|THEY passed, that evening, the region of Peng-tze where Tao Yuan-ming,
after a scant three months as district magistrate, surrendered his
honors and retired to his humble farm near Kiu Kiang, there to write
in peace the verse and prose that have endured during sixteen crowded
centuries; and on, then, moving slowly through the precipitous Gateway
of Anking and, later, around the bend that bounds that city on the west,
south and east. Those on deck could see, indistinctly in the deepening
twilight, the vast area of houses and ruins--for Anking had not
yet recovered from the devastations of the T'ai-ping rebels in the
eighteen-sixties--where half a million yellow folk swarm like ants; and
very indistinctly indeed, farther to the north, they could see: the
blue mountains. Slowly, quietly, then, Anking, with its ruins and its
memories fell away astern.
Half an hour later the sweeps were lashed along the rail. The great dark
sails, with their scalloped edges between the battens of bamboo, seeming
more than ever, in the dusk, like the wings of an enormous bat, were
lowered; and with many shouts and rhythmic cries the tracking ropes were
run out to mooring poles on the bank. Forward the mattings were adjusted
for the night. The smells of tobacco and frying fish drifted aft. A
youth, sipping tea by the rail, put down his cup and sang softly
in falsetto a long narrative of friendship and the mighty river and
(incidentally) the love of a maiden who slipped away from her mother's
side at night to meet a handsome student only to be slain, as was just,
by the hand of an elder brother.... From the cabin aft drifted a faint
odor of incense. A flageolet mingled its plaintive oboe-like note with
the song of the youth by the rail.... From a near-by village came soft
evening sounds, and the occasional barking of dogs, and the beat of a
watchman's gong.... The greatest of rivers--greatest in traffic and in
rich memories of the endless human drama--was settling quietly for the
night.
At the first rays of dawn the forward deck would be again astir. Sails
would be hoisted, ropes hauled aboard and coiled; and the shining yellow
craft would resume her journey down-stream, with carven and brightly
painted eyes peering fixedly out at the bow, with carefully tended
flowers perfuming the air about the after gallery, a thing of rich and
lovely color even on the rich and lovely river; slipping by busy ports,
each with its vast tangle of small shipping and its innumerable families
of beggars in slipper-boats or tubs awaiting miserably the steamers and
their strangely prodigal white passengers. T'ai-ping itself, of bloody
memory, lay still ahead; and farther yet Nanking the glorious, and
Chin-kiang, and the great estuary. Slowly the huge craft would drift
and sail and tie, moving patiently on toward the Shanghai of
the ever-prospering white merchants, the Shanghai that somewhat
vaingloriously had dubbed itself “the Paris of the East.” And no one of
the thousands, here and there, that idly watched the golden junk as it
moved, not without a degree of magnificence, down the tireless current,
was to know that a Manchu viceroy, a prince hunted to the death by his
own blood, a statesman known to the courts of great new lands, was in
hiding within those timbers of polished cypress. Nor would they know
that a princess, his daughter yet strangely of the new order, voyaged
with him clad in the simple costume of a young Chinese woman. Nor would
they dream of certain inexplicable whites. Nor would they have cared;
for the voyage of the yellow junk was but a tiny incident in the crowded
endless drama of the river; to the millions of struggling, breeding,
dying souls along the banks and on the water, merely living was and
would be burden enough. So China merely lives--dreaming a little but
hoping hardly at all--with every eye on the furrow or the till; lives,
and dies, and--lives again and on.
Late in the third afternoon, Rocky Kane, sitting, head forlornly in
hands, in his narrow room, heard a light step--heard it with every
sensitive nerve-tip--and, springing up, softly drew his curtain. But the
quick eagerness faded from his eyes; for it was Dixie Carmichael.
Her thin lips curved in the faintest of smiles as she moved along the
corridor toward her own curtained door. But then, as she passed and
glanced back, her skirt, in swinging about, caught on a nail; caught
firmly; and as she stooped to release it, a string of pearls swung down,
broke, and rolled, a score of little opalescent spheres, along the deck,
a few of them nearly to Rocky's feet. He stooped--without a thought
at first--picked them up and turned them over in his fingers; then,
stepping forward to return them, observed with an odd thrill of somewhat
unpleasant excitement, that the girl had gone an ashen color and was
staring at him with something the look of a wild and hostile animal.
