In Red and Gold

At the first rays of dawn the forward deck would be again astir. Sails would be hoisted, ropes hauled aboard and coiled; and the shining yellow craft would resume her journey down-stream, with carven and brightly painted eyes peering fixedly out at the bow, with carefully tended flowers perfuming the air about the after gallery, a thing of rich and lovely color even on the rich and lovely river; slipping by busy ports, each with its vast tangle of small shipping and its innumerable families of beggars in slipper-boats or tubs awaiting miserably the steamers and their strangely prodigal white passengers. T’ai-ping itself, of bloody memory, lay still ahead; and farther yet Nanking the glorious, and Chin-kiang, and the great estuary. Slowly the huge craft would drift and sail and tie, moving patiently on toward the Shanghai of the ever-prospering white merchants, the Shanghai that somewhat vaingloriously had dubbed itself “the Paris of the East.” And no one of the thousands, here and there, that idly watched the golden junk as it moved, not without a degree of magnificence, down the tireless current, was to know that a Manchu viceroy, a prince hunted to the death by his own blood, a statesman known to the courts of great new lands, was in hiding within those timbers of polished cypress. Nor would they know that a princess, his daughter yet strangely of the new order, voyaged with him clad in the simple costume of a young Chinese woman. Nor would they dream of certain inexplicable whites. Nor would they have cared; for the voyage of the yellow junk was but a tiny incident in the crowded endless drama of the river; to the millions of struggling, breeding, dying souls along the banks and on the water, merely living was and would be burden enough. 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. But then, as she passed and glanced back, her skirt, in swinging about, caught on a nail; caught firmly; and as she stooped to release it, a string of pearls swung down, broke, and rolled, a score of little opalescent spheres, along the deck, a few of them nearly to Rocky’s feet. He stooped – without a thought at first – picked them up and turned them over in his fingers; then, stepping forward to return them, observed with an odd thrill of somewhat unpleasant excitement, that the girl had gone an ashen color and was staring at him with something the look of a wild and hostile animal. She turned then; glanced with furtive eyes up and down the corridor; and swiftly gathering up the remaining pearls clutched them tightly in one hand, extending the other and saying, in a quick half-whisper: “Give me those.”

He hesitated, confused, unequal to the quick clear thinking he felt, even then, was demanded of him.

“What are you doing with them?” he asked.

“Not so loud! Come here!” She was indicating her own doorway; even drawing the curtain; while her head moved just perceptibly toward the room immediately beyond her own where Miss Hui Fei, he knew, would be resting at this time.

“Where did you get them?” he asked, huskily, doggedly.

There was a long pause. Again her subtle gaze swept the corridor. “You’d better step in here,” said she, very quiet. “I’ve something to say to you.”

Sensing, still confusedly, that he ought to see the thing through, struggling to think, he yielded to her stronger will.

She followed him into the room and let the curtain fall. “Give me those pearls,” she commanded again.

He shook his head.

During a tense moment she studied him. She moved over by the translucent window of ground oyster shells, itself, in the mellow afternoon light, as opalescent as the pearls in her hand and his. Her gaze, for an instant, sought the wide stain on the floor where the Manila Kid had, so recently, wretchedly died; and her instant imagination considered the incomprehensible mental attitude of these quiet Chinese who had, without a word, disposed of the body and painstakingly cleansed the spot. No one, observing them day by day, now, as they calmly pursued their tasks, could suspect that the slanting quiet eyes had so lately seen murder… As for the youth before her she was, now that her moment of fright had passed, supremely confident in her skill and mental strength. He was, still, little more than an undeveloped boy. And his position, now that he had set up his flag of reform, would be absurdly vulnerable.

“Once more” – her low voice was cool and soft as river ice – “give them to me.”

He shook his head. “Tell me first where you got them.”

“If you’re determined to make a scene,” said she, “I advise you to be quiet about it. You wouldn’t want – her – to know you’re in here.”

“I – I” – this was the merest boyishness – “I’ve told her about – well, that I tried to make love to you. I’m not afraid of that.”

