“You’d get killed!”
“Not on a job like that. It’s got to come to pass. It’s written in the stars. You don’t think I’d trail carelessly off the earth and leave my job undone? Until a long time from now—” he smiled—“until I’ve done everything I want to do, I refuse to die.
“You see, I’m torn two ways. Sometime I shall join Sun Yat Sen. He needs me. But I have fires to tend here. The flame over there was lit from here. I’d go in a minute if I could only feel we’d turned the trick here; but the newspapers from home are full of dire forebodings. An enterprise like this must be made to sink as a fact into the consciousness of the East.
“But time is passing—by the water clock of Canton that has kept time for a thousand years!” he murmured to himself.
“Why,” he demanded suddenly, “do I want to share all my secrets with you? Is it because of the light of you, that shines like a lantern in the dark of the world?”
Julie dropped her eyes. “China must be a dark world,” she hazarded confusedly.
“I used to think so! I was only a lad. The people weren’t people then. They were flies, hordes, multiple numbers in the universe! And the faiths of their souls! Monstrous gods, with blood drooling out of their man-eating jaws! Blood seemed a commonplace, like milk. Will I ever be able to forget that large crude yard of the execution grounds—running with blood that stifled the nostrils and caused me to reel with illness—human blood, rivers of it, turning black? Terrible was the human capitulation of that field! That submissively surrendered stream showed the Chinaman in a new light; for not much of the blood of the Execution Grounds was criminal. That kind could get away with bribes. It was ferociously demanded blood of sacrifice—the blood of gophers offered to that figment in Pekin. Why should these wet, reasonless, red spots continue on the earth? You see that something must happen over there soon.
“A flat, bare, yellow, ancient land!” he mused. “The saddest land I have ever seen, with little vegetation to cover its old bones—just the stark drear plains. Isn’t nature brutal, to turn out millions and millions of creatures to subsist on dead mountains and sand. And, lifting like excrescences out of that land, the mud huts of the living mingle with the mud tombs of the dead. Gophers in mud banks, living and dead. Nowhere else does one ache so for man. And the intolerable sensations one experiences at first over this monstrous dirt-like cheapness of human life!”
“All our lives,” Julie reflected, “we have looked upon ourselves as a little less than God; but over here we are just rats crawling in and out of the universe!” Her face contracted in a painful spasm.
“Don’t put them too far down in the abyss of your pity, though they were in the beginning a hideous phantom across the vision of my ideals. Pekin, of course, was different. It was all that I had dreamed of ancient and opulent Cathy: an oriental fantasy with its great Chaldean towers, its temples and pagodas sparkling with sapphire lights; with its marble courts, its flashing scarlet palaces; its grottos on lotus lakes, its gay pailows with flapping banners, and its millions of rainbow-hued boxes that are the dwellings of men. But, over beyond the city, cut into the clay of the cliffs—the holes of the gophers still!”