The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (22 page)

The Admiral

A
fter I finished painting the hatch-combing, I walked back aft to the well deck where Tony and Dick were standing by the rail looking down into the Whangpoo. The sampan was there again, and the younger woman was sculling it in closer to the ship’s side. When she stopped, the old woman fastened a net on the end of a long stick and held it up to the rail, and Tony put some bread and meat into it.

Every day they came alongside at about the same time, and we were always glad to see them, for we were lonely men. The young woman was standing in the stern as always, and when she smiled, there was something pleasant and agreeable about it that made us feel better. The old woman gave the kids some of the bread and meat, and we stood watching them.

Probably they didn’t get meat very often, and bread must have been strange to them, but they ate it very seriously. They were our family, and they seemed to have adopted us just as we adopted them when they first came alongside at Wayside Pier. They had come to ask for “bamboo,” which seemed to mean any kind of lumber or wood, and for “chowchow,” which was food, of course. The greatest prize was “soapo,” but although most of the Chinese who live like that sell the soap or trade it, our family evidently used it—or some of it.

That was one reason we liked them, one reason they had become our family, because they were clean. They wore the faded blue that all the Chinese of that period seemed to wear, but theirs was always newly washed. We had thrown sticks of dunnage to them or other scrap lumber and some that wasn’t scrap, but then the mate came by and made us stop.

There were five of them, the two women and three young ones, living in a sampan. Tony had never seen the like, nor had I, but it was old stuff to Dick, who had been out to the Far East before.

He told us lots of the Chinese lived that way, and some never got ashore from birth to death. There is no room for them on China’s crowded soil, so in the seemingly ramshackle boats they grow up, rear families, and die without knowing any other home. There will be a fishnet on the roof of the shelter of matting, and on poles beyond the roof the family wash waves in the wind. Sometimes the younger children have buoys fastened to their backs so they will float if they fall over the side.

Two of the children in our family were girls. I have no idea how old they were. Youngsters, anyway. We never saw them any closer than from our rail to the sampan. They were queer little people, images of their mother and the old woman but more serious. Sometimes we’d watch them play by the hour when not working, and they would never smile or laugh. But it was the Admiral who was our favorite. We just called him that because we didn’t know his name. He was very short and very serious. Probably he was five years old, but he might have been older or younger. He was a round-faced little tyke, and he regarded us very seriously and maybe a little wistfully, for we were big men, and our ship was high above the water.

We used to give them things. I remember when Tony came back from a spree and brought some chocolate with him. When he was painting over the side on a staging, he dropped it to the Admiral, who was very puzzled. Finally he tasted it and seemed satisfied. After that he tasted everything we dropped to him.

Tony had a red silk handkerchief he thought the world of, but one day he gave it to the Admiral. After that, whenever we saw the Admiral, he was wearing it around his head. But he was still very serious and maybe a little prouder.

Sometimes it used to scare me when I thought of them out there on the Whangpoo in the midst of all that shipping. Partly it was because the Chinese had a bad habit: they would wait till a ship was close by and then cut across her bows real sharp. Dick said they believed they could cut off evil spirits that were following them.

There were wooden eyes painted white with black pupils on either side of the bow of each sampan or junk. They were supposed to watch for rocks or evil spirits. Those eyes used to give me the willies, always staring that way, seeming to bulge in some kind of dumb wonder. I’d wake up at night remembering those eyes and wondering where the Admiral was.

But it got Tony more than me. Tony was a hard guy. He was said to have killed a cop in Baltimore and shipped out to get away. I always thought the old man knew, but he never said anything, and neither did the rest of us. It just wasn’t any of our business, and we knew none of the circumstances. Something to do with payoffs, we understood.

Tony took to our family as if they were his own flesh and blood. I never saw a guy get so warmed up over anything. He was a tough wop, and he’d always been a hard case and probably never had anybody he could do for. That’s what a guy misses when he’s rambling around—not somebody to do something for him but somebody to think of, to work for.

One day when we were working over the side on a staging, the sampan came under us, and Tony turned to wave at the Admiral. “Lookit, Duke,” he says to me, “ain’t he the cute little devil? That red silk handkerchief sure sets him off.”

It was funny, you know? Tony’d been a hard drinker, but after our family showed up, he began to leave it alone. After he gave that red silk handkerchief to the Admiral, he just quit drinking entirely, and when the rest of us went ashore, he’d stay aboard, lying in his bunk, making something for the Admiral.

