Front matter (continued 2)

"Quite the usual thing, is it?"

"Of late. They're just children."

"Are they apt to get any less good-natured?"

"Yes, they have suffered much. They do not understand."

Romney fingered the pistol. "I feel quite like a boy," he remarked. "There's a charm about this thing. I never shot one before—without everybody standing well back."

Ti Kung's hand darted over and touched Romney's appreciatively.

4

It was the end of the promised three days. Romney was dressing for dinner when there was a tap at the inlaid door, and Dr. Ti Kung entered with grave smile and hand outstretched. For just a second he had looked into Romney's eyes. His manner showed neither relief nor surprise; nor did he offer any comment upon the rallied manhood which he must have observed.

Romney had climbed a stiff grade in the three days. They went below for dinner, but it was not until their coffee was served and the catfooted servant was gone, that Dr. Ti Kung appeared to note the patience of his companion.

"Doubtless, Mr. Romney," he began, "you have been wondering a good deal why I brought you to my home, and toward what end things were trending here. The time has come for me to enlighten you somewhat."

The American lit a pipe he favoured and Dr. Ti Kung drew his chair closer. They were alone.

"I saw you laughing there in the Street of the Lepers—or was it the Street of the Ever-lasting Spring?" continued the Chinese. "To me it symbolised the blending of America with my poor country. We are now without veils between us. I was in a most serious mood that morning, anxious with the weight of many affairs.

"You sat upon the stone steps with the beggars beside you, laughing. You were in the glow of events—at one with those about you. You used to say back in college, 'To hell with it,' that most ingenious of many wonderful American remarks. I thought of that. I said to myself, 'Huan Ti Kung, you are heavy; you are long-faced. Why should you bear your burdens with such labour? If you fail, very good. If you win, especially good, but having done the best you can—'To hell with it.'

"So you see, Mr. Romney, you offered me a fine message that morning, and after all I was very fond of you from the beginning. So, here we are. I promise you days of excitement. You have seen from the little episode in front of the Provincial House last night, that all China does not love me. I counted it a good omen that you saved me from a wound. You may have the pleasure again. But supposing you had not, or supposing you were not quite so quick the next time—'To hell with it!'"

Romney leaned forward. He knew that the foregoing was simply the Oriental way of introducing a subject of real moment. He felt new inside, mind and will.

Dr. Ti Kung continued:

"I look upon you now with great satisfaction. You are free and adventurous, and you are my strong friend. You are a mind—an interpreter of our life. We need all these things from you. You know how poor China is distressed at this hour—"

He leaned forward and spoke very softly. The long low room in which they dined was empty, yet the voice was pitched to reach Romney's ears and no farther.

"... I did not go ashore in the Japanese ports on the way home, but I heard much from those who did. It happened that I became so interested in you that much of the first day here in Shanghai was consumed. The three days since, I have been catching up, studying the events that came to pass during the two weeks' voyage—events, Mr. Romney, that the world is too intensely occupied to notice, but which we Chinese regard with finality and deepest foreboding.

"As you perhaps know, the Japanese have demanded from us all that we hold dear. They are a fighting people, whetted by recent victories. There are three parties here in China: Old China, which says 'We will temporize,' the Middle Party which says, 'We will fight,' and the party—"

Romney knew instinctively that the destiny of Ti Kung was aligned with this third one; and yet he supposed that it was also a fighting destiny.

"And the third one," the Doctor repeated, "which believes that war as the Japanese know it; that war as it is being waged on French and Polish and Carpathian fields at this moment, is a stupid and ancient activity, having no part with what the best men of all countries know—"

"But," said Romney, "it's the Japanese way. They may bring the fighting to you—fighting such as they know. You may say that war is archaic rot, but if it is to be met, must it not be met with force?"

"Of course, but not with force of the same nature," said Dr. Ti Kung.

"You mean to say that this third party in China is going to stand pat on the expediency of toleration. The Hindus have taken a hundred years—"

"Not exactly that," said Dr. Ti Kung. "We believe that Japan can be stupefied—even strangled."

A servant entered at this moment and spoke to Dr. Ti Kung—a hurried sentence. Voices from the street now reached them, as if an outer door had suddenly blown open.

Dr. Ti Kung arose quickly, beckoning Romney to follow. They made their way to the rear of the house and into the garden.

"Another little engagement. So glad you appreciate these absurd affairs. You have your pistol?"

"Yes—I have become attached to it."

Ti Kung thrust a packet of papers into Romney's hands.

"These are invaluable and safer with you. In case I am separated from you or hurt, deliver the packet in person to the address in the inner envelope, Tientsin. Now we must get over the masonry."

Together they lifted a bench from the poolside to the wall. Romney helped his companion over the jagged glass on the coping. He then removed his coat and laid it upon the top for his own passage over, his hands and arms already bleeding. On the coping, he perceived that Ti Kung was not alone below. Romney landed upon his feet between two struggling figures. A knife burned his back. He kicked with effect in the direction it came.

Meanwhile he called for Ti Kung, and a hand came up to him from below. The assailant had vanished. Something in the touch of that hand made him know that his friend was badly hurt.

"As little noise as you can, Romney," came a whisper. "There will be others upon us. Are you hurt?"

"No, are you?"

"I am afraid—a little. Help me up. We must get away from here with all speed. Have you the packet?"

Romney left him and sprang to the wall's coping for his coat, pulling it loose from the glass. The papers dropped out as the coat fell.

"Yes," he answered, "I'm glad you mentioned that. I'll be more careful hereafter."

"Do," said Ti Kung, regaining his feet.

They were in a passage of almost utter darkness. The Chinese was making poor work of walking. The American lifted him forward and listened for direction from a voice that grew weaker as moments passed. All was silent behind.

"I need sewing up," the Chinese whispered. "It's very unfortunate.... That light ahead is the Grotto Road. We will be safe there. If consciousness leaves me, put me in a carriage, paying the driver and speaking the words, Sarenji loopni; then make your way as rapidly as possible, taking the papers with you, to a gentleman named Minglapo, in Merchant's Square, Tienstin—full directions inside outer envelope."

Romney reached the lights of Grotto Road with the form of the Oriental sagging limp in his arms from loss of blood. It looked like death to the American. The hardest, or possibly next to the hardest thing he ever did, was to obey orders. It was very far from Romney's way to leave a friend in a plight, but this he was called upon to do.

Whatever it meant, the driver seemed to understand, but to Romney, there was something altogether too frail in the words Sarenji loopni to send a friend away with. The driver accepted his coin, closed the door of the vehicle, and whipped away, leaving Romney standing alone under the dim street light. He watched the vehicle out of sight, and began for the first time to feel the effects of the night's activities. Under his torn coat he was wet with blood. He transferred the packet of papers to a safer pocket, lit his pipe thoughtfully, and then it occurred that he must set out for Tientsin that night either by rail or the sea.

5

Minglapo was a dealer in inlays of wood and pearl and jewels. His shop in Merchant's Square, Tientsin, was a still place of many riches. Minglapo sat in the far shadows, an elderly Chinese of large unwrinkled bulk and a voice like the wonderful water-music in Fingal's cave.

The large part of a week was required for Romney to reach this shop, for they do not travel great distances over night as yet in China. When he sat down before Minglapo his faculties at first were deeply occupied with the problem of where he had seen this old master before. It dawned upon him at last that he hadn't, but that Minglapo when he shut his eyes was almost identical in feature and color with a death-mask of Beethoven that had hung on his study-wall back in Palo Alto.

"I came from a gentleman named Dr. Ti Kung," Romney began.

Minglapo bowed.

"My orders were not very explicit. I believe that there was an order-book that he asked me to deliver to you," the American resumed, perfectly aware that a direct statement of facts would have discountenanced the Oriental. "It was all very hurried at the last. He was stricken with illness in the street, and turning to me, a comparative stranger, asked me to deliver this package to you. With that he was helped into a carriage and driven away."

"Yes," said Minglapo, raising his eyebrows just a trifle, "the order-book—you have it?"

Romney was startled at the English, quick, concise—the speech of a Chinese who had been among the younger peoples for many years. He drew forth the yellow packet and gave it to the other.

Now Minglapo was sitting upon a raised dais, several sumptuous rugs between him and the polished wood. He sat upon his limbs, and smoked continuously.

The large envelope was opened and a certain paper drawn forth. This he perused at first with surprise and impatience; then with a beam of humour which opened into laughter wide and deep. Minglapo was a spectacle in this giving forth. His body rippled under the silks; the ashen yellow left his face and neck, giving way to rising ruddiness, the yellowish eyelids dropped, suggesting the mask again, but this was broken by the open mouth. Mastering all was the sound—soft, intoned laughter, full of leisureliness and music; not infectious exactly, since one who witnessed it first was too awed to be drawn in—a surpassing wonder over all. The teeth of this elderly Oriental were like the teeth of a young woman.

