HILLS OF HAN

The slight geographical confusion which will be found by the observant reader in Hills of Han is employed as a reminder that the story, despite considerable elements of fact in the background, is a work of the imagination, and deals with no actual individuals of the time and place. S. M.

HILLS OF HAN

CHAPTER I—THE SOLITARY

I

ON a day in late March, 1907, Miss Betty Doane sat in the quaintly airy dining-room of the Hotel Miyaka, at Kioto, demurely sketching a man's profile on the back of a menu card.

The man, her unconscious model, lounged comfortably alone by one of the swinging windows. He had finished his luncheon, pushed away his coffee cup, lighted a cigarette, and settled back to gaze out at the hillside where young green grasses and gay shrubs and diminutive trees bore pleasant evidence that the early Japanese springtime was at hand.

Betty could even see, looking out past the man, a row of cherry trees, all afoam with blossoms. They brought a thrill that was almost poignant. It was curious, at home—or, rather, back in the States—there was no particular thrill in cherry blossoms. They were merely pleasing. But so much more was said about them here in Japan.

The man's head was long and well modeled, with a rugged long face, reflective eyes, somewhat bony nose, and a wide mouth that was, on the whole, attractive. Both upper lip and chin were dean shaven. The eyebrows were rather heavy; the hair was thick and straight, slanting down across a broad forehead. She decided, as she sketched it in with easy sure strokes of a stubby pencil, that he must have quite a time every morning brushing that hair down into place.

He had appeared, a few days back, at the Grand Hotel, Yokohama, coming in from somewhere north of Tokio. At the hotel he had walked and eaten alone, austerely. And, not unnaturally, had been whispered about. He was, Betty knew, a journalist of some reputation. The name was Jonathan Brachey. He wore an outing suit, with knickerbockers; he was, in bearing, as in costume, severely conspicuous. You thought of him as a man of odd attainment. He had been in many interesting corners of the world; had known danger and privation. Two of his books were in the ship's library. One of these she had already taken out and secreted in her cabin. It was called To-morrow in India, and proved rather hard to read, with charts, diagrams and pages of figures.

The sketch was about done; all but the nose. When you studied that nose in detail it seemed a little too long and strong, and—well, knobby—to be as attractive as it actually was. There would be a trick in drawing it; a shadow or two, a suggestive touch of the pencil; not so many real knobs. In the ship's diningroom she had his profile across an aisle. There would be chances to study it.

Behind her, in the wide doorway, appeared a stout, short woman of fifty or more, in an ample and wrinkled traveling suit of black and a black straw hat ornamented only with a bow of ribbon. Her face wore an anxious expression that had settled, years back, into permanency. The mouth drooped a little. And the brows were lifted and the forehead grooved with wrinkles suggesting some long habitual straining of the eyes that recent bifocal spectacles were powerless to correct.

“Betty!” called the older woman guardedly. “Would you mind, dear... one moment...?”

Her quick, nervous eyes had caught something of the situation. There was Betty and—within easy earshot—a man. The child was unquestionably sketching him.

Betty's eagerly alert young face fell at the sound. She stopped drawing; for a brief instant chewed the stubby pencil; then, quite meekly, rose and walked toward the door.

“Mr. Hasmer is outside. I thought you were with him. Betty.”

“No... I didn't know your plans... I was waiting here.”

“Well, my dear... it's all right, of course! But I think we'll go now. Mr. Hasmer thinks you ought to see at least one of the temples. Something typical. And of course you will want to visit the cloisonné and satsuma shops, and see the Damascene work. The train leaves for Kobe at four-fifteen. The ships sails at about eight, I believe. We haven't much time, you see.”

A chair scraped. Jonathan Brachey had picked up his hat, his pocket camera and his unread copy of the Japan Times, and was striding toward her, or toward the door. He would pass directly by, of course, without so much as a mental recognition of her existence. For so he had done at Yokohama; so he had done last evening and again this morning on the ship.

But on this occasion, as he bore down on her, the eyes of the distinguished young man rested for an instant on the table, and for a brief moment he wavered in his stride. He certainly saw the sketch. It lay where she had carelessly tossed it, face up, near the edge of the table. And he certainly recognized it for himself; for his strong facial muscles moved a very little. It couldn't have been called a smile; but those muscles distinctly moved. Then, as coolly as before, he strode on out of the room.

Betty's cheeks turned crimson. A further fact doubtless noted by this irritatingly, even arrogantly composed man.

Betty, with desperate dignity, put the sketch in her wrist bag, followed Mrs. Hasmer out of the building, and stepped into the rickshaw that awaited her.

The brown-legged coolie tucked the robe about her, stepped in between the shafts of the vehicle; a second coolie fell into place behind, and they were off down the hill. Just ahead, Mrs. Hasmer's funny little hat bobbed with the inequalities of the road. Just behind, Doctor Hasmer, a calm, patient man who taught philosophy and history in a Christian college fifteen hundred miles or more up the Yangtse River and who never could remember to have his silvery beard trimmed, smiled kindly at her when she turned.

And behind him, indifferent to all the human world, responsive in his frigid way only to the beauties of the Japanese country-side and of the quaint, gray-brown, truly ancient city extending up and down the valley by its narrow, stone-walled stream, rode Mr. Jonathan Brachey.

The coolies, it would seem, had decided to act in concert. From shop to shop among the crowded little streets went the four rickshaws. Any mere human being (so ran Betty's thoughts) would have accepted good-humoredly the comradeship implied in this arrangement on the part of a playful fate; but Mr. Brachey was no mere human being. Side by side stood the four of them in a toy workshop looking down at toy-like artisans with shaved and tufted heads who wore quaint robes and patiently beat out designs in gold and silver wire on expertly fashioned bronze boxes and bowls. They listened as one to the thickly liquid English of a smiling merchant explaining the processes and expanding on the history of fine handiwork in this esthetic land. Yet by no sign did Mr. Brachey's face indicate that he was aware of their presence; except once—on a crooked stairway in a cloisonné shop he flattened himself against the wall to let them pass, muttering, almost fiercely, “I beg your pardon!”

The moment came, apparently, when he could endure this enforced companionship no longer. He spoke gruffly to his rickshaw coolies, and rolled off alone. When they finally reached the railway station after a half-hour spent in wandering about the spacious enclosure of the Temple of Nishi Otani, with its huge, shadowy gate house, its calm priests, its exquisite rock garden under ancient mystical trees—the tall journalist was pacing the platform, savagely smoking a pipe.

At Kobe they were united again, riding out to the ship's anchorage in the same launch. But Mr. Brachey gave no sign of recognition. He disappeared the moment of arrival at the ship, reappearing only when the bugle announced dinner, dressed, as he had been each evening at the Grand Hotel and the previous evening on the ship, rather stiffly, in dinner costume.

Then the ship moved out from her anchorage into that long, island-studded, green-bordered body of water known as the Inland Sea of Japan. Early on the second morning she would slip in between the closepressing hills that guard Nagasaki harbor. There another day ashore. Then three days more across the Yellow Sea to Shanghai. Thence, for the Hasmers and Betty, a five-day journey by steamer up the muddy but majestic Yangtze Kiang to Hankow; at which important if hardly charming city they would separate, the Hasmers to travel on by other, smaller steamer to Ichang and thence on up through the Gorges to their home among the yellow folk of Szechwan, while Hetty, from Hankow, must set out into an existence that her highly colored young mind found it impossible to face squarely. As yet, despite the long journey across the American continent and the Pacific, she hadn't begun so much as to believe the facts. Though there they stood, squarely enough, before her. It had been easier to surrender her responsive, rather easily gratified emotions to a day-by-day enjoyment of the journey itself. When the constant, worried watchfulness of Mrs. Hasmer reached the point of annoyance—not that Mrs. Hasmer wasn't an old dear; kindness itself, especially if your head ached or you needed a little mothering!—why then, with the easy adaptability and quick enthusiasm of youth, she simply busied herself sketching. The top layer of her steamer trunk was nearly full now—sketches of the American desert, of the mountains and San Francisco, of people on the ship, of the sea and of Honolulu.

But now, with Yokohama back among the yesterdays and Kobe falling rapidly, steadily astern, Betty's heart was as rapidly and as steadily sinking. Only one more stop, and then—China. In China loomed the facts.

That night, lying in her berth, Betty, forgot the cherry blossoms of Kioto and the irritating Mr. Brachey. Her thoughts dwelt among the young friends, the boy-and-girl “crowd,” she had left behind, far off, at the other edge of those United States that by a queerly unreal theory were her home-land. And, very softly, she cried herself to sleep.

2

Betty Doane was just nineteen. She was small, quick to feel and think, dark rather than light (though not an out-and-out brunette). She was distinctly pretty. Her small head with its fine and abundant hair, round face with its ever-ready smile, alert brown eyes and curiously strong little chin expressed, as did her slim quick body, a personality of considerable sprightly vigor and of a charm that could act on certain other sorts of personalities, particularly of the opposite sex, with positive, telling effect.

Mrs. Hasmer, who had undertaken, with misgivings, to bring her from suburban New Jersey to Hankow, found her a heavy responsibility. It wasn't that the child was insubordinate, forward, or, in anyway that you could blame her for, difficult. On the contrary, she was a dear little thing, kind, always amusing, eager to please. But none the less there was something, a touch of vital quality, perhaps of the rare gift of expressiveness, that gave her, at times, a rather alarming aspect. Her clothes were simple enough—Griggsby Doane, goodness knew, couldn't afford anything else—but in some way that Mrs. Hasmer would never fully understand, the child always managed to make them look better than they were. She had something of the gift of smartness. She had, Mrs. Hasmer once came out with, “too much imagination.” The incessant sketching, for instance. And she did it just a shade too well. Then, too, evening after evening during the three weeks on the Pacific, she had danced. Which was, from the only daughter of Griggsby Doane—well, confusing. And though Mrs. Hasmer, balked by the delicacy of her position, had gone to lengths in concealing her disapproval, she had been unable to feign surprise at the resulting difficulties. Betty had certainly not been deliberate in leading on any of the men on the ship; young men, by the way that you had no means of looking up, even so far as the certainty that they were unmarried. But the young mining engineer on his way to Korea had left quite heart-broken. From all outer indications he had proposed marriage and met with a refusal. But not a word, not a hint, not so much as a telltale look, came from Betty.

Mrs. Hasmer sighed over it. She would have liked to know. She came to the conclusion that Betty had been left just a year or so too long in the States. They weren't serious over there, in the matter of training girls for the sober work of life. Prosperity, luxury, were telling on the younger generations. No longer were they guarded from dangerously free thinking. They read, heard, saw everything; apparently knew everything. They read openly, of a Sunday, books which, a generation earlier, would not have reached their eyes even on a week-day. The church seemed to have lost its hold (though she never spoke aloud of this fact). Respect for tradition and authority had crumbled away. They questioned, weighed everything, these modern children.... Mrs. Hasmer worried a good deal, out in China, about young people in the States.

But under these surface worries, lurked, in the good woman's mind, a deeper, more real worry. Betty was just stepping over the line between girlhood and young womanhood. She was growing more attractive daily. She was anything but fitted to step into the life that lay ahead. Wherever she turned, even now—as witness the Pacific ship—life took on fresh complications. Indeed, Mrs. Hasmer, pondering the problem, came down on the rather strong word, peril. A young girl—positive in attractiveness, gifted, spirited, motherless (as it happened), trained only to be happy in living—was in something near peril.

One fact which Mrs. Hasmer's mind had been forced to accept was that most of the complications came from sources or causes with which the girl herself had little consciously to do. She was flatly the sort of person to whom things happened. Even when her eager interest in life and things and men (young and old) was not busy.

In the matter of the rather rude young man in knickerbockers, at Kioto, Betty was to blame, of course. She had set to work to sketch him. Evidently. The most you could say for her on that point was that she would have set just as intently at sketching an old man, or a woman, or a child—or a corner of the room. Mrs. Hasmer had felt, while on the train to Kobe, that she must speak of the matter. After all, she had that deathly responsibility on her shoulders. Betty's only explanation, rather gravely given, had been that she found his nose interesting.

The disturbing point was that something in the way of a situation was sure to develop from the incident. Something. Six weeks of Betty made that a reasonable assumption. And the first complication would arise in some quite unforeseen way. Betty wouldn't bring it about. Indeed, she had quickly promised not to sketch him any more.

This is the way it did arise. At eleven on the following morning Mr. and Mrs. Hasmer and Betty were stretched out side by side in their steamer chairs, sipping their morning beef tea and looking out at the rugged north shore of the Inland Sea. Beyond Betty were three vacant chairs, then this Mr. Brachey—his long person wrapped in a gay plaid rug. He too was sipping beef tea and enjoying the landscape; if so dry, so solitary a person could be said to enjoy anything. A note-book lay across his knees.

Mrs. Hasmer had thought, with a momentary flutter of concern, of moving Betty to the other side of Doctor Hasmer. But that had seemed foolish. Making too much of it. Betty hadn't placed the chairs; the deck steward had done that. Besides she hadn't once looked at the man; probably hadn't thought of him; had been quite absorbed in her sketching—bits of the hilly shore, an island mirrored in glass, a becalmed junk.

A youngish man, hatless, with blond curls and a slightly professional smile, came up from the after hatch and advanced along the deck, eagerly searching the row of rug-wrapped, recumbent figures in deck chairs. Before the Hasmers he stopped with delighted greetings. It came out that he was a Mr. Harting, a Y. M. C. A. worker in Bttrmah, traveling second-class.

“I hadn't seen the passenger list, Mrs. Hasmer, and didn't know you were aboard. But there's a Chinese boy sitting next to me at table. He has put in a year or so at Tokio University, and speaks a little English. He comes from your city, Miss Doane. Or so he seems to think. T'ainan-fu.”

Betty inclined her head.

“It was he who showed me the passenger list. At one time, he says, he lived in your father's household.”

“What is his name?” asked Betty politely.

“Li Hsien—something or other.” Mr. Harting was searching his pockets for a copy of the list.

“I knew Li Hsien very well,” said Betty. “We used to play together.”

“So I gathered. May I bring him up here to see you?”

Betty would have replied at once in the affirmative, but six weeks of companionship with Mrs. Hasmer had taught her that such decisions were not expected of her. So now with a vague smile of acquiescence, she directed the inquiry to the older woman.

“Certainly,” cried Mrs. Hasmer, “do bring him!”

As he moved away, Betty, before settling back in her chair, glanced, once, very demurely, to her left, where Jonathan Brachey lay in what might have been described, from outer appearances, supercilious comfort.

He hadn't so much as lifted an eyelid. He wasn't listening. He didn't care. It was nothing to him that Betty Doane was no idle, spoiled girl tourist, nothing that she could draw with a gifted pencil, nothing that she knew Chinese students at Tokio University, and herself lived at T'ainan-fu!... It wasn't that Betty consciously formulated any such thoughts. But the man had an effect on her; made her uncomfortable; she wished he'd move his chair around to the other side of the ship.

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.

But he drove heavily on:

“This morning, while not wishing to appear as an eavesdropper... that is to say... the fact is, Miss Doane, I am a journalist, and am at present on my way to China to make an investigation of the political—one might even term it the social—unrest that appears to be cropping out rather extensively in the southern provinces and even, a little here and there, in the North.”

He was dreadful! Stilted, clumsy, slow! He hunted painstakingly for words; and at each long pause Betty's quick young nerves tightened and tightened, mentally groping with him until the hunted word was run to earth.

He was pounding on:

“This morning I overheard you talking with that young Chinaman. It is evident that you speak the language.”

“Oh. yes,” Betty found herself saying, “I do.”

Not a word about the drawing.

“This young man, I gather, is in sympathy with the revolutionary spirit.”

“He—he seems to be,” said Betty.

“Now... Miss Doane... this is of course an imposition...”

“Oh, no,” breathed Betty weakly.

“... it is, of course, an imposition... it would be a service I could perhaps never repay...” This pause lasted so long that she heard herself murmuring, “No, really, not at all!”—and then felt the color creeping to her face... but if I might ask you to... but let me put it in this way—the young man is precisely the type I have come out here to study. You speak in the vernacular, and evidently understand him almost as a native might. It is unlikely I shall find in China many such natural interpreters as yourself. And of course... if it is thinkable that you would be so extremely kind as to... why, of course, I...”

“Heavens!” thought Betty, in a panic, “he's going to offer to pay me. I mustn't be rude.”

The man plodded on: “... why, of course, it would be a real pleasure to mention your assistance in the preface of my book.”

It was partly luck, luck and innate courtesy, that she didn't laugh aloud. She broke, as it was, into words, saving herself and the situation.

“You want me to act as interpreter? Of course Li knows a little English.”

“Would he—er—know enough English for serious conversation?”

“No,” mused Betty aloud, “I don't think he would.”

“Of course, Miss Doane, I quite realize that to take up your time in this way....”

There he stopped. He was frowning now, and apparently studying out the structural details of a huge junk that lay only a few hundred yards away, reflected minutely, exquisitely—curving hull and deck cargo, timbered stern, bat-wing sails—in the glass-like water.

“I'll be glad to do what I can,” said Betty, helplessly. Then, for the first time, she became aware that Mrs. Hasmer was stirring uncomfortably on her other hand, and added, quickly, as much out of nervousness as anything else—“We could arrange to have Li come up here in the morning.”

“We shall be coaling at Nagasaki in the morning,” said he, abruptly, as if that settled that.

“Well, of course,... this afternoon....

“My dear,” began Mrs. Hasmer.

“This afternoon would be better.” Thus Mr. Brachey. “Though I can not tell you what hesitation...”

“I suppose we could find a quiet corner somewhere,” said Betty. “In the social hall, perhaps.”

It was then, stirred to positive act, that Mrs. Hasmer spoke out.

“I think you'd better stay out here with us, my dear.”

To which the hopelessly self-absorbed Mr. Brachey replied:

“I really must have quiet for this work. We will sit inside, if you don't mind.”

5

At half past four Mrs. Hasmer sent her husband to look into the situation. He reported that they were hard at it. Betty looked a little tired, but was laboriously repeating Li Hsien's words, in English, in order that Mr. Brachcy might take them down in what appeared to be a sort of shorthand. Doctor Hasmer didn't see how he could say anything. Not very well. They hadn't so much as noticed him, though he stood near by for a few moments.

