When Tom next came forward, Doane, paying not the slightest heed to his own defense, exchanged blows with him; planted a right swing that raised a welt on the yellow cheek. A moment later he landed another on the same spot.
At the sound of these blows the men about the ringside straightened up with electric excitement. Then again the long muscular right arm swung, and the tightly gloved fist crashed through Tom’s guard with a force that knocked him nearly off his balance. Doane promptly brought him back with a left hook that sounded to the now nearly frantic spectators as if it must have broken the cheek-bone.
Tom crouched, covered and backed away.
“Have you had enough?” Doane asked. As there was no reply, he repeated the question in Chinese.
Tom, instead of answering, tried another rush, floundering wildly, swinging his arms.
Doane stepped firmly forward, swinging up a terrific body blow that caught the big Chinaman at the pit of the stomach, lifted his feet clear of the floor and dropped him heavily in a sitting position, from which he rolled slowly over on his side.
“What are you trying to do?” cried the Manila Kid, above the babel of excited voices, as he rushed in there and revived his fellow champion. “What are you trying to do – kill ‘im?”
The mate stripped off his wet gloves and tossed them to the floor. “Teach your man to box fairly,” he replied, “or some one else will.” With which he stepped out of the ring, drew on his sweater and, with a courteous bow to the mandarin, went out on deck. There, after depositing with the purser the winnings paid over by a surly Connor, Dawley Kane found him.
“Well!” cried the hitherto calm financier, “you put up a remarkable fight.”
Doane looked down at him, unable to reply. He was still breathing hard; his thoughts were traveling strange paths. He heard the man saying other things; asking, at length, about the mandarin.
“He is Kang Yu,” Doane replied now, civilly enough, “Viceroy of Nanking.”
“No! Really? Why, he was in America!”
“He toured the world. He has been minister at Paris, Berlin, London, I believe. He is a great statesman – certainly the greatest out here since Li Hung Chang.”
“No – how extremely interesting!”
“He is ruler of fifty million souls, or more.” The mate had found his voice. He was speaking a thought quickly, with a very little heat, as if eager to convince the great man of America of the standing and worth of this great man of China. “He has his own army and his own mint. He controls railroads, arsenals, mills and mines. Incidentally, he is president of this line.”
“The Chinese Navigation Company? Really! You are acquainted with him yourself?”
“No. But he is a commanding figure hereabouts. And of course, I – at present I’m an employee of the Merchants’ Line.”
“Oh, yes! Yes, of course! You seem to speak Chinese.”
“Yes” – the mate’s voice was dry now – “I speak Chinese.”
A shuffling sound reached their ears. Both turned. The viceroy had come out of the cabin and was advancing toward them, followed by all his mandarins. Before them he paused, and again exchanged with the mate the charming Eastern greeting. In Chinese he said – and the language that needs only a resonant, cultured voire to exhibit its really great dignity and beauty, rolled like music from his tongue: “It will give me great pleasure, sir, if you will be my guest to-morrow at twelve.”
The mate replied, with a grave smile and a bow: “It is a privilege. I am your servant.”
They bowed again, with hands to breast. And all the mandarins bowed. Then they moved away in stately silence to their quarters aft.
Kane spoke now: “How very curious! Very curious!”
Doane said nothing to this.
“They really appear to have charm, these upper class people. It’s a pity they are so poorly adapted to the modern struggle.”
Doane looked down at him, then away. As a man acquainted with the East he knew the futility of discussing it with a Western mind; above all with the mind of a successful business man, to whom activity, drive, energy, were very religion.
His own thoughts were ranging swiftly back over two thousand years, to the strong civilization of the Han Dynasty, when disciplined Chinese armies kept open the overland route to Bactria and Parthia, that the silks and porcelains and pearls might travel safely to waiting Roman hands; to the later, richer, riper centuries of Tang and Sung, after Rome fell, when Chinese civilization stood alone, a majestic fabric in an otherwise crumbled and chaotic world – when certain of the noblest landscapes and portraits ever painted were finding expression, when philosophers held high dreams of building conflicting dogma into a single structure of comprehensive and serene faith. The Chinese alone, down the uncounted centuries, had held their racial integrity, their very language. Surely, at some mystical but seismic turning of the racial tide, they would rise again among the nations.
This giant, standing there in sweater and knickerbockers, bareheaded, gazing out at the dark river, was not sentimentalizing. He knew well enough the present problems. But he saw them with half-Eastern eyes; he saw America too, with half-Eastern eyes – and so he could not talk at all to the very able man beside him who saw the West and the world with wholly Western eyes. No, it was futile. Even when the great New Yorker, who had just won two thousand dollars, gold, spoke with wholly unexpected kindness, the gulf between their two minds remained unfathomable.
“I want you to forgive me, sir – I do not even know your name, you see – but, frankly, you interest me. You are altogether too much of a man for the work you are doing here. That is clear. I would be glad to have you tell me what the trouble is. Perhaps I could help you.”
This from the man who held General Railways in the hollow of his hand, and Universal Hydro-Electric, and Consolidated Shipping, and the Kane, Wilmarth and Cantey banks, a chain that reached literally from sea to sea across the great young country that worshiped the shell of political freedom as insistently as the Chinese worshiped their ancestors, yet gave over the newly vital governing power of finance into wholly irresponsible private hands.
The situation, grotesque in its beginning, seemed now incredible to Doane. He drew a hand across his brow; then spoke, with compelling courtesy but with also a dismissive power that the other felt: “You are very kind, Mr. Kane. At some other time I shall be glad to talk with you. But my hours are rather exacting, and I am tired.”
“Naturally. You have given a wonderful exhibition of what a man of character can do with his body. I wish I had you for a physical trainer. And I wish the example might start my boy to thinking more wholesomely… Good night!” And he extended a friendly hand.
Mr. Kane’s boy presented himself on the following morning as an acute problem. He was about the deck, shortly after breakfast, playing with the Manchu child. Then, after eleven, Captain Benjamin handed his mate a note that had been scribbled in pencil on a leaf torn from a pocket note-book and folded over. It was addressed:
“To the Chinese Lady who spoke English last night.” And the content was as follows: “I shouldn’t have been rude, but I must see you again. Can’t you slip around the canvas this evening, late? I’ll be watching for you.” There was no signature.
“Make it out?” asked the captain. “Old Kang sent it up to me – asks us to speak to the young man. But how’m I to know which young man it is?”
“Do you know how it was sent?”
“Yes. The little princess took it back.”’
“It won’t be hard to find the man.”
“You know?”
“I