AH WONG
That same night, at midnight, Tom Carruthers and Hilda Gregory sat hand
in hand on a verandah that looked down the Peak on to the city and
the water beyond. The midnight sky was thick with stars, and up and
down the Peak’s town-side thin snakes of light crept now and then--the
lantern lights of late-sojourning natives, or of those pulling and
pushing the rickshaws, and carrying the chairs of European merry-makers
returning to the Peak to sleep in its comparative cool--a party that
had dined at Government House, a dozen who had made moonlight picnic in
the grounds of Douglas’ Folly or at Wong-ma-kok, a man who had worked
late at the bank, three who had played late at the club, several who
had been at a dance, and perhaps fifty who had been yawning over the
Richelieu of a very scratch Australian company. In Hong Kong--the
town itself--the lights were still many, for Hong Kong both works and
revels late o’ nights, and on the nearer water dimmer lights blinked
sleepily. And from the mastheads of many a ship larger lights hung
bright and clear--red, green, blue, orange. There were half a dozen
that Carruthers could identify as theirs--lanterns slung from craft of
the Gregory Steamship Company--and he pointed them out to Hilda.
They spoke to each other but fitfully. Each was trying to think of some
worth-while suggestion to make about poor Basil, and neither could.
A window that led from the balcony to the room beyond was open, and
Robert Gregory and his wife were sitting in there, not silent like the
two on the verandah, but going together over and over again a dozen
sorry theories of their son’s disappearance, a dozen feverish plans for
his rescue.
The island and the mainland beyond had been well beaten by now. All
the Europeans, the Government House, the Civil Service, residents,
officials big and small, had tried to help in the search. For Robert
Gregory was a power in Hong Kong, and Mrs. Gregory was well liked. And
many of the natives were trying, too, to help in the search, or seemed
to be.
In the Company’s offices on the bund, a light still burned in the
manager’s room, and Holman and William Simpson sat there in earnest,
anxious conclave.
“Nothing could look much blacker,” Simpson was saying.
“Nothing.”
“The bottom seems about out!”
Holman nodded grimly.
And indeed the affairs of the great Company seemed desperate, and
all in the last few weeks, chiefly in the last few days! Strike had
followed strike among the dock hands, inexcusably, inexplicably.
Demands for increased wages, made when some important contract, already
overdelayed, must be fulfilled quickly, or lost, were scarcely acceded
to when they were renewed. It looked as if their hands were determined
to ruin and shut down the Company by which they all lived and that had
treated and paid them well for years. It was one of Robert Gregory’s
boasts that he believed in keeping his tools bright and his machinery
well oiled. The _Fee Chow_ must not miss the next morning’s tide,
and yet her loading had been hindered and bungled consistently. A
dozen mishaps and a dozen odd financial backsets had followed each
other, and it looked as if disaster had come to the Gregory Steamship
Company, and come to stay.
Too anxious for the house they had served long and staunchly to rest,
and anxious for their own salt too, the two men had returned after
office hours to talk it over--to find a way out, if they could.
And the deeper they went into their canvass of affairs, the
more difficult and bad it all seemed. And certainly the strange
disappearance of young Gregory was far and away the worst feature of
the entire complication. The Gregory purse was long, the Gregory credit
enormous; both would stand a great deal of strain. But the accident (or
whatever it was) to his boy was beginning to tell upon the father--that
had been evident all day; and when Robert Gregory’s nerve went, the
greatest asset of the firm went.
And for this reason, rather than for any keen feeling for the young man
who had shown but little for the business at which they toiled loyally
early, and late, while he neglected it or played at it flippantly, and
from which, as a rule, he drew in a day rather more in the way of cash
than they together did in a week, it was of his disappearance and of
the chance of his return that they spoke and planned, much more than of
the ledger that lay between them, or the more immediate affairs of the
office.
And while the six--two here, four in the hotel on the Peak--were trying
to think and to contrive, two others, but quite separately, were doing
something more active.
