Chapter II: At a Treaty Port (4)

I waited for some time and the youth who had shown me in brought a pot of tea, two cups, and a tin of Virginian cigarettes. As he went out the philosopher entered. I hastened to express my sense of the honour he did me in allowing me to visit him. He waved me to a chair and poured out the tea.

"I am flattered that you wished to see me," he returned. "Your countrymen deal only with coolies and with compradores; they think every Chinese must be one or the other."

I ventured to protest. But I had not caught his point. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression of mockery.

"They think they have but to beckon and we must come."

I saw then that my friend's unfortunate communication still rankled. I did not quite know how to reply. I murmured something complimentary.

He was an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue, and bright large eyes under which were heavy bags. His teeth were broken and discoloured. He was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small, were withered and claw-like. I had been told that he was an opium-smoker. He was very shabbily dressed in a black gown, a little black cap, both much the worse for wear, and dark grey trousers gartered at the ankle. He was watching. He did not quite know what attitude to take up, and he had the manner of a man who was on his guard. Of course the philosopher occupies a royal place among those who concern themselves with the things of the spirit and we have the authority of Benjamin Disraeli that royalty must be treated with abundant flattery. I seized my trowel. Presently I was conscious of a certain relaxation in his demeanour. He was like a man who was all set and rigid to have his photograph taken, but hearing the shutter click lets himself go and eases into his natural self. He showed me his books.

"I took the Ph.D. in Berlin, you know," he said. "And afterwards I studied for some time in Oxford. But the English, if you will allow me to say so, have no great aptitude for philosophy."

Though he put the remark apologetically it was evident that he was not displeased to say a slightly disagreeable thing.

"We have had philosophers who have not been without influence in the world of thought," I suggested.

"Hume and Berkeley? The philosophers who taught at Oxford when I was there were anxious not to offend their theological colleagues. They would not follow their thought to its logical consequences in case they should jeopardise their position in university society."

"Have you studied the modern developments of philosophy in America?" I asked.

"Are you speaking of Pragmatism? It is the last refuge of those who want to believe the incredible. I have more use for American petroleum than for American philosophy."

His judgments were tart. We sat down once more and drank another cup of tea. He began to talk with fluency. He spoke a somewhat formal but an idiomatic English. Now and then he helped himself out with a German phrase. So far as it was possible for a man of that stubborn character to be influenced he had been influenced by Germany. The method and the industry of the Germans had deeply impressed him and their philosophical acumen was patent to him when a laborious professor published in a learned magazine an essay on one of his own writings.

"I have written twenty books," he said. "And that is the only notice that has ever been taken of me in a European publication."

But his study of Western philosophy had only served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom after all was to be found within the limits of the Confucian canon. He accepted its philosophy with conviction. It answered the needs of his spirit with a completeness which made all foreign learning seem vain. I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true. If Confucianism gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because it explained and expressed them as no other system of thought could do.

My host lit a cigarette. His voice at first had been thin and tired, but as he grew interested in what he said it gained volume. He talked vehemently. There was in him none of the repose of the sage. He was a polemist and a fighter. He loathed the modern cry for individualism. For him society was the unit, and the family the foundation of society. He upheld the old China and the old school, monarchy, and the rigid canon of Confucius. He grew violent and bitter as he spoke of the students, fresh from foreign universities, who with sacrilegious hands tore down the oldest civilisation in the world.

"But you, do you know what you are doing?" he exclaimed. "What is the reason for which you deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilisation been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order. And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by the machine gun shall you be judged."

But at that moment we were interrupted. A little girl came softly in and nestled close up to the old gentleman. She stared at me with curious eyes. He told me that she was his youngest child. He put his arms round her and with a murmur of caressing words kissed her fondly. She wore a black coat and trousers that barely reached her ankles, and she had a long pig-tail hanging down her back. She was born on the day the revolution was brought to a successful issue by the abdication of the emperor.

"I thought she heralded the Spring of a new era," he said. "She was but the last flower of this great nation's Fall."

From a drawer in his roll-top desk he took a few cash, and handing them to her, sent her away.

"You see that I wear a queue," he said, taking it in his hands. "It is a symbol. I am the last representative of the old China."

