THE PAGODA

He was spared that inconvenience. The untimely rain and cold, some persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril. But accounts varied, reasons were plentiful. Soldiers had come down from the chow city, two-score li inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a great shout of victory. A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil, then cut it adrift in the sky. A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness, and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night, in flame. A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run throughout Nature. For any or all of these reasons, the town was delivered. The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.

The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,--the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ended at three in the morning on rice-brandy and betel served by unreal women with chalked faces and vermilion-spotted lips, simpering and melancholy. By day, there was work, or now and then a lesson with Dr. Earle's teacher, a little aged Chinaman of intricate, refined, and plaintive courtesy. Under his guidance Rudolph learned rapidly, taking to study as a prodigal might take to drink. And with increasing knowledge came increasing tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo-milk.

Then, too, came the mild excitement of moving into his own house, the Portuguese nunnery. Through its desolate, lime-coated spaces, his meagre belongings were scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for thought. The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a cry from the river, or the sing-song of a "boy" improvising some endless ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray to flowing brass;--all these, and nights between sleep and waking, when fancy peopled the echoing chambers with the visionary lives, now ended, of meek, brown sisters from Goa or Macao, gave to Rudolph intimations, vague, profound, and gravely happy, as of some former existence almost recaptured. Once more he felt himself a householder in the Arabian tales.

And yet, when his life was growing all but placid, across it shot some tremor of disquieting knowledge.

One evening, after a busy day among his piece-goods, he had walked afield with Heywood, and back by an aimless circuit through the twilight. His companion had been taciturn, of late; and they halted, without speaking, where a wide pool gleamed toward a black, fantastic belt of knotted willows and sharp-curving roofs. Through these broke the shadow of a small pagoda, jagged as a war-club of shark's teeth. Vesper cymbals clashed faintly in a temple, and from its open door the first plummet of lamplight began to fathom the dark margin. A short bridge curved high, like a camel's hump, over the glimmering half-circle of a single arch. Close by, under a drooping foreground of branches, a stake upheld an oblong placard of neat symbols, like a cartouche to explain a painting.

"It is very beautiful," ventured Rudolph, twisting up his blond moustache with satisfaction. "Very sightly. I would say--picturesque, no?"

"Very," said Heywood, absently. "Willow Pattern."

"And the placard, so finishing, so artistic--That says?"

"Eh, what? Oh, I wasn't listening." Heywood glanced carelessly at the upright sentence. That's a notice:--

"'Girls May Not be Drowned in This Pond.'"

He started on, without comment. Without reply, Rudolph followed, gathering as he walked the force of this tremendous hint. Slow, far-reaching, it poisoned the elegiac beauty of the scene, alienated the night, and gave to the fading country-side a yet more ancient look, sombre and implacable. He was still pondering this, when across their winding foot-path, with a quick thud of hoofs, swept a pair of equestrian silhouettes. It was half glimpse, half conjecture,--the tough little ponies trotting stubbornly, a rider who leaned across laughing, and a woman who gayly cried at him: "You really do understand me, don't you?" The two jogging shadows melted in the bamboo tracery, like things blown down the wind. But for years Rudolph had known the words, the laugh, the beguiling cadence, and could have told what poise of the head went with them, what dangerous glancing light. Suddenly, without reason, he felt a gust of rage. It was he that understood. It was to him these things belonged. The memory of her weakness was lost in the shining memory of her power. He should be riding there, in the dusk of this lonely and cruel land.

Heywood had thrown after them a single gloomy stare, down the pointed aisle of bamboos.

"Well matched!" he growled. "Chantel--He bounds in the saddle, and he bounds afoot!"

Rudolph knew that he had hated Chantel at sight.

