Samuel Merwin

“ To be a philosopher was, then, to be emotionally dead. The church had been taken out of his life, leaving—nothing. A mate on a river steamer, in China. Life had gone quite topsy-turvey. Even the amazing courtesy of his excellency—it was that, when you considered—and this profound compliment from the revolutionary junta seemed but incidents. Too many promises had smiled at Doane, these years of his spiritual Odyssey—smiled and faded to nothing—to permit an easy hope of anything new and beautiful. He was beginning to believe that a man can not build and live two lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There would be memorials to the throne and to his children and friends, couched in the language of a master of the classics, rich in the literary allusions dear to the heart of the scholar, Manchu and Chinese alike.
Doane found a seat on a coil of the heavy tracking rope. His own part in the drama through which they were all so strangely living could be only passive. He would serve as he might. His little dream of personal happiness, with a woman to love and new strong work to be somehow begun, was wholly gone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, colored now with deep emotion, it had an appealing quality to which Doane found a response—difficult, at the moment, to repress—among his own emotions. He sensed, too, with a pleasure that was, in his lonely life, stirring, the naiveté of her Western feeling. Standing here in simple native costume, in the heart of old China, gazing wistfully out over the tangled hundreds of sleeping junks and sampans, this girl, freshly out of a Massachusetts college, was pleading against hope that her father might be spared the final jealous vengeance of the mightiest remaining Oriental throne. ”

“ The Chinese alone, down the uncounted centuries, had held their racial integrity, their very language. Surely, at some mystical but seismic turning of the racial tide, they would rise again among the nations.
This giant, standing there in sweater and knickerbockers, bareheaded, gazing out at the dark river, was not sentimentalizing. He knew well enough the present problems. But he saw them with half-Eastern eyes; he saw America too, with half-Eastern eyes—and so he could not talk at all to the very able man beside him who saw the West and the world with wholly Western eyes. ”

“ And then, after a few words—the girl said that Tex Connor and the Manila Kid made her come; it had been a terrible business; she thought both must have been, killed; she had contrived to hide—how Mr. Doane asked him to take her back to the women; and how they went, he and she, his heart beating hotly, out through the darkening gate where paper lanterns now moved about. He felt that for the first sharp blow at his new life. There would be other blows; doubtless through this girl; for the old life would not give him up without a fight. ”

“ There was, then, manhood in him. The viceroy recognized the fact in his friendly smile. Hui Fei plainly recognized it as she walked, chatting brightly, at his side, while he bent on her a gaze of boyish adoration.
As for Doane, he moved away unobserved; dropped at length on a knoll, rested his great head on his hands, and gazed out at the blazing steamer. She would soon be quite gone. Poor Benjamin was gone already; a strange little man, one of the many that drift through life without a sense of direction, always bewildered about it, always hoping vaguely for some better lot. ”

“ Dixie Carmichael, in the inevitable blue middy blouse, sat quietly reading in a corner. A strange creature, always imperturbably girlish. Duane had observed her casually on the boat and about the Astor House at Shanghai, and despite the curious tales that drifted along the coast—already the girl had acquired an almost legendary fame—he had never seen her other than discreetly quiet. Men who had observed her on the steamer from Hong Kong after the outraged British wives as good as drummed her out of town asserted that she exhibited not so much as a ruffle of the nerves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You will permit an old man this latitude? I have served China without thought of self during nearly fifty years. To the Old Buddha I was ever a loyal servant. If toward the new emperor and the empress dowager I find it impossible to feel so deeply, my heart is yet devoted to the throne and to my people. If while sent abroad in service of my country it has been given me to see much of merit in Western ways, it is not that I have become a revolutionist, a traitor to the government of my ancestors. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ CHAPTER VII—THE INSCRUTABLE WEST DOANE knew nothing of the dignified figure he presented as he took the viceroy's hand, a profoundly sobered giant, his huge frame outlined beneath his wet garments like a Greek statue of an athlete.
“You have helped to save the life of my child, Griggsby Doane”—thus his excellency, in what proved to be a little set speech—“and with all my heart I thank you. I am old. Little time is left to me. But life follows upon death. Death is the beginning of life. ”

“ And here beside him, smoking a cigar, stood a man whose uncommon genius fitted him to seize that power as it gathered and administer it; a man to whom money came—the very winds of chance heaped it about him. And to Doane, just now, money—even in quantity that would be to Kane hardly the income of a day or so—meant so much that the grotesque want of it (the word “grotesque” came) stopped his brain.
For it was coming clear to him how completely the throne could at will, obliterate the worldly establishment of Kang Yu. ”

“ CHAPTER X—YOUTH THERE came for his excellency, as the sun mounted the sky, a large junk of his own river fleet—great brown sails flapping against the five masts of all heights that pointed up at crazily various angles, pennons flying at each masthead, hull weathered darkly, mats and fenders of woven hemp hung over the poop-rail, and a swarming pigtailed crew at the sweeps and overside on the spunson and hard at the tracking ropes as the tai-kung screamed from the bow and the laopan shouted from the poop. ”

