remote islands of the sea more easily escape detection by the world at large than if it were displayed in the heart of a city?”
JAPANESE SOLDIERS had begun to loot foreign homes. Word got around that Arthur Elmslee, long the Tientsin branch manager of the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, had bribed the Japanese to allow foreigners in the city to store their most lootable valuables in safe deposit boxes in the bank building, even though the premises had been taken over by the Japanese. Dr. Cunningham told Mrs. Evenrude about the subterfuge. She flew into a rage at Treadup for having withheld this information from her. “But I just learned it from Phinneas myself, this very day, exactly when you did,” he protested. This defense did him no good. She was convinced he had known for some time. He went with her to the bank in her carriage. She deposited some necklaces, most of her flat silver, and some cheap bric-a-brac she called “my heirlooms.” She remained implacably furious at David.
Simon Evenrude must have had a black tongue. She learned some curse words from him that I have never heard before. It is hard to listen to filth in a woman’s mouth—harder to think I may be the filth she says I am. I thought I was warding it all off, when she said, “I know that you brought your miserable trash back to my storage room, you sly b—st—d.” Chou must have spent my tip and told her. She has caught me. I am still blushing, two hours later. The filth is on my hands. I have a pain in my old place in my left upper arm.
The next night Treadup wrote:
Mrs. E has broken down with headaches and sleepnessness. She took to her bed when we got back from the bank yesterday. Hide nor hair of her since. My arm pesky.
THE JAPANESE gave notice that they wanted the hospital building on August 1. On July 20, eight Chinese Christian pastors were admitted, who had been tortured by Japanese military police. The men had suffered frightful burns, inflicted by lit cigarettes, some on the soles of their feet, some on their private parts. One had lost all his fingernails. The Japanese were convinced that these men had contact with Chinese Communists. In David’s commonplace book, entered that night:
I could not reach them with my sympathy. I doubt if anyone could. ‘Ecclesiastes’ 4:1: So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.
IN MID-AUGUST the Japanese took over the hospital and quartered a battalion of men there.
Treadup’s diary:
Phinny is amazing. He bounced up from the floor after the Jonathans stole everything, and now he says, “Cheer up, my bucko! They’re desperate.” News has trickled through, ever since the spring, that the Js have not been having things all their way—big battle off New Guinea, battle in the Coral Sea, American foothold in the Solomon Islands ect. ect. But closer to home: There are many flat-bottomed motorized boats newly gathered in the river along the Bund. And now these troops stationed on us. Phinny says this means there must be a guerrilla suppression afoot upriver. The Nips are being harassed, he says. I kneel and pray for my friends around Paoting. O dear villagers, have strength!
But Dr. Cunningham was wild about the Japanese presence in the hospital building, and he could not face going into it. He sent Treadup each day to check on what was happening.
The place was a shambles. Furniture had been broken up and burned. The old Pierce Arrow the hospital had used for an ambulance had been dragged out in the street and stripped. Locks on doorjambs had been broken. Windows had been smashed. Dr. Han, who lived on the fourth floor, had been threatened; a bayonet had been plunged through a panel of his bedroom door.
Worst of all—at first, Treadup could not bear even to tell Dr. Cunningham about this—the hospital library, the doctor’s pride and joy, had been taken over as a bunkroom, and the books had been dumped out in refuse piles with wet garbage; scavenging Chinese children were carrying them off to sell for paper. Among them were priceless works on Chinese medicine, some of them ancient. Treadup went straight to the Tientsin Commandant’s headquarters to complain; and he went to the Chinese puppet police to ask them to keep an eye out for books with the hospital chop on their end papers and to return any they found.
General Yamamura, Deputy Commandant for the Tientsin District, came in person to the hospital, rebuked the commander of the bivouacked battalion for the desecration of the library, and asked Treadup for a written report and an accounting of everything taken from the hospital from the time of the original raid. At the end he half-bowed stiffly and said, “Very sorry.”
The diary: “Could it be that books still have some meaning in this violent world?”
David and Phinneas together spent three evenings totting up the hospital’s losses, and David then took to the Deputy Commandant’s office a claim for U.S.$68,633.
There was never any acknowledgment.
Aug. 23. Hot, clear day. Was working in Lib clearing up and sorting books piled in corners. Some have actually been returned by the blackie police. While I was shelving books, J officer in negligee accosted me, asking in quasi-English what right I had there & saying it was useless to clear up & put books on shelves as they would only be thrown out again. Obviously offended that we had put the Deputy Commandant on his neck. I was very polite, I bowed when he bowed, I said I was sorry when he said he was sorry. I then added that I would knock the teeth out of any person I found taking the books off the shelves. I thought Phinny would suffer a hernia laughing when I told him this. He said, “Treads, you are alive after all.” I notice books have not been moved since. One’s being bulky has its advantages. Many books however still missing.
