High Road to China

JON CLEARY

High Road to China

Dedication

To Marina and Aubrey Baring

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Author’s Postscript

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Preface

William Bede O’Malley died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 22 July 1974, aged 80. He left behind him an autobiography called, plainly, AN ADVENTURE; it ran to over 1500 pages of manuscript. He left no instructions as to whether he wished it to be submitted for publication. After much discussion his family offered it to me, a distant cousin, to use as I thought fit.

I decided to tell the story of what I think was one of the best of Bede O’Malley’s adventures and it was agreed that I could use excerpts from his manuscript. I wished to include them because I thought that, with some minor editing, they would give a sense of perspective to a story that took place when I was only three years old, a time of which my memory is, to say the least, hazy. The year 1920 is almost as remote as 1492 or 1066 to a lot of people today.

I found that certain incidents did not accord with historical fact in respect of time, but Bede O’Malley was writing without benefit of diary or notes and an old man’s memory does not always recognize the calendar. But it does not alter the truth of what he experienced.

He was an adventurer, a dying breed: but who of us does not still dream of being one?

Chapter 1

1

‘So far I’ve shot only one man.’ Eve Tozer patted the gun-case beside her as if it were a vanity bag containing all she needed to face the men of the world. ‘Elephants are easier.’

‘Of course.’ Arthur Henty kept his eyebrows in place. ‘Did you kill the, er, man?’

‘One couldn’t miss at ten yards. He was a perfectly ugly Mexican who was trying to rape me.’

‘Ten yards? That was rather distant for rape, wasn’t it?’

‘He was trouserless. His intention was distinctly obvious, if you know what I mean.’

Henty hung on to his eyebrows from the inside, wondering if one could dislocate one’s forehead. He was a tall balding man in whom the bone was very evident, as if the skeleton had already decided to shrug off the flesh; but his eyes were bright blue, shrewd and amused, and he had no intention of stepping into an early grave. Not while women as attractive as Eve Tozer presented themselves to his gaze. Even if that was as far as the presentation of themselves went.

He had never met Bradley Tozer’s daughter until he had gone down to Tilbury this morning to escort her from the ship that had brought her from China. Several people in the Shanghai head office of Tozer Cathay Limited had written him that she was every inch her father’s daughter and now, with a glance at the gun-case on the seat of the car, he was prepared to believe they were right. He studied her, wondering what the perfectly ugly Mexican had thought of her as, trouserless and lance pointed, he had rushed towards her and the fate worse than he had anticipated.

Eve was staring out at London as it slid by outside the car and Henty looked at her closely, yet managed not to stare. It was a trick he had learned in ten years up-country in China, where the stranger’s gaze could never afford to be too frank. He saw a girl above average height with a figure that would attract men less violent and point-blank than the unfortunate Mexican. She was dressed in a beige silk travelling suit with tan stockings and shoes that, even to his inexpert eye, looked expensive and hand-made. The skirt, he noticed, was of the fashionable length, just below the knee; his wife Marjorie was always trying to educate him in such trivialities. But he also noticed that she was wearing her dark hair cut unfashionably short and there was a touch of rouge on her cheeks, something that Marjorie would have labelled as ‘fast’.

‘It is six years since I was last in London.’ Eve looked out the window of the Rolls-Royce as they drove along the Embankment. Grey skies and a thin muslin drizzle of rain had not kept the August Bank Holiday crowd at home; the English, she guessed, were as dogged about their pleasures as they had been about winning the war. England was still settling uneasily into the new peace; during last year’s summer holidays, she had read in The Times, there had still been a disbelief that the long agony was really over. This long holiday weekend, however, the citizens were determined to enjoy themselves, come what may. Buses, bright in their new postwar paint, rolled by; on their open top decks passengers sat beneath their umbrellas, teeth bared in resolute smiles. Excursion boats went up and down the Thames, their passengers bellowing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ as they went past the Mother of Parliaments. A newspaper poster said, Woolley: Duck, and Eve wondered at the strangeness of the English language as spoken in England.

‘What’s a woolly duck?’

