In Red and Gold

“Please! You must listen! Can’t you see I’m just tearing my heart out and putting it in your hands – under your feet? There isn’t any other life for me. I can’t live without you. I could give up my friends, my home, my country, and be happy just serving you.”

He had captured her hand; had it tight in his two hands and was kissing it tenderly. The thrill was unbelievable now. It was ecstasy. He could hear himself murmuring over and over, “You’re so exquisite! So thrilling! I love the way your hair lies over your forehead. I love your eyes, especially when you smile”… On and on.

The tired sad girl in the steamer chair could not fail to respond in some measure, in every sensitive nerve, to so ardent a wooing. Even when she rose, and struggled a little to withdraw her hand, she couldn’t be angry. He was surprising; in his very boyishness, compelling.

Then, a little later, he was sitting moodily on the extension front of the chair, face in hands, plunged into a wordless abyss; she sat on the edge of the steersman’s deck, leaning against the rail, her face close to a lotus plant, with one flower that looked a ghostly blue in the fading moonlight, and just later, shaded through pink to deep red with the first quick-spreading color of the dawn. His emotional outburst had passed, for the moment, like a gust. He seemed to himself, already, to have failed. His thoughts were turned, behind the gray half-covered face, on death. For so swung the pendulum. He couldn’t, in these depths, draw significance from the remarkable fact that she had risen only to drop down again and carry forward the talk that he let fall, and that he had, for the time at least, swept away those mental obstacles. Certainly Miss Hui Fei was not elusive now.

The things she was saying, in a deliberate, matter-of-fact way, bewildered him.

“I don’ want you to make love to me like tha’.”

“But how can I help it? You’re so wonderful. You thrill me so. I tell you it’s my whole life. I can never live on without you – not any more. It’s got to be with you, or – or nothing.”

It was strange. This impulsive affection had grown very, very rapidly within him; yet, even a day earlier he couldn’t have pictured this scene. Not a phrase of these burning sentences he was so fervently uttering had been consciously framed in his mind. A part of the thrill of the situation lay in the very fact that he was so wildly committing himself. Now that it was being said, he felt no desire to take a word back. He meant it all; and more – more.

But she – still, even in the telltale morning light, quaint, charming, adorable – was growing so practical about it.

“You’re a ver’ romantic boy.”

“I’m not! This is real! Can’t you understand that it’s love – forever?”

“Please!.. I don’ want you to think I don’ un’erstan’. It’s ver’ sweet an’ generous of you – ”

“I’m not generous! I want you!”

“I do apprecia’ all it woul’ mean. You offer me so much – ”

“You dear girl, I offer you everything – everything I have or am! I don’t want to live at all unless it’s with you always at my side.”

“But I don’t think – Please! I woui’n’ hurt you for anything. You’ve helped so – helped saving my father’s life an’ mine. It’s won’erful – but I don’ think life is like that. People mus’ have so much in common to marry in the Western way. They mus’ love each other, yes. But in their min’s an’ feelings they mus’ share so much – their backgroun’s…”

He was out of the chair now; was beside her on the deck.

“Listen!” he was huskily saying. “Well get married right away in Shanghai. We’ve got to! I won’t let you say no! And then we won’t go back. Well stay out here. There’ll be money enough, in spite of the pater. We’ll study this East together. I’m going to devote all the rest of my life to it. Well build our common interest. I shall never want anything else!”

“How do you knew that?”

“Can you doubt me?” He had both her hands now. He seemed so young, so eager. He would fight for what he greatly desired, as his father had fought before him. However crudely, boyishly, he would fight.

“No” – her own voice was, surprisingly, a little unsteady – “of course I don’ doubt you. But how can you know what you’re going to wan’ – years from now. I don’ un’erstan’ that. It does seem pretty romantic to me. I don’t know for myself. I coul’n’ tell.”

This, or perhaps it was her failure to rise to his ecstasy, plunged him again into the depths.

“It’s you or nothing now,” he repeated. “You or nothing.”

“Wha’ do you mean by that?”

“I’ve got to have you. If I can’t, I’ll – oh, I guess I’ll just drop quietly overboard. What’s the use?”

