BY VICKI BAUM

INTRODUCTION

THE town which is the scene of the events here reported exists no longer; its face has been altered, as so often before. There has been fighting in its streets on innumerable occasions, but never fighting so desperate as in the late summer and early autumn of 1937. For eighty-eight days this town was besieged, shelled and bombed. Hundreds of thousands died, and the smell of charred human flesh for long hung in thick clouds above it.

One of the first bombs to be dropped from the air hit the Shanghai Hotel, the large, new building erected four years before, soon after the fighting of 1932. A colonnaded building of eighteen stories, surmounted by its celebrated roof garden, it stood in Nanking Road halfway between the Bund and the English racecourse.

The bomb did considerable damage. All the windows were shattered, and a gaping hole in the facade tore open several rooms, exposing their interior to view. The Japanese maintained that the bomb was dropped by Chinese fliers, whereas the Chinese insisted that the bomb was Japanese. The foreign correspondents inclined to the view that this bomb was meant for the Japanese warships on the Whang-poo River but had been badly aimed by a Chinese airman. Protests were made and apologies were published, for although the Chinese quarters had been shelled to bits from time to time, it was always taken for granted that the International Settlement in the heart of the city was inviolable. Those who had lived long in the East and were well acquainted with its subtle methods of waging war appeared to be convinced that with this bombing the Chinese intended to indicate to the Japanese that they would not tolerate a repetition of what occurred in 1932. On that occasion a detachment of Japanese marines, on the pretext that the Japanese had a share in the International Settlement, occupied the centre of it and abused the neutrality of the International concessions by making them a base for warlike operations.

Whichever side dropped the bomb, the Shanghai Hotel was damaged, many people wounded and nine killed - nine of the thousands who were destined to die on that first day of hostilities.

In the following pages an account is given of the roads that led those nine people to Shanghai, of the course of their lives and of the hour of their death.

B.G. CHANG

CHANG was born in a boat. At night he came into the world, the river lapped against the planks, his mother loosed him from her with a rusty knife. In the morning she was dead. He had no father, the boat was house and home for many people for his family and their children. It found its way with the eyes painted on its bow. A mat laid over a rounded bamboo framework was its roof. His sister, who was seven years older than he, went into the prosperous village where they anchored and begged beans for the orphan; she squeezed a thin milk from them, he sucked it hungrily from her finger-tips. Thus he took hold of life.

He lay wrapped in rags on the bottom of the boat, with only the planks between him and the living water. He watched his sister bending and leaning her weight on the oar and urging the boat forward. The veins stood out on her small arms. When he cried she took him up and tied him on her back and laboured on at the heavy oar. Back and forth, back and forth. The regular motion sent him to sleep. As there were no parents to choose a good name for him, he was simply called Ah Tai, a big one. To his sister he stayed devoted all his life, although she was only a girl. The river was his father and his teacher. He grew tall and strong and pushed his elder cousins aside or threw them into the water. They made merry over him.

He was always hungry, all his thoughts had mostly to do with food. Sometimes the boat lay idle and motionless in a bend of the river below a village. Then food became scarce and finally disappeared altogether. Chang dreamt of noodles, of bread and hot cabbage. He stole garlic from a little acre and chewed a piece of wood as if it were bread. If they had a cargo to take downstream there were good times. Sometimes there was poultry in a cage or a young pig. The men laughed and ate, played Kaipu for little pierced coins, quarrelled, made it up, and their merriment knew no end. The women and children got what was left over. The joy of a full belly came seldom to Ah Tai. Nevertheless he flourished.

The river rose after the summer rains and flooded the fields. It was grey and covered with white mist in the morning and yellow after the rains. Down through the tree roots at its banks it was clear and dark green. Chang grabbed for fish among the roots and took his booty to the fishmongers at the nearest market. His uncle snatched the money out of his hand. Ah Tai stood over the gigantic pots of the itinerant cooks; his round black nostrils distended as he swallowed down the good smell, together with his hungry spittle.

Nobody took any care of him. His head and his jacket were full of lice. His sister undressed him and, kneeling at the river's edge, spread his clothes on a stone and beat them with a stick to wash them. Chang sat on the edge of the boat in the sun, dangling his legs, and felt the warmth tingling on his skin and saw the light reflected from the river making patterns on the boat's side; it looked like lizards made of light. He was hungry. He put on his clothes again as soon as they were dry, folding his trousers round his waist and tying the string tight that served him as a belt. The next moment he was scratching again.

As soon as he had his wits about him he begged in the towns near which they were anchored, and it was not long before he learned how to steal. A handful of chestnuts from a stall or a pumpkin from the open field; great, full, glorious, secret meals.

His sister grew heavy with child, nobody knew who the father was. The river people were not particular, they had little virtue and a lot of fun. The boats plied upstream and downstream, at night they anchored and by morning they were gone. Children were born and there were always more hungry bellies to be filled. The man whom Chang called Uncle beat Elder Sister. Chang watched laughingly, for it was funny. That night he saw Elder Sister bending over the boat's side and throwing something into the water. In the morning her belly was flat again. A month later she began to cough, but she worked on at the oar.

By this time Chang was helping to load and unload the sacks of meal. He hoisted sail, steered, pushed with the pole when they stuck in the mud, piloted the boat past others with shouts and cries. He did not know how old he was, for no one counted his years, but he was now the strongest man on the boat, a young giant with large powerful shoulders. He had a quarrel with his uncle, and the elder man struck him between the eyes with a leather thong. That night Chang jumped ashore from the boat and hid among the graves on a hillside. He was afraid of the spirits, for that reason he shouted rude threats into the darkness. He stayed there until the boat went on and the search for him had been given up. As he was strong, the spirits seemed to fear him and did him no harm. He ate raw cabbage and little red onions which he pulled out of the ground. He was famished with hunger. As the boat was being rowed downstream he set off up-stream.

He came to a neighbourhood he had never seen before, for the boat had always plied only between Sekuang and Gantsing. A temple with a beautiful roof stood on a hill, rich people were being carried up the steep road in litters and chairs. Chang followed, filled with curiosity, for he had never been in a temple. He gazed at the great gilded Buddha in the first courtyard of the temple with open-mouthed astonishment. A bald priest beat a gigantic gong hanging from the pillars. The air was clouded with incense. Priests and pilgrims knelt below the table on which were the incense vessels and the bronze vases full of golden lotus flowers. A god with innumerable arms and hands leaped to view from the darkness of a side altar. In the first courtyard outside the temple the pious were burning money made out of silver and gold paper and dealers sat in rows selling incense and food.

Chang's eyes devoured and devoured all these new and wonderful sights. He stood laughing stupidly from sheer astonishment. The chair bearers were sitting in front of the outer gate eating noodles. A seller of tea was standing behind them pouring tea into blue-and-white cups.

Chang's mouth watered. He went up to them. One of the bearers called out a greeting to him in jest: "Have you eaten?"

Politeness required the answer: "I have eaten." But Chang was entirely uneducated. "No, my belly is empty," he shouted out.

The bearers burst with laughter. One of them held out his bowl in which a little of the meal was left, noodles and vegetables. It was only lukewarm but marvellous all the same. Chang grabbed for the bowl, but the man slapped his hand and the others laughed louder than ever. One of them, an old and toothless one, rolled about with laughter and slapped his thighs in his mirth at the joke. Chang let out and brought his two fists down on the shoulders of the joker like two sledge hammers. The man went small. Chang took the bowl with noodles from him and began to eat. The bearers were still for a moment, then they complimented him on his strength. He laughed good-naturedly and stuffed himself. The man whose noodles he had taken looked surprised. Chang Ah Tai held the bowl to his mouth and crammed in the food with his chopsticks as fast as he could.

After he had eaten he felt fine and great and full of courage. He hung around the bearers and waited for further events. When they carried their patrons down the hill again late in the afternoon Chang kept pace with them, singing the songs that were sung on the river. There were three bearers to each chair, two who carried it and one as spare man. Chang watched with interest how the spare man put his shoulders under the poles and took over from the other man without breaking step. The man who had been relieved went to the edge of the path, coughed and spat, wiped the sweat from his face with his arm, and then followed the chair until it was time for him to relieve one of the others again. "I could carry without being relieved," Chang thought, and he said so too. The bearers laughed about him pantingly. One of them, after being relieved, dropped behind; he doubled up and vomited at the wayside. He was an elderly man and he had a piece of red plaster stuck to his ailing body with a holy saying on it.

Chang stood beside him and watched him being sick. "How much if I carry for you?" he asked.

The man, more exhausted now that he had emptied his stomach, waved him aside.

But Chang insisted. In the end he took the bearer's place and got no money but a second helping of noodles.

He slept with the bearers in the village at the foot of the hill and stayed with them for a while. Now he had enough to eat every day, and he saw many people who came by boat on pilgrimage to the temple on the hill. Strict old ladies with their slave girls, fat, wealthy men, with swollen livers and short of breath, scholars with faces like ivory. Once a mandarin came to visit the temple with his son in order to pray for success in the imperial examination which the young man was going to take in Peking. He had his own bearers, runners, outriders, and his litters had their blue curtains drawn. As Chang was well nourished he sang and talked a lot, even when he was going uphill, and so he learned a great deal about the comings and goings of the gentry he carried. After his meal at night he fell asleep at once on the ground, wrapped in a tattered mat. Just before he fell asleep he was always in the boat on the river, hearing the waves lap against its sides, smelling the moist air that smelt of reeds and rushes and many fish, listening to the subdued coughing of his sister. But he did not know that he was homesick for all this.

It was only that after a time he grew restless, although he was prospering and his belly was contented as never before. So one day he left the hill and the temple and went off, this time downstream. He did not know what drove him, for no one had beaten him. The bearers were witty fellows, he had learned some funny stories from them and also a little politeness through his relations with the great.

For a time he helped to pull a heavy boat upstream, and the rope chafed his shoulders raw until his skin got used to it and grew calluses. This time he received money, one piece of silver and seventeen coppers. He bought himself straw sandals and a worn blue jacket, for his was gone and he had worked naked from the waist.

It got cold, he took shelter in a peasant's hut where there were only women and children. The men had all died, black in the face, of a plague. "I can do the work of five men," Chang boasted, and the women surveyed his gigantic frame with respect and pleasure. There was not much work for him to do, but bandits often descended on the village from the hills and pillaged the peasants. Chang knocked three of them down, and one of them did not get up again. Since then the house had been left in peace. There was little to eat, although the women kept almost nothing for themselves and tried only to content their protector. The silkworms ate dwarf-oak leaves on the frames; it sounded like the steady, steady patter of rain. Chang slept with all the women who were not too old and left his seed behind him when he went on his way in the spring.

Once he saw the boat on which he had been born gliding past, and he called to Elder Sister, who was standing at the oar. But she looked in front of her as though asleep, as was her habit, and Chang lay down again in the grass on the bank, for he had no desire to meet his uncle.

Early in the summer of that year the dragon bestirred himself and the river went far beyond its banks and flooded the villages and towns. It carried houses and cattle and corpses on its back to the sea, and great misery overwhelmed the Province-East-of -the-Mountains. When the floods subsided and the people set about rebuilding their houses, Chang helped to carry the beams for the house of a teacher and assisted the carpenters.

Lo Si, the teacher, was one of the many scholars whose lives ran to waste while they tried to pass the three imperial examinations: the first in the district capital, the second in the provincial capital, the third in the northern capital itself, in Peking, in the temple of Confucius. In his youth the teacher had passed the first examination with great distinction. Then he was prevented for two periods of three years from taking the next examination, as he had to go into mourning first for his grandfather, then for his mother. When after nine years he went up for the second examination, his head had grown stiff and forgetful, his excitement made the brush tremble in his hand. He failed, went back to his village, resolved to wait until the prescribed three years were over and then to venture a second time. When he failed this time too, his ambition withered. Now he had settled down in his native village, giving lessons to the small boys for slender payment which often consisted only of eggs and flour.