He talked to me, more gently now, of how philosophers in long past days wandered from state to state with their disciples, teaching all who were worthy to learn. Kings called them to their councils and made them rulers of cities. His erudition was great and his eloquent phrases gave a multicoloured vitality to the incidents he related to me of the history of his country. I could not help thinking him a somewhat pathetic figure. He felt in himself the capacity to administer the state, but there was no king to entrust him with office; he had vast stores of learning which he was eager to impart to the great band of students that his soul hankered after, and there came to listen but a few, wretched, half-starved, and obtuse provincials.

Once or twice discretion had made me suggest that I should take my leave, but he had been unwilling to let me go. Now at last I was obliged to. I rose. He held my hand.

"I should like to give you something as a recollection of your visit to the last philosopher in China, but I am a poor man and I do not know what I can give you that would be worthy of your acceptance."

I protested that the recollection of my visit was in itself a priceless gift. He smiled.

"Men have short memories in these degenerate days, and I should like to give you something more substantial. I would give you one of my books, but you cannot read Chinese."

He looked at me with an amicable perplexity. I had an inspiration.

"Give me a sample of your calligraphy," I said.

"Would you like that?" He smiled. "In my youth I was considered to wield the brush in a manner that was not entirely despicable."

He sat down at his desk, took a fair sheet of paper, and placed it before him. He poured a few drops of water on a stone, rubbed the ink stick in it, and took his brush. With a free movement of the arm he began to write. And as I watched him I remembered with not a little amusement something else which had been told me of him. It appeared that the old gentleman, whenever he could scrape a little money together, spent it wantonly in the streets inhabited by ladies to describe whom a euphemism is generally used. His eldest son, a person of standing in the city, was vexed and humiliated by the scandal of this behaviour; and only his strong sense of filial duty prevented him from reproaching the libertine with severity. I daresay that to a son such looseness would be disconcerting, but the student of human nature could look upon it with equanimity. Philosophers are apt to elaborate their theories in the study, forming conclusions upon life which they know only at second hand, and it has seemed to me often that their works would have a more definite significance if they had exposed themselves to the vicissitudes which befall the common run of men. I was prepared to regard the old gentleman's dalliance in hidden places with leniency. Perhaps he sought but to elucidate the most inscrutable of human illusions.

He finished. To dry the ink he scattered a little ash on the paper and rising handed it to me.

"What have you written?" I asked.

I thought there was a slightly malicious gleam in his eyes.

"I have ventured to offer you two little poems of my own."

"I did not know you were a poet."

"When China was still an uncivilised country," he retorted with sarcasm, "all educated men could write verse at least with elegance."

I took the paper and looked at the Chinese characters. They made an agreeable pattern upon it.

"Won't you also give me a translation?"

"_Traduttore--traditore_," he answered. "You cannot expect me to betray myself. Ask one of your English friends. Those who know most about China know nothing, but you will at least find one who is competent to give you a rendering of a few rough and simple lines."

I bade him farewell, and with great politeness he showed me to my chair. When I had the opportunity I gave the poems to a sinologue of my acquaintance, and here is the version he made.[1] I confess that, doubtless unreasonably, I was somewhat taken aback when I read it.

_You loved me not: your voice was sweet;
Your eyes were full of laughter; your hands were tender.
And then you loved me: your voice was bitter;
Your eyes were full of tears; your hands were cruel.
Sad, sad that love should make you
Unlovable._

* * * * *

_I craved the years would quickly pass
That you might lose
The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,
And all the cruel splendour of your youth.
Then I alone would love you
And you at last would care._

_The envious years have passed full soon
And you have lost
The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,
And all the charming splendour of your youth.
Alas, I do not love you
And I care not if you care._

[1] I owe it to the kindness of my friend Mr. P.W. Davidson.

XXXIX

THE MISSIONARY LADY

She was certainly fifty, but a life of convictions harassed by never a doubt had left her face unwrinkled. The hesitations of thought had never lined the smoothness of her brow. Her features were bold and regular, somewhat masculine, and her determined chin bore out the impression given you by her eyes. They were blue, confident, and unperturbed. They summed you up through large round spectacles. You felt that here was a woman to whom command came easily. Her charity was above all things competent and you were certain that she ran the obvious goodness of her heart on thoroughly business lines. It was possible to suppose that she was not devoid of human vanity (and this is to be counted to her for grace) since she wore a dress of violet silk, heavily embroidered, and a toque of immense pansies which on a less respectable head would have been almost saucy. But my Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, who had decided views on the proper manner of dress for a clergyman's wife, never objected to my Aunt Sophie wearing violet, and he would have found nothing to criticise in the missionary lady's gown. She spoke fluently with the even flow of water turned on at a tap. Her conversation had the admirable volubility of a politician at the end of an electioneering campaign. You felt that she knew what she meant (with most of us so rare an accomplishment) and meant what she said.

