Hills of Han 7
“I ought to take you back.”
She rested a hand on his arm. It was no more than a girlish gesture. She
didn’t notice that he set his teeth and sat very still.
“I’ve thought this, though,” she said. “If I’m to meet you out here
like--like this--”
“But you’re not to.”
“Well... here we are!”
“Yes... here we are!”
“I was going to say, it’s dishonest, I think, for us to avoid each other
during the day. If we’re friends...”
“If we’re friends we’d better admit it.”
“Yes. I meant that.”
He fell to working at his pipe with a pocket knife She watched him until
he was smoking again.
“Mrs. Hasmer won’t like it.”
“I can’t help that.”
“No. Of course.” He smoked. Suddenly he broke out, with a gesture so
vehement that it startled her: “Oh, it’s plain enough--we’re on a ship,
idling, dreaming, floating from a land of color and charm and quaint
unreality to another land that has always enchanted me, for all the
dirt and disease, and the smells. It’s that! Romance! The old web!
It’s catching us. And we’re not even resisting. No one could blame
you--you’re young, charming, as full of natural life as a young flower
in the morning. But I... I’m not romantic. To-night, yes! But next
Friday, in Shanghai, no!”
Betty turned away to hide a smile.
“You think I’m brutal? Well--I am.”
“No, you’re not brutal.”
“Yes, I am.... But my God! You in T’ainanfu! Child, it’s wrong!”
“It is simply a thing I can’t help,” said she.
They fell silent. The pulse of the great dim ship was soothing. One bell
sounded. Two bells. Three.
3
A man of Jonathan Brachey’s nature couldn’t know the power his nervous
bold thoughts and words were bound to exert in the mind of a girl like
Betty. In her heart already she was mothering him. Every word he spoke
now, even the strong words that startled her, she enveloped in warm
sentiment.
To Brachey’s crabbed, self-centered nature she was like a lush oasis in
the arid desert of his heart. He could no more turn his back on it than
could any tired, dusty wanderer. He knew this. Or, better, she was like
a mirage. And mirages have driven men out of their wits.
So romance seized them. They walked miles the next day, round and
round the deck. Mrs. Hasmer was powerless, and perturbed. Her husband
counseled watchful patience. Before night all the passengers knew that
the two were restless apart. They found corners on the boat deck, far
from all eyes.
That night Mrs. Hasmer came to Betty’s door; satisfied herself that the
girl was actually undressing and going to bed. Not one personal word
passed.
And then, half an hour later, Betty, dressed again, tiptoed out. Her
heart was high, touched with divine recklessness. This, she supposed,
was wrong; but right or wrong, it was carrying her out of her girlish
self. She couldn’t stop.
Brachey was fighting harder; but to little purpose. They had these two
days now. That was all. At Shanghai, and after, it would be, as he had
so vigorously said, different. Just these two days! He saw, when she
joined him on the deck, that she was riding at the two days as if they
were to be her last on earth. Intensely, soberly happy, she was passing
through a golden haze of dreams, leaving the future to be what it might.
They sat, hand in hand, in the bow. She sang, in a light pretty voice,
songs of youth in a young land--college ditties, popular negro melodies,
amusing little street songs.
Very, very late, on the last evening, after a long silence--they had
mounted to the boat deck--he caught her roughly in his arms and kissed
her.
She lay limply against him. For a moment, a bitter moment--for now, in
an instant, he knew that she had never thought as far as this--he feared
she had fainted. Then he felt her tears on his cheek.
He lifted her to her feet, as roughly.
She swayed away from him leaning against a boat.
He said, choking:
“Can you get down the steps all right?”
She bowed her head. He made no effort to help her down the steps. They
walked along the deck toward the main companionway. Suddenly, with an
inarticulate sound, he turned, plunged in at the smoking-room door, and
was gone.
