China to Me (49 page)

Hilda and I didn't discuss the general situation any more; she was a plain scared woman, wandering about the halls of the hospital in her A.N.S. uniform. I was sorry for her, and glad that I was of a more bovine disposition. We did talk, but it was of peaceful things: gossip, and our pasts, and poetry. I still had my Untermeyer anthology. Reading poetry — any poetry as long as it had rhythm and was fairly long — had a hypnotic effect on me. I felt warm and safe when I had read for a while, and I began to understand people who read the Bible under stress. I thought it might help Hilda, but it seems to have been a private peculiarity that I couldn't share. Nina obviously thought me dotty, and regarded the book like a balky horse. Now that we had moved, we lost Nina. She went downtown and lived with her husband at the office. I was alone with Hilda and Constance and the servants and children.

Ah King had been brought over across the street, too, to do the cooking for the hospital after their own cooks ran away. He seemed to be enjoying himself, though they bullied him and he was overworked. He wore a tall chef's cap and looked most impressive, and he tried without success to smuggle us a little extra in the way of rations. It was all scrappy and pretty grim, but I didn't stay there long.

It was the morning of the twentieth that Hilda came and told me about Charles. He had been wounded while leading an attack on the Repulse Bay Road, in the foray known later as the Battle of Shouson Hill. Tony dressed his wound, and they sent him on to the Queen Mary. He had been shot between the chest and the left shoulder. A rifle bullet traveled close to the lung and came out near the middle of his back, just off center. He had lain in the paddy field all night, losing blood, and was delirious when they brought him in. He kept saying to Tony, “I had a hundred and twelve dollars; be careful of it. Telephone Mickey, somebody. I had some money in my wallet. Notify Mickey.” After a night in the resuscitation ward, with frequent transfusions and plenty of salt water put into his veins, they decided he would live. At the time I didn't know any details. Hilda just told me, gently and with admirable and uncharacteristic restraint, that Charles was wounded in the chest but was now safe.

I am inclined to gloss over it and say I felt nothing but a very strong impulse to get to Charles, but that wouldn't be true. I remember feeling like a volcano, and then I was mixed up in a ridiculous quarrel, after all those days of self-control, with Hilda. She didn't think I should go to the Queen Mary. She was willing to fight like a lioness to keep me with her. She thought she was acting in my best interests and from principle, but Hilda isn't very good at self-analysis; it was obvious that she just couldn't bear being left alone.

“Your Duty Is to Your Child,” she said.

“Now where can I get a lift?” I said to myself.

“Are You Taking Carola?” she asked dangerously.

“Huh? No — don't be silly. It's impossible. I'll have to hitchhike. I won't take anything.”

“I,” said Hilda, “cannot be responsible for Carola. Your Duty Is to — ”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Vera will do it.” I rushed upstairs and phoned her. The Armstrongs had funked going back to May Road, after all, and were hiding out in the Edmonstons' cellar, on the Peak. Edmonston, I now learned, was vice-president of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. You must remember his name; I didn't, just then. I hadn't ever met him. I wasn't aware of his existence.

Vera was warmly sympathetic and promised to come over that morning and take Carola with Ah Cheung back to their cellar. After Hilda's fireworks it was a comforting note to hear her light voice. She sent her love to Charles, and the world lost a good deal of its nightmare quality for me. After all, people were going on, eating and sleeping and getting well from wounds. After all, I had friends. There were other places besides hospitals.

Down in the basement I found a knot of men making plans for the day. There was a “dead wagon” starting out soon for Pokfulam, with some bodies which couldn't be buried up there in the rocky ground. (Phillips, a man from the bank, had to bury his own wife that week, and his difficulties were tremendous. The soil was too shallow up there for graves. It was an outstanding problem for us.) The men were willing for me to go along, though they kept making deprecatory noises at the idea of a lady taking such means of transportation. But they couldn't promise to reach the Queen Mary that day. It sounded hopeless. I decided to walk. It could be done; there are short cuts down the back of the mountain, but I wasn't sure I knew the way, and they didn't like the idea of my going alone. At last a young man turned up and said, “I'm going downtown. I'm aiming for a post near Happy Valley, which is just the opposite direction from yours, but we can go together till we reach the bank.” (The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building was the focal point of the main streets, and in that building were the medical headquarters and other important institutions.) “You will no doubt get a lift there,” he said.