Yet the teacher had handed down his ambition to his son, a lively boy with red cheeks and a pleasing voice. Chang quickly made friends with him and learned from him the first eight characters: Heaven, Earth, Sun, Moon, Mountain, Water, Ground and Tree. The old teacher also explained to him one day the meaning of the symbol carved in the door of the house where Chang had often seen it: a circle divided into two parts, one black and one white, whose curved edges fitted completely one within the other. This was the sign Yin and Yang, the male and the female elements, Heaven and Earth, Cold and Heat, Light and Darkness, Day and Night - all things that are opposed and together make the whole: the meeting of the poles, the balance in the sum of all things. To Chang it meant Hunger and Satiety, Poor and Rich. He never forgot the time he spent with the teacher, for from that time on he was free of lice.

Working now at this, now at that, and always following the river's course until it became flatter and broader, and slower like an ageing man, at last he reached the sea. There by the sea was the great city Chang Ah Tai had already heard of. He could not help learning a great deal on his wanderings, and now he had left the river people far behind in understanding. He did not hide his learning under a bushel; on the contrary, he was proud of it, showed it off on all occasions. "This is the sign Tien," he would say. "It represents the sky." His companions would look with awe at the sign which could be seen in many shops: the sign of the sky, immense and mighty, with a little man sitting beneath it and eating from his bowl. This picture expressed complete contentment, and Chang himself knew this contentment well. Yes, indeed, a little man leaning against the great sky, but sitting on the earth and his rice bowl full.

Chang had never seen a town so large as this. For three days he merely stood about and gaped. The streets of the silk dealers, the open-air kitchens, the bakers, the basket weavers, the coffin makers, the candle makers, the incense sellers, and then the markets, the stalls of beef, pork, poultry; then the smoked ducks hanging in rows by their long necks; the sacks of rice from the South; the quiet stores of the tea merchants, who sat in the elegance of their silken robes among their ten thousand tin boxes; the stags' antlers, dried snakes and tigers' hearts exhibited by the medicine men. Ten thousand banners and flags hung above the streets, and lanterns and signs of every sort; all covered with written characters inviting customers to enter, praising the goods or perhaps merely offering a prayer for happiness and contentment. Since Chang had learned to understand a few of the signs he was troubled by many others which were incomprehensible to him. He pushed his way through the crowd, and his shoulders were always above the others. The children ran after him and cried out: "Big one, big one, was your father a dragon?"

Following the advice of a friend, Chang asked his way to the house in which the Porters' Guild had its headquarters. It was a little house near the harbour, and two old men who were sitting there sipping tea, clothed in long black robes which though not of silk were of great elegance, asked him certain questions. "It is known that the men of Shantung are the tallest men in the Middle Kingdom, but you are as a seven-storied pagoda compared with them," the elder of the two said. Chang bowed in acknowledgment. He became a member of the guild, work was found for him and he paid his contributions.

A thousand ships of every sort and size lay in the harbour. Although Chang Ah Tai had sometimes heard on his wanderings about ships of such a size as this, he had taken it all for fairy-tales and tall talk. But there they lay in the water, larger than the temple on the hill. They could roar like beasts and exhale black smoke like gigantic dragons. They were the ships of the foreign devils, and Chang might have feared them if he had known what fear was. He carried coals on his back up long narrow swaying plankways; a procession of men carried coal into the bellies of the great ships, going and returning, a chain of coal heavers that never ceased from sunrise until the yellow dusk. They sang the coolie song that sounds like a groan and helps to regulate the breath. But Chang's breath was big and inexhaustible. In the harbour he saw, for the first time, the foreign devils of whom lately there had been so much talk. They were hideous and impertinent, and it was said that they cooked and ate small children. Chang, who was very fond of children, could not think of it without feeling a hot tremor in his huge fists. Most of the dock porters were afraid of the foreigners, but he went right up to them, measured his height and strength against theirs; he was sure that he was stronger than their Number One man.

As Chang now had regular work he nearly always earned enough to feed himself well. There were tea-houses for the porters and seamen in the narrow streets along the harbour, and at night a dense crowd moved to and fro under the lanterns. Women's voices could be heard singing from many of the houses; that's where the girls were. Chang began to do without his second bowl of noodles and saved the money in his girdle in order to buy himself his pleasure with a whore. When he had saved up enough copper coins to exchange for two small silver pieces he went to the tea-house from where the singing came. Men sat below eating and drinking as in every drinking shop, but a narrow stair led up and an old woman drew him into a small room.

"How much money has the gentleman?" she asked.

Chang Ah Tai showed his two silver pieces; they looked lost and small in his immense palm.

The woman pulled a face and spat. "Do you come here with those two dwarfs?" she asked contemptuously.

A girl came in, and Chang was so excited that he did not see what she looked like, his eyes were riveted on her tiny, embroidered, red silk shoes. When he went up to the girl she pushed him back and laughed. "Go away. You stink"' she cried out. "I have nothing to do with stinking porters." The old woman joined in at once in a shrill voice and called him a crazy egg. Chang's face flushed at the insult. He had just enough presence of mind to call the girl a lean, lazy whore and the old woman a daughter of a bitch. He put the two silver pieces back in his belt, kicked over a wooden bucket, spilling the water over the mats, and tramped down the stairs and out of the door.

Although he tried to put the gnawing and smarting humiliation out of his mind it must have remained hidden somewhere in his memory, for Chang the porter, who up to then had been contented and happy as long as he had food and sleep, began to be tortured by ambition. Now he would stare into vacancy for hours, indulging in a beautiful dream. In this dream it always happened that he arrived at the house of the sing-song girls borne in a litter. He got out, he was clothed in fine silk raiment, wearing over it a jacket of heavy black silk such as he had seen the wealthy merchants wear. He held his hands in his sleeves as he entered the house, and his servant flung down a handful of large, heavy silver pieces. The girls threw themselves down and scuffled for the coins. Chang saw the girls distinctly, heard the ring of the silver pieces. He was never quite clear whether he then would leave the house again, observing that the girls were too old and ugly for a man of his rank, or whether he would graciously permit them to entertain him with their arts. Nor did he know whence the money and his prosperity were to come, for rich was rich and poor was poor and there was no bridge leading from one to the other.

At that very time, however, there was a great rising against the foreign devils and many were killed, for so it was ordered by the Empress, the Old Tiger who lived in the Northern Capital, and these orders were proclaimed throughout the country. Chang armed himself with an old razor which he bought in the market - for he had now got beyond stealing - and he and a large band broke into a house and killed two of the men and one woman. While the rest were plundering and finally setting fire to the house he quietly searched the clothing of the dead. Sewn into the lining of the foreign-looking coat of the elder of the two men he found some paper notes printed with foreign characters. He did not know whether this was the money of the foreigners, but he knew that the paper must be of value, for otherwise the dead devil would not have hidden it on his person. He cut the shining buttons from the woman's jacket with his razor, for they too looked precious, and left the house just before the blazing roof fell in.

When order was restored again in the town, Chang confided his loot to a money-changer and received forty taels for the foreign paper, enough money for a mandarin. Now that he could realize his dream, he was reluctant to throw away the good solid money on whores. Instead of that he went to a pawnbroker, whom he had got to know in a tea-house, and offered him the money at interest, for money begets money as everyone knows. "I must make money, for it is time I took a wife and had sons," he explained td the pawnbroker who listened with a polite smile. " That is so, that is so," he agreed. He drew up a document, which Chang unfortunately could not read, and kept the money, promising to pay him a piece of silver every month as interest. He himself got six silver pieces a month on the capital, but Chang did not know that yet, although he was too clever to be a porter for ever.

Foreign warships put in at the harbour, guns thundered and regiments of foreign soldiers came out of the ships' bellies. They all looked exactly alike and marched as stiffly as if they were not living people but figures of wood to frighten the people. Some great war lords were with them and took over the command of the town. The soldiers soon began to dig fortifications, and there was no more talk of killing all the foreign devils, for there were too many of them and they carried fire sticks over their shoulders.

One night when Chang was sitting in the harbour peacefully humming to himself and looking up into the sky where the moon was sailing like a boat, he happened to get into a dispute with some of the foreign soldiers. For once he was not in the mood for a scrap; the night was beautiful, he felt as happy and contented as the little man on the sign who leans against the heavens, but the soldiers, three young fellows with vacant eyes, were drunk and above themselves and they wanted to show the world what great face they had. They kicked Chang, who lost his balance and fell from the paved edge of the quay into the water. It tasted of mud and the refuse of the new town drains, and he got out dripping, breathless, very angry. The soldiers were still standing there laughing, shouting down to him in their barbarous speech.

Chang Ah Tai wiped the water from his eyes and looked at the soldiers. They wore small swords at their sides, but they did not have their fire sticks with them. He remembered the thunder of the ships' guns and was about to go on his way, dripping and insulted as he was. They shouted something after him, he heard their noisy, hard-soled feet following him. Dirty barbarians, he thought; for that was how they were described in many edicts. They overtook him, one of them barred his way. Chang pushed him aside. The soldier swore, he swore in Chang's own language. "A whore bore you, fatherless one," he shouted loudly and distinctly.

Chang had never known his mother, and it did not occur to him that the soldier was shouting out the only Chinese words he knew. He raised his fist, and it came down on the soldier with the force of a sledge hammer. The other two threw him to the ground. He defended himself, for now rage roused all his strength. He knelt on the chest of the one he had felled, and pressing his thumbs into his eye sockets he beat his skull with all his strength again and again against the stone pavement of the quay. He felt the man beneath him go lip and die.

A cold sweat tan down into his mouth, but he stood up and, thrusting the two others aside, tan away. His wind was good and he knew the harbour. He concealed himself in a little boat under the bows of a large ship. Next morning the harbour was searched for him. His friends of the Porters' Guild hid him for a few days, then they got frightened. His closest friend advised him to flee, for the foreigners had now put a reward on his head and it was certain that someone would betray him.

It was autumn and there were grey mists over the red-and-yellow foliage as Chang once mote set out on his travels. The pawnbroker had refused to deliver up to Chang's friends the forty taels, and Chang bad not ventured to put himself in his hands by going in person. The loss tasted bitter, but instead of repining he gained new impetus from it, as he had from the disastrous visit to the brothel.

At the beginning of the winter Chang joined a gang of bandits and robbers who lived in huts in the mountains. They were a wretched, famished lot, and it was little they could extort from the peasants in the district. They had given their leader the name Hung Tsi, the Red, because he had a large burn on his left cheek. He was a slow-witted man, and he had to eat a great deal to keep up his strength. He was now lean and wasted and was fond of telling boastful stories of the courage and strength he had shown in past adventures. Chang laughed him to scorn, for he himself was aware of hunger only in his belly and not in the muscles of his arms or in the adventurous courage of his heart. As the peasants of the district had made a complaint to the imperial prefect of the district, a body of soldiers was sent against the bandits, and the peasants were sorry that they had added this new peril to the old one.

The Red was killed in a fight with the soldiers; Chang led the survivors to safety and became their leader. In the new spring he moved off downstream with them to the mountain and the temple he knew already. But they did not haunt the populous, paved roads by the river's bank. They kept to the hidden trails in the hills. Chang had bigger and more enterprising ideas; he was tired of extorting bread or a handful of flout from impoverished peasants. The whole district was in distress, for the silkworms had got a sickness and died, and the mulberry trees were unprofitably occupying ground which ought to have been sown with grain.

In his years of restless wandering and hard labour, ambition must have been mounting in Chang's heart like a deep water whose depth could not be plumbed. He could not endure staying where he was; he had to go on to something else. Perhaps this uncommon and peculiar discontentedness was due to his having been begotten and born on a moving boat and on flowing water. In any case, Chang Ah Tai, as leader of a band of robbers, was not content with petty theft: he went all out for a big scoop.

