THE DRAGON
BY
M. P. SHIEL
AUTHOR OF “THE YELLOW DANGER,” ETC.
[Illustration]
“Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the
place of understanding?”
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
PUBLISHERS
PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
EDINBURGH
1913
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PRINCE EDWARD 9
II. OYONE 29
III. THE COUP D’ÉTAT 37
IV. AUSTRALIAN GOLD 46
V. THUNDERY WEATHER 51
VI. THE GIRL IN THE CROWD 56
VII. THE “MAURETANIA” 65
VIII. THE TREASURE 78
IX. FATE OF THE SIX MILLIONS 93
X. THE “ASAHEL” 106
XI. GERMANS IN PALL MALL 119
XII. THE PRINCESS 135
XIII. THE REDLIKE RAY 150
XIV. THE SIX MILLIONS 163
XV. THE HAUNTED SUBMARINE 181
XVI. THE BURIED RAY 196
XVII. THE FLOOD 217
XVIII. THE RAY RADIATES 240
XIX. THE HOARD OF GOLD 259
XX. THE SEA AND THE AIR 276
XXI. THE DYING LIPS 288
XXII. THE RAY MIGRATES 295
XXIII. INTO WHOSE HANDS? 302
XXIV. THE YELLOW DELUGE 307
XXV. IN THE COMET’S TAIL 333
CHAPTER I
PRINCE EDWARD
It is the eye that begets and conceives: suddenly by the hap and
fecundity of glances which meet a child is summoned from the place of
dumbness, and hears, and quickens, and arises to come among men.
Never a conception of Prince “Teddy,” who contended with Li Ku Yu, had
entered a human head to the moment when Prince John, his father-to-be
(whom the French have called Jean _l’Entêté_, or “the Stubborn”) landed
from the _Dominion_ at Scarboro’ to attend a dance one February night.
He, having just got his “executive curl” as a sub., was sitting among
his new wardroom messmates, looking at the dancing, when he made the
remark: “Set of frights!—not a pretty girl among the lot.”
But just then three passed before his eyes—sisters—all tall, dark, but
the middle one, who was the youngest, the tallest of all; and she came
upon his eyes surprisingly, like some being superior to men.
Before long he was waltzing with her, his eyes tied to her eyes whose
dark-blue anon looked black.
She was Minna Simmons, a doctor’s daughter, already at nineteen a
Bachelor of Science, now “swotting” to get a degree in medicine.
His Royal Highness was amazed at her “cleverness”; and queens suddenly
appeared to him mean in the presence of this imperial creature and more
reigning thing than queens, a lady.
But with that sea-dog bluntness on which he prided himself, he said to
her within a den of Union Jacks and smilax: “You are the very nicest
girl I ever dreamt of!”
On which she shook her head slowly at him, murmuring with an indulgent
smile: “I am not to be commandeered.”
His answer was: “I don’t believe you are: what I should rather choose
would be to offer you my hand in marriage.”
“Ah! the vast paw,” she breathed, her eyes turned white to heaven.
He said: “Suppose I did so, what would you say to it?”
“I am sorry, Sir,” she answered: “I should say no.”
“We will see about that,” muttered John _l’Entêté_.
And before midnight he had got from her a promise of correspondence in
six months’ time—on general topics.
Within two he began to write frequently; within three he appeared
suddenly at The Priory (her house), vowing that he would go mad; he
kept telephoning across Britain; and after six months she began to
answer his letters, as promised.
He had got his second stripe when he received from her at Shotley this:
“My sisters, whose judgment is considered good, urge it upon
me that that may well turn to the public advantage, if I am
given the honour to unite my mother’s blood with your Royal
Highness’; and though I pity _you_, Sir, for the quite hot
water which this business must bring you into, I will now
profess myself ready to act as your Royal Highness directs....
Your Royal Highness divines that I could not long be kept a
back-stairs consort.... If centuries of custom attempt to
suppress me, I think it is the custom that will see itself
suppressed.... God only grant that I may be some good, if it is
to be so....”
Count three months thence, England is under snow—it is seven days
before Christmas—when from him at Balmoral comes to her: “I am now
taking car to come....”
She locked herself into her room then, to stare....
Afterwards she opened a steel casket by knobs that revolved to
cypher-numbers, to get from it the photograph of a young man in
flannels, with which she sat again; and, gazing at it, presently said
to it: “Dear, it is no good, it can’t be helped—unless I turn tail, and
don’t play the game. I was to be one of the mother-women, you see, not
one of the wife-women—God’s will be done.”
