Hills of Han 21

Hills of Han 21

Farther up the hill, however, rounding a turn in the road, he stopped

short, suddenly alive to the vivid outer world. A newly built wall of

brick stood before him, enclosing an area of two acres or more, within

which appeared the upper stories of European houses, as well as the

familiar curving roofs of Chinese tile. And just outside the walls two

young men and two young women, in outing clothes, white folk all, were

playing tennis. To their courteous greeting he responded frigidly.

 

Later a somewhat baffled young Australian led him to the office of M.

Pourmont and presented him.

 

The distinguished French engineer, looking up from his desk, beheld a

tall man in homespun knickerbockers, a man with a strong if slightly

forbidding face. He fingered the card.

 

“Ah, Monsieur Brashayee! Indeed, yes! It is ze _grand plaisir!_ But it

mus’ not be true zat you go on all ze vay to T’ainan-fu.”

 

“Yes,” Brachey replied with icy courtesy, “I am going to T’ainan.”

 

“But ze time, he is not vat you call---ripe. One makes ze trouble. It

is only a month zat zay t’row ze _pierre_ at me, zay tear ze cart of me,

zay destroy ze ear of me! _Choses affreuses!_ I mus’not let you go!’’

 

Brachey heard this without taking it in any degree to himself. He was

looking at the left ear of this stout, bearded Parisian, from which,

he observed, the lobe was gone.... Then, with a quickening pulse, he

thought of Betty out there in T’ainan, in real danger.

 

“Come wiz me!” cried M. Pourmont. “I vill show you vat ve do--_nous

ici_.” And snatching up a bunch of keys he led Brachey out about the

compound. He opened one door upon what appeared to be a heap of old

clothes.

 

“_Des sac â terres_,” he explained.

 

Brachey picked one up. “Ah,” he remarked, coldly

interested--“sand-bags!”

 

“Yes, it is zat. Sand-bag for ze vail. Ve have ze _femme Chinoise_--ze

Chinese vimmen--sew zem all every day. And you vill look...” He led the

way with this to a corner of the grounds where the firm loess had been

turned up with a pick. “It is so, Monsieur Brashayee, _partout_. All is

ready. In von night ve fill ze bag, ve are a fort, ve are ready.... See!

An’ see!”

 

He pointed out a low scaffolding built here and there along the compound

wall for possible use as a firing step. Just outside the wall crowding

native houses were being torn down. “I buy zem,” explained M. Pourmont

with a chuckle, “an’ I clear avay. I make a _glacis, nest ce pas?_” On

several of the flat roofs of supply sheds along the wall were heaps of

the bags, ready filled, covered from outside eyes with old boards. In

one building, under lock and key, were two machine guns and box on box

of ammunition. Back in M. Pourmont’s private study was a stand of modern

rifles.

 

“You vill see by all zis vat is ze t’ought of myself,” concluded the

genial Frenchman. “Ze trouble he is real. It is not safe to-day in

Hansi. Ze Société of ze Great Eye--ze Lookair--he grow, he _fait

l’exercice_, he make ze t’reat. You vill not go to T’ainan, alone. It is

not right!”

 

Brachey was growing impatient now.

 

“Oh, yes,” he said, more shortly than he knew. “I will go on.”

 

“You have ze arm--ze revolvair?”

 

Brachey shook his head.

 

“You vill, zen, allow me to give you zis.”

 

But Brachey declined the weapon stiffly, said good night, and returned

to the inn below.

 

The next morning a Chinese servant brought a note from M Pourmont. If he

would go--thus that gentleman--and if he would not so much as carry

arms for protection, at least he must be sure to get into touch with

M. Griggsby Duane at once on arriving at T’ianan. M. Doane was a man of

strength and address. He would be the only support that M. Brachey could

look for in that turbulent corner of the world.

 

3

 

The lamp threw a flickering unearthly light, faintly yellow, on the

tattered wall-hangings that bore the Chinese characters signifying

happiness and hospitality and other genial virtues. The lamp was of

early Biblical pattern, nor unlike a gravy boat of iron, full of oil or

grease, in which the wick floated. It stood on the roughly-made table.

 

The inn compound was still, save for the stirring and the steady

crunching of the horses and mules at their long manger across the

courtyard.

 

Brachey, half undressed, sat on his cot, staring at the shadowy brick

wall. His face was haggard. There were hollows under the eyes. His hands

lay, listless, on his knees. The fire that had been for a fortnight

consuming him was now, for the moment, burnt out.