She turned then; glanced with furtive eyes up and down the corridor; and
swiftly gathering up the remaining pearls clutched them tightly in one
hand, extending the other and saying, in a quick half-whisper: “Give me
those.”
He hesitated, confused, unequal to the quick clear thinking he felt,
even then, was demanded of him.
“What are you doing with them?” he asked.
“Not so loud! Come here!” She was indicating her own doorway; even
drawing the curtain; while her head moved just perceptibly toward the
room immediately beyond her own where Miss Hui Fei, he knew, would be
resting at this time.
“Where did you get them?” he asked, huskily, doggedly.
There was a long pause. Again her subtle gaze swept the corridor. “You'd
better step in here,” said she, very quiet. “I've something to say to
you.”
Sensing, still confusedly, that he ought to see the thing through,
struggling to think, he yielded to her stronger will.
She followed him into the room and let the curtain fall. “Give me those
pearls,” she commanded again.
He shook his head.
During a tense moment she studied him. She moved over by the translucent
window of ground oyster shells, itself, in the mellow afternoon light,
as opalescent as the pearls in her hand and his. Her gaze, for an
instant, sought the wide stain on the floor where the Manila Kid had,
so recently, wretchedly died; and her instant imagination considered the
incomprehensible mental attitude of these quiet Chinese who had, without
a word, disposed of the body and painstakingly cleansed the spot. No
one, observing them day by day, now, as they calmly pursued their tasks,
could suspect that the slanting quiet eyes had so lately seen murder....
As for the youth before her she was, now that her moment of fright had
passed, supremely confident in her skill and mental strength. He was,
still, little more than an undeveloped boy. And his position, now that
he had set up his flag of reform, would be absurdly vulnerable.
“Once more”--her low voice was cool and soft as river ice--“give them to
me.”
He shook his head. “Tell me first where you got them.”
“If you're determined to make a scene,” said she, “I advise you to be
quiet about it. You wouldn't want--her--to know you're in here.”
“I--I”--this was the merest boyishness--“I've told her about--well, that
I tried to make love to you. I'm not afraid of that.”
“Still--you wouldn't want her to hear you now.” This was awkwardly true.
And his hesitation as he tried to consider it, to work out an attitude,
ran a second too long.
“The pearls are mine,” she pressed calmly on. “The best advice I can
give you is to return them and go.”
“But--”
“Do you think I want the people aboard this junk--anybody--to know that
I have them?”
“I believe you stole them from the viceroy's place.”
“That, of course--Well, never mind! What you may believe is nothing to
me.”
“Will you tell Mr. Doane about them?”
“Certainly not. And you won't.”
“Why shouldn't I?”
“It's none of your business.”
“Perhaps it's my duty.”
“Listen”--he felt himself wholly in the right, yet found difficulty in
meeting her cold pale eyes--“it's my impression that I've been acting
rather decently toward you. Of course, I could have--”
“What could you have done?”
“For you own good, keep your voice down. I will tell you just this--you
were pretty wild in Shanghai for a week or two.”
“Well?” This was hurting him; but he met it. “And there's no likelihood
that you've told her all of it. Were you such a fool as to think you
could keep it all secret? Out here on the coast--and from a woman with
as many underground connections as I have?”
“There's nothing that!--”
“Listen! I'm not through with you. You've been a very, very rough
proposition. I know all about it. No--wait! There's something else. I
knew all about you when you were making up to me on the steamer. I could
have trapped you then--tangled your life so with mine that you could
never have got away from me, never in the world. But I didn't. I liked
you, and I didn't want to hurt you--then.”
“You do want to hurt me now?”
“It may be necessary.”
“Since you're taking this position”--he was finding difficulty in
making his voice heard; there seemed to be danger of explosive
sounds--“probably I'd better just go to Mr. Doane myself with these
things.”
“If you do that I'll wreck your life.”
“You don't mean that you'd--”
“You seem to be forgetting a good deal.”
“But you--”
“I will defend myself to the limit. I've really been easy with you. You
see, you don't know anything about me. Least of all what harm I can do.
