Samuel Merwin - In Red and Gold

There was a light in the kindly eyes; a strong ring in the deep voice. He went on:

“No, I am not a traitor. It is not that. It is that my country has suffered, is now prostrate, with a long sickness. She must be helped; but she must as well help herself. She is like one who has lain too long abed. She must think, arise, act. With my poor eyes I can see no other hope for her. Even though I myself may suffer, I can not, in truth to my own faith, punish those who, loving China as deeply as I myself love her, yet feel that they must goad her until she awakens from her pitiful sleep of more than six centuries… Nor am I a republican. China is not like your country. In an imperial throne I must believe. Yet, she must listen to all, study all, draw from all. Freedom of thought there must be. We must not longer worship books and the dead. We must learn to look about us and on before.”

Their chairs were drawn about to the window’s. Slowly the wide river slipped off astern.

“But you, Griggsby Doane, why are you here? This is not the life for which you so laboriously and so worthily prepared yourself. I knew of you over in T’ainan-fu. You were a true servant of your faith. After the dreadful year of the Boxers you returned to your task. And during the trouble in nineteen hundred and seven, the fighting with the Great Eye Society in Hansi, you conducted yourself with bravery. I was at Sian-fu that year, and was well informed. Yet you gave up the church mission.”

The mate’s eyes were fixed gloomily on the long vista of the river. For a moment it seemed as if he would speak; and the viceroy, seeing his lips part, leaned a little way forward; but then the lips were closed tightly and the great head bent deliberately forward.

“I knew,” continued his excellency, “when the Asiatic Company of New York was negotiating with me the contract for rebuilding the banks of the Grand Canal in Kiang-su that you had gone from T’ainan, and that you had, as well, left the church. You had even gone from China.”

“That was in nineteen nine,” said Doane, in the somber voice of one who thinks moodily aloud. “I was in America then.”

“Yes, it was in your year nineteen nine. For a time those negotiations hung, I recall, on the question of the means to be employed in dealing with local resentments. The trouble over the Ho Shan Company in Hansi, of which you knew so much and which you met with such noble courage, had taught us all to move with caution.”

“My position in that Hansi trouble has not been clearly understood, Your Excellency. I was there only, a short time, and was ill at that.”

The viceroy smiled, kindly, wisely. “You went alone and on foot from T’ainan-fu to So T’ung in the face of a Looker attack, and yourself settled that tragic business. You then walked, without even a night’s rest, the fifty-five li from T’ainan to Hung Chan. There, at the city gate, you were attacked and severely wounded, and crawled to the house of a Christian native. But while still weak and in a fever you walked the three hundred li to Ping Yang and made your way through the Looker army into Monsieur Pourmont’s compound…”

He pronounced the two words “Monsieur Pour-mont” in French. What a remarkable old man he was – mentally all alive, sensitive as a youth to the quick currents of life! The accuracy of his information, like his memory, was surprising. Though to the Westerner, every normal Chinese memory is that. Merely learning the language needs or builds a memory…

Most surprising was that so deep attention had been given to Doane’s own small case. The fact bewildered; was slow in coming home. For Kang was a great man; his proper preoccupations were many; that he was a poet, and had early aspired to the laureateship, was commonly known – indeed, Doane had somewhere his own translation of Kang’s Ode to the Rich Earth , from the scroll in the author’s calligraphy owned by Pao Ting Chuan at T’ainan-fu. As an amateur in the art of his own land of fine taste and sound historical background he was known everywhere; his collection of early paintings, porcelains, jades and jewels being admittedly one of the most valuable remaining in China. And he was reputed to be the richest individual not of the royal blood (excepting perhaps Yuan Shi K’ai).

A contrast, not untinged with a passing bitterness, arose in Doane’s mind. Here before him quietly sat this so-called yellow man who was more competent than perhaps any other to select his own art treasures and write his own poems and state papers; whose journals, known to exist, must inevitably, if not lost in a war-torn land, take their place as a part of China’s history; a man who was at once manufacturer, financier, and statesman, on whom for a decade a weakening throne had leaned. While in the cabin forward was a great white man as truly representative of the new civilization as was Kang of the old; yet who hired men of special knowledge to select the art treasures that would be left, one day, in his name and as a monument to his culture, who even employed a trained writer to pen the work that he proposed unblushingly to call his “autobiography.” For such a man as Dawley Kane, whatever his manners, Doane felt now, knew only the power of money. Through that alone his genius functioned; the rest was a lie. On the one hand was culture, on the other – something else. The thought bit into his brain.

But his excellency had not finished:

“And there, my dear Griggsby Doane, while still suffering from your wound, you learned that those in Monsieur Pourmont’s compound were cut off from communication with their nationals at Peking. You at once volunteered to go again, alone, through the Looker lines to the railhead with messages, and successfully did so… Do you wonder, my dear young friend, that knowing this, and more, of your honesty and personal force from my one-time assistant, Pao Ting Chuan, of T’ainan-fu, I pressed strongly on the gentlemen from New York who represented the Asiatic Company my desire that they secure you to act as their resident director? And do you wonder that I regretted your refusal so to act?”

This statement came to Doane as a surprise.

“They offered me a position, yes,” he said, pondering on the inexplicable ways in which the currents of life meet and cross. “But they told me nothing of your interest.”

His excellency smiled. “It might have raised your price. They would think of that. The sharpest trading, Griggsby Doane, is not done in the Orient. That I have learned from a long lifetime of struggling against the aggressions of white nations. During the discussion of the concerted loan to China – you recall it? – they talked of lending us a hundred million dollars, gold. To read your New York papers was to think that we were almost to be given the money. It seemed really a philanthropy. But do you know what their left hands were doing while their right hands waved in a fine gesture of aid to the struggling China? These were the terms. First they subtracted a large commission – that for the bankers themselves; then, what with stipulations of various sorts as to the uses to which the money – or the credit – was to be put, mostly in purchases of railway and war material from their own hongs at further huge profits to themselves, they whittled it down until the actual money to be expended under our own direction, amounted to about fifteen millions. And with that went immense new concessions – really the signing away of an empire – and new foreign supervision of our internal affairs. For all these privileges we were to pay an annual interest and later repay the full amount, one hundred millions. It was quite unbearable.” He sighed. “But what is poor old China to do?”

Doane nodded gravely. “I felt all that – the sort of thing – when I talked with representatives of the Asiatic Company. Not that I blamed them, of course. It is a point of view much larger than any of them; they are but part of a great tendency. I couldn’t go into it.”