|THE luncheon table of his excellency was simply set, with two chairs of
carven blackwood, behind a high painted screen of six panels. It was at
this screen that the first mate (left by a smiling attendant) gazed with
a frown of incredulity. Cap in hand, he stepped back and studied the
painting, a landscape representing a range of mountains rising above
mist in great rock-masses, chasms where tortured trees clung, towering,
lagged peaks, all partly obscured by the softly luminous vapor--a scene
of power and beauty. Much of the brighter color had faded into the
prevailing tones of old ivory yellow shading into some thing near
Rembrandt brown; though the original, reds and blues still held vividly
in the lower right foreground, where were pictured very small, exquisite
in detail yet of as trifling importance in the majestic scheme of the
painting as are man and his works in all sober Chinese thought when
considered in relation to the grim majesty of nature, a little friendly
cluster of houses, men at work, children at play, domestic animals, a
stream with a water buffalo, a bridge, a wayfarer riding a donkey,
and cultivated fields. The ideographic signature was in rich old gold,
inscribed with unerring decorative instinct on a flat rock surface.
The mate bent low and looked closely at the brush-work; then stepped
around an end panel and examined the texture of the silk.
“Ah!”--it was a musical deep voice, speaking in the mandarin
tongue--“you admire my screen, Griggsby Doane.” The name was pronounced
in English.
His excellency wore a short jacket of pale yellow over a skirt of blue,
both embroidered in large circles of lotus flowers around centers of
conventional good-fortune designs, in which the swastika was a leading
motive. His bared head was shaved only at the sides, as the top had long
been bald. He looked gentle and kind as he stood leaning on his cane
and extending a wrinkled hand; smiling in the fashion of forthright
friendship. The thin little gray beard, the unobtrusively courteous
eyes, the calm manner, all gave him an appearance of simplicity that
made it momentarily difficult to think of him as the great negotiator
of the tangled problems of statesmanship involved in the expansion of
Japan, the man who very nearly convinced Europe of American good faith
during the agitated discussion and correspondence that arose out of the
“Open Door” proposals of John Hay, a man known among the observant and
informed in London, Paris and Washington as a great statesman and a
greater gentleman.
“I thought at first”--thus the mate, touched by the fine honor done
him (an honor that would, he quickly felt, demand tact on the
bridge)--“that it was a genuine Kuo Hsi.”
“No. A copy.”
“So I see. A Ming copy--at least the silk appears to be Ming--the heavy
single strand, closely woven. And the seals date very closely. If it
were woven of double strands, even in the warp alone, I should not
hesitate to call it a genuine Northern Sung.”
“You observe closely, Griggsby Doane. It is supposed that Ch'uan Shih
made this copy.” His smile was now less one of kindness and courtesy
than, of genuine pleasure. “You shall see the original.”
“You have that also, Your Excellency?”
“In my home at Huang Chau.”
“I have never seen a genuine panting of Kuo Hsi. It would be a great
privilege. I have read some of the sayings attributed to him, as taken
down by his son. One I recall--'If the artist, without realizing his
ideal, paints landscapes with a careless heart, it is like throwing
earth upon a deity, or casting impurities into the clean wind.'”
“Yes,” added his excellency, almost eagerly, “and this--'To have in
landscape the opportunity of seeing water and peaks, of hearing the
cry of monkeys and the song of birds, without going from the room.'”
Servants appeared bearing covered dishes. His excellency placed the mate
in the seat commanding the wider view of the river. A clear broth was
served, followed by stewed shell fish with cassia mushrooms, steamed
sharks' fins set red with crabmeat and ham, roast duck stuffed with
young pine needles, and preserved pomegranates, carambolas and plums,
followed by small cups of rice wine.
The conversation lingered with the great Sung painters, passing
naturally then to the conflict during the eleventh and twelfth centuries
between the free vitality of Buddhist thought and the deadening
formalism of the Confucian tradition.
And Doane's thoughts, as he listened or quietly spoke, dwelt on the
attainments and character of this great man who was so simple and so
friendly. His excellency had spoken his own full name, Griggsby Doane,
which would mean that the wide-reaching, instantly responsive facilities
for gathering information that may be set at work by the glance of a
viceroy's eye or a movement of his jeweled finger had been brought into
play within the twenty-four hours.
“My heart is there in the Sung Dynasty,” his excellency said. “I never
look upon the old canals of Hang Chow or the ruins of stone-walled lotus
gardens by the Si-hu without sadness. And Kai-feng-fu to-day wrings my
heart.”
“Truly,” mused Doane, “it was in the days of Tang and Sung that the soul
of China so nearly found its freedom.”
