FACE TO FACE
It was four when Wu Li Chang reached Kowloon and his own home. Barely
two hours in which to arrange the details, the scenic background, of
the last act of the tragedy--the exquisitely horrible details of his
revenge. But it was time enough, for he had planned it all down to the
smallest point as he sat with Nang Ping dead at his feet. A few moments
would suffice for the orders he had still to give Ah Sing, and upon the
implicit obedience of his servants he could depend absolutely.
He bathed, dressed in the garments of his country, took rice, spoke
briefly to Ah Sing, then sent for Sing Kung Yah and coached that
surprised and flustered lady in the part she was to play in the events
of the afternoon. She was not a particularly skillful or astute
coadjutor--indeed, for a Chinese woman, she was dull, inept and dense;
but for seventeen years it had been her invariable habit to give him
minute obedience, and the habit would stand her in good stead to-day.
And, too, she had, of course, a Chinese memory--the most wonderful
memory bestowed on any race. He had little fear of Sing Kung Yah, and,
for that matter, the rôle he had assigned to her was but that of a
well-dressed supernumerary with a few unimportant lines to speak. She
was not essential to the movement of the piece, and her rôle might well
enough have been “cut” from the cast, but with the evil seething at his
heart all the native artist in him was aflame. He intended to carve
his victims delicately--a dish for the gods. On the terrible altar of
his hatred, yes, and of his just resentment, he would lay an English
woman who had never wronged him and an English son who----. But he
intended it all to be done as exquisitely as some finest ivory carving
cut by a master Chinese hand.
When he had dismissed Sing Kung Yah he went into his study and waited.
It was the room in which perhaps he had lived most. It was here
he studied; and in the many long hours of leisure which he always
relentlessly kept for himself, Wu Li Chang was a devoted student.
It was here he wrote; and Wu was an author of some distinction in
the current literature of China--the land in which a genuine love of
letters counts as nothing else does, a fine skill in literature is
respected as no other human quality is. There were poems to his credit
in the Imperial library at the pink-walled palace in Pekin, a book of
philosophy, a comedy, and a history of the women of his house. And he
contributed almost regularly to the _Pekin Gazette_ and at long
intervals to _Le Journal Asiatique_--in French, of course.
The hour-glass--he had turned it when Sing Kung Yah had left him--was
running down; almost was run.
Wu rose, and stood looking out into his garden, saying good-night to
it something as Nang Ping had said “good-by” to hers four mornings
ago--saying good-night, for it would be dark when Mrs. Gregory left him.
He had no doubt that she would come.
He turned from the window, and walked gravely into the next room, where
he intended--in less than an hour now--to receive his guest.
It was a curious room: Chinese, but with some differences from other
Chinese rooms. For this man dared to tamper with custom when it suited
his convenience, and to modify an architecture that had been unaltered
almost since Kublai Khan ordered every grave in China to be plowed up
remorselessly, and so made room for homes and crops for the living,
till then out-crowded by the honorable dead.
This was a very beautiful room, and so richly furnished that its
opulence must have been oppressive had it been less beautiful, its
taste less distinguished.
Essentially and strikingly like Nang Ping’s room, unlike hers it
was not so exclusively Chinese, and it was more nearly crowded. The
Chinese--like all Orientals--are fantastic collectors, even of European
flotsam and jetsam, though more discriminatingly so than the Turk, the
Indian, or the Japanese. In the remotest yamên in Honan or Kwei Chau
you may find a Dresden vase, a music-box from Geneva, a silver dish
from Regent Street, and--most probably of all--half a dozen clocks,
made anywhere from Newhaven, Connecticut to Novgorod, and all ticking
away together, but quite independently, and all giving a different lie
to the old dial in the sunny Chinese garden. (There were eighty-five
clocks--and all “going”--in one of the Pekin throne-rooms.) But you are
not apt to find, except in the poorer quarters of the treaty ports, the
gimcrack chandeliers and tawdry vases, Europe-made, which will astonish
and shame you in a palace in Patialla or Kashmere.
Wu had collected in princely fashion during his years in Europe.
There was a Venetian harp, a German grand piano, and an English
organ in an adjacent music-room. And in this, the smaller of
his own reception rooms, there were several European treasures.
Unlike most Chinese rooms, this was carpeted, not with one of the
beautiful native carpets, but with a great mat of silk and mellow
splendor--Constantinople was the poorer since Wu had purchased it.
It was an octagonal room--perhaps the only one in China--and when all
the sliding panels were closed its only ventilation came from a small
window or opening high up against the ceiling. The panels were made
to slide back or up, and out of sight; each was in the center of one
of the apartment’s eight walls, and cut into about half of the wall’s
width. The widest panel was open wide, and through it Wu could see his
garden, with all its pretty architecture of pagoda, bridge, pavilion
and “tinkly temple bells,” all its lush and flush of flowers, all its
affected labyrinth of yellow path and costly forests of dwarf trees,
and, beyond the garden, the bay, terraced Hong Kong, the imperial
Chinese sky.
The room was furnished in ebony, as costly and as carved as ebony could
be made. There were no chairs, but several stools. A stool stood on
each side of the moderately-sized square table, behind which stood the
most noticeable article in the room--the huge bronze gong, swinging in
a frame of chiselled ebony lace and silver and onyx, which no hand but
the mandarin’s ever struck.
There were several cabinets, Chinese masterpieces, holding china and
bric-à-brac, chiefly Chinese and all priceless.