“Do you think it’s fair to talk li’ that?”

“Perhaps not, but – I guess I’m beside myself.”

“Listen!” said she now: with a friendly, even sympathetic pressure of his trembling hands, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think the thing for you to do is to go back to college.”

This stung him. “How can you talk like that,” he cried, “when – ”

“I don’ wan’ to hurt you. But please try to think this as I wan’ you to.”

“Haven’t you any feeling for me?”

“Of course, an’ I’m ver’ grateful.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk like that.”

There was a pause. He withdrew his hands; plunged his feverish face into them.

She rose, wearily. Said: “I’m going to try to sleep.”

“And you could go? Leaving it like this?”

“Please! I can’t help – ”

“Oh, I understand – ” he was on his feet before her; caught her arms in his hands that now were firm and young – “I haven’t moved you yet, that’s all. But I will. We Kanes aren’t quitters. We don’t give up. And I’m not going to give you up. I’m going to win you. Can’t you see that I’ve got to? That I can’t live… Listen! You’re the loveliest, daintiest little girl in the world. You’re exquisite. Your voice is music to me. I’ve got to live my life to that music. It’ll be beautiful! Can’t you see that? I don’t care how much time it takes. I’ll settle down to it. But I’ll win you. And we’ll be married at Shanghai?”

He was very nearly irresistible now. The power in him was real. She broke away; then, a surprise to herself, lingered. Strangely to her, this ardent, still somewhat impossible boy, with his vital, Western force, had actually created an atmosphere of romance in which she was, for the moment, and in a degree, enveloped. She knew, clearly enough, that she must exert herself to escape from it: but lingered.

He caught her hands again; covered them with kisses; held them firmly while his eyes, suddenly radiant, sought hers and, during a moving instant, held them. She went below then. And Rocky dropped into the steamer chair and smiled exultantly as he drifted into slumber.

When they met again, away from the others, after an excellent luncheon of fowl and vegetables prepared by the surprising Miss Carmichael, his mood was wholly changed. He had charm; consciously or unconsciously, he made it felt.

“I wasn’t fair to you,” he began.

“If you don’ min’,” said she, “we jus’ won’ talk abou’ that.”

“Can’t help it.” He smiled a little. “There’s no use pretending I can think about another thing. I’m madly in love with you – hopelessly gone. It’ll probably simplify things if you’ll just accept that as a fact. But last night – this morning – whenever it was! – after all we’d been through – you know, it wasn’t so unnatural that I got all fired up that way.”

As this half-smiling, half-serious youth was plainly going to be even more difficult to manage than the ardent boy of the glowing dawn, she was silent.

“Here’s the thing,” he went on. “I was too worn out myself to be considerate of you. I meant every word, of course. You’ll never know how wonderful you seem to me.” This rather wistfully. They were leaning on the rail, gazing at the rocky hills along the southern bank. “It’s all wrong for me to be so impatient. I know I’ve got to make good. I’ve got to earn you. That won’t come all at once. But I am going to try not to get stirred up like that again. God knows you’ve got enough to bother you.”

“I’m ver’ uncertain abou’ my father,” said she. “How do you mean?”

“Oh – he stays in his room. He doesn’ come out with us. An’ he’s always working.”

“Well – does that mean anything? Wouldn’t he naturally be busy?”

“I don’ think so. No, like this.”

“But I don’t understand what – ”

“It isn’ easy to say. When a man like father – what you call a mandarin – feels that he mus’” – her voice wavered – “that he mus’ go, there is a grea’ deal that he must wri’ to his frien’s an’ to the governmen’. He doesn’ wan’ to be disturb’. I can’ tell wha’ he’s doing. It worries me.”

Doane, during the sunny dreamy afternoon, heard them, now and again. They were quite monopolizing the pleasant after gallery. And they were drifting on into their love story. He could not restrain himself from watching and listening. Despite the fact that his own dream was over, Doane felt about it, in his heart, like a boy. The sight of her quickened his pulse. Thoughts of her – mental pictures – came irresistibly. And these, at times, puzzled his heart if never his reason; the moment on the top deck of the steamer, when she climbed the after ladder and first confided her tragic difficulty; the dance she “sat out” with him.