Minglapo subsided by imperceptible gradations, and lifting his eyelids at length, surveyed Romney as one newly awakened from sleep.

"This is a most wonderful order-book," he said slowly.

Minglapo was rippling again under his gown as he replaced the papers in the envelope. The inscrutability of the fat figure challenged Romney. It occurred to him that if he should start to go, something of finality might come from the impressive figure. He cleared his throat and arose.

"Dr. Ti Kung, as I have said, gave me no further orders before the door of his carriage closed upon him. I presume, having fulfilled my task, that it would be well for me to return to Shanghai—"

"Very naturally," said Minglapo.

"Then I will bid you good-day."

The Chinese was holding the yellow packet in his hand. A further sheet had been drawn forth, glanced at, and returned. Minglapo's hands were perfect. The face of the envelope toward Romney was but partly covered by the eight beautiful fingers that held the paper lightly, while the face bowed above. The eyelids narrowed and the corners of the mouth were sunken, the broad, bland forehead, just faintly ruffled. There came to the white man a sense of prodigious power, as if this man's thought could manipulate the destinies of other men; as if behind that brow a conception was now forming so clean-cut in all its processes that instant action must follow its maturity. A suspicion dawned upon him that this man was strong enough to be Ti Kung's master.

Minglapo rose almost imperceptibly.

"Mr. Romney." The voice halted him. "Your friend informed me you were coming some time ago. I have been expecting you. Please sit down."

Romney smiled.

"It would be natural, as I said before, for you to return to Shanghai, except that I have heard from Dr. Ti Kung, who, I perceive, picks well his associates. These are delicate matters; these are times to try men's souls. Our friend is now healing at sea. I am grievously concerned, however, over wounds that could delay such a man for six days. Much depends upon his coming. The character of Dr. Ti Kung's service cannot be duplicated. In saving his life, Friend Romney, you have done one of those significant things upon which the destiny of a great people hangs, and an action that can never be publicly known. It is with utmost pleasure that I ask you to remain under my roof. I hope that we may succeed in making you comfortable in the interval before your friend arrives. There is to be a particular servant for you in this house—one of my favourites—"

Minglapo clapped his hands, and a small but almost perfect creature of the boy-class appeared, alert in every sense and apparently without inertia.

"This is Bamban. He is yours, Friend Romney, and you who know so much of China realize that a bestowal of this kind between man and man means that Bamban is no longer my servant."

Fastidious in his ways, swift and delicate in all his doings, Bamban appeared to embrace his new master with the sudden look of eager intelligence which shot out from under his lifted brows. Romney knew enough about China to realise that Bamban held something in the deeps of his being that could not be transferred. At the same time he knew that only some significant treachery on his own part toward the interests of Minglapo could ever call this reservation into action.

In the several days following Romney became convinced that he was being studied in ways beyond Western ingenuity to fathom; and though he was schooled to be guileless in intent and at the same time wise as the serpent, the processes of surveillance which he imagined about him were either above or below his own levels. He had nothing to conceal, and no plan apart. He met all fancied subtleties by being himself, just that, which in the case of uncomplicated purpose is the invariable master-stroke. The fact is, Romney had learned much from the Great Drift. He could let himself go. His nerves had left the surface once more, covered themselves in the cushions of health. He did not know the particular passion that drove Ti Kung and Minglapo, but he felt it big and gripping. He even felt at last that he was identified with a movement potent and far-reaching enough to command those powers of his which all his former dealings with men made him repress.

Though Minglapo did not appear to be a man of great riches, there were objects of priceless beauty in his establishment, which was a shop only on the street floor. No one appeared to buy while Romney was there. Once while the American was standing in the rear of the shop, the floor raised a little before his feet, and he was aware of a deep oil-lit basement that had every look and indication of being a fully equipped chemical laboratory—vials, flames and crucibles, tables with spawn-trays and culture-boards. An oppressive, earthy breath as from fungoid growths touched Romney's nostrils from the opened trap. Minglapo called him to the dais at that instant and the trap itself was abruptly closed. The Chinese upon whose shoulder the door had been raised did not emerge. There was something aged and wasted about the figure, the eyes spent and hollow.

Romney enjoyed the challenging mystery of it all. The two upper floors, high-ceiled and extending far back from the street, formed little less than a palace. Ti Kung's house in Shanghai was austere as a monastery compared. Romney found himself surrounded with luxuries startling even with his considerable acquaintance in the East. Ensconced here in the midst of influences insistently languorous, he was amused to find a tendency of his own character to tighten rather than to let down. The first night in Ti Kung's house had seemed to straighten him out and render distasteful abandonment such as he had known. Abandonment here, he was well aware, would bring about the same results as the wastrel days on the water-fronts. He had entered into that with the fixed purpose of letting life go. It had refused to leave him, and now he was rather distantly glad to be alive.

In his own quarters, on the second day, he drew forth the frayed and soiled chiffon waist, washed it carefully and put it back in his breast. It was no more than a handkerchief. It had seen him through strange days and roads. He was the least maudlin of men, but the little fabric meant something striking and imperishable in his nature—something of him no longer, but around him. She was not the woman, but she had made the picture of what a woman could be. The farther from her, the more he appreciated. She had known in two weeks what it had taken him nearly a year to find out—that they were not for each other. The change had come to him from the months in the Drift—something to break his unparalleled infatuation. All her wonder and daring and splendour remained clear, and yet the terrible draw of her had somehow eased upon his heart. In a word, he saw as quite true another of her sayings—that love can never be on one side alone in a great romance.

Late the fifth afternoon of his stay in the house of Minglapo, Romney got the first inkling of the real business at hand. There had been talk at the dais for several moments, when the old master turned at the soft swinging of one of the shop's rear doors, and without finishing the sentence on his tongue, remarked:

"And now, Friend Romney, you are ready to meet a countryman of yours, General Nifton Bend—"

Very low in the doorway appeared that long, sad, strange face, and again the leap in Romney's breast and the impulse to hurry forward and help the Hunchback to the cushions. At the same time—a hot thrill for an unemotional man—the thought that his association with Ti Kung and Minglapo meant association with Nifton Bend, the genius of Young China.

At the moment of the General's entrance from the rear, the servants had sprung to the main door opening on Merchant's Square, closed and barred it as if for the night, though the afternoon was not entirely spent. The servants of the shop were banished and the three sat down together....

Romney's mind had rushed back not only to his first meeting in the native professor's house in the Congrou district of Peking, but to Longstruth's where his impressions of that brief former interview became vivid and animate again for the listening of Moira Kelvin. The Hunchback seemed to bring again something of her almost as intimate as her perfume....

Daylight did not reach them now. The dead expressionless look had come again to the General's eyes. Romney felt his own face turn bloodless under the second appraisal, as was the other's in the warm gathering dusk. The unhasting and uninflected voice spoke again—the voice of a man with a single purpose, a man so close to the end that he laughs at pain. The words came slow and steadily, like running water:

"... We are working for the future of China. We may be wrong. We are doing the thing as we see it. Our deepest convictions are that we are right. We do not mean to meet Japan in this extraordinary crisis in the old fashion of arms and battle-lines. We do not care to fight. We favour theoretically the expediency of toleration, and yet we observe to the east and south, India, and on the north and west, Japan. Old India is magnificent in philosophy and yet so far without the physical impulse to protect herself; Japan, empty-minded, imitative, is furious with the idea of her own raw power of men and guns. If mind is a finer and more potent force than matter, we believe that guns and explosives and battle-lines are to be mastered by a thought. It cannot be written that Chinese age and wisdom shall succumb to the upstart and hot-headed people that has not even a language of its own—"

Nifton Bend's face was lit. Romney did not comprehend. This man, an authority on arms and military matters, spoke now against their use in case of war with Japan. He may have been a mystic in so far as his vision of the future went, but he had been enough of the manipulator of matter to make the new Chinese army. Did he plan to use some force of extermination more powerful than gases and explosives?

Minglapo now spoke to Romney, though his hand affectionately touched Nifton Bend's shoulder.

"We have learned to accept a lift of the General's eyelid, Friend Romney. He had not been thirty seconds in this room before you were approved. Already Dr. Ti Kung had approved you—and I. Still you would not have touched this inner circle as now but for your action in saving our Doctor's life. It appears they burned his house that night in Shanghai. You were intrusted with papers that contain certain of our plans. You may be asked to carry them again—even to Japan. There is for you a possibility of being an instrument toward the ending of all war from the world. China need act but once to end all war. It is a superb adventure for you, and incidentally you will be a power in preventing the world-calamity of a Japanese Asia."

