1
DOANE left the compound a little before noon, and arrived at So T'ung at six the following morning. The distance, a hundred and eighty li, was just short of sixty-five English miles. The road was little more than a footpath, so narrow that in the mountains, where the grinding of ages of traffic and the drainage from eroded slopes had long ago worn it down into a series of deep, narrow canyons, the came! trains, with their wide panniers, always found passing a matter of difficulty and confusion. Here it skirted a precipice, or twisted up and up to surmount the Pass of the Flighting Geese, just west of the sacred mountain; there it wandered along the lower hillsides above a spring torrent that would be, a few months later, a trickling rivulet. His gait averaged, over all conditions of road and of gradient, about five miles an hour. He followed, on this occasion, the principle of walking an hour, then resting fifteen minutes. And toward midnight he set up his cot by the roadside, in the shelter of a tree by a memorial arch, and gave himself two hours of sleep.
The little hill city of So T'ung was awake and astir, with gates open and traffic already flowing forth. There were no signs of disorder. But Doane noted that the anti-foreign mutterings and sneers along the roadside (to which he had grown accustomed twenty years earlier) were louder and more frequent than common. For himself he had not the slightest fear. His great height, his enormous strength, his commanding eye, had always, except on the one recent occasion of the riot at the T'ainan fair, been enough to cow any native who was near enough to do him injury. And added to this moral and physical strength he had lately felt a somewhat surprising recklessness. He felt this now. He didn't care what happened, so long as he might be busy in the thick of it. His personal safety took on importance only when he kept Betty in mind. He must save himself to provide for her. And, of course, in the absence of any other strong personality, the mission workers needed him; they had no one else, just now, on whom to lean. And then there were the hundreds of native Christians; they needed him, for they would be slaughtered first... if it should come to that. They would be loyal, and would die, at the last, for their faith.
During the long hours of walking through the still mountain night, his thoughts ranged far. He considered talking over his problems with M. Pourmont. There should be work for a strong, well-trained man somewhere in the railroad development that was going on all over the yellow kingdom. Preferably in some other region, where he wouldn't be known. Starting fresh, that was the thing!
Over and over the rather blank thought came around, that a man has no right to bring into the world a child for whom he can not properly, fully, care. And it came down to money, to some money; not as wealth, but as the one usable medium of human exchange. A little of it, honestly earned, meant that a man was productive, was paying his way. A saying of Emerson's shot in among his racing thoughts—something about clergymen always demanding a handicap. It was wrong, he felt. It was—he went as far as this, toward dawn—parasitic. A man, to live soundly, healthily, must shoulder his way among his fellows, prove himself squarely.
And he dwelt for hours at a time on the ethical basis of all this missionary activity. It was what he came around to all night. There was an assumption—it was, really, the assumption on which his present life was based—that the so-called Christian civilization, Western Europe and America—owed its superiority to what he thought of as the Christian consciousness. That superiority was always implied. It was the motive power back of this persistent proselytizing. But to-night, as increasingly of late years, he found himself whittling away the implications of a spiritual and even ethical quality in that superiority of the White over the Yellow. More and more clearly it seemed to come down to the physical. It was the amazing discoveries in what men call modern science, and the wide application in industry of these discoveries, that made much of the difference. Then there were the accidents of climate and soil and of certain happy mixtures of blood through conquests... these things made a people great or weak. And lesser accidents, such as a simple alphabet, making it easy and cheap to print ideas; the Chinese alphabet and the lack of easy transportation had held China back, he believed.... Back of all these matters lay, of course, a more powerful determinant; the genius that might be waxing or waning in a people. The genius of America was waxing, clearly; and the genius of China had been waning for six hundred years. But in her turn, China had waxed, as had Rome, and Greece, and Egypt. None of these had known the Christian consciousness, yet each had run her course. And Greece and Rome, without it, had risen high. Rome, indeed, whatever the reason, had begun to wane from the very dawn of Christianity; and had finally succumbed, not to that, but to barbarians who had in them crude physical health and enterprise.
The more deeply he pondered, the more was he inclined to question the importance of Christianity in the Western scheme. For Western civilization, to his burning eyes, walking at night, alone, over the hills of ancient Hansi, looked of a profoundly materialistic nature. You felt that, out here, where oil and cigarettes and foreign-made opium and merchandise of all sorts were pushing in, all the time, about and beyond the missionaries. And with bayonets always bristling in the background. The West hadn't the finely great gift of Greece or the splendid unity of Rome. Its art was little more than a confusion of copies, a library of historical essays. And art seemed, now, important. And as for religion... Doane had moments of real bitterness, that night, about religion. And he thought around and around a circle. The one strongest, best organized church of the West—the one that made itself felt most effectively in China—seemed to him not only opposed to the scientific enterprise that was, if anything, peculiarly the genius of the West, but insistent on superstitions (for so they looked, out here) beside which the quiet rationalism of the Confucian drift seemed very reality. And the period of the greatest power and glory of that church had been, to all European civilization, the Dark Ages. The Reformation and the modern free political spirit appeared to be cognates, yet the evangelical churches fought science, in their turn, from their firm base of divine revelation. It was difficult, to-night, to see the miracles and mysteries of Christianity as other than legendary superstitions handed down by primitive, credulous peoples. It was difficult to see them as greatly different from the incantations of the Boxers or of these newer Lookers.
And then, of all those great peoples that had waxed and waned, China alone remained.... There was a thought! She might wax again. For there she was, as always. Without the Christian consciousness, the Chinese, of all the great peoples, alone had endured.
A fact slightly puzzling to Doane was that he thought all this under a driving nervous pressure. Now and then his mind rushed him, got a little out of control. And at these times he walked too fast.