"I always think," she remarked pleasantly, "that if you know both sides of a question you'll judge differently from what you will if you only know one side. But the fact remains that two and two make four and you can argue all night and you won't make them five. Am I right or am I wrong?"

I hastened to assure her that she was right, though with these new theories of relativity and parallel lines behaving at infinity in such a surprising manner I was in my heart of hearts none too sure.

"No one can eat their cake and have it," she continued, exemplifying Benedetto Croce's theory that grammar has little to do with expression, "and one has to take the rough with the smooth, but as I always say to the children you can't expect to have everything your own way. No one is perfect in this world and I always think that if you expect the best from people you'll get the best."

I confess that I was staggered, but I determined to do my part. It was only civil.

"Most men live long enough to discover that every cloud has a silver lining," I began earnestly. "With perseverance you can do most things that are not beyond your powers, and after all, it's better to want what you have than to have what you want."

I thought her eyes were glazed with a sudden perplexity when I made this confident statement, but I daresay it was only my fancy, for she nodded vigorously.

"Of course, I see your point," she said. "We can't do more than we can."

But my blood was up now and I waved aside the interruption. I went on.

"Few people realise the profound truth that there are twenty shillings in every pound and twelve pence in every shilling. I'm sure it's better to see clearly to the end of your nose than indistinctly through a brick wall. If there's one thing we can be certain about it is that the whole is greater than the part."

When, with a hearty shake of the hand, firm and characteristic, she bade me farewell, she said:

"Well, we've had a most interesting chat. It does one good in a place like this, so far away from civilisation, to exchange ideas with one's intellectual equals."

"Especially other people's," I murmured.

"I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past," she retorted. "It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain."

Her conversation was devastating.

XL

A GAME OF BILLIARDS

I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading a number, several days old, of the _South China Times_, when the door of the bar was somewhat brusquely thrown open and a very long, thin man appeared.

"Do you care for a game of billiards?" he said.

"By all means."

I got up and went with him into the bar. It was a small hotel, of stone, somewhat pretentious in appearance, and it was kept by a half-caste Portuguese who smoked opium. There were not half a dozen people staying there, a Portuguese official and his wife waiting for a ship to take them to a distant colony, a Lancashire engineer who was sullenly drunk all day long, a mysterious lady, no longer young but of voluptuous appearance, who came to the dining room for meals and went back to her room immediately afterwards, and I had not seen the stranger before. I supposed he had come in that evening on a Chinese boat. He was a man of over fifty, I should think, shrivelled as though the sap had been dried out of him by tropical suns, with a face that was almost brick red. I could not place him. He might have been a skipper out of a job or the agent of some foreign firm in Hong Kong. He was very silent and he made no answer to the casual remarks that I made in the course of the game. He played billiards well enough, though not excellently, but he was a very pleasant fellow to play with; and when he pocketed my ball, instead of leaving me a double balk, gave me a reasonable shot. But when the game was over I should never have thought of him again, if suddenly, breaking his silence for the first time, he had not put me a very odd question.

"Do you believe in fate?" he asked.

"At billiards?" I retorted not a little astonished at his remark.

"No, in life."

I did not want to answer him seriously.

"I hardly know," I said.

He took his shot. He made a little break. At the end of it, chalking his cue, he said:

"I do. I believe if things are coming to you, you can't escape them."

That was all. He said nothing more. When we had finished the game he went up to bed, and I never saw him again. I shall never know what strange emotion impelled him to put that sudden question to a stranger.

XLI

THE SKIPPER

I knew he was drunk.

He was a skipper of the new school, a neat little man, clean-shaven, who might easily have passed for the commander of a submarine. In his cabin there hung a beautiful new coat with gold braid on it, the uniform which for its good service in the war has been granted to the mercantile marine, but he was shy of using it; it seemed absurd when he was no more than captain of a small boat on the Yangtze; and he stood on his bridge in a neat brown suit and a homburg hat; you could almost see yourself in his admirably polished shoes. His eyes were clear and bright and his skin was fresh. Though he had been at sea for twenty years and could not have been much less than forty he did not look more than twenty-eight. You might be sure that he was a clean-living fellow, as healthy in mind as he was in body, and the depravity of the East of which they talk had left him untouched. He had a pleasant taste in light literature and the works of E.V. Lucas adorned his book-case. In his cabin you saw a photograph of a football team in which he figured and two of a young woman with neatly waved hair whom it was possible enough he was engaged to.

