Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [161]
‘No wonder it’s so hot up here,’ thought the Major who was suffering from the heat. Similar blue flames roared at other tables and the noise from the men sitting around them was deafening. He sipped the hot tea which had been set before him and longed for a cold beer. A young waitress who had joined them at the table busied herself with chopsticks, picking morsels of raw meat, chicken and fish off a plate and dropping them into the seething soup. When they were cooked she fished them out and dropped them now into the Major’s bowl, now into Mr Wu’s. The Major, anxious to be polite, struggled to maintain a conversation on fire-fighting of which it was all he could do to make out his own words, let alone those of Mr Wu.
The noise from the other tables continued to grow in volume. The Major was astonished; he was accustomed to think of the Chinese as quiet and well-behaved but these Chinese were shouting their heads off. Mr Wu himself appeared not to notice his fellow-diners until the Major drew his attention to them. He had to shout to make himself heard … Who were these young men at the other tables?
‘National anti-enemy society of ah Kuomintang!’ shouted Mr Wu. ‘They drink ah whisky for defeating ah enemy!’ And he roared with laughter while the Major had a look. Mr Wu was quite right: each young Chinese had a half-bottle of whisky planted on the table in front of him and from time to time he took a swig from it to moisten his gullet before resuming his shouting.
The evening pursued its course. The heat and the noise grew steadily more acute. This, the Major decided, his brain reeling, could only be a local chapter meeting of the Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps. He could not help but make a dubious comparison between these wild and vociferous young men and the disciplined Japanese officers he had met. What chance would they have? Why, none at all. Their eyes bulged, their faces grew red, though not as red as the Major’s, and the veins stood out on their temples. Many of them wore string singlets over their stomachs and as they got drunker they lifted them to cool their navels. Presently, tired of shouting their lungs out at each other they gathered round the Major and Mr Wu instead and shouted their lungs out at them.
Meanwhile, unconcerned, Mr Wu, continued to pick delicately with his chopsticks in the bubbling soup, searching for choice fragments of squid and sea-slug to drop in the Major’s bowl. Only when he had finished this search did he notice the Major’s harassed expression. Then he tried to explain something but the Major, deafened, could not hear. Mr Wu turned to the shouting young men and with a barely perceptible frown murmured something under his breath. Instantly, the young men stopped shouting and fell back, watching the remainder of the meal in eerie silence from their own tables.
‘They make you member society,’ explained Mr Wu genially. ‘Society call ah Prum Brossom Fists Society.’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the Major, touched. ‘Please thank them on my behalf. He wondered why the name of the society should stir some distant recollection in his mind. It was only later that it came back to him. Was it not something to do with the Boxer Rising in 1900? Surely one of the factions pledged to drive foreigners out of China had been called the Plum Blossom Fists Society? He was almost certain. He must remember to ask Mr Wu.
35
‘My dear Herringport, nothing could give me greater pleasure now that your country has entered the War than to accede to your request.’ Thus it was that Brooke-Popham, ambushed by Ehrendorf as he was leaving a conference, gave him the opportunity to satisfy his most pressing need: to leave the city in which Joan lived without delay. Brooke-Popham had spoken in what was, for that kindly gentleman, a somewhat surly tone: he was tired of being ambushed by people; he was tired of conferences, too; he was tired of the War, even, although it had only just begun. In a few days from now, however, someone else would be stepping into his shoes as Commander-in-Chief and he would