Tom Beauling/Chapter 9
THE Peninsular and Oriental single-screw, warranted not to make over ten knots an hour, old-type (by the saloon aft) steamship Rohilla lay in the crater-like basin of Hong-Kong harbor, with three feet of her sheathing out forward and a foot of it out aft. Two yellow-white awninged launches, fat as grub-worms in the bows, smelled at her starboard side. The Rohilla was taking in, with grunts and crashes, the perishable freight for Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. The harbor swarmed with evil-smelling junks and sampans. War-ships of France, England, Germany, and Russia, compact as watches, of dirtied colors but extreme cleanliness and threatening design, rode in the harbor, and rose above the huddling junks as unfeelingly as robber castles stand above villages on the Rhine. Far up the harbor, by the dry-docks, a mud-colored raft, pointed at both ends, supported two squat, mud-colored turrets and a giddy flag, much too big for it, that was just beginning to be known and feared in the far East. The French, English, German, and Russian war-ships were there on a hurry call, because it seemed that some one was threatening some one else's sphere of influence, and the four capitals of China (which are Paris, London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg) wanted to find out whose sphere of influence it was that was being threatened, why it was being threatened, and by whom. After that England would stick her jaw into Russia's face, and her elbow into Germany's ribs. Germany would hit out a scheme for announcing universal peace from the top of the Mount of Olives; Russia would catch a yellow statesman by the pig-tail and make him dance, and France would either plan a noble revenge for herself or jump up and down, clap her hands, and say:
"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."
The mud-colored raft with the twin turrets was the only vessel there which meant business. There was fighting in the Philippines, and she was going to get back to it just as soon as the weeds could be scraped off her; and after that she had an ambitious design of finding, all by herself, some island that nobody wanted, calling the inhabitants rebels (for the benefit of the press at home), and afterward annexing them to the United States in the interest of the Republican candidate for President, with much destruction of seaboard villages and a decimation of the native population.
A sick white man dragged himself out of the Rohilla's smoking-room—an isolated dog-kennel aft, ornamented by two potted palms, a photograph of a famous Japanese actor, and a colored photograph of an infamous geisha—supported himself by two anemic-looking hands against the rail, and took in the prospect through eyes whose whites were yellow, and which could not open to their full because of the dull pain in the man's head. The man had a shrewd, whimsical face, and was clothed from neck to heel in snow-white linen made up by a real tailor. The breast pockets of his coat bulged with cigars. The little finger of his left hand was circled by a plain gold seal-ring, with a coat of arms cut into the oval. Originally the ring had fitted the finger; now only the bones of the knuckle kept it on. The man looked at the clean, leafy city of Hong-Kong for some moments, then traveled his eyes over the grim cliffs above it, then over the war-ships in the harbor, rested them for a moment on the red, white, and blue flag of his country, and shut them tight. Then he drew the back of his hand across them, opened them, and said to the view:
"There's a fine big city, and back of it's a fine big country, about five times as rich as the State of Pennsylvania, inhabited by four hundred million people who would consider me vulgar; in front of it is one of the finest harbors in the world, filled with war-ships belonging to four world powers—pardon me, five." He turned to wink at the distant Stars and Stripes. "No; filled with a war-ship belonging to a world power, and many war-ships belonging to four harpies. When I think that there may be a big war, with thousands of men killed and blown to pieces, why it gives me food for reflection. And when I think that one man from Ohio and one man from New York and one man from Pennsylvania—that's me—could buy the whole damned thing and declare dividends on it—why, that's food for laughter; but when I think that it'll be a whole month or more before I can buy a good piece of beefsteak—why, that's food for tears."
The man embraced all those regions lying to the west with a wave of the hand. With the other hand he felt of his ribs.
"Never again," said he, and he hummed from the "Pilot Boy":
He felt the wonder of the sea:
'It's either liquid hell,' he said,
'Or kingdom come,' said he."
The man in the bows of the yacht-club launch continued to speak, and, in spite of the screaming whistles and the booming guns, what he said was perfectly audible to the sick man leaning over the rail of the Rohilla.
"You are Mr. Wareing, of course," he said. "I was up country when your note came, and that's why you're thinking I'm rude. I'm afraid you've had an awfully dull time of it. You see, there was a big flight of snipe, and I simply had to go after them. Come ashore now, and we'll do some lunch." The whistles suddenly stopped, and the man's voice rang like a trumpet in the abrupt stillness. Wareing laughed.
"All right," he called. "Good for you! Shall I jump, or will you come alongside?"
The man in the launch laughed, and gave an order. The launch churned water aft, and sidled in to the Rohilla.
"So that's a magnate out for pleasure," mused the man in the launch. "Wareing of Pennsylvania—the Grand Mogul of Pennsylvania. He looks like a ghost getting over jungle fever."
"So that's the man who went through from Canton to Su-Chow, and knows about the coal-fields of Shen-se," said Wareing of Pennsylvania, as he came over the side.
He saw his slim, sickly hand disappear into a hand made of brown steel.
"Glad to meet you, Mr. Wareing."
"I've come a long way for the pleasure, Mr. Beauling."
The launch lurched forward, and then ran steadily in the direction of the yacht-club pier.