In Red and Gold

“His Excellency, Duke Ma Ch’un.” Doane added gently, “has sent a company of soldiers to escort you fittingly to his headquarters. They are waiting now at the outermost gate. I took it upon myself in this hour of sorrow and confusion to advise them, through the mouths of your loyal officers, that your excellency is not to be disturbed before dawn.”

Slowly, with an expressionless face, the viceroy folded the paper and laid it on the kang. He sank, then, beside it; with visible effort indicating that his visitor sit as well. But Doane remained standing – enormously tall, broad, strong; a man to command without question of rank or authority; a man, it appeared, hardly conscious of the calm power of personality that was so plainly his.

“Your Excellency is aware” – thus Doane said – “that to admit the authority of Duke Ma Ch’un at this sorrowful time is to submit both yourself and your lovely daughter to a fate that is wholly undeserved, one that I – if I may term myself the friend of both – can not bring myself to consider without indulging the wish to offer strong resistance. It has been said, ‘The truly great man will always frame his actions with careful regard to the exigencies of the moment and trim his sail to the favoring breeze.’ Your Excellency must forgive me if I suggest that, whatever value you may place upon your own life, we can not thus abandon your daughter, Hui Fei.”

The viceroy’s voice, when he spoke, had lost much of its timbre. It was, indeed, the voice of a weary old man. Yet the words came forth with the old kindly dignity.

“I asked you, Griggsby Doane, to make with me this painful journey to my home. We did not know then that we were moving from one scene of tragedy to another more terrible. But motive must not wait on circumstance. It need not be a hardship for my other children to live on in Asia as Asiatics. As such they were born. They know no other life. They will experience as much happiness as most. But with Hui Fei it is different. She must not be held away from contact with the white civilization. I did not give her this modern education for such an end as that. Hui Fei is an experiment that is not yet completed. She must have her chance. That is why I brought you here, Griggsbv Doane. My daughter must be got to Shanghai. There she has friends. I have ventured to count on your experience and good will to convey her safely there. Will you take her – now? To-night? I had meant to send with her the jewels and the paintings of Ming, Sung and Tang. Both collections are priceless. But the gems are gone – to-night. The paintings, however, remain. Will you take those and my daughter, and two servants – there are hardly more that I can trust – and slip out by the upper gate, and in some way escort her safely to Shanghai?”

“She would not go,” said Doane. “Not while you, Your Excellency, live, or while your body lies above ground.”

The viceroy, hesitating, glanced up at the vigorous man who spoke so firmly, then down at the scattered papers on the kang. In the very calm of that shadowed face he felt the bewildering strength of the white race; and he knew in his heart that the man was not to be gainsaid. His mind wavered. For perhaps the first time in his shrewd, patiently subtle life, he felt the heavy burden of his years.

“I will send for her,” he said now, slowly. “I will give her into your keeping. At my command she will go.”

“No, Your Excellency, I have already sent word to her to prepare herself for the journey. Again you must forgive me. Time presses. It remains only to collect the paintings. You must have those, at the least We start now in a very few moments. I have found here, a prisoner in your palace, the master of a junk that lies at the river bank, and have taken it upon myself to detain him further. He will convey us to Shanghai. It is now but a few hours before dawn. Hostile soldiers stand impatient at the outermost gate, eager to heap shame upon you and all that is yours. You must change your clothing – the dress of a servant would be best.”

He waited, standing very still.

“You will forgive indecision in a man of my years,” began the viceroy. After a moment he began again: “The world has turned upside down, Griggsby Doane.”

“You will come?”

The viceroy sighed. Trembling fingers reached out to gather the papers.

“I will come.” he said.

Adrift in unreality, fighting off from moment to moment the drowsy sense that these strange events were but a blur of dreams in which nothing could be true, nothing could matter, Rocky found himself at work in a dim room, taking down in great handfuls from shelves scrolls of silk wound on rods of ivory and putting them in lacquered boxes. Mr. Doane was there, and the servant, and a second servant of lower class, in ragged trousers and with his queue tied about his head. Still another Chinese appeared, shortly, in blue gown and sleeveless short jacket; an older man who looked, in the flickering faint light of the single lantern, curiously like the viceroy himself. The first servant disappeared and returned with the short poles of bamboo used everywhere in China in carrying burdens over the shoulder, and with cords and squares of heavy cotton cloth.

