CHAPTER IX—KNOTTED LIVES
1
IF Brachey had approached that East Gate a year later he would have rolled comfortably into the city in a rickshaw (which has followed the white man into China) along a macadamized road bordered by curbing of concrete from the new railway station. But in the spring of 1907 there was no station, no pavement, not a rickshaw. The road was a deep-rutted way, dusty in dry weather, muddy in wet, bordered by the crumbling shops and dwellings found on the outskirts of every Chinese city. A high, bumpy little bridge of stone spanned the moat.
Over this bridge rode Brachey, in his humble cart, sitting fiat under a span of tattered matting, surrounded and backed by his boxes and bales of food and water and his personal baggage. John and the cook rode behind on mules. The muleteers walked.
Under the gate were lounging soldiers, coolies, beggars, and a money-changer or two with their bags of silver lumps, their strings of copper cash and their balanced scales. Two of the soldiers sprang forward and stopped the cart. Despite their ragged uniforms (of a dingy blue, of course, like all China, and capped with blue turbans) these were tall, alert men. Brachey was rapidly coming to recognize the Northern Chinese as a larger, browner, more vigorous type of being than the soft little yellow men of the South with whom he had long been familiar in the United States as well as in the East. A mure dangerous man, really, this northerner.
Brachey leaned back on his baggage and watched the little encounter between his John and the two soldiers. Any such conversation in China is likely to take up a good deal of time, with many gestures, much vehemence of speech and an 'ncreasing volume of interference from the inevitable curious crowd. The cook and the two muleteers joined the argument, Brachey had learned before the first evening that this interpreter of his had no English beyond the few pidgin phrases common to all speech along the coast. And since leaving Shau T'ing it had transpired that the man's Tientsin-Peking dialect sounded strange in the ears of Hansi John was now in the position of an interpreter who could make headway in neither of the languages in which he was supposed to deal. Brachey didn't mind. It kept the man still. And he had learned years earlier that the small affairs of routine traveling can be managed with but few spoken words. But just now, idly watching the little scene, he would have liked to know what it meant.
Finally John came to the cart, followed by shouts from the soldiers and the crowd.
“Card wanchee,” he managed to say.
“Card? No savvy,” said Brachey.
“Card,” John nodded earnestly.