Produced by Al Haines.
_The Last Ditch_
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF "CHILD AND COUNTRY," "DOWN AMONG
MEN," "MIDSTREAM," "RUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,"
ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1916
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
JOHN
*CONTENTS*
PROLOGUE: HANKOW
The Yellow Rug Woman
PART ONE: THE GREAT DRIFT
Sundry Adventures
PART TWO: THE GOBI
Anna Erivan
PART THREE: THE GOBI
Rajananda
PART FOUR: TIENTSIN
The Hunchback
PART FIVE: CONCLUSION
The Hill Country
*PROLOGUE: HANKOW*
*THE YELLOW RUG WOMAN*
*I*
Romney saw the rug before he saw the woman. It was the yellow of India,
the yellow you see on the breast of the purple martin and on the inner
petals of an Emperor rose. The weave of the rug was like no other. Its
folds looked heavy like raw silk, yet the fabric itself was thin. It
would last a life time, and then become a priceless gift for the one
held most dear. It was soil-proof as a snake's skin. It was either
holy or savage.
They were on the little river steamer, _Sungkiang_, a day's passage
below Hankow. The woman had boarded that forenoon at Wu-chang. Romney
had come through from Ngan-king. The yellow rug lay across the knees of
the woman. The afternoon was breezy and bright. It was May, and the
rice was green along the flats of the southern shore.... She was either
English or American, Romney reflected, and also that the world was well
supplied with pretty women, but not with rugs like that.
Just now the woman held out her arms to a missionary's child--a passing
boy-child of five in sandals. His legs were bare and brown and
scratched. His name was Paul and he was a stoic from much manhandling.
He went to her arms in silence, and there was a burning now in Romney's
chest. Her voice had been a thirsty primitive note, like a cry, as if
the presence of the child hurt her.
The little boy stood erect and silent against her limbs. She lifted the
rug and drew it about his waist to hold him close. She was lost to
everything else. Romney had fancied her the most exquisite and delicate
creature, but this face that he saw now had the plain earthy passion of
a river-woman talking to her first-born--a love of the child's body and
face and lips, the love of a woman who loves the very soil of play on
her child. Paul had been running the decks for two days, making enough
noise to give the missionary the reputation of being a widower. The
child was moist from running at this moment, and the woman buried her
face in his throat.
Romney wished whimsically that he were the missionary so he could come
into the picture for the sake of meeting the woman. The child was
drawing away. Her dark eyes were untellably hungry already. Paul must
have told his name, for she was saying:
"Such a right name for a noble boy. And where are you going?"
"To Hankow."
"It's like a fairy-tale--a young man going to Hankow to seek his
fortune--"
"My father does not like me to read fairy-tales--"
Paul's eyes were full of pictures. Romney did not hear what she said to
that, but circled the little deck again, thinking of her eyes and voice.
They went with the yellow rug. As Romney returned, the child pulled
back from the woman, announcing:
"That's my father."
And now for the first time Romney's eyes and the woman's met. The child
had pointed his way, though the missionary was behind him. Her look
came up with something that seemed to say, "I beg of you--don't
disappoint me." Then Romney forgot the peculiarity of that, in the
sudden sense that she was like the blood-sister of some one he had
known. At the same time flat in his consciousness was the fact that he
had not known any such "some one." She was young, but this was not the
look of a girl at all--the look of a hungry imperious woman who had
known love and been denied--adult understanding, the shoals of cheap
illusion passed. She was looking beyond him at the real father of Paul.
Under his own calm, Romney was intensely sensitized. Something had
happened to him from her eyes. He felt he was out somewhere in the deep
waters of life wherein she sailed--the shallow problems already put from
them, all decoration, convention and imitation thrust aside. The
missionary and the little boy had passed. And now Romney did a very
good thing for him, and something that he would not have thought
possible before this day. He drew a chair close to the yellow rug,
saying:
"May I?"
"Yes."
... They talked of Paul, of missionaries, of Asia, travel. Her manner
was easy and genuine, her observations wise and humorous, but her eyes
full of challenge. There was tenderness in them, and something that for
a better name he called deviltry. He felt himself in the presence of a
big nature, whose sweep was from the primitive passions of birth and
death, of fear and hunger, to some consummate and mysterious ambition.
He could not tell what she wanted; and at the same time her thrall was
stealing over him, preventing him from seeing her the same at different
moments. He felt that her sweetness could be unfathomable to one she
loved. She was exquisite in every detail--lip, nostril, finger-tip,
hair, figure, voice, manner, wear--all as perfect as the yellow rug.
Yet it was beauty, rather than loveliness, something to fear about it.
