The Last Ditch
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Title: The Last Ditch
Creator: Will Levington Comfort
Release date: June 30, 2014 [eBook #46152]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46152
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST DITCH ***
Produced by Al Haines.
_The Last Ditch_
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF "CHILD AND COUNTRY," "DOWN AMONG
MEN," "MIDSTREAM," "RUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,"
ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1916
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
JOHN
*CONTENTS*
PROLOGUE: HANKOW
The Yellow Rug Woman
PART ONE: THE GREAT DRIFT
Sundry Adventures
PART TWO: THE GOBI
Anna Erivan
PART THREE: THE GOBI
Rajananda
PART FOUR: TIENTSIN
The Hunchback
PART FIVE: CONCLUSION
The Hill Country
*PROLOGUE: HANKOW*
*THE YELLOW RUG WOMAN*
*I*
Romney saw the rug before he saw the woman. It was the yellow of India,
the yellow you see on the breast of the purple martin and on the inner
petals of an Emperor rose. The weave of the rug was like no other. Its
folds looked heavy like raw silk, yet the fabric itself was thin. It
would last a life time, and then become a priceless gift for the one
held most dear. It was soil-proof as a snake's skin. It was either
holy or savage.
They were on the little river steamer, _Sungkiang_, a day's passage
below Hankow. The woman had boarded that forenoon at Wu-chang. Romney
had come through from Ngan-king. The yellow rug lay across the knees of
the woman. The afternoon was breezy and bright. It was May, and the
rice was green along the flats of the southern shore.... She was either
English or American, Romney reflected, and also that the world was well
supplied with pretty women, but not with rugs like that.
Just now the woman held out her arms to a missionary's child--a passing
boy-child of five in sandals. His legs were bare and brown and
scratched. His name was Paul and he was a stoic from much manhandling.
He went to her arms in silence, and there was a burning now in Romney's
chest. Her voice had been a thirsty primitive note, like a cry, as if
the presence of the child hurt her.
The little boy stood erect and silent against her limbs. She lifted the
rug and drew it about his waist to hold him close. She was lost to
everything else. Romney had fancied her the most exquisite and delicate
creature, but this face that he saw now had the plain earthy passion of
a river-woman talking to her first-born--a love of the child's body and
face and lips, the love of a woman who loves the very soil of play on
her child. Paul had been running the decks for two days, making enough
noise to give the missionary the reputation of being a widower. The
child was moist from running at this moment, and the woman buried her
face in his throat.
Romney wished whimsically that he were the missionary so he could come
into the picture for the sake of meeting the woman. The child was
drawing away. Her dark eyes were untellably hungry already. Paul must
have told his name, for she was saying:
"Such a right name for a noble boy. And where are you going?"
"To Hankow."
"It's like a fairy-tale--a young man going to Hankow to seek his
fortune--"
"My father does not like me to read fairy-tales--"
Paul's eyes were full of pictures. Romney did not hear what she said to
that, but circled the little deck again, thinking of her eyes and voice.
They went with the yellow rug. As Romney returned, the child pulled
back from the woman, announcing:
"That's my father."
And now for the first time Romney's eyes and the woman's met. The child
had pointed his way, though the missionary was behind him. Her look
came up with something that seemed to say, "I beg of you--don't
disappoint me." Then Romney forgot the peculiarity of that, in the
sudden sense that she was like the blood-sister of some one he had
known. At the same time flat in his consciousness was the fact that he
had not known any such "some one." She was young, but this was not the
look of a girl at all--the look of a hungry imperious woman who had
known love and been denied--adult understanding, the shoals of cheap
illusion passed. She was looking beyond him at the real father of Paul.
Under his own calm, Romney was intensely sensitized. Something had
happened to him from her eyes. He felt he was out somewhere in the deep
waters of life wherein she sailed--the shallow problems already put from
them, all decoration, convention and imitation thrust aside. The
missionary and the little boy had passed. And now Romney did a very
good thing for him, and something that he would not have thought
possible before this day. He drew a chair close to the yellow rug,
saying:
"May I?"
"Yes."
... They talked of Paul, of missionaries, of Asia, travel. Her manner
was easy and genuine, her observations wise and humorous, but her eyes
full of challenge. There was tenderness in them, and something that for
a better name he called deviltry. He felt himself in the presence of a
big nature, whose sweep was from the primitive passions of birth and
death, of fear and hunger, to some consummate and mysterious ambition.
He could not tell what she wanted; and at the same time her thrall was
stealing over him, preventing him from seeing her the same at different
moments. He felt that her sweetness could be unfathomable to one she
loved. She was exquisite in every detail--lip, nostril, finger-tip,
hair, figure, voice, manner, wear--all as perfect as the yellow rug.
Yet it was beauty, rather than loveliness, something to fear about it.
Romney knew in that first hour that he did not challenge her. He felt
his youth, his imperfections, the wastes of his past years. All that he
had fancied good about those years looked questionable now. If he had
known that he was to meet this woman, his life would have been
different. He had met no one like her. She accepted his best with ease
and without wonder. No man had been able to do that. She tossed a crown
over the highest of his mental offerings and added a higher one of her
own on his favourite subjects. Yet they were not showing each other
their wares. She stimulated him as no one had done before, and as for
her part--it was the pleasant passage of an hour.
An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes--slender and
not too tall. Her face in profile had the Greek essential of beauty, but
with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigour of that austere
line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had
ever met, as if every excellence of life had been known to her from a
child--all love and reverence and protection. He suddenly remembered
that fury of instinct with which she had kissed the boy Paul in the
throat. Something earthy and ample about that, sound and
deeply-grounded like a peasant woman's passion.
He wondered again and again what she wanted. It had nothing to do with
money or position--Romney was sure of this. Queerly enough the truth
did not come to him until later. They dined together humorously in the
little cabin of the _Sunkiang_.... A Burmese tiger had killed her
husband.
"I can stand it--if I don't stay in one place too long," she said,
looking at the farthest punkah. "It is always with me. If I stay at
home, or any one place many weeks, the thoughts seem to pile up so that
I cannot breathe. They drive me away--"
She had evidently not found before much understanding of this
point--seemed without hope to make herself clear to him.
"The thoughts of it become heavy in any one place," she added, "so that
there is no home--"
"I know," Romney said.
She looked at him quickly. Any one might have said it, but Romney spoke
as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that.
"The tiger killed my baby, too,--though I was in England--"
She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed a slow
pounding of agony in her breast, like a sea that cannot quiet down.
"I have thought of everything," she was saying. "I have some
philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all--or death
being all, but, oh, I was going to take him his little baby--as soon as
it was born. I was at his father's in Kent, England. And to think that
a bit of pink paper and the word _tiger_--"
Romney was silent.
"My baby would have been as old as that little boy with the silly
missionary father," she added.
"Why silly? I only saw a bent drab man with his particular idea of
God--"
"Silly because he doesn't permit the child to hear fairy stories--"
"Ah--"
Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right.
He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live
too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of
five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with the future, not
with the past. At the same time there was something tremendous in the
slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father. A
magnificent sort of Englishman he must have been to hold this woman's
life to his....
They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon
the mists of the ricelands on the southern shore. To the north the
river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying
city were fused into a dull red glow. The woman was thrilling him now
with every sentence:
"I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression.
Perhaps I carry it with me--and give it forth from time to time as a
matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is
not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If
I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You
are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and
drew up your chair. That startled me pleasantly--your doing that. At
least, I knew you weren't common. Grown-ups--men and women
adults--should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am--"
"I like it. I do feel the gift of it--"
"No, I'm not going around the world clinging to an ancient
bereavement.... He was a very good man, patient, a man's man--a
tiger-hunter. It's all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was
so young that I thought for a time my future sufficiently wrapped in
his. Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had
_lived_ those months. I found that there was something huge and endless
about that experience. I am not giving you any cant about motherhood.
I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a
rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why, he took it as a matter of
mere nature--as something in the natural course of events--that I should
bring _his_ child into the world. I was growing into a real creature
and he could not rise out of the annual tiger rhamadan. It is a sort of
religion with his family--and couldn't be broken. And then I was
smothered in his family. When the word was brought a kind of madness
came over me--sorrow--yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his
good, but the madness had to do with _perpetuating him_--a man who could
leave me in that smothering British household.... It seemed I wanted a
child that had nothing to do with him--with them.... What I wanted in
those days, I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief
that killed the little one. These things are mysterious.... And now--"
She laughed softly. Romney was trying to adjust this story with the
earlier talk, but each part destroyed the other. He could as readily
believe the first as the final. It dawned upon him that the real truth
might lie somewhere between, but there were no tangible forms to grip in
this middle distance. He was not inclusive enough to know that she was
for the moment intensely what she said. In any event the strange lapses
of the tale did not break the enchantment.
"Don't try to understand," she added gently. "No man could
understand--at least, none but a very great artist."
"But now," he repeated.
"Oh, I search and search. I know that travel does not bring me nearer
to what I want, but I can't rest long in one place. He left me
everything that the world can give, but I can't live long in his houses.
Yet what I search for is as likely to come to me at home, as here in
Asia--"
"What is it you search for?" Romney asked.
"A man," she said.
*2*
Romney lay in his berth after midnight. All that he had known and won
heretofore was gathered together but did not weigh in the balance
against Moira Kelvin. No discrepancy stopped the tumultuous striding of
his thoughts after her flying image and the multitude of her sentences.
She had amplified her story. Here was a woman brave enough to go out
and look for her own. She believed she would know him at once. She
believed the woman in her would know before he knew.
"It's not a matter of place," she had repeated. "I don't hasten matters
by rounding the world every year or two. I know he might just as well
cross my own threshold in Ireland or come to one of the late
tiger-hunter's households in England. Not a matter of place, but the
right time. I think when we are both ready he will come surely--it must
be he who is not ready.... See how the years go. I am older than you,
Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am
afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I
don't want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child--one child
from him. I learned something of what it means--oh, just the beginning
of that mighty mystery. I would kill him--if he did not prove the real
lover. No more tiger-hunters for me. All boyish things would have to be
put away by the man I took for my own. He would have to know what it
means to be a father. There's something heroic about that that the world
doesn't dream of yet. My lover would have to understand that. At
least, he would have to know when I told him. God, how few are the
lovers in the world."
Romney pondered this again and again in his berth, sentence by sentence.
Once she had laughed and said:
"The man I mean--why, his romance is greater to him than his life work."
And again, she had bent forward whispering, her hand upon his knee:
"Sometimes I feel as if I were strong enough to be the mother of the new
race."
All this on a little river steamer, deep in China, the rice-lands giving
away to the hills as they neared Hankow. Moira Kelvin had but one
theme--the lover she would some time know. A frail superb woman burning
with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff in her to endure fire
that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions.
He quite believed that she was capable of killing the man who failed
her. He sensed something of her deadly horror in the mistake she had
once made. She was different now from the girl-wife of that patient
English sportsman.
"There are analogies in nature about this killing of the male," she had
said. "Look at the fate of the bee whom the queen crowns king in their
flight."
The hours had passed magically. It was he who had risen first. He was
afraid of the woman, afraid as he had never been before, of some
intrinsic lacking of his own. He felt at times that his own presence
had nothing to do with her ideal--that she was merely telling her story
as she might have done to some woman companion. Then there were other
moments of personal relation--as if she felt from the first the power
she possessed for him; that she was interested in making it greater;
that she loved the use of her power in his arousing; even that he might
be or become something of this solar being she dreamed of.... Always
with her was the feeling that she was not interpreting herself exactly,
some histrionic weakness--that she was carried away in the ardour of her
impulses; that she acted perfectly the moment, but was not exactly that.
Romney hated the logic of the male mind that persistently brought him
this observation.
They were together the next afternoon at Longstruth's _Pyramids_ by the
river, a little table in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of
the Empire. Two white butterflies were whirling together persistently
near. Moira Kelvin's eyes followed them dreamily. Romney said:
"They make me think of the States--little common kid-day butterflies. I
don't know as I ever saw them before in China."
"They are around the world," she answered. "They are always where I am
because I see them. Always two--like bluebirds, and always silent like
bluebirds. I see them and all well-paired things.... Once in Ireland
in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different
one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept
as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my
mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that
dress--ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took
the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June
when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty windless
evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed
upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over
the grove of copper beeches.... I am hungry and thirsty to-day, Sir
Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes Nature maddens me....
"But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the
corner, and I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts
to me, and there seemed no love in the world--only loneliness and
twilight--my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward, but seeming
to touch no living thing.
"I laughed at myself for being frightened by a little rustle and went
back into the room. I saw a great gray moth at the window screen and
then I remembered and ran to the desk where I had left the cocoon. The
whole branch had fallen--and I got the picture of the birth of a winged
thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen--a
gleaming gray creation, with a light of its own about it--the light of
the fairy world which I remembered from a child. The wings were
whirring silently--the still strange creature poised for flight in the
night, and held by this man-made screen. At the end of each feathered
antenna was a pendent cross. I tried to open the screen, but it was old
like all of the things of that house and I ran to find a servant.
When I returned, the moth was not alone. _Its own_ had come to it
through the twilight--answering some cry we are too coarse to hear.
They were there together--a mystic pair of wonderful gray mates--one on
the outside of the screen, one in the room. I could not wait for the
servant, but cut a door in the wire with a rough bronze paper-cutter,
and away they flew together."
It was her theme.
All that day Romney dwelt in her power. She gilded his world. He found
that his relation to her was that of servitude. She commanded
imperiously, dictating what they should say, where they should go, what
they should eat and drink. Yet he was glad, for this had never happened
before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of
their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him
anew. She was great and glowing. He did not know that all the old
ideals of wooing and winning that the world has come up through were
impossible with her. Vaguely and darkly the hope formed that _time_
might change something; that the luck of a white man in Asia might come
to his aid.
Romney was less the mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions,
visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the levelling
dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled,
she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and
she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was not the
thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might
not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and
splendour of her diffusion.
There was at Longstruth's a Chinese boy who served them. He seemed to
enter into their thought of the little delicacies. He had some English
which Romney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late
afternoon when a matter of service required explicit information, and
Romney administered it in Chinese, excusing himself as he took his
attention for a moment from the woman. He turned back to her to find a
new interest in her eyes.
"Tell me about yourself," she said suddenly. "You must have come to
China as a child to speak like that."
"No, I have been here only four years--three years in India before that.
My ways have not been interesting. Since you came they have all been
cheapened. I see I have wasted my time--"
"Now that is a good saying. Thank you. Sometimes, Sir Romney, you are
very attractive--"
"It is quite true. The things that interested men here--I mean the
Americans and English, the big exploiters--have not held me long, though
I have worked with them and for them. Always the different, the more
hidden things called me. Until yesterday I thought I was at least doing
decently well. But I see you have somehow touched the core of things.
I've been puttering--"
"At least, it is good not to be considered either wicked or insane," she
answered. "I usually draw that. I wonder that you like my things.
Sometimes I have even felt myself that I am a little mad. The first
time that came to me was in England the first year after the tiger. It
was a summer Sunday morning--the earth was risen in beauty--birds
singing as they only sing in the sun-mists that follow a night of rain.
It was a seething of bird-song, of colour and fragrance--just a year
after the tiger. As I listened, the fury of longing that I live with
came upon me in high tide--and then in the midst of it, I heard the
sound of church-bells from the village. It was like a gray cloud, an
evil odour, a catarrhal voice.... Spectres of the English Sabbath.
People stifled me for days after that.... But I talk and talk and I
want your story now. See, we have been together all day and some of
yesterday and you have listened--"
"I am not through listening. So much of me was asleep before
yesterday."
She smiled swiftly at him. "You shall not escape now that you are so
good. See, the night is coming. Everything is here. Longstruth's is
worth coming up the river for. China is sweeter here and undefiled. I
would be hideously lonely without you--and you have not told me who and
what you are. Why, listen, I don't often ask a man to talk about
himself."
"I get the force of that. It's only that what I have is drab and young.
I would have made it different had I known you were coming--"
"Sir Romney--there's a pull about you. You do not diminish. Oh, I must
know all about you now--"
"I hear and obey," he said.
*3*
Romney was a bit taller than necessary with a beaked nose and a head
that bowed naturally. When he turned from the side and looked up at you
smilingly, it was a face you were apt to remember. The mannerism was so
peculiarly his own when he was interested or amused, that he did not
know of it. There was nothing about him (unless it was the depth of
calmness in his eyes) to denote other than a sophisticated white man
travelling in a state of comfort if not plenty. A clean-faced,
white-toothed American of twenty-seven--a good mouth, a good brow,
straight lean shoulders, and a long dark hand--nothing striking or
exceptional, except the beaked nose, and possibly the depth of calmness
in his eyes. Something of poise and power in that.
"I came out here seven years ago from California," he said. "A
tender-chested young student from Palo Alto with book-Sanscrit. I had a
post with an American consul in one of the second towns of Bengal. I
used to write letters in Bengali for him. He had a rice-brewery on the
side, and couldn't write English. He used to chew tobacco and promote
his business, swearing that rice beer was more delectable than English
ale, and experimenting in keg-making with the native woods. It hurt him
to have to import kegs. The English didn't like him and he had an
incessant war on. It kept him fit, this battling. The East could not
smother his energy.... But I took other posts and was presently
touching the skirts of Mother China.
"She challenged me more than India had done. I really got the call from
her one morning on the Pearl River a little above Canton. It was a
shimmering day--the big rice-lands on either side. Some rice we saw
yesterday, though we're a bit far north. There was a glitter about that
day as the sun rose. I seem to remember this now more than then. You
always put an atmosphere to your stories--the kind of day or night.
Nature means things to you.... I knew right there that day that I had
left India for good. That was four years ago. China needed me and I
was to spare. All hitherto was mere preparation for a life in the East,
more real. You see the English have everything in India. The higher a
man climbs the more he feels the ordering English hand. It doesn't make
any difference if he likes it or not.
"I was merely carrying a little commercial message up the Pearl River
that morning. China touched me, kind of opened up to me then and there,
the big deviltry, the big cunning, the big beauty in the world above the
dollar sign and the designation of the British pound.
"I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing-song intonation
as he hailed some naked neighbour in a passing junk. I began to get the
quality of the voices of the Chinese then, as I had heard the native
Bengali three years before--a kind of lust in my heart to know what they
were saying, and why they said it. I threw up my job and travelled
north. I studied long in Shanghai. Long--that is, about two years.
Academic Sanscrit didn't help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned
the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the
provinces. I didn't do this with the idea of commanding big money, but I
began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight
or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the
working of the Oriental mind.
"The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu
boys in Bengal. That's what they do best--study, gather in, mull over,
meditate, but bolt at the idea of action. I was American enough to want
to make some of this study-stuff come true, but that in India was a
valuable period of mental accretion. It wasn't living here in the East
that made me in a sense familiar with the native mind--it was the sacred
writings of China, India and Palestine. In Shanghai, and later in
Peking, I hobnobbed with the young _literati_--a different class from
the Indian students, very interesting men who prepare themselves almost
cosmically to enter local politics. I saw that China had always pulled
me strangely. Meeting the boys here recalled to me how interested I had
been in the Chinese students at Palo Alto. It was from a Chinese at
college that I began to get a real conception of the historic and
esoteric figure of Jesus--the man we make a religion of in the States.
Over here the steady-going literature of the best minds is never far
from the utterances of the mystics and the prophets. I met them all from
Patanjali to Paracelsus and volumes of magic, the spiritual properties
of medicine, studies of the stars that none would scoff at so breezily
as the modern astronomers of Europe and America.