Which report Mrs. Hasmer found masculine and unsatisfactory. At five she went herself; took her Battenberg hoop and sat near by. Betty saw her, and smiled. She looked distinctly a little wan.

The journalist ignored Mrs. Hasmer. He was a merciless driver. Whenever Betty's attention wandered, as it had begun doing, he put his questions bruskly, even sharply, to call her back to the task.

Four bells sounded, up forward. Mrs. Hasmer started; and, as always when she heard the ship's bell, consulted her watch. Six o'clock!... She put down her hoop; fidgetted; got up; sat down again; told herself she must consider the situation calmly. It must be taken in hand, of course. The man was a mannerless brute. He had distinctly encroached. He would encroach further. He must be met firmly, at once. She tried to think precisely how he could be met.

She got up again; stood over them. She didn't know that her face was a lens through which any and all might read her perturbed spirit.

Betty glanced up; smiled faintly; drew a long breath.

Li Hsien rose and bowed, clasping his hands before his breast.

Mr. Bradley was writing.

Mrs. Hasmer had tried to construct a little speech that, however final, would meet the forms of courtesy. It left her now. She said with blank firmness:

“Come, Betty!”

“One moment!” protested Mr. Brachey. “Will you please ask him, Miss Duane, whether he believes that the general use of opium has appreciably lowered the vitality of the Chinese people? That is, to put it conversely, whether the curtailment of production is going to leave a people too weakened to act strongly in a military or even political way? Surveying the empire as a whole, of course.”

Betty's thoughts, which had wandered hopelessly afield, came struggling back.

“I—I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm afraid I didn't quite hear.”

“I must ask you to come with me, Betty,” said Mrs. Hasmer.

At this, looking heavily disappointed, Mr. Brachey rose; ran a long bony hand through his thick hair.

“We could take it up in the morning,” he said, turning from the bland young Chinaman to the plainly confused girl. “That is, if Miss Doane wouldn't mind staying on the ship. I presume she has seen Nagasaki.”

His perturbed eyes moved at last to the little elderly lady who had seemed so colorless and mild; met hers, which were, of a sudden, snapping coals.

“You will not take it up again, sir!” cried Mrs. Hasmer; and left with the girl.

The Chinaman smiled, clasped his hands, bowed with impenetrable courtesy, and withdrew' to his quarters.

Mr. Brachey, alone, looked over his notes with a frown; shook his head; went down to dress for dinner.

6

Late that night Betty sat in her tiny stateroom, indulging rebellious thoughts. It was time, after an awkwardly silent evening, to go to bed. But instead she now slipped into her heavy traveling coat, pulled on her tam-o'-shanter, tiptoed past the Hasmers' door and went out on deck.

It was dim and peaceful there. The throb of the engines and the wash of water along the hull were the only sounds. They were in the strait now, heading out to sea.

She walked around the deck, and around. It was her first free moment since they left the Pacific ship at Yokohama. After that very quietly—sweetly, even—the chaperonage of Mrs. Hasmer had tightened. For Betty the experience was new and difficult. She felt that she ought to submit. But the rebellion in her breast, if wrong, was real. She would walk it off.

Then she met Mr. Brachey coming out of the smoking-room. Both stopped.

“Oh!” said he.

“I was just getting a breath of air,” said she.

Then they moved to the rail and leaned there, gazing off at the faintly moonlit land.

He asked, in his cold way, how she had learned Chinese.

“I was born at T'ainan-fu,” she explained. “My father is a missionary.”

“Oh,” said he. And again, “Oh!”

Then they fell silent. Her impulse at first was to make talk. She did murmur, “I really ought to be going in.” But he, apparently, found talk unnecessary. And she stayed on, looking now down at the iridescent foam slipping past the black hull, now up into the luminous night.

Then he remarked, casually, “Shall we walk?” And she found herself falling into step with him.

They stopped, a little later, up forward and stood looking out over the forecastle deck.

“Some day I'm going to ask the chief officer to let me go out there,” said she.

“It isn't necessary to ask him,” replied Mr. Brachey. “Come along.”

“Oh,” murmured Betty, half in protest—“really?” But she went, thrilled now, more than a little guilty, down the steps, past hatches and donkey engines, up other steps, under and over a tangle of cables, over an immense anchor, to seats on coils of rope near the very bow.

The situation amounted already to a secret. Mrs. Hasmer couldn't be told, mused Betty. The fact was a little perplexing. But it stood.

Neither had mentioned Mrs. Hasmer. But now he said:

“I was rude to-day, of course.”

“No,” said she. “No.”

“Oh, yes! I'm that way. The less I see of people the better.”

This touched the half-fledged woman in her.

“You're interested in your work,” said she gently. “That's all. And it's right. You're not a trifler.”

“I'm a lone wolf.”

She was beginning to find him out-and-out interesting.

“You travel a good deal,” she ventured demurely. “All the time. I prefer it.”

“Always alone?”

“Always.”

“You don't get lonesome?”

“Oh, yes. But what does it matter?”

She considered this. “You go into dangerous places.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You traveled among the head-hunters of Borneo.”

“How did you find that out?”

“There's an advertisment of that book in To-morrow in India.”

“Oh, have you read that thing?”

“Part of it. I...”

“You found it dull.”

“Well... it's a little over my head.”

“It's over everybody's. Mine.”

She nearly laughed at this. But he seemed not to think of it as humor.

“Aren't you a little afraid, sometimes—going into such dangerous places all alone?”

“Oh, no.”

“But you might be hurt—or even—killed.”

“What's the difference?”

Startled, she looked straight up at him; then dropped her eyes. She waited for him to explain, but he was gazing moodily out at the water ahead.

The soft night air wrapped them about like dream-velvet. Adventure was astir, and romance. Betty, enchanted, looked lazily back at the white midships decks, bridge and wheelhouse, at the mysterious rigging and raking masts, at the foremost of the huge funnels pouring out great rolling clouds of smoke. The engines throbbed and throbbed. Back there somewhere the ship's bell struck, eight times for midnight.

“I don't care much for missionaries,” said Mr. Brachey.

“You'd like father.”

“Perhaps.”

“He's a wonderful man. He's six feet five. And strong.”

“It's a job for little men. Little souls. With little narrow eyes.”

“Oh... No!”

“Why try to change the Chinese? Their philosophy is finer than ours. And works better. I like them.”

“So do I. But...” She wished her father could be there to meet the man's talk. There must surely be strong arguments on the missionary side, if one only knew them. She finally came out with:

“But they're heathen!”

“Oh, yes!”

“They're—they're polygamous!”

“Why not?”

“But Mr. Brachey...” She couldn't go on with this. The conversation was growing rather alarming.

“So are the Americans polygamous. And the other white peoples. Only they call it by other names. You get tired of it. The Chinese are more honest.”

“I wonder,” said she, suddenly steady and shrewd, “if you haven't stayed away too long.”

His reply was:

“Perhaps.”

“If you live—you know, all by yourself, and for nobody in the world except yourself—I mean, if there's nobody you're responsible for, nobody you love and take care of and suffer for...” The sentence was getting something involved. She paused, puckering her brows.

“Well?” said he.

“Why, I only meant, isn't there danger of a person like that becoming—well, just selfish.”

“I am selfish.”

“But you don't want to be.”

“Oh. but I do!”

“I can hardly believe that.”

“Dependence on others is as bad as gratitude. It is a demand, a weakness. Strength is better. If each of us stood selfishly alone, it would be a cleaner, better world. There wouldn't be any of this mess of obligation, one to another. No running up of spiritual debt. And that's the worst kind.”

“But suppose,” she began, a little afraid of getting into depths from which it might be difficult to extreate herself, “suppose—well, you were married, and there were—well, little children. Surely you'd have to feel responsible for them.”

“Surely,” said he curtly, “it isn't necessary for every man to bring children 'nto the world. Surely that's not the only job.”

“But—but take another case. Suppose you had a friend, a younger man, and he was in trouble—drinking, maybe; anything!—wouldn't you feel responsible for him?”

“Not at all. That's the worst kind of dependence. The only battles a man wins are the ones he wins alone. If any friend of mine—man or woman—can't win his own battles—or hers—he or she had better go. Anywhere. To hell, if it comes to that.”

He quite took her breath away.

One bell sounded.

“It's perfectly dreadful,” said she. “If Mrs. Has-mer knew I was out here at this time of night, she'd...”

This sentence died out. They went back.

“Good night,” said she.

She felt that he must think her very young and simple. It seemed odd that he should waste so much time on her. No other man she had ever met was like him. Hesitantly, desiring at least a touch of friendliness, on an impulse, she extended her hand.

He took it; held it a moment firmly; then said:

“Will you give me that drawing?”

“Yes,” said she.

“Now?”

“Yes.” And she tiptoed twice again past the Hasmers' door.

“Please sign it,” said he, and produced a pencil. “But it seems so silly. I mean, it's nothing, this sketch.”

“Please!”

She signed it, said good night again, and hurried off, her heart in a curious flutter.

CHAPTER II—ROMANCE

I

UNWILLING either to confess like a naughty child or to go on keeping this rather large and distinctly exciting secret under cover, Betty, at teatime, brought the matter to an issue. The morning ashore had been difficult. Mr. Brachey had severely ignored her, going about Nagasaki alone, lunching in austere solitude at the hotel.

She said, settling herself in the deck chair:

“Mrs. Hasmer, will you ask Mr. Brachey to have tea with us?”

After a long silence the older woman asked, stiffly: “Why, my dear?”

Betty compressed her lips.

Doctor Hasmer saved the situation by saying quietly, “I'll ask him.”

It was awkward from the first. The man was angular and unyielding. And Mrs. Hasmer, though she tried, couldn't let him alone. She was determined to learn whether he was married. She led up to the direct question more otariously than she knew. Finally it came. They were speaking of his announced plan to travel extensively in the interior of China.

“It must be quite delightful to wander as you do,” she said. “Of course, if one has ties... you, I take it, are an unmarried man, Mr. Brachey ?”

Betty had to lower her face to hide the color that came. If only Mrs. Hasmer had a little humor! She was a dear kind woman; but this!...

The journalist looked, impassively enough, but directly, at his questioner.

She met his gaze. They were flint on steel, these two natures.

“You are obviously not married,” she repeated.

He looked down at his teacup; thinking. Then, abruptly, he set it down on the deck, got up, muttered something that sounded like, “If you will excuse me...” and strode away.

Betty went early to her cabin that evening.

She had no more than switched on her light when the Chinese steward came with a letter.

She locked the door then, and looked at the unfamiliar handwriting. It was small, round, clear; the hand of a particular man, a meticulous man. who has written much with a pen.

She turned down the little wicker seat. Her cheeks were suddenly hot, her pulse bounding high.

She skimmed it, at first, clear to the signature, “Jonathan Brachey”; then went back and read it through, slowly.

“I was rude again just now,” (it began). “As I told you last night, it is best for me not to see people. I am not a social being. Clearly, from this time on, it will be impossible for me to talk with this Mrs. Hasmer. I shall not try again.

“I could not answer her question. But to you I must speak. It would be difficult even to do this if we were to meet again, and talk. But, as you will readily see, we must not meet again, beyond the merest greeting.

“I was married four years ago. After only a few weeks my wife left me. The reasons she gave were so flippant as to be absurd. She was a beautiful and, it has seemed to me, a vain, spoiled, quite heartless woman. I have not seen her since. Two years ago she became infatuated with another man, and wrote asking me to consent to a divorce. I refused on the ground that I did not care to enter into the legal intrigues preliminary to a divorce in the state of her residence. Since then, I am told, she has changed her residence to a state in which 'desertion' is a legal ground. But I have received no word of any actual move on her part.

“It is strange that I should be writing thus frankly to you. Strange, and perhaps wrong. But you have reached out to me more of a helping hand than you will ever know. Our talk last night meant a great deal to me. To you I doubtless seemed harsh and forbidding. It is true that I am that sort of man, and therefore am best alone. It is seldom that I meet a person with whom my ideas are in agreement.

“I trust that you will find every happiness in life. You deserve to. You have the great gift of feeling. I could almost envy you that. It is a quality I can perceive without possessing. An independent mind, a strong gift of logic, stands between me and all human affection. I must say what I think, not what I feel.

“I make people unhappy. The only corrective to such a nature is work, and, whenever possible, solitude. But I do not solicit your pity. I find myself, my thoughts, excellent company.

“With your permission I will keep the drawing. It will have a peculiar and pleasant meaning to me.”

2

Betty lowered the letter, breathing out the single word, “Well!”

What on earth could she have said or done to give him any such footing in her life?

She read it again. And then again.

An amazing man!

She made, ready to go to bed, slowly, dawdling, trying to straighten out the curious emotional pressures on her mind.

She read the letter yet again; considered it.

Finally, after passing through many moods leading up to a tender sympathy for this bleak life, and then passing on into a state of sheer nervous excitement, she deliberately dressed again and went out on deck.

He stood by the rail, smoking.

“You have my letter?” he asked.

“Yes. I've read it.” She was oddly, happily relieved at finding him.

“You shouldn't have come.”

She had no answer to this. It seemed hardly relevant. She smiled, in the dark.

They fell to walking the deck. After a time, shyly, tacitly, a little embarrassed, they went up forward again.

The ship was well out in the Yellow Sea now. The bow rose and fell slowly, rhythmically, beneath them.

Moved to meet his letter with a response in kind, she talked of herself.

“It seems strange to be coming back to China.”

“You've been long away?”

“Six years. My mother died when I was thirteen. Father thought it would be better for me to be in the States. My uncle, father's brother, was in the wholesale hardware business in New York, and lived in Orange, and they took me in. They were always nice to me. But last fall Uncle Frank came down with rheumatic gout. He's an invalid now. It must have been pretty expensive. And there was some trouble in his business. They couldn't very well go on taking care of me, so father decided to have me come back to T'ainan-fu.” She folded her hands in her lap.

He lighted his pipe, and smoked reflectively.

“That will be rather hard for you, won't it?” he remarked, after a time. “I mean for a person of your temperament. You are, I should say, almost exactly my opposite in every respect. You like people, friends. You are impulsive, doubtless affectionate. I could be relatively happy, marooned among a few hundred millions of yellow folk—though I could forego the missionaries. But you are likely, I should think, to be starved there. Spiritually—emotionally.”

“Do you think so?” said she quietly.

“Yes.” He thought it, over “The life of a mission compound isn't exactly gay.”

“No, it isn't.”

“And you need gaiety.”

“I wonder if I do. I haven't really faced it, of course. I'm not facing it now.”

“Just think a moment. You've not even landed in China yet. You're under no real restraint—still among white people, on a white man's ship, eating in European hotels at the ports. You aren't teaching endless lessons to yellow children, day in, day out. You aren't shut up in an interior city, where it mightn't even he safe for you to step outside the gate house alone. And yet you're breaking bounds. Right now—out here with me.”

Already she was taking his curious bluntness for granted. She said now, simply, gently:

“I know. I'm sitting out here at midnight with a married man. And I don't seem to mind. Of course you're not exactly married. Still... A few days ago I wouldn't have thought it possible.”

“Did you tell the Hasmers that you were out here last night?”

“No.”

“Shall you tell them about this?”

She thought a moment; then, as simply, repeated: “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. It's the way I feel.”

He nodded. “You feel it's none of their business.”

“Well—yes.”

“Of course, I ought to take you back, now.”

“I don't feel as if I were doing wrong. Oh, a little, but...”

“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 in the world was moving quietly, resistlessly along, as it had moved for six thousand years.

2

Reverend Henry B. Withery, on a morning in late March, came, by springless cart, out of Kansu into T'ainan. A drab little man, with patient fervor in his eyes and a limp (this latter the work of Boxers in 1900). He was bound, on leave, for Shanghai, San Francisco and home; but a night at T'ainan with Griggsby Doane meant, even in the light of hourly nearing America, much. For they had shared rooms at the seminary. They had entered the yielding yet resisting East side by side. Meeting but once or twice a year, even less often, they had felt each other deeply across the purple mountains.

They sat through tiffin with the intent preoccupied workers in the dining-room of the brick house; and Mr Withery's gentle eyes took in rather shrewdly the curious household. It interested him. There were elements that puzzled him; a suggestion of staleness in this face, of nervous overstrain in that; a tension.

The several native workers smiled and talked less, he thought, than on his former visits.

Little Mr. Boatwright—slender, dustily blond, always hitherto burning with the tire of consecration—was continually fumbling with a spoon, or slowly twisting his tumbler, the while moodily studying the table-cloth. And his larger wife seemed heavier in mind as in body.

Mr. Withery found the atmosphere even a little oppressive. He looked up about the comfortable, high ceiled room. Mounted and placed on the walls were a number of interesting specimens of wild fowl. Elmer Boatwright, though no devotee of slaughter or even of sport, had shot and mounted these himself.

Withery asked him now if he had found any interesting birds lately. The reply was little more than monosyllabic; it was almost the reply of a middle-aged man who has lost and forgotten the enthusiasm of youth.

There was talk, of course; the casual surface chatter of folk who are deeply united in work. A new schoolroom was under construction. Jen Ling Pu, a native preacher, was doing well at So T'ung. The new tennis court wasn't, after all, long enough.

During all this, Withery pondered. Griggsby was driving too hard, of course. The strongly ascetic nature of the man seemed to be telling on him; or perhaps it was running out, the fire of it, leaving only the force of will. That happened, of course, now and then, in the case of men gifted with great natural vitality.

Then too, come to reflect on it, the fight had been hard, here in Hansi. Since 1900. Harder, perhaps, than anywhere else except Shantung and Chihli. Harder even than in those more easterly provinces, for they were nearer things. There were human contacts, freshening influences... . The Boxers had dealt heavily with the whites in Hansi. More than a hundred had been slain by fire or sword. Young women—girls like these two or three about the dinner table—had been tortured. Griggsby and his wife and the little girl had missed destruction only through the accident of a journey, in the spring, to Shanghai. And he had returned, dangerously early, to a smoldering ruin and plunged with all the vigor in his unusual body and mind at the task of reconstruction. The work in the province was shorthanded, of course, even yet. It would be so. But Griggsby was building it up. He even had the little so-called college, down the river at Hung Chan, going again, after a fashion. Money was needed, of course. And teachers. And equipment. All that had been discussed during tiffin. It was a rather heroic record. And it had not passed unobserved. At the Missionary Conference, at Shanghai, in 1906, Griggsby's report—carefully phrased, understated throughout, almost colorless—had drawn out unusual applause.

