Samuel Merwin - In Red and Gold

ON a night in October, 1911, the river steamer Yen Hsin lay alongside the godown, or warehouse, of the Chinese Navigation Company at Shanghai. Her black hull bulked large in the darkness that was spotted with inadequate electric lights. Her white cabins, above, lighted here and there, loomed high and ghostly, extending as far as the eye could easily see from the narrow wharf beneath. Swarming continuously across the gangplanks, chanting rhythmically to keep the quick shuffling step, crews of coolies carried heavy boxes and bales swung from bamboo poles.

During the evening the white passengers were coming aboard by ones and twos and finding their cabins, all of which were forward on the promenade deck, grouped about the enclosed area that was to be at once their dining-room and “social hall.” Here, within a narrow space, bounded by strips of outer deck and a partition wall, these few casual passengers were to be caught, willy-nilly, in a sort of passing comradeship. For the greater part of this deck, amidships and aft, was screened off for the use of traveling Chinese officials, and the two lower decks would be crowded with lower class natives and freight. And, not unnaturally, in the minds of nearly all the white folk, as they settled for the night, arose questions as to the others aboard. For strange beings of many nations dig a footing of sorts on the China Coast, and odd contrasts occur when any few are thrown together by a careless fate… And so, thinking variously in their separate cabins of the meeting to come, at breakfast about the single long table, and of the days of voyaging into the heart of oldest China, these passengers, one by one, fell asleep; while through open shutters floated quaint odors and sounds from the tangle of sampans and slipper-boats that always line the curving bund and occasional shouts and songs from late revelers passing along the boulevard beyond the rows of trees.

It was well after midnight when the Yen Hsin drew in her lines and swung off into the narrow channel of the Whangpoo. Drifting sampans, without lights, scurried out of her path. With an American captain on the strip of promenade deck, forward, that served for a bridge, a yellow pilot, and Scotch engineers below decks, she slipped down with the tide, past the roofed-over opium hulks that were anchored out there, past the dimly outlined stone buildings of the British and American quarter, on into the broader Wusung. Here a great German mail liner lay at anchor, lighted from stem to stem. Farther down lay three American cruisers; and below these a junk, drifting dimly by with ribbed sails flapping and without the sign of a light, built high astern, like the ghost of a medieval trader.

“There’s his lights now!” Thus the captain to a huge figure of a man who stood, stooping a little, beside him, peering out at the river. And the captain, a stocky little man with hands in the pockets of a heavy jacket, added – “The dirty devil!”

Indeed, a small green light showed now on the junk’s quarter; and then she was gone astern.

After a silence, the captain said: “You may as well turn in.”

“Perhaps I will,” replied the other. “Though I get a good deal more sleep than I need on the river. And very little exercise.”

“That’s the devil of this life, of course. Look a’ me – I’m fat!” The captain spoke in a rough, faintly blustering tone, perhaps in a nervous response to the well-modulated voice of his mate, “Must make even more difference to you – the way you’ve lived. And at that, after all, you ain’t a slave to the river.”

“No… in a sense, I’m not.” The mate fell silent.

There were, of course, vast differences in the degrees of misfortune among the flotsam and jetsam of the coast. Captain Benjamin, now, had a native wife and five or six half-caste children tucked away somewhere in the Chinese city of Shanghai.

“We’ve gut quite a bunch aboard this trip,” offered the captain.

“Indeed?”

“One or two well-known people. There’s our American millionaire, Dawley Kane. Took four outside cabins. His son’s with him, and a secretary, and a Japanese that’s been up with him before. Wonder if it’s a pleasure trip – or if it means that the Kane interests are getting hold up the river. It might, at that. They bought the Cantey line, you know, in nineteen eight. Then there’s Tex Connor, and his old sidekick the Manila Kid, and a couple of women schoolteachers from home, and six or eight others – customs men and casuals. And Dixie Carmichael – she’s aboard. Quite a bunch! And His Nibs gets on tomorrow at Nanking.”

“Kang, you mean?”

“The same. There’s a story that he’s ordered up to Peking. They were talking about it yesterday at the office.”

“Do you think he’s in trouble?”

“Can’t say. But if you ask me, it don’t look like such a good time to be easy on these agitators, now does it? And they tell me he’s been letting ‘em off, right and left.”

The mate stood musing, holding to the rail. “It’s a problem,” he replied, after a little, rather absently.

“The funny thing is – he ain’t going on through. Not this trip, anyhow. We’re ordered to put him off at his old place, this side of Huang Chau. Have to use the boats. You might give them a look-see.”

“They’ve gossiped about Kang before this at Shanghai.”

“Shanghai,” cried the captain, with nervous irrelevancy, “is full of information about China – and it’s all wrong!” He added then, “Seen young Black lately?”

The mate moved his head in the negative.

“Consul-general sent him down from Hankow, after old Chang stopped that native paper of his. I ran into him yesterday, over to the bank. He says the revolution’s going to break before summer.”

The mate made no reply to this. Every trip the captain talked in this manner. His one deep fear was that the outbreak might take place while he was far up the river.

It had been supposed by all experienced observers of the Chinese scene, that the Manchu Dynasty would not long survive the famous old empress dowager, the vigorous and imperious little woman who was known throughout a rational and tolerant empire, not without a degree of affection, as “the Old Buddha.” She had at the time of the present narrative been dead two years and more; the daily life of the infant emperor was in the control of a new empress dowager, that Lung Yu who was notoriously overriding the regent and dictating such policies of government as she chose in the intervals between protracted periods of palace revelry.

The one really powerful personage in Peking that year was the chief eunuch, Chang Yuan-fu, a former actor, notoriously the empress’s personal favorite, who catered to her pleasures, robbed the imperial treasury of vast sums, wreaked ugly vengeance on critical censors, and publicly insulted dukes of the royal house.

All this was familiar. The Manchu strain had dwindled out; and while an empress pleased her jaded appetites by having an actor cut with the lash in her presence for an indifferent performance, all South China, from Canton to the Yangtze, seethed with the steadily increasing ferment of revolution. Conspirators ranged the river and the coast. At secret meetings in Singapore, Tokio, San Francisco and New York, new and bloody history was planned. The oldest and hugest of empires was like a vast crater that steamed and bubbled faintly here and there as hot vital forces accumulated beneath.

The mate, pondering the incalculable problem, finally spoke: “I suppose, if this revolt should bring serious trouble to Kang, it might affect you and me as well.”