1
PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village
called Shau T'ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the
night in a native caravansary, his folding cot set up on the earthen
floor. The room was dirty, dilapidated, alive with insects and thick
with ancient odors. A charcoal fire in the crumbling brick _kang_ gave
forth fumes of gas that suggested the possibility of asphyxiation before
morning. Brachey sent his guide, a fifty-year-old Tientsin Chinese
of corpulent figure, known, for convenience, as “John,” for water and
extinguished the fire. The upper half of the inner wall was a wooden
lattice covered with paper; and by breaking all the paper squares within
his reach, Brachey contrived to secure a circulation of air. Next he
sent John for a piece of new yellow matting, and by spreading this under
the cot created a mild sensation of cleanliness, which, though it belied
the facts, made the situation a thought more bearable. For Brachey,
though a veteran traveler, was an extremely fastidious man. He bore dirt
and squalor, had borne them at intervals for years, without ever losing
his squeamish discomfort at the mere thought of them. But the stern
will that was during these, years the man's outstanding trait, and his
intense absorption in his work, had kept him driving ahead through all
petty difficulties. The only outward sign of the strain it put him to
was an increased irritability.
He traveled from Shau T'ing to Ping Yang, the next day in an unroofed
freight ear without a seat, crowded in with thirty-odd Chinese and their
luggage. During the entire day he spoke hardly a word. His two servants
guarded him from contact with the other natives; but he ignored even
his own men. At a way station, where the engine waited half an hour for
water and coal, a lonely division engineer from Lombardy called out a
greeting in bad French. Brachey coldly snubbed the man.
He planned to pick up either a riding animal or a mule litter at Ping
Yang. As it turned out, the best John could secure was a freight cart;
springless, of course. T'ainan was less than a hundred miles away, yet
he was doomed to three days of travel in a creaking, hard-riding cart
through the sunken roads, where dust as fine as flour sifts through the
clothing and rubs into the pores of the skin, and to two more nights at
native inns--with little hope of better accommodation at T'ainan.
By this time Brachey was in a state of nerves that alarmed even himself.
Neither will nor imagination was proving equal to this new sort of
strain. The confusion of motives that had driven him out here provided
no sound justification for the journey. When he tried to think work now,
he found himself thinking Betty. And misgivings were creeping into his
mind. It amounted to demoralization.
He walked out after the solitary dinner of soup and curried chicken and
English strawberry jam. The little village was settling into evening
calm. Men and boys, old women and very little girls, sat in the shop
fronts--here merely rickety porticoes with open doorways giving on dingy
courtyards--or played about the street. Carpenters were still working on
the roof of the new railway station. Three young men, in an open field,
were playing decorously with a shuttlecock of snake's skin and duck
feathers, deftly kicking it from player to player. Farther along the
street a middle-aged man of great dignity, clad in a silken robe and
black skull-cap with the inevitable red knot, was flying a colored kite
... through all this, Jonathan Brachey, the expert observer, wandered
about unseeing.
2
Farther up the hill, however, rounding a turn in the road, he stopped
short, suddenly alive to the vivid outer world. A newly built wall of
brick stood before him, enclosing an area of two acres or more, within
which appeared the upper stories of European houses, as well as the
familiar curving roofs of Chinese tile. And just outside the walls two
young men and two young women, in outing clothes, white folk all, were
playing tennis. To their courteous greeting he responded frigidly.
Later a somewhat baffled young Australian led him to the office of M.
Pourmont and presented him.
The distinguished French engineer, looking up from his desk, beheld a
tall man in homespun knickerbockers, a man with a strong if slightly
forbidding face. He fingered the card.
“Ah, Monsieur Brashayee! Indeed, yes! It is ze _grand plaisir!_ But it
mus' not be true zat you go on all ze vay to T'ainan-fu.”
“Yes,” Brachey replied with icy courtesy, “I am going to T'ainan.”
