“That could make no difference, Griggsby Doane. By edict of the Yellow Dragon Throne of Imperial China I have been instructed to go to my ancestors. My allegiance is only to that throne. I will obey.... Already, Griggsby Doane, you have done for me more than one can ever demand of a friend. And yet one more demand I must make upon you. There is no other to whom I can turn. I have no other friend to-night. Within a short time my secretaries will secure a launch or a junk to convey us to my home near Huang Chau. Will you come with us there?”
Doane, surprised, bowed in assent.
“Thank you. The gratitude of myself and all my family and friends will remain with you. You are a princely man.... Until later, then, good night, Griggsby Doane.”
He was gone.
Doane walked farther along the bank; stood for a time absorbed in thought that led, at length, to what seemed a new ray of light in the darkness that was his mind. And he strode back, hunting in this group and that for Dawley Kane. That man had offered help. Now he could give it.
Dawley Kane, fully dressed, unruffled, quietly smoking a cigar and looking through a pocket notebook by the light from the river, seemed a note of sanity in an unbelievably confused world. To him, apparently, the nightmare of fighting and slaughter on the steamer, like the fire, were but incidents. The only evidence the man gave out of quickened nerves was that he talked a little more freely than usual. To Doane he presented a surface as clear and hard as polished crystal, impenetrable, in a sense repelling, yet, as we say, a gentleman.
They even chatted casually, as men will, standing there looking out at the fire (which now had reached the stem and eaten down to the lower decks, incinerating alike the bodies of men who had died for faith and for lust) and at the wide circle of light on the rim of which floated the vulture-the boats of the rivermen. Doane forced himself into the vein of the man's interest; riding roughshod over a desperate sense of unreality. For he knew that the great masters of capital were often proud and even finicky men who must be approached with skill. They were kings; must be dealt with as kings.
Kane was interested to learn what relation the fight below decks might have to the rebellion up the river. That, clearly, was characteristic of the man—the impersonal gathering in and relating of observable data. His interest was deeper in the agriculture and commerce of the immense Yangtze basin, to which subject he easily passed. His questions came out of a present fund of knowledge—questions as to the speed, cargo-capacity and operation-cost of the large junks that plied the river by thousands, as to the cost of employing Chinese labor and the average capacity of the coolie. He knew all about the slowly developing railroads of North and Central China; commented in passing on the surprising profits of the young Hankow-Peking line.... He seemed to Doane to have in his mind a map or diagram of a huge, profitmaking industrial world, to which he added such bits of line or color as occurred in the answers to his questions. But he gave out no conclusions, only questions. Famines, other wide-spread suffering so tragically common in the Orient, interested him only as an impairment of trade and industrial man power. The opium habit he viewed as an economic problem.
Doane, settling doggedly to his purpose, found himself analyzing the power of this quiet man. It lay of course, in the control of money. And money would be only a token of human energy. The religion of his own ardent years had taken no account of earthly energy or its tokens; it had directed the eyes of the bewildered seeker toward a mystical other world. Yet human life, in the terms of this earth, must go on. To this point he always came around, of late years, in his thinking, just as the church had always come around to it. Money was vital. The church was endlessly begging for it; in no other way could it survive to continue turning away the puzzled eyes of the seekers.
And the immense energy created in the human struggle to live and prosper must continually be gathering up, here and there, into visible power that shrewd human hands would surely seize. He felt this now as a law. Religion had not left him. He felt more strongly than ever before that this miraculously continuing energy implied a sublime orderly force that transcended the outermost bounds of human intelligence. Religion was surely there: it only wanted discovering. It had, as surely, to do with primitive energy, with the heat of the sun and the disciplined rush of the planets, with the tragic struggle of human business, with work and war and sex and money.... And then he indulged in a half-smile. For this primitive undying energy could be no other than the Tao of Lao-tzu and Chuang Tzü. And so, after all these groping years of his errant faith, he had fetched up, simply in Taoism.