DOANE left the compound a little before noon, and arrived at So T'ung at six the following morning. The distance, a hundred and eighty li, was just short of sixty-five English miles. The road was little more than a footpath, so narrow that in the mountains, where the grinding of ages of traffic and the drainage from eroded slopes had long ago worn it down into a series of deep, narrow canyons, the came! trains, with their wide panniers, always found passing a matter of difficulty and confusion. Here it skirted a precipice, or twisted up and up to surmount the Pass of the Flighting Geese, just west of the sacred mountain; there it wandered along the lower hillsides above a spring torrent that would be, a few months later, a trickling rivulet. His gait averaged, over all conditions of road and of gradient, about five miles an hour. He followed, on this occasion, the principle of walking an hour, then resting fifteen minutes. And toward midnight he set up his cot by the roadside, in the shelter of a tree by a memorial arch, and gave himself two hours of sleep.
The little hill city of So T'ung was awake and astir, with gates open and traffic already flowing forth. There were no signs of disorder. But Doane noted that the anti-foreign mutterings and sneers along the roadside (to which he had grown accustomed twenty years earlier) were louder and more frequent than common. For himself he had not the slightest fear. His great height, his enormous strength, his commanding eye, had always, except on the one recent occasion of the riot at the T'ainan fair, been enough to cow any native who was near enough to do him injury. And added to this moral and physical strength he had lately felt a somewhat surprising recklessness. He felt this now. He didn't care what happened, so long as he might be busy in the thick of it. His personal safety took on importance only when he kept Betty in mind. He must save himself to provide for her. And, of course, in the absence of any other strong personality, the mission workers needed him; they had no one else, just now, on whom to lean. And then there were the hundreds of native Christians; they needed him, for they would be slaughtered first... if it should come to that. They would be loyal, and would die, at the last, for their faith.
During the long hours of walking through the still mountain night, his thoughts ranged far. He considered talking over his problems with M. Pourmont. There should be work for a strong, well-trained man somewhere in the railroad development that was going on all over the yellow kingdom. Preferably in some other region, where he wouldn't be known. Starting fresh, that was the thing!
Over and over the rather blank thought came around, that a man has no right to bring into the world a child for whom he can not properly, fully, care. And it came down to money, to some money; not as wealth, but as the one usable medium of human exchange. A little of it, honestly earned, meant that a man was productive, was paying his way. A saying of Emerson's shot in among his racing thoughts—something about clergymen always demanding a handicap. It was wrong, he felt. It was—he went as far as this, toward dawn—parasitic. A man, to live soundly, healthily, must shoulder his way among his fellows, prove himself squarely.
And he dwelt for hours at a time on the ethical basis of all this missionary activity. It was what he came around to all night. There was an assumption—it was, really, the assumption on which his present life was based—that the so-called Christian civilization, Western Europe and America—owed its superiority to what he thought of as the Christian consciousness. That superiority was always implied. It was the motive power back of this persistent proselytizing. But to-night, as increasingly of late years, he found himself whittling away the implications of a spiritual and even ethical quality in that superiority of the White over the Yellow. More and more clearly it seemed to come down to the physical. It was the amazing discoveries in what men call modern science, and the wide application in industry of these discoveries, that made much of the difference. Then there were the accidents of climate and soil and of certain happy mixtures of blood through conquests... these things made a people great or weak. And lesser accidents, such as a simple alphabet, making it easy and cheap to print ideas; the Chinese alphabet and the lack of easy transportation had held China back, he believed.... Back of all these matters lay, of course, a more powerful determinant; the genius that might be waxing or waning in a people. The genius of America was waxing, clearly; and the genius of China had been waning for six hundred years. But in her turn, China had waxed, as had Rome, and Greece, and Egypt. None of these had known the Christian consciousness, yet each had run her course. And Greece and Rome, without it, had risen high. Rome, indeed, whatever the reason, had begun to wane from the very dawn of Christianity; and had finally succumbed, not to that, but to barbarians who had in them crude physical health and enterprise.
The more deeply he pondered, the more was he inclined to question the importance of Christianity in the Western scheme. For Western civilization, to his burning eyes, walking at night, alone, over the hills of ancient Hansi, looked of a profoundly materialistic nature. You felt that, out here, where oil and cigarettes and foreign-made opium and merchandise of all sorts were pushing in, all the time, about and beyond the missionaries. And with bayonets always bristling in the background. The West hadn't the finely great gift of Greece or the splendid unity of Rome. Its art was little more than a confusion of copies, a library of historical essays. And art seemed, now, important. And as for religion... Doane had moments of real bitterness, that night, about religion. And he thought around and around a circle. The one strongest, best organized church of the West—the one that made itself felt most effectively in China—seemed to him not only opposed to the scientific enterprise that was, if anything, peculiarly the genius of the West, but insistent on superstitions (for so they looked, out here) beside which the quiet rationalism of the Confucian drift seemed very reality. And the period of the greatest power and glory of that church had been, to all European civilization, the Dark Ages. The Reformation and the modern free political spirit appeared to be cognates, yet the evangelical churches fought science, in their turn, from their firm base of divine revelation. It was difficult, to-night, to see the miracles and mysteries of Christianity as other than legendary superstitions handed down by primitive, credulous peoples. It was difficult to see them as greatly different from the incantations of the Boxers or of these newer Lookers.
