That night, Searle Bates and Plumer Mills slept in our main dormitory and the Arts Building, respectively, while Lewis Smythe kept Luhai company at our gatehouse. Before turning in, the husky Plumer wept and cursed again, his heavy-jawed face scrunched and his hair damp with sweat. He suffered from pain in his chest caused by being hit twice by the Japanese with rifle butts that morning when he had attempted in vain to prevent them from taking thirteen hundred Chinese soldiers out of the police headquarters. A group of American missionaries had disarmed those men and promised them personal safety, but all the poor fellows had been dragged away and executed in the afternoon. Fifty policemen guarding the Safety Zone were also rounded up and shot for letting the Chinese soldiers enter the neutral district. With the three American men in our camp we felt a little more secure. Minnie stayed with Miss Lou in the Practice Hall, which was more than two hundred yards away from the nearest building, tucked in the southeast corner of campus, while I was in charge of the main dormitory. The college’s two policemen still patrolled, but in plainclothes. In addition, an old watchman, lantern in hand, would make rounds throughout the night.
THE NEXT DAY the Japanese went on looting, burning, arresting men, and attacking women in town. Luckily, it was uneventful at Jinling, except that early in the morning a soldier came from the house across from the front gate with four coolies and dropped two sacks of rice with loud thumps. We were pleased that the Japanese had finally let our camp use the grain and didn’t sell the rice back to us. Some soldiers had seized rations from the camp in Magee’s charge and then sold them back to the porridge plant there “at a discount”—wheat flour was two yuan for a fifty-pound bag and rice five yuan for a two-hundred-pound sack.
Since daybreak, more refugees had been coming to Jinling. Although the buildings were all packed, we still accepted the new arrivals, now that they wanted nothing but a place to stay. Most of them just lounged on the lawns or the sports ground. Looking at the refugees around her, Minnie said she was even more convinced that she’d made the right decision to remain behind. I felt the same. Again the Lord’s words rose in my mind: “Thine is the power and the glory.” That seemed to have new meaning to me now, like a promise.
I recited that line, and Minnie nodded solemnly in agreement.
Around midafternoon, Rulian came and reported that some soldiers had gone into the South Hill Residence. Minnie, Big Liu, and I set out at once for that manor, taking the path that cut a diagonal through a bamboo grove. The second we stepped into the building, we heard laughter from the dining room on the left. Three Japanese were sitting at a table drinking apple juice and spooning compote directly from an eight-pound can. Beyond them the door of the pantry was open, the padlock smashed. Minnie went up to them and shouted, “You can’t do this!”
They all stood up and made for the door, holding the juice bottles and two large floral-cloth parcels, seemingly frightened. Once out of the building, they veered east and dashed away, their calves wrapped in leggings.
As I wondered what was inside the two parcels, Minnie said, “They seem like young boys who know they did something wrong.”
“Some of the Japanese are quite young indeed,” Big Liu said, and pushed up his glasses with his knuckle. He looked frazzled; he suffered from insomnia these days and often complained of a headache.
“Do you think they were hungry?” I asked both of them.
“They could be,” he answered.
“I wouldn’t mind if they came just to eat and drink something, but they must let us know in advance,” Minnie said.
Big Liu shook his bushy head and spoke as if to himself. “They really love American party food.”
Minnie chuckled. I liked Big Liu for his sense of humor as well as for his levelheadedness. Sometimes when he said something funny, he himself didn’t realize it — which made it more deadpan. We went upstairs and found the door of a small storage room ajar. Inside, half a dozen suitcases were cut open or unzipped, all ransacked, women’s clothing scattered around. One of the bags belonged to Mrs. Dennison and another to Donna Thayer, a biology teacher who was in Shanghai at the moment. There was no way to find out what had been stolen, so we closed the suitcases and placed them next to four intact ones sitting behind a tall bookshelf loaded with pinkish toilet tissue. There we saw Dr. Wu’s varnished pigskin chest opened and gutted, but again we couldn’t tell what had been taken.
When we were back at the quadrangle, Minnie saw John Magee speaking to Luhai. Suddenly a burst of gunfire came from the southwest, and everybody stopped to listen until the fusillade subsided.
We went up to Magee and Luhai. The reverend said to Minnie, “I just heard that the Panay was sunk by Japanese warplanes.”
“Good Lord, what about the people on the boat?” she asked.
“Three were killed and more than forty wounded — most of the casualties were sailors.”
“The staff of the embassy is okay?”
“Apparently so. They were rescued.”
My mind began spinning, because Jinling’s portmanteau containing papers, foreign currencies, and Mrs. Dennison’s wedding silver had been aboard the gunboat. I hoped that the trunk was safe and still in the care of the embassy’s staff. If the silverware was lost, Mrs. Dennison might go bonkers. She disliked Minnie, though she was decent to me, mainly because Dr. Wu kept me under her wing. From her first days at Jinling, Minnie must have known that the founding president viewed her as a rival, perhaps because Minnie was bold enough to assume the acting presidency, which no one else dared take, and also because her ability as a leader might pose a threat to the old woman, who demanded loyalty only to herself from the faculty, staff, and even students. Yet Minnie and I agreed that Mrs. Dennison had always regarded Jinling as her home and had dedicated herself to the college. It was this devotion that united the two of them.
ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, more than a company of Japanese troops came to search for Chinese soldiers. Minnie told the commander, a tall man with hollow cheeks, that this camp sheltered only women and children. The head officer, who must have been a colonel and was accompanied by two bodyguards and an adjutant, wouldn’t listen and declared that the Safety Zone Committee had broken its promise to provide sanctuary only for noncombatants, so now the Imperial Army was entitled to weed out all the hostile remnants. True enough — in its original proposal, the committee had claimed that the area would be “kept from the presence of armed men and from the passage of soldiers in any capacity.” But when the letter for the Japanese authorities was composed, none of the committee members had been able to imagine such a turn of events: thousands of Chinese soldiers would come and implore them to save their lives. The foreigners accepted them after collecting their weapons, assuming that the Japanese would follow the common practice in war of treating the capitulated men with basic humanity. Now, in the name of eliminating the former soldiers, the conquerors began to seize whomever they suspected might be a potential fighter.
The search started with the Science Building, and the Japanese wanted to go through every room. If a door was locked and the key was not available right away, a soldier carrying a hefty ax would smash the lock. My heart was hammering as we followed them around. In the second-floor office of the Geography Department were stored six hundred cotton-padded garments for the Chinese troops, made by the neighborhood women the previous fall. Minnie and I had decided to keep them because we believed that the refugees might need winter clothes. Now those jackets and pants could be criminal evidence. How should we explain if they were discovered? Could we say that the Chinese army had forced us to make them? If the Japanese found the clothes, I’d have to step up and invent an excuse before Minnie could respond. She was such a poor liar that they would see through her.