You Two and We Two

by Achmed Abdullah

You Two and We Two
[A Novelette]

By Achmed Abdullah

Chapter I

UP in Shanghai, where the eastern end of the overland road dips into the China Sea, times have changed. Ships are no longer argosies that follow the call of adventure beyond all outer charting and flicker their house flags in the breeze of unknown isles, but steel-made, haggling freighters, whose chantey is coal and dividends. Business is no longer a swaggering, picaresque romance upon the purple hills and the blue, but a prosy rubric of facts and figures, earnest and escrow, indenture and indorsement. Nabobs are no longer two-fisted, crimson-nosed swashbucklers who breakfast on a raw egg and Cayenne pepper stirred in a pony of Holland gin and prefer a Nanking singsong girl to a muslin-frocked Massachusetts Miss recently out of finishing school, but asthmatic, gold-coining automatons, safely esconced behind a stock ticker, patent filing cabinets, and relays of private secretaries with immaculate, almost episcopal manners and pin-stripe worsted suits, Profits are no longer reckoned by a camel's load of Pekin candareens and shoe-shaped, archaic Manchu silver ingots, but by drafts on New York or London. …

Yet the Road has remained the Road; and throughout Shanghai, from the Bubbling Well to the gaudy opium houses on Chankieng Street, from the murky, stinking shallows of the Whang-poa River to the O-me-tu, the “Praise to the Lord Buddha,” carved on the struts of the Fo K’ieng temple, the tale went that whoever received kowtow in the governor's palace at Yarkand controlled the Road’s western end, and whoever controlled the latter controlled the whole, including tremendous li-kin, in cruder words: graft.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

There was no difference of opinion.

All the whites agreed, crystallizing their judgment into the American consul’s heartfelt, slightly nostalgic:

“Sainted Tammany—what loot. …!”

“I wonder who gets the lion’s share?” asked another. “Old Tommy Crane or mandarin Po—?”

“Honest thieves! I fancy they split even—with a dash of odds on the Yank!” chimed in the purse-mouthed, dyspeptic Yorkshireman who looked after His Britannic Majesty’s interests.

The yellow boys chanted the same refrain. Only they, all of them, officials as well as coolies—the meanest shroffs badgering English clerks for half-tael instalment payments on debts three years outlawed, the greasiest compradores whispering of poppy juice to furtive-eyed Lascar sailormen, the veriest “pidgin Christians” of the Old Town trundling their putty-faced womenfolk on creaking, rickety wheelbarrows—added a spice of twisted Mongol tolerance to the Europeans’ comments:

“The broken furnace may turn out good tiles.”

“Indeed. Mandarin Po’s li-kin is enormous. But it is also said that in his province the highways are secure, the taxes not too large, the evening rice plenty.”

“He is possessed of the most exquisite and harmonious wisdom. So is the coarse-haired barbarian who shares his house and purse. Both knew the foolishness of felling a tree to catch a blackbird.”

Which reasoning, though unmoral and unethical, was true in its essence and practical in its application.

For in the twenty years that mandarin Po had been governor of Chinese Turkestan, in the twelve years that Mr. Thomas W. Crane, lately ward-heeler out of Chicago, Ill., had ably if unofficially assisted him, not once had the inhabitants considered it necessary to send a ping, or petition, to the Old Buddha, the Dowager Empress, or to the fu mu kuan, the “Parental Officials” in Pekin, clamoring for relief from oppression.

“It is better far to reckon on this year’s bamboos than on the promise of next year’s bamboo sprouts,” opined the stout, provincial burgesses. And when certain serious, bespectacled, and entirely honest youths, who called themselves the “Central Chinese Committee for Liberty, Union and Progress,” drifted into Yarkand one leap ahead of the Old Buddha’s efficient Tartar executioners and whispered stealthy words in tea house and temple, the merchants replied that they knew little about democracy—“an empty sound it seems to us, like the tinkle-tinkle of a woman’s jade girdle gems; but somewhere in the Yung Lo To Tien of exquisite Ming memory we have read about it being preferable to be ruled by one lion who cannot steal much, than by a thousand and three rats—who can steal a great deal.”

Which again proves their regrettable Chinese lack of morals and ethics.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

To return to the Overland Road. Three thousand odd years old, three thousand odd miles long, it runs, never as flies the crow but, tortuously, as crawls the worm, from Shanghai west through Hu-pe and Szu-chwan, thence northwest skirting Tibet and west once more through a corner of Outer Mongolia, paralleling the Thian Shan mountains. Finally it descends southwest and winds up in Yarkand, the capital of Chinese Turkestan; Yarkand of the Far West where the yellow Chinese are outnumbered by ruddy-faced Tartars and Kirgiz and Turkomans, where the Moslem call to prayers blends with the thin porcelain bells of Buddhist pagodas, where silk robes give way to fur cloaks and embroidered slippers to high felt boots; Yarkand, the chief commercial depot of Central Asia, where a spider’s web of caravan trails connects the Middle Kingdom with the rich marts of Russia, India, Tibet, Afghanistan, Bokhara, and Persia. Trodden into deep canyons through centuries of incessant traffic, the Road is a monument to China’s ancient greatness more stable and telling, if less blatantly dramatic, than boastful granite obelisks and marble temples and jeweled palaces; a monument to a continuous exchange of business and ideas, to a continuous civilization nearly as old as the yellow race itself.

Up and down this road, year in and year out, passes all China in vivid procession, hungry, eager for gain, out for the main chance, hurrying, ever hurrying, grudging the hours of rest spent in camp or towns by the way: flat-featured Mongolians with raucous voices, their hair burnt rust-red by the sun; coppery Kan-suh braves swinging along with a crackle of naked steel; smiling, butter-yellow Tibetans crowned with ludicrous mutton-pie caps and twirling their wooden prayer wheels; duffle-clad drovers from the Himalayas and the Pamirs, speaking an uncouth Toorki jargon; stately Pekin Manchus riding in gorgeously lacquered litters and surrounded by mounted and armed retainers; occasional ruffianly Afghans picking fights as they go along; nervous Ho-nan traders, their waist shawls bulging with gold; government couriers carrying despatches from one provincial capital to another and galloping their tiny, shaggy ponies no matter how steep and rough the road; anxious-eyed, tawdry half-castes from the treaty ports; soldiers of the Manchu Banner Corps on furlough to their western villages; Gilyak Tartars from the frozen north swaggering with the beggars’ arrogance of their breed; and a leavening of ubiquitous, chattering Cantonese coolies.

Men on foot. Men in palanquins. Men on horse-back and camel-back. Men old and young, and the women and children after their kind.