Chinese antiquities of every description were on the walls and on
narrow tables against the walls--bronze from Soochow, porcelain from
Kintêching, cornelians from Luchow cut into gods and reptiles, jades
from the quarries of Central Asia, bowls, weapons, vases, statues,
armor, a piece of Satsuma that Yeddo could not match.
There were two scrolls inscribed with lofty sentiments Tze-Shi
herself had brushed one, and Kwang-Hsu had given it to Wu with his
yellow-jacket. Aside from its imperial association it was very
beautiful--even a European could see that, and Bradley had spent
much covetous time gazing on it--for in all China, where the cult of
“handwriting” is an obsession, no one has ever written more beautifully
than her majesty. The other said in the original Arabic, “Es-salam
aleika.” (John Bradley had another verse from the same Sura over his
bed.)
And, as in Nang Ping’s room, there was just one picture--this one a
bird perched on a spray of azalea painted by Ting Yüch’uan.
Wu prostrated himself before the altar which proclaimed the owner’s
importance. He had come here to do worse than butchery, but to do it
as a priest--to sacrifice to his gods and to his ancestors, to scourge
in their service a woman who had never injured him or them, as much as
to scourge a man who had; but he had vocation in his heart rather than
personal vengeance--and such is Chinese justice.
Fantastic--is it not?--the Chinese code that ennobles and flagellates
the dead ancestors and the living kindred in punishment of the raw
present sin! And yet, even for it, there is a poor, feeble something to
be said. We dig down into the earth and uproot the diseased tree, burn
it _all_, search out and burn, too, its suckers and its saplings
lest all our orchard suffer worm-breeding blight.
From an alabaster box, gold-lined, he took a handful of yellow powder,
dribbled it into the tiny saucer of sacred oil burning before the
tablet, and as the pungent blue flames hissed up, prostrated himself
again, and knelt for a long time--in prayer.
When he rose Ah Sing had entered, and stood waiting to say, “Your
honorable instructions have been obeyed.”
“Good,” Wu said grimly, throwing more powder, from a different box, on
to the votive oil. A thin smoke curled up, thickening as it rose into
perfumed clouds that broke in waves of jade hues until all the room was
a glow of green.
“Bring him now!” the mandarin said, seating himself beside the table
and waiting with an expressionless face.
Ah Sing said something to a servant waiting outside the door through
which he had come, and presently feet came along the passage. They were
bringing Basil Gregory to Wu Li Chang.
They had not met or exchanged a message since Wu had bent and gathered
up Nang Ping where she had swooned at Basil’s feet. Since then no
slightest message from the outer world had reached the prisoner in the
pagoda. Wu’s servants had brought him food, and, on the second night,
even a rug; but not once had they spoken to him or appeared to hear
what he said to them.
The hours in the pagoda had marked him. And--why not? Those other hours
there had marked Nang Ping down to doom. The man does not go scot-free.
Never! That is immemorial fallacy. Nature would be full-moon mad if
that were so--and nature is very wise and sane, as wise as she is old.
The partners foot the bill both--always. Nang Ping had paid her share.
Now he was paying his.
He looked ill and haggard, and his wrists were bound together. Two
Chinese servants stood guarding him, close on either side. Almost at
the threshold Ah Sing halted the three.
Basil Gregory had no doubt that he was about to die and little hope
that he would not be tortured first. And the horrors of Chinese
tortures lose little hideousness in the telling at English clubs in
China. Basil was abjectly tormented.
The mandarin sat and studied his prisoner curiously. His lip curled,
and his soul. What had his daughter, bred for centuries from China’s
best and finest, descended from Wu Sankwei and from the two supreme
Sages, and who might well have made an Imperial marriage, seen in this?
He had known such slight men by the dozens and twenties at Oxford,
scant-minded, uncultured, clad like popinjays; and for this--this
English nothing, this manling thing too slight for Wu Li Chang’s hate,
almost unworth his crushing--she had made the father that had adored
and cherished her grandsire to a mongrel of shame. The pain at Wu
Li Chang’s heart was greater and gnawed sharper than that at Basil
Gregory’s. The Chinese was the bigger man, and paid the bigger penalty.
And Nang Ping had died for this: degraded herself beneath Chinese
forgiveness, beyond pity, for this: disgraced him, her father, and the
great ancestry of a thousand years for this! _This!_--and she
might have been the bride of a _man_!--loved as he had loved her
mother, cherished as he had cherished Wu Lu--and the mother of sons,
honorable, love-begotten Chinese sons!
Almost Wu Li Chang’s Chinese imperturbability cracked under his strain.
His sorrow and his rage panted in his throat, battled, almost squealed
aloud. But he was master yet a little, and he said smoothly, “Well, are
your thumbs more comfortable?”
“If I were only free, I’d throttle you.” Basil said it, of course, to
cover his own terror--but, too, he meant it. He was insanely angry
with Wu. The offender rarely forgives!
“The heated language of youth!” the mandarin said with contemptuous
patronage. “But I will be indulgent. You will admit, I think,
that, so far, you have been dealt with leniently--considering the
resourcefulness usually attributed to us in the matter of ingenious
torture.”
“I presume you have not yet exhausted your ingenuity,” Gregory said
with sullen, trembling lips.
“By no means,” was the bland reply.
“And that is why I am brought here; I supposed so.”
“Partly,” the Chinese replied coldly; “also to prepare you for a shock.”
“Death”--Basil tried to say it stoically. And, too, since it was to
come, it would almost be welcome in place of such suspense.
“Nothing so pleasant,” Wu replied.