THE VALLEY OF EYES UNSEEN
By GILBERT COLLINS
AUTHOR OF "FLOWER OF ASIA."
LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.2.
_First published in 1923._
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
_Made and printed in Great Britain by
The Birmingham Printers, Ltd.,
42-44, Hill Street and 82-84, Station Street,
Birmingham._
DEDICATION
TO BROADER UNDERSTANDING, DEEPER SYMPATHY,
AND UNTHREATENED PEACE
BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF EAST AND WEST
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.
THE VALLEY OF EYES UNSEEN
PROLOGUE
The tale begins in my rooms in Peking, in the north of China,
one bitter January morning many years ago. The scene is stamped
ineffaceably on my recollection, so that even without the help of
certain confirmatory details, such as the overturning of the coffee
pot, I am able to say with certainty that the hour of day was breakfast
time. The breakfast table was the central point of a triangle, formed
by the blazing fire in the grate and two ponderous oil stoves farther
out in the room; for this was in the punishing old days before that
gift of the gods, the steam-heated radiator, came to soften the arctic
rigours of a North China winter.
My number-one house boy had brought in the morning paper and laid it on
my table, but it was without any lively anticipation of delight that I
picked up the straw-blemished, hazily printed sheet. The local press
of the time was not of enthralling interest; and what news of the
outer world filtered through to our buried corner of Asia in erratic
dribbles was apt to be still further marred by the bold but not always
illuminating innovations of the Chinese compositors in setting English
type. I was idly turning over the spavined issue of this morning when
something caught my eye in the middle column of the middle page. A
moment later the sheet was fluttering to the floor, and a river of
boiling coffee sluiced out over the cloth of the breakfast table.
I picked up the fallen newspaper and began to read. The age-yellowed
sheet lies before me as I write, and the following, save for numerous
typographical errors which I have not copied, is an exact transcript of
the report that had given me this sudden start:--
"MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR IN SHANGHAI.
"DISTINGUISHED ORIENTALIST DEAD, IS REPORT.
"Our Shanghai correspondent writes: 'Mr. Ronald Mirlees, the
well-known author, was discovered dead in the Marco Polo Hotel of
this city, this morning about eight o'clock, under circumstances of
considerable mystery. The deceased was well known to the management
and staff, having frequently stayed at Marco Polo before, in
the intervals between his journeys to other localities of China
on research work. It is believed he had just returned from one
such expedition three months back, when he took possession of
the two first-storey rooms he was occupying at the time of his
death. Mr. Mirlees lived apparently much alone, hotel servants
state, remaining busy at work in his apartment all day and barely
desisting from his labours to take meals which were brought up to
him; indeed, house boy whose duty it was to attend to Mr. Mirlees
alleges that more than once he found the scholar at work in the
early morning, his bed not slept in; from which it is assumed at
the hotel that Mirlees was for some reason or other working against
time to complete one of those contributions to oriental research
with which his name has become associated.
"'When house boy entered Mr. Mirlees' apartment this morning he
found deceased at his writing desk apparently deep in composition.
Deceased's back was turned to the door, and not until the servant
had asked Mr. Mirlees what time to serve breakfast and received no
reply that he suspected anything was untoward. Then he approached
and saw. The boy becoming terror-stricken screamed for help, and
other servants rushed in, followed by Mr. Alexis Delabre (Manager,
Marco Polo Hotel), who overheard the boy's cries. Medical aid was
at once summoned, but quite unavailing, death having apparently
supervened several hours before as muscles of deceased were already
set fast in _rigor mortis_. Witnesses one and all lay especial
emphasis on gruesome nature of the discovery. The body, they
allege, was placed in so natural and lifelike an attitude that
until spectators had come right across the apartment and looked
from that side they were unable to credit they were looking upon a
corpse. Expression on features of dead man is stated to have been
one of extreme horror, not pain--witnesses are unanimous upon that
point--but sheer and unmistakable horror. Mr. Mirlees held a pen
in one hand and there were sheets of paper before him, but no mark
upon them. There, in fact, lies another mysterious feature of the
case. No trace can be found of the voluminous writings upon which
Mr. Mirlees is lately known to have been engaged. Only possible
explanation would appear to be that prior to his decease he had
forwarded his manuscripts elsewhere, and that he was meditating
composition of another when death overtook him. Medical evidence,
however, places hour of decease about two a.m., and why the defunct
man should remain at his desk far into the night without putting
pen to paper is another point which remains shrouded in obscurity.
"'No cause so far has been assigned for Mr. Mirlees' sudden end,
and the strange and tragic affair will of course necessitate
coroner's inquest. Mr. Mirlees was thought to be enjoying good
health, though his manner had been observed to be moody and
distraught for some time, as if he were prey to some severe mental
stress; this, however, is alleged by those who knew deceased
orientalist best to have been a not uncommon mood with him.'"
