Читать книгу In Red and Gold - Samuel Merwin - Страница 5

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TOWARD noon Miss Means and Miss Andrews were in their chairs on deck, when a gay little outburst of laughter caught their attention, and around the canvas screen came running the child they had seen on the wharf at Nanking. A sober Chinese servant (Miss Means and Miss Andrews were not to know that he was a eunuch) followed at a more dignified pace.

The child was dressed in a quilted robe of bright flowered silk, the skirt flaring like a bed about the ankles, the sleeves extending down over the hands. Her shoes were high, of black cloth with paper soles. Over the robe she wore a golden yellow vest, shortsleeved, trimmed with ribbon and fastened with gilt buttons. Over her head and shoulders was a hood of fox skin worn with the fur inside, tied with ribbons under the chin, and decorated, on the top of the head, with the eyes, nose and ears of a fox. As she scampered along the deck she lowered her head and charged at the big first mate. He smiled, caught her shoulders, spun her about, and set her free again; then, nodding pleasantly to the eunuch, he passed on.

Before the two ladies he paused to say: “We are coming into T'aiping, the city that gave a name to China's most terrible rebellion. If you care to step around to the other side, you'll see something of the quaint life along the river.”

“He seems very nice—the mate,” remarked Miss Andrews. “I find myself wondering who he may have been. He is certainly a gentleman.”

“I understand,” replied Miss Means coolly, “that one doesn't ask that question on the China Coast.” They found the old river port drab and dilapidated, yet rich in the color of teeming human life. The river, as usual, was crowded with small craft. Nearly a score of these were awaiting the steamer, each evidently housing an entire family under its little arch of matting, and each extending bamboo poles with baskets at the ends. As the steamer came to a stop, a long row of these baskets appeared at the rail, while cries and songs arose from the water.

The little Manchu girl had found a friend in Mr. Rocky Kane. He was holding her on the rail and supplying her with brass cash which she dropped gaily into the baskets. The eunuch stood smiling by. After tiffin the child appeared again and sought her new friend. She would sit on his knee and pry open his mouth to see where the strange sounds came from. And his cigarettes delighted her.

It was the Manila Kid himself who asked Miss Means and Miss Andrews if they would mind a bit of a boxing: match in the social hall. They promptly withdrew to their cabin, after Miss Means had uttered a bewildered but dignified: “Not in the least! Don't think of us!”

Shortly after dinner the cabin stewards stretched a rope around four pillars, just forward of the dining table. The men lighted cigarettes and cigars, and moved up with quickening interest. Tex Connor, who had disappeared directly after the coffee, brought in his budding champion, a large grinning yellow man in a bathrobe. The second mate, and two of the engineers found seats about the improvised rings. Then an outer door opened, and the great mandarin appeared, bowing and smiling courteously with hands clasped before his breast. The fifteen lesser mandarins followed, all rich color and rustling silk.

The young officers sprang to their feel and arranged chairs for the party. The great man seated himself, and his attendants grouped themselves behind him.

Into this expectant atmosphere came the mate, in knickerbockers and a sweater, stooping under the lintel of the door, then straightening up and stopping short. His eyes quickly took in the crowded little picture—the gray-bearded mandarin in the ringside chair, backed with a mass of Oriental color; that other personage, Dawley Kane, directly opposite, with the aquiline nose, the guardedly keen eyes and the quite humorless face, as truly a mandarin among the whites as was calm old Kang among the yellows; the flushed eager face of Rocky Kane; the other whites, all smoking, all watching him sharply, all impatient for the show. He frowned; then, as the mandarin smiled, came gravely forward, bent under the rope and addressed him briefly in Chinese.

The mandarin, frankly pleased at hearing his own tongue, rose to reply. Each clasped his own hands and bowed low, with the observance of a long-hardened etiquette so dear to the Oriental heart.

“How about a little bet?” whispered Rocky Kane to Tex Connor. “I wouldn't mind taking the big fellow.”

“What odds'll you give?” replied the impassive one.

