In Red and Gold

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.

At last she murmured: “I think I coul’ rest now.”

“I’m glad,” said he, and drew down a coil of rope for a pillow, and left her sleeping there.

Doane heard his step, but for a moment could not lift his head. Finally the boy, standing respectfully, spoke his name: “Mr. Doane!”

“Yes.”

“May I sit here with you?”

“Of course. Do.”

“I’ve got to talk to somebody. It’s so strange. You see, she and I – Miss Hui Fei – it’s all been such a whirl I couldn’t think, but…”

That sentence never got finished. The boy dropped down on the deck and clasped his knees. Doane, very gravely, considered him. He was young, fresh, slim. He had changed, definitely; a degree of quiet had come to him. And there could be no mistaking the unearthly light in his eyes. The love that is color and sunshine and exquisite song had touched and transformed him.

Doane could not speak. He waited. Young Kane finally brought himself with obvious, earnest effort in a sense to earth. But his voice was unsteady in a boyish way.

“Mr. Doane,” he asked, “do you believe in miracles?”

Thoughtfully, deliberately, Doane bowed his great head. “I am forced to,” he replied.

“You’ve seen men change – from dirty, selfish brutes, I mean, to something decent, worth while?”

“Many times.”

“Really?.. But does it have to be religion?1’

“I don’t knew.”

“Can it be love? The influence of a woman, I mean – a girl?”

“Might that not be more or less the same thing?”

“Do you really think that?”

Again the great head bowed. And there was a long silence. Rocky broke it

“I wish you would tell me exactly how you feel about marriage between the races.”

“Why – really – ”

“You must have observed a lot, all these years out here. And the pater tells me that you’re an able man, except that you’ve sort of lost your perspective. He did tell me that he’d like to have you with him, if you could only bring yourself around to our ways.” Rocky, even now, could see this only as a profound compliment. He rushed on: “Oh, don’t misunderstand me! She doesn’t love me yet. How could she? I’ve got to earn the right even to speak of it again. But if I should earn the right – in time – tell me, could an American make her happy?”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that general question.” But Rocky felt that he was kind. “The pater says I’d be wrecking my life. He says she’d always be pulled two ways – you know! God! He seemed to think I had only to ask her, and she’d come. He doesn’t understand.”

“No,” said Doane – “I’m afraid he couldn’t understand.”

“You feel that too? It’s very perplexing. I know I’ve spoken carelessly about the Chinese and Manchus. I looked down on them. I did! But oh, if I could only make it clear to you how I feel now! If I could only express it! We’ve been talking a long time, she and I. I don’t mind telling you I’m taking a pretty bitter lesson, right now. She knows so much. She has such fine – well, ideals – ”

“Certainly.”

“Oh, you’ve noticed that!.. Well, I feel crude beside her. Of course, I am.”

“Yes – you are. Even more so than you can hope to perceive now.”

The youth winced; but took it. “Well, suppose – just suppose that I might, one of these days, prove that I’m decent enough to ask her to be my wife… Oh, don’t think for a minute that I don’t understand all it means. I do. I tell you I’m starting again. I’m going to fight it out.”

“That is fine,” said Griggsby Doane, and looked squarely, gravely, at the very young face. It was a white face, but good in outline; the forehead, particularly, was good. And the blue eyes now met his. “I believe you will fight it out. And I believe you have it in you to win.”

“I’m going to try, Mr. Doane. But just suppose I do win. And suppose I win her. It’s when I think of that, that I… I’ll put it this way – to my friends, to everybody in New York, she’d be an oddity. A novelty, not much more. You know what most of them would think, in their hearts. Either they’d make an exception in her case – partly on my account, at that – or else they’d look down on her. You know how they are about people that aren’t – well, the same color that we are. Probably I couldn’t live out here. The business is mainly in New York, of course. And she’s such an enthusiastic American herself – she’d want to be there. Some, anyway. And she’s got to be happy. She’s like a flower to me, now; like an orchid. Oh, a thousand times more, but… What could I do? How could I plan? Oh, I’d fight for her quick enough. But you know our cold rich Americans. They wouldn’t let me fight. They’d just…”

“My boy,” said Doane. quietly but with an authority that Rocky felt, “you can’t plan that. You can do only one thing.”