TIME OF OUTRAGE
THE HOUSE on Davenport Road was dark day and night. On its south and west sides, Mrs. Evenrude had had the usual straw matting put up on bamboo scaffolding to ward off the summer sun’s rays. She kept the shutters closed on the other sides. Even in what little gloaming light was left in the house she squinted, as if dazzled. It was hard to tell in the unchanging dimness what time of day or night it was. It always seemed, in any case, to be the right time for outrage.
TREADUP was wakened by the sounds of footsteps on the ground floor of the house. He switched on a light and looked at his bedside clock: it was one thirty in the morning. Yes, there were sounds of hard shoes on wood floors. He went downstairs and found two Japanese soldiers wandering around. They had sake on their breath. They spoke no English. Treadup went to the front door and pointed their way out. They pointed instead at the hall stairs. They were too drunk to be afraid of the big foreigner. They started up the steps.
In her bedroom, meanwhile, Mrs. Evenrude had wakened. She heard the hobnail shoes on the stairs. She took a dinner bell she kept by her bed out onto the sleeping porch and began to ring it hard.
The men ran.
In the morning Number One Boy Chou told Mrs. Evenrude that her one remaining carriage horse had been stolen. The diary: “She has taken to her bed again. She keeps a damp cloth over her eyes. I seem to have wrenched my arm—painful.”
A JAPANESE OFFICER and a squad of men came to the house with a document authorizing an inspection. The paper had impressive red and blue official chops all over it. It seemed a bona fide order. The men went into every room of the house. When they entered her bedroom, Mrs. Evenrude took her damp cloth off her eyes and looked at them, then put it back again without saying anything.
The b—st—ds (Mrs. E’s word, I never thought I would use it) made off with my little gyroscope. The one I have had ever since Salt Branch. Mama sent it to me, all the way to China. It made Teacher Chuan’s eyes sparkle and that was what gave me the courage to go on with my lecture idea.
DR. CUNNINGHAM said he thought Treadup was quite possibly suffering a recurrence of the osteomyelitis of his youth. There would of course be no way now to make tests at the hospital. He suggested a period of bed rest. If it got worse, Treadup might have to go to Peking to have it checked. Dr. Cunningham lugged some heavy books to Mrs. Evenrude’s house: Kant, Locke, Spinoza. Later, Nietzsche.
How strange. It was my teacher Maud Chase who brought me books when my arm was bad in my seventeenth year. Now Phinny. “You are preparing yourself,” Phinny says, “to enter the twentieth century.” I thought I’d entered it forty-two years ago!
In early September Dr. Cunningham brought Marx, Weber, Freud. In the evenings the two friends talked about what Treadup had read.
His eyes are still mischievous, wit cascades off that little pink tongue. But I know something Phinny will not admit even to himself. He is every bit as blue as I am.
IT WAS three o’clock in the afternoon of an Indian summer day in late September. Fan in hand, Mrs. Evenrude was in a cool valley between headaches. She walked like a sentry from room to room. Treadup was reading The Interpretation of Dreams in the parlor: Dr. Cunningham had said he could sit up for two hours each afternoon. David had just come to Freud’s assertion that some dream content is always supplied by images registered on the mind by the previous day’s events. He lowered the book to think about this. Since he had started this book, he had been trying to retain his dreams, often lighting a light as he wakened from them, and making immediate notes. He began testing a dream from the night before.
Mrs. Evenrude was strutting about dressed up as a Chinese dowager lady. She had a pig’s snout. She shrieked.
At the edge of his rumination Treadup heard the front door screen slam. He felt a thrill like an electric shock. The shriek had been real—not in the remembered dream. He ran to the front door.
A completely naked Japanese man was squatting on the grass near the pine trees and defecating. Mrs. Evenrude was running toward him crying out, “Shame! Shame!” The man half rose. He staggered—drunk. She poked him in the ribs with her long fingers. She began cursing him. The man smirked and dodged in a provocative dance. Mrs. Evenrude slashed with her fingernails, the man’s skin was in danger. (Treadup’s diary, later: “Could it be that the Jonathan was showing signs of sentiment for a seventy-year-old dowager lady?”) Mrs. Evenrude began screaming for Chou! Liu! Treadup! When all three appeared the man ducked into the pine trees, snatched up his clothes, and ran for the compound gate, which hung open.