But ever and always on the move. Ever and always cold and practical, shrewd and patient, spicing the banter of the road with keen barter; calculating even beneath the outer gesture of Kan-suh truculence and Afghan savagery and snobbish, sneering Manchu superciliousness; preferring, with the shamelessly materialistic philosophy of an ancient people, peace to strife, mediocre results to high-flung theories, and the meager comfort of the living to the memory-fattened glories of the dead; averse to spilling the tea and burning the evening rice for the sake of mouthing, nonconstructive heroics; and all those who trekked as far as Turkestan paying li-kin to mandarin Po and Thomas W. Crane, and—to quote the latter—“proving that it’s a darn sight more profitable to sell what other people use, than to use what other people sell.”

“And still more profitable,” replied mandarin Po, “to sit on a high chair of honor—as you do and I, O wise and older brother—and see to it that neither seller nor user gets too little or”—winking brazenly—“too much.”

“Well—” rejoined Thomas W. Crane, voicing somehow the view of the local merchants—“we give them a first-chop administration. And I’m no reform nut. If the laborer is worthy of his hire, why not the governor—?”

“Absolutely!” purred mandarin Po.

And they looked at each other, feeling singularly happy and friendly and contented.

Chapter II

A strange team they were: the one an American, angular, lean, long of limb, pink and tan as to complexion, grey-haired, grey-eyed, freckled; the other a Pekinese Manchu, yellow, silky, urbane, smooth, immensely obese, with bluish-black hair and slanting, sloe eyes, the nails of his right-hand thumb and second finger grown to a fantastic, curling length and covered by delicate sheaths of gold and lapis lazuli.

The one of the West, Western; the other of the East, Eastern. Yet there had been a certain similarity in the fateful pendulum of their careers.

Thomas W. Crane had been a brilliant young lawyer in his native Chicago, with the supreme court, the presidency itself, shining like a Holy Grail in the autumnal distance of his full life. Ward politics had come first, of course; slapping people on the back, kissing small grubby babies, gossiping with their mothers, and—yes!—occasionally a little sociable nip in some saloon the other side of Dexter Hall.

Yearly his thirst increased while, proportionately, his earlier promise of great, lasting achievement dwindled. Still, he had not lost all his hold on his favorite ward. The marshaling of that curious and illogical phenomenon called public opinion had become second nature to him. His fertile eloquence, chiefly when he was in his cups, had not suffered, nor his readiness to close a tolerant eye when one of his underlings resorted to more primitive, more abysmal methods in convincing doubting Thomases that his party was the right party. So, a good many years earlier, when the nation was electing its president, he was able to swing a crucial block of hand-picked votes into the ballot boxes of the party which came out victoriously.

Reward was his.

“Tom Crane has to be taken care of,” said a certain bigwig in Washington. “His ward was rather ticklish, but he turned the trick.”

“Sure enough,” another bigwig replied. “But—you know—”

“Yes, yes. Looks too much upon the wine when it is whiskey, eh?” The first speaker walked to a large map of the world spread on the wall. He studied it with a saturnine twinkle in his eyes. “Ever hear of Yarkand?” he asked over his shoulder.

“What is it? I bite!”

“It seems to be a town in—” again he studied the map—“yes—it’s the capital of Chinese Turkestan, ’steen million miles the other side of nowhere. Jack,” he continued, lighting one of his famous cigars, “I’ve a hunch that this republic needs a consul out yonder. What say?”

“I say Amen. And I nominate Tom Crane for the job.”

“Seconded and carried!”

Thus Thomas W. Crane became United States consul at Yarkand. It was so far away from the White House, and the salary was not much of a burden to the generous taxpayer, and there was not enough American business out there, at the back of the beyond, for him to do harm. And even this contingency became abrogated a year after his appointment when a cable reached the State Department:

“Resign. Not enough flivvers or Singers sold here to keep me busy. Have taken position with mandarin Po. Am teaching him how.

“(Signed) CRANE.”

“Teaching him how—what?” the first bigwig asked when he learned the news.

“Either how to shake up a Sazerac cocktail,” the second bigwig replied, “or how to do the Chinese equivalent for ward-heeling. More likely the latter,” he guessed; and guessed rightly.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

As to mandarin Po, the scion of an aristocratic Manchu clan in Pekin, he had passed high in the examination of the literati, and had received the degree of chen-shih, or “Eminent Doctor,” at the Palace of August and Happy Education to the west of the Ch-’ien Men Gate in the Forbidden City. Afterward he passed a no less brilliant examination at Oxford, was attached as secretary to several Chinese embassies, tried to stimulate his brain with opium—until, one day, perhaps giving way to an atavistic weakness, he surrendered, body and soul and ambition, to the curling, black poppy smoke.

Still, to him too, was due a certain measure of gratitude on the part of those in power since, several years earlier, when first Young China had been in Canton’s yellow, stinking slums and under the name of the “Big Sword Society” had tried to knock off the fetters of Manchu autocracy, he had fought fearlessly for the Dragon Throne. The Old Buddha remembered, rewarded. Like Thomas W. Crane, he was sent into honorable exile, as governor of Yarkand. …

Manchu and American liked each other from the first. Perhaps the knowledge of their mutual earlier promises and later failure tested and tempered the link of sympathy between them. At all events they spent many hours together, grey eyes looking as tolerantly upon treacly opium jar, slanting, sloe eyes looking as tolerantly upon whiskey and syphon. But while whiskey is cheap in China, first-class opium is expensive; and when one day mandarin Po sighed and said that he did not know how to pay for his next month’s swirling poppy dreams, Crane asked a surprised question:

“Isn’t this job paying you well?”

“Fifteen thousand taels salary a year.”

“Salary—my number ten foot! What about the extras?””

“You mean—”

“Exactly. Don’t try and look like a cherub in an old-fashioned oleograph! Why—I always imagined that here in China the belief in the sacred prerogatives of graft is so strong as to be almost beautiful—almost a Buddhist ritual—?”

“Graft—? Oh—” Mandarin Po sucked in his breath. He was busy with the ancient Mongol pastime of saving his face.

But Crane cut in with impatient words:

“Never mind the fig-leaf in your speech! Graft—that’s what I mean. Do you want me to be legal and Latin? Sic vos non vobis—don't get me yet, you old fraud? Must I be crude? All right. Don’t you know how to filch, sponge, forage, peculate, abstract, cabbage, and bilk?”

The Manchu blinked, swallowed, then smiled.

“Teach me how,” he suggested mildly.

“What is there in it for me?”

“Fifty-fifty, O wise and older brother!”

“Fair enough!”

Thence the cable to the State Department. Thence, too, a year or two in which the province was mercilessly mulcted until, according to the time-honored Chinese custom, crimson placards began to appear here and there, warning the governor that the people would soon be forced—literally—“to express regrettable dissatisfaction by honorable revolution.”

“If this happens and they send a ping, a petition, to the Old Buddha, off comes my head,” said mandarin Po. “What are we going to do?”

