Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

was intensely curious as to what had brought him here, and
apparently so unwillingly.
     
    Huge crowds surrounded the railway station, encircling it in lines ten
deep until it looked, said George Westrum, exactly like a baseball stadium at
World Series time besieged by eager fans. With Miss Chu and Mr. Li to run
interference, they made their way through line after line to a smaller queue inside
the building, where they waited with families gripping small portable fans in
one hand and food packages in string bags in the other: visitors to Canton , bearing gifts to
relatives.
    ”This must be first class,” murmured George Westrum, standing just behind
her.
    ”In a classless society?” said Mrs. Pollifax in amazement.
    Again she surprised that twinkle. ”It’s a matter of semantics,” he said.
”They call them soft seats, as against the hard seats for the masses out
there.”
    ”You’ve visited China before, then?”
    ”I read a lot,” he said simply.
    She smiled at him. ”And what do you think of our newly met China guide?”
    ”Mr. Li? Young and very organized,” he said. ”Put him in Western clothes
and he’d be a junior executive anywhere. IBM, probably.”
    She laughed. In spite of Mr. Li’s modest attire it was exactly that
executive quality, with its sense of coiled energy, that had first struck her
on meeting him, too. Or perhaps his attire wasn’t modest at all, she thought,
as she glanced around and compared him with the other Chinese waiting in line,
for his sandals were of leather, not plastic; she had already glimpsed black
silk socks with tiny clocks on them, and he wore a digital watch on his wrist.
She only wished that she could be more confident about his English, which was
spoken with enthusiasm at a reckless speed and with an explosive laugh at the
end of each statement.
    The crowd suddenly began to move and they achieved the train at last,
said good-bye to Miss Chu, and climbed aboard the appointed car that would take
them across the Lo Wu bridge into Mainland China . Mrs. Pollifax, entering the
car last of all, chose to sit next to Peter Fox, from whom she received a
swift, bored glance. Paying this no attention she gazed around in awe at the
starched lace curtains at each window of the railway car, and the pale blue
decor. Everything was immaculate; in fact no sooner were they all seated than a
young woman hurried out from some inner sanctum to run a damp floor mop up and
down the aisle and erase every hint of traffic. Music began; a small TV screen
over the door sprang to life and as the train began to move, so did figures on
the screen: a happy smiling young woman sang a Chinese song in a strident
singsong voice; a handsome young man joined her and with large gestures and an
even happier smile reinforced the suggestion of total bliss in Mainland China.
Mrs. Pollifax watched in fascination, and then her attention moved past Peter
Fox’s impassive profile to the lush green countryside sliding past the window.
    Eventually the stoniness of that profile challenged her. ”Excited?” she
asked Peter Fox, not without irony.
    He turned and gave her a measuring glance. ”Half and half,” he said with
a shrug.
    Being direct by nature she refused such tiresome ambiguousness. ”What
made you come, then?” she asked. ”What made you choose China ?”
    ”I didn’t,” he said.
    Mrs. Pollifax began to feel amused by this conversation. ”I thought you
seemed a little martyred,” she said, warming to the game. ”Of course my next
question—naturally—is just why and what—”
    But apparently he was not playing games. ”I didn’t mean to seem
martyred,” he said, with deadly seriousness and a scowl. ”It’s just I’m still
making up my mind whether I’ll like it. It’s a college graduation present from
my grandmother.”
    ”Ah,” said Mrs. Pollifax. ”It was her idea then, China ?”
    He nodded. ”She was born here—spent the first thirteen years of her life
in China, so China