In all this there was no plan. Brachey, confused, aware that the instinctive pressures of life were too much for him, that he was beaten, was soberly, breathlessly, driving toward the girl who had touched and tortured his encrusted heart. He was not even honest with himself; he couldn't be. He dwelt on the importance of studying the Hansi problem at close range He decided, among other things, that he wouldn't permit himself to see Betty, that he would merely stay secretly near her, certainly until a cablegram from New York should announce his positive freedom. In accordance with this decision he tore up his letters to her as fast as they were written. If the fact that he was now writing such letters indicated an alarming condition in his emotional nature, at least his will was still intact. He proved that by tearing them up. He even found this thought encouraging.
But, of course, he had taken his real beating when he gave up his plans and caught the coasting steamer at Shanghai. He was to learn now that rushing away from Betty and rushing toward her were irradiations of the same emotion.
He left Peking on that early morning way-train of passenger and freight cars, without calling again at the legation; merely sent a chit to the Commandant of Marines to say that he was off. He had not heard of the requirement that a white traveler into the interior carry a consular passport countersigned by Chinese authorities, and also, for purposes of identification, a supply of cards with the Chinese equivalent of his name; so he set forth without either, and (as a matter of fixed principle) without firearms.
CHAPTER VIII—THE WAYFARER
1
PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village called Shau T'ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the night in a native caravansary, his folding cot set up on the earthen floor. The room was dirty, dilapidated, alive with insects and thick with ancient odors. A charcoal fire in the crumbling brick kang gave forth fumes of gas that suggested the possibility of asphyxiation before morning. Brachey sent his guide, a fifty-year-old Tientsin Chinese of corpulent figure, known, for convenience, as “John,” for water and extinguished the fire. The upper half of the inner wall was a wooden lattice covered with paper; and by breaking all the paper squares within his reach, Brachey contrived to secure a circulation of air. Next he sent John for a piece of new yellow matting, and by spreading this under the cot created a mild sensation of cleanliness, which, though it belied the facts, made the situation a thought more bearable. For Brachey, though a veteran traveler, was an extremely fastidious man. He bore dirt and squalor, had borne them at intervals for years, without ever losing his squeamish discomfort at the mere thought of them. But the stern will that was during these, years the man's outstanding trait, and his intense absorption in his work, had kept him driving ahead through all petty difficulties. The only outward sign of the strain it put him to was an increased irritability.
He traveled from Shau T'ing to Ping Yang, the next day in an unroofed freight ear without a seat, crowded in with thirty-odd Chinese and their luggage. During the entire day he spoke hardly a word. His two servants guarded him from contact with the other natives; but he ignored even his own men. At a way station, where the engine waited half an hour for water and coal, a lonely division engineer from Lombardy called out a greeting in bad French. Brachey coldly snubbed the man.
He planned to pick up either a riding animal or a mule litter at Ping Yang. As it turned out, the best John could secure was a freight cart; springless, of course. T'ainan was less than a hundred miles away, yet he was doomed to three days of travel in a creaking, hard-riding cart through the sunken roads, where dust as fine as flour sifts through the clothing and rubs into the pores of the skin, and to two more nights at native inns—with little hope of better accommodation at T'ainan.