Tony could carve. You’d have to see it to believe how good he was. Of course, in the old days of sail, men aboard ship carved or created all sorts of things, working from wood, ivory, or whatever came to hand. Tony began to carve out a model of our own ship, a tramp freighter from Wilmington. That was the night we left for Hong Kong and just a few hours after the accident.

We had been painting under the stern, hanging there on a plank staging, and it was a shaky business. The stern is always the worst place to paint because the stage is swinging loose underneath, and there isn’t a thing to lay hold of but the ropes at either end.

Worse still, a fellow can’t see where the ropes are made fast to the rail on the poop deck, and those coolies are the worst guys in the world for untying every rope they see knotted. One time at Taku Bar I got dropped into the harbor that way. But this time it was no trouble like that. It was worse.

We were painting almost overhead when we heard somebody scream. Both of us turned so quickly we had to grab the ropes at either end to keep from falling, and when we got straightened around, we saw the Admiral in the water.

Our family had been coming toward our ship when somehow the Admiral had slipped and fallen over the side, and now there he was, buoyed up by the bladder fastened to his shoulders, the red handkerchief still on his head. Probably that had happened a dozen times before, but this time a big Dollar liner was coming upstream, and she was right abeam of us when the Admiral fell. And in a minute more he’d be sucked down into those whirling propeller blades.

Then the plank jerked from under my feet, and I fastened to that rope with both hands, and I felt my heart jump with sudden fear. For a minute or so I had no idea what had happened, and by the time I could pull myself up and get my feet on the staging again, Tony was halfway to the Admiral and swimming like I’d seen nobody swim before.

It was nip and tuck, and you can believe it when I say I didn’t draw a breath until Tony grabbed the Admiral just as the big liner’s stern hove up, the water churning furiously as she was riding high in the water. Tony’s head went down, and both he and the Admiral disappeared in the swirl of water that swept out in a wake behind the big liner.

There was a moment there when they were lost in the swirl of water behind the steamer, and then we saw them, and Tony was swimming toward the sampan towing the Admiral, who had both hands on Tony’s shoulder.

That night when we slipped down the Whangpoo for Hong Kong, Tony started work on his boat. For we were coming back. We had discharged our cargo and were heading south to pick up more, and by the time we returned, there would be cargo in Shanghai for us.

You’d never guess how much that boat meant to us. All the time we were gone, we thought about our family, and each of us picked up some little thing in Hong Kong or Kowloon to take back to them. But it was the carving of the boat that occupied most of our time. Not that we helped because we didn’t. It was Tony’s job, and he guarded it jealously, and none of us could have done it half so well.

We watched him carve the amidships house and shape the ventilators, and we craned our necks and watched when he fastened a piece of wire in place as the forestay. When one of us would go on watch, the mate would ask how the boat was coming. Everybody on the ship from the old man to the black cook from Georgia knew about the ship Tony was carving, and everyone was interested.

Once the chief mate stopped by the fo’c’sle to examine it and offer a suggestion, and the second mate got to telling me about the time his little boy ran his red fire engine into the preacher’s foot. Time went by so fast it seemed no time at all till we were steaming back up the Whangpoo again to anchor at Wayside Pier. We were watching for our family long before they could have seen us.

The next morning the boat was finished, and Chips took it down to the paint locker and gave it a coat of paint and varnish, exactly like our own ship; the colors were the same and everything. There wasn’t much of a hold, but we had stuffed it with candy. Then we watched for the sampan.

Dick was up on the crosstree of the mainmast when he saw it, and he came down so fast it was a crying wonder he didn’t break a leg. When he hit the deck, he sprinted for the rail. In a few minutes we were all standing there, only nobody was saying anything.

It was the sampan. Only it was bottom up now and all stove in. There wasn’t any mistaking it, for we’d have known that particular sampan anywhere even if it hadn’t been for the red silk handkerchief. It was there now, a little flag, fluttering gallantly from the wreckage.

Shanghai, Not Without Gestures

S
he came in from the street and stood watching the auction, a slender girl with great dark eyes and a clear, creamy complexion. It was raining outside on Kiangse Road, and her shoes were wet. From time to time she shifted uncomfortably and glanced about. Once her eyes met mine, and I smiled, but she looked quickly away, watching the auction.

There was always an auction somewhere, it seemed. One day it might be on Range Road or somewhere along the Route Frelupt, tomorrow in Kelmscott Garden. Household effects, usually, for people were always coming or going. The worlds of international business, diplomacy, and the armed services are unstable, and there is much shifting about, from station to station, often without much warning.