“Still – you wouldn’t want her to hear you now.” This was awkwardly true. And his hesitation as he tried to consider it, to work out an attitude, ran a second too long.

“The pearls are mine,” she pressed calmly on. “The best advice I can give you is to return them and go.”

“But – ”

“Do you think I want the people aboard this junk – anybody – to know that I have them?”

“I believe you stole them from the viceroy’s place.”

“That, of course – Well, never mind! What you may believe is nothing to me.”

“Will you tell Mr. Doane about them?”

“Certainly not. And you won’t.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Perhaps it’s my duty.”

“Listen” – he felt himself wholly in the right, yet found difficulty in meeting her cold pale eyes – “it’s my impression that I’ve been acting rather decently toward you. Of course, I could have – ”

“What could you have done?”

“For you own good, keep your voice down. I will tell you just this – you were pretty wild in Shanghai for a week or two.”

“Well?” This was hurting him; but he met it. “And there’s no likelihood that you’ve told her all of it. Were you such a fool as to think you could keep it all secret? Out here on the coast – and from a woman with as many underground connections as I have?”

“There’s nothing that! – ”

“Listen! I’m not through with you. You’ve been a very, very rough proposition. I know all about it. No – wait! There’s something else. I knew all about you when you were making up to me on the steamer. I could have trapped you then – tangled your life so with mine that you could never have got away from me, never in the world. But I didn’t. I liked you, and I didn’t want to hurt you – then.”

“You do want to hurt me now?”

“It may be necessary.”

“Since you’re taking this position” – he was finding difficulty in making his voice heard; there seemed to be danger of explosive sounds – “probably I’d better just go to Mr. Doane myself with these things.”

“If you do that I’ll wreck your life.”

“You don’t mean that you’d – ”

“You seem to be forgetting a good deal.”

“But you – ”

“I will defend myself to the limit. I’ve really been easy with you. You see, you don’t know anything about me. Least of all what harm I can do. You’d be a child in my hands. Turn against me and I’ll get you if it takes me ten years. You’ll never be safe from me. Never for a minute.”

He looked irresolutely down at the lustrous jewels in his hand.

“You had these sewed in your skirt. There must be more there.”

“Are you proposing to search me?”

“No – but”… His black youth was stabbing now, viciously, at his boyishly sensitive heart; but still, in a degree, he met it. “I’m going to Mr. Doane. I don’t care what happens to me.”

He even moved a soft step toward the door; but paused, lingered, watching her. For she was rummaging among the covers of her bed. He caught a brief glimpse of a hand-bag that she meant him not to see. She took from a bottle two green tablets. Then she faced him.

To the startled question of his eyes she replied: “They’re corrosive sub mate. I shall take them now unless you – give me the pearls. If you want to have my death on your hands, take them to Mr. Doane. But it’s only fair to tell you that if you do it – if you mix in this business – your own life won’t be worth a nickel. They’ll get you, and they’ll get the pearls. You’re caught in a bigger game than you can play.

“Get out, while you can” – as the low swift words came she reached out and took the pearls from his nerveless hand – “and I’ll protect you. You can have your pretty Manchu girl. You can ride around in a rickshaw and look at old temples and buy embroideries. Just don’t mix in affairs that don’t concern you.”

“I” – he was pressing a hand to a white forehead – “I’ve got to think it over.”

“Remember this, too” – she laid a hand on his arm – “you could never fasten anything on me. The proof doesn’t exist. Nobody can identify unmounted pearls As a matter of fact I got these”… during a brief but to her perverse imagination an intensely pleasing moment she closed her eyes and lived again through that strange scene on the steps of the pavilion; again in vivid fancy rolled over the inert body that had been Tex Connor, took the amazing cape of pearls from his shirt and rolled the body heavily back…"I got these from a man I knew – an old friend. Just mind your own business and no one will harm you. But remember, you’re walking among dangers. Step carefully. Keep quiet. Better go now.”

