8Romney 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 theJohn 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 toJohn Dividendor 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 mustwhisperthe 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 GOBIANNA ERIVAN1Romney 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 steamerSungkiang—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.2From 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.3Presently 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 haveusedyou—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 havefancy," 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 hadfancy. 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....He thought of journeying with her in the evenings together on the dromedary—she sitting forward, sun and moon and sand, the deep drinking at evening, the fire on the desert, the tents—the tent.He had stopped in the centre of the room and now paced on again. He was not quite the same after that last. He wished for the day. He tried the cot again, but could not stay; paced the room, longing for the day. At last he thought of papers given him to be opened at this stage of the journey.
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 theJohn 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 toJohn Dividendor 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 mustwhisperthe 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 steamerSungkiang—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 haveusedyou—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 havefancy," 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 hadfancy. 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....
He thought of journeying with her in the evenings together on the dromedary—she sitting forward, sun and moon and sand, the deep drinking at evening, the fire on the desert, the tents—the tent.
He had stopped in the centre of the room and now paced on again. He was not quite the same after that last. He wished for the day. He tried the cot again, but could not stay; paced the room, longing for the day. At last he thought of papers given him to be opened at this stage of the journey.