You'd be a child in my hands. Turn against me and I'll get you if it
takes me ten years. You'll never be safe from me. Never for a minute.”
He looked irresolutely down at the lustrous jewels in his hand.
“You had these sewed in your skirt. There must be more there.”
“Are you proposing to search me?”
“No--but”.... His black youth was stabbing now, viciously, at his
boyishly sensitive heart; but still, in a degree, he met it. “I'm going
to Mr. Doane. I don't care what happens to me.”
He even moved a soft step toward the door; but paused, lingered,
watching her. For she was rummaging among the covers of her bed. He
caught a brief glimpse of a hand-bag that she meant him not to see. She
took from a bottle two green tablets. Then she faced him.
To the startled question of his eyes she replied: “They're corrosive
sub mate. I shall take them now unless you--give me the pearls. If you
want to have my death on your hands, take them to Mr. Doane. But
it's only fair to tell you that if you do it--if you mix in this
business--your own life won't be worth a nickel. They'll get you, and
they'll get the pearls. You're caught in a bigger game than you can
play.
“Get out, while you can”--as the low swift words came she reached out and
took the pearls from his nerveless hand--“and I'll protect you. You can
have your pretty Manchu girl. You can ride around in a rickshaw and
look at old temples and buy embroideries. Just don't mix in affairs that
don't concern you.”
“I”--he was pressing a hand to a white forehead--“I've got to think it
over.”
“Remember this, too”--she laid a hand on his arm--“you could never
fasten anything on me. The proof doesn't exist. Nobody can identify
unmounted pearls. As a matter of fact I got these”.... during a brief but
to her perverse imagination an intensely pleasing moment she closed
her eyes and lived again through that strange scene on the steps of the
pavilion; again in vivid fancy rolled over the inert body that had been
Tex Connor, took the amazing cape of pearls from his shirt and rolled
the body heavily back.... “I got these from a man I knew--an old friend.
Just mind your own business and no one will harm you. But remember,
you're walking among dangers. Step carefully. Keep quiet. Better go
now.”
He found himself in the corridor; walked slowly, uncertainly, up to the
deck; sat by the rail and, head on hand, moodily watched the river and
the hills. He asked himself if he had, by his very silence, struck a
bargain with the girl; but could find no answer to the question, only
bewilderment. Could it be that she was only a daring thief? It could, of
course, but how to get at the truth? Abruptly, then his thoughts turned
inward. His wild days had seemed, since his change of heart, of the
remote past; but they were not, they had still been the stuff of his
life within about a week. It was unnerving. He thought, something
morbidly, as the sensitive young will, about habits.... The day had gone
awry, too, in the matter of his love. A reaction had set in. Hui Fei
was keeping much to herself. It had become difficult to talk with her
at all. And that had bewildered him.... He was all adrift, with neither
sound training nor a mature philosophy to steady him, life had turned
unreal on his hands; nothing was real--not Hui or her father, certainly
not himself, not even Mr. Doane. His background, even, was slipping
away, and with it his sense of the white race. This, it seemed, was a
yellow world--swarming, heedless, queerly tragic. His soul was adrift,
and nobody cared. Toward his father and mother he felt only bitterness.
There were, it appeared, no friends.
He thought, it seemed, confusedly, excitedly, of everything; of
everything except the important fact that he was very young.
Early on the following morning Doane found the little princess playing
about the deck, and with a smile seated himself beside her. She settled
at once on his knee, chattering brightly in the Mandarin tongue of her
play world.
He responded with a note of good-humored whimsy not out of key with her
alert clear imagination. It was pleasant to fall again into the little
intimacies of the language that had become, during these twenty years
and more, almost his own. He pointed out to her the trained cormorants
diving for fish, and the irrigating wheels along the banks; and then
told quaint stories--of the first water buffalo, and of the magic
rice-field.
Soon she, too, was telling stories--of the simpleton who bought herons
for ducks, of the toad in the lotus pool, of the child that was born in
a conch shell and finally crawled with it into the sea, of the youngest
daughter who to save the life of her father married a snake, of the
magic melon that grew full of gold and the other melon that contained
hungry beggars, of the two small boys and the moon cake, and of the
curious beginning of the ant species.