I knew he was drunk, but I did not think he was very drunk, till he asked me suddenly:

"What is democracy?"

I returned an evasive, perhaps a flippant answer, and for some minutes the conversation turned on less unseasonable topics to the occasion. Then breaking his silence, he said:

"I hope you don't think I'm a socialist because I said, what is democracy."

"Not at all," I answered, "but I don't see why you shouldn't be a socialist."

"I give you my word of honour I'm not," he protested. "If I had my way I'd stand them up against a wall and shoot them."

"What is socialism?" I asked.

"Oh, you know what I mean, Henderson and Ramsay Macdonald and all that sort of thing," he answered. "I'm about fed up with the working man."

"But you're a working man yourself, I should have thought."

He was silent for quite a long time and I thought his mind had wandered to other things. But I was wrong; he was thinking my statement over in all its bearings, for at last he said:

"Look here, I'm not a working man. Hang it all, I was at Harrow."

XLII

THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN

I am not an industrious sight-seer, and when guides, professional or friendly, urge me to visit a famous monument I have a stubborn inclination to send them about their business. Too many eyes before mine have looked with awe upon Mont Blanc; too many hearts before mine have throbbed with deep emotion in the presence of the Sistine Madonna. Sights like these are like women of too generous sympathies: you feel that so many persons have found solace in their commiseration that you are embarrassed when they bid you, with what practised tact, to whisper in their discreet ears the whole tale of your distress. Supposing you were the last straw that broke the camel's back! No, Madam, I will take my sorrows (if I cannot bear them alone, which is better) to someone who is not quite so certain of saying so exactly the right thing to comfort me. When I am in a foreign town I prefer to wander at random and if maybe I lose the rapture of a Gothic cathedral I may happen upon a little Romanesque chapel or a Renaissance doorway which I shall be able to flatter myself no one else has troubled about.

But of course this was a very extraordinary sight indeed and it would have been absurd to miss it. I came across it by pure chance. I was sauntering along a dusty road outside the city wall and by the side of it I saw a number of memorial arches. They were small and undecorated, standing not across the way but along it, close to one another, and sometimes one in front of the other, as though they had been erected by no impulse of gratitude to the departed or of admiration for the virtuous but in formal compliment, as knighthoods on the King's birthday are conferred on prominent citizens of provincial towns. Behind this row of arches the land rose sharply and since in this part of the country the Chinese bury their dead by preference on the side of a hill it was thickly covered with graves. A trodden path led to a little tower and I followed it. It was a stumpy little tower, ten feet high perhaps, made of rough-hewn blocks of stone; it was cone shaped and the roof was like a Pierrot's hat. It stood on a hillock, quaint and rather picturesque against the blue sky, amid the graves. At its foot were a number of rough baskets thrown about in disorder. I walked round and on one side saw an oblong hole, eighteen inches by eight, perhaps, from which hung a stout string. From the hole there came a very strange, a nauseating odour. Suddenly I understood what the queer little building was. It was a baby tower. The baskets were the baskets in which the babies had been brought, two or three of them were quite new, they could not have been there more than a few hours. And the string? Why, if the person who brought the baby, parent or grandmother, midwife or obliging friend, were of a humane disposition and did not care to let the new-born child drop to the bottom (for underneath the tower was a deep pit), it could be let down gently by means of the string. The odour was the odour of putrefaction. A lively little boy came up to me while I stood there and made me understand that four babes had been brought to the tower that morning.

There are philosophers who look upon evil with a certain complacency, since without it, they opine, there would be no possibility of good. Without want there would be no occasion for charity, without distress of sympathy, without danger of courage, and without unhappiness of resignation. They would find in the Chinese practice of infanticide an apt illustration of their views. Except for the baby tower there would not be in this city an orphanage: the traveller would miss an interesting and curious sight, and a few poor women would have no opportunity to exercise a beautiful and touching virtue. The orphanage is shabby and bedraggled; it is situated in a poor and crowded part of the city; for the Spanish nuns who conduct it--there are but five of them--think it more convenient to live where they may be most useful; and besides, they have not the money to build commodious premises in a salubrious quarter. The institution is supported by the work, lace and fine embroidery, which they teach the girls to do, and by the alms of the faithful.

