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