“Odds nothing! Your man's a trained fighter, and he must be twenty years younger.”

“But this man Doane's an old athlete. He's boxed, off and on, all his life. And he's kept in condition. Look at his weight, and his reach.”

“What's the distance?”

“Oh—six two-minute rounds.”

“Who'll referee?”

“Well—one of the Englishmen.”

But the Englishmen were not at hand. A friendly bout between yellow and white overstepped their code. One of the customs men, an Australian, accepted the responsibility, however.

“I'll lay you a thousand, even,” said Rocky Kane.

“Make it two thousand.”

“I'll give you two thousand, even,” said Dawley Kane quietly.

“Taken! Three thousand, altogether—gold.”

The mate, turning away from the mandarin, caught this; stood motionless looking at them, his brows drawing together.

“Gentlemen,” he finally remarked, “I came here with the understanding that it was to be only a little private exercise. I had no objection, of course, to your looking on, some of you, but this....”

“Oh, come!” said Connor. “It's just for points. Tom's not going to fight you.”

Young Kane, gripping the rope nervously with both hands, cried: “You wouldn't quit!”

The mate looked down at these men. “No,” he replied, in the same gravely quiet manner, “I shall go on with it. I do this”—he made the point firmly, with a dignity that in some degree, for the moment, overawed the younger men—“I do it because his excellency has paid us the honor of coming here in this democratic way. He tells me that he is fond of boxing. I shall try to entertain him.” And he drew the sweater over his head, and caught the gloves that the Kid tossed him.

The elder Kane shrewdly took him in. The authority of the man was not to be questioned. Without so much as raising his voice he had dominated the strange little gathering. Physically he was a delight to the eye; anywhere In the forties, his hair thin to the verge of baldness, his strong sober face deeply lined, yet with shoulders, arms and chest that spoke of great muscular power and a waist without a trace of the added girth that middle age usually brings; of sound English stock, doubtless; the sort that in the older land would ride to hounds at eighty.

Dawley Kane looked, then, at the Chinese heavyweight. This man, though not quite a match in size for the giant before him, appeared every inch the athlete. Kane understood the East too well to find him at all surprising; he had seen the strapping northern men of Yuan Shi K'ai's new army; he knew that the trained runners of the Imperial Government were expected, on occasion, to cover their hundred miles in a day; in a word, that the curious common American notion of the Chinese physique was based on an occasional glimpse of a tropical laundryman. And he settled back in his comfortable chair confident of a run for his money. The occasion promised, indeed, excellent entertainment.

The mate, still with that slight frown, glanced about. Not one of the crowded eager faces about the ropes exhibited the slightest interest in himself as a human being. He was but the mate of a river steamer; a man who had not kept up with his generation (the reason didn't matter)—an individual of no standing.... He put up his hands.

Tom Sung fell into a crouch. With his left shoulder advanced, his chin tucked away behind it, he moved in close and darted quick but hard blows to the stomach and heart. Duane stepped backward, and edged around him, feeling him out, studying his hands and arms, his balance, his footwork. It early became clear that he was a thoroughgoing professional, who meant to go in and make a fight of it.... Doane, sparring lightly, considered this. Conner, of course, had no sportsmanship.

Tom's left hand shot up through Doane's guard, landing clean on his face with a sharp thud; followed up with a remarkably quick right swing that the mate, by sidestepping, succeeded only in turning into a glancing blow. And then, as Doane ducked a left thrust, he uppercut with all his strength. The blow landed on Doane's forearms with a force that shook him from head to foot.

A sound of breath sharply indrawn came from the spectators, to most of whom it must have appeared that the blow had gone home. Doane, slipping away and mopping the sweat from eyes and forehead, heard the sound; and for an instant saw them, all leaning forward, tense, eager for a knockout, the one possible final thrill.

The yellow man was at him again, landing left, right and left on his stomach, and butting a shaven head with real force against his chin. For an instant stars danced about his eyes. Elbows had followed the head, roughing at his face. Doane, quickly recovering, leaped back and dropped his hands.

