Hills of Han 17

Hills of Han 17

She compressed her lips. She didn’t know that her face showed something

of the trouble in her mind. She spoke, bravely, with an abruptness that

surprised herself a little, as it surprised him.

 

“No, Dad, I shan’t marry. Not for years, if ever. I’d rather work. I’d

rather work hard, if only I could fit in somewhere.”

 

“I’m seeing it a little more clearly, Betty.”’ He arose. “On the way out

I’ll tell Mrs. Boatwright and Miss Hemphill both that I don’t want you

to do any more work about the compound.... No, dear, please! Let

me finish!... When you’re a few years older, you’ll learn as I have

learned, that the important thing is to find your own work, and find

it early. So many lives take the wrong direction, through mistaken

judgment, or a mistaken sense of duty. And nothing--nothing--can so

mislead us as a sense of duty.”

 

He said this with an emphasis that puzzled Betty.

 

“The thing for you,” he went on, “is to draw. And dream. The dreaming

will work out in more drawing, I imagine. For you have the nature of

the artist. Your mother had it. You are like her, with something of my

energy added. Don’t let the atmosphere of the compound pull you down.

It mustn’t do that. Live within yourself. Let your energy go into honest

__EXPRESSION__ of yourself. You see what I’m getting at--_be_ yourself.

Don’t try to be some one else.... You happen to be here in an

interesting time. There’s a possibility that the drawings you could make

out here, now, would have a value later on. So try to make a record

of your life here with your pencil. And don’t be afraid of happiness,

dear.” He pointed to a row of jonquils in a window-box. “Happiness is

as great a contribution to life as duty. Think how those flowers

contribute! And remember that you are like them to me.”

 

She clung to him, in impulsive affection, as she kissed him good-by. And

it wasn’t until late that night, as she lay in her white bed, such a glow

did he leave in her warm little heart, that the odd nature of his talk

caught her attention. She had never, never, heard him say such things.

It was as if he, her great strong dad, were himself starved for

happiness. As if he wanted her to have all the rich beauty of life that

had passed him grimly by.

 

She fell to wondering, sleepily, what he meant by finding a way to get

the money. There was no way. Though it was dear of him even to think of

it.

 

She fell asleep then.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI--CATASTROPHE

 

 

1

 

DOANE left the compound a little before noon, and arrived at So T’ung

at six the following morning. The distance, a hundred and eighty _li_,

was just short of sixty-five English miles. The road was little more

than a footpath, so narrow that in the mountains, where the grinding of

ages of traffic and the drainage from eroded slopes had long ago worn it

down into a series of deep, narrow canyons, the came! trains, with

their wide panniers, always found passing a matter of difficulty and

confusion. Here it skirted a precipice, or twisted up and up to surmount

the Pass of the Flighting Geese, just west of the sacred mountain; there

it wandered along the lower hillsides above a spring torrent that would

be, a few months later, a trickling rivulet. His gait averaged, over

all conditions of road and of gradient, about five miles an hour. He

followed, on this occasion, the principle of walking an hour, then

resting fifteen minutes. And toward midnight he set up his cot by the

roadside, in the shelter of a tree by a memorial arch, and gave himself

two hours of sleep.

 

The little hill city of So T’ung was awake and astir, with gates open

and traffic already flowing forth. There were no signs of disorder.

But Doane noted that the anti-foreign mutterings and sneers along the

roadside (to which he had grown accustomed twenty years earlier)

were louder and more frequent than common. For himself he had not the

slightest fear. His great height, his enormous strength, his commanding

eye, had always, except on the one recent occasion of the riot at the

T’ainan fair, been enough to cow any native who was near enough to do

him injury. And added to this moral and physical strength he had lately

felt a somewhat surprising recklessness. He felt this now. He didn’t

care what happened, so long as he might be busy in the thick of it. His

personal safety took on importance only when he kept Betty in mind. He

must save himself to provide for her. And, of course, in the absence of

any other strong personality, the mission workers needed him; they had

no one else, just now, on whom to lean. And then there were the hundreds

of native Christians; they needed him, for they would be slaughtered

first... if it should come to that. They would be loyal, and would die,

at the last, for their faith.

 

During the long hours of walking through the still mountain night, his

thoughts ranged far. He considered talking over his problems with M.

Pourmont. There should be work for a strong, well-trained man somewhere

in the railroad development that was going on all over the yellow

kingdom. Preferably in some other region, where he wouldn’t be known.

Starting fresh, that was the thing!

