Hills of Han 13

Hills of Han 13

Pao Ting Chuan was a man of great shrewdness and considerable

distinction of appearance, skilled in ceremonial intercourse, a master

of the intricate courses a prominent official must steer between

beautifully phrased moral and ethical maxims on the one hand and

complicated political trickery on the other. But, as Doane had said, he

knew the cost of indemnities. It was on his shrewdness, his really great

intelligence, and on his firm control of the “gentry and people” of the

province that Doane relied to prevent any such frightful slaughter of

whites and destruction of their property as had occurred in 1900. Pao,

unlike most of the higher mandarins, was Chinese, not Manchu.

 

The tao-tai of the city of T’ainan-fu, Chang Chih Ting, was an older man

than Pao, less vigorous of body and mind, simpler and franker. He was of

those who bewail the backwardness of China.

 

From the tao-tai’s yamen, on the first day of the great April fair, set

forth His Excellency in full panoply of state--a green official chair

with many bearers, an escort of twenty footmen, with runners on ahead.

 

Behind this caravan, hidden from view in the depths of a blue Peking

cart, with the conventional extra servant dangling his heels over the

foreboard, rode Griggsby Doane.

 

The principal feature of the opening day was a theatrical performance.

The play, naturally, was an historical satire, shouted and occasionally

sung by the heavily-costumed actors, to a continuous accompaniment of

wailing strings. The stage was a platform in the open air, under a tree

hung with bannerets inscribed to the particular spirit supposed to dwell

within its encircling bark.

 

His Excellency stood, with Doane, on a knoll, looking out over the heads

of the vast audience toward the stage. Doane estimated the attendance at

near ten thousand.

 

The play, begun in the early morning, was now well advanced. At its

conclusion, the audience was beginning to break up when a slim blue-clad

figure mounted the platform and began a hurried speech.

 

Chang and Doane looked at each other; then as one man moved forward

down the knoll with the throng. The tao-tai’s attendants followed, in

scattered formation.

 

The speaker was Li Hsien.

 

Slowly the magistrate and the missionary made their way toward the

stage.

 

At first the crowd, at sight of the magistrate’s button and embroidered

insignia, made way as well as they could. But as the impassioned phrases

of Li Hsien sank into their minds resistance developed. From here

and there in the crowd came phrases expressing a vile contempt for

foreigners such as Doane had not heard for years.

 

Li was lashing himself up, crying out more and more vigorously against

the Ho Shan Company, the barbarous white governments from which it

derived force, foreign pigs everywhere. The crowds closed, solidly,

before the two advancing men.

 

The magistrate waved his arms; shouted a command that Li leave the

platform. Li, hearing only a voice of opposition in the crowd, poured

out voluble scorn on his head. The crowd jostled Duane. A stick struck

his cheek. He whirled and caught the stick, but the wielder of it

escaped in the crowd.

 

Chang tried to reason, then, with the few hundred within ear-shot.

 

The sense of violence seemed to be increasing. A few of the magistrate’s

escort were struggling through. These formed a circle about him and

Doane.

 

Li shouted out charge after charge against the company. He begged his

hearers to be brave, as he was brave; to destroy all the works of the

company with dynamite; to wreck all the grounds of the foreign engineer

at Ping Yang and kill all the occupants; to kill foreigners everywhere

and assert the ancient integrity and superiority of China. “Be brave!”

he cried again. “See, I am brave. I die for Hansi. Can not you, too,

die for Hansi? Can not you think of me, of how I died for our cause, and

yourself, in memory of my act, fight for your beloved country, that it

may again be the proud queen of the earth?”

 

He drew a revolver from his sleeve; shot twice; fell to the stage in a

widening pool of blood.

 

At once the vast crowd went wild. Those near the white man turned on him

as if to kill him. His clothes were torn, his head cut. Man after man

he knocked down with his powerful fists. Before many moments he was

exulting in the struggle, in his strength and the full use of it.

 

The magistrate, struggled beside him. For the people. In their frenzy,

forgot or ignored his rank and overwhelmed him.

 

The runners fought as well as they could. Two or three of them fell.

Then a body of horsemen came charging into the crowd, soldiers from

the judge’s yamen, all on shaggy little Manchu ponies, swinging clubbed

carbines as they rode. Right and left, men and boys fell. The crowd

broke and scattered.