Mrs. Doane's death occurred during the first year of that painful reconstruction. Griggsby's course, after that, from the day of the funeral, in fact, as you looked back over it, recalling this and that apparently trivial incident, was characteristic. The daughter was sent back to the States, for schooling. Griggsby furnished for himself, up in what was little more, really, than the attic of the new mission residence, a bare, severe little suite of bedroom and study. The newly married Boatwrights he installed, as something near master and mistress, on the second floor. The other white workers and teachers filled all but the two guest rooms, and, at times, even these. And then, his little institution organized on a wholly new footing, he had loaded himself sternly with work.

Dinner was over. One by one the younger people left the room. And within a few moments the afternoon routine of the mission compound was under way.

Through the open window came a beam of warm spring sunshine. Outside, across the wide courtyard Withery noted the, to him, familiar picture of two or three blue-clad Chinese men lounging on the steps of the gate house; students crossing, books in hand; young girls round and fresh of face, their slanting eyes demurely downcast, assembling before one of the buildings; two carpenters working deliberately on a scaffold. A soft-footed servant cleared the table. Now that the two friends were left free to chat of personal matters, the talk wandered into unexpectedly impersonal regions. Withery found himself baffled, and something puzzled. During each of their recent visits Griggsby's manner had affected him in this same way, but less definitely. The aloofness—he had once or twice ever, thought of it as an evasiveness—had been only a tendency. The old friendship had soon warmed through it and brought ease of spirit and tongue. But the tendency had grown. The present Griggsby was clearly going to prove harder to get at. That remoteness of manner had grown on him as a habit. The real man, whatever he was coming to be, was hidden now; the man whose very soul had once been written clear in the steady blue eyes.

And what a man he was! Mr. Withery indulged in a moment of sentiment as he quietly, shrewdly studied him, across the table.

In physical size, as in mental attainments and emotional force, James Griggsby Duane had been, from the beginning, a marked man. He was forty-five now; or within a year of it. The thick brown hair of their student days was thinner-now at the sides and nearly gone on top. But the big head was set on the solid shoulders with all the old distinction. A notable fact about Griggsby Doane was that after winning intercollegiate standing as a college football player, he had never allowed his body to settle back with the years. He weighed now, surely, within a pound or two or three of his playing weight twenty-four years earlier. He had always been what the British term a clean feeder, eating sparingly of simple food. Hardly a day of his life but had at least its hour or two of violent exercise. He would rise at five in the morning and run a few miles before breakfast. He played tennis and handball. He would gladly have boxed and wrestled, but a giant with nearly six and a half feet of trained, conditioned muscle at his disposal finds few to meet him, toe to toe. His passion for walking had really, during the earlier years, raised minor difficulties about T'ainan. The Chinese were intelligent and, of course, courteous; but it was more than they could be asked to understand at first.

It had worked out, gradually. They knew him now; knew he was fearless, industrious, patient, kind. During the later years, after the Boxer trouble, his immense figure, striding like him of the fabled seven-league-boots, had become a familiar, friendly figure in central Hansi. Not infrequently he would tramp, pack on shoulders, from one to another of the outlying mission stations; and thought nothing of covering a hundred and thirty or forty li where your cart or litter mules or your Manchu pony would stop at ninety and call it a day.

Withery was bringing the talk around to the personal when Doane looked at his watch.

“You'll excuse me, Henry,” he said. “I've a couple of classes. But I'll knock off about four-thirty. Make yourself comfortable. Prowl about. Use my study, if you like.... Or wait. We were speaking of the Ho Shan Company. They've had two or three mass meetings here during the winter, and got up some statements.”

“Do they suggest violence?”

“Oh, yes.” Doane waved the thought carelessly aside. “But Pao will keep them in hand, I think. He doesn't want real trouble. But he wouldn't mind scaring the company into selling out. The gossip is that he is rather heavily interested himself in some of the native mines.”

“Is Pao your governor?”

“No, the governor died last fall, and no successor has been sent out. Kang, the treasurer, is nearly seventy and smokes sixty to a hundred pipes of opium a day. Pao Ting Chuan is provincial judge, but is ruling the province now. He's an able fellow.”... Doane drew a thick lot of papers from an inner pocket, and selected one. “Read this. It's one of their statements. Pao had the translation made in his yamen. I haven't the original, but the translation is fairly accurate I believe.”

Withery took the paper; ignored it, and studied his friend, who had moved to the door. Doane seemed to have lost his old smile—reflective, shrewd, a little quizzical. The furrow between his eyes had deepened into something near a permanent frown. There were fine lires about and under the eyes that might have indicated a deep weariness of the spirit. Yet the skin was clear, the color good.... Griggsby was fighting something out; alone; through the years.

Feeling this, Henry Withery broke out, in something of their old frank way.

“Do knock off, Grigg. Let's have one of the old talks. I think—I think perhaps you need me a little.” Doane hesitated. It was not like him to do that. “Yes,” he said gravely, but with his guard up, that curious guard, “it would be fine to have one of the old talks if we can get at it.”

He turned to go; then paused.

“Oh, by the way, I'm expecting Pourmont. A little later in the day. He's resident engineer for the Ho Shan Company, over at Ping Yang. Pierre François George Marie Pourmont. An amusing person. He feels a good deal of concern over these meetings. For that matter, he was mobbed here in February. He didn't like that.”

Withery found himself compressing his lips, and tried to correct that impulse with a rather artificial smile. It wasn't like Griggsby to speak in that light way. Like a society man almost. It suggested a hardening of the spirit; or a crust over deep sensitiveness.

Men, he reflected, who have to fight themselves during long periods of time are often hardened by the experience, even though they eventually win.

He wondered, moving to the window, and thoughtfully watching the huge man striding across the courtyard, if Griggsby Doane would be winning.

3

Up in the little study under the roof Mr. Withery sank into a Morris chair and settled back to read the views of the “Gentry and People of Hansi” on foreign mining syndicates. The documents had been typed on an old machine with an occasional broken letter; and were phrased in the quaint English that had long been familiar to him.

First came a statement of the “five items” of difference between these “Gentry and People” and the Ho Shan Company—all of a technical or business nature. Only in the last “item” did the emotional reasoning common to Chinese public documents make its appearance.... “Five. In Honan the company boldly introduced dynamite, which is prohibited. The dynamite exploded and this gave rise to diplomatic trouble, a like thing might happen in Hansi with the same evil consequences.” Then followed this inevitable general statement:

“At present in China, from the highest to the lowest, all are in difficulty—the annual for the indemnities amounts to Taels 30,000,000, and in every province the reforms involve great additional expenditure, while the authorities only know how to control the expenditure, but not how to reach fresh sources of income. Those in power can find no fresh funds and the people are extremely poor and all they have to trust to are a few feet of land which have not been excavated by the foreigners. Westerners say that the coal of Hansi is sufficient to supply the needs of the world for two thousand years; in other countries there is coal without iron, or iron without coal, but in Hansi there is abundance of both coal and iron and it forms one of the best manufacturing countries in the world. At present if there is no protection for China then that finishes it, but if China is to be protected how can Hansi be excluded from protection? Therefore all China and all Hansi must withstand the claims of the Ho Shan Company.

“The company's agent general says that the agreement was drawn up with the Chinese Government, but at that time the people were unenlightened and traitors were suffered to effect stolen sales of Government lands, using oppression and disregarding the lives of the people. Now all the Gentry and People know how things are, and of what importance the consequences are for the lives of themselves and their families, and so with one heart they all withstand the company in whatever schemes it may have, for they are not willing to drop their hands and give themselves up to death, and if the officials will not protect the mines of Hansi then we will protect our mines ourselves.

“We suggest a plan for the company, that it should state the sum used to bribe Hu Pin Chili, and to win over Chia Ching Jen and Liu O and Sheng Hsuan Hui and the Tsung Li Yamen, and the Wai Wu Pu and the Yu Chuan Pu, at the present time, and the bribes to other cruel traitors, and a detailed account of their expenditure in opening their mines since their arrival in China, and Hansi will repay the amount. If the company still pushes the claim for damages, in consequence of the delay in issuing the permit then the Hansi people will never submit to it.

“In conclusion the people of Hansi must hold to their mines till death, and if the Government and officials still unrighteously flatter the foreigners in their oppression and flog the people robbing them of their flesh and blood to give those to the foreigners then some one must throw away his life by bomb throwing and so repay the company, but we trust the company will carefully consider and weigh the matter and not push Hansi to this extremity.”

Mr. Withery laid the documents on Doane's desk, and gave up an hour to jotting down notes for his own annual report. Then he took a long walk, in through the wall and about the inner city. He was back by four-thirty, but found no sign of his friend.

At five a stout Frenchman arrived, a man of fifty or more, with a long, square-trimmed beard of which he was plainly fond. Doane returned then to the house.

4

The three men had tea in the study. M. Pourmont, with an apology, smoked cigarettes. Withery observed, when the genual Frenchman turned his head, that the lobe of his left ear was missing.

M. Pourmont regarded the local situation seriously.

“Zay spik of you,” he explained to Griggsby Doane.

“Zay say zat you have ze petit papier, ze little paper, all yellow, cut like ze little man an' woman. An' it is also zat zay say zat ze little girl, ze student, all ze little jeunes filles, is ze lowair vife of you, Monsieur It is not good, zat. At Paree ve vould say zat it is se compliment, but here it is not good. It is zat zay have not bifore spik like zat of Monsieur Doane.”

Doane merely considered this without replying.

“That statement of the Gentry and People looks rather serious to me,'' Mr. Withery remarked.

“It has its serious side,” said Doane quietly. “Put you see, of course, from the frankness and publicity of it, that the officials are back of it. These Gentry and People would never go so far unsupported. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the documents originated within the yamen of his Excellency Pao Ting Chuan.”

“Very good,” said Withery. “Put if he lets it drift much further the danger will be real. Suppose some young hothead were to take that last threat seriously and give up his life in throwing a bomb—-what then?”

“It would be serious then, of course,” said Doane. “But I hardly think any one here would go so far unsupported.”

“Yes!” cried M. Pourmont, in some excitement, “an' at who is it zat zay t'row ze bomb? It is at me, n'est ce pas? At me! You tlink I forget v'en ze mob it t'rowr ze bierre at me? Mais non! Zay tear ze cart of me. Zay beat ze head of me. Zay destroy ze ear of me. Ah, c' était terrible, ça!”

“They attacked Monsieur Pourmont while he was riding to the yamen for an audience with Pao,” Doane explained. “But Pao heard of it and promptly sent soldiers. 1 took it up with him the next day. He acted most correctly. The ringleaders of the mob were whipped and imprisoned.”

“But you mus' also say to Monsieur Vitieree zat ze committee of my compagnie he come to Peking—quinze mille kilometres he come!—an' now Son Excellence he say zay mus' not come here, into ze province. It is so difficult, ça! An' ze committee he is ver' angry. He swear at Peking. He cool ze—vat you say—-heels. An' ze work he all stop. No good! Noz-zing at all!”

“That is all so, Henry.” Thus Doane, turning to his friend. “I don't mean to minimize the actual difficulties. But I do not believe we are in any such danger as in 1900. Even then the officials did it, of course. If they hadn't believed that the incantations of the Boxers made them immune to our bullets, and if they hadn't convinced the Empress Dowager of it, we should never have had the siege of the legations. But I am to have an audience with His Excellency tomorrow, at one, and will go over this ground carefully. I have no wish, myself, to underestimate the trouble. My daughter arrives next week.”

“Oh!” said Withery. “Oh... your daughter! From the States, Grigg?”

“Yes, I am to meet her at Hankow. The Hasmers brought her across.”

“That's too bad, in a way.”

“Of course. But there was no choice.”

“But zat is not all zat is!” M. Puurmont was pacing the floor now. “A boy of me, of ze cuisine, he go home las' week to So T'ung an' he say zat a—vat you call?—a circle..

“A society?”

“Mais oui! A society, she meet in ze night an' fait l'exercise—”

“They are drilling?”

“Oui! Ze drill. It is ze society of Ze Great Eye.”

“I never heard of that,” mused Griggsby aloud. “I don't really see what they can do. But I'll take it up to-morrow with, Pao. I would ask you, however, to remember that if the people don't know the cost of indemnities, there can be no doubt about Pao. He knows. And it is hard for me to imagine the province drifting out of his control for a single day. One event I am planning to watch closely is the fair here after the middle of April. Some of these agitators of the Gentry and People are sure to be on hand. We shall learn a great deal then.”

“You'll be back then, Grigg?”

“Oh, yes. By the tenth. I shan't delay at all at Hankow.”

It seemed to Henry Withery that his friend and host maneuvered to get him to retire first. Then he attributed the suspicion to his own disturbed thoughts.... Still, Griggsby hadn't returned to the house until after M. Pourmont's arrival. It was now nearly midnight, and there had been never a personal word.

But at last, M. Pourmont out of the way for the night, lamp in hand, Griggsby led the way to the remaining guest room.

Withery, following, looked up at the tall grave man, who had to stoop a little at the doors. Would Griggsby put down the lamp, speak a courteous good night, and go off to his own attic quarters; or would he linger? It was to be a test, this coming moment, of their friendship.... Withery's heart filled. In his way, through the years, out there in remote Kansu, he had always looked up to Grigg and had leaned on him, on memories of him as he had been. He had the memories now—curiously poignant memories, tinged with the melancholy of lost youth. But had he still the friend?

Duane set down the lamp, and looked about, all grave courtesy, to see if his friend's bag was at hand, and if the wash-stand and towel-rack had been made ready.

Withery stood on the sill, struggling to control his emotions. Longfellow's lines came to mind:

“A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long

thoughts.”

They were middle-aged now, they two. It was extraordinarily hard to believe. They had felt so much, and shared so much. They had plunged at missionary work with such ardor. Grigg especially. He had thrown aside more than one early opportunity for a start in business. He had sacrificed useful worldly acquaintances. His heart had burned to save souls, to carry the flame of divine revelation into what had then seemed a benighted, materialistic land.

Grigg would have succeeded in business or in the service of his government. He had a marked administrative gift. And power.... Distinctly power.

Withery stepped within the room, closed the door behind him, and looked straight up into that mask of a face; in his own deep emotion he thought of it as a tragic mask.

“Grigg,” he said very simply, “what's the matter?”

There was a silence. Then Doane came toward the door.

“The matter?” he queried, with an effort to smile.

“Can't we talk, Grigg?... I know you are in deep trouble.”

“Well”—Doane rested a massive hand on a bedpost—“I won't say that it isn't an anxious time, Henry. I'm pinning my faith to Pau Ting Chuan. But... And, of course, if I could have foreseen all the little developments, I wouldn't have sent for Betty. Though it's not easy to see what else I could have done. Frank and Ethel couldn't keep her longer. And the expense of any other arrangement... She's nineteen, Henry. A young woman. Curious—a young woman whom I've never even seen as such, and my daughter!”

“It isn't that, Grigg.”

At the moment Withery could say no more. He sank into a chair by the door, depressed in spirit.

Doane walked to the window; looked out at the stars; drummed a moment on the glass.

“It's been uphill work, Henry... since nineteen hundred.”

Withery cleared his throat. “It isn't that,” he repeated unsteadily.

Doane stood there a moment longer; then turned and gazed gloomily at his friend.

The silence grew painful.

Finally, Doane sighed, spread his hands in the manner of one who surrenders to fate, and came slowly over to the bed; stretching out his long frame there, against the pillows.

“So it's as plain as that, Henry.”

“It is—to me.”

“I wonder if I can talk.”

“The question is, Grigg—can I help you?”

“I'm afraid not, Henry. I doubt if any one can.” The force of this sank slowly into Withery's mind. “No one?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“I'm afraid not.... Do you think the others, my people here, see it?”

“The tone has changed here, Grigg.”

“I've tried not to believe it.”

“I've felt it increasingly for several years. When I've passed through. Even in your letters. It's been hard to speak before. For that matter, I had formulated no question. It was just an impression. But today... and to-night...”

“It's as bad as that, now.”

“Suppose I say that it's as definite as that, Grigg. The impression.”

Doane let his head drop back against the pillows; closed his eyes.

“The words don't matter,” he remarked.

“No, they don't, of course.” Withery's mind, trained through the busy years to the sort of informal confessional familiar to priests of other than the Roman church, was clearing itself of the confusions of friendship and was ready to dismiss, for the time, philosophically; the sense of personal loss.

“Is it something you've done, Grigg?” he asked now, gently. “Have you—”

Doane threw out an interrupting hand.

“No,” he said rather shortly, “I've not broken the faith, Henry, not in act.”

“In your thoughts only?”

“Yes. There.”

“It is doubt?... Strange, Grigg, I never knew a man whose faith had in it such vitality. You've inspired thousands. Tens of thousands. You—I will say this, now—you, nothing more, really, than my thoughts of you carried me through my bad time. Through those doldrums when the ardor of the first few years had burned out and I was spent, emotionally. It was with your help that I found my feet again. You never knew' that.”

“No. I didn't know that.”

“I worried a good deal, then. I had never before been aware of the church as a worldly organization, as a political mechanism. I hadn't questioned it. It was Hidderleigh's shrewd campaign for the bishopric that disturbed me. Then the money raised questions, of course.”

“There's been a campaign on this winter, over in the States,” said Doane, speaking slowly and thoughtfully. “Part of that fund is to be sent here to help extend my work in the province. They're using all the old emotional devices. All the claptrap. Chaplain Cabell is touring the churches with his little cottage organ and his songs.”

“But the need is real out here, Grigg. And the people at home must be stirred into recognizing it. They can't he reached except through their emotions. I've been through all that. I see now, clearly enough, that it's an imperfect world. We must do the best we can with it. Because it is imperfect we must keep at our work.”

“You know as well as I what they're doing, Henry. Cabell, all that crowd, haven't once mentioned Hansi. They're talking the Congo.”

“But you forget, Grigg, that the emotional interest of our home people in China has run out. They thought about us during the Boxer trouble, and later, during the famine in Shensi. Now, because of the talk of slavery and atrocities in Central Africa, public interest has shifted to that part of the world.”

“And so they're playing on the public sympathy for Africa to raise money, some of which is later to be diverted to Central China.”

“What else can they do?”

“I don't know.”