“You indeed understand, Griggsby Doane!” The two English words stood out
with odd emphasis in the musical flow of cultured Chinese speech. “Had
that spirit endured, China would to-day, I like to think, have Korea
and Manchuria and Mongolia and Sin Kiang. China would not to-day wear
a piteous smile on the lips, turning the head to hide tears of shame,
while the Russians absorb our northern frontiers and the French draw
tribute from Annam and Yunnan, while the English control this great
valley of the Yangtze, while the Germans drive their mailed fist into
Shantung, and the Japanese send their spies throughout all our land and
stand insolently at the very gate of the Forbidden City. I could not,
perhaps, speak my heart freely to one of my own countrymen, but to you I
can say, Confucian scholar though they may term me, that since what you
call the thirteenth century there has been a gradual paralysis of the
will in China, a softening of the political brain.... You will permit an
old man this latitude? I have served China without thought of self
during nearly fifty years. To the Old Buddha I was ever a loyal servant.
If toward the new emperor and the empress dowager I find it impossible
to feel so deeply, my heart is yet devoted to the throne and to my
people. If while sent abroad in service of my country it has been given
me to see much of merit in Western ways, it is not that I have become a
revolutionist, a traitor to the government of my ancestors.”
There was a light in the kindly eyes; a strong ring in the deep voice.
He went on:
“No, I am not a traitor. It is not that. It is that my country has
suffered, is now prostrate, with a long sickness. She must be helped;
but she must as well help herself. She is like one who has lain too long
abed. She must think, arise, act. With my poor eyes I can see no other
hope for her. Even though I myself may suffer, I can not, in truth to
my own faith, punish those who, loving China as deeply as I myself love
her, yet feel that they must goad her until she awakens from her pitiful
sleep of more than six centuries.... Nor am I a republican. China is not
like your country. In an imperial throne I must believe. Yet, she must
listen to all, study all, draw from all. Freedom of thought there must
be. We must not longer worship books and the dead. We must learn to look
about us and on before.”
Their chairs were drawn about to the window's. Slowly the wide river
slipped off astern.
“But you, Griggsby Doane, why are you here? This is not the life for
which you so laboriously and so worthily prepared yourself. I knew of
you over in T'ainan-fu. You were a true servant of your faith. After the
dreadful year of the Boxers you returned to your task. And during the
trouble in nineteen hundred and seven, the fighting with the Great Eye
Society in Hansi, you conducted yourself with bravery. I was at Sian-fu
that year, and was well informed. Yet you gave up the church mission.”
The mate's eyes were fixed gloomily on the long vista of the river. For
a moment it seemed as if he would speak; and the viceroy, seeing his
lips part, leaned a little way forward; but then the lips were closed
tightly and the great head bent deliberately forward.
“I knew,” continued his excellency, “when the Asiatic Company of New
York was negotiating with me the contract for rebuilding the banks of
the Grand Canal in Kiang-su that you had gone from T'ainan, and that you
had, as well, left the church. You had even gone from China.”
“That was in nineteen nine,” said Doane, in the somber voice of one who
thinks moodily aloud. “I was in America then.”
“Yes, it was in your year nineteen nine. For a time those negotiations
hung, I recall, on the question of the means to be employed in dealing
with local resentments. The trouble over the Ho Shan Company in Hansi,
of which you knew so much and which you met with such noble courage, had
taught us all to move with caution.”
“My position in that Hansi trouble has not been clearly understood, Your
Excellency. I was there only, a short time, and was ill at that.”
The viceroy smiled, kindly, wisely. “You went alone and on foot from
T'ainan-fu to So T'ung in the face of a Looker attack, and yourself
settled that tragic business. You then walked, without even a night's
rest, the fifty-five _li_ from T'ainan to Hung Chan. There, at the city
gate, you were attacked and severely wounded, and crawled to the house
of a Christian native. But while still weak and in a fever you walked
the three hundred _li_ to Ping Yang and made your way through the Looker
army into Monsieur Pourmont's compound....”
He pronounced the two words “Monsieur Pour-mont” in French. What a
remarkable old man he was--mentally all alive, sensitive as a youth to
the quick currents of life! The accuracy of his information, like his
memory, was surprising. Though to the Westerner, every normal Chinese
memory is that. Merely learning the language needs or builds a
memory....