“What is this?” he called sharply to Connor, whose round expressionless face with its one cool light eye and thin little mouth looked at him without response. “Head? Elbows? Is your man going to box, or not?”

The eyes that turned in surprise about the ringside were not friendly. These men cared nothing for his little difficulties; their blood was up. They wanted what the Americans among them would term “action” and “results.”

Tom was tearing at him again. So it was, after all, to be a fight. No preliminary understandings mattered. He felt a profound disgust, as by main strength he stopped rush after rush, making full use of his greater reach to pin Tom's arms and hurl him back; a disgust however, that was changing gradually to anger. He had known, all his life, the peculiar joy that comes to a man of great strength and activity in any thorough test of his power.

The customs man called time.

Rocky Kane—flushed, excited, looking like a boy—felt in his pockets for cigarettes; found none; and slipped hurriedly out to the deck.

There a silken rustle stopped him short.

A slim figure, enveloped in an embroidered gown, was moving back from a cabin window. The light from within fell—during a brief second—full on an oval face that was brightly painted, red and white, beneath glossy black hair. The nose was straight, and not wide. The eyes, slanted only a little, looked brightly out from under penciled brows. She was moving swiftly toward the canvas screen; but he, more swiftly, leaped before her, stared at her; laughed softly in sheer delighted surprise. Then, with a quick glance about the deck, breathing out he knew not what terms of crude compliment he reached for her; pursued her to the rail; caught her.

“You little beauty!” he was whispering now. “You wonder! You darling! You're just too good to be true!” Beside himself, laughing again, he bent over to kiss her. But she wrenched an arm free, fought him off, and leaned, breathless, against the rail.

“Little yellow tiger, eh?” he cried softly. “Well, I'm a big white tiger!”

She said in English: “This is amazing!”

He stood frozen until she had disappeared behind the canvas screen. Then he staggered back; stumbled against a deck chair; turning, found the strange thin girl of the middy blouse stretched out there comfortably in her rug.

She said, with a cool ease: “It's so pleasant out here this evening, I really haven't felt like going in.”

With a muttered something—he knew not what—he rushed off to his cabin; then rushed back into the social hall.

The customs man called time for the second round.

As Doane advanced to the center of the ring, Tom rushed, as before, head down. Doane uppercut him; then threw him back, forestalling a clinch. The next two or three rushes he met in the same determined but negative way; hitting a few blows but for the most part pushing him off. The sweat kept running into his eyes as he exerted nearly his full strength. And Tom Sung's shoulders and arms glistened a bright yellow under the electric lights.

Rocky Kane, lighting a cigarette and tossing the blazing match away, called loudly: “Oh, hit him! For God's sake, do something! Don't be afraid of a Chink!”

Doane glanced over at him. Tom rushed. Doane felt again the crash of solid body blows delivered with all the force of more than two hundred pounds of well-trained muscle behind them. Again he winced and retreated. He knew well that he could endure only a certain amount of this punishment.... Suddenly Tom struck with the sharpest impact yet. Again that hard head butted his chin; an elbow and the heel of a glove roughed his face.... Doane summoned all his strength to push him off. Then he stepped deliberately forward.

At last the primitive vigor in this giant was aroused. His eyes blazed. There was no manner of pleasure in hurting a fellow man of any color; but since the particular man was asking for it, insisting on it, there was no longer a choice. The fellow had clearly been trained to this foul sort of work. That would be Connor's way, to take every advantage, place a large side bet and then make certain of winning. There was, of course, no more control of boxing out here on the coast than of gambling or other vice.

When Tom next came forward, Doane, paying not the slightest heed to his own defense, exchanged blows with him; planted a right swing that raised a welt on the yellow cheek. A moment later he landed another on the same spot.

At the sound of these blows the men about the ringside straightened up with electric excitement. Then again the long muscular right arm swung, and the tightly gloved fist crashed through Tom's guard with a force that knocked him nearly off his balance. Doane promptly brought him back with a left hook that sounded to the now nearly frantic spectators as if it must have broken the cheek-bone.

