interesting, for his credentials opened a different shelf of native life
from that which the foreign traveller ever encounters. Here he was
surrounded by the young men to whom the names of Ti Kung and Minglapo
and Nifton Bend were demigods, no less. He saw the cause of Young China
in force, felt the strong fresh beat of it, and became more than ever
glad that it was in the world, and that he had the honour to be a
servant of it. To him, there were no longer three but four leaders. He
told Moira Kelvin this before he left the lamp-lit room in Tientsin.
She was vital warmth and depth of background to a picture such as his.
Men called forth his friendship and loyalty and service, but there was
something in the spirit of romance which she stood for, that made a
slave of him, and there was something of creative significance in her
love-relation with the General that was so intimate and sacred that he
did not bring it even to the foreground of his mind for close analysis.
Her personal pull upon him was easily borne now. He kept it as a kind
of secret sweetness of life. It honoured her, and the yearning that
came with it was one of the finest ingredients for moral health. No man
spends energy in yearning whose real forces are asleep. So they were
good girding days and his health came back. He felt himself relaxing
again in the slow rhythmic breath of the interior.
Romney only knew that he was going to the Gobi Desert. There was a
Peking letter among his numbered documents; another letter to be opened
in Tushi-kow and for all points of his journey ahead up to a town in the
desert called Wampli. But these letters were not to be read until he
reached the towns noted, and the documents attending each letter were
promised to give him further details as to friends, impedimentum, his
task and safe conduct.
Three days were spent in Tushi-kow where the Chinese Post Road forks
from the Russian caravan route to Siberia. Here he was quartered in the
house of Fai Ming, whose name was in daily use by the members of the
cause in Peking. This old aristocrat who felt honoured in giving his
wealth and strength to the people, had many tales to tell of the Chinese
awakening, of the young social order in America and Europe which he had
visited since Romney had been home. It was his view that a certain
brotherhood passion was trimmed for ignition around the world and would
shortly become a circle of cleansing flame.
"The camels are ready," Fai Ming said on the last day, "but I would not
have you hasten, my friend. There is a long caravan-route from
here--let us say to Turgim, where a real activity may begin for you.
Another party will start three days hence if you wish to wait--"
Romney shook his head. "Yet I have felt that I have been in my own home
with you," he added.
"Your mission is unprecedented. The desert tribes are said to be full
of zeal, and slow in discrimination, though you will not meet dangers on
this side of Turgim. In any event we are taught that a man with a real
mission is in the hands of strange and powerful helpers."
Bamban meant superb tea, dry blankets, and dustless food. Also, he
appeared to command a proper respect for his new master not only from
the native travellers, but from the camel-drivers and Tartar merchants.
Moreover, that camel-reek which became a part of the very texture of
everything in the caravan, as all men and equipment of a cavalry outfit
partake of the essence of horse, was at least checked in its
pervasiveness so far as Romney was concerned, by the tireless efforts of
the fastidious one.
"Bamban, you're getting to be a habit that will be hard to break,"
Romney remarked one evening early in the journey to Turgim.
Days folded into each other, and something from the unearthly gleam of
the desert edges entered his soul. His mind moved slowly. Sometimes he
wondered if the old quick thinking and sharp mental activity would ever
come back. At times he had no care regarding it, feeling that all
surface glibness had passed for good. His orders so far were only
arousing. He did not know as yet what he was to do in the Gobi, though
the intimations were of a most challenging kind. He had been furnished
with copies of manuscripts written in Chinese and in part in Sanscrit,
containing information regarding the desert, information that the world
at large would scoff at. He was advised concurrently to study these
papers. More and more he realised that in ways other than his
linguistic prowess he was fitted for the journey at hand.
He thought much of Moira Kelvin and Nifton Bend. One night by the
desert fire, with Bamban sitting expectantly near, the salient events of
the year moved by in steady, and for the first time, ordered procession,
beginning with his first glance at the yellow rug on the little river
steamer _Sungkiang_--that whirlwind fortnight. For a month or so he had
been close to death--he saw this clearly now--her laugh the note of his
delirium, her kiss the heat of his fever. After that, a kind of low
animal hate which had to burn out before decency and sense came.