Now tears filled her lids, her lip quivered: she held the photograph
tenderly pressed to her face, her eyes closed; but then with a gasp of
anger and anguish dashed it off her into the fire.
Six months later she was the Queen of the Britains and Empress of
India; and her “bowing-manner” was considered good.
But from the first her reign was a troubled reign.
Here at home she was not universally adored. That wit of her tongue
was too swift and withering. Her talk, if always distinguished, was
always vigorously vernacular, dashed anon with a sort of slang, and
anon, for all her moral severity, with the _risqué_—that which came
to her tongue’s tip out it flew, like new knives flying. Then, too,
no daughter of a hundred kings was ever so jealous a stickler for the
intricacies of ritual. She pestered the Cabinet. The anger of her
glance became a social apprehension, and her censorship of morals
extended to males. Lords, grooms, equerries, had to be Bayards! and,
like Victoria, she looked coldly upon widows who remarried.
As to the foreign Royalties, the home aristocracy, who, for a
fortnight, had a thought of patronising her, they were taught in
torrents of lava-torments that she was twice the sovereign of subjects,
and once the sovereign of sovereigns. If a dowager was proud of
monkey-ancestry, be sure her sin would find her out, and a tongue
like the Avenging Angel’s edge would singe her. Some day Her Majesty
would manage to put to her some simple question in biology or physics,
and then was lost in horror at the Hottentot ignorance of European
women with coronets on their foreheads. But if all this caused her
domineering forehead, her tongue, and the play of her eyes to become a
terror in the land, it did not tend to make her idolised.
But nothing much troubled her but her son, she truly a “mother-woman,”
every day finding time to be with him; and to him the privilege of her
presence was ever more fascinating than his toy-submarine.
Seldom a day but she spoke to him of Germany growing, of China
changing. “The Chinese are pretty shrewd, Teddy,” she said in showing
him a lump of white jade, sent her by the Dowager Empress, one day
at Windsor: “the only man who can outwit a Jew in business is a
Chinaman—don’t forget. And, then, there are so many of them! How many?”
“Four hundred and ten millions, mother,” the Prince promptly responded.
“Just think—more than all Europe. God wanted them to be so many: and
there they _are_. But nobody quite knows why!”
“Teddy” meditated the matter; and he said: “Mother, why don’t all the
countries make themselves into one under one King? Save such a mass of
energy! How absurd for Berks to set up as a separate kingdom, and Bucks
as another——”
“But of what nation would that one King be?”
“English, I suppose.”
“His name ‘_Teddy_’?”
“Teddy” blushed under her roguish ogle, and she, seeing him in
distress, came to his rescue, saying, “Dear, you will deserve to
be such a King: your mind is large enough. And don’t think that I
disagree, for I quite see that all sorrow is due to that folly of
nations and men in calling bits of an earth their ‘own.’ When nations
do it, the result is wars, and all this cost of armaments; when
individuals do it, the result is all the failure and perplexity and
bread of tears that we see men eat. But if one King owned it all for
everybody, and hired out bits, then we might see some fun, and soon
would be flying to the moon! That what you meant?” The boy was gazing
into her great flamboyant eyes with such adoration, that it made her
laugh, and dip a kiss inside his sailor collar.
But her plans for him were beset by obstacles. There was King John
_l’Entêté_, for one, to be reckoned with; as one morning when she
exclaimed: “I am his mother!” pacing a room of the Winter Palace at
Petersburg; to which His Majesty answered: “Your Majesty speaks as if a
father was of no account!”
“Oh, of course, a father, too,” she said—“though fathers are only a
modern development, mind! Formerly there were no fathers, only mothers.”
The King fingered his beard, saying with his touch of pompousness:
“Indeed! But Your Majesty fails to mention at what precise period of
the world’s history this innocent condition of things prevailed.”
“It prevails still!—among bees, for instance.”
“This is strange,” said the King.
“Ah!” said the Queen.
“But what have bees to do with the matter?” asked His Majesty: “the
point is, that Your Majesty wishes to deprive the Prince of learning
what all gentlemen learn——”
“Oh, I do! since a decent boy hasn’t _the time_ to: and if the point of
that boy’s intellect be soppyfied and softened by learning six hundred
words of Greek—if he becomes the least bit like any of them—I shall go
mad, I think, I _couldn’t_ stand it. What I want him to learn is that
about bees—God’s facts—infinitely Divine, awful, lovely, romantic,
religious, significant, educating. But, if a boy learns that it pleases
some people to call a boy a ‘_pais_,’ or a ‘_garçon_,’ does _that_ give
him to think and adore? Oh, Your Majesty knows very little Greek, and I
know lots—through no fault of my own, God knows—and some other things,
too—can’t you listen to me?”