And then, of all those great peoples that had waxed and waned, China alone remained.... There was a thought! She might wax again. For there she was, as always. Without the Christian consciousness, the Chinese, of all the great peoples, alone had endured.
A fact slightly puzzling to Doane was that he thought all this under a driving nervous pressure. Now and then his mind rushed him, got a little out of control. And at these times he walked too fast.
The mission station was situated in the northern suburbs of So T'ung-fu, outside the wall. Duane went directly there.
The mission compound lay a smoking ruin. Not a building of the five or six that had stood in the walled acre, was now more than a heap of bricks, with a Ft of wall or a chimney standing. The compound wall had been battered down at a number of points, apparently with a heavy timber that now lay outside one of the breaches. There was no sign of life.
He walked in among the ruins. They were still too hot for close examination. But he found the body of a white man lying in an open space, clad in flannel shirt and riding breeches, with knee-high laced boots of the sort commonly worn by engineers. The face was unrecognizable. The top of the head, too, had been beaten in. But on the back of the head grew' curly yellow' hair. From the figure evidently a young man; one of Pourmont's adventurous crew; probably one of the Australians or New Zealanders. A revolver lay near the outstretched hand. Doane picked it up and examined it. Every chamber was empty. And here and there along the path were empty cartridges; as if he had retreated stubbornly, loading and firing as he could. Not far off lay an empty cartridge box. That would be where he had filled for the last time. He must have sent some of the bullets home; but the attackers had removed their dead. Yes, closer scrutiny discovered a number of blood-soaked areas along the path.
A young Chinese joined him, announcing himself as a helper at the station. Jen Ling Pu had sent him out over the rear wall, he said, with the telegram to Mr. Doa ne.
Together they carried the body of the white man to a clear space near the wall and buried him in a shallow grave. Duane repeated the burial service in brief form.
The boy, whose name was Wen, explained that on his return from the telegraph station he had found it impossible to get into the compound, as it was then surrounded, and accordingly hid in the neighborhood. By that time, he said, Jen, with the three or four helpers and servants who had not perished in the other buildings, one or two native Bible-women, a few children of native Christians and the white man were all in the main house, and were firing through the windows. They had all undoubtedly been burned to death, as only the white man had come out. He himself could not get close enough to see much of what happened, though he slipped in among the curious crowd outside and picked up what information he could. The attacking parlies were by no means of one mind or of settled purpose. The Lookers among them were for a quick and complete massacre, as were the young rowdies who had joined in the attack for the fun of it. But there were more moderate councils. And so many were injured or killed by the accurate marksmanship of the young foreign devil, that for a time they all seemed to lose heart. The Lookers were subjected to ridicule by the crowd because by their incantations they were supposed to render themselves invisible to foreign eyes, and it was difficult to explain the high percentage of casualties among them on the grounds of accidental contact with flying bullets. Finally a ruse was decided on. The white man was to come out for a parley. A student, recently attached to the yamen of the local magistrate as an interpreter volunteered—in good faith, Wen believed—to act in that capacity on this occasion.
The meeting took place by one of the breaches in the wall. The engineer demanded that the three principal leaders of the Lookers Le surrendered to him on the spot, and held until the arrival of troops from T'ainan. While they were pretending to listen, a party crept around behind the wall. He heard them, stepped back in time to avoid being clubbed to death, in a moment shot two of them dead, and shot also the captain of the Lookers, who had been conducting the parley. Then, evidently, he had backed tow ard the main house and had nearly reached it when his cartridges gave out.
Doane was busy, what with the improvised burial and with noting down Wen's narrative, until nearly noon. By this time he was very sleepy. There was nothing more he could do. The ruins of the main house would not be cool before morning. Nor would the soldiers arrive. He decided to call at once on the magistrate and arrange for a guard to be left in charge of the compound; then to set up his cot in a cell in one of the local caravansaries. He had brought a little food, and the magistrate would give him what else he needed. The innkeeper would brew him tea.... Before two o'clock he was asleep.
He was awakened by a persistent light tapping at the door. Lying there in the dusky room, fully clad, gazing out under heavy lids at the dingy wall with its dingier banners hung about lettered with the Chinese characters for happiness and prosperity, and at the tattered gray paper squares through which came soft evening sounds of mules and asses munching their fodder at the long open manger, of children talking, of a carter singing to himself in quavering falsetto, it seemed to him that the knocking had been going on for a very long time. His thoughts, slowly coming awake, were of tragic stuff. Death stalked again the hills of Hansi. Friends had been butchered. The blood of his race had been spilled again. Life was a grim thing....
A voice called, in pidgin-English.
He replied gruffly; sat up; struck a match and lighted the rush-light on the table. It was just after eight.
He went to the door; opened it. A small, soft, yellow Chinaman stood there.
“What do you want?” Doane asked in Chinese.
The yellow man looked blank.
“My no savvy,” he said.
“What side you belong?” The familiar pidgin-English phrases sounded grotesquely in Doane's ears, even as they fell from his own lips.
“My belong Shanghai side,” explained the man. He was apparently a servant. Some one would have brought him out here. Though to what end it would be hard to guess, for a servant who can not make himself understood has small value. And no Shanghai man can do that in Hansi.