Henty frowned in puzzlement, looked back, then laughed. ‘That’s Frank Woolley, one of our more famous cricketers. He scored a duck. Nil runs.’

‘Oh. Some time, not this trip, I must go to see a cricket game. When we were last here, Mother wanted to see one, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. Said it was too slow for him. Instead we went to Wimbledon. We saw Norman Brookes beat Tony Wilding in the men’s singles. I remember I fell in love with Tony Wilding.’

‘He was killed in the war. At Neuve Chapelle. My two brothers were killed there, too.’

‘Was that where you got your, er, wound?’

‘No, on the Somme.’ Henty tapped his stiff right leg with his walking-stick. ‘The bally thing plays up occasionally. When it rains, mostly.’

‘You shouldn’t have come all the way down to the ship.’ But she turned away from him, looked out the car window again. She could shoot animals without a qualm and had shot the rape-minded Mexican and left no mental scar on herself; but she felt helpless in the face of other people’s suffering. ‘That was a beautiful summer, 1914, I mean. I read that they are calling it the long golden summer, as if there’ll never be another like it.’

Perhaps there never will be, thought Henty, but not in terms of weather. It had been a summer, he mused, which even some people not yet born would look back to with nostalgia. But he had looked up the weather records and they had shown that it had not been a ‘long golden summer’: that had occurred four years before, in 1910, the last season of the Edwardian reign, of a king meant for pleasure and not for war. But memory, Henty knew, had its own climate and regret for a time gone forever created its own golden haze. So people now believed the sun had been shining through all the months and years up till August 1914. Suddenly his leg began to ache. But he knew it had nothing to do with the rain or the shrapnel still lodged beneath his kneecap.

The Rolls-Royce turned up towards the Strand and a few moments later pulled into the forecourt of the Savoy Hotel. It was followed by the smaller Austin in which rode Anna, Eve’s maid, and the luggage. Henty, who did not own a car and usually rode in buses and taxis, knew he had done the right thing in hiring the Rolls-Royce in which to bring his boss’s daughter up from the ship. He had been warned that Bradley Tozer expected nothing but the best for his only child; and, Henty had remarked to himself, evidently Miss Tozer took for granted that only the best was good enough for her. At least she had made no comment when he had escorted her off the ship and down to the car. The Rolls-Royce was good enough for the Savoy, too: a covey of porters and pages appeared as if royalty had just driven up to hand out grace and favour pensions to the common herd.

The head porter showed no surprise as Eve handed out her gun-case: it could have been that American ladies arrived every day at the Savoy with their guns, Annie Oakleys every one of them. He passed the gun-case on to a junior porter, then took the small lacquered wooden box which Eve pushed at him.

‘Tell them to be careful with that. My father would have my scalp and yours if what’s inside that box should be broken.’

‘Yes, miss,’ said the head porter, wondering if the father of this dark-haired beauty could be a Red Indian; but miffed at the suggestion that anything, other than perhaps the guests’ virginity, should ever be broken at the Savoy.

Going up in the lift Arthur Henty said, ‘I’m sorry your father couldn’t come with you. I was looking forward to seeing him after so long. It is almost seven years since I said goodbye to him in Shanghai.’

‘He hasn’t changed.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Henty ventured and was relieved to see Eve smile.

‘He still believes China belongs to him.’

Inside the suite Eve moved to the windows, opened one of them and looked out on the river, dull as unwashed quartz under the grey skies. It had stopped raining, but it was still a miserable day. A day for going to bed with a good book or a good man. She smiled to herself: her Boston grandmother would have commended her for the first thought and banished her for the second.

Henty studied her again, the heiress to the Tozer fortune, legatee of that part of China which her father thought belonged to him. Tozer Cathay had been started in Shanghai in 1870 by Eve’s grandfather, a windjammer captain from Boston turned merchant. Rufus Tozer had died in 1903 from a surfeit of bandits’ bullets while estimating a price for a repair job on the Great Wall of China: or so the company legend went. His son had run the firm ever since, had built it into the major competitor for trade in China of Jardine Matheson, the British firm that, until Tozer Cathay began to develop, had thought that it owned China.