She scolded him for his failure, at the first, to laugh with her. Her
happy child quality stirred memories of old-time days in T'ainan-fu,
when his own daughter had been a child of six, playing happily about the
mission compound. They were poignant memories. His eyes were misty even
as he smiled over the bright merriment of this child, and in his heart
was a growing wistful tenderness. To be again a father would be a great
privilege. He was ripe for it now, tempered by poverty and sorrow, yet
strong, with a great emotional capacity on which the world about him
had, apparently, no claim to make. He was simply cast aside, left
carelessly in an eddy with the great stream of life flowing, bankful,
by. The experience was common enough, of course. In the great scheme
of life the fate of an individual here and there could hardly matter.
He could tell himself that, very simply, quite honestly; and yet the
strength within him would rise and rise again to assert the opposite.
The end, for himself, lay beyond the range of conscious thought; but
at least, he felt, it could not be bitterness. He seemed to have passed
that danger.... The little princess was soberly telling the old story of
the father-in-law, the father, and the crabs that were eaten by the
pig. At the conclusion she laughed merrily; and then Ending his response
somewhat unsatisfactory, scowled fiercely and with her plump fingers
bent up the corners of his mouth.
He laughed then; and rolled her up in his arms and tossed her high in
the air.
When Hui Fei came upon them they were gazing out over the rail. Mr.
Doane seemed to be telling a long story, to which the child listened
intently. She moved quietly near, smiling; and after listening for a few
moments seated herself on the deck behind them.
The story puzzled her. She leaned forward, a charming picture in her
simple costume, black hair parted smoothly, oval face untouched with
powder or paint. She smiled again, then, for his story was nothing other
than a free rendering into Chinese of Stevenson's:
“In Winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light...”
He went on, when that was finished, with a version of:
“Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand....”
--and other poems from _The Child's Garden of Verses._
Hui Fei's eyes lighted, as she listened. Mr. Doane, it appeared, knew
nearly all of these exquisite verse-stories of happy childhood and
exhibited surprising skill in finding the Chinese equivalents for
certain elusive words. What a mind he had.... rich in reading as in
experience, ripe in wisdom, yet curiously fresh and elastic! It seemed
to her a young mind.
The little princess was especially pleased with _My Bed Is a Boat_, and
made him repeat it. At the conclusion she clapped her hands. And then
Hui Fei joined in the applause, and laughed softly when they turned in
surprise.
“Won't you do _The Land of Counterpane?_” she asked.
It was later, when the child had run off to play among the flowers, that
he and she fell to talking as they had not talked during these recent
crowded days. There were silences, at first. Despite his effort to seem
merely friendly and kind, he felt a restraint that had to be fought
through. In this time, so difficult for her at every point, he felt
deeply that he must not fail her. Her greatest need, surely, was for
friendship. The excited youth who dogged her steps and hung on her most
trivial glance could not offer that. And melancholy had touched her
bright spirit; he sensitively felt that when the little princess
ran away and her smile faded. Sorrow dwelt not far behind those dark
thoughtful eyes.
Early in the conversation she spoke of her father. Her thoughts,
clearly, were always with him.
“I wan' to ask you,” said she simply and gravely, “if you know what he
is doing.”
Doane moved his head in the negative.
“He has been in his room for more than a day. When I go to his door
he is kin' but he doesn' ask me to come in. And he doesn' tell me
anything.”
“He is not confiding in me,” said Doane.
“I don' like that, either, Mis'er Doane. For I know he thinks of you now
as his closes' frien'. There is no other frien' who knows what you know.
An' you have save' his life an' mine. My father is not a man to fail in
frien'ship or in gratitu'.”
Doane's eyes, despite his nearly successful inner struggles, grew misty
again. Impulsively he took her hand gently in his. At once, simply, her
slender fingers closed about his own. It seemed not unlike the trusting
affection of a child; he sensed this as a new pain. Yet there was strong
emotional quality in her; he felt it in her dark beauty, in the curve of
her cheek and the lustrous troubled splendor in her eyes, in the slender
curves of her strong young body. She was, after all, a woman grown;
aroused, doubtless, to the puzzling facts of life; a woman, with an
ardent lover close at hand, who was--this as his wholly adult mind now
saw her--already at her mating time. And feeling this he gripped her
hand more tightly than he knew. But even so, he was not unaware of his
own danger. It wouldn't do; once to release his own tightly chained
emotions would be to render himself of no greater value to her in her
bewilderment than any merely pursuing male. He set his teeth on that
thought, and abruptly withdrew his hand.
