But Hilda Gregory found this one a little dull at first, and was driven in self-respect to appropriate the ship’s surgeon and two homing subalterns.
For Basil and their mother were inseparable, and the father who heretofore had been her faithful, if not too picturesque, knight lived in the smoking-room, telling again and again the story of his cowing of the great Chinese “I Am,” Wu Li Chang. Robert Gregory, never a wordless man, had never talked so much in all his life.
It was impossible to pass the smoking-room door without catching some such scrap of English masterpiece as: “I put him through it.” “The damned nigger was only bluffing. Well, I damn well called his bluff!” “... and that’s where a knowledge of the Chinaman comes in—an inside, intelligent knowledge. They like to be thought clever, I tell you. Don’t you see that it flattered him that I should think—seem to think, of course—that he was a sort of Mister Know-All?—and he was sly enough to play up to it. Oh! he was sly, I grant you that. But no match for me; no real ability.” “Yes; as I told you, he hummed and hawed a bit at first, until I simply turned him inside out, and then I could see he knew nothing. It was only tickling his vanity to let him imagine I thought he was a little local god. That’s why I left him to Mrs. Gregory. I saw it was a mere waste of my time. And it pleased her, and, too, it took her mind off the boy a bit. She was fretting over him—the young dog!—until I thought she’d make herself downright ill.” “Oh! we flatter these damned Chinamen too much in thinking them so clever.” “Oh! if you know the way to manage Chinamen. You should have seen the way I talked to that compradore. I frightened the beggar—just as I’d frightened Wu the day before. He saw it was a bit dangerous to play any games with me, by the Lord Harry, and so he called off the strike. I scared him stiff. And I scared Wu half to death, I can tell you.” “Oh, yes! he’s dead, right enough. No, I don’t know how he died. Perhaps he was ordered to commit suicide. Well, I had no objection, I can tell you. And I shan’t go into much black for him.” “He always was a bit of a handful. Kept his school-masters busy. But that did them good and him no harm. And they were well paid for it. Boys will be boys, you know. Why, when I was his age....”
In the smoking-room other men came and went all day and a good bit of the night, but Robert Gregory’s voice went on forever. And Mrs. Gregory and Basil, walking up and down, grew careful to keep at the other end of the big ship. For the smoking-room was near the front, and opened on to both sides of the promenade deck.
Basil Gregory scarcely left his mother from Hong Kong to Liverpool.
As the great ship drew anchor, he drew her arm in his, and they stood together so and watched Hong Kong until their sight had gone from it quite. This was their passing from China, but not from tragedy, and the woman knew it.
They did not speak of Wu Li Chang. They had spoken of him definitely together for the last time. They did not speak at all as the island faded slowly away from them. But they knew that to-day the mandarin’s interminable funeral cortège started from Kowloon to Sze-chuan. For they were taking the dead man to his old home—taking him tenderly with shriek of fife and howl of drum, coffined almost as splendidly as the Macedonian in his casket of gold. And no son followed Wu Li Chang! But behind the mandarin’s coffin they carried, more meekly, a simpler, smaller one. And Sing Kung Yah walked behind them both, almost bare-footed, clad in coarse unbleached hemp. This was her last secular function, if one may speak so of any human burial rite; for when at last Wu Li Chang and Wu Nang Ping were laid beside their dead ancestors in far-off Sze-chuan, Sing Kung Yah, if she lived so far—the road was long and rough—would seek life-long sanctuary in the Taoist nunnery of her abbess cousin.
As long as Anglo-Hong Kong’s eyes had been upon her, Mrs. Gregory had borne herself bravely—gayly even. But she was breaking now, and with each revolution of the ship’s great wheel she showed a little older, a little more limp. “You’re looking downright washed out,” Gregory told her; “high time we got you home.” Already she was no longer Basil Gregory’s young and pretty mother. No passenger among them all mistook her for his sister. She would never be so mistaken again. But he was very tender of her, and offered her a daily atonement of constant companionship and of those little tendings which mean so much more to a woman than any great sacrifice or big climax of devotion ever can. (If women are small in this, they are also exquisite by it.)
They clung together pathetically. And, at the same time, each shrank from the other a little, almost unconsciously, and quite in spite of themselves. Their souls shrank; their hearts clung.
Basil sensed that she grieved over his crime, and, as he thought, out of all proportion to its real seriousness, and that also she condemned and despised it. He was far from self-absolution. His conscience was not dead. But he resented her disapproval and the implied “charity” of her careful considerateness and studied cheerfulness.