John Bradley, just at midnight, came out of a tiny house in Po
Yan Street, not far from the Tung Wah Hospital, in the heart of
Tai-pingshan, the poorest part of the Chinese quarter--a malodorous
hovel in which a native miscreant, whom Bradley had befriended more
than once, and whom, rightly or wrongly, the clergyman thought he could
trust, lived. Sung Fo would have come to the Englishman on receipt of
a message, but Bradley had thought it best to manage otherwise. And he
feared nothing in Hong Kong, and indeed had nothing to fear, not even
here in its worst quarter of slime and dirt and worse, tucked away
behind the cobblers’ lanes.
He had found Sung Fo at home, and had made the bargain he had come to
make. Sung Fo had promised to “look-see” and “try-find,” and for the
rest Bradley thought he could do nothing but wait and watch and pray.
Like Ah Wong, he knew nothing but suspected everything, but with much
less accuracy than she.
Unlike Ah Wong, all John Bradley’s sympathies were with Wu Li Chang.
He would do anything that a man might do to find Basil Gregory.
He would do anything that a man might to avoid injuring Wu Li Chang.
And to spare Wu he would have gone even a little farther than he was
prepared to go for Basil’s sake, had not Basil been Hilda’s brother.
But if his sympathy was all Wu Li Chang’s, his anxiety was not. He had
a firm conviction that nothing he could do, by purpose or by accident,
could harm or imperil Wu Li Chang.
When he had been walking away from Sung’s--perhaps for ten
minutes--picking his way over garbage heaps and broken side-paths, he
paused to look curiously at a house of which he had heard a great deal
but had never entered--a well-kept brick edifice, taller and better
built than many houses in that quarter, painted a dull light blue, and
owned and inhabited by a Chinese apothecary who was infamously famous
throughout the Empire.
It looked an innocent house, clean and law-abiding. It was lightless,
and each of its shutters was tightly closed; but at midnight--a
quarter-past midnight now--that it was darkened and closed but added to
its air of trim respectability. And yet, to this quiet blue house half
the poisoning crimes in China were attributed by the native and the
European authorities alike--attributed, but not one ever traced.
The authorities had raided the place again and again, but always
uselessly. Nothing incriminating was ever found--nothing but the
ordinary wares of a well-stocked apothecary: glass bowls of Korean
ginseng-plant roots (one, five inches long, was worth ten pounds, and
a little of its dust would give vigor to the old, hair to the bald),
skins of black cats and dogs (stewed, they prevent disease, and are
the best hot-weather diet), musk, rhubarb and silk-covered packets of
dragons’ blood (invaluable medicinally, but not what it sounds--a dry
resinous powder scraped from Sumatra rattan), cups of rhinoceros’ horn,
skins and horns ground into powdered doses, antidotes to poison, or
guaranteed to impart the qualities of the animal which it had protected
or adorned. Horns of cornigerous animals hung in tidy rows, and formed
a conspicuous part of the stock-in-trade, for they give the human
partaker strength and courage, still silly nerves, quell fearfulness. A
pyramid of the hoofs of young deer, specific to inculcate fleet gait,
half-screened the chief treasure of the place: a lacquer cabinet of
hearts. There were three hearts, each in its own well-sealed jar: a
lion’s heart, and two that were human--a pirate’s and a young girl’s.
The criminal’s was preserved in alcohol, the maiden’s in honey; and
each was of fabulous value. There was no secret about their being here.
They had been honorably bought: one from the criminal himself just
as he bent down smilingly on the Kowloon execution ground, the other
from a widowed grandmother who was a holy woman and very poor. The
girl had been very lovely, and some rich man would buy her heart one
day, no doubt, to enhance the marriage chances of a plain but favorite
daughter. The pirate had been a monster of ferocity, and to eat his
heart would be to become forever brave. Chinese warriors have eaten
the hearts of their bravest foes. They can pay no greater compliment,
none more sincere. Two alabaster boxes were stowed carefully beneath
the counter: one held charms; the other held smaller boxes of p’ingan
tan (pills of peace and tranquillity), the choicest drug in China.
Tze-Shi sent boxes of p’ingan tan to troops sorely pressed or whom she
wished greatly to reward. There were ointments here made from the gums
of trees that surrounded the tomb of Confucius, and precious medicines
brewed or pounded beside the Elephant’s Pool, where Pusien washed
his elephant after crossing the great mountain from the west; some
in Pootoo, the sacred isle of Nan Hai, and still others in a garden
that Marco Polo knew. There were simples here that would cure women of
vanity, and one (but this the apothecary would by no means guarantee)
that healed them from overtalkativeness. But all this was as it should
be, and the police had never been able to find here anything nefarious
or even objectionable.