Every bit of woodwork that his hands touched in moving about, Rocky found to be intricately carved and gilded and inlaid with smooth lacquer. And dimly, crowded about the walls, he half saw, half sensed, innumerable vases, small and large, with rounding surfaces of cream-colored crackle and blood-red and blue-and-white and green which threw back the moving light like a softly changing kaleidoscope. And there were screens that gave out, from their profound shadows, the glint of gold.

They packed the boxes together, wrapped the large and heavy cubes in the squares of cloth and lashed them to hang from the bamboo poles. Four of them, then, Mr. Doane, Rocky himself and the servants, each balanced a pole over his shoulders and lifted the bulky cubes. The old man, who surely, now, was the viceroy, carried a European hand-bag. There were other parcels… They made their way along a nearly dark corridor and out into the moonlight. Here, in a porch, stood four silent figures – Dixie Carmichael he distinguished first; then Hui Fei, wearing a short coat and women’s trousers and a loose cloak. Her hair was parted and lay smoothly on her pretty bead, glistening in the moonlight… And the little princess was there, clinging to the hand of her sister and rubbing her eyes. They moved silently on, all together, following a path that wound among shrubbery, over an arching bridge to a gate.

Rocky could dimly see the timbers studded with spikes and the long hinges of bronze. The servant, with a great key, unlocked the gate, which closed softly behind them.

The pole weighed heavily on Rocky’s unaccustomed shoulder. There was a trick of timing the step to the swing of the bales, that, stumbling a little, he caught. He was to remember this – the little file of men and women gathered from the two ends of the earth and walking without a spoken sound down through a twisting, sunken Chinese road to the Yangtze. And sensing the gathering drama of his own life, brooding over it with slowly increasing nervous intensity, he found himself coming awake. If this kept on he would soon be excitedly beyond sleep. But it didn’t matter. They were saving Hui Fei. Not a word of explanation had been offered; but it was coming clear. As for the rest of it, he asked himself how it could matter. The presence of Miss Carmichael, a dangerous girl, an adventuress – he was thinking quite youthfully about her – who might easily be capable of anything, who could in a moment destroy the hope that was the only foundation, thus far, of his new life, and perhaps would choose to destroy it – even this, he tried to tell himself, couldn’t possibly matter. Over and over, stumbling and shuffling along, he told himself that; almost convinced himself that he believed it.

He was to remember most vividly of all the first glimpse, through a notch in the hills, of the river. The viceroy paused at that point, and turning back from the shining picture before him, where the moonlight silvered the unruffled surface of the water, toward the home of his ancestors over the hill, spoke in a low but again musical voice a few lines in which even the American youth could detect the elusive vowel rhymes of a Chinese poem. And he saw that Mr. Doane stood by with the slightly bowed head of one who attends a religious ceremony. It was a moving scene. But could he have understood the words the boy would have been puzzled. For the poem – the Surrendering of Po Chu-I. breathed resignation, humility, the negative philosophy so dear to Chinese tradition, but nothing of religion in the sense that he a Westerner, understood the word, nothing of mysticism or romantic illusion or childlike faith; rather a gentle recognition of the fact that life must go as it had come, unexplained, without tangible evidence of a personal hereafter; that, too, the individual is as nothing in the vast scheme of nature.

They were ferried out, shortly after this, to the great junk they had twice seen within the twenty-four hours, her smooth sides curving yellow in the moonlight, her decks now scraped and scrubbed clean, flowers blooming in porcelain pots about a charming gallery that extended high over the river astern. The crew, roused from slumber, came swarming out from under the low-spread mattings. The laopan stepped nimbly to his post amidships on the poop. The heavy tracking ropes were hauled aboard, and the craft swung slowly off down the current.

Doane, with a lantern, escorted his excellency and Hui Fei, and the whimpering little princess, to the rooms below; then returned and with the same impersonal courtesy conducted Miss Carmichael down the steps. But at the door he indicated she stopped short; wavered a moment, lightly, on the balls of her feet. Then she accepted the lantern from him, bit her lip, and let fall the curtain without replying to his suggestion that she had better sleep if she could.

