THE DUST OF CHINA FROM THEIR FEET
The Gregorys sailed from Hong Kong the next week, and half the Colony
saw them off. One means, of course, half the Europeans: the Chinese
don’t count--in China. But John Bradley did not see them off--nor
had he come to wish them good-by. Hilda was offended, and Basil was
grateful. (He could be grateful at times.) Except Florence, none of
them had seen the priest since the night Basil had consulted him. Mrs.
Gregory called upon him two days after her escape. She had sent a note
asking him to come to her at the hotel. He had replied asking if she
could, and kindly would, come to him instead; he knew she’d been out
continuously the day before. And she had gone at once.
Of Kowloon she had told him nothing: when she had enjoined silence on
Basil, she had meant silence; and she had no thought of breaking it
towards any one.
She had wished to see him before they left Hong Kong, she said, and
they were going home at once now.
Mrs. Gregory had a very sincere affection for John Bradley. If she had
been in Hilda’s shoes, she’d not have given him for a wilderness of Tom
Carrutherses, she thought. And in leaving Hong Kong she was leaving
behind her nothing that she regretted more than her talks with Bradley;
except Ah Wong. That was her great regret, for she was leaving Ah Wong.
The amah had refused to quit her country. Mrs. Gregory had pleaded at
last. Ah Wong would not budge. Hilda was indifferent, Mr. Gregory not
sorry, and Basil Gregory was meanly glad.
And John Bradley was glad, too, when he heard it, but not meanly. He
knew that the amah knew more than any other living person did of all
that had happened--far more than he knew or even suspected--and he was
sure that her presence with them in England would make for a blight
upon the entire Gregory family--a blight which all her devotion and all
her deft service could not counterbalance.
It was partly concerning Ah Wong that Mrs. Gregory had called. Would he
befriend the woman--her amah, perhaps he’d noticed her?--if he could
ever?
“Oh, yes!” he said, he “had noticed her, several times.” He did not
add how well he knew her, or how highly he valued her, or that he
had received her in this very room, and in the middle of the night,
not long ago. But he promised cordially to do any earthly thing
he ever could for the Chinese woman. It was a queer legacy for a
bachelor priest, he said, laughing, but all was fish that came to his
net--pastoral or otherwise--and he accepted Ah Wong heartily. She
should come into his service, if she would--potter about the bungalow,
sit hunched up on the verandah and sew, or play a guitar or a native
drum or something in the compound--and, if she declined his service,
still he’d try to contrive to look after her some other way. He’d keep
an eye on her, a friendly, helpful eye--if she’d let him--seriously he
would.
And he echoed fervently the amah’s entreaty that the Gregorys should
leave China at once--_at once_--let the order of their going be
what it would, the comforts or discomforts of the first outgoing boat
just what they might. Nothing mattered, absolutely nothing, except for
them to go--to go at once, and never to return.
“You’ll say good-by to them all for me?” he begged, “I--I may be called
away for a few days by any post. But please say my good-bys to them
all: your husband--and Basil--and to your daughter. And, Mrs. Gregory,
young Carruthers is staying here, you said. I’ll look him up as soon
as I know you’ve sailed, and I’ll look after him a bit, be a sort of
parson his-man-Friday, if the boy’ll let me.”
“Tom?--Tom’s a nice boy--I think,” Mrs. Gregory said a trifle
hesitantly.
“I think so too,” the priest said cordially.
She was going into the city when she left him, and he went almost to
the level with her, walking beside her chair.
“Remember,” he said at parting, “you’ll go at once. And you’ll none of
you come back--ever.”
“We will go at once,” she told him earnestly. “And we will not come
back.” But to that last there was a small reservation at the far
back of her mind. She thought it just possible that Hilda might come
back--some day. Not that Hilda particularly liked China; she did
not--she greatly preferred Kensington. But, if Holman thought well of
Tom Carruthers, it was probable that he--now that Basil was definitely
out of the Hong Kong running--might be permanently attached to that
branch, and ultimately its head.
And with one slight deviation, Mrs. Gregory kept the promise she made
John Bradley as he stood bare-headed beside her chair. For they did
sail--almost at once. And only one of them ever came back--Hilda.
The long voyage home differed in nothing from all other such voyages.
Not one voyage in ten thousand ever does differ from other voyages. It
is impossible. They made the same stops, the same changes, ate the same
food, had the same fellow passengers. Nothing short of pirates or a
shoal of ship-devouring Jonah’s whales could differentiate one P. & O.
passage from another.
But Hilda Gregory found this one a little dull at first, and was driven
in self-respect to appropriate the ship’s surgeon and two homing
subalterns.
For Basil and their mother were inseparable, and the father who
heretofore had been her faithful, if not too picturesque, knight lived
in the smoking-room, telling again and again the story of his cowing of
the great Chinese “I Am,” Wu Li Chang. Robert Gregory, never a wordless
man, had never talked so much in all his life.
It was impossible to pass the smoking-room door without catching some
such scrap of English masterpiece as: “I put him through it.” “The
damned nigger was only bluffing. Well, I damn well called his bluff!”
“... and that’s where a knowledge of the Chinaman comes in--an inside,
intelligent knowledge. They like to be thought clever, I tell you.