She did not look up--her gaze was fixed on the surface of the river.
The only indication she gave that she was so much as aware of this odd
little act of his was that she started to speak, then paused for a brief
instant before going on.
“I ask--ask myself all the time if there is anything we coul' be doing.”
Doane's head moved again in the negative.
“If not even his gratitu'--”
“Gratitude,” said Doane gently, “becomes less than nothing when it is
demanded.”
“True, it can no' be ask', but it can be given.”
“Sometimes”--he was thinking aloud, dangerously--“I wonder if any
healthy human act is free from the motive of self-interest. Generosity
is so often self-indulgence. Self-sacrifice, even in cases where it may
be regarded as wholly sane, may be only a culmination or a confusion of
little understood desires.”
She looked up at this; considered it.
“Certainly,” he went on, “your father owes me nothing.”
Her hand moved a little way toward his, only to hesitate and draw
back. She looked away, saying in a clouded voice: “He--and I--owe you
everything.” It wouldn't do. Doane waited a long moment, then spoke in
what seemed more nearly his own proper character--quietly, kindly, with
hardly an outward sign of the intensely personal feeling of which his
heart was so full.
“Your father has spoken to me of you as an experiment.”
“You mean my life--my education.”
“Yes. He feels, too, that the experiment has not yet been fully worked
out. I often think of that--your future. It is interesting, you know.
You have responded amazingly to the spirit of the West. And of course
you'll have to do something about it.”
“Oh, yes,” said she, musing, “of course.”
“Whatever personal interests may for a time--or at times--absorb your
life”.... this was as close as he dared trust himself to the topic of
marriage__“I feel about you that your life will seek and find some
strong outward expression.”
“Yes--I have often fel' that too. Of course, at college I like' to
speak. I went in a good 'eal for the debates, an' for class politics.”
“You have an active mind. And you have a fine heritage. Knowing--even
feeling--both East and West as you do, your life is bound to find some
public outlet. Something.”
“I know.” She seemed moody now, in a gentle way. Her fingers picked at
a rope. “But I don' know what. I don' think I woul' like teaching.
Writing, perhaps. Even speaking. That is so easy for me.”
“There is a service that you are peculiarly fitted to perform.” She
glanced up quickly, waited. “It is a thought that keeps coming to my
mind. Perhaps because it will probably become the final expression of my
own life. For my life is curiously like yours in one way. You remember,
that--that night when we first talked--on the steamer--”
“I climb' the ladder,” she murmured, picking again at the rope.
“--And we agreed that we were both, you and I”--his voice grew
momentarily unsteady--“between the worlds.”
“Yes. I remember.” He could barely hear her, “It is true, of course.”
“It is true. And for myself, I feel more and more strongly every day
that I must pitch into the tremendous task of helping to make the East
known to the West.”
“Tha' woul' be won'erful!” she breathed.
“I have come to feel that it is the one great want in Western
civilization, that the philosophy, the art, the culture, indeed, of
China has never been woven into our heritage. It is strange, in a
way--we derived our religion from certain primitive tribes in Syria. But
they had little culture. The Christian religion teaches conduct but very
nearly ignores beauty. And then there is our insistent pushing forth
of the Individual. I have come to believe that our West will seem less
crass, less materialistic, when the individual is somewhat subdued.”
He smiled. “We need patience--sheer quality of thought--the fine art
of reflection. We shall not find these qualities at their best, even in
Europe. They exist, in full flower, only in China. And America doesn't
know that. Not now.”
A little later he said: “That work has been begun, of course, in a small
way. A slight sense of Chinese culture is creeping into our colleges,
here and there. Some of the poetry is bring translated. The art
museums are reaching out for the old paintings. The Freer collection
of paintings will some day be thrown open to the public. But traditions
grow very slowly. It will take a hundred years to make America aware
of China as it is now aware of Italy, Egypt, Greece, even old
Assyria.... and the thing must be freed from Japanese influence--we can't
much longer afford to look at wonderful, rich old China through the
Japanese lens.”
