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ANTHONY THE ABSOLUTE

By Samuel Merwin

Author Of “The Citadel,” Etc.

Illustrated By R. M. Crosby

New York The Century Co.

1914

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ANTHONY THE ABSOLUTE

_At Sea--March 28th._

|THIS evening I told Sir Robert What's-His-Name he was a fool.

I was quite right in this. He is.

Every evening since the ship left Vancouver he has presided over the
round table in the middle of the smoking-room. There he sips his coffee
and liqueur, and holds forth on every subject known to the mind of man.
Each subject is his subject. He is an elderly person, with a bad
face and a drooping left eyelid. He wears a monocle; and carries his
handkerchief in his left sleeve.

They tell me that he is in the British Service--a judge somewhere down
in Malaysia, where they drink more than is good for them. I believe
it. He tosses about his _obiter dicta_ as if he were pope of the human
intellect. A garrulous pope. Surely the mind of a judge, when exposed,
is a dreadful thing!

Go where I will, of an evening, there is no peace for me. In the “social
hall” some ungoverned young thing is eternally at the piano--“On the
Mississippi” and “The Robert E. Lee” and the other musical literature
of the turkey trot. I could not possibly sit five minutes there without
shrieking. Outside, on deck, it has been raw and chill for a week, with
rain penetrating my clothing and misting the lenses of my spectacles and
rousing my slumbering rheumatism. And you can not sit long in a stuffy
cabin, with the port screwed fast; it is unpleasant enough sleeping
there.... So I have huddled myself each night in a corner of the
smoking-room. I have played at dominoes. I have played at solitaire with
cards. _And I loathe games!_ But anything is a relief that will divert
my mind, even for an instant now and then, from thoughts of that loose,
throaty voice, and of the truly awful mind that animates it.

Few of the passengers ever give me more than a nod; for I am not what is
called a “mixer.” Except the Port Watch. He has looked confidingly at
me twice over his siphon. But I have not encouraged him, for he has
an over-intense eye and the flush of drink is on his cheek. Every day,
hours on end, he paces the deck; hence his nickname. He is, like myself,
a lonely man; and a little wild--distinctly a little wild.

Sir Robert outdid himself this evening. No man could possibly know so
much. I have made a list (not complete, of course) of the subjects on
which he speaks with dogmatic authority--very positive, very technical,
with a glib use of catch phrases, with emphasis always on the peculiarly
significant point in the matter. The list runs:

Aëronautics; the American temperament as affected by immigration;
archery; art; ballistics; dog-breeding; engineering (civil and
military); ethnology; folk-lore of all nations; geology; horticulture;
inferiority of Latin peoples (particularly the French); laces and
embroideries; modern accounting; navigation (which he explained last
night in detail to the Chief Officer, a silent person); psychology (all
branches); Roman law; rugs (and textiles generally); _Weltpolitik_;
wireless telegraphy; and, at all times and places, the glory of England
and the superiority of English blood.

This evening he was dismissing, with a torrent of apparently precise
ethnological and historical data, the recent Japanese pretension
to Aryan origin--doubtless for the benefit of that little Japanese
commercial agent with bad teeth who sat in the corner opposite me
working out problems on a go-board. The usual group of weak-minded
persons were sitting about Sir Robert's table, listening with the usual
awe.

Now, I rather like that Japanese. Only this morning he was so kind as
to sing several examples of the folk-song of his country into my
phonograph. Five records he gave me, so that my work is begun even
before we land. Excellent specimens, two of them, of the Oriental
tone sense, with observably different intervals for the ascending and
descending scales.

He exhibited no sign that Sir Robert's talk annoyed him; quietly went
on placing the little black and white shells on the board. (It is
interesting to note, at this point, that the Japanese handle small
objects with the first three fingers only, without employing the thumb
as we do.) But I felt myself becoming angry. My forehead grew hot and
flushed, as it always does when I am stirred. I tried to calm myself
by constructing a house of dominoes; but the pitching of the ship
overturned it.

Still that throaty voice. “Thank God,” I thought, “in another day we
shall be at Yokohama!”

I tried to read a four-weeks-old copy of the _Illustrated London News_.
No use; the voice held me.

It occurred to me, as an exercise in self-control, to interest myself
in speculating on the emotions and the characteristics back of the faces
here in the smoking-room. I achieved some success at this exercise.
Why, when you come to think of it, should each particular unit in this
haphazard assemblage of men and women be journeying away off here to the
other side of the earth? There are surely dramas in our little company.
The two middle-aged ladies with the firm chins, for instance, who dress
so quietly and speak so discreetly--it is whispered among the men
that they are high and prosperous in a sad business on Soo-chow Road,
Shanghai. And the young German adventurer with the scars across his
nose, who borrowed fifteen dollars from me, to be repaid when we land at
Yokohama--if he approaches me again I shall refuse him firmly. And the
fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati, who plays fan-tan every night
with a heap of Chinese brass _cash_ and a bowl borrowed from the ship's
dining-room!

As I mused, I felt the Port Watch gazing at me again over his siphon. I
believe he would pour out his story, were I to permit it. But I do not
choose to hear. After all, I am not a romancer, but a scientific man.
My concern is not with the curious and personal tangle of human affairs,
but with impersonal fact and sober deductions therefrom.

Sir Robert was now defining culture as the touchstone of
civilization--from the British point of view, of course. God, that
voice! And then, without a thought in my head as to where the talk was
leading--suddenly--he plumped squarely down on my subject. It was the
first time in the twelve days of our voyage. Until this moment, the
tribal god referred to in his national anthem had spared him. _My
subject!_ The one thing I know more about than any other human being. I
had him.

“The surest test of the culture of a people,” said he, _ex cathedra_,
“is the music of that people. Primitive races invariably express their
emotions in primitive music. They try to tell me that the Chinese are a
civilized people. 'Very well,' I say then; 'let me hear their music.'
No nation has progressed far along the great highroad of civilization
without coming into an understanding of the diatonic system. The Chinese
civilized? When their finest musical instrument is the little _sheng_,
a crude collection of twelve pipes that are not even in tune? When they
have failed to arrive at even a rudimentary perception of tonality and
scale relationships? No; I tell you, the Chinese civilization is to
the European as the little _sheng_ is to the grand piano. The piano,
on which all scales are related, all harmomes possible, is the supreme
artistic achievement of the highest civilization.”

This was enough. I got right up and went over to the round table. My
forehead was burning; I must have been red as fire.

“You do not know what you are talking about,” I cried out. I had to
lean over the shoulder of one of the weak-minded in order to catch Sir
Robert's eye. “It is the piano that has killed music in Europe! The
piano is a lie from end to end of the keyboard. Bach confirmed that
lie with his miserable triumph of the well-tempered clavichord. And in
finally fastening his false scale upon us he destroyed in us the fine
ear for true intervals that is to-day found only in your primitive
peoples. The Chinese have it. The Javanese have it. The Siamese, most
wonderful of all, have a true isotonic scale. But we of the _cultured_
West (I put a wonderful sneering emphasis on that word) can not even
_hear_ true fluid music to-day, because our tone perception goes no
farther than the barbarous mechanical compromise of the piano keyboard.
You do not know what you are talking about. You are a fool!”

When I am excited my voice rises and becomes shrill. I talked rapidly,
so that no one could interrupt. And the weak-minded ones sank back in
their chairs. They were actually afraid, I think now. In fact, when I
paused the whole smoking-room was still as death.

I swept my eye about--commandingly, I think. The fat vaudeville man--he
sat behind Sir Robert--was grinning at me with delight in his eyes, and
was softly clapping his hands behind the fan-tan bowl. The Port Watch
with red face and suddenly twinkling eyes, had clapped his hand over his
mouth as if to smother an outright laugh. Sir Robert was looking up at
me, his left eyelid drooping, a sort of perplexed uncertainty on his
face--his old face that was all lines and wrinkles.

Now that I had the floor, it seemed worth while to make a thorough job
of it, so I swept on:

“You make the piano the test of civilization. Greece had a
civilization--where were the pianos of Greece? Oh, I am tired of your
talk. I have listened to you for twelve long days and nights. I have
suspected your accuracy, but I could not be sure, for you luckily
avoided _my_ subject. But now I have you! And I know you for a fraud
on all subjects! I see confusion in your face. You are groping for
something to say about the music of Greece. Very well; I will say it for
you. The Greeks had no piano, because they had no harmony. They did not
know that harmony was possible. And if they had heard it, they would not
have liked it.”

“Ah,” cried Sir Robert, flushing under the parchment of his skin, and (I
must say) taking up the gage of battle, “but Greece gave us our diatonic
system. The root of our scale, the tetrachord, came to us from the
Greeks.”

I laughed him down. The intervals of that Greek tetrachord were not the
same as ours. They used intervals that actually can not be written in
our notation--three quarter tones, one and a quarter tones. Pythagoras
states, 'The intervals in music are rather to be judged intellectually
through numbers than sensibly through the ear.' For they followed the
acoustic laws, _like the Chinese!_ The fragments we have of the worship
of Apollo are more nearly like the ancient Confucian hymn than like
anything known in modern music. “Tell me, sir, did you know that? And
tell me this--does not the quality you call 'culture' imply that we
should seek sympathetically for the standpoint of other minds? Has it
never occurred to you that when Oriental music sounds absurd and out of
key to you, it is your own ear that is at fault--that the intervals are
too fine and true for your false, piano-trained sense? For such is the
fact.”

I was shaking my finger under his nose, so closely that he had to lean
back.

“And I will tell you,” I added, standing right over him, “that the
Chinese _sheng_ has seventeen pipes, not twelve.”

“Ah,” he broke in, “but the other pipes are mute.”

“Two are mute,” I replied triumphantly. “And two are duplicates of
others. The correct number of speaking pipes is fifteen.”

His eyes were kindling now. “See here!” he cried. “Who and what are
you?”

“I am a banker!” I shouted--the first thing that came to my tongue. Then
I turned and walked straight out on deck. It was precisely the moment
for leaving; even the weak-minded could see that their oracle was
tripped. Besides, I had to be alone. For I was breaking into a profuse
sweat. The drops were running down my forehead into my eyes and clouding
my spectacles; I had to take them off and carry them in my hand.

My under lip was quivering so that my teeth chattered. And my heart was
palpitating, and skipping beats.

It was wet and wild and dark out there on deck; but in my intense moods
I like the rough, elemental thing.

I stood right up to the storm, clinging to the weather-rail. The
ship rolled away down, then away up, until I could see only the dim,
scurrying clouds. The rain beat into my face. I felt happy, in a way.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I sprang away, and turned. I dislike
exceedingly to have any one lay hands on me.

It was the Port Watch. He had put on a long raincoat, and a cap that was
pulled low on his forehead. Under it I could see his eyes shining in a
nervous, excited way. He certainly is a wild man, if there ever was one.
But then I saw that he was grinning at me, and felt relieved.

“You sure did hand it to the old cock,” he said, shouting against the
storm. “It was great. I don't know a dam' thing about music. But I know
when a bluff is called. He's gone below.”

“Well,” said I, for there was no need of being uncivil to the man, “I
got sick of his voice. And then, he was wrong.”

“Any one could see that,” chuckled the Port Watch.

We walked around together to the lee side of the ship, so that he could
light a cigar. And while I did not like his taking my arm, still he
seems to be a decent fellow enough, after all. We exchanged cards. He is
connected with a Stock Exchange house in New York. He is a big,
vigorous man, surely not past his middle thirties. I rather envy him
his strength, I am so thin and frail myself. He is one of those who
know nothing of what we weaker ones go through who have to husband our
energies. A rather primitive person, I should say. He occupies one of
the high-priced cabins on the promenade-deck, with a private bath. It
must be pleasant to travel that way.

When we parted at the after stairway, I said: “I did n't think I should
like you. Shall I tell you why?”

“Yes,” said he.

“Because you drink too much.”

At this he stood still, his hands plunged into the pockets of his
raincoat, chewing his under lip. Finally he said, with a break in his
voice:

“You're right there. I _am_ drinking too much. But--God, if you knew!”

Then, without so much as a good night, he plunged off down the passage
toward that comfortable room of his, with bath. And I went below to my
stuffy cabin, where the port has been screwed fast for a week.

His name is Crocker, Archibald Crocker, Jr., son of the well-known and,
truth to tell, rather infamous millionaire and manipulator of stocks.
Our worlds lie wide apart, his and mine. I realized that much when he
looked at my card. The name of Anthony Ives Eckhart conveyed nothing
to him--the name that is known and respected by Boag and the great von
Stumbostel of Berlin, by de Musseau, Ramel, and Fourmont at Taris, by
Sir Frederick Rhodes of Cambridge; the name that spells anathema to that
snarling charlatan, von Westfall, of Bonn.

Crocker has offered to guide me through the Yoshiwara district at
Yokohama to-morrow evening. He says that the music will interest me.

I think I shall go with him. He says that every traveled white man
in the world has been to “Number Nine”--that it is a legitimate, even
necessary part of a man's experience. Certainly I do not wish to appear
unmanly.

My room proved intolerable, and I was still too excited to rest; so I
came back to the deserted smoking-room to write up my journal.

It is very late. The steward is hovering anxiously about, yawning now
and then. I may as well let the poor fellow get to his berth. God knows,
he sees little enough of it.

But first I will have him fetch me a mug of their wonderful English
stout. I find that this is even better than ale for inducing sleep. At
least, in my own case.