“You find yourself inclined to question the whole process?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't you misplacing your emphasis, Grigg? We all do that, of course. Now and then.... Isn't the important thing for you, the emphatic thing, to spread the word of God in Hansi Province?” He leaned forward, speaking simply, with sincerity.

Doane closed his eyes again; and compressed his lips.

Withery, anxiously watching him, saw that the healthy color was leaving his face.

After a silence that grew steadily in intensity, Doane at last opened his eyes, and spoke, huskily, but with grim force.

“Of course, Henry, you're right. Right enough. These things are details. They're on my nerves, that's all. I'm going to tell you...” He sat up, slowly swung his feet to the floor, clasped his hands.... “I'll spare you my personal history of the past few years. And, of course, captious criticism of the church is no proper introduction to what I'm going to say. During these recent years I've been groping through my own Gethsemane. It has been a terrible time. There have been many moments when I've questioned the value of the struggle. If I had been as nearly alone as it has seemed, sometimes... I mean, if there hadn't been little Betty to think of...”

“I understand,” Withery murmured.

“In a way I've come through my Valley. My head has cleared a little. And now I know only too clearly; it is very difficult; in a way, the time of doubt and groping was easier to bear... I know that I am in the wrong work.”

Withery, with moist eyes, studied the carpet.

“You are sure?” he managed to ask.

He felt rather than saw his friend's slow nod.

“It's a relief, of course, to tell you.” Doane was speaking with less effort now; but his color had not returned. “There's no one else. I couldn't say it to Hidderleigh. To me that man is fundamentally dishonest.”

Withery found it difficult to face such extreme frankness. His mind slipped around it into another channel. He was beginning to feel that Grigg mustn't be let off so easily. There were arguments....

“One thing that has troubled me, even lately,” he said, hunting for some common ground of thought and speech, “is the old denominational differences back home. I can't take all that for granted, as so many of our younger workers do. It has seemed to me that the conference last year should have spoken out more vigorously on that one point. We can never bring missionary work into any sort of unity here while the denominational spirit is kept alive at home.”

Doane broke out, with a touch of impatience: “We approach the shrewdest, most keenly analytical people or; earth, the Chinese, with something near a hundred and fifty conflicting varieties of the one true religion. Too often, Henry, we try to pass to them our faith but actually succeed only in exhibiting the curious prejudices of narrow white minds.”

This was, clearly, not a happy topic. Withery sighed.

“This—this attitude that you find yourself in—is really a conclusion, Grigg?”

“It is a conclusion.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know.”

“It would be a calamity if you were to give up your work here, in the midst of reconstruction.”

“No man is essential, Henry But of course, just now, it would lie difficult. I have thought, often, if Boatwright had only turned out a stronger man....”

“Grigg, one thing! You must let me speak of it.... Has the possibility occurred to you of marrying again?”

Doane sprang up at this; walked the floor,

“Do you realize what you're saying, Henry!” he cried out.

“I understand, Grigg, but you and I are old enough to know that in the case of a vigorous man like yourself—”

Doane threw out a hand.

“Henry, I've thought of everything!”

A little later he stopped and stood over his friend.

“I have fought battles that may as well be forgotten,” he said deliberately. “I have won them, over and over, to no end whatever. I have assumed that these victories would lead in time to a sort of peace, even to resignation. They have not. Each little victory now seems to leave me further back. I'm losing, not gaining, through the years. It was when I finally nerved myself to face that fact that I found myself facing it all—my whole life.... Henry, I'm full of a fire and energy that no longer finds an outlet in my work. I want to turn to new fields. If I don't, before it's too late, I may find myself on the rocks.”

Withery thought this over. Doane was still pacing the floor. Withery, pale himself now, looked up.

“Perhaps, then,” he said, “you had better break with it.”

Doane stopped at the window; stared out. Withery thought his face was working.

“Have you any means at all?” he asked.

Doane moved his head in the negative.... “Oh, my books. A few personal things.”

“Of course”—Withery's voice softened—“you've given away a good deal.”

“I've given everything.”

“Hum!... Have you thought of anything else you might do?”

Doane turned. “Henry, I'm forty-five years old. I have no profession, no business experience beyond the little administrative work here. Yet I must live, not only for myself, but to support my little girl. If I do quit, and try to find a place in the business world, I shall carry to my grave the stigma that clings always to the unfrocked priest.” He strode to the door. “I tell you, I've thought of everything!... We're getting nowhere with this. I appreciate your interest. But... I'm sorry, Henry. Sleep if you can. Good night.”

They met, with M. Pourmont and the others, at breakfast.

There was a moment, on the steps of the gate house, overlooking the narrow busy street, when they silently clasped hands.

Then Henry Withery crawled in under the blue curtains of his cart and rode away, carrying with him a mental picture of a huge man, stooping a little under the red lintel of the doorway, his strong face sternly set.

CHAPTER IV—THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, AND OF DEATH

1

DOANE stood on the Bund at Hankow, by the railing, his great frame towering above the passers-by. He had lunched with the consul general, an old acquaintance. He had arranged to stop overnight, with Betty, in a missionary compound. In the morning they would take the weekly Peking Express northward.

The wide yellow Yangtse flowed by, between its steep mud cliffs, crowded with sampans—hundreds of them moored, rail to rail, against the opposite bank, a compact floating village that was cluttered and crowded with ragged river-folk and deck-houses of arched matting and that reared skyward a thick tangle of masts and rigging. The smaller boats and tubs of the water-beggars lay against the bank just beneath him, expectantly awaiting the Shanghai steamer. Out in the stream several stately junks lay at anchor; and near them a tiny river gunboat, her low free-board glistening white in the warm spring sunshine, a wisp of smoke trailing lazily from her funnel, the British ensign hanging ir folds astern.

Down and up the water steps were moving continuously the innumerable water bearers whose business it was to supply the city of near a million yellow folk that lay just behind the commercial buildings and the pyramid-like godowns of the Bund.

To Doane the picture, every detail of which had a place in the environment of his entire adult life, seemed unreal. The consul general, too, had been unreal. His talk, mostly of remembered if partly mellowed political grievances back home, of the great days when a certain “easy boss” was in power, and later of the mutterings of revolution up and down the Yangtse Valley, sounded in Doane's ears like quaint idle chatter of another planet.... His own talk, it seemed now, had been as unreal as the rest of it.

Of the compliment men of affairs usually paid him, despite his calling, in speaking out as man to man, Doane had never thought and did not think now. He was not self-conscious.

The hours of sober thought that followed his talk with Henry Withery had deepened the furrow between his brows.

In an odd way he was dating from that talk. It had been extraordinarily futile. It had to come, some sort of outbreak. For two or three years he had rather vaguely recognized this fact, and as vaguely dreaded it. Now it had happened. It was like a line drawn squarely across his life. He was different now; perhaps more honest, certainly franker with himself, but different... It had shaken him. Sleep left him for a night or two. Getting away for this trip to Hankow seemed a good thing. He had to be alone, walking it off, and thinking... thinking.... He walked the two hundred and ninety li to M. Pour-mont's compound, at Ping Yang, the railhead that spring of the new meter-guage line into Hans' Province in two days. The mule teams took three.

He dwelt much with memories of his daughter. She had been a winning little thing. Until the terrible Boxer year, that ended, for him, in the death of his wife, she had brought continuous happiness into their life.

She would be six years older now. He couldn't picture that. She had sent an occasional snapshot photograph; but these could not replace his vivid memories of the child she had been.

He was tremulously eager to see her. There would be little problems of adjustment. Over and over he told himself that he mustn't be stern with her; he must watch that.

He felt some uncertainty regarding her training. It was his hope that she would fit into the work of the mission. It seemed, indeed, necessary. She would be contributing eager young life. Her dutiful, rather perfunctory letters had made that much about her clear. They needed that.

During the talk with Withery—it kept coming, up—he had heard his own voice saying—in curiously deliberate tones—astonishing things. He had sent his friend away in a state of deepest concern. He thought of writing him. A letter might catch him at Shanghai. There would be time in the morning, during the long early hours before this household down here would be awaking and gathering for breakfast. It would help, he felt impulsively, to explain fully... But what? What was it that was to be so easily explained? Could he erase, with a few strokes of a pen, the unhappy impression he had made that night on Henry's brain?

The suggestion of marriage, with its implication of a rather cynical worldly wisdom, had come oddly from the devout Henry. Henry was older, too. But Doane winced at the mere recollection. He was almost excitedly sensitive on the topic. He had put women out of his mind, and was determined to keep them out. But at times thoughts of them slipped in.

On the walk to Ping Yang, the second afternoon, he was swinging down a valley where the road was no more than the stony bed of an anciently-diverted stream. The caravan of a mandarin passed, bound doubtless from Peking to a far western province. That it was a great mandarin was indicated by his richly decorated sedan chair borne by sixteen footmen with squadrons of cavalry before and behind. Five mule litters followed, each with a brightly painted, young face pressed against the tiny square window, the wives or concubines of the great one. Each demurely studied him through slanting eyes. And the last one smiled; quickly, brightly. It was death to be caught at that, yet life was too strong for her. He walked feverishly after that. He had said one thing to Henry... something never before formulated, even in his own thinking. What was it? Oh, this!—“Henry, I'm full of a fire and energy that no longer find an outlet in my work. I want to turn to new fields. If I don't, before it's too late, I may find myself on the rocks.”

There was something bitterly, if almost boyishly true in that statement. The vital, vigorous adult that was developing within him, now, in the forties, seemed almost unrelated to the young man he had been. He felt life, strength, power. In spirit he was younger than ever. All he had done, during more than twenty years, seemed but a practising for something real, a schooling. Now, standing there, a stern figure, on the Hankow Bund, he was aware of a developed, flowering instinct for the main currents of the mighty social stream, for rough, fresh contacts, large enterprises. His religion had been steadily widening out from the creed of his youth, gradually including all living things, all growth, far outspreading the set boundaries of churchly thought. This development of his spirit had immensely widened his spiritual influence among the Chinese of the province while at the same time making it increasingly different to talk frankly with fellow churchmen.

He had come to find more of the bread of life in Emerson and Montaigne, Chaucer and Shakespeare; less in Milton and Peter. He could consider Burns now with a new pity, without moral condescension, with simple love. He could feel profoundly the moral triumph of Hester Prynne, while wondering at what seemed his own logic. He struggled against a weakening faith in the authenticity of divine revelation, as against a deepening perception that the Confucian precepts might well be a healthy and even sufficient outgrowth of fundamental Chinese characteristics.

He thought, at times rather grimly, of the trials for heresy that now and then rocked the church; and wondered, as grimly, how soon the heresy hunters would be getting around to him. The smallest incident might, sooner or later would, set them after him.

Henry Withery was certain, in spite of his personal loyalty, out of his very concern, to drop a word. And there was literally no word he could drop, after their talk, but would indicate potential heresy in his friend, James Griggsby Doane.

Or it might come from within the compound. Or from a passing stranger. Or from remarks of his own at the annual conference. Or from letters.

There were moments when he could have invited exposure as a relief from doubt and torment of soul. There was nothing of the hypocrite in him. But in soberer moments he felt certain that it was letter to wait until he could find, if not divine guidance, at least an intelligent earthly plan.

All he could do, as it stood, was to work harder and harder with body and mind. And to shoulder more and more responsibility. Without that he would be like a wild engine, charging to destruction.

His daughter would be, for a time certainly, one more burden. He was glad. Anything that would bring life real again! Work above all; every waking moment, if possible, filled; his mental and physical powers taxed to their uttermost; that was the thing; crowd out the brooding, the mere feeling. Action, all the time, and hard, objective thought. The difficulty was that his powers were so great; he seemed never to tire any more; his thoughts could dwell on many planes at once; he actually needed but a few hours' sleep.... And so Betty would be a young woman now, mysteriously as old as her mother on her wedding day: a young woman of unknown interests and sympathies, of a world he himself had all but ceased to know. And it came upon him suddenly, then with tremendous emotional force, that he had no heritage to leave her but a good name.

He stood gripping the railing, head back, gazing up out of misty eyes at a white-flecked blue sky. A prayer arose from his heart and, a whisper, passed his lips: “O God, show me Thy truth, that it may set me.”

In the intensity of his brooding he had forgotten to watch for the steamer. But now he became aware of a stir of life along the river-front. The beggars were paddling out into the stream, making ready their little baskets at the ends of bamboo poles.

Over the cliffs, down-stream, hung a long film of smoke. The steamer had rounded the bend and was plowing rapidly up toward the twin cities. He could make out the two white stripes on the funnel, and the cluster of ventilators about it, and the new canvas across the front of the bridge. A moment later he could see the tiny figures crowding the rail.

The steamer warped in alongside a new wharf.

Doane stood near the gangway, all emotion, nearly out of control.

From below hundreds of coolies, countrymen and ragged soldiers swarmed up, to be herded off at one side of the wharf. The local coolies went aboard and promptly started unloading freight, handling crates and bales of half a ton weight with the quick, half grunted, half sung chanteys, intricately rhythmical, with which all heavy labor is accompanied in the Yangtse Valley.

Two spectacled Chinese merchants in shimmering silk robes came down the gangway. A tall American, in civilian dress and overcoat but carrying a leather sword case, followed. Two missionaries came, one in Chinese dress with a cue attached to his skull-cap, bowing to the stern giant as they passed. Then a French father in black robe and shovel hat; a group of Englishmen; a number of families, American, British, French; and finally, coming along the shaded deck, the familiar kindly face and silvery heard of Doctor Hasmer—he was distinctly growing older, Hasmer—then his wife, and, emerging from the cabin, a slim little figure, rather smartly dressed, extraordinarily pretty, radiating a quick charm as she hurried to the gangway, there pausing a moment to search the wharf.

Her eyes met his. She smiled.

It was Betty. He felt her charm, but his heart was sinking.

She kissed him. She seemed all enthusiasm, even very happy. But a moment later, walking along the wharf toward the Bund, her soft little face was sad. He wondered, as his thoughts whirled around, about that.

Her clothes, her beauty, her bright manner, indicating a girlish eagerness to be admired, wouldn't do at the mission. And she couldn't wear those trim little shoes with heels half an inch higher than a man's.

She had, definitely, the gift and the thought of adorning herself. She was a good girl; there was stuff in her. But it wouldn't do; not out there in T'ainan. And she looked like anything in the world but a teacher.

She fascinated him. She was the lovely creature his own little girl had become. Walking beside her up the Bund, chatting with the Hasmers, making a fair show of calm, his heart swelled with love and pride. She was delicate, shyly adorable, gently feminine.

It was going to be difficult to speak about her costume and her charming ways. It wouldn't do to crush her. She was quick enough; very likely she would pick up the tone of the compound very quickly and adapt herself to it.

3

Young Li Hsien, of T'ainan had come up on the boat. Doans talked a moment with him on the wharf. He was taking the Peking Express in the morning, traveling first-class. The boy's father was a wealthy banker and had always been generous with his firstborn son.

Li appeared in the dining-car at noon, calmly smiling, and, at Doane's imitation, sat with him and Betty. He carried a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, in English, with a large number of protruding paper bookmarks.

Doane glanced in some surprise at the volume lying rather ostentatiously on the table, and then at the pigtailed young man who ate foreign food with an eagerness and a relish that indicated an excited interest in novel experiment not commonly found among his race.

They talked in Chinese. Li had much to say of the Japanese. He admired them for adopting and adapting to their own purposes the material achievements of the Western world. He had evidently heard something of Theodore Roosevelt and rather less of Lloyd George and Karl Marx. Doane was of the opinion, later, that during the tiffin hour the lad had told all he had learned in six months at Tokio. When asked why he was not finishing out his college year he smiled enigmatically and spoke of duties at home. He knew, of course, that Doane would instantly dismiss the reason as meaningless; it was his Chinese way of suggesting that he preferred not to answer the question.

Twenty-four hours later they transferred their luggage to the Hansi Line, and headed westward into the red hills; passing, within an hour, through the southern extension of the Great Wall, now a ruin. The night was passed in M. Pourmont's compound at Ping Yang. After this there were two other nights in ancient, unpleasant village inns.

Duane made every effort to lessen the discomforts of the journey. Outwardly kind, inwardly emotions fought with one another. He felt now that he should never have sent for Betty; never in the world She seemed to have had no practical training. She grew quiet and wistful as the journey proceeded. The little outbreaks of enthusiasm over this or that half-remembered glimpse of native life came less frequently from day to day.

There were a number of young men at Ping Yang; one French engineer who spoke excellent English; an Australian; others, and two or three young matrons who had adventurously accompanied their husbands into the interior. They all called in the evening. The hospitable Pourmont took up rugs and turned on the talking-machine, and the young people danced.

Doane sat apart, watched the gracefully gliding couples; tried to smile. The dance was on, Betty in the thick of it, before he realized what was meant. He couldn't have spoken without others hearing. It was plain enough that she entered into it without a thought; though as the evening wore on he thought she glanced at him, now and then, rather thoughtfully. And he found himself, at these moments, smiling with greater determination and nodding at her.

The incident plunged him, curiously, swiftly, into the heart of his own dilemma. He rested an elbow on a table and shaded his eyes, trying, as he had been trying all these years, to think.

What a joyous little thing she was! What a fairy! And dancing seemed, now, a means of expression for her youth and her gift of charm. And there was an exquisite delight, he found, in watching her skill with the young men. She was gay, quick, tactful. Clearly young men had, before this, admired her. He wondered what sort of men.

She interrupted this brooding with one of those slightly perturbed glances. Quickly he lowered his hand in order that she might see him smile; but she had whirled away.

Joy!... Not before this moment, not in all the years of puzzled, sometimes bitter thinking, had he realized the degree in which mission life—for that matter, the very religion of his denominational variety—shut joy out. They were afraid of it. They fought it. In their hearts they associated it with vice It was of this world; their eyes were turned wholly to another.

His teeth grated together. The muscles of his strong jaws moved; bunched on his cheeks. He knew now that he believed in joy as an expression of life.

Had he known where to turn for the money he would gladly have planned, at this moment, to send Betty back to the States, give her more of an education, even arrange for her to study drawing and painting. For on the train, during their silences, she had sketched the French conductor, the French-speaking Chinese porter, the sleepy, gray-brown, walled villages, the wide, desert-like flats of the Hoang-Ho, the tumbling hills. He was struck by her persistence at it; the girlish energy she put into it.

