A CONFERENCE
Lord Melbourne once said that “nobody has ever done a very foolish
thing except for some great principle.” Well, it would be difficult
to find the great principle underlying most of the very foolish
things the average European does in Asia. As a nation we British are
very wise in our conduct there. As a race we deal honorably with the
Oriental peoples--when once we’ve conquered them--and honorable conduct
is a high wisdom in itself, and from it we reap a fine reward--the
respect of the Eastern races. But as individuals we perpetrate a long
series of crass blunders, of petty daily idiocies, whose sum total is
tragedy and sometimes threatens international holocaust. And it is
the Englishwoman, not the Englishman, who is the worst offender. Our
security in Asia is built up on Oriental respect and liking, and Mrs.
Montmorency-Jones can do more in a day to undermine it than a Sir Harry
Parkes can do in a month to build it. Insolence is her method; fair
dealing is his.
The average British man in Asia learns little enough, Heaven knows!
of the natives among whom he lives; the average British woman learns
nothing. She does not decline to know the natives; no, indeed--she
simply ignores them. Woman rules in Asia--and especially in China--as
(if a woman may be allowed to hint it) she does almost everywhere. And
Englishwomen living in Calcutta or Shanghai do English interests grave
injury, by courting, winning (and meriting) the dislike of Indian and
Chinese women. The Englishwoman does it not by any overt act or series
of acts, but by a consistent supercilious contemptuousness of attitude.
I am a memsahib. You do not exist. The secret societies--the tongs and
the brotherhoods--are responsible for much of our Asiatic difficulties;
our own women are responsible for more. If the Boxers made Pekin run
red with European blood, some women of the European Legations did even
more to bring down the trouble and to foment it.
And the pity of it is its absolute unnecessariness: just a cup of cold
water now and then, just a little human kindliness now and then, and
the liking and sympathy of Oriental womanhood were ours. Some one has
written of “the heart that must beat somewhere beneath the impenetrable
Oriental mask.” The mask is not impenetrable. An honest, friendly smile
will pierce it. The Oriental is nine-tenths heart. A typical Asiatic
can be won by moderate kindness to great loyalty and devotion. Page
after page of the history of the Indian mutiny proves it.
And of the Chinese people this is even truer.
Florence Gregory was a kindly, likeable woman, and during her year in
Hong Kong she had not thought it necessary to make herself detestable
to the Chinese with whom she came in contact.
On her part this was neither tact nor studied policy. They interested
her and she liked them, and in return they liked her. She gave them
courtesy and decent treatment, and sometimes a sunny word or two, and
in return they gave her of their best and served her loyally. Ah Wong,
her amah, adored her.
There was nothing that Ah Wong would not have done for her English
mistress. And the story of it is this: Mrs. Gregory had never saved Ah
Wong’s life or rescued her son from slavery. She had just been quietly
and decently kind to her in the little daily ways. Oh! those little
ways, the little things--too small to chronicle, almost too small to
sense sometimes--but to women they are _everything_! The big
things scarcely count to women; but the little things--they count.
When Basil Gregory did not keep his promise to dine at their hotel
his mother was disappointed, but not inordinately surprised, and only
moderately hurt. It had happened before.
They waited dinner half an hour. Robert Gregory would not allow a
longer waiting. And even the mother dined with an unruffled appetite.
Even when midnight came without him it occurred to no one to be in the
least alarmed--to no one but Ah Wong.
Ah Wong had seen the impalpable intrinsic stalking in the garden at
Kowloon. And what she saw alarmed her then. Basil’s continued absence
alarmed her more and more. She was alarmed for her mistress’s peace of
mind. Basil himself she neither liked nor disliked. She thought Robert
Gregory a funny old chap. The son did not interest her.
When Basil did not appear at the office the next day his father was
angry. When three days passed, and no word came of the truant, they
were alarmed--all of them. And in a week the island rang with hue and
cry for him.
Mrs. Gregory was distraught.
Perhaps the son’s disappearance might have worried the father even more
if there had been no other pressing anxieties. But there were--several.
There was the very deuce to pay at the Hong Kong branch of the Gregory
Steamship Company, and a good deal of inadequacy with which to pay it.
