 CHAPTER 44 THE NORMAL MAN I was once obliged to study anatomy, a very dreary business since there is neither rhyme nor reason for the vast number of things you have to remember. But one remark made by my teacher, when he was helping me in the dissection of a thigh, has always remained in my memory. I was looking in vain for a certain nerve, and it needed his greater skill to discover it in a place in which I had not sought it. I was aggrieved because the textbook had misled me. He smiled and said, You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the world. Although he spoke of anatomy, he might have spoken with equal truth of man. The casual observation impressed itself upon me as many a profounder one has not, and all the years that have passed since then, with the increasing knowledge of human nature which they have brought, have only strengthened my conviction of its truth. I have met a hundred men who seemed perfectly normal, only to find in them presently an idiosyncrasy so marked as to put them almost in a class by themselves. It has entertained me not a little to discover the hidden oddity of all men to all appearances most ordinary. I have been often amazed to come upon a hideous depravity in men who you would have sworn were perfectly commonplace. I have at last thought the normal man as a precious work of art. It has seemed to me that to know him would give me that peculiar satisfaction which can only be described as aesthetic. I really thought I have found him in Robert Webb. He was a counsel in one of the smaller ports, and I was given a letter to him. I heard a good deal about him on my way through China, and I heard nothing but good. Whenever I happened to mention that I was going to the port in which he was stationed, somebody was sure to say, You know, like Bob Webb, he's an awfully good chap. He was no less popular as an official than he was as a private person. He managed to please the merchants because he was active in their interests without antagonizing the Chinese who praised his firmness or the missionaries who approved his private life. During the revolution, by his tact, decision, and courage, he had not only saved from great danger the foreign population of the city in which he then was, but also many Chinese. He had come forward as a peacemaker between the warring parties, and by his ingenuity he had been able to bring about a satisfactory settlement. He was marked down for promotion. I certainly found him a very engaging fellow. Though he was not good looking, his appearance was pleasing. He was tall, perhaps a little more than of average height, well covered without being fat, with a fresh complexion inclined now, for here was nearly fifty, to be somewhat bloated in the morning. This was not strange, for in China the foreigners both eat and drink a great deal too much, and Robert Webb had a healthy liking for the good things of life. He kept an excellent table. He liked eating and company, and it was seldom that he did not have one or two people to tiffen or to dinner with him. His eyes were blue and friendly. He had the social gifts that give pleasure. He played the piano quite well, but he liked the music that other people liked, and he was always ready to play a one-step for waltz if others wanted to dance. With a wife, a son, and a daughter in England he could not afford to keep racing ponies, but he was keenly interested in racing. He was a good tennis player, and his bridge was better than average. Unlike many of his colleagues he did not allow himself to be overwhelmed by his position, and in the evening at the club he was affable and unaffected. But he did not forget that he was his Pertainic Majesty's Council, and I admired the skill with which, without portentiousness, he preserved the dignity which he thought necessary to his station. In short, he had very good manners. He talked agreeably, and his interests, though somewhat ordinary, were varied. He had a nice sense of humour. He could make a joke and tell a good story. He was very happily married. His son was at Charter House, and he showed me a photograph of a tall, fair lad in flannels with a frank and pleasant face. He showed me also the photograph of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies of life in China that a man must be separated for long periods from his family, and owing to the war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years. His wife had taken the children home when the boy was eight and the girl eleven. They had meant to wait till his leave came so that they could all go together, but he was stationed in a place that suited neither of the children, and he and his wife agreed that she had better take them at once. His leave was due in three years, and then he could spend twelve months with them. But when the time for this came the war broke out, and the consular staff was shorthanded, and it was impossible for him to leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated from young children. The journey was difficult and dangerous. No one expected the war to last so long, and one by one the years passed. My girl was a child when I saw her last, he said to me when he showed me the photograph. Now she's a married woman. When are you going on leave? I asked him. Oh, my wife's coming out now. But don't you want to see your daughter? I asked. He looked at the photograph again, and then looked away. There was a curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he answered, I've been away from home too long now, I shall never go back. I leaned back in my chair smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair. It was a pretty face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb's daughter was a very alluring young person. I like that engaging audacity. It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph, he said presently. I'd always thought of her as a child. If I'd met her in the street I shouldn't have known her. He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural. It isn't fair. When she was a child she used to love being petted. His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see them in a very unexpected emotion. I can hardly realize she's my daughter. I thought she'd come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged. He looked away now, and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the downturned corners of his mouth. I suppose one gets selfish out here. I feel awfully sore. But I gave a big dinner-party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind. He gave an apologetic laugh. I had to, you know. He said awkwardly. I had such an awful hump. What's the young man like? I asked. She's awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are all about nothing else. There was an odd quaver in his voice. It's a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you've never even seen. I've got his photograph somewhere. I don't know where it is. I don't think I'd care about him very much. He helped himself to another whiskey. He was tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together. Well, thank God her mother's coming out soon. I don't think he was quite a normal man, after all. CHAPTER 45 THE OLD TIMER He was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little more than a boy, a second mate of a sailing vessel, and had never gone home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Yichang, and he knew by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtzee. He had been a master of a tug at Hong Kong and had fought in the ever-victorious army. He had got a lot of loot in the boxer-troubles and had been in Hankau during the Revolution when the rebels shelled the city. He had been married three times, first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese, and finally when he was hard upon fifty, to an English woman. They were all dead now, and it was the Japanese who lingered in his memory. He would tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house in Shanghai, just one chrysanthemum in a vase, or a sprig of cherry blossom, and he always remembered how she held a teacup, with both hands, delicately. He had had a number of children, but he took no interest in them. They were settled in the various ports of China, in banks and shipping offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud of his daughter by his English wife, the only girl he ever had, but she had married well and was gone to England. He would never see her again. The only person now for whom he had any affection was the boy who had been with him for five and forty years. He was a little wisened China man, with a bald head, slow of movement and solemn. He was well over sixty. They quarreled incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that he was past his work and that he must get rid of him, and then the boy would say that he was tired of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew that the other did not mean a word he said. They were old friends, old men both of them, and they would remain together till death parted them. It was when he married his English wife that he retired from the water and put his savings into a hotel, but it was not a success. It was a little way from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before there were motorcars in China. He was a sociable fellow and he spent too much of his time in the bar. He was generous and he gave away as many drinks as were paid for. He also had the peculiar habit of spitting in the bath and the more squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his last wife died