CHAPTER I – FELLOW VOYAGERS

ON a night in October, 1911, the river steamer Yen Hsin lay alongside the godown, or warehouse, of the Chinese Navigation Company at Shanghai. Her black hull bulked large in the darkness that was spotted with inadequate electric lights. Her white cabins, above, lighted here and there, loomed high and ghostly, extending as far as the eye could easily see from the narrow wharf beneath. Swarming continuously across the gangplanks, chanting rhythmically to keep the quick shuffling step, crews of coolies carried heavy boxes and bales swung from bamboo poles.

During the evening the white passengers were coming aboard by ones and twos and finding their cabins, all of which were forward on the promenade deck, grouped about the enclosed area that was to be at once their dining-room and “social hall.” Here, within a narrow space, bounded by strips of outer deck and a partition wall, these few casual passengers were to be caught, willy-nilly, in a sort of passing comradeship. For the greater part of this deck, amidships and aft, was screened off for the use of traveling Chinese officials, and the two lower decks would be crowded with lower class natives and freight. And, not unnaturally, in the minds of nearly all the white folk, as they settled for the night, arose questions as to the others aboard. For strange beings of many nations dig a footing of sorts on the China Coast, and odd contrasts occur when any few are thrown together by a careless fate… And so, thinking variously in their separate cabins of the meeting to come, at breakfast about the single long table, and of the days of voyaging into the heart of oldest China, these passengers, one by one, fell asleep; while through open shutters floated quaint odors and sounds from the tangle of sampans and slipper-boats that always line the curving bund and occasional shouts and songs from late revelers passing along the boulevard beyond the rows of trees.

It was well after midnight when the Yen Hsin drew in her lines and swung off into the narrow channel of the Whangpoo. Drifting sampans, without lights, scurried out of her path. With an American captain on the strip of promenade deck, forward, that served for a bridge, a yellow pilot, and Scotch engineers below decks, she slipped down with the tide, past the roofed-over opium hulks that were anchored out there, past the dimly outlined stone buildings of the British and American quarter, on into the broader Wusung. Here a great German mail liner lay at anchor, lighted from stem to stem. Farther down lay three American cruisers; and below these a junk, drifting dimly by with ribbed sails flapping and without the sign of a light, built high astern, like the ghost of a medieval trader.

“There’s his lights now!” Thus the captain to a huge figure of a man who stood, stooping a little, beside him, peering out at the river. And the captain, a stocky little man with hands in the pockets of a heavy jacket, added – “The dirty devil!”

Indeed, a small green light showed now on the junk’s quarter; and then she was gone astern.

After a silence, the captain said: “You may as well turn in.”

“Perhaps I will,” replied the other. “Though I get a good deal more sleep than I need on the river. And very little exercise.”

“That’s the devil of this life, of course. Look a’ me – I’m fat!” The captain spoke in a rough, faintly blustering tone, perhaps in a nervous response to the well-modulated voice of his mate, “Must make even more difference to you – the way you’ve lived. And at that, after all, you ain’t a slave to the river.”

“No… in a sense, I’m not.” The mate fell silent.

There were, of course, vast differences in the degrees of misfortune among the flotsam and jetsam of the coast. Captain Benjamin, now, had a native wife and five or six half-caste children tucked away somewhere in the Chinese city of Shanghai.

“We’ve gut quite a bunch aboard this trip,” offered the captain.

“Indeed?”

“One or two well-known people. There’s our American millionaire, Dawley Kane. Took four outside cabins. His son’s with him, and a secretary, and a Japanese that’s been up with him before. Wonder if it’s a pleasure trip – or if it means that the Kane interests are getting hold up the river. It might, at that. They bought the Cantey line, you know, in nineteen eight. Then there’s Tex Connor, and his old sidekick the Manila Kid, and a couple of women schoolteachers from home, and six or eight others – customs men and casuals. And Dixie Carmichael – she’s aboard. Quite a bunch! And His Nibs gets on tomorrow at Nanking.”

“Kang, you mean?”