“An' you're going to make tha' your work,” observed Hui Fei.
“I must. I begin to feel that it is to be the only final explanation of
my life.”
There was a silence. Then, abruptly, in a tone he did not understand,
she asked: “Are you going to work for the Revolution?”
“That is the immediate thing--yes. I shall offer my services.”
“Coul' I do anything, you think? At Shanghai, I mean? Of course, I'm a
Manchu girl, but I can no' stand with the Manchu Gover'ment. I am not
even with my--my father there.”
“It is possible. I don't know. We shall soon be there.”
“Will you tell me then--at Shanghai?”
He inclined his head. Suddenly he couldn't speak. She was holding to
him, as if it were a matter of course; yet he dared not read into her
attitude a personal meaning of the only sort that could satisfy his
hungry heart. The difficulty lay in his active imagination. Like that of
an eager boy it kept racing ahead of any possible set of facts. All
he could do, of course, was to go on curbing it, from hour to hour.
It would be harder seeing her at Shanghai than running away, as he had
half-consciously been planning. But it was something that she clung to
him as a friend. He mustn't, couldn't, really, fail her there.
All of the last day they sailed the wide and steadily widening estuary.
The lead-colored water was roughened by the following wind that drove
the junk rapidly on toward her journey's end. But toward sunset wind and
sea died down, and under sweeps, late in the evening-, the craft moved
into the Wusung River and moored for the night within sight of a line of
war-ships.
A feeling of companionship grew strongly among those fugitives, yellow
and white, as the evening advanced. They had passed together through
dangerous and dramatic scenes. Now that danger and drama were alike,
it seemed, over, with the peaceable shipping of all the world lying just
ahead up the narrow channel, with, in the morning to come, a fresh view
of the bund at Shanghai, where hotels, banks and European clubs elbowed
the great trading hongs, with motor-cars and Sikh police and the bright
flags of the home land so soon to be spread before their weary eyes,
they gathered on the after gallery to chat and watch the flashing signal
lights of the cruisers and the trains on the river bank, and dream each
his separate dream. Even Dixie Carmichael, though herself untouched by
sentiment, joined, for reasons of policy, the little party. Hui Fei
was there, between Doane and the moodily silent Rocky Kane. The Chinese
servants smilingly grouped themselves on the deck just above. And
finally--though it is custom among these Easterners to sleep during the
dark hours and rise with the morning light--his excellency appeared,
walking alone over the deck, smiling in the friendliest fashion and
greeting them with hands clasped before his breast.
Doane felt a little hand steal for a moment into his with a nervous
pressure. His own relief was great.
For this smiling gentleman could hardly be regarded as one about to die.
They placed him in the steamer chair of woven rushes from Canton. And
pleasantly, then, their last evening together passed in quiet talk.
His excellency was in reminiscent mood. He had been a young officer, it
transpired, in the T'aiping Rebellion, and had fought during the last
three years of that frightful thirteen-year struggle up and down the
great river, taking part in the final assault on Su-chau as a captain in
the “Ever Victorious” army of General Gordon. Regarding that brilliant
English officer he spoke freely; Doane translating a sentence, here and
there, for young Kane.
“Gordon never forgave Li Hung Chang,” he said, “for the murder of the
T'ai-ping Wangs, during the peace banquet. It was on Prince Li's own
barge, in the canal by the Eastern Gate of the city. Gordon claimed
that Li procured the murder. He was a hot-blooded man, Gordon, often too
quick and rough in speech. Li told me, years later, that the attack
was directed as much against himself as against the Wangs, and regarded
himself as fortunate to escape. He never forgave Gordon for his
insulting speech. But Gordon was a vigorous brave man. It was a
privilege to observe him tirelessly at work, planning by night, fighting
by day--organizing, demanding money, money, money--with great energy
moving troops and supplies. He could not be beaten. He was indeed the
'Ever Victorious.'”
It was, later, his excellency who asked Hui Fei and young Kane to sing
the American songs that had floated on one or two occasions through his
window below. They complied; and Dixie Carmichael, in an agreeable light
voice, joined in. At the last Duane was singing bass.
