If love be a flower,
Pluck not that flower,
Though flowers be cool
And dear to thy brow.
Thou happy fool,
Thou shalt travel not far,
Thou shalt lie down with this
Cold flower for thy lover.
He shall blind, he shall star
Thine eyes. His cold kiss
Thy mouth shall cover.
If love be music,
Hear not that music,
Sing not that song,
Though songs be few.
Oh, very strong,
Very close is the weaving
Of notes among notes.
Thou art bound and entangled.
Sing, then, unbelieving,
And sing till thy throat’s
Soft song is strangled.
If love be a lion,
Flee not that lion,
Let thy triumphing bones
On the desert lie.
On a desert of stones
Thy bones shall smile,
Comforted only
By stark silence.
Silence and dew
Be thy crown, for thou
Wert blind to a flower
And deaf to music.
Edward could hardly believe in his own existence when he found himself
approaching China.
Japan had been nothing. A country packed with color and little hills
but empty of importance, being empty of Emily. All in vain the veil of
Fujiyama floated over Yokohama; all in vain little pearl-like clouds were
strung round the shoulders of Fujiyama in the indefinite sun. Edward only
thought it was very like its pictures.
When he rode in a little light ricksha through the centreless streets
of Yokohama, he thought, “This is Edward Williams doing the things that
Sunday school children at home see on lantern slides. But Our Hero
remains detached, as in a dream.” He was glad to feel detached, to feel
that, unlike the other passengers on the ship, he was not “doing the
Orient.” He was looking for Emily.
Afterwards he remembered more of Japan than he had realised at the
time. He had been inconsistent enough to imitate the majority of the
passengers and go by train to Kobe. He had even been chosen as escort
by a stout, lonely lady passenger. “Women were more and more interested
in Our Hero as he grew older and sadder. Women adore an atmosphere of
tragedy.” It was true that Edward had scarcely been able to hear anything
that the lonely lady said. It must therefore have been his “mystic air
of remoteness” that had interested her. Or perhaps it was just that he
was a man. Together they had spoiled for themselves the enchantment
of the Kamikura Buddha by climbing coarsely up the steps inside him.
Together, in a hired Ford car, they roared through the faery streets of
Kyoto in broad daylight without pausing to hear the clicking pattens in
the crowded quiet streets. They did not wait to see the crouching lion
outlines of the temples against the multiplying stars of an evening sky.
All the flowers of Japan passed Edward by. “I am no botanist,” he said
proudly.
Japan haunted him afterwards like a ghost. Afterwards he knew that he
had shut his eyes. Afterwards he knew that he had nothing to remember,
nothing but little sharp negligible details that had pricked his idle
mind—the white crests printed on the backs of the blue-clad coolies—the
paint on the women’s faces—the way the women’s toes turned in—the
greasiness of the women’s hair—the deformed look of the women’s backs in
the evening when they put on outer kimonos over their broad thick obi
sashes—the angry officious voices of the policemen—the similarity of the
Tokyo railway to the London Underground....
After rejoining the ship at Kobe he had defiantly read cheap books
all through the Inland Sea. At Nagasaki he did not land. “I’m not a
tourist—I’m here on business,” he told a little fat bald American
business man, who had not asked him whether he were a tourist or not.
Manila Edward ignored. He only saw one thing belonging to Manila, a small
Filipino woman with gauze sleeves and ruffles starched as though she
were an Elizabethan, who came on board with her husband, a little man,
the upper part of whose body was sensibly clothed in a garment of such
transparency that no single crease or roll of brown fat over his ribs and
stomach was hidden.
And here was Hongkong.
Edward woke up. He was alive to the bland blue outlines of the Peak
against the sky. Every scarlet and gold flutter of the paper prayers on
the importunate sampans that raced for the liner was a message from Emily
to Edward.
People talked with English voices in Hongkong. Edward could hardly hear
what the women said. England at last! He followed a couple of pink,
small-headed subalterns to the hotel. He heard one say, “By Jove,” in
a throaty English voice. Edward felt no longer despised and exotic. He
saw that everyone in the hotel lobby looked cooler than himself. But the
faces were English and not complacent. Or even if they were a little
complacent—why not?—they were English. He ordered a cocktail.
“After that I will look in the register,” he thought. “Perhaps Emily’s
name will lie like a strip of light on the first page I look at.”
He did not know Emily’s last name.
He could hardly believe for a moment that he did not know her name. The
cocktail was so good that while he was drinking it he thought, “I shall
think of her name in a minute.” But nobody had ever told him her name.
“I know Tam’s name at least.”
It was a pseudonym.
He deliberately interposed a blankness between his brain and this
disaster of a China rendered empty of Emily. China to him meant Emily
now. The divorce of the two words—China—Emily—was inconceivable.
He studied the register. “If I see her writing I shall recognise
it—though I have never seen it.”
A long untidy addition sum of names lay before him on the page. The
result of the sum was—nothing. He turned to another fruitless page.
Another. “Miss E. L. Spring, Walthamstow.... Mr. Irwin Scales, Binset,
Somerset ... Mrs. Irwin Scales....” The date of those was about right. E.
L. Spring? It was a blasphemy. Walthamstow?...
But the date was all right.
E. L. Spring was the only woman with the initial E. There were dark
horses all over the page, fiendishly concealing the most important part
of their names... Miss Framlingham, Delhi, India ... Miss Wherry, London
... Miss Burnett, Canterbury ... Miss Something Illegible, San Francisco,
Calif.... They all sounded like thin women with withered necks and little
green veils hanging from the backs of their hats, not like Emily.
