“WILL YOU VISIT SING KUNG YAH?”
“Quite right,” Wu Li Chang said cordially. “This is--or was--your
son’s property. My servants found it in my garden, after your son had
left there. I intended to give myself pleasure of returning it to you
in person”--that was perfectly true--“although I hardly anticipated
doing so in so--humorous a manner. Now kindly ring your bell”--his
voice stiffened suddenly, still low and easy; it had a new percussive
note, and the words came quicker. “When it is answered, merely say
to whomever enters, ‘Pray desire Mrs. Gregory to step this way.’ Do
nothing more, say nothing more. Because”--the voice grew beautifully
soft again--“if you should draw attention to this, or anything of that
kind, my hand might tremble so much with fear that it might go off, and
that would be too ridiculous, with one of your own cartridges! Please
ring.”
At the mention of his wife--by Wu--Robert Gregory drew himself up
stiffly. “What do you want with Mrs. Gregory?”
“I might merely wish to show her how foolish her husband has been
in trying to bully and intimidate me instead of dealing with me
reasonably. But also I have a message I have promised my daughter to
deliver for her to your wife. Chancing to see Mrs. Gregory here reminds
me of it, and it will be more convenient to me to deliver it here
than to call at your hotel”--Gregory’s eyes blazed--“and possibly as
agreeable to the lady. Also I have a message--but less important--from
Madame Sing, my relative.” (Gregory grunted curtly.) “Ring!”
“Ring--yourself,” the Englishman at bay said sullenly.
“That is a liberty I would not dream of taking in another man’s office.
You’ll ring”--the revolver’s barrel repointed insinuatingly. “You will
ring now, Mr. Gregory.”
Robert Gregory pressed the bell push on his desk and leaned back
heavily in his chair, with an unhappy sigh, defeated.
As Murray came in, Wu so moved his body that the clerk could not see
the little pistol which still covered Gregory. “Murray,” his employer
said wearily, “ask Mrs. Gregory to step this way a moment.” Then he
began breathlessly, “_Ce sacré Chinois me_----”
But Wu interrupted with a contented laugh and, “Oh! this damned
Chinaman understands French perfectly. And I’ve often heard Englishmen
pronounce it very much as you do. You are a linguist too, Mr. Murray?
_E’um dom util--o dom das linguas--e de alto valar em cidades
cosmopolitas!_”
Poor Murray stood bewildered, quite uncertain what to do. And Wu turned
pleasantly to Mr. Gregory with, “Please repeat your instructions, as
Mr. Murray does not seem to understand quite.”
And Gregory said at once--broken, defeated--in a whipped tone his clerk
had never heard from those thin lips before, “Please ask Mrs. Gregory
to come here.”
And indeed the hard little man was broken and defeated, and he knew it.
The Chinese duellist had made but little lunge, but with a gentleness
more cruel than any storm, and a suave persistence that under such
circumstances no mere European nerve could outfight, he had borne his
opponent to the knees; slowly, deftly had worn him out. His method and
his touch had been--almost consistently--velvet, but through the velvet
of the fur that hid them, relentless claws had found and torn and
jagged the English adversary.
Robert Gregory was down and out.
“Now,” Wu said in a changed tone, speaking briskly and quick, as the
door closed on Murray, “I will open the matter to Mrs. Gregory--if you
please.”
“What’s your object in wanting to humiliate me before my wife?” Gregory
asked drearily.
Wu smiled. “Merely a ‘Chinaman’s’ idea of--humor, let us say.” He slid
the Webley lazily into his sleeve.
Florence Gregory came in eagerly. Knowing less than her husband did of
the mandarin’s important place in international finance, yet she had
a far clearer estimate of Wu Li Chang’s personal potency than Gregory
had. Ah Wong had coached her--if only with a hint or two--and she had
her own woman’s instinct, fine and alert.
Wu had risen instantly, and taken a courteous step towards her. He
paused as she did. For a moment she stood looking from one man to the
other questioningly, and then she fixed her anxious eyes on Wu, and
they stood measuring each other quietly.
For once the English eyes were the quicker. Perhaps sex and motherhood
combined outweighed any and every superiority of race. Perhaps he gave
her a much more careless gaze than she gave him. Perhaps her exquisite
anxiety gave her sharper sight. At all events, as they looked, she
almost recognized him, but he had no such experience concerning her.
For a puzzled instant her mind trembled towards “When? Where?” and in
a few moments, or in less mental turbulence, her half-awakened memory
might have caught up a broken thread, a forgotten acquaintance; but Wu
spoke, and in the tension of her anxiety the chance passed.
