When your songs for me shall be songs that are finished,
When voices shall have left me beyond my retrieving,
When the key shall be turned and my broad world diminished,
A dream of the cricket’s song shall save me from grieving.
The long locks of the willow-tree are sloped at one angle,
Are swung to one wind, and that wind can awaken
The crickets to their chanting and the fireflies to spangle
The long locks of the willow-trees, shimmering and shaken.
There are dragons in the sky, and the horned moon is a rider,
The horned moon goes riding through gates that break asunder.
Stand wide, O ye gates, for the challenger, stand wider,
He goes challenging the dragons, the dragons and the thunder.
I am holding, I am hoarding these songs by the million,
For singers grow very wise but hearers grow wiser,
And a thin flute in the dimness of a dragon-decked pavilion
Plays only for my treasuring, for the treasuring of a miser.
When the key shall have turned on me, the silence disarmed me,
And gates at my challenging swing no more asunder,
Not mortally—not mortally my enemy shall have harmed me,
For I have heard the crickets’ songs and the thin flutes and the
thunder.
In the evening Edward met Stone Ponting in the corridor. The boy looked
pale and hysterical.
“I bin out with Doc. He’s bin setting me up cocktails. Some drink I’ll
say. I’ve had cocktails before, though—a boy and me knoo a man in
Sacramento ... the other feller had a Buick.... I ain’t no sneezing
innocent, believe me....”
Edward followed him into his room.
“I’ll say I’d be kinda lonesome here, without Doc—him and me’s buddies.
Emerly was a sport, I’ll tell the world. Her and me raised hell in this
one-horse city. My, we made ona these Chink traffic cops mad one day,
having ricksha races.... Doc’s a piker. I didn’t feel but a little
queer after that cocktail and now he says he’ll never buy me another. I
tell you I ain’t no snivelling kid—he’s a piker—I feel queer now and no
mistake.”
He was very sick. Then he began to cry. Edward sat on the edge of the
bed and patted the prostrate boy’s knee awkwardly. All the time Edward
was thinking, “This boy’s going to depend on me absolutely within a few
hours. A thousand dollars.... Besides, it’s my duty to look after him.
Melsie’s a friend of mine....”
“There must have been poison in that hooch,” sobbed Stone. “Mebbe Doc’s a
thug, after my thousand bucks.... ’Sociating with foreigners has ruined
him. Emerly was a sport though she was a foreigner.... My, I’m lonesome
without Emerly, I don’t mind telling you. Emerly and me was affinities,
like Mom and Lon Merriman. But she quit. Doc says women are all that
way.” He cried again hideously. “She useter kid me along. She useter make
up tales about the stunts Tam could put over. She said he was a saint
like in the Bible. Her and me was sharks for the polo-game. We useter
went and look at the polo-game and she useter kid me along about the
things Tam done when he went to the polo-game. It was like the tales in
the kid’s supplement of the Sunday papers. Once she said he waved his
stick and there was eight balls on the field so’s all the guys went off
quite happy with a ball and they all shot a goal, and often, she said,
he’d stick the ball on to the ground by magic and the fellers’d whack at
it and whack at it and ride over it and curse at each other for missing
it ... just kid’s tales, but the way she telledum just tickled me to
death someway. Gee, makes me laugh right now.... I don’t mind telling
you, this is a bum city without Emerly.”
He was still crying a little but the effect of the cocktails was wearing
off and soon he would hide himself again behind his rude walls.
“Emerly and me was going to take a look-see at the Big Wall. I dunno why
she quit. I can go by myself, I guess. I got a thousand bucks. Still,
Emerly’s a piker.”
“You and I’ll go and see the Big Wall,” said Edward. “You and I’ll be
buddies now. We’ll go tomorrow.”
They went to see the Great Wall. Stone Ponting found great pleasure in
taking the tickets. Doc came with them, a stout, red, young man with a
fixed smile, which only faded during his frequent and earnest seizures of
laughter.
They went up to the pass on a pig train from Nankow; they sat on the
running board of the train and their sight was haunted by walls creeping
furtively round the mountains and by dead walled towns.
The Great Wall, however, was not furtive. It gloried in its fight with
the mountains. It condescended to conquer only the fiercest slopes.
