The Dangerous Years (23 page)

‘So long as we arrive home, I don’t think anybody’ll complain.’

As it grew dusk, the bamboo poles appeared and Rumbelo found a depth of three and a half feet round the bows and four feet in other places, though in one patch on the port side the water barely covered the tip of the pole.

‘Looks like we’re ’ere for keeps,’ the seaman who was doing the sounding said gloomily.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Kelly snapped. ‘Get the sampan lowered and let’s have some soundings away from the ship.’

The sampan soundings showed deep water running out to midstream along a narrow channel, and Kelly turned to Gregory. ‘Shove a kedge on a three-and-a-half wire hawser out into midstream along that channel so we can haul off when we’re ready. Get it done before daylight, and keep the cables slack enough to be out of sight below water.’

‘Aye aye, sir.’

‘And let’s have the chap in my cabin who runs the ship’s concert party.’

The sailor who ran the concert party was a grizzled little man with a creased neck and a nutcracker face.

‘Able Seaman Donkin, sir. I’m the resident comic. I do a soft shoe shuffle to
Japanese Sandman
. It goes down well.’

‘I’ve no doubt. Well, we might want the use of your props. Got any greasepaint?’

‘Plenty, sir. We put on a neat little cross-talk act between a chap dressed as an officer and a Chinese makee-washee man. The officer’s laundry’s gone missing.’

‘I bet it’s killing,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘Got enough for three people to be made up like Chinese?’

‘Oh, yes, sir. We having a show?’

‘No, you bloody idiot! I want to go ashore.’

The ship lay in silence. Beyond the bund was China proper, not the veneer of Shanghai or even Hankow. The looting and raping were still going on, but the worst was over and the town looked as dirty as it smelled, a bouquet of open sewers and the rotting corpses of dogs, cats and abandoned female infants. It was raining and the people moving up and down the bund carried umbrellas of bamboo and oiled paper, and there were none of the taipans in private rickshaws or elegant ladies carried on the shoulders of bearers. Here it was only sweating coolies, carrying loads of springy poles which raised orange-sized callouses on their bare shoulders, gaping soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms, and occasionally some wretched man pursued by a screaming mob hurling abuse, dung and stones.

Watching the nervous crowds moving agitatedly along the shore, their eyes on the stranded ship, Kelly arranged for the machine gun to be quietly mounted and unobtrusively manned.

‘We’d best take no chances, Sub,’ he warned. ‘When I go ashore, you’ll be in charge, so keep your head and let’s have no shooting. I don’t want to stir the bloody place up, I want to calm it down. Can the battery touch us here?’

‘No, sir. The bank hides us. They’ll be after us if we try to move downriver, though.’

The rain stopped and the sun raced up, a blinding glare on the water. The heat shimmered over the land and the mountain behind the town reared like a blue shadow out of the plain. There were still yells from the town and men with rifles patrolled the shore. At midday, along the roadway opposite the ship where the town’s refuse was dumped, the crowd began to thicken and the stream of coolies came to a stop.

‘Now what?’

‘Executions,’ Gregory said in a strained voice.

‘Of whom?’

‘Chinese, sir, who’ve been working for the British.’ Gregory looked shaken. ‘This is the second time they’ve done it.’

Soldiers appeared and began to push the crowd back, and one of them began to place nine stones in a row along the flat stretch of the foreshore near the barrier of carts and drums. Through the line of spectators, two men were pushed. They were fat and their wrists were bound cruelly behind their backs to their ankles so that they had to walk with bent knees. They were forced to kneel by the end stones, which had been placed directly opposite the ship, then seven more men appeared at intervals, all dressed in white, one man to each of the remaining stones. More soldiers arrived, escorting a tall man dressed in the blue denim of a coolie, who carried a huge two-handed sword decorated with tassels.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Donkin murmured. ‘’Ere we go again.’

There was a hush as the escorting soldiers stepped back. The nine men in white didn’t move. Then an officer stepped forward and, drawing a heavy revolver from his holster he walked up to the nearest man and placed the muzzle to the back of his head. As the shot rang out, the man’s skull seemed to burst apart and the body was flung forward across the stone. There was no sound from the crowd as the officer walked along the line, solemnly shooting five more of the men. At the sixth, he handed the revolver to a sergeant who exchanged it for another and the seventh man was despatched.