“But everyone differs from Your Majesty!”
“Except thinkers,” she said, almost crying, “and, oh, isn’t that hard
that the brightness of the wise should be for ever overborne by the
dullness of the stupid?”
That break of tears in her voice, her throbbing throat, touched His
Majesty. Her figure, moreover, as she roamed the room, with that glory
of her gallant grand eyes aglow, was very magnetic, so that the King
lowered his lids a little, let slip a look at her hips, lowered them,
stole a look, then said: “Well, I only hope Your Majesty’s plans won’t
compromise the Throne’s popularity.”
“No”—in a gentler tone, touching his shoulder—“people will understand.”
“But will they?” he asked: “I pride myself upon my knowledge of the
people—or does Your Majesty imagine yourself so popular a monarch as I
am?”
She smiled down now upon him. “No, I don’t dispute that with you. _You_
have the popularity, but, oh, let _me_ have Teddy.”
And in the end she managed: the Prince went to Brockweir.
Now, already at Brockweir was Li Ku, called “Sky-Blue” (since he was
a Celestial!) son of a member of the Min Cheng Pu (Home Office); and
nine days after the Prince’s arrival, he slapped Li Ku across the face.
Whereupon a formal fight.
It was toward the end of lunch-time, and a small boy, flying with
tidings toward the Lower School, panted, “Prince and Sky-Blue—fight!”
to one Richard Chinnery, sitting on the Fourth Form steps, intent upon
winding primary wire round a bobbin; and Chinnery called after: “What’s
the row?”
“Caught Sky-Blue trephining cat not properly anæsthetised!”—he was gone.
Whereupon Chinnery dashed off to the shed down in the hollow, and made
his way through a throng that already had no little respect for him,
to see the champions already stripped—like David and Goliath, Sky-Blue
being a tall strip of yellow, six months the elder.
But there was little fun; and after the third lead-off Chinnery,
muttering, “It’s a butchery,” dashed back to his induction coil. The
Royal combatant, in fact, had all the art, and presently muttering,
“Oh, well, doesn’t matter,” put on his jacket.
It was over, then? Li Ku Yu sat on the shed-bench, his legs under
him—impossible to guess if he was humbled, if he was ratty inside, he
smiling as ever his insolent smile, chin up—huge-headed, tough as
orange-skin, breezy, brazen, a cool blade, looking ready to wink.
He smiled ever; but seldom laughed, except on Saturdays—when he was
younger—when he would stand in the town’s electric shed watching the
commutators spinning asleep, six revolutions a second; and a moment
would come when that depth of insolence would be riven by a little
giggle—a giggle of glee and victory at the trickiness of man and
the admission of God; and he laughed one Tuesday when a crusher was
crushing up the old school-chapel bricks, when, after gazing many
minutes at the engine jigging, the glee digged him, and he giggled.
“But there’s something wrong about that orange lately,” said Chinnery
after six months: “he has changed his Saturday-habits.”
The Prince was “doing arsenic”—a Wednesday afternoon when he
did the metals; and Chinnery, whose drawer was next to his, was
under instructions to show him his way about in analysis—Chinnery
two years the elder, and already his young head was a garden of
consciousness—tall—hollow-chested ... gentle....
“Know that man they call Spider?” he asked—“retired poacher and
gaol-bird—cottage back of the Chasewood. I go up there to get
rock-specimens, and twice I’ve spied Sky-Blue and Spider in the dell
there. Deighton wouldn’t like it, though Sky-Blue’s a Steer.”
(“Steers” were town-boys, and Dr Deighton the Head-Master—a bearded
Sea-King, blushing rich with brandy, his gown dropping down his right
shoulder, the howl of a cow in him, heart-harrowing, memorable, a
wrangler—“mathematics”—not perhaps “learned,” but the very best of
earth’s teachers.)
“What would Sky-Blue be doing at Spider’s?” the Prince asked.
“Not sure, but you look out: for if you two meet in serious battle, you
kill each other. My idea is that Sky-Blue is taking lessons in boxing
from Spider.”
“Free country—Or the attraction may be Spider’s gal.”
“Ah, don’t underestimate my Sky-Blue,” Chinnery said: “that’s no
ordinary orange. I’ll swear that he hasn’t wasted five minutes since
he was nine—I know him, for I have some attraction for him apparently,
and he comes to watch me messing about up in that library alcove. Dumb
as a mummy! But one afternoon he began to gas, and, Ted-of-the-Throne,
I never knew speech so fascinating. The things that saffron sack of
thoughts vomited out of his chasm! you’d hardly believe.”