… He called himself, often enough, a fool. But his spirit refused to accept the words that formed in his mind. He was simply at war with himself… The sort of thing happened often enough in life, of course. Every man lived through such periods. Men of middle age in particular… Thus he fell back, over and again, on reason. It was all he could do. Plainly the experience would take a lot of living through.

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. At times he nearly convinced himself that he felt only concern lest they rush along too fast; surrender their hearts, only to find too late that the necessary affinity was not growing into flower. The boy must have some proving, of course. That lovely girl mustn’t be sacrificed.

Late in the afternoon they were singing, softly, even humorously. Doane caught snatches of Mandalay, and the college songs. That would seem to them a fine bond, of course – the mere casual fact that both knew the songs. For youth is quite as simple as that… So they were rushing on with it, while an older man pondered. Rocky hung unashamed on her every word, every movement; waited forlornly about whenever she went below; starting at sounds, sinking into moods, and shining with radiance when she reappeared. He even had gentle moments… What girl could be insensible to all that? He himself was avoiding them, of course. There was no helping that; certainly in this stage of the romance.

His excellency appeared on deck during the second afternoon; greeted Doane in friendly fashion – looking oddly simple in his servant costume; blue gown, plain cloth slippers, skull-cap with a knot of vermilion silk. They walked the deck together; later, they sat on a coil of rope. In manner he was very nearly his old self; smiling a thought less, perhaps, but as humanly direct in his talk as a Chinese.

“We shall soon be parting, Grigsby Doane,” he remarked, “and I shall think much of you. Do you know yet where you shall go and what you shall do?”

“No,” 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.”

This shrewd bit of observation struck Doane sharply. Come to think, it was true.

“At the critical moment you wasted not one thought in reflection. You weighed none of the difficulties; you ignored consequences. You took command. You acted. As a result – here we are… I suppose you were right. At any rate, I yielded to your active judgment. It has saved my daughter.”

“And you, as well, Your Excellency, if I may say so.”

“Very well – myself too… I shall always think of you now as I have twice seen you – once in that curious boxing match on the steamer; and again as you took command of me and my own house. I regret that in my position as a Manchu, however progressive, I can not be of any considerable service to you with the republicans. It is in their camp that your advice will help. Only there. Shall you go to them?”

Doane found it impossible to mention the invitation of Sun-Shi-pi. That would be a sacred confidence. So he replied in merely general terms:

“I should like to sit in their councils. They seem to represent, at this time, China’s only material hope. Though I am not strongly an optimist regarding the revolution. China is so vast, so sunken in tradition, that the real revolution must be distressingly slow. Still, I have some familiarity with the constitutional history of my own country, and, I think, some acquaintance with yours. And I love China. Yes, I should like to help.”

“You are a great man, Griggsby Doane. You have known sorrow and poverty. To the merely successful American I do not look for much real guidance. But China needs you. I hope she will find you out in time.”

They talked on, of many things. His excellency was gently, at times even whimsically, reflective. At length he touched, lightly at first, on the subject of Rocky Kane. A little later, more openly, he asked what the boy’s standing would be in New York.

Doane thought this over very carefully. It was curious how that confusing element of mere feeling reappeared promptly in his mind. But he explained, finally, that while the boy was young, and had been passing through a phase of rather adventurous wildness, still his father was a man of enormous prestige in society as in the financial world. The boy had nice qualities. Given the right influences he might, with the wealth that would one day be his, become like his father, a powerful factor in American life.

“I find myself somewhat puzzled,” remarked his excellency then. “He seems devoted to my daughter. I can not easily read her mind. And I would not attempt to direct her life as would be necessary had she been merely a Manchu girl reared in a Manchu environment. Is she, do you think, and as your people understand the term, in love with him? I find their present relationship somewhat alarming.”

“It would be difficult to say, Your Excellency – ” thus Doane, simply and gravely. “The young man is, of course, in love with her.”

“Ah,” breathed his excellency. “You are sure of that?”

