In Red and Gold — A Reader’s Guide

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In Category - Romantic Drama

Authors: Merwin, Samuel, 1874-1936, Baldridge, Cyrus Leroy, 1889-1977 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2016 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Love stories; River boats -- Fiction; China -- History -- Revolution, 1911-1912 -- Fiction; Yangtze River (China) -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 87,802

Reading time 382 min

Text sections 10

Before opening In Red and Gold — A Reader’s Guide, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 87,802 words, 6 hr 22 min estimated reading time, and 10 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 13.9 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Love stories,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #51974

Samuel Merwin's 1921 novel uses a confined steamer and a commandeered junk on the Yangtze to stage a tense romance amid the 1911 Chinese Revolution, with narrative voice shifting between detached observation and charged interiority.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg51974

Read the Text

between berth and couch, a board across their knees--Connor twisting his head to fix his one eye on the intruder, the Kid, in his check suit, a German of the customs and Rocky Kane. There were cards, chips and a heap of money in American and English notes and gold.

“What is it?” cried Kane. “What do you want?”

“You'd better stop this,” said the mate quietly.

“Oh, come, we're just having a friendly game! What right have you to break into a private room, anyway?”

The mate, stooping within the doorway, took the boy in with thoughtful eyes, but did not reply directly.

Connor, with another look upward, picked up the cards, and with the uncanny mental quickness of a practised _croupier_ redistributed the heap of money to its original owners, and squeezed out without a word, the mate moving aside for him. The German left sulkily. The Kid snapped his fingers in disgust, and followed.

Doane was moving away when the Kid caught his elbow. He asked: “Did Benjamin send you around?”

Doane inclined his head.

“Running things with a pretty high hand, you and him!”

“Keep away from that boy,” was the quiet reply.

The thin man looked up at the grave strong face above the massive shoulders; hesitated; walked away. The mate was again about to leave when young Kane spoke. He was in the doorway now, leaning there, hands in pockets, his eyes blazing with indignation and injured pride.

“Those men were my guests!” he cried.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Kane, to disturb your private affairs, but--”

“Why did you do it, then?”

“The captain will not allow Tex Connor to play cards on this boat. At least, not without a fair warning.”

The boy's face pictured the confusion in his mind, as he wavered from anger through surprise into youthful curiosity.

“Oh....” he murmured. “Oh.... so that's Tex Connor.”

“Yes. And Jim Watson with him. He was cashiered from the army in the Philippines. He is generally known now, along the coast, as the Manila Kid.”

“So that's Tex Connor!.... He managed the North End Sporting in London, three years ago.”

“Very likely. I believe he is known in London and Paris.”

“He's a professional gambler, then?”

“I am not undertaking to characterize him. But if you would accept a word of advice--”

“I haven't asked for it, that I'm aware of.” An instant after he had said this, the boy's face changed. He looked up at the immense frame of the man before him, and into the grave face. The warm color came into his own. “Oh, I'm sorry!” he cried. “I needn't have said that.” But confusion still lay behind that immature face. The very presence of this big man affected him to a degree wholly out of keeping with the fellow's station in life, as he saw it. But he needn't have been rude. “Look here, are you going to say anything to my father?”

“You will have to ask him yourself. Though you could hardly expect to keep it from him long, at this rate.”

“Well--he's so busy! He shuts himself up all day with Braker, his secretary. The chap with the big spectacles. You see”--Kane laughed self-consciously; a naively boyish quality in him, kept him talking more eagerly than he knew--“the pater's reached the stage when he feels he ought to put himself right before the world. I guess he's been a great old pirate, the pater--you know, wrecking railroads and grabbing banks and going into combinations. Though it's just what all the others have done. From what I've heard about some of them--friends of ours, too!--you have to, nowadays, in business. No place for little men or soft men. It's a two-fisted game. This fellow spent a couple of years writing the pater's autobiography:--seems funny, doesn't it!--and they're going over it together on this trip. That's why Braker came along; there's no time at home. The original plan was to have Braker tutor me. That was when I broke out of college. But, lord!....”

“You'll excuse me now,” said the mate.

Meantime the Manila Kid had sidled up to the captain.