“Oh, aye, I guess,” muttered the Prince, holding up a precipitate to
squint at.
“Said that white people are a freak! ‘like white mice,’ not a permanent
type; hence we produce a shudder in the yellow breast. And you know
that old sixpenny atlas which is his Bible—he produced that to show me
that Europe and Asia are just like twins in structure; and he calls the
two islands, England and Japan, the negative and positive terminals of
a cell, the continents being the plates, Europe the white zinc, Asia
the yellow copper.”
“Scott, that’s gas,” “Teddy” said.
“Anyway, an intellect above Spider’s gal.”
“Oh, aye, I think I know.”
“Yes, and above gals diviner far than Spider’s! Look here—don’t tell
anybody——” Chinnery produced from his drawer a curious document, a
folio of silk-paper on a stick of ivory round which the folio rolled,
sending an aroma of roses into that sulphuretted stench of the room.
“This must have dropped out of Sky-Blue’s pocket when he snatched
out Asia to show me, and I confiscated it as contraband. Passion,
my boy.... Ever seen one Oyone motoring in the town? Not? Then you
never beheld human beauty. Visits at my cousins, the Santleys—oh,
Oyone, would that I had never beheld the phiz and evil peeper of
thee! A half-caste—her father a P. & O. ship’s-surgeon—Irish—mother
a geisha-girl of Nagasaki. How Oyone ever got into a Wesleyan
mission-school at Tientsin I can’t say, but she did, then fell in with
Sky-Blue’s present guardian, A-lu-te.—Surely you have seen A-lu-te
somewhere? Little old woman like a monkey?”
Teddy said no.
“But you know where Sky-Blue lives?”
“Isn’t it that mansion with gables up on the hill?”
“That’s it. But A-lu-te and Oyone are mostly at Regent’s Park, where
they have to be for the intrigues. Talk of intrigues! A-lu-te,
it seems, was a conspirator, and was banished with Oyone to ‘the
post-roads’; and now for Oyone and A-lu-te the puzzle is, so to
intrigue as to get back again to the whisperings and peepings of
Court-life. As to Oyone—pretty. Blessed are your eyes that have not
seen her: some day you may, and then over goes the blooming Throne.
Her age, though, is rather in advance of the Heir-apparent’s:
seventeen!—twenty-seven she will never see—assassinated, beheaded
perhaps, long ere then: tragedy sleeps in those ravishing peepers.
But see Sky-Blue’s height above Spider’s ‘gal’: he disdains Venus.
Here’s her scroll to him; unroll. Observe the neat, crude, school-girl
writing.”
“Li Ku Yu, Her Excellency asks about your health, and wishes
you well.
“It is now five weeks since she or I have seen you; and your
writing is like a miser’s kindnesses.
“Li Ku Yu, persons are born and flung up into the sun’s light
not when or where they choose. From China round to America
and back, life in its tossings, like a fish which is caught
and tosses, flings this one up in one generation, and that
one up in another, and the rubbings together of persons is as
was ordained. Each is sent to his own generation, to rub with
it, so that everything may be as was ordained with life; and
when one generation is buried, the sun shines on brightly on
another. You, Li Ku Yu, and I, Oyone Umé, have been flung up in
the same generation, and been flung together, to rub.
“It is a sin in life that you are ice and iron to me! Others
tend to me, but not I to them; I to you, but not you to me? You
are ice, but I will make you bubble; and iron, but I will make
you flow.
“I have the leprosy for you, Li Ku Yu. I think you are like
Indian pansupari of areca-nut, and like chunam with spices
rolled up in a betel leaf.
“Li Ku Yu, when someone speaks of the end of your college-term,
this makes me pale, but afterwards in my chamber my little body
dances at this.
“I have the hope that you are in health, and not troubling your
brow always about studies.
“My prayer is that you write to me separately and comfortingly,
for my tongue suffers thirst in this furnace.
“When I think of you, Li Ku Yu, I stretch myself and kiss the
wind. _Sayonara!_
“Oyone.”
“Oh, the miserable...!” muttered Teddy, with a little flush.
“Yes,” said Chinnery, “but the point is, that Sky-Blue is ‘ice and
iron’ to _her_—the nymph of nymphs, earth’s thickest thimbleful of
intense liqueur—compared with whom Spider’s han’some gal is a gross
frog squatted, a goggling gecko of the rocks. Sky-Blue has other
business with Spider.”