It was a bright, hot day--a blue and gold day, without a trace of Hong
Kong mist and murk--and the windows in the manager’s room were open
wide. The furniture was sparse but rich; it was Robert Gregory’s own
room, and he was of the type of business man who likes to do himself
well in the format of his office routine, more in a sincere pride in
his business cult than in personal vanity or any pampering of self, and
also in a well-defined theory of advertisement: Persian carpets and
Spanish mahogany desks indicate a firm’s prosperity clearly. Gregory’s
furniture was very expensive, but sensible, solid and untrimmed. He
earned and amassed money in big ways and in small, but, in the main,
he left the spending of it on fripperies to Hilda and his wife. A
photograph of Hilda--the one ornament the office confessed to--stood
on her father’s desk, in a splendid wide frame that might have been
Chinese, so costly and so barbaric was it, had only the design and the
workmanship been better. But if the picture was somewhat over-framed,
its girl-subject was not over-dressed, for English Hilda, who from her
father’s office table smiled up at all the world, was several inches
more décolleté than even the moon had ever seen Nang Ping.
But modesty and even decency are as much virtues of the eye that looks
as of the creatures of its glance; and John Bradley, sitting in Robert
Gregory’s chair, saw only maidenhood delectable and flawless in the
picture his eyes sought again and again. And any man who, to Robert
Gregory’s knowledge, had seen anything coarser, Robert Gregory would
have shot cheerfully.
Holman, Gregory’s head clerk, sat moodily opposite the priest, looking
out into the quay. The long window he faced was the apartment’s most
conspicuous feature, and through it outrolled a teeming panorama of
steamships and shipping industries. Docks and shipping in the near
distance looked even nearer in the clear magnifying atmosphere, and
close at hand smoke curled up from the funnels of a large steamer,
flying the house flag of the company--a noticeable pennant even in that
harbor, where noticeable objects jostle each other by the hundreds.
The big lettering--“G. S. S. Co.”--was as bright and blue as the
sky against whose brilliant background the smoke belched forth from
the fat funnels, and the bunting that backgrounded the letters was
yellow--impertinently yellow, for it was of the precise shade that in
Pekin would have spelled death to any other who wore it or showed it on
his chair, so sacred was it to reigning Emperor and Empress. But Robert
Gregory did not know that, nor did Holman. But they should have known
it--certainly Holman should, for he had lived in China many years now,
and was far from being so crassly stupid concerning the Chinese as his
chief was.
Between the big ship and the office building a constant procession of
coolies passed up and down the dock, and the hum of their incessant
intoned chatter filled the room with a noisy sing-song that rose and
fell but never rested or drew breath.
On a rostrum behind the _Fee Chow’s_ side, Simpson, an old and
trusted clerk, was watching the coolies load, and a Chinese clerk
perched near him on a high stool, checking each bale and box. A
compradore sat at his desk on the wharf, wrangling with a knot of
loin-clothed coolies who were gesticulating wildly with arms and poles
and chattering like angry chimpanzees.
“And that is all you can tell me?” Holman said, as Bradley rose to go.
“All I care to say. I’ve strained a point to say that much.”
“And you will not tell me where you got your information? Is that quite
fair?”
John Bradley shook his head. “Not information. I have no
information--none. But I have my suspicion, and I believe it is well
based.”
“Built on Chinese rock!”
“Well--yes--in part. And I have a great deal of respect for Chinese
rock. As for being unfair, that is the last thing I’d be willingly. And
I have tried to look at this from every side. A man likes to respect
confidence; with a priest it is a duty, solemn and imperative. But if I
chose to blab, I have not one concrete fact to state. A Chinese woman,
I will not tell you her name--if I know it--comes to me in the middle
of the night, getting into the grounds somehow over the wall or up the
hill, certainly not through the gate, and begs me to find some way of
getting Basil Gregory’s people out of China. She urges me to let them
lose no time in searching for him, because no searching will find him;
and they, she insists, are in danger that will grow deadlier every hour
they stay on here. I did not know that Basil was missing until she told
me; it’s two nights ago. I had been expecting him to call--to complete
some talk we’d begun----”
“About a girl?”
“But I was not particularly surprised that he delayed keeping
an appointment that was not very definite. Basil was always a
procrastinator. The woman does not know where he is or what has
happened to him. Take that from me. She said so, and she was speaking
the truth. It is part of my business to know when people are telling
the truth and when they are lying to me. She had some suspicion--what
it was I have no idea, or whether it was right or wrong--but she would
tell me nothing, except that she risked her life to warn me that at all
costs the Gregorys must go from China, and go now.”
