Hills of Han 20

Hills of Han 20

“But of course, Brachey, there’s an excellent chance, right now, to

study a revolution in the making out here in Hansi. You can get into

the heart of it in less than a week’s travel. And if you don’t mind a

certain element of danger...”

 

The very name of the province thrilled Brachey. He sat, fingering his

cigar, his face a mask of casual attention, fighting to control the

uprush of feeling. The attache was talking on. Brachey caught bits here

and there; “You’ve seen this crowd of banker persons from Europe around

the hotel? Came out over the Trans Siberian with their families. A

committee representing the Directorate of the Ho Shan Company. The story

is that they’ve been asked to keep out of Hansi for the present for fear

of violence.... You’d get the whole thing, out there--officials with a

stake ‘n the local mines shrewdly stirring up trouble while pretending

to put it down; rich young students agitating, the Chinese equivalent of

our soap-box Socialists; and queer Oriental motives and twists that you

and I can’t expect to understand.... The significant thing though, the

big fact for you, I should say--is that if the Hansi agitators succeed

in turning this little rumpus over the mining company into something of

a revolution against the Imperial Government, it’ll bring them into an

understanding with the southern provinces. It may yet prove the deciding

factor in the big row. Something as if Ohio should go democratic this

year, back home. You see?... There are queer complications. Our Chinese

secretary says that a personal quarrel between two mandarins is

a prominent item in the mix-up.... That’s the place for you, all

right--Hansi! They’ve got the narrow-gauge railway nearly through to

T’ainan-fu, I believe. You can pick up a guide here at the hotel. He’ll

engage a cook. You won’t drink the water, of course; better carry a few

cases of Tan San. And don’t eat the green vegetables. Take some beef and

mutton and potatoes and rice. You can buy chickens and eggs. Get a money

belt and carry all the Mexican dollars you can stagger under. Provincial

money’s no good a hundred miles away. Take some English gold for a

reserve. That’s good everywhere. And you’ll want your overcoat.”

 

Five minutes later Brachey heard this:

 

“A. P. Browning, the Agent General of the Ho Shan Company, is stopping

here now, along with the committee. Talk with him, first. Get the

company’s view of it. He’ll talk freely. Then go out there and have

a look--see for yourself. Say the word, and I’ll give you a card to

Browning.”

 

Now Brachey looked up. It seemed to him, so momentous was the hour,

that his pulse had stopped. He sat very still, looking at his guest,

obviously about to speak.

 

The attaché, to whom this man’s deliberate cold manner was becoming a

friendly enough matter of course, waited.

 

“Thanks,” Brachey finally said. “Be glad to have it.”

 

But the particular card, scribbled by the attaché, there across the

table, was never presented. For late that night, in a bitter revulsion

of feeling, Brachey tore it up.

 

4

 

In the morning, however, when he stopped at the desk, the Belgian clerk

handed him a thick letter from his attorney in New York, forwarded from

his bank in Shanghai. He read and reread it, while his breakfast turned

cold; studied it with an unresponsive brain.

 

It seemed that his wife’s attorney had approached his with a fresh

proposal. Her plan had been to divorce him on grounds of desertion and

non-support; this after his refusal to supply what is euphemistically

termed “statutory evidence.” But the fact that she had from month to

month through the years accepted money from him, and not infrequently

had demanded extra sums by letter and telegram, made it necessary that

he enter into collusion with her to the extent of keeping silent and

permitting her suit to go through unopposed. His own instructions to his

lawyer stood flatly to the contrary.

 

But a new element had entered the situation. She wished to marry again.

The man of her new choice had means enough to care for her comfortably.

And in her eagerness to be free she proposed to release him from payment

of alimony beyond an adjustment to cover the bare cost of her suit, on

condition that he withdraw his opposition.

 

It was the old maneuvering and bargaining. At first thought it disgusted

and hurt him. The woman’s life had never come into contact with his,

since the first few days of their married life, without hurting him. He

had been harsh, bitter, unforgiving. He had believed himself throughout

in the right. She had shown (in his view) no willingness to take

marriage seriously, give him and herself a fair trial, make a job of

it. She had exhibited no trait that he could accept as character. It had

seemed to him just that she should suffer as well as he.