“What pidgin belong you this side?”
“My missy wanchee chin-chin.”
Thus the man. His mistress wished a word. It was odd. Who, what, would his mistress be!
Doane always made it a rule, in these caravansaries, to engage the “number one” room if it was to be had. A countryside inn, in China, is usually a walled rectangle of something less or more than a halfacre in extent. Across the front stands the innkeeper's house, and the immense, roofed, swinging gates, built of strong timbers and planks. Along one side wall extend the stables, where the animals stand a row, looking over the manger into the courtyard. Along the other side are cell-like rooms, usually on the same level as the ground, with floors of dirt or worn old tile, with a table, a narrow chair or two of bent wood, and the inevitable brick kang, or platform bed with a tiny charcoal stove built into it and a thickness or two of matting thrown over the dirt and insect life of the crumbling surface. At the end of the court opposite' the gate stands, nearly always, a small separate building, the floor raised two or three steps from the ground. This is, in the pidgin vernacular, the “number one” room. Usually, however, it is large enough for division into two or three rooms. In the present instance there were two rather large rooms on either side of an entrance hall. Doane had been ushered into one of these rooms with no thought for the possible occupant of the other, beyond sleepily noting that the door was closed.
Hastily brushing his hair and smoothing the wrinkles out of his coat he stepped across the hall. That other door was ajar now. He tapped; and a woman's voice, a voice not unpleasing in quality, cried, in English, “Come in!”
She rose, as he pushed open the door, from the chair. She was young—certainly in the twenties—and unexpectedly, curiously beautiful. Her voice was Western American. Her abundant hair wras a vivid yellow. She was clad in a rather elaborate negligee robe that looked odd in the dingy room. Her cot stood by the paper windows, on a square of new white matting. Two suit-cases stood on bricks nearer the kang. And a garment was tacked up across the broken paper squares.
“I'm sorry to trouble you,” she said breathlessly. “But it's getting unbearable. I've waited here ever since yesterday for some word. I know there was trouble. I heard so much shooting. And they made such a racket yelling. They got into the compound here. I had to cover my windows, you see. It was awful. All night I thought they'd murder me. And this morning I slept a little in the chair. And then you came in... I saw you... and I was wild to ask you the news. I thought perhaps you'd help me. I've sat here for hours, trying to keep from disturbing you. I knew you were sleeping.”
She ran on in an ungoverned, oddly intimate way.
“I'm glad to be of what service I—” He found himself saying something or other; wondering with a strangely cold mind what he could possibly do and why on earth she was here. His own long pent-up emotional nature was answering hers with profoundly disturbing force.
“I ought to ask you to sit down,” she was saying. She caught his arm and almost forced him into the chair. She even stroked his shoulder, nervously yet casually. He coldly told himself that he must keep steady, impersonal; it was the unexpectedness of this queer situation, the shock of it...
“It's all right,” said she. “I'll sit on the cot. It's a pig-sty here. But sometimes you can't help these things.... please tell me what dreadful thing has happened!”
She had large brown eyes... odd, with that hair!... and they met his, hung on them.
In a low measured voice he explained:
“The natives attacked a mission station here—”
“Oh, just a mission!”
“They burned it down, and killed all but one of the workers there.”
“Were they white?”
“The workers were Chinese, Christian Chinese. But—”
“Oh, I see! I couldn't imagine what it was all about. It's been frightful. Sitting here, without a word. But if it was just among the Chinese, then where's—I've got to tell you part of it—where's Harley Beggins? He brought me out here. He isn't the kind that skips out without a word. I've known him two years. He's a good fellow. You see, this thing—whatever it is—leaves me in a hole. I can't just sit here.”
“I am trying to tell you. Please listen as calmly as you can. First tell me something about this Harley Beggins.”
“He's with the Ho Shan Company. An engineer. But say—you don't mean—you're not going to—”
“He was a young man?”
“Yes. Tall. Curly hair. A fine-looking young man. And very refined. His family... but, my God, you—”
“You must keep quiet!”
“Keep quiet! I'd like to know how, when you keep me in suspense like this!” She was on her feet now.
“I am going to tell you. But you must control yourself. Mr. Beggins must be the young engineer who tried to help the people in the compound.”
“He was killed?”
“Quiet! Yes, he was killed. I buried him this morning.”
Then the young woman's nerves gave way utterly, Doane found his mind divided between the cold thought of leaving her, perhaps asking the magistrate to give her an escort down to Ting Yang or up through the wall to Peking, and the other terribly strong impulse to stay. It was clear that she was not—well, a good woman; excitingly clear. She said odd things. “Well, see where this mess leaves me!” for one. And, “What's to become of me? Do I just stay out here? Die here? Is this all?”... When, daring a lull in the scene she was making he undertook to go, she clung to him and sobbed on his shoulder. The young engineer had meant little in her life. Her present emotion was almost wholly fright.
He knew, then, that he couldn't go. He was being swept toward destruction. It seemed like that. He could think coolly about it during the swift moments. He could watch his own case. One by one, in quick-flashing thoughts, he brought up all the arguments for morality, for duty, for common decency, and one by one they failed him. Something in life was too strong for him. Something in his nature.... This, then was the natural end of all his brooding, speculating, struggling with the demon of unbelief.... And even then he felt the hideously tragic quality of this hour.