"More or less at this time I was in touch with Americans in China who
were making money. I lived a double life--holding fast to the
commercial world, and keeping secret my enthusiasm for matters of
mysticism. This recreation kept me from getting stale and tainted. The
white man over here plays a lot, and he drinks too much at his play.
Perhaps I'm getting too diffused in this story, but I rather wanted you
to understand, since I began, the idea that drove me to become powerful
in the native mind and at the same time to hold a grip on the West. I
was disinclined to the poverty of the earth and at the same time
unwilling to release my grip on certain ideas of Heaven. You see all
real mysticism is out of the East. There was only one way to make good
on this training and the Chinese knows how. The Hindu doesn't. It's to
keep God and man separate, to keep the left hand for the spirit of
things and the right for matter and the world. I had a gift in the
beginning for these languages. I wouldn't have gotten them without
that. I wouldn't have had the urge without it. It was that lust to
know what the river-men were saying, and not only that, but to know why
they said these things. A man might learn Chinese in a certain number
of months, but he can't learn the _feel_ of the people without a call to
them.
"Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That
means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to
think in Chinese--that's the truth--so much so that the English and
American training I had known began to take on the same sense of
distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a
cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you and the yellow rug--even before
you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of romance--"
He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence
because he saw that his story was making her incline to him pleasantly.
"Meanwhile," he added, "I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways, and I
had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy.
I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh--"
"That is much," Moira Kelvin said.
Then Romney realized--perhaps it was something of premonition--that what
he said was not quite as exact as it would have been before meeting her.
"Perhaps it is too much," he replied quickly. "I would have said it
without qualification before--before yesterday. I only mean in
men-matters. Perhaps I have to learn how to wait and how to laugh all
over again in the things that are nearer the heart. I was only talking
about the pressures that the world put on a man. Perhaps I have not put
away boyish things that pertain to a man's relation with women, his
woman. That's an arcanum to me--"
"Arcanums call you, don't they, Sir Romney?" she asked.
He saw the gleam of her eyes and teeth in the purple dusk.
"Something as they call you, I think. I have never known the sheer
excitement of a human presence such as you have brought to me. It's
because I can lose myself in you. China has a new atmosphere when I'm
with you--"
"I am interested. I like your praise."
Her voice came lingeringly to him. "You are not so young as I thought,"
she went on. "And yet you are young. You are still preparing, and yet
you have passed the multitudes of men--oh, so far."
"Presently I began to see the new birth of China. It became clearer and
clearer as I learned more of the native mind. Now that I think of it,
this new birth which is not yet consummated, is like the gray glistening
moth of your Irish house that lay in the desk through the long winter.
All that the usual white man sees, even now, is the weathered rusty
chrysalis of the old, but I see the wings. They are still pinned. The
body is moist and craving, but it looks great and good to me. I met some
of the young men who are ready to give their lives for it--a kind of
inspired group of young men, like Hugo's group that nearly became
famous.
And there is one American whom I was honoured to meet--oh--just
recently. My story is rapidly getting up to date. This American, a
hunchback and a prophet, has given himself to old mother China. He
dreams about the peace that is ahead for the world, and his dreams are
straight as the hammer to the anvil because he has no sentiment, knows
all about war--even the cleansing of war--has written a text-book on
military tactics which is the biggest and newest thing in American and
British camps--yet a dreamer about peace--"
Her face was close to his in the dusk, a yearning in her eyes that shook
his heart. A chill went through him because this yearning was not for
him. He saw that he had touched her in the center of her mysterious
being--saw that a man with a dream was more to her than any man's
action.
"Tell me more," she whispered.
"Nifton Bend--have you, too, heard of him?"
"Not until now. Is that the Hunchback's name?"
"Yes. I only saw him for about ten minutes. It was in Peking a year
ago--the strangest, saddest and longest face in the world. It looks up
at you, for he is maimed. I could not speak when he first looked up at
me. Something leaped in my chest. I wanted to put my arms about him and
lead him to a chair. It wouldn't do to tell that impulse--only to a
woman.... The name of Nifton Bend was repeating in my mind. It was in
a room of a native professor's house in the Congrou section of Peking.
There were students about, but all became hushed with the Hunchback's
presence. Cushions were brought and we sat down around him. I
remembered his name in connection with the military text-book now. That
came with a jump. He was young and yet long ago I had read another book
of his, which, until he was here before me, I had not related to the
author of the text-book. It was during the college days in California
when that other book came to me, and I loved the Chinese setting. The
book itself, I did not remember. It was half a story, half a
fairy-tale, but from it, the spirit of China had come to me--something
related to the emerging of the great gray moth. This was only the
beginning of recollections. I had heard this man spoken of as the
spirit of Young China, as the organiser and leader of the new Chinese
army, as a represser of the Japanese influence. This frail and broken
body seemed, in the extravagance of my thoughts of that moment, to hold
the future of the Empire. I saw him somehow as the embodiment of the
depth and genius of the yellow race. They called him _The General_.
"He was looking at me with a dead, expressionless gaze. An instant
before his eyes had been burning, and there had been a smile on the
woman-mouth of him. Only the pale angular jaw and the narrow temples
had not changed. I was startled at his look. His head made me think of
a wolf-hound--that long ironed head. It was not until normal
consciousness and the smile returned that I realised that his lapse of
expression meant that he was _seeing into me_--that I had been appraised
body and soul--"
Romney talked coldly now. He felt the entire passion of the woman
turned from his own story--that he had touched something that took her
farther from himself, if nearer to her dream. He caught a glimpse of
what it would mean to hold the heart of this woman in all its power. It
was like Romney to make as much as possible now of the opposing
influence, yet he hurried through:
"Nifton Bend's eyes were lingering warmly upon me again. I felt zeal
for service under him, but I was tied up for the time being. Yes, it was
as if I had found a master. In coming into his presence, I had touched
the inner circle. He spoke of China and Japan, a low uninflected
English, and then of America--how he had left her because there was no
play of his powers in America--how the States seemed to him tranced in
trifles--yet how he loved the States. Presently he said that we were
destined to meet again--and I knew that the audience was finished."
"Where is he now?" Moira Kelvin asked.
"In Peking--at least, he is never far from the centre of things, and
that is Peking."
They were silent some time and then the woman spoke:
"You have told me a story of yourself--by talking about China and
another man.... Take me back to the hotel, Sir Romney, I will see you
to-morrow. Come to me at noon if you like. It has been a good
day--thanks to you. I'm glad to know you better and better. It sounds
cold--but perhaps some time you'll know what that means. I am a little
mad to-night.... I seem to feel old China in her new birth--moist and
craving like the big gray moth--her mate not yet come--and this
Hunchback whom you are destined to meet again--"
*4*
It was a whirlwind fortnight at Hankow. Romney was game, rather big
game, for a questing beauty a-wing around the world. His soul had been
asleep to her kind of magic. She touched him awake. His education and
many attitudes towards life were torn down and rebuilt. There was a
furious lover in the man, and serious weaknesses that had never been
tested before. Though he did not acknowledge, and perhaps was not aware
of the fact, he had been in his own way a terrific worker. The passions
of his life, in a single day, had been turned from his tasks to Moira
Kelvin. She had to be a rather splendid creature to take gracefully the
full tumult from such a man's heart, but this was her genius.
Romney's woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive.
She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought
to bear upon a man to make him greater, to make him surpass himself,
than an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest
force, and still have an aching void to spare.
Moira Kelvin was thirty years old, in full bloom, trusting nothing under
the sun but her own heart. Whether it was mania or the excellence of
her evolution, her conviction remained upstanding that there was one man
somewhere who could fully awaken her. She was without laws and without
fears, but she would have considered it the most vulgar form of failure
to give herself to a man who called her only in part. She was in the
height of her power, and modern enough to wish to know a man well before
she revealed to him more than the usual arts of woman. Her one great
mistake had been made at the end of girlhood in the case of the
tiger-hunter. She held her body and her beauty even more sacred now
because of that failure. Yet she looked into the faces of men
everywhere. Any man brave enough could have his chance. Romney made
the most of his.
For hours on their last day together Romney could not speak. He looked
long into her face from time to time--until it turned into a mist before
his eyes, or other shadowy faces passed before it. He could see nothing
beyond her but his own death, and he knew enough to realise there could
not be much help in that, considering his present frame of mind.... They
were at Longstruth's, a sultry evening. She was tender and tyrannical in
turn.
"... We are not enemies," she said. "I have been no more to you than
you have called. I know you are not holding that ancient balderdash that
I lured you on. I have never from the first day kept from you my
conviction that the one had not been found in Sir Romney. And yet you
were more to me than I thought at first. Why not take the full honour
of that now?"
"You are going away," he said dully.
"It is a mercy to you--though I am not merciful. If you were a fool,
like most men, you would think me a devil."
"I suppose men who are not big enough to make good with a woman--call
her a devil--"
"Or a vampire," she laughed.
He shook his head. He had lost his sense of humour for the time. "I'm
not making any mistake about you. I've been away about world matters
like most men. The women we meet usually call us to be less than we
are, rather than more--"
"Men have made women that way," she said quickly.
"The way doesn't matter. That's what happens, or at least men think so,
and fail to get on the ground where even an average woman is at her
best.... But it's not generalities for me. I perceived myself lost in
you. I loved from the first the great open nature which you drew
from--mates in everything, your whole creativeness lost in the one
subject--your whole power and reason for being--love. When I came to
you I seemed to come into my own country.... I did not seek you. I was
happy enough in the old. I looked bleak and blind to myself before your
coming. Oh, I praise you right enough--only it's hard, damned hard, to
give up--"
"You will be tremendous for some woman," she whispered. "Let me tell
you--there was one day when I rocked before you--"
"To think I could diminish after that," he said slowly. His voice
chilled her.
"You have said it all, Sir Romney. We did not seek this thing. At
least, I had no wish to hurt you. I do not play in these great matters.
Some have thought otherwise, but I do not play. You would not have
known me an hour if you had not been worth knowing--"
"I have ceased to be worth knowing then--only to-day?"
"That is not kind, Sir Romney. You are less than yourself to say that.
We have been much together. If you are hurt by this, it is because you
are less than I think you are. Hurt--I mean enduringly. Hurt, of course
now, but constructively. You will not die. Perhaps you will not break
training seriously. Listen, do you think I fail to know what will happen
to you--if you make the best of this? ... You will be a greater lover
for some other woman. She will have to be a greater woman to call you.
You will know her more in the first hour because of these days with me.
You will be less apt to make the one hideous mistake which men and women
make in the world--that of choosing the wrong mate. You will be a
quester because of these days with me. There's something precious about
that."
"If there is but one woman in the world for me--as you say there is but
one man for you--then why is it that I want you so?"
"This is your initiation. Mine was more sordid and revolting with the
tiger-hunter. I am your awakener. You think I am everything, because I
am older, deeper in the world of love--demanding so much--thinking so
much of these things. Remember this--there is no such thing as the
triangle among real people. Mark the woman as common-minded who is in
doubt between two men whom she knows well. All shuffling and
experimenting is the cause of misery in the world. The higher the soul
of a man or woman, the more essential is _the_ voice, the hand of one.
Any key will fit common locks. As for you--you were held in your work.
All the natural fury of you was compressed in the gray and the silence
of mere men-things. You were like a sleeping prince, Sir Romney. I but
break the enchantment, and look into your face as your eyes open, and
say sorrowfully--'No, it is not he,' and pass on."
"Moira Kelvin--you pass on."
"You would not want me to take less than I dream of?"
"But I love you. I never said it before. I have no place to put this
great thing--that you have called. It doesn't come back to me. It's
got all of me. It leaves me so much less than alive--when you pass on."
He smiled at her. "Sounds weak and pleady. I don't mean it that way. I
want nothing of pity, of course. Pity, that would be obscene. I'm not
making a picture of the heart bereft. This is no doom-song to a
gracious lady--only knowing you is an insult to the rest of the world."
Her slim hand darted out to him.
For a moment his voice choked. The touch of her was like a greater
self. He was tortured with a vision of what it would mean to have all
of this woman--to command her tenderness utterly, her bestowals, the
full deep look of woman to man, the night and day presence, the child
she dreamed of--this woman lovely as a golden cloud.... He trembled and
his head turned away.
Her face came around to his.
"Romney," she whispered. "It isn't nearly so easy as it would be if you
were less a man. Oh, don't you see that? I would have had the heart of
a girl and pitied you, and thought it love. You're enough to make
that--except for the life I learned in England. Now it's the one
covenant. Why, the man I want--I'll do the winning. I would bring the
fight to him. Nothing could stand between us. I could be saint or
wanton. You don't know me. You would not want half of me. You could
only want that part of me you are able to command. Perhaps, as that
Hunchback said to you, 'We shall meet again.' I feel that you are a big
fellow--brave and quiet and generous--that you have the stuff to make a
lover. The real lover must be a bit of a mystic and you have that--but
not now, and I must go on.... See, how I have stayed--"
Romney stared hard at her a moment, and then beyond. It was all black,
a depth of bamboo clumps like a jungle, over her bent left shoulder. He
saw his end in that blackness. She was light and power and beauty and
art. A group of waiting-girls were playing the _vina_, behind the
lattice by the bank of the river. It was like the slow song of
nightingales. The scent of roses passed between them like a spirit
hand. Her face was nearer. The warm scent of her was in his nostrils,
and power came to him that he had not known at all that day. Romney
spoke:
"Don't think of me as holding you. I love you too much for that--how
easy to say that after once it is spoken.... I have nothing but praise
and gladness to give you. Yes, you have stayed--that I might be with
you--that I might have my full chance. I know what you mean by its
being worth death--and what a man he would be to command your heart
once, even--and live on afterward.... No, I wouldn't hold you. I
wouldn't cry out. I would hold you by sheer love for me--but I am not
great enough for that. I would cry out if you came to my arms, but they
are not magnetic enough. I have had my chance. I know what a woman is.
Forgive me if I disagree about there being another--for me. I'm afraid
there isn't, because I've known you--"
His voice became very soft. "You'll feel it," he added. "You'll feel
it following you around--a man's love for you--mine. I win--to know
what I know to-night. And when you find him--know that I drink his
health. I could do that devoutly.... I have had your baggage taken to
the boat. The launch will call here for you.... In a few minutes....
I think--I think you are not a woman at all--but an immortal! You see I
cannot suffer thinking of you that way--"
"Romney--"
"Yes--"
"Romney--no one is watching. I would not care if they were--put your
head a moment on my breast.... Ah, and now upon my knee ... dear boy
... Romney, I am blind. I almost hate to go. Don't let me stay, will
you? ... Ah, kiss me--once ... lips ... ice cold ... once? It isn't
true! It's just passion, Romney! I hate myself. Don't let me stay
to-night ... once--"
They were standing. She had not spoken for long. The launch was
waiting.
"I want something that you have on--something of yours," he managed to
say steadily.
She unfastened her cloak, gave it to him to hold--took off the waist she
wore--a bit of gold-rose chiffon that he could cover in his palm. Then
she put on her cloak again.
He helped her into the launch. Her bowed head turned to him a moment,
and she covered her eyes. The launch sputtered away.
Romney went back to the seat near the bamboo thicket. The scent of
roses wavered past, and the music of the _vina_ came in to him. Romney
drank. Once he raised his head. It was her steamer passing down the
river. Hours afterwards he was drinking there alone.... Toward morning
Longstruth himself came and sat down, but the American did not speak.
Neither was he drunk in the least.
*PART ONE: THE GREAT DRIFT*
*SUNDRY ADVENTURES*
*1*
The night was starless, windless. The funnels of the _John Dividend_, a
tramp steamer, lying in the yellow water off Woosung, were smearing the
deck; the cinders crunched under the boots of the solitary forward
watch. This was a white man who leaned over the railing, and reflected
in the dull fashion of a bruised mind, that he would have to scrub down
that deck at dawn. A live cinder dropped on the back of his neck. He
brushed it away stolidly without haste. The action was that of one so
accustomed to suffering that the finer sense was deadened to ordinary
pangs. The tall attenuated figure was clad in loose and dirty garments
of cotton. One of his reckless eyes a fist had rimmed with black. In
some respects this was the most miserable man that ever swabbed the
decks of the _John Dividend_.
He had been given a berth without undue questioning while the ship lay
in Manila harbour; had spent eleven days and nights on board the tramp,
learning what the deeper hell is like. He had been refused the
privilege of going ashore at Woosung, had been abused by the captain and
the crew, beaten by the second mate and bitten by the engineer's dog.
Besides he had gotten onto McLean's books to the extent of twenty-five
dollars.
McLean was the second engineer, a sober Scot who augmented his earnings
by loaning money to the crew at interest. The murderous rate which he
charged reinforced him somewhat against the big chances necessary in
dealing with lawless, ship-jumping wanderers. Yet his losses were
smaller than men believed. McLean had a sleepless gray eye--only one,
but that sufficed--and a memory for faces and wrongs as remorseless as
temporal things can be.
He never accounted a debt lost until he had seen the dead body of the
debtor and found it barren. He was a profound believer in the smallness
of the world and in the efficacy of time. He had money banked in all
the Oriental seaport towns from Aden to Yokohama. He was a money-lender
by nature. The sea was a means, not a labour of love. In a word it was
wisdom to keep away from McLean; and if that were impossible, the next
best thing was to pay what he had coming with interest in full, for he
had a way of overturning cities and draining seas for his own.
The white man on watch had seen the more favoured members of the crew
return from the port in song and sottishness. He thought of the lights
of Shanghai up the river, beyond fourteen miles of foul marsh mist. His
own various and recent miseries had often recurred. On this night that
the _John Dividend_ dropped anchor off the Shanghai port, they brought
the white man a kind of madness. There was nothing in particular to
watch. Overside, the sea and dark were one, though the ship was
surrounded by Chinese junks. Some of the junks were manned by begging
lepers, but the needy would have fared ill from the mercy of the _John
Dividend's_ crew.
As if moved by an involuntary impulse, the white man tumbled forward
into the dark. The junks shot toward the splash, like a school of sharks
after a chunk of pork. The nearest dragged in the prize, and the
forward deck of the _John Dividend_ was left without a watch. This was
not exactly a loss, since the missing man as a sailor was equally
worthless above and below, but there was a bad debt and a bad name left
behind, consequently a memory. McLean held the memory and the missing
man's note for five pounds.
Dawn was upon the water as the junk approached the city. From either
bank came the shrill voices of the river-dwellers not unlike the waking
sound of winged scavengers. Hoarse shouts were heard ahead. The American
buried his face while the last drunken party of the _John Dividend_
pulled past, headed for the ship. When the voices could be heard no
more, the fugitive raised his head, shuddering. It was then that he
noticed the other occupant of his own junk--a hairless female without
hand, without teeth, with an empty socket in the place of one eye. She
manipulated the oars by means of straps attached from her wrists to the
handles. A child was in her lap, and the child was so far clean.
This was the creature who had helped him into the boat before light, who
had touched him. When the junk bumped into the masonry of the city's
front, he tossed a silver dollar into the leper's dress. She screamed
for more as she would have done had the piece been a double-eagle.
Fearful lest she should spring at him, the white man threw another coin
into her lap and fled.
Yet after all, he took Shanghai with something of a smile that day. The
first thought was to get clean clothes, but there is always formality
and inconvenience about such purchases that are not connected with the
barter of rum.
Within a few hours he had fallen once more into the great drift; resumed
his classic jaunt over Asia and the Islands. It had begun far up a
certain big yellow drain many months before.
Of the two days which followed, only distorted passages that touched
McLean, the money-lender, came to surface. Certain foreigners, however,
were stopped upon the streets of Shanghai by a dilapidated American who
seemed to have a wild laugh back in his brain, and who inquired with
manner, "Has the _John Dividend_ put to sea?"
