Читать книгу The Vintage of Yon Yee - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 11

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And Henry Cotterel and Lois Allingham, strolling together at the edge of old Si-wu, as beautiful now as when Marco Polo had thought it the most beautiful spot on earth, were talking of extraterritoriality too. That smoldering tangle and menace did not interest Cotterel greatly. Lois scarcely had consciously given it a serious thought.

Everything always had gone right in her life. She was sure that everything always would. And no life but her own—and, of course, her father’s—interested her much.

Cotterel was not financially involved in China. He had thrown a “tidy sum” into the new house at Mo-kan-shan, but not more than he could afford to lose several times over.

But extraterritoriality was in the air. The very leaves on the trees whispered it. The hibiscus trees told the bamboos, the bamboos told the violets; hibiscus, bamboo and violets were indignant; even the little Chinese violets were indignant. The very birds of the Chinese air were indignant, rebellious. Peasants, dumb with toil and poverty, so ignorant that they did not know that China was a republic now, spoke of it bitterly. They did not know the word. Their vocabulary had few and short primitive words. But they knew the thing and cursed it, cursing and hating the arrogant foreigners who had despoiled and shamed China.

Trench was right. It was less the thing itself than the shame because of it that was enraging China—and threatening Europeans.

It was arguable that, except for the injury it unavoidably was to her international prestige, extraterritoriality did China little, if any harm, beyond its providing places of refuge and security for absconding Chinese scoundrels—a very small fraction of China’s many breakers and evaders of law. But, as individuals and as a people, prestige means more to the Chinese than it does to any other race. Peasants who never had heard of international prestige, yet valued it, resented its damage.

A very small proportion of the Chinese knew—fewer understood—the history of extraterritoriality. Nor did the majority of the Europeans who, in and out of China, talked about it anxiously, and many of them cocksurely.

Among the best-informed Europeans conscience and self-interest clashed.

Among the best-informed and most thoughtful Chinese self-interest and national pride clashed and locked. If, they argued, extraterritoriality was a slur on China and on her competence, even perhaps on her good faith, it too advantaged China in some important ways. It drew, and kept in China, immense and fluid capital. Destroy extraterritoriality, and probably many of the richest Western firms would leave China at once or by degrees. That was one of the last things to be desired for China now—little as European imports and exports had been welcome at first, long ago. A great deal of gold flowed through China from Shanghai. A withdrawal of Western spending would be disastrous. China needed Western loans and credit, Western purchasings, and even needed Western friendliness.

Extraterritoriality gnawed at the vitals of China. But, do away with it, and a grave national disaster might result. The “feeling” of the people—the poor, uninformed proletariat of Young China!—was unanimous, but even the “Government” opinion was divided. And many of the wisest, most disinterested and unselfishly patriotic Chinese were frankly opposed to the renationalization of the treaty ports.

It was all very difficult, and it grew increasingly dangerous: Extraterritoriality.

And Lois Allingham had heard the word heedlessly a thousand times now. Whenever two or more with knitted brows talked together earnestly and apart, Lois presumed that they were talking about extraterritoriality. The subject bored her. She was as tired of the word as Betty was. Her father never talked about it to her. Lois was glad. Many bad things come to pass because reiterated talk of them bores us until, in our impatience at the subject, we refuse to think of it.

“Miss Monroe does not like Red Bridges,” Cotterel said, holding back a long-stemmed bamboo, that she might pass on unimpeded.

“Not like Red Bridges! But she must! No one could help liking Red Bridges. It’s a dream of a place; a perfect house, and the garden is even lovelier. Betty was trying to tease you. Never pay too much attention to what Betty says when she is in one of her ways. It’s the nicest place I’ve seen in China—English-made one, I mean.”

“You have seen Chinese ones that you like better?”

“Even better, yes. Real Chinese homes, built by Chinese for Chinese families to live in. The foreigners compromise and modify, of course, over here.”

“Why, yes; I suppose we do.” For the life of him the Englishman couldn’t see why they should not.

“And get their houses and gardens rather mixed up—neither one thing nor the other.”

“Have I gone off the track too? I suppose I have. How would you alter Red Bridges?”

“But I wouldn’t. Certainly not. It is perfect. I said so. An Englishman’s house in China should be different. Sometimes the mixture’s rather funny—that’s all. But Red Bridges isn’t funny; it’s a gem.”

“Honestly?”

“Absolutely.”

“But you like Chinese Chinese houses even better?”

“Some of them—for Chinese to live in.”

“Oh—them!”

Cotterel dismissed the Chinese race with an intonation of indifference.

Lois Allingham smiled softly at the bamboo she was passing, and put her hand on it gently.

“Do you mean the palaces? In Peking?”

“No, Mr. Cotterel. I was thinking of some of the Chinese houses that I know; just the homes of Chinese gentlepeople.”

“I say, do you know many Chinese out here?”

“Oh, yes—quite a few.”

“But not well.” It was not a question. Cotterel made a statement.