He returned to the chair beside his empty cocktail glass. His eyes had
tears in them so he pretended there was a fly in one of them. His throat
was compressed by distress. He could not have spoken aloud. “I thought
I left myself behind,” he thought. “But I am still Edward Williams in
China. Myself has caught me up. Look at me, crying now in a hot chair
in Hongkong, I who used to cry in the cold draught that ran through my
dreadful room in San Francisco.”
The heat was like stagnant steam. He felt sick and very deaf. The only
sounds he could hear through the exasperating roaring of his ears were
the sharp cries of the chair-bearers outside the open window, trying to
attract patronage. The cool vacant faces of English women moved up and
down in the shadow of the arcades outside. Edward could not hear the
clicking of their high heels, they seemed to him to move subtly like
ghosts.
It was terribly hot.
“I shall cry frankly unless I move about.” He hung his self-conscious
head as he left the hotel. He tried to interest himself in the Chinese
names above the shops. No—not China now; China was a horrible half-name
now. The Peak leaned like a cloud over the houses. He could see a little
train sliding up the mountain, like a fish which some giant fisherman was
drawing up from the sea. He found the station. The train was full, but,
as Edward approached it, an official, seeing him, turned out a Chinese
clerk in order that Edward might find a place. Edward looked angrily at
the patient alert face of the ousted Chinese on the platform. “I don’t
care if his business is urgent,” thought Edward. “I hope his wife is
dying. It isn’t fair that only I should be hurt.”
“Oh, my dear ...” screamed the hot English girl in front of Edward to her
hot friend. All the women in the car were fanning themselves and talking
in a frenzy of foolish energy about men.
The car lifted them all up the hill. Dense dull shrubs bordered the
steep track. The houses seemed to lean against the hill. The harbour was
unrolled at the foot of the mountain. A fringe of ships, like tentacles
round a jellyfish, radiated from the shore. Kowloon, backed by crumpled
hills, stretched out a corresponding fringe towards Hongkong. Edward’s
ears cracked and clicked, affected by the change of level.
He walked on the neat paths of the Peak. The Peak seemed as hot as the
seashore. “Must be nearer the sun,” thought Edward confusedly. But no,
it seemed that he was above the sun; he had left the sun behind floating
on a thin delicate sea. It was sinking in the sea. All the islands were
blue imitative suns, sinking in the sea. The whole sky was the colour of
fire. Edward could almost hear the roaring of the fire in the sky. The
sea was suddenly sheathed in shadow; mists like snakes writhed between
the islands. The islands were no longer sinking in the sea; they were
buoyed up by encircling mists. Why was it still so hot? The sea closed
and flowed over the sun. The fire in the sky burned no more.
Edward thought, “She must have gone to Peking.” At once it was cooler.
“I will go to Peking tomorrow.” At once he began to enjoy the thought of
China. A Chinese woman with a small gaunt face in a bright blue tunic
and trousers neatly pressed, her sleek black hair in a spangled net, a
neat white flower in her hair, tottered by on small compressed feet. He
thought “Emily would have wanted to kiss that darling woman. Perhaps
she would have kissed her. No, she would have stood and looked back at
her, she would have jumped a little and all her body would have been
electrified with pleasure. ‘Oh, look ... oh, look ... oh, look....’ The
woman would have turned and laughed in delight.”
He could not believe it when next day a schoolboy English clerk behind a
counter told him the price of a journey to Peking.
“Say it again, please,” said Edward.
The boy said it again without referring to any book. He seemed to know
the dreadful words by heart, just as a torturer knows by heart the levers
that will hurt most.
“That’s seventy dollars more than I have,” said Edward.
“Hard luck,” said the boy, looking at him curiously. It seemed odd to him
to admit such a thing. “You can go by boat to Tientsin. That would save
you a few dollars.”
“It wouldn’t save enough dollars for me,” said Edward. He stood on the
doorstep of the office. “Well, I can’t stop here all day,” he thought.
Several times he told himself briskly, “Well, well, well, I can’t stop
here all day....”
He comforted himself presently by thinking, “I must have tremendous
courage to have got so far. Many people wouldn’t have got out of that
naked little room in San Francisco.” He drew a little courage from the
illusion of his own courage. Presently he realised that the world did not
end on the doorstep of a tourist agency. He found several possible jobs
in the newspaper. “English jobs sound somehow less fierce than American
jobs,” he thought and, buoyed up by a desperate hope, he called on the
headmaster of an English school for Chinese.
“I’m afraid you haven’t had much experience of teaching,” said the
headmaster, a gentle, uncertain young man, looking at Edward unhappily.
“It is I who am afraid,” replied Edward courteously.
The school was in great need of teachers. The headmaster did not seem to
mind whether the teachers could teach—if only a specious appearance of
teaching was sustained in his dozen classrooms. Edward was engaged at a
small salary to live in the school and teach a class of fifty boys in
“all ordinary English subjects.” There was one professional teacher in
the school—a woman. The other teachers’ desks were occupied by one or
two unemployed merchant seamen, some bright young women stenographers,
a stray woman journalist teaching “as a stunt,” and two or three sullen
Chinese whose classes were always in an uproar.
Edward nearly fainted as the headmaster took him into the classroom on
the first day and introduced him to the boys. “I am sure you will do your
best ... Mr. Williams who lives in England and has spent much time in
America ... giving his time to help Class C in their study of English....
Now, boys, we must all do our best ... make Mr. Williams welcome....”
While the headmaster’s shy voice wavered on, Edward studied the faces
in front of him. Half the class was Eurasian; the other half Chinese.
