The second trouble that came to him was on a grander scale than the cutting of hair or the enforced wearing of strange, uncomfortable garments. It was tragedy indeed, and almost broke his affectionate, homesick heart. When he had been in England about a year word came that his grandfather was dead.

Wu was desperate. And now he was quite alone. He belonged to no one in all the world. And in all the world no one belonged to him except a baby-girl just learning to walk across a floor of polished cherry-wood, nearly eight thousand miles away in old Pekin.

CHAPTER VIII
Some Balm

THERE was a great deal in the Oxford life that reminded Wu of China: the beauty and the dignity, the repose, the dedication (and of some the devotion too) to the finer things, and not less the riot of the “wines,” the crash and clash of the “rows,” the luxury and the elaborations. It was reminder that he found, and not resemblance. Oxford was intensely English. He liked it none the less for that. Nothing at Portland Place had annoyed him more than the mongrel mix-up of West and East, the fatuous attempt to blend the unblendable. It was neither English goose nor Chinese mongoose, and he loathed it. Oxford was good, downright English dog, and well pedigreed; he liked the bark and the bite of it and the honest look in its eyes.

The crass mistakes so often made by his rich countrymen at such places he avoided, partly by his own good sense and partly by Muir’s counsel and the dead mandarin’s command. He spent of his great income lavishly, but not too lavishly. He kept good horses, but not too good; and he kept no valet. His entertainment was generous, but nothing much out of the common, and never beyond the convenient return of the richer men. He made much pleasant and useful acquaintance, but no friends. He indulged himself a little in the furnishing of his rooms, but they scarcely smacked of China. His jade lamp had cost a great deal, but a young duke had one that had cost more. He had a little bronze and some lacquer, but he had no kakemonos and burned no incense. Quite a number of the other students had kakemonos by the half-dozen, and burned joss-sticks elaborately.

Wu worked prodigiously at Oxford and played industriously. He enjoyed the work. There were some brilliant men at Oxford then, but no mind better than his, and no industriousness to equal his. He took nothing much in honors—that was not in his grandfather’s scheme; but he assimilated an immense amount of alien fact and thought. He learned Englishmen. He read many books and mastered them. But he had been sent to Europe to study men and peoples, and he never forgot it or swerved from it for an hour. None of his fellow undergraduates particularly liked him, but few disliked him, and he interested many. Several of the dons and fellows did like him; with one he might have had intimacy if he had cared to, and from studying Wu two of the wisest reversed a lifelong estimate of China and the Chinese.

He excelled at all he did there. But almost always he was at pains to be surpassed at the last lap; and when now and then he won, he made it his inexorable rule to win by but a hair’s breadth.

Not all his fellow undergraduates treated him with entire courtesy. Some laughed at him openly at times and called him “Chops.” And because these presumably were gentlemen he was not so altogether indifferent to it as he had been to the gibes of the gamins on the London streets. He was young enough to wince at the criticisms of companions he was Chinese enough to despise.

He studied women too when he had the chance, but with all them his relations were impeccably ceremonial and on the surface. His being was in China still, and no English girl stirred his pulse or fogged his subtle shrewdness. James Muir, who watched over him faithful as a mother, had somewhat feared for him when the passing of adolescence into first raw manhood should come pounding at the door of sex. Muir knew that in that experience Englishmen in exile usually found some impulse toward vagary irresistible. But Wu lived on unruffled—alone in Europe, and content with loneliness.