She was, it came out, a notorious woman of Soo-chow Road, Shanghai; one of the so-called “American girls” that have brought a good name to local disgrace. The new American judge, at that time engaged in driving out the disreputable women and the gamblers from the quasi protection of the consular courts, had issued a warrant for her arrest, whereupon young Beggins, who had been numbered among her “friends,” had undertaken to protect her, out here in the interior, until the little wave of reform should have passed.
Despite her vulgarity, and despite the chill of spiritual death in his heart, he wished to be kind to her. Something of the long-frustrated emotional quality of the man overflowed toward her. He did what he could; laid her case before the magistrate, and left enough money to buy her a ticket to Peking from the northern railroad near Kalgan. This in the morning.
One other thing he did in the morning was to write to Hidderleigh, at Shanghai, telling enough of the truth about his fall, and asking that his successor be sent out at the earliest moment possible. And he sent off the letter, early, at the Chinese post-office. At least he needn't play the hypocrite. The worst imaginable disaster had come upon him. His real life, it seemed, was over As for telling the truth at the mission, his mind would shape a course. The easiest thing would be to tell Boatwright, straight. Though in any case it would come around to them from Shanghai. He had sealed his fate when he posted the letter. They would surely know, all of them. Henry Withery would know. It would reach the congregations back there in the States. At the consulates and up and down the coast—where men drank and gambled and carved fortunes out of great inert China and loved as they liked—they would be laughing at him within a fortnight.
And then he thought of Betty.
That night, on the march back to T'ainan, he stood, a solitary figure on the Pass of the Flighting Geese, looking up, arms outstretched, toward the mountain that for thousands of years has been to the sons of Han a sacred eminence; and the old prayer, handed down from another Oriental race as uttered by a greater sinner than he, burst from his lips:
“I will lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help!”
But no help came to Griggsby Duane that night. With tears lying warm on his cheeks he strode down the long slope toward Tainan.
IT WAS early morning—the first day of April—when the Pacific liner that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped anchor in the river below Shanghai and there discharged passengers and freight for all central and northern China.
Brachey, on that occasion, watched from his cabin porthole while Betty and the Hasmers descended the accommodation ladder and boarded the company's launch. Then, not before, he drank coffee and nibbled a roll. His long face was gray and deeply lined. He had not slept.
He went up to Shanghai on the next launch, walked directly across the Bund to the row of steamship offices, and engaged passage on a north-bound coasting steamer. That evening he dined alone, out on the Yellow Sea, steaming toward Tsingtau, Chefu and (within the five days) Tientsin. He hadn't meant to take in the northern ports at this time; his planned itinerary covered the Yangtse Valley, where the disorderly young shoots of revolution were ripening slowly into red flower. But he was a shaken man. As he saw the problem of his romance, there were two persons to be saved, Betty and himself. He had behaved, on the one occasion, outrageously. He could see his action now as nothing other than weakness, curiously despicable, in the light of the pitiless facts. Reason had left him. Gusts of emotion lashed him. He now regarded the experience as a storm that must be somehow weathered. He couldn't weather it in Shanghai. Not with Betty there. He would surely seek her; find her. With his disordered soul he would cry out to her. In this alarming mood no subterfuge would appear too mean—sending clandestine notes by yellow hands, arranging furtive meetings.
He was, of course, running away from her, from his task, from himself. It was expensive business. But he had meant to work up as far as Tientsin and Peking before the year ran out. He was, after all, but taking that part of it first. To this bit of justification he clung. He passed but one night at Tientsin, in the curiously British hotel, on an out-and-out British street, where one saw little more to suggest the East than the Chinese policeman at the corner, an occasional passing amah or mafoo, and the blue-robed, soft-footed hotel servants; then on to Peking by train, an easy four-hour run, lounging in a European dining-car where the allied troops had fought their way foot by foot only seven years earlier.
Brachey, though regarded by critical reviewers as a rising authority on the Far East, had never seen Peking. India he knew; the Straits Settlements—at Singapore and Penang he was a person of modest but real standing; Borneo, Java, Celebes and the rest of the vast archipelago, where flying fish skim a burnished sea and green islands float above a shimmering horizon against white clouds; the Philippines, Siam, Cochin China and Hongkong; but the swarming Middle Kingdom and its Tartar capital were fresh fuel to his coldly eager mind. He stopped, of course, at the almost Parisian hotel of the International Sleeping Car Company, just off Legation Street.
Peking, in the spring of 1907, presented a far from unpleasant aspect to the eye of the traveler. The siege of the legations was already history and half-forgotten; the quarter itself had been wholly rebuilt. The clearing away of the crowded Chinese houses about the legations left à glacis of level ground that gave dignity to the walled enclosure. Legation Street, paved, bordered by stone walks and gray compound-walls, dotted with lounging figures of Chinese gatekeepers and alert sentries of this or that or another nation—British, American, Italian, Austrian, Japanese, French, Belgian, Dutch, German—offered a pleasant stroll of a late afternoon when the sun was low. Through gateways there were glimpses to be caught of open-air tea parties, of soldiers drilling, or even of children playing. Tourists wandered afoot or rolled by in rickshaws drawn by tattered blue and brown coolies.
