1
THE day of sudden and dramatic peace was drawing near its close. Seated
on the parapet of a rifle pit Betty and Brachey looked out over the
red-brown valley. Long, faintly purple shadows lay along the hillside
and in the deeper hollows. From the compound, half-way down the slope,
a confusion of pleasant sounds came to their ears--youthful voices,
snatches of song, an energetically whistled Sousa march, the quaintly
plaintive whine of Chinese woodwinds--while above the roofs of tile
and iron within the rectangle of wall (that was still topped with brown
sand-bags) wisps of smoke drifted lazily upward.
“It seems queer,” mused he, aloud, “sitting here like this, with
everything so peaceful. During the fighting I didn't feel nervous,
but now I start at every new sound. I loathed it, too; but now, this
evening, I miss it, in a way.” He gazed moodily down into the short
trench. “Right there,” he said, “young Bartlett was hit.”
“And you brought him in under fire.”
“A Chinaman helped me.”
“Oh, it was you,” she said. “He wouldn't have done it. I watched
from the window.” Her chin was propped on two small lists; her eyes,
reflective, were looking out over the compound and the valley toward the
walled temple on the opposite slope with its ornate, curving roofs and
its little group of trees that were misty with young foliage. “I've been
thinking a good deal about that, and some other things. All you said,
back there on the ship, about independence and responsibility.”
“I don't believe I care to remember that,” said he quietly.
“But, John, if you will say startling, strong things to an
impressionable girl--and I suppose that's all I was then--you can't
expect her to forget them right away.”
His face relaxed into a faint, fleeting smile. But she went earnestly
on.
“Of course I know it wasn't really long ago. Not if you measure it by
weeks. But if you measure it by human experience it was--well, years.”
He was sober again; cheek on hand, gazing out into those lengthening,
deepening shadows.
“That was what we quarreled about, John. I felt terribly upset. I was
blue--I can't tell you! Just the thought of all your life meant to you,
and how I seemed to be spoiling it.”
A strong hand drew one of hers down and closed about it. “I'm going to
try to tell you something, dear,” he said. “You thought that what I said
to you, on the ship, was an expression of a real philosophy of life.”
“But what else could it have been, John?”
“It was just a chip--right here.” He raised her hand and with it patted
his shoulder. “It was what I'd tried for years to believe. I was bent on
believing it. You know, Betty, the thing we assert most positively isn't
our real faith. We don't have to assert that. It's likely to be
what we're trying to convince ourselves of.... I'm just beginning to
understand that, just lately, since you came into my life--and during
the fighting. I had to bolster myself up in the faith that a man can run
away, live alone, because it seemed to be the only basis on which I, as
I was, could deal with life. The only way I could get on at all. But you
see what happened to me. Life followed me and finally caught me, away
out here in China. No, you can't get away from it. You can't live
selfishly. It won't work. We're all in together. We've got to think
of the others..... I'm like a beginner now--going to school to life.
I don't even know what I believe. Not any more. I--I'm eager to learn,
from day to day. The only thing I'm sure of”... he turned, spoke with
breathless awe in his voice... “is that I love you, dear That's the
foundation on which my life has got to be built. It's my religion, I'm
afraid.”
Betty's eyes filled; her little fingers twisted in among his; but she
didn't speak then.
The shadows stretched farther and farther along the hillside. The sun,
a huge orange disc descending amid coppery strips of shining cloud,
touched the rim of the western hills; slid smoothly, slowly down behind
it, leaving a glowing vault of gold and rose and copper overhead and a
luminous haze in the valley. Off to the eastward, toward Shau T'ing and
the crumbling ruins of the Southern Wall (which still winds sinuously
for hundreds of miles in and out of the valleys, and over and around the
hills) the tumbling masses of upheaved rock and loess were deeply purple
against a luminous eastern sky.
“Will you let me travel with you, John? I've thought that I could draw
while you write. Maybe I could even help you with your books. It would
be wonderful--exploring strange places. I'd like to go down through
Yunnan, and over the border into Siam and Assam and the Burmah country.
I've been reading about it, sitting in the hospital at night.”
“There would be privation--and dangers.”
“I don't care.”
“You wouldn't be afraid?”
“Not with you. And if--if anything happened to you, I'd want to go,
too.... Of course, there'd be other problems coming up. Don't think I'm
altogether impractical, dear.”
“What are you thinking of?”
She hesitated. “Children, John. I know we shan't either of us be
satisfied to live just for our happiness in each other. I couldn't help
thinking about that, watching you here, during the siege.”
“No, we shan't.”
“And with your work what it is--what it's got to be there's our first
problem.”
“We'll have to take life as it comes.”
“Yes, I know.” They were silent again. Gradually the brilliant color
was fading from the sky and the distant hills softening into mystery....
“Father says that we'll find marriage a job--”
“Oh, it's that!”
“Full of surprises and compromises and giving up. He says it's very
difficult, but very wonderful.”