He could not bring himself, next day, to join their party for tiffin at the Flowery Pagoda. But in the midst of his brooding, Teppich and the fat Sturgeon assailed the nunnery gate with pot-valiant blows and shouts. They had brought chairs, to carry him off; and being in no mood to fail, though panting and struggling, they packed him into a palanquin with many bottles of the best wine known to Fliegelman and Sons. By a short cut through the streets--where checkered sunshine, through the lattice roof, gave a muddy, subdued light as in a roiled aquarium--the revelers passed the inland wall. Here, in the shade, grooms awaited them with ponies; and scrambling into saddle, they trotted off through gaps in the bamboos, across a softly rolling country. Tortuous foot-paths of vivid pink wound over brilliant green terraces of young paddy. The pink crescents of new graves scarred the hillsides, already scalloped and crinkled with shelving abodes of the venerable dead. Great hats of farmers stooping in the fields, gleamed in the sun like shields of brass. Over knolls and through hollows the little cavalcade jogged steadily, till, mounting a gentle eminence, they wound through a grove of camphor and Flame-of-the-Forest. Above the branches rose the faded lilac shaft of an ancient pagoda, ruinously adorned with young trees and wild shrubs clinging in the cornices.

At the foot of this aged fantasy in stone, people were laughing. The three riders broke cover in time to see Mrs. Forrester, flushed and radiant, end some narrative with a droll pantomime. She stood laughing, the life and centre of a delighted group.

"And Gilbert Forrester," she cried, turning archly on her husband, "said that wasn't funny!"

Gilly tugged his gray moustache, in high good-nature. Chantel, Nesbit, and Kempner laughed uproariously, the padre and the dark-eyed Miss Drake quietly, Heywood more quietly, while even stout, uneasy Mrs. Earle smiled as in duty bound. A squad of Chinese boys, busy with tiffin-baskets, found time to grin. To this lively actress in the white gown they formed a sylvan audience under the gnarled boughs and the pagoda.

"Too late!" called the white-haired giant, indulgently, to the dismounting trio. "Mr. Hackh, you should have come spurring."

Rudolph advanced, pale, but with a calmness of which, afterward, he was justly proud. The heroine of the moment turned toward him quickly, with a look more natural, more sincere, than she had ever given him.

"Is this Mr. Hackh?" she said graciously. "I've heard so much about you!"

The young man himself was almost deceived. Was there a German mail-boat? Was there a club, from which he had stolen out while she wept, ignominiously, in that girl's arms? And then of a sudden he perceived, with a fatuous pleasure, how well she knew him, to know that he had never spoken. His English, as he drew up a stool beside Miss Drake, was wild and ragged; but he found her an astonishing refuge. For the first time, he recalled that this quiet girl had been beautiful, the other night; and though now by day that beauty was rather of line than of color, he could not understand how it had been overlooked. Tiffin, meanwhile, sped by like an orgy. He remembered asking so many questions, about the mission hospital and her school for orphans, that the girl began at last to answer with constraint, and with puzzled, sidelong scrutiny. He remembered how even the tolerant Heywood shot a questioning glance toward his wine-glass. He remembered telling a brilliant story, and reciting "Old Captain Mau in Vegesack,"--rhymes long forgotten, now fluent and spontaneous. The applause was a triumph. Through it, as through a haze, he saw a pair of wide blue eyes shining with startled admiration.

But the best came when the sun had lowered behind the grove, the company grown more silent, and Mrs. Forrester, leaning beside the door of the tower, turned the great pegs of a Chinese lute. The notes tinkled like a mandolin, but with now and then an alien wail, a lament unknown to the West. "Sing for us," begged the dark-eyed girl; "a native song." The other smiled, and bending forward as if to recollect, began in a low voice, somewhat veiled, but musical and full of meaning. "The Jasmine Flower," first; then, "My Love is Gathering Dolichos"; and then she sang the long Ballad of the Rice,--of the husband and wife planting side by side, the springing of the green blades, the harvest by millions upon millions of sheaves, the wealth of the State, more fragrant to ancestors than offerings of spice:--

"...O Labor and Love and hallowed Land!
Think you these things are but still to come?
Think you they are but near at hand,
Only now and here?--Behold.
They were the same in years of old!"