"Mr. Ronald Mirlees was a widower, having lost his wife in Shanghai
some years back, and so far as is known leaves no relatives to
mourn his loss. His death will be keenly felt among scholarly
circles of the Far East, however, and indeed of the East
generally, to whose researches in oriental art and archæology he
contributed matter of recognised value, though not a few of our
prominent sinologues were disposed to regard Mr. Mirlees' essays
as more brilliant and imaginative than sound. His best known and
most characteristic work was the volume entitled _Treasure of
Asia_, which appeared only last year, and as is no doubt still
fresh in the minds of our readers aroused a storm of controversy
not only on this side of the world, but also among the learned
societies of Europe and America. At the risk of repeating facts
already known we will here state that Mr. Mirlees' work embodies
much original matter of deep interest concerning the Buddhist
faith and Buddhist temples of China, dealing more particularly,
as the title indicates, with instances of treasure buried in and
around the ancient shrines. The deceased author's critics, and
there were many, challenged his statements on grounds of fact,
alleging that no authentic evidence of these supposed hoards
exists, and especially on the score of propriety, as they feared
that Mr. Mirlees' allegations would have the unfortunate effect of
attracting to this country an undesirable class of treasure-hunters
who would desecrate religious sites in the mere hope of gain. We
are happy to record that this fear has not been realised. Such
excavations as have been made have been carried out under the
auspices of duly authorised oriental societies, and though the
finds so far brought to light have not been extensive, they have
afforded considerable proof of the shrewdness and accuracy of Mr.
Mirlees' speculations. It is admitted at least that the deceased
scholar had opened up a branch of study of peculiar fascination: a
line of research which if not absolutely new, has so far never been
sufficiently explored; and there seems reason to anticipate that
later excavations will still further vindicate his arresting and
outspoken views.
"Mr. Mirlees had something of the scholarly recluse in his
disposition, and was personally known to but few residents in this
country; he was, nevertheless, well liked and admired by such as
were privileged to enjoy his friendship, and his death while still
in the prime of life--he was in his thirty-seventh year--will be
universally deplored."
The foregoing item of news came to me with a peculiar poignancy and
shock. I was one of those few persons quoted in the report as having
enjoyed the privilege of Mirlees' friendship. I had not known him
intimately, it is true, or for any great stretch of time, but there are
circumstances which cement friendship more swiftly by far than mere
knowledge of a man's history and companionship with him in the common
workaday run of the world. If to have shared a strange and perilous
adventure and to have escaped with him a horrible death by violence
be title to friendship, I was indeed the friend of Ronald Mirlees.
The details of this affair I have recorded elsewhere, and need not
recount at any length here. It is enough to say that after making
Mirlees' acquaintance in the queerest and most unconventional manner
I accompanied him on an expedition to an ancient Buddhist temple
some forty miles out from the city of Peking, where, by deciphering
the inscription carved on the inner surface of the great temple bell,
Mirlees hoped to locate a rich hoard of buried gems, an offering
to the shrine by some pious donor of the remote past. How we were
received by the last surviving priest of the sect, how he most subtly
and devilishly plotted to murder us both, how he lost his own life in
the attempt and was even instrumental in directing us straight to the
cache, and how we took possession and escaped with our bare lives,
pursued by a band of the local peasantry out to kill--these matters, as
I say, have been chronicled in another place.
After that episode Mirlees returned to Shanghai, which he was wont to
make his headquarters, and I heard no more of him until the publication
of that remarkable book entitled _Treasure of Asia_ sent his name
whooping round the erudite world. Our North China adventure was not
specifically recorded in that work: I imagine that Mirlees judged the
affair too recent to be safely alluded to, fearing lest our ownership
of the treasure trove be disputed; but it unquestionably afforded to
himself, if he needed such, a crowning proof of the soundness of his
views, to say nothing of ample funds wherewith to meet the expense of
publication.
The report of the inquest came a few days after the news of Mirlees'
death. Nothing had been found to account satisfactorily for this,
and the medicos were obliged to wrap their ignorance in a few foggy
generalities regarding obscure affections of the heart. The finding
would have far from satisfied public opinion at Home. It left me
distinctly sceptical even in so raw and haphazard a region as the
Far East. There was something hidden, some mystery left unravelled.
Mirlees' age had been correctly stated in the newspaper report as only
thirty-six years; he was, moreover, of that "hard-bitten" type which,
if it dies young, does so only by a violent or unnatural death.
I was still pondering the melancholy problem a week later when I
received from a firm of solicitors in Shanghai a letter stating that in
pursuance of the request made to them some days before by their client,
the late Ronald Mirlees, they were forwarding to me, separately, a
parcel which he had left in their charge. The lawyers added that while
respecting the promise Mirlees had extracted from them not to reveal
this matter to any third party, they relied on my honour to make public
any evidence the parcel might contain which would help the authorities
to arrive at some conclusion regarding Mr. Mirlees' mysterious death.
Of the contents of the package they themselves were totally ignorant.
A day after that the parcel arrived. I tore off the outer covering and
found inside it a bundle wrapped in stout oilskin, sealed at every
point and so enmeshed in cords that I could scarcely read the legend
on the two labels. They were addressed to me in a curiously scrawled
writing, and when I had taken off this cover, there dropped out a
small fat envelope in the same hand, but more recognisable to my eye.
It was, so far as I could remember, the writing of Ronald Mirlees.
"Dear Hugh Jevons" (ran the missive)--
"It becomes necessary that you should step in to help me a second
time--and a last time--in my life. I have not forgotten how you helped
me before. You were a solid man to me then, and it is proof enough.