“Mrs. Gregory,” Wu Li Chang began, deferentially bowing and going a
little nearer, “I am sorry to be compelled to ask your presence, but,
before I explain, will you take this weapon from me? You see”---he
laughed a little, lightly--“I present it to you with the barrel toward
my own breast--but”--and this he added with quiet emphasis--“do not
give it to your husband.” As he indicated Gregory he gave him a
straight look. “I trust to your honor.” And he bowed again as he held
the pistol out towards her.
She took it wonderingly, and held it so. She was not one of the women
who have an exaggerated fear of weapons, but neither was she one of
those who rather affect them. She had never hunted, and she had never
practiced pistol shooting (Hilda had done both). Ordinarily Florence
Gregory would have declined to hold a revolver. But she took this and
held it steadily--puzzled but not afraid. She was in an abject terror
for her boy that left no room for petty, personal, bodily qualms.
“What--what is all this?” she said ruefully. “Robert, what have you
been doing?”
He sighed heavily before he answered her. “Mr. Wu has rather
over-reached me in--a little transaction.”
“Oh! pardon, pardon,” Wu protested pleasantly. “You over-reached
yourself. May we be seated?” he asked Florence Gregory; and as she
sat down he drew himself a chair conveniently towards her, and
convenient for an unimpeded view of Gregory. “I called here to-day,” he
continued suavely, “at your husband’s invitation, on a matter of grave
importance.”
The woman leaned forward towards him quickly, her hands knotted at her
knee. “Yes--yes--my son,” she began eagerly.
“What the matter was,” Wu went on smoothly, “he did not say. Of course,
I knew of your son’s disappearance--everybody in Hong Kong knows
that--so I fancied that your husband wished, perhaps, to ask me that
any influence I might possess among my countrymen should be exerted to
assist you in your search----”
“Yes--yes,” she said, “if you could!”
“Could!” Gregory muttered, “he knows all about it.”
“To assist you in your search,” Wu repeated blandly. “His reception of
me, however, was strangely unlike that of a man--asking a favor.”
“Favor!” Gregory flamed out--he couldn’t help it--“I was going to ask
no favor, I can tell you.”
His wife sent him a peremptory glance, but Wu paid him no attention,
but continued:
“And in the end, Mrs. Gregory, he presented a revolver at me, and
practically held me prisoner.”
“Yes,” Gregory snarled, “and by a cunning ruse, like a man of your
crafty nature----”
Wu Li Chang smiled deprecatingly. “Listen to him, Mrs. Gregory! It is
cunning of me to endeavor to save my own life. It is not cunning of him
to beguile me here under the pretext of----”
“Pretext be damned!” Gregory blustered, beside himself now, rising and
going to the window. His face was twitching. He stood looking out at
the seething humans on the dock-side, but it is doubtful if he saw them.
“You see,” Wu said gently, “the strange means by which your husband
seeks to enlist my help and sympathy.”
Florence Gregory hung her head.
Wu moved his chair an inch towards hers. Gregory did not turn round
at the sound. The Chinese spoke lower, and the sympathy in his voice
seemed very real, “And all your natural maternal anxiety----” He paused
eloquently, and the mother looked up at him, eagerly, gratefully.
And in return he gave her a long direct look--there were respect and
friendship in it. And after a moment she rose abruptly and went to the
window.
“Robert!”
He did not answer. She touched his shoulder. He paid no attention.
“Leave me to talk to Mr. Wu! Please!” But her tone was imperative.
A smile, a glint of triumph, flickered across the Chinese’s face. “You,
Mrs. Gregory?” he said, just stepping towards her--he had risen when
she rose--“that would be different.”
“He needs a man’s methods of dealing with him!” Gregory growled,
without turning.
“But they don’t seem to have been very effective in your hands, do
they? Robert,” she urged more appealingly, “I want to find my boy! Let
me try--my way.”
“I’ll send Ah Wong to you,” was the grudging reply, and Robert Gregory
shuffled awkwardly from the room. He did not even look at Wu again--and
Wu barely looked at him.
“And who is Ah Wong, Mrs. Gregory?” Wu asked amiably, as the door
closed.
“My servant,” she told him.
“Your amah? But I do not need an interpreter,” he laughed.
“She rarely leaves me.”
“Who could?” he said with a little bow.
Ah Wong came noiselessly into the room.
“And now, Mr. Wu,” the woman asked earnestly, her voice low and tense,
“will you help us?”
“You, if I can--but--I am not sure if----” He broke off and gave Mrs.
Gregory a little inquiring gesture that said, “Are you going to let her
stand there?” For Ah Wong had come steadily across the room until she
stood quite at his elbow.
