menu_book Chapter 25

1916 First Chapters Collection by Varius Chapter 1 Prologue, Han Cow, The Yellow Rug Woman From The Last Ditch by Will L. Comfort Romney saw the rug before he saw the woman. It was the yellow of India, the yellow you see on the breast of the purple marten and on the inner petals of an emperor rose. The weave of the rug was like

no other. Its folds looked heavy like raw silk, yet the fabric itself was thin. It would last a lifetime and then become a priceless gift for the one held most dear. It was soil-proof as a snake skin. It was either holy or savage. They were on the little river steamer Sang Khiang, a day's passage below Han Cow. The woman had boarded that forenoon at Wu Chang. Romney had come through from Negan King. The yellow rug lay across the knees of the woman. The afternoon was breezy and bright.

It was May and the rice was green along the flats of the southern shore. She was either English or American, Romney reflected, and also that the world was well supplied with pretty women, but not with rugs like that. Just now the woman held out her arms to a missionary's child, a passing boy child of five in sandals. His legs were bare and brown and scratched. His name was Paul and he was a stoic from much man handling. He went to her arms in silence and there was a burning now in

Romney's chest. Her voice had been a thirsty primitive note like a cry as if the presence of the child hurt her. The little boy stood erect and silent against her limbs. She lifted the rug and drew it about his waist to hold him close. She was lost to everything else. Romney had fancied her the most exquisite and delicate creature, but this face that he saw now had the plain earthy passion of a river woman talking to her firstborn, a love of the child's body and face and lips, the love of

a woman who loves the very soil of play on her child. Paul had been running the decks for two days making enough noise to give the missionary the reputation of being a widower. The child was moist from running at this moment and the woman buried her face in his throat. Romney wished whimsically that he were the missionary so he could come into the picture for the sake of meeting the woman. The child was drawing away. Her dark eyes were untelably hungry already. Paul must have

told his name for she was saying such a right name for a noble boy. And where are you going? To Han Cow. It's like a fairy tale, a young man going to Han Cow to seek his fortune. My father does not like me to read fairy tales. Paul's eyes were full of pictures. Romney did not hear what she said to that but circled the little deck again thinking of her eyes and voice. They went with the yellow rug. As Romney returned the child pulled back from the woman announcing

that's my father. And now for the first time Romney's eyes and the woman's met. The child had pointed his way though the missionary was behind him. Her look came up with something that seemed to say I beg of you don't disappoint me. Then Romney forgot the peculiarity of that in the sudden sense that she was like the blood sister of someone he had known. At the same time flat in his consciousness was the fact that he had not known any such someone. She was young but this was not

the look of a girl at all. The look of a hungry imperious woman who had known love and been denied. Adult understanding, the shoals of cheap illusion passed. She was looking beyond him at the real father of Paul. Under his own calm Romney was intensely sensitized. Something had happened to him from her eyes. He felt he was out somewhere in the deep waters of life wherein she sailed. The shallow problems already put from them all decoration convention an imitation thrust aside.

The missionary and the little boy had passed and now Romney did a very good thing for him and something that he would not have thought possible before this day. He drew a chair close to the yellow rug saying may I? Yes. They talked of Paul of missionaries of Asia travel. Her manner was easy and genuine. Her observations wise and humorous but her eyes full of challenge. There was tenderness in them and something that for a better name he called devil tree.

He felt himself in the presence of a big nature whose sweep was from the primitive passions of birth and death, of fear and hunger, to some consummate and mysterious ambition. He could not tell what she wanted and at the same time her thrall was stealing over him, preventing him from seeing her the same at different moments. He felt that her sweetness could be unfathomable to one she loved. She was exquisite in every detail, lip, nostril,

fingertip, hair, figure, voice, manner, wear, all as perfect as the yellow rug. Yet it was beauty rather than loveliness, something to fear about it. Romney knew in that first hour that he did not challenge her. He felt his youth, his imperfections, the wastes of his past years, all that he had fancied good about those years looked questionable now. If he had known that he was to meet this woman his life would have been different.

