SING KUNG YAH’S FLOWERS
That afternoon Florence Gregory, coming in with Hilda and Ah Wong from
a weary, distracted searching--searching here, there, everywhere--found
in her sitting-room such a basket of flowers as she had never seen
before, and a red Chinese visiting card, three inches wide and fully
eight inches long. Ah Wong eyed it dismayed, and at her lady’s command
translated the ideographic characters reluctantly. “No like,” she
added. “Chlinese lady no make vlisit so way--Chlinese lady no have
vlisitling clard chit. No like.”
“But who is Sing Kung Yah?” Mrs. Gregory asked wearily, not interested
to know, except that any straw might prove a clew to the only thing on
earth that mattered now, and so must be clutched.
“Lido wuman,” the amah said contemptuously, her fine, acrid Mongolian
disgust in no way softened by the unhappy fact that she herself was a
widow also.
“Whose widow is she?” Mrs. Gregory was puzzled.
“Not know.”
“Who is she? Why has she called?”
“Not know--whly she clome--or send slweet blossoms. Not know if she
clome itself.”
“Find out.”
“Madam, can do,” the woman said, running off on her errand reluctantly.
“Did,” she reported presently. “Top-side chair. Plenty coolie.”
“Who is she?”--the English voice implied that the English mistress
intended to be answered explicitly this time.
And Ah Wong answered desperately, “Her all same klinsloman Wu Li Chang.
Live Kowloon yamên. Be mock mother lonorable miss-child we dlink tea.”
“Great Scot!” Hilda exclaimed. “What a time to choose to force her
acquaintance on us--a Chinawoman! Even they must have heard of Basil’s
disappearance, with every wall and corner in Hong Kong placarded with
his description and his picture.”
“Oh! be quiet,” the mother told her. Florence was thinking--thinking
hard.
Ah Wong was thinking too, and on the Chinese face, usually so
inscrutable, there was an unmistakable pinch of anxiety, and her
dog-like, devoted eyes were growing haggard.
“Take them away--where Mr. Gregory will not see them. But take care of
them. Let the hotel servants see that we are treating them with the
greatest respect. Do you understand?”
“Ah Wong understland,” the woman said. “Can do.” And she did do; but
she only just could, for the great gilded bamboo basket of flowers was
so heavy and so huge that she could scarcely lift it; she staggered a
little as she carried it from the room.
And Basil Gregory’s mother went on thinking--on and on.
The mandarin Wu was said to be the most powerful man in China--at least
in this part of China. Surely he could help them to find Basil. And
he was a kind man--his girl had said so. And his near kinswoman--the
aunt who had been on a visit at a Taoist nunnery or something when they
were in Kowloon--had called and brought a garden full of flowers. That
call should be returned, post-haste. Perhaps she could help, the woman
who had left the flowers and the absurd red card; and the girl, the
little girl who had given them tea, she could help, too, to persuade
the all-powerful mandarin, if it needed much to persuade him; of course
she could and she would; of course she would--she had had the kindest
eyes and a soft, girlish mouth. How she, his mother, wished that Basil
might have shown little Miss Wu just a little more attention--not too
much, of course; that might have alarmed or even offended a Chinese
girl--you never could tell about such oddities; but if only he’d shown
a little less--yes--a good deal less cold indifference--indifference so
cold that it had been almost a rudeness--and girls felt such things,
and resented them too--even Chinese girls, probably. Of course, she,
his mother, rejoiced in the niceness of her boy, and that he was not
as other young Englishmen were in China--some of them--but manly
Aryan self-respect was one thing, and an almost brutal display of
racial superiority and masculine indifference was quite another. She
wished indeed, that he had treated the only child of the great Wu less
cavalierly, for his manner to the pretty Chinese creature had been very
cavalier--Chinese, but a girl for all that. Still, his fault was in his
favor, and it was no part of a mother’s office to forget that. Basil
was innately and intrinsically--and she believed irradicately--nice.
Thank God for it! He had been a little wild at school--the best boys
always were (repeating to herself the foolish old threadbare paternal
fallacy); a trifle lax at Oxford too--but, her son and always nice!
There was nothing cavalier about the way in which Ah Wong carried
her fragrant burden through the hotel corridors. Her manner to the
honorable flowers grown in the garden of the jade-like mandarin, and
gathered by noble, jeweled hands, was conspicuously obsequious.
But when she had placed them in a cool, dark room, sacred to an adjunct
of her lady’s toilet, and into which Robert Gregory never came, nor
the hotel servants, her manner changed. She put them down abruptly,
fastened the doors (there were two) feverishly and securely, and
gestured angrily towards the gleaming golden basket of bloom, with
a use of arms and fingers strangely identical with the motions with
which the Neapolitan peasant averts the evil eye. Then she ran one
matting-blind up, letting such breeze as there was blow across the
flowers and out of the room through the window.
She even knelt down by the big basket, and with a guttural groan
sniffed--not at the blossoms, but at the stems, and at the gilded
wicker-work. But if there was some insidious poison hidden in the gift,
to kill or disfigure whoever smelt or touched, Ah Wong could not detect
it.
But how could she? Why should she hope to pit her wit against the wit
of Wu?
Next, the woman got a sharp bamboo, and, kneeling down again, prodded
cautiously but thoroughly among the leaves and stems and the depths of
moss. She trembled as she worked, for she was prodding for some small
poison-snake or asp, and was terribly afraid; but because another woman
had treated her decently for a whole year, and kindly more than once,
she worked on until convinced that nothing that crawled or stung was
hidden in the glowing gift.
Then she unlocked one door and made several hurried journeys into the
adjacent sleeping-room, carrying a small tub, a spirit-lamp, a box, a
manicure set, a dozen sundries, and arranging them as best she could,
first locking the dressing-room door from the bedroom side and hiding
the key in her bosom.
The flowers seemed innocent enough, but Ah Wong would die before her
English lady should touch them or inhale their breath.
Ah Wong was absurdly wrong--if devotion can ever be absurd; the flowers
were exactly what they seemed. Wu Li Chang was no crude bungler. When
he unsheathed his knife the knife would cut, but it would leave no
trace of Wu.
Of the tragedy that had been enacted at Kowloon Ah Wong knew exactly
nothing; but she suspected almost all, and the details of her suspicion
were uncannily accurate. She was Chinese.