Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident. Samuel Merwin

      She read it again. And then again.

      An amazing man!

      She made, ready to go to bed, slowly, dawdling, trying to straighten out the curious emotional pressures on her mind.

      She read the letter yet again; considered it.

      Finally, after passing through many moods leading up to a tender sympathy for this bleak life, and then passing on into a state of sheer nervous excitement, she deliberately dressed again and went out on deck.

      He stood by the rail, smoking.

      “You have my letter?” he asked.

      “Yes. I've read it.” She was oddly, happily relieved at finding him.

      “You shouldn't have come.”

      She had no answer to this. It seemed hardly relevant. She smiled, in the dark.

      They fell to walking the deck. After a time, shyly, tacitly, a little embarrassed, they went up forward again.

      The ship was well out in the Yellow Sea now. The bow rose and fell slowly, rhythmically, beneath them.

      Moved to meet his letter with a response in kind, she talked of herself.

      “It seems strange to be coming back to China.”

      “You've been long away?”

      “Six years. My mother died when I was thirteen. Father thought it would be better for me to be in the States. My uncle, father's brother, was in the wholesale hardware business in New York, and lived in Orange, and they took me in. They were always nice to me. But last fall Uncle Frank came down with rheumatic gout. He's an invalid now. It must have been pretty expensive. And there was some trouble in his business. They couldn't very well go on taking care of me, so father decided to have me come back to T'ainan-fu.” She folded her hands in her lap.

      He lighted his pipe, and smoked reflectively.

      “That will be rather hard for you, won't it?” he remarked, after a time. “I mean for a person of your temperament. You are, I should say, almost exactly my opposite in every respect. You like people, friends. You are impulsive, doubtless affectionate. I could be relatively happy, marooned among a few hundred millions of yellow folk—though I could forego the missionaries. But you are likely, I should think, to be starved there. Spiritually—emotionally.”

      “Do you think so?” said she quietly.

      “Yes.” He thought it, over “The life of a mission compound isn't exactly gay.”

      “No, it isn't.”

      “And you need gaiety.”

      “I wonder if I do. I haven't really faced it, of course. I'm not facing it now.”

      “Just think a moment. You've not even landed in China yet. You're under no real restraint—still among white people, on a white man's ship, eating in European hotels at the ports. You aren't teaching endless lessons to yellow children, day in, day out. You aren't shut up in an interior city, where it mightn't even he safe for you to step outside the gate house alone. And yet you're breaking bounds. Right now—out here with me.”

      Already she was taking his curious bluntness for granted. She said now, simply, gently:

      “I know. I'm sitting out here at midnight with a married man. And I don't seem to mind. Of course you're not exactly married. Still … A few days ago I wouldn't have thought it possible.”

      “Did you tell the Hasmers that you were out here last night?”

      “No.”

      “Shall you tell them about this?”

      She thought a moment; then, as simply, repeated: “No.”

      “Why not?”

      “I don't know. It's the way I feel.”

      He nodded. “You feel it's none of their business.”

      “Well—yes.”

      “Of course, I ought to take you back, now.”

      “I don't feel as if I were doing wrong. Oh, a little, but …”

      “I ought to take you back.”

      She rested a hand on his arm. It was no more than a girlish gesture. She didn't notice that he set his teeth and sat very still.

      “I've thought this, though,” she said. “If I'm to meet you out here like—like this—”

      “But you're not to.”

      “Well … here we are!”

      “Yes … here we are!”

      “I was going to say, it's dishonest, I think, for us to avoid each other during the day. If we're friends …”

      “If we're friends we'd better admit it.”

      “Yes. I meant that.”

      He fell to working at his pipe with a pocket knife She watched him until he was smoking again.

      “Mrs. Hasmer won't like it.”

      “I can't help that.”

      “No. Of course.” He smoked. Suddenly he broke out, with a gesture so vehement that it startled her: “Oh, it's plain enough—we're on a ship, idling, dreaming, floating from a land of color and charm and quaint unreality to another land that has always enchanted me, for all the dirt and disease, and the smells. It's that! Romance! The old web! It's catching us. And we're not even resisting. No one could blame you—you're young, charming, as full of natural life as a young flower in the morning. But I … I'm not romantic. To-night, yes! But next Friday, in Shanghai, no!”

      Betty turned away to hide a smile.

      “You think I'm brutal? Well—I am.”

      “No, you're not brutal.”

      “Yes, I am. … But my God! You in T'ainanfu! Child, it's wrong!”

      “It is simply a thing I can't help,” said she.

      They fell silent. The pulse of the great dim ship was soothing. One bell sounded. Two bells. Three.

3

       Table of Contents

      A man of Jonathan Brachey's nature couldn't know the power his nervous bold thoughts and words were bound to exert in the mind of a girl like Betty. In her heart already she was mothering him. Every word he spoke now, even the strong words that startled her, she enveloped in warm sentiment.

      To Brachey's crabbed, self-centered nature she was like a lush oasis in the arid desert of his heart. He could no more turn his back on it than could any tired, dusty wanderer. He knew this. Or, better, she was like a mirage. And mirages have driven men out of their wits.

      So romance seized them. They walked miles the next day, round and round the deck. Mrs. Hasmer was powerless, and perturbed. Her husband counseled watchful patience. Before night all the passengers knew that the two were restless apart. They found corners on the boat deck, far from all eyes.

      That night Mrs. Hasmer came to Betty's door; satisfied herself that the girl was actually undressing and going to bed. Not one personal word passed.

      And then, half an hour later, Betty, dressed again, tiptoed out. Her heart was high, touched with divine recklessness. This, she supposed, was wrong; but right or wrong, it was carrying her out of her girlish self. She couldn't stop.

      Brachey was fighting harder; but to little purpose. They had these two days now. That was all. At Shanghai, and after, it would be, as he had so vigorously said, different.