“Wait, Ah Wong,” her mistress told her, with a gesture of the head
towards the door. And Ah Wong moved back as quietly as she had come,
and waited just inside the door, immovable, expressionless. But not
for an instant, never once, did her eyes leave Wu Li Chang. A critic
at a “first night” could not have watched and listened more closely or
seemed less interested.
Ah Wong and the mandarin were ill matched, but better matched than he
and Robert Gregory had been.
Mrs. Gregory wasted no time on preliminaries. She forgot that he was a
stranger. That he was man, she woman, she forgot that she was English
and he Chinese. She had but one thought, one memory--Basil. “Oh! Mr.
Wu,” she pleaded--urged--at once, “if you can help us, if you could
even give us your advice as to the best way of appealing to the natives
or of offering a reward----”
“Ah!” Wu interjected gently, “for your sake, Mrs. Gregory--as his
mother--I would do much.” He picked up his hat and moved towards the
door. But Ah Wong did not trouble to move from it--she knew that he
was not going yet. But Florence Gregory did not know--and she followed
him a step. Wu bowed to her with the utmost courtesy, and said--as if
considering the situation--“Well, we must meet again.”
“Oh! I hope so, Mr. Wu. But now--when every moment is so precious----”
“I am thinking, Mrs. Gregory, and I will not waste one of them, you may
trust me.”
“I do,” she said impulsively.
Wu bent his head gratefully--perhaps, too, to veil a smile--“But I will
venture to take just two of those precious moments, to ask a great
favor of you.”
“Oh, anything!”
“You were visited yesterday by a lady of my house, Madame Sing, a
kinswoman who has, since my wife’s death, taken a mother’s part--so far
as it ever can be taken--to my daughter. Sing Kung Yah suffers a great
humiliation and an intolerable loneliness----”
“I was sorry I was out----”
“And she was grieved to find you not at home. May I solicit your
kindness for Madame Sing, Mrs. Gregory?”
“Oh--indeed--anything. But what can I do?”
“Much,” Wu said. “She is ostracized by the ladies of our race. I am a
powerful man among my own people, madame, but I cannot influence or
soften the prejudices of Chinese femininity in the slightest. Because
she is a widow, she should, according to one of the absurdest of the
many absurd canons of our race, live in seclusion, sackcloth and
discomfort. She is a nice creature, Mrs. Gregory, and she longs for
friends. Will you visit Sing Kung Yah?”
“Oh--of course--gladly.”
“It will open many doors to her, for Mr. Gregory’s wife is a social
power in Hong Kong. Chinese doors we are both powerless to open--in any
real sense. Chinese cordiality I am not rich enough to buy for her or
strong enough to seize. But life will be less dull for her if she can
sometimes exchange visits with English ladies.”
“I shall be so glad.”
“Soon--perhaps?”
“Indeed, yes. Of course, until this terrible anxiety is removed----”
“It would be cruel of me to ask you to come to Kowloon to drink tea
with Sing Kung Yah. And yet I do ask it--but for your own sake too.
Yes, if you will be so kind--it will delight Sing--you shall be my
guest.”
“We have been already, Mr. Wu,” she said a little sadly. “You remember
it was in your house, or rather in your gardens, that I last saw my
son. It was there he left us--and disappeared as completely as though
the earth had swallowed him up.”
“And it is from that point that we will begin our investigations--you
and I--his mother and a Chinese who is honored to serve her. We will
take the thread up from that moment--when you last saw him--from that
place--my own house.”
“But you know that he was seen afterwards here--in Hong Kong?”
“I know that it was said so,” Wu replied judicially. “It may, or it
may not, be true, and we will begin at the beginning--and end by
discovering the truth. That at least I can promise you.”
“Oh! You do?” she almost sobbed.
“I am sure of it.”
“Then when may we come? If we must.”