He had met no one like her. She accepted his best with ease and without wonder. No man had been able to do that. She tossed a crown over the highest of his mental offerings and added a higher one of her own on his favorite subjects. Yet they were not showing each other their wares. She stimulated him as no one had done before and as for her part it was the pleasant passage of an hour. An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes, slender and not too tall, her face in

profile had the Greek essential of beauty but with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigor of that austere line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had ever met. As if every excellence of life had been known to her from a child, all love and reverence and protection. He suddenly remembered that fury of instinct with which she had kissed the boy Paul in the throat. Something earthy and ample about that, sound and deeply grounded like a

peasant woman's passion. He wondered again and again what she wanted. It had nothing to do with money or position. Romney was sure of this. Queerly enough the truth did not come to him until later. They dined together humorously in the little cabin of the Sun Kiang. A Burmese tiger had killed her husband. I can stand it if I don't stay in one place too long, she said looking at the farthest Pungka. It is always with me. If I stay at home or any one place many weeks, the

thoughts seem to pile up so that I cannot breathe. They drive me away. She had evidently not found before much understanding of this point seemed without hope to make herself clear to him. The thoughts of it become heavy in any one place, she added, so that there is no home. I know, Romney said. She looked at him quickly. Anyone might have said it, but Romney spoke as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that. The tiger killed my baby too, though I was in

England. She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed the slow pounding of agony in her breast like a sea that cannot quiet down. I have thought of everything, she was saying. I have some philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all or death being all, but oh, I was going to take him, his little baby, as soon as it was born. I was at his father's in Kent, England, and to think that a bit of pink paper and the word tiger. Romney was silent. My baby

would have been as old as that little boy with the silly missionary father, she added. Why silly? I only saw a bent, drab man with his particular idea of God. Silly because he doesn't permit the child to hear fairy stories. Ah, Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right. He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with

the future, not with the past. At the same time, there was something tremendous in the slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father, a magnificent sort of Englishman. He must have been to hold this woman's life to his. They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon the mists of the rice lands on the southern shore. To the north, the river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying city were fused into a dull red glow.

The woman was thrilling him now with every sentence. I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression. Perhaps I carry it with me and give it forth from time to time as a matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and drew up your

chair. That startled me. Pleasantly, you're doing that. At least I knew you weren't common. Grown-ups, men and women, adults, should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am. I like it. I do feel the gift of it. No, I'm not going around the world clinging to an ancient bereavement. He was a very good man, patient, a man's man, a tiger hunter. It's all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was so young that I thought for a time my future was sufficiently wrapped in his.

Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had lived those months. I found that there was something huge and endless about that experience. I'm not giving you any cant about motherhood. I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why he took it as a matter of mere nature, as something in the natural course of events, that I should bring his child into the world. I was growing into a real creature and he

could not rise out of the annual tiger Ramadan. It is a sort of religion with his family and couldn't be broken. And then I was smothered in his family. When the word was brought, a kind of madness came over me. Sorrow, yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his good, but the madness had to do with perpetuating him. A man who could leave me in that smothering British household. It seemed I wanted a child that had nothing to do with him, with them. What I wanted in those days,

I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief that killed the little one. These things are mysterious. And now she laughed softly. Romney was trying to adjust this story with the earlier talk, but each part destroyed the other. He could as readily believe the first as the final. It dawned upon him that the real truth might lie somewhere between, but there were no tangible forms to grip in this middle distance. He was not inclusive enough to know that she was,

for the moment, intensely what she said. In any event, the strange lapses of the tale did not break the enchantment. Don't try to understand, she added gently. No man could understand, at least none but a very great artist. But now, he repeated, oh, I search and search. I know that travel does not bring me nearer to what I want, but I can't rest long in one place. He left me everything that the world can give, but I can't live long in his houses. Yet what I search for is as likely to come

to me at home as here in Asia. What is it you search for, Romney asked. A man, she said. Section Two Romney lay in his birth after midnight. All that he had known and won heretofore was gathered together, but did not weigh in the balance against Moira Kelvin. No discrepancy stopped the tumultuous striding of his thoughts after her flying image and the multitude of her sentences.