“The same. There’s a story that he’s ordered up to Peking. They were talking about it yesterday at the office.”

“Do you think he’s in trouble?”

“Can’t say. But if you ask me, it don’t look like such a good time to be easy on these agitators, now does it? And they tell me he’s been letting ‘em off, right and left.”

The mate stood musing, holding to the rail. “It’s a problem,” he replied, after a little, rather absently.

“The funny thing is – he ain’t going on through. Not this trip, anyhow. We’re ordered to put him off at his old place, this side of Huang Chau. Have to use the boats. You might give them a look-see.”

“They’ve gossiped about Kang before this at Shanghai.”

“Shanghai,” cried the captain, with nervous irrelevancy, “is full of information about China – and it’s all wrong!” He added then, “Seen young Black lately?”

The mate moved his head in the negative.

“Consul-general sent him down from Hankow, after old Chang stopped that native paper of his. I ran into him yesterday, over to the bank. He says the revolution’s going to break before summer.”

The mate made no reply to this. Every trip the captain talked in this manner. His one deep fear was that the outbreak might take place while he was far up the river.

It had been supposed by all experienced observers of the Chinese scene, that the Manchu Dynasty would not long survive the famous old empress dowager, the vigorous and imperious little woman who was known throughout a rational and tolerant empire, not without a degree of affection, as “the Old Buddha.” She had at the time of the present narrative been dead two years and more; the daily life of the infant emperor was in the control of a new empress dowager, that Lung Yu who was notoriously overriding the regent and dictating such policies of government as she chose in the intervals between protracted periods of palace revelry.

The one really powerful personage in Peking that year was the chief eunuch, Chang Yuan-fu, a former actor, notoriously the empress’s personal favorite, who catered to her pleasures, robbed the imperial treasury of vast sums, wreaked ugly vengeance on critical censors, and publicly insulted dukes of the royal house.

All this was familiar. The Manchu strain had dwindled out; and while an empress pleased her jaded appetites by having an actor cut with the lash in her presence for an indifferent performance, all South China, from Canton to the Yangtze, seethed with the steadily increasing ferment of revolution. Conspirators ranged the river and the coast. At secret meetings in Singapore, Tokio, San Francisco and New York, new and bloody history was planned. The oldest and hugest of empires was like a vast crater that steamed and bubbled faintly here and there as hot vital forces accumulated beneath.

The mate, pondering the incalculable problem, finally spoke: “I suppose, if this revolt should bring serious trouble to Kang, it might affect you and me as well.”

The captain flared up, the blustering note rising higher in his voice. “But somebody’ll have to run the boats, won’t they?”

“If they run at all.”

His impersonal tone seemed to irritate further the captain’s troubled spirit. “If they run at all, eh? It’s all right for you – you can go it alone – you haven’t got children on your mind, young ones!”

The big man was silent again. A great hand gripped a stanchion tightly as he gazed out at the dark expanse of water. The captain, glancing around at him, looking a second time at that hand, turned away, with a little sound.

“I will say good night,” remarked the mate abruptly, and left his chief to his uncertain thoughts.

The steamer moved deliberately out into the wide estuary of the Yangtze, which is at this point like a sea. Squatting at the edge of the deck, outside the rail, the pilot spoke musically to the Chinese quartermaster. Slowly, a little at a time, as she plowed the ruffling water, the steamer swung off to the northwest to begin her long journey up the mighty river to Hankow where the passengers would change for the smaller Ichang steamer, or for the express to Peking over the still novel trunk railway. And if, as happened not infrequently, the Yen Hsin should break down or stick in the mud, the Peking passengers would wait a week about the round stove in the old Astor House at Hankow for the next express.

