Chapter 2910: Mai Ruibao in Guangzhou (3)

After taking leave of the Shi brothers, Reporter Mai spent what remained of the day rushing about in circles. Miss Sun had been taken into the Provincial and Port Hospital — though the doctors' examination found, in truth, nothing much amiss with her — and he had gone through the formalities to have her admitted for observation, stopped by the bureau to arrange for someone to keep an eye on the young lady, and, while he was about it, carried the evening tickets back to the shipping company for a refund. Next came the police station, to give his statement; by the time he returned to the guesthouse, the lamps were being lit.

Vexing as the deranged itinerary was, Mai Ruibao felt no regret. Supper had gone entirely by the board; he could not have felt hunger just then if he'd tried. That thread of nervous excitement on the wharf that afternoon had by now been fanned into a blaze in his chest. He opened the practical atlas the magazine had issued him, pored over it carefully, and at last made up his mind: he took out manuscript paper and wrote at a furious pace, petitioning Chief Ding for assignment to "distant Shandong and the Jeju frontier" — willing to brave the risks, to taste at first hand the hard lives of the Army's and Navy's officers and men, and to cover and report their heroic deeds in defense of the Senate and the people.

"Sai lou" — little brother — "slept your fill yet? Wake up!"

"Ah-ko?" — Elder Brother? Mai Ruibao had never taken to the swaying hammocks of a sailor, and the lantern's light striking his eyes brought him around at once. "You're off your watch?"

Third Brother Mai Ruijin made no answer; he only unrolled his own bedding, drew a thin wool blanket from inside it, and tossed the blanket to his younger brother. "Don't go waking the whole lot of them. Up on deck to talk — mind you don't catch a chill."

Mai Ruijin walked ahead carrying the storm lantern. Mai Ruibao threw his jacket on in haste and followed, squeezing with his brother through the close-packed thicket of hammocks and out of the crew's quarters, where the snoring rose and fell and the air was foul. Toward four in the morning the sky was still dark, though the stars were already withdrawing behind the clouds. On the deck of the converted guang ship, Mai Ruijin settled down against a coiled mound of hawsers, set the storm lantern on the planks, and drew two books from inside his jacket. By the kerosene flame Mai Ruibao made out the titles: Practical Sail Seamanship, and A Concise Marine Meteorology. Both covers were worn whitish at the edges, creased and crumpled from much thumbing.

"Ah-ko, what's all this about, then?"

"You've been to the Chiefs' schools, little brother — come, read the books out to me." Mai Ruijin had shifted into what he took for unimpeachable "New Speech," and it raised gooseflesh all down Mai Ruibao's arms. What was this about? Third Brother was a clever man and a willing worker; a few short years sailing for the Dabo Company had carried him to first-class shipwright. He had exactly two faults. The first was a mulish temper. The second: though from childhood, with his old father's cudgel for a schoolmaster, he had learned his letters well enough to take a C-level diploma in short order, the moment a book touched his hands — one stick of incense, at most — he was certain to slip away into dreamland. Was the sun to rise in the west today?

A knifing sea wind swept the deck. Mai Ruibao pulled the blanket tight about him, and his mind gave a lurch awake. "Ah-ko — you're not thinking of sitting for the second mate's certificate?"

"And why couldn't I?" Mai Ruijin went on parading his half-baked New Speech. "I've made every inquiry. For second mate you must sit a paper in the maritime official tongue. Last month, when a Chief did our ship the honor of an inspection, I greeted him in the official tongue — he praised how well I spoke it, and we chatted and laughed together like old friends. There's seamanship as well, and after this many years running the sea, what I've soaked up by eye and ear must count as the beginnings of it. It's only this here meteorology — I could read my scalp raw and make nothing of it. Truly the Chiefs' arts of measuring the heavens and reckoning the clouds are profound past reaching. And you, little brother — you're all but a disciple taught by the Chiefs' own hand. If you won't help me, who will?"

"And if I help Ah-ko — what's in it for me?"

"None of your sauce!" His brother's jest made Mai Ruijin bristle as if in earnest. "Once I'm made second mate, it's six dollars a month at the very least, and the company will allot me a room of my own..."

"And keep a little sister-in-law for me into the bargain?"

The sky was beginning to lighten; even without the lantern, Mai Ruibao could make out that his brother's face had grown uncomfortable. He hastily took up the lamp, cracked the book, and began the lesson.

The lesson came out stammering and halting. A higher-primary graduate, under the Senate's rule, counted as a fully paid-up "intellectual" — not a "petit intellectual" — but in honesty his schoolwork had always kept to the bottom of the class; otherwise he would never have been steered onto the art track. The textbook's knottier stretches — tides and prevailing winds, shear lines, pilotage calculations — were frankly past him. Not that this was the main difficulty. At the outset Mai Ruijin could still raise a question or two and trade remarks with his brother; then old habit began to exert its power, and Mai Ruibao observed his brother's head commencing to bob fore and aft, up and down, until at last it tipped back against the coil of hawsers, and from his nostrils came an even, measured snore.

