If love be a flower,
Pluck not that flower,
Though flowers be cool
And dear to thy brow.
Thou happy fool,
Thou shalt travel not far,
Thou shalt lie down with this
Cold flower for thy lover.
He shall blind, he shall star
Thine eyes. His cold kiss
Thy mouth shall cover.
If love be music,
Hear not that music,
Sing not that song,
Though songs be few.
Oh, very strong,
Very close is the weaving
Of notes among notes.
Thou art bound and entangled.
Sing, then, unbelieving,
And sing till thy throat’s
Soft song is strangled.
If love be a lion,
Flee not that lion,
Let thy triumphing bones
On the desert lie.
On a desert of stones
Thy bones shall smile,
Comforted only
By stark silence.
Silence and dew
Be thy crown, for thou
Wert blind to a flower
And deaf to music.
Edward could hardly believe in his own existence when he found himself approaching China.
Japan had been nothing. A country packed with color and little hills but empty of importance, being empty of Emily. All in vain the veil of Fujiyama floated over Yokohama; all in vain little pearl-like clouds were strung round the shoulders of Fujiyama in the indefinite sun. Edward only thought it was very like its pictures.
When he rode in a little light ricksha through the centreless streets of Yokohama, he thought, “This is Edward Williams doing the things that Sunday school children at home see on lantern slides. But Our Hero remains detached, as in a dream.” He was glad to feel detached, to feel that, unlike the other passengers on the ship, he was not “doing the Orient.” He was looking for Emily.
Afterwards he remembered more of Japan than he had realised at the time. He had been inconsistent enough to imitate the majority of the passengers and go by train to Kobe. He had even been chosen as escort by a stout, lonely lady passenger. “Women were more and more interested in Our Hero as he grew older and sadder. Women adore an atmosphere of tragedy.” It was true that Edward had scarcely been able to hear anything that the lonely lady said. It must therefore have been his “mystic air of remoteness” that had interested her. Or perhaps it was just that he was a man. Together they had spoiled for themselves the enchantment of the Kamikura Buddha by climbing coarsely up the steps inside him. Together, in a hired Ford car, they roared through the faery streets of Kyoto in broad daylight without pausing to hear the clicking pattens in the crowded quiet streets. They did not wait to see the crouching lion outlines of the temples against the multiplying stars of an evening sky. All the flowers of Japan passed Edward by. “I am no botanist,” he said proudly.
Japan haunted him afterwards like a ghost. Afterwards he knew that he had shut his eyes. Afterwards he knew that he had nothing to remember, nothing but little sharp negligible details that had pricked his idle mind—the white crests printed on the backs of the blue-clad coolies—the paint on the women’s faces—the way the women’s toes turned in—the greasiness of the women’s hair—the deformed look of the women’s backs in the evening when they put on outer kimonos over their broad thick obi sashes—the angry officious voices of the policemen—the similarity of the Tokyo railway to the London Underground....
After rejoining the ship at Kobe he had defiantly read cheap books all through the Inland Sea. At Nagasaki he did not land. “I’m not a tourist—I’m here on business,” he told a little fat bald American business man, who had not asked him whether he were a tourist or not.
Manila Edward ignored. He only saw one thing belonging to Manila, a small Filipino woman with gauze sleeves and ruffles starched as though she were an Elizabethan, who came on board with her husband, a little man, the upper part of whose body was sensibly clothed in a garment of such transparency that no single crease or roll of brown fat over his ribs and stomach was hidden.
And here was Hongkong.
Edward woke up. He was alive to the bland blue outlines of the Peak against the sky. Every scarlet and gold flutter of the paper prayers on the importunate sampans that raced for the liner was a message from Emily to Edward.
People talked with English voices in Hongkong. Edward could hardly hear what the women said. England at last! He followed a couple of pink, small-headed subalterns to the hotel. He heard one say, “By Jove,” in a throaty English voice. Edward felt no longer despised and exotic. He saw that everyone in the hotel lobby looked cooler than himself. But the faces were English and not complacent. Or even if they were a little complacent—why not?—they were English. He ordered a cocktail.
“After that I will look in the register,” he thought. “Perhaps Emily’s name will lie like a strip of light on the first page I look at.”
He did not know Emily’s last name.
He could hardly believe for a moment that he did not know her name. The cocktail was so good that while he was drinking it he thought, “I shall think of her name in a minute.” But nobody had ever told him her name.
“I know Tam’s name at least.”
It was a pseudonym.
He deliberately interposed a blankness between his brain and this disaster of a China rendered empty of Emily. China to him meant Emily now. The divorce of the two words—China—Emily—was inconceivable.
He studied the register. “If I see her writing I shall recognise it—though I have never seen it.”
A long untidy addition sum of names lay before him on the page. The result of the sum was—nothing. He turned to another fruitless page. Another. “Miss E. L. Spring, Walthamstow.... Mr. Irwin Scales, Binset, Somerset ... Mrs. Irwin Scales....” The date of those was about right. E. L. Spring? It was a blasphemy. Walthamstow?...
But the date was all right.
E. L. Spring was the only woman with the initial E. There were dark horses all over the page, fiendishly concealing the most important part of their names... Miss Framlingham, Delhi, India ... Miss Wherry, London ... Miss Burnett, Canterbury ... Miss Something Illegible, San Francisco, Calif.... They all sounded like thin women with withered necks and little green veils hanging from the backs of their hats, not like Emily.