he found it was she who had kept things from going to pieces and in a little while he could no longer bear up against the difficulty of his circumstances. All his savings had gone into buying the place, now heavily mortgaged, and in making up the deficit year by year. He was obliged to sell out to a Japanese and having paid his debts at the age of sixty-eight found himself without a penny. But by God, sir, he was a sailor. One of the company's running boats of the Yangtzee gave him a birth as chief officer. He had no master's certificate, and he returned to the river which he knew so well. For eight years he had been on the same run. And now he stood on the bridge of his trim little ship, not so large as a penny steamer on the Thames, a gallant figure upright and slender as when he was a lad, in a neat blue suit, and the company's cap set hotly on his white hair, with his pointed beard natally trimmed. Seventy-six years old, it is a great age. With his head thrown back, his glasses in his hand, the Chinese pilot by his side, he watched the vast expanse of the winding river. A fleet of junks with their high sterns, their square sails set, descended on the swift current, and the rowers chanted a monotonous chant as they worked at their creaking oars. The yellow water in the setting sun was lovely with pale, soft tints. It was as smooth as glass, and along the flat banks the trees and the huts of a bedraggled village, hazy in the heat of the day, were now silhouetted sharply, like the shadows of a shadow-graph against the pale sky. He raised his head as he heard the cry of wild geese, and he saw them flying high above him in a great vee to what farlands he knew not. In the distance against the sunlight stood a solitary hill crowned with temples. Because he had seen all this so often, it affected him strangely. The dying day made him think, he knew not why, of his long past and of his great age. He regretted nothing. By George, he muttered, I've had a fine life. Chapter 46 The Plane The incident was of course perfectly trivial, and it could be very easily explained. But I was surprised that the eyes of the spirit could blind me so completely to what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was taken aback to find how completely one could be at the mercy of the laws of association. Day after day I had marched along the uplands, and today I knew that I must come to the great plain in which lay the ancient city whether I was bound. But when I set out in the morning there was no sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed no less sheer, and when I reached the top of one, thinking to see the valley below, it was only to see before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond, climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway that I had followed so long, shining in the sunlight as it skirted the brow of a rugged, tawny rock. The sky was blue, and in the west hung here and there little clouds like fishing boats becombed towards evening off Dunganes. I trudged along, mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that awaited me, if not round this bend than round the next. And at last, suddenly, when I was thinking of other things, I came upon it. But it was no Chinese landscape that I saw, with its patty fields, its memorial arches, and its fantastic temples, with its farmhouses set in a bamboo grove, and its wayside inns where under the banyan trees the poor Coolies may rest them of their weary loads. It was the valley of the Rhine, the broad plain all golden in the sunset. The valley of the Rhine with its river, a silvery streak running through it, and the distant towers of worms. It was the great plain upon which my young eyes rested, when, a student in Heidelberg, after walking long among the fur-clad hills above the old city, I came out upon a clearing. And because I was there first conspicuous of beauty, because there I knew the first glow of the acquisition of knowledge, each book I read was an extraordinary adventure. Because there I first knew the delight of conversation, oh, those wonderful common places which each boy discovers as though none had discovered them before. Because of the morning stroll in the sunny Onlaga, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my ebstimious youth at the end of a strenuous walk. The leisurely evenings on the castle terrace, with the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs of the old town below me. Because of Goethe, and Heine, and Beethoven and Wagner, and, why not, Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer garden where the band played and the girls with yellow plates walked sedately. Because of all these things, recollections which have all the force of the appeal of sense. To me not only does the word plain mean everywhere and exclusively the valley of the Rhine, but the only symbol for happiness I know is a wide prospect, all golden in the setting sun, with a shining stream of silver running through it, like the path of life, or like the ideal that guides you through it, and far away the gray towers of an ancient town. Failure. A student of the drama. The Taipan. Of. On a Chinese screen. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dickolas Clifford. On a Chinese screen by W. Somerset-Mohm. Chapters 47 to 49. Failure. A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat like a bush rangers, with an immense brim, a pea jacket such as you see in Leach's pictures of the seafaring man, and very wide checked trousers of a cut fashionable heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes off his hat you see a fine head of long curly hair, and though he is approaching the sixties it is scarcely gray. His features are regular. He wears a collar several sizes too large for him, so that his whole neck, massive and statuesque, is shown. He has the look of a Roman emperor in a tragedy of the sixties, and this air of an actor of the old school is enhanced by his deep, booming voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd. You could imagine his declaiming, the blank verse of Sheridan Knowles, with an emphasis to rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you with too large a gesture you guess how that resonant organ would tremble when he rung your heart, in 1860, over the death of his child. It was splendid a little later to hear him ask the Chinese servant for me boots, boy, me boots, a kingdom for me boots. He confessed that he should have been an actor. To be or not to be, that was the question, but me family, me family dear boy, they would have died of the disgrace, and so I was exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In short he came out to China as a tea-taster, but he came when the salon tea was already ousting the Chinese, and it was no longer possible for the merchant to enrich himself in a few years. But the old lavishness endured, and life was led in a grand style when the means to pay for it no longer existed. The struggle became harder. Finally came the Sino-Japanese war, and with the loss of Formosa, ruin. The tea-taster looked about for another means of livelihood. He became a wine merchant, an undertaker, an estate agent, a broker, an auctioneer. He tried every way of making money that his ardent imagination suggested, but with the diminishing prosperity of the port his efforts were bootless. Life was too much for him. And now at last he had the pitiful air of a broken man. There was even something touching in it, like the appeal of a woman who cannot believe in the loss of her beauty, and implores the compliment which reassures but no longer convinces her. And yet notwithstanding he had a solace. He had still a magnificent assurance. He was a failure, and he knew it, but it did not really affect him, for he was the victim of fate. No shadow of a doubt in his own capacity had ever crossed his mind. Chapter 48 A Student of the Drama He sent in a neat card of the correct shape and size, deeply bordered and black, upon which, under his name was printed, Professor of Comparative Modern Literature. He turned out to be a young man, small, with tiny, elegant hands, with a larger nose than you see as a rule in the Chinese, and gold-rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day, he was dressed in European clothes, in a suit of heavy tweed. He seemed a trifle shy. He spoke in a high falsetto, as though his voice had never broken, and though shrill notes gave I know not what feeling of unreality to his conversation. He had studied in Geneva, and in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English, French, and German. It appeared that he lectured on the drama, and he had lately written, in French, a work on the Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left him with a surprising enthusiasm for screem, and this was the model he proposed for the regeneration of the Chinese drama. It was curious to hear him demand that the drama should be exciting. He was asking for the pièce bien fête, the Seine affaire, the curtain, the unexpected, the dramatic. The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate symbolism, has been what we are always crying for, the theatre of ideas, and apparently it has been perishing of dullness. It is true that ideas do not grow on every gooseberry bush. They need novelty to make them appetizing, and when they are stale, they stink as badly as stale fish. But then, remembering the description on the card, I asked my friend what books, English and French, he recommended his students to read in order to familiarize themselves with the current literature of the