That night, late, long after the music had stopped and the last guests had left for their dwellings about the large compound, she came across the corridor and tapped at his door. She wore a kimono of Japan; her abundant brown hair rippled about her shoulders.

“Just one more good night, Daddy,” she murmured.

And then, turning away, she added this, softly:

“I never thought about the dancing until—well, we'd started...”

He stood a long moment in silence, then said:

“I'm glad you had a pleasant evening, dear. We—we're rather quiet at T'ainan.”

4

Pao Ting Chuan was a man of great shrewdness and considerable distinction of appearance, skilled in ceremonial intercourse, a master of the intricate courses a prominent official must steer between beautifully phrased moral and ethical maxims on the one hand and complicated political trickery on the other. But, as Doane had said, he knew the cost of indemnities. It was on his shrewdness, his really great intelligence, and on his firm control of the “gentry and people” of the province that Doane relied to prevent any such frightful slaughter of whites and destruction of their property as had occurred in 1900. Pao, unlike most of the higher mandarins, was Chinese, not Manchu.

The tao-tai of the city of T'ainan-fu, Chang Chih Ting, was an older man than Pao, less vigorous of body and mind, simpler and franker. He was of those who bewail the backwardness of China.

From the tao-tai's yamen, on the first day of the great April fair, set forth His Excellency in full panoply of state—a green official chair with many bearers, an escort of twenty footmen, with runners on ahead.

Behind this caravan, hidden from view in the depths of a blue Peking cart, with the conventional extra servant dangling his heels over the foreboard, rode Griggsby Doane.

The principal feature of the opening day was a theatrical performance. The play, naturally, was an historical satire, shouted and occasionally sung by the heavily-costumed actors, to a continuous accompaniment of wailing strings. The stage was a platform in the open air, under a tree hung with bannerets inscribed to the particular spirit supposed to dwell within its encircling bark.

His Excellency stood, with Doane, on a knoll, looking out over the heads of the vast audience toward the stage. Doane estimated the attendance at near ten thousand.

The play, begun in the early morning, was now well advanced. At its conclusion, the audience was beginning to break up when a slim blue-clad figure mounted the platform and began a hurried speech.

Chang and Doane looked at each other; then as one man moved forward down the knoll with the throng. The tao-tai's attendants followed, in scattered formation.

The speaker was Li Hsien.

Slowly the magistrate and the missionary made their way toward the stage.

At first the crowd, at sight of the magistrate's button and embroidered insignia, made way as well as they could. But as the impassioned phrases of Li Hsien sank into their minds resistance developed. From here and there in the crowd came phrases expressing a vile contempt for foreigners such as Doane had not heard for years.

Li was lashing himself up, crying out more and more vigorously against the Ho Shan Company, the barbarous white governments from which it derived force, foreign pigs everywhere. The crowds closed, solidly, before the two advancing men.

The magistrate waved his arms; shouted a command that Li leave the platform. Li, hearing only a voice of opposition in the crowd, poured out voluble scorn on his head. The crowd jostled Duane. A stick struck his cheek. He whirled and caught the stick, but the wielder of it escaped in the crowd.

Chang tried to reason, then, with the few hundred within ear-shot.

The sense of violence seemed to be increasing. A few of the magistrate's escort were struggling through. These formed a circle about him and Doane.

Li shouted out charge after charge against the company. He begged his hearers to be brave, as he was brave; to destroy all the works of the company with dynamite; to wreck all the grounds of the foreign engineer at Ping Yang and kill all the occupants; to kill foreigners everywhere and assert the ancient integrity and superiority of China. “Be brave!” he cried again. “See, I am brave. I die for Hansi. Can not you, too, die for Hansi? Can not you think of me, of how I died for our cause, and yourself, in memory of my act, fight for your beloved country, that it may again be the proud queen of the earth?”

He drew a revolver from his sleeve; shot twice; fell to the stage in a widening pool of blood.

At once the vast crowd went wild. Those near the white man turned on him as if to kill him. His clothes were torn, his head cut. Man after man he knocked down with his powerful fists. Before many moments he was exulting in the struggle, in his strength and the full use of it.

The magistrate, struggled beside him. For the people. In their frenzy, forgot or ignored his rank and overwhelmed him.

The runners fought as well as they could. Two or three of them fell. Then a body of horsemen came charging into the crowd, soldiers from the judge's yamen, all on shaggy little Manchu ponies, swinging clubbed carbines as they rode. Right and left, men and boys fell. The crowd broke and scattered.

Chang, bleeding from several small wounds, his exquisitely embroidered silken garments torn nearly off his body, made his way back to the green chair.

Doane was escorted by soldiers to the mission compound. He slipped in to wash off the blood and change his clothes without being seen by Betty or any of the whites.

Shortly came two runners of His Excellency, Pao Ting Chuan, bearing trays of gifts. And a Chinese note expressing deepest regret and pledging complete protection in the future.

Doane dismissed the runners with a Mexican dollar each, and thoughtfully considered the situation. Pao was strong, very strong. Yet the self-destruction of Li Hsien would act as a flaming signal to the people It was the one appeal that might rouse them beyond control.

CHAPTER V—IN T'AINAN

1

THE Boatwrights were at this time in the thirties; he perhaps thirty-six or seven, she thirty-three or four. As has already been noted through the observing eyes of Mr. Withery, Elmer Boatwright had lost the fresh enthusiasm of his first years in the province. And he had by no means attained the mellow wisdom that seldom so much as begins to appear in a man before forty. His was a daily routine of innumerable petty tasks and responsibilities. He had come to be a washed-out little man, whose unceasing activity was somehow unconvincing. He had stopped having opinions, even views. He taught, he kept accounts and records, he conducted meetings, he prayed and sometimes preached at meetings of the students and the native Christians, he was kind in a routine way, his rather patient smile was liked about the compound, but the gift of personality was not his. Even his religion seemed at times to have settled into routine....

He was small in stature, not plump, with light thin hair and a light thin mustache.

His wife was taller than he, more vigorous, more positive, with something of an executive gift. The domestic management of the compound was her province, with teaching in spare hours. Her husband, with fewer petty activities to absorb his energy until his life settled into a mold, might have exhibited some of the interesting emotional quality that is rather loosely called temperament; for that matter it was still a possibility during the soul-shaking changes of middle life; certainly his odd, early taste for taxidermy had carried him to the borders of a sort of artistry; but her own gift was distinctly that of activity. She seemed a wholly objective person. She was physically strong, inclined to sternness, or at least to rigidity of view, yet was by no means unkind. The servants respected her. She was troubled by no doubts. Her religious faith, like her housekeeping practise, was a settled thing. Apparently her thinking was all of the literal things about her. Of humor she had never shown a trace. Without the strong proselyting impetus that had directed and colored her life she might have become a rather hard, sharp-tongued village housewife. But at whatever cost to herself she had brought her tongue under control. As a result, having no mental lightness or grace, she talked hardly at all. When she disapproved, which was not seldom, she became silent.

The relation between this couple and Griggsby Doane had grown subtly complicated through the years that followed the death of Mrs. Doane. Doane, up in his simply furnished attic room, living wholly alone, never interfered in the slightest detail of Mrs. Boatwright's management. Like her, when he disapproved, he kept still. But he might as well have spoken out, for she knew, nearly always, what he was thinking. The deepest blunder she made during this period was to believe, as she firmly did, that she knew all, instead of nearly all his thoughts. The side of him that she was incapable of understanding, the intensely, warmly human side, appeared to her merely as a curiously inexplicable strain of weakness in him that might, some day, crop out and make trouble. She felt a strain of something disastrous in his nature. She regarded his growing passion for solitude as a form of self-indulgence. She knew that he was given more and more to brooding; and brooding—all independent thought, in fact—alarmed her. Her own deepest faith was in what she thought of as submission to divine will and in self-suppression. But she respected him profoundly. And he respected her. Each knew something of the strength in the other's nature. And so they lived on from day to day and year to year in a practised avoidance of conflict or controversy. And between them her busy little husband acted as a buffer without ever becoming aware that a buffer was necessary in this quiet, well-ordered, industrious compound.

Regarding the change of tone for the more severe and the worse that had impressed and disturbed Withery, none of the three but Duane had formulated a conscious thought. Probably the less kindly air was really more congenial to Mrs. Boatwright. Her husband was not a man ever to survey himself and his environment with detachment. And both were much older and more severe at this time than they were to be at fifty.

The introduction of Betty Doane into this delicately balanced household precipitated a crisis. Breakfast was served in the mission house at a quarter to eight. Not once in a month was it five minutes late. A delay of half an hour would have thrown Mrs. Boatwright out of her stride for the day.

During the first few days after her arrival Betty appeared on time. It was clearly necessary. Mrs. Boatwright was hostile. Her father was busy and preoccupied. She herself was moved deeply by a girlish determination to find some small niche for herself in this driving little community. The place was strange to her. There seemed little or no companionship. Even Miss Hemphill, the head teacher, whom she remembered from her girlhood, and Dr. Mary Cassin, who was in charge of the dispensary and who had a pleasant, almost pretty face, seemed as preoccupied as Griggsby Doane. During her mother's lifetime there had been an air of friendliness, of kindness, about the compound that was gone now. Perhaps less work had been accomplished then than now under the firm rule of Mrs. Boatwright, but it had been a happier little community.

From the moment she rode in through the great oak, nail-studded gates of the compound, and the mules lurched to their knees, and her father helped her out through the little side door of the red and blue litter, Betty knew that she was exciting disapproval. The way they looked at her neat traveling suit, her becoming turban, her shoes, worked sharply on her sensitive young nerves. She was aware even of the prim way they walked, these women—of their extremely modest self-control—and of the puzzling contrast set up with the free activity of her own slim body; developed by dancing and basketball and healthy romping into a grace that had hitherto been unconscious.

And almost from that first moment, herself hardly aware of what she was about but feeling that she must be wrong, struggling bravely against an increasing hurt, her unrooted, nervously responsive young nature struggled to adapt itself to the new environment. A pucker appeared between her brows; her voice became hushed and faintly, shyly earnest in tone. Mrs. Boatwright at once gave her some classes of young girls. Betty went to Miss Hemphill for detailed advice, and earnestly that first evening read into a work on pedagogics that the older teacher, after a kindly enough talk, lent her.

She went up to her father's study, just before bedtime on the first evening, in a spirit of determined good humor. She wanted him to see how well she was taking hold.... But she came down in a state of depression that kept her awake for a long time lying in her narrow iron bed, gazing out into the starlit Chinese heavens. She felt his grave kindness, but found that she didn't know him. Here in the compound, with all his burden of responsibility settled on his broad shoulders, he had receded from her. He would sit and look at her, with sadness in his eyes, not catching all she said; then would start a little, and smile, and take her hand.

She found that she couldn't unpack all her things; not for days. There were snapshots of boy and girl members of “the crowd,” away off there, beyond the brown hills, beyond the ruined wall, beyond the yellow plains, and the Pacific Ocean and the wide United States, off in a little New Jersey town, on the other side of the world. There were parcels of dance programs, with little white pencils dangling from silken white cords. There were programs of plays, with cryptic pencilings, and copies of a high-school paper, and packets of letters. She couldn't trust herself to look at these treasures. And she put her drawing things away.

And other more serious difficulties arose to provoke sober thoughts. One occurred the first time she played tennis with her father; the day before Li Hsien's suicide. The court had been laid out on open ground adjoining the compound. Small school buildings and a wall shut it off from the front street, and a Chinese house-wall blocked the other end; but the farther side lay open to a narrow footway. Here a number of Chinese youths gathered and watched the play. It happened that none of the white women attached to the mission at this time was a tennis player; and the spectacle of a radiant girl darting about with grace and zest and considerable athletic skill was plainly an experience to the onlookers. At first they were respectful enough; but as their numbers grew voices were raised, first in laughter, then in unpleasant comment. Finally all the voices seemed to burst out at once in chorus of ribaldry and invective. Betty stopped short in her play, alarmed and confused.

These shouted remarks grew in insolence. All through her girlhood Betty had grown accustomed to occasional small outbreaks from the riff-raff of T'ainan. She recalled that her father had always chosen to ignore them. But there was a new boldness evident in the present group, as the numbers increased and more and more voices joined in. And it was evident, from an embroidered robe here and there, that not all were riff-raff.

Her father lowered his racket and walked to the net.

“I'm sorry, dear,” he said; “but this won't do.”

Obediently she returned to the mission house; while Doane went over to the fence. But before he could reach it the youths, jeering, hurried away. That evening he told Betty he would have a wall built along the footway.

2

Within less than a week Betty found herself fighting off a heart-sickness that was to prove, for the time, irresistible. On the sixth evening, after the house had became still and her big, kind father had said good night—in some ways, at moments, he seemed almost close to her; at other moments, especially now, at night, in the solitude, he was hopelessly far away, a dim figure on the farther shore of the gulf that lies, bottomless, between every two human souls—she locked herself in her little room and sat, very still, with drooping face and wet eyes, by the open window.

The big Oriental city was silent, asleep, except for the distant sound of a watchman banging his gong and shouting musically on his rounds. The spring air, soft, moistly warm, brought to her nostrils the smell of China; and brought with it, queerly disjointed, hauntlike memories of her childhood in the earlier mission house that had stood on this same bit of ground. She closed her eyes, and saw her mother walking in quiet dignity about the compound, the same compound in which Luella Brenty, a girl of hardly more than her-own present age, was, in 1900, burned at the stake. Down there where the ghostly tablet stood, by the chapel steps.

She shivered. There was trouble now. They were talking about it among themselves, if not in her presence. That would doubtless explain her father's preoccupation.... She must hurry to bed. She knew she was tired; and it wouldn't do to be late for breakfast. And she had a class in English at 8:45.

But instead she got out the bottom tray of her trunk and mournfully staring long at each, went through her photographs. She had been a nice girl, there in the comfortable American town. Here she seemed less nice. As if, in some way, over there in the States, her nature had changed for the worse. They looked at her so. They were not friendly. No, not that. Yet this was home, her only home. The other had seemed to be home, but it was now a dream... gone. She could never again pick up her place in the old crowd. It would be changing. That, she thought, in the brooding reverie known to every imaginative, sensitive boy and girl, was the sad thing about life. It slipped away from you; you could nowhere put your feet down solidly. If, another year, she could return, the crowd would be changed. New friendships would be formed. The boys who had been fond of her would now be fond of others. Some of the girls might be married... She herself was changed. A man—an older man, who had been married, was, in a way, married at the time—-had taken her in his arms and kissed her. It w'as a shock. It hurt now. She couldn't think how it had happened, how it had ever begun. She couldn't even visualize the man, now, with her eyes closed. She couldn't be sure even that she liked him. He was a strange being. He had interested her by startling her. Romance had seized them. He said that. He said it would be different at Shanghai. It was different; very puzzling, saddening. There was no doubt as to what Mrs. Boatwright would say about it, if she knew. Or Miss Hemphill. Any of them.... She wondered what her father would say. She couldn't tel! him. It had to be secret. There were things in life that had to be; but she wondered what he would say.

But she was, with herself, here in her solitude, honest about it. It had happened. She didn't blame the man. In his strange way, he was real. He had meant it. She had read his letter over and over, on the steamer, and here in T'ainan. It was moving, exciting to her that odd letter. And he had gone without a further word because he felt it to be the best way. She was sure of that.... She didn't blame herself, though it hurt. No, she couldn't blame him. Yet it was now, as it had been at the time, a sort of blinding, almost an unnerving shock.... Probably they would never meet again. It was a large world, after all; you couldn't go back and pick up dropped threads. But if they should meet, by some queer chance, what would they do, what could they say? For he lingered vividly with her; his rough blunt phrases came up, at lonely moments, in her mind. He had stirred and, queerly, bewilderingly, humbled her.... She wondered, all nerves, what his wife was like. How she looked.

Perhaps it was this change in her that these severe women noticed. Perhaps her inner life lay open to their experienced eyes. She could do nothing about it, just set her teeth and live through somehow.... Though it couldn't be wholly that, because she had worn the clothes they didn't like before it happened, and had danced, and played like a child. And they didn't seem to care much for her drawing; though Miss Hemphill had, she knew, suggested to Mr. Boatwright that he let her try teaching a small class of the Chinese girls.... No, it wasn't that. It must, then, be something in her nature.

She had read, back home—or in the States—in a woman's magazine, that every woman has two men in her life, the one she loves, or who has stirred her, and the one she marries. The girls, in some excitement, had discussed it. There had been confidences.

She might marry. It was possible. And even now she saw clearly enough, as every girl sees when life presses, that marriage might, at any moment, present itself as a way out. The thought was not stimulating. The pictures it raised lacked the glowing color of her younger and more romantic dreams.... That mining engineer was writing her, from Korea. His name was Apgar, Harold B. Apgar; he was stocky, strong, with an attractive square face and quiet gray eyes. She liked him. But his letters were going to be hard to answer.

The soft air that fanned her softer cheek brought utter melancholy. She felt, as only the young can feel, that her life, with her merry youth, was over. Grim doors had closed on it. Joy lay behind those doors. Ahead lay duties, discipline, the somber routine of womanhood.

She shivered and stirred. This brooding wouldn't do.

She got out a pad of paper and a pencil, and sitting there in the dim light, sketched with deft fingers the roofs and trees of T'ainan, as they appeared in the moonlight of spring, with a great faint gate tower bulking high above a battlemented wall. Until far into the morning she drew, forgetful of the hours, finding a degree of melancholy pleasure in the exercise of the expressive faculty that had become second nature to her.

She slept, then, like a child, until mid-forenoon. It was nearly eleven o'clock when she hurried, ready to smile quickly to cover her confusion, down to the dining-room.

The breakfast things had been cleared away more than two hours earlier. The table boy (so said the cook) had gone to market. She ate, rather shamefaced, a little bread and butter (she was finding it difficult to get used to this tinned butter from New Zealand).

In the parlor Mrs. Boatwright sat at her desk. She heard Betty at the door, lifted her head for a cool bow, then resumed her work. Not a word did she speak or invite. There was an apology trembling on the tip of Betty's tongue, but she had to hold it back and turn away.