He returned to the chair beside his empty cocktail glass. His eyes had tears in them so he pretended there was a fly in one of them. His throat was compressed by distress. He could not have spoken aloud. “I thought I left myself behind,” he thought. “But I am still Edward Williams in China. Myself has caught me up. Look at me, crying now in a hot chair in Hongkong, I who used to cry in the cold draught that ran through my dreadful room in San Francisco.”
The heat was like stagnant steam. He felt sick and very deaf. The only sounds he could hear through the exasperating roaring of his ears were the sharp cries of the chair-bearers outside the open window, trying to attract patronage. The cool vacant faces of English women moved up and down in the shadow of the arcades outside. Edward could not hear the clicking of their high heels, they seemed to him to move subtly like ghosts.
It was terribly hot.
“I shall cry frankly unless I move about.” He hung his self-conscious head as he left the hotel. He tried to interest himself in the Chinese names above the shops. No—not China now; China was a horrible half-name now. The Peak leaned like a cloud over the houses. He could see a little train sliding up the mountain, like a fish which some giant fisherman was drawing up from the sea. He found the station. The train was full, but, as Edward approached it, an official, seeing him, turned out a Chinese clerk in order that Edward might find a place. Edward looked angrily at the patient alert face of the ousted Chinese on the platform. “I don’t care if his business is urgent,” thought Edward. “I hope his wife is dying. It isn’t fair that only I should be hurt.”
“Oh, my dear ...” screamed the hot English girl in front of Edward to her hot friend. All the women in the car were fanning themselves and talking in a frenzy of foolish energy about men.
The car lifted them all up the hill. Dense dull shrubs bordered the steep track. The houses seemed to lean against the hill. The harbour was unrolled at the foot of the mountain. A fringe of ships, like tentacles round a jellyfish, radiated from the shore. Kowloon, backed by crumpled hills, stretched out a corresponding fringe towards Hongkong. Edward’s ears cracked and clicked, affected by the change of level.
He walked on the neat paths of the Peak. The Peak seemed as hot as the seashore. “Must be nearer the sun,” thought Edward confusedly. But no, it seemed that he was above the sun; he had left the sun behind floating on a thin delicate sea. It was sinking in the sea. All the islands were blue imitative suns, sinking in the sea. The whole sky was the colour of fire. Edward could almost hear the roaring of the fire in the sky. The sea was suddenly sheathed in shadow; mists like snakes writhed between the islands. The islands were no longer sinking in the sea; they were buoyed up by encircling mists. Why was it still so hot? The sea closed and flowed over the sun. The fire in the sky burned no more.
Edward thought, “She must have gone to Peking.” At once it was cooler. “I will go to Peking tomorrow.” At once he began to enjoy the thought of China. A Chinese woman with a small gaunt face in a bright blue tunic and trousers neatly pressed, her sleek black hair in a spangled net, a neat white flower in her hair, tottered by on small compressed feet. He thought “Emily would have wanted to kiss that darling woman. Perhaps she would have kissed her. No, she would have stood and looked back at her, she would have jumped a little and all her body would have been electrified with pleasure. ‘Oh, look ... oh, look ... oh, look....’ The woman would have turned and laughed in delight.”
He could not believe it when next day a schoolboy English clerk behind a counter told him the price of a journey to Peking.
“Say it again, please,” said Edward.
The boy said it again without referring to any book. He seemed to know the dreadful words by heart, just as a torturer knows by heart the levers that will hurt most.
“That’s seventy dollars more than I have,” said Edward.
“Hard luck,” said the boy, looking at him curiously. It seemed odd to him to admit such a thing. “You can go by boat to Tientsin. That would save you a few dollars.”
“It wouldn’t save enough dollars for me,” said Edward. He stood on the doorstep of the office. “Well, I can’t stop here all day,” he thought. Several times he told himself briskly, “Well, well, well, I can’t stop here all day....”
He comforted himself presently by thinking, “I must have tremendous courage to have got so far. Many people wouldn’t have got out of that naked little room in San Francisco.” He drew a little courage from the illusion of his own courage. Presently he realised that the world did not end on the doorstep of a tourist agency. He found several possible jobs in the newspaper. “English jobs sound somehow less fierce than American jobs,” he thought and, buoyed up by a desperate hope, he called on the headmaster of an English school for Chinese.
“I’m afraid you haven’t had much experience of teaching,” said the headmaster, a gentle, uncertain young man, looking at Edward unhappily.
“It is I who am afraid,” replied Edward courteously.
The school was in great need of teachers. The headmaster did not seem to mind whether the teachers could teach—if only a specious appearance of teaching was sustained in his dozen classrooms. Edward was engaged at a small salary to live in the school and teach a class of fifty boys in “all ordinary English subjects.” There was one professional teacher in the school—a woman. The other teachers’ desks were occupied by one or two unemployed merchant seamen, some bright young women stenographers, a stray woman journalist teaching “as a stunt,” and two or three sullen Chinese whose classes were always in an uproar.
Edward nearly fainted as the headmaster took him into the classroom on the first day and introduced him to the boys. “I am sure you will do your best ... Mr. Williams who lives in England and has spent much time in America ... giving his time to help Class C in their study of English.... Now, boys, we must all do our best ... make Mr. Williams welcome....”
