The call, p.83
The Call, page 83
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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.
* * *
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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.
* * *
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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.
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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.”
* * *
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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.
* * *
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IN MAY came Mrs. Evenrude’s seventieth birthday. She was furious all day.
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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.”
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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?
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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!”
* * *
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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!”
* * *
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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.
