One's Company by Peter Fleming

Author:Peter Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446485132
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER XXIII

TWO MEN TIED UP

AT THE GATES of the town, and all along the principal street, the crowds, though dense, were happily less demonstrative. It was a queer feeling, this riding in triumph through a sea of yellow faces: particularly queer for M. and me, who were doubly impostors, for not only had no victory taken place to justify these cheers, but it would have been nothing to do with us if it had. We aroused a disproportionate curiosity – disproportionate because the townspeople had experience of missionaries and knew what white men looked like. But M.’s enormous stature drew many subdued cries of ‘Ai-ai-ai-yah!’, which is Chinese for ‘Coo-er!’, and I was still more overtly exclaimed at. The reason, I heard afterwards, was that I was thought to be the representative of an entirely new race. I had worn no hat on the march, to the amazement of the Japanese, and now my face was a kind of chestnut colour which put me in a different ethnological category from the pale-faced missionaries. The more educated onlookers inclined to the belief that I was an Indian; but most put me down as a devil.

We were assigned our quarters, which centred round a big courtyard. (It was astonishing how quickly, in the room which was being used as a kitchen, the Japanese killed all the flies and covered the torn paper windows with gauze against a further invasion.) A company of Japanese troops had been garrisoned in the town for the last six months, and M. and I were invited to accompany our officers to lunch at their Headquarters.

It was here, in the courtyard outside their mess, that I saw my first bandit. He was tied to a post – a net-ball post, to be exact. A few feet away, lashed to a smaller stake, was one of his spies, a man who, posing as a respectable citizen, had been caught sending out information to the bandits from Sinpin. They were both going to be shot that night.

They were not an attractive pair. The bandit was a youth of nineteen; he had commanded a gang of forty men. He was poorly dressed in peasants’ clothes, and he had a large, round, moon-like face. It gave you the impression of being unnaturally swollen, and this impression was heightened by a generous black eye which embossed one cheek – the legacy presumably of Third Degree methods after his capture. The face wore an expression of surly and bestial resignation. His pig-like eyes betrayed little interest in his captors, who for their part betrayed little interest in him. They treated him as if he were a permanent, inanimate, and only slightly out of the ordinary fixture in their temporary home. (‘Oh that? Yes, it is rather a curious old sundial. Perhaps you’d like to go and have a look at it after lunch?’)

If there was something brutish and remote about the bandit, his spy was a Caliban, beyond all question hag-born. He was a big ape-like man, with a forehead villainously low and a jaw which at once jutted and sagged.

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