A Single Pebble Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN HERSEY

  Blues (1987)

  The Call (1985)

  The Walnut Door (1977)

  The President (1975)

  My Petition for More Space (1974)

  The Writer’s Craft (1974)

  The Conspiracy (1972)

  Letter to the Alumni (1970)

  The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)

  Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)

  Too Far to Walk (1966)

  White Lotus (1965)

  Here to Stay (1963)

  The Child Buyer (1960)

  The War Lover (1959)

  The Marmot Drive (1933)

  The Wall (1950)

  A Bell for Adano (1944)

  Hiroshima (1946; new edition, 1985)

  Into the Valley (1943)

  First Vintage Books Edition, February 1989

  Copyright © 1956 by John Hersey

  Copyright renewed 1984 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1956.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hersey, John, 1914 –

  A single pebble.

  I. Title.

  PS3515.E7715S56 1989 813′.52 88-40018

  ISBN 9780394756974

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080726

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART ONE    The Junk

  PART TWO   The Rapids

  PART THREE  The Dam

  PART FOUR   The Path

  About the Author

  I became an engineer. I found my way into hydraulics, and not many years along, while still a youthful dam surveyor, I was chosen by the big contracting firm for which I worked to go to China and study the river called by the Chinese “the Great,” the Yangtze, to see whether it would make sense for my company to try to sell the Chinese government a vast power project in the river’s famous gorges.

  This was half my life ago, in the century’s and my early twenties; the century and I were both young and sure of ourselves then.

  I spent a year preparing myself for the trip. I applied myself to spoken Mandarin Chinese and got a fair fluency in it. I read all I could find on the Yangtze; I learned of its mad rise and fall, of the floods it loosed each year, killing unnumbered people and ruining widespread crops; of its fierce rapids and beautiful gorges, and of its endless, patient traffic of hundreds of junks towed upstream and rowed down by human motive power.

  Even after my studies, though, I could scarcely visualize this storied, treacherous river, and being an ambitious young engineer I could only think of it as an enormous sinew, a long strip of raw, naked, cruel power waiting to be tamed. I had much yet to learn.

  I took passage on a steamer to Shanghai, and after an impatient month in that transplanted Western city I was able to talk my way onto a British gunboat, the Firefly, which was going upriver as far as Ichang, at the gate of the gorges, on a patrol such as British ships were then allowed by treaty to make on certain Chinese rivers on behalf of British business interests in the interior.

  The thousand miles from Shanghai to Ichang were long. The landscape was flat; the river was enormously wide and sluggish. Where was the Yangtze’s brutal power? I was let down. We made no stops, and everything on board was British and regular, and I witnessed a riverbank China but did not feel it.

  We arrived at length in Ichang. I went immediately, as I had been told to do, to our consul in that city, and because bandits and revolutionaries were said to be harassing the few flat-bottomed steamboats then trading in the gorges above Ichang, he urged me to go upriver not by steamer but by junk, as he thought I would travel unnoticed that way and would have more leisure for my study. And so with his help I arranged a passage with a thin, gaunt junk owner whose Chinese I could understand quite well, for he was a Szechuan man, from Wanhsien, and the Szechuanese dialect is not too far from pure Mandarin.

  I was eager indeed to go aboard his boat.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS the junk’s cook who first colored my whole new view of China.

  When I made my deal with the owner, he warned me that he wished to start away early the next morning, and I boarded his vessel, with my bedroll and a single Gladstone bag, just after dawn of the following day.

  The boat was a ma-yang-tzǔ, one of the great upriver junks, a hundred and two feet in length over all, nineteen feet in beam, made entirely of the tough cypress of the Wanhsien district, with a turret-built hull divided by strong bulkheads into fourteen cargo compartments, and carrying on deck abaft the mast its living quarters, a big shelter for the crew and a cabin for the owner on the stern: a craft well designed forty centuries ago.

  All appeared to be ready. The cargo of cotton bales was in the watertight compartments below the loose-planked decks; the crew was fully hired on; lines were clear and all that was needed was handy.

  But at the very moment when the owner gave the order to cast off from our spar moorings in the foul muck at the riverbank, the cook cried out that he had yet to take delivery of a supply of pai-ts’ai, fresh white Chinese cabbage, at the market place. Amid shouts and laughter he jumped from the junk and rushed along the staked-up plank bridge to dry ground, holding in his hand a bag of the owner’s coppers. He was a stocky man, with a clean-shaven head, a round face, black eyes very close together, and skin like buffed candlewax. He glanced back at us, grinning, when he reached the shore, and waved the bag of coppers and made the coins tinkle. He looked a rogue.

  I thought the errand would take fifteen minutes. But all the crew, I saw, sat down or lay down, and the men occupied themselves, as if for all the day, with gossip, lice-picking, gambling, and snoozing.

  A quarter of an hour passed, and a half, and a whole. I was alert; I kept watching the riverbank and the rows of mat huts that crowded to the verge of the muck at the bank. I grew weary, tensely waiting for the cook.

