In Red and Gold. Merwin Samuel
It was utterly different from anything I had known, a trader’s paradise, a place of unbelievable confusion, of an activity that bewildered, rushing to what end I could not understand.”
He was speaking now not only in the Chinese language but in the idiom as well, generalizing rhetorically as the Chinese do. It was almost as if the words came from a Chinese mind.
They were silent for a time Then the viceroy asked, in his gently abrupt way: “Why did you leave the church?”
“Because I sinned.”
“Against the church?”
“That, and my own faith.”
“Were you asked to leave?”
“No.”
“They knew of your sin?”
“I told them.”
“Yet they would have kept you?”
“Yes. My own feeling was that my superior temporized.”
“He knew your value.”
“I can not say as to that. But he wished me to marry again. I couldn’t do that – not in the spirit intended. Not as I felt.”
“We are different, Griggsby Doane, you and I. I am a Manchu, you an American. The customs of our two lands are very different. What would seem a sin to you, might not seem so to me. Yet I, too, have a conscience to which I must answer. I believe I understand you. It is, I see, because of your conscience that you sit before me now, on this boat and in this uniform, a man, as your great Edward Everett Hale has phrased it, without a country.”
He paused, and filled again the little pipe-bowl, studied it absently as his wrinkled fingers worked the tobacco. His nails were trimmed short, like those of a white man. Doane thought, swiftly, of the man’s dramatic past, sent out as he had been to become a citizen of the world by a nation that would in very necessity fail to understand the resulting changes in his outlook. There was his daughter; she would be almost an American, after four years of college life. And she, now, would be a problem indeed! What could he hope to make of her life in this Asia where woman, like labor in his own country, was a commodity. It would be absorbingly interesting, were it possible, to peep into that smooth-running old brain and glimpse the problems there. They were gossiping about him. His stately figure was to-day the center about which coiled the life and death intrigue of Chinese officialdom and over which hung suspended the silken power of an Oriental throne… Doane’s personal problem shrank into nothing – a flitting memory of a little outbreak of egotism – as he studied the old face on which the revealing hand of Age had inscribed wisdom, kindliness and shrewdness.
Soft footfalls sounded; then, after a moment, a sharper sound that Doane assumed, with a slight quickening of the imagination, to be the high wooden clogs of a Manchu lady, until he realized that no clogs could move so lightly; no, these were little Western shoes.
A young woman appeared, slender and comely, dressed in a tailored suit that could have come only front New York, and smiling with shy eagerness. She was of good height (like the Manchus of the old stock), the face nearly oval, quite unpainted and softly pretty, with a broad forehead that curved prettily back under the parted hair, arched eyebrows, eyes more nearly straight than slanting (that opened a thought less widely than those of Western people), and with a quaint, wholly charming friendliness in her smile.
He felt her sense of freedom; and knew as she tried to take his huge hand in her own small one that she carried her Western ways, as her own people would phrase it, with a proud heart. She was of those aliens who would be happily American, eager to show her kinship with the great land of fine free traditions.
And holding the small hand, looking down at her, Doane found his perhaps overstrained nerves responding warmly to her fine youth and health. He reflected, in that swift way of his wide-ranging mind, on the amazing change in Chinese official life that made it even remotely possible for the viceroy to present his daughter with a heart as proud as hers. The change had come about during the term of Doane’s own residence… America, then, was not alone in changing. It was a shaking, puzzled and puzzling world.
“This,” his excellency was saying, “is my daughter, Hui Fei.”
“I am very pleas’ to meet you,” said Hui Fei.
They sat then. The girl became at once, as in America, the center of the talk. Though of the heedlessness not uncommonly found among American girls she had none. She was prettily, sensitively, deferential to her father. Somewhere back of the bright surface brain from which came the quick eager talk and the friendly smile, deep in her nature, lay the sense of reverence for those riper in years and in authority that was the deepest strain in her race. She dwelt on things almost utterly American: the brightness of New York – she said she liked it best in October, when the shops were gay; the approaching Yale-Harvard football game, a motoring tour through the White Mountains, happy summers at the seashore.
Doane watched her, speaking only at intervals, wondering if there might not be, behind her gentle enthusiasm, some deeper understanding of her present situation. He could not surely make out. She had humor, and when he asked if it did not seem strange to step abruptly back into the old life, she spoke laughingly of her many little mistakes in etiquette. Her English he found charming. She was continually slipping back into it from the Mandarin tongue she tried to use, and as continually, with great gaiety, reaching back into Chinese for the equivalent phrase. She had so nearly conquered the usual difficulty with the l’s and r’s as to confuse them only when she spoke hurriedly. At these times, too, she would leave off final consonants. The long e became then, a short i. Doane even smiled, with an inner sense of pleasure, at her pretty emphasis when she once converted people into pipple. She was, unmistakably, a young woman of charm and personality. Despite the quaintness of her speech, she was accustomed to thinking in the new tongue. Her command of it was excellent; better than would commonly be found in America. All of which, of course, intensified the problem.
His excellency sat back, smoked comfortably, and looked on her with frankly indulgent pride.
A servant came with a message; bowing low. The viceroy excused himself, leaving his daughter and Doane together. Doane asked himself, during the pause that followed his departure, what the observant attendants beyond the screen would be thinking. The situation, from any familiar Chinese point of view, was unthinkable. Yet here he sat; and there, her brows drawn together (he saw now) in sober thought, sat delightful Miss Hui Fei.
She said, in a low voice, while looking out at the river: “Mr. Doane, no matter what you may think – I mus’ see you. This evening. You mus’ tell me where. It mus’ not be known to any one. There are spies here.”
Doane glanced up; then, too, looked away. There could be no question now of the girl’s deeper feeling. She was determined. Her tune was honest and forthright, with the unthinking courage of youth. It would be her father, of course…
But his mind had gone blank. He knew not what to think or say.
“Please!” she murmured. “There is no one else You mus’ help us. Tell me – father will be coming back.”
And then Griggsby Doane heard his own voice saying quietly: “The boat deck is the only place. You will find a sort of ladder near the stern. If you can – ”
“I will go up there.”
“It will be only just after midnight that I could arrange to be there.”
His excellency returned then. And Doane took his leave. He had been but a few moments in his own cabin when two actors of his excellency’s suite appeared, each with a lacquered tray, on one of which was a small chest of tea, wrapped in red paper lettered in gold and bearing the seal stamp of the private estate of Kang Yu, on the other an object of more than a foot in height carefully wound about with cotton cloth.
Doane dismissed the lictors with a Mexican dollar each and unwrapped the larger object, which the servant had placed with great care on his berth. It proved to be a pi, a disk of carven jade, in color a perfect specimen of the pure greenish-white tint that is so highly prized by Chinese collectors. The diameter was hardly less than ten inches,