“I should think,” said Brachey, his voice somewhat unsteady, “that it
would be the most wonderful job in the world. Its very complexities, the
nature of the demands it must make.”
“I know!”
After a long silence he asked, so abruptly that she looked swiftly up:
“Do you ever pray, dear?”
“Why--yes, I do.”
“Will you teach me? I've tried--up here in the trenches. I've thought
that maybe I'd pick up a copy of the English prayer-book. They'd have it
at Shanghai or Tientsin....”
2
Dusk was mounting the hill-slopes.
“It was a strange talk father and I had. Nearly all the afternoon--while
you were checking up ammunition and things. It's the first time he's
really sat down with me like that like a friend, I mean--and talked out,
just as he felt. Oh, he's been kind. But it's queer about father and
me. You see, when they sent me over to the States, I was really only a
child. Mother was dead then, you know. Father was always hoping to get
over to see me, but there was all the strain of building up the missions
after the Boxer trouble, and then he'd had his vacation. And he couldn't
afford to bring me out here just for the journey.”
Brachey broke in here. “Did you ask him if he would marry us?”
She nodded. “Yes. And he won't. That's partly what I'm going to tell
you. He's resigned.”
“From the church?”
“Yes. He thought of having Mr. Boatwright do it. But it seems that his
position is rather difficult. On account of his wife. She'll never be
friendly to us.”
“Oh, no!”
“I could see, though, that Dad was glad about our plan for an early
wedding. Of course, he's had me to think of, every minute. He did say
that the certain knowledge that I'm cared for will make it easier for
him to carry out his plans. But he wouldn't tell me what the plans are.
It's odd. He doesn't like to think of me as a responsibility. I could
see that. I mean, that he might have to do something he didn't believe
in in order to earn money for me. He said that he's been for years in
a false position. I never saw him so happy. He acts as if he'd been set
free.”
“Perhaps he has,” Brachey reflected aloud. “It is strange--almost as if
we represented opposite swings of the pendulum, he and I. Perhaps we
do. I've not had enough responsibility, he's had too much. Probably one
extreme's as unhealthy as the other.”
“I've worried some about him, John. But he begs me not to. He's planning
now to sell all his things.”
“All?”
“Everything. Books, even. And his desk, that he's had since the first
years out here. Mr. Withery is going to be in charge at T'ainan, and
Dad's leaving the final arrangements to him.”
“You speak as if your father were going away, far off. And in a hurry.”
“He is. That's the strange thing. Just to tell about it, like this,
makes it seem'--well, almost wild. But when you talk with him you feel
all right about it. He's so steady and sure. Just as if at last he's hit
on the truth.”
The night drew its cloak swiftly over the valley. For a long time after
this conversation they sat there in silent communion with the dim hills;
she nestling in his arms; he dreaming of the years to come in which his
life--such was his hope--might through love find balance and warmth.
3
Doane was at the residence when Brachey left Betty there--at the door,
chatting with M. Pourmont. He walked away with Brachey. And the tired
but still genial Frenchman looked after them with a puzzled frown.
“Stroll a bit with me, will you?” said Doane. “I've got a few things to
say to you.” And outside the gate, he added soberly: “About the beastly
thing I did.”
“I've forgotten that,” said Brachey; stiffly, in spite of himself.
“No, you haven't. You never will. Neither shall I. What I have to say is
just this--it was an overwrought, half-mad man who attacked you.”
“Of course, I've come to see that. All you'd been through.”
“What I'd been through, Brachey, wasn't merely hardship, fighting,
wounds. It was something else, the wreck of my life. I'd had to stand
by, in a way, and look at the wreckage. I was doing the wrong thing,
living wrong, living a lie. For years I fought it, without being able
to see that I was fighting life itself. You see, Brachey, the power
of dogmatic thinking is great. It circumscribed my sense of truth for
years.”
He fell silent for a moment, looking up at the stars. Then, simply, he
added this:
“I want you to know the whole truth. I feel that it is due you. My
struggle ended in sin. The plainest kind--with a woman--and without a
shred of even human justification. Just degradation.... I can see now
that it was a terrific shock. It nearly pulled me under, very nearly.
They want me to stay in the church, but I can't, of course.”
“No,” said Brachey, “you wouldn't want to do that.”
“I couldn't. I went through the more or less natural morbid phases, of
course. That attack on you--”
“That was partly exhaustion,” said Brachey. “You weren't in condition
to analyze a situation that would have been difficult for anybody. And
of course I was in the position of breaking my pledge to you.”
“It was more than that, Brachey. The primitive resurgence in me simply
reached its climax then. No--let me have this out! I suspected you
because I had learned to suspect myself. That blow was a direct result
of my own sin. And I want you to know that I've come to see it for what
it was.”
“H'm!” mused Brachey. They were standing by a pile of weathering
timbers, beside the old Chinese highway. “Shall we sit a while?”
Then--“I'd have to think about that.” Finally--“I don't know but what
your analysis is sound. But”--he mused longer, then, his voice clouded
with emotion, broke out with--“God, man, what you must have suffered!