“And leave poor Mr. Basil to his fate?”
Bradley made a gesture of baffled helplessness.
The clerk’s lip curled. “You have a poor idea of my intelligence. I
know it all now--all that you know--and what you suspect.”
“Then you do not know much,” the other retorted hotly.
“No,” Holman admitted grimly. “Not much to chew on, and nothing at
all to go upon. Ah Wong comes to you in the middle of the night--it
_was_ Ah Wong; she is devoted to Mrs. Gregory, and quite
indifferent to Mr. Basil, dead or alive. You learn from her, or from
some one else, the next morning, of the visit three days ago to Wu’s
garden at Kowloon, and off you go to Kowloon to dig it all out. You
said you went to Kowloon to try to interest your friend Wu in the case,
because he is the one man who can do anything that can be done in
China. Now, you did not go--excuse me, Mr. Bradley--to Kowloon to try
to interest Wu in the case; you went to find Mr. Basil.”
Bradley threw down the hat he had taken up and sat down again. “You
are wrong there,” he said. “For I too believe that Basil Gregory will
not be found. But I did go to try to interest Wu Li Chang in what is
very urgent to me--for--for several reasons--because I know him to be,
humanly speaking, almost omnipotent, and because I trust and like him.”
“Trust and like Wu Li Chang!”
“Emphatically,” was the quiet answer. “I’ve seen a great deal of
Mandarin Wu since I first came out. He’s a gentleman, and every inch a
man. There is no one I respect more, and very, very few of my own race
I respect as much. We are friends, I tell you. And I think he likes me.
I went to beg a great favor of him.”
“H’m!” the clerk mused aloud. “And he wouldn’t see you?”
“And I couldn’t get in. I have never been refused ‘come in and welcome’
at Wu’s before, and I must have been there fifty times. But I couldn’t
get past the outer gate yesterday. The mandarin didn’t refuse to see
me; I just couldn’t get in.”
“Much the same thing----”
“Not at all! I was met at the gate and turned away from it with every
courtesy. If Wu had wished to avoid me, I might still have been made
free of the grounds, as I have been a dozen times when he has been away
or too busy to chat. But I was driven--with the utmost politeness--from
the gate. Why? Because there was something in there I was not to see--I
believe, Basil. And if Basil, Basil alive. A dead Englishman would have
been obliterated.”
“But could not a living one be hidden beyond your suspicion, even by so
astute a Chinaman as Wu Li Chang?”
The clergyman looked puzzled. “Yes--yes--undoubtedly, most probably,
but such men as Wu take no chance, and there is always just one chance
that any living prisoner may make himself heard or seen. But dead men
tell no tales.”
Holman shook his head. He was unconvinced.
And Holman was right. Wu Li Chang would, had he chosen to do so, have
let all Anglo-Hong Kong stroll through his gardens, and have kept
twenty prisoners there undiscovered at the same time. He had had
Bradley denied entrance at his gate because his home was the home of
mourning, and in it there was no room or welcome for any Englishman,
except the one grimly guarded guest in the pagoda by the lake.
“Well,” Bradley said, rising again, “I can only repeat, as you value
Basil’s life, let Mr. Gregory do nothing to rasp Wu Li Chang. See him,
I must and will. But it will have to be at his convenience and consent,
not at mine. I don’t know why I should hope to influence him. But I can
only try.” He picked up his hat, and continued looking at the girl in
the frame. “Wu may be coaxed; he cannot be coerced. There is no force
to which we could appeal, even if we had anything to go upon, and we
have nothing. The Tsungli yamên itself, at Pekin, could neither coerce
nor punish Wu Li Chang if it were minded to----”
“You know that Mr. Basil was seen here on the island after they had all
returned from their visit to Wu’s daughter?”
John Bradley waved that aside contemptuously. “Rubbish!”
“Precisely what I think,” Holman acquiesced tersely.
At the door the priest turned to say earnestly, “Remember, Mr. Gregory
must do nothing to annoy Wu now--absolutely nothing. Basil’s very life
may depend on that.”
“I’ll do my best,” Holman said, none too confidently, rising wearily
and taking a step towards the other.
“And, Holman, not one word about Ah Wong--that you think she has been
to me. It would serve no purpose, and it might cause her trouble--so--I
expressly ask you, not one word.”
“Not one word, then,” the other man said, taking Bradley’s outheld hand.
And they parted with a grip long and strong. They were brother Masons.