“Say, Cap,” he observed cautiously, “wha'd you come down on Tex like that for?”

“Oh, come,” replied the captain testily, not turning, “don't bother me!”

“But what you expect us to do all this time on the river--play jackstraws?”

“I don't care what you do! Some trips they get up deck games.”

“Deck games!” The Kid sniffed.

“You'll find plenty to read in the library”

“Then I guess you'll just have to stand it.”

For some time they stood side by side without speaking; the captain eying the river, the Kid moodily observing water buffalo bathing near the bank.

Continue Reading →

The opening chapter of In Red and Gold establishes a tightly bounded social space: the promenade deck of the river steamer Yen Hsin, where a handful of white passengers are “caught, willy-nilly, in a sort of passing comradeship.” The narrative voice is coolly ethnographic, noting the “odd contrasts” thrown together by “a careless fate,” and the prose lingers on sensory details—quaint odors, drifting sampans, the rhythm of coolies chanting as they load cargo. This detached, almost sociological tone gives way later to a more intimate, breathless register when the woman character awakens to find Connor staring at her, his “wooden” face and “odd rapid intensity” signaling a shift from collective observation to personal threat.

Confined Spaces and Shifting Perspectives

The narrative’s geography is deliberately claustrophobic. The steamer’s white cabins are grouped around a single dining-and-social hall, while the rest of the deck is screened off for Chinese officials and the lower decks crowded with “lower class natives.” This physical division mirrors the novel’s focalization: the early chapters adopt a collective white perspective, generalizing about “the white folk” and their curiosity about “the others aboard.” But as the story progresses, the point of view narrows. In the later excerpt, the woman’s interiority dominates—her languorous thoughts of “priceless gems” and exotic ports, her calculated plans to “dress and act differently.” The shift from external description to subjective sensation is marked by the line “She felt her eyes about to open—slowly—on a presence,” where the prose slows to match her drowsy perception.

Dialogue as a Weapon of Unease

Conversations in the excerpts are terse and loaded with subtext. The woman’s casual questions—“Where’s Jim?” “What time is it?”—are met with Connor’s delayed, minimal replies: “It’s afternoon.” “Right along.” His silence and staring create a “curious hostility” that she finds alien. The dialogue is punctuated by physical details—his “rubber soles” that let him approach unheard, his “hip pockets bulged” with weapons—that amplify the threat. When she says “I look like the devil,” her self-deprecation is a bid for control, but Connor’s refusal to respond leaves her off-balance. The exchange is a power struggle conducted through pauses and non-answers, with the narrative voice staying close to her perceptions: “alien he was indeed, and hostile.”

Pace and the Sound of Revolution

The novel’s tempo is keyed to the distant rumble of the 1911 Revolution. Early on, the steamer’s departure is described in a leisurely, almost documentary style—the “American captain,” “yellow pilot,” “Scotch engineers” each noted. But as the junk approaches Huang Chau, the pace quickens. The woman hears “a faint sound—a boom—boom-bom” and learns it is “Fighting around Hankow.” The narrative then cuts to the junk slowing, working “in toward the yellow shallows,” and Connor’s abrupt commands: “When I go ashore, you’re to stay here.” The revolution is never shown directly; it is an offstage noise that accelerates the plot. The contrast between the languid opening—with its “quaint odors and sounds” from sampans—and this sudden, terse action underscores how historical events intrude on personal dramas.

Readers should attend to the novel’s handling of time and sensory detail. The excerpts show a writer who builds tension through what is withheld—Connor’s motives, the revolution’s progress, the woman’s true past. The narrative voice oscillates between a detached, almost reportorial stance and a tight third-person limited that registers every flicker of unease. Pay attention to the sounds: the coolies’ chant, the boom of distant guns, the silence between spoken words. These acoustic cues are as important as the visual descriptions of “black hull” and “yellow shallows” in shaping the story’s atmosphere.

That rainy afternoon, I kept thinking about how Merwin’s steamer held everyone so close, their secrets practically brushing shoulders. The shifting narrative voice left me restless—I wanted something quieter, more rooted. Then I stumbled upon The Law of Hemlock Mountain — Edition Insights and found the same delicate tension, but among mountain pines instead of river fog.