She had amplified her story. Here was a woman brave enough to go out and look for her own. She believed she would know him at once. She believed the woman in her would know before he knew. It's not a matter of place, she had repeated. I don't hasten matters by rounding the world every year or two. I know he might just as well cross my own threshold in Ireland or come to one of the late Tiger Hunters households in England. Not a matter of place, but the right time to do so.

Not a matter of place, but the right time. I think when we are both ready he will come surely. It must be he who is not ready. See how the years go. I am older than you, Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I don't want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child, one child from him. I learned something of what it means. Oh, just the beginning of that mighty mystery. I would kill him

if he did not prove the real lover. No more Tiger Hunters for me. All boyish things would have to be put away by the man I took for my own. He would have to know what it means to be a father. There's something heroic about that that the world doesn't dream of yet. My lover would have to understand that. At least he would have to know when I told him, God, how few are the lovers in the world. Romney pondered this again and again in his birth, sentence by sentence. Once she had

laughed and said, the man I mean, why his romance is greater to him than his life work. And again she had bent forward, whispering her hand upon his knee. Sometimes I feel as if I were strong enough to be the mother of the new race. All this on a little river steamer deep in China, the rice lands giving away to the hills as they neared Hankow. Moira Kelvin had but one theme, the lover she would sometime know, a frail superb woman burning with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff

in her to endure fire that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions. He quite believed she was capable of killing the man who failed her. He sensed something of her deadly horror in the mistake she had once made. She was different now from the girl wife of that patient English sportsman. There are analogies in nature about this killing of the male, she had said. Look at the fate of the bee whom the queen crowns king in their flight. The hours had passed

magically. It was he who had risen first. He was afraid of the woman, afraid as he had never been before of some intrinsic lacking of his own. He felt at times that his own presence had nothing to do with her ideal, that she was merely telling her story as she might have done to some woman companion. Then there were other moments of personal relation as if she felt from the first the power she possessed for him, that she was interested in making it greater, that she loved

the use of her power in his arousing, even that he might be or become something of this solar being She dreamed up. Always with her was the feeling that she was not interpreting herself exactly, some histrionic weakness, that she was carried away in the ardor of her impulses, that she acted perfectly the moment, but was not exactly that. Romney hated the logic of the male mind that persistently brought him this observation. They were together the next afternoon at Long's

Truths, pyramids by the river, a little table in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of the empire. Two white butterflies were whirling together persistently near. Moira, Kelvin's eyes, followed them dreamily. Romney said, They make me think of the states, little common kid-day butterflies. I don't know as I ever saw them before in China. They are around the world, she answered. They are always where I am because I see them, always too,

like bluebirds, and always silent like bluebirds. I see them and all well paired things. Once in Ireland in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept as a child. The silk was grey-brown, a filmy weave, like a dress my mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that dress. All the moths, I was telling you, I broke the branch and took the cocoon to the room.

Then there was a night in the following June when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty, windless evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over the grove of copper beaches. I am hungry and thirsty today, Sir Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes nature maddens me. But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the corner and

I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts to me and there seemed no love in the world, only loneliness and twilight, my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward but seeming to touch no living thing. I laughed at myself for being frightened by a little rustle and went back into the room. I saw a great grey moth at the window screen and then I remembered and ran to the desk where I had left the cocoon. The whole branch had fallen and I got the picture

of the birth of a winged thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen, a gleaming grey creation with a light of its own about it, the light of the fairy world, which I remembered from a child. The wings were whirring silently, the still strange creature poised for flight in the night and held by this man-made screen. At the end of each feathered antenna was a pendant cross. I tried to open the screen but it was old like all of the things of

that house and I ran to find a servant. When I returned the moth was not alone, its own had come to it through the twilight answering some cry, we are too coarse to hear. They were there together, a mystic pair of wonderful grey mates, one on the outside of the screen, one in the room. I could not wait for the servant but cut a door in the wire with a rough bronze paper cutter and away they flew together. It was her theme. All that day Romney dwelt in her power,

she gilded his world. He found that his relation to her was out of servitude. She commanded imperiously, dictating what they should say, where they should go, what they should eat and drink. Yet he was glad for this had never happened before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him anew, she was great and glowing. He did not know that all the old ideals of wooing and winning that