 

Chang, bleeding from several small wounds, his exquisitely embroidered

silken garments torn nearly off his body, made his way back to the green

chair.

 

Doane was escorted by soldiers to the mission compound. He slipped in to

wash off the blood and change his clothes without being seen by Betty or

any of the whites.

 

Shortly came two runners of His Excellency, Pao Ting Chuan, bearing

trays of gifts. And a Chinese note expressing deepest regret and

pledging complete protection in the future.

 

Doane dismissed the runners with a Mexican dollar each, and thoughtfully

considered the situation. Pao was strong, very strong. Yet the

self-destruction of Li Hsien would act as a flaming signal to the people

It was the one appeal that might rouse them beyond control.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V--IN T’AINAN

 

 

1

 

THE Boatwrights were at this time in the thirties; he perhaps

thirty-six or seven, she thirty-three or four. As has already been noted

through the observing eyes of Mr. Withery, Elmer Boatwright had lost the

fresh enthusiasm of his first years in the province. And he had by no

means attained the mellow wisdom that seldom so much as begins to appear

in a man before forty. His was a daily routine of innumerable petty

tasks and responsibilities. He had come to be a washed-out little man,

whose unceasing activity was somehow unconvincing. He had stopped

having opinions, even views. He taught, he kept accounts and records, he

conducted meetings, he prayed and sometimes preached at meetings of the

students and the native Christians, he was kind in a routine way, his

rather patient smile was liked about the compound, but the gift of

personality was not his. Even his religion seemed at times to have

settled into routine....

 

He was small in stature, not plump, with light thin hair and a light

thin mustache.

 

His wife was taller than he, more vigorous, more positive, with

something of an executive gift. The domestic management of the compound

was her province, with teaching in spare hours. Her husband, with fewer

petty activities to absorb his energy until his life settled into a

mold, might have exhibited some of the interesting emotional quality

that is rather loosely called temperament; for that matter it was still

a possibility during the soul-shaking changes of middle life; certainly

his odd, early taste for taxidermy had carried him to the borders of a

sort of artistry; but her own gift was distinctly that of activity. She

seemed a wholly objective person. She was physically strong, inclined to

sternness, or at least to rigidity of view, yet was by no means unkind.

The servants respected her. She was troubled by no doubts. Her religious

faith, like her housekeeping practise, was a settled thing. Apparently

her thinking was all of the literal things about her. Of humor she had

never shown a trace. Without the strong proselyting impetus that had

directed and colored her life she might have become a rather hard,

sharp-tongued village housewife. But at whatever cost to herself she

had brought her tongue under control. As a result, having no mental

lightness or grace, she talked hardly at all. When she disapproved,

which was not seldom, she became silent.

 

The relation between this couple and Griggsby Doane had grown subtly

complicated through the years that followed the death of Mrs. Doane.

Doane, up in his simply furnished attic room, living wholly alone, never

interfered in the slightest detail of Mrs. Boatwright’s management.

Like her, when he disapproved, he kept still. But he might as well

have spoken out, for she knew, nearly always, what he was thinking.

The deepest blunder she made during this period was to believe, as she

firmly did, that she knew all, instead of nearly all his thoughts. The

side of him that she was incapable of understanding, the intensely,

warmly human side, appeared to her merely as a curiously inexplicable

strain of weakness in him that might, some day, crop out and make

trouble. She felt a strain of something disastrous in his nature. She

regarded his growing passion for solitude as a form of self-indulgence.

She knew that he was given more and more to brooding; and brooding--all

independent thought, in fact--alarmed her. Her own deepest faith was

in what she thought of as submission to divine will and in

self-suppression. But she respected him profoundly. And he respected

her. Each knew something of the strength in the other’s nature. And so

they lived on from day to day and year to year in a practised avoidance

of conflict or controversy. And between them her busy little husband

acted as a buffer without ever becoming aware that a buffer was

necessary in this quiet, well-ordered, industrious compound.

 

Regarding the change of tone for the more severe and the worse that

had impressed and disturbed Withery, none of the three but Duane had

formulated a conscious thought. Probably the less kindly air was really

more congenial to Mrs. Boatwright. Her husband was not a man ever to

survey himself and his environment with detachment. And both were much

older and more severe at this time than they were to be at fifty.

 

The introduction of Betty Doane into this delicately balanced household

precipitated a crisis. Breakfast was served in the mission house at a

quarter to eight. Not once in a month was it five minutes late. A delay