“I could see at once you were not English, of course,” said the young man. “You are Russian. I could not, of course, make a mistake on a thing like that. Yet, since I speak no Russian and you, probably, no Cantonese dialect, I thought I was perhaps justified in addressing you in English. I was right. Allow me to introduce myself—Mr. Wilfred Chew—Chu Wei-fu.”
He watched closely for Seryozha’s bow, but Seryozha’s large untutored body knew none of these graces. Seryozha simply looked at the Chinese with a cold rather stolid intensity, his mouth a little open, his fingers drumming rather impudently on the wooden rail in front of him. Mr. Chew himself bowed, therefore, once for Seryozha and once for himself. He was evidently a young man who never spared himself this kind of effort.
“I myself speak English quite perfectly,” he said. “I have lived in England for many years—in London, to be exact, as a law student. I am now qualified to practice as a barrister. I could have made a fortune in London in the law, I dare say. But I am not the kind of man who deserts his country. I am Chinese. I am not ashamed of being Chinese. On the contrary. I therefore return to China to lay my services at her feet.”
“Oi-oi!” said Seryozha. He had never heard the English tongue spoken so fast—or through a gold tooth. The combination of speed and sparkle he found intriguing but bewildering.
“Russians,” went on Mr. Chew, “are a people of very striking intelligence, influence, and—in short, a people full of soul. Nevertheless, in Canton, my native city, I must confess that, from the point of view of an English trained professional man like myself, the Russian influence seems perhaps not altogether—Excuse me, sir, what are your politics?”
“Politics?” squeaked Seryozha. “Oi! I am sorry, I am not a political person.”
“No politics? Well, of course, my dear Mr.—er—I sympathise with your point of view. It shows intelligence. Living in a foreign land as your business evidently obliges you to do, you feel, very reasonably, that you cannot sufficiently keep in touch with the conflicting ideas that followed upon the Russian revolution—that the Bolshevik theory, interesting though it may be—”
“Eh—Bolshevik!” said Seryozha. “I mistook. I thought you have said politics. Eh no, of course, my family is a very White Russian family—most White indeed.”
“I thought so. I was right. Well, as I was saying, the Bolsheviks have made Canton, my native city, a quite impossible place for a man like myself to conduct a career in. They are called ‘bloody Bolshies,’ you know, sir, in London—and truly it is so. Shanghai is almost as bad, and—to make a long story short—”
“You cannot,” said Seryozha, who had been listening intently.
“Cannot what?”
“You cannot make a long story now short. It is too late. The story already is long. Though very interesting,” he added politely, seeing the expression of poor Mr. Chew’s face.
Wilfred Chew swallowed twice, with two little clicks, and his face looked suddenly childishly abashed and disappointed. One thin eyebrow puckered and rose high, as if that eye were trying to say, “Well, I at least don’t care …”
“Ah,” said Mr. Chew, and was silent, trying to be brave.
They leaned on the balustrade side by side, watching in silence the logs coming down in a disorderly scattered charge. Every approaching log was announced to the bridge’s defenders by a roar of warning from the spectators. Logs that traveled meekly endways were allowed to pass under the bridge unmolested, with a ready pole held hoveringly over them at the crucial moment, or, if they steered too close to a pier, a light kick from a coolie’s bare outstretched foot. But other logs, broadside on to their course, rolled clumsily down the muddy stream like rolling pins on yellow flour, and these, to the tune of howls of advice and applause, were deftly turned and steered under the bridge by the poles of the coolies. In the full central flow of the current, the logs rushed down like dragons to the attack. But near the banks of the river they traveled sleepily, even occasionally making long waltzing pauses in quiet eddies. These more dilatory attackers exerted a fascination for not too scrupulous citizens. Somehow, out of a group of logs that remained too long in harbor, one or two were likely never to put to sea again. All the cottages near by had the smoke of a good supply of firewood rising out of their chimneys, and one householder was frankly building a new bullock-shed of damp planks.
Seryozha’s dog squeezed itself between Seryozha and Wilfred Chew and, putting both paws on a horizontal rail below the balustrade, leaned out intelligently to watch the doings on the river. It barked once or twice in rather an affected voice, and then, deciding that it had shown all the interest that it could be expected to show in an almost smell-less entertainment, went away to talk with a group of farm dogs outside an inn near by.
Seryozha was uncomfortable about this deathlike silence in his right ear. He disliked the feeling of snubbing or interrupting anything. He obscurely wanted things to go on happily by themselves—puppies to go on playing, suns to go on rising and setting, flowers to go on growing, babblers to go on babbling. … Of course, killing animals was different. Killing was part of the game of life that had a right to go on. Killing was allowed but snubbing was not.
“And London?” he said, in a grumbling, ungracious voice. “It is a good city?”
“London,” said Mr. Chew instantly, as if a cork had been pulled out, “is not, conventionally speaking, perhaps, a beautiful city. There are fogs and a great many rains. Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Buckingham and Saint James’s Palaces, Madame