the world has come up through were impossible with her. Vaguely and darkly the hope formed, that time might change something, that the luck of a white man in Asia might come to his aid. Romney was less than mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions, visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the leveling dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and she had come from

all the earth. His thought of her today was not the thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and splendor of her diffusion. There was at Long's Truths a Chinese boy who served them. He seemed to enter into their thought of the little delicacies. He had some English, which Romney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late afternoon when a matter of service required

explicit information and Romney administered it in Chinese, excusing himself as he took his attention for a moment from the woman. He turned back to her to find a new interest in her eyes. Tell me about yourself, she said suddenly. You must have come to China as a child to speak like that. No, I have been here only four years, three years in India before that. My ways have not been interesting. Since you came they have all been cheapened. I see I have wasted my time.

Now that is a good saying, thank you. Sometimes Sir Romney you are very attractive. It is quite true the things that interested men here, I mean the Americans and English, the big exploiters, have not held me long, though I have worked with them and for them. Always the different, the more hidden things called me. Until yesterday I thought I was at least doing decently well, but I see you have somehow touched the core of things. I've been puttering. At least it is good not to be considered

either wicked or insane, she answered. I usually draw that. I wonder that you like my things. Sometimes I have even felt myself that I am a little mad. The first time that came to me was in England the first year after the tiger. It was a summer Sunday morning. The earth was risen in beauty, birds singing as they only sing in the sun mist that follow a night of rain. It was a seething of bird song of color and fragrance just a year after the tiger. As I listened the fury of

longing that I lived with came upon me in high tide and then in the midst of it I heard the sound of church bells from the village. It was like a gray cloud, an evil odor, a cartaral voice. Specters of the English Sabbath. People stifled me for days after that, but I talk and talk and I want your story now. See we have been together all day and some of yesterday and you have listened. I am not through listening. So much of me was asleep before yesterday. She smiled swiftly at

him. You shall not escape now that you are so good. See the night is coming. Everything is here. Long's truth is worth coming up the river for. China is sweeter here and undefiled. I would be hideously lonely without you and you have not told me who and what you are. Why listen, I don't often ask a man to talk about himself. I get the force of that. It's only that what I have is drab and young. I would have made it different had I known you were coming. Sir Romney, there's a pool about

you. You do not diminish. Oh, I must know all about you now. I hear and obey, he said. Section 3 Romney was a bit taller than necessary with a beaked nose and a head that bowed naturally. When he turned from the side and looked up at you smilingly, it was a face you were apt to remember. The mannerism was so peculiarly his own when he was interested or amused that he did not know of

it. There was nothing about him unless it was the depth of calmness in his eyes to denote other than a sophisticated white man traveling in a state of comfort, if not plenty. A clean-faced, white-toothed American of 27, a good mouth, a good brow, straight, lean shoulders, and a long, dark hand. Nothing striking or exceptional except the beaked nose and possibly the depth of calmness in his eyes. Something of poise and power in that. I came out here seven years ago from California,

he said, a tender-chested young student from Palo Alto with book, Sanskrit. I had a post with an American consul in one of the second towns of Bengal. I used to write letters in Bengali for him. He had a rice brewery on the side and couldn't write English. He used to chew tobacco and promote his business, swearing that rice beer was more delectable than English ale and experimenting in keg making with the native woods. It hurt him to have to import kegs. The English didn't like him

and he had an incessant war on. It kept him fit, this battling. The East could not smother his energy, but I took other posts and was presently touching the skirts of Mother China. She challenged me more than India had done. I really got the call from her one morning on the Pearl River a little above Canton. It was a shimmering day, the big rice lands on either side. Some rice we saw yesterday, though we're a bit far north.