Don’t you see that it flattered him that I should think--_seem_
to think, of course--that he was a sort of Mister Know-All?--and he
was sly enough to play up to it. Oh! he was sly, I grant you that.
But no match for me; no real ability.” “Yes; as I told you, he hummed
and hawed a bit at first, until I simply turned him inside out, and
then I could see he knew nothing. It was only tickling his vanity to
let him imagine I thought he was a little local god. That’s why I
left him to Mrs. Gregory. I saw it was a mere waste of my time. And
it pleased her, and, too, it took her mind off the boy a bit. She was
fretting over him--the young dog!--until I thought she’d make herself
downright ill.” “Oh! we flatter these damned Chinamen too much in
thinking them so clever.” “Oh! if you know the way to manage Chinamen.
You should have seen the way I talked to that compradore. I frightened
the beggar--just as I’d frightened Wu the day before. He saw it was
a bit dangerous to play any games with me, by the Lord Harry, and so
he called off the strike. I scared him stiff. And I scared Wu half to
death, I can tell you.” “Oh, yes! he’s dead, right enough. No, I don’t
know how he died. Perhaps he was ordered to commit suicide. Well, I
had no objection, I can tell you. And I shan’t go into much black for
him.” “He always was a bit of a handful. Kept his school-masters busy.
But that did them good and him no harm. And they were well paid for it.
Boys will be boys, you know. Why, when I was his age....”
In the smoking-room other men came and went all day and a good bit of
the night, but Robert Gregory’s voice went on forever. And Mrs. Gregory
and Basil, walking up and down, grew careful to keep at the other end
of the big ship. For the smoking-room was near the front, and opened on
to both sides of the promenade deck.
Basil Gregory scarcely left his mother from Hong Kong to Liverpool.
As the great ship drew anchor, he drew her arm in his, and they stood
together so and watched Hong Kong until their sight had gone from it
quite. This was their passing from China, but not from tragedy, and the
woman knew it.
They did not speak of Wu Li Chang. They had spoken of him definitely
together for the last time. They did not speak at all as the island
faded slowly away from them. But they knew that to-day the mandarin’s
interminable funeral cortège started from Kowloon to Sze-chuan. For
they were taking the dead man to his old home--taking him tenderly
with shriek of fife and howl of drum, coffined almost as splendidly
as the Macedonian in his casket of gold. And no son followed Wu Li
Chang! But behind the mandarin’s coffin they carried, more meekly, a
simpler, smaller one. And Sing Kung Yah walked behind them both, almost
bare-footed, clad in coarse unbleached hemp. This was her last secular
function, if one may speak so of any human burial rite; for when at
last Wu Li Chang and Wu Nang Ping were laid beside their dead ancestors
in far-off Sze-chuan, Sing Kung Yah, if she lived so far--the road was
long and rough--would seek life-long sanctuary in the Taoist nunnery of
her abbess cousin.
As long as Anglo-Hong Kong’s eyes had been upon her, Mrs. Gregory had
borne herself bravely--gayly even. But she was breaking now, and with
each revolution of the ship’s great wheel she showed a little older,
a little more limp. “You’re looking downright washed out,” Gregory
told her; “high time we got you home.” Already she was no longer Basil
Gregory’s young and pretty mother. No passenger among them all mistook
her for his sister. She would never be so mistaken again. But he was
very tender of her, and offered her a daily atonement of constant
companionship and of those little tendings which mean so much more to a
woman than any great sacrifice or big climax of devotion ever can. (If
women are small in this, they are also exquisite by it.)
They clung together pathetically. And, at the same time, each shrank
from the other a little, almost unconsciously, and quite in spite of
themselves. Their souls shrank; their hearts clung.
Basil sensed that she grieved over his crime, and, as he thought, out
of all proportion to its real seriousness, and that also she condemned
and despised it. He was far from self-absolution. His conscience was
not dead. But he resented her disapproval and the implied “charity” of
her careful considerateness and studied cheerfulness.
Her soul-withdrawal from him was more justified, and of more moment and
dignity than his from her. For once or twice she just glimpsed almost
an antagonism, a seed of hatred--born of his writhing conscience--that
was slowly cankering in his mind. That he should doubt the
all-forgiveness of her love grieved her sorely, but she recognized that
it certainly was involuntary, and probably was inevitable; but that,
even so, he presumed to arraign her at the judgment seat of his peccant
soul, blaming her that she could not forget, could not quite condone,
incensed her bitterly.
The grave secret that they shared, and that no one else now of their
world even suspected, linked them tightly--too tightly: the gyves hurt.
And while it linked it separated. They were closer together than they
had ever been before; closer than even a mother and son should be;
closer than any two human creatures should be. They violated, with the
hideousness of their mutual knowledge, each other’s utmost right of
privacy--the soul-privacy which God and nature command that with each
human entity shall be forever inviolable.
He suffered at her suffering. He brooded over her. He was very tender
of his mother. But between them, and in them mutually, a poison worked.
Their love was exquisite and human still; their companionship, and even
their sympathy, warm and sincere. But a slight cloud hung over them, a
cloud no bigger than a dead man’s hand. It grew a little darker every
day.