It pursued splendidly terrible edges. Edward, looking down from the
broad road on the wall at the pale bleak valleys towards Manchuria,
was oppressed by a sense of tottering and fearful height. But when he
leaned over the battlements and looked down expecting to see straight
into dark, dragon-haunted abysses, there was the grass like an assurance
of safety a few feet below him, and there were the little intimate blue
and yellow flowers in the grass, holding out hands to break the fall of
courage. All the way down the steep mountains there were flowers among
the rocks. The rocks might have been the graves of enemies of China who
had failed and fallen on the green grass, failed and fallen and never
set foot on the land within the wall. The wall itself was low; it lay
flat like a snake in the sun; it was more sinuous than anything built of
brick had any right to be. When it linked crag with crag it was so steep
that, to follow it, travellers must sometimes crawl on hands and knees
up very steep steps, clinging to the rank weeds and grasses that grew
between steep stones. Astride of the wall, at regular intervals, were
the watch-towers, entered by arched doorways. The wall looped its length
sometimes; there were wanderings of walls within the wall. Wherever one
looked the mountains were crowned and mocked by the wall.
Doc hardly had time to look at the wall, he was so busy photographing it.
Stone was frankly bored.
“Can’t be but a dozen feet high,” he complained. “They ought to see the
Capitol at Sacramento or some of the buildings on Montgomery Street in
Frisco.”
They walked down to the train along the paved camel road that for two
thousand years has carried travellers from Manchuria to Peking. It is a
dead road now. Occasionally a string of camels or donkeys threads its way
through the crowds of travelling ghosts, but a Ford car would disdain the
road now, so it is dead.
Doc’s Chinese boy, an efficient, cheerful old man who never apparently
opened his eyes, was waiting for the three travellers at Nankow with a
string of donkeys. Stone proudly produced money whenever it was needed,
and Edward had nothing to do except humour Doc’s passion for photography.
Edward was certain, even while posing with a self-conscious smile
between two donkeys, that, by the time the films were developed, Doc
would have forgotten the very name of Edward R. Williams. The snapshot,
stuck in an album, would be introduced to friends as “Yes, that’s a
feller—I forgot his name—anyway we were starting off on donkeys—I forget
where to....” The snapshottist is the most catholic of all artists.
They rode first through Kao-liang and then through orchards to the
Ming tombs. Each rider rode in a little dream of donkey bells and of
affectionate conversation between the donkeys and the running drivers.
The drivers said “Trrk trrk” and “K’erh-to” and “Tsou-pa” and “Yueh,” and
the donkeys danced along, crossing their delicate little hoofs as if on a
tight rope, and signalling with their soft dusty ears.
Very close to a road of rust,
Very close to the red ground,
Till he dies he dwells
In the dust
Of his donkey’s feet, in the sound
Of his donkey’s bells....
The travellers reached the Ming tombs at Sunset. The precarious last
light of the sun was spilled over the shining golden roofs. There was a
master tomb crouching among its many courtyards, and the disciple tombs
on the wooded slopes imitated it respectfully. The marble steps and the
carved and knotted marble balustrades seemed to hold light. In the
main hall of the main tomb great plain trunks of trees were the pillars
bridging the dusky air between the candle-lit pavement and the ceiling. A
little marble empty coffin in the innermost place was the only reminder
of the fact that the brittle and ridiculous bones of a dead man were the
treasure in this sombre splendid casket. This was man’s defence against
his smallness. “Never dust to dust now,” said the dust of the dead
Emperor. But his defence was crumbling. The marble and gold pavilion and
the years were playing him false.
Edward could not sleep on his camp bed between the great pillars of the
entrance. He leaned his chin upon the marble balustrade and watched the
darkness. The writhing outlines of cedars and pavilions in the starlight
were gold no more. The dragons and the branches of the cedars wrestled
together in the dark and were entangled.
Edward was desperately patient with Stone Ponting. He was comforted in
this period of doubt by the constant mention of Emily, but he knew Stone
well enough now never to suggest that they should go together in search
of her. It was impossible for Edward to be charming and Stone did not
care for him at all. But they both tried to disguise foolishly delighted
smiles when Emily’s name was mentioned, and both were conscious of the
impossibility of boring each other on a topic which both took pains to
introduce.
They rode together in Peking. Edward was a bad horseman but he always
felt rather heroic on a horse. They rode outside the walls of the
Forbidden City.