Mrs. Evenrude held tight to her tantrum all day long. She ordered Chou to have Liu make a barbed-wire fence around the grass plot in front of the house. Treadup tried to tell her this was a foolish project; he was rewarded with a blistering stream of abuse. Bars on the gate: open for no one. Get a mason to put broken glass in mortar on top of the wall all the way around. Have Liu keep a big cudgel handy. Go and buy two big wonks. Damn you, Treadup, don’t you have any firearms?
She was still swearing and shouting orders from her bed at two o’clock in the morning.
TREADUP was down for breakfast the next morning in his dressing gown. Mrs. Evenrude, in her red winter peignoir, was still rattling and rumbling. Her hair was uncombed.
There came sounds of a fuss at the gate. Mrs. Evenrude rose and went herself, on very fast little steps, to see what it was. Treadup followed, asking her to calm herself.
At the gate Chou said there was a “number two topside boy”—meaning a middle-rank Japanese officer (“boy presumably because he was not white”)—outside, wanting to come in. Mrs. Evenrude ordered Chou to open the gate six inches. There stood an officer with a bar and two stars on his collar. He said in English that he had an order to inspect. He reached a piece of paper forward. Mrs. Evenrude snatched it and tore it in four pieces and threw them in the officer’s face. She screamed vile slanders on his ancestry and on “your scum of an emperor.” The officer blanched. He forcibly pushed the gate wider, stepped forward, and slapped Mrs. Evenrude hard on the cheek.
Treadup stepped into the gate, his fists up. The officer drew a revolver. The diary:
A picture flashed in my mind of Dr. Azariah Dudley Morton, on the morning before my conversion. The famous pistol episode. I had a moment’s fantasy, to the music of Mrs. Evenrude’s gasping for breath, of baring my heart and advancing on the officer, offering Christ’s love and mine—especially sweet, given to an enemy. But it did not take long for prudence to get the better of me. I knew that if I moved another inch he would shoot. What would Jesus Christ have thought of that?
Treadup then raised flat hands in a pacifying gesture. He explained to the officer what had happened the previous afternoon. He said the lady was upset. He also said that to slap a lady was an inexcusable offense, particularly for a military man. He would have to report the incident to the officer’s superior. The man recovered himself. He put the gun away. He almost bowed. He quickly walked off.
MRS. EVENRUDE vanished. Two hours later Treadup, who was worried about her, went hunting for her. He found her in her dressing room, packing a trunk. “I have to get out of here,” she said.
“Where will you go?”
She went on folding dresses into the drawers of the trunk.
“You offended his precious emperor,” Treadup said.
She began to weep.
THAT EVENING Treadup wrote a letter to the Deputy Commandant of the Tientsin District, with whom he felt he had made something like a humane contact over the books missing from the hospital library. He gave an account of the slapping, and entered a formal complaint. He marked on the letter that he was sending a copy to the United States Secretary of State, in Washington, D.C., U.S.A.—though he gave no clue as to how the letter would reach America. He sent Chou with the letter the first thing in the morning.
Chou had not been back twenty minutes when the Deputy Commandant himself and four people from his staff appeared at Mrs. Evenrude’s gate, to investigate. The Japanese refused to enter the compound; they stood in the street. They asked Treadup and Mrs. Evenrude many questions. What division was the man from? Did he have an O or an X under his insignia of rank? Mrs. Evenrude thought an O, but she could not be sure. Treadup had not noticed.
The next morning an officer with two interpreters came to write down all the details of the slapping incident. They, too, stood at the gate, refusing to enter. They asked many questions about the cause of the slapping. Neither Mrs. Evenrude nor Treadup mentioned anything about the emperor.
“I think they are excited,” David wrote, “because there is a question here of a possible breach of manners. That would matter almost more than life or death.”
The day after that, nothing having been heard from the Deputy Commandant, Treadup wrote a letter about the slapping, at Mrs. Evenrude’s request, to the military police. He sent it by Chou. No answer came.
As days of silence came marching along, Mrs. Evenrude became more and more furious. She kept rearranging things in her trunk. Finally she sent Treadup in person to the Deputy Commandant’s headquarters. Having spent so much time in bed, Treadup felt weak. The Deputy Commandant, not surprisingly, could not be seen just then. Treadup left word that an apology was expected.
None came.
The diary:
Mrs. E has broken down again. She lies there with the damp cloth over her eyes. I hear her mumbling. Phinny has given her a dose of salts and a good talking to, but nothing stirs her.
