the crowded little room.
“Well,” cried Kane petulantly, “that’s all, isn’t it? I understand! I’ll let her alone!”
“You don’t feel that an apology might be due?”
“Apologize? To that girl?”
“To her father.”
“Apologize – to a Chink?”
The word grated strangely on Doane’s nerves. Suddenly the boy cried out: “Well – that’s all? There’s nothing more you want to say? What are you – what are you looking like that for?”
The sober deep-set eyes of the mate were resting on the high dresser at the head of the berths. There, tucked away behind the water caraffe, was a small lamp with a base of cloisonné work in blue and gold and a small, half globular chimney of soot-blackened glass.
“What are you looking at? What do you mean?”
The boy writhed under the steady gaze of this huge man, who rested a big hand on the upper berth and gazed gravely down at him; writhed, tossed out a protesting arm, got to his feet and stood with a weak effort at defiance.
“Now I suppose you’ll go to my father!” he cried. “Well, go ahead! Do it! I don’t care. I’m of age – my money’s my own. He can’t hurt me. And he knows I’m on to him. Don’t think I don’t know some of the things he’s done – he and his crowd. Ah, we’re not saints, we Kanes! We’re good fellows – we’ve got pep, we succeed – but we’re not saints.”
“How long have you been smoking opium?” asked the mate.
“I don’t smoke it! I mean I never did. Not until Shanghai. And you needn’t think the pater hasn’t hit the pipe a bit himself. I never saw a lamp until he took me to the big Hong dinner at Shanghai last month. They had ‘em there. And it wasn’t all they had, either – ”
“If you are telling me the truth,” said the mate.
– “I am. I tell you I am.”
“ – Then you should have no difficulty in stopping. It would take a few weeks to form the habit. You can’t smoke another pipe on this boat.”
“But what right – good lord, if the pater would drag me out here, away from all my friends… you think I’m a rotter, don’t you!”
“My opinion is not in question. I must ask you to give me, now, whatever opium you have.”
Slowly, moodily, evidently dwelling in a confusion of sulky resentful thoughts, the boy knelt at the cupboard and got out a small card-board box.
The mate opened it, and found several shells of opium within. He promptly pitched it out over the rail.
“This is all?” he asked.
“Well – look in there yourself!”
But the mate was looking at the suit-case, and at the trunk beneath the lower berth.
“You give me your word that you have no more?”
“That’s – all,” said the boy.
The mate considered this answer; decided to accept it; turned to go. But the boy caught at his sleeve.
“You do think I’m a rotter!” he cried. “Well, maybe I am. Maybe I’m spoiled. But what’s a fellow to do? My father’s a machine – that’s what he is – a ruthless machine. My mother divorced him ten years ago. She married that English captain – got the money out of father for them to live on, and now she’s divorced him. Where do I get off? I know I’m overstrung, nervous. I’ve always had everything I want. Do you wonder that I’ve begun to look for something new? Perhaps I’m going to hell. I know you think so. I can see it in your eyes. But who cares!”
Doane stood a long time at the rail, thinking. The ship’s clock in the social hall struck eight bells. Faintly his outer ear caught it. It was time to join his excellency.
CHAPTER III – MISS HUI FEI
THE luncheon table of his excellency was simply set, with two chairs of carven blackwood, behind a high painted screen of six panels. It was at this screen that the first mate (left by a smiling attendant) gazed with a frown of incredulity. Cap in hand, he stepped back and studied the painting, a landscape representing a range of mountains rising above mist in great rock-masses, chasms where tortured trees clung, towering, lagged peaks, all partly obscured by the softly luminous vapor – a scene of power and beauty. Much of the brighter color had faded into the prevailing tones of old ivory yellow shading into some thing near Rembrandt brown; though the original, reds and blues still held vividly in the lower right foreground, where were pictured very small, exquisite in detail yet of as trifling importance in the majestic scheme of the painting as are man and his works in all sober Chinese thought when considered in relation to the grim majesty of nature, a little friendly cluster of houses, men at work, children at play, domestic animals, a stream with a water buffalo, a bridge, a wayfarer riding a donkey, and cultivated fields. The ideographic signature was in rich old gold, inscribed with unerring decorative instinct on a flat rock surface.
The mate bent low and looked closely at the brush-work; then stepped around an end panel and examined the texture of the silk.
“Ah!” – it was a musical deep voice, speaking in the mandarin tongue – “you admire my screen, Griggsby Doane.” The name was pronounced in English.
His excellency wore a short jacket of pale yellow over a skirt of blue, both embroidered in large circles of lotus flowers around centers of conventional good-fortune designs, in which the swastika was a leading motive. His bared head was shaved only at the sides, as the top had long been bald. He looked gentle and kind as he stood leaning on his cane and extending a wrinkled hand; smiling in the fashion of forthright friendship. The thin little gray beard, the unobtrusively courteous eyes, the calm manner, all gave him an appearance of simplicity that made it momentarily difficult to think of him as the great negotiator of the tangled problems of statesmanship involved in the expansion of Japan, the man who very nearly convinced Europe of American good faith during the agitated discussion and correspondence that arose out of the “Open Door” proposals of John Hay, a man known among the observant and informed in London, Paris and Washington as a great statesman and a greater gentleman.
“I thought at first” – thus the mate, touched by the fine honor done him (an honor that would, he quickly felt, demand tact on the bridge) – “that it was a genuine Kuo Hsi.”
“No. A copy.”
“So I see. A Ming copy – at least the silk appears to be Ming – the heavy single strand, closely woven. And the seals date very closely. If it were woven of double strands, even in the warp alone, I should not hesitate to call it a genuine Northern Sung.”
“You observe closely, Griggsby Doane. It is supposed that Ch’uan Shih made this copy.” His smile was now less one of kindness and courtesy than, of genuine pleasure. “You shall see the original.”
“You have that also, Your Excellency?”
“In my home at Huang Chau.”
“I have never seen a genuine panting of Kuo Hsi. It would be a great privilege. I have read some of the sayings attributed to him, as taken down by his son. One I recall – ‘If