The drift took him at length to the Walled City where a white man may
truly be lost, and where countless animals, roughly shaped like men,
move about to a dirge-like beat of many afflictions and seem waiting for
death.
Three days after the white man disappeared into the walled city of
Shanghai, a great liner's nose cleaved the yellow water off Woosung. On
the hurricane deck, well away from the enthusiastic party of American
tourists, a small slant-eyed man stood alone by the landward rail. To
him every puff of the warm breeze was lotus and memory-laden, though he
kept his sentiments in chilled steel.
"_Dr. Huan Ti Kung, San Francisco to Shanghai,_" was all the ship's
registry told of him.... He might have been twenty or forty, as you
preferred. One couldn't tell anything definite from the styleless black
suit and hat he wore, nor from the sombre repose of the classically
Chinese face.
Throughout the final two hours of the passage between Nagasaki and the
Shanghai port, Dr. Ti Kung did not once leave the liner's deck. The
ship was now churning the yellow emptyings of the Yang-tze, and that
which held his eyes ahead, looked very much like a swamp to the eyes of
the Americans and English. To Dr. Ti Kung it was not marshland, but the
garment's hem of the Mother Empire, not seen these many years. There
were no tears in his eyes; it is doubtful if his pulse had quickened.
It is dangerous to suggest the nature of a yellow man's emotion. None
but a yellow man could understand exactly. Yet this was certain, Dr. Ti
Kung had not stood on the deck heretofore during the three weeks' voyage
from San Francisco. He had not gone ashore in Japanese ports. The
expression on his face was as serene and contemplative as usual while
the liner lay on the different days in the three harbours of Nippon. But
the face of the yellow man is not an authoritative document.
The recent ten years in America had been years of much movement, study
and mystery. He had lived much in college towns, in Toronto, Vancouver,
also in California and New England. It had not been the mere matter of
an education, though he had specialised rather extensively at chemistry
and biology. Plentiful education is to be had in Peking.
Dr. Ti Kung had made friends in America. There were Americans of his own
age who had tried to know him as a white man knows another. It may be
certain of these believed they succeeded. The Chinese accepted with
equal mind the condescension of his inferiors, who held the belief that
the Celestial Empire was a kind of giant laundry, and the frank,
emotional friendliness of those of his classmates and business
affiliates who had found that he was equally prodigious as athlete and
student. His was a manner of profound gentility, with a mental
background sumptuous in colour and experience. To Dr. Ti Kung most of
these Americans were acquaintances, nothing more. The word _friend_ in
his language was something to which only the best aspired.
In spite of his various appearances for a year or more in different
colleges and commercial establishments, none of these affairs had made
up the real life of Dr. Ti Kung, nor had anything to do with his present
journey home. He had not worked for money. A certain class of American
acquaintances had found him not only approachable for temporary benefit
but admirable in forgetfulness as he was unswerving in bestowal. His
material means seemed inexhaustible from the first. A large portion of
his life in America was unaccounted for, except by the few men and women
whose lips were as well governed as his own.
Dr. Ti Kung made himself very small in the crowded launch on the way up
the river, and was one of the first to step forth upon the stones of the
Bund. A word to a coolie there and his baggage and other matters of
disembarkation were taken from his hands. He moved into the foreign
quarter swiftly, passing through the streets with as little interest as
if it were a daily custom. A mile deep in the Nankin Road, well past
the row of German tobacconists, he hailed a particular 'rickshaw coolie
from a group and was carried by a round-about journey through the
northeast gate of the Walled City. Here Dr. Ti Kung sniffed; at least
something of relaxation was for the first time apparent. His
surroundings were not pleasant, but it was China herself.
The street had now narrowed to a passageway. There was not room for two
'rickshaws. The beggars were forced to move back close to the
stall-fronts as he passed, and the progress of his coolie was
necessarily slow. Presently the passage was broken by a series of broad
stone steps to the right. Half way up these, in the midst of a group of
beggars, sat a white man, very drunk. He appeared to be expounding some
great matter in a lingual mixture straight from nowhere. His head
rocked leisurely from side to side. But one eyelid could withstand its
heaviness at a time. On occasion both of the lids would drop, whereupon
the white man's hand would fumble to his face and prop up the nearest
with a very soiled finger, an effort that quite commanded his faculties
so that speech halted for the moment.
Dr. Ti Kung spoke to the 'rickshaw coolie, who halted promptly. Leaning
forward, he surveyed the figure with thoughtful interest. It now
appeared that an insect threatened the lean inflamed face of the
American, for the propping finger was withdrawn and waved laboriously
before the beaked nose, the eyelids meanwhile falling in abandon. Just
a word was spoken from the 'rickshaw and the next instant the figure on
the steps was alone. Dr. Ti Kung now took one shoulder, ordering his
coolie to the other, and the American was lifted to his feet. Walking
rigidly on either side, they steadied the limp and slender giant to the
vehicle, where he sprawled across the wheel and was pushed with
considerable effort into the seat. He sighed luxuriously and called for
a cigarette. Dr. Ti Kung brought forth his case, lit the match, and
resumed his way on foot, a man's length or more behind the 'rickshaw.
Thus they proceeded for some distance along the numerous unsavoury
passages. Keeping to a direction was impossible in trending the
intricate alley-ways; the coolie seemed merely to be following the paths
of greatest smell.
By degrees the novelty of the ride wore off for the tall fellow in the
'rickshaw. Even the cigarette stump, burning into the padding of the
seat, failed to interest him. The eyes of Dr. Ti Kung, walking behind,
were presently held to the back of the vehicle which strained and
creaked outrageously. A moment later, it stopped. Stepping forward and
around, the Chinese gentleman found his 'rickshaw coolie standing like a
faithful horse, waiting to be extricated from the embrace of the
American who had launched forward over the handles, with the intention
seemingly of depositing himself upon the neck and shoulders of the
native. He had not altogether succeeded. Dr. Ti Kung decided that his
charge must have a change.
They were now at the junction of the passage and a broader artery, where
a barbershop was in operation, partly upon the corner and partly within
doors. Dr. Ti Kung beckoned and three of the barbers were at his side
in an instant. The idea was not broached to the white man. He was
seized and benched, lather applied at once. He had evidently met
Chinese at home. His jaw hardened and he appeared to await some
brutality from without, before taking exception to events. At the first
scrape of the blade, however, he lay back at ease--a white man's long
training under the knife.
Meanwhile the chief barber, disdaining other than to officiate in the
present activity, turned to Dr. Ti Kung as if resuming a conversation
halted yesterday:
"... The amazement of this low-minded proprietor in having his
unmentionable shop patronized by so enlightened a personage, is without
bounds and earth-defying." He produced a water-pipe of silver mounting
and proceeded: "To say nothing of this illustrious foreigner who thus
disguises his exalted rank--"
"You suffer from slight misconception," said Dr. Ti Kung, "only as
regards the companion of this foreign prince. Behold in myself a rural
born of lowest degree--"
The barber drowned the utterances in the loud bubbling of his
water-pipe. "This day will ever linger in the memory of one degraded
chief of barbers, for the patronage of a court companion of the great
Yi--"
Dr. Ti Kung again courteously depreciated himself, and they turned to
the American. The chief of barbers said:
"The illustrious one now occupying the chair has relapsed in revery,
having given no directions. Is it desirable that the entire head be
denuded?"
Ti Kung uncovered his own queue-less head. "Let the hair be
short-cropped merely, as this of his servant--and the features shaven."
"So be," said the chief, shuffling over to direct the operators. In a
moment he was back in his position beside the Chinese gentleman.
"This illiterate one," he began again, as the gurgling of the water-pipe
was renewed, "perceived in the reports today that the wrestler, Kwong,
won all honours in the athletic contests at the Imperial Pavilion. His
prowess has doubtless come under court attention before. Today the
trained cormorant of the Mandarin Pih has proved to be the best diver in
a tournament that has been held three successive days on the river.
Probably, however, this fact is already known to one whose relatives
recline in the Yellow Palanquin...."
Just now one of the barbers drew back a step to survey his half-finished
task. The eyes of the others were drawn to the strange voices at the
turning of the street. A small party of American tourists, exploring
the Walled City, had reached this point. Dr. Ti Kung recognised the
party as belonging to the ship he had left this morning. Just at this
moment the white man leaped up from the barber's chair and staggered
forth, waving his hands. Dr. Ti Kung observed that his charge had been
whipped back to consciousness by the voices of the tourist party.
The Chinese gentleman spoke quickly, a low, intense order. One of the
barbers darted after the white man who had turned down an alley-way to
the rear of the shop, Dr. Ti Kung following leisurely. A moment later,
he watched without concern while two brawny bare-shouldered natives
overcame the half-shaven one, and carried him through the nearest
door.... It was still early in the day. The tourist party had passed
on.
*2*
The white man awoke several hours later on the floor of a small stone
cell containing one table and one chair. The chair was cemented to the
floor. He had not jarred it loose, though the cell was so small that
his body had been forced to adjust itself to it during sleep. The table
was also stationary. The door was of heavy black wood, intended to
preserve silence from without and possibly from within. There was a
small metal disc in the door and by the finger-marks around it, the
prisoner grasped the fact that it doubtless covered a hole.
Gaining his feet he had to bend considerably to put his mouth to the
opening. He called and turned his ear to the disc for answer. He was
about to make further outcry when he heard a peculiar scuffling step in
a distant corridor. It soon halted before the door and inquired in a
nasal, whining tone, something which sounded like:
"_Pai ning?_"
The white man now recalled that he was in China. Recollections came
quickly. He sank down into the chair, the thick table pressing against
him. He heard the scuffling step depart and wondered what he was in
for. There was no doubt in his mind regarding the nature of the place.
There is a similarity to such places around the world. The stationary
table and chair, however, were new.
He was dry. He was in pain. His face felt sticky, and rubbing his
fingers across it, he was at first inclined to doubt his senses. The
right side of his face witnessed to several days neglect, while the left
cheek and part of the chin were cleanly shaven.
"_Pai ning,_" he repeated. "Or was it _pai ning_?"
He could not tell. He remembered a native barber, but did not know if
this were a new day or still last night. The last he remembered clearly
was a vow of mortal friendship delivered in Shropshire dialect by a
sailor from his Majesty's cruiser _Dunedin_, and that they were about to
anoint the vow in a bar-room close to the water-front. He wondered if
all the lights had gone out at that instant or just his own. He patted
his face in several places, regarding his hands intently in the gloom
for blood, but none appeared. He was all right muscularly; the choking
which he experienced was to be expected. Now the vital questions
appeared: How long was he in for? Had he been tried?
"_Pai ning,_" he repeated. "Yes, that's what he said."
He now arose and shoved back the metal disc once more, but his call was
touched with a different respect. Listening was again rewarded with the
scuffling step and a whining voice.
"_Pai ning?_"
"Sure! _Pai ning_," said the American.
There was hesitation without, after which the question was repeated.
The prisoner explained his need for drink in Chinese and found himself
making signs of draining a fourth-dimension cup against the black door.
The scuffling retreated.
He now relapsed in awe. His first impulse had been to use strength. He
was aware of his strength because it had been tested and failed. The
awe had to do with thirst. He had felt this before and became deadly
afraid at the memory. He pressed his body into the seat again and
cleared his throat.
Just now there was a voice in the corridor, a key in the door, and a
Chinese gentleman in European attire entered smilingly, holding out his
hand. The white man took the hand and tried to recall where he had seen
that face before. It had nothing to do with China, nothing to do with
recent years, yet somewhere before he had seen that smile, and something
was glad within him.
"Well, Mr. Romney," said Dr. Ti Kung, "did you rest well?"
"Let me have a cigarette," the other said unsteadily.
A certain case was proffered again.
"Thanks. You haven't a touch of heartener--have you?"
"I have ordered refreshments," said Dr. Ti Kung, lighting a match.
"How did you hear of my trouble?"
"Trouble?"
"Well, the fact is," said Romney, "I was not altogether there when it
happened--just a sort of night-shift working.... What did I do?"
Dr. Ti Kung lit a cigarette. "This morning in passing by the
waterfront," he began pleasantly, "I came upon you in the midst of a
group of friends--sitting and talking, you know. I recognized you at
once, waited until you were not engaged. We had a short ride in my
'rickshaw up to the street of the Everlasting Spring. Here you became
restless; you were not feeling yourself. We stopped at a barber-shop,
but you were impatient to be off. In fact, you insisted upon leaving
before the--"
Romney smiled painfully, passing his hand again over his half-shaven
face. However, a certain appreciation formed in his mind for the man
who described his condition so delicately.
"And after that?"
Dr. Ti Kung hesitated.... Here the door swung back on silent hinges and
the old man whom the American had called to through the chink, scuffed
in with glasses and a bottle. He made a curious little bobbing bow to
Dr. Ti Kung, and scuffed out.
Romney added, when the door had closed: "I mean the lock-up, this
calaboose, what am I in for?"
"This is not a jail. You're merely in one of our examination cells."
The other turned white and arose.
"What am I enlisting for? Some conscript mess I got into with your
countrymen?"
"Not at all," laughed Dr. Ti Kung. "This is an educational institution;
this chamber is connected with one of our colleges. We put aspiring
young men in these chambers together with a set of questions and a large
quantity of white paper, leaving them in quiet contemplation until the
questions are answered. Here, exchange of thoughts with any other
student is impossible and one is able to put his best concentration upon
the task."
"I see," said the American, looking about at the thickness of the stone
walls.
"Our young literati," continued Dr. Ti Kung, "are rigorously brought
up." He eyed Romney with narrowed lids through the smoke. "It so
happened that this place was at hand when you required rest, so we
carried you in. By the way, you are very light for your length."
Romney did not appear to hear the observations, but leaned toward the
other, saying apologetically, "You'll have to excuse me, but I give it
up. My head is bad. Where did I meet you before?"
Dr. Ti Kung almost smiled. "The first time, I believe, was at a certain
field-meet in the Santa Clara valley."
"Lord, that's more than seven years. I have you. I was fit that day--"
"You were fit this morning," beamed Dr. Ti Kung.
Another drink came. Romney was more cheerful.
"Say, what's this _pai ning_ stuff in use here? I know the expression,
but didn't get the connection."
"_Pal ning?_" repeated Ti Kung.
"You've got it. That's the way he said it."
"Why, that means literally, 'f-i-n-ee-s-h-e-d?' It had to do with the
examination papers. The hall-boy came at your call. His duty was to
inquire if your work was done before turning the key."
"It wasn't," said Romney thoughtfully.
He was thinking of the day of that field-meet in the Santa Clara valley.
He had been a distance runner of sorts, a bit too fine physically--a
little cough in the throat that had stuck until he came to China, but a
superb bit of health compared to the red panting animal he had become in
the past nine months.... His throat was cooled; his whole nerve-system
had leaped to the stimulant which Ti Kung had ordered. Romney laughed.
He wouldn't even have been able to think as coherently as this, but for
the two recent drinks. It was a deep ironical laugh from somewhere
within, possibly from the soul of things.... Running--and a victory had
thrilled him. Cheap things to thrill over. He hadn't asked much in
those days. Now he was an inflamed pig, half-bearded, in soiled white
clothing that he could get the smell of.... He had sincerely tried to
arrive at the end of himself, but he had put on a belated kind of
toughness in the years of Asia. He wondered if he would go on trying,
or square about and regain something of his old form--form of mind as
well as form of body, his old form among men.
Romney looked up at Ti Kung and laughed again. This very thought of
rehabilitation was not from the wreck that he felt himself to have
become, but from the fresh warmth of alcohol.... No, he had done his
living. If he got well enough to think connectedly for any length of
time, a certain two weeks would rush back and make a monkey of him. No,
this was a false note--this idea of regaining form. He didn't want form
among men. Nothing would be interesting. The Immortal had spoiled all
the rest. Even China would bore him. And she was gone--on her own
blessed highway. It had seemed good to put an end to himself out of
extreme boredom of days, but he hadn't counted on being tough as
blacksnake.... He would be kicked and trampled around Asia a little
longer until something broke--something that had been so perversely
strong inside of him.
He looked to find Dr. Ti Kung smiling contentedly and without haste.
The Chinese had understood the laugh. It was remarkable how this little
yellow man understood. It had been the same, many years ago. They had
all commented upon it. They had always found Ti Kung on the dot,
without haste, without raising his voice. It was so now.... Why had he
stopped to pick up a ruffian white man on the street? Romney felt
himself leaning on the other. He hated it, but didn't lie to himself
about it.... His hand crept to his face--one clean side, one hairy one.
It was like him. He swallowed the shame of it.
"Well," he said, "what are we going to do about all this?"
"I will tell you in three days," said Dr. Ti Kung.
There was something so authoritative, so decisive and prepared, in the
statement that Romney identified it with a clean side. It had to do
with climbing out.... This man was on the dot. His eyes were full of
fire, yet hard-held, steady and kind; full of reason and order. Three
days. Ti Kung meant three days. There was no lying, no leaning in
that. He had a design. There was something to Romney in his own
weakness and vacillation, like the splendour of God in this capacity of
vision, this steadiness of eye and clarity of speech; white strength of
hand and hard-held manhood.
"And what now?" he remarked. Even in this rare moment of
self-examination, he did not know it, but he asked that last question
like a child.
He was spared the pathos.
"We'll go to my home," said Dr. Ti Kung. "It's not a 'rickshaw this
time. I have ordered a carriage. I take great pleasure in bringing you
to my home."
Romney drew his hand across his chin. The other touched his arm.
"All that will be attended to. Don't let's think of it. You will find
that all is ready for you."
*3*
The scent of soap in the fountain-place of the Ti Kung house might be
considered by some a preposterous detail, but it was real to Romney. It
had to do with Longstruth's, on a certain night when he had felt himself
to be a far more reckonable person even than on the day of the
field-meet at Palo Alto which brought him a trophy or two. It was on a
night about mid-way in the Moira Kelvin revelations when it suddenly
appeared that she was wavering a little. Hope lifted and he had felt
fit to conquer continents. But that had passed. He had somehow
diminished again.
It is true that she had been shaken during their last moments together,
but that was different. Romney was man enough not to take any advantage
there--even in thought. He understood her that night. She was in a
scope of a more common attraction. She had hated herself in it. Had he
pressed that advantage, it would merely have meant to unseal a crater
for hell to break forth not only for himself but for her. Before
knowing her, he might have considered the savage splendour of that
passion as having to do with a woman's great gift, but he glimpsed in
the days preceding what it would mean to the man who could force the
capitulation of the full creature. Even in the blinding of those
moments of parting, he knew he was far from that magnitude.
Romney threw back his head and laughed at the upper arch of tiles, his
arms held out. It was the laugh of a man who stands on the rim of the
last ditch.... He had certainly sifted to the bottom of things. The
_John Dividend_ was the last of many ships. He had made the grand
traverse of the Asiatic coast from the Yellow Sea to the Bay of Bengal
and doubled back to Shanghai. This drink-thing was the great weakness
he had uncovered. Three days after her steamer had gone down the river,
he had fallen into the low eddies of it--a cheap thing, but he felt
cheap. He saw that he had always been intoxicated somehow. A turn of a
card and he might have become a saint instead of a drunkard. Mother
China had intoxicated him first; then the woman. It was all a matter of
temperament. Having lost the levitation of cleanness and strength, he
had permitted the mother-force of gravitation to take her certain
course. From Longstruth's at Hankow he had swirled into the great drift
of the water-fronts--deserters, remittance-men, hangovers from every
form of human failure. He had spent everything he had within reach--a
large amount of money. He had learned the value of money when his
pockets flattened to a few thin coins. There was a large slice of his
fortune left in Peking, but it was so placed that he would have to go
there to get it. He was on the way back now. In fact the _John
Dividend_ would have taken him almost there--she was booked for
Tientsin--but had been too stagnant and stenchy in her bowels. The fact
is he would never have reached Manila and the deck of the _John
Dividend_ except for this new something, superlatively fine in his
physique. Altogether he had seen a lot of life with the integument
off--and had expected little more of the late days than to be found dead
somewhere....