“What thing?”

“Stay here in China a year before you offer yourself to that lovely girl. Study the Chinese – their language, their philosophy, their art. A year will not advance you far, but it should be enough to show you where you yourself stand.”

“A year…!”

“Listen to what I am going to try to tell you. Listen as thoughtfully as you can. First I must tell you this – the Chinese civilization has been – in certain aspects still remains – the finest the world has known. With one exception, doubtless.”

“What exception?”

“The Grecian. You see, I have startled you.”

“Well, I’m still sort of bewildered.”

“Naturally. But try to think with me. The Chinese worked out their social philosophy long ago. They have lived through a great deal that we have only begun, from tribal struggles through conquest and imperialism and civil war to a sort of republicanism and a fine feeling for peace and justice. And then, when they had given up primitive desire for fighting they were conquered by more primitive Northern tribes – first the Mongols, and later the Manchus. The Manchus have been absorbed, have become more or less Chinese.

“And now a few more blunt facts that will further startle you. The Chinese are the most democratic people in the world. No ruler can long resist the quiet force of the scores of thousands of villages and neighborhoods of the empire.

“They are the most reasonable people in the world. You can no more judge them from the so-called Tongs in New York and San Francisco, made up of a few Cantonese expatriates, than you can judge the culture of England by the beachcombers of the South Seas.

“They developed, centuries before Europe, one of the finest schools of painting the world has so far known. There is no school of reflective, philosophical poetry so ripe and so fine as the Chinese. They have had fifty Wordsworths, if no Shakespeare.

“You will find Americans confusing them with the Japanese, whom they resemble only remotely. All that is finest in Japan – in art and literature – came originally from China.”

“You take my breath away,” said Rocky slowly. But he was humble about it; and that was good.

“But listen, please. What I am trying to make clear to you is that in old Central China – in Hang Chow, and along this fertile Yangtze Valley, and northwest through the Great Plain to Kai Feng-fu and Sian-fu in Shensi – where the older people flourished – germinated the thought and the art, the humanity and the faith, that have been a source of culture to half the world during thousands of years.

“But you can not hope to understand this culture through Western eyes. For you will be looking out of a Western background. You must actually surrender your background. It is no good looking at a Chinese landscape or a portrait with eyes that have known only European painting. Can you see why? Because all through European painting runs the idea of copying nature – somehow, however subtly, however influenced by the nuances of color and light, copying. But the Chinese master never copied a landscape He studied it, felt it, surrendered his soul to it, and then painted the fine emotion that resulted. And, remember this, he painted with a conscious technical skill as fine as that of Velasquez or Whistler or Monet.”

The youth whistled softly. “Wait, Mr. Doane, please… the fact is, you’re clean over my head. I – I don’t know a thing about our painting, let alone theirs. You see I haven’t put in much time at – ” He stopped. His smooth young brows were knit in the effort to think along new, puzzling channels. “But she would understand,” he added, honestly, softly.

“Exactly! She would understand. That is what I am trying to make clear to you.”

“But you’re sort of – well, overwhelming me.”

“My boy.” said Doane very kindly, “you could go back home, enter business, marry some attractive girl of your own blood who thinks no more deeply than yourself, whose culture is as thinly veneered as your own – forgive me. I am speaking blunt facts.”

“Go on. I’m trying to understand.”

