Hills of Han 35

Hills of Han 35

Frequently they passed trains of camels or asses or carts, often on

a precipice where one caravan hugged the loess wall while the other

flirted with death along the earthen edge. But though the Hansean or

Chihlean muleteers shouted and screamed in an exciting confusion of

voices and the Mongol camel drivers growled and the ponies plunged, no

animal or man was lost.

 

Nearly always the air was heavy with fine red dust. It enveloped

them like a fog, penetrating clothing, finding its way into packs and

hand-bags. At times it softened and exquisitely tinted the view.

 

At long intervals the little caravan wound its slow way through villages

that were usually built along a single narrow street. In the broader

valleys the villages, gray brown and faintly red like the soil of which

their bricks had once been moulded, clung compactly to hill-slopes

safely above the torrents of spring and autumn, each little settlement

with its brick or stone wall and its ornamental pagoda gates, and each

with its cluster of trees about some consequential tomb rising above the

low roofs in plumes of pale green April foliage.

 

Nowhere was there a sign of the disorder that was ravaging the province

like a virulent disease. Brachey was aware of no glances of more

than the usual passing curiosity from slanting eyes. He saw only the

traditional peaceful countryside of the Chinese interior.

 

This sense of peace and calm had an effect on his moody self that

increased as the day wore on. Life was turning unreal on his hands.

His judgment wavered and played tricks with memory. Had it been so

dangerous back there in T’ainan? Could it have been? He had to look

steadily at the ragged, trudging figure of the erstwhile elegant Mr. Po

to recapture a small degree of mental balance.... He had brought Betty

away. He saw this now with a nervous, vivid clarity for what it was,

an irrevocable act. It had come about naturally and simply; it had felt

inevitable; yet now at moments, unable to visualize again the danger

that had seemed terribly real in T’ainan he felt it only as the logical

end of the emotional drift that had carried the two of them far

out beyond the confines of reason. It was even possible that Mrs.

Boatwright’s judgment was the better.

 

But Betty couldn’t go back now; they had turned her off; not unless

her father should yet prove to be alive, and that was hardly thinkable.

Anxiously during the day, he asked Mr. Po about that. But Mr. Po’s

confidence in the accuracy of his information was unshakable. So here he

was, with a life on his hands, a life so dear to him that he could

not control his mind in merely thinking of her there in the litter,

traveling along without a question, for better or worse, with himself;

a life that perhaps, despite this new spirit of consecration that was

rising in his breast, he might succeed only in injuring. Brooding thus,

he became grave and remote from her.

 

In his distant way he was very considerate, very kind. During the

afternoon, as they moved up a long valley, skirting a broad watercourse

where peach and pear trees foamed with blossoms against the lower slopes

of the opposite hills, he persuaded her to descend from the litter

and walk for a mile or two with him. He felt then her struggle to keep

cheerful and make conversation, but himself lacked the experience with

women that would have made it possible for him to overcome his own

depression and brighten her, Once, when the caravan stopped to repack

a slipping saddle, he asked her to sketch the view for him. It was his

idea that she should be kept occupied when possible. He always corrected

his own moods in that disciplinary manner. But just then his feelings

were running so high, his tenderness toward her was so sensitively deep,

that he spoke bruskly.

 

They rode on through the sunset into the dusk. The red hills turned

slowly purple under the glowing western sky, swam mistily in a

world-wide sea of soft dame.

 

Betty opened her windows wide now; gazed out at this scene of unearthly

beauty with a sad deep light in her eyes.

 

2

 

They rode into another village. A soldier galloped on ahead to inspect

the less objectionable inn. He reappeared soon, and the caravan jingled

and creaked into a courtyard and stopped for the night. John dismounted

and plunged into argument with the innkeeper. The cook set to work

removing a pack-saddle. Coolies appeared. The mules were beaten to their

knees. Brachey threw his bridle to a soldier and helped Betty out of

the litter. Then they stood, he and she, amid the confusion, her hand

resting lightly on his arm, her eyes on him.

