“I wonder if it is like a net,” said she.
CHAPTER XII—STORM CENTER
1
CHINA, in its vastness, its mystery, its permanence, its ceaseless ebb and flow of myriad, uncounted life, suggests the ocean. The surface is restless, ripped by universal family discord, whipped by gusts of passion from tong or tribe, upheaved by political storms, but everywhere in the unsounded depths lies the peace of submissiveness. Within its boundaries breathes sufficient power to overwhelm the world, yet only on the self-conscious surface is this power sensed and slightly used. Chinese life, in city and village, as in the teeming countryside, moves in disorganized poverty about its laborious daily tasks, little more aware of the surface political currents than are Crustacea at the bottom of the sea of ships passing overhead; while to these patient minds the mighty adventure of the Western World is no more than a breath upon the waters.
This simile found a place among the darker thoughts of Griggsby Doane as he tramped down into the fertile valley of the Han. Behind him lay tragedy; yet on every hand the farmers were at work upon the narrow holdings that terraced the red hills to their summits. At each countryside well the half-naked coolies—two, three, or four of them—were turning windlasses and emptying buckets of water into stone troughs from which trickled little painstakingly measured streams to the sunbaked furrow of this or that or another field. The trains of asses anil camels wound ceaselessly up and down the road that led from the northern hills to T'ainan. The roadside vendors and beggars chanted their wares and their grievances. The villages, always indolent, lived on exactly as always, stirred only by noisy bargains or other trivial excitement. The naked children tumbled about. It w as hard to believe that here could be—had so lately been—violence and cruelty. It was simply one of the occasions, evidently, when no Lookers or hostile young men happened to be about to shout their familiar taunts at the white devil. Though the fighting of 1900, for that matter, had passed like a wave, leaving hardly more trace. Still more, at dusk, the outskirts of the great city stirred perplexing thoughts. The quiet of a Chinese evening was settling on shops and homes. Children's voices carried brightly over compound walls. Kites flew overhead. The music of stringed instalments floated pleasantly, faintly, to the ear.
And every quaint sight and sound was registered with a fresh vividness on Doane's highly strung nerves. He was tired; might easily, too easily, become irritable; a fact he sensed and struggled to guard against. Now, of all occasions in his life, he must exercise self-control. Difficult tasks lay directly ahead. One would be the talk with Pao Ting Chuan about the So T'ung massacre. Pao was, in his Oriental way, friendly; but his way was Oriental. It would be necessary to meet him at every evasive turn; necessary to read behind every courteous speech of a cultivated and charming gentleman the complex motivation of a mandarin skilled in the intricate relationships of the Court of Peking. Helping avert trouble was one matter; Pao could doubtless, or apparently, be counted on to that extent; but assuming full responsibility for the taking of white life and the destruction of white man's property, was a vastly more complicated matter. No other sort of human creature is so skilful at evading responsibility as the Chinaman; this, perhaps, because responsibility, once accepted, is, under the Chinese tradition and system, inescapable.... Another task, of course, would be the telling Boatwright of his personal disaster. It still seemed better to do this before the news could drift around in some vulgar, disruptive way from Shanghai. He couldn't plan this talk, not yet; but a way would doubtless present itself. He stood before his God, in his own strong heart, convicted of sin. There had been moments, during the tramp southward, when he found himself welcoming this nearly public self-arraignment with a bitter eagerness. But at such moments pictures of Betty rose in his mind, and of the gentle beautiful wife of his youth—wistful, delicately traced pictures.
His face would change then; the lines would deepen and a look of torment, of wild hurt animal strength that was new, would appear in and about his deep-shaded eyes.