There were one or two thin, glowing Indian faces among the broad Chinese
masks. Three Portuguese-Chinese boys in staring striped suits with small
waists sat in the front row, trying successfully to frighten Edward
by means of an exaggerated look of awe. With these exceptions the two
front rows were occupied by little boys who were physically too weak to
challenge the determination of the big boys to sit behind unseen. Edward
looked hopefully at two little boys in the front row trying to look
superlatively good. Their lips were moving; they were making a show of
repeating the headmaster’s words to themselves in order to make a good
impression. Over their heads Edward could see a dazzle of insolent faces,
laughing at him and at the futile gentle enthusiasm of the headmaster.
The big boys were quite frankly talking. Sometimes even Edward could hear
their twanging voices. The headmaster looked wistfully down the room at
the disturbers but made no comment. Edward felt his face fixed in an
expression that a martyr might wear. His face was frozen. He could not
change his expression. He looked in sickly appeal at the headmaster, who
was now leaving the room. He looked in sickly appeal at the boys.
There was a fearful silence, broken by one of the big Eurasians at the
back suddenly breaking into song.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“Now you must be quiet, please,” said Edward huskily.
“Shall not I sing?” enquired the musician. “Am not I having sing lesson
every evening when school finish?”
Edward ignored him. “I see by the timetable that we should begin with a
Scripture lesson——”
“Oh, no sah—nevah Scriptchah. Monday mornings we was having hygiene—no,
we was having dictations—nevah Scriptchah.”
The concerted noise of contradiction became louder and louder. Edward
felt as if he were caught in a great roaring machine that he could not
stop. “Oh, silence ... oh, silence ...” he cried, tapping the desk feebly
with his pencil. He could not stop the noise. He rose and flung his arms
out. “Oh, silence—I can’t stand this.”
The hysterical gesture produced a startling silence. Then some of the big
boys laughed.
“The timetable says Scripture and I say Scripture,” said Edward
furiously. “No-one else’s opinion is needed. Now I want one of you big
boys—I don’t know your names yet—that one with a pale blue coat on—to
come and tell me how far you got in the Bible ...”
“Please sah, you say no other man opinion was needed.”
“Shut up, curse you.”
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“He sing a song for welcoming you, sah.”
The boy in a long pale blue coat stood in front of Edward, unexpectedly
abashed. His small eyes seemed deliberately veiled with dulness.
“What is your name?” asked Edward.
“I new scholar.”
“You have a name, though,” insisted Edward.
“Oh, no, sah,” shouted another boy from the back of the room. “He was
having no name. He was married man....”
“His name was Ng Sik Wong,” said one of the laboriously good little boys.
“_What_ is his first name?”
“Ng,” buzzed the whole class.
“I can’t believe it.” Feeling a little braver Edward wrote down, “? Sick
Wong—Scar on nose—pale blue—halfwitted,” in his notebook. “Now, ... ahem,
Sick Wong, you’re one of the biggest boys in the class, aren’t you?”
“I new scholar.”
“Almost big enough to be a master, eh?”
“Eh—tya—tya.... Hey, Ng Sik Wong—you be master—number one class
master—married man....”
Edward pressed on. “So I’m sure I can depend on you to try and help me.”
“I new scholar.”
“Go back to your seat.”
“Please, sah,” cooed a good little boy. “I shall help you. I shall
tell you where was we reading holy book. Last Monday we have finish
Matthew-holy-gospel-according-to twenty four chapter. I tell you my name,
sah. I Rupert Frazer, sah.”
“Open your Bibles at the twenty fifth chapter of Saint Matthew.”
Bibles flew about in the air. There was a riotous noise of opening books
and a few whines, “Please sah, he steal my book ... please sah, Pong
Poon Chong pinch me.... Sah, I have lose my Bible since a long time....”
The tallest of the smart Portuguese boys in the front row rose.
“Excuse me, sah, what does it mean, Virgin?”
Edward’s skull was sweating. “A virgin—” he began.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“Surely the whole class has sense enough not to ask silly questions.”
“Please, sah, you shall tell him ask Ng Sik Wong. He married man.”
“Please, sah, tell him ask Ng Sik Wong wife—she shall know what is
virgin—I wonder....”
“A virgin is a young unmarried woman,” said Edward, petulantly damning
all virgins.
“But, sah——”
“In this case that definition is enough.”
“But, please, sah——”
“Begin to read, Rupert Frazer.”
In a high staccato voice which ignored punctuation and sense, Rupert
Frazer began to read.
“Please, sah,” said the tallest of the three Portuguese. “Please excuse
us leave the room, sah.” All three rose as if worked by one lever.
“What for?” asked Edward.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
The three Portuguese stared at Edward in exaggerated reproach and
bashfulness.
(“And att midnight there wass a cry made be-hold de brid-a-groom cometh
go yee—”)
“Very well. Come straight back,” said Edward.
(“Less thah bee no eno for uss and—”)
“Oh, stop, Frazer,” implored Edward. “Next boy, read.”
The boys on Frazer’s right and left began reading in concert with furious
glances at each other.
“Not both; the Indian boy.”
“I am Parsee,” said the boy, a small nervous looking child. “My name iss
Bannerjee.”
“Please excuse us leave the room, sah,” said the first of a line of big
boys filing past Edward’s desk towards the door.
“Stop,” shouted Edward unsteadily. His head was rocking with the heat and
consciousness of failure. “Go back to your seats.”
“Oh, sah, other teachah Mistah Ramsee he nevah stop us.”
“Go on reading, Bannerjee,” said Edward. He pretended not to see the
last of the line disappearing through the door. The departure of the
disturbing element gave rise to peace in the class.
“Watch therefore,” read a boy with a Chinese face and a German accent.
“For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.
Please, sah, is not it true dat nuns haf Our Lord als Bridegroom?”
“Nuns iss virgins,” said one of the Parsees in a shocked voice.
