Rocky said--“I beg your pardon, sir?”--stiffly, not unlike a proud young Briton--and from a tied-up handkerchief and bulging pockets--even from his shirt above his tightly drawn belt--produced enormous quantities of perfectly matched large pearls; laid them on the bed in a heap; helped Mr. Doane make a bundle of them in a square of blue cloth.
He withdrew then, with a coldness of manner that to the older man was moving; and went out on deck to await his turn in the sampan.
Doane found a temporary home for Hui Fei and her sister at the mission compound of his friend, Doctor Henry Withery, in the Chinese city; himself lodging with other friends. Rocky went to the Astor House, across Soochow Creek, which was still, in 1911, a famous stopping place for the tourists, diplomats, military and commercial men, and all the other more prosperous among the white travelers that pour into Shanghai from everywhere else in the world by the great ships that plow unceasingly the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Yellow and China Seas; to pour out again (in peaceful times) from Shanghai by rail and by lesser craft of the river and the coast to Hong Kong and Manila to Hankow, to Tientsin and Peking, to Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohoma and Tokio.... and Shanghai had never been so crowded as now, with its thousands of travelers detained, awaiting news from this or that revolutionary center; with the American Marines and the British and German sailors; with Manchu refugees swarming into the foreign settlements; with revolutionists, queueless, wearing unaccustomed European dress, parading everywhere.
Doane found time to call at the hotel and leave word regarding the burial of his excellency; but was not to know that Rocky, himself, immured in his room, gave the word that he was out and there awaited the friendly chit that Doane sent up by the blue-robed servant. Nor was he to know that the boy dressed carefully for the ceremony, only to find the ordeal too great for his overstrung emotions. It was as an afterthought, a day or two later that Doane sent him Hui Fei's address.
It was after this sad experience that Doane, in accordance with his promise to the late Sun Shi-pi, called on Doctor Wu Ting Fang and offered his services to the revolutionary party. Another day and he was hard at work, bending his strong, finely trained and experienced mind to the great task of presenting the dreams and the activities of Young China fairly and sympathetically to the press and the governments of the Western World.... And so Griggsbv Doane, concealing--at moments almost from his own inner eye--the ache in his heart, the unutterable loneliness of his solitary existence, found himself once more fitting into the scheme of organized human life. A grave man, with sad eyes but with a slow kindly smile, always courteously attentive to the person and problem of the moment, thinking always clearly and objectively out of a comprehensively tolerant background that seemed to include all nations and all men; a gently tactful man; a tireless, powerful figure of a man, who could work twenty hours on end without a trace of fatigue, going through masses of minor detail without for a moment losing his broad view of the major problems--such was the Griggsby Doane one saw at revolutionary headquarters during that late autumn of 1911.... Life had caught him up. Whatever his private sorrow, the world needed him now. Rapidly, in all that confusion, he was formulating policies, helping to direct the current of one stream of destiny. In past years Griggsby Doane had been discussed and forgotten. He had even been laughed at as an unfrocked missionary by ribald, dominant, not infrequently drunken whites along the coast. It occurred to no one to laugh at him now.