From the western end of the street beyond the American glacis, one might see the traffic through the Chien Gate, with now and then a nose-led train of camels humped above the throng; and beyond, the vast brick walls and the shining yellow palace roofs of the Imperial City. Around to the north, across the Japanese glacis, one could stroll, in the early evening, to the motion-picture show, where one-reel films from Paris were run off before an audience of many colors and more nations and costumes, while a placid Chinaman manipulated a mechanical piano.
Brachey had letters to various persons of importance along the street. With the etiquette of remote colonial capitals, he had long since trained himself to a mechanical conformity. Accordingly he devoted his first afternoon to a round of calls, by rickshaw; leaving cards in the box provided for the purpose at the gate house of each compound. Before another day had gone he found return cards in his box at the hotel; and thus was he established as persona grata on Legation Street. Invitations followed. The American minister had him for tiffin. There were pleasant meals at the legation barracks. Tourist groups at the hotel made the inevitable advances, which he met with austere dignity. Meantime he busied himself discussing with experts the vast problems confronting the Chinese in adjusting their racial life to the modern world, and within a few days was jotting down notes and preparing tentative outlines for his book.
This activity brought him, at first, some relief from the emotional storm through which he had been passing. Work, he told himself, was the thing; work, and a deliberate avoidance of further entanglements.
If, in taking this course, he was dealing severely with the girl whose brightly pretty face and gently charming ways had for a time disarmed him, he was dealing quite as severely with himself; for beneath his crust of self-sufficiency existed shy but turbulent springs of feeling. That was the trouble; that had always been the trouble; he dared not let himself feel, lie had let go once before, just once, only to skim the very border of tragedy. The color of that one bitter experience of his earlier manhood ran through every subsequent act of his life. Month by month, through the years, he had winced as he drew a check to the hard, handsome, strange woman who had been, it appeared, his wife; who was, incredibly, his wife yet. With a set face he had read and courteously answered letters from this stranger. A woman of worldly wants, all of which came, in the end, to money. The business of his life had settled down to a systematic meeting of those wants. That, and industriously employing his talent for travel and solitude.
No, the thing was to think, not feel. To logic and will he pinned his faith. Impulses rose every day, here in Peking, to write Betty. It wouldn't be hard to trace her father's address. For that matter he knew the city. He found it impossible to forget a word of hers. Vivid memories of her round pretty face, of the quick humorous expression about her brown eyes, the movements of her trim little head and slim body, recurred with, if anything, a growing vigor They would leap into his mind at unexpected, awkward moments, cutting the thread of sober conversations. At such moments he felt strongly that impulse to explain himself further. But his clear mind told him that there would be no good in it. None. She might respond; that would involve them the more deeply. He had gone too far. He had (this in the bitter hours) transgressed. The thing was to let her forget; it would, he sincerely tried to hope, be easier for her to forget than for himself He had to try to hope that.
But on an evening the American military attaché dined with him. They sat comfortably over the coffee and cigars at one side of the large hotel dining-room. Brachey liked the attaché. His military training, his strong practical instinct for fact, his absorption in his work, made him the sort with whom Brachey, who had no small talk, really no social grace, could let himself go. And the attaché knew China. He had traversed the interior from Manchuria and Mongolia to the borders of Thibet and the Loto country of Yunnan, and could talk, to sober ears, interestingly. On this occasion, after dwelling long on the activity of secret revolutionary societies in the southern provinces and in the Yangtse Valley, he suddenly threw out the following remark:
“But of course, Brachey, there's an excellent chance, right now, to study a revolution in the making out here in Hansi. You can get into the heart of it in less than a week's travel. And if you don't mind a certain element of danger...”
The very name of the province thrilled Brachey. He sat, fingering his cigar, his face a mask of casual attention, fighting to control the uprush of feeling. The attache was talking on. Brachey caught bits here and there; “You've seen this crowd of banker persons from Europe around the hotel? Came out over the Trans Siberian with their families. A committee representing the Directorate of the Ho Shan Company. The story is that they've been asked to keep out of Hansi for the present for fear of violence.... You'd get the whole thing, out there—officials with a stake 'n the local mines shrewdly stirring up trouble while pretending to put it down; rich young students agitating, the Chinese equivalent of our soap-box Socialists; and queer Oriental motives and twists that you and I can't expect to understand.... The significant thing though, the big fact for you, I should say—is that if the Hansi agitators succeed in turning this little rumpus over the mining company into something of a revolution against the Imperial Government, it'll bring them into an understanding with the southern provinces. It may yet prove the deciding factor in the big row. Something as if Ohio should go democratic this year, back home. You see?... There are queer complications. Our Chinese secretary says that a personal quarrel between two mandarins is a prominent item in the mix-up.... That's the place for you, all right—Hansi! They've got the narrow-gauge railway nearly through to T'ainan-fu, I believe. You can pick up a guide here at the hotel. He'll engage a cook. You won't drink the water, of course; better carry a few cases of Tan San. And don't eat the green vegetables. Take some beef and mutton and potatoes and rice. You can buy chickens and eggs. Get a money belt and carry all the Mexican dollars you can stagger under. Provincial money's no good a hundred miles away. Take some English gold for a reserve. That's good everywhere. And you'll want your overcoat.”