Alone there, she held up the lantern. The floor had been lately scrubbed; but, even so, she made out a faint broad stain in the wood. And a bed of clean matting was spread where she had left a grisly heap.

For a time Dixie stood by the square small window, looking out over the shining river toward the dim northern bank with its hills that seemed to drift at a snail’s pace off astern. Her quick mind had never been farther from sleep. Her thin hands felt through her blouse the twisted ropes of pearls that were wound about her waist. Her lips were pressed tightly together. These pearls represented a fortune beyond even Dixie’s calculating dreams. To keep them successfully hidden during the days, perhaps weeks to come of floating down the river in close companionship with these two strong observant men, and a half crazy American boy, and clever Oriental women, would test her resourcefulness and her nerve. Though she felt, ever, now, no doubt of the latter…

The thing was tremendous. 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. For money, enough of it, she knew, will accomplish even that. While on the other, hand, to fail now, might, would, spell a life of drab adventure along the coast, without even a goal, without a decent hope; with, always, the pitiless years gaining on her.

She searched, tiptoeing, about the room, lantern in hand, for a place to hide her treasure; then reconsidered. In some way she must keep the pearls about her person; though not, as now, looped around her waist. An accidental touch there might start the fateful questioning.

She put down the lantern; stood for a long time by the curtained door, listening. From up and down the passage came only the heavy breathing of exhausted folk. She slipped out cautiously; made her way to the sloping deck above – how vividly familiar it was! – tiptoed lightly aft, past the uncurious helmsman, around the huge coils of rope and the piled-up fenders of interwoven matting, out to the pleasant gallery where the flowers were.

And then, as she stepped down and paused to breathe slowly, deeply, again the heavy-sweet perfume of the tuberoses, a boyish figure sprang up, with a nervous little gasp of surprise, from the steamer chair of Hong Kong grass.

She said, in her quiet way, “Oh, hello!” And then, with a quick sidelong glance at him, accepted the chair he offered. He seemed uncertain as to whether he would go or stay. Lowering her lids, she studied him. He was standing the excitement well, even improving. His carriage was better; he stood up well on his strong young legs. And he was quieter, better in hand, though of course the never-governed, long overstimulated emotions would not be lying very deep beneath this new, more manly surface. He was very good-looking, really a typical American boy.

He stood now, fingering the petals of a dahlia and gazing out astern into the luminous night. She pondered the question of exerting herself again to win him. The money was there, plenty of it. He would be as helpless as ever in her experienced hands. And the mere use of her skill in trapping and stripping him would be enjoyable… He was lingering.

She decided in the negative. He would surely become tempestuous. And as surely, if she permitted that, he would discover the pearls. And – again the thrill of mastery swept through her finely strung nerves – she had those. They were enough. But they must be better hidden. There was her problem still, a problem that aught at any instant become delicately acute. She considered it, lying comfortably back in the chair, luxuriating in the richly blended scent of the crowded blossoms, while her nearly closed eyes studied the restless boy.

Abruptly he turned. What now? Was he about to become tempestuous all on his own? It would be anything but out of character. Her slight muscles tightened, but her face betrayed no emotion, would have betrayed none in a more searching light than this soft flood from the moon. He was sentimental over the Manchu princess, now, of course. She hadn’t missed that. But in the case of an ungoverned boy, she well knew, the emotion itself could he vastly more important than its immediate object But now she was to meet with a small surprise.

“Look here!” he began, crude, naive, as always, “there’s something – perhaps – I ought to tell you. I tried to carry on with you. You’ve got a right to think anything about me – ”

At least he was keeping his voice down. She lay still; let him talk.

“ – But I’ve changed. Smile at that, if you want to!”

She did smile faintly, but only at his clear, clean ignorance of the insult that underlay his words.

“ – I was on the loose. It’s different now. I’m going to try to do something with my life. Whatever happens – I mean however my luck may seem to turn – ”

He could hardly go on with this. The next few words were swallowed down. It was plain enough that he couldn’t think clearly. And he couldn’t possibly know that he was giving her an opening through which, within a very few moments, she was to see the outline of the policy she must pursue during these difficult days to come on the junk.