_Yokohama, Grand Hotel, March 20th._

|IT was past three o'clock to-day when the ship came to anchor and the
steam tender brought us ashore. It interested me to see the rickshaws
with their bare-legged coolies. By the time we had ridden along the Bund
to the hotel and secured our rooms it was four o'clock. We went down to
the “lounge,” Crocker and I, and had tea brought in. Or I did. He drank
a whisky and _Tan San_. Then pretty soon he drank another.

Several couples from the ship were about, but not many of the men who
were traveling alone.

“Where are they all?” I asked.

“Who?” said he.

“The men from the ship. Have they gone to other hotels?”

“Some of them--perhaps,” he replied. Then he looked away and smiled.

Sometimes, when I talk with a hard, practical man of the world, I find
myself feeling vaguely out of it all. My life, devoted as it is to the
discovery and classification of facts, is certainly a practical life;
yet I seem to dwell aside from the main current. I do not quite catch
the point of view of a rough-handed rich man like Crocker. And when I
speak my mind, as I always endeavor to do, men do not resent it. I do
not understand this. Come to think of it, I was decidedly outspoken last
night with Sir Robert. He should have struck me; at least, he should
have exhibited some anger. He would have struck Crocker, I think, in
such a case--or jailed him for contempt.

We lingered nearly an hour over our tea and whisky. The experience was
wholly new to me--comfortably seated in a large European hotel, with
English folk and Americans all about, and yet with Japanese servants,
and yellow, shrewd little Oriental faces behind the desk, and a Chinese
cashier in a blue rote, and Chinese tailors pressing in on one, samples
on arm, offering to make suits of clothes overnight. And out the window,
floating about the glittering harbor, sampans and a great Chinese junk
or two, and the fleet of fishing-boats with ribbed sails just skimming
in between the breakwaters. We were the West, we and our absurdly
Anglo-Saxon hotel; but all about us were hints and flavors of the
eternal East.

Suddenly I realized that Crocker had been for quite a little time
twisting restlessly in his armchair. I looked at him now. He was tapping
the carpet softly but very rapidly with his right foot, and rubbing his
chin with his hand. Crocker's chin is of good size and shape, the sort
we usually speak of as “strong.” He is a dark man, inclined to fullness
in the face and figure, but still athletic in appearance. His eyes are
brown. He is not at all a bad-looking fellow, when you study him out.
I rather like the blend in him of vigor, and perhaps stubbornness,
with frankness. I should say that apart from the abnormal experiences,
whatever they may be, that have driven or drawn him to this part of the
world, he is a man of will and spirit. He would fight, I think, in a
pinch. When fully himself, in his own home and business environment, he
must be a man's man. He is nearly a head taller than I.

He caught me looking at him, and smiled.

“Well,” said he, “shall we go along?”

“Where?”

“On that little expedition we spoke of last night.”

“Oh!” I remembered now. “But--is n't it--do we want to go to such a
place now--in the day-time?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You old sybarite!” he chuckled, and hummed,
“_Et la nuit, tous les chats sont gris!_” Then he added, more seriously:

“But really, Eckhart, three ships are in to-day--the Pacific Mail and
the French finer besides ours--and if we wait until evening we shall
have no choice at all.”

“Very well,” said I then, briskly, for I do not like to be ridiculed.
“Just wait until I can get my phonograph.”

“Your _what?_” said he.

“My phonograph,” I repeated, with dignity. And I went upstairs for ft.

When I came down, with the heavy instrument in its case under one arm
and a box of new record cylinders under the other, he was not in the
lounge. I passed on out to the porch, and found him there with two
rickshaws waiting. When he saw me with my heavy burdens, he began
laughing in that nervous, jumpy way he has. But I ignored him, and
placed the boxes carefully in my rickshaw. We were about to start when I
realized that I had forgotten my record-taking horn, so I went back for
it.

“Look here, old man,” said Crocker, from his rickshaw, when I
reappeared, “it's all right, of course,--I don't mind,--but what on
earth are you bringing all that junk for?”

“You were so good as to explain that I would find the music
interesting,” I replied. “You surely don't suppose that I trust my ear
in this delicate research work. Why, my dear fellow, in my studies of
our American Indian songs I have succeeded in recording intervals as
close as the sixteenth part of a tone.”

He was still grinning. “All right,” he said; “don't get stuffy. I'll be
good. Hop into your rickshaw.”

I did so. The coolies turned for directions. Crocker was about to give
them when two of our fellow passengers, accompanied by their wives,
stepped out of the hotel. Crocker waited, and we sat there, looking
rather foolish, until they had passed on out of ear-shot; then he leaned
forward and said in a low voice:

“Number Nine.”

“Heh!” cried the two coolies instantly, as one man, and wheeling about
they ran the little vehicles out of the court and into the street.

I must admit that my first impression of the Yokohama streets was
rather disappointing--that is, until we turned a corner unexpectedly and
entered the Yoshiwara district. The streets were much more like England
than the Japan of my fancy. Crocker tells me that Yokohama was built up
as a foreign concession for purposes of trade, and therefore is really
not Japanese at all. But once in the Yoshiwara quarter my nerves began
to tingle; for this was a bit of Japan.

Crocker insists that it is small and tawdry compared to the Tokio
Yoshiwara. Never having explored that portion of the capital, I can
not say. To me it was quite enchanting. The houses were higher than is
customary in Japanese cities. In color all were of the unpainted but
pleasantly weathered shade of light brown that is so agreeable to the
eye--very possibly they stain the wood, as we do in the case of our
modern bungalows. There were little hanging balconies on the upper
stories, with decorative festoons of colored paper lanterns. Through the
windows and the open doorways one caught glimpses of the spring flowers
and blossoms that play so great and fine a part in the esthetic life
of this extraordinary people. And here and there, at a window or over
a balcony railing, could be seen a face--a quaint and girlish face with
glossy black hair done up fantastically high over wide shell combs and
with glimpses of flowered silks about slim shoulders. The fragrance of
the early cherry and plum blossoms was in the air.

The famous “Number Nine” proved to be a large house at the end of the
street. The door stood invitingly open. A well-trained servant took my
two boxes and the horn and carried them in. Another servant guided us
upstairs.

The interior was cool and spacious. It differed in so many respects from
photographs of typical Japanese house interiors that I decided it is
really a foreign resort. Later inquiries this evening have confirmed
this conclusion. In the actual Japanese house, the floor is elevated a
foot or more and is also the seat; and in entering one passes first into
a tiny hall on the street level, removes his shoes, then steps up to the
floor proper. Here there was no such arrangement. We mounted steps,
then walked through a broad hall that led into a central court full of
flowers. The woodwork of floor and walls was of that characteristic and
agreeable tan or natural shade. The rugs were simple and quiet in design
and color.

Our guide led us to a stairway. The boy with my apparatus looked to
me for instructions, and I motioned him to follow. Then we mounted the
stairs, and passed along a broad corridor overlooking the court to an
office-like room in the corner that was furnished with European tables
and chairs. On the way we passed an open doorway, and I caught a passing
glimpse of a dim, large room, in which the only furniture appeared to be
a low platform covered with a rug of light red.

“That's where the geisha girls dance,” Crocker whispered.

I nodded. I was looking forward with a good deal of interest to hearing
the music that accompanies this performance.

In the corner room we were welcomed very civilly by a little old woman,
and tea was brought us. Then she said something to Crocker in a sort of
pidgin-English which I did not quite catch. He nodded eagerly.

It occurred to me, with some bitterness I am afraid, that the little
old woman would never have thought of turning to me as the leading
spirit--never in the world. She hardly looked at me. So I went on
sipping my tea.

A door opened, and in came a file of girls--fourteen of them. All
were young; one, I thought, of not more than thirteen or fourteen
years--though it is difficult for us of the West to judge accurately
the age of Orientals. They shuffled along in their curious little
shoes. Several seemed to me extremely pretty; all were small and dainty.
Everything considered, they made a pleasing picture as they stood there,
looking at us with a demure twinkling in each almond eye. I wondered
what would come next. A dance, perhaps.

Crocker had hitched forward in his chair and was looking rapidly from
one end of the line to the other. His face was more flushed even than
usual; his eyes were eager. Finally his gaze rested on the third girl
from the right end of the line. I began to feel uncomfortable.

After a moment he rose, and nodded toward that third girl. She promptly
stepped forward. “See you later, old man,” he said to me bruskly, hardly
looking at me, and then, laying down a gold coin and taking the girl's
arm, hurried from the room with her.

Left alone there, with the old woman and the thirteen girls, I found
myself rather confused. It had not occurred to me that the business was
to be rushed through with so mechanically, so brutally. The beauty of
the building and the charm of these quaint little girls in soft-colored
costumes had up to this moment held a strong lure for me. But suddenly
the situation rang hard and metallic. It was, after all, just the
problematic, age-old business in a new dress.

And then I began to feel ashamed. After all, most men are direct and
practical in these puzzling matters. They do not theorize, they do not
shrink from rough facts. They take life as they find it, and pass on.
Here am I (so ran my thoughts) drawing hack, refusing life, and that not
in any firmness of purpose, but in a sort of fright!

“I should like to see the geishas dance,” I managed to say.

“No can do,” replied the old woman, with a gesture of her skinny hands.
“One day--three day--must tell.” And she held up three fingers.

“I don't understand you,” said I.

“Geisha girls no have got--must go catchee two, three, four piecee girl;
two, three, four piecee music. Two--three day you tell. No can do.”

She evidently meant that it was necessary to give notice if one wished
the geisha dance. And she was grinning at me now and pointing to the
girls. I was being swept along in this brutal business. Otherwise, they
would feel, why had I come to take up their time?

I felt the color rushing into my face as I raised my hand and pointed at
random. One of the girls came forward. The old woman held out her hand.
I found a gold coin and dropped it on her palm; then turned for my
apparatus, which the boy had set on a chair by the door. I made a rather
awkward matter of picking it up, dropping the horn with a clatter. The
other girls and the old woman were leaving the room and seemed not to
observe my confusion. The girl whom I had selected picked up the horn;
then led the way out the door and along the corridor overlooking the
wide court where the flowers were.

We entered a room, and she closed the door. My heart was palpitating,
and I knew that my face was red; so I busied myself setting down the two
boxes on the table and opening them.

I felt her brush against my arm, and looked at her. She was rather
older than I had thought, though still young enough, God knows, for the
pitiful trade she plies. And she was smiling, with what appeared to be
genuine good humor. Probably I amused her. Worldly-wise women, when they
observe me at all, usually look amused; so I make it a rule to avoid
them when I can.

“Wha' ees eet?” she asked, nodding toward the instrument. She spoke in
quite understandable English, though with a strong accent.

I told her it was a phonograph, and asked if she would sing into it. She
seemed pleased.

I had her sing all the native songs she was able to think of at the
moment, making notes of the title of each, as nearly as I could
catch the sound of the words. To make sure that I had each correctly
identified, I repeated it to her. She laughed a good deal over my
attempts to pronounce these titles. The seven songs that interested me I
then requested her to sing into the phonograph. This she did, with
only fair satisfaction to me; for she laughed a good deal, and would
occasionally turn her head to look up at me, thus directing the tone
away from the horn. I had to make her sing four of them twice. I
regretted this, as four cylinders were thereby wasted, and I can not
replace these specially made cylinders on this side the Pacific. I began
to see that the twenty-two hundred I have brought with me will be used
up pretty rapidly when my investigation gets under full headway on the
farther side of the Yellow Sea.

I have, later to-night, played over these seven records here in my room
at the hotel, with some sense of disappointment. One of them I think
will prove, on careful analysis, to have for its basis the ancient
pentatonic scale. The intervals of two are very nearly those of the
oldest known Greek scales of a tone and two conjunct tetra-chords.
But in the case of the other four I shall be greatly surprised if they
employ any other intervals than those of our own equal temperament scale
of twelve semitones to the octave.

That, of course, is really the trouble with Japan as a field of
research; these marvelous little people pick up and assimilate Western
ideas with such rapidity that their ancient traditions become hopelessly
confused.

The girl seemed to tire after a while. Her voice became hoarse and she
fell to coughing. I realized then that I had been holding her pretty
closely to this work, and told her that she could rest a little while.

At this, she sat on the edge of the European ted, and looked at me, half
smiling.

“You lig hear the _koto?_” she asked suddenly.

I nodded eagerly. The _koto_, as I have long known, is closely related
to the ancient Chinese instrument, the _ch'in_, beloved of Confucius.
Many investigators hold, indeed, that it is the same instrument,
transplanted in the earliest times and changed a little in its new
environment.

She slipped out of the room, and shortly returned with the instrument,
which remotely resembles a modern zither--at least, in the fact that
it has a number of strings (thirteen in this instance) stretched over
a board and played by plucking with the fingers. It was a beautiful
object, the _koto_ of this nameless little inmate of the Yoshiwara,
highly lacquered, with fine inlays of polished woods, tortoise-shell,
ivory, and silver; and I could see by her smiling breathlessness and the
engaging, almost shy glances she gave me as she curled up on the bed to
play it, that she was inordinately proud of it.

“You lig hear me pray?” she murmured.

The word “pray” came to me with a curious shock in this place. Then I
remembered the Japanese confusion of our _r_ and _l_ sounds, and knew
that she meant “play.”

I nodded.

She drew from a fold of her dress a pitch-pipe contrived of six little
bamboo tubes bound together by means of a copper wire, and tuned all the
thirteen strings. Then she played for quite a long time, characteristic
melodies of the Orient that floated vaguely and hauntingly between the
major and the minor. I was able to get a fairly clear idea of the scale
she used before I decided upon the nature of the records I wished to
make of it. I moved a table over to the phonograph, and, by resting the
koto on small boxes that I found on the bureau, I contrived to place it
almost against the horn of the phonograph. Then I had her play, first
the scale of the open strings, followed by those two or three of the
melodies that had particularly interested me.