In the village at the foot of the hill on which the temple stood, and also among the bearers, he had spies who let him know when unusually wealthy and important pilgrims were coming. By this means he got news of the pilgrimage of Wu Tsing the banker, who had arrived by boat with his own retainers but without his own bearers. Chang held his people down until the banker was leaving again and being carried down from the temple in the dusk; then he fell on the train and the bearers ran away, for they were in the game. The banker's retainers put up just enough fight to preserve their face, and then took refuge in a junk. They then bargained from a distant village about the ransom and sent food and warm coverings for the prisoner, who was in poor health. Chang Ah Tai did all he could to treat the banker as a guest while his agents negotiated with the agents of Wu Tsing's family at the foot of the temple hill. He waited on him, told him the stories and jokes he had picked up in the course of his travels, and it was only a pity that the banker, who came from the South, could hardly understand his northern speech. He played Kaipu and Mahjong with him, games he had learned in the tea-houses of Kiaochow, and he sat by with his mouth watering while Wu Tsing ate the food sent for him and which Chang scrupulously handed over. His thoughtful family sent opium too, and under its soothing influence the banker came at last to take great pleasure in the stalwart young bandit.

Wu Tsing's affairs were not in a flourishing condition. His health and energy were undermined by opium. His doctors had advised him to give up smoking it, and this had caused him acute physical pains and restlessness of mind. For this reason he had gone on pilgrimage to the famous temple in order to pray for peace of mind and the fortitude to give up the vice. He had taken to the opium pipe when his three sons died and his sorrow was not to be borne.

Chang thought over all the banker told him; he thought it over so intently that he could not sleep. When he had thought it out to the end he made his proposal. He forfeited a part of the ransom and asked in return to be taken into Wu Tsing's bank, which was far away in the South in the town of Hangchow on the Western Lake. Fantastic as this demand appeared at first, the banker finally had no choice but to fall in with it. Possibly, too, his weary heart had become so deeply attached to the robust young man that he did not wish to part from him. The ransom was divided among Chang Ah Tai's band and Wu Tsing took Chang away with him. And thus began the career that made of Chang Ah Tai the banker Chang, one of the richest and most influential men of China.

"A coolie, yet he has no monkey's heart but the heart of a lion," Wu Tsing said when Chang made his first ten thousand taels for the bank. Wu Tsing was a tired man, inclined to caution, and he had conducted his business on the lines of making small loans to merchants of good standing who were certain to pay back. But where there is no risk there is little gain, as Chang knew, although he could not count beyond his fingers. He knew how to gamble, and as he had no fear he was always successful. He won wealth as he had his first dish of noodles - by force and brutality and fearlessness. He financed the great landowning families. He seized their land if they did not pay punctually at New Year, and he grew opium on all the land he got possession of in this way. A case of opium fetched over six thousand taels, more than a case of silver. He bribed officials and made them his puppets. The bank's money was at the service of great men, magistrates and prefects, if they needed it to retain their face, and in return they were his friends and did all they could for him. Wu Tsing went back to his opium pipe and left his young partner a free hand.

At first Chang, who came from the North, felt himself a foreigner in this southern land. The people were different to look at, they spoke another language. They were yellow, small, and their skin had an oily sheen Among them he looked like the big figure of the red-faced guard in the temple of Lin Ying, and they laughed at the way he spoke. He did not mind and laughed louder than they did. In time he realized that he was not a foreigner but after all a Son of Han, just like the people of Hangchow. The banker, Wu Tsing, his boss, undertook his education, and soon Chang shone like a freshly minted silver tad with his new learning and polite manners. As soon as he began to enrich both himself and the bank, Wu Tsing gave him a new and better name. Thenceforward Chang was known no longer as Ah Tai, which was a worthless appellation, but as Bo Gum, precious gold.

"I am rich enough to buy myself eyes, ears and understanding," Bogum Chang boasted. He sent for the poor village schoolmaster in whose house he had learned to read the first eight characters. The teacher was thankful to come, and Chang settled him and his whole family in an outer court of his house, for by this time he had even a house of his own. It was the old rambling house of a great family which had fallen on bad times and let it go to ruins. On its outer walls there were still traces of red paint to be seen, the token of imperial favour in earlier days. It was situated on the slope of a hill near the lake; there were courtyards and gardens, bamboos. and pine trees, ponds and tiny bridges, artificially Constructed cliffs and winding paths and galleries connecting the various buildings and pavilions.

The schoolmaster was but ill acquainted with the southern dialect, but he made great parade of the mandarin speech of the educated, and the glamour of his culture was reflected on Chang just as Chang's wealth gilded the existence of the needy teacher. Bogum Chang took him about with him whenever there was any occasion for reading documents. He made use of him as old men with weak eyes make use of spectacles. But at night Chang sat down with paper and paintbrush and learned the difficult art of tea ding and writing. There was no need for him to know the ten thousand characters required by a student; in a month he could distinguish most of the two hundred and fourteen chief characters, and in a year he knew about six hundred letters - enough to read the edicts, trade signs and contracts that came his way.

Once more he sent out messengers to the province of Shantung to inquire for the boat of the Chang family that plied with cargo between Sekuang and Gantsing. The schoolmaster wrote an elaborate letter in which Chang informed his family that there was room for them all in his house and that he, Chang, the banker, invited them to do him the honour of eating his rice. As the river people could not read, Chang gave the messengers the same message in briefer words, and about three months later, on the fourteenth day of the seventh month, two of his messengers returned with the news that his honourable family had just entered the north gateway of the town. Chang ordered his chair-bearers, put on his most gorgeous dress and went to meet his family borne on the shoulders of his own coolies in his own palanquin. He had taken care to send plenty of fine clothes with the messengers and had impressed on them that they were to escort his relations into the town in a befitting manner. And now there they were, seven mouths to feed, including the children - his old uncle, lean and bent, his younger uncle with wife and sons, his ancient grandmother, who was blind and had always lain in the bottom of the boat looking like a dirty little bundle of old clothes, and his sister, bent with labour, gnarled as a root, in an embroidered robe with a fan in her hand, coughing and spitting. "Even the Emperor has relations in straw sandals," the schoolmaster said, quoting the old saying.

They were all struck dumb as they were carried through the black, metal-plated doorway into the first court of Chang's house and as the doorkeeper bowed before them and exclaimed: "The great and honourable family of the great lord Chang has come!" The men were as brown as old wood, their hands were twisted with labour, and the women and girls had large feet that had never been bound up; but Chang was a man of too strong a character to be ashamed of his own people. "I was born on a boat and I have been a coolie," he often said without shame, and it sounded almost like a boast. "But the strength of my forefathers in me has raised me to the position of a rich man." He had tablets of his ancestors made, and set them up so that he could bow before them daily, as was the practice in great families. As he had suffered much from hunger, there were always plentiful offerings of rice and fruit before the altar. But on special feast days he offered his forefathers pigs roasted whole. He bought a fine coffin for his old grandmother and had it placed beside her bed to rejoice her heart. Though she was blind she could feel it with her gnarled hands and was so flattered that she giggled like a young girl. Only his old uncle could not refrain from saying: "And so you have gone over to the rice-eaters and made your fortune among the dwarfs." And he said that because, if Chang had towered above the men of the Province-East-of-the-Mountains, here in the South he was a giant among dwarfs. He had two good cooks in his household, and soon he grew as heavy and stout as he was tall, for now he ate all the food of which before he had only dreamed As for Wu Tsing, the old banker, he called Chang son and praised him for all he did.

Owing to the restless and unsettled way in which he had spent his youth, Chang had long passed the age when his parents would have had him married if they had been alive. He had long since blotted out his disastrous adventure with the whores in Kiaochow, and there were plenty of pretty young slave girls in his house who were sold to him for a handful of coppers. But now he became impatient to beget sons, and Wu Tsing sent out his own wife to find the right bride for Chang.

Lilian, the lotus flower, was the daughter of a magistrate who was entitled to the imperial distinction of the coral button on his cap. It was said that Lilian was sixteen years old and had had the best of educations. Although no man had ever seen her, since she always resided in the inner court of her father's house, the fame of her beauty was spread through the markets and streets by slaves and slave girls. As a child she had been betrothed to a cousin of the third degree, but the young man was robbed and murdered in an inn when he was on his way to the northern capital to sit for the third examination. Thus she was free for other suitors.

Bogum Chang had made up his mind to marry into the family of an official belonging to the literati. Lilian's father, one of the greatest and most distinguished persons in the province, had got deeply into debt owing to various circumstances. He had had to come to the assistance of the family of the murdered young man when they had to equip soldiers to catch and execute the murderers. Also he was one of the few who obeyed the old and strict imperial edict against opium and had given up the cultivation of it on his lands. As he drew no salary he was supposed, as all other officials were, to extort money from the people by abusing his office. But the magistrate had a gentle hand and could not clench his fist. His income had become smaller year by year while he could not, without losing face, restrict the size of his household, the pomp of his funeral celebrations, the number of his servants, slaves and coolies, or diminish the expenses of hospitality and the number of presents he gave. So he had borrowed large sums in one quarter and another, which were gladly advanced to him. Many of the lenders may have had no thought of repayment; they would have been content with the interest and with the advantages that came of serving a magistrate. Chang bought all these debts off the people, and this lent considerable force to his suit. His ruthlessness in calling in debts was notorious, and the magistrate knew that New Year's Day would not go by without costing him dignity and face if he were not able to pay the bank; so he submitted to the undesired proposal with a polite and inscrutable smile. When he handed over his daughter to the one-time coolie he may have felt as a poor man does who sells his child as a concubine. But the subtle and enlightened mandarin gave no outward sign; the documents were drawn up and the wedding took place with all pomp. The red silk curtains of the palanquin in which Lilian was carried to the house of her husband were so richly embroidered with gold that the people in the street stood still exclaiming their admiration. There was also a long train of porters following with clothing and household goods which were partly hired for this pageant and partly belonged to the bride's dowry. For some days before the wedding all the gifts were displayed in the magistrate's house, and visitors came and went and marvelled at the hairpins and the jewellery of precious jade which the bridegroom had sent to the bride. But Lilian sat with her youthful friends and wept, as convention demanded, and besides she was in great fear of the man who, it was said, looked like a gigantic demon.

When Bogum Chang knelt with his bride on the mat before the ancestral altar and shared wine and rice with her in token of their union, he was as excited as he had once been in the house of the sing-song girls, and again he saw nothing but the tiny feet in the embroidered shoes. Lilian too cast down her eyes and wafted intoxicating breaths of perfume; and a little later Chang saw her hands as well - fingers of carved ivory. His chest expanded with great laughter. He made her his wife in the intimacy of the night within the drawn curtains of the marriage bed, and it made him laugh again and again to feel how small and finely turned she was. And her skin was like finest silk which has laid in the sun, and her limbs were warm and supple and young, and his property. He could feel her fine ribs beneath his hands; and he was careful not to break something so fragile. For the first time a woman inspired the feeling which he had only known before when he lifted up a child. But he did not know that this was tenderness.

Lilian served him thenceforward with great politeness, and he sometimes caught himself in the act of wondering about her. He would have given a lot to know whether she was happy or sad, whether she cared for him or whether she was afraid of him. But her eye's were always downcast, her voice gentle and her gestures expressive of a refinement and politeness that betrayed nothing. Now that Chang had his wife in his bed he paid no attention for weeks to the slave girls in his courtyards, and every one of his limbs seemed to have its own joy and contentment. During this time, too, he saw for the first time that his house was not only expensive and smart but beautiful: the floors polished as smooth as mirrors with Ningpo polish, the pillars which supported the 'narrow galleries lacquered red, veil-tailed fish in the little ponds, flowers and trees, shadow and scent in all the courts.