While the headmaster’s shy voice wavered on, Edward studied the faces in front of him. Half the class was Eurasian; the other half Chinese. There were one or two thin, glowing Indian faces among the broad Chinese masks. Three Portuguese-Chinese boys in staring striped suits with small waists sat in the front row, trying successfully to frighten Edward by means of an exaggerated look of awe. With these exceptions the two front rows were occupied by little boys who were physically too weak to challenge the determination of the big boys to sit behind unseen. Edward looked hopefully at two little boys in the front row trying to look superlatively good. Their lips were moving; they were making a show of repeating the headmaster’s words to themselves in order to make a good impression. Over their heads Edward could see a dazzle of insolent faces, laughing at him and at the futile gentle enthusiasm of the headmaster. The big boys were quite frankly talking. Sometimes even Edward could hear their twanging voices. The headmaster looked wistfully down the room at the disturbers but made no comment. Edward felt his face fixed in an expression that a martyr might wear. His face was frozen. He could not change his expression. He looked in sickly appeal at the headmaster, who was now leaving the room. He looked in sickly appeal at the boys.
There was a fearful silence, broken by one of the big Eurasians at the back suddenly breaking into song.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“Now you must be quiet, please,” said Edward huskily.
“Shall not I sing?” enquired the musician. “Am not I having sing lesson every evening when school finish?”
Edward ignored him. “I see by the timetable that we should begin with a Scripture lesson——”
“Oh, no sah—nevah Scriptchah. Monday mornings we was having hygiene—no, we was having dictations—nevah Scriptchah.”
The concerted noise of contradiction became louder and louder. Edward felt as if he were caught in a great roaring machine that he could not stop. “Oh, silence ... oh, silence ...” he cried, tapping the desk feebly with his pencil. He could not stop the noise. He rose and flung his arms out. “Oh, silence—I can’t stand this.”
The hysterical gesture produced a startling silence. Then some of the big boys laughed.
“The timetable says Scripture and I say Scripture,” said Edward furiously. “No-one else’s opinion is needed. Now I want one of you big boys—I don’t know your names yet—that one with a pale blue coat on—to come and tell me how far you got in the Bible ...”
“Please sah, you say no other man opinion was needed.”
“Shut up, curse you.”
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“He sing a song for welcoming you, sah.”
The boy in a long pale blue coat stood in front of Edward, unexpectedly abashed. His small eyes seemed deliberately veiled with dulness.
“What is your name?” asked Edward.
“I new scholar.”
“You have a name, though,” insisted Edward.
“Oh, no, sah,” shouted another boy from the back of the room. “He was having no name. He was married man....”
“His name was Ng Sik Wong,” said one of the laboriously good little boys.
“What is his first name?”
“Ng,” buzzed the whole class.
“I can’t believe it.” Feeling a little braver Edward wrote down, “? Sick Wong—Scar on nose—pale blue—halfwitted,” in his notebook. “Now, ... ahem, Sick Wong, you’re one of the biggest boys in the class, aren’t you?”
“I new scholar.”
“Almost big enough to be a master, eh?”
“Eh—tya—tya.... Hey, Ng Sik Wong—you be master—number one class master—married man....”
Edward pressed on. “So I’m sure I can depend on you to try and help me.”
“I new scholar.”
“Go back to your seat.”
“Please, sah,” cooed a good little boy. “I shall help you. I shall tell you where was we reading holy book. Last Monday we have finish Matthew-holy-gospel-according-to twenty four chapter. I tell you my name, sah. I Rupert Frazer, sah.”
“Open your Bibles at the twenty fifth chapter of Saint Matthew.”
Bibles flew about in the air. There was a riotous noise of opening books and a few whines, “Please sah, he steal my book ... please sah, Pong Poon Chong pinch me.... Sah, I have lose my Bible since a long time....” The tallest of the smart Portuguese boys in the front row rose.
“Excuse me, sah, what does it mean, Virgin?”
Edward’s skull was sweating. “A virgin—” he began.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
“Surely the whole class has sense enough not to ask silly questions.”
“Please, sah, you shall tell him ask Ng Sik Wong. He married man.”
“Please, sah, tell him ask Ng Sik Wong wife—she shall know what is virgin—I wonder....”
“A virgin is a young unmarried woman,” said Edward, petulantly damning all virgins.
“But, sah——”
“In this case that definition is enough.”
“But, please, sah——”
“Begin to read, Rupert Frazer.”
In a high staccato voice which ignored punctuation and sense, Rupert Frazer began to read.
“Please, sah,” said the tallest of the three Portuguese. “Please excuse us leave the room, sah.” All three rose as if worked by one lever.
“What for?” asked Edward.
“Eh—tya—tya....”
The three Portuguese stared at Edward in exaggerated reproach and bashfulness.
(“And att midnight there wass a cry made be-hold de brid-a-groom cometh go yee—”)
“Very well. Come straight back,” said Edward.
(“Less thah bee no eno for uss and—”)
“Oh, stop, Frazer,” implored Edward. “Next boy, read.”
The boys on Frazer’s right and left began reading in concert with furious glances at each other.
“Not both; the Indian boy.”
“I am Parsee,” said the boy, a small nervous looking child. “My name iss Bannerjee.”
“Please excuse us leave the room, sah,” said the first of a line of big boys filing past Edward’s desk towards the door.
“Stop,” shouted Edward unsteadily. His head was rocking with the heat and consciousness of failure. “Go back to your seats.”
“Oh, sah, other teachah Mistah Ramsee he nevah stop us.”
“Go on reading, Bannerjee,” said Edward. He pretended not to see the last of the line disappearing through the door. The departure of the disturbing element gave rise to peace in the class.
“Watch therefore,” read a boy with a Chinese face and a German accent. “For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh. Please, sah, is not it true dat nuns haf Our Lord als Bridegroom?”