Two nuns, the Mother Superior and another, showed me what there was to see. It was very strange to go through the whitewashed rooms, work-rooms, playrooms, dormitories, and refectory, low, cool, and bare; for you might have been in Spain, and when you passed a window you half expected to catch a glimpse of the Giralda. And it was charming to see the tenderness with which the nuns used the children. There were two hundred of them and they were, of course, orphans only in the sense that their parents had abandoned them. There was one room in which a number were playing, all of the same age, perhaps four, and all of the same size; with their black eyes and black hair, their yellow skins, they all looked so much alike that they might have been the children of a Chinese Old Woman who lived in a Shoe. They crowded round the nuns and began to romp with them. The Mother Superior had the gentlest voice I ever heard, but it became gentler still when she joked with the tiny mites. They nestled about her. She looked a very picture of charity. Some were deformed and some were diseased, some were puny and hideous, some were blind; it gave me a little shudder: I marvelled when I saw the love that filled her kind eyes and the affectionate sweetness of her smile.

Then I was taken into a parlour where I was made to eat little sweet Spanish cakes and given a glass of Manzanilla to drink, and when I told them that I had lived in Seville a third nun was sent for, so that she might talk for a few minutes with someone who had seen the city she was born in. With pride they showed me their poor little chapel with its tawdry statue of the Blessed Virgin, its paper flowers, and its gaudy, shoddy decoration; for those dear faithful hearts, alas! were possessed of singularly bad taste. I did not care: to me there was something positively touching in that dreadful vulgarity. And when I was on the point of leaving the Mother Superior asked me whether I would care to see the babies who had come in that day. In order to persuade people to bring them they gave twenty cents for every one. Twenty cents!

"You see," she explained, "they have often a long walk to come here and unless we give them something they won't take the trouble."

She took me into a little anteroom, near the entrance, and there lying on a table under a counterpane were four new-born babes. They had just been washed and put into long clothes. The counterpane was lifted off. They lay side by side, on their backs, four tiny wriggling mites, very red in the face, rather cross perhaps because they had been bathed, and very hungry. Their eyes seemed preternaturally large. They were so small, so helpless: you were forced to smile when you looked at them and at the same time you felt a lump in your throat.

XLIII

NIGHTFALL

Towards evening perhaps, tired of walking, you get into your chair and on the crest of a hill you pass through a stone gateway. You cannot tell why there should be a gateway in that deserted spot, far from a village, but a fragment of massive wall suggests the ruin of fortifications against the foes of a forgotten dynasty. And when you come through the gateway you see below you the shining water in the rice fields, diapered, like the chess-board in some Chinese _Alice in Wonderland_, and then the rounded, tree-clad hills. But making your way down the stone steps of the narrow causeway which is the high road from city to city, in the gathering darkness you pass a coppice, and from it waft towards you chill woodland odours of the night. Then you hear no longer the measured tread of your bearers, your ears are on a sudden deaf to their sharp cries as they change the pole from shoulder to shoulder, and to the ceaseless chatter or the occasional snatch of song with which they enliven the monotonous way, for the woodland odours are the same as those which steal up from the fat Kentish soil when you pass through the woods of Bleane; and nostalgia seizes you. Your thoughts travel through time and space, far from the Here and Now, and you remember your vanished youth with its high hopes, its passionate love, and its ambition. Then if you are a cynic, as they say, and therefore a sentimentalist, tears come to your unwilling eyes. And when you have regained your self-control the night has fallen.

XLIV

THE NORMAL MAN

I was once obliged to study anatomy, a very dreary business, since there is neither rhyme nor reason for the vast number of things you have to remember; but one remark made by my teacher, when he was helping me in the dissection of a thigh, has always remained in my memory. I was looking in vain for a certain nerve and it needed his greater skill to discover it in a place in which I had not sought it. I was aggrieved because the text book had misled me. He smiled and said:

"You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the world."

And though he spoke of anatomy he might have spoken with equal truth of man. The casual observation impressed itself upon me as many a profounder one has not and all the years that have passed since then, with the increasing knowledge of human nature which they have brought, have only strengthened my conviction of its truth. I have met a hundred men who seemed perfectly normal only to find in them presently an idiosyncrasy so marked as to put them almost in a class by themselves. It has entertained me not a little to discover the hidden oddity of men to all appearances most ordinary. I have been often amazed to come upon a hideous depravity in men who you would have sworn were perfectly commonplace. I have at last sought the normal man as a precious work of art. It has seemed to me that to know him would give me that peculiar satisfaction which can only be described as æsthetic.

