“What are they doing now?” asked Tab.
“In a few days we shall cast a second pillar,” said Yeh Ling, “and then the work is finished. You think I am at heart a barbarian?” Yeh Ling seldom smiled, but now his pale lips curled momentarily, “and you will take these pillars as proof?”
“I wouldn’t say that—” began Tab.
“Because you are so polite, Mr. Holland,” said Yeh Ling, “but then you see, we look at things from a different angle. I think your church steeples are ridiculous! Why is it necessary to stick a great stone spike on to a building to emphasise your reverence?”
He searched in his blouse and brought out a gold cigarette case, and offered it to Tab. Then he lit a cigarette himself, inhaled deeply before he sent a blue cloud into the still air.
“My Pillar of Grateful Memories will have a greater significance than all your steeples,” he said, “than all your stained glass windows. It is to me what your War Memorial Crosses are to you, a concrete symbol (literally concrete) of an intangible sentiment.”
“You are a Taoist?” asked Tab interested.
Yeh Ling shrugged his shoulders.
“I am a believer in God,” he said, “in ‘x’ in something beyond definition. Churches and sects, religions of all kinds are monopolies. God is like the water that flows down the mountain-side and fills the brooks and the rivers. There come certain men who bottle the waters, some in ugly bottles, some in beautiful bottles, and these bottles they sell, saying that ‘only this water will quench your thirst.’ That it does quench thirst we will not deny, but the water is often a little stale and flat, and the sparkle has gone out of it. You can drink better from the hollow of your hands kneeling by a brook. In China we bottle it with mystic writings and flavour it with cinnamon and spices. Here it is bottled without any regard to the water, but with punctilious care as to the shape of the bottle! I go always to the brook.”
“You are a queer devil,” said Tab surveying the other curiously.