“Nuns iss virgins,” said one of the Parsees in a shocked voice.
“Please, sah,” continued the German. “Iss it not Mystic Union between Our Lord and nuns? If we not believing in Mystic Union between Holy Lord and mankind iss it not true we shall be perishing in outer darkness and there shall be whipping and gnashing off teeth?”
“Everyone is free to have his own opinion about these things,” said Edward, doubtfully. “Outer darkness is only a parable in itself——”
“But the Bible say——”
“There are a great many interpretations of the Bible’s words,” snapped Edward, feeling unhappy and strangely alone among the quiet familiar words in front of him. “Perhaps we should all be more likely to agree on the general sense of this parable. What do you think Jesus meant us to understand by this story——”
“Not story, sah, it was holy parable.”
“Well, what can we learn from this parable?”
“We shall not know, sah. You telling us, after—we shall be knowing.”
“Use your minds. What lesson do you find in the parable?”
“We not virgins, sah.”
“Mistah Ramsee he nevah ask the thing he have not teach.”
“This is Mr. Williams, not Mr. Ramsay,” said Edward, whose confidence was increasing with the increasing tranquillity of the class. “I will give you three minutes in which to glance over the parable again before answering——”
“It mean—the wicked people shall perishing in efferlasting fires,” declaimed the German.
“Silence for three minutes.”
There was an uneasy silence broken suddenly by the opening of a side door. The woman teacher in the next classroom stood in the doorway and spoke in a contemptuous voice to Edward. “Will you please restrain your boys from shooting their pea-shooters at this door? The noise in the next room is most disturbing.”
“Sorry,” said Edward, feeling lost again. “I’m rather deaf. I didn’t know....”
“And you might like to know,” continued the visitor, “that eleven boys from this class are playing ball in the playground. I don’t know, of course, if they have your permission....”
“Oh, well ...” said Edward. “My God, it’s terribly hot, isn’t it?...”
The woman-teacher shut the door sharply.
Edward felt as if he were outside himself, as if he could see himself leaning limply over his desk, his damp mud-colored hair drooping forward—its parting lost—his thin face shining with sweat and almost certainly rather dirty, the red spots growing redder upon his chin and forehead, his lower jaw trembling although he was trying, by hard biting, to hold it steady. “Even if I found Emily,” he thought, “she would hate me now.” He could never be cool or lovable in these thick weary English clothes. Then he thought with sudden pleasure that he would buy a new suit, a cool pale suit in which to meet Emily. He imagined himself, looking delicate and tired and cool in a delicately pale suit, walking triumphantly towards Emily along a Chinese street between booths full of lilies. “Oh, look ... oh, look ...” Emily would cry, throwing her arms up in her exquisitely exaggerated way. “Oh, look ... here’s that darling Edward ... looking like a damned old primrose ...”
“Shall I went to tell Ma Lo Yung and other boys come in to lesson?” suggested the saintly Rupert Frazer.
“Yes, run along for Heaven’s sake,” said Edward, trembling with various emotions.
The day was at last over. It seemed like two days to Edward because it was cut in half by an hour for luncheon. During this hour he could be sullen and quiet; the half dozen other men teachers took little notice of him. The women teachers could be heard screaming in secluded mirth in another room.
The week was at last over. Edward had half Saturday and all Sunday to himself. Not quite to himself, for on Sunday he had to be “on duty” for half the day. He sat in the window of his room in the shade of the big palm-tree outside. Heat hummed through the garden, through the open doors and along the dingy passages of the school. Edward did not mind what the boys were doing—whatever it was, they were doing it fairly quietly. Occasionally a tearing yell of laughter or a whine or a shrill protest in Chinese was mixed with the hum of heat and insects.
Edward was comforted by comforting spirits, the contents of two bottles which were his only contribution to the furniture of his room. These represented the only money he had spent that week. The new suit was still a dream. He taught in his shirt-sleeves.
He had nothing to do on Sundays. Yet he tried to regulate his drinking. He made appointments with himself. “At half past three I will have another....” But sometimes he forgot and had another too early. “It keeps off the mosquitoes,” he thought.
One of the big Portuguese boys from his class was standing in the doorway. “Please, Mistah Weelims....”
“Have a drink,” said Edward. He thought the boy looked rather beautiful; his black hair was so thick and shining; it was brushed like a smooth breaking wave.
Before suppertime there were six boys in Edward’s room. “If you fellers would only behave decently in class,” said Edward, feeling like a man of the world surrounded by his friends, “we’d have s’more parties like this....”
Edward stayed at the school for a month. The boys were almost fatherly to him. Edward ceased to assert authority. His system was based entirely on bribes. The system seemed to answer. Only once during the month the headmaster sent a note to ask that less noise be made in Class C. That was when a boy hid behind the blackboard and over-turned it upon Edward. This amused even the good boys.
“A joke’s a joke,” said Edward with tears in his eyes. The blackboard had shaken tears into his eyes. Two of the big boys had their arms around his neck, were roaring yells of laughter into his ear. “This joke’s certainly on me. Oh, come now, go easy.” He was straining after laughter. He thought, “That’s the way to take boys, no frills, no airs....” He thought he was fond of the boys. He knew they were not fond of him. He was terribly afraid of them. The note from the headmaster was handed to him.
“A letter from Daisy ... he says we’re making too much noise, fellers.”