“But ze time, he is not vat you call---ripe. One makes ze trouble. It
is only a month zat zay t'row ze _pierre_ at me, zay tear ze cart of me,
zay destroy ze ear of me! _Choses affreuses!_ I mus'not let you go!''
Brachey heard this without taking it in any degree to himself. He was
looking at the left ear of this stout, bearded Parisian, from which,
he observed, the lobe was gone.... Then, with a quickening pulse, he
thought of Betty out there in T'ainan, in real danger.
“Come wiz me!” cried M. Pourmont. “I vill show you vat ve do--_nous
ici_.” And snatching up a bunch of keys he led Brachey out about the
compound. He opened one door upon what appeared to be a heap of old
clothes.
“_Des sac â terres_,” he explained.
Brachey picked one up. “Ah,” he remarked, coldly
interested--“sand-bags!”
“Yes, it is zat. Sand-bag for ze vail. Ve have ze _femme Chinoise_--ze
Chinese vimmen--sew zem all every day. And you vill look...” He led the
way with this to a corner of the grounds where the firm loess had been
turned up with a pick. “It is so, Monsieur Brashayee, _partout_. All is
ready. In von night ve fill ze bag, ve are a fort, ve are ready.... See!
An' see!”
He pointed out a low scaffolding built here and there along the compound
wall for possible use as a firing step. Just outside the wall crowding
native houses were being torn down. “I buy zem,” explained M. Pourmont
with a chuckle, “an' I clear avay. I make a _glacis, nest ce pas?_” On
several of the flat roofs of supply sheds along the wall were heaps of
the bags, ready filled, covered from outside eyes with old boards. In
one building, under lock and key, were two machine guns and box on box
of ammunition. Back in M. Pourmont's private study was a stand of modern
rifles.
“You vill see by all zis vat is ze t'ought of myself,” concluded the
genial Frenchman. “Ze trouble he is real. It is not safe to-day in
Hansi. Ze Société of ze Great Eye--ze Lookair--he grow, he _fait
l'exercice_, he make ze t'reat. You vill not go to T'ainan, alone. It is
not right!”
Brachey was growing impatient now.
“Oh, yes,” he said, more shortly than he knew. “I will go on.”
“You have ze arm--ze revolvair?”
Brachey shook his head.
“You vill, zen, allow me to give you zis.”
But Brachey declined the weapon stiffly, said good night, and returned
to the inn below.
The next morning a Chinese servant brought a note from M Pourmont. If he
would go--thus that gentleman--and if he would not so much as carry
arms for protection, at least he must be sure to get into touch with
M. Griggsby Duane at once on arriving at T'ianan. M. Doane was a man of
strength and address. He would be the only support that M. Brachey could
look for in that turbulent corner of the world.
3
The lamp threw a flickering unearthly light, faintly yellow, on the
tattered wall-hangings that bore the Chinese characters signifying
happiness and hospitality and other genial virtues. The lamp was of
early Biblical pattern, nor unlike a gravy boat of iron, full of oil or
grease, in which the wick floated. It stood on the roughly-made table.
The inn compound was still, save for the stirring and the steady
crunching of the horses and mules at their long manger across the
courtyard.
Brachey, half undressed, sat on his cot, staring at the shadowy brick
wall. His face was haggard. There were hollows under the eyes. His hands
lay, listless, on his knees. The fire that had been for a fortnight
consuming him was now, for the moment, burnt out.
But at least, he now felt, the particular storm was over. That there
might be recurrences, he recognized. That girl had found her way,
through all the crust, to his heart. The result had been nearly
unbearable while it lasted. It had upset his reason; made a fool of him.
Here he was--now--less than a day's journey from her. He couldn't go
back; the thought stirred savagely what he thought of as the shreds of
his self-respect. And yet to go on was, or seemed, unthinkable. The best
solution seemed to be merely to make use of T'ainan as a stopping place
for the night and pass on to some other inland city. But this thought
carried with it the unnerving fear that he would fail to pass on, that
he might even communicate with her.
