CHAPTER XII
O Curse of Asia!
DO you know Hong Kong? If not, you are poor with poverty indeed. Except in China earth has no lovelier spot, and heaven itself needs none. The interior of the island is almost bleak, not beautiful, but its edge is paradise.
Other unknown wonder-places you may a little learn from books, from travelers and from pictures, but not Hong Kong. No words can in the least describe it. The attempt is an impertinence. Canvas and camera are useless too. “Hong Kong,” the gazetteers say, means “Fragrant Streams” or “Place of Sweet Lagoons.” But they are absurd. “Hong Kong” means “superbly beautiful.” If you know it, your eyes have been enriched forever. Climb the Peak, feathered with fern and bamboos, you are enwalled in beauty. Go far along the island by-ways, beauty leans toward you from every side, and beckons you on and still on. Pause on the bamboo-outlined path that bisects the great amphitheater of Happy Valley, and you may bathe your spirit and your sight in beauty, whether you look to the right, where the graves of European dead in China rest beneath their sumptuous coverlets of flowers, or to the left, where the Chinese jockeys, with their blue petticoats tucked up above their brown hips, and their bright satin jackets showing up their dancing cues, and English boys in regimental colors—gentlemen riders—canter neck to neck on the race-course, rehearsing the ponies for to-morrow’s race.
It is a unique juxtaposition, that sweet and perfumed bit of God’s acreage, and the lurid, teeming race-course, the dead men’s bones (and women’s, too, and babes’) just under the grass, and the betting, straining, champagne-drinking, well-dressed crowd, with only a narrow strip of yellow, bamboo-fringed path between; unique as is the old juxtaposition of life and death, and, too, strangely eloquent and appropriate of Anglo-Chinese life.
Hong Kong! Heaven and Hell in one. Hong Kong a gem of lovely, laughing China given to Britain—or, perhaps, loaned for a century or two. Wu often wondered which.
Every light in Victoria seemed twinkling hard as Basil Gregory’s boat gained the shore, a lamp in every window, a thousand painted paper lanterns, no two shaped or colored alike, swaying ambiently in the hands of coolies who trotted along the bund and up the hill paths, along the Bowen Road and peak-climbing streets, carrying chairs, pulling rickshaws, or running errands, uninterested but faithful, the most reliable hirelings on earth, and often, when the European employer gives himself half a chance with them, the most devoted.
Basil walked some distance from the spot where he had landed before he hailed a rickshaw. The naked coolie grunted a little at the address the Englishman gave him, but said grimly, “Can do.” For Gregory had named a bungalow that nestled in a tiny grove of persimmon and loquat trees, nearly halfway up the Peak—and Hong Kong Peak is steep.
It was not his home address that he had given, nor that of any club respectable or otherwise, or tree-hidden wayside tea-house, but the bungalow of a man he had treated none too well, and to call upon whom this was an odd hour.
In our moments of greatest personal dilemma and peril we seek the strangest confidants: sometimes in half-crazed desperation, sometimes in shame and fear of our nearer and dearer, sometimes instinctively, and then oddly often it proves well done. But whatever the most general explanation, most of us are prone at such tremulous times to lean upon some one not of our constant or closest entourage.
Basil Gregory had little estimate of Wu’s position and power, and none at all of Chinese character. But he had heard something of Wu, of course, and had read unconsciously something of her father between the pretty lines of Nang Ping’s gilded home life, and the young fellow realized that he was in personal peril, though he had not the least impression of how much.
He knew that he needed advice and a sounder judgment than his own.
His mother was his chum, and had been from his birth—they had stood together and pulled together always; but he could not take this to his mother. And he hoped to goodness it need not reach his father’s ear. He feared his father’s anger far less than he did his mother’s sorrow, and he divined that the paternal anger would be nine-tenths financial and not more than one-tenth moral. But such an escapade as his was calculated to injure a business that depended considerably upon a nice balance of British interests and Chinese industriousness and acquiescence. And the elder Gregory could be nasty at times, and disconcertingly close-fisted too. Certainly he could turn to neither parent now. He was not brave, but he certainly would have thrown himself into Hong Kong harbor or into the deadlier foaming rapid of Tsin-Tan rather than have had his mother know the truth about Nang Ping.
In his schooldays he had made half friends, half foes with a boy a few years his senior, whose influence, the little way it had gone, had all been to the good for Basil.
