Quong Ho

“ It was old China that he entered, a land stable in its peculiar civilization which, in spite of many traditional oppressions and time-sanctioned cruelties, had its fascination and grace—the gift to a Mandarin of a precious and much-coveted ancient manuscript had purchased the life of a boy, Li Quong Ho, condemned to elaborate death for a venial offence, the transaction being carried out in an atmosphere of high refinement, and scented tea served and drunk with exquisite punctilio. ”

“ It dealt with big issues in a broad and simple way. . . .
“That’s what I love about the three great systems of Chinese ethics,” he would declare. “There’s no damned subtlety about them. You accept the various propositions or you, don’t. There are no homoousian and homoiousian conflicts, and suchlike rubbish, that have torn Western thought to ribbons for over a thousand years. In China you go straight to the heart of truth. All the subtlety lies, Quong Ho, in the correct interpretation of your appalling but fascinating script.” ”

“ He pitied Quong Ho. Yet, after a year or so of probation, the young man, lusty in his youth and confident in his future, would return to his native land heart-whole, with all the romance of life still before him—whilst he, Baltazar, would re-enter a world from which all such things were blotted out for ever. For what of romance could lie before a man of fifty—one who had lost all touch with women and women’s ways? For the first time a fear of loneliness sent a shiver through him. It was not natural for a man to have neither wife nor child. ”

“ So, Quong Ho, never mind this excellent medicine man, who can’t see beyond his nose and doesn’t want to, because all he’s concerned with is getting you well—never mind him, but tell me what most in the world you would like to do.”
“Sir,” said Quong Ho, “if you desire to dispense with my personal services, which I have always regarded it as a privilege to render to my benefactor, may I dare to formulate an ambition which has hitherto been but an idle dream?”
Dr. Rewsby knitted his grizzled brows and dragged Baltazar away from the bed. ”

“ Glimpses like this one, fine and deliberate, to Quong Ho, and that one of long ago, passionate and self-destroying, to Marcelle Baring. To neither did he accord more than a glimpse. To neither did he show himself on a razor-edged ledge with the abyss on one side and salvation on the other. Another touch of the girl’s lips would have sent them both into what the sensitive and honourable gentleman would have called the abyss. Perhaps, if she had been older, a woman, one tuned to the pulsating responsibilities of life, he might have faced things with her. ”

“ When Quong Ho returned the first time to the farm with the jeering laughter ringing in his ears, he bewailed the impoliteness of the inhabitants of Water-End. Said Baltazar in Chinese:
“Dost thou not know the proverb, Quong Ho, ‘A man must insult himself before others will?’ And again, what saith the Master? ‘Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered.’ By acting against my orders and striving to plaster the muddy walls of these rustics with ceremonial politeness, you have insulted yourself and therefore exposed yourself to rudeness.” ”

“ But I have spoken very seriously to Fung Yu.”
“Fung Yu can go to blazes,” said Baltazar.
Quong Ho smiled. “I alone could give evidence that would condemn him to a perpetuity of punishment.”
“So could I,” cried Baltazar. “Graft! If Tammany Hall really wanted to know how to do things, it ought to sit like a little child at the feet of a high-class Mandarin’s head-gardener. Fung Yu’s the real thing.”
“He is a corrupt personality,” said Quong Ho.
“Therefore,” replied Baltazar, “he is not the kind of person with whom an honourable man should seek alliance. ”

“ Secure in the unswerving fidelity of Quong Ho, and in the impregnable seclusion of this God-disclosed hermitage, John Baltazar lived a life according to his ideals. No outer ripple of the maëlstrom in which the world was engulfed lapped, however faintly, against the low granite wall encircling the low-built granite farmhouse. His retirement was absolute, his retreat off the track of the most casual wanderer.
Six months passed before his eyes rested on a human being other than Quong Ho. ”

“ Ten minutes afterwards Baltazar was speeding eastwards, grimly smiling. By skilful contrivance he had despatched the helpful Quong Ho upstairs to Marcelle at the last moment, and had pitched Godfrey’s kit into the dining-room and had driven off without it. If the infatuated youth would not listen to reason or the lady to the plainest of speech, he should go off to his love in a cottage unromantically destitute of toothbrush and pyjamas. Ridicule kills. ”