He did not drink much in the day-time. Whisky in such hot weather made him tremble, made him unable to bear the noise and difficulty of the class room. But after dinner, when at least it was dark and one could pretend that the heat was lifted, he drank a good deal and was comforted. But he saved a great deal of his salary. He thought he would look for an opportunity to leave. He would be ill; it was quite easy for him to seem ill. He would be obliged to go and see a great American doctor in Peking about his hearing. He had been engaged for three months, in the absence on sick leave of one of the regular teachers, but he had no sense of responsibility to the school. His brain was full of prospective interviews with the headmaster. “I suffer terribly with my ears and my sinuses. I have just had a most dangerous operation. I need hardly say it will be a matter of real regret to me to leave the dear boys....” The headmaster would say, “Of course, of course, I quite understand.” Edward had not only no objection to telling lies, he even failed as a rule to notice how broadly he lied.
He did not have a chance to excite the sympathy of the headmaster. He was turned out of the school one Sunday.
Sunday was his day without fear, and when he was on duty on Sunday afternoons, he drank a great deal. His last Sunday passed like a dream; he had no fear except the fear of the week to come. He was aware that he was to preside at the supper of the boarders. The half-dozen big boys who had been “sharing the party” thought he had forgotten. Edward laughed at this idea. The big boys shepherded him downstairs to the dining room; they linked their arms with his in facetious tenderness. It was absurd, Edward thought. His mind was quite clear and serene. He knew that he would have to say grace. The boys’ food was very bad—the boys told him so. How absurd to say grace over a bad meal. Indeed it was blasphemy. He would be honest. He would be witty. What a curious perspective of white faces along the tables. The boys spoiled the austerity of the perspective by wearing different-colored clothes.
“Let us pray that dinner today will be better than it was yesterday.” (God does not mind a man being witty at His expense.) “O God, who daily turnest our bread into a stone——”
Well, even if the Matron was looking at him, she could appreciate wit, couldn’t she? He laughed a little to give her a lead. Her hard white collar and cap seemed to heave like the ruff and crest of an affronted bird. Women had no sense of humor. And anyway it was he, not she, who was on duty. He could say what grace he liked. The matron was gone now. She had realised that she had no business there. The boys were all laughing. They were a broad-minded crew, these boys.
Someone took him quite rudely by the arm. It was the headmaster. He looked drunk, Edward thought. So that was how the headmaster spent Sunday afternoons—and he a parson. He pulled Edward out of the room. It was outrageous that the headmaster should so interrupt Edward’s duties.
After a short talk, during which the headmaster gave voice to some most insolent personalities, Edward realised quite suddenly that he himself was drunk. He wanted immediately to go away from the people who had noticed this humiliating fact. He wanted new faces around him, unreproachful faces.
“I’m going,” said Edward; the chair span away from him unkindly as he rose. “After the way I’ve been treated——”
“Please go tonight,” said the headmaster.
Everything was going well. Soon he would be away from these people who only witnessed his moments of indignity. The boys would never triumph over him again now. He would be alone, travelling in search of Emily. People who did not know him would think, “Who is that thin eager young man with the far-off look in his eyes?”
The Matron packed his clothes for him. She did not speak. She touched his possessions as though they were dirty. The headmaster called a ricksha for him and, without speaking, put Edward’s suitcase into it. Nobody said good-bye. The stars were like dew on Edward’s eyes. Inside his head pulsed the impact of the ricksha coolie’s feet on the ground. The street was narrow and crowded and quiet, at least there were only voices in it. Across the lighted booths and under the hanging bannered shop signs hurried the coolies at a half trot on their bare feet. Their burdens swung at either end of long poles; they had slung the great absurd shields which were their hats on their backs, the heat of the day being over. “Hai-ya ho, hoi-ya hai-ya, hai-ya ho, hoi-ya hai-ya....” Two withered women, with thin bare legs under their turned-up trousers, were beating a child’s garment with poles. Fierce treatment for so small a thing. But the devil of sickness was in the garment; it required fierce treatment. The lights glared on the scarlet and gold banners and on the gilt filigree woodwork that framed the doors of the shops. It seemed as if one heard noise more with one’s eyes than with one’s ears. The glare seemed to drown the voices and the barefoot tread of the crowds. Wherever one street crossed another, however, there was a great clamoring of coolies forging their own right of way through the tangle. Edward’s ricksha coolie said “Hao hao” when anyone crossed his path; the “hao” was always in time with the thumping of his running feet, as if jerked from his throat. Tall Sikh policemen pushed coolies roughly about. In the sight of the policemen the little crowd of almost naked beggar children running after Edward momentarily evaporated.
Edward could now pay for his passage to Tientsin by sea and for a ticket from Tientsin to Peking. He could not pay for the new cool suit of clothes. Emily must take him as he was—hot or cold.
He was the only passenger in the ship to Tientsin. It was carrying simply a great deal of indigo—and Edward. It was intent upon this duty and stopped at only one port.
A gentle and pleasant measure of eternity passed over Edward. He lay on a chair alone upon the deck, flattened between the soft sea and sky. Flying fish rained upwards out of the sea. The flying fish made little scratches on the smooth sea. One evening the ship passed the mouth of the Yangtze River at sunset. An enormous plume of crimson cloud leaned away from the sea up the river. Thick polished plates of gold and crimson seemed laid upon the smooth waves of the sea to the west. The low hills at the mouth of the river were luminously purple....