The scent of the fountain-place had a certain whipping magic about it.
It seemed to cleanse away some weakness.
It made Moira Kelvin draw close in memory, but there was a queer up-pull
to it now, as if she said:
"_You have played enough, Sir Romney. Give it up--you're too
clean-blooded to die soiled. You don't want me. You've forgotten for
days at a time what you are trying to kill yourself for. If that next
daybreak had found me in your arms--you would have hated me, and I would
have had for myself something infinitely worse than hatred. You were
big that night to let me go. Nature will not let a man as big as that
pass out without doing his work and finding his own. If you want
sin--pray, sin magnificently._"
The cool running water passed over his fevered and wasted body. There
was ample time for everything. A servant brought him a house-gown and
slippers. Ti Kung's barber was waiting. A little helpful drink was
brought from time to time, not too often, and just a touch. Ti Kung was
waiting for him below. Romney had found a fineness of comprehension in
the Chinese that he had not revelled in from any man for months. It was
almost like a woman's. It liberated the better parts of him, but he was
ill and fagged to the core. He looked forward to a long, clean night.
First he would go back to the fountain place. He would think of that
Longstruth's night before he slept.... Ti Kung showed him his room,
opened the door, led him to the window of the low-lit chamber. From the
casement he pointed out the stars and the lower lights of the distant
shipping.
"I'll be away tomorrow," he said, "but shall return for dinner. You may
rest and read. You may go to the city; there is a carriage. There are
books; there are servants who understand English. Forgive me, I always
forget that you speak our language; in short, anything you may wish. If
convenient, be here for dinner at eight to-morrow. If you have another
appointment, of course, I can wait--"
"I'll be here," Romney said.
... It was not until the door was shut that he saw the gleam of glass
and the half-open door of a walnut cabinet against the wall. He
understood all that it meant before he took a step toward it. He wished
that Ti Kung had spared him this hospitality.... It was very complete,
even to importations from America, even to certain brands that he had
not seen for years. There was crystal, silverware, napkins, and this
that was covered on the table clinked with ice as he touched it. He was
dry and tense. Everything had been designed to turn him loose, even the
departure of his host.
Romney thought of the words of Dr. Ti Kung in the examination cell: "I
will tell you in three days."
He laughed softly. "And what he will tell me in three days hangs
imperatively upon this most perfect cabinet. Romney, here's a ripe
chance to use your head. You are allowed one respectable _touch_. You
may choose your poison--but just one."
He measured out a portion by no means of a size that a man is inclined
to seize with his last dime, drank it with discretion and without water.
Then he stared awhile at the stars and the shipping, took a long drink
from the water-pitcher, and went to bed.
But Romney could not sleep. It was not so easy and laughable as when
the episode began. His thoughts turned to the walnut cabinet as the eye
turns to fire in the night. He lay restless and wide-eyed in the dark.
Presently the moon came in and gleamed upon the open door and upon the
glasses and bottles on the table, bringing out inner fires from the
multi-colored glass. He arose often for water. There was fever burning
full-length. The novelty of keeping himself in hand left him and it
became fight. The bars had long been down.... The long night crawled.
He heard some English sailors pass through the street below. The
Chinese city was full of sounds not to be designated--cries, gongs, the
tapping of canes, sounds that the elemental traffic of the day had
deluged, for he heard women's voices and the voices of children. One
does not hear these in the day-time. He relit the lamp at last, smoked
and read, and when the activities of the night had at last died out,
there was an hour of blackness and quiet that was like a jungle
experience. He was full of fears, not at all the kind of fears that
Romney knew when his mind was in order.
Dawn came, and with it a soft breeze that stirred the wind-glasses in
the garden below. It was a thirsty tinkle, a sound he had heard
somewhere before and found hauntingly sweet. There was a touch of rose
in the light, and the scent of rose came to him in the morning dusk, and
rushed his thoughts far up the Yellow River.... Old days in the open
swept back to mind with rugged value. He was on his feet. The night
was gone. He could take a drink now without breaking his word, but the
new strength tided him over that.
A servant tapped at the inlaid door and asked if he would have anything.
Yes, he would have coffee. He found the place of the fountain. The
cool morning air came in as he bathed, and with the scent came back to
him the sense of equilibrium that he had not known for many days, a
suggestion of self-sanction, perfect but valid.... The coffee was
served when he returned to the room. He asked if he might walk in the
garden then and the servant tarried to show him the way.
Three servants were standing at the street door in the dim-lit lower
hall as Romney and his guide passed below. They were engaged in a more
or less orderly passage of words. Suddenly a cry arose, and the three
servants were seen to leap upon a man in European dress who seemed
intent upon entering. Romney disdained more than a side glance at the
encounter down the long dark hall, as he followed the footsteps of his
diminutive but most engaging guide.
In the garden there were stone and water glasses, cool shallows, deep
drinking palms, awakening birds and amazingly perfect roses, all in a
space no larger than a city back-yard. A high wall with broken glass on
the top, suffocating China outside, and within the beauty of the pearl
and the lotus. The American's tension allayed somewhat in that beauty.
He smoked and picked his way among the stones, sniffing the blooms while
the day rose. The voices of his own countrymen outside the wall hardly
broke his reverie at first. Presently a peculiar sound held his
attention. It was a scraping, as if some wooden object were being raised
against the masonry. He halted as a hand came over the top of the
glass. A blue-sleeved arm was picking its way to the inner-coping, the
woolen sleeve alone between the flesh and the bare glass. The top of
the head that appeared presently was rugged and close-cropped.
Something about it was strangely familiar, but no more showed for the
present. There was a renewed scraping, the head paused in the air, then
dropped back again.
It startled Romney, but he did not feel called upon to protest. The
house seemed adequately protected with man-servants; that fact had been
impressed at the street-door. He forgot the incident, and was leaning
back against the wall a couple of minutes afterward, when his eyes were
called to the corner of the wall at his right. Poised motionless above
it was the ominous head again, and that light vulture-blue eye, which
found his own like an electric contact, and loosed his jaw. McLean had
seen him at the same instant.
"Looking for me?" Romney asked.
The answer made him think of the boiler-room of the _John Dividend_.
There was silence after that. The eye remained fixed upon him.
"Come here," added McLean, unwinking.
Romney did not move.
"Come here," reached him again, hoarsely.
There was pull to it. The intensity and concentration of that single
utterance had real attraction.
Just then the little house-servant appeared, saw the head above the
wall, and called for assistance. Other servants came quickly. There was
considerable hub-bub behind in the garden as Romney went indoors sick
and slowed-up.
He found his way back to his room. There hadn't been a single coin in
the clothes that he wore when entering Ti Kung's house. The contents of
these pockets otherwise had been carefully placed on the table in his
room, but the clothes were gone. As he stood in his morning-gown
reflecting upon the recent affair, his boy came in, bringing a plain
black suit of fine quality, suggesting that he try if it would do, and
adding apologetically that breakfast was now prepared. The clothing
fitted perfectly. Romney realized that they had been made overnight
from the dimensions of his old suit, which did not appear again. He
wondered if such a thing could be done outside of China.
McLean was both light and heavy upon his mind as he transferred his few
belongings to the new coat. Drawing forth his hand, he found that it
contained currency of the empire to an amount that he had not seen since
the early days of his abandonment. It was an altogether comic-opera
amount.
He turned to the servant who stood by, grinning.
"If that one-eyed man comes back again," he said, "show him in."
"One-eye gone way down," grinned the boy.
"What's that?"
The boy made an eloquent gesture to betoken an open grave, supplementing
the picture which Romney felt mentally, with: "One-eye gone way down."
"Now, that's too bad," mused Romney. Then there was a crisp, brown,
small fish before him that made him forget.
That night the Doctor came for dinner--a cool, delicate meal,
exquisitely Chinese--rice, tea, several varieties of sea-food and small
high-colored vegetables. Ti Kung appeared alert for the welfare of his
guest.
"My dear Romney, I'm afraid things have been pretty dull for you here.
A little matter takes me to the Provincial Headquarters. Would you care
to come for the ride?"
The American learned more of his friend. Certain officials and older
students were encountered. Their deepest respect, even reverence, for
Ti Kung interested Romney, as well as their quick and animated interest
in himself as he showed acquaintance with their language.
There was a secret meeting which he could not enter, but he became aware
as he waited that the long halls of the provincial building were dotted
with groups of nobles and elders not in the least pleased with the
political activity of the younger men with which Dr. Ti Kung was
associated.
Presently Romney retired to the carriage to wait, leaving word with a
page for Ti Kung to be informed. Nobles and others were still entering
the building, often old men largely attended and in full regalia. A
native throng was collecting rapidly and cluttered the street at the
entrance of the building. The effects produced on the crowd by the
entrance of different personages were varied and absorbing. Some were
lauded; others brought forth scowls and mutterings. Excitement seethed
and cleared Romney's mind.
Ti Kung was not long in coming forth. He apologised for being detained,
quite as if the matter he had attended was of most trivial importance.
Even as he talked, the crowd thickened about the carriage, and pressed
against the wheels. Dr. Ti Kung leaned forward to speak to the driver,
who began to lash furiously at the heads and shoulders of the throng.
Romney was the first to see the long knife that whipped up from the
wheel, and was lucky enough to jerk the Doctor back into the seat in
time. A pistol was thrust into his hand.
"I regret we will have to fire," Ti Kung said.
Neither shot to kill, for the way was instantly cleared for the horses.
They passed out of the public square without further molestation.
Romney leaned forward whimsically and searched the Doctor's face.
"Quite the usual thing, is it?"
"Of late. They're just children."
"Are they apt to get any less good-natured?"
"Yes, they have suffered much. They do not understand."
Romney fingered the pistol. "I feel quite like a boy," he remarked.
"There's a charm about this thing. I never shot one before--without
everybody standing well back."
Ti Kung's hand darted over and touched Romney's appreciatively.
*4*
It was the end of the promised three days. Romney was dressing for
dinner when there was a tap at the inlaid door, and Dr. Ti Kung entered
with grave smile and hand outstretched. For just a second he had looked
into Romney's eyes. His manner showed neither relief nor surprise; nor
did he offer any comment upon the rallied manhood which he must have
observed.
Romney had climbed a stiff grade in the three days. They went below for
dinner, but it was not until their coffee was served and the catfooted
servant was gone, that Dr. Ti Kung appeared to note the patience of his
companion.
"Doubtless, Mr. Romney," he began, "you have been wondering a good deal
why I brought you to my home, and toward what end things were trending
here. The time has come for me to enlighten you somewhat."
The American lit a pipe he favoured and Dr. Ti Kung drew his chair
closer. They were alone.
"I saw you laughing there in the Street of the Lepers--or was it the
Street of the Ever-lasting Spring?" continued the Chinese. "To me it
symbolised the blending of America with my poor country. We are now
without veils between us. I was in a most serious mood that morning,
anxious with the weight of many affairs.
"You sat upon the stone steps with the beggars beside you, laughing.
You were in the glow of events--at one with those about you. You used
to say back in college, 'To hell with it,' that most ingenious of many
wonderful American remarks. I thought of that. I said to myself, 'Huan
Ti Kung, you are heavy; you are long-faced. Why should you bear your
burdens with such labour? If you fail, very good. If you win,
especially good, but having done the best you can--'To hell with it.'
"So you see, Mr. Romney, you offered me a fine message that morning, and
after all I was very fond of you from the beginning. So, here we are.
I promise you days of excitement. You have seen from the little episode
in front of the Provincial House last night, that all China does not
love me. I counted it a good omen that you saved me from a wound. You
may have the pleasure again. But supposing you had not, or supposing
you were not quite so quick the next time--'To hell with it!'"
Romney leaned forward. He knew that the foregoing was simply the
Oriental way of introducing a subject of real moment. He felt new
inside, mind and will.
Dr. Ti Kung continued:
"I look upon you now with great satisfaction. You are free and
adventurous, and you are my strong friend. You are a mind--an
interpreter of our life. We need all these things from you. You know
how poor China is distressed at this hour--"
He leaned forward and spoke very softly. The long low room in which they
dined was empty, yet the voice was pitched to reach Romney's ears and no
farther.
"... I did not go ashore in the Japanese ports on the way home, but I
heard much from those who did. It happened that I became so interested
in you that much of the first day here in Shanghai was consumed. The
three days since, I have been catching up, studying the events that came
to pass during the two weeks' voyage--events, Mr. Romney, that the world
is too intensely occupied to notice, but which we Chinese regard with
finality and deepest foreboding.
"As you perhaps know, the Japanese have demanded from us all that we
hold dear. They are a fighting people, whetted by recent victories.
There are three parties here in China: Old China, which says 'We will
temporize,' the Middle Party which says, 'We will fight,' and the
party--"
Romney knew instinctively that the destiny of Ti Kung was aligned with
this third one; and yet he supposed that it was also a fighting destiny.
"And the third one," the Doctor repeated, "which believes that war as
the Japanese know it; that war as it is being waged on French and Polish
and Carpathian fields at this moment, is a stupid and ancient activity,
having no part with what the best men of all countries know--"
"But," said Romney, "it's the Japanese way. They may bring the fighting
to you--fighting such as they know. You may say that war is archaic
rot, but if it is to be met, must it not be met with force?"
"Of course, but not with force of the same nature," said Dr. Ti Kung.
"You mean to say that this third party in China is going to stand pat on
the expediency of toleration. The Hindus have taken a hundred years--"
"Not exactly that," said Dr. Ti Kung. "We believe that Japan can be
stupefied--even strangled."
A servant entered at this moment and spoke to Dr. Ti Kung--a hurried
sentence. Voices from the street now reached them, as if an outer door
had suddenly blown open.
Dr. Ti Kung arose quickly, beckoning Romney to follow. They made their
way to the rear of the house and into the garden.
"Another little engagement. So glad you appreciate these absurd
affairs. You have your pistol?"
"Yes--I have become attached to it."
Ti Kung thrust a packet of papers into Romney's hands.
"These are invaluable and safer with you. In case I am separated from
you or hurt, deliver the packet in person to the address in the inner
envelope, Tientsin. Now we must get over the masonry."
Together they lifted a bench from the poolside to the wall. Romney
helped his companion over the jagged glass on the coping. He then
removed his coat and laid it upon the top for his own passage over, his
hands and arms already bleeding. On the coping, he perceived that Ti
Kung was not alone below. Romney landed upon his feet between two
struggling figures. A knife burned his back. He kicked with effect in
the direction it came.
Meanwhile he called for Ti Kung, and a hand came up to him from below.
The assailant had vanished. Something in the touch of that hand made
him know that his friend was badly hurt.
"As little noise as you can, Romney," came a whisper. "There will be
others upon us. Are you hurt?"
"No, are you?"
"I am afraid--a little. Help me up. We must get away from here with
all speed. Have you the packet?"
Romney left him and sprang to the wall's coping for his coat, pulling it
loose from the glass. The papers dropped out as the coat fell.
"Yes," he answered, "I'm glad you mentioned that. I'll be more careful
hereafter."
"Do," said Ti Kung, regaining his feet.
They were in a passage of almost utter darkness. The Chinese was making
poor work of walking. The American lifted him forward and listened for
direction from a voice that grew weaker as moments passed. All was
silent behind.
"I need sewing up," the Chinese whispered. "It's very unfortunate....
That light ahead is the Grotto Road. We will be safe there. If
consciousness leaves me, put me in a carriage, paying the driver and
speaking the words, _Sarenji loopni_; then make your way as rapidly as
possible, taking the papers with you, to a gentleman named Minglapo, in
Merchant's Square, Tienstin--full directions inside outer envelope."
Romney reached the lights of Grotto Road with the form of the Oriental
sagging limp in his arms from loss of blood. It looked like death to
the American. The hardest, or possibly next to the hardest thing he
ever did, was to obey orders. It was very far from Romney's way to
leave a friend in a plight, but this he was called upon to do.
Whatever it meant, the driver seemed to understand, but to Romney, there
was something altogether too frail in the words _Sarenji loopni_ to send
a friend away with. The driver accepted his coin, closed the door of
the vehicle, and whipped away, leaving Romney standing alone under the
dim street light. He watched the vehicle out of sight, and began for
the first time to feel the effects of the night's activities. Under his
torn coat he was wet with blood. He transferred the packet of papers to
a safer pocket, lit his pipe thoughtfully, and then it occurred that he
must set out for Tientsin that night either by rail or the sea.
*5*
Minglapo was a dealer in inlays of wood and pearl and jewels. His shop
in Merchant's Square, Tientsin, was a still place of many riches.
Minglapo sat in the far shadows, an elderly Chinese of large unwrinkled
bulk and a voice like the wonderful water-music in Fingal's cave.
The large part of a week was required for Romney to reach this shop, for
they do not travel great distances over night as yet in China. When he
sat down before Minglapo his faculties at first were deeply occupied
with the problem of where he had seen this old master before. It dawned
upon him at last that he hadn't, but that Minglapo when he shut his eyes
was almost identical in feature and color with a death-mask of Beethoven
that had hung on his study-wall back in Palo Alto.
"I came from a gentleman named Dr. Ti Kung," Romney began.
Minglapo bowed.
"My orders were not very explicit. I believe that there was an
order-book that he asked me to deliver to you," the American resumed,
perfectly aware that a direct statement of facts would have
discountenanced the Oriental. "It was all very hurried at the last. He
was stricken with illness in the street, and turning to me, a
comparative stranger, asked me to deliver this package to you. With
that he was helped into a carriage and driven away."
"Yes," said Minglapo, raising his eyebrows just a trifle, "the
order-book--you have it?"
Romney was startled at the English, quick, concise--the speech of a
Chinese who had been among the younger peoples for many years. He drew
forth the yellow packet and gave it to the other.
Now Minglapo was sitting upon a raised dais, several sumptuous rugs
between him and the polished wood. He sat upon his limbs, and smoked
continuously.
The large envelope was opened and a certain paper drawn forth. This he
perused at first with surprise and impatience; then with a beam of
humour which opened into laughter wide and deep. Minglapo was a
spectacle in this giving forth. His body rippled under the silks; the
ashen yellow left his face and neck, giving way to rising ruddiness, the
yellowish eyelids dropped, suggesting the mask again, but this was
broken by the open mouth. Mastering all was the sound--soft, intoned
laughter, full of leisureliness and music; not infectious exactly, since
one who witnessed it first was too awed to be drawn in--a surpassing
wonder over all. The teeth of this elderly Oriental were like the teeth
of a young woman.
Minglapo subsided by imperceptible gradations, and lifting his eyelids
at length, surveyed Romney as one newly awakened from sleep.
"This is a most wonderful order-book," he said slowly.
Minglapo was rippling again under his gown as he replaced the papers in
the envelope. The inscrutability of the fat figure challenged Romney.
It occurred to him that if he should start to go, something of finality
might come from the impressive figure. He cleared his throat and arose.
"Dr. Ti Kung, as I have said, gave me no further orders before the door
of his carriage closed upon him. I presume, having fulfilled my task,
that it would be well for me to return to Shanghai--"
"Very naturally," said Minglapo.
"Then I will bid you good-day."