‘How do you feel about China?’ Henty himself had loved it and its people, but he knew his leg would never allow him to go back there and take up his old job as a traveller. He had been grateful when Bradley Tozer had made him general manager of the London office.

Eve shrugged, turned from the window. The reflected light from the river struck sideways across her face, accentuating the slight slant of her eyes and the high cheekbones. Years before, Rufus Tozer had taken home a half-caste Chinese bride and Boston, already feeling itself invaded by the Irish, had resented this introduction of a possible further invasion, this time by the Yellow Peril. Since then, however, Pearl Tozer, having conveniently died at the birth of her son, had been forgiven and forgotten for her intrusion into decent Boston society: after all, her son had grown up to play quarterback for Harvard, gaining both All-American selection and a bride who was a distant cousin of the Cabots. Pearl’s granddaughter, grown to extraordinary beauty, was admired and, though given to such eccentricities as big-game hunting, piloting an aeroplane and smoking cigarettes in public, was still considered more acceptable than the Irish.

‘It’s not my cup of tea, if that’s the appropriate metaphor. I get upset by poverty, Mr Henty, and there is so much of it in China. I like to see happiness everywhere.’

He hadn’t thought she would be so shallow-minded and his voice was a little sharper than he intended it to be. ‘The Chinese are happy. Things could be better for them, but they are not un-happy.’

‘You think I’m shallow-minded for making such a remark, don’t you?’

Henty hung on to his eyebrows again. He should have recognized that she had probably inherited her father’s almost uncanny perception. But he was not a cowardly man: ‘Your remark did suggest that to me. I apologize. Perhaps we had better talk about something else. What are your plans while you are in London this week?’

Eve smiled, forgiving him. He was right, of course: she was shallow-minded. At least if that meant preferring happiness to misery. ‘I want to do some shopping at Harrods and a few other places. And Father wants me to order him some shirts at Turnbull and Asser’s. They have his measurements. How long will they take to make them?’

‘Two, three days, no more. I have tickets for the theatre every night – you can take your choice. Chu Chin Chow – ’ Then he, too, smiled. ‘But not if you don’t like China.’

She shook her head. ‘I’d like to see some of the new matinée idols. I’m mad about good-looking men, Mr Henty. Does that shock you?’

‘Not really,’ said Henty, wondering if she took her gun when she went in pursuit of good-looking men. ‘I understand it’s a perfectly normal thing with young girls.’

‘I adore you, Mr Henty. You try to sound like a stuffed shirt, but you’re not, are you? I read about a new leading man, Basil Rathbone. I’d like to see him, no matter what show he’s in.’

He held up a fan of tickets. ‘He’s in a new play opening next week, one by Somerset Maugham. I’ve included it amongst these.’

‘You’re perfectly slick, Mr Henty.’

He took it that that was a compliment: he was not up on the latest American slang.

Then the luggage arrived, supervised by Anna. She was a tiny Chinese who had been born in New York and had hated every moment of the three months she and her mistress had just spent in China. She had a New York accent but a Mandarin attitude towards servants less than herself. And in her book hotel porters were much less than the personal maid to a millionaire’s daughter. She clapped her tiny hands in tiny explosions and fired off orders with machine-gun rapidity. The two porters, silent and expressionless, Leyton Orientals, but boiling with thoughts about Yanks and Chinks who were mixed together in this midget witch, carried the trunks and suitcases into the main bedroom of the suite.

Eve took the small lacquered box from the page-boy who had brought it up and put it on a table. ‘When I left Father he was heading for Hunan to look for the companion piece to this. It’s a jade statue of Lao-Tze, the Taoist god. I believe there is one something like it in a museum in Paris, but Father says if he can get the pair of these, he’ll make all the museums and collectors sick with envy. You know what he’s like about his collection.’

Indeed Henty knew. On their trips into the Chinese hinterland all Tozer Cathay representatives were expected to keep an eye out for any items that might prove worthy additions to the famous Tozer collection.