“ Rang Yu listened attentively.
“Your Excellency,” Doane pressed on, “it is not right that you should listen to the command of a decadent throne. Forgive my frankness, my presumption, but I must say this! True, you are a Manchu. While this revolution continues it will be difficult for you. But before another year shall have gone by there will be a new China. The bitter animosities of to-day will pass. Though a Manchu, your wise counsel will be needed. Your knowledge of the Western World will temper the over-emphatic policies of the young hot-heads from the universities of Japan.” ”

“ A grave man, with sad eyes but with a slow kindly smile, always courteously attentive to the person and problem of the moment, thinking always clearly and objectively out of a comprehensively tolerant background that seemed to include all nations and all men; a gently tactful man; a tireless, powerful figure of a man, who could work twenty hours on end without a trace of fatigue, going through masses of minor detail without for a moment losing his broad view of the major problems—such was the Griggsby Doane one saw at revolutionary headquarters during that late autumn of 1911.... ”

“ And then, as the sun mounted higher and the gentle rush of the river along the hull and the continuous chantey of the oarsmen floated, more and more soothingly to their ears, they fell quiet, her hand still pleasantly in his. Together they hummed certain of the current popular songs, he thinking them good, she smiling not unhappily as her voice blended prettily with his. And Griggsby Doane heard them. ”

“ For a huge prize the viceroy's collection would indeed be; many of the priceless stones and paintings would never reach the throne.
The thought came of trying to persuade her to save herself; a thought that was as promptly discarded. She would not leave her father while he lived. He, of course, would not take his own life elsewhere than in his ancestral home. And to that home, with his inevitable escort of underlings and soldiers, was hurrying—if not already there—this Chang Yuan-fu, one of those powerfully venomous creatures that have figured darkly at intervals in the history of China. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A puff of wind found its way through an open window; a blue curtain swung out, discovering, through a doorway, Miss Carmichael, seated in a chair beneath the window. It was lighter in her cabin. She had laid aside the familiar middy blouse and skirt, and appeared to be sewing something on her petticoat. For an instant she looked up, her eyes meeting those of the pale youth who stood motionless in the corridor. The curtain swung back then; but as it swung the youth stepped through the doorway and stood within the room. ”

“ She is like one who has lain too long abed. She must think, arise, act. With my poor eyes I can see no other hope for her. Even though I myself may suffer, I can not, in truth to my own faith, punish those who, loving China as deeply as I myself love her, yet feel that they must goad her until she awakens from her pitiful sleep of more than six centuries.... ”

“ To hope that her quick youth could altogether resist Rocky's ardent youth was asking too much, of course. The young people were almost certain to find themselves helpless—their emotions stirred by what they had been living through; thrown together here, romantically, on the junk. Whatever small difficulties they might encounter in exploring each other's nascent feelings would be softened by the very air they were breathing. The young are often, usually, helpless when nature so works upon them.... But Doane wasn't bitter. ”

“ Now that the confusion of the day and night were over with, she found a thrill in considering the problem, while her sensitive fingers pressed and pressed again the hard little globes. There were so many of them; such beauties, she knew, in form and size and color.... Never again would such an opportunity come to her. It was, precisely, if on the grandest scale imaginable, her sort of achievement. Tex was gone. The Kid was gone. No one could claim a share or a voice: it was all hers—wealth, power, even, perhaps, at the last, something near respectability. ”

“ It was anything but unreal to Doane. He knew too well that America and England, even all the white peoples, make up but a fraction of the inhabitants of this strange earth. His eyes filled again as he considered the possible—yes, the probable fate of the lovely girl at his side. In such a time of disorganization the reckless Manchu woman at Peking could do much. Chang might lose his head at the sound of gunfire in Han Yang and fly back to the capital, or he might not. A capable and corrupt eunuch would run heavy risks to gain such a prize. ”

“ Could a republic, he asked himself, possibly mean anything real to those minds? The habit of mere endurance, of bare existence, was so deep-seated, the struggle to live so intense, the opportunity so slight. Sun Shi-pi and his kind were a semi-Western product. They were, when all was said and done, an exotic breed. They were the ardent, adventurous young; and they were the few. There had always been a throne in China, always extortionate mandarins, always a popular acceptance of conditions. ”

“ Doane broke away and plunged into the dim interior of the boat. Most of the lights were out. Dark figures were wrestling. There were grunts, groans, savage cries of rage and triumph. A huge pole-knife caught the light as it swung. Doane was aware of men breathing hard as they struggled.
He stumbled over an inert body; would have fallen had not the Australian caught him. A tall soldier who lunged toward them with a dripping bayonet was shot by MacKail.... There were no means here of distinguishing the parties to this savage struggle, but in the inner corridor it was lighter. ”

“ Doane led the way clear aft. The heat was terrific. From a row of fire buckets he sprinkled the little princess; bathed her temples. The water was warm, but it helped.
Young Kane, with a nervous movement, suddenly picked up one, then another, of the buckets and dashed them over himself. Distinctly he was coming to life. “We may never come out of this, Mr. Doane,” he said. “It's a terrible fix.” More and more, as he came slowly awake, he was dramatizing the situation and himself. “But I want to say this. I've never known a man like you. ”