“I’d like to see a eunuch,” said Stone. “Doc’s bin talking no end about
eunuchs. Say, listen, did you know they can whatch women in their tubs
’n’ everything and nobody give a whoop? When I was a kid I useter think
eunuchs was a Turkish tribe. These Orientals is all queer. Say listen,
Edward, d’you reckon we could tell a eunuch if we seedum?”
“I guess so,” said Edward. “Let’s keep our eyes open.”
The Imperial City has rose-red walls and the guard-houses on the walls
have golden roofs. The guard-houses are like jewels having many facets.
The elaborate horizon of the roofs is like a thread on which are strung
fantastic jewels—red and gold and green and turquoise blue. Dragons and
strange fishes and curling waves and plumes are strung upon the fringe of
the pale sky. The central gate is the great pendant on the breast of the
sky; the dark door of the city is set in a square mass of red plastered
wall and over the archway the lines of the gold tiles are dramatically
sober. The moat at the feet of the red wall holds a clear strange dream
of all these things, reflections caught in a mesh of floating lotos
leaves. Above the city fly the pigeons. The owners of the pigeons
apparently fit their birds with little Æolian harps. A whispered wailing
of flocks of pigeons falls constantly like an intangible tuneful rain
upon Peking.
“From Coal Hill you kin see right inside the city,” said Stone. “Doc says
the eunuchs live under the blue roof and the big bugs under the yaller
roofs.... Emerly and me and Doc had a picnic on Coal Hill. Emerly fed
Cigarettes to the Chink soldiers—they was tickled to death—and she told
us a crazy tale about a toob of Colgate’s shaving soap that one of these
Chink empress dames figured was a love dope. Say, listen, I guess Emerly
ain’t more’n ten years older’n me. Lots of men gets married to dames ten
years older’n them. A feller at school called Jenkinson got married when
he was eighteen. I guess I gotta have a speel with Dad and, if he raises
hell about me being too young, I kin hand out all kinds of dope like
that.”
“You’d better make sure of Emily first,” said Edward.
“Whaddyer mean—make sure of Emerly?” asked Stone, who was in a brave rude
mood. “Emerly’s crazy about me, I tell yer. She certainly was peeved when
her boss moved her out of Peking.”
“Crazy about you!” said Edward, who felt glad that nobody else could hear
him thus debating grotesquely with a shadow. “Might as well say she’s
crazy about me. Don’t you know who she’s crazy about?”
“Aw, cut it out,” said Stone uneasily.
“Didn’t you see her look at Tam?”
“Fergit it. Tam’s married. Emerly’s straight, I tell yer. Emerly’s not
like my Mom. Any guy that says Emerly’s crooked’s going to hear from
me....”
He spat angrily but neatly into the moat. Not many boys so young as he
acquire so much proficiency in the characteristic arts of their native
land.
Edward watched him and was afraid of him. Edward himself as a child never
spat and never played roughly with the feelings of men and women. He had
never dared, yet his had been a safer world.
“Emily is shameless, I tell you, Stone....”
* * * * *
At Hankow Edward and Stone found that they had almost too much money.
In order to go to Chungking—one of the few cities in the world without
a Thomas Cook—they had to change their eight hundred American dollars
into a much larger number of Mexican silver dollars. Their suitcases were
rooted to the ground by the weight of their silver.
“Let me borrow some from you,” suggested Edward, turning scarlet in a
way that proved his honesty to himself. “It’ll be a purely business
transaction. I’ll pay you two per cent per month. I want a thin suit of
clothes.”
“Sure, go ahead,” said Stone.
Edward bought a cream-colored ready-made suit and saw in the mirror that
he looked like an unsuccessful dentist. He walked hurriedly out of the
store to escape this dreadful ghost.
“You look like thirty cents,” said Stone, who seemed to have inherited
his mother’s frank callousness.
They embarked on a wide sunny little steamer for Ichang. Edward sat on
the deck day after day and saw failure gathering like a cloud about his
hope of Emily. He reminded himself industriously of his hopelessness and
of the fact that he looked like thirty cents. Edward never, in the whole
course of his life, forgot any derogatory personal remark made about
himself in his hearing. He luxuriated too much in the criticism of others
to forget it.