‘Isn’t it risky, carrying it with you? Wouldn’t it have been safer to have shipped it straight home to America?’

‘That was Father’s original idea, but then he became afraid it might be stolen on the way. I persuaded him to let me bring it with me. I – ’ For the first time she looked embarrassed. ‘I wanted to prove I could be useful. I owe my father a lot, Mr Henty.’

Henty felt at ease enough to be frank: ‘I understand he thinks the world of you. So perhaps the debt is mutual.’

‘You’re perfectly sweet, Mr Henty.’ She smiled, then shook her head, nodding at the gun-case lying on a sofa. ‘He took me tiger hunting in Kwelchow this summer. He didn’t want to go, he was frightfully busy, but I wanted to go and he took me. He’s been doing that ever since my mother died, spoiling me terribly. He’s a kind man, Mr Henty, too kind. At least to me.’

Henty was glad of the qualification, though he couldn’t detect whether she had said it defensively. Bradley Tozer had no reputation in China for kindliness; he hunted business with all the rapacity of an old China Sea pirate. Henty guessed there would be few people in China who felt they owed Bradley Tozer anything.

He was saved from an awkward reply by the ringing of the phone. Eve, a lady who, despite the admonitions of her maternal grandmother, could never resist the temptation to answer her own telephone, picked it up. It was the reception desk.

‘A gentleman to see you, Miss Tozer.’

‘A gentleman? English?’ Basil Rathbone, perhaps? Eve was not so spoiled that she didn’t have girlish dreams occasionally. ‘Did he give his name?’

A hand was obviously held over the mouthpiece downstairs. Then: ‘Mr Sun Nan. A Chinese gentleman.’

Eve looked at Henty. ‘Do you know a Mr Sun Nan?’

‘No. Is he downstairs? I’ll go down and see what he wants.’

Eve spoke into the phone again. ‘Mr Henty will be down to see him.’

She put down the phone, but almost at once it rang again. ‘I am sorry, Miss Tozer, but the gentleman insists that he see you.’ The tone of voice suggested that the Savoy reception desk did not approve of the cheek of a Chinese, gentleman or otherwise, insisting on disturbing one of the hotel’s guests. The hand was held over the mouthpiece again and then the voice came back, this time in a state of shock: ‘He insists he see you at once.’

‘Send him up.’ Eve put down the phone once more and stopped Henty who, leaning on his stick, was already limping towards the door. ‘You had better stay. This Mr Sun evidently has something important he wants to tell me.’

‘If he’s selling anything or wanting to buy, he should have come to the office. Let me handle him.’

‘No, leave him to me,’ Eve said, and Henty suddenly and ridiculously wondered if Mr Sun, whoever he was, might meet the same fate as the unfortunate Mexican.

Mr Sun Nan was brought up to the suite by one of the reception clerks, as if the hotel did not trust pushy, demanding Orientals to be wandering around alone on its upper floors. He was ushered into the suite, a smiling li-chi of a man who seemed amused at the attention he was being given.

‘A thousand apologies, Miss Tozer, for this intrusion. If time had allowed, I should have written you a letter and awaited your reply.’ He spoke English with a slight hiss that could have meant a badly-fitting dental plate or been a comment on the barbarians who had invented the language. ‘But time, as they say, is of the essence.’

‘Not a Chinese saying, I’m sure,’ said Eve.

Sun smiled. ‘No. I only use it because you will be the one to profit by our saving time.’

Henty introduced himself. ‘If you have anything to sell or wish to buy, you should be talking to me.’

Sun smiled at him as he might have at a passer-by, then looked back at Eve. ‘It would be better if we spoke alone, Miss Tozer.’

Henty bridled at being dismissed and Eve stiffened in annoyance at the smiling, yet cool arrogance of the Chinese. ‘Mr Henty stays. If time is of the essence, don’t waste it, Mr Sun.’

‘I was warned you might resemble your father in your attitude.’ Sun gave a little complimentary bow of his head, then the smile disappeared from his face as if it had been an optical illusion instead of a friendly expression. ‘The matter concerns your father. He has been kidnapped.’