He found himself in the corridor; walked slowly, uncertainly, up to the deck; sat by the rail and, head on hand, moodily watched the river and the hills. He asked himself if he had, by his very silence, struck a bargain with the girl; but could find no answer to the question, only bewilderment. Could it be that she was only a daring thief? It could, of course, but how to get at the truth? Abruptly, then his thoughts turned inward. His wild days had seemed, since his change of heart, of the remote past; but they were not, they had still been the stuff of his life within about a week. It was unnerving. He thought, something morbidly, as the sensitive young will, about habits… The day had gone awry, too, in the matter of his love. A reaction had set in. Hui Fei was keeping much to herself. It had become difficult to talk with her at all. And that had bewildered him… He was all adrift, with neither sound training nor a mature philosophy to steady him, life had turned unreal on his hands; nothing was real – not Hui or her father, certainly not himself, not even Mr. Doane. His background, even, was slipping away, and with it his sense of the white race. This, it seemed, was a yellow world – swarming, heedless, queerly tragic. His soul was adrift, and nobody cared. Toward his father and mother he felt only bitterness. There were, it appeared, no friends.

He thought, it seemed, confusedly, excitedly, of everything; of everything except the important fact that he was very young.

Early on the following morning Doane found the little princess playing about the deck, and with a smile seated himself beside her. She settled at once on his knee, chattering brightly in the Mandarin tongue of her play world.

He responded with a note of good-humored whimsy not out of key with her alert clear imagination. It was pleasant to fall again into the little intimacies of the language that had become, during these twenty years and more, almost his own. He pointed out to her the trained cormorants diving for fish, and the irrigating wheels along the banks; and then told quaint stories – of the first water buffalo, and of the magic rice-field.

Soon she, too, was telling stories – of the simpleton who bought herons for ducks, of the toad in the lotus pool, of the child that was born in a conch shell and finally crawled with it into the sea, of the youngest daughter who to save the life of her father married a snake, of the magic melon that grew full of gold and the other melon that contained hungry beggars, of the two small boys and the moon cake, and of the curious beginning of the ant species.

She scolded him for his failure, at the first, to laugh with her. Her happy child quality stirred memories of old-time days in T’ainan-fu, when his own daughter had been a child of six, playing happily about the mission compound. They were poignant memories. His eyes were misty even as he smiled over the bright merriment of this child, and in his heart was a growing wistful tenderness. To be again a father would be a great privilege. He was ripe for it now, tempered by poverty and sorrow, yet strong, with a great emotional capacity on which the world about him had, apparently, no claim to make. He was simply cast aside, left carelessly in an eddy with the great stream of life flowing, bankful, by. The experience was common enough, of course. In the great scheme of life the fate of an individual here and there could hardly matter. He could tell himself that, very simply, quite honestly; and yet the strength within him would rise and rise again to assert the opposite. The end, for himself, lay beyond the range of conscious thought; but at least, he felt, it could not be bitterness. He seemed to have passed that danger… The little princess was soberly telling the old story of the father-in-law, the father, and the crabs that were eaten by the pig. At the conclusion she laughed merrily; and then Ending his response somewhat unsatisfactory, scowled fiercely and with her plump fingers bent up the comers of his mouth.

He laughed then; and rolled her up in his arms and tossed her high in the air.

When Hui Fei came upon them they were gazing out over the rail. Mr. Doane seemed to be telling a long story, to which the child listened intently. She moved quietly near, smiling; and after listening for a few moments seated herself on the deck behind them.

The story puzzled her. She leaned forward, a charming picture in her simple costume, black hair parted smoothly, oval face untouched with powder or paint. She smiled again, then, for his story was nothing other than a free rendering into Chinese of Stevenson’s:=

"In Winter I get up at nightAnd dress by yellow candle-light…"=

He went on, when that was finished, with a version of:=

"Dark brown is the river,Golden is the sand…"=

– and other poems from The Child’s Garden of Verses.

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.

“Won’t you do The Land of Counterpane?” she asked.