Edward noticed the bald leathery water buffaloes at work in the flat
fields; he only noticed them because he thought their faces were like
his, like his own face reduced—or magnified—to the absurd. This idea
made him watch for the closer buffaloes with a morbid eagerness. On the
tilted swaying back of one near the tail sat a little boy in a broad
hat, playing the flute and drumming his heels. The buffalo went dismally
past its fellows who were lying dismally in the mud; it had not enough
strength of mind to defy the little boy and give itself up to its one
dismal pleasure. Black trails worn by the tears of years streaked the
buffalo’s face; its horns drooped awry.
The river ran so smoothly that it was like a broad road of polished
golden glass. It seemed that the eyes were deceived—nothing so unruffled
could pass so swiftly. It seemed to Edward that he was flashing above
its still surface, the cords of the western sun had snared him and
were snatching him from himself. Beneath him time and youth and the
river—flowered and golden—stood still and were left behind.
A dull but hot sun laid shadeless light on the exact pyramid hills that
stand about Ichang and the mouth of the Yangtze Gorges.
Edward and Stone carried their silver and Stone’s ukelele and golf-clubs
on to a new boat. The new boat, battling against the terrible protest
of the river, thrust herself into the yellow shadows of the mountains.
One could feel the muscles of the strong ship wrestling with the river.
The ship swung; it advanced, it bowed sideways, it reared, it faced the
fearful cliffs, it seemed to save itself narrowly from disaster every
minute. The river screamed about the ship. The hot sunlight was wild
with noise; the shadow of the cliffs was impregnated with terrible deep
echoing. The river was a maniac prisoner between the tense leaning golden
cliffs.
Curious turbulent dreams haunted the water. The surface was flowered
and starred with strange boiling shapes; ominous shadows—like hands and
serpents and gaping faces—were half seen beneath it; scars of foam were
scored across it. The water was too wild to conform to natural laws or to
find its own level. There were fifty different levels between cliff and
cliff. There were table-lands and canyons in the water, and glaciers of
water tilted over hidden rocks. The whirlpools were like sunken golden
glass bowls in the water. Or they were like great birds’ nests, great
faery rocs’ nests with eggs of cream-gold foam spinning deep down in the
nests.
Close to the cliffs, the water, in a frenzy of contradiction, flowed
the wrong way. Junks could sometimes move upstream without difficulty
there. All the upstream junks clung timorously to the red cliffs; they
were towed by scores of coolies. Strings of coolies, like beads, tawny
or blue, were looped along the bright cliffs. The ropes were tied to the
masts of the junks. Women crouched under the hooped, humped matting that
covered the junks. A down-stream junk span down the centre of the river.
A dozen oarsmen stood on the lower deck and on the poop stood their
leader beating time frantically like the leader of an orchestra. The
chantey of the oarsmen was as thin as a hair of sound in the voluminous
voice of the river. The oarsmen swung and dipped and bowed and fell back
in time to the frenzied baton of their leader. The junk looked dark and
nervous, dipping like a dark whale. Again it darted heavily like a bee at
the whirlpools in the water; it made clumsy feints towards the shining
sharp rocks and the cliffs; it twisted, plunged, heeled half over,
shuddered, span round and round. Yellow waves washed the knees of the
oarsmen but still they sang.
Sometimes there were loopholes in the prison of tumultuous noise
and shadow. Sometimes the cliffs were cloven and a tranquil and
compressed perspective of sun on apparently heathery moorland and
serene red-flowering cotton trees, peered down the cleft. Sometimes the
mountains fell back as though exhausted by their fighting and between
broad open shores the river ran more patiently. Then there were towns and
temples on the slopes. Shih-Pao-Chai, a square tower of rock, challenged
the ship at a wide bend in the river. Like the shadow of the rock, like
its soul or its guardian angel, a tall pagoda was built against it,
with nine roofs one above the other. The nine gracious roofs were like
nine branches springing from the living rock. Once there was a town in
a gorge built on two shelves of a sheer ochre cliff; ladders led from
one shelf to the other. Sometimes there were greater towns, their lower
streets standing precariously on stilts in the river. Sometimes there
were temples with curled green or yellow roofs and painted walls, looking
down worn steps at the river. Once the ship tied up at sunset opposite
the single line of a black slope against a fading green sky. The line
blossomed into the outlines of temple roofs, bending, bristling roofs
under great tiers of trees and the silhouette of a defiant griffin with
plumed wings and tail.