“Darned if I know,” replied Thomas W. Crane.

And then Yakoob Beg—though rather vicariously—solved their quandary.

Chapter III

This Yakoob Beg was a free-booting Moslem chief from Russian Turkestan who, whenever hard pressed for cash or when the latest and youngest addition to his harem cajoled or sulked for jewels, made a bargain with some white-bearded Moslem priest and declared Jehad, Holy War. Then—with the tacit approval of the Tsar’s government, ever ready to fish in muddied water—he would sweep across the Chinese frontier followed by his band of hawkish Central Asian marauders, Moslems of many races, the bitter sweepings of Bokhara and Khiva, Khabul and Khokand and Samarkand, looting, burning, killing.

So it happened this time. Yakoob Beg and his braves were “out.”

“Hayah arbauba Islam!” shrilled their battle cry. “Deen! Deen!”

They tore into the peaceful chatter of barter and trade with the swish of the sword, the jingling of turquoise-studded headstalls, the scream and bray of the war trumpets, the rasp of bamboo lance butts, the flat thud of home-made, soft-nose bullets. Here and there they galloped like a red whirlwind of destruction, blazing up and down the overland road with the leap and slash of their lean Moslem knives and the sun rippling crimson on lance blade and rifle barrel, while the wheeling, carrion-fed kites paralleled their progress on eager wings.

“Hayah arbauba Islam! Deen! Deen!”

A runner brought first news of the raid to mandarin Po simultaneously with the latter’s discovery of a placard pasted on the very door of his palace. It was signed by both the Tartar and the Chinese communities of Yarkand. It was countersigned by the presidents of the Azure Dragon Trading Guild, the Guild of the Five Honorable Companies, the Guild of Benevolent Countenance, and the Guild of the Seven Yellow Storks; and it acquainted the governor in floridly courteous but unmistakable terms that, given the general dissatisfaction with his administration—et cetera, et cetera.

Mandarin Po looked from the placard to the despatch which the runner had brought, and back to the placard.

“My laughter,” he said to Thomas W. Crane, “is like the laughter of a walnut between two stones.”

“Meaning—?”

“That even the shrewdest fox goes at last to the shop of the furrier. I have two furriers to choose between. The Old Buddha and Yakoob Beg. In either case I shall lose my pelt.”

“Then I would suggest Yakoob Beg.”

“Why?”

“Because, from what I gather, you haven’t even a sporting chance with the Dowager Empress, while Yakoob Beg—well—at least we can fight for our lives.”

“Our lives? We?”

“I am with you.”

“Ah—exquisite and harmonious thanks, O wise and older brother!”

“Exquisite and harmonious poppycock! I’m scared to be here—alone—with all those Yarkand merchants down on me like a ton of bricks. Nothing doing. I go with you. All settled, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now you go and call a meeting and give the boys a little patriotic spiel. Wave the old Dragon flag. Get recruits. In the meantime I'll try my fine Italian hand with the merchants. They are Chinamen—reasonable, philosophic human beings, always willing to listen to a compromise. They'll put a temporary stop to their placarding and threats of rebellion and sending—oh—whatyoucallems—pings to Pekin when they hear that Yakoob Beg’s gang is in the offing and that you and I are going to march forth nobly into battle.”

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Crane guessed right. The merchants listened to his suggestion. Placards were torn down, and the talk of revolution ceased, while under the whip of mandarin Po’s opium-stimulated eloquence recruits poured in, put on odds and ends of uniforms, picked up odds and ends of weapons, and marched to the northwest with quivering yells of:

“Pao Ch’ing Mien Yang—death to the foreigners and honorable loyalty to China!”

The battle developed into a campaign; two months, three; marching and countermarching.

Perhaps it was the blood of his ancestors, the Manchu conquerors, the iron-capped princes of Nurhachi’s breed, that screamed in mandarin Po’s veins. Perhaps, similarly, there was an atavistic throwback in Tom Crane’s soul to a great-grandfather who, rifle in arm and knife in boot, had come out of Virginia into Kentucky in the days when Kentucky was the farthest frontier, and whose grandfather, following the shifting frontier, had drifted into Kansas when it was “Bloody Kansas.” At all events, they fought well, led well, until, at the end of three months the broken remnants of Yakoob Beg’s band fled back into Russian territory, while the head of their chief and more than a hundred of his followers, stuck on tall bamboo poles, grimacing, stark, glassy-eyed, with a curiously iridescent, bluish-green half-light playing on their high cheekbones, adorned Yarkand’s brown bastions, and while once more, as if nothing had happened, although perhaps just a trifle more shrewd, a trifle more patient, China poured itself down the great Overland Road—to find, here and there, a sacked and burnt village, a heap of grim battle refuse, a low circling of kites and hawks where mounds of skeletons bleached in the wind and the strong upland sun, and festering corpses of man and woman, of child and animal.

The governor’s return was a triumph, with yellow Dragon bunting flickering in the breeze, and firecrackers blazing orange and crimson, and long-drawn shouts of:

“Ten, thousand years!”

“Ten thousand times ten thousand years!”

There were speeches and enthusiastic thanksgiving and more speeches; mandarin Po’s appropriate replies; and in the evening Thomas W. Crane suggesting to the latter a “little private celebration of our own.”

A few minutes later, while outside the crowds were still parading the streets, the two friends sat down comfortably in the governor’s study, and servants brought refreshments: opium for the one, whiskey for the other.

“First shot of hooch in three months!” Crane filled his glass; raised it. “Here’s how, old man!” He moistened his lips; put down the glass

“Po,” he asked, making a wry face, almost immediately. “where did you get this whiskey?”

“Same old brand. Why?”

“Tastes like a punk variety of creosote. …” He pushed the glass away.

In the meantime mandarin Po had prepared his opium with agile fingers, kneading the brown pellet which the flame of the open lamp changed gradually into amber and gold, filling the pipe. He was leaning back, both shoulders on the mat, so as the better to dilate his chest and keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of the philosophic drug.

He took a short puff; coughed; sat up straight.

“What is the matter?” asked the other.

“Choked me. Too bitter.” He looked at the opium jar. “First-choice number one genuine Shen-si Chandoo’,” he read the label. “Strange. I don’t like it. …”

“As I don’t like my liquor,” rejoined the American; then, suddenly, laughed. “By ginger!” he went on. “Here's a fine howdyedo! Three months’ roughing it without stimulants—dog-gone if we haven’t lost the habit! Reformed in spite of ourselves! Now what are we going to do—?”

There was a knock at the door. The president of the Azure Dragon Trading Guild who, besides being the wealthiest and most influential merchant, held the local rank of Poh K’uei, “General Regulator” or mayor, entered, his obese body dressed in coquettish and decidedly unbecoming rose-red silk embroidered with tiny butterflies. He bowed, hands clasped across his chest.