The Chinese was holding the yellow packet in his hand. A further sheet
had been drawn forth, glanced at, and returned. Minglapo's hands were
perfect. The face of the envelope toward Romney was but partly covered
by the eight beautiful fingers that held the paper lightly, while the
face bowed above. The eyelids narrowed and the corners of the mouth
were sunken, the broad, bland forehead, just faintly ruffled. There
came to the white man a sense of prodigious power, as if this man's
thought could manipulate the destinies of other men; as if behind that
brow a conception was now forming so clean-cut in all its processes that
instant action must follow its maturity. A suspicion dawned upon him
that this man was strong enough to be Ti Kung's master.
Minglapo rose almost imperceptibly.
"Mr. Romney." The voice halted him. "Your friend informed me you were
coming some time ago. I have been expecting you. Please sit down."
Romney smiled.
"It would be natural, as I said before, for you to return to Shanghai,
except that I have heard from Dr. Ti Kung, who, I perceive, picks well
his associates. These are delicate matters; these are times to try
men's souls. Our friend is now healing at sea. I am grievously
concerned, however, over wounds that could delay such a man for six
days. Much depends upon his coming. The character of Dr. Ti Kung's
service cannot be duplicated. In saving his life, Friend Romney, you
have done one of those significant things upon which the destiny of a
great people hangs, and an action that can never be publicly known. It
is with utmost pleasure that I ask you to remain under my roof. I hope
that we may succeed in making you comfortable in the interval before
your friend arrives. There is to be a particular servant for you in
this house--one of my favourites--"
Minglapo clapped his hands, and a small but almost perfect creature of
the _boy_-class appeared, alert in every sense and apparently without
inertia.
"This is Bamban. He is yours, Friend Romney, and you who know so much
of China realize that a bestowal of this kind between man and man means
that Bamban is no longer my servant."
Fastidious in his ways, swift and delicate in all his doings, Bamban
appeared to embrace his new master with the sudden look of eager
intelligence which shot out from under his lifted brows. Romney knew
enough about China to realise that Bamban held something in the deeps of
his being that could not be transferred. At the same time he knew that
only some significant treachery on his own part toward the interests of
Minglapo could ever call this reservation into action.
In the several days following Romney became convinced that he was being
studied in ways beyond Western ingenuity to fathom; and though he was
schooled to be guileless in intent and at the same time wise as the
serpent, the processes of surveillance which he imagined about him were
either above or below his own levels. He had nothing to conceal, and no
plan apart. He met all fancied subtleties by being himself, just that,
which in the case of uncomplicated purpose is the invariable
master-stroke. The fact is, Romney had learned much from the Great
Drift. He could let himself go. His nerves had left the surface once
more, covered themselves in the cushions of health. He did not know the
particular passion that drove Ti Kung and Minglapo, but he felt it big
and gripping. He even felt at last that he was identified with a
movement potent and far-reaching enough to command those powers of his
which all his former dealings with men made him repress.
Though Minglapo did not appear to be a man of great riches, there were
objects of priceless beauty in his establishment, which was a shop only
on the street floor. No one appeared to buy while Romney was there.
Once while the American was standing in the rear of the shop, the floor
raised a little before his feet, and he was aware of a deep oil-lit
basement that had every look and indication of being a fully equipped
chemical laboratory--vials, flames and crucibles, tables with
spawn-trays and culture-boards. An oppressive, earthy breath as from
fungoid growths touched Romney's nostrils from the opened trap.
Minglapo called him to the dais at that instant and the trap itself was
abruptly closed. The Chinese upon whose shoulder the door had been
raised did not emerge. There was something aged and wasted about the
figure, the eyes spent and hollow.
Romney enjoyed the challenging mystery of it all. The two upper floors,
high-ceiled and extending far back from the street, formed little less
than a palace. Ti Kung's house in Shanghai was austere as a monastery
compared. Romney found himself surrounded with luxuries startling even
with his considerable acquaintance in the East. Ensconced here in the
midst of influences insistently languorous, he was amused to find a
tendency of his own character to tighten rather than to let down. The
first night in Ti Kung's house had seemed to straighten him out and
render distasteful abandonment such as he had known. Abandonment here,
he was well aware, would bring about the same results as the wastrel
days on the water-fronts. He had entered into that with the fixed
purpose of letting life go. It had refused to leave him, and now he was
rather distantly glad to be alive.
In his own quarters, on the second day, he drew forth the frayed and
soiled chiffon waist, washed it carefully and put it back in his breast.
It was no more than a handkerchief. It had seen him through strange days
and roads. He was the least maudlin of men, but the little fabric meant
something striking and imperishable in his nature--something of him no
longer, but around him. She was not _the woman_, but she had made the
picture of what a woman could be. The farther from her, the more he
appreciated. She had known in two weeks what it had taken him nearly a
year to find out--that they were not for each other. The change had come
to him from the months in the Drift--something to break his unparalleled
infatuation. All her wonder and daring and splendour remained clear,
and yet the terrible draw of her had somehow eased upon his heart. In a
word, he saw as quite true another of her sayings--that love can never
be on one side alone in a great romance.
Late the fifth afternoon of his stay in the house of Minglapo, Romney
got the first inkling of the real business at hand. There had been talk
at the dais for several moments, when the old master turned at the soft
swinging of one of the shop's rear doors, and without finishing the
sentence on his tongue, remarked:
"And now, Friend Romney, you are ready to meet a countryman of yours,
General Nifton Bend--"
Very low in the doorway appeared that long, sad, strange face, and again
the leap in Romney's breast and the impulse to hurry forward and help
the Hunchback to the cushions. At the same time--a hot thrill for an
unemotional man--the thought that his association with Ti Kung and
Minglapo meant association with Nifton Bend, the genius of Young China.
At the moment of the General's entrance from the rear, the servants had
sprung to the main door opening on Merchant's Square, closed and barred
it as if for the night, though the afternoon was not entirely spent.
The servants of the shop were banished and the three sat down
together....
Romney's mind had rushed back not only to his first meeting in the
native professor's house in the Congrou district of Peking, but to
Longstruth's where his impressions of that brief former interview became
vivid and animate again for the listening of Moira Kelvin. The Hunchback
seemed to bring again something of her almost as intimate as her
perfume....
Daylight did not reach them now. The dead expressionless look had come
again to the General's eyes. Romney felt his own face turn bloodless
under the second appraisal, as was the other's in the warm gathering
dusk. The unhasting and uninflected voice spoke again--the voice of a
man with a single purpose, a man so close to the end that he laughs at
pain. The words came slow and steadily, like running water:
"... We are working for the future of China. We may be wrong. We are
doing the thing as we see it. Our deepest convictions are that we are
right. We do not mean to meet Japan in this extraordinary crisis in the
old fashion of arms and battle-lines. We do not care to fight. We
favour theoretically the expediency of toleration, and yet we observe to
the east and south, India, and on the north and west, Japan. Old India
is magnificent in philosophy and yet so far without the physical impulse
to protect herself; Japan, empty-minded, imitative, is furious with the
idea of her own raw power of men and guns. If mind is a finer and more
potent force than matter, we believe that guns and explosives and
battle-lines are to be mastered by a thought. It cannot be written that
Chinese age and wisdom shall succumb to the upstart and hot-headed
people that has not even a language of its own--"
Nifton Bend's face was lit. Romney did not comprehend. This man, an
authority on arms and military matters, spoke now against their use in
case of war with Japan. He may have been a mystic in so far as his
vision of the future went, but he had been enough of the manipulator of
matter to make the new Chinese army. Did he plan to use some force of
extermination more powerful than gases and explosives?
Minglapo now spoke to Romney, though his hand affectionately touched
Nifton Bend's shoulder.
"We have learned to accept a lift of the General's eyelid, Friend
Romney. He had not been thirty seconds in this room before you were
approved. Already Dr. Ti Kung had approved you--and I. Still you would
not have touched this inner circle as now but for your action in saving
our Doctor's life. It appears they burned his house that night in
Shanghai. You were intrusted with papers that contain certain of our
plans. You may be asked to carry them again--even to Japan. There is
for you a possibility of being an instrument toward the ending of all
war from the world. China need act but once to end all war. It is a
superb adventure for you, and incidentally you will be a power in
preventing the world-calamity of a Japanese Asia."
Nifton Bend now spoke again:
"The history of that package which you so safely brought to us would
make the raciest of novels. Once I hoped to become a novelist myself.
That was in the days before the big dream of being a foster-child to the
ancient Yellow Mother. In order that you may not be troubled longer by
working in the dark, I am going to tell you something of what the yellow
packet contains--"
And now there was the snap of a bone--the unmistakable snap of a faulty
knee-cap, from the far end of the room. Nifton Bend's utterance was cut
short. Romney glanced quickly at the two faces. Minglapo's hands
lifted slowly from the cushions. They seemed to waver a moment--then
were clapped together. No servant appeared. It had undoubtedly been a
servant of the household and had he been innocent he would have
responded to the master's signal. Minglapo clapped his hands a second
time, louder, and Romney saw in his eye what to him was unmistakably a
command to make haste toward the part of the shop from which the snap
had come. Rising, he heard a cry from Minglapo and was conscious of
Nifton Bend making for the door to the right of the room. From overhead
and from the hall-way outside was now heard the stirring and hurried
approach of servants.
Romney skirted the shadowy edge of the long rear-hall, running silently
on tip-toe. All that he saw at the far end was a slight movement, as of
a door being softly shoved to. It had moved possibly no more than an
inch. The American pushed it open. This rear-room was empty, and there
was no sound whatsoever. He crossed quickly to a further door which
opened to a dim hall. A crouched figure came to a stop at the far end
under Romney's eye--the decrepit figure he had seen for an instant under
the lifted trap to the basement. One of the servant's hands was
concealed under his blouse.
*6*
Certain aspects of the affair which followed were ridiculous, and others
profoundly Asiatic. Romney had felt himself far removed from the need
of physical encounter with any human being, and yet as he came close to
the tense bowed figure of the Chinese, the meaning of the concealed hand
darted to his mind, also the sense that he must act quickly in an
aggressive way or withdraw again out of the reach of the striking arm.
It has been observed that, generally speaking, it was easier for Romney
to advance than to withdraw. There was another point in that fraction
of a second. He could not use a hand or foot upon an Oriental bowed
with years--not even to disarm him. The fact is Romney dove forward, a
sort of hip-tackle, the idea being to carry the servant's body to the
floor with his arms pinned. After they had bumped the polished wood
together as one, he was disagreeably shocked at the extreme emaciation
of the figure beneath him. This turned in a moment to astonishment at
the extraordinary strength and agility which the Oriental displayed.
There was a crush in the thin hard limbs twined about his own, and the
hands were not to be held captive, but darted again and again to the
girdle where the knife lay. Romney flattened his weight upon the lithe
body and struggled for possession of the tearing, cutting fingers which
sometimes found his face and again burrowed into the pressure between
them. It was Minglapo's voice and foot that stilled the struggle, the
latter placed disdainfully upon the neck of his house-servant.
Romney strolled back to the dais ashamed of himself somehow. Minglapo
and Nifton Bend joined him a moment later, and rather quietly, as if
they appreciated the delicacy of the white man. The emaciated one was
brought in by two house-servants. He stood now before the master of the
shop, trying to repress the heavy breathing of his exhausted body, and
to cover as well as he could the trembling of his muscles from the
recent strain. Something of warmth and approval crept into Romney's
heart for the old man, as the pregnant meanings of the moment cleared in
his mind. Minglapo dismissed the servants and regarded the trapped one,
as Romney imagined, with something of strange kindness. Shutting his
eyes, the vast head of the master moved slowly from right to left, then
bowed before the American.
"Again you are our good genius, Friend Romney.... There appears a need
wherever you are--of fast action. I am beginning to believe in what our
Doctor says of the thing called American luck."
Romney waved his hand deprecatingly, and the General remarked with a
smile:
"Our young friend feels with very good cause that he has better gifts
for us than the force and swiftness of his hands."
He turned to Romney, adding:
"Do you not see that it was imperative for Young China to find the owner
of that badly-hinged knee? Our enemies would have required but little
more than a report of our words before that accident. I trust there has
been no mistake as to one of these being the lucky knees."
He pointed to the house-servant's thin legs, and presently Romney fell
once more into the charm of Minglapo's voice, though a tension was
increasing in his mind in regard to the fate of the captive, his eyes
turning often to the hollow-eyed one, as the voice of Minglapo came to
his ears as from the deeps of a bubbling well. From none but a fat man
with a great chest could such softness and volume issue.
The trembling of the servant's body resulted from exertion, not from
fear. His features were sombre and changeless as the east at evening--a
face of deep intelligence, but just a wrapping of yellow-pale tissue on
the bony block of it, except for the burning quiet of the eyes. The
ears were decently cut, the mouth and brow were good. Deference,
attention, apprehension--these three were expressed and held in order by
a concentration that was no less than mastery.
Nifton-Bend had also satisfied himself in study of that face. Minglapo
was now questioning his servant in Chinese.
... Fifty years old ... served in this house for two years ... came from
the South, from Canton ... papers in his possession to prove this...
Nifton Bend leaned forward to straighten the fringe of the cushions at
Romney's knee and whispered:
"They all have papers. He is Japanese--as we shall doubtless prove--"
The talk went on. It appeared that Minglapo was interested in the same
point that the General had just expressed, for presently he made a
gesture to bring the servant down to his level. The lifeless eyes
rolled backward for the fraction of a second as the wasted figure
obeyed. He bent but one knee in his kneeling, his right leg thrust back
loosely, the left bearing the full weight. The three also watched
intently. Again the warmth surged up into Romney's throat--a curious
fondness for the Oriental's courage and guile.
Now Minglapo stretched forth his hand to his servant's head and drew it
forward into his lap. Silently and resigned, the other submitted.
Still the left knee did double service. Very carefully Minglapo examined
the man's crown, tweaking the queue with tense fingers, peering into the
braid close to the scalp, letting the tight black length of it pass
before his eyes slowly, as if watching the gloss of it under the
lamp-light. This braid alone of him seemed fully alive.
"The queue is right enough. He has probably been in the service for
many years, ever since a little boy--probably helped to map
Manchuria--like as not helped to whip us in '95. Worked here two years
waiting for to-night, and then, just a little dryness of the knee--"
Minglapo bade his servant stand once more. Nifton Bend leaned forward,
placing his hand upon the loose right knee.
The servant explained that it was a bit rheumatic; that the pain was
unbearable when he bent it.
"I'm afraid he will have to bend it," Minglapo said.
A look of agony swept across the servant's face, as the master commanded
him to bend both knees at the same time. The force of will now called
into action was so intense as to be like a frictional heat in the room.
He lowered himself slowly, the weight seemingly equally divided in both
limbs. He was now sitting on his heels, Oriental fashion. Minglapo
waved him up again, and commanded him to repeat the exercise with a
quick movement.
The tell-tale snap filled the room.
There was something exquisite to Romney in the fact that not one of the
three faces to whom this was like an ultimatum, changed. Not the trace
of a smile, nor light of triumph appeared in the eyes of Minglapo or the
General. A hundred times more, they respected this old man as a captive
spy, than when he was merely one of the house-force. They respected him
perhaps as only one gamester can respect another.... Minglapo went on
speaking, but slowly, fragmentarily now. He clapped his hands. A
servant came and returned immediately bringing a small lacquered box.
"Is he not superb?" Nifton Bend whispered.... "They train them from
childhood. The Japanese system of espionage is far-reaching--ah, look
there."
Minglapo had reached forward and lifted the blue loose-hanging blouse of
the spy, rolling it well up above the shoulders. The bare brown chest
and back showed scarred and blackened from some terrible maiming in the
past. There were series of lumpy welts upon the back which Minglapo
examined minutely. The disfigurations of the chest were of a different
nature, long pale scars over which the skin stretched with a honey-like
transparency.
"One of the most trusted of his kind beyond a doubt," said Nifton Bend.
"This is not the first time he has been caught. Those three-barred
welts on his back are from the Siberian knout, a devilish contrivance
made of knotted whip-cord soaked in brine. The dark rashy appearance in
spots is also from the North--frost-bite. We have a hero in our midst,
Mr. Romney, one of the real ones whose names are never known."
The spy stood perfectly unemotional, looking upward, turning obediently
whenever Minglapo took his arm.
"... He knows it is his last half-hour--"
The last was in a sense abrupt to Romney. He had been so absorbed in the
whole game of these passionate nationalists, that the life and death end
of it for the one caught had been put aside from his mind for the
moment.
Minglapo arose and drew a goblet of water from the cooler, opened the
lacquer box, took forth a small metal case which contained a long
needle.
The pressure of it all was now a trifle heavy, even for the
well-repressed American. The excellence of physical manhood manifested
in the whole affair did not take away entirely the fact that the spy was
about to be murdered. Romney felt he could not stay. His head turned to
Minglapo and back to Nifton Bend. Their faces were expressionless and
half averted. They would have accepted a reversal that meant death to
them, with the same external calm that characterized the manner of the
spy.... Yet the American could not lift. He was no stranger to the
various fashions of brutality, but the temptation to pluck the stupor
needle from the hand of Minglapo was well nigh overpowering. The
unoccupied hand of the master was now held out toward the servant as if
to take his arm. Very slowly the spy's hand lifted from his side, the
palm toward Minglapo's, moving forward as one would grope in the dark.
Over his face was that same eternal quietude like a faint reflection of
day in the sky at evening.
That tableau seemed immortally fixed in Romney's mind. He leaned
forward, his hands gripping his ankles as he sat.... Suddenly the
principal was plucked from the centre of things. It was the queerest
extraction--a sort of side-lurching as if the spy's body had been hurled
past....
A quick shot from Nifton Bend at Romney's left--the voice of Minglapo in
English--then a crash of glass and frame as the body of the spy hurled
itself through the forward casement.
"Your work, Friend Romney. Get him, or all is ruined!" this from
Minglapo.
As he darted across the room Romney realised that it did appear to be
his work, that the house-servants were not to be trusted, that Minglapo
was fat and the General maimed from birth. He dove through the pearl
casement, somewhat enlarging the opening the other had made, and the
street took him--a stunning impact. Then came a curious realisation of
the freshness of evening.
The spy was up and away, the American following at a pace not adjusted
to distance, a sprint which could not have lasted two hundred yards.
*7*
A boy runs, an animal runs, but a white man cannot preserve his esteem
chasing a native through a Chinese street. Still the words of Minglapo
rang in his ears--"Your work, Romney. Get him or all is ruined."
Other thoughts flashed as he ran--thoughts having to do with the
changing and colouring of the Oriental maps, the end of a warring world,
the strange patience and passion of practical visionaries like Minglapo
and Nifton Bend and Dr. Ti Kung.
He ran with his elbows tucked in, his head forward. The spy, turning
often, would have seen but for the duck a face that did not know how to
quit. Yet Romney who knew what physical condition meant was surprised
at his own lack of form. The Japanese ran with a limp--ran for his
Emperor in whose service he had given youth and all the fine edge of his
vitality. It was not until he was spent that he turned fox. Luck was
not with him. The white man neared and the streets they passed
furnished no hiding place, not even an open door. At his last turn
Romney met a creature on the ground with fists upraised. Perhaps at no
other time would he have found the spy without a weapon.
The fists of an Oriental are always pathetic, but these were piteously
so. Romney did not join action with them, but sat down on a door-step,
gasping, laughing a little. The ludicrous cringing attitude was a clue
to a still greater pathos. The white man in his exhaustion was struck
again suddenly with the darkness of the whole drama. Why should he
return this heroic little figure to his death? It was true that he was
somehow in the service of the Big Three, that he had touched the secrets
of their devoted lives, but now, as in the shop of Minglapo, the great
zeal and patience, the unswerving fealty of this spy's service to his
most human and impossible God, had a merit to it that touched him where
he was tenderest. Nifton Bend and the two Chinese leaders meant
adventure; reinstatement into the world of real men; more than that they
meant initiation into the deepest crafts of men.... Ti Kung had picked
him up from the gutter of the world's darkest slum, placed him on his
feet, trusted him with a matter of life and death, sent him on a journey
to his masters. Minglapo was a figure to tie to; and as for the
Hunchback, Romney had uncovered an emotion that startled himself. He
knew now what it meant to love a leader--something of the old mystery of
what it means to die for another.