Most surprising was that so deep attention had been given to Doane's own
small case. The fact bewildered; was slow in coming home. For Kang was a
great man; his proper preoccupations were many; that he was a poet, and
had early aspired to the laureateship, was commonly known--indeed, Doane
had somewhere his own translation of Kang's _Ode to the Rich Earth_,
from the scroll in the author's calligraphy owned by Pao Ting Chuan at
T'ainan-fu. As an amateur in the art of his own land of fine taste and
sound historical background he was known everywhere; his collection of
early paintings, porcelains, jades and jewels being admittedly one
of the most valuable remaining in China. And he was reputed to be the
richest individual not of the royal blood (excepting perhaps Yuan Shi
K'ai).
A contrast, not untinged with a passing bitterness, arose in Doane's
mind. Here before him quietly sat this so-called yellow man who was more
competent than perhaps any other to select his own art treasures and
write his own poems and state papers; whose journals, known to exist,
must inevitably, if not lost in a war-torn land, take their place as a
part of China's history; a man who was at once manufacturer, financier,
and statesman, on whom for a decade a weakening throne had leaned. While
in the cabin forward was a great white man as truly representative
of the new civilization as was Kang of the old; yet who hired men of
special knowledge to select the art treasures that would be left, one
day, in his name and as a monument to his culture, who even employed a
trained writer to pen the work that he proposed unblushingly to call his
“autobiography.” For such a man as Dawley Kane, whatever his manners,
Doane felt now, knew only the power of money. Through that alone his
genius functioned; the rest was a lie. On the one hand was culture, on
the other--something else. The thought bit into his brain.
But his excellency had not finished:
“And there, my dear Griggsby Doane, while still suffering from your
wound, you learned that those in Monsieur Pourmont's compound were
cut off from communication with their nationals at Peking. You at once
volunteered to go again, alone, through the Looker lines to the railhead
with messages, and successfully did so.... Do you wonder, my dear young
friend, that knowing this, and more, of your honesty and personal force
from my one-time assistant, Pao Ting Chuan, of T'ainan-fu, I pressed
strongly on the gentlemen from New York who represented the Asiatic
Company my desire that they secure you to act as their resident
director? And do you wonder that I regretted your refusal so to act?”
This statement came to Doane as a surprise.
“They offered me a position, yes,” he said, pondering on the
inexplicable ways in which the currents of life meet and cross. “But
they told me nothing of your interest.”
His excellency smiled. “It might have raised your price. They would
think of that. The sharpest trading, Griggsby Doane, is not done in the
Orient. That I have learned from a long lifetime of struggling against
the aggressions of white nations. During the discussion of the concerted
loan to China--you recall it?--they talked of lending us a hundred
million dollars, gold. To read your New York papers was to think that we
were almost to be given the money. It seemed really a philanthropy. But
do you know what their left hands were doing while their right hands
waved in a fine gesture of aid to the struggling China? These were the
terms. First they subtracted a large commission--that for the bankers
themselves; then, what with stipulations of various sorts as to the uses
to which the money--or the credit--was to be put, mostly in purchases of
railway and war material from their own hongs at further huge profits to
themselves, they whittled it down until the actual money to be expended
under our own direction, amounted to about fifteen millions. And
with that went immense new concessions--really the signing away of an
empire--and new foreign supervision of our internal affairs. For all
these privileges we were to pay an annual interest and later repay the
full amount, one hundred millions. It was quite unbearable.” He sighed.
“But what is poor old China to do?”
Doane nodded gravely. “I felt all that--the sort of thing--when I talked
with representatives of the Asiatic Company. Not that I blamed them, of
course. It is a point of view much larger than any of them; they are but
part of a great tendency. I couldn't go into it.”
“Why not?” The viceroy's keen eyes dropped to the slightly faded blue
uniform, then rested again on the strong face.
“The past few years--I will pass over the details--have been--well, not
altogether happy for me. I have been puzzled. All the rich years of my
younger manhood were given to the mission work. But I had to leave the
church. At first I felt a joy in simple hard work--I am very strong--but
hard work alone could not satisfy my thoughts.”
“No.... No.”
“For a time I believed that the solution of my personal problem lay in
taking the plunge into commercial life. I had come to feel, out there,
that business was, after all, the natural expression of man's active
nature in our time.”
“Yes. Doubtless it is.”
“It was in that state of mind that I returned home--to the States. But
it proved impossible. I am not a trader. It was too late. My character,
such as it was and is, had been formed and hardened in another mold. I
talked with old friends, but only to discover that we had between us no
common tongue of the spirit. Perhaps if I had entered business early,
as they did, I, too, would have found my early ideals being warped
gradually around to the prevailing point of view.”
“The point stands out, though,” said the viceroy, “that you did not
enter business. You chose a more difficult course, and one which
leaves you, in ripe middle age, without the means to direct your life
effectively and in comfort.”
“Yes,” mused Doane, though without bitterness. “I feel that, of course.
