By this time Brachey was in a state of nerves that alarmed even himself. Neither will nor imagination was proving equal to this new sort of strain. The confusion of motives that had driven him out here provided no sound justification for the journey. When he tried to think work now, he found himself thinking Betty. And misgivings were creeping into his mind. It amounted to demoralization.
He walked out after the solitary dinner of soup and curried chicken and English strawberry jam. The little village was settling into evening calm. Men and boys, old women and very little girls, sat in the shop fronts—here merely rickety porticoes with open doorways giving on dingy courtyards—or played about the street. Carpenters were still working on the roof of the new railway station. Three young men, in an open field, were playing decorously with a shuttlecock of snake's skin and duck feathers, deftly kicking it from player to player. Farther along the street a middle-aged man of great dignity, clad in a silken robe and black skull-cap with the inevitable red knot, was flying a colored kite ... through all this, Jonathan Brachey, the expert observer, wandered about unseeing.
2
Farther up the hill, however, rounding a turn in the road, he stopped short, suddenly alive to the vivid outer world. A newly built wall of brick stood before him, enclosing an area of two acres or more, within which appeared the upper stories of European houses, as well as the familiar curving roofs of Chinese tile. And just outside the walls two young men and two young women, in outing clothes, white folk all, were playing tennis. To their courteous greeting he responded frigidly.
Later a somewhat baffled young Australian led him to the office of M. Pourmont and presented him.
The distinguished French engineer, looking up from his desk, beheld a tall man in homespun knickerbockers, a man with a strong if slightly forbidding face. He fingered the card.
“Ah, Monsieur Brashayee! Indeed, yes! It is ze grand plaisir! But it mus' not be true zat you go on all ze vay to T'ainan-fu.”
“Yes,” Brachey replied with icy courtesy, “I am going to T'ainan.”
“But ze time, he is not vat you call—-ripe. One makes ze trouble. It is only a month zat zay t'row ze pierre at me, zay tear ze cart of me, zay destroy ze ear of me! Choses affreuses! I mus'not let you go!''
Brachey heard this without taking it in any degree to himself. He was looking at the left ear of this stout, bearded Parisian, from which, he observed, the lobe was gone.... Then, with a quickening pulse, he thought of Betty out there in T'ainan, in real danger.