One day the spell was broken. There were grey soldiers on the bank. There
were junks full of soldiers moored to the bank. Three soldiers stood on
the lowest step of a temple with their rifles aimed at Edward’s eye—as
it seemed. The moment seemed to call for an act of heroism. “Our hero’s
first thought was for the women and children,” thought Edward, calling
Stone huskily as he ran behind a door.
“Crack—crack ... crack.” One report was long after the others. “A Chinese
Edward R. Williams,” thought Edward. When he came out of cover the
brigands had not moved from their stone step. Their rifles still looked
into Edward’s eye across fifty yards of shimmering air. Something ought
to be done about it.
“Crack—crack ... crack.” It was like a word in a nonsense language, a
made-up word that did not convey any meaning. A secret and negligible
sound.
“Crack—crack....” The Chinese Edward Williams failed altogether this
time. Probably he had forgotten to load the thing. It would be just like
him. The whine of a bullet was heard so quickly that nothing was realised
except an after-taste of sound. A fountain leaped in the water.
“Now watch,” said one of the ship’s officers. The ship’s syren cut off
the end of his utterance. The syren’s sound was like a warlock springing
up with both bony hands straight over her head. Springing and sinking ...
springing and sinking ... to frighten children.
Terror and astonishment wiped one of the brigands from the temple step
into the river. He flashed into oblivion; his desperate hand made a
little passing splash in the river. All the men on deck laughed. “That
was the Edward who fell in,” thought Edward, laughing a little too.
“Just like him.” The other two brigands ran away. The syren was such an
unexpected retort. There was no declaration in the voice of the syren.
Doubt made them run away.
“Gee, look at the corpses....” said Stone. One dead man pursued another
furiously down the river. They floated on their faces, legs and arms
wide-thrown. They looked like dead spiders.
“They’re always fighting about one thing or another up in Szechuan,” said
the ship’s officer in an irritated voice.
Edward thought of Emily’s voice, “Oh, what a party....”
“She will enjoy dead men,” he thought.
But there was, it seemed, peace in Chungking, at least for a few hours
after the ship arrived. The junkmen were taking advantage of the peace;
they were leaning out of their junks armed with poles and arresting the
procession of the dead in order to take the coats and sandals that were
no longer needed. The retreat of the dead was easy now and, though they
had a long journey before them, they needed no supplies. The cold could
not reach them now, their pitiful feet might be bare. The dead soldiers,
released, fled away eagerly and joined the long humble file of their
fellows.
Chungking stood in the hush that comes when one’s friends have forsaken
one and one’s enemies have not yet come. Like panels the tall, thin,
wooden houses lined the steep banks of the river. Strings of yellow
fish and dried vegetables and blue garments hung across the faces of
the houses. The wall framed the strangely perpendicular city. The steep
steps—Chungking’s only streets—were like grey gashes or scars down the
town. Outside the wall stood the outcast houses on unsafe trestles; the
feet of the trestles were in the water; the cleanly dressed outcast women
watched the vanquished soldiers leave the city and waited for the victors
to come in.
The ship was moored opposite Chungking. The town on this side was diluted
with grass and trees. Green hills, grey hills, blue hills lay behind it.
Groves of sharp thin trees—the cypresses that are supposed to denote the
graves of poets—fitted like plumed caps upon the lower hills.
Retreating soldiers were climbing the steps on their thin active ponies.
Soldiers were carrying a few of the wounded along a climbing path. The
wounded were bound to poles.
“Gee, Emily’ll be tickled to death,” said Stone. “To see us, I mean.”
On shore they asked the only white man they could see, “Do you know Emily
Frere?”
“I ought to,” replied the stranger. “There’s only about a dozen white
women up here. But I never heard of her. Sure you don’t mean Miss Erica
Blainey?”
Edward covered up in his mind the fact that in a community of a dozen
women Emily’s name should be unknown to any sane man. He covered this
fact up as he would have covered up the information that she wore a
wig, had anyone volunteered it, or that she never took a bath. These
were blasphemies. Erica Blainey flickered through his mind as an
anti-Emily—thin with a pointed quivering nose and pale lips and very fair
corrugated hair.