“ – And find happiness, in the sense that we so carelessly use the word. But here you are, in China, proposing to offer your life to a Manchu princess. You do seem to see clearly that there, would be difficulties. It is true that our people crudely feel themselves superior to this fine old race. As a matter of fact, one of the worthiest tasks left in the world is to explain East to West – draw some part of this rich old culture in with our own more limited background. But as it stands now, the current will be against you. So I say this – study China. Open your mind and heart to the beauty that is here for the taking. Try to look through the decadent surface of this tired old race and see the genius that still slumbers within. If, then, you find yourself in the new belief that their culture is in certain respects finer than ours – as I myself have been forced to believe – if you can go to Hui Fei humbly – then ask her to be your wife. For then there will be a chance that you can make her happy. Not otherwise.”

Doane stopped abruptly. His deep voice was rich with emotion. The boy was stirred; and a moment later, when he felt a huge hand on his shoulder he found it necessary to fight back the tears. The man seemed like a father; the sort of father he had never known.

“Don’t ask her so long as a question remains in your mind. Defiance won’t do – it must be faith, and knowledge. I can’t let you take the life of that girl into your keeping on any other terms.”

The odd emphasis of this speech passed quite by the deeply preoccupied young mind.

“You’re right,” he replied brokenly. “I’ve got to wait. Everything that you say is true – I really haven’t a thing in the world to offer. I’m an ignorant barbarian beside her.”

“You have the great gift of youth,” said Doane gently.

But a moment later Rocky broke out with: “But, Mr. Doane – how can I wait? She – after her father – they’re going to take her away – make her marry somebody at Peking – somebody she doesn’t even know – ”

“I don’t think they will succeed in that plan,” said Doane very soberly.

“But why not? What can she do? A girl – alone – ”

“There are tens of thousands of girls in China that have solved that problem.”

“But I don’t see – ”

“You must still try to keep your mind open. You are treading on ground unknown to our race.” A breathless quality crept into Doane’s voice; his eyes were fixed on the distant river bank. “I wonder if I can help you to understand. Death – the thought of death – is to them a very different thing – ”

“Oh!” It was more a sharp indrawing of breath than an exclamation. “You don’t mean that she would do that?”

Doane bowed his head.

“But she couldn’t do a cowardly thing.”

Doane brought himself, with difficulty, to utter the blunt word. “Suicide, in China, is not always cowardice. Often it is the finest heroism – the holding to a fine standard.”

“Oh, no! It wouldn’t ever – ”

“Please! You are a Westerner. Your feelings are those of the younger – yes, the cruder half of the world. I must still ask you to try to believe that there can be other sorts of feelings.” Again the great hand rested solidly on the young shoulder; and now, at last, the boy became slightly aware of the suffering in the heart of this older man. Though even now he could not grasp every implication. That human love might be a cause he did not perceive. But he sensed, warmly, the ripe experience and the compassionate spirit of the man.

“You have stepped impulsively into an Old-World drama,” Doane went quietly on – “into a tragedy, indeed. No one can say what the next developments will be. You can win, if at all, only by becoming yourself, a fatalist; You must move with events. Certainly you can not force them.”

“But I can take her away,” cried the boy hotly; finishing, lamely, with “somehow.”

“Against her will?”

“Well – surely – ”

“She will not leave her father.”

“But – oh, Mr. Doane…”

He fell silent. For a long time they sat without a word, side by side. Here and there about the junk sleepers awoke and moved about. A few of the women, forward, set up their wailing but more quietly now. The craft headed in gradually toward the right bank, passing a yellow junk that was moored inshore and moving on some distance up-stream. At a short distance inland a brown-gray village nestled under a hillside.

“That junk passed us before we left the island,” Rocky observed, gloomily making talk.

Doane’s gaze followed his down-stream; then at a sound like distant thunder, he turned and listened. “What’s that?” asked the boy.

Doane looked up into the cloudless, blazing sky. “That would be the guns at Hankow,” he replied.

The lictors were landed first to seek carts in the village. Then all were taken ashore in the small boat. His excellency smilingly, with unfailing poise, talked with Doane of the beauties of the river; even quoted his favorite Li Po, as his quiet eyes surveyed the hills that bordered the broad river:=

“‘The birds have all flown to their trees,The last, last lovely cloud has drifted off,But we never tire in our companionship —The mountains and I,’”=

The line of unpainted, springless carts, roofed with arched matting, yellow with the fine dust of the highway, moved, squeaking, off among the hills. Following close went the women and the servants. The junk swung deliberately out and off down the river.