And it is hard, very hard, to lose one's country. Yet....”
His voice dropped. He sat, elbow on crossed knees, staring at the
ever-changing river. When he spoke again, the bitter undertone was no
longer in his voice. He was gentler, but puzzled; a man who has suffered
a loss that he can not understand.
“All my traditions,” he said, “my memories of America, were of simple
friendly communities, a land of earnest religion, of political
freedom. In my thoughts as a younger man certain great figures stood
out--Washington, Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Wendell Philips, Philips
Brooks and--yes, Henry Ward Beecher. I had deeply felt Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. The Declaration of Independence could
still fire my blood. And it was such a land of simple faith that I tried
for so many years, however ineffectually, to represent here in China.
To be sure, disquieting thoughts came--church disunity, the spectacle
of unbridled license among so many of my fellow countrymen in the coast
ports, the methods of certain of our great corporations in pushing their
wares in among your people. But even when I found it necessary to leave
the church, I still believed deeply in my country.”
He paused to control a slight unsteadiness of voice; then went on:
“May I ask if you, Your Excellency, after your long visits in Europe,
have not come home to meet with something the same difficulty, to
find yourself looking at your own people with the eyes of a stranger,
receiving such an impression as only a stranger can receive?”
“Indeed, yes!” cried the viceroy softly, with deep feeling. “It is the
most difficult moment, I have sometimes felt, in a man's life. It is
the summit of loneliness, for there is no man among his friends who
can share his view, and there is none who would not misunderstand and
censure him. And yet, a country, a people, like a city, does present
to the alien eye, a complete impression, it exhibits clearly outlined
characteristics that can be observed in no other way. Even the alien
lose? that clear, true impression on very short acquaintance. He then
becomes, like all the others, a part of the picture he has once seen.”
“It is so, Your Excellency. My country, in that first, startled, clear
glance, affected me--I may as well use the word--unpleasantly. It was
utterly different from anything I had known, a trader's paradise, a
place of unbelievable confusion, of an activity that bewildered, rushing
to what end I could not understand.”
He was speaking now not only in the Chinese language but in the idiom as
well, generalizing rhetorically as the Chinese do. It was almost as if
the words came from a Chinese mind.
They were silent for a time Then the viceroy asked, in his gently abrupt
way: “Why did you leave the church?”
“Because I sinned.”
“Against the church?”
“That, and my own faith.”
“Were you asked to leave?”
“No.”
“They knew of your sin?”
“I told them.”
“Yet they would have kept you?”
“Yes. My own feeling was that my superior temporized.”
“He knew your value.”
“I can not say as to that. But he wished me to marry again. I couldn't
do that--not in the spirit intended. Not as I felt.”
“We are different, Griggsby Doane, you and I. I am a Manchu, you an
American. The customs of our two lands are very different. What
would seem a sin to you, might not seem so to me. Yet I, too, have a
conscience to which I must answer. I believe I understand you. It is, I
see, because of your conscience that you sit before me now, on this
boat and in this uniform, a man, as your great Edward Everett Hale has
phrased it, without a country.”
He paused, and filled again the little pipe-bowl, studied it absently as
his wrinkled fingers worked the tobacco. His nails were trimmed short,
like those of a white man. Doane thought, swiftly, of the man's dramatic
past, sent out as he had been to become a citizen of the world by a
nation that would in very necessity fail to understand the resulting
changes in his outlook. There was his daughter; she would be almost an
American, after four years of college life. And she, now, would be a
problem indeed! What could he hope to make of her life in this Asia
where woman, like labor in his own country, was a commodity. It would
be absorbingly interesting, were it possible, to peep into that
smooth-running old brain and glimpse the problems there. They were
gossiping about him. His stately figure was to-day the center about
which coiled the life and death intrigue of Chinese officialdom and over
which hung suspended the silken power of an Oriental throne.... Doane's
personal problem shrank into nothing--a flitting memory of a little
outbreak of egotism--as he studied the old face on which the revealing
hand of Age had inscribed wisdom, kindliness and shrewdness.
Soft footfalls sounded; then, after a moment, a sharper sound that Doane
assumed, with a slight quickening of the imagination, to be the high
wooden clogs of a Manchu lady, until he realized that no clogs could
move so lightly; no, these were little Western shoes.
A young woman appeared, slender and comely, dressed in a tailored
suit that could have come only front New York, and smiling with shy
eagerness. She was of good height (like the Manchus of the old stock),
the face nearly oval, quite unpainted and softly pretty, with a broad
forehead that curved prettily back under the parted hair, arched
eyebrows, eyes more nearly straight than slanting (that opened a thought
less widely than those of Western people), and with a quaint, wholly
charming friendliness in her smile.