The house stood on a hill, and from the gallery in the third courtyard you could look down on the lake. In the distance on the other side of the lake a slender, tall, needle pagoda rose into the sky, the hills lay peacefully in the dusk, the water was still and smooth, and from the pavilion in the middle of the lake people like dots, with lanterns in their hands, moved through the evening over the Bridge-of-the-Nine-Windings. Wild geese, emblem of marriage, flighted high above with the soft beat of their wings. Music and far-away laughter came floating up from the boats on the lake. Chang had the symbol Yin and Yang carved in the outer gates of his house' and painted in gold and red, and this time it meant for him: man and woman. His life felt round and unified within him the two signs that completed one another.

In the third month of his marriage his Sister announced that his wife bore a child within her, for Lilian confided in the eider woman as though she were her mother. Chang had sucked his earliest nourishment from her finger-tips, now she served his young wife with devoted affection. There was great joy in the Chang household, and the women had themselves carried in their curtained litters to the Temple-of-the-Purple-Cloud, to pray for the birth of a son. In the first flush of his pride Chang invited friends in, and there was much eating and still more drinking and a great tumult and disorder in the hall. But Chang was too strong to be affected by wine, next morning he went about his business with a head as hard and clear as before. Yet the soft light and peace that lay over the first weeks had fled, and soon he was once more an honoured guest at the teahouses and brought light girls into his house, for one night or ten nights.

When the time drew near, Chang went secretly and alone the fifteen li to the rock temple which was called In-the-Shadow-of-the-Spirits, feeling rather ashamed, for prayers were the business of women. He turned to the god of happiness, Mi Lei Fo, in whom he had most confidence because he was fat and laughed. But instead of praying, burning paper money and putting sticks of incense in the holders on the altar, he menaced the god with evil imprecations in case a girl should be born and promised him a hundred taels in spirit money and candies in return for the birth of a man child. Chang was a good man of business and did not pay for goods until they were delivered. The god seemed to take these curses and promises to heart, for on the seventh day of the eighth month Lilian bore a son with a golden skin, and when he opened his tiny mouth to cry the women saw that the new-born baby already had a tooth, which was a great miracle and gave promise of boundless might in the days to come. The astrologer who cast the horoscope of the hour of his birth foretold that the first-born son of the house of Chang would be a leader of thousands, mightier than a war lord. But he concealed the fact that the stars prophesied an early death.

The son was given the name of Yutsing, which means a star, because the little shining tooth in his mouth looked like a star and because the man in the fairy-story with a mole like a star became the leader of thousands. On his first birthday the relatives and friends came to wish him 'joy. They showed the child all kinds of objects, money and jade, paint-brush and books, a flute and a sword. His future could be told from the object he grasped. But Yutsing took hold of nothing he was offered; instead he flourished his tiny fists and knocked everything over. Chang, the father, laughed out loud. "He is going to be a coolie as his father was," he shouted in his mirth.

Two years after the birth of Chang's son, a new edict against the cultivation and use of opium was issued, and this edict, which gave three years' grace for the common people 'but imposed the severest penalties on officials and mandarins who could not break themselves of the vice within half a 'year, was taken very seriously by those in authority over towns, districts and provinces. Chang's father-in-law exerted all his power and influence to carry out the edict in his district and advised the peasants to cultivate more tea, the celebrated tea of Chekiang. But Bogum Chang, who could smell a spring of water when it was three li away, had a good nose for money also. If less opium was grown, then its price would go up: this was his very simple calculation. He had a discussion with his old partner, who spent most of his time in' drowsy contentment, and one day, not long after, he had himself carried to the house of the fire wagons which had been built a short while ago outside the town. He got without fear into one of the little houses which were attached behind the head of the dragonlike monster, and travelled in it to the City-by-the-Sea, Shanghai.

Bogum Chang had often already done business with foreigners in his bank, when they wanted to rent land in the bank's possession. He liked doing business with them, for they were too stupid to bargain over the price and there was no need to lose time over politeness, as they were entirely ignorant of good manners and, further, they kept their promises. It made him laugh to heat his friends call the foreigners devils, for devils are crafty and sly and these red-haired people were exactly the opposite. They did inexplicable' things, such 'as collecting new-born girls and feeding them instead of destroying or selling them; they opened schools for coolie children whose fathers could pay nothing in return; they encouraged all the sick of the town to come to their white house and put them in good clean beds and gave them medicine and occasionally even made them well - all without payment and for no apparent reason.' Since the publication of the opium edict they did a new thing. They endeavoured to help those who were afraid of the punishment and could not break themselves of the habit of smoking, when their pains became unendurable and the craving for the Great Smoke made them go mad and writhe like worms. They took them into that house of theirs, locked them in and gave them soothing medicines and watched over them until they were cured of the vicious habit. Chang laughed as he tried to explain the folly of the foreigners to his old partner: "First they smuggle the dirt into the country. With the money they make on it they build their senseless schools and sick-houses. Then they go and cure the people of the opium they have sold them. If nobody smoked opium any more in the Middle Kingdom, where would they get the money for themselves and their servants?" Wu Tsing shook his head and could say nothing but: "They are devils and they ought to be driven out."

Chang had sent one of his nephews to the foreigners' school to learn their language. Now he had taken the young man into his bank to assist him as interpreter in his dealings with the foreigners. But he did not entirely trust him and felt sure he would make higher profits if he understood the language himself. So he had his nephew explain to him the characters and the words of those stupid devils, and he soon found out that they were in truth barbarians, as his honoured father-in-law always said. A three-year-old child could take in their bellyful of letters in a day, their language was poor and had only one pitch of voice and one word where his own language had five tones of voice and fifty words. In order to help out their poverty they twisted and contorted their Words to give them a fine appearance; but Chang lost no time over these tortuosities.

In the wagon, which bore him along more swiftly than a storm, were seated two foreigners whom he had never seen before. Chang tried his linguistic abilities on them, and they not only understood him but seemed to be overcome with joy that he could speak to them. He drank tea with them, in which jasmine flowers floated, and a servant went round and poured on boiling water as often as he had drunk up his tea. Chang did not believe the official at the station when he said how short the journey would be to the distant town. Therefore he had taken a servant with him, who sat trembling a corner holding a large bundle with food for his master on his lap. Chang invited the foreigners to join him at his meal, and finally it became a feast in which all his fellow-travellers took part. The foreigners brought out bottles, in which they had their strong and burning sort of wine, and if Chang had not been a giant at drinking, as he was in all else, it would have gone to his head. His servant in any ease was ill merely from the speed, although he had drunk nothing, and vomited in a corner. Two of the other passengers sank to the floor and fell asleep there, while Chang chewed melon seeds and adroitly spat out the husks upon them.

Although there were many marvels in Shanghai, Chang lost no time in marvelling at them. He was pleased to see that there were buildings as much taller than other buildings and ships as much bigger than other ships as he himself was taller and bigger than other, men. He visited Wu Tsing's business friends, and they in turn introduced him to their business friends. He found that where he made ten thousand taels and thought himself a big man, the banks here made a hundred thousand. Shanghai was the open door through which opium poured into the country. The foreigners paid no attention to the edict, and the laws that had their origin in the northern capital did not bind them. Also a subterranean murmur of discontent ran through the Chinese quarters of Shanghai, and Chang learned for the first time that some provinces were resolved to shake off the dominion of the Manchus. A young man got up in a teahouse after he had drunk too much yellow rice wine and made a speech: "How long are we going to run around with long pigtails like slaves or like buffaloes whose master has burnt his brand on them? The foreign oppressors have laid this upon us as a sign of subjection, and we obey like sheep. A pigtail hanging from the head of a Chinese is a sign that he is a slave of the Manchus. Who rules the Middle Kingdom? The Old Tiger? The palace eunuchs in Peking? The mandarins who squeeze the marrow from our bones so that they can grow fat and lazy? When will you wake, China, and throw off your chains?"

Chang put his hand in dismay to his long, smooth pigtail, of which he had always been proud. You learn some new things in this town, he thought in amazement. An elderly man with the bent shoulders of a scholar said in a loud tone - and his voice had the ring of common sense after the mouthing of the young man: "Confucius teaches: A good man in the service of the sovereign always strives to show the utmost loyalty in his master's presence and in his leisure hours considers how to make good the mistakes his master may have committed." The young man sprang to his feet again. "Confucius did not know our rulers," he shouted. "He never taught that we had to obey thieves and blackmailers who break our rice bowls. He taught: Set yourself against wrong commands." His voice broke in his excitement; someone crowed in a corner as unpractised cockerels crow, and another shouted: "Without pigtails we shall be laughed at as tailless dogs," and the dispute was drowned in laughter.

Next morning Chang bought newspapers, Chinese as well as English, and after three days he understood something of stocks and shares and the money market. He also observed that the smarter men of the town did not tie their trousers round their ankles and that jackets were worn without sleeves. He paid a visit to a barber's shop, the like of which he had never seen before, and he paid with silver instead of coppers and for days after he smelled as lovely as a whore. He found plenty to amuse him in this town, with friends and feasting, eating and drinking, sing-song girls and driving in open gigs drawn by two ponies. He saw so many novelties in those days that he was not surprised when the foreigners told him that there were carriages that pulled themselves and that men had flown through the sky in newfangled rickshas and - come down again alive.

As he had so much to do with opium, he wanted to know what this earthy smoke was that was dearer to so many men than eating or sleeping with women. He visited an opium den with one of his new friends and sniffed the sickly odour that hovered with its faint fragrance over all the houses and streets of the country as though the walk were saturated with it; but in this den it was so thick that you could almost touch it. He lay down on a bench, rested his head on the hard neck-rest and looked at the handsome boy who prepared the opium for him. He gave two pulls at the pipe, had it filled again, sucked at it and again had it filled; it tasted neither good nor bad,' and he waited for the magic results that were supposed to follow. But nothing happened, after the fifth pipe Chang was every bit as sober as he had been at first. He did not become brilliant and excited as some did, nor drowsy as others. Opium made him neither philosophic nor drunk: it left him just as it found him - a jolly giant of a man. He got up, pushed the table and opium lamp aside, gave the boy a few coins and went out with a laugh. When he got home he smote his mighty chest and thought: I am stronger than the Great Smoke. Before returning to the town by the Western Lake he affiliated his bank to the banks which were combining to monopolize the opium trade, and he bought a case of twelve bottles of whisky, that hot drink of the foreigners in which he found particular pleasure.

He had enjoyed his visit to Shanghai so much that after the death of his partner Wu Tsing he transferred his bank to Shanghai and invested much money in real estate. As he had foreseen, the price of opium soared, he made a lot of money on his own account and also for his clients. He saw how the town sprawled in all directions like a young growing animal, and he could smell money in land that was not yet built up.

Very soon Chang could touch nothing that did not turn to money. The revolution found him on the right side, for he had seen it coming. The foreign shares he bought went up. He had a finger in everything that went on in Shanghai, and his capital was at work in many places at once He owned hotels in the centre of the foreign town and sheds on the outskirts where the coolies lived. He owned cotton shares and railway shares, he was the first man to buy himself a motorcar such as the foreigners had. He had shares in a company that hired rickshas and in the earliest cinemas and in a Chinese theatre in the Rue Edouard VII and in many brothels, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and International. But more profitable than all else to B.G., as he was soon called in Shanghai, were the civil wars, the exploits of generals and war lords' and the warring of provinces against provinces. Some of the war lords were friends of his; he drank with them and gave them banquets at which they were waited on and entertained by girls. He sold them arms and munitions a profit, lent them money at high interest to pay for what they bought, and in return they mortgaged the taxes they extorted from their districts. Chang helped them to invent new taxes. He thought only of the simplest things that arise in the lives of everybody - birth, marriage, death. With the money he made on the coffin tax he bought the government its first aeroplane.