It had grown dark some time before this, and she had lighted a lamp.
Now, feeling on the whole well satisfied with the ten records I had
made, I looked at my watch, and was astonished to learn that it was
half-past eight in the evening. I at once set about packing up my
apparatus.

She stood close to me, watching the process. Occasionally she put out
her small hand and stroked my hair. When I had done, she came still
closer and, with momentary hesitation, placed her arms about my neck.

“You go 'way?” she whispered.

“Yes,” said I, “I must go now.”

“You doan' lig me?”

“Why, yes, certainly,” I replied, “I like you very much. And you have
sung and played very prettily for me.”

“Oh,” said she, looking somewhat puzzled, “you lig that?”

I nodded. My hands had dropped naturally upon her shoulders. But I was
conscious then--and indeed, am to-night, as I write it down--of some
confusion of thought.

Then she raised her face--by stretching up on tiptoe and pulling with
tight little arms about my neck. I did not know what to do. To draw
my lips away from hers would be something more than absurd. There is
a limit even to what I suppose I must sooner or later admit as my own
unmanliness. So I kissed her, white man fashion. And, to my complete
surprise, she clung to me with what seemed, for the moment, to be
genuine emotion.

I will not attempt to explain either my nature in general or my actions
at this particular time. What would be the use? I am writing this
journal for my own eyes alone; and, God knows, hours enough of my life
have been wasted in the pale avenues of introspection. I am not a wholly
bloodless being. And I know well enough that the average man buys women
now and then, here and there, whatever obligation he may think himself
under to conceal the fact and thereby contribute his support to the
immense foundation lie on which our Anglo-Saxon structure of virtue and
morality rests.

I do not know why I found myself unable to stay. Perhaps in another
place and at another time 't would have been different. Perhaps the
beauty and charm of the house and the pleasant attractiveness of the
little person herself had raised me too high above the ordinary sordid
plane of this transaction, and emphasized the ugliness of it.

Perhaps, too, the fact (extraordinary in my lonely experience) that she
had given up smiling at me, and now plainly wanted me to stay, was among
the curious psychological forces that drove me away. As to _why_ she
wanted me, I can not say. I have puzzled over that part of it all
the evening (it is now a quarter to midnight) without arriving at any
conclusion. It may be that by unconsciously permitting her, through my
deep interest in her music, to show something of her own enthusiasms and
of the emotions that stirred them, I had flattered her more subtly than
I knew. Who can say?

I turned right back to my boxes. She called a boy to carry them, and I
went away. My last glimpse, as I closed her door, was of a quaint little
slant-eyed person, whose hair had become disarranged and was tumbling
about her ears, whose lips were parted in a breathless smile.

One thing is sure: I shall never let Crocker know that I came away like
that. If he believed me at all, which I doubt, he would certainly think
me weaker than I am. I may be a complicated, finicky person; but I do
not believe I am as weak as he would think me if he knew.

As I was walking along the corridor I heard other footsteps, and looking
across the dim, flower-scented court, just managed to distinguish a
rather ponderous figure proceeding slowly among the shadows on the other
side. We met at the top of the stairs. It was Sir Robert.

I felt myself coloring furiously; and he wore a shamefaced expression.
For such is the curious hypocrisy of man when caught in his more or less
constant relationship with the one completely universal and unchangeable
of his institutions.

“Well,” said he, rather awkwardly, “it is a very pleasant place, the way
they keep it up.”

“Very,” I replied.

“And what is all this?” He was looking at my boxes, in the arms of the
boy at my elbow. “Purchases? Here?”

“That is my phonograph,” I explained, quite unnecessarily.

“Your _what?_” He said this much as Crocker had said it.

“My phonograph,” I repeated.

He stood looking at me, with knit brows. Then, “Ah, ha!” he said,
musing. “So _that_ was it! I could n't explain that music--hours of
it--and the repetitions. I begin to see. You are the authority on
Oriental music.”

I bowed coldly.

Sir Robert began smiling--an old man's smile. I started down the stairs,
but he kept at my side.

We went on to the outer door together without a word, and waited while
the boy called rickshaws for us. I looked at Sir Robert. He was still
smiling.

“Let me congratulate you,” he said then, rather dryly. And his left
eyelid drooped in what was grotesquely like a wink. “You have the
distinction, I believe, of being quite the most practical man in the
world. You will go far.”

Thank God, the rickshaw is the most unsociable of vehicles. Each of us
stepped into his own and rolled away through a dim street bordered by
rows of gay paper lanterns, which were lighted now.

As my rickshaw turned the corner, we nearly collided head on with
another one. By the light of the lanterns I made out its occupant--the
fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati.

He waved a cheerful hand at me as we passed.

“Number Nine?” he called.

“Number Nine,” I replied. I felt depressed and ashamed; but he took it
very easily.

I have, however, confirmed a conclusion tonight, so the experience has
its value. I shall push on to China, where the ancient music may still
be caught in its pure form, uncorrupted and unconfused by the modern
touch. For my purposes, time spent in Japan would be wasted. And I shall
hurry past the treaty ports to Peking. The treaty ports, they tell me,
are not really Chinese at all. For that matter, how could they be?

_Grand Hotel, Yokohama, March 30th, Early Afternoon._

|CROCKER has not yet appeared. I borrowed his key from the office, just
before lunch, and looked in his room. His bed had not been, slept
in. There is certainly no indirection about Crocker, no introspective
uncertainty; he meets life as it presents itself, roughly and squarely.

On the whole, I find I like him much better than I expected. He is
really a companionable chap. He is not so eager to tell his troubles as
I had thought he would be. In fact, barring that one moment on the ship,
he has not even referred to them; and I myself drew that out by telling
him he was drinking too much.

Sir Robert came over and sat with me just now in the dining-room while I
finished my lunch. I cut the meal as short as I could. He was distinctly
affable. He asked point-blank where I am going, and I had to tell. It
seems that he is bound for Peking also, _via_ Shanghai and Nanking.
Fortunately, he announced his route before asking about mine. I decided
on the spot to go around by the Korean and Chinese Imperial Railways,
through Fusan, Mukden, and Shanhaikwan.

However, he perhaps did me a service by telling me of a pleasant little
French hotel at Peking, on the Italian _glacis_, whatever that is. The
big hotel in the Legation Quarter, he says, is rather expensive and at
this time of year will be swarming with tourists. The little _Hôtel
de Chine_, on the other hand, is frequented only by queer types of the
Coast, and is really very cheap.

“The _cuisine_,” said Sir Robert, “is atrocious. But, being French,
they serve excellent coffee, which does for breakfast and one can, in a
pinch, put together a fair luncheon there. For dinner, the _Wagon-lits_,
of course. Above all, make no experiments with the cellar of the _Hôtel
de Chine_. They will show you an imposing wine-card. Shun it!”

I merely bowed at this. It was no use telling Sir Robert that I should
certainly not know one alleged vintage from another.

There is one difficulty. Sir Robert himself, affecting a taste for the
quaint, will be stopping at our less pretentious hostelry; again, with
my eyes closed at night, I shall see that bad old face with the one
drooping eyelid; again that loose voice will sound in my ears. But then,
I shall be very busy.

Some one is knocking at my door. Crocker is calling.

Midnight--Still the 30th.

|CROCKER was in the worst shape I have seen him in so far. His eyes
were red. And when he dropped on my couch, the first thing he did was
to stretch out his right hand and watch it critically. It was decidedly
unsteady.

“Ring up a boy, old chap, will you?” he said. I did so. He ordered a
quart bottle of whisky and a half-dozen bottles of _Tan San_.

“Steady my nerves,” he observed, half to himself. “It's that dam'
_saké_. Gets to me like absinthe.” He chuckled. “I must have a quart of
the stuff in me. Some night, my boy!”

Curiously, a few drinks of the whisky did seem to steady his nerves.
After a while he came over to the table, sat down opposite me, and
lighted a cigar. We talked for an hour or two--until I finally explained
that I really had to get at my work. Then he returned to the sofa,
stretched out comfortably, with the whisky and an ash-tray on a chair
beside him, and watched me, with only an occasional good-natured
interruption.

He seemed greatly interested in my method of musical notation. Of
course, the ordinary staff of five lines would not serve me at all,
since I find it necessary to indicate intervals much closer ===than the
usual half-step. I use large sheets of paper, ruled from top to bottom
with fine lines, every sixteenth line being heavier. Thus I can record
intervals as fine as the sixteenth of a tone. In fact, as I told
Crocker, and as Rameau and von Stumbostel both recognize, _I have
actually done so!_ I undoubtedly possess the most delicate aural
perception of any scientist that has ever investigated the so-called
primitive music. My ears are to me what the eyes of the great astronomer
are to him. This is why all my contemporaries, particularly the great
von Stumbostel, are following my present inquiry with such extraordinary
interest.

It was six o'clock before I finished noting down the songs and _koto_
melodies from my records of the preceding evening. Crocker sipped
continuously at his whisky and _Tan San_--to my surprise, without the
slightest apparent ill effect. Perhaps he grew a little mellower, a
little more human, as the phrase runs, but that was all. When my work
was done, I drew a chair to the sofa, put my feet up, and encouraged him
to talk.

At a little after seven he went to his room to dress for dinner.
I scrubbed some of the ink off my fingers and slipped into my
dinner-jacket, then knocked at his door.

As we descended the wide stairs, I observed that Crocker was walking
down very rigidly, placing his foot squarely in the middle of each step.
On the landing he paused, and turned to me with a slight smile.

“Am I acting all right?” he asked.

“Perfectly. Why?”

“My boy,”--he lowered his voice,--“I'm drunk as a lord. But I reckon I
can get away with it. Come along.”

He really handled himself surprisingly well. I am not an expert, of
course, in the various psychological reactions from drink. I should have
said he was a little over-stimulated, nothing more. He kept away from
the bar, and at the table in the big dining-room drank very little--only
a cocktail and a light wine with the roast. And he discussed this with
me at the start, finally deciding that it would not be wise for him to
stop abruptly.

All went well until the dessert. There was quite a choice of items on
the bill. I ordered vanilla ice cream. I distinctly heard him order the
same. I recall wondering a little, at the moment; for surely vanilla
ice cream was not the most desirable addition to the various substances
already on his alcohol-poisoned stomach.

When the waiter set the dish before him, he astonished me with a sudden
outburst of anger.

“Good God!” he cried, quite loud, “am I to be treated like this! Has
nobody any regard for my feelings!”

I began to feel unpleasantly conspicuous.

“This is past all endurance!” he shouted, pushing back his chair.

The Chinese waiter had turned back, by this time, and stood, bowing
respectfully by his chair.

Crocker swore under his breath, sprang to his feet, and with a short,
hard swing of his right hand struck the unsuspecting Chinaman on the
jaw.

I never before saw a man fall in precisely that way. Indeed, it was not
a fall in the ordinary sense of the word. It was more like a sudden
paralysis. His knees appeared to give, and he sank to the floor without
the slightest sound that I was conscious of.

There was a good deal of confusion, of course. Women made sounds. One
or two, I think, ran from the room. There was much scraping of chairs as
men got up and made for us. The manager of the hotel appeared, crowding
through toward us.

The Chinaman did not stir; he was now merely a heap of blue clothing at
our feet, huddled against the table-leg.

Crocker stood beside the table, steadying himself by gripping the
back of his chair, and smiling with an air of rather self-conscious
distinction. He bowed slightly to the breathless manager.

[Illustration: 0059]

“It was quite unavoidable,” he said. “As a gentleman you will readily
see that.” His tongue was thicker now. “Nobody regrets it more'n
I--nobody more'n I.”

The manager gave me a look and caught him by one arm. I took the other.
Crocker hung back.

“This is quite unnecessary,” he said, “quite unnecessary. I'm perf'kly
sober, I assure you. As a matter o' fac', I'm soberes' man in th 'ole big
room. Very big room. Ver' big room indeed. Bigges' room ever saw.”

Between, us, the manager and I got him upstairs and into his room. Then
I was left alone with him to undress him and get him into his bed. The
task consumed all of an hour. He was rough, almost violent, one moment,
and absurdly polite the next. His mind developed a trick of leaping off
on unexpected tangents. He tried to point out reasons against removing
each article of clothing as we came to it. It was interesting, on the
whole. I have since almost regretted that I did not make exact notes
of these curious mental flights. But at the moment it seemed too remote
from my own field of study. And I suppose my decision was reasonable.

It occurs to me, in glancing back over the foregoing paragraph, that
Crocker--had I been the drunk one and he the sober--would not have
drifted into this highly self-conscious theorizing; he would not have
felt this detachment from the fact. Perhaps that is the secret of my
difference from other men. Perhaps that is the peculiar respect in which
I am not wholly normal. If this is so, am I doomed to dwell always apart
from my fellows in a cold region of pure thought? I am going to set this
confession down here: I have almost envied Crocker to-night--not, of
course, the frightful things he does, but the human, yes, the animal
quality of the man that makes it possible for him to get drunk now and
then. _For I can't do it!_ I am farther from the norm than he; on the
opposite side, to be sure, but farther. Is not this why I have never had
a man chum?

Is not this why no good woman has ever looked on me with the eye of
love?