I knew none of these people, being an outsider in Shanghai and contented to be so, for a writer, even when a participant, must also be the observer. As yet I was not a writer, only someone wishing to be and endlessly working toward that end.

There were beautiful things to be seen, Soochow curtains, brass-topped tea tables, intricately carved chests of drawers, even sometimes swords or scimitars with jeweled hilts or the handmade guns of long ago. I used to imagine stories about them and wonder what sort of people had owned them before. It wasn’t much of a pastime, but they were dark days, and it was all I could afford.

The girl interested me more. Reading or thinking stories is all right, but living them is better. This girl had obviously not come to buy. She had come to get in out of the rain, to find a place to sit down. Probably it was cold in her rooms.

Rooms? No—more likely just one room, a small place with a few simple things. Some worn slippers, a Japanese silk kimono, and on the old-fashioned dresser would be a picture—a man, of course. He would be an army or naval officer, grave and attractive.

By the way she seemed to be moving her toes inside her shoes and bit her lower lip from time to time, I knew she was tired of walking and her feet were sore.

When I tried to move closer to her, she noticed it and got up to go. I was persistent. There was a story here that I knew well. I had often lived it. When she stepped into the rain, I was beside her.

“Wet, isn’t it?” I said, hoping to hear her voice, but she hurried on, turning her face away and ignoring me.

“Please,” I said, “I’m not being fresh. I’m just lonely. Weren’t you ever lonely?”

She started to walk slower and glanced at me. Her eyes were dark and even larger than I had thought. She smiled a little, and she had a lovely mouth. “Yes,” she said, “I am often lonely.”

“Would you like some coffee?” I suggested. “Or tea? What does one drink in Shanghai?”

“Almost everything,” she said, and laughed a little. She seemed surprised at the laugh and looked so self-conscious I knew she was hungry. Once you have been very hungry you know the signs in someone else. It makes you feel very different. “But I would like some coffee,” she admitted.

We found a little place several blocks away run by a retired French army officer and his wife. We sat down and looked across the table at each other. Her dark suit was a little shabby but neat, and she was obviously tired. I have become sensitive to such things.

There was the slightest bit of an accent in her voice that intrigued me, but I could not place it. I have heard many accents, but I was younger then, and that was the other Shanghai before the guns of Nippon blasted Chapei into smoking ruins and destroyed the fine tempo of life.

“You are new here?” she asked. “You don’t belong here?”

“I have just come,” I said, “but I belong nowhere.”

“Then you must be at home. Nobody belongs in Shanghai. Everyone is either just going or just arriving.”

“You?” I suggested.

She shrugged a shoulder. “I am like you. I belong nowhere. Perhaps Shanghai more than anywhere else because it is a city of passersby. Not even the Chinese belong here because this city was started for Europeans. It was only a mud flat then.”

She moved her feet under the table, and I heard them squish. She had been walking a long time, and her feet were soaked.

“I’m part Russian, but I was born in Nanking. My grandfather left Russia at the time of the Revolution, and for a time they lived in Siberia. There was an order for his arrest, and he escaped over the border with his wife and children. She was French. He met her in Paris when he was a military attaché there.

“I am told he had a little money, but he could never seem to find a place, and the money disappeared. My father was an interpreter in Peking and then in Nanking.”

She sipped her coffee, and we ordered sandwiches. This time there was money enough, and for once I had more in prospect. “He knew nothing about the Revolution or the tsar’s government and cared less. Everyone talked politics in Peking—all the Russians did, at least. So he came to Nanking where I was born.”

“An interesting man. I thought only grand dukes left Russia. What did he do then?”

“My grandfather died and left him whatever there was. For a time we lived very well, and my father drank.”

The sandwiches came, and it was several minutes before she touched one, then a small bite only, which she took a long time chewing. I knew the signs, for when one is hungry, it is the taste one wants. In the movies, when they portray a hungry man, he is always gulping down his food, which is entirely false. It is not at all that way, for when one has been truly hungry for some time, the stomach has shrunk, and one can eat but a little at a time. Only in the days after that first meal can one truly eat, and then there is never enough.

“What did he drink?” I asked.

“Fine old Madeira at first. And port. He would sit in the cafes and talk of Tolstoi and Pushkin or of Balzac. He was a great admirer of Balzac. Father had always wished to become a writer, but he only talked of it. He could never seem to sit down and do it.”

“There are thousands like him. If one wishes to be a writer, one shouldn’t talk about it, one should do it.”

