The tourists returned to the Sha-mien at four o'clock. They were
silent and no longer observant, being more or less exhausted by the
tedious action of the chairs. Even Ah Cum had resumed his Oriental
shell of reserve. To reach the Sha-mien--and particularly the Hotel
Victoria--one crossed a narrow canal, always choked with rocking
sampans over and about which swarmed yellow men and women and
children in varied shades of faded blue cotton. At sunset the
swarming abruptly ceased; even the sampans appeared to draw closer
together, with the quiet of water-fowl. There is everywhere at
night in China the original fear of darkness.
From the portals of the hotel--scarcely fifty yards from the
canal--one saw the blank face of the ancient city of Canton. Blank
it was, except for a gate near the bridgehead. Into this hole in the
wall and out of it the native stream flowed from sunrise to sunset,
when the stream mysteriously ceased. The silence of Canton at night
was sinister, for none could prophesy what form of mob might
suddenly boil out.
No Cantonese was in those days permitted to cross to the Sha-mien
after sunset without a license. To simplify matters, he carried a
coloured paper lantern upon which his license number was painted in
Arabic numerals. It added to the picturesqueness of the Sha-mien
night to observe these gaily coloured lanterns dancing hither and
yon like June fireflies in a meadow.
Meantime the spinsters sought the dining room where tea was being
served. They had much to talk about, or rather Miss Prudence had.
"But she is a dear," said Angelina, timidly.
"I'll admit that. But I don't understand her; she's over my head.
She leaves me almost without comparisons. She is like some
character out of Phra the Phoenician: she's been buried for thirty
years and just been excavated. That's the way she strikes me. And
it's uncanny."
"But I never saw anybody more alive."
"Who wouldn't be lively after thirty years' sleep? Did you hear her
explain about beachcombers? And yet she looks at one with the
straightest glance I ever saw. Still, I'm glad she didn't accept my
invitation to join us. I shouldn't care to have attention
constantly drawn to us. This world over here! Everything's
upside-down or back-end-to. Humph!"
"What's the matter?"
"Sh!"
Spurlock passed by on the way to the bar. Apparently he did not see
his recent companions. There was a strained, eager expression on
his face.
"Going to befuddle himself between now and dinner," was the comment
of Prudence.
"The poor young man!" sighed Angelina.
"Pah! He's a fool. I never saw a man who wasn't."
"There was Father," suggested Angelina gently.
"Ninny! What did we know about Father, except when he was around
the house? But where is the girl? She said something about having
tea with us. I want to know more about her. I wonder if she has any
idea how oddly beautiful she is?"
Ruth at that precise moment was engaged by a relative wonder. She
was posing before the mirror, critically, miserably, defensively,
and perhaps bewilderedly. What was the matter with the dress? She
could not see. For the past four weeks mirrors had been her
delight, a new toy. Here was one that subtly mocked her.
Life is a patchwork of impressions, of vanishing personalities.
Each human contact leaves some indelible mark. The spinsters--who
on the morrow would vanish out of the girl's life for ever--had
already left their imprint upon her imagination. Clothes.
Henceforth Ruth would closely observe her fellow women and note the
hang of their skirts.
Around her neck was a little gold chain. She gathered up the chain,
revealing a locket which had lain hidden in her bosom. The locket
contained the face of her mother--all the family album she had. She
studied the face and tried to visualize the body, clothed in the
dress which had created the spinsters' astonishment. Very well.
To-morrow, when she returned to Hong-Kong, she would purchase a
simple but modern dress. Anything that drew attention to her must be
avoided.
She dropped the locket into its sweet hiding place. It was precious
for two reasons: it was the photograph of her beautiful mother whom
she could not remember, and it would identify her to the aunt in
Hartford.
She uttered a little ejaculative note of joy and rushed to the bed.
A dozen books lay upon the counterpane. Oh, the beautiful books!
Romance, adventure, love stories! She gathered up the books in her
arms and cuddled them, as a mother might have cuddled a child. Love
stories! It was of negligible importance that these books were
bound in paper; Romance lay unalterably within. All these wonderful
comrades, henceforth and for ever hers. She would never again be
lonely. Les Misérables, A Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, The
Last Days of Pompeii, The Marble Faun ... Love stories!
Until her arrival in Singapore, she had never read a novel.
Pilgrim's Progress, The Life of Martin Luther and Alice in
Wonderland (the only fairy-story she had been permitted to read)
were the sum total of her library. But in the appendix of the
dictionary she had discovered magic names--Hugo, Dumas, Thackeray,
Hawthorne, Lytton. She had also discovered the names of Grimm and
Andersen; but at that time she had not been able to visualize "the
pale slender things with gossamer wings"--fairies. The world into
which she was so boldly venturing was going to be wonderful, but
never so wonderful as the world within these paper covers. Already
Cosette was her chosen friend. Daily contact with actual human
beings all the more inclined her toward the imaginative.
Joyous, she felt the need of physical expression; and her body
began to sway sinuously, to glide and turn and twist about the
room. As she danced there was in her ears the faded echo of wooden
tom-toms.