“Chin lai pu jung kuei hsia—come in without kneeling,” said the mandarin affably. “What is it, Wong Ng?”

“Excellency,” replied Wong Ng, “I am here in the name of all the local merchants.”

“Charmed!”

“Excellency,” continued Wong Ng, “it says in the Kung-Yang Chian that when fire rages on the Kun Lun ridge, common pebbles and precious jade will be consumed together. Thus, in the hour of danger, vice and virtue are consumed together, and shineth then the man’s real essence, the man’s real soul—as your soul shone in the hour of battle, Excellency!”

“I bow! I bow!” smiled the mandarin.

“Yarkand is grateful to you and—” pointing to Thomas W. Crane—“to the foreigner.”

“Again I bow!”

“So do I!” chimed in the American.

“Excellency—there were days when—ah—we called you Hun-te-Kung—the Duke of Confused Virtue. now a new name has been conferred upon you.”

“Namely—?”

“I Ho T’uan—Patriotic Harmony.”

“Will you permit small and worthless me to bow once more, O brother very wise and very old? …”

“Furthermore,” went on Wong Ng, “I read in the Younger Tai’s Record of Rites that the upper and lower jaws mutually assist each other; if the lips shrivel, then must the teeth catch cold. You are the upper, we the lower jaw. We need each other. We cannot do without your prowess. You cannot do—ah—without our gold. Excellency—remain our governor! But—” kow-towing with outspread hands—“be pleased not to take too much li-kin!”

“Small and worthless I,” replied mandarin Po, “is also slightly versed in the classics. I remember a line where Confucius speaks about it being better to do a mediocre deed at home than to burn incense in a far temple. I accept your proposal.”

“To fan sai lok—thank you, thank you!” said the merchant, and withdrew, while Crane burst into a roar of long-suppressed laughter.

“I have to hand it to you,” he said. “For a business nation you're a sure-enough, all-wool, nickel-plated business nation. You could sell safety razors at a barber’s convention and get away with it. Never again shall I doubt the wisdom of the Chinese Exclusion Law. Po, old boy, you are the yellow peril!”

“Gold, too, is yellow,” came the mild reply. “Does the white man mind?”

“I'll say he don’t!” agreed the American.

Chapter IV

Ably if unofficially assisted by Thomas W. Crane, mandarin Po continued to govern the province. He had given up opium, as the other had given up whiskey. For no moral reason, Simply because they had lost the habit.

“But otherwise,” said the American to a passing, rather shocked missionary, “we're no reform nuts. We're not nobble—nobble with two b’s. No, sir. We've discovered that it is a darn sight more businesslike to fatten the goose that lays the golden egg than to slit its gizzard.”

So, while their li-kin was great, they saw to it that the highways were secure, the taxes not too high, the evening rice plenty. They suppressed all petty grafting with an iron hand.

“How do we do it? Why, brother—” said Tom Crane in answer to the same missionary’s question—“did you ever try to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a Tammany alderman?”

Turkestan was happy and contented. Trade in steadily increasing volume passed down the Overland Road, with the west clamoring for rice and pulse and soy-beans, the north for poppies, the treaty ports for tea and silk and salt, and the south for pottery and copper vessels. Up in Shanghai the whites admired and envied; and: “better far to be ruled by one lion who cannot steal much, than by a thousand and three rats—who can steal a great deal,” said the Yarkand burgesses to the emissaries of the “Central Chinese Committee for Liberty, Union, and Progress.”

When finally, after the Dowager Empress’ death, China overthrew the Manchu throne and established the republic, the general turmoil was hardly felt in this far-away western backwater of Turkestan.

Mandarin Po, meticulously Mongol in correctness of demeanor, proceeded to the Temple of the Goddess of Mercy where he prayed long and fervently before the violet-faced idol that the Empress’ soul might be permitted to jump the Dragon Gate and to find peace near the Seven Yellow Springs. For a month or two he wore white mourning robes, across his chest a salmon-colored ribbon embroidered with archaic hieroglyphics that read: “Dutiful Grief.” Then he took his oath of loyalty to the new government and attended to his business, while north, south and east the republic ran its turbulent course.

Under the leadership of Yüan Shih-k’ai, his cohort of American universities-bred young enthusiasts arranged everything according to the most approved western pattern, with constitution, presidential election, party whips, and a mass of investigating committees all complete. Everything was there in fact, except the special genius of the Anglo-Keltic race.

Of course, they were so pleased with the cut of their new political and civilizational clothes that they forgot the glory of their old. So, north, south, east, decay stalked through the land. The lustrous roofs of the great sanctuaries were left to slip into the mud and break. The Temple of Confucius with its superb roof of amber-colored tiles resting on an intricacy of peacock-green eaves; the fine old memorial tablets of Ming and Sung that lifted their dazzling whiteness against the subdued green of cypress trees planted two thousand years ago; the cypress trees themselves; the huge spirit stairway in the Temple of Heaven, deeply carved with five interlaced dragons; the golden gods to whom the Manchus had prayed; the splendid trinkets of their hours of peace; the sacrificial jade vessels whereon the sodden meat and the unhusked rice were offered to ancestral spirits; the very philosophy, ethics, and genius of their ancient race—everything was betrayed and destroyed, while the embryo statesmen spoke and argued about democracy.

Only Turkestan, in the Far West, remained more or less undisturbed, since Yüan Shih-k’ai, the president of the republic, was wise enough to realize that without a strong hand at Yarkand the great Overland Road would go to rack and ruin—and the road was the central artery of China’s economic body.

“Leave mandarin Po be,” he said, when earnest young politicians clamored and objected.

“He is an imperialist, Mr. President!”

“He has sworn fealty to the republic.”

“A foreigner is his confidential adviser!”

“I thought you believed in international good-will?”

“He takes li-kin!”

“His province does not seem to mind.”

“It is against the principles of the republic, Mr. President!”

“What are political principles except the scrupulous embodiment of the trite?”

So mandarin Po and Thomas W. Crane were left free to carry on their administration until one day, in Shanghai, the American consul brought news to the other members of the club:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “old Tom Crane and his Manchu side-kick will have to look after their laurels.”

“Why—?”

“Robert Emmet Chang-tü has arrived—not to forget Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky.”

“Whoever are they?”

“What their names imply: radicals, congenital rebels, incorruptible young idealists! My boy went to college with them. He wrote me. Watch for the fireworks!”

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

It was Levinsky’s father, an honest Kieff tailor migrated to New York’s East Side on the tail-end of a seasonable pogrom, who had in a moment of fervor and hero worship conferred on his son the names of Theodore Roosevelt.