  The owner, I saw, was easy. He was playing a game of little bamboo “stones” with a Chinese girl whom I took to be his daughter; later I learned that she was his wife.

  As nine o’clock was left behind, the preposterousness of the delay overwhelmed me, and I went in a kind of temper to the owner and said that I thought he should sign on another cook and weigh spars and be off.

  The owner had a haggard, fine-wrinkled face, which had been eroded, one could guess, not so much by weather as by fiercely running thoughts of profit and loss. From his chin hung a black, sparse beard of hardly more than a hundred hairs—a token of dignity and idleness. He turned this face up to me and mildly said, in a phrase I was to hear often spoken by the Chinese with a shrug and a look of resignation, “There is no way.”

  So, frustrated in my Western hurry—I was in a hurry, with hundreds of miles of hydro-electric promises ahead of me—I lay down on the deck and tried to be patient, listening to the owner sucking at his teeth and to the low, sweet murmur of his young wife’s dutiful laughter when he spoke to her words I could not make out.

  The time shuffled along. Bursts of conversation and sudden little arguments came from the clump of trackers forward, but they seemed content and laughed often. The hour came and went for the noonday meal, and because the cook had gone ashore it seemed evi
dent that there would be no such lunch: for who would fix it?

  At about two o’clock the owner’s young wife came, carrying a handleless cup and a pot with a quilted cover, to where I was still lying disconsolate. She poured me some tea without speaking; she looked at my face openly, but she seemed afraid of me. She went back to her husband then and their game went on.

  I seemed to be held in a prison of others’ patience; I was wild, but I lay still.

  It was nearly five in the evening when the cook came aboard. He did not have the cabbages. He did have, in one hand, holding them upside down by their bound legs, four live chickens, and in his other hand he had a big jug of vegetable oil. He was cheerful and possibly drunk; the owner, who was also cheerful, greeted him quietly; the owner’s wife acknowledged his slight bow with a slight bow; the crew welcomed him with jokes and friendly curses; and only I seethed. Needless to say, it was too late to set out on the river that night. We stayed at the mooring, and I slept badly among nocturnal cries, coughs, spittings, songs, and sounds of the loading of coal by hand into the bunkers of the Firefly out in the stream.

  * * *

  —

  WE STARTED up the river at dawn the next day.

  I carried over into the journey’s first morning, like an aching muscle strained the day before, the painful knot of impatience that I had built up while waiting for the cook. These Chinese aboard the junk did everything so slowly and carelessly!—and with such infuriating cheerfulness. Though they had begun the noisy work of weighing moorings just as the first incendiary hints of sunrise had lit up the mists around the strange pyramidal hill across from Ichang, it was nearly ten o’clock by my watch before we finally cleared the pack of moored junks on the city’s lap and began to move upstream. I was outraged by the deliberation of the owner. He was setting out on a nearly two-hundred-mile voyage with a cargo worth two hundred taels, perhaps more; surely upstream speed would mean downriver profit for him. Yet he seemed not to care whether he made twenty miles or one in his first day’s progress. Once in a while he would rise up in a fury of shouting at his crew; then he would subside to his tea and his game of “stones”with his young wife, and it seemed that his outbursts were a matter of form, almost of ceremony.

  I noticed the owner’s wife more closely than I had the day before, when she had seemed just a rather shabby, though somehow bright and even coarsely pretty young woman of the river. Now I saw that the brightness came from her eyes; when her husband stood up in his formal rampages, her large black-pupiled eyes took in more than his exaggerated presiding gestures and shouting rushes. She looked in the faces of the crew. She saw the men. Her eyes were wide open, figuratively as well as actually, it seemed to me, and they looked wiser than the rest of her young face seemed to warrant.

  By mid-morning my irritability, like the mists on the river which were gradually burnt off by the April sun, was dissipated by the all-melting view into the heart of which we were being carried on a fine breeze by our big bamboo-ribbed lugsail. All the way from Shanghai, a thousand miles by river, the terrain had been flat and brown. Now, in a soft spring morning laden with the fragrance of dewy grass and numberless violets, we moved in a northerly direction across what seemed an inland lake nearly three quarters of a mile wide, with sun-washed mountains along the west bank and low purple hills to the east.

  Then all at once, on the left, a cleft in the massif showed itself, and there, narrowed to two hundred yards, flowing between rounded limestone mountains, was the Great River in the first of its wondrous gorges. The surprise was overwhelming.

  It was here at the mouth of Yellow Cat Gorge that I first saw the trackers at work, as we had too little wind to sail against the constricted current; and it was here, therefore, that I first noticed the head tracker. As the lugsail was taken in and the junk was rowed toward the left bank by a squad of trackers, I noticed that one of them, a lumpy, broad-faced fellow with a shaven head, who was dressed in new blue cotton pants and a drab ragged jacket, took the lead in all that was done. From his powerful larynx to his square feet, this man, whom the owner addressed with a nickname, Old Pebble, seemed to be one whole, rhythm-bound muscle. Everything he did had rhythm. As he gave orders on board the junk, he kicked his feet on the slapping unbolted planks of the deck; he punctuated what he said with tongue-clicks; his hands moved in rope-pulling gestures, all in time with his cadenced speech. His head was spherical, and he had the crow’s feet of cheerfulness all the way from his narrow eyes back to his ears. I have never been able to tell with certainty how old a Chinese is; I would guess that this one was in his mid-thirties. At any rate, the “Old” of his nickname was surely an affectionate term; he seemed young and strong. I saw that he wore a silver ring, and although his hands had no more grace than monkey-wrenches, he had let his fingernails grow rather long, in the old style, evidently to show that he was of the boatmen’s nobility.

