A weaker man would have "gloomed" openly; he did nothing more despairing than stroll into the office of one of his secretaries and have some talk about indifferent matters. None the less it was an unusual thing for him to do, as, whenever they had business together, his secretaries came to him, and he must have been pushed to it by one of those mysterious impulses that sometimes shape men's destinies. Was it the same strange impulse that sent him over to the bookcase in the corner of the room, that made him pick out, at random, and without thinking what he was doing, a volume of the Chinese classics, and when he opened it carelessly made his eye light on the sentence "_Kung Kwei Yih Kwei_,"--literally, the "work wants another basket"? (The phrase is part of one of Confucius' sayings.) "If a man wants to build a hill so high," says the Sage, "he must not refuse it the last basketful of earth."
Here was a direct answer to the I.G.'s own perplexity. Perhaps one more effort and his work, too, might be successful. At any rate he would keep back the fatal telegram for a day.
Next morning he went to the Yamên again. The first thing the Minister said to him was, "Have you sent that telegram?" And they were all anxiety till they had his reply, which, strange to say, they received with profound sighs of relief, for once again the Court had changed their minds--had come to see the folly of risking a break in the negotiations--and the Ministers, who feared the I.G. had already taken the step they had insisted on so firmly the day before, were prodigiously relieved to find nothing definite had been done. Then, when he told them the reason, how Confucius had guided China from his grave, they were still more deeply impressed.
The telegram that the I.G. _did_ send that morning to his London agent was "Sign the Treaty. But don't sign the 1st of April," he added, for they were then in the last days of March. The sudden relief from anxiety made him want a little joke--but he did not want it in the Treaty. Unfortunately nobody appreciated the sally. His Resident Secretary solemnly wrote on the telegram when he handed it to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, "Don't sign on the 1st of April--_parce que c'est un jour néfasfe_--because it is an unlucky day." Either as a Scotchman he deplored the unseemly frivolity, or he thought the French could not appreciate a _poisson d'Avril_, and so racked his brains for a serious reason to justify the I.G.'s objection.