Romney knew in that first hour that he did not challenge her. He felt
his youth, his imperfections, the wastes of his past years. All that he
had fancied good about those years looked questionable now. If he had
known that he was to meet this woman, his life would have been
different. He had met no one like her. She accepted his best with ease
and without wonder. No man had been able to do that. She tossed a crown
over the highest of his mental offerings and added a higher one of her
own on his favourite subjects. Yet they were not showing each other
their wares. She stimulated him as no one had done before, and as for
her part--it was the pleasant passage of an hour.
An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes--slender and
not too tall. Her face in profile had the Greek essential of beauty, but
with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigour of that austere
line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had
ever met, as if every excellence of life had been known to her from a
child--all love and reverence and protection. He suddenly remembered
that fury of instinct with which she had kissed the boy Paul in the
throat. Something earthy and ample about that, sound and
deeply-grounded like a peasant woman's passion.
He wondered again and again what she wanted. It had nothing to do with
money or position--Romney was sure of this. Queerly enough the truth
did not come to him until later. They dined together humorously in the
little cabin of the _Sunkiang_.... A Burmese tiger had killed her
husband.
"I can stand it--if I don't stay in one place too long," she said,
looking at the farthest punkah. "It is always with me. If I stay at
home, or any one place many weeks, the thoughts seem to pile up so that
I cannot breathe. They drive me away--"
She had evidently not found before much understanding of this
point--seemed without hope to make herself clear to him.
"The thoughts of it become heavy in any one place," she added, "so that
there is no home--"
"I know," Romney said.
She looked at him quickly. Any one might have said it, but Romney spoke
as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that.
"The tiger killed my baby, too,--though I was in England--"
She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed a slow
pounding of agony in her breast, like a sea that cannot quiet down.
"I have thought of everything," she was saying. "I have some
philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all--or death
being all, but, oh, I was going to take him his little baby--as soon as
it was born. I was at his father's in Kent, England. And to think that
a bit of pink paper and the word _tiger_--"
Romney was silent.
"My baby would have been as old as that little boy with the silly
missionary father," she added.
"Why silly? I only saw a bent drab man with his particular idea of
God--"
"Silly because he doesn't permit the child to hear fairy stories--"
"Ah--"
Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right.
He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live
too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of
five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with the future, not
with the past. At the same time there was something tremendous in the
slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father. A
magnificent sort of Englishman he must have been to hold this woman's
life to his....
They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon
the mists of the ricelands on the southern shore. To the north the
river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying
city were fused into a dull red glow. The woman was thrilling him now
with every sentence:
"I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression.
Perhaps I carry it with me--and give it forth from time to time as a
matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is
not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If
I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You
are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and
drew up your chair. That startled me pleasantly--your doing that. At
least, I knew you weren't common. Grown-ups--men and women
adults--should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am--"
"I like it. I do feel the gift of it--"
"No, I'm not going around the world clinging to an ancient
bereavement.... He was a very good man, patient, a man's man--a
tiger-hunter. It's all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was
so young that I thought for a time my future sufficiently wrapped in
his. Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had
_lived_ those months. I found that there was something huge and endless
about that experience. I am not giving you any cant about motherhood.
I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a
rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why, he took it as a matter of
mere nature--as something in the natural course of events--that I should
bring _his_ child into the world. I was growing into a real creature
and he could not rise out of the annual tiger rhamadan. It is a sort of
religion with his family--and couldn't be broken. And then I was
smothered in his family. When the word was brought a kind of madness
came over me--sorrow--yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his
good, but the madness had to do with _perpetuating him_--a man who could
leave me in that smothering British household.... It seemed I wanted a
child that had nothing to do with him--with them.... What I wanted in
those days, I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief
that killed the little one. These things are mysterious.... And now--"
She laughed softly. Romney was trying to adjust this story with the
earlier talk, but each part destroyed the other. He could as readily
believe the first as the final. It dawned upon him that the real truth
might lie somewhere between, but there were no tangible forms to grip in
this middle distance. He was not inclusive enough to know that she was
for the moment intensely what she said. In any event the strange lapses
of the tale did not break the enchantment.
"Don't try to understand," she added gently. "No man could
understand--at least, none but a very great artist."
"But now," he repeated.
"Oh, I search and search. I know that travel does not bring me nearer
to what I want, but I can't rest long in one place. He left me
everything that the world can give, but I can't live long in his houses.
Yet what I search for is as likely to come to me at home, as here in
Asia--"
"What is it you search for?" Romney asked.
"A man," she said.
*2*
Romney lay in his berth after midnight. All that he had known and won
heretofore was gathered together but did not weigh in the balance
against Moira Kelvin. No discrepancy stopped the tumultuous striding of
his thoughts after her flying image and the multitude of her sentences.
She had amplified her story. Here was a woman brave enough to go out
and look for her own. She believed she would know him at once. She
believed the woman in her would know before he knew.
