Read Ebook: Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident by Merwin Samuel Louderback Walt Illustrator

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Ebook has 2102 lines and 82813 words, and 43 pages

The moment came, apparently, when he could endure this enforced companionship no longer. He spoke gruffly to his rickshaw coolies, and rolled off alone. When they finally reached the railway station after a half-hour spent in wandering about the spacious enclosure of the Temple of Nishi Otani, with its huge, shadowy gate house, its calm priests, its exquisite rock garden under ancient mystical trees--the tall journalist was pacing the platform, savagely smoking a pipe.

At Kobe they were united again, riding out to the ship's anchorage in the same launch. But Mr. Brachey gave no sign of recognition. He disappeared the moment of arrival at the ship, reappearing only when the bugle announced dinner, dressed, as he had been each evening at the Grand Hotel and the previous evening on the ship, rather stiffly, in dinner costume.

Then the ship moved out from her anchorage into that long, island-studded, green-bordered body of water known as the Inland Sea of Japan. Early on the second morning she would slip in between the closepressing hills that guard Nagasaki harbor. There another day ashore. Then three days more across the Yellow Sea to Shanghai. Thence, for the Hasmers and Betty, a five-day journey by steamer up the muddy but majestic Yangtze Kiang to Hankow; at which important if hardly charming city they would separate, the Hasmers to travel on by other, smaller steamer to Ichang and thence on up through the Gorges to their home among the yellow folk of Szechwan, while Hetty, from Hankow, must set out into an existence that her highly colored young mind found it impossible to face squarely. As yet, despite the long journey across the American continent and the Pacific, she hadn't begun so much as to believe the facts. Though there they stood, squarely enough, before her. It had been easier to surrender her responsive, rather easily gratified emotions to a day-by-day enjoyment of the journey itself. When the constant, worried watchfulness of Mrs. Hasmer reached the point of annoyance--not that Mrs. Hasmer wasn't an old dear; kindness itself, especially if your head ached or you needed a little mothering!--why then, with the easy adaptability and quick enthusiasm of youth, she simply busied herself sketching. The top layer of her steamer trunk was nearly full now--sketches of the American desert, of the mountains and San Francisco, of people on the ship, of the sea and of Honolulu.

But now, with Yokohama back among the yesterdays and Kobe falling rapidly, steadily astern, Betty's heart was as rapidly and as steadily sinking. Only one more stop, and then--China. In China loomed the facts.

That night, lying in her berth, Betty, forgot the cherry blossoms of Kioto and the irritating Mr. Brachey. Her thoughts dwelt among the young friends, the boy-and-girl "crowd," she had left behind, far off, at the other edge of those United States that by a queerly unreal theory were her home-land. And, very softly, she cried herself to sleep.

Betty Doane was just nineteen. She was small, quick to feel and think, dark rather than light . She was distinctly pretty. Her small head with its fine and abundant hair, round face with its ever-ready smile, alert brown eyes and curiously strong little chin expressed, as did her slim quick body, a personality of considerable sprightly vigor and of a charm that could act on certain other sorts of personalities, particularly of the opposite sex, with positive, telling effect.

Mrs. Hasmer, who had undertaken, with misgivings, to bring her from suburban New Jersey to Hankow, found her a heavy responsibility. It wasn't that the child was insubordinate, forward, or, in anyway that you could blame her for, difficult. On the contrary, she was a dear little thing, kind, always amusing, eager to please. But none the less there was something, a touch of vital quality, perhaps of the rare gift of expressiveness, that gave her, at times, a rather alarming aspect. Her clothes were simple enough--Griggsby Doane, goodness knew, couldn't afford anything else--but in some way that Mrs. Hasmer would never fully understand, the child always managed to make them look better than they were. She had something of the gift of smartness. She had, Mrs. Hasmer once came out with, "too much imagination." The incessant sketching, for instance. And she did it just a shade too well. Then, too, evening after evening during the three weeks on the Pacific, she had danced. Which was, from the only daughter of Griggsby Doane--well, confusing. And though Mrs. Hasmer, balked by the delicacy of her position, had gone to lengths in concealing her disapproval, she had been unable to feign surprise at the resulting difficulties. Betty had certainly not been deliberate in leading on any of the men on the ship; young men, by the way that you had no means of looking up, even so far as the certainty that they were unmarried. But the young mining engineer on his way to Korea had left quite heart-broken. From all outer indications he had proposed marriage and met with a refusal. But not a word, not a hint, not so much as a telltale look, came from Betty.