Nifton Bend now spoke again:

"The history of that package which you so safely brought to us would make the raciest of novels. Once I hoped to become a novelist myself. That was in the days before the big dream of being a foster-child to the ancient Yellow Mother. In order that you may not be troubled longer by working in the dark, I am going to tell you something of what the yellow packet contains—"

And now there was the snap of a bone—the unmistakable snap of a faulty knee-cap, from the far end of the room. Nifton Bend's utterance was cut short. Romney glanced quickly at the two faces. Minglapo's hands lifted slowly from the cushions. They seemed to waver a moment—then were clapped together. No servant appeared. It had undoubtedly been a servant of the household and had he been innocent he would have responded to the master's signal. Minglapo clapped his hands a second time, louder, and Romney saw in his eye what to him was unmistakably a command to make haste toward the part of the shop from which the snap had come. Rising, he heard a cry from Minglapo and was conscious of Nifton Bend making for the door to the right of the room. From overhead and from the hall-way outside was now heard the stirring and hurried approach of servants.

Romney skirted the shadowy edge of the long rear-hall, running silently on tip-toe. All that he saw at the far end was a slight movement, as of a door being softly shoved to. It had moved possibly no more than an inch. The American pushed it open. This rear-room was empty, and there was no sound whatsoever. He crossed quickly to a further door which opened to a dim hall. A crouched figure came to a stop at the far end under Romney's eye—the decrepit figure he had seen for an instant under the lifted trap to the basement. One of the servant's hands was concealed under his blouse.

6

Certain aspects of the affair which followed were ridiculous, and others profoundly Asiatic. Romney had felt himself far removed from the need of physical encounter with any human being, and yet as he came close to the tense bowed figure of the Chinese, the meaning of the concealed hand darted to his mind, also the sense that he must act quickly in an aggressive way or withdraw again out of the reach of the striking arm. It has been observed that, generally speaking, it was easier for Romney to advance than to withdraw. There was another point in that fraction of a second. He could not use a hand or foot upon an Oriental bowed with years—not even to disarm him. The fact is Romney dove forward, a sort of hip-tackle, the idea being to carry the servant's body to the floor with his arms pinned. After they had bumped the polished wood together as one, he was disagreeably shocked at the extreme emaciation of the figure beneath him. This turned in a moment to astonishment at the extraordinary strength and agility which the Oriental displayed. There was a crush in the thin hard limbs twined about his own, and the hands were not to be held captive, but darted again and again to the girdle where the knife lay. Romney flattened his weight upon the lithe body and struggled for possession of the tearing, cutting fingers which sometimes found his face and again burrowed into the pressure between them. It was Minglapo's voice and foot that stilled the struggle, the latter placed disdainfully upon the neck of his house-servant.

Romney strolled back to the dais ashamed of himself somehow. Minglapo and Nifton Bend joined him a moment later, and rather quietly, as if they appreciated the delicacy of the white man. The emaciated one was brought in by two house-servants. He stood now before the master of the shop, trying to repress the heavy breathing of his exhausted body, and to cover as well as he could the trembling of his muscles from the recent strain. Something of warmth and approval crept into Romney's heart for the old man, as the pregnant meanings of the moment cleared in his mind. Minglapo dismissed the servants and regarded the trapped one, as Romney imagined, with something of strange kindness. Shutting his eyes, the vast head of the master moved slowly from right to left, then bowed before the American.

"Again you are our good genius, Friend Romney.... There appears a need wherever you are—of fast action. I am beginning to believe in what our Doctor says of the thing called American luck."

Romney waved his hand deprecatingly, and the General remarked with a smile:

"Our young friend feels with very good cause that he has better gifts for us than the force and swiftness of his hands."

He turned to Romney, adding:

"Do you not see that it was imperative for Young China to find the owner of that badly-hinged knee? Our enemies would have required but little more than a report of our words before that accident. I trust there has been no mistake as to one of these being the lucky knees."

He pointed to the house-servant's thin legs, and presently Romney fell once more into the charm of Minglapo's voice, though a tension was increasing in his mind in regard to the fate of the captive, his eyes turning often to the hollow-eyed one, as the voice of Minglapo came to his ears as from the deeps of a bubbling well. From none but a fat man with a great chest could such softness and volume issue.

The trembling of the servant's body resulted from exertion, not from fear. His features were sombre and changeless as the east at evening—a face of deep intelligence, but just a wrapping of yellow-pale tissue on the bony block of it, except for the burning quiet of the eyes. The ears were decently cut, the mouth and brow were good. Deference, attention, apprehension—these three were expressed and held in order by a concentration that was no less than mastery.

Nifton-Bend had also satisfied himself in study of that face. Minglapo was now questioning his servant in Chinese.

... Fifty years old ... served in this house for two years ... came from the South, from Canton ... papers in his possession to prove this...

Nifton Bend leaned forward to straighten the fringe of the cushions at Romney's knee and whispered:

"They all have papers. He is Japanese—as we shall doubtless prove—"

The talk went on. It appeared that Minglapo was interested in the same point that the General had just expressed, for presently he made a gesture to bring the servant down to his level. The lifeless eyes rolled backward for the fraction of a second as the wasted figure obeyed. He bent but one knee in his kneeling, his right leg thrust back loosely, the left bearing the full weight. The three also watched intently. Again the warmth surged up into Romney's throat—a curious fondness for the Oriental's courage and guile.

Now Minglapo stretched forth his hand to his servant's head and drew it forward into his lap. Silently and resigned, the other submitted. Still the left knee did double service. Very carefully Minglapo examined the man's crown, tweaking the queue with tense fingers, peering into the braid close to the scalp, letting the tight black length of it pass before his eyes slowly, as if watching the gloss of it under the lamp-light. This braid alone of him seemed fully alive.

"The queue is right enough. He has probably been in the service for many years, ever since a little boy—probably helped to map Manchuria—like as not helped to whip us in '95. Worked here two years waiting for to-night, and then, just a little dryness of the knee—"

Minglapo bade his servant stand once more. Nifton Bend leaned forward, placing his hand upon the loose right knee.

The servant explained that it was a bit rheumatic; that the pain was unbearable when he bent it.

"I'm afraid he will have to bend it," Minglapo said.

A look of agony swept across the servant's face, as the master commanded him to bend both knees at the same time. The force of will now called into action was so intense as to be like a frictional heat in the room. He lowered himself slowly, the weight seemingly equally divided in both limbs. He was now sitting on his heels, Oriental fashion. Minglapo waved him up again, and commanded him to repeat the exercise with a quick movement.

The tell-tale snap filled the room.

There was something exquisite to Romney in the fact that not one of the three faces to whom this was like an ultimatum, changed. Not the trace of a smile, nor light of triumph appeared in the eyes of Minglapo or the General. A hundred times more, they respected this old man as a captive spy, than when he was merely one of the house-force. They respected him perhaps as only one gamester can respect another.... Minglapo went on speaking, but slowly, fragmentarily now. He clapped his hands. A servant came and returned immediately bringing a small lacquered box.

"Is he not superb?" Nifton Bend whispered.... "They train them from childhood. The Japanese system of espionage is far-reaching—ah, look there."

Minglapo had reached forward and lifted the blue loose-hanging blouse of the spy, rolling it well up above the shoulders. The bare brown chest and back showed scarred and blackened from some terrible maiming in the past. There were series of lumpy welts upon the back which Minglapo examined minutely. The disfigurations of the chest were of a different nature, long pale scars over which the skin stretched with a honey-like transparency.

"One of the most trusted of his kind beyond a doubt," said Nifton Bend. "This is not the first time he has been caught. Those three-barred welts on his back are from the Siberian knout, a devilish contrivance made of knotted whip-cord soaked in brine. The dark rashy appearance in spots is also from the North—frost-bite. We have a hero in our midst, Mr. Romney, one of the real ones whose names are never known."

The spy stood perfectly unemotional, looking upward, turning obediently whenever Minglapo took his arm.

"... He knows it is his last half-hour—"

The last was in a sense abrupt to Romney. He had been so absorbed in the whole game of these passionate nationalists, that the life and death end of it for the one caught had been put aside from his mind for the moment.

Minglapo arose and drew a goblet of water from the cooler, opened the lacquer box, took forth a small metal case which contained a long needle.

The pressure of it all was now a trifle heavy, even for the well-repressed American. The excellence of physical manhood manifested in the whole affair did not take away entirely the fact that the spy was about to be murdered. Romney felt he could not stay. His head turned to Minglapo and back to Nifton Bend. Their faces were expressionless and half averted. They would have accepted a reversal that meant death to them, with the same external calm that characterized the manner of the spy.... Yet the American could not lift. He was no stranger to the various fashions of brutality, but the temptation to pluck the stupor needle from the hand of Minglapo was well nigh overpowering. The unoccupied hand of the master was now held out toward the servant as if to take his arm. Very slowly the spy's hand lifted from his side, the palm toward Minglapo's, moving forward as one would grope in the dark. Over his face was that same eternal quietude like a faint reflection of day in the sky at evening.