Through the open window there floated up from the Embankment the cheerful mutter of London on holiday: the ordinary, reassuring sounds that made Eve think she had not heard Mr Sun correctly. ‘Did you say kidnapped?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ The smile flickered on his face again, but it was no longer apologetic or friendly; Sun smiled as a relieving movement to relax what was indeed a badly-fitting dental plate. ‘My master has him in custody and will kill him on 21 August by your calendar, eighteen days from today. Unless – ’

Eve went to the window and closed it, shutting out the ordinary, locking in the macabre. The clouds were lifting a little, but there was no break in them. She caught a glimpse of a plane high in the sky to the west: it had just written a giant O in dark smoke, an empty circle barely discernible against the grey sky. The pilot’s effort at sky-writing on such a day seemed as ridiculous as what she had just heard Mr Sun say. She turned back into the room in a state of shock.

She heard Henty say, ‘Is this some frightful joke by Jardine Matheson? If so, I think it’s in deucedly bad taste.’

‘It is no joke, Mr Henty.’ But Sun smiled at the thought of Jardine Matheson’s being involved; he thought that was a joke. ‘My master is a very serious man at times. If he says he will kill Miss Tozer’s father, then he certainly will.’

‘You said unless.’ Eve had to clear her throat to get the words out. ‘Unless what?’

‘You have a small statue, I believe. Of the god Lao-Tze riding on a green ox – ’

Surprised, puzzled, Eve gestured at the box on the table. ‘It’s in there. But it belongs to my father – ’

Sun shook his head, face stiff now with impatience and denial. He was a Confucian, but he had a more immediate master, the tuchun, the war lord, in Hunan who laid down timetables which had no place for etiquette and ritual. ‘It belongs to my master.’

‘Where did your father get it?’ Henty asked Eve.

‘He bought it from some provincial governor. General Chang something-or-other.’

‘Chang Ching-yao,’ said Sun. ‘My master’s enemy. My master has the twin to the statue. He owned both of them, but Chang stole one of them from him. Open the box. At once, please!’

Henty grasped his stick as if he were going to use it for something other than support for his leg. ‘This has gone far enough! I think we had better call the police – ’

‘It would be foolish to call the police.’ The hiss in Sun’s voice was even more pronounced now. ‘My master does not recognize any other authority but his own. Even in China.’

‘Miss Tozer, you can’t let him get away with this! How do we know this isn’t some bluff to swindle you out of that statue? The cleverest swindlers in the world are the Chinese – ’

Sun bowed his head again, as if he and his countrymen had been paid a compliment. Then he took a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He was dressed in a dark suit that was too tight for him and he carried a black bowler hat; he looked like a civil servant, a non-white from Whitehall. He looked at the watch, then held it out on the palm of his plump hand.

‘Do you recognize this, Miss Tozer?’

Eve took the watch: it ticked like a tiny gold bomb in her hand. ‘It’s my father’s. I gave it to him last Christmas.’

‘Your father was captured the day he arrived in Hunan province, two days after you left Shanghai on your ship. I travelled overland to Hong Kong and the intention was to speak to you there. Your ship was supposed to spend four days in that port.’

‘We were there only two days. The schedule was altered for some reason or other. None of us minded,’ she said irrelevantly; then added very relevantly, ‘At the time.’

‘I caught another ship and followed you, but at each port I just missed you.’

‘You could have sent a wireless message to the ship.’ Eve, assaulted by reason, now believed everything she was hearing: no swindler could be so cool about his facts.

‘How to word it, Miss Tozer?’ Sun smiled again, as if admitting even the cleverness of the Chinese would have found such a code beyond them; he marvelled sometimes at the stupidity of white foreigners, whose minds never seemed to work as quickly as their tongues. ‘My master wants secrecy. If I had sent a wireless message, even if you had believed it and not thought it a hoax, you would have contacted the authorities in Shanghai, am I not correct?’

Eve nodded, and Henty said, ‘You said something about – how long? eighteen days? – in which to return the statue. Return it to where – Hunan? That’s absolutely impossible, you know that.’