Mrs. Hasmer sighed over it. She would have liked to know. She came to the conclusion that Betty had been left just a year or so too long in the States. They weren't serious over there, in the matter of training girls for the sober work of life. Prosperity, luxury, were telling on the younger generations. No longer were they guarded from dangerously free thinking. They read, heard, saw everything; apparently knew everything. They read openly, of a Sunday, books which, a generation earlier, would not have reached their eyes even on a week-day. The church seemed to have lost its hold . Respect for tradition and authority had crumbled away. They questioned, weighed everything, these modern children.... Mrs. Hasmer worried a good deal, out in China, about young people in the States.

But under these surface worries, lurked, in the good woman's mind, a deeper, more real worry. Betty was just stepping over the line between girlhood and young womanhood. She was growing more attractive daily. She was anything but fitted to step into the life that lay ahead. Wherever she turned, even now--as witness the Pacific ship--life took on fresh complications. Indeed, Mrs. Hasmer, pondering the problem, came down on the rather strong word, peril. A young girl--positive in attractiveness, gifted, spirited, motherless , trained only to be happy in living--was in something near peril.

One fact which Mrs. Hasmer's mind had been forced to accept was that most of the complications came from sources or causes with which the girl herself had little consciously to do. She was flatly the sort of person to whom things happened. Even when her eager interest in life and things and men was not busy.

In the matter of the rather rude young man in knickerbockers, at Kioto, Betty was to blame, of course. She had set to work to sketch him. Evidently. The most you could say for her on that point was that she would have set just as intently at sketching an old man, or a woman, or a child--or a corner of the room. Mrs. Hasmer had felt, while on the train to Kobe, that she must speak of the matter. After all, she had that deathly responsibility on her shoulders. Betty's only explanation, rather gravely given, had been that she found his nose interesting.

The disturbing point was that something in the way of a situation was sure to develop from the incident. Something. Six weeks of Betty made that a reasonable assumption. And the first complication would arise in some quite unforeseen way. Betty wouldn't bring it about. Indeed, she had quickly promised not to sketch him any more.

This is the way it did arise. At eleven on the following morning Mr. and Mrs. Hasmer and Betty were stretched out side by side in their steamer chairs, sipping their morning beef tea and looking out at the rugged north shore of the Inland Sea. Beyond Betty were three vacant chairs, then this Mr. Brachey--his long person wrapped in a gay plaid rug. He too was sipping beef tea and enjoying the landscape; if so dry, so solitary a person could be said to enjoy anything. A note-book lay across his knees.

Mrs. Hasmer had thought, with a momentary flutter of concern, of moving Betty to the other side of Doctor Hasmer. But that had seemed foolish. Making too much of it. Betty hadn't placed the chairs; the deck steward had done that. Besides she hadn't once looked at the man; probably hadn't thought of him; had been quite absorbed in her sketching--bits of the hilly shore, an island mirrored in glass, a becalmed junk.

A youngish man, hatless, with blond curls and a slightly professional smile, came up from the after hatch and advanced along the deck, eagerly searching the row of rug-wrapped, recumbent figures in deck chairs. Before the Hasmers he stopped with delighted greetings. It came out that he was a Mr. Harting, a Y. M. C. A. worker in Bttrmah, traveling second-class.

"I hadn't seen the passenger list, Mrs. Hasmer, and didn't know you were aboard. But there's a Chinese boy sitting next to me at table. He has put in a year or so at Tokio University, and speaks a little English. He comes from your city, Miss Doane. Or so he seems to think. T'ainan-fu."

