The Seeds of Enchantment | Page 2

Thought and Struggle and a little clean Pride in accomplishment, is neither Truth nor Life as even our "Cyprian Beamishes," to whom I dedicate this adventure, eventually discover.
131, Westbourne Terrace,
Hyde Park, London, England
The first day of January, nineteen twenty-one.

THE SEEDS OF ENCHANTMENT
CHAPTER THE
FIRST
In which the reader makes acquaintance of three white men and a mystery girl
"INTERNATIONAL Socialism..." began Doctor Cyprian Beamish.
His companion dipped spoon to a plateful of that Mulligatawny soup which invariably commences Sunday's tiffin throughout the Federated Malay States, and drawled in the unmistakeable accents of Oxford University:
"Too hot for Socialism, old man. Give it a rest."
It was hot, stiflingly so. Outside, Singapore City steamed under an equatorial rain-drizzle: moisture clammy, bloodthinning moisture permeated the gloomy stucco-pillared tiffin room of the Hotel Europe. Even See-Sim, the Cantonese "boy" whom the Honourable Dicky had managed to pick up at Penang, felt uncomfortably warm as he stood, yellow-faced and impassive, behind his master's chair.
"Ayer baton," commanded Dicky. The boy grinned, and slipped away his embroidered felt shoes making no noise on the gray stone floor.
"What's ayer baton?" asked Beamish.
"Ice. Literally water, stone. Solid water. Rather a neat way of putting it," drawled Dicky.
"You've got an extraordinary knack of acquiring languages, Long'un."
"Think so?"
"Globe-trotters," judged the men at the other tables men dressed for the most part in high silver-buttoned tunics of white linen and chattered their endless discussions about tin prices arid rubber prices land the Siamese rice-crop.
The two "globe-trotters" subsided into silence over their Mulligatawny. See-Sim, returning with the ice, slipped deft lumps into their glasses; poured out the whisky stengahs fizzed aerated water brim-high; and resumed his impassive pose, hands tucked away in the sleeves of his blue silk jacket.
"Of these Fan-qui-lo (foreign devils)," thought See-Sim, "the fair-haired one is undoubtedly great in riches, wisdom, and strength. That other seems to me a person of lesser consideration."
So China; but to American minds and eyes the pair require a more detailed, more sympathetic picture.
The Honourable Richard Assheton Smith, only son of that Lord Furlmere who married Miss Sylvia Gates of Danville, Virginia, in 1888, was almost lankily tall, long-handed, fair to freckling point. His tropical clothes, though tailored in Bombay of Foochow silk, yet managed to hint of Bond Street, London. He wore his hair, yellow hair with a touch of gold in it, close-cropped. The moustache above the red lips and fine teeth curled back flat below clean-cut nostrils. Dark lashes veiled languid eyes of intense blue. At twentyfour Dicky had only just escaped being "pretty"; now, in his thirtieth year, he looked merely aristocratic. And this aristocratic appearance of Dicky's was all the more curious, because the Purlmere peerage did not date back to the Norman Conquest, or even to the Restoration: the Honourable Richard's great-grandfather having been a Lancashire cotton weaver who succeeded, by hard work and hard saving, in founding one of those business dynasties which emerged from the Victorian prosperity of the British Empire.
In the language of Beamish, therefore, the heir of Castle Furlmere belonged to the "capitalist" class, stood for a scion of "individualism," of "competitive industry," and "wage slavery" in their most commercial, least humanized forms. For Doctor Cyprian Beamish was among other things an undistinguished member of Fabian Socialist Society!
Thirty-six years old, ascetic-looking, clean-shaven, grayishhaired, Beamish might well appear of "lesser consideration--" to the wise, tired eyes of China as represented by the motionless See-Sim. He wore his silk clothes carelessly; seemed lacking in repose; inclined, thought the Cantonese, to familiarity. Yet Beamish, apart from his opinions, might have been a very pleasant fellow.
The Beamishes had never attained commercial prosperity. As a family, they counted among their remote ancestors an eighteenth-century beadle and a Bow Street runner, the modern representatives drifting into minor positions on Parish Councils, the Inland Revenue, and various Government offices. Cyprian, youngest of a large brood, had taken a Scotch degree in medicine, and been appointed Officer of Health to a South Coast holiday resort some two years before the 1914 outbreak of war in Europe.
See-Sim removed empty soup-plates, brought sweet curry of Singapore custom. The damp heat, which grew more intense every moment, suppressed all conversation between the two Europeans.
A curious intimacy, this, begun in a dressing-station near Neuve Chapelle, continued intermittently through four years of battle, and culminating in a leisurely post-war journey through the East.
The original suggestion of the trip had been Dicky's. Lord Furlmere, despite his seat in the House of Lords, still drove the complicated organization founded by his plebeian grandfather; and his son, before resuming a business career interrupted by military service, was anxious to make personal acquaintance of the markets from which the bulk of his riches would derive.
Also, after forty-two months of almost continuous fighting on the Western front, during which he had risen from second lieutenant to command of