"She challenged me more than India had done. I really got the call from her one morning on the Pearl River a little above Canton. It was a shimmering day—the big rice-lands on either side. Some rice we saw yesterday, though we're a bit far north. There was a glitter about that day as the sun rose. I seem to remember this now more than then. You always put an atmosphere to your stories—the kind of day or night. Nature means things to you.... I knew right there that day that I had left India for good. That was four years ago. China needed me and I was to spare. All hitherto was mere preparation for a life in the East, more real. You see the English have everything in India. The higher a man climbs the more he feels the ordering English hand. It doesn't make any difference if he likes it or not.
"I was merely carrying a little commercial message up the Pearl River that morning. China touched me, kind of opened up to me then and there, the big deviltry, the big cunning, the big beauty in the world above the dollar sign and the designation of the British pound.
"I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing-song intonation as he hailed some naked neighbour in a passing junk. I began to get the quality of the voices of the Chinese then, as I had heard the native Bengali three years before—a kind of lust in my heart to know what they were saying, and why they said it. I threw up my job and travelled north. I studied long in Shanghai. Long—that is, about two years. Academic Sanscrit didn't help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the provinces. I didn't do this with the idea of commanding big money, but I began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the working of the Oriental mind.
"The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu boys in Bengal. That's what they do best—study, gather in, mull over, meditate, but bolt at the idea of action. I was American enough to want to make some of this study-stuff come true, but that in India was a valuable period of mental accretion. It wasn't living here in the East that made me in a sense familiar with the native mind—it was the sacred writings of China, India and Palestine. In Shanghai, and later in Peking, I hobnobbed with the young literati—a different class from the Indian students, very interesting men who prepare themselves almost cosmically to enter local politics. I saw that China had always pulled me strangely. Meeting the boys here recalled to me how interested I had been in the Chinese students at Palo Alto. It was from a Chinese at college that I began to get a real conception of the historic and esoteric figure of Jesus—the man we make a religion of in the States. Over here the steady-going literature of the best minds is never far from the utterances of the mystics and the prophets. I met them all from Patanjali to Paracelsus and volumes of magic, the spiritual properties of medicine, studies of the stars that none would scoff at so breezily as the modern astronomers of Europe and America.
"More or less at this time I was in touch with Americans in China who were making money. I lived a double life—holding fast to the commercial world, and keeping secret my enthusiasm for matters of mysticism. This recreation kept me from getting stale and tainted. The white man over here plays a lot, and he drinks too much at his play. Perhaps I'm getting too diffused in this story, but I rather wanted you to understand, since I began, the idea that drove me to become powerful in the native mind and at the same time to hold a grip on the West. I was disinclined to the poverty of the earth and at the same time unwilling to release my grip on certain ideas of Heaven. You see all real mysticism is out of the East. There was only one way to make good on this training and the Chinese knows how. The Hindu doesn't. It's to keep God and man separate, to keep the left hand for the spirit of things and the right for matter and the world. I had a gift in the beginning for these languages. I wouldn't have gotten them without that. I wouldn't have had the urge without it. It was that lust to know what the river-men were saying, and not only that, but to know why they said these things. A man might learn Chinese in a certain number of months, but he can't learn the feel of the people without a call to them.
"Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to think in Chinese—that's the truth—so much so that the English and American training I had known began to take on the same sense of distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you and the yellow rug—even before you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of romance—"
He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence because he saw that his story was making her incline to him pleasantly.
"Meanwhile," he added, "I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways, and I had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy. I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh—"
"That is much," Moira Kelvin said.
Then Romney realized—perhaps it was something of premonition—that what he said was not quite as exact as it would have been before meeting her.