For many days the ship followed the coast, followed it far off, like the timid disciple. There were high unreasonable islands, suddenly before the unsuspecting ship. The islands sustained an illusion of life on their shores; they sent their hopes out into the sea in little fishing boats. Once there was a boat quite near. In it one man smoothed his long unbound hair into a queue; another played on a stringed instrument and whined a song; another indolently directed the boat towards the bristling stockade of floating poles that marked their net. But it must all have been faery. No community could really live such a secret life, a life so full of things that would never be known.
One day passengers came on board in mid-sea, a great crowd of birds, land-birds who knew nothing of the dangerous skies over the sea. Hawks and woodpeckers, sparrows and doves and little tits and finches stood about the rigging pretending not to see one another. The seagulls laughed at them. The land-birds felt uneasy standing in these strange, black, even trees, they were too much puzzled to be very much afraid of men. A red and green bird walked about near Edward, hoping that it would find a worm somewhere. Whenever Edward spoke to it, it pulled itself self-consciously together but did not fly away. A Chinese sailor caught a sparrowhawk and tied it to the capstan by the leg. Wei-hai-wei seemed to be the arranged destination of these passengers. Like a Cook’s Conducted Tour they all disembarked together in the most businesslike way. Only the hawk, tied by the leg to the capstan, was left behind looking sullenly across at the sullen dark battleships that peered out of the harbour.
The three officers of the ship left Edward a great deal alone. The captain was an Irishman, a fat, fair man with great, serene, grey eyes. He had once been, he told Edward pointedly, a slave to drink; he had an idea that Edward was similarly bound. He thought he could haul Edward’s soul to safety on a thin string of sentimental reminders ... “mother, waiting at home ... grey hairs in sorrow to the grave ... England needs strong sane men now ... devil’s brew ... I know, me lad, I’ve been through hell on account of it....”
“Hell’s the word,” said Edward placidly, basking in the light of the captain’s earnest missionary interest.
The captain would not allow Edward to drink, either in the ship or at Chefoo—their only port of call. “You don’t know China,” said the captain. “You youngsters simply don’t know how to behave in China. In London now, two or three whiskies and sodas ... no harm at all. But in China—I tell you I’ve seen men arrive in Shanghai with babies’ complexions ... and five years after ... yellow as a daffodil, bent, malarial, only fit for nursing homes.”
Edward hoped that he would look only fit for a nursing home when he met Emily. Then she would think, “How he has suffered. How I have made him suffer.”
Much of the indigo disembarked at Chefoo. The ship seemed to have run aground on a brown island of barges. This island was peopled by brown coolies with vacant faces; their heads were half shaven and half covered with hair like cotton waste; sometimes they had bound their hair into chignons. Under their unresting but unhurrying hands, their island of barges became mountainous with sacks of indigo. Many of the sacks burst; indigo oozed down the slopes of the mountains; the coolies became bluer and bluer; there was indigo in their hair and indigo round their shoulders like shawls.
Edward and the captain walked austerely and thirstily about Chefoo. The Chinese of Chefoo seemed to be of a rougher race than those of Hongkong. They even grated on the eye, Edward thought. They were taller and hairier; their clothes were neither neat nor complete. Their houses were ragged and indecent. The houses of the missionaries looked to Edward even more impossible than those of the Chinese. Outside one of the mission gates a thin boy, quite naked, tortured a yellow lizard. There were yellow, scarred hills round the harbour. They trailed a silken hem of white sand into the sea and, behind the town, a green scarf of orchard land was thrown upon the shoulder of a low hill.
Between golden castled hills the ship left the harbour in the evening.
The Yellow Sea was really yellow. It was thickly yellow and reflected no light. It was more like a desert than a sea. The eye would have found a string of camels crossing the sea no anomaly.
The Pei-ho River was yellow too. The ship entered the river between low mud forts. Salt was stacked on a broad streaky plain to the north. Primitive windmills, like merry-go-rounds at English fairs, whirled among the stacks of salt. The earth was yellow, the water was yellow, the long slanted wave that ran after the ship was yellow and, breaking over the squeaking yellow babies on the shore, left them a little yellower. The villages were of yellow mud; the blind mud houses had no angles; they were like beehives. There was a ragged yellow camel kneeling self-consciously in a street; he kneeled as though his hind legs were broken. A little girl in dark strawberry red—an exquisite color for a dweller in golden mud—watched the camel from a dark doorway. The boats in the river had nets stretched between bending slim poles hinged to their masts. When, worked by primitive levers, these nets were bowed to the water and rose spangled and silvered, the boats were like dragonflies resting delicately on the water.
Tientsin ... a few dusty hours in a train ... Peking. The train seemed to collide with Peking. The high city wall approached the railroad at a steep angle. The train seemed to glance from the wall without impact. Edward found himself outside the Water Gate, at the inner wall of Peking.
He became a ghost in a soundless ricksha. Lights pricked his eyes. There was nothing in this Peking but houses transplanted from European suburbs. There was an English bank, there were English business men, English soldiers, French soldiers, small serene policemen in commonplace khaki uniform, several Chevrolet cars ... finally an immense hotel, the road to which was lined by rickshas at rest with sweating coolies sitting on their shafts.
“Emily can’t be here. This is not Peking. Peking has been stolen away. Emily has been stolen away.”
Edward took a room in the hotel. He did not know how he would pay for it. He thought he would be here forever; he hoped that he would soon die; perhaps, through dimming eyes, he would see at last the real Peking and Emily running urgently towards him. “Too late, Emily ... too late....”