I got him to bed, finally, and sat by him until he fell asleep. I am
going back there now to pass the night on his sofa, first undressing
here. I shall feel somewhat conspicuous, walking down the hall in the
gay kimono I bought this morning. But I do not think any one will notice
it. They seem not to mind such things out here.

The manager has just been up to see me. He says that the waiter is all
right now, excepting a slight nausea. And he suggests that Crocker leave
the hotel as soon as convenient. Poor fellow, I shall have to carry this
word to him. I found, on pinning the manager down, that by the phrase
“as soon as convenient” he means as early to-morrow as possible. But I
shall not wake Crocker up; he shall have his sleep before they turn him
out on the Bund.

Well, I must get ready now for my night watch. It is the first time I
have ever been responsible for a drunken man.

To-morrow I leave over the Tokaido Railway for the Straits of Tsushima,
Korea, Manchuria, and the barbaric old capital of the newest republic on
earth. It has been a curious experience throughout, this with Crocker.
But it will soon be over now. And I do not regret it. I may never again
be drawn so deeply into the rough current of actual life. My way lies
far from this.

On the Railway, Coasting the Island Sea--March 31st.

|CROCKER'S story came out, after all. This morning, in his room. It is
rather difficult writing here on the train, with only a suit-case for a
table; but I feel that I must set down the last of this strange story,
now that I have given so much of my time and thought to the man; and
it must be written before any new experiences may arise to claim my
attention and perhaps erase some salient detail of the narrative. Then,
who knows? This may not be the last. I may find myself involved in it
again. Sir Robert observed yesterday: “The China Coast is even smaller
than the well-known world. Even if I should miss you at Peking, we shall
meet again.” He is doubtless right. We shall meet again. And Crocker and
I, too, shall meet again, I think. When and how, I can only wonder.

I slept badly last night, on his sofa. Early this morning I returned to
my own room, dressed, ordered up a light breakfast, and then spent two
hours in packing. It was nearer eleven than ten when I tapped on the
door.

“Come in!” he called.

He had pulled an extra pillow in behind his head, and was sitting up
in bed. He was whiter than I had before seen him. And the hand that he
extended to me shook so that he could hardly hold it up. It was cold to
the touch.

For a few moments after I had sent a boy for his coffee, we talked about
next to nothing--the time, the weather, my departure. But his hollow
eyes were searching me.

“Who put me here?” he asked, finally.

I told him.

“Any trouble?”

I hesitated.

“Tell me. Don't play with me. Did I break out?”

There was nothing to do but tell him the whole story; which I did. He
listened in complete silence, sipping the coffee (for which he seemed to
feel some repugnance).

“Hurt the fellow?” he asked, when I had done.

“No. He is reported all right this morning.”

His chin dropped on his deep chest. He seemed to be mediating, in a
crestfallen sort of way; but I observed that his eyes wandered aimlessly
about the room. Finally he said:

“Suppose I had killed him.”

“You did n't,” I replied shortly.

He covered his face with his shaking hands.

“It's the murder in my heart,” he muttered.

I could only look at him.

After a little he dropped his hands, leaned back on the pillow, and
gazed at me.

“You're blaming me,” he said.

I shook my head.

“You are. But not so much as you will. Do you know what I'm doing out
here? Do you suppose I left my business to come halfway around the world
on a pleasure trip--at my age? Chuck everything worth while, just when
I'm at the top of my stride? No, you don't know; but I'm going to tell
you.”

I put up my hand, but he plunged gloomily on: “My wife eloped with a
man. A man I knew. They came out here. I've come to find them. I'm going
to kill him and her. With a knife.”

“You must not do that,” said I. I recall now that the thought came to me
to deal with him as if he were a lunatic, and humor him. So I said, “You
must not do that.”

“It is the only thing to do,” said he, rather dogmatically. “How can I
face my friends again if I fail? A man who doesn't even try to protect
his home!”

“It would be murder.”

He shook his head. “No honest jury would hang me for that. It is the
unwritten law.” Then, as if conscious of the weakness of his argument,
he added: “Besides, what difference does it make? Those two have
committed worse than murder against me. It does n't matter a particle
now what becomes of me. I loved my wife. I gave her everything that
money could buy. I bought her an automobile for her own only last year.
I took her to Europe. And when I married her she had never had anything
or been anywhere. I wanted her to be the mistress of my home, and she
insisted on sacrificing all that--and me--to her music. So I got her the
best teachers in New York and Paris. Even left her in Paris to study.
That's where she met him. She insisted on going into opera. I forbade
that--naturally. I wanted children--she refused. Tell me--is that asking
too much?”

He had been talking in a monotonous tone; but now his voice began
rising, and his face was twitching nervously.

“Is it?” he went on. “Is it asking too much for a husband to have sons
to bear his name and inherit his property? When I saw what was going on,
she told me to divorce her. I said, 'By God, that's one thing I won't do
for you! I've some sense of honor, if you haven't! You're mine, and yuu
stay mine!' Then she ran away with that crook. But she can't have him, I
tell you! She can't have him!”

I suggested that he lower his voice. He gave me a curious, wild glance,
and fell silent.

It occurred to me that, knowing all this, I had no right to go
away--that I must stay and prevent this terrible thing from taking
place. I said as much to him.

“No,” he replied, with some vehemence; “there's nothing in that. You
could n't prevent anything. The best thing you can do is to run along. I
don't even know where they are; but I'll find them. You can't hide long
on the China Coast--not from a man that's really looking.”

I thought this over for quite a little time. It was true enough that
I could not prevent his giving me the slip. I could not lock him up
or detain him in any forcible way. It seemed to me that I must do
something; but as the moments passed it grew increasingly difficult to
imagine what it could be.

It was all very disturbing. I helped him get up. Then, as he seemed
fairly well able to dress himself, I went out and walked for a while on
the Bund. When I returned I found him stretched out on my sofa, smoking.

“Come on in,” he said in a strong, sober voice. What an extraordinary
fund of vitality the man has to draw on! “I want to talk to you.”

As I sank into a chair beside him, I felt once more that he was the
stronger of us, I the weaker, even after all we had been through.

He knocked the ash off his cigar. It missed the ash-tray and fell, part
of it, on the leg of my trousers. “I beg your pardon, old man,” he said,
and carefully brushed it off. Then he settled back against the wall and
stared up through his smoke at the pattern on the ceiling.

“My hand is n't quite steady yet,” he added calmly.

Then he went on: “I should n't have told this to you, Eckhart. It is n't
the sort of thing a man can tell. But, as it happens, you know why I
did it. I've been stewed to the brim for two days. I'm through with that
now, though. Until a certain job is done, I touch nothing stronger than
wine. Here's my hand on it.”

I had to clear my throat. I managed to say huskily: “I can't take your
hand on that, Crocker.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Very well,” he said. “If you prefer it that
way. It goes, however. I drink no more now. That is one thing I really
have you to thank for, Eckhart. Until you spoke out, back there on the
ship, I did n't realize how much I was drinking. What you told me this
morning has clinched the business. I'm through. And you will find that I
am a man of my word.”

“I am glad of that,” said I, “because I believe that, with the drink out
of your system, your philosophy of life will change. I hope it will.”

He shook his head at this.

“No, Eckhart. Now, see here. You have today seen deep into a man's
heart. What you saw was not drink, merely; it was fact.”

His manner of saying this gave me an uncomfortable feeling that he was
speaking the truth. Indeed, my increasing conviction as to the great
reserve power of the man was distressing me.

“As I told you this morning,” he went on, “there is absolutely nothing
you can do in the matter. Except killing me, of course--you could do
that. But you won't.”

“No,” said I sadly; “I won't.”

“And I'm going to ask you to take the only course that an honorable
man can take in the private quarrel of another--stand aside and try to
forget what I have told you. You have my drunken confidences; forget
them.”

“See here!” I broke out. “Were you faithful to your wife before she
turned against you?” His eyes hardened. “What do you mean by that?” he
asked.

“Precisely what I say.”

“You're talking nonsense, Eckhart--”

“I am _not_ talking non--”

“Yes, _you are!_”

He had swung around, and was sitting up, looking me squarely in the
eye, as he shouted me down. My heart sank. Mere squabbling would get us
nowhere. I did not know what to do. I do not now know what to do.

He went on:

“Yes; I was, to all intents and purposes, faithful to her. I did as well
as a normal, healthy man can be expected to do. Let us not be childish
about this. You and I know that man is physiologically different from
woman. We know that what there is of purity and sacredness in marriage
and in life will be lost forever once we lower our ideal of woman's
virtue.”

“No,” said I; “as a scientific man--”

I could not go on with my protest; for thoughts of a few wild moments in
my own relatively quiet life had come floating to the surface of memory.
Who was I, to oppose the double standard of morality that has ruled the
world so long!

He was still looking at me in that intent way. There was deep sadness
behind the hard surface of his eyes.

“I came here to thank you for all your kindness, Eckhart,” he said then.
“As for what you have heard, remember it is mine, not yours. That is
all. Now, if you don't mind, I'll help you get your truck down to the
train.”

I did as he said. I am on my way to Peking to pursue my research. He is
plunging off to scour the ports of Japan, all the way to Nagasaki, for
the man and the woman who have assailed his honor and (what I am tempted
to think even more to the point) outraged his pride as the head of his
own house. Then he will go on, if necessary, to Shanghai,--that port of
all the world,--to Hongkong, Manila, and Singapore, perhaps up the coast
to Tientsin and Peking. And he has made me believe that he will do as he
has sworn. It is very strange--very sad.

At the station I made my last weak protest.

“Crocker,” I blurted out, “for God's sake, try to win her back. Perhaps
you drove her away. Perhaps you were harsher, less understanding, than
you knew. Perhaps you should beg her forgiveness, not she yours.”

He shook his head. “That may be so,” he said. “All that you say may be
so. But I could n't take her back. Don't you see?”

“No,” I replied stoutly, “I don't see.”

He raised both his hands in a despairing gesture.

“She is---she--” His voice suddenly failed him. “She's a woman--and
she's soiled!” His eyes filled; a tear rolled down his cheek. He made a
queer, convulsive face; then threw up his hands and turned away.

That was all. I boarded my train.

*****

The young German did not return the fifteen dollars. This China Coast is
a hive of swindlers--so says Sir Robert. Henceforth I intend hardening
my heart against every man. And against every woman, above all. For
they, says Sir Robert, are the subtler and the worse.

_Peking, April 5th, Midday._

|THAT Crocker affair haunts me with the power of a bad dream.

I do not like this at all.

I was too sympathetic with that man. I opened the gates of my mind to
his ugly story; now I can not thrust it out and close those gates. My
first impulse, to hold him at arm's length, was sound. I should have
done that. But at least, and at no small cost, I have again learned my
little lesson; from now on I purpose dwelling apart from the tangle of
contemporary life. It has no bearing on my work, on my thoughts. None
whatever. It merely confuses me.

Yet, through momentary weakness, I have permitted my precious line of
pure thought to be clouded with the vision of a strong man's face with
tears on it. I see it at night. And, worse, I can not stop myself from
hunting for the woman he is going to kill. The mere sight of a youngish
couple sets my pulse to racing. I watch--on trains, in station crowds,
on the street--for a beautiful woman with a sad face. That she will be
beautiful I am certain; for Crocker would have had nothing less in that
house of which he felt himself so strongly and dominantly the master.
And I think she will be sad.

I study the throats of the beautiful young women I see. She will have
the full, rather broad throat of the singer. And the deep chest and
erect bearing. And I think her head will be well poised.

There _is_ a woman here in the hotel--a particular woman, I mean--on
this second floor. Though, for that matter, there are only the two
floors. I have passed her twice, in the hall. But the light is dim, and
I have been unable to observe her throat or her face. She is of a good
height, for a woman,--quite as tall as I,--and she steps firmly on the
balls of her feet. Her figure is slim. The chest, I think, is deep. And
in a way that I, as a man (and a man who knows little of woman outside
the psychology books), can not explain in any satisfactory way, she
conveys, even in this dim light, the impression of being exquisitely
dressed.

I think she has her meals served in her room. At least, I have on three
occasions met a waiter coming upstairs with a tray; and I can not make
out that if would be for any other.

As Sir Robert intimated, these other guests are a queer lot. There can
not be more than twelve or fourteen, in all. The men are seedy, and
rather silent. They sit about a good deal, reading the papers (copies of
the more suggestive French weeklies are strewn about on every chair and
sofa in the lounge), and they eye me and one another with a sort of cool
distrust. The women, three or four in all, seem to come and go rather
freely. And each has the eye, the manner, even the physical bearing,
of the woman for whom the halfworld has no secrets. Then, there is a
discreet, drifting class of transients--men from the Legation Quarter,
I believe (often, indeed, they come in full uniform), who are always
accompanied by young women. Sometimes, as it may happen, these are the
familiar women of the place; but quite as often they are strangers to
my eyes. And always, day and night, there is in the manner of the guests
and in that of the little French manager and his half-caste clerk an air
of carefully refraining from questions. It is as if every one said to
every one else: “You are here, but you are quite safe, for I make it a
rule never to see who comes or what goes on here. Perhaps one day I may
have to ask the same discreet courtesy from you. It is quite all right,
believe me.”

In this odd atmosphere I live and have my being. The building is a
mere rambling collection of _mansardes_. The chairs in the bedrooms--at
least, in my own--are of the common bent-iron variety usually seen in
gardens. The beds are of the most simple iron sort, once painted with a
white enamel that has been largely chipped off. The linen is threadbare,
even ragged,--there is a hole in my nether sheet through which my foot
slips at night, not infrequently catching there and waking me from
dreams of the pillory and chains,--but it is not unclean. There would be
no excuse for that, in a whole world of laundry-men. On each mantel and
iron-legged table is an ash-tray that blatantly advertises a Japanese
whisky.