She lifted her head; leaned on an elbow. “Do you know,” she said, in a voice that seemed, now, to have a note of friendliness, “I’m sorry for you.”

“Sorry for me!”

“Don’t think I can’t see how it is. And you mustn’t misunderstand me. I’m older than you. I’m pretty experienced. My life has been hard. There couldn’t be anything serious between you and me. You’ve wakened up to that.”

The new note in her voice puzzled him, but caught his interest. He stood looking straight down at her.

“I know you’re in love,” she went on.

“But – ”

“Don’t be silly. It’s plain enough. She’s very attractive. Nobody could blame you.”

“She’s wonderful!”

“It’s nice to see you feeling that way. It – it’s no good our talking about it, you and me. All I’ve got to say is – please don’t think I’d bother you. I may have led a rough life at times – a girl alone, who has to live by her wits – but – oh, well, never mind that! Every man has had his foolish moments. I understand you better than you will ever know – and – well, here’s good luck!” And she offered her hand.

He took it, breathless, eager. He seemed, then, on the point of pouring out his story to this new surprising friend. But a slight sound caught his attention. He looked up, and slowly let fall the hand that was gripped in his; for at the break of the deck, just above them, hesitating, very slim and wan, stood Miss Hui Fei.

The situation was, of course, in no way so dramatic as it seemed to the boy. He, indeed, drew back, overcome; the habit of guilty thought was not to be thrown off in a moment. Miss Carmichael, sensing that he would begin erecting the incident into a situation the moment he could clumsily speak, took the matter in hand; rising, and quietly addressing herself to the Manchu girl. Breeding, of course, was not hers, could not be; but her calm manner and her instinct for reticence could seem, as now, not unlike the finer quality.

“Do have this chair,” she said. “I was going down.”

Miss Hui Fei smiled faintly. “I coul’n’ sleep,” she murmured.

“There’s one little article I suppose none of us thought to bring – ” thus Miss Carmichael, balancing in her light way on the balls of her feet – “needle and thread.” She even indulged in a little passing laugh. “I think my maid – ” began Miss Hui Fei.

“Oh, no! I wouldn’t bother you!”

“Yes! Please – I don’ min’.”

She turned; and the boy started impulsively toward her. Miss Carmichael moved away, over the deck, but heard him saying, in a broken voice:

“You’ll come back? I’ve got to tell you something!”

To which Miss Hui Fei replied, in a voice that was meant to be at once pleasant and impersonal: “Why – yes. I think I’ll come back. It’s so close down there.” The two young women went below. Quietly Miss Carmichael waited in the passage.

The needle and thread were shortly forthcoming. The white girl smiled; seeming really friendly there in the dim ray of light that slanted in through a window.

“It’s good of you,” she said.

“Oh, no – it’s nothing.”

“We’re in for a rather uncomfortable trip of it. I hope you’ll let me do anything I can to help you. I’m more used to knocking about, of course.”

“We’ll all make the best of it,” said the Manchu girl, and turned, with an effort at a smile, toward the stairs.

Miss Carmichael entered her own room. The lantern still burned, but the candle-end was low. She saw now an iron lamp, an open dish full of oil with a floating wick. This she lighted with the candle. Next, moving about almost without a sound, she fastened the swaying door-curtain with pins. Then she slipped out of her blouse and skirt; untied the pearl cape; and seated on the bed of matting, with her back to the door, began patiently sewing the pearls into her undergarments. It was to be a long task. Before dawn the lamp burned out, and fearful of being caught asleep with the amazing treasure about her she stood at the window and let the wind blow into her face until the faintly spreading light of dawn made the work again possible. The drowsiness that nearly overcame her now she fought off with an iron will. Nothing mattered – nothing but success. Her thin deft fingers worked in a tireless rhythm. Only once, very briefly, did she yield to the impulse to weigh the exquisite lustrous globes in her hands; to hold them close to the light. Her tireless reason told her that this wouldn’t do. It brought an excited throbbing to her weary head… She settled again to her task; time enough to gloat later. By way of a healthy mental occupation she counted the pearls as she threaded them – up to a thousand – on up to two thousand – then (the sun was redly up now; and folk were stirring about the deck) three thousand. In all, a few more than thirty-seven hundred pearls she threaded about her person; and then slipped back into blouse and skirt before permitting herself a few hours of sleep. The diamond-studded clasps she wrapped in a bit of cloth and stuffed into her hand-bag.