But Chinnery’s warning came too soon, and was forgotten in a month. In
eighteen nothing had happened.
Meantime, the Prince did well with his eyes and fingers. On the
football field, moreover, everything scattered before his passionate
impetuosity: for which alone, and then for his decent way, he was well
loved. If a boy new to that most anxiously _élite_ “schoolboy spot”
“Highnessed” him, he’d say, “My name’s Teddy Reeks to you, kid”: and
only one boy, who never forgot, saw his chin lift with a chilling
hauteur. It was an amusing thing at Brockweir that after a year many
were to be found imitating his nimble way of lifting his toes in
stepping, his brisk and restless little roll, his trick of saying
“Scott!”
He had no resemblance to the men of the House of Hanover—his face open
as a summer’s day, quite English in expression, fair like a face of
milk-and-pink in a picture, his eyes light like a Norfolk sky: no weak
line, from whatever angle one glanced. Taller than his father: shorter
than his mother; slightly bow-legged.
He had been at Brockweir eighteen months when one day—as if the Star
Venus should descend to earth—the Queen descended upon Brockweir. It
was well with “Teddy” that day, and well with all: holiday! throats
hoarse with hurrahs! a Teddy carried shoulder high.
Using that day as a date, we count six months to the date when Li Ku
Yu received an order to return to China. That was on a Thursday in the
Autumn term.
The next Saturday afternoon being fine, the Prince was permitted to
take part in a paper-chase—Brockweir being great on running; several of
its lads could range a country-side like stags; and none surpassed the
Prince in this.
He was in a solitary spot on an estate named Penryth, rather separated
from “the hounds,” running down a steep field through sheep toward the
river tow-path, when he heard a calling: “Ho! Hi! Help!”—seeming to
proceed from a chapel-of-ease which stands half-way down the field—a
little ruin no bigger than a room—roofless—just four walls, two with
gable-ends, and some Gothic window-slits.
A wall of loose stones runs round it, enclosing a bit of ground crammed
with bracken (in the summer); so the Prince vaulted the wall, and ran
to see what the matter was.
He looked in; and there within stood Li Ku Yu.
But he did not at once recognise Sky-Blue!—a Sky-Blue arrayed in
Oriental raiment, as for a ceremony! The Prince wondered whether the
pigtail had grown in a day; but it was a silken _queue_ platted on, as
many upper-class Chinese wear them.
And the significance was this: that it was China there to interview
Europe.
“Well?” said the Prince.
Li Ku Yu made no reply.
“Did you call out ‘help’?”
Li Ku Yu was mute. They looked at each other—well-grown lads now, the
Prince in the Upper Fifth, Li Ku Yu the head of the Sixth, but for
Chinnery, who lingered on several terms after Brockweir ceased to have
anything to teach him.
All at once Li Ku Yu, with a moan, threw his arm round the Prince’s
neck, and began to rub his cheek on the Prince’s cheek, up and down,
moaning, like a lover moaning for love.
The other, very astonished, tried to draw back, saying: “I say, what’s
all this?” But even as he asked, he knew: knew that he would never
forget that day.
The Prince wrenched himself spinning from that venomous affection; and
he said sharply: “Hurry up! What’s it all about?”
Li Ku Yu was smiling: but in the expression of his eyes was something
very terribly tense and strained, atrociously cruel and ferocious; the
eye-whites looking bloodshot.
Now at last he spoke, in that strange voice of his—foreign as an
animal’s from another planet.
“You were unwise to strike me, Prince.”
“Who? When? Years ago? Got that in you still, have you?”
“_Cluck!_ a minute ago to me.”
“So it’s a fight, is it? But stay—let me warn you; the boys and men
of this land can’t be conquered. You may kill and mince them, but you
won’t see them strike their flag. Are you prepared for all that? In for
bloodshed, and a fight to the finish?”
He was now eyeing the Chinese loweringly under the eyes, his tones, as
he spoke, more and more trilling with emotion: in the back of his head
a question as to his mother—how she would wish him to act now.
Li Ku Yu, with one finger out, commenced to lecture: “‘The boys and
men of this land’? _Cluck!_ poor stuff. Done nothing great. The
steam-engines they use? Papin! Electricity? the Voltas of Italy!
Explosion motors? the French! Guns, navigation? the Chinese! Chemistry?
a French science! The Saxon a gross dog—obedient! a slave: as you
English aristocrats know with secret glee. William the Conqueror
conquered them by one single battle. It took his sons three hundred
years to conquer the Scotch, the Welsh. Not conquered the Irish yet.
