He said to her: “I am selfish.”
He had supposed he was telling the simple truth. But clearly he wasn't. At this moment, as at every moment since that last night on the boat deck, he was as dependent on her as a helpless child. And now he wasn't even selfish. These two days since the little talk with M. Pourmont he had been stirred deeply by the thought that she was in danger.
Over and over, with his almost repelling detachment of mind, he reviewed the situation. She might not share his present emotion. Perhaps she had recovered quickly from the romantic drift that had caught them on the ship. She was a sensitive, expressive little thing; quite possibly the new environment had caught her up and changed her, filled her life with fresh interest or turned it in a new direction. With this thought was interwoven the old bitter belief that no woman could love him. It must have been that she was stirred merely by that romantic drift and had endowed him, the available man, with the charms that dwelt only in her own fancy. Young girls were impressionable; they did that.
But suppose—it was excitingly implausible—she hadn't swung away from him. What would her missionary folk say to him and his predicament? Sooner or later he would be free; but would that clear him with these dogmatic persons, with her father? Probably not. And if not, wouldn't the fact thrust unhappiness upon her? You could trust these professionally religious people, he believed, to make her as unhappy as they could—nag at her.
Suppose, finally, the unthinkable thing, that she—he could hardly formulate even the thought; he couldn't have uttered it—loved him. What did he know of her? Who was she? What did she know of adult life? What were her little day-by-day tastes and impulses, such as make or break any human companionship...? And who was he? What right had he to take on his shoulders the responsibility for a human life... a delicately joyous little life? For that was what it came down to. It came to him, now, like a ray of blipdirig light, that he who quickens the soul of a girl must carry the burden of that soul to his grave. At times during the night he thought wistfully of his freedom, of his pleasant, selfish solitude and the inexigent companionship of his work.
His suit-case lay on the one chair. He drew it over; got out the huge, linen-mounted map of the Chinese Empire that is published by the China Inland Mission, and studied the roads about T'ainan. That from the east—his present route—swung to the south on emerging from the hills, and approached the city nearly from that direction. Here, instead of turning up into the city, he could easily enough strike south on the valley road, perhaps reaching an apparently sizable village called Hung Chan by night.
He decided to do that, and afterward to push southwest. It should be possible to find a way out along the rivers tributary to the Yangtse, reaching that mighty stream at either Ichang or Hankow. And he would work diligently, budding up again the life that had been so quickly and lightly overset. At least, for the time. He must try himself out This riding his emotions wouldn't do. At some stage of the complicated experience it was going to be necessary to stop and think. Of course, if he should find after a reasonable time, say a few months, that the emotion persisted, why then, with his personal freedom established, he might write Betty, simply stating his case.
And after all this, on the following afternoon, dusty, tired of body and soul, Jonathan Brachey rode straight up to the East Gate of T'ainan-fu.