And yet they had thrust their responsibilities upon him. To take back
this old man, all broken with exhaustion, meant to deliver him to his
death. The personal side of the subject was big and near. He had run
down the spy but didn't know what to do with him.... The little Jap had
his life to live, his work to do. He had already done great silent
unanswering tasks. He lay face downward on the turf now, panting
hard--too old a man, his vitality too far spent, to be used so roughly.
The fact that Romney had been too long in Asia to care much for Japan
and her ambitions and that he was deeply called to the mysterious
activities of such men as the Big Three, didn't change a whit his
incapacity just now.
He sat down on a doorstep, just at the feet of the spy, and mopped his
brow laughingly, though his mental movements were heavy and severe. The
way he personally panted and perspired, disgusted a mind in which the
old ideal of an athlete still remained.... He saw for the first time
the expediency of Pilate's memorable washing of hands.... The sound of
hurried footsteps came up the narrow way.
Romney gambled with himself. If these were Minglapo's servants--the
affair of course was out of his hands. If not--well, he couldn't
exactly let the Jap escape with information that would betray the lives
and work of his friends.... The hurrying feet had not to do with the
house of Minglapo. They were Tientsin policemen--three of them--summoned
to duty doubtless by the chase. Perceiving the American now, and his
game on the ground before him, they brought lanterns to bear upon the
two faces, talked long and with much gravity. Romney blinked into the
lantern light again, an extra-long exposure. Then his life-story in
full was hypothecated by one of the officers. The two others afterward
relieved themselves of prolonged intonations in many high keys, having
little to do with the facts of the case. Their manner became
sumptuously courteous, even deferential, so that the American felt in
justice to them he should rise from the doorstep. They touched his
elbows on either side--slight, lifting pressures, bowing repeatedly to
him and pointing over their shoulders in a direction contrary to the
shop in Merchant's Square. Romney did not care to return just then to
Minglapo. In fact, he doubted whether he ever would again. Two of the
officers had lifted the spy between them.
As they walked, a little ray came down upon the American from the
future. Policemen meant calaboose, even in China. Calaboose meant on
some occasions an inconvenient chance to think. Minglapo of course
would exert himself in behalf of them, but delivery meant a return to
the dais and resumption of the murder process. Meanwhile in the little
old head walking behind, between the two Chinese policemen, were facts
and suspicions enough to break entirely what Romney was willing to grant
as the biggest game in Asia at the present moment.... Just now it
occurred that a properly trained Japanese spy would be able to talk in
English, which would prove utterly unintelligible to the Chinese police.
"Oh, I say, we'd better fix matters somehow--so we'll pull together--"
"Good," came the answer.
"You--why didn't you say something before?"
"There was nothing to say. I expected death when I fell in the
street--"
"I suppose that was my business."
"I do not understand--"
Romney was charged with queer elation. He would have known the spy was
Japanese by his English--probably a University of Tokyo training. He
was familiar with Japanese students. Always they bent forward with the
effort of thinking in a foreign language. The Chinese were inclined to
sit back and let the other do the heavy work of listening.
"You mean you don't understand why I didn't kill you?"
"Yes, that is what I mean."
"I'm not a murderer. I haven't got anything against you."
"Then you are not with them?"
"Yes--"
"I do not understand--"
It was the East and West again, a chasm that could not be bridged.
Romney dropped the subject.
"We'd better fix matters--as to what front is best to put up--"
"Front?"
"What we'd better tell them, so that our stories will fit--"
"Stories?"
"Listen," said Romney, straining for the non-idiomatic. "They will ask
questions at the station. We must answer. If we answer differently, it
would be better if we had not spoken--"
"Yes. I am your servant. We had a disagreement. You started to beat me
and I ran--"
"Just a little domestic difference," Romney remarked.
"Yes."
"Where do we live?"
"I came with you from Shanghai four days ago. We have been in the
country since arrival--"
Romney was further amused. Minglapo had been studiously avoided in the
arrangement. The spy had a fertile mind. These things were a part of
his work. He was aware even of Romney's coming from Shanghai.
"You are not to remember the place we have been since Shanghai and
Tongu," the Japanese added. "I have been showing you our country. You
are rich. You just play and pay.... You must speak sharp to me now, as
if you did not like my talk--"
Romney noisily rebuked his servant. The hands of the little policeman
tightened on his arm. "Good," said the Japanese in frightened, cringing
tones. "Now I will explain to them that I am your servant and that you
were displeased with me."
There were suspended explanations to the policeman; long, voluble
breaths and fresh beginnings, as if the spy were releasing a memorized
address; after that a moment of silence, and a low wailing sentence in
English:
"It does not please them altogether."
They were locked presently in the same cell. Voices of the drugged and
drunken beat through the corridors, and screams of madness from lower
passages. And still Romney had his chance to think. The Big Three
wouldn't be pleased to learn that he had permitted the spy to fall into
the hands of the law. Even the Japanese didn't understand a white man's
mercy. These nationalists were an interesting sort. They didn't ask
from others what they were unwilling to give themselves. Failure meant
forfeiture of life in their work. But the West didn't breed this sort of
thing in a man. Romney found himself not as intrinsically of the East
as he imagined. He could conceive a big system doing away with a host
of lives, but still he didn't care to be the direct instrument of taking
the life of one man.
Presently he found himself in the midst of conjecture as to how the Big
Three meant to strangle Japan. For many moments this matter wavered
back and forth through his mind, and did not take real form until he
happened to recall the laboratory in Minglapo's cellar. There might be
a connection here. He had heard of a ghastly, almost incommunicable
horror having to do with the slaying of multitudes without any formal
arrangement of platoon, brigade or corps....
He dozed in his chair at last, dreaming of a nation stricken with
pestilence--its soldiers all away in the clean and ancient barbarities
of war.... He would wait for Ti Kung and then possibly it would be well
to clear himself from the Big Three. Perhaps they wouldn't trust
him--even to keep his mouth shut.... The little old spy slept at his
feet.... In the heart of the night, a prison-guard entered with a
lantern, drawing the cell-door shut behind him.
Romney opened his eyes, and saw a queer intelligence in the glance of
the other--a face he had not seen before. The prison guard was intent
for an instant upon the figure at Romney's feet, the lantern-ray pouring
over the spy's length from feet to queue--then back to Romney's face.
"Sit quiet and say nothing," he whispered, "Your friends are working for
you. To-morrow you will be free. This--remember--is a madman. He is
not responsible.... Say only that he attacked you and me--now--"
The voice of the prison-guard came from the dark, behind the
lantern-ray. Romney caught up sleepily with the full significance of
the words. Suddenly the lantern fell and the stranger raised a terrible
outcry, springing upon the spy, who had half-risen. Now they were on
the floor together, and a shot was fired.
The prison-guard was the one to arise. The lantern was spraying the
stone floor with light, above was darkness. Romney's face was caught in
the hands of the policeman, and these words were driven in his mind,
even as he struggled to be free:
"Listen. He leaped upon me and tried to take my pistol. I had to
shoot. He is done and cannot deny. They are coming--"
The officer now raised his voice for help, and the corridors drummed
with hurrying feet.
*8*
Romney did not sleep during the rest of the night. They were slow about
taking the body of the little spy forth from the cell. The murder
passage recurred repeatedly. It had been very swift and matter of fact,
the prison-guard explaining what Romney should say as he watchfully
prepared to assassinate the Japanese, who in his turn arose slowly and
empty-handed to meet the end--all this in a treacherous lantern-ray.
Romney did not fancy such patriotism. Of course he realised that the
cause of the Big Three would have been ruined had the Japanese spy
managed to live to make his report. He granted that the Big Three
dreamed of a greater and purer China; even granted that if their dream
were applied to the machinery of nationalism, the result would be finer
for the Orient and the world, than if Japan became the dominant power of
Asia. At the same time he was not so modern in holding a curious
repugnance for the present episode.
In mid-afternoon the murderous prison-guard found an opportunity to
whisper that Romney's liberty would have been obtained hours before, had
there not been found another charge against him, the nature of which was
not yet clear. The prisoner was asked to be patient, however, that
great forces were at work to set him free. Romney took another long
breath. At times like this, the period of his life, since the parting
at Longstruth's seemed altogether irrational.
They had not yet cleansed the floor of his cell.
It was not until toward evening that he was led forth to meet this
mysterious new charge. A bearded Chinese in lavender robes sat in a high
box and appeared four-eyed behind his spectacles. Before him stood the
avid McLean of the _John Dividend_, now turning at the step of his prey
and feasting his single eye on the length and thinness of the American.
Romney's laugh was doubtless charged to him.
"Hello, Mac," he said, "I heard you had gone way down--"
"It has cost me a great deal to bring you face to face--"
"If I had seen you ten minutes after our meeting over the wall in
Shanghai, I could have fixed that little matter--"
"It is to be fixed now. The cost of collection and the payment for
personal damage received--brings the amount to twenty-five pounds. The
items are all here--"
McLean presented a long paper of charges.
"I may not have that much--what in that case?"
"Back to _John Dividend_ or rot here--"
Romney recalled that he had slightly less than a hundred dollars, which,
with his other belongings, was now in the hands of the police. He
offered seventy-five dollars to close McLean's claim.
To his surprise this amount--three times the original loan--was refused.
"Come around to-morrow--maybe I can raise the wind," Romney suggested.
"I've made you a lot of trouble and you've got a right to be sore."
Romney was still further surprised that the money-lender did not wabble.
He had not expected to be led back to the cell. An hour later, however,
he was called to the office again and after an evening's performance of
formality, extending through trial, initiatory and several deeper
degrees, he found himself in the street, his own money not used in
obtaining this freedom, and a secret verbal order, imparted by the
prison-guard, for him to report at once to the shop of Minglapo.
Dr. Ti Kung had returned.
The three were gathered at the dais when Romney was admitted. Dr. Ti
Kung raised his hand and apologised for not rising.
"From what they tell me," he said with a tired smile, "your former
proficiency in athletics has stood you in good stead."
Minglapo glanced whimsically at the forward casement, repaired since
Romney had crashed through. The deep bubble of a laugh started, but
dripped back.
The Hunchback bowed toward his countryman, studying him with a strange
mixed expression of anxiety and compassion. The long, narrow,
wolf-hound head held something that invariably lifted Romney--something
very deep that had to do with the love of man for man.
"I'm afraid," he remarked, "that I don't take the joy in a foot-race
that I once did. And it's mainly knowing how now. I'm really far from
fit."
"We trust that there will be no more of that for your portion. We have
reserved a task for you, Friend Romney--not more important, perhaps, but
of a much higher form of activity."
It was in Romney's mind at that moment to state certain objections, but
the face of Nifton Bend held him silent.
"I have been honoured," Dr. Ti Kung added, "in that my friends have
found you all that I promised--and more. It is strange that Mother
China should uncover among her most valuable workers, two men of your
country--"
"I have been wondering if I have the training for such ardent
nationalism," Romney said quietly.
Dr. Ti Kung turned to Nifton Bend who replied:
"We have thought of that. I can answer you best in my own experience.
I was without a country--and dared to be a citizen of the world. It was
this old Yellow Mother who took me in. China is not a nation. She is
the bed-rock of Asia. All elements are in her breast--the most ancient,
and conceptions so modern that they cannot be spoken aloud. For one must
_whisper_ the absolutely new. There is no place as yet for a visionary
in America--but there is a place here. One who works for China works
for all the East--and for the world, since out of the East all great
things come to light."
The Hunchback smiled. "I do not speak much in this way. There is
something in you that draws forth the dream.... But I see you are
troubled."
"Perhaps it was because he was locked up for a night and a day," said
Dr. Ti Kung.
"No, it is not that," said Nifton Bend. "I saw it here before the
little house-servant escaped. He won your heart, Mr. Romney?"
"Yes," the word came eagerly.
"You lost your sense of the greatness of a cause--that could sacrifice
him so ruthlessly?"
"Yes. He was all tempered with suffering--so absolute in fortitude....
They murdered him at my feet in the cell."
"He has done well. Perhaps you can see that we too love a servant like
that--"
"Yes--but to put him out of the way--"
"The cause is greater than the man."
"I do not mean to argue. I can either take it or leave it." Romney
could not say more. There was an encompassing understanding in the
Hunchback's eye.
"We are glad to discuss this with you. The East regards these things
differently. Tell us how you overtook him and what happened before the
arrest--"
"He fell from fatigue. His hands were held up to me from the ground. I
knew that you wanted him dead, knew what you expected of me, but I sat
down on a doorstep to think it out. He expected death. He was trained
your way. He asked me afterward why I had not killed him then. I knew
you could not rest while his thoughts held together in that gritty head.
Presently the police came along. It occurred to me if he were a trained
spy, he would know English, and it was so. We arranged our story on the
way to the lock-up--arranged it so as to keep out the name of
Minglapo.... When I saw him trying to take care of that dry kneecap
right here in this room--why, the stuff of me went out to him."
"Europe has gone mad," the Hunchback said wearily. "France, England,
Italy, Austria, Russia, Germany, all goring each other--America
threatened--Japan standing ready to take up the murderous confession of
her material-mindedness. Mother China can stop all that forever."
Except for the presence of the Hunchback, Romney would have assumed a
Western point of view fully at this time and explained that life had
taught him to do most of his dreaming at night. Instead, he said:
"Of course, I should be very glad to hear about China's power of
mastering Japan without arms and ending war forever from the
hard-pressed earth--"
It was one of the strangest moments. Romney had come very close to the
truth several times in his own thoughts, but never so close as now. His
question had put the answer into three minds. It was not that any one
of the three intended to speak, but what he had asked had brought the
picture of the truth as each saw it into a kind of form of words. If
there is anything to the transference of thought, the mental pictures of
the three may have helped Romney to the solution at that moment. He had
turned from Nifton Bend to Dr. Ti Kung. Queerly enough, just now he
recalled the extraordinary interest and capacity of the Chinese in
chemical and biological matters during his work in Palo Alto. Instantly
upon this was added the sharp recollection of the trap entrance to the
basement laboratory in this very house. Then came the large seeming
importance of the packet he had delivered to Minglapo from Dr. Ti Kung.
Might not the documents contained in that represent the fruits of Ti
Kung's studies in the laboratories of the States? All this was in a
flash, and over it all--it was like a panorama--a Japan with desolated
streets and highways, an Island of Pestilence.... Nifton Bend next
spoke:
"You see, Mr. Romney, as you now stand troubled by this dramatic little
matter having to do with our spy--it would not be well for us to
complete our plans for you. You are honest. You are of the
West--called to us and called from us, by your ideals. Our measure is
heroic. A measure to accomplish such a result as we deem to be required
now must be heroic.
"Without knowing exactly the form our activity will take, you can
continue to serve us. If we told you the exact truth--your very
possession of it would endanger your life in the event of its making you
waver in your allegiance to us--"
"You mean like the spy. You had to kill him because he had learned too
much. But I know as much as he now--"
"Perhaps not. He has been in this house for two years, and during the
last day or two, he has been used in a particular service."
"Then you think what he heard here was not all, but merely an added
inkling to the full understanding."
"He became dangerous to us."
"You do not think that I am dangerous to you now?"
"Your case is different. We have seen your trustworthiness. We know
that any difference now is moral and that our cause is safe in your
hands. At the same time any explicit methods which we might use must
not become the property of any mind which is not imbued with the great
passion which we feel."
"You say you could use me without divulging further?"
"Yes. We wish--"
"You are not treating me then, as you would treat an Oriental--"
"That is because I am an American. My friends have learned to trust
me--and I have chosen to trust you--"
Romney thanked him.
"What plan have you for me?"
The two Chinese turned to Nifton Bend who arose.
"This morning we planned to send you to Japan. The delay in securing
your release from custody has changed that. You are to start for the
Gobi Desert. The plan is written, the progress of your journey set
down, the policy and full meaning of your mission. These papers are in
my chamber on the floor above. There may be a detail or two to finish
in regard to them. Your servant will bring you to me in a few minutes.
If you can be ready within an hour, it would be well for you to reach
Peking in the morning. Let me add that this is a mission of great
mercy, not a mission of death--"
Romney made himself ready in his own quarters. A lift had come to his
heart which he did not pretend to understand. It had seemed that his
acceptance of the mission had been ordained deep in his own
volition--the decision arising finished in his consciousness while the
Hunchback spoke.... Many of the preparations for travel had already been
made by Bamban, who left him to bring the word from Nifton Bend.
... Romney was in one of the halls, his servant walking ahead. A door
opened a little distance forward and low in it, the place a half-grown
child's head would occupy, appeared the long face of the
Hunchback--beyond that, golden lamplight, the sound of a softly-playing
fountain, and an instant later, the movement of another figure in the
mellow light.
Romney halted. The figure had come forward. The head and breast were
above Nifton Bend and two bare white arms rested upon the low shoulders.
One was held out.
Her head turned slightly, the light touching that perfect profile. She
was smiling. Romney could not feel his limbs, yet they carried him
forward to the outstretched hand.
"It's good to see you again, Sir Romney."
Something had broken within him. The strange elation had changed to a
tangible power. There was sorrow in her loveliness. But such a sense of
the beauty in the presence of the two together--a kind of entering into
the heart of a sacred place. And queerly enough he felt himself at the
end of commonness--mere man movements and matters put away, an end to
the drift of the waterfronts, all helplessness and the stress of hand to
hand. She was close, looking into his face.
"You have put on something that I could not find a year ago, Sir
Romney," she whispered.
"For awhile I thought I had lost rather than gained. I hope you are
right," he answered.
His eyes were held to the yellow rug. It lay over a low chair by the
fountain. She led Nifton Bend to it, the bare arm ever close to his
shoulder.
"I am glad that he is chosen for the mission to the desert," she was
saying to the Hunchback. "I am glad you two know each other, for I
found Sir Romney very much a man."
*PART TWO: THE GOBI*
*ANNA ERIVAN*
*1*
Romney was not delayed long in Peking, and the few days were
interesting, for his credentials opened a different shelf of native life
from that which the foreign traveller ever encounters. Here he was
surrounded by the young men to whom the names of Ti Kung and Minglapo
and Nifton Bend were demigods, no less. He saw the cause of Young China
in force, felt the strong fresh beat of it, and became more than ever
glad that it was in the world, and that he had the honour to be a
servant of it. To him, there were no longer three but four leaders. He
told Moira Kelvin this before he left the lamp-lit room in Tientsin.
She was vital warmth and depth of background to a picture such as his.
Men called forth his friendship and loyalty and service, but there was
something in the spirit of romance which she stood for, that made a
slave of him, and there was something of creative significance in her
love-relation with the General that was so intimate and sacred that he
did not bring it even to the foreground of his mind for close analysis.
Her personal pull upon him was easily borne now. He kept it as a kind
of secret sweetness of life. It honoured her, and the yearning that
came with it was one of the finest ingredients for moral health. No man
spends energy in yearning whose real forces are asleep. So they were
good girding days and his health came back. He felt himself relaxing
again in the slow rhythmic breath of the interior.
Romney only knew that he was going to the Gobi Desert. There was a
Peking letter among his numbered documents; another letter to be opened
in Tushi-kow and for all points of his journey ahead up to a town in the
desert called Wampli. But these letters were not to be read until he
reached the towns noted, and the documents attending each letter were
promised to give him further details as to friends, impedimentum, his
task and safe conduct.