The great lobby of the hotel was like purgatory. Surely it would have held all the saints and sinners of the world. The saints and sinners sat in large absorbing chairs and at little tables, waiting till the time came when they might do something else. There was dance music in the distance, a beat like a hammer behind one’s head. The beat fought with the beat of Edward’s heart; it was intolerable. He could hear and feel the beat of his heart louder and louder as he drank cocktail after cocktail. Cocktails here at any rate were better than they would have been had he found the real Peking. A broad serene face crowning a high-necked robe of green gold filled Edward’s imagination when he thought of Peking. Over that face a banner waved, and as it waved the wild gold dragon on the banner whipped his length about but could not escape. Even the man who brought another cocktail had something to say about this dragon, Edward thought. “The moon is his saddle ...” the cocktail man seemed to say. It was true; the dragon was saddled by the curve of the satiny moon. Edward had seen the moon from the other side of the Water Gate, when the real Peking had still seemed to be in front of him. Perhaps he could find Peking after all, in the light of the young moon. It was very late. There was hardly time to go to bed, not time, in his present mood, to take off one damp, snarling garment after another, to wash his hot and tired body, to find his way uncertainly into an unknown bed. It would be morning in a breath.
He went out. He walked east. The air was cool and the sharp brittle rays of the stars made him feel as though he were on the verge of being more widely awake than ever man was before. Here were trees and a very broad moonlit street. Here, suddenly, was Peking. A great gate cast its mountainous tented shadow to his feet. The curves of the roofs above the gate were high and ample and optimistic. The moon shone through the deserted windows of the high guard-house. There were soldiers at the gate so Edward went no nearer to its arch. But he waded in its clean shadow upon the uneven dust of the street. He walked still east, along very narrow streets. There were no straight roofs at all; all the eaves turned up as if the roofs were of drooping dark silk with their hems slung to the stars, or as if the houses were dancing and swinging gay skirts.
There was an open space; low trees splashed shadows on white dust and wet grass. Peking was not so tightly packed within its walls but that a wide space might be left in the angle of one corner of the walls, a space where goats and donkeys had their lodging. Beggars slept here too, but Edward’s tread on the dust did not wake them.
The walls barred his way. They were new-looking walls, he thought, almost silver in the moonlight, the design of castellation fencing the outer rim was unbroken. But the guard-house on the corner of the wall looked forgotten and old. There was a brick slope which climbed to the top of the wall. Iron gates barred both the foot and the head of the slope, but the gates were easily climbed.
Edward was on the broad weedy path that ran on the top of the wall. The seeds of flowers and tall grasses had accepted the wall as part of the soil of China. Edward went into the high beamed hall of the guard-house. The moonlight made strange and glorious broad spaces of its dusty floor; its dazzled windows looked out on naked moonlight. It was so full of silence that its old walls cracked.
That corner of Peking was a watching corner. A little further on the dragons of the Observatory watched the stars. Great wild bucking dragons bore on their backs or between their claws huge secret instruments which, in the belief of men and dragons, prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. The bronze dragons of the Peking Observatory are only a little junior to history, but Edward did not know that. He tried feebly to open the locked gate and then forgot and left the dragons, the spying and puritan dragons, holding their check on the wild and dancing stars.
To the west Peking was like an enchanted forest in the milky half light. No house declared itself among the trees except the great insolent hotel which raised itself like a banner of unworthy victory over the quiet city. Beyond Peking, far away, were the Western Hills, their outline a wild tossing together of angles, their chequered surface broken by strange folds and scars.
There was a light other than the moon. It was not a sudden light but Edward realised it suddenly. The dawn was creeping up behind him to devour him unawares. The centre of the universe had shifted. The dawn was a subtler miracle than was the moon; the dawn succeeded to the empire of the moon.
Light ran like a snake along the tops of the Western Hills. There was a spear of flame along the eastern horizon. Little escaping clouds caught fire; there was an ominous look of molten gold where the east made ready the first step of the stair for the sun’s ascent. The sun pointed its sword abruptly at Peking. The golden roofs of the Imperial City most gloriously received the challenge. The city threw away its cloak of mystery and the birds sang. A blue cart, its long peak stretching forward as far as the ears of the mule that drew it, its little fretted windows set into the blue tunnel that covered it, heaved slowly along a red track from the east into the sunstricken city.
The dam of day had burst.
Edward thought, “Emily is somewhere, drowning, asleep in that lake of sunlight. I can find her now. I have begun finding instead of losing now....”
Where does hope set its roots? Out of what blessed and silly seed does hope rise like a flower, fed by nothing more reasonable than a piercing of sunlight through air full of birds’ songs? It is curious how joyfully we pluck and wear at our hearts that fatal hope that has sprung from the seed of a dream or of the little wind that passes across the morning.
“Hope is a true thing,” thought Edward when he looked, later in the morning, at the hotel register. There were the names.
“Mr. and Mrs. Tam McTab—not so well but unfortunately more correctly known as
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Watson—” (Tam had written facetiously).
“Miss Emily Frere”—(in a small impudent writing).
“Master Stone W. Ponting.”
The clerk said that they had left some weeks ago—here was the date—all except the young gentleman, Master Ponting, he was over there—the one drinking a lemon squash.
Stone W. Ponting was about thirteen years old; his thick, upstanding hair seemed gray with dust; dirt and freckles obscured his complexion; his hands were dark with dirt.
“You’re Stone Ponting, aren’t you?” said Edward nervously. “Mrs. Melsie Ponting’s boy?”
“Yump,” said Stone, speaking into a glass of lemon squash.