“Then he could not afford such wines. He drank vodka then, and finally samshu or Hanskin.”

The decline and fall of a refined palate. “And then he died?”

She nodded, but I had known that it had to be. For a man to sink from fine old Madeira to Hanskin—after that there is nothing to do but die.

Our coffee was finished. I looked into the cup, made a mental calculation, and decided against ordering another. “Shall we go?” I suggested.

The rain had resolved itself into a fine mist, and streetlights were glowing through the fog that was coming in off the river. It would be this way all night. She hesitated, glanced quickly at me, and held out her hand. “I’d better go.”

I took her hand. “Why not come with me? It’s going to be an unpleasant night.” Her eyes met mine, and she looked quickly away. “Why not?” I said. “It isn’t all that much of a place, but it’s warm.”

“All right,” she said.

We walked rapidly. It was not going to be a nasty night; it was already one. A taxi skidded around a corner throwing a shower of spray that only just missed us. A rickshaw passed, going the other way, its curtains drawn. I was glad when we reached the door.

For myself it did not matter. Sometimes I walked for hours in the rain, but she was not dressed warm, and the rain was cold and miserable. The Shanghai streets were not a place to be at night and alone.

My place was warm. My boy was gone. I called him my “number-only” boy. I told him when he took the job he couldn’t be the “number-one” boy because there would not be a number two, three, or four.

It was not just a room but a small apartment, pleasant in a way. Drifting men have a way of fixing up almost any place they stop to make it comfortable. Seamen often fix things up like any old maid might do and for much the same reason.

Yet the apartment was not mine. I’d been given the use of it by a Britisher who was up-country now. His name was Haig, and he came and went a good deal with no visible means of support, and I was told that he often stayed up-country months at a time. He had been an officer in one of the Scottish regiments, I believe. I had a suspicion that he was still involved in some kind of duty, although he had many weird Asiatic connections.

Some of the books were mine, and it pleased me when she went to the books immediately. It always makes a sucker out of a man who truly loves books to see someone taking a genuine interest in them.

Later, when she came out of the shower wearing my robe, her eyes were very bright. I hadn’t realized she was so pretty. We sat by the fire, watching the coals.

“Lose your job?” I asked finally.

“Two weeks ago, and it came at a bad time. My rent was up last week, and there is always a demand for lodgings here. This morning they said not to come back unless I could pay.”

“That’s tough. What’s your line?”

“I’ve done a lot of things. A secretary, usually. I can handle five languages very well and two others a little. I worked for Moran and Company in Tientsin, and then here for a transport firm, but lately there has been so little business, and the owner has been gambling. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Outside was China. Outside was Shanghai, the old Shanghai when it was an international city. Outside were the millions, of all nationalities. French, English, Japanese, Dutch, German, Sikh, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Malay, and of course, Chinese. Outside was the Whangpoo, a dark river flowing out of China, out of old China and into the new, then down to the sea. Outside rivers of men flowed along the dark streets, men buying and selling, men fighting and gambling, men bargaining and selling, loving and dying. Millions of men, women, and children, opening countless doors, going into lives of which I knew nothing, eating the food of many countries, speaking in tongues I had never heard, praying to many gods.

Listening to her as she spoke of China, I remembered the shuffle of feet in the noontime streets. There was nothing I could do. It was bad for a man to be broke but so much worse for a woman. Especially for such a girl as this.

Perhaps I was a fool, but I, too, had been hungry. Soon there would be a ship, and I would go to Bombay or Liverpool or New York, while she—

“You wouldn’t have come had there been any other place to go, would you?”

“No.”

A lock of her dark hair had fallen against my robe. It looked good there. So black against the soft white of her throat.

“But I am grateful. What could I have done?”

Well, what? I had a feeling I was going to make a fool of myself. Americans are a sentimental lot, and every cynic is a sentimentalist under the skin. I knew enough about women to be skeptical but had been hungry enough to be human.

A wind moaned about the eaves, and rain dashed against the window.

“Listen,” I said, “this isn’t quite the sporting thing, is it? To have you come here because there was nowhere else to go and because I bought you a cup of coffee? Or maybe because of breakfast in the morning? I don’t like the sound of it.

“Well, hell, I’m going to sleep on the sofa, and you can have the other room.”

After the door closed, I stood looking at it. If she hadn’t been so damned lovely it would have been easier to be gallant. Probably right now she was thinking what a sap I was. Well, she wouldn’t be the only one.

I had a feeling I was going to be sorry for this in the morning.