It was later, when the child had run off to play among the flowers, that he and she fell to talking as they had not talked during these recent crowded days. There were silences, at first. Despite his effort to seem merely friendly and kind, he felt a restraint that had to be fought through. In this time, so difficult for her at every point, he felt deeply that he must not fail her. Her greatest need, surely, was for friendship. The excited youth who dogged her steps and hung on her most trivial glance could not offer that. And melancholy had touched her bright spirit; he sensitively felt that when the little princess ran away and her smile faded. Sorrow dwelt not far behind those dark thoughtful eyes.

Early in the conversation she spoke of her father. Her thoughts, clearly, were always with him.

“I wan’ to ask you,” said she simply and gravely, “if you know what he is doing.”

Doane moved his head in the negative.

“He has been in his room for more than a day. When I go to his door he is kin’ but he doesn’ ask me to come in. And he doesn’ tell me anything.”

“He is not confiding in me,” said Doane.

“I don’ like that, either, Mis’er Doane. For I know he thinks of you now as his closes’ frien’. There is no other frien’ who knows what you know. An’ you have save’ his life an’ mine. My father is not a man to fail in frien’ship or in gratitu’.”

Doane’s eyes, despite his nearly successful inner struggles, grew misty again. Impulsively he took her hand gently in his. At once, simply, her slender fingers closed about his own. It seemed not unlike the trusting affection of a child; he sensed this as a new pain. Yet there was strong emotional quality in her; he felt it in her dark beauty, in the curve of her cheek and the lustrous troubled splendor in her eyes, in the slender curves of her strong young body. She was, after all, a woman grown; aroused, doubtless, to the puzzling facts of life; a woman, with an ardent lover close at hand, who was – this as his wholly adult mind now saw her – already at her mating time. And feeling this he gripped her hand more tightly than he knew. But even so, he was not unaware of his own danger. It wouldn’t do; once to release his own tightly chained emotions would be to render himself of no greater value to her in her bewilderment than any merely pursuing male. He set his teeth on that thought, and abruptly withdrew his hand.

She did not look up – her gaze was fixed on the surface of the river. The only indication she gave that she was so much as aware of this odd little act of his was that she started to speak, then paused for a brief instant before going on.

“I ask – ask myself all the time if there is anything we coul’ be doing.”

Doane’s head moved again in the negative.

“If not even his gratitu’ – ”

“Gratitude,” said Doane gently, “becomes less than nothing when it is demanded.”

“True, it can no’ be ask’, but it can be given.”

“Sometimes” – he was thinking aloud, dangerously – “I wonder if any healthy human act is free from the motive of self-interest. Generosity is so often self-indulgence. Self-sacrifice, even in cases where it may be regarded as wholly sane, may be only a culmination or a confusion of little understood desires.”

She looked up at this; considered it.

“Certainly,” he went on, “your father owes me nothing.”

Her hand moved a little way toward his, only to hesitate and draw back. She looked away, saying in a clouded voice: “He – and I – owe you everything.” It wouldn’t do. Doane waited a long moment, then spoke in what seemed more nearly his own proper character – quietly, kindly, with hardly an outward sign of the intensely personal feeling of which his heart was so full.

“Your father has spoken to me of you as an experiment.”

“You mean my life – my education.”

“Yes. He feels, too, that the experiment has not yet been fully worked out. I often think of that – your future. It is interesting, you know. You have responded amazingly to the spirit of the West. And of course you’ll have to do something about it.”

“Oh, yes,” said she, musing, “of course.”

“Whatever personal interests may for a time – or at times – absorb your life”… this was as close as he dared trust himself to the topic of marriage__"I feel about you that your life will seek and find some strong outward expression.”

“Yes – I have often fel’ that too. Of course, at college I like’ to speak. I went in a good ‘eal for the debates, an’ for class politics.”

“You have an active mind. And you have a fine heritage. Knowing – even feeling – both East and West as you do, your life is bound to find some public outlet. Something.”

“I know.” She seemed moody now, in a gentle way. Her fingers picked at a rope. “But I don’ know what. I don’ think I woul’ like teaching. Writing, perhaps. Even speaking. That is so easy for me.”

“There is a service that you are peculiarly fitted to perform.” She glanced up quickly, waited. “It is a thought that keeps coming to my mind. Perhaps because it will probably become the final expression of my own life. For my life is curiously like yours in one way. You remember, that – that night when we first talked – on the steamer – ”

“I climb’ the ladder,” she murmured, picking again at the rope.

