Hills of Han 45

Hills of Han 45

Doane considered this puzzle; finally shook his head over it. It was

very Chinese. Kang doubtless believed that through it he was deluding

the stupid foreigners and escaping responsibility for his savage course.

 

Finally Doane won M. Pourmont’s approval for his forlorn sally. He was,

in a wild way, glad.

 

During the few hours left to him he must work rapidly, think hard. That,

too, was good. He decided to write a will. If he had little money to

leave Betty, at least there were things of his and her mother’s. Elmer

Boatwright would help him. And he must tell Betty he was going. It was

curiously hard to face her, hard to meet the eye of his own daughter. He

winced at the thought.

 

She had returned to the residence before him. He asked for her now.

 

M. Pourmont, giving a moment more to considering this man, whom he

had long regarded with a respect he did not feel toward all the

missionaries, wondered, as he sent word to the young lady, what might

underlie that strange quarrel of the early morning. The only explanation

that occurred to him he promptly dismissed, for it involved the

little Mademoiselle’s name in a manner which he could not permit to

be considered. M. Pourmont was a shrewd man; and he knew that the

Mademoiselle was ashamed of nothing. Nothing was wrong there. Like his

wife he had already learned to love the busy earnest girl. And then,

leaving M. Doane in the reception-room waiting for her, he returned to

his study and dismissed the whole matter from his mind. For the siege

was cruel business. One by one, some one every day, men and women and

children, were dying. The living had to subsist on diminishing rations,

for he had never foreseen housing and feeding so large a number. There

were problems--of discipline and morale, of tactics, of sanitation, of

burying the dead--that must be met and solved from hour to hour.

 

On the whole, as he settled again into his endless, urgent task, M.

Pourmont was not sorry that M. Doane had won his consent to this last

desperate effort to reach those inhumanly deliberate white folk up at

Peking; men whose minds dwelt with precedents and policies while

their fellows, down here at Ping Yang, on a hillside, held off with

diminishing strength the destruction that seemed, at moments, certain to

fall.

 

3

 

Doane, watching Betty as she entered the room attired in a long white

apron over her simple dress, knew that he must again beg the question

that lay between them. He could no more listen to the burden of her

heart than to the agony of his own. Sooner or later, if he lived, he

would have to work it out, decide about his life. If he lived....

 

“My dear,” he said, quickly for him, holding her hand more tightly than

he knew, “I have some news which I know you will take bravely.”

 

He could feel her steady eyes on him. He hurried on. “I am going out

again to-night. There seems a good chance that I may get through to Shau

T’ing, with messages. I’m going to try.”

 

His desire was to speak rapidly on, and then go. But he had to pause

at this. He heard her exclaim softly--“Oh, Dad!” And then after a

silence--“I’m not going to make it hard for you. Of course I understand.

Any of us may come to the end, of course, any moment. We’ve just got to

take it as it comes. But--I--it does seem as if--after all you’ve been

through, Dad--as if--”

 

He felt himself shaking his head.

 

“No,” he said. “No. It’s my job, dear.”

 

“Very well, Dad. Then you must do it. I know. But I do wish you could

have a day or two more to rest. If you could”--this wistfully--“perhaps

they’d let me off part of the time to take care of you. You know, I’m

nursing. I’d be stern. You’d have to sleep a lot, and eat just \vhat I

gave you.” She patted his arm as she spoke; then added this: “Of course

it’s not the time to think of personal things. But there’s one thing

I’ve got to tell you pretty soon, Dad. A strange experience has come

to me. It’s puzzling. I can’t see the way very clearly. But it’s very

wonderful. I believe it’s right--really right. It’s a man.”

 

She rushed on with it. “I wanted you to meet him to-night. He’s--out

in the trenches, all day, up the hill. We’re expecting word--a

cablegram--when they get through to us. And when that comes, I’d have

to tell you all about it. He’ll come to you then. But I--well, I had to

tell you this much. It’s been a pretty big experience, and I don’t like

to think of going through it like this without your even knowing about

it from me, and knowing, too, no matter what they may say”--her voice

wavered--“that it’s--it’s--all right.” Her hands reached suddenly up

toward his shoulders; she clung to him, like the child she still, in his

heart, seemed.

 

He could trust himself only to speak the little words of comfort he

would have used with a child. He felt that he was not helping her;

merely standing there, helpless in the grip of a fate that seemed bent

on racking his soul to the final Emit of his spiritual endurance.