His life, apparently, was a lie. He had believed since his boyhood that
human companionship lay apart from the line of his development. Even
his one or two boy friends he had driven off. The fact embittered his
earlier life; but it was so. In each instance he had said harsh things
that the other could not or would not overlook. His marriage had
contributed further proof. Along with his pitilessly detached judgment
of the woman went the sharp consciousness that he, too, had failed
at it. He couldn't adapt his life to the lives of others. Since that
experience--these four years--by living alone, keeping away, keeping
clear out of his own land, even out of touch with the white race, and
making something of a success of it, he had not only proved himself
finally, he had even, in a measure, justified himself. Yet now, a chance
meeting with a nineteen-year-old girl had, at a breath, destroyed the
laborious structure of his life. It all came down to the fact that
emotion had at last caught him as surely as it had caught the millions
of other men--men he had despised. He couldn't live now without feeling
again that magic touch of warmth in his breast. He couldn't go on alone.
He bowed his head over it. Round and round went his thoughts, cutting
deeper and deeper into the tempered metal of his mind.
He said to her: “I am selfish.”
He had supposed he was telling the simple truth. But clearly he wasn't.
At this moment, as at every moment since that last night on the boat
deck, he was as dependent on her as a helpless child. And now he wasn't
even selfish. These two days since the little talk with M. Pourmont he
had been stirred deeply by the thought that she was in danger.
Over and over, with his almost repelling detachment of mind, he reviewed
the situation. She might not share his present emotion. Perhaps she had
recovered quickly from the romantic drift that had caught them on the
ship. She was a sensitive, expressive little thing; quite possibly the
new environment had caught her up and changed her, filled her life with
fresh interest or turned it in a new direction. With this thought was
interwoven the old bitter belief that no woman could love him. It must
have been that she was stirred merely by that romantic drift and had
endowed him, the available man, with the charms that dwelt only in her
own fancy. Young girls were impressionable; they did that.
But suppose--it was excitingly implausible--she hadn't swung away from
him. What would her missionary folk say to him and his predicament?
Sooner or later he would be free; but would that clear him with these
dogmatic persons, with her father? Probably not. And if not,
wouldn't the fact thrust unhappiness upon her? You could trust these
professionally religious people, he believed, to make her as unhappy as
they could--nag at her.
Suppose, finally, the unthinkable thing, that she--he could hardly
formulate even the thought; he couldn't have uttered it--loved him. What
did he know of her? Who was she? What did she know of adult life? What
were her little day-by-day tastes and impulses, such as make or break
any human companionship...? And who was he? What right had he to take on
his shoulders the responsibility for a human life... a delicately joyous
little life? For that was what it came down to. It came to him, now,
like a ray of blipdirig light, that he who quickens the soul of a girl
must carry the burden of that soul to his grave. At times during the
night he thought wistfully of his freedom, of his pleasant, selfish
solitude and the inexigent companionship of his work.
His suit-case lay on the one chair. He drew it over; got out the huge,
linen-mounted map of the Chinese Empire that is published by the China
Inland Mission, and studied the roads about T'ainan. That from the
east--his present route--swung to the south on emerging from the hills,
and approached the city nearly from that direction. Here, instead of
turning up into the city, he could easily enough strike south on the
valley road, perhaps reaching an apparently sizable village called Hung
Chan by night.
He decided to do that, and afterward to push southwest. It should be
possible to find a way out along the rivers tributary to the Yangtse,
reaching that mighty stream at either Ichang or Hankow. And he would
work diligently, budding up again the life that had been so quickly and
lightly overset. At least, for the time. He must try himself out This
riding his emotions wouldn't do. At some stage of the complicated
experience it was going to be necessary to stop and think. Of course,
if he should find after a reasonable time, say a few months, that the
emotion persisted, why then, with his personal freedom established, he
might write Betty, simply stating his case.
And after all this, on the following afternoon, dusty, tired of body and
soul, Jonathan Brachey rode straight up to the East Gate of T'ainan-fu.