There was a glitter about that day as the sun rose. I seem to remember this now more than then. You always put an atmosphere to your stories, the kind of day or night nature means things to you. I knew right there that day that I had left India for good. That was four years ago. China needed me and I was to spare. All hitherto was mere preparation for a life in the East, more real. You see the English have everything in India. The higher a man climbs, the more he feels the

ordering English hand. It doesn't make any difference if he likes it or not. I was merely carrying a little commercial message up the Pearl River that morning. China touched me, kind of opened up to me then and there. The big devil tree, the big cunning, the big beauty in the world above the dollar sign and the designation of the British pound. I remember the saffron legs of my boatman and his sing song intonation as he hailed some naked

neighbor in a passing junk. I began to get the quality of the voices of the Chinese then as I had heard the native Bengali three years before. A kind of lust in my heart to know what they were saying and why they said it. I threw up my job and traveled north. I studied long in Shanghai, long that is about two years. Academic Sanskrit didn't help then. I had to get a new neck. I learned the basic Chinese and then began to put on the flourishes of the provinces.

I didn't do this with the idea of commanding big money but I began to make money. You see, I was getting something that only eight or ten Americans have. I wanted more than the language. I wanted the working of the oriental mind. The only clue to that is religion. I had studied a lot with the Hindu boys in Bengal. That's what they do best. Study, gather in, mull over, meditate, but bolt at the idea of action. I was American enough to want to make some of this study stuff

come true but that in India was a valuable period of mental accretion. It wasn't living here in the east that made me in a sense familiar with the native mind. It was the sacred writings of China, India, and Palestine. In Shanghai and later in Peking, I hobnobbed with the young literati, a different class from the Indian students, very interesting men who prepared themselves almost cosmically to enter local politics. I saw that China had always pulled me strangely.

Meeting the boys here recalled to me how interested I had been in the Chinese students at Palo Alto. It was from a Chinese at college that I began to get a real conception of the historic and esoteric figure of Jesus, the man we make a religion of in the states. Over here, the steady going literature of the best minds is never far from the utterances of the mystics and the prophets. I met them all from Patanjali to Parachelsis and volumes of magic. The spiritual properties of medicine,

studies of the stars that none would scoff at so breezily as the modern astronomers of Europe and America. More or less at this time, I was in touch with Americans in China who were making money. I lived a double life, holding fast to the commercial world and keeping secret my enthusiasm for matters of mysticism. This recreation kept me from getting stale and tainted. The white man over here plays a lot and he drinks too much at his play. Perhaps I'm getting too diffused in this

story, but I rather wanted you to understand since I began the idea that drove me to become powerful in the native mind and at the same time to hold a grip on the West. I was disinclined to the poverty of the earth and at the same time unwilling to release my grip on certain ideas of heaven. You see all real mysticism is out of the East. There was only one way to make good on this training and the Chinese knows how. The Hindu doesn't. It's to keep God and man separate,

to keep the left hand for the spirit of things and the right for matter and the world. I had a gift in the beginning for these languages. I wouldn't have gotten them without that. I wouldn't have had the urge without it. It was that lust to know what the river men were saying and not only that but to know why they said these things. A man might learn Chinese in a certain number of months, but he can't learn the feel of the people without a call to them.

Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to think in Chinese. That's the truth so much so that the English and American training I had known began to take on the same sense of distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you in the yellow rug, even before you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of

romance. He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence because he saw that his story was making her inclined to him pleasantly. Meanwhile, he added, I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways and I had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy. I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh. That is much, Moira Kelvin said. Then Romney realized perhaps it was something of premonition that what he said was not quite

as exact as it would have been before meeting her. Perhaps it is too much, he replied quickly. I would have said it without qualification before, before yesterday. I only mean in men matters. Perhaps I've learned how to wait and how to laugh all over again in the things that are nearer the heart. I was only talking about the pressures that the world put on a man. Perhaps I've not put away boyish things that pertain to a man's relation with women. His woman, that's an arcanum

to me. Arcanums call you, don't they, Sir Romney? she asked. He saw the gleam of her eyes and teeth in the purple dusk. Something as they call you, I think. I've never known the sheer excitement of a human presence such as you have brought to me. It's because I can lose myself in you. China has a new atmosphere when I'm with you. I am interested. I like your praise. Her voice came lingeringly to him. You are not so young as I thought, she went on, and yet you are young. You are still preparing,

and yet you have passed the multitudes of men. Oh, so far. Presently I began to see the new birth of China. It became clearer and clearer as I learned more of the native mind. Now that I think of it, this new birth, which is not yet consummated, is like the gray glistening moth of your Irish house that lay in the desk through the long winter. All that the usual white man sees even now is the weathered rusty chrysalis of the old, but I see the wings. They are still pinned. The body is moist

