Kitabı oku: «In Red and Gold», sayfa 13
“We shall soon be parting, Grigsby Doane,” he remarked, “and I shall think much of you. Do you know yet where you shall go and what you shall do?”
“No,” Doane replied. “All I can do now is the next thing, whatever that may prove to be.”
“You will help China?”
“I shall hope for an opportunity.”
“You are, first and last, a Westerner.”
“I suppose that is true.”
“I did think you a philosopher, Griggsby Doane. So you seemed to me. Like our humble great, almost like Chuang Tzü himself. But in the moment of crisis your nature found expression wholly in action. At such times we of the East are likely to be negative. We are a static people. But you, like your own, are dynamic.”
This shrewd bit of observation struck Doane sharply. Come to think, it was true.
“At the critical moment you wasted not one thought in reflection. You weighed none of the difficulties; you ignored consequences. You took command. You acted. As a result – here we are… I suppose you were right. At any rate, I yielded to your active judgment. It has saved my daughter.”
“And you, as well, Your Excellency, if I may say so.”
“Very well – myself too… I shall always think of you now as I have twice seen you – once in that curious boxing match on the steamer; and again as you took command of me and my own house. I regret that in my position as a Manchu, however progressive, I can not be of any considerable service to you with the republicans. It is in their camp that your advice will help. Only there. Shall you go to them?”
Doane found it impossible to mention the invitation of Sun-Shi-pi. That would be a sacred confidence. So he replied in merely general terms:
“I should like to sit in their councils. They seem to represent, at this time, China’s only material hope. Though I am not strongly an optimist regarding the revolution. China is so vast, so sunken in tradition, that the real revolution must be distressingly slow. Still, I have some familiarity with the constitutional history of my own country, and, I think, some acquaintance with yours. And I love China. Yes, I should like to help.”
“You are a great man, Griggsby Doane. You have known sorrow and poverty. To the merely successful American I do not look for much real guidance. But China needs you. I hope she will find you out in time.”
They talked on, of many things. His excellency was gently, at times even whimsically, reflective. At length he touched, lightly at first, on the subject of Rocky Kane. A little later, more openly, he asked what the boy’s standing would be in New York.
Doane thought this over very carefully. It was curious how that confusing element of mere feeling reappeared promptly in his mind. But he explained, finally, that while the boy was young, and had been passing through a phase of rather adventurous wildness, still his father was a man of enormous prestige in society as in the financial world. The boy had nice qualities. Given the right influences he might, with the wealth that would one day be his, become like his father, a powerful factor in American life.
“I find myself somewhat puzzled,” remarked his excellency then. “He seems devoted to my daughter. I can not easily read her mind. And I would not attempt to direct her life as would be necessary had she been merely a Manchu girl reared in a Manchu environment. Is she, do you think, and as your people understand the term, in love with him? I find their present relationship somewhat alarming.”
“It would be difficult to say, Your Excellency – ” thus Doane, simply and gravely. “The young man is, of course, in love with her.”
“Ah,” breathed his excellency. “You are sure of that?”
“Yes. She is undoubtedly accustomed to play about pleasantly with young men as do the young women of America.” Sudden, poignant memories came of his own lovely daughter, as she had been; and of the puzzling romance that had seemed for a time to injure her young life – a romance in which he, her father, had played a strange part. But that was, after all, but an echo from another life; a closed book.
“Your daughter, I am sure,” Doane continued, “can be trusted to form her own attachments. She is a noble as well as a beautiful girl.”
“Indeed – you find her so, Griggsby Doane? That is pleasant to my ears. For into the directing of her life have gone my dreams of the new China and the new world. I would not have her choose wrongly now. But I do not understand her. It is difficult for me to talk freely with her.”
“I am sure,” said Doane slowly, “‘that if you could bring yourself to do so” – as once or twice before, in moments of deep feeling, he forgot to use the indirect Oriental form of address – “it would make her very happy.”
“You think that, Griggsby Doane?” His excellency considered this. Then added: “I will make the effort.”
“If I may suggest – talk with her not as father with daughter, but on an equality, as friend with friend.”