I believe you a solid man still that I have picked upon you to be
custodian of my confidences now that I can no longer hold them myself.
You will understand what I mean, as you read on.
"In the first place, my number is up. I see death approaching as
clearly as you look to the rise of to-morrow's sun. But I do not intend
that my secret shall die with me. Some other human being must carry
on the knowledge I have gained during the past year, for I feel there
is more in my experience than mere marvel and mystery and adventure.
I feel, I _know_, that there is a purpose at work behind it all: that
the Great Artificer who planted us, bickering insects, upon this planet
never willed that such truths as I have unearthed should sink back
into oblivion after a man of the real, outer world has penetrated to
them--and sacrificed his life in the doing. It wouldn't square with my
idea of the Great Artificer.
"Not for your scholarship or your knowledge of the East have I chosen
you to be legatee of my secrets--you would hardly flatter yourself that
far. I was under no illusion as to your qualifications for partnering
me before--but you partnered me handsomely, for all that. You were
ready to listen to my theories at a time when men with far bigger
pretensions pooh-poohed them; you were intelligent enough to let my
brains do duty for the pair of us. The orthodox oriental societies were
not always that intelligent. For them, those pretty stones we picked
out from under the ruin of Lao Tien Ssu would be there now, and the
book which is my chief claim to be remembered would languish still in
manuscript. I must have told you that was how I utilised the bulk of
my share in the loot? Anyway, it was. _You_ helped me to the ownerless
gems, comrade. _You_ had a hand in financing _Treasure of Asia_. _You_,
therefore, have assisted materially in throwing light on this dim-lit
quarter of the globe. I've known respected God-fearing professional
orientalists who couldn't say as much--without a lie.
"Now I claim a bigger service of you. I've instructed my lawyers to
send you this packet only after my death. It was a pretty blistering
oath I collected from the senior partner of the firm, and I think he'll
respect it. What I want done with the manuscript is another story.
I will be perfectly frank with you. I consider it to be a dangerous
thing--unless rightfully used. You wouldn't carry fulminate of mercury
about in your pocket, would you? Well, I regard this manuscript as more
deadly than fulminate of mercury. I solemnly assure you that I believe
death began to close in upon me from the moment I resolved to make
a record of the events with which this manuscript deals. It sounds
fantastic, does it not? Perhaps you will alter your opinion as you read
on.
"But, you may ask, since I am convinced I am to die in any event, why
do I not publish the manuscript now? I answer that it is in the nature
of an act of submission. I swore to keep these matters secret from the
world. In intention, I broke my oath. The punishment at once gathered
over my head. I acquiesce in the justice of it. It is the difference
between the criminal who confesses on the scaffold and the coward
who professes innocence to the end, between dying contrite and dying
in revolt. I have chosen the former course. It still sounds wild and
incredible? That view, too, I think you will come to abandon.
"But, you say again, was it a comradely act to pass the narrative on
to you? I reply, not uncomradely. The detonator is harmless enough in
a situation where it cannot be touched off. So with this manuscript.
I am convinced, nay, certain, that no danger threatens you so long as
you hold the secret close in your own bosom. It is no blind unreasoning
malignance we have to deal with, but a sentient power, and as I now
see, a just one, meting out punishment only where there is guilt. I
have been guilty: therefore I am doomed. You, so long as you keep the
secret, are guiltless: you will be unharmed. Why, then, have I not
destroyed the manuscript and with it the risk of betrayal? Because, as
I have written before, I do not believe it was intended that the secret
should perish utterly for the outer world. Perhaps, in years to come,
the powers which forbade me to reveal these matters will lift the veto.
Should that occur, have no doubt that they will find means to convey
their will to you, they, who have found no difficulty in making known
to me, over a distance of untold miles, that I must die.
"Till then, comrade, lock this secret in the innermost recesses of
your soul. Hold the manuscript safe. Leave nothing to chance. Deposit
it under seal with your bankers or your lawyers, with instructions
that nothing is to be done with it without your express command, and
that should you die without giving that command, the package is to be
destroyed unopened. For I say again that there is a doom in it, a doom
which I now see approach me as clearly as I see from the window of this
hotel the big, butt-ended freighters swinging on the tide of Whangpu
River.
"As to the manuscript, every word in it is as true as our finite human
brains can know aught to be true. Nothing is written but what I have
seen with my own eyes or heard with my own ears. The narrative will
amaze you, doubtless, but I give you credit for the intelligence not
to meet it with a stupid unreasoning denial. Let me appeal to you to
put aside all your preconceived notions as to what is and what is not
in this queer, half-known quarter of the earth. Above all, banish
from your mind the least shadow of suspicion that I am either mad or
insincere. I am as sane as you are, and in dead earnest. Consider
the probabilities. Is it for one instant to be supposed that I, who
see death hard upon me, should write a monstrous hoax?--that I, who
came East when I was little more than a boy and have given my whole
working life to the search for hard facts regarding the East, should
now fritter my last hours on mere romance of the imagination?--that I,
who have boldly stated the truth as I found it, even though this often
exposed me to hostility and derision from the orthodox, timid-minded
scholars of this land, should abandon truth for falsehood at a moment
when I am due to appear before a Higher Tribunal which knows nothing
but eternal truth?
