The mate bent low and looked closely at the brush-work; then stepped around an end panel and examined the texture of the silk.
“Ah!”--it was a musical deep voice, speaking in the mandarin tongue--“you admire my screen, Griggsby Doane.” The name was pronounced in English.
His excellency wore a short jacket of pale yellow over a skirt of blue, both embroidered in large circles of lotus flowers around centers of conventional good-fortune designs, in which the swastika was a leading motive. His bared head was shaved only at the sides, as the top had long been bald. He looked gentle and kind as he stood leaning on his cane and extending a wrinkled hand; smiling in the fashion of forthright friendship. The thin little gray beard, the unobtrusively courteous eyes, the calm manner, all gave him an appearance of simplicity that made it momentarily difficult to think of him as the great negotiator of the tangled problems of statesmanship involved in the expansion of Japan, the man who very nearly convinced Europe of American good faith during the agitated discussion and correspondence that arose out of the “Open Door” proposals of John Hay, a man known among the observant and informed in London, Paris and Washington as a great statesman and a greater gentleman.
“I thought at first”--thus the mate, touched by the fine honor done him (an honor that would, he quickly felt, demand tact on the bridge)--“that it was a genuine Kuo Hsi.”
“So I see. A Ming copy--at least the silk appears to be Ming--the heavy single strand, closely woven. And the seals date very closely. If it were woven of double strands, even in the warp alone, I should not hesitate to call it a genuine Northern Sung.”
“You observe closely, Griggsby Doane. It is supposed that Ch'uan Shih made this copy.” His smile was now less one of kindness and courtesy than, of genuine pleasure. “You shall see the original.”
“I have never seen a genuine panting of Kuo Hsi. It would be a great privilege. I have read some of the sayings attributed to him, as taken down by his son. One I recall--'If the artist, without realizing his ideal, paints landscapes with a careless heart, it is like throwing earth upon a deity, or casting impurities into the clean wind.'”