Tom crouched, covered and backed away.

“Have you had enough?” Doane asked. As there was no reply, he repeated the question in Chinese.

Tom, instead of answering, tried another rush, floundering wildly, swinging his arms.

Doane stepped firmly forward, swinging up a terrific body blow that caught the big Chinaman at the pit of the stomach, lifted his feet clear of the floor and dropped him heavily in a sitting position, from which he rolled slowly over on his side.

“What are you trying to do?” cried the Manila Kid, above the babel of excited voices, as he rushed in there and revived his fellow champion. “What are you trying to do—kill 'im?”

The mate stripped off his wet gloves and tossed them to the floor. “Teach your man to box fairly,” he replied, “or some one else will.” With which he stepped out of the ring, drew on his sweater and, with a courteous bow to the mandarin, went out on deck. There, after depositing with the purser the winnings paid over by a surly Connor, Dawley Kane found him.

“Well!” cried the hitherto calm financier, “you put up a remarkable fight.”

Doane looked down at him, unable to reply. He was still breathing hard; his thoughts were traveling strange paths. He heard the man saying other things; asking, at length, about the mandarin.

“He is Kang Yu,” Doane replied now, civilly enough, “Viceroy of Nanking.”

“No! Really? Why, he was in America!”

“He toured the world. He has been minister at Paris, Berlin, London, I believe. He is a great statesman—certainly the greatest out here since Li Hung Chang.”

“No—how extremely interesting!”

“He is ruler of fifty million souls, or more.” The mate had found his voice. He was speaking a thought quickly, with a very little heat, as if eager to convince the great man of America of the standing and worth of this great man of China. “He has his own army and his own mint. He controls railroads, arsenals, mills and mines. Incidentally, he is president of this line.”

“The Chinese Navigation Company? Really! You are acquainted with him yourself?”

“No. But he is a commanding figure hereabouts. And of course, I—at present I'm an employee of the Merchants' Line.”

“Oh, yes! Yes, of course! You seem to speak Chinese.”

“Yes”—the mate's voice was dry now—“I speak Chinese.”

A shuffling sound reached their ears. Both turned. The viceroy had come out of the cabin and was advancing toward them, followed by all his mandarins. Before them he paused, and again exchanged with the mate the charming Eastern greeting. In Chinese he said—and the language that needs only a resonant, cultured voire to exhibit its really great dignity and beauty, rolled like music from his tongue: “It will give me great pleasure, sir, if you will be my guest to-morrow at twelve.”

The mate replied, with a grave smile and a bow: “It is a privilege. I am your servant.”

They bowed again, with hands to breast. And all the mandarins bowed. Then they moved away in stately silence to their quarters aft.

Kane spoke now: “How very curious! Very curious!”

Doane said nothing to this.

“They really appear to have charm, these upper class people. It's a pity they are so poorly adapted to the modern struggle.”

Doane looked down at him, then away. As a man acquainted with the East he knew the futility of discussing it with a Western mind; above all with the mind of a successful business man, to whom activity, drive, energy, were very religion.

His own thoughts were ranging swiftly back over two thousand years, to the strong civilization of the Han Dynasty, when disciplined Chinese armies kept open the overland route to Bactria and Parthia, that the silks and porcelains and pearls might travel safely to waiting Roman hands; to the later, richer, riper centuries of Tang and Sung, after Rome fell, when Chinese civilization stood alone, a majestic fabric in an otherwise crumbled and chaotic world—when certain of the noblest landscapes and portraits ever painted were finding expression, when philosophers held high dreams of building conflicting dogma into a single structure of comprehensive and serene faith. The Chinese alone, down the uncounted centuries, had held their racial integrity, their very language. Surely, at some mystical but seismic turning of the racial tide, they would rise again among the nations.