"I take my leave of you with every warm wish for your happiness. I am,
I may say, without kin of my own, and at about the time this package
arrives you will receive from the same firm of lawyers a notification
that I have named you my heir to such small parcels of this world's
goods as I possess. The property consists almost wholly of personal
effects, trophies, curios--some of them valuable, by the way--and
the copyright of my published works. The more precious part of my
belongings goes with this letter. I offer it to you not as proof of
the truth of my narrative, but as a gift made in good fellowship to a
comrade who risked his life with me in a quest few men in the world
would have taken on. But there is a condition attaching to the legacy.
I charge you that if at any future date it becomes possible, in the
manner I have hinted, for you to publish this manuscript, you should
do so, using what may be necessary of the proceeds from sale of the
contents of the accompanying box. Even should you print the narrative
on gold leaf and bind it in choicest silk, there will still be left
money enough to maintain you in luxury to the end of your days.
"Good-bye.
"Ronald Mirlees, known as Ran Mirlees, Master of Arts in the University
of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now resident in the Marco Polo Hotel,
Shanghai, China, this first day of January in the year of Our Lord
19--."
Enclosed in the package was a heavy skin box, about eight inches square
by four high. I opened this with a small key hanging by silk thread
from the lid, and at once sat back in my chair gasping and blinking
with astonishment. The casket was full to the brim with large uncut
diamonds, not one of them smaller than a marble and all apparently of
very fine quality. My skill in gems was not professional, but I could
see at a glance that these stones must be worth many thousands of
pounds sterling; and if I had been curious to read Mirlees' manuscript
before, now my eagerness was whipped to the point of fever. I tore off
the wrappings from the close-writ ten quarto sheets and began to peruse
them.
The house boy came in with a note from Randegger (my partner at the
office) inquiring rather acidly if I was ill. I looked up at the
clock. It was two in the afternoon. I then remembered that the boy
had entered the room some time before but that I had ordered him out
without hearing what he had to say. That must have been at tiffin
time: I had been reading for four hours solid, lost to all else in the
world. I sent a note to Randegger pleading urgent private affairs,
and resumed the reading of Mirlees' narrative. It was dark before I
had finished, for the manuscript, though not of an inordinate length,
was written, till quite near the end, in Mirlees' crabbed, scholarly,
meticulously fashioned hand, and did not admit of a rapid perusal. Nor
was the subject matter of a sort to encourage skipping. As I worked
from phase to phase of the amazing story it seemed to me that never
before in the history of written words could so strange, so incredible,
yet withal so convincing a record of events have been placed on paper.
Time after time I flung down the manuscript almost in anger--only to
pick it up a moment later and find the precise spot where I had left
off. Now I felt that I was in the grip of a tale of such force as only
the hall-mark of truth can give, now I seemed to be listening to the
ingenious but wild fancies of a madman. Here was human experience set
at naught, the history which has passed as certainty for two thousand
years brusquely picked up and thrown down gutted like cod under the
fishmonger's knife--and on what evidence? The statements of one man,
unsupported by a single witness. It was monstrous, unthinkable! No sane
person could have offered such testimony. It is a commonplace saying
that genius may come near to insanity. Mirlees possessed the brilliant,
bold, penetrating type of intellect which we are in the habit of
calling genius--that I had felt during my previous encounter with him.
Surely towards these his last days his brain had given way, and this
screed I was now perusing was the reflection not of his observations
and experience but of the disordered fancies of an unbalanced mind?
I came to the end of the manuscript and laid it down with a great
wave of pity for the dead man. As I did so, once more there caught my
eye the box of uncut diamonds, their brilliancy darting irrepressibly
through the crust of impurities that overlaid them. At least the writer
had vouchsafed some solid support for his statements, though he had
appealed to me not to regard the gems as such, or even to require proof
beyond his own written words.
Of the circumstances under which this amazing record is now laid before
the world I have written later. Of the truth and sanity, or otherwise,
of Mirlees' assertions, it shall be left to the reader to judge.
Here, then, follows the narrative of Ronald Mirlees, exactly
transcribed from his own manuscript which I received from the dead
man's lawyers more than thirteen years ago.
CHAPTER I
THE AFFAIR OF THE OPIUM HELL
My name is Ronald Mirlees, or Ran Mirlees as I have usually signed
myself under those contributions to the learned press of the East by
which I have chiefly picked up a living, and through which I am known
to a good deal wider circle of readers than ever I possessed friends.
I was born thirty-six years ago, son of a schoolmaster, on the fringes
of Paisley, in Scotland. After completing my schooling in that town
and my course at the University of Edinburgh, where I took the degree
of Master of Arts, I came to the East, a region of the globe which had
deeply fascinated me from boyhood up.