"It's not a matter of place," she had repeated. "I don't hasten matters
by rounding the world every year or two. I know he might just as well
cross my own threshold in Ireland or come to one of the late
tiger-hunter's households in England. Not a matter of place, but the
right time. I think when we are both ready he will come surely--it must
be he who is not ready.... See how the years go. I am older than you,
Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am
afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I
don't want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child--one child
from him. I learned something of what it means--oh, just the beginning
of that mighty mystery. I would kill him--if he did not prove the real
lover. No more tiger-hunters for me. All boyish things would have to be
put away by the man I took for my own. He would have to know what it
means to be a father. There's something heroic about that that the world
doesn't dream of yet. My lover would have to understand that. At
least, he would have to know when I told him. God, how few are the
lovers in the world."
Romney pondered this again and again in his berth, sentence by sentence.
Once she had laughed and said:
"The man I mean--why, his romance is greater to him than his life work."
And again, she had bent forward whispering, her hand upon his knee:
"Sometimes I feel as if I were strong enough to be the mother of the new
race."
All this on a little river steamer, deep in China, the rice-lands giving
away to the hills as they neared Hankow. Moira Kelvin had but one
theme--the lover she would some time know. A frail superb woman burning
with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff in her to endure fire
that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions.
He quite believed that she was capable of killing the man who failed
her. He sensed something of her deadly horror in the mistake she had
once made. She was different now from the girl-wife of that patient
English sportsman.
"There are analogies in nature about this killing of the male," she had
said. "Look at the fate of the bee whom the queen crowns king in their
flight."
The hours had passed magically. It was he who had risen first. He was
afraid of the woman, afraid as he had never been before, of some
intrinsic lacking of his own. He felt at times that his own presence
had nothing to do with her ideal--that she was merely telling her story
as she might have done to some woman companion. Then there were other
moments of personal relation--as if she felt from the first the power
she possessed for him; that she was interested in making it greater;
that she loved the use of her power in his arousing; even that he might
be or become something of this solar being she dreamed of.... Always
with her was the feeling that she was not interpreting herself exactly,
some histrionic weakness--that she was carried away in the ardour of her
impulses; that she acted perfectly the moment, but was not exactly that.
Romney hated the logic of the male mind that persistently brought him
this observation.
They were together the next afternoon at Longstruth's _Pyramids_ by the
river, a little table in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of
the Empire. Two white butterflies were whirling together persistently
near. Moira Kelvin's eyes followed them dreamily. Romney said:
"They make me think of the States--little common kid-day butterflies. I
don't know as I ever saw them before in China."
"They are around the world," she answered. "They are always where I am
because I see them. Always two--like bluebirds, and always silent like
bluebirds. I see them and all well-paired things.... Once in Ireland
in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different
one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept
as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my
mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that
dress--ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took
the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June
when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty windless
evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed
upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over
the grove of copper beeches.... I am hungry and thirsty to-day, Sir
Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes Nature maddens me....
"But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the
corner, and I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts
to me, and there seemed no love in the world--only loneliness and
twilight--my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward, but seeming
to touch no living thing.
"I laughed at myself for being frightened by a little rustle and went
back into the room. I saw a great gray moth at the window screen and
then I remembered and ran to the desk where I had left the cocoon. The
whole branch had fallen--and I got the picture of the birth of a winged
thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen--a
gleaming gray creation, with a light of its own about it--the light of
the fairy world which I remembered from a child. The wings were
whirring silently--the still strange creature poised for flight in the
night, and held by this man-made screen. At the end of each feathered
antenna was a pendent cross. I tried to open the screen, but it was old
like all of the things of that house and I ran to find a servant.
When I returned, the moth was not alone. _Its own_ had come to it
through the twilight--answering some cry we are too coarse to hear.
They were there together--a mystic pair of wonderful gray mates--one on
the outside of the screen, one in the room. I could not wait for the
servant, but cut a door in the wire with a rough bronze paper-cutter,
and away they flew together."
It was her theme.
All that day Romney dwelt in her power. She gilded his world. He found
that his relation to her was that of servitude. She commanded
imperiously, dictating what they should say, where they should go, what
they should eat and drink. Yet he was glad, for this had never happened
before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of
their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him
anew. She was great and glowing. He did not know that all the old
ideals of wooing and winning that the world has come up through were
impossible with her. Vaguely and darkly the hope formed that _time_
might change something; that the luck of a white man in Asia might come
to his aid.
Romney was less the mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions,
visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the levelling
dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled,
she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and
she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was not the
thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might
not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and
splendour of her diffusion.