Without taking time to tell Ah King, I shouted to Ah Cheung that she and Carola would be called for later by Mrs. Armstrong, and we started out.

I got to the Queen Mary by this and that method at three in the afternoon. Mostly I owe it to Gordon King. After having had to run for our lives two or three times on the way down, when planes flew over and bombed us, my first helper said good-by and left me near the bank. Another raid had just been announced, and I raced for the nearest door into the building. I had a tin helmet, but I still didn't feel immune. This door was doing duty as the main entrance, from Queen's Road: the real main entrance faced the harbor and Kowloon and the Japanese guns, and was now miles deep in sandbags. As I reached the revolving door and the safety of steel-enforced concrete, I was stopped by a fierce-looking gent in another tin helmet.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Where do you want to go?”

Somewhat surprised, I stared at him. I couldn't have known that this was Edmonston, vice-president of that august bank. All I saw was a funny man with a mustache, a bit of a pot, and a scared frown.

“Medical headquarters,” I said mildly, considering that I was standing out of doors in a raid, and he was keeping me out there. “I want to get in to see Selwyn-Clarke.”

I don't know what would have happened then. He still stood there, hesitating, and then Gordon King came swinging along, coming out. I forgot the little mustache and ran toward him. “Gordon! Are you going out to the Queen Mary? Charles is there; he's been wounded.”

We walked off together, and Edmonston stared after us, shaking after his encounter with a Scarlet Woman. I didn't know that he was even then preventing Vera from taking Carola into his house. If I had, things would have been different during that interview at the door of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

Gordon wasn't going to the Queen Mary, but he was aiming in that direction. I went with him to the market and we bought masses of food, supplies for the university, where he was running an emergency hospital. Two medical students, a Chinese and an Indian, helped us. I saw a few people I knew in the street, and I talked with a couple of tommies who wished me and my husband good luck. They didn't quite know what was happening on the island. They had been fighting in Happy Valley and were now in the middle of town, but they didn't know why.

I lunched at the university with a Chinese doctor and his wife, and got another lift afterward in an ambulance. It was all too long for me; I was dying with impatience. As soon as I reached the university it all seemed quieter. On that side of the island we didn't have any shells except a stray one that came hurtling now and then across the Peak. Planes were bombing Mount Davis near by, but they left us pretty well alone, and near the Queen Mary things were even quieter. I looked down Sassoon Road toward Mme. Kung's house and remembered that she and Mme. Sun had escaped on Tuesday night, in the second to the last plane that managed to come in and get out to Kweilin. Thirteen trips were made, I think, ferrying back and forth, and after that it had to stop because the Japs moved in on Kai Tak airdrome.

The elevators weren't running at the Queen Mary, and I ran up and down the big marble steps, trying to find Charles. First they sent me to one ward, and then another. It was nice there, though, and sane and quiet. The sisters hadn't gone to pieces as yet. They and the doctors were still being held up by that serene conviction that they, above all others, were immune. The quiet of the neighborhood added to this illusion. The Japanese planes really behaved well in regard to the Queen Mary and didn't bomb anywhere near it. I felt that the rest of the island must have been a mistake, and that I had come back to reality.

At last I found Charles, though at first I didn't recognize him, he looked so white. He was packed up on an army cot, in a small but pleasant room. On the other cot was a young ruddy blond fellow with one leg amputated, but not recently. His remaining leg was bandaged, and he rolled fretfully and cursed at intervals, paying no attention to us.

I had been in fluttering fragments all day, but now that I had got to Charles I was all right. “Hi there,” I said.

“Mickey.” He stopped and wet his lips. “I didn't mean for you to come. I just wanted them to notify you.”

“Well,” I said, “I wanted to come.” I took off my helmet and sat down. “What the hell have you been doing to yourself anyway? I thought staff officers never fought?”