He was a good friend to his friends and a relentless enemy to his enemies. He could sleep for forty-eight hours and do without sleep for forty-eight hours; he could drink any man under the table and then go and put through an intricate deal. On his forty-fifth birthday he made a bet that he would sleep with ten whores that night, and he won the bet. A bevy of concubines, servants, hangers-on and parasites accompanied him wherever he went. He loved to look on at executions and ran over people, dogs and pigs when he raced long the frightful roads of China in his motor-car; he attended all races and was passionately fond of flying. He spoke English and French well and understood enough Russian to hold his own with White 'Russian night-club girls and Soviet emissaries. He gave and received many presents, huge, heavy, silver salvers with long-winded inscriptions and the price ticket still attached. When a newspaper attacked him he bought it up and broke the rice bowls of the journalists who were responsible. From then onwards the papers described him as the benefactor of China. His were the money, the strength and the might.

There was only one vacant and aching spot in his life of violence and success: his son, Chang Yutsing. He was his only son, for the giant was unable to beget another son either with his wife or any of his concubines. While Chang attended to his many interests in Shanghai, travelled the country, now to Canton, where the revolutionaires were in power, now to Peking, where one war lord after another was in the saddle and where now and again even an emperor was set up; while his life spread out in ever-widening circles, his house by the Western Lake remained almost unaffected and unaltered. Behind the black double gateway the courts and buildings extended where the family lived, the servants and slave girls worked, where incense smouldered before the tablets of his ancestors and where Lilian flowered and faded. But Yutsing, who had come into the world with a tooth in his mouth, was not the man his father wished He had not been born on the river but in a silken bed and the older he grew the more he resembled his mandarin grandfather. He had trouble over teething, had many childish ailments. Every time news reached Chang that his son was sick he let all his affairs drop and journeyed home. He tried to subdue his heavy step and his loud voice and sat at the bedside of his feverish son trying to breathe his own strength into him. But the child gazed solemnly at him and did not smile when he saw his father. He had the narrow chest, the rounded shoulders and the ivory face of an old learned family. Soon after his third birthday he began to ask what the characters meant that were written on the rolls hanging on the wall. Although he was always polite and respectful to his father, his manner showed that he was afraid of him. Chang took great pains over his son, greater pains than he had ever taken with any person or thing in his life. But they remained on opposite banks of a wide river and drew no nearer to one another.

The old schoolmaster still lived in one of the outer courtyards, and his son, who had likewise become a teacher, with him. Yutsing soon learned from these two the first characters, the two hundred and fourteen which his father too had learned in his day, and the first teachings of Confucius. Chang was opposed to this. Since the revolution Confucius was superseded; there was better learning than the parrotlike gabble of the scholars. There were too many women in the household, there were no men for Yutsing to measure himself, against or conflict with. His mother became ever more polite, but it looked as though a steady flame of obstinate hostility burned in her. She and her son stuck closely together; they had secrets of their own, their suppressed laughter died away the moment Chang joined them. There were soft clouds over the lake; Yutsing chewed candied lotus kernels as the concubines did; he was the precious and only offspring, the jewel, spoiled and petted. Chang consulted his friends in Shanghai, and one day he took the child back with him to the great town and put him to school with the foreigners. True, they made a Christian of him there, but as Chang had little opinion of religions he did not care to what gods his son prayed.

The one thing Yutsing seemed to have inherited from his father was the stubborn mind and discontent which had sent Chang on his travels in his youth. But this discontent drove the boy in the opposite direction - away from the riches and the high-handed achievements that fell to his father's lot. Chang discovered too late that he had sent his son to the wrong school, where he learned nothing of the submission and reverence proper to a child. Chang's rebelliousness had driven him from the bottom to the top: Yutsing's led him in the opposite direction. It took him out of the upper classes to which he belonged down to the poor, to the millions of little men who made up China.

He took part in every rising and always on the wrong side, on the side his father opposed. It is only his youth, Chang thought; youth talks big, and reflection is far from it. He thought of all the people he had killed by the time he was Yutsing's age. He himself had grown tame; he no longer killed anybody, at best he now and then looked on at a mass execution. Yutsing too would calm down.

Of course, he married the girl his parents had betrothed to him in his childhood. But immediately after the wedding he forsook the great house in Hangchow and took his wife with him in defiance of all convention. He became a student in Canton. After three years he turned up in a tattered uniform as a partisan of the Reds. At this Chang's patience gave out. He shouted at his son who was so sunk in folly, and Yutsing committed the unheard-of crime of shouting back. Chang raised both his fists and struck the boy. He ordered him to drop his callow notions and to enter the bank and lead a sensible life. His son, green in the face and trembling like a willow leaf, replied that the hank was a stinking quagmire, stained with the blood of the poor. This tactless and bombastic speech threw Chang into a fury. He felt capable of murdering the son he had begotten. He put his hands in his sleeves, kept them there to ward off a disaster. Yutsing, the weakling, had an attack of nosebleeding. He had been born with a tooth in his mouth, now he stood there in his tattered uniform, pale and trembling and sniffing back the blood into his nose.

Every coolie has a son to obey and respect him, Chang thought. But I, the most powerful man in Shanghai, am insulted by my son. He had built up a kingdom for his successor, who threw it in his teeth. He told the boy to go. He was afraid he might kill him if he remained any longer in his sight. Yutsing went out of the door without a word of parting. There were some drops of blood on the floor, and Chang trod on them with the felt sole of his shoe. He will come back and beg for forgiveness, he thought with an impulse of relenting weakness. But it was four years before saw his son again.

DR. EMANUEL HAIN

EMANUEL'S father was called Rosenhain and was the owner of the well-known Rosenhain bookstore near the Hauptwache which Emanuel's grandfather, Sigmund Rosenhain, had built up out of trading in wastepaper and second-hand books. It was said that his greatgrandfather had gone from door to door with a sack on his back; on the other hand, this old South-German family had in every generation produced a scribe or even a rabbi and thus handed on to all its descendants an inborn familiarity with intellectual matters together with a tendency to short sight.

At the instance of his wife, Emanuel's father applied for permission to alter his name and by dropping its first two syllables it lost its Jewish sound and became German. Emanuel's mother was a beautiful and charming woman with light brown hair and a white skin, who was fond of travelling. "Is there any reason why we should be known for Frankfort Jews every time we sign a hotel register?" she asked, and her husband, who was indolent in such matters, did as she wished. His brother, Dr. Paul Rosenhain, often twitted him about it, with an undercurrent of malice in his mockery. He was not particularly eminent in medicine, but he was a good, reliable family doctor and a contented bachelor, of whom children were particularly fond. His clients were mostly Christians, as Jewish doctors were reputed to be the best.

One of the old chestnuts in the repertoire of Emanuel's mother was the story of his behaviour at his christening. According to her, he had first looked earnestly at old Pastor Meiners, blinking tensely, and had then suddenly and quite unexpectedly uttered a loud crow, laughed with toothless gums and tried to pull the pastor's hand from his head - an astonishing exhibition of strength and understanding in an infant only three weeks old. Emanuel heard this little tale so often in later years that in time he came to believe that he could remember his own christening, the candles, Pastor Meiners' clean-shaven face, the cold dry smell of the cathedral.

Emanuel's grandparents lived with his parents until he "'as born, but a month after his christening they moved into lodgings with large lofty rooms and gas. They gave no particular reason for this change of abode, for they were too civilized in the Rosenhain family to quarrel and too clever to say openly what they meant. It was not until old Sigmund Rosenain got into bed for the first time in their new dwelling, with two hot bottles, which had previously held K¨¹mel, placed at his cold feet by his wife, that he said, sighing half in resignation and half in relief: "Why then should Frau Geheimrat Schonchen run into two old Jews every time she calls?" - expressing his meaning in a question, after the manner of the Jews. Frau Geheimrat Schonchen, Emanuel's godmother, and his mother's closest friend ever since their schooldays, was responsible for the Christian leanings of the Hain family.

It was the age of the liberal bourgeois class in Germany, ten years after the victory of Sedan. Everywhere there was prosperity and progress. Banks flourished and housed themselves in sumptuous buildings in the style of the Palazzo Pitti. The Hain's house was in the Paulsgasse in the new quarter which arose on the right of the old fortifications of Frankfort. It was built in old German style, which was the latest fashion, with an unsuccessful attempt to imitate the gables of the German Renaissance. Although there were the finest examples of old timbered buildings in the old town, the modern architects could only produce an ostentatious mixture of styles. But the townsfolk, lulled by their security and their wealth, felt perfectly happy amidst sham marble and wallpapers stamped in imitation of old Spanish leather, and heavy carved furniture, the dusting of which was exalted to a rite.

There Emanuel grew up behind thick dark curtains, in the care of a nurse from the Hessian hills. On Sundays the house smelt of roast goose and cucumber salad, of coffee and fresh yeast cakes and his father's cigars. At night a delicate perfume was wafted into his room - Mamma, dressed for the opera or a party. He loved Mamma, he stroked the fine suede of her long gloves, and when the door closed behind her again he would have liked to cry a little. But he did not cry, for he was a man, so at least Uncle Paul said, who also saw to it that he was rubbed down in cold water and went for regular walks.

Emanuel was wrapped in peace and security - a security so profound and certain that it seemed to him incredible in later years. It was as though all mankind slept enclosed in a cradle or a shell, the child Emanuel part of this repose.

Behind the house was a garden, at first very large but growing ever smaller as Emanuel grew up. In autumn the walnuts were beaten down from the walnut tree; they fell with a thump into the grass in their green rinds and had a bitter smell of autumn. The rinds made dark stains on his fingers, then Mamma was cross. Papa only laughed behind his newspaper in a cloud of cigar smoke. When vintage time came round there were jolly family expeditions to the vineyards of the Pfalz.

Emanuel's first sorrow was having to wear skirts like a girl. But on his third birthday he was put into trousers and shiny boots, which he loved so dearly that he took them to bed with him. When he went to school he wore a little sailor Suit, as all the better-class children of the town did, with a sailor knot emerging from under the wide collar, He parted with tears from his nurse and unwillingly made friends with Mademoiselle, who took her place. A little sister, Pauline, ';.had made her appearance, a helpless dribbling creature; and properly brought up people had to know French. With a sigh Emanuel resigned himself to the two disagreeables.

Every Friday evening he was taken to the grandparents', and it is to be presumed that Grandfather purposely selected Friday evenings for the visits of his grandson; for on that evening the Sabbath began and there was white damask on the table and a plaited loaf and two lighted candies in old silver candlesticks over which Grandfather murmured a blessing. Moreover, he wore a little black cap on his head end a fine white, fringed silk shawl with gold thread woven in it, over his shoulders.

You could easily tell in Frankfort when it was a Jewish holy day, for there were many gentlemen to be seen in the street wearing shining top-hats and virtuously carrying player-books under their arms. They were going to the temple to pray, Emanuel was told. He too was taken to the temple once, but only once. Hand in hand with his grandfather he walked through the old town with its squares and gables and fountains to a small and very ancient, hunchbacked house. There were many lighted candles inside, and a funny smell, and people sang in nasal voices. Emanuel began to feel afraid and started to cry. Uncle Paul often teased him about it afterwards. Mamma said to Father, "I can't help it, it's quite unnecessary, why must Grandfather agitate the child?" And although the Hains too had been baptized in the meanwhile, Frau Hain still made use of a question instead of a statement. From the date of this visit to the temple Emanuel's evening with the grandparents was changed to Wednesday, and he soon forgot the Friday-evening Sabbath atmosphere. It was not until he had passed his fiftieth year that Dr. Hain remembered his grandfather with increasing distinctness, and the candles, the plaited bread, the warm feeling of security as he put his hand in Grandfather's hand on that one and only walk to the temple.

