I
UNWILLING either to confess like a naughty child or to go on keeping
this rather large and distinctly exciting secret under cover, Betty,
at teatime, brought the matter to an issue. The morning ashore had been
difficult. Mr. Brachey had severely ignored her, going about Nagasaki
alone, lunching in austere solitude at the hotel.
She said, settling herself in the deck chair:
“Mrs. Hasmer, will you ask Mr. Brachey to have tea with us?”
After a long silence the older woman asked, stiffly: “Why, my dear?”
Betty compressed her lips.
Doctor Hasmer saved the situation by saying quietly, “I'll ask him.”
It was awkward from the first. The man was angular and unyielding.
And Mrs. Hasmer, though she tried, couldn't let him alone. She was
determined to learn whether he was married. She led up to the direct
question more otariously than she knew. Finally it came. They were
speaking of his announced plan to travel extensively in the interior of
China.
“It must be quite delightful to wander as you do,” she said. “Of course,
if one has ties... you, I take it, are an unmarried man, Mr. Brachey ?”
Betty had to lower her face to hide the color that came. If only Mrs.
Hasmer had a little humor! She was a dear kind woman; but this!...
The journalist looked, impassively enough, but directly, at his
questioner.
She met his gaze. They were flint on steel, these two natures.
“You are obviously not married,” she repeated.
He looked down at his teacup; thinking. Then, abruptly, he set it down
on the deck, got up, muttered something that sounded like, “If you will
excuse me...” and strode away.
Betty went early to her cabin that evening.
She had no more than switched on her light when the Chinese steward came
with a letter.
She locked the door then, and looked at the unfamiliar handwriting. It
was small, round, clear; the hand of a particular man, a meticulous man.
who has written much with a pen.
She turned down the little wicker seat. Her cheeks were suddenly hot,
her pulse bounding high.
She skimmed it, at first, clear to the signature, “Jonathan Brachey”;
then went back and read it through, slowly.
“I was rude again just now,” (it began). “As I told you last night, it
is best for me not to see people. I am not a social being. Clearly, from
this time on, it will be impossible for me to talk with this Mrs.
Hasmer. I shall not try again.
“I could not answer her question. But to you I must speak. It would be
difficult even to do this if we were to meet again, and talk. But,
as you will readily see, we must not meet again, beyond the merest
greeting.
“I was married four years ago. After only a few weeks my wife left
me. The reasons she gave were so flippant as to be absurd. She was a
beautiful and, it has seemed to me, a vain, spoiled, quite heartless
woman. I have not seen her since. Two years ago she became infatuated
with another man, and wrote asking me to consent to a divorce. I refused
on the ground that I did not care to enter into the legal intrigues
preliminary to a divorce in the state of her residence. Since then, I am
told, she has changed her residence to a state in which 'desertion' is
a legal ground. But I have received no word of any actual move on her
part.
“It is strange that I should be writing thus frankly to you. Strange,
and perhaps wrong. But you have reached out to me more of a helping hand
than you will ever know. Our talk last night meant a great deal to me.
To you I doubtless seemed harsh and forbidding. It is true that I am
that sort of man, and therefore am best alone. It is seldom that I meet
a person with whom my ideas are in agreement.
“I trust that you will find every happiness in life. You deserve to. You
have the great gift of feeling. I could almost envy you that. It is a
quality I can perceive without possessing. An independent mind, a strong
gift of logic, stands between me and all human affection. I must say
what I think, not what I feel.
“I make people unhappy. The only corrective to such a nature is work,
and, whenever possible, solitude. But I do not solicit your pity. I find
myself, my thoughts, excellent company.
“With your permission I will keep the drawing. It will have a peculiar
and pleasant meaning to me.”
2
Betty lowered the letter, breathing out the single word, “Well!”
What on earth could she have said or done to give him any such footing
in her life?
She read it again. And then again.
An amazing man!
She made, ready to go to bed, slowly, dawdling, trying to straighten out
the curious emotional pressures on her mind.
She read the letter yet again; considered it.
Finally, after passing through many moods leading up to a tender
sympathy for this bleak life, and then passing on into a state of sheer
nervous excitement, she deliberately dressed again and went out on deck.
He stood by the rail, smoking.
“You have my letter?” he asked.
“Yes. I've read it.” She was oddly, happily relieved at finding him.
“You shouldn't have come.”
She had no answer to this. It seemed hardly relevant. She smiled, in the
dark.
They fell to walking the deck. After a time, shyly, tacitly, a little
embarrassed, they went up forward again.
The ship was well out in the Yellow Sea now. The bow rose and fell
slowly, rhythmically, beneath them.
Moved to meet his letter with a response in kind, she talked of herself.
“It seems strange to be coming back to China.”
“You've been long away?”
“Six years. My mother died when I was thirteen. Father thought it would
be better for me to be in the States. My uncle, father's brother, was
in the wholesale hardware business in New York, and lived in Orange, and
they took me in. They were always nice to me. But last fall Uncle Frank
came down with rheumatic gout. He's an invalid now. It must have been
pretty expensive. And there was some trouble in his business. They
couldn't very well go on taking care of me, so father decided to have me
come back to T'ainan-fu.” She folded her hands in her lap.
He lighted his pipe, and smoked reflectively.
“That will be rather hard for you, won't it?” he remarked, after a time.
“I mean for a person of your temperament. You are, I should say, almost
exactly my opposite in every respect. You like people, friends. You are
impulsive, doubtless affectionate. I could be relatively happy, marooned
among a few hundred millions of yellow folk--though I could forego the
missionaries. But you are likely, I should think, to be starved there.
Spiritually--emotionally.”
“Do you think so?” said she quietly.