3

The day after the suicide of Li Hsien rumors began to drift into the compound. News travels swiftly in China. The table “boy” (a man of fifty-odd) brought interesting bits from the market, always a center for gossip of the city and the mid-provincial region about it. The old gate-keeper, Sun Shao-i, picked up much of the roadside talk. And the several other men helpers about the compound each contributed his bit. The act of the fanatical student had, at the start, as Doane anticipated, an electrical effect on public sentiment. Suicide is by no means generally regarded in China as a sign of failure. It is employed, at times of great stress, as a form of deliberate protest; and is then taken as heroism.

So reports came that the always existent hatred of foreigners was rising, and might get out of control. A French priest was murdered on the Kalgan highway, after protracted torture during which his eyes and tongue were fed to village dogs. This, doubtless, as retaliation for similar practises commonly attributed to the white missionaries. The fact that the local Shen magistrate promptly caught and beheaded a few of the ringleaders appeared to have small deterrent effect on public feeling.

Detachments of strange-appearing soldiers, wearing curious insignia, were marching into the province over the Western Mountains. A native worker at one of the mission outposts wrote that they broke into his compound and robbed him of food, but made little further trouble.

Reports bearing on the activities of the new Great Eye Society—already known along the wayside as “The Lookers”—were coming in daily. The Lookers were initiating many young men into their strange magic, which appeared to differ from the incantations of the Boxers of 1900 more in detail than in spirit.

And in the western, villages this element was welcoming the new soldiers.

Here in T'ainan disorder was increasing. An old native, helper of Dr. Cassin in the dispensary, was mobbed on the street and given a beating during which his arm was broken. He managed to walk to the compound, and was now about with the arm in a sling, working quietly as usual. But it was evident that native Christians must, as usual in times of trouble, suffer for their faith.

On the following afternoon the tao-tai called, in state, with bearers, runners, soldiers and secretaries. The main courtyard of the compound was filled with the richly colored chairs and the silks and satins and plumed ceremonial hats of his entourage. For more than an hour he was closeted with Griggsby Doane, while the Chinese schoolgirls, very demure, stole glances from curtained windows at the beautiful young men in the courtyard.

By this impressive visit, and by his long stay, Chang Chih Ting clearly meant to impress on the whole city his friendship for these foreign devils. For the whole city would know of it within an hour; all middle Hansi would know by nightfall.

He brought disturbing news. It had been obvious to Doane that the menacing new society could hardly spread and thrive without some sort of secret official backing. He was inclined to trust Chang. He believed, after days of balancing the subtle pros and cons in his mind, that Pao Ting Chuan would keep order. And he knew that the official who was responsible for the province—as Pao virtually was—could keep order if he chose.

Chang, always naively open with Doane, supported him in this view. But it was strongly rumored at the tao-tai's yamen that the treasurer, Kang Hsu, old as he was, weakened by opium, for the past two or three years an inconsiderable figure in the province, had lately been in correspondence with the Western soldiers. And officers from his yamen had been recognized as among the drill masters of the Looker bands. Chang had reported these proceedings to His Excellency, he said (“His Excellency,” during this period, meant always Pao, though Kang Hsu, as treasurer, ranked him) and had been graciously thanked. It was also said that Kang had cured himself of opium smoking by locking himself in a room and throwing pipe, rods, lamp and all his supply of the drug out of a window. For two weeks he had suffered painfully, and had nearly died of a diarrhea; but now had recovered and was even gaining in weight, though still a skeleton.

Doane caught himself shaking his head, with Chang, over this remarkable self-cure. It would apparently be better for the whites were Kang to resume his evil ways. It was clear to these deeply experienced men that Kang's motives would be mixed. Doubtless he had been stirred to jealousy by Pao. It seemed unlikely that he, or any prominent mandarin, could afford to run the great risks involved in setting the province afire so soon after 1900. Perhaps he knew a way to lay the fresh troubles at Pao's gate. Or perhaps he had come to believe, with his befuddled old brain, in the Looker incantations. Only seven years earlier the belief of ruling Manchus in Boxer magic had led to the siege of the legations and something near the ruin of China. Come to think of it, Kang, unlike Pao and Chang, was a Manchu.

Chang also brought with him a copy of the Memorial left by Li Hsien, which it appeared was being widely circulated in the province. The document gave an interesting picture of the young man's complicated mind. His death had been theatrical and, in manner, Western, modern. Suicides of protest were traditionally managed in private. But the memorial was utterly Chinese, written with all the customary indirection, dwelling on his devotion to his parents and his native land, as on his own worthlessness; quoting apt phrases from Confucius, Mencius and Tseng Tzu; quite, indeed, in the best traditional manner. And he left a letter to his elder brother, couched in language humble and tender, giving exact directions for his funeral, down to the arrangement of his clothing and the precise amount to be paid to the Taoist priest, together with instructions as to the disposition of his small personal estate. Doane pointed out that these documents were designed to impress on the gentry his loyal conformity to ancient tradition, while his motives were revolutionary and his final act was designed to excite the mob at the fair and folk of their class throughout the province. Chang believed he had scholarly help in preparing the documents. And both men felt it of sober significance that the memorial was addressed to “His Excellency, Kang Hsu, Provincial Treasurer.”

That Li Hsien's inflammatory denunciation of “the foreign engineer at Ping Yang” had an almost immediate effect was indicated by the news from that village at the railhead. M. Puurmont wrote, in French, that an Australian stake-boy had been shot through the lungs while helping an instrument man in the hills. He was alive, but barely so, at the time of writing. As a result of this and certain lesser difficulties, M. Pourmont was calling in his engineers and mine employees, and putting them to work improvising a fort about his compound, and had telegraphed Peking for a large shipment of tinned food. He added that there would be plenty of room in case Doane later should decide to gather in his outpost workers and fall back toward the railroad.

Doane translated this letter into Chinese for Chang's benefit.

“Has he firearms?” asked the tao-tai.

Doane inclined his head. “More than the treaty permits,” he replied. “He told me last winter that he thought it necessary.”

“It is as well,” said Chang. “Though it is not necessary for you to leave yet. To do that would be to invite misunderstanding.”

“It would invite attack,” said Doane.

It was on the morning after Chang's call that the telegram came from Jen Ling Pu. Doane was crossing the courtyard when he heard voices in the gate house; then Sun Shao-i came down the steps and gave him the message. He at once sent a chit to Pao, writing it in pencil against a wall; then ordered a cart brought around. Within an hour the boy was back. Pao had written on the margin of the note: “Will see you immediately.”

For once the great mandarin did not keep him waiting. The two inner gates of the yamen opened for him one after the other, and his cart was driven across the tiled inner court to the yamen porch. It was an unheard-of honor. Plainly, Pao, like the lesser Chang, purposed standing by his guns, and meant that the city should know. By way of emphasis, Pao himself, tall, stately, magnificent in his richly embroidered robe, the peacock emblem of a civil mandarin of the third-class embroidered on the breast, the girdle clasp of worked gold, wearing the round hat of office crowned with a large round ruby—Pao, deep and musical of voice, met him in the shadowy porch and conducted him to the reception room. Instantly the tea appeared, and they could talk.

“Your Excellency,” said Doane, “a Christian worker in So T'ung, one Jen Ling Pu, telegraphs me that strange soldiers, helped by members of the Great Eye Society, last night attacked his compound. They have burned the gate house, but have no firearms. At eight this morning, with the aid of the engineer for the Ho Shan Company in that region, and with only two revolvers, he was defending the compound. I am going there. I will leave this noon.”

“I hear your alarming words with profound regret,” Pao's deep voice rolled about the large high room. “My people are suffering under an excitement which causes them to forget their responsibility as neighbors and their duty to their fellow men. I will send soldiers with you.”

“Soldiers should be sent, Your Excellency, and at once. Well-armed men. But I shall not wait.”

“You are not going alone? And not in your usual manner, on foot?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“But that may be unsafe.”.

“My safety is of little consequence.”

“It is of great consequence to me.”

“For that I thank you. But it is to So T'ung a hundred and eighty li. The best mules or horses will need two days. I can walk there in less than one day. I have walked there in twenty hours.”

“You are a man of courage. I will order the soldiers to start by noon.”

Back at the compound, Doane assembled his staff in one of the schoolrooms. Mr. and Mrs. Boatwright were there, Miss Hemphill and Dr. Cassin. He laid the telegram before them, and repeated his conversation with the provincial judge.

They listened soberly. For a brief time one spoke. Then Mrs. Boatwright asked, bluntly:

“You are sure you ought to go?”

Doane inclined his head.

“If things are as bad as this, how about our safety here?”

“You will be protected. Both Pao and Chang will see to that. And in case of serious danger—something unforeseen, you must demand an escort to Ping Yang. You will be safe there with Monsieur Pourmont.”

“How about your own safety?”

“I have put the responsibility squarely on Pao's shoulders. He knows what I am going to do. He is sending soldiers after me. He will undoubtedly telegraph ahead; he'll have to do that.”

4

Betty was in his study, standing by the window. She turned quickly when he came in. He closed the door, and affecting a casual manner passed her with a smile and went into the bedroom for the light bag with a shoulder strap, the blanket roll and the ingenious light folding cot that he always carried on these expeditions if there was likelihood of his being caught overnight at native inns. He put on his walking boots and leggings, picked up his thin raincoat and the heavy stick that was his only weapon, and returned to the study.

He felt Betty's eyes on him, and tried to speak in an offhand manner.

“I'm off to So T'ung, Betty. Be back within two or three days.”

She came over, slowly, hesitating, and lingered the blanket roll.

“Will there he danger at So T'ung, Dad?” she asked gently.

“Very little, I think.”

He saw that neither his words nor his manner answered the questions in her hind. Patting her shoulder, he added:

“Kiss me good-by, child. You've been listening to the chatter of the compound. The worst place for gossip in the world.”

But she laid a light finger on the court-plaster that covered a cut on his cheek-bone.

“You never said a word about that, Dad. It was the riot at the fair. I know. You had to fight with them. And Li Hsien killed himself.”

“But His Excellency put down the trouble at once. That is over.”

She sank slowly into the swivel chair before the desk; dropped her cheek on her hand; said, in a low uneven voice:

“No one talks to me... tells me...”

He looked down at her, standing motionless. His eyes filled. Then, deliberately, he put his park aside, and seated himself at the other side of the desk.

She looked up, with a wistful smile.

“I'm not afraid, Dad.”

“You wouldn't be,” said he gravely.

“No. But there is trouble, of course.”

“Yes. There is trouble.”

“Do you think it will be as—as bad as—nineteen hundred?”

“No... no, I'm sure it won't. The officials simply can't afford to let that awful thing happen again.”

“It would be... well, discouraging,” said she thoughtfully. “Wouldn't it? To have all your work undone again.”

He found himself startled by her impersonal manner. He saw her, abruptly then, as a mature being. He didn't know how to talk to her. This thoughtful young woman was, curiously, a stranger.... And this was the first moment in which it had occurred to him that she might already have had beginning adult experience. She was an individual; had a life of her own to manage. There would have been men. She was old enough to have thought about marriage, even. It seemed incredible.... He sighed.

“You're worried about me,” she said.

“I shouldn't have brought you out here, dear.”

“I don't fit in.”

“It is a great change for you.”

“I... I'm no good.”

“Betty, dear—that is not true. I can't let you say that, or think it.”

“But it's the truth. I'm no good. I've tried. I have, Dad. You know, to put everything behind me and make myself take hold.... And then I draw half the night, and miss my classes in the morning. It seems to go against my nature, some way. No matter how hard I try, it doesn't work. The worst of it is, in my heart I know it isn't going to work.”

“I shouldn't have brought you out here.”

“But you couldn't help that, Dad.”

“It did seem so.... I'm planning now to send you back as soon as we can manage it.”

“But, Dad... the expense...!”

“I know. I am thinking about that. There will surely be a way to manage it, a little later. I mean to find a way.”

“But I can't go back to Uncle Frank's.”

“I must work it out so that it won't be a burden to him.”

“You mean... pay board?”

“Yes.”

“But think, Dad! I've cost you so much already!”

“I am glad you have, dear. I think I've needed that. And I want you to go back to the Art League. You have a real talent. We must make the most of it.” Betty's gaze strayed out the window. Her father was a dear man. She hadn't dreamed he could see into her problems like this. She was afraid she might cry, so she spoke quickly.

“But that means making me still more a burden!”

“It is the sort of burden 1 would love, Betty. But don't misunderstand me—I can't do all this now.”

“Oh, I know!”

“You may have to be patient for a time. Tell me, dear, first though... is it what you want most?”

“Oh... why...”

“Answer me if you can. If you know what you want most.”

“I wonder if I do know. It's when I try to think that out clearly that it seems to me I'm no good.”

“I recognize, of course, that you are reaching the age when many girls think of marrying.”

“I... oh...”

“I don't want to intrude into your intimate thoughts, dear. But in so far as we can plan together... it may help if...”

She spoke with a touch of reserve that might have been, probably was, shyness.

“There have been men, of course, who—-well, wanted to marry me. This last year. There was one in New York. He used to come out and take me riding in his automobile. I—I always made some of the other girls come with us.”

Doane found it impossible to visualize this picture. When he was last in the States there were no automobiles on the streets. It suggested a condition of which he knew literally nothing, a wholly new set of influences in the life of young people. The thought was alarming; he had to close his eyes on it for a moment. Much as his daughter had seemed like a visitor from another planet, she had never seemed so far off as now. And he fell to thinking, along with this new picture, of the terribly hard struggle they had had out here, since 1900, in rebuilding the mission organization, in training new workers and creating a new morale. He felt tired.... His brain was tired. It would help to get out on the road again, swinging gradually into the rhythm of his forty-inch stride. Once more he would walk himself off, even as he hastened on an errand of rescue.

Betty was speaking again.

“And there's one now. He's in Korea, a mining engineer. He's awfully nice. But I—I don't think I could marry him.”

“Do you love him, Betty?”

“N—no. No, I don't. Though I've wondered, sometimes, about these things....” The person she was wondering about, as she said this, was Jonathan Brachey. Suddenly, with her mind's eye, she saw this clearly. And it was startling. She couldn't so much as mention his name; certainly not to her father, kind and human as he seemed. But she would never hear from him again; not now. If he could live through those first few weeks without so much as writing, he could let the years go. That would have been the test for her sort of nature, and she could understand no other sort.

She compressed her lips. She didn't know that her face showed something of the trouble in her mind. She spoke, bravely, with an abruptness that surprised herself a little, as it surprised him.

“No, Dad, I shan't marry. Not for years, if ever. I'd rather work. I'd rather work hard, if only I could fit in somewhere.”

“I'm seeing it a little more clearly, Betty.”' He arose. “On the way out I'll tell Mrs. Boatwright and Miss Hemphill both that I don't want you to do any more work about the compound.... No, dear, please! Let me finish!... When you're a few years older, you'll learn as I have learned, that the important thing is to find your own work, and find it early. So many lives take the wrong direction, through mistaken judgment, or a mistaken sense of duty. And nothing—nothing—can so mislead us as a sense of duty.”

He said this with an emphasis that puzzled Betty.

“The thing for you,” he went on, “is to draw. And dream. The dreaming will work out in more drawing, I imagine. For you have the nature of the artist. Your mother had it. You are like her, with something of my energy added. Don't let the atmosphere of the compound pull you down. It mustn't do that. Live within yourself. Let your energy go into honest expression of yourself. You see what I'm getting at—be yourself. Don't try to be some one else.... You happen to be here in an interesting time. There's a possibility that the drawings you could make out here, now, would have a value later on. So try to make a record of your life here with your pencil. And don't be afraid of happiness, dear.” He pointed to a row of jonquils in a window-box. “Happiness is as great a contribution to life as duty. Think how those flowers contribute! And remember that you are like them to me.”

She clung to him, in impulsive affection, as she kissed him good-by. And it wasn't until late that night, as she lay in her white bed, such a glow did he leave in her warm little heart, that the odd nature of his talk caught her attention. She had never, never, heard him say such things. It was as if he, her great strong dad, were himself starved for happiness. As if he wanted her to have all the rich beauty of life that had passed him grimly by.

She fell to wondering, sleepily, what he meant by finding a way to get the money. There was no way. Though it was dear of him even to think of it.

She fell asleep then.

CHAPTER VI—CATASTROPHE

1

DOANE left the compound a little before noon, and arrived at So T'ung at six the following morning. The distance, a hundred and eighty li, was just short of sixty-five English miles. The road was little more than a footpath, so narrow that in the mountains, where the grinding of ages of traffic and the drainage from eroded slopes had long ago worn it down into a series of deep, narrow canyons, the came! trains, with their wide panniers, always found passing a matter of difficulty and confusion. Here it skirted a precipice, or twisted up and up to surmount the Pass of the Flighting Geese, just west of the sacred mountain; there it wandered along the lower hillsides above a spring torrent that would be, a few months later, a trickling rivulet. His gait averaged, over all conditions of road and of gradient, about five miles an hour. He followed, on this occasion, the principle of walking an hour, then resting fifteen minutes. And toward midnight he set up his cot by the roadside, in the shelter of a tree by a memorial arch, and gave himself two hours of sleep.

The little hill city of So T'ung was awake and astir, with gates open and traffic already flowing forth. There were no signs of disorder. But Doane noted that the anti-foreign mutterings and sneers along the roadside (to which he had grown accustomed twenty years earlier) were louder and more frequent than common. For himself he had not the slightest fear. His great height, his enormous strength, his commanding eye, had always, except on the one recent occasion of the riot at the T'ainan fair, been enough to cow any native who was near enough to do him injury. And added to this moral and physical strength he had lately felt a somewhat surprising recklessness. He felt this now. He didn't care what happened, so long as he might be busy in the thick of it. His personal safety took on importance only when he kept Betty in mind. He must save himself to provide for her. And, of course, in the absence of any other strong personality, the mission workers needed him; they had no one else, just now, on whom to lean. And then there were the hundreds of native Christians; they needed him, for they would be slaughtered first... if it should come to that. They would be loyal, and would die, at the last, for their faith.

During the long hours of walking through the still mountain night, his thoughts ranged far. He considered talking over his problems with M. Pourmont. There should be work for a strong, well-trained man somewhere in the railroad development that was going on all over the yellow kingdom. Preferably in some other region, where he wouldn't be known. Starting fresh, that was the thing!

Over and over the rather blank thought came around, that a man has no right to bring into the world a child for whom he can not properly, fully, care. And it came down to money, to some money; not as wealth, but as the one usable medium of human exchange. A little of it, honestly earned, meant that a man was productive, was paying his way. A saying of Emerson's shot in among his racing thoughts—something about clergymen always demanding a handicap. It was wrong, he felt. It was—he went as far as this, toward dawn—parasitic. A man, to live soundly, healthily, must shoulder his way among his fellows, prove himself squarely.