The Chinese maid woke her then, bringing food that had been cooked, she knew, in the brick stove up forward, where the crew slept. She could bring herself to eat but a few mouthfuls… This didn’t matter, either. No hardship was of consequence in such a battle as hers; she would have submitted coolly to torture rather than surrender her prize. But it suggested fresh tactics. She had a knack at cooking. Quietly, later in the day – she knew better than to try effusive friendliness; to play herself to the last would be best – she spoke to Mr. Doane of that small gift. A kitchen was improvised in the laopan’s cramped quarters, aft; and Miss Carmichael, quite intent about her business, coolly cheerful about it, indeed, began to prove her capacity. And she knew, then, that she was winning. They would soon be respecting her, even liking her.

Even so she would keep her distance; then they would have to keep theirs. That was all she needed.

To Rocky, the most elusive memory of all this eventful night was the conversation with Miss Hui Fei. For she returned in a moment – so he remembered it – and sank wearily into the steamer chair. The picture of that scene was to vary bafflingly in his mind. At times he saw himself, torn with an emotion now so great that it seemed the end of life, standing over her, saying, passionately:

“I know how it looked – you’re finding us here like that! And you’d have reason. I did flirt with her. I’m ashamed now. I hadn’t seen you – felt you – like this. But that’s all over. I was telling her – Please! You’ve got to know! – that I love you. Or telling her enough. She understood. And she was awfully decent. She took my hand, wished me luck.”

There must have been a brief time then when the poor girl was endeavoring pleasantly to turn aside this torrent of heavily freighted words. Certainly he was talking feverishly on. He could remember pulling down a coil of rope from the steersman’s deck and sitting moodily beside her; and there was a sensation in their minds, his and hers, of being at cross-purposes. There was something about her, back of the weary smile – a smile that was long to haunt him, dim in the moonlight, exquisite in its sensitive beauty – that eluded his pressing desire until it seemed near to driving him mad. Kipling’s East is East, and West is West, slipped in among his thoughts; kept coming and coming until it became a nerve-wracking singsong in his brain.

There was one period, fortunately very short, when he seemed to be almost forcing a quarrel. Why, he couldn’t afterward imagine. That part of it was dreadful in the retrospect. He had reached the point, apparently, when he couldn’t longer endure the failure to reach her. There was simply no response. It was almost as if he were frightening her away. Perhaps it was just that.

But the most vivid memory was of the unaccountable force that suddenly rose in him, seizing on his tongue, his brain, his very nerves. The power of the Kanes was abruptly his, and it brought its own skill with it. It was, distinctly, a possession. It simply came, at this very top of his emotional pitch. There must have been preliminaries. He must have said things that she must have answered. But these lesser moments dropped out. Even a day later, he could see, could almost feel, himself on one knee beside the steamer chair, saying those amazing things, without a shred of memory as to how he got there. Never had he so spoken, to girl or woman; for in the escapades of the younger Rocky there had always been a reticence if seldom a restraint. It was precocity; the blood that was in him.

“You beautiful, wonderful girl!” he was breathing, close to her ear. (He was never to forget this.) “How can you hide your feelings from me? Can’t you see it’s just driving me mad?.. You’re adorable! You’re exquisite! You thrill me so – just your voice; the way you walk – your hands – your hair!.. Can’t you understand, dear, it isn’t what they call ‘love.’” (This with a divine contempt.) “It’s the cry of my whole being. I want to give you my life. I want to know your life – study it – come to understand the wonderful people that has made you possible! I’m going to study it – history, art, everything!.. I worship you! I dream so of you – all the time – daytimes! I just half-close my eyes and then, right away, I can see you, walking. And I see you as you were at the dance on the boat.” He choked a little; then rushed on. “And in those dreams I always take you in my arms – No, let me say it! The angels are singing it, the wonderful truth! – I take you in my arms and kiss your hair and your eyes. You always close your eyes – oh, so slowly – and I press my lips on the lids. And your arms are around my neck. I can feel your hands. But I never kiss your lips – not in those dreams. Because that will mean that you have given me your soul, and I always know I must wait for that…