Samuel Merwin

“ No one knows how much opium was grown in China last year. There are estimates—official, missionary, consular; and they disagree by thousands and tens of thousands of tons. But it is known that where the delicate poppy is reared, it demands and receives the best land. It thrives in the rich river-bottoms. It has crowded out grain and vegetables wherever it has spread, and has thus become a contributing factor to famines. Its product, opium, has run over China like a black wave, leaving behind it a misery, a darkness, a desolation that has struck even the Chinese, even its victims, with horror. ”

“ Babcock was not looking at the sky. His soul was tuned to lower things—to lumber, for instance, heaps of it, piles of it, rows of it, stretched for hundreds of yards along the river, and across the peninsula, and along the edge of the harbour. The mills were silent; the watchmen were not to be seen; the only sign of life was the smoke curling from the funnels of the Number One, where Robbie MacGregor was dozing on the engine-room bench and hourly growing fatter. Six million feet of lumber greeted the eye of the man from Chicago, as he looked—and looked. ”

“ The elder bushes and briers crowded close to the little clearing behind the hut, and Menard, lying on his side with his face close to the ground, watched the clusters of leaves as they gently rustled. He rolled half over and stared up at the bits of sky that showed through the trees. It seemed as if the great world were a new thing, as if these trees and bushes and reaches of tufted grass were a part of a new life. ”

“ For this life of mine is a working life no longer. It has turned off into the dark byways of passion. My purpose, hitherto compelling, falters now. My once clear mind is clouded and confused. I do not know when I shall work again. I do not know what I shall do. I only know that all is dark and still in the room next to this dingy room of mine, and that a sad, beautiful woman sleeps softly there. I only know that I love her beyond my strength, and yet that I seem unable to hate the man who would hate me if he knew. ”

“ And Brachey observed him through narrowed eyes.
Here, thought the journalist, before him, smoking a cigarette, sat modern China; in robe and queue, speaking of the future but ridden by the past; using strong words but with no fire, no urge or glow in the voice; as if eager to hope without the substance of hope; at once age and youth, smiling down the weary centuries at himself. ”

“ It was soon after eight that Bannon went to the boarding-house where Hilda and Max lived, and sat down to wait in the parlor. When a quarter of an hour had gone, and they had not returned, he buttoned up his coat and went out, walking slowly along the uneven sidewalk toward the river. The night was clear, and he could see, across the flats and over the tracks, where tiny signal lanterns were waving and circling, and freight trains were bumping and rumbling, the glow of the arc lamps on the elevator, and its square outline against the sky. ”

“ Higginson had been the victim of a delusion. After half a century of struggle he had allowed himself to believe that the fight was about over, that his personal achievement meant something; that he could stand securely on the heights. He had forgotten that Business is Business, that Time is Money and Money Talks; he had forgotten that the glorious old world was spinning along, as heedless as ever, after the ever-receding glitter, and that there could be no stopping until the last great stop should be reached.
“From what I can gather,” said Halloran, “they mean to fight us all along the line. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was a feeling of eternity in the gathering twilight as though there had never been anything else and never would be. But she knew there had; it was only three days since she and Harvey had driven along this road. She recalled the glisten of the sunlight on the river, and the crimson of the hard maples stained by the first early frost, and she knew it was not the sunshine nor the tingle in the air nor the beautiful way in which Ned and Nick flew along stride for stride over the hard white road, but something else, something quite different, which had made her glad that Sunday morning. ”

“ And all through the forest was the sand, drifting like snow over roads and fences, changing the shape of the land in every high wind, blowing into hair and clothes, and adding, with the tall, endless, gray-green mullein stalks, the final touch of desolation to a hopeless land. Here and there, in the clearings, sand-colored farmers and their sand-colored wives struggled to wring a livelihood from the thankless earth. Other farmers had drifted helplessly away, leaving houses and barns to blacken and rot and sink beneath the sand drifts, and leaving, too, rows of graves under the stumps. ”

“ One of the great lessons learned during Menard’s work under Governor Frontenac had been that the man who once permits himself to be lowered in the eyes of the Indians has forever lost his prestige. Now he sat before the chiefs of a great village, weak from the strain of the long days and nights of distress and wakefulness and hunger, his clothing still wet and bedraggled, with no weapon but a knife, no canoe, not to speak of presents,––with none of the equipment which to the Indian mind suggested authority,––and yet made his demands in the stern voice of a conqueror. ”

“ Strains of dance music floated out over board fences that were gaudy with posters, out over evergreen hedges that thrived in green tubs. All the world was gay to-night; all the world was in the mood to sit at white tables under the trees and dine on the best of German fare, to tip back and listen to German music from German orchestras, to toss the waiter half a dollar; life was gay, life was jolly ”