He was cool now. The night was winter clear. He would never have been
able to see her so largely and definedly as now, had she taken him. She
had become a kind of institution, but impersonal. His present run of
thoughts was not without a touch of chivalry. He saw that there are very
few really exciting vampires among the love-women; that no man strikes
fire with a superb woman's genius without enduring benefits. If a man
figures out the cost in dollars for such an adventure he's not a lover
of quality. If a man's career in the world is slowed somewhat, it's an
easy price to pay for being privileged to enter even for a little time
the domain of a passionate woman's genius. The yellow-rug woman was his
initiation. The fact that he had glimpsed a devil in her too much for a
boy to subdue, no longer prevented him from seeing that the fault was
his own weakness and that her devil was in no way smug. He had well put
away the cheap male diversion of hating all women, because he had met
one too great to hide herself in him. He did not want Moira Kelvin
back, but his heart was strangely expectant of meeting some one of her
quality, some glory akin to hers, but nearer his own full comprehension.
Because he did encounter something of this kind, he is present on these
pages. The rest--the strangeness, the peril, the desert itself, is mere
setting and arrangement.
In the main, the deeps of his mind were undisturbed, the forces there
moving often with a finer vitality than he had known before, but day
after day the expectancy recurred in the same form, the sense of an
imminent and radical complication. He could not quite put away thoughts
of this delicate and encompassing mystery. Always he said, "This will
pass when I really enter the desert," but it was not so in the journey
to Turgim, though he saw no white woman throughout those majestic
days--only the dark and yellow women in the shadows of the Rest Houses
at evening--creatures very far from complication. Still, the gently
lingering of feminine redolence in his reveries....
Always when he thought of the woman yet unknown, the penetration and
one-pointedness of his mission diminished. In the colder morning hours
he was able to reckon with the soft haunt of it all; but in the wondrous
nights of desert moonlight (the same lady of the moon, full-throated,
head tilted back) Young China of the towering present, and the
sand-strewn relics of the ancient Lemurians, said to be left in the
Gobi, alike lost their conspicuous magic.
At Turgim, a vile and sprawling town, Romney drew a somewhat clearer
idea of what he was out after, and the vague vastness of the undertaking
at this time possessed the large part of his thinking in the day-light
hours of travel. The main road was left at Turgim and the next point
was Nadiram, six days' journey straight west into the desert. Three
Tartar merchants arranged to travel this stretch and Bamban explained
that they relied upon his master's credentials, since Nadiram was
usually reached from an open spur running south from the Chinese Post
Road at a point ten days' journey ahead. Nearly two weeks was to be
saved by this western cut, but the trail was commercially unsafe. The
remotest of the Russian consuls was said to be stationed at Nadiram.
Six days--a party of five camels. The Gobi now gave them battle, days
of burning, nights of sudden chill. The three strangers proved helpful,
as they knew the best switches of the trail and the halts for water and
rest. Three times desert bands swept up to the little caravan--foul and
furious they appeared, demanding their tariffs of money to the last
copper or kopeck. It was on this journey that Romney first heard the
hyenas....
The last day of the journey to Nadiram was ending. It had been an extra
long stretch for the camels. He planned to rest a few days, and Nadiram
was supposed to be for him, the last day on the outer and open highway
of the desert. A sense of the mystery of the East came that night, as
it had not since his early days in India.
They neared the settlement in the first coolness of early evening. It
lay in a strange, fixed fashion, as if moulded low upon the rolling
sand. Except for the shadows, it would have been unearthly. Indeed,
there was a sharp intensity to the shadows, such as one finds upon the
moon through a strong lens, but the colour was lowered--a Gobi colour, a
lifeless, sand-scoured yellow. Romney gathered his padded coat about
him before the hut-shadows fell across the way. The desert was clean,
but the smell of the town was of uncovered dead. In the open, the sun
had played upon all surfaces; men had defiled these shadows. Romney
shivered, his nostrils had long been clean of Turgim....
Nothing of his reading or imagination had pictured this entrance to
Nadiram, and yet there was a strange and evil familiarity about it
all--as if some ancient picture of his mind finally opened to tally with
the present, object for object.
The moon was not yet risen; the town was lit, but the desert still in
twilight. The main road through the town stretched straight into the
East. In the very centre of it, in the low distance, the planet Jupiter
was rising--something to hold to, something of peace and spaciousness.
