Tom Beauling/Chapter 10
THERE followed a week which Wareing of Pennsylvania never forgot. It began with a pepper-pot. This dish, he learned, made the sick strong, and was to be had at its best in only three privileged places—the Yacht Club of Hong-Kong, the island of Barbados, and the Westchester Country Club of Westchester, New York. It continued amid a whirl of young men who received incomes of from twelve hundred to two thousand dollars a year and kept establishments with quantities of servants, played polo on ponies that came up from Australia for no other purpose, never walked except in the house, drank drinks called pegs, which were made of whisky and soda and did not go to their heads for a long time, and performed the various functions of their various callings between nine o'clock of one morning and eleven-thirty of the same. The week went on with a night trip through darkest Canton, where a million people live in boats in a river, and push into the water between them the people they do not like. There were rickshaw and horseback rides in the moonlight. A dinner for the Chamber of Commerce, at which the English merchants opened their mouths to talk and said nothing, and Chinese merchants opened their mouths to eat and spoke volumes. It was a whirl of a week, out of which incidents stood only by recollection. Wareing remembered shops where the sunlight struck on old bronze; dark alleys that closed suddenly with gates of yellow, grim faces; temples full of bestialized devils, and little children who embroidered like angels. But what stood forever vividest in Wareing's mind was the recollection of a gentle, towering man, with a big, sweet mouth, who went through it all at his side—a man who laughed with a pure heart, who sang songs so plaintively that you cried, or so splendidly that martial shivers jumped along your spine, or so loudly that the roof complained.
A man who took him—Griswold B. Wareing, the Grand Mogul of Pennsylvania—under his wing, instructed him with strange fables, and would not let him pay for as much as a chop-stick. He had become conscious, without being told, that the huge, graceful young man had seen most of the things worth seeing, done most of the things worth doing, sat at meat with princes and ridden their elephants for them, and was withal as simple and communicative as a child and as debonair as the seraphim. "He is the Lord's anointed," wrote Griswold B. Wareing to his son and heir. "And thou shalt go and do likewise."
Beauling took him one day to lunch with some friends of his in a little house on the hill. There were a man and his wife and their children five.
Over the gate of the house was gilded: Bleak House
The house was cold brown, in a garden of gravel, and looked down a drop of cliff. Beyond and below was Hong-Kong, green and white, the blue harbor and the many-colored ships. "It is one of the places I like to call home," Beauling said affectionately; "we'll see why."
Wareing saw. The door flew open, and out flew children. They seized Beauling by the hands and knees, and were swung squeaking into the air and kissed. They yowled with delight. Behind them, smiling, were their young father and mother.
Within the bleak house were warm hearts, poverty that was not ashamed—and Griswold B. Wareing thought that he understood.
There were times during that week when long and serious pow-wows were held by Griswold B. Wareing, who could float a national loan, and Tomas Beauling, who had jollied his way through yellowest China and beheld the coal-fields of Shen-se. The pow-wows were of coal—coal—coal, and how to get it. Wareing drew a pencil across a map, from a port of the sea to an ancient city of the interior, and, "So the road should run," he said. "Loop it to the left," said Beauling, "for the iron." And they so talked, schemed, planned, and entered into mutual confidence that at the week's end they smelled action.
"It will take years to put the road through," said Wareing; "but that's my business. I came out here for pleasure and big game. I've got sick of the latter and precious little of the former, so I think I will run up to Pekin and do a little plain business with his Imperial Majesty, and persuade him to let me open up his empire for him. That road will cost so many"—he opened and shut his hands rapidly a number of times—"millions to build, but we will buy up the land at the terminals, coin money that way, get the powers hitched, and pour a stream of coal-black coal a thousand miles long and as big round as a freight-car into the holds of their war-ships. And you, Beauling, do you realize that when the road is through, I have picked on you, young man, to be the whole song and dance up at the other end? You're a daisy, Beauling." (It may be remembered that Griswold B. Wareing was in the East for pleasure, and that this conversation took place on the veranda of the Hong-Kong Yacht Club. Enough said. The next day he was sober, but took back nothing.) "You're one of the finest young men I've ever met, and you're cut out to be the Oriental representative of the only absolutely unique and original old King Cole—that's me. But what do you know about coal, Beauling?"
"It all goes up into smoke, doesn't it?" said Beauling.
"That's right—joke about a man's pet plan, Tommie. But listen. I've made letters for you to take to various people that"—the original old King Cole threw out his thin chest—"belong to me. These people live in Pennsylvania, and do the coal trick. Now, while I go up to Pekin and hobnob with Majesty—I don't know but you would do that part better, but I want to try it on— Boy, get two pegs—you're to go home—"
"Home?" said Beauling.
"Home with the letters, and the people they are to will take you in hand and put you through the mines and through the mines and through the mines until you've learned to be over one of the mines, and you will put your mind on the mines; and after you've learned and learned and learned, you'll blow back here and up to Shen-se and be the new Emperor of China. The present one is yellow, and the next one's going to be black. Will you do it, Tommie?"
Tommie smiled an embracing smile. "If he means it, I will," he said to himself. "Not because I want to be the coal-black Emperor of China particularly, but because it's something I've never done before." And aloud he said: "If you make me that offer to-morrow morning in time for me to catch the boat for Yokohama, I will accept."
"Bully for you!" said Wareing.
Here a number of young men came to drag Wareing and Beauling off to dinner. It was Wareing's last night, and they made it hum.
Toward morning they threatened to make a breach in the huge Beauling by siphon fire unless he would sing for them. And he, nothing loath, sent forth a roaring voice to greet the dawn.
'And I will choose,' said he,
'The loveliest in all the world
To be my queen to me.
And you, Sir Barbaree,
Shall seek her in the doucest ship
That swims upon the sea.
Shall say this word for me . . .'"
Dawn broke into gold. And before the sun had set Tomas Beauling was on board the P. & O. S. S. Rohilla, lifting across the Yellow Sea to Japan.
And for years afterward the young men of Hong-Kong were wont to boast that they had once been drunk with Griswold B. Wareing of Pennsylvania.