“ Seated on the parapet of a rifle pit Betty and Brachey looked out over the red-brown valley. Long, faintly purple shadows lay along the hillside and in the deeper hollows. From the compound, half-way down the slope, a confusion of pleasant sounds came to their ears—youthful voices, snatches of song, an energetically whistled Sousa march, the quaintly plaintive whine of Chinese woodwinds—while above the roofs of tile and iron within the rectangle of wall (that was still topped with brown sand-bags) wisps of smoke drifted lazily upward. ”

“ The Manchu strain had dwindled out; and while an empress pleased her jaded appetites by having an actor cut with the lash in her presence for an indifferent performance, all South China, from Canton to the Yangtze, seethed with the steadily increasing ferment of revolution. Conspirators ranged the river and the coast. At secret meetings in Singapore, Tokio, San Francisco and New York, new and bloody history was planned. The oldest and hugest of empires was like a vast crater that steamed and bubbled faintly here and there as hot vital forces accumulated beneath. ”

“ So long as any commodity remains in the currents of trade the law of trade must reign, the balance sheet must balance. It is difficult to get a commodity into these currents, but once you have got the commodity in, you will find it next to impossible to get it out. There has been more than one prime minister, I fancy, more than one secretary of state for India, who has wished the opium question in Jericho. It is not pleasant to answer the moral indignation of the British empire with the cynical statement that the India government cannot exist without that opium revenue. ”

“ Even before his death the Big Buffalo must lie as he has always lied. His tongue knows not the truth. He thinks to deceive our young braves with talk of his furs and his lodges and his power in the land of the white men. But our warriors know the truth. They know that the Big Buffalo has no store of furs, no great lodges,––that he lives in the woods with only a stolen musket, where he can by his lies capture the peaceful hunters of the Onondagas to make them the slaves of his Chief-Across-the-Water. ”

“ Or walk to the window and look out at the sleeping city—at this rich old capital of a peaceful people, who smile languidly at the turbulent West from which I spring (like Crocker and his sorry kind) —who turn from the miseries of actual life to the philosophy of their ancient seers.
Though, come to think of it, I am wrong here. Even gentle, contemplative old China has been drawn from her slumber of the ages into the whirlpool of modern life. I was thinking of the past. I had forgotten. They are carving out a republic here now. Their hands are stained with blood. ”

“ At half-past two a disjointed-looking train panted into the Harrison Street Station, and Judge Black climbed disconsolately out of the smoker. There was a coating of cinders on the top of his derby hat; there were drifts of cinders in the curl of the brim; there were streaks of cinders along the lines where his coat wrinkled; and there was one cinder in his left eye which gave him so leery and bibulous an aspect that an old lady who narrowly escaped colliding with him turned and looked after him in indignation, being half minded to go back and plead with him to lead a better life. ”

“ Elmer Boatwright was studying his wife. His color was high, his eyes nervously bright. He was studying, too, Griggsby Doane, who had for more than a decade been to him almost an object of worship. Moved by an impulse, perhaps the boldest of his life—and just as his wife said, coldly, “I'm sure I wish you happiness,” and moved toward the door—he went over and caught Betty and Brachey each by a hand.
“I haven't understood this,” he said—and tears stood in his eyes as he smiled on them—“but now I'm glad. Betty, we are all going to be proud of the man you have chosen. I'm proud of him now.” ”

“ The bold splashes of crimson and yellow and golden brown on the long slopes, brought sharply out by the somber pines; the fringe of Queen Anne's lace along the road, and the masses of goldenrod and mint; the hum of millions of bees; the tumbling brook a rod away, with its pebbly ripples and dark pools; these he hardly saw. Even the Wittenberg, standing rugged against the sky, its crown of balsams now a trembling, luminous purple under the shafts of the setting sun, could not move him.
After supper, by some managing, he caught her alone in the hall. “Come,” he said, “let's go outside.” ”

“ But through the chaos Griggsby Doane was never for a moment to lose the new vision that had finally cleared his long troubled mind. Behind the crumbling of the empire, underlying the torn and bleeding surface of Chinese life, lay a tradition finer, he was to believe until his dying day, than any so far developed in the truculent West—a delicate responsiveness to beauty in nature and art, a reflective quality, an instinct for peace—it was all these at once, and more; a blend of art in living and living in art ”

“ The spectacle of a great corporation in any century giving up a lucrative traffic on merely human and moral grounds would be illuminating and uplifting. But unfortunate business corporations are, in their very nature, slaves of the balance sheet, organized representatives of the mighty laws of trade. I have already quoted enough evidence to show that the company was not only awake to the dangers of opium, but that it had deliberately and painstakingly worked up the traffic. ”

“ I am a scientist! I am of the most wonderful guild of explorers this wretched old world has yet seen—the guild that is exploring for the truth. Tradition has not stopped us yet. It will never stop us. ”

“ There are some of us, Mademoiselle, who have no home, no ties of family, no love, except for the work in which we are slowly building up a good name and a firm place. That is what I was. Do you know what it is that makes up the life of such a man? It is the little things, the acts of every day and every week; and they must be honest and loyal, or he will fail. I might have stayed in Paris, I might even have found a place in Quebec where I could wear a bright uniform, and be close in the Governor’s favour. ”