Eventually her movements carried her to the little stand at the
side of the bed. There lay upon this stand a book bound in limp
black leather--the Holy Bible.
Her glance, absorbing the gilt letters and their significance,
communicated to her poised body a species of paralysis. She stood
without motion and without strength. The books slid from her arms
and fluttered to the floor. Presently repellance grew under the
frozen mask of astonishment and dissipated it.
"No!" she cried. "No, no!"
With a gesture, fierce and intolerant, she seized the Bible and
thrust it out of sight, into the drawer. Then, her body still tense
with the atoms of anger, she sat down upon the edge of the bed and
rocked from side to side. But shortly this movement ceased. The
recollection of the forlorn and loveless years--stirred into
consciousness by the unexpected confrontation--bent her as the high
wind bends the water-reed.
"My father!" she whispered. "My own father!"
Queerly the room and its objects receded and vanished; and there
intervened a series of mental pictures that so long as she lived
would ever be recurring. She saw the moonlit waters, the black
shadow of the proa, the moon-fire that ran down the far edge of the
bellying sail, the silent natives: no sound except the slapping of
the outrigger and the low sibilant murmur of water falling away
from the sides--and the beating of her heart. The flight.
How she had fought her eagerness in the beginning, lest it reveal
her ignorance of the marvels of mankind! The terror and ecstasy of
that night in Singapore--the first city she had ever seen! There
was still the impression that something akin to a miracle had
piloted her successfully from one ordeal to another.
The clerk at the Raffles Hotel had accorded her but scant interest.
She had, it was true, accepted doubtfully the pen he had offered.
She had not been sufficiently prompted in relation to the ways of
caravansaries; but her mind had been alert and receptive. Almost at
once she had comprehended that she was expected to write down her
name and address, which she did, in slanting cobwebby lettering,
perhaps a trifle laboriously. Ruth Enschede, Hartford, Conn. The
address was of course her destination, thousands of miles away, an
infinitesimal spot in a terrifying space.
She could visualize the picture she had presented, particularly the
battered papier-mâché kitbag at her feet. In Europe or in America
people would have smiled; but in Singapore--the half-way port of
the world--where a human kaleidoscope tumbles continuously east and
west, no one had remarked her.
She would never forget the agony of that first meal in the great
dining room. She could have dined alone in her room; but courage
had demanded that she face the ordeal and have done with it. Every
eye seemed focussed upon her; and yet she had known the sensation
to be the conceit of her imagination.
The beautiful gowns and the flashing bare shoulders and arms of the
women had disturbed and distressed her. Women, she had been taught,
who exposed the flesh of their bodies under the eyes of man were in
a special catagory of the damned. Almost instantly she had
recognized the fallacy of such a statement. These women could not
be bad, else the hotel would not have permitted them to enter!
Still, the scene presented a riddle: to give immunity to the black
women who went about all but naked and to damn the white for
exposing their shoulders!
She had eaten but little; all her hunger had been in her eyes--and
in her heart. Loneliness--something that was almost physical: as if
the vitality had been taken out of the air she breathed. The
longing to talk to someone! But in the end she had gone to her room
without giving in to the craving.
Once in the room, the door locked, the sense of loneliness had
dropped away from her as the mists used to drop away from the
mountain in the morning. Even then she had understood vaguely that
she had touched upon some philosophy of life: that one was never
lonely when alone, only in the midst of crowds.
Another picture slid across her vision. She saw herself begin a
slow, sinuous dance: and stop suddenly in the middle of a figure,
conscious that the dance was not impromptu, her own, but native--the
same dance she had quitted but a few minutes gone. She had fallen
into it naturally, the only expression of the dance she had ever
seen or known, and that a stolen sweet. That was odd: when young
people were joyous, they had to express it physically. But native!
She must watch out.
She remembered that she had not gone to bed until two o'clock in
the morning. She had carried a chair into the room veranda and had
watched and listened until the night silences had lengthened and
only occasionally she heard a voice or the rattle of rickshaw
wheels in the courtyard.
The great ordeal--that which she had most dreaded--had proved to be
no ordeal at all. The kindly American consul-general had himself
taken her to the bank, where her banknotes had been exchanged for a
letter of credit, and had thoroughly advised her. Everything had so
far come to pass as the withered old Kanaka woman had foretold.
"The Golden One knows that I have seen the world; therefore follow
my instructions. Never glance sideways at man. Nothing else
matters."
The prison bars of circumstance, they no longer encompassed her.
Her wings were oddly weak, but for all that she could fly. That was
the glorious if bewildering truth. She had left for ever the cage,
the galling leash: she was free. The misty caravans of which she
had dreamed were become actualities. She had but to choose. All
about her, hither and yon, lay the enticing Unknown. Romance! The
romance of passing faces, of wires that carried voices and words to
the far ends of the world, of tremendous mechanisms that propelled
ships and trains! And, oh the beautiful books!
She swiftly knelt upon the floor and once more gathered the books
to her heart.