Another snatched his thick, compact traveling Bible from his jacket. She flipped through the thin pages crowded with his scrawled commentary. Several sheets of ministerial notes and ideas for future sermons fluttered to the dirt floor. The Reverend snatched them up, stuffed them back into the book, and took the Bible away from her. He returned it to his breast pocket, where it always stayed close to his heart.
Yet another of the young ladies sank a lithe hand into one of his deeper pockets and pulled forth his leather-bound copy of the Romantics. This thick volume, every page of which the Reverend had read and reread, committing many fine lines of poetry to memory, had been given to him upon his graduation from seminary. Here in China, it had proved almost as important a companion as the Lord's good book. Within those poems, the barbaric was tamed; the wild was praised, and yet the language, through its refinement, proved that civilization won out in the end. Whenever his heart was sunk low by the unresponsive Chinese, he turned to wise Wordsworth, swashbuckling Byron, and sublime Keats and knew that faith would abide.
Now this child harlot before him waved the heavy thing in the air and sang a silly song. He grabbed it back from her and placed it out of reach in his other interior breast pocket. At all costs, he would keep these profound and uplifting texts safe from sly pickpockets.
Luckily, the ladies did not go into his other trouser pocket to find the gold watch his father had passed down to him before he had left for Shansi Province. The temptation of that shiny object would surely have been too much for this greedy gang. Instead, one of the girls reached for the spectacles in his hand, and before he knew it, she was swinging them in the air and wearing them herself.
The Reverend grabbed for his glasses, but the girls had him now. Their ranks had swelled, and they pulled him down onto one of the filthy mats, where he fell like Gulliver himself. They swarmed him, and he felt certain they would tie him down with ropes in the manner of the Lilliputians, but it was merely their delicate hands that pawed over him and made him frighteningly weak.
"Please, ladies, please," he shouted. "This must stop!"
And they did stop— such was the force of his voice speaking their tongue. But then one of the younger ones burst into giggles again, and the older ones put on more determined faces than ever. They dove for his shirt buttons. The Reverend pushed them off with some effort and managed to get his boots back upon the dirt floor. He finally snatched his spectacles, put them on, and stood.
He held out his arms in preparation for a further attack, but the girls just looked up at him. Disappointment and even boredom quickly passed over their young faces. Several of them trailed off toward the opium pipes and lamps. Others went to customers who mumbled in the sickly air. Such were their distracted natures and the fickleness of their passions. Sin could be quite desultory at times.
Over in a back corner, the Reverend spotted a group of men he had not noticed before. They sat on their haunches and threw dice against a mud wall. They cursed under their breaths, or sometimes quite loudly, and drank from dark bottles.
This sort of behavior rotted the soul to its very core. The Reverend faced the room and called forth his most effective preaching voice. "You, every one of you, is giving your one and only life over to the Devil," he announced, loud enough he hoped to reach even those most lost in their own ether. "Throw off the mantle of evil and join the pure way of Christ."
The grandfather shuffled forward from a corner of the chamber and reached out a claw to grip the Reverend's arm. Strangely, the Reverend felt almost glad to see him again. He felt he could talk sense to this fellow and perhaps get somewhere. The old man had taken off his wool cape, and, as he stood close, the Reverend was puzzled to notice that he wore a high lace collar, a European or American woman's finely wrought garment with ivory buttons down the neck. As the man inched forward, the Reverend saw on his bent head a thick, crocheted oval. He was mystified at the sight. Could it be an antimacassar?