And he dwelt for hours at a time on the ethical basis of all this missionary activity. It was what he came around to all night. There was an assumption—it was, really, the assumption on which his present life was based—that the so-called Christian civilization, Western Europe and America—owed its superiority to what he thought of as the Christian consciousness. That superiority was always implied. It was the motive power back of this persistent proselytizing. But to-night, as increasingly of late years, he found himself whittling away the implications of a spiritual and even ethical quality in that superiority of the White over the Yellow. More and more clearly it seemed to come down to the physical. It was the amazing discoveries in what men call modern science, and the wide application in industry of these discoveries, that made much of the difference. Then there were the accidents of climate and soil and of certain happy mixtures of blood through conquests... these things made a people great or weak. And lesser accidents, such as a simple alphabet, making it easy and cheap to print ideas; the Chinese alphabet and the lack of easy transportation had held China back, he believed.... Back of all these matters lay, of course, a more powerful determinant; the genius that might be waxing or waning in a people. The genius of America was waxing, clearly; and the genius of China had been waning for six hundred years. But in her turn, China had waxed, as had Rome, and Greece, and Egypt. None of these had known the Christian consciousness, yet each had run her course. And Greece and Rome, without it, had risen high. Rome, indeed, whatever the reason, had begun to wane from the very dawn of Christianity; and had finally succumbed, not to that, but to barbarians who had in them crude physical health and enterprise.

The more deeply he pondered, the more was he inclined to question the importance of Christianity in the Western scheme. For Western civilization, to his burning eyes, walking at night, alone, over the hills of ancient Hansi, looked of a profoundly materialistic nature. You felt that, out here, where oil and cigarettes and foreign-made opium and merchandise of all sorts were pushing in, all the time, about and beyond the missionaries. And with bayonets always bristling in the background. The West hadn't the finely great gift of Greece or the splendid unity of Rome. Its art was little more than a confusion of copies, a library of historical essays. And art seemed, now, important. And as for religion... Doane had moments of real bitterness, that night, about religion. And he thought around and around a circle. The one strongest, best organized church of the West—the one that made itself felt most effectively in China—seemed to him not only opposed to the scientific enterprise that was, if anything, peculiarly the genius of the West, but insistent on superstitions (for so they looked, out here) beside which the quiet rationalism of the Confucian drift seemed very reality. And the period of the greatest power and glory of that church had been, to all European civilization, the Dark Ages. The Reformation and the modern free political spirit appeared to be cognates, yet the evangelical churches fought science, in their turn, from their firm base of divine revelation. It was difficult, to-night, to see the miracles and mysteries of Christianity as other than legendary superstitions handed down by primitive, credulous peoples. It was difficult to see them as greatly different from the incantations of the Boxers or of these newer Lookers.

And then, of all those great peoples that had waxed and waned, China alone remained.... There was a thought! She might wax again. For there she was, as always. Without the Christian consciousness, the Chinese, of all the great peoples, alone had endured.

A fact slightly puzzling to Doane was that he thought all this under a driving nervous pressure. Now and then his mind rushed him, got a little out of control. And at these times he walked too fast.

2

The mission station was situated in the northern suburbs of So T'ung-fu, outside the wall. Duane went directly there.

The mission compound lay a smoking ruin. Not a building of the five or six that had stood in the walled acre, was now more than a heap of bricks, with a Ft of wall or a chimney standing. The compound wall had been battered down at a number of points, apparently with a heavy timber that now lay outside one of the breaches. There was no sign of life.

He walked in among the ruins. They were still too hot for close examination. But he found the body of a white man lying in an open space, clad in flannel shirt and riding breeches, with knee-high laced boots of the sort commonly worn by engineers. The face was unrecognizable. The top of the head, too, had been beaten in. But on the back of the head grew' curly yellow' hair. From the figure evidently a young man; one of Pourmont's adventurous crew; probably one of the Australians or New Zealanders. A revolver lay near the outstretched hand. Doane picked it up and examined it. Every chamber was empty. And here and there along the path were empty cartridges; as if he had retreated stubbornly, loading and firing as he could. Not far off lay an empty cartridge box. That would be where he had filled for the last time. He must have sent some of the bullets home; but the attackers had removed their dead. Yes, closer scrutiny discovered a number of blood-soaked areas along the path.

A young Chinese joined him, announcing himself as a helper at the station. Jen Ling Pu had sent him out over the rear wall, he said, with the telegram to Mr. Doa ne.

Together they carried the body of the white man to a clear space near the wall and buried him in a shallow grave. Duane repeated the burial service in brief form.

The boy, whose name was Wen, explained that on his return from the telegraph station he had found it impossible to get into the compound, as it was then surrounded, and accordingly hid in the neighborhood. By that time, he said, Jen, with the three or four helpers and servants who had not perished in the other buildings, one or two native Bible-women, a few children of native Christians and the white man were all in the main house, and were firing through the windows. They had all undoubtedly been burned to death, as only the white man had come out. He himself could not get close enough to see much of what happened, though he slipped in among the curious crowd outside and picked up what information he could. The attacking parlies were by no means of one mind or of settled purpose. The Lookers among them were for a quick and complete massacre, as were the young rowdies who had joined in the attack for the fun of it. But there were more moderate councils. And so many were injured or killed by the accurate marksmanship of the young foreign devil, that for a time they all seemed to lose heart. The Lookers were subjected to ridicule by the crowd because by their incantations they were supposed to render themselves invisible to foreign eyes, and it was difficult to explain the high percentage of casualties among them on the grounds of accidental contact with flying bullets. Finally a ruse was decided on. The white man was to come out for a parley. A student, recently attached to the yamen of the local magistrate as an interpreter volunteered—in good faith, Wen believed—to act in that capacity on this occasion.

The meeting took place by one of the breaches in the wall. The engineer demanded that the three principal leaders of the Lookers Le surrendered to him on the spot, and held until the arrival of troops from T'ainan. While they were pretending to listen, a party crept around behind the wall. He heard them, stepped back in time to avoid being clubbed to death, in a moment shot two of them dead, and shot also the captain of the Lookers, who had been conducting the parley. Then, evidently, he had backed tow ard the main house and had nearly reached it when his cartridges gave out.

Doane was busy, what with the improvised burial and with noting down Wen's narrative, until nearly noon. By this time he was very sleepy. There was nothing more he could do. The ruins of the main house would not be cool before morning. Nor would the soldiers arrive. He decided to call at once on the magistrate and arrange for a guard to be left in charge of the compound; then to set up his cot in a cell in one of the local caravansaries. He had brought a little food, and the magistrate would give him what else he needed. The innkeeper would brew him tea.... Before two o'clock he was asleep.

3

He was awakened by a persistent light tapping at the door. Lying there in the dusky room, fully clad, gazing out under heavy lids at the dingy wall with its dingier banners hung about lettered with the Chinese characters for happiness and prosperity, and at the tattered gray paper squares through which came soft evening sounds of mules and asses munching their fodder at the long open manger, of children talking, of a carter singing to himself in quavering falsetto, it seemed to him that the knocking had been going on for a very long time. His thoughts, slowly coming awake, were of tragic stuff. Death stalked again the hills of Hansi. Friends had been butchered. The blood of his race had been spilled again. Life was a grim thing....

A voice called, in pidgin-English.

He replied gruffly; sat up; struck a match and lighted the rush-light on the table. It was just after eight.

He went to the door; opened it. A small, soft, yellow Chinaman stood there.

“What do you want?” Doane asked in Chinese.

The yellow man looked blank.

“My no savvy,” he said.

“What side you belong?” The familiar pidgin-English phrases sounded grotesquely in Doane's ears, even as they fell from his own lips.

“My belong Shanghai side,” explained the man. He was apparently a servant. Some one would have brought him out here. Though to what end it would be hard to guess, for a servant who can not make himself understood has small value. And no Shanghai man can do that in Hansi.

“What pidgin belong you this side?”

“My missy wanchee chin-chin.”

Thus the man. His mistress wished a word. It was odd. Who, what, would his mistress be!

Doane always made it a rule, in these caravansaries, to engage the “number one” room if it was to be had. A countryside inn, in China, is usually a walled rectangle of something less or more than a halfacre in extent. Across the front stands the innkeeper's house, and the immense, roofed, swinging gates, built of strong timbers and planks. Along one side wall extend the stables, where the animals stand a row, looking over the manger into the courtyard. Along the other side are cell-like rooms, usually on the same level as the ground, with floors of dirt or worn old tile, with a table, a narrow chair or two of bent wood, and the inevitable brick kang, or platform bed with a tiny charcoal stove built into it and a thickness or two of matting thrown over the dirt and insect life of the crumbling surface. At the end of the court opposite' the gate stands, nearly always, a small separate building, the floor raised two or three steps from the ground. This is, in the pidgin vernacular, the “number one” room. Usually, however, it is large enough for division into two or three rooms. In the present instance there were two rather large rooms on either side of an entrance hall. Doane had been ushered into one of these rooms with no thought for the possible occupant of the other, beyond sleepily noting that the door was closed.

Hastily brushing his hair and smoothing the wrinkles out of his coat he stepped across the hall. That other door was ajar now. He tapped; and a woman's voice, a voice not unpleasing in quality, cried, in English, “Come in!”

4

She rose, as he pushed open the door, from the chair. She was young—certainly in the twenties—and unexpectedly, curiously beautiful. Her voice was Western American. Her abundant hair wras a vivid yellow. She was clad in a rather elaborate negligee robe that looked odd in the dingy room. Her cot stood by the paper windows, on a square of new white matting. Two suit-cases stood on bricks nearer the kang. And a garment was tacked up across the broken paper squares.

“I'm sorry to trouble you,” she said breathlessly. “But it's getting unbearable. I've waited here ever since yesterday for some word. I know there was trouble. I heard so much shooting. And they made such a racket yelling. They got into the compound here. I had to cover my windows, you see. It was awful. All night I thought they'd murder me. And this morning I slept a little in the chair. And then you came in... I saw you... and I was wild to ask you the news. I thought perhaps you'd help me. I've sat here for hours, trying to keep from disturbing you. I knew you were sleeping.”

She ran on in an ungoverned, oddly intimate way.

“I'm glad to be of what service I—” He found himself saying something or other; wondering with a strangely cold mind what he could possibly do and why on earth she was here. His own long pent-up emotional nature was answering hers with profoundly disturbing force.

“I ought to ask you to sit down,” she was saying. She caught his arm and almost forced him into the chair. She even stroked his shoulder, nervously yet casually. He coldly told himself that he must keep steady, impersonal; it was the unexpectedness of this queer situation, the shock of it...

“It's all right,” said she. “I'll sit on the cot. It's a pig-sty here. But sometimes you can't help these things.... please tell me what dreadful thing has happened!”

She had large brown eyes... odd, with that hair!... and they met his, hung on them.

In a low measured voice he explained:

“The natives attacked a mission station here—”

“Oh, just a mission!”

“They burned it down, and killed all but one of the workers there.”

“Were they white?”

“The workers were Chinese, Christian Chinese. But—”

“Oh, I see! I couldn't imagine what it was all about. It's been frightful. Sitting here, without a word. But if it was just among the Chinese, then where's—I've got to tell you part of it—where's Harley Beggins? He brought me out here. He isn't the kind that skips out without a word. I've known him two years. He's a good fellow. You see, this thing—whatever it is—leaves me in a hole. I can't just sit here.”

“I am trying to tell you. Please listen as calmly as you can. First tell me something about this Harley Beggins.”

“He's with the Ho Shan Company. An engineer. But say—you don't mean—you're not going to—”

“He was a young man?”

“Yes. Tall. Curly hair. A fine-looking young man. And very refined. His family... but, my God, you—”

“You must keep quiet!”

“Keep quiet! I'd like to know how, when you keep me in suspense like this!” She was on her feet now.

“I am going to tell you. But you must control yourself. Mr. Beggins must be the young engineer who tried to help the people in the compound.”

“He was killed?”

“Quiet! Yes, he was killed. I buried him this morning.”

Then the young woman's nerves gave way utterly, Doane found his mind divided between the cold thought of leaving her, perhaps asking the magistrate to give her an escort down to Ting Yang or up through the wall to Peking, and the other terribly strong impulse to stay. It was clear that she was not—well, a good woman; excitingly clear. She said odd things. “Well, see where this mess leaves me!” for one. And, “What's to become of me? Do I just stay out here? Die here? Is this all?”... When, daring a lull in the scene she was making he undertook to go, she clung to him and sobbed on his shoulder. The young engineer had meant little in her life. Her present emotion was almost wholly fright.

He knew, then, that he couldn't go. He was being swept toward destruction. It seemed like that. He could think coolly about it during the swift moments. He could watch his own case. One by one, in quick-flashing thoughts, he brought up all the arguments for morality, for duty, for common decency, and one by one they failed him. Something in life was too strong for him. Something in his nature.... This, then was the natural end of all his brooding, speculating, struggling with the demon of unbelief.... And even then he felt the hideously tragic quality of this hour.

5

She was, it came out, a notorious woman of Soo-chow Road, Shanghai; one of the so-called “American girls” that have brought a good name to local disgrace. The new American judge, at that time engaged in driving out the disreputable women and the gamblers from the quasi protection of the consular courts, had issued a warrant for her arrest, whereupon young Beggins, who had been numbered among her “friends,” had undertaken to protect her, out here in the interior, until the little wave of reform should have passed.

Despite her vulgarity, and despite the chill of spiritual death in his heart, he wished to be kind to her. Something of the long-frustrated emotional quality of the man overflowed toward her. He did what he could; laid her case before the magistrate, and left enough money to buy her a ticket to Peking from the northern railroad near Kalgan. This in the morning.

One other thing he did in the morning was to write to Hidderleigh, at Shanghai, telling enough of the truth about his fall, and asking that his successor be sent out at the earliest moment possible. And he sent off the letter, early, at the Chinese post-office. At least he needn't play the hypocrite. The worst imaginable disaster had come upon him. His real life, it seemed, was over As for telling the truth at the mission, his mind would shape a course. The easiest thing would be to tell Boatwright, straight. Though in any case it would come around to them from Shanghai. He had sealed his fate when he posted the letter. They would surely know, all of them. Henry Withery would know. It would reach the congregations back there in the States. At the consulates and up and down the coast—where men drank and gambled and carved fortunes out of great inert China and loved as they liked—they would be laughing at him within a fortnight.

And then he thought of Betty.

That night, on the march back to T'ainan, he stood, a solitary figure on the Pass of the Flighting Geese, looking up, arms outstretched, toward the mountain that for thousands of years has been to the sons of Han a sacred eminence; and the old prayer, handed down from another Oriental race as uttered by a greater sinner than he, burst from his lips:

“I will lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help!”

But no help came to Griggsby Duane that night. With tears lying warm on his cheeks he strode down the long slope toward Tainan.

CHAPTER VII—LOVE IS A TROUBLE

1

IT WAS early morning—the first day of April—when the Pacific liner that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped anchor in the river below Shanghai and there discharged passengers and freight for all central and northern China.

Brachey, on that occasion, watched from his cabin porthole while Betty and the Hasmers descended the accommodation ladder and boarded the company's launch. Then, not before, he drank coffee and nibbled a roll. His long face was gray and deeply lined. He had not slept.

He went up to Shanghai on the next launch, walked directly across the Bund to the row of steamship offices, and engaged passage on a north-bound coasting steamer. That evening he dined alone, out on the Yellow Sea, steaming toward Tsingtau, Chefu and (within the five days) Tientsin. He hadn't meant to take in the northern ports at this time; his planned itinerary covered the Yangtse Valley, where the disorderly young shoots of revolution were ripening slowly into red flower. But he was a shaken man. As he saw the problem of his romance, there were two persons to be saved, Betty and himself. He had behaved, on the one occasion, outrageously. He could see his action now as nothing other than weakness, curiously despicable, in the light of the pitiless facts. Reason had left him. Gusts of emotion lashed him. He now regarded the experience as a storm that must be somehow weathered. He couldn't weather it in Shanghai. Not with Betty there. He would surely seek her; find her. With his disordered soul he would cry out to her. In this alarming mood no subterfuge would appear too mean—sending clandestine notes by yellow hands, arranging furtive meetings.

He was, of course, running away from her, from his task, from himself. It was expensive business. But he had meant to work up as far as Tientsin and Peking before the year ran out. He was, after all, but taking that part of it first. To this bit of justification he clung. He passed but one night at Tientsin, in the curiously British hotel, on an out-and-out British street, where one saw little more to suggest the East than the Chinese policeman at the corner, an occasional passing amah or mafoo, and the blue-robed, soft-footed hotel servants; then on to Peking by train, an easy four-hour run, lounging in a European dining-car where the allied troops had fought their way foot by foot only seven years earlier.

Brachey, though regarded by critical reviewers as a rising authority on the Far East, had never seen Peking. India he knew; the Straits Settlements—at Singapore and Penang he was a person of modest but real standing; Borneo, Java, Celebes and the rest of the vast archipelago, where flying fish skim a burnished sea and green islands float above a shimmering horizon against white clouds; the Philippines, Siam, Cochin China and Hongkong; but the swarming Middle Kingdom and its Tartar capital were fresh fuel to his coldly eager mind. He stopped, of course, at the almost Parisian hotel of the International Sleeping Car Company, just off Legation Street.

Peking, in the spring of 1907, presented a far from unpleasant aspect to the eye of the traveler. The siege of the legations was already history and half-forgotten; the quarter itself had been wholly rebuilt. The clearing away of the crowded Chinese houses about the legations left à glacis of level ground that gave dignity to the walled enclosure. Legation Street, paved, bordered by stone walks and gray compound-walls, dotted with lounging figures of Chinese gatekeepers and alert sentries of this or that or another nation—British, American, Italian, Austrian, Japanese, French, Belgian, Dutch, German—offered a pleasant stroll of a late afternoon when the sun was low. Through gateways there were glimpses to be caught of open-air tea parties, of soldiers drilling, or even of children playing. Tourists wandered afoot or rolled by in rickshaws drawn by tattered blue and brown coolies.