“Do you know Tam and Lucy McTab?” asked Stone.
“Now you’re talking,” said the Englishman. “He’s a celebrity, isn’t he?
An author or what not? He’s borrowed the Worsley bungalow up in the
hills. Want to go? I’ll talk to your chairmen for you.”
Four men carried each chair. They wore straw hats like the roofs of round
pavilions and blue shirts and cotton short trousers rolled high above
their knees.
The chairmen chanted intermittently as they walked; they kept time by
means of a sort of retorting chant, each man speaking rhythmically in
turn. When they wanted to change shoulders they uttered a series of small
screams or jodels. As they bent their heads under the carrying poles
during the change of shoulders, the chair dipped and canted alarmingly to
one side. Edward each time made the change as difficult as he could for
them. He shifted his weight; the chair leaned over; there was a little
squall of startled chatter from the balancing chairmen. Edward resented
the discomfort of the chair and, since it was bad, determined to make
it worse. He tortured himself by craning out over the steep edges and
watching the shining narrow rice-fields piercing the feet of the hills.
The rice-fields were banked up below him ingeniously in a stairway of
crescent-shaped dams.
Soldiers were everywhere. In long files they threaded the narrow mud
dikes between the rice-fields. The steps on the mountain slopes, the
tilted shady villages and the temples were crowded with them. They wore
shabby uniforms of greenish-grey, red cap-bands, grey frayed puttees
apparently wound about the fleshless bone, and bare angular ankles
showing between the puttees and the straw sandals. The cobbled climbing
street of one village was covered with a flat roof; every house lacked
the wall on the street side; every house was like a little stage, a stage
set with frightened silent groups watching the loitering and thronging
soldiers. Some shopmen, with strings of perforated copper money like
ornaments across their shoulders, were trying to conciliate the soldiers
by selling them food. Flour sausages, coarse biscuits, dumplings, a few
“Shao-ping,” sold at a loss, perhaps meant a daughter saved. The soldiers
were small exhausted men; their jaws hung with fatigue; their panting
mouths looked square; their knees knocked together. Two of them had
strength enough to beat a country boy with his own carrying-pole.
Beside the road, head downward on a flowery slope, lay a dead man. The
splayed yellow soles of his feet seemed to stare at passers on the road.
Here were woods in rain, pines with soft tufted grey needles ... here was
a great view of the winding Yangtze between the wet trunks of trees. Here
were safe and peaceful foreign houses.
And Lucy McTab, stiff and untidy, at the top of a steep flight of steps.
“Oh, I thought you were Tam coming. How do you do, Mr. Williams? How do
you do, Stone?”
No sound of Emily running along the verandah to cry,
“Edward—Edward—E-yee—E-yee—” That was her joyful noise. But there was no
sound of it now. Lucy’s voice without that accompaniment seemed quite
meaningless to Edward.
Lucy stood awkwardly patting her hair. She was not pleased to see Edward
and Stone. No plain statement could have made this more transparently
clear than did her glazed politeness. Edward was seized with a panic
of dumbness; he could not utter the name of Emily in this nervous,
constricted atmosphere.
“Well, so you’ve found your way here,” said Lucy. “It’s a long way.”
“Yes.”
“I thought your father expected you to wait for him in Peking, Stone.”
“Yump. I guess he did.”
“This is a dreadful house to receive visitors in. Look at the furniture.
Tam says it was probably all bought at the ten cent store. Still, there
are advantages in living here. We can have dogs here for the first time
for years. I do adore dogs. I feel ... perfect, somehow, if there is a
dog in the room. Sometimes I’m shocked to think how long I spend looking
at the way a dog’s hair grows on his face ... or looking at him crossing
his paws in that patient way. I just look and look.”
There was a dog on the hearth, a handsome Eurasian dog. Edward crossed
the room and looked blankly down on its golden forehead. One was glad
when one could like anything that Lucy liked, or in any way flatter her.
He noticed that she shrank as he came near her as though she thought he
might kiss her or insult her.
“These Chinese,” went on Lucy, “are such a weird unreasonable race. I
suppose one will get used to their funny ways in time. But this fighting
is dreadful.”
“Yes.”