There was at Longstruth's a Chinese boy who served them. He seemed to
enter into their thought of the little delicacies. He had some English
which Romney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late
afternoon when a matter of service required explicit information, and
Romney administered it in Chinese, excusing himself as he took his
attention for a moment from the woman. He turned back to her to find a
new interest in her eyes.
"Tell me about yourself," she said suddenly. "You must have come to
China as a child to speak like that."
"No, I have been here only four years--three years in India before that.
My ways have not been interesting. Since you came they have all been
cheapened. I see I have wasted my time--"
"Now that is a good saying. Thank you. Sometimes, Sir Romney, you are
very attractive--"
"It is quite true. The things that interested men here--I mean the
Americans and English, the big exploiters--have not held me long, though
I have worked with them and for them. Always the different, the more
hidden things called me. Until yesterday I thought I was at least doing
decently well. But I see you have somehow touched the core of things.
I've been puttering--"
"At least, it is good not to be considered either wicked or insane," she
answered. "I usually draw that. I wonder that you like my things.
Sometimes I have even felt myself that I am a little mad. The first
time that came to me was in England the first year after the tiger. It
was a summer Sunday morning--the earth was risen in beauty--birds
singing as they only sing in the sun-mists that follow a night of rain.
It was a seething of bird-song, of colour and fragrance--just a year
after the tiger. As I listened, the fury of longing that I live with
came upon me in high tide--and then in the midst of it, I heard the
sound of church-bells from the village. It was like a gray cloud, an
evil odour, a catarrhal voice.... Spectres of the English Sabbath.
People stifled me for days after that.... But I talk and talk and I
want your story now. See, we have been together all day and some of
yesterday and you have listened--"
"I am not through listening. So much of me was asleep before
yesterday."
She smiled swiftly at him. "You shall not escape now that you are so
good. See, the night is coming. Everything is here. Longstruth's is
worth coming up the river for. China is sweeter here and undefiled. I
would be hideously lonely without you--and you have not told me who and
what you are. Why, listen, I don't often ask a man to talk about
himself."
"I get the force of that. It's only that what I have is drab and young.
I would have made it different had I known you were coming--"
"Sir Romney--there's a pull about you. You do not diminish. Oh, I must
know all about you now--"
"I hear and obey," he said.
*3*
Romney was a bit taller than necessary with a beaked nose and a head
that bowed naturally. When he turned from the side and looked up at you
smilingly, it was a face you were apt to remember. The mannerism was so
peculiarly his own when he was interested or amused, that he did not
know of it. There was nothing about him (unless it was the depth of
calmness in his eyes) to denote other than a sophisticated white man
travelling in a state of comfort if not plenty. A clean-faced,
white-toothed American of twenty-seven--a good mouth, a good brow,
straight lean shoulders, and a long dark hand--nothing striking or
exceptional, except the beaked nose, and possibly the depth of calmness
in his eyes. Something of poise and power in that.
"I came out here seven years ago from California," he said. "A
tender-chested young student from Palo Alto with book-Sanscrit. I had a
post with an American consul in one of the second towns of Bengal. I
used to write letters in Bengali for him. He had a rice-brewery on the
side, and couldn't write English. He used to chew tobacco and promote
his business, swearing that rice beer was more delectable than English
ale, and experimenting in keg-making with the native woods. It hurt him
to have to import kegs. The English didn't like him and he had an
incessant war on. It kept him fit, this battling. The East could not
smother his energy.... But I took other posts and was presently
touching the skirts of Mother China.
"She challenged me more than India had done. I really got the call from
her one morning on the Pearl River a little above Canton. It was a
shimmering day--the big rice-lands on either side. Some rice we saw
yesterday, though we're a bit far north. There was a glitter about that
day as the sun rose. I seem to remember this now more than then. You
always put an atmosphere to your stories--the kind of day or night.
Nature means things to you.... I knew right there that day that I had
left India for good. That was four years ago. China needed me and I
was to spare. All hitherto was mere preparation for a life in the East,
more real. You see the English have everything in India. The higher a
man climbs the more he feels the ordering English hand. It doesn't make
any difference if he likes it or not.
"I was merely carrying a little commercial message up the Pearl River
that morning. China touched me, kind of opened up to me then and there,
the big deviltry, the big cunning, the big beauty in the world above the
dollar sign and the designation of the British pound.
"I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing-song intonation
as he hailed some naked neighbour in a passing junk. I began to get the
quality of the voices of the Chinese then, as I had heard the native
Bengali three years before--a kind of lust in my heart to know what they
were saying, and why they said it. I threw up my job and travelled
north. I studied long in Shanghai. Long--that is, about two years.
Academic Sanscrit didn't help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned
the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the
provinces. I didn't do this with the idea of commanding big money, but I
began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight
or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the
working of the Oriental mind.