Gross dogs. But for the Celts around who have mixed blood, England
still a fifth-rate state. As it is, great in nothing! only big.
Half-discovered Uranus; invented boxing, roast beef: and I now about
to teach their King’s son the secrets of boxing, and of raw beef. Even
their robbing-career done now: now their turn to be robbed from. See if
Japan doesn’t have Australia—Canada! and be not surprised if before you
die you catch sight of the saffron Dragon-flag of the Manchus flapping
from the staff atop of your Parliament-house. I say this because I
happen——”
“Make haste finish!” said the Prince, harsh and sharp.
“Yes, proud, I know!—though not of what——”
“Of being a white boy!”
“I proud of my head! though I should not wish the skin over it to be
sickly, faded. White? the colour of decay!—old hair—the louse——”
“And yellow of death, of corruption, cholera, and tropical
rottenness”—each speaking now with a bitterness that hissed, their
faces leaning toward each other.
“Hence English hair yellow!” said Li Ku Yu: “I have seen old Manchu
women’s hair turn yellow, too, like other plants in Autumn, their
skins bleach. Yet the fair races not like that through age—freak of
nature! You are proud of your ancestry: but your father’s line? a fly’s
lifetime to mine! As to your mother, she is only——
“_Slave!_”—Lucifer said it, and instantaneously with that lightning of
his eye broke the bolt of his knuckles upon the other’s nose.
Li Ku Yu staggered, licking his blood.
He fell upon an altar-step near the east end that divided the stone
floor into an upper and lower level; and, sitting there, he very
deliberately took off slippers, hat, _bluse_—threw them into grass
and bracken that grew thicker along the rims than in the middle, the
Prince, too, throwing away cap and jacket; and he stood waiting with
his fists tight, high-strung, smiling, white.
All at once Li Ku Yu, with a slight cry, was up; and without another
syllable the battle began.
The Prince’s aim was mainly the eye; the Chinese aim mainly the heart.
Whenever the Prince led off with the left, Li Ku Yu would parry,
and spin the Prince round by pressure on the Prince’s left; then
cross-counter with a sounding pound in the unprotected right ribs—he
having at this time more science than the other; but perhaps less art.
With every blow that he planted—with every blow that he received—Li Ku
Yu let out a slight cry, a little scream of laughter.
But the floor was uneven, slippery—made mainly of grave-slabs,
grass-grown and dislocated—and thrice Li Ku Yu, though in his socks,
flew staggering; the Prince’s feet, on the contrary, were his strong
point, his two legs advancing and retreating like one, at a constant
angle; and, in attacking, he advanced as if taller grown, with quite a
light and dominant step, impending upon his enemy.
But both had pretty soon enough of it to please them, the flush and fun
of the thing finished; and now they found themselves with the burden
of its earnest on their backs, Li Ku’s nose now a rotten apple, the
Prince in considerable distress for breath, trickling blue blood under
the right eye, both fists of both all swollen and deformed. And now the
consciousness fell heavily upon their young hearts that this was only
the beginning, the grimness of the game yet to come; nor was there any
hope of rescue in that lonely place.
Li Ku Yu sent such a left-hander into the right side of the Prince’s
neck, that the Prince was driven to stand inactive several seconds, his
back against the west wall, his mouth gaping, Li Ku, meantime, stooping
before him in a species of crouch, just able to get out the gasp: “You
done now?”
At this question, an attempt at laughter distorted the Prince’s lips an
instant, as he lifted his foot and kicked the Chinese fiercely on the
shin.
Whereupon Li Ku Yu lost temper and form; and from that second the
battle degenerated wretchedly into a horror of random rancours.
Like a cat Li Ku Yu was in the air with a cry, abandoning now the
restraints of the art taught him by “Spider,” and backsliding to the
simple instincts of nature.
He got all his ten claws riveted on the Prince’s neck, and pressed;
but at the same time the Prince contrived to get the pigtail round Li
Ku’s throat, and pulled: a sound like a creaking proceeding out of both
their crowded throats; and their faces went sombre, as under the shade
of the cloud of death.
And when presently the pigtail came away from the other’s head, the
Prince realised that it was an ill case now with him. The face before
him had grown bony somehow, ugly to indelicacy in the nakedness of its
lust; no chance of compassion there.
But the outstanding fact of the battle to a looker-on would have been
this—that in every extremity the young Prince did not fail to find a
way out, contriving every time to skip nimbly out of his fix, his knee
in this case saving him, he kicking up with it so lucky a blow, that Li
Ku Yu fell away convulsed, and fled, looking backward, as he fled, with
an expression of fright in his eyes.
