“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!”
“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.