"You don't mean they broke you?" He whistled. "Gee, I'm sorry about that! I sure am, though." Absolutely, he sounded shocked. "Over a passel o' guns. Well, I'll be!" He shook his head, and smiled, a mite sheepish. "Say, colonel … why don't you let that hog-leg alone, and come on in my berth for a drink? See here, I'm sorry as hell—but t'wasn't my fault. 'Sides, it's over and done with now." He looked at me, half-grinning, half-contrite. "And you're ahead o' me by two shots. No hard feelings. Okay?" And he held out his hand.
Now, I know a rogue when I see one—and I was forming a strange suspicion that Mr Ward wasn't a rogue at all. Oh, I've known charming rascals, bland as be-damned, and the eyes give them away every time. This fellow's were bright and dark and innocent as a babe's—which you might say was all against him. And yet … he sounded downright pleased to see me. I couldn't credit he was that good an actor; and why should he trouble to be? There was nothing I could do to him, now; certainly not here.
"I ought to blow your blasted head off!" says I.
"You dam' near did!" cries he cheerily, and when I continued to ignore his hand: "Okay, you've got a right to be sore, I guess. But why don't we go lower a couple, anyway? I'm off watch."
Indeed, why not? I can only say he was a hard man to refuse, and the truth is I was curious about him. He was a rare bird, I felt sure, so I followed him out of the warm night into the stuffy little cabin, where he seated me on the bunk and poured out two stiff tots. "Say, this is fine!" says he, sitting on the locker. "How've you been?" And without letting me reply he rattled off into a recital of his own escape through the paddy, and how he'd smuggled himself back to Macao, and thence up the coast to Shanghai, where he'd flourished his papers at Dent's, and got himself a mate's berth. I watched him like a hawk, but he was easy as old leather, prattling away. Crazy, undoubtedly, but if he was crook, it didn't show.
"It's not a bad berth," says he, "but I won't stick. Fellow called Gough, one of your people, commands a gunboat flotilla for the Imps. He's offered me second place on the Confucius; reckon I'll take it."
"What happened to the notion of being a Taiping prince?" I asked, and he grinned and pulled a face.
"No, sir, thank you. I've had a look at 'em, these past few weeks. They're not for Fred T." He shook his head so firmly that, thinking of my own mission, I pressed him for information.
"Well, all this stuff about being Christians—they don't have the first notion! They have a lot o' mumbo-jumbo about Jesus, that they've picked up an' got wrong, but … Listen—to give you an idea, when they get a new recruit they give him three weeks to learn the Lord's Prayer, and if he can't—whist!" He chopped his hand against his neck. "No fooling! Now, what kind of Christianity is that, will you tell me? And they treat the people something shameful. Take all their goods—'cos no one can have property in the Taiping, it's all in common, 'lessn you're one of the top Wangs. And they put 'em to work in companies, like it was the army, and if they're too old or sick to work—whist again! And everybody has to work for the Taiping, see, and obey all their foolish rules about religion, an' learn the proclamations of the Heavenly King by heart—and, boy, they're the wildest stuff, I tell you! The Thousand Correct Things, an' the Book of Celestial Decrees, and nobody under-stands 'em a little bit!"
I said the missionaries were all for them, and he shook his head again. "Maybe they used to be, but now they've had a good look. You go up-river, into a Taiping province, you see the ruin, the gutted villages, the bodies laying about in thousands – and it ain't as if all their rules and discipline made things better – why, they make it worse! Nobody has land, so nobody can plant 'cept the Taiping tells him, an' the local governors, why, they have to wait for orders from further up, an' the fellow further up … well, there's nothing in it for him, and he probably used to be a shoemaker, anyway, so what does he know about crops? He knows the rules, though, and learns a new chapter of the Bible each day, and thinks Moses was a Manchoo Mandarin who thought better of it!"
I recalled that the Heavenly King himself had been an educated man, and while he was crazy there must be some Taipings who knew how things should be run; he scoffed me out of court.
"That kind of person—you mean merchants and clerks and fellows with some schooling—they have no time for the Heavenly Kingdom; they're mostly dead, anyway, or made themselves scarce. Why should they truck with a crowd that just robs 'em and says they're no better'n the peasants? 'Sides, they can see the Taipings are only good at killing and stealing and laying waste."
"You seem to have learned a lot in a short time," I said, and he replied that one trip up to Nanking, and a look at the country around, had been enough for him. "They're so mean and cruel," he kept saying. "Sure, the Imps are worse—their army's rotten, and they just use the war as an excuse for plundering and killing wherever they go -but at least they've got something behind them, I mean, a real government, even if it doesn't work too well … a … a … sort of like the Constitution. I mean … China." He grinned ruefully, and poured me another drink. "I don't make it too clear, I guess. But the Taipings just have this crazy dream—and they're no good at making things work. Well, the Imps aren't much better, maybe, but at least they can read and write."
I asked if he had seen anything of the leading Taipings at Nanking, and he said, no, but he had heard plenty. "They do all right, from what I hear—that's what really got my goat. There's all this fine talk about love and brotherhood and equality—but the Wangs live in palaces and have a high old time, while the people are tret no better'n niggers. You know," says he, all boyish earnestness, "at the beginning, they made the women and men stay apart—there was a special part of Nanking for the girls, and if they and the boys … you know … why, they just killed 'em. Even now, 'lessn you're married—well, if you … you know … they just—whist! The poor people are allowed one wife, but the Wangs …" He blew out his cheeks. "They have all the girls they want, and aren't there some doings in those palaces? So I heard." I found this quite cheering, and pressed him for further details, but he didn't have any. "It's one law for the rich and another for the poor, I guess," says he philosophically. "Mind, they've done some good things, like not letting girls bind their feet, and don't they come down hard on crooks and shysters, though! Stealing, opium-smoking, girls selling themselves, anything illegal at all—or even just talking out of turn—and off comes the head. I've seen that."
I wondered how long the people would endure a rule quite as despotic as the Manchoos', and even less efficient, and he laughed.
"Wait till you see those Taiping soldiers! One thing they're good at is discipline—putting it on the people, and taking it themselves. That's why they can whip the Imps, easy; they're real good, and so are their generals. I'll tell you something, an' the sooner all our people realise it, the better—this here's going to be a Taiping China, for keeps, unless we—I mean you British and us Americans, and the French maybe, do something about it." He'd become very earnest, rapping his finger on the locker; a serious lad, when he wasn't being crazy. But all his talk about the Wangs and their women had reminded me of what I'd been about in the first place, so presently I left him and strolled down to the steerage. Besides, my chat with him had almost been in the way of duty, and I was due for a spell of vicious recreation.
It was full night now, and we were thumping upstream with the Tsungming lights to starboard and the last warmth dying from the night wind. The great steerage deck, poorly lit, was littered with sleepers, and I was about to turn back, cursing, and wait until daylight, when I heard voices forrard. I picked my way over the bodies and rounded the deckhouse in the bows, and my heart gave a lustful little skip—there was the slim, towering figure at the bow-rail, talking with a couple of Chinese rivermen; they turned to glower at me, and then the girl laughed and said something, and the Chinks melted into the dark, leaving the two of us alone under the bow-lamp. She lounged with her elbows on the rail—Jove, what a height she was, topping me by a good four inches. I stepped up to her, lustfully appraising the play of the superb muscles on the bare bangled arms, the lazy grace of the splendid body, and the sensuous hawk face above the strange chain collar. Aye, she was ready to play; it was in every line of her.