I really thought I had found him in Robert Webb. He was a consul in one of the smaller ports and I was given a letter to him. I heard a good deal about him on my way through China and I heard nothing but good. Whenever I happened to mention that I was going to the port in which he was stationed someone was sure to say:

"You'll like Bob Webb. He's an awfully good chap."

He was no less popular as an official than he was as a private person. He managed to please the merchants because he was active in their interests, without antagonising the Chinese who praised his firmness or the missionaries who approved his private life. During the revolution by his tact, decision, and courage he had not only saved from great danger the foreign population of the city in which he then was, but also many Chinese. He had come forward as a peacemaker between the warring parties and by his ingenuity had been able to bring about a satisfactory settlement. He was marked down for promotion. I certainly found him a very engaging fellow. Though he was not good-looking his appearance was pleasing; he was tall, perhaps a little more than of average height, well covered without being fat, with a fresh complexion inclined now (for he was nearly fifty) to be somewhat bloated in the morning. This was not strange, for in China the foreigners both eat and drink a great deal too much, and Robert Webb had a healthy liking for the good things of life. He kept an excellent table. He liked eating in company and it was seldom that he did not have one or two people to tiffin or to dinner with him. His eyes were blue and friendly. He had the social gifts that give pleasure: he played the piano quite well, but he liked the music that other people liked, and he was always ready to play a one step or a waltz if others wanted to dance. With a wife, a son, and a daughter in England he could not afford to keep racing ponies, but he was keenly interested in racing; he was a good tennis player, and his bridge was better than the average. Unlike many of his colleagues he did not allow himself to be overwhelmed by his position, and in the evening at the club he was affable and unaffected. But he did not forget that he was His Britannic Majesty's Consul and I admired the skill with which without portentousness he preserved the dignity which he thought necessary to his station. In short he had very good manners. He talked agreeably, and his interests, though somewhat ordinary, were varied. He had a nice sense of humour. He could make a joke and tell a good story. He was very happily married. His son was at Charterhouse and he showed me a photograph of a tall, fair lad in flannels, with a frank and pleasant face. He showed me also the photograph of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies of life in China that a man must be separated for long periods from his family, and owing to the war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years. His wife had taken the children home when the boy was eight and the girl eleven. They had meant to wait till his leave came so that they could go all together, but he was stationed in a place that suited neither of the children and he and his wife agreed that she had better take them at once. His leave was due in three years and then he could spend twelve months with them. But when the time for this came the war broke out, the Consular staff was short-handed, and it was impossible for him to leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated from young children, the journey was difficult and dangerous, no one expected the war to last so long, and one by one the years passed.

"My girl was a child when I saw her last," he said to me when he showed me the photograph. "Now she's a married woman."

"When are you going on leave?" I asked him.

"Oh, my wife's coming out now."

"But don't you want to see your daughter?" I asked.

He looked at the photograph again and then looked away. There was a curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he answered:

"I've been away from home too long now. I shall never go back."

I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb's daughter was a very alluring young person. I liked that engaging audacity.

"It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph," he said presently. "I'd always thought of her as a child. If I'd met her in the street I shouldn't have known her."

He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.

"It isn't fair.... When she was a child she used to love being petted."

His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see in them a very unexpected emotion.

"I can hardly realise she's my daughter. I thought she'd come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged."

He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners of his mouth.

"I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind."

He gave an apologetic laugh.

"I had to, you know," he said awkwardly. "I had such an awful hump."

"What's the young man like?" I asked.

"She's awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are about nothing else." There was an odd quaver in his voice. "It's a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you've never even seen. I've got his photograph somewhere, I don't know where it is. I don't think I'd care about him very much."

He helped himself to another whisky. He was tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together.

"Well, thank God, her mother's coming out soon."

I don't think he was quite a normal man after all.