Doane, declining a cart, walked beside that of his excellency; Rocky Kane, deadly pale, his mouth set firmly, beside Miss Hui Fei. And so, through the peaceful country-side they came to the long brick wall and the heavily timbered gate house by the road, and, pausing there, heard very faintly the soft tinkling of the little bronze bells within. It was late afternoon. The shadows were long; and the evening birds were twittering among the leafy branches just within the wall.

CHAPTER XI – THE LANDSCAPE SCROLL OF CHAO MENG-FU

ROCKY KANE, the few hours that followed were to exist in memory as a confused sequence of swift-pressing scenes, all highly colored, vivid; certain of them touched with horror, others passing in a flash of exotic beauty; while the fire of hot, unreasoning young love burned all but unbearably within his breast.

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 would remember the sad face of Miss Hui Fei-drawn back within the shadow of the cart and the faint smiles that came and so quickly went; and the efforts he made, at first, to cheer her with boyishly bright talk of this and that.

He would remember how he made his way forward through the press, without recalling what had just been said, or what, precisely, could have been the impulse driving him on; past his excellency – sitting yet in his cart, calmly waiting, while the drabbled man darins stood respectfully by; and how he found the soldiers carrying oddly limp Bodies into one of the gate houses, hiding them there.

He would remember the picture on which he stumbled as he rounded the inner screen of brick; Mr. Doane and an officer and two or three soldiers standing thoughtfully about a fat body in spattered silks that was hideously without a head; standing there in the half dusk – for the shadows were lengthening softly into evening here under the trees – Mr. Doane then bending over, the officer kneeling, to examine the embroidery on the breast; and then two soldiers bringing up a pole on the end of which grinned the missing head; and then the sound of his own voice – curiously breathless and without body, asking, “What is it, Mr. Doane? What terrible thing has happened?” And then, even while he was speaking, four soldiers carrying another body by, this of a stout man in shirt and flannel trousers, that he felt he had seen somewhere before.

He would remember – when they had carried out the last awful reminder of the bloodshed that had been, and while Mr. Doane pressed a hand to his eyes as if in prayer – how he stood silent there on the gravel area, looking up into the trees and about at the dim quaint pai-lows on either hand and at the pavilions behind them, each on its arch of stone over placid dark water; and how the lightly moving air of evening whispered through the trees, stirring, with the foliage, faintly musical little bells; and how, into this moment of calm, appeared, light of step, swinging her shopping bag as she descended the marble steps of the pavilion at the right and came forward under the pai-lows, the pale girl, Dixie Carmichael, who glanced respectfully toward Mr. Doane, and at Rocky himself raised her black eyebrows while her thin lips softly framed the one word, “You?” 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.

He was to forget what they said, he and this unaccountable, cool girl, as he left her out there and hurried back; but would remember the picture he found on his return – Mr. Doane striding off deliberately into the darkness beyond the little white bridges, while the officer followed with a lantern, and the few soldiers, also with lanterns, straggled after. He would remember crowding himself past all of them, snatching one of the lanterns as he ran, and falling into step at the side of the huge determined man.

There were broad courtyards, then, and buildings with heavily curving roofs and columns richly colored and carved, with dim lights behind windows of paper squares. There were drunken soldiers, who ran away, and screaming women, and other women who would never scream or smile again. There was litter and splintered furniture and a broken-in door here and there. There was a familiar big soldier who plunged at Mr. Doane with a glinting blade in his hand; and then a sharp struggle that was to last, in retrospect, but an instant of time, for the clearer memory was of himself binding with his handkerchief a small cut in Mr. Doane’s forearm while the soldiers carried out a wounded struggling giant, and then shouts and shots from the courtyard when the giant escaped. And he would remember picking up an unset ruby from the tiling and handing it to Mr. Doane. There was the picture, then, of a melancholy procession winding slowly through the grove with bobbing gay lanterns.