In her plaintive interlude, the slant-eyed servants watched her, nodding and muttering under the camphor trees.

"And here's a song of exile," she said. "I render it very badly."--Rudolph had never seen her face like this, bending intently above the lute. It was as though in the music she found and disclosed herself, without guile.

"...Blue was the sky,
And blue the rice-pool water lay
Holding the sky;
Blue was the robe she wore that day.
Alas, my sorrow! Why
Must life bear all away,
Away, away,
Ah, my beloved, why?"

A murmur of praise went round the group, as she put aside the instrument.

"The sun's getting low," she said lightly, "and I must see that view from the top." Chantel was rising, but sat down again with a scowl, as she turned to Rudolph. "You've never seen it, Mr. Hackh? Do come help me up."

Inside, with echoing steps, they mounted in a squalid well, obscurely lighted from the upper windows, toward which decaying stairs rose in a dangerous spiral, without guard-rail. A misstep being no trifle, Rudolph offered his hand for the mere safety; but she took it with a curious little laugh. They climbed cautiously. Once, at a halt, she stood very close, with eyes shining large in the dusk. Her slight body trembled, her head shook with stifled merriment, like a girl overcome by mischief.

"What a queer little world!" she whispered. "You and I here!--I never dreamed you could be funny. It made me so proud of you, down there!"

He muttered something vague; and--the stairs ending in ruin at the fourth story--handed her carefully through the window to a small outer balustrade. As they stood together at the rail, he knew not whether to be angry, suspicious, or glad.

"I love this prospect," she began quietly. "That's why I wanted you to come."

Beyond the camphors, a wide, strange landscape glowed in the full, low-streaming light. The ocean lay a sapphire band in the east; in the west, on a long ridge, undulated the gray battlements of a city, the antique walls, warmed and glorified, breasting the flood of sunset. All between lay vernal fields and hillocks, maidenhair sprays of bamboo, and a wandering pattern of pink foot-paths. Slowly along one of these, a bright-gowned merchant rode a white pony, his bells tinkling in the stillness of sea and land. Everywhere, like other bells more tiny and shrill, sounded the trilling of frogs.

As the two on the pagoda stood listening,--

"It was before Rome," she declared thoughtfully. "Before Egypt, and has never changed. You and I are just--" She broke off, humming:--

"Only here and now? Behold
They were the same in years of old!"

Her mood colored the scene: the aged continuity of life oppressed him. Yet he chose rather to watch the straggling battlements, far off, than to meet her eyes or see her hair gleaming in the sun. Through many troubled days he had forgotten her, despised her, bound his heart in triple brass against a future in her hateful neighborhood; and now, beside her at this time-worn rail, he was in danger of being happy. It was inglorious. He tried to frown.

"You poor boy." Suddenly, with an impulse that must have been generous, she rested her hand on his arm. "I was sorry. I thought of you so often."

At these close quarters, her tremulous voice and searching upward glance meant that she alone understood all his troubles. He started, turned for some rush of overwhelming speech, when a head popped through the window behind them.

"Boot and saddle, Mrs. Forrester," announced Heywood. His lean young face was very droll and knowing. "We're leaving, bottom-side."

"Thank you so much, Maurice," she answered, perhaps dryly. "You're a dear, to climb all those dreadful stairs."

"Oh!" said Heywood, with his gray eyes fastened on Rudolph, "no trouble."

All three went down the dark well together.

When the company were mounted, and trooping downhill through the camphor shadow, Heywood's pony came sidling against Rudolph's, till legging chafed legging.

"You blossomed, old boy," he whispered. "Quite the star, after your comedy turn." He reined aside, grinning. "What price sympathy on a pagoda?"

For that moment, Rudolph could have struck down the one sure friend he had in China.

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