“It is for you to accept an offer, not for you to make one,” I replied, placing $6 on the table. “Now listen. Here are $6 for your fare back to Tientsin if you do not come to my terms; and you must decide at once. I will give you exactly $120, and not one cash more, to accompany us to Kiakhta and find your own way back. Accept or refuse; and if the latter, make yourself scarce, for I shall not change my mind.”
My sulky friend’s only reply was to carelessly take up the money, pocket it, and without another word calmly leave the room. I watched him slink slowly down the little courtyard and out of the gate, half hoping he would think better of it; but no! He never even once looked behind him, and as I watched his tall, gaunt form vanish slowly in the dusk, I felt that now, indeed, our last hope was gone, and retiring to my room, threw myself on the bed in despair, and wondered what on earth we were going to do next.
To reach Siberia by way of the Gobi Desert was obviously impossible, for, judging by past experience, we could not reasonably expect to find another English-speaking boy, under another month or so. It would then be too late to attempt the journey viâ Mongolia, that is, without risking imprisonment of a couple of months in some lonely Siberian village——hardly a pleasant prospect, judging from all we had heard of that melancholy country.
There was now but one course to pursue——to return to Tientsin, and embark thence on the first vessel for Nicolaiefsk at the mouth of the Amour River, thus altogether avoiding the Mongolian desert, and gaining Irkoutsk by way of Khabarofka, Stratensk, and Chita, instead of Urga and Kiakhta.
It was a great disappointment. We had looked forward to the desert journey far more than to any other part of the voyage. There would have been some novelty and excitement in crossing the wild desolate plains lying between the Great Wall of China and Siberia, but none whatever in the cut-and-dried route from Nicolaiefsk, from which port a comfortable and well-found steamer takes the traveller a distance of about fifteen hundred miles up the Amour river to Stratensk. From here he proceeds by tarantass or sleigh (according to season) to Verchui Udinsk and across Lake Baikal (by steamer if in summer) to Irkoutsk, which city is distant about one thousand odd versts from Stratensk. There is but one main post-road across Siberia from Irkoutsk to Tomsk. But the come down from a journey in a camel caravan across the great Gobi Desert to an ordinary steamer and posting carriage along a dull, uninteresting river and monotonous road with a post-house every twenty versts,[[2]] was a severe blow to one’s feelings and anticipations.
Dinner that night was a sad meal; even the champagne, which our host insisted upon producing, failed to enliven it. Our party was increased by three Russians from Shanghai, who were on their way to Manchuria for a month’s shooting. One of them had done the Amour journey, and devoutly hoped he might never have to do it again. For monotony and lack of interest that great river was (according to his account) unrivalled. But we had made up our minds, and it must be done. Fortunately enough, a vessel would be leaving Tientsin for Nicolaiefsk in four or five days’ time, which would give us plenty of time to retrace our steps to Tientsin and embark. To bemoan one’s fate under such circumstances is worse than useless, and we retired to rest resigned, if not cheerful. The Gobi was impossible, “Vogue pour ‘l’amour’!”
But the proverb that it is ever “darkest before dawn,” was exemplified next morning when, about ten o’clock, and on the eve of departure for Tientsin, the welcome news was brought us that a boy had been found! and by whom but our good angel, M. Tallien, who, moved to compassion by our woe-begone faces the previous evening, had himself searched Pekin high and low, and run the article to earth within the very walls of the Russian Embassy. No ordinary “boy” was this either, but an excellent cook, speaking English, Russian, and Mongolian fluently, and who, best of all, was willing to go to Kiakhta and find his own way back again for $100 all found. I could have fallen into Tallien’s arms and embraced him. Perhaps, being a Frenchman, he would have taken such a proceeding as a matter of course.
Our new acquisition, Jee Boo by name, a nice, quiet-looking fellow of about 30, had been cook and servant to Prince ————, one of the Russian attachés, for some time. Under ordinary circumstances we should perhaps have asked for his character, but dreading another delay we determined to chance it, take him as he was, and ask no questions. We were armed and he was not, which is always satisfactory in case of a disagreement. He was, at any rate, a very different stamp of man to our Tientsin friend, who, it now appeared, had taken the trouble to find him out and advise him to have nothing to do with us, for if he did he would never get paid. We should be sure to repudiate our debt on arrival at Kiakhta and leave him stranded in a foreign land without friends or money. That was why he had himself refused to entertain our offer, &c., &c.
We soon convinced Jee Boo, however, of the honesty of our intentions by making M. Tallien his banker for the amount of $80, the remaining $20 to be paid him on arrival at Kiakhta, with an additional $20 if he behaved himself. Having thus arranged things to everybody’s satisfaction, we gave Jee Boo leave to absent himself for the day, and (not without misgivings of another disappointment) made preparations for a start at six the following morning.
The same afternoon, while we were busily engaged fixing our heavy baggage to the mule packs, two of the most extraordinary beings I ever beheld rode up to the hotel gate. Both might have been any age from nineteen to ninety, and were dressed in suits of loud tartan check (not unlike that worn by Jack Spraggon in that best of sporting novels “Soapy Sponge”), enormous pith sun-hats with long, flowing puggarees and green spectacles. We put them down at a glance for what they unmistakably were, “globe-trotters,” sent out by their mammas (or mamma, for they were like as two peas), to see the world and improve their mind (if they had any). How they had drifted to Pekin, goodness only knows. It is not a city much affected by the genus. The comforts are not up to their standard.