Robert Emmet Chang-tü, on the other hand, had conferred his Christian names upon himself when during his senior year at Cornell, where he had been sent through the efforts of a Baptist missionary in his native Canton, had come under the glorious spell of Erin’s age-long fight for liberty and had read therein a parallel with his own oppressed land. He was the only Chinese in America who subscribed to the United Irishman. Not that he specialized in the green isle. India, too, was sympathetic to him. So were the Armenians, San Domingo, the black-and-tan vote of Alabama, the I. W. W., the Russian Jews, in fact everybody who was persecuted. And it was through this monomania—a perfectly honest monomania—that he became friends with his classmate Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky, who was similarly afflicted. Together they would dream of the future; dream greatly, shiningly.

During their senior year they were expelled for editing a campus weekly called “The Torch—a Cry in the Wilderness of Academic Oppression,” which on a notable Saturday apostrophized the whole university faculty and the board of trustees as an “obese, flagging-jowled, pendulous-nosed, gold-bloated, blood-sucking, swag-bellied bourgeoisie.”

Hereafter, for a year or two, Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky and Robert Emmet Chang-tü became well-known New York characters. For a year or two they earned a meagre living by causing neurasthenic hearts of both sexes to skip a beat when they addressed them from the platform of the People’s Forum on a variety of subjects ranging from dress reform to sex reform, from prison reform to political reform. Every day of their lives they stated rusty surface truths which, somehow, ought to have been lies. Every day they were right statistically, and wrong from every single last other point of view.

Then came the Chinese revolution, the republic.

“Comrade!” said Robert Emmet Chang-tü. “We must go to China!”

“How?” asked the more practical Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky. “We're both broke.”

“Where there is a will, there is a way!”

There was. Amidst clacking tea cups, they spoke to a gathering of women; rich women with bobbed hair and ideals. Their speech, partly filched from the writings of a famous radical, described young China as “a significant matrix both unitary and infinite,” “a base-soil of proud sublimation glowing with warm, cosmic rhythms,” “the lucid and impregnable hope of democracy’s manifold mind,” and “a challenge into the very teeth of privilege-scabbed corporationism.”

Net result: twelve hundred and eighteen dollars and five cents; and, seven weeks later, the two friends stepped into the presence of the president of the Chinese republic.

They spoke long and ardently. He was silent long and ardently. Perhaps, as he listened to them abounding in the sense of their own, self-intoxicated righteousness, for a fleeting moment he may have regretted the Old Buddha’s efficient Tartar executioners. But the dragon-embroidered robes of Manchu pomp had given way to sober frock-coats; deeds to words. He sighed.

“Yes,” he said finally, “the republic needs you.”

“May I suggest,” said Robert Emmet Chang-tü, “a place in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs—?”

“Or,” chimed in Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky, “in the Finance Ministry—?”

“Neither!” came the firm rejoinder. “Your talents would be wasted in Pekin. Yarkand! That’s where you are needed. It’s a danger spot. Mandarin Po is a reactionary. See what you can do. But peacefully. The days of brute force are over.”

They were delighted; flattered; then mentioned sordid details:

“We spent all our money to get here.”

“The republic is in bad straits financially,” said the president. “But I shall personally advance you enough to take you to Yarkand. Then you must shift for yourselves. You have youth, energy, brains, enthusiasm. May your success be like the Hoa Tchao—the Birthday of a Hundred Flowers!”

And he bowed them out of his presence, and immediately afterward sent a special courier to Yarkand warning the governor of their coming and winding up:

 

“Remember the saying of the wise Duke Ts’e that a needle is sharp at only one end. Remember, too, that the phoenix is not as good at roosting as the chicken. So do not be down-hearted!”

Chapter V

“Down-hearted? Why should I be?” asked mandarin Po when he had read the letter.

“Hm—” grunted Thomas W. Crane. He seemed bothered.

“What is the matter?” continued the Manchu. “Let them come. Hayah—I am a reasonable man. I shall give them a golden pill and cure them of their disease—”

“You mean—you will grease their hands?”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“They have ideals.”

“Ideals are like nuts. You must eat them before they become hollow—then get new ones.”

“All right for an old reprobate like yourself. But these kids—I know their type. I’ve met their doubles at municipal elections back home. You can’t bribe them the ordinary, pay-as-you-enter way, and they haven't enough sense to know when they are licked. That’s what makes them hard to handle politically. I guess we'll have to fight them with their own weapons.”

“For instance?”

“Wait till they get here and show their hand. Then I'll slip a couple of big, juicy ace spots from the bottom of the deck and fill our own hand. A full house beats a straight any day—and I don’t care how straight they are!” Thomas W. Crane wound up his rather mixed pun.

A week later a blue-tented Pekin cart drawn by a brace of mules deposited Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky and Robert Emmet Chang-tü in Yarkand. They had passed rapidly through Shanghai and Pekin, spending only a day in either place, and now this far, western Turkestan jerked startlingly through their focus with the harsh, sneering overtones of Central Asian Islam across the suave silkiness of its Chinese civilization.

Levinsky was frankly homesick. He felt as if he had been transplanted into a motley, bewildering land of too much color, of sudden, useless splendor—and sudden, useless ugliness. At home in New York he had been able to span, by intellect, perhaps by desire and envy, the chasm between the smooth wealth of upper West Side and the scabbed, pauperized reek of lower East Side. Here, where riches and poverty met in the same block, often in neighboring houses, and where the former did not seem to pity the latter nor the latter to hate the former, the hard contrast made him nervous. Nor could his friend help him to understand.

For Chang-tü, though native-born, yet of Canton, the light-hearted, hysterical city of the warm south, still more estranged through years of residence in America where, in spite of surface chaos, life somehow ran evenly between a policeman’s whistle and a hooting motor horn, had to readjust himself from the first. These people, western Chinese, Kirgiz, Turkomans and Karakalpaks, resembled neither the smiling, excitable Cantonese nor the men of Pekin with their meretricious courtliness of phrase and gesture. Tall, big-framed, wide-stepping, often bearded and turbaned, they moved ponderously and grimly, each toward some definite object of his own.

As the two young idealists passed through the streets beneath a sunset of crushed rose-pink, as they sensed the great, stony Central Asian soul pulsing everywhere, immense in passive power, progressing inexorably and rather cruelly, Karl Marx and Debs, the People’s Forum and Cooper Union seemed far away. And when they had found a Tartar inn, had eaten their frugal supper and looked out upon the dusty caravanserai yard where a number of fur-capped, felt-booted Turkoman cameleers were talking in harsh gutturals while nearby their hobbled, shaggy, shuffle-footed beasts were chewing the cud in the night’s peace, fear and homesickness rushed upon them full-armed.

But be it said in their favor that no thought of turning back entered their heads and that the next morning, in spite of their misgivings, they entered energetically upon what they were pleased to call their “educational campaign.”