 

But now, as the meaning of the letter penetrated his mind, his spirits

began to rise. It was a tendency he resisted; but he was helpless. From

moment to moment his heart, swelled. Not once before in four years had

the thought of freedom occurred to him as a desirable possibility. But

now he knew that he would accept it, even at the cost of collusion and

subterfuge. He saw nothing of the humor in the situation; that he, who

had judged the woman so harshly, should find his code of ethics, his

very philosophy, dashed to the ground by a look from a pair of brown

eyes, meant little. It was simply that up to the present time an ethical

attitude had been the important thing, whereas now the important thing

was Betty. That was all there seemed to be to it. But then there had

been almost as little of humor as of love in the queerly solitary life

of Jonathan Brachey.

 

He cabled his attorney, directly after breakfast, to agree to the

divorce. Before noon he had engaged a guide and arranged with him

to take the morning train southward to the junction whence that

narrow-gauge Hansi Line was pushing westward toward the ancient

provincial capital.

 

In all this there was no plan. Brachey, confused, aware that the

instinctive pressures of life were too much for him, that he was beaten,

was soberly, breathlessly, driving toward the girl who had touched and

tortured his encrusted heart. He was not even honest with himself; he

couldn’t be. He dwelt on the importance of studying the Hansi problem

at close range He decided, among other things, that he wouldn’t permit

himself to see Betty, that he would merely stay secretly near her,

certainly until a cablegram from New York should announce his positive

freedom. In accordance with this decision he tore up his letters to her

as fast as they were written. If the fact that he was now writing such

letters indicated an alarming condition in his emotional nature, at

least his will was still intact. He proved that by tearing them up. He

even found this thought encouraging.

 

But, of course, he had taken his real beating when he gave up his plans

and caught the coasting steamer at Shanghai. He was to learn now that

rushing away from Betty and rushing toward her were irradiations of the

same emotion.

 

He left Peking on that early morning way-train of passenger and freight

cars, without calling again at the legation; merely sent a chit to the

Commandant of Marines to say that he was off. He had not heard of the

requirement that a white traveler into the interior carry a consular

passport countersigned by Chinese authorities, and also, for purposes

of identification, a supply of cards with the Chinese equivalent of

his name; so he set forth without either, and (as a matter of fixed

principle) without firearms.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII--THE WAYFARER

 

 

1

 

PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village

called Shau T’ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the

night in a native caravansary, his folding cot set up on the earthen

floor. The room was dirty, dilapidated, alive with insects and thick

with ancient odors. A charcoal fire in the crumbling brick _kang_ gave

forth fumes of gas that suggested the possibility of asphyxiation before

morning. Brachey sent his guide, a fifty-year-old Tientsin Chinese

of corpulent figure, known, for convenience, as “John,” for water and

extinguished the fire. The upper half of the inner wall was a wooden

lattice covered with paper; and by breaking all the paper squares within

his reach, Brachey contrived to secure a circulation of air. Next he

sent John for a piece of new yellow matting, and by spreading this under

the cot created a mild sensation of cleanliness, which, though it belied

the facts, made the situation a thought more bearable. For Brachey,

though a veteran traveler, was an extremely fastidious man. He bore dirt

and squalor, had borne them at intervals for years, without ever losing

his squeamish discomfort at the mere thought of them. But the stern

will that was during these, years the man’s outstanding trait, and his

intense absorption in his work, had kept him driving ahead through all

petty difficulties. The only outward sign of the strain it put him to

was an increased irritability.

 

He traveled from Shau T’ing to Ping Yang, the next day in an unroofed

freight ear without a seat, crowded in with thirty-odd Chinese and their

luggage. During the entire day he spoke hardly a word. His two servants

guarded him from contact with the other natives; but he ignored even

his own men. At a way station, where the engine waited half an hour for

water and coal, a lonely division engineer from Lombardy called out a

greeting in bad French. Brachey coldly snubbed the man.

 

He planned to pick up either a riding animal or a mule litter at Ping

Yang. As it turned out, the best John could secure was a freight cart;

springless, of course. T’ainan was less than a hundred miles away, yet

he was doomed to three days of travel in a creaking, hard-riding cart

through the sunken roads, where dust as fine as flour sifts through the

clothing and rubs into the pores of the skin, and to two more nights at

native inns--with little hope of better accommodation at T’ainan.

 

By this time Brachey was in a state of nerves that alarmed even himself.

Neither will nor imagination was proving equal to this new sort of

strain. The confusion of motives that had driven him out here provided

no sound justification for the journey. When he tried to think work now,

he found himself thinking Betty. And misgivings were creeping into his

mind. It amounted to demoralization.

 

He walked out after the solitary dinner of soup and curried chicken and

English strawberry jam. The little village was settling into evening

calm. Men and boys, old women and very little girls, sat in the shop