From the western end of the street beyond the American glacis, one might see the traffic through the Chien Gate, with now and then a nose-led train of camels humped above the throng; and beyond, the vast brick walls and the shining yellow palace roofs of the Imperial City. Around to the north, across the Japanese glacis, one could stroll, in the early evening, to the motion-picture show, where one-reel films from Paris were run off before an audience of many colors and more nations and costumes, while a placid Chinaman manipulated a mechanical piano.

2

Brachey had letters to various persons of importance along the street. With the etiquette of remote colonial capitals, he had long since trained himself to a mechanical conformity. Accordingly he devoted his first afternoon to a round of calls, by rickshaw; leaving cards in the box provided for the purpose at the gate house of each compound. Before another day had gone he found return cards in his box at the hotel; and thus was he established as persona grata on Legation Street. Invitations followed. The American minister had him for tiffin. There were pleasant meals at the legation barracks. Tourist groups at the hotel made the inevitable advances, which he met with austere dignity. Meantime he busied himself discussing with experts the vast problems confronting the Chinese in adjusting their racial life to the modern world, and within a few days was jotting down notes and preparing tentative outlines for his book.

This activity brought him, at first, some relief from the emotional storm through which he had been passing. Work, he told himself, was the thing; work, and a deliberate avoidance of further entanglements.

If, in taking this course, he was dealing severely with the girl whose brightly pretty face and gently charming ways had for a time disarmed him, he was dealing quite as severely with himself; for beneath his crust of self-sufficiency existed shy but turbulent springs of feeling. That was the trouble; that had always been the trouble; he dared not let himself feel, lie had let go once before, just once, only to skim the very border of tragedy. The color of that one bitter experience of his earlier manhood ran through every subsequent act of his life. Month by month, through the years, he had winced as he drew a check to the hard, handsome, strange woman who had been, it appeared, his wife; who was, incredibly, his wife yet. With a set face he had read and courteously answered letters from this stranger. A woman of worldly wants, all of which came, in the end, to money. The business of his life had settled down to a systematic meeting of those wants. That, and industriously employing his talent for travel and solitude.

No, the thing was to think, not feel. To logic and will he pinned his faith. Impulses rose every day, here in Peking, to write Betty. It wouldn't be hard to trace her father's address. For that matter he knew the city. He found it impossible to forget a word of hers. Vivid memories of her round pretty face, of the quick humorous expression about her brown eyes, the movements of her trim little head and slim body, recurred with, if anything, a growing vigor They would leap into his mind at unexpected, awkward moments, cutting the thread of sober conversations. At such moments he felt strongly that impulse to explain himself further. But his clear mind told him that there would be no good in it. None. She might respond; that would involve them the more deeply. He had gone too far. He had (this in the bitter hours) transgressed. The thing was to let her forget; it would, he sincerely tried to hope, be easier for her to forget than for himself He had to try to hope that.

3

But on an evening the American military attaché dined with him. They sat comfortably over the coffee and cigars at one side of the large hotel dining-room. Brachey liked the attaché. His military training, his strong practical instinct for fact, his absorption in his work, made him the sort with whom Brachey, who had no small talk, really no social grace, could let himself go. And the attaché knew China. He had traversed the interior from Manchuria and Mongolia to the borders of Thibet and the Loto country of Yunnan, and could talk, to sober ears, interestingly. On this occasion, after dwelling long on the activity of secret revolutionary societies in the southern provinces and in the Yangtse Valley, he suddenly threw out the following remark:

“But of course, Brachey, there's an excellent chance, right now, to study a revolution in the making out here in Hansi. You can get into the heart of it in less than a week's travel. And if you don't mind a certain element of danger...”

The very name of the province thrilled Brachey. He sat, fingering his cigar, his face a mask of casual attention, fighting to control the uprush of feeling. The attache was talking on. Brachey caught bits here and there; “You've seen this crowd of banker persons from Europe around the hotel? Came out over the Trans Siberian with their families. A committee representing the Directorate of the Ho Shan Company. The story is that they've been asked to keep out of Hansi for the present for fear of violence.... You'd get the whole thing, out there—officials with a stake 'n the local mines shrewdly stirring up trouble while pretending to put it down; rich young students agitating, the Chinese equivalent of our soap-box Socialists; and queer Oriental motives and twists that you and I can't expect to understand.... The significant thing though, the big fact for you, I should say—is that if the Hansi agitators succeed in turning this little rumpus over the mining company into something of a revolution against the Imperial Government, it'll bring them into an understanding with the southern provinces. It may yet prove the deciding factor in the big row. Something as if Ohio should go democratic this year, back home. You see?... There are queer complications. Our Chinese secretary says that a personal quarrel between two mandarins is a prominent item in the mix-up.... That's the place for you, all right—Hansi! They've got the narrow-gauge railway nearly through to T'ainan-fu, I believe. You can pick up a guide here at the hotel. He'll engage a cook. You won't drink the water, of course; better carry a few cases of Tan San. And don't eat the green vegetables. Take some beef and mutton and potatoes and rice. You can buy chickens and eggs. Get a money belt and carry all the Mexican dollars you can stagger under. Provincial money's no good a hundred miles away. Take some English gold for a reserve. That's good everywhere. And you'll want your overcoat.”

Five minutes later Brachey heard this:

“A. P. Browning, the Agent General of the Ho Shan Company, is stopping here now, along with the committee. Talk with him, first. Get the company's view of it. He'll talk freely. Then go out there and have a look—see for yourself. Say the word, and I'll give you a card to Browning.”

Now Brachey looked up. It seemed to him, so momentous was the hour, that his pulse had stopped. He sat very still, looking at his guest, obviously about to speak.

The attaché, to whom this man's deliberate cold manner was becoming a friendly enough matter of course, waited.

“Thanks,” Brachey finally said. “Be glad to have it.”

But the particular card, scribbled by the attaché, there across the table, was never presented. For late that night, in a bitter revulsion of feeling, Brachey tore it up.

4

In the morning, however, when he stopped at the desk, the Belgian clerk handed him a thick letter from his attorney in New York, forwarded from his bank in Shanghai. He read and reread it, while his breakfast turned cold; studied it with an unresponsive brain.

It seemed that his wife's attorney had approached his with a fresh proposal. Her plan had been to divorce him on grounds of desertion and non-support; this after his refusal to supply what is euphemistically termed “statutory evidence.” But the fact that she had from month to month through the years accepted money from him, and not infrequently had demanded extra sums by letter and telegram, made it necessary that he enter into collusion with her to the extent of keeping silent and permitting her suit to go through unopposed. His own instructions to his lawyer stood flatly to the contrary.

But a new element had entered the situation. She wished to marry again. The man of her new choice had means enough to care for her comfortably. And in her eagerness to be free she proposed to release him from payment of alimony beyond an adjustment to cover the bare cost of her suit, on condition that he withdraw his opposition.

It was the old maneuvering and bargaining. At first thought it disgusted and hurt him. The woman's life had never come into contact with his, since the first few days of their married life, without hurting him. He had been harsh, bitter, unforgiving. He had believed himself throughout in the right. She had shown (in his view) no willingness to take marriage seriously, give him and herself a fair trial, make a job of it. She had exhibited no trait that he could accept as character. It had seemed to him just that she should suffer as well as he.

But now, as the meaning of the letter penetrated his mind, his spirits began to rise. It was a tendency he resisted; but he was helpless. From moment to moment his heart, swelled. Not once before in four years had the thought of freedom occurred to him as a desirable possibility. But now he knew that he would accept it, even at the cost of collusion and subterfuge. He saw nothing of the humor in the situation; that he, who had judged the woman so harshly, should find his code of ethics, his very philosophy, dashed to the ground by a look from a pair of brown eyes, meant little. It was simply that up to the present time an ethical attitude had been the important thing, whereas now the important thing was Betty. That was all there seemed to be to it. But then there had been almost as little of humor as of love in the queerly solitary life of Jonathan Brachey.

He cabled his attorney, directly after breakfast, to agree to the divorce. Before noon he had engaged a guide and arranged with him to take the morning train southward to the junction whence that narrow-gauge Hansi Line was pushing westward toward the ancient provincial capital.

In all this there was no plan. Brachey, confused, aware that the instinctive pressures of life were too much for him, that he was beaten, was soberly, breathlessly, driving toward the girl who had touched and tortured his encrusted heart. He was not even honest with himself; he couldn't be. He dwelt on the importance of studying the Hansi problem at close range He decided, among other things, that he wouldn't permit himself to see Betty, that he would merely stay secretly near her, certainly until a cablegram from New York should announce his positive freedom. In accordance with this decision he tore up his letters to her as fast as they were written. If the fact that he was now writing such letters indicated an alarming condition in his emotional nature, at least his will was still intact. He proved that by tearing them up. He even found this thought encouraging.

But, of course, he had taken his real beating when he gave up his plans and caught the coasting steamer at Shanghai. He was to learn now that rushing away from Betty and rushing toward her were irradiations of the same emotion.

He left Peking on that early morning way-train of passenger and freight cars, without calling again at the legation; merely sent a chit to the Commandant of Marines to say that he was off. He had not heard of the requirement that a white traveler into the interior carry a consular passport countersigned by Chinese authorities, and also, for purposes of identification, a supply of cards with the Chinese equivalent of his name; so he set forth without either, and (as a matter of fixed principle) without firearms.

CHAPTER VIII—THE WAYFARER

1

PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village called Shau T'ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the night in a native caravansary, his folding cot set up on the earthen floor. The room was dirty, dilapidated, alive with insects and thick with ancient odors. A charcoal fire in the crumbling brick kang gave forth fumes of gas that suggested the possibility of asphyxiation before morning. Brachey sent his guide, a fifty-year-old Tientsin Chinese of corpulent figure, known, for convenience, as “John,” for water and extinguished the fire. The upper half of the inner wall was a wooden lattice covered with paper; and by breaking all the paper squares within his reach, Brachey contrived to secure a circulation of air. Next he sent John for a piece of new yellow matting, and by spreading this under the cot created a mild sensation of cleanliness, which, though it belied the facts, made the situation a thought more bearable. For Brachey, though a veteran traveler, was an extremely fastidious man. He bore dirt and squalor, had borne them at intervals for years, without ever losing his squeamish discomfort at the mere thought of them. But the stern will that was during these, years the man's outstanding trait, and his intense absorption in his work, had kept him driving ahead through all petty difficulties. The only outward sign of the strain it put him to was an increased irritability.

He traveled from Shau T'ing to Ping Yang, the next day in an unroofed freight ear without a seat, crowded in with thirty-odd Chinese and their luggage. During the entire day he spoke hardly a word. His two servants guarded him from contact with the other natives; but he ignored even his own men. At a way station, where the engine waited half an hour for water and coal, a lonely division engineer from Lombardy called out a greeting in bad French. Brachey coldly snubbed the man.

He planned to pick up either a riding animal or a mule litter at Ping Yang. As it turned out, the best John could secure was a freight cart; springless, of course. T'ainan was less than a hundred miles away, yet he was doomed to three days of travel in a creaking, hard-riding cart through the sunken roads, where dust as fine as flour sifts through the clothing and rubs into the pores of the skin, and to two more nights at native inns—with little hope of better accommodation at T'ainan.

By this time Brachey was in a state of nerves that alarmed even himself. Neither will nor imagination was proving equal to this new sort of strain. The confusion of motives that had driven him out here provided no sound justification for the journey. When he tried to think work now, he found himself thinking Betty. And misgivings were creeping into his mind. It amounted to demoralization.

He walked out after the solitary dinner of soup and curried chicken and English strawberry jam. The little village was settling into evening calm. Men and boys, old women and very little girls, sat in the shop fronts—here merely rickety porticoes with open doorways giving on dingy courtyards—or played about the street. Carpenters were still working on the roof of the new railway station. Three young men, in an open field, were playing decorously with a shuttlecock of snake's skin and duck feathers, deftly kicking it from player to player. Farther along the street a middle-aged man of great dignity, clad in a silken robe and black skull-cap with the inevitable red knot, was flying a colored kite ... through all this, Jonathan Brachey, the expert observer, wandered about unseeing.

2

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.

CHAPTER IX—KNOTTED LIVES

1

IF Brachey had approached that East Gate a year later he would have rolled comfortably into the city in a rickshaw (which has followed the white man into China) along a macadamized road bordered by curbing of concrete from the new railway station. But in the spring of 1907 there was no station, no pavement, not a rickshaw. The road was a deep-rutted way, dusty in dry weather, muddy in wet, bordered by the crumbling shops and dwellings found on the outskirts of every Chinese city. A high, bumpy little bridge of stone spanned the moat.

Over this bridge rode Brachey, in his humble cart, sitting fiat under a span of tattered matting, surrounded and backed by his boxes and bales of food and water and his personal baggage. John and the cook rode behind on mules. The muleteers walked.

Under the gate were lounging soldiers, coolies, beggars, and a money-changer or two with their bags of silver lumps, their strings of copper cash and their balanced scales. Two of the soldiers sprang forward and stopped the cart. Despite their ragged uniforms (of a dingy blue, of course, like all China, and capped with blue turbans) these were tall, alert men. Brachey was rapidly coming to recognize the Northern Chinese as a larger, browner, more vigorous type of being than the soft little yellow men of the South with whom he had long been familiar in the United States as well as in the East. A mure dangerous man, really, this northerner.

Brachey leaned back on his baggage and watched the little encounter between his John and the two soldiers. Any such conversation in China is likely to take up a good deal of time, with many gestures, much vehemence of speech and an 'ncreasing volume of interference from the inevitable curious crowd. The cook and the two muleteers joined the argument, Brachey had learned before the first evening that this interpreter of his had no English beyond the few pidgin phrases common to all speech along the coast. And since leaving Shau T'ing it had transpired that the man's Tientsin-Peking dialect sounded strange in the ears of Hansi John was now in the position of an interpreter who could make headway in neither of the languages in which he was supposed to deal. Brachey didn't mind. It kept the man still. And he had learned years earlier that the small affairs of routine traveling can be managed with but few spoken words. But just now, idly watching the little scene, he would have liked to know what it meant.

Finally John came to the cart, followed by shouts from the soldiers and the crowd.

“Card wanchee,” he managed to say.

“Card? No savvy,” said Brachey.

“Card,” John nodded earnestly.

Brachey produced his personal card, bearing his name in English and the address of a New York club.

John studied it anxiously, and then passed it to one of the soldiers. That official fingered it; turned it over; discussed it with his fellow. Another discussion followed.

Brachey now lost interest. He filled and lighted his pipe; then drew from a pocket a small leather-bound copy of The Bible in Spain, opened at a bookmark, and began reading.

There was a wanderer after his own heart—George Borrow! An eager adventurer, at home in any city of any clime, at ease in any company, a fellow with gipsies, bandits, Arabs, Jews of Gibraltar and Greeks of Madrid, known from Mogadore to Moscow. Bor-row's missionary employment puzzled him as a curious inconsistency; his skill at making much of every human contact was, to the misanthropic Brachey, enviable; his genius for solitude, his self-sufficiency in every state, whether confined in prison at Madrid or traversing alone the dangerous wilderness of Galicia, were to Brachey points of fine fellowship. This man needed no wife, no friend. His enthusiasm for the new type of human creature or the unfamiliar tongue never weakened.

The cart jolted, creaking, forward, into the low tunnel that served as a gateway through the massive wall. A soldier walked on either hand. Two other soldiers walked in the rear. The crowd, increasing every moment, trailed off behind. Small boys jeered, even threw bits of dirt and stones, one of which struck a soldier and caused a brief diversion.

They creaked on through the narrow, crowded streets of the city. A murmur ran ahead from shop to shop and corner to corner. Porters, swaying under bending bamboo, shuffled along at a surprising pace and crowded past. Merchants stood in doorways and puffed at lung pipes with tiny nickel bowls as the strange parade went by.

Finally it stopped. Two great studded gates swung inward, and the cart lurched into the courtyard of an inn.

Brachey appropriated a room, sent John for hot water, and coolly shaved. Then he stretched out on the folding cot above its square of matting, refilled his pipe and resumed his Borrow.

2

Within half an hour fresh soldiers appeared, armed with carbines and revolvers, and settled themselves comfortably, two of them, by his door; two others taking up a position at the compound gate.

They brought a letter, in Chinese characters, on red paper in a buff and red envelope, which Brachey examined with curiosity.

“No savvy,” he said.

But the faithful John, inarticulate from confusion and fright could not translate.

Between this hour in mid-afternoon and early evening, six of these documents were passed in through Brachey's door. With the last one, John appeared to see a little light.

“Number one policeman wanchee know pidgin belong you,” he explained laboriously.

That would doubtless mean the police minister. So they wanted to know his business! But as matters stood, with no other medium of communication than John's patient but bewildered brain, explanation would be difficult. Brachey reached for his book and read on. Something would have to happen, of course. It really hardly mattered what. He even felt a little relief. The authorities might settle his business for him. Pack him off. It would be better. M. Pourmont's letter to Griggsby Doane had burned in his pocket for two days. It had seemed to press him, like the hand of fate, to Betty's very roof. Now, since he had become—the simile rose—a passive shuttlecock, a counterplay of fate might prove a way out of his dilemma.

He had chicken fried in oil for his dinner. And John ransacked the boxes for dainties; as if the occasion demanded indulgence.

At eight John knocked with shaking hands at his door. It was dark in the courtyard, and a soft April rain was falling. Two fresh soldiers stood there, each with carbine on back and a lighted paper lantern in band. A boy from the inn held two closed umbrellas of oiled paper.

“Go now,” said John, out of a dry throat.

“Go what side?” asked Brachey, surveying the little group.

Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident

HILLS OF HAN

A Romantic Incident

By Samuel Merwin

Illustrated by Walt Louderback

Indianapolis

The Bobbs. Merrill Company Publishers

1919

NOTE

HILLS OF HAN

CHAPTER I—THE SOLITARY

I

2

3

4

5

6

CHAPTER II—ROMANCE

I

2

3

CHAPTER III—THE SHEPHERD

2

3

4

CHAPTER IV—THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, AND OF DEATH

1

3

4

CHAPTER V—IN T'AINAN

1

2

3

4

CHAPTER VI—CATASTROPHE

1

2

3

4

5

CHAPTER VII—LOVE IS A TROUBLE

1

2

3

4

CHAPTER VIII—THE WAYFARER

1

2

3

CHAPTER IX—KNOTTED LIVES

1

2