The Prince stumbled after, lashing feebly at him with the pigtail,
laughing with distorted lips—feeble, but still dominant; and when Li
Ku, flying east, came to the altar-step, he was too far gone to lift
his foot enough, and, stumbling, tumbled in a lump. The Prince lashed
him once with the pigtail, gasping at him: “Had enough?”
There was no answer; and he dropped back to the west wall, upon which
he propped his back, thankful enough for the respite and space to draw
his breath in, wondering if it was ended, or when it would end, or if
no rescue would spring up out of those grassy graves to deliver two
poor lads entangled there in the trap of their natures and fate.
And during some moments only the rasping drone of the two throats
broke the stillness, and the prattle of a wren tripping on the west
window-sill, and distant bleatings of sheep feeding in the field.
Till, all at once, with a little cry of laughter Li Ku Yu was up from
the step to dash himself desperately afresh upon the adversary.
After three blows only, they closed to a wrestle, the Oriental hugging
in a strangling grasp of his right arm, while his left fingers got into
the Prince’s shirt-collar, which he first dragged to rags, and then the
vest. Meantime, though, he was being severely kicked and beaten, and
suddenly experienced a cuff so deep in the left ear, as set his cranium
breaking out into cricket-song.
Again he fell away; again in an impulse of panic he ran; and again the
Prince followed laughing. Past the step they pelted, on to the east
wall, where Li Ku made a leap to catch the sill of the chancel-window,
as if to escape that way—though the window was obviously far too narrow
for a body to pass through. His first try failed, but by his second
he contrived to catch the sill; and there hung stretched. Instantly,
though, the Prince was dragging at a leg, gasping again: “Had enough
now?” and when Li Ku Yu kicked, the Prince grasped at him and dragged
him down.
Li Ku Yu dropped....
But the instant he dropped, he again let slip his rollick cry of fight,
and attacked with such a cat-o’-mountain franticness, that in the
tempest of it the Prince had to retreat rapidly, panting as if to die;
and, flying backward, his face to the foe, he stumbled on coming to the
step, and slapped down flat. Li Ku Yu fell over him.
An Oriental grotesque in bronze now glared through that stare of the
Orient as it rode its overthrown foe. The Chinese rubbed his cheek on
the Prince’s, and kissed him, even as he banged upon the battered face,
panting, “You done now?” and he dragged off the last of the rags from
the already naked breast, gasping: “Were you _wise_ to strike Li Ku
Yu?” and he grabbed a handful of grass and bracken to cram into the
other’s throat, panting, as he crammed it: “You done now?” and he spat
his foam over the other’s face, and licked the other’s lips, and bit
bestially with his teeth, and knocked at the gates of the dead under
the grave-slab with the prostrate skull, asking: “Were you _wise_ to
strike Li?”
But his undoing was in the twinkling of an eye....
The Prince, with a twist of the wrist, swift as the swift’s wing,
clapped a sprig of nettle that he had grasped upon those eyeballs over
him, and, in the instant of Li Ku Yu’s confusion, was free.
He had fallen with one of his heels on the upper level of the step; he
put up the other on it; and winning himself swiftly footward, came up
with his face between Li Ku Yu’s legs, who clapped his legs together,
but too late.
And as Li Ku Yu himself was in the act of scrambling upright, he
staggered down again upon his palms—the pigtail having been twisted
with a dazzling alacrity round and round his ankles.
Long before it had dropped just there, and the Prince, on rising, had
spied it. A little push behind sent the entangled Chinaman flat. The
Prince sprang at him, and rapidly had the pigtail tied tight.
“Had enough?” he panted, as he himself dropped upon the platform.
“_Oh!!_”—as he dropped, a little cry was at the door yonder to the
west, a young lady’s face there.... The Prince rose on his elbow,
blushing....
A minute’s use of her eyes, and she uttered a sound of compunction,
then came with decision to undo the pigtail, glancing daggers at the
Prince.
Li Ku Yu, loosed, got up to stagger away against the north wall: and
the three looked at one another.
“Oh, how could you!”—to the Prince.
The Prince glanced up to shake at her his abandoned brow, murmuring:
“Not my fault.”
At this point Li Ku Yu staggered from that wall to the opposite where
his slippers and things were, gathered them, leant aside to whisper the
Prince, “Not finished, Prince,” then bowed, _o’jiji_, to the girl and
staggered away out, his things on his arm.
“But where is he going?” the girl asked: “he can hardly walk.”
