Dragons Blood | Page 2

not at all impressed.
Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first
plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading
shyly toward the Quai Francois Joseph. He slipped through the barrier
gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little
awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman's course along the
shining Canal toward the black wall of a German mail-boat. Cramping
the Arab's oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage. Safe on
deck, he became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow
passenger here and there with a half-military salute. All afternoon he
sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy
stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray
desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching
southward into the unknown.
He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book. He recalled
famous exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy

something of all three in his attitude. He cherished the thought that he,
clerk at twenty-one, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward
a house with servants, off there beyond the turn of the Canal, beyond
the curve of the globe. But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young,
homesick, timid of the future, and already oppressed with the distance,
the age, the manifold, placid mystery of China.
Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep. Behind her,
houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out
the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert
banks closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them
to the vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the
Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped
on and added to the two converging dotted lines.
"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally
at this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote
appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the
sadness of his emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"
The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the
sunset. That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of
the gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her
search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced
the deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the
half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the
clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the
unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world. His own
career seemed no more dubious than trivial.
Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea passed in a
dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface
stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast,
faint and distant. Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and
then, suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.
He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the
new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the

swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw, sliding
into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.
"Mahlzeit" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German.
Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow
warm and red. Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient
courage to steal side-glances.
The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in the
plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very
charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her
spoon that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he
was shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance,
from large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amusement.
"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry,
conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own
boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized
from long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely
interested thought: "They always do."
Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor
traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she
diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance. He shot
many a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had
gone below, strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it,
and by a carefully shielded match contrived to read the tag that
fluttered on the arm: "B. Forrester, Hongkong."
Afterward he remembered that by early daylight he might have read it
for nothing; and so,