“Some of them very well indeed.”

What a pretty laugh this girl had. He hoped she would laugh again soon. But what she had laughed at he could not imagine. But it didn’t matter; her laugh was delicious; and all girls laughed at nothing.

“I don’t think you can know them very well, not really.”

By Jove, her laugh was pretty: the most delicious laugh he had ever heard; pure music. Music and mischief! Bless her.

The girl nodded at him insistently.

“But I do know them very well indeed, really.”

The man was more than incredulous. But he didn’t trouble to dispute it again.

“Like any of them?” he asked instead.

“All of them,” she told him gravely. “No—I mean, most of them—sometimes; many of them always. Several of my Chinese friends I love very dearly.”

That was not true. Lois Allingham loved no one but her father—and herself—yet. But she believed what she said—no altogether discreditable substitute for truth itself.

“By Jove!”

Cotterel’s tone expressed surprise, but not disapprobation; or Miss Allingham would not have laughed again so pleasantly.

Lois Allingham never had thought of her mixed blood as a detriment. She knew that it was a personal inconvenience to herself sometimes because of her peculiar changeableness of moods, and the sometimes bitter clash that she felt in herself. But she never had thought of it as a detriment. She was so radiantly sure of herself! So splendidly sure of her father! If conversation suddenly faltered and broke off when she came into a room, it never occurred to her that they had been “talking about” her. They might have been praising or envying her more than her good taste would have welcomed to her face. Probably they had been speaking of something that would have bored her, or of something a girl’s dainty ears were better spared. She never had realized that her mixed blood could be a reflection, to many seemed a misfortune. But her instinct was quick in defense of her mother’s race. Had she understood any slur in Henry Cotterel’s “By Jove!” she would have resented it hotly; it would have angered her.

The slur had been there—involuntary, unconscious: an Englishman’s ineradicable sense of superiority. But Cotterel had not intended it. It was his amazement that had spoken.

Lois had heard the surprise, and been roguishly amused by it. She had not heard the slur on the Chinese, or this pleasant acquaintance would not have ripened and warmed as she knew, and Cotterel suspected, that it was going to do—enjoyably, rapidly.

Lois Allingham knew that she attracted this man. It was not a novel experience.

She thought that as they knew each other better she might like him a good deal. She often did. But that wouldn’t go far—at least, it never had. Of course, some day it might.

Cotterel harked back to Betty Monroe’s stricture. Apparently it rankled.

“She wouldn’t say what was wrong with it. Told me to ask Mr. Trench. By-the-way, she insisted that I was not to ask your father’s advice about Red Bridges. I wonder why.”

“There couldn’t be any earthly reason. Betty was teasing you. I told you so. She’s always up to something. But she was right about Mr. Trench. He knows. He knows more about Chinese things than any other foreigner.” A sweeping statement! But the girl believed it. “Father isn’t very keen about architecture, I think. He isn’t a pundit. Mr. Trench is. He is wonderful.”

Cotterel was startled, not at what Miss Allingham had said, but at that something odd he had just glimpsed, half caught again. He had no idea what it was. But it was something. It was something compelling. It was something he had not met before.

Perhaps a pretty use of her girlish lips when she spoke, perhaps a palm-up gesture of her little, finely molded hand, had given an unintended message that he had just barely caught, but had not at all understood.

It puzzled him. It a little thrilled him. A pleasantly new experience—very slight, but distinct.

Were the girl’s charming eyes, delightfully unlike other eyes, a little odd?

He caught a glint of something non-English. He was surprised that he hadn’t seen it just that before. Or heard it, for it was in voice, as it was in the pose of head, her peculiarly delicate hands, profile, warm velvet eyes. Chiefly her eyes, he believed. Was Miss Allingham partly French? Yes, he thought that it must be that! She was chic. Very chic. Or it might be no farther than over the Irish Sea? Hadn’t some one told that Mrs. Allingham—this charming girl’s grandmother—had been an Irish beauty? And Allingham’s grandmother too, hadn’t some one added? That accounted for Allingham’s undeniable charm, very blue eyes and black hair, pleasant, cultured voice: more than half Celt.

And the daughter showed her Celt ancestry even more. Perhaps her mother too had been Irish. But there was French blood, no matter how far back. He was sure of the French blood.

Or might it not be Spanish?

He admired Spanish beauties immensely—until they became too plump. It was unimaginable that this delicate creature, walking beside him here, ever might grow even a little over-plump.

“What a lot of petty wars they keep having over here, don’t they?” he said as they came to the lake’s very edge, and she sat down with a smile on a stone on which he invitingly spread his handkerchief.

“Yes,” Lois Allingham said regretfully.

“What makes them do it?”

“Mismanagement and poverty—the wars among themselves. China is a country of enormous wealth, but most of it is undeveloped. She hasn’t enough ready money to develop her great wealth. It is underground; hard and costly to get and to make marketable. So, most of the people go hungry most of the time. The crops on the surface won’t go round. And the peasants are not very intelligent. They do not manage too well. Hunger aches, then it snarls, at last it fights, if it has the strength.”