XLV

THE OLD TIMER

He was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little more than a boy as second mate of a sailing vessel and had never gone home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He had been master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had fought in the Ever-Victorious Army. He had got a lot of loot in the Boxer troubles and had been in Hankow during the revolution when the rebels shelled the city. He had been married three times, first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese, and finally when he was hard upon fifty to an Englishwoman. They were all dead now and it was the Japanese who lingered in his memory. He would tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house in Shanghai, just one chrysanthemum in a vase or a sprig of cherry blossom; and he always remembered how she held a tea-cup, with both hands, delicately. He had had a number of children, but he took no interest in them; they were settled in the various ports of China, in banks and shipping offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud of his daughter by his English wife, the only girl he ever had, but she had married well and was gone to England. He would never see her again. The only person now for whom he had any affection was the boy who had been with him for five and forty years. He was a little wizened Chinaman, with a bald head, slow of movement and solemn. He was well over sixty. They quarrelled incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that he was past his work and that he must get rid of him, and then the boy would say that he was tired of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew that the other did not mean a word he said. They were old friends, old men both of them, and they would remain together till death parted them.

It was when he married his English wife that he retired from the water and put his savings into a hotel. But it was not a success. It was a little way from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before there were motor cars in China. He was a sociable fellow and he spent too much of his time in the bar. He was generous and he gave away as many drinks as were paid for. He also had the peculiar habit of spitting in the bath and the more squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his last wife died he found it was she who had kept things from going to pieces and in a little while he could no longer bear up against the difficulty of his circumstances. All his savings had gone into buying the place, now heavily mortgaged, and in making up the deficit year by year. He was obliged to sell out to a Japanese and having paid his debts at the age of sixty-eight found himself without a penny. But, by God, sir, he was a sailor. One of the companies running boats up the Yangtze, gave him a berth as chief officer--he had no master's certificate--and he returned to the river which he knew so well. For eight years he had been on the same run.

And now he stood on the bridge of his trim little ship, not so large as a penny steamer on the Thames, a gallant figure, upright and slender as when he was a lad, in a neat blue suit and the company's cap set jauntily on his white hair, with his pointed beard nattily trimmed. Seventy-six years old. It is a great age. With his head thrown back, his glasses in his hand, the Chinese pilot by his side, he watched the vast expanse of the winding river. A fleet of junks with their high sterns, their square sails set, descended on the swift current, and the rowers chanted a monotonous chant as they worked at their creaking oars. The yellow water in the setting sun was lovely with pale soft tints, it was as smooth as glass; and along the flat banks the trees and the huts of a bedraggled village, hazy in the heat of the day, were now silhouetted sharply, like the shadows of a shadowgraph, against the pale sky. He raised his head as he heard the cry of wild geese and he saw them flying high above him in a great V to what far lands he knew not. In the distance against the sunlight stood a solitary hill crowned with temples. Because he had seen all this so often it affected him strangely. The dying day made him think, he knew not why, of his long past and of his great age. He regretted nothing.

"By George," he muttered, "I've had a fine life."

XLVI

THE PLAIN

The incident was of course perfectly trivial, and it could be very easily explained; but I was surprised that the eyes of the spirit could blind me so completely to what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was taken aback to find how completely one could be at the mercy of the laws of association. Day after day I had marched among the uplands and to-day I knew that I must come to the great plain in which lay the ancient city whither I was bound; but when I set out in the morning there was no sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed no less sheer and when I reached the top of one, thinking to see the valley below, it was only to see before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond, climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway that I had followed so long, shining in the sunlight as it skirted the brow of a rugged tawny rock. The sky was blue and in the west hung here and there little clouds like fishing boats becalmed towards evening off Dungeness. I trudged along, mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that awaited me, if not round this bend, then round the next, and at last, suddenly, when I was thinking of other things, I came upon it. But it was no Chinese landscape that I saw, with its padi fields, its memorial arches and its fantastic temples, with its farmhouses set in a bamboo grove and its wayside inns where under the banyan trees the poor coolies may rest them of their weary loads; it was the valley of the Rhine, the broad plain all golden in the sunset, the valley of the Rhine with its river, a silvery streak, running through it, and the distant towers of Worms; it was the great plain upon which my young eyes rested, when, a student in Heidelberg, after walking long among the fir-clad hills above the old city, I came out upon a clearing. And because I was there first conscious of beauty; because there I knew the first glow of the acquisition of knowledge (each book I read was an extraordinary adventure); because there I first knew the delight of conversation (oh, those wonderful commonplaces which each boy discovers as though none had discovered them before); because of the morning stroll in the sunny Anlage, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my abstemious youth at the end of a strenuous walk, the leisurely evenings on the castle terrace, with the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs of the old town below me; because of Goethe and Heine and Beethoven and Wagner and (why not?) Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer-garden where the band played and girls with yellow plaits walked sedately; because of all these things--recollections which have all the force of the appeal of sense--to me not only does the word _plain_ mean everywhere and exclusively the valley of the Rhine; but the only symbol for happiness I know is a wide prospect all golden in the setting sun, with a shining stream of silver running through it, like the path of life or like the ideal that guides you through it, and far away the grey towers of an ancient town.