“We must not temporize or compromise!” said Robert Emmet Chang-ti. “The cancer of corporationism has bitten too deeply into the political system of Turkestan! Ruthless attack! Up and at them! That’s our slogan, eh?”

“Sure,” agreed Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky. “No time to lose. Besides—well—our finances aren't exactly flush.”

Traveling down the Overland Road they had picked up a mass of information. During the next days, asking questions right and left, they learned more until they had a true enough impression of mandarin Po and Thomas W. Crane as two unregenerate reactionaries who only gave lip service to the republic, took graft, interpreted the law as they wotted, and cared not a snap of their fingers for democracy’s principles. But—though this is going ahead of the tale and quoting mandarin Po after he had regained his loss of face—“they were too young to comprehend the wisdom of the ancient saying that much wealth will not come if a little does not go; that a diamond with a flaw is preferable to a common pebble with none; that when the market is brisk the seller does not stop to wash the mud from his turnips.”

So, a week after their arrival, a large crowd gathered about a huge, crimson-and-black placard that covered a wall in Ha-Ta-Men Street, flanked—typically—on the left by a tumbledown hut where a leprous Tartar beggar whined for alms in the name of Allah, on the right by a great shop where precious, snow-white Sung porcelain served as foil for the blue and peachblow of exquisite Ming pottery.

“Workers of Yarkand, awaken!” began the text, brushed in Chang-tü’s best Chinese hieroglyphics. “Unite! Make known your sovereign people’s will to the gold-bloated, blood-sucking aristocratic oppressors! The day of the proletariat is at hand—et cetera, et cetera. …”

“Look!” exclaimed a merchant. “He calls mandarin Po a thief stewed in the fat of his own greed! A fool, to write such words—hayah—like the fool who rides a tiger!”

“Aye—and he who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount!”

“Paper tiger with paper teeth!”

“Who is this Chang-tü who signs the message?”

“A new-comer—a Cantonese mud-turtle educated by the coarse-haired barbarians!”

“By Buddha and Buddha! The cock went abroad for seven days—and returned a peacock!”

“A precocious lad! His father is still in the womb, and already the son thinks of marriage!”

“What will not a goat eat or a fool say?”

“Ahee! Talk does not cook rice!”

“The sea is not worn by little, little ships!”

“It is said that he has a friend, a foreigner!”

“To be sure—rats know the ways of rats!”

Decidedly, public opinion was not in sympathy with the two young crusaders, and it was all crystallized into the words of a shriveled, berry-brown old coolie who, after making an improper gesture with thumb and second finger toward the placard and calling its author a name which reflected equally on the latter’s ancestry and his own morals, said:

“Bah! The drum that booms most loudly is filled with wind!”

This, too, though differently expressed, was Thomas W. Crane’s opinion when mandarin Po, in somewhat of a huff, asked him if he had heard the news:

“Nothing to be scared of, old man.”

“I know. Two fleas cannot raise a coverlet.”

“Besides, your province is prosperous and contented.”

“Yes, yes. But consider the indignity of it—my loss of face!”

“Forget your face. Take one look in the mirror—that’s all you have to do. …”

“I am serious,” interrupted the Manchu. A light like a slow flame eddied up in his oblique eyes. “I shall send my Tartar servants and catch these two arrogant youths—and make them eat stick—a great deal of stick.”

“Not on your life!”

“Who is to prevent me?”

“Your horse sense. Make martyrs out of them? Martyrdom is like the measles—darn catching! First thing you know, fifty more young idiots, yellow and white assorted, will come beating it out here on the chance of becoming martyrs for the Cause, and once you get enough martyrs the revolution will blaze forth as a fact—that’s usually the way with revolutions. Take a leaf from the English—and let ’em talk!”

“But—I repeat—my loss of face. …”

“Sit tight and wait for developments. Be patient—and you'll get that precious face of yours restored to all its pristine splendor.”

“By the way—I understand that they are poor. I have already given orders that no credit be granted them by the merchants!” He turned to Yi Feng, his private secretary, a Harvard-bred young Tartar, who had come in. “You saw to that?”

“Yes, Excellency

“Fair enough,” commented the American. “But. …”

“Well?”

“There are always our Russian brethren across the border, eager to fish in our pond. They'll invest a few loose roubles in MM. Levinsky & Co.”

He was right. For, flushed with enthusiasm, the two reformers decided to feed the flames of social revolution by issuing a Chinese magazine which, in memory of Cornell days, they called “The Torch,” and it was due to Levinsky’s latent racial business instincts that they incorporated it—without much trouble, since Young China, amongst other western innovations, had also copied the civil code and regulations applying to corporations of one of the more easy-going States of the Union. So here they were, editors and owners of The Torch Publishing Company, Inc., capital stock 25,000 taels. And when they discovered shortly afterward that the new venture had cost them their last cent, when the inn-keeper told them gruffly to be gone and the grocer pointed at a vermilion banner above his counter which read: “No credit given—former customers have taught caution,” it was one of the Tsar’s ubiquitous Secret Service agents who stepped into the breach.

This gentleman, a Russian of debatable ancestry who, strictly for the time being, called himself Fyodor Antonovitch Grushkine, breathed not a word of Tsar or imperial politics. On the contrary, he declared himself a radical of radicals and—to quote Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky—“certainly kicked through handsome!”

For a while their activities progressed gloriously. Their placards were numerous and gaudy. Their journalistic efforts were magnificent. Too—“money praises itself,” said the riff-raff of Yarkand’s bazaars—they were glad to have their crooked fingers gilt for a mere parading of streets beneath crimson flags and hoarse shouting of: “Down with the oppressors! Long live the social revolution!” The only fly in the ointment was that mandarin Po, acting on Thomas W. Crane’s advice and in spite of the fact that his thin-skinned Mongol pride squirmed and itched, paid no attention to them.

When finally the latter’s patience was about to give way under the strain, it was once more the American who came to the rescue.

“I have an inspiration,” he said.

“Hm—” grunted the other.

“Do you know a ward-heeler’s chief qualification?”

“I hate to tell you. I am your friend.”

“Wrong! His chief qualification is an expert knowledge of human psychology.”

He went to mandarin Po’s desk, busied himself among the files, then called on Robert Emmet Chang-tü and Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we are in opposite camps. But—I trust that we are both sincere?”

“You—sincere?” sneered Levinsky.

“That’s the trouble with you radicals,” rejoined Crane. “You always underestimate the other fellow’s principles and ideals. I am convinced of your sincerity. I honor your principles, though I can’t subscribe to them. That’s why I am so disappointed in you.”

“Why?” demanded Chang-tü.

“Because you're letting a Tsarist agent subsidize you.”

“Grushkine? Why—he’s a radical!”