"The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu
boys in Bengal. That's what they do best--study, gather in, mull over,
meditate, but bolt at the idea of action. I was American enough to want
to make some of this study-stuff come true, but that in India was a
valuable period of mental accretion. It wasn't living here in the East
that made me in a sense familiar with the native mind--it was the sacred
writings of China, India and Palestine. In Shanghai, and later in
Peking, I hobnobbed with the young _literati_--a different class from
the Indian students, very interesting men who prepare themselves almost
cosmically to enter local politics. I saw that China had always pulled
me strangely. Meeting the boys here recalled to me how interested I had
been in the Chinese students at Palo Alto. It was from a Chinese at
college that I began to get a real conception of the historic and
esoteric figure of Jesus--the man we make a religion of in the States.
Over here the steady-going literature of the best minds is never far
from the utterances of the mystics and the prophets. I met them all from
Patanjali to Paracelsus and volumes of magic, the spiritual properties
of medicine, studies of the stars that none would scoff at so breezily
as the modern astronomers of Europe and America.
"More or less at this time I was in touch with Americans in China who
were making money. I lived a double life--holding fast to the
commercial world, and keeping secret my enthusiasm for matters of
mysticism. This recreation kept me from getting stale and tainted. The
white man over here plays a lot, and he drinks too much at his play.
Perhaps I'm getting too diffused in this story, but I rather wanted you
to understand, since I began, the idea that drove me to become powerful
in the native mind and at the same time to hold a grip on the West. I
was disinclined to the poverty of the earth and at the same time
unwilling to release my grip on certain ideas of Heaven. You see all
real mysticism is out of the East. There was only one way to make good
on this training and the Chinese knows how. The Hindu doesn't. It's to
keep God and man separate, to keep the left hand for the spirit of
things and the right for matter and the world. I had a gift in the
beginning for these languages. I wouldn't have gotten them without
that. I wouldn't have had the urge without it. It was that lust to
know what the river-men were saying, and not only that, but to know why
they said these things. A man might learn Chinese in a certain number
of months, but he can't learn the _feel_ of the people without a call to
them.
"Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That
means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to
think in Chinese--that's the truth--so much so that the English and
American training I had known began to take on the same sense of
distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a
cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you and the yellow rug--even before
you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of romance--"
He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence
because he saw that his story was making her incline to him pleasantly.
"Meanwhile," he added, "I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways, and I
had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy.
I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh--"
"That is much," Moira Kelvin said.
Then Romney realized--perhaps it was something of premonition--that what
he said was not quite as exact as it would have been before meeting her.
"Perhaps it is too much," he replied quickly. "I would have said it
without qualification before--before yesterday. I only mean in
men-matters. Perhaps I have to learn how to wait and how to laugh all
over again in the things that are nearer the heart. I was only talking
about the pressures that the world put on a man. Perhaps I have not put
away boyish things that pertain to a man's relation with women, his
woman. That's an arcanum to me--"
"Arcanums call you, don't they, Sir Romney?" she asked.
He saw the gleam of her eyes and teeth in the purple dusk.
"Something as they call you, I think. I have never known the sheer
excitement of a human presence such as you have brought to me. It's
because I can lose myself in you. China has a new atmosphere when I'm
with you--"
"I am interested. I like your praise."
Her voice came lingeringly to him. "You are not so young as I thought,"
she went on. "And yet you are young. You are still preparing, and yet
you have passed the multitudes of men--oh, so far."
"Presently I began to see the new birth of China. It became clearer and
clearer as I learned more of the native mind. Now that I think of it,
this new birth which is not yet consummated, is like the gray glistening
moth of your Irish house that lay in the desk through the long winter.
All that the usual white man sees, even now, is the weathered rusty
chrysalis of the old, but I see the wings. They are still pinned. The
body is moist and craving, but it looks great and good to me. I met some
of the young men who are ready to give their lives for it--a kind of
inspired group of young men, like Hugo's group that nearly became
famous.
And there is one American whom I was honoured to meet--oh--just
recently. My story is rapidly getting up to date. This American, a
hunchback and a prophet, has given himself to old mother China. He
dreams about the peace that is ahead for the world, and his dreams are
straight as the hammer to the anvil because he has no sentiment, knows
all about war--even the cleansing of war--has written a text-book on
military tactics which is the biggest and newest thing in American and
British camps--yet a dreamer about peace--"
Her face was close to his in the dusk, a yearning in her eyes that shook
his heart. A chill went through him because this yearning was not for
him. He saw that he had touched her in the center of her mysterious
being--saw that a man with a dream was more to her than any man's
action.
"Tell me more," she whispered.
"Nifton Bend--have you, too, heard of him?"
"Not until now. Is that the Hunchback's name?"
