good manners. He talked agreeably, and his interests, though somewhat ordinary, were varied. He had a nice sense of humour. He could make a joke and tell a good story. He was very happily married. His son was at Charterhouse and he showed me a photograph of a tall, fair lad in flannels, with a frank and pleasant face. He showed me also the photograph of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies of life in China that a man must be separated for long periods from his family, and owing to the war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years. His wife had taken the children home when the boy was eight and the girl eleven. They had meant to wait till his leave came so that they could go all together, but he was stationed in a place that .suited neither of the children and he and his wife agreed that she had better take them at once. His leave was due in three years and then he could spend twelve months with them. But when the time for this came the war broke out, the Consular staff was short-handed, and it was impossible for him to leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated from young children, the journey was difficult and dangerous, no one expected the war to last so long, and one by one the years passed.
'My girl was a child when I saw her last,' he said to me when he showed me the photograph. 'Now she's a married woman.'
'When are you going on leave ?' I asked him.
'Oh, my wife's coming out now.'
'But don't you want to see your daughter?' I asked.
He looked at the photograph again and then looked away. There was a curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he answered :
'I've been away from home too long now. I shall never go back.'
I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb's daughter was a very alluring young person. I liked that engaging audacity.
'It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph,' he said presently. 'I'd always thought of her as a child. If I'd met her in the street I shouldn't have known her.'
He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.
'It isn't fair. . . . When she was a child she used to love being petted.'
His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see in them a very unexpected emotion.
'I can hardly realise she's my daughter. I thought she'd come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged.'
He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners of his mouth.
'I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind.'
He gave an apologetic laugh.
'I had to, you know,' he said awkwardly. 'I had such an awful hump.'
'What's the young man like?' I asked.
'She's awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are about nothing else.' There was an odd quaver in his voice. 'It's a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you've never even seen. I've got his photograph somewhere, I don't know where it is. I don't think I'd care about him very much.'
He helped himself to another whisky. He waa tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together.
'Well, thank God, her mother's coming out soon.'
I don't think he was quite a normal man after all.
XLV
THE OLD TIMER
HE was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little more than a boy as second mate of a sailing vessel and had never gone home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He had been master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had fought in the Ever- Victorious Army. He had got a lot of loot in the Boxer troubles and had been in Hankow during the revolution when the rebels shelled the city. He had been married three times, first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese, and finally when he was hard upon fifty to an Englishwoman. They were all dead now and it was the Japanese who lingered in his memory. He would tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house in Shanghai, just one chrysanthemum in a vase or a sprig of cherry blossom; and he always remembered how she held a tea-cup, with both hands, delicately. He had had a number of children, but he took no interest in them; they were settled in the various ports of China, in banks and shipping offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud of his daughter by his English wife,, the only girl he ever had, but she had married well and was gone to England. He would never see her again. The only person now for whom he had any affection was the boy who had been with him for five and forty years. He was a little wizened Chinaman, with a bald head, slow of movement and solemn. He was well over sixty. They quarrelled incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that he was past his work and that he must get rid of him, and then the boy would say that he was tired of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew that the other did not mean a word he said. They were old friends, old men both of them, and they would remain together till death parted them.
It was when he married his English wife that he retired from the water and put his savings into a hotel. But it was not a success. It was a little way from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before there were motor cars in China. He was a sociable fellow and he spent too much of his time in the bar. He was generous and he gave away as many drinks as were paid for. He also had the peculiar habit of spitting in the bath and the more squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his last wife died he found it was she who had kept things from going to pieces and in a little while he could no longer bear up against the difficulty of his circumstances. All his savings had gone into buying the place, now heavily mortgaged, and in making up the deficit year by year. He was obliged to sell out to a Japanese and haying paid his debts at the age of sixty-eight found himself without a penny. But, by God, sir, he was a sailor. One of the companies running boats up the Yangtze, gave him a berth as chief officer -- he had no master's certificate -- and he returned to the river which he knew so well. For eight years he had been on the same run.