“ His grandfather's death marked an end and a beginning, and just as a needle when a magnet is taken away swings unerringly into the line of force of the original magnet, the earth, so Jim's life swung to a new direction. There was no one whose life could direct or influence his, and alone he started on what business men of the next generation knew as his career.
The war had lessened but not destroyed Jonathan's fortune, and it went without reservation to Jim. The times offered golden opportunities to a man with ready money and good business training, and his success was almost inevitable. ”

“ I can imagine better, too, how you have suffered—how I have made you suffer—and now that there are times when my life seems clouded and unreal—some days and weeks even, when I look back I can hardly remember what I have said or done, or how I have lived—when I think of this, and think how my life seems to be slipping away from me, a little at a time, I feel that I just must come back to you. Of course, nothing can be undone, nothing can be lived over. ”

“ It is my wish that all of you, my friends and family, should live happily in the life that lies before you. To you, Griggsby Doane, out of the gratitude and admiration of my proud heart, I give and bequeath all the little that may be left of my worldly goods, including the money, the pitiful handful of jewels, the historic paintings and my daughter Hui Fei. It is my wish that you will marry her at once, and that in your best judgment you sell any or all of the paintings to provide what money you and she may need, and also that you and she care lovingly for the younger child. ”

“ It is not easy to do, Crocker. But Heloise must go to Europe, and take up her study. Her gifts, her hopes, all lead her straight toward opera. Neither you nor I has the right to stop her. It is the instinct for expression, nothing else. You have followed that instinct freely in your own life and work. I have followed it freely in mine. Now let her do the same. Work—the sort of work that will give scope to his own peculiar sort of energy—is what every human being needs. It is, above all, what Heloise needs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the Five Nations have given their word to another nation, it has not been necessary to sign a paper; it has not been necessary to keep a record. The Long Arrow has said that the Iroquois do not forget. He is right. The words that have gone out from the councils have never been forgotten. I see here, in this council, the faces of warriors who have grown old in serving their people, of chiefs who are bent and wrinkled with the cares of many generations. I see in the eyes of my brothers that they have not forgotten the Onontio, who went away to his greater chief only five seasons ago. ”

“ Had that spirit endured, China would to-day, I like to think, have Korea and Manchuria and Mongolia and Sin Kiang. China would not to-day wear a piteous smile on the lips, turning the head to hide tears of shame, while the Russians absorb our northern frontiers and the French draw tribute from Annam and Yunnan, while the English control this great valley of the Yangtze, while the Germans drive their mailed fist into Shantung, and the Japanese send their spies throughout all our land and stand insolently at the very gate of the Forbidden City. ”

“ But after all, it is a great thing to be alive when one has been clinging to a rope in a desperate sea with ugly thoughts to face. At any rate, these men seemed to find it so; for, after a time, when doubtless the white surf-boat was bobbing far out, one of the hundred white flecks on the black lake; when doubtless the poor fellows who had to wait, old Captain Craig with them, were still cursing and praying—and one of them had wept foolish tears when they parted—they fell back into talk. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life has seized upon me and whirled me into its main current. I have felt passion and jealousy. I have loved. I have hated. I have fought. I have held in my arms—close, close—the one woman whose eyes have the magic power to unlock my heart and flood it with the radiant music of love.
And now we go our ways—because it is life. I had her large trunk conveyed to the station this afternoon. To-morrow morning I shall call for her. We shall step into our separate rickshaws; quiet-seeming folk; I a thin man in spectacles and an overcoat and a soft hat ”

“ He would remember the crowded line of carts in the sunken narrow road, the unruly mules that plunged and entangled their harness; the huddled women; the yellow dust that clung thickly to the bright silks of the mandarins; the confusion about the gate, and the handful of soldiers that came hurrying forward to help in a strange business up there; the trains of other carts that struggled to pass in the narrow way, while tattered muleteers shouted a babel of invective. ”

“ He was dressed almost stiffly—not in knickerbockers now, but in what would be called at home a business suit, with stiff white collar and a soft but correct hat; and he carried a stick—like an Englishman, Betty thought, careful to the last of appearances. As if there were no such thing as danger; only stability. She might have been back in the comfortable New Jersey town and he a casual caller. And then, after taking him in, in a quick conflict of moods that left her breathless, she glanced hurriedly about. ”

“ Through the windows and the open doorways one caught glimpses of the spring flowers and blossoms that play so great and fine a part in the esthetic life of this extraordinary people. And here and there, at a window or over a balcony railing, could be seen a face—a quaint and girlish face with glossy black hair done up fantastically high over wide shell combs and with glimpses of flowered silks about slim shoulders. The fragrance of the early cherry and plum blossoms was in the air.
The famous “Number Nine” proved to be a large house at the end of the street. The door stood invitingly open. ”