His excellency slowly rose; and Doane, also rising, felt for the first time that the fine old statesman fully looked his age. He was, standing there, smiling a thought wistfully, an old man, little short of a broken man. And then his dry thin hand found Doane’s huge one and gripped it in the Western manner. This was a surprise, evidently as moving to Kang as to Doane himself; for they stood thus a moment in silence.
“My dearest hope, of late,” said the great Manchu – the smoothest of etiquette giving way, for once, before the pressure of emotion – “has been that my daughter’s heart might be entrusted to you, Griggsby Doane.”
Again a silence. Then Doane:
“That was my hope, as well.”
“Then – ”
“No. It is plainly impossible. All life is before her. The thought has not come to her. It never will. I see now that she could not be happy with me. And I think she ought to be happy. I must ask you not to speak of this again. Let youth call unto youth. And let me be her friend.”
His excellency went below after this. Miss Hui Fei was also below, sleeping. Rocky Kane had been playing with the little princess, out on the gallery; but now, evidently watching his chance, he came forward to the informal seat the mandarin had vacated.
It was to be difficult – always difficult. The boy, plainly, couldn’t live through these tense days without a confidant. Doane steeled himself to bear it, and to respond as a friend. There was no way out; would be none short of Shanghai; just an exquisite torture. It was even to grow, with each fresh contact, harder to bear. The boy was so curiously unsophisticated, so earnest and honest an egotist.
“ – I’ve asked her,” he said now.
Doane could only wait.
“She hasn’t said yes. That would be absurd, of course – so soon.” He was so pitifully putting up a brave front. “But she does like me. And it’s something that she hasn’t said no. Isn’t it something?”
That was hardly a question; it was nearer assertion – what he had to think. Doane managed to incline his head.
“But never mind that. God knows why I should bother you with it. You’ve been so kind – such a friend. We – are friends, aren’t we?”
Doane felt himself obliged to turn and meet his eyes. And such eyes! Ablaze with nervous light. And then he had to grip another hand – this one young, moist, strong. But he managed that, too.
“Listen! I do bother you awfully, but – I’ve been thinking – here we are, you know. God knows when I’ll find a man who could help me as you can. And we brought all those wonderful old paintings aboard here. I’ve been thinking – well, since I’ve got so much to learn of Chinese culture, why not begin? Couldn’t I – would they mind if I looked at some of the pictures? And – if it isn’t asking too much – you could tell me why they’re good. Just begin to give me something to go by. Isn’t it as good a way to make the break as any?”
It was a most acceptable diversion. Doane, though several boxes of the paintings were in his own rooms, sent a servant to ask a permission that was cordially granted. And as there was a wind blowing, they went below, and talked there in low voices in order not to disturb the sleeping girl, while the elder man carefully opened a box and got out a number of the long scrolls that were wound on rods of ivory, handling them with reverent fingers.
He chose one from the brush of that Chao Meng-fu who flourished under the earliest Mongol or Yuan rulers, a roll perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches in width, and in length, judging from the thickness, as many feet, tied around with silk cords and fastened with tags of carven jade. The painting itself, naturally, was on silk, which in turn was pasted on thick, dark-toned paper, made of bamboo pulp, with borders of brocade. The projecting ends of the ivory rollers, like the tags, were carved.
At the edge of the scroll were, besides the seal signature of the artist, and the date – in our chronology, A. D. 1308 – many other signatures in the conventional square seal characters of royal and other collectors who had possessed the painting, with also, a few pithy, appreciative epigrams from eminent critics of various periods. On that one margin was stamped the authentic history of the particular bit of silk, paper and pigment during its life of six full centuries; for no hand could have forged those seals.
There was no likelihood that the boy – lacking, as he was, in cultural background – would exhibit any sensitive responsiveness to the exquisite brush-work of the fine old painter or to his consciously subjective attitude toward his art. But there is a way in which the simple Western mind that is not preoccupied with fixed concepts of art may be led into enjoyment of such a landscape scroll; this is to exhibit it as do the Chinese themselves, unrolling it, very slowly, a little at a time, deliberately absorbing the detail and the finely suggested atmosphere, until a sensation is experienced not unlike that of making a journey through a strange and delightful country. Doane employed this method – it was surely what that old painter intended – and led the boy slowly from a pastoral home, so small beneath its towering overhanging mountain crags, that lost themselves finally in soft cloud-masses, as to appear insignificant, out along a river where lines of reeds swayed in the winds and boats moved patiently, across a lake that was dotted with pavilions and pleasure craft – on and on, through varied scenes that yet were blended with amazing craftsmanship into a continuous, harmonious whole.