Three days were spent in Tushi-kow where the Chinese Post Road forks
from the Russian caravan route to Siberia. Here he was quartered in the
house of Fai Ming, whose name was in daily use by the members of the
cause in Peking. This old aristocrat who felt honoured in giving his
wealth and strength to the people, had many tales to tell of the Chinese
awakening, of the young social order in America and Europe which he had
visited since Romney had been home. It was his view that a certain
brotherhood passion was trimmed for ignition around the world and would
shortly become a circle of cleansing flame.
"The camels are ready," Fai Ming said on the last day, "but I would not
have you hasten, my friend. There is a long caravan-route from
here--let us say to Turgim, where a real activity may begin for you.
Another party will start three days hence if you wish to wait--"
Romney shook his head. "Yet I have felt that I have been in my own home
with you," he added.
"Your mission is unprecedented. The desert tribes are said to be full
of zeal, and slow in discrimination, though you will not meet dangers on
this side of Turgim. In any event we are taught that a man with a real
mission is in the hands of strange and powerful helpers."
Bamban meant superb tea, dry blankets, and dustless food. Also, he
appeared to command a proper respect for his new master not only from
the native travellers, but from the camel-drivers and Tartar merchants.
Moreover, that camel-reek which became a part of the very texture of
everything in the caravan, as all men and equipment of a cavalry outfit
partake of the essence of horse, was at least checked in its
pervasiveness so far as Romney was concerned, by the tireless efforts of
the fastidious one.
"Bamban, you're getting to be a habit that will be hard to break,"
Romney remarked one evening early in the journey to Turgim.
Days folded into each other, and something from the unearthly gleam of
the desert edges entered his soul. His mind moved slowly. Sometimes he
wondered if the old quick thinking and sharp mental activity would ever
come back. At times he had no care regarding it, feeling that all
surface glibness had passed for good. His orders so far were only
arousing. He did not know as yet what he was to do in the Gobi, though
the intimations were of a most challenging kind. He had been furnished
with copies of manuscripts written in Chinese and in part in Sanscrit,
containing information regarding the desert, information that the world
at large would scoff at. He was advised concurrently to study these
papers. More and more he realised that in ways other than his
linguistic prowess he was fitted for the journey at hand.
He thought much of Moira Kelvin and Nifton Bend. One night by the
desert fire, with Bamban sitting expectantly near, the salient events of
the year moved by in steady, and for the first time, ordered procession,
beginning with his first glance at the yellow rug on the little river
steamer _Sungkiang_--that whirlwind fortnight. For a month or so he had
been close to death--he saw this clearly now--her laugh the note of his
delirium, her kiss the heat of his fever. After that, a kind of low
animal hate which had to burn out before decency and sense came.
He was cool now. The night was winter clear. He would never have been
able to see her so largely and definedly as now, had she taken him. She
had become a kind of institution, but impersonal. His present run of
thoughts was not without a touch of chivalry. He saw that there are very
few really exciting vampires among the love-women; that no man strikes
fire with a superb woman's genius without enduring benefits. If a man
figures out the cost in dollars for such an adventure he's not a lover
of quality. If a man's career in the world is slowed somewhat, it's an
easy price to pay for being privileged to enter even for a little time
the domain of a passionate woman's genius. The yellow-rug woman was his
initiation. The fact that he had glimpsed a devil in her too much for a
boy to subdue, no longer prevented him from seeing that the fault was
his own weakness and that her devil was in no way smug. He had well put
away the cheap male diversion of hating all women, because he had met
one too great to hide herself in him. He did not want Moira Kelvin
back, but his heart was strangely expectant of meeting some one of her
quality, some glory akin to hers, but nearer his own full comprehension.
Because he did encounter something of this kind, he is present on these
pages. The rest--the strangeness, the peril, the desert itself, is mere
setting and arrangement.
In the main, the deeps of his mind were undisturbed, the forces there
moving often with a finer vitality than he had known before, but day
after day the expectancy recurred in the same form, the sense of an
imminent and radical complication. He could not quite put away thoughts
of this delicate and encompassing mystery. Always he said, "This will
pass when I really enter the desert," but it was not so in the journey
to Turgim, though he saw no white woman throughout those majestic
days--only the dark and yellow women in the shadows of the Rest Houses
at evening--creatures very far from complication. Still, the gently
lingering of feminine redolence in his reveries....
Always when he thought of the woman yet unknown, the penetration and
one-pointedness of his mission diminished. In the colder morning hours
he was able to reckon with the soft haunt of it all; but in the wondrous
nights of desert moonlight (the same lady of the moon, full-throated,
head tilted back) Young China of the towering present, and the
sand-strewn relics of the ancient Lemurians, said to be left in the
Gobi, alike lost their conspicuous magic.
At Turgim, a vile and sprawling town, Romney drew a somewhat clearer
idea of what he was out after, and the vague vastness of the undertaking
at this time possessed the large part of his thinking in the day-light
hours of travel. The main road was left at Turgim and the next point
was Nadiram, six days' journey straight west into the desert. Three
Tartar merchants arranged to travel this stretch and Bamban explained
that they relied upon his master's credentials, since Nadiram was
usually reached from an open spur running south from the Chinese Post
Road at a point ten days' journey ahead. Nearly two weeks was to be
saved by this western cut, but the trail was commercially unsafe. The
remotest of the Russian consuls was said to be stationed at Nadiram.
Six days--a party of five camels. The Gobi now gave them battle, days
of burning, nights of sudden chill. The three strangers proved helpful,
as they knew the best switches of the trail and the halts for water and
rest. Three times desert bands swept up to the little caravan--foul and
furious they appeared, demanding their tariffs of money to the last
copper or kopeck. It was on this journey that Romney first heard the
hyenas....
The last day of the journey to Nadiram was ending. It had been an extra
long stretch for the camels. He planned to rest a few days, and Nadiram
was supposed to be for him, the last day on the outer and open highway
of the desert. A sense of the mystery of the East came that night, as
it had not since his early days in India.
They neared the settlement in the first coolness of early evening. It
lay in a strange, fixed fashion, as if moulded low upon the rolling
sand. Except for the shadows, it would have been unearthly. Indeed,
there was a sharp intensity to the shadows, such as one finds upon the
moon through a strong lens, but the colour was lowered--a Gobi colour, a
lifeless, sand-scoured yellow. Romney gathered his padded coat about
him before the hut-shadows fell across the way. The desert was clean,
but the smell of the town was of uncovered dead. In the open, the sun
had played upon all surfaces; men had defiled these shadows. Romney
shivered, his nostrils had long been clean of Turgim....
Nothing of his reading or imagination had pictured this entrance to
Nadiram, and yet there was a strange and evil familiarity about it
all--as if some ancient picture of his mind finally opened to tally with
the present, object for object.
The moon was not yet risen; the town was lit, but the desert still in
twilight. The main road through the town stretched straight into the
East. In the very centre of it, in the low distance, the planet Jupiter
was rising--something to hold to, something of peace and spaciousness.
It was needed, because the sights and sounds and scents about him, as
the camels rocked in, belonged to a flaring hell. Little shops were lit
with torches in the doorways, torches that roared and were red. The
faces of the keepers took on this red light, also the faces of the
beggars in the streets. The tired beasts moved forward rapidly and with
a stealth that had long been forgotten in the desert. The forward
drivers were continually screaming for right of way. Thus Romney saw
Nadiram, the faces of the people turned upward in the red
reflection--like a kindling of hatred upon a countenance of impassive
gloom.
The three Tartar merchants disappeared into a side street. Romney
turned presently into the court-yard of the Russian consulate, and
dismounted, deeply conscious in the dusk of the eyes of a woman in the
doorway.
*2*
From the moment that he beckoned to Bamban to make his camel kneel in
the court of the Consulate, until the woman's eyes turned to his from
where she stood in the narrow opening of the door, an intensity of sheer
living possessed him such as he had never experienced except during the
Hankow fortnight. His good limbs stumbled as he crossed the level stone
flags, not because he had been on the rack for hours, but because the
main force of his life had turned out to the woman's face--as if all his
life hitherto had been but a journey to that face.
She gave no sign; merely bowed and said in English:
"The Russian Consul is ill. He can see no one."
To the weathered Romney had come a certain dismay. He had been able to
meet most pressures from men; take up most of men's crosses and carry
them to Golgotha, if necessary, but the burden of this--that her face
was calm, that her eyes gave no sign, that his approach meant nothing of
the extraordinary nature that had prevailed upon him--this held the
unique pang. He tried to save himself, as a man's mind will, by the
thought that the suddenness of this encounter and the utter absence of
beauty from his life for many weeks, had stimulated him in an unusual
way. This that had rocked his heart was just a pretty woman's influence.
She would say something presently to break the dream, and he would be
quite calm again.
It was not until after this rush of thinking that Romney came up out of
the deeps--enough to laugh at himself, for expecting her to be startled
by his coming. But it was not a very successful laugh, not the kind he
used in men's affairs or against the worst that the world had shown him
since the other woman went her way. The idea of his mission did not
rouse him. He had merely concentrated on work to pass the time until
this moment. In fact it is the great workers of the world who become
terrific to handle when they turn from their tasks to a woman....
Romney had no particular message for the Russian Consul, yet he said
with difficulty:
"Is the Consul very ill?"
"I think he will be able to see you in the morning."
Now she was looking at him differently, her head bent toward him.
"You do not speak like an Englishman," she added.
He drew closer. "I am American."
It was not apparent whether she was pleased or regretted the fact. That
there was a medium of language between them did not occur in its full
importance until afterward.
"I am Anna Erivan, the Consul's sister."
If she had been Erivan's wife, Romney might have treasured for some time
a certain deep dream, but certainly he would have kept his dreaming
clean-clipped that night; and certainly he would not have tarried in the
court, until he was asked to enter the Consulate.
Bamban was sent with the camels to the Rest House. The woman made tea
and placed food before him, lighting the candles and tending the fire
upon the hearth.
It was a low, broad room, the beams of the ceiling uncovered, the floor
paved with flags, like the court, and gratifyingly clean.
She spoke as she served him.... Her brother was not dangerously ill.
He would be up again in the morning, if that would do.... She had been
here with him a year. Yes, she had been lonely.... There were no other
Russians here, no other Europeans, none who remained.... No one
remained in Nadiram. It was but a point on the long road. No one came
back; all moved on. In good time every one passed on. If one remained
long enough in Nadiram, all Asia would go by, she supposed.... Mostly,
however, they were Chinese and Buddhist holy men, many of them weak from
hunger that they had brought upon themselves. She loved the holy men.
Some of them were quite pure.... There was one very ancient one, who
was almost dead. He had slept in the court for a whole day, and she had
served him. His heart was an abode of peace. She had been better for
days following. She had felt a strange peace for an hour or two from
others who had passed, but never like the power of this very old saint.
His name was Rajananda.... Mostly it was a passing of world faces,
Chinese and Tartars who pressed on, wanting something--their faces set
with desire.... Sometimes it was all like a dream to her, the great
rolling, burning desert--the moving dots becoming men and horses and
camels, the men and horses and camels becoming dots again....
Thus she talked, breaking and toasting bread, pouring his tea. Romney's
heart was like an upturned cup with listening. He ate but did not taste
the food, drank but did not know that the tea was priceless. Night had
closed upon the court. He heard the heavy breathing from an inner room,
and horses somewhere outside clearing their nostrils from the dusty
forage. The voices of the Chinese came in when he stopped to listen, an
endless iteration of nothings.
The woman moved about--a sentence and a silence--cleansing the tea
things. An hour passed. The place was bare as before. A plate of
sweets was left upon the table, a pitcher of water with a cup beside it,
a tin of tobacco and papers. She rolled a cigarette absently, standing
by the table, still telling of the long road. She proffered the
cigarette to him, suddenly recalling herself.
"I quite forgot," she said. "He taught me to do it for him." She
looked at the shut door, from which the breathing issued.
Romney accepted the cigarette gratefully. He spoke very little and
quietly, a deep hush upon him. He had been afraid to comment, lest she
be aroused and hastily call in the fragments of her story. He was
sensitive enough to know that she was easing some tragic ache from her
heart. Her voice, her face and figure, the hands that served, the story
itself, filled his imagination with pictures and a startling kind of
power.
The sense now came to Romney that he could be himself at last. This
woman was a flame that freed him. In the light of her, he dared be a
full being. He did not feel less, nor was prompted in any way to act or
cover. She did not make a slave of him, but called forth such as he had
of humour and wisdom. He could see past the flash of her eyes. There
had been at times such a surface dazzle in the eyes of the yellow-rug
woman that he had not been able to see beyond it, but that dazzle was
for him and the world. Nifton Bend doubtless encountered no such
difficulty. It was but one of the perfectly appointed barriers that
preserved the love-woman for her own.... There was a moment--it was the
same that Romney fully realised that he was himself at last--in which
the smooth-running levels of Anna Erivan's story changed to rush of a
cataract:
"... I have been here a year--do you understand that--a year? I came
from Odessa, four thousand miles, by train, by caravan, over mountain
passes, across rivers, through wastes of sun and rock.... Days of fever
heat, nights of perishing cold--thirst and suffering--four thousand
miles, five hundred on the back of a camel.... My mother was just dead,
yet all the way I dreamed of the bountiful heart of a big brother I had
not seen for years. He was here. All the way from Odessa I came to
him.
"The last fifty miles I travelled with Tartar merchants, and learned to
know them well. They were not unreal. They were good to me. And yet, I
was so frightened. They told me as I neared Nadiram on the road from
Urga that their caravan had a thousand miles still to wander through the
desert, past ruined cities and along dried-up river-beds to Peking.
"It was evening when we reached here--just as you reached here this
evening. I had seen Nadiram spelled out on the maps; I had seen the
post-mark on his yearly letter. I had pictured it so differently, and
this is what I saw--sun-dried clay, and the low blowing desert and this
court-yard with the Russian flag. I had expected him to come forth to
meet me. All day I watched. I had started early for the journey's end.
I entered the court, but saw no face. The merchants passed on, turning
queerly. The door-way was heavy with dust, that door where you entered.
I pushed it open, my arms ready to fling about him. I thought he must
be busy or detained.
"This room was darkening. It was not as you found it, but sodden and
evil--an evil odour. I called, and there was no answer. I was
frightened. I had been frightened all day. One does not know what one
can stand. That was but the beginning, and I thought I was close to
death then.
"Do you know what I found? I will show you--"
She turned quickly to the door and opened it. Romney saw a great bear
of a man, half sprawled over a wooden table, the candle sputtering near
his head in the fresh pressure from the open door, the sharp fume of
brandy issuing. The body seemed swollen, neck and ears, shoulders,
abdomen, legs--all swollen, but the top of the head. That was small and
sparsely covered with hair, the candle-light upon it. The lips were
swollen and parted.
"That is what I found," she said.
*3*
Presently she shut the door of the forward room with quick hand--her
face remorseful and tender.
"I don't know why I did that. It was hateful to do that--and before
you. I don't know why I did it."
"You had to," he said. "I listened so intently, you had to tell me.
You could not tell one more ready to understand and help you."
"But he is not always like that--not always like to-night and that
night. There have been many days ... oh, but he is not what I
expected--so different from when he left Odessa. But very kind, always
kind. To-morrow morning he will be kind enough. Only such a desolation
comes over me out of his soul. It is like the desert.... And nothing I
can do changes him. I have ceased trying to change him, ceased trying,
ceased hoping--"
"Some men can't stand the desert," Romney said. "One must bring a
certain integration of force, a certain resistance, to stand it here.
The Gobi saps the vitality of the weak; it often takes the sanity of men
who do not drink.... Your brother does not know what comes over him.
He feels himself going insane, that's all. A man drinks, when he feels
that, if he's the kind that turns to drink.... You had to tell me.
It's lucky I came. I wouldn't have failed to come--not for worlds.
Perhaps I came to take you away--"
... Her fineness appeared only to one who had the grace to see. Romney,
surprised at his own words, sensed vast reaches in her, depths that
defied him, something of the newness of new Russia and hues of beauty
ancient as Asia. Her eyes had widened, making her face the more
fragile. Just then he saw the rising moon through a low pane behind
her. It was in the full and still red from the horizon. The glass was
poor, distorting the circle so that it was like a bulging grain bag....
She had not smiled, nor taken exception to his words. There was no
coquetry in her. She waited for him to explain.
"You have seen all the terror and the oppression of the desert. You
cannot have failed to see something of the rest," he suggested.
She paused and he added, "Something that has to do perhaps with that old
Buddhist holy man you spoke of so kindly."
"I only know he brought me a strange peace," she replied. "As if living
here with no one to talk or listen to, wasn't all of life, but just a
little part, a hard part.... He was very little and old--but so kind!
I am telling it very badly, but I got a sense from him, not through
words, that I must take this hard part, day by day, and put it behind;
that it had come to me because I deserved it, every day of it. And I do
just that for hours, feeling courageous, but I cannot always hold it.
The rebellion comes back; the darkness and squalor of it all come back."
"Does something like that peace ever come to you from the desert
itself?"
She shivered. "No, it does not belong to me. I am here, because there
could be no more terrible place. If I deserved suffering, the design is
perfect. But I have whimpered enough. You see I was choking with it.
I have _used_ you--to ease myself."
"I wonder if it is all illusion to me," he mused. "I have seen another
side to the desert--nights like to-night when everything is softened in
moonlight--the old civilisation--and all so clean. The Gobi is a mate
of the moon's. I think it is almost as big as the moon. It starts the
imagination because everything is finished. It has had its day, like
the moon, and there is a wonderful story to be read if one could pass
the aloofness. Even here in Nadiram we are but on the edge of its
mystery. Hasn't the heart of the desert ever called to you?"
"Only when I wanted to die," she answered. "I don't know why men should
love the past. Each day is enough conquest for me. I can face anything
in the morning--_except yesterday_. Until noon I am brave, and feel that
I can take what is to come from ahead; but I cannot turn back. The moon
is dead. The Gobi is dead. I don't care for the cleanness of death.
The death ahead for you and for me and for all--that's not so hard to
face, but it seems to me sometimes that we are the products of many
deaths and I dare not think of that.... How strange our talk! And you
should rest from your journey. There is a room here for you. You will
not need to go to the Rest House. Are your servants cared for?"
"Yes, thank you. I'll stay, if I may. The journey has not wearied me,
but you are very tired. The day has been hard for you. I wish I could
say something that would make you rest.... I wish I might say the words
to make you sleep like a little child, forgetting the moon and the Gobi
and all that is past--your face turned with a smile to to-morrow. There
are such words, if I could think of them."
The smile had come to her face. Her lips parted. Romney had somehow
helped her. He did not know just what word had done it, unless it was
the mention of the little child.
"You have _fancy_," she said softly. "For ages here, no one has talked
except of meat and smoke and fire and beds. Perhaps I shall rest. We
do not often keep guests here. Perhaps that was why I asked you--so that
I could rest--"
Still the smile remained. She added:
"Very rarely an American comes. We are fond of America in Russia."
He wanted hours more. He could have talked the night away. Yet there
was something in his very passion to remain with her that forced him to
rise, that long training that makes a man skeptical and impatient of the
thing he wants most for himself.
She brought a candle and led the way to an inner room.
"Is there anything I can do for him to-night?" Romney asked, pointing to
the forward room.
"No, there is a cot there. When he finds himself in darkness, he will
feel his way to that. You will hear his fingers on the wall--but do not
mind."
She swung open the single window of the little room. The stone-work was
barred. She left him, but did not shut the door.