THE DAYS groaned and became weeks, the weeks were insomniac and became months, autumn got the shakes and became winter. Nothing really changed. There was nothing to do but read and talk. Once in a while one could write a letter demanding an apology or claiming a reimbursement, but the letter would never be answered. Mrs. Evenrude did not live in her house; she haunted it. Treadup’s arm neither improved nor worsened. Phinny brought books. The Jonathans were tense, polite, and outrageous. This could go on forever. In January Treadup wrote:
This has been the worst winter of my life. Even if I thought the mail would get through I wouldn’t dare write to Emily, because I would only frighten her more than ever. I miss her as though I had had the better part of me amputated—I have eerie shadow sensations in the stump where she was cut away from me, as if that part of me, which she was, were still there. No more letters have come from her.
THE MELANCHOLY WEIGHT of Joseph Conrad exactly suited Treadup’s nerve tone. He came as close as he could, in those chilled days, to delight, when he came across the Eldorado Exploring Expedition in Heart of Darkness, and recognized, “as if they stood right in the jungle of this room with me,” some of the businessmen of Tientsin—Olander of Standard Oil, Skinner of B.A.T., Elmslee of Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank: men who swaggered through life cutting down “natives,” men who were, as Conrad caught them, “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”
“And now I have it in my mind,” Treadup wrote,
that precisely what is lacking in my life is any touch with the “natives.” Three Chinese servants in this house do not a country make. My mission was to the Chinese. I am in jail with a crazy old broken American woman. Oh how I miss the laughter, the fortitude, the yearning for a better life, even the quarrels and the grubbing and the pettiness and the cosmic sense of futility, of my dear villagers! Try as I will to give the Jonathans the benefit of the doubt—victors in war have always been beasts—I cannot forgive them for having taken me away from China itself. From even a clear memory of Teacher Chuan, of my lost A Ch’u, of that crusty self-taught Inventor Wang. Mr. Lin! Johnny Wu! That fine young one-armed Mi in Ma Ch’iao. David Liu, for that matter, even when he had become so difficult. With all their faults there is a sweetness in the Chinese nature for which I have a craving, and a need, as if I had a debilitating nutritive deficiency.
TREADUP and Dr. Cunningham had a pointless quarrel with the Japanese about coal. The hospital’s bins had been filled with enough coal to heat the building through the winter, but now Japanese officers, quartered elsewhere, were helping themselves to basketfuls from the hospital supply and carting them off to warm themselves. Phinneas Cunningham clung to the stubborn belief, in the face of all reports, that Britain and America would defeat Japan in a few months, that the hospital would soon be returned to its rightful proprietors, and that “realistically,” therefore, the present coal was his. The Jonathans were purloining his coal. The two men made the rounds of all authorities. “It is like playing blindman’s buff,” David wrote. “You are spun around, blindfolded, then you grope to try to catch hold of someone.” The whole thing ended when a certain Captain Tsuzumi, Department of Supplies, Tientsin District, pointed out that the coal in the hospital bins was running low, and that since it was Mr. Cuddingman’s coal, it would be up to Mr. Cuddingman to buy more coal to get through the rest of the winter.
THE RUMOR pigeons began to fly again. Something was going to happen. Enemy foreigners were all going to be put in a prison. Or perhaps they were going to be killed.
BY FEBRUARY everyone seemed to be staying in bed most of the time. Even Phinneas Cunningham. Treadup was afraid Mrs. Evenrude was going mad. She had long conversations with people who were not in her dark rooms. The Japanese raided houses at their pleasure. They came knocking on Mrs. Evenrude’s gate, asking for “English food” and girls. They stole the shrubs from her garden, saying “Thank you, thank you, very sorry,” and beaming with smiles. Weak Treadup wore out his legs going back and forth, with his arm in a sling, to the military police with protests, claims, and bills of particulars. He killed a rat in his bathroom.
ON MARCH 8, 1943, at 3:15 in the afternoon, a polite young man with a German accent from the Swiss consulate called on Mrs. Evenrude. He told her and David Treadup that he was mediating for the Japanese Consul General, and he had an order for all “Japanese enemy aliens” in Tientsin. They were to prepare themselves for removal on March 13 and 14 to a Civilian Assembly Center (“—euphemism, we fear,” the young Swiss delicately said, “for concentration camp, you must be prepared for an indefinite stay”) at Yin Hsien, in southern Hopei Province. Heavy baggage, which might consist, for each person, of a bed, bedding, and not more than two small trunks or foot lockers, should be ready for collection at the Recreation Ground, on Recreation Road, on Thursday, the eleventh. Eating utensils, metal mess kit if possible, must be taken. All American and British subjects should be prepared to depart, with only such hand luggage as they themselves could carry, on Saturday, March 13.
Mrs. Evenrude swam up out of her murk. “I am all packed,” she firmly said.