It was needed, because the sights and sounds and scents about him, as
the camels rocked in, belonged to a flaring hell. Little shops were lit
with torches in the doorways, torches that roared and were red. The
faces of the keepers took on this red light, also the faces of the
beggars in the streets. The tired beasts moved forward rapidly and with
a stealth that had long been forgotten in the desert. The forward
drivers were continually screaming for right of way. Thus Romney saw
Nadiram, the faces of the people turned upward in the red
reflection--like a kindling of hatred upon a countenance of impassive
gloom.
The three Tartar merchants disappeared into a side street. Romney
turned presently into the court-yard of the Russian consulate, and
dismounted, deeply conscious in the dusk of the eyes of a woman in the
doorway.
*2*
From the moment that he beckoned to Bamban to make his camel kneel in
the court of the Consulate, until the woman's eyes turned to his from
where she stood in the narrow opening of the door, an intensity of sheer
living possessed him such as he had never experienced except during the
Hankow fortnight. His good limbs stumbled as he crossed the level stone
flags, not because he had been on the rack for hours, but because the
main force of his life had turned out to the woman's face--as if all his
life hitherto had been but a journey to that face.
She gave no sign; merely bowed and said in English:
"The Russian Consul is ill. He can see no one."
To the weathered Romney had come a certain dismay. He had been able to
meet most pressures from men; take up most of men's crosses and carry
them to Golgotha, if necessary, but the burden of this--that her face
was calm, that her eyes gave no sign, that his approach meant nothing of
the extraordinary nature that had prevailed upon him--this held the
unique pang. He tried to save himself, as a man's mind will, by the
thought that the suddenness of this encounter and the utter absence of
beauty from his life for many weeks, had stimulated him in an unusual
way. This that had rocked his heart was just a pretty woman's influence.
She would say something presently to break the dream, and he would be
quite calm again.
It was not until after this rush of thinking that Romney came up out of
the deeps--enough to laugh at himself, for expecting her to be startled
by his coming. But it was not a very successful laugh, not the kind he
used in men's affairs or against the worst that the world had shown him
since the other woman went her way. The idea of his mission did not
rouse him. He had merely concentrated on work to pass the time until
this moment. In fact it is the great workers of the world who become
terrific to handle when they turn from their tasks to a woman....
Romney had no particular message for the Russian Consul, yet he said
with difficulty:
"Is the Consul very ill?"
"I think he will be able to see you in the morning."
Now she was looking at him differently, her head bent toward him.
"You do not speak like an Englishman," she added.
He drew closer. "I am American."
It was not apparent whether she was pleased or regretted the fact. That
there was a medium of language between them did not occur in its full
importance until afterward.
"I am Anna Erivan, the Consul's sister."
If she had been Erivan's wife, Romney might have treasured for some time
a certain deep dream, but certainly he would have kept his dreaming
clean-clipped that night; and certainly he would not have tarried in the
court, until he was asked to enter the Consulate.
Bamban was sent with the camels to the Rest House. The woman made tea
and placed food before him, lighting the candles and tending the fire
upon the hearth.
It was a low, broad room, the beams of the ceiling uncovered, the floor
paved with flags, like the court, and gratifyingly clean.
She spoke as she served him.... Her brother was not dangerously ill.
He would be up again in the morning, if that would do.... She had been
here with him a year. Yes, she had been lonely.... There were no other
Russians here, no other Europeans, none who remained.... No one
remained in Nadiram. It was but a point on the long road. No one came
back; all moved on. In good time every one passed on. If one remained
long enough in Nadiram, all Asia would go by, she supposed.... Mostly,
however, they were Chinese and Buddhist holy men, many of them weak from
hunger that they had brought upon themselves. She loved the holy men.
Some of them were quite pure.... There was one very ancient one, who
was almost dead. He had slept in the court for a whole day, and she had
served him. His heart was an abode of peace. She had been better for
days following. She had felt a strange peace for an hour or two from
others who had passed, but never like the power of this very old saint.
His name was Rajananda.... Mostly it was a passing of world faces,
Chinese and Tartars who pressed on, wanting something--their faces set
with desire.... Sometimes it was all like a dream to her, the great
rolling, burning desert--the moving dots becoming men and horses and
camels, the men and horses and camels becoming dots again....