Mai Ruibao shut the book in resignation. Across the still sea drifted the far-off thrum of a steamer. By now the waterline stood out clean; between the fish-belly paleness of the sky and the dark blue of the sea, distant Lantau, the nearer islets, and the sailing craft were all easing into silhouette. The voice of machinery came from astern of the Jieyun, drawing nearer, dragging a curved column of smoke through the air, thin fading into thick, linking all the way back to that grotesquely shaped steamship behind. Mai Ruibao studied her bow: squat and square, like some great wooden box. In stark contrast to her fat funnel, the foremast carried one laughably small triangular sail — with Mai Ruibao's shallow knowledge of ships, that would be an auxiliary canvas, good for nothing more than catching a little wind to help the steamer come about; the true strength lay below decks, in the coal-swallowing, smoke-breathing, thundering triple-expansion steam engine. He had once photographed, on special assignment for the pictorial, those great soot-black roaring machines in an engine room — the monstrous noise and the swinging connecting rods had given even him, raised from childhood on the "new education," a healthy shock.

The steamer drew gradually abreast of the Jieyun, and two short, sharp whistle blasts sent Mai Ruijin leaping to his feet. The other hands on watch, no less than the Mai brothers, stood breathless and intent, watching the Yuehai Mei 003 — a ship that scarce used canvas at all, driven purely by her engines. Her lines were outlandish past describing: a towering castle at each end, bow and stern, yet by no means heaped up aft into an overhanging structure as a guang ship's poop would be — rather, near perfectly symmetrical. Along her tall sides ran not a single porthole; the whole effect was of some lofty stockade wall with gate towers raised fore and aft, and on the deck between, no sailors could be seen moving to and fro. Mai Ruibao noticed a handful of men clustered at either flank of the bow castle, scanning the sea, and mounted before them a weapon every Dabo sailor knew well indeed: the carronade. The same at the stern castle's side, only there tarpaulin gun covers hooded the weapons. Mai Ruibao stared hard and long, and hazarded the guess that these were the revolving-barrel machine cannon carried only aboard naval vessels.

This vast, outlandish steamer was none other than the Surprise-class bulk carrier that Wang Kai had once presided over the "designing" of — modified for the sea with heightened freeboard and the addition of enclosed hatch covers. When the Planning Institute received the application to build the Surprise class it lost not a day in granting approval, and ranked the project's priority ahead of the clipper ships and a whole queue of others. The reason was simple: the Senate's rapidly ballooning industrial capacity stood bawling to be fed with steam coal. Thus the Surprise-class ore carriers, fresh from the drawing board and onto the slipways, were at once assigned their names as "Yuehai Mei No. such-and-such" in the resource fleet under the Planning Institute's direct administration; and no sooner were they completed and entered into service than their first mission was to run laden with coal among Hongai, Lingao, and Hong Kong. The Sanya shipyards drew a share of the Surprise-class orders too, which put into the Navy's hands the new colliers it had so long yearned for. Only the Senators of the Nanyang Company were left stamping and sighing in their Sanya offices. Not that they came away empty-handed: once Brunei's petroleum had brought in its first well, the shipyards had begun building T1-class tankers fit to carry barreled oil in safety — tankers not in the modern sense, with great oil holds and pumps, but freighters expressly refined for hauling oil drums. Though on these waters, such tankers were scarcely ever to be seen.

Without a moment's pause the coal ship left the Jieyun astern, bequeathing her nothing but a stretch of sea churning white. "Second mate on a steam vessel — that's seven dollars a month, that is," Mai Ruijin murmured to himself, stuffing the books back into his jacket as he spoke. "Best part of an hour gone already, hasn't it? Three hours left for sleeping before the middle watch — ah, what misery!" He waved a hand at his brother and went below, alone with his thoughts.

Mai Ruibao had no intention of following his brother down into the quarters. To stay on deck — even with the pre-dawn wind biting and raw — still beat the reeking, racketing crew's berths below. Boarding life at Fangcaodi had likely spoiled him for clean and wholesome lodging. "Precious little priss!" — the curse Miss Sun had once let fly at him in a temper came back to him unbidden. It puzzled him a little: by the fragments she let drop of her origins, she came of a substantial household, and a graduate of the Women's College besides — yet now and again she betrayed a certain slovenliness, strangely out of key with the "refined fastidiousness" she otherwise took such pains to keep up.

"Priss!" — and who, exactly, was being a priss? Thanks to the fair Miss Sun, Mai Ruibao had missed the Wuzhishan's sailing. Unwilling to cool his heels a full week, he had gone down to the Whampoa wharves the very next day, hunting for any vessel outbound that day, and had at last found the Jieyun at a Dabo Company berth, fully laden and waiting only to cast off. And had his brother not happened to be serving aboard her, standing stout surety for Mai Ruibao, he would likely never have boarded at all. The captain had been most unwilling to take on one more strange passenger — the times were turbulent, after all, and who could say whether the young man was not a Ming agent, or a set of eyes selling its sight to some nest of sea bandits. The Senate had swept the great pirate fleets from the waters, true; but the shore folk who fished one day and plundered the next — honest as you please so long as the nets came up full — would rob a careless vessel without a second's scruple, should the chance offer. The Senate could keep its grip on the large matters; it had not yet the reach to shine its light into every corner under its rule. Crewmen and merchants who lived by the sea still had best look sharp after themselves.

(End of Chapter)