and craving, but it looks great and good to me. I met some of the young men who are ready to give their lives for it, a kind of inspired group of young men like Hugo's group that nearly became famous. And there is one American whom I was honored to meet, oh, just recently. My story is rapidly getting up to date. This American, a hunchback and a prophet, has given himself to old mother China. He dreams about the peace that is ahead for the world, and his dreams are straight

as the hammer to the anvil because he has no sentiment, knows all about war. Even the cleansing of war has written a textbook on military tactics, which is the biggest and newest thing in American and British camps, yet a dreamer about peace. Her face was close to his in the dusk, a yearning in her eyes that shook his heart. A chill went through him because this yearning was not for him. He saw that he had touched her in the center of her mysterious being, saw that a man with a dream was

more to her than any man's action. Tell me more, she whispered. Nifton Bend. Have you, too, heard of him? Not until now. Is that the hunchback's name? Yes. I only saw him for about 10 minutes. It was in Peking a year ago, the strangest, saddest, and longest face in the world. It looks up at you, for he is named. I could not speak when he first looked up at me. Something leaped in my chest. I wanted to put my arms about him and lead him to a chair. It wouldn't do to tell that impulse,

only to a woman. The name of Nifton Bend was repeating in my mind. It was in a room of a native professor's house in the kangaroo section of Peking. There were students about, but all became hushed with the hunchback's presence. Cushions were brought, and we sat down around him. I remembered his name in connection with the military textbook now. That came with a jump. He was young, and yet long ago I had read another book of his, which until he was here before me,

I had not related to the author of the textbook. It was during the college days in California when that other book came to me, and I loved the Chinese setting. The book itself I did not remember. It was half a story, half a fairy tale, but from it the spirit of China had come to me, something related to the emerging of the great Gray Moth. This was only the beginning of recollections. I had heard this man spoken of as the spirit of young China, as the organizer and

leader of the new Chinese army, as a repressor of the Japanese influence. This frail and broken body seemed, in the extravagance of my thoughts of that moment, to hold the future of the empire. I saw him somehow as the embodiment of the depth and genius of the yellow race. They called him the General. He was looking at me with a dead expressionless gaze, an instant before his eyes had been burning, and there had been a smile on the woman mouth of him, only the pale angular jaw

and the narrow temples had not changed. I was startled at his look. His head made me think of a wolfhound, that long ironed head. It was not until normal consciousness and the smile returned that I realized that his lapse of expression meant that he was seeing into me, that I had been appraised, body and soul. Romney talked coldly now. He felt the entire passion of the woman turn from his own story, that he had touched something that took her farther from himself,

if nearer to her dream. He caught a glimpse of what it would mean to hold the heart of this woman in all its power. It was like Romney to make as much as possible now of the opposing influence, yet he hurried through. Niften Ben's eyes were lingering warmly upon me again. I felt zeal for under him, but I was tied up for the time being. Yes, it was as if I had found a master. In coming into his presence, I had touched the inner circle. He spoke of China and Japan,

aloh, uninflected English, and then of America, how he had left her because there was no play of his powers in America, how the states seemed to him trance and trifles, yet how he loved the states. Presently, he said that we were destined to meet again, and I knew that the audience was finished. Where is he now, Morira Kelvin asked, in Peking. At least he is never far from the center of things, and that is Peking. They were silent some time, and then the woman spoke,

you have told me a story of yourself by talking about China and another man. Take me back to the hotel, Sir Romney. I will see you tomorrow. Come to me at noon if you like. It has been a good day, thanks to you. I'm glad to know you better and better. It sounds cold, but perhaps sometime you'll know what that means. I am a little mad tonight. I seem to feel old China in her new birth, moist and craving like the big gray moth, her mate not yet come, and this hunchback whom you are

destined to meet again. Section four. It was a world-wind fortnight at Hankau. Romney was game, rather big game, for a questing beauty, a wing around the world. His soul had been asleep to her kind of magic. She touched him awake. His education and many attitudes towards life were torn down and rebuilt. There was a furious lover in the man and serious weaknesses that had never been tested before. Though he did not