"Yes. I only saw him for about ten minutes. It was in Peking a year
ago--the strangest, saddest and longest face in the world. It looks up
at you, for he is maimed. I could not speak when he first looked up at
me. Something leaped in my chest. I wanted to put my arms about him and
lead him to a chair. It wouldn't do to tell that impulse--only to a
woman.... The name of Nifton Bend was repeating in my mind. It was in
a room of a native professor's house in the Congrou section of Peking.
There were students about, but all became hushed with the Hunchback's
presence. Cushions were brought and we sat down around him. I
remembered his name in connection with the military text-book now. That
came with a jump. He was young and yet long ago I had read another book
of his, which, until he was here before me, I had not related to the
author of the text-book. It was during the college days in California
when that other book came to me, and I loved the Chinese setting. The
book itself, I did not remember. It was half a story, half a
fairy-tale, but from it, the spirit of China had come to me--something
related to the emerging of the great gray moth. This was only the
beginning of recollections. I had heard this man spoken of as the
spirit of Young China, as the organiser and leader of the new Chinese
army, as a represser of the Japanese influence. This frail and broken
body seemed, in the extravagance of my thoughts of that moment, to hold
the future of the Empire. I saw him somehow as the embodiment of the
depth and genius of the yellow race. They called him _The General_.
"He was looking at me with a dead, expressionless gaze. An instant
before his eyes had been burning, and there had been a smile on the
woman-mouth of him. Only the pale angular jaw and the narrow temples
had not changed. I was startled at his look. His head made me think of
a wolf-hound--that long ironed head. It was not until normal
consciousness and the smile returned that I realised that his lapse of
expression meant that he was _seeing into me_--that I had been appraised
body and soul--"
Romney talked coldly now. He felt the entire passion of the woman
turned from his own story--that he had touched something that took her
farther from himself, if nearer to her dream. He caught a glimpse of
what it would mean to hold the heart of this woman in all its power. It
was like Romney to make as much as possible now of the opposing
influence, yet he hurried through:
"Nifton Bend's eyes were lingering warmly upon me again. I felt zeal
for service under him, but I was tied up for the time being. Yes, it was
as if I had found a master. In coming into his presence, I had touched
the inner circle. He spoke of China and Japan, a low uninflected
English, and then of America--how he had left her because there was no
play of his powers in America--how the States seemed to him tranced in
trifles--yet how he loved the States. Presently he said that we were
destined to meet again--and I knew that the audience was finished."
"Where is he now?" Moira Kelvin asked.
"In Peking--at least, he is never far from the centre of things, and
that is Peking."
They were silent some time and then the woman spoke:
"You have told me a story of yourself--by talking about China and
another man.... Take me back to the hotel, Sir Romney, I will see you
to-morrow. Come to me at noon if you like. It has been a good
day--thanks to you. I'm glad to know you better and better. It sounds
cold--but perhaps some time you'll know what that means. I am a little
mad to-night.... I seem to feel old China in her new birth--moist and
craving like the big gray moth--her mate not yet come--and this
Hunchback whom you are destined to meet again--"
*4*
It was a whirlwind fortnight at Hankow. Romney was game, rather big
game, for a questing beauty a-wing around the world. His soul had been
asleep to her kind of magic. She touched him awake. His education and
many attitudes towards life were torn down and rebuilt. There was a
furious lover in the man, and serious weaknesses that had never been
tested before. Though he did not acknowledge, and perhaps was not aware
of the fact, he had been in his own way a terrific worker. The passions
of his life, in a single day, had been turned from his tasks to Moira
Kelvin. She had to be a rather splendid creature to take gracefully the
full tumult from such a man's heart, but this was her genius.
Romney's woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive.
She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought
to bear upon a man to make him greater, to make him surpass himself,
than an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest
force, and still have an aching void to spare.
Moira Kelvin was thirty years old, in full bloom, trusting nothing under
the sun but her own heart. Whether it was mania or the excellence of
her evolution, her conviction remained upstanding that there was one man
somewhere who could fully awaken her. She was without laws and without
fears, but she would have considered it the most vulgar form of failure
to give herself to a man who called her only in part. She was in the
height of her power, and modern enough to wish to know a man well before
she revealed to him more than the usual arts of woman. Her one great
mistake had been made at the end of girlhood in the case of the
tiger-hunter. She held her body and her beauty even more sacred now
because of that failure. Yet she looked into the faces of men
everywhere. Any man brave enough could have his chance. Romney made
the most of his.
For hours on their last day together Romney could not speak. He looked
long into her face from time to time--until it turned into a mist before
his eyes, or other shadowy faces passed before it. He could see nothing
beyond her but his own death, and he knew enough to realise there could
not be much help in that, considering his present frame of mind.... They
were at Longstruth's, a sultry evening. She was tender and tyrannical in
turn.