 

But at least, he now felt, the particular storm was over. That there

might be recurrences, he recognized. That girl had found her way,

through all the crust, to his heart. The result had been nearly

unbearable while it lasted. It had upset his reason; made a fool of him.

Here he was--now--less than a day’s journey from her. He couldn’t go

back; the thought stirred savagely what he thought of as the shreds of

his self-respect. And yet to go on was, or seemed, unthinkable. The best

solution seemed to be merely to make use of T’ainan as a stopping place

for the night and pass on to some other inland city. But this thought

carried with it the unnerving fear that he would fail to pass on, that

he might even communicate with her.

 

His life, apparently, was a lie. He had believed since his boyhood that

human companionship lay apart from the line of his development. Even

his one or two boy friends he had driven off. The fact embittered his

earlier life; but it was so. In each instance he had said harsh things

that the other could not or would not overlook. His marriage had

contributed further proof. Along with his pitilessly detached judgment

of the woman went the sharp consciousness that he, too, had failed

at it. He couldn’t adapt his life to the lives of others. Since that

experience--these four years--by living alone, keeping away, keeping

clear out of his own land, even out of touch with the white race, and

making something of a success of it, he had not only proved himself

finally, he had even, in a measure, justified himself. Yet now, a chance

meeting with a nineteen-year-old girl had, at a breath, destroyed the

laborious structure of his life. It all came down to the fact that

emotion had at last caught him as surely as it had caught the millions

of other men--men he had despised. He couldn’t live now without feeling

again that magic touch of warmth in his breast. He couldn’t go on alone.

 

He bowed his head over it. Round and round went his thoughts, cutting

deeper and deeper into the tempered metal of his mind.

 

He said to her: “I am selfish.”

 

He had supposed he was telling the simple truth. But clearly he wasn’t.

At this moment, as at every moment since that last night on the boat

deck, he was as dependent on her as a helpless child. And now he wasn’t

even selfish. These two days since the little talk with M. Pourmont he

had been stirred deeply by the thought that she was in danger.

 

Over and over, with his almost repelling detachment of mind, he reviewed

the situation. She might not share his present emotion. Perhaps she had

recovered quickly from the romantic drift that had caught them on the

ship. She was a sensitive, expressive little thing; quite possibly the

new environment had caught her up and changed her, filled her life with

fresh interest or turned it in a new direction. With this thought was

interwoven the old bitter belief that no woman could love him. It must

have been that she was stirred merely by that romantic drift and had

endowed him, the available man, with the charms that dwelt only in her

own fancy. Young girls were impressionable; they did that.

 

But suppose--it was excitingly implausible--she hadn’t swung away from

him. What would her missionary folk say to him and his predicament?

Sooner or later he would be free; but would that clear him with these

dogmatic persons, with her father? Probably not. And if not,

wouldn’t the fact thrust unhappiness upon her? You could trust these

professionally religious people, he believed, to make her as unhappy as

they could--nag at her.

 

Suppose, finally, the unthinkable thing, that she--he could hardly

formulate even the thought; he couldn’t have uttered it--loved him. What

did he know of her? Who was she? What did she know of adult life? What

were her little day-by-day tastes and impulses, such as make or break

any human companionship...? And who was he? What right had he to take on

his shoulders the responsibility for a human life... a delicately joyous

little life? For that was what it came down to. It came to him, now,

like a ray of blipdirig light, that he who quickens the soul of a girl

must carry the burden of that soul to his grave. At times during the

night he thought wistfully of his freedom, of his pleasant, selfish

solitude and the inexigent companionship of his work.

 

His suit-case lay on the one chair. He drew it over; got out the huge,

linen-mounted map of the Chinese Empire that is published by the China

Inland Mission, and studied the roads about T’ainan. That from the

east--his present route--swung to the south on emerging from the hills,

and approached the city nearly from that direction. Here, instead of

turning up into the city, he could easily enough strike south on the

valley road, perhaps reaching an apparently sizable village called Hung

Chan by night.

 

He decided to do that, and afterward to push southwest. It should be

possible to find a way out along the rivers tributary to the Yangtse,

reaching that mighty stream at either Ichang or Hankow. And he would

work diligently, budding up again the life that had been so quickly and

lightly overset. At least, for the time. He must try himself out This

riding his emotions wouldn’t do. At some stage of the complicated

experience it was going to be necessary to stop and think. Of course,

if he should find after a reasonable time, say a few months, that the

emotion persisted, why then, with his personal freedom established, he

might write Betty, simply stating his case.

 

And after all this, on the following afternoon, dusty, tired of body and

soul, Jonathan Brachey rode straight up to the East Gate of T’ainan-fu.