Something about the building fascinated Bradley--probably the
contrast between its docile and pleasant seeming and its sinister
reputation--and he stood some time gazing at it, scrutinizing each
closely shuttered window--there was not a balcony; it was unique in
that--and the tight-shut door with the apothecary sign hanging from the
lintel.
“It looks a peaceful place, innocently asleep after a day of honest
industry,” he said to himself; and then some old words that were great
favorites of his, from a book he never tired of reading, came to his
memory, and he bespoke them aloud softly to the star-emblazoned Chinese
night: “He it is who ordaineth the night as a garment, and sleep for
rest, and ordaineth the day for waking up to life.”
But the apothecary’s house was not quite asleep. A thin line of light
trickled out from below the door, and then the door opened narrowly
and a woman, shrouded from crown to shoe in humble blue, came into the
street.
He did not see her face, although, as by law obliged, she carried a
lantern, but she saw his, clear-cut in the white moonlight, a late,
just-rising moon, and for an instant she turned as if to speak to him;
but she thought better of it, and walked quietly but quickly away.
Bradley wondered who she was--up to no special harm, he hoped. It did
not occur to him that her gait was familiar, at least not individually
so--thousands of amahs walk so. But he noticed that her coarse blue
clothes looked very clean--as clean and as blue as the blue house of
Yat Jung How.
He went home then, and Ah Wong went too, back to the hotel, slipping
out of the Chinese quarter stealthily, but going along the Praya
unconcernedly and through Queen’s Road and Ice House Street, and up the
long climb to the Peak, and past the night watchman at the hotel door.
She had a night-police pass; and her mistress had given her leave to
spend the evening on some errand of her own.
It’s a long climb up Hong Kong Peak. Ah Wong was very strong, but
her indefatigable little feet ached when she slipped into the room
where she had locked the flowers almost twelve hours ago, and day was
slipping rosy up the sky.
Day was coming, but she did not lift a blind. She lit a candle. And
when she had laid off the long blue cloth in which she had veiled
herself, closely in the Chinese quarter, carelessly in English-town,
she took from her dress the spoil of her visit to Yat Jung How’s blue
house: three bottles.
The smallest of the three was filled (it was very small) with a few
drops of opalescent green liquid. Ah Wong studied it grimly awhile, and
then she knotted the phial in some corner of her garments, and tucked
it securely back inside her dress.
The second bottle held about a dram of something that smelt
disagreeably when she uncorked it; but she kept it well away from her
own face and nose, and turned it instantly into the moss in the basket.
It was deadly poison this, and would destroy any reptile or scorpion
thing that came within a yard of it, and so potent was it that being
near it would render any other poison quite innocuous--Yat had told
her so. And she trusted Yat Jung How. She had known a way to make him
trustworthy.
The third bottle was a generous, roomy receptacle, squat but wide. It
held nearly a pint. And this was disinfectant, warranted to purify a
poisoned room, and smelt of an acceptable cool pungence as Ah Wong
threw it lavishly about the room, until she had spilled the last drop.
Then she lit several handfuls of joss-sticks and pulled up the blinds.
But she did not unlock the doors, or leave one unlocked when at last
she left the room, to sit outside it till her lady called. She intended
that no one but she should pass into that room until the Kowloon
flowers were all dead, and she had won Mrs. Gregory’s permission to
burn them herself, basket and all.
The sweet pungence of the joss-sticks came to her from under the door.
From under the room’s other door no doubt it was filling her mistress’s
chamber with thick sweetness--but that was well, for the English lady
loved the smell. Mr. Gregory did not especially. Quite possibly he
might swear a little in his sleep. But he often swore in his sleep. Ah
Wong had heard him.
She leaned back her head against the cool corridor wall, anxious and
tired, but well content with her night’s work.
And she had left her three jade bangles (and they were good) and her
seven silver ones and her stick-pin of seed pearls and coral with Yat
Jung How. And almost she had pawned her soul to him, and had quite
pawned all she would earn for years.
Heathen Chinee!