Five minutes later Brachey heard this:
“A. P. Browning, the Agent General of the Ho Shan Company, is stopping here now, along with the committee. Talk with him, first. Get the company's view of it. He'll talk freely. Then go out there and have a look—see for yourself. Say the word, and I'll give you a card to Browning.”
Now Brachey looked up. It seemed to him, so momentous was the hour, that his pulse had stopped. He sat very still, looking at his guest, obviously about to speak.
The attaché, to whom this man's deliberate cold manner was becoming a friendly enough matter of course, waited.
“Thanks,” Brachey finally said. “Be glad to have it.”
But the particular card, scribbled by the attaché, there across the table, was never presented. For late that night, in a bitter revulsion of feeling, Brachey tore it up.
In the morning, however, when he stopped at the desk, the Belgian clerk handed him a thick letter from his attorney in New York, forwarded from his bank in Shanghai. He read and reread it, while his breakfast turned cold; studied it with an unresponsive brain.
It seemed that his wife's attorney had approached his with a fresh proposal. Her plan had been to divorce him on grounds of desertion and non-support; this after his refusal to supply what is euphemistically termed “statutory evidence.” But the fact that she had from month to month through the years accepted money from him, and not infrequently had demanded extra sums by letter and telegram, made it necessary that he enter into collusion with her to the extent of keeping silent and permitting her suit to go through unopposed. His own instructions to his lawyer stood flatly to the contrary.
But a new element had entered the situation. She wished to marry again. The man of her new choice had means enough to care for her comfortably. And in her eagerness to be free she proposed to release him from payment of alimony beyond an adjustment to cover the bare cost of her suit, on condition that he withdraw his opposition.
It was the old maneuvering and bargaining. At first thought it disgusted and hurt him. The woman's life had never come into contact with his, since the first few days of their married life, without hurting him. He had been harsh, bitter, unforgiving. He had believed himself throughout in the right. She had shown (in his view) no willingness to take marriage seriously, give him and herself a fair trial, make a job of it. She had exhibited no trait that he could accept as character. It had seemed to him just that she should suffer as well as he.
But now, as the meaning of the letter penetrated his mind, his spirits began to rise. It was a tendency he resisted; but he was helpless. From moment to moment his heart, swelled. Not once before in four years had the thought of freedom occurred to him as a desirable possibility. But now he knew that he would accept it, even at the cost of collusion and subterfuge. He saw nothing of the humor in the situation; that he, who had judged the woman so harshly, should find his code of ethics, his very philosophy, dashed to the ground by a look from a pair of brown eyes, meant little. It was simply that up to the present time an ethical attitude had been the important thing, whereas now the important thing was Betty. That was all there seemed to be to it. But then there had been almost as little of humor as of love in the queerly solitary life of Jonathan Brachey.
He cabled his attorney, directly after breakfast, to agree to the divorce. Before noon he had engaged a guide and arranged with him to take the morning train southward to the junction whence that narrow-gauge Hansi Line was pushing westward toward the ancient provincial capital.
In all this there was no plan. Brachey, confused, aware that the instinctive pressures of life were too much for him, that he was beaten, was soberly, breathlessly, driving toward the girl who had touched and tortured his encrusted heart. He was not even honest with himself; he couldn't be. He dwelt on the importance of studying the Hansi problem at close range He decided, among other things, that he wouldn't permit himself to see Betty, that he would merely stay secretly near her, certainly until a cablegram from New York should announce his positive freedom. In accordance with this decision he tore up his letters to her as fast as they were written. If the fact that he was now writing such letters indicated an alarming condition in his emotional nature, at least his will was still intact. He proved that by tearing them up. He even found this thought encouraging.
But, of course, he had taken his real beating when he gave up his plans and caught the coasting steamer at Shanghai. He was to learn now that rushing away from Betty and rushing toward her were irradiations of the same emotion.
He left Peking on that early morning way-train of passenger and freight cars, without calling again at the legation; merely sent a chit to the Commandant of Marines to say that he was off. He had not heard of the requirement that a white traveler into the interior carry a consular passport countersigned by Chinese authorities, and also, for purposes of identification, a supply of cards with the Chinese equivalent of his name; so he set forth without either, and (as a matter of fixed principle) without firearms.
PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village called Shau T'ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the night in a native caravansary, his folding cot set up on the earthen floor. The room was dirty, dilapidated, alive with insects and thick with ancient odors. A charcoal fire in the crumbling brick kang gave forth fumes of gas that suggested the possibility of asphyxiation before morning. Brachey sent his guide, a fifty-year-old Tientsin Chinese of corpulent figure, known, for convenience, as “John,” for water and extinguished the fire. The upper half of the inner wall was a wooden lattice covered with paper; and by breaking all the paper squares within his reach, Brachey contrived to secure a circulation of air. Next he sent John for a piece of new yellow matting, and by spreading this under the cot created a mild sensation of cleanliness, which, though it belied the facts, made the situation a thought more bearable. For Brachey, though a veteran traveler, was an extremely fastidious man. He bore dirt and squalor, had borne them at intervals for years, without ever losing his squeamish discomfort at the mere thought of them. But the stern will that was during these, years the man's outstanding trait, and his intense absorption in his work, had kept him driving ahead through all petty difficulties. The only outward sign of the strain it put him to was an increased irritability.