"... We are not enemies," she said. "I have been no more to you than
you have called. I know you are not holding that ancient balderdash that
I lured you on. I have never from the first day kept from you my
conviction that the one had not been found in Sir Romney. And yet you
were more to me than I thought at first. Why not take the full honour
of that now?"
"You are going away," he said dully.
"It is a mercy to you--though I am not merciful. If you were a fool,
like most men, you would think me a devil."
"I suppose men who are not big enough to make good with a woman--call
her a devil--"
"Or a vampire," she laughed.
He shook his head. He had lost his sense of humour for the time. "I'm
not making any mistake about you. I've been away about world matters
like most men. The women we meet usually call us to be less than we
are, rather than more--"
"Men have made women that way," she said quickly.
"The way doesn't matter. That's what happens, or at least men think so,
and fail to get on the ground where even an average woman is at her
best.... But it's not generalities for me. I perceived myself lost in
you. I loved from the first the great open nature which you drew
from--mates in everything, your whole creativeness lost in the one
subject--your whole power and reason for being--love. When I came to
you I seemed to come into my own country.... I did not seek you. I was
happy enough in the old. I looked bleak and blind to myself before your
coming. Oh, I praise you right enough--only it's hard, damned hard, to
give up--"
"You will be tremendous for some woman," she whispered. "Let me tell
you--there was one day when I rocked before you--"
"To think I could diminish after that," he said slowly. His voice
chilled her.
"You have said it all, Sir Romney. We did not seek this thing. At
least, I had no wish to hurt you. I do not play in these great matters.
Some have thought otherwise, but I do not play. You would not have
known me an hour if you had not been worth knowing--"
"I have ceased to be worth knowing then--only to-day?"
"That is not kind, Sir Romney. You are less than yourself to say that.
We have been much together. If you are hurt by this, it is because you
are less than I think you are. Hurt--I mean enduringly. Hurt, of course
now, but constructively. You will not die. Perhaps you will not break
training seriously. Listen, do you think I fail to know what will happen
to you--if you make the best of this? ... You will be a greater lover
for some other woman. She will have to be a greater woman to call you.
You will know her more in the first hour because of these days with me.
You will be less apt to make the one hideous mistake which men and women
make in the world--that of choosing the wrong mate. You will be a
quester because of these days with me. There's something precious about
that."
"If there is but one woman in the world for me--as you say there is but
one man for you--then why is it that I want you so?"
"This is your initiation. Mine was more sordid and revolting with the
tiger-hunter. I am your awakener. You think I am everything, because I
am older, deeper in the world of love--demanding so much--thinking so
much of these things. Remember this--there is no such thing as the
triangle among real people. Mark the woman as common-minded who is in
doubt between two men whom she knows well. All shuffling and
experimenting is the cause of misery in the world. The higher the soul
of a man or woman, the more essential is _the_ voice, the hand of one.
Any key will fit common locks. As for you--you were held in your work.
All the natural fury of you was compressed in the gray and the silence
of mere men-things. You were like a sleeping prince, Sir Romney. I but
break the enchantment, and look into your face as your eyes open, and
say sorrowfully--'No, it is not he,' and pass on."
"Moira Kelvin--you pass on."
"You would not want me to take less than I dream of?"
"But I love you. I never said it before. I have no place to put this
great thing--that you have called. It doesn't come back to me. It's
got all of me. It leaves me so much less than alive--when you pass on."
He smiled at her. "Sounds weak and pleady. I don't mean it that way. I
want nothing of pity, of course. Pity, that would be obscene. I'm not
making a picture of the heart bereft. This is no doom-song to a
gracious lady--only knowing you is an insult to the rest of the world."
Her slim hand darted out to him.
For a moment his voice choked. The touch of her was like a greater
self. He was tortured with a vision of what it would mean to have all
of this woman--to command her tenderness utterly, her bestowals, the
full deep look of woman to man, the night and day presence, the child
she dreamed of--this woman lovely as a golden cloud.... He trembled and
his head turned away.
Her face came around to his.