“Please, sah,” continued the German. “Iss it not Mystic Union between
Our Lord and nuns? If we not believing in Mystic Union between Holy Lord
and mankind iss it not true we shall be perishing in outer darkness and
there shall be whipping and gnashing off teeth?”
“Everyone is free to have his own opinion about these things,” said
Edward, doubtfully. “Outer darkness is only a parable in itself——”
“But the Bible say——”
“There are a great many interpretations of the Bible’s words,” snapped
Edward, feeling unhappy and strangely alone among the quiet familiar
words in front of him. “Perhaps we should all be more likely to agree on
the general sense of this parable. What do you think Jesus meant us to
understand by this story——”
“Not story, sah, it was holy parable.”
“Well, what can we learn from this parable?”
“We shall not know, sah. You telling us, after—we shall be knowing.”
“Use your minds. What lesson do you find in the parable?”
“We not virgins, sah.”
“Mistah Ramsee he nevah ask the thing he have not teach.”
“This is Mr. Williams, not Mr. Ramsay,” said Edward, whose confidence
was increasing with the increasing tranquillity of the class. “I will
give you three minutes in which to glance over the parable again before
answering——”
“It mean—the wicked people shall perishing in efferlasting fires,”
declaimed the German.
“Silence for three minutes.”
There was an uneasy silence broken suddenly by the opening of a side
door. The woman teacher in the next classroom stood in the doorway and
spoke in a contemptuous voice to Edward. “Will you please restrain your
boys from shooting their pea-shooters at this door? The noise in the next
room is most disturbing.”
“Sorry,” said Edward, feeling lost again. “I’m rather deaf. I didn’t
know....”
“And you might like to know,” continued the visitor, “that eleven boys
from this class are playing ball in the playground. I don’t know, of
course, if they have your permission....”
“Oh, well ...” said Edward. “My God, it’s terribly hot, isn’t it?...”
The woman-teacher shut the door sharply.
Edward felt as if he were outside himself, as if he could see himself
leaning limply over his desk, his damp mud-colored hair drooping
forward—its parting lost—his thin face shining with sweat and almost
certainly rather dirty, the red spots growing redder upon his chin and
forehead, his lower jaw trembling although he was trying, by hard biting,
to hold it steady. “Even if I found Emily,” he thought, “she would hate
me now.” He could never be cool or lovable in these thick weary English
clothes. Then he thought with sudden pleasure that he would buy a new
suit, a cool pale suit in which to meet Emily. He imagined himself,
looking delicate and tired and cool in a delicately pale suit, walking
triumphantly towards Emily along a Chinese street between booths full of
lilies. “Oh, look ... oh, look ...” Emily would cry, throwing her arms
up in her exquisitely exaggerated way. “Oh, look ... here’s that darling
Edward ... looking like a damned old primrose ...”
“Shall I went to tell Ma Lo Yung and other boys come in to lesson?”
suggested the saintly Rupert Frazer.
“Yes, run along for Heaven’s sake,” said Edward, trembling with various
emotions.
The day was at last over. It seemed like two days to Edward because it
was cut in half by an hour for luncheon. During this hour he could be
sullen and quiet; the half dozen other men teachers took little notice
of him. The women teachers could be heard screaming in secluded mirth in
another room.
The week was at last over. Edward had half Saturday and all Sunday to
himself. Not quite to himself, for on Sunday he had to be “on duty” for
half the day. He sat in the window of his room in the shade of the big
palm-tree outside. Heat hummed through the garden, through the open doors
and along the dingy passages of the school. Edward did not mind what the
boys were doing—whatever it was, they were doing it fairly quietly.
Occasionally a tearing yell of laughter or a whine or a shrill protest in
Chinese was mixed with the hum of heat and insects.
Edward was comforted by comforting spirits, the contents of two bottles
which were his only contribution to the furniture of his room. These
represented the only money he had spent that week. The new suit was still
a dream. He taught in his shirt-sleeves.
He had nothing to do on Sundays. Yet he tried to regulate his drinking.
He made appointments with himself. “At half past three I will have
another....” But sometimes he forgot and had another too early. “It keeps
off the mosquitoes,” he thought.
One of the big Portuguese boys from his class was standing in the
doorway. “Please, Mistah Weelims....”
“Have a drink,” said Edward. He thought the boy looked rather beautiful;
his black hair was so thick and shining; it was brushed like a smooth
breaking wave.
Before suppertime there were six boys in Edward’s room. “If you fellers
would only behave decently in class,” said Edward, feeling like a man
of the world surrounded by his friends, “we’d have s’more parties like
this....”
Edward stayed at the school for a month. The boys were almost fatherly to
him. Edward ceased to assert authority. His system was based entirely
on bribes. The system seemed to answer. Only once during the month the
headmaster sent a note to ask that less noise be made in Class C. That
was when a boy hid behind the blackboard and over-turned it upon Edward.
This amused even the good boys.
“A joke’s a joke,” said Edward with tears in his eyes. The blackboard had
shaken tears into his eyes. Two of the big boys had their arms around
his neck, were roaring yells of laughter into his ear. “This joke’s
certainly on me. Oh, come now, go easy.” He was straining after laughter.
He thought, “That’s the way to take boys, no frills, no airs....” He
thought he was fond of the boys. He knew they were not fond of him. He
was terribly afraid of them. The note from the headmaster was handed to
him.
“A letter from Daisy ... he says we’re making too much noise, fellers.”
He did not drink much in the day-time. Whisky in such hot weather made
him tremble, made him unable to bear the noise and difficulty of the
class room. But after dinner, when at least it was dark and one could
pretend that the heat was lifted, he drank a good deal and was comforted.