That tableau seemed immortally fixed in Romney's mind. He leaned forward, his hands gripping his ankles as he sat.... Suddenly the principal was plucked from the centre of things. It was the queerest extraction—a sort of side-lurching as if the spy's body had been hurled past....

A quick shot from Nifton Bend at Romney's left—the voice of Minglapo in English—then a crash of glass and frame as the body of the spy hurled itself through the forward casement.

"Your work, Friend Romney. Get him, or all is ruined!" this from Minglapo.

As he darted across the room Romney realised that it did appear to be his work, that the house-servants were not to be trusted, that Minglapo was fat and the General maimed from birth. He dove through the pearl casement, somewhat enlarging the opening the other had made, and the street took him—a stunning impact. Then came a curious realisation of the freshness of evening.

The spy was up and away, the American following at a pace not adjusted to distance, a sprint which could not have lasted two hundred yards.

7

A boy runs, an animal runs, but a white man cannot preserve his esteem chasing a native through a Chinese street. Still the words of Minglapo rang in his ears—"Your work, Romney. Get him or all is ruined."

Other thoughts flashed as he ran—thoughts having to do with the changing and colouring of the Oriental maps, the end of a warring world, the strange patience and passion of practical visionaries like Minglapo and Nifton Bend and Dr. Ti Kung.

He ran with his elbows tucked in, his head forward. The spy, turning often, would have seen but for the duck a face that did not know how to quit. Yet Romney who knew what physical condition meant was surprised at his own lack of form. The Japanese ran with a limp—ran for his Emperor in whose service he had given youth and all the fine edge of his vitality. It was not until he was spent that he turned fox. Luck was not with him. The white man neared and the streets they passed furnished no hiding place, not even an open door. At his last turn Romney met a creature on the ground with fists upraised. Perhaps at no other time would he have found the spy without a weapon.

The fists of an Oriental are always pathetic, but these were piteously so. Romney did not join action with them, but sat down on a door-step, gasping, laughing a little. The ludicrous cringing attitude was a clue to a still greater pathos. The white man in his exhaustion was struck again suddenly with the darkness of the whole drama. Why should he return this heroic little figure to his death? It was true that he was somehow in the service of the Big Three, that he had touched the secrets of their devoted lives, but now, as in the shop of Minglapo, the great zeal and patience, the unswerving fealty of this spy's service to his most human and impossible God, had a merit to it that touched him where he was tenderest. Nifton Bend and the two Chinese leaders meant adventure; reinstatement into the world of real men; more than that they meant initiation into the deepest crafts of men.... Ti Kung had picked him up from the gutter of the world's darkest slum, placed him on his feet, trusted him with a matter of life and death, sent him on a journey to his masters. Minglapo was a figure to tie to; and as for the Hunchback, Romney had uncovered an emotion that startled himself. He knew now what it meant to love a leader—something of the old mystery of what it means to die for another.

And yet they had thrust their responsibilities upon him. To take back this old man, all broken with exhaustion, meant to deliver him to his death. The personal side of the subject was big and near. He had run down the spy but didn't know what to do with him.... The little Jap had his life to live, his work to do. He had already done great silent unanswering tasks. He lay face downward on the turf now, panting hard—too old a man, his vitality too far spent, to be used so roughly.

The fact that Romney had been too long in Asia to care much for Japan and her ambitions and that he was deeply called to the mysterious activities of such men as the Big Three, didn't change a whit his incapacity just now.

He sat down on a doorstep, just at the feet of the spy, and mopped his brow laughingly, though his mental movements were heavy and severe. The way he personally panted and perspired, disgusted a mind in which the old ideal of an athlete still remained.... He saw for the first time the expediency of Pilate's memorable washing of hands.... The sound of hurried footsteps came up the narrow way.

Romney gambled with himself. If these were Minglapo's servants—the affair of course was out of his hands. If not—well, he couldn't exactly let the Jap escape with information that would betray the lives and work of his friends.... The hurrying feet had not to do with the house of Minglapo. They were Tientsin policemen—three of them—summoned to duty doubtless by the chase. Perceiving the American now, and his game on the ground before him, they brought lanterns to bear upon the two faces, talked long and with much gravity. Romney blinked into the lantern light again, an extra-long exposure. Then his life-story in full was hypothecated by one of the officers. The two others afterward relieved themselves of prolonged intonations in many high keys, having little to do with the facts of the case. Their manner became sumptuously courteous, even deferential, so that the American felt in justice to them he should rise from the doorstep. They touched his elbows on either side—slight, lifting pressures, bowing repeatedly to him and pointing over their shoulders in a direction contrary to the shop in Merchant's Square. Romney did not care to return just then to Minglapo. In fact, he doubted whether he ever would again. Two of the officers had lifted the spy between them.

As they walked, a little ray came down upon the American from the future. Policemen meant calaboose, even in China. Calaboose meant on some occasions an inconvenient chance to think. Minglapo of course would exert himself in behalf of them, but delivery meant a return to the dais and resumption of the murder process. Meanwhile in the little old head walking behind, between the two Chinese policemen, were facts and suspicions enough to break entirely what Romney was willing to grant as the biggest game in Asia at the present moment.... Just now it occurred that a properly trained Japanese spy would be able to talk in English, which would prove utterly unintelligible to the Chinese police.

"Oh, I say, we'd better fix matters somehow—so we'll pull together—"

"Good," came the answer.

"You—why didn't you say something before?"

"There was nothing to say. I expected death when I fell in the street—"

"I suppose that was my business."

"I do not understand—"

Romney was charged with queer elation. He would have known the spy was Japanese by his English—probably a University of Tokyo training. He was familiar with Japanese students. Always they bent forward with the effort of thinking in a foreign language. The Chinese were inclined to sit back and let the other do the heavy work of listening.

"You mean you don't understand why I didn't kill you?"

"Yes, that is what I mean."

"I'm not a murderer. I haven't got anything against you."

"Then you are not with them?"

"Yes—"

"I do not understand—"

It was the East and West again, a chasm that could not be bridged. Romney dropped the subject.

"We'd better fix matters—as to what front is best to put up—"

"Front?"

"What we'd better tell them, so that our stories will fit—"

"Stories?"

"Listen," said Romney, straining for the non-idiomatic. "They will ask questions at the station. We must answer. If we answer differently, it would be better if we had not spoken—"

"Yes. I am your servant. We had a disagreement. You started to beat me and I ran—"

"Just a little domestic difference," Romney remarked.

"Yes."

"Where do we live?"

"I came with you from Shanghai four days ago. We have been in the country since arrival—"

Romney was further amused. Minglapo had been studiously avoided in the arrangement. The spy had a fertile mind. These things were a part of his work. He was aware even of Romney's coming from Shanghai.

"You are not to remember the place we have been since Shanghai and Tongu," the Japanese added. "I have been showing you our country. You are rich. You just play and pay.... You must speak sharp to me now, as if you did not like my talk—"

Romney noisily rebuked his servant. The hands of the little policeman tightened on his arm. "Good," said the Japanese in frightened, cringing tones. "Now I will explain to them that I am your servant and that you were displeased with me."

There were suspended explanations to the policeman; long, voluble breaths and fresh beginnings, as if the spy were releasing a memorized address; after that a moment of silence, and a low wailing sentence in English:

"It does not please them altogether."

They were locked presently in the same cell. Voices of the drugged and drunken beat through the corridors, and screams of madness from lower passages. And still Romney had his chance to think. The Big Three wouldn't be pleased to learn that he had permitted the spy to fall into the hands of the law. Even the Japanese didn't understand a white man's mercy. These nationalists were an interesting sort. They didn't ask from others what they were unwilling to give themselves. Failure meant forfeiture of life in their work. But the West didn't breed this sort of thing in a man. Romney found himself not as intrinsically of the East as he imagined. He could conceive a big system doing away with a host of lives, but still he didn't care to be the direct instrument of taking the life of one man.

Presently he found himself in the midst of conjecture as to how the Big Three meant to strangle Japan. For many moments this matter wavered back and forth through his mind, and did not take real form until he happened to recall the laboratory in Minglapo's cellar. There might be a connection here. He had heard of a ghastly, almost incommunicable horror having to do with the slaying of multitudes without any formal arrangement of platoon, brigade or corps....

He dozed in his chair at last, dreaming of a nation stricken with pestilence—its soldiers all away in the clean and ancient barbarities of war.... He would wait for Ti Kung and then possibly it would be well to clear himself from the Big Three. Perhaps they wouldn't trust him—even to keep his mouth shut.... The little old spy slept at his feet.... In the heart of the night, a prison-guard entered with a lantern, drawing the cell-door shut behind him.

Romney opened his eyes, and saw a queer intelligence in the glance of the other—a face he had not seen before. The prison guard was intent for an instant upon the figure at Romney's feet, the lantern-ray pouring over the spy's length from feet to queue—then back to Romney's face.