“ As Baltazar’s body-servant he refrained from familiar conversation. But Baltazar was in an expansive mood. He went on:
“You cook for me enchantingly. You serve me perfectly. Your attitude, Quong Ho, is one of the most exquisite tact. But if we were the last two persons on the earth, you would see me damned before you would devote yourself to my personal comfort in this unrestricted manner.”
“I think not,” replied Quong Ho. “The truths of religion would not be affected by the annihilation of the human race. ”

“ Meanwhile, Baltazar walked home to Godalming with Quong Ho in gay spirits. It was just like the modern young Englishman to shy at the depths and attack the surface. And, after all, as a more alert glance assured him, the surface of Quong Ho deserved the censure of any reasonable being. ”

“ I must pay some penalty for my egotistical folly in bringing Quong Ho to this infernal place. Oh, I know,” he added quickly, checking with a gesture the doctor’s obvious remonstrance; “I know it might have happened anywhere. But nowhere else than in that desert island of a farm would I have had to leave him alone for hours on the bare ground, without medical assistance. It’s my fault. I must pay for it.”
“You’ve paid for it, my good friend,” said Dr. Rewsby, “by your anxiety, by your—apparently—by your remorse. You’ve done everything that a human being could do in the circumstances.” ”

“ Language is a marvellous solvent of prejudice. No one who talked English like the Vicar could strangle English necks. But Quong Ho, unfortunately, complicated this favourable impression by overdoing the perfect Briton.
At the butcher’s door, freshly coloured as the carcasses hanging at each side, stood Gwinnie Bates, the leader of the staring crowd, blocking the way. ”

“ Please let me have a look at it.”
“You can do that afterwards,” said Baltazar. “For God’s sake let us go.”
“You’re not fit to go. I won’t allow you to,” replied Dr. Rewsby with suave firmness.
Said Baltazar, with the hard gleam in his eyes, “I’m going. It’s my responsibility, not yours. I don’t care what happens to me. But I swear to God I neither wash nor eat nor drink until my friend Quong Ho is brought back, alive or dead. And it’s much better I should go with you than remain here and frighten your excellent wife, Mr. Pillivant, out of her wits.” ”

“ Myself adrift in a sort of typhoon, with not a human straw to cling to but my adopted son, this extraordinary mathematical genius of a Quong Ho. I fly to Cambridge to try to get some sort of sane attachment to life. I discover your existence. No sooner do I meet you than I’m thrown against the very woman for whose sake, as a young man, I chucked the whole of my career. ”

“ Nevermore would Spendale Farm be a human habitation. The men conveyed with their shovels the nameless things to the unhallowed resting-place. Baltazar would have liked to give the faithful Brutus, who had obviously rushed out of the house at the heels of Quong Ho and himself, decent burial. But not only had Brutus ceased to be Brutus, but Baltazar knew from experience the toil of digging in that granite-bound earth. ”

“ Quong Ho returned to the dining-room.
“I think, sir,” said he, “that we have just parted from a happy young man.”
“If a man’s not happy when he gets his heart’s desire at twenty-one,” said Baltazar, “he had better apply for transference to another planet. I threw mine away,” he added in a tone of reminiscence. “Wilfully. I ought to have been Senior Wrangler. But I was a fool. I was always taking false steps. That’s the wonderful thing about Godfrey, Quong Ho, as doubtless you’ve noticed—he always takes the right steps. A marvellously well-balanced mind.” ”

“ Now, as John Baltazar, who had been dead to the English-speaking world for nearly twenty years, held correspondence with no one save a few necessary tradesmen, mostly booksellers, as he took in no periodical, daily, weekly, monthly or annual of any kind whatever, and as he conversed with no human being except Quong Ho, whose lips he had sealed, he had created for himself an almost perfect barrage through which the news of contemporary happenings could not penetrate. ”