 

“This won’t do,” she said. “I have no right to give way. They need me in

the hospital. I shall think of you every minute, Dad. I’m very proud of

you.”

 

She kissed him and rushed away. He walked back to Elmer Boatwright’s

room fighting off a sense of unreality that had grown so strong as to

be alarming. It was all a nightmare now--the manly dogged faces in the

compound, the wailing sounds from the native quarter, the intermittent

shots, the smells, the very sun that blazed down on the tiling. Nothing

seemed really to matter. He knew well enough, in a corner of his mind,

that this mood was the most dangerous of all. It lay but a step from

apathy; and apathy, to such a nature as his, would mean the end.

 

So he busied himself desperately. The simple will he left for Boatwright

with instructions that it was to be given to Betty in the event of his

death. It seemed that the little man was one of a machine-gun crew

and could not be reached until well on in the evening; he had turned

fighter, like the others.

 

He sewed up his tattered knapsack and filled it with a sort of iron

ration. He wrote letters, including a long one to Henry Withery,

addressed in care of Dr. Hidderleigh’s office at Shanghai. He framed

with care the messages that were to go over the wires to Peking. He ate

alone, and sparingly. And early, as soon as darkness settled over the

scene of petty but bitter warfare, he clipped out of the compound and

disappeared, carrying no weapon but his walking stick.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XX--LIGHT

 

 

1

 

DOANE walked, carelessly erect, to a knoll something less than a

hundred yards northeast of the compound and off to the left of the ride

pits. Here he stood for a brief time, listening. He purposed going out

through the lines as he had come in through them, by crawling, hiding,

feeling his way foot by foot. The line was thinnest in front of the

rifle pits, and just to the left where the upper machine gun commanded a

defile.

 

He had allowed two hours for the journey through the lines, but it

consumed nearly four. At one point he lay for an hour behind a stone

trough while a squad of Lookers built a fire and brewed tea. A recurring

impulse was to walk calmly in among those yellow men and go down

fighting. It seemed as good a way as any to go. He found it necessary to

hold with a strong effort of will to the thought of his fellow’s in the

compound; that to save them, and to save Betty, he must carry through.

 

Toward one o’clock in the morning, now well to the eastward of the

besieging force, he swung into his stride. It seemed, in the retrospect,

absurdly like the play of children to be hiding and crawling about the

hillsides. But he was glad now that he had somehow, painfully, kept

his head. Barring the unforeseen, the diplomatic gentlemen up at Peking

would find the news awaiting them when they came to their desks in the

morning. After that noting that he might do would greatly matter. He

could follow these powerfully recurring impulses if he chose; let

the end come. That was now his greatest desire. Life had become quite

meaningless. Except for Betty....

 

2

 

Shau T’ing was but another of the innumerable rural villages that dot

northern China. Though there were a railway station, and sidings, and

a quaintly American water tank set high on posts. The inns were but the

familiar Oriental caravansaries; no modern hotel, no “Astor House,” had

sprung up as yet to care for newly created travel.

 

As he approached the stream that ran through a loess canyon a mile or

more west of the village he glimpsed, ahead, a group of soldiers seated

about a fire. Just behind them were stacks of rifles; this much he saw

and surmised with the help of the firelight. And the first glow of dawn

was breaking in the east. He left the highway and swung around through

the fields, passing between scattered grave mounds from whose tops

the white joss papers fluttered in the gray twilight like timid little

ghosts.

 

He crossed the gorge by the old suspension footbridge, with the

crumbling memorial arches at either end bearing, each characteristic

inscriptions suggestive of happiness and peace. Looking down-stream he

could dimly see that the railway bridge lay, a tangle of twisted steel,

in the stream, leaving the abutments of white stone rearing high in the

air with wisps of steel swinging aimlessly from the tops.

 

He half circled the village, and waited outside the eastern gate until

the massive doors swung open at sunrise.

 

He went to the leading inn, and gave up an hour to eating the food in

his knapsack and cleaning his mud-dyed clothing. The innkeeper informed

him, when he brought the boiled water, that another white man had been

there for three days. After this Doane went down to the station. A

solitary engine was puffing and clanking among the sidings, apparently

making up a train.

 

A number of the blue-turbaned military police stood sentry-go here and

there about the yard, each with fixed bayonet. Within the room that

was at once ticket office and telegraph station sat the Chinese agent

cheerfully contemplating a slack day.