Free Mandarin-Gold by James Leasor

enforced rigorously and without exception, would soon stamp it out, as a man in heavy boots can beat down a fire before it spreads and sets a whole forest aflame.
    He would also appoint a new Viceroy in Canton, a man who had reached high rank by his own endeavours, whose honesty was not suspect. He would give this man strict orders to deal harshly with the Foreign Devils. They would react in some violent and un-Confucian way, as they had so often reacted in the past, and he would strike and banish them all. And then China and all his empire could return to peaceful things, and life would be as it had been in the olden .times. He would promise Heaven he would do this great deed, worthy of all his ancestors; now Heaven would relent and allow rain to fall.
    The procession stopped as it approached his palace. Gently, his palanquin was lowered, and the singing died to a whisper. A servant prostrated himself and then opened the door.
    The Emperor stepped out. As he turned his face to look up at the sky, rain began to fall; thin scattered drops at first, like tiny fingers tapping on a drum, and then in a torrent of water as the skies opened.
    Now the gongs and drums beat triumphantly and the singers took up their song. The crowds shouted with wild delight. Truly, the Son of Heaven's prayer had been answered with unusual and amazing swiftness.
    But only the Son of Heaven knew why.

 
     
    5
    In Which a Reverend American
    Gentleman Receives an Important Visitor
    At the same hour that rain fell in Peking, the Reverend Selmer Mackereth knelt piously at prayer in his room in Macao. It was not raining there, and the room was warm, and he was praying to another God.
    Mackereth was a squat, broad-shouldered man, with hair turning grey and cropped short against the heat. In the half light of evening, his head looked as though it had been dusted with iron fillings.
    Mackereth's hands were broad and the nails bitten down to the quick. His eyes, unusually, were open, for he had run out of anything further to say to the Almighty. As he knelt, elbows tucked into his round stomach, looking at the opposite wall of the room where Christ hung on an ivory crucifix, the thought struck him that he had been praying like this in Macao, morning and evening, for seven years, and he. was still as far from converting the Chinese heathen to the ways of the one true God' as when he had arrived from New York. Perhaps this was God's way of informing him that he was in the wrong place, and had answered the wrong call? Or perhaps he had only imagined he had ever heard a call?
    He struggled to his feet, stiff in his joints, confused and disappointed, and sat back thankfully in a wicker chair. He poured himself a neat whisky. I have laboured in the vineyard, he thought to himself, but there are no grapes yet worth gathering, nor any foreseeable harvest worthy of the name.
    His mind ran back for a moment over the chequer-board of his life. His family had sailed from Bohemia to the United States, where his parents had both died when he was in his teens, and on money he inherited from his father, who owned a market garden, he had qualified as a priest of a small and unfashionable order, the Sons of Zebedee.
    Priesthood in this order was no bar to marriage, and he chose as his wife a dull, mousey woman who sang in the tabernacle choir. She was a widow, in poor health, as it turned out, and had died within months of their marriage. Mackereth then discovered with surprise, and some relief, that her first husband had left her thousands of acres of wheatland. Mackereth sold this, banked the money and lived comfortably off the interest.
    He liked travel and had visited England, but the climate and the welcome were both too chill for him; also, England already had enough priests. He had moved on to France and Germany, then back to Bohemia; next, on to Egypt. His rank and his money assured him of respect, but friends he would have to make himself, and this he had always found