The party was breaking up--his excellency had already gone below--when
Rocky, moved to the point of exquisite pain, caught the hand of Hui Fei.
“Please!” he whispered. “Just a word!”
“Not now. I mus' go.”
“But--it's our last evening--I've tried to be patient--it'll be all
different at Shanghai--I can't let you.”
But she slipped away, leaving the youth whispering brokenly after
her. He leaned for a long time on the rail then, looking heavily at the
winking lights of the cruisers. It was a relief to see Mr. Doane coming
over the deck. Certainly he couldn't sleep. Not now. His heart was full
to breaking.... The fighting impulse rose. During this past day or so he
had seemed to be losing ground in his struggle with self. The startling
incident in Miss Carmichael's room had turned out, he felt, still
confusedly, as a defeat. It had left him unhappy. This night, out there
in the blossom-scented gallery, he had sensed the strange girl, close at
hand, cool as a child, singing the old college songs with apparent quiet
enjoyment, as an uncanny thing, a sinister force. Even when speaking to
Hui Fei, her influence had enveloped him.... This would be just one more
little battle. And it must be won.
Accordingly he told Mr. Doane the story. The older man considered it,
slowly nodding.
“It is probably the fact,” he said, at length, “that she stole the
pearls at Huang Chau. She was with Connor and Watson. But it is also
a fact that she might have pearls of her own. And in traveling alone
through a revolution it would be her right to conceal them as she chose.
It is true, too, that unset pearls couldn't be identified easily, if
at all. And she is clever--she wouldn't weaken under charges.... No, I
don't see what we can do, beyond watching the thing closely. As for her
threats against you, they are partly rubbish.”
But Rocky cared little, now, what they might be. Once again he had
cleaned the black slate of his youth. His head was high again. He could
speak to Hui Fei convincingly in the morning.
His excellency, alone in his cabin, took from his hand-bag the book of
precepts of Chuang Tzü; and seated on his pallet, by the small table on
which burned a floating wick in its vessel of oil, read thoughtfully as
follows:
“Chuang Tzü one day saw an empty skull, bleached but intact, lying on
the ground. Striking it with his riding whip, he cried, 'Wert thou once
some ambitious citizen whose inordinate yearnings brought him to this
pass?--some statesman who plunged his country into ruin and perished
in the fray?--some wretch who left behind him a legacy of shame?--some
beggar who died in the pangs of hunger and cold? Or didst thou reach
this state by the natural course of old age?'
“When he had finished speaking, he took the skull and, placing it under
his head as a pillow, went to sleep. In the night he dreamt that the
skull appeared to him and said: 'You speak well, sir; but all you say
has reference to the life of mortals and to mortal troubles. In death
there are none of these.... In death there is no sovereign above, and
no subject below. The workings of the four seasons are unknown. Our
existences are bounded only by eternity. The happiness of a king among
men can not exceed that which we enjoy.'
“Chuang Tzü, however, was not convinced, and said: 'Were I to prevail
upon God to allow your body to be born again, and your bones and flesh to
be renewed, so that you could return to your parents, to your wife and
to the friends of your youth, would you be willing?'
“At this the skull opened its eyes wide and knitted its brows and said:
'How should I cast aside happiness greater than that of a king, and
mingle once again in the toils and troubles of mortality?'”
He closed the book; laid on the table his European watch; and sat for
a long time in meditation. As the hands of the watch neared the hour of
three in the morning, he took from the bag a box of writing materials, a
small red book and a bottle of white pills.
The leaves of the book were the thinnest gold. On one of these
he inscribed, with delicate brush, the Chinese characters meaning
“Everlasting happiness.” Tearing out the leaf, then, he wrapped loosely
in it one of the pills--these were morphine, of the familiar sort
manufactured in Japan and sold extensively in China since the decline of
the opium traffic--and swallowed them together. He inscribed and took
another, and another, and another.
Gradually a sense of drowsy comfort, of utter physical well-being, came
over him. The pupils of his eyes shrunk down to the merest pin-points.
His head drooped forward. His frail old body fell on the bed and lay
peacefully there as his spirit sought its destiny in the unchanging,
everlasting Tao.