acknowledge and perhaps was not aware of the fact he had been in his own way a terrific worker. The passions of his life in a single day had been turned from his tasks to Moirah Kelvin. She had to be a rather splendid creature to take graciously the full tumult from such a man's heart, but this was her genius. Romney's woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive. She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought to bear upon a man to

make him greater, to make him surpass himself in an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest force and still have an aching void to spare. Moirah Kelvin was 30 years old, in full bloom, trusting nothing under the sun but her own heart. Whether it was mania or the excellence of her evolution, her conviction remained upstanding that there was one man somewhere who could fully awaken her. She was without laws and without fears, but she would have considered it the most

vulgar form of failure to give herself to a man who called her only in part. She was in the height of her power and modern enough to wish to know a man well before she revealed to him more than the usual arts of woman. Her one great mistake had been made at the end of girlhood in the case of the tiger hunter. She held her body and her beauty even more sacred now because of that failure. Yet she looked into the faces of men everywhere. Any man brave enough

could have his chance. Romney made the most of his. For hours on their last day together, Romney could not speak. He looked long into her face from time to time until it turned into a mist before his eyes or other shattery faces passed before it. He could see nothing beyond her but his own death, and he knew enough to realize there could not be much help in that, considering his present frame of mind. They were at long's truths a sultry evening. She was tender

and tyrannical in turn. We are not enemies, she said. I have been no more to you than you have called. I know you are not holding that ancient balderdash that I lured you on. I have never from the first day kept from you my conviction that the one had not been found in Sir Romney. And yet you were more to me than I thought at first. Why not take the full honor of that now? You are going away, he said Dolly. It is a mercy to you, though I am not merciful.

If you were a fool like most men, you would think me a devil. I suppose men who are not big enough to make good with a woman call her a devil, or a vampire, she laughed. He shook his head. He had lost his sense of humor for the time. I am not making any mistake about you. I have been away about world matters like most men. The women we meet usually call us to be less than we are, rather than more. Men have made women that way, she said quickly. The way doesn't matter. That's

what happens, or at least men think so, and failed to get on the ground where even an average woman is at her best. But it's not generalities for me. I perceive myself lost in you. I loved from the first, the great open nature which you drew from, mates in everything, your whole creativeness lost in the one subject, your whole power and reason for being, love. When I came to you I seemed to come into my own country. I did not seek you. I was happy enough in the old. I looked bleak and

blind to myself before your coming. Oh, I praised you right enough. Only it's hard, damned hard, to give up. You will be tremendous for some woman, she whispered. Let me tell you, there was one day when I rocked before you. To think I could diminish after that, he said slowly. His voice chilled her. You have said it all, Sir Romney. We did not seek this thing. At least I had no wish to hurt you. I do not play in these great matters. Some have thought otherwise, but I do not play.

You would not have known me an hour if you had not been worth knowing. I have ceased to be worth knowing then, only today. That is not kind, Sir Romney. You are less than yourself to say that. We have been much together. If you are hurt by this, it is because you are less than I think you are. Hurt, I mean enduringly. Hurt, of course, now, but constructively. You will not die. Perhaps you will not break training seriously. Listen, do you think I failed to know what will happen to you?

If you make the best of this, you will be a greater lover for some other woman. She will have to be a greater woman to call you. You will know her more in the first hour because of these days with me. You will be less apt to make the one hideous mistake which men and women make in the world, that of choosing the wrong mate. You will be a questor because of these days with me. There is something precious about that. If there is but one woman in the world for me,

as you say there is, but one man for you, then why is it that I want you so? This is your initiation. Mine was more sordid and revolting with the tiger hunter. I am your awakening. You think I am everything because I am older, deeper in the world of love, demanding so much, thinking so much of these things. Remember this, there is no such thing as the triangle among real people. Mark the woman as common-minded who is in doubt between two men whom she knows well,

all shuffling and experimenting is the cause of misery in the world. The higher the soul of a man or woman, the more essential is the voice, the hand of one. Any key will fit common locks. As for you, you were held in your work. All the natural fury of you was compressed in the gray and the silence of mere men things. You were like a sleeping prince, Sir Romney. I break the enchantment and look into your face as your eyes

open and say sorrowfully, no, it is not he, and pass on. Moira, Calvin, you pass on. You would not want me to take less than I dream of, but I love you. I never said it before. I have no place to put this great thing that you have called. It doesn't come back to me. It's got all of me. It leaves me so much less than alive when you pass on. He smiled at her. Sounds weak and pleady. I don't mean it that way. I want nothing of pity, of course. Pity, that would be obscene.

