In an odd way he was dating from that talk. It had been extraordinarily futile. It had to come, some sort of outbreak. For two or three years he had rather vaguely recognized this fact, and as vaguely dreaded it. Now it had happened. It was like a line drawn squarely across his life. He was different now; perhaps more honest, certainly franker with himself, but different... It had shaken him. Sleep left him for a night or two. Getting away for this trip to Hankow seemed a good thing. He had to be alone, walking it off, and thinking... thinking.... He walked the two hundred and ninety li to M. Pour-mont's compound, at Ping Yang, the railhead that spring of the new meter-guage line into Hans' Province in two days. The mule teams took three.
He dwelt much with memories of his daughter. She had been a winning little thing. Until the terrible Boxer year, that ended, for him, in the death of his wife, she had brought continuous happiness into their life.
She would be six years older now. He couldn't picture that. She had sent an occasional snapshot photograph; but these could not replace his vivid memories of the child she had been.
He was tremulously eager to see her. There would be little problems of adjustment. Over and over he told himself that he mustn't be stern with her; he must watch that.
He felt some uncertainty regarding her training. It was his hope that she would fit into the work of the mission. It seemed, indeed, necessary. She would be contributing eager young life. Her dutiful, rather perfunctory letters had made that much about her clear. They needed that.
During the talk with Withery—it kept coming, up—he had heard his own voice saying—in curiously deliberate tones—astonishing things. He had sent his friend away in a state of deepest concern. He thought of writing him. A letter might catch him at Shanghai. There would be time in the morning, during the long early hours before this household down here would be awaking and gathering for breakfast. It would help, he felt impulsively, to explain fully... But what? What was it that was to be so easily explained? Could he erase, with a few strokes of a pen, the unhappy impression he had made that night on Henry's brain?
The suggestion of marriage, with its implication of a rather cynical worldly wisdom, had come oddly from the devout Henry. Henry was older, too. But Doane winced at the mere recollection. He was almost excitedly sensitive on the topic. He had put women out of his mind, and was determined to keep them out. But at times thoughts of them slipped in.
On the walk to Ping Yang, the second afternoon, he was swinging down a valley where the road was no more than the stony bed of an anciently-diverted stream. The caravan of a mandarin passed, bound doubtless from Peking to a far western province. That it was a great mandarin was indicated by his richly decorated sedan chair borne by sixteen footmen with squadrons of cavalry before and behind. Five mule litters followed, each with a brightly painted, young face pressed against the tiny square window, the wives or concubines of the great one. Each demurely studied him through slanting eyes. And the last one smiled; quickly, brightly. It was death to be caught at that, yet life was too strong for her. He walked feverishly after that. He had said one thing to Henry... something never before formulated, even in his own thinking. What was it? Oh, this!—“Henry, I'm full of a fire and energy that no longer find an outlet in my work. I want to turn to new fields. If I don't, before it's too late, I may find myself on the rocks.”
There was something bitterly, if almost boyishly true in that statement. The vital, vigorous adult that was developing within him, now, in the forties, seemed almost unrelated to the young man he had been. He felt life, strength, power. In spirit he was younger than ever. All he had done, during more than twenty years, seemed but a practising for something real, a schooling. Now, standing there, a stern figure, on the Hankow Bund, he was aware of a developed, flowering instinct for the main currents of the mighty social stream, for rough, fresh contacts, large enterprises. His religion had been steadily widening out from the creed of his youth, gradually including all living things, all growth, far outspreading the set boundaries of churchly thought. This development of his spirit had immensely widened his spiritual influence among the Chinese of the province while at the same time making it increasingly different to talk frankly with fellow churchmen.
He had come to find more of the bread of life in Emerson and Montaigne, Chaucer and Shakespeare; less in Milton and Peter. He could consider Burns now with a new pity, without moral condescension, with simple love. He could feel profoundly the moral triumph of Hester Prynne, while wondering at what seemed his own logic. He struggled against a weakening faith in the authenticity of divine revelation, as against a deepening perception that the Confucian precepts might well be a healthy and even sufficient outgrowth of fundamental Chinese characteristics.