“Yes.” He thought it, over “The life of a mission compound isn't exactly
gay.”
“No, it isn't.”
“And you need gaiety.”
“I wonder if I do. I haven't really faced it, of course. I'm not facing
it now.”
“Just think a moment. You've not even landed in China yet. You're under
no real restraint--still among white people, on a white man's ship,
eating in European hotels at the ports. You aren't teaching endless
lessons to yellow children, day in, day out. You aren't shut up in an
interior city, where it mightn't even he safe for you to step outside
the gate house alone. And yet you're breaking bounds. Right now--out
here with me.”
Already she was taking his curious bluntness for granted. She said now,
simply, gently:
“I know. I'm sitting out here at midnight with a married man. And I
don't seem to mind. Of course you're not exactly married. Still... A few
days ago I wouldn't have thought it possible.”
“Did you tell the Hasmers that you were out here last night?”
“No.”
“Shall you tell them about this?”
She thought a moment; then, as simply, repeated: “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don't know. It's the way I feel.”
He nodded. “You feel it's none of their business.”
“Well--yes.”
“Of course, I ought to take you back, now.”
“I don't feel as if I were doing wrong. Oh, a little, but...”
“I ought to take you back.”
She rested a hand on his arm. It was no more than a girlish gesture. She
didn't notice that he set his teeth and sat very still.
“I've thought this, though,” she said. “If I'm to meet you out here
like--like this--”
“But you're not to.”
“Well... here we are!”
“Yes... here we are!”
“I was going to say, it's dishonest, I think, for us to avoid each other
during the day. If we're friends...”
“If we're friends we'd better admit it.”
“Yes. I meant that.”
He fell to working at his pipe with a pocket knife She watched him until
he was smoking again.
“Mrs. Hasmer won't like it.”
“I can't help that.”
“No. Of course.” He smoked. Suddenly he broke out, with a gesture so
vehement that it startled her: “Oh, it's plain enough--we're on a ship,
idling, dreaming, floating from a land of color and charm and quaint
unreality to another land that has always enchanted me, for all the
dirt and disease, and the smells. It's that! Romance! The old web!
It's catching us. And we're not even resisting. No one could blame
you--you're young, charming, as full of natural life as a young flower
in the morning. But I... I'm not romantic. To-night, yes! But next
Friday, in Shanghai, no!”
Betty turned away to hide a smile.
“You think I'm brutal? Well--I am.”
“No, you're not brutal.”
“Yes, I am.... But my God! You in T'ainanfu! Child, it's wrong!”
“It is simply a thing I can't help,” said she.
They fell silent. The pulse of the great dim ship was soothing. One bell
sounded. Two bells. Three.
3
A man of Jonathan Brachey's nature couldn't know the power his nervous
bold thoughts and words were bound to exert in the mind of a girl like
Betty. In her heart already she was mothering him. Every word he spoke
now, even the strong words that startled her, she enveloped in warm
sentiment.
To Brachey's crabbed, self-centered nature she was like a lush oasis in
the arid desert of his heart. He could no more turn his back on it than
could any tired, dusty wanderer. He knew this. Or, better, she was like
a mirage. And mirages have driven men out of their wits.
So romance seized them. They walked miles the next day, round and
round the deck. Mrs. Hasmer was powerless, and perturbed. Her husband
counseled watchful patience. Before night all the passengers knew that
the two were restless apart. They found corners on the boat deck, far
from all eyes.
That night Mrs. Hasmer came to Betty's door; satisfied herself that the
girl was actually undressing and going to bed. Not one personal word
passed.
And then, half an hour later, Betty, dressed again, tiptoed out. Her
heart was high, touched with divine recklessness. This, she supposed,
was wrong; but right or wrong, it was carrying her out of her girlish
self. She couldn't stop.
Brachey was fighting harder; but to little purpose. They had these two
days now. That was all. At Shanghai, and after, it would be, as he had
so vigorously said, different. Just these two days! He saw, when she
joined him on the deck, that she was riding at the two days as if they
were to be her last on earth. Intensely, soberly happy, she was passing
through a golden haze of dreams, leaving the future to be what it might.
They sat, hand in hand, in the bow. She sang, in a light pretty voice,
songs of youth in a young land--college ditties, popular negro melodies,
amusing little street songs.
Very, very late, on the last evening, after a long silence--they had
mounted to the boat deck--he caught her roughly in his arms and kissed
her.
She lay limply against him. For a moment, a bitter moment--for now, in
an instant, he knew that she had never thought as far as this--he feared
she had fainted. Then he felt her tears on his cheek.
He lifted her to her feet, as roughly.
She swayed away from him leaning against a boat.
He said, choking:
“Can you get down the steps all right?”
She bowed her head. He made no effort to help her down the steps. They
walked along the deck toward the main companionway. Suddenly, with an
inarticulate sound, he turned, plunged in at the smoking-room door, and
was gone.
Early in the morning the ship dropped anchor in the muddy Woosung. The
breakfast hour came around, then quarantine inspection; but the silent
pale Betty, her moody eyes searching restlessly, caught no glimpse of
him. He must have taken a later launch than the one that carried Betty
and the Hasmers up to the Bund at Shanghai. And during their two days in
the bizarre, polyglot city, with its European façade behind which swarms
all China, it became clear that he wasn't stopping at the Astor House.
The only letter was from her father at T'ainan-fu.
She watched every mail; and inquired secretly at the office of the river
steamers an hour before starting on the long voyage up the Yangtse; but
there was nothing.
Then she recalled that he had never asked for her address, or for her
father's full name. They had spoken of T'ainan-fu. He might or might not
remember it.
And that was all.