Arrived here, I at once plunged into the study of eastern languages
and history and religion which I had begun at Home, earning my bread
the while by odd jobs of journalism--though not always the brand of
journalism I should have chosen if I hadn't been starving when I did
it. Those early days were about the most desperately thin period of
a life which has never run to fat. Later on my name got to be better
known, and my pen better paid, and I might in time have aspired to a
sedate competence if I had been able to purvey the kind of orientology
the public expects. Unfortunately, I wasn't. That sort of orientology
I found to be too full of elementary error, too much given to vague
and shallow report compiled in the study with the help of other men's
books, to commend itself to me. I soon saw that such things as native
life and the native point of view couldn't be soundly written about by
any man who had not gone _fantee_ himself, for the information gets
very distorted even when it comes through the medium of servants and
hired teachers and the tame type of native who prides himself on his
foreign friends. The art of living "native" was about the first I set
myself to learn when I came to the country, and ever afterwards, when
I wanted facts, I dived into the raw mass of yellow humanity to get
those facts direct, and I passed them on exactly as they had come to
me. It was good orientology, but bad policy for a penniless journalist
largely dependent on the favour of his fellow scholars to get work at
all. I became an "outsider," a blackleg, in more or less perpetual bad
odour. It was annoying, naturally, for the accepted authorities to
have certain of their pet mis-statements, which had been handed down
from generation to generation after being blindly cribbed in the first
place from the writings of some sinologue long dead, abruptly exploded
by that one real, first-hand, naked fact I had collected from the
folk of the Far East in person. The wider my knowledge and experience
grew, the more of these venerable bearded errors I found it necessary
to kill off, and my popularity in learned circles steadily dwindled.
The culminating point came when I published my best known and least
conciliatory work under the title of _Treasure of Asia_. Every scholar
in the land, and a host of people who couldn't by any stretch of the
word be called scholars, attacked this hapless book virulently, yet
even within the past year facts have come to light which go far to
confirm those I had written.
The book brought me fame, or at least notoriety, but little else.
Certainly not money. Indeed, to the best of my belief, I lost
substantially over it. I never could give business correspondence the
applied study it no doubt deserves, and I'm afraid my publisher's
letters remained for the most part on my mantelpiece, half skimmed
through, wholly undigested, eventually to become spills. I have an
uncertain recollection of his telling me once that to produce _Treasure
of Asia_ the way I wanted it produced would mean selling the book
at a loss. Perhaps that's what happened. I cared little, for at the
beginning of our dealings I was, strangely enough, well off, as the
result of a risky but highly profitable investigation I had carried out
some months before. The proceeds of that adventure took wings and flew.
Soon I found myself drifting again towards the impecuniousness that has
been my normal condition through life. Also, I was getting restless,
short of patience, dissatisfied with the one bed I was sleeping in
night after night. Arrangements to publish _Treasure of Asia_ had
confined me a good deal to the European quarter of Shanghai, a city
for which I never harboured any great love, and I felt once more the
stirrings that have so often driven me up country to the wild interior.
I wanted to see life raw and naked again, to wrestle another fall with
those yet unprobed mysteries of the East that have always held such a
profound, half-grim fascination for me. My wife had died several years
before, and with her passed out the one tie that could have reconciled
me to fixture in one humdrum existence; since her death, indeed,
I'd been a planet with a zigzag orbit, halted only by shortage of
funds--and not always that.
I come now to my last adventure, beside which whatever I had met before
in the way of queer experience--and my life has embraced some very
queer experience--seems tameness itself: an adventure surely stranger
and wilder than ever fell to the lot of another man living or dead.
Let me say at the starting out that this narrative which follows is
literally true from beginning to end. It may, if ever it sees the light
of day, be disbelieved; it may even be laughed down as the vapourings
of a lunatic. That will not detract one jot from its truth. If I have
dwelt at length on my previous record, it is only for the purpose of
making my real position clear, and letting any reader of this narrative
see that if I have been regarded in the past as no true authority on
oriental matters, that was not because of my failure to write facts
about the East, but of my resolute refusal to perpetuate accepted
errors. Let this suffice for the present. Later on the time must
come when wider knowledge and exacter exploration will vindicate my
assertions up to the hilt.
* * * * *
It was a hot, moist, stifling evening of May. A dun haze lay heavy over
the river, where native junks and sampans and steam tugs were churning
the oily water into an evil-smelling froth the colour of coffee. Seldom
had the city of Shanghai so revolted me, and as I strolled along the
crowded Bund I reflected that I would give a king's ransom--if I
had it--to get out into open country or open sea and away from this
strident, feverish, dollar-grubbing prison on Whangpu River.
My footsteps led me to the side of Soochow Creek, across the bridge
and northward and eastward, beyond banks and wharves and godowns, into
a locality I remembered from having visited before, though I don't
suppose I could have mapped it with any pretension to accuracy. Nor
did I pay great heed to my direction, for I was weary, washed out
with boredom and the sickening, stewy heat, and walked slowly and
aimlessly. In time I found myself penetrating deeper and deeper into
a dense warren of native dives, cranky houses bulging out over the
grimy, narrow, snaking, flagged lanes and leaning one upon another
this way or that, like a row of soused revellers arm in arm. I must
have wandered some way through this maze, for it was now twilight, a
twilight still further deepened by the beetling houses and shop signs
in Chinese character which often hung so thick as to blot out entirely
the twisting riband of sky overhead. Then I came to that blind alley
which, though I little dreamed it then, was to prove the threshold of
the biggest and queerest adventure of my life.