This giant, standing there in sweater and knickerbockers, bareheaded, gazing out at the dark river, was not sentimentalizing. He knew well enough the present problems. But he saw them with half-Eastern eyes; he saw America too, with half-Eastern eyes—and so he could not talk at all to the very able man beside him who saw the West and the world with wholly Western eyes. No, it was futile. Even when the great New Yorker, who had just won two thousand dollars, gold, spoke with wholly unexpected kindness, the gulf between their two minds remained unfathomable.

“I want you to forgive me, sir—I do not even know your name, you see—but, frankly, you interest me. You are altogether too much of a man for the work you are doing here. That is clear. I would be glad to have you tell me what the trouble is. Perhaps I could help you.”

This from the man who held General Railways in the hollow of his hand, and Universal Hydro-Electric, and Consolidated Shipping, and the Kane, Wilmarth and Cantey banks, a chain that reached literally from sea to sea across the great young country that worshiped the shell of political freedom as insistently as the Chinese worshiped their ancestors, yet gave over the newly vital governing power of finance into wholly irresponsible private hands.

The situation, grotesque in its beginning, seemed now incredible to Doane. He drew a hand across his brow; then spoke, with compelling courtesy but with also a dismissive power that the other felt: “You are very kind, Mr. Kane. At some other time I shall be glad to talk with you. But my hours are rather exacting, and I am tired.”

“Naturally. You have given a wonderful exhibition of what a man of character can do with his body. I wish I had you for a physical trainer. And I wish the example might start my boy to thinking more wholesomely... Good night!” And he extended a friendly hand.

Mr. Kane's boy presented himself on the following morning as an acute problem. He was about the deck, shortly after breakfast, playing with the Manchu child. Then, after eleven, Captain Benjamin handed his mate a note that had been scribbled in pencil on a leaf torn from a pocket note-book and folded over. It was addressed:

“To the Chinese Lady who spoke English last night.” And the content was as follows: “I shouldn't have been rude, but I must see you again. Can't you slip around the canvas this evening, late? I'll be watching for you.” There was no signature.

“Make it out?” asked the captain. “Old Kang sent it up to me—asks us to speak to the young man. But how'm I to know which young man it is?”

“Do you know how it was sent?”

“Yes. The little princess took it back.”'

“It won't be hard to find the man.”

“You know?”

“I think so.”

“Well, just put him wise, will you?”

“I'll speak to him.”

“Wait a minute! You thinking of young Kane?”

The mate inclined his head.

“Well—you know who he is, don't you? Who they are?”

Doane bowed again.

“Better use a little tact.”

Doane walked back along the deck to cabin sixteen. A fresh breeze blew sharply here; the chairs had all been moved across to the other side where the sunlight lay warm on the planking. Within the social hall the second engineer—a wistful, shy young Scot—had brought his battered talking machine to the dining table and was grinding out a comic song. Two or three of the men were in there, listening, smoking, and sipping highballs; Doane saw them as he passed the door. Through the open but shuttered window of cabin number twelve came the clicking of a typewriter and men's voices, that would be Mr. Kane, discussing his “autobiography” with its author.

Before number sixteen, Doane paused; sniffed the air. A curious odor was floating out through these shutters, an odor that he knew. He sniffed again; then abruptly knocked at the door.

A drowsy voice answered! “What is it? What do you want?”

“I must see you at once,” said Doane.

There was a silence; then odd sounds—a faint rattling of glass, a scraping, cupboard doors opening and closing. Finally the door opened a few inches. There was Rocky Kane, hair tousled, coat, collar and tie removed, and shirt open at the neck. Doane looked sharply at his eyes; the pupils were abnormally small. And the odor was stronger now and of a slightly choking tendency.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” cried young Kane, shrinking back a little way.

“I think,” said Doane, “you had better let me come in and talk with you.”

“What right have you got saying things like that? What do you mean?”

“I have really said nothing as yet.”

Kane, seeming bewildered, allowed the door to swing inward and himself stepped back. The big mate came stooping within.

“Your note has been returned,” he said shortly; and gave him the paper.