I'm not making a picture of the heart wreck. This is no doom song to a gracious lady. Only knowing you is an insult to the rest of the world. Her slim hand darted out to him. For a moment his voice choked. The touch of her was like a greater self. He was tortured with a vision of what it would mean to have all of this woman, to command her tenderness utterly, her bestowals, the full deep look of woman to man, the night in day presence, the child she dreamed

of, this woman lovely as a golden cloud. He trembled and his head turned away. Her face came around to his. Romney, she whispered. It isn't nearly so easy as it would be if you were less a man. Oh, don't you see that? I would have had the heart of a girl and pitied you and thought it love. You're enough to make that, except for the life I learned in England. Now it's the one covenant. Why, the man I want, I'll do the winning. I would bring the fight to him. Nothing could stand

between us. I could be saint or wanton. You don't know me. You would not want half of me. You could only want that part of me you are able to command. Perhaps as that hunchback said to you, we shall meet again. I feel that you are a big fellow, brave and quiet and generous, that you have the stuff to make a lover. The real lover must be a bit of a mystic and you have that. But not now and I must go on. See how I have stayed. Romney stared hard at her a moment and

then beyond. It was all black, a depth of bamboo clumps like a jungle over her bent left shoulder. He saw his end in that blackness. She was light and power and beauty and art. A group of waiting girls worked playing the vina behind the lattice by the bank of the river. It was like the slow song of nightingales. The scent of roses passed between them like a spirit hand. Her face was nearer. The warm scent of her was in his nostrils and power came to him that he had not known at all

that day. Romney spoke, don't think of me as holding you. I love you too much for that. How easy to say that after once it is spoken. I have nothing but praise and gladness to give you. Yes, you have stayed that I might be with you, that I might have my full chance. I know what you mean by his being worth death and what a man he would be to command your heart once even and live on afterward. No, I wouldn't hold you. I wouldn't cry out. I would hold you by sheer love

for me. But I'm not great enough for that. I would cry out if you came to my arms, but they are not magnetic enough. I have had my chance. I know what a woman is. Forgive me if I disagree about there being another for me. I'm afraid there isn't because I've known you. His voice became very soft. You'll feel it, he added. You'll feel it following you around. A man's love for you, mine. I win to know what I know tonight. And when you find him, know that I drink his health. I could do

that devoutly. I've had your baggage taken to the boat. The launch will call here for you. In a few minutes, I think. I think you're not a woman at all, but an immortal. You see, I cannot suffer thinking of you that way. Romney, yes. Romney, no one is watching. I would not care if they were. Put your head a moment on my breast. Ah, and now upon my knee, dear boy. Romney, I am blind. I almost hate to go. Don't let me stay, will you? Ah, kiss me once. Lips ice cold once.

It's just passion, Romney. I hate myself. Don't let me stay tonight. Once. They were standing. She had not spoken for long. The launch was waiting. I want something that you have on, something of yours, he managed to say steadily. She unfastened her cloak, gave it to him to hold, took off the waist she wore, a bit of gold rose chiffon that he could cover in his palm. Then she put on her cloak again. He helped her into the launch. Her bowed head turned to him

a moment and she covered her eyes. The launch sputtered away. Romney went back to the seat near the bamboo thicket, the scent of roses wavered past, and the music of the vina came into him. Romney drank. Once he raised his head, it was her steamer passing down the river. Hours afterwards, he was drinking there alone. Toward morning, Long's truth himself came and sat down, but the American did not speak. Neither was he drunk in the least.

End of section 24, chapter 1, prologue, Han Cow, The Yellow Rug Woman, from The Last Ditch by Will L. Comfort.