“He doesn’t live far,” the Prince mourned despondently.
“And you?”
“I am at the College.”
“College?... Well, it is your own fault if I took you for a plough-boy.”
“It wasn’t my fault. I heard a cry of ‘help!’ and it was he waiting to
attack me. I couldn’t give in—forgive me for offending your eyes——”
She seemed to him an angel sent to rescue him and Li Ku Yu.
“I will, then,” she said, “since that was how it was.”
At which sympathy the Prince covered his eyes and began to
cry—“swing-of-the-pendulum” to softness after the grimness and tension
of the fight.
“Never mind,” she said to him, “it’s over now; and you did get him
nicely tied up in the end, didn’t you?”
Now her lips split in a smile, and he, peeping between his fingers,
felt that he had never seen anything so neat and nice, like fine white
linens.
“Well, better come with me,” she said, “let’s see what can be done”;
and he followed her, picking up jacket and cap—through bracken—over a
slab-stile—through fifteen yards of scrub to a marshy spot with rocks
to step on, and so to the river-brink.
There is a flat spot just there—a break in the lines of cliff thick
with timber that rise on both sides of the Wye; and there in the little
bay a boat lay, made fast to a bunch of bulrushes.
“It is well that I got out,” she said over her shoulder: “something
seemed to say to me: ‘have a look at that little church’—and I went.
Otherwise, how would you have got back to the College—and what _will_
they say to you?”
“I’m afraid poor Dr Deighton will be wishing himself dead,” he said
half to himself: “but not his fault, not anyone’s.”
She thought that that would be excessive of Dr Deighton to wish himself
_dead_—for the thought did not happen to crop up in her mind that this
might possibly be the Prince: else she might have been saved the pangs
of her fate.
When he had sat opposite her, she pulled in the rope, and the tide,
just turning, bore them slowly up-stream, while she worked away at
wiping his wounds with her wetted handkerchief, the quick female-organs
of her fancy immediately conceiving him a warrior-knight of old,
victorious, though sore wounded.
He, meantime, kept his eyes on her face. “How is it I never saw you
before? belong to Brockweir?”
“Nottingham!—spending three weeks with a school-friend.”
“Brockweir school?”
“No, we’re Cheltenham College girls.”
“Like Brockweir?”
“Anywhere near the sea I love. It is in me, I suppose.”
“How’s that?”
“A sea-faring lot. One of my grandfathers was a Chief Coastguardsman,
the other a mercantile-marine captain; and _his_ grandfather—if you
can conceive a grandfather’s grandfather—fought at Trafalgar. Irish
Paddies. And my father’s a Sergeant-Major of Marines, not to mention a
cousin who’s a naval Boy-Telegraphist—so you see.”
His eyes dwelt on her pointed soft face, smooth-rounded like good
sculpture, her pointed hat of black velvet half hiding her globe of
gold-hair, her ring not costly, her brooch cheap. But with those eyes
she had no need of sapphires, eyes that shrank and reproached with a
shy and roguish guile. And she soothed his wounds with touches soft as
fondness itself. He wished that a compelling impulse would push her to
put her lips on them, like a young mother, and make them well.
“Better now?”
“Skull all cracked to atoms apparently,” he answered: “but that’s
excellent of you—oh, thanks. Pansy-petal fingers. You—should tell your
name.”
“Bayley.”
“That’s the unchristian one.”
“Eulalia, then.”
“Aged sixteen and seven months,” he said.
“Just! You can hit other things beside eyes, can’t you? And _yours_?”
“Mine’s—Edward Reeks.”
“Like the Prince!... Oh, I should so like to see him before I go, to
say that I have! Tell me—do you see him every day?”
“Why, yes.”
“They say that he’s not at all like ordinary princes—lots of brains and
character. Is that so? And handsome——”
“Then, _I_ am: for they say I am like him—or was. But I think I could
procure you a sight of him—let me see—next Saturday, if you meet me in
there by the little church. How would that do?”
His heart sank guiltily, asking it, his voice lowered: for the standard
of conduct was high at home; and he had been brought up with two
facts constantly hammered into his skull: that his father had married
a subject; and that his father’s son never, never must, since human
nature could not stand it twice.
He knew that his mother, if there to hear that rendezvous, would have
been furious. Yet he could not help saying “Well?” when the girl turned
her face toward the cliffs.
“It is getting cold for boating,” Eulalia said, with her begging eyes.
“Still—could you not?”
Maiden meditation.
“I’ll see if I can possibly see my way.”
“Now, decent of you!”
The turrets of the College appeared through trees beyond a bend.