But he saved a great deal of his salary. He thought he would look for
an opportunity to leave. He would be ill; it was quite easy for him to
seem ill. He would be obliged to go and see a great American doctor in
Peking about his hearing. He had been engaged for three months, in the
absence on sick leave of one of the regular teachers, but he had no
sense of responsibility to the school. His brain was full of prospective
interviews with the headmaster. “I suffer terribly with my ears and my
sinuses. I have just had a most dangerous operation. I need hardly say
it will be a matter of real regret to me to leave the dear boys....” The
headmaster would say, “Of course, of course, I quite understand.” Edward
had not only no objection to telling lies, he even failed as a rule to
notice how broadly he lied.
He did not have a chance to excite the sympathy of the headmaster. He was
turned out of the school one Sunday.
Sunday was his day without fear, and when he was on duty on Sunday
afternoons, he drank a great deal. His last Sunday passed like a dream;
he had no fear except the fear of the week to come. He was aware that he
was to preside at the supper of the boarders. The half-dozen big boys who
had been “sharing the party” thought he had forgotten. Edward laughed at
this idea. The big boys shepherded him downstairs to the dining room;
they linked their arms with his in facetious tenderness. It was absurd,
Edward thought. His mind was quite clear and serene. He knew that he
would have to say grace. The boys’ food was very bad—the boys told him
so. How absurd to say grace over a bad meal. Indeed it was blasphemy. He
would be honest. He would be witty. What a curious perspective of white
faces along the tables. The boys spoiled the austerity of the perspective
by wearing different-colored clothes.
“Let us pray that dinner today will be better than it was yesterday.”
(God does not mind a man being witty at His expense.) “O God, who daily
turnest our bread into a stone——”
Well, even if the Matron was looking at him, she could appreciate wit,
couldn’t she? He laughed a little to give her a lead. Her hard white
collar and cap seemed to heave like the ruff and crest of an affronted
bird. Women had no sense of humor. And anyway it was _he_, not _she_,
who was on duty. He could say what grace he liked. The matron was gone
now. She had realised that she had no business there. The boys were all
laughing. They were a broad-minded crew, these boys.
Someone took him quite rudely by the arm. It was the headmaster. He
looked drunk, Edward thought. So that was how the headmaster spent Sunday
afternoons—and he a parson. He pulled Edward out of the room. It was
outrageous that the headmaster should so interrupt Edward’s duties.
After a short talk, during which the headmaster gave voice to some
most insolent personalities, Edward realised quite suddenly that he
himself was drunk. He wanted immediately to go away from the people who
had noticed this humiliating fact. He wanted new faces around him,
unreproachful faces.
“I’m going,” said Edward; the chair span away from him unkindly as he
rose. “After the way I’ve been treated——”
“Please go tonight,” said the headmaster.
Everything was going well. Soon he would be away from these people who
only witnessed his moments of indignity. The boys would never triumph
over him again now. He would be alone, travelling in search of Emily.
People who did not know him would think, “Who is that thin eager young
man with the far-off look in his eyes?”
The Matron packed his clothes for him. She did not speak. She touched
his possessions as though they were dirty. The headmaster called a
ricksha for him and, without speaking, put Edward’s suitcase into it.
Nobody said good-bye. The stars were like dew on Edward’s eyes. Inside
his head pulsed the impact of the ricksha coolie’s feet on the ground.
The street was narrow and crowded and quiet, at least there were only
voices in it. Across the lighted booths and under the hanging bannered
shop signs hurried the coolies at a half trot on their bare feet. Their
burdens swung at either end of long poles; they had slung the great
absurd shields which were their hats on their backs, the heat of the day
being over. “Hai-ya ho, hoi-ya hai-ya, hai-ya ho, hoi-ya hai-ya....” Two
withered women, with thin bare legs under their turned-up trousers, were
beating a child’s garment with poles. Fierce treatment for so small a
thing. But the devil of sickness was in the garment; it required fierce
treatment. The lights glared on the scarlet and gold banners and on the
gilt filigree woodwork that framed the doors of the shops. It seemed
as if one heard noise more with one’s eyes than with one’s ears. The
glare seemed to drown the voices and the barefoot tread of the crowds.
Wherever one street crossed another, however, there was a great clamoring
of coolies forging their own right of way through the tangle. Edward’s
ricksha coolie said “Hao hao” when anyone crossed his path; the “hao”
was always in time with the thumping of his running feet, as if jerked
from his throat. Tall Sikh policemen pushed coolies roughly about. In the
sight of the policemen the little crowd of almost naked beggar children
running after Edward momentarily evaporated.
Edward could now pay for his passage to Tientsin by sea and for a ticket
from Tientsin to Peking. He could not pay for the new cool suit of
clothes. Emily must take him as he was—hot or cold.
He was the only passenger in the ship to Tientsin. It was carrying simply
a great deal of indigo—and Edward. It was intent upon this duty and
stopped at only one port.
A gentle and pleasant measure of eternity passed over Edward. He lay on
a chair alone upon the deck, flattened between the soft sea and sky.
Flying fish rained upwards out of the sea. The flying fish made little
scratches on the smooth sea. One evening the ship passed the mouth of
the Yangtze River at sunset. An enormous plume of crimson cloud leaned
away from the sea up the river. Thick polished plates of gold and crimson
seemed laid upon the smooth waves of the sea to the west. The low hills
at the mouth of the river were luminously purple....
For many days the ship followed the coast, followed it far off, like the
timid disciple. There were high unreasonable islands, suddenly before the
unsuspecting ship. The islands sustained an illusion of life on their
shores; they sent their hopes out into the sea in little fishing boats.