“ – And we agreed that we were both, you and I” – his voice grew momentarily unsteady – “between the worlds.”

“Yes. I remember.” He could barely hear her, “It is true, of course.”

“It is true. And for myself, I feel more and more strongly every day that I must pitch into the tremendous task of helping to make the East known to the West.”

“Tha’ woul’ be won’erful!” she breathed.

“I have come to feel that it is the one great want in Western civilization, that the philosophy, the art, the culture, indeed, of China has never been woven into our heritage. It is strange, in a way – we derived our religion from certain primitive tribes in Syria. But they had little culture. The Christian religion teaches conduct but very nearly ignores beauty. And then there is our insistent pushing forth of the Individual. I have come to believe that our West will seem less crass, less materialistic, when the individual is somewhat subdued.” He smiled. “We need patience – sheer quality of thought – the fine art of reflection. We shall not find these qualities at them best, even in Europe. They exist, in full flower, only in China. And America doesn’t know that. Not now.”

A little later he said: “That work has been begun, of course, in a small way. A slight sense of Chinese culture is creeping into our colleges, here and there. Some of the poetry is bring translated. The art museums are reaching out for the old paintings. The Freer collection of paintings will some day be thrown open to the public. But traditions grow very slowly. It will take a hundred years to make America aware of China as it is now aware of Italy, Egypt, Greece, even old Assyria… and the thing must be freed from Japanese influence – we can’t much longer afford to look at wonderful, rich old China through the Japanese lens.”

“An’ you’re going to make tha’ your work,” observed Hui Fei.

“I must. I begin to feel that it is to be the only final explanation of my life.”

There was a silence. Then, abruptly, in a tone he did not understand, she asked: “Are you going to work for the Revolution?”

“That is the immediate thing – yes. I shall offer my services.”

“Coul’ I do anything, you think? At Shanghai, I mean? Of course, I’m a Manchu girl, but I can no’ stand with the Manchu Gover’ment. I am not even with my – my father there.”

“It is possible. I don’t know. We shall soon be there.”

“Will you tell me then – at Shanghai?”

He inclined his head. Suddenly he couldn’t speak. She was holding to him, as if it were a matter of course; yet he dared not read into her attitude a personal meaning of the only sort that could satisfy his hungry heart. The difficulty lay in his active imagination. Like that of an eager boy it kept racing ahead of any possible set of facts. All he could do, of course, was to go on curbing it, from hour to hour. It would be harder seeing her at Shanghai than running away, as he had half-consciously been planning. But it was something that she clung to him as a friend. He mustn’t, couldn’t, really, fail her there.

All of the last day they sailed the wide and steadily widening estuary. The lead-colored water was roughened by the following wind that drove the junk rapidly on toward her journey’s end. But toward sunset wind and sea died down, and under sweeps, late in the evening-, the craft moved into the Wusung River and moored for the night within sight of a line of war-ships.

A feeling of companionship grew strongly among those fugitives, yellow and white, as the evening advanced. They had passed together through dangerous and dramatic scenes. Now that danger and drama were alike, it seemed, over, with the peaceable shipping of all the world lying just ahead up the narrow channel, with, in the morning to come, a fresh view of the bund at Shanghai, where hotels, banks and European clubs elbowed the great trading hongs, with motor-cars and Sikh police and the bright flags of the home land so soon to be spread before their weary eyes, they gathered on the after gallery to chat and watch the flashing signal lights of the cruisers and the trains on the river bank, and dream each his separate dream. Even Dixie Carmichael, though herself untouched by sentiment, joined, for reasons of policy, the little party. Hui Fei was there, between Doane and the moodily silent Rocky Kane. The Chinese servants smilingly grouped themselves on the deck just above. And finally – though it is custom among these Easterners to sleep during the dark hours and rise with the morning light – his excellency appeared, walking alone over the deck, smiling in the friendliest fashion and greeting them with hands clasped before his breast.