Perhaps the son’s disappearance might have worried the father even more if there had been no other pressing anxieties. But there were—several.
There was the very deuce to pay at the Hong Kong branch of the Gregory Steamship Company, and a good deal of inadequacy with which to pay it.
It was a bright, hot day—a blue and gold day, without a trace of Hong Kong mist and murk—and the windows in the manager’s room were open wide. The furniture was sparse but rich; it was Robert Gregory’s own room, and he was of the type of business man who likes to do himself well in the format of his office routine, more in a sincere pride in his business cult than in personal vanity or any pampering of self, and also in a well-defined theory of advertisement: Persian carpets and Spanish mahogany desks indicate a firm’s prosperity clearly. Gregory’s furniture was very expensive, but sensible, solid and untrimmed. He earned and amassed money in big ways and in small, but, in the main, he left the spending of it on fripperies to Hilda and his wife. A photograph of Hilda—the one ornament the office confessed to—stood on her father’s desk, in a splendid wide frame that might have been Chinese, so costly and so barbaric was it, had only the design and the workmanship been better. But if the picture was somewhat over-framed, its girl-subject was not over-dressed, for English Hilda, who from her father’s office table smiled up at all the world, was several inches more décolleté than even the moon had ever seen Nang Ping.
But modesty and even decency are as much virtues of the eye that looks as of the creatures of its glance; and John Bradley, sitting in Robert Gregory’s chair, saw only maidenhood delectable and flawless in the picture his eyes sought again and again. And any man who, to Robert Gregory’s knowledge, had seen anything coarser, Robert Gregory would have shot cheerfully.
Holman, Gregory’s head clerk, sat moodily opposite the priest, looking out into the quay. The long window he faced was the apartment’s most conspicuous feature, and through it outrolled a teeming panorama of steamships and shipping industries. Docks and shipping in the near distance looked even nearer in the clear magnifying atmosphere, and close at hand smoke curled up from the funnels of a large steamer, flying the house flag of the company—a noticeable pennant even in that harbor, where noticeable objects jostle each other by the hundreds. The big lettering—“G. S. S. Co.”—was as bright and blue as the sky against whose brilliant background the smoke belched forth from the fat funnels, and the bunting that backgrounded the letters was yellow—impertinently yellow, for it was of the precise shade that in Pekin would have spelled death to any other who wore it or showed it on his chair, so sacred was it to reigning Emperor and Empress. But Robert Gregory did not know that, nor did Holman. But they should have known it—certainly Holman should, for he had lived in China many years now, and was far from being so crassly stupid concerning the Chinese as his chief was.
Between the big ship and the office building a constant procession of coolies passed up and down the dock, and the hum of their incessant intoned chatter filled the room with a noisy sing-song that rose and fell but never rested or drew breath.
On a rostrum behind the Fee Chow’s side, Simpson, an old and trusted clerk, was watching the coolies load, and a Chinese clerk perched near him on a high stool, checking each bale and box. A compradore sat at his desk on the wharf, wrangling with a knot of loin-clothed coolies who were gesticulating wildly with arms and poles and chattering like angry chimpanzees.
“And that is all you can tell me?” Holman said, as Bradley rose to go.
“All I care to say. I’ve strained a point to say that much.”
“And you will not tell me where you got your information? Is that quite fair?”