Edward was afraid of him. He never really believed that boys of thirteen had no longer the power to twist his arms.
“Have you heard your mother speak of me—Edward R. Williams?”
But Stone, who had an abnormally long tongue, was using it to explore the outside of his lower cheek, in the hope of prolonging by a second or two the taste of lemon squash. Apparently failing in this he peeled the paper from a strip of chewing gum and inserted the contents. He did not answer Edward but, on the other hand, did not destroy hope of an answer by shutting his mouth. The chewing gum, though active, remained in the public gaze.
Edward felt helpless but, in such a cause, dared not cease his efforts.
“What’s happened to Emily and her friends?” he asked. “Didn’t you come here with them?”
“Yump,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, gimme my check. I must hustle. Going out horseback riding with the Doc.”
A shower of money fell from his pockets as he rose and the re-assembling of this gave Edward an opportunity to speak again.
“No, but truly, I want awfully to know about Emily and the others. I say, if you’ll stay and give the Doc a miss for today, we’ll go somewhere and find a real American soda fountain.”
He thought Stone might strike him. Or perhaps Stone would simply walk away, dwindle through the door and be lost in the sunlight forever.
“Sure I’ll stop,” said Stone W. Ponting, putting out his tongue meditatively and sitting down again. “We kin get a dandy nut sundae right here. Nut sundae’s mine.”
“Why Emerly’s went up the Yangtze Ki-yang,” he told Edward in reply to three or four more questions. “So’s Tam and Lucy. Peking fer mine, I said, when they wanted to have me go withum. My dad’s sent me plenty of dough, so I should worry. My dad’ll be tickled to death to have me withum. He and Mom bin fighting for the custody of me. Dad won. But he had to go to Japan or some place on business. He’s a financier.”
Edward was neither acute enough nor sufficiently interested to notice the sad bleak defences the child had put up for himself against a hard world. Edward thought, “A detestable child. He has too little imagination and too much horse-sense to help me.”
“Wasn’t Emily supposed to be looking after you?”
Stone gave a sharp cracked laugh. “I guess Mom thought so. Mom’s kinda soft. Emerly knows I’m a feller kin look out for himself. Dad wouldn’t give a whoop. He don’t know yet, but he should worry. He’s a financier. He sent me a thousand bucks to blow—till he could come back from Japan. I got the letter, that is to say, it was addressed to Emerly. There was a thousand bucks for her to blow on me insidum. Emerly’s a sport, I’ll say. She acted like she was leaving me in charge of a dame here—so’s Mom wouldn’t get mad at her for piking. But there was nothing to that. The other dame don’t worry me any.”
“She is shameless,” thought Edward. “Loving Emily is like loving a tigress.” He felt a better man because he loved the shameless Emily. It was like a romance among supermen, he thought.
“Your mother asked me once to take care of you and bring you to your father. I had business at the time that prevented me. But she was very anxious that I should. Perhaps she told you——”
“Mebbe,” said Stone indifferently. The nut sundae nearly oozed out of his mouth, but was checked by sleight of suction. “She’s kinda soft, is Mom.”
“You oughtn’t to be here by yourself.”
“I’m sicka being handed around,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, another nut sundae. And then some. I’m a shark for nut sundaes.”
“Well, we can be friends anyway,” said Edward shyly. “A man can be friends with another man.”
Stone took no notice of this. He lifted up the corner of his jacket and licked from it a lump of nut sundae which had accidentally fallen there. Then he walked away, whining a little song.
Edward had not slept at all. The hope he had nursed a few hours earlier seemed divorced from reality. He remembered suddenly something that his mental cowardice had swept from his mind. “Emily loves Tam,” he thought, trying to hurt himself as much as possible. “Emily has never thought of me again. She loves Tam. She wants to steal Tam from Lucy. She is shameless. She is full of fury because she has not got Tam. I am to her the least of the people she met over there somewhere in America, while she was engaged in pursuing Tam.” He was determined to throw himself into an agony, he was revelling in fatigue and despair. He imagined his next meeting with Emily. Her fierce eyes would detach themselves reluctantly from Tam’s face. They would turn cold as they rested on Edward’s own face. Edward’s face would look dull and pale; he felt very conscious of the lifelessness of his face. He saw himself so grey as to be almost invisible. Near him now there was an arrangement of mirrors that showed him his own rarely seen profile. It was detestable that life— even the mean allowance of life that was his—should be given to so poor a body. His upper lip was too long, it sloped forward without the curve that enlivens most human lips; his chin was thin and fleshless as though made of paper. His face seemed to him hardly a human face. His shoulders were very round. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his reflection in profile present a cocktail glass to that slack sad mouth. Cocktails at least were left to him. Everything that requires only weakness was left to him. “If all this were not so, this is what I would do.” The intensity of his despair was, with the help of the cocktail, defeating its own ends ... “if love perhaps gave me life ... if I were as shameless as she is ... and if shamelessness could give me a little of the splendour that it has given her, this is what I would do ... I would get control of that thousand dollars ... I would travel night and day, in fury and certainty ... I would find her on the banks of the river, the high reeds as high as her head ... I would walk to her with a new tread, a heavy, sure, new tread, and when she looked she might love me or hate me ... but she would remember me then.” And now, though he tried again superficially to revive his luxury of despair, he could not really think himself despicable. His coward mind leapt at the accuser from behind, and in the dark and the dust the accuser was strangled. Edward smiled at the boy who brought him a fresh cocktail. When he smiled he saw now that his upper lip curved after all.