Free Mandarin-Gold by James Leasor Page A

difficult.
    He rented a villa on the outskirts of Cairo near the Nile, but the weather was hot, and the rasping dust from the desert and those endless burning days, irritated his throat and made him cough. Also, it had been difficult to find companions among either the English or the French community. He had been disturbed by critical remarks from irreligious people who doubted that he was a priest, for the Sons of Zebedee were not widely known. So he had sailed even farther east to India; then on to Burma. A brief stay in Java followed, and finally, he had reached Macao, the farthest East that he could travel. If he left Macao, he could only go back, not forward, and there was nothing and no-one to return to in any of the countries he had visited.
    Mackereth had established himself as a missionary in Macao, printing Bible tracts with his own money, and distributing them to the Chinese. They accepted them politely enough at street corners, but once out of his sight either threw the paper into the gutter, or else carried it home to patch up a hole in one of their ramshackle houses.
    Mackereth had really achieved nothing, and now as he sat in the evening of middle age, dwelling on his past and contemplating the present, he knew the future would be similarly full of failures. How disappointed Our Lord must have felt, he thought, when He had walked round the shores of Lake Galilee and spoken to the multitudes in parables, and even performed miracles for them, and yet still they remained unbelievers, or even worse, disbelievers!
    Mackereth sipped his drink again, and poured himself another. He was running away, of course. He could admit this to himself only after a few drinks; but never to anyone else. He was running away from that terrible vice which every nation gave to a neighbouring country. In England, it was the French complaint; in France, the English vice. In Germany it was said to belong to Italians; Italy blamed it on the Slavs. Only in the comfortable acceptability of Cairo and in some of the anonymous back streets of Bombay, had Mackereth been at ease, out of his dark suits and imprisoning white collar; for he was a homosexual. He had realized this as soon as he was married — before, if he was absolutely honest — but the Lord in His infinite mercy, in gathering his wife to the Eternal Blessed, had saved him the further degradation of connection with a woman.
    He sat, legs apart, head flung back, remembering the Chinese and half-caste Portuguese boys he liked to think of as his friends, with their fresh clean complexions and firm young limbs, their flat bellies and rounded buttocks. At the thought, he squirmed in his seat, and the familiar arrows of desire dug well-sharpened barbs in his loins.
    Of course, he was not alone in this private battle. Had not St Paul suffered from these same agonies of lust? Mackereth had adopted all kinds of allies in his war against these forbidden longings. He had endured cold baths, purges, sea-bathings. He had drunk foul-tasting elixirs and swallowed pills, but beneath these extremes of drugs and discomforts, his need burned oh like fire below a covering of burnt-out ash.
    He told himself he was helping the boys, that he was teaching them Christianity. If, in return, they shared his bed or fingered him, or allowed him to finger them with his brown, nicotine-stained hands, while his breath throbbed and rattled in his throat, perhaps they would forget these physical indignities, and remember the spiritual introduction he had given them to the Kingdom of Heaven?
    There had been complaints against him, but he had bought them off. In Macao, this was not difficult to do. Officials of every kind and every rank had their price, just as in Canton and Lintin the mandarins had theirs.
    He was a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and of all the millions in China, surely a handful would eventually accept the message of the Gospels he had come so far to spread? Then everything would be