“How did the Old Woman look?” Mr. Fong inquired.
“She has not repented,” Dr. Lane said grimly.
“Did I not tell you?” Mr. Fong replied and he laughed, though his face was full of rue.
William Lane remembered suddenly in the midst of his preparation for a test in advanced English that he had not read his father’s letter. He had got it in the morning with other letters, one of them from Candace, and hers he had read first. He wanted very much to be in love with Candace, and most of the time now he thought he was. The obstacle to his complete conviction was simple enough — herself. She expected from him a quality of attendance, a constant gallantry, which he found little short of degrading. For a woman to be beautiful was entirely necessary in his eyes. He despised his sister Henrietta for her plain face. Candace was beautiful enough to satisfy him, could he subdue her other less-attractive qualities.
At the moment, however, his relation with Candace was puzzling and exciting. He felt at a disadvantage, there was so much he did not know because he had not always lived in his own country. The secret hostility he had always felt toward his father for compelling him to be born the son of a missionary in China was now rising into a profound and helpless anger. In spite of this he loved his father in a strange half-hating fashion, and some of his darkest moods were those in which he brooded upon what his father might have been had he not heard the unfortunate call of God. Handsome in face, winning in manner, a leader of men, there was no reason, William thought when his fancy was rampant, why his father might not have gone into politics and even become the President of the United States. There was nothing wonderful about Theodore Roosevelt. William spent a good deal of time studying that bumptious angular face. Anybody could be President!
He pulled his father’s letter from his pocket and saving the Chinese stamp for Jeremy, he tore the envelope and took out the sheets of thin paper, lined closely with the delicate and familiar handwriting. He was quite aware that his father always took pains to communicate with him on equal terms, and especially to tell him constantly what was happening in the land that had been left behind. William was too shrewd not to understand these pains. His father dreamed that the dear only son would come back to China, to be a better missionary than anyone had ever been before, to persuade the changing nation toward God. Some day or other, William knew, he would have to destroy this dream, but he had not yet the courage for it. He did not put it in terms of courage. He told himself that he was only waiting for the moment when it would hurt his father least. Now quickly and carelessly he read what his father had written slowly and with care.
I told you of the pending return of the Court. Now it has come. It was a strange and barbaric sight, a motley crowd of rascals ruled over by a feminine tyrant, and yet somehow there was magnificence in it, too, a sort of wild and natural glory, the atmosphere which the Chinese can manage so well in whatever they do. The Old Empress is too great a person, in spite of her monstrous evil, to remain ungenerous. She has acknowledged her defeat, if not her fault, and now she sees that she must begin reforms for the people. Even before the return she issued an edict demanding that the officials of the empire immediately learn all about political science and international law. She has given them six months in which to complete this task, upon pain of death. Six months. There speaks the old ignorance and the new!
Perhaps more exciting, because more practicable, is the fact she has appointed a commission to draft a public school system, the first that China has ever had. Some day the old examinations will be entirely abolished and China will be modern. It may happen before you finish college, dear boy, so that when you come back it will be to another country altogether, one which you can help to build.
But I do not wish to speak only of China. Tell me about yourself at college. What you say of Jeremy seems pleasant and good. What fortune to find such a friend! I had feared loneliness for you. The young can be so cruel to those who have not their exact experience. Give him my warm regards.
Your mother is writing you tomorrow, she says, about the reception which the Old Empress held for all the foreigners. It was a great affair. All the diplomats and their wives went and so far as I can learn from your mother, the Empress behaved exactly as though she had won the war and was graciously meeting her captives and freeing prisoners. So successful was she that a number of ladies capitulated to her frightful charm. I myself refused to go. I could not stomach having to be polite to that female personification of the Evil One. Your mother was not so scrupulous and apparently enjoyed herself.
His father’s letters always took him back to China, however much he might resist. He could see clearly that bold figure of the Old Empress, great enough to accept defeat lightly and so be still imperial, still powerful. There was power in her which William felt was sacred, compelling a quality in himself which might be a similar power. As he grew into manhood to his full height of six feet one, he felt the excitement of his ambition surging into his body and his mind. He was drawn always to the powerful and the proud. Once he had passed the famous president of the university crossing the yard with an enormous watermelon under his arm, and he never felt the same respect again for him. Whatever the genius of Charles Eliot, and William acknowledged genius, it was lessened by the man’s lack of pride. Nothing could have persuaded William to carry even a bundle under his arm.
Indeed, few of his professors fulfilled his secret expectations. It was hard to give high respect to a pudgy philosopher with a big head thatched with rough yellowish gray hair covered with an old tired-looking hat, or a little man with a high forehead and a shaggy disheveled mustache. Two men alone satisfied his instinct for dignity and seriousness. One was a great handsome German who looked like the Kaiser and taught psychology with the voice of a thundering god. The other was a tall slender man, a Spaniard, whose eyes were dark and cold. Under George Santayana alone William sat with complete reverence. The man was an aristocrat.
The same absolute and delicate pride he had seen long ago in the Chinese Empress, a quality which could not stoop to common folk. For William democracy meant no more than that from among the common mass a king might arise, a Carlylean hero, a leader unexplained. People tried to explain such persons by many myths of virgin births and immaculate conceptions. Chinese history, he had often heard his father say, was rich with such myths. The unexplained great men, born of ordinary parents must, the people felt, be the sons of gods.
In the dark depths of his emotions William acknowledged the possibility of explanation. How explain himself? There was no one in his family like him. He could not be explained any more than the Chinese Empress could be, for she was born the daughter of a common small military official. Somewhere in the path of the generations, certain genes met to make the invincible combination. He would never forget the haughty face of the indomitable ruler bent above him, a young American boy. It had been his first glimpse of greatness and it remained in him, a permanent influence.
So William created his world in his own image. The sons of gods were the saviors of mankind and they lived upon the Gold Coast, anywhere in the world.
William folded his father’s letter and saw on the back of the sheet one further note:
By the by, here is something interesting. You remember the Faith Mission family Miller, who were killed by the Boxers. Actually the boy escaped. Quite by accident I met a Chinese who had saved his life and sent him on his way to the coast. From there, if he got a ship, he may have reached America safely — may be there now, under God’s care.
This news did not interest William. That brief and humiliating moment in the dusty Peking street was repulsive even in memory. He crushed the letter in his hand and threw it into the wastepaper basket under the desk.