day. He hesitated a little. I really don't know, he said at last. You see, that's not my branch. I only have to do with drama, but if you're interested I'll ask my colleague, who lectures on European fiction, to call on you. I beg your pardon, I said. Have you read Les Avariés, he asked? I think that it is the finest play that has been produced in Europe since screem. Do you, I said politely? Yes, you see our students are greatly interested in sociological questions. It is my misfortune that I am not, and so, as deftly as I could, I led the conversation to Chinese philosophy, which I was desultorily reading. I mentioned Zhuangzi, the professor's draw fell. He lived a very long time ago, he said, perplexed. So did Aristotle, I murmured pleasantly. I have never studied the philosophers, he said, but of course we have at our university a professor of Chinese philosophy, and if you are interested in that I will ask him to come and call on you. It is useless to argue with a pedagogue as the spirit of the ocean, somewhat portentiously to my mind, remarked to the spirit of the river, and I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor was interested in its technique, and indeed was preparing a course of lectures on the subject which he seemed to think both complicated and obstruc. He flattered me by asking me what were the secrets of the craft. I know only two, I answered. One is to have common sense, and the other is to stick to the point. Does it require no more than that to write a play, he inquired, with a shade of dismay in his tone. You want a certain knack, I allowed, but no more than to play billiards. They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America, said he. The Americans are an extremely practical people, I answered. I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs. I do not think I quite understand you. If you can't write a play, no one can teach you, and if you can, it's as easy as falling off a log. Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics. But if it is so easy to write a play, why do dramatists take so long about it? They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern play writes have been perfectly illiterate men, and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript, and I saw that he had written the question, will you have sugar in your tea five times before he could put it in this form? A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted without any beating about the bush. You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man, and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play. It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He wracked his brain furiously month after month, and at last in despair used the very same that he had used before. What do you mean, the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream, I do not understand you at all. Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, and then someone comes from the mountains or from over the sea and flings the window open, everyone gets a cold in the head, and then the curtain falls. I thought it just possible that the shadow of a smile might lighten for a moment the professor's grave face, but he knit his brows and gazed for two minutes into space. Then he rose. I will peruse the works of Henrik Ibsen once more with that point of view in mind, he said. I did not admit before he left to put him the question which one earnest student of the drama always puts another when per adventure they meet. I asked him, namely, what he thought was the future of the theatre. I had an idea that he said, oh, hell, but on reflection I believe his exclamation must have been oh, ciel. He sighed, he shook his head, he threw up his elegant hands, he looked the picture of dejection. It was certainly a comfort to find that all thoughtful people considered the drama's state in China no less desperate than all thoughtful people consider it in England. Chapter 49 The Taipan No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability, and he looked back with a faint smile at the Calo Clark who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home that he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion with its wide verandas and spacious rooms which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school. He was at St. Paul's, with his father and mother and his two sisters and a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which he now ate his evening meal. He always dressed, and whether he was alone or not, he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked, and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping, but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entree, roast, sweet and savory, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food, and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dither than when he had a guest. He had indeed gone far. That was why he did not care to go home now. He had not been to England for ten years, and he took his leave in Japan, or Vancouver, where he was sure of meeting old friends from the China coast. He knew no one at home. His sisters had married in their own station. Their husbands were clerks, and their sons were clerks. There was nothing between him and them, they bored him. He satisfied the claims of a relationship by sending them every Christmas a piece of fine silk, some elaborate embroidery, or a case of tea. He was not a mean man, and as long as his mother lived he made her an allowance. But when the time came for him to retire he had no intention of going back to England. He had seen too many men do that, and he knew how often it was a failure. He meant to take a house near the race course in Shanghai. What with Bridge and his ponies and golf he expected to get through the rest of his life very comfortably. But he had a good many years before he need think of retiring. In another five or six Higgins would be going home, and then he would take charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile he was very happy where he was. He could save money, which you couldn't do in Shanghai, and have a good time into the bargain. This place had another advantage over Shanghai. He was the most prominent man in the community, and what he said went. Even the consul took care to keep on the right side of him. Once the consul and he had been at loggerheads, and it was not he who had gone to the wall. The typen thrust out his jaw pugnaciously as he thought of the incident. But he smiled for he felt in an excellent humor. He was walking back to his office from a capital luncheon at the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank. They did you very well there. The food was first-rate, and there was plenty of liquor. He had started with a couple of cocktails, then he had some excellent sotern, and he had finished up with two glasses of port and some fine old brandy. He felt good, and when he left he did a thing that was rare with him. He walked. His bearers with his chair kept a few paces behind him in case he felt inclined to slip into it, but he enjoyed stretching his legs. He did not get enough exercise these days. Now that he was too heavy to ride, it was difficult to get exercise, but if he was too heavy to ride he could still keep ponies, and as he strolled along in the balmy air he thought of that spring meeting. He had a couple of griffins that he had hopes of, and one of the lads in his office had turned out a fine jockey. He must see they didn't sneak him away. Old Higgins and Shanghai would give a pot of money to get him over there, and he ought to pull off two or three races. He flattered himself that he had the finest stable in the city. He pouted his broad chest like a pigeon. It was a beautiful day, and it was good to be alive. He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood there, neat and orderly, as an evident sign of the community's opulence. He never passed the cemetery without a little glower pride. He was pleased to be an Englishman, for the cemetery stood in a place valueless when it was chosen, which with the increase of the city's affluence was now worth a great deal of money. It had suggested that the grave should be moved to another spot, and the land sold for building, but the feeling of the community was against it. It gave the Taipan a sense of satisfaction to think that they are dead rested on the most valuable site on the island. It showed that there were things they cared for more than money—money be blowed—when it came to the things that mattered. This was a favorite phrase with the Taipan. Well, one remembered that money wasn't everything. And now he thought he would take a stroll through. He looked at the graves. They were neatly kept, and the pathways were free from weeds. There was the look of prosperity. And as he sauntered along, he read the names on the tombstones. Here were three side by side—the captain, the first mate, and the second mate of the bark, Mary Baxter, who had all perished together in the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well. There was a little group of two missionaries—their wives and children—who had been massacred during the Boxer Troubles. Shocking thing that had been. Not that he took much stock in missionaries, but hang it all, one couldn't have these damn Chinese massacring them. Then he came to a cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap, Edward Mullick, but he couldn't stand his liquor, drank himself to death, poor devil at twenty-five. The Taipan had known a lot of them do that. There were several more neat crosses with the man's