“Tell it to the marines!” And Crane spread on the table ample, documentary evidence from mandarin Po’s files that Grushkine had during the last twenty years been a factor in numerous unsavory intrigues, from arranging pogroms to stirring up strife over half of Asia. He left without waiting for a reply, sure of the result of his psychological experiment. He was right.

“Oh—if I had known!” sighed Chang-tü; and when his friend, more practical, suggested taking the money just the same, saying that the Cause needed it and there was no harm in spoiling the Egyptians, he went on: “No! It’s tainted money!” and that evening he showed the door to Grushkine who forthwith betook himself south to the Pamirs whence he threw his gold-baited net across the borders of British India.

Chapter VI

A week later, with all but a couple of hundred taels spent, the two young crusaders were faced by a problem as well as by a truth. The problem consisted in how to raise capital for their magazine which by this time had become their pet endeavor; the truth was that the riff-raff of Yarkand, no longer paid to be social revolutionaries, promptly turned into reactionaries and rolled down the streets shouting:

“Long live mandarin Po!”

“Alas—the ingratitude of mobs!” exclaimed Chang-tü, like many a reformer before and since, while peace reigned once more in the governor’s palace.

“Speaking about loss of face,” said Thomas W. Crane, “you ought to see their faces—pinched, haggard—I don’t think the boys are eating enough. I feel sorry for them.”

“Thank Buddha that I am a Buddhist,” smiled mandarin Po, folding his hands across his comfortable paunch. “I do not have to be sorry for my enemies.”

They fell to talking business. For the American, some time ago, had used his influence to obtain oil concessions south of Yarkand and had incorporated a company in New Jersey to develop his properties. He took a stock prospectus with subscription blank attached from a heap on the desk and showed it to the other.

“Better invest, old man,” he said.

“I think I shall, O wise and older brother.”

Po filled out and signed the blank while, unbeknown to both, an impish wind brushed through the open window, sucked up one of the prospectuses, and swept back out the window, the printed sheet flying in its wake. The wind continued its fantastic career. It carried the bit of paper far—clear through Jade Street and the Street of the Pork-Butchers—clear to the Tartar inn where, with a swoop like that of fate, it struck Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky, who was standing in the caravanserai yard, wondering how he might raise enough money to carry on “The Torch.”

He had not eaten that day, and when the paper from Crane’s desk flopped against his chest and stuck there, he was about to snap it away with an impatient: “Damn!” But he happened to look at it, and the first words which he saw brought him up standing. For they were:

“Thomas W. Crane, Chairman of the Board of Directors.”

After which he read through the whole prospectus, considered, whispered: “Providential!” and hurried back to his room.

“Chang-tü,” he said—for he was inclined to be epic in moments of enthusiasm, “let us take a weapon from the arsenal of blood-stained capitalism! Listen!” He explained his plan in detail. “Do you see?” he wound up.

“But will the people—?”

“They are fools. They will not take what is offered to them for nothing. But they will always buy. Besides, it’s our only chance. We have enough money left to issue one more number of our magazine. We'll print the appeal on the front page, in red. I'll write it in English, and you’ll translate it into Chinese.”

“Very well.”

A few days later coolies ran through the streets, distributing copies of “The Torch,” leaving one at the door of the governor’s palace, where Thomas W. Crane found it. He opened it, aimlessly read the first page, then, quite suddenly, burst into laughter.

“Po,” he asked, “how’s the old face? Still suffering from loss?”

“Somewhat,” came the guarded reply.

“What’ll you give me if I help you regain it completely and for keeps?”

“I'll give you that oxen-blood Keen-Lung vase of mine.”

“It’s a bargain. Look here!” He read out the announcement which, in red Chinese hieroglyphics, adorned the first page of the magazine:

“HOW ABOUT TAKING A LEAF OUT OF THE CAPITALISTIC BOOK? HOW ABOUT A TWENTY THOUSAND TAEL FUND FOR “THE TORCH”? WORKERS OF YARKAND! COMRADES! WHAT ABOUT BUYING A SHARE?”

Followed a blank more or less faithfully copied from the financial prospectus which the wind had carried from mandarin Po’s desk straight to the hands of Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky:

“I hereby subscribe for ... shares of stocks in THE TORCH PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc., at ten taels per share and enclose ........ taels in full payment.

Name............

Address.................

“I don’t see. …” said mandarin Po.

“You will presently.” Crane walked over to the corner where, on a small taboret, flanked by two bronze statues of Wen Tchang, chief of the five Taoist divinities of letters, a perfect specimen of oxen-blood Keen-Lung porcelain showed its ruddy sheen among the perfumed incense sticks, “I’ve always envied you this particular bit of china. Thanks awfully.”

“For nothing. You haven’t got it yet.”

“Just wait! Lend me your secretary?”

“Certainly.”

Po clapped his hands, and Yi Feng came in.

“Yi,” asked the American. “Do those two young fellows—Chang-tü and Levinsky—know you by sight?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Tell me—are you a social revolutionary?”

“Buddha! No!” came the shocked reply.

“All right. You're going to be one in the shake of a lamb’s tail.”

“I?”

“Yes. You. And you're going to prove it in the best way in the world. By cash.” He showed him the prospectus. “You will call on the boys, introduce yourself as a rich young Chinese fresh from Harvard and in sympathy with their ideas, get their confidence, and buy those shares.”

“You are trying to buy control of the magazine, sir?”

“And then something! Buying control is easy enough. I made a wager with your boss that I’d restore his face to its virginal, immaculate glory. You studied law, didn’t you?”

“Both at Harvard and Pekin.”

“Familiar with the new Chinese legal code, corporation laws and all that?”

"Yes, sir."

“All right. Listen to me.” He lowered his voice, speaking at length. “Think you can put it across?”

“I shall try, sir.”

“Go to it! …”

He did. And to Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky and Robert Emmet Chang-tü, who that morning, after a sketchy breakfast, had been given three hours by the gruff Tartar inn-keeper to pay up or clear out, the arrival of Yi Feng, charming, in sympathy with their political principles, and, best of all, armed with a fat roll of hundred tael bank notes, seemed more than propitious.

“Chang-tü,” said Levinsky, pocketing the twenty thousand taels while Yi Feng slipped the corresponding stock certificate into his loose sleeve, “I hate to admit it—but, perhaps, there is a God!”

“Yes, yes!” agreed Chang-tü. “If not a God—then—at least—an Immutability of Eternal Justice! I am so happy. Now we can carry on our fight for social revolution—against the oppressor—the. …” He interrupted himself as he heard Yi Feng’s sigh which, incidentally, was a pure product of art. “What is the matter, comrade?”

“I—oh—” stammered the latter, wincing under the appellation—“perhaps I was foolish to buy the shares …”

“Why?”