He cried when Grandfather died, but he was not taken to the funeral; instead he had to spend a few days with Frau Geheimrat Schonchen, and he broke a coffee cup which had belonged to Goethe; and then he inherited Grandfather's violin.

Grandfather was very fond of music; he loved Mozart and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin, and Rossmi and Meyerbeer too. On the other hand, Grandfather, with an embittered and fanatical hostility, warned his grandson against a swindler and devil called Richard Wagner. When Emanuel in later years was taken for the first time to a performance of a Wagner opera he listened at first with dread and horror, and the exciting surge of sound made a weird impression on him. Afterwards his dislike turned to a passionate and rather intoxicated love. But it had not got to that yet. Emanuel was still going to the elementary school; he got up at a chill and early hour, was ruthlessly submitted to the cold tub ordained by Uncle Paul, trotted off to school holding Mademoiselle's hand, learned reading, writing and arithmetic, and also geography and history, from which he received an extremely one-sided picture of Germany as the central point and navel of the world, the greatest empire on earth, peopled by heroes, and valiant kaisers and never conquered. When he was ten years old he was removed to the grammar school, had Latin drilled into him and later, with much sweat and agony, Greek as well. This classical education filled every crevice of his brain to bursting, and in the third year he missed his promotion. A new spurt got him through, then things were easier, as he was a year ahead of his classmates in age and experience. Mamma was almost pleased over his failure, for the classes in the grammar school of Frankfort were composed of Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and the Jewish boys were always the best scholars. The better a boy's family, the worse his performance in class. Count Moltke, an elongated youth, was almost at the bottom, and it took the united efforts of all concerned to push him along until he was old enough to enter the army. In Mamma's eyes it gave Emanuel a certain claim to nobility that he too had failed once. Father was annoyed and talked about the seriousness of life.

Confirmation, his first watch (a present from Frau Geheimrat Schonchen), dancing lessons, a blue suit with long trousers, his first pimples, the first trace of a moustache, his first attack of calf love - an oppressive time of growing pains and suppressed fears The examinations were a torture which haunted Dr. Hain's dreams at intervals for the rest of his life. One of the boys (his name was Karl Blei) went out of his mind while they were doing the mathematics paper; he was led out struggling madly and vanished into an asylum. But Emanuel got through.

"What are you going to be?" Father, Mamma, Uncle Paul and Frau Geheimrat Schonchen all asked him, For a time it seemed that music had taken complete possession of him. Ever since, as a fourth-year schoolboy, he had picked out his first tunes on Grandfather's violin, he was regarded in the family as a prodigy. "A second Sarasate!" exclaimed all their acquaintances, to whom he now sometimes had to play a violin sonata. But Emanuel surprised his parents with the decision that he was too fond of music to make it his career. And so music was to remain friendly to him throughout his life, a gentle relief in difficult moments. Uncle Paul had given him a microscope for his confirmation day, and this turned the scales. "Why should the boy not be a doctor and take over my practice later on?" Uncle Paul asked. And "Why should he not?" was Emanuel's father's answer. There was no question of his taking on the bookstore. "The business cannot support two families," his father said. He had taken to complaining frequently about the state of his business round about the turn of the century. "People do not read as much as they used to," he said.

What did people do then, now that they had electric light and could very well spend the evenings over a book? Well, they did this and that, they played lawn tennis, for example, the new game imported from England, and they went for bicycle rides into the country. People altered, gradually, almost unnoticeably. Emanuel's sister played tennis and fell in love, although she was only sixteen, and there were secret meetings and Mademoiselle got fired and there were scenes. Then came the crash of the stock market, and it seemed that everyone in Frankfort had lost money. All of a sudden Emanuel's father looked grey in the face and his shoulder-blades stuck out. The end of it was that he decided to take Paula's young man into the business. Emanuel could be a doctor. Emanuel agreed. First of all he had to do his one year's military service as a volunteer with the 12th Artillery Regiment at Wiesbaden.

Emanuel remembered that year as the happiest and jolliest of his whole life. He loved the service, the uniform, the comrades, the discipline. It was freedom from his home, which in the last two years had become oppressive. Mamma suffering from nephritis, Father from worries; the furniture too heavy, the curtains too thick, the rooms too dark. It was a rest from too much thinking. Emanuel's brain took a rest, his body stretched, he got broader in the shoulders. Wiesbaden was at its zenith, the Kaiser and many of his generals took the cure, beautiful women walked on the esplanades, and a new theatre, which belonged to the Kaiser, provided cheap seats for officers and volunteers. By day Emanuel did his drill, in the evening he soaked himself in music and opera and at night he sometimes visited a girl of bad reputation but pleasing manners.

When he came home on leave at Christmas he surprised his parents by the announcement that he would like best to become an officer. His father laughed at him. His mother shut her lips tightly. "How can you be an officer?' she asked. Don't you know that old Rosenhain was your grandfather? Pot those people you'll always be a Jew." It was the first and only time his mother spoke to him about his origin.

"Your greatgrandfather was still going round with a sack on his back buying up wastepaper," his father put in.

Something crashed down in Emanuel. He had a bad week of it and from now onward he searched the faces of his comrades. Did they accept him as one of themselves? Or did they say of him as they did of some others: "A Jew - but not a bad fellow in spite of it"? Up to now he had heard such remarks without any personal feeling, but now a small, almost unnoticeable sore spot began to form. After all, he was the son of Jewish parents, in spite of Pastor Meiners' baptismal water. But I don't feel Jewish, he told himself.

A photograph was taken of him at this period of his life: a lean slender boy in uniform with a frank and pleasing face; with a half-shy and half-energetic look in his heavy-lidded but dear eyes. A Jew disguised as a soldier. In the autumn, when he had served his year, he took to spectacles and went to Heidelberg University.

As a changed person he came home for his first vacation. New thoughts and new spirits had taken him by storm - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen. The "life-illusion." Free love. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. The superman. Richard Strauss. Oscar Wilde. Dostoevsky. Strindberg Jugendstil.

Everything he saw at home was like in Ibsen's play. Worm-eaten, lying, suffocating. His dull, vegetative love for his patents turned instantly to revolt. His whole generation was in revolt. All fathers and mothers were saturated, over-fed, hypocritical pharisees. He told them so, and there were bitter words. Mamma wept helplessly; sobbingly she crept to her bedroom, and then there was an unpleasant and reproachful smell of Hoffmann's drops.

Back at the university Emanuel plunged into his studies and spent his leisure hours with his new friend, Max Lilien They went for long walks and had long arguments, while the soft and lovely landscape slipped by them unobserved. Lilien was a Socialist. Emanuel tried to read Marx's Das Kapital but he quailed under its long, dry and dogmatic sentences. It came to life only when Lilien interpreted its ideas, for Emanuel loved this first real friend he had ever had.

Max Lilien was a sturdy fellow with flashing eyes and an ascetic face like the monk's in Giorgione's "Concert." He was a man of burning enthusiam who was always upsetting beer jugs, scattering ash about, affronting people and treading on ladies' dainty shoes; an ill-groomed, comic, angular person, hard and transparent as a jewel, a Socialist at a time when Socialism was almost a crime. "All Socialists are curs," the Kaiser had said. Emanuel understood nothing of politics; his bent was to music and away from facts. Somewhere in the world things went on and people fought and died, but it had nothing to do with him. The Boer War came, and people sided with the Boers. Then the Russo-Japanese War - and people sided with the Japanese, that little, unknown nation of which up to now scarcely anything had been heard. But all this was sentimentality, not politics. Nouveau art became Japanese. Lafcadio Hearn wrote his sentimental books about Japan; then they were forgotten again. Lilien picked a fight with a policeman, he spent three days under arrest and emerged from the adventure as a martyr in miniature.

Suddenly Emanuel's father died. He was quite well in the afternoon, but in the evening he got up from table, excused himself and went to bed. When Mamma went into his room he was already dead. Emanuel attended the funeral in a daze. Mamma hung sobbing on his arm and Uncle Paul's. Emanuel found it hard to realize that this little old Jewess was Mamma, his mother, whose beloved perfume and tender goodnight kiss he remembered from childhood days. His father's death was like a blow over the head. He sat in embarrassment while the will was read, clothed in black in the midst of blackclothed relations who awkwardly cleared their throats.

It came out that there were almost no assets in money, there were even a few debts. The house was mortgaged, and when it was put up for sale its value had declined, for it was old-fashioned and had no bathroom or electric light. The paintings too, for which old Hain had paid large sums, were worth very little; there were landscapes with waterfalls, fat, beer-drinking monks, a cat playing with a ball of wool, a solid portrait of Mamma. Impressionists had become the rage: there was a lot of talk about "plein air," and a new school of painting was already following on the heels of the Manets and Monets, people who painted confused, ugly pictures and called themselves Futurists. When it was all cleared up and Mamma had gone to live with her son-in-law, who had taken on the business and the responsibility of providing for her; there was just enough money left to enable Emanuel to complete his studies without waste of time. The security in which he had grown up had begun to crumble. The twentieth century began to grow up: motor-cars, uncomfortable and dangerous vehicles, were seen on the streets. There was an exhibition of the first motion photographs; some stubborn cranks promised a dirigible airship, and psychologists had discovered something called the subconscious.

For the first time Emanuel knew what it was to be embarrassed for money. He had a serious discussion with Uncle Paul, then he worked harder than ever for his degree. It appeared that he had some talent for the profession his family had chosen for him. He graduated summa cum laude, spent the required time as an interne, walking the surgical wards of the municipal hospital, and then joined Uncle Paul in his practice. The first case he had to deal with was his sister's servant, who had an abortion. He stood bewildered in the stuffy garret where the girl writhed on a blood-soaked mattress, and only the thought of Max Lilien restrained him from handing her over to the police. His sister never forgave him. Emanuel did not love his sister.

He told Lilien all about it later, not without pride, for the girl had got better and found another place. Lilien listened absent-mindedly. "There ought to be municipal bureaus to give advice in sexual matters, and municipal birth-control centres," he said dreamily; it sounded entirely crazy. He was on the staff of a free-thinking newspaper, and Emanuel spent every Wednesday evening with him playing sonatas. Max Lilien played wrong notes with great enthusiasm and snorted through his nose whenever he came to a cantilena.

When Emanuel was thirty-one he fell in love with Irene von Stetten. He had had various love affairs before this: there were secret rendezvous with a married woman in a private room of a smart restaurant patronized by the world of fashion, an affair with a young milliner, which went on for nearly two years until she got engaged, and a passing and ardent liaison with a young actress in the Stadt Theatre. But this was something different. It bowled him over in a moment, thunder, lightning and annihilation. "You've got it this time, Mani," Uncle Paul told him, good-natured and expenenced. As he got older he handed over more and more of his practice to his young partner, and it was at the house of one of his patients that Emanuel met Irene. Lieutenant- Colonel von Stetten had come back from the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 with rheumatism and had never been able to get rid of it for the last forty years and more. The doctor's visits were more a way of passing the time and keeping him in a good humour than a real treatment. Uncle Paul had for a long time given up prescribing medicine for the pains in the old retired soldier's left side. But Emanuel, inspired by the ambition of a young doctor and pride in his new methods, paid him daily visits) applied electrically heated pads, ordered massage and put him on a diet which the Colonel kept with Spartan courage.

Irene von Stetten, his daughter, was twenty-one and very beautiful But it was not her beauty that carried Emanuel off his feet. It was the wonderful vitality that radiated from her, and a transparency for which he could find no words. He was happy when she entered the room, it went dark when she left it. When he gave her instructions for the Colonel's treatment in the dark hall of their small flat his heart beat so loudly that he was ashamed. Irene laughed softly. For three weeks he had not the courage to kiss her. Irene was every thing he meant by a lady. She was tall and slender, noiseless and yet lively, she was not prudish as most girls were her hair was blonde with a dull sheen like tin, she was of good family and yet poor, she had a boundless capacity for joy, in fact she was in every aspect the fulfillment of a desire he had never even known until he saw her. "The girl has breeding," Uncle Paul said with the complacency of an old bachelor who had been a connoisseur of wine and women in his day.