Basil had not done well at school or at ’Varsity. But ’Varsities are fairly used to that, and are built of long-suffering stuff, and young Gregory’s shortcomings had not over-mattered at Queen’s. But at school—a nice school, strictly run—he had been in serious trouble more than once, and once had been saved from expulsion by Jack Bradley, and at some sacrifices on Bradley’s part.
Both the school and the ’Varsity had been rather inappropriately selected. Basil came of commercial stock and was dedicated to a commercial life, and commercial life of a sort for which a few years’ business training in Chicago would have been more useful preparation than any amount of term-keeping at Oxford. But Gregory the father, who had had a very limited education, was, as is usual with such men of means, obsessed that his son should have the public-school and ’Varsity hallmark that he himself lacked. And Mrs. Gregory had wished it no less ardently. She had Oxford associations in her blood and of her girlhood, and her own father had worn an Oxford hood and held a modest incumbency near the town.
Basil Gregory learned some of the prescribed lessons at public school: he had to. And he might have learned something of books and other erudite lore at Oxford, for they do teach at the ’Varsities any one who insists upon being taught. But Basil had not insisted, and left Oxford knowing a little less than when he went.
Bradley had been at Queen’s, but had worked while Basil played, and such intimacy as had been between them died away, naturally enough, in the wider life and the greater individual freedom and scope of ’Varsity. But they had met sometimes; and once Bradley had been of great service to Gregory.
When Basil had reached Hong Kong a year ago, John Bradley had been serving there for some time as a curate in the Cathedral Church of St. John.
The young priest had held out an eager, friendly hand at once, but Basil had almost ignored it. It was shabby of him, and he knew it at the time. He knew that the other’s overtures were not in the least to the rich ship-owner’s son, but altogether to an old schoolmate newly come to a foreign country.
The priest—he lived quite alone—was just sitting down to his solitary dinner when Basil’s rickshaw came through the gate, ran up the path between the tall lychee trees, and stopped at the door.
The older man gave the younger the cordial greeting of their old days, and added, “Come and eat. Oh! but you must. I’m famished.”
And Basil sat down, both glad and sorry to postpone even by half an hour the unpleasant tale he had come to tell.
The priest was no anchorite, and his simple food was good, his wine sound. Both had their flattering tonic effect upon the easily influenced peccant, and as he ate and drank his misdemeanor dwindled away in his own eyes, until almost it seemed to him that he had been more sinned against than sinner.
But it seemed nothing of the sort to John Bradley, and it was soon evident as Gregory unfolded his errand while they smoked on the tiny balcony that jutted out into the begonias and laburnums of the little garden. The priest was sorrowful, but the man was furious. With some effort he heard the other through, and then he ripped out an ugly oath.
The visitor was astonished. Old John had always been a bit particular, of course—had to, don’t you know, and all that—but a man of the world and a thorough good sort. And this was not the first confession his schoolfellow had made to him.
“I say, easy all,” Gregory protested. “I wish it hadn’t happened”—you nearly always do—“but you needn’t play Peter Prigg. It isn’t one of your flock. The girl’s a nice little girl. I’m fond of her, I tell you. But she isn’t one of your reserved flock. She’s Chinese——”
“Oh, hell and damnation!” interrupted Bradley, striking the well-built railing with a fist so angry that the interlaced bamboos quivered and shook, “that’s the infamy of it. If you had to be a beast, don’t you see how much less loathsome you’d have been if you had seduced some girl of your own race?”
The other was too dumbfounded to reply, and the priest pounded on: “O curse of Europe! That such men as you pour into Asia and do this damnable thing! You’ll boil in oil for this. You insufferable ass! Don’t you realize in the least who and what her father is? You might better have affronted Tze-Shi herself. Boil in oil, I tell you, and, by God, so you ought! If it were not for your mother, I’d help Wu to heat it. How would you like some Chinese man to do to your sister what you have done to this girl? Oh! you needn’t spring up like that. You’ll not put a finger to me. I could pitch you over there, down to the road a thousand feet below, and for half a string of counterfeit cash I’d do it too. Oh! Basil, old chap, how could you, how could you——”
“Well,” sulkily, “I’m not the first.”
“No,” brokenly, “and you’ll not be the last. And where will it end, where will it end!”
