THE VAGABOND

Vag didn't know much about China. He had never taken Chinese 10a at Harvard or read more than an occasional heading in the newspaper about how Uncle Sam was lending China lots of money as sort of a scare to Japan and Hitler. But he wasn't quite sure about how that worked except he had a faint suspicion we might not get the money back. He didn't know much about Chinese culture except for the few "Confucius Say's" that went around the country a couple of years ago. Every now and then they flashed some picture of Peiping being bombed on the screen at the U.T. but he always felt that he had seen the pictures somewhere before. But for that matter other places were being bombed, too, so that didn't give him much to go by. Of course he knew that Terry was having a mild sort of love affair with Hu Shee in the Boston Herald before he stumbled onto Burma and that nasty Kiel. Still he couldn't believe that all Chinese girls looked like Hu Shee. Otherwise the Vag might have felt the old wanderlust boiling in his veins. Probably all Chinese girls wore pig-tails, and being very mature, Vag felt above that sort of thing.

Still he wasn't quite convinced. He did know, however, that Lin Yutang was coming back to Harvard to give a lecture. While Vag had never read My Country and My People, that didn't stop him from knowing that Dr. Lin was a very great writer. He sort of felt instinctively that anybody who could write a book about China must be a great man. And besides, Lin Yutang had once gone to Harvard for a while, which would have made him a great man even if he hadn't written lots of books. Once he had heard somewhere that Dr. Lin was a pagan and represented the Young China movement. While Vag didn't go to church regularly he had never seen a pagan in the flesh and he thought that this might be a good chance. As for that matter he didn't even know that there was an Old China Movement, but the whole idea rather intrigued him. All in all he felt rather ignorant about that great blot on the world's map which was always printed in a bright yellow, and figuring he had better snap up the chance, he decided to stroll over to Emerson D about eight o'clock and see what the whole thing was about. Maybe Chinese girls didn't all wear pig-tails.