Once there was a boat quite near. In it one man smoothed his long unbound
hair into a queue; another played on a stringed instrument and whined a
song; another indolently directed the boat towards the bristling stockade
of floating poles that marked their net. But it must all have been faery.
No community could really live such a secret life, a life so full of
things that would never be known.
One day passengers came on board in mid-sea, a great crowd of birds,
land-birds who knew nothing of the dangerous skies over the sea. Hawks
and woodpeckers, sparrows and doves and little tits and finches stood
about the rigging pretending not to see one another. The seagulls laughed
at them. The land-birds felt uneasy standing in these strange, black,
even trees, they were too much puzzled to be very much afraid of men.
A red and green bird walked about near Edward, hoping that it would
find a worm somewhere. Whenever Edward spoke to it, it pulled itself
self-consciously together but did not fly away. A Chinese sailor caught a
sparrowhawk and tied it to the capstan by the leg. Wei-hai-wei seemed to
be the arranged destination of these passengers. Like a Cook’s Conducted
Tour they all disembarked together in the most businesslike way. Only the
hawk, tied by the leg to the capstan, was left behind looking sullenly
across at the sullen dark battleships that peered out of the harbour.
The three officers of the ship left Edward a great deal alone. The
captain was an Irishman, a fat, fair man with great, serene, grey eyes.
He had once been, he told Edward pointedly, a slave to drink; he had an
idea that Edward was similarly bound. He thought he could haul Edward’s
soul to safety on a thin string of sentimental reminders ... “mother,
waiting at home ... grey hairs in sorrow to the grave ... England needs
strong sane men now ... devil’s brew ... I know, me lad, I’ve been
through hell on account of it....”
“Hell’s the word,” said Edward placidly, basking in the light of the
captain’s earnest missionary interest.
The captain would not allow Edward to drink, either in the ship or
at Chefoo—their only port of call. “You don’t know China,” said the
captain. “You youngsters simply don’t know how to behave in China.
In London now, two or three whiskies and sodas ... no harm at all.
But in China—I tell you I’ve seen men arrive in Shanghai with babies’
complexions ... and five years after ... yellow as a daffodil, bent,
malarial, only fit for nursing homes.”
Edward hoped that he would look only fit for a nursing home when he met
Emily. Then she would think, “How he has suffered. How I have made him
suffer.”
Much of the indigo disembarked at Chefoo. The ship seemed to have run
aground on a brown island of barges. This island was peopled by brown
coolies with vacant faces; their heads were half shaven and half covered
with hair like cotton waste; sometimes they had bound their hair into
chignons. Under their unresting but unhurrying hands, their island
of barges became mountainous with sacks of indigo. Many of the sacks
burst; indigo oozed down the slopes of the mountains; the coolies became
bluer and bluer; there was indigo in their hair and indigo round their
shoulders like shawls.
Edward and the captain walked austerely and thirstily about Chefoo. The
Chinese of Chefoo seemed to be of a rougher race than those of Hongkong.
They even grated on the eye, Edward thought. They were taller and
hairier; their clothes were neither neat nor complete. Their houses were
ragged and indecent. The houses of the missionaries looked to Edward even
more impossible than those of the Chinese. Outside one of the mission
gates a thin boy, quite naked, tortured a yellow lizard. There were
yellow, scarred hills round the harbour. They trailed a silken hem of
white sand into the sea and, behind the town, a green scarf of orchard
land was thrown upon the shoulder of a low hill.
Between golden castled hills the ship left the harbour in the evening.
The Yellow Sea was really yellow. It was thickly yellow and reflected no
light. It was more like a desert than a sea. The eye would have found a
string of camels crossing the sea no anomaly.
The Pei-ho River was yellow too. The ship entered the river between
low mud forts. Salt was stacked on a broad streaky plain to the north.
Primitive windmills, like merry-go-rounds at English fairs, whirled
among the stacks of salt. The earth was yellow, the water was yellow,
the long slanted wave that ran after the ship was yellow and, breaking
over the squeaking yellow babies on the shore, left them a little
yellower. The villages were of yellow mud; the blind mud houses had no
angles; they were like beehives. There was a ragged yellow camel kneeling
self-consciously in a street; he kneeled as though his hind legs were
broken. A little girl in dark strawberry red—an exquisite color for a
dweller in golden mud—watched the camel from a dark doorway. The boats
in the river had nets stretched between bending slim poles hinged to
their masts. When, worked by primitive levers, these nets were bowed to
the water and rose spangled and silvered, the boats were like dragonflies
resting delicately on the water.
Tientsin ... a few dusty hours in a train ... Peking. The train seemed
to collide with Peking. The high city wall approached the railroad at a
steep angle. The train seemed to glance from the wall without impact.
Edward found himself outside the Water Gate, at the inner wall of Peking.
He became a ghost in a soundless ricksha. Lights pricked his eyes. There
was nothing in this Peking but houses transplanted from European suburbs.
There was an English bank, there were English business men, English
soldiers, French soldiers, small serene policemen in commonplace khaki
uniform, several Chevrolet cars ... finally an immense hotel, the road
to which was lined by rickshas at rest with sweating coolies sitting on
their shafts.
“Emily can’t be here. This is not Peking. Peking has been stolen away.
Emily has been stolen away.”
Edward took a room in the hotel. He did not know how he would pay for it.
He thought he would be here forever; he hoped that he would soon die;
perhaps, through dimming eyes, he would see at last the real Peking and
Emily running urgently towards him. “Too late, Emily ... too late....”
