Tai-Pan Read Online Free PDF Page B

painting aside and set a clean piece of paper on his easel.
    “Quite agree, quite agree.” Skinner lumbered up the bank, his pale brown eyes looking like the dregs of ancient beer. “Just wanted to ask you your opinion of this momentous day. Going to put out a special edition. Without a few words from our senior citizen the edition wouldn’t be complete.”
    “Quite correct, Mr. Skinner. You may say, ‘Mr. Aristotle Quance, our leading artist, bon vivant and beloved friend, declined to make a statement as he was in the process of creating another masterpiece.’ ” He took a pinch of snuff and sneezed hugely. Then with his kerchief he dusted the excess snuff off his frock coat and the flecks of sneeze off the paper. “Good day to you sir.” Once more he concentrated on the paper. “You are disturbing immortality.”
    “Know exactly how you feel,” Skinner said with a pleasant nod. “Exactly how you feel. Feel the same when I’ve something important to write.” He plodded away.
    Quance did not trust Skinner. No one did. At least no one with a skeleton in his past, and everyone here had something he wanted to hide. Skinner enjoyed resurrecting the past.
    The past. Quance thought about his wife and shivered. Great thunderballs of death! How could I have been so stupid to think that Irish monster could make a worthy mate? Thank God she’s back in the loathsome Irish bog, never to darken my firmament again. Women are the cause of all man’s tribulations. Well, he added cautiously, not all women. Not dear little Maria Tang. Ah, now, there’s a luscious coleen if ever I saw one. And if anyone knows an impeccable cross of Portuguese and Chinese, you do, dear clever Quance. Damn, I’ve had a wonderful life.
    And he realized that though he was witnessing the end of an era, he was also part of a new one. Now he had new history to eyewitness and record. New faces to draw. New ships to paint. A new city to perpetuate. And new girls to flirt with and new bottoms to pinch.
    “Sad? Never!” he roared. “Get to work, Aristotle, you old fart!”
     
    Those on the beach who heard Quance chuckled one to another. He was hugely popular and his company sought after. And he was given to talking to himself.
    “The day wouldn’t be complete without dear old Aristotle,” Horatio Sinclair said with a smile.
    “Yes.” Wolfgang Mauss scratched the lice in his beard. “He’s so ugly he’s almost sweet-faced.”
    “Mr. Quance is a great artist,” Gordon Chen said. “Therefore he is beautiful.”
    Mauss shifted his bulk and stared at the Eurasian. “The word is ‘handsome,’ boy. Did I teach you for years so that you still don’t know the difference between ‘handsome’ and ‘beautiful,’ 
hein?
 And he’s not a great artist. His style is excellent and he is my friend, but he has not the magic of a great master.”
    “I meant ‘beautiful’ in an artistic sense, sir.”
    Horatio had seen the momentary flash of irritation pass through Gordon Chen. Poor Gordon, he thought, pitying him. Of neither one world nor the other. Desperately trying to be English yet wearing Chinese robes and a queue. Though everyone knew he was the Tai-Pan’s bastard by a Chinese whore, no one acknowledged him openly—not even his father. “I think his painting wonderful,” Horatio said, his voice gentle. “And him. Strange how everyone adores him, yet my father despised him.”
    “Ah, your father,” Mauss said. “He was a saint among men. He had high Christian principles, not like us poor sinners. May his soul rest in peace.”
    No, Horatio thought. May his soul burn in hellflre forever.
    The Reverend Sinclair had been one of the first group of English missionaries to settle in Macao thirty-odd years ago. He had helped in the translating of the Bible into Chinese, and had been one of the teachers in the English school that the mission had founded. He had been honored as an upstanding citizen all his life—except by the