name on them, and the age, twenty-five, twenty-six or twenty-seven. It was always the same story. They had come out to China. They had never seen so much money before. They were good fellows, and they wanted to drink with the rest. They couldn't stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You had to have a strong head and a fine constitution to drink, drink for drink, on the China coast. Of course it was very sad, but the Taipan could hardly help a smile when he thought how many of those young fellows he had drunk underground. And there was the death that had been useful, a fellow in his own firm, senior to him, and a clever chap, too. If that fellow had lived, he might not have been Taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs. Turner, violent Turner. She had been a pretty little thing. He had had quite an affair with her. He had been devilish cut up when she had died. He looked at her age on the tombstone. She'd be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought of all those dead people, a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He had beaten them all. They were dead, and he was alive, and by George he'd scored them off. His eyes collected in one picture all those crowded graves, and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his hands. No one ever thought I was a fool, he muttered. He had a feeling of good-natured contempt for the gibbering dead. Then, as he strolled along, he came suddenly upon two Cooleys digging a grave. He was astonished, for he had not heard that anyone in the community were dead. Who the devil's that for, he said aloud. The Cooleys did not even look at him. They went on with their work, standing in the grave, deep down, and they shoveled up heavy clods of earth. So he had been so long in China, he knew no Chinese. In his day it was not thought necessary to learn the damned language, that he asked the Cooleys in English whose grave they were digging. They did not understand. They answered him in Chinese, and he cursed them for ignorant fools. He knew that Mrs. Broom's child was ailing, and it might have died, but he would certainly have heard of it, and besides that wasn't a child's grave, it was a man's, and a big man's, too. It was uncanny. He wished he hadn't gone into the cemetery. He hurried out and stepped into his chair. His good humor had all gone, and there was an uneasy frown on his face. The moment he got back to the office, he called to his number two. I say, Peters, who's dead, you know? But Peters knew nothing. The typhan was puzzled. He called one of the native clerks and sent him to the cemetery to ask the Cooleys. He began to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said the Cooleys had gone, and there was no one to ask. The typhan began to feel vaguely annoyed. He did not like things to happen of which he knew nothing. His own boy would know. His boy always knew everything, and he sent for him. But the boy had heard of no death in the community. I knew no one was dead, said the typhan irritably, but what's the grave for? He told the boy to go to the overseer of the cemetery and find out what the devil he had dug a grave for when no one was dead. Let me have a whiskey and soda before you go, he added, as the boy was leaving the room. He did not know why the sight of the grave had made him uncomfortable, but he tried to put it out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk the whiskey, and he finished his work. He went upstairs and turned over the pages of punch. In a few minutes he would go to the club and play a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it would ease his mind to hear what his boy had to say, and he waited for his return. In a little while the boy came back and he brought the overseer with him. What are you having a grave dug for? he asked the overseer point blank. Nobody's dead. I know dig-glave, said the man. What the devil you mean by that? There were two coolies digging a grave this afternoon. The two Chinese looked at one another, then the boy said they had been to the cemetery together. There was no new grave there. The typhan only just stopped himself from speaking. But damn it all I saw it myself, with the words on the tip of his tongue. But he did not say them. He grew very red as he choked them down. The two Chinese looked at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his breath failed him. All right, get out, he gasped. But as soon as they were gone he shouted for the boy again, and when he came, maddeningly impassive, told him to bring some whiskey. He rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief. His hand trembled when he lifted the glass to his lips. They could say what they liked, but he had seen the grave. Why, he could still hear the dull thud as the coolies threw the spadefuls of earth on the ground above them. What did it mean? He could feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at ease. But he pulled himself together. It was all nonsense. If there was no grave there it must have been a hallucination. The best thing he could do was to go to the club, and if he ran across the doctor he would ask him to give him a look over. Every one in the club looked just the same as ever. He did not know why he should have expected them to look different. It was the comfort. These men, living for many years with one another, lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little idiosyncrasies. One of them hummed incessantly while he played bridge, another insisted on drinking beer through a straw, and these tricks which had so often irritated the Taipan, now gave him a sense of security. He needed it, for he could not get out of his head that strange sight he had seen. He played bridge very badly, his partner was sensorious, and the Taipan lost his temper. He thought the men were looking at him oddly. He wondered what they saw in him that was unaccustomed. Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in the club any longer. As he went out he saw the doctor reading the times in the reading room, but he could not bring himself to speak to him. He wanted to see for himself whether that grave was really there, and stepping into his chair he told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You couldn't have a hallucination twice, could you? And besides he would take the overseer in with him, and if the grave was not there he wouldn't see it, and if it was he'd give the overseer the soundest thrashing he'd ever had. But the overseer was nowhere to be found. He had gone out and taken the keys with him. When the Taipan found he could not get into the cemetery he felt suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair and told his bearers to take him home. He would lie down for half an hour before dinner. He was tired out, that was it. He had heard that people had hallucinations when they were tired. When his boy came in to put out his clothes for dinner it was only by an effort of will that he got up. He had a strong inclination not to dress that evening, but resisted it. He made it a rule to dress. He had dressed every evening for twenty years, and it would never do to break his rule. But he ordered a bottle of champagne with his dinner, and that made him feel more comfortable. Afterwards he told the boy to bring him the best brandy. When he had drunk a couple of glasses of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be damned. He went to the billiard room and practiced a few shots. There could not be much the matter with him when his eye was so sure. When he went to bed he sank immediately into a sound sleep. But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely. He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it was a hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the night watch when going his rounds. It broke upon the stillness of the night so harshly that it made him jump out of his skin. And then terror seized him. He felt a horror of the winding multitude in the streets of the Chinese city. And there was something ghastly and terrible in the convoluted roofs of the temples with their devils grimacing and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted his nostrils and the people, those myriads of blue-clad coolies and the beggars in their filthy rags and the merchants and the magistrates sleek, smiling and inscrutable in their long black gowns. They seemed to press upon him with menace. He hated the country. China. Why had he ever come? He was panic-stricken now. He must get out. He would not stay another year, another month. What did he care about Shanghai? Oh, my God! he cried if I were only safely back in England. He wanted to go home. If he had to die he wanted to die in England. He could not bear to be buried among all these yellow men with their slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted to be buried at home, not in that grave he had seen that day. He could never rest there, never. What did it matter what people thought? Let them think what they liked. The only thing that mattered was to get away while he had the chance. He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the firm and said that he had discovered he was dangerously ill. He must be replaced. He could not stay longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go home at once. They found the letter in the morning, clenched in the typhan's hand. He had slipped down between the desk and the chair. He was stone dead. End of Section 17. Section 18. Madam Psychosis. The Fragment. One of the best. Of On a Chinese Screen. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Nicholas Clifford. On a Chinese Screen by W. Somerset Maugham, chapters 50 to 52. Madam Psychosis. He was decently, though far from richly clad. He had a small round cap of black silk on his head and on his feet black silk shoes. His robe was pale green of the floured silk which is made in tiading, and over it he wore a short black jacket. He was an old man with a white beard, long, and for a Chinese full. His broad face, much wrinkled especially between the brows, was benign, and his large horned spectacles did not conceal the friendliness of his eyes. He had all the look of one of those sages whom you may see in an old picture, seated by a bamboo grove at the foot of a great rocky mountain contemplating the eternal way. But now his face bore an expression of great annoyance, and his kindly eyes were frowning, for he was engaged in the singular occupation, for a man of his appearance, of leading a little black pig along the causeway between the flooded paddy fields. And the little black pig, with sudden jerks, with unexpected dodging, ran hither and thither in every direction but that in which the old gentleman wished to go. He pulled the string violently, but the pig, squealing, refused to follow. He addressed it in terms of expostulation and of abuse, but the little pig sat on his haunches and looked at him with malicious eyes. Then I knew that in the Tang dynasty the old gentleman had been a philosopher who had juggled with facts as philosophers will, making them suit the whims which he called his theories. And now, after who knows how many existences, he was expiating his sins and suffering in his turn the stubborn tyranny of the facts which he had outraged. The Fragment When you travel in China, I think nothing amazes you more than the passion for decoration which possesses the Chinese. It is not astonishing that you should find decoration in memorial arches or in temples. Here the occasion for it is obvious, and it is natural enough to find it in furniture, nor does it surprise, though it delights you, to discover it on the commoner objects of household use. The Pewter Pot is enriched with a graceful design. The Kuli's rice bowl has its rough but not inelegant adornment. You may fancy that the Chinese craftsman does not look upon an article as complete till by line or color he has broken the plainness of a surface. He will even print an arabesque on the paper he uses for wrapping. But it is more unexpected when you see the elaborate embellishment of a shop front, the splendid carving, guilt or relief with gold of its counter, and the intricate sculpture of the signboard. It may be that this magnificence serves as an advertisement, but it does so only because the passerby, the possible customer, takes pleasure in elegance, and you are apt to think that the tradesman who owns the shop takes pleasure in it too. When he sits at his door, smoking his water pipe, and through his great horned spectacles reading a newspaper, his eyes must rest with good humor sometimes on the fantastic ornamentation, on the counter in a long necked pot stands a solitary carnation. You will find the same delight in the ornate in the poorest villages, where the severity of a door is mitigated by a charming piece of carving, and where the trellis of the windows forms a complicated and graceful pattern. You can seldom cross a bridge in however unfrequented a district without seeing in it the hand of an artist. The stones are so laid as to make an intricate decoration, and it seems as though these singular people judged with a careful eye whether a flat bridge or an arched one would fit in best with the surrounding scene. The balustrade is ornamented with lions or with dragons. I remember a bridge that must have been placed just where it was for the pure delight of its beauty, rather than for any useful purpose, since, though broad enough for a carriage and pair to pass over it, it served only to connect a narrow path that led from one ragged village to another. The nearest town was thirty miles away. The broad river, narrowing at this point, flowed between two green hills, and nut trees grew on the bank. The bridge had no balustrade. It was constructed of immense slabs of granite and rested on five piers. The middle pier consisted of a huge and fantastic dragon with a long and scaly tail. On the sides of the outer slabs, running the whole length of the bridge, was cut in very low relief, a pattern of an unimaginable likeness, delicacy, and grace. But though the Chinese take such careful pains to avoid fatiguing your eye, with sure taste making the elaborateness of a decoration endurable by contrasting it with a plain surface, in the end, weariness overcomes you. They're exuberance bewilders. You cannot refuse your admiration to the ingenuity with which they so diversify the ideas that occupy them as to give you an impression of changing fantasy, but the fact is plain that the ideas are few. The Chinese artist is like a fiddler, who with infinite skill should play infinite variations upon a single tune. Now, I happened upon a French doctor who had been in practice for many years in the city in which I then found myself. And he was a collector of porcelain, bronze, and embroidery. He took me to see his things. They were beautiful, but they were a trifle monotonous. I admired perfunctorily. Suddenly I came upon the fragment of a bust. But that is Greek, I said in surprise. Do you think so? I am glad to hear you say it. Head and arms were gone and the statue, for such it had been, was broken off just above the waist, but there was a breastplate with a sun in the middle of it, an in relief, perseus, killing the dragon. It was a fragment of no great importance, but it was Greek, and perhaps because I was surfeted with Chinese beauty it affected me strangely. It spoke in a tongue with which I was familiar. It rested my heart. I passed my hands over its age-worn surface with the delight I myself was surprised at. I was like a sailor who, wandering in a tropic sea, has known the lazy loveliness of coral islands and the splendors of the cities of the east, but finds himself once more in the dingy alleys of a channel-port. It is cold and gray and sordid, but it is England. The doctor, he was a little bald man with gleaming eyes in an excitable manner, rubbed his hands. Do you know it was found within thirty miles of here on this side of the Tibetan frontier? Found, I exclaimed, found where? Montieux, in the ground. It had been buried for two thousand years. They found this in several fragments more, one or two complete statues, I believe, but they were broken up and only this remained. It was incredible that Greek statues should have been discovered in so remote a spot. But what is your explanation, I asked? I think this was the statue of Alexander, he said. By George! It was a thrill. Was it possible that one of the commanders of the Macedonian, after the expedition into India, had found his way into this mysterious corner of China, under the shadow of the mountains of Tibet? The doctor wanted to show me Manchu dresses, but I could not give them my attention. What bold adventurer was he who had penetrated so far towards the east to found the kingdom? There he had built a temple to Aphrodite, and a temple to Dionysus, and in the theater actors had sung the Antigone, and in his halls at night bards had recited the Odyssey. And he and his men listening may have felt themselves the peers of the old seaman and his followers. What magnificence did that stained fragment of marble call up and what fabulous adventures? How long had the kingdom lasted, and what tragedy marked its fall? Ah, just then I could not look at Tibetan banners or Saladon cups, for I saw the Parthenon, severe and lovely, and beyond Serene the blue Aegean. One of the best. I could never remember his name, but whenever he was spoken of in the port he was always described as one of the best. He was a man of fifty, perhaps thin and rather tall, dapper and well-dressed, with a small neat head and sharp features. His blue eyes were good-natured and jovial behind his pants-nay. He was of a cheerful disposition, and he had a vein of banter which was not ineffective. He could turn out the sort of jokes that makes men standing at the club bar laugh heartily, and he could be agreeably malicious but without ill nature about any member of the community who did not happen to be present. His humour was of the same nature as that of the comedian in a musical play. When they spoke of him they often said, You know, I wonder he never went on the stage. He'd made a hit, one of the best. He was always ready to have a drink with you, and no sooner was your glass empty than he was prompt with the China phrase, ready for the other half. But he did not drink more than was good for him. Oh, he's got his head screwed on his shoulders the right way, they said, one of the best. When the hat was passed round for some charitable object he could always be counted on to give as much as anyone else, and he was always ready to go in for a golf competition, a rebellious tournament. He was a bachelor. Marriage is no use to a man who lives in China, he said. He has to send his wife away every summer, and then when the kids are beginning to be interesting they have to go home. It costs a juice of a lot of money, and you get nothing out of it. But he was always willing to do a good turn to any woman in the community. He was number one at Jardines, and he often had the power to make himself useful. He had been in China for thirty years, and he prided himself on not speaking a word of