The great lobby of the hotel was like purgatory. Surely it would have
held all the saints and sinners of the world. The saints and sinners
sat in large absorbing chairs and at little tables, waiting till the
time came when they might do something else. There was dance music in
the distance, a beat like a hammer behind one’s head. The beat fought
with the beat of Edward’s heart; it was intolerable. He could hear
and feel the beat of his heart louder and louder as he drank cocktail
after cocktail. Cocktails here at any rate were better than they would
have been had he found the real Peking. A broad serene face crowning
a high-necked robe of green gold filled Edward’s imagination when he
thought of Peking. Over that face a banner waved, and as it waved the
wild gold dragon on the banner whipped his length about but could not
escape. Even the man who brought another cocktail had something to say
about this dragon, Edward thought. “The moon is his saddle ...” the
cocktail man seemed to say. It was true; the dragon was saddled by the
curve of the satiny moon. Edward had seen the moon from the other side of
the Water Gate, when the real Peking had still seemed to be in front of
him. Perhaps he could find Peking after all, in the light of the young
moon. It was very late. There was hardly time to go to bed, not time, in
his present mood, to take off one damp, snarling garment after another,
to wash his hot and tired body, to find his way uncertainly into an
unknown bed. It would be morning in a breath.
He went out. He walked east. The air was cool and the sharp brittle
rays of the stars made him feel as though he were on the verge of being
more widely awake than ever man was before. Here were trees and a very
broad moonlit street. Here, suddenly, was Peking. A great gate cast its
mountainous tented shadow to his feet. The curves of the roofs above
the gate were high and ample and optimistic. The moon shone through the
deserted windows of the high guard-house. There were soldiers at the gate
so Edward went no nearer to its arch. But he waded in its clean shadow
upon the uneven dust of the street. He walked still east, along very
narrow streets. There were no straight roofs at all; all the eaves turned
up as if the roofs were of drooping dark silk with their hems slung to
the stars, or as if the houses were dancing and swinging gay skirts.
There was an open space; low trees splashed shadows on white dust and
wet grass. Peking was not so tightly packed within its walls but that a
wide space might be left in the angle of one corner of the walls, a space
where goats and donkeys had their lodging. Beggars slept here too, but
Edward’s tread on the dust did not wake them.
The walls barred his way. They were new-looking walls, he thought, almost
silver in the moonlight, the design of castellation fencing the outer
rim was unbroken. But the guard-house on the corner of the wall looked
forgotten and old. There was a brick slope which climbed to the top of
the wall. Iron gates barred both the foot and the head of the slope, but
the gates were easily climbed.
Edward was on the broad weedy path that ran on the top of the wall. The
seeds of flowers and tall grasses had accepted the wall as part of the
soil of China. Edward went into the high beamed hall of the guard-house.
The moonlight made strange and glorious broad spaces of its dusty floor;
its dazzled windows looked out on naked moonlight. It was so full of
silence that its old walls cracked.
That corner of Peking was a watching corner. A little further on the
dragons of the Observatory watched the stars. Great wild bucking dragons
bore on their backs or between their claws huge secret instruments which,
in the belief of men and dragons, prepare the way of the Lord and make
his paths straight. The bronze dragons of the Peking Observatory are only
a little junior to history, but Edward did not know that. He tried feebly
to open the locked gate and then forgot and left the dragons, the spying
and puritan dragons, holding their check on the wild and dancing stars.
To the west Peking was like an enchanted forest in the milky half light.
No house declared itself among the trees except the great insolent hotel
which raised itself like a banner of unworthy victory over the quiet
city. Beyond Peking, far away, were the Western Hills, their outline
a wild tossing together of angles, their chequered surface broken by
strange folds and scars.
There was a light other than the moon. It was not a sudden light but
Edward realised it suddenly. The dawn was creeping up behind him to
devour him unawares. The centre of the universe had shifted. The dawn was
a subtler miracle than was the moon; the dawn succeeded to the empire of
the moon.
Light ran like a snake along the tops of the Western Hills. There was a
spear of flame along the eastern horizon. Little escaping clouds caught
fire; there was an ominous look of molten gold where the east made ready
the first step of the stair for the sun’s ascent. The sun pointed its
sword abruptly at Peking. The golden roofs of the Imperial City most
gloriously received the challenge. The city threw away its cloak of
mystery and the birds sang. A blue cart, its long peak stretching forward
as far as the ears of the mule that drew it, its little fretted windows
set into the blue tunnel that covered it, heaved slowly along a red track
from the east into the sunstricken city.
The dam of day had burst.
Edward thought, “Emily is somewhere, drowning, asleep in that lake of
sunlight. I can find her now. I have begun finding instead of losing
now....”
Where does hope set its roots? Out of what blessed and silly seed does
hope rise like a flower, fed by nothing more reasonable than a piercing
of sunlight through air full of birds’ songs? It is curious how joyfully
we pluck and wear at our hearts that fatal hope that has sprung from the
seed of a dream or of the little wind that passes across the morning.
“Hope is a true thing,” thought Edward when he looked, later in the
morning, at the hotel register. There were the names.
“Mr. and Mrs. Tam McTab—not so well but unfortunately more
correctly known as
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Watson—” (Tam had written facetiously).
“Miss Emily Frere”—(in a small impudent writing).
“Master Stone W. Ponting.”
The clerk said that they had left some weeks ago—here was the date—all
except the young gentleman, Master Ponting, he was over there—the one
drinking a lemon squash.
Stone W. Ponting was about thirteen years old; his thick, upstanding hair
seemed gray with dust; dirt and freckles obscured his complexion; his
hands were dark with dirt.
“You’re Stone Ponting, aren’t you?” said Edward nervously. “Mrs. Melsie
Ponting’s boy?”
“Yump,” said Stone, speaking into a glass of lemon squash.