Yes, in this odd atmosphere I live and, in a manner, breathe--I and the
slim, beautifully dressed woman who walks so firmly on the balls of her
feet. Whoever she may be, she belongs here no more than I.

Of course, the chances are all against--yet I wonder! For one thing, she
is alone. I am positive of this. All the other guests I have seen, now,
coming and going. But she never comes or goes--excepting apparently for
a short walk each afternoon, and always unaccompanied. He would not have
deserted her--away out here. Surely a man would not do that to a woman
he has loved.

But wait--I am forgetting the sort of world this is. There is
nothing--nothing--man does not do to woman. Or that woman does not do to
man. Nothing is too subtly selfish, nothing too cruel.

To-day I mean to time my own walk with hers. I must see her in the
light. I must observe her throat and her face.... At the thought of what
I may see my nerves behave abominably. My forehead burns. My heart beats
with an absurd irregularity. These facts alone appear to indicate that
my place is not in this wild world of passion and conflict.

It is not wholly unpleasant here in my dingy little room--though the
carpet is a rag, and the door between me and my next neighbor has shrunk
its lock out of alignment and appears to be blocked off, on the farther
side, by some bulky piece of furniture. This door opens on my side of
the partition.

No, it is not so unpleasant. Outside, the sun is shining. To my nostrils
comes floating the quaint, pungent odor that has in the minds of so many
travelers characterized the East. Over the low-tiled roofs of a row of
Chinese houses I can see--beyond an open space--the masonry wall of the
fortified Legation Quarter, with a sentry-box peeping above it, and the
flag of Italy, and trees.

_April 5th--night._

|IT is she.

This afternoon I was revising my notation of the Japanese music;
quite late, five o'clock or so. Suddenly I heard a voice--a woman's
voice--singing very softly, in the next room, beyond that shrunken door
and the bulky piece of furniture. It is a bureau, I think, with a mirror
above it that is nearly as high as the door.

She was singing “_Aus Meinen Grossen Schmerzen_” of Robert Franz, that
saddest and most exquisite of German _lieder_. The voice is a full, even
soprano. It is a big voice, I am sure, though she sang so softly. The
impression I received was that she was carefully holding it down to
a _pianissimo_. It is, I should say, a remarkable organ. Even in her
softest voice there is what the great singers call an “edge”--that firm,
fine resonance that will send the lightest thread of tone floating out
over all the volume of sound of a full orchestra.

She sang the little song with a tone color of poignant sadness--as if
her heart were throbbing with all the sorrow of the world, and yet as
if she could not keep from singing. She has plainly studied much. The
impulse to sing and the habit of singing are strong within her.

But the voice, so beautiful and under such fine control, was not what
suddenly caused me to leap up from my chair and tiptoe to that rather
useless door, and then to turn to my kit-bag and fumble wildly for
my tuning-fork. No; what excited me--for it did excite me out of
all reason--was her sense of pitch. The mezzo-soprano or baritone
transposition of that Franz song is in the key of _f_-major, ending in
_d_-minor. I stood by her door, the _c_-fork resting lightly against my
teeth, waiting for that lovely voice to descend the final minor third,
linger, tenderly and sadly, on the _d_. Then I bit the fork. She was
singing a perfect _d_. Certainly there was no piano in any of these
miserable little rooms. And she had employed no other instrument; she
had simply and naturally broken into song because she could not help
singing. _She has absolute pitch!_

The great regret of my life is that my own sense of pitch is not
absolute. It is very nearly but not quite perfect, despite my extremely
delicate ear for close intervals. Yet this young woman, who to my
own knowledge has not sung a note for several days, and who can not
conceivably have heard any Occidental music whatever, breaks into
song, and casually and unconsciously employs the correct pitch to the
twentieth part of a tone.

My first thought was that it might be an accident. So I waited,
tuning-fork in hand.

Having begun to sing, of course she could not stop. I am thinking now
that probably it was the first time she had released her voice for a
considerable period, and that at last she simply could not help making
use of what was the natural outlet for her emotions.

She next hummed a few bars of “_Im Herbst_,” also by Franz. Evidently
she is fond of the work of this fine lyric composer. This is in the key
of _c_-minor. Again I tested her with my tuning-fork, and again she
was correct to the minutest shade of a tone. Her voice had leaped the
interval between the two keys apparently without a conscious thought on
her own part.

This second song perhaps failed as a vehicle for her mood; at any rate,
she stopped it abruptly, and was silent for a time. Standing there close
to the door, I could hear her moving about with light, restless feet.
Myself, I held my breath at moments. Then the sound of her footsteps
ceased, and there was a sudden creaking sound, as if she had thrown
herself upon the bed. But still I waited, breathless, balancing there
with my left hand against the door-frame, the right clutching the
tuning-fork. I was sure she would sing again.

She did. But it must have been after quite a long time, for I realized
afterward that my feet ached and that the arm I held up against the door
frame had, as we say, gone to sleep.

Finally there came another creaking. She was getting up. Doubtless she
was quite too restless to lie down long. Again I heard the quick, light
sound of her feet moving about the room. Then the voice again. And again
it was that saddest and most exquisite of songs.=

```”_Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen_

```_Mach' ich die kleine Lieder_...”=

she sang, very low. I felt nearly certain that she had slipped naturally
back into the key of _f_-major, but not absolutely certain.

It was disturbing, this partial uncertainty on my part. No person in the
world--not a single living being--has quite so great a need for absolute
pitch as I. With that, coupled with my ear for intervals, I would stand
as the one scholar perfectly equipped for my own line of investigation.
As it is, I am not unlike an astronomer with enthusiasm, exhaustive
knowledge, a fine mathematical brain, and a marvelous seeing eye, but
with a very slight--oh,--very slight--touch of color-blindness. And I
never before missed this one attribute quite so keenly as I miss it
now, out here on the ground for the great first-hand investigation of my
whole life.

So at last I had to give up my effort to place precisely the key in
which she was singing, and sound the fork. As I supposed, she was right
again. There was no doubt now. Not the slightest. As I have already
written down, she has it--a sheer, prodigal gift of nature. And,
of course, it is of no particular value to her. She is not even, at
present, a professional singer; and, if she were, she could do very well
without this precise gift.... I have supposed for years that I had
a philosophy. I long ago realized that to waste time and tissue in
concerning myself with the one defect in my equipment would be simply
by that much to impair my actual effectiveness. But to-day my philosophy
failed me, as I thought of that sad little woman who has what I lack,
and who does not need it. I even had a wild notion of knocking on the
door and making myself known to her.

As for what actually did follow, I think I will try to set down just as
simply and naturally as I can, reconstructing the curious scene more
or less coolly as I recall it now, with my excitement spent and my mind
reasonably steady. That is surely the best way, in the case of such an
extraordinary occurrence--just write it down and let it go at that.

She was silent for a little time, perhaps standing at her dresser. I
wonder if it is like mine, a rickety chest of drawers, sadly in need
of paint, with a narrow mirror above it. My mirror is broken in the
right-hand lower corner; and at that point I see, instead of the
reflection of the dingy room, only an irregular triangle of pine
backing. I should like to think that hers is at least a little fresher
and brighter, and that the mirror is not broken. These things mean
a great deal to a woman, I think. I might have observed all this for
myself, doubtless; but at the moment I was too full of the thrill of my
discovery to indulge in a single personal thought.

I was still standing there by the door, my left hand quite numb, my feet
a little cold from remaining motionless so long, when she began lightly
to run over those remarkable exercises of hers.

She began by striking octaves. Her voice flew ever so lightly, yet
firmly and surely, from lower _a_ to middle _a_ to upper _a_. Then the
two octaves of _a_-sharp. Then _b_. And so on, until she was touching,
in that same light, sure way, the _d_-sharp above high _c_.

Next she sang an ordinary chromatic scale, no differently from the
performance of other singers I have heard excepting perhaps for the
remarkable evenness and firmness and pure, floating quality of her
_pianissimo_ tone. It was after all this that the remarkable gift that
amazed me came to light.

She returned to singing octaves. Only, as if testing and trying her own
precision of pitch, she began striking the upper octave note, in making
the leap from the lower to the higher, first correctly according to the
accepted tempered scale of the Western world, then a fraction of a tone
fiat, then a fraction of a tone sharp, then back to the normal octave.
She played with, these fractional tones as easily and surely as the
ordinary good singer plays with mere semitones. She actually took them
in succession, quite as easily as she had, a little earlier, taken the
semitones of the chromatic scale.

This was too much. I could not stand still any longer. In all my
experience I had never found a white person with anything approaching my
fineness of ear in merely hearing close intervals.

But I can not sing them as I hear and know them. I have no voice at all;
my vocal chords will not obey my will with any degree of precision. Yet
here, in this queer, rather unpleasant little French hotel in the great,
barbaric city of Peking, in the next room to mine, is an American woman
who can actually sing the intervals that I can only hear.

I knocked on the door.

There was instant and utter silence in the next room.

I knocked again.

She must have been holding her breath. I could not hear so much as the
rustle of her skirt.

I spoke, in what I suppose was an excited whisper.

“Please let me speak with you,” I said. “Please let me speak with you!”

Still no sound.

Then it was that I opened the door--the shrunken door that would not
lock.

Hôtel de Chine, Peking, April 5th--or 6th.

|TIS sometime in the very early morning. Peking is still. Even in
this rookery of night birds every light is out but mine. I had to stop
writing a while back and go for a long hard walk--around the Legation
Quarter, outside the walls. But now I shall force myself to write down
the rest of it. I shall not go to bed until it is done. It is too absurd
that a scientist of proved ability and of highly trained will power
should be overcome by his emotions in this way.

I have just tiptoed to the shrunken door that so inadequately separates
her room from mine. I heard her irregular breathing: and, while I stood
there, caught a low jumble of words spoken with the thick tongue of the
sleeper.

And she stirs restlessly in her bed. Even from my chair I can hear that.

But I must tell what happened this afternoon.

I opened her door. I was quite beside myself.

Behind it not quite blocking off the opening, the unpainted, dusty back
of her bureau confronted me. I looked through the narrow space between
the mirror post and the door frame, and saw her.

She was standing by the foot of the bed.

I laid hands on the creaky old bureau and moved it aside. It was heavy,
and it had no castors. I had to exert all my strength, tugging and
pushing at it. Then I had to wait a moment to recover my breath.

She was standing rigidly, very white, holding with one hand to the
bent iron tube over the foot of the little bed. She has long, slender
fingers.

She never moved. Her wide eyes were fixed on me.

The sweat was breaking out on my forehead. A drop fell on the right lens
of my spectacles. I took them off and fumbled for my handkerchief. Then
I said--

“You have absolute pitch!”

She did not move or speak.

“But that is not all,” I went on, more rapidly. “You have the finest
sense of intervals of any one in the world. Excepting myself.”

Her eyes narrowed a very little. And she glanced toward the other door,
the one that led into the hall. It seemed to me that her tense muscles
relaxed somewhat.

But when I had put on my spectacles and, now quite myself, came forward
into the room, she swung back a step and flashed her eyes on me again.
And I saw her fingers tighten around the iron tube at the foot of the
bed.

This would n't do. I had frightened her dreadfully. Of course she could
n't possibly know how mistaken she was in this. The thing to do was to
explain everything to her.

“My name is Eckhart, Anthony Ives Eckhart,” I began; then paused,
thinking that she, being a musical person, might have heard the name.
But there was no light of recognition in her eyes.

“You can not imagine what it means to me to find you,” I went on.
It seemed to me that from moment to moment she was on the point of
interrupting me, so I talked very rapidly, trying at the same time to
make my voice and manner as easy and matter-of-fact as possible.

“I have come all the way to China to make phonographic records of
Chinese music. I shall make at least two thousand such records, and when
I have finished my work will be recognized as the one great contribution
to the study of the Oriental tone sense. For I shall secure and preserve
on my cylinders the primitive scale intervals that underlie all natural
musical expression.”

For some reason this explanation did not seem to get me anywhere.
Excepting that now she looked bewildered as well as frightened. But I
could not retreat. For here before me was a woman who had the great gift
and who could understand. At this thought my mind began racing excitedly
ahead. I thought of what she could do for me. And it was so absurdly
simple, so little to ask! My forehead was burning now, and the hand that
pressed the handkerchief against it was shaking perceptibly. It was a
great moment--the greatest, perhaps, in my life.

“God has sent you to me!” I cried, my voice rising and becoming shrill.
“I _must_ make you understand!”

She was glancing again toward the hall door. I could n't make her out at
all. But I lowered my voice.

“I must make you understand,” I repeated. “To-day, at the very beginning
of my work, I find you. I need you more than anything else in the
world--and right now. Yet an hour ago I did not know you existed. It is
unbelievable. It is a miracle! I must have a phonographic record of a
close-interval scale. For years I have dreamed of securing one. I
myself can hear the closest intervals, but I can not sing them. Now
you--you--shall sing this scale for me--not the artificial half-tones of
our barbarous piano keyboard, but quarter-tones, even eighth-tones. With
such a scale, the sounds recorded unerringly on a cylinder from which
they can be reproduced at will, we shall at last have an absolute
standard for the comparison of all tones and scales. Tell me”--I was
trembling with eagerness--“do you think you could sing eighth-tones?
_Do_ you think you could?”

She just stood there.