Chinese. He never went into the Chinese city. His compredor was Chinese, and some of the clerks, his boys of course, and the chair-coolies. But they were the only Chinese he had anything to do with, and quite enough too. I hate the country, I hate the people, he said. As soon as I've saved enough money I mean to clear out. He laughed. Do you know, last time I was home I found everyone cracked over Chinese junk, pictures and porcelain and stuff. Don't talk to me about Chinese things, I said to him. I never want to see anything Chinese as long as I live. He turned to me. I'll tell you what, I don't believe I've got a single Chinese thing in my house. But if you wanted him to talk to you about London, he was prepared to do so by the hour. He knew all the musical comedies that had been played for twenty years, and at the distance of nine thousand miles he was able to keep up with the doings of Miss Lily Elsie and Miss Elsie Janis. He played the piano and he had a pleasing voice. It required little persuasion to induce him to sit down and sing you the popular ditties he had heard when last he was at home. It was quite singular to me, the unfathomable frivolity of this gray-haired man. It was even a little uncanny. But people applauded him loudly when he finished. He's priceless, isn't he? They said. Oh, one of the best. CHAPTERS 53-55 THE SEA DOG Ships captains for the most part are very dull men. Their conversation is of freights and cargos. They have seen little more in the ports they visit than their agent's office, the bar which their kind frequents, and the body-houses. They owe the glamour of romance which their connection with the sea has cast over them to the imagination of the landsmen. To them the sea is a means of livelihood, and they know it, as an engine driver knows his engine, from a standpoint which is aridly practical. They are men, working men, of a narrow outlook, with small education for the most part, and little culture. They are all of a peace, and they have neither subtlety nor imagination. Straight forward, courageous, honest, and reliable, they stand for square on the abutability of the obvious, and they are definite. They are placed in their surroundings like the objects in a stereoscopic photograph, so that you may seem to see all around them. They offer themselves to you with salient traits. But no one could have adhered less to type than Captain Boots. He was the master of a little Chinese steamer on the Upper Yangtze, and because I was his only passenger, we spent a good deal of time in one another's company. But though he was fluent of speech, garrelous even, I see him shadowy, and he remains in my mind indistinctly. I suppose it is on account of his elusiveness that he engages my imagination. There was certainly nothing elusive in his appearance. He was a big man, six foot two, powerfully built, with large features and a red friendly face. When he laughed he showed a row of handsome gold teeth. He was very bald and clean shaven, but he had the most bushy, abundant, and aggressive eyebrows that I have ever seen, and under them mild blue eyes. He was a Dutchman, and though he had left Holland when he was eight, he still spoke with an accent. He could not pronounce the, but always made it the. His father, a fisherman who sailed his own schooner on the Zeider Z, hearing that fishing was good in Newfoundland, had set out with his wife and his two sons across the Broad Atlantic. After some years there and in Hudson's Bay, all this was hard on half a century ago, they had sailed round the Horn for the Bering Straits. They hunted seal until the law stepped in to save the beasts they were exterminating, and then boots, a man now and a brave one God knows, sailed here and there as third, then as second mate on sailing vessels. He had been almost all his life in sail, and now on a steamer, could not make himself at home. It's only in a sailing boat you get comfort, he said. There's no comfort anywhere when you got steam. He had been all along the coast of South America, after nitrates, and then to the west coast of Africa, then again fishing cod off the coast of Maine to America, and after that with cargoes of salt fish to Spain and Portugal. A tavern acquaintance in Manila suggested that he should try the Chinese customs. He went to Hong Kong, where he was taken on as a tide-waiter, and presently was put in command of a steam launch. He spent three years chasing the opium smugglers, and then, having saved a little money, built himself a forty-five ton schooner with which he determined to go to the Bering Straits and try his luck again with the seal fishery. But I guess my crew got scared, he said. When I got the Shanghai they deserted, and I couldn't get no other, so I had to sail the boat, and I shipped on a vessel what was going to Vancouver. It was then he first left the sea. He met a man who was pushing a patent hayfork, and this he agreed to take round the states. It was a queer occupation for a sailor man, and it was not a successful one, for at Salt Lake City, the firm that employed him, having gone bankrupt, he found himself stranded. Somehow or other he got back to Vancouver, but he was taken with the idea of life ashore, and he found work with an estate agent. It was his duty to take the purchases of land to their plots, and if they were not satisfied, persuade them that they need not regret their bargain. We sold one fellow a farm on the side of the mountain, he said, his blue eyes twinkling at the recollection, and it was so steep that the chickens had one leg longer than the other. After five years he had the idea that he would like to go back to China. He had no difficulty in getting a job as a mate of a ship sailing west, and soon he was at the old life once more. Since then he had been on most of the China runs, from Vladivostok to Shanghai, from Amoy to Manila, and on all the big rivers, on steamers now, rising from second to first mate, and at last on Chinese-owned ships to master. He talked willingly of his plans for the future. He had been in China long enough, and he hankered after a farm on the Fraser River. He would build himself a boat and do a bit of fishing, salmon and halibut. It's time I settled down, he said, fifty-three years I've been to sea, and I shouldn't wonder what I did a bit of boat-building to. I'm not one to stick to one ding. There he was right, and this restlessness of his translated itself into a curious indecision of character. There was something fluid about him so that you did not know where to take hold of him. He reminded you of a scene of mist and rain and a Japanese print, where the design, barely suggested, almost escapes you. He had a peculiar gentleness which was somewhat unexpected in the rough old salt. I don't want to offend any one, he said. Treat him kindly, that's what I try to do. If people won't do what you want, talk to him nicely, persuade him. There's no need to be nasty. Try what coaxing will do. It was the principle which it was unusual to find used with the Chinese, and I do not know that it answered very well, for after some difficulty he would come into the cabin, wave his hands and say, I can do nothing with him. They won't listen to reason. And then his moderation looked very like weakness, but he was no fool. He had a sense of humor. At one place we were drawing over seven feet, and since the river at its shallowest was barely that, and the course was dangerous, the harbor authorities would not give us our papers till part of the cargo was unloaded. It was the ship's last trip when she was carrying the pay of regiments stationed several days downstream. The military governor refused to let the ship start, unless the bullion was taken. I guess I got to do what you tell me, said Captain Boots, to the harbour master. You don't get your papers till I see the five foot mark above the water, answered the harbour master. I'll tell the compredor to take out some of that silver. He took the harbour master up to the customs club and stood him drinks while this was being done. He drank with them for four hours, and when he returned he walked as steadily as when he went, but the harbour master was drunk. Ah, I see they've got it down two foot, said Captain Boots. That's all right then. The harbour master looked at the numbers on the ship's side, and sure enough the five foot mark was at the water's edge. That's good, he said, and now you can go. I'll be off right away, said the captain. Not a pound of cargo had been removed, but an astute Chinaman had neatly repainted the numbers. And later, when mutinous regiments with an eye on the silver we carried sought to prevent us from leaving one of the riverside cities, he showed an agreeable firmness. His equitable temper was tried, and he said, No one's going to make me stay where I don't want to. I'm the master of this ship, and I'm the man what gives the orders. I'm going. The agitated compredor said the military would fire if we attempted to move. An officer uttered a command, and the soldiers going down on one knee leveled their rifles. Captain Boots looked at them. Put down the bulletproof screen, he said. I tell you I'm going at the Chinese army, and go to hell. He gave his orders to raise the anchor, and at the same time the officer gave the order to fire. Captain Boots stood on his bridge, a somewhat grotesque figure, for in his old blue jersey, with his red face and burly frame, he looked the very image of those ancient fishermen that you see lounging about Grimsby docks, and he rang his bell. We steamed out slowly to the spatter of rifle shots. The question. They