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IT WAS early morning—the first day of April—when the Pacific liner that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped anchor in the river below Shanghai and there discharged passengers and freight for all central and northern China.

Brachey, on that occasion, watched from his cabin porthole while Betty and the Hasmers descended the accommodation ladder and boarded the company's launch. Then, not before, he drank coffee and nibbled a roll. His long face was gray and deeply lined. He had not slept.

He went up to Shanghai on the next launch, walked directly across the Bund to the row of steamship offices, and engaged passage on a north-bound coasting steamer. That evening he dined alone, out on the Yellow Sea, steaming toward Tsingtau, Chefu and (within the five days) Tientsin. He hadn't meant to take in the northern ports at this time; his planned itinerary covered the Yangtse Valley, where the disorderly young shoots of revolution were ripening slowly into red flower. But he was a shaken man. As he saw the problem of his romance, there were two persons to be saved, Betty and himself. He had behaved, on the one occasion, outrageously. He could see his action now as nothing other than weakness, curiously despicable, in the light of the pitiless facts. Reason had left him. Gusts of emotion lashed him. He now regarded the experience as a storm that must be somehow weathered. He couldn't weather it in Shanghai. Not with Betty there. He would surely seek her; find her. With his disordered soul he would cry out to her. In this alarming mood no subterfuge would appear too mean—sending clandestine notes by yellow hands, arranging furtive meetings.

He was, of course, running away from her, from his task, from himself. It was expensive business. But he had meant to work up as far as Tientsin and Peking before the year ran out. He was, after all, but taking that part of it first. To this bit of justification he clung. He passed but one night at Tientsin, in the curiously British hotel, on an out-and-out British street, where one saw little more to suggest the East than the Chinese policeman at the corner, an occasional passing amah or mafoo, and the blue-robed, soft-footed hotel servants; then on to Peking by train, an easy four-hour run, lounging in a European dining-car where the allied troops had fought their way foot by foot only seven years earlier.

Brachey, though regarded by critical reviewers as a rising authority on the Far East, had never seen Peking. India he knew; the Straits Settlements—at Singapore and Penang he was a person of modest but real standing; Borneo, Java, Celebes and the rest of the vast archipelago, where flying fish skim a burnished sea and green islands float above a shimmering horizon against white clouds; the Philippines, Siam, Cochin China and Hongkong; but the swarming Middle Kingdom and its Tartar capital were fresh fuel to his coldly eager mind. He stopped, of course, at the almost Parisian hotel of the International Sleeping Car Company, just off Legation Street.

Peking, in the spring of 1907, presented a far from unpleasant aspect to the eye of the traveler. The siege of the legations was already history and half-forgotten; the quarter itself had been wholly rebuilt. The clearing away of the crowded Chinese houses about the legations left à glacis of level ground that gave dignity to the walled enclosure. Legation Street, paved, bordered by stone walks and gray compound-walls, dotted with lounging figures of Chinese gatekeepers and alert sentries of this or that or another nation—British, American, Italian, Austrian, Japanese, French, Belgian, Dutch, German—offered a pleasant stroll of a late afternoon when the sun was low. Through gateways there were glimpses to be caught of open-air tea parties, of soldiers drilling, or even of children playing. Tourists wandered afoot or rolled by in rickshaws drawn by tattered blue and brown coolies.

From the western end of the street beyond the American glacis, one might see the traffic through the Chien Gate, with now and then a nose-led train of camels humped above the throng; and beyond, the vast brick walls and the shining yellow palace roofs of the Imperial City. Around to the north, across the Japanese glacis, one could stroll, in the early evening, to the motion-picture show, where one-reel films from Paris were run off before an audience of many colors and more nations and costumes, while a placid Chinaman manipulated a mechanical piano.

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Brachey had letters to various persons of importance along the street. With the etiquette of remote colonial capitals, he had long since trained himself to a mechanical conformity. Accordingly he devoted his first afternoon to a round of calls, by rickshaw; leaving cards in the box provided for the purpose at the gate house of each compound. Before another day had gone he found return cards in his box at the hotel; and thus was he established as persona grata on Legation Street. Invitations followed. The American minister had him for tiffin. There were pleasant meals at the legation barracks. Tourist groups at the hotel made the inevitable advances, which he met with austere dignity. Meantime he busied himself discussing with experts the vast problems confronting the Chinese in adjusting their racial life to the modern world, and within a few days was jotting down notes and preparing tentative outlines for his book.