Bert Wilson, Wireless Operator

by J. W. Duffield

They had reached the gateway of Southern China and cast anchor in the harbor of Hong-Kong. It had been a day of great bustle and confusion, and all hands had been kept busy from the time the anchor chain rattled in the hawse-hole until dusk began to creep over the waters of the bay. The great cranes had groaned with their loads as they swung up the bales and boxes from the hold and transferred them to the lighters that swarmed about the sides of the Fearless. The passengers, eager once more to be on terra firma after the long voyage, had gone ashore, and the boat was left to the officers and crew. These had been kept on board by the manifold duties pertaining to their position, but were eagerly looking forward to the morrow, when the coveted shore leave would be granted in relays to the crew, while the officers would be free to go and come almost as they pleased. It was figured that even with the greatest expedition in discharging cargo and taking on the return shipments for the “States,” it would be nearly or quite a week before they began their return journey, and they promised themselves in that interval to make the most of their stay in this capital of the Oriental commercial world.

Now, as dusk fell over the waters, the boys sat at the rail and gazed eagerly at the strange sights that surrounded them. The harbor was full of shipping gathered from the four quarters of the world. On every side great liners lay, ablaze with light from every cabin and porthole. Native junks darted about saucily here and there, while queer yellow faces looked up at them from behind the mats and lateen-rigged sails. The unforgettable smells of an Eastern harbor assailed their nostrils. The high pitched nasal chatter of the boatmen wrangling or jesting, was unlike anything they had ever before heard or imagined. Everything was so radically different from all their previous experiences that it seemed as though they must have kneeled on the magic carpet of Solomon and been transported bodily to a new world.

Before them lay the city itself glowing with myriad lights. The British concession with its splendid buildings, its immense official residences, its broad boulevards, might have been a typical European city set down in these strange Oriental surroundings. But around and beyond this lay the real China, almost as much untouched and uninfluenced by these modern developments as it had been for centuries. Great hills surrounded the city on every side, and temples and pagodas uprearing their quaint sloping roofs indicated the location of the original native quarters. In the distance they could see the lights of the little cable railway that carried passengers to the heights from which they could obtain a magnificent view of the harbor and the surrounding country.

The ship’s doctor had come up just as Dick had finished his quotation.

“Yes,” he assented, as he lit a fresh cigar and drew his chair into the center of the group. “The poet might have gone further than that and intimated that even one year of Europe would be better than a ‘cycle of Cathay.’ There’s more progress ordinarily in a single year among Europeans than there is here in twenty centuries.”

They gladly made room for him. The doctor was a general favorite and a cosmopolitan in all that that word implies. He seemed to have been everywhere and seen everything. In the course of his profession he had been all over the world, and knew it in every nook and corner. He had a wealth of interesting experiences, and had the gift of telling them, when in congenial company, in so vivid and graphic a way, that it made the hearer feel as though he himself had taken part in the events narrated.

“Of course,” went on the doctor, “it all depends on the point of view. If progress is a good thing, we have the advantage of the Chinese. If it is a bad thing, they have the advantage of us. Now, they say it is a bad thing. With them ‘whatever is is right.’ Tradition is everything. What was good enough for their parents is good enough for them. They live entirely in the past. They cultivate the ground in the same way and with the same implements that their fathers did two thousand years ago. To change is to offend the gods. All modern inventions are devices of the devil. Every event in their whole existence is governed by cut and dried rules. From the moment of birth to that of death, life moves along one fixed groove. They don’t want railroads or telephones or phonographs or machinery or anything else that to us seems a necessity of life. Whatever they have of these has been forced upon them by foreigners. A little while ago they bought up a small railroad that the French had built, paid a big advance on the original price, and then threw rails and locomotives into the sea.”

“Even our ‘high finance’ railroad wreckers in Wall Street wouldn’t go quite as far as that,” laughed Tom.

“No,” smiled the doctor, “they’d do it just as effectively, but in a different way.”

“And yet,” interposed Dick, “the Chinese don’t seem to me to be a stupid race. We had one or two in our College and they were just as bright as anyone there.”