 

Over and over the rather blank thought came around, that a man has no

right to bring into the world a child for whom he can not properly,

fully, care. And it came down to money, to some money; not as wealth,

but as the one usable medium of human exchange. A little of it, honestly

earned, meant that a man was productive, was paying his way. A saying of

Emerson’s shot in among his racing thoughts--something about clergymen

always demanding a handicap. It was wrong, he felt. It was--he went as

far as this, toward dawn--parasitic. A man, to live soundly, healthily,

must shoulder his way among his fellows, prove himself squarely.

 

And he dwelt for hours at a time on the ethical basis of all this

missionary activity. It was what he came around to all night. There was

an assumption--it was, really, the assumption on which his present life

was based--that the so-called Christian civilization, Western Europe

and America--owed its superiority to what he thought of as the Christian

consciousness. That superiority was always implied. It was the

motive power back of this persistent proselytizing. But to-night,

as increasingly of late years, he found himself whittling away the

implications of a spiritual and even ethical quality in that superiority

of the White over the Yellow. More and more clearly it seemed to come

down to the physical. It was the amazing discoveries in what men

call modern science, and the wide application in industry of these

discoveries, that made much of the difference. Then there were the

accidents of climate and soil and of certain happy mixtures of blood

through conquests... these things made a people great or weak. And

lesser accidents, such as a simple alphabet, making it easy and cheap

to print ideas; the Chinese alphabet and the lack of easy transportation

had held China back, he believed.... Back of all these matters lay, of

course, a more powerful determinant; the genius that might be waxing or

waning in a people. The genius of America was waxing, clearly; and the

genius of China had been waning for six hundred years. But in her turn,

China had waxed, as had Rome, and Greece, and Egypt. None of these had

known the Christian consciousness, yet each had run her course. And

Greece and Rome, without it, had risen high. Rome, indeed, whatever the

reason, had begun to wane from the very dawn of Christianity; and had

finally succumbed, not to that, but to barbarians who had in them crude

physical health and enterprise.

 

The more deeply he pondered, the more was he inclined to question

the importance of Christianity in the Western scheme. For Western

civilization, to his burning eyes, walking at night, alone, over the

hills of ancient Hansi, looked of a profoundly materialistic nature. You

felt that, out here, where oil and cigarettes and foreign-made opium and

merchandise of all sorts were pushing in, all the time, about and beyond

the missionaries. And with bayonets always bristling in the background.

The West hadn’t the finely great gift of Greece or the splendid unity of

Rome. Its art was little more than a confusion of copies, a library

of historical essays. And art seemed, now, important. And as for

religion... Doane had moments of real bitterness, that night, about

religion. And he thought around and around a circle. The one strongest,

best organized church of the West--the one that made itself felt most

effectively in China--seemed to him not only opposed to the scientific

enterprise that was, if anything, peculiarly the genius of the West, but

insistent on superstitions (for so they looked, out here) beside which

the quiet rationalism of the Confucian drift seemed very reality. And

the period of the greatest power and glory of that church had been, to

all European civilization, the Dark Ages. The Reformation and the modern

free political spirit appeared to be cognates, yet the evangelical

churches fought science, in their turn, from their firm base of

divine revelation. It was difficult, to-night, to see the miracles and

mysteries of Christianity as other than legendary superstitions handed

down by primitive, credulous peoples. It was difficult to see them as

greatly different from the incantations of the Boxers or of these newer

Lookers.

 

And then, of all those great peoples that had waxed and waned, China

alone remained.... There was a thought! She might wax again. For there

she was, as always. Without the Christian consciousness, the Chinese, of

all the great peoples, alone had endured.

 

A fact slightly puzzling to Doane was that he thought all this under a

driving nervous pressure. Now and then his mind rushed him, got a little

out of control. And at these times he walked too fast.

 

2

 

The mission station was situated in the northern suburbs of So

T’ung-fu, outside the wall. Duane went directly there.

 

The mission compound lay a smoking ruin. Not a building of the five

or six that had stood in the walled acre, was now more than a heap of

bricks, with a Ft of wall or a chimney standing. The compound wall had

been battered down at a number of points, apparently with a heavy timber

that now lay outside one of the breaches. There was no sign of life.

 

He walked in among the ruins. They were still too hot for close

examination. But he found the body of a white man lying in an open

space, clad in flannel shirt and riding breeches, with knee-high

laced boots of the sort commonly worn by engineers. The face was

unrecognizable. The top of the head, too, had been beaten in. But on the

back of the head grew’ curly yellow’ hair. From the figure evidently

a young man; one of Pourmont’s adventurous crew; probably one of the