XLVII

FAILURE

A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat, like a bushranger's, with an immense brim, a pea-jacket such as you see in Leech's pictures of the sea-faring man, and very wide check trousers of a cut fashionable heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes off his hat you see a fine head of long curly hair, and though he is approaching the sixties it is scarcely grey. His features are regular. He wears a collar several sizes too large for him so that his whole neck, massive and statuesque, is shown. He has the look of a Roman Emperor in a tragedy of the sixties and this air of an actor of the old school is enhanced by his deep booming voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd. You can imagine his declaiming the blank verse of Sheridan Knowles with an emphasis to rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you, with too large a gesture, you guess how that resonant organ would tremble when he wrung your heart (in 1860) over the death of his child. It was splendid a little later to hear him ask the Chinese servant for "me boots, boy, me boots. A kingdom for me boots." He confessed that he should have been an actor.

"To be or not to be, that was the question, but me family, me family, dear boy, they would have died of the disgrace, and so I was exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

In short he came out to China as a tea-taster. But he came when the Ceylon tea was already ousting the Chinese and it was no longer possible for the merchant to enrich himself in a few years. But the old lavishness endured and life was led in a grand style when the means to pay for it no longer existed. The struggle became harder. Finally came the Sino-Japanese war, and with the loss of Formosa, ruin. The tea-taster looked about for other means of livelihood. He became a wine-merchant, an undertaker, an estate-agent, a broker, an auctioneer. He tried every way of making money that his ardent imagination suggested, but with the diminishing prosperity of the port his efforts were bootless. Life was too much for him. And now at last he had the pitiful air of a broken man; there was even something touching in it, like the appeal of a woman who cannot believe in the loss of her beauty and implores the compliment which reassures but no longer convinces her. And yet, notwithstanding, he had a solace: he had still a magnificent assurance; he was a failure and he knew it; but it did not really affect him, for he was the victim of fate: no shadow of a doubt in his own capacity had ever crossed his mind.

XLVIII

A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA

He sent in a neat card of the correct shape and size, deeply bordered in black, upon which under his name was printed _Professor of Comparative Modern Literature_. He turned out to be a young man, small, with tiny elegant hands, with a larger nose than you see as a rule in the Chinese and gold rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day he was dressed, in European clothes, in a suit of heavy tweed. He seemed a trifle shy. He spoke in a high falsetto, as though his voice had never broken, and those shrill notes gave I know not what feeling of unreality to his conversation. He had studied in Geneva and in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English, French, and German.

It appeared that he lectured on the drama and he had lately written, in French, a work on the Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left him with a surprising enthusiasm for Scribe, and this was the model he proposed for the regeneration of the Chinese drama. It was curious to hear him demand that the drama should be exciting. He was asking for the _pièce bien faite_, the _scène à faire_, the curtain, the unexpected, the dramatic. The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate symbolism, has been what we are always crying for, the theatre of ideas; and apparently it has been perishing of dullness. It is true that ideas do not grow on every gooseberry bush, they need novelty to make them appetising, and when they are stale they stink as badly as stale fish.

But then, remembering the description on the card, I asked my friend what books, English and French, he recommended his students to read in order to familiarise themselves with the current literature of the day. He hesitated a little.

"I really don't know," he said at last, "you see, that's not my branch, I only have to do with drama; but if you're interested I'll ask my colleague who lectures on European fiction to call on you."

"I beg your pardon," I said.

"Have you read _Les Avariés_?" he asked. "I think that is the finest play that has been produced in Europe since Scribe."

"Do you?" I said politely.

"Yes, you see our students are greatly interested in sociological questions."

It is my misfortune that I am not, and so as deftly as I could I led the conversation to Chinese philosophy which I was desultorily reading. I mentioned Chuang-Tzu. The professor's jaw fell.

"He lived a very long time ago," he said, perplexed.