“I am afraid of mandarin Po. He has spies everywhere. If he should find out that I bought them. …”

“Well? …”

“He can hire and bribe witnesses, have me adjudged an incompetent and put into an insane asylum. You see—the Chinese republic has copied all the western laws! Automatically all my property would be administered by a trustee, one of his creatures, who would vote The Torch stock—my controlling majority block of stock—as mandarin Po dictates! You two would be ousted from your editorial positions!”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Levinsky. “What is to be done?”

They pondered, considered, argued; and finally Yi Feng said that he had an idea:

“Let us have a stockholders’ meeting at once and elect you two directors and editors for a term of years. Let us draw up an iron-bound contract between you two and The Torch Publishing Company. I am a lawyer. I'll draw up the contract, and then you look it over, and we sign it. And—may I look at the incorporation papers?” They were produced, and he read them.. “Comrades,” he went on, “I would like to suggest a few changes in these articles. Safety first—even in the fight for social justice!”

“By all means!” agreed Levinsky.

“The Shang Shuh, the secretary of the provincial, administrative board, happens to be a friend of mine.” And here Yi Feng spoke the absolute truth since, in mandarin Po’s patriarchal administration, he himself filled this office. “He will see to it that the changes which I am going to suggest are made legally and speedily.” He outlined them. “Do you agree, comrades?”

“Entirely!” said Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky

“Entirely!” echoed Robert Emmet Chang-tü.

Chapter VII

It was the following Saturday, and the two editors were preparing the next issue of The Torch, when the door opened and mandarin Po entered, accompanied by Thomas W. Crane. Levinsky’s first impulse was one of frank alarm. He was about to beat a masterly retreat behind the table when, seeing the peaceful smile on the Manchu’s face and the unwarlike cigar clamped between Crane’s lips, it occurred to him that they had no intention of assaulting him or his friend, that thus his fear had been groundless. The thought made him mad. It also made him brave. So he blazed up epically:

“What do you want here, blood-gorged oppressors?”

“Indeed!” Chang-tü chimed in, in Chinese. “Ni seung iu mi yeh ni?”

“We—?” smiled Crane. “Why—we just dropped in to see how The Torch is getting on.”

“None of your business!”

“Oh yes, it is! Mandarin Po and I are stockholders.”

“You are—what?”

“Stockholders. In fact we own control; and, to cross our t’s and dot our i’s, we two are you two’s bosses. See, Theodore?” He grinned like the cat that has stolen the cream; pointed at Chang-tü. “See, Robert. We're representing Yi Feng.”

“Oh—” exclaimed Chang-tü, remembering the latter’s fear—“you put him in an insane asylum!”

“What for? Isn’t he the governor’s private secretary—and a darn efficient one. Didn’t he bilk you good and proper?”

“Oh—” Levinsky slurred, stopped, turned pale.

“Sure enough. I sent him here to buy the shares. I primed him up to his deep-toned, nefarious misdeeds. And now, young fellows, lend me your ears!”

“We have nothing to say to you.”

“Then don’t say it. Just listen. We own a majority interest in your little concern, eh?”

“What of it?” Levinsky decided to play trumps. “We have a hard-and-fast contract with the publishing company by the terms of which. …”

“Which Yi Feng helped you to draw up!”

“Oh—” Again Levinsky turned pale.

“Boys,” went on Crane, “there are more than a couple of colored citizens in your particular woodpile. Your contract is all right. I admit it. But do you realize that this brand-new Chinese republic has copied wholesale most of our good old American laws?”

“For instance?”

“The one which compels all magazines to publish in their pages, I forget how often during the year, a sworn statement of ownership. Well—how would you two like to have your brother radicals in Canton and Chicago and Pekin and the Bronx and God knows where else, read a little six-inch bit in The Torch, stating that its owners are you two—and we two?”

Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky was silent. His brain was full of buzzings, and he felt as if he was being needle-pricked all over. He was in a trap. He knew it. There was just one way out. He took it, after whispering rapidly to Chang-tü.

“Our brain child,” he said, with a return to his old epic manner, “we give it up. The octopus has crushed us. But we are not disheartened, are we, Chang-tü?”

“Indeed not!” exclaimed the latter. “Others will come after us—to carry on—to win! In the meantime—we give up our stock in the publishing company. …”

“And we resign from our editorial positions!”

“And you still are twenty thousand taels to the good, eh?” suggested Thomas W. Crane.

“Exactly!” Levinsky agreed triumphantly.

“Here is where the other colored citizen in the woodpile gets in,” laughed Crane. “Theodore Roosevelt,” he asked, “did you read those changes in your corporation papers good and thorough?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Remember paragraph five

“It interests us no longer. We have resigned!”

“It should interest you. For it says there—”

“What?”

“It says—cutting out all the legal rigmarole which makes it so bully and binding—that, hereafter, the official title of the magazine is not The Torch, but. …”

“But—?”

“The Torch—edited by Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky and Robert Emmet Chang-tü! Get the noble thought behind it? Your names are part and parcel of it! Cede your stock! Resign your editorial jobs! But your names will keep right on being immortalized if you like it or not. And what will your fellow-radicals think of you—say of you?”

“We shall tell them the truth!”

“But will they believe you? You just bet they won't. I know. I was in politics, back home in Chicago. They'll say that you are the hired agents of—what do you call it—oh yes—the blood-gorged dragon of reactionary corporationism. Your names will be a stench in the nostrils of the righteous! Boys, you’re in the soup! I have you by the slack of your pants, haven’t I? Haven't I?” he repeated. “Just bob your heads if you can’t talk.”

Theodore Roosevelt Levinsky inclined his head. So did Robert Emmet Chang-tü.

“Now that’s settled,” Crane went on, “I’ll tell you what we have decided. We could be real mean and have the next issue of The Torch come out with a peppery defence of the mandarin’s administration. But we won't. It would be bad politics. This little magazine of ours, with you two boys as editors, is going to switch gradually. It’s going to have a slow, but steady change of heart. All right? Just bob your heads once more.”

Again they inclined their heads. There was nothing else they could do. And then for the first time since he had come in, mandarin Po opened his lips.

“You two are young,” he said, “and we two are old—and wise—and perhaps—ah—not altogether as dishonest and selfish as you think? You don’t believe me? Of course you don’t. But presently you will grow in years—and perhaps in tolerance and understanding. And then you will comprehend the saying of the Excellent Confucius that the broken furnace may turn out good tiles; that if there is no oil in the lamp the wick will be wasted; that it is only when the cold season comes that we know the pine and cypress to be evergreens.”

He turned to Thomas W. Crane:

“Are you coming, O wise and older brother?”

*⁠*⁠*⁠*

And it was hours later, in his palace, that mandarin Po remarked to Thomas W. Crane, apropos of nothing:

“Truth to the young is a bitter, single fact, while to those of riper years it is—ah—a compromise both gentle and ironic. …

And he was silent and smiled beatifically at his old friend.