Hills of Han 3

Hills of Han 3

Li Hsien proved to be quite a young man, all of twenty or twenty-one.

He had spectacles now, and gold in his teeth. He wore the conventional

blue robe, Liack skull-cap with red button, and queue. More than four

years were yet to elapse before the great revolution of 1911, with its

wholesale queue-cutting and its rather frantic adoption, on the part of

the better-to-do, of Western clothing--or, rather, of what they supposed

was Western clothing.... He was tall, slim, smiling. He shook hands with

Betty, Western fashion; and bowed with courtly dignity to Doctor and

Mrs. Hasmer.

 

His manner had an odd effect on Betty. For six years now she had lived

in Orange. She had passed through the seventh and eighth grades of the

public school and followed that with a complete course of four years in

high school. She had fallen naturally and whole-heartedly into the life

of a nice girl in an American suburb. She had gone to parties, joined

societies, mildly entangled herself with a series of boy admirers.

Despite moderate but frank poverty she had been popular. And in this

healthy, active young life she had very nearly forgotten the profoundly

different nature of her earlier existence. But now that earlier feeling

for life was coming over her like a wave. After all, her first thirteen

years had been lived out in a Chinese city. And they were the most

impressionable years.

 

It was by no means a pleasant sensation. She had never loved China; had

simply endured it, knowing little else. America she loved. It was of

her blood, of her instinct. But now it was abruptly slipping out of her

grasp--school, home, the girls, the boys, long evenings of chatter and

song on a “front porch,” picnics on that ridge known locally as “the

mountain,” matinées in New York, glorious sunset visions of high

buildings from a ferry-boat, a thrilling, ice-caked river in

winter-time, the misty beauties of the Newark meadows--all this was

curiously losing its vividness in her mind, and drab old China was

slipping stealthily but swiftly into its place.

 

She knit her brows. She was suddenly helpless, in a poignantly

disconcerting way. A word came--rootless. That was it; she was rootless.

For an instant she had to fight back the tears that seldom came in the

daytime.

 

But then she looked again at Li Hsien.

 

He was smiling. It came to her, fantastically, that he, too, was

rootless. And yet he smiled. She knew, instantly, that his feelings were

quite as fine as hers. He was sensitive, strung high. He had been that

sort of boy. For that matter the Chinese had been a cultured people when

the whites were crude barbarians. She knew that. She couldn’t have put

it into words, but she knew it. And so she, too, smiled. And when she

spoke, asking him to sit in the vacant chair next to her, she spoke

without a thought, in Chinese, the middle Hansi dialect.

 

And then Mr. Jonathan Brachey looked up, turned squarely around and

stared at her for one brief instant. After which he recollected himself

and turned abruptly back.

 

Mr. Harting dropped down on the farther side of Doctor Hasmer. Which

left his good wife between the two couples, each now deep in talk.

 

Mrs. Hasmer’s Chinese vocabulary was confined to a limited number of

personal and household terms; and even these were in the dialect of

eastern Szechwan. Just as a matter of taste, of almost elementary taste,

it seemed to her that Betty should keep the conversation, or most of

it, in English. She went so far as to lean over the arm of her chair and

smile in a perturbed manner at the oddly contrasting couple who chatted

so easily and pleasantly in the heathen tongue. She almost reached the

point of speaking to Betty; gently, of course. But the girl clearly had

no thought of possible impropriety. She was laughing now--apparently at

some gap in her vocabulary--and the bland young man with the spectacles

and the pigtail was humorously supplying the proper word.

 

Mrs. Hasmer decided not to speak. She lay hack in her chair. The

wrinkles in her forehead deepened a little. On the other side Mr.

Halting was describing enthusiastically a new and complicated table

that was equipped with every imaginable device for the demonstrating

of experiments in physics to Burmese youth. It could be packed, he

insisted, for transport from village to village, in a crate no larger

than the table itself.

 

And now, again, she caught the musical intonation of the young Chinaman.

Betty, surprisingly direct and practical in manner if unintelligible in

speech, was asking questions, which Li Hsien answered in turn, easily,

almost languidly, but with unfailing good nature. Though there were a

few moments during which he spoke rapidly and rather earnestly.

 

Mrs. Hasmer next became aware of the odd effect the little scene was

plainly having on Jonathan Brachey. He fidgeted in his chair; got up

and stood at the rail; paced the deck, twice passing close to the

comfortably extended feet of the Hasmer party and so ostentatiously

_not_ looking at them as to distract momentarily the attention even of

the deeply engrossed Betty. Mr. Harting, even, looked up. After all of

which the man, looking curiously stern, or irritated, or (Betty decided)

something unpleasant, sat again in his chair.

