IT WAS early morning—the first day of April—when the Pacific liner that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped anchor in the river below Shanghai and there discharged passengers and freight for all central and northern China.

Brachey, on that occasion, watched from his cabin porthole while Betty and the Hasmers descended the accommodation ladder and boarded the company's launch. Then, not before, he drank coffee and nibbled a roll. His long face was gray and deeply lined. He had not slept.

He went up to Shanghai on the next launch, walked directly across the Bund to the row of steamship offices, and engaged passage on a north-bound coasting steamer. That evening he dined alone, out on the Yellow Sea, steaming toward Tsingtau, Chefu and (within the five days) Tientsin. He hadn't meant to take in the northern ports at this time; his planned itinerary covered the Yangtse Valley, where the disorderly young shoots of revolution were ripening slowly into red flower. But he was a shaken man. As he saw the problem of his romance, there were two persons to be saved, Betty and himself. He had behaved, on the one occasion, outrageously. He could see his action now as nothing other than weakness, curiously despicable, in the light of the pitiless facts. Reason had left him. Gusts of emotion lashed him. He now regarded the experience as a storm that must be somehow weathered. He couldn't weather it in Shanghai. Not with Betty there. He would surely seek her; find her. With his disordered soul he would cry out to her. In this alarming mood no subterfuge would appear too mean—sending clandestine notes by yellow hands, arranging furtive meetings.

He was, of course, running away from her, from his task, from himself. It was expensive business. But he had meant to work up as far as Tientsin and Peking before the year ran out. He was, after all, but taking that part of it first. To this bit of justification he clung. He passed but one night at Tientsin, in the curiously British hotel, on an out-and-out British street, where one saw little more to suggest the East than the Chinese policeman at the corner, an occasional passing amah or mafoo, and the blue-robed, soft-footed hotel servants; then on to Peking by train, an easy four-hour run, lounging in a European dining-car where the allied troops had fought their way foot by foot only seven years earlier.

Brachey, though regarded by critical reviewers as a rising authority on the Far East, had never seen Peking. India he knew; the Straits Settlements—at Singapore and Penang he was a person of modest but real standing; Borneo, Java, Celebes and the rest of the vast archipelago, where flying fish skim a burnished sea and green islands float above a shimmering horizon against white clouds; the Philippines, Siam, Cochin China and Hongkong; but the swarming Middle Kingdom and its Tartar capital were fresh fuel to his coldly eager mind. He stopped, of course, at the almost Parisian hotel of the International Sleeping Car Company, just off Legation Street.

Peking, in the spring of 1907, presented a far from unpleasant aspect to the eye of the traveler. The siege of the legations was already history and half-forgotten; the quarter itself had been wholly rebuilt. The clearing away of the crowded Chinese houses about the legations left À glacis of level ground that gave dignity to the walled enclosure. Legation Street, paved, bordered by stone walks and gray compound-walls, dotted with lounging figures of Chinese gatekeepers and alert sentries of this or that or another nation—British, American, Italian, Austrian, Japanese, French, Belgian, Dutch, German—offered a pleasant stroll of a late afternoon when the sun was low. Through gateways there were glimpses to be caught of open-air tea parties, of soldiers drilling, or even of children playing. Tourists wandered afoot or rolled by in rickshaws drawn by tattered blue and brown coolies.

From the western end of the street beyond the American glacis, one might see the traffic through the Chien Gate, with now and then a nose-led train of camels humped above the throng; and beyond, the vast brick walls and the shining yellow palace roofs of the Imperial City. Around to the north, across the Japanese glacis, one could stroll, in the early evening, to the motion-picture show, where one-reel films from Paris were run off before an audience of many colors and more nations and costumes, while a placid Chinaman manipulated a mechanical piano.

2

Brachey had letters to various persons of importance along the street. With the etiquette of remote colonial capitals, he had long since trained himself to a mechanical conformity. Accordingly he devoted his first afternoon to a round of calls, by rickshaw; leaving cards in the box provided for the purpose at the gate house of each compound. Before another day had gone he found return cards in his box at the hotel; and thus was he established as persona grata on Legation Street. Invitations followed. The American minister had him for tiffin. There were pleasant meals at the legation barracks. Tourist groups at the hotel made the inevitable advances, which he met with austere dignity. Meantime he busied himself discussing with experts the vast problems confronting the Chinese in adjusting their racial life to the modern world, and within a few days was jotting down notes and preparing tentative outlines for his book.