  That evening, after we had made perhaps ten miles between amazing limestone battlements, turrets, and buttresses, towed every inch of the way by the chanting trackers, with the one called Old Pebble out in front, singing weird rhythmic melodies—that evening, when we were securely moored in a little eddying cove at the head of Yellow Cat Gorge, I spoke to the head tracker. He received me openly and without deference.

  I began to question him about his life.

  “I pull the towline,” he said, and stopped, as if to say: What more is there? What more could there be?

  But, I asked, what of the future?

  “I have very little,” he said, and he spoke as if having little were the greatest fortune, and the greatest buffer against the future, that a man could wish.

  Again I tried to ask him what his goal was.

  “In my spare time ashore I drink wine,” he said. “I never fight when I get drunk. I just talk when I’m drunk and lean against a wall and go to sleep. I hate fighting, and really no one wants to fight me. I am an ‘old good.’ I don’t save money, I spend it on my friends. I buy them wine. I buy friendship. I save friendship. But some of the men on the river are no good. If they know you have money, they want you to gamble with jumping sticks or cards. If you refuse, they form a circle around you and threaten you.”

  He cleared his throat and spat over the side into the Great River, and he seemed very pleased with himself.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I have no home; my body is my home,” he said. “But I am an old good. I shall stay on boats, and there will always be someone to hire me, and when I am old, all my brothers in the boatmen’s guild and all the captains on the riverside who know me will give me a few coppers in payment for the friendship I have hoarded for them. I will have plenty. I will have a fine funeral.”

  This was the way he spoke. At the time I wanted to believe him, and mostly did, though I thought him full of guile; in my Occidental complacency I then considered all Chinese liars, anyhow. I guess I wanted to believe that he was a simple, good man, but I was troubled by his obvious inner enjoyment of his account of himself; from time to time he had pursed his lips, so that his face had looked shrewd, as if he had been saying to himself, “I am the grandest liar in the world, and see how I have this stupid foreign boy on my towline!” I thought he might be dramatizing himself as a poor, pure-hearted wanderer, one of Heaven’s minstrels, to me, a foreigner who asked questions. I could not imagine that a young, vigorous, and cheerful man could live without distant goals: wealth, family, and a good name widely known.

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING day, the second of our passage, we moved through a landscape of such wildness as I had never before even imagined. Not far above the cove where we had moored for the night, the river took an abrupt turn to the right, beyond which we entered the trough called Lampshine Gorge. On the bank on our right were steep, giddying limestone cliffs crowned with soft-formed, many-wintered rocks, while on the left, on the shelves of less precipitous but still
formidable mountains, picturesque villages and temples rested. Once, high on an apparently inaccessible cliff, we saw huge characters painted on the rock, and the owner read them to me: “The hills are bright, the waters dark.” Near the upper mouth of the gorge, on the eastern side, a narrow, isolated pinnacle of limestone called, as I was told, the Pillar of Heaven rose nearly two thousand feet; one could imagine that it did, indeed, support the crystal ceiling of the day.

  At length we erupted from the gorge. The limestone formations fell away, and we moved all at once into a region of plutonic rocks. In a valley nearly a mile wide huge boulders of gneiss and granite, larger by far than our junk, lay strewn about, and straight across the line of the river, relenting only enough to grant it a shallow channel, curious dykes of greenstone and porphyry rose up out of the other stone. It was a primeval landscape, and it seemed to have been arranged by some force of fury. I was deeply moved and humbled by the sight of the trackers scrambling like tiny, purposeful crickets over the rough and intractable banks. We were all hopeless insects in this setting. My career, engineering, seemed only nonsense here. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could be done by man’s puny will for this harsh valley littered with gigantic rocks.

  By evening I was worn out with awe and small-stirring fears, for the currents of the river, wrenched and twisted by hidden boulders and sunken dams of porphyry, had sucked at our huge junk and made it tremble and bob as if it had been a mere autumn leaf on the water; and when, after the evening meal in the softness of twilight, some slapstick began to be set up by the cook and the head tracker, while the other men laughed around them, I was irritated. I felt that my boatmates were men without feeling, if men at all. How could they have traveled all day through this land of pre-history only looking forward to an evening of pranks and cackling? The cook and the head tracker jumped about burlesquing the formal ritual of jugglers and magicians, chanting the nonsense-rhymes such men use, and waving their arms and looking mysterious; these two excelled in the universal funny talk of gangs of men—companionable abuse, loving cruelty—and they were making verbal monsters of each other, and their friends roared.