"Sit quiet and say nothing," he whispered, "Your friends are working for you. To-morrow you will be free. This—remember—is a madman. He is not responsible.... Say only that he attacked you and me—now—"

The voice of the prison-guard came from the dark, behind the lantern-ray. Romney caught up sleepily with the full significance of the words. Suddenly the lantern fell and the stranger raised a terrible outcry, springing upon the spy, who had half-risen. Now they were on the floor together, and a shot was fired.

The prison-guard was the one to arise. The lantern was spraying the stone floor with light, above was darkness. Romney's face was caught in the hands of the policeman, and these words were driven in his mind, even as he struggled to be free:

"Listen. He leaped upon me and tried to take my pistol. I had to shoot. He is done and cannot deny. They are coming—"

The officer now raised his voice for help, and the corridors drummed with hurrying feet.

8

Romney did not sleep during the rest of the night. They were slow about taking the body of the little spy forth from the cell. The murder passage recurred repeatedly. It had been very swift and matter of fact, the prison-guard explaining what Romney should say as he watchfully prepared to assassinate the Japanese, who in his turn arose slowly and empty-handed to meet the end—all this in a treacherous lantern-ray. Romney did not fancy such patriotism. Of course he realised that the cause of the Big Three would have been ruined had the Japanese spy managed to live to make his report. He granted that the Big Three dreamed of a greater and purer China; even granted that if their dream were applied to the machinery of nationalism, the result would be finer for the Orient and the world, than if Japan became the dominant power of Asia. At the same time he was not so modern in holding a curious repugnance for the present episode.

In mid-afternoon the murderous prison-guard found an opportunity to whisper that Romney's liberty would have been obtained hours before, had there not been found another charge against him, the nature of which was not yet clear. The prisoner was asked to be patient, however, that great forces were at work to set him free. Romney took another long breath. At times like this, the period of his life, since the parting at Longstruth's seemed altogether irrational.

They had not yet cleansed the floor of his cell.

It was not until toward evening that he was led forth to meet this mysterious new charge. A bearded Chinese in lavender robes sat in a high box and appeared four-eyed behind his spectacles. Before him stood the avid McLean of the John Dividend, now turning at the step of his prey and feasting his single eye on the length and thinness of the American.

Romney's laugh was doubtless charged to him.

"Hello, Mac," he said, "I heard you had gone way down—"

"It has cost me a great deal to bring you face to face—"

"If I had seen you ten minutes after our meeting over the wall in Shanghai, I could have fixed that little matter—"

"It is to be fixed now. The cost of collection and the payment for personal damage received—brings the amount to twenty-five pounds. The items are all here—"

McLean presented a long paper of charges.

"I may not have that much—what in that case?"

"Back to John Dividend or rot here—"

Romney recalled that he had slightly less than a hundred dollars, which, with his other belongings, was now in the hands of the police. He offered seventy-five dollars to close McLean's claim.

To his surprise this amount—three times the original loan—was refused.

"Come around to-morrow—maybe I can raise the wind," Romney suggested. "I've made you a lot of trouble and you've got a right to be sore."

Romney was still further surprised that the money-lender did not wabble. He had not expected to be led back to the cell. An hour later, however, he was called to the office again and after an evening's performance of formality, extending through trial, initiatory and several deeper degrees, he found himself in the street, his own money not used in obtaining this freedom, and a secret verbal order, imparted by the prison-guard, for him to report at once to the shop of Minglapo.

Dr. Ti Kung had returned.

The three were gathered at the dais when Romney was admitted. Dr. Ti Kung raised his hand and apologised for not rising.

"From what they tell me," he said with a tired smile, "your former proficiency in athletics has stood you in good stead."

Minglapo glanced whimsically at the forward casement, repaired since Romney had crashed through. The deep bubble of a laugh started, but dripped back.

The Hunchback bowed toward his countryman, studying him with a strange mixed expression of anxiety and compassion. The long, narrow, wolf-hound head held something that invariably lifted Romney—something very deep that had to do with the love of man for man.

"I'm afraid," he remarked, "that I don't take the joy in a foot-race that I once did. And it's mainly knowing how now. I'm really far from fit."

"We trust that there will be no more of that for your portion. We have reserved a task for you, Friend Romney—not more important, perhaps, but of a much higher form of activity."

It was in Romney's mind at that moment to state certain objections, but the face of Nifton Bend held him silent.

"I have been honoured," Dr. Ti Kung added, "in that my friends have found you all that I promised—and more. It is strange that Mother China should uncover among her most valuable workers, two men of your country—"

"I have been wondering if I have the training for such ardent nationalism," Romney said quietly.

Dr. Ti Kung turned to Nifton Bend who replied:

"We have thought of that. I can answer you best in my own experience. I was without a country—and dared to be a citizen of the world. It was this old Yellow Mother who took me in. China is not a nation. She is the bed-rock of Asia. All elements are in her breast—the most ancient, and conceptions so modern that they cannot be spoken aloud. For one must whisper the absolutely new. There is no place as yet for a visionary in America—but there is a place here. One who works for China works for all the East—and for the world, since out of the East all great things come to light."

The Hunchback smiled. "I do not speak much in this way. There is something in you that draws forth the dream.... But I see you are troubled."

"Perhaps it was because he was locked up for a night and a day," said Dr. Ti Kung.

"No, it is not that," said Nifton Bend. "I saw it here before the little house-servant escaped. He won your heart, Mr. Romney?"

"Yes," the word came eagerly.

"You lost your sense of the greatness of a cause—that could sacrifice him so ruthlessly?"

"Yes. He was all tempered with suffering—so absolute in fortitude.... They murdered him at my feet in the cell."

"He has done well. Perhaps you can see that we too love a servant like that—"

"Yes—but to put him out of the way—"

"The cause is greater than the man."

"I do not mean to argue. I can either take it or leave it." Romney could not say more. There was an encompassing understanding in the Hunchback's eye.

"We are glad to discuss this with you. The East regards these things differently. Tell us how you overtook him and what happened before the arrest—"

"He fell from fatigue. His hands were held up to me from the ground. I knew that you wanted him dead, knew what you expected of me, but I sat down on a doorstep to think it out. He expected death. He was trained your way. He asked me afterward why I had not killed him then. I knew you could not rest while his thoughts held together in that gritty head. Presently the police came along. It occurred to me if he were a trained spy, he would know English, and it was so. We arranged our story on the way to the lock-up—arranged it so as to keep out the name of Minglapo.... When I saw him trying to take care of that dry kneecap right here in this room—why, the stuff of me went out to him."

"Europe has gone mad," the Hunchback said wearily. "France, England, Italy, Austria, Russia, Germany, all goring each other—America threatened—Japan standing ready to take up the murderous confession of her material-mindedness. Mother China can stop all that forever."

Except for the presence of the Hunchback, Romney would have assumed a Western point of view fully at this time and explained that life had taught him to do most of his dreaming at night. Instead, he said:

"Of course, I should be very glad to hear about China's power of mastering Japan without arms and ending war forever from the hard-pressed earth—"

It was one of the strangest moments. Romney had come very close to the truth several times in his own thoughts, but never so close as now. His question had put the answer into three minds. It was not that any one of the three intended to speak, but what he had asked had brought the picture of the truth as each saw it into a kind of form of words. If there is anything to the transference of thought, the mental pictures of the three may have helped Romney to the solution at that moment. He had turned from Nifton Bend to Dr. Ti Kung. Queerly enough, just now he recalled the extraordinary interest and capacity of the Chinese in chemical and biological matters during his work in Palo Alto. Instantly upon this was added the sharp recollection of the trap entrance to the basement laboratory in this very house. Then came the large seeming importance of the packet he had delivered to Minglapo from Dr. Ti Kung. Might not the documents contained in that represent the fruits of Ti Kung's studies in the laboratories of the States? All this was in a flash, and over it all—it was like a panorama—a Japan with desolated streets and highways, an Island of Pestilence.... Nifton Bend next spoke:

"You see, Mr. Romney, as you now stand troubled by this dramatic little matter having to do with our spy—it would not be well for us to complete our plans for you. You are honest. You are of the West—called to us and called from us, by your ideals. Our measure is heroic. A measure to accomplish such a result as we deem to be required now must be heroic.

"Without knowing exactly the form our activity will take, you can continue to serve us. If we told you the exact truth—your very possession of it would endanger your life in the event of its making you waver in your allegiance to us—"

"You mean like the spy. You had to kill him because he had learned too much. But I know as much as he now—"

"Perhaps not. He has been in this house for two years, and during the last day or two, he has been used in a particular service."

"Then you think what he heard here was not all, but merely an added inkling to the full understanding."

"He became dangerous to us."

"You do not think that I am dangerous to you now?"

"Your case is different. We have seen your trustworthiness. We know that any difference now is moral and that our cause is safe in your hands. At the same time any explicit methods which we might use must not become the property of any mind which is not imbued with the great passion which we feel."