The time crept by and by. When Doane finally explained the seal characters at the end and retied the old silk cords with their hanging rectangles of unclouded green jade, the sun was low over the western hills.
Rocky’s face was flushed, his eyes nervously bright. “I don’t get it all, of course,” he said; “but it makes you feel somehow as if you’d been reading The Pilgrim’s Progress!”
Doane gravely nodded.
“Shall we look at another?” said Rocky.
“No. That is enough. The Chinese knew better than to crowd the mind with confused impressions of many paintings. A good picture is an experience to be lived through, not a trophy to be glanced at.”
“I wonder,” said the boy, “if that’s why I used to hate it so when my tutor dragged me through the Metropolitan Museum?”
“Doubtless.”
“And this picture has a great value, I suppose?”
“It is virtually priceless – in East as well as West,” replied Doane as he replaced it among its fellows in the box.
Thus began, late but perhaps not too late, what may be regarded as the education of young Rockingham Kane.
CHAPTER XII – AT THE HOUR OF THE TIGER
THEY passed, that evening, the region of Peng-tze where Tao Yuan-ming, after a scant three months as district magistrate, surrendered his honors and retired to his humble farm near Kiu Kiang, there to write in peace the verse and prose that have endured during sixteen crowded centuries; and on, then, moving slowly through the precipitous Gateway of Anking and, later, around the bend that bounds that city on the west, south and east. Those on deck could see, indistinctly in the deepening twilight, the vast area of houses and ruins – for Anking had not yet recovered from the devastations of the T’ai-ping rebels in the eighteen-sixties – where half a million yellow folk swarm like ants; and very indistinctly indeed, farther to the north, they could see: the blue mountains. Slowly, quietly, then, Anking, with its ruins and its memories fell away astern.
Half an hour later the sweeps were lashed along the rail. The great dark sails, with their scalloped edges between the battens of bamboo, seeming more than ever, in the dusk, like the wings of an enormous bat, were lowered; and with many shouts and rhythmic cries the tracking ropes were run out to mooring poles on the bank. Forward the mattings were adjusted for the night. The smells of tobacco and frying fish drifted aft. A youth, sipping tea by the rail, put down his cup and sang softly in falsetto a long narrative of friendship and the mighty river and (incidentally) the love of a maiden who slipped away from her mother’s side at night to meet a handsome student only to be slain, as was just, by the hand of an elder brother… From the cabin aft drifted a faint odor of incense. A flageolet mingled its plaintive oboe-like note with the song of the youth by the rail… From a near-by village came soft evening sounds, and the occasional barking of dogs, and the beat of a watchman’s gong… The greatest of rivers – greatest in traffic and in rich memories of the endless human drama – was settling quietly for the night.
At the first rays of dawn the forward deck would be again astir. Sails would be hoisted, ropes hauled aboard and coiled; and the shining yellow craft would resume her journey down-stream, with carven and brightly painted eyes peering fixedly out at the bow, with carefully tended flowers perfuming the air about the after gallery, a thing of rich and lovely color even on the rich and lovely river; slipping by busy ports, each with its vast tangle of small shipping and its innumerable families of beggars in slipper-boats or tubs awaiting miserably the steamers and their strangely prodigal white passengers. T’ai-ping itself, of bloody memory, lay still ahead; and farther yet Nanking the glorious, and Chin-kiang, and the great estuary. Slowly the huge craft would drift and sail and tie, moving patiently on toward the Shanghai of the ever-prospering white merchants, the Shanghai that somewhat vaingloriously had dubbed itself “the Paris of the East.” And no one of the thousands, here and there, that idly watched the golden junk as it moved, not without a degree of magnificence, down the tireless current, was to know that a Manchu viceroy, a prince hunted to the death by his own blood, a statesman known to the courts of great new lands, was in hiding within those timbers of polished cypress. Nor would they know that a princess, his daughter yet strangely of the new order, voyaged with him clad in the simple costume of a young Chinese woman. Nor would they dream of certain inexplicable whites. Nor would they have cared; for the voyage of the yellow junk was but a tiny incident in the crowded endless drama of the river; to the millions of struggling, breeding, dying souls along the banks and on the water, merely living was and would be burden enough. So China merely lives – dreaming a little but hoping hardly at all – with every eye on the furrow or the till; lives, and dies, and – lives again and on.