"Romney," she whispered. "It isn't nearly so easy as it would be if you
were less a man. Oh, don't you see that? I would have had the heart of
a girl and pitied you, and thought it love. You're enough to make
that--except for the life I learned in England. Now it's the one
covenant. Why, the man I want--I'll do the winning. I would bring the
fight to him. Nothing could stand between us. I could be saint or
wanton. You don't know me. You would not want half of me. You could
only want that part of me you are able to command. Perhaps, as that
Hunchback said to you, 'We shall meet again.' I feel that you are a big
fellow--brave and quiet and generous--that you have the stuff to make a
lover. The real lover must be a bit of a mystic and you have that--but
not now, and I must go on.... See, how I have stayed--"
Romney stared hard at her a moment, and then beyond. It was all black,
a depth of bamboo clumps like a jungle, over her bent left shoulder. He
saw his end in that blackness. She was light and power and beauty and
art. A group of waiting-girls were playing the _vina_, behind the
lattice by the bank of the river. It was like the slow song of
nightingales. The scent of roses passed between them like a spirit
hand. Her face was nearer. The warm scent of her was in his nostrils,
and power came to him that he had not known at all that day. Romney
spoke:
"Don't think of me as holding you. I love you too much for that--how
easy to say that after once it is spoken.... I have nothing but praise
and gladness to give you. Yes, you have stayed--that I might be with
you--that I might have my full chance. I know what you mean by its
being worth death--and what a man he would be to command your heart
once, even--and live on afterward.... No, I wouldn't hold you. I
wouldn't cry out. I would hold you by sheer love for me--but I am not
great enough for that. I would cry out if you came to my arms, but they
are not magnetic enough. I have had my chance. I know what a woman is.
Forgive me if I disagree about there being another--for me. I'm afraid
there isn't, because I've known you--"
His voice became very soft. "You'll feel it," he added. "You'll feel
it following you around--a man's love for you--mine. I win--to know
what I know to-night. And when you find him--know that I drink his
health. I could do that devoutly.... I have had your baggage taken to
the boat. The launch will call here for you.... In a few minutes....
I think--I think you are not a woman at all--but an immortal! You see I
cannot suffer thinking of you that way--"
"Romney--"
"Yes--"
"Romney--no one is watching. I would not care if they were--put your
head a moment on my breast.... Ah, and now upon my knee ... dear boy
... Romney, I am blind. I almost hate to go. Don't let me stay, will
you? ... Ah, kiss me--once ... lips ... ice cold ... once? It isn't
true! It's just passion, Romney! I hate myself. Don't let me stay
to-night ... once--"
They were standing. She had not spoken for long. The launch was
waiting.
"I want something that you have on--something of yours," he managed to
say steadily.
She unfastened her cloak, gave it to him to hold--took off the waist she
wore--a bit of gold-rose chiffon that he could cover in his palm. Then
she put on her cloak again.
He helped her into the launch. Her bowed head turned to him a moment,
and she covered her eyes. The launch sputtered away.
Romney went back to the seat near the bamboo thicket. The scent of
roses wavered past, and the music of the _vina_ came in to him. Romney
drank. Once he raised his head. It was her steamer passing down the
river. Hours afterwards he was drinking there alone.... Toward morning
Longstruth himself came and sat down, but the American did not speak.
Neither was he drunk in the least.
*PART ONE: THE GREAT DRIFT*
*SUNDRY ADVENTURES*
*1*
The night was starless, windless. The funnels of the _John Dividend_, a
tramp steamer, lying in the yellow water off Woosung, were smearing the
deck; the cinders crunched under the boots of the solitary forward
watch. This was a white man who leaned over the railing, and reflected
in the dull fashion of a bruised mind, that he would have to scrub down
that deck at dawn. A live cinder dropped on the back of his neck. He
brushed it away stolidly without haste. The action was that of one so
accustomed to suffering that the finer sense was deadened to ordinary
pangs. The tall attenuated figure was clad in loose and dirty garments
of cotton. One of his reckless eyes a fist had rimmed with black. In
some respects this was the most miserable man that ever swabbed the
decks of the _John Dividend_.
He had been given a berth without undue questioning while the ship lay
in Manila harbour; had spent eleven days and nights on board the tramp,
learning what the deeper hell is like. He had been refused the
privilege of going ashore at Woosung, had been abused by the captain and
the crew, beaten by the second mate and bitten by the engineer's dog.
Besides he had gotten onto McLean's books to the extent of twenty-five
dollars.
McLean was the second engineer, a sober Scot who augmented his earnings
by loaning money to the crew at interest. The murderous rate which he
charged reinforced him somewhat against the big chances necessary in
dealing with lawless, ship-jumping wanderers. Yet his losses were
smaller than men believed. McLean had a sleepless gray eye--only one,
but that sufficed--and a memory for faces and wrongs as remorseless as
temporal things can be.
He never accounted a debt lost until he had seen the dead body of the
debtor and found it barren. He was a profound believer in the smallness
of the world and in the efficacy of time. He had money banked in all
the Oriental seaport towns from Aden to Yokohama. He was a money-lender
by nature. The sea was a means, not a labour of love. In a word it was
wisdom to keep away from McLean; and if that were impossible, the next
best thing was to pay what he had coming with interest in full, for he
had a way of overturning cities and draining seas for his own.