took me to the temple. It stood on the side of a hill, with a semicircle of tawny mountains behind it, staging it as it were, with a formal grandeur. And they pointed out to me with what exquisite art the series of buildings climbed the hill till you reached the final edifice, a jewel of white marble encircled by the trees. For the Chinese architect sought to make his creation an ornament to nature, and he used the accidents of the landscape to complete his decorative scheme. They pointed out to me how cunningly the trees were planted, to contrast with the marble of a gateway, to give an agreeable shadow here or there to serve as a background. And they made me remark the admirable proportion of those great roofs, rising one beyond the other in rich profusion with the grace of flowers. And they showed me that the yellow tiles were of different hues so that the sensibility was not offended by an expansive color, but amused and pleased by a subtle variety of tone. They showed me how the elaborate carving of a gateway was contrasted with a surface without adornment so that the eye was not wearied. All this they showed me as we walked through elegant courtyards, over bridges which were a miracle of grace, through temples with strange gods, dark and gesticulating. But when I asked them what was the spiritual state which had caused all this massive building to be made, they could not tell me. The Sinalog He is a tall man, rather stout, flabby as though he does not take enough exercise, with a red, clean shaven, broad face and gray hair. He talks very quickly in a nervous manner, with a voice not quite big enough for his body. He lives in a temple just outside the city gate, inhabiting the guest chambers, and three Buddhist priests with a tiny acolyte tend the temple and conduct the rites. There is a little Chinese furniture in the rooms and a vast number of books, but no comfort. It is cold, and the study in which we sit is insufficiently warmed by a petroleum stove. He knows more Chinese than any man in China. He has been working for ten years on a dictionary which will supersede that of a noted scholar, whom for a quarter of a century he is personally disliked. He is thus benefiting sinological studies and satisfying a private grudge. He has all the manner of a dawn, and you feel that eventually he will be professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, and then at last exactly in his place. He is a man of wider culture than most sinologues, who may know Chinese. And this you must take on trust, but who, it is lamentably obvious, knows nothing else. And his conversation upon Chinese thought and literature has in consequence a fullness and a variety which you do not often find among students of the language. Because he has immersed himself in his particular pursuits, and has cared nothing for racing and shooting, the Europeans think him queer. They look upon him with the suspicion and awe with which human beings always regard those who do not share their tastes. They suggest that he is not quite sane, and some accuse him of smoking opium. It is the charge which is always brought against the white man who is sought to familiarize himself with the civilization in which he is to pass the greater part of his career. You have only to spend a little while in that apartment bear of the most common luxury to know that this is a man who leads a life wholly of the spirit. But it is a specialized life. Art and beauty seem not to touch him, and as I listen to him talk so sympathetically of the Chinese poets, I cannot help asking myself if the best things have not, after all, slipped through his fingers. Here is a man who has touched reality only through the printed page. The tragic splendor of the lotus moves him only when its loveliness is enshrined in the verse of Li Bo, and the laughter of the pure Chinese girls stirs his blood, but in the perfection of an exquisitely chiseled quatrain. The Vice Consul His bear has set down his chair in the yamen, and unfastened the apron which protected him from the pouring rain. He put out his head like a bird looking out of its nest, and then his long, thin body, and finally his thin, long legs. He stood for a moment as if he did not quite know what to do with himself. He was a very young man, and his long limbs, with their ungainliness, somehow added to the callowness of his air. His round face, his head looked too small for the length of his body, with its fresh complexion was quite boyish, and his pleasant brown eyes were ingenuous and candid. The sense of importance which his official position gave him, it was not long since he had been no more than a student interpreter, struggled with his native shyness. He gave his card to the judge's secretary, and was led by him into an inner court and asked to sit down. It was cold and drafty, and the Vice Consul was glad of his heavy waterproof. A ragged attendant brought tea and cigarettes. The Secretary, an emaciated youth in a very shabby black down, had been a student at Harvard, and was glad to show off his fluent English. Then the judge came in and the Vice Consul stood up. The judge was a portly gentleman, in heavily wadded clothes, with a large smiling face and gold-rimmed spectacles. They sat down and sipped their tea and smoked American cigarettes. They chatted affably. The judge spoke no English, but the Vice Consul's Chinese was fresh in his mind, and he could not help thinking that he acquitted himself creditably. Presently an attendant appeared and said a few words to the judge, and the judge very courteously asked the Vice Consul if he was ready for the business which had brought him. The door into the outer court was thrown open, and the judge, walking through, took his place on a large seat at a table that stood at the top of the steps. He did not smile now. He had assumed instinctively the gravity proper to his office, and in his walk, notwithstanding his obesity, there was an impressive dignity. The Vice Consul, obeying a polite gesture, took his seat by his side. The secretary stood at the end of the table. Then the outer gateway was flung wide. It seemed to the Vice Consul that there was nothing so dramatic as the opening of a door, and quickly, with an odd sort of flurry, the criminal walked in. He walked to the center of the courtyard and stood still, facing his judge. On each side of him walked a soldier in khaki. He was a young man, and the Vice Consul thought he could be no older than himself. He wore only a pair of cotton trousers and a cotton singlet. They were faded, but clean. He was bare-headed and barefoot. He looked no different from any of the thousands of coolies in their monotonous blue that you passed every day in the crowded streets of the city. The judge and the criminal faced one another in silence. The Vice Consul looked at the criminal's face, but then he looked down quickly. He did not want to see what was there to be seen so plainly. He felt suddenly embarrassed. And looking down, he noticed how small the man's feet were, shapely and slender. His hands were tied behind his back. He was slightly built of the middle height, a listen creature that suggested the wild animal, and standing on those beautiful feet of his there was in his carriage a peculiar grace. But the Vice Consul's eyes were drawn back unwillingly to the oval, smooth and unlined face. It was livid. The Vice Consul had often read of faces that were green with terror, and he thought it but a fanciful expression. And here he saw it. It startled him. It made him feel ashamed. And in the eyes, too, eyes that did not slant as the Chinese eye is wrongly supposed always to do, but were straight. In the eyes that seemed unnaturally large and bright, fixed on those of the judge, was the terror that it was horrible to see. But when the judge put him a question, trial and sentence were over, and he had been brought there that morning only for purposes of identification, he answered in a loud, plain voice boldly. However his body might betray him, he was still master of his will. The judge gave a brief order and flanked by two soldiers the man was marched out. The judge and the Vice Consul rose and walked to the gateway where their chairs awaited them. Here stood the criminal with his guard. Not withstanding his tied hands, he smoked a cigarette. A squad of little soldiers had been sheltering themselves under the overhanging roof, and on the appearance of the judge the officer in charge made them form up. The judge and the Vice Consul settled themselves in their chairs. The officer gave an order, and the squad stepped out. A couple of yards behind them walked the criminal. Then came the judge in his chair, and finally the Vice Consul. They went quickly through the busy streets, and the shopkeepers gave the possession an incurious stare. The wind was cold and the rain fell steadily. The criminal in his cotton singlet must have been wet through. He walked with the firm's step, his head held high, jauntily almost. It was some distance from the judge's yamen to the city wall, and the cover it took them nearly half an hour. Then they came to the city gate and went through it. Four men in ragged blue, they looked like peasants, were standing against the wall by the side of a poor coffin, rough hewn and unpainted. The criminal gave it a glance as he passed by. The judge and the Vice Consul dismounted from their chairs, and the officer halted his soldiers. The rice fields began at the city wall. The criminal was led to a pathway between two patches and told to kneel down. But the officer did not think the spot suitable. He