Hills of Han 19

Hills of Han 19

She was, it came out, a notorious woman of Soo-chow Road, Shanghai; one

of the so-called “American girls” that have brought a good name to local

disgrace. The new American judge, at that time engaged in driving out

the disreputable women and the gamblers from the quasi protection of the

consular courts, had issued a warrant for her arrest, whereupon young

Beggins, who had been numbered among her “friends,” had undertaken to

protect her, out here in the interior, until the little wave of reform

should have passed.

 

Despite her vulgarity, and despite the chill of spiritual death in his

heart, he wished to be kind to her. Something of the long-frustrated

emotional quality of the man overflowed toward her. He did what he

could; laid her case before the magistrate, and left enough money to buy

her a ticket to Peking from the northern railroad near Kalgan. This in

the morning.

 

One other thing he did in the morning was to write to Hidderleigh, at

Shanghai, telling enough of the truth about his fall, and asking that

his successor be sent out at the earliest moment possible. And he sent

off the letter, early, at the Chinese post-office. At least he needn’t

play the hypocrite. The worst imaginable disaster had come upon him. His

real life, it seemed, was over As for telling the truth at the mission,

his mind would shape a course. The easiest thing would be to tell

Boatwright, straight. Though in any case it would come around to them

from Shanghai. He had sealed his fate when he posted the letter. They

would surely know, all of them. Henry Withery would know. It would reach

the congregations back there in the States. At the consulates and up and

down the coast--where men drank and gambled and carved fortunes out of

great inert China and loved as they liked--they would be laughing at him

within a fortnight.

 

And then he thought of Betty.

 

That night, on the march back to T’ainan, he stood, a solitary figure on

the Pass of the Flighting Geese, looking up, arms outstretched, toward

the mountain that for thousands of years has been to the sons of Han a

sacred eminence; and the old prayer, handed down from another Oriental

race as uttered by a greater sinner than he, burst from his lips:

 

“I will lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help!”

 

But no help came to Griggsby Duane that night. With tears lying warm on

his cheeks he strode down the long slope toward Tainan.

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII--LOVE IS A TROUBLE

 

 

1

 

IT WAS early morning--the first day of April--when the Pacific liner

that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped

anchor in the river below Shanghai and there discharged passengers and

freight for all central and northern China.

 

Brachey, on that occasion, watched from his cabin porthole while Betty

and the Hasmers descended the accommodation ladder and boarded the

company’s launch. Then, not before, he drank coffee and nibbled a roll.

His long face was gray and deeply lined. He had not slept.

 

He went up to Shanghai on the next launch, walked directly across

the Bund to the row of steamship offices, and engaged passage on a

north-bound coasting steamer. That evening he dined alone, out on the

Yellow Sea, steaming toward Tsingtau, Chefu and (within the five days)

Tientsin. He hadn’t meant to take in the northern ports at this time;

his planned itinerary covered the Yangtse Valley, where the disorderly

young shoots of revolution were ripening slowly into red flower. But he

was a shaken man. As he saw the problem of his romance, there were

two persons to be saved, Betty and himself. He had behaved, on the one

occasion, outrageously. He could see his action now as nothing other

than weakness, curiously despicable, in the light of the pitiless facts.

Reason had left him. Gusts of emotion lashed him. He now regarded

the experience as a storm that must be somehow weathered. He couldn’t

weather it in Shanghai. Not with Betty there. He would surely seek her;

find her. With his disordered soul he would cry out to her. In this

alarming mood no subterfuge would appear too mean--sending clandestine

notes by yellow hands, arranging furtive meetings.

 

He was, of course, running away from her, from his task, from himself.

It was expensive business. But he had meant to work up as far as

Tientsin and Peking before the year ran out. He was, after all, but

taking that part of it first. To this bit of justification he clung. He

passed but one night at Tientsin, in the curiously British hotel, on an

out-and-out British street, where one saw little more to suggest the

East than the Chinese policeman at the corner, an occasional passing

amah or mafoo, and the blue-robed, soft-footed hotel servants; then

on to Peking by train, an easy four-hour run, lounging in a European

dining-car where the allied troops had fought their way foot by foot

only seven years earlier.

 

Brachey, though regarded by critical reviewers as a rising authority

on the Far East, had never seen Peking. India he knew; the Straits

Settlements--at Singapore and Penang he was a person of modest but real

standing; Borneo, Java, Celebes and the rest of the vast archipelago,

where flying fish skim a burnished sea and green islands float above a

shimmering horizon against white clouds; the Philippines, Siam, Cochin

China and Hongkong; but the swarming Middle Kingdom and its Tartar

capital were fresh fuel to his coldly eager mind. He stopped, of course,

at the almost Parisian hotel of the International Sleeping Car Company,

just off Legation Street.

