Yet after all, he took Shanghai with something of a smile that day. The first thought was to get clean clothes, but there is always formality and inconvenience about such purchases that are not connected with the barter of rum.
Within a few hours he had fallen once more into the great drift; resumed his classic jaunt over Asia and the Islands. It had begun far up a certain big yellow drain many months before.
Of the two days which followed, only distorted passages that touched McLean, the money-lender, came to surface. Certain foreigners, however, were stopped upon the streets of Shanghai by a dilapidated American who seemed to have a wild laugh back in his brain, and who inquired with manner, "Has the John Dividend put to sea?"
The drift took him at length to the Walled City where a white man may truly be lost, and where countless animals, roughly shaped like men, move about to a dirge-like beat of many afflictions and seem waiting for death.
Three days after the white man disappeared into the walled city of Shanghai, a great liner's nose cleaved the yellow water off Woosung. On the hurricane deck, well away from the enthusiastic party of American tourists, a small slant-eyed man stood alone by the landward rail. To him every puff of the warm breeze was lotus and memory-laden, though he kept his sentiments in chilled steel.
"Dr. Huan Ti Kung, San Francisco to Shanghai," was all the ship's registry told of him.... He might have been twenty or forty, as you preferred. One couldn't tell anything definite from the styleless black suit and hat he wore, nor from the sombre repose of the classically Chinese face.
Throughout the final two hours of the passage between Nagasaki and the Shanghai port, Dr. Ti Kung did not once leave the liner's deck. The ship was now churning the yellow emptyings of the Yang-tze, and that which held his eyes ahead, looked very much like a swamp to the eyes of the Americans and English. To Dr. Ti Kung it was not marshland, but the garment's hem of the Mother Empire, not seen these many years. There were no tears in his eyes; it is doubtful if his pulse had quickened. It is dangerous to suggest the nature of a yellow man's emotion. None but a yellow man could understand exactly. Yet this was certain, Dr. Ti Kung had not stood on the deck heretofore during the three weeks' voyage from San Francisco. He had not gone ashore in Japanese ports. The expression on his face was as serene and contemplative as usual while the liner lay on the different days in the three harbours of Nippon. But the face of the yellow man is not an authoritative document.
The recent ten years in America had been years of much movement, study and mystery. He had lived much in college towns, in Toronto, Vancouver, also in California and New England. It had not been the mere matter of an education, though he had specialised rather extensively at chemistry and biology. Plentiful education is to be had in Peking.
Dr. Ti Kung had made friends in America. There were Americans of his own age who had tried to know him as a white man knows another. It may be certain of these believed they succeeded. The Chinese accepted with equal mind the condescension of his inferiors, who held the belief that the Celestial Empire was a kind of giant laundry, and the frank, emotional friendliness of those of his classmates and business affiliates who had found that he was equally prodigious as athlete and student. His was a manner of profound gentility, with a mental background sumptuous in colour and experience. To Dr. Ti Kung most of these Americans were acquaintances, nothing more. The word friend in his language was something to which only the best aspired.
In spite of his various appearances for a year or more in different colleges and commercial establishments, none of these affairs had made up the real life of Dr. Ti Kung, nor had anything to do with his present journey home. He had not worked for money. A certain class of American acquaintances had found him not only approachable for temporary benefit but admirable in forgetfulness as he was unswerving in bestowal. His material means seemed inexhaustible from the first. A large portion of his life in America was unaccounted for, except by the few men and women whose lips were as well governed as his own.