They watched from
Spider
with angry eyes. Then the man with the sword stepped up to the two fat men, the sun glinting on the metal.

‘The last bribe is to the officer,’ Balodin said. ‘So they can die with the dignity of a beheading.’

As the escorting soldiers stepped out of the way, the big coolie spat on his hands, and the whirling sword flashed as the sun caught it. Then, measuring the distance, the coolie rushed forward with a scream. Automatically, it seemed, the kneeling man inclined his head to one side, and as the sword swept down there was a loud snick that came across the water quite clearly, and the head hurtled yards from the trunk to come to rest on a pile of rubbish, the eyes still blinking, the mouth still twitching. Spurting blood, the body remained kneeling for a second then it overbalanced. The last man’s head landed at the foot of a soldier who indifferently kicked it aside.

As the ninth man toppled forward, the crowd began to disperse and the soldiers and executioners moved away. The procession of coolies started again, passing the bodies without even looking at them. For a while everything was quiet, then wailing women appeared, and, picking up the heads, began to sew them back on the bodies.

‘Can’t face their ancestors without their heads,’ Balodin said dryly. ‘They’d lose face.’ He gave a stiff smile. ‘No pun intended of course.’

As coolies appeared with coffins, they all retreated below deck again, keeping out of sight. When it was dark, Kelly moved quietly round the stern, checking the kedges that had been put out. Then he called Gregory, the Chief ERA and Rumbelo to the captain’s cabin.

‘What we’re going to do has got to be fast,’ he said. ‘I’m taking Petty Officer Rumbelo and Mr Balodin with me and I hope to be back tonight or tomorrow night. If I’m not, you’ll just have to sit tight. I shan’t be wanting to move except after dark, so see you have steam for a quick take-off, Chief, whatever night it is. Right?’

‘Right, sir.’

‘In the meantime, Sub, we’ll have screens placed along the deck ready to be raised after dark, to give us a more solid look. Like a three-tiered passenger ship, for instance. Gunboats look like gunboats in anybody’s language.’

It was after midnight when Kelly, Rumbelo and Balodin, dressed in Donkin’s concert party rigs and with their faces daubed with mud, clambered over the bow and hurried up the bank. There was no movement along the bund but there were fires where coolies slept, and here and there the plink-plonk of a stringed instrument and the breathy whistle of a flute or the thump of a gong; further along the dim glow of a lantern showed where the sentries waited by the barrier.

A thin silver moon was picking up the squares of the paddy fields and they could see the rushes stark against the water. Over the centre of the town there was a glow in the sky where fires lit three days before were burning themselves out, and occasionally they heard a howl from the mob prowling about the streets.

Nationalist shells had smashed the great studded gate in the river wall and, groping their way over the stones by the light of a hanging lantern, they skirted the houses and broken-down hovels, to scramble over a cascade of bricks and head down an alley, hardly daring to breathe. The place was ominously quiet and every door and window was shuttered and barred, the inhabitants out of sight and praying for daylight.

The sound of the mob still rose and fell in the distance as they splashed through stinking patches of water, holding their breath at the smell of sewage, ordure and years-old rotting rubbish. A puddle reflected the moon and the shape of houses in silhouette, then they were stumbling in and out of ditches and falling over broken masonry and charred beams back to the bund beyond the barrier. There was a smell of burning everywhere and a stink of death from the rubble, and several times they heard rats squeaking and the scrape of their claws over the stones.

The Withinshawe house was outside the town and close to the river. Weeping willows overhung the stone banks and they could hear the water lapping alongside. Occasionally a dog barked and once a whole lot of wild ducks started honking loudly. Here, the path was muddy, and night birds swooped about seeking the mosquitoes, passing close to their heads with the whirr of wings.

Then they saw a pagoda-like building with decorative gardens now trampled by dozens of feet, and as they reached it they saw a faint glimmer of light through the windows. As they tapped on the door there was a scream from inside.

‘Open up!’ Kelly said quietly. ‘It’s the Navy!’

