1
Romney connected with Peking by telegram at Tushi-kow, and was ordered to report at the Hotel Nestor in Tientsin and to inquire for Dr. Ti Kung. At least, this was the information he drew from a long, vague and rambling telegram, the direct meaning of which was veiled, doubtless for political reasons. The whole affair was strange. He recalled how Rajananda had enjoined speed for his return, and how the aged one had been unable to see Nifton Bend in the big reconstruction activity of the East.
He reached Tientsin late at night, asked at the desk for the Doctor, and was taken upstairs at once, a boy leading the way. Several knocks brought no reply from within. At the desk again it was reported that no one had observed Dr. Ti Kung to leave the hotel—that his key was gone, that it might be well for the visitor to sit down and wait. Romney had his bags taken to a room.
It was midnight. For an hour the messenger from the Gobi sat rigid as an Oriental. It was not through effort or tension—this stillness of the American's. He had learned how to wait. He kept his back straight and his hands and head still, because he forgot them and turned his thoughts within, quite as if he sat in meditation upon a mat of kusa grass. He had to protect himself from the preying of the city—from sounds and odours and the shatteringly low vibration of massed human beings out of peace with each other. He had come from the silences, which he had mastered.
He fell into the very deeps of himself, deeper than the desert mission and the cause of the Big Three, to an area where Anna Erivan alone could reach. For thirty days he had been apart from her. Sometimes he felt, as now, that it was too great a wonder ever to come into her presence again, at least on earth where perfections are not by any means guaranteed. He felt that such a mating enforces in the human mind the sense that mystic love goes on and on.... Yet his eyes stung often with the thought of being with her again—if not on desert-sands, anywhere with the good brown earth under their feet. He loved her spirit, felt some miraculous union with it; but he loved her step beside, her movement in the house, the touch of her hand and the lift of her breast; loved her lips and eyes, loved the dream of a child of her body and soul.
From the beginning to the end (sitting rigid near the desk of the Nestor) he went through the precious scenes of his romance—all the words and pictures, the meeting, the Forward Room, the hyenas, the kiss and the quest, the cots and the cross, the camels and Rajananda's coming, the desert and the dream of a child, the desert-men and the thonged stakes, until that moment of horror—separation—that would never subside. This last invariably shook him back to the dull drag of earth again.
It was the litany of a lover. When he looked at the clock it was one in the morning. He went to his room, leaving word for Dr. Ti Kung to call him if an interview was advisable before morning.... Romney felt himself fixing for a sleepless night. There was a curious heat in his heart at the thought of meeting Nifton Bend again. Was he in Tientsin? Would Ti Kung take him to Merchant's Square and the house of Minglapo in the morning? Where was Ti Kung to-night? Perhaps some call to conference at the dais—perhaps the Doctor had given up hope of his arriving to-night.
The Big Three drew a certain love from him. They were men. They rang true. They had trusted him and been lenient in regard to his tender-heartedness in the case of the little spy. Nifton Bend had been splendid about that.... Romney never ceased to wonder that three wise men in the desert had not agreed with him about the spy's death being an atrocity, or about the questionableness of the sacrifice of Japan for the greater good of Asia. Perhaps it was his own limitation, that he considered so strongly the personal side in all things. Perhaps a man impassioned with the glory of the future, who reckons not with the lives of his brothers, his enemies or himself in order to promote his dream of coming days into action, has the greater human heart.
Now the picture of the Island of Pestilence took sharper form and clearer colour. It literally hurtled into his mind.... They would have sent him to Japan had it not been for his delay in the Chinese police-station. Doubtless that mission concerned the Chinese agents there. The myriad Chinese working in the Japanese financial world were possibly lined up in the cause he had touched; perhaps they were bound together in Young China's system. They would have to leave Japan in case of war, but their work might be done before they left.... There was nothing missing from Romney's idea of the plot to end war in the world by making it too hideous even for the militarists. His present conception covered every fact. Each part fitted perfectly. He saw it far more clearly than when he outlined the form of it to the sages of the Gobi.... Ti Kung, working in the laboratories of the West, had brought back methods of producing and propagating the cultures of all the plagues. Perhaps the packet Ti Kung had thrust upon him, to carry from Shanghai to Minglapo, had contained directions for producing certain cultures, or added information for spreading the most loathsome infections.
Romney felt the sweat start from his brow and throat. Sleep was farther and farther away. When his head started to work at a pitch like this—it had to wear itself out, a process requiring many hours.... The plan would stop war, but the Japanese nation would pay the price in extermination. The strike would come possibly before the soldiers took the field; agents of the Big Three would start to distribute infections among the crowded myriads of Japanese, among women and children—typhus, yellow fever, cholera, bubonic plague.... A few hundred of agents might ravage the entire island in a night's work, and that which they carried would require no more space than a surgeon's bag. Was this what Dr. Ti Kung called using mind instead of muscle? There would be no heavy war engines—no noise, no reek of powder, no twelve-mile projectiles. That was innocent boys' play. Taking a citadel with charges of infantry under the cover of silencing batteries—a mere sport of picked sides! ... Yet this thought held him: In the greater economy of civilisation and the future of mankind, was it not a fair price to pay—to sacrifice one nation for the elimination forever of the international curse?