 

Here they were! He felt now her loneliness, her sadness, her--the word

rose--her helpless dependence upon himself. She was so helpless! His

heart throbbed with feeling. He couldn’t look down at her, standing

there so close. He couldn’t have spoken; not just then. He was

struggling with the impractical thought that he might yet protect her

from the savage tongues of the coast; from himself, even, when you came

to it. The depression that had been pulling him down all day was turning

now, rushing up and flooding his fired brain like a bitter tide. He

shouldn’t have let her come. It had been a beautiful impulse; her quiet

determination to give her life into his hands had thrilled him beyond

his deepest dreams of happiness, had lifted him to a plane of devotion

that he remembered now, felt again, even in his bitterness, as utter

beauty, intensified rather than darkened by the tragic quality of the

hour. But he shouldn’t have let her come. Mightn’t she, after all, have

been as safe hack there in the mission compound? What was the

matter?... He hadn’t thought of her coming on with him alone. That had

simply happened. It was bewildering. Life had swept them out of

commonplace safety, and now here they were! And nothing to do but go on,

go through!

 

“Oh, I left my bag in there,” he heard her saying, and himself got it

quickly from the litter.

 

Then John came. The “number one” rooms were to be theirs, it seemed;

Betty’s and his.... If only he could talk to her! She needed him so !

Never, perhaps, again, would she need him as now, and he, it seemed, was

failing her. Silently he led her up the steps of the little building at

the end of the courtyard and into the corridor; peered into one dim room

and then into the other; then curtly, roughly ordered John to spread for

her his own square of new matting.

 

Her hand was still on his arm, resting there, oh, so lightly. She seemed

very slim and small.

 

“It’s a dreadful place,” he made himself say. “But we’ll have to make

the best of it.”

 

“I don’t mind,” he thought she replied.

 

“Perhaps we’d better have dinner in here, It’s a little cleaner than my

room.”

 

She glanced up at him, then down: “I don’t believe I can eat anything.”

 

“But you must.”

 

“I--I’ll try.”

 

“I’ll ask Mr. Po to come in with us. He is a gentleman. And perhaps it

would be better.”

 

“Oh, yes,” said she, “of course.”

 

“Here’s John with hot water. I’ll leave you now.”

 

“You’ll--come back?”

 

“For dinner, yes.”

 

With this he gently withdrew his arm. As she watched him go her eyes

filled Then she closed her door.

 

Brachey found Mr. Po curled on the ground against a pack-saddle, smoking

a Chinese pipe.

 

He rose at once, all smiles, and bowed half-way to the ground. But he

thought it inadvisable to accept the invitation.

 

“I hate to be fly in ointments,” he said, with his curiously

dispassionate quickness and ease of speech, “but it’s really no go. Our

own men would play game of thick and thin blood brother, but to village

gossip monger I must remain muleteer and down and out person of no

account. It’s a dam’ sight safer for each and every one of us.”

 

3

 

Betty tried to set the dingy room to rights. John had laid a white

cloth over the table, and put out Brachey’s tin plate and cup, his

knife, fork and spoon, an English biscuit tin and a bright little

porcelain jar of Scotch jam that was decorated with a red-and-green

plaid. These things helped a little. She tidied herself as best she

could; and then waited.

 

For a time she sat by the table, very still, hands folded in her lap;

but this was difficult, for thoughts came--thoughts that spun around

and around and bewildered her--and tears. The tears she would not

permit. She got up; rearranged the things on the table; moved over to

the window, and through a hole in one of the paper squares watched with

half-seeing eyes the coolies and soldiers and animals in the courtyard.

Her head ached. And that wheel of patchwork thoughts spun uncontrollably

around.

 

For a little time then the tears came unhindered. That her father, that

strong splendid man, could have been casually slain by vagabonds in a

Chinese city seemed now, as it had seemed all day, incredible. His loss

was only in part personal to her, so much of her life had been lived

on the other side of the world; but childhood memories of him rose, and

pictures of him as she had lately seen him, grave and kind and (since

that moving little talk about beauty and its importance in the struggle

of life) lovable. Her mother, too, had to-day become again a vivid

memory. And then the sheer mystery of death twisted and tortured her

sensitive Pagination, led her thoughts out into regions so grimly, darkly

beautiful, so unbearably poignant, that her slender frame shook with

sobs.

 

The sensation of rootlessness, too, was upon her. But now it was

complete. There was no tie to hold her to life. Only this man on whom,

moved by sheer emotion, without a thought of self, yet (she thought now)

with utter unreasoning selfishness, she had fastened herself.

 

Mrs. Boatwright had called her bad. That couldn’t be true. She couldn’t

picture herself as that. Even now, in this bitter crisis, she wasn’t

hard, wasn’t even reckless; simply bewildered and terribly alone.