CHAPTER X—YOUTH
THERE came for his excellency, as the sun mounted the sky, a large junk of his own river fleet—great brown sails flapping against the five masts of all heights that pointed up at crazily various angles, pennons flying at each masthead, hull weathered darkly, mats and fenders of woven hemp hung over the poop-rail, and a swarming pigtailed crew at the sweeps and overside on the spunson and hard at the tracking ropes as the tai-kung screamed from the bow and the laopan shouted from the poop.
They were ferried aboard in the small boat, Kang with his daughters and his suite and servants, a handful of pitifully wailing women, young Kane and Griggsby Doane. Then the trackers cast off from the shore and the mooring poles, the sweeps moved, and with the lao pan musically calling the stroke the junk moved laboriously up-stream toward the home of his excellency's ancestors.
Crowded into the uninviting cabins the weary travelers sought a few hours of rest. Even the servants and the mourning women, under the mattings forward, fell swiftly asleep. Only Rocky Kane, his eyes staring widely out of a sensitively white face, walked the deck; until the thought—a new sort of thought in the life of this headstrong youth—that he would be disturbing those below drove him aft, out beyond the steersman to the over-hanging gallery. Here he sat on the bamboo rail and gazed moodily down at the tireless, mighty river flowing off astern.
The good in the boy—made up of the intelligence, the deep-smoldering conscience, the fineness that were woven out of his confused heritage into his fiber—was rising now like a tide in his spirit; and the experience was intensely painful. It seemed to his undisciplined mind that he was, in certain of his aspects, an incredible monster. There had been wild acts back home, a crazy instinct for excess that now took on distinctness of outline; moments of careless evil in Japan and Shanghai; the continuous subtle conflict with his father in which any evasion had seemed fair; but above all these vivid memory-scenes that raced like an uncontrollably swift panorama through his over-alert brain stood out his vicious conduct on the ship. It was impossible at this moment to realize mentally that the Princess Hui Fei was now his friend; he could see her only in the bright Manchu costume as she had appeared when he first so uncouthly spoke to her. And there were, too, the ugly moments with the strange girl known as Dixie Carmichael. That part of it was only a nightmare now.... The racing in his brain frightened him. He stared at the dimpling yellow river, at a fishing boat, and finally lifted his hurt eyes to the bright sky.... He had been going straight to hell, he told himself, mumbling the words softly aloud. And then this lovely girl had brought him into confusion and humility. Suddenly he had broken with his father; that, in itself, seemed curiously unaccountable, yet there the fact stood.... Life—eager, crowding—had rushed him off his feet. He felt wildly adrift, carried on currents that he could not stem.... He was, indeed, passing through one of life's deepest experiences, one known to the somewhat unimaginative and intolerant people whose blood ran in his veins as conviction of sin. His own careless life had overtaken and confronted him. It had to be a bitter moment. There was terror in it. And there was no escaping; it had to be lived through.
A merry voice called; there was the patter of soft-clad feet, and in a moment the little princess in her yellow hood with the fox head on the crown was climbing into his lap. Eagerly, tenderly, he lifted her; cuddled her close and kissed her soft cheek. Tears were frankly in his eyes now.
He laughed with her, nervously at first, then, in the quick responsiveness of youth, with good humor. She came to him as health. Together they watched the diving cormorants and the wading buffalo. Then he hunted about until he found a bit of board and a ball of twine; whittled the board into a flat boat, stuck a little mast in it with a white sail made from a letter from his pocket, and towed it astern. Together they hung on the rail, watching the craft as it bobbed over the little waves and laughing when it capsized and lost its sail.
She climbed into his lap again after that, and scolded him for making the unintelligible English sounds, and made signs for him to smoke; and he showed her his water-soaked cigarettes.
At a low-pitched exclamation he turned with a nervous start. The tall eunuch stood on the cabin roof; came quickly forward for the child. And beside him was Miss Hu Fei, still of course wearing the Chinese coat and trousers in which she had escaped from the steamer. She had, under the warm sun, thrown aside the curiously modern opera wrap. She was slim, young, delicately feminine. The boy gazed at her reverently. She seemed to him a fairy, an unearthly creature, worlds beyond his reach. In his excitement, but a few hours back—in what he had supposed to be their last moment together, in what, indeed, had seemed the end of the world—he had declared his love for her. That had been an uprush of pure emotion.... He recalled it now, yet found it difficult to accept as an occurrence. The actual world had turned unreal to him, as it does to the sensitively young that suffer poignantly.