Late in the third afternoon, Rocky Kane, sitting, head forlornly in hands, in his narrow room, heard a light step – heard it with every sensitive nerve-tip – and, springing up, softly drew his curtain. But the quick eagerness faded from his eyes; for it was Dixie Carmichael.
Her thin lips curved in the faintest of smiles as she moved along the corridor toward her own curtained door. But then, as she passed and glanced back, her skirt, in swinging about, caught on a nail; caught firmly; and as she stooped to release it, a string of pearls swung down, broke, and rolled, a score of little opalescent spheres, along the deck, a few of them nearly to Rocky’s feet. He stooped – without a thought at first – picked them up and turned them over in his fingers; then, stepping forward to return them, observed with an odd thrill of somewhat unpleasant excitement, that the girl had gone an ashen color and was staring at him with something the look of a wild and hostile animal. She turned then; glanced with furtive eyes up and down the corridor; and swiftly gathering up the remaining pearls clutched them tightly in one hand, extending the other and saying, in a quick half-whisper: “Give me those.”
He hesitated, confused, unequal to the quick clear thinking he felt, even then, was demanded of him.
“What are you doing with them?” he asked.
“Not so loud! Come here!” She was indicating her own doorway; even drawing the curtain; while her head moved just perceptibly toward the room immediately beyond her own where Miss Hui Fei, he knew, would be resting at this time.
“Where did you get them?” he asked, huskily, doggedly.
There was a long pause. Again her subtle gaze swept the corridor. “You’d better step in here,” said she, very quiet. “I’ve something to say to you.”
Sensing, still confusedly, that he ought to see the thing through, struggling to think, he yielded to her stronger will.
She followed him into the room and let the curtain fall. “Give me those pearls,” she commanded again.
He shook his head.
During a tense moment she studied him. She moved over by the translucent window of ground oyster shells, itself, in the mellow afternoon light, as opalescent as the pearls in her hand and his. Her gaze, for an instant, sought the wide stain on the floor where the Manila Kid had, so recently, wretchedly died; and her instant imagination considered the incomprehensible mental attitude of these quiet Chinese who had, without a word, disposed of the body and painstakingly cleansed the spot. No one, observing them day by day, now, as they calmly pursued their tasks, could suspect that the slanting quiet eyes had so lately seen murder… As for the youth before her she was, now that her moment of fright had passed, supremely confident in her skill and mental strength. He was, still, little more than an undeveloped boy. And his position, now that he had set up his flag of reform, would be absurdly vulnerable.
“Once more” – her low voice was cool and soft as river ice – “give them to me.”
He shook his head. “Tell me first where you got them.”
“If you’re determined to make a scene,” said she, “I advise you to be quiet about it. You wouldn’t want – her – to know you’re in here.”
“I – I” – this was the merest boyishness – “I’ve told her about – well, that I tried to make love to you. I’m not afraid of that.”
“Still – you wouldn’t want her to hear you now.” This was awkwardly true. And his hesitation as he tried to consider it, to work out an attitude, ran a second too long.
“The pearls are mine,” she pressed calmly on. “The best advice I can give you is to return them and go.”
“But – ”
“Do you think I want the people aboard this junk – anybody – to know that I have them?”
“I believe you stole them from the viceroy’s place.”
“That, of course – Well, never mind! What you may believe is nothing to me.”
“Will you tell Mr. Doane about them?”
“Certainly not. And you won’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Perhaps it’s my duty.”
“Listen” – he felt himself wholly in the right, yet found difficulty in meeting her cold pale eyes – “it’s my impression that I’ve been acting rather decently toward you. Of course, I could have – ”
“What could you have done?”
“For you own good, keep your voice down. I will tell you just this – you were pretty wild in Shanghai for a week or two.”
“Well?” This was hurting him; but he met it. “And there’s no likelihood that you’ve told her all of it. Were you such a fool as to think you could keep it all secret? Out here on the coast – and from a woman with as many underground connections as I have?”