A mighty river indeed, is the Yangtze. During half the year battle-ships of reasonably deep draught may reach Hankow. In the heyday of the sailing trade clippers out of New York and blunt lime-juicers out of Liverpool were any day sights from the bund there. Through a busy and not seldom bloody century the merchants of a clamorous outside world have roved the great river (where yellow merchants of the Middle Kingdom, in sampan, barge and junk, roved fifty centuries before them) with rich cargoes of tea (in leaden chests that bore historic ideographs on the enclosing matting) – with hides and horns and coal from Hupeh and furs and musk from far-away Szechuen, with soya beans and rice and bristles and nutgalls and spices and sesamum, with varnish and tung oil and vegetable tallow, with cotton, ramie, rape and hemp, with copper, quicksilver, slate, lead and antimony, with porcelains and silk. Along this river that to-day divides an empire into two vast and populous domains a thousand thousand fortunes have been gained and lost, rebellions and wars have raged, famines have blighted whole peoples. Forts, pagodas and palaces have lined its banks. The gilded barges of emperors have drifted idly on its broad bosom. Exquisite painted beauties have found mirrors in its neighboring canals. Its waters drain to-day the dusty red plain where Lady Ch’en, the Helen, of China, rocked a throne and died.

The morning sun rode high. Soft-footed cabin stewards in blue robes removed the long red tablecloth and laid a white. By ones and twos the passengers appeared from their cabins or from the breezy deck and took their seats, eying one another with guarded curiosity as they bowed a morning greeting.

Miss Andrews, of Indianapolis, stepped out from her cabin through a narrow corridor, and then, at sight of the table, stopped short, while her color rose slightly. Miss Andrews was slender, a year or so under thirty, and, in a colorless way, pretty. Shy and sensitive, the scene before her was one her mind’s eye had failed to picture; the seats about the long table were half filled, and entirely with men. She saw, in that one quick look, the face of a young German between those of two Englishmen. A remarkably thin man in a check suit looked up and for an instant fixed furtive eyes on hers. Just beyond him sat a big man, with a round wooden face and one glass eye; he turned his head with his eyes to look at her. A quiet man of fifty-odd, with gray hair, a nearly white mustache that was cropped close, and the expression of quiet satisfaction that only wealth and settled authority can give, was putting a spoonful of condensed milk into his coffee. Next to him sat a young man – very young, certainly not much more than twenty or twenty-one – perhaps his son (the aquiline nose and slightly receding but wide and full forehead were the same) – rubbing out a cigarette on his butter plate. He had been smoking before breakfast. She remembered these two now; they had been at the Astor House in Shanghai; they were the Kanes, of New York, the famous Kanes. They called the son, “Rocky” – Rocky Kane.

Unable to take in more, Miss Andrews stepped back a little way into the corridor, deciding to wait for her traveling companion, Miss Means, of South Bend. She could hardly go out there alone and sit down with all those men.

But just then a door opened and closed; and across the way, coming directly, easily, out into the diningroom, Miss Andrews beheld the surprising figure of a slim girl – or a girl she appeared at first glance – of nineteen or twenty, wearing a blue, middy blouse and short blue shirt. Her black hair was drawn loosely together at the neck and tied with a bow of black ribbon. Her somewhat pale face, with its thin line of a mouth, straight nose, curving black eyebrows and oddly pale eyes, was in some measure attractive. She took her seat at the table without hesitation, acknowledging the reserved greetings of various of the men with a slight inclination of the head.

It seemed to Miss Andrews that she might now go on in there. But the thought that some of these men had surely noticed her confusion was disconcerting; and so it was a relief to hear Miss Means pattering on behind her. For that firmly thin little woman had fought life to a standstill and now, except in the moments of prim severity that came unaccountably into possession of her thoughts, found it dryly amusing. They took their seats, these two little ladies, Miss Means laying her copy of Things Chinese beside her coffee cup; and Miss Andrews tried to bow her casual good mornings as the curious girl in the middy blouse had done. The girl, by the way, seemed a very little older at close view.

Miss Andrews stole glimpses, too, at young Mr. Rocky Kane. He was a handsome boy, with thick chestnut hair from which he had not wholly succeeded in brushing the curl, but she was not sure that she liked the flush on his cheeks, or the nervous brightness of the eyes, or the expression about the mouth. There had been stories floating about the hotel in Shanghai. He plainly lacked discipline. But she saw that he might easily fascinate a certain sort of woman.