 

Peking, in the spring of 1907, presented a far from unpleasant aspect to

the eye of the traveler. The siege of the legations was already history

and half-forgotten; the quarter itself had been wholly rebuilt. The

clearing away of the crowded Chinese houses about the legations left

_à glacis_ of level ground that gave dignity to the walled enclosure.

Legation Street, paved, bordered by stone walks and gray compound-walls,

dotted with lounging figures of Chinese gatekeepers and alert sentries

of this or that or another nation--British, American, Italian, Austrian,

Japanese, French, Belgian, Dutch, German--offered a pleasant stroll of

a late afternoon when the sun was low. Through gateways there were

glimpses to be caught of open-air tea parties, of soldiers drilling,

or even of children playing. Tourists wandered afoot or rolled by in

rickshaws drawn by tattered blue and brown coolies.

 

From the western end of the street beyond the American _glacis_, one

might see the traffic through the Chien Gate, with now and then a

nose-led train of camels humped above the throng; and beyond, the vast

brick walls and the shining yellow palace roofs of the Imperial City.

Around to the north, across the Japanese _glacis_, one could stroll, in

the early evening, to the motion-picture show, where one-reel films from

Paris were run off before an audience of many colors and more nations

and costumes, while a placid Chinaman manipulated a mechanical piano.

 

2

 

Brachey had letters to various persons of importance along the street.

With the etiquette of remote colonial capitals, he had long since

trained himself to a mechanical conformity. Accordingly he devoted his

first afternoon to a round of calls, by rickshaw; leaving cards in the

box provided for the purpose at the gate house of each compound. Before

another day had gone he found return cards in his box at the hotel;

and thus was he established as _persona grata_ on Legation Street.

Invitations followed. The American minister had him for tiffin. There

were pleasant meals at the legation barracks. Tourist groups at the

hotel made the inevitable advances, which he met with austere dignity.

Meantime he busied himself discussing with experts the vast problems

confronting the Chinese in adjusting their racial life to the modern

world, and within a few days was jotting down notes and preparing

tentative outlines for his book.

 

This activity brought him, at first, some relief from the emotional

storm through which he had been passing. Work, he told himself, was the

thing; work, and a deliberate avoidance of further entanglements.

 

If, in taking this course, he was dealing severely with the girl whose

brightly pretty face and gently charming ways had for a time disarmed

him, he was dealing quite as severely with himself; for beneath his

crust of self-sufficiency existed shy but turbulent springs of feeling.

That was the trouble; that had always been the trouble; he dared not let

himself feel, lie had let go once before, just once, only to skim the

very border of tragedy. The color of that one bitter experience of his

earlier manhood ran through every subsequent act of his life. Month by

month, through the years, he had winced as he drew a check to the hard,

handsome, strange woman who had been, it appeared, his wife; who was,

incredibly, his wife yet. With a set face he had read and courteously

answered letters from this stranger. A woman of worldly wants, all of

which came, in the end, to money. The business of his life had settled

down to a systematic meeting of those wants. That, and industriously

employing his talent for travel and solitude.

 

No, the thing was to think, not feel. To logic and will he pinned his

faith. Impulses rose every day, here in Peking, to write Betty. It

wouldn’t be hard to trace her father’s address. For that matter he

knew the city. He found it impossible to forget a word of hers. Vivid

memories of her round pretty face, of the quick humorous __EXPRESSION__

about her brown eyes, the movements of her trim little head and slim

body, recurred with, if anything, a growing vigor They would leap into

his mind at unexpected, awkward moments, cutting the thread of sober

conversations. At such moments he felt strongly that impulse to explain

himself further. But his clear mind told him that there would be no good

in it. None. She might respond; that would involve them the more deeply.

He had gone too far. He had (this in the bitter hours) transgressed. The

thing was to let her forget; it would, he sincerely tried to hope, be

easier for her to forget than for himself He had to try to hope that.

 

3

 

But on an evening the American military attaché dined with him. They

sat comfortably over the coffee and cigars at one side of the large

hotel dining-room. Brachey liked the attaché. His military training, his

strong practical instinct for fact, his absorption in his work, made

him the sort with whom Brachey, who had no small talk, really no

social grace, could let himself go. And the attaché knew China. He had

traversed the interior from Manchuria and Mongolia to the borders of

Thibet and the Loto country of Yunnan, and could talk, to sober ears,

interestingly. On this occasion, after dwelling long on the activity

of secret revolutionary societies in the southern provinces and in the