Samuel Merwin - In Red and Gold

A slim figure, enveloped in an embroidered gown, was moving back from a cabin window. The light from within fell – during a brief second – full on an oval face that was brightly painted, red and white, beneath glossy black hair. The nose was straight, and not wide. The eyes, slanted only a little, looked brightly out from under penciled brows. She was moving swiftly toward the canvas screen; but he, more swiftly, leaped before her, stared at her; laughed softly in sheer delighted surprise. Then, with a quick glance about the deck, breathing out he knew not what terms of crude compliment he reached for her; pursued her to the rail; caught her.

“You little beauty!” he was whispering now. “You wonder! You darling! You’re just too good to be true!” Beside himself, laughing again, he bent over to kiss her. But she wrenched an arm free, fought him off, and leaned, breathless, against the rail.

“Little yellow tiger, eh?” he cried softly. “Well, I’m a big white tiger!”

She said in English: “This is amazing!”

He stood frozen until she had disappeared behind the canvas screen. Then he staggered back; stumbled against a deck chair; turning, found the strange thin girl of the middy blouse stretched out there comfortably in her rug.

She said, with a cool ease: “It’s so pleasant out here this evening, I really haven’t felt like going in.”

With a muttered something – he knew not what – he rushed off to his cabin; then rushed back into the social hall.

The customs man called time for the second round.

As Doane advanced to the center of the ring, Tom rushed, as before, head down. Doane uppercut him; then threw him back, forestalling a clinch. The next two or three rushes he met in the same determined but negative way; hitting a few blows but for the most part pushing him off. The sweat kept running into his eyes as he exerted nearly his full strength. And Tom Sung’s shoulders and arms glistened a bright yellow under the electric lights.

Rocky Kane, lighting a cigarette and tossing the blazing match away, called loudly: “Oh, hit him! For God’s sake, do something! Don’t be afraid of a Chink!”

Doane glanced over at him. Tom rushed. Doane felt again the crash of solid body blows delivered with all the force of more than two hundred pounds of well-trained muscle behind them. Again he winced and retreated. He knew well that he could endure only a certain amount of this punishment… Suddenly Tom struck with the sharpest impact yet. Again that hard head butted his chin; an elbow and the heel of a glove roughed his face… Doane summoned all his strength to push him off. Then he stepped deliberately forward.

At last the primitive vigor in this giant was aroused. His eyes blazed. There was no manner of pleasure in hurting a fellow man of any color; but since the particular man was asking for it, insisting on it, there was no longer a choice. The fellow had clearly been trained to this foul sort of work. That would be Connor’s way, to take every advantage, place a large side bet and then make certain of winning. There was, of course, no more control of boxing out here on the coast than of gambling or other vice.

When Tom next came forward, Doane, paying not the slightest heed to his own defense, exchanged blows with him; planted a right swing that raised a welt on the yellow cheek. A moment later he landed another on the same spot.

At the sound of these blows the men about the ringside straightened up with electric excitement. Then again the long muscular right arm swung, and the tightly gloved fist crashed through Tom’s guard with a force that knocked him nearly off his balance. Doane promptly brought him back with a left hook that sounded to the now nearly frantic spectators as if it must have broken the cheek-bone.

Tom crouched, covered and backed away.

“Have you had enough?” Doane asked. As there was no reply, he repeated the question in Chinese.

Tom, instead of answering, tried another rush, floundering wildly, swinging his arms.

Doane stepped firmly forward, swinging up a terrific body blow that caught the big Chinaman at the pit of the stomach, lifted his feet clear of the floor and dropped him heavily in a sitting position, from which he rolled slowly over on his side.

“What are you trying to do?” cried the Manila Kid, above the babel of excited voices, as he rushed in there and revived his fellow champion. “What are you trying to do – kill ‘im?”

The mate stripped off his wet gloves and tossed them to the floor. “Teach your man to box fairly,” he replied, “or some one else will.” With which he stepped out of the ring, drew on his sweater and, with a courteous bow to the mandarin, went out on deck. There, after depositing with the purser the winnings paid over by a surly Connor, Dawley Kane found him.

“Well!” cried the hitherto calm financier, “you put up a remarkable fight.”

Doane looked down at him, unable to reply. He was still breathing hard; his thoughts were traveling strange paths. He heard the man saying other things; asking, at length, about the mandarin.

“He is Kang Yu,” Doane replied now, civilly enough, “Viceroy of Nanking.”

“No! Really? Why, he was in America!”

“He toured the world. He has been minister at Paris, Berlin, London, I believe. He is a great statesman – certainly the greatest out here since Li Hung Chang.”

“No – how extremely interesting!”

“He is ruler of fifty million souls, or more.” The mate had found his voice. He was speaking a thought quickly, with a very little heat, as if eager to convince the great man of America of the standing and worth of this great man of China. “He has his own army and his own mint. He controls railroads, arsenals, mills and mines. Incidentally, he is president of this line.”

“The Chinese Navigation Company? Really! You are acquainted with him yourself?”

“No. But he is a commanding figure hereabouts. And of course, I – at present I’m an employee of the Merchants’ Line.”

“Oh, yes! Yes, of course! You seem to speak Chinese.”

“Yes” – the mate’s voice was dry now – “I speak Chinese.”

A shuffling sound reached their ears. Both turned. The viceroy had come out of the cabin and was advancing toward them, followed by all his mandarins. Before them he paused, and again exchanged with the mate the charming Eastern greeting. In Chinese he said – and the language that needs only a resonant, cultured voire to exhibit its really great dignity and beauty, rolled like music from his tongue: “It will give me great pleasure, sir, if you will be my guest to-morrow at twelve.”

The mate replied, with a grave smile and a bow: “It is a privilege. I am your servant.”

They bowed again, with hands to breast. And all the mandarins bowed. Then they moved away in stately silence to their quarters aft.

Kane spoke now: “How very curious! Very curious!”

Doane said nothing to this.

“They really appear to have charm, these upper class people. It’s a pity they are so poorly adapted to the modern struggle.”

Doane looked down at him, then away. As a man acquainted with the East he knew the futility of discussing it with a Western mind; above all with the mind of a successful business man, to whom activity, drive, energy, were very religion.

His own thoughts were ranging swiftly back over two thousand years, to the strong civilization of the Han Dynasty, when disciplined Chinese armies kept open the overland route to Bactria and Parthia, that the silks and porcelains and pearls might travel safely to waiting Roman hands; to the later, richer, riper centuries of Tang and Sung, after Rome fell, when Chinese civilization stood alone, a majestic fabric in an otherwise crumbled and chaotic world – when certain of the noblest landscapes and portraits ever painted were finding expression, when philosophers held high dreams of building conflicting dogma into a single structure of comprehensive and serene faith. The Chinese alone, down the uncounted centuries, had held their racial integrity, their very language. Surely, at some mystical but seismic turning of the racial tide, they would rise again among the nations.