"You say you could use me without divulging further?"

"Yes. We wish—"

"You are not treating me then, as you would treat an Oriental—"

"That is because I am an American. My friends have learned to trust me—and I have chosen to trust you—"

Romney thanked him.

"What plan have you for me?"

The two Chinese turned to Nifton Bend who arose.

"This morning we planned to send you to Japan. The delay in securing your release from custody has changed that. You are to start for the Gobi Desert. The plan is written, the progress of your journey set down, the policy and full meaning of your mission. These papers are in my chamber on the floor above. There may be a detail or two to finish in regard to them. Your servant will bring you to me in a few minutes. If you can be ready within an hour, it would be well for you to reach Peking in the morning. Let me add that this is a mission of great mercy, not a mission of death—"

Romney made himself ready in his own quarters. A lift had come to his heart which he did not pretend to understand. It had seemed that his acceptance of the mission had been ordained deep in his own volition—the decision arising finished in his consciousness while the Hunchback spoke.... Many of the preparations for travel had already been made by Bamban, who left him to bring the word from Nifton Bend.

... Romney was in one of the halls, his servant walking ahead. A door opened a little distance forward and low in it, the place a half-grown child's head would occupy, appeared the long face of the Hunchback—beyond that, golden lamplight, the sound of a softly-playing fountain, and an instant later, the movement of another figure in the mellow light.

Romney halted. The figure had come forward. The head and breast were above Nifton Bend and two bare white arms rested upon the low shoulders. One was held out.

Her head turned slightly, the light touching that perfect profile. She was smiling. Romney could not feel his limbs, yet they carried him forward to the outstretched hand.

"It's good to see you again, Sir Romney."

Something had broken within him. The strange elation had changed to a tangible power. There was sorrow in her loveliness. But such a sense of the beauty in the presence of the two together—a kind of entering into the heart of a sacred place. And queerly enough he felt himself at the end of commonness—mere man movements and matters put away, an end to the drift of the waterfronts, all helplessness and the stress of hand to hand. She was close, looking into his face.

"You have put on something that I could not find a year ago, Sir Romney," she whispered.

"For awhile I thought I had lost rather than gained. I hope you are right," he answered.

His eyes were held to the yellow rug. It lay over a low chair by the fountain. She led Nifton Bend to it, the bare arm ever close to his shoulder.

"I am glad that he is chosen for the mission to the desert," she was saying to the Hunchback. "I am glad you two know each other, for I found Sir Romney very much a man."

PART TWO: THE GOBI

ANNA ERIVAN

1

Romney was not delayed long in Peking, and the few days were interesting, for his credentials opened a different shelf of native life from that which the foreign traveller ever encounters. Here he was surrounded by the young men to whom the names of Ti Kung and Minglapo and Nifton Bend were demigods, no less. He saw the cause of Young China in force, felt the strong fresh beat of it, and became more than ever glad that it was in the world, and that he had the honour to be a servant of it. To him, there were no longer three but four leaders. He told Moira Kelvin this before he left the lamp-lit room in Tientsin. She was vital warmth and depth of background to a picture such as his. Men called forth his friendship and loyalty and service, but there was something in the spirit of romance which she stood for, that made a slave of him, and there was something of creative significance in her love-relation with the General that was so intimate and sacred that he did not bring it even to the foreground of his mind for close analysis. Her personal pull upon him was easily borne now. He kept it as a kind of secret sweetness of life. It honoured her, and the yearning that came with it was one of the finest ingredients for moral health. No man spends energy in yearning whose real forces are asleep. So they were good girding days and his health came back. He felt himself relaxing again in the slow rhythmic breath of the interior.

Romney only knew that he was going to the Gobi Desert. There was a Peking letter among his numbered documents; another letter to be opened in Tushi-kow and for all points of his journey ahead up to a town in the desert called Wampli. But these letters were not to be read until he reached the towns noted, and the documents attending each letter were promised to give him further details as to friends, impedimentum, his task and safe conduct.

Three days were spent in Tushi-kow where the Chinese Post Road forks from the Russian caravan route to Siberia. Here he was quartered in the house of Fai Ming, whose name was in daily use by the members of the cause in Peking. This old aristocrat who felt honoured in giving his wealth and strength to the people, had many tales to tell of the Chinese awakening, of the young social order in America and Europe which he had visited since Romney had been home. It was his view that a certain brotherhood passion was trimmed for ignition around the world and would shortly become a circle of cleansing flame.

"The camels are ready," Fai Ming said on the last day, "but I would not have you hasten, my friend. There is a long caravan-route from here—let us say to Turgim, where a real activity may begin for you. Another party will start three days hence if you wish to wait—"

Romney shook his head. "Yet I have felt that I have been in my own home with you," he added.

"Your mission is unprecedented. The desert tribes are said to be full of zeal, and slow in discrimination, though you will not meet dangers on this side of Turgim. In any event we are taught that a man with a real mission is in the hands of strange and powerful helpers."

Bamban meant superb tea, dry blankets, and dustless food. Also, he appeared to command a proper respect for his new master not only from the native travellers, but from the camel-drivers and Tartar merchants. Moreover, that camel-reek which became a part of the very texture of everything in the caravan, as all men and equipment of a cavalry outfit partake of the essence of horse, was at least checked in its pervasiveness so far as Romney was concerned, by the tireless efforts of the fastidious one.

"Bamban, you're getting to be a habit that will be hard to break," Romney remarked one evening early in the journey to Turgim.

Days folded into each other, and something from the unearthly gleam of the desert edges entered his soul. His mind moved slowly. Sometimes he wondered if the old quick thinking and sharp mental activity would ever come back. At times he had no care regarding it, feeling that all surface glibness had passed for good. His orders so far were only arousing. He did not know as yet what he was to do in the Gobi, though the intimations were of a most challenging kind. He had been furnished with copies of manuscripts written in Chinese and in part in Sanscrit, containing information regarding the desert, information that the world at large would scoff at. He was advised concurrently to study these papers. More and more he realised that in ways other than his linguistic prowess he was fitted for the journey at hand.

He thought much of Moira Kelvin and Nifton Bend. One night by the desert fire, with Bamban sitting expectantly near, the salient events of the year moved by in steady, and for the first time, ordered procession, beginning with his first glance at the yellow rug on the little river steamer Sungkiang—that whirlwind fortnight. For a month or so he had been close to death—he saw this clearly now—her laugh the note of his delirium, her kiss the heat of his fever. After that, a kind of low animal hate which had to burn out before decency and sense came.

He was cool now. The night was winter clear. He would never have been able to see her so largely and definedly as now, had she taken him. She had become a kind of institution, but impersonal. His present run of thoughts was not without a touch of chivalry. He saw that there are very few really exciting vampires among the love-women; that no man strikes fire with a superb woman's genius without enduring benefits. If a man figures out the cost in dollars for such an adventure he's not a lover of quality. If a man's career in the world is slowed somewhat, it's an easy price to pay for being privileged to enter even for a little time the domain of a passionate woman's genius. The yellow-rug woman was his initiation. The fact that he had glimpsed a devil in her too much for a boy to subdue, no longer prevented him from seeing that the fault was his own weakness and that her devil was in no way smug. He had well put away the cheap male diversion of hating all women, because he had met one too great to hide herself in him. He did not want Moira Kelvin back, but his heart was strangely expectant of meeting some one of her quality, some glory akin to hers, but nearer his own full comprehension.

Because he did encounter something of this kind, he is present on these pages. The rest—the strangeness, the peril, the desert itself, is mere setting and arrangement.

In the main, the deeps of his mind were undisturbed, the forces there moving often with a finer vitality than he had known before, but day after day the expectancy recurred in the same form, the sense of an imminent and radical complication. He could not quite put away thoughts of this delicate and encompassing mystery. Always he said, "This will pass when I really enter the desert," but it was not so in the journey to Turgim, though he saw no white woman throughout those majestic days—only the dark and yellow women in the shadows of the Rest Houses at evening—creatures very far from complication. Still, the gently lingering of feminine redolence in his reveries....

Always when he thought of the woman yet unknown, the penetration and one-pointedness of his mission diminished. In the colder morning hours he was able to reckon with the soft haunt of it all; but in the wondrous nights of desert moonlight (the same lady of the moon, full-throated, head tilted back) Young China of the towering present, and the sand-strewn relics of the ancient Lemurians, said to be left in the Gobi, alike lost their conspicuous magic.

At Turgim, a vile and sprawling town, Romney drew a somewhat clearer idea of what he was out after, and the vague vastness of the undertaking at this time possessed the large part of his thinking in the day-light hours of travel. The main road was left at Turgim and the next point was Nadiram, six days' journey straight west into the desert. Three Tartar merchants arranged to travel this stretch and Bamban explained that they relied upon his master's credentials, since Nadiram was usually reached from an open spur running south from the Chinese Post Road at a point ten days' journey ahead. Nearly two weeks was to be saved by this western cut, but the trail was commercially unsafe. The remotest of the Russian consuls was said to be stationed at Nadiram.