“There’s nothing that! – ”
“Listen! I’m not through with you. You’ve been a very, very rough proposition. I know all about it. No – wait! There’s something else. I knew all about you when you were making up to me on the steamer. I could have trapped you then – tangled your life so with mine that you could never have got away from me, never in the world. But I didn’t. I liked you, and I didn’t want to hurt you – then.”
“You do want to hurt me now?”
“It may be necessary.”
“Since you’re taking this position” – he was finding difficulty in making his voice heard; there seemed to be danger of explosive sounds – “probably I’d better just go to Mr. Doane myself with these things.”
“If you do that I’ll wreck your life.”
“You don’t mean that you’d – ”
“You seem to be forgetting a good deal.”
“But you – ”
“I will defend myself to the limit. I’ve really been easy with you. You see, you don’t know anything about me. Least of all what harm I can do. You’d be a child in my hands. Turn against me and I’ll get you if it takes me ten years. You’ll never be safe from me. Never for a minute.”
He looked irresolutely down at the lustrous jewels in his hand.
“You had these sewed in your skirt. There must be more there.”
“Are you proposing to search me?”
“No – but”… His black youth was stabbing now, viciously, at his boyishly sensitive heart; but still, in a degree, he met it. “I’m going to Mr. Doane. I don’t care what happens to me.”
He even moved a soft step toward the door; but paused, lingered, watching her. For she was rummaging among the covers of her bed. He caught a brief glimpse of a hand-bag that she meant him not to see. She took from a bottle two green tablets. Then she faced him.
To the startled question of his eyes she replied: “They’re corrosive sub mate. I shall take them now unless you – give me the pearls. If you want to have my death on your hands, take them to Mr. Doane. But it’s only fair to tell you that if you do it – if you mix in this business – your own life won’t be worth a nickel. They’ll get you, and they’ll get the pearls. You’re caught in a bigger game than you can play.
“Get out, while you can” – as the low swift words came she reached out and took the pearls from his nerveless hand – “and I’ll protect you. You can have your pretty Manchu girl. You can ride around in a rickshaw and look at old temples and buy embroideries. Just don’t mix in affairs that don’t concern you.”
“I” – he was pressing a hand to a white forehead – “I’ve got to think it over.”
“Remember this, too” – she laid a hand on his arm – “you could never fasten anything on me. The proof doesn’t exist. Nobody can identify unmounted pearls As a matter of fact I got these”… during a brief but to her perverse imagination an intensely pleasing moment she closed her eyes and lived again through that strange scene on the steps of the pavilion; again in vivid fancy rolled over the inert body that had been Tex Connor, took the amazing cape of pearls from his shirt and rolled the body heavily back…"I got these from a man I knew – an old friend. Just mind your own business and no one will harm you. But remember, you’re walking among dangers. Step carefully. Keep quiet. Better go now.”
He found himself in the corridor; walked slowly, uncertainly, up to the deck; sat by the rail and, head on hand, moodily watched the river and the hills. He asked himself if he had, by his very silence, struck a bargain with the girl; but could find no answer to the question, only bewilderment. Could it be that she was only a daring thief? It could, of course, but how to get at the truth? Abruptly, then his thoughts turned inward. His wild days had seemed, since his change of heart, of the remote past; but they were not, they had still been the stuff of his life within about a week. It was unnerving. He thought, something morbidly, as the sensitive young will, about habits… The day had gone awry, too, in the matter of his love. A reaction had set in. Hui Fei was keeping much to herself. It had become difficult to talk with her at all. And that had bewildered him… He was all adrift, with neither sound training nor a mature philosophy to steady him, life had turned unreal on his hands; nothing was real – not Hui or her father, certainly not himself, not even Mr. Doane. His background, even, was slipping away, and with it his sense of the white race. This, it seemed, was a yellow world – swarming, heedless, queerly tragic. His soul was adrift, and nobody cared. Toward his father and mother he felt only bitterness. There were, it appeared, no friends.
He thought, it seemed, confusedly, excitedly, of everything; of everything except the important fact that he was very young.
Early on the following morning Doane found the little princess playing about the deck, and with a smile seated himself beside her. She settled at once on his knee, chattering brightly in the Mandarin tongue of her play world.