Kane accepted it, stared down at it, then sank back on the couch.

“What's this to you!” he managed to cry. “What right.... what do you mean, saying I wrote this?”

“Because you did. You sent it back by the little girl.”

“Well, what if I did! What right—”

“I am here at the request of his excellency, the viceroy of Nanking. You have been annoying his daughter. The fact that she chooses, while in her father's household, to wear the Manchu dress, does not justify you in treating her otherwise than as a lady. Perhaps I can't expect you to understand that his exellency is one of the greatest statesmen alive to-day. Nor that this young lady was educated in America, knows the capitals of Europe better, doubtless, than yourself, and is a princess by birth. She went to school in England and to college in Massachusetts. Take my advice, and try no more of this sort of thing.”

The boy was staring at him now, wholly bewildered. “Well,” he began stumblingly, “perhaps I have been a little on the loose. But what of it! A fellow has to have some fun, doesn't he?”

The mate's eyes were taking in keenly the crowded little room.

“Well,” cried Kane petulantly, “that's all, isn't it? I understand! I'll let her alone!”

“You don't feel that an apology might be due?”

“Apologize? To that girl?”

“To her father.”

“Apologize—to a Chink?”

The word grated strangely on Doane's nerves. Suddenly the boy cried out: “Well—that's all? There's nothing more you want to say? What are you—what are you looking like that for?”

The sober deep-set eyes of the mate were resting on the high dresser at the head of the berths. There, tucked away behind the water caraffe, was a small lamp with a base of cloisonné work in blue and gold and a small, half globular chimney of soot-blackened glass.

“What are you looking at? What do you mean?”

The boy writhed under the steady gaze of this huge man, who rested a big hand on the upper berth and gazed gravely down at him; writhed, tossed out a protesting arm, got to his feet and stood with a weak effort at defiance.

“Now I suppose you'll go to my father!” he cried. “Well, go ahead! Do it! I don't care. I'm of age—my money's my own. He can't hurt me. And he knows I'm on to him. Don't think I don't know some of the things he's done—he and his crowd. Ah, we're not saints, we Kanes! We're good fellows—we've got pep, we succeed—but we're not saints.”

“How long have you been smoking opium?” asked the mate.

“I don't smoke it! I mean I never did. Not until Shanghai. And you needn't think the pater hasn't hit the pipe a bit himself. I never saw a lamp until he took me to the big Hong dinner at Shanghai last month. They had 'em there. And it wasn't all they had, either—”

“If you are telling me the truth,” said the mate.

—“I am. I tell you I am.”

“—Then you should have no difficulty in stopping. It would take a few weeks to form the habit. You can't smoke another pipe on this boat.”

“But what right—good lord, if the pater would drag me out here, away from all my friends.... you think I'm a rotter, don't you!”

“My opinion is not in question. I must ask you to give me, now, whatever opium you have.”

Slowly, moodily, evidently dwelling in a confusion of sulky resentful thoughts, the boy knelt at the cupboard and got out a small card-board box.

The mate opened it, and found several shells of opium within. He promptly pitched it out over the rail.

“This is all?” he asked.

“Well—look in there yourself!”

But the mate was looking at the suit-case, and at the trunk beneath the lower berth.

“You give me your word that you have no more?”

“That's—all,” said the boy.

The mate considered this answer; decided to accept it; turned to go. But the boy caught at his sleeve.

“You do think I'm a rotter!” he cried. “Well, maybe I am. Maybe I'm spoiled. But what's a fellow to do? My father's a machine—that's what he is—a ruthless machine. My mother divorced him ten years ago. She married that English captain—got the money out of father for them to live on, and now she's divorced him. Where do I get off? I know I'm overstrung, nervous. I've always had everything I want. Do you wonder that I've begun to look for something new? Perhaps I'm going to hell. I know you think so. I can see it in your eyes. But who cares!”

Doane stood a long time at the rail, thinking. The ship's clock in the social hall struck eight bells. Faintly his outer ear caught it. It was time to join his excellency.