CHAPTER IV—THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, AND OF DEATH
1
DOANE stood on the Bund at Hankow, by the railing, his great frame towering above the passers-by. He had lunched with the consul general, an old acquaintance. He had arranged to stop overnight, with Betty, in a missionary compound. In the morning they would take the weekly Peking Express northward.
The wide yellow Yangtse flowed by, between its steep mud cliffs, crowded with sampans—hundreds of them moored, rail to rail, against the opposite bank, a compact floating village that was cluttered and crowded with ragged river-folk and deck-houses of arched matting and that reared skyward a thick tangle of masts and rigging. The smaller boats and tubs of the water-beggars lay against the bank just beneath him, expectantly awaiting the Shanghai steamer. Out in the stream several stately junks lay at anchor; and near them a tiny river gunboat, her low free-board glistening white in the warm spring sunshine, a wisp of smoke trailing lazily from her funnel, the British ensign hanging ir folds astern.
Down and up the water steps were moving continuously the innumerable water bearers whose business it was to supply the city of near a million yellow folk that lay just behind the commercial buildings and the pyramid-like godowns of the Bund.
To Doane the picture, every detail of which had a place in the environment of his entire adult life, seemed unreal. The consul general, too, had been unreal. His talk, mostly of remembered if partly mellowed political grievances back home, of the great days when a certain “easy boss” was in power, and later of the mutterings of revolution up and down the Yangtse Valley, sounded in Doane's ears like quaint idle chatter of another planet.... His own talk, it seemed now, had been as unreal as the rest of it.
Of the compliment men of affairs usually paid him, despite his calling, in speaking out as man to man, Doane had never thought and did not think now. He was not self-conscious.
The hours of sober thought that followed his talk with Henry Withery had deepened the furrow between his brows.