told the man to rise. He walked a yard or two and knelt down again. A soldier was detached from the squad and took up his position behind the prisoner. Three feet from him, perhaps. He raised his gun. The officer gave a word of command. He fired. The criminal fell forward, and he moved a little, convulsively. The officer went up to him, and seeing that he was not quite dead, emptied two barrels of his revolver into the body. Then he formed up his soldiers once more. The judge gave the Vice Consul a smile, but it was a grimace rather than a smile. It distorted painfully that fat, good-humored face. They stepped into their chairs, but at the city gate their ways parted. The judge bowed the Vice Consul a courteous farewell. The Vice Consul was carried back toward the consulate through the streets, crowded and tortuous, where life was going on just as usual. And as he went along quickly, for the consular bearers were fine fellows. His mind distracted a little by their constant shouts to make way. He thought how terrible it was to make an end of life deliberately. It seemed an immense responsibility to destroy what was the result of innumerable generations. The human races existed so long, and each one of us is here as the result of an infinite series of miraculous events. But at the same time, puzzling him, he had a sense of the triviality of life. One more or less mannered so little. But just as he reached the consulate, he looked at his watch. He had no idea it was so late, and he told the bearers to take him to the club. It was time for a cocktail, and by heaven he could do with one. A dozen men were standing at the bar when he went in. They knew what errand he had been on that morning. Well, they said, did you see the blighter shot? You bet I did, he said, in a loud and casual voice. Everything go awful, right? He wriggled a bit. He turned to the bartender. Same as usual, John. A city built on a rock. They say of it that the dog's bark when per adventure the sun shines there. It is a gray and gloomy city shrouded in mist. For it stands upon its rock where two great rivers meet, so that it is washed on all sides but one by turbid, rushing waters. The rock is like the prow of an ancient galley, and seems as though possessed of a strange unnatural life, all tremulous with effort. It is as if it were ever on the point of forging into the tumultuous stream. Rugged mountains hem the city round about. Outside the walls bedraggled houses are built on piles, and here when the river is low a hazardous population lives on the needs of the waterman. For at the foot of the rock a thousand junks amour'd, wedged in with one another tightly, and men's lives there have all the turbulence of the river. A steep and tortuous stairway leads to the great gate guarded by a temple, and up and down this all day long go the water-coolies with their dripping buckets, and from their splashing the stair and the street that leads from the gate are wet as though after heavy rain. It is difficult to walk at the level for more than a few minutes, and there are as many steps as in the hill towns of the Italian Riviera. Because there is so little space the streets are pressed together, narrow and dark, and they wind continuously, so that to find your way is like finding it in a labyrinth. The throng is as thick as the throng on a pavement in London when a theatre is emptying itself of its audience. You have to push your way through it, stepping aside every moment as chairs come by and coolies bearing their everlasting loads, itinerant cellars selling almost anything that anyone can want to buy jostle you as you pause. The shops are wide open to the street without windows or doors, and they are crowded too. They are like an exhibition of arts and crafts, and you may see what a street looked like in medieval England when each town made all that was necessary to its needs. The various industries are huddled together so that you will pass through a street of butchers, where carcasses and entrails hang bloody on each side of you, with flies buzzing about them and mangy dogs prowling hungrily below. You will pass through a street where in each house there is a hand loom, and they are busily weaving cloth or silk. There are innumerable eating houses from which come heavy odors, and here at all hours people are eating. Then generally at a corner you will see tea houses, and here all day long again the tables are packed with men of all sorts drinking tea and smoking. The barbers ply their trade in the public view, and you will see men leaning patiently on their crossed arms, while their heads are being shaved, others are having their ears cleaned, and some a revolting spectacle the inside of their eyelids scraped. It is the city of a thousand noises. There are the peddlers who announce their presence by a wooden gong, the clappers of the blind musician or of the masseurs, the shrill falsetto of a man singing in a tavern, the loud beating of a gong from a house where a wedding or a funeral is being celebrated. There are the raucous shouts of the coolies and the chair-bearers, the menacing wines of the beggars, caricatures of humanity, their emaciated limbs barely covered by filthy tatters and revolting with disease, the cracked melancholy of the bugler who incessantly practices a call he can never get, and then like a bass to which all these are a barbaric melody, the insistent sound of conversation, of people laughing, quarreling, joking, shouting, arguing, gossiping. It is a ceaseless din. It is extraordinary at first, then confusing, exasperating, and at last maddening. You long for a moment's utter silence. It seems to you that it would be a voluptuous delight. And then, combining with the irksome throng and the din that exhausts your ears, is a stench which time and experience enable you to distinguish into a thousand separate stenches. Your nostrils grow cunning. Foul odors beat upon your harassed nerves, like the sound of uncouth instruments playing a horrible symphony. You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about you. Upon your own people, sympathy and knowledge give you a hold. You can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really possess them. By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a fashion part of yourself. But these are as strange to you as you are strange to them. You have no clue to their mystery. For their likeness to yourself in so much does not help you. It serves rather to emphasize their difference. Someone attracts your attention. A pale youth with great horn spectacles and book under his arm, whose studious look is pleasant, or an old man wearing a hood with a sparse gray beard and tired eyes. He looks like one of those sages that the Chinese artists painted into a rocky landscape, or under Kangxi, modeled in porcelain. But you might as well look at a brick wall. You have nothing to go upon. You do not know the first thing about them, and your imagination is baffled. But when reaching the top of the hill you come once more to the granulated walls that surround the city, and go out through the frowning gate you come to the graves. They stretch over the country one mile, two miles, three, four, five interminable green mounds up and down the hills, with gray stones to which the people once a year come to offer libation, and to tell the dead how fair the living whom they left behind. And they are as thickly crowded the dead, as are the living in the city, and they seem to press upon the living as though they would force them into the turbid, swirling river. There is something menacing about those serried ranks. It is as though they were laying siege to the city with the subtle ruthlessness biding their time, and as though in the end encroaching irresistibly as fate, they would drive those seething throngs before them till the houses and the streets were covered by them, and the green mounds came down to the water-gate. Then at last silence would dwell their undisturbed. They are uncanny those green graves. They are terrifying. They seem to wait. A libation to the gods. She was an old woman, and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket worn and patched, and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was very poor. She was not stout but squarely built, and in her prime she must have done without effort the heavy work in which her life had been spent. She walked leisurely with the sedate tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She came down to the harbour. It was crowded with painted junks. Her eyes rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants, and then she sat about her business. She took three tiny bowls and filled them with the liquid that she had brought with her in a bottle, and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper shoes and unraveled them so that they should burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and when it was well a light she took the three bowls and poured out some of their contents before the smoldering joss sticks. She bowed herself three times and muttered certain words. She stirred the burning paper so that the flames burned brightly. Then she emptied the bowls on the stones and again bowed three times. No one took the smallest notice of her. She took a few more paper cash from her basket and flung them in the fire. Then without further ado she took up her basket and with the same leisurely rather heavy tread walked away. The gods were duly propitiated, and like an old peasant woman in France, who was satisfactorily done her day's housekeeping, she went about her business.