Rice Papers. Hugh Leigh Norris
unavailing, as he would keep rubbing his hands over his chest. My own opinion is that he hadn’t got at most more than one pellet in him; but I had no further time to look after him, because we were in a few seconds surrounded by the men, women, children, lunatics, and incurably leprous of the neighbouring village. They got to hustling us, and things looked ugly. All of ’em were singing out something in Chinese, and when they started pulling me about I got nasty and let out at ’em. Then they took my gun away, and by this time we were nearly crushed by the crowds round us. It was no use to create international complications by letting ’em have a few charges of No. 6, so we concluded to go without resisting to their village and see the matter out. So the howling, stinking mob conducted us to their village, and led us through filthy pig-infested lanes to an open space near the centre of the village, in which stood a dismal banyan tree, under whose shade a baby or two and some half-dozen hens and scraggy pigs were grubbing. A very benevolent-looking, grey-bearded Chinaman approached, and from the increased yells of our conductors we concluded that he was a man of some importance. He calmly surveyed us for quite a while, and spoke to our furiously shouting accusers in a calm and passionless manner. The wounded coolie was brought forward amid more shouts and gesticulations, and our ancient friend spoke a few words to him in a rather off-hand manner.
“We were getting a bit tired of all this hoop-hooraying when suddenly our ancient friend turned to me and said, ‘Say, what you goin’ to do about it?’ We were both pretty surprised at hearing him speak English, but I was jolly glad to find someone could understand us. I explained that the whole thing was an accident, that the man wasn’t much hurt, and that now, as we understood each other, we might go back to the ship, as having lost our tiffin, we didn’t care to do any more shooting that day. Our genial friend smiled kindly on us, and said it would be very hard to make his poor uneducated fellow-villagers understand that the shooting had not been done on purpose. He explained that no Chinaman was such a fool as to suppose that anyone with sense would shoot at a bird flying, that a bird could by no possibility be shot unless sitting still, and that my firing into the luncheon-basket was only a pretext to kill both coolies when they least expected it. He remarked, moreover, ‘We’ve got your gun, and I guess it’s worth at least forty dollars gold, so you’d better pay up if you want to get back to your ship. We know that in time you’ll be rescued by a landing-party, but we think you’d prefer to pay up rather than spend a night or two in our flea-infested village and be laughed at by your messmates when you do return.’ I got pretty angry at this and said, ‘I wish I had a few blue-jackets and marines now, and we’d knock hell out of your old village!’
“The ancient Chinaman smiled and said, ‘In your country you have an Employers’ Liability Act by which you’d have to pay for this coolie’s injury.’ We found then that we had a man of education to deal with, so I said I’d pay within reason but that I was dead keen to get aboard, and didn’t care if I never went shooting again in China.
“Then we got on to the question of money; I had two silver dollars and a ten and five dollar Hong Kong note. My Chinese friend explained that paper money was of no use to villagers, that if I handed over the lot to him he’d pay the two silver dollars to the wounded man in compensation, that later on he might manage to negotiate the paper money (for the good of the village), and that if I’d give twenty more dollars on the morrow to his representative he’d return my gun. At the same time he added that if the navigator attempted to use his gun and resist that the villagers would eat us raw.
“So we had to climb down. We left the village escorted by a howling mob, and now I’ve got to pay twenty Mexican dollars to that smooth-tongued English-speaking Chinaman before I get my 12-bore back.
“Ah Hing, give me another whisky-and-soda.”
Again the sun shines on the turbid pea-soup river, the steaming paddy-fields, and sunburnt backs of the sweating trackers as they painfully tow the junks up-stream. A continuous stream of junks drifts down the river, steered by clumsy rudders and big sweeps; now and then a Hakka boat passes laden with lime made by burning oyster-shells, and occasionally a steam launch, flying the Chinese flag, belonging to the Salt Commissioners or Imperial Chinese Customs. The sun is now mounting high in the heavens, when a sampan puts off from the shore and goes alongside the British gunboat. A grey-bearded man steps up the gangway and, handing a double-barrelled gun to the quarter-master, says, “Give that to the doctor, please, and tell him that there is someone waiting to see him.”
The quarter-master grunts, as much as to say, “Well, I’m damned!” He hands the gun to the surgeon in the wardroom and says, “Chinaman to see you, sir.”
“Show him down, quarter-master,” replies the surgeon, and the venerable Chinaman is conducted to the wardroom.
“Well,” says the surgeon, “what’s to prevent me, now I’ve got my gun back, from having you pushed over the side into your sampan and being told never to come near the ship again?”
The Chinaman smiles and says, “Nothing, except a foolish sense of honour which prevents you from getting out of a promise you’ve once made, even if you know you’ve been badly swindled. When I sent your gun down to you I knew you might have me thrown into the river, and with some justice on your side, but I also knew that, being a white man, you would stick to your promise and pay me the twenty dollars you agreed on yesterday. I don’t admire you for it, but I know your Western ways.”
“Look here,” says the surgeon, “you speak devilish good English; here’s your twenty dollars, and now we’re quits. Have a drink, and tell us something about yourself.”
“I will,” replies the Chinaman, “but whether you believe it or not matters little. I call myself Fung Wa Chun,” and the story of Fung Wa Chun as heard by the surgeon remains to be told.
THE STORY OF FUNG WA CHUN
THE STORY OF FUNG WA CHUN
AH HING brought the drinks. The surgeon pushed the cigarettes over to Fung Wa Chun, and waited for him to begin.
The Chinaman tasted his drink as one accustomed to European liquids, and began:—
“I think I was born in a sampan in Hong Kong harbour; of that I’m not certain; but anyway, my earliest recollections are of living in a boat which was managed entirely by my father and mother; and there we lived, cooked, fed, and slept. We used to also take foreigners off to their ships, and from their ships to the shore, but the best times were at night. At dusk my father would get a tough string net out of the sleeping-place amidships. Each mesh of this net was heavily weighted with leaden bullets, and he’d attach it in some clever manner to the inside of the bamboo shelter we carried in the stern sheets. Mother used to steer and work a yulo aft. Father pulled an oar and managed our one sail, and any passengers we had sat under the bamboo shelter in the stern sheets.
“At night time our passengers were generally drunk, and by a simple contrivance father could pull a string when we got some way out in the harbour. The weighted net would then fall on the semi-unconscious passenger, and father and mother with a few stabs finished him off. Then came the counting of his possessions, the stripping of the body, and the throwing over of the corpse, to be found or not, as fate decided.
“I remember once we got a fare well after dark. He was a huge, yellow-haired man, very drunk, and, I think, a Scotchman. Father and mother worked the sampan out in the harbour, and then father pulled the string. The net fell, and he made two good jabs into the writhing bundle with his knife. The man kicked and fought horribly. He tore the net, nearly broke the gunwale of the boat, and at last got hold of father’s ankle in his teeth just above the heel. Father jabbed away with his knife, and didn’t dare to howl, and mother had to drop the tiller and come and help with the meat chopper. She tore our net badly, but killed the man, and then father’s ankle was released from the dead man’s mouth, also with the chopper. We found less than a dollar on that Scotchman, and my parent was lame from the bite for the rest of his life.
“Although I was very young at that time, still some of the incidents,