He responded with a note of good-humored whimsy not out of key with her alert clear imagination. It was pleasant to fall again into the little intimacies of the language that had become, during these twenty years and more, almost his own. He pointed out to her the trained cormorants diving for fish, and the irrigating wheels along the banks; and then told quaint stories – of the first water buffalo, and of the magic rice-field.
Soon she, too, was telling stories – of the simpleton who bought herons for ducks, of the toad in the lotus pool, of the child that was born in a conch shell and finally crawled with it into the sea, of the youngest daughter who to save the life of her father married a snake, of the magic melon that grew full of gold and the other melon that contained hungry beggars, of the two small boys and the moon cake, and of the curious beginning of the ant species.
She scolded him for his failure, at the first, to laugh with her. Her happy child quality stirred memories of old-time days in T’ainan-fu, when his own daughter had been a child of six, playing happily about the mission compound. They were poignant memories. His eyes were misty even as he smiled over the bright merriment of this child, and in his heart was a growing wistful tenderness. To be again a father would be a great privilege. He was ripe for it now, tempered by poverty and sorrow, yet strong, with a great emotional capacity on which the world about him had, apparently, no claim to make. He was simply cast aside, left carelessly in an eddy with the great stream of life flowing, bankful, by. The experience was common enough, of course. In the great scheme of life the fate of an individual here and there could hardly matter. He could tell himself that, very simply, quite honestly; and yet the strength within him would rise and rise again to assert the opposite. The end, for himself, lay beyond the range of conscious thought; but at least, he felt, it could not be bitterness. He seemed to have passed that danger… The little princess was soberly telling the old story of the father-in-law, the father, and the crabs that were eaten by the pig. At the conclusion she laughed merrily; and then Ending his response somewhat unsatisfactory, scowled fiercely and with her plump fingers bent up the comers of his mouth.
He laughed then; and rolled her up in his arms and tossed her high in the air.
When Hui Fei came upon them they were gazing out over the rail. Mr. Doane seemed to be telling a long story, to which the child listened intently. She moved quietly near, smiling; and after listening for a few moments seated herself on the deck behind them.
The story puzzled her. She leaned forward, a charming picture in her simple costume, black hair parted smoothly, oval face untouched with powder or paint. She smiled again, then, for his story was nothing other than a free rendering into Chinese of Stevenson’s:=
"In Winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light…"=
He went on, when that was finished, with a version of:=
"Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand…"=
– and other poems from The Child’s Garden of Verses.
Hui Fei’s eyes lighted, as she listened. Mr. Doane, it appeared, knew nearly all of these exquisite verse-stories of happy childhood and exhibited surprising skill in finding the Chinese equivalents for certain elusive words. What a mind he had… rich in reading as in experience, ripe in wisdom, yet curiously fresh and elastic! It seemed to her a young mind.
The little princess was especially pleased with My Bed Is a Boat, and made him repeat it. At the conclusion she clapped her hands. And then Hui Fei joined in the applause, and laughed softly when they turned in surprise.
“Won’t you do The Land of Counterpane?” she asked.
It was later, when the child had run off to play among the flowers, that he and she fell to talking as they had not talked during these recent crowded days. There were silences, at first. Despite his effort to seem merely friendly and kind, he felt a restraint that had to be fought through. In this time, so difficult for her at every point, he felt deeply that he must not fail her. Her greatest need, surely, was for friendship. The excited youth who dogged her steps and hung on her most trivial glance could not offer that. And melancholy had touched her bright spirit; he sensitively felt that when the little princess ran away and her smile faded. Sorrow dwelt not far behind those dark thoughtful eyes.
Early in the conversation she spoke of her father. Her thoughts, clearly, were always with him.
“I wan’ to ask you,” said she simply and gravely, “if you know what he is doing.”
Doane moved his head in the negative.
“He has been in his room for more than a day. When I go to his door he is kin’ but he doesn’ ask me to come in. And he doesn’ tell me anything.”
“He is not confiding in me,” said Doane.
“I don’ like that, either, Mis’er Doane. For I know he thinks of you now as his closes’ frien’. There is no other frien’ who knows what you know. An’ you have save’ his life an’ mine. My father is not a man to fail in frien’ship or in gratitu’.”