Though hazy on a point of geography, I knew something of this
neighbourhood, with its opium-dens and gambling hells, and I
hesitated some minutes before advancing. That narrow cut seemed to
leave the wholesome world all behind it. There might be interesting
matters ahead, I felt, but there would very possibly be more danger
than interest, particularly for a man in European clothes. Almost
unthinkingly I ran my hand over the hip of my pongees. It seemed a
downright fatality. I wasn't in the habit of carrying firearms in a
city the size of Shanghai--unless I had some definite objective which
I knew to be risky. To-night I had nothing, yet some vague impulse or
other had caused me to slip a revolver into my pocket before coming out
from the hotel. That shooting-iron was at least as good an argument
as I could have on my side if I happened to get into an overheated
discussion, and it decided me to go forward.
The end of the alley was completely blocked by a double folding
door, with boss-shaped brass lock of native pattern. On this portal
I knocked. There was no reply. Then I tried the "opium-den" rat-tat,
a bit of special knowledge I had often found effective in the past.
Still the door remained close shut; but for certain muffled sounds of
revelry beyond it I should have concluded there was nobody to answer
my summons. At last, however, one half of the door came a few inches
ajar, and a puckered yellow face showed in the chink. Here, too,
there seemed an odd hint of the fatalistic. I'd never been to this
den before, yet I recognised the doorkeeper at once--perhaps from
some former visit to a dive of similar kind. The doorkeeper likewise
recognised me, and after some hesitation allowed me to enter.
There was a small porch behind the door, plunged in pitch dark, through
which we passed into the den itself. It was of the usual pattern
for places of the sort, but a good deal larger, and had also about
it palpable signs of foreign influence. The walls were lined with
squalid-looking couches, where natives in all degrees of robustness or
decrepitude reclined drowsily over their opium pipes, but the nave of
the dim-lit hall was dotted here and there with ramshackle tables and
chairs after the fashion of a European drinking hell, and at one end
was, apparently, a low stage, now screened off by a silk curtain across
which yellow dragons were chasing wisps of conventional whorled cloud.
Manifestly this half-breed den was wont to cater not so much for the
unsophisticated native as for the sea-going, semi-Europeanised type,
and for that queer underworld of foreigners of the beach-combing class.
Hence the dramatic stage and the grotesquely incongruous restaurant
tables, and the "fire-water" which I saw--and smelt even above the
sickly reek of opium--to be on sale in the place.
I sat down at one of the tables nearest the back of the hall, while a
boy brought me tea and melon-pips. He had proposed fire-water first,
but I thought not. The European who starts to swallow that unholy
preparation may as well throw in his hand. After a while an eerie
wailing of native violins rose from somewhere to one side of the stage,
and the curtain was drawn crosswise, revealing a girl posed for the
dance. She would have presented, to anybody enamoured of the type, an
attractively exotic figure, her long brown-black hair flowing loose,
her lithe limbs swaying to and fro with the evil grace of a snake,
her oblique almond-shaped eyes half closed, and small round breasts
heaving with an air of drugged passion. The dance was little more than
a succession of postures, involved, elaborate, voluptuous, sometimes
intentionally indelicate; and having watched many exhibitions of the
kind before, I was not a little weary of it by the end. This came in
the middle of an unusually plaintive scrape of the fiddles; the girl
broke off suddenly and sank to the stage in a tinkle of jewellery, amid
grunts of "_Hao! Hao!_" from all quarters. Then the company resumed
its pipes, and the grumble of talk that had slackened ever so slightly
during the dance grew loud again.
There were several other performances on the primitive stage, but
nothing that I could see of any novelty or interest, and I was sinking
steadily deeper into boredom. I'd already made up my mind to clear
out and look for adventure elsewhere, and was rising to do so, when
there came under my eye the first sight to hold it that evening. By
this time the room had filled up--though I could see no foreigner
besides myself--and taken on a brisker air. Some few of the smokers,
it is true, had dropped asleep and lay in queerly twisted attitudes
across the side-couches, but others had come instead to the stage of
exaltation. They sat up on the foot of the beds, drank from the chipped
water jug which a boy was carrying round, and breathed in deeply, with
that wild dilation of the eyes and glare of ecstasy of the opium fiend
which always, though I have seen it often enough to get hardened,
strikes me as such a loathsome distortion of the human countenance.
But it wasn't the opium smokers that had trapped my attention. What I
was looking at was a table a little way from mine, where two Chinese
sat in the most earnest conversation. You wouldn't have thought this
dive, given over as it was to amusement of a sort and debauchery of
a worse, was any manner of a place to do business in, but this pair
appeared to think so, for there they sat whispering and nodding and
wagging fingers at one another for all the world as if it were a
question of dethroning the Emperor. They were so placed that I had a
profile view of both faces, and even by the bad light of the place
I could see that one of these men was rather handsome, uncommonly
so for a Chinese, and handsome, too, with that queer approach to
the European type of beauty which will crop out now and again among
well-bred Chinks; whereas the other was of such a repellent ugliness
as not even I, in all my wanderings over the myriad-faced Land of Han,
had ever seen exceeded or even equalled. I watched this ill-assorted
couple slyly, and began to wonder what it could be that engaged them
in such a deedy talk. They spoke in very low whispers, with their
heads close together, and nobody in the room could have caught a word
of what they were saying; but for all that it came to me with a queer
sort of presentiment that there was foul play brewing. I scanned them
more closely. It appeared to me the good-looking Chink was pressing
some request upon the other, urging, arguing, now almost entreating;
but to every advance the ill-favoured fellow returned a stolid if not
absolutely ungracious refusal.
