The car left the quay, swung into the Avenue of the Two Republics. And now it could advance only with difficulty, caught in the seething movement of the Chinese crowd which was bursting from all the streets towards the refuge of the French concession. As one racehorse outdistances another, head, neck, shoulders, the crowd was “closing in” on the car, slowly, steadily. Wheelbarrows with babies’ heads sticking out between bowls, Peking carts, rickshaws, small hairy horses, handcarts, uucks loaded with sixty-odd people, monstrous mattresses piled with a whole household of furniture, bristling with table-legs, giants with cages of blackbirds dangling from the end of their anns which were stretched out to protect tiny women with a litter of children on their backs. The chauffeur was at last able to tum, to get into streets that were still obsuucted but where the din of the hom sent the crowd scurrying a few meters ahead of the car. It arrived at the vast headquarters of the French police.
Ferral climbed the stairs almost at a run.
In spite of his slicked-back hair, his informal tweed suit, and his gray silk shirt, his face preserved something of 1900, of his youth. He smiled at people “who disguise themselves as captains of industry,” which permitted him to disguise himself as a diplomat: he had relinquished only the monocle. His drooping, almost gray mustache, which seemed to prolong the sagging line of his mouth, gave his profile an expression of refined brutality; its strength was in the combination of his aquiline nose and his jutting chin, badly shaved this morning: the water- service employees were on strike, and the limy water brought by the coolies gave the soap a poor lather. He disappeared in the midst of the bows that greeted him.
At the far end of the office of Martial, the chief of police, a Chinese secret agent-a paternal-looking Her- cules-was asking:
“Is that all, Chief?”
“Also, getbusy disorganizing the syndicates,” answered Martial, whose back was turned. “And what’s more, you’ll have to snap into it. The work’s been rotten. You deserve to be fired: half your men can't be trusted out of sight! I’m not paying you to hire quarter-revolutionaries who don’t dare to come out in the open and say what they are: the police is not a factory for fu^rnishing alibis. Fire all agents who traffic with the Kuomintang, and don’t let me have to tell you again. And try to understand, instead of looking at me like an idiot! A nice mess it would be if I didn’t know my men better than you know yours!”
“Sir. ”
“That’s that. Settled. Classified. Get the hell out of here. How do you do, Monsieur Ferral?”
He turned round: a military face: large, regular and impersonal features, less revealing than his shoulders. “Hello, Martial. WeU?”
“To keep the railroad the government is obliged to take away thousands of men from other duties. You can’t hold out against a whole country, you have
a police like ours at your disposal. The only thing the gove^rnment can count on is the ^armored train, with its White officers. That’s serious.”
“A minority still implies a majority of imbeciles. Well, anyway. ’’
“Everything depends on the front. Here they’re going to try to revolt. It’s going to be hot for them, maybe, for they’re scarcely armed.”
Ferral could only listen and wait, which he thoroughly detested. The parleys held by the chiefs of the Anglo- Saxon and Japanese groups, himself, certain consulates, with the go-betweens who filled all the big hotels of the concessions to overflowing, still remained fruitless. This afternoon, perhaps.
Once Shanghai was in the hands of the revolutionary army, the Kuomintang would at last have to choose between democracy and Communism. Democracies are always good customers. And a company can make profits without depending on treaties. On the other hand, if the city became sovietized, the Franco-Asiatic Consortium- and with it all the French trade in Shanghai-would crumble away; Ferral was of the opinion that the powers would abandon their nationals, as England had done at Hankow. His immediate objective was to prevent the taking of the city before the arrival of the army, to make it impossible for the Communists to do anything alone.
“How many troops, Martial, in addition to the armored train?”
“Two thousand police and a brigade of infantry, Monsieur Ferral.”
“And how many revolutionaries who can do something besides talk?”
“A few hundred at the most, who are armed. … As for the others, they’re not worth considering. As there’s no military service here, they don’t know how to use a gun, don’t forget. In February there were two or three thousand of those fellows, if you count the Communists.. They’re no doubt a little more numerous now.”
But in February the gove^rnment army had not been
“How many will follow them?” Martial went on. “But you see, Monsieur Ferral, all that doesn’t get us very far. One would have to know the psychology of the chiefs. …I know that of the men pretty well. The Chinaman, you see. ”
Ferral was looking at him with an expression he had seen before-on rare occasions-and which was enough to silence him: an expression less of contempt, of irritation, than of appraisal. Ferral did not say, in his cutting and somewhat mechanical voice: “Is this going to last much longer?” But he expressed it. He could not bear to have Martial pass off information obtained from his agents as the fruit of his own perspicacity.
If Martial had dared he would have answered: “What difference does it make to you?” He was dominated by Ferral; and his relations with him had been established through orders to which he could only submit. Even as a man he felt him to be superior to himself; but he could not endure his insolent indifference, his way of reducing him to the status of a mechanism, of ignoring him whenever he wanted to speak as an individual and not merely as a transmitter of information. Members of Parliament on missions had told him about Ferral’s effectiveness at the Chamber Committees, before his fall. In the sessions he made such use of the qualities that gave his speeches their clearness and their force that his colleagues detested him more and more every year: he had a unique talent for ignoring their existence. Whereas a Jaures, a Briand, conferred upon them a personal life which, to be sure, they often did not possess, giving the illusion of appealing to each one individually, of wishing to convince them, of involving them in a complicity in which a common experience of life and men united them-Ferral, on the contrary, erected a structure of impersonal facts, and would conclude with: “In view of these conditions, gentlemen, it would thus obviously be absurd. ” He got his way by force or by money. He had not changed, Martial observed.
“And what about Hankow?” asked Ferral.
“We had reports last night. There are zzo,ooo unemployed there, enough to make a new Red army. ”
For weeks goods from three of the companies controlled by Ferral had been rotting on the sumptuous quays: the coolies refused to transport anything.
“What news of the relations between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek?”
“Here’s his last speech,” answered Martial. “For my part, you know, I don’t believe much in speeches. "
“I believe in them. In these at least. It doesn't matter."
The telephone bell. Martial took the receiver.
“It's for you, Monsieur Ferral.”
Ferral sat down on the table.