The sky did not fall nor did the earth open nor did Irene box his ears when Emanuel took her in his arms. She clasped her hands behind his neck and not only received but returned his kiss. "At last," she said with a deep sigh.

From that day onwards they met both secretly and openly; they went to the theatre together, chaperoned by old Frau Geheimrat Schonchen, made expeditions and went for long walks, visited exhibitions and danced. It was only when Emanuel spoke of their marrying that Irene drew back. They had many quarrels over this question and many reconciliations; once they discussed it at length.

"It's impossible because of my father - and don't ask any mote," Irene said. "I have talked to him about it and it's impossible. I should love you even if you were a Hottentot. But my father can't get over your being a Jew. Let's forget this stupid business of marrying - we're very happy as we are. Aren't we?"

Emanuel had left his uncle's house some time before and taken a small flat of his own, and there they could see each other undisturbed and belong to one another. When he held Irene in his arms, it seemed as incomprehensible as ever that she loved him almost as much as he loved her, and now she called him a Jew. His face burned and then became cold as ice.

"But I'm not really a Jew," he said stubbornly.

"No - not really," Irene replied with a smile. "Not for yourself, not for me either. But for my father you'll always be a Jew. You don't know his sort."

They kissed each other, and neither of them observed that Emanuel had denied himself instead of standing up for himself.

Irene often talked of becoming a nurse. She felt a vehement urge for activity and independence, and this was a profession open to ladies. But one spring that bloomed more luxuriantly than any before, she forgot all about it again. The fruit trees along the Bergstrasse were a snowdrift of white and red petals with the almost carmine patches of the vineyard peaches in between. A little later the lilacs were out, clouds of purple trusses in the parks and gardens of Frankfort. The whole air smelt of lilac and then of June and roses, the whole world was drunk with the heavy luxuriance of early summer. There were so many cherries that the market women in the old town were selling them for twopence the pound, and boats laden with fruit followed each other down the Main. In July a storm-cloud blew up and darkened the whole of Europe, and old soldiers like Colonel von Stetten sniffed the air and prophesied war. The younger people did not believe it. There were wars in Africa and Manchuria but not at their own door.

On the second of August war was declared.

Enthusiasm, jubilation, speeches, flags, flowers, drunken men in the ditches. "I know no patties, I know only Germans," the Kaiser said. The first troops were called up and sent to Belgium. In three weeks we shall be in Paris, in six weeks the war will be over. Germany looked round for friends. The English, blood relations and cousins? The Italians, allies by oath and treaty? Perhaps the Japanese, that energetic race in the East, whom they respected and had supplied with arms and drill instructions?

Suddenly the Germans were alone; they could not explain to themselves why, they understood nothing of politics, they trusted their leaders and their newspapers. The youthful regiments marched singing to their death, and their heroism was acclaimed on all sides. The older soldiers, the reservists, took the field calmly and deliberately. If there was work to be done, then it should be done. New victories were announced daily on the kiosks, and the church bells rang for ever-new victorious battles. Soon the first casualty lists came through; the first mothers were seen in mourning, smiling through their tears and proud of their fallen sons.

Dr. Emanuel Hain, a licutenant in the reserve, joined his regiment. But first, in the exuberance of feeling that marked the outbreak of war, he was able to overcome the old Colonel's opposition. "I know no parties," the Kaiser had said, and Emanuel was now an officer too. Hasty war marriages took place by the thousand. Emanuel and Irene were only one of thousands of young married couples who parted after one night together. In the grey of dawn Irene stood on the Station platform, waving to Emanuel. "To Paris," was scrawled on the train in chalk. Max Lilien was a soldier too, A volunteer and as enthusiastic as the rest. Irene joined the Red Cross for home service. Emanuel was sent to Belgium, first to the base and later to the front.

So much has been written about the war that there is no need to repeat it here. Dr. Hain had his full share of it all, of victory and defeat, of attack and retreat, of dirt and blood, of enthusiasm and fatigue, of assault and exhaustion; enough of rain and snow and mud and sun and of the never-ceasing, never-ceasing noise of the guns. As he was a doctor and worked for three years in field hospitals just behind the front line, he saw all the refuse of battle, his own and the enemy's; they were picked up from the battlefields and thrown into the hospitals as offal is swept up from the floor of a slaughter-house. Dr. Hain forgot how to pity the dying; he needed all his pity for those who remained alive. The ceaseless stream of surgical cases gave him endless opportunities of practice, and thus he became an excellent surgeon. He learned to choke back his pity and to perform desperate operations on desperately mangled cripples who implored him for God's sake to let them die. He was too tired to think; nobody thought as long as the war went on.

He was just about to operate on the shot, mangled entrails of a Hessian sergeant-major, when his hospital was shelled. He finished the operation, not out of bravado, but with the instinct of a doctor who cannot bear to leave a cavity open. His orderlies loaded up the casualties and fled, but he went on fixing clips, extracting splinters and finally stitched it all up. He had scarcely done, when a shell hit the building and buried him and his patient. The man died, and he himself was only rescued two days later. He was given the Iron Cross of the First Class. It was a senseless distinction for one of the senseless acts of gallantry of which the war was made up.

He met Irene in Brussels. His longing for her had been so intense that she had ceased to be a real person, a girl, a woman with eyes and small breasts and warm hands: she had become merely an idea, an imaginary being, like the ghost of a dream he had once dreamt. Now she was there, Irene, his wife. Her mouth, her smile, her eyes, her whole self. Brussels at that time was a rather crazy city. The women of Belgium were in mourning, the inhabitants made themselves as invisible as they could, and there was a black background of hatred to be seen in every face and every movement. Men and officers were sent to Brussels from the fighting line for a few days and then back to the front again. Leave there was an almost certain sign that they were destined for a new offensive. There were banquets and dinners to celebrate meetings and partings. There were theatre companies and cinemas for the soldiers and bevies of women had descended upon the hotels; there were cocottes for the officers, prostitutes for the sergeants and low brothels for the men.

The two lovers met in the turmoil of this town. Their union was profound and impenetrable, a primeval forest. A child was born of that night, a son to whom Irene gave birth when famine had already laid hold of Germany. She was brought to bed between sheets made of paper, and the new-born baby was wrapped in paper, for there was no more linen left. The flood of woollen things which had been lavished on the soldiers in the trenches during the first year had long since rotted in those very trenches. All that was left was "Ersatz." The troops wore boots of leather substitute which went to pieces in the mud. Their uniforms were made of substitute material which fell to bits. The country ate substitute and then even substitute gave out. The soldiers who were sent to the front were substitute too, very old men very young children. Those who stayed at home were weary and pathetic from undernourishment, too weary to fell even disaster very acutely. There was no more hope of victory, only of peace. Every month a new peace rumour flickered up and then died away. The men who came on leave or were finally disabled said nothing. This silence came between those who were at the front and those who stayed home, between the army and the civil population, between mothers and sons, husbands and wives; it formed an abyss, an estrangement that could scarcely be bridged.

Then America entered the war, and the last spark of hope was extinguished.

Dr. Hain came twice to Frankfort in the last two years of to see his wife and child. Roland, the child, seemed to flourish, but Irene grew thinner and more transparent. She had a desperate and uncontrolled way of caressing the boy which almost frightened Emanuel.

The doctor had one more opportunity of showing his courage. It was in the last days of the war, just before and after the armistice, when all discipline had been thrown to the winds. The story was never told - and so he received no decoration for it. With the help only of his sergeant, Heinrich Planke, he transported fourteen badly wounded men to Germany right through the mud and rain and confusion of the roads, right through rebellion and mutiny, right through the horrors of a beaten army in revolt. When he handed over his wounded men in the railway station at Wiesbaden, a soldier stepped up to him and tore off his officer's shoulder straps. Sergeant Planke gave the man a punch in the face and knocked him down. This was the end of the war for Dr. Emanuel Hain.

The country was in chaos - a German, that is to say, an orderly, deliberate and organized chaos. Barbed wire and barricades, a little shooting in the streets, then calm. Hastily assembled committees of workmen and soldiers kept order. Dr. Hain reported and put himself at their disposal. He felt no hostility for the new rulers; he knew too well what they had suffered and endured. A bearded man with a deep scar across his forehead threw himself upon him, kissed and hugged him. It was Max Lilien. "Comrades," he shouted, "this is my friend - we lived together, we dreamed of the future together and recited Karl Marx - isn't that so, Mani?"

Dr. Hain made no protest, and besides it was more or less true. He consented to join the committee, he thought it right to stand by these inexperienced people and to see that the returning troops did not infect the country with too much vermin and sexual disease. He soon had his hands full with arrangements for disinfection and delousing. It was not from lack of character that he put himself at the disposal of the new regime. He was a Jew: he took the colour of his surroundings.

On Wednesday evening Lilien paid him a visit; it was a happy evening, and they played the Brahms Sonata in A Major for violin and piano, both of them with clumsy soldiers' hands, but with much feeling. Irene brought in Roland to say good night. Lilien gazed at the child, amazed.

"He's the most beautiful creature I've ever seen in my life," he said in all seriousness. Dr. Hain took the child in his arms and breathed the warmth of his silvery hair; he was so overwhelmed with tenderness that he could have cried.

Slowly everything settled down: the government, life in general - and Dr. Hain's marriage. For the first time Irene and he could live for each other in a harmony beyond all expectation. As Irene had been a nurse, she could now help when he saw patients in his house, keep his instruments dean, listen when he talked about his cases. Her father lived with them; he was very old, very lost and utterly incapable of understanding the new situation. He had never got beyond Sedan. "The cuts!" he would mumble. "Pack of cowards, scoundrels!" When the Treaty of Versailles was signed he had a stroke - not metaphorically but in actual fact, From that day he kept to his bedroom, a crippled, warlike skeleton who weighed heavily on Irene.

A new cleavage soon split up the already divided country; the humiliation of the dictated peace smarted and burned in e souls of many, and they despised the new government, Which was so eager to make friends with the enemy that it swallowed every undeserved insult. They had fought obstinately and courageously and alone, but the conquerors showed no generosity towards the conquered; there were coloured regiments in the occupied territory, and the German people, bled white and starving, had to grovel for the of peace. Half of the people had no love for their new liberty, a sickly liberty from the start - and the world outside Germany did nothing to put this liberty on its feet.

When Dr. Ham joined the workers' committee, he had no thought of personal advantage; he was not an opportunist but merely a man who went with the current. Nevertheless, this connection got him a post in Berlin after Max Lilien had become a secretary of state. As head surgeon of the Charlotten Hospital he began on a career which soon put him in the first rank. "The Jew has pulled it off," many people said behind his back.

The Hains first rented and then bought a home in Grunewald, beautifully situated on a small lake, with a garden and a sandbox where little Roland could play. Chamber music was now played on the Wednesday evenings by musicians from the opera house instead of the bungled sonatas, and Irene wore a pearl necklace round her delicate neck. Best of all, the love between Emanuel and his wife did not seem to grow old and threadbare as love in marriage usually does. And so, blessed with work, success and prosperity, Dr. Hain might have been called a completely happy man but for the ever-growing anxiety he felt over his son.