“ The incessant reaction on the individual would be death. One other nature at least was needed for the distribution and application of vital forces, and in their mutual action and reaction could alone be found the compensation that was safety, sanity, normal human existence. And the more attuned were the part of the reciprocal human machine, the greater the compensation; this human adjustment had its degrees: understanding, friendship, affection, culminating in love—the perfect state.
When Quong Ho appeared, books and papers as usual under his arm, Baltazar waved an inviting arm. ”

“ To bring a specialist from London would be a wicked waste of invaluable lime. All that science could do was being done. The rest must be left to Nature. Baltazar was disappointed. Having an exile’s faith in the wonders of modern surgery, he had thought that a few hundreds of pounds would have brought down a magician of a fellow from Harley Street with gleaming steel instruments, who could have mended Quong Ho’s head in a few miraculous seconds. The ironical smile on the lips of Rewsby, for whom he had conceived respect and liking, convinced him of extravagant imaginings. ”

“ That was his career. He saw it all before him. And Baltazar, led away by the boy’s bright promise, clapped both his hands on his shoulders in a powerful grip, and cried:
“I’m proud of you! My God, I’m proud of you! You and I will make our name famous again, as it was in the days of Admiral de Coligny. We’ll do things. We’ll make this rocking old Europe hum.” He laughed, and fire leaped into his eyes. “It’s good to be alive these days!”
“It is. It’s glorious!” replied Godfrey.
Quong Ho, smiling, urbane, approached with outstretched hand. ”

“ Quong Lee, the president of the Quong Duck Tong, a highbinder society, was her owner, and she supposed that everybody was like him, and that there was no goodness or happiness in all the world. All the world to Pao Chu meant just the limited area she could see from her iron-barred window—about one foot square. And yes—on one occasion the old hag who guarded her had fallen into a deep opium sleep, and Pao Chu had slipped out on the tiny, flower-decked balcony, and, leaning far over, had gazed with pathetic eagerness down at the swarming crowd of Chinamen below. ”

“ It was true he did not have a very definite idea of just what it meant to be one, but he knew this: his father belonged to the Hip Sing Tongs, an order of highbinders in San Francisco, and they were men who kept their promises. At night as he lay on his hard bamboo couch, with the fumes of opium thick around him, he could hear ho chun talking in a low tone to a crowd of men, who were all of the same order of highbinders as his father. “There is Chong Sing,” they were saying; “he has told some of our secrets to a white devil, and he must die ”

“ Falling men, stricken horses. The rush of the bandits, the dead left for the coyotes and the buzzards. He had glimpsed the robber stronghold with its women, its lawlessness. Quong was a conjuror of words, his style of speech, almost a monotone, had flawless technique in the art of story telling. Sheridan saw, too, Juan Mendoza, sidling like a crab among the patrons of the opium rooms, worshiping Quong, his god, who gave him surcease, telling him his secret. ”

“ When Quong Lung would have seated Wau Shun on the chair of which the highbinder had such a lively recollection, the coolie shook his head, saying: “Nay, who is thy slave that he should sit in the presence of the Most Powerful. The ground thou treadest is good enough for him.” ”

“ Ho Chin did not live in one of the small, dark, opium-scented rooms in which the rest of the Chinese children lived, but in the elegant Consulate with its large rooms and marble stairway; but, after all, he was just a boy, and liked the things that boys liked. He attended a very select American school, and dressed in American style. In fact, nothing was too good for Ho Chin—the eldest son of a Consul. But you know, sometimes he almost wished he was a common boy, and could run and play, and have the perfect freedom of the street boy. ”

“ Mr Gunson must be here, I thought, for Quong would naturally be drawn to him as a strong man who would protect him.
“Come along,” I said; “we are right after all.”
“No, no, stop!” he cried, seizing me and holding me back, for Quong evidently heard our voices, and darted back among the trees.
“Nonsense,” I said, struggling.
“Keep back, I tell you. ’Tain’t safe. They don’t know it’s us, and somebody may shoot.” ”

“ I explained, pained inwardly that one of official rank should so slightly esteem my appearance as to judge that I was so meagrely endowed. “The milk name of Ho; Tsin upon entering the Classes; as a Great Name Cheng; another style in Quank; the official title already expressed, and T’chun, Li, Yuen and Nung as the various emergencies of life arise.” ”