He stood waiting in the centre. There was just a cot with blankets and
a table at the head, upon which the candle sat in solitude. He thought
of his travel-bags just then, but she was bringing them and he hastened
to the door, for they were heavy and the camel-reek was upon them. She
left him again for a pitcher of water and a cup, very pleasing and
graceful in her services.
"And now is there not something I can do for you?" he said.
"No--unless--" She laughed.
"Yes?"
"Unless you think of me sleeping like a little child, my face turned
toward to-morrow--"
She was gone. Still she had not shut his door.
It was all a kind of blur to Romney until he lay down. Then the picture
straightened and steadied. Could it be that he, Romney, had hypnotised
himself--so that the first possible woman had fallen straight into his
heart? He had reached the period of life when a man begins consciously
to look for his woman. Does not such a search make the man blind? One
cannot see clearly so long as he doesn't want anything. Was he so
shallow and common as to be caught in a whirlwind of the artificial? It
was not that he lowered Anna Erivan in this thought, but could she be
the one woman in the world for him?
Then he thought of her from the first moment to the last, reviewed her
every gesture and movement of face and hand. It was not what she said,
though there was much in that for him, but her comprehension was so
instantaneous. She had _fancy_. She loved the half-lights; she had
passion; the whole strength of her had to do with that. Was her
strength the strength of repression? She had beauty, but was it the
kind of beauty that goes with terrible self-love? ... She seemed tender
and brave and imaginative.
Romney sat up on the cot with a suddenness that made the whole fabric
creak. And what of his task? The possibility of his penetrating to the
heart of the great Gobi mystery seemed far and intolerable compared to
the next morning, when she would come into the outer room.... Would she
be there first and he emerge to join her, or would he be waiting?
He laughed. Even this simple question had absorbed him utterly,
banishing the mystery of the desert. There could not be two missions.
As for her beauty, it seemed as if he had created it in his own highest
moments, touch by touch.... Might she not journey on with him,
thrilled, too, by the strange thing he had set out to accomplish? This
was madness. Even the physical dangers forbade that.... The task,
whatever it was, looked little and fanatical beside her. The Big Three
and Fai Ming seemed altered, their zeal misguided; his own former
seriousness in relation to man's accomplishment, seemed absurdly
young.... This is what a woman had done for him in one evening.
There could not be two missions. He must stay or go on.... Perhaps
after reading the Nadiram documents he could tell her something of what
he was out after, but it would change nothing. There could not be two
tasks. He must cleave to the one and forsake the other....
Romney was sweating. It would not have been so hard, had she not made
the whole business appear insignificant. Must he be a ghost-chaser,
leaving this superb creature here? ... Wickedness in her? He could not
find it anywhere. She might become a saint or a wanton, but there would
be greatness in her giving in either case. In that she was like Moira
Kelvin. Splendours flashed for his eyes about her repressions, and yet
what had her repressions to do with him? She had merely talked with
him, and she was dying to talk. She would have talked with any one who
would listen and furnish understanding. After all, Romney relied upon
the one fact that such meetings as he had known in the twilight in the
court of the Consulate, did not in the nature of things rouse one heart
alone. There was no magic in life, if meetings such as that did not
contain magic. Still he had not won Moira Kelvin.... It may have been
only a waver, a gleam to her, so far, yet he felt that if he remained,
Anna Erivan would know something of this that had come to him in an
instant.... There was a kind of bruise in his heart that all his old
life had been lessened. Suppose she was destined to be only a passing
face to him. Would the old zeal for the world come back? Did he want
back anything that had been spoiled? A woman great enough to diminish
everything else, even for a night, was great enough for any man. But
the things he had set himself to do.... Romney's lip tightened with
self-scorn. He could come to no decision. The episode was making him
yellow already. He had hitherto prided himself upon his faculties for
decision. He arose and paced the room in bare feet. The night cold
came in....
He thought of journeying with her in the evenings together on the
dromedary--she sitting forward, sun and moon and sand, the deep drinking
at evening, the fire on the desert, the tents--the tent.
He had stopped in the centre of the room and now paced on again. He was
not quite the same after that last. He wished for the day. He tried
the cot again, but could not stay; paced the room, longing for the day.
At last he thought of papers given him to be opened at this stage of the
journey.
*4*
There was much to read from the Peking papers, and something was made
clear at last regarding the purpose of his travel. His work though
political was imposing. It was of China yet above China. Full
knowledge of his undertaking was promised at the next point of his
journey, Wampli, but Romney had enough now to understand that there was
no illusion about the bigness of the thing he was called upon to do.
For a time he was lifted a little from the intensity of the present
episode--at least, from what the world would have called madness in
connection with it.
That was Romney's longest night. When the dawn came in, cold and
yellowish gray, he felt that much which had been his the night before,
was gone from him. He arose quietly and went forth. The outer room was
empty, the house, even the forward room, still. Outside the chill was
leaving, a day of bright heat promised. No one was abroad. He located
the Rest House with difficulty, and finally touched Bamban's shoulder.
"Find the camel drivers," he said. "Get the party ready as soon as you
can. We start for Wampli at once."
Bamban looked up quickly--the nearest thing to a start that his master
had ever noted. In ordinary course, there would have been a halt of
several days in Nadiram, and even under the pressure of speed, the
camels would have been permitted to rest for one day. Moreover, it meant
passage alone to Wampli, since the three Tartar merchants were now to
continue by a northeastward trail to the Post Road. Romney laughed at
his own sensitiveness in feeling so keenly the surprise of the little
man. He did not hasten back to the Consulate, yet it was impossible to
loiter. Turning into the gate of the court he saw a movement of the
woman within. It was very early. The feeding and saddling of the
camels and the procuring of stores would require at least an hour....
Anna Erivan came to the door. He saw something of her morning
joyousness fade as she glanced into his face. This numbed him further.
"How early you rise," she said. "I heard your step and made haste to
join you, but you had gone.... You have been gone a long time. The tea
is ready."
"Thanks," he said briefly.
There was no sound from the forward room. She stood behind his chair
waiting for him to be seated. He glanced at her. There was a hard
thing in his breast; it seemed as if his breath did not go lower than
his throat. He sat down to the table. The woman brought a covered dish
hot from the fire, placed it before him and poured tea. She cleared her
voice before speaking:
"Did you rest?"
Something gray had come into her face.
"No. Did you?"
She winced. Yet there had been something in her mind to say. She let
it forth, but the gladness was gone.
"It was as we said last night--a strange and sweet kind of rest at
first. I went to sleep like a little child--drifting away so
pleasantly. But it didn't last. Something awoke me--some change. I
could not have slept an hour. Since then, I have been waiting for the
day."
They were like two melancholy strangers meeting on a strange road, each
having lost his way, debating vaguely.
She ate nothing. Just as he was about to remind her, she suggested to
him that he try the contents of the dish before him. He put the spoon
into it and discovered that he was forced to follow each movement with
his mind lest his hand stop; that he must give separate thought to each
gesture, the placing of food upon her plate and upon his own, then a
thought for each morsel that he lifted--a thought even to taste it. If
he did not keep up the thinking, movement stopped altogether. His eyes
were called to her face. The gray widened there, her eyes very large.
He heard Bamban bring in the camels to the court at last. The voice of
the driver with him was like a voice from the pit. Anna Erivan cleared
her throat:
"Are you going at once?"
"Yes."
"But my brother.... You see, I did not call him because every moment of
sleep helps him--like this. I shall get him--"
Her dismay was rending to him.
"Don't trouble. What I had to say isn't vital. It will hold until I
come back from Wampli if--"
Her throat was like a flower. This that she wore at the throat was
black. He could see her hand clearly and her throat. Above was
enveloped in the pervading grayness, all but the eyes. Always as the
face cleared, the low voice of Bamban, or the voice of that camel-driver
from the pit, blurred it. Again Romney began to think of the food,
morsel by morsel. One spoonful remained on his plate. It seemed as if
he could never come to the end. And now he saw the tea. He drank it
eagerly. That seemed to help her, too, as if something of life had come
into the room--something human and grippable. She took his cup and
thankfully refilled it. He drank this more slowly, because it had not
cooled.
In the open door was sunlight. It was not like the sun of yesterday,
yet it was sunshine. This brought him a swift picture of the day's
journey, a long and full day's passage, then nightfall. Every league,
every mile, every camel-pace would take him farther away from this
room.... He heard her voice.
"What did you say?" he asked.
"I said your face looked gray," she answered.
The horror of the journey held his mind again, twelve hours in swift
passage, and two more like it to Wampli--every camel-pace away from this
room.
She cleared her voice. He turned to her.
"Your camels should have rested."
"They are good," he said.
And now he was debating if there remained strength enough for him to
rise and depart. All he could say was good-bye and the lie about Wampli,
that he would come again. He was not sure of his limbs. He was very
tired and her hands were so near--just across the little board. His
eyes lifted from them to her throat, and he felt the burn of her eyes,
without really looking higher. Back to her hands again. They were
never still--lovely quick hands, waiting now to fill his cup.
A queer thought came to him--that he should some time bring her a yellow
rose, and she would hold it in the arch of her hand, her thumb
beneath.... He arose. He could stand. He turned from her to locate
the door, so that he would make no mistake after he spoke. He did not
know what he said--some huddled, unintelligible phrase. All that he knew
well was that he took her hand, that he had to leave it almost instantly
or fail, since a mist came over him--even over the single madness that
he held to. It was madness to leave her, yet it was the one strong
prevailing thing.
His feet stumbled on the way to the door. In the bright light of the
court, his camel was already kneeling. Bamban stood there ready to take
his ankle. He reached the seat. The camel arose.... Voices of the pit
in his ears, and now he saw her there below. She had come forth into
the light. Her face was clear. He saw her hand below on the leather
near his foot, her lips forming to speak. He bent to them.
"Why don't you _tell_ me?" she said softly.
Romney brushed his hand across his eyes and bent again.
"What did you say?" he asked.
"Why don't you tell me?" she repeated.
Romney glanced about till he found Bamban.
"Tell the driver to bring this camel down," he said.
The beast knelt obediently.
Romney stood before her in the court. He brushed his hand across his
eyes again, then turned to Bamban:
"Tell the drivers to put the beasts away. It's a long journey and they
had better rest for to-day."
"What have I done?" she asked. "I would not delay you. Oh, no, I would
not hold any one from his journey--"
"Don't make it harder," he said abruptly. "Let us go in."
"But--nothing but misery comes to a woman for holding a man from his
journey."
"How do you know that?" he asked hoarsely.
*5*
The second camel sprawled out of the court. He looked elongated like a
dog that stretches as he walks. The man and the woman went in and took
their former places at the table. It did not occur to them to move the
chairs.
"I had been thinking only of myself," he said at last.
She smiled faintly, as if she had met that from men for ages and ages.
Then the gray cold came again to her face.
"It's a fact," he repeated, "I was thinking only of myself--I didn't
know I was like that."
"It has always been man's way to forget woman's part in a crisis--and
woman's to turn to man. You don't know me at all."
"But I do know you," he said. "You must have seen that. In fact, never
before did I know so much from a first meeting--"
"But man always believes that a woman is at war with his work. I have
always said that I should not care to be the rival of a man's work."
"And yet, you said--'Why don't you tell me?' ... Anna Erivan, I shall
always hear that question. I am going to tell you."
She did not help him to begin. There was a kind of core of silence from
the forward room, which was as distracting as the sound of breathing had
been. He had to organise himself repeatedly.
"... I was sent out here because I had _fancy_."
He laughed a little harshly. "Because you have that you will
understand. I have been forwarded from Peking somewhat like a valuable
package. My next point is Wampli, as you know. I had looked forward to
the real desert from this point. It would have been desert right enough
had I gone on this morning."
Her eyes gleamed at him.
"I can't tell you all--not even all I know--I pick up my orders on the
way; but this much I can tell you, and it mainly became known to me from
papers read only last night, for they were not to be opened until I
reached Nadiram--"
He told her hastily, something of the world-crisis, of the parties of
China, of the Japanese danger, and of the big dream of the truly great
men of the Empire, and something of his own relation with Nifton Bend,
Minglapo and Ti Kung.
"This new party in China is not great enough to have a large following,"
he said, "and yet, though there are some things about it that trouble,
possibly because I am a bit of an Occidental still, it seems to me that
the power and the vision of the men I have met in it must become a
terrific constructive force in the future of Asia and the world. You
see Japan threatens to become a Japanese Asia, if it is not met with
vision and force. The two older Chinese parties have neither. At the
heart of any Empire is its religion, and it happens that the centre of
the religion of the Chinese Empire is yonder in this desert--the Inner
Temple, even the great Lohan himself--"
"You are sent to that Inner Temple?" she asked breathlessly.
"Yes."
"To bring forth a sign for the people of Young China?"
"Come to think of it--it is something like that."
"And you let me delay you this morning?"
"I had not thought of it as a bringing forth a sign," he mused, watching
her, "but that is really what it amounts to. If the new social order in
China is recognised by the Inner Temple; if its dream of progress and
power is found to be a true dream by the Holy Men of the Inner
Temple--don't you see, the support of all the people touched by this
religion will be turned from the old to the new?"
"They chose a white man, an American, for this mission--and I am
delaying him?"
Still Romney evaded the issue.
"I always thought it queer that they chose me," he said. "These Holy
Men are free from racial prejudice. They are said to be super-national.
Our leaders in Peking felt that if they sent a Chinese, the Holy Men
might see in him one nation's ambition, but if they chose an Occidental
who was called to the struggle of New China because he had found it the
purest dream for all Asia; one also who could place before the wise men
the position relatively of other nations--"
"What an equipment!"
"I'm afraid it sounds more than it is," he said hastily. "You see they
did not have many foreign adherents to choose from. Nifton Bend would
have accomplished the mission far more wisely than I, but he is the
Centre--needed every hour in Peking."
"I'm afraid you can't make me see anything insignificant now--about your
being here. They thought you pure enough--real priest enough--to enter
the Inner Temple and bring forth a sign to the many. You know the many
always demand a sign. They did in Judea--"
He did not look above her hands. They were tightly shut.
"I asked you last night--if you ever had any sense about the Gobi, other
than that of its terror and menace," he said, in an effort that he knew
was vain to lift her from her part in keeping him from the journey.
"The Chinese believe that the heart of the desert is a spirit-haunted
land; that the Inner Pavilion holds all the ancient writings, all the
seeds of wisdom and magic out of the past, the essence of truths
gathered by forgotten civilisations.
"In fact, the myths and legends which surround this country make the
stories of Peru and Central America seem paltry and commonplace. There
are forests, it is said, in which no white man has penetrated, buried
gold and statuary and all that--" Romney smiled.
"You do not need to be afraid of me," she whispered. "I love to believe
such things."
"Ten years away from America--perhaps I am too ready to believe," Romney
finished. "Anyway the Chinese leaders say there are wise men, whom the
world never hears of as persons, doing the great constructive tasks
behind the scenes, and that the central pavilion of these wise men is in
the heart of the Gobi, and not in Thibet.... But all these things
belonged to yesterday. I know now that there are meeting-places in a
man's life, and that in the hours of meeting he cannot reckon even with
missions of mercy.... This--last night--here in the court--has taken me
almost like death takes a man--as the cups have taken him in
there--something resistless--"
He saw one hand leave the table between them. It was held out to him,
palm outward, as if trying to stop his words. Her eyes were wide with
terror.... Now a change came. She turned to the forward room,
listening.
"Hush," she whispered.
Strangeness was all about them. Romney came down from his story, with
the sense that he had not done well. The silence crowded in again, as
if from the desert.
"Perhaps he is awake," she said quietly. "Go on."
"That's all. I learned a great deal last night."
"You say that a day or two would make no difference, and yet this
morning you were up very early. You ordered the camels--"
"I thought only of myself."
"You thought it would be easier to go to-day--though the camels needed
rest--"
"I could not hold it in the night that the meeting meant anything to
you."
"You were out on the quest and I appeared in the way--" she smiled and
added, "a dragon to be overcome."
"I have not imagination enough to make you that--"
"A dragon to test the courage of the quester. A man must never forget
his mission--must remember first of all the little ones, the many little
ones, who require a sign."
In spite of the tearing-down, it was a pinnacle moment to Romney. She
was lovely as he had not seen her before. Her swift and absolute
understanding liberated his whole nature upon her. Had she chosen to
captivate him, there could not have been conceived a more perfect
design. Had she met him level-eyed, weakness for weakness, it would
have sounded, temporarily, at least, the knell for his infatuation. Had
she clung or pressed him to linger, it would have become a mere episode.
He arose, his lips smiling, his eyes burning with tributes to her--moved
about the table, placed his hands upon her shoulders and bent his lips
to hers.
"Won't you come with me?" he whispered.... "We will go to the Temple
together. We will bring forth a sign to the people."
... Her fingers closed gently upon his wrists, lifting his hands outward
from her shoulders and letting them fall. Then she arose and looked at
him tenderly.
"You are dear--I think you could not be so dear if you were not
bewildered. These meetings are wonderful, but don't you see--that you
are dreaming? Don't you see that a man must travel alone on his quest?
It's like the old stories--he must slay the dragon that stands between.
A man does not take a woman to the Inner Temple. A man who passes the
threshold of the Inner Temple cannot have a woman in his eyes or heart.
They would say, 'Why, this is a mere mortal. He cannot enter here.' Do
you not see, do you not see?"
"Anna Erivan."
She smiled and put down his hands that lifted to her.
"You are the quest," he said intensely. "It was our meeting. The
Gobi--why, it was but a means of bringing me to you. Last night, as I
stood in the court, I knew that. Today, when in a sentence you made all
the meanings of my life clear, taking up my story and completing it
briefly--today, just now, I saw that I could never look beyond you--"
"Don't say that. I should not have let you say that. We are asked to
renounce nothing that lasts. You must not fail through me. This is not
a good beginning for our story. You know this. You are only
bewildered."
Romney began to understand her strength. She had risen above him. Her
vision was clearer. In getting down from the camel he had become
altogether human. The fury of his ardour was for the woman. Because he
was moved with desire, he was not at his best. He took her in his arms,
the tempest of emotions blinding him....
Women with a touch of the savage left in them, may be captured with
strength, but he had given her a dream of greater days than these.
She did not resist, but the wonder of their first kiss did not come
again. Instead, through his mind, crippling his arms, flashed the
picture of his own red passion--and that in his arms chilled him to the
heart. Utterly passive, she had allowed him to wound himself in a way
that would never be forgotten.
He felt suddenly small and altered before her. He drew back, lowering
his eyes from her face, his hand reaching behind him until he found the
arm of his chair. He sat down, covering his face.
Presently she came and touched his hands, whispering:
"Do not grieve--I was thinking of something. Do not grieve. I do not
care for you less. A woman loves the boy--the boy-tumult in a man--"
"You were in my arms--and yet I was alone," he said strangely. "I never
knew such a sudden loneliness--all that I had for you--flung back to
me--"
"I would not have hurt you so. But suddenly as you held me--I thought
of the many little ones waiting for a sign--"
He was still shocked at the lifelessness which had confronted his
passion. The shame of his untimely bestowal did not pass.
His life had seemed full of perfect gifts for her, and a sudden desire
had blinded him, bringing down upon his head a rebuke more magic than
any blow.
"You have made me afraid," he said dully. "It could never happen again.
I could not go to you so again--unless you held out your arms--"
"After you have entered the Inner Temple," she whispered.
The seven words numbered and registered themselves in his consciousness.
He looked up at her and there was something endless in her beauty.
"You must not be hurt," she said tenderly. "It is the man in you that is
wounded. You must know that you cannot really be wounded, unless I am
wounded, too--and oh, a woman is not wounded by loving, by
passion--that's why we are women. I
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