“However, Tam is getting a lot of work done. He is writing a book about
little wars.” Her voice changed as she spoke of Tam. “It is really a
treat listening to him. I often think what a pity it is that every
word he says just casually to me can’t be preserved. All about war and
politics and ... psychoanalysis and so on.... He just sits and smokes—he
is an inveterinary smoker—and all these brilliant opinions pour out.
People would pay to hear them, I’m sure. Perhaps I am no judge, but I
really do think his book, when it is finished, will be acknowledged to be
one of the most meretricious books of the century ... you have no idea——”
She checked herself. She had forgotten to be shy and ladylike, she
corrected this oversight.
“Where’s Tam?” asked Stone, whose feelings seemed to be a reproduction in
miniature of Edward’s.
“He’s gone for a walk. He adores rain.”
“Where’s Emerly?” asked Stone.
Lucy was silent for a moment. There was a sort of clatter in Edward’s
mind during her silence. “Where’s—Emily—where’s—Emily-where’s Emily,”
with the hurried insistence of a telegraphic tapper. In a second it would
be silenced by some tremendous fact about Emily.
“Emily’s gone.”
Yes, there was silence now in Edward’s mind.
“Whaddyer mean—gone?” asked Stone, ceasing for a few seconds to chew his
gum.
“She left—I think for Shanghai. She didn’t like it much here. The climate
... the fighting....”
“Did you drive her away?” asked Edward.
Lucy would not answer this. She would not say anything sincere or even
hear anything sincere. She was afraid of nakedness.
“We were sorry to lose her ... in a way,” she said, fixing alarmed eyes
on Edward. “But her health became so bad we could not press her to stay
with us.”
“Did you drive her away?”
There was a bridge of hate between her eyes and Edward’s.
“Tam valued her services as secretary so much. He says he can hardly get
on without her.”
She would not say anything real. She was like a martyr, steeped in an
ecstasy of pretence, refusing to recant.
“Well, isn’t this astonishing,” said the exaggerated voice of Tam.
“Wonder upon wonder. First a mouse eats a hole in my bedroom slippers
and then we are invaded by Californians. All in one day. I forget your
name—” (this to Edward) “—but I know I love you, as it were. As for you,
Stone—ever find those rainbow pants?”
This was evidently a joke, but Stone did not laugh.
Edward was surprised that he remembered Tam so well. “I must have thought
a great deal about him without knowing it.” Tam looked excited and
unkempt. He had begun to grow a beard. The falling lock of hair across
his low, nervously wrinkled forehead gave him a primitive and rather
barbarous look.
“Oh, I know ... I’m always ten minutes late in an emergency, but I know
now. You’re Edward, the man that Emily talked about.”
“What did she say?” asked Edward huskily.
“She said you were in love with her and wished there were more like you.
Are you in love with her?”
His frankness was an affectation as was Lucy’s restraint. He had a
wide-mouthed, insolent way of saying these things.
“Where is she now?” asked Edward.
“Oh, I see.” Tam’s voice was deliberately childlike and naïve. “You’re
one of these people who think it’s immodest to mention love. Well, well,
Stone and I discuss everything we think of, from God to indigestion,
don’t we, old man?” He threw his arm round the impassive Stone’s neck.
“Emily’s in Shanghai, we believe. Lucy sacked her because Emily declared
her love for me.”
Lucy went quickly out of the room, letting no-one see her face.
How shocking. How shocking. Emily’s light defences of brave, witty
dignity were torn down so easily. Emily was humiliated in the sight of
the humiliated Edward.
“Well, well, there’s no accounting for tastes. There’s no good in
refusing to admit these things. Emily’s a fine, unique creature—too
furiously alive for her own peace of mind. I suppose you don’t want to
stay here now, eh?”
“No.”
“Nothing to stay for? You for Shanghai, what? Well, well, if I didn’t
happen to be in love with Lucy, I’d come too.”
In love with Lucy when Emily loved him? “It is because he is a cad,”
thought Edward. “Lucy’s thin love is the kind of love a cad values. Vain
men only live by the love of second-rate women. Emily’s love doesn’t
flatter Tam enough. Her love is too insolent. She couldn’t cringe. It
takes an inglorious man like me to appreciate glory. It is because I am
so wholly in the dark that I can see the light of Emily.” Edward tried
to imagine Emily’s eager face, should her love and eagerness be refused.