“But you must do this!” I cried. “You have no right to withhold such a
gift! God has sent you to me, and I shall use you. It will take a little
time, but we shall practise, practise, practise! There will be failures,
but we shall be patient. My life work is to be a true science at last.
They can no longer say that it depends on the caprice of a single human
ear. They shall now hear for themselves, they shall make their own
comparisons, working with our absolute phonographic scale. Who knows,
perhaps we shall yet make the final perfect scale of eighty-one distinct
notes to the octave. No voice has yet done that. And no violin. For no
living performer has the delicacy of ear and muscle.”

I began chuckling excitedly at this thought. I admit that my condition
bordered on hysteria; but has not a man the right to be very slightly
hysterical in the great moment of his life?

“We shall make many records,” I said to her, mopping my wet forehead.
“Von Stumbostel shall have one, in Berlin--and Boag. Ramel and Fourmont
shall have them, at Paris. And de Musseau, at the Sorbonne. And Sir
Frederick Rhodes, at Cambridge. The new scale record shall be the basis
of volume six--on 'True Intervals and Natural Song.' One copy I shall
seal in a metal tube for preservation at the British Museum, together
with my other records. And--yes, I shall send one to that miserable
little von Westfall, of Bonn. I shall silence him. I shall crush him. It
will amuse me to do that.”

I stopped, all glowing.

She looked at me until her lids drooped, and I could see her long lashes
against the whiteness of her skin.

She fell back a step, hesitating, and shrinking a little, still clinging
to the foot of the bed, and made a listless gesture with her left hand.

“You have broken into my room,” she said, steadily enough, but very low.

Women _are_ literal.

But it was so. I had done just that. Doubtless it was an outrageous
thing to do, but it had not seemed outrageous. It had come about quite
naturally.

Still, she confused me. I had been talking volubly; now, all of a
sudden, I could not speak at all. For the first time I fully realized
how pale she was. And she looked tired about the eyes, where nervous
exhaustion always shows first. It occurred to me, too, that her eyes
were very blue and distinctly beautiful. I never saw longer lashes.

So I stood stupidly there, looking at her. I had flown too high. Now
my spirits were dropping fast into a pit of depression. She suddenly
appeared to me as a helpless, pitiful creature. God knows there was
little enough privacy for her in this shabby hotel with its thin
partitions and its ill-fitting doors and its drifting, dubious class of
guests; and what little privacy she had I had violated. I looked at the
dilapidated bureau that had stood across our common door. It had taken
all my strength to push it aside. I wondered if she herself had moved
it there. What a pitiful effort, if she had, to shield her tired, hunted
soul from intrusion! “Will you please go!” she breathed.

I am afraid this nettled me a little At least, my coming in that wild
way had not been a personal matter I had tried to make that much plain
to her. Then why make it so personal! But that, of course, is the woman
of it. And God knows I was wrong--all wrong.

“Will you please go!” she breathed again.

I bowed and turned to the door. But then I occurred to me as likely that
I would no more than get my door closed before she would be in a frantic
hurry to move the bureau back. And that bureau was too heavy for her, or
for any woman. It was almost too heavy for me.

So I stepped back into her room and began tugging at the bureau again.
When I saw the fresh concern on her face, I nodded toward the hall door
and said, “I'll go out that way.”

She understood this. She even came over and watched me as I worked at
the thing. It would n't move. Having no castors, the feet had caught in
the matting. I went to the other end and pushed, but only succeeded in
tipping it up, and spilling several articles to the floor. I let the
bureau drop, and went down on my knees to pick them up. There was a
hair brush and a nail buffer, both with heavy silver backs bearing the
initials “H. C.” Then there was a small bottle with a glass stopper that
came out and let the contents of the bottle run over the matting. And
there was a wide tortoise-shell comb, of the sort that you pick up at
Nagasaki.

I put all these things back on the bureau, and pushed again. She stood
beside me in apparent hesitation, then, as if on an impulse, caught
hold and pulled with me. But it was no use. The matting was by this time
hopelessly wrinkled up about the feet. And after a moment of this we
both stepped back and looked at it. I simply had to stop anyway and mop
off my forehead and wipe my spectacles. I was all out of breath.

Then, after a moment, I took off my coat and dropped it on a chair.

“If you don't mind helping once more,” I began--

She inclined her head.

“--I'll have to lift it over those wrinkles.”

So I caught hold and lifted with all my strength. She went around to the
other side and threw her weight against it. Together we finally got it
back squarely across the doorway.

“I've made you a great deal of trouble,” I said, “and I'm sorry.” I
could n't resist adding the question, “Did you move it here before, by
yourself?”

She looked at me; then, slowly and guardedly, nodded.

I shook my head, ruefully I think. “You are a strong woman.”

“No,” she said, without any change of expression, with not the slightest
animation of manner, “but it did n't catch in the matting that time.”

I walked toward the door, with my coat thrown over my arm. It was
hard to go away like that. I wonder why it is that I seem always to be
walking away from women.

At the door I turned and glanced back at her. She was still there by the
bureau, watching me go. I felt that she was looking rather intently at
the coat on my arm, and it suddenly occurred to me that I must not leave
her room like that, in my shirt sleeves. I felt the color come rushing
to my face as I struggled into the coat.

I have read in works on the psychology of women that they often tell
with a look what they are unable or unwilling to frame in spoken words.
Certainly I knew that she had told me to put my coat on, and she knew
that I had understood. And so, even as she drove me out of her room
there was an understanding between us that was not wanting in subtlety.
She had even asked me to make an effort to protect her; and she was no
longer angry.

I had my coat on now, and was reaching for the door knob when a sound
outside arrested my hand. Men were coming up the stairs to our hall.

She heard them too. She was rigid again, her hand resting on the bureau.

I could hear the Chinese porter talking pidgin-English as he came along
the hall. Behind him sounded a ponderous step. Then came another voice,
as the heavy step paused right near us--at my door, I thought.

“Here, boy, this is number nineteen.”

It was a loose throaty voice, unlike any other in the wide world. I
should have recognized it anywhere, in a drawing-room or blindfolded at
the bottom of a mine. It brought rushing to my mind pictures of a ship's
smoking-room where sat an old man with a wrinkled skin and one drooping
eyelid who held forth on every subject known to man--pictures of the
absurdly Anglo-Saxon hotel at Yokohama, and of a strange evening at the
notorious “Number Nine” where an old man had smiled cynically at me.

Sir Robert had arrived at Peking. He had come to this hotel. He was to
occupy room number nineteen, directly opposite the closed door behind
which I stood, motionless, breathless.

I felt momentarily ill. Which was foolish.

For what is he to me or I to him! But he had stirred a confusion of
thoughts in my mind. I saw the face of another man--a strong face,
even when flushed with drink--I saw that face with tears on it, working
convulsively. And directly behind me stood the woman. There she was, and
there, with her, was I myself. I felt the strange, rushing drama of
life whirling about me. I suddenly knew that every man is entangled in
it--and every woman.... Oh, God, why does she have to be so beautiful!
And so terribly alone!

The porter was opening the door of number nineteen, just across the
hall. Sir Robert was still at my door, swearing to himself.

“Number nineteen this side,” the porter was saying. “That number
sixteen.”

So Sir Robert came heavily along the hall and entered the opposite room.
We, the woman and I, heard the porter set down his hand baggage. We
heard him order hot water. We heard the door close and the porter rustle
away in his robe and his soft Chinese shoes and go off down the stairs.

Then, hardly knowing what I was about, I reached for the knob. But she
came swiftly across the floor and caught it ahead of me, holding the
door shut. Our hands touched. She looked very lovely, and very tired. My
eyes wandered aimlessly over the kimono she wore, of gray crepe silk. It
was embroidered from neck to hem in a wistaria pattern of the same soft
gray color. I never saw such exquisite embroidery.

“Don't go out there,” she said, low but very positive.

“But,” I whispered lamely, “but--but--”

“The other door,” she said.

So we went back and moved that cursed bureau again. It was even more of
a task this time, as we had to be careful about making any noise.

Again I lingered in our common doorway.

“Do you know that man?” I asked, in the guarded tones we were both
employing now.

“No,” she replied simply, “but it is quite evident that you do.”

Still I lingered. And she did not drive me out. She quietly busied
herself rearranging the innumerable little articles on the bureau. She
was very natural and unconscious about it. There was no hint in her
manner that she was aware of the curious interest I felt in all those
intimate little accessories of her life. Though I find myself wondering
if my crudely concealed masculine emotions are not an open book to her,
even so soon. The perceptions of women are finer than ours. I have read
that in the psychology books, and I believe it. They feel more deeply
and see farther. And it is when they feel most deeply and see farthest
that they do and say the inconsequential little things that puzzle us
so.

She had the bureau arranged to her taste now, and moved slowly over
toward the round table with the bent iron legs. There were a few books
on this table--a little red “Guide to Peking,” Murray's “Japan,” Dyer
Ball's “Things Chinese.”--her shopping bag, her wrist watch propped up
to serve as a clock, and the inevitable ash-tray advertising a Japanese
whisky.

Still I lingered there, half in her room, half in mine. She did not
look at me. She hesitated at the table and fingered that absurdly vulgar
little ash-tray. For the life of me I could not divine what she was
thinking or what she wished me to do. I had meant to go straight into my
own room and close the door. But I had done nothing of the sort.

It came to me that perhaps she was ready to have me pick up the
shattered mood of my musical enthusiasm and carry it forward. Perhaps
she would respond to it now. But I could not reconstruct that mood. In a
desperate sort of way I was trying from moment to moment to do
precisely that, and failing. For across my menial vision was floating,
tantalizingly vague, the flushed desperate face of Crocker, as I had
last seen him, at the Yokohama station. If this girl only knew it, we
have a common interest that binds us a million times closer than the
mere gift we both have.

I see I have called her a girl. She seemed so to me at that moment,
standing there by the crooked-legged table, slim of body, softly,
appealingly feminine in her outlines. I found myself thinking how lonely
she must be, and what terrors must lurk ambushed in the byways of her
thoughts, particularly at night. I fell to wondering about the man who
had brought her out here and left her. Where was he? Did he leave her
any money? Not a great deal, surely, or she would not be living in this
shabby place. And yet, sad as she is, _she does not know what I know!_
I am sure of that. She did not see Crocker's face, there at the Yokohama
station. She does not dream that he is scouring the Coast for her from
Mukden to Singapore--that in his heart, where pity should be, there is
outraged pride, and the exhausting bewilderment of a man who has only a
code where he should have been taught a philosophy--and murder.

This world is hard on women. Perhaps because we men run it.

I slowly drew my foot back across the sill, moving into my own room. I
hesitated again, and rested a trembling hand against the door frame.

It broke my heart to look at her, yet I could not keep from it. I
wanted to help her. I wanted to _do_ something. I even thought wildly of
marching straight over to that crooked-legged iron table and taking her
two hands solidly in mine and saying--“I know who you are, my dear, and
I can imagine something of what you are suffering. I know from a glimpse
of you that not one of the men who will be so quick to cast stones at
you is fit to touch the hem of your skirt. I know, too, that no man
can so much as befriend you, without plunging you into a deeper hell
of suspicion and torment than the hell you are in now. But I am your
friend, and all I ask of you is the opportunity to prove it!”

I was foolish in this, of course.

Suddenly she lifted her head and looked at me

I grew red all at once, and tried to swallow.

We were quite silent. She relieved the tension by stepping casually away
from the table and glancing past me into my room.

“Is that your phonograph--in there?” she asked, her voice still low, and
now a thought husky.

“Yes,” said I. “You must have heard it.”

She nodded slowly. “Sometimes it sounded like that,” she mused. “And
other times it was like music a long way off. You played some melodies
on a Chinese stringed instrument. They were quaint.”

“It is a Japanese instrument,” I corrected eagerly. Then I became
confused, and knew that I was turning red again. The story of those
Yoshiwara melodies and of the outcast girl who had played them for me
seemed painfully out of place here. Not for anything in the world would
I have told that commonplace story--not to this slim woman with the sad,
honest blue eyes. For we do not tell such stories to women.

“You spoke of the piano scale,” she went on, in that musing tone. “I
never knew before that other people noticed that. Sometimes, when I'm
sitting at the piano, and strike one of the black keys after playing on
the white, I can hear all around if--overtones, and fractions of tones.”

“Tell me,” I said--“What is the closest interval you have ever sung?”

She slowly shook her head. “I don't know. There never was any reason for
trying. And then there was no way to measure fractional tones.”

“There is now,” said I, emphatically. “My ear. Try it. We shall find
out. First give me upper _c_.”

I got out my tuning fork, and struck the note after her

“Perfect pitch again!” I cried.

“Oh, yes,” she replied listlessly, “I can always do that.”

“Now take the closest interval you can, below the c.”

She did so. Then the next--and the next. I would not permit an
_apportamento_, but made her separate the notes. She sang three distinct
notes between the _c_ and the _b_-natural that, on the piano, is the
next step down.

I clapped my hands.

A little color came into her cheeks. She took a deep breath and kept
at it. Her performance was not quite perfect--she got in only two clean
notes between _a_ and _a_-flat. But at that it was easily the most
delicately precise bit of singing I have ever heard. She played with
those close intervals with a facility that was amazing. And baring
perhaps Sembrich and the earlier Melba, I have never heard such
perfection of breath control (Patti doubtless had it, but I never heard
her).

She stepped forward, threw her shoulders back (without raising them),
swung up on the balls of her feet, and with a fine un-self-consciousness
spun out those light, clear threads of tone. When she breathed it was
with a quick inhalation that expanded the whole upper part of her body
and made you forget how slim she had seemed. She became for the moment a
strong, vibrant creature with a light in her eyes. But when she stopped
singing that light died out.