Thus she talked, breaking and toasting bread, pouring his tea. Romney's
heart was like an upturned cup with listening. He ate but did not taste
the food, drank but did not know that the tea was priceless. Night had
closed upon the court. He heard the heavy breathing from an inner room,
and horses somewhere outside clearing their nostrils from the dusty
forage. The voices of the Chinese came in when he stopped to listen, an
endless iteration of nothings.
The woman moved about--a sentence and a silence--cleansing the tea
things. An hour passed. The place was bare as before. A plate of
sweets was left upon the table, a pitcher of water with a cup beside it,
a tin of tobacco and papers. She rolled a cigarette absently, standing
by the table, still telling of the long road. She proffered the
cigarette to him, suddenly recalling herself.
"I quite forgot," she said. "He taught me to do it for him." She
looked at the shut door, from which the breathing issued.
Romney accepted the cigarette gratefully. He spoke very little and
quietly, a deep hush upon him. He had been afraid to comment, lest she
be aroused and hastily call in the fragments of her story. He was
sensitive enough to know that she was easing some tragic ache from her
heart. Her voice, her face and figure, the hands that served, the story
itself, filled his imagination with pictures and a startling kind of
power.
The sense now came to Romney that he could be himself at last. This
woman was a flame that freed him. In the light of her, he dared be a
full being. He did not feel less, nor was prompted in any way to act or
cover. She did not make a slave of him, but called forth such as he had
of humour and wisdom. He could see past the flash of her eyes. There
had been at times such a surface dazzle in the eyes of the yellow-rug
woman that he had not been able to see beyond it, but that dazzle was
for him and the world. Nifton Bend doubtless encountered no such
difficulty. It was but one of the perfectly appointed barriers that
preserved the love-woman for her own.... There was a moment--it was the
same that Romney fully realised that he was himself at last--in which
the smooth-running levels of Anna Erivan's story changed to rush of a
cataract:
"... I have been here a year--do you understand that--a year? I came
from Odessa, four thousand miles, by train, by caravan, over mountain
passes, across rivers, through wastes of sun and rock.... Days of fever
heat, nights of perishing cold--thirst and suffering--four thousand
miles, five hundred on the back of a camel.... My mother was just dead,
yet all the way I dreamed of the bountiful heart of a big brother I had
not seen for years. He was here. All the way from Odessa I came to
him.
"The last fifty miles I travelled with Tartar merchants, and learned to
know them well. They were not unreal. They were good to me. And yet, I
was so frightened. They told me as I neared Nadiram on the road from
Urga that their caravan had a thousand miles still to wander through the
desert, past ruined cities and along dried-up river-beds to Peking.
"It was evening when we reached here--just as you reached here this
evening. I had seen Nadiram spelled out on the maps; I had seen the
post-mark on his yearly letter. I had pictured it so differently, and
this is what I saw--sun-dried clay, and the low blowing desert and this
court-yard with the Russian flag. I had expected him to come forth to
meet me. All day I watched. I had started early for the journey's end.
I entered the court, but saw no face. The merchants passed on, turning
queerly. The door-way was heavy with dust, that door where you entered.
I pushed it open, my arms ready to fling about him. I thought he must
be busy or detained.
"This room was darkening. It was not as you found it, but sodden and
evil--an evil odour. I called, and there was no answer. I was
frightened. I had been frightened all day. One does not know what one
can stand. That was but the beginning, and I thought I was close to
death then.
"Do you know what I found? I will show you--"
She turned quickly to the door and opened it. Romney saw a great bear
of a man, half sprawled over a wooden table, the candle sputtering near
his head in the fresh pressure from the open door, the sharp fume of
brandy issuing. The body seemed swollen, neck and ears, shoulders,
abdomen, legs--all swollen, but the top of the head. That was small and
sparsely covered with hair, the candle-light upon it. The lips were
swollen and parted.
"That is what I found," she said.
*3*
Presently she shut the door of the forward room with quick hand--her
face remorseful and tender.
"I don't know why I did that. It was hateful to do that--and before
you. I don't know why I did it."
"You had to," he said. "I listened so intently, you had to tell me.
You could not tell one more ready to understand and help you."