Six days—a party of five camels. The Gobi now gave them battle, days of burning, nights of sudden chill. The three strangers proved helpful, as they knew the best switches of the trail and the halts for water and rest. Three times desert bands swept up to the little caravan—foul and furious they appeared, demanding their tariffs of money to the last copper or kopeck. It was on this journey that Romney first heard the hyenas....

The last day of the journey to Nadiram was ending. It had been an extra long stretch for the camels. He planned to rest a few days, and Nadiram was supposed to be for him, the last day on the outer and open highway of the desert. A sense of the mystery of the East came that night, as it had not since his early days in India.

They neared the settlement in the first coolness of early evening. It lay in a strange, fixed fashion, as if moulded low upon the rolling sand. Except for the shadows, it would have been unearthly. Indeed, there was a sharp intensity to the shadows, such as one finds upon the moon through a strong lens, but the colour was lowered—a Gobi colour, a lifeless, sand-scoured yellow. Romney gathered his padded coat about him before the hut-shadows fell across the way. The desert was clean, but the smell of the town was of uncovered dead. In the open, the sun had played upon all surfaces; men had defiled these shadows. Romney shivered, his nostrils had long been clean of Turgim....

Nothing of his reading or imagination had pictured this entrance to Nadiram, and yet there was a strange and evil familiarity about it all—as if some ancient picture of his mind finally opened to tally with the present, object for object.

The moon was not yet risen; the town was lit, but the desert still in twilight. The main road through the town stretched straight into the East. In the very centre of it, in the low distance, the planet Jupiter was rising—something to hold to, something of peace and spaciousness. It was needed, because the sights and sounds and scents about him, as the camels rocked in, belonged to a flaring hell. Little shops were lit with torches in the doorways, torches that roared and were red. The faces of the keepers took on this red light, also the faces of the beggars in the streets. The tired beasts moved forward rapidly and with a stealth that had long been forgotten in the desert. The forward drivers were continually screaming for right of way. Thus Romney saw Nadiram, the faces of the people turned upward in the red reflection—like a kindling of hatred upon a countenance of impassive gloom.

The three Tartar merchants disappeared into a side street. Romney turned presently into the court-yard of the Russian consulate, and dismounted, deeply conscious in the dusk of the eyes of a woman in the doorway.

2

From the moment that he beckoned to Bamban to make his camel kneel in the court of the Consulate, until the woman's eyes turned to his from where she stood in the narrow opening of the door, an intensity of sheer living possessed him such as he had never experienced except during the Hankow fortnight. His good limbs stumbled as he crossed the level stone flags, not because he had been on the rack for hours, but because the main force of his life had turned out to the woman's face—as if all his life hitherto had been but a journey to that face.

She gave no sign; merely bowed and said in English:

"The Russian Consul is ill. He can see no one."

To the weathered Romney had come a certain dismay. He had been able to meet most pressures from men; take up most of men's crosses and carry them to Golgotha, if necessary, but the burden of this—that her face was calm, that her eyes gave no sign, that his approach meant nothing of the extraordinary nature that had prevailed upon him—this held the unique pang. He tried to save himself, as a man's mind will, by the thought that the suddenness of this encounter and the utter absence of beauty from his life for many weeks, had stimulated him in an unusual way. This that had rocked his heart was just a pretty woman's influence. She would say something presently to break the dream, and he would be quite calm again.

It was not until after this rush of thinking that Romney came up out of the deeps—enough to laugh at himself, for expecting her to be startled by his coming. But it was not a very successful laugh, not the kind he used in men's affairs or against the worst that the world had shown him since the other woman went her way. The idea of his mission did not rouse him. He had merely concentrated on work to pass the time until this moment. In fact it is the great workers of the world who become terrific to handle when they turn from their tasks to a woman....

Romney had no particular message for the Russian Consul, yet he said with difficulty:

"Is the Consul very ill?"

"I think he will be able to see you in the morning."

Now she was looking at him differently, her head bent toward him.

"You do not speak like an Englishman," she added.

He drew closer. "I am American."

It was not apparent whether she was pleased or regretted the fact. That there was a medium of language between them did not occur in its full importance until afterward.

"I am Anna Erivan, the Consul's sister."

If she had been Erivan's wife, Romney might have treasured for some time a certain deep dream, but certainly he would have kept his dreaming clean-clipped that night; and certainly he would not have tarried in the court, until he was asked to enter the Consulate.

Bamban was sent with the camels to the Rest House. The woman made tea and placed food before him, lighting the candles and tending the fire upon the hearth.

It was a low, broad room, the beams of the ceiling uncovered, the floor paved with flags, like the court, and gratifyingly clean.

She spoke as she served him.... Her brother was not dangerously ill. He would be up again in the morning, if that would do.... She had been here with him a year. Yes, she had been lonely.... There were no other Russians here, no other Europeans, none who remained.... No one remained in Nadiram. It was but a point on the long road. No one came back; all moved on. In good time every one passed on. If one remained long enough in Nadiram, all Asia would go by, she supposed.... Mostly, however, they were Chinese and Buddhist holy men, many of them weak from hunger that they had brought upon themselves. She loved the holy men. Some of them were quite pure.... There was one very ancient one, who was almost dead. He had slept in the court for a whole day, and she had served him. His heart was an abode of peace. She had been better for days following. She had felt a strange peace for an hour or two from others who had passed, but never like the power of this very old saint. His name was Rajananda.... Mostly it was a passing of world faces, Chinese and Tartars who pressed on, wanting something—their faces set with desire.... Sometimes it was all like a dream to her, the great rolling, burning desert—the moving dots becoming men and horses and camels, the men and horses and camels becoming dots again....

Thus she talked, breaking and toasting bread, pouring his tea. Romney's heart was like an upturned cup with listening. He ate but did not taste the food, drank but did not know that the tea was priceless. Night had closed upon the court. He heard the heavy breathing from an inner room, and horses somewhere outside clearing their nostrils from the dusty forage. The voices of the Chinese came in when he stopped to listen, an endless iteration of nothings.

The woman moved about—a sentence and a silence—cleansing the tea things. An hour passed. The place was bare as before. A plate of sweets was left upon the table, a pitcher of water with a cup beside it, a tin of tobacco and papers. She rolled a cigarette absently, standing by the table, still telling of the long road. She proffered the cigarette to him, suddenly recalling herself.

"I quite forgot," she said. "He taught me to do it for him." She looked at the shut door, from which the breathing issued.

Romney accepted the cigarette gratefully. He spoke very little and quietly, a deep hush upon him. He had been afraid to comment, lest she be aroused and hastily call in the fragments of her story. He was sensitive enough to know that she was easing some tragic ache from her heart. Her voice, her face and figure, the hands that served, the story itself, filled his imagination with pictures and a startling kind of power.

The sense now came to Romney that he could be himself at last. This woman was a flame that freed him. In the light of her, he dared be a full being. He did not feel less, nor was prompted in any way to act or cover. She did not make a slave of him, but called forth such as he had of humour and wisdom. He could see past the flash of her eyes. There had been at times such a surface dazzle in the eyes of the yellow-rug woman that he had not been able to see beyond it, but that dazzle was for him and the world. Nifton Bend doubtless encountered no such difficulty. It was but one of the perfectly appointed barriers that preserved the love-woman for her own.... There was a moment—it was the same that Romney fully realised that he was himself at last—in which the smooth-running levels of Anna Erivan's story changed to rush of a cataract:

"... I have been here a year—do you understand that—a year? I came from Odessa, four thousand miles, by train, by caravan, over mountain passes, across rivers, through wastes of sun and rock.... Days of fever heat, nights of perishing cold—thirst and suffering—four thousand miles, five hundred on the back of a camel.... My mother was just dead, yet all the way I dreamed of the bountiful heart of a big brother I had not seen for years. He was here. All the way from Odessa I came to him.

"The last fifty miles I travelled with Tartar merchants, and learned to know them well. They were not unreal. They were good to me. And yet, I was so frightened. They told me as I neared Nadiram on the road from Urga that their caravan had a thousand miles still to wander through the desert, past ruined cities and along dried-up river-beds to Peking.

"It was evening when we reached here—just as you reached here this evening. I had seen Nadiram spelled out on the maps; I had seen the post-mark on his yearly letter. I had pictured it so differently, and this is what I saw—sun-dried clay, and the low blowing desert and this court-yard with the Russian flag. I had expected him to come forth to meet me. All day I watched. I had started early for the journey's end. I entered the court, but saw no face. The merchants passed on, turning queerly. The door-way was heavy with dust, that door where you entered. I pushed it open, my arms ready to fling about him. I thought he must be busy or detained.

