The next morning my intoxicating sense of freedom had gone. I was once more the radio operator on a tramp steamer, the lowest of the low. My right hand was out of action, so that I had to signal with my left, and now in broad daylight, while the ship was at sea, I was still afraid. After a few days, when my hand was better, it passed, especially once I had firmly resolved never to go ashore in China again, except in Hong Kong, which was still tolerable. In the past China had seemed to me only filthy and disgusting, as I knew nothing but the coolies, the docks and the port areas, and then I suddenly saw what lay beyond them: the vast country with its endless arid fields, which people had to fertilize with their own manure to produce a yield, living, that is, from their own excrement; in the fields the millions of graves, the cities where the overpopulation spilt over into the surrounding area, where the stench of food and corpses competed with miasma emanating from the sick living, and among them were the grimacing dragons and statues of idols, the gnawing, never-ending antiquity of it all.
Now I was far removed from this wretchedness, as resigned and grinning as the Chinese themselves, and I could despise it. It had been my experience that the greatest misery lies not in a starving, fatally ill body, but in a tortured mind. Desperately I clung to what was left of the old life, and sought, in order to strengthen it, the company of those who shared my fate, my fellow-mariners, as if I wanted to surround myself with their din, and joined in their conversations and drank with them.
At first I was warmly accepted into the small circle: just as the pious rejoice at the conversion of a Christian, so the drunks rejoice at the fall of a moderate man. But later they started mocking me, since I did not really belong with my past, which I used arrogantly as a barrier between them and me. I could not do it. It is difficult to assume a cultured personality, and it is even more difficult to appear coarse when one is not. After that they began to avoid me. Life on board became hell, a thousand times more unbearable than the real one, because of its very smallness.
But it became a thousand times worse when I was back in my cabin at night. At the beginning all that happened was that it shrank, becoming narrower and narrower until I was nearly stifled; it became a cell that was detached from the ship, and the immensely deep base of the Chinese mainland pressed against the walls. Sometimes I broke out, went to the radio cabin, was alarmed by the instruments, which had become instruments of torture, primitive and refined. I escaped the narrow cell like a bullet fired from the barrel, and collapsed onto an open, wide, yellow, cruel plain. The only problem was that there was nothing on earth but scattered dots, immovable boulders and grey vultures soaring in the sky.
In the morning, awake, I felt increasingly hopeless; I would become a prey if I could not oppose them with a stronger being, but what was I, the most rootless, most raceless person alive, to do? And then it also came when I was sitting on watch with the headphones on. Signals that cannot have been sent by any transmitter kept intervening between my listening and the other signals. I did not dare write them down, though something sometimes came through that resembled a word, but fortunately I knew only English and French. Two words formed themselves quite often, but I managed to forget them. The dream of the cell and the plain became worse.
After three months we put into Hong Kong, and in all that time I had not set foot on shore. I was summoned to the company office. I was unused to walking, and had become like the others: after ten paces I got into a rickshaw, and without saying or asking anything the coolie rode me to the red-light district, where I spent half an hour in one of the houses with a Japanese woman. For the first time in months, a moment’s life. Would it be the last? Softness, melancholy and the bitter, wry aftertaste it all leaves. At the office, I was offered a position on a ship bound for England: the Captain had reported that that I was mentally disturbed. I reflected for a moment and refused, and made out that it was nothing. It was too late: a few months ago I would have seized that chance of saving myself, but now I could no longer escape, being pursued at a great distance was worse.
I was kept on the ship. It moored in the bay for two nights, close to Stonecutter’s Island; I slept soundly and well, as do many condemned men, the night before. I still had time.
III
IN THE EVENING we steamed back out of the bay. The weather was bad, and a mixture of foam and rain blew over the bow, and sometimes over the bridge. The white patch of Waglan Island was like a ghost in the dark and as we passed it, the buoy that always sounds there let out, at long intervals, a bellow like a slaughtered cow. Then came the Lingding rocks, then the Ladrones islands, and we were out in the open sea, in the dead of night.
I was able to get four hours’ sleep and had to take down the weather reports. I woke up on time, but it was as if I had been asleep for months and for the time being would need no further sleep, so completely rested was I, so certain was I that a new life was about to begin, although we were in the middle of the ocean. I switched on the power and waited, with the headphones inevitably round my head, for the weather report from Zi-Ka-Wei, where the Jesuits observe the atmosphere of the Yellow and South China Sea and warn shipping of storms. They watch over the ships, as others do over the welfare of souls. They have many sins to expiate. It took some time, and I read while I waited, but finally the introductory signals came, and I was ready: typhoon originating north of Luzon, moving south-westwards, speed…
I felt something cold on my forehead. I tried to brush it away, still absorbed in receiving the signals, but my hand was grasped, and another claw grabbed me round the neck, while yet another pulled my hand off the signal key and several at once tugged at the headphones.
How did all those hands come to be on me at the same time? I was able to look up for a moment, and then my head was forced down again. The radio cabin was full of Chinese: I had never realized so many people could fit into it; less than half the number of white men could have done so. Even without a revolver against my temple I would not have been able to resist. I could not move, the cabin was so full. They tied me up, then some of them left the cabin, leaving four behind, who smashed the dynamo; they knew what they were doing. I had to show them where the elements were and they were destroyed too. Then I was carried outside. The bridge was full of Chinese, and the Captain stood among them. We were thrown into a cabin together. Some of us were injured and at first were able to lie down, but the engineers were also stuffed into the cabin one by one, so that everyone had to stand up again.
There was no great problem if one did not resist and waited calmly: the ship was steered into a shallow bay until it ran aground. Then the pirates left the ship with the valuables, went ashore somewhere among the mountains and immediately disappeared, while we stayed on board until a torpedo boat with a shallow draught came and took off the rest of the crew, or a storm finished us off. The pirates could not be caught, and the ship could not be refloated. That was the normal outcome. If the torpedo boat came quickly and one had kept one’s possessions, one could just sign on for another ship. The company’s losses were covered by the insurance.
This time it was different, frighteningly different. Usually about twenty men attacked the ship, whereas this gang numbered at least a hundred, as many as there were crew. And then the way they acted proved that there were as many leaders as foot soldiers. Normally one of the officers has to steer the ship with a couple of revolver barrels trained on him. This gang did not need a helmsman. The third different thing was… the typhoon, which only I knew about. If we kept heading straight for the shore, we were bound to encounter it, as we would be heading straight for it.