Roland grew more and more beautiful; he was such a perfect specimen that many people gasped when they saw him for the first time. Emanuel was attached to his child with a physical intensity of almost the same kind as attached him to Irene. But Roland remained distant and strange with him, and it seemed that his first two years of life without a father had made him solitary for ever. From his birth he was afflicted with a nervous sensibility; he cried too easily and was afraid of all kinds of everyday things; for example, he could never be got to sleep in a dark room; he was sick with terror, became feverish and turned up his eyes as though in a spasm. Even a shaded lamp was no good: he demanded the brightest light, every electric lamp switched on, and he woke up the moment they were turned out. Emanuel would have preferred to be strict with him, but Roland's upbringing was the one point on which Irene opposed him. Roland was her child; there was always something going on between the two; there were whispered talks and suppressed laughter in the nursery, things were dragged about, bells were rung and clothing rustled over the floor, but as soon as Emanuel went in to share the fun they were silent and the playthings were guiltily pushed aside. Every one of Roland's meals required patience. Stories had to be told: a guardian angel, which was supposed to watch from a tree outside the window, was implored to look on; the Teddy beat had to share the meal, end Irene begged and wept and moaned before Roland could be induced to eat a mouthful. New antics began when it to going to bed. As long as Roland was little no one understood him, but as soon as he was nine or ten years old and could express himself he confided to Irene that he was afraid of his dreams. "I dream such horrible things," he said, but more than this he could not be induced to say, and so Irene insisted on putting the big boy to sleep. She sat on his bed and he twined a strand of her hair round his finger. This was the only way he could go to sleep. Irene waited, every light on, until he was fast asleep; only then was she at liberty to spend the rest of the evening as she liked.

Dr. Hain sought the help of psychoanalysis but without much practical result. It is one thing to understand a condition and its roots but quite another to cure it. Also the one-sided mental processes of psychoanalysis seemed slightly disgusting to the surgeon whose knife made a clean-cut, exact job of things. And so he prescribed sport, cod-liver oil and fresh air.

A war child ..." Irene said. She thought of the night in hell's kitchen when he was conceived, the days of want while she was pregnant and the months of terror when he was born and suckled. Roland, however, was taller and stronger than most children born in those days of famine, and unusually good at all kinds of sport. He was the best athlete of his school, the fastest and most tireless swimmer on the lakes of the Grunewald, and a tennis player of whom the club professional promised to make a champion. Without needing to be taught he drove the motor-car which his father acquired at that time, and at school he was the best at history; although he failed at all other subjects; yet he had an oddly sceptical turn of mind and wit, unusual in a child.

Dr. Hain would have liked his son to have brothers and sisters, but apparently Irene had exhausted all her reproductive energy in this one beautiful and original child. At this stage in their married life it happened that Kurt Planke joined the household, a welcome playmate for Roland. Dr. Hain's meeting with his sergeant occurred under strange circumstances. It was part of his duties to demonstrate operations for the medical students; thus, one morning, he was operating a rather complicated case of gallstone. Although this was purely routine work he took the same pleasure, whatever the operation, in his own accurate craftsmanship. When he entered the operating theatre the man on whom he was to operate was already under the anesthetic and covered with white cloths, which left only the field of operation exposed. Hence he performed the operation without knowing who the man was. It was not until the next evening, when he was going his rounds and came in due course to this patient's bed, that he recognized Heinrich Planke, his old sergeant. He was weak and pallid from the after effects of the anesthetic and distressed in mind. Instantly the days of the retreat rose before the two men - the comradeship and the dangers share - and for a moment they were both back in that other world the man's world of war of which those at home knew nothing. Planke was moved from the ward into a room which he shared with only one other patient. Dr. Hain took personal charge of him and soon had his sergeant on his feet again "I feel as good as new," the Berliner said, and his good-natured sea-lion face soon got back its colour. He was a so-called social-security case, for as a worker in a rubber factory he came under the new health-insurance laws. This was one of the new laws that caused much unrest. The employers, who had to pay monthly contributions whether the men they employed were sick or not, complained of the imposition. The employees complained even more loudly over the deduction made from their weekly wages. The sick complained most of all, for they were profoundly convinced that the doctors paid them very scant attention and would let them die from pure malice.

It was five years since the end of the war, and yet Germany was still shaken with convulsions. The fantastic inflation Caused a catastrophic devaluation of money from one day to the next. Pennyworths were paid for with billion-mark notes. A new and ridiculous class of upstarts with no traditions Came to the top, while the solid old middle-class was destitute and lacked everything. food, coal, warmth, rooms and respectability. At last its late enemies came to the help of the crippled country and a policy of appeasement introduced better days. That Germany began to be herself again was shown above all by the revival of the arts, for music and books and good drama were more necessary to the Germans than bread. Berlin breathed a freer air, and it almost looked as though a real democracy might spring from soil manured with the blood of war.

But just at the very moment that seemed to herald prosperity a new difficulty arose: the country was too small and too closely populated with people who worked and produced more than was needed. The large factories, compelled to pay union wages, began dismissing their men.

"They've laid me off," Planke announced as soon as he was well again. "Out of work! What a mess!"

So it happened that Planke became the Hains's chauffeur. He moved with his wife and son into the chauffeur's cottage and helped in the garden in his free time. Kurt, his boy, was three years older than Roland, a sturdy fellow with large hands and vivacious eyes. The doctor did all he could to encourage the friendship between the two boys and often listened with a pleased smile when they were romping in the garden.

One Wednesday evening in July, when they played chamber music, and the warm starlit night air from the terrace streamed through the open doors, Max Lilien discovered Kurt Planke, who was then thirteen, hiding in the shadow of a beech, listening to the music with tense face and clasped hands. It was the second movement of Schubert's D Minor Quartet.

"Whoever's that boy?" the secretary of state asked. "He seems to be quite drunk with the music."

"It's only Kurt," Irene replied, shutting the doors on to the garden.

But Lilien wanted to have a look at the boy. He slipped out during the next movement of the Quartet, and Sat beside him on the lawn, and after a while he began to talk to the shyly smiling boy. It soon came out that Sergeant Planke's son, the chauffeur's son, thought and dreamed of nothing but being a musician. Lilien dragged him into the music-room and introduced him, almost crying from embarrassment, to the musicians and guests, and amidst a clamour of questions and good-natured laughter Kurt sat down at the piano and played. He played his own rendering of a gramophone record he had made Roland put on for him over and over again: Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E Minor for the Well Tempered Clavichord, played by D'Albert. The company listened with amusement to the strange performance, which was full of mistakes and wrong interpretations, of ragged patches, wrong notes and distorted rhythms, but all the same amazing in its naivete' and fervour. Kurt, his ears red, seemed long since to have forgotten his audience; he was completely lost in playing. When he stopped and there was an outburst of laughing applause, he started as though he had been playing in his sleep.

His mother scolded him later and begged Irene to excuse him. But the doctor and Max Lilier had meanwhile taken Kurt's destiny into their own hands, and after he had been give some auditions and put through his paces he ended up in the State Academy of Music as a pupil of the celebrated Professor Boskowitz. The professor was an eccentric with an enormous nose and elephantine ears which absorbed every Tiniest nuance. "He sniffs with his ears," Roland said of him.

Kurt was soon devoted body and soul to his teacher. Roland was greatly annoyed at being left to himself again. Now that he was in the throes of growing up he was more difficult than ever. He went from bad to worse at school, and he had only one interest of his own - heraldry. Most of his Was taken up in learning all about the old families and names and arms of Germany. He also produced a number of abstract drawings, sinuous and geometrical designs which looked like nothing on earth or in the waters. He coloured them in faint, fatigued and sick water-colours and hung them over his bed. Unreal as these compositions were, they seemed to have some mysterious principle of their own, and Irene was often lost in contemplation of them for minutes together. When he was asked about them, Roland announced without hesitation that they were pictures of his dreams. Dr. Hain purloined two of these creations and showed them to the neurologists at his hospital. Nothing came of it.

"The boy gives me the creeps," Emanuel told his wife when, getting home late from the theatre or a party, they saw the brilliant light of Roland's window stretching far across the garden. The trees stood motionless and silent in the light.

"Wait until he has got over puberty," Irene begged.

She went into his room on tiptoe; Roland lay fast asleep, stretched out and breathing regularly. His young face, cut so clear, beautiful, with the keen sweep of his fair hair, seemed tense even in his sleep. Sometimes Dr. Hain could almost understand the strangeness between himself and this child whose blood and whole nature were so different from his own.

It was around that time that the doctor began to feel that lie was growing older. He got up at six every morning, breakfasted alone, was driven to the hospital, operated from eight to twelve in the white light of the shadowless lamp, a recent invention; when he had done he pulled off his white linen mask, washed his hands, took off his rubber boots and smoked a cigarette, and another one and still another one. By the increasing number of cigarettes he needed, he could measure his exhaustion. He went the round of his patients, ate a hasty meal in a small restaurant, attended his surgery for consultations, was called in for urgent and desperate cases, operated again, operated at every hour of day and night. There was no time to think, scarcely time to live. He had accustomed himself to doing with four hours' sleep, so that, at least at night, he might have time for a little music, a little of Irene, time to breathe and indulge his fatigue. When he went to the opera or sat listening to music at home, smoking incessantly, he could feel himself going to pieces. His back, his eyes, his shoulders were tired, round shoulders, bent Jewish back. The wrinkles that lined his face were Jewish wrinkles, engraved in the faces of a race that for thousands of years had blinked at the desert sun.

It so happened that the circle of friends the doctor collected round him consisted more and more of Jews. Max lilien, Professor Boskowitz, the musicians and directors of the opera house, the actors, writers and journalists, the lawyers and the other doctors who came to the house - they all were Jews. Irene's friends came from the other camp - conservative families of nationalist leanings, discontented with the new regime. Impoverished people of noble birth and wealthy landowners, who came to Berlin for the "Grune Woche," and their young sons and daughters who did not know what to do with themselves. Again the times wore a new mask: jazz, short skirts, short hair, woman suffrage, a plethora of woman students, birth control, relativity, flying records, Americanization, films, pacifism, speed, speed, speed. The Spartacists of the revolution had become Communists after the Russian pattern, which was rather unsuited to Germany. Parliament was made up of so many parties that none had an absolute majority. The German vice of quarrelsomeness split up the nation. Max Lillen left his party, resigned his post and became a Communist. Danger was in the air. But the dance orchestras still played in a thousand night clubs. Foreigners were shown these night clubs, as a specialty of Berlin, where homosexual boys, dressed as women, and monocle-wearing Lesbians amused themselves. The unemployment figures went up and miserable chains of beggars took their stand in the main streets of the city.

Emanuel and Irene had their first serious quarrel. He accused her of spoiling the boy, of ruining him by her weakness. She replied that he did not understand the child and that any appendectomy was more important to him than Roland's development. Meanwhile, Roland's portrait was to he seen at every street corner. Von Ruding, the painter, a cousin of Irene's, had painted him, with his streaming blond hair, and made use of it as a poster for some national meeting or other: the Jew's son, the German ideal. Sometimes Emanuel felt afraid when he thought of the confused and blurred relations between his son and himself. He tried to talk to him. But the boy had an impish way of thwarting him. For days he would make a joke of addressing his father as professor. "How is the professor feeling tonight? How many corpses has the professor pickled today?"

Young Planke made good progress. He was a silent listener on the Wednesday evenings and was often present on other occasions, too. Professor Boskowitz had taken a great fancy to him. He discussed knotty problems of counterpoint with him, equally knotty problems of philosophy, and taught him chess. Sometimes Emanuel felt as if this son of a proletarian were more his own child than Roland was. The quarrel between him and Irene ended with Roland's being sent to one of the new country schools from which he came home only occasionally for weekends. It lasted only for a year and a half One of the masters fell in love with the boy, he could not break the spell which Roland's weird charm had cast, and he shot himself Scandal and catastrophe. Roland spoke of it as though it were something he had read in the newspaper, quite impersonally, quite unmoved by the aberration as well as by the tragedy.

Demonstrations in the streets. Communistic and Nationalistic ones. Anti-Semitism, kindled by a few muddled heads after the war, now received scope and a name. Its adherents had so far been laughed at for their absurd, barbaric and even bestial manifestoes and for their leader, whom many took to be insane Suddenly a new party was in being, the National Socialist party, with representatives in P