This activity brought him, at first, some relief from the emotional storm through which he had been passing. Work, he told himself, was the thing; work, and a deliberate avoidance of further entanglements.

If, in taking this course, he was dealing severely with the girl whose brightly pretty face and gently charming ways had for a time disarmed him, he was dealing quite as severely with himself; for beneath his crust of self-sufficiency existed shy but turbulent springs of feeling. That was the trouble; that had always been the trouble; he dared not let himself feel, lie had let go once before, just once, only to skim the very border of tragedy. The color of that one bitter experience of his earlier manhood ran through every subsequent act of his life. Month by month, through the years, he had winced as he drew a check to the hard, handsome, strange woman who had been, it appeared, his wife; who was, incredibly, his wife yet. With a set face he had read and courteously answered letters from this stranger. A woman of worldly wants, all of which came, in the end, to money. The business of his life had settled down to a systematic meeting of those wants. That, and industriously employing his talent for travel and solitude.

No, the thing was to think, not feel. To logic and will he pinned his faith. Impulses rose every day, here in Peking, to write Betty. It wouldn't be hard to trace her father's address. For that matter he knew the city. He found it impossible to forget a word of hers. Vivid memories of her round pretty face, of the quick humorous expression about her brown eyes, the movements of her trim little head and slim body, recurred with, if anything, a growing vigor They would leap into his mind at unexpected, awkward moments, cutting the thread of sober conversations. At such moments he felt strongly that impulse to explain himself further. But his clear mind told him that there would be no good in it. None. She might respond; that would involve them the more deeply. He had gone too far. He had (this in the bitter hours) transgressed. The thing was to let her forget; it would, he sincerely tried to hope, be easier for her to forget than for himself He had to try to hope that.

3

But on an evening the American military attachÉ dined with him. They sat comfortably over the coffee and cigars at one side of the large hotel dining-room. Brachey liked the attachÉ. His military training, his strong practical instinct for fact, his absorption in his work, made him the sort with whom Brachey, who had no small talk, really no social grace, could let himself go. And the attachÉ knew China. He had traversed the interior from Manchuria and Mongolia to the borders of Thibet and the Loto country of Yunnan, and could talk, to sober ears, interestingly. On this occasion, after dwelling long on the activity of secret revolutionary societies in the southern provinces and in the Yangtse Valley, he suddenly threw out the following remark:

“But of course, Brachey, there's an excellent chance, right now, to study a revolution in the making out here in Hansi. You can get into the heart of it in less than a week's travel. And if you don't mind a certain element of danger...”

The very name of the province thrilled Brachey. He sat, fingering his cigar, his face a mask of casual attention, fighting to control the uprush of feeling. The attache was talking on. Brachey caught bits here and there; “You've seen this crowd of banker persons from Europe around the hotel? Came out over the Trans Siberian with their families. A committee representing the Directorate of the Ho Shan Company. The story is that they've been asked to keep out of Hansi for the present for fear of violence.... You'd get the whole thing, out there—officials with a stake 'n the local mines shrewdly stirring up trouble while pretending to put it down; rich young students agitating, the Chinese equivalent of our soap-box Socialists; and queer Oriental motives and twists that you and I can't expect to understand.... The significant thing though, the big fact for you, I should say—is that if the Hansi agitators succeed in turning this little rumpus over the mining company into something of a revolution against the Imperial Government, it'll bring them into an understanding with the southern provinces. It may yet prove the deciding factor in the big row. Something as if Ohio should go democratic this year, back home. You see?... There are queer complications. Our Chinese secretary says that a personal quarrel between two mandarins is a prominent item in the mix-up.... That's the place for you, all right—Hansi! They've got the narrow-gauge railway nearly through to T'ainan-fu, I believe. You can pick up a guide here at the hotel. He'll engage a cook. You won't drink the water, of course; better carry a few cases of Tan San. And don't eat the green vegetables. Take some beef and mutton and potatoes and rice. You can buy chickens and eggs. Get a money belt and carry all the Mexican dollars you can stagger under. Provincial money's no good a hundred miles away. Take some English gold for a reserve. That's good everywhere. And you'll want your overcoat.”