"This room was darkening. It was not as you found it, but sodden and evil—an evil odour. I called, and there was no answer. I was frightened. I had been frightened all day. One does not know what one can stand. That was but the beginning, and I thought I was close to death then.

"Do you know what I found? I will show you—"

She turned quickly to the door and opened it. Romney saw a great bear of a man, half sprawled over a wooden table, the candle sputtering near his head in the fresh pressure from the open door, the sharp fume of brandy issuing. The body seemed swollen, neck and ears, shoulders, abdomen, legs—all swollen, but the top of the head. That was small and sparsely covered with hair, the candle-light upon it. The lips were swollen and parted.

"That is what I found," she said.

3

Presently she shut the door of the forward room with quick hand—her face remorseful and tender.

"I don't know why I did that. It was hateful to do that—and before you. I don't know why I did it."

"You had to," he said. "I listened so intently, you had to tell me. You could not tell one more ready to understand and help you."

"But he is not always like that—not always like to-night and that night. There have been many days ... oh, but he is not what I expected—so different from when he left Odessa. But very kind, always kind. To-morrow morning he will be kind enough. Only such a desolation comes over me out of his soul. It is like the desert.... And nothing I can do changes him. I have ceased trying to change him, ceased trying, ceased hoping—"

"Some men can't stand the desert," Romney said. "One must bring a certain integration of force, a certain resistance, to stand it here. The Gobi saps the vitality of the weak; it often takes the sanity of men who do not drink.... Your brother does not know what comes over him. He feels himself going insane, that's all. A man drinks, when he feels that, if he's the kind that turns to drink.... You had to tell me. It's lucky I came. I wouldn't have failed to come—not for worlds. Perhaps I came to take you away—"

... Her fineness appeared only to one who had the grace to see. Romney, surprised at his own words, sensed vast reaches in her, depths that defied him, something of the newness of new Russia and hues of beauty ancient as Asia. Her eyes had widened, making her face the more fragile. Just then he saw the rising moon through a low pane behind her. It was in the full and still red from the horizon. The glass was poor, distorting the circle so that it was like a bulging grain bag.... She had not smiled, nor taken exception to his words. There was no coquetry in her. She waited for him to explain.

"You have seen all the terror and the oppression of the desert. You cannot have failed to see something of the rest," he suggested.

She paused and he added, "Something that has to do perhaps with that old Buddhist holy man you spoke of so kindly."

"I only know he brought me a strange peace," she replied. "As if living here with no one to talk or listen to, wasn't all of life, but just a little part, a hard part.... He was very little and old—but so kind! I am telling it very badly, but I got a sense from him, not through words, that I must take this hard part, day by day, and put it behind; that it had come to me because I deserved it, every day of it. And I do just that for hours, feeling courageous, but I cannot always hold it. The rebellion comes back; the darkness and squalor of it all come back."

"Does something like that peace ever come to you from the desert itself?"

She shivered. "No, it does not belong to me. I am here, because there could be no more terrible place. If I deserved suffering, the design is perfect. But I have whimpered enough. You see I was choking with it. I have used you—to ease myself."

"I wonder if it is all illusion to me," he mused. "I have seen another side to the desert—nights like to-night when everything is softened in moonlight—the old civilisation—and all so clean. The Gobi is a mate of the moon's. I think it is almost as big as the moon. It starts the imagination because everything is finished. It has had its day, like the moon, and there is a wonderful story to be read if one could pass the aloofness. Even here in Nadiram we are but on the edge of its mystery. Hasn't the heart of the desert ever called to you?"

"Only when I wanted to die," she answered. "I don't know why men should love the past. Each day is enough conquest for me. I can face anything in the morning—except yesterday. Until noon I am brave, and feel that I can take what is to come from ahead; but I cannot turn back. The moon is dead. The Gobi is dead. I don't care for the cleanness of death. The death ahead for you and for me and for all—that's not so hard to face, but it seems to me sometimes that we are the products of many deaths and I dare not think of that.... How strange our talk! And you should rest from your journey. There is a room here for you. You will not need to go to the Rest House. Are your servants cared for?"

"Yes, thank you. I'll stay, if I may. The journey has not wearied me, but you are very tired. The day has been hard for you. I wish I could say something that would make you rest.... I wish I might say the words to make you sleep like a little child, forgetting the moon and the Gobi and all that is past—your face turned with a smile to to-morrow. There are such words, if I could think of them."

The smile had come to her face. Her lips parted. Romney had somehow helped her. He did not know just what word had done it, unless it was the mention of the little child.

"You have fancy," she said softly. "For ages here, no one has talked except of meat and smoke and fire and beds. Perhaps I shall rest. We do not often keep guests here. Perhaps that was why I asked you—so that I could rest—"

Still the smile remained. She added:

"Very rarely an American comes. We are fond of America in Russia."

He wanted hours more. He could have talked the night away. Yet there was something in his very passion to remain with her that forced him to rise, that long training that makes a man skeptical and impatient of the thing he wants most for himself.

She brought a candle and led the way to an inner room.

"Is there anything I can do for him to-night?" Romney asked, pointing to the forward room.

"No, there is a cot there. When he finds himself in darkness, he will feel his way to that. You will hear his fingers on the wall—but do not mind."

She swung open the single window of the little room. The stone-work was barred. She left him, but did not shut the door.

He stood waiting in the centre. There was just a cot with blankets and a table at the head, upon which the candle sat in solitude. He thought of his travel-bags just then, but she was bringing them and he hastened to the door, for they were heavy and the camel-reek was upon them. She left him again for a pitcher of water and a cup, very pleasing and graceful in her services.

"And now is there not something I can do for you?" he said.

"No—unless—" She laughed.

"Yes?"

"Unless you think of me sleeping like a little child, my face turned toward to-morrow—"

She was gone. Still she had not shut his door.

It was all a kind of blur to Romney until he lay down. Then the picture straightened and steadied. Could it be that he, Romney, had hypnotised himself—so that the first possible woman had fallen straight into his heart? He had reached the period of life when a man begins consciously to look for his woman. Does not such a search make the man blind? One cannot see clearly so long as he doesn't want anything. Was he so shallow and common as to be caught in a whirlwind of the artificial? It was not that he lowered Anna Erivan in this thought, but could she be the one woman in the world for him?

Then he thought of her from the first moment to the last, reviewed her every gesture and movement of face and hand. It was not what she said, though there was much in that for him, but her comprehension was so instantaneous. She had fancy. She loved the half-lights; she had passion; the whole strength of her had to do with that. Was her strength the strength of repression? She had beauty, but was it the kind of beauty that goes with terrible self-love? ... She seemed tender and brave and imaginative.

Romney sat up on the cot with a suddenness that made the whole fabric creak. And what of his task? The possibility of his penetrating to the heart of the great Gobi mystery seemed far and intolerable compared to the next morning, when she would come into the outer room.... Would she be there first and he emerge to join her, or would he be waiting?

He laughed. Even this simple question had absorbed him utterly, banishing the mystery of the desert. There could not be two missions. As for her beauty, it seemed as if he had created it in his own highest moments, touch by touch.... Might she not journey on with him, thrilled, too, by the strange thing he had set out to accomplish? This was madness. Even the physical dangers forbade that.... The task, whatever it was, looked little and fanatical beside her. The Big Three and Fai Ming seemed altered, their zeal misguided; his own former seriousness in relation to man's accomplishment, seemed absurdly young.... This is what a woman had done for him in one evening.

There could not be two missions. He must stay or go on.... Perhaps after reading the Nadiram documents he could tell her something of what he was out after, but it would change nothing. There could not be two tasks. He must cleave to the one and forsake the other....

Romney was sweating. It would not have been so hard, had she not made the whole business appear insignificant. Must he be a ghost-chaser, leaving this superb creature here? ... Wickedness in her? He could not find it anywhere. She might become a saint or a wanton, but there would be greatness in her giving in either case. In that she was like Moira Kelvin. Splendours flashed for his eyes about her repressions, and yet what had her repressions to do with him? She had merely talked with him, and she was dying to talk. She would have talked with any one who would listen and furnish understanding. After all, Romney relied upon the one fact that such meetings as he had known in the twilight in the court of the Consulate, did not in the nature of things rouse one heart alone. There was no magic in life, if meetings such as that did not contain magic. Still he had not won Moira Kelvin.... It may have been only a waver, a gleam to her, so far, yet he felt that if he remained, Anna Erivan would know something of this that had come to him in an instant.... There was a kind of bruise in his heart that all his old life had been lessened. Suppose she was destined to be only a passing face to him. Would the old zeal for the world come back? Did he want back anything that had been spoiled? A woman great enough to diminish everything else, even for a night, was great enough for any man. But the things he had set himself to do.... Romney's lip tightened with self-scorn. He could come to no decision. The episode was making him yellow already. He had hitherto prided himself upon his faculties for decision. He arose and paced the room in bare feet. The night cold came in....