He traveled from Shau T'ing to Ping Yang, the next day in an unroofed freight ear without a seat, crowded in with thirty-odd Chinese and their luggage. During the entire day he spoke hardly a word. His two servants guarded him from contact with the other natives; but he ignored even his own men. At a way station, where the engine waited half an hour for water and coal, a lonely division engineer from Lombardy called out a greeting in bad French. Brachey coldly snubbed the man.
He planned to pick up either a riding animal or a mule litter at Ping Yang. As it turned out, the best John could secure was a freight cart; springless, of course. T'ainan was less than a hundred miles away, yet he was doomed to three days of travel in a creaking, hard-riding cart through the sunken roads, where dust as fine as flour sifts through the clothing and rubs into the pores of the skin, and to two more nights at native inns—with little hope of better accommodation at T'ainan.
By this time Brachey was in a state of nerves that alarmed even himself. Neither will nor imagination was proving equal to this new sort of strain. The confusion of motives that had driven him out here provided no sound justification for the journey. When he tried to think work now, he found himself thinking Betty. And misgivings were creeping into his mind. It amounted to demoralization.
He walked out after the solitary dinner of soup and curried chicken and English strawberry jam. The little village was settling into evening calm. Men and boys, old women and very little girls, sat in the shop fronts—here merely rickety porticoes with open doorways giving on dingy courtyards—or played about the street. Carpenters were still working on the roof of the new railway station. Three young men, in an open field, were playing decorously with a shuttlecock of snake's skin and duck feathers, deftly kicking it from player to player. Farther along the street a middle-aged man of great dignity, clad in a silken robe and black skull-cap with the inevitable red knot, was flying a colored kite ... through all this, Jonathan Brachey, the expert observer, wandered about unseeing.
Farther up the hill, however, rounding a turn in the road, he stopped short, suddenly alive to the vivid outer world. A newly built wall of brick stood before him, enclosing an area of two acres or more, within which appeared the upper stories of European houses, as well as the familiar curving roofs of Chinese tile. And just outside the walls two young men and two young women, in outing clothes, white folk all, were playing tennis. To their courteous greeting he responded frigidly.
Later a somewhat baffled young Australian led him to the office of M. Pourmont and presented him.
The distinguished French engineer, looking up from his desk, beheld a tall man in homespun knickerbockers, a man with a strong if slightly forbidding face. He fingered the card.
“Ah, Monsieur Brashayee! Indeed, yes! It is ze grand plaisir! But it mus' not be true zat you go on all ze vay to T'ainan-fu.”
“Yes,” Brachey replied with icy courtesy, “I am going to T'ainan.”
“But ze time, he is not vat you call—-ripe. One makes ze trouble. It is only a month zat zay t'row ze pierre at me, zay tear ze cart of me, zay destroy ze ear of me! Choses affreuses! I mus'not let you go!''
Brachey heard this without taking it in any degree to himself. He was looking at the left ear of this stout, bearded Parisian, from which, he observed, the lobe was gone.... Then, with a quickening pulse, he thought of Betty out there in T'ainan, in real danger.
“Come wiz me!” cried M. Pourmont. “I vill show you vat ve do—nous ici.” And snatching up a bunch of keys he led Brachey out about the compound. He opened one door upon what appeared to be a heap of old clothes.
“Des sac â terres,” he explained.
Brachey picked one up. “Ah,” he remarked, coldly interested—“sand-bags!”
“Yes, it is zat. Sand-bag for ze vail. Ve have ze femme Chinoise—ze Chinese vimmen—sew zem all every day. And you vill look...” He led the way with this to a corner of the grounds where the firm loess had been turned up with a pick. “It is so, Monsieur Brashayee, partout. All is ready. In von night ve fill ze bag, ve are a fort, ve are ready.... See! An' see!”
He pointed out a low scaffolding built here and there along the compound wall for possible use as a firing step. Just outside the wall crowding native houses were being torn down. “I buy zem,” explained M. Pourmont with a chuckle, “an' I clear avay. I make a glacis, nest ce pas?” On several of the flat roofs of supply sheds along the wall were heaps of the bags, ready filled, covered from outside eyes with old boards. In one building, under lock and key, were two machine guns and box on box of ammunition. Back in M. Pourmont's private study was a stand of modern rifles.
“You vill see by all zis vat is ze t'ought of myself,” concluded the genial Frenchman. “Ze trouble he is real. It is not safe to-day in Hansi. Ze Société of ze Great Eye—ze Lookair—he grow, he fait l'exercice, he make ze t'reat. You vill not go to T'ainan, alone. It is not right!”
Brachey was growing impatient now.
“Oh, yes,” he said, more shortly than he knew. “I will go on.”
“You have ze arm—ze revolvair?”
Brachey shook his head.
“You vill, zen, allow me to give you zis.”
But Brachey declined the weapon stiffly, said good night, and returned to the inn below.