There was a long silence then they heard bolts being drawn. As they stepped inside, Kelly became aware at once not of one or two people but of many. A curtain was put across the windows and a wick in a saucer of bean oil was lit. By its light he saw the room had been wrecked and the windows smashed by looters. It seemed to be full of men, women and children, most of them dressed like himself in the padded clothes of coolies.

‘Who the devil are you?’ Kelly asked.

A tall man with a red face and mad blue eyes rose from his knees. ‘I’m the Reverend Donald MacIntyre,’ he announced in a strong Scottish accent. ‘Presbyterian Foreign Bible Society. My wife an’ bairn are here, too, and two American families. There’s also a Dutch family and two Irish nuns. Seventeen souls. There are also eleven Chinese converts. We cannae leave them behind. They’ll be murdered.’

‘Where are the people who own this house?’

MacIntyre didn’t seem to think it was any part of his duty to worry about the safety of anybody else, but somebody plucked at Kelly’s sleeve and an old Chinese, bent and yellow, a wisp of white beard on his chin, looked up at him with slant black eyes. He whispered something Kelly didn’t catch.

‘What’s he say?’

‘He says he’s the gardener,’ Balodin translated, ‘and that Withinshawe was beaten to death by Nationalist soldiers. Mrs Withinshawe, her small son and two more British who came to persuade her to leave are in the
Swei-Fan
. He carried their things aboard. They were expecting to leave at first light the following morning, but that night the Chinese boarded her.’

Things seemed to be growing complicated, and Kelly saw that his simple plan for rescue was going to need amending. Plucking people from a captured ship was a very different kettle of fish from leading them to safety along the river bank.

He drew a deep breath and looked at Balodin.

‘Are they, by God,’ he said. ‘Well, that makes things a bit bloody awkward, doesn’t it?’

The noise in the town seemed to have died down during the night and the mob appeared to have dispersed.

As soon as it was daylight, Kelly began studying the river through the closed shutters. He could just see
Spider
to his left wedged on the mud. Beyond her downstream was
Swei-Fan
, desolate-looking and deserted except for one man who was lounging in the sun, shaded by an umbrella. Later during the morning a few Chinese soldiers in grey uniforms and bus conductor’s hats appeared, but there seemed to be no discipline and no lookouts. Whatever other men were on board, they were certainly not very obvious and he hoped they’d found the ship’s liquor stores and were drunk.

‘See any Europeans?’ he asked Rumbelo.

‘No, sir. Just the slopehead on the stern with the sunshade.’

‘Let’s hope he sleeps deeply.’

Clouds formed around noon and during the afternoon it began to rain heavily.

‘Just what we need,’ Balodin said. ‘It’ll keep people away from the bund.’

They called the missionaries together and told them to gather their belongings, and Rumbelo vanished into the rain as dusk fell. He was back within two hours with three of
Spider
’s seamen, all complaining less about the danger than about the weather. They were led by Able Seaman Donkin, looking vaguely like Mr Punch, and all carried rifles and were dressed to kill in gaiters, bandoleers and bayonets, with that portion of the day’s rations that orders insisted they should carry when away on duty from the ship.

‘Screens ready to go up round the fore and after decks, sir,’ Donkin reported. ‘Christ knows what the slopeheads’ll think we are if they see us. Probably the Gosport ferry.’

‘Right,’ Kelly said. ‘Get this lot formed up, Donkin, and lead off with Mr Balodin. I’ll bring up the rear with Petty Officer Rumbelo.’

Led by Donkin, the procession moved off. It wasn’t easy getting the missionaries across the mud and up
Spider
’s side. They were an unhandy lot with their bags and Bibles, and fell over things as they climbed aboard; and there was one sudden affronted silence as Donkin jerked his foot away from MacIntyre’s boot.

‘That’s my fucking toe!’ he complained.

They got them all aboard at last, more or less in silence. Chief ERA Dover was waiting in the rain with Gregory as Kelly appeared.

‘All ready, sir,’ he announced.

‘Good. This has got to be fast, Chief. Is there steam on the winches?’

‘As much as you need, sir.’

Kelly peered through the rain at the dark shape of
Swei-Fan
.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I want an armed party, Sub. It seems the people we came for are aboard
Swei-Fan
. It looks as if we’ve got to board her.’