At this point the curtain drew back again from the stage and about half
a dozen girls, a good deal closer to a state of nature, as it seemed
to me, than their art really demanded, began a sort of choric dance
together. The measure started lazily enough, but quickened bit by bit
with the music, rising at last to such a pitch of frenzy that the whole
stage was one blurred whirl of flying beads and naked brown limbs. This
was clearly to be taken as the star show of the evening. Grunts of
approbation came louder and more frequent on all sides. Even the couple
I was watching looked up from their chin-wagging and stared at the odd,
wild spectacle on the stage. At last, with a concerted leap high into
the air, the dancers came to a halt and flung themselves down on to the
boards in a sort of tableau, a dusky picture of unholy seductiveness;
then the curtain was drawn amid loud barks of applause.
The drawing of the curtain threw everything into gloom until lamps
were brought in from somewhere behind the hall. It was in this short
interval of twilight that the ugly Chink made a sudden slight gesture,
as if to somebody at the far side of the room. So unobtrusive was the
movement that had I not been on the alert I should certainly not have
noticed it at all. As it was, the handsome fellow looked to be totally
unaware of anything wrong, for he plunged again into talk as earnest
as ever, while his companion answered him with an air of unshaken
determination. Then I realised the game. A third figure was edging
nearer and nearer the two, and I saw that this man was carrying, half
hidden in his ample sleeve, a stout, heavy bottle. The ugly Chink,
clearly, was talking to hold the attention of the handsome one while
the accomplice approached him from behind--with intent there was no
mistaking.
I called sharply to the prospective quarry, but too late. At this
very instant the lamps were obscured for another act on the stage.
The man with the bottle glided forward and aimed a savage blow at the
good-looking Chink. It fell on the back of his black skull-cap, with a
horrible hollow crack, and the man went down like a log. In a flash the
other had pounced upon him, tearing at his long robe as if to get at
something in the inner folds.
Now I knew well enough that in places of this kind, which are none
too wholesome for a European at the best, it would be sheer lunacy
to interfere in any and every quarrel that might break out between
natives. The only thing to do then is to get into the street, on your
belly if there's shooting or knife-throwing, in any case the quicker
the better. But there was a cold brutality and treachery about this
assault that set my blood boiling and stirred every ounce of the sense
of fair play that was in me. Moreover, I had taken a queer sort of
fancy to the handsome Chinaman. Perhaps it was because he left his
enemies so far behind in the way of looks, but I think also I was
attracted by the air of decency and straightforwardness which he had
and the others certainly had not. Anyway, I had thrown prudence to the
winds in an instant, and taken shares in the row to the full amount of
my capital. I sprang on to the ugly Chink and flung him off his victim,
then picked up the stunned man and backed towards the door with him in
my arms; but the tables and the thick crowd were all against escape
that way. Besides, the bottle man had edged round behind me, and there
I stood, carrying a helpless stranger, midway between two of the ripest
looking scoundrels in Asia. I saw that my one chance would be to get my
back to the wall and hold on until I could attract help, if any, from
outside. It was a slender hope, but the best that occurred to me at the
moment.
I rushed my burden to one of the side-couches and dropped him on to
a sleeping opium smoker, who rolled to the floor with a curse. The
next instant I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and the two Chinks
were making at me from different directions. Luckily, my father had
taught me as a boy the sovereign virtue of a straight left--a bit of
education that has stood me in better stead than all he ever imparted
out of his primers. I hit out, caught the nearest of my attackers on
the point of his weedy chin, and sent him spinning back amongst the
crowd. The other came on, and received a like dissuader from my right.
Neither blow was a true king hit, however, and neither Chink was
anything near knocked out: on the contrary, the setback only seemed
to have whipped up all the venom in the pair of them, and there they
crouched, spitting curses, amongst which I caught the repeated epithet
of "foreign devil." This was disquieting. So far, the sense of the
room seemed to be a sort of armed neutrality, but I knew that if this
villainous partnership succeeded in inflaming popular feeling on the
score of race, I shouldn't last the minute out. I yelled again for the
police, all I knew how.
The bottle man had dropped the bottle, and I caught the glint of a
knife in his hand. I snatched out my revolver. I had intended to use
this only in the last resort, but there was nothing else for it now.
The fellow sprang at me with a hiss, and I distinctly remember how my
slow, erring senses coupled that sound with the flash of the knife as
it swept up in a half-circle. I aimed as low as possible, but there
is no guaranteeing results in an affair like that. I am much afraid
the bullet took my gentleman in the entrails and put a period to his
crimes there and then. He had his revenge, however. With the firing of
that shot the sympathies of the room turned very definitely against
me. There was an ugly movement in the crowd. I swept the front rank
with my gun, and they drew back a little--only a little, but long
enough to allow me to dash forward and snatch the knife out of the dead
man's hand and get back to the couch by the wall. The crowd resented
this move. A howl of rage went up. Those in a position to know say the
howling of an angry Chinese mob is the most terrible sound in this
world, and I agree. The end couldn't be long coming. One rush, and I
must be overwhelmed and meet such a handling as the mind would not
picture. On they came. I fired into the brown--two, three, four, five,
six--and at the last report felt a sudden sharp sting in my wrist and
heard the empty revolver clatter to the floor. Somebody had thrown a
knife.