Five minutes later Brachey heard this:

“A. P. Browning, the Agent General of the Ho Shan Company, is stopping here now, along with the committee. Talk with him, first. Get the company's view of it. He'll talk freely. Then go out there and have a look—see for yourself. Say the word, and I'll give you a card to Browning.”

Now Brachey looked up. It seemed to him, so momentous was the hour, that his pulse had stopped. He sat very still, looking at his guest, obviously about to speak.

The attachÉ, to whom this man's deliberate cold manner was becoming a friendly enough matter of course, waited.

“Thanks,” Brachey finally said. “Be glad to have it.”

But the particular card, scribbled by the attachÉ, there across the table, was never presented. For late that night, in a bitter revulsion of feeling, Brachey tore it up.

4

In the morning, however, when he stopped at the desk, the Belgian clerk handed him a thick letter from his attorney in New York, forwarded from his bank in Shanghai. He read and reread it, while his breakfast turned cold; studied it with an unresponsive brain.

It seemed that his wife's attorney had approached his with a fresh proposal. Her plan had been to divorce him on grounds of desertion and non-support; this after his refusal to supply what is euphemistically termed “statutory evidence.” But the fact that she had from month to month through the years accepted money from him, and not infrequently had demanded extra sums by letter and telegram, made it necessary that he enter into collusion with her to the extent of keeping silent and permitting her suit to go through unopposed. His own instructions to his lawyer stood flatly to the contrary.

But a new element had entered the situation. She wished to marry again. The man of her new choice had means enough to care for her comfortably. And in her eagerness to be free she proposed to release him from payment of alimony beyond an adjustment to cover the bare cost of her suit, on condition that he withdraw his opposition.

It was the old maneuvering and bargaining. At first thought it disgusted and hurt him. The woman's life had never come into contact with his, since the first few days of their married life, without hurting him. He had been harsh, bitter, unforgiving. He had believed himself throughout in the right. She had shown (in his view) no willingness to take marriage seriously, give him and herself a fair trial, make a job of it. She had exhibited no trait that he could accept as character. It had seemed to him just that she should suffer as well as he.

But now, as the meaning of the letter penetrated his mind, his spirits began to rise. It was a tendency he resisted; but he was helpless. From moment to moment his heart, swelled. Not once before in four years had the thought of freedom occurred to him as a desirable possibility. But now he knew that he would accept it, even at the cost of collusion and subterfuge. He saw nothing of the humor in the situation; that he, who had judged the woman so harshly, should find his code of ethics, his very philosophy, dashed to the ground by a look from a pair of brown eyes, meant little. It was simply that up to the present time an ethical attitude had been the important thing, whereas now the important thing was Betty. That was all there seemed to be to it. But then there had been almost as little of humor as of love in the queerly solitary life of Jonathan Brachey.

He cabled his attorney, directly after breakfast, to agree to the divorce. Before noon he had engaged a guide and arranged with him to take the morning train southward to the junction whence that narrow-gauge Hansi Line was pushing westward toward the ancient provincial capital.

In all this there was no plan. Brachey, confused, aware that the instinctive pressures of life were too much for him, that he was beaten, was soberly, breathlessly, driving toward the girl who had touched and tortured his encrusted heart. He was not even honest with himself; he couldn't be. He dwelt on the importance of studying the Hansi problem at close range He decided, among other things, that he wouldn't permit himself to see Betty, that he would merely stay secretly near her, certainly until a cablegram from New York should announce his positive freedom. In accordance with this decision he tore up his letters to her as fast as they were written. If the fact that he was now writing such letters indicated an alarming condition in his emotional nature, at least his will was still intact. He proved that by tearing them up. He even found this thought encouraging.

But, of course, he had taken his real beating when he gave up his plans and caught the coasting steamer at Shanghai. He was to learn now that rushing away from Betty and rushing toward her were irradiations of the same emotion.

He left Peking on that early morning way-train of passenger and freight cars, without calling again at the legation; merely sent a chit to the Commandant of Marines to say that he was off. He had not heard of the requirement that a white traveler into the interior carry a consular passport countersigned by Chinese authorities, and also, for purposes of identification, a supply of cards with the Chinese equivalent of his name; so he set forth without either, and (as a matter of fixed principle) without firearms.