 

Then, a little later, Mr. Harting and Li Hsien took their leave and

returned to the second-class quarters, astern.

 

Mrs. Hasmer thought, for a moment, that perhaps now was the time to

suggest that English be made the common tongue in the future. But

Betty’s eager countenance disarmed her. She sighed. And sighed again;

for the girl, stirred by what she was saying, had unconsciously raised

her voice. And that tall man was listening.

 

“It’s queer how fast things are changing out here,” thus Betty. “Li

Hsien is--you’d never guess!--a Socialist! I asked him why he isn’t

staying out the year at Tokio University, and he said he was called

home to help the Province. Think of it--that boy! They’ve got into some

trouble over a foreign mining syndicate--”

 

“The Ho Shan Company,” explained Doctor Hasmer.

 

Betty nodded.

 

“They’ve been operating rather extensively in Plonan and southern

Chihli,” the educator continued, “and I heard last year that they’ve

made a fresh agreement with the Imperial Government giving them

practically a monopoly of the coal and iron mining up there in the Hansi

Hills.”

 

“Yes, Doctor Hasmer, and he says that there’s a good deal of feeling

in the province. They’ve had one or two mass meetings of the gentry and

people. He thinks they’ll send a protest to Peking. He believes that the

company got the agreement through bribery.”

 

“Not at all unlikely,” remarked Doctor Hasmer mildly. “I don’t know

that any other way has yet been discovered of obtaining commercial

privileges from the Imperial Government. The Ho Shan Company is... let

me see... as I recall, it was organized by that Italian promoter,

Count Logatti. I believe he went to Germany, Belgium and France for the

capital.”

 

“Li has become an astonishing young man,” said Betty more gravely. “He

talks about revolutions and republics. He doesn’t think the Manchus can

last much longer. The southern provinces are ready for the revolution

now, he says--”

 

“That,” remarked Doctor Hasmer, “is a little sweeping.”

 

“Li is very sweeping,” replied Betty. “And he’s going back now to

T’ainan-fu for some definite reason. I couldn’t make out what. I asked

if he would be coming in to see father, and he said, probably not; that

there wouldn’t be any use in it. Then I asked him if he was still a

Christian, and I think he laughed at me. He wouldn’t say.”

 

The conversation was broken by the appearance of a pleasant Englishman,

an importer of silks, by the name of Obie. He had been thrown with the

Hasmers and Betty in one of their sight-seeing jaunts about Tokio.

Mr. Obie wore spats, and a scarf pin and cuff links of human bone from

Borneo set in circlets of beaded gold. His light, usually amusing talk

was liberally sprinkled with crisp phrases in pidgin-English.

 

He spoke now of the beauties of the Inland Sea, and resumed his stroll

about the deck. After a few turns, he went into the smoking-room.

 

Jonathan Brachey, still with that irritably nervous manner, watched him

intently; finally got up and followed him, passing the Hasmers and Betty

with nose held high.

 

4

 

It was early afternoon, when Mrs. Hasmer and Betty were dozing in their

chairs, that Mr. Obie, looking slightly puzzled, came again to them. He

held a card between thumb and forefinger.

 

“Miss Doane,” he said, “this gentleman asks permission to be presented.”

 

Mrs. Hasmer’s hand went out a little way to receive the card; but Betty

innocently took it.

 

“Mr. Jonathan Brachey,” she read aloud. Then added, with a pretty touch

of color--“But how funny! He was with us yesterday, and _wouldn’t_ talk.

And now....”

 

“My go catchee?” asked Mr. Obie.

 

To which little pleasantry Betty responded, looking very bright and

pretty, with--“Can do!”

 

“She gives out too much,” thought Mrs. Hasmer; deciding then and there

that the meeting should be brief and the conversation triangular.

 

Mr. Obie brought him, formally, from the smoking-room.

 

He bowed stiffly. Betty checked her natural impulse toward a hearty

hard-grip.

 

Mrs. Hasmer, feeling hurried, a thought breathless, meant to offer him

her husband’s chair; but all in the moment Betty had him down beside

her.

 

Then came stark silence. The man stared out at the islands.

 

Betty, finding her portfolio on her lap, fingered it. Then this:

 

“I must begin, Miss Doane, with an apology....”

 

Betty’s responsive face blanched. “What a dreadful man!” she thought.

His voice was rather strong, dry, hard, with, even, a slight rasp in it.