At this moment, when frankly my chances didn't look worth the hole in
a copper cash, help came from a quarter the very least expected. The
good-looking Chink sat up, as if roused to life by the repeated shots.
He stared about him for the bare fraction of a second, then leapt to
his feet. And now followed the most astonishing phase of the whole
fight. Darting to the nearest of the fallen, my new ally gripped him by
the ankles, and with a miracle of strength I should never have dreamed
possible in a man, jerked the limp body above his head and swung it
round and round. Twice this terrible human club fell, and twice a
swathe of men went down beneath it.
'This way,' he muttered to me in the vernacular, dashing out into the
room. The mob drew back, more from amazement than fear, leaving an
irregular path between the tumbled chairs and tables. I followed close
on my ally's heels. Now we had gained a small door on the far side, to
which he nodded. As I flung it open and dashed through I caught over my
shoulder a glimpse of the human mace swinging aloft again. My companion
had wheeled around, hurled the body at the nearest of the crowd who
were already closing in behind us, and followed me through the open
door, securing it after him.
Together we ran along a short dark corridor, thence out into the open
air. The lane in which we found ourselves was surprisingly broad, and
at the end of it, to my even greater astonishment, stood a petrol car,
a small vehicle, but as it looked to me in the half-lit street, richly
finished and built with an eye to speed. The engine throbbed into life
at the first swing of the crank, and an instant later we had sprung up
and were moving away from the scene of the fight. Our escape, from the
moment when my ally recovered consciousness to the time we boarded the
automobile, cannot have taken more than half a minute; and as I look
back upon it, even after this lapse of months, the whole business seems
like a swift, vivid dream.
For a while the warren-like ways of this unsavoury district were
against us, and I could see, over the folded hood of the car, a dim
swirling mob of pursuers and hear their howling with still that
high-pitched, unmistakable note of murder in it. Our position was
improved, but still nasty in the extreme. Even if we got away from
the mob, we should certainly be arrested by the police if caught, in
which event there would be several woundings and at least one death to
explain, and that, too, against a swarm of witnesses who would swear
our lives away without a tinge of compunction.
Luckily, the streets quickly widened, and my companion was a driver
of a thousand. Scores of foot-passengers and pole-bearing coolies and
native barrows he missed by a bare hair's breadth; several corners in
succession he took on two wheels, but never for an instant slackened
the pace; and within five minutes the last uneasy sounds of pursuit
had died away. Still we continued to press on. The pair of us seemed
to realise by silent agreement that it would be a good thing for us to
vanish at once into some burrow where we could take counsel together on
the best way to elude the allied hostility of Law and Disorder.
The Chinaman drove westward for some distance, into that part of the
city where I had crossed the Soochow Creek several hours before. Then
we turned south, and in a few moments were spinning down the broad,
bright-lit Nanking Road, with its queer blend of western paving with
eastern shops and their garishly carved and gilded fronts. Some way
farther on we turned east once more into the fringes of the French
Concession, and at last drew up at a compact bungalow standing in its
own grounds at the point where town and country meet.
We seemed to have been expected, for no sooner had the noise of our
horn broken on the quiet night than I saw a wide wooden gate swing
open, and my companion had driven the car straight into its garage.
The gate was immediately closed. Nobody watching in the street a moment
later would have had a notion of our arrival. There was no light
whatever to be seen in the house.
The Chinaman jumped down, leading the way along a path hidden in
shrubbery, into a side door of the bungalow. This opened on a long dark
passage. My companion disappeared down this, leaving me in charge of
the native servant who had opened the gate to us. Together we entered a
small room richly furnished in Chinese style, with one or two fine old
scroll-pictures hung round the walls, and cabinets through the glass
doors of which I could see a collection of carvings in choice white
jade, and on top of the cabinets several vases of Ming porcelain.
The boy left me for a moment, returning with hot water and lint and
bandages for my wounded wrist, which I had roughly bound with a
handkerchief. He made a swift workmanlike job of the stab--fortunately
it had touched no big blood--and withdrew, leaving me sitting in a wide
silk-cushioned settee of blackwood and wondering what breed of Chinaman
it could be that drove a car like Gordon Bennett and swung full-grown
bodies about his head like Eric Brighteyes.
The room, heavily shuttered, was lit by a hanging lamp of brass, worked
into the form of a dragon, which didn't give a very brilliant light,
but quite enough to show me my companion clearly when he returned a few
minutes later. I had gasped with astonishment earlier in the evening,
when I saw him do the Brighteyes act. Now I gasped again. He was the
same person, exactly, in externals, even to the sleek celestial grin on
his yellow face, and yet there was a palpable change in the whole air
of the man. I couldn't lay my finger on the difference, but it was the
difference between chalk and cheese. Then even the grin fell away from
him, and he smiled, a frank, open smile.
'Well, Mr. Ronald Mirlees!' he said.
The words had been spoken in the perfect English of a well-bred man.