“While I perish,” said Prothero still more wickedly, “I say good things. . . .”

13

White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city.  Here it was that Benham stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town below.  It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the place.  And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure, moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display.  In the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly upon the black flowing waters.

And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who was for some reason very vividly realized by White’s imagination.  He was a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to hand Prothero’s message to Benham was lean as a pole.  So he stood out in White’s imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the distinctest thing in the story.  The message he bore was scribbled by Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl:  “Send a hundred dollars by this man.  I am in a frightful fix.”

Now Benham’s host had been twitting him with the European patronage of opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.  Twice before he had had similar demands.  And on the whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable demands.  He was astonished that while he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible, his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him.  He felt a wave of intense irritation.

“No,” he said, “I will not.”

And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable by his messenger.

His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the occasion was serious.  Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.