Читать книгу Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident - Samuel Merwin - Страница 19

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Reverend Henry B. Withery, on a morning in late March, came, by springless cart, out of Kansu into T'ainan. A drab little man, with patient fervor in his eyes and a limp (this latter the work of Boxers in 1900). He was bound, on leave, for Shanghai, San Francisco and home; but a night at T'ainan with Griggsby Doane meant, even in the light of hourly nearing America, much. For they had shared rooms at the seminary. They had entered the yielding yet resisting East side by side. Meeting but once or twice a year, even less often, they had felt each other deeply across the purple mountains.

They sat through tiffin with the intent preoccupied workers in the dining-room of the brick house; and Mr. Withery's gentle eyes took in rather shrewdly the curious household. It interested him. There were elements that puzzled him; a suggestion of staleness in this face, of nervous overstrain in that; a tension.

The several native workers smiled and talked less, he thought, than on his former visits.

Little Mr. Boatwright—slender, dustily blond, always hitherto burning with the tire of consecration—was continually fumbling with a spoon, or slowly twisting his tumbler, the while moodily studying the table-cloth. And his larger wife seemed heavier in mind as in body.

Mr. Withery found the atmosphere even a little oppressive. He looked up about the comfortable, high ceiled room. Mounted and placed on the walls were a number of interesting specimens of wild fowl. Elmer Boatwright, though no devotee of slaughter or even of sport, had shot and mounted these himself.

Withery asked him now if he had found any interesting birds lately. The reply was little more than monosyllabic; it was almost the reply of a middle-aged man who has lost and forgotten the enthusiasm of youth.

There was talk, of course; the casual surface chatter of folk who are deeply united in work. A new schoolroom was under construction. Jen Ling Pu, a native preacher, was doing well at So T'ung. The new tennis court wasn't, after all, long enough.

During all this, Withery pondered. Griggsby was driving too hard, of course. The strongly ascetic nature of the man seemed to be telling on him; or perhaps it was running out, the fire of it, leaving only the force of will. That happened, of course, now and then, in the case of men gifted with great natural vitality.

Then too, come to reflect on it, the fight had been hard, here in Hansi. Since 1900. Harder, perhaps, than anywhere else except Shantung and Chihli. Harder even than in those more easterly provinces, for they were nearer things. There were human contacts, freshening influences. … The Boxers had dealt heavily with the whites in Hansi. More than a hundred had been slain by fire or sword. Young women—girls like these two or three about the dinner table—had been tortured. Griggsby and his wife and the little girl had missed destruction only through the accident of a journey, in the spring, to Shanghai. And he had returned, dangerously early, to a smoldering ruin and plunged with all the vigor in his unusual body and mind at the task of reconstruction. The work in the province was shorthanded, of course, even yet. It would be so. But Griggsby was building it up. He even had the little so-called college, down the river at Hung Chan, going again, after a fashion. Money was needed, of course. And teachers. And equipment. All that had been discussed during tiffin. It was a rather heroic record. And it had not passed unobserved. At the Missionary Conference, at Shanghai, in 1906, Griggsby's report—carefully phrased, understated throughout, almost colorless—had drawn out unusual applause.

Mrs. Doane's death occurred during the first year of that painful reconstruction. Griggsby's course, after that, from the day of the funeral, in fact, as you looked back over it, recalling this and that apparently trivial incident, was characteristic. The daughter was sent back to the States, for schooling. Griggsby furnished for himself, up in what was little more, really, than the attic of the new mission residence, a bare, severe little suite of bedroom and study. The newly married Boatwrights he installed, as something near master and mistress, on the second floor. The other white workers and teachers filled all but the two guest rooms, and, at times, even these. And then, his little institution organized on a wholly new footing, he had loaded himself sternly with work.

Dinner was over. One by one the younger people left the room. And within a few moments the afternoon routine of the mission compound was under way.

Through the open window came a beam of warm spring sunshine. Outside, across the wide courtyard Withery noted the, to him, familiar picture of two or three blue-clad Chinese men lounging on the steps of the gate house; students crossing, books in hand; young girls round and fresh of face, their slanting eyes demurely downcast, assembling before one of the buildings; two carpenters working deliberately on a scaffold. A soft-footed servant cleared the table. Now that the two friends were left free to chat of personal matters, the talk wandered into unexpectedly impersonal regions. Withery found himself baffled, and something puzzled. During each of their recent visits Griggsby's manner had affected him in this same way, but less definitely. The aloofness—he had once or twice ever, thought of it as an evasiveness—had been only a tendency. The old friendship had soon warmed through it and brought ease of spirit and tongue. But the tendency had grown. The present Griggsby was clearly going to prove harder to get at. That remoteness of manner had grown on him as a habit. The real man, whatever he was coming to be, was hidden now; the man whose very soul had once been written clear in the steady blue eyes.