“Yes. She is undoubtedly accustomed to play about pleasantly with young men as do the young women of America.” Sudden, poignant memories came of his own lovely daughter, as she had been; and of the puzzling romance that had seemed for a time to injure her young life – a romance in which he, her father, had played a strange part. But that was, after all, but an echo from another life; a closed book.

“Your daughter, I am sure,” Doane continued, “can be trusted to form her own attachments. She is a noble as well as a beautiful girl.”

“Indeed – you find her so, Griggsby Doane? That is pleasant to my ears. For into the directing of her life have gone my dreams of the new China and the new world. I would not have her choose wrongly now. But I do not understand her. It is difficult for me to talk freely with her.”

“I am sure,” said Doane slowly, “‘that if you could bring yourself to do so” – as once or twice before, in moments of deep feeling, he forgot to use the indirect Oriental form of address – “it would make her very happy.”

“You think that, Griggsby Doane?” His excellency considered this. Then added: “I will make the effort.”

“If I may suggest – talk with her not as father with daughter, but on an equality, as friend with friend.”

His excellency slowly rose; and Doane, also rising, felt for the first time that the fine old statesman fully looked his age. He was, standing there, smiling a thought wistfully, an old man, little short of a broken man. And then his dry thin hand found Doane’s huge one and gripped it in the Western manner. This was a surprise, evidently as moving to Kang as to Doane himself; for they stood thus a moment in silence.

“My dearest hope, of late,” said the great Manchu – the smoothest of etiquette giving way, for once, before the pressure of emotion – “has been that my daughter’s heart might be entrusted to you, Griggsby Doane.”

Again a silence. Then Doane:

“That was my hope, as well.”

“Then – ”

“No. It is plainly impossible. All life is before her. The thought has not come to her. It never will. I see now that she could not be happy with me. And I think she ought to be happy. I must ask you not to speak of this again. Let youth call unto youth. And let me be her friend.”

His excellency went below after this. Miss Hui Fei was also below, sleeping. Rocky Kane had been playing with the little princess, out on the gallery; but now, evidently watching his chance, he came forward to the informal seat the mandarin had vacated.

It was to be difficult – always difficult. The boy, plainly, couldn’t live through these tense days without a confidant. Doane steeled himself to bear it, and to respond as a friend. There was no way out; would be none short of Shanghai; just an exquisite torture. It was even to grow, with each fresh contact, harder to bear. The boy was so curiously unsophisticated, so earnest and honest an egotist.

“ – I’ve asked her,” he said now.

Doane could only wait.

“She hasn’t said yes. That would be absurd, of course – so soon.” He was so pitifully putting up a brave front. “But she does like me. And it’s something that she hasn’t said no. Isn’t it something?”

That was hardly a question; it was nearer assertion – what he had to think. Doane managed to incline his head.

“But never mind that. God knows why I should bother you with it. You’ve been so kind – such a friend. We – are friends, aren’t we?”

Doane felt himself obliged to turn and meet his eyes. And such eyes! Ablaze with nervous light. And then he had to grip another hand – this one young, moist, strong. But he managed that, too.

“Listen! I do bother you awfully, but – I’ve been thinking – here we are, you know. God knows when I’ll find a man who could help me as you can. And we brought all those wonderful old paintings aboard here. I’ve been thinking – well, since I’ve got so much to learn of Chinese culture, why not begin? Couldn’t I – would they mind if I looked at some of the pictures? And – if it isn’t asking too much – you could tell me why they’re good. Just begin to give me something to go by. Isn’t it as good a way to make the break as any?”

It was a most acceptable diversion. Doane, though several boxes of the paintings were in his own rooms, sent a servant to ask a permission that was cordially granted. And as there was a wind blowing, they went below, and talked there in low voices in order not to disturb the sleeping girl, while the elder man carefully opened a box and got out a number of the long scrolls that were wound on rods of ivory, handling them with reverent fingers.

He chose one from the brush of that Chao Meng-fu who flourished under the earliest Mongol or Yuan rulers, a roll perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches in width, and in length, judging from the thickness, as many feet, tied around with silk cords and fastened with tags of carven jade. The painting itself, naturally, was on silk, which in turn was pasted on thick, dark-toned paper, made of bamboo pulp, with borders of brocade. The projecting ends of the ivory rollers, like the tags, were carved.

