Tom Beauling/Chapter 17
BEAULING had written to Dunbar from Brindisi. At Hong-Kong he received a cable saying, "Come when you have wound up your affairs." So that was all right. He could foresee nothing that could delay him again. The way home was pleasant. He knew the highroads of the East as a New York banker knows Wall Street, and all ports were full of friendly faces. But the homing was not without melancholy, for he was saying "Good-by" to many people whom he would never see again. At the ex-missionary's house in Hong-Kong he sang until the heat became endurable; then he kissed the five children, tipped the servants, and went down through the night to the Yacht Club. The young men looked older, but they were as free from care as ever, and still talked of Wareing week and the Shen-se coal fizzle. They made Beauling sing for the last time. And he, the sweat rolling off him, for it was bitter hot, sat at the tuneless piano and sang the old songs. Certain great merchants of China heard that he was passing through, and sent him presents of carved jade and amethyst. One—the revered Chang Lo—sent him a string of beads, alternately pierced pearls and cunningly carved gold, with this word:
"He is leaving us forever because he is going to his beloved. Take her this, esteemed Beauling, from the honorable old Chang Lo. It will guard her from the evils of this world and the next."
Beauling thrust the chain and the note into his breast pocket, and he blushed at thought of the astute guesswork of the Honorable Chang Lo. Then he sang the love-song of Taikon in what sounded something like the original Mandarin, and the young men howled with joy. They went aboard ship with him, carrying their own wine in tubs packed with ice, annexed the saloon, and waked the sleeping wild-fowl in the far-off bays of the harbor. With the first light they went ashore, reckless and careless; and Beanling, looking upon them for the last time, realized for the first time that, in spite of all the gaiety and the proud spirits, they were sorrowful exiles in a strange city, far from the walls of the fathers. And he went on his way saddened. It was the same at Nagasaki, at Kobe, and at Yokohama. Faces that he had learned to look for when he shored at those ports smiled on him again; voices long since familiar told him again of trials and ambitions. Mothers drew back the coverlets, and showed him the youngest born. And many little children made much of him. Ahead was a narrowing ocean; behind, thousands of miles of good-bys. There are few faces to which, with the knowledge that we shall never see them again, we can say good-by without emotion. To say good-by with the meaning, "Good luck," "God be with you," is so easy, so pleasant; to say "Good-by. I shall never see your face again"—that is so difficult. The first Beauling said with all his heart; the second, with all his courage. He was hull-down for the well-beloved, but he was leaving all the old homes for a new. But when the steamer had sunk the Hawaiian Islands, the old life had become a companionable ghost of a recollection. And his face was ever turned forward—north by east to the Golden Gate by which he should enter the land of his great hope.
Mist and cold closed in; the winds passed over the bergs of Bering Strait and blew upon them; the seas ran gray and high. For days the fog-horn vomited wind and sound, the hoarse, shaking "Beware!" of the ocean. They sailed by dead-reckoning, an ill-built ship, manned by Orientals and crowded to her last berth with restless humanity. They steamed slowly. On the tenth day a barren coast rose ahead, and a pilot-boat, double-reefed, shining like a yacht, came out to them, whipping across the waves and lifting like a duck. Through the drizzle they saw the gray seal on the rocks, and, far beyond, the masts of shipping and the precipitous water-front of San Francisco.
Beauling's heart was singing a delightful song with this burden:
Four and a half days to New York.
When suddenly it was bruited about that there was plague in Yokohama, and the ship, with all souls, would have to remain for ten days in quarantine. After the first indignant outburst, people did not speak to each other at all, but became sullen and brooding, Beauling among them.
A worse misfortune befell. The awfulness of delays increases in direct ratio as the distance decreases. If you were in Singapore and the Only One was in New York, you could force yourself to wait over a steamer. You would suffer, but you could do it. Arriving at San Francisco, a delay of ten days would be torture infernal. You would grow thin, your temper would spoil—you could just manage to live through it. But suppose your beloved was in the very next room, the wall of which was too thick to transmit sound, and you were compelled to wait there for ten days! It would be impossible. Your heart would knock out your sides, you would go mad as to your mind, and you would die after three quarters of an hour by the clock. If precisely that had happened to Beauling, he would have simplified matters by knocking the wall down; but what did happen was next-best bad. The quarantine officers brought out papers from the desired shore, and, a San Francisco "Social Topics" falling to the lot of Beauling, he learned that Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar of New York, with their daughter. Miss Phylis Dunbar, and a party of friends, transported thither in two palatial cars—the Lasca and the Weda—were at that moment at the Palace Hotel of the Metropolis of the Pacific Slope.
People knew him no longer, and fled when he approached. He had the port deck to himself, and there, barring occasional moments when he went below to shave savagely or eat savagely, he walked out the ten days of vile durance and most of their accompanying nights. His language, when he did speak—and it was only to hardened men—bordered on the improbable. His clothes hung about him loosely.
On the morning of the tenth day, a shambling giant was allowed to go ashore. He spoke to the customs officers in a weary voice, collapsed into a cab, and was jolted to the Palace Hotel. The clerk told him in a confidential tone that Mr. Dunbar and party had left an hour ago for the races. Mr. Beauling fasted and followed.
A crowd of young men and girls in lovely clothes came laughing across the paddock. A gigantic hurricane of joy swept suddenly into their midst, and scattered them as a wolf may be supposed to scatter sheep.
One man, the favored son of a Pittsburg magnate, who was of the party, said that, "Barrin' demonstrations, he and she met as if they was engaged to be married."
Beauling plunged heavily on the long shot in the three remaining races, and won three times. It simply had to be like that.
Beauling, bag and baggage, went home in two palatial cars named Lasca and Weda. They were occupied by his heart's desire and himself, and a number of other people.