Early in the morning the ship dropped anchor in the muddy Woosung. The
breakfast hour came around, then quarantine inspection; but the silent
pale Betty, her moody eyes searching restlessly, caught no glimpse of
him. He must have taken a later launch than the one that carried Betty
and the Hasmers up to the Bund at Shanghai. And during their two days in
the bizarre, polyglot city, with its European façade behind which swarms
all China, it became clear that he wasn’t stopping at the Astor House.
The only letter was from her father at T’ainan-fu.
She watched every mail; and inquired secretly at the office of the river
steamers an hour before starting on the long voyage up the Yangtse; but
there was nothing.
Then she recalled that he had never asked for her address, or for her
father’s full name. They had spoken of T’ainan-fu. He might or might not
remember it.
And that was all.
CHAPTER III--THE SHEPHERD
AT the point where the ancient highway, linking Northern China with
Thibet, the Kukunor region and Mongolia, emerges from the treeless,
red-brown tumbling hills of Hansi Province there stands across the
road--or stood, before the revolution of 1911--a scenic arch of masonry
crowned with a curving elaborately ornamented roof of tiles. Some
forgotten philanthropist erected it, doubtless for a memorial to
forgotten dead. Through this arch the west-bound traveler caught his
first view of the wide yellow valley of the Han, with its yellow river,
its square-walled, gray-green capital city, and, far beyond, of the
sharp purple mountains that might have been cut out of cardboard.
The gray of old T’ainan lay in the massive battle-mented walls and in
the more than six square miles of closely packed tile roofs; the green
in its thousands of trees. For here, as in Peking and Sian-fu they
had preserved the trees; not, of course, in the innumerable tortuous
streets, where petty merchants, money-changers, porters, coolies,
beggars, soldiers and other riffraff passed freely through mud or dust,
but within the thousands of hidden private courtyards, in the yamens of
governor, treasurer, and provincial judge, in temple grounds outside the
walls, and in the compound of the American Mission. At this latter
spot, by the way, could be seen, with the aid of field-glasses, the only
two-story residence in T’ainan; quite a European house, built after
the French manner of red brick trimmed with white stone, and rising
distinctly above the typically gray roofs that clustered about its lower
windows.
There were bold gate towers on the city wall; eight of them, great
timbered structures with pagoda roofs rising perhaps fifteen yards above
the wall and thirty above the lowly roadway. The timber-work under the
shadowing eaves had sometime been painted in reds, blues and greens;
and the once vivid colors, though dulled now by weather and years, were
still richly visible to the near-observer.
Many smaller settlements, little gray clusters of houses, lay about the
plain on radiating highways; for T’ainan boasted its suburbs. The
hill slopes were dotted with the homes and walled gardens of bankers,
merchants and other gentry. On a plateau just north of the Great Highway
stood, side by side, two thirteen-roof pagodas, the pride of all central
Hansi.
About the city, on any day of the seven, twisting through the hundreds
of little streets and in and out at the eight gates, moved tens of
thousands of tirelessly busy folk, all clad in the faded blue
cotton that spells China to the eye, and among these a slow-moving,
never-ceasing tangle of wheeled and fourfooted local traffic.
And along the Great Highway--down the hill slopes, through suburbs and
city, over the river and on toward the teeming West; over the
river, through city and suburbs and up the hills, toward the teeming
East--flowed all day long the larger commerce that linked province with
province and, ultimately, yellow man with white, at the treaty ports,
hundreds of miles away. There were strings of laden camels with
evil-looking Mongol drivers; hundreds and thousands of camels,
disdainfully going and coming. There were hundreds and thousands of
asses, patient little humorists, bearing panniers of coal lumps and iron
ore from the crudely operated mines in the hills. There were hundreds
and thousands of mule-drawn carts, springless, many with arched roofs of
matting.
Along the roadside, sheltered by little sagging canopies of grimy
matting, or squatting in the dirt, were vendors of flat cakes and
vinegary _sumshoo_ and bits of this and that to wear. Naked children
swarmed like flies in the sun.
The day-by-day life of the oldest and least selfconscious civilization
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기