“Come!” I cried. “We shall get this down now. We shall prove it on the
phonograph. We shall settle that von Westfall beast forever!”

And I rushed back into my own room and prepared the instrument, without
so much as ushering her in first. This was rude of me. But I have
admitted I was not quite myself.

Before I had the cylinder on and the horn in position she followed. She
stood at my side, watching my hands at work. I felt her there, so close,
and was elated. I can not describe this sensation. That it is dangerous,
I know only too well It is distinctly a tendency to be resisted.

On second thought, I decided not to waste any of my precious cylinders
until she should acquire a reasonable degree of certainty with the
delicate scale that was our goal. I explained this to her, and she
understood. So I made her work upward from middle _c_, note by note,
employing the utmost care to keep the intervals at precisely one-eighth
of a tone. Over and over we did this. It called for the closest
concentration, on her part as well as mine. I found a sort of wild
happiness springing up within me at the thought that this woman has the
rarest of all qualities, great capacity for work and for the enthusiasm
and utter self-absorption that enter into all real achievement. I can
not call her a trained worker. I would not go so far as to say that
she has a trained mind. She needs guidance. And I rather imagine that
further acquaintance will show that she lacks enterprise. Women of fine
quality and great capacity often do, I think. They need stimulus and
leadership. Imagine a man with both her extraordinary gift and her
striking personality yet stirred by no curiosity to explore and create!
“There never was any reason for trying,” was all she had said to that,
and it was plainly all that was in her mind on the subject.

Women are incomplete creatures.

But--come to think of it--so are men.

Outside, the early April twilight settled down and deepened without
our knowing it. It was she who first noted the fact. I was writing down
notes on my extra-ruled paper to show her just where she had repeatedly
missed our scale by a fine fraction of a tone, and she was bending
close in the effort to see. Suddenly she sat up, drew in a quick breath,
blinked a little, then reached over and switched on the electric light.

This act broke the tension of our work. We talked on about it for a
little while, planning to get at it again in the morning. After a time
she rose. But instead of going into her own room she moved over to the
window and looked out across the dim, tiled roofs of the Chinese houses
toward the walls and trees of the Legation Quarter that were darkly
outlined against a glow of electric light.

I had lifted her momentarily out of her solitude. Now she dreaded
returning to it. I felt this, with a glow of exultation in my heart that
frightened me. But my impulses were too strong to-night to be governed
offhand. I followed her to the window and stood beside her looking out,
while my pulse raced.

“It's a wonderful old city,” I heard myself saying.

And though I did not look around, I knew that she inclined her head by
way of reply.

Then for quite a long time we were silent. But my muscles were tense.
There was a suggestion gathering head in my mind that I knew had to
come out. I waited, resisting it with less and less vigor frum moment to
moment. I was afraid of it.

Finally it came. I said, “I wish we could have dinner here together.”

Then I dug my nails into my palms, standing very still there, and tried
to breathe.

I felt her relax, and move a little.

“I am not hungry,” she said.

After a minute, as I still waited, she added--“Though I don't know that
it makes any difference--if you wish.”

“Of course not,” said I clumsily--“just having a little food brought
in.”

So I rang for the China boy, and cleared the phonograph and cylinders
and papers and ash-tray off my little iron table, and we had dinner
there. Though first she slipped into her room, drew the door to, and
changed from her gray kimono to a simple blue frock that I thought very
becoming.

After the meal, we sat back without saying anything in particular until
she grew restless, and finally pushed her chair back.

“I wish,” said I, “before you go, that you would sing that Franz song
again for me. And let your voice out a little. I want to hear it.”

I thought her eyes grew suddenly moist. But without the slightest
hesitation, without rising, even, she began the song--“Aus Meinen
Grossen Schmerzen.”

But she was still holding her voice in. “Louder,” I urged. “Come, come!
Sing!”

She could not resist my appeal. Out came the tones, round and rich, and
colored with the inexpressible sorrow that is the life-breath of that
exquisite song.

I leaned right forward on the table. I could not take my eyes from her
broad white throat and the softly rounded chin above it and the finely
muscular lips that framed themselves around the tones with a slight
flaring out that suggested the bell of a trumpet.

The tears came flooding to my eyes. There was _timbre_ in that voice,
and a wonderful floating yet firm resonance. When it swelled out in the
climax I could feel the sound vibrations throbbing against my ear
drums. Then it shrank in volume, and died down until the song ended in
a breathless sob that yet was perfect music. And after she had done, and
was sitting there motionless, brooding, with downcast face, it seemed to
me I could still hear those sad, breathless words, and could still feel
that gentle throbbing against my ear.

“You have learned how to sing that song,” said I.

“Yes,” she replied, “I have learned how to sing it.”

We were in a sort of poignant dream--I still gazing at her; she still
downcast, with the light gone out of her eyes.

Then, directly outside my door in the hall, we heard a man clear his
throat. An old man, unmistakably. And we heard heavy footsteps creaking
slowly off toward the stairs. God knows how long he had been listening
there!

She said nothing. Merely sat with her hands in her lap. But she seemed
to me to go limp. Certainly her face grew slowly pale until it was quite
white, as I had first seen it.

“I should have known better,” I muttered. “I am a fool!”

She did not reply at once. After a moment she rose, then hesitated,
resting a hand on the back of her chair. And her eyelids drooped until I
could see the long, long lashes against her white skin.

“It was n't your fault,” she said, very low.

She moved toward her own room. I rose, and followed part way. “The
morning will be a better time--to work,” I managed to say. “It will be
quieter then.”

She hesitated in the doorway; then slowly inclined her head, as if in
assent. It seemed to me that she was making an effort to smile.

“Good-night,” she murmured.

“Good-night,” said I.

She closed the door after her. But there remained a narrow opening where
the upper part had shrunk away from the frame.

I stood confused, looking about my room. The table was still cluttered
with our dinner things.

I got my long raincoat out of the wardrobe that serves me for a closet.
I unscrewed a hook from the wardrobe and, climbing on a chair, screwed
it into the woodwork directly above the edge of the door. Then I hung my
raincoat from it. Thus I cosed that narrow opening between her room and
mine.

When I went out for my walk, a little later, I came squarely on Sir
Robert. He was standing at one end of the clerk's desk, peering through
his monocle at the board on which were recorded the names and room
numbers of the guests.

It is an odd and frank custom, that. It is doubtless done for the
guidance of the Chinese servants, who know us only by our numbers.

He turned and met me squarely, as I was about to walk by.

“So,” he said, wrinkling up his face into a smile and pecking at me with
his monocle. His left eyelid drooped unpleasantly. “So--you, my friend,
are the fortunate inhabitant of number sixteen. I was captivated by
the lady's voice. I congratulate you--again.” Then, still smiling as he
observed my rising anger, he added--“But, my dear Eckhart, you must not
look at me as if I were an intruder--not after the lady has sung like
that. I could hardly refuse to listen.”

He grew thoughtful, and looked past me toward the door. “Women and
song!” he mused. “Women and song!... You are a sly devil, Eckhart.”

He turned, raised his monocle, and again studied the board--with an
insolence that was calmness itself.

He was searching for the name of the woman.

I grew hot all over as I stood there watching him. In a moment--a
second--he would find it. But no, he was looking everywhere on the board
except in the space next to that occupied by my name. Clearly, it had
not occurred to him to look there.

I moved closer and peeped over his shoulder. I had not before observed
this board, beyond noting in a general way that it hung here by the
clerk's desk. I found myself suddenly wondering if she could possibly
have been so careless--

There it was--directly under mine. _Her own name!_

Yes, there was--“Mrs. H. Crocker.” Why she has written herself down so
irrevocably I can not imagine. In her dreadful predicament a false name
is so clearly indicated.

Still, come to think of it, she herself does not yet know how dreadful
that predicament is. I had forgotten that.

I wonder if it is that she consciously and deliberately refuses to sail
under false colors. Or if, as is possible, it never occurred to her.

Sir Robert's eyes were still searching the board. They had traversed two
rows of names. They were now moving up the third row, closer and closer
to numbers sixteen and eighteen.

Then I saw him start. He had found it. He lowered his monocle and
carefully wiped it with the handkerchief that he kept in his sleeve Then
he leaned forward and looked again.

I heard him give a low whistle of sheer surprise.

I could n't stand that. I hurried outdoors and plunged off on my walk.

He was not in sight when I came back, more than an hour later. So I
haven't to face that cynical, drooping eye to-night, at least.

It is pitifully indiscreet of her to use her real name this way--in the
circumstances. But oh, I am glad, just the same!

_April 6th. Night._

|WE worked hard this morning, she and I. And a little this afternoon.

That is the thing, of course--work. It steadies me. And it is her only
hope. For she has a life to build, poor child!

April 7th.

|HER name is Héloïse.

I like it. It fits her. Or it would fit her real self. Despite the
fact that she is now in a disheartened, quite apathetic phase, I catch
glimpses of a Gallic effectiveness about her. It is in her face, in the
poise of her body, in the way she wears her clothes.

Yesterday, all day, I successfully avoided Sir Robert. This afternoon,
for a moment, he caught me; but I deliberately said good-day and walked
off. It was rude. But he, as an Englishman, would not hesitate an
instant to be rude to me if the fancy took him. Curiously, he is
anything but rude to me. I believe he stations himself where there
appears to be a chance of waylaying me. He is even foregoing the big
hotel in the Legation Quarter and having some of his meals here, in his
room, directly across from hers. Which is disturbing--rather.

April 8th. Noon.

|WE have a perfect half scale, at last--_c_ to _g_.

I shall now drive ahead after the rest of it. It has been a rather
more exacting task than either of us foresaw. But she is persistent. If
anything she throws too much nervous intensity into her work. She
has asked me for copying to do, and even secretarial work. With her
reasonably complete musical education she is quite competent to take
down from the phonograph the notation of melodies and themes. She shuts
herself in at night and works over my papers and music sheets until she
is quite exhausted. I have tried to remonstrate; but she insists that
she likes having the work to do. Poor child!

She has told me a good deal about her musical life. Not the least of her
troubles is the fact that it would take at least two years of the very
best coaching to fit her for opera. She has no repertoire to speak of.
She has dreamed of the operatic stage from her earliest girlhood.
But while she was young the opportunity was lacking. Her father was a
high-school superintendent--a man of fineness and principle, I take it,
but desperately poor. Her mother, who had been a singer, died when she
was a child, the father two years ago. And then after her early marriage
to Crocker, her life took a new and strange direction. She says nothing
about Crocker. What little she does tell of this more recent part of
her life she tells in a very quiet, reserved manner, implying an
understanding that I will display no curiosity to learn more.

Yes, she accepts me as a friend. And she still thinks I know nothing
of her beyond her bare name. I lie to her a dozen times a day, in my
silences. But I don't see what else I can do. Certainly I can't offer
her money. I can't buy her a ticket over the Trans-Siberian and send her
off to Europe to study for opera. I am foolish enough to have moments
of wishing to do just that; but it is, of course, an impossible thought.
And to tell her the painful knowledge that is at present locked up in my
mind would simply shock and hurt her to no purpose that I can perceive.

We have at least one meal a day together. Yesterday we shared all three
meals--breakfast in her room, luncheon and dinner in mine. It seemed the
natural thing to do. Excepting the breakfast--that was perhaps a trifle
odd. But all during the night, at intervals, I heard her stirring about
in her room, and saw that her light was on. Toward morning, feeling
rather disturbed about her, I got up, and, at length, dressed. This was
about six o'clock.

At six-thirty I stepped out on the narrow little French balcony outside
my window. It is less than a foot wide, this balcony, and has a fancy
wrought-iron railing.

She also has a balcony, and while I stood there she came out. She was
dressed. And she seemed so frankly glad to see me, that I suggested the
breakfast. She looked very tired about the eyes. Indeed, I am not sure
that she does not grow a shade more tired, a shade slimmer, each day.
She eats next to nothing at all.

Certainly, each day she works harder. I am going to think out some way
in which I can offer to pay her for this work. It is most assuredly
worth something. As it stands now, she even insists on paying for her
share of the meals.

_Night._

|SIR ROBERT spoke to her to-day. As luck would have it, I was not at
hand.

It has been cloudy, and when she went out for her walk this afternoon
she forgot to take her umbrella. She is not timid about the weather,
anyway. I have thought once or twice that she likes storms.

She was on her way back to the hotel when the storm broke--not far from
the Arcade, where the moving pictures are shown. She took refuge in the
entrance to the Arcade until the worst of the rain appeared to be over,
then started out again through the wet.

Sir Robert appeared at her elbow, with an umbrella. She did not observe
whether he had been following her or merely happened to meet her. He
walked to the hotel with her. This was all she told me; but I am sure it
was not quite all that occurred.

She asked if he was n't a judge.

“Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” said she--“it was something he said.”

Which was all I learned about that episode.

It did not seem to disturb her materially. I was glad it did n't. I made
a strong effort to conceal my own foolish anger over it, and trust that
I succeeded. At any rate, we dropped the subject.

_April 10th._

|THIS afternoon, late, I came into the hotel from a walk in the rain and
went directly upstairs. I had my rubbers on.

The upper corridor was nearly dark, particularly to my eyes that were
fresh from the street and the bright lights of the office.

I saw a dark object by her door--a man, undoubtedly, crouching there.

