CHAPTER NINE
THE DERELICT
The Brotherhood of Tien Tu Hin, swallowing in its deluge all degrees of mankind, likewise swallows now and then one of those nameless Europeans whom Fate has utterly cast adrift in those mysterious currents of the Orient Seas.
While not generally understood, yet it is true that most Occidentals, who by choice have drifted heretofore on Orient streams, have almost always been derelicts of some kind. Thither noble scions, criminals, priests, soldiers of fortune have drifted. Some have prospered and some in the wild surge of these seas have been wrecked and sunk.
The flotsam of humanity, like the drift of rivers, like the derelicts of the sea, is but wreckage of some sort hurried along in those irresistible currents that we call Fate. Each village has its little eddy where, round and round in quiet whirl, the neighbouring drift collects. Each country has its maelstrom, a black whirlpool where is collected the debris of human kind. This debris, starting at the top in wide circles, whirls round; swirling deeper and deeper until it disappears through that narrow abysmal funnel. These terrible vortices are never still and never without their debris. London is such a maelstrom, so is Paris, so is New York.
The world also has its colossal eddy, but they that drift upon the world’s currents are derelicts, not debris; it is true both are wreckage, but there is a wide difference between them. Debris is scum; derelicts are wrecks. Scum from scum arises; derelicts may be the wrecks of greatness. Debris is unnamed; the House of Orleans is a derelict, and its princes have died by the wash of the China Sea.
The seas are awash with derelicts of different kinds. Some, in due time, like the hulks of the old East Indiamen, become thrifty, incrustating themselves with spray gusts of silver, and furring themselves with the fur of their drift; a wealth clings to them and they become stranded by riches. They are found imbedded in all Oriental ports, and while they have formed a new environment, they still remain conspicuous.
Again these seas are adrift with derelicts that would succour; as when men float on the sea in an open boat suddenly behold with immeasurable joy a speck in the distance. It approaches, they board it, but only too often to find it hollow.
Derelicts most known are those that destroy. Deserted, forsaken, alone in this coaxing wilderness of waves, they drink deeply of their unrestraint and become master-derelicts of death; hurling themselves, areek with froth, on vessels they sink and on rocks which destroy.
In a fisherman’s hut near by the Bay of Tai Wan, a hovel mud-walled, windowless, rice-thatched, cluttered with poverty, dark and dismal, there lay dying a derelict of this latter kind.
The only brightness within the hut was a floating taper burning before the Ancestral Tablets and sending through the gloom its trembling, hesitant rays. This glimmering light that fell agleam on the tablets lit the faces and forms of three persons, two peasants and a foreigner. The stranger lay upon the only bed in the hut, and the peasants squatted beside him. A clot of blood was upon his bosom, and a red froth oozed from between his teeth, which the woman was wiping away with a wet cloth, while her husband kept his eyes fixed and reverent upon a Great Medallion suspended from the neck of the dying man, and glittering beside the wound in his breast.