“I thought you——”
“Oh! I don’t mean where will this special case end—for you and for that poor child I know how it will end—but how will it all end?—the putrid inter-racial welter and tangle that we Christians have made! And we—misunderstanding China, spoiling China, insulting her people, fattening on her industry—we, we English call ourselves men! We push our way into China. We laugh at everything she holds sacred, mock what we should admire, condemn what we lack the brain to understand, spit on a culture four thousand years older and in a good deal as much deeper and more sincere than ours, we steal what we want—oh, yes! it’s just that, most of it—we teach her boys to smoke opium, we show her a dozen new corruptions, teach her twenty new sins, we seize and spill her thimbleful of saki and give her a tumbler of brandy, and her women—her women——” he broke off.
The other man winced now. He knew there were tears in Bradley’s eyes, perhaps on his face. Just once before he had known John in tears, and he thought of it now, a never-to-be-forgotten radiant summer day when a young boy, an only child, had been publicly expelled from school for the saddest of young crimes—the one crime that even the laxest of our public schools neither forgive nor condone—and sent broken home to his mother, a widow.
“You’d like to throttle me when I dare say, ‘How would you like it, what would you think of it then, if a Chinese man treated your sister as you have treated this Chinese girl?’ Well, I say it again—and I hold your sister very dear—I say it again. And I say more: I say, ‘Why not?’ You have set the example—you and some generations of Christian gentlemen! And I tell you the day of reckoning will come.” With a gesture of despair he picked up his discarded pipe and filled it with nice men’s opium—tobacco.
When he had lit his pipe, Bradley sat and pulled at it moodily, and for a while Basil, thrashed and sore, sat and watched him. But the prick of personal dilemma could not give way long to, or even be dwarfed by, any thought of a general tragedy, be it as great and terrible even as Bradley averred.
“You said you knew how this was going to end for me——”
“And for her! Yes. It began in selfishness. It will go on, forever, in misery. It will end in misery. But there is just one thing now. A crime can never be so damned black that it can’t be made blacker. Yours is black enough, and it is going to stop right there. You must marry her.”
“I say——”
“You needn’t. There is nothing for you to say; you have come to me for help, and I am going to help you, as far as I can.”
“But——”
“Oh! there’ll be trouble—plenty of trouble. Wu will never forgive you or the poor child; though it’s he himself he ought not to forgive for having let a Chinese girl out and unwatched so with us English about. He’ll punish you both, and what Wu does he does well. There’ll be no escaping him. No boat will take you beyond his reach, no spot on earth hide you. You can’t stay in China with her. Her position would be too intolerable, even for one of us to inflict on a woman. You must take her to England—if you can get there. And even if Wu lets you do the best you can with the monstrous mess you’ve made of life for yourself and for her, you’ll both be miserable there, but not quite so miserable as you’d be in China. England is the one country on earth where the Eurasian, the poor innocent mongrel result of such conduct as yours, is treated a little better than contagion and vermin. Think what chance your children would have here! You have seen such children here, and how they fare!”
Little as he, in common with most of his race, had troubled to observe in Asia, Basil Gregory knew well enough how those half-European, half-Chinese were despised and treated in Hong Kong, and how much more despised by the Chinese than by the Europeans. And he knew too—though not so thoroughly as Bradley did—that to the Chinese at least such Eurasians were doubly despised when born in wedlock. The Chinese mind has some contemptuous shrug of “n’importe” for such racial misdemeanor that is unaffectedly wanton, but to that mind marriage makes the gross miscarriage ten times more putrid. Such few attempts at European-Chinese marriage as are braved in China are between, almost always, European men and Chinese women. Exiled, the Chinese will marry and treat well and honorably the women of the race of the place in which he lives—he does it in Singapore, in Chicago and in Rio—but never for him such mixed marriage in China.
Basil had no intention of making the experiment in China or otherwise. Escape, not atonement, was his intention.
“Yes,” he said presently, “and if only for that reason, the children, don’t you see that it would better end here and now? At the worst—now—one. But if—if I did marry Nang and take her to England, there might be others.”
Bradley groaned. “It is all very difficult. The consequences of wrong always are. I don’t see my way. You must let me think a bit; perhaps to-morrow I’ll see what’s best, least bad!” He groaned again, but he did not tell Gregory that it had just occurred to him that legal marriage without Wu’s consent might prove impossible. Wu’s consent would never be had, he thought. They solve such problems differently in China. They cut them.