He thought of her eyes pierced with pain, her brows drawn together, her
cheeks white, the generous expression of her mouth frozen on pale lips.
“I’ll walk down to the river again with you, if you like. I want to see
some fighting. They say the Szechaanese may march in at any minute.”
“Say, what did Emerly say about me?” asked Stone in a muffled voice. This
seemed to Edward an altogether trivial interruption.
“Said you were a bully kid, of course,” said Tam. He hugged Stone’s
shoulders, shook the boy backwards and forwards and made him look
ridiculous.
“That is the manner of real men with school-boys,” thought Edward. “If I
had adopted that manner Stone would have loved me.”
“D’you know what happened to me this morning?” Tam began. “Stone, listen,
you’ll roar over this yarn. When I got out of my bath, I couldn’t find
one of my bedroom slippers. You know the coldness of the floors of
Chinese bathrooms. My little toe is still suffering from infantile
paralysis——”
“We must go,” said Edward. “Stone, come.”
Tam’s eyes wore almost the same alarmed expression that Lucy’s had worn.
That expression apparently meant that Edward was not doing what was
expected of him. He ought to have been looking eagerly at Tam, waiting
with a suspended laugh on a caught breath for the climax of the story.
“Listen to the yarn,” said Tam with a touch of asperity. “I hadn’t worn
the slippers since my bath the morning before. I knew I’d left them both
by the bath tub. Their names are Abelard and Heloïse. Abelard was there,
ready for duty, but Heloïse——”
“We must go.”
“Well, I found her at last. If you’ll believe me, she was looking into a
mouse hole with her tip bitten off—rape of the Sabines, what? Of course
she’s disfigured for life; my big toe is frankly naked now when I wear
Heloïse, but Abelard still loves her. You’d expect him to philander now
with one of Lucy’s pumps, but——”
“Come—Stone.”
“I am forced to the conclusion that Edward doesn’t love me. Most people
do, really they do, Edward. Please enroll yourself with the majority.” He
came over and took both Edward’s reluctant hands in his. His voice became
richer. “Old man, old man, I know you’re going through hell. Don’t think
I’m unsympathetic and flippant. Listen. I want to have a long talk with
you. I can tell you a lot of things about Emily that will interest you.
We’ll go down to Chungking together. Nobody can go on long refusing to be
friends with me, can they, Stone, old man?” He released Edward and hugged
Stone again.
“Aw, let’s go,” said Stone.
As they filed along the verandah a dreadful picture of the visit came
into Edward’s mind. A picture of two despicable creatures, a dirty
gum-chewing schoolboy and a spotty-faced dentist’s assistant arriving on
a futile and ridiculous errand and being met and easily dismissed by a
competent man of the world in grey flannel trousers and a tweed coat—so
competent that he was not embarrassed by a five days’ growth of beard.
Edward wanted to hear the “things about Emily.” But he wanted still more
to hurt and irritate Tam. So he would not walk down to the river. He sat
sullenly in his chair. The chair-bearers ran down miles of steep steps
with loud triumphant cries. The chair tilted so acutely forward that
Edward had to cling to its arms. He stared down on to a strange chart of
towns and river. Now and then the chairmen would put the chair down and
wait for Tam and Stone who were walking. Then, in the distance, Tam’s
voice could be heard coming nearer, saying something like, “Well, I used
to smoke Lucky Strike in California, but only as a substitute. I have a
very sensitive palate ...” or, “My finger nails grow so fast in this damp
climate. I have to get Lucy to cut them. Do you know, Stone, I’d rather
run a mile than cut the nails of my right hand....”
There was no sound from Stone. Sometimes Tam laughed very loudly—stood in
the path and rocked with laughter—but the joke was apparently not Stone’s.
“But this is not the way to the ship?” said Edward to the chairmen as
they set him down on the edge of the river half a mile below the ship.
The four men, not understanding, laughed happily.
Tam and Stone arrived. “I asked. The ship doesn’t leave till tomorrow
morning. You must come and seek adventures with me in Chungking. If
we’re killed, the English and American governments will have a glorious
time registering protests. Funny, they don’t seem to care a damn for us
until we die. I loathe diplomats, don’t you? They’re always too clean for
words; they wash eighteen times a day behind their ears, I believe.”