Edward was afraid of him. He never really believed that boys of thirteen
had no longer the power to twist his arms.
“Have you heard your mother speak of me—Edward R. Williams?”
But Stone, who had an abnormally long tongue, was using it to explore
the outside of his lower cheek, in the hope of prolonging by a second or
two the taste of lemon squash. Apparently failing in this he peeled the
paper from a strip of chewing gum and inserted the contents. He did not
answer Edward but, on the other hand, did not destroy hope of an answer
by shutting his mouth. The chewing gum, though active, remained in the
public gaze.
Edward felt helpless but, in such a cause, dared not cease his efforts.
“What’s happened to Emily and her friends?” he asked. “Didn’t you come
here with them?”
“Yump,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, gimme my check. I must hustle. Going out
horseback riding with the Doc.”
A shower of money fell from his pockets as he rose and the re-assembling
of this gave Edward an opportunity to speak again.
“No, but truly, I want awfully to know about Emily and the others. I say,
if you’ll stay and give the Doc a miss for today, we’ll go somewhere and
find a real American soda fountain.”
He thought Stone might strike him. Or perhaps Stone would simply walk
away, dwindle through the door and be lost in the sunlight forever.
“Sure I’ll stop,” said Stone W. Ponting, putting out his tongue
meditatively and sitting down again. “We kin get a dandy nut sundae right
here. Nut sundae’s mine.”
“Why Emerly’s went up the Yangtze Ki-yang,” he told Edward in reply to
three or four more questions. “So’s Tam and Lucy. Peking fer mine, I
said, when they wanted to have me go withum. My dad’s sent me plenty
of dough, so I should worry. My dad’ll be tickled to death to have me
withum. He and Mom bin fighting for the custody of me. Dad won. But he
had to go to _Japan_ or some place on business. He’s a finan_cier_.”
Edward was neither acute enough nor sufficiently interested to notice the
sad bleak defences the child had put up for himself against a hard world.
Edward thought, “A detestable child. He has too little imagination and
too much horse-sense to help me.”
“Wasn’t Emily supposed to be looking after you?”
Stone gave a sharp cracked laugh. “I guess Mom thought so. Mom’s kinda
soft. Emerly knows I’m a feller kin look out for himself. Dad wouldn’t
give a whoop. He don’t know yet, but he should worry. He’s a financier.
He sent me a thousand bucks to blow—till he could come back from Japan.
I got the letter, that is to say, it was addressed to Emerly. There was
a thousand bucks for her to blow on me insidum. Emerly’s a sport, I’ll
say. She acted like she was leaving me in charge of a dame here—so’s Mom
wouldn’t get mad at her for piking. But there was nothing to that. The
other dame don’t worry me any.”
“She is shameless,” thought Edward. “Loving Emily is like loving a
tigress.” He felt a better man because he loved the shameless Emily. It
was like a romance among supermen, he thought.
“Your mother asked _me_ once to take care of you and bring you to your
father. I had business at the time that prevented me. But she was very
anxious that I should. Perhaps she told you——”
“Mebbe,” said Stone indifferently. The nut sundae nearly oozed out of his
mouth, but was checked by sleight of suction. “She’s kinda soft, is Mom.”
“You oughtn’t to be here by yourself.”
“I’m sicka being handed around,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, another nut
sundae. And then some. I’m a shark for nut sundaes.”
“Well, we can be friends anyway,” said Edward shyly. “A man can be
friends with another man.”
Stone took no notice of this. He lifted up the corner of his jacket and
licked from it a lump of nut sundae which had accidentally fallen there.
Then he walked away, whining a little song.
Edward had not slept at all. The hope he had nursed a few hours earlier
seemed divorced from reality. He remembered suddenly something that his
mental cowardice had swept from his mind. “Emily loves Tam,” he thought,
trying to hurt himself as much as possible. “Emily has never thought
of me again. She loves Tam. She wants to steal Tam from Lucy. She is
shameless. She is full of fury because she has not got Tam. I am to her
the least of the people she met over there somewhere in America, while
she was engaged in pursuing Tam.” He was determined to throw himself into
an agony, he was revelling in fatigue and despair. He imagined his next
meeting with Emily. Her fierce eyes would detach themselves reluctantly
from Tam’s face. They would turn cold as they rested on Edward’s own
face. Edward’s face would look dull and pale; he felt very conscious of
the lifelessness of his face. He saw himself so grey as to be almost
invisible. Near him now there was an arrangement of mirrors that showed
him his own rarely seen profile. It was detestable that life— even the
mean allowance of life that was his—should be given to so poor a body.
His upper lip was too long, it sloped forward without the curve that
enlivens most human lips; his chin was thin and fleshless as though made
of paper. His face seemed to him hardly a human face. His shoulders
were very round. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his reflection
in profile present a cocktail glass to that slack sad mouth. Cocktails
at least were left to him. Everything that requires only weakness was
left to him. “If all this were not so, this is what I would do.” The
intensity of his despair was, with the help of the cocktail, defeating
its own ends ... “if love perhaps gave me life ... if I were as shameless
as she is ... and if shamelessness could give me a little of the
splendour that it has given her, this is what I would do ... I would get
control of that thousand dollars ... I would travel night and day, in
fury and certainty ... I would find her on the banks of the river, the
high reeds as high as her head ... I would walk to her with a new tread,
a heavy, sure, new tread, and when she looked she might love me or hate
me ... but she would remember me then.” And now, though he tried again
superficially to revive his luxury of despair, he could not really think
himself despicable. His coward mind leapt at the accuser from behind, and
in the dark and the dust the accuser was strangled. Edward smiled at the
boy who brought him a fresh cocktail. When he smiled he saw now that his
upper lip curved after all.