“The men were retreating as I came by. They didn't have an officer. You can't expect them not to retreat if there's nobody to lead them. So I led them, and some bugger got me just as I was climbing out of a nullah. I never even saw him.”

“Idiot.”

“I thought I was dying,” said Charles with a spark of interest. “I lay there wishing I would hurry up and die, because it was cold out there. I knew my blood was running away, and there was damn all to do. Then the stretcher-bearers must have found me. How did you get here, and what are you going to do now?”

“I hitchhiked. I can find somewhere to sleep.”

“You can't sleep here,” he said irritably. “This is a hospital, not a hotel. Where's Carola?”

“With Vera Armstrong. I'll go down now and see where I can stay. Maybe with Margaret Watson.”

“It was sweet of you to come,” he admitted grudgingly. “But that isn't what I meant. … Can you give this bed a push up?”

“It's a cot, old boy,” said the crippled officer.

“Oh. I'm supposed to have one of those gadgets on the bed. Probably later on.”

“When I come back,” I said, “I'll wash you and comb your hair.”

Margaret Watson, the almoner, was a close friend of Hilda's and, like Hilda, had red hair and a sympathy with the leftist element in politics. I had always found her intelligent and sharply pleasant, but today she wasn't.

“My flat,” she said, referring to her living quarters next door to the hospital, “is already jammed. There's nowhere for you to stay. You shouldn't have come. Go back up the Peak.”

“Have you talked to Hilda?” I demanded. Margaret walked off, her starched skirt swishing. I was pretty mad. It is surprising how angry one can get in times like these. Both Margaret and I must have been shaking with rage, and after all, why? She probably thought I had deserted Hilda. Or perhaps her anger was an exhaust. I heard her later on, simply laying out anyone with whom she had dealings, especially one Indian gentleman with a dark red fez. When, after the surrender, he joined the Japanese with a glad cry I remembered Margaret's savage rudeness to him and I thought I understood. Yet when the sound and the fury had died, she was charming again and couldn't remember having been bitchy. When we talked it over she couldn't recall a word of it. Very odd.

Well, there I stood in the almoner's office, wondering if I couldn't break into the Canaval house and stay there. It wasn't far away as distances go in Hong Kong. My luck held, though. Susie Potts had overheard our conversation, and she suddenly stood there, unfamiliar in her A.N.S. uniform, but looking like heaven all the same.

“We live near here,” she said. “You come on home with me, Mickey.”

Chapter 40

Susie came of an international family. Her mother, Mrs. Weill, was born in Stambul. I don't quite know how that works out with the fact that she met the French Mr. Weill in Shanghai or Harbin or Hong Kong, but it does, and they married and had four children and settled down in Hong Kong with a jewelry shop, after wandering about the Far East long enough for Mother Weill to have learned to speak Japanese, Cantonese, and goodness knows what else on top of her French and German and other non-exotic tongues. Daddy Weill, by the time the Asiatic war overtook his family, was dead and in his grave, but Mamma still ran the whole lot of them. She owned a plot of ground out near the Queen Mary, in the lovely countryside, and on this ground she built two large houses, one just above the other on a steep slope. Susie, the baby, married Alec Potts, a Yorkshireman. Susie and Alec were old friends of mine from those long-ago days when I followed the horses. Alec was very horsy and had been “starter” for the races for as long as I could remember. At this time he was fighting in the Volunteers.

The rest of the Weills were new to me.

I was tired and didn't ask questions. At about five-thirty, when it began to grow dark, Susie took me downstairs to the entrance of the hospital and said, “We meet Mother here every night. You remember Mother?”

She was a short, thickset lady with Susie's snapping black eyes, and she accepted the introduction and the addition to her household with a placid lack of surprise that was very comforting.

A remarkably pretty slender blonde A.N.S. then appeared. “This is my sister-in-law, Vera,” said Susie, “and you will live in her house. Vera lives in the other house, all alone.”

“I'll be glad to have you,” said the blonde, “and my name is Veronica.”