The next morning a Chinese servant brought a note from M Pourmont. If he would go—thus that gentleman—and if he would not so much as carry arms for protection, at least he must be sure to get into touch with M. Griggsby Duane at once on arriving at T'ianan. M. Doane was a man of strength and address. He would be the only support that M. Brachey could look for in that turbulent corner of the world.
The lamp threw a flickering unearthly light, faintly yellow, on the tattered wall-hangings that bore the Chinese characters signifying happiness and hospitality and other genial virtues. The lamp was of early Biblical pattern, nor unlike a gravy boat of iron, full of oil or grease, in which the wick floated. It stood on the roughly-made table.
The inn compound was still, save for the stirring and the steady crunching of the horses and mules at their long manger across the courtyard.
Brachey, half undressed, sat on his cot, staring at the shadowy brick wall. His face was haggard. There were hollows under the eyes. His hands lay, listless, on his knees. The fire that had been for a fortnight consuming him was now, for the moment, burnt out.
But at least, he now felt, the particular storm was over. That there might be recurrences, he recognized. That girl had found her way, through all the crust, to his heart. The result had been nearly unbearable while it lasted. It had upset his reason; made a fool of him. Here he was—now—less than a day's journey from her. He couldn't go back; the thought stirred savagely what he thought of as the shreds of his self-respect. And yet to go on was, or seemed, unthinkable. The best solution seemed to be merely to make use of T'ainan as a stopping place for the night and pass on to some other inland city. But this thought carried with it the unnerving fear that he would fail to pass on, that he might even communicate with her.
His life, apparently, was a lie. He had believed since his boyhood that human companionship lay apart from the line of his development. Even his one or two boy friends he had driven off. The fact embittered his earlier life; but it was so. In each instance he had said harsh things that the other could not or would not overlook. His marriage had contributed further proof. Along with his pitilessly detached judgment of the woman went the sharp consciousness that he, too, had failed at it. He couldn't adapt his life to the lives of others. Since that experience—these four years—by living alone, keeping away, keeping clear out of his own land, even out of touch with the white race, and making something of a success of it, he had not only proved himself finally, he had even, in a measure, justified himself. Yet now, a chance meeting with a nineteen-year-old girl had, at a breath, destroyed the laborious structure of his life. It all came down to the fact that emotion had at last caught him as surely as it had caught the millions of other men—men he had despised. He couldn't live now without feeling again that magic touch of warmth in his breast. He couldn't go on alone.
He bowed his head over it. Round and round went his thoughts, cutting deeper and deeper into the tempered metal of his mind.
He said to her: “I am selfish.”
He had supposed he was telling the simple truth. But clearly he wasn't. At this moment, as at every moment since that last night on the boat deck, he was as dependent on her as a helpless child. And now he wasn't even selfish. These two days since the little talk with M. Pourmont he had been stirred deeply by the thought that she was in danger.
Over and over, with his almost repelling detachment of mind, he reviewed the situation. She might not share his present emotion. Perhaps she had recovered quickly from the romantic drift that had caught them on the ship. She was a sensitive, expressive little thing; quite possibly the new environment had caught her up and changed her, filled her life with fresh interest or turned it in a new direction. With this thought was interwoven the old bitter belief that no woman could love him. It must have been that she was stirred merely by that romantic drift and had endowed him, the available man, with the charms that dwelt only in her own fancy. Young girls were impressionable; they did that.
But suppose—it was excitingly implausible—she hadn't swung away from him. What would her missionary folk say to him and his predicament? Sooner or later he would be free; but would that clear him with these dogmatic persons, with her father? Probably not. And if not, wouldn't the fact thrust unhappiness upon her? You could trust these professionally religious people, he believed, to make her as unhappy as they could—nag at her.
Suppose, finally, the unthinkable thing, that she—he could hardly formulate even the thought; he couldn't have uttered it—loved him. What did he know of her? Who was she? What did she know of adult life? What were her little day-by-day tastes and impulses, such as make or break any human companionship...? And who was he? What right had he to take on his shoulders the responsibility for a human life... a delicately joyous little life? For that was what it came down to. It came to him, now, like a ray of blipdirig light, that he who quickens the soul of a girl must carry the burden of that soul to his grave. At times during the night he thought wistfully of his freedom, of his pleasant, selfish solitude and the inexigent companionship of his work.
His suit-case lay on the one chair. He drew it over; got out the huge, linen-mounted map of the Chinese Empire that is published by the China Inland Mission, and studied the roads about T'ainan. That from the east—his present route—swung to the south on emerging from the hills, and approached the city nearly from that direction. Here, instead of turning up into the city, he could easily enough strike south on the valley road, perhaps reaching an apparently sizable village called Hung Chan by night.
He decided to do that, and afterward to push southwest. It should be possible to find a way out along the rivers tributary to the Yangtse, reaching that mighty stream at either Ichang or Hankow. And he would work diligently, budding up again the life that had been so quickly and lightly overset. At least, for the time. He must try himself out This riding his emotions wouldn't do. At some stage of the complicated experience it was going to be necessary to stop and think. Of course, if he should find after a reasonable time, say a few months, that the emotion persisted, why then, with his personal freedom established, he might write Betty, simply stating his case.
And after all this, on the following afternoon, dusty, tired of body and soul, Jonathan Brachey rode straight up to the East Gate of T'ainan-fu.