At the edge of the scroll were, besides the seal signature of the artist, and the date – in our chronology, A. D. 1308 – many other signatures in the conventional square seal characters of royal and other collectors who had possessed the painting, with also, a few pithy, appreciative epigrams from eminent critics of various periods. On that one margin was stamped the authentic history of the particular bit of silk, paper and pigment during its life of six full centuries; for no hand could have forged those seals.

There was no likelihood that the boy – lacking, as he was, in cultural background – would exhibit any sensitive responsiveness to the exquisite brush-work of the fine old painter or to his consciously subjective attitude toward his art. But there is a way in which the simple Western mind that is not preoccupied with fixed concepts of art may be led into enjoyment of such a landscape scroll; this is to exhibit it as do the Chinese themselves, unrolling it, very slowly, a little at a time, deliberately absorbing the detail and the finely suggested atmosphere, until a sensation is experienced not unlike that of making a journey through a strange and delightful country. Doane employed this method – it was surely what that old painter intended – and led the boy slowly from a pastoral home, so small beneath its towering overhanging mountain crags, that lost themselves finally in soft cloud-masses, as to appear insignificant, out along a river where lines of reeds swayed in the winds and boats moved patiently, across a lake that was dotted with pavilions and pleasure craft – on and on, through varied scenes that yet were blended with amazing craftsmanship into a continuous, harmonious whole.

The time crept by and by. When Doane finally explained the seal characters at the end and retied the old silk cords with their hanging rectangles of unclouded green jade, the sun was low over the western hills.

Rocky’s face was flushed, his eyes nervously bright. “I don’t get it all, of course,” he said; “but it makes you feel somehow as if you’d been reading The Pilgrim’s Progress!”

Doane gravely nodded.

“Shall we look at another?” said Rocky.

“No. That is enough. The Chinese knew better than to crowd the mind with confused impressions of many paintings. A good picture is an experience to be lived through, not a trophy to be glanced at.”

“I wonder,” said the boy, “if that’s why I used to hate it so when my tutor dragged me through the Metropolitan Museum?”

“Doubtless.”

“And this picture has a great value, I suppose?”

“It is virtually priceless – in East as well as West,” replied Doane as he replaced it among its fellows in the box.

Thus began, late but perhaps not too late, what may be regarded as the education of young Rockingham Kane.

CHAPTER XII – AT THE HOUR OF THE TIGER

THEY passed, that evening, the region of Peng-tze where Tao Yuan-ming, after a scant three months as district magistrate, surrendered his honors and retired to his humble farm near Kiu Kiang, there to write in peace the verse and prose that have endured during sixteen crowded centuries; and on, then, moving slowly through the precipitous Gateway of Anking and, later, around the bend that bounds that city on the west, south and east. Those on deck could see, indistinctly in the deepening twilight, the vast area of houses and ruins – for Anking had not yet recovered from the devastations of the T’ai-ping rebels in the eighteen-sixties – where half a million yellow folk swarm like ants; and very indistinctly indeed, farther to the north, they could see: the blue mountains. Slowly, quietly, then, Anking, with its ruins and its memories fell away astern.

Half an hour later the sweeps were lashed along the rail. The great dark sails, with their scalloped edges between the battens of bamboo, seeming more than ever, in the dusk, like the wings of an enormous bat, were lowered; and with many shouts and rhythmic cries the tracking ropes were run out to mooring poles on the bank. Forward the mattings were adjusted for the night. The smells of tobacco and frying fish drifted aft. A youth, sipping tea by the rail, put down his cup and sang softly in falsetto a long narrative of friendship and the mighty river and (incidentally) the love of a maiden who slipped away from her mother’s side at night to meet a handsome student only to be slain, as was just, by the hand of an elder brother… From the cabin aft drifted a faint odor of incense. A flageolet mingled its plaintive oboe-like note with the song of the youth by the rail… From a near-by village came soft evening sounds, and the occasional barking of dogs, and the beat of a watchman’s gong… The greatest of rivers – greatest in traffic and in rich memories of the endless human drama – was settling quietly for the night.