And after our row.... I can't bear to think of it.” And then, quite
forgetting himself, he rested a hand on Doane's arm. It was perhaps the
first time in his adult life that he had done so demonstrative a thing.
Doane compressed his lips, in the darkness, and stared away.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, after a moment, “I've suffered, of course. I even
made a rather cowardly try at suicide.”
“No--not--”
“On my return from Shau T'ing I walked into the Looker lines in broad
daylight. I rather hoped to go out that way. But the fighting was over.
I couldn't even get killed.”
He seemed as confiding as a child, this grave powerful man. And he was
Betty's father! Brachey was sensitively eager to help him.
“Betty said you had new plans. I wonder if you would feel like telling
me of them.”
“Yes. I've meant to.”
“Are you going back to the States?”
“No. Not now. Not with things like this. My worldly possessions, when
everything is sold, will probably come down to a thousand or fifteen
hundred dollars. My library is worth a good deal more than that, but
won't bring it. I have a little in cash; not much. I've estimated that
two hundred dollars--gold, not Mex.--will get me down to Shanghai
and tide me over the first few delays. I'm giving Betty the rest, and
arranging for Withery to turn over to her the proceeds of any sale.”
“But what are you going to do down there?”
“Work. Preferably, for a while, with my hands.”
“You don't mean at common labor?”
“Yes. Why not? I have a real gift for it. And I'm very strong.”
“That would mean putting yourself with yellow coolies. The whites
wouldn't like it; probably they wouldn't let you. And you have a brain.
You're a trained executive.”
“I won't take a small mental job. A large one---that would really keep
me busy--yes. But there'll be no chance of that at first. And I must
be fully occupied. I want to be outdoors. I may take up some branch of
engineering, by way of private study. But at the moment I really don't
care....” He smiled, in the dark. Brachey felt the smile in his voice
when he spoke again. “I was forty-five years old this spring, Brachey.
That's young, really. I have this great physical strength. And I'm free.
If I have sinned, I have really no bad habits. I probably shan't be
happy long without slipping my shoulders under some new burden--a good
heavy one. But don't you see how interesting it will be to start new, at
nothing, with nothing? What an adventure?”
“It won't be with nothing, quite. There's your experience, your
mental equipment. With that, and health, and a little luck you can do
anything.”
“Yes,” said Doane, “it is, after all, a clean start. I've been terribly
shaken.”
“So have I,” said Brachey gently. “And I'm starting new, too.” He rose;
stood for a moment quietly thinking; then turned and extended his hand.
“Mr. Doane, here we are, meeting at life's crossroads. You're starting
out on something pretty like my old road, and I'm starting on a road not
altogether unlike yours. The next few years are going to mean everything
to each of us. And what we both do with our lives is going to mean
everything to Betty. Let's, between us, make Betty happy.” His voice was
a little out of control, but he went resolutely on. “Let's, between us,
help her to grow--enrich her life all we can--give her every chance to
develop into the woman your daughter has a right to become!”
Doane sprang up; stood over him; enveloped his hand in a huge fist and
nearly crushed it.
4
The Reverend Henry Withery came in that night, on a shaggy Manchu pony,
with his luggage behind on a cart. And late the following afternoon a
wedding took place at the residence. A great event was made of it by
the young people of the compound. The hills were searched for flowers.
A surprising array of presents appeared. Mrs. Boatwright was prevented
from attending by a severe headache, but her husband, at the last
moment, came. The other T'ainan folk were there. His Excellency, Pao
Ting Chuan, with fifteen attendant mandarins, in full official costume,
among whom was Mr. Po Sui-an, lent the color of Oriental splendor to the
occasion. His Excellency's gift was a necklace of jade with a pendant of
ancient worked gold. Withery performed the ceremony; and Griggsby Doane
gave the bride.
The young couple were leaving in the morning for Peking, at which city
the groom purposed continuing for the present his study of the elements
of unrest in China.
Directly after the wedding and reception a remarkably elaborate dinner
was served in the large diningroom, at winch Griggsby Doane appeared for
a brief time to join in the merrymaking with an appearance of _savoir
faire_ that M. Pourmont, shrewdly taking in, found reassuring; but he
early took a quiet leave.
At dusk, after the talking machine had been turned on and the many young
men were dancing enthusiastically with the few young women, the newly
wedded couple slipped out and walked down to the gate. Here, outside in
the purple shadows, they waited until a huge man appeared, dressed in
knickerbockers, a knapsack on his back and a weatherbeaten old walking
stick in his hand.
The bride clung to him for a long moment. The groom wrung his hand.
Then the two stood, arm in arm, looking after him as he descended to
the highroad and strode firmly, rapidly eastward, disappearing in the
village and reappearing on the slope beyond, waving a final farewell
with stick and cap--very dimly they could see him--just before he
stepped through the old scenic arch at the top of the hill.
THE END