In a second he was by her side, his arm about her.
“What is it Ursula?” he asked anxiously, “are you ill?”
She shook her head.
“No, I have had a shock. I have just remembered some thing. Won’t you please forgive me?”
She turned from him quickly and ran out of the room, leaving Tab a prey to various emotions. He waited for fully a quarter of an hour before she reappeared. She was still pale, but she was calm and her first words were an apology.
“The truth is,” she said with a faint smile, “I am a nervous wreck.”
“What was it I said that upset you?”
“I don’t know. You talked about the will and it brought it all back,” she said hurriedly.
“Ursula, you are not speaking the truth. Accidentally I must have said something that horrified you. What was it?”
She shook her head.
“I am telling you the truth, Tab,” she said, and in her distress, dropped the prefix.
It was his flush that reminded her.
“I suppose I ought not to call you Tab,” she said a trifle incoherently, “but we actresses are bold and brazen women. I thought with your vast experience you would have known that. Really, I should have begun calling you Tab the first time I met you. And now you want to go—you are trying to tell me that you don’t want to go until I explain what it was that distressed me, and you are going to refuse all explanation about my poor nerves, so I can see we are likely to have an interminably quarrelsome evening. Come and see me tomorrow—Tab.”
He took her hand and kissed it, and felt awkward and artificial.
“That was very sweet of you,” she said gently.
When Tab left her he was feeling amazingly happy.
XXIV
To the left of the vermillion door of Yeh Ling’s new house was a tablet set into the brick buttress inscribed with those words, which to the old Chinese represent the beginning and end of philosophical piety: “Kuang tsung yu tou,” which in English may be roughly translated: “Let your acts reflect glory upon your ancestors.”
Yeh Ling, for all his western civilization, would one day burn gold paper before a shrine within those vermillion doors and would stand with hidden hands before the family shrine and ask commendation and approval for his important acts.
Now he was sitting on one of the very broad and shallow steps that led from terrace to terrace, watching the primitive system by which his engineer was getting ready the casting of the second concrete pillar. About the site were a number of bottomless tubs hinged so that they opened like leg-irons open to receive the ankle of a prisoner. Steel brackets on each enabled them to be clamped together to make a long tube. The first of these was in its place, and sticking up from the centre was a rusty steel bar that drooped out of the true—the core of the pillar to be. High above on a crazy scaffolding was a huge wooden vat, connected with the tub by a wooden shoot. All day long an endless chain of buckets responding to a hand-turned wheel had been rising to the top of the platform, their contents being turned into the vat.
“Primitive,” murmured Yeh Ling, but in a way he liked primitive things and primitive methods.
Down the shoot would run a stream of semiliquid cement and rubble and the two toiling labourers would pat and shovel the concrete into place until the tub was filled. Then to the first would be fastened a second mould, the process would be repeated and the pillar would rise. Then, on a day when the cement had hardened, the connecting wedges would be knocked away, the hinged tubs pried loose, the rough places of the Pillar of Grateful Memories chiselled and polished smooth and, crowned with a companion lion, the obelisk would stand in harmony with its fellow.
Yeh Ling looked up at the frail scaffolding that supported the vat and the narrow platform and wondered how many western building laws he was breaking. The second tub was now brimming with the grey concrete and a third and a fourth were being fixed. All this Yeh Ling saw from his place on the steps, a cigar clenched between his small teeth. He saw the workmen climb down the ladders from the interior of the new tubs, and he glanced at the sun and rose.
A blue-bloused Chinaman ludicrously handling a fan came running toward him.
“Yeh Ling, we must wait four days for the water-stone to grow hard. Tomorrow I will strengthen the wall of the terrace.”
“You have done well,” said Yeh Ling.
“I thought you wrong,” said the builder nodding, “it seemed so much money to waste. He that is not offended at being misunderstood is a superior man.”
“He that fears to correct a fault is not a brave man,” said Yeh Ling, giving one saying of Confucius for another.
The workmen lived on the spot; their fires were burning when he left the ground. On the roadway was a small black car, a noisy testimony to the efficiency of mass production and into this he stepped.
He did not drive away for a long time, but sat hunched up at the wheel, his head sunk in thought.
Once he glanced at the pillar in making; speculatively as though his meditations had to do with this. It was growing dark when at last he put his foot upon the starting plug and rattled away into the gloom.
He left the car at the side door of the restaurant and passed in.
“The lady is in No. 6,” said his personal servant, “she wishes to see you.”
There was no need for Yeh Ling to ask which lady. Only one had the right of entry to No. 6. He went straight to her, dusty as he was, and found Ursula Ardfern sitting before an untouched meal.
She was very pale and a shadow lay beneath