He felt her sense of freedom; and knew as she tried to take his huge
hand in her own small one that she carried her Western ways, as her own
people would phrase it, with a proud heart. She was of those aliens who
would be happily American, eager to show her kinship with the great land
of fine free traditions.
And holding the small hand, looking down at her, Doane found his perhaps
overstrained nerves responding warmly to her fine youth and health. He
reflected, in that swift way of his wide-ranging mind, on the amazing
change in Chinese official life that made it even remotely possible for
the viceroy to present his daughter with a heart as proud as hers.
The change had come about during the term of Doane's own residence....
America, then, was not alone in changing. It was a shaking, puzzled and
puzzling world.
“This,” his excellency was saying, “is my daughter, Hui Fei.”
“I am very pleas' to meet you,” said Hui Fei.
They sat then. The girl became at once, as in America, the center of
the talk. Though of the heedlessness not uncommonly found among American
girls she had none. She was prettily, sensitively, deferential to her
father. Somewhere back of the bright surface brain from which came the
quick eager talk and the friendly smile, deep in her nature, lay the
sense of reverence for those riper in years and in authority that was
the deepest strain in her race. She dwelt on things almost utterly
American: the brightness of New York--she said she liked it best in
October, when the shops were gay; the approaching Yale-Harvard football
game, a motoring tour through the White Mountains, happy summers at the
seashore.
Doane watched her, speaking only at intervals, wondering if there might
not be, behind her gentle enthusiasm, some deeper understanding of her
present situation. He could not surely make out. She had humor, and when
he asked if it did not seem strange to step abruptly back into the old
life, she spoke laughingly of her many little mistakes in etiquette.
Her English he found charming. She was continually slipping back into
it from the Mandarin tongue she tried to use, and as continually, with
great gaiety, reaching back into Chinese for the equivalent phrase. She
had so nearly conquered the usual difficulty with the l's and r's as
to confuse them only when she spoke hurriedly. At these times, too, she
would leave off final consonants. The long _e_ became then, a short
_i_. Doane even smiled, with an inner sense of pleasure, at her pretty
emphasis when she once converted _people_ into _pipple_. She was,
unmistakably, a young woman of charm and personality. Despite the
quaintness of her speech, she was accustomed to thinking in the new
tongue. Her command of it was excellent; better than would commonly be
found in America. All of which, of course, intensified the problem.
His excellency sat back, smoked comfortably, and looked on her with
frankly indulgent pride.
A servant came with a message; bowing low. The viceroy excused himself,
leaving his daughter and Doane together. Doane asked himself, during the
pause that followed his departure, what the observant attendants beyond
the screen would be thinking. The situation, from any familiar Chinese
point of view, was unthinkable. Yet here he sat; and there, her brows
drawn together (he saw now) in sober thought, sat delightful Miss Hui
Fei.
She said, in a low voice, while looking out at the river: “Mr. Doane, no
matter what you may think--I mus' see you. This evening. You mus' tell
me where. It mus' not be known to any one. There are spies here.”
Doane glanced up; then, too, looked away. There could be no question now
of the girl's deeper feeling. She was determined. Her tune was honest
and forthright, with the unthinking courage of youth. It would be her
father, of course...
But his mind had gone blank. He knew not what to think or say.
“Please!” she murmured. “There is no one else. You must help us. Tell
me--father will be coming back.”
And then Griggsby Doane heard his own voice saying quietly: “The boat
deck is the only place. You will find a sort of ladder near the stern.
If you can--”
“I will go up there.”
“It will be only just after midnight that I could arrange to be there.”
His excellency returned then. And Doane took his leave. He had been but
a few moments in his own cabin when two actors of his excellency's suite
appeared, each with a lacquered tray, on one of which was a small chest
of tea, wrapped in red paper lettered in gold and bearing the seal stamp
of the private estate of Kang Yu, on the other an object of more than a
foot in height carefully wound about with cotton cloth.
Doane dismissed the lictors with a Mexican dollar each and unwrapped
the larger object, which the servant had placed with great care on his
berth. It proved to be a _pi_, a disk of carven jade, in color a perfect
specimen of the pure greenish-white tint that is so highly prized by
Chinese collectors. The diameter was hardly less than ten inches, and
the actual width of the stone from the circular inner opening to the
outer rim about four inches. It stood on edge set in a pedestal of
blackwood, the carving of which was of unusual delicacy. The pedestal
was, naturally, modern, but Doane, with a mounting pulse, studied the
designs cut into the stone itself. That cutting had been done not later
than the Han Dynasty, certainly within two hundred years of the birth of
Christ.