And finally, to the boy incredibly, the place came into a degree of order and calm. Women and men disappeared into this building and that. Rocky sat alone on the steps of a structure that might have been a temple, hands supporting his throbbing head. The moonlight streamed down into the courtyard; he could see the grotesque ornaments on the eaves of the buildings, and the large blue-and-white bowls and vases in which grew flowering plants and dwarfed trees from Japan, and, in the farther gate, a sentry lounging. Now and again faint sounds came from within the largest of the buildings, voices and footsteps; and he could see lights again dimly through the paper. He wondered what they might be doing… His thoughts were a fever. The spirit of Hui Fei hovered like an exquisite dream there, but crowding in with malignant persistence came, kept coming, pictures of Dixie Carmichael. He wondered where they had put her. Perhaps she was already asleep. It would be like her to sleep. She was so cold, so oddly unhealthy. Doubtless, surely, he would have to speak with her.

He must have dozed. Soldiers were dragging themselves sleepily about the courtyard, rifles in hand. Two officers and a mandarin in a gown were examining a paper by the light of a lantern. Then Mr. Doane came out and read the paper. They talked in Chinese, Mr. Deane’s as fluent as theirs. Rocky thought drowsily about this; considered vaguely the years of study and experience that must lie back of that fluency.

Mr. Doane, indeed, seemed to be assuming a sort of command. With great courtesy, but with impressive finality, he appeared to be outlining a course to which the mandarin assented. The officers bowed and went out through the gate. And when the mandarin and Doane then turned and entered the largest building it was the white man who held the paper in his hand.

Rocky fell again into a doze; slept until he found Mr. Doane shaking him.

“Come with me now. You can help.” Thus the huge grave man with the deep shadows in his face.

And Rocky went with him, guided by a servant with a lantern, through corridors and courtyards, glimpsing dimly massive pillars and panels in black wood and softly red silk and railings of marble carved into exquisite tracery.

With the paper that the boy had drowsily observed Doane sought his excellency. Dominated by the white man the attendant mandarin tapped at an inner door, then hesitatingly opened; and Doane alone stepped within.

The room was long, plain, obscurely seen by the light of a single incandescent lamp over the formal kang or platform across the farther end. Doane had not thought of electric light in here and found it momentarily surprising. The walls were paneled in silk; the ceiling was heavy with beams. Against either side wall, mathematically at the center, stood a square small table and a square stool, heavily carved. Seated on the kang, with papers spread about and brushes and ink pot directly under the light, in short quilted coat and simple black cap, was Kang; a serenely patient figure, quietly working. He had merely looked up; a frail old man, quite beyond the reach of annoyance, whose eyes gazed unafraid over the rim of mere personal life into the eternal, tireless energy that would so soon absorb all that was himself. Then, recognizing the stalwart figure that moved forward into the light, he rose and clasped his hands and smiled.

“Only an unexpected crisis would lead me to intrude thus,” began Doane in Chinese, bowing in courtly fashion and clasping his own hands before his breast.

“No visit from Griggsby Doane could be regarded as an intrusion in my home,” replied his excellency.

“I will speak quickly, in the Western fashion,” Doane went on. “His Excellency, the General Duke Ma Ch’un, commanding before Hankow, writes that he regrets deeply the violent death of the eunuch, Chang Yuan-fu on your excellency’s premises while dutifully engaged on the business of her imperial majesty, and cordially requests that your excellency come at once to headquarters as his personal guest to assist him in making an inquiry into the tragedy. He supplements this invitation with a copy of a telegram from His Excellency, Yuan Shih-k’ai, commanding him to guard at once your person and property.”

The simple elderly man, who had been a minister, a grand councilor and a viceroy, seemed to recoil slightly as his eyes drooped to the papers about him; then he reached, with a withered hand that trembled, for this new paper and very slowly read it through.