I stopped short, and watched, he had a white paper in his hand. He
fumbled with this for a moment, then slipped it under the door, pushing
it clear through into the room with a pencil. Then he got awkwardly
to his feet, and stood hesitating. By this time my eyes were partially
accustomed to the dim light, and I knew it was Sir Robert. He did not
see me. After a moment he tiptoed heavily across the hall to his own
door, just opposite and entered, cautiously and silently closing the
door behind him.

I walked straight along the hall, past my own door, and stood before
his. I had a mind to go in there and strangle him.

But what was the use? He was an absurd old man, that was all. But none
the less, as I stepped back and entered my own room, I found myself
shivering oddly. There was an uncomfortable pressure at the back of my
head, and my heart was skipping beats.

It is the first time in my life, I think, that I have been seized by the
impulse to do physical harm to a fellow creature.

Before putting on my pajamas to-night I stood and looked at my bare
chest and arms in my broken mirror. My chest is narrow, my skin white.
My arms are thin. Possibly I could n't have strangled him, if I had
tried. I wish I were strong.

A little earlier than that, before she closed our door, I asked her if
Sir Robert was annoying her in any serious way.

The question made her very grave--graver even than usual. She looked
at me, then dropped her eyes, and said nothing. But after a moment she
looked up again, made one of those efforts to smile that are pain to me,
and shrugged her shoulders. That was all.

_April 11th._

|SIR ROBERT is always hovering about the office and the lounge when I
appear, and he always tries to engage me in talk. I can't understand it.
He is insistent. He acts as if I fascinate him. Twice to-day I fairly
ran away from him. I was afraid I would strike him. It makes me
physically uncomfortable to have him so much as stand near me, even if
he does not try to take my hand in greeting.

I fear I am not managing this matter very well. I am acting aimlessly,
and in a sort of panic of the soul. This won't do.

_April 12th._

|THIS afternoon he caught me squarely at the clerk's desk. He extended a
cigar and suggested that we stroll into the lounge and have a chin-chin.
I observed that his hand was unsteady, as if the palsy had reached and
touched him.

On the spot I made up my mind to face him out. I accepted the cigar, and
down we sat.

He asked if I had attended any of the theaters in the Chinese city that
lies to the south of the Tartar Wall. When I replied in the negative, he
suggested that we do a little exploring together of an evening.

“The ancient Chinese character is nowhere better preserved,” said he,
“than in these theatrical performances. And the music, of course, is the
pure old strain, quite uncorrupted by Modernism or the West. I can boast
of some familiarity with the Chinese drama and music, and even a little
acquaintance with the language. It would give me pleasure to act as your
guide.”

“Thank you,” said I, a bit too shortly. “Later on, perhaps. Just now I
am very busy with my records.”

He smiled--all wrinkles. That left eyelid drooped and drooped.

I pulled savagely on my cigar, chewing it so hard that the end crumpled
between my teeth and filled my mouth with unpleasant little particles of
tobacco leaf.

Then he laughed--with an effort, I thought. It was not a successful
laugh.

So we sat for a few moments, in silence and smoke. So men sit often in
this queer tangle of life--smoking, smiling, speaking the commonplace
phrases that are the current small change of human intercourse, yet
hating each other in their hearts.

“I say, Eckhart”--it was a little later on that he came out with
this--“you know who she is, of course.”

There was no good in pretending ignorance. God knows I am not quite the
child I sometimes seem, even to myself. So I nodded.

He looked narrowly at me. I met his gaze. I was just a thin, nervous
man, a little bald, sitting quietly there and smoking, yet all the time
that drooping left eyelid irritated me so that I wanted to reach right
over and tear it off his face. But I only nodded.

“Dangerous game, my boy,” said he.

That was his assumption, of course--that to me, too, she was merely a
quarry in the endless, universal pursuit of woman by man. Out here on
the Coast, of course, from the point of view of the hard world about us,
any lone woman is quite legitimate prey.

He was still studying me.

“I 'm wondering how much you know,” he went on.

“About what?” said I, confused.

“About that woman and the fix she is in. You know who her husband is,
surely.”

I bowed. “He was on the ship.”

“Yes,” grunted Sir Robert sardonically, “he was on the ship. And you saw
what he did in the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, didn't you? He nearly killed
a waiter--a Chinaman, who was quite defenseless. But of course you saw
it. I recall that you were dining with him at the time.”

“He was drunk,” I said huskily, as if in extenuation.

“Yes,” repeated Sir Robert dryly. “He was drunk. Rather dangerous at
such times, is n't he?”

“Yes, but he quit drinking--after that. Cut it all out.” I could not
keep my voice from rising a little. I felt my confusion increasing--my
thoughts were all adrift, swept here and there by currents of feeling
that I could not fathom.

“Oh, he did?” Why would n't that old man take his unpleasant eyes off
me! “Oh, he did? You are in his confidence, then. And of course you know
even more”--he paused, very deliberately--“regarding his state of mind,
his reason for coming out here to the other side of the world, all
that?”

I sat limp in my chair, still chewing that crumpling cigar.

Sir Robert leaned back. He was seated on the leather sofa. He let his
head rest on the shabby upholstery and studied the ceiling. In one hand
he held his cigar, in the other his monocle, tracing patterns in the air
with them. His hands are not thin, but the skin on them is crisscrossed
with fine wrinkles like the skin on his face and neck.

“My boy,” he began, after a rime, “I'm going to offer you a little
counsel. You won't take it, but I am going to offer it. Probably, at
your age, I should n't have taken it either.” He sighed. “I am an old
man. For forty-five years I have been observing men--and women. I have
seen--well, a good deal, one way and another. And the one fact I have
come to be sure of.... You know, Eckhart, the great mass of human
beings--in Europe and America, at least, labor under the curious
delusion that the race has finally worked out something of a
civilization. Curious, but they do. It is rot, of course. All rot. There
is no civilization. Life is quite as primitive as ever. Only we have
developed extraordinary ingenuity at covering life up. That's it. That's
our greatest triumph--covering up! At best, it is pretty messy business.
And all we can be sure of is that every man owes it to himself and his
legitimate offspring to save his skin at all costs, and incidentally, to
capture what little he can of the common booty.”

He made me nervous. I couldn't sit there indefinitely and listen to his
sordid philosophy.

He was quick to catch my mood, and went on more to the point. This
shiftiness is the seasoned lawyer in him, I suppose. He is pretty keen,
after all.

“Look here, Eckhart--there's no sense in men like you and me beating
about the bush. Crocker got blind drunk at Nagasaki, and missed
the Shanghai boat. That night he told me the same story that he had
doubtless told you. Or did n't he?”

I nodded. As he had said, there was no use beating about the bush.

“Then I've only this much to say, my boy. It's the one thing I've
learned from life. Never--never--fall in love with a woman. Play with
them, yes. Use them. But for God's sake don't let yourself fall in love
with them!”

He was speaking with a curious emphasis. His gaze had drifted upward
again toward the dirty ceiling. And now it was suddenly my turn to sit
and watch him.

“Don't do it!” he went on. “Don't do it. They fasten their lives on you,
they smother you. If you don't marry them, it's bad enough. If you do,
it's worse. You are an extremely gifted young man. I do not know that
I ever met a man with a keener mind or one that impressed me as having
more driving, vital force with which to shape a career. You are out here
now, right in your best years, full of enthusiasm for your work. Don't
let any woman into your life. Good or bad, whatever the phrases mean,
a woman is n't happy with a man until she has trimmed the scope of his
life down to the compass of her own understanding. She has to get it
right into her hands, and choke it. Then life begins to mean something
to her. Personally I have come to the conclusion that I get on rather
better with the bad women, so called. They don't expect so much. In a
way they are squarer--better sports, as you Americans say. Remember, my
boy, 'He travels the fastest who travels alone.'.

I was becoming tired of his wandering thoughts. Generalizations are a
bore, anyway. They are always loose, and generally wrong. Then, too, I
may as well admit that he was disturbing me deeply, this loose-minded
but shrewd old man.

“Look here,” I said abruptly, “you know of this obsession of Crocker's?”

He bowed.

“Can't we do something to restrain him?” He slowly shook his head.

“You don't mean to say that we can't stop a man who is bent on murder?”

“Our motives might be regarded as--well, not exactly clear, yours and
mine,” mused Sir Robert. “Besides, he hasn't done anything. You can
hardly restrain a man from becoming indignant if an acquaintance breaks
into his house and steals his wife.”

“But she is n't his property, like his watch!” I exclaimed.

He smiled tolerantly at me. “In a sense, she is,” said he. “In a sense.
The weight of law and tradition is against you there, Eckhart.”

“Traditions are nothing to me!” said I, hotly.

“They still mean a good deal to the rest of the world,” said he dryly.
“And even the law still has weight.” Then he went on, quite as if I had
not interrupted him. “In England it might be possible, in case we could
prove that he had openly threatened murder in the presence of competent
witnesses, to put him under bonds to keep the peace. But this is n't
England--it is the China Coast. At that, what would bonds mean to a
strong, self-willed man in Crocker's state of mind! A jealous man!” He
raised his monocle, held it a few inches before his face, and looked
through it at a speck on the ceiling. He even moved it around a little,
and squinted his right eye, as if sighting through a transit.

I wanted to strike it from his shaking fingers. Instead, I sat up very
straight and clasped my hands tightly together in my lap.

“Do you know,” he continued, in that irritating, musing tone, “I believe
the man is still in love with her, or thinks he is.”

“Love!” I sniffed. “You call _that_ love!” He did n't look at me. He was
still squinting at the ceiling. Pretty soon he sighed. “When you come
right down to it,” he said, “if a man has no right to protect his
home--and that implies some right of control over his wife--'love, honor
and obey,' you know--what becomes of our institutions! You see, Eckhart,
in the eyes of the world Crocker is entitled to a good deal of sympathy.
He took care of this woman for years, supported her in some luxury, I
take it, gave her a much richer sort of life than she had known before.”

“What do you mean by 'richer'.” I cried. “More money?”

He waved me back with his monocle, and went on with his argument. “She
was unwilling to bear him children. Now, Eckhart, that is serious. She
was his wife. She refused there to meet her absolute duty as a wife.
English law, at least, is quite definite on that point.”

This was dreadful. I could hardly keep in my chair.

“And following all this”--he was growing emphatic now--“she deliberately
leaves his home and attaches herself to another man. There is certainly
no doubt there, my boy. That is adultery. She dishonored his home. She
dishonored him--”

Here, I admit, I lost my temper. I sprang up, and for the second time in
my acquaintance with this old man, shook my finger under his nose.

“Rot!” I cried, using his own phrase. “Rot! All rot! He had _dishonored_
her home a hundred times.” My voice rang out on that word “dishonored.”
 I fairly jammed it down Sir Robert's throat--made h'm eat that
word, letter by letter. “For God's sake, lower your voice!” said
he. “_Adultery!_” I shouted this, too. “Good God--'adultery' is a
commonplace to Crocker!”

“You don't know this,” said he. Then, “Lower your voice!”

“But I _do_ know,” I answered him. “He told me himself. 'Adultery!' Why,
millions of men commit adultery'--good men, bad men, every sort of
men! That's what the millions of prostitutes are _for!_ And, guilty
or innocent, we all lie about it to the women and the children.
Lie--lie--lie! I'm sick of it! I'm a scientist, I tell you, and I don't
recognize lies in my business. There's something wrong somewhere. We're
all playing at life--all pretending--all making believe--when we ought
to be studying the facts, working through those facts toward the truth.”

“What did I tell you,” he broke in, talking around my finger--“covering
up!”

“We're afraid of the truth,” I shouted. “So we cling desperately to
our lies, and call them beautiful. And the truth--beaten down,
perverted--undermines us, saps us, beats us at every turn. God, it's
awful!” My hand fell by my side.

“The worst of it is, probably the truth would be beautiful, if we could
only find it.”

Sir Robert again drew a long, long breath. “But what's the use,
Eckhart?” said he. “What you say is of course true. But why make a
Quixote of yourself? Why be a dam' fool! Society does cling to its
little lie. Even at a sacrifice of half the women in the world.
Admitting that some of our traditions are nothing more than outworn
tribal notions, what's the use of beating your brains out against them.
I tell you, my boy, if you talk too much of that sort of truth the world
will kill you. And the women who call themselves good will lead the
attack, for they are the sheltered, the privileged class. No, we must
take it as we find it.”

But I was past all this now--past the influence of all his miserable
sophistry. My head and hands were blazing hot.

“So!” I cried. “You tell _me_ to play the coward! Do you not know that
every one of the great explorers into the wonderful region of scientific
truth has faced the terror and hatred of the world in precisely this
way? Do you not know that if those great-hearted men, one after another,
had not cut their way through the spiritual horrors of 'tradition' We
should to-day be living in medieval darkness and filth? Why, Old Man,
you yourself can remember when 'free-thinker' was a term of obloquy.
To-day our right to _think_ is the finest, greatest right we have.--Do
you suppose I care if they kill me?” Again I waved my finger under his
nose. “Tell me, Old Man, do you really imagine I care? Don't you know,
the scientific mind better than that? Can't you see that I admit no
tradition, no dogma, no authority. I am a scientist! I am of the most
wonderful guild of explorers this wretched old world has yet seen--the
guild that is exploring for the truth. Tradition has not stopped us yet.
It will never stop us.”

I turned away. “Oh, I am disgusted with you,” I said--“with you and your
beastly, cowardly mind! I'm sick of you!--Understand that? I'm sick of
you!” And I walked straight for the door.

Sir Robert followed me. He had to step fast, too. He put his hand on my