It was after this sad experience that Doane, in accordance with his promise to the late Sun Shi-pi, called on Doctor Wu Ting Fang and offered his services to the revolutionary party. Another day and he was hard at work, bending his strong, finely trained and experienced mind to the great task of presenting the dreams and the activities of Young China fairly and sympathetically to the press and the governments of the Western World.... And so Griggsbv Doane, concealing—at moments almost from his own inner eye—the ache in his heart, the unutterable loneliness of his solitary existence, found himself once more fitting into the scheme of organized human life. A grave man, with sad eyes but with a slow kindly smile, always courteously attentive to the person and problem of the moment, thinking always clearly and objectively out of a comprehensively tolerant background that seemed to include all nations and all men; a gently tactful man; a tireless, powerful figure of a man, who could work twenty hours on end without a trace of fatigue, going through masses of minor detail without for a moment losing his broad view of the major problems—such was the Griggsby Doane one saw at revolutionary headquarters during that late autumn of 1911.... Life had caught him up. Whatever his private sorrow, the world needed him now. Rapidly, in all that confusion, he was formulating policies, helping to direct the current of one stream of destiny. In past years Griggsby Doane had been discussed and forgotten. He had even been laughed at as an unfrocked missionary by ribald, dominant, not infrequently drunken whites along the coast. It occurred to no one to laugh at him now.
These were the days when in half the provincial capitals of China the Manchus that had ruled during nearly three centuries were hunted to their death, men and women alike, like vermin. Bloody heads decorated the lamp posts that had been erected in the Western fashion beside freshly macadamized streets. Slaughter, as in other dramatic moments in Oriental history, had become a pastime. Palaces and wealthy homes in a hundred cities were looted and burned, and a vast new traffic started up in the silks and paintings and pottery and objects of art suddenly thrown into the market.... Hankow had been taken by the imperial troops, but was to be recaptured as a charred, gutted ruin. General Li Yuan-hung was now “president of the Republic of China,” up at Wu Chang, by right of military organization and popular acclaim. Admiral Sah, of the Imperial Navy, was about to witness the unanimous mutiny of his fleet. The great Yuan Shi-K'ai, himself a Chinese born, was in command of the imperial troops while negotiating on either hand with the frantic throne and the upsurging revolutionists. At Peking heads were falling and great princes were fleeing or hiding pitifully within the walls of the legations.... Within a few weeks Sun Yat Sen was to leave London on his long journey eastward by way of Suez and Singapore, but without the enormous golden treasure so confidently expected by the revolutionists. Before his arrival, even, he was to be elected president of the new China, in the recently captured Nanking—where a National Assembly in cropped heads and frock coats already would be grinding out fresh tangles of legislation.... The event was outrunning the mental capacity of man. What was now tragic confusion would grow through the swift-following years into tragic chaos, as the most numerous and most nearly inert of peoples struggled out of the sluggish habit of centuries toward the dubious light of modernity.
But through the chaos Griggsby Doane was never for a moment to lose the new vision that had finally cleared his long troubled mind. Behind the crumbling of the empire, underlying the torn and bleeding surface of Chinese life, lay a tradition finer, he was to believe until his dying day, than any so far developed in the truculent West—a delicate responsiveness to beauty in nature and art, a reflective quality, an instinct for peace—it was all these at once, and more; a blend of art in living and living in art; a finish that was exquisite in concept, a sensitiveness that lifted the soul of man above the ugly fact. Even the brittle perfection of Chinese etiquette—regulating every passing human contact, clothing in silken manner the naked thought—was like a fine lacquer over the knotted wood of life... America, he felt, with all its earnestly insistent young virtues, worshiped the fact. To the Americans must be preached the gospel of sensitive thought, of reflective enjoyment of the beautiful. Those old master painters of Tang and Sung breathed beauty; it was sweet air in their lungs; whereas in America beauty was too often like a garment to be bought in a shop and worn for show.... Yes, this revolutionary work was a gratifying opportunity for service, of great momentary importance because the Chinese people must be rescued from Manchu conquerors and their eunuchs, from disease and famine, and from ignorance of the new world that had come amazingly, brutally, into being while the old Middle Kingdom slumbered; but it was not the main work. The aggressively greedy West, now, with its merchants and war-ships and armies, was destroying the soul of China even while teaching her a smattering of the materialistic new faith. There must be a counter-influence; as the East now so strongly felt the West, so must be the West made sensitively aware of the East. It was fair give and take. It might yet help the world to find a stable balance.... This was what the difficult life of Griggsby Doane was coming to mean. The East had crept into his heart. So he must turn back to the West.
For three days Mr. Doane's brief chit—with the address of Hui Fei in the native city—burned in Rocky Kane's pocket; then, early in the third afternoon, he went down to the Japanese steamship offices (for the keen little brown people had already captured the Pacific traffic from the Americans) and bought the second officer's room on a crowded liner leaving at the end of the week for San Francisco.... On the fourth afternoon he called a rickshaw and rode out beyond the American post-office to the address the older man had given him.
But Mr. Doane, it appeared, was not in; already he was established at Doctor Wu's revolutionary headquarters. Rocky considered driving there; even took the address and rode part of the way: but reconsidered, returned to the hotel, and sent a messenger to Hui Fei with this chit:
“I'm sailing Saturday. Do you feel that you could see me for a few moments?”
The reply, within the hour, bade him come. He found her in Western dress—-a tailored suit, very simple; her glistening black hair parted smoothly—as he would always most vividly remember it—gently sad in manner, yet able to smile. She would be like that, come to think of it; not crushed by the tragedy, not sunken in the grief that, among Westerners, is so often a sort of histrionic egotism.... They sat in a tiled courtyard among dahlias. More than ever like a proud young Briton was Rocky.
“It is good of you to see me.” Thus he began.... “I couldn't go without a word.”
She murmured then: “Of course not.”
“I want you to know, too, that I am coming to see”—he had to pause; in this new phase of sober young manhood he had not yet achieved steady self-control.