“Yes, I see. But why do they go for us so? We spend a lot here, and they get most of it.”

“Not the peasants—not many of them. And most Chinese are too overworked to think, I believe; to reason at all clearly. But they all can feel and resent. They more and more dislike foreigners being here—and the airs so many foreigners put on. European manners cause more than half the trouble in Asia, I believe. Trouble between foreigners and the natives, I mean.”

“Are you always polite to them—to the Chinese?” Cotterel asked lightly as he sat down on the sloping, fern-carpeted bank.

Lois answered him with the prettiest ripple of laughter she had given him yet, he thought.

“Me? Yes, of course, I am. I like Chinese courtesy; it is exquisite.”

“I am looking at something more exquisite—I believe the most exquisite thing I have seen,” the man thought, his eyes on her face. But what he said was, “I must study Chinese courtesy.”

“It’s worth it,” Lois said with a smile. “But the politest Chinese may be boiling inwardly, longing to sweep all foreigners back into the sea, longing—perhaps scheming—to take or destroy every foreign-owned thing in China. And they ought not to be blamed for that.”

“I shan’t like it, if they take Red Bridges away from me.”

“Take it—your own—away from you! But no one must; nobody could. Who? Why?”

“Well—bandits might come and burn it—after they had looted it, taken every portable valuable in it.”

“Oh, no,” the girl said reassuringly, with again her pretty laugh. “This isn’t bandit country at all.”

“How do you know that?”

“My father would not let me be here if it were.”

“I see. Well then—any two of China’s sixty or seventy armies might select Mo-kan-shan for the scene of a pitched battle. They do really have pitched battles semi-occasionally, don’t they? And my pretty Red Bridges might be destroyed that way. Or one army might see it as they strolled by, and help themselves to everything in it, and hack and destroy what they couldn’t take away. The generals are just bandits under another name. Every one knows that the Chinese ‘armies’ are all bandits, and the worst of the lot.”

“That is not so! The Chinese armies are raw, but they are gaining in skill and in discipline every day. Some of the generals are great men and great patriots, trying to serve China, not the mercenaries that ignorant foreigners call them.”

“Disinterested patriots devoted to the service of China, are they? Then why don’t they unite and do something for China? Why do they fly at each other’s throats all the time?”

Lois Allingham frowned unhappily.

“Oh, it is all very troubled,” she said. “They don’t see alike. One believes that a certain policy is best for China. Another believes quite the opposite. So, of course, they clash. They make mistakes in the way they fight probably: and the rank and file of the armies are not all well trained. But Europe has no right to laugh at China’s soldiers. The Chinese are not a fighting people, though she has had very great soldiers, and waged great wars splendidly in the long-ago. China has loved peace; respected it, despised strife, for centuries and centuries. An entire nation can’t swing round all at once. I wish that China had had no need to. But she will do it supremely well as soon as she gets her hand in. Be sure of that. Whatever the Chinese do, they do well. And there is nothing they can’t do. They have all the qualifications, the essential qualifications for everything. They have no instinct for war. Almost as little for modern ‘popular’ government. But they have all the ability. The rest will come. It won’t drop down to them like manna out of the sky. Europe and America won’t give it to them. It will come because they will make it come. International defeat is not for China. National failure is not for China.”

“By Jove, you care?”

“Intensely,” Lois Allingham said quietly.

“I wonder if I’d like them—the Chinese—half as well as you do, if I had been here as much, seen as much of them?”

“Probably not,” she said with an odd, slow smile. “I am in a minority, in the Concessions, Mr. Cotterel,” she added. “But I am not alone even there in my estimate of China. Ask the men who have lived here longest. Ask your own diplomats. And the more important the man you ask, the more wide of experience, more cultured, and finer of character, the more emphatically he will speak well of China—of the Chinese people high and low.”

“I have noticed that, now that you put it to me. Can’t say I’d thought of it though, I’m afraid. But, by Jove, it’s true.”

“No one thinks about China. It isn’t done.”

Why was the girl so angry?

“You wonder how I know—think I know—that China won’t fail, isn’t going to be wiped out, never will be absorbed,” she said. “You didn’t trouble to ask me; didn’t think it worth while—”

“Oh! I say!”

“That’s all right, I don’t mind. Why should I!”

“I should mind if you didn’t care what I thought.”

But Lois paid no attention to that.

“How do I know, Mr. Cotterel? The blood in my veins tells me. They tell me!” She gestured to the bamboos across the path they had come, and laid her hand caressingly on a wild white rose clambering close to her seat of rock. “The peonies in the courtyards tell me, and the poppies in the grain fields. Many, many Chinese things tell me. And I do know.”

Henry Cotterel was startled. What a rum girl! He never had heard a girl talk like that before. He was not sure just how much he liked it.

But he was sure that he liked Lois Allingham. And her laugh was adorable.