And what a man he was! Mr. Withery indulged in a moment of sentiment as he quietly, shrewdly studied him, across the table.

In physical size, as in mental attainments and emotional force, James Griggsby Duane had been, from the beginning, a marked man. He was forty-five now; or within a year of it. The thick brown hair of their student days was thinner-now at the sides and nearly gone on top. But the big head was set on the solid shoulders with all the old distinction. A notable fact about Griggsby Doane was that after winning intercollegiate standing as a college football player, he had never allowed his body to settle back with the years. He weighed now, surely, within a pound or two or three of his playing weight twenty-four years earlier. He had always been what the British term a clean feeder, eating sparingly of simple food. Hardly a day of his life but had at least its hour or two of violent exercise. He would rise at five in the morning and run a few miles before breakfast. He played tennis and handball. He would gladly have boxed and wrestled, but a giant with nearly six and a half feet of trained, conditioned muscle at his disposal finds few to meet him, toe to toe. His passion for walking had really, during the earlier years, raised minor difficulties about T'ainan. The Chinese were intelligent and, of course, courteous; but it was more than they could be asked to understand at first.

It had worked out, gradually. They knew him now; knew he was fearless, industrious, patient, kind. During the later years, after the Boxer trouble, his immense figure, striding like him of the fabled seven-league-boots, had become a familiar, friendly figure in central Hansi. Not infrequently he would tramp, pack on shoulders, from one to another of the outlying mission stations; and thought nothing of covering a hundred and thirty or forty li where your cart or litter mules or your Manchu pony would stop at ninety and call it a day.

Withery was bringing the talk around to the personal when Doane looked at his watch.

“You'll excuse me, Henry,” he said. “I've a couple of classes. But I'll knock off about four-thirty. Make yourself comfortable. Prowl about. Use my study, if you like. … Or wait. We were speaking of the Ho Shan Company. They've had two or three mass meetings here during the winter, and got up some statements.”

“Do they suggest violence?”

“Oh, yes.” Doane waved the thought carelessly aside. “But Pao will keep them in hand, I think. He doesn't want real trouble. But he wouldn't mind scaring the company into selling out. The gossip is that he is rather heavily interested himself in some of the native mines.”

“Is Pao your governor?”

“No, the governor died last fall, and no successor has been sent out. Kang, the treasurer, is nearly seventy and smokes sixty to a hundred pipes of opium a day. Pao Ting Chuan is provincial judge, but is ruling the province now. He's an able fellow.” … Doane drew a thick lot of papers from an inner pocket, and selected one. “Read this. It's one of their statements. Pao had the translation made in his yamen. I haven't the original, but the translation is fairly accurate I believe.”

Withery took the paper; ignored it, and studied his friend, who had moved to the door. Doane seemed to have lost his old smile—reflective, shrewd, a little quizzical. The furrow between his eyes had deepened into something near a permanent frown. There were fine lires about and under the eyes that might have indicated a deep weariness of the spirit. Yet the skin was clear, the color good. … Griggsby was fighting something out; alone; through the years.

Feeling this, Henry Withery broke out, in something of their old frank way.

“Do knock off, Grigg. Let's have one of the old talks. I think—I think perhaps you need me a little.” Doane hesitated. It was not like him to do that. “Yes,” he said gravely, but with his guard up, that curious guard, “it would be fine to have one of the old talks if we can get at it.”

He turned to go; then paused.

“Oh, by the way, I'm expecting Pourmont. A little later in the day. He's resident engineer for the Ho Shan Company, over at Ping Yang. Pierre François George Marie Pourmont. An amusing person. He feels a good deal of concern over these meetings. For that matter, he was mobbed here in February. He didn't like that.”

Withery found himself compressing his lips, and tried to correct that impulse with a rather artificial smile. It wasn't like Griggsby to speak in that light way. Like a society man almost. It suggested a hardening of the spirit; or a crust over deep sensitiveness.

Men, he reflected, who have to fight themselves during long periods of time are often hardened by the experience, even though they eventually win.

He wondered, moving to the window, and thoughtfully watching the huge man striding across the courtyard, if Griggsby Doane would be winning.