“Must,” the man deprecated. “My dear Mrs. Gregory, I employ no such
word where you are concerned. I merely point out to you, and I hope as
delicately as possible, that--aside from the very real kindness your
visit would be to a Chinese woman somewhat pathetically placed--that
the--the circumstances of my visit here this afternoon hardly make this
a--a propitious place--indeed, I am sure you will understand I am only
too anxious to find myself outside this room--and to forget--as far as
such things can be forgotten----”
“Yes--yes!” Mrs. Gregory interjected contritely, “I do indeed
understand. I am so ashamed----”
Wu waved that aside, and then he broke out with sudden feeling--it was
finely done; even to Ah Wong it almost rang true--“Why, I wonder, do
some Europeans--Mr. Robert Gregory and others--think God in heaven came
to be guilty of making the Chinese race? You come here and reap the
harvest of our centuries of sowing, and affront us while you fatten on
our industry; teach the foolish among us to suck and smoke the poppy,
and condemn us for it while it enriches you; brand the vice ‘Chinese’
while you revenue India from it--you treat us a thousand times worse
than the leech-like fops of Venice treated the Jews they exploited and
plundered--at least the Venetian cads were in their own country--you
are in ours. I tell you, madame, a Chinese _hath_ eyes, hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections--_yes, affections_,
passions--fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by
the same winter and summer, as you English Christians are! If you prick
us, we bleed. If you tickle us, we laugh. If you poison us, we die. If
you wrong us, shall we not revenge? For sufferance is _not_ the
badge of _our_ great tribe. Oh! forgive me, dear lady,” and his
voice that had been a shaking whirlwind was regretful, soft and humble.
“Forgive me--not you--I do not mean you. Mrs. Gregory,” he said with
deep earnestness, “I _will_ help _you_--to my utmost, to find
your boy. And I _am_ powerful. But, Mrs. Gregory, I will not help
your husband. Nor shall he have the satisfaction of knowing that I have
been instrumental in restoring Mr. Basil Gregory to you.”
“Oh! I do not blame you,” Basil Gregory’s mother said. And her eyes
were full of tears.
“Thank you,” Wu said softly. “I will help you to find your son. I swear
it. Trust me--and I shall not fail.”
“I do.”
Wu bent his head.
“And try to believe how much I regret to seem petty; but, really, Mrs.
Gregory, frankly, if your husband and I were to meet again, even under
the restraining influence of your presence, his strange animosity,
his extraordinary prejudice against me, and his curious ideas of the
language which a European may use to a Chinese gentleman--if I may
so describe myself--would, I fear, tempt me to wash my hands of the
whole affair. In short, I can not again enter any place that is Mr.
Gregory’s, and he has made it impossible for me to invite him to my
house or to receive him there; but if you will so far honor me, and my
kinswoman Sing Kung Yah, and my daughter--bring your amah with you” (he
indicated Ah Wong with a gesture), “she has a loyal face, and I am sure
you can trust her not to report your visit--and indeed,” he added in a
low tone, “she need not know how far I aid you. But all that I leave
to you, naturally. All I ask is your promise that Mr. Gregory shall be
ignorant always that your son has been restored to you by a ‘damned
Chinaman’; promise me that, and----”
She bowed her head.
“I promise you that it shall not be my fault if your son is not
restored to you within a few hours.”
“Then you know----”
“I know nothing,” Wu Li Chang said earnestly, “Mrs. Gregory, that you
yourself shall not know--at Kowloon.”
“When may I come?” she begged.
“To-morrow, at four? I will be entirely at your service----”
“To-morrow?” Her voice broke on the word.
“To-night, then?” He glanced at the clock consideringly. “Yes, the
time is short--but I think I can contrive it. I will employ myself so
diligently in the meantime that I think I can promise you that your son
shall be brought into your presence before you leave mine. I cannot put
in words how much I shall rejoice to see that meeting--and how proud to
have achieved it.” His voice trembled at the last words. And she could
scarcely command hers to say, “At what hour?”
“Six, or six-thirty? That will give time for the visit to which I shall
so look forward--and my daughter and her aunt--and time to permit you
to return while it is light, in time to dress for dinner.”
“Return--with Basil?”
Wu Li Chang smiled kindly. “I believe--with--Basil.” He spoke the name
as tenderly as she had, or as Nang Ping might have done.
“Oh! Mr. Wu!” the woman cried, and held out to him both her hands. He
took them and bent over them gravely.
“Oh! tell me,” she begged, her hands still in his, “Mr. Wu, do you
think he is safe and well?”
“I have no doubt of it,” Wu said earnestly. “And that it is merely a
question of making terms with those who are detaining him. And now,”
he said in a bright, brisk tone, turning alertly to the door, and this
time Ah Wong drew aside, “there is so much to do, and I have put
myself upon my honor not to fail in my--promise--if you do not fail----”
“I fail!” the mother said. “And you promise that I shall see my boy
to-night?”
“I promise!”
“Oh!” she went to him impulsively again and held out her hand. But he
seemed not to see it.
“Till six,” he said bowing, and was gone.
The woman sat down in the nearest chair and began to cry softly. Ah
Wong huddled over to her quickly and bundled down at her feet. “No,
no,” the amah said, catching her lady’s hand, clutching her dress. “No,
no, madame. Not go! Not go!”