"But he is not always like that--not always like to-night and that
night. There have been many days ... oh, but he is not what I
expected--so different from when he left Odessa. But very kind, always
kind. To-morrow morning he will be kind enough. Only such a desolation
comes over me out of his soul. It is like the desert.... And nothing I
can do changes him. I have ceased trying to change him, ceased trying,
ceased hoping--"
"Some men can't stand the desert," Romney said. "One must bring a
certain integration of force, a certain resistance, to stand it here.
The Gobi saps the vitality of the weak; it often takes the sanity of men
who do not drink.... Your brother does not know what comes over him.
He feels himself going insane, that's all. A man drinks, when he feels
that, if he's the kind that turns to drink.... You had to tell me.
It's lucky I came. I wouldn't have failed to come--not for worlds.
Perhaps I came to take you away--"
... Her fineness appeared only to one who had the grace to see. Romney,
surprised at his own words, sensed vast reaches in her, depths that
defied him, something of the newness of new Russia and hues of beauty
ancient as Asia. Her eyes had widened, making her face the more
fragile. Just then he saw the rising moon through a low pane behind
her. It was in the full and still red from the horizon. The glass was
poor, distorting the circle so that it was like a bulging grain bag....
She had not smiled, nor taken exception to his words. There was no
coquetry in her. She waited for him to explain.
"You have seen all the terror and the oppression of the desert. You
cannot have failed to see something of the rest," he suggested.
She paused and he added, "Something that has to do perhaps with that old
Buddhist holy man you spoke of so kindly."
"I only know he brought me a strange peace," she replied. "As if living
here with no one to talk or listen to, wasn't all of life, but just a
little part, a hard part.... He was very little and old--but so kind!
I am telling it very badly, but I got a sense from him, not through
words, that I must take this hard part, day by day, and put it behind;
that it had come to me because I deserved it, every day of it. And I do
just that for hours, feeling courageous, but I cannot always hold it.
The rebellion comes back; the darkness and squalor of it all come back."
"Does something like that peace ever come to you from the desert
itself?"
She shivered. "No, it does not belong to me. I am here, because there
could be no more terrible place. If I deserved suffering, the design is
perfect. But I have whimpered enough. You see I was choking with it.
I have _used_ you--to ease myself."
"I wonder if it is all illusion to me," he mused. "I have seen another
side to the desert--nights like to-night when everything is softened in
moonlight--the old civilisation--and all so clean. The Gobi is a mate
of the moon's. I think it is almost as big as the moon. It starts the
imagination because everything is finished. It has had its day, like
the moon, and there is a wonderful story to be read if one could pass
the aloofness. Even here in Nadiram we are but on the edge of its
mystery. Hasn't the heart of the desert ever called to you?"
"Only when I wanted to die," she answered. "I don't know why men should
love the past. Each day is enough conquest for me. I can face anything
in the morning--_except yesterday_. Until noon I am brave, and feel that
I can take what is to come from ahead; but I cannot turn back. The moon
is dead. The Gobi is dead. I don't care for the cleanness of death.
The death ahead for you and for me and for all--that's not so hard to
face, but it seems to me sometimes that we are the products of many
deaths and I dare not think of that.... How strange our talk! And you
should rest from your journey. There is a room here for you. You will
not need to go to the Rest House. Are your servants cared for?"
"Yes, thank you. I'll stay, if I may. The journey has not wearied me,
but you are very tired. The day has been hard for you. I wish I could
say something that would make you rest.... I wish I might say the words
to make you sleep like a little child, forgetting the moon and the Gobi
and all that is past--your face turned with a smile to to-morrow. There
are such words, if I could think of them."
The smile had come to her face. Her lips parted. Romney had somehow
helped her. He did not know just what word had done it, unless it was
the mention of the little child.
"You have _fancy_," she said softly. "For ages here, no one has talked
except of meat and smoke and fire and beds. Perhaps I shall rest. We
do not often keep guests here. Perhaps that was why I asked you--so that
I could rest--"
Still the smile remained. She added:
"Very rarely an American comes. We are fond of America in Russia."
He wanted hours more. He could have talked the night away. Yet there
was something in his very passion to remain with her that forced him to
rise, that long training that makes a man skeptical and impatient of the
thing he wants most for himself.
She brought a candle and led the way to an inner room.
"Is there anything I can do for him to-night?" Romney asked, pointing to
the forward room.
"No, there is a cot there. When he finds himself in darkness, he will
feel his way to that. You will hear his fingers on the wall--but do not
mind."