Betty inclined her head.

"It was he who showed me the passenger list. At one time, he says, he lived in your father's household."

"What is his name?" asked Betty politely.

"Li Hsien--something or other." Mr. Harting was searching his pockets for a copy of the list.

"I knew Li Hsien very well," said Betty. "We used to play together."

"So I gathered. May I bring him up here to see you?"

Betty would have replied at once in the affirmative, but six weeks of companionship with Mrs. Hasmer had taught her that such decisions were not expected of her. So now with a vague smile of acquiescence, she directed the inquiry to the older woman.

"Certainly," cried Mrs. Hasmer, "do bring him!"

As he moved away, Betty, before settling back in her chair, glanced, once, very demurely, to her left, where Jonathan Brachey lay in what might have been described, from outer appearances, supercilious comfort.

He hadn't so much as lifted an eyelid. He wasn't listening. He didn't care. It was nothing to him that Betty Doane was no idle, spoiled girl tourist, nothing that she could draw with a gifted pencil, nothing that she knew Chinese students at Tokio University, and herself lived at T'ainan-fu!... It wasn't that Betty consciously formulated any such thoughts. But the man had an effect on her; made her uncomfortable; she wished he'd move his chair around to the other side of the ship.

Li Hsien proved to be quite a young man, all of twenty or twenty-one. He had spectacles now, and gold in his teeth. He wore the conventional blue robe, Liack skull-cap with red button, and queue. More than four years were yet to elapse before the great revolution of 1911, with its wholesale queue-cutting and its rather frantic adoption, on the part of the better-to-do, of Western clothing--or, rather, of what they supposed was Western clothing.... He was tall, slim, smiling. He shook hands with Betty, Western fashion; and bowed with courtly dignity to Doctor and Mrs. Hasmer.

His manner had an odd effect on Betty. For six years now she had lived in Orange. She had passed through the seventh and eighth grades of the public school and followed that with a complete course of four years in high school. She had fallen naturally and whole-heartedly into the life of a nice girl in an American suburb. She had gone to parties, joined societies, mildly entangled herself with a series of boy admirers. Despite moderate but frank poverty she had been popular. And in this healthy, active young life she had very nearly forgotten the profoundly different nature of her earlier existence. But now that earlier feeling for life was coming over her like a wave. After all, her first thirteen years had been lived out in a Chinese city. And they were the most impressionable years.

It was by no means a pleasant sensation. She had never loved China; had simply endured it, knowing little else. America she loved. It was of her blood, of her instinct. But now it was abruptly slipping out of her grasp--school, home, the girls, the boys, long evenings of chatter and song on a "front porch," picnics on that ridge known locally as "the mountain," matin?es in New York, glorious sunset visions of high buildings from a ferry-boat, a thrilling, ice-caked river in winter-time, the misty beauties of the Newark meadows--all this was curiously losing its vividness in her mind, and drab old China was slipping stealthily but swiftly into its place.

She knit her brows. She was suddenly helpless, in a poignantly disconcerting way. A word came--rootless. That was it; she was rootless. For an instant she had to fight back the tears that seldom came in the daytime.

But then she looked again at Li Hsien.

He was smiling. It came to her, fantastically, that he, too, was rootless. And yet he smiled. She knew, instantly, that his feelings were quite as fine as hers. He was sensitive, strung high. He had been that sort of boy. For that matter the Chinese had been a cultured people when the whites were crude barbarians. She knew that. She couldn't have put it into words, but she knew it. And so she, too, smiled. And when she spoke, asking him to sit in the vacant chair next to her, she spoke without a thought, in Chinese, the middle Hansi dialect.

And then Mr. Jonathan Brachey looked up, turned squarely around and stared at her for one brief instant. After which he recollected himself and turned abruptly back.

Mr. Harting dropped down on the farther side of Doctor Hasmer. Which left his good wife between the two couples, each now deep in talk.

Mrs. Hasmer's Chinese vocabulary was confined to a limited number of personal and household terms; and even these were in the dialect of eastern Szechwan. Just as a matter of taste, of almost elementary taste, it seemed to her that Betty should keep the conversation, or most of it, in English. She went so far as to lean over the arm of her chair and smile in a perturbed manner at the oddly contrasting couple who chatted so easily and pleasantly in the heathen tongue. She almost reached the point of speaking to Betty; gently, of course. But the girl clearly had no thought of possible impropriety. She was laughing now--apparently at some gap in her vocabulary--and the bland young man with the spectacles and the pigtail was humorously supplying the proper word.

Mrs. Hasmer decided not to speak. She lay hack in her chair. The wrinkles in her forehead deepened a little. On the other side Mr. Halting was describing enthusiastically a new and complicated table that was equipped with every imaginable device for the demonstrating of experiments in physics to Burmese youth. It could be packed, he insisted, for transport from village to village, in a crate no larger than the table itself.

And now, again, she caught the musical intonation of the young Chinaman. Betty, surprisingly direct and practical in manner if unintelligible in speech, was asking questions, which Li Hsien answered in turn, easily, almost languidly, but with unfailing good nature. Though there were a few moments during which he spoke rapidly and rather earnestly.

Then, a little later, Mr. Harting and Li Hsien took their leave and returned to the second-class quarters, astern.

Mrs. Hasmer thought, for a moment, that perhaps now was the time to suggest that English be made the common tongue in the future. But Betty's eager countenance disarmed her. She sighed. And sighed again; for the girl, stirred by what she was saying, had unconsciously raised her voice. And that tall man was listening.

"It's queer how fast things are changing out here," thus Betty. "Li Hsien is--you'd never guess!--a Socialist! I asked him why he isn't staying out the year at Tokio University, and he said he was called home to help the Province. Think of it--that boy! They've got into some trouble over a foreign mining syndicate--"

"The Ho Shan Company," explained Doctor Hasmer.

Betty nodded.

"They've been operating rather extensively in Plonan and southern Chihli," the educator continued, "and I heard last year that they've made a fresh agreement with the Imperial Government giving them practically a monopoly of the coal and iron mining up there in the Hansi Hills."

"Yes, Doctor Hasmer, and he says that there's a good deal of feeling in the province. They've had one or two mass meetings of the gentry and people. He thinks they'll send a protest to Peking. He believes that the company got the agreement through bribery."

"Not at all unlikely," remarked Doctor Hasmer mildly. "I don't know that any other way has yet been discovered of obtaining commercial privileges from the Imperial Government. The Ho Shan Company is... let me see... as I recall, it was organized by that Italian promoter, Count Logatti. I believe he went to Germany, Belgium and France for the capital."

"Li has become an astonishing young man," said Betty more gravely. "He talks about revolutions and republics. He doesn't think the Manchus can last much longer. The southern provinces are ready for the revolution now, he says--"

"That," remarked Doctor Hasmer, "is a little sweeping."

"Li is very sweeping," replied Betty. "And he's going back now to T'ainan-fu for some definite reason. I couldn't make out what. I asked if he would be coming in to see father, and he said, probably not; that there wouldn't be any use in it. Then I asked him if he was still a Christian, and I think he laughed at me. He wouldn't say."

The conversation was broken by the appearance of a pleasant Englishman, an importer of silks, by the name of Obie. He had been thrown with the Hasmers and Betty in one of their sight-seeing jaunts about Tokio. Mr. Obie wore spats, and a scarf pin and cuff links of human bone from Borneo set in circlets of beaded gold. His light, usually amusing talk was liberally sprinkled with crisp phrases in pidgin-English.

He spoke now of the beauties of the Inland Sea, and resumed his stroll about the deck. After a few turns, he went into the smoking-room.

Jonathan Brachey, still with that irritably nervous manner, watched him intently; finally got up and followed him, passing the Hasmers and Betty with nose held high.

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