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.”
“Why not?” The viceroy’s keen eyes dropped to the slightly faded blue uniform, then rested again on the strong face.
“The past few years – I will pass over the details – have been – well, not altogether happy for me. I have been puzzled. All the rich years of my younger manhood were given to the mission work. But I had to leave the church. At first I felt a joy in simple hard work – I am very strong – but hard work alone could not satisfy my thoughts.”
“No… No.”
“For a time I believed that the solution of my personal problem lay in taking the plunge into commercial life. I had come to feel, out there, that business was, after all, the natural expression of man’s active nature in our time.”
“Yes. Doubtless it is.”
“It was in that state of mind that I returned home – to the States. But it proved impossible. I am not a trader. It was too late. My character, such as it was and is, had been formed and hardened in another mold. I talked with old friends, but only to discover that we had between us no common tongue of the spirit. Perhaps if I had entered business early, as they did, I, too, would have found my early ideals being warped gradually around to the prevailing point of view.”
“The point stands out, though,” said the viceroy, “that you did not enter business. You chose a more difficult course, and one which leaves you, in ripe middle age, without the means to direct your life effectively and in comfort.”
“Yes,” mused Doane, though without bitterness. “I feel that, of course. And it is hard, very hard, to lose one’s country. Yet…”
His voice dropped. He sat, elbow on crossed knees, staring at the ever-changing river. When he spoke again, the bitter undertone was no longer in his voice. He was gentler, but puzzled; a man who has suffered a loss that he can not understand.
“All my traditions,” he said, “my memories of America, were of simple friendly communities, a land of earnest religion, of political freedom. In my thoughts as a younger man certain great figures stood out – Washington, Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Wendell Philips, Philips Brooks and – yes, Henry Ward Beecher. I had deeply felt Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. The Declaration of Independence could still fire my blood. And it was such a land of simple faith that I tried for so many years, however ineffectually, to represent here in China. To be sure, disquieting thoughts came – church disunity, the spectacle of unbridled license among so many of my fellow countrymen in the coast ports, the methods of certain of our great corporations in pushing their wares in among your people. But even when I found it necessary to leave the church, I still believed deeply in my country.”
He paused to control a slight unsteadiness of voice; then went on:
“May I ask if you, Your Excellency, after your long visits in Europe, have not come home to meet with something the same difficulty, to find yourself looking at your own people with the eyes of a stranger, receiving such an impression as only a stranger can receive?”
“Indeed, yes!” cried the viceroy softly, with deep feeling. “It is the most difficult moment, I have sometimes felt, in a man’s life. It is the summit of loneliness, for there is no man among his friends who can share his view, and there is none who would not misunderstand and censure him. And yet, a country, a people, like a city, does present to the alien eye, a complete impression, it exhibits clearly outlined characteristics that can be observed in no other way. Even the alien lose? that clear, true impression on very short acquaintance. He then becomes, like all the others, a part of the picture he has once seen.”
“It is so, Your Excellency. My country, in that first, startled, clear glance, affected me – I may as well use the word – unpleasantly. It was utterly different from anything I had known, a trader’s paradise, a place of unbelievable confusion, of an activity that bewildered, rushing to what end I could not understand.”
He was speaking now not only in the Chinese language but in the idiom as well, generalizing rhetorically as the Chinese do. It was almost as if the words came from a Chinese mind.
They were silent for a time Then the viceroy asked, in his gently abrupt way: “Why did you leave the church?”
“Because I sinned.”
“Against the church?”
“That, and my own faith.”
“Were you asked to leave?”
“No.”
“They knew of your sin?”
“I told them.”
“Yet they would have kept you?”
“Yes. My own feeling was that my superior temporized.”
“He knew your value.”
“I can not say as to that. But he wished me to marry again. I couldn’t do that – not in the spirit